Sitting by the river with a strong breeze moving the water and blowing against one side of my face while the sun warms the other.
I woke up in a warm house, while it was still dark and made coffee. Made a to-go breakfast for my older daughter for her drive to work. I laughed with my younger daughter taking her to school.
Now I am sitting in the sun and the wind by the water praying, reading, writing, listening, smiling.
Behind me is a cemetery where my grandparents, family members, and friends rest peacefully. Memories and love dance between us and connect us.
The books in front of me are titled “Pilgrim” and “Gold.”
Talking to God, Rumi writes:
“Today you arrived beaming with laughter– that swinging key that unlocks prison doors.
You are hope’s beating heart. You are a doorway to the sun. You are the one I seek and the one who seeks me. Beginning and end.
You greet need with generous hands. You flood us with spirit,
ringing from the heart, lifting thought.”
Reading this, he and I say it together. I like to think God smiles in the sunlight.
Across the cove the sun and the wind dress a weeping willow tree. Geese float tucked away from the tide.
When I am fully here, in this moment, with a full heart and an open mind, and time alone with God, what more can I ask for? I am not alone.
Thank you for this view. Thank you for this day. Thank you for this life. Thank you for your love.
Amen.
* My practice/devotion for Lent this year is to write a “proem” (prayer-poem-prose) in the spirit of Brian Doyle each day of the season. I will share some of them.This is day #3.
Creator God, thank you for things that grow and change and bloom in their own time.
Thank you for patience so that we can wait with hope on your timing.
Thank you for giving us grateful hearts so that we can appreciate the impermanence, the fleeting moments–nothing remains in bloom and that makes each opening, each unfolding, each blossom special.
Thank you for making us able to grow, able to change, able to seek you, to seek beauty. Thank you for making us new creations in response to the shining of your light, your truth.
God, we thank you for helping us let go when it is time. Lord, I am not always good at this. Letting go hurts. I want to hold on to the blossoms, hold on to the people, hold on to the perfect moments–I want to stay in those wonderful experiences, found and lost in time, captured and forgotten in memory. Like Peter, I want to build dwellings to stay right there.
All around us, you show us that’s not how it works. You show us in your creation that everything has its time, its season. You show us the petals, the leaves dropping off, falling to the ground, coming apart, and going back into the dirt, back to dust.
“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
From dust to dust. From dust to seed. From seed to sprout. From sprout to bud. From bud to flower.
Thank you for the dust we are and the blossoms we can become.
Thank you for your love that helps us grow and bloom.
Thank you for things that grow and change and bloom in their own time.
In your time.
Thank you.
* My practice/devotion for Lent this year is to write a “proem” (prayer-poem-prose) in the spirit of Brian Doyle each day of the season. I will share some of them. This quick prayer on Ash Wednesday is the first.
Life is a pendulum swinging between remembering and forgetting. Often I find myself on the forgetting end of the swing.
The poet Rita Dove described something that goes on in my mind in her poem “Lucille, Post-Operative Years”–
Most often she couldn’t think–which is to say she thought of everything, and at once– …
Then, sudden as a wince, she couldn’t remember a thing. …
What bothered her: the gaps between.
(Those are connected excerpts from three different stanzas)
I can have what feels like so much spinning around in my head that I can’t think of the name of the person standing in front of me, who I’ve known for years and I can tell you everything about them, but their name is missing. Or I can be talking along towards a point and have it fly out of my head and leave me looking for a direction to catch up to it.
Meanwhile I have memories from the first 20 years of my life that are crystal clear and in context like they just happened. Oh, but the gaps in between. The mind is a marvelous thing, particularly when it cooperates or shows us things we had forgotten we knew.
Sometimes I wonder if our collective memory works like that as well. There are things we forget that are critical to who we are or who we are called to be.
That’s where my mind has wandered with this weekend’s lectionary Gospel reading, Matthew 5:13-20 (quoting 13-16, “Salt and Light”)
“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid.
No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.
In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”
What if we forgot what it is to be salt and light? What if we lost what that means? Maybe being light in the darkness makes sense, but what is it to be salt?
