community, reflecting

Friends

Mary Elyn Bahlert

“You’ve always had good friends,” my mother once told me. She was right. I’ve always had good friends, friends I find interesting, friends who listen to me as much as I listen to them, friends who are readers and travelers, friends who have a keen interest in life.

As I get older, I think I value my friendships even more than I ever did. Or maybe I realize now that our lives are short – we don’t know when we will lose another friend, or when we might face our own demise – and so each moment, each encounter, becomes more important as the years pass.

A few years ago, I received an email from a former student at Clarke Street School in Milwaukee, where I’d gone to 5 and 6 grades. She had written as part of the outreach to let me know about an event honoring Washington High School in Milwaukee. “Did you go to Clarke Street School?” she had written. When I looked at the name, the signature said Fran xxxxx. I knew her as Frances, and I sent my email response right away. “Are you Frances xxxxx?” I asked. I’d found her, my best friend in the few years before we entered Junior High, before I entered the Pilot Program for “smart” kids, and she skipped a grade, instead. I’d often wondered about Frances, how her life had unfolded. A few months later, Jeff and I were privileged to have a meal with Frances – now she’s Fran – and her husband, Jakov, in Milwaukee. And our staying in touch has been important to me in this season of my life.

Some friendships seem to last a long time, other friendships seem to last for a season, a short time in life. My husband, Jeff, makes friends with everyone he meets. He’s an extravert, and there are times I’ve teased him about the easy and comfortable way he makes friends. He’s got good friends, as I do. I’m grateful to be married a man who values male friendships as much as I value my female friends. I like to tease him that he’s the world’s “most extraverted man.” That’s not an exaggeration! And I have to say that Jeff and I are good friends as well as life partners. That’s a gift in my life, to be sure.

And I’m grateful now to be making new friends as the years unfold. I’ve connected with a woman pastor I’ve known for many years, and at our yearly clergy gathering, we make time to spend with each other. Another colleague – we went to seminary together – and I have decided to make sure to have lunch once a month. A woman I’ve known since the 1980’s and with whom I share an August birthday, have dinner together at least two times a year – before Christmas and during our birthday month. Just as we have for a long time, we each come with a small gift for our long time friend. One of my good friends is making end-of-life plans for herself as a single woman, carefully laying out what she wants and intends as she lives in her 80’s. I’m just one of the people she is bringing into her planning. Even though she is single, her friendships reassure her that she is not alone. Some of my friends are friends I share with Jeff – couples – and others are solo friends.

For a few years, I led a group at a local Senior Center in Oakland, which I called “Life’s Reflections.” Although the group has ended, the faithful members met for a Christmas sing-fest at my house during the holidays. And I count them among my friends.

Over the past few years, since a former parishioner and new friend to me, Margret, died suddenly, her widower Jim has been a good friend to both Jeff and me. Jim likes to cook, and he has Jeff and me for breakfast at his house once a week. We’ve never had a repeat breakfast in two years!

I can still see Joanne’s face as she sat at my desk in Green Bay, Wisconsin, for the first time, in 1973, and asked me: “Do you golf?” I hadn’t golfed – still haven’t golfed – I told her I’d try to golf! – but Joanne and I have been friends ever since.

I have lunch dates a couple of times a week, even in my elder years. Lunch together is a good way for me to connect with my friends. I learn which friends text, and who likes to communicate via email. Or a phone call.

One or two of my friends are women I’ve met through taking part in spiritual retreats overseas. Sometimes we plan for a phone call or a zoom call to connect, since we live a long distance from one another.

I’m grateful for them all. As I reflect on my friendships, I see I could add others. I’m grateful to each one. And yes, I have always had good friends. Mom was right.

Jeff, Thanksgiving Day at the Bahlerts’ in San Francisco, 11/2025

memories, reflecting, Uncategorized, wisdom

Curiosity

Mary Elyn Bahlert

“Curiosity killed the cat…” hmmm… that may be true. And although it may be true, it is also true that curiosity is a curious and important quality. Some people are curious, others are not. Maybe that’s one way the world is divided into “us” and “them.” For some, each day holds some curiosity… a new view of an old street, or seeing something one has not seen before. When we are curious, the world opens itself to us, shining full of curious things – and happenings.

As I reflect on my life in my elder years, I often return in memory to my Junior High years. I walked from our rented flat in a working class neighborhood of Milwaukee – I actually passed the Master Lock Company – on Fond du Lac Avenue, into the middle class neighborhood that surrounded Peckham Junior High School. At Robert M. LaFollette School and later at Clarke Street School on Milwaukee’s North Side, my classmates were also the children of factory workers and stay at home moms. But Peckham Junior High was in a lovely north side neighborhood with single family homes and carefully kept lawns. My world grew as I walked under the viaduct at 35th Street. I was a young person with open eyes and a keen interest in the world, a quality shared by my family. Right away, I noticed the differences in the neighborhood where Peckham J.H. stood, comparing what I saw in some deep, unspoken part of myself.

