A Night at the Drottningholm Opera

The Drottningholm Palace, where the Royal Family actually reside, was bathed in the most lovely light as we arrived for our night at the Opera.

Once again I was treated to a magical night of Opera at the Drottningholm Opera where the music director is a member of our church. I was wearing a traditional African dress, made by a member of our congregation. It was much cuter without that silly sweater. Wish I had taken it off before we took the photo!

The theater was built in 1766 and has now been fully restored to its original glory. Check out the theater by clicking here. The staging props, costumes and music all transport you to another time and place. It is indeed magical. The evening itself was beautiful. My friend Sandra put together a beautiful picnic which we enjoyed on the lawn outside of the theater. The lovely Sandra amidst the well-heeled of Stockholm.

At intermission, we enjoyed our beautiful surroundings while checking out the many outfits and people that were taking in the Opera. At Intermission the musicians, dressed in period costumes, took a break from the 17th century to join the 21st century through the use of their cell phones.

We saw La finta giardiniera or the secret garden girl which is a seriously hilarious romp that includes rage, jealousy, mistaken identity but where of course, love prevails in the end. The stage action was at times brilliant and watching my dear friend Mark conducting the amazing music of Mozart made for a feast for all of my senses!
It was a good mental workout for me as well as I tried to watch Mark conduct, listen to the Italian, watch the stage action and read the overhead subtitles in Swedish!
The only downside is that in keeping things totally aligned with the original theater, the benches upon which we sit are terribly uncomfortable! But even so, the seats were front and center and I didn't really even mind the numbness of my backside by the time it all ended.
I feel lucky to be invited to partake of these wonderful aspects of Stockholm's cultural life. I am not an Opera fan by nature, but through Mark's involvement in this theater, I've come to look forward to enjoying the production each summer.
When we walked out after the show had ended, it was 10.30 and still light. As we walked out to the car, lurking just beyond the theater, was this magnificent sunset which caused us both to feel that an already perfect evening was ending with just a bit more magic indeed.

High School Graduation

Here in Sweden, when someone graduates from High School they call it Taking your Student: Ta Student! High School graduation is a big right of passage here in Sweden and there are some great traditions associated with it. First, the graduation hats look like captain's hats! The students wear these with pride around town as a symbol that they have completed their studies. Second, when the final day arrives, the Seniors all gather in the school and then at the allocated moment run out of the front door together! This is the Utspring (run out). Parents and family members and other close friends gather with signs that have a baby photograph of the graduate prominently displayed! Then, most importantly of all, the students get to ride around in an open top truck, blasting loud music, blowing whistles and cheering while a driver chauffeurs them all around town so that they can express their glee in graduating for all the town to hear! From the last week of May through the second week of June, we are constantly barraged by trucks, loud music with a blasting baseline and delighted, screaming students driving all around our neighborhood and throughout the city!
The students are so happy and it's fun to celebrate such a great accomplishment. This year, we went to one the student's utspring. It was fun to gather with his parents and sisters, and to be among the first to congratulate him and join in the festive atmosphere!We have been invited to several receptions for the students. Last week we attended a beautiful dinner for one of Eritrean students.
Notice the cake on the left is in the shape of the graduation hat!The food was awesome, the crowd warm and welcoming, and the graduate thrilled and happy. It was a pleasure to join the celebration. In the week ahead, we will attend a couple of more receptions and take joy in celebrating this great accomplishment of all our high school graduates.

Tennis Farewell Lunch

Another one of my Tuesday Tennis buddies is heading back to England. Boo. Makes me sad. That's Sue on the far left.

She's great fun to play with and her style is exactly opposite mine. She's dainty and delicate and flits about the court like a little bird. I'm a bit more like a gorilla, hitting the ball aggressively and with as much power as possible as often as possible! But Sue is a great player and she'll sting you with her accuracy, especially when you cheat off the alley!

The only good thing about her leaving is that another of our tennis buddies, Myriam, invited us to lunch at her fabulous home. She happens to be the wife of the Belgian ambassador so her home is quite lovely! And so is she!Sitting on the terrace with Myriam at the start of the lunch.As we gathered, we were offered champagne and snacks on the terrace. The day was perfect and the views were gorgeous.Bright sunshine streaming through the windows, water glistening from the terrace view, good friends gathered around good food. Myriam did a clever thing to seat us. She had placed a card with hearts at each setting. Then on our way into the dining room, we drew a card from her hand which was the same card in spades. Clever way to seat folks.Parting is such sweet sorrow, but the food at Myriam's is delicious. First course: Saffron infused tiger shrimp.Second course: Pork with a morel mushroom sauce that was TO DIE FOR! The plate was beautiful and delicious.