I am going to stick with Debie Thomas, who I have quoted a good bit lately from her book “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories.” She says when Jesus calls his listeners ‘salt of the earth’ he is saying something profound that is easy for our to miss in our time:
“First of all, he is telling us who we are. We are salt. We are not ‘supposed to be’ salt, or ‘encouraged to become’ salt, or promised that ‘if we become’ salt, God will love us more. The language Jesus uses is 100 percent descriptive. It’s a statement of our identity. We are the salt of the earth. We are that which enhances or embitters, soothes or irritates, melts or stings, preserves or ruins. For better or worse, we are the salt of the earth, and what we do with our saltiness matters.“
Salt by itself doesn’t do much. And too much of it can ruin things. But the right amount of salt (which was in Jesus’s time a precious commodity) can enhance and make things better. Salt’s value is in its being spread around, added to other things–but not in a way that dominates or takes over.
If we forget that we are salt of the earth and keep ourselves separate and distant or try to take things over, we are not being true to who we are called to be.
Thomas’s essay, “Salty” looks deeply at what is to be salt–something that was precious, something that “does its best work when it’s poured around”, something that doesn’t exist to preserve itself; a calling that is not meant “to make us proud; it’s meant to to humble and awe us.”
What an honor to be asked to help, to be of service. Thomas continues:
“Our vocation in these times and places is not to lose our saltiness. That’s the temptation–to retreat. To choose blandness over boldness and keep our love for Jesus an embarrassed secret… But that kind of salt, Jesus tells his listeners, is useless. It is untrue to its essence… Salt at its best sustains and enriches life. It pours itself out with discretion so that God’s kingdom might be known on the earth–a kingdom of spice and zest, a kingdom of health and wholeness, a kingdom of varied depth, flavor, and complexity.“
I’m really looking forward to discussing Thomas’s reflections on the life of Christ. We’ll see how salty and balanced we can become during our Lent small groups .
These are some of the books that are pouring ideas and prayers and sentences and questions and wonder and inspiration into my heart and mind at the moment.
Next weekend (February 11-12), I preach at Christ Church Easton. What that looks like walking around and how to process it is a different kind of thing. Barbara Brown Taylor in her book, “The Preaching Life,” points towards it:
“I do not want to pass on knowledge from the pulpit; I want to take part in an experience of God’s living word, and that calls for a different kind of research. It is time to tuck the text into the pocket of my heart and walk around with it inside me. It is time to turn its words and images loose on the events of my everyday life and see how they mix. It is time to daydream, whittle, whistle, pray.”
The more often I tuck God’s Word into the pocket of my heart and walk around with it inside me, the more it helps shape who I am and how I see the world. If I hope to take part in an experience of God’s living word, I need to remind myself that I am salt and light–my role is to enhance, sooth, melt, preserve, to add some flavor that might bring it into our world in a fresh way.
Back to Thomas:
“We are the salt of the earth. That is what we are, for better or for worse. May it be for the better. May your pouring out–and mine–be for the life of the world.”
Life has felt large and open and raw of late, where prayers, feelings, experiences and thoughts are all super charged.
There are plenty of reasons: Ava’s stereotactic neurosurgery is on Monday; Anna turns 21 on Tuesday and Ava turns 18 in mid-February; we’ve past the half-way point in our Romans Bible studies; seminary is stirring good things up and Kelsey Spiker and I just became postulants, the next designation in the path to ordination to the priesthood; even occasional preaching is a full-body experience; gearing up for Lent small groups; and the girls had their first ever snow skiing experiences, which was a trip with Holly and her kids as well as many teen and twenty-something friends.
Life has an open feeling, which is both filling and fulfilling and taxing and shaky sometimes.
Studying for a Saturday seminary day retreat, Rev. Susie Leight has us reading and thinking about the spirituality of the priesthood, which included excerpts from Barbara Brown Taylor’s “The Preaching Life” and Gordon W. Lathrop’s “The Pastor: A Spirituality.” Lathrop recalls an experience in a Swiss airport where he read a quote on a poster from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, written in French. Lathrop translated it literally to say:
“As a profound thirst: the desire to be a human being among human beings.”
