cultivating a sacramental consciousness during advent...

We are quickly approaching the Fourth Sunday of Advent. My spiritual tradition asks us to embrace a threefold discipline during the four weeks before Christmas by getting grounded in the practice of patience, cultivating a contemplative presence each day, and trusting the spirituality of this season, wherein the earth shares wisdom with us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. It is a practical mysticism committed to nourishing a sacramental consciousness: a way of being that discerns both the facts of our reality and their more profound truths. Chris Webb suggests that living sacramentally means consciously acting so that "everything we do and everything we experience in the material world - the depth and breadth of our existence - is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace."  Interfaith author, Kaitlin Curtice, talks about this as "wintering" - going inward, watching, waiting, and wondering what will be revealed and experienced during the unfolding darkness - a core commitment of her Potawatomie heritage. My soul hears a parallel in Gertrud Mueller-Nelson' description of Advent spirituality:

Waiting is mysteriously necessary to all that is becoming. As in a pregnancy, nothing of value comes into being without a period of quiet incubation: not a healthy baby, not a loving relationship, not a reconciliation, a new understanding, a work of art, never a transformation. Rather, a shortened period of incubation brings forth what is not whole or strong or even alive. Brewing, baking, simmering, fermenting, ripening, germinating, and gestating are the feminine processes of becoming, and they are the symbolic states of being that belong in a life of value, necessary to transformation. (To Dance with God, p. 64)

Cultivating a sacramental consciousness has always been a challenge, all the more so in these days of perpetual engagement with our digital distractions. Nevertheless, my musical colleagues and I in Wednesday's Child believe that we can not only interrupt the tumult of our culture by offering a bit of respite in what we call our Blue Christmas/Longest Night liturgy, but also share tools for unplugging, too. I have partnered with these gifted and faithful musicians for over 15 years of music-making, gift-bearing, consciousness-raising, and soul-sharing. We create in pursuit of faith, hope, and love. In doing so, we have become a small but eclectic collective that spans different ages, backgrounds, genders, spirituality, family, aesthetics, and perspectives. A small faith community nourished by song, striving to integrate each person's unique gifts, quirks, and blessings into the whole. As we've been preparing our 2025 take on the Longest Night (December 21) through music, song, silence, poetry, candlelight, and presence, I've heard a sacred invitation to learn from the darkness.

Darkness scares us. Darkness can feel like a nightmare. We’ve been taught to fear it, to avoid it, to keep the lights on, to think happy thoughts, to pretend everything’s all right, and to not go into “that dark place.” Yet because God created both light and dark, day and night, and called ALL of creation good, we are invited to learn to see in the dark. It is, to be sure, an acquired art, without which we will miss what is there. Barbara Brown Taylor, put it like this in her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark: "I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light....new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark."

After collecting the songs and poems that resonated with us this year, three discrete yet interrelated challenges surfaced. One recognized the fullness of our respective schedules: it hasn't been easy to ensure the whole band is consistently together for rehearsals. Because we deconstruct songs before refashioning them, having folk away slowed the simmering process of creativity down considerably. There are a ton of reasons why this has been so, and there's no blame; it's just the luck of the draw that's made this year more complicated.

A second challenge involved new material and genres: the core of this year's liturgy is built on seven songs from Gen X and Millennial culture, which is a big shift for some of us old timers. It's been exciting, but also required a longer learning curve to make the art of Alanis Morrissette, NIN, REM, David Bowie, and others work within our groove. Which points to wrinkle number three: how to close this gig?  After finding a path through the first two challenges, we came to a strategic and aesthetic fork in the road. After tossing away a few good but as yet unformed songs, there was no consensus about how to bring it all home.

At first, this was vexing to me: with only a few days before it was time to stand and deliver, I was yearning for clarity, and it wasn't coming. Further, my heart genuinely wanted us ALL to weigh in and clarify how we thought it best to wrap things up, but we had to do this virtually. Would that we had a few more weeks to meet, talk, and rework some tunes in person, but we'd already used all the available time. So, after probably too many IMs and emails, we agreed to trust simplicity and see how that shakes out. My point in recounting these challenges is that creating art and worship in community is an existential act of practicing sacramental consciousness. We were listening to what the heart wanted us to know. What were likewise searching through the wisdom of our flesh, too, even while discerning how the whole presentation fit together intellectually. Aesthetics, culture, liturgy, and experience mashed together with reality, trust, love, confusion, and our mission to create a safe space for contemplation. I won't speak for others, but this strikes me as a growing edge for the band. Tricia Gates Brown wrote in her Substack column:

Listening, singing, and sharing music in a certain heart-wide-and-open way has become for us closest thing to prayer we know. And it’s not that listening leads me to pray or puts me in a mind for prayer and we become so filled with love/empathy/awe for my fellow creatures and life itself, that we feel deeply in touch with the divine.

Creating and sharing sacramental consciousness music in cooperative solidarity is transformative. It is not always easy and never simple, but rich, rewarding, and blessed in ways I could never have imagined. Come join us this Sunday in Palmer, MA @ 4 pm.

a week of sorting clutter...

Advent One 2025: I HATE clutter. Always have and always will. So, on what became a delightful snow day, I gave my attention to dusting, vacuuming, sorting, tossing, and scouring our home. I have no idea when this happened last, but the accumulating detritus was contributing to my weariness and needed the old heave-ho! (There's still a bedroom in need of attention - and my personal study is a wreck - but that may have to wait for another day.) The "Two of Us" band practice was cancelled, a chicken is in the sink defrosting, and soon our satchel of Advent/ Christmas music will reappear to grace our home with the sounds of Loreena McKinnitt, Vince Guaraldi, John Rutter, George Winston, and a host of subdued Celtic and French carols. All of this, as well as the silence of the snowfall and the absence of our clutter, has brought me a measure of blessed serenity - and I am grateful.

To say that this Advent feels like a reckoning of sorts for me would not be wrong: I am increasingly aware of my own mortality, conscious that on some days my energy dwindles and requires a newfound attention to choices, profoundly concerned about the ups and mostly downs of my loved one's health, and perplexed about the long-term consequences of my nation's ongoing obsession with chaos and cruelty. Earlier in the day, I read C. Christopher Smith's Substack column, Paying Attention to Poetry, which noted that:

Poetry (can be) a way to practice paying better attention—a habit that is essential to resisting the ever-encroaching allure of exploitative technology and consumerism and to being formed more deeply into the image of Christ. Paying attention is a key part of what makes us human, and poetry can be a valuable tool for developing that skill.

https://cultivatingcommunities.substack.com/p/paying-attention-to-poetry?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Could it be that in this season of watching, waiting, and paying attention, beyond the clutter, it's the poetry of Advent that is calling to me for a new hearing? I'm rather taken with this from Wisława Szymborska: A Little Bit About the Soul

A soul is something we have every now and then.
Nobody has one all the time
or forever.

