Pre-Birthday Ruminating

 

Ministerial Meditations

by The Rev. Connie Yost

July 22, 2013



Annie Oakley "Little Sure Shot" age 28, 1898



I recently flew to Los Angeles to meet with one of our Chalice Oak Foundation clients, the nonprofit 20KWatts, which brings solar lighting to desperately poor communities in Central America.  As I boarded the small commuter plane in Long Beach to return home, I found my seat next to a young girl who was sitting next to the window.   I settled into my seat and asked her if she was travelling alone.  Limpid blue pools looked straight at me and she kindly but firmly announced that she was.  "I'm old enough," she told me.  "People don't think that I am, but I am.  I'm fourteen."  Impressed with her self-possession, I struggled with what to say next.  Certainly I would NOT say that she didn't look fourteen.  She knows that; everyone always says that.  And I remember how much I always hated people telling me that I didn't look my age (when I was younger, mind you!).

So I said, "Well, that's very good.  I know how annoying it is when people think you're a lot younger than you are.   They treat you like you don't know anything.  I always hated that."  "Yes," she agreed.  "It is annoying," she said and calmly went on reading her book.

I didn't start travelling alone much less on an airplane until I was much much older than fourteen.  But then, I was raised in the pre-feminist dark ages, discovering my own womanpower well into my thirties and with little support from my parents or society.  I wondered how my life might have turned out had I been as empowered as she when I was 4'7" and weighed 80 lbs.

Quanah Parker, Comanche Leader

Ministerial Meditations

By The Rev. Connie Yost

April 28, 2012

Quanah Parker, Comanche Leader

            On a recent trip to Oklahoma and Arkansas, I got to indulge my passion for travel to 1) places I haven't been before; 2) national parks; and 3) Indian museums, art galleries and crafts stores.  Killing time at the Portland airport, I stopped at Powells to browse the sale table and a book immediately jumped out at me, Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne.  On the cover was a picture of a handsome Indian and it read, Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.

            That caught my attention, as I was going to Indian Country where the Comanche live to this day.  It's a fascinating book but I quickly realized it wasn't bedtime reading.  The Comanche were a nomadic warrior people, and the book sparred none of the gory details of their battles with other Indians (mostly Navajo, Apache and Tonkawa), white settlers, soldiers, and buffalo hunters.  The basic storyline is the Comanche were expert warriors and horsemen who lived and rode on the Great Plains, and because of these skills were able to resist first the Spanish, then the French, then white settlement on their lands until the late 19th century.  The American West did not open up until the end of a forty year war with the Comanche.

Hildegard and Viriditas

Ministerial Meditations

By The Rev. Connie Yost

April 6, 2013

Hildegard's Illumination All Beings Celebrate Creation

            I am home from my trip to Germany which, like all the best travel experiences, was much more and much less than I expected.  The less part was that I expected to experience the "greening" of Spring that Hildegard of Bingen wrote so much about.  That was not to be as there was a huge blizzard in the area just 2 days before I arrived.  So instead of green, I looked out my hotel window and saw various shades of white and gray for the first few days.  I never imagined that we would be running around in the snow at Disibodenberg where Hildegard lived until she was nearly 50 years old (just ruins now, but still a wonderful site, even in the snow).  I was on retreat with 30 other people, visiting the sites where Hildegard lived and did her ministry.  She left Disibodenberg to found the monastery at Rupertsberg (the only original part of the structure left is just a cellar now), and if that wasn't enough, at age 67 she acquired the damaged buildings of the Eibingen convent and restored them for 30 of her Benedictine sisters and thereafter, crossed the Rhine twice a week to supervise her two monasteries until she died at age 81.

            Part of the "more" part of the trip was all that I learned and experienced about Hildegard.  She was a pistol in her time, influencing the pope and cardinals and gaining audiences and respect in high places despite her criticisms of the Church (Catholic, of course, in those days).  She continues to inspire us today.  In fact, there is an incredible surge of interest in her ministry today.  She even finally made it to the top of sainthood in the Catholic Church, being declared a doctor of the church just last fall, taking only 900 years to get there!  (A lesson in patience, for sure.)