Writer’s block

In fact, it is being part of a writer’s group that keeps me from writer’s block, or, at the very least, keeps me from fearing it. Having colleagues and friends to whom I can turn, when no words or wrong words or scattered words or convoluted ones are the problem, simply to say, “I have nothing to say whatsoever,” offers me such grace as a writer, as a human being, as a pastor, as a friend.

The very act of speaking aloud, “I have absolutely nothing to say right now,” helps me remember that I do, in fact, have something to say. I utter into the Universe, by speaking truthfully to my writing companions, a thought, though seemingly uninspired and bare, and that one little thought releases me to write the next one.

So, my advice for the impending reality of writer’s block is this:

1. Write in community. Share your frustrations, your fears, your worries and your obsessions with others. It just may be that your frustrations, your fears, your worries, your obsessions are the seed for a poem or a prayer or a narrative that others need to hear.

2. Instead of fearing writer’s block as something that’s always about to happen, trust that it will, indeed, happen. There will be times when you have nothing to say—but write anyway. And, in the end, trust the abundance of words like you trust the abundance of God.

Return to me, says the Lord, and I will return to you.
- Zechariah 1:3

Amen.

Claire McKeever-Burgett is a contributor to the current issue of Weavings, “Diversity.” She is pastor at Northminster Church in Monroe, Louisiana. Her writing offers a poetic pastoral style, one in which she pays close attention to the rhythms and rhymes present in the world. Visit her blog at pastorpoet.com.

For more than twenty years I have collected rosaries and other types of prayer beads. I thought they were beautiful and loved knowing they were used by people around the world to pray. But I never used them myself. I was raised Presbyterian and then became Methodist; prayer beads were not part of either tradition. Plus, rosaries were only for Catholics, or so I thought. But in 2009 I learned about Anglican, or Protestant, prayer beads. I was hooked. Finally, I gushed, beads I can use! The more I used them in prayer, the more I wanted to know about their history and how beads were used among other religions. I was hoping that this evening’s discussion would provide an interesting exchange for the students and help me discover new ways of using beads in my prayer life.

BEADS OF PRAYER

“Welcome!” I said, looking at the crowd of ten students, a faculty sponsor, and a few onlookers. “This is very informal. Who wants to start?”

A first-year student with soft brown eyes spoke up, offering to talk about Hindu prayer beads.

“This is a mala,” he said, holding up a long strand of beads with a tassel at the bottom. “Malas contain 108 beads. The number 108 is sacred because Hindus believe there are 108 names for Brahma, the creator of all beings.” He draped the strand over his right ring finger, demonstrating how he used his thumb to move the strand around in a clockwise direction. “We use the beads to repeat a mantra—a word or short phrase—over each bead. It is our way of meditating.”

“That’s similar to how Buddhists use prayer beads,” said a young woman with long, jet-black hair. Reaching into her backpack, she pulled out a set of beads that looked exactly like the Hindu student’s set.

“Buddhists also use a 108-bead mala to recite mantras. However, for Buddhists, the number 108 represents the number of afflictions or flaws that people must overcome in life.”

“That’s a lot of vices,” laughed one student.

“I know,” she said. “I think the hope is that people can overcome them by using the beads to meditate.”

I was beginning to see commonalities among the traditions. This was a fascinating exercise.

“Can I go next?” asked a soft-spoken second-year student.

“Sure,” I said.

She held up a strand of beads that was very familiar to me. It was a Catholic rosary made of gorgeous lavender glass beads.

“I’m Catholic,” she said. “We use a rosary. It’s made up of five sets of ten beads. Over a thousand years ago, the priests, the monks and the nuns were supposed to pray the Psalms every day. The laity wanted to be able to do this, too, but most of them were illiterate, so it would have been hard for them to do. Someone came up with the idea of having the laity repeat the Lord’s Prayer 150 times, since there are 150 Psalms. But it was hard for people to keep track of how many times they had said it. Someone put together a strand of 150 beads, and that was the beginning of the rosary.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a great history.”

“But don’t Catholics say prayers to Mary with the rosary?” asked a student.

“Yes,” she replied. “Eventually, the practice changed so that now we use the ten beads to say the ‘Ave Maria’ prayer, and the larger bead in between to say the Lord’s Prayer.”

The faculty sponsor looked at her. “So why don’t Protestants use the rosary?”

The young woman looked at me and shrugged.

“I’ve been trying to find that out,” I said. “It has been hard to find sources that describe exactly what happened with the rosary after the Reformation. But one book I have says that Luther didn’t have a problem with Protestants continuing to use it. I’m sure he thought that anything that helped people with prayer was a good thing. He did, however, make changes to the ‘Ave Maria’ part of the rosary. Still, his fellow Reformers, Calvin and Zwingli, completely disagreed. They didn’t want Protestants to use the rosary at all. Nor did they want icons, statues, stained glass windows, or anything else that might stand between Christians and God. They were all about a direct line. They must have won the argument, because Protestants have been bead-less ever since.”(1)

“Got it,” said the sponsor. “So Protestants don’t use any type of beads in prayer?”

“Well, for several hundred years we didn’t. But in the 1980s, a group of Episcopalians developed a new format for prayer beads.” I held up the strand of beads I had brought with me. “These are called ‘Anglican prayer beads,’ or ‘Protestant prayer beads.’ They are made up of four large beads. When you spread the beads out, these beads form the shape of the cross, so they are called ‘Cruciform beads.’ Between these beads are seven smaller beads, called ‘Week beads.’ There is also one more bead called the ‘Invitatory bead.’ Altogether, there are 33 beads, to represent the number of years that Christ lived on earth.”

“How do you use them?”

“There is no set form for how to use them. You can hold them as you pray your own prayer, or follow the beads as you read Scripture. You can also use them to provide structure for your prayer. For instance, you can use the first set of seven beads to praise God, the next set to confess your sins, the third to offer your prayer concerns, and the fourth to thank God for whatever God is doing in your life.”

“Interesting. I’ve never heard of them.”

“Not many people have. It’s an idea that is slowly gathering speed.” I said. Looking around the room I asked, “Who’s next?”

“I’ll go,” said the student sitting next to me. “I’m Muslim. We use a subha.” He held the strand of beads up for us to see. “It has 99 beads, although a lot of subhas, like this one, have only 33 beads. The number 99 is important to us because we have 99 names for Allah. The names all represent different attributes of Allah, such ‘The Creator,’ ‘The Guardian,’ and ‘The Peace.’ People can use the beads to recite all of the names, but most people use it to say ‘Glory be to God’ (in Arabic) 33 times; then ‘Praise be to God’ 33 times; and then ‘God is the greatest,’ 33 times. Not all Muslims use prayer beads, but those that do, this is usually how they pray with them.”

How do you repeat all of those sayings if you only have 33 beads?” asked the Hindu student.

“You just go around the strand three times.”

“That’s what we do with the rosary,” said the Catholic student. “Most rosaries are made up of five sets of ten beads, so we go around three times to equal 150.”

More commonalities. I was loving this.

“Anyone else?”

A young man wearing a baseball cap had been sitting quietly at one end of the table. He cleared his throat and said, “I really came just to listen. I’m Jewish. We don’t use beads to pray. But I do think we have something similar.”

“What’s that?” asked the Buddhist woman.

“We use a prayer shawl, called a tallith. On the four corners are fringe made of eight strands of thread that have been tied to form five knots. The knots are called tzitzit.”

“How is that similar to prayer beads?” asked the sponsor.

“We hold the knots between our fingers as we are praying. In the Book of Numbers, God instructed the Israelites to use the knots to remember the commandments. There are 613 commandments in the Torah. The Hebrew letters for the word tzitzit equal the number 600. When you add that to the five knots and eight strands you get 613. The knots help us to honor the commandments and remember the Lord is God.”

“That’s fascinating,” I said. “All five major religions are using something small, round, and hard to rub between their fingers as they pray or meditate.”

“It’s interesting, too,” said the Muslim student, “because all of these have numbers in common. Whether it’s 108 names for Brahma,” he began pointing to each of the students, “or 108 vices, or 150 Psalms, or 99 names for Allah, 33 years that Christ lived on earth, or 613 commandments, there are numbers everywhere!”

We looked at each other.

“What do you think the numbers mean?” I asked.

For a minute, they were quiet.

“I know with the Hindu mala you are repeating the same thing over and over 108 times in order to meditate. That helps us get out of our heads and focus on the divine. I imagine the same is true for the other types of prayer beads.”

“That’s what the rosary does for me,” agreed the Catholic student.

“I think you’re on to something,” I said. “All of these practices you’ve described tonight involve repetition; repeating something so often that the words aren’t important anymore.” I paused. “It seems that the prayer beads—or knots—are helping us to listen to the Divine.”

BEADS OF PEACE

In the year since, I have thought many times about my evening with the students. I am thankful for that opportunity to meet them and learn more about their religious traditions. It fostered several wonderful follow-up conversations, and seemed to be meaningful for the students. I know it was for me. I now have a better understanding of how beads can be used to listen to God. In times when I need to hear God, I find a short phrase, such as “Be still and know that I am God,” and repeat it with each bead. This has helped take the focus off of me and my words—I don’t have to worry about whether I have remembered every prayer request or if my words are sufficient—and place my focus on what God has to say to me. This has changed my prayer life in fundamental ways.

At the same time, I hope our roundtable discussion affected the way the students view other religious traditions. As I write this, it is the fall of 2012. Two weeks ago, a filmmaker from California released an anti-Islamic video that was thought to have sparked extensive violence throughout the Middle East. Around the same time, The Guardian reported that religious intolerance is on the rise worldwide (20 September 2012). As our world grows more connected through technology we seem to be growing more disconnected. We trust less, and judge more. We fear the people who are different from us.

But that gathering around the table represents, in a small way, who we are. We are, indeed, a widely diverse world with different understandings of the Divine. And yet, we are all so much alike. We all want to be safe through the structure that comes with commandments. We seek repentance and the opportunity to overcome our vices. We desire to know God and all of God’s many attributes. We long to know that we are loved and blessed. We yearn for peace.

Jesus commands us to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. I understand now the best way to do that is by listening. When we stop talking, arguing, and judging, we begin to hear. We hear God’s voice of love for us, and can only respond in love. It has become clear to me, and, hopefully, to those students: listening is the first step towards peace in our world.

1 Nan Lewis Doerr and Virginia Stem Owens, Praying with Beads: Daily Prayers for the Christian Year, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007), viii.

Kristen E. Vincent is the owner and artisan of Prayerworks Studio, which specializes in making handcrafted prayer beads. She speaks widely on prayer and prayer beads and enjoys leading retreats. Kristen is the author of One Bead at a Time: A Beginner’s Guide to Praying with Beads. Her blog is abeadnaprayer.wordpress.com.

“Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt. 18:20). These words clearly contain a counsel of simplicity. As Jesus’ followers, if we are to find true community with one another and with him, then we should look not just to the massive throng or the dramatic moment. We should look as well to the simplest instance of one life brushing up against another. We should open ourselves to the small and intimate moments when persons draw together in their joys and in their needs.

If love flows among us, even briefly, God is there—in traffic jams, in places of staggering beauty, in the realms of darkest communal pain. If we find ourselves bound together even momentarily, God is present. We taste with our spirits the community God longs to build.

To honor these occasions of community is to acknowledge how widely and all inclusively God works to fashion bonds among us. It is to open ourselves in wonder to the One who beckons toward wholeness at every turn.

And yet by honoring these experiences, we do not hold them up as substitutes for formal religious communities that gather in Christ’s name. Only in the long-term bonds of such community itself stands as a sign of what our passing experiences of closeness suggest. And rather than distracting us, these experiences of wider beckoning may ultimately be a means by which the living God calls us to fuller immersion in the community of faith that is both our home and our place of ongoing growth.

From Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. XVIII, No. 3 (Nashville: The Upper Room, 2003), 7-8.

Most of what goes on in this world is unseen. Planets orbit, flocks migrate, cells and organs work in the darkness. And love does its work. Skeptics look for proof of God, as if God were Bigfoot, as if The Holy One were any more provable than love or humor, as if paparazzi could somehow catch Spirit taking out the trash. No, God is The Unseen One. The closer we come the more there is only mystery. Fools never realize that when we stop knowing and can only wonder, we are seeing God.

We learn to tune our hearts to the invisible, to see with our souls, not just our eyes, to know that we live in a world and in the company of a Presence whose power and grace so far exceeds our capacity to know or see or understand that all we can do is wonder and trust. The world sings its song. God is at work. We come near, and listen with gratitude, and wonder and trust.

As I am a creature of habit, I knew that I needed to address the topic of resilience. Lot’s wife came to mind immediately. When she looked back to the past, she became a pillar of salt with no resilience at all. She brought to mind the others who had become so stuck in their ways that they couldn’t truly live.

While I try not to live in the past, I certainly draw from it. My parents both grew up on farms, and had friends and family who still farmed. So although I grew up in the city, I learned the differences between Holsteins and Herefords, and that a combine is a combination of a reaper and a thresher. It’s undoubtedly that agrarian tie that raised the idea of Lent as a fallow field. The changing face of the field suggested the title.

The poem came together quickly and easily—another indication that it was something I needed to write.

Gardener God, 
they said you were the one with the ax,
the demanding one, the avenging punisher—
but you are not him. You are the giver of life,
the one with nothing but loving care,
not one who commands, for whom I must produce,
but one who tends me, so that I bear fruit.
Yes, you are the one who protects me from the other!
I look for you looming above me and you are not there.
You are beneath, digging at my roots.

Will you forgive me if I flinch when I see the ax?
Will I let you dig around me,
loosen the soil I count on to hold me fast?
Will I welcome the manure, and all that it means,
for my nourishment?
Will I let your grace into my deepest roots?
Will I hear your voice not of threat but of nurture?
Will I recognize that greater power?
Will I let your manure of utter self-giving and death
bear fruit in me?

Gardener God,
tend to me
and I will bear the fruit of your love.

Many years ago, I backpacked across the Kalahari Desert in Botswana with two friends. We had spent Christmas in the Okavango Delta, exploring the wetlands in dugout canoes poled by local guides. It had been a tremendous experience, an overload of sensation, with abundant heat, greenery, water and wildlife. We had camped and celebrated the season under stars whose reflections shone out at us as much from the water as from the sky.

Emerging from the Okavango, the desert assaulted us with its aridity and hostility. We found a lift on the back of an open-backed truck bearing the road crew for a band from Maun, at the edge of the Delta, down to Francistown near the border of Zimbabwe. From there we could catch a train back east toward Malawi where we were all working as volunteer teachers.

Between delays and breakdowns the trip took all day, starting at 4:00am. Sitting with my head covered by my African cloth (chitenge) against sun and wind, I peered out at what seemed like an unchanging landscape of grey sand. A scraggly tree or some bushes would break the monotony here and there, perhaps a small hill, but my impression was mainly of endless emptiness.

Speech was impossible on the back of the truck as the wind whipped our words away, carrying them off into the dunes and sky. All we could do was gaze out at the infinite world. I don’t know at what point the emptiness shifted, but I do remember finding myself slowly captivated by both the stillness before me and the stillness within me. The desert became a meditation, a place to empty my heart into earth and sky.

And then I saw it. Against the horizon at the edge of a silvery salt pan, a creature stood – watchful, waiting – an ostrich. The magnificent bird turned its head sideways to observe our rumbling truck. I remember the simple sensation of awe. I had so emptied myself by now, that the vision of the ostrich filled me,and showed me the wonder of all creation, of life against the starkness of empty world, empty sky.

I remember feeling like I could hardly breathe from the beauty of it, wished I could share it, then turned and looked at my two companions. And they were smiling too.

I don’t know what Jesus found in his forty days in the desert. But I know it’s worth joining him there.

During this Lenten journey, may we each find the beautiful detail of the sand crystals in our lives, and the expansive and endless horizon of the love of our God.  soulsider.blogspot.com

Rick let the question hang there in front of us. I honestly don’t remember what he said right after he asked it. I do know it was clear that in no way was he demeaning whatever other practices of Lenten self-denial may have been present in that room. The banishing of, say, sweets from our lives, or refraining from words we shouldn’t be saying anyway, these things have their place and it is a good place. In the emptiness created by the simplest denial, we create within a greater space for Christ. Rick, however, was inviting us to something undeniably larger and far more demanding than the norm.

“How about giving up safety for Lent?”

The giving up can happen in so many ways. I saw a teen do it years ago. A ridiculous squabble broke out among some of the adults in his church. Right in the sanctuary. Right in the middle of worship. In my sermon I asked a poorly framed question, opened things up for discussion, and matters swiftly went from mediocre to much worse. After about three minutes the teen got up. “Aren’t we followers of Jesus? Aren’t we capable of something better than this?” He sat down. People fell quiet, then headed in a better direction. The fellow, fifteen at most, had given up the safety of keeping silent.

I know a young mother deeply disturbed by the gun violence in our society. She fears for her children. She grieves for not only victims of horrendous mass killings, but also the 30,000 who die each year with little notice at all, the victims of domestic violence, the targets of drive-by killings and unintended casualties of turf wars, toddlers playing with unlocked guns. She knows the issues are complex. She knows advances against this plague will need to be as multi-faceted and long term as the advances against cancer, AIDS, and heart disease. She has also heard, “This is a controversial matter around here. It’s best to stay silent.” She no longer buys the bit about staying silent. She has joined others in her area advocating for common sense change. For the sake of greater safety and health for all, she has abandoned the safety of keeping quiet.

The question haunts. It will not quit. How, for the sake of Christ’s healing love, can I now give up the safety of quiet, of holding with the familiar, of just letting things be?

A CLINKER FROM THE INTERNET

Lest I offend you at the very start, let me say that I recognize the tremendous gift the computer and the Internet are. My little iMac is a fabulous instrument. Although I have used it primarily as a word processor, the range of information it puts at my fingertips causes me to gape in absolute astonishment and awe: the instant connections it enables me to establish with friends in China, India, Australia; the transmission of finished manuscripts and books it facilitates; the world of art and music it sets before my eyes and ears; the games it lets me play; and a jillion other things. No one who grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, least of all I, could have dreamed of anything like it.

It puts the world at my fingertips.

So what is my complaint? What fault do I find with such a fabulous advance in human technology? As in so many things we humans invent, the fault rests in the way we use the technology rather than in the technology itself. In the Internet we have put to use something that potentially creates immense problems for the development of greater intimacy with God, with one another, and with the world around us, for it takes to the highest level the distractions that get in the way of attentiveness, which is what prayer is at bottom. The ability to pay attention is precisely what is taking a severe beating from this new technology. In consequence, God may end up perched out there on the periphery of our consciousness, of even less importance in our busy lives than God is now.

In his best-selling The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr reported this disturbing news. “Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators, and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.” (1) What is particularly disturbing and has special relevance to the spiritual life, he went on to say, is that “the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it. . . . It returns us to our native state of bottom-up distractedness, while presenting us with far more distractions than our ancestors ever had to contend with.” (2) The distractedness the Internet fosters is not diversion of the mind to weigh a decision. Rather, it’s “cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively.”(3)

I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that it is not easy to learn how to pray or to keep at it when we have learned how. Teresa of Ávila, the first woman named a “Doctor of the Church,” in the main because of her contribution to Christian understanding of prayer, confessed that she spent twenty years learning how. (4) Admittedly, she didn’t get serious in her effort to learn until a three-year illness and a near-death experience put some pressure on. What she discovered is what everyone who takes prayer seriously will discover, that prayer is, above all, response to the prior love of God. As Bernard of Clairvaux reminded his fellow monks, “. . . every soul among you that is seeking God should know that it has been anticipated by [God], and has been sought by [God] before it began to seek [God].” (5) It couldn’t happen any other way, could it? How could we mortals get God’s attention, the attention of the God of a universe of 150-plus billion galaxies. We can’t yell loud enough, build a Babel tower high enough, or send a space ship far enough to get God’s attention unless God has chosen to enter into our consciousness. If we pray, then, we have to learn how to pay attention. We have to cultivate wakefulness.

If Nicholas Carr is right, however, that is precisely where the Internet is tripping us up. Google, on which most of us rely heavily, epitomizes the problem. “Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction.” (6) To be fair in our evaluation, we have to acknowledge the benefit of efficient collection of data, but where it poses a problem for us is that it does not leave room for meditation or contemplation. “In Google’s world, which is the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.” (7)

NOTES

1 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2011), 115-6.  Italics mine.
2 Ibid. 118.  Italics mine.
3 Ibid. 119.
4 Teresa of Ávila, The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila, translated by E. Allison Peers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image Books, 1960), 108.
5 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 84 on the Song of Songs, 2; “Library of Christian Classics, XIII, edited by Ray C. Petry, 74-75.
6 Ibid. 157.
7 Ibid. 173.  Italics mine.

Excerpt from the current issue of Weavings, “Resilience” (Feb/Mar/Apr 2013). To get a copy of this issue or to order a subscription to Weavings, call 1.800.972.0433 or order online.

www.sallyclark.info  

At the end of September, I spent a weekend at Algonquin Park in Ontario, a wilderness site largely deserted by that time of year. I was there with good people who knew how to camp and how to build a fire much better than I ever could. That night we sat around a campfire and talked and joked and watched the wood turn to ash as all the stresses of our work and our lives burned away.

The smoke of the campfire traveled up into a cloudless night, and after a while a few of us walked out on the beach to look at the sky. A slash of stars burned down at us, sprinkling us with blessings, even as our little fire reached up toward heaven. The energy of a billion galaxies laid itself before us, because, quite simply, we had taken the time to look.

There’s a burning for God that consumes the heart and opens the spirit. The burning bush is no metaphor, nor the flames of the upper room. The energy of the universe exists in a God that fills us, heats us, and burns away our pain and sorrow, leaving only ashes behind.

I think of the ashes in my life, the mistakes made, the friendships lost. Call it sin, call it human failure, the truth is if we dare to live, we will err sometimes, miss the mark, and hurt others as well as ourselves. But ashes are the price of living.

We light our little fires here on earth, in our hearts and in our lives, reaching out for an eternal God who can open our eyes to invisible truths. God burns in us as we strive to live for peace, justice, compassion and truth. In our friendships and our care we start small flames of possibility and hope. Only this can strip away the trivial and hurtful – greed, arrogance, fear, jealousy, war, injustice, hate – and so open our hearts to the most profound, the most real energy of the universe. Call it love. Call it God. soulsider.blogspot.com

I recently heard a colleague remark that Ash Wednesday is his favorite holy day for being a pastor. It’s mine too. Ash Wednesday is like a congregation-wide experience of hospice: a focused moment where death is uncomfortably close to life. And the pastor’s role is to pray and to love and to say gently, “This too is part of life. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” What moves me in that moment of ministry is not the proximity of death but the exposed tenderness of life. In the space of Ash Wednesday, as in the space of hospice, companionship and touch and the promise that God is greater than our dust mean everything; in fact, they are the only things.

To me, the most satisfying aspect of pastoral ministry is the privilege of witnessing this breadth of life: the dust and death, the birth and the hope. It is also the most challenging aspect of pastoral ministry. Pastoring congregants across the breadth of their lives (and across the breadth of the congregation’s life) requires a breadth of gifts and skills—all of the spiritual, emotional, logistical, theological, and intellectual skills that I have and aspire to. “How best might a new education program be started that generates energy without draining its volunteers?” “How can outdated modes of being church be respectfully put to rest and its devotees encouraged to new habits of participation?” “How best can I transition my own spirit when visiting a hospice care facility immediately after visiting a hospital’s maternity wing?”

Those discerning a call into ministry—and those of us already in ministry—do well to start in the same place that Lent begins: Ash Wednesday and its stark reminder that we each are dust. With all of the gifts that God bestows on us for breadth of ministry, we are still but dust. And in this dust of ministry, the most important things are companionship and touch and the promise that God is greater.

Read more of Rachel’s insights at faithandwater.com.

 The question by the Jewish retreat leader, in the middle of a retreat with business people on the subject of resilience, caught me off guard. Let me explain.

After 25 years in pastoral ministry, I was feeling both a little burned out in parish ministry and surprisingly interested in trying something new. My spiritual director noticed the nudges of excitement in retreat work and spiritual formation and kept urging me to pay attention, keep alert. Once, while on a day retreat, the leader passed around a basket of quotes and Bible verses and invited us to choose one randomly. The words of Isaiah jumped off the paper, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19). So when a friend told me about a retreat on life transitions, how could I do anything but sign up instantly?

I did not know that most of the participants would be business leaders; though the participants were employed differently, we had much in common as we all were searching for ways to live and move in times of transition.

“Many think of life and change as an upward slant, always getting better,” said the leader,  “but what happens when life throws a curve, when things don’t get better?” Common responses are despair, a crash-and-burn experience, an all-or-nothing response. The slanted line she drew looked like climbing a mountain and then abruptly falling off.

She drew an alternative line that still slanted up but now included one or more loops. She called it “the resilience spiral.” This looped line and the wisdom of resilience comes from the study of people who have survived difficult times and situations: in particular, Holocaust survivors, widowers who lived more than five years after the death of the wife, and teenagers who avoided gangs. Interviews with these survivors revealed the wisdom and practices of resilience.

When a difficulty comes, the upward line begins to curve back on itself and eventually curves down. This may happen when a new boss is appointed that doesn’t appreciate our work, for instance. Or when several families move and the parish budget is severely impacted. Or when the big contract goes to a competitor. The straight line of bigger and better begins to curve back on itself. That is when the leader asked me the resurrection question: In essence, did I believe the line would curve back up again? Even if the line did not come out at the same spot as before, did I believe in the upward slant, the joy and energy we feel when we use our gifts and talents, doing what God calls us to do? Resilience is trusting that the curve will come back up.

Trust is the essential key in resilience, trusting that when the curve heads south, God is still at work in the midst of the shifts and changes.  Don’t jump off and crash, but pay attention; trust and learn some practices to hold you until the new emerges.

Excerpt from the current issue of Weavings, “Resilience” (Feb/Mar/Apr 2013). To get a copy of this issue or to order a subscription to Weavings, call 1.800.972.0433 or order online.

when you grieve
that your life is troubled or a mess,

when you doubt
your life’s benefit to the universe,

remember that no matter your faults,
regardless of your disappointments,

you are more than this one individual flesh:
you are a part of this vast, wondrous humanity,

this glorious Creation,

that you are part of God’s healing of the world,
and know that your life, your whole life,

is wonderful, beautiful, and worthy,
holy, and belonging to God…

and give thanks.

“Let us go into the house of the LORD;

Let us go home.”

- Psalm 122:1

Imagine a place where you can worship God in your bare feet – not because the dress code is so casual but because you are so comfortable, so at home.

To be at home…in church. It’s not about shoes or bare feet, of course, nor whether you dress up or dress down for worship. It’s about every sense – mind, body, spirit – receiving the consistent message when you enter that space: “Here you are safe. Here you are loved. Here you are supported to figure out, to reassemble, to revive your best and most whole self. Here you are home.” A message gathered through the touch of your naked toes (should you choose to go barefoot!) on the carpet; from the smell of freshly broken bread on the table; in the familiar sight of candles standing tall and bright, right there where they always are; by the sound of voices greeting you; and (lest we forget) through the taste of fish fry after worship or red jello with pineapples or no-crust-white-bread-triangle finger sandwiches arranged in circles and piled high.

Mind, body, spirit, all receiving the good news: You are home, be at peace. Let your body rest here as it cannot rest out in the wilderness. Let your mind spark and rekindle with ideas and inspirations after a week of mind-numbing routines, mind-battering stresses. Let your spirit soak up living water. Reconnect yourself in all of your part – live in wholeness. Let the tears run if you are sad. Let the chuckle burst into full laughter if you are joyful. Let your passion find direction and fellowship for the journey. You are safe to be your whole self here in this home, here in God’s house.

Just imagine: feeling home-happy when you step into the house of the LORD!

It is a common event—people growing plants from seeds and then seeing them standing tall in the garden, flourishing under full sun. Yet their sheer presence and development had the power to draw my wife and me into an ongoing dialogue with the Spirit in all aspects of our lives.

The opening of human experience into mystery may happen on retreats, or on those infrequent occasions when we feel particularly graced. Mystics, however, tell us that we should be attentive to the Spirit at all times. Uncovering mystery is not limited to special times and places, and is in fact a way of living to which faith invites us. Thomas Merton (New Seeds of Contemplation), for example, insists that each moment and event of our lives plants seeds of spiritual dynamism in our souls. But, he cautions, most seeds die because the soil of the inner life is not prepared to receive them.

Jesus saw the world as an ongoing expression of the Spirit. From his perspective reality was gracious and loving, and ultimately revealed the glory of God. Drawing on images from nature, he invited his contemporaries to “look at the birds of the air,” and “consider the lilies” (Matt. 6:26, 28, NRSV). In other words, change the way you see the world and be receptive to the presence of the divine. His view challenged the conventional wisdom of his time as well as ours today. Do we see the world as dynamic, pulsing with divine energy, or as inanimate and impersonal? The answer to this question may seem to have little impact on our daily lives, but our ideas have potency. Whether we voice them or not, they affect how we respond to life.

OPENING OUR EYES

God is everywhere. Truth and love pervade all things as the light and heat of the sun pervade our atmosphere. But just as the rays of the sun do not set fire to anything by themselves, so God does not touch our souls with the fire of supernatural knowledge and experience without Christ.  —St. Francis of Assisi, by G. K. Chesterton

So how do we begin to see deeply? Merton reminds us that Christ is the door to all wisdom. The questions arise: Are we passionate about allowing our lives to be filled and led by the Spirit of Christ? Do we desire this above all else? Are we willing to be disciples, not simply to become familiar with the teachings of Jesus, but to follow Christ and hold fast to him? As disciples, our hearts, ears, and eyes can be transformed and we can see the world from a different perspective.

In his biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, G. K. Chesterton describes how Francis went to a cave and underwent a radical transformation. He entered with the perspective of an ordinary person and exited with the eye of a fool. His foolish outlook was more than a change of viewpoint or the adoption of an aesthetic stance; it undercut all conventional ways of seeing. Because of his conversion, the visible was no longer the primary reality. Francis saw the world immersed in and flowing from divine light, a light he also perceived within himself.

Our own transformation may not occur with such drama or intensity, but each of us is called to enter the dark cavern of our inner life and be transformed in Christ’s love. In the process, we become like the disciples on the road to Emmaus and awaken to the presence of Christ at the center of everyday experiences. As a result, our hearts burn with a steady, peaceful flame (see Luke 24:13-35, NRSV).

The grace of this vision is tested during times of loss. After attending the funeral of a close friend, I left the church with a heavy heart and was greeted by a sweet, earthy scent carried by a cool spring breeze. For a moment my sorrow gave way to a deeper vision, one of creativity, life, and hope, a perspective that my friend had reinforced in me through the example of her life. As seekers we look for hope in times of loss, and we try to find signs of the Kingdom of God hidden in the suffering and injustice of the world. However, we realize that only with the new eyes of a disciple can we discover healing in places of pain and see history as God’s history, the secret unfolding of the divine will. Nurturing the perspective of a fool, we trust that the Spirit of Christ is with us, drawing all reality to its final fulfillment when God becomes “all in all” (1 Cor.15:28, NRSV).

INNER STRUGGLE

When spring arrives I find myself unwilling to shed the layers of clothing that have protected me from winter cold. Several forays into warm spring days must pass before I embrace the change of seasons and allow myself to stand vulnerable in the warmth of the sun. As a child I eagerly ran outside without a coat; as an adult I am cautious.

Trusting the divine is much like this struggle to welcome spring. We hold on to isolation and layers of protection, anxiety, pain from past wounds, addictions, and complexes. We encounter the power for good and for harm in ourselves and in others. A vision of the world immersed in a divine and gracious Presence is not easy to trust. No wonder we find it difficult to open our hearts to spiritual healing, to greet the light and warmth of grace with childlike freedom and allow ourselves to be embraced by it. How do we uncover God’s light and warmth in such chaos and darkness?

Toward the end of his life, his body racked with illness, Francis lay incapacitated in a rough hut behind the convent of San Damiano. His badly infected eyes shied away from light. He could no longer see even by the soft glow of a candle. Moreover, he must have thought about the community he had cared for over so many years, now wrested from his hands. He had relinquished his official position and others were manipulating the Rule for their own ends. In the darkness he felt the onslaught of self-pity and despair. Why had he been abandoned by the God to whom he had dedicated his life? In the midst of his turmoil, Francis turned to prayer and uncovered a light deeper than his suffering and hopelessness. He envisioned the same light shining with such power and beauty at the heart of the created world that he became an instrument for a song of praise and gratitude, a canticle that joined the voices of all creatures and the cosmos itself.

This experience of the “little poor man” marks a path of radical trust that illumines both personal and cultural darkness. He shows us that if we rely on our deepest faith during times of crisis and pray for strength to rise above our winter moods, the Spirit breathing through us can create fresh possibilities that announce the new life of the Resurrection.

THE ORDINARY

Where do we turn to cultivate our vision? Like Francis and holy men and women through the centuries who believed the divine permeated every part of their lives, we can turn to ordinary moments and common things: seeds in the basement, flowering trees and plants, a budding leaf, muddy boots in the garage, music composed on a computer, car trips, football games, and children or parents needing our care—all of these hold the potential to surprise us.

As we learn to trust the wonder of this world, we discover the capacity to “seize God in all things,” an ability that Meister Eckhart holds up as a sign of deepening faith (Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher). Such open-hearted seeing is an ongoing prayer. No words are necessary, only attentiveness to the power of the Spirit already present in nature, in history, and within us. The heart leans toward Love and responds with acts of love. We strive to be more concerned for those who are in need and we offer compassion and service to those who are suffering. Ordinary responses to people and surroundings create an opening for the work of the Kingdom of God. Do not seek mountaintop visions but be content with Galilee experiences, advises Kathleen Norris: “We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were.” (The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work”)

Except from Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. XIX, No. 1  (January/February 2004) (Nashville: The Upper Room, 2004), 6.

No one knows

what became

of the gifts

first given

to the child.

Except

wherever

the hungry receive their bread

and the grieving their comfort

and captives their freedom

and love wraps round the lonely

and our own wearied hearts

are filled with joy.

There

the little one

lavishes his

now never-ending gifts

upon our needy world.

finally,

fully,

no longer a heavenly concept

or ontological mystery

but a Life

of breath and flesh

showing that Love lived

is possible

in the fullest –

not nuanced or strategized,

not compromised or politicized,

but simply expressed

in touch

in bread

in questions

in fishing tales

in fellowship.

And in these days of Christmas,

the most basic question is

do we believe

that Love

lived, and

that Love

can be

lived?

I often forget about the lived reality of what we are celebrating: a young woman in her ninth month of pregnancy, travelling by donkey, not knowing where she will give birth, a child born into a world ruled by a brutal military power and a corrupt king. When I think of this perspective, I remember what it was like to be nine months pregnant, and what it has been like for some of my friends. I cringe to think of what it must have been like for my husband during that time!

Certainly there is the joy of anticipating new life, but there is such discomfort. Lots of emotions come up during this time.  Not long before my delivery date, I heard the story of a woman who died during childbirth in the town where we lived.

We know by faith that Advent is the beginning of the story that is our salvation. All the same, there may be discomfort, fear, and messy emotions. May we be gentle with ourselves and with others. May we slow down–the way one must in that last month of gestation–and live honestly with our discomfort. May we ask God’s Spirit and the spirit of the Holy Season to enter into the very core of our fears and anxieties to bring us new and renewed life.

O Lord, you came into this world to be with us, to love us into life. Encourage my heart and soul to meet you and walk with you every year from the manger to the cross.  Holy God, open my eyes to what you are birthing in me.  Holy Spirit, breathe in and through me. Amen.

As beautiful as light can be, this image of Zechariah’s is not ornamental. The light he speaks of serves a more fundamental and essential function. Light illuminates, reveals, exposes. When we are engulfed in darkness we don’t need adornment and embellishment—we need illumination. We need light to keep from stumbling.

The manager scene depicts a baby’s birth. This birth is a sunrise that penetrates a dark world and darkened hearts. I know what lies hidden in the shadows of my soul. I am petty, arrogant, selfish, bitter, deceptive, and angry. There is a parade of ugliness beneath the surface. Zechariah makes plain what is intended by the metaphor of light invading darkness when he says that the Lord will, ”give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins.” (Luke 1:77).

Advent is a reminder that what I need most desperately is not a life more attractively decorated, despite what the Sunday glossies would have us believe. I need my shadowed soul illuminated. I need to see the sunrise. Well, the sun is rising. The light of the infant Messiah is overcoming the darkness of sin. It won’t shine in full glory until Easter. But those first rays of light breaking through the darkness are glorious indeed.

When I read Isaiah 40, I hear “Every Valley” from Handel’s Messiah resonate in my mind. How incredible that the prophet spoke words of longing for a Messiah using road construction images. He speaks of making a highway in the wilderness, making the path straight in the desert so that every valley is lifted up and every mountain is made low, the rough places made smooth. He beckons us to get out the tractor and the shovel and make a way for the coming of Christ.