I forgot to take a picture of the dessert but the plum pie with vanilla ice cream was equally as satisfying as the first two courses:

There is something very special about being invited to dine with good friends in a beautiful place. It was so luxurious to leave work in the middle of the day and attend a three course, three hour luncheon complete with a champagne aperitif, white wine with the starter and red with the entree. Good thing I had decided to take the afternoon off!
The Tuesday tennis bunch are a great group of women that I've come to deeply appreciate in my life. We represent 8 countries: The U.S., Belgium, The Netherlands, England, Denmark, Sweden, Australia, and Germany. What fun to chat each week and enjoy the good, fun competition we love with one another.We clean up pretty well too! We always laugh about how different we look when we see one another in the "real world."
Of course, as part of the festivities, speeches were made to thank Myriam for the wonderful lunch and to bid farewell to Sue. I was chosen to do the bidding so in order to inject a bit of silliness to the sad affair of saying good-bye, I wrote a rap. No, I will not publish it here. It is easily the dopiest thing I've ever written or performed but it was fun! Let's just say that I'll be keeping my day job!
Here's the lovely Sue with her gifts displayed: A midsommar wreath and beautiful jewelry by the Swedish company Snö. Wendy the Aussie sports a smile next to her. This lunch is one of the very special things that I get to enjoy while living my Stockholm life. When else will I ever be invited to the residence of an ambassador? And when else will I ever keep company with the whole world? This I treasure. Thank you my friends. Myriam, thanks for a lovely day and Sue...I will miss you dearly.

Confirmation Week-end

This past week-end we celebrated Confirmation at Immanuel International Church. I was reminded of my own confirmation way back in 1975. I even found my photograph from that special day! That's me, front and center!
On Saturday night we have a family night where all the kids share something from their year in confirmation. We also eat delicious cake!It is a great time watching the kids share their deep and careful thoughts about their faith journey and where they are landing today. They always share from their hearts, showing an amazing willingness to be vulnerable about their weaknesses and open about some of their hurts. Our kids come from a huge variety of backgrounds and it's always incredible to see how God has been in work in their young lives through various circumstances and people.
The final thing we do on Saturday is baptize the students who have never been baptized and are now ready to take this significant step. Immanuel church has a great baptismal pool in the large sanctuary so we gather together around the pool and take part in this wonderful moment in these young people's lives. Our colleague, Chris Peterson, does an awesome job as he communicates to the students a bit more of what is happening at this time. He always ends each baptism with these words: "Remember you baptism and the grace that God pours into your life at all times." I love it. It is a reminder that we all need in order to stay the course in our Christian lives.
Sunday is a big day for the students as they don their white robes, stand in front of the congregation, recite the Apostles' Creed and answer questions about their intentions to follow Christ and continue to be a part of His church. Some of the students share their faith journey during the service and others read scripture. At the end of the Rite of Confirmation, the parents join their children up front and lay hands on them as the pastors pray for each student. It is a powerful visual image seeing these kids with their parents standing behind them.It is such a great day for our congregation. All are inspired by the confession of faith that comes forth from these young lives. All get inspired for being a church that helps young people grow and mature in their faith. All are inspired to follow Jesus more closely by listening to the testimony of how the youth are seeking the same.
Confirmation is a great part of being a pastor. Oh, I'm not saying that some times it isn't a huge headache. And of course there are moments when you feel so frustrated that they don't complete assignments or when they don't give their parents necessary information. You wonder if they are learning anything at all or if the entire process is lost on them. I remember how much I screwed around during my confirmation. We must've driven our pastors mad with frustration! And yet, here I am, an ordained pastor seeking to do the same with the young people in our church!
And then Confirmation week-end rolls around and here they come with their insightful comments, looking all grown up, fearlessly proclaiming their faith in God in front of the entire congregation.
What a blessing! What a gift! What a privilege it is to be a pastor on Confirmation week-end!

