everything is broken... and held in God's love

Today's musical meditation and biblical reflection for Lent...

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Let me say out loud at the start of this reflection that I process life – and learn best – through music. If you know Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, he posits eight different ways people make sense of the world: some of us are body-smart and prefer kinesthetic education while people-smart learners gravitate towards interpersonal encounters. There are word-smart folk who thrive verbally, rational-people with follow the path of logic, nature-smart people who learn best in creation, self-smart souls who use intrapersonal and intuitive educational tools, picture-smart people who prefer visual/spatial resources, and music-smart people who make sense of the world through song. Over the years I’ve discovered that when it comes to theology, spirituality, and most other intellectual pursuits I take my first clues from music as well as nature, silence, and poetry: the mystic’s path of learning is how insights, facts, and wisdom are clarified within me.

That’s why I insist that my education into the foolishness of God’s love began with Bob Dylan – well, Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Neither would have considered themselves evangelists back in the day, but that’s how I heard their music. I was literally stunned into consciousness and enraptured by the energy, creativity, and sex appeal of the Beatles. On Sunday, February 9, 1964 I had a personal Pentecost when I heard those cats singing and playing on the stage of the Ed Sullivan show. It was as if a veil had been lifted and for the first time, I saw that life had meaning. I was enthralled by the Beatles and still consider them salvific.

Just a year before, during the first March on Washington, I became a Bob Dylan fan: songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A’Changing” spoke to my heart when I heard Peter, Paul and Mary sing them. And when that snare drum crack that opens “Just Like a Rolling Stone” jumped out of the radio at me while sitting in a car in July 1965 waiting for my mother to come out of the Zayre’s department store I knew that the gates of heaven opening for me.

But there were two songs in particular that introduced me to the sacred clown who sees the promise of the spirit beyond the sorrow without ever diminishing the pain of real life. The first was Dylan’s break away from folk music anthem, “My Back Pages,” that came out four months after the Beatles hit the stage on Ed Sullivan’s show. It goes something like this…

Crimson flames tied through my ears 

Rolling high and mighty traps

Pounced with fire on flaming roads using ideas as my maps

"We'll meet on edges, soon, " said I 

Proud 'neath heated brow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I'm younger than that now 

Oh, that great refrain: I was SO much older then, I’m younger than that now. I didn’t know it then, but it was written during a time when a young Bob Dylan felt like quitting the music making world.  He’d written a ton of stunning protest songs – beautifully poetic musical masterpieces celebrating confrontation with the status quo, civil rights for people of color, and the sacredness of the anti-war movement – and he cherished those songs. They came from his heart.

But as so often happens, Dylan’s most ardent supporters, in this case those on the political Left, wanted him to keep on churning out more and more social justice anthems. And, truth be told, young Bob Dylan wanted to do more with his music that be a social justice Tin Pan Alley. He wanted to make more poetry, evoke more creativity, invite more introspection. He, too, had been knocked out by the Beatles and yearned to explore what rock’n’roll and electric guitars might add to his repertoire. But to the doctrinaire commissars of politically correct culture in NYC at the time, this was forbidden as rock’n’roll was considered collaboration with the idolatry of popular culture. For a time, he gave-in to this pressure releasing yet another acoustic album in August of 1964 – but nobody knew what to do with this one: yes it was acoustic and didn’t exactly sound like rock’n’roll, but its vibe was wild and restless. It was weirdly esoteric, too – much more about the inward journey than the outward work of social change.

It opens with the totally goofy: “All I really want to do… is baby be friends with you.” Includes “Chimes of Freedom,” “Motorphycho Nitemare,” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and that great refrain: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” My favorite verses close the song:

In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand 

At the mongrel dogs who teach

Fearing not I'd become my enemy 

In the instant that I preach

My existence led by confusion boats 

Mutiny from stern to bow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I'm younger than that now

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats 

Too noble to neglect

Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect

Good and bad, I define these terms

Quite clear, no doubt, somehow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I'm younger than that now 

The story goes that when his Left-wing critics heard this album, and thrashed his creativity, Dylan was ready to throw-in the towel. But before doing so, he did what all sacred clowns and tricksters do: he took a road trip. A vision quest. The North American equivalent of Christ’s time in the desert – where along the way to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, he heard the Beatles. AGAIN! And he, too had a revelation: I could be making the same kind of joyful, rebellious music as the Beatles, but from a creative and eclectic American perspective. That’s when the Master went electric with tunes like “Subterranean Homesick Blues, “Just Like a Rolling Stone” and “Maggie’s Farm.” In essence, Dylan started to reinvent American popular music by bringing the blues together with his ginned-up, psychedelic poetry – a combination of Rimbaud meets Chuck Berry while cruising a party at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. These were experiments in genre-bending driven by lament and abstract social commentary. My favorite saturates a blues form with a kaleidoscope of hallucinatory lyrics Dylan called “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” for only God knows why. It starts off like this:

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez

When it's Easter time, too

And your gravity fails and 

Negativity don't pull you through

Don't put on any airs 

When you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue

They got some hungry women there 

They really make a mess outta you

Now, if you see Saint Annie, please, 

Tell her, "Thanks a lot" 

