Welcome Back Spring. Finally Here! God Knows We Missed You!

"Blossom by blossom the spring begins."       --Algernon Charles Swinburne

It has to come. It must come. It will come. It has come. Finally.

Spring. At least for me. How about for you?

Yes, I know that technically, meteorologically, spring began in these parts March 1^st; or if you really want to split hares (!) spring began March 19^th, more than a month ago when the earth’s equator aligned with the sun.  

Others marked spring’s initiation on April 9^th, the day of the Red Sox home opener, played in the friendly confines of Fenway Park. Bright blue skies and sixty degrees. It was a mixed day, with excitement at a brand-new year but sadness too. For Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield, the team’s longtime knuckleballer, as good a soul and teammate as you’d ever meet, he was remembered. You see he died much too young at 57 of cancer last October. Tears were shed by fans and teammates. 

And then it was an underwhelming effort by the men in red and white. Baltimore Orioles 7, the Sox 1.

Maybe the onset of spring for you is about enjoying foods that come back after chilling out for winter. Ice cream cones. Anything grilled. On a seaside boulevard south of Boston, not far from my childhood home, is a venerated restaurant called the Clam Box. For 55 years folks have stood in line there in flip flops and dripping bathing suits awaiting the deep-fried delicacy of fresh clams, or fish and chips right out of the fryer, or a juicy cheeseburger, or in my case, onion rings. The Clam Box on Wollaston Beach makes the best rings in all of western civilization. Light and flaky, just a bit sweet, crunchy batter all brown and golden, salt sparkling on the rings’ surface.  Many springs my mom and I have ventured forth on the first warm spring Sunday, walked down to the beach and returned to the Clam Box. YUM!

How about the Boston Marathon? That’s a good signal for spring, the streets of MetroWest and Boston teeming with thousands of runners and cheering throngs.  Or taking the lawn furniture out of the basement and setting it up in the backyard. Putting up storms windows and pulling down the screens. Carrying heavy sweaters and flannel shirts back to the cedar closet, for winter hibernation and then pulling out short sleeve shirts and docksider boat shoes and maybe even a baseball glove and ball too.   

This year my spring opening came late, in part because it has felt so Seattle-esque around here, all rainy and chilly and gray. But yesterday I returned home from a weekend away to an explosion of colors that mother nature offered up, seemingly overnight. One day all is cold mud and blustery winds and cold temperatures and then one morning, spring just explodes!  

Announces itself with gaudy and gorgeous colors. Yellow daffodils dance forth. Red tulips twist and tango in the breeze. Green buds emerge on the end of tree branches, their tendrils stretching up towards heaven.  The purple azaleas in my front yard are blooming forth in all their violet vivaciousness, almost spilling over into the driveway.  The bright yellow forsythias that border the neighbor’s yard look like an explosion of sunshine, one huge bush spilling out onto the lawn in a symphony of golden hues.

WOW!  Weren’t those bushes bare, barely a day or so ago?

Welcome back spring! And yes, however we humans choose to meet it, to mark it, to revel in it, to calendar it, to just say hello to this new season.  God knows we need spring. I know I absolutely do, every year. Maybe this year even more with so much ugly, messy stuff going on in our country and world. Spring never gets old or boring. Never fails to amaze with its resurrection power, its invitation to start all over again, to begin anew, to believe in renewal, both natural and spiritual.  

In April and May God wakes us and the earth up from slumber and lethargy, shakes our shoulders and dares us to revel in the warmth again. To be witness to these months when the earth embodies hope as it awakens too. Nothing can hold back spring. It has been with us forever in a way and it is stronger and more faithful and dependable than any human power. Thank you, God, for spring.  May we enjoy it and invite it back into our hearts and homes.

Me? I’m ready for my very first order of onion rings. It is finally time for spring!

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

NO INTERNET?!?! Confessions From Living A Life Offline.

“Technology is a useful servant, but a dangerous master.” --Christian Lou Lange, Nobel Peace prize recipient, 1921

It’s 1994 again.

