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)
· 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
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.
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