to pray ALL ways: holy ground and life after covid...

NOTE: The following reflection was shared today, May 30, 2021 on my weekly Sunday live-streaming offering: Small is Holy. Throughout June and July, I will draw insight from a small book by Fr. Ed Hays, Pray ALL Ways, as well as from the YES! Magazine collective's work on ecological civilization. If you might like to join the conversation, please go to my FB page: Be Still and Know @ 9:55 am for live streaming, or, any time to view past videos. (https://www.facebook.com/Be-Still-and-Know-913217865701531)

Two weeks ago I had a holy encounter with sisters and brothers in San Francisco’s North Beach: for the first time in about a year and a half, I was walking around an urban community without a mask. I had one on me, mind you – being cavalier and flip is NOT what this new moment calls for – but the CDC and the President assured us that if we were fully vaccinated, outside, and among others who were also mostly vaccinated – we could let go of walking while masked. And I must tell you, it was delightful:

· People I’d never met before stopped to speak with me on the street. Smiles abounded. And there were a few fist bumps and hugs, too. I felt like a Poppa Bear coming out of a cave after a grueling winter’s hibernation.

· Taking in the beauty of each stranger’s full face, I walked about tentatively. I spoke softly – as did my neighbors – as we did not want to take this blessed moment for granted or misuse it. For the better part of the week that I visited my family in California, it felt like going outside had become a sacramental act. An embodied prayer, if you will, where the mystery and promise of being fully alive felt new again. Fresh, holy, and crying out for reverence.

I had experienced something similar about a year earlier, the first time in six months our children and grandchildren embraced us on our deck. To have those precious little ones on my lap, to hold my daughter who was alive and well and vibrant, was sacred. And tears flowed freely as we recognized that we were all standing on holy ground. It was an incarnational blessing in real time. Look, I KNOW that social distancing, washing hands, carrying hand sanitizers, and self-isolation was and is a privilege. Last week FB reminded us ALL of the unique privileges many of us have enjoyed during the plague. It came in a note from a physician in India that reads in part:

Social distancing is a privilege: it means you live in a house large enough to practice it. Hand washing is a privilege, too: it means you have access to running water. Hand sanitizers are a privilege: it means you have the resources to buy them. Lockdowns, too document the wealth to own your own dwelling. What we are fighting right now in India is a disease spread by the rich as they flew all over the globe that is now killing millions of the poor.

There’s NO hyperbole in this – just the facts, ma’am – and the facts clearly stated that the contagion exposed the ugly inequalities and injustice built into our old status quo and our OLD normal in all their horror. The murder of George Floyd by a white policeman in Minneapolis did much that same thing for any illusion some of us might have held concerning racial equality in this land of the not so free and home of the only sometimes brave. Just a year ago, we could no longer hide from the deadly meaning of American white privilege and why we must do our part of dismantling it now. Together – the inequality of wealth, the ubiquity of structural racism, the poisoning and incineration of Mother Earth, cultural chaos, and our new war against women and the LGBTQ community – each and all of these truths were swirling around inside me as I rejoiced and celebrated the blessing of those wonderful, unexpected moments of unmasked human solidarity: 14 months of solitude and silence had done a job on my heart. I not only WANTED to live in a different and more compassionate way, my flesh was telling me that I HAD be different as these days of our new life together unfolded. I came across a poem written by a young Hindu poet from India who put it like this in “Will the Door EVER Open?”

The roads are empty, the crowds too small, and no trace of life outside, none at all. Every human is locked up in their house, and the sunny playground, now looks bleak. Why does our wide world look so desolate now? What a silly question, even a toddler would have the answer. cause, there’s a monster out there, that can make even breathing like hell. It is tinier than our cells, but it is causing a huge pandemic, if it enters your body, it may wreak havoc. Coughs or sneezes are like its private jet, and to your lungs, it’s a threat. We, who always chat and dine in groups now prefer to stay away, And with a mask on our mouths, stay at home straight away. Nobody’s going to school anymore, no child playing in the park, nobody’s even opening the door except for grocery or stock. We used to giggle and play on our swings and slide, now, we’re caged in our homes, As Corona gambols outside. I used to pity my dolls, trapped on the shelves, Now, I really don’t know why, as to me, it’s a privilege to even bask in sunlight these days. We, who are social animals, now dread the doorbell. Sadly, we are told to see, every visitor as an unwelcome virus. When can we really be free? When can we stick our heads out? When will the dawn arrive? Come on, let us await that day.

Well, it’s a LONG way from happening in India, but with gratitude and delight I

experienced that day when the door opened in North Beach. Before I left Massachusetts, my neighbor said, “You’re going to the safest place in America right now. San Francisco. More than 75% of that place has been vaccinated.” So, tentatively, with fear and trembling, we trusted Dr. Fauci and walked outside unmasked. Alive and alert – meeting strangers as long, lost kin – sipping sangria in the sunshine outside City Lights Bookstore – listening to Bossa Nova musicians along Jack Kerouac Alley serenade us with a secular, syncopated Sanctus that shouted: holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest!

And that is the moment I knew that there was still a place for this quiet little live-streaming gig even 14 months after we started. You may recall that when we kicked-off Small is Holy at the out-set of the lockdown, everyone thought it would be a short run. As March became May, however, and we waded through raging fear and ignorance into a quiet and sometimes patient uncertainty something shifted. So we wept and waited, watched and wondered, and incrementally made our way from solitude into solidarity. It was a journey I was grateful to share with you. And some 14+ months later, I was thinking that maybe it was time to bring this to a close.