A deep and profound desire to be a human being–someone who lives and feels, who is flawed and who needs others–among human beings. To be in community and to be allowed to be fully ourselves. This is what it is to be open, to be honest, to be vulnerable, which is not instantly a comfortable place to be.
Thursday we had a class discussing Tracy K. Smith’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Life on Mars,” which is one of my favorite books. The discussion was about space and time, love, loss, grief, dancing, intimacy, language–it was flung like stars around the minds and hearts of those there. The last poem read was titled, “The Weather in Space”–
Is God being or pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we’re certain to lose, so alive–
Faces radiant with panic.
That is part of the challenge of being human, loss and fear are always in the mix with us. It’s a lot and sometimes we want to–I want to–shut the faucet off. But that’s not why we’re here. That’s not why I am here.
On Tuesday morning, I was thinking ahead to this weekend’s Gospel reading, which is Matthew 5:1-12, commonly known as the Beatitudes:
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And 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 the sake of righteousness, 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.“
I’ve been in a habit of looking to see if Debie Thomas has anything to say about a particular Bible passage in her book “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories.” And reading her take on the Beatitudes, it hit me that her book would make an incredible Lent study, looking at and discussing different aspects of Jesus’s life. Here is a bit of her take on the reading:
“What Jesus bears witness to in the Beatitudes is God’s unwavering proximity to pain, suffering, sorrow, and loss. God is nearest to those who are lowly, oppressed, unwanted and broken. God isn’t obsessed with the shiny and the impressive; God is too busy sticking close to what’s messy, chaotic, unruly, and unattractive.”
She goes further:
“I think what Jesus is saying in the Beatitudes is that I have something to learn about discipleship that my privileged life circumstances will not teach me. Something to grasp about the beauty, glory, and freedom of the Christian life that I will never grasp until God becomes my all, my go-to, my starting and ending place. Something to recognize about the radical counter-intuitiveness of God’s priorities and promises. Something to notice about the obfuscating power of plenty to blind me to my own emptiness. Something to gain from the humility that says, ‘The people I think I am superior to have everything to teach me. Maybe it’s time to pay attention.'”
If I want to be a human being among human beings, I have to be open to, to learn from, to love, those whom God loves: everyone. More than that, if as followers of Christ, we look to do God’s work in the world, we have to be, we have to show, we have to act out in faith the love that God makes real here and now, especially to those who feel alienated or shut off from it.
In teaching the Beatitudes, Jesus is turning the world and what we think we know about it, on its head. This is something he does frequently in his teachings and his parables. We should ask why.
Next week we will discuss poet Joy Harjo’s book “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.” In “Talking with the Sun,” she writes:
After dancing all night in a circle we realize that we are a part of a larger sense of stars and planets dancing with us overhead. When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony, we are renewed. There is no mistaking this connection, though Walmart might be just down the road. Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of meaning.
To be a human being among human beings is also to be human in and as a part of God’s Creation. Which He asks us to be stewards of, to take care of.
Humans are vulnerable and rely on kindnesses. When I try to live with my heart open, I have a greater sense of, and gratitude for these kindnesses–kindnesses that can come from anywhere and anyone. Any one of us. Even me.
Thankfully, life rarely comes down to desert island preferences. You know the scenarios: if you were stranded on a desert island and could only have five albums, or if you could only eat one kind of food, or if you had to watch one movie, and on and on. But they make for great conversation scenarios. You get to know someone by cutting through all the white noise and cocktail party chatter and learn something about what is important to that person. And those questions often circle back to things like music, food, books–things that open up something about what we love.
Here is one for me: if I could only read one genre of writing for the rest of my life, it would be poetry. I don’t have to think about it, I don’t need the Final Jeopardy music playing, I can say that instantly. Poetry fills my soul, speaks to my heart, and expands my mind in ways that no other kind of writing can.
When John and I thought about what poets to discuss for that class, we went with some of the well-known writers; it’s maybe a stretch to say that a poet other than Shakespeare can be a household name, but Milton, Blake, and Wordsworth are close. Talking about a class for this winter and what poets read and talk about, we had a different approach.