Day after day,
year after year,
can go by without one.

Only sometimes in rapture
or in the fears of childhood
it nests a little longer.
Only sometimes in the wonderment
that we are old.

It rarely assists us
during tiresome tasks,
such as moving furniture,
carrying suitcases,
or traveling on foot in shoes too tight.

When we’re filling out questionnaires
or chopping meat
it’s usually given time off.

Out of our thousand conversations
it participates in one,
and even that isn’t a given,
for it prefers silence.

When the body starts to ache and ache
it quietly steals from its post.

It’s choosy:
not happy to see us in crowds,
sickened by our struggle for any old advantage
and the drone of business dealings.

It doesn’t see joy and sorrow
as two different feelings.
It is with us
only in their union.
We can count on it
when we’re not sure of anything
and curious about everything.

Of all material objects
it likes grandfather clocks
and mirrors, which work diligently
even when no one is looking.

It doesn’t state where it comes from
or when it will vanish again,
but clearly it awaits such questions.

Evidently,
just as we need it,
it can also use us
for something.

This is an act of faith - trusting that our elusive souls can and will use us for something - an incarnational paradox resolved only by patience and practice. Lou Reed sang, "It takes a busload of faith to get by" -  and he wasn't kidding. Kate Bowler adds, "Advent begins in the dark—with one small candle and a stubborn kind of hope. Not the shiny, everything’s-fine version. The gritty, keep-going kind. We wait. We bless what’s unfinished. Because the world is still a mess. And God is still coming." Her reflection for Advent One rings true to me and feels like I do today:

The church, in its wisdom, starts the new year not with champagne toasts or gym memberships but with a candle in the dark. Advent is the beginning of the Christian calendar, though you’d be forgiven for missing that detail if your mailbox is already stuffed with glossy holiday catalogues. We start here—not at the finish line of Christmas morning—but in the long, deliberate work of waiting. Advent always begins on (or around) the feast of St. Andrew, the first disciple to follow Jesus and the first to drag someone else (his brother Peter, no less) along with him. Andrew is not the most memorable apostle. He’s not Peter with the speeches or John with the poetry. He’s the brother in the background. But he is the one who told his brother, “We have found the Messiah” (John 1:41).

The first week of Advent is devoted to hope. Not optimism, which is a little too seamless, too unrealistic, too pie-in-every-sky. And not nostalgia either. Remember those childhood Christmas concerts in drafty school gyms, where a dozen shaky recorders and one out-of-tune piano were supposed to sound like angels singing? We didn’t care—it was magic. But nostalgia can trick us into thinking the best days are behind us. Advent hope is grittier. It looks squarely at the world as it is—fragile, unjust, unfinished—and still insists that God is not done yet.

And so it is, has been, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Last Sunday, I taught the children of the church some of our Advent hymns - and how to use the hymnal. After worship, we all made Advent wreaths to take home and I was given this stunning and arresting crucifix made of wire and nails. It took my breath away. This Sunday, our children will present the congregation with a new white altar cloth. We will baptize a newborn, too, before gathering around the Lord's table to celebrate Eucharist. Indeed, the world is still a mess - and God continues to come to us for the Holy One is not done yet.

this year's advent wreath...

I love Advent almost as much as All Saints/All Souls Days: these semi-barren early winter holy days speak to my soul like this blessing from Jan Richardson.

Go slow if you can.
Slower. More slowly still.
Friendly dark or fearsome,
this is no place to break your neck by rushing,
by running, by crashing into what you cannot see.
Then again, it is true: different darks
have different tasks, and if you have arrived here unawares,
if you have come in peril or in pain,
this might be no place you should dawdle
I do not know what these shadows ask of you,
what they might hold that means you good or ill.
It is not for me to reckon whether you should linger
or you should leave.
But this is what I can ask for you:
That in the darkness there be a blessing.
That in the shadows there be a welcome.
That in the night you be encompassed by the Love that knows your name.

Given the complexities of contemporary blended families, we head out of town for the feast of Thanksgiving in the USA. We cherish the quiet solitude of Quebec's Eastern Townships and take a few days to bask in the stark boldness of the land. This also lays a foundation for the practice of Advent that always begins with the call to watch and wait. The Community of Corrymela in Northern Ireland frames Advent well in this prayer:

God, the thief who breaks into this world;
God, the child who cries out with new life:
as we prepare ourselves for Christmas,
and bed down for this season,
surprise us in the night.
Steal us away from the gloom.
May we find ourselves separated
from monotonous tasks
and ready
for the coming of light.
Amen.

To suggest that I was replenished and well rested for today's Advent One worship would be an understatement: I was pumped! And the good souls in Palmer outdid themselves in setting the environment with tasteful holiday lights, garlands, a lovely little tree, and the Advent wreath. I am partial to Advent wreaths having been schooled by Gertrud Mueller-Nelson's insights in To Dance with God. Some years back, while going deeper into Celtic practices, we celebrated Advent for a full 40 days. This is the Advent wreath from that year.

This year, after our church's Advent wreath workshop, a fun intergenerational event that was well attended, I schlepped home through a mini-snow squall on the mountain, I had a thought about this year's home wreath. I still have a TON of pumpkins - my autumn/early winter delight - and wanted to incorporate them somehow into the mix. So, with a bit of ascetic and sacramental liberty, this is what I came up with for this year.

There's pumpkins and Native corn, apples, evergreen, candles in Advent blue, and a Tohono O'otham nativity painting from Tucson crafted by Ted DeGrazia. This year's wreath is ALL about Mother Earth and solidarity with what is small, vulnerable, and ultimately holy. And so, like the lone candle, I begin another cycle of watching, waiting, and trusting that a small sign of blessing will break forth from the darkness.

from thanksgiving eve to blue christmas...

For 30 years, in the spirit of Pete and Arlo, my various churches celebrated Thanksgiving Eve as a Night of American Music. In one incarnation, it was like a Prairie Home Companion: lots of group singing, emphasis on folk songs and the blues. In time, it became more like the Last Waltz with special guests playing short sets, the house band rocking things up, and a few a capella gospel tunes added for good measure.

All that came to a close 12 years ago when a massive snowstorm shut down the town. The Thanksgiving Eve shows never recovered. And while we have shared a variety of other benefits, one era had clearly ended - and, truth be told, I am still nostalgic for the magic we shared on those sacred nights.

After COVID, the core band regrouped into what is now Wednesday's Child. On Sunday, December at @ 4 pm in Palmer, MA, Wednesday's Child will offer up a "BLUE CHRISTMAS/LONGEST NIGHT" encounter with song and silence, prayer and candlelight, as an act of refuge and solidarity with all who grieve during this season. It is a quiet and safe space to feel all those complicated emotions truth so often obscured by popular culture.

