Last night I had the strangest dream...

I'd taken friends to church with me to hear a friend of mine preach--Newell Bishop, who was as close to a mentor as I've ever had. Newell died earlier this month, though in the dream I had no awareness of this. The thing I did notice, though, was that Newell's hair and beard were pure white. The church looked more like a high school auditorium, rectangular, with a screen and stage at one end, padded metal seats bolted to the floor. Newell was giving some kind of a farewell sermon, and he talked about the search committee that was doing the work of finding his successor. As he spoke, people were setting up projection equipment for some kind of presentation. One man brought in canisters of what looked like movie film. I assumed the committee would be watching videos of their finalists preaching while the rest of us went to coffee hour following the service. Newell finished by directing everyone's attention to the screen, and all of a sudden we were watching a film that introduced the finalists. This is really odd, I thought. The whole congregation doesn't get to see this.

Then everything shifted and rather than being on film, the people were there in person. I must have changed seats, because I was right next to the communion table as the first finalist led worship. She was giving a sermon, sort of, but was overwhelmed by having to marshal her three young children into something like a cooperative state. All the while she was talking with the congregation (they seemed more like an audience), and I remember thinking this isn't a sermon at all. It was more of a monologue on how hard it is to be a single parent. She had my sympathy, but I was thinking this isn't a very good way to present yourself to a search committee. There was something about the interplay between her and her kids, though, especially her adolescent daughter, that was intriguing and beautiful. When she finished, I realized I was wowed by how musical their interactions had been. They hadn't been singing, but the pitch and rhythm, the counterpoint of their voices, even their subtle movements and shifts in position, could only be described as inspired. How did she get them to do that? I wondered. It looked completely unrehearsed, but was so amazingly well coordinated that it had to have been. That was what I wanted to tell her, rather than how it was lacking as a candidating sermon, when afterward she asked me what I thought. But things were changing quickly on what had become a stage that I didn't get a chance to say anything meaningful.

Then the next candidate came out, and the whole scene bore no resemblance to a church. It was clearly a theater, and four people came onstage in costume, onto a set that was a living room. They were ready to begin, but I was in their way, lying down on the front of the stage and blocking others' view. For some reason, that seemed to be my assigned "seat." I shifted to the side of the stage, near the curtain. All was very friendly, though, and the actors, the people behind me, and I all joked about how I was kind of like their footlights.

And then my alarm went off and I woke up.

Several years ago I was talking with Mary Ann Mattoon about dreams and what they might mean. Mary Ann (some of you will remember her) was a Jungian and a distinctively practical one. A dream probably means whatever you think it means, she said. I'm not sure about all of the details in this one, though I do think some of the particulars are simply trace elements of things I've been thinking about in my waking hours--Newell's death, the search committee looking for whoever will be the next principal minister at the church I left when I moved to London--but on balance the dream seems to reflect the transitional process going on in me, away from the pastorate and toward something that at least uses the tools of theatre, or is in that aesthetic world. I see my dreams not so much as predicting things to come as reflecting what's going on inside, the mind continuing to deal symbolically with things I think about, usually more analytically, in the daylight.

I still don't know where this exploration at Lispa is leading me. I don't even know what language to use to describe it. Is it leading me at all, for example, or is it completely up to me to chart the course? Where between the two does the balance lie? I have this image of balancing a long stick on its end in the palm of my hand. There's a back and forth between being able to stand still and being able to control which way I can walk while balancing the stick, and corrections in course that I have to take because the stick isn't completely in my control.

And so on it goes. Hoping (and praying) for a fertile year as I move from what I did before to what possibilities I may yet step into--and help to create.

Back in London

I'd signed up for a weekend course in street photography for yesterday and today, but with my foot all banged up, I thought it best to cancel. (Sigh.) With the help of a friend I was able to see an osteopath within hours of arriving back here on Friday, though, and found that I hadn't broken a bone after all--I love that they test for fractures, not with an X-ray machine, but with a tuning fork. I did, however, do a number on some muscles and tendons in my right foot. Reassuringly, I also found that I'd been doing the right things by icing and elevating the foot as much as possible the past week, and using crutches to keep off it when it got sore. At least I'm learning something from all the injuries of the past year! Now I'm doing painful massages to help with the healing, and the improvement has sped up. At this rate, my hobbling days will soon be in the dust receding behind me.

Another insight into the health care absurdity back home: I went in search of one of those padded plastic boots people wear instead of a cast these days, as well as those shorter crutches that have a cuff that goes around your forearm instead of the pad that's designed for your armpit. I thought it might be easier to travel with those than the pair of vintage wooden crutches we had in the basement. At Fairview Medical Supply, the crutches cost $58. Each. And the boot was over 150. Surely it can't cost anything like that to manufacture them. I assume they get away with this because insurance companies will pay the bulk of the cost. Sounds an awful lot like the $300 toilet seats the military used to buy from defense contractors.

