the day after...

Awaiting, at my computer screen, election updates from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia, I am reminded of what it felt like to sit anxiously in a hospital waiting room as loved ones kept it together anticipating word from their attending surgeon. As the emptiness dragged on after opening embraces and prayers, the shared silences that started naturally soon turned awkward. Even oppressive. So, like mist on a cold, country field, random stories of the heart would start to rise from often the most unlikely member of the family. A tenderness would be spoken. Real albeit incongruous laughs would erupt, too breaking down the tension in the room. And, in the Spirit's own mysterious time, what began as brittle became incrementally more supple. A few hours in, some would even fall asleep. Others drummed and paced - especially men used to "fixing" a problem that was now beyond control - while the unofficial mother hen slipped away quietly to bring back baked goods and coffee. Over and over, I saw this rhythm ripple through waiting rooms all across America until the facts on the ground were disclosed, owned, and digested. Then a whole new cycle of uncertainty moving towards trust would show up and capture us as we tentatively worked at finding our new place of balance once again.

When we went to bed last night, at about 2:00 AM, Joe Biden urged patience and trust while Donald Trump threw emotional gasoline upon our worst fears and prejudices. Both candidates late night behavior resembled their dispositions before the election: one was inclusive and calm, the other unhinged and mean-spirited. The Trump camp continued to insist - especially after their loss in Arizona - that votes were being stolen, manufactured in the dead of night, and manipulated. The President said and tweeted as much beginning at 4:00 AM and has not taken a break. The former Vice President chose to remind the nation that there is an orderly process that we've all experienced before that will make all things clear when it is complete. He added that the numbers and possibilities looked good for his side, but noted "it ain't over til it's over!"

This, too, reminds me of the surgical waiting room after the doc has spoken to the family: some become unmoored - they are addicted to drama and need all things to be about them - so their wailing dominates. Others hunker down in quiet discomfort, trying to grasp what the consequences will be short and long term. And most stand in front of the surgeon like a deer in the headlights, hearing some of what has been said, but still fundamentally confused. After he/she leaves, these precious souls turn to one another and cry, "What did she say? What did he mean? Is this good or bad?" I am of the opinion that there's no interrupting this essential dance with uncertainty and grief. It must be incarnated - and only later can we unpack what is real and what is not. Often that became my job in these settings: carefully and with tender balance restating the facts at this time, gathering more information if necessary, and then grounding everyone in more prayer and silence. This was NOT kabuki theater. Real people with profound love were feeling their hearts break open and minds split as the life or death of a mother, father, or child rested in the balance. 

And so that's where we are at 12 noon on the Wednesday after Election Day 2020. We all are grieving. Some are calling attention to themselves in unhealthy but not unexpected ways with the President being the most offensive of the lot. Others are taking a nap or a shower - and eating a little too much cold pizza - as they let reality sink in. And most of the rest of us realize we are not in control. We can practice acceptance and find a bit of serenity in this, or, we can distract ourselves or cause a ruckus and bounce around in our own chaos. We will probably try out both sides of the equation before deciding to breathe, trust, and wait. After the first wave of uncertainty washed over a family, and after a few more hours of quiet conversation and prayer, I would typically bow out. Now it was time for the family to make the new truths their own. I needed to know what I could and could not change - and honor that. And, over the next few hours and days, I also needed to regularly check in so that those in the tumult knew they were not alone.

Honest, hard-working patriots are now counting our votes. ALL of our votes. The Liar-in-Chief can huff and puff all he wants. He can pout, posture, and threaten to subvert our democracy, too. And, for a time, he may suck all the air out of the room. He may also intimidate those who know better. But adrenaline addicts run out of gas and drama junkies eventually get shut down by wiser members of the family. Currently, the facts as reported show that the Biden team holds a modest advantage in both Wisconsin and Michigan with hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots still to be counted. Team Biden is also trending in Georgia, too. With one million votes still uncounted in Pennsylvania. it seems likely this battle ground state is tipping towards the Trump camp as is North Carolina. Sadly, the more responsible members of this national family have not yet taken the boisterous bully out of the room. Currently he keeps saying he needs to take the election results to the Supreme Court. In our dysfunctional national family, the shrieking and flailing will continue without an intervention. I pray that someone - or someones - will rise to the occasion and act like the adult in the room.

When my sister Beth was dying, fundamentally because for years she had over medicated herself to the point that her kidneys shut down (to say nothing of the agonizing pain she experienced due to the neglect of her caregivers who let deep, ulcerated and open bedsores go untreated and nearly eat her alive) we had to make the call to move her into palliative care. As her doctors gathered around her bedside with the extended family and explained the slow death before us, after we concluded it was most merciful to unplug the ventilator and let hospice manage her pain as she moved into death, her confused and wounded lover asked, "Will she then live and be able to come home." I was astounded. What willful ignorance! What mind-numbing narcissism! The doctors, too looked like they had been slapped with a brick. For a moment they were speechless before adding, "We're going to step outside and let the family talk about your choices." They weren't skirting their responsibilities. Or ducking for cover. They were living the Serenity Prayer and knew we needed to accept what we could not change. With a ton of patience and prayer, we were able to say out loud over and over what was true and eventually come to a consensus to let Beth pass painlessly from this life to life eternal.

When the ventilator was turned off and new pain meds administered, we created a 24 hour visitation schedule where two members of the extended family would sit with Beth so that she would not die alone. It was agonizing - and essential. And then, from out of nowhere, four relatives from well-beyond the immediate family showed up in the middle of the night and started to insist that they knew better than the doctors. "Beth wants to live. We know" they said over and over with dramatic sincerity. Foolishly they chose to see intention in her involuntary twitches. After 36 hours of this new chaos, I had to assert my professional role (when I just wanted to be a brother) and insist that this crew be banned from the hospital and NEVER be consulted concerning Beth's hospice care. Indeed, we had to physically bar them from her private room. It was ugly and unnecessary and all too frequently one more cross to bear. They huffed off hurling insults and making a host of wild accusations and threats. They took to social media as well with vile assertions and lies adding insult to injury. In two days, Beth was finally able to go let go and go home to the Lord in peace. We were now empowered to say good-bye in a calm and quiet way. And plan her memorial service with a modicum of dignity. (Interestingly, after cutting off the drama and noise, none of the offending parties managed to make it to Beth's memorial service.) 