But as I experienced that tentative euphoria in North Beach, my heart was saying that perhaps some of us might still want to stay grounded together for a little while longer as we tease out new behaviors and discern what it means to trust that the stead-fast love of the Lord endures forever in a post-Covid culture? That’s the message of the Hebrew Bible for our era – not those worn out, medieval obsessions with judgment, rules, hell fire, brimstone and all the rest that we in the West have misread for 1500 years – no, it’s time to get grounded in grace and renewal and what it means to be a good neighbor. The way of Jesus tells us much the same if we can toss into the dust bin of history the punitive fear and shame that has corseted our imaginations for so long. One of my mentors, the late Fr. Ed Hays of Shantivanum/ Forest of Peace House of Prayer in Lawrence, KS put it like this in a little book called: Pray ALL Ways. To pray all ways, he writes, is to open our lives to a new way of being. “It does NOT mean that we must enter some remote and secluded monastery, but rather that we must find a new definition of prayer.” A way where our LIVES are our prayers. “Over the centuries,” he continues:

To pray has meant to engage in vocal or in silent prayers. Praying has meant being faithful to special times that are set aside from the daily routines of life. But surely Jesus has not called all his followers to abandon all other activities of family, life, and work to continually and solely engage in such times of(monastic) prayer. What he prefers is living in communion with him and God and one another in ways that celebrate the holy in all our human experiences. Such a living communion is the heart of prayer, prayer which permeates all we do… To pray all ways means we can pray with our eyes, our nose, our feet – at those times we might not think of as prayerful. It is to be grounded in feasting and fasting, having fun in play, but also honoring our sorrow and our tears as holy, too… To pray all ways calls for a renewal of patience… and simplicity… and allows us to transform our experience of pain and suffering into portals of transformation and justice…

As summer 2021 ripens and parts of the pandemic slip into memory, I thought we might use Fr. Ed’s outline to guide us into living again in public as a living, breathing prayer. To use his words, without knowing how to pray in all ways, we risk the danger of filling our hearts, minds, and lives up again with more tasks – more acts that may have merit – but which separate us from knowing that we are now living on holy ground.

The story of Moses and the burning bush spoke to me last week of our summons to see the sacred within the secular of this moment in time and the holy within our humanity. It commands us to take off our shoes, to reverence the soil with our senses, and open our hearts and minds to the mystery of a divine love saturated with tenderness yet hidden within history. The text from Exodus tells us that while tending his father-in-law’s herd of sheep in the mountains, the shepherd Moses suddenly sees that: “There the angel of the Lord has appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it was not consumed… “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your shoes, for the place you are standing is holy ground.” If ever there was a verse from Scripture to speak to this moment in time, it has to be this: take off your shoes for you are standing on holy ground!

Old Testament scholar at Duke Divinity School, the Rev. Dr. Anatheia Portier-Young, writes that Moses is commanded: “to remove his shoes. Draw away the covering that has protected you. Clear away the barrier between yourself and the earth so that your bare feet may touch and sink and take root in this holy ground. Let this living soil coat your skin. Dig in, feel your way, and find your balance here upon this mountain, so that its life becomes your life, its fire your fire, its sacred sand and loam and rock the ground of your seeing, speaking, and calling.” She reminds us that it was from this soil that God shaped the first human beings, crafted all living creatures as kin of the land, “caused trees to grow and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to flourish.” Take off your shoes for you are standing on holy ground.

So, Moses obeys. He takes off his sandals as if he were ending one journey – and rests. He turns his attention to the wisdom of the sacred and listens. He removes the barriers which separate him from being grounded in the earth. And he waits upon the Lord before beginning his new journey, one not of his own choosing, but rather one guided by the Spirit and shaped by events beyond his control. To me, this sounds a lot like where we are right now: standing on the promise of holy ground even as we ponder events that are beyond our control. Celtic poet, David Whyte, writes in Fire in the Earth, that when Moses paused and removed his sandals, he was transformed:

We know, when Moses was told, in the way he was told, “Take off your shoes!” that he grew pale from that simple reminder of fire in the dusty earth. And he never recovered his complicated way of loving again – for now he was free to love in the same way he felt the fire licking at his heels had first loved him: as if the lion earth could roar and take him in one movement…

When Moses recognized that his first, self-absorbed journey had ended, he waited before the fire of the Lord on holy ground for what was to come next. It was a wild moment: earthy and mysterious. The total opposite of everything he had known in Egypt. The contemporary desert mystic, Matthew Syrdal, says that “our collective humanity is like Israel enslaved in Egypt, silently crying out” for release. Resurrection. Renewal in the presence of the mysterium tremendum:

Perhaps there is something beneath our collective experience expressing itself now in the violent storm surges of racism, fear, and terror. At times… it seems as if the whole of western culture is enslaved in a cultural pathology (like) the City that Egypt represents in the Exodus narrative. This City, egocentric civilization, is almost by definition structured as a defense mechanism against the natural world and the threat it represents. In our times, Egypt is that which slashes and burns the old growth of a forgotten World, that which consumes the Earth’s resources with an insatiable appetite. (That which pits us against one another.) We are largely, and mostly unconsciously, enculturated from early childhood with the incipient imperialism of Egypt. (So God brings to us the spirit of Moses in the wilderness) who, as he awakens from the imperial nightmare (of bondage) begins to dream of a new world singing: Let my people go.