Poetry often seems to be the realm of old, dead white guys. What if for a follow up, we let people know that poetry is as meaningful, powerful, and relevant today, that poetry matters and has a much broader range of accomplished writers than those from the past. Let’s look at three living women of color who are carrying on the mantel.
Tracy K. Smith, Joy Harjo, and Rita Dove have won Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and just about any other recognition you can think of for their writing. And they have each served as Poet Laureates of the United States.
Smith’s book, “Life on Mars,” Harjo’s “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings,” and Dove’s “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” have come out in 2011, 2015, and 2022: they are recent, relevant, and are evidence that these writers, these women, are wrestling with and trying to make sense out of life, experience, and so many of the alienating forces at work in the world. These are writers, and books, that belong on our bookshelves and in our hearts and minds as we try to walk through life doing the same.
I go back to Robin Williams’ line from the movie Dead Poets Society frequently because I think it says it so powerfully:
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
Or maybe we give the floor to Tracy K. Smith, the first poet we will read and discuss in our class. “Life on Mars” is a book that took a hold of me from the first time I picked it up. Smith’s father was an engineer on the Hubble Telescope, which is something that comes out in her searching and brilliant poem, “My God, It’s Full of Stars.” You can read more about Smith and hear her read from that poem at the link.
Smith talks about why she loves poetry:
That’s a lofty but worthwhile goal. It’s part of the hope of a class like this: that the world we return to after reading and discussing Smith, Harjo, and Dove might seem fuller and more comprehensible as a result.
Books are time travel devices on their own. But when you take a book off your shelf that you have read, all kinds of associated memories come rolling back. Re-reading three books this week, weaving in and out of time, life comes up.
I first learned about T.H. White’s novel “The Once and Future King” from one of the X-Men movies where Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier has his students reading it (that was X2 in 2003). I’ve loved King Arthur stories and legends since I was a kid–when I was 9 years old I named our new Golden Retriever “Morgan” after King Arthur’s devious half-sister Morgan Le Fay. So it didn’t take much prompting, finding out White’s novel was a modern, moving, funny re-telling of the Arthur story, I was all in. My brother-in-law mentioned he’s given more copies of that book to people than any other book and he named a bearded dragon King Pellinore after White’s version of the character.
Merlyn is phenomenal, from his physical introduction in the story, to his life philosophies:
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
Learn why the world wags and what wags it.
I’ve started the book maybe three times over the years, read 100+ or 200+ pages and life has happened in a way that has made me put it down, despite being drawn in.
2018 was the last time I tried to make time to read “The Once and Future King.” I found a note I left myself on page 154–that is where I stopped. This past week, studying the Pre-Reformation Church in England for seminary, Sir Thomas Malory’s “Morte D’Arthur” was discussed and a quick line about White’s updated telling. That was enough to motivate me. I started again and knocked out 30 pages this morning, making a goal to finish it before the end of the year.
Sitting on the campus of the National War College in DC 10 years ago, I read Tracy K. Smith’s “Life on Mars” on my lunch breaks. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. My mind was thrown open and my jaw was frequently dropped while reading.
My friend John Miller and I are going to lead a discussion on Smith’s book in January and February for Chesapeake Forum. I grabbed my copy from the bookshelf in my bedroom and the bookmark I had in the book was my ordering receipt from Barnes and Noble, May 2012. I have lived in three houses since the house it was delivered to.
This morning I read this, from the poem, “My God, It’s Full of Stars”–
…I want to be One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial. Wide open, so everything floods at once. And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time, Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.
Reading today, what I read 10 years ago, finding the receipt with an old address on it from what feels like a different life, time did curl in on itself.
“My God, It’s Full of Stars” is how I feel every time I look up at a clear night sky.
The last book doesn’t go back so far, but it washes over me in new ways each time I read it. I found Rowan Williams’ “Being Christian” in 2019 and have led three classes using it for perspective on what the things we do as Christians are all about. This fall we have 20 people in our newcomers class at Christ Church Easton, a new group of folks wading through Williams. Last week, we talked about baptism, but the former Archbishop of Canterbury goes deeper than most of us go. He talks about how we have lost our identities, we have let go of them. Our default settings aren’t the way they should be. Enter Jesus.
