Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Summer Reading Suggestions

This year I may be content to wile away any languid summer hours with nothing more challenging than Sudoku and children's books, but if you're sitting around this summer with nothing on your mind, and you're looking for something to read that could be potentially life-altering, Patheos has some suggestions.  They asked a number of folks to answer what book most affected their faith in the last ten years and compiled their answers in this article below.  I was one of those people, (and I do poorly with wide perimeters, so I had a hard time narrowing things down)...
enjoy.
Patheos Summer Reading

Monday, June 21, 2010

When God is Silent


1 Kings 19:1-15


Once upon a time, there was a prophet in Israel named Elijah. A man of God, fearless and brave. He used to confront King Ahab and his wife Queen Jezebel, causing all sorts of upset in their kingdom.  

One day, a most famous incident occurred.  Elijah the prophet proposed a face-off between the God of Israel, Yahweh, and the god that Jezebel had imported in and Ahab had propped up alongside Yahweh, Baal.  The showdown was epic, on the top of a mountain a huge crowd gathered to watch the 450 prophets of Baal on one side and Lone Elijah on the other.

Get your god to answer, was the challenge.  Set up a sacrifice and get your god to show up.  Whoever does, is the real god.  Up first, the prophets of Baal. They cut up their ox and laid it on their alter with firewood underneath and began begging Baal to start it on fire.  All morning long they begged, throwing themselves down, pleading, urging, cutting themselves, whatever they could think of to make it happen.  Around noon Elijah started taunting them. “Maybe your God is away on a long journey! Or sleeping – call louder! Maybe he just can’t hear you because he’s meditating!”  But their god stayed silent. 

Finally the prophets of Baal gave up, and it was Elijah’s turn. Elijah dug a trench around his alter, and asked for several jugs of water to poured upon it until the wood was drenched and the whole trench itself was full of water.  Then he prays to Yahweh a polite little prayer.  It went something like: 
‘O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.’
 Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt-offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench. When all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, ‘Yahweh indeed is God!; Yahweh indeed is God!.’

God showed up in fire.  And Elijah, the man of the hour, took his bow and then chased away the prophets of Baal, cornered them in a valley, and with his sword, invincible Elijah killed all 450 of them.  That was his most famous triumph.
And that was just before we encounter Elijah today, the taste of his victory speech still on his tongue, the blood of his enemies still on his sword. Once upon a time there was this great and mighty prophet, Elijah, who had God’s ear and stood up to an evil King and Queen and singlehandedly slayed an army of liars.

But then, the king tells Queen Jezebel what happened that day, and the Queen sends Elijah this message: “I’m gonna get you.” 
And this big brave man runs. 
He flees. Deep into the wilderness. 100 miles he goes, driven by terror he blindly races as fast as his legs can take him as far as he can go into nothingness, and he collapses under a single broom tree in the middle of the parched desert.  “O God! he cries out, “just kill me now!”

But God pays no mind to his drama. “Get up and eat,” says an angel, startling him from sleep and giving him a cake cooked on a hot stone next to him. So he eats and then he sleeps again, fitfully, fearfully, and when he awakens an angel is there again, ready to feed him.  “Eat this or you wont have strength for the journey that’s ahead of you.”

How did I get here? Have you ever wondered that? 
How in the world did I end up here? 
And so we meet up with Elijah under the broom tree.

And huddled there, in the wilderness, Elijah is a mess.  For all the strength he’s just exhibited, Elijah feels anything but strong. For all his bravado and might, when he heard Jezebel was after him he ran for his life. With the triumph quickly worn off and his bloodstained hands mocking him as Jezebel’s warning rings in his ears that she would do to him what he did to them, he finds himself crouched up under a scraggly broom tree in the wilderness.

We’ve already spent some time in the wilderness – with Moses, with Jesus – we’ve seen that the wilderness is the place of terror and confusion, where you get stripped down and laid bare, and everything that made sense gets taken from you.  So the wilderness is a place of loss.  But we’ve also seen that the wilderness is the place of finding, the place where people’s lives are given back to them, identities are clarified, callings are heard loud and clear and they are given strength to respond, to truly live.