That feels right to me, this contemporary call to take off our shoes and feel the holy ground beneath our feet. It an invitation to get grounded in the wisdom of God’s first word in nature so that our old, self-absorbed journeys can end even as we discern what our new quest entails – and it begins by taking off our shoes as a sacramental act pointing us towards the sacred. Scholars say that: “When Moses removed his sandals, one journey ended… He released himself from every claim of his old way (of being) so that he could accept the new claim God now makes upon him. He started to strip away strivings for status, success, and stability so that he might find his true ground and know where he stands.”

His new journey meant living with vulnerability and trust. It meant turning away from empire and reimagining community. It meant a whole lot of wandering and waiting both for new clues as well as the death of old habits. And it is my hunch that what was true for Moses is no less true for us right now: as we sense the end of our old journey and the emergence of holy ground beyond the contagion, I hear the sacred fire asking that we let nothing stand between us and our reverence for new life.

What I’m feeling about the days ahead of us is that God is inviting us: “To stand barefoot in an attitude of wonder as we witness God’s presence in the blazing fire (before us) that is not consumed.” Let’s listen for, “the astonishing name of the God who is radically free… who calls us to find our footing in the holy soil… to refuse complicity in (our culture’s) practices of slavery and domination, trusting that God will empower us to challenge rulers and bring hope to the hopeless.” In barefoot vulnerability I think of the poetic prophet of ancient Israel, Isaiah, who once sang, “how beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim shalom, and share a life constructed upon shared holy ground.” That’s part of how I’m hearing the song of the sacred from within the unquenchable fire – and there are two other verses in this text for us to consider, too.

· The first is found in the words Moses uses to respond to God’s call: Here I am, Lord. Hineni. This is liturgical language used through the Old Testament – and it’s use here is a summons to us to pay careful attention. When God first called to Adam in the garden of origins, searching for the ones created in humble holiness, Adam answers his creatior: Hineni – here I am, Lord. When God called upon Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on the mountain top, Abraham answered, “Hineni.” When the angel of God later rushed to stop Abraham from performing this obscene act, Abraham once again said, “Hineni.” When Moses stood before the burning bush and was called by name from within, he too responded, “Hineni.” And when the young prophetic poet of ancient Israel, Isaiah, was called by the spirit to serve his wounded nation, when the One who is Holy asked: Who shall I send, the young prophet replied, Hineni – here I am, Lord, send me! Rabbi David Cohen writes:

The answer “hineni” means: “Here I am ready and waiting to do Your will. Here I am, a partner with You in the eternal covenant between You and our people. How can I fulfill my role more fully?” Yet the word conveys so much more. To say “hineni” expresses a yearning for a spiritual awakening, a moment, however fleeting, in which we feel close to the heart of the Universe. It indicates a receptive mind and an openness of soul. It declares a readiness to engage, to take part in the unfolding of the Jewish people’s history. It signals the moment when the details of my own life story become one with the story of our people — a legacy I stand ready to pass down to those who follow. To say “hineni” is to live simultaneously in the past, present and future: To be aware of our past as a source of our identity and values; to see the future, alert to its possibilities, committed to its betterment; and to experience every day in the present, living according to our values, grateful for every moment. To say “hineni” is to admit that I cannot be fully present without a community to say “hinenu” — “here we are.” Indeed, we Jews are a hopelessly communal people. Our individual efforts accrue meaning and gain purpose when we make them with others.

· The other truth is that God’s calling links us to our community – God hears the cries of the wounded and oppressed – and asks us to live in solidarity with the broken. To grasp that our well-being – shalom – is intimately tied up in theirs and everyone else’s is to recognize the holy ground God has set before us. The Reverend Drs. William Barber and Liz Theoharris, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Movement, have been trying to tell us this for the past five years. They’re not re-inventing the wheel, articulating some new ultra-liberal socialist agenda as the mean-spirited, know-nothing, Q-Anon insurrectionists and their Republican lackeys in Congress would have us believe. No, they are simply updating God’s compassionate call and response to the broken-ness of our neighbors. God said unto Moses what God says unto us: I hear the cries of the wounded and reply: let my people go. Let them go into all of freedom’s rainbow colors – economically, ethically, sexually, ecologically, racially, and more – let my people go so that we might live and walk and play and love upon holy ground. To trust the Lord, to hear God’s call, to respond, Here I am, Lord – hineni – is to live in solidarity with the wounded making God’s words of compassion flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.

Today’s sacred text also asks us to remember that the transformation of Moses as well as his community didn’t happen overnight: it took a full generation for the children of Israel who followed Moses OUT of Egypt into freedom to lose their old habits and dispositions. The late Ellie Wiesel writes that on the anniversary of the Exodus, Moses made his community dig their own graves and lie in them overnight. In time, some never arose – meaning that the old journey was finally over, old habits were dead, and lives unencumbered by the past could enter the Promised Land and see it as holy ground. And what was true then, will likely be true for us, too: every generation must respond to the freedom’s call anew – with patience, persistence, and trust. That is part of how creation has been constructed, yes? My garden doesn’t sprout overnight. My bread doesn’t leap from the oven fully baked. And the agonizing suffering of our sisters and brothers is no different.

And that brings me to one other insight: namely that the power and promise of sacramental action is how the slow healing of the Lord transforms our flesh into a living prayer able to recognize and name holy ground when we see it. Practicing trusting God’s love from the inside out – and given all our cultural and emotional distractions we need a lot of practice – we recognize that we need reminders - sacred post-it notes spread throughout our day – to keep us grounded. Jesus gave his friends a ritual to practice that mirrored the commitment Moses made when he found himself on holy ground: those who want to live into God’s new life must practice taking off their shoes and washing one another’s feet on a regular basis. “Do THIS,” he said, “To remember me. For THIS is my NEW commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you. As a servant. As one standing on holy ground. As one who is vulnerable and open and even bare footed.”