“And when Jesus arrives on the scene he restores humanity to where it should be. But that in itself means that Jesus, as he restores humanity ‘from within’ (so to speak), has come down into the chaos of our human world. Jesus had to come down fully to our level, where things are shapeless and meaningless, in a state of vulnerability and unprotectedness, if real humanity is to come to birth.
“This suggests that the new humanity that is created around Jesus is not a humanity that is always going to be successful and in control of things, but a humanity that can reach out its hand from the depths of chaos, to be touched by the hand of God.”
Baptism is going down into the chaos and coming up as new people, in a new relationship with God in Christ. Not as perfect or flawless, but one where we can reach out to be touched by God. That’s not generally what we think about when we attend a baptism, though it’s all right there in the vows.
Williams has this wonderful way of looking at the kind of life that is begun anew through baptism:
A life that gives us resources and strength to ask questions; a life that reconciles and builds bridges and repairs broken relationships–a life that reflects God’s wisdom and order. That sounds like a life worth living.
My mind moves forwards and backwards in time re-reading books, wandering through memories, and leaning into both goals and daydreams. “Once and Future,” stands out as a phrase that touches on something about that.
For those of us who have been in and around Easton for any time, Waterfowl Festival is an event that moves in both directions as well. As a kid, I watched my mom cut greens and decorate buildings and saw my dad cooking and serving food with the Kiwanis Club in town. Over the years, it’s been a fun reason to either walk through town as a spectacle, or avoid town altogether.
For the past six years (of my life, the church has been doing it much longer), Waterfowl Festival has meant Christ Church coming together to decorate, to serve food, to be together, to raise funds that go back out into the community, where they are needed. That points to Williams’ idea of a communal life that “looks toward reconciliation, building bridges, repairing shattered relationships.” It’s a step in the right direction. It’s among the work we are sent out to do.
Fall is a time of change, a time of incredible colors, crisp air, clear skies, and fire-pit warmth. My bones know when fall hits. It’s also always been a time of renewal, energy, and new beginnings.
This year, fall is the beginning of year two of seminary through Iona Eastern Shore for seven of us aspirants and postulants. Our studies this year are focused on the history of the Christianity (what happened between the Acts of the Apostles and today) and heavily on homiletics–preaching. I’m especially appreciating lectures, essays, and books by Tom Long, who makes me think that preaching is something that can be taught, even to those of us to whom it doesn’t come naturally.
To borrow a few aspirational sentences from Long’s book “The Witness of Preaching”–
“To have our own lives, our own work, our own words, our own struggles and fears gathered up in some way into that event (preaching) is an occasion of rich and joyful grace… To be a preacher is to be a midwife of the word… we do not establish the time of its arriving; we cannot eliminate the labor pains that surround it; but we serve with gratitude at its coming and exclaim with joy at its birth.”
And:
“Faithful preaching requires such gifts as sensitivity to human need, a discerning eye for the connections between faith and life, an ear attuned to hearing the voice of Scripture, compassion, a growing personal faith, and the courage to tell the truth.”
I have such a long way to go, but I am inspired and encouraged and am becoming a student of the art and event of preaching.
I’ve also been helped along the way this fall by a discernment group who have gathered multiple times to help me discern, distill, and clarify my calling as part of the canonical process toward ordination. The way is each and every step and I am grateful beyond words for the questions, love, and encouragement from these friends.
Romans has given me a particular focus and opportunity for the fall/winter. In the same way that I wrote each week about our small group study of John O’Donohue’s book “Anam Cara,” I’ll be writing about Romans–thoughts from different scholars, snippets from our group discussions, and I am hoping to do some video segments and interviews with folks talking Romans.
