Earlier this week my sister observed the 70th anniversary of my parents’ wedding by sharing the bill for the reception: $270.16 for 105 guests, including $99 for 18 bottles of champagne. Today, for the 75th anniversary of VE Day, I offer these pages from my dad’s war journal:

“TUESDAY-MAY 8TH
“TODAY IS VE DAY – The Germans have surrendered unconditionally to us. The terms were signed in Rheims at 4:41 GMT yesterday. The hostilities end official at 12:01 GMT tonight.

“It is hard to believe – that after nearly six years of war the Allies have driven the Germans from Africa, Italy, France, Belgium, Russia and a score of other countries and forced defeat on them on their own soil. Yet it’s true; no more 88’s or ME0109’s or anything.

“We heard addresses by Churchill, Truman, and King George today. We also attended an informal Thanksgiving service at 3:30. Even the Germans seem glad. They knew it was only a matter of time.

“Half of our mission is accomplished. Now we shall either occupy Germany or head for the other war.

“A day later he learned that they’d be assigned as security guards ‘near Nuremburg for awhile.”\'”

He’s glad it’s over; there’s only a hint here of what he had endured. But on the first page of the Engineer’s Field Transit Book he used to record his thoughts, he explained his reason for journaling:

“I am going to keep this diary so that in future years I may remember more clearly the day to day events of my Army career. I especially want to remember – in the days of normal living coming again in the not too distant future – the days of hell of our present existence in combat. For, as Sherman said, war really is hell – crowded with misery, discomfort and uncertainty – uncertainty as to whether or not you’ll be alive in the next minute.

“In the peaceful sort of living which was once normal and which will follow this conflict, surrounded by the things which I have longed for so constantly, I may lose sight of this fact. Old memories will soften with time. Thus, the mission of this diary: to remind me, should I need the reminder, what it was like, and to make me work unceasingly to make certain that my son does not march off to war; or if he does – and I say this with the sad knowledge that our fathers fought for the same ideals – he goes prepared.”

My brother never did go marching off to war, mostly because his age cohort was too young for Vietnam and too old for all that followed.

Not because humanity had somehow come to its senses about senseless armed conflict. Lord, have mercy.

Sometimes things that look pretty from a distance turn out to be surprisingly hairy up close.

Three friends have died this week, members of different communities I’ve been part of over the years. They weren’t close friends, but one each of them touched my life in ways that made an impression that has stayed with me. I’m feeling sad about losing them now, but also glad that I had a chance to know them. Both emotions are reminding me to appreciate all of the special people I know while they’re still here. I’m also thinking about a comment made by the priest who preached at the funeral of the poet John O’Donohue; he recalled that when asked not long before his death what it was that haunted him, O’Donohue had replied, “It is the sense of my days running through my fingers like the finest sand and I can’t stop it.” That pretty much sums it up for me, perhaps for all of us.

Self portrait. Looking in from the outside, out from the inside, seemingly everywhere at once. 

I’m getting better with practice at PhotoShop, enjoying the time with my family, trying to experience some of the blessings in this time, but still so worried for the world, for all of us, for the hungry and the sick and those who are dying alone and their families who grieve in isolation. 

These lines from a book I’m reading resonate this morning:

There will always be more grief
than we can bear.
There will always be ripe fruit flesh
making your fingers sticky from the juice.

Life is tidal, rising and receding,
its long loneliness, its lush loveliness,
no need to wish for low tide when
the banks are breaking.

From The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred, by Christine Valters Paintner

One of the things I’m noticing now in my practice of walking and observing the arrival of spring is the trees: The way they come into leaf at different times, each according to its own heritage. The colors of the leaves, much more brilliant now than they will be in the fullness of summer. And especially the way the exist in community, branch to branch with others not freely chosen, together until death parts them.

A while back I read a fascinating book called Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren. It’s part memoir, part passionate plea for a sustainable earth, part rumination on the lives of trees, which turns out to be a much more interesting subject than I’d ever imagined. Jahren talks about the tremendous risk involved when a tree-to-be puts out its first root:

No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor – to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only one chance to guess what the future years, decades – even centuries – will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It asses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.

Everything is risked in that one moment when the first cells (the ‘hypocotyl’) advance from the seed coat. The root grows down before the shoot grows up, and so there is no possibility for green tissue to make new food for several days or even weeks. Rooting exhausts the very last reserves of the seed. The gamble is everything, and losing means death. The odds are more than a million to one against success.

But when it wins, it wins big … “

I took this photo a year ago, on my last Sunday at the church I’d served for five years. I wanted to remember it as I saw it, and that view and that moment came back to me as I’ve thought about why I’m finding most of the online church services I’ve seen lately to be so unsatisfying. It’s because they’re all about the clergy.

Sometimes you get them appearing self-conscious and poorly lit in front of a smartphone camera which has been set at a tilt, and sometimes the high (read expensive) production values make them look like angels or saints on temporary loan from heaven. Most of the time it’s somewhere in the middle, but the bottom line is that what you get is just the clergy and what you don’t get is the people, without whom it isn’t really church.

I know my view on this isn’t the norm. I’ve got the clerical title and the collar that goes with it, but what I’m realizing so clearly just lately is that for years I went to church every Sunday and never saw a clergyperson there. What I saw was those dear faces and what I heard was their voices, all of them, and that’s how I knew that God was present. Lifting up bread and wine was important, but really it was a confirmation of what was already happening when we came together on Sunday morning.

From yesterday’s late-afternoon walk along the abandoned railroad tracks in Lambertville. I love the way that fern is so full of potential: everything it will become is already there, all tightly coiled and ready to burst into life. I didn’t know there was a graffiti train along the overgrown tracks. NJ is a little weird right now? Never so true.

I didn’t used to spend much time in the woods, but lately we’ve been seeking out parks with trails because it’s too hard to keep your distance from everyone else who’s walking closer to home. So I’m not a nature girl, and one thing that’s stood out for me on our little hikes is just how many fallen trees there are, and how often they seem to fall across the trails. 

Most of the parks chain saw and move just enough of the fallen tree to keep the trail open. We didn’t see much of that at Washington Crossing, though, and the thing that really struck me was just how quickly passing feet were able to move the trail to go around the fallen tree. 

I have to hope that we will find a way around this, too.