Stewardship

During the rain-fest earlier this month, I walked into the office, coffee in hand, closed toed shoes, wearing a big black raincoat - for the third day in a row. I was about to pick up the pace from walking to jogging when I realized that all around my feet were the most beautiful, albeit wet leaves. The leaves had begun to change! When did that happen? Had I missed the memo? How had I missed the beginning of next season? Shame on me! I stopped. I stopped in my big black raincoat and let a few drops fall from the sky onto my already wet head. I took a moment to look at a dozen different wet leaves, taking note of their differences, I considered their journeys from bud to the green leaf they must have been in the August sun. I wondered about their appetite for light and water and I marveled at the unique way that the rain was making them art. My pause in the rain reminded me to take note of life. Are we truly too busy to notice life around us? Or is the rain just another excuse to move faster through life.

Strings and Freedom

The result of just one day - a meeting finally set that freed me to dream, and a final day at the library has given me all the apron string to tie as I desire.

String and freedom, Space and connection - it's the mix of the two that seems to be the perfect recipe. Even a recipe of this type works for family. Freedom, without strings? Sometimes we wish the strings were shorter, pulling and tugging back to the table (a table waiting for laughter and honesty and shared life and celebration). Yet there are a few time we wish the string longer, for times of flight for each, inching toward the future with enough freedom to explore, discover, and enjoy the new without the tug turning us toward the old life.

Strings and freedom - Old tugs and new terrain.

Biblical limping

Emerging from the congregation yesterday, the Bible limped to the atar. The woman carrying it as part of the procession had a limp. Not a generative one, but rather the result of a pulled muscle or a strained back. She limped up the three steps and reached with both arms as far as she could to tenuously place the word of God on the corner of the altar.

As I approached the intention to preach the word of God, I could not help but understand fully that all of us limp as we deliver the Bible. We emerge from our lives, from our tensions, from our pain and happiness with words for our spirit. The scriptures are best understood through a limp, humble and honest, worn and pulled.

It is what it is

May God give us the courage to face life as it is and grace to embrace it. Courage to face, grace to embrace. Through courage and grace we come to know God, one nearer nearer than our next breath. Amen.

Praying our Goodbyes by Joyce Rupp

Pilgrim God, there is an exodus going on in our lives - desert stretches, a vast land of questions. Inside our hearts your promises tumble and turn. No pillar of cloud by day or fire by night can we see. Our hearts hurt at leaving loved ones and so much of the security we have known. We try to give in to the stretching and the pain. It is hard, God, and we want to be settled, secure, safe, and sure. And here we are feeling so full of the pilgrim's fear and anxiety.

O God of the journey, life us up, press us against your cheek. Let your great love hold us and create a deep trust in us. Then set us down, God of the journey; take our hands in yours, and guide us ever so gently across the new territoy of our lives.

Lights in the sky

We ran into friends downtown while looking for a bite to eat. On the evening of July 4th, open restaurants are hard to find. I suppose running into friends with such few choices isn't too odd. Yet, I find the longer I live in NJ, the smaller my world gets. We enjoyed middle eastern food and then ice cream for dessert. The sky was beautifully blue, almost colonial blue - appropriate for the day.

At home, I enjoyed a moment of silence before retiring. Yet the silence was surrounded by the sounds of three different fireworks celebrations. Booms and pops from the northeast, the southeast and due west came rumbling to my solace with the occasional exclamatory "zzzz." The lights that accompanied the fireworks were provided by the fireflies, dancing with one another before my eyes. I had a perfect, front row seat for the daily display of God's homemade fireworks. The only applause they know comes from those of us who stop long enough to notice their dancing.

The poets have scattered you, by Rilke

The poets have scattered you.
A storm ripped through their stammering.
I want to gather you up again
in a vessel that makes you glad.

I wander in your winds
and bring back everything I find.

The blind man needed you as a cup.
The servant concealed you.
The homeless one held you out as I passed.

You see, I like to look for things.

What is it about the art of gathering that fascinates me so? My deep belief that we come to know through riddles runs parralel with my heart's aching for that which is lost in life. Some things are lost from my life, sometimes I am lost from life. The cure for lost-ness is journeying home. Wandering in the the wind as Rilke says. The image is priceless for me. The image speaks of pieces that deserve to be remembered as my own. Re-membered.