These days, the promise and potential of that first Massachusetts Thanksgiving in 1621 still resonates in my soul. That's why we slip out of town for a few quiet days of rest and reflection on the big picture - NOT the sentimental or sanitized version of this holiday that ignores the genocide the white settlers committed not long after the harvest feast - but the whole story. For we must own that legacy even as we strive to live into and through it. Historians agree that the English Pilgrims and others didn't make contact with the Wampanoag people for the first four months on North American soil.

"The "real history" of Thanksgiving involves a 1621 harvest feast between Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag people, which was a brief moment of cooperation that contrasts with the subsequent history of conflict and oppression. The traditional narrative focuses on the 1621 event, while more complete histories acknowledge the violence and displacement of Native Americans that followed. From a Native American perspective, particularly the Wampanoag, Thanksgiving is often seen as a day of mourning, not celebration."

If you are free, please join on in December. We're using the music of Sarah MacLachlan, Bruce Springsteen, Alanis Morissette, David Bowie, NIN/Johnny Cash, and others for a quiet time of owning and sharing the complexities of this season.

letting a word from the Lord choose me...

Sometimes we just don't know until it happens: a blessing, a sorrow, a joy, a grief, or a word. Over the past three decades, I've been slowly practicing the spiritual discipline of "listening for a word." The wise and creative spiritual director, Christine Valters Paintner, puts it like this:

Beginning in around the third century CE, a group of monastics known as the desert mothers and fathers retreated to the deserts of northern Egypt, Syria, and Palestine to pursue lives of silence and prayer. A key phrase, repeated often among the sayings of the desert mothers and fathers, is "Give me a word." Rather than choosing a word, I invite you to let a word choose you. What does this mean exactly? How am I chosen by a word? It means releasing your thinking mind and expectations and resting into your heart....What if I trusted that a word would come when the time was ripe? What if I let go of the need to find something for myself and opened myself to receive what comes? If you find yourself obsessing over the “right” word, it is time to breathe and let go. Pay attention to synchronicities around you. Look for images that shimmer and make your heart stir with delight. Notice what is making you uncomfortable, calling you to grow beyond the known edges of your life. These are the places where your word will make itself known. Eventually.

When I was considering leaving ministry in Tucson, I kept "hearing" the call to trust the "unforced rhythms of grace." During my sabbatical 10 years ago, it was "tenderness." And when my congregation offered me an insulting and professionally unacceptable offer in order to save money, after stealing away for a week of silence, what I "heard" was the word "behold." Behold what the Lord is doing! Behold what the Scriptures are saying. Behold what options are unfolding. And as I beheld, it became clear it was time to let go - so I retired. After Covid, a denominational leader suggested to me that just because I sensed it was once time to let go of ministry... we're a people of the resurrection, so maybe there's new life yet to be discerned. And she was right: new life became my word as I returned to ministry first in Williamstown and now in Palmer.

Once again, we are away for a few days of silence and solitude - and beyond any plans or expectations - an from Dr. Valters-Paintner arrived to "let a word choose me" for Advent or the unfolding year. As I felt my heart smile it hit me: Oh, THAT is what this Thanksgiving retreat is all about: listening for a word to choose me. The good doctor writes:

For some of you, the word may come right away, but others may find the process much slower. Trust that perhaps it is the waiting itself that is being offered to you as wisdom and practice. The word comes as a gift. You will often know it through an intuitive experience, a more embodied sense of yes. The word (or phrase) is one that will work in you (rather than you working on it). Remember that a word that creates a sense of inner resistance is as important to pay attention to as one that has a great deal of resonance.

This rings true... so may it be so. Tonight we'll light a fire in the fireplace, eat pierogis and sausage, and sleep in a new place. Tomorrow we will explore. We'll rest and wander, listen and pray in anticipation of the Feast of Thanksgiving.

christ the upside-down king, thanksgiving harvest, and letting go...

Today is Christ the King Sunday within the Western Body of Christ. It is a relatively new feast day crafted and advanced by Pope Pius XI in 1925 to challenge the rise of fascism throughout Europe after WWI. As one who came late to celebrating liturgical and sacramental spirituality, I cherish this feast, which closes the circular church calendar with a strong blast of paradoxical wisdom. To be sure, like many of the "imperial" festivities of formal Christianity, there is a literal and obvious focus to Christ the King Sunday - the cosmic rule of Christ over all temporal powers - which is what Pius intended. But as Diana Butler Bass so eloquently notes: 

One thing has messed up Christianity more than any other single problem — the desire of Christians for a king. If you consider the inquisitions, crusades, heresy hunts, persecutions, and wars conducted by a religion claiming the Prince of Peace as its savior, the problem of human kings seems obvious. For about 1,600 years — ever since Christians hailed the Emperor Constantine as the “Thirteenth Apostle” — the church founded by and for the poor has constantly given in to the temptations of worldly wealth and power. There will be a lot of sermons preached today on the kingship of Jesus. Jesus, the crucified King. Jesus, the King of a Kingdom within. Jesus, the King of love. Many of those sermons will relocate, redefine, or reconstruct the idea of kings and kingdoms. Most, I suspect, will be thoughtful and helpful. Then, churchgoers will lustily sing, “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” The real issue is not relocating, redefining, or reconstructing the language or imagery of kings and kingdoms — the problem is kings. Period. Kings are the problem.

https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/christ-the-no-kings-sunday

Rather than advance this corrupt and corrupting practice, however, I have found myself searching for the "Paschal Mystery" rooted in the most profound truths of our faith. Like the Cross itself, Christ the King Sunday is saturated in subversive blessings: it is a time to clearly articulate the upside-down, paradoxical, and compassionate spirituality of God's "Small is Holy" realm. Our guide is the leader who empties himself to stand in solidarity with the wounded. It is a messiah born from below who washes feet and tells us that our new commandment is to do like wise. It is the Lord who incarnates God's presence through embodied acts of tenderness and restoration. This requires a sacramental spirituality rather than a doctrinaire or literal take on scripture and tradition. I have long been shaped by the clarifying words of Gertrud Mueller-Nelson in her brilliant text, To Dance with God.

