And Yes, the Dress Still Fits (Sort of)

Read the Frank and Funny Memoir of a Church-Geek Girl 

It's coming out in March and I couldn't be happier about it. Here's what SUNY Press has to say about PREACHING IN MY YES DRESS

Read the Frank and Funny Memoir of a Church-Geek Girl  A Lutheran pastor and a regular contributor to the Albany Times Union, Jo Page highlights, in her delightful new memoir, a series of childhood misfortunes and adult choices that led her in and out of the church. After more than twenty years in the ecclesiastical trenches, Page explores how she continued to preach weekly words of hope she wasn't sure she even believed in Preaching in My Yes Dress. Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers, says, "Preaching in My Yes Dress lives up to its wonderful title. Jo Page's memoir is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, and unusually frank chronicle of her spiritual journey. Anyone interested in Christianity, the daily realities of pastoral work, or the challenges of living an ethical life will find this book illuminating and inspiring."Preaching in My Yes Dress will be available in March. Pre-order your copy today!

From Going Out, the memoir

Breaking Silence

La Sainte Chappelle in Paris, from Monks and Mermaids, a Benedictine blog

I’m up there in the pulpit in the middle of the sermon when the first car alarm goes off. The woman whose car it is doesn’t like to wear her hearing aids so she doesn’t notice it. I pretend not to. For some reason, one of the tenors in the choir thinks it’s his car and he makes his way out of the choir stall, treading over the other choristers’ feet, then across the uncarpeted side aisle, out of the sanctuary and into the parking lot.

Now another car alarm begins to go off. A second choir member decides it must be his car.

I keep preaching.

Then both alarms stop. Both men come back into the sanctuary, down the side aisle and noisily back into the choir loft. Mission accomplished. And I’ve only got a few more pages to go.

But then the car alarm goes off again. It’s the same car alarm that had gone off the first time and the tenor now recognizes that it hadn’t been his alarm that had gone off before. Somehow he’s figured out that it’s the car belonging to the woman who doesn’t like to wear her hearing aids.

So the tenor decides it’s a good idea to go tell her about it. But just as he is stepping down from the choir loft again, the second car alarm starts up again. And this time a third car alarm goes off. It’s like a parking lot full of wailing toddlers—it only takes one to set them all off.

 

 

Princton Bulldogs

 I see the tenor walking toward the woman who doesn’t like her hearing aids. Then a man in a red tie gets up from about halfway back in the pews. He thinks one of those alarms is his. He makes his way out of the sanctuary to the door into the church foyer. Then I see a woman sitting toward the front. She’s been holding her baby, but now she hands the baby off to her husband and sprints after the man going to the back of the sanctuary. Suddenly it all seems like a football play, the two of them setting up an offensive formation. I expect the husband to lob the baby into the choir loft. Whatever happens, I hope it’s a completed pass.

Meanwhile, the tenor has made it over to the pew where the woman who doesn’t like her hearing aids is sitting. She is looking up at me with a rapt smile. So she jumps in surprise when the tenor stands at her shoulder and tries to tell her about the car alarm. It’s easy to see she’s confused. I find out later she hadn’t even realized she had a security alarm in her car. So naturally she would have had no idea how to turn it off even if she had heard it.

She gets up slowly, a little stiffly and she and the tenor join the others going into the parking lot. After a bit we hear the car alarms turn off, one by one. Then the man in the red tie, the tenor, the young mother and the woman who hates her hearing aids, each of them holding their car keys, come back to their pews. I keep right on preaching, now just a half-a-page away from the ‘Amen.’

“Rabbi, what can we learn from the sound of a car alarm?”

“That what you need to hear is not always what you are listening for.”

***                              ***                              ***

Where Some of the Wild Things Are

I suffer from a predictable francophilia. It's true. I'm a sucker for the language. Not only does it sound good, it feels good to speak. I'm a Tour de France junkie, even though I really don't understand the way it works. I know the geography of the country almost the way I know my home state. And if someone offered me the chance tomorrow to  jump on a plane and head to the Dordogne or back to Provence or Languedoc, I'd say mais oui, pack my bag, pop a Xanax (mais oui, I have a fear of flying) and go.

But it's also easy to romanticize a place. When I was in Provence in 2006 I rented a house, La Colle, that was twenty minutes down a 'white road' (which translates from the English into 'narrow, rock-studded, rain-gutted wildlife-infested track not suitable for a rental car'). This was accessed after climbing into the mountains on successively smaller roads and making a right turn at the petrol pump. A petrol pump. Not a gas station.

The house itself was an old barn with a stone vault where the animals had been kept and though it had been skillfully re-habbed, there was nothing to be done about the scorpions and wolf spiders, wasps and mice, frequent thunderstorms and power outages and general shortage of water. I confess I didn't last the week there. In fact, I made an exquisite ratatouille with produce picked up at the market in Forcalquier, the last outpost of civilization, spend two unquiet nights at La Colle, then drove back to Arles, thankfully never having had to use the epi-pen on a scorpion bite.

I thought of La Colle when I re-read A Pig in Provence over the weekend. Georgeanne Brennan's thoughtful memoir describes the years she and her first husband (and children) spent in Provence in the 1970's (in other words, way before the Peter Mayle-ing of Provence. They came to make goat cheese, having no previous experience of know-how and though they lieved in the Alpes-Maritime and La Colle is in the Luberon, both places, at the time Brennan lived there, were thoroughly rural and rugged.

Her affection for the land and nostalgia for the fascinating experiment--she and her husband did succeed as cheesemakers, but circumstances forced them back to California after a few years and she has not lived there full-time since--make compelling reading. The first time I read it, I had fantasies of doing something similar in a similarly-outback part of Provence or Languedoc. But as with Carol Drinkwater's captivating memoir, The Olive Farm, the harsh realities of living off the land, as well as the sheer work and expense involved can never be fully obscured nor fully captured by the prose.

Reading A Pig in Provence this time, with its detailed descriptions of a sheep's breech, the annual pig slaughter and the rugged transhumance in which large herds of sheep and goats are shepherded from lower Provence into the mountains of Haute Provence, remind me that I never made it through a week at La Colle and that it takes a person of resilience, devotion and a writerly's eye to pen such a memoir.