To clarify: in my house, it’s 1994. Technologically speaking, I’m living thirty years ago. My Verizon FIOS internet service just stopped working this week. “No Internet” my laptop informed me. Well that’s just great! When I tried to reach google, my browser’s cheeky message didn’t take this tragedy seriously enough. “Hmmmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.” Ya think! Until a tech person repairs the wires that a little critter munched on, I am without the internet.    

WITHOUT THE INTERNET!

That’s right. I am being forced to live in the real world, with real people, non-stop, 24/7!  No surfing the web, no reading news online, no checking the weather or reading email, or perusing Facebook or falling into the Reddit rabbit hole. No more Amazon or crossword puzzles. No YouTube to review songs my choir is singing this season and no Google to quickly look up some random fact or idea.

My cyber umbilical cord has been cut, and I’ll admit…it really hurts.

I’m using my phone to connect but it’s just not the same. Not even close. Screen is way too small. No internet also means I’m without streaming services, so no TV either.  No CSI New York or Star Trek Next Generation or The Good Place to soothe me when I get home from a long day at work. No Netflix. Max is missing. Hulu hidden. I got so desperate on my first screenless night, I hooked up an old DVD player and watched my favorite PBS detective show and yes, I know that makes me sound as old as dirt.      

How old? The last time I lived untethered from the information superhighway, Bill Clinton was President, Tom Hanks was Forrest Gump on the big screen (Life is a box of chocolates!) and Ace of Base had the #1 song, “The Sign”. I was a kid, 33 and the most I did with my used Macintosh, was write sermons and play tic tac toe.  

In 1994 millions of us were introduced to something called the “world wide web.” I still remember the day I installed America Online on my desktop computer and signed up for an email account. (Yup—I still have and use it, if only for the looks I get from the young, as in What’s AOL?). The web then was all so quaint, simple, new. I’d dial into AOL, knowing I was on my way by that weird series of beeps, buzzes, clicks and chhhhhhhhhh.

“You’ve got mail!” my computer would cheerfully chirp. Then the internet was exotic, wild, kind of clunky. Sites loaded up so slowly. It was mostly nerds and computer geeks who actually understood how to use it and how it worked. 

But now? We do everything online. EVERYTHING. Nothing escapes that virtual world. We connect. Date. Fall in love. Read test results from the doctor. Book plane tickets. Order everything from flowers to pharmaceuticals to a pizza. We watch our home camera that shows the dog tearing apart the couch pillows and who just rang the doorbell. We zoom. Imagine COVID without zoom? We’d have been completely cut off from one another.    

The web is also about some not so good stuff. Vulnerable people (especially kids) get bullied by anonymous folks on social media. Teens fall prey to unrealistic notions about looks, weight, life. I don’t look like that person. I’m ugly. Less than. Foreign governments like Russia and China spread disinformation and try to influence elections. Demagogues lie about everything and whip up their followers to carry out violence. Folks consume pornography in huge amounts. (Fourteen percent of web searches and 4 percent of websites are porn-related, according to a recent BBC report.)

What amazes me is how far and how fast the world has come because of the net. So much information created, disseminated, and democratized. Trillions of dollars’ worth of business transactions. And all these technologies come about because humans use the minds that God gives to each and everyone of us.

We think. We create. We progress. We change the world.

Is technology a blessing? Yes. Is it a curse? Yes. Are many of us addicted to it? Yes. Has it made life better? Yes. Could we live without it? I suppose. Do we want to live without it?

Not me.

Maybe when my internet finally comes back, I’ll ask God to help me be more thoughtful and intentional about my endless appetite for life in cyberspace. Look up from my screen into actual life. Look away from online “life” more often. Let me enjoy the thousands of movies and TV shows and documentaries I have access to, and then let me close the laptop, switch off the big screen TV. Take a walk outside. Go old school. Read a real book.  Or get together in the real world with a friend for coffee. More conversation. Less text.