Voting with the right wing or cheering for the left wing is our attempt to create a kingdom outside ourselves, but the kingdom we ultimately discover is "not of this world." It is not a perfect government, nor is it the kingdom of God, only a pie in the sky which we get in a better day than this one. It is a process in which each of us participates. It lies in our individual, inward relatedness to God. The kingdom God has prepared for us becomes ours as we participate personally, with growing consciousness, in its ultimate unfolding and fulfillment. In knowing ourselves, in living out creatively our unique way, and in loving relationships with our fellows, the process takes place, and we inherit the kingdom. (To Dance with God, p. 231)

Beauty, paradox, and the challenge of relinquishing control shape my take on the feast of Christ the King Sunday, all of which have been obscured in my tradition for too long by our sentimental attachment to the dominant culture's take on our secular Thanksgiving. Two more wise women have helped me move beyond the mythology and ideology of this holiday. Carrie Newcomer links God's revelation in nature at this time of year with a sacred invitation to make harvesting flesh:

I’ve always have connected the holiday of Thanksgiving to the concept of harvest. In September and October people are still stopping their cars at road side stands for the last tomatoes, red peppers, waxy light green cabbage, round womanly squash, sweet potatoes, sweet apples and cider. Although the unbridled abundance of July has slowed, the last crops are still completing their natural cycle. But by the end of November the harvest is now fully in and next year’s garlic planted. The fields, so recently lush with tasseled corn, are now dry stalks and stubble. The last golden remnants of warm air is now carrying the first early hints of the coming winter. Harvest is a time of cutting down and bringing in, preparing for leaner times and longer nights. And yet, I can’t think of harvest as a time comprised solely of dying. Yes, Harvest is the completion of a cycle of planting, growing and reaping, but it is also a time of taking stock and acknowledging the fruits of our labor. Harvest is a time to consider what has grown from the seeds we planted in hope and tended with our most sincere trying. Harvest is also about grace and gratitude for what we did not do—for the sunshine and rain, for natural processes, butterflies and bees, for all the things we did not create but only received as a gift.

Harvest is also about considering who the fruits of our work might feed. For I am surely the recipient of the work of those who came before me, the ancestors who did not meet me in person, but dreamt of me when they planted seeds that would take more than one life time to bear fruit. I am the receiver of all they envisioned and I am the keeper of a promise I carry forward. I am planting seeds for those I’ll never meet. I am sending songs into the air to fly where they will, landing like birds or apples in the grass. I am not done by a long shot with all my growing, but at the end of autumn I am considering who the harvest of my life might feed. This is one of the beauties of autumn, a reminder that the work of our lives is not measured in how much we did—but how deeply we loved, how hopefully we planted and how faithfully we tended our gardens the time we are given.

https://carrienewcomer.substack.com/p/in-the-time-of-harvest?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=49p8n&utm_

source=substack&utm_medium=email

And Kaitlin Curtice, a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, amplifies this in the ways she encourages us to move beyond the algorithms of empire by returning: "to the dust, aki, earth, our wild selves, our relationship with Segmekwe refreshed and refined."

"Be wild; this is how to clear the river. In its original form, the river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. IT is made up of divine paradox. It is an entirely interior process."(Clarissa Pinkola Etsés) Want to escape the technological grip on your life? Get to the woods, to the river, to a quiet spot of the house where you can stare at the leaves falling from trees or birds flying by.

https://kaitlincurtice.substack.com/p/rhythms-of-reciprocity

So, while dominant culture squeezes us into the mold of conformity by paying homage to the idols of Black Friday; empire ignores our legacy of genocide by confusing overeating and falling asleep in front of our TV sets with gratitude; and popular religion hides the subversive elements of Christ the King Sunday: the heart of the feast day insists that:

This is one of the rare times in the year when Christianity’s two major feasts — Easter and Christmas, Cross and Incarnation — come into close connection. The one condemned before crowds in Jerusalem is the same one born in a forgotten, backwater town. The one hailed by angels, shepherds, and philosophers from afar is the same one eventually betrayed, abandoned, and left to die in shame. “Silent Night” and “What Wondrous Love is This?” overlap and interweave, together creating another kind of song entirely. And this juxtaposition, this creative tension, is precisely the point. To paraphrase the great womanist theologian Delores Williams, the “kingship” of Christ can only be understood through dissonance and harmony: “King of Kings!” on the one hand, as if sung by a resplendent choir; and “poor little Mary’s boy” on the other, as if whispered by an elderly woman standing alone. Or, “Reign of Christ” on the one hand; and God’s child, exquisitely vulnerable, on the other. These two songs, Williams contends, sung back and forth in call and response, is “the Black church doing theology.” Each song needs the other for the truth to shine through. 

(SALT Project, https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2019/11/18/power-and-mercy-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-reign-of-christ-the-king-sunday)

Every year, to honor THIS Christ the King as well as the discipline of Advent, we leave these barely United States of America for French-speaking Quebec to sit in the woods. To be still and know. To let go of all the superficialities of our native land so that we might discern not only what is real but what the Spirit may be asking of us as the new year of Advent ripens. Kaitline Curtice gets it right for me when she asks that this year: 

In the United States, it’s Thanksgiving Week, and, hardly anyone would know it, but the day after Thanksgiving is Native American Heritage Day.
And I feel a lot like the way it feels with a lot of things, how the build up to something is so big, so epic, so monumental—get Thanksgiving right or get out of the way. But I want something different this year. In the same way that I don’t necessarily endorse New Year’s resolutions in the sense that they are supposed to last all year—we need seasonal resolutions and goals—I wouldn’t endorse Thanksgiving to be the destination for us.

This year, I want Thanksgiving to be a beginning, not a destination.In other words, I want us to show up tenderly to this moment, whether it’s in our personal lives or in our collective ones. I want us to think of Thanksgiving as a marker on our journey, or the beginning of something, not the final destination. I think we put too much pressure on ourselves—to change, to say the right thing, to deal with people in the ways we think we should, to read the right books, to post the right things to social media. This is where the tenderness of words, of poetry, of the prophets of our time speak to us.

Slow down. Let the words come as they come. Don’t rush this process. You will be ready for everything when you’re ready.This week, we begin. We decide where we want to start from—the truth about Thanksgiving, holding nuance and complexity, honoring the sacredness of Mother Earth, or all of the above. We begin here, knowing that the journey is lifelong, that it isn’t just this holiday season, but the coming cold winter months that will guide us home to ourselves, the sacred Earth always tending to our wounds with us. That is where we begin, and that is how we hold space for a destination beyond and above us. We have arrived, but we are still arriving.

https://kaitlincurtice.substack.com/p/thanksgiving-as-beginning-not-as

Lord, may it be so for those open to a new/old way of being...

credits:

1) karl barth for dummies

2) kay redman: servant king

3) christ the king: ronald raab

 

heaven and earth shall become one...

One of my favorite lines in the Psalter is found in Psalm 85:10: Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. (KJV) A The more contemporary rendering is equally evocative: Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. (NRSV) This verse revels in paradox while simultaneously revealing the sacred unity of creation. The wedding of our existential Alpha with the eternal spiritual Omega unites humanity with the holy, light with darkness, the feminine with the masculine, and spirit with matter beyond all dualistic distractions. It depicts wisdom within mystery - ecstasy within existence - awe and even trust within doubt. Other verses in the Psalter amplify this blessing as well:

+ Psalm 89:14: Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne, O Lord, as loving devotion and faithfulness go before you.