I cannot move and my fingers are all in a knot

I don't have the strength to get up and take another shot

And my best friend, my doctor 

Won't even say what it is I've got 

He’s singing about the personal and political apocalypse brewing in America in the 60’s albeit with a trickster’s sense of humor. It was radical social commentary for those educated in the parlance of Allen Ginsberg and T.S. Eliot. At the same time Brother Dylan is making THIS type of magic, John Lennon is coming to terms with his shadow which lets him know that he cannot keep on keeping on without confronting HIS inner demons. He’s got all the money, booze, sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll notoriety that anyone might crave – he’s at the top of his game– but he keeps crashing into a relentless and self-destructive inner angst that tears him apart. He tries to mask his suffering with upbeat rhythms and jangling guitars, but lyrics like” “Help – I need somebody. Help – not just anybody. Help – you know I need someone. HELP!” tell a deeper story – and even as a goofy 9th grade adolescent guy I could hear the despair underneath all those happy sounding country’n’ western guitar riffs. If you strip “I’m a Loser” down to its essence, you’ll hear something like this:

Although I laugh and I act like a clown 

Beneath this mask I am wearing a frown

My tears are falling like rain from the sky

Is it for her or myself that I cry? 

I'm a loser - and I lost someone who's near to me

I'm a loser - and I'm not what I appear to be 

These are the songs that connected me as a young, spiritual mystic to the path of Christ’s descent and the journey of self-emptying I was learning about in church. In a way I could not explain then, these songs sounded and felt like Lent to me. The more I listened, the more I heard a link between the spiritual practices of prayer and fasting, the stories of Jesus in this liturgical season, and what I would eventually come to know as the archetype of Jesus as the sacred clown.

These songs convinced me that it was not coincidence that a Holy Lent mirrors the spiritual formation of Jesus in the desert: just as he was called into a season of solitude, silence, and searching, so are we. Lent isn’t about giving up chocolate, it’s a letting go of illusions so that our spiritual maturation might take on the same gravitas as Christ’s. During Lent, Jesus is shown to be simultaneously fully human – fragile, anxious, broken, hungry, and alienated from both God and other human beings – and thoroughly committed to the downward mobility of the sacred clown who trusts the folly of God’s love more than everything else. Fr. Thomas Keating of blessed memory, an early leader in the Centering Prayer movement, writes: “Jesus appears in the desert as the representative of the human race.”

He bears within himself the experience of the human predicament in its raw intensity. Hence, he is vulnerable to the temptations of Satan. In the New Testaments, Satan means the Enemy, the Confuser, the Adversary, that mysterious and malicious spirt that seems to more than a mere personification of our unconscious evil tendencies. The temptations of Satan are allowed by God to help us confront our own wounds. If relatives and friends fail to bring out the worst in us, Satan is always around to finish the job. Self-knowledge (you see) is experiential: it tastes the full depths of human weakness. (And) in the desert Jesus (experiences) all the primitive instincts of human nature (and our wounds.) (Keating, The Mystery of Christ, Liturgy as Spiritual Experience, pp. 40-41)

The gospel text for this day in St. Mark tells of a time when Jesus explained the rhythm and upside-down logic of his ministry to those he loved. It reads: Jesus began to teach (his friends) that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. So, Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter saying, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on things above, but on things below.’ The story continues with:

And calling a crowd together along with his disciples, he told them: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their soul? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’ (Mark 8: 31-38)

In an intentionally visual manner Jesus points out the rhythm or cycle of spiritual maturation – integrating things above with those below so that our vision is not dualistic but unified in one, organic whole – and then goes on to describe what growing up in the Spirit includes: Rejection by those with power and status, physical and spiritual suffering, various types of dying before our physical death and then the blessings of consolation and renewal.

He is describing the path of spiritual descent where you let go of control, give your heart, mind, body, and strength to God lest you forfeit your soul, and incrementally learn how to become empty so that you might be filled with God’s grace. Or, as I heard St. Bob saying, we practice letting go of being so old and controlling that we become younger, freer, and more fun to be with than we ever were before now.

We go out into the desert as Jesus did, confront our fears, anxieties, obsessions, wounds, and ego, practice emptying ourselves by trust, and wait upon the Lord to renew our strong. Without the desert, or the road trip, we remain spiritual children. That’s why every year Lent begins with Jesus inviting us out into the desert. Join me. Follow me. See how I do it: Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it and you will learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly. Ok? Those songs carried me to Lent – they led me to the path of Jesus – and they still do. Given the multiplicity of musical styles I’ve learned over the years, I’ve also come to trust that there’s more than one way to make sense of Christ’s call to a wilderness vision quest road trip, too.

· Fr. Keating believes that the three temptations of Christ involved saving himself, seeking the affection of others, and giving up control over his own destiny. Each challenge from the Confuser called for a choice: hold on to the illusion and idolatry of power, or, relinquish control and trust God without qualification.