Verizon: I’d like to get back to 2024. Now please. I lived in 1994 once and though I miss “Ace of Base”, it’s time to come back to my wired home. 

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

Spring and Hope and the First Ride of the Season...Ready?

"Where flowers bloom so does hope." – Lady Bird Johnson

I open up the blinds on my bedroom window and look out at the world. I was hoping for a better forecast when I went to bed last night, one more promising than the cloudy and cool conditions predicted for today. 

It’s grey, overcast, not very spring like, not what I hoped, for my first ride of the new cycling season.

That’s what I tell myself, chilly first day of April, a Monday, Easter Monday. Twelve days into spring. One day since Jesus rose up from the dead, but me? I’d like to stay down all day, thank you very much. Recline on my soft couch. Sip smoky dark coffee. Read the news on my laptop and rest. 

He may be risen but this pastor is bone tired and weary from a week of non-stop services. So many sermons preached, and lots of prayers pronounced, and hundreds of hands shaken, and several Easter hymns sung and one 6:15 am sunrise seen and a schedule like no other time of year. Hence my prevarication about getting back on the bike again, after six months off.     

It’s too cold to ride. Maybe later in the week. Just a few days more to wait.   

This is New England spring after all, a most fickle and unpredictable season.  In 1997, in a meteorological April Fool’s Day joke, mother nature sent 25 inches of snow to these parts. Last week ice cold needles of rain fell almost every day, chilling me, drenching me, soaking everything and everyone. Today is not as dramatic weather wise but rushing out to the car late this morning to retrieve my favorite “Baseball Hall of Fame” thermal coffee container from the car, I was barefoot as I skipped across the driveway.  My toes curled in at the coolness of the pavement. 

I can always ride in another day or two. Yeah, that’s it.  Who’s going to know?

Then I open an email and it’s from the young man I’ve hired to help me train this year for the summer charity bike ride I’ve done for the past fourteen summers. Almost 100 miles in just one day.  “Enjoy your first ride of the season!” he enthusiastically instructs me. I’d forgotten I told Owen about my sometime yearly tradition of riding on Easter Monday.

Damn it! Now I have to ride. No excuses.

I go out to the garage and examine my just tuned up bicycle. It’s a deep blue color, all sleek and straight lines, thin black tires built for speed in the front and back, handlebars just waiting for someone to grip them again, to take this twenty-three-pound cycle out for a spin. 

Can I still do it? Ride ten or twenty or forty or eighty miles? I don’t know.

This bout of insecurity hits me every year, just before I take up my bike again. I worry about being able to make it up the first big hill of the season, to spin the pedals eighty revolutions per minute, thighs burning, lungs huffing, butt stinging, hands numbing.  If I’m not careful I might psych myself out but then I remember. Most springs, most Aprils, since 1995, almost thirty years, I’ve mounted up on my two-wheeled conveyance, and ridden, ridden again. Still, it feels like the first time ever.

Relax. Just do circles on the pedals. Just spin. No rush. It’s not a race.  Enjoy it.

That’s my inner voice of calm, or perhaps God, reminding me that the ride is not about going the fastest or proving something to someone, no. It’s not a race or competition to win or lose. It’s about the joy of watching the world go by at twelve or thirteen miles per hour, and hearing the quiet thrum of the wheels beneath you as they glide across the blacktop, and listening to the “clack, clack” of the gears as they shift, and watching as a hawk lands on a tree just into the woods on your right and feeling the sun as it warms the skin on your arm. 

Feeling more alive somehow.   

I can do this.

First ride. Saddle up.  Spring calls forth, to me, to you, to all of us. God declares, “Begin again.” 

Ready?

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

Know Boundaries, Know God. No Boundaries, No God. No Life.

Boundary (noun) 1. A line or a limit where one thing ends, and another begins   --Dictionary.com

“What are you looking at?!”