Yet looking for things is not the same as actually collecting things. I can look for things and believe they belong to the new environment and never reach for them. The art of gathering is not just the act of looking for things, but daring to believe that one thing belongs to another and remembering them.

Finding meanings

I’ll admit that I always see deeper meanings in things. For example, my son Joe found two cats in the woods. They were too young to be left without a mother and so they became ours. Joe fed them with cat formula using an eyedropper. They were going to be named Jake and Elwood, after the Blues Brothers.

But, somehow Elwood stuck but Jake became “Red,” partly because he was more red in color than Elwood but also because we found him on the curb. When our oldest son, Dan acquires anything from the curb, he says that he got it from “Red’s garage sale.” Names are complicated, suffice it to say.

Back to Elwood. We had the cats for seven years, Joe had gone off to college and one evening, Pete (my partner) came home from work to watch Elwood have what seemed to be a heart attack. It was very dramatic. He was trying to eat, then it seemed he couldn’t breathe. He did a somersault and died.

I was telling my friend, Shannon the story a couple days later. I was telling her that the two cats were so much like the two sides to Joe’s personalities. It scared me with him being away at school. I started to say, “Perhaps that means that part of Joe’s personality is dying as he matures,” but she interrupted me and said, “Not everything means something.” I was caught off guard. I said, “of course everything means something.”

Shelter from the wind

I was taking some ridiculously overdue time away. By time away, I mean solitude. I have learned over the years that a life without solitude can never be truly hospitable. In other words, if there is no place for me in me, there is no place for you either. So, space – I created space for myself. My friend offered her beach house to me (which turned out to be a house, literally on the boardwalk on Long Island complete with private beach entrance and private pool.) So, I loaded my car braved the seventeen bridges it takes to go 50 miles. As a general rule, Jersey folk don’t drive to NY, we take the train. Of course, there are many, many – did I say many – commuters who drive every dang day into the city. But, the rest of us are happy to go in every once in awhile and take public transportation. So, driving to LI was an adventure.

Yet my destination was not LI, it was solitude. And to accommodate that solitude, I had to fill up my proverbial gas tank, I had to make sure I had enough “cash” for the seventeen bridges. I needed helpers to accommodate solitude: books, wine, sunscreen.

Upon arrival, I was given the grand tour and welcomed with a beer. A good beer. Thank God for good beer. Then, when I was left on my own, I quickly took a walk down the shoreline. I made it about ½ mile down and then turned around, wondering what to do next. I mean I could keep walking… heck, I could walk to the end, but is that what I want to do?

Wow, I haven’t asked, “what do you want to do?” in a long time! I wanted to go back to the condo and read a bit. So, I did. I did that for 40 minutes and as if my legs had minds of their own, I stood up and wondering, “What do I want to do now?” It’s only been 40 minutes, certainly you can sit still for more than 40 minutes. Apparently not!

It’s not boredom, it’s terror. Terror of facing myself alone. Terror of having no other voices around to drown out the worries in my soul. There was no one else to share the grief of transition happening in my life. Just me. And, of course the books, the wine, and the sunscreen.

Day One: I read. I listened to the wind. I reflected. I penned letters to my partner, who I desperately wished was hear to share my solitude. I drank wine. I put on my sunscreen. I read. You get the picture.

Day two: More sunscreen, less wind, more breathing, continued letter but happier to be alone. And, then the most amazing thing happened. A tiny butterfly, not even an inch in diameter landed on the arm of my beach chair. She was gold with a bit of amber. I cupped my hand to her side to shelter her from the wind, which seemed heavier on her than on me. Her wings slowed down, my own breathing matched hers. She rested, and then road the wind to her next destination.

Plan for day three: Read, drink wine , apply sunscreen. breathe deeper, allowing the solitude to be for me a cosmic hand cupped to my side, sheltering me from the wind. Know that I too will ride the wind to my next destination, in due time.

Van Gogh on Jesus

"Christ alone - of all the philosophers, Magi, etc. - has affirmed, as a pricpal certainty, eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death, the necessity and the raison d'etre of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as a greater artist than all other artists, despising marble and clay as well as color, working in living flesh. That is to say, this matchless artist, hardly to be conceived of by the obtuse instrument of our modern, nervous, stupefied brains, made neither statues nor pictures nor books; he loudly proclaimed that he made... living men, immortals.