· Fr. Henri Nouwen came to trust that the desert was where Jesus had to decide between the way of upward or downward mobility. The diabolical one, Nouwen said, told Jesus he could be relevant by doing something the world wanted like making bread out of stones for hungry people. Or he could be important by doing stunning and impressing the world by jumping from the temple tower and surviving. Or Jesus could become powerful by turning his back on God and pledging his allegiance to idols that captured the world’s imagination and attention. “Do this and I will give you dominion over everyone and everything. To each challenge and every temptation Jesus responds with humility, choosing greater trust and the promise of serenity by accepting what truly cannot be changed.

The contemporary musical artist, Alanis Morissette, offers a slightly different take on the descent of the desert in her song, “Thank You” – and that’s the one that feels MOST like Lent to me. It sounds like Keating and Nouwen embracing with encourage-ment from Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault and Thomas Merton. It is ALL about releasing resentment and fear into a sacred silence that moves the journey along with a funky, New Jack City groove:

How bout me not blaming you for everything 

how bout me enjoying the moment for once 

how bout how good it feels to finally forgive you 

how bout grieving it all one at a time 

thank you India - thank you terror 

thank you disillusionment 

thank you frailty - thank you consequence 

thank you thank you silence 

the moment I let go I got more than I could handle 

the moment I jumped off of was when I touched down 

how bout no longer being masochistic 

how bout remembering your divinity 

how bout unabashedly bawling your eyes out 

how bout not equating death with stopping 

Thank you India - thank you providence 

thank you disillusionment 

Thank you nothingness - thank you clarity 

thank you thank you silence 

This is the archetype of the sacred clown singing about God’s upside-down realm to popular culture through music. Artists like Warren Zevon and Patty Smith are masters. So, too, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Joni Mitchell, Joan Osborne as well as Leonard Cohen, Fiona Apple, and Gil Scott-Heron. These are the songs of Lent coming from the heart of a still speaking God who calls to us in love even as our culture tries to keep us stone-cold tone deaf and rhythmically challenged. They’re telling us that desert time, the path of descent, the serenity of letting go, and downward mobility is a great way to practice dying before we die. And for Christians this is the heart of the way of Jesus during Lent. And if you’re really into the groove, you start noticing, feeling, hearing, and sensing that the journey into the desert is intimately intertwined with our baptism.

We aren’t baptized just to get ourselves – or our babies – right with the holy or cleansed from sin. Ours is a tradition of original blessing not original sin no matter how mixed up the patriarchal church of the Empire got it. So, just as Jesus set out for the wilderness and his spiritual formation in the desert after his baptism, so, too, do we because baptism and the desert are for the healing of the world. It’s not only a personal, inward journey: it is how we bring healing to the world

First, baptism – like Eucharist - is grounded in community. St. Paul explains that when he was baptized, Jesus was immersing himself into a life of radical solidarity with the human condition not merely water. He wasn’t baptized for selfish reasons, but to show us how much he loved us. I think Philippians 2 got it right: Though he was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God to be something grasped at or held on to. Rather, Jesus emptied himself and took the form of a servant – some texts say a slave – and entered into the fullness of the human experience. First of all, baptism is ALL about solidarity and communion with those Christ loves.

Second, this solidarity is born of humility: Elizabeth-Anne Stewart defines New Testament humility as a great tenderness for others not an individual act of sacrifice or debasement. It is compassion and mercy made flesh so that other flesh might be healed, cherished, honored, cleansed, and renewed. This is how the early faith community understood spiritual formation before and after baptism: baptism must lead to a tender heart – for without tenderness, it is not sacramental. It is an empty ritual. St. Mark’s gospel tells a story where after his baptism Jesus looks out upon his people with compassion for he saw that they were like sheep without a shepherd. Those who have known anything of Christ’s mercy are called to look upon one another and do likewise. Again, Philippians 2 is useful: if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if you have known any comfort from his love, any intimacy with the sharing of his Spirit, if you have known the tenderness and compassion of Christ Jesus, then make his joy complete by being of the same mind and sharing compassion with the sisters and brothers. Tenderness and compassion define humility – and humility is the second truth about baptism.

And the third is that baptism demands intentionality. Sometime back in the 90’s a well-intentioned Oprah Winfrey started talking about random acts of kindness – it became a fad. Remember? I had a youth leader who got caught up in this fad who set aside periodic Sunday night gatherings for “adventures in random acts of kindness.” And I thought WTF? Jesus didn’t call us to be RANDOM with our kindness. Capricious with our compassion? Temporary with our tenderness. His commit-ment like ours is to an intentional life of mercy. Even the most selfish soul can blunder her or his way into a random act of kindness every now and again; but those who are followers of Jesus know it takes discipline and commitment to construct your life on it.

No wonder baptism drove Jesus – or led him – into the desert to follow the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: making a commitment to radical hospitality and living as God’s sacred clown takes training. Practice. Prayer and a ton of letting go. Jesus went to the desert to let go of what got in the way of love. And so do we: our commitment to community calls us to keep practicing dying before we die in all the ways we can so that we incarnate the grace of God as best we’re able.

