help me, st francis, help me...

Today we will walk in the wetlands and soak up some warm, winter sun. Later I will make more chicken soup from the recent remnants as well as a quick bread. We will stop by the grocery store to get a few supplies for Di while I am gone. And before bed I will pack for Ottawa and download a few podcasts for the trip. All of it will be worship.   

In an on-line course Fr. Richard Rohr is leading re: the Way of St. Francis, he tells us that: "the foundational error in all religion is that we make a distinction between the sacred and the profane - leaving 98% of life outside of our engagement." No wonder the modern realm is saturated with so many so-called atheists and spiritual but not religious folk: they have recognized in both heart and mind that our religion is too small for the enormity of God's grace. They know from the inside out that all creation cries holy - even if the word holy is never uttered. A poem in the Franciscan tradition called "Sacraments" puts it like this:

I once spoke to my friend, an old squirrel, about the Sacraments—
he got so excited

and ran into a hollow in his tree and came
back holding some acorns, an owl feather,
and a ribbon he had found.

And I just smiled and said, "Yes, dear,
you understand:

everything imparts
His grace."

I am finding that I need both the expansive everything of life to be sacramental as well as a few particulars of form to nourish my soul. Taking in the subtle magnificence of the winter woodland is one prayer, saying the Salve Regina in the tongue of King James with my wooden beads is another. Waking Lucie each morning with an embrace and a scratch is an act of praise, but I also need to sing: "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Amen." I like the way Pádraig Ó Tuama  puts it in the introduction to the Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community book.

Breath, like prayer, is a cry. Breath, like prayer, can also be an art. Prayer is a small fire lit to keep cold hands warm. Prayer is a practice that flourishes both with faith and doubt. Prayer is asking, and prayer is sitting. Prayer is the breath. Prayer is not an answer, always, because not all questions can be answered. Prayer can be a rhythm that helps us make sense in times of senselessness, not offering solutions, but speaking to and from the mystery of humanity... Prayer is rhythm. Prayer is comfort. Prayer is disappointment. Prayer is words and shape and art around desperation, and delight and disappointment and desire. Prayer can be the art that helps you name your desire. And even if the desire is only named, well, naming is a good thing, surely. Naming is what God did, the Jews tell us, and the world unfolded. Or perhaps naming is what the Jews did, and God unfolded. Either way, I'm thankful. Naming things is part of the creative impulse. Naming the deep desire of our heart is a good thing, even if those desires are never satisfied. (pp.xi-xii)

It will be 45F today. Tomorrow, nearly 50F. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that when the land around the maple tree no longer bears snow, then sugar season has arrived. It is as if the trees are returning thanks for the resurrection of the sun as sap rises and starts to flow with new life again. I noticed this is beginning to happen in our woods. The birds are returning, too: starlings and robins are already back - and soon the red wing blackbirds will be home - a sure sign that spring is right around the corner. 

All of this - the poetry and the sap, the birds and the books, the beauty and the pain - are holy. Rohr says that the genius of St. Francis, who took his lead from Jesus, is that he excluded nothing. He even embraced the negative as part of his spirituality. Francis went to the periphery to live. He kissed the lepers. He welcomed the sun and the moon as sisters and brothers. He talked theology with the squirrels. Today I want to look at it all - what is present and what is promised, what I can touch and see as well as what is missing or empty - and cry, "Glory!" Help me, Francis, help me...

Meditation on Beauty
by J. Estanislao Lopez

There are days I think beauty has been exhausted
but then I read about the New York subway cars that,

dumped into the ocean, have become synthetic reefs.
Coral gilds the stanchions, feathered with dim Atlantic light.

Fish glisten, darting from a window into the sea grass
that bends around them like green flames—

this is human-enabled grace. So maybe there’s room
in the margin of error for us to save ourselves

from the trends of self-destruction.
Or maybe such beauty is just another distraction,

stuffing our hearts with its currency, paraded for applause.
Here, in the South, you can hear applause

coming from the ground: even the buried are divided.
At the bottom of the Gulf, dark with Mississippi silt,

rests the broken derrick of an oil rig—and isn’t oil
also beautiful? Ancient and opaque, like an allegory

that suggests we sacrifice our most beloved. Likely
ourselves. In one photograph, a sea turtle skims its belly

across a hull, unimpressed with what’s restored,
barely aware of the ocean around it growing warm.