In my tradition during Advent, we have a Chrismon tree with symbols of Christ on it in the sanctuary. Maybe we should have an Isaiah tree, too. It could have hardhats and shovels and bobcat ornaments. We could hang dump trucks and cement trucks from the branches, and let’s not forget the little leveling tools with the green bubbles in them. Those would be cute!

Advent is a time of clearing the way for Christ, the true WAY, to come. He yearns for a place in each of our hearts. He longs to bring love and justice to a broken world. We don’t have to go find Jesus or get our hearts right before him … these teachings are a remnant of many painful versions of ancient moralistic heresies. We don’t go get Christ, Christ comes to us in pure grace. That’s what the incarnation is all about. That’s what Christmas is all about.

Maybe road construction is what Advent is all about. We don’t drive to Jesus, but our part is to make space for him to come.

Steve West is a husband, father, minister, musician, and writer who serves as senior pastor of Saint Mark UMC in Birmingham, AL. His blog, “Musings of a Musical Preacher,” is found at stevewestsmusings.blogspot.com .

I appreciate Advent for all sorts of reasons. I love the music, I love the missions, and I love the families that work and play together as we prepare to celebrate the coming of Christ!

But one of the main reasons I value Advent is that it puts us in touch with a deep spiritual reality that we too often neglect. The things of the Holy Spirit take time. Feasting on the Word is not a fast food meal, but an experience to be savored. Prayer is not a quick fix but an invitation to be changed from within over time. Forgiveness doesn’t happen overnight but can be quite a journey. Feeling at home in a local church takes “making a home” there, building relationships that last. A deeper relationship with God is not something we can download instantaneously.

During Advent, we become people who get in touch with that part of ourselves that is empty for God. Advent is counter-cultural in a time when we expect instant results. I pray that this year, we prepare a manger of the heart for Christ to be born anew.

Steve West is a husband, father, minister, musician, and writer who serves as senior pastor of Saint Mark UMC in Birmingham, AL. His blog, “Musings of a Musical Preacher,” is found at stevewestsmusings.blogspot.com .

A cursory reading of the lectionary for the first two Sundays of Advent reveals that looking at the coming again of Christ shows us the lives we are to live now. For example, look at this passage for the Second Sunday of Advent:

I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God’s grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that on the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God. (Philippians 1:3-11, NRSV).

As the first two Sundays of Advent look forward to the future of Christ’s coming kingdom and reign, the closing two Sundays look backwards to the past; to Christ’s birth. We see in these texts that in that birth God begins the process of turning the world upside down:

My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on

the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all

generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done

great things for me,

and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud

in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful

from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made

to our ancestors,

to Abraham and

to his descendants forever.

(Luke 1:46b-55, NRSV)

In misunderstanding the purpose of Advent, we miss the full potency of the meaning of the Incarnation. Yes, we celebrate a God who is not remote, but here with us now. We celebrate that through Christ we have eternal life. We bow our heads in gratitude that Christ is born in our hearts. But more than that, this season calls us to contemplate and celebrate history’s destination. It is in the promise that God wins in the end that we can live in hope and anticipation.

Steven W. Manskar is Director of Wesleyan Leadership for The General Board of Discipleship (GBOD). Read his blog at wesleyanleadership.wordpress.com .

Advent is the first light of Resurrection. It does not wait for Easter’s bright dawn, for Resurrection begins in predawn chill, and is the way to face every cold season or dark night.

Advent. Incarnation. Atonement. Resurrection. Sometimes the very words, locked into stained-glass categories, obscure the truth. They lead us to scan the far horizon for bright rays of deliverance, while its simple power is pulsing near at hand.

Resurrection is a simple word that describes a process so ordinary and recurrent that we may not connect it to the great expectations of deliverance the holy words inspire. The Greek for resurrection gives the clue to this ordinariness: anastasis means, simply, “again standing up.” We all lie down. We all rise up. Every day. The same word is used for Christ’s resurrection. Christ reveals it as the secret of his way through life: ego eimi anastasis kai zoe—“I am resurrection and life” (John 11:25,NRSV – author’s translation and emphasis). Resurrection life. Getting up again, no matter what lays you flat.

Do I wake myself up in the morning? No, rather, I am awakened by an innate power in the mysterious body, if not by sunlight or sound of a loved one’s bustle. Letting the miracle grasp us begins here, with the mystery of any awakening:

Blessed art thou, who removest sleep from mine eyes,
yea, and slumber from mine eyelids.
Blessed art thou … who restorest litl’ to mortal creatures.
-Daily Jewish Morning Prayers from Weekday Prayer Book, ed. by Rabbi Morris Silverman, pp. 104-5.

We begin learning ordinary resurrection in infancy. What compels an infant to crawl, stand, fall, wail, and then with joyful smile stand again and brave the challenge of the path? The muscles and the mind begin learning the lesson of standing again, facing the terrors of the path again, and again.

No, Resurrection does not wait till Easter. It is the life power the seeds and bulbs yearn for in the cold night of Advent. It is the light that delivers, not so much by rejecting the darkness, but by entering into it with compassionate bravery, looking for what is lost in it.

One of the most ancient ways of reading the Christ story is to see that Christ’s whole life “brought life and immortality to light” (2 Tim. 1:10, NRSV) to the human race, seen as dwelling in “darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1: 79, NRSV). Though we dwell in God’s own creation, our sight is weakened so we cannot see it as it truly is. Tasting God’s goodness every day, our minds are so full of fears and cravings for superficial stimulation we hardly notice the miracle of daily bread. Deadened in body and soul, it is a struggle to trust the compassionate connection that is the true pathway to cooperative living. The Light incarnate at Christmas begins to pervade this shadowland in every step Jesus takes, victoriously seeping into the chaos of our insanity to take the imprisoned image of God within us by the hand and help it stand again, sane and whole.

Feeling your way deeper and deeper through every dark realm
You came to the bottomless pit of fear
and closed it round with the embrace of your compassionate gaze,
comprehending it within the wider assurance
that everything can fall, finally,
only toward your Life. 1

Deliverance begins not by rescue, but by arousal from the deadening, daily, sleepy stupor of sin. Befriended in our fear, our hardened hearts are touched by God’s goodness, however dimly perceived, and aroused to possibilities still undreamt.

THE POWER TO STAND

The descent of the Living Word to dwell among us “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14,NRSV) shows us a different way to approach both the blossoming joys and the inevitable sufferings of this life—a way not rooted in pain, but in the goodness of God’s very presence in the midst of all life’s circumstances,

Christ does not suffer in order to triumph. Rather, his way of dealing with suffering is already a victory. This is because Christ’s way of suffering is so different from our ordinary approach. We have come, somehow, to believe that suffering in and of itself is good for us, even redemptive—a kind of cosmic “no pain, no gain” spirituality. This is often tied with a deep, underlying fear that we deserve to suffer.

The whole biblical story of Christ is meant to deliver us from this hellish state of mind. Deliverance does not come when pain is over, but can arise in the ordeal of it. Christ’s way of entering our suffering is resurrection life, zoe—eternal life, not after death, but “life-now-eternally-springing.” It is everywhere available to an awakening trust in God’s goodness: “All (things) that came to be were alive with this Life (zoe)” (John 1:3-4, AT). 2

You laid bare for all to see how they lurk at the heart of every situation
goodness hidden in the hardest, darkest shells
waiting to be unlocked and stand up again.
Overwhelmed by the tidal waves of your world
we yearn for your rescue, pining for some other kind of Presence
than the still, small pulse of life within us.

GRACE BEYOND AND WITHIN

I sat listening to Biblical prophecy after prophecy at the Advent service of lessons and carols. As each voice proclaimed the good news that nation would someday not lift up sword against nation, that deserts would bloom, that trees of the forest would rejoice in God’s justice, all I could think of were the ecological disasters everywhere. Such a lovely dream, and such grim facts. As if a deep moan from somewhere in my belly came the thought, We need saving! Some force or power must help turn us from this destruction. So secular and serious was my reflection that it took a minute or two to realize where I was and what I was listening to. “Savior” was what Advent is about. But could God really save the world? Not just in theory, doctrine, ritual—but so that the trees could “clap their hands together for joy before the Lord when he comes to bring justice to the earth” (I Chron. 16:33, AT). I had been brought up to believe God could save souls—but a whole planet?

On the way home from church, I popped Paul Winter’s jazz mass, Missa Gaia, into the tape deck and played the Agnus Dei, which begins with the sound of whales singing in the deep. I wept as I drove along, humming with the human voices that echoed the whale song. I prayed aloud, “Strong Lamb of God, take away the sin of the world! Help this beautiful, difficult planet. Turn us away from our destructive ways. Please!” In my heart, it was as if I heard a quiet voice respond: How mucn do you want this salvation?

Enough to love life so much you really don’t want to see it harmed?
Enough to enter still more deeply into the agony of this time in history?
Enough to taproot yourself deeply into the sufficiency of my own active goodness?
Enough to trust it, love it, cultivate it with all your heart, all your soul, all your might?
Enough to let it grow you strong enough to join me in the struggle?

“Death and resurrection aren’t a matter of jolly daffodils pushing up in the spring,” said the seriously intellectual preacher that next Good Friday. On the way to the service, I’d noticed the incredibly powerful, sharp blade of the daffodil in my front lawn, dirty from its push through hard soil. I wondered how the highly urban preacher knew so much about what it feels like to be a daffodil. Slicing through the hard soil in an early thaw, risking a sudden freeze, slightly cut by a sharp rock, the daffodil seemed worthy enough as a companion to the story of resurrection.

Perhaps I resented his jaunty dismissal of the determination of daffodils because I had learned to feel within myself some­ thing like  what I saw in the daffodils—a power within, stirring, pushing through, helping me to climb out and stand up after every discouragement or defeat. I was brought up to think of saving power as deliverance from beyond. I was now realizing that the gracious goodness touching me from beyond myself was awakening the mysterious gift of health at the core of my being. Both the outer grace and the awakening inner grace were from the same Source, giving me courage to face the path, wherever it might lead.

Jolly daffodils? Hardly. The green blade of the daffodil that pushes out toward the sun does so only by the power of last year’s sunlight patiently savored and stored, day by day, in its very heart.

NOTES
1 Prayer insets are from the author’s own journal, unless otherwise noted.
2 Translation is based on the discussion in Raymond Brown’s Anchor Bible Commentary on the Fourth Gospel. The Greek can be translated many ways. Brown says this is a possible rendering, but that the Evangelist couldn’t possibly have meant it! The conventional tendency to divorce zoe from the everyday world is so strong it bends translations to its predetermined expectations.

The first Sunday of Advent is regarded in the Western Church as the beginning of the liturgical year. But Advent is first of all about the end of time. Because the term itself means “coming” or “arrival,” and because is precedes Christmas, many have misunderstood Advent to be exclusively a time to get ready to celebrate the coming of a child at Bethlehem. In fact, the primary focus of Advent is on what is popularly called “the second coming.” Thus Advent concerns the future of the Risen One, who will judge wickedness and prevail over every evil. Advent is the celebration of the promise that Christ will bring an end to all that is contrary to the ways of God; the resurrection of Jesus is the first sign of this destruction of the powers of death, the inauguration and anticipation of what is yet to come in fullness. As such, the opening Sundays of Advent bring to sharp focus themes that in the lectionary system have been accumulating for some weeks; for as the lectionary year closes, the Gospel readings, in particular, deal with signs of the end.

This season calls us to contemplate and celebrate history’s destination. It is in the promise that God wins in the end that we can live in hope and anticipation.

When the church chooses to resist the cultural pull to jump right into the Christmas season, embracing and observing a holy Advent, it can be a powerful witness to Christ and his coming reign “on earth as it is in heaven.” When we intentionally make the journey through the Advent season as it is intended, we create space for repentance, confession, prayer, and worship. We give ourselves the opportunity to slow down, to fast from the orgy of consumerism, consumption, and gluttony that has become so typical of this time of year to remember what is important.

As citizens of the kingdom of God, we can be a powerful witness when we support each other in serving with and alleviating the suffering of the poor, the sick, and the prisoners. To do that means going against the grain of the culture we live in. How would the church and the world be changed if Christians fasted and prayed and engaged in acts of justice and compassion during the weeks of Advent as their witness to and way of preparing for Christ’s coming again?

Steven W. Manskar is Director of Wesleyan Leadership at The General Board of Discipleship (GBOD). Read his blog at wesleyanleadership.wordpress.com .

While Matthew is my least favorite gospel, other persons find it to be their favorite. Matthew was a tax collector, involved in a fraudulent legal system. Understandably, then, his Jesus is primarily a new law giver, with clear rules against dishonesty. “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil” (Mt.5:37). Let not one dot or tittle of the law be “conveniently” removed. Conversion, as he sees it, involves keeping carefully a life record, as God does – one that is accurate, precise, honest, and, above all, accountable. In contrast to his former tax collector colleagues, Matthew insists that “you, therefore, must be perfect” (Mt.6:46-48). The motivation for living such an honestly disciplined life makes contact with the one surrounding him –  that of self-interest. The one who lives according to the teachings of Jesus will receive compensation many times over in the world to come. “Do this and great will be your reward.”  This is his repeated promise.

Such an approach is coherent and appealing as long as a person inhabits a Matthew-type world. But there are others who bring to the Jesus event contrasting needs, hoping that there is a version of the “good news” for us. Since anxiety over the possibility of abandonment has a way of haunting me, my struggle is with being worth keeping. Thus my favorite gospel is Luke, for he focuses on the outcast and rejected. The Jesus I need is not the one who promises reward for much well-doing. I have been a workaholic to a fault, with much of my life consumed in an effort to earn acceptance by proving through my well-doing that I am worth keeping. Thus there is no good news for me in hearing that there will be a final life inventory in which heaven or hell depends on whether I’ve worked hard enough to make the grade. Such stress would simply escalate big time my fear of not being found worth keeping. No, the God I need is not the one who demands absolute perfection. The God who has touched my soul is the one portrayed in the parables unique to Luke.

Instead of Matthew’s stress on being perfect like God, for Luke it is a God who above all is merciful. The God who embraces me is the Father yearning for his son, the Widow searching for her lost coin, and the Shepherd leaving all behind in search of me his abandoned lamb. These parables portray a God who lovingly cares for the undeserving. I need understanding not reward, and forgiveness not compensation. I need to be embraced not for what I have done or earned, but in spite of what I deserve.

Which scriptural version touches each of us depends on the primal need that is operative in our own life pilgrimage. When Christ touches that bare wire, the vital change that happens in each of us has to do with motivation. We are all born with a basic neediness, so we are motivated by getting. And when we begin receiving what we most need, the inevitable shift is toward thankfulness - bringing an increasingly serene soul. As this center is experienced as firm, our boundaries expand, for we no longer need to clutch the little that we have.

Thus our favorite scriptures depend on that particular theme – of how being loved results in becoming loving; or how being taught brings integrity; or how being welcomed home spawns hospitality; or how being found encourages seeking the unfound; or how in being cured one becomes a healer; or how in being forgiven one becomes forgiving. Yet while diverse versions meet diverse needs, the plot remains the same. They are all about being fed.

On a Saturday in May, the alleluias of Easter still resounding in our prayers, the Rutba House community rises early for a work day. These things do not happen without some prep work. Two years ago we noticed that the house next door to one of ours was falling down. The hole in the roof had gone unattended for months. We wondered how Marie, our neighbor, continued to live there. Then, one day, she was gone.

We walked through the house with a friend who’s a contractor, looking for what could be salvaged. The foundation was bad. The wood was rotting. The roof was about to cave in. I stopped midway through the tour to take the kids outside, worried that the mold might settle in their little lungs.

A few weeks later the bulldozer came. The house was gone in thirty minutes, but it took the rest of the day to load the debris onto dump trucks and haul it across town to be buried in the ground. Beside us sat an empty lot.

We’d been talking for years with the housing development group in our neighborhood about rising home prices, about the dangers of gentrification. They’re good people. They had rehabbed dozens of homes for neighbors who’d rented all their lives. A grandmother who’d raised her kids in the projects, feeding them with money she earned cleaning other people’s houses, got a nice three-bedroom to call her own. Now she gets up early every Saturday morning to cut the grass, running an edger along the sidewalk to cut a crisp, clean line. She’s proud of what she has, and she works hard to keep it nice. Community is made by people like her.

But markets being what they are, there comes a point when too much development can change a neighborhood. This is what we’d been talking with the housing group about. As long as renters were becoming homeowners, their model had worked. But when we ran out of neighbors who could make that transition, grad students started qualifying as “low income” families, buying starter homes to write their thesis in. They didn’t bother getting to know their neighbors’ names because they were, for the most part, afraid of them. Every three years, on average, they moved on, often with a loud, late-night party to celebrate their departure. No one was sad to see them go.

All of this was part of our conversation with the developers about the lot next door. Eventually, they decided not to build another house. Maybe we convinced them. Or maybe property values just rose to a point that their model doesn’t work here anymore. At any rate, they sold us the lot to keep as a green space. We started to dream about what it might become.

Sarah, who doesn’t lack for vision, sketched a three-tiered garden with a prayer labyrinth at its heart—a place to pray and grow fresh vegetables. My brother, who runs a landscaping company, volunteered to do the grating. Dan ordered supplies and thought through what it would take to build the walls, to spread the dirt. We talked up the vision to the neighbors and to our friends, proclaiming the good news of a garden in the city. Still, we all felt like Ezekiel must have, looking over that valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37:1-14). All we could see when we looked out the window was a mud pit.

But we each had our jobs to do. Leah made plans for the kids to all go off with a friend for the day. Matt got all the tools out. I checked in with neighbors who I knew had the time and asked to make sure they were coming. “Work day tomorrow,” I said half a dozen times. “We’ll have coffee and donuts in the morning, lunch for anybody who makes it that long.”

This prep work done, and we are here, twenty of us scurrying about this mud pit finding our tasks. I work with my shovel on the ditch I’m assigned to, chatting with Alex about the rock climbing he likes to do on the weekends and the rabbits he raises in his back yard. A chain saw whines on the hill above us, then two other guys deliver a landscaping timber that fits our ditch just so. We smile, a little surprised that it worked on the first try. “Not bad for a couple of amateurs.”

By late morning the sun is up. I’m sweating, and I can feel my back begin to ache. I don’t do this kind of work often enough. I look at my watch. I look around. I have a conversation with Leah about lunch plans.

When the food arrives from a local sandwich shop, I call “break” because it’s after noon, because I need it. Sarah grumbles. “Break if you need to. We’re not done yet.” Each person is left to discern the mixed messages, to decide for themselves when to grab a bite. I’m sitting in the shade at the bottom of the hill, holding a sandwich in my hands when I look up, amazed.

A garden is taking shape, here in the place where a dilapidated house once stood, here in the mud pit that we’ve been trampling all morning. It is not finished yet, but I can see it now. Though there’s nothing we can do to make it happen, green shoots are going to rise out of this soil. A resurrection is happening. In lieu of grace, I whisper alleluia.

Above the desk where I write hangs a simple icon of Mary, the mother of Jesus, pregnant with the Maker of the Universe. Her hands are lifted in praise, and she is surrounded by flames, her robe flowing down to the grass beneath her. “Fire Temple,” it is titled, and I cannot look at it without thinking of the fire that fell at Pentecost, the Spirit’s power that we celebrate at the end of every Easter season.

Yet, when I look again at this image, I see that Mary’s robe forms a trunk, rooted firmly in the ground. She is engulfed in flames, but the tongues of fire surround her like the leaves of a tree, her arms its outstretched branches. She rises from the earth, the Christ child inside of her. She is singing an alleluia before Jesus is ever born. This act of welcome has laid the foundation for her whole life.

It is Advent now, and the plants that flourished through the summer in our new garden are mostly gone, except for the garlic that will over-winter in the ground and the leafy greens that grow year round in this part of North Carolina. I think of Mary because we are singing the Magnificat at morning prayer, because she is not only an icon on my wall but also an icon for our community—a picture of what, by grace, a hospitality house might become if we truly welcome every guest as if the guest were Christ.

“This being human is a guest house,” the poet Rumi says, and we have learned that it is true, for Mary as for us. We become the community that we’re called to be by welcoming every gift that comes along—the dilapidated house, the vision of a seer, the labor of neighbors, the pain in my lower back at the end of a long day behind a shovel. When your head is down and you’re doing your task, all of this can seem mundane—burdensome, even. Sometimes in community, you want to stop and shout, “Break.”

But then you sit down at the bottom of the hill and look up to behold a mystery—resurrection right in front of your eyes. You sing the song that came before you, a song that Hannah sang before Mary, “The Lord looks on me, a lowly servant; henceforth all ages will call me blessed.” And you know that you are blessed. You’re blessed because you’ve found life in a garden, planted in a place where you can establish roots of love. Of course, there’s work to be done—there is always, always something to be done. But you can take a break—you can rest, even—because you’ve been through enough seasons to know that there’s nothing you can do to make a garden grow. There’s nothing you can do to make community happen.

Everything is gift.

And you are engulfed in flames, burning like a bush—roots in the ground, your branches on fire. Yet somehow not consumed. Then someone notices. They take off their shoes, stand barefoot on your porch, knocking on the door with hope in their eyes. Their soul has been stretched thin by the fragmented life of a world that’s always on the go. They stumble in the darkness, longing for community. Like the magi, their eyes are drawn to light. “Tell me,” they say, “how I can find real life in community.”

You wish you had the answer. You wish you could be the guru who speaks the word that will transform their life. But you know you can’t. Because you know that you know nothing. You know that there are no how-to guides for this stuff. You know your life is a gift.

Like the garden you planted with neighbors and friends last May. Like the Christ child in Mary’s womb. Like the stranger who’s standing outside your door, her face encircled in flames.

who have baked the bread of faith

and allured us with the aroma,

we sing praise.

For the saints in our own lives

who, finding their way through the dark

became our light,

we give thanks.

For the unseen saints in this world

who hold it up with their prayers,

whose hope and labor save us

without our ever knowing,

we cry glory.

For the suffering saints

who are our only hope in this world,

who languish in prisons and slums,

reservations and townships,

who labor in fear,

who are trafficked and tortured,

who die of hunger even as we pray,

we ask blessing.

May we all be made holy

in wonder and gratitude

and steadfast loving kindness

toward all that lives.

Steve Garnaas-Holmes is pastor of St. Matthew’s UMC in Acton, MA. He writes a daily reflection called Unfolding Light. Steve and his wife have three sons in their twenties, the oldest of whom was just married in October 2012.   

Let the Lord bless his people with peace!

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I like this idea. I like to look at both sides of a question, and I like fairness and taking everyone’s interests into consideration. Christian spirituality as balance works great for me. I only wish it were really so.

Read the story of Martha and Mary again. Jesus does not call for balance between the two sisters. He says, “Mary has chosen the better part”—Mary, who left all the housework to her sister and just sat around taking in the words of Jesus! Unfair! Unbalanced!

Rather than working toward balance, Jesus called on his hearers to choose one thing and drop everything else; to take a wild-eyed plunge into the heart of all that is; to love God without limit, distraction, or restraint. “No one can serve two masters!” he said. “Don’t worry about what you will eat or drink!” “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength!”

Jesus called people to a single-minded devotion to God in spite of all social pressures and conventions. He had work for Martha (and Mary) to do, as he had for James and John. It just wasn’t the socially acceptable work of keeping house or running the family fishing business. It wasn’t the kind of work that would let you keep your religion in balance with your other interests.

We’re much better at things like balance and compromise than Jesus was. We’re inclined to be proud of this, but perhaps our satisfaction is misplaced. The God of Jesus is one with whom, it seems, nothing whatever can be put in the scales and balanced.

A significant gap frequently exists between what a speaker or writer says and what their intended audience hears. This natural disconnect between speaking and listening occurs because we are all unique. We communicate and write in ways that may be meaningful and clear to ourselves, but in order to be received our words must pass through the filter of our listener’s and reader’s experience, background, perspective, and situation in life. The ways that Megan and I communicated with each other changed when we understood that the potential interpretation of our words was just as important as what we wanted to say.

In our Christian culture we are generally clear about the messages we want to send out. We have no hesitation to “stand up” or “speak out” concerning our faith. However, we often seem to take little thought for how our “word from on high” will be received. Clearly communicating our beliefs and values means paying as much attention to what others hear as to what we say. Is there a gap between our message spoken and our message received? When Jesus characterized himself, he claimed to be “gentle and humble.” When our world hears our message, how do they describe us?

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND HOPE

When the letter to the Hebrews says, “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul,” the image is familiar—hope symbolized as an anchor while faith is represented as a cross, and charity as a heart—but it also seems right (Heb. 6:19, nrsv). As waves buffet our unsteady boat, we know we are attached to an anchor with chains that will not break, fathoms below and out of our range of sight. And the anchor’s durability, tested over time, has been vouched for by others who have been anchored in turbulent waters sometimes more menacing than those we face. From the image of the anchor we get the idea of the solidity, steadiness, constancy, and invincibility of hope.

It often happens, as John Carmody writes in How to Handle Trouble,” that suffering tests hope and only when we touch the bottom are we truly in touch with hope. C. F. D. Moule, in The Meaning of Hope tells us, “It is precisely de profundis (out of the depths of misery or dejection) that hope begins to be understood.” Hope does not disappoint because God is our hope and it is the nature of God to honor commitments, to lead us through the valley of darkness. Christian hope, quite simply, is based on the undeviating reliability of God.

Now that we know hope gives proof of its power when things get tough, Paul tells us to let our imaginations soar. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead” (1 Cor. 15:19-20). And now anything is possible! We are invited to think beyond this life, and certainly beyond this century. We are invited to think and to hope beyond fixed parameters, beyond the doubts scattered in our paths, beyond those who think accepting the status quo is the best course. We are invited to imagine a different world as we enter the next millennium—something we desperately need to do because things are so out of joint on the planet we inhabit.

[In the late 1990’s], The New York Times published highlights from the United Nations Human Development Report.” The style of the report in itself was interesting. Instead of faceless statistics like per capita gross domestic product or export/import figures, it dug into the facts about who has education, food, health care, clean water—and who does not. Here is a sample from the article titled “Kofi Annan’s Astonishing Facts!”:

Americans and Europeans spend $17 billion a year on pet food—$4 billion more than the estimated annual amount needed to provide basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world.

Europeans spend $11 billion a year on ice cream—$2billion more than the estimated cost of providing clean water and safe sewers for the world’s population.

Americans (both men and women) spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics—$2 billion more than it would cost to provide basic education for everyone in the world.

 Do you find these facts astonishing? Probably not. Maybe you realize all of these facts are too believable, which is why we take such consolation from scripture when it asks, commands, or even begs that we “seize the hope set before us” (Heb. 6:18, nrsv). Seize it, yes, and keep hope practical. Seize it, yes, but share it. Keep hope alive because “we have been born anew to a living hope” (I Pet. 1:3, rsv). This living hope is active, vibrant, ready to make a different tomorrow and a different next millennium as well. We must keep in mind that to be legitimate, hope must turn outward, touching and caring for others. We are to be mediators and ambassadors of hope. (Moule, The Meaning of Hope) Hope is meaningless if it is intended only for those within one nation, one government, one group.

So what can we do? We keep hope alive in a world where evil challenges our capacity to hope, where evil paralyzes even the strongest among us. We keep hope alive by refusing to believe that either the death of persons or the death of dreams is the last word. Because of the resurrection of Jesus we hold a different script in our hands. The power of death has been broken by Christ; the future is new and possible. Hope then becomes the impulse to change the world in light of God’s promises, even when those promises seem remote, veiled, or untenable. In fact, hope keeps faith from identifying the hiddenness of God as absence. When that error is avoided, hope is ready to take the next step-for ourselves and for others who think the world has forgotten them. Solidarity with people who deserve more than the share they are getting gives a flesh and blood context to William Lynch’s insight that “Hope is truly on the inside of us, but hope is an interior sense that there is help on the outside of U5.” We, the privileged, are the source of hope for the poor, the dispossessed, the underserved, the marginalized.

A collaborative effort like this honors the truth that God is the source of hope. This is the same God who is our anchor, our strength, and our rock, so our dreams are in good hands. But if God is the source of hope, it also is consoling to remember that the Holy Spirit is its sustaining power so that our hope does not dwindle but gathers in force (Moule, The Meaning of Hope).

Power, strength, stability, solidity, anchor, rock—these words may seem peculiar for describing hope, the middle sister [faith, hope, and love] who lives obscurely in the shadow of her more famous siblings. Who ever would have imagined that they would be used about hope?

Maybe someplace deep inside each of us, we all imagined this possibility. Because of that capacity to imagine, we continue to breathe new expectations into her. We reach beyond ourselves and give hope to people about to give up—to people who doubt they are attached to an anchor. We hold on tightly to the promises of God as we stand in a new millennium, remembering that there is plenty of distress in the world but that hope has come out of the shadows to show us the way to make even unimaginable dreams come true.

I invite you to consider worship gatherings as a laboratory for practicing the art of communication, particularly during the sermon. Preaching has been a central part of the Church’s mission and it has transformed lives. But, it has other benefits beyond leading us to important life changes. The practice of preaching, and listening to what is preached, is a profound opportunity to learn more about communication.

It is a powerful and humbling thing to listen attentively while someone else speaks without interruption. It can be hard to lay our opinions, our questions, and our voice aside, in order to give someone else’s words the opportunity to change us. As we embrace the discipline of listening week after week, we learn to open our hearts and minds, and we develop a greater capacity for respect, understanding, and mutual learning.

The act of preaching calls the speaker to carefully weigh the message, to consider the receivers, and to craft our communication in ways that engage clearly and invite further conversation. This work is not done by clergy alone. We are all preachers in some way. As parents, friends, and partners, we constantly have ideas, convictions and new discoveries to share. We can all learn to communicate better by studying good preachers and then doing the work of crafting our own communication more effectively.

The sermon is intended to be a prophetic moment in which God communicates with us and transforms us into Christlikeness. But, it is also a moment in which God seeks to recruit us as those who share the life, the grace, and the justice of Christ with others. As such, our ability to communicate the life and hope that we have found becomes even more important—as does our ability to talk less and listen more to those who long to see Christ in us.

John van de Laar is a Methodist minister in South Africa and the founder of Sacredise worship consulting, resourcing and publishing ministry (sacredise.com). He is a songwriter, musician, and author of Food for the Road—Life Lessons from the Lord’s Table. John has been married to Debbie for twenty-two years and they have two sons.

Films have taught us a similar lesson. In a film lecture I attended once, the instructor showed a 4-minute clip of a street scene from an old Orson Welles film and a similar clip from a more recent film. The difference between the two was striking. In the earlier film the camera recorded “real time”–people got out of their cars, walked down the street, waited for the light, crossed, spoke to other people, and entered a bank. In the more recent film a similar sequence of events was interrupted by half a dozen cuts. Transition time was eliminated. Driving home after that lecture I recognized my habitual impatience with traffic that was moving “too slowly.” I recognized how I had become acculturated to the expectation that transition time could be compressed, if not eliminated. I wanted to be one place and then another place.

The culture teaches us that “down time” is wasted. Time is money. Time is to be productive in. Car phones, cell phones, answering machines and e-mail enable us to “waste” less time. As the tempo of cultural life speeds up, the heartbeat of daily life races, and our own body rhythms respond with adrenalin, cramped muscles and heart attacks.

To take time daily for prayer, for a quiet walk that’s not to the next meeting, for daydreaming or for an unplanned conversation is a countercultural act. I believe that following Christ is also countercultural. I believe Jesus calls us to resist the particular excesses and delusions of whatever culture we live in and to measure them by the plumb line of the Gospel stories where he pauses so often to pray, to eat with friends, or, neglecting the pressing crowds, to give his whole attention to the one need among many that touched his heart.

This is God’s desire, God’s design and gift for us—that we may move not out of fear and anxiety, but out of the simple, quiet joy of knowing, truly knowing, that we are loved. And not just that we are loved, but that we are love. We are one with the One who is Love and, therefore, we are a source of that love to all that is around us. This reality is already available to us. It is the reality we can come to inhabit when we accept it as our true identity.

“With God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26, NIV). I can be love and you can be love. Not just a part of love, but complete love. Jesus was that love, the full expression of God here on earth, Divinity itself. Jesus calls us to be light as he is light.

Our infinite potential scares us. We resist the death of self and the birth of our untethered soul. As Marianne Williamson says, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” The truth that we have within all that it takes to move beyond our self-made-self into the soul that embraces its true nature as one-with-all and One-with-God can seem frightening and yet, we know it is death for the sake of greater life.

When we accept and embrace the truth of who we are, when we live and move and act and even breathe out of this truth, peace will begin to fill the soul. The constant wanting, yearning, pushing, driving, pursuing, or fighting to find a place in the universe begins to lessen its choking grip. What begins to emerge is a more grace-full way of being and a movement from seeking to understand and grasp a god who is outside of ourselves into the slow uncovering of the God who is one with us. The kingdom of God is truly available to us here on earth—now.

Do you hear a call in your soul to recognize your own place in the universe? How would your life be different if this very second, if in this “right now” of your life, you recognized that you and God and all are ONE? What would it feel like to know that the starting place is the simple acceptance of God’s utter oneness with your own soul?

Enjoyment is only complete when we have someone to share it with. Yet, sharing does not come naturally to us. From the moment we learn the concept of ownership and utter our first, vehement “mine!”, our parents try to teach us to share. Children’s play groups and television programs are filled with exhortations proclaiming, “Sharing is caring”. But, the message doesn’t seem to be getting through. Our world is built on a system that insists on constant, unhindered growth, no matter how unsustainable that may be. While we may deny it in our hearts, the habits and systems of the society in which we live seem to affirm Donald Trump’s shocking assertion that “You can’t be too greedy”.

This is why we need the disciplines of worship. Worship is the classroom in which a truly Christlike – truly human – life is learned. When it comes to sharing the resources and blessings of our world, the act of giving, which is an important part of our worship, is designed to confront and challenge us. When we realise that giving is less about the money than about our lives, we can embrace the transforming blessing it promises. Jesus taught that where our treasure is our hearts will be (Matthew 6:21), and so, by calling us to give our “treasure”, our worship seeks to capture our hearts so that we become sharers of all that we have and all that we are.

When we learn to share, whatever blessings we enjoy are multiplied many times over as we invite others to enjoy them with us. When we open our hands to give, we begin to appreciate the wealth (of all kinds) that we do have and we discover the dignity of being able to contribute in meaningful ways. When we realise that everyone has something to share, we move out of a charity mode of “giving to” and into a shared mode of “giving with”. Finally, giving is an investment in the Reign of God that enables us to live now the equality, mutual caring and security that God desires for the whole world.

John van de Laar is a Methodist minister in South Africa and the founder of Sacredise worship consulting, resourcing and publishing ministry (sacredise.com). He is a songwriter, musician, and author of Food for the Road—Life Lessons from the Lord’s Table. John has been married to Debbie for twenty-two years and they have two sons.

A MYSTERIOUS TRANSFORMATION

Some times I feel discouraged, and think my work’s in vain,
But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again… (1)

I saw such a transformation vividly portrayed in Band of Brothers, (2) the film dramatizing the trials of a parachute infantry company in the catastrophe we call World War II. As the brutal Battle of the Bulge drags on in the winter of 1944-45, a young medic, “Doc” Eugene Roe, nears the outer limit of his emotional endurance. The constant agony of the wounded in the midst of recurrent bombardment threatens to overwhelm him. He is losing heart, in spite of his repeated “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace” prayer. (3)

Carrying a victim to the makeshift hospital in the crypt of the village church, he meets a Belgian nurse with whom he finds solidarity. Yet she is unable to stop his continuing slow spiral into frozen numbness, which leaves him crouching in a semi-fetal position in a foxhole at the front.

Forcibly pulled into duty by his commanding officer, he is still dead of heart, operating mechanically. Eugene is in the midst of spiritual warfare, nothing less; for “the heart is the battlefield of the soul, the place of struggle and suffering.” (4)

Ordered back to the village “for a hot meal,” he finds the town ablaze in a hell of enemy bombardment, church destroyed, and all inside dead in the rubble. He spies the young nurse’s headscarf in the debris and sadly pockets it as a reminder of her kindness. But rather than plunging him deeper into deadness, he returns to the front alive again, leaping into care for the wounded with a renewed heart. When we last see him he is tearing up her headscarf to use as a bandage for a wounded soldier.

One can only guess what happened inside the medic’s heart, mind, and soul to give him this near-miraculous ”second wind” for his work; but we can be sure that it couldn’t have happened without some change of heart, for the literal meaning of “courage” is “heart.”

Did he somehow talk himself into a new attitude?  Pray for renewed strength? Did the memory of kindness from the nurse re-awaken his capacity for compassion? Did her example of resilience in the face of the endless succession of wounded soldiers call him back to his original valor? Or was the nurse’s death itself a final straw, provoking him to throw all caution to the wind, leaving nothing left but the desire to “be an instrument” of God’s peace, no matter what? Any or all of these factors may spark courage when it has faltered or failed. Whatever the explanation, “Doc” had found renewed heart for his work.