Fr. Ed writes in his practice manual, Pray All Ways, that the bare-foot spirituality of Jesus embraces “the natural parts of our human nature” rather than trying to escape or deny them. Ours is a culture of ascent, he notes, while the path of Jesus is one of descent. Not upward mobility, but to paraphrase Thomas Merton, a bare-foot downward mobility. David Brooks put it like this at the close of his commencement address this week at Boston College: “The essence of the resurrection is that everything is inverted.”

To find yourself you have to lose yourself, to gain power you have to give yourself up, salvation comes through the weakness of repentance, success leads to the greatest failure which is pride, and failure leads to the greatest success which is humility. Inversion follows inversion. God chooses the poor over the rich, the foolish over the wise, the meek over the proud.

Fr. Ed adds: “Whenever we reject our human nature – our bodies, sexuality, emotions – we are rejecting the God who created us as cosmic amphibians, people intended to live in two worlds as one. For us, balance and harmony are holiness; they invite an awareness that ALL creation is good… for isn’t that what God says at the close of each act of creation: Oh, that was good!?!” To live as if we are on holy ground will not be easy: we have forgotten our natural spirituality – our resurrection and renewal spirituality” in our “electric, air-conditioned, plastic-loving, comfort-seeking” habits. Many are no longer even comfortable in the realm of nature. The wise souls at YES Magazine cut to the chase:

We’re rapidly decimating the Earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, fresh water—even the topsoil we need to grow our crops. We’ve already transgressed four of the nine planetary boundaries that define humanity’s safe operating space, and yet global GDP is expected to triple by 2060, with potentially calamitous consequences… We need to forge a new era for humanity—one that is defined, at its deepest level, by a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our values, goals, and collective behavior. In short, we need to change the basis of our global civilization. We must move from a civilization based on wealth accumulation to one that is life-affirming: an ecological civilization. Without human disruption, ecosystems can thrive in rich abundance for millions of years, remaining resilient in the face of adversity. Clearly, there is much to learn from nature’s wisdom about how to organize ourselves. This is the fundamental idea underlying an ecological civilization: using nature’s own design principles to reimagine the basis of our civilization. Changing our civilization’s operating system to one that naturally leads to life-affirming policies and practices rather than rampant extraction and devastation.

This is what praying ALL ways is about: recognizing that we are standing on holy ground. Living as those called to take off our shoes – get grounded in the natural again – wash one another’s feet, and act quietly as a gentle leaven encouraging the resurrection of our whole culture. Consider a few questions as preparation for our summer of sacramental living:

· Do our homes and habits bring us into contact with creation or do they separate us from the earth? Do we find patterns for living from machines or from nature?

· What about the food we consume: does it fill us with blessings or junk? Have we learned to cherish the rain, snow, and dirt, or, do we hate them as inconvenient? Do our days allow us time to touch the earth and revel in its mysteries?

I wonder if at some point in the week to come if we might each take a moment to literally take off our shoes or sandals and do as Moses and Jesus did: touch the earth with our flesh and reclaim a connection with the holy? Consider it a prayer to simply get bare-foot and touch the earth. What do you think? Could you do that? Over the next two months, using both Fr. Ed’s guidebook as well as YES Magazine’s ecological civilization insights, our Small is Holy time will explore HOW we might learn to pray with our eyes, our tears, our nose, our feet, and our tongue. We’ll practice treating play as prayer, laughter as prayer, our times of suffering as prayer as well as feasting and fasting, the holiness of nap time, and the burden of hurrying. Liturgically, today is the Feast of the Holy Trinity, a time to reclaim both the community of God as Creator, Christ, and Comforter as well as God’s command for us to live as good neighbors in a community built upon holy ground. Let me close with this Canticle of Creation as we move into our simple Eucharist.

In the beginning, Lord my God, you alone existed: eternally one yet pregnant in the fullness of unity. Full to overflowing, Father of all life, you exploded outward in a billion bits and pieces. Your Word became flesh, whirling in shining starts, shimmering suns, and in genesis glimmering galaxies. You, O Mother of creation, spoke and your word became flesh: in sun and moon, earth and seas, mountains and gentle hills, rolling rivers and silent streams. Yes, you spoke, Gracious One, and your words became flesh: in winged bird, in deer and elephant, in grazing cow, racing horse, and fish of the deep. Your words are unique and varied, filling the earth with rabbit, squirrel and ant. And when you looked upon it all you said that your words were beautiful – and all were good.

From each of these Holy Words arose a prayer of praise and adoration to you, their Creator and Wondrous Womb of Life: blessings rang out of the redwoods, hosanna chimed the cedars, holy are you prayed the prairie grasses. And from all four corners of creation rose up a chorus of per-petual adoration. O Sacred Spirit, O Divine Breath of Life, unseal our ears that they may ever listen to your continuous canticle of creation; open our hearts that we might sing in harmony with all its many voices.

This summer teach us to commune with your first word made flesh, your creation, that we may be able to unravel the wondrous words of another word made flesh in Jesus, through whom, with whom, and in whom we see ourselves as still another of your words made flesh to your glory and honor. Amen.

I love to laugh...

Today at L'Arche Ottawa we celebrated Donna's 19th anniversary in community - and I shared this contemplative reflection. It was a joyous time.

TEXT: Who Makes These Changes - Rumi

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
Chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
And end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.