I recall this now, as well as my decades of interaction with grieving families in hospital rooms, because another death is taking place among us. Part hubris, part denial, part bourgeois self-interest, and part sexist,racist, and classicist, too this death is dismantling the romantic and idealistic mis-truths white Americans have savored for 400 years. A deeper truth is being revealed that holds the potential of a healthier country. But, there will be lots of sound and fury signifying nothing before the truth sets us free. It will be chaotic and mean-spirited. If you thought the violence and intimidation of 2000 was sickening, wait till Team Trump brings their neo-storm troopers to a vote recount in Wisconsin. It is going to be wretched before it starts to heal. But that is what needs to die right not. And that death gives us the possibility of forging greater and more authentic solidarity with one another. That is the part of the Serenity Prayer we're facing now: "the courage to change the things we can change and the WISDOM to know the difference."

all souls day

It is blustery in these hills today with a light mist of snow. It feels like All Souls Day. The appointed Psalm (130) speaks of patient waiting in a broken-hearted trust that all shall be made well.

Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice; let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication. If you, Lord, were to note what is done amiss, O Lord, who could stand? For there is forgiveness with you; therefore you shall be feared. I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope. My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. O Israel, wait for the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy.

My go to commentary, Robert Alter's The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary, notes the the "depths" is a reference to the depths of the sea, an "image for the realm of death." It is essential to note that the misdeeds and failings at the Psalm's start are the shared sins of the nation not those of an individual. As Alter announces: "This is a penitential psalm, focusing not on the evil of Israel's enemies... but on the wrongs Israel as done." The day before our presidential election the United States is filled with corporate sin. My short list includes: voter intimidation, lies, fear-mongering, a willful dereliction of duty causing over 230,000 deaths to the covid virus, racial injustice, slander, using public office for crass personal gain, destroying the beauty and purity of the earth for short-term profit, and undermining the nation's trust in both the media and our democratic institutions. This, of course, is not new to those who have been paying attention; but rather cause for sorrow, anxiety, and confession.

As I lay down to sleep last night I kept thinking about what one of my mentors told me about "doing" church. The Rev. Ray Swartzback often said, "If we can't figure out how to make the way of Jesus real in the city - where pain and injustice is palpable - how will we ever incarnate Christ's call in the suburbs where so much is masked?" I have held on to Swartzy's insight for decades: it has been the lens of wisdom through which I look upon my politics and spirituality. It is no surprise then when middle class supporters of Biden are threatened and roughed-up by Trump bullies. This has been going in the Black America since Reconstruction. It is simply the "chickens come home to roost" to paraphrase Malcolm X after JFK's assassination. It is a visible manifestation of violent America taking up residence inside what was once our bourgeois safety zone. Today the whole nation looks more like Philadelphia, MS where Goodman, Schwerner, and Channey were murdered while trying to register Black citizens to vote. Or the beer hall violence  of Hitler's brown shirts in Munich just 90 years ago in what was once considered the cradle of well-educated European Christendom.

Like the ancient Psalmist, we wait and hope for a hope that often feels chocked off by reality. We trust that God's steadfast kindness will heal and redeem our sins... but, right now, it feels more like the blustery cold and snow whipping around our hills. To honor the beloved souls of the faithful departed in both houses of Lumsden and De Mott, I am going to bake "pan de los muertos" this afternoon. Before my dad died, he gave up on the Republicans after being a loyal son all of his adult life: they are so corrupt and cruel he confessed. "And that son-of-a-bitch McConnell? His smug face makes my skin crawl!" In so many ways I am grateful that our parents have not had to endure the past four years. Or the current contagion. They lived through the Depression. WWII. McCarthyism. The changes of the Civil Rights Movement. The chaos of the Vietnam War. Watergate. In each of those pilgrimages, my dad said he saw the best of our nation rise to the surface as we became a more perfect union. Not a perfect one, just a bit more perfect. 

I hoped for the Lord, my being hoped, and for God's healing word I waited...

feasting with all saints and all souls in a celtic groove...

Here are today's live-streaming notes: it was a good morning and I am grateful to friends and family who stay connected with me during these strange days. At the close of the text is a link to today's video.

THE FEASTS OF ALL SAINTS/ALL SOULS DAYS: November 1, 2020
Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Gospel: Matthew 5:1-12
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

For the word of God in Scripture, for the word of God within us, for the word of God among us: Thanks be to God. 

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All around us and within us - yet it's only at times we notice 

It's real as rain, and soft as stardust – 

we know deep down what no one told us 

Can't you feel it ever closer? We breathe it in and then exhale 

We touch both sides and now eternal standing closer to the veil 

Now is just a moving image - not a ribbon, a start or end 

There's a bird, a hidden singer that calls and listens and calls again… 

Centered down and moving outward sometimes almost too sweet to bear 

There are endless ways to reach home 

just keep pm walking I'll meet you there… 

There's a blurring of the borders and I swear that I heard voices 

Every act of simple kindness calls the kingdom down and all around us… 

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That’s Carrie Newcomer’s “All Saints Day.” She’s one of my favorite singer-songwriters and captures something of the mystery of this feast day and time of year as well as anyone. November seems to be a season of transitions – a month when the veil between life, death, and life beyond death is thin and porous – an occasion for learning how to let go on so many levels. “This is the season when the dance of surrender is obvious,” writes Sr. Joyce Rupp, “nature’s presentation of what it looks like to discover large spaces of emptiness where something beautiful once lived.”

As leaves fall, a precious emptiness appears… the naked beauty of the branches can be seen, the birds’ abandoned nests become visible… through these gaps mountain ridges become visible… and at night if you stand beneath a tree and gaze upward, stars now peer through the once full branches. This is autumn’s lesson: when certain things fall away there are other things that can be seen more clearly. (The Circle of Life, p. 167)

That’s certainly what I have been feeling all week as I walked around with my

head in the mist of autumn’s mysteries. The once vivid ambers out in our wetlands are now charcoal grey and brown. Saffron, rose, and apricot leaves cover the ground like a salad of stained-glass. Wedges of songbirds and geese dot the sky on their southward trek for the winter – and it snowed here for Halloween. Existentially, a realignment comparable to nature seems to be taking place within, too:

· My body’s been exhausted but my mind’s been working overtime. My soul feels grounded in the grace of God’s love yet part of me continues to be troubled about the upcoming election.

· And in ways I can barely comprehend I’ve perceived all around and within me the sweet albeit unsettling presence of precious family and friends who have already gone home to the Lord: they’ve been in my dreams, on my FB page, in my songs – and they seem to want me to know that the road ahead of me is a LOT shorter than the one behind.

I sensed this while reading the reviews and interviews of my man Bruce Springsteen on the release of what many say is his best recording in 20 years – but may be his last, too. A double-whammy of sorrow and gratitude hit me upon word that our neighbor, Arlo Guthrie, is retiring from music-making after a series of small strokes. I’ve been going to Arlo concerts with my family for over 40 years – and now that he realizes it’s time to hang up his GONE FISHIN’ sign (an awareness I know well and fully endorse) – there’s still a brooding emptiness in the place that his beautiful songs and wit once filled.