So here is Elijah’s turn in the wilderness, Elijah’s 40 days and nights. And he feels like a failure, a frightened, weak, empty failure. It doesn’t get any grander than what had just happened, so why does he feel so badly about it?  It doesn’t get more final than having everyone bow down, so why has it seemed to just go back to the way its been, Jezebel breathing down his neck, Ahab too weak to stand up for the god of Israel? Elijah feels alone – oh so alone.  He feels alone and tired and very very afraid. 

So he flees to the harsh solace of the wilderness.  And he asks to please die. Please just kill me, God.  But God is silent on the matter.  Doesn’t answer any of his whining or begging, doesn’t hear his arguments.  Instead, like a mommy with a sick kid, God lets him sleep, feeds him in spite of himself, tells him to get up his strength, and then when he is ready, God sends him on a journey. Deeper into the wilderness, further into his questions.

“What are you doing here, Elijah?”
“Oh God.  I’ve tried so hard but I’ve failed, I’m alone, I can’t do it. And they’re going to get me.”

“Let me show you myself,” God says.

So God leads him up to a mountain cave:
And there came a wind so great that it split mountains and broke apart rocks, but Yahweh was not in the wind.  And after the wind an earthquake, but Yahweh was not in the earthquake, and after the earthquake a fire, but Yahweh was not in the fire, and after the fire, a 
sound of 
sheer 
silence.

Then, 
“What are you doing here, Elijah?”
Oh God.  I’ve tried so hard but I’ve failed, I’m alone, I can’t do it. And they’re going to get me.

“Go, return through the wilderness…and go back.”

And Elijah does.

I find it fascinating to get a glimpse into someone else’s wilderness. Because for as completely individual and isolating as wilderness experiences are, they are also universally familiar.  And there is a sense, when you read through scripture, that having it all fall apart, losing yourself, your direction, your faith, is part of the whole journey – that maybe it is even an essential part of the human journey with God. 

Because it is in the wilderness that we learn that our God finds us when we’re lost.  It is in the wilderness that we learn that our God sustains us when we’ve got nothing left to live on.  It is in the wilderness that our great lies are exposed and our deep fears are manifested and God doesn’t flinch at either.  It is through the wilderness that we come out changed from how we came in, braver from having been so afraid, stronger from having been so weak.

And even though he’s a total whiny baby, I love and admire how Elijah isn’t afraid to lay it all out there to God, and even to ask God to just go ahead and be done with him.  And that it doesn’t phase God in the least – God’s silence starts pretty early on in the story. 

In fact, it seems that is exactly what Elijah needs.  God’s silence.  He has seen the God of might, he has reckoned with the God of power. He has just watched God send down fire from the sky in front of everyone. 
But not here.  That isn’t how God meets Elijah in the wilderness. In the wilderness when all displays of power blow over, all recognizable godlike rumbles die down, and he is left with a vacuum, an emptiness, a vast, quiet nothingness – it is here that God meets Elijah.

When God is silent. 

Would we prefer earthquakes?  Everything knocked down and mixed up and split open -  We can try to make sense of destruction, at least it shakes things up.  Would we rather God come like wind or fire – tangible, hot, forceful, leaving your skin prickly and taking your breath away?  Perhaps.

But often, God is silent.

But Yaweh’s silence is different than the silence of Baal to the prophets pleadings.  It isn’t the inanimate silence of your own efforts bouncing back at you; it isn’t silence dependent on your own ability to keep it, or fill it, or explain it away. 
When Yaweh is silent it is like deep calling to deep – it is the sound of the great I AM, that no despair, no fear, no horror or godforsakenness ever dreamed up could ever swallow or overpower.  In the absence of sound, I AM, in the vacuum of light, I AM, in the loss of all hope, I AM: there is nothing that can drive me away. 
And when we’ve reached the end of ourselves, and we’ve got nothing left to say, when our strength is gone and our voice gives out and we fall utterly, helplessly silent, God is.

Elijah went back. And God showed him that he was not alone, there were 7000 people who still worshiped Yahweh in Israel. And he spoke out and anointed kings and was a great prophet until the day he was taken into heaven.  And I imagine that for the rest of his days he carried with him the encounter in the wilderness with the silent God.

In our own noise and the world’s clamor, in the force of all that blusters and burns and rages and billows within and around us,
may the silence of God hold us.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

The good, the bad...