I should be suspicious
Of what I want.

REFLECTION
Sometimes poetry is the only way to speak to our heart: reason has its place, logic is essential, facts are important but poetry cuts deeper. It speaks to what we feel and trust, what we hope for when life is dark and quiet, and even what we need when we pray. I did not come to poetry until later in life, so I’m making up for lost time. Music helped me communicate – and still does – but not every situation allows for song. That’s another thing poetry brings to the table: it can open our eyes and hearts to insights we might otherwise be afraid to accept.

That’s what I hear in today’s poem from the mystical Muslim Sufi Rumi: he encourages us to laugh at ourselves because it strengthens humility and takes time before claiming a path in life because so often we don’t know the whole story. Humility also helps us to trust that a love greater than our-selves is at work beyond our wisdom, choices, and actions. I think that’s what Jesus was saying when he told his friends: Each day has enough trouble on its own; so do not be anxious or fret about tomorrow for tomorrow will worry about itself.” It’s a reminder that worrying is like pray-ng for something we DON’T want to happen. We all do it, it doesn’t make life any better, it ties us up in knots, and doesn’t fix our problem. It just makes us nervous and annoys everyone else! That’s why Jesus – and Rumi – playfully and tenderly invites us to let go of worry. And the way they teach this to us is through learning to laugh at ourselves. Not take ourselves so seriously. See our own foolishness and embrace it.

Life in community – or in a healthy family – requires a LOT of laughter. And humility. Because so much of life is beyond our control. St. Paul used to tell his friends: when I was a child I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and often acted like a child. But when I grew up – or better yet when I started to mature – I put childish things away. Now I know that only three things last: faith, hope, and love – and the greatest of these is love. In the movie, “Mary Poppins” there’s a grand song called “I Love to Laugh” and I’ve made it one of my own prayers. Laughter as prayer is a sure-fire way to grow in humility. Are you able to laugh at yourself? Take a break from taking yourself so seriously? Rumi advises us to be suspicious of what we think we want and sense he’ right. Let’s watch this little musical clip – and join in the prayer of laughter.

better days...

This is a week of rain in New England - at least Western Massachusetts - where it is all rain and a wild fluctuation of temperatures. When the precipitation has not been falling, I've been tweaking the garden - adding wooden borders or granite blocks from our neighbor - and replanting native flowers and plants. It is our hope to saturate the remaining gardens with wild flowers this weekend. We need to rake and clean out Louie's "Milkweed and Butterfly Garden" too before I head west to spend a week with Phil and Julie. 

It feels a little weird to know I will be flying across the country after being in seclusion for 14+ months. My doctor and friend said that he and his beloved have been trying to visit a new eatery every Friday since being fully vaccinated. That feels like pushing it to me but, as he says, "I spent more than a year masked in small examination rooms. Thank God I made it through that healthy, so now I'm going to reclaim some of the beauty of life with gusto." I wonder what it will be like in San Francisco? Or the airport? To be honest, I am much more at peace puttering about our Zen Celtic garden, but love calls me to the airport.

For the first time in more than 14 months I won't be live streaming on Sunday morning. That, too is pretty weird. Nor will I be connecting with my community in L'Arche Ottawa via Zoom. I am going to do an abbreviated FB live stream of "Small is Holy" on Saturday, May 8th (time to be announced) so those who are engaged in our Mary Magdalene series can stay current. But then I'll be off for a full week. 

Upon my return, my musical buddies and I will start to plot a late summer/early autumn rock and soul concert: it will be a time of returning thanks to God and science for all the sacrifices that have been a part of our shared lives during the COVID lockdown. I can't wait to KICK OUT THE JAMS, brothers and sisters, and make a TON of rock and roll noise! Stay tuned, dear friends, as the next month is going to be wild. I can't wait to see my loved ones on the West Coast. I can't wait to celebrate my anniversary with Di tomorrow. I can't wait to get back into the garden. But wait, I must. This poster Di posted earlier today gets it right...

mary magdalene and seeing with the eyes of the heart...

SEEING WITH THE EYS OF THE HEART:  Mary Magdalene series

This morning I want to start my reflection on seeing with the eyes of the heart counter-intuitively – with a song. It is my preferred way of easing into a conversation about spirituality because, at least for me, songs are suggestive. Evocative rather than didactic. They invite you into an experience with something in an open-ended and alluring manner, a way that is illustrative not precise. Pablo Casals said, “Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.” Igor Stravinsky said, “I have never understood a single bar of music in my life – but I’ve felt it.” And Leonard Bernstein noted that, “Music can express the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

For some reason, this song FEELS like Mary Magdalene to me. I’ll say a few words about it after-wards, but let me just play it and ask you to sense its invitation to rest. Soak up something of its grace and see if, at some level, it doesn’t feel to you like deep calling to deep. I hear the heart of creation singing to each of our hearts in this tune with a voice that is calling us home. Lisa Null’s, “I’m Going Home to Georgia.”

My body is tired, my spirit is burned: 

I’m going home to Georgia
My poor heart is aching with all I have seen: 

I’m going home to Georgia
Sing me a song, set my spirit at rest, 

you know all the tunes I love best
Maybe it'll lighten this weight on my chest: 

I'm going home to Georgia.

In all of my travels and all I have seen:

I’m going home to Georgia
It's none of your business just where I have been: 

I’m going home to Georgia
Pour me a drink that will settle my thirst 

you always knew what I loved best
Maybe it'll dampen this pain in my chest: 

I’m going home to Georgia

I've brought you a secret as true as a rose: 

I’m going home to Georgia
The more tarnished it gets, still the brighter it grows: 

I’m going home to Georgia
In all of my wandering I could never forget 

you were the one I loved best
Lay yourself down, put your head on my breast: 

I’m going home to Georgia.