+ Psalm 112:4-5: A righteous person is gracious, compassionate and just... his/her affairs are guided by justice.

+ Psalm 103:6: The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.

+ Psalm 145:8: The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.

Unpacking the implications of this text has long been essential to my spirituality and ethics. Mercy - or steadfast love - is how English Bibles translate the Hebrew word: hesed. My heart prefers compassion from: "the Latin "compati", meaning "to suffer with," and is a combination of the prefix "com-" (meaning "with" or "together") and the verb "pati" (meaning "to suffer"). It literally means to "suffer with" another person and is related to the English word "patient" and the Greek word for suffering, "pathos". Compassion is spiritual, emotional, and incarnational solidarity. Truth or faithfulness are how we have translated the Hebrew, emeth, a noun describing that which is certain or trustworthy. Righteousness, from the Hebrew, tsedek, could be rendered into English as justice or right relations especially when the Hebrew, shalom, is added. Peace often sounds too passive, as in the absence of conflict, when it is all about everything that makes creation whole, safe, and satisfying.

For me, these two verses offer a pattern to practice - a model for a living, nondual spirituality - or the path of embodied prayer. It is a way of being where I can experience the essence of the holy through the choices I make every day: it is not a sappy piety promising "pie in the sky" or eternal bliss in the great by and by, but sacramental living that trusts the promises of God. A spirituality that not only changes me but advances tenderness and healing in my relationships and choices. That's what I hear in part two of the text: Eternal verity will spring from the earth (from the Hebrew erets for our fields, soil, or the ground below the sky) as the bounty and blessings of heaven are given shape and form by our activity (from shamayim for the restorative power linking the love of the celestial realm with the nitty gritty earth cycle of life below.) 

Poetically, prophetically, and practically, Psalm 85 offers me both guidance for living a spirit-filled life as well as the assurance that compassion and right relations fulfill what became the Lord's Prayer: Our Father/Mother, who art in heaven... Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is already being done in heaven. Like the words of the prophet in Micah 6:8 - The Holy One has told you already, O mortal one, what is good and what the Lord requires: to DO justice (that is to become - ashah - an act of healing - from the Hebrew mishpat for the one who renders a just verdict), to cherish kindness (from hesed) and walk through this life humbly with the Lord (from halak for walking/behaving and tsana` for cultivating a perspective or vision born from below.) The wisdom of Jesus gives me the tools and practices to cultivate this holy/human embrace. St. Paul amplifies it in Romans 12: 

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for the Lord. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God requires wants, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, and develops well-formed maturity in you. (From Eugene Peterson's The Message)

Last week was for me a series of mini-humiliations - nothing catastrophic or immobilizing (save a flat tire that is currently being repaired) - just a series of little upsets to my expectations. Both a bit of minor frustration encased in a sacred invitation to make some attitude adjustments. As things unfolded, and I resisted, I kept hearing Fr. Richard Rohr's words: I pray to the Lord that every day I face at least three humiliations, for they help me practice humility by knocking me off my high horse. These roadblocks to my expectations remind me NOT to believe my own public relations and to trust that my shadow is a gift that helps me live beyond my self-imposed limitations. The poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez, puts it like this in Robert Bly's translation of "Yo No Soy Yo."

I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.

So, in the spirit of All Saints' and All Souls' Day -  and en route to the mixed-up and paradoxical holiday of American Thanksgiving - Di and I are preparing for a few weeks of letting go. Tonight we'll rehearse with Wednesday's Child for our Blue Christmas gig on December 21st in Palmer. On Friday, we head to Vermont with part of our family to join my Sunday School teacher at the memorial service for his beloved wife of 46 years. And soon afterwards, we'll get out of Dodge for a retreat in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where solitude and rest will be the way we return thanks. The wise and time-tested Gertrud Mueller-Nelson recently suggested that gratitude is likely the best way to celebrate Thanksgiving. So, today, as I wait for my tire to be replaced, I choose to be grateful for this past week - roadblocks, shadows, and all. 

art work from Jan Richardon.

 

humility and gratitude embrace...

The Lord works in mysterious ways, God's wonders to behold. Sometimes I have to be reminded of that - especially trusting that something sacred is happening beyond the obvious and way beyond my control. Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, author of Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn From Nature's Mothers in a Time of Unraveling, notes that:

Sacred as that which pulls us beyond the bounds of our individual selves, envelops us within mystery, and gives us a glimpse into the vast, entwined, eternal network of living beings that we are in relationship with.

On and off for 40+ years, I've been reminded of this when someone says to me after Sunday worship: "That message REALLY helped me today, pastor. Thank you." That is always nice to hear. But when my message was only modestly delivered - or worse, when I think it was a train wreck, no matter how hard I tried to do otherwise - not only am I immediately humbled, but mystically awakened to the way the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for human words. (Romans 8:6) I've loved quoting St. Bob Dylan over the years when he snarled, "Something's going on all around you and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" (Ballad of a Thin Man) And then it happens to me, and I don't hear it as a cynical snarl, but more like an invitation to rest and trust God's grace is bigger than anything I can control or even comprehend.

Our band, All of Us, played Methuselah in Pittsfield, MA, last night with some of our beloved friends. It was an uneven show. Our shared songs - with Sean and Deb and later with Wendy and Elaine - worked pretty well as they are always gracious and gifted. And a number of our rock and soul songs shook the house, too. But there were a few genuine clunkers that not only took me by surprise but left me a bit frustrated. It's happened before, of course, and will occur again. For some reason, I wanted last night to be special. Maybe my expectations got in the way - that's been known to throw me off balance before - and I'm aware there was only a limited time for rehearsal, too. But given the grief and angst that dampens life in these barely United States of America these days, I yearned to share a balm in Gilded. As I drove home in the cold, dark, early winter night, however, I was feeling blue. Not bereft or despondent, just tender and sad. The night air seemed to affirm the gig's ambiguity. (Photo credit: Lee Everitt)

When I woke up this morning, after re-editing this week's sermon about holding sorrow and celebration together as part of an integrated whole, not only did I get two beautiful emails of encouragement from friends that had joined us last night; but one included a tender rendition of a sweet song by Lowell George and the other not only a jazz reworking of "Bless be the Ties That Bind" but a request for our set list so that he might learn a few of our songs and add some addition harmonies. Truly, "something is going on all around me, and I don't know what it is, do I, Mr. Jones?"

It is wonderfully humbling to be confronted with truths I've been preaching for decades, but apparently still don't fully practice myself. As one note said: Your passion is infectious! All I can say is thank you - and thanks be to God.

yearning for all saints' day...

