Don't wait for Tom...

Today, after the snow evaporated and the wind died down, I read two different readings that spoke to my life, heart and ministry.  In a way, they were words of consolation and reassurance.  The first, by Fr. Richard Rohr, of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, NM speaks of the inner journey:

“Everything exposed to the light itself  becomes light,” says Ephesians 5:13. In prayer, we merely keep returning the  divine gaze and we become its reflection, almost in spite of ourselves: Whenever, though, they turn to face God as Moses did, God removes the veil and there they are—face-to-face! They suddenly recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. And when God is personally present, a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation is recognized as obsolete. We're free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him. (II Corinthians 3: 16-18)

The word “prayer” has often been trivialized by making it  into a way of getting what we want. But I use “prayer” as the umbrella word for  any interior journeys or practices that  allow you to experience faith, hope, and love within yourself. It is not a  technique for getting things, a pious exercise that somehow makes God happy, or  a requirement for entry into heaven. It is much more like practicing heaven  now.

Such prayer, such seeing, takes away your  anxiety for figuring it all out fully for yourself, or needing to be right  about your formulations. At this point, God becomes more a verb than a noun,  more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a  personal relationship than an idea. There is Someone dancing with you, and you  are not afraid of making mistakes.

So much of ministry, it seems, is encouraging people (and sometimes myself) that there truly is no reason to be anxious if God is God.  Faith is resting in God's care, knowing that God's grace is bigger than our doubts, trusting that God's presence is real and well... godly. Friends, near and far, worry so much - fret even more - and doubt, doubt, doubt.  I have come to believe that this is choice.  Like the Wailin' Jennys said in concert last year:  Worrying is like praying for something bad to happen, yeah?  Not that we don't have fears, but by faith we seek to place even our dearest fears and wounds into God's grace.  Seems like I spend most of my days sharing this truth over and over again in different ways...

The second reading came from Eugene Peterson's book, The Contemplative Pastor, and he writes:  "Matter is real. Flesh is good. Without a firm rooting in creation, religion is always drifting off into some kind of pious sentimentalism or sophisticated intellectualism."

Then he cuts to the chase:

The task of salvation is not to refine us into pure spirits so that we will not be cumbered with this too solid flesh. We are not angels, nor are we to become angels. The Word did not become a good idea, or a numinous feeling or a moral aspiration; the Word became flesh. It also becomes flesh. Our Lord left us a command to remember and receive him in bread and wine, in acts of eating and drinking. Things matter: the physical is holy. It is extremely significant that in the opening sentences of the Bible, God speaks a world of energy and matter into being: light, moon, stars, earth, vegetation, animals, man, woman (not love and virtue, faith and salvation, hope and judgment, though they will come soon enough.) Apart from creation, you see, covenant has no structure, no context, no rootage in reality.

I love Peterson! He is so earthy and honest - clear and challenging - reminding me again and again that my calling is NOT to solve people's problems, but rather to be present with them in the mystery of a life of faith:  If pastors become accomplices in treating every child as a problem to be figured out, every spouse as a problem to be dealt with, every clash of wills in choir or committee as a problem to be adjudicated, we abdicate our most important work which is directing worship in the traffic (of everyday life), discovering the presence of the cross in the paradoxes and chaos between Sundays, calling attention to the splendor in the ordinary, and, most of all, teaching a life of prayer to our friends and companions in the pilgrimage.

So now it is off to my Play-Full Life discussion group - who knows what will pop up there?!?