Grace Odyssey: The Journey is Home

It's all about grace. 

Anneli's backstory. Everybody has one. Right?  What's yours? 

One of very few bona fide Colorado natives, I grew up in Denver before heading east for school. I harbored fantasies of becoming the next Chrissie Evert for a little while, then took up rock-climbing and ruined my ankles while working at a camp at the very base of the diamond of Long's Peak for several summers. To give some perspective, I climbed Long's in tennis shoes, for god's sake, and when we summited there were three of us. That has changed!

I loved the city and its human diversity as much as I had loved the variety of rocks, some 2.5 billion years old, on Trail Ridge Road. Urban vitality is a whole other animal and absolutely as beautiful in its own way as my mountains. My dad had cleared a lot of the land for that camp where I started out and I count it as 'home' almost as much as any patch on earth. But I never stopped falling in love with new homes, cultures so I have come to understand that, most importantly,  "the journey is home."    (Nelle Morton)

My husband and I, whom I married two days before graduating from university, loved living and working and eventually raising two children in Chicago for almost 20 years before moving back to Denver in 1999. The Lakefront was not quite the ocean but it would do. And the Cubs. Well, what can you say about the Cubs?  But the lobster trap is still on the front porch. You just never know. And we have plenty of buoys. (Can you tell, I'm a bit conflicted, still, about where I live?  Even though it is drop dead gorgeous here, too, and I have 78,376 photos to prove it!, Massachusetts still has a claim.) I'm still here.

My great-great-great-grandfather was digging around out here with a pick ax, looking for gold and silver in these mountains decades before Colorado even became a state!  My Swedish ancestors  (how can you tell) came to try their hands at mining, which didn't pan out terribly well, but enough to buy farms, and a few mines, and then try railroad administration, and finally business and law. My parents were both born on farms in the newly irrigated lands north of Denver, and my dad's beloved horse, Silver, lived long enough for me to meet her in her ancient of days. I still want a horse!

From all these Swedish immigrants --- and who goes all the way out to the steppes of Eastern Colorado to farm when there is Swedish-looking land from Connecticut to Iowa in between! good heaven!  ---- I inherited their sense of adventure and courage, their tenacity and resilience, thank God, their rebellious and determined spirits, and from my grandmother, that gene that makes me the family prankster. I love to laugh, most of all at myself. Life is meant to be taken seriously, but frankly, it is so bizarre, you just have to laugh.

History, anthropology, and psychology are great interests. While in grad school, I studied in Poland in 1980, just as Lech Walesa vaulted over the shipyard fence in Gdansk and Solidarity was sprung. I was hooked. How could I not be? When I crossed the Polish-Soviet border for the first time in late November, 1980, we encountered a battalion of the half-million or more Soviet troops poised to invade. We shared a tense waiting room with their officer corps for several hours at the border in Brest. The sight of this multitude of imposing Soviet power, men in gorgeous (it's true) long wool coats with epaulets and many medals, their furry big "Rooskie" hats, actually made me so nervous I began to giggle, uncontrollably. I could not stop.You know those giggles. It went on for a good half-hour. It was not an auspicious introduction. And it didn't help that my buddies, Ed and Harris, kept up a quiet prattle, addressing the gathering, "And I suppose you are wondering why we asked you all here..."  But the Soviets in their great coats and dang-enviable hats stayed on their side of the invisible boundary and the Polish revolution staggered on. No invasion that day.

 As for me, I sold the tennis shoes off my feet to some kid in Leningrad who was desperate for Western apparel. And I sat down by accident in the Archbishop of Moscow's chair at the formal luncheon in the city's most elegant establishment. I was gracious 'redirected.'  (Who knew the person of honor sat in the middle of the table, not at the head?)  Seven forks, four knives, five spoons, four crystal goblets and many vodka toasts later, our motley crew of students, dressed inappropriately for the occasion -- for every occasion -- in flannel shirts and blue jeans, staggered out into an early dusk, into the always waiting Chaika, leaving passersby to wonder what rock band had just had lunch with the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate.

