community, reflecting

Little Free Library

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I was walking in my neighborhood late last year when I discovered a Little Free Library a few blocks from home. I stopped and looked through the books, enchanted. When I arrived home, I looked for the website that I’d seen on a little plaque attached at the top of the library: littlefreelibrary.org

I was ready to go! Jeff and I have a friend who can build anything, our friend Jim. So we asked Jim to build the library for us, and within a couple of weeks, we had our library, perched on a cement post on the strip of land we call “the panhandle,” that’s part of our property.

From the very first days of our hosting the Little Free Library, books began to appear. Jeff and I supplied a couple of books to get started. One day soon after, as I watched from the kitchen window, a car stopped, a woman I did not know got out, and she walked over to the Little Free Library to deposit some books. We were live!

I had followed up on my research, too, and so I went to littlefreelibrary.org and ordered a plaque that would put my library on the map. The Little Free Library that we are hosting is #125791. Little Free Library #125791 appears on a map on the website, and now we’re connected to other folks who host a Little Free Library in their neighborhood. I’m happy to be present to my community in this way, in a way that is important to me, and to Jeff: we’re both avid readers, mostly of nonfiction.

A few days later, I posted a picture of our Little Free Library on the Facebook page for Little Free Libraries, and I was set to go! I’m still receiving notes of welcome from other Little Free Librarians!

The story doesn’t end there, however. I was all set to go into a ZOOM meeting last week, when the doorbell to our house rang. I had to hurry clear to the other end of the house to answer, and I checked out the window before I opened the door, to make sure the door-ringer was still there. A young man I didn’t recognize was waiting for me to answer. When I did, he asked me if I was the person who was hosting the Little Free Library on the street. I told him that yes, I was.

He wanted to let me know that he’d found a book, The Freedom to Be, by A. H. Almaas, in the Little Free Library on our street. He had read the book. And – he said, looking into my eyes: “it changed my life.” He told me that he was on his way to meet with a teacher, an adherent of Almaas, right after his stop at my house. I had read a bit of Almaas over the years, and I told him that. We exchanged names. Before he turned to go, I suggested he stop over to see me again some time, when we could talk more. Smiling at me before he walked back down the stairs, he said yes.

Our Little Free Library! photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 4/2024

Uncategorized

Acedia

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Acedia:  spiritual or mental sloth; apathy

Monks in their cells in the Middle Ages
rose before dawn to pray.
Instead, they walked that narrow room,
     back and forth, back and forth, all day.
Some called this a sin,
     this rocking in their stiff chairs,
     the unwillingness to kneel, to pray.

The days of cloistering went on eternally, it seemed.

We've been sheltering for months,
the agitated monk inside us growing, growling,
longing to be free.
Still he paces, frantic and passive.
Call it a sin.
Call it malaise, a fever.
Acedia has risen from the ashes
to mark this time.

Mary Elyn Bahlert
10/2020

Uncategorized

It’s Easter

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Very early this Easter morning, a couple of hours before sunrise, Jeff and I were both awake to hear the screeching sounds of a “sideshow” somewhere close to our street in Oakland. Young people connect with one another via text to set a time and place to come together at an intersection in the city, where bystanders watch as the fast moving cars in the intersection screech around and around the circle formed by the intersection itself. One disturbing memory I have of having served as a pastor in Oakland is of the day I received a distraught phone call from the mother of a teenage girl who had been killed the night before while she watched a sideshow from the side of the street, a bystander, an observer. The sanctuary was full the day we held the teenager’s funeral, her casket open as the community gathered to mourn her passing.

When I heard the screeching tires last night, I was reminded of that day.

Last night Jeff and I listened as the screech of tires on pavement made its way into our bedroom through the open windows, open to bring in the beautiful night air of spring. The sound of a sideshow is another thing: the tires of the cars screech as they circle the chosen intersection. Today as we drove home from church, we looked carefully at each intersection until we saw the one with tire marks that marked the activities of the night before Easter. The sideshow last night was only two blocks we from our house.