Thomas Merton once said that the deepest connection we have with one another is not communication. It is communion. An intimacy beyond words where we recognize and then reclaim our old-est, deepest, original unity. Our time in the desert of Lent encourages us to reconnect to this unity. Merton added: “there is a point of nothingness at the center of our being," a point of absolute poverty, the small thing within us that Rilke said is always being pulled by "gravity’s law" toward the heart of the world. When we surrender to gravity's law – when we seek to be filled with God’s grace and empty of our own fears – we befriend our own poverty of being and start to rise up rooted, like trees." The knots of our own making are untangled.

Letting go isn’t easy. It doesn’t come naturally to me – maybe to no one. So, in addition to the Centering Prayer I am practicing imperfectly this Lent, I find that I need to go back to the oldest songs of our faith: the Psalms. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record to you, the Psalm that continually gives me the greatest guidance and clarity, it that little Psalm 131: 

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, 

my eyes are not raised too high; 

I am not proud nor do I have haughty looks 

so I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me. 

No, I have calmed and quieted my soul,

like a child upon her mother’s breast 

my soul is quieted within me. 

Hope and trust in the Lord from this time on and forevermore. 

Not long ago, a former colleague – a wonderful musician with whom I once collaborated with on works of the heart – decided to troll and trash me on FB. It is NOT the end of the world, right? And it won’t be the last time it happens either. But if you’ve ever gotten into a spitting contest with the wind you know you can’t win, right? Logic doesn’t make any difference, nor do facts or appeals to God’s grace. And this is as true of those on the Left as it is on the Right. So, mostly these days I just remain silent and choose to use my extremely limited energy and wisdom in other ways. But this time I thought a reply was in order because the attack was so ugly. And untrue.

And almost without thinking – automatically – what popped into my head and heart but Psalm 131 – so my reply said something like: At this stage of my life, most days I’ve given up trying to be a moral arbiter: most things, as the Psalmist says, are just too grand and lofty for me. So, I choose to celebrate the small and good things I can grasp... and trust God to sort out the rest.

So, let me close with one more wee song that I use as a prayer a lot. I sang part of it not long ago at a Zoom birthday party for a beloved friend – and on and off for nearly 50 years I’ve been singing it for myself, too. First because it touched my heart, later because it spoke to me of God’s call to my life. And now as a Lenten invitation to the desert. It’s Leslie Duncan of the UK’s tune: Love Song.

The words I have to say 

may well be simple but they're true 

Until you give your love 

there's nothing more that we can do 

Love is the opening door, 

love is what we came here for 

No one could offer you more

Do you know what I mean

have your eyes really seen 

You say it's very hard 

To leave behind the life we knew 

But there's no other way 

And now it's really up to you 

Love is the key we must turn

Truth is the flame we must burn 

Freedom the lesson we must learn

Do you know what I mean

have your eyes really seen

so... ash wednesday 2021

Like so many of you, I've wondered how we might mark Ash Wednesday 2021 this year. Some, obviously, will not mark it at all. Ignoring the intentional call to "die before our death" is not something popular culture has much of a stomach for, right? We are a youth obsessed people who deny, hide, and obfuscate death as much as possible. And when, like this full year of pandemic, we cannot run away from the inevitable, we distract and/or self-medicate ourselves only to become resentful when the contagion still triumphs. 

Others, like one of my favorite writers, Diana Butler Bass, simply acknowledge their weariness. "The pandemic has made the traditional practice unworkable, as it involves close contact and in-person gathering."

Thus, some churches have developed alternatives including drive-thru ashes and handing out baggies of ashes for self-imposition or sprinkling on one’s head. But, I confess: the whole thing is wearying. How is Ash Wednesday really all that different from any other day in this interminable pandemic? The entire year has felt like Lent, so today is just another ashy day.

It is not up to me to say what another feels. In some ways, I get what Dr. Bass is feeling, and it rings true. The older I get, the more space I have for letting others feel what they feel without any interference, commentary, or judgement from me. I recall a conversation guideline someone insisted upon when we were building a coalition to oppose a state-wide ban on same sex marriage. The word was simple: NO comparisons of our various degrees of suffering, ok? No one would be allowed to suggest that they have been hurt more than anyone else. I thought back to my political sociology classes in the 70's where academics spoke of the "relative depravity" factor. However you want to measure it, life is hard for us all in varying degrees, and if we are going to live and work together I've realized that it is not my job to evaluate your feelings or experiences. Period.

For me, I am missing my loved ones this Ash Wednesday. And singing the songs of faith with others in full throated abandon, too. I'll join with my L'Arche community in Ottawa via ZOOM of Friday - and that will be holy ground. I shared some songs, poems, thoughts, and prayers with our tiny FB streaming community today, too - and that was a blessing. (check it out here on Be Still and Know: "Small is Holy." Here is the link:

https://fb.watch/3JmAgH6XaH/)

Where I've come out as Lent 2021 begins is this: with so little practice transforming our own pain, it seems like we mostly transmit it to those who are most vulnerable. Without a chance to learn and practice how to "did before our death," we keep doing the same old things while expecting different results. I know that I personally need to break that death spiral. I also know that to choose to "die" to self in this self-centered culture is foolishness writ large. So I am honoring the way St. Paul put it: a life guided by the foolishness of Christ and his Cross. 