He didn’t concoct courage. He found it, or it found him; for the wellsprings of courage are built into our nature. Heart, for Scripture and early Christianity, is the convergent center of the self, the ground from which both intention and action arise. Heart cares and can move us toward action even in the face of challenge, overriding the power of the fight/flight mechanism that would paralyze us. Though inner voices may say “run and hide,” and the signs of the times may urge us to lose heart, the God-rooted power at the center of our nature may give us courage.

REMOVING THE HINDRANCES

What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.
Psalm 56:3  (KJV)

I’ve seen the mystery of heart at work in my own experience many times. While I can be impulsively bold, I am often inwardly cowed by venturing into new territory. I don’t step out of familiar and safe routines without a struggle to find courage.

A decade or so ago I was challenged to become a leader in a new community-wide interracial dialogue effort in our increasingly multi-ethnic suburban town. For me this was a giant step into a more public, less controllable space, where controversy and argument could easily arise more easily than in my carefully constructed educational workshops. I agreed readily, but in the days afterwards the prospect of leading a town-wide series of diversity discussions pushed all my “unknown territory” buttons. How was I to find the heart for what my mouth had gotten me into?

I certainly engaged in self-encouraging dialogues with my anxieties: “You’ve crossed other thresholds . . . you’ve been anxious before and then done a good job.” Those inner musings were bolstered by the confidence my colleagues had in my abilities. And when my inner dialogue became intentional prayer, the Spirit had greater freedom to whisper, nudge, and inspire, influencing the words and the feelings of the dialogue, working deep in the core of the heart.

But I suspect the deep heart was really driving the process all along, prodding me to face down my doubts. God had “given me a heart” for racial justice during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Here was another opportunity. Heart had spoken through my “yes” to the invitation to participate, but I still had to face nay-sayers in my soul. They were still chattering away in the background as I crossed the threshold of that high school meeting room to face the first diversity dialogue. But my wrestling in the “battlefield of the soul” was not so much to summon courage as to remove the hindrances to its functioning.

Just so, I can easily imagine that the young medic’s heart had led him into caring service, and that his loss of nerve was reversed by surrendering—or being released from—the hindrance of his growing fears and disappointments. My guess is that the “final straw” of the nurse’s death precipitated this ultimate, even reckless, letting-go that allowed the pulse-beat of his courage to surge forth once more.

A STEADFAST FOUNDATION

My heart, O God, is steadfast; my heart is steadfast.
Psalm 57:7  (NIV)

The heart may be a more steadfast foundation of our lives than we realize—part of the organic reality of our nature. The organic basis of courage is indicated by very physical descriptions we use, beginning with “heart” itself:  “You’ve got to have the heart to go on . . . the guts to try that . . . the stomach for it. . . .”

Perhaps any of us who feel our hearts might “fail from fear” over the “things which are coming on the earth” in our times (Luke 21:26 KJV)—catastrophic climate change, continuing war and carnage, subtle and overt injustice, rampant sin and impiety, threats to family solidarity, or whatever may trouble us—need to trust this power of heart, which is the power of God, with us.

Courage is hard-wired into us—a birthright survival necessity. So ordinary a companion we hardly notice it: everyday courage gets us up in the morning to face the challenges of the day, helps us to negotiate the ups and downs of relationships, companions us as we set out on the truly astonishing enterprise of driving a two-ton plus metal vehicle along a crowded expressway. Our brains, minds, and bodies were shaped in their long development through the eons by danger and catastrophes great and small. Unless we undergo some deep spiritual heart-failure, courage burns quietly within us, like the pilot light of a furnace ready to blaze forth when needed.

Usha Narayane did not anticipate facing down Akku Yadav, the violent gang lord of her family’s slum neighborhood outside of Nagpur, India. The pride of her family, she was studying for hotel management, passively resigned to the brutality and intimidating that were daily life in the slum. But when the gangster demanded protection money from a beloved neighbor, Usha complained to the police. Akku came after her with forty thugs, isolating her alone in her family home. Cornered, her latent courage blazed forth. She turned on the propane gas and threatened to blow up her family’s house and the thugs surrounding it.

This audacious move sparked the latent courage of the onlooking neighbors, who began throwing stones at the gangster, catalyzing a massive uprising against the gang, leaving Usha as the “galvanic new boss” of the slum community. She now organizes women to begin micro-businesses, promotes education, and inspires resident responsibility for maintaining the peace and improving conditions. Her “heart” for familiar neighbors she loved decided the battle in her soul between cowardice and holy audacity. (5)

So it is with any of us when the better angels of our nature, those emissaries of God’s grace, are allowed to stand forth from the hidden depths of our souls, where they ever watch over our lives ready to lend their aid in time of need.

1 American spiritual, “There is a Balm in Gilead.”
2 “Band of Brothers” produced by Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks, 2001, based on the book of the same name by Stephen Ambrose (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
3 Prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, Book of Common Prayer 1979.
4 From John Chryssavgis, “Orthodox Spirituality” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, Philip Sheldrake, editor, (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2005), 474.
5 See Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Knopf, 2009)

Reflection Question
What has been your experience of “finding heart,” unexpectedly, and at just the right time?

One way of thinking about what it is to inhabit the kingdom of heaven is to consider what it is to live fully in the present moment. If eternity is an ultimate experience of “nowness,” that means, I imagine, the complete repose of not carrying guilt for the past or anxiety for the future. It may be that to “practice resurrection” is to attend fully to the present moment, to practice putting past and future into God’s hands and consenting to be where we are when we are.

I think to do that would be to live in expectation of surprise.  In the old Sherlock Holmes movies, Basil Rathbone used to enter a room, look around alertly, spy some innocuous object, and cry, “Hello!  What’s this?” I’d like to enter every encounter that way, ready to find what I didn’t know to look for. I’d like life to include a series of pauses like a poem, rather than moving along like a fact-paced page-turner airport novel. I’d like to give myself permission to keep releasing what I’m not doing into God’s hands so that I can bring my whole heart to what I am doing. I’d like to be less like Martha, busy about many things, and more like Mary, who hears the call of the moment and lets a visit from Jesus reorganize her afternoon.

But, the consequences of our distrust are significant and destructive. Nations are driven to war because their lack of trust makes negotiation impossible. Communities are divided as distrust drives people into rival factions. Families break apart as our inability to trust destroys our intimacy and keeps us from giving ourselves wholly to one another. Without trust our society simply does not work. We desperately need a way to learn to trust once again.

It may sound strange to claim that prayer is a potential solution to this crisis. For many people prayer is part of the problem – it fails us all too often. But perhaps our mistake is to think of prayer as pleading with a deity that is outside of our world in the hopes that this deity will swoop in and save the day. Prayer is seen as a way to “use” God as a “force” that changes people and situations according to our agendas. If prayer worked like this, we would all live constantly at the whim of others, and God would be little more than a cosmic genie waiting to grant our every wish irrespective of the consequences.

But the New Testament speaks of prayer as something that we can do “without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). This means that prayer must be more than just a few words addressed to God from time to time. It must be a way of ordering our lives – every breath, motivation, attitude, and action. The words we speak in prayer are simply the “exercises” we do to learn to pray with our entire lives, and the essence of this “life-prayer” is to live from a place of trust. Our words addressed to God remind us that we are not ultimately in control of our lives, and that we need to entrust ourselves to Someone far bigger than we are. Our requests for transformation of people and places that are suffering teach us to trust our own God-given capacity for compassion. Our cries of grief at the injustice in our world teach us to trust God’s Reign of love and justice, and to trust our ability to live the values and purpose of God’s Reign in our own lives.

As we pray, we discover that God is not apart from us in some distant heaven, but rather that God is within us and among us – closer than breathing. As we pray we are reminded that we are connected to every person, every creature and every part of this world we share – we are all created and loved by God. As we pray we discover that our lives have meaning and that we are able to make a contribution to the healing and saving of the cosmos by the way we live each day.

The gift of prayer is not that it enables us to escape the world’s suffering, but that it drives us toward one another in order to heal and embrace each other. As we allow prayer to change us like this, we discover that we can trust the God who created us for love, we can trust one another as we learn to love, and we can trust ourselves to grow in love. My prayer is that we will refuse to settle for a world of distrust, but will choose to embrace the gift of prayer and find the courage to risk living from the trust it seeks to teach us.

From sacredise.com/blog/

John van de Laar is a Methodist minister in South Africa and the founder of Sacredise, a training and publishing ministry that explores the connections between worship, justice & transformation (sacredise.com). He holds a masters degree in theology and is an author, songwriter, and musician. John has been married to Debbie for twenty-five years and they have two sons.

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Communication technologies like cell phones, the answering machine, and e-mail, and Facebook are mixed blessings at best. Using them, we participate in a kind of collective self-delusion; we act as though we don’t have to limit ourselves to the time and space it is given us to inhabit; rather we leave our voices in one place while we take our bodies elsewhere, assuming somehow we can recoup the time we were away from the phone by playing back a recording.  Of course we can’t; the time it takes to play back the voicemail and have the conversations we didn’t have (because we were having other conversations) is borrowed from family time, writing time, sleep time, reading time.

Here’s my prayer for those of us who are entangled in technology: that the God who promises rest for the weary will keep us from the temptations of overload and that we may receive each moment as a gift from his hand, to discern what is called for in each new encounter, and gather our divided energies to be wholly present in the moments we are given.

It’s a strange, difficult lesson—even more difficult for our time, perhaps, than for earlier ages; but never easy or obvious, one of the most formidable teachings in the Christian spiritual tradition. Yet it comes from Saint Francis, that little guy in the garden, the one who preached to the birds and offered praise to God for sun and moon, fire and water. Like a lot of the people who get designated “saints,” he turns out to be harder to assimilate into everyday life than we might wish.

“Write what true joy is,” Francis said to Brother Leo one day, apropos of nothing. True joy, he said, would not consist in having all the theologians, church authorities, or kings enter the Franciscan order; or converting all the unbelievers; or doing a lot of miracles. Rather it would consist in coming back to the friary on a winter night, muddy and freezing cold; being repeatedly refused admission by the brother who answered the door; being called a simpleton and told to go away and not come back; and yet remaining patient and not getting upset. That would be true joy. (1)

As this story was retold in the Franciscan tradition that came to be called The Little Flowers, it grew more elaborate. The hypothetical porter’s insults became more copious (“rascals, thieves, ruffians”), and he knocked Francis and Leo down with a club. They in turn absorbed all this with patience, joy, and love, assuming that God was somehow behind the porter’s accusations and reflecting on Christ’s sufferings and enduring for love of him—and thus they found perfect joy. (2)

This is not a teaching that resonates well with us today. There is something about it that is almost abhorrent to our contemporary values of self-esteem, justice, and defense of the innocent. Taking joy in being insulted and hurt? Accepting someone else’s lies about oneself as if they were true? Being rejected and abused and willingly coming back for more? To us that may sound more like a sickness than a spiritual discipline.

REMAINING WHO CHRIST HAS CALLED US TO BE

But I don’t think that’s what Francis’s imaginary tale is about. We may need to put aside our initial impressions and reflexive revulsion in order to listen to the story carefully. What is the spirituality, the way of relating to God and other people, being portrayed here? In the story, the brother at the door is not denounced for being cruel or unjust, although his behavior is both. He remains a brother. Francis, on the other hand, though he begs and pleads for shelter from the cold, does not accept the doorkeeper’s false accusations. He does not try to make amends for wrongs he has not committed. He neither argues nor bargains with brother porter. He simply remains who Christ has called him to be, focusing his mind and heart not on the doorkeeper but on Christ. He trusts that God is in charge, and tries to discern God’s presence in the whole mess.

I don’t see this story as being about remaining in an abusive relationship as if that were somehow “the Lord’s will.” Rather, it teaches that spiritual joy does not come from happiness and achievement and success—“even the Gentiles” (Matthew 5:47) could manage that, after all—but instead arises from remaining intent on Christ through pain and difficulty and betrayal. I think this story embodies Jesus’ teaching about loving one’s enemies (Matthew 5:38-48). Jesus saw such love at the heart of what it means to be children of God, who sends sun and rain on both the evil and the good, the righteous and the unrighteous. Francis saw in that same love the source of true joy. Perhaps Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane also helped inspire this little meditation: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). (3) Francis did not imagine himself as enjoying the doorkeeper’s invective, anymore than Jesus wanted to be crucified. He expected that he would want, naturally enough, to get inside and be warm and dry and fed. Yet Francis aspired to yield, like Jesus, to the will of God that he perceived to be somehow present underneath this undeserved affliction.

THE PRESENCE OF GOD IN ALL REALITY

And that, I think, is where the joy comes from: not from wallowing in martyrdom or thinking that we deserve to suffer, but from remaining in steady and steadfast relationship with Christ and continuing to love those whose actions hurt us (which is not the same as excusing the actions). Persevering in love and trust toward the Triune God even when hurt comes from an unexpected quarter and there is no way out: there is true joy. Francis’s fable neither declares nor denies that “suffering is good for us.” It certainly is, and it certainly isn’t; but that’s not the point. Rather, the point is to acknowledge two things: the reality of painful experiences in life, and the presence of God in all reality. We cannot wish our way out of pain. It will come to us, and it will be real. At its strongest, it can seem to be the only reality, and that’s when we are likely to lose heart. But pain is never the only reality, never truly the dominant factor in reality. All reality originates in God, and therefore in everything that is real, God is present. Even Jesus’ outcry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34, quoting Psalm 22:1), assumed that God could be spoken to, that God was there to hear, even to hear an accusation of not being there. To detect, to assume, the presence of God in every real situation, no matter how hurtful or how severe: that is not to lose heart; that is true and perfect joy.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, in a recent article in this journal, put it like this: “We cannot and need not pretend to go joyfully into places of uncertainty or loss, though some, miraculously, have. But though it is exactly what we have feared or avoided, . . . that path through darkness may yet be a place of divine encounter.” (4) We do not pretend a joy we have not been given. Rather, we look, against all likelihood, for that divine encounter, and so prepare ourselves for a joy that we cannot possibly generate on our own.

But how do we do that? What spiritual practice can prepare us to encounter God, and so to encounter joy, even in experiences of pain?

THE PRACTICE OF “GAZING” ON CHRIST

The expanded version of Francis’s dialogue with Leo speaks of “reflecting that we must accept and bear the sufferings of the Blessed Christ patiently for love of Him.”(5) Such reflection is the central spiritual practice in this way of not losing heart. Ilia Delio speaks of this in terms of “gazing” on the crucified Christ, and she draws on the writings of Clare of Assisi (whom Francis inspired to found a parallel movement for women) to lay out a fourfold path of gazing on, considering, contemplating, and imitating Christ.(6) Gazing on the Crucified leads toward imitation: “We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become.”(7) This habitual inward attentiveness toward Christ, reflecting on his life and death, holding him before our awareness, can so form and shape us in the pattern of his love that we no longer react only with fear and anger to undeserved hostility and aggression. We may certainly feel afraid and outraged, but if we have accustomed ourselves to “gazing” on Christ in this way, we can get beyond those responses to something more creative and more profound. Rather than losing heart, we may be transformed into Christ’s image and become “vessels of God’s compassionate love for others.”(8) This love is the root of true joy: joy at discovering in ourselves something more than our wounded desire for fairness and respect, joy in genuine discipleship to Jesus, joy in having a forgiveness that we have received in order to share it with others.

The epistle to the Hebrews, in summoning its readers not to become discouraged over the long haul of the Christian life, also calls for this kind of contemplation:

Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart.” (Hebrews 12:1b-3)

Losing heart, becoming dispirited, was already a danger in the second Christian generation. On the surface, Christianity was unprepossessing, unimposing in a world of long-established and powerful intellectual and religious traditions. Considered more closely, its claim of eternal life in the name of a crucified prophet and its call to live a life modeled on his—catastrophic ending and all—seemed little short of ridiculous. No wonder the anonymous author of Hebrews needed to encourage readers to “lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees” (Hebrews 12:12, quoting Isaiah 35:3).

Is this starting to feel familiar? As Christianity loses its dominant place and can no longer unquestionably set the cultural tone in the Western world, we find ourselves more and more at home in the New Testament, where few Christians held positions of power and the contentions of Jesus and his spokespersons often went deeply against the cultural grain. To keep from losing heart, we too need the help that comes from the practice of “looking to Jesus,” his suffering, and his vindication.

ENDURING PAIN WITHOUT LOSING HEART

Francis of Assisi, who made the poor and crucified Christ the center of his life with such astonishing courage and directness, had his own reasons for losing heart. As a young man, he had to break free from his father’s wealth and influence (as he had to help Clare break free from her predetermined role as a noblewoman). Founding a radical renewal movement within the heavily institutionalized medieval church, he had to negotiate with bishops and popes. Even after guiding this movement to astonishing growth, he had to endure being excluded from its leadership and seeing it fall into the hands of others whose motivations and vision seem to have been far different from his own. (9) Francis’s little story about being shut out of the friary as too simple-minded to fit into so powerful an organization came alarmingly close to the truth.

From all the evidence, he found the means to take his own advice and to remain so centered on Jesus that he could endure all this without resentment. The joy of St. Francis in the beauty of God’s creation is well known. What is less well known, perhaps because it is more challenging and more disturbing, is his joy even in the midst of such attacks and heartaches. Not that they didn’t hurt, or that he never felt the emotions that anyone would feel in such a situation. But he had become so habituated to the Jesus way of life and to its constant, devoted focus on God that he could again and again avoid losing heart, recover his focus, and be restored to joy.

True and perfect joy means enduring even painful circumstances, failure, and rejection with patience and love, without losing heart. This has been the lesson of Christian spiritual teachers from the apostles onward. The ground of this joy-inducing love remains what it always has been: Jesus alone, to whom we must look with attentiveness, gladness, and hope.

Reflection Question
What would it mean to “gaze” on Christ in the midst of painful circumstances that you are now facing?

1 Raphael Brown, trans. and ed., The Little Flowers of St. Francis (New York: Doubleday, Image Books, 1958), 319–20; see also Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, trans. Regis J. Armstrong and Ignatius C. Brady, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 165–66.
2 Brown, Little Flowers, 58–60.
3 All Scripture references are to the New Revised Standard Version Bible.
4 Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, “Preparing for What Is,” Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. XXVII, No. 1 (November/December 2011/January 2012), 40–41.
5 Brown, Little Flowers, 60.
6 Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2004), 67–69. As Delio points out, this is comparable to the four phases of lectio divina: reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. Her source is Clare’s Second Letter to Agnes of Prague 20 (Armstrong and Brady, Francis and Clare, 197).
7 Delio, Franciscan Prayer, 68.
8 Delio, Franciscan Prayer, 68.
9 For accessible treatments of these and other incidents in the lives of Francis and Clare, see such works as Julien Green, God’s Fool: The Life and Times of Francis of Assisi, trans. Peter

If we are to love “what is”, it is the second kind of love that is needed since much of “what is” doesn’t suit us at all. It requires inner spaciousness — a capacity to be inclusive. In the final analysis it requires us to be whole. This love asks us to include all the horror, terror and awesome beauty of life — no exceptions. It asks us to allow for everything to belong to us in some way and for us to belong to it in some way. It asks us to be humble enough to have such an attitude. It asks us to be real so we can accept reality. In other words it asks us to be utterly human.

We know that the words humus, humility and human are connected. To be truly human is to be soil-like, a spacious ground the way the earth is, allowing life in all its variety. This is so difficult for us. Our inner lives are often not warm and fuzzy. Our outer lives are frequently full of challenges and devastating losses. The world around us aches with pain. When we can be clear that all of it belongs, and that we can only tolerate such clarity by way of compassion, then we are loving “what is”. Opening further and further into inclusiveness is the hallmark of compassionate love. It allows us to take action on behalf of the whole and not just on our own behalf.

Being human we will fail, of course, but being human we will also long to open our consciousness more and more so we can become humus — a ground of acceptance, a ground of love. This love will not be warm and fuzzy. It will be clear and whole making.

From “Musings” at  gunillanorris.com.

Gunilla Norris is an author, meditation teacher, spiritual director, and psychotherapist in private practice. Her books on the spiritual in the everyday include Being Home: Discovering the Spiritual in the Everyday, Inviting Silence: Universal Principles of Meditation, and Simple Ways: Towards the Sacred. Gunilla lives in Mystic, CT.

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

Many years ago, when I was writing my PhD dissertation—it was entitled “The Hymnic Language in Deutero-Isaiah—I dealt with this scripture in minute detail. Not surprisingly, I had it memorized. I could even quote it in Hebrew! During those months of dissertation writing, the words and message of Isaiah 43:1-3 somehow seeped into my soul and have stayed there since.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. For one thing, water has always attracted me. I swam so often when I was young that I used to dream that I could breathe under water. I have always loved swimming. Still do.

When you walk through the fires, you will not be burned. On the other hand, fire has always petrified me. I can hardly watch the stories on TV about what is currently taking place in Colorado.

And then to think that God is with me in both those circumstances: when I am enjoying the pleasures of life, including water, and when I am in frightening times and feel out of control. This scripture is my ultimate “comfort food.”

Years later, after the dissertation was finished and (almost) forgotten, I was going through a rough patch in my life. During that time, a good friend made me a beautiful rendering of that text in his calligraphy. Timing is everything, and his timing was perfect.

During a recent experience with chemotherapy, this scripture was my touchstone, my mantra, my comfort.

While putting this issue together, I asked myself what scripture would be best to include on the back cover. What best addresses the question “Why are you afraid?” Of course, what else could it be? “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”

Most of us know these things to be true. I know these things to be true, yet still I resist eating well and stretching regularly … until the muscular stiffness demands a proper response.

Likewise, our spirits can become stiff, impacted by our work, our emotions, our bodies, our relationships. The discipline of writing has taught me – and continues to remind me – of the impact of spiritual stiffness. When I deprioritze those necessary creative moments of listening and reflecting through my pen, when I neglect to stretch my spirit, inevitably I fall into an emotional funk paired with a spiritual rut. Seven days without writing is all it takes for my soul to feel rigid, weary and discouraged.

All writers – bloggers and novelists, preachers and composers – encounter writer’s block. Often I can’t find the suitable word for a sentence (praise God for the thesaurus app!) or the right opening paragraph for a sermon (rereading scripture, then pacing, usually helps). But those momentary blocks are not unsurmountable, as many good books on writing encourage.

What is more common to all of us, writers and non, is the spiritual block: the experience of spiritual stiffness, the soul’s standstill in the midst of life’s unfolding, that place where the air is stale except perhaps for a recurring haunting mirage. The reasons for finding ourselves in such a place are many, but we have in common that spiritual block and the wrestling through it. When we do not engage or contend with our spiritual blocks, stiffness sets in. At that point for me, writing becomes necessary to stretch my spirit, to pull against the paralysis, to feel the burn of easing those tight places.

How do you stretch your spirit against that stiffness? How do you work out the aches of spiritual tightness and immobility? I like to stretch my spirit with Beethoven on full blast or with a good book. I often loosen my spiritual muscles with pen and paper and a hot cup of caffeine to sort through my soul. I stretch by looking at life, sometimes artistically, sometimes quietly, sometimes in community, as honestly as I can muster. Stretching and working out the stiffness can cause brand new aches or satisfying relief, or a burst of inspired creativity, moving me through the spiritual block for more flexible living in body, mind and soul.

Rachel G. Hackenberg is a UCC pastor in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the author of Writing to God and Writing to God: Kids’ Edition (www.paracletepress.com). She blogs at http://faithandwater.blogspot.com. Read her article, “Finding the Courage to Pray” in the current issue of Weavings.

DEVELOP A PRAYERFUL, INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

Jesus’ agonizing encounters with fear and abandonment in the garden and on the cross give hope to the rest of us, for ultimately Abba did not abandon him. Peter learned the importance of a prayerful retreat in those days of waiting in the Upper Room before Pentecost. And each experience of imprisonment for Peter surely must have called him to a more prayerful union with the crucified and risen Jesus.

In our own time, we have the testimony of countless heroes of faith for whom a prayerful, intimate relationship with Abba, Jesus, and the Spirit carried them through raging storms. In their prison journals, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Etty Hillesom, Phil Berrigan, and John Dear speak convincingly of the power of prayer and love to overcome the power of fear. Gandhi courageously walked alone as a disarming presence of love into the incredible violence between Hindus and Muslims in the villages of India in 1946-47 because he was convinced that Jesus walked with him. Certainly the lives of Ita Ford, Maura Clark, Jean Donovan, and Dorothy Kazel—the four religious women assassinated in EI Salvador in 1980 because they dared to live in solidarity with the oppressed Salvadoran people—confirm the power of prayer and love to overcome fear and domination. Placing ourselves in the presence of Abba, Jesus, and the Spirit of love allows us to confidently embark each day on the journey from fear to love.

SEEK INSPIRATION FROM OTHER COURAGEOUS DISCIPLES

As Jews, Jesus and Peter were raised with the stories of courageous Jewish prophets, leaders, and simple women and men like Jochebed, the mother of Moses. So too, we draw inspiration from those mentors and models of courage as well as others of our time. If we place ourselves in the presence of such mentors and models, we will grow in the courage and love that cast out fear. Sister Helen Prejean (whose story is portrayed in the movie Dead Man Walking) learned that she could go into death row, develop a relationship with a convicted murderer, face all the recriminations that flowed from that relationship, and then accompany him at the moment of death. When she asked him if he wanted her to be present at his execution, he said yes. She went on to tell him, “At that last moment, Patrick, look into my eyes and I will be the face of Christ for you,” a response that has become a call to courageous and compassionate discipleship for others. Hearing Helen tell that story, reading it again in her book, and then watching it on her video, has inspired me to embrace other similarly risky ministries. Other stories of heroes of faith can nurture courage and love in us.

STAND WITH THE VICTIMS OF INJUSTICE

Jesus also was deeply moved by people hungry for food, justice, and vision (Matthew 14:14). From childhood, he knew the lot of a people exploited and repressed by the Roman empire. The suffering of the outcasts in his society—women, diseased and disabled persons, sinners and tax collectors, Samaritans and other “aliens”—touched him and he responded by courageously embracing their lives and lot. Peter shared this experience with Jesus before his death and continued to embody it in his own life after Pentecost.

In our own time, one of the most poignant expressions of this path to courageous discipleship was written by Jean Donovan to a friend just two weeks before she was assassinated in El Salvador in 1980:

“The Peace Corps left today and my heart sank low. The danger is extreme and they were right to leave ... Now I must assess my own position, because I am not up for suicide. Several times 1have decided to leave. I almost could except for the children, the poor bruised victims of adult lunacy. Who would care for them? Whose heart would be so hard as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and helplessness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.”

— Ana Carrigan, Salvador Witness: The Life and Calling of Jean Donovan (New York: Ballantine, 1984), p. 212.

While we may not have opportunities to live with suffering peoples in other countries, we can expand our personal world to include those nearby who are victims of discrimination and injustice. As we get to know such people, we find ourselves more willing to stand with them publicly and to challenge those whose words, actions, or policies are harming them. Personal relation­ ships foster a love that overcomes fear. As we grow in love for those who are victimized, we grow in courage. A spirit of timidity is overcome by the Spirit of power and love.

FIND A SUPPORT COMMUNITY

Jesus didn’t ask people to embrace his way of living on their own. To the rich young man who had kept all the commandments but needed to sell what he had and give it to the poor, Jesus offered this invitation: “Come, follow me.” In essence he said, Come walk and work with me and my band (of disciples and you will overcome your fear of economic insecurity. When Jesus sent his disciples out on their first missions, he sent them in pairs. After Pentecost, without personal bank accounts and under fire from all sides, Peter and the others found remarkable strength and security in communal living.

Because of their love for each other, Bob and Janet Aldridge and their ten children were able to embrace the economic insecurity that followed Bob’s resignation of his position designing the Trident missile system, Additionally, a small band of Christians equally concerned about the nuclear arms race and its impact on the poor helped sustain the Aldridges through years of financial uncertainty.

We may not be called to that level of heroic courage and faith, but we know from experience how important it is to have a soul brother or a soul sister, a family support group, or a small faith community to help us overcome our fears of embracing the compassionate and prophetic way of Jesus. Nancy Haas, a middle-aged single parent, had that kind of support when she decided to cut back to half-time employment so that she could attend seminary, Knowing that others are in it with us, perhaps even helping to support us financially, enables us to live more boldly and faithfully, On the way we discover how God provides us with the “manna” we need each day.

TEST YOUR LIMITS

When Jesus asked Peter and the other disciples to row to the other side of the lake a second time, this time without him, they found their limits tested again, As Matthew describes this scene, “The boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them…” (Matt. 14:24), They had to learn that they could survive such danger and that Jesus would always be with them. Then Jesus tested Peter even further and asked him to walk across the water to him. Impetuous Peter accepted the challenge. But “when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’” (Matt. 14:30-31).

Similarly, Jesus tests our limits and invites us to go out into the deep, far from the secure shores of large savings accounts, comfortable routines, familiar places and situations, There have been many times when I felt overwhelmed by work and family responsibilities. There have been times when I felt depressed, wanting to escape to the comfort of home or to the security of familiar tasks. I was afraid of what lay ahead. Every year we wonder where the money will come from to sustain our ministry. But in everyone of these situations, Jesus has been there beckoning me, beckoning us, beyond the security of shallow water to go with him into the deep.

Jesus is there for us, just as we were there for our young children when they were first learning to swim. “Come on, you can do it,” we said. “See, I’m right here. Just swim to me.” How much more can we count on Jesus being there for us. If it does get stormy, we can cry out for help in confidence. Jesus sleeps no more. No matter how long the storm, Jesus is always at the helm. He can calm our frightened, turbulent spirits so we can ride out the storm together. What confidence we can have going into each day, each challenge of life. Jesus will never let us drown. But we have to ask for the help we need, crying out as loudly and persistently as the situation warrants.

Jesus, you both challenge us and comfort us. Help us to see this day and each day as your beckoning us forth with you. With you at our side, with you at the helm, why should we ever be terrified? Increase our faith in your saving presence, that we may find the love and courage to journey through the deep waters of discipleship, even to Jerusalem. Help us to experience anew that God’s gift to us—as it was to you, to Peter and to Timothy—is not a spirit of timidity, but a Spirit of love and power.”

Excerpted from “Go Out Into the Deep,” by James McGinnis, Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. XIV, No. 2 (March/April 1999).

In Philip Huber’s article, “Faith’s Bitter Foe,” is in the current issue of Weavings (page 32), he reflects on Abraham’s struggle with fear in Genesis 15. He was inspired to write that piece out of his own struggle with fear.

Lately I have been addressing another struggle in my life—inertia. Once again, I find help in Abraham, this time in Genesis 12. This chapter concerns the first of seven visits between God and Abraham recorded in Genesis. Their relationship begins with an invitation to overcome inertia.

Go.  In Genesis 12:1, God invites Abraham on a journey. And, as in any journey, this invitation has a first step and a last step, a departure and a destination. The point of departure is clearly defined. “Leave your country, your people, your father’s household….” Each phrase is more intimate, adding punch to the command.  Abraham is to leave behind all that is familiar and comfortable and safe. He is to be uprooted.

The clarity of the point of departure is matched by the murkiness of the destination—“…to the land I will show you.” This is a destination that seems wildly undefined. Abraham is to leave all that is familiar to go…somewhere. In the words of Alexander Maclaren, “To part with solid acres and get nothing but hopes of inheritance looks like insanity.”

How can Abraham trade these solid acres for mere hopes? The answer is faith. “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as an inheritance, obeyed and went even though he did not know where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8). We are not given any details of the trip. We need only know that he obeyed. The obedience is as plainly spoken as the command. “So Abram left, as God had told him” (Gen. 12:4). Inertia is overcome.

And while the destination is unsettlingly misty, God’s promise is crystal clear—you go and I will bless. Some form of the Hebrew word “bless” (barach) is used five times in Genesis 12:2-3. Abraham leaves all that is familiar to pursue God’s favor. And this seems a fitting depiction of faith—letting go of what we know to grasp the favor of God. In letting go, we release our grip. Empty of other things, we can hold hard to the blessing of God.

God meets me in the moment I take a risk and step out into the unknown. God works through my initiative—sometimes in ways that I hoped, other times in ways I never would have imagined. In whatever way he works, I am blessed. And this blessing is worth grasping.

Philip Huber lives with his wife and four children in Syracuse, New York. He enjoys long walks in the woods, a strong cup of coffee, the smell of a wood fire in the air, and a good book in his hands. By day he is a retail manager and by night a writer. This is an abbreviated version of a fuller reflection that is posted on his blog at aploddingpilgrimage.blogspot.com

Photo Credit: istockphoto

In all these years of watching the crystal ball descend, of seeing the fluttering pieces of confetti, I never knew the confetti captured heartfelt prayers and dreams. But this year, to paraphrase my daughter, as the ball drops on December 31, wherever each one of us is, we will know that our family prayers are falling down on the crowd.

The act of writing down a prayer is a powerful one. This weekend my parish is unrolling an Intercessory Prayer Initiative. Parishioners will be encouraged to write down their prayer petitions on brightly colored pieces of paper. They will place their petitions in a basket and the congregation will pray for the intentions.

A few years ago, when I visited Iona Abbey in Scotland, I discovered written prayers of a plainer sort. In the corner of the ancient Abbey was an old, wooden box. Handwritten petitions were scribbled on every manner of scrap paper. The worldwide Iona Prayer network lifts up those petitions daily.

Paper prayers might sound unsubstantial, ephemeral. Yet somehow, whether they flutter down on a New Year’s Eve crowd or rest in a church basket or get tucked into an old box in Iona – those paper prayers carry us straight to the heart of God.

Anne-Marie Drew is an English professor at the United States Naval Academy. She writes about everything from Shakespeare to spaghetti sauce. Read her article, “Holding On Through Waves of Fear” in the current issue of Weavings. To order, call 1.800.972.0433 or go to weavings.org.

We need to learn, for the sake of our families, our planet and ourselves, to be people of appreciation. Only the practice of thanksgiving can move us beyond the “culture of the disposable” that we have developed. That is why, every week when we gather for worship, we repeat the practice of thanksgiving. There is a mysterious power in saying thank you that realigns our lives with what is truly important, and as we allow this shift to happen within us, we find that the joy we seek was there all along just waiting for us to notice.

John van de Laar is a Methodist minister in South Africa and the founder of Sacredise worship consulting, resourcing and publishing ministry (sacredise.com). He is a songwriter, musician, and author of Food for the Road—Life Lessons fromthe Lord’s Table. John has been married to Debbie for twenty-two years and they have two sons.

Photo Credit: istockphoto

While fear is generally disparaged—certain types of fear have achieved respectability among the general population. Phobias relating to running with scissors, playing in traffic, or jumping out of airplanes indicate good sense to most of us. For a Christian, one cannot do any better than to live in the fear of God. But other expressions of unease or dread seem to be patently “un-Christian.” Take, for example the garden- variety fear of death. Mention to your Christian circle of friends that you are none-too-keen on the idea of breathing your last and being deposited in the ground and you may be invited to listen to a sermon on heaven or a sing-along about the “Sweet By-and-By.”

I, for one, am none too eager for leaving this mundane world of drudgery and fear and find those who are overly enthusiastic at the thought of releasing their final breath a cause for concern. Dying troubles me. Although I am alarmed by the prospect of death in general, it is not out of a dread for judgment or pain or even exhaling that finishing breath (which, may I emphasize, I do not look forward to with happy anticipation). Rather, it is the fear of being forgotten that perplexes me: not merely passing into the shadows of memory, but of failing to leave behind anything that demands recalling.

I feel I am in good company with my dread. Wise Solomon expressed no fervent anticipation of being reduced to dust in the wind: “No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them” (Ecclesiastes 1:11, NIV. If our existence is so transient and being forgotten so certain, then what is the point to life at all? The unsettling suspicion that the sum of one’s life: all the pain endured, all the joy experienced, the loss suffered, and the success achieved—in the end amounts to nothing more than “a handful of dust” gives teeth to death’s terror. That prudent old man of Ecclesiastes wails for all of us: “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless” (Eccl. 1:2, NIV).

On my better days, I have tried to teach my children that it is ok to be scared, but it is what we do after we are afraid that really matters. How we respond to whatever terrifies us defines us to a far greater degree than what actually makes us feel frightened. This line of reasoning makes some sense when applied to the terror created by flies buzzing around one’s head or riding a bicycle or heading off to kindergarten in a room full of unfamiliar children; but does it hold any value in managing an all-grown-up fear like mine? How should I approach my fear?

I could deny which does admittedly seem appealing. I could very easily allow myself to be so caught up with the responsibilities of everyday living that I never stop long enough to name my fear. If forced to admit my gnawing disquiet, I could mask it by reciting pious-sounding platitudes that mean little but contribute to a veneer of superficial spirituality. By hiding my fear, however, I would erect a barrier to genuine intimacy with those for whom I deeply care while also barring myself from an invaluable opportunity to grow in faith.