I find that I am drawn to this simple song like I am drawn to the wisdom of St. Mary Magdalene especially during these times when I recognize that my soul, my heart, or my life feels tarnished. God knows we’ve all been worn out and wearied by the ups and downs of living these past 14 months – and it’s been going on even longer if we add in the terror of the Trump regime. So, as a part of my spiritual practice I’ve started to honor those times when I just ache for solace. I don’t need words or answers or understanding; I just need a rest. I know that to everything there is a season: a time to suck it up and deal, but also a time to break down and step back. And the lyric of this song that caresses my heart is: It’s NONE of your business just where I have been.

That might sound snarky or brash to some, but to me it sounds like pure, sweet, and amazing grace where love trusts and listens and embraces without judgement. With love, it doesn’t matter how my peculiar ups and downs came about or even where they came from. In sacred love, we’re all welcomed to the feast, all nourished by grace, all embraced from within the safety of God’s rest. I think that’s why I have always loved Tom Petty when he sang much the same thing in “Last Dance with MaryJane.” In his broken-hearted, slacker, rock’n’roll challenge St. Thomas sings: buy me a drink, sing me a song, take me as I am cuz I can’t stay long! Yes, it’s a little rougher around the edges, but that’s what a yearning for the embrace of radical grace sounds like sometimes – especially to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear God’s invitation everywhere! Many of us don’t trust this to be true right away – we’ve been trained to separate the sacred from the secular, the arts from religion, so that the holy is always distinct from our humanity. That’s why I make a point to use totally non-religious songs at the start of some reflections: they gently and obliquely ask us to listen for our STILL speaking God who is committed to bringing us rest and grace no matter where we live.

Those songs remind us that ours isn’t really an abstract and intellectual faith, but an incarnational spirituality where the words and ideas of the holy are fused forever with our human flesh. “In all of my wanderings I could NEVER forget you were the one I loved best, lay yourself down, put your head on my breast – and come home.”

As I prayerfully study the texts of our tradition, trying to incorporate the insights from a few of the extra-canonical gospels as well, a pattern appears to me suggesting that St. Mary Magdalene has been singing this song to the first followers of the Jesus Movement who continued to question her right to celebrate Christ’s love in public. The gospel of Thomas along with the gospel of Mary Magdalene amplifies a tension and rivalry that is always present but just below the surface of our canonical text where St. Peter regularly questions the veracity and integrity of the woman chosen by Christ to be the apostle to the apostles. In Mary’s gospel she tells the disciples that her soul is now able to sing the grace of God because of Christ’s resurrecting love:

What has bound me has been slain. What encompassed me has been vanquished. Desire has reached its end and I am freed from ignorance. I left one world behind with the aid of another, and now as image I have been freed from the analog. I am liberated from the chains of forget-fulness which have existed in time. From this moment onward, I go forward into the fullness of life beyond the limits of time, where time rests in the stillness of eternity. In this rest, I repose in silence.

Rest, music, beauty, trust, grace, and peace abound in Mary’s soul – yet Peter chooses to keep on carping as he denigrates Mary as an emotionally unstable woman. We know OUR texts have erased and silenced the magnitude of her witness. The gospel of Thomas adds some juice to the historic conflict between these disciples telling us that after Mary proclaims the beauty of her encounter with Christ’s healing grace within her soul, Peter orders Mary to leave the community:

“Mary must leave us now for women are not worthy of this life.” To which the Fully Human One, Jesus of the resurrection, replies: “Then I myself will lead her making her male if she must become worthy as the rest of you men! I will transform her into a living spirit because any woman changed in this way will be a part of the kingdom of God.”

Cynthia Bourgeault comments that Jesus is NOT celebrating male supremacy here, but rather asserting that only those who do their inner work of allowing grace and rest to purify their heart are worthy of being called a disciple. In their understanding a disciple is NOT defined by tradition, gender, race, class, or culture: a disciple is one who does the inner work so that it can be shared outwardly in acts of radical hospitality to others and profound trust in the power of God’s love. St. Mary Magdalene’s stunning song of in-ward transformation puts her in conflict with many of the male disciples. Bourgeault writes:

She, more than they, caught the incredible subtlety of what Jesus was teaching. She saw that he really did come from another realm of being and that his purpose was to make that realm manifest here and now. She was able to penetrate into the integral, nondual vision of wholeness celebrated by Jesus. And this was absolutely galling to the other apostles, particularly to Peter, who held a more traditional view of the role of women in spiritual groups.

Mary discerned well before her male colleagues that in order to share a sense of God’s peace and compassion with others in the wider world, she first had to come home to the grace-filled rest that lays within. This was key for incarnating Christ’s love in creation because you can’t give what you ain’t got! She loved Jesus and was devoted to his mystical path of kenosis – his upside down spirit-uality of self-emptying – and the more she loved, the more she was empowered to pass on this love to those who needed it most. The wounded. The weary. The worn out and broken. Learning from Jesus and making his path her own, Magdalene multiplied the miracles that he first set in motion. By doing as he did, by refusing to cling to anything else, Magdalene gave shape and form to the path of a true disciple.