I was just finishing up supper last week with friends whom I’ve shared a weekly dinner table with for more than twenty years now.  If it is a Monday night chances are good that we are breaking bread together. But this meal, this sacred and set apart meal I so appreciate? It was being disturbed by a lack of boundaries that evening.

Ok, by my lack of boundaries.

Back story. Last fall, in a fit of consumer envy, I bought myself a smartwatch, because everyone has one, right? In fact, I purchased a wicked “smaht” watch. Not some undereducated Fitbit, not for me anymore! My new watch tells me about so much than steps. It precisely measures my heart rate and my pulse ox (whatever that is), gives me a weather report, tracks my sleep, measures my stress even.  You can’t have too much information phone wise—I think. Oh, and when I get a text message on my phone or a call, the watch then vibrates on my wrist.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZ. BZZZZZZZZZ.

Kind of like a Pavlov’s bell. The watch shakes. I immediately turn my wrist to look, push my sleeve up, and then read that oh so important text, confirming my haircut appointment for the next day. I react to that technological stimuli. And yes, I guess I do that even at the dinner table now.

Hence my friend’s legitimate protest, “What are you looking at?!”  She rightfully wanted to continue our discussion about family and work, about the election and our friends, but me?  Well, the “bell” went off. My brain got a jolt of adrenaline—WHAT’S THAT!!!! WHO IS THE VERY IMPORTANT PERSON TRYING TO GET IN CONTACT WITH ME? I AM SOOOOOOOOO NEEDED BY THE WORLD—MUST…READ…TEXT!

And so, I broke the precious boundary of our mealtime together, our connection, my paying attention to her, as a way of showing her, and saying, “I care about you.”  And yes, “I care about you more than my next trivial or annoying or interruptive text message.”  But that night the text trumped the friend. Not the first time I’ve done that. Not good. Not good at all.

I’m no Luddite. (Google it.) I mostly love technology. Enjoy it. Use it. Appreciate it. Yes, my new smart watch too.  But what I don’t like about it is how so easily I allow it to break boundaries in my life.  To break into my life when I should be fully “here” and  fully “now,” and not being dragged away by some technological interruption. It’s sobering for me to recognize and confess just how often I do allow my phone to break boundaries.

At the dinner table. On a walk in the woods. In the car: how many times have I almost rear-ended someone to try and read a stupid text or notification? I’ve broken the boundary of looking at work emails or texts when I am at play and reading personal emails or texts when I should be working. I don’t think I’ve been as aware of this busting of boundaries as I should be.  So, I am very grateful to my friend for calling me out for my rude behavior at the table.

One of the real gifts of practicing a faith tradition, is its requirement that you set boundaries, as a way to connect with God and take a breath and quiet the heart and soul. In faith we set boundaries between sabbath and work; boundaries between holy days and regular days; boundaries between the sacred and the secular. Go to worship at church, temple or mosque and you’ve set a boundary. This is my God time. Phone off. Tech ceased. For now, it is just me and my higher power.  Set aside time for daily prayer or meditation and you’ve got a boundary. Listen to the deepest longings of your heart, listen for the invitation of transcendence, somethings beyond daily life…this cannot happen unless we are intentional about setting a boundary and honoring that boundary.

Faith teaches boundaries and when you start doing that for God, you can also start doing it in the rest of your life too. No phones at the dinner table or no phones in the bedroom.  Maybe no TV in the bedroom.  Or how about this? A weekend is a weekend—not time to let more work bleed over into what is supposed to be time off. Boundaries. This is my time to walk, to exercise, to paint, to birdwatch. To be disciplined, to experience such things, we have to set boundaries.

So, thank you my friend, for your truth telling, showing me that by reading some throwaway text and not being fully present to you, we’d lost the boundary of loved ones at the table. Just so you know: I got home later that night and stopped notifications for my watch. I guess it is now not so smart. Maybe I am a bit wiser.

Thank you, God, for life and for boundaries. Now friend, can you please pass the bread and butter? We’ve got a meal to share and lots to catch up on.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.