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.”