I was curious and I was smart, both qualities that have served me well in life. I had role models. At home, my parents listened to the news each morning from the radio that sat on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen. And they stayed up at night to watch the news at 10 o’clock, before they went to bed to get enough sleep before the alarm in their bedroom went off at 6 am. They read the daily newspaper – The Milwaukee Journal. Many years later, on the cold February day in 2001 that my mother was buried alongside my dad at their gravesite on the south side of Milwaukee, I walked away from the grave as my good friend Vickie walked alongside me in the cold. “You had neat parents,” she said.

I think curiosity is one quality that my parents had that made them “neat parents.” They were interested, not only in the world, but in my friends. And when Vicki lost her mother at a young age, they were particularly welcoming to her whenever she came to spend time with me.

The world can be a difficult place – often. We are assured of that by staying in touch with the news every day, as my parents did. As adults, they knew the pitfalls of life along with the kindness and goodness. The world can be a difficult place. But the world is endlessly interesting.

I was thinking about curiosity today when I was preaching about Nicodemus. Nicodemus, best known for visiting Jesus at night to discuss spiritual rebirth and later assisting with Jesus’ burial, had a journey from hidden curiosity to becoming a follower of Jesus. Nicodemus came at night to talk to Jesus, apparently curious himself about this man who was causing a stir as crowds followed him from place to place, eager to hear a good word, or eager to be healed.

I told the story of a time my big brother Ronn, who married in his early 20’s, came to me after his marriage and made a comment I have not forgotten. In a way, Ronn had always treated me as an equal, although he was 9 years older than me. And I’ve never forgotten what he said: “did you know that not everyone is interested in things, like our family is?” I understood then that he was reflecting on a difference he had noticed in his new wife’s family. He didn’t say more. I always loved Sue – love her still now that she’s been gone many years – but it is true, she did not have the interest in life that Ronn carried, as if he was carrying a gene that gave him a keen interest in learning, in new things. Later, he’d turn that interest to computers, and when I called him from across the country with a problem using my first computer at home, he’d patiently walk me through the steps I needed to get back on track.

And I suppose, like Nicodemus, curiosity might lead us into unknown, uncharted places. Maybe curiosity is responsible for whatever risks we take, a companion to the risk.

The world is endlessly interesting… even the small places are beautiful… photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2/2026

Uncategorized

winter

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Winters were tough – cold, with lots of snow – when I was a child growing up in Milwaukee. Many of my memories include cold, gray skies, and snow. Although climate change has affected snowfall in later years, I recall vividly when I lived on Martin Drive in Milwaukee, in an apartment that came without a garage. Winter mornings, as I prepared to drive to Waukesha – west of Milwaukee – I’d often have to start the car, run the engine, and get out to scrape ice off the windshield before I drove away from the street – hoping I’d be able to get back into a car already warm, hoping that I’d make it to Waukesha without running into a pileup.

Ugh.

And as I scraped the windows, I remember clearly thinking, again and again: “who would live in this climate?” Maybe I was planning ahead – unknown to even me – for another future.

Today, a headline in the New York Times reads: Record Snowfall Slams New England as New York Digs Out.
Ugh. I can relate. And I’m grateful to have had a busy morning here in Oakland, running a list of errands as I enjoy a sunny day. Again. We’ve had a week of rain, and the forecast is for more rain this week. We’re always grateful for rain, even in years when the rain is unrelenting. The Bay Area is not “sunny California,” which I quickly learned during my first winter, 1981-1982, an El Nino year. Instead of sunny days, I walked all over Berkeley in the rain. I had my mother send a box of my clothes that I’d failed to pack when I left Milwaukee. I needed clothes suitable for rain.

But this winter we’ve had plenty of rain, and another storm is on the way. It’s about time for spring to arrive full force, as the neighborhood trees, already budding, call out.

But I miss the snow, sometimes. I miss those wind-less snow falls, when the snow falls straight from the sky and leaves a blanket on the streets. In one memory, I watched late into the evening the snow fall, gentle, onto the lawn in front of my apartment building. Some memories of snow are gentle, like the snow.

And I don’t miss the times I skidded to a stop at a stop light – or even on the freeway, driving someone else’s car. Ugh. Ugh.

Spring in Oakland – photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2/11/2026

reflecting, The Holy, Uncategorized, wisdom

a few steps on a long journey

Mary Elyn Bahlert

At my retirement gathering, to honor my retirement from active ministry, a woman I went to seminary with and who had retired several years before I retired, told me that after she retired, she felt as if she had lost God for a while.  I was surprised at her comment.  I didn’t think I would experience the same thing.  At the time, I “prayed at all times” by having an on-going conversation with Jesus.  

But I was wrong.  For a couple of years after I retired in 2014, I felt as if I was adrift in my spiritual life/journey.  As time has unfolded, I have returned to my relationship to the Holy, in a new/different way than before.  