It was hairy times, and my time later spent in Warsaw during Martial Law (what they called war, Poland at war against itself) was utterly heartbreaking. I had no idea if they would come out of it alive. It took nine years then, of war and angst and looming disaster, before, of all things, the Communists, including the Prime Minister, a man I knew!  and members of Solidarity sat down at a Round Table and fashioned a new, post-Communist future. Their first mostly-free elections on June 4, 1989 was the Berlin Wall coming down, for real. That was the real turning point! The dramatic razing of the Berlin Wall several months later, in November, was presaged by the tedious work and remarkable courage of the Poles. But nobody noticed: their elections took place on the very day we were all transfixed by the heart-stopping drama in Tiananmen Square.

Thanks to the vision of the Lutheran World Federation, I spent significant amounts and quality of time in Eastern Europe, especially the Baltics, Poland, and Moscow and Leningrad all through the decade of the 1980's. It was almost an accident, if you believe in such things. You just never know how life is going to go. Dave and I drove out to Washington, D.C. in the Fall of 1981 to a meeting of folks interested in promoting understanding between the East and West, as we called it then.  New and feeling shy, we sat near the back, in a row with just one other person. Before the evening ended, we had met, talked at length, and I had an invitation to join a delegation of Lutheran seminary students going to spend time in the Baltics the next Spring, of 1982. Can I just confess, for the record, I had to go back and look up where Estonia was. Estonia?  A Baltic Republic of the USSR at the time, a tiny but lively culture, lovely people, and kissing cousins to the Finnish. And wow, can they sing! The Estonian Folk Song Festival, of over a hundred thousand singers, should be on your bucket list!

We were about fifteen graduate students, plus our fearless leaders, and we were 'officially' a choir. Gary Bunge could at least play the violin like a pro and Luanne Deckard has the most ethereal operatic soprano: to hear her fill the cathedrals, some turned into museums by the Soviets, was a holy moment I shall never forget. So we were a choir. We had to be; you didn't just go to the USSR in those days. You needed a purpose. Thanks to the formal "Basket Three of the Helsinki Act for Security and Cooperation in Europe," I'm officially a 'Basket Case,' and can put 'Human Contact' on my resume. It was a dynamic time of relationship-building for a future generation of leaders there, so we hoped and so it has come to be. We met around bonfires under the Midnight Sun and snuck through the streets of Tallinn, Tartu, Riga, and Vilnius with young people who, in many cases, risked a very great deal to be with us. They were called in for questioning and I don't even know what other consequences they paid. They gave far more than we did and I got way more than I knew how to offer. And some of us are friends for life. And our children have now met!  We showed up at the oddest places, over the years, in our big red Intourist bus and I can tell you that it went places no Intourist bus had ever gone before, or since. We argued with the Soviet Peace Committee over radar installations in Krasnoyarsk and agreed that we both needed less warheads and more smart minds working on resolving our differences. I saw "perestroika" and "glasnost" in their nascent forms, and I have an address book from Tallinn that has a very very peculiar back story. Later....  I have a KGB file. God only knows what is in it. Shall we try to find out? I've been wanting to. Or is it rotted away in a basement of some warehouse on the outskirts of Moscow?

There shall be more stories from those trips, many stories, oh! the stories! and they're good ones!, and of the impact they have made up to this day, on my life. But they changed me, from the inside out. They also gave my daughters' their names, and honorary godparents. And they made history. At the gracious, and stunning, audacious invitation of the Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in Vilnius, which at the time, 1985, was still just learning about Vatican II (it was so cut off!), I am the first and only woman to preside at a Holy Eucharist inside an Orthodox cathedral. (cf Keston College)  It was a Lutheran liturgy, and the Lithuanian Lutheran Archbishop stood by like a very proud papa as our invited group of Lutheran worshipers celebrated Holy Communion at a prominent side altar dedicated to my favorite evangelist, St. John. The Orthodox women who looked on had to be careful not to get caught smiling, as their priests scanned the crowd. It was an epic moment. Literally.

And so it went, ending for me in 1989, when I came home with an actual Estonian flag! A real Estonian flag. The USSR wasn't quite kaput but it would be soon. And we celebrated early. I cannot overstate the impact of these relationships, while in Eastern Europe and as Russian Orthodox delegations came to visit us in the States. It combined my passions for peace, with justice, and my fascination with people and culture, and just plain friendship. I'm going on about it here because, well, it made me, me, in a most significant way. And besides, my mother was thrilled when it even got me into People Magazine!