I am still blessed to have a few childhood friends. That may not be such an awesome reality for those who grew up in small communities and stayed there, but it was for me. Given my father's career path, we moved every two years until we stayed put in Southern Connecticut so that I might complete junior and senior high school. These are the friends and lovers I still hold close to my heart. I hear from them periodically on FB and rejoice in that simple pleasure. And when possible, I try to visit. This August, I spent an afternoon with my once Sunday School teacher, who now lives in a retirement community in Vermont. Last week, he told me that his beloved wife of over 40 years had died and wondered if I might be able to join the upcoming Memorial Service to sing the Paul Stookey song I sang at their wedding. "In a heartbeat, brother," I replied without hesitation and have started reworking the music for this occasion.

Her death - and others throughout 2025 - have awakened in me a yearning to celebrate All Saints/All Souls Day more intentionally this year. Once upon a time, we would use our annual Thanksgiving Eve gig to name and perform some of the music crafted and shared with the world by musicians who had crossed over that year. We would also mark those who had joined the journey home in our church. I find that this year I am keenly missing the presence of: Bill Moyers, Sly Stone, Brian Wilson, Diane Keeton, Phyllis Tribble, Robert Redford, Jane Goodall, Graham Greene, Lou Christie, Rick Derringer, Valerie Mahaffey, Ruth Buzzi, Jesse Colin Young, June Lockhart, Danny Thompson, Roberta Flack, Jerry Butler, Marianne Faithfull, Garth Hudson, Sam Moore, and Peter Yarrow. Everyone will have their own list, of course, and this is mine, highly subjective and top-heavy with musicians to be sure.

I trust that one of the reasons I'm so focused on the fleeting holy days of All Saints' and All Souls' this year is my own mortality. There's no escaping the fact that I know I am much closer to the end than the beginning. Another concerns the current chaos in our culture, which denigrates history and depth in relationships in favor of short-term profits and selfish acquisitions. Social critic Ted Goia writes that we are now living through a time when most social institutions are run like casinos, eager to bleed us dry in a fun house we cannot escape. If you've ever been in a casino, you know what I mean: countless seemingly exciting distractions, no easy way out, the lure of winning against the odds, and a conspicuous absence of any clocks. 

So, this weekend, we'll quietly slip out of Dodge for a few days and nights of quiet wandering. And reminiscing. And reconnecting with loved ones. I need a little downtime right now to feel both my loss and my gratitude. Tonight, our band, All of Us, will play some rock'n'roll Halloween favorites. Tomorrow, our Wednesday's Child band will work on this year's "Blue Christmas" gathering. This weekend, our church will present an intergenerational liturgical drama before celebrating Eucharist. And in between, there are leaves to gather, acorns to scatter, outdoor chores to be completed before the first heavy frost, and a whole lot of quiet time to take stock. The poet, Jacqueline Osherow, gets it so right for me this year with her "Autumn Psalm" poem. It's long, obviously, but well worth the time.

A full year passed (the seasons keep me honest)
since I last noticed this same commotion.
Who knew God was an abstract expressionist?

I’m asking myself—the very question
I asked last year, staring out at this array
of racing colors, then set in motion

by the chance invasion of a Steller’s jay.
Is this what people mean by speed of light?
My usually levelheaded mulberry tree

hurling arrows everywhere in sight—
its bow: the out-of-control Virginia creeper
my friends say I should do something about,

whose vermilion went at least a full shade deeper
at the provocation of the upstart blue,
the leaves (half green, half gold) suddenly hyper

in savage competition with that red and blue—
tohubohu returned, in living color.
Kandinsky: where were you when I needed you?

My attempted poem would lie fallow a year;
I was so busy focusing on the desert’s
stinginess with everything but rumor.

No place even for the spectrum’s introverts—
rose, olive, gray—no pigment at all—
and certainly no room for shameless braggarts

like the ones that barge in here every fall
and make me feel like an unredeemed failure
even more emphatically than usual.

And here they are again, their fleet allure
still more urgent this time—the desert’s gone;
I’m through with it, want something fuller—

why shouldn’t a person have a little fun,
some utterly unnecessary extravagance?
Which was—at least I think it was—God’s plan

when He set up (such things are never left to chance)
that one split-second assignation
with genuine, no-kidding-around omnipotence

what, for lack of better words, I’m calling vision.
You breathe in, and, for once, there’s something there.
Just when you thought you’d learned some resignation,

there’s real resistance in the nearby air
until the entire universe is swayed.
Even that desert of yours isn’t quite so bare

and God’s not nonexistent; He’s just been waylaid
by a host of what no one could’ve foreseen.
He’s got plans for you: this red-gold-green parade

is actually a fairly detailed outline.
David never needed one, but he’s long dead
and God could use a little recognition.

He promises. It won’t go to His head
and if you praise Him properly (an autumn psalm!
Why didn’t I think of that?) you’ll have it made.

But while it’s true that my Virginia creeper praises Him,
its palms and fingers crimson with applause,
that the local breeze is weaving Him a diadem,

inspecting my tree’s uncut gold for flaws,
I came to talk about the way that violet-blue
sprang the greens and reds and yellows

into action: actual motion. I swear it’s true
though I’m not sure I ever took it in.
Now I’d be prepared, if some magician flew

into my field of vision, to realign
that dazzle out my window yet again.
It’s not likely, but I’m keeping my eyes open

though I still wouldn’t be able to explain
precisely what happened to these vines, these trees.
It isn’t available in my tradition.

For this, I would have to be Chinese,
Wang Wei, to be precise, on a mountain,
autumn rain converging on the trees,

a cassia flower nearby, a cloud, a pine,
washerwomen heading home for the day,
my senses and the mountain so entirely in tune

that when my stroke of blue arrives, I’m ready.
Though there is no rain here: the air’s shot through
with gold on golden leaves. Wang Wei’s so giddy

he’s calling back the dead: Li Bai! Du Fu!
Guys! You’ve got to see this—autumn sun!
They’re suddenly hell-bent on learning Hebrew

in order to get inside the celebration,
which explains how they wound up where they are
in my university library’s squashed domain.

Poor guys, it was Hebrew they were looking for,
but they ended up across the aisle from Yiddish—
some Library of Congress cataloger’s sense of humor:

the world’s calmest characters and its most skittish
squinting at each other, head to head,
all silently intoning some version of kaddish

for their nonexistent readers, one side’s dead
(the twentieth century’s lasting contribution)
and the other’s insufficiently learned

to understand a fraction of what they mean.
The writings in the world’s most spoken language
across from one that can barely get a minyan.