And then last Sunday night, after sharing my thoughts with you about All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints and Souls Days, a picture popped up on Face Book of me signing with my family on the evening of my father’s memorial service six years ago to the day. It recalled the Tom Waits’ tune I played that day in his honor, “Hold On.” When I tried to play it again later that night, I was overwhelmed with a rush of big feelings and tears…

… they were all good, mind you, but they so took me by surprise as they swirled up from out of no-where that I had to call it quits with the music. That night my Dad showed up in my dreams – my two sisters and mother who have all passed on, too – as well as a few guest appearances by St. Lou Reed, Michael Daniels, and three or four others who’ve shared love with me over the years. It was uncanny – I woke up and sat with a host of competing feelings and memories in the darkness – as they encouraged me to take stock of the time that still remains. And who do you think popped up next day on my FB page? Lou Reed – whom I consider a saint despite and maybe because of the life he lived – and for the first time since his death knocked me on my ass 7 years ago I noticed that St. Lou died just one year to the day before my father’s passing.

I hadn’t connected those dots before, but I did last week – and it was one of those aha epiphanies – that helped me make a little more sense of my feelings. Now, I don’t want you to worry that I’m going to get all wonky and weird on you, ok? I simply sensed a connection that had always been there and smiled to myself knowing that coincidences are one of the ways God remains anonymous.  It was like now that I was paying more attention, I had eyes to see and ears to hear what my family, my musical mentors, and my spiritual guides needed me to know: namely, that like everyone else, my time was finite – so why not make the most of what remains this side of the veil.? Kabir, the 15th century Indian mystic, got it so right when he said: “If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive, do you think ghosts will do it after? The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten – is all fantasy. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death. But if you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire!”

Saints – and those within that great cloud of witnesses who continue to love and pray for us – come into our lives to help us become whole, holy, and fully human. Like Gertrud Mueller-Nelson wrote: “Saints were not perfect… they simply lived their fate with creativity and participated in the evolution of human consciousness and compassion so that we, too might live life more authentic-ally.” The ancient Celtic Church and their offspring in the Celtic spirituality renewal teach that nature does much the same thing as our saints by awakening us to the sacrament of the seasons.

Autumn, you see, will not stay with us forever (any more than summer or spring.) It will soon fall into the womb of winter. In that dark resting place, another dimension of depth will be revealed (if we have eyes to see) because each season’s entrance and departure is part of the gracious turning of the circle of life. Autumn will return to the land and to our lives at just the right time – for the wheel keeps turning. (Rupp, p. 169)

For the past 15 years I’ve been learning and listening to the Celtic way of wisdom and believe there are three insights germane to our celebration of All Saints/All Souls day. So, before considering a bit of today’s Scripture through their lens, I want to highlight for you the Trinitarian nature of Celtic vision, their sacramental view of the world, and their commitment to community and relational religion rather than simply an individual’s quest for private salvation.

There is broad unanimity among those following this path that wisdom, religion, politics, nature, and the spiritual journey are all rooted in what the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault calls the law of the three. We’ve simplified this by naming God “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” or “Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.” And the synergy of the holy in community is one of our most important if misunderstood charisms. But the law of the three cuts deeper than any one faith tradition and has been celebrated by our Druid Celtic ancestors as well as mystical Sufis, those honoring the practices of Zen Buddhism, and even classical Marxists!

Bourgeault believes that the Holy Trinity describes the sacred process of how the

loving Word of God becomes flesh in everyday human experience. It is the interweaving, she says, of affirmation, denial, and reconciliation. This is similar but less mechanical than the insights of Marxist theory which posits history to be the evolution of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. For us the holy three sways beyond involuntary movement, acting more like a dance that is always situationally discerned, and always aching for reconciliation rather than conflict. Fr. Richard Rohr writes that: Solutions to impasses or sticking points generally emerge by learning how to spot and mediate the third force – reconciliation – which is present in every situation but generally in a hidden and mysterious manner. By way of explanation, Rohr adds:

Consider the seed, as Jesus said: unless it falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single seed. If this seed does fall into the ground, it enters a sacred transformative process. Seed, the first or “affirming” force, meets ground, the second or “denying” force (and at that, it must be moist
ground, water being its most critical first component). But even in this encounter, nothing will happen until sunlight, the third or “reconciling” force, enters the equation. Then together the three generate a sprout, which is the actualization of the possibility latent in the seed and a whole new “field” of possibility.

Celtic Christianity is saturated with hymns and practices dedicated to incarnating the Three in One and the One in Three. We insist that God, who is love, is the embodiment of community – and all authentic community flows outward into the world to bathe it in blessings – so one Celtic affirmation from the Iona Community says: “We affirm that we are made in God’s image, befriended by Christ and empowered by the Spirit; with people everywhere we affirm God’s goodness at the heart of humanity and nature that is planted more deeply than all that is wrong; and with creation we celebrate the miracle and wonder of life, the unfolding purposes of God, and our participation in them as we live and move and have our being.”

Whether it’s the shamrock or the Celtic knots adorning the Cross that we’ve inherited from our pre-Christian spiritual mentors: Trinitarian love is foundational to Celtic spirituality. The law of the three rules. That’s first. Second is a that this spirituality is sacramental rather than purely cerebral. Our sisters and brothers in the Northumbria Community put it like this: 

To live in a sacramental way is to say nothing is secular because everything is sacred and nothing existing outside of God’s love and grace. It is the conviction that all that is ordinary is extraordinary and all that is earthy has been baptized by heaven.” Esther De Waal, an Anglican scholar in the recovery of Celtic wisdom, put it well: “The Celtic approach to God opens up a world in which nothing is too common to be exalted and nothing is so exalted that it cannot be made common.’ They believed that the presence of God infused daily life and thus transforms it, so that at any moment, any object, any job of work, can become a place for encounter with God. In everyday happenings and ordinary ways, we have prayers for getting up, lighting the fire, getting dressed, milking the cow etc. 

Much like our cousins in Judaism, the Celtic path crafted prayers covering all the quotidian mysteries of baking, cleaning, farm chores, loving making, and more. I rather like the way the poet, William Butler Yeats, playfully presents this in his poem, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.”

I met the Bishop on the road and much said he and I. 

Those breasts are flat and fallen now, those veins must soon be dry; 

Live in a heavenly mansion, not in some foul sty.' 

Fair and foul are near of kin, and fair needs foul,' I cried.

My friends are gone, but that's a truth nor grave nor bed denied, 

Learned in bodily lowliness and in the heart's pride. 

A woman can be proud and stiff when on love intent; 

But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement; 

For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.’ 

Like Leonard Cohen’s masterpiece, “Anthem,” Celtic spirituality shouts: ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there’s a crack, a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in. We see God in everything – including nature – and strive to find reverence for every iota within God’s creation. In Western civilization, Celtic spirituality is the font of eco-justice theology. Small wonder, then, that this way of wisdom is also radically relational – that’s my third insight – noting that even Celtic monasteries were all about serving the wider community by welcoming IN the stranger, including women and men inside the cloister, preserving the intellectual writings of both the mystical Muslims alongside Aristotle while creating the Book of Kells, and honoring lay as well as ordained folk within the work of worship and compassion.

