I love this quote from Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
This weekend, I hope we’ll take off our shoes.
A treasured loved one introduced me to this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
“If you board the wrong train, there’s no sense running along the corridor in the other direction.”
Sometimes, we need to get off of the train. It’s okay to change our minds. We can take in new information and act on it. It can be remarkably wise and courageous to step off and move in another direction.
We’ll never get to the destination we desire if we just keep running along the corridor in the other direction.
— Renee Roederer
These images of Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles honoring and playfully bowing to Rebeca Andrade on the Olympic podium speak volumes. 💜
Fun Fact: I have three Olympic gold medals.
🥇 🥇🥇
Not from the Olympics you’d think about most readily, of course. But from… the Choir Olympics!
I suppose it seems funny that there is such a thing — a Choir Olympics. I picture choristers trying to sing while jumping hurdles. But in actuality, this was an incredible event with 350 choirs from around the world that competed in different styles of music on a world stage.
In 2004, in ways that shocked us — we weren’t expecting this at all — my collegiate choir won the Choir Olympics in in multiple categories in Bremen, Germany. Each time, we were called to the front of a stage in a large auditorium, and we watched the flag rise with the national anthem.
This is one of the best, most surprising, and most adventurous memories of my life.
Very grateful! 🥇🥇🥇
When I was seven years old, I was sitting at a lunchroom table in the Cafegymatorium. Our lunchroom tables were the kinds that people could pull down from out of the walls. At my elementary school, this room truly was a cafeteria, gym, and auditorium space all at once.
Each day, that table was pulled down from the wall, and we would sit there patiently. (Were we patient though?) until it was our turn. Then our 1st grade glass would be dismissed to line up where we would approach the lunch ladies. Once we reached the window where food was distributed, we would step bit by bit sideways, going down the line and receiving the various prepared food items onto our tray.
One day, I was sitting at that table, having already received my food along with most of my class, when one of our classmates arrived, sat down, and announced to all of us,
“I told them I didn’t want the green beans, and they didn’t give them to me.”
Wait, what?
“You told them you didn’t want them?”
I remember that we were astonished at this. First of all, the thought had never crossed my mind, and if it had, I would have assumed that we could get in trouble for this. But most of all, we were flabbergasted because we realized we could say No.
No — We could do that! That was a thing that could happen! We did not see this coming.
Over the next month or so, we relished in telling the lunch ladies that we didn’t want some odd item. And most of the time, they left an empty spot on the tray where it would have gone. This typically involved side dishes of various kinds. There was no way, for instance, that we were going to refuse eating one of those square pieces of elementary school pizza.
We found tiny ways to rebel and assert autonomy for its own sake.
Saying No is important. And we can learn it anew any time.
— Renee Roederer
I thoroughly enjoyed this podcast episode:
Vox’s Unexplainable: Do we live inside an enormous black hole?
An interesting question and thought experiment!
Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
A friend of mine is in a band, and I had the pleasure to attend a house concert that he and his bandmates put on for their friends. They don’t play gigs or concerts so often, but they’ve been playing together once a week for many years. Basically, they do it just for their own enjoyment.
But they could probably perform for gigs and concerts if they wanted to do that. They were great.
They are largely a cover band, and they play many styles of music from a variety of decades. But they did perform an original song, too, written by my friend. This song seemed to sum up what they were doing, in fact. It was about creating just to create, just for the pure enjoyment of it.
“I did it just to do it, and now it’s done,” the lyrics said.
And it made me think about the power of doing things just to take pleasure in them, rather than having a particular result in mind.
You know what I’m going to start doing in earnest today?
Writing a book.
— Renee Roederer
If you’ve read the stories, it’s easy to envision lepers, sex workers, tax collectors, and Samaritans sitting at table with Jesus. He lifted up every one of them and included them in his community.
The Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics in Paris created an artistic tableau of Bacchus and additional Greek gods, portrayed by trans people and people in drag. Many assumed this was a representation of the Last Supper, and they expressed all kinds of outrage. How can these people play the roles at the table? some seemed to ask, and, Why are they mocking us?
If you’ve read the stories, it’s easy to envision trans people, those who are unemployed, Drag Queens, and Palestinians sitting at table with Jesus. Would he not lift up every one of them and include them in his community?
Where is the outrage for how members of these communities are treated?
— Renee Roederer
Smuggling Grace 