It has come to pass, the promise on my ordination announcment, that "You who once were far off have been brought near........ You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens together with the saints and members of the household of God."  (Eph. 2)  Yep. These friends who had reason to be afraid to meet us now chat with me on Facebook. They visit, I visit, my kids visit. We talk. They earn degrees from Princeton. God who is rich in mercy has done this!  Now, about the folks so close yet so far, in ancient Palestine...
Stir up your power, again, and again, O God, and come!  Quickly. Please.


People do fascinate me! All people. I won't live long enough to get to Mongolia and the sweep of the trans-Siberian Railroad is looking less likely every year. It's not looking good for me to make it to South Africa -- the place that first pulled me completely out of my American experience and worldview -- either, but my daughter has been there and is likely to return. She learned to talk by shouting, "Free Mandela!" with us at the South African Consulate every Thursday noon, and learned to sing, "Freedom is Coming!" as she joined me in the anti-apartheid protests I had begun participating in at Princeton in 1976. She's been back to Africa again, this time as part of her medical school work, and she has her feet firmly planted on many continents. Our other daughter is hooked on global education, especially for girls, and was thrilled to be with Malala for "Malala Day" at the UN in 2013. She studied in Geneva at the United Nations in 2013 and is not likely to stay in this corner of the world, either. They have inherited my desire to be out, in the world, to make an impact, to stir things up, to settle things down.

My grandmother is said to have been "in hot water" frequently at her church for speaking her mind, for speaking up for the poor girl who was got pregnant, for the outcast, for the questionable ones. I like to think that we got that gene, too.

Nature and nurture got tangled up together to create the unique complex personality that is me, and I am endlessly curious to see how those dynamics play out in others. And I just love people. Even with my injury-based sense of mistrust and fear, due to an attack several years ago, I am one of those people. I talk in elevators. I chat up the waitstaff at restaurants. I make small talk in line at the movies. And I am terminally doomed to say, "I'm sorry." I once even apologized for the sun.

I am an avid but informal student of Jung and read as much as I can and take workshops when possible. I like to learn, to pick a topic and dig it up. My grandfather was hunched over from picking potatoes. I prefer to sit up straight and dig up history about Palestine, for example, these days, or the Ute people who once inhabited the land I live on now.

I came out of the womb with a passion for justice. Sometimes it boils over into outrage. And my husband gently sits me down and says, "patience, the long view." But sometimes, sometimes, things need to be done NOW. Knowing the difference, and knowing my limits, my boundaries, is a challenge. I grew up in the role of rescuer and have carried it with me lifelong. I am just about as sensitive and tender as they come. This is a good thing and a not so good thing.

I have a collection of posters that help define my spirit.  Try this one:

"There's a fine line between crazy and free spirited and its usually a prescription."

"I always mean what I say. I may not always mean to say it out loud, but I always mean it."

"Sometimes my biggest accomplishment is just keeping my mouth shut."

But I also remember my first trip to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. while in college. It is engraved there, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."   And Edmund Burke's word caught me early, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men [sic] do nothing."

Judith Herman wrote in her seminal work on "Trauma and Recovery,"  that all the perpetrator, or oppressor asks of us is silence. The victim, the ones traumatized, the oppressed need us, our voices to speak up, to tell their story, or give them the space and credibility to speak. We are called, always, to bear witness. 

And of course, I learned from the women who went to find a dead Jesus at the tomb, and discovered it empty, one of them encountering the Risen Christ, to "Go and tell......"

So I pretty much do. I pretty much have. Go, tell.  Injury shut me up for a long time but I am finding my voice -- and with a fury, a passion, perhaps feeling the need to make up for lost time.

Another poster, "We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is primary among my virtual mentors, thanks to my wonderful teacher, the late F. Burton Nelson (one of the earliest and most careful of Bonhoeffer scholars). DB, as we call him at home, said that ignoring evil was tantamount to collaboration, participation in it. He got me off my butt early on, got me on the picket lines, the editorial page, the soapbox. And did I ever get off? I know what that costs. And I am willing to pay. I almost did. And I knew what I was doing.

That scares my kids sometimes. And my spouse. But it's me. I saw first hand growing up what life was worth. And what it's not. I choose life, and abundantly, as Jesus promised. But that doesn't include the right to keep silent about injustice, abuse, or cruelty. So bug my phone. I'm okay with that. I have nothing to hide.