Much like St. Francis some one thousand years later, the early Celtic Church insisted upon preaching the gospel everywhere but only using words when necessary. It was a way of being holy grounded in reality. It’s not that Celtic spirituality was anti-intellectual; rather they rejected the Western church’s obsession with gnosis – pure knowledge as arrogant elitism - and favor ed acsesis – the practice of discovering holiness in community. In relationships they crafted a spirituality that was more “do as I do” than the “do as I say” style of the priesthood. The once Irish priest become lay poet and mentor, the late John O’Donohue, spoke of this path as anam cara – soul friend – a wise, equal partner on a shared pilgrimage rather than a spiritual director as elite guide. I think he captures this brilliantly in his poem: “Courage.”

When the light around you lessens and your thoughts darken until

Your body feels fear turn cold as a stone inside, 

When you find yourself bereft of any belief in yourself

And all you unknowingly leaned on has fallen, 

When one voice commands your whole heart,

And it is raven dark, 

Steady yourself and see that it is your own thinking

that darkens your world. 

Search and you will find a diamond-thought of light, 

Know that you are not alone, and that this darkness has purpose;

Gradually it will school your eyes to find the one gift your life requires

Hidden within this night-corner. 

Invoke the learning of every suffering you have suffered. 

Close your eyes. Gather all the kindling about your heart

To create one spark that is all you need to nourish the flame

That will cleanse the dark of its weight of festered fear. 

A new confidence will come alive to urge you towards higher ground

Where your imagination will learn to engage difficulty as its most rewarding threshold 

Three practices – three spiritual commitments – three ways for moving within the world that helps us discern truth, direction, meaning, and purpose in real life: the law of the three, sacramentality, and relational religion. More than many, I have found those practicing Celtic spirituality to grasp more clearly what Jesus was getting at in the Sermon on the Mount – and especially the Beatitudes which are the appointed texts today for All Saints Day – than many others. Those far wiser than I have written that over time Christian theologians have named 36 discrete interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount.

I won’t even try to articulate them because some are so obscure as to be

offensive; while others are so dumbed-down as to be scandalous. At some level, we know these words of Jesus are the quintessence of his wisdom way even when we’re perplexed. So, let me offer two clues that might make sense in your pursuit of compassion and inner peace this week that have been shaped by the Celtic insights I spoke of earlier.

The first has to do with the word blessed: blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek and those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Blessed is how the Greek makarios has been translated into English. And this isn’t wrong, just too small. Jesus is describing a way of wisdom, the practice of nourishing serenity within and compasssion without – so a better rendering might say: “How happy you would be if…” IF you were poor in spirit, IF you were meek, and all the rest. We might re-phrase this as: how at peace you would be “if you put your trust in God rather than in possessions or symbols of status or security.” (Fr. Thomas Keating)

This insight isn’t only about personal feelings – although that is part of a blessing – nor is it just about DOING something to control our outer environment. Rather, this is about experiencing bless-ing by living into God’s presence is in all of life – including those hard things and places that hurt us. Think political chaos. Poverty. Race and gender violence. In each of the beatitudes Jesus is saying: God’s peace will elude you so long as you obsess over what is missing outside of you. Fr. Thomas Keating writes: “The experience of being at peace in the face of destitution, poverty, and affliction is the fruit of accepting what is. By accepting reality (like the Celts) we are free of our predetermined demands of what should be ours. This isn’t passive, it is receptive, finding out where God is already bringing presence and comfort to us in what is real.”

I might sound like a broken record, but this is precisely what the Serenity Prayer promises: peace in what cannot be changed, courage in what must be challenged, and the wisdom to know one from the other. The abiding promise of Christ’s blessing is: consider “how happy and at rest you would be if you did not want to control every situation, other people or even your own life – if you possessed the freedom to accept insults and injustice without being blown away” or devastated.” (Keating, Invitation to Love, p.106) This is the first clue I have about the Sermon on the Mount.

And the second is this: the incarnational, sacramental way to open our hearts to this blessing is acceptance: coming to terms with real people and circumstances in community without needing to change them. Traditionally, the path to making peace with reality involves “upsetting our habits of eating, sleeping, being caressed, and having our bodily needs promptly serviced.” That is, when we practice interrupting our habitual way of living, we discover that we can find equanimity even in hardship. That’s why there are spiritual vigils as well as fasting and simplifying our lifestyle. It is a way to practice letting go – relinquishing our needs and addictions – for a short time so that we realize it can be done. Inner rest IS possible. It takes practice and time. But when the dance of surrender is shared incrementally, we see that just as autumn and winter move into spring, so too can hardship lead us into peace.

Additionally, people of faith usually practice giving up trying to control others in… community. Being with those who sometimes drive us crazy – or confound, unsettle, or simply ask us to pay attention – is where we learn to accept and even love others just as they are. It may only be for two minutes at a time, but the focus is a love that replaces fear or resentment. Back when I was doing training at the Hazelden Clinic in MN, one of the instructors said: “If you come from alcoholic parents (like I did) they always want to control you – and when you are around them you’ll likely slip back into all the unhealthy ways of being you learned as a child. So, it is up to you to pull the plug on the disease by only staying with them for as long as there is love. If that means getting up and leaving after just five minutes – that’s what you must do.” When my mom and dad were alive that meant two things that I slowly made a difference: one was we couldn’t stay in the same house with them – we had to make other arrangements during visits for safety and sanity – and the other was we had to get back on the road no later than 48 hours after showing up. Anything more became toxic.

And it made all the difference in the world. I could be loving and at peace with them – eventually for up to 36 hours at a pop – and they learned how to back off just a little, too. Not a lot. They were still their frustrating, beautiful, broken and loving selves when they died. But it was enough for a little love to grow in a a healthy way for us all – and that was wonderful. Unlike the desert fathers and mothers of the fourth century the early Celtic monasteries made a point of going out beyond the walls of the cloister to feed the hungry, visit the lonely, care for the sick, and befriend those in prison. They gave shape and form to what we now call the corporeal and spiritual works of mercy.

Today, in our essential solitude, it is much more complicated to practice letting go

in community, right? Talk about the upside-down practices of Christ’s wisdom! So, we must find new ways – novel and creative ways – to connect with others. This is one forum – there are many others, too. I have found it essential nearly every week to stay connected with my friends at L’Arche Ottawa. Every Friday I am committed to being part of our Zoom prayers and bring some songs to the community – and sometimes a homily – because simply connected helps me practice letting go. It reminds what’s really important and what is just my own junk! Same with joining the Iona Community many days for morning prayer.