I could try to overcome my fear by achieving significance that would prevent the memories I’ve left behind from fading too quickly. It seems unlikely that I will invent the next world-changing gadget, discover a miraculous cure, or be the first human being to reach Mars; so, my chances seem pretty slim. Beyond the improbability of my reaching such notoriety to ensure my lasting memory, selecting (or even considering) this option only reveals my own selfish attempts to alleviate insecurity.

With halting courage, I could also own my fear and use it constructively. This may be the most difficult of the three choices. Naming my fear requires self-evaluation and conscious effort to live this life knowing what the end will bring. I will become dust and will probably be soon forgotten by those who come after me, but that does not have to be the end. If I invest my life in other people through planting the good seeds of love and sacrifice, then my life will never truly be lost—even when I and all that I have known becomes compacted into a handful of dust.

About twenty miles from where I now live stand a pair of bur oak trees that I helped to plant. The bur oak is a marvelous tree with unusually large leaves. It sends down a deep taproot that enables it to survive in drought conditions. Its bark grows thick enough to thwart many insects and even gives it a fighting chance to survive a fire. It grows slowly but is strong. Barring any unforeseen events those trees should provide shade for at least a hundred years after I have been forgotten.

Planting good seeds into another’s life can leave a lasting impact even greater than that of a tree. Choosing to give my life away for others by building relationships with generosity and compassion is an act of planting good seeds into the lives of my family, friends, coworkers, and even casual acquaintances. These seeds can grow into lives transformed by self-sacrifice and kindness that reproduces from person to person and generation to generation. I think this may have been part of what Jesus had in mind when he said: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:24-25, NIV). I believe that this is something of the way God can redeem the fear that troubles me. What about your fear?

To be human is to be afraid. Fear ranks among the most basic and powerful of human motivators. It is easy to consider our fears as harmful deficiencies, more difficult to alter our perspective to become aware of the advantages fear might offer, and hardest of all to ask God to—not remove our fear—but to transform our ugly horror into something good and beautiful. If we can accept who we are and offer our entire being—flaws, fear, and all—to our Heavenly Father, we may be surprised with how our fears can be redeemed. In the hand of God, what is bad can be changed to good. After all, hasn’t God done amazing things with nothing more than a handful of dust before?

As a father has compassion on his children, so the lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:13-14, NIV).

1 T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, lines 27-30.

But, joy does not work on a deadline, and it can’t be found in an endless stream of new experiences and things. Joy takes time. Joy requires mindfulness. Joy is not earned or achieved and it is not a prize that can only be won by the fastest, the wealthiest or the strongest. The paradox of the quest for joy is that the harder we work to enjoy life, the less enjoyment we find. But, when we slow down and look around us; when we learn to recognise the beauty, truth and goodness that fills our lives; when we stop striving for joy, and just learn to appreciate what we have and where we are, joy inevitably sneaks up and wraps us in its embrace.

This is a lesson I have to learn over and over again. It’s all too easy to turn healthy goal-setting into an addictive practice that I believe will lead me to happiness if I can just find the right “key”. It’s all too common for my necessary planning routines to become a ritual that forces my heart and energy into some hoped-for future dream, which, I am convinced will give me joy, once it’s finally achieved. But inevitably, all this striving and struggling only moves me further away from the things and the people that really bring me joy. To come back to the joyful, abundant life that Jesus promised requires me to release the quest for more, for perfection, and, yes, for joy, and embrace the practices that open my soul to the joy that already waits within and around me.

John van de Laar is a Methodist minister in South Africa and the founder of Sacredise worship consulting, resourcing and publishing ministry (sacredise.com). He is a songwriter, musician, and author of Food for the Road—Life Lessons fromthe Lord’s Table. John has been married to Debbie for twenty-two years and they have two sons.

Photo Credit: istockphoto

 I didn’t realize it at the time, but this remark was inaccurate. In an awkward attempt to encourage my cousin, who was moving into the end of a dark tunnel created by cancer, I had in mind how much he loves to hunt and fish and how regularly he does both. His wife didn’t say anything then, but that errant and thoughtless remark must have festered in her mind and heart. In an e-mail today, months after, she recounted a record of years of church activity by their entire family.

Now my cousin can verify that I am not one to jump up and down and click my heels when somebody corrects me. To admit error is humbling. In this case, however, I am delighted. I can proclaim loud and clear, “I rejoice! I rejoice with unspeakable joy!” Why? Because Church—in all its manifold expressions—means the world to me.

During the 1960’s people sometimes gave the word “churchy” a negative nuance, “tithing mind, dill and cumin” and “neglecting the weightier matters of the Law” (Matt 23:23). But that is not the way my life has taught me to think about the Church. The Church is my extended family. It’s the “one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth.” It’s a community of fellow sufferers who are with me in moments of joy and moments of sorrow.

That last observation should let you know why I rejoice over this correction. As my dear cousin and I proceed step-by-step toward that vast unknown sea of love, we do not walk alone. And we know that, whatever the future brings, those closest to us will not walk alone either.

We are all surrounded by a great host of people who have cherished us in this “school of love.” They’ve been with us not only when we gathered with them but also when we discharged the purpose of the Church and its ministry—to increase among humankind the love of God and of neighbor.

E. Glenn Hinson is Professor Emeritus of Spirituality and Church History at Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond, Kentucky. His autobiography, A Miracle of Grace, will be published in the fall of 2012. Read his article, “Epektasis: An Antidote to Fear of Change,” in the current issue of Weavings. To order, call 1.800.972.0433 or go to weavings.org.

Or does he? Humans are untrusting and untrustworthy creatures, lacking in faith, enchained by the mundane, blindly obeying the laws of physics, of society, and of religion, even though they are blessed by choice, freedom, possibility, and hope. Humans frequently, even usually, let God down.

But Peter, grasping at last the fullness of Truth, rejecting finally his fear, breathing deeply as if for the first time, grips the boat’s gunwales and steps boldly onto water. As called.  As required. And stands, eyes wide, pulse smooth, in the impossibility of God’s grace.

This one moment, this one choice, this one decision, this eternal memory, lives in the hearts of believers forever, empowering all risk takers, rule-breakers and faith seekers for generations to come.  For the ones who speak for change, for the ones who stand for justice, for the ones who work for peace, for the ones who won’t give up – for all of them, for himself, for God – Peter walks on water.

It doesn’t last of course.  Behind him in the boat, the other disciples, the friends of Jesus, quake in fright, trembling in terror, shouting loudly that it isn’t possible, that Peter will drown, and refuse to join in and step foot out of the boat. And Peter, although he wants to believe and struggles to make the moment last by desperately clinging to his splintering faith, begins to doubt and starts to sink.

Jesus’ hand snaps forward, quickly reaching, firmly catching, and pulls Peter back from the abyss. Gasping and still wide-eyed, believing and doubting together, all at once, Peter, the repeatedly redeemed one, the frequent failure, standing for all humanity, looks not at the water, not at the boat, not at the stars, not anywhere else, but at the hand of God that holds his own.

And the question that returns ever again, that nags and persists always and forever, to each generation, to each individual, to me, is this: if God asked me to do the impossible, if God beckoned me to come to him, if God suggested that I embrace the absurd, if God required me to ignore all human wisdom, all experience, all history, all law—if God called me to walk on water—would I trust in his hand and give it a try?

*The original title is “God’s Hand.”
Reprinted from Soul Side: Articles of Faith, by Catherine Cavanagh (Gaithersburg, MD: Butternut Press, 2010) Used by permission of the author.

Photo Credit: jcrosemann/istockphoto

An experience I had in prayer fifteen years ago unearthed and solidified this fear. At a five-day silent retreat, I had an experience of the presence of God that has both scared and strengthened me spiritually ever since. I was praying for union with God when suddenly, as I felt my entire body relax, I was immediately aware of God’s presence. I felt utterly loved, protected, and safe. I understood in that instant that God had been with me. In a life review, I saw God’s loving presence at each stage of my life, even during the most difficult times, the times when I had felt most alone. In that moment, nothing else mattered, nothing else seemed of any importance but remaining in union with God.  I felt deeply loved and utterly certain of what life was about. I felt great compassion and oneness with all of humanity. I kept repeating to myself “if people only knew.”

Suddenly, as I began praying for my loved ones, I saw my life in the future. I had a husband, children and a lot of joy. Then, I experienced my worst fear, my husband and children died. I was startled out of my feelings of peace and instead felt such profound sadness. I did not want such a future. The rest of the retreat I was left feeling scared and confused. I wondered, how could such a beautiful experience of God’s love be mixed with such deep fear and anxiety? The effects of the experience have stayed with me ever since. The experience uncovered my unconscious fear that loving God hurts, loving God means loss and death.

I didn’t realize it then, but I have sought to understand death all my life as if by uncovering its mysteries and seeing its relationship to God, I would lessen its sting. I have been trying to reconcile my different images of God, particularly as they relate to suffering. I see that God has even used my fears and questions to draw me closer God’s own being.  The fear of death, loss, and the suffering that comes with it, is my personal desert. I began to understand the roots of my fear of death very recently. Actually, it was not until I began to write this article that I saw the connection between my life growing up in El Salvador and my fear of loss and the way this fear affects my prayer, dreams, and even my hopes for the future.

At first, I was very surprised to notice that the first memories that came to my mind while reflecting on my life growing up were those of death and violence, though it makes perfect sense. I grew up in the middle of a civil war. The sound of bombs and machine guns were not an uncommon occurrence. Although they did not happen all the time, they happened often enough that I knew even as a young child which wall in our house was thickest in case we needed to protect ourselves from any flying bullets.

I grew up in walking distance from Universidad Centroamericana (UCA, the Jesuit University in San Salvador. My mother received her psychology degree from that school.  She was taught by and had great respect for the Jesuits who would later be murdered there. I went to a wonderful school growing up where the sense of God was present in its reverence for silence, order, prayer, and care for others. It was a contemplative educational experience. The peace I felt there was disrupted one morning when, while being dropped off at school by my dad, we noticed that outside the main entrance my friend’s father had been shot in the head seconds after dropping off his daughters. While his body was still bleeding in the car, we were rushed inside the school.  Both his girls were ushered inside too, still crying, still shocked. I remember not much being said afterwards. Classes simply continued. 

Something interesting happens when you grow up in an environment like this. When you don’t know that life can be any other way, senseless death is normalized. Your internal defense mechanisms kick in. The society as a whole stops being shocked and continues living their “normal lives.” Stories like this were not uncommon. Death, poverty and suffering were everywhere, yet my family was somehow always spared.  The threat of death, though, was always looming in my unconscious.  While in the midst of this chaos, I enjoyed an otherwise loving and joy- filled upbringing.

It is no wonder that I have always been trying to understand, perhaps even tame my fear of death and loss. The theme is pretty consistent. Throughout my life I have volunteered with orphan children, the elderly, terminally ill patients and their families, and most recently, with bereaved families at my local parish. I feel drawn to chaplaincy work in the area of healing. It is almost laughable that I have never seen this recurring threat/thread in my own life. Spiritually I am asking: Where is God in suffering? Where is God in times of loss? What is God’s relationship to death?

These questions find a voice in my interiority. I have a recurrent dream of standing in front of the ocean, when suddenly I see the waves building strength and rising up. I know something big is coming; I brace myself. Sometimes, I just stand there watching, sensing the fear wash over me, knowing that change is coming. One time I was able to walk on water, knowing and trusting that there was something strong underneath me holding me up. Another time I was able to see, from the safety of an underground house, what was underneath the water. What I saw surprised me.  What I initially took to be a scary creature turned out to be a pair of loving eyes looking back at me. Most recently, I saw the waves rising up again, but this time I chose to go under the waves. I saw myself coming out safely as a transformed new being. I see this series of dreams as a call to the inner world, a call to contemplation, a call to find God even in those things I fear most. It is a call to trust that in the end, what I will find if I choose to face my life with trust and courage, is either God holding me up, God’s loving gaze, or my own transformation into a more powerful being.

The theme of death and suffering is asking something of me I do not yet fully understand. What I do know is that it is urging me to grow, inviting me to come to know God more deeply, and drawing me into the desert. The desert in this sense is serving for me as a source of  both temptation and grace. It is pushing me to confront the demons of fear, doubt, and hopelessness. It is inviting me to leave everything behind, not in a literal sense, but metaphorically as the way in which I can come to engage in a trusting relationship with God. Can I trust enough to give God my loved ones? Can I trust him enough to dive into life and into myself? Can I trust enough to give God myself completely and open up to transformation?

I listen to this call as I discern another series of recurrent dreams.  After helping at a funeral service, I dreamt of an ominous spirit trying to enter my body. My response to the feeling of fear and dread was to try to protect myself by uttering a prayer over and over. I woke up a couple of times feeling anxious. This fearful feeling loomed around me into the next day. In a more recent related dream, I saw my spiritual director Sr. Peg Dolan. She was an important influence in my life and my spiritual director for many years up until she passed away two years ago. In my dream I saw her, went to her, and with great urgency, I asked her my “spiritual question.” She looked at me and smiled. Her spirit entered my body, but this time there was no fear or resistance on my part. I was able to feel her thoughts and communicate with her. She was caring, reassuring towards me, and pleased by my earnest desire to know God.  She smiled at me lovingly and told me to rest. That time I felt peaceful.

It has taken me a long time to get an internal “click” on the meaning of this series of dreams. Finally, I remembered St. Ignatius’ rules of discernment of spirits and specifically, rule number seven in which he says that those things that come from God feel like water entering a soft sponge. The grace is absorbed gently and without resistance. On the contrary, the evil spirit causes disturbing thoughts like water hitting a rock, scattering in all directions. The ominous spirit in my dreams represents my fears of death, the dead, and loss. Its fruits are anxiety and dread.  My body rejects this spirit. In contrast, my director’s spirit represents love, goodness, and trust in God’s graciousness and is received in me like a healing balm. I am reminded of 1 John 4:18, “love casts out fear,” and I hear once again the invitation to let God’s love in.

Upon reflection, I begin to understand the temptations of the desert, the devils we find along the way, and the call to discern, through contemplation, guidance and prayer, the voice of God in our hearts. The desert is an invitation to listen to our own interiority and come to absorb in our hearts the God whose goodness uses all that we are, even our fears, to draw us closer to him.  And Jesus said, don’t be afraid.

What this experiment reveals, of course, is that we often don’t see what we’re not looking for. Our brains are trained to filter the information they receive through our senses. The brain automatically blocks out what it considers unnecessary, and accepts only what it considers important. While this is a very helpful skill for navigating the world, it does have some flaws. It means that, in many cases, we have to learn to see things that don’t fit into our usual framework. To the extent that we are willing to learn to see with new eyes, we remain humble, growing and welcoming people. To the extent that we insist on seeing things in the same way that we always have, we shut down our ability to connect with anything or anyone that we perceive as “different”.

One of the most important functions of worship is to teach us to learn to see in a completely new way. The choice to follow Christ is an admission that we don’t have it all together, that we don’t know it all, and that we do not see clearly. In fact, the moment we come to worship thinking that we have “arrived” we stop being people of faith, and our worship ceases to be authentic.

One of the most profound acts of worship, and one that completely transforms how we see God, ourselves, others and our world is the act of adoration. We do not praise God because God has a fragile ego that needs regular stroking. We praise God because we need to be constantly reminded of God’s presence, purpose and nature. As author Anne Lamott comically reminds us, “The difference between you and God is that God doesn’t think he’s you.” Adoration confronts us with our humanness and our limited perspectives by opening our hearts and minds to the glory, infinity and wisdom of the Divine.

When we come to the act of praise mindfully and humbly, we find ourselves rising above the small view of the world that we have adopted from our culture, gender, language, generation, race, or religion. We begin to recognise the presence and activity of God in surprising places, and we begin to see the world and its inhabitants from the Divine perspective. When we offer heartfelt praise, we receive a vision of God and of God’s grace and love that teaches us not just who God is, but who we are in relation to God – and this vision changes how we see others and ourselves. The gift of adoration is the gift of wonder, awe and beauty. It is impossible to express praise without seeing God’s artistry wherever we look, and without being overwhelmed by the mystery and majesty of life.

We all “see through a glass darkly” in so many ways. But, as we learn to be people of praise, we will learn to see a little more clearly until that day when our eyes are completely and gloriously opened.

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We all have these “rogue” elements within us that, although they may lie dormant, threaten to bring us – and those around us – great pain and suffering. I’m not talking about physical issues here, of course. I’m talking about the attitudes, thoughts, habits and values that subtly influence us toward destructive behaviour. In our celebrity-addicted culture we have grown very uncomfortable with facing our darkness. From every side we are encouraged to celebrate our light, to reach for our best and to ignore anything that seems negative or painful. It is a good and powerful thing to acknowledge the divine image that lies within us and to strive to be the best people we can be. But, unless we couple this quest for growth with an honest acknowledgement of what keeps us from wholeness, we will always be doomed to failure. We cannot be healed until we are willing to admit that we are sick, and do what is necessary to get better.

The paradox that we must all face about ourselves is that we are a combination of divine glory and evil shadows. We all hold within us good and bad, health and sickness, creativity and destruction. Each day we must choose which forces we will embrace, which will drive us and which will affect how we treat others, how we make our decisions and what direction our lives will take. But, if we refuse to recognise these forces within us, seeing only those we want to see, we will find ourselves driven by the worst in us, and powerless to change.

This is why the Church has traditionally included the practice of confession in its worship. As we focus on the beauty and holiness of God, we cannot help but become aware of all that is not beautiful and whole within us. As we acknowledge our sinfulness and brokenness, we need some way to process it, to face it and deal with it – and confession is exactly the surgery we need.

It takes courage to do the work of confession, opening ourselves to God’s searching Spirit and to the painful transformation that God’s Spirit brings – which is why we so often choose not to do it. I am always curious when those who facilitate worship gatherings choose to leave this practice out of their orders of worship
. When we neglect confession it becomes harder to be honest about our struggles and weaknesses, which simply drives them underground. Without confession we feel no need to apologise, and we inevitably project our shadows on to others, blaming and judging them for what we won’t face in ourselves. And, of course, any need we may have to change is the furthest thing from our minds.

As we seek to follow Christ we will find ourselves facing the call to confess again and again. My prayer is that we will embrace it, face the truth that God’s Spirit seeks to reveal to us about ourselves, and willingly submit to the surgery that will make us whole. It may be a painful process, but the healing it brings is most definitely worth it – for us, and for those with whom we journey through life.

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Dawning One,
you are in this moment,
not entombed in the past.

Forgiving One,
you are in the freedom of my soul,
not the stones of my surroundings,
not the grave of my deeds.

You whose glory it is to set us free,
deliver me
into the present moment.

You who give life
where there is none,
I live not by surviving
but by being raised
each moment,

with each breath
to have died,
with each breath
to be risen.

(Weavings “Do Not Lose Heart” Issue, page 47)

Did you try the writing exercise? What was the experience like for you? What do you think Jesus wrote in the sand?

Seeing the print magazine took me back to the days when I was putting this issue together. The first task is to look through the submissions folder to see what came in freelance for the particular topic. I remember commenting to a colleague that there were very few submissions for the previous issue on “All Who Have This Hope,” but a thick folder full of submissions for “Why Are You Afraid?” How interesting! We spent a few minutes wondering aloud why this difference. Perhaps it is a sign of the times.

Titus O’Bryant addresses the prevalence of fear in his article entitled “Fear in a Handful of Dust.” He says, “‘To be human is to be afraid. Fear ranks among the most basic and powerful of human motivators.” That rings true for me. We all “live in fear” of many things: the phone call in the middle of the night, the distracted driver in the lane next to us, the spontaneously called meeting at work, the appointment to hear the diagnosis.

One of the most poignant stories about fear in this issue is the one about a rescued dog in Flora Wuellner’s article. The only way the woman who rescued the dog could calm his fear and wash him properly was to get in the water with him. As a proud owner of a rescued cat, I was totally taken in by this beautiful story. After spending some quality time with my cat, I began to think about the message of the story. I began to wonder: who do I know—a work colleague, a friend, a family member, even an acquaintance—who is afraid and needs me to get in the water to help? Ask yourself this question. And maybe, just maybe, someone will do the same for you when it’s your turn to be afraid.

I find that the Lenten season functions in a similar way in my spiritual life. As the celebration of Easter becomes my destination, I seek quiet moments to prepare my heart and mind. But even though I desire silence and solitude, I am distracted by many things. The solitude of Lent is not “forced” in the same way as that of air travel, but the move of the liturgical calendar toward the cross invites me and reminds me to carve out space and time for reflection for which I do not always make room.

As I begin the Lenten journey, I remember Jesus himself taking time to retreat from the crowds to pray in dark, early morning hours. Such moments of silence were not a luxury, but were instead necessity—a vital practice of a spirit attuned to God. Lent calls me to follow Christ to the quiet places.

Gracious God, help us to find our way to the rest you offer. During this Lenten journey, draw us closer to you in silent spaces. Give us the strength to set apart times in our lives for solitude. And in those quiet moments, Lord, fill us with your Spirit so that we may be renewed. Amen. 

“If God is for us,” asks Paul, “who is against us?”(Rom. 8:31) (2) He probably intended it as a rhetorical question. But his premise is yet another form of the fundamental question. Is God for us? Or have we been abandoned by God, left alone and helpless in an uncaring universe? We have to answer that question before we can go on to the choice to give ourselves to God in self-abandonment. We may answer with a confident, “Yes, God is for us. We can trust God’s loving guidance.” Even then it can be a long struggle to get from a decision that God is trustworthy to actually trusting God.

The first step is from ought to want. It begins in an external suggestion (or command): “You really ought to trust God and trust yourself to God.” Whether by an experience of God’s love or conviction of the futility of trying to be good on our own, that is transformed, internalized: “I want to trust God to guide me.” That often comes as a single dramatic step, a conversion. The problem, of course, is that while we may want to trust God, we don’t. At least, I don’t. I hold back whole areas of my life from God’s control. I try hard to follow what I can see of God’s guidance in some areas. In others I still second-guess every hint of God’s will. And so there needs to be a second step, the slow movement from want to be. Gradually we learn to trust God more and more, until our will is one with God.

Throughout this process we need all the help we can get: encouragement from friends, spiritual guidance, immersion in scripture and other spiritual reading. But it is good to have some constant prod, something to keep us moving forward toward the goal of complete self-surrender. For me that spur has been the Covenant Prayer. The version I first learned was in the 1964 Methodist Book of Worship.

I am no longer my own, but thine.

Put me to what thou wilt, rant me with whom thou wilt;

put me to doing, put me to suffering;

let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low for thee;

let me be full, let me be empty;

let me have all things, let me have nothing;

I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

Thou art mine, and I am thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

Let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.(3)

This prayer has its origin in two mid-seventeenth-century books of piety by Puritan evangelists (and brothers) Richard and Joseph Alleine. John Wesley read these works and borrowed freely from them to create services of covenant renewal, beginning in 1755. Methodists continued such services, particularly as watch night services on New Year’s Eve or on New Year’s Day. In 1922, George B. Robson chaired a committee to create a modern service of covenant renewal for a British Methodist worship book. One of the features of the service was the Covenant Prayer, greatly shortened from earlier services and using phrases from both of the Alleines. Robson is credited with creating the prayer.

I first met the Covenant Prayer in seminary as part of a service of covenant renewal. A few years later, after using the service in my first parish, I began to include the prayer in my own daily devotions. This practice was reinforced when my bishop presented me with a copy of the prayer when I was ordained as an elder. It has been a regular (but not constant) part of my daily prayers ever since. I keep hoping I will grow into it. But I find that the deeper I go, the more deeply it invites me into abandonment to God.

I am no longer my own, but thine.

Right there, in the first line, is the essence of Christian humility: knowing whose I am, and therefore something of my place in the grand scheme of things. It announces my intention in response to the question of whether I will hold onto myself or surrender control to God. When I was starting in ministry, I had the opportunity to talk with Harry, a retired pastor whose ministry had begun in the early years of the century. He said that in those days, surrender to God was a regular topic in preaching and evangelistic services. But after World War I, that changed. It was un-American to talk about surrender any more. More recently, people who have been struggling for the right to control their own decisions find it difficult to turn that control over to God. No matter what our level of power or autonomy, we can find reasons to insist that we alone know what is best for ourselves. We are happy to accept suggestions from God, but reserve to ourselves the final decision.

But the Covenant Prayer keeps calling me away from this misplaced self-confidence. It helps me remember that I haven’t really done very well trying to call the shots in my life. A century ago, Hannah Smith wrote her own prayer of surrender:

Here, Lord, I abandon myself to thee. I have tried in every way I could think of to manage myself, and to make myself what I know I out to be, but have always failed. Now I give it up to thee. Do thou take entire possession of me. Work in me all the good pleasure of thy will. Mold and fashion me into such a vessel as seemeth good to thee. I leave myself in thy hands, and I believe thou wilt, according to thy promise, make me into a vessel unto thy own honor, ‘sanctified, and meet for the master’s use, and prepared unto every good work.’(4)

 Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt;

I have always had trouble with making long-range plans. Things always turn out differently from the way I envisioned them. I began to feel that I was wandering in the dark, without a clue where I was really headed. This feeling crystallized in a meditation many years ago. I imagined that I was in the dark, without a clue where I was headed. I had a small candle, but it barely lit the hand and arm holding it. I couldn’t even see the floor of the cave. So, as I’d been taught, I asked for the help I needed. I asked for light, so I could see where I was going. Instead, a hand reached into the small globe of light, offering guidance. I became angry. I didn’t want a guide through the dark. I wanted light—and a map, too, for that matter! I wanted to be able to make my own plans. And, for then at least, that is where the meditation ended.

The Covenant Prayer calls me to accept the guiding hand. Abandonment means not only that there is no promise of a map, but no hope for one. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, in his classic Abandonment to Divine Providence, seems to speak directly to my meditation.

 Imagine we are in a strange district at night and are crossing fields unmarked by any path, but we have a guide. He asks no advice nor tells us of his plans. So what can we do except trust him? It is no use trying to see where we are, look at maps, or question passers-by. That would not be tolerated by a guide who wants us to rely on him. He will get satisfaction from overcoming our fears and doubts, and will insist that we have complete trust in him. (5)

In another place, de Caussade compares making long range plans to trying to predict a shifting wind. All one can really do is pay careful attention to the wind moment by moment and change course accordingly. (6) So it is, he says, with the direction of the Holy Spirit.

put me to doing, put me to suffering;

First, this is suffering as in “suffer the little children to come…” It is allowing others to do something. We might paraphrase, “put me to doing, put me to being done to.” Sometimes I am called to action. But at other times, all I can do is wait for others to take action—or for events to catch up with me. Thomas Merton tells of a time when construction work was going on at his monastery. Young novices were assigned to hold signs warning of falling bricks. He writes, “At first one of them was standing at the precise spot where all the falling bricks would land on his head. He was saying the rosary in an attitude of perfect abandonment.”(7) Sometimes being-done-to suffering can lead to physical suffering as well. The ultimate example, of course, is Jesus. His active life ends with the prayer in Gethsemane, “Not my will but yours.” Immediately his passion, his time of being done to, begins. It ends only when he is raised by God from the grave (note the passive voice).

One recurring season of suffering for me has been waiting for news of a new pastoral appointment. Since I have never come close to guessing where I would be sent, I might as well simply pray the Covenant Prayer and pray for the Spirit to guide the decision. The appointive system can be excellent training in abandonment. And of course, when I have abandoned myself to the process, I have little room to second-guess the result. I can only accept that whatever happens is what God would have me doing, at least for the next little while. Once I give up thoughts of career advancement and concentrate only on growth in abandonment, even the most confounding situations can be received as God’s gift. All my appointments have had something to teach me both about being a pastor and about living in abandonment to divine providence. Sometimes it has taken a good bit of distance to gain the perspective to see what I’ve been taught.

let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low for thee;

Humble abandonment does not only mean being brought low. It means accepting whatever task God assigns us. That can even mean being exalted. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the two apart. Therese de Lisieux was made novice mistress of her convent at twenty-three, against her preference for obscurity. Somewhere she speaks of herself as a rubber ball belonging to the Child Jesus. When Jesus is paying special attention to her, he is playing with the ball, and she gets bounced off walls and generally bashed about. When life becomes calmer, it is because Jesus has set her aside for the time being, back in the toy box.

For me, the hardest times have been the times of transition from being employed to being laid aside. These become times when all thought I knew of God’s plan for me gets called into question. I face at least the possibility that I have misheard or misinterpreted God’s call. A few years ago, I was sure that my time as a pastor was over. For the next three years I concentrated on writing and editing. I am glad for all the work I was able to do. But during the second of those years, I was again a part-time pastor. Now I am serving full-time as pastor of a small church with a very large building. I can look back and see how many of my experiences have helped prepare me for this parish. I suspect the problem was not so much misunderstanding my call as thinking that anything was permanent. Abandonment means listening each moment for God’s new call.

let me be full, let me be empty;

let me have all things, let me have nothing;

I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

This section of the Covenant Prayer seems to deal mostly with stuff, with things. The prayer reminds me that it is all the same whether I have a lot of stuff or nothing at all. I understand all of that in theory. But I still think I desperately need all kinds of stuff. Surely I would be able to write much better if only I had the latest, most powerful computer. With dozens of books on spirituality and preaching being published every year, don’t I need at least some of them to keep current? On the other hand, computing power really makes much more difference to the kind of games I can play than to my word processing. And I’ve done a better job keeping up with newly purchased mysteries and fantasies than with spiritual reading. I have a long way to go in simplifying my life. At least the prayer holds an ideal of detachment in front of me. It keeps me aware of my greed.

Besides, it may be that I have attachments that are of more concern to God than my love of books and computing power. Pride, anger, self-importance, control—these are the things I really need to let go of. And they have been under constant attack for years. As de Caussade explains:

No matter what it is we attach ourselves to, God will step in and upset our plans so that, instead of peace, we shall find ourselves in the midst of confusion, trouble and folly. As soon as we say, “I must go this way, I must consult this person, I must act like this,” God at once says the opposite and withdraws his power from those means which we ourselves have chosen. So we discover the emptiness of all created things, are forced to turn to God and be content with him. (8)

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

thou art mine, and I am thine.

So be it

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

The Covenant Prayer ends in praise, summary, and one final request: “let it be ratified in heaven.” By itself, the prayer will only remind me of how far short of my ideal I fall. I can offer my will to God, but only God’s grace can transform my heart. This is good news. God’s part of the bargain is far harder than ours. All we really have to do is respond to God’s guidance and accept whatever comes as God’s good gift, intended for our growth in abandonment.

I continue to pray the Covenant Prayer because I still need it. I am growing slowly, by fits and starts, with many more fits than starts. The prayer is not a map. It gives me no clue about how God will guide me. But it does claim God’s promise to make me God’s own, to help me to grow “to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”(Eph.4:13) It holds up to me a picture of that maturity. It holds up to me a picture of that maturity. It keeps me aware of areas that need more attention. Above all, it reminds me to take one step at a time, offering myself to God’s service every day, opening myself to God’s guidance at every moment. It is a good companion on the spiritual journey.

1 Keith Miller, The Taste of New Wine (Waco: Word Books, 1965), 39.
2 All scripture references are to the New Revised Standard Version.
3 The Book of Worship for Church and Home (Nashville: The Methodist Publishing House, 1964), 387.
4 Hannah Whitall Smith, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), 23.
5 Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, trans. by John Beevers (Garden City: Image Books, 1975), 83.
6 Ibid. 61
7 Thomas Merton, A Thomas Merton Reader, edited by Thomas P. McDonnell (New York: Doubleday Image Books, 1974), 195
8 de Caussade, 74f

The moment we commit to moving beyond our own needs and desires, the instant we recognise that life can only be lived in connection with others, we face a startling and shocking truth. To build strong and deep relationships requires us to be willing to change, to bend with the needs and expectations of others, to lose our need to be “me” in the quest to find a healthy and life giving “us”.

This is why I remain committed to the organisation we know as the Church. Unfortunately, too many churches are simply congregations of individualists, seeking their own personal Jesus for their own personal fulfilment and salvation. At its best, though, Church is true community, a gathering of people who are committed to something bigger than themselves–the Reign of God. And when we step into the life of such a faith community, everything we do helps us learn to belong–together.

Gathering with people not of our own choosing flies in the face of the individualism of our time. It teaches us to lay aside our own preferences and desires for the sake of the community. Greeting one another, as we do at the start of our worship gatherings, calls us to celebrate our diversity and learn to love and respect those with whom we would not naturally choose to associate. As we are called to worship, we are invited to recognise that we each reflect something of God’s image, and that together we can encounter God more fully and effectively than we can alone (See Matthew 18:20). And then, as we invoke God’s presence, opening our awareness to the Spirit of God that moves within us and among us, we find that our love for God and our love for one another are not two loves but one.

When we take our connectedness seriously, when we open ourselves to belonging in a community, and when we allow our worship to teach us how, a whole new world opens up for us. We discover that we are more deeply connected with God, and more actively involved in God’s purposes. We discover that our relationships become more authentic, deep and accepting, and we learn the glorious skills of compassion, forgiveness and mutual self-giving. And finally, through these deepened connections with God and others, we discover ourselves–the good and the bad–more honestly, more completely and more able to live the life God has created us for.

In “Kiln-Fired Hope” (see the current issue of Weavings, pages 25-30), Heidi Grogan refers to an angel. She sent us this photo. Here is an excerpt from her story.

My raku angel stands atop my living room mantel. She stands not in the tradition of meek angels; she has no pastoral posture. She is Amazon-tall, hands extended high and wide above her head, her chin up in exultation. It is as if she embraces, receives the transforming, dangerously personal mercy by which my own spirit strains to be consumed.

Her raku-fired colours tell her story—she has been through the fire. Unlike other glazed clay, she is brilliant. Metallic shiny blues and iridescent purples blend like the sky after sunset, shimmering under a blush of gold left by the sun’s touch.

Raku pottery is pottery that has survived fire and smoke, emerging with unique patterns and unpredictable designs. My angel’s story, part of it at least, is this: she was fired to 1800°F (about 982°C) and while glowing hot, transferred to a metal can filled with combustible materials—newspapers, old leaves, even garbage. The heat she emitted caused them to catch fire, and afire in refuse, she remained sealed inside.

When the garbage and decaying leaves are gone and the fire is over, the pottery is placed in a can of water or left to cool naturally. This process develops and freezes the fire-created patterns. Potters say it is the unique way that air moisture, time of day, type of combustible material, kiln and glazes interact to affect the final outcome that makes raku so spectacular.

My angel is broken. While I was high on a stepladder watering my plants one day, my elbow bumped her and in slow motion, she tumbled between fronds of fern and dangling ivy, down to meet the hardwoods, wing to wood, fragile pieces scattered.

I came home after work the day after the accident to find my husband gluing her tiny fierce pieces together. It was the best gift he could give me, even better than the day he came home with her in her large white box. He looked up from his mending, and said the next step was to paint the fracture lines. I said , “No, I want to let her scars be.”

My angel stands back in her place between the fern and the ivy. Her white fracture line shows her story of how life broke her, and her arms extend in worship, brilliant blues and purples shining.

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned”  (Isa. 43:2, NIV)

The real work of elpisizing can take many forms, but my most significant experiences of elpisizing have occurred in intentional communities. One such community was a group at my undergraduate university, whose mission was maintaining and uplifting the spirit of the school through service and acknowledgement of significant events for the school and the world with candlelit walks through campus. We distributed scholarships and emergency funds to students in need, giving many students unexpected opportunities to continue their education, to purchase expensive books, to fly home for a family emergency. These actions showed acceptance of individuals and their unique needs while at the same time offering constancy, the message, as Hinson says, that “persons matter more…and what persons become assumes infinite importance” (p. 20). Our candlelight walks also had an elpisizing effect on the school. The walks were reminders of our vulnerability in a world where shootings take the lives of students, faculty and staff on college campuses and where natural disasters destroy lives and livelihoods. The walks also demonstrated expectancy that our campus community could and would stand together to support one another and to make the world a better place.

At the time, of course, I did not think this work as elpisizing. But that is precisely what we were doing. We were listening to the needs of a community, responding with and to vulnerability with acceptance, expectancy, and constancy. Hinson’s article challenges us to look for opportunities to be in true community for that is where the “business of elpisizing” takes place.

Photo Credit: franckreporter/istockphoto

You know, as I do, that prayer depends on attentiveness to God, on awareness, on awakening, on turning on and tuning in.  Its chief nemeses are busyness and distractedness.  We live in a culture that, as Thomas Merton observed, encourages activity for activity’s sake.  Already saturated with distractions of sound and sight, now we have the internet, at which most of us spend hours every day.  Your screen doesn’t let you focus on one thing.  It constantly thrusts in front of you a panoply of things.  Ability to focus diminishes.  Attention of “multi-taskers” drops precipitously.