This Lent I want to go deeper into a life that lets my false self die so that I might revel more in joy, trust, integrity, and compassion. I have a LOT of work to do in this dying so I give thanks for one more season of Lent to do some of it. For those who would like to join me in this pilgrimage, I'll be sharing my reflections and my experiences in prayer, word, poetry, and song on my Sunday live streaming: "Small Is Holy." (go to: https://www.facebook

.com/Be-Still-and-Know-913217865701531/)

Lent will mostly be spent alone. Such is the reality of this moment and no amount of Zooming will change this. I might be able to get my first vaccination in early March, with does number two ight before Holy Week. Perhaps there's the change we might be able to some time with our wee family after all of this. But probably not as Di has to wait even longer than I for a vaccina-tion. No matter how this Lent shakes out, however, I am ready to let go of a little more of myself and move towards the foolishness of the Cross.

learning to live together...

This time last year I was still going to cafes for artistic planning meetings. I was
still going to L'Arche Ottawa for retreats, conversations, and encounters in community. And we were still travelling to Brooklyn to visit with children and grandchildren. The very day before Massachusetts locked-down, we celebrated our daughter's birthday at a great local Mexican eatery, too. We had worshipped with our loved ones at Trinity Church in NYC, feasted with other loved ones in thanksgiving for her birth, and made St. Brigid's crosses for our thresholds just because.  And then... it was apocalypse now!

So much has shifted in nearly a year: so much time in solitude, so much longing and heartache, so much death and grief, so much time in nature, so much political drama, and so many prayers. Oh my Lord, so many prayers. A year ago today (oh, does that ever sound like the start of an old Mothers of Invention song?)

... I had never Zoomed. Or shared anything live-streaming on FB. And now it is SOP. I am still woefully low tech (as you'll see below) but I prefer to call it "old school." I suppose it is time to up my game with technology although I prefer to give my time to writing, revision, and content. Here's my latest "Small Is Holy" live-streaming that rings in a new cycle after my first nearly 52 week streak of reflections, poems, prayers, and songs.

Candidly, who knew this would still be on-going? Not I for certain! And yet it has become a place of connection for some of us even as we commit to more solitude in solidarity. Last year at this time, when the silence and isolation of the contagion was novel, I found myself encouraging friends to take in the beauty and serenity of Mother Nature. Not only is there solace in the woods and streams, there is a quiet sacred witness, too: winter is not forever. Spring is just around the corner.

During that year, I refashioned our kitchen, repainted two bathrooms, built and rebuilt raised bed platforms for a terraced garden, chopped and hauled wood, rebuilt much of the back deck - and now the front deck, too - shared spiritual reflections with my community of L'Arche Ottawa on Zoom, celebrated prayers and Eucharist on my FB live-streaming gig "Small is Holy," collaborated with a local poet on an experiment in voice, music, and photography, visited with loved ones virtually and eventually in public, worked my way through most of Michael Connelly's "Bosch" detective novels, studied a variety of scholars re: Celtic spirituality, and grown closer to both Di and Lucie.

We are now two weeks into the ancient Celtic season of Imbolc that honors the Rowan Moon. Wise Meg Llewellyn writes that "imbolc means 'in the belly of the mother.'" (The Celtic Wheel of the Year.)

This is the time of pregnancy and the stirring of new life in seeds and creatures. Another name for the feast day of Imbolc on February 1-2 is Oimelc which means "milk of the ewes," for this was the lambing season in the Celtic world.

A prayer from the former days dedicated to St. Brigid at the End of Winter hints at what is to come as north country slowly shifts into spring.

Radiant flame of gold,

Sweet foster-mother of Christ,

I call you name:

   Let not death come to my house at winter's end.

   
Let us not be harried and hungry.

You will not let me be put into a cell.

You will not let me be wounded.

You will not let me fall into forgetfulness of Christ.

You are my gentle foster-mother.

You bring new life at winter's end.

   I am sick in my heart;

   Winter lingers in my bones.

As you did help bring Jesus from Mary's womb,

Bring new life from me.

I am winter-bare, without gold or corn or cows.

Aid me, O Brigid! Great is my winter need.

   Bring springtime to the land.

   Bring springtime to my heart.

As a bit of a joke, at first, and then as an act of defiance as the contagion deepened into summer and then fall last year, I steadfastly chose NOT to cut my hair. With, perhaps, another nine months of waiting in various degrees of solitude to go I shall rival the mane of the late Leon Russell by the time its over.

So here's to the next nine months of ripening, loving, maturing inwardly, caring for those we can outwardly, gestating in spirit and flesh, and trusting that God's grace is stronger than all the forces of chaos. Play on brother Leon, play on.

february blues...