Saints are formed over time by practicing letting go and sharing our gifts in community with love. God is saying this to us in nature right now as she does the dance of surrender. If you don’t have another community to connect with let me suggest that you join with me for a Celtic Advent pilgrimage of 40 days. Before the 7th century when Rome brought the Celtic Church under strict control, their Advent lasted for 40 days. It mirrored Lent. So, I am going to try to live into a simple Advent discipline starting on November 15th and running through Epiphany on January 6th. It will be a time of shared prayer, candle lighting and commitment to hold one another prayerfully in God’s love. If you want to explore this, I invite you to join me and I will share some written resources with you, ok?

Now just three days before the most important election in our time – in the midst of this damnable contagion that is claimed 100,000 new people on Friday of last week alone and as our sisters and brothers in the Black Lives Matter movement stand fast against our systematic violence against black and brown men, women and children – holding one another in prayer, lighting candles and focusing on Advent may not seem like enough. In a time like our own, why the hell would I suggest such a thing? Well, one of our saints, author C.S. Lewis put it like this in a sermon he gave to the Oxford University community at the start of WWII. In the fall of 1939, in the chapel of St. Mary the Virgin, Lewis addressed the question of why bother with academic study, the arts, and even prayer during a war? When human life is SO vulnerable – and time is so precious – why explore the higher goods of the soul given the fierce urgency of NOW? Here’s how St. Clive Staples Lewis put it then – and I wonder if you will find that it rings as true to you as it does to me right now:

I think it is important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates absolutely no permanent human situation; it simply exaggerates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to live under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If we had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until we were secure, the search would never have begun.

You and I have lived through a moment in culture when ALL things of beauty, spirituality, and grace have been written out of our public budgets as incidental and unnecessary. So too with our encounters with silence: there is hardly a place free from some type of noise, commercial, or mood music. Even pump-it-yourself gas stations and taxi cabs now have TV screens blasting tidbits of pop culture minutia at us. Noise, business bottom lines, and busyness became our new normal – along with gun violence and crimes against women – to which pandemic exhaustion must now be added to the mix. St. Clive continues saying:

We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural (or spiritual) activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. For humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. So, what is exaggerated now? Our perception of the importance of death. War changes our perspective by bringing what is potentially very far from us potentially very close to us; so, does a pandemic. But the relative proximity of a thing does not radically change its nature. War and disease do not change whether we are going to die; they only change when we might die.

This moment in time, in all its challenge and complexity, gives us eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to feel what is ULTIMATELY true: we are nearly always just moments away from death. Our saints knew this and found ways to both cherish life and share consolation with others so that within the brokenness there was also blessing. Listening to them, learning from them opens us to communion with all in that great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us in ways that fortify love for one another in the real world.

St. Brigid of Kildare, the OTHER patron saint of Ireland used to put it like this: Let me seek you, Christ Jesus, for you show us how to bring harmony out of conflict, light to the darkness, and hope to the downcast. Your mantle of peace can calm those who are trouble and lead us to the path of serenity in our hearts and in our world.

In whatever time remains, in whatever way I can, that is where I want to give myself, my energy, my time, trust, resources, and love. Perhaps this resonates with you, too. And perhaps we might sojourn together… let’s pray in preparation for our time of Eucharist…

CHECK IT OUT  @ https://www.facebook.com/913217865701531/videos/362966641453706

a wee Celtic trifecta: All Hallows Eve, All Saints and All Souls Days

On All Hallows Eve - the ancient Samhain or Sauin on the Isle of Man - is unfolding well in our wee Berkshire hills. We walked in the late autumn sun after being greeted by frost on the pumpkins. I edited my reflections and practiced Carrie Newcomer's "All Saints Day" for tomorrow, Face-Timed with the little ones in their cat-wing costumes (and mama attired as Ursula Le Guin no less!), the fairy lights are dressing the bodhran and Celtic harp in the front room. And now my shepherd's pie is nearing readiness for the oven. Di is preparing soul cakes and Altan is blasting on the sound system. 

                Thig Oidhche Shamhna thig agus cuir fàilte oirnn

                      (Come, Halloween, come and greet us!) 

We had our first wee trick-or-treater just a moment ago. Given the lack of side walks in our neighborhood and the relatively old inhabitants, it is rare for little ones to join us. And given the pandemic I was certain no one would come round. But a true little princess and her mom, both appropriately social distances as good citizens of the Commonwealth, and well-masked, too received our mandarin oranges with grace and a big THANK YOU!

Earlier today I read a post by one of the new monastics re: Halloween and All Hallows Eve. It wasn't particularly deep and the author's history could use some tweaking, but his point was well-made: this ancient ritual gives us all a chance to playfully consider our own deaths, honor the deaths of those who have gone before us, and learn a measure of depth from measuring whatever time remains. As expected, however, a somewhat self-righteous evangelical started carping about the dark, evil and malicious pagan roots of this trifecta. It brought to mind a novel by one of Israel's most popular writers about an ultra conservative Talmudist who, as a widower, falls in love with a young woman convert to the faith. The novel highlights all the cultural bigotry and prejudice alive in Boro Park, Brooklyn despite the tradition's commitment to radical hospitality. As the faithful wrestled with this love, one wise old woman taught the community that the father of the tribe, Abram, came from pagan parents. Same, too for Moishe's in-laws, mother, and wife. So often we know the words of part of our various traditions but not its soul. With beheadings in France, religious white supremacists in the US, violent Buddhist nationalists in India it is clear that no one religious group holds a monopoly on cruelty, stupidity, or vicious violence towards outsiders.

A wiser and more historically appropriate approach to our various spiritual pre-histories is gratitude and critique/correction when needed. St. Paul noted in the opening of his letter to the small church in Rome: "What can be known about God is plain, because God has shown it to us. Ever since the creation of the world God's eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things God has made." My Celtic relatives who came to embrace the way of Jesus used to say that "creation is God's first word" and that everything God ever wanted us to know has been revealed in nature." So, while hardly a Druid, I bask in my heritage tonight and give thanks to the way my kin deepened it as the centuries have passed. There will be time for making amends and doing deep justice, too but tonight is the feast!

living into a spiritual family reunion (of sorts)...

Shortly before heading to bed last night, an unexpected FB post from six years ago popped up on my IPhone: a variety of black and white photos from my late father's memorial service were on view along with comments from my siblings and nephews. It was a bittersweet moment. My father was a complicated, broken man with a big heart, a sharp intellect, more than his share of demons along with an abiding shame that was only partially resolved when he died. I loved him deeply. Like many first-born sons, we had our share of conflicts - some became physical - and they always turned cruel whenever fueled by alcohol. Paradoxically, we shared a robust respect for one another, too on our six decade roller coaster relationship.