If prayer is, as the saints have said through the centuries, above all, attentiveness, our reliance on the internet poses a major challenge not only for prayer but for a life informed by attention to God.  How will we meet such a challenge?  Our forebears through the centuries would commend fasting and retreating, just as you would to cope with other addictions, busyness, and distractedness in your life.  Schedule time outs from the internet.  Get away.  Spend time in solitude and silence.  That is urgent.

photo credit: coreay/istockphoto

In a conversation with a friend, I mentioned my frustration with my lack of a prayer life. He reminded me that while we often imagine prayer as a time of stillness or quiet, prayer does not need to be motionless or silent—and it shouldn’t be stressful! Instead of setting aside time as prayer time, my friend suggested I make one of my daily tasks an act of prayer. He suggested I might pray while I washed the dishes, folded laundry, or drove to work.  I liked the idea of prayer being woven into the fabric of my life.

After that conversation, I began to pray while knitting. The first project of my “prayer-knitting” was a blanket for a close friend’s new baby. With each new row, I lifted up in prayer my friend, her health, the health of the child, our friendship, God’s amazing creation, my worries, thoughts, and thanksgivings. Stitch by stitch I prayed.  I did not rush. Though my hands were busy, my mind slowed down, taking the time to pray and to listen for God.

Praying while knitting has taught me that prayer is a practice, not a skill that we are expected to demonstrate flawlessly each time we try.  As I knit, I drop stitches or forget to pray; I have to unravel mistakes and begin again. But with each new project and each new row I get to practice, and God patiently waits and listens. Stitch by stitch I am learning to pray.

Sustain me according to your promise, that I may live,

Every time I work myself into a self-indulgent state of gloom, God surprises me with a ray of hope.

Glimmers of hope were far from my mind the morning I wandered into a seminar on “The Global Energy Challenge” at an annual American Jewish Committee convention I was attending as an interfaith leader. Though I was weighed down by the stubborn forces resisting any significant “greening” of the world’s energy production, hope broke through nonetheless. A bright young Israeli-American entrepreneur presented a game-changing electric automobile plan that had already been adopted by Israel and was being considered by Denmark along with a half-dozen other countries.¹ The speaker’s ambitious goal: converting the infrastructure of whole countries to support high-powered electric autos and trucks within a decade. This would end each country’s dependence on foreign oil, reduce carbon emissions, and help retard global climate change. Here was a hopeful development I’d never heard of!

My states of gloom are shortsighted, based as they are on headlines that most often ignore creative innovators and pioneers, people shaping a better future. Print and electronic media highlight well the ignorance, folly, and sin of this world’s self-serving denial of manifest problems, but they seldom report the redeeming and reparative work that God is inspiring through brave and creative people. Worse, the self-indulgence of despair takes energy away from the real call of Jesus, which is to look keenly and expectantly for signs of hope—signs of the inrushing energies of God’s kingdom. Self-imposed despair can even block the never-end hope that flows from God, in whom hope has its origin.

Hope springs from the Divine itself.

“Hope springs eternal,” the common saying goes. ² Though Alexander Pope, the 18th century originator of the phrase, says that it “springs eternal in the human breast,” I’ve come to believe that hope springs recurrently in us because it springs ultimately from the heart of God. Faced with the ignorance and rebellion of humanity, God hopes for the best, too.

At least that’s the way the Bible tells the tale. The vibrant God of Torah and the Prophets responds passionately to the ways humans frustrate or further the divine desire for the well-being of humanity, earth, and all the creatures. God’s hopes and desires are dashed again and again in the failure of the primal parents in Eden, the arrogance of the tower of Babel, the repeated infidelity of Israel, and the quarrelsome divisions of the early church. We’re even told that on one infamous occasion God gave up hope, “sorry that he had made man” (Gen, 6:6, ESV), and decided to have done with the whole planetary enterprise. But then God’s eye fell on Noah and his family; hope sprang again in The Eternal breast, and humanity’s future was secured once more.

These stories are written in this way “for our learning” (Rom. 15:4, KJV). Whatever the ultimate truth of God’s own inner life, the anthropomorphic picture of God’s feelings in scripture is set forth as a model for the movements of our own hearts. At the very heart of Reality there is an ever-springing energy that faces down discouragement, an energy that translates into human terms as “hope.” The God of always-springing hope has our backs when we are tempted toward hopelessness, and is both the ground and goal of our deepest hopes.

Hope: An Ingredient in Survival

Is this why the wellsprings of hope in us can sometimes be renewed by something seemingly small? I’ve seen a man’s wavering hope in God’s goodness restored by the light of a spectacular sunrise falling on a snow-capped mountain peak. I knew a woman whose hopes for the resolution of a difficult situation were renewed by an unexpected and uncannily timed rainbow. A parishioner once told me that my unexpected pat on his back one Christmas Eve turned him away from despair toward hope, most especially because he knew I was ignorant of his desperate feelings.

What invites hope to spring forth is some imagined good in the future, however vague. Powerful, symbol-laden images like the light-drenched mountain peak and the rainbow touch deep memories of joy and goodness; a hand on the shoulder of a discouraged person evokes memories of love and support. The remembrance of past good leaps into an imagined future promising enough to take that next step, out of gloom, into positive action.

Surely such a process, so necessary for our survival, is hardwired in us, rooted in the imago Dei, the imprint of God’s own character at the roots of our nature. When we give up hope, our spirits begin to turn toward half-life and, ultimately, death.

Our Hopes—or God’s?

Our “imagined futures,” however, can easily become a hindrance to hope. Limited by self-regarding preferences and prejudices, our hopes can become the fodder for new disappointment if we are too attached to them. God has a wider vision of possibilities than we do, and we are wise to place more hope in the providential activity of God than we do in our own limited expectations.

Take the story of Jonah — a telling example of how our short-term, ego-bound hopes and God’s own long-range, extravagant hopes sometimes clash. Called to deliver God’s word of judgment and promise to one of Israel’s enemies, Jonah’s heart-felt hopes are for Nineveh’s destruction. The city’s rulers had forged terrifying new battle tactics, forced evictions, and culture-destroying policies as part of their imperial strategy. Jonah flees to the ends of the earth, as we discover, to forestall any possibility that the Ninevites will repent. “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (Jonah 3). In spite of the prophet’s reluctance, the sinners in this biblical parable repent with alacrity and intensity.

Jonah is so distressed about the dashing of his hopes for vengeance that he declares himself ready to die rather than share God’s own hope that even the worst sinners might turn and be saved. As the story closes, Jonah sits stubbornly outside the gates of repentant Nineveh, ready to die rather than share God’s love for children gone tragically astray.

Jonah’s stance is what Catholic tradition calls a “sin against hope.” This traditional Christian concept struck me as a wise safeguard for the soul when a friend, who had been raised Roman Catholic, told me of his temptation to despair over some situation. “Then I remembered that to fall into despair would be a sin against the virtue of hope.”

Seeing despair as a sin — as a ‘thou shalt not’ — provides guardrails for the heart. So guarded, we can be schooled by our disappointments toward more realistic hopes. And we can be taught by the gospel to hope for what God hopes for — our gradual growth, whatever the circumstances, into the faith and love, compassion and justice, hopefulness and patience that can make us God’s partners in the world’s ongoing creation and redemption. We can develop a practiced attentiveness to the ways God opens up new possibilities from unexpected, or previously unknown, sources.

“How will something new come into my life?” the Episcopal priest and writer Barbara Crafton recently wrote, lamenting her own discouragement at the cruelty stalking so much of the world today. “All stories, from folk tales to Bible tales (and so many Bible tales are both) are stories of new things coming to be.”³ Hope feeds on the possibility of something new emerging that will change outcomes for the better, like my discovery of a savvy entrepreneur pioneering an electric car revolution.

“Fear not, little flock,” Jesus told his discouraged followers one day when their misplaced hopes must have been dashed to the ground. “It is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32, KJV). So, day by day, the challenge is whether I will take Jesus at his word or not.

I’m not suggesting we suppress every surge of discouragement or ignore a brooding layer of despair. The issue is how we respond to the feelings of this moment in our lives.  I can hold tightly to the utopian daydreams of my limited hopes and the gloomy nightmares of my deepest fears, or I can practice a “holy agnosticism” of letting God weave God’s own possible future out of the materials humanity offers each day, by our actions, for God’s use.

So, while I make an intentional practice of staying informed about the challenges facing my family, community, and world, I can also try to refrain from future-casting, especially about the dire possibilities this unfolding century seems to portend. The psalmist tells me not to fret myself because of the ungodly, (see Ps. 37:1), and Jesus bids me not to worry about tomorrow but to pray with persistence for good to come. (See Luke 18:1-8; Matt. 6:34) It’s my job to believe I will see the “goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Ps. 27:13) and to be on the lookout for the signs of hope that arise out of God’s continual work in the world. Some days, quite frankly, it’s a struggle, but whatever the challenge, I can pray for the energies of the kingdom to come with their world-redeeming power.

To do otherwise would be a sin against hope.

¹ ‘Better Place’ founder Shai Agassi was named one of Time magazine’s 100 people who most affect the world in 2000. See the article in Time here.

² Epistle I, Section 3 in Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man  (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994). p. 48. Originally published in England in 1734, one of most influential essays of the Enlightenment.

³ Barbara Crafton, “Why Is All This Happening” in The Daily Emo from Geranium Farm.org, July 30, 2011.

While the sparkle of December filled my mind with delight, the stark landscape around me today—the low clouds, empty trees, and fog clinging to the river—offer no distraction from the concerns and worries I carry.

The winds force me indoors. I am quieted. I must listen.

And in the silence, I hear my doubts and fears clearly, echoing loudly on the bare canyon walls. But just as panic threatens to take hold, I feel warmth, a gentle nudge. Another path is illuminated. I need not hurry to disguise or drown out my cares. But neither am I forced to bend beneath their weight. Instead, surrender.

I let the full force of life’s burdens wash over me without resisting, simply feeling. “Cast your cares upon the Lord, for God care for you.” Though I encounter a heavy load at times on my path, I need not stoop to lift it up. God calls me to follow, but promises that the yoke is easy and the burden is light. For Another shoulders the burden.

Let the new year come. I’ll not clutter it with resolutions and noise.  I resolve only to rest in the One who cares for me and to invite others into that Holy rest as well.

As I read down the list, I remembered why I had created it. After I finished chemotherapy and went into remission, I was determined to hold onto whatever good would come from the experience. Making a list of all the things for which I was grateful was a good start. A friend who had gone through chemotherapy a few years earlier told me that part of her endurance strategy was to write down, at the end of each day, at least five things for which she was grateful. I love that idea!

So now, reading the list I created four years earlier, I can add good health to that list. I am grateful every day for that!!!! I’m also grateful for my colleagues at the Weavings journal—Nelson, Gina, Robin, and Anna—and for our fine writer, artists, and our loyal, supportive readers.

We asked associate editor, Safiyah Fosua, DMin,  about the inception of the project. Here’s what she told us:

“The Africana Worship Book series began with an innocent question posed to a group of African-American church leaders that I had convened for discussion about worship: “Does the black (UMC) church have the kinds of resources needed for vital worship in its own context?”  There were pastors and professors, directors from the General Board of Discipleship and United Methodist Publishing House, middle-aged adults, young people and not-so-young people gathered around a common table for a meal. They answered, almost in unison, with a resounding “No!”

Valerie Bridgeman, our facilitator and one of the editors of the series, began to pass out paper and pens and challenged each participant to “go, then, and write an example of what you need…” The results that evening were profound. Their litanies and calls to worship immediately transformed us from a “church meeting” into a worshipping community. That night, assignments were given to the group to write appropriate resources for the next 52 weeks of the Revised Common Lectionary. The resources we received were profound, provocative, and worship-inspiring  begging to be shared with the Church – first online, then later in print as the Africana Worship Book series that includes all three years of the lectionary.

We are participants in an historic faith with historic liturgy that nurtures us and grounds us. But, we are also people of a right-now faith, needing to give voice to the realities, challenges and the celebrations of 21st century faith. I like to think of the Africana series as an ancient-future call to the Church, reminding her to keep one ear to the ground.”

Safiyah Fosua, DMin, is the Director of Preaching Ministries at General Board of Discipleship in Nashville, Tennessee, and a clergy member of the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Author of several books, Dr. Fosua is a poet, a preacher, and a devotional writer who writes weekly preaching and liturgical resources for the GBOD Worship website.

Epiphany—this is the season of growing light. The days lengthen, slowly and often imperceptibly. In step with nature, the church marks this as the season of the manifestation of Christ’s light in the world. As we absorb and reflect that light, we manifest and nurture life lived in faithfulness and fullness. But how do we do this? How do we embrace epiphany and become light bearers each day? One of the ways I’ve found in my own life is to acknowledge, honor, and cultivate my experiences of deep desire and holy satisfaction. Doing so, however, is usually easier said than done. I must continually look for and open myself to the subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of the Holy. I must “come and see,” as Jesus says to John’s disciples (John 1:39) where the Holy lives in my midst. ¹

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?: DESIRE AND SATISFACTION

When Jesus encounters John’s disciples, he asks, “What are you looking for?” (John 1:38). If Jesus asked me that question, I’d probably stammer an inarticulate but honest, “I don’t know.” Although that response may be symptomatic of midlife crisis, for me it is also a sign of deep desire—a desire to reach beyond who and what I am to what is yet to be. At the same time, my “I don’t know” challenges me to acknowledge and embrace what brings about holy, or true, satisfaction in my life now—those people, places, and things that sustain, delight, and encourage me but which I often take for granted.

In many ways, Jesus’ invitation to John’s disciples to “come and see” is an invitation into desire and satisfaction—those manifestations of the reign of God that draw us more deeply into life and into relationship with the Holy. Jesus invites us all into the realm of God—into both its being and its becoming. To “come and see” challenges us to be fully present now even as we are fully open to God’s future.

Although the Bible does not recount this, I suspect the question “What are you looking for?” was also on the lips of Herod when he met with the Magi, who had left their homes to seek the one whose star they had seen in the east. They seek “the child who has been born king of the Jews,” for they have, they tell Herod, “observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage” (Matt. 2:2).

But manifestations of the Holy—as was true for the Magi as they followed the star—can involve long and uncertain journeys. We find ourselves leaving behind what is safe and familiar and seeking who-knows-what. Our elation at seeing the true star and our excitement as the journey begins often wane as the starlight grows dim in the stark light of day and the hardships of travel. And even when we encounter an undeniable manifestation of the Holy, as the Magi did when they found the Christ child in the manger, our journey does not end.

This journey of life and light is seldom clear—at least that’s often the case for me. Most of the time, my path is circuitous, and the movement of the Spirit is subtle and difficult to discern. Occasionally I experience epiphanies, or moments of truth, that come with startling clarity, only to be followed by years of discovering and working through their implications as well as gathering up the courage to act faithfully on them. I’m right in the middle of that courage-gathering now as I uneasily move from certainty into uncertainty in my professional life, trying to trust Jesus’ invitation to “come and see.” Let me give you a little background to put my current dilemma into context.

Many years ago, a friend asked what I most wanted to do in life, and immediately I blurted out, “To create!” My response startled me with its clarity and truth. I didn’t even know that’s what I wanted. What that “to create” meant I didn’t exactly know, and today I’m still trying to live into and out of that truth—just as the Magi must have done when they returned home after finding the Christ child. When I mentioned to my friend, in that same conversation, that I wanted to write but doubted my ability to do it, she said, “Sometimes it’s harder to do what we don’t know we can do.” Another truth—this one harder to accept than the first. If I haven’t figured out anything else in life, I have learned that manifestations of the Holy aren’t always warm, fuzzy, or welcome. Frequently they cut me to the core, simultaneously revealing my deepest desires and fears, my greatest strengths and weaknesses. Truth, I’ve found, while offering profound clarity, direction, and affirmation, can also be an extremely disturbing life companion.

More recently the life truths that emerged in that conversation long ago were joined by yet another more challenging and unsettling truth. One winter day as I walked by a bare yet gracious old cottonwood, a voice deep within said, “Sometimes you have to lose everything in order to do what you want to do.” Again, I didn’t know—and wasn’t sure I wanted to know—what that truth entailed.

The power of these epiphanies has been growing lately, pushing me to let go of the security of my work as an editor in order to complete a dramatic musical. It is a project I’ve been working on for nearly five years around the edges of my editorial and other writing commitments. Even now as I write about this, I feel vulnerable. Although I feel compelled to follow my deep desire to complete this play and the music to go with it, I can’t help but feel I am crazy to do so. Despite my love of theater, I have no formal theater education. Despite my love of music, my preparation in music is woefully inadequate. I was forty before I began to study piano, and even older before I studied theory and composition. And yet, it’s as if I’m being asked to “come and see” where God might be in this, to trust that in my weakness, somehow power may be made perfect (see 2 Cor. 12:9). I’m also being asked to discern between the unholy and holy manifesta­ tions of desire and satisfaction, and to turn away from what blocks me from the Holy.

ROOTED IN FEAR: UNHOLY MANIFESTATIONS OF DESIRE AND SATISFACTION

Unholy, or negative, manifestations of desire thrive in our culture. Advertising promotes blatant materialism, greed, and attitudes of I-deserve-it and whatever-I­want-I-get. It’s easy for me to point out these destructive forms of desire. It’s much harder for me to recognize and acknowledge the negative manifestations of desire within me—the many ways in which I am self-centered rather than Spirit-centered. Particularly difficult to admit are the ways I let my fears squelch the call to live faithfully and to use my gifts for the good of the larger community of faith and world. I claim, for example, that I must contribute to the family finances, even though I know, at least at this time, that my income is not crucial to our survival. I assert that I don’t want to burden my husband, but in reality I fear being financially dependent. I maintain that one of the purposes and gifts of marriage is to help each other become most deeply who each is called to be, but I struggle to accept the love manifest in my husband’s desire for me to fully develop and use my gifts. Perhaps more destructively, I choose to stay with work I can do because I doubt my ability to do what I long to do and perhaps even am called to do. This reveals a lack of trust not only in myself and in my husband but also, more crucially, in my God. As I dress my distrust, my unholy desire for control and predictability, in the clothes of responsibility and concern for family, I shut out joy and possibility, shoving them into the dark recesses of my life closet. In doing so, am I also shutting out God?

At the root of this negative, destructive desire for control and predictability is fear—in particular, a fear of nothingness or worthlessness. I shore up my own worth by my list of clients, my long hours, and my paychecks. If I control my work I am something, I am someone. If I control nothing—and true creativity is never controlled, it is gift—I fear that I will be perceived as nothing, particularly in a society where income, professional accomplishments, and feverish workaholism determine stature, status, and worth. If l finish the musical, but nothing comes of it—it is never produced, is poorly received, or is never financially remunerative—will I feel that I have done what I’ve been called to do? In short, can I face being faithful without being successful? Can I trust that God can work through anything, even my failure?

The negative manifestations of satisfaction are often more subtle than those of unholy desire. On the surface, they may appear as contentment or an easygoing manner when in reality apathy and stagnation reign. I may stay with the work I’ve done for years because it’s familiar and I’m considered good at what I do, even as it drains my creative energy and erodes any semblance of courage I once may have had to follow my deepest desire. I become self­absorbed and complain about what the work is doing to me, but can’t see or admit what I’m doing to me—or more accurately, what I’m allowing my fear to do to me. I cover up my timidity with false altruism, claiming that I can’t let my clients down. In doing that, however, do I let both myself and God down? Do I avoid what I am to do for the larger community simply because I can’t see where it will all lead? Through my actions and inaction, I proclaim that certainty is better than uncertainty, stagnation is better than change. I refuse to venture into the unknown, to take risks without knowing what the results will be. I choose job over joy, fear and familiarity over faithfulness.

ROOTED IN LOVE: HOLY MANIFESTATIONS OF DESIRE AND SATISFACTION

I know those negative manifestations of desire and satisfaction well. I’ve lived by them and others like them much of my life. But even as I’ve settled into them, the Spirit continues to unsettle me and offer me experiences of deep desire and holy satisfaction. At times, I willingly open myself to this grace. Other times, the Spirit works in spite of me. One of my continual challenges—I learned early that any desire I had was wrong—is to recognize that when I desire to use the gifts God has given me, I am not being selfish. Those gifts—some of which I may not even recognize—may bring me deep joy and holy satisfaction, a wonderful grace. But those gifts have not been given simply for my own pleasure or edification; they have been given for the good of all, even if I can’t imagine how.

But what distinguishes holy desire and satisfaction from the unholy? Two clues I’ve come to recognize are joy and what researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” For me, flow—a very focused time of work—is often followed by joy, an experience of the wonder of creation: a new song, a fresh musical idea, a surprising insight into a character, or simply the ever-amazing experience of something emerging from nothing. My husband smiles knowingly when he gets home from work and I tell him that I started my day by working on the musical. My plan, I say, had been to work for an hour before I turned to my “real” (i.e., paying) work. Then with a sheepish grin, I add, “But the hour turned into three!” This kind of desire is rooted, I believe, in God and in love. In a very concrete way, I am experiencing that God is love.

Just as the Magi journeyed beyond the world they knew, deep desire rooted in love compels us to seek something beyond ourselves, our fears, and our excuses. God continually draws us on, deeper into areas where we are uneasy, uncertain, and lack confidence. God asks us to grow, to give, to be grace and light in the world. God challenges us to push the boundaries of self and world from what is to what can be. We trust that, as we do this, God will be our guide.

At the same time, holy satisfaction draws us more deeply into the “at-home-ness,” or immanence, of God. I can’t help but think that the Magi experienced home in a new and more satisfying way because of their encounter with the Holy. Holy satisfaction savors what is—the slant of the morning sun on a newly mown field of alfalfa, the trill of a red-winged blackbird, the refreshing taste of a ripe orange. We trust that God provides and is ever present. Instead of moving toward God, we rest in God. We recognize that what we have, are, and do is enough. It is gift. God holds us within the boundaries of grace.

How do I respond to the desire to do more, be more, and have more, to be most fully the one God calls me to be? At the same time, how do I let go of all the possible things that I might do and have, and be satisfied with who, what, and where I am right now? In short, how do I balance moving toward God and being in God? It is this dynamic tension that animates our faith and our faithfulness. As I ask, “Where, God, do you live?” I am sustained by the experiences and epiphanies of God here and now as well as drawn toward epiphanies yet to come.

One of the mysteries of faith is that God is both transcendent (ever beyond us) and immanent (present with and within us). By honoring our deep desires and holy satisfactions, we enter into that mystery and into the realm of God.

1 All Scripture references are to the New Revised Standard Version Bible unless otherwise indicated.
2 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience-Steps toward Enhancing the Quality of Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 4.

Several years ago, I joined [an old friend] in exchang[ing] short lists of particular things in our lives for which we were grateful. “Particular” was mandatory: no vague generalizations about good health or pleasant weather. Our identified blessings might be small, but they had to be specific.

Soon after beginning this regimen… my friend fell and broke her arm [and] I underwent surgery to repair a tendon in my shoulder. We kept careful track of every miniscule gain during our recoveries, noting each small step out of disability and pain not only as milestone but as gift.

We realized…that gratitude is not simply an easy emotion or obvious response; it can be a challenging discipline, with far-reaching implications for the way we see the world.

Cognitive psychologists urge their patients to list things they are grateful for as…an exercise that trains those who may be habitually discouraged, resentful, or exhausted by depression, to begin to see patches of light in the prevailing darkness, to be able to shift from a dominant attitude of negativity to a more positive approach to their situation.

My friend and I certainly found this to be true….What began as a simple accounting of the mercies in our lives…gradually came to change not only what we saw (“things” to thank God for) but how we saw them (with amazement, joy, love, and praise). Saluting a greater number of the manifold blessings half-hidden in the landscape of our daily lives (a simple quantitative change), lead us¾without our really intending it¾to a qualitative change perception. This was the first gift our practice gave us.

[The] second gift our practice of gratitude gave my friend and me [is that] over time, we came to see… more deeply into the mystery of things. We began to see grace… surrounding and pervading and defining everything. In St. Paul’s…apt phrase, the eyes of our hearts were enlightened (Eph. 1:18).

For Jews and Christians, who know God to be the fount of all blessing, gratitude has always been an essential (even though implicitly difficult or costly) part of worship. We are to make a “sacrifice” of thanks and praise to God (Ps. 50:23; II6:17; Heb. 13:15), which certainly suggests that such gratitude is not always spontaneous or easy. Paul insists that it is not just for the obviously good things, or in the obviously fortunate circumstances, that we are to thank God: “We must always give thanks to God” (2 Thess. 2:13); “give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thess. 5:18); “[give] thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything” (Eph. 5:  20).

…We must come to see that [all] of our experience[s] are real and discernable, and full of meaning: full, in fact, of God….We are usually willing to find God in, and be grateful to God for, obvious blessings. We may need practice to see that God’s presence … gives meaning and hope to even the darkest and most difficult times.

…The third, most precious gift of a habit of gratitude…is to realize that…there is nothing outside the realm of God’s mercy, that everything is grace, that “there is faithfulness at the heart of all things.”(1)…For Christians, it offers an opportunity to deepen our intimacy with God, to focus our awareness of ¾and trust in¾God present with us in love and faithfulness; inseparably, at all times and in all places.

1 David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, the Heart Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness (New York: Paulist, 1984), 102, quoting Oscar Cullmann.

Yet we hang back,
content with the gods we make
in the little corners of our lives:
habits and possessions,
fears and despondence,
distracting our hearts
from the only true
satisfaction:
the sure, surprising grace
of your abundant love.

Reprinted from Alive Now (November/December 2011), © The Upper Room, Inc. Used by permission. alivenow.org

On a cool fall day, her healthy baby boy entered the world. When I arrived at the hospital I had to know a code word to be able to find mother and baby, measures taken to ensure they were safe from threat of violence. And instead of a string of visitors and gifts, when I entered the room, I found that I was the first to arrive. Though the mother looked at the baby with love and tenderness, her eyes were red from tears, and she was alone.

In those quiet moments shared with a scared, young mother, I began to hear the story of Jesus’ birth in a new way. I recognized what must have been panic and fear in Mary’s voice, the strained face of Joseph, and the damp, cool ground of the stable. “…Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” (Philippians 2:5-7)

O, the miracle of the Incarnation. God in Christ did not simply come to earth in human form. God emptied God’s self and entered the world in the most fragile and vulnerable of positions, that of a baby. And not just in the form of any baby, but a child born to ordinary parents facing difficulty and uncertainty. The Savior visited us as a child whose paternity was questioned and as a child who did not have a place to rest his head. That knowledge allowed me to look honestly into the young woman’s eyes and assure her that she was in fact not alone, that the God of all creation sits with her and knows her circumstance intimately. Thanks be to God.

Photo by Beth Richardson. Willow Tree nativity, Susan Lordi, artist.

We are troubled to consider
that you are still
teaching us
a lesson:
to believe
what we cannot
see.

Like a woman in labor,
we pray for
easy birthing pains
and
speedy delivery.
But you have already labored
to the point
of death;
we are impatient.

May HOPE be
your Advent gift to us,
not our
indulgent lament
to you,
Still Coming God.

Do something to us!

Cause a change to take place

in our hearts and in our relationships!

Let our watching and waiting not be a waste -

not because you don’t show up,

but because we don’t!

Call us to full & awake participation

in the advent of peace and hope and justice!

Make this, not a season, but a movement

of watchfulness that advocates

and waiting that engages

and adoration that stomps its feet

in restless resistance to a too slow and too comfortable Coming!

who meets you in broken places!

Lift your spirit and your hands in sweet gratitude

to the God of Acceptance and Patience

who sees holy beauty just as you are, and

gently kneads your hardness & stubbornness.

Be happy, and keep your faith

in the Awesome and Holy One who

challenges your pride with a single snowflake.

Place your hope in the Source of Life,

the Daily Wisdom, the Foolish Lover.

Say to your spirit each day and each moment:

“Do not be afraid. Praise the LORD!”

Somehow I have been persuaded by the consumer culture around me to consider my belongings as gifts from God. Perhaps part of that understanding is helpful—remembering that even the material possessions we have are not all gained by our own merit. While many with wealth (of any degree) work hard for their income and possessions, we recognize that there are privileges we gain that we do not earn. Plenty of people work just as hard as I do, but do not gain the same outcome. Our race, class, and status can contribute to our position in the world. However, acknowledging privilege does not mean that privilege comes from God.

What, then, are blessings? I think of Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”, etc. All the “Blessed are” statements seem connected to intimacy and connection with God and participation in the Kingdom of God here on earth and in the age to come. God pours out these blessings to all who are open to receive, regardless of financial status or material wealth.

As I enter the season of Advent, I continue to identify blessings in my life—grace, love, peace—and I am thankful for the many wonderful joys I experience each day. I also feel challenged to see the possessions in my life for what they are—things. I am thankful for all that I have, and I will keep working and praying for a world in which all have what they need.

Lord, as the season of Advent begins, prepare my heart for your coming. Allow me to maintain perspective on the things I own and to recognize the blessings I receive from you. May I be generous to share both my material possessions and blessings of grace and love.

During the hunting seasons of my childhood, I cried over the bucks and does, gutted and hanging from the trees. Family members gently ridiculed me, trying to toughen me, I guess, for life in a world where animal sacrifice is commonplace—not only for food, but also for securing our standard of living. Think of habitat bulldozed for housing developments, animal drug testing, and roadkill.

The toughening didn’t take somehow. I’ve lived over five decades pained at the violent deaths of animals by human hands or human designs, but not speaking of it. I don’t much like ridicule, even the gentle kind or the unspoken kind, like the looks my neighbor gives me when I pick up from his manicured lawn the moles he’s poisoned.

Striking, the mystery that runs through all created things. During the fifteen-day season that woke me, as a child, to the sorrow of our domination of other creatures, fifteen days when over 400,000 deer are shot in the state every year, one appeared to me and by her mere presence converted me, as no preacher ever had, to the gospel: She who loses her life, invisible in the shadow of God, will find it.

I’m beginning to be able to speak of it.

Because I love Advent/Christmas, discovering that my very first project as Editor of Weavings would be the November/December/January issue was amazing! I so enjoyed working on those articles! Even though we were deep into summertime when I was doing the editorial work, I could almost hear the Christmas music as I worked.

Have you read the featured article yet? It’s called “Elizabeth’s Hope,” and it was written by Catherine Cavanagh. It’s a beautiful article. Through an imaginative retelling of the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah and the birth of their son John (later to become John the Baptist), Catherine Cavanagh gently leads us into the miracle of the Incarnation. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to do so, and then to read it aloud to someone close to you. It is truly a beautiful story.

As I write this I am listening to Christmas music. I know that is not liturgically correct. I just can’t help myself!

And the child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness till the day of his manifestation to Israel.

Elizabeth nestles her infant son John, peering at his face in flickering candlelight—this future holy prophet who nevertheless awakens her in the dark hours with his hunger for her milk, his need to grow, his intent to leave her some day.

Elizabeth sighs. Her back aches, and tonight she cannot sleep anyway. She shifts John, whose eyes open for a moment, then close again as he settles once more into suckling.

At six months, John lights up Elizabeth and Zechariah’s life. This miracle child, this angelic gift still leaves them in awe. Elizabeth looks down at him again, draws a gnarled finger through his fine hair. She kisses the smoothness of his baby skin, so different from her own.

He is a child of Creation, this one, of sunlight and rainfall, of sand and stone. He already sits on his own, sifting sand through his fingers, studying the grains, watching the reflected light and colours that cause them to sparkle, something that Elizabeth hasn’t noticed in years. He laughs, pats the earth, wonders at insects, marvels at water, and Elizabeth worries about how she will keep up with him once he can crawl, once she can no longer contain him. He cries only when brought inside, reaching back for the light. Sometimes at night even, Elizabeth must bring him outdoors to calm him.

As if reading her thoughts, John opens his eyes, squirms, gives a cry and stretches toward the door, brightly lit with stars on this moonless night. Elizabeth appreciates the chance to move, to straighten old joints, and carries her son to the door.

Judea sparkles in the deep night, starlight kindling Elizabeth’s soul. She breathes deeply, holds John close. Has there ever been a night like this? The heavens blaze, an iridescent transparency drawing her out. And John squeals, almost jumps from her arms, reaching both hands up.

A new star hovers on the horizon. Impossible, Elizabeth thinks, then stops herself. What is impossible to a woman who gives birth at her age? What can ever be impossible again?

Before John was born she had loved the stories of Hannah and Sarah, but perhaps, she had to admit, had not taken them seriously.  Isolated in her childless status, she had struggled for years with frustration, enduring the imagined smug pity of mothers of babies, toddlers, youth. The stories had comforted her, but left her feeling alone too. Where was the truly childless woman in scripture?

With Zechariah, she had pursued the model of unfailing hospitality of Abraham and Sarah, had welcomed the sick, the lonely, the stranger, the grieving, and had come to find comfort in who she was, a woman of God, a childless mother to all, a giver, a person. She had said, “Here I am,” to any who came her way, had built her family of all those who approached, all those who needed her. They came then from near and far for advice, comfort, friendship and sanctuary. She realized at last that she would be alright without child, that God’s presence filled her anyway, comforted her, and called her.

On the day Zechariah had stumbled home from the Temple, mute, shocked, needing her, she had struggled to believe, to understand.  And then the pregnancy had followed, unbelievable, impossible, true.

The women, the whole community had celebrated Elizabeth’s pregnancy, even through Zechariah’s continued silence. Not that anyone had known about it at first of course. For the first five months, Elizabeth had hardly believed it was happening, and had hidden herself, afraid that she would lose the child, until the day of Mary’s arrival.

She looks down at her wide awake baby, her unexpected-expected one. And thinks of Mary.

Elizabeth had been pounding grain in the enclosure behind the house. The sensation calmed her, she could get lost in the rhythm and the heat, sweat evaporating in the dry breezy air. But she knew Mary was there even before she heard her call, a sure knowledge, a certainty, and she had turned, dropped the pestle and ran.  Elizabeth had felt herself carried on wings, despite her heaviness, despite her age, to her young cousin.

And John had leapt within her, taking her breath. Elizabeth knew then her baby was safe, that there was salvation within the woman before her, not just for Elizabeth, so long ignored because of her barrenness, but for all forgotten women, for all the downtrodden, excluded, ridiculed, harassed. She had reached out to Mary, had felt her baby leap again and had hailed the young woman.

And Mary had answered her, recognized her son, the first woman to do so. Mary had reached her hands out to Elizabeth’s belly, filling it with fire and hope. Elizabeth’s soul too had magnified the Lord even as Mary said the words. For women do not operate alone. No one does.

Everything had come clear to Elizabeth all at once. Like a vision, a tilting of the world, eternity stretched behind her and ahead, her whole history and that of her people suddenly coming into focus. Sarah laughing, and Hannah beseeching, and Abraham and Moses saying, “Here I am, here I am,” for the Lord was with them all.

“Here I am.” Elizabeth’s heart had whispered too, even as Mary’s words catapulted through her and out to the world, words that she would not forget even if Zechariah did not write them down, did not record them as he did everything in these days. And indeed she realized that it was possible to have God within her, and God outside of her. That her soul existed both as hers and as God’s, just as Mary remained full of God, full of grace, even as Mary remained Mary.

Elizabeth had gathered her cousin to her, knowing that the young woman would be punished for her pregnancy, knowing that the road ahead would be worse for Mary than it had been for her, Elizabeth, the barren one. For Mary had chosen courage. Mary had chosen risk. To be pregnant before marriage. To be pregnant with God. The world stretched lonely and dangerous if Joseph did not understand.

The two women had prepared each other, stood before their God, talked long into the night, breaking the silence that had wrapped itself around Elizabeth ever since she had conceived and Zechariah had lost his voice to the angel.

And on that night when finally the pains had assaulted Elizabeth and to her joy, to her sorrow, she had brought a yelling, squalling John out of her forever into the world in a splash of water and blood, Mary had been with her, had caught the infant in her own hands and held him briefly to her own belly before handing him over still soaked, still soiled, this boy who loved sand and water, to his mother Elizabeth, for whom the hut had exploded with stars, with sun, with love, with God.

The next day Mary had left early, prepared, ready.

And now on this bright star-scoured night, Elizabeth cannot turn her thoughts away from Mary. Her time would be close.

No, she realizes, looking at the star, her time is now.

John grows quiet, transfixed by the night sky, eyes wide as if he sees through it, as if he sees beyond it. In the distance, low down over the fields, the starlight shines brighter than anything Elizabeth has seen.  She lowers herself to the sandy earth, stands John on her lap as he strains to move toward the light. A warm hand on her shoulder tells her Zechariah has joined them. He drapes a blanket around his wife and child, then crouches beside them, all three facing the bright east.

The stars sparkle silent in the still air, all sound disappearing into the expectant void.  They breathe together, this small family, in rhythm with that other family, and Elizabeth feels her belly tighten and expand with every prayer she sends to Mary. And then it seems as if the whole sky expands, grows, and John gives a leap, and Elizabeth knows, she knows, as the tears fall down her face, as she feels Zechariah’s grip, that eternity has come.

