Gilgal

I walk in through the front door of my little rental here in Happy Valley, and on the wall opposite the door hangs a picture.  Much of the art I have hanging throughout my house is original - whether paintings or pen and ink or needlework or photographs or stained glass.  But this one is a large framed print of something that hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  It came from my mother's home, and was the one thing I really wanted after she died last October.  None of my sisters were in the least way interested in it, so I got it.

Mom and I had a very difficult relationship.  It wasn't always as bad as it got in those final years, but facing her mortality as she aged made the questions of the afterlife even more acute for her.  To put it bluntly, she was convinced that I did not believe things about God and Jesus properly, and that as a result, I was headed to hell when I died. 

She was convinced that her mother and father were already there.  When working on some genealogy stuff at some point in the past, I had tried to get more information from her about her family.  She agreed to talk with me for a bit, but after a little while was quite clear that she did not want to talk about her parents any further.  It was simply too distressing for her to think about them now that she couldn't do anything for them, as they were "right this minute suffering in the fires of hell" (her exact words to me about them).  

That distress and anxiety played out between us in ways that were not conducive to a continued relationship.  She could not bear talking with me without trying to do something or say anything that might turn me around.  Something that might save me from the fire.  In the past, we had been able to find other things to talk about rather than our different approaches to our belief in God.  But as she aged, and she knew her time was short, she couldn't even talk about the weather with me.  

Mom was of the more conservative, fundamentalist, strain of Christianity.  Women were not to speak in church.  So, obviously, my being an Episcopal priest didn't fit in that world at all.  (Along with a whole host of other things I don't think God cares much about, and she thought were central.)  But being a priest is about me trying to be faithful to the God who created me with a particular set of skills and interests, faithful in seeking to follow where Jesus has led me, faithful to the stirrings of the Spirit within me.  She has always seen my journey as me turning my back on God.  

And yet, every time I'd go into her home, there hung this picture.  A young shepherd GIRL.  Mom's theology had no room for "the Lord is my shepherd" to be imaged by a female.  Mom's beliefs had no room for a woman to be 'shepherding the flock.'  And yet, there she hung in that picture above Mom's dining room table.

Mom was an artist.  She majored in art in college, and went on to become an art teacher.  Paintings were not just decoration for her.  They meant something.  There was one in her bedroom that had four young girls in it, out in a large field, with flowers and sunshine.  She once told me about how they always made her think of her four daughters - the girls in the painting did have some resemblances to us!  And the background of this painting even reminded her of our home area in Pennsylvania.  

This painting of the young female shepherd hung where she sat and ate.  Where she sat and studied.  You couldn't walk into her house and miss this one.  A female shepherd!  I always wondered about that picture, yet never asked her.  I preferred to stay in the unknown, the unspoken.  Fearing, I think, that asking her to try to put the tenderness of that female shepherd into words might break the spell of the mystery.  I hoped that somewhere in that unspoken mystery, she in some way understood me.  Or that at least, in some way there was still room for me, for who I was called to be, to have a place in her world.   I would walk into her home and smile, because I was there in the company of that female shepherd. 

The Old Testament reading for tomorrow (4th Sunday in Lent, Year C) comes from the 5th chapter of the book of Joshua.  I've been pondering it this week - - but not those exact 4 verses.  They reference the place, Gilgal, and then go on to talk about no longer eating manna.  But the place and the name have caught me this week - - Gilgal.  12 large stones carried out of the river bed.  12 large stones Joshua set up in a circle, that their children could look at and ask "What do these stones mean?"  They would see the stones, which would prompt the question, which would lead to remembrance and the telling of stories.  Remembrance of what God had done in leading them out of Egypt (crossing the Red Sea on dry land) and through the wilderness, and then crossing the River Jordan on dry land (where these stones had come from) and into the promised land. 

When we enter into church and pause at the baptismal font and anoint ourselves with the water, we are at Gilgal.  We see.  We touch.  We ask, "What does this water mean?" And, just like at Gilgal, we answer by remembering what God has done.  Telling ourselves the story once again of a love that has washed over us and claimed us.  We tell ourselves the story of a love that has set us free and made us a new people.  

When I enter my own home now, I see that picture: the female shepherd. And I am at Gilgal.  "What does it mean?"  And I tell myself the story of how I have always been in the shepherd's embrace, for that is where I am in that picture.  And I tell myself the story of being called to be a shepherd - to live into the image of the one I follow - for I am also the female shepherd in that picture.  

But I also tell myself the story of Mom, engulfed in so much fear, who was also never out of the shepherd's embrace.  In our final moments, as I sat with Mom while she died, there was a healing that I did not expect.  She even looked at me and named it: "This is healing."  And I watched as the shepherd carried her gently home.  Yes that, too, has become a part of the story I remember.    

We all need a Gilgal or two in our lives.

* The painting is by William Morris Hunt (American, 1824-1879) and is titled "The Belated Kid"

The story that goes with the painting says that the kid (yes, these are goats) had wandered, and the young shepherd girl has found it and is carrying it back home, looked upon by the worried mother goat.