Small wonder I awoke at 2:00 AM awash in feelings and memories. As is often true for me in these moments, I try to breathe into them. Feel them thoroughly. And, in time, bathe them in a quiet prayer. Contemplating his death took me on a journey through other significant deaths: my beloved Aunt Donna, my sisters Linda and Beth, my mother as well as a few cherished congregants including Dolores Brown, Kathy Arzt, Michael Daniels, and Don Wooton. I felt a churning anxiety in my chest concerning the enormity of eternity. And then the spiritual fog burned away as I became aware that this was just what I had spoken about in my Sunday reflection: the visitation of my loved ones in my own intimate All Souls Day. 

The Celts believed that this time of year was a "thin place" -  a porous and alive season that encouraged visitations from beyond our realm - a unique intimacy between the living and the dead. Before heading to bed last night, I sang the song I offered at my father's memorial service - and wept again. Driving down to Maryland in a mean storm, Tom Waits' "Hold On" came over the radio, and I felt that it might be the right one for Big Jim's farewell. After his passing, that same feeling washed over me again so I used it in the context of the love he shared for my mother. I now know that Waits' song massaged my psyche in ways I cannot explain except to say I was somehow now ready for another encounter with my departed ancestors.

As I visited with them in my heart last night, sensing the vastness of their current journey and the shortness of my own, I prayed that they were accompanied by God's love. And, without hesitation, asked that when my time to go comes, as it surely will, that I might journey in that love with them. Then, without any residual anxiety, I quietly returned to sleep. Here are my live-streaming notes from Sunday's reflection as well as the FB recording.

REFLECTION: ALL HALLOW’S EVE, ALL SAINTS DAY, ALL SOULS DAY, AND DAY OF THE DEAD

Psalm 148
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, all the angels; praise the Lord, all the hosts!
Praise the Lord, sun and moon; praise the Lord, all you shining stars!
Praise the Lord from the earth, you monsters of the seas and all deeps,
Fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling God’s commands!
Mountains and hills, fruit trees and cedars, wild animals and cattle,
Creeping things and flying birds: let ALL creation praise the Lord!

Matthew 22: 34-40
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered and one of them, a lawyer, asked a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ Jesus replied, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’

I am a Johnny come lately to some of the smaller observances of my Christian

tradition. Having been raised in staid, proper, and resolutely Protestant Pilgrim New England, my baptism into the balanced beauty of feasting and fasting – celebrations and silences emanating from the ebb and flow of God’s first word in nature – occurred relatively late in life. It has been said that when the student is ready, the Buddha will appear – and Gertrud Mueller-Nelson showed up as a bodhisattva for me in her masterwork: To Dance with God: a Guide to Family Ritual and Community Celebra-tion. Other wisdom-keepers like Kathleen Norris, Fr. Richard Rohr, Sr. Joan Chittister, and the Rev. Frederick Buechner met me along the way, too. But it began with the words of wisdom Dr. Mueller-Nelson crafted in To Dance with God:

We mark the major moments in our human existence with a rite or a ceremony. Sometimes even the small events in our lives need the recognition of a celebration or the consciousness that a ritual brings… in this we draw a circle around that place and that event so that we can be more fully awake to the magnitude of the moment…(throughout time we often remember, celebrate, and sanctify our lives) in conjunction with the moon and sun cycles or simultaneous to the changing seasons in nature. Each day we experience a little birth, life, death, and rebirth. Every day gives us the opportunity to engage the routine rituals – rising and dressing, eating and leaving, relating and working, recreating and sleeping – with greater care and awareness. (To Dance with God, pp. 46/48)

Well after my years in seminary I learned to name this sacramental spirituality, the awareness and practice of seeing the eagle within the egg, a deeper trust that God reveals the sacred inside the commonplace. It’s what Chittister calls a wisdom distilled from the daily: the infusion of the extraordinary into the ordinary, the living, spiritual presence of Christ encountered in bread and wine, depth and integrity at the core of creation even as culture is riddled with the superficial and tinny. What Dr. Mueller-Nelson wrote about Advent continues to shape my soul. bringing solace and strength to my faith: We are invited, she writes, to become vulnerable about our longing and open about our hope. Here we learn to practice a sacred waiting – the blessings of the feminine in our overly masculine culture – in a manner much like a spiritual pregnancy: 

… for waiting will always be with us. Advent invites us to underscore and understand with a new patience that very feminine state of being: waiting. Our masculine world wants to blast away waiting from our lives. Instant gratification has become our constitutional right and delay an aberration. We equate waiting with wasting. So, we build Concorde airplanes, drink instant coffee, roll out green plastic and call it turf, and reach for the phone before we reach for the pen. The more life asks us to wait, the more we anxiously hurry… But waiting mysteriously reveals, as in pregnancy, that nothing of value comes into being without a period of quiet incubation: not a healthy baby, to 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, gestating are the feminine processes of becoming and they are the symbolic states of being which being in a life of value. (p. 62)

Trusting this insight was the key that opened the door to a host of additional wisdom-keepers – particularly sages from the Celtic realm – who encouraged cherishing equanimity, revering the rhythm of the sun and moon, the seasons and the sacred sense of balance they honor, so that spirituality became a passionate, earthy dance of humility, devotion, and creative.  Joy Mead, from the Community of Iona in Scotland, puts it like this in a prayer/poem she calls Bread Time: 

Because bread won’t be hurried we have to learn to let be, to do nothing, to be patient, to wait for the proving. Because bread won’t be hurried and is a life and death process, we find out in its making that time is not a line, but a cycle of ends and beginnings, rhythms and seasons, growth and death, celebration and mourning, eating and fasting, because bread won’t be hurried. Remember: in a pyramid in Egypt a few grains of wheat lay surrounded by death – dormant for thousands of years. They waited quietly until the time was right, until the life impulse was awakened by the good earth, warmed by the sun and ready to dance in the bread of tomorrow.

This sacred rhythm of creative waiting infused with feasting and fasting, this dance of life driven by sound and silence, is how the three feasts of next week with roots in Celtic Christianity ask to be engaged because they have largely been trivialized and neglected in our culture.  All Hallows Eve, All Saints and All Souls Days are rich with blessings. They animate our love of God and embolden our kinship with all of our neighbors – two legged and four, flora and fauna, air, soil, fire and water – so that we might rest into the unforced rhythms of grace even in this damnable and escalating pandemic. 

David Adam, vicar of the holy island Lindisfarne, has observed that one of the many reasons why our politics and economic priorities have become ugly, vapid, and increaseingly cruel has something to do with contemporary culture’s disconnect from the sacred rhythms the One who is Holy breathed into creation in the beginning. Everyday there is “betrayal, rejection, crucifixion, and death woven into our streets, homes, and jobs” he writes, “yet the redeeming love and salvation of God is still at work in the world. I believe in the resurrection of the body,” he adds, “for it is an on-going fact” that I witness every day in the “mysterious, joyful, sorrowful, glorious” ebb and flow of real-life.