I did get a couple of unanticipated benefits from using those ancient crutches on my flight--I was invited to jump to the head of the line at immigration at Heathrow. And I found that a Boeing 777 has an amazing amount of legroom for the bulkhead seats. If you ever start to feel invisible, just get around on crutches for a day or two. People offer you their seats, call you sir or ma'am. It's still a kind world after all. (Yes, I know, with notable exceptions.)

"Large live rats"

You know how, when you sit on a plane waiting for takeoff and they run through the safety instructions (this is how you buckle a seat belt, etc.--I mean, really, come on), those times when you tune out and you're not really listening? I had a bit of a startle the other day as we were waiting to take off from Minneapolis. I heard the flight attendant say--or thought I heard--"Large live rats are located in the overhead storage compartments." Large live rats, you say? So I perked up my ears (wouldn't you?) and was relieved to hear the next part was about how to inflate your life vest. Never has the reminder of the possibility of a crash into Lake Michigan been so reassuring.

The Great Thanksgiving

Must be the Rick Steves in me, but whenever I go to a country where I don't know the language, the first things I try to learn to say are Hello, Goodbye, Please, and Thank you. And sometimes the word for Cheers or whatever it is people say when they toast one another. This, my children will tell you, is a big improvement over when they were young and I insisted that they learn the phrase for "Where is the bathroom?" (When in Rome, I may know little else, but I can say "Dov'e la tolletta?" with the best of them.) In Crete a couple of weeks ago for a friend's wedding, I was delighted to learn that the Greek word for "Thank you" is Eucharisto.

Had I taken even the most rudimentary Greek class in div school, this would surely have been no surprise to me. One of the humbling results of blogging is that you reveal your own ignorance. Perhaps a happier ripple effect is evoking an affirming "Well, even I knew that" response in many a reader. (If many readers there be.)

Another liturgical echo: From an essay in yesterday's Guardian looking back on the anniversary of the stock market collapse:

In the dock together, both in hock together, what answers have the English-speaking peoples come up with? They have duly shown remorse. They have drawn on the resources of a common cultural heritage in acknowledging the sinfulness of their ways. Like the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the mode has often been that of general confession: to acknowledge and confess manifold sins and wickedness, without specifying personal lapses. Have we followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts? Guess so. Have we left undone those things which we ought to have done? You betcha--we should have shackled Wall Street and the City. And have we done those things which we ought not to have done? Yes, we too got a bit greedy, we too were had, we too have been burned and we won't forget it (unlike some folks who still expect their bonuses).

Many's the time I would have loved to insert a "Guess so" or a "You betcha" into a Sunday morning prayer.

Labor Day, without the labor

Enjoying some time at home in the beautiful late Minnesota summer. A cookout with friends this afternoon. Lots of time reading these days. Mostly with my right foot propped up because last Thursday, just before heading off for a long day at the State Fair, I was working on my handstands at home and cracked a toe hard against a piece of furniture. I assumed I'd just bruised it and then spent all day walking around on pavement at the fairgrounds, only to have my foot swell and turn all sorts of lovely colors. I think I may have broken a bone. But since I have no health insurance in the good ol' U S of A, I can't afford to go to a doctor who will probably just tell me not to walk on it (too late). So I'll get it looked at, some 2 weeks later, by my GP in London, with whom I've set up an appointment by email. And meanwhile I read all these articles in the paper about people demonizing "socialized health care" in Britain, where it costs me nothing to see my doctor and next to nothing to get prescriptions filled. The tone of the public... debate? discussion? those words seem too elevated a description ... here is so disheartening. I'm afraid the best we can hope for is so complicated a package that almost no one will understand it. An interesting article the other day in the paper quoted Bob Dole, first as saying that health care reform is the most important thing most senators and reps will ever vote on and that just saying no to everything is simply not an option (hooray there) and that having a complicated bill is actually an advantage because people can fiddle with the minor points and still feel like they have something to show to their just-say-no constituents. (I guess I'd give that a qualified hooray.)

This is why I shouldn't wait weeks between posts. There's always something present to write about and I never get caught up.

Back to Greece: While in Rethymno (on Crete) we saw two classic Greek plays, one by Aristophanes (Thesmophoriazusae) and one by Aeschylus (The Persians), both in Greek of course. I couldn't follow the dialog at all, but it was fun seeing Greek plays in a (modern) amphitheater in the old fortress at Rethymno, under starry skies. The comedy was broad enough that, with some previous description of the plot, we could basically follow it. With Persians, again we were given a preliminary description of the plot by a friend who's well read in such things, but I gotta say, I find tragic chorus things pretty impenetrable (in my limited experience). That'll be one of the challenges of the upcoming year at Lispa, when we run through a rotation of dramatic styles. Tragic chorus is one of them. I have a lot to learn there. (So what's new?) Other dramatic styles ahead of us include platform, melodrama, commedia, grotesque (and/or bouffant? not sure if there's a difference), and clown. Again, stay tuned. This is a collection of areas I can promise I'll write about.

More later, little by little.