I think for many church-goers, Paul’s Letter to the Romans is something experienced piecemeal, here and there, in lectionary readings. People know it’s a big deal, but they never take the time to read it and reckon with it. And that’s understandable–it’s daunting! But it’s also beautiful and potentially transformative. I love this thought by Rev. Jay Sidebotham, in “Conversations with Scripture: Romans,” when he says:
“The expression of trust in God’s grace, a theme of the Letter to the Romans, has the power to change individual lives. It also has the power to change communities, which is why it matters that we enter into this conversation. Such a conversation does not mean that we will like or understand everything in the letter… In the spirit of conversation, a word that suggests companionship on the journey, we hope that faithful attention to this ancient letter may open the door for new insights into the expansiveness of the grace of God.”
Romans has a history of changing lives and communities. Would that our studies might increase our trust in God’s grace.
To Live Prayerfully
Last weekend, Fr. Bill Ortt preached on Luke 18:1-8, the Parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge. The text starts out by saying, “Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose hope.” This is advice you give people who are going through tough times; people who might reach a point in their lives and their faith where they want to give up.
If we are going to be people for God, who is love, and so people for love, we need to lean in, not give up. We need to live prayerfully. Prayer is not simply asking for things–prayer is our connection to God. Prayer requires listening as much, if not more than talking.
That’s part of the reason why we use Rowan Williams’ book “Being Christian” in our newcomer class. It ends with prayer. And Williams describes three things that are essential for prayer:
First, and most importantly, prayer is God’s work in us… It is the opening of our minds and hearts to the Father…
Second, there is the deep connection… between praying and living justly in the world… Prayer is the life of Jesus coming alive in you, so it is hardly surprising if it is absolutely bound up with a certain way of being human which is about reconciliation, mercy, and freely extending the welcome and the love of God to others.
Third, prayer from our point of view is about fidelity, faithfulness, sticking to it… Just stay there and if in doubt say, ‘O God, make speed to save me.’ Prayer is your promise and pledge to be there for the God who is there for you.
To live a prayerful life is to open our hearts, minds, and lives to God. It’s about praying and living in a way that shows reconciliation, mercy, welcome, and love. And it’s about sticking with it.
It’s a lot to take in. It’s a lot to try. We won’t always get it right. We will stumble and fall. And none of us can do it alone. But with God’s help, and with each other, we can get back up, try again, and keep forward on the way.
I come back to the Thomas Merton Prayer regularly. We prayed it together at the first meeting of our discernment group. And it feels like a good time to offer it here:
I think about the movie “Shawshank Redemption” a good bit. In one of the most quotable conversations of the film, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) says to Red (Morgan Freeman):
“It comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.”
And that might be the simplest breakdown, though likely too simple, of the last section of John O’Donohue’s “Anam Cara.” The section is called, “Death: The Horizon is the Well.”
Death has a lot to do with life. In our lives, negativity and fear exile us from our own love and warmth, O’Donohue says, and to live life fully we need to transfigure or transform the negativity and fear “by turning it toward the light of your soul.”
“Eventually what you call the negative side of yourself can become the greatest force for renewal, creativity, and growth within you.”
O’Donohue says that part of transforming this negativity and fear happens by us letting go of it.
“Mystics have always recognized that to come deeper into the divine presence within, you need to practice detachment. When you begin to let go, it is amazing how enriched your life becomes. False things, which you have desperately held on to, move away very quickly from you. Then what is real, what you love deeply, and what really belongs to you comes deeper into you.”
Like the subject of aging, which was the previous section in “Anam Cara,” we don’t like to think or talk about death. It is an absolute fact of life, but it’s not a place we are comfortable going in conversation. We see death as separate from life, an ending, a horizon that we head towards. O’Donohue points out that it doesn’t really work that way. He quotes Hans Georg Gadamer, who says:
“A horizon is something toward which we journey, but it is also something that journeys along with us.”
Death is something that is always with us, not just at the end. And there are ways that we can get to know it.
“The meeting with your own death in the daily forms of failure, pathos, negativity, fear, or destructiveness are actually opportunities to transfigure your ego. These are invitations to move out of that productive, controlling way of being toward an art of being that allows openness and hospitality.”
What we go through in life can help us live more deeply. When we risk something and fail or fall and learn and get back up and move on, we can learn to release our fear and anxiety about it. This is also true of death.