And we honored Easter today by going to Mass at a parish in North Oakland, where the people sang and shouted: “Christ is Risen!” And Christ, indeed, was risen in that place, a colorful group of worshippers remembering and honoring the High Holiday of the Christian faith. In worship we remembered the people of the world who are struggling to survive in the midst of horrific wars: Ukraine, Palestine. We like this parish for its diversity: class diversity, racial diversity, diversity of acceptance of Catholicism – or not. To us, the people there represent the diversity that is Oakland, which has been an important part of our making our home here for many years.

We chanted together with the other worshippers, laughed and sang with them, and when we left, we felt as if we had, indeed, worshipped on this day, on Easter Day, remembering the old, old story, so badly abused and harmed by well-meaning and damaged human beings. Even so, the story remains. We have known its message to be true in our lives.

It’s Easter.

Easter time in the desert, Joshua Tree Park, Mojave Desert. photo by meb: 3/2024

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I love that tree

Mary Elyn Bahlert

This is our place. You sit with your back to the tree I love, and I think:

“You planted that tree.”

The seasons turn, right outside the window of our place.

Before I loved that tree, I wondered of it: how do you change, so effortlessly, and with grace?

Then, I came to love that tree: I love that tree and that tree loves me.

You gave a gift the day you planted that tree by our place. You didn’t know then, don’t know now:

you planted that tree, and I love that tree and that tree loves me

And right here, right where that tree loves – love simmers here, too.

The tree I love is waiting for spring… photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 3/2024

beauty, reflecting, remembering, Uncategorized

Closet Catholic

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Sometimes I think I’m a closet Catholic. I didn’t grow up Catholic, like so many of my friends in Milwaukee. I grew up understanding that my family wasn’t Catholic. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, many families still went to church together, although mine did not. I understood that we were not church people, because I had friends who were “church people,” whose families went to church together every week. As I got older, I came to understand and to accept my family’s distrust of “church.” They had their reasons.

Still, when I was in Junior High School, my mother made sure I was enrolled in Confirmation Class at a neighborhood Lutheran Church. Every Saturday morning for two school years, I studied – and memorized – Luther’s Small Catechism with the Deaconess, and then I studied once a week with the Pastor for a year before I was confirmed with a large Confirmation Class, on Palm Sunday, when I was 14. Almost immediately, I stopped going to church.

I was a University student in the late 60’s and early 70’s, that time of anti-war protests and hippies marching in the streets, and so it was a strange quirk inside of me that set my mind on becoming a woman pastor, at a time when there were few women pastors, at a time when I had not heard of such a thing as a woman pastor. At least I had the idea, with no plans in sight, to go to seminary to study.

I still had to find a church, and I found a place for myself in the United Methodist Church, where I met Harvey Stower, a Young Adult Minister, who asked me: “have you ever thought about going to seminary?” My answer: “I think about it all the time, but I don’t tell anyone about it.” Within a year, I was on my way to seminary in Berkeley, on my way to being ordained, on my way to a life in the Church.

And so it must seem odd to think of myself as a Closet Catholic, since the Roman Catholic Church has still not seen its way to ordaining women.

I tell people that “I love the Mass.” I love liturgy. There is something in the rhythm of the Mass, of the reciting of the words that have been recited for centuries, across the world, that touches me. Maybe it’s because my ancestors were Catholic, on another continent, at another time, before they were harmed by the Church. Maybe it’s my love of poetry, of the sounds of things that are beautiful sounds. Maybe it’s my deep connection to the life of faith, that deep connection that had me searching before I knew I was searching.

I do come to Mass with my own judgements: where are the women here? where are the women-priests? What of the damage the Church has done – is doing – in so many people’s lives?

And I set those judgements aside when I go to Mass. I feel a connection there, a connection that is not dependent on the others who are worshipping with me. The connection is deep, deep inside of me, and deep inside the words, the recitations, the incantations. The connection is there, in spite of me. I don’t get it. My understanding does not matter to me.

And so I show up from time to time at Mass, responding when I can, taking in the sanctuary where I sit, the crucifix high in front, the Altar with the elements central to the sanctuary. I listen to the words and I feel myself there – a bit out of place, but still – not out of place at all.

A winter’s day, Martinez – photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 1/2023