Sick of lanzmen, the yidden are trying to engage
the guys across the aisle in some conversation:
How, for example, do you squeeze an image
into so few words, respectfully asks Glatstein.
Wang Wei, at first, doesn’t understand the problem
but then he shrugs his shoulders, mumbles Zen
… but, please, I, myself, overheard a poem,
in the autumn rain, once, on a mountain.
How do you do it? I believe it’s called a psalm?

Glatstein’s cronies all crack up in unison.
Okay, groise macher, give him an answer.
But Glatstein dons his yarmulke (who knew he had one?)

and starts the introduction to the morning prayer,
Pisukei di zimrah, psalm by psalm.
Wang Wei is spellbound, the stacks’ stale air

suddenly a veritable balm
and I’m so touched by these amazing goings-on
that I’ve forgotten all about the autumn

staring straight at me: still alive, still golden.
What’s gold, anyway, compared to poetry?
a trick of chlorophyll, a trick of sun.

True. It was something, my changing tree
with its perfect complement: a crimson vine,
both thrown into panic by a Steller’s jay,

but it’s hard to shake the habit of digression.
Wandering has always been my people’s way
whether we’re in a desert or narration.

It’s too late to emulate Wang Wei
and his solitary years on that one mountain
though I’d love to say what I set out to say

just once. Next autumn, maybe. What’s the occasion?
Glatstein will shout over to me from the bookcase
(that is, if he’s paying any attention)

and, finally, I’ll look him in the face.
Quick. Out the window, Yankev. It’s here again.

when you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce...

As a part of my commitment to self-care AND professional development as both pastor and spiritual director, this week I began a five-part reflection at Wisdom Ways. The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault has revised her "Introduction to Wisdom School" course, designed to help practitioners move beyond mere information to "knowing more deeply rather than knowing more." She writes:

Wisdom schools appear throughout history during two critical periods: when humanity stands on the edge of evolutionary leaps in consciousness, and, during times of great planetary instability. Our current era fulfills both of these conditions as we struggle between individualistic consciousness and an emerging collective awareness that can think from the whole to the part.

Taking on this commitment of study and practice - including renewing my on-
again, off-again romance with Centering Prayer - brought to mind a poem by Tich Naht Hanh he calls: When You Plant Lettuce.

When you plant lettuce,
if it does not grow well,
you don't blame the lettuce.

You look for reasons
it is not doing well.
It may need fertilizer,
or more water, or less sun.
You never blame the lettuce.

Yet if we have problems
with our friends or family,
we blame the other person.

But if we know how
to take care of them,
they will grow well,
like the lettuce. Blaming
has no positive effect at all,
nor does trying to persuade
using reason and argument.
That is my experience.

No blame,
no reasoning,
no argument,
just understanding.

If you understand,
and you show that you understand,
you can love, and the situation will change.

Blaming - and reacting - is not what's needed. Instead, to paraphrase Bourgeault, whenever we engage in conversation, it is best to do so from an inner quiet so that we might speak from silence with force and agency. For the past 45 years, I seem to learn and practice this only to gradually forget it and lose touch. Perhaps with each recollection, I go a little deeper, but then again, maybe not. There is a rhythm to my journey and it involves trust, rest, silence, and careful conversation.

reflections on relinquishing and renewal part two...

NOTE: This is part two of an unfolding reflection on relinquishing and renewal.

Over the past week, our small family marked the Feast Day of St. Francis and celebrated our grandson’s 12th birthday (they’re the same day), harvested our first 10lb pumpkin from our own garden, brought most of our plants indoors to escape the first frost, visited Ioka Farms for yet another family search for the Great Pumpkin, and blessed about 15 dogs, along with a few cats and a bunny, at church. It has been a full time. Autumn is now full-blown in these parts as the trees shed their colors and the squirrels and chipmunks snatch up the acorns. Soon, all the yellows, oranges, and browns will give way to silvers and greys, and the stripped-down hills and wetlands will invite us to return to the inward journey. All Hallows’ Eve is just around the corner, so too All Saints and Souls Days – thin places in time and matter where ordinary people sometimes sense something of the Creator’s vast albeit mysterious presence within and all around us. Parker Palmer puts it like this:

For years, my delight in the autumn color show quickly morphed into sadness as I watched the beauty die. Focused on the browning of summer’s green growth, I allowed the prospect of death to eclipse all that’s life-giving about fall and its sensuous delights. Then I began to understand a simple fact: All the “falling” that’s going on out there is full of promise. Seeds are being planted and leaves are being composted as Earth prepares for yet another uprising of green. Today, as I weather the late autumn of my own life, I find nature a trustworthy guide. It’s easy to fixate on everything that goes to ground as time goes by: the disintegration of a relationship, the disappearance of good work well-done, the diminishment of a sense of purpose and meaning. But as I’ve come to understand that life “composts” and “seeds” us as autumn does the Earth, I’ve seen how possibility gets planted in us even in the hardest of times.
(check it out: https://www.yesmagazine.org/orphan/2018/10/22/parker-palmer-on-autumn-aging-and-acceptance)

One layer is diminished – and dies – while another simultaneously sends seeds of new life outward to prosper and grow in their own time. On Indigenous Peoples Day in the USA – a national holiday saturated in our culture wars – I find my heart singing the wisdom of the ancient prophet Isaiah, who captured the paradox of creation in his poetic oracle.

Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. For you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle, and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.(Isaiah 55)

This sounds to me like both the first inhabitants of this land—the Pocomtuc and Nipmuc nations of the Machican/Algonquin region—and St. Francis of Assisi. Without appropriating their respective cultures, I am grateful to recognize that my own Western spiritual tradition celebrates a holistic spirituality that honors the unity of creation, too.

To be sure, the Franciscan way is a minority report in Christianity – what Richard Rohr calls a generous and alternative orthodoxy - but so too the practices of ancient Celtic spirituality that peeks its head up in culture from time to time. For those who practice, we have now entered one of the unique, but all too often ignored, liturgical season called Allhallowtide. Officially, it spans only the three days between October 31 and November 2. Aesthetically and incarnationally, however, it feels like it has already begun. In this, nature clearly manifests a wisdom greater than the contemporary church, as the greenery, mammals, birds, and reptiles of this region prepare to withdraw from their outward activities in anticipation of winter.