“Here I am,” she whispers to John, to God, to Mary, to the world. “Here I am.” And hears it echo back to her from the stars, from the world, from John, from Mary, from God.

I then remembered a Weavings issue from several years ago, entitled “The Vineyard” (Weavings XVI/5, September/October 2001). The individual pieces in the issue each spoke to a different aspect of the vineyard image, and I found myself taking pages of notes.

In John Mogabgab’s introduction to the issue, he took on the concept of pruning. He explained pruning as eliminating non-essentials for the purpose of gathering and focusing energy in order to live out our calling fully. Mogabgab led me to understand the agricultural concept of pruning which allowed me to encounter Jesus’ metaphor in a powerful way.

I treasure my library of Weavings issues. The collection of journals serves as a spiritual advisor, a council of mentors, and an instructive word. When a new issue arrives at my home, I read the articles for enjoyment and nourishment. And as I keep the issues, I return to them time and again as a trusted resource for preaching and teaching.

As a young person beginning in ministry, I am deeply thankful for the wealth of insights I find in Weavings as well as for the community of authors and readers that interact with the journal. In God’s loving pruning in my life, I consider Weavings to be one of the mediums through which God shapes and forms my faith and ministry.

Stated in the simplest of terms, the challenge posed by community life, whatever its form, is this: How can I learn to love all these people in the way that they really need to be loved? How can I relate to them in a way that allows me to be fully myself, not playing roles or games, and that also allows them to be themselves? In other words, how can I discover and affirm my own uniqueness while also acknowledging that it is only in relation to others that I shall find my full personhood?

As I wrestled with these questions, I discovered that I was looking less for lists of good techniques for building community than for clarification of underlying principles. That is why the source I have come back to time and again in the past ten years is the Rule of Benedict (discovered almost by chance as a result of living in Canterbury, which in the Middle Ages had been a great Benedictine community). This choice may seem somewhat surprising for a Christian laywoman in the later twentieth [and early twenty-first] century. After all, the Rule was written for a community of men in sixth century rural Italy, and the short monastic text of nine thousand words might not at first seem to have any sort of relevance to present-day life. Yet because Benedict shows such an amazing grasp of the human psyche, because he shows us how to be human and to become more fully human, what he has to say applies not only to those who live in monastic communities bound by enclosure and by vow but also to all of us who struggle to live out our Christian commitment today. The practical wisdom of his Rule has continued to guide and nourish me, helping me to see more clearly what is involved in this demanding business of living fully, freely, and creatively with others.

Ultimately, Benedict’s Rule is about the living out of Christ’s love in daily life—something which is at once immediate, accessible, and relentlessly demanding. [One] aspect of Benedict’s vision [is] respect for persons.

RESPECT FOR PERSONS

Benedict appeals to me because he starts with no theory, no abstraction. He starts with each of us as we are and where we are, in all our human frailty and limitations, with our weakness and our strength, our woundedness, and our potential.

His Rule is totally realistic about people. The people who make up his community are typical of those with whom I also have to live: restless, lazy, careless, as well as patient, quiet, hardworking. In building all these people into one community, Benedict is concerned for the good of each. He challenges the strong and gives them something to strive for; he makes allowances and concessions for the weak, and he varies his approach according to the need of each individual. Describing, for example, the role of the abbot, Benedict writes: “He must vary with the circumstances, threatening and coaxing by turns, stern as a taskmaster, devoted and tender as only a father can be. He must know what a difficult and demanding burden he has undertaken, directing souls and serving a variety of temperaments, coaxing, reproving, and encouraging them as appropriate.” Here Benedict is simply making a statement about the unique value of each person. His starting point is that we should see each person as a unique creature of God. In his own day this was a radical statement. In his community he brought together slaves and free, Romans and foreigners, men who owned land and men who worked the soil with their hands. In the words of a statement from the American Benedictine sisters today, “He wrote in bold letters across the pages of history that every human being is sacred, that each has a right to develop to full potential.”

Here is something which may seem obvious, yet it is something we neglect at our peril: Benedict is saying simply that Christian community is built upon respect for persons. The common life never becomes some piece of abstract idealism. He would probably have approved that aphorism of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren loves community.” Perhaps we also need to hear again this very simple and basic statement about the worth of each and every person. We pay lip service to it in the roles Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram have for us in the game of self-analysis and self-assessment which is part of the fascination with “self” running so violently through our society today. But society goes on to bombard us with a further message. We are told to succeed, to prove ourselves, to climb the ladder of self-advancement. We are encouraged, sometimes subtly and sometimes more openly, to project images of ourselves which will impress. This would have been totally unacceptable to Benedict. While he is always anxious that we should use our gifts and talents, fulfill our potential, and run toward God through our good deeds, he is also clear that we stand before God with empty hands, that we identify with the publican by acknowledging our total dependence.” This leaves no room or possibility for the feigned identity with which we find it so easy to deceive ourselves—that mask which we assume so readily.

At the moment of entering the community, the novice stands before the rest of the community and says, Suscipe me—accept me, receive me, O Lord. These simple words are profoundly important, for they lay the foundation of any fulfilling relationship—whether with self, with others, or with God. They have become words that I come back to time and again and make a prayer for myself. They ask of me a total honesty, a handing over of myself to God just as I am, hands with all my flaws, my vulnerability, my gifts, and my strengths. This is an act of obedience to my creator. But it is an act which then allows me to do the same to others. For unless and until I accept myself, I have no hope of accepting others. It is this total and honest acceptance first of myself and then of others which makes possible any true community living.

This is of course no more and no less than living out the radical implications of the gospel, and as always Benedict points me all the time to Christ and to the gospel. What he is asking of me is that I should accept, love, and forgive myself since I know (though how often I forget, or worse still, reject) that I am accepted, loved, and forgiven by Christ. This is the foundation, and the only foundation, on which I can base my relations with others.

Esther de Waal is an Anglican lay woman living on the borders of England and Wales, where she grew up. She writes, travels and gives retreats. Her great interest is in monastic spirituality, which began when she wrote Seeking God, The way of St. Benedict. Her real loves however are her garden and her increasing number of grandchildren.

The publishing industry is still in the midst of transition. We can make a decision one week, and by the time we begin to implement the change we need to ask ourselves whether we should revisit our earlier decision. Things are changing that fast. This environment is both frustrating and full of excitement and potential. Other areas of our culture and our lives are also changing constantly—that is perhaps the subject of another blog. For now, I want to talk about Weavings.

We are planning to begin an electronic version of the journal in the very near future. The e-magazine will have enhancements that the print version cannot have, and that will be both fun and challenging to plan and carry out. If you have ideas for enhancements, please send them along to us. We want to create something that you will enjoy!

We would also love to hear your thoughts on the subject of change. How does it intersect with your spiritual life? How could it? Let us know what you think.

“Cathy!” My brother James called to me from across Princess Street. “What’re you doing? There’s a bunch of us going to Coppers.”

“Can’t,” I answered, as he crossed over. “Got a date.”

“Ooooo,” James’ eyebrows went up. “That him?”

A good looking young man in a leather jacket was heading toward us at a rapid pace.

I smiled. “Yup. Don’t do anything stupid.  I like him.”

“Sure,” James said, and threw his arm around me pulling me close.

“Getyourarmoffme!” I hissed. He just grinned until I pushed him off.

My date approached and I introduced them. “James, this is Brian.  Brian this is my BROTHER James.”

Later, Brian told me he’d never felt so relieved. Much later. Brian and I celebrated our twenty-second wedding anniversary last Friday.

Now twenty-two years may seem like a long time, and it might be an eternity in a bad relationship, but a few decades are nothing, not nearly enough time together, in a good relationship, be it friendship or marriage.

We walk with each other for a short time only on this earth, and some day Brian and I will say good-bye.  Sooner or later we all grieve or are grieved. But for that short walk we can support each other and love each other. We can embrace companionship and bear each other’s sorrows.

It’s easy to let conflict overwhelm us, easy to blame the people closest to us for our pain, easy to nurse the ways we are wronged. God knows I’ve done that often enough. But it might be easier still to forgive, let go, and fall into friendship and love, if only we would let ourselves.

Friendships are treasures that last beyond human breath, and outpace the beating of a human heart. May you embrace yours, and hold close the memory of those who are gone. Eternity and love belong to all of us.

Catherine Cavanagh is also a contributor in this quarter’s issue (XXVI/4), “The Art of Loving.” Her article is entitled, “On Friendship in Dark Places.”

Lectio divina is a slow, meditative reading and reflection on a passage of scripture. Rather than processing the scripture intellectually, you’re invited to let the words and images connect your heart with God’s heart.

This feature is brought to you by our sister magazine, Alive Now. If you are new to Audio Lectio, listen to the introduction below by clicking the play button.
Audio Lectio Introduction by Alive Now

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I hope Weavings becomes your companion as you seek to sort out a pattern of faithful living marked by prayer, community, and engagement in this contemporary world.

If you’d like to know a bit more about me and our Weavings team, click on the “About” tab above.

Blessings,
Lynne M. Deming
Weavings editor

I was recently talking with a friend about his new patio furniture. Almost immediately after our conversation, I found myself researching my next purchase and thinking of what we “need” for the house. Like an unexpected cold, patterns of greed and consumerism sneak up on me and take hold. Sometimes all it takes is a commercial, a conversation, a movie, and I am distracted with desires. It seems that for every decision I make toward living simply, I make twice as many choices to consume.

As I consider my constant wrestling with a deep desire to live in the model of Christ versus my habits and choices, I think of the rich young man talking with Jesus. The young man has kept many commandments and has lived well. Yet, when he asked Jesus what he lacks, Jesus invites him to sell his possessions, give the money to the poor, and follow. The young man went away grieving, because his possessions were numerous.

I, too, grieve. My possessions are numerous and clutter my path toward the Kingdom of God. Despite my striving for holy living, I stumble onward in my quest for more and better things. If it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, then, with the disciples I ask, exasperated, “Who can be saved?” But as Jesus responded to the disciples, so he answers me: “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”

O God, I thank you for your loving kindness. Show me mercy and grace. Transform my heart. Grow in me a desire for the things you value. Instead of bearing the image of my culture, may I reflect your heart. Amen.

As we celebrate Christ’s rising in our worship each week, we have the precious opportunity to encounter resurrection in a whole variety of ways. My favourite resurrection truth, though, is that resurrection opens us to the love of life. When he rose, Jesus proclaimed that life is the most resilient, most irrepressible reality in creation, and it is available to all who are willing to embrace it.

One of my greatest frustrations is when people of faith speak of the resurrection as only a “past and future” reality. It amazes me how we can fall into the trap of seeing the resurrection as a once off, past, historical event that happened to Jesus, and then follow this up with the mistake of seeing our own resurrection as only a future event in some otherworldly place. As true as these two ideas may be, the power of the resurrection is neither in the past nor in the future – it is right here and right now. When Jesus offers us abundant life (John 10:10) he is not making a promise for some far off time. Life is a gift that we can receive and enjoy in every moment – and faith in the resurrection should be the doorway to access this life.

When we are consumed with resurrection life, we find ourselves living in constant celebration. Every moment – even those of great tragedy or pain – is filled with glory, with possibility, with hope and with creativity. Resurrection people are unable to speak the language of cynicism. Resurrection people see the world and all its creatures as alive with God’s purpose, God’s beauty and God’s energy. Sacredness is everywhere, transformation is a constant reality and every moment is pregnant with the potential for a divine encounter.

There is an old Jewish proverb, from the Jerusalem Talmud, that says this: “Every person will be called to give an account for every good thing they beheld in life and did not enjoy”. As people of the resurrection, we are called to enjoy all the goodness we can behold, wherever we may behold it. And it is our worship that teaches us to do this.

As we meet the risen Christ in the sanctuary, we can’t help but notice all the beauty and creativity that makes this divine encounter possible. Our liturgies are the poetry of worship. Our symbols, stained glass windows, banners, sculptures and icons are the art of worship. Our music and ritual is the theatre of worship. In all of this creativity we are opened to the surprising, unconstrained life of God, and we are invited to experience this life first hand. Then we are challenged to leave the church to live out this life in every moment and every place.

So, why not choose life right now? Just do it!

John is a South African Methodist minister, author, and founder of Sacredise worship consulting, resourcing and publishing ministry (www.sacredise.com). For more on worship and living the Christian life, see his blog.

In the corridors of power, in the halls of the wealthy, in the darkest and most impoverished slums of the world, and in each of our own hearts is a natural, but destructive tendency, to fall in love with death. It is from this necrophilia (literally: love of death) that most, if not all, of our brokenness, woundedness, dividedness and suffering comes.

What is this love of death of which I speak? It is the natural human tendency to embrace and nurture attitudes and actions that lead to pain and destruction. When we choose cynicism and apathy over the more difficult, but life-giving, choice for hope and action, we have chosen necrophilia. When we choose hatred and the harbouring of grudges over the more difficult, but life-giving, choice for love and forgiveness, we have chosen necrophilia. When we choose expediency and self-interest over the more difficult, but life-giving, choice for sustainability and shared interest, we have chosen necrophilia. When we choose legalism and judgement over the more difficult, but life-giving, choice for grace and understanding, we have chosen necrophilia. In every moment, every relationship, every situation in which we allow our darker, less noble selves to guide our decisions and actions, we have made the choice to love death. Whenever we allow ourselves to be part of what destroys and divides our world and its creatures, we have become lovers of death.

The Pharisees would never have thought of themselves as lovers of death, until they were faced with what real, abundant life would mean. Where Jesus offered them grace, they retreated back to the safety of law. Where Jesus offered them love, they retreated back to the status of power. Where Jesus offered them a part in the larger, inclusive reality that God offers to all human beings, they retreated back into their sheltered, exclusive “old-boys club”. And, in order to prevent the truth being seen, they killed the one who offered them life. The ones who claimed to love life, had revealed themselves to be lovers of death.

But, here’s where the resurrection becomes so subversive and powerful. The love of death has no power over the love of life. Jesus loves life so much that he is prepared to die in order to remain free from the love of death. Paradoxical isn’t it? He goes to the cross still loving life, and still offering life to anyone who will leave their love of death behind. And if that’s not enough, he reveals the fundamental powerlessness of death by rising again. When life and death come face to face, life is the last one standing, as death kills itself by trying to kill life.

Since every Sunday is a remembrance of the resurrection, our worship has the potential each week to remind us of life’s indestructibility, and to lead us into the love of life. If we can commit to resurrection sufficiently that we will refuse to do anything that cooperates with death – even when it brings us pain and suffering, we have truly embraced the resurrection, and we will find, even if death tries to silence us once and for all, that we have truly found life eternal.

So, where are you tempted to get familiar with death? Where is necrophilia at work in you? What can you do to commit yourself again to the love of life? Do it. Do it now.

John is a South African Methodist minister, author, and founder of Sacredise worship consulting, resourcing and publishing ministry(www.sacredise.com). For more on worship and living the Christian life, see his blog.

We are captivated by love stories, whether they tell of romance or friendship, whether they are truth or fiction. We wonder at the power of friendship and love to move and shape us. We talk about it, dream about it, pray over it, and always, always look for it. When we take time for love, we are really searching for deeper meaning—connection with ourselves and our Source.

Saint Paul wrote that “love is patient and love is kind” (1 Cor 13:4). Today that might mean waiting for your partner before having supper. It might involve calling a friend. It’s driving your children to hockey practice. It’s spending time with family. It’s feeding the hungry, and offering shelter to the homeless. It’s biting your tongue, and filling your heart.

True love hovers mist-like, hard to describe, just out of reach of any final words. But we know it when we feel it. It proclaims itself in the ‘I do’ of newlyweds, in the faces of new parents, in the touch of lovers. Yet true love possesses other forms as well, more difficult to recognize, more often ignored. True love exists in the parent who demands complete homework, and the spouse who challenges their beloved over addiction. True love is unafraid of caring confrontation, of demanding more, of expecting better. It holds dreams close and only lets go with a struggle, with a cry. It grieves the loss of love, the separation of death, the end of a vision.

True love gives itself for others, makes sacrifices, welcomes love in return. It reaches for the love of God, the ultimate love that would sacrifice and empty itself for humanity, holding nothing back, taking on any suffering, because its bearer knows that love is eternal and nothing good can be destroyed. The love on the cross mirrors the love of the resurrection, bound together, one in sacrifice, the other in celebration, unity, and peace.

True love holds tight to hopes of the future, faith in each other, and forgiveness of failings. It warms and builds, explodes within us, takes us higher, transforms us into our best self, the one God calls us to be. Found as much in friends as in lovers, in the presence of true love you know only one thing. You have come home.

Catherine Cavanagh is also a contributor in this quarter’s issue (XXVI/4), “The Art of Loving.” Her article is entitled, “On Friendship in Dark Places.”

A friend writes to tell me of her work,
which is making art, which is making love
in the fullness of the day. And yes, I know

I should turn to other tasks; bills need
to be paid, and the dishes still won’t wash
themselves. But for some reason this poem

keeps on interrupting, and draws me to consider
things more necessary than these. Like those lilies
in the field Jesus admonishes us to wonder about;
like the aroma of potato-leek soup simmering
on her stove, all of which prove Plato wrong
in his notion that what is really real lies

beyond this world; like the particular clouds
that drift so tirelessly above, living without fear
or any anxiety.  They don’t worry about the past,

or the future or any such things, knowing
that “love speaks everywhere,” as the old monk
reminds us.  And just so, I ponder the wind

with its sweet solace, and wonder whether
it makes a difference that I am not there to
taste her soup, which as I’ve already said

is an act of love and an art. And all the while,
as I write these lines, my four cats lie idly in the sun,
their bodies curled around each other for warmth,

perhaps for love. Who can say?

A face-to-face approach in which we accept responsibility for the Other is necessary not only on a personal level but for society as well, as we strive to move away from violence and oppression. Mark S. Burrows, in “A Passion That We Feel,” highlights the critical importance of ‘loving our enemy’ even when we are most vulnerable to them. We approach the Other, even the worst Other, the most evil, the most aggressive, the most threatening, ‘God to God’.

Stereotypes and categorizations of people stand in the way of our ability to see their uniqueness. Perhaps this is what Paul meant when he said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28, RSV-CE). Etty Hillesum, defined by the Nazis as a Jew and no more or less than that, recognized that even the aggressor must be understood to be an individual, and as such is worthy of mercy. In taking responsibility for our enemy, we build justice in the world, live in mercy, and free our souls to love.

Downey’s personal experiences in Vietnam and Kenya remind me that the struggle to truly see the Other remains a problem in our world, (and perhaps a worsening one as communication becomes even more faceless with growing social media). But it remains possible. Friendship truly does exist. A willingness to care is embedded within us, a beseeching call from a God who gives us the freedom to sin and thus, most wonderfully and artfully, to love.

Catherine Cavanagh is also a contributor in this quarter’s issue (XXVI/4), “The Art of Loving.” Her article is entitled, “On Friendship in Dark Places.”

Hello everyone, from the new editor of Weavings! If you’ve read the blogs from earlier this summer, you know that Pam Hawkins has left Upper Room Ministries to take an associate pastor position at a local United Methodist Church (my church, in fact). We miss her greatly, but we know that she is where she needs to be. So now, I am ensconced as the new Weavings editor. I also carry some of my previous duties as Executive Director of Publishing, so I have two quite different sets of responsibilities these days. We’ll see how that works!

I have been in publishing administration for almost twenty years now. But a part of me has always longed for the good old days of actually doing editorial work. It kind of gets into your system and it’s hard to get rid of. So now that part of me gets to come to work every day and accomplish something tangible. I know that sounds strange, but those of us in administration often talk about the fact that we don’t feel like we really DO anything in these administrative roles. We help other people do things, or we solve problems… but we don’t really do anything concrete. So now I am looking forward to feeling a sense of accomplishment on a regular basis!

Speaking of accomplishments—Gina, Nelson, and I just sent our first issue to the printer last week. Except for some software glitches, the process went smoothly. I hope you enjoy reading “The Lord Is With You.” We certainly enjoyed creating it!

I recently came across the story of Jesus talking with the Samaritan woman at the well. Though a familiar passage, I heard something new on this read, as though for the first time. It is the woman’s response to Jesus’ offer of living water that struck me. To this, the woman replies, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” She hears an offer of a drink from a deep well with no bucket in sight.

Part of my ministry entails receiving calls and visits from folks in the community in need of help through one crisis or another—the lights are about to be turned off, the rent is due, there is not enough money to buy the prescription. Often we are able to walk alongside a family as they take steps to sorting out what feels like an up-turned life. But then there are days when none of the resources come through, a call is not returned, the situation is much worse than we anticipated. And on those days, we grieve with the family for the suffering they face. We speak words of peace and healing. But as we offer words of hope, they ask, “How will we make it? Where will we go next?” These folks and many around us look to the church, the church that promises hope and healing, and asks, “You have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?”

In my frantic trips to and from the well for resources, I am reminded of Jesus’ response to the woman at the well. Those who drink of the water from the earth will be thirsty again and will have to return to the well to retrieve more water. Thus, the bucket and the well are not the only keys to satiation, for those that drink of the living water will never be thirsty. In them will spring up water gushing to eternal life. We can, and do, help our neighbors with physical “thirst” through resources of all kinds, but even as we meet those needs, their thirst will return again. The true water the church offers is living water, an invitation to encounter the love of God and to experience a depth of drink not found elsewhere.

God of living water, may we be attentive to the physical and spiritual thirst around us. Remind us of what type of drink we can offer, and help us to share it liberally. May the water gushing up to eternal life saturate our thirsty earth. Amen.

Until I heard that line, I had never thought about “loving well.” I thought you either loved or you didn’t. I began to question my feelings about my relationship with my own mother, and realized that of course she loved me. She just didn’t know how to show it in the ways I needed. I also felt prompted to ask myself what it meant to love well and how I might need to change in order to love in that way.

Loving well doesn’t come naturally, does it? This kind of loving requires divine intervention; it is a fruit of the Spirit. Sometimes the ways we express our love are different from the ways someone needs love expressed. It takes courage and humility to be willing to learn to speak a different love language. The poem, “How You Loved Me,” by Steve Garnaas-Holmes illustrates this sublimely. I invite you to take a look for yourself (page 12).

Gina Manskar is the editorial assistant for the Weavings journal.

Luke 10:38-42

Upon Jesus’ arrival to her home, Martha rushed around the way she thought a good hostess should, while Mary sat at Jesus’ feet. “Lord do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?” Martha asked. Jesus responded, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

I have never liked the way people talk about Martha when referring to this passage. They say that she was wrong to worry so much. She should have focused on Jesus. I want to stick up for Martha, “Someone has to take care of the details!”

Recently, I was running late to prepare for our church’s food pantry. The opening of the pantry was still more than an hour away, but many were already lined up. I attempted to weave my way through the crowd to reach the door. Despite my tunnel vision on the task at hand, I realized those around me were singing. The group of folks blocking my way into the pantry reached the joyous line, “And many more!” Those in line were singing happy birthday to a woman waiting patiently for food. There were smiles all around. I turned around just in time for the exchanging of hugs and high-fives.

In that moment I began to better understand what Jesus was telling Martha. Jesus was not dismissing the need for attending to details or utilizing one’s gifts in service. What Martha was doing wasn’t “bad.” It’s just that sometimes other things are “better.” God calls us to be attentive to the Spirit’s leading each day to discern God’s agenda, even if that means leaving some of the “details” undone for a time.

On that busy morning the food pantry certainly needed to be open. But Jesus called to me saying, “Anna, Anna, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing right now, rejoicing with a sister in Christ. These folks have chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from them.”

Merciful God, help us each to recognize the holy distractions to which we are being called. Do not let our good intentions and plans stand in the way of encounters with you and our neighbors. Amen.

For twenty-five years, Weavings has lived in the capable hands of founding editor, John Mogabgab and a host of skilled colleagues, most recently Pam Hawkins. You may have heard that Pam has taken an appointment at Belmont United Methodist Church in Nashville. Bob Dylan’s song talks about the need to get off the new, rapidly changing road if you are not willing to lend a hand. So, that is just what I am doing—lending a hand.

I will still be overseeing The Upper Room, Inc. publishing operation, with some help from  newly-appointed Associate, Robin Pippin. But I am so looking forward to immersing myself in Weavings. John and Pam have worked hard to create a firm foundation for the journal. We have a rich store of contributors. They are knowledgeable, thoughtful, and creative writers of profound spiritual depth. We have a productive and efficient editorial process that will be relatively easy to take on. We have a wealth of content that has been developed and nurtured over many years. We have an amazingly capable assistant, Gina Manskar. And, most importantly, we have the support of our committed and enlightened readers!!!

I have worked at The Upper Room for about fifteen years, and over those years we have been consistently proud of this journal and its reputation in the religious publishing field. I am honored and challenged to carry on this tradition. As the song says, now I need to start swimming so I won’t sink like a stone!!! Thanks so much for your continued interest in the Weavings journal.

I liked figuring it all out. I liked learning to recognize the different symbols — campgrounds, boating, hiking, railroads, unfinished highways. I liked learning about state lines and county lines, about detours and alternate routes. There is just something about that work of reading maps and deciding on which way to go that I miss, and from which I now realize I learned a great deal, not only in my traveling life but in my spiritual life as well.

These days, as I think about summer trips I have taken throughout my life and all the maps I have picked up, folded, marked, and read along the way, I find that the practice of map-reading is reminding me a great deal of the practice of praying. I am preparing for another trip this summer — a vocational trip — so I am pulling out my worn, folded, marked, and well-read spiritual maps, my prayer books, which have guided me this far on my faith journey. I know they will guide me again to new waters, deserts, gardens, vineyards, valleys, and spaces as I prepare to leave my Weavings home to return to local parish ministry from which I came several years ago and to which I am being called again.

I am excited about the journey ahead, and I am excited about the people who have begun to arrive in the Weavings editorial office to continue the work here. It has been a privilege to be part of this staff over the years, but now I will join you, once again, as a reader of the journal. And for all of us, wherever God is leading us, I pray for traveling mercies.

Acts 2:1-21

As I read the scriptures of Pentecost, I love to imagine the faces of those who heard the disciples speaking in their own languages. Men and women, some far from home, might even have wept at the sound of their native tongue. The power of the Holy Spirit poured out a gift for languages that day, a gift that allowed the erasure of boundaries and separation and alienation.

On a trip to Nogales, Sonora, a town between the Mexico and US border near Tucson, Arizona, our group stayed at homes in the community. A few of us were welcomed at the home of a man named Juan. He and his family showed us sincere hospitality, preparing food for us and helping us feel comfortable in their home, a small structure constructed from scraps of wood and metal.

One evening we sat outside on squeaky folding chairs visiting with one another, listening to animals and children calling to one another from house to house, and watching the sun color the sky as it set behind the mountains. Juan and I were engaged in a lively conversation, hungry to learn more about each other’s lives and experiences. Our words were funneled through a third channel, our translator, who added her own perspective as well. Juan’s Spanish was quick and spirited, and while I usually understood the tone of his remarks, I had to wait each time he spoke for his thoughts to be unwound and re-braided into a language I could understand.

As the hours passed and the air around us grew dark, our translator stood to excuse herself for a moment. But I soon thought of the next thing I wanted to hear about Juan and his family. I asked, he leaned in, and I waited for his response. Only then did we remember that our conversations had been reliant upon our translator. We each gave a small laugh, and then we sat back to wait for our mouthpiece to return.

Many boundaries separated Juan and me. Our language, age, gender, life experience, to start. But the most limiting of all the boundaries was the imposing wall that divides his country from mine. On one side he is “home,” a few feet farther away, he is “illegal.” Lines are drawn around and between us, yet we are brothers and sisters, children of the same God.

Holy Spirit, may it be so today. May your power lead and guide us, your people, to work for the dismantling of harmful boundaries and the celebration of healthy ones. May God’s peace reign on all the earth as we live as one with each other and with all of creation.

I’m not a cook either, but my wife is. Recently she took some leftover rice, a few vegetables, and made something new. “I don’t know about this,” she said, “I just threw it together.” It was delicious, of course, because of her years of practice in the kitchen.

What I can do is teach. After thirty years, I know certain subjects forward and backward. But students always come up with new questions, and I’ve found that when you’ve really learned something ¾ to the point where you don’t have to think about what comes next ¾ then you find that you have room to play around with it.

They call it “playing” music, and my wife talks about “playing” in the kitchen. I play with words and ideas. When you know something well from long experience and practice, you begin to see it in new ways. You know where its parts go, where the spaces are, how things relate to one another. Then, you can play with it. You can look around and say, “What if I shrink this space, or put this thing in contact with that one?” A student asks a question, and suddenly I see a connection between part of our topic and some other subject, and I have an answer and maybe a whole new topic.

One way that wisdom develops is from playing around with what you know. With the wisdom that comes from experience, you realize you don’t always have to do things the same way. You see possible new patterns and combinations. Wisdom is not just a static set of insights, but a dynamic unfolding of experiential learning in new situations. You have to know what goes with what and how things work; but once you do, you can play with it and discover new combinations, startling and fresh. Wisdom grows from both practice and play.

My family is one of storytellers. In moments of sadness or celebration and all times in between, we tell stories. We tell stories of the present and we re-tell stories of the past. We tell the stories of others and we tell stories from different points of view in the same story. I hear stories of members of my family I never even knew, and their stories shape my story. The stories of my family remind me who I am.

In Jesus’ final hours with his closest followers, he promised that God would send an Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to be with them forever. In describing the Holy Spirit, Jesus said that the Spirit will teach the disciples, but Jesus also said that the Spirit will remind them of all that Jesus himself said to them. Jesus’ description of the Holy Spirit is one of fresh, continuing revelation and one of remembrance.

I find great comfort in the image of the Spirit as a bearer of holy memory, a storyteller. The Christian faith is one of telling and re-telling stories. Our church calendar guides us through the story of our faith, year after year. We recite prayers, read scriptures, and rehearse traditions, recognizing that the past is as important as the present in living our faith.

Just as the early followers of Christ needed reminding, we too need God’s help in remembering who we are. In a culture whose memory is often short, moving always to the next thing, the still, small voice of the Spirit whispers an invitation to remember. “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” “You are not left an orphan.” “I am with you.” The Spirit of memory calls us to remember who we are and from where we came. It is in the remembering that we are able to retain our identity and receive fresh words from God.

Pentecost, you see, reminds us that Christ is with us now in and through the Holy Spirit. Why get antsy about the date of his return and the consummation of God’s purposes for humankind? Such antsyness is not new, of course. The first disciples already were afflicted with it. They wanted to know, “Lord, will you restore the Kingdom to Israel at this time?” Jesus had to clue them in about the coming Pentecost. “It’s none of your business to know the times (chronoi) or occasions (kairoi) the Father has placed in his own power. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all Judaea, Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:6-8).

Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) captured better this directive of the Risen Christ in his longing for a “New Pentecost.” In an address at the conclusion of the first session of Vatican Council II, he spoke of his yearning for “a Pentecost that will increase the Church’s wealth of spiritual strength and extend her maternal influence and saving power to every sphere of human endeavor” [The Encyclicals and Other Messages of John XIII (Washington, DC: TPS Press, 1964), 444]. Did it happen? Not in the sense of a finalizing of Christ’s mission, to be sure. But it did in the same way the first Pentecost signaled a remarkable beginning that hasn’t and won’t stop so long as human life lasts. May we pray for a “New Pentecost” every day and not worry about the End.

“Wisdom cannot enter if our lives are consumed with surviving, getting things done, and exercising competency. Indeed, if those endeavors are laced with greed, anger, jealousy, envy, and lust for power and status, they become toxic and dangerous,” posits Wright. Describe, using specific examples, how such endeavors can prevent us from receiving God’s wisdom.

A reflection question accompanies each article published in the Weavings journal. For more information about Weavings Reading Groups and how they might work for you, see.

What is the price of wisdom for the people of God? “[W]here shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding. . .” for people of faith? (Job 28:12). From news report to news report, and sermon to conversation, I realize that one of the interior litmus tests I keep applying to the reaction of my heart and soul to what is going on in the world or outside my office door is whether or not I see change in the direction of wisdom. But then, when I try to articulate or describe to others what wisdom looks or feels like to me, my “results” seem far less scientific or certain than I want them to be. I begin to gesture more than speak. My words don’t fit well around my emotions and beliefs, at least not well enough to speak clearly.

And yet, I do believe in wisdom, not just ordinary-everyday wisdom, but I believe that there is extraordinary-spiritual wisdom that I may not ever be able to articulate well, but I am nonetheless drawn toward it by the mystery, guidance, and power of God. And this wisdom, this “strange wisdom, “ as author David Rensberger describes it in our first article of the issue, is the wisdom of great price that “leads, in the end, to putting one’s confidence in God, not in oneself.”[1]

So I invite you to share here where you see signs of God’s wisdom being attended to. Or to share how you determine, as best you can, where and how wisdom can be found for the sake of our shared world and creation. Or simply tell us about persons who, to you, give evidence to the wisdom of God.

My daughter has a little fan that she absolutely loves to use. It’s the kind made of little wooden slats, painted red with white flowers on it. It is just one of those things that has captured her imagination. She dances with it, fans herself, flicks it open, and hides her face behind it when she doesn’t want to answer one of my many “mom” questions.

One night around bedtime she realized, to her horror, that she had left the fan outside at the top of the hill in our backyard. The security light at the back of our house doesn’t shine very far up into the yard, and it is a dark, rocky walk up an uneven stone path to get to the top. My daughter burst into tears at the thought of having to go outside in the dark to get the fan, but was even more fearful of leaving it out there.

“Don’t worry, “ I told her. “I’ll go with you and we will take a flashlight.”

As we made our way up the yard, stepping from one stone to another, we could not see very well where we were headed. But we just kept putting one foot in front of another, moving out into the little pool of light made by our trusty flashlight. At the top of the hill we had to search around for a while to locate the fan, but finally we found it on the low stone wall.

It strikes me now that this is often the way we move forward in faith. Jesus has told us where we are headed, and that by faith we make our way. But sometimes we can only see what is right before us in little pools of light made available by prayer, scripture, breath — one faith step after another. And it is good to remember that we are not alone.

Christ is Risen!

This is the message that was proclaimed around the world this past Sunday. This is the message that continues to be proclaimed for the fifty days following Easter Sunday. The Easter season is not over—it includes the three faith foundations of Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost. In Christian worship, every Sunday is considered a celebration of the resurrection, and now, this fifty day season is considered to be one long Sunday – an extended resurrection celebration.

This begs the question: How then do we celebrate this long Easter appropriately? Perhaps a closer look at the Easter story can help us to answer this question.

The first thing I notice is that the resurrection is like a divine game of “hide and seek.” Jesus constantly appears and disappears. He keeps surprising his followers, and often they don’t even recognize him. I find this to be a challenging reminder that Jesus cannot be “nailed down”. As followers of Christ, are tempted to think we know him and understand him better than others. We find it all too easy to exclude those who disagree with us, and convince ourselves that they’ve missed the boat.

But, the “hide and seek” Jesus reminds us that he refuses to be co-opted into our agendas, groups or belief systems. The only appropriate response to the Easter miracle is humble adoration, acknowledging as Isaiah did that, “My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the LORD. And My ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.” (Isaiah 55:8, NLT)

What this means is that our worship needs to be filled with awe and humility, and with a new desire to recognize God’s greatness and glory. This is true of every Sunday, but in the aftermath of resurrection, we have a special opportunity to embrace this humbling journey. It also means that we need to make a new commitment to living by faith, recognizing that ultimately our lives are not in our own hands, but in the nail-pierced hands of the risen Christ.

The second thing I notice in the resurrection story is that the first witness to the resurrection is not one of the “inner circle” of disciples – Peter, James and John. The first person that Jesus encounters after he is risen is Mary Magdalene – a woman with a dubious past, who was brought to vibrant life during Jesus’ ministry. As a woman, she would not have qualified to testify in a court of law, and so it’s shocking that Jesus should choose her as the first one to testify to the resurrection. So unlikely is she as a witness, that the apostles are unable to believe her at first. Peter and John both run to the tomb to check it out for themselves (perhaps feeling a little peeved that Jesus didn’t choose them to be first?).

What this means is that the resurrection continues the work Jesus did before his death—including the outcast, raising up the oppressed and breaking down our arbitrary lines of class, race, gender, orientation, economic and educational status, and religion. As we worship, then, we are called to embody the resurrection life that is available to all, and that includes all. We are also called to seek ways to bring that life to those who most need it – the poor, the excluded, the wounded and the grieving.

May the next fifty days not be just a celebration, but also an offering of practical Christ-honoring and justice-bringing service. Resurrection is about the offer of new life. So, too, must the worship that flows from it be.

But, what makes this week important is not just the remembering, or even the understanding we might gain. This week is what theologian Marcus Borg calls a “thin place” – a place where the ‘line’ between spiritual and physical realities grows thin. It is an opportunity for us not just to remember Jesus, but to encounter him. It is a moment when the stories we read can become our own lived experience. If we allow this week to do its work, everything can change.