For my birthday in 2020 my Brooklyn family gave me a beautiful bracelet of wooden beads. The brass clasp adds a unique flair as it is hollow in order to hold a small paper wish. For about 20 years I have been enamored with bracelets: colorful cloth friendship bracelets, wooden beads, metal jewelry as well as strands of woven leather. At one point I wore about 25 from all over the world. Right now it's down to 13. Last fall I shared my wish out loud with my daughter: I wished we might be together at Christmas. There was a moment in September when it looked like it might come true. But then reality set in and the contagion spiked everywhere. This morning I read that Dr. Fauci thinks that maybe we can start to ease up on PPE in late autumn. Late autumn. I know it is a moving target, but that's truth is staggering to me: late autumn before we'll be able to visit loved ones and friends again in anything approaching normalcy.

Speaking with friends in Ottawa over the weekend I learned that they are facing a time table even more grim than our own. Given the fact that the US holds a near monopoly on the production of vaccinations - and has been unusually stingy to our neighbor which must import their meds from Europe - it will be early summer before many of their most vulnerable folk are inoculated. Later still for the wider population. Once upon a time, Di and I thought that our 25th anniversary magical mystery tour to Nova Scotia might take place a mere year after our original plan: May 2020. Not likely any more - perhaps May 2022 - and it will certainly be Christmas 2021 before we get back to celebrating live jazz at Diese Onze in Montreal. We fantasize about doing a slow car trip to see our loved ones this fall, moving across country to see other friends, too before winding up in Tucson.

Obviously, my thoughts are turned to travel today - and longing - while I watch yet another snow storm fall vigorously all around us. We may pick up another 6" before it quits. From the warmth of my study window, it looks calming and serene. I've noted before that these types of storms not only encase the Berkshires in silence, but enshroud us in beauty. The contrast of greys and browns against the white ground and hills highlights the hints of red that still linger in the wetlands behind our home. Last week I trekked out to my favorite tree in knee high drifts just to take in its majesty. Even while naked, it is a wonder to behold that brings a measure of comfort when so much of the rest of the world looks bleak. I think the poet, Bill Christopherson, grasped some of this season's dilemma when he crafted "February." 

The cold grows colder, even as the days
grow longer, February's mercury vapor light
buffing but not defrosting the bone-white
ground, crusty and treacherous underfoot.
This is the time of year that's apt to put
a hammerlock on a healthy appetite,
old anxieties back into the night,
insomnia and nightmares into play;
when things in need of doing go undone
and things that can't be undone come to call,
muttering recriminations at the door,
and buried ambitions rise up through the floor
and pin your wriggling shoulders to the wall;
and hope's a reptile waiting for the sun.

In 15 minutes the second impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump will begin a mere month after his attempted coup. Indeed, "the cold grows colder, even as the days grow longer..." I am hearing Langston Hughes in my heart: "hold fast to dreams, for when dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly." 

An old friend, Don Wooten, long gone to his eternal resting place, wrote a musical interpretation of the Hughes poem back in our Cleveland days. Don was a white public school teacher in a majority Black system: he taught music, coached girls' sports and held an all-city youth orchestra in the church basement on Saturday mornings. He turned me on to the Christmas jazz standard, "A Child Is Born" by Thad Jones, that still haunts my memory on Christmas Eve. We used to play it at the late Christmas Eve  liturgy with me on bass while he sang. And then he, for as long as felt right, Don would play the sweetest, most soulful violin improvisations over the top.

It is just one of those days...

clowning and communion: ways of discerning the blessings of each day

One of the truths that I ache to share - and celebrate myself - is an experiential
intimacy with God. Whether we feel it, know it, trust it, or even believe it, my life seems to be built upon a yearning to awaken an awareness of this intimacy in myself and others. Not to manipulate another nor demand any dogmatic uniformity. That kills the Spirit - and Jesus said in St. John's gospel that the Spirit blows where it will. We have no control to which is say: Thanks be to God!

Truth be told, the further I move away from my institutional loyalties, the closer I sense the possibilities for discerning and then living into the presence of the divine in my ordinary life. Talk about paradox! And yet, without the constraints and demands of living as a public clergy person, I have felt free to be fully alive in each moment: listening for and honoring the holy wherever it shows up gives me the chance to give voice to a shared blessing - and this often happens in the most unlikely and unexpected places. In this, it becomes clear, that the whole of creation cries glory. 

It seems I was letting this truth drift through my thoughts last night before I went to sleep. They showed up a few hours later when, as has become a regular event, I awoke 90 minutes later. Most of the time when this happens I smile inwardly. Sure I get annoyed at other times, too, but mostly it has become 45 minutes of reading and thinking - and sometimes prayer. Last night, what kept going through my head is how valuable it is for me to name the encounter with the sacred. Those experiences are soul food for me - and I think for others, too - for when we know we are being blessed, a deeper sense of awe takes root within us. Little things take on greater significance. Passing insights hold the potential for deeper wisdom. And the presence of joy or sorrow - strength or fragility - asks us to take nothing for granted. Not a blue sky, a snow storm, a heartbreak, a smile, a tear, or a dog who wants to sit on your lap. The whole of creation cries glory. 