In all things, over many roads, on many different journeys, I have come to discover that life unfolds as a process that spirals around:  as we gather experiences and insights, friends and enemies, adventures, wisdom and knowledge, by trial and error, with surprises in surplus. And so it moves us forward. Then. Then. It devolves again into chaos, for the same reason it moves us forward --- more new stuff ---  a new mix that requires of us a persistence, tenacity, curiosity, and the application of insight if we are to grow.  And that eventually, or constantly, resolves, moving us onward again, before the cycle begins again. And again. Rinse. Repeat.  

So goes it. 

It is all about grace. 

Grace is everything.

I am delighted by daily treasures --- Colorado has the best clouds, clouds! in the world --- and I love photography, travel, and music of all kinds. Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto is playing through the earphones right now. It often does. The bedroom / writing room radio is set to NPR classical (except on Saturday mornings for "Wait, Wait!"), while the car radio has its presets tuned to rock, KBCO is king. My iPod goes everywhere and has everything from (all of) Chopin to Lady Gaga to Carole King (of course), Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Lina Sandell's gentle Swedish folk hymns, Lauridsen, and massive amounts of sing-along Peter, Paul and Mary, and Marty Haugen. The main thing is that it is LOUD.

Half-measures irritate the hell out of me. But I have had to learn to do with doing less after a traumatic brain injury and continuing complex PTSD. And now, oh joy, I have Parkinson's Disease. I work hard at finding the gift, even the grace in these realities (and most certainly the humor!) and I use them to help me do interesting things like "build character." I don't like having been stopped in my tracks but then again....

My brain injury may have been the best thing that happened to me. It ended my need for perfectionism (see previous post), and taught me the gift of idleness Seriously. Doing nothing is highly underrated.

I love to write and to read, as most authors do. I am a long-time fan of Chicago's own Sara Paretsky and her brilliant and ballsy, witty and unstoppable detective creation, V. I. Warshawski. I live from one new V. I. book to the next. And I firmly, duly believe that V. I. should just run the world. We'd all be better off.

Literary fiction is another love, besides biographies, history (need a book about Poland, pick an era, pick a topic, pick a person, I have it) and my favorite novel is the one I just read. I decided a while ago to let the poets Adrienne Rich and Wyslawa Szymborska be my spokespeople: they say what I mean far better than I can.  (Although I certainly seeming to be giving them a run for their money here!)

Learning about different cultures and traditions, and more about my own, is very important to me. We are still very much a Swedish-American family but my own and my family's wanderings around the world have integrated an elephant from Kenya and a goat from Nablus into our Jultide table's tribal gathering of Tomten. Middle Eastern, Eastern European and Russian, other African and Swiss priorities, traditions, and passions have mingled well into our basic Scandinavian sensibilities. For me, meeting friends from Palestine, all the way back in 1985, brought new insights that give purpose to my days. My lifelong (and I mean, lifelong: from baking at age three with my grandmother's Jewish next door neighbor and dear friend, the "ginger woman" I called her due to an exotic fragrance that was far outside the cardamon and cinnamon I knew, the woman with a blue tattoo on her wrist that I had yet to understand), and later living among Shoah survivors, looking out my dorm window onto an Hasidic Yeshiva, and going to temple some Friday nights:   this lifelong affection and respect, honor and love of the Torah, of Jewish teaching, the Prophets passion for justice, and the traditions, rituals and the profound impact of the Holocaust has not diminished at all, but it lives alongside awareness of another narrative, and a kind of prophet's zeal, "Return to me," I hear G-D calling to Israel in these terrible days. Bombs are falling on Gaza as I write this. I woke to pages and pages of posts in Arabic this morning, first person accounts from friends there, of houses destroyed, neighbors killed. I'm not exaggerating. That makes me furious. I know that this a long and complex conflict. I know it will not likely be resolved in my lifetime. But can a woman pray for a ceasefire?  Can a person tell her own government to stop funding this Occupation and brutality, to the tune of  $8 million every day?  If they want my money, now, they will have to come and get it! They'll have to wring it out of me. (And they will.) But I am done. Done paying Israel to kill, to break the commandments, its own sacred Covenant with Yahweh. "Return to the Lord your God, for God is gracious and merciful..."  Pray it be so.