Manicured Lawns

Kim Stafford writes, "There is a clear lawn, then the messy digging that begins a garden, then the order of the garden when it flourishes." I have never thought that my summa cum lifestyle was creating a beautifully lush lawn that would may provide space for a church to plant a garden. All I saw/ felt this morning was the shovel making a hole. I wonder now what kind of fruit might grow in that hole?

New faces can
undo old ideas
My inner voice
plays tricks on me
as it changes its mind.
Twisting sights and sounds
as they swish into space.
the space of my inner voice.
At once I perceive
options.
No longer objects but
subjects.
Before me reside
faces.

Doubled over in pain, with dozens of
advil swimming in my stomach, I
lay in bed.
Am I sick? Or just
avoiding the mext phase?
Piles of paper, mail,
books invade the air around me.
But - I leave it - wanting
to remember
the last phase. People, work,
assignments and learning, left
to read.
My life clutters my house.

Clutter? Is my life but clutter?
In my you th, we
collected clutter in the
laundry basket - carried
by little hands
distributing, depositing
remnants of weeks past --
dividing, delivering
a face lifted life.
The space no longer speaks as
a whole but many
spaces, flavored with the
life past.

Perhpas life like cooking requires layered flavors.
Some from the whole
to the part - ready to seep
into the whole again.

"... to say the very think you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words... When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces." ~ C.S. Lewis in Till we have faces

A week has gone since seminary and the strangest thing happened on my porch the other day. I prayed, spontaneously, honestly, without pretense or burden, without agenda or obiligation. From my soul, I found true words to express me currently. Laying aside my book, I traveled to the feelings that aroused my courage to sit face to face with the gods. Me in my sandles, me with a glass of ice tea, me still dressed in my Sunday best, but most of all... simply me.

Hushed in my soul
Tightened in my core
I tilted my head back
and smiled out
thank you.

It was the only prayer
to emerge
from years of books
and floods of thoughts,
wrestling with the gods
who once had a face
now illusively larger.

thank you.

hope and faith,
wonder and dismay,
all laid within the smile that spoke,
daring to unveil the face
which betrayed feelings.

Could it be that the truest face is
thankful
grateful
remarkably humble and small
alongside a face so large?

Does anyone, with their face
delve to other words
than thank you?

Do we dare to linger
with our truest self
to speak what comes next?

Perhaps words will not be necessary
as our faces will reveal us.

transition

When leaves take the blossoms,
Trees are quite odd looking.

Toward a spiritual autobiography

My grandmother almost always lived in the same house with us. And, on Saturday mornings, she would make “share eggs.” A share egg is a soft-boiled egg, which she timed with her yellow egg timer, over a piece of wheat toast. She cut the egg in half so the warm, custard-like middle could soak into the bread. And, she put a bit of salt and pepper on top. She made two and put them on the same plate.

My memory tells me that my brother Robbie and I would sit on each side of her chair, she in the middle and we would share the egg. Each got a bite in turn.

My other siblings, David and Kristin remember, “share eggs” too but for I suppose because they were younger, I remember eating it with my brother Robbie. I suppose that a memory like that holds different meaning for each of us. It’s kind of like how different everyone’s faith is, it comes through memories, through things passed down.

Paul Tillich

"You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for that name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted! If that happens to us, we experience grace."

Robert Fulgum says...

"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge - That myth is more potent than history,I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -That hope always triumphs over experience - That laughter is the only cure for grief.And I believe that love is stronger than death."

Riddle me this

The 12th verse of the very famous "love" passage in the bible has always typically translates our way of understanding or knowing in the present as "seeing dimly." In reality, the word is "riddle" or the greek "anigmati" and the latin "enigma."

People of varying faiths have sought truth, revelation of God, understanding of the world and the Christian scripture has given excuse for our lack of clarity as a dimly lit room in which we search or a textured window out of which we gaze. It is not our formula toward revelation that stands in the way, it is the revelation itself. It is a riddle.

Revelation comes in the form of clues. A clue from this part of the world, a clue from that part of the playground. A hint from work, an insight from family, a definition from history. Revelation is the net result of combining clues and daring to give meaning to an issue or event that began the search.

It is that initial calling to the search that lessens the importance of the detective skills. In a whisper of grace, something now has called us to search for something beyond now. Perhaps that whisper continues to blow clues from here and there, its breath articulating its meaning for us.

Whispers, Hints, Clues... the riddles of revelation.