gobsmacked and surprised...

My current quest to unlearn the ways of privilege and power in favor of a holistic spirituality of tenderness, solidarity and living small regularly discloses to me ways in which my old habits and patterns of thinking infect the new. Without an equally robust trust in embodied grace, it would be safe to say that I would throw in the towel. Letting go, as I continue to learn, is never finished. Growing small in the ways of trust is always a work in progress. Incremental rather than immediate - and always built upon grace. 

My spiritual directors for the past year have been bread baking, embracing the wisdom of nature revealed where I live, poetry, and, surprisingly to me, taking photographs. I was conscious about choosing the first three. But last night as part of my periodic examen (a prayerful look backwards over my days) I was drawn to the pictures on my IPhone and discovered that my photos had become a source of reflection, prayer and encouragement, too. (A few years ago one of the blessings of technology was unveiled when a friend taught me how to use my phone's internal alarm clock to set regular chimes as a call to gratitude much like the bells of a monastery beckon monks to prayer. And just this morning another technological blessing was brought to light when Di was invited to teach Syrian refugees English over the Internet. It has long been a calling of her heart - and now a path through the maze of fear has been opened.)

In addition to countless shots of my children and grandchildren, I was delighted to see that my phone revealed three other ways I am practicing letting go of the old in anticipation of the new: the evolving seasons in my backyard, various Facebook memes re: God's first word of wisdom in creation, and a host of contemporary icons. As I reviewed the message of the seasons, the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweet Grass came into focus: 

We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth. Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift that we must pass on, just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we'll need will be for mourning. For the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers and the memory of snow.

(October 2018)

(November 2018)

(December 2018)

An excerpt from Mind of Our Mother by Bob Samples also rang out:

Culture has a way of giving us ladders when we need trees, reason when we need myth, and separateness when we need unity. In the music of the universe, there is harmony. The discord, the non-harmonious, is slowly drifting back in to the misty domains of our lost games. Ritual is being restored to rite. With a higher sense of the rhythms of the planet, we can recognize the emerging vision of grace. A grace to honor, not befowl, our Mother. A grace to honor each other as end products of diverse cultural journeys. A grace to become the kind of human that can embody the spiritual. A grace to blend into all that is, was, and shall be.

(March 2019)

(April 2019)

(May 2019)

(June 2019)

(July 2019)

Looking backwards over the pictures makes it clear that nothing stays the same. Nothing of life is stagnant. The ebb and flow of creation is reassuring albeit mysterious: we enter life and death, abundance and scarcity, summer and winter and everything in-between just as the Hebrew text teaches: to everything there is a season and a purpose for all things under heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

A second series of saved pictures include memes from Facebook that celebrate God's first word in creation. On the website, Friends of Silence, (https:// friendsofsilence.net)I recently read this insight from  Nathaniel Altman: 

Through greater intimacy with the natural world, we begin to appreciate its complexity and gain a clearer understanding of the relationship between the rains, the soul, and the plants, the animals and the trees, and how the welfare of one living being depends on that of another. (Sacred Water)

I was not raised with an awareness of my connection to Mother Earth. My training as a child - and as an adult seminarian - was thoroughly anthropomorphic. I loved quiet walks through the woods as a boy. And have been gobsmacked into silence and awe upon the sound of a secret stream in the forest. But it wasn't until my congregation and I started to honor a new liturgical season, The Season of Creation, that I learned about listening to the wisdom of God revealed in the first word: the cosmos and all its inhabitants. It is a way of letting go that will continue until I, too return to the earth and enter into the love of God in a new way.

What was extraordinary was that I saw clearly, indisputably, finally, that the child, the grass, the trees, the sky above were all woven of the same material, were all part of the same fabric, which was the fabric of which the universe is made, and that this fabric lived. As pointed contrast, the cement sidewalk lay ugly and dead, a scar in the picture; except for it, the whole scene was transcendent with beauty, the colors had an intensity, a purity not present in "real" life, and the vision was imbued with a feeling of the perfect peace and oneness and benevolence of the universe. (The Perfection of the Morning, Sharon Butala)

There were lots of icons - contemporary artistic visual prayers - giving shape and form both to God's tenderness and the agony of God's children in this generation. Many of the icons that I collected last year have their origins in the current regime's war against immigrants and refugees. Some point towards the plight of those fleeing genocide in Syria. And a few offer new insights into what it means to see the Christ Child and/or the Holy Family on the boundaries of our own culture. (NOTE: I will share the icons over the weekend. For now, here is my prayer altar with Jean Vanier seated with his favorite icon, Theotokos of Vladimir, alongside my prayer candles showing Nina Simone and Patty Smith.)

And poems... so many wonderful, provocative, contemplative and laugh-out loud poems. Here's one that opened my heart: "Personal Effects" by Raymond Burns.

The lawyer told him to write a letter
to accompany the will, to prevent
potential discord over artifacts
valued only for their sentiment.

His wife treasures a watercolor by
her father; grandmama's spoon stirs
their oatmeal every morning. Some
days, he wears his father's favorite tie.

He tries to think of things that
could be tokens of his days:
binoculars that transport
bluebirds through his cataracts

a frayed fishing vest with
pockets full of feathers brightly
tied, the little fly rod he can still
manipulate in forest thickets,

a sharp-tined garden fork,
heft and handle fit for him,
a springy spruce kayak paddle,
a retired leather satchel.

He writes his awkward note,
trying to dispense with grace
some well-worn clutter easily
discarded in another generation.

But what he wishes to bequeath
are items never owned: a Chopin
etude wafting from his wife's piano
on the scent of morning coffee

seedling peas poking into April,
monarch caterpillars infesting
milkweed leaves, a light brown
doe alert in purple asters

a full moon rising in October,
hunting-hat orange in ebony sky,
sunlit autumn afternoons that flutter
through the heart like falling leaves.