Jesus paid careful attention to the mystical prophets of ancient Israel like Isaiah and Ezekiel. He listened to and evaluated the wisdom his Wildman cousin John the Baptist shared with him in his formative years, he questioned the sacred within the solitude and soul-searching vision quest of his 40 days in the desert, he listened to the cries of the wounded and brought their pain into his own contemplative prayers. And, in due time, like the late Thomas Merton discovered, Jesus tapped into his truest, most grace-filled sense of rest within. Merton writes:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our mind or the brutal-ities of our will. This little point of nothingness and absolute poverty is the pure glory of God within us. It is so to speak God’s name written in us… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in every-body, and if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely...I have no program for this seeing as it is given as a gift, the very gate of heaven open to us and everyone everywhere.

I believe this is what Jesus was trying to tell the Pharisees when he said: The kingdom of God does not come to us with observation; nor can we say, ‘See it here!’ or ‘See it there!’ For the kingdom of God is within and among you all. Yes, the blessings of the kingdom are even within those who opposed and plotted against Jesus: they have the kingdom of rest and grace within, too. And not merely because Jesus was standing in their midst as some of our fundamentalist friends teach. They would have us believe that the kingdom is only where Jesus is – but that’s too exclusive – too small for the God who lives in the heart of the cosmos as Creator. No, our truest home, our eternal diamond, our most sacred resting place, the very kingdom of God’s grace and peace – is within.

It is among us, too whether we recognize it or not. That’s fundamentally why Jesus insisted on teaching and showing his friends how to nourish a measure of intimacy with the kingdom within. It has to do with learning to see through the eyes of the heart – looking and trusting beyond the obvious, beyond our fears and prejudices, beyond what we consider rational into the eternal where God’s deepest love resides – for then we are in kingdom country and even our enemies can taste and see the goodness of the Lord should they choose to cultivate a purity of heart.

Once I was in conversation with a Russian Orthodox monk who asked me: why do you liberals keep insisting that the kingdom of God is a place? Or a political agenda? Don’t you know that we slip in and out of the kingdom hundreds of times every day? When I replied that my theology celebrates a God of justice and true compassion, he smiled. And after a moment of quiet said, “Absolutely true, brother, but don’t ever think that you can accomplish the blessings of the kingdom in this world without first nourishing and knowing it within your heart.” Cynthia Bourgeault puts it like this: 

My bare bones take on Jesus is that he comes (into the world) as the “master cardiologist,” the next in the great succession of Hebrew prophets, to share the “heart surgery” first announced by Ezekiel when he proclaimed: The Lord our God will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land (of rest.) I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your wounds, and from all your idols I will cleanse you, too. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land I gave to your ancestors, and you shall be my people and I will be your God. The powerfully original method Jesus used to awaken heart perceptivity—a radical non-clinging or “letting go”— was heretofore unknown in the Semitic lands.

And who incarnated the wisdom of letting go and non-clinging better than the one we now call St. Mary Magdalene? Over and again, she learned from Jesus to love extravagantly, giving herself away in trust just as he did. And should we have any doubt this is true, ask yourself what did Jesus say to her in the resurrection story as recorded in St. John’s gospel?

After calling her by name, he says: “Do not cling to me.” Noli me tangere in church Latin. For nearly 1600 years Western Christianity has insisted that Jesus said this to Magdalene because he did not want to be tarnished by sinful flesh; he had not yet ascended to his Father in heaven, so he urged Mary to stay back. Some have gone so far as to say that Jesus told Mary not to cling to him because she was a woman. In the very next chapter of St. John’s gospel Jesus allows Thomas to touch his wounds and flesh before he ascended to the father, so why not Mary? Their conclusion is it MUST have something to do with sin and gender.

But those interpretations fail to recognize that Jesus is reminding Mary of the heart of their shared spirituality: don’t cling to anything, let it ALL go in trust, relinquish control to extravagant love of God; for as you do, you’ll be enveloped in the essence of the holy. St. Paul made this claim foundational when he taught new believers how to see with the eyes of the heart. In Philippians 2 the apostle writes: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”: Though his state was that of God, yet he did not deem equality with God something he should cling to. Rather he emptied himself, and assuming the state of a slave, he was born in human likeness.

Jesus emptied himself – the exact opposite of clinging, controlling, or possessing – for Jesus model-ed with his life a new way of coming close to God’s rest: Let go! Don’t cling! Don’t hoard! Don’t assert your importance! Don’t fret. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom!” (Luke 12:32).

Magdalene, learned this, practiced this, and shared it better than the rest. Noli me tangere is not a rebuke. It’s an affirmation of the spirituality they shared. And this is the reason I’m so drawn to St. Mary Magdalene – it’s the reason I’ve chosen to devote the Eastertide to this inquiry, too – she reframes what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, the Fully Human One, and, reshapes how we come to grips with the Cross as well. For nearly 300 years during the early days of Christianity, her wit-ness – and the gospel written under her name – gave guidance to parts of the emerging Jesus movement. Before there was an official Creed, a well-calibrated canon, and an institutional hierarchy with resources and accountability, the Jesus Movement was a wildly diverse coalition of believers who all loved and trusted Jesus as Lord albeit with a variety of meanings to this love.

That’s intriguing, Magdalene’s solidarity of compassion, her cosmic understanding of the Cross, her devotion to the letting go spirituality of Jesus, and her commitment to seeing with the eyes of the heart that attracts and impels me to trust that she has food to offer my hungry soul. Since Easter we’ve been looking at Mary’s courageous and loving witness outside Christ’s tomb after the crucifixion of Good Friday. To use the words of Bourgeault: most of us have never considered – and maybe never even heard – what this heroic and selfless act of love means. Magdalene refused to abandon Jesus. When everyone else betrayed and/or fled in fear of their lives, she stood witness. “No wonder Mary Magdalene came so unerringly to the tomb on Easter morning; she had stood by in a silent, unflinching vigil the whole time Jesus was being laid to rest there… and perhaps she never left…” Which gives an entirely new slant to our old, old story – asking us to reconsider what a spirituality of not clinging might mean?