I have done some wild and crazy things in my life, things I will never tell my children, and a few things that even made the history books (again cf Keston College). The mangled sweater I almost bought (it was a set-up) from an Afghani at the Ukraina Hotel in Moscow during their war, the long talks with the daughter of Poland's first post-war Communist leader. The visits I had with Poland's last Communist Prime Minister. Chatting by phone with Allan Boesak, the apartheid leader from South Africa, while he was confined during "house arrest."  Reading his speech, in absentia, to a crowded ballroom.

My days are filled with amazing memories: sitting four feet from Kurt Elling as he sang, "April in Paris" at Martin Marty's house; hearing as if for the first time the haunting words of Lorraine Hansberry's character, "Hope deferred is hope denied."  Reading the prophet Micah from the very pulpit at Martin Luther King's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. For that matter, kneeling every night next to my children's beds, singing the medley of lullabies that were as set as a liturgy, "All Night, All Day...  Thy Holy Wings...."   Sacred time. Holy. Being in a stadium as Archbishop Desmond Tutu held the rapt attention of 30,000 high school kids, begging them to be passionate about loving others as themselves.  Singing along with Peter, Paul and Mary -- and my kids!!! --- at Ravinia, "No Easy Walk to Freedom," and celebrating Andrew Tecson's vibrant Jazz Mass every year at Christ the King in the Loop. Sitting at the deathbed of young men dying of AIDS, offering the comfort that their parents were not able to give. Officiating illegally at 'illegal' gay unions. And listening, 'hearing into speech' the anguish of women who had been sexually abused by their pastors. Ah, holy ground. And giving them some measure of comfort, and the promise of payment for counseling, justice, a sincere apology on behalf of the church. Holy ground indeed. And the wondrous joy of Buddettes and "Dimwitted Feminists" as fantastic colleagues for many years.

And family!   Ah!  The joy of a fabulous family that my husband and I fashioned out of naivete, good will, deep love, great respect, and passion. Those private joys and celebrations are cherished more than all else. That is the life that really really matters!  Laughing together, serious talks, shopping for shoes (I'm really kidding about that: I am not aware of ever shopping for shoes with my kids after they outgrew StrideRite.) Introducing them to my mountains, to the wonders of the city, to classical music, driving across South Dakota (you have no idea how big this country is until you have driven across South Dakota in one shot) listening to Beethoven. Meeting Goofy and Minnie Mouse. Meeting the poor. Meeting, each in our own ways, the One who Loves. Singing together all the favorite old Swedish hymns --- oops, never done that. Well anyway, I never aimed for perfection in the whole parenting thing, and a good thing too. But we're good. We love.

Sacred moments. Here, Far off. And remembering these poignant words of promise,  "I do." And we did, we have, we are. Unconditionally.

Sailing on the Atlantic, sunset at the far eastern tip of Nova Scotia's easternmost island, where the light is surreal and the water is pure aqua. Sunrise while crossing over the Baltic Sea. Giggling at the fireworks squiggling like lit-up sperm falling right on your very head!  The gleaming gold domes of the Kremlin. The never-failing awe of the Maroon Bells. Kandinsky's original Improvisation 13. So many moments, awe, and horror. The world holds it all in a single piece. And ours it is to reconcile, to simply behold, to respect. And revel.

Now, after years of injury and feeling much too defined by it, and before that, years of frenetic running -- I find that a simple and very quiet life is perfect. And it's what I'm capable of. I tell my daughter that I need thirty minutes warning if she is bringing boyfriend home because, quite frankly, if it is a writing day like today, I need to put on pants!  I have the best bedroom / writing room in the world: my nest, as I've said, my sanctuary, very simple and full of art and light and books and music. I leave the shades open all the time now. A big step! And no more unraveling socks. Well, hardly.

I am still not "wired to code," and have confrontations with the symptoms of my invisible illnesses all too often. I find myself feeling grateful everyday that my friends are gracious and patient and generous, and have sent quilts and prayer shawls, books, and much love, and would rather just laugh along with me than at me.

It is a screwed up world out there. But also a beautiful one. The growing, healing spiral continues as more light gets in.  And it is all about grace. Life is an odyssey and its beginning middle and end are grace.

Rosie always said,

So goes it.

The journey is home.