Special Occasions are Special

Yesterday Doug and I celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary. We have always tried to set aside time to acknowledge and celebrate our anniversary in some way. It's not always extravagant, but we do prioritize making a special effort on May 28.
Yesterday was no exception. We didn't want to spend a lot of money as we've had quite the year in travel and still have the expense of fixing the boat motor ahead of us. Even so, we knew we could still take time to celebrate us.
The one thing I wanted to do was to walk down to the water and sit and have a drink seaside. The afternoon broke out in a lovely way and it was so wonderful to be outside, sitting in the sun, me enjoying a nice rosé (not my favorite wine but so beautiful to look at and at times a nice in between to white and red) while Doug imbibed on a Swedish pear cider. Tanner enjoyed being in on the action.
I did manage to write Doug a card expressing how grateful I am that he is my partner, willing to walk the journey of life with me through ups and downs, good moods and bad ones. Doug made the day very special for me. There were 16 red roses, and champagne, and a card with writing in it! We went down to a special food hall nearby and picked out some entrecoté steaks, sort of like rib-eye but not quite the same. Good steaks are hard to come by here. It's just not part of the Swedish cuisine. We got some fresh bread, fresh raspberries and strawberries, lovely baking potatoes, fresh vegetables for a salad and cracked open a beautiful bottle of red wine that our friends from France had brought when they were here last month.
We don't have a grill right now but Sweden has these little "one time grills", a brilliant invention where you have the charcoal and grill top all in a little metal container that you light and use and then dispose of. For grilling big stuff, not so great, but in a pinch, it gets the job done! I have to say, the steaks were as close to the yummy ones we eat in California all the time as we've ever had.
We had a lovely day together by simply prioritizing time together and making sure the focus was on us. And shouldn't special occasions be just that...special? It's important to remember that in order to make something special you don't have to spend a lot of money or give extravagant gifts. There are perhaps times and places for that as well. But the most important thing about a special occasion is that time is set aside to break the ordinary routine and lift up something worth celebrating.
My marriage to Doug is worth celebrating. I am so grateful that he is my husband and I look forward to the adventure that spending our life together will continue to be.

Books and Why They Touch Us

I've always been a fairly avid reader and can rarely remember a time when my nose wasn't in a book. One of the great highlights of my life while living here in Stockholm is my book group. It is comprised of American women living in Sweden and we have rip-roaring discussions and loads of fun together. We also subject, I mean, expose, one another to all kinds of books that under other circumstances we might not ever read. Sometimes it's a real score, like The Help was this past year. Other times, there are total stinkers, like Inheritance of Loss, which I chose a few years back. Everyone hated it, including me, but at least the cover looked cool, which is more than we could say for The Senator's Wife, which the wife of the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden picked and was really, really, really bad, in my humble opinion!
Book Club is over for the season so now I'm reading stuff that been on my shelf for awhile. I just finished reading To Kill A Mockingbird. I'm not entirely sure I had ever read the entire book or at least it has been so long that the details were buried deep within my sub-conscious. I got interested in it by reading Truman Capote (A book club nudge...we read In Cold Blood a few years back. Loved, loved, loved it and was not disappointed by the movie Capote that came out a few years ago.) The movie revealed the close relationship between Harper Lee and Truman Capote and thus To Kill A Mockingbird came back onto my radar. Of course, I loved the book and desired immediately to travel to Maycomb, Alabama, even though it's a made up town. I want to rent the movie and watch Gregory Peck in this great role. But even beyond the actual story, it got me thinking about what makes a book a classic. Why is it that a book Like TKAM has had such an enduring quality? Why is it referred to as a Great American Classic? Are there any classics that are being written and read today? When will they emerge as classics and then eventually be self-described as a classic?
I don't have answers to these questions, but I am genuinely interested in what bookies think about how a book becomes a classic.
For the record, I have several books that are favorites of mine and I really don't know if they would be considered classics. But in my opinion they are stories worth reading and savoring certainly more than once in a lifetime. So here's a sampling of Jodi's Classics.
My all time favorite book is A Prayer for Owen Meany. I LOVE this book. I love John and Owen, the two main characters. I want them in my life. I love the theology, the commentary on war, the way in which the relationships are complex and meaningful. I love Owen's good heart and John's need for his friendship. I love what they mean to one another and how they influence one another. I seriously doubt another book will ever emerge as more beloved than this one.

My favorite book when I was a kid was Harriet the Spy. I read it again as an adult and was amazed by some of the humor and references that I know I more fully understood as
an adult. I could read it again, with ease. This is a great story. I so wanted to be Harriet. Probably still do in some ways. I may have to go get a red sweatshirt.

My Name is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev are two books that are worth lingering over. Set within the Hasidic Community of New York, the stories trace the life of a young Jewish boy seeking to figure out his life as he discovers the artistic gifts that lurk within.

Glittering Image by Susan Howatch. This is actually the first book of a 7 book series that is set within the Church of England. Lots of theology, sin, forgiveness and redemption.

Life of Pi. Beautifully written, full of deep and abiding themes. Surprises all along the way. Must read it more than once to fully appreciate what the author is doing.
If I sat down with a list of books, I'd likely come up with other titles that I would rate more highly than these. For but today, these come to mind and I suppose in one way or another, they would always make a favorite book list and now, I am dying to re-read each and everyone of them!
How 'bout you? What are your favorite books?