Luke 7:36-50



Around our house the question comes up a couple of times a day - Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?  Stories, sports games, tv shows, the kids want clarification - who are the bad guys and who are the good guys?  Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not so much...
if I read a list of names, could you distinguish which ones?  Let your mind do it's catagorizing as you listen to these: Osama Bin Ladin... BP... Barak Obama... Snoop Dogg... nurses... upper management... nurses who cross the picket line... Sarah Palin... firefighters... Priests... Lady Gaga...
So?
I guess it depends on who you ask, right?
So in this story, who’s the good guy and who’s bad?

Simon the Pharisee thinks the woman is bad, they all do, but we can see that she is actually the good guy and Simon is the bad one for being so judgmental… right?
She’s our precious prostitute, even though it doesn’t say that anywhere, it has been the jumped-to conclusion for years, (a "sinner" who is a woman must be a prostitute), and we can dig Jesus hanging out with the downtrodden, even the sentimental sinners that we feel badly for: prostitutes are people too.

But all it says is that she’s a sinner. A recognized, acknowledged sinner. What if she cheats people?  What if she spreads false rumors, vicious slanderous lies?  What if she rips off people’s possessions and gets rid of them on ebay? What if she sells pot to kids and poisons puppies?  The point is, she’s the bad guy, and sinner means sinner, not someone we should necessarily feel pity or affinity for.  If we knew her, we probably wouldn’t like her either.

I mean, really, a good guy, a really nice guy, who is a pillar of his community, a tithing, recycling, stopping to help you change your tire, honest, upright solid guy is having a dinner party.  And he’s invited the rockstar visiting teacher, the one making headlines for his radical poor-loving, rule-breaking, ways, so he’s not just a solid upright guy, he’s open-minded too.
So this nice guy has a dinner party, and suddenly in the middle of it this wretched person, who is an embarrassment to the community, a liar or a thief, or a whore, someone who is corrupting our corporate well-being, and tainting our community, comes in, makes a horrifying scene all over the guest of honor, I mean practically lewd, sniveling and crying, falling all over him, taking down her hair in public and wiping his feet with it – emotional, inappropriate, disgusting, really.  And he takes it, in front of all these people he lets her do this.
Poor good guy, right?  Poor host.  How’d she get in here? What humiliation.  So he tries to spare his reputation, because it looks like maybe he was wrong about this Jesus.  “He must not know who this is, what kind of person this is touching him.” he mutters. He must not really be a prophet, says the good guy, because if he were then he would know this lady taking such liberties with him in front of everyone is one of the bad guys.

"Simon," Jesus says, calling him by name and not by distinction.  "I have something to say to you."  Then he tells a story, a story about forgiveness.  Which one loves more? he asks. The one forgiven more is, of course, the right answer. And then Jesus tells another story, one that would make us ready to point out who was the good guy and who was the bad guy, the story of what is going on right there, unfolding in that very moment, each of them a character, everyone listening.  And how awkward and uncomfortable that would be to listen to!  "You’ve been a lousy host," he says, "and she is expressing great love."  Her sins – which were many, were forgiven.  Hence she has shown great love.  But the one to whom little is forgiven loves little. The implications are offensive.  And the message is: You don’t get to categorize people as good or bad.  She is a person. Just like you. In fact, she has greater love than you because she has been forgiven more.

So, our minds want to sort it out again, we must have had it wrong after all, just like Simon did.  She is actually the good guy and he is the bad guy, right?  I mean he certainly gets stripped down to size.  And so we can take this story as some kind of morality tale about judging others too quickly, about overlooking the importance of hospitality. We can use this story to be an even better good guy than Simon the Pharisee was.  Amen, and move on with the renewed effort: not to judge and to try to love more – (but maybe not so much that we’d make a public scene or anything).

Only forgiveness, God’s grace, Jesus himself doesn’t play by that rule either.

She walks into the room a sinner.  The label sticks, it is what defines her in their eyes and company, it sets the trajectory for her future, it is her identity. A Sinner in Our Town.  But she also walks into the room having been forgiven.  She walks in having been given a new identity, Forgiven, moving in her forgiven-ness, outside the bounds of invitation and definition and decorum and decency, and she pours out her thanks and her soul in front of everyone. In spite of everyone. 