For Jesus, the cross was not something he went through alone. We celebrate that Jesus “died for us”, offering us life, forgiveness and the hope of heaven, but there is more to it than that. Peter says it this way:

“To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.” (1 Peter 2:21 NIV).

This is a disturbing thought, but until we embrace our own crosses, we are not yet followers of Christ. Perhaps we can explore three ways this challenges us.

Forgiving

We know that Jesus’ dying words of forgiveness were for us. We also know that Jesus calls us to forgive, although we all find excuses when it gets too hard. But, Jesus doesn’t ever limit forgiveness. He was betrayed by a close friend, and disowned by another. All but a few ran away when he was arrested, and even people he had taught and healed called for his execution. Yet, Jesus never utters a word of condemnation. Whatever pain others have inflicted on you, the cross calls you to the liberating work of forgiving.

Not Justifying

Do you have a compulsive need to justify yourself? Do you work really hard to explain to others why you are right? It’s natural to do this, but it breaks down relationships, because in making ourselves right, we make others wrong. Jesus refused to do this. In spite of the accusations he remains silent, allowing his life to speak for itself.  Perhaps this week you can try to let your life speak for you, and give up the quest to justify.

Being Kind

I am always deeply moved by Jesus’ kindness in the midst of his own pain. He has the compassion to speak kind words to a dying thief beside him. He has the kindness to commend his grieving mother to the care of John, his beloved disciple. This challenges me to refuse to use my pain as an excuse for unkindness. Rather, I am challenged to make a new commitment to compassion.

As we reflect on Jesus’ suffering through this significant week, we can open our hearts and embrace the cross, not just as something Jesus did for us, but as something he calls us to do for him and others. And if we can make the commitment to follow Jesus’ sacrificial example, our worship in Holy Week really will change everything.

Born into human history in the fullness of time —for our salvation and the redemption of the world—Jesus lived, suffered, and died our death. And, God “raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand…, and has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” (Ephesians 1:20, 22-23.) This is the Paschal Mystery for which the season of Lent prepares us, the mystery that Easter and the Great Fifty Days celebrate.

At the heart of the Christian faith and our life together is our entry into the life, teaching, suffering, death, resurrection, ascension and Spirit-giving of Jesus Christ. Lent calls us to face in the direction toward which God’s embodied love looks. As the writer of John proclaims, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (1:14)

The Paschal Mystery points to inexhaustible the range of meanings found in the saving work of Christ and in the church’s participation in his life poured out into the world—into our lives, struggles, hopes and disappointments, sorrows and deepest joys. My favorite definition of the Christian liturgical year is “keeping time with Jesus.” Lent is a way of keeping time with the story that unfolds from Ash Wednesday through Easter to Pentecost: the journey from ashes to fire.

The Paschal Mystery embraces and sustains us on our way.

Karen’s experiences cause her to view the Passion through the eyes of Mary, a parent struggling with the unbearable burden of watching one’s child suffer. As I think of Mary at the foot of the cross, I am stunned, as if for the first time, by the tragedy and pain of Jesus’ death, a pain experienced by Jesus as well as by those who loved him.

Mary knelt devastated at the foot of the cross, and God, the Divine Parent, grieved there as well. For God was not only with Mary in her suffering, but God’s own heart was breaking at the suffering of God’s child, Jesus. God did not merely sympathize with Mary; God experienced the pain firsthand.

God suffering on the cross, God mourning at the foot of the cross. Both reveal one of the most deeply moving and comforting truths I know about the Divine: despite our position in suffering, God is with us. While through Lent I am confronted with my own sin and mortality, I cling to the promise of God’s presence, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

Loving, Compassionate God, be with those who are experiencing suffering of all kinds. Please bring peace where there is turmoil, relief where there is pain, and comfort where there is fear. May the promise of Easter’s triumph and the peace of the presence of God be with us now and always. Amen.

We are summoned to fast and pray through the astonishing images given in Scripture this season. As Jesus faced temptation, so must we. As he struggled with human misunderstanding, so must we. As he healed the sick and feed the hungry, so must we pray and work for healing and for feeding the hungry. As he faced mortality and human weakness, so must we. As he steadfastly journeyed toward Jerusalem, so we must face the world’s conflict of good and evil. All of this is prayer. As some in the early Church have said, the life of the Christian is one long continual prayer.

Our double journey unfolds the whole range of our humanity before God and neighbor. We go the way of Christ’s liturgy. Take heart! The One who bids us follow has gone this way and will not fail us.

“Is our rectitude, our obedience to God’s laws, even our service to God because we love God or because we are afraid of what God will do if we are disobedient?”

As I read these lines from Bonnie Thurston in her article “The Wrong Question: A Reflection on the Book of Job,” in Weavings, XXVI/2 “Cross Purposes,” I immediately thought of my rituals of morning and evening prayer. Since I first learned to pray, kneeling awkwardly by my bedside as a child, I have prayed a similar set of prayers each morning and evening. While the rest of my prayer life has grown and changed over the years, my morning and evening prayers remain remarkably the same.

I am a creature of habit. I get ready each morning and evening in a familiar pattern, one step predictably following the next. Likewise, my dawn and dusk prayers follow a path, an order. I include the same requests, the same people. Some may be added, but none are left out. And though there is beauty and comfort in the repetition of my prayers, Thurston’s words call me to question my motivation in such routine.

When one step in my morning routine is re-arranged or skipped, something gets forgotten; I make a mistake, or I do not do the things I mean to do.  So, I do my best to stay in my routine so that all will be well. And maybe, if I am honest, a bit of the same rationale drives my prayer life. I carry my loved ones to God in prayer, perhaps not to lay them down before God, but to make sure God remembers. Fear and anxiety urge me to recite the names of those I care most about so that God will protect them, care for their needs. Then, at its worst, my ritual of prayer becomes no more than superstition. In those moments of fear and doubt I pray, as Thurston identifies, because I am afraid of what will happen if I don’t.

But my rituals of prayer and intercession need not be abandoned due to my own lapses in faith. Though I am prone to doubt and fear, God still hears, still listens, still moves. So, at their best, my routines of intercession become opportunities for faith. God bids me, “Come, you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” And on the days when I hear that call most clearly, I whisper the names of those I love and the cares that burden my heart to God. I pray not because I must, not because something bad will happen if I do not. I pray instead because the ritual allows me to identify and remember the power and love of God, who hears my prayers.

Understanding and compassionate God, thank you for hearing my prayers, even when I come with so little faith. Increase my faith and allow me to surrender to your loving embrace. Amen.

Downright goodness is what Jesus insisted upon when he spoke about almsgiving, prayer, and fasting (Matt. 6:1-18). He was not negating these religious practices. He was teaching that an intimate relationship with God ought to result in unselfconscious expressions of them. When we practice them, we should do so without calling attention to ourselves—indeed, without even thinking about them. We should become so sensitized to and conscious of God’s mysterious presence in our every thought and action that we would do them automatically.

Jesus told the Parable of Kingdom Character in Matthew 25:31-46 to make unmistakable what authentic spirituality is. In it, the king invited into the kingdom those who had fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked, taken strangers into their homes, and, in short, met human need wherever or in whatever form they found it. They were goodness in action.

They were those good trees bearing good fruit (Matt. 7:17-18). They were people who did the will of the heavenly Father and not those who just said, “Lord! Lord!” (7:21).  They were the wise who built on rock rather than on sand (7:24-27).

In our humanness, we can only strive to act with complete selflessness. But strive, we must. A few “ordinary saints” sometimes inspire us. Mother Teresa of Calcutta spent her life tending the dying, and called it doing “something beautiful for God.”

What beautiful thing can you do for God today?

We begin our Lenten landscape journey in the rather bland monochromatic place of dust and ashes.  Whenever I clean out the fireplace, attempting to clean and create space for a new fire, I am reminded that ashes, just as dust are difficult to gather into one place. Ashes and dust are messy business and the more we attempt to clean our homes and perhaps our very lives of the messiness of dust and ash, the more it simply falls softly into a different space.

On Ash Wednesday, many of us will gather as communities of faith to be marked with the sign of a palm-ash cross on our foreheads. The palms that last year heralded the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem in worship have now turned to ashes that mark the beginning of our Lenten journey, of turning to face the shadows of the cross. On our way towards the cross we will walk with Jesus as he encounters a variety of terrain but we begin here, in the essence of our mortal bodies—ashes and dust.

For some of us, being reminded of our mortality may seem quite morbid but there is hope to be found among the ashes of our existence. Hildegard of Bingen was a German mystic of the twelfth century who was a writer, poet, composer, innovator, and person who longed for a deep relationship with God. Her words remind us that there is nothing that needs to hold us back in living full lives as we remember that we began as dust and we will return to dust. Rather than being afraid, let us embrace each day fully with our whole selves as we walk through the various landscapes of life. Where will Jesus meet us this Lent? Perhaps we will meet him at the rocky springs beside the well with the Samaritan woman (John 4:7-30) or in the mudflats where Jesus is waiting to heal us as he spits into the dust of earth (John 9:1-41).

Prayer: God of mercy, we hear your call to return to you with all of our heart. As we reflect upon our response to this call, free us of our fear so that we may follow Christ through all the landscapes we will are invited to enter this season of Lent. In the name of Christ we pray, AMEN.

1 The Ways of the Lord: Hildegard of Bingen, foreword by Homer Hickam, edited by Emilie Griffin; translation by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, selections from the 1990 Paulist Press translation of Scivias (Harper One: New York 2005).

Before I joined the editorial staff of Weavings, most of my vocational writing took the shape of sermons. In fact, it is through my preaching life that I formed lifelong “friendships” with writers like Barbara Brown Taylor, Howard Thurman, Wendy Wright, Evelyn Underhill, Glenn Hinson, Basil Pennington, and many others whose beautiful, intricate words about things holy and gospel-shaped draped across the pages of Weavings and guided me into my call to ministry.

My seminary training was superb, and I still have all the notes I took in every homiletics course I could squeeze into the all-too-brief years of divinity school that prepared me for ordination. Still, every time I opened the scriptures from which I was to preach, I longed for more than commentaries, class notes, dictionaries, and the sky outside my study window. I wanted a communion of poets, saints, thinkers, and theologians who could push me beyond my own perspective. I wanted to listen to others who, like me, treasure words and images, history and justice, not only from my own tradition and generation, but past boundaries and experiences I bring to the pulpit.

Weavings became one of the most valuable preaching resources in my library. It still is. I did not approach the little journal for this work of proclamation. I read it because its writers and artists fed my soul. They became my spiritual guides and built up my library through their footnotes and references. It was a slow cultivation, this mentoring of the preacher in me by people, most of whom, I would never meet. But to those of you who are or care for the preachers among us, I urge you to consider the preaching possibilities that our contributors inspire.

As I drove past the bulbs, wheelbarrows, and soil, I began to think of Noah, carefully crafting an ark on perhaps dry and sunny days. I thought of Abram and Sarai daring to plan for an improbable child. I imagined the Israelites’ ridiculous faith that the promised land might one day be in sight. And yet believe, they did, and prepare, they did.

God has a habit of calling us to plant now, in the frozen days of winter, for spring beauty. Despite the fact that racism and fear often seem in control, I hear God invite me to advocate for the rights and well-being of our brothers and sisters from other countries who now call our country home. Even in the face of a worsening environmental crisis, God dares me to imagine a new way of living with creation. These and other efforts that some call a drop in the proverbial bucket, God calls building the kingdom of God.

So we take a step of faith. We cover the tiny seed with cool dirt. We spend weeks watering and tending a pile of not much at all. And then, when we are sure our work has been in vain, the first tender, green chute appears. And the absurd message of the gospel becomes clear—just when it seems most impossible, new life can and will come.

How has 2011 been for you so far? After the first month, do you already feel like you’re falling behind? Or are you on track, and ready to go into the rest of the year with confidence and faith?

There’s always so much hype around a New Year that it can be tempting to just ignore the whole thing. After all it’s just a few numbers on a calendar, isn’t it? Well, I want to suggest that there’s another way to look at New Year. I believe that it can be an incredible opportunity, or even better – a sacrament. The sacraments are ordinary things that are part of our everyday lives – bread, wine, water – that God fills with God’s presence and purpose in order to touch us and transform us. One of the reasons for the sacraments is to teach us to view all things – every situation, every person, every moment – as a potential sacrament.

So, what is the “sacrament” of New Year? I believe it is a time when we are called to remember one of the most liberating truths of the Gospel – that God is a God of new beginnings. Right from the first, whenever someone failed, or got lost, or was hurt in some way, God was there offering a new start. Abram, Hagar, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, and the prophets all experienced new beginnings and were able to touch others with God’s grace because of it. Through Christ, many broken and desperate people were given new lives, new hope and new connection with God. God is the God of new beginnings, and New Year offers us the invitation to experience this again for ourselves.

As Methodists, we have an annual worship celebration that teaches us to claim this promise and experience God’s grace and presence again. It’s known as the Covenant Service, and it’s a time when we acknowledge our need of God’s guidance and resources, when we place our lives at God’s disposal and where we remind ourselves that everything is really about God’s Reign among us. By the time you read this you will probably already have shared in a Covenant Service in 2011, but perhaps I can invite you to cast your mind back, and reflect again on the challenge and the blessing of the commitment you have made.

Whatever last year brought you, we’re now in the early stages of a whole new year. Yes, it’s just numbers on a calendar, but it creates a space for us to pause, reflect, take stock and reset our life’s direction – make a new covenant. It creates a way for us to lay aside what has passed and start again.

Even if 2011 has already started badly for you, it’s still not too late to begin again. Each month offers another new beginning. Each week, each day is a blessed gift from the God of second chances. How would it be if you embraced this sacrament this year? Imagine taking each new day, each new week, each new month, each new season, as a new beginning and opening yourself to the hope and possibility that God offers. This one thought, lived and applied, really can change your entire year!

I was tired and could not even seem to pray, but grace came anyway. As I sat there utterly uninspired (and beginning to feel a bit sorry for myself), my mind was drawn to the names and faces of people who have showed me their strength, stamina, and faith. I recalled Bible study groups and spiritual retreats where I had come into intimate contact with others who have had to find strength they did not think they had in order to meet life’s challenges. I remembered their stories—some which only now begin to touch me and register fully because of my current experiences. I went back to bed beginning to feel refreshed, beginning to find faith and hope again. Knowing other Christians who struggle, fall, hang on, and surrender to God got me through that dark night. Knowing we are all real people, it is needless and unhelpful to idolize others, but taking each other’s strengths as glimmers of light in the darkness is essential. I believe this is a very real part of living in the Body of Christ.

More than ever, I see the wisdom and true need in attending spiritual retreats, being part of a church community, participating in study groups and prayer groups.  The true gift of this kind of communal spiritual nourishment may show up immediately, or may come in the form of unexpected hope on a dreary winter’s night.

Prayer for this day:
Lord, make me strong that others may also find strength.

Before I became a monk, I had never had a heated dispute with anyone old enough to be my grandfather.  I had never been in the right but backed down anyway, because I could no longer stand to see myself prize winning arguments over being kind.  By now, in this my sixth year of praying at South Carolina’s Mepkin Abbey, I’ve done both.

I don’t deal well with suffering.  More precisely, I am no great supporter of how God deals with suffering.  In the Abbey, God does well what we monks merely attempt: he spends much of the day in silence.  The resemblance serves as a mirror, to show us where we fall into emotional, psychological or spiritual ruts.  Of course, we run from him, then he confronts us anew until we’re out of energy to evade, ready to be honest with ourselves.

“Elegy: What Willie Taught Me” is the result, in my own life, of one such conflict.  Over a period of several months, my inner monologue used several unanswered, existential questions as an excuse to be, quite loudly, impatient; first with the brothers, but also with God.  I wanted easy answers.  I wanted to plunk quarters in the vending machine of life and have Hostess^® Cupcakes come out.

God doesn’t work that way.  He’s unconditional.  He leaves systematic evils in place, violent people in the world and old monks’ foibles intact so that we’ll learn to serve people as they are, to live in the world as it is.  “Elegy” showed me I’d mistaken God’s silence for indifference.  The last line of “Elegy” came to mind when I realized that, in fact, God is silent because he’s listening. I got the message: “Go and do likewise.”

*The poem “Elegy” appears in Weavings: Cross Purposes.

“The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” –Psalm 19:1-4

Our wonderfully wooded lot means that fall and winter bring a thick blanket of leaves to our yard. Though we enjoy the crunch of leaves under foot, on a mild winter afternoon my husband and I decided to attend to the raking. We worked our way quietly around the yard, pile after pile. I soon found myself fatigued and abandoned my task for the soft ground below. Stretching out on my back, I allowed my eyes to drift closed.

Somewhere between waking and sleeping I stumbled upon a deep, listening rest. I heard the song of friendly birds flitting from bush to shrub. My husband’s nearby rake prodded and pushed leaves, scraping and clinking, while the wind played its own game, lifting leaves skyward from carefully collected piles. As I took in the sounds floating over and around, I began to feel the deep dampness of the earth press against my legs. Despite the layers of dry grass and leaves, the rich moisture of the soil made its way to my skin. I heard the cool whisper of life and remembered the intricacy of creation.

The same ground my boots hurry over each day without ever noticing daily proclaims God’s great majesty, sings of the wonder of creation. I did not hear the ground’s testimony because I was looking or listening. I only caught the passing word because I lingered. And in lingering I was fortunate enough to hear—caught completely by surprise—creation pouring forth its speech, bearing witness to God’s mighty works.

I wonder what kind of life I would have to lead for God to say something similar about me, for God to be surprised, in a good way, about the places at which I am showing up and the ways I am pushing against whatever expectations God has grown accustomed to having of me. Maybe God is getting used to finding me in Church on Sundays but would be pleasantly surprised to find me teaching Sunday school or tithing regularly. Maybe God is used to finding me amongst my wonderful group of friends who share the same faith and seem to have the same values and lifestyle. But maybe God would be caught off guard if I started spending time with people who were not like me spiritually, socio-economically, and culturally. I don’t know. I am thinking aloud. Maybe surprising God and keeping God on God’s proverbial toes would simply take a number of small gestures of stretching my communal boundaries, of asking more honest questions aloud and seeking discipline and accountability in my efforts to change a few habits. It would be different for each of us depending on our gifts, our season of life and how the Spirit convicts us. But it’s worth asking the question isn’t it? Where would God be surprised and relieved of heart to find ME? If these little gestures and changes in habit lead me to new places and keep me open to surprise epiphanies maybe God and I will meet one another where we both least expect it.

1.    Where do you imagine God would be surprised, in a good way, to find you?
2.    What small gestures or habits would you need to practice or quit in order to find yourself in new places, open for new growth and new glimpses of God?
3.    Is there one person in your life with whom you can share this devotional and reflect on the questions? In other words, who helps keep you accountable?

For more from Emuma Okoro, go to Reluctant Pilgrim.

I reflect on what has been done and left undone. For a moment I dwell on one thing done— my first writing for Weavings.

I don’t even remember the first time I encountered Weavings. I do remember the neutral earth tones, the texture and weight of paper, the spare lettering. I remember just sitting with the physicality of Weavings—savoring, anticipating, and, finally, opening the pages and myself for the text, the inspired messages.

You see, Weavings was rare. I never knew when I would see another issue. With our life style choices, subscriptions were not easily assumed. So I’d encounter a back issue here and there.

Over a decade ago we left our vibrant church community to live on Lake Superior. Initially it tore and emptied me – the loss of conversation, teachings, challenges and endeavors which sharpened and deepened my, and the communal, soul. One day at “The Exchange” (our new town’s response to poverty and waste), I discovered an armload of way-back issues of Weavings. In the quiet of our tiny lake-edge cabin, I lifted the bent coffee-stained covers. I was challenged, questioned, deepened, and companioned in the words of Glenn Hinson, Flora Slosson Wuellner, John Mogabgab, Marjorie Thompson, Parker Palmer and so many more. In one of those issues was a business reply postcard referring to the Upper Room’s Academy for Spiritual Formation. Knowing the card was obsolete, but wanting more of what I’d found in those old journals, I called the toll-free number.

Oh – actually a Two-Year Academy was about to begin in my state!
Oh – there was still room!
And, mmmm – I was on my way!

Those battered old Weavings launched me into life changing, spirit-forming community.

Now, Weavings looks different, it feels different, has some new names… and I am amazed and grateful to have contributed to this companion of my soul.

O God, help us to look with awe-laden eyes,
Let us hear with soft-edged hearts the first cries
of the New Year, of a new day,
that we may come running as if life,
fragile and tear-stained,
awaits us.

O Creator, lover of life,
What child has been born as Day this hour?
Stretched across heaven and earth,
Arms wide open
Waiting for us to return the embrace –
To count fingers and toes of light and rivers,
bird and flower,
woman, man, and child.
Straining to hear a whispered word –
A song of peace,
A hymn of promise,
A lullaby of justice.

God who was, now is, and will still be,
Show us the way of newness –
conceived by Your desire,
born of Your Love’s labor,
made visible,
embraceable.

O Lord,
In this now toddling year,
we move, outstretched in hope, toward You.
Amen

Pageant

O Christmas saints, come gather here
in my Bethlehem:
let the miracle unfold in me.

Come, Gabriel, interrupting angel,
and tell the innocent Virgin within me
that she shall bear holiness into the world.

Come, dreams, and haunt me with the courage
to marry the blessing I would spurn.

Come, tender Joseph, and walk with me
along this road of not knowing.

Come, natal star, build your nest in my darkness,
and guide me to seek, and keep seeking.
Mark my life with your promise
that beauty may be found here.

Come, magi, from your wanderings,
and teach me to follow;
teach me to behold.

Come heavenly choir, breathing wonder:
Astonish my routine. Awaken me.
Send me into this village
looking, looking.

Come, shepherds and all who are shabby and shady,
and show me how to recognize glory
swaddled in the mundane.

Come, Holy Child, and be alive in me,
wordlessly, helplessly
drawing out all my love.

O Christmas miracle,
come to the little shed of my life;
enfold me in your strangeness
and make me a house of wonder.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a poem about the many communions I have tasted. In a myriad of ways, I feel the Holy Spirit has brought me close to the fellowship of seekers, some human, some animal

, some made from the earth, and all held in the Spirit of Love who gathers us on this planet. I sent it to members of my clergy writing group. To my surprise, I was asked to read it at a retreat the other day during Communion as we passed the bread and juice to each other, surrounded by the prairie, now bending its head to be covered soon by winter garlands. Perhaps you will find it meaningful to you as well as you imagine all the ways the Holy Spirit has visited you in this last year.

Communions

I have tasted wine in many communions,
and eaten bread broken in many ways –
the wine came from crimson rivers,
blue pools and white ice in sanctuaries
where rubbed smooth kneeling rails,
river rocks, and the black jet sides
of ocean drenched cliffs spoke
words of intinction from the thin pearl air
and people who came and went wept
for lives they lived or didn’t live.

The bread sometimes left as crumbs
at the pathway of deer and birds,
or in the dark hands that prayed
in the kneading, whose prayers rose
and met the whispers on wet lips,
for those who took it as a symbol,
and for those who felt Him rise in their flesh –
it was all a sacrament, a sign of another breath,
a way to love, a healing from sun burnt grain,
the rain that grew it, the day that stretched to hold the stalks.

I have tasted wine in many communions,
and they were not all churches,
but the wingspan of the red shouldered hawk
in the lavender morning when the bees fly again,
and in the damp bark of forest wood under the moss;
there were times when I was alone, the simple dignity
of stillness and found by deep rememberings;
there was the moment my child gave me a wild flower,
and when measured, it was the universe.

Grant me today, Lord,

a new heaven and a new earth.

Grant me the wonder of a child who for the first time

opens her eyes upon the world;

the joy of a child who discovers

Your splendor in each object,

in each encountered being,

a reflection of Your glory.

Grant me the joy of one whose steps are new.

Grant me the happiness of one whose life is each day

fresh and innocent and hopeful, each day pardoned.

Grant me to see everything in Christ—

trees and fields, homes and tasks, animals and people—

and to be thankful,

0 my God!

Michael Bouttier, Prayers for My Village, an English translation by Lamar Williamson (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1994), 25.

We humans have expanded without limit. There are too many of us here; our busy-ness needs the perpetual blare of man-made light. The night sky seems a small thing to forfeit and forget.

As if for the first time, I noted again the almost three-dimensional impression created by the brightest stars, which seem to stand out boldly in front of the velvet-black depths of space, so close in their sparkle it almost seems as if one might touch them.

I didn’t choose to feel awe; it thrust itself upon me, standing out there in the chilly night, mouth literally agape at the the magic, ghostly blur of the Pleides and the gauzy stretch of the Milky Way as it marches across the sky. Once again, I was so small, so utterly insignificant in the vastness of the universe, but at the same moment belonged profoundly to it all—exactly what Albert Einstein called “cosmic religious feeling.”

One of the traditional Advent themes is Exile: Come Immanuel; ransom…Israel…in lowly exile here . The holy Story tells us we “fell” from Paradise into an exile not only from God but from the very “face” of the creation itself.

Is it a pure coincidence that atheism is most prevalent where the full panoply of the night sky cannot be seen? How many are the ways, I wonder, that our lifestyle itself—our distraction-saturated, Muzak-charged, craving-driven lifestyle—eclipses what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “dearest freshness deep down things” and exiles us from the astonishing thereness of a world charged with awe? Our ransom from this exile is, I suspect, as close as the night sky.

If we could but see it.

For an expanded version of this blogpost, and further postings on this Advent theme, go to Provocative Ponderings.

Read the entire article at Reluctant Pilgrim e-newsletter, November 28, 2010.

Scripture and tradition are therefore seasoned with admonitions to be vigilant. We are to be like a watchman on the ramparts of a city, scanning the dark sky for hints of dawn and the safety of morning’s light (Ps. 130.6); like wise servants prepared for the arrival of the householder (Luke 12:35-40); like those who know the hour has come to wake from sleep (Rom. 13:11). Through vigilant attention, says eighteenth-century priest Jean-Pierre de Caussade, we may discern the “profound mysteries” of God’s activity behind the veil of creaturely activity that conceals them.²

Vigilance is poised attentiveness to the spiritual environment, sensitive awareness of the presence and purpose of God in our midst, uninhibited responsiveness to the flow of Love’s energy at work in the world, constant resistance to temptations that deform that love. For Philotheos of Sinai, such alertness “cleanses the conscience and makes it lucid.”³ Vigilance is the spiritual posture of Advent, when the soul is bent forward in anticipation of the One who is to come. And vigilance is also the spiritual perceptiveness of Christmas, when the soul recognizes the One who is to come in the Bethlehem newborn swaddled in ordinariness.

John the Solitary, writing his “Letter to Hesychius” during the first half of the fifth century, offers wisdom for our consideration when he counsels Hesychius to “choose vigilance, even in preference to fasting, for vigilance makes the understanding luminous, it keeps the intellect awake, it makes the body still, it is more beneficial than all other labours.”⁴ May we come to discover these benefits in our own experience.

Notes

¹T. S. Eliot, “The Four Quartets,” in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, 194: “We had the experience but missed the meaning. . . .”

²Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, trans. and intro. John Beevers (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1975), 36.

³St. Philotheos of Sinai (9-10^th century?), “Forty Texts on Watchfulness,” in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. III, compiled St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, trans. and ed. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), 25 (Saying #24).

⁴John the Solitary, “Letter to Hesychius,” in The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life, trans. and intro. Sebastian Brock (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Pubns., 1987), 87 (para. #23).

If there was anything that John was good at, it was seeing the signs. From the first encounter with Jesus before they were even born to the final denial that he was the Christ while pointing to the One who was still to come, John embodies Jesus’ call to be alert and aware of the signs of God’s coming. Even when he began to question his faith, he sent his disciples to find Jesus and receive the signs that would set his heart at rest again.

John’s message, and his mindful example, are the heart of the Advent journey. God’s arrival is always heralded, but not in the loud, dramatic manner of the world’s dignitaries. Rather, God seems to play a hide-and-seek game, leaving subtle evidence and enticing us to follow the clues to a divine encounter. The Advent season calls us to embrace the adventure and the playfulness of this journey. John’s gift to us, if we will listen, is to show us where and how to look in order to see the signs of God’s presence. In the midst of a world in crisis and fear, this is a valuable gift indeed.

Preparation of the Heart

The first word that John speaks was, and still is, that of preparation. John clearly proclaimed that the hearts that see the signs of God’s coming are hearts that have done the work of preparation, in self-examination and repentance. Advent both reminds us of this work, and enables us to do it, if we will just give ourselves the time and space – metaphorically following John out to the desert – away from the usual busy-ness and excess of this season. In your personal spiritual practice, and in your worship services in this season, can you make a little more space to allow the work of preparation to be done well?

A Change of Behaviour

The second word that John speaks was, and still is, one of change – to embrace the values of God’s reign, and make significant, long term changes in behaviour – from self-seeking short-sightedness to the world-changing practices of justice and compassion. Unlike Christmas greeting-card messages of “peace on earth” or shallow New Year resolutions that fade as quickly as the thinking that created them, Advent calls us to do the real work of transformation – taking note of the impact of our actions on others, and thoughtfully and deliberately choosing a new way. Can you create opportunities for mindful change to occur as you journey through this season?

Advent, while challenging us to do serious, transformative work, can be a time of divine surprise and true playfulness. If we are willing to join the game, we will find that even when Jesus’s presence seems hidden, we nevertheless see the signs and feel the nearness of God.

But the change in landscape transformed more than just the trees themselves. My entire view of the world around me became new. In the vibrant days of summer, my gaze stopped at the thick canopy above. But as the foliage vanishes, the normal view has as well. I can now see deep into the ravine behind my home and can trace the line of the ridge beyond. The afternoon sun, no longer filtered through shades of green, fills the halls clearly. The ordinary passing of a season reveals a new world in my first winter here.

As the landscape around me is altered by the changing season, the arrival of Advent reframes my world as well. As I travel the familiar road of Advent, I clear away the overgrown brush and foliage in my life. I begin to see glimpses of God’s presence, often hidden by the business of life, as though seeing the rise and fall of the ridgeline for the first time.

When I arrived home at 7:30 p.m., I located my camera and a flashlight and set up my viewing station on the patio. Then I watched.

At 8:45 I detected a slight swelling of the pods. By 9:20, they were opening ever so slightly.  10:15 brought the first hint of the beauty that had been hidden within, and a wondrous fragrance washed over the patio. (I had forgotten that Ellen said this would occur at a certain stage in the blooming.) At 11:30, I beheld intricately designed, magnificent white blossoms.  They were glorious, and I was thrilled. I was also ready for bed.

First thing the next morning I headed to the patio. The blooms had faded just as prophesied, but my wonder had not. My experience the night before hung over me bringing a peaked awareness of God at work in the world and in my life. In the stillness of the night, without fanfare or fireworks, God’s creative work had continued—even as I slept.  So I ask myself, with a God so caring and ever attentive why do I worry and fret about tomorrow? Why don’t I just trust God’s benevolence and know that it is sufficient? Why do I let my heart be troubled—often by minutia?

I feel certain Ellen and Charlie didn’t expect the night-blooming cactus delivered to my patio to be a catalyst for spiritual renewal, but it has been.  Now more than ever before, I notice God at work in nature. And I see God at work in simple and lavish acts of kindness extended from one person to another. To see God’s goodness all around me, to know that it extends far beyond my sight and imagination, and to know it is never ceasing or sleeping quiets my worrisome mind.  And I let go of my anxiousness and relax in the wonder of God.

When I write, I always feel I am in relationship with that unceasing Spirit, the pilgrims of the spiritual life everywhere, and the faithfulness of the earth. It is like draping a prayer shawl, or cloak of many colors, around my inner self.  In one of the New Testament letters, the Apostle Paul, writing from prison, asks Timothy, “please do not forget to bring my coat when you come,”  (2 Tim. 4:13), and for me these lines always invoke the way our being in community covers us from the time of chill, the cold that seeps into our lives, sometimes in unexpected seasons. Do not let us forget to bring a coat for winter!  And we in the faith community understand that the coat we need most is each other. We enter this time of gratitude remembering the way others have stood for us. We enter Advent prepared again to celebrate the way that, in the heart of winter, new and abiding life reaches out for us and for the world.

I am big on happy endings. I like to see a movie or read a book that ties up all the loose ends and leaves me feeling happy, satisfied. Stories that end with ambiguity frustrate me. I am unsettled not because the art itself is not good, in fact such works are often the best I have encountered. I suspect those stories turn me off because they are too much like real life.

Perhaps that is also why I often find blogging difficult. For me, blogging is essentially about meaning making. As I sit down to write a blog entry, I reflect on the passing of days and weeks and search for glimpses of God’s presence, of revelation, or of clarity. But as I identify and process those events, I want to wrap them up. In doing so, I hope to understand events and contain or compartmentalize them. But as I sit to write in attempts to sort out the experiences of living, I am frustrated. My encounters defy easy categorization. I cannot summarize them. I am unable to clearly see the meaning. The happy ending does not always come. The thesis statement is not always apparent.

In his autobiographical writing, Frederick Buechner shares the realization that one cannot fix meanings to events because the meaning in our lives is incarnate, alive, changing (The Sacred Journey. New York: Harper Collins, 1982, 41). I find this to be true. As I write about my experiences of God and the world, I find the task to be akin to the working of a puzzle—turning each piece round and round, searching for its place in the picture, a picture that is itself always changing.

Do you who invented clocks?  Monks, so they could observe the canonical hours. So they would know when it was time to pray.  Muslims have a muezzin up in the minaret to call them to prayer five times a day.  What do you have? We  have a clock in our dining room that chimes every half hour.  For me it’s the monastery bell, calling me to prayer.

I like the Old Testament idea of the phylactery, the little box with the Shema that you’d strap around your wrist that would remind you to pray.  Remember the watches that used to beep on the hour?  When they first came out people set them to beep all the time and they were annoying.  I think they subconsciously suggested hurry and anxiety.  But for me they were phylacteries.  I let them remind me  to be prayerful in whatever I was doing.

I don’t hear those watches any more. But I hear cell phones.  And land phones.   Every time I hear a bell or phone, I hear it as a call to stop and be mindful of God’s gracious presence. I  often pray for whomever it is on the other end. I do the same with bird songs.

I have a Tibetan singing bowl on my desk, not exactly out of the way, so that I often bump into it—and when I do it rings, and reminds me to pray without ceasing.

What are your phylacteries, your reminders? What awakens you to God’s loving presence and calls you to prayer in the midst of your day?

Let the remembrance of Jesus be united to your every breath” the sixth century monk St. John Climacus urged…When anxiety grabs me by the throat I cannot will my lungs to relax.  In those times, surrendering is exactly what I cannot do.

—Deborah Smith Douglas, “Feathers on the Breath of God,” Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, XXV/4

Quite literally, Brother Luke prayed constantly.  He’d break from Lectio Divina or the Rosary only to think, hard, about what he wanted for supper, and he always ended up wanting the same things: Cream of Wheat, a small bowl of fruit, coffee.

Life for Luke was no different than it is for the rest of us. He had the capacity to obsess.  His uniqueness lay in the fact that he was a Trappist monk, whose advanced age had confined him to his bed.  Unimpeded by activity, his thoughts often became anxieties, and ranged from what he ought to have for supper to whether or not he was going to heaven.

As one of those whom Providence had tapped to be Luke’s caretakers, I immediately noticed his battle with self.  Luke’s struggles were, initially at least, somewhat off-putting.  But after a while, layers and nuances, grounds for compassion emerged.

He had reason to struggle with memory and emotion.  He’d been a World War II veteran, who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge.  The best modern psychiatry had been insufficient to address the residual trauma, so Luke turned to prayer.

For him, this was a ministry.  If he noticed me struggling, he would remember me as he received communion, or promise to offer a Rosary for me.  “We all need prayers,” he’d say.

Our interactions were limited by the monastery’s silence.  But when Luke died, it left a hole in my life.  In my grief, the letter to the Hebrews brought me to acceptance: “Jesus offered up prayers” it reads, “to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.”

I realized Jesus was saved from death, not exempted from it.  By and by, I came to believe that Luke was saved from his anxieties precisely because he felt them.  On the days when life at Mepkin is difficult, I go to his grave: it forces me to stand still.  Sometimes I recite a psalm or two.  Other times I just remind him: “Luke,” I say, “we all need prayers.”

More than twenty years ago, a friend handed me a copy of Margaret Spufford’s book, Celebration: a Story of Suffering and Joy, of which I had never heard but which I read at once. And then read again.

A kind of memoir of enduring unendurable pain, Dr. Spufford’s story would seem almost too terrible to read, and in some ways so it was. But the grace she found in her own suffering is so luminous that her account of it both broke my heart and strengthened it.

There is nowhere we can go, she reminds us—there is no suffering so intense, so enclosing-in-darkness—that God cannot find us in it. There is no fence, no wall, which can keep God out.