Now, I have the sense of my being “in” God, as part of God, not separate.  I am immersed in God’s presence, as I am immersed in the air, say.  The relationship I have now – as I compare my “before” and “after” – is to be part of the Whole.  And ‘the Whole” is abundantly huge, “the Whole” is all that is.  “The Whole” is loving all of creation and all that is beyond within itself.  What that means, I can’t say/explain to myself.   I don’t try.  My time of prayer now is simply being with awareness, when I have that awareness.  Often, my time spent walking is a time for me to be in that presence – 

“You will wonder and in the depths of wonder
you will discover a simpler way:   
you will walk, feet planted firmly on the earth,
head up.
You will walk into that sighing Presence.”         – from the Collection, “Moments,”
Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2026.
                                                                                      

“You will walk into that sighing Presence…” – photo, Mary Elyn Bahlert, 1/2026

memories, remembering

visits

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I’m not sure who the visitors have been, always, but over the years, I have received visitors – uninvited – who came to me with a message, and in their own voice.

The first time, I was sitting alone in a tiny cabin along Highway 57 in Baileys Harbor, Wisconsin. I had traveled to Door County to be alone for a few days to heal from some heartbreak. Door County is one of my places on earth, the place I return to as often as possible, even now that I’ve lived in California for most of my life. I travel to Door County to honor a promise I made to myself many years ago – that no matter how far my life would take me, I would return.

I still turn to look up at the cabin each time I pass it, when I visit Door County, in silent recognition of that time. The builder placed the wood frame building just-so on a rise, a few hundred feet in front of the woods. The highway below cannot be seen from the front window, which I faced, sitting alone at the little kitchen table. Across from me was the sky hanging over Green Bay. Except for me and my relentless thoughts, I was alone. “It’s ok, Mary:” a voice spoke in the room. I turned to look over my left shoulder, in the direction of the sound. No one was there. When I turned to face the window again, I was still alone in the room.

*

A few years later, I was awakened in my dorm room at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, where I was studying for a Master of Divinity degree, on my way to being ordained in the United Methodist Church. What had wakened me? I didn’t know, didn’t understand, still don’t understand. What I did understand was that the presence of my maternal grandmother – Frances Markowski – Feodosia Machsuda Srebny – had somehow entered me, come into me, inhabited me. I was afraid, and in my fear, I cried out for Jesus. Then, nothing. No presence, no sound, no light, no other disturbance. Did I fall back to sleep? Mostly a light sleeper, I don’t remember if I was able to sleep again that night.

Over the coming months that turned into years, I was aware – always – of the presence of my maternal grandmother, who had passed when I was in college. Hers was the first funeral I attended; until her death, my parents had gone without me, my sister, or my brother, to funerals. I had not felt attached to my grandmother. She had lost her ability to speak any English in her later years, instead speaking only Ukrainian when Dad picked her up at the nursing home to spend the holidays with us. As soon as she arrived, she began to ask my mother to be taken home again.

She gave me a gift after her return during my seminary years. Jeff speaks about those visitations as a “haunting,” although I didn’t feel haunted. Instead, from time to time I sat and word by word, line by line, I crafted poems that tell the story of her life, of her leavings, of her griefs. I call the poems, “The Feodosia Poems”, and they will be included in my collection of poems, Moments, to be published this year.

Years later, a friend and I would sit on the floor of my home and together, with our intentions, free my grandmother to move on in her life. I watched as she traveled away from me, away into the past. She has not returned.

I asked my friend why she had come to me, why not to others in the family? “Who else would she go to?” my friend answered, simply.

*

In 2001, I was living in Oakland, California, in a rented duplex with Jeff. I had moved my mother to Oakland to live in a wonderful assisted living home, The Matilda Brown Home, not far from where I live now, in 1998, the year I was appointed as Pastor at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church in downtown Oakland. Mom loved her new home, where she made friends and enjoyed the simple activities, the regular meals in the beautiful dining room, her times outside in the garden, where she and I sat together on a swinging bench during our visits. She loved her little room, the smallest at the home, where she returned after breakfast every day to read the newspaper as she sat on her single bed. The one small window overlooked the school yard of Oakland Tech, and she could hear the young people playing sports as she sat in her chair.

The night before she passed, Jeff insisted that I go home to sleep in my own bed. He spent the night in the swivel chair next to her bed. Before I left her room to go home that last evening, I sat in the silence, her breathing the only sound in the room. Then, I noticed a melody, playing itself alone in my head. The words of a melancholy song from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” came into my head: how can I make you understand, why I do, what I do? Going away to a distant land, far from the home I love.”

As planned, Jeff stayed the night in the chair beside Mom’s bed. In the morning, I awoke alone in our flat, and prepared for the day. I stood at the window in the corner of our bedroom, combing my hair. “Everything is going to happen naturally from here on.” I heard a voice. I turned to look over my shoulder into the room behind our bedroom, with its windows on two sides bright with the morning. “Jesus?” I asked, into the silence.

A few minutes later, I arrived in Mom’s room. I saw immediately that her breathing had changed, and that death was not far away. Mom had been asleep now for several days, medication given by her doctor easing her discomfort. As I arrived, I turned to Mom in her bed and said: “I’m here now.” Jeff had left the room, and she and I were alone. And I stood and watched as she took her last breath.

*

I expect life holds many mysteries, many things I will not ever understand. I expect that your life holds many mysteries, too.