Imagine my delight when I watched the following video: it comes from the Henri Nouwen Society's celebration of Henri's birthday 25 years after his death. My friends at L'Arche Ottawa told me I would love it - and they were right. Especially the part where Henri is reborn as a clown on his 60th birthday. And the closing clip about the importance of celebrating Eucharist. Clowning and communion are vital to me, too - not only as discrete spiritual encounters - but more as ways of seeing reality and God's presence therein. 

Today looks like it will be given over to some ordinary tasks: minor shopping errands, a bit of house cleaning, closing the day with a light supper and a gentle TV program or two. This quote from one of Nouwen's reflection rings true to me today. 

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage but also a strong faith. As hard as it is to believe that the dry desolate desert can yield endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness is hiding unknown beauty. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is a movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.

singing the Lord's new song as a holy fool: Isaiah 56

In my ongoing series re: sacred clowns and holy fools who make flesh the often counter-cultural values of Jesus, I spent a LOT of time today on Isaiah 56. With a lasting debt to Walter Brueggemann I made the case that if ancient Israel could realize the err of their ways after exile - and become increasingly more inclusive - so can we. Check out this morning's reflection from "Small is Holy" here:

https://fb.watch/3w8HY2QqzF/

st. brigid's day 2021

Last year at this time I had a deep but inexplicable desire to make a Brigid's cross for our house. I w
as still learning about her (and still am). I went out into the frozen wetlands in search of dried foliage to use for my cross, but found none. And none to be had at either local craft store. So we improvised and made three including one out of Kelly green pipe cleaners. How were we to know that the world would be turned upside just a month later? Or that we would still be in self-isolation for the most part a full year later?

This old cross looks a bit worn out, yes? Same here. But it is still a symbol of God's loving presence in the midst of strife and of the slow, often mysterious movement from what is frozen and dark to what is fecund and vibrant. It is too funny to me that we had a blizzard with 9" inches of snow to the 4" already on the ground for the start of Imbolc and Brigid's feast day. Talk about living by faith not sight! But that is how it should be, yes? 

This link to a modest article on Brigid might be a good place to start for those who are just beginning. It comes from the respected and creative Celtic Christian Spirituality site on FB @ https://newedenministry.com/2020/10/08/brigid/?. I liked it a lot.

This graphic was on my phone from last year on this date - and it seems right to share, too. Stay safe.

going out on a limb...

Time to go out on a limb: not ever person of faith is called to be a public activist - especially not as we current understand activism in liberal circles. Back in December, I was fortified and encouraged when Fr. Richard Rohr posted this confession:

I don’t think most people feel called to activism; I myself don’t. It was initially humiliating to admit this, and I lost the trust and admiration of some friends and supporters. Yet as we come to know our own soul gift more clearly, we almost always have to let go of certain “gifts” so we can do our one or two things well and with integrity. I believe that if we can do one or two things wholeheartedly in our life, that is all God expects. The important thing is that we all should be doing something for the rest of the world! We have to pay back, particularly those of us born into privilege and comfort.

Clearly some of us are not only called into social action that transforms an unjust status quo, but also blessed with the charism to do so. Reading this morning's NY Times OP ED on Mrs. Rosa Parks highlights her unique and abiding commitment to taking on injustice with all her heart and soul. (Take a few minutes here https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/opinion/rosa-parks.html) I, however, was not given this gift by God. My witness has been quiet and often personal. I have, of course, participated in a variety of social justice actions and movements. I've been a community and boycott organizer, too. Like Diana Butler Bass wrote recently, there's long been a tension between a deep disposition for small acts of tender compassion and solidarity, and, what the Spirit is saying to the Body of Christ in culture, art, and politics. She writes:

This month, I’ve been thinking a lot about silence — and longing for it. Perhaps because of the January 6 madness, the screaming of the rioters, the QAnon lies. But partly because of the breathless, continuous outrage on social media and in the news. There’s a continual demand to take sides, speak out, prove one isn’t “complicit” with whatever structural injustice has become viral on any given day. Yet, when I long for silence, two familiar quotes come to mind, both by Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people. In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” And others as well remind me that speaking out is a necessary part of the work of justice: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” — Elie Wiesel. “Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.” — Thurgood Marshall

It has been my experience over nearly 40 years that the liberal/progressive cadre of the American church often confuses silence and contemplation for acquiescence - or collaboration. Shame has become a foundational resource for enlisting participation and patience can be in short supply. "Calling out" another is normative and considered exemplary behavior in the quest for accountability. (Please see YES Magazine

https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2017/10/19/6-signs-your-callout-isnt-actually-about-accountability/ ) Dr. Bass and Fr. Rohr both suggest that perpetual motion activism and a rush to judgment is NOT always what the hour requires. In the same column, "Words That Matter," Bass continues

Right now, our public culture is marked by a sense that every single thing is a world-historical crisis to the nth degree. We are living in a time with multiple, demanding crises — climate change, economic inequality, the structural injustice of hierarchies of race and gender, and the challenges of technological society and globalization. Few generations of human beings have had to face such a set of interlocking challenges, and these difficult times demand insistent, passionate, and clear voices — those who point to the problems and offer possible solutions. But understanding these problems and leading toward solutions isn’t about viral tweets, jumping on the cause of the day, or public shaming of those who resist the latest bandwagon. The things that matter are often a matter of discernment, research, creativity, empathy, and innovation — the things that matter aren’t always entirely visible, and the things that matter are something just beyond what is immediately obvious. We sometimes think we know what matters only to learn later that we were wrong. (read more @ https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/words-that-matter-and-things-that)

Rohr compliments this writing: "I think there are three basic levels of social ministry, and none is better than the other. I believe all are the movement of the Holy Spirit within us for the sake of others. I like to imagine a river flooding out of control—symbolizing the circumstances and injustices that bring about suffering—overflowing its banks and sweeping those in its path off their feet."