Mary confirms that Jesus opened up a new way of doing spirituality. Most spiritual practices are all about ascent – moving into the lofty, noble, and pure realm of grace and compassion by looking upward. Think of Jacob’s Ladder. Or the various biblical mountains where holy pilgrims go to commune with the sacred. The path of ascent has a long, long history that has nourished many. It insists on giving away everything that distracts or pulls us down so that we focus our energy on what is above. It is the way of asceticism, purification, fasting, and concentration on what is holy. But as Jesus shows us ,the path of ascent is not the only sacred way – and let me quote Bourgeault again because her prose is so powerful:

There is another route to the center of the sacred: a more reckless and extravagant path which is attainted NOT through storing up energy or concentrating on the life force above, but through throwing it all away – or giving it all away. The unitive point is reached not through the concentration of being but through he free squandering of love; not through acquisition or attainment but through self-emptying in love; not through up but through down… through solid-arity not ascetic solitude. The path that Jesus walked through the end, even in the Garden of Gethsemane where he struggled in anguish, was one where he did not hoard, nor cling to even life itself. “Not my will, but yours be done, O Lord, for into your hands I commend my spirit. Jesus came and went giving himself fully into life and death, losing himself, squandering himself, gambling every gift God bestows NOT in a love stored up and held in private but in a love utterly poured out that opened the gated to the Kingdom of Heaven.

As some have made clear – especially Magdalene – Jesus shows us there is NOTHING to be renounced or resisted. Everything can be embraced if we are free not to cling to it. And this happens when we can see with the eyes of the heart. When we can interrupt our feelings, our obsessions, our fears, and prejudices long enough that we quit clinging to them because love is so much more satisfying. Spiritual masters of the mystical wisdom of Jesus say that our heart does not need to be grown or helped to evolve. “Every heart is already a perfect replica of the divine heart.”

What does need purification, as Jesus taught, is focusing our heart so that it stays aligned with God. And what causes us to lose focus? Our passions. Our insistence on only following our feelings with-out taking into consideration what the holy is saying to us beyond the obvious. This is how we get lost. This is where we lose touch with the inner diamond – we forget the loving rest and grace that God has placed within us all – and become lost in our feelings and fears. 

The dictionary tells us that the word passion comes from the Latin verb patior – to suffer – not abstractly, mind you, but as one stuck, caught or grabbed by feelings that render us “blindly reactive. Small wonder that over time being stuck in our feelings was articulated into the doctrine of the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Each of these obsessions and/or addictions START with thoughts that become hard wired within. The more we allow ourselves to be caught by them, the more we cling to them even when we don’t want to.

The way out of this trap is to interrupt our broken thoughts: prayer, spiritual practices, acts of compassion, and contemplation are ways to change the direction of our heart and mind so that we are no longer stuck. Jesus was ALWAYS slipping away to spend time in solitude so that he could be certain he wasn’t clinging to fear or obsession. The late Fr. Thomas Keating teaches that centering prayer is a time-tested way to interrupt our clinging and dangerous thoughts with the gentle silence of God’s grace.

Fr. Ed Hays has a slightly different tact: he speaks of learning the wisdom of our wounds which follow the upside-down, relinquish spirituality of Jesus. When our feelings tell us one thing we need to pause and see if they are not actually encouraging us to do the exact opposite. When you’re feeling sorry for yourself and you feel like hiding away, the wisdom of your wound is probably telling you it would be best to spend some time with those who love you rather than hide away.

Same is true for when you are filled with a rage that wants to scream – the wisdom of the wound is saying why not be still? When you want to strike out, consider stepping back and waiting. When you want to hoard, best let it go. When you want to run away, better to stay. Are you with me? This is the practical application of “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all its righteousness.” It is the applied spirituality of Jesus who doesn’t run away but gives himself totality to God’s love. It is what Magdalene learned and shared and seeks to share with us, too.

Last week I suggested trying a few simple ways to interrupt what is normative so that it might awaken you to the moment. There are other ways to interrupt when we usually do so that there is room to change directions: I’ve been gardening a lot this week. Pulling weeds, tossing stones, planting bulbs slows me down and helps me know just exactly where my feet are and what I’m feeling. Same is true with the music I listen to: sometimes I have to go through a number of songs to really get in touch with what I am feeling. And when I KNOW what I’m feeling then I have to ask Jesus if following those feelings will lead to the rest he promises me. More often than not, its just the opposite: staying when I want to run away, crying when I want to lash out, stepping back when I’m feeling like a know it all.

That’s why I kept going back to Lisa Null’s song – and playing it and playing it until I head its truest meaning – a call to rest into the extravagant grace of God’s love. I wonder if you might find a song prayer that helps you connect with what the sacred aches for you to hear? A work of art or poetry that encourages solace and grace? Let these words of Mary Magdalene be both pledge and promise for you: What has bound me has been slain. What encompassed me has been vanquished. Desire has reached its end and I am freed from ignorance. I left one world behind with the aid of another, and now as image I have been freed from the analog.

I am liberated from the chains of forgetfulness which have existed in time. From this moment onward, I go forward into the fullness of life beyond the limits of time, where time rests in the stillness of eternity. In this rest, I repose in silence.