In celebrating this truth she found in the bedrock of her own pain, Dr. Spufford tells the poignant story (which, like hers, was new to me) of Robert Aske, the idealistic and courageous man who led a doomed rebellion against Henry VIII’s ruthless dissolution of the monasteries. Aske was betrayed by those he trusted, hanged alive in chains from the keep of York Castle, and left to die.

In the worst of her own suffering, and her struggle to keep her focus on the suffering God who promised to companion her through all her dyings, Dr. Spufford was inspired by Robert Aske’s story, as told by H. F. M. Prescott, in her remarkable novel, The Man on a Donkey.

Dr. Spufford salutes Prescott’s description of Robert Aske’s death as a tremendous evocation of suffering and redemption “at an unpayable cost, at a level of pain where the unimaginable worst has indeed come true, and the victim has not been delivered.” But in the white-hot crucible of that moment, in equally unimaginable silence and light, Aske finds the Crucified One by his side.

As does Dr. Spufford.

And so may we.

______________________________
Deborah’s article “Enclosed in Darkness (But Not Alone),” can be found on pages 27-33 in the “Fenced In” issue of Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. XXVI, No. 1. Order Weavings subscriptions or single issues.

This candle was already afire earlier in the day when our retreat group worshiped together for the first time.  During that initial, virgin voyage together as a group the candle is alert, upright, stolidly performing its singular task with clarity.  And yet the clarity is less about the flame.

After all, in such a fresh, young candle the flame is steady but only because the body of the candle is near-package perfect.  Because of its newness the candle burns in singularity early in the day.

But by tonight time has passed, and the candle has been lighted a second time.  It has become experienced, no longer fresh and form-fit.  In fact, as my questioning eyes look more closely, I see that the foundation has begun to shift.  Having served its first purpose with thoughtless duty, the candle is changing as I watch.  The flame, which had flickered with youthful intensity is now less focused, more disparate, waning here and waxing there.

The foundation has shifted, and although its future is less clear than at an earlier time, the flame glows in its glass surround.  Scattered light.  Twisted gleams.  Indecisive warmth.  Unpredictable incandescence.

Yet light.  Warmth.  Shadows.

As the candle ages, serving its intended purpose, a transformation takes place.  It is not as though an inanimate object has self-awareness of its change.  It’s for Another, a more sophisticated Life, to observe, process, consider, evaluate, discern, describe.

It is for candles to burn, wax gradually, continually reshaping and reforming, change known only to the Other, whose own heart is like wax, melted within the breast.

The challenge of context – and it’s one that many of us miss – is that we can, to a large extent, choose our context. We can decide whether our context is narrow – centred on ourselves and our own specific needs and concerns – or whether our context is wide – formed by concerns and meaning that is beyond us, larger than us.

You don’t have to look far to see the impact of living with a context that is too small. The effects are everywhere, from the financial crisis to the widespread poverty in the world, from conflict and war over disputed ideologies or territories to the extinction of species through human carelessness and consumption. Clearly there is a strong case to be made for the necessity of the quest to widen our context.

So, how do we do this? How do we move beyond our own small concerns and ideas and begin to live in a context that goes beyond ourselves, that is large enough to lead us into a different, more inclusive, more compassionate and more life-giving way of being? There may be other ways, but in my experience, one of the best ways is to worship. One of the most powerful and significant purposes of worship is to order our context – to move us out of ourselves and into the wide context of God’s person and work, God’s purpose and priorities.

Clearly our worship often fails to do this, perhaps because, although we claim it is about God, it actually ends up being about us – our musical preferences, our needs and hopes, our prayers and friendships. I’m not knocking this – for worship to fulfill its function it must engage us where we are and move us on from that point. The problem is that it often doesn’t move us, except perhaps into some emotional experience that leaves us as quickly as it is generated.

So, here’s a call, to worshipers and worship leaders, to begin to allow our acts of worship to become uncomfortable. To begin to spend more time in the kind of praise that leaves us in awe of God’s compassion and justice. To begin to do more heartfelt and honest confession, so that we face our own darkness, and seek to live more openly in the light. To begin to search the Scriptures more diligently to catch a glimpse of God’s heart, God’s priorities and God’s cross-carrying call.

If we allow it to, our worship – and every song, prayer, symbol, word, and act that is part of it – can lead us into a wider context for living – a context that lifts us out of ourselves, and connects us with the world that God loves; a context that changes not just us, but all who meet us because of the reflection of Jesus that is seen in us; a context that takes us out of our safety and comfort and smallness, and into a radical, frightening, vibrant, exciting, creative, unpredictable and abundant life. As Jesus said, the Spirit blows where it will – and so it is with everyone born of the Spirit. May our worship be the womb where we are truly born again into this Spirit-directed world.

I don’t know Dr. Klamer, the surgeon.  Oh, I’ve met him and liked the straightforward way he spoke.  He and his associate gave me clear information about what is going to happen.  But I’m trusting my personal physician’s recommendation of a colleague in the same hospital, and I’m trusting the hospital and the whole medical community in the city of Louisville, which has an excellent reputation. Is that enough given the desperate need I have for the surgery?

I don’t think so, at least not for me.  Something as serious as this, however needful, forces me to find within myself a deeper level of faith than I find in medical savvy and institutional reputation. I need God, beyond in our midst.  I’m at peace about this because I’ve learned how to let myself down like a swimmer letting down to trust the buoyancy of the water.  The saints through the ages remind me that we live in a sea of love and if I will let myself down into its waters, the waters of grace will hold me up.  I’ve lived a long and grace-filled life.  Should I end up among the 2%, I can only say thanks for this inexpressible gift of life that has been mine.

Update: I can now give a positive report.  The surgery went well, although it left me with a row of staples across my neck on the right side.  The surgeon will remove them in two weeks.  I feel much gratitude, however, to know that the risk of stroke is gone.

These wild things that inhabit our yard lift me with surprise and have made their way into my life with God.  They snap me out of the rut I get into, that place of believing that I am my “to do” list. I get lost in the frustrations and pressures of the world.  The wild things remind me:  I am a child of God, a part of creation.

Awakened in the middle of the night by a hoot owl in the walnut tree, I pull the curtains back and sit to pray in the moonlight.  Surprised by the scarlet flashes of cubs chasing each other across the top of the yard, I gather up my daughter, and we sit quietly watching, pressing each others hand when we catch glimpses of them.  I cannot plan these moments.  I have to drop what I am doing and meet them as they come with prayer, with shared silence, or with a pause of wonder.

I pray I am never so lost in my own plans that I do not stop in my tracks to watch a coyote trot along and disappear out of the reach of my headlights, then just sit a moment before the lighted dash, reciting the Lord’s Prayer.  I hope this process continues in me that just the sight of the tops of trees swaying in wind as I sit at a stoplight brings me back to the fact that I have my very living and breathing in God.

And so it has been for me in recent months. I strive to prove myself a reliable, responsible adult, but I let the discipline of Sabbath slip away unnoticed. I convince myself that my graduate studies must be given the best of my time, the dishes cannot be left sitting forever, or that I must read the latest novel or article. I pour myself out, all with the best of intentions, but I am left dry and disconnected.

God calls to me in the midst of my desire to “give my best” to simply rest in the Divine, to “Be still and know that [God is] God.” (Psalm 46:10) So this afternoon, I attempt it. In all honesty, I began a time of rest with the notion, “I need to accomplish some Sabbath time…” But soon I forgot about lists and tasks, and I listen to the rain drip from the tall trees. I hear the acorns surrender to the soft ground below. I am still. I do nothing in particular, and God’s presence is revealed. Not a commodity to be calculated, but a reality to be drunk in deeply.

Often, I am tired when I do not want to be. I have a few extra emotions when it is not convenient, like crying a little too long when Maria runs away and the VonTrapp children are sad in The Sound of Music or laughing too loudly at the jokey comment of a fellow student. The laundry piles up. The papers must be on time.  We have to eat every day.  My husband would love to have a conversation with me that does not concern theology or Biblical criticism. Sometimes it just seems like too much. What if it does not all get done?  What of the deadlines and expectations? Is my family getting enough fiber?

We go forward on faith every day. We make the budget. We buy the bread. We start the graduate program. We buy uniforms on sale one size up for school next year.  It is good and right that we go forward making our plans and being who we are. Getting anxious over how it will get done or if it will turn out the way we expect , or give us the return we desire, well, this calls for mercy.

I think of Psalm 103, “But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him…” I think “fear” in my current context means staying in touch with the fact that God’s time is not my time.  I do not know what tomorrow will bring.Today, I can love God and I can love my neighbor. I can start another paper and put in a load of wash.  Lord have mercy on us.

Here’s a prayer for those of us who want to be simply present.

God, keep my mind simple today:

free of fears and calculations,
mindful of your presence,
generously attentive to the present moment,
desiring only to love,
accepting of what is beyond my control,
willing to be used for your mercy.

Keep my eyes open to beauty and grace,
my heart grateful and ready to forgive,
my hands open to receive and ready to serve.

May my soul be a singing bird
on the branch of this day.

In this piece, Flora tells her personal story of attending a sky show in a planetarium when she was a young girl. The show was intended to delight and amaze its audience, but for Flora, who had already lived through the horrors of World War Two, the show was at the same time dazzling and horrifying.

Remembering this event and her reaction to it, Flora muses about how what she calls “symbolic anxieties” (the dazzling end of the sky show recalling the air raids she lived through earlier) can sometimes mask deeper fears that are unfaced and unnamed. For Flora, the fear was light and sound in the midst of a darkness that surrounded her.

We all have these deep fears that surface at unexpected times. As for me, I have a fear of falling as a result of a pretty scary bicycle accident some years ago. I remember nothing about the accident, but a deeply-rooted sense of falling sometimes washes over me. I can imagine that many people these days fear the sight and sound of airplanes flying low in the sky. Here in Nashville, we had a horrifying flood this past year, and I’m sure that people who lived through that will forever be afraid of heavy rain.

The good news in all this, according to Flora, is that our moment of greatest fear is also “the moment of God’s deepest presence with us.”  I would add a resounding YES to this. As she says, it can be for us a moment of new beginning. Amen!

He hardly speaks at all anymore, and is almost completely withdrawn. Soon after we saw him last month, and took him out for that ice cream he enjoyed so much, he slipped into this new, dark, silent place.

I keep thinking of submarines “going quiet” as they submerge ever deeper below the surface.

And of icebergs “calving”—how big pieces simply break away, and fall into cold darkness, lost.

Alzheimer’s seems to work that way: a ruthless falling to pieces, the ongoing helpless losing of parts of oneself.

The nurse I spoke with on the phone at Dad’s “home” last night called it “staging”— moving to a deeper stage of the dementia, part of the inexorable process of disintegration.

That word—new to me in that context—now makes me think of the way a space ship loses parts of itself—aren’t they called “stages”?—on its flight.

I think that’s what I’ve seen on television of all those rocket launches from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage fires first, and then it falls away. The second stage fires, so the now-lighter rocket can fly even faster. Then the rest of the stages ignite and fall away in turn, allowing the core to achieve escape velocity and leave the atmosphere of the earth altogether.

Maybe Dad’s journey is not just deeper into darkness—like the pieces broken off an iceberg—but higher, into light.

He is certainly losing himself, steadily, in big pieces.

But perhaps not purposelessly.

Maybe he is jettisoning the inessential—and eventually even the essential—elements of himself in some mystery of renunciation or surrender.

A kind of dying before he dies.

Lightening the load as, ever more swiftly, he climbs the sky.

Some years ago I attended the liturgy for the Feast of St. Benedict at a Benedictine monastery. This was the day of monastic profession. I watched with deep respect as novices I had befriended vowed to continue in the Benedictine way for another three years as junior monks. Respect deepened into wonder as several junior monks solemnly professed to live faithfully the remainder of their days in that community. Wonder broadened into stunned awakening as I realized that within the month I myself would be making solemn vows to live in lifelong Christian community with my fiancée. Awakening flowered into awe as I saw monks who had lived the Rule of St. Benedict for fifty and sixty years come before the Abbot to renew the solemn vows they had first embraced so many years before. What these senior monks showed me was that deep commitments worthy of our whole heart are never behind us like accomplishments or acquired things that we can display in a trophy case. Nor are they merely consumables that satisfy personal needs or moral imperatives. Instead, deep commitments continue to open before us, expanding horizons of light and life.

From editor’s introduction for “Commitment,” Weavings, Vol. IX, No. 4, July/August 1994.

In all sorts of ways the exhortations of our faith and the realities of our lives come into conflict. All too easily we find ourselves saying one thing, but living another. And nowhere is this more true than with anxiety. It’s as if we long to live the words of Jesus, but we just don’t have the capacity. We hear the instruction not to worry, but it feels like an impossible request, and so we fall into an unintentional hypocrisy.

I doubt, though, that Jesus believed a less anxious life was beyond our reach. He was not in the habit of commanding what was unattainable, nor did he ignore the realities of the world we live in. Yet, in his usual, incisive way, he identified the pathology of human systems. When we are immersed in these systems of power, economics, security and in-group relationships, worry is the only possible response. Inevitably our lives are filled either with the anxiety of striving for that which we hope will provide us with security and comfort, or with the fear of losing those things.

The alternative to this anxiety-driven lifestyle is to immerse ourselves in a different reality – the reality of God’s reign. It’s not that God promises that we will face no suffering or have no struggle. Rather, it’s that within this broken world we constantly remain attuned to a different set of values and resources, and, to the extent that we live from this reality, we are able to overcome whatever life may throw at us. The deeper we go into God’s reality, the more we are released from the fear of failure, the striving for status, the suspicion of others and all the other factors that contribute to our anxiety. The world may remain broken, and we may still be wounded by it, but our hearts have found a home that gives us a still centre in the worst of storms.

But, where do we find this still centre? The best answer I have found is in the spiritual discipline of worship. As we gather and sing and pray, we open ourselves to a vision of God’s reign. And as we allow this vision to impress itself on our hearts and minds each week, we are aligned a little more to its rhythms and realities. It’s a simple process, but in it’s ability to lead us into an alternative, less anxious life, it is amazingly profound.

One reason for this has been because of recent conversations I have had with my good friend, Peter Storey, a former Methodist Bishop from South Africa and a committed peacemaker who helped select the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Earlier in my ministry, I had the privilege to serve in a local church with Peter and he has remained a mentor for my work in the church and beyond. It was during one of our e-mail exchanges awhile back that Peter told me about the international project in which he was involved entitled the Charter for Compassion. Initiated by one individual’s desire, developed with contributions from over 150,000 people from over 180 countries before it was complete and its website launched, this charter and the community that has formed around it serves, for me, as a hopeful message about what people around the world can do in the name of love. The Charter begins with the following words, and I invite you to take some time to reflect, with new intention, about the place of compassion in our life together:

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

Most of the time he obviously didn’t have any idea what was going on, or where he was, or who all those people were. But there were graced moments of clarity too, like clouds unexpectedly parting and allowing a glimpse of blue sky.

On the plane on the way home, though, everything fell apart.

Dad grew increasingly agitated as the plane taxied onto the runway. He muttered to himself, fumbling with the tray table on the seatback in front of him (despite the flight attendants’ repeated reminders that all tray tables must be securely locked and in their full upright position for take-off). He kept trying to lower the tray, and then scrambling frantically as though to find something hidden behind it.

He was perspiring, panic-stricken. By the time the plane landed, he was feverish and incoherent, completely disoriented, unable to walk unaided.

That arrival was really the end of the road for Dad.

He went from the airport to the nearest emergency room. From there he went into hospital, and then—eventually—into the nursing home.

I didn’t realize it then, but it occurred to me later what Dad’s seemingly random distress and urgency that night was all about.

It wasn’t just the haphazard delirium of a disintegrating mind.

He was trying to find the instrument panel, in order to fly the plane.

Dad was a pilot to the marrow of his bones. His most earnest advice to me from childhood had been always to pay attention to life’s take-offs and landings, and let the flying in between take care of itself.

Somehow, on that last flight, Dad knew that he was on a plane, and was convinced he was responsible to get it airborne and land it. And he also knew, somewhere within the ruin of his mind, that he could not do it. He must have felt that he was—like Icarus flying too close to the sun, like so many of his fellow pilots in the war—hurtling from the sky.

He could not even find the controls. But in the midst of that terrible knowledge, I hope he also knew that he did not have to.

No matter from what sky we fall, “underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut. 33:27).

In the fullness of time, God alone will bring Dad’s long flight—as all of ours—safely in for that last landing.

When I do this I divert my attention from God to my fear about God, from my actual life and the world about me to the failures and successes in my head— figuring things out, strategizing and arranging tasks, judging the results.  I focus on my doing instead of my being. My accomplishments become a sort of “virtual reality.”   It’s what Percy Ainsworth in the “Do Not Be Anxious About Tomorrow” issue of Weavings talks about when he says that faith “ceases to be faith and becomes calculation.”

Calculation—that’s the key.  When I calculate how to impress God, or how to distract my soul from deep feelings I don’t want to face, I leave the present moment, and I turn away from God and God’s rich grace. When I stop calculating and simply receive the present moment without analyzing, judging, planning or predicting, I become present not only to the moment but also to God who is present to me. And then a miracle happens: this moment finally becomes enough.  Even I myself am enough.  In religious language, I’m “justified.” Saved.

I pray for the grace to be aware when I am calculating, and to gently put the calculator down—even if I am working hard on a project under a deadline— and simply be here, now, with God, doing just what we are doing and no more.

Some memories, however, put people out of commission if they do not remember to forget.  That is the way we have to think about such things, isn’t it?  God made us with rememberers—not with forgetters; so we have to remember to put things behind us.  Hardly anyone would have grasped this point better than the Apostle Paul—zealot and persecutor of the church.  “Brothers [and sisters],” he told his beloved Philippians, “I do not consider myself to have arrived, but one thing I do, forgetting things behind and stretching forward toward those ahead, I race ahead toward the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil 3:13-14).   Remember to forget “things behind.”  What are they? Things that never really mattered?  Things you can’t do anything to rectify?  Things that weigh you down and hold you back?  How can you lay them aside?  As Paul did, remembering and then “stretching forward toward those ahead” . . . toward the prize of God’s upward call.

There is no scarcity of excellent and beautifully crafted writing about life with God and neighbor. There is also no waning in the desire and requests for good, poetic, and thoughtful material to read about the Christian spiritual life. And as grateful as I am for the daily privilege to work with writers, poets, artists, readers, and imaginers, I confess that I do get anxious at times about doing this work well or well enough to serve our expanding and creative community.

And then a piece comes across my desk that speaks right to the heart of my worry, and I am reminded of the deep gift given by our contributors. Today, it is the “Prayer” that Phyllis Tickle wrote for the current issue, “Do Not Be Anxious about Tomorrow,” (page 13) and from its opening lines, I am still drawn in by her words:

Lord, I was ever greedy of life, my attention always straining toward the parts of it that had not yet come. . .toward what was about to be, or might be, or hopefully would be, and especially toward those things that, by Your mercy, might turn out not to be after all. . . .

I have been spending a lot of time wondering lately. I don’t think this is the same thing as daydreaming, although it could be if I gave it that much room in my imagination. Or maybe I am just deluding myself–thinking that I can wonder about one thing while accomplishing something else with my whole self (body, heart, mind, strength and a little soul). Somehow when I am just wondering, I do not feel as guilty about having my interior attention head off in some creative, playful direction while trying to do what is in front of me. I am still getting my work done, my important and essential work is getting done beneath my hands and my eyes and my ears.

But my heart keeps busy at this wondering. It is like butterfly flutters or owl hoots — I am not really expecting them, but there they are in my peripheral vision or distant hearing. I have to look twice or tilt my head to be sure they are there–those wonderings.

So I am becoming a wonderer, I think. And suddenly I feel like I understand a bit about Ruth and Naomi, and Anna and Simeon, Elizabeth and even Mary–they wondered and pondered and went on about the business of life. But God met them in their willingness to wonder [I hope]. What about others “out there” in the Weavings community?  Where is your wondering and imagination taking you these days as you ponder what God is doing in the world?

And these days the airports seem full of soldiers in uniform, on their way to or from Afghanistan or Iraq or some other war-torn corner of the world.

I’m not sure why one particular young recruit, swept along with me that day in the torrent of corridors and escalators and trams required to change terminals in Atlanta—caught my attention.

Maybe because he seemed so impossibly young—hardly more than seventeen, adolescently tall and thin in his brand-new desert-camouflage fatigues.

I suppose he reminded me of my father, who was barely eighteen when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps right after Pearl Harbor. Dad used to tell us how he had to have all his uniform trousers let down, since he was still growing when he was flying those B-24s across the Atlantic.

I had caught glimpses of this particular young man all along the way, as we journeyed from one terminal to another.

I wondered where he came from, where he was headed, if he had ever been on a plane before. Why he seemed to be all alone.

I wondered if these wars will ever cease. If we will ever stop sending our young people off to kill and be killed.

He and I stepped onto the packed parallel escalators ascending steeply from the tram-stop, suddenly side by side. His narrow left hand rested on the sliding banister just three inches from my right hand.

I was instantly overwhelmed by—filled to the brim with, almost electrically charged with—such powerful love for this boy, and such anger and sorrow for whatever war he was bound for—that it was all I could do not to reach out and cover his hand with mine.

Only the certain knowledge that this would frighten and embarrass him stopped me.

So I let our hands lie there, not touching. But in my heart I laid my hands on those narrow shoulders as well as that thin hand. I poured that love into him, like water, like light.

I prayed for courage, for protection, for freedom from harm and pain, for an awareness of the presence and the mercy of God—all the way up, for the whole silent space of our shared ascent to our separate departures.

The present moment is the holy moment
Past and future are illusions
phantasms accumulated
and
familiar

Infinite Love doesn’t live there
can’t abide in legends

“Why?”
I cultivate despair.
“What if…?”
I forge anxiety.
I crave control.

I forget
I’m the only resident in the wizard’s Oz.

I hear that peace reigns in the present moment
With a breath
I relocate to I AM
no conditions, manipulations
limits and confines not in the vocabulary

The assurance of things hoped for…
the conviction of things unseen

Faith is nourished in the present moment
the holy moment
out of time
in the world
not of the world

NOW is the place where we make our plans
And dream our dreams – in faith

Remember?
The cross was death
the Resurrection
lives NOW
in us

This time, though, it has been different. Something about the theme, “Do Not Be Anxious About Tomorrow,” has taken them beyond the usual friendship routine with me and I have heard from several of them. They have called, sent e-mails, stopped me in the halls at church, and made a point of saying “good topic.” Of course, some of their comments have been punctuated with “yeah, right, do not be anxious” looks, while other conversations have moved from the title of the issue to personal stories where anxiety has been hovering very near. Still, my friends are taking time to tell me that there is something in this title, “Do Not Be Anxious About Tomorrow,” something in this issue, something that a poet or writer or artist rendered in these pages that now resonates in the lives of the people I know and love.

I cannot help but wonder what responses this theme elicits from others in the Weavings community. It would be good to hear from you.

I was reviewing some freelance manuscripts we received here in the Weavings editorial office. I found myself feeling a little unsated, as nothing I was reading really spoke to the theme the way I wanted. The thought came to mind that maybe I needed to write something myself.

I’ve never considered myself a writer. I’m one of those people who process my thoughts and ideas by talking them through. It is a little ironic to me that I live with two writers. My husband is a published author. My son is a high school senior planning to pursue journalism. And now I work with writers. I am immersed in writing all day and the majority of it is really, really good writing.

It would seem that, in the seven months I’ve been editorial assistant here, all this creativity has rubbed off. The experience of writing, for me, proved to be more about the process than the product. I really enjoyed the process of crafting my thoughts.  I was fascinated by the stages the work progressed though. It started out as this lump of raw clay. I began to knead ideas the way a potter wedges clay to establish consistency in it and remove air bubbles. Then, like a potter, I threw it onto the wheel. I saw a structure begin to emerge. My mind and spirit began to work in a mystical collaboration to shape and refine those ideas into word pictures. When the piece felt complete, I stepped back to take a look. “It is finished”, I thought.

A few days later, I went back to my creation. To my surprise, I discovered I wasn’t finished. In fact, I made that discovery a few more times. Is it finished now? I guess time will tell.

I love words, always have. I especially enjoy the nuance of just the right word. Mostly, though, I am in love with love the creative process. Whether it is writing, drawing and painting, composing and playing music, or even just coming up with an idea of how to do something, creativity is divine. I think it is a way we get to participate in God’s creation—and I am humbled by the honor and privilege of it.

As I continued to walk, feeling the sting of the scratches on my arm, I recalled how easily I was trapped by the thicket when I extended my grasp. It reminded me of all those unhealthy attachments– numerous addictions, for example to busyness and food; compulsive behaviors, like the need to control and possess– that grab at our psyches and take hold.

The Gospel calls us to empty self but we struggle mightily. We easily become entangled and assume that the spiritual path costs too much and should be left to those more prepared and dedicated than ourselves. No wonder words like detachment, emptying, releasing, letting go, and self-denial are so difficult to discuss and so readily the source of misinterpretation and fear.

So where do we begin? Reading John of the Cross, a mystic who has put off many by his talk of negation, I realized that his emphasis on self-denial is always in the context of a love relationship. “Where have you hidden, Beloved, and left me moaning?” is the opening line of his “Spiritual Canticle.” Our personal experience of God’s love affects us profoundly and inspires a transformation process; love itself fires the will so that we can do our part in freeing the heart. In the process we discover freedom, an inner spaciousness that allows us to love God, others and creation in the way we were meant to.

Of course this invitation to self denial holds true for any maturing love relationship; we are inspired to sacrifice for the sake of the one who has stolen our heart. We willingly release self-interest and accept emptying for the sake of love. This insight has helped me whenever I struggle with letting go. I recount how God first loved me in a personal way and how this love is the only love that can satisfy the hunger of my heart. St. Paul has the same insight in his Letter to the Philippians: “For his (Jesus Christ’s) sake I have forfeited everything; I have accounted all else as rubbish so that Christ may be my wealth” (Phil 3:8) This language of Paul may sound radical but it is simply the expression of a person who has fallen in love with the one who matters most.

I want to write about what catches my eye across the street. I want to write about changes that are going on in my family. I want to write about kindnesses that I have witnessed today, and moments of courage. I want to write about what God seems up to. I want to write about what I am up to when I take time to wonder about what God is up to. I long to become one who has “eyes to see” and “ears to hear”….[was that thunder?].

Is it possible to practice contemplation by blogging? I think that I think so.

She took the window seat; I had the aisle.

We smiled at each other as we stowed our bags and fastened our seatbelts, but we did not speak. She opened her book, I flipped through a magazine.

I was grateful for the silence, and the empty seat between us. I didn’t want to make small talk with strangers that day.

I was on my way to visit my father in the nursing home to which dementia had recently confined him. My mind was like a jumbled box of knives: all sharp edges, fears and sorrows that cut deep if I tried to pick them up.

I needed the silence, and the space. To sort those wounding blades into some kind of safe order—or at least fasten the box securely closed.

Not until we the wheels of the plane touched down did my fellow traveler speak.

She leaned toward me across the empty space between us, and said softly, “I hope you won’t mind me saying this, but everything will be all right.”

“Excuse me?” I asked, amazed.

“Whatever it is you are worried about, it is going to be all right. Be at peace.”

I was speechless for a moment. Then “thank you,” I said.

I took a deep breath and smiled shakily. “I needed to hear that.”

“Oh I am so glad,” she replied, visibly relieved. “I was afraid it would sound strange, and I didn’t want to say anything, but the Lord said, ‘you be obedient now, and tell that lady what I said.’”

And then we were at the gate, and the plane erupted into the familiar upheaval of arrival. I lost sight of my traveling companion almost at once. She had disappeared, as completely as angels in the Bible when they have spoken what they have to say.

The peace that she offered that day has been elusive in the difficult months since then. But I hold fast to the memory of that stranger’s words, the promise that “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

And I marvel at the ways God finds to speak to us along our pilgrim way.

For several days I allowed myself extra time to take in the magnolia’s fragrant offerings or to watch rain drip from its delicate petals. Then one morning I found that the tree had surrendered its long-awaited blooms to the ground below, gone as abruptly as they had come. I stepped softly on the fading pinks and whites of the petals and felt a twinge of sadness at the passing of the brilliant display.

In the coming weeks I watched as all the other trees I pass each day reached a climax of rich yellows, purples, whites, and pinks, only to be replaced by hundreds of shades of green on every tree soon thereafter. The world presses on toward summer. Like the movement of the seasons, our liturgical calendar moves on as well, always repeating the cycle of the Christian story, year after year. The purples of Advent and Lent, the white of Easter, and the red of Pentecost are replaced quickly by shades of green as we move into the long season of ordinary time.

I treasure the pageantry and celebration of the seasons of the church, and like my feelings at the close of spring, I find myself moving toward ordinary time with reluctance. Surely ordinary time cannot bring me the spiritual nourishment of the more “exciting” seasons, and certainly I will not feel God’s presence in the same way. However, the greens of ordinary time are persistent, they do not appear and flee so quickly as the colors of the other seasons of the natural and liturgical year. The hearty greens remind me of the persistent presence of the incarnate God in all our seasons. Through ordinary time God speaks a powerful word of assurance and love reminiscent of Jesus’ final words in the gospel of Matthew he says, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:20).

The liturgical and natural worlds mirror the motion of our own existence. We live most of our lives in ordinary time between celebrations, deaths, and births. The greens of ordinary time remind us that God is present in all seasons, always at work bringing forth and sustaining life.

One of the gifts of poetry is its ability to offer wells of wisdom and truth in playful and purposeful clipped fragments of language. At various points in my life poetry has been the prayerful balm for my sorrows or confetti for my celebrations, and always food for my thought. Poetry like scripture has a way of embedding itself in our spirits and then floating to the surface when we least expect it but could most need it. And like scripture, my love of poetry has come from a habitual engagement with it. If one aspect of prayer is truly about learning to pay attention to the holy around us then I imagine that the poems and poets who have helped me navigate the dips and turns of life have been both my prayers and my prayer partners.

The deepening of my faith has been woven with the words of poets like Robert Frost, whose poems “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “The Road Not Taken” reminds me that life is glorious and short and there exists an option to be bold and courageous before life’s choices. Other poets like Denise Levertov, Rainer Marie Rilke, Mary Oliver, Richard Wilbur, and Czeslaw Milosz challenge me with multiple ways in which to think about my place in the midst of God’s creation, and how to respond to the duties and desires of life. For prayerful laughter I have often turned to Billy Collins. To prayerfully dwell in the mystery and beauty of affairs of the heart I read Pablo Neruda and sometimes Micheal O’ Siadhail. When my conscious needs reawakening I read the likes of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, Yehuda Amichai, and Ariel Dorfman.

Poetry not only teaches us to pay attention but opens new doors of communicating with God and with one another. And that is always prayer.

In her article “Where the Path Narrows,” in Weavings XXV/3 Show Me Your Ways, O Lord, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre describes the narrow path of the Christian journey. She illuminates four instructions given by Jesus for how one goes about following Christ. One such instruction is Jesus’ call, “Do not be afraid.” McEntyre reminds me that, “‘Do not be afraid’ is an invitation: Step out of your fear. Receive the unlikely gift of confidence. Remember who is with you.” As I read her words, I feel a release of pressure, a deep breath entering my lungs, a calm return that I have so desperately desired in these tension-filled weeks.

As the path in my own life “narrows” in order to follow God’s call, I realize that Christ’s invitation to “be not afraid” necessitates a relinquishment of control on my part. I am not called to shirk responsibility or hard work, rather, I am invited to cease my futile and exhausting attempts at control. I am beckoned to follow God with assurance and faith. Choosing faith over fear is not a careless abandonment of important items. Rather, the choice of trust over fear reflects a deep acknowledgment of the love of God surrounding us all. Though I live in a culture often governed by fear and anxiety, I follow a God of peace. The simple remembrance of God’s presence re-orients my worldview. As I feel myself revert to a compulsion to plan and control, I hear God call, “Do not be afraid, for I am with you.”

Unfortunately, one of my other habits is to get a little ahead of myself.  When I face big decisions or goals, I begin with prayer, asking for guidance.  Then I begin to move forward, praying that its in the direction God is calling me to—that it is serving God’s purpose.  Then momentum picks up. Plans unfold, I get excited about what I’m doing, connect with more people, add meetings, events, activities, long to-do lists. And the prayers for guidance recede.  Time with God shrinks. Or at least with all the distractions, my time paying attention to God shrinks.  And I forget my starting place.  That is, until things begin to crumble, as they always do when you forget your starting place.

The best time I have found to orient myself—or reorient myself—to God is the morning, before to-do lists and details take over.  In university, a group of friends ran a meditation center. Twice a day they would gather to meditate on the word “Maranatha”, which means “Our Lord, Come” while clearing their mind.  The idea was to create space for God to enter.

As I enter a new adventure in my life I have a challenge for myself, and for anyone that would like to join me.  I’m going to meditate each morning. Just for ten minutes, but to see if I can make that my new habit, and maybe break the old one.

Words matter, it has been so since, as the biblical record claims, God SPOKE matter into being. And the words of God Incarnate still have the power to make a difference in the world. In the preface to her book The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord with Reflections, Weavings contributor Phyllis Tickle offers a sort of analysis of Jesus’ gospel message, undergirded by her discovered assumption that Jesus was an “actualist,” not a literalist or a metaphorist… [the words] don’t mean; they are. As such, they must be absorbed with both heart and mind together.

Ms. Tickle is not the first to reach such a conclusion. Lee Cantelon came to the same basic conclusion in 1990 when he, like Ms. Tickle, compiled a volume of Jesus’ words for publication. The award-winning documentary film maker’s compilation has inspired more creative expressions. In 2006, Cantelon asked pop-folk singer Ricki Lee Jones (known for 1979’s Chuck E’s in Love) to speak his translation of Jesus’ words over some musical tracks. Jones heard the tracks and read the words, then proposed a new project. She would sing commentary in response to Jesus’ words; a kind of musical lectio divina. The result was Jones’ “The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard.”

Cantelon’s project also sparked a second musical collection. This one, “The Wordz,” gathered an unlikely roster of well-known veteran hip-hop artists recording their own hodgepodge of spoken word, hip hop, jazz, recitation, reflection and commentary, all inspired by the words of Jesus. The video, “The Wordz Project,” has just released to stores.

What Tickle and Cantelon, neither one professional theologians or pastors (Tickle consider herself a profession religionist: a relative outsider commenting on things religious) count on is the power of the words themselves to spark art, creativity and personal transformation.

Do the words of Jesus still have the power to turn the world upside down?

I remind myself that I was embarking on a spiritual journey.  It may seem a bit drastic, but that is where I felt I had to go to “be alone with God”.  To the end of the world, where no email, phone call, or text message could find me.  Where all day for 5 days, I was alone with my bike, the road, and the wind. Belief that I quite literally would survive the barren and almost inhabitable landscape meant dependence on God.

Of course, this is absurd.  You don’t have to go anywhere to be alone with God.  God is always there. But sometimes you do have to do something drastic to allow yourself the space to be attentive to God.

I can’t say I had any epiphanies or Franciscan-style life changes.  But I did familiarize myself with that space and even simply for that, it was worth going to the end of the world.

At any given time it is easy to forget that the people we encounter each day are journeying on their own unique paths. All of us encounter one another with a variety of anxieties and anticipations, and fears and fortunes through which we filter conversation. Naturally because we tend to get wrapped in our own mini-worlds we can lose sight of how our words either sap or satiate. I am trying to be more mindful of this, to pay attention to how I am hospitable with my words regardless of what is going on in my own life. In the midst of conversing with others I am trying to respect and honor what is going on in their own lives. I am trying to mouth my words after the Word that brings light, hope, and always the possibility of resurrection.

A few months later, I asked this same friend if she would be willing to lead a mid-week group formed to discuss topics the journal raised. We didn’t call the group a Weavings Reading Group and there wasn’t a guide available that I knew of. However, the group was still going strong after I had moved on to pastor another church.

What’s your history with Weavings? How did you find out about it? Do you read it primarily alone or study its content within a group? Share your Weavings story.

So we now welcome you to one part of the new site—our blog—a place where we hope our community will further engage in prayerful conversation about how our lives and God’s life are woven together in the world.

Awesome as that moment was, it was not Mother Teresa’s greater blessing to me. The second blessing came after she died September 5,1997. You may not count this kind of thing much of a gift, but it was a very great one for me. Her diaries and letters, which she intended never to see the light of day, revealed that this diminutive saint who embodied love and glowed with light experienced darkness and forsakenness not just now and then but throughout her life as she ministered in the slums of Calcutta. How could that bless me? Would confession of the absence of God by such a saint not undermine whatever faith you had? Indeed not! In her candor this extraordinary Christian inserted a linchpin in something God has been trying to get me to see during roller coaster life of faith—that there’s a Presence in the absence but you have to persevere like Mother Teresa even when the eyes of your heart can’t see.