At the first level, we rescue drowning people from the swollen river, dealing with the immediate social problem right in front of us: someone hungry comes to our door and we offer them some food, or invite them inside. These are hands-on, social service ministries, like the familiar soup kitchen or food pantry. Such works will always look rather generous, Christian, charitable, and they tend to be admired, if not always imitated. At the second level, there are ministries that help people not to fall into the swollen river in the first place, or show them how to survive despite falling in. In general, these are the ministries of education and healing. Most of the religious orders in the Catholic Church in the last three hundred years went in that direction, filling the world with schools, hospitals, and social service ministries that empowered people and gave them new visions and possibilities for their lives.

Finally, on the third level, some ministries build and maintain a dam to stop the river from flooding in the first place. This is the work of social activism and advocacy, critique of systems, organizing, speeches, boycotts, protests, and resistance against all forms of systemic injustice and deceit. It is the gift of a few, but a much-needed gift that we only recently began to learn and practice. It seeks systemic change and not just individual conversion. (https://cac.org/participating-in-movements-for-justice-2020-12-04/)

Clearly there are times when as many people as possible must put their bodies on the line and be counted. I think of the protests taking place in Russia right now. Or the masses of women challenging the current restrictions on reproductive rights in Poland. Or the BLM mobilizations this summer. Each and all were designed to name a clearly defined evil and enlist broad public support for well articulated redress. These acts, however, are relatively few and far between and far less often than some would have us believe. Further, as Rohr has written elsewhere, the chosen witness of resistance born of Jesus is much less about confrontation than non-cooperation. In an article from October 2020, he puts it like this:

Jesus does not directly attack the religious and institutional sin systems of his time until his final action against the money changers in the temple (see Matthew 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–17; Luke 19:45–46). Because of this, Jesus’ primary social justice critique and action are often a disappointment to most radicals and social activists. Jesus’ social program, as far as I can see, is a quiet refusal to participate in almost all external power structures or domination systems. His primary action is a very simple lifestyle, which kept him from being constantly co-opted by those very structures, which I (and Paul) would call the “sin system.”

As Fredrick Buechner observed about an individual's calling or vocation - "Our vocation is our deepest gladness meets the world's greatest need." - Rohr adds:

The important thing is that we all should be doing something for the rest of the world! We have to pay back, particularly those of us born into privilege and comfort. We also must respect and support the other two levels, even if we cannot do them. Avoid all comparisons about better or lesser, more committed or less committed; those are all ego games. Let’s just use our different gifts to create a unity in the work of service (Ephesians 4:12–13), and back one another up, without criticism or competition. Only in our peaceful, mutual honoring do we show forth the glory of God.

Bass amplifies this insight. This is a time for wise discernment - not rash over-reaction. The time-tested adage born of the 70's is doubly true right now: "Let us hurry up and DO nothing!" At least until we are grounded - willing and able to listen both to the Spirit and the voices of those all around us who are hurting - and committed to the counter-cultural practice of silence. "Not all silence is the same." Bass writes, "Knowing when to speak, knowing when to hold silence — this is a spiritual practice. And it is wisdom."

Mystics of all religious traditions have known this. So many of history’s greatest activists for justice have also been history’s most profound contemplatives. Silence and justice are not opposing energies, but part of a single fabric of our inner and outer lives. Silence is not quietism. Instead, silence is guide and path toward the world envisioned by our gurus, prophets, and God... the work of transforming the world — comes into being when words that matter and things that matter converge. And, I know from experience, that doesn’t happen without blanketing silence.

You can’t force someone into or out of such a silence. That silence is an enveloping cloud, the hush of the snow storm — it just is. It is like Jesus’s forty days in the desert or his refusal to speak before Pilate; Paul’s three years of contemplation and learning; Israel’s forty years in the wilderness. Silence should be welcomed for its generative power, not condemned as a moral failing. America needs to wake up in silence.

Silence. To hear. To see a different landscape. Wait in silence until the snow melts. We need the counter-cultural practice of silence. Perhaps if we keep more silence instead of less, we’ll be able to speak words that matter and understand the things that matter to face the crises that threaten our neighbors and our future. We are in desperate need of the right words about the right things.

https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/words-that-matter-and-things-that?t

This is fundamentally why I am devoting so much time to the "foolishness of God" live streaming series. It is my conviction that when we practice and live into the call to be "sacred clowns for God" we step outside the busyness of even our self isolation. To listen to what is stirring within. To hear the still, small voice of the sacred beyond. And to trust a love greater than ourselves.