To have eyes to see, however, takes practice – something modern folk have forsaken and forgotten. In the middle of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, T.S. Eliot articulated a truth in his poem, “The Rock,” that has only been magnified over the years.

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven, the Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars, O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying: The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, all our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death and no nearer to GOD? Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries bring us farther from GOD
and nearer to the Dust.

Without familiarity with the way of wisdom, without a sacred vocabulary and a spiritually awakened imagination that we practice regularly, we are indeed tossed to and fro by ideology, fear, grief, and exhaustion like St. Paul writes in Ephesians 4: “We must no longer be as little children, beloved, the apostle says, blown about by ever wind of doctrine, human trickery and their deceitful scheming… no we must ripen and mature as Christ himself did by listening and practicing grace-filled love.”

The soul of Celtic spirituality in general, and the heart of next week’s three feast days, offer an alternative to the dust and chaos that reclaims a sacred vocabulary and renews our awareness of creation’s salvific rhythm. You see, the ancient Celtic Church did not cast off as inferior or heretical the numinous insights of their Druid ancestors. Patrick, Brigid, Columba, Deirdre and all the rest embraced them, carrying them into the emerging cadence of their sacramental spirituality. As the days grew darker in the North Country, the old souls sensed that the veil between heaven and earth – the living and dead – was becoming more porous. Christopher Hill writes in his wise, Holidays and Holy Nights, that: “In traditional cultures, the important turning points of the year – solstices and equinoxes, or the changes of the pastoral seasons when the heard or flock was let out into summer pasture and the brought down for the winter – were understood to stand outside of time.”

In the more sensuous awareness of time that people had in the absence of precise measuring systems, it was apparent that at these moments, one ‘time’ had ended and another time would start again in the new season. But between the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next was a gap. At these points, it was believed, the world reverted to the way it was before time began – in the beginning, at the birth of creation, a dreamtime as the Australian aborigines say. Our world became continuous with the timeless world and all the beings and powers, things seen and unseen, inhabitants of the world, before, above, and outside of time – gods, angels, ancestors, and spirits – became present… This human sense of time is so deep and apparently universal that it has found its way into almost every religious tradition – including our own. And is the root of most holy days. This sacred sense of time and timelessness can break through at any moment but is celebrated in the sacraments of our holy days. (pp. 50-51)

… so that we can practice reclaiming eyes to see and ears to hear. Next week it’s going to get really, really dark in these parts as we give up the warm evening sun for the refracted, diminishing glow of Eastern Standard Time. I don’t recall any significant differences in the way light looked when we lived in Arizona or California, but here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts it becomes murky and dense by 4 o’clock in the afternoon. So, even without this modern manipulation of time, this darkness that creeps into being at this time of year is one of the reasons our pre-Christian Celtic kin created the festival of Samhain.

It marks the birth of winter as most of the leaves on our trees have fallen, frosts begins to appear, the fields lay fallow and “autumn looks like nature’s end.” The old way insisted that as one season closed, it must be acknowledged with a sign of finality so that our souls might open to receiving new possibilities. “With the death of summer and fall, the dormancy of nature” readies us for the inwardness of winter.” (Mueller-Nelson, p. 222) In the way of wisdom ritualized in sacramental spirituality, the “mystery of apparent death, finalities and rest before new life returns” is rehearsed liturgically so that we might practice recognizing the holy as it arrives beyond our control in real life.

First there is All Hallows Eve – Halloween for us – the Holy Night that prepares us

for Holi-Day of All Saints and then All Souls day. October 31st was Samhain, the celebration of the year’s death in anticipation of a new year’s birth. Just like the creation story in Genesis, there is evening and there is day with darkness setting the stage for the cycle of illumination still to come. Christianity chose to appropriate the energy of this Celtic ritual – borrowing the colors, symbols, and feelings of the season – but adding new insights, too. No one is fully clear how the pagan Celts practiced Samhain, but “the persistence of some things now offers us clues: bonfires as well as fortune-telling took place, feasting and dancing was robust, as was guising or mumming (going to one another’s dwellings in a variety of costumes with songs and ritualized begging.” (Hill, p. 53) It’s likely the bonfires included some type of sacrifice on this night – probably human and/or animals deemed evil – before these rituals became symbolic. Fear of ghosts and wicked curses filled the darkness “as demons went wild playing tricks on the innocent and needing to be placated with treats and sweet food.” Gertrud Mueller-Nelson adds:

What is unseen and unknown is often rendered evil or dangerous.” As the light vanished at the close of the year it was believed that the night became saturated with the spirits of the departed dead. Some of those spirits were troublesome, but others were beloved and were “invited to return to their old homes to sit by the fireside, be warmed and fed, and respected once more in the land of the living. (Mueller-Nelson, p. 223)

The Celtic Church before the 4th century transfigured this fire festival maintaining many of its outward rituals but filling them with sanctified meaning: sweet foods and candles were now taken to the graves of the departed where stories and memories were shared and passed down from one generation to the next as the living communed with the dead. Soul cakes were baked and passed out to children – and beggars, too - as some in the community playfully dressed as witches, ghosts, and goblins to honor the fears of the past. And the whole community sometimes gathered to carve pumpkins and gourds and dunk for apples. These evening festivals set the stage of two holy DAYS of remembering: All Saints Day was a reflection on those from within the tradition who brought new life to the world, while All Souls Day was a chance each year to honor our own loved ones who are now part of that great cloud of witnesses.

I have found that the way Gertrud Mueller-Nelson AND Frederick Buechner talk about All Saints Day helpful: “All Saints Day is the celebration of those who have contributed successfully to the creation of God’s community in history. The saints were not perfect, but they were whole, holy, and very human. They lived their fate with creativity and participated in the evolution of human consciousness” and compassion. Frederick Buechner amplifies this insight writing: 

In God’s holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief – and these handkerchiefs are called saints. Many people think of saints as plaster statues, men and women of such paralyzing virtue that they never thought a nasty thought or did an evil deed their whole lives long. As far as I know, real saints never even come close to characterizing themselves that way. On the contrary, no less a saint than Saint Paul wrote to Timothy, ""I am foremost among sinners"" and Jesus himself prayed God to forgive him his trespasses. When the rich young man addressed him as ""good Teacher,"" answered, ""No one is good but God alone.” In other words, the feet of saints are as much of clay as everybody else's, and their sainthood consists less of what they have done than of what God has for some reason chosen to do through them. When you consider that Saint Mary Magdalene was possessed by seven devils, that Saint Augustine prayed, ""Give me chastity and continence, just not now,"" that Saint Francis started out as a high-living young dude in downtown Assisi, and that Saint Simeon Stylites spent years on top of a sixty-foot pillar, you figure that maybe there's nobody God can't use as a means of grace, including even ourselves. The Holy Spirit has been called ""the Lord and giver of life"" and, drawing their power from that source, saints are essentially life-givers. To be with them is to become more alive.