And Jesus, after her outburst and his parable, having just publicly humiliated his host, Jesus turns to the woman, and says, your sins are forgiven, they have been and continue to be forgiven.   Go in peace.

And can she go any other way?  Now in front of everyone, in spite of everyone, her place is shifted, her identity is different. Who knows who she will be among them from now on, but she can no longer by the de facto Sinner in Our Town, she can no longer be the widely acknowledged, easily recognized bad guy.  She might be that lady who blubbered all over Jesus, the one who wrecked Simon’s party, but my suspicion is that what sticks is - The Forgiven One. 
Because she lives in her forgiven ness, She walks in it and moves from it and revels in it, and it has been declared over her in front of everyone, and whether they believe it or not doesn’t really matter.  It’s irreversible.  And she’s not playing by their rules and roles any more.

And Simon is no longer the good guy.  Not necessarily bad, but just a little tainted, perhaps. He did, after all, kind of botch the whole hospitality thing… And maybe even if you didn’t jive with what Jesus said, you could have some reservations about Simon’s judgment for inviting this wild card preacher in the first place.  So Simon, even if he isn’t bad, is not the completely good guy, anyway, the model good guy…

But mostly, the residue left behind from this encounter with grace, that can’t get erased, is the vague unease that maybe we don’t actually know who’s the good guy and who's the bad guy.  I mean, Simon trusted Jesus and look where that got him – we thought Jesus was a good guy but he appears to be something of a loose canon.  We just aren’t sure what to make of all this, or how to resume a kind of “life as usual.”

Forgiveness is very destabilizing.
Grace upends all order, it changes the rules and obliterates the categories we use to make sense of who is who, the ways we judge what is good.  These moral categories that we need to make sense of life, Jesus takes away.  Getting too close to grace can be a dangerous thing.

And yet we are called by grace, bathed in grace, summoned to exist in the reality of grace – in forgiveness that disturbs and transforms our lives, our relationships, our structures and the very fabric of reality.  Are we ready to be agents of such transformative grace in the world?

Are we willing to invite the unsettling power of grace to invade our orderly dinner parties?

But most of all, whether you are Simon the Pharisee or the Sinner in Town - and everyone in between -
hear this: You are forgiven.  Get ready - That changes everything.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

inexplicably grace

1 Kings 17:8-24
Luke 7:11-17

Does God answer prayers?  What is it ok to pray for without being a jerk? 
While oil gushes into the ocean and jobs and livelihoods are lost and fear mounts and whole ecosystems are on the brink of collapse, I prayed that I would make it to Georgia for my goddaughter’s birth. I prayed that the 3 day visit I planned for 5 days after her due date would somehow fall right on the time of her birth, so that I could be there, stand with my friend, watch this girl come into the world, hold her fresh from the womb.
I shamelessly prayed for that, and a little shamefully too, but I prayed nonetheless.   Conflicted by my friend’s discomfort in being overdue, aware my chances were slim, I worked to let go and be content with whatever happened.  But really, I told God, what I really want is to be there when it happens.

And I was. Somehow, inexplicably and amazingly, I was there. I arrived on Wednesday and she went into labor on Thursday morning and was born Thursday night. I slept there in the room with mother and daughter as they acclimated to each other, meeting and discovering what it meant to belong to one another.  I sat and watched her brothers meet her for the first time Friday morning, took photos and video of the astounding moment for the family.  Boys, here is your sister.
Friday night I took those sweet boys home – one of whom is also my godson – I took them home and read to them and tucked them into their beds and prayed with them for their new sister and their mom and dad, and I slept there and awoke to watch the family be reunited in their home to start this new part of their life together before I boarded a plane and came home.

This week was a crazy, overwhelming gift.  I don’t know why I got it. I feel guilty for getting what I wanted. I feel awed by the powerful experience of standing with a friend, a family, bearing witness to their joy and her pain, watching and seeing and participating in this stunning moment in their lives – when new life enters the world and they are irreversibly changed by their connection to her.
Mother, here is your daughter.

But why did I get that when there is still oil pumping into the gulf?  When people are living in tent cities in Haiti?  When children are being blown apart in Iraq?  What made God listen to my prayers?  What did I do to earn that, to deserve that? How can I celebrate my gift when so many other, more important prayers, are going unanswered?  How dare I say it was anything other than coincidence? 
But I can’t. It was a gift from God. It was grace, for some reason, grace.