Those who live close to the land grasp this as their once-abundant fields are

harvested and ploughed under before the frost. But rather than honoring the rhythmic wisdom of nature with rest, New Englanders initiate a new cycle of activity: schools reopen and students return, organizational budgeting ramps up, and church programming kicks into high gear after the summer hiatus. This feels increasingly wrong to me. Could it be yet another contradiction of domination long embedded into our culture, economics, and politics? Trisha Hersey of the Nap Ministry is on to something when she observes that:

We are grind culture. Grind culture is our everyday behaviors, expectations, and engagements with each other and the world around us. We have been socialized, manipulated, and indoctrinated by everything in culture to believe the lies of grind culture. For a capitalist system to thrive, our false beliefs about productivity and labor must remain. We have internalized its teachings and become zombie-like in Spirit and exhausted in body. So, we push ourselves and each other under the guise of being hyperproductive and efficient. From a very young age, we begin the slow process of disconnecting from our bodies’ need to rest, and we are praised when we work ourselves to exhaustion… Our bodies and Spirits do not belong to capitalism, no matter how it is theorized and presented. Our divinity secures this, and it is our right to claim this boldly. I’m not grinding ever. I trust the Creator and my Ancestors to always make space for my gifts and talents without needing to work myself into exhaustion.

Small wonder the ancient Celts created a 40-day Advent season that not only mirrors Lent but constructs an intentionally counter-cultural season of rest and respect that resonates with Mother Nature. In Celtic Advent, a wheel was removed from one of the farm’s working wagons to become the prototype of our Advent wreath. It thus slowed work down while providing a frame for candles to illuminate a darken home. Ms. Hershey adds:

Rest is as natural as breathing and waking up. Rest is part of our nature. Resting is about getting people back to their truest selves. To what they were before capitalism robbed you of your ability to just be. Rest is anything that slows you down enough to allow your body and mind to connect in the deepest way. We must focus on knowing that our bodies and our worth are not connected to how many things we can check off a list. You can begin to create a “Not-To-Do-List” as you gain the energy to maintain healthy boundaries. Our opportunity to rest and reimagine rest is endless. There is always time to rest when we reimagine.

I rather like the way Randy and Edith Woodley, co-founders of the Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm and Seeds, put it: “To overwork—that is, to spend time working for what one does not need—means that one’s life is out of balance, and it breaks the circle of harmony.” I have come to trust that the liturgical calendar I have inherited – and cherish – holds some additional possibilities for reclaiming a more balanced way of being. Like the great Red Maple in the wetlands behind our home that first bursts forth in wild yellows before becoming gray and bare, there is a time for every purpose under heaven – and now is clearly a time to journey inward.

reflections on relinquishing and renewal: part one

NOTE: In keeping with the spirituality of this season, I’ve been drawn to craft a multiple-part reflection on relinquishing. Over the next few weeks, I will attempt to articulate some of the reasons why St. Paul’s call to kenosis has become a touchstone. In Philippians 2, the apostle borrows a baptismal hymn from the early church: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore, God exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

 Part One:

When we moved from Tucson to Pittsfield – a dramatic journey that included emotional peaks and valleys as well as geographic ones – we not only slowly wandered through deserts, prairies, mountains, and farmland before crossing the Atlantic for an extended romp through London, but we also returned to the land of our respective births. In ways that continue to be revealed, we began a sojourn of relinquishment: travelling backwards through lands once vanquished and violated by so-called pioneers and settlers, our return to New England has been an expedition of reversal. To say that this was not clear at the outset would be an understatement. Yes, I felt a warm sense of security when we first hit the rolling hills of the Berkshires. Clearly, the terrain around Webster and Lake Chaubunagungamaug had long been a family homeland. At least four generations regularly made the lake our vacation destination. A variety of church retreats and numerous honeymoons also took place here. And experiencing all four seasons was ecstatic.

But it wasn’t until I returned to gardening that the magnitude and meaning of this move was clarified. You see, while I experienced blessing after blessing while doing urban ministry in Michigan and Ohio, and genuinely loved the Sonoran Desert with its big sky, wild flora, and almost prehistoric fauna (okay, I am not a fan of rattlesnakes!). I could never get the hang of gardening in those places. In Saginaw and Cleveland, there wasn’t adequate space. And in Arizona, without perpetual drip irrigation, plants placed outdoors in the morning withered and died by sunset. I was able to amass an unruly collection of houseplants for a few years, but nothing grounded me like the feel of cool, dark soil in my hands as I carefully nestled seedlings into fertile earth. I had not realized how much I missed intimacy with Mother Earth. Nor did I know how much she wanted to teach me about owning, grieving, relinquishing, and then revisioning my heritage as a Scots-Irish settler. The Native American wisdom-keeper, Robin Wall Kimmerer, put it like this:

“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” (Braiding Sweetgrass)

 It began with the seasons. New England blessed us the first year back with a smorgasbord of colors. The trees in the wetlands behind our home burst into vibrant yellows, reds, oranges, and browns, while sumac turned a deep crimson, and sunflowers and goldenrod waved to us in the wind. The aroma of burning wood wafted our way as daylight gave up to midnight in the afternoon. At first, it was disorienting to enter a store at 3:30 pm only to exit into a shroud of darkness. But those late October and early November days helped me reconnect with the numinous mystery of thin places in time and space – small wonder that All Hallows’ Eve and All Saints' and Souls' Days became ensconced in these months.

Add to that our first local Halloween parade, with costumes and floats right out of “Northern Exposure,” and it was clear that we were no longer in Kansas anymore, Toto. We promised ourselves we wouldn’t carp or whine about winter – it rarely even hints at freezing in the desert – so we soon gathered protective thermal underwear, snowshoes, and eventually hand-me-down cross-country skis. I discovered the varying shades of grey and brown of winter to be soothing after a decade of 300+ days of sunshine in the Sonoran Desert. The barren trees and frozen rivers offered a calming call to join nature’s inward journey, which led me to Parker Palmer’s “spirituality of the seasons”.

 Autumn is a season of sacred beauty, but it is also a season of decline: the days grow shorter, the light is suffused, and summer’s abundance decays toward winter’s death. Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? She scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring — and she scatters them with amazing abandon. In my own experience of autumn, I am rarely aware that seeds are being planted. Instead, my mind is on the fact that the green growth of summer is browning and beginning to die. My delight in the autumn colors is always tinged with melancholy, a sense of impending loss that is only heightened by the beauty all around. I am drawn down by the prospect of death more than I am lifted by the hope of new life. But as I explore autumn’s paradox of dying and seeding, I feel the power of a metaphor. In the autumnal events of my own experience, I fixate on surface appearances — on the decline of meaning, the decay of relationships, the death of a work. (For more, please go to:  https://fetzer.org/news/the-paradox-of-fall-a-sacred-meditation/)

 Palmer put me back in touch with Thomas Merton, whom I had read in the 1970s but lost touch with as my ministry matured. “There is in all visible things…a hidden wholeness,” Merton contends. A sacramental way of seeing wherein “the visible world of nature conceals a great truth in plain sight: diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites. They hold together in the paradox of the 'hidden wholeness.” A Zen koan says: When the student is ready, the Buddha will appear. And my Buddha was Mother Nature, who was starting to sound a lot like the Grateful Dead in “Ripple. (Additional parts to follow as autumn unfolds.)