Returning thanks to God for those who have brought YOU more life is at the heart of this feast day. I don’t believe they have to be Christians – or famous – or necessarily dead. But that’s my generous orthodoxy speaking. Going backwards in time to discern and give thanks to those who within my experience have been life-givers and wisdom-keeper for me has been soul food. Among this pantheon are St. Mary Magdalene, St. Francis and Clare, St. Ray Swartzback, St. MLK and St. Rumi. Each have illuminated my heart with love and tenderness. The once Irish priest turned secular saint, the late John O’Donohue, wrote of the blessings we have received from our saints like this:

I imagine the eyes of Jesus were harvest brown,
The light of their gazing suffused with the seasons:
The shadow of winter, the mind of spring, the blues of summer and the amber of harvest.
A gaze that is perfect sister to the kindness in his beautiful hands.
The eyes of Jesus gaze on us, stirring in the heart’s clay
The confidence of seasons that never lose their way to harvest.
(Those who have gazed upon us with this blessing have shared)
The artistry of emptiness that knows to slow the hunger
Of outside things until they weave into the twilight of the heart
A gaze of all that is still future…

And then, after a night of darkness and fire – songs, silence and mystery – and a day given to recalling in gratitude the saints in our days – comes All Souls Day when we remember those in our families who are among the dearly departed and now a part of that great cloud of witnesses. We didn’t do much with All Souls Day when I was young and it has taken me some time to learn why it is holy. But what I grasp now is simple: it is a time to be humbled by the folk who have birthed and shaped us and are now gone. Some were wonderful. Others… not so much. All were human – and most, to paraphrase Brené Brown did their best with what they were given. I no longer want to conflate All Saints with All Souls as that diminishes their unique wisdom. Rather, why not give over two full days to consider those who brought us to life and gave us new life even as we grieve and honor their passing?

Last year at this time I made a small family altar using pictures and poems of those who have gone before me: my parents, grand-parents, sisters, friends, colleagues, mentors and congregants who have touched my life. It was sobering. And sad. Some were those I cherished. Some hurt me deeply. Both were true. Doing this also helped me remember some of the stories long forgotten. How my people hailed from Scotland and Ireland: on the 25th anniversary of my ordination, we visited the wee town of Lumsden outside of Aberdeen, Scotland. Remembering that trip helped me recall that among my kin here and there were loving servants and mean-spirited scoundrels. There were patriots and traitors, probable slave owners as well as sea captains, factory workers, scholars, clergy and cooks, mechanics, business executives along with drug addicts, alcoholics and friends of Bill.

My family, much like yours I imagine, were and are a motley crew: returning thanks for them all has become a simple way of nourishing a bit of inner humility. And one more thing, All Souls Day put me in touch with some incredible stories about ordinary people who have lived into the blessings of God and shared them even while surrounded by the worst human behavior. Richard Rohr reminds us that a great deal has happened among us since the beginning days of the pandemic – and there is much more to come.

Yet the fundamental reality of humanity’s interconnectedness remains as true now as it has been at every moment in our history. Pope Francis said in his recent encyclical All Brothers and Sisters: If everything is connected, it is hard to imagine that this global disaster is unrelated to our way of approaching reality, our claim to be absolute masters of our own lives and of all that exists. Humanity, you are all One. You are one beloved community and you are one global sickness. You are all contagious—and always have been, unconsciously infecting and yet able to also bless one another. There are no higher and lower in this world. There is no smart or stupid; no totally right or totally wrong. The only meaningful division now is between those who serve and those who allow themselves to be served. All the rest is temporary posturing.

Many to whom you look for power and leadership have shown themselves to have empty hands, minds, and hearts. We are bereft of all satisfying explanations, all ledgers of deserving and undeserving. There are no perfect answers or absolute heroes. We must all wear a mask to protect the other from “me.” So don’t play the victim! Victimhood is always a waste of time—God’s time and yours. Instead, try to learn the important lessons. We are all in the same elementary school now. Here, we must learn to stand in two different places and to change places often. The served must also be the servants, and the servants must also be the served. Just stay in the eternal circle of the Suffering and the Servants. Christians call this the Body of Christ. We are not the first or the last generation that gets to suffer and to serve on this earth. 

Next Saturday is All Hallows Eve – next Sunday and Monday All Saints and Souls days – in simple but transformative ways each of these little feasts invite us to practice a humility that has a sense of humor and holiness. I am looking forward to this practice and invite you join with me if you can. Let’s take a moment of silence and then be prayerful. (go to the video here:

https://www.facebook.com/913217865701531/videos/709766396306989)

who knows where the time goes...

                             ... six weeks in the wetlands!

       

       

                                   

           

          

getting lost is another way to be found...

One of the inward insights I have gleaned over the past year of repairing our deck, rebuilding stairs, constructing raised bed terraces for our garden, building steps, and painting a great deal inside and outside our home is that I am a kinesthetic learner with an aesthetic disposition. In Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Inventory - a useful summary of the various ways different people learn best - I am off the charts when it comes to Musical as well as Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence. I knew the former as I hear answers, questions, and even solutions to so much in life in terms of songs, but the later is new to me. (O Lord, do i LOVE this song!)          

I knew I had an eye for beauty in my worship and home settings. It was equally clear that I am drawn to the clean lines of Zen/Mission interiors as well as the bold blocks of balanced color of Rothko, Mondrian and a host of French expressionists and impressionists. What I did not understand is that I learn best by doing. Trial and error and beginner's mind come natural to me. Di tells me this is an affinity for what business jargon calls "lateral decisions." Only after I've given a project a shot or two am I interested in reading what others have learned. Out of the box resolutions pop up first. And the lessons that stay with me for the long haul begin with trying to fix something, taking it apart when it doesn't work, and trying again. And again. And again to make it work. I rather like the way Rumi puts it the interpretation Coleman Barks shares in "The Guest House."

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Today, after researching and writing about the early celebrations of All Hallow's Eve and All Saints and All Souls Days, I spent four hours up on a ladder painting shutters. I am uncertain of heights and it takes me a while to get my bearings. To be sure, for that first shutter I had a headache and I was sure I was going to puke. But after a glass of water, I kept at it - and incrementally learned how to keep my balance 17' off the ground. I knew that if I left the higher shutters brown while all the others were sky blue, I would have an aesthetic collapse. It would be so ugly and unbalanced. So, I tried. And learned how to make it work as I went along. Along the way I saw that the window sills need to be repainted, too. I will get to that after more writing about the lesser feasts born of ancient Celtic wisdom.

Funny how getting older can resolve some of the questions and doubts of my youth - mostly by pushing through fear with beginner's mind.