Whether we admit it or not, we often read stories from the bible to figure out how to figure out God, to determine how we should be to get God to do what we want God to do. What does it take to get God’s attention? God’s favor? What should I do to earn some points with God so that when it matters God will listen to me?  Or, how badly have I messed things up, how hopeless is it that God will ever want to help me out?  What would I have to do to become someone God would see, listen to?

 Only, the bible is all over the place on what God does and how and why God does it. Why would God, in the middle of a famine, feed God’s prophet by the hand of an impoverished widow and her son, and then keep them going on food that never runs out while all around them others pass away into starvation? What did they do, and how did they do it, to catch God’s eye? To deserve their miracle?

Elijah, God’s prophet, is told by God that God will take care of him in the middle of this famine, in this wilderness. I got your back, God says. Just head off to that town and there is someone there who will feed you, I’ve got it all worked out. So he goes, and the woman comes out and Elijah asks for food – only instead of saying, “Oh! I’ve been expecting you! Come to the feast all laid out at my mansion!”?
 No, she says, “we’ve got enough for this one last meal and then we’re going to die.”  Not exactly someone you’d want to take food from.
But Elijah says, OK, so give me some of what you have first, share with me out of your nothingness, your poverty, and then go on with your plans, only God will provide for you. So she does, and God does.  These unlikely partners – the prophet and the penniless.
But then when it seems like God is really with them her son goes and dies.  And she turns on Elijah and demands an answer – is God punishing her for sins and killing her son? Elijah grabs the boy’s body and takes it upstairs for a confrontation with God. He demands God intervene, and then – as though to transfer the life and breath from his own body, mouth to mouth, limb to limb, he stretches out on top of the boy three times, crying out to God to give him life. And God does. Then Elijah brings him down and places him in her arms.  Here is your son.
God is not the way the woman supposed at all, punishing her for her sins, or giving her what she deserves.  That equation doesn’t work at all in this story.  And in this story instead of sending his prophet to care for an impoverished widow, God chooses this one who has nothing to be the provider.  
God doesn’t play by rules that make sense to us.

And why, in our Luke story, did Jesus resurrect that particular widow’s son? What did she ever do to deserve it? She didn’t ask for his help.  The story says nothing about pious faith or a track record of selfless philanthropy.  All it says is that she was grieving. Heartbroken. Her son is dead. Her future gone;  all she has is this moment walking alongside his body and nothing beyond that.

And Jesus steps in.  Jesus barges in on her funeral parade, brings her son back from the dead and gives him back to her.  Because he wants to.  That’s it.  He is moved with compassion and death is no thing in the way.  Neither, apparently are decorum or decency, politeness or purity laws.  He just interrupts the procession, tells her to quit crying, slaps his palm on the dead man’s gurney and raises him up right then and there.  Woman, here is your son.

But God’s grace is like that.  Inexplicable, and unnerving, it invades and interferes here and there and  we don’t know why. 

So here is what I wonder: Did the widow walk around feeling bad that her son lived while others died?  Did she spend the rest of her life feeling guilty about her gift?  Embarrassed by her good fortune?  Or did she find a way to live in joy and gratitude for this inexplicable thing that had occurred that had given her a different future? How does one go on living after a grace intrusion like that?

I can’t help but think of the 1998 film “Saving Private Ryan” – where, following the invasion of Normandy, a group of US soldiers go behind enemy lines to retrieve a paratrooper whose three brother have all been killed in the war.  They are to find him so that he can be returned home to his mother.
So they can give him back to his mother.
Woman, here is your son.

Several die in the search for him, but they eventually do find him and he goes home.  But then Ryan spends the rest of his life trying to earn this gift he was given. The lives that were lost to save his, he spends the rest of his life wondering if he is good enough to have made it all worth it. 

When grace doesn’t leave good enough alone…

Sometimes God listens when we plead and beg, and intervenes to change the course of things.  That's grace.
Sometimes God leads us into unfamiliar places and puts us in awkward situations and makes us rely on those we wouldn’t ordinarily think would have anything to give us.  That's grace.
Sometimes God stretches us, asking us to give or share or help another– even when we are at our very end – and then meets us in abundance when we do. That's grace.
Sometimes God steps into our grief with compassion, unbidden, uninvited, uninhibited, and gives us a gift we didn’t know to ask for. That's grace too.

Sometimes God is this way.

The bible and life itself are full of all manner of strange and wonderful stories, and terrible and confusing stories, all of which God is somehow in the midst of.  But it’s certainly no simple formula or prescription. 
And the goal is not to figure out how to get God to give us what we want, or how to stop wanting things except for those that are selfless and global, praying only for others and for all the suffering in the world and never ever for the little things in our own lives that are certainly, we assume, unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

I guess what I am trying to say is that there isn’t a grand scheme of things; there is a Grand Schemer - who is moved with compassion at our grief, who hears when we cry out in anger and confusion and even accusations of betrayal, who is part of the unfolding story, whatever the story may be, part of it, involved, bringing people together, who moves within circumstances and situations to give us grace, life, hope, joy.   And who came and joined it with us:
World and all who live and breathe – here is your God.

And the common thread in our stories today is that God gave them to each other.  That in this act, in these shared words, “he gave her back her son” grace was experienced, God was encountered, hope was made alive. 
Just as Christ himself looked down from the cross just before he died, and met eyes with his own weeping mother and his dear friend John, “Woman, here is your son,” he said, and in their grief he gave them to each other. 
And in my own story this week, I watched, grace palpable, poignant, as God gave them all to each other.  Boys, here is your sister.  Mother and Father, here is your daughter.

So I suspect that grace is something we know in relationship, that Jesus joins us as we join one another. That the gift we most often experience, the place God most often is recognized, is when God gives us to each other.

I have no idea why some prayers are answered and others aren’t. 
But I know that my prayers were answered this week.  My silly, sentimental prayers for this week were answered, and they weren’t silly and sentimental to God.

So how can we recognize God’s grace in the world and celebrate it? How can we live unafraid to ask for things, and brave to share what we have?  Where is God at work, giving us to one another?  And how can we join God’s grand scheme of leaking grace into the world?


Wednesday, June 2, 2010

en route...

Sitting at the airport…
Traveling makes me hopelessly nostalgic and sentimental.
I blew dramatic air-kisses to my freckle-nosed tow-head as the school-bus pulled away, and shed a few tears after squeezing my pig-tailed wonder goodbye. 
And then I almost hugged my cabby.
My heart is swollen and I feel love for the world and all in it. 
If Andy were here he’d groan, roll his eyes, and put a chair of distance between us. 
I almost wish I could do that myself. 

I’m off to see my dear Mandy – inside her belly my goddaughter has kindly waited 5 days past her due date for my arrival, and I hope not to wait too long for hers.  I’d like a few days of nuzzling and sniffing her before I have to take a plane home. 

I checked the world’s largest suitcase, stuffed to near-splitting seams with all manner of tiny, feminine clothing, shoes and hats, and the gate agent politely looked the other way when the scale read a bright “51 lbs”, rather than charging me $75 for the extra pound.  For a split second I imagined myself rummaging through the thing and removing one pound’s worth of onesies and miniature leggings and stuffing them all throughout my pockets, carry-on and computer bag…thumb-sized socks dropping out of my purse in the hallways of the Lindburgh terminal as I rushed to catch my flight. 
Thank you, Kind Gate Agent. 

When I travel with my children I am the picture of efficiency and control, managing all manner of travel predicament with resourcefulness and economy.  Alone, I am fumbling, meandering, taking forever to reassemble my strewn-about self and baggage after the security screening, bumping through airport shops and forgetting which pockets hold what items.  Unencumbered, and untethered, I also feel small and quick if not a little haphazard, and I must seem young because every single uniformed person today has called me, “Miss.”  I'm buzzing with anticipation, zeroed in on my goal; I'm a godmother on a mission. Get there before she does. And then hope she comes quickly. I'm coming baby Sloan... are you?

Tonight we plan to eat at Scalini’s.  Their famous Eggplant Parmesan is credited with inducing over 300 babies – whose photos are displayed under the title “Eggplant Babies” on a wall of their dining room. 
Come tonight, sweet Sloan.  Don’t you want to be an Eggplant Baby too?

The plane is boarding now, Lord help the poor person seated next to me.

Eggplant Babies at Scalini's

How to Repent (It's not how you think)

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