“When you learn to let go of things, a greater generosity, openness, and breath comes into your life. Imagine this letting go multiplied a thousand times at the moment of your death. That release can bring you to a completely new divine belonging.”
Our life and our faith can help us to see death as a release into a completely new divine belonging. We can see examples of the natural life cycle, birth, life, death, rebirth–in the landscape, in nature, and all around us.
In our lives, we can see and feel and know that love goes on beyond death, love is bigger.
If we see death as going into nothingness, O’Donohue points out that “nothingness is the sister of possibility.” There needs to be space, nothingness, in order to create. In the creation story in Genesis, out of a formless void, God uses light and creates space for things to happen.
“Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes an urgent space for that which is new, surprising, and unexpected… This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities. It is also a sign that your soul longs to transfigure the nothingness of your death into the fullness of a life eternal, which no death can ever touch… Death is not the end; it is a rebirth.”
This is all heady stuff. We are dealing with something we have no first-hand experience of, it is not something we can know. But it’s something we come to know in terms of losing people we love. During the six weeks that our study was together, we had multiple people lose dear and close family members as well as bringing in home hospice care to care for a parent. Death is ever present and devastating when it claims those we love.
Some folks in our group found this chapter helpful, some felt it was a subject that was too close to process. The thing about a study like this, or a Bible study, or any small group of people who you meet with and are close to–I think Ram Dass put it beautifully in saying, “We are all walking each other home.” We need to be there for each other in the tender and tough times of loss and pain.
We get a chance to be there for one another. But as for those who have died, O’Donohue says, why grieve them?
“We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation, or pain. They are home. They are with God from whom they came. They have returned to the nest of their identity within the great circle of God. God is the greatest circle of all, the largest embrace in the universe, which holds visible and invisible, temporal, and eternal, as one.”
There is the good stuff. Those who have passed have gone home. They are contained in the circle of God. They have moved from our temporal world into the eternal.
And then O’Donohue does something cool. He talks about how he sees eternal time:
“In eternal time all is now; time is presence. I believe that is what eternal life means: it is a life where all that we seek–goodness, unity, beauty, truth, and love–are no longer distant from us but are now completely present with us.”
Completely present. Complete presence. There is something wonderful, whole, and beautiful to that. In the deepest sense, that is home.
What do we do with all that? How should that inform our lives? Well, if death is a release, a homecoming, a rebirth, then it isn’t something to be feared or ignored. Being at peace with what happens at the end of our lives, we should focus on how we live our lives.
We should transfigure the small deaths–the failures, the fears, the setbacks–and try to grow in presence with others in love, grace, hospitality. We should look for and try to experience eternal presence in our temporal lives (we go back to chronos and kairos again).
O’Donohue reminds us:
“It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here.”
If I think back to Shawshank Redemption, and “get busy living or get busy dying,” I can think of living as taking advantage of the miracle of being here. And I can think of get busy dying is forgetting that privilege, of allowing fear and negativity to control how we live, which would be not living to the fullest.
So Andy Dufresne may still be on to something.
We closed our last class this past Monday with part of a prayer from “A New Zealand Prayer Book,” in their Daily Devotions, excerpting from the Monday prayer. Since it is Monday as I write, we will close here with it as well:
From “A New Zealand Prayer Book”
From Monday Evening
There is nothing in death or life, in the realm of spirits or superhuman powers, in the world as it is or the world as it shall be, in the forces of the universe, in heights or depths – nothing in all creation which can separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Love never comes to an end.
Holy One, holy and eternal, awesome, exciting and delightful in your holiness; make us pure in heart to see you; make us merciful to receive your kindness, and to share our love with all your human family; then will your name be hallowed on earth as in heaven.
Support us, Lord, all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work done; then Lord, in your mercy, give us safe lodging, a holy rest and peace at the last.
Let’s begin with intention. This is a blessing/prayer shared by Rev. Susie Leight:
Been praying this on repeat for the last few weeks…trying to utter it before my feet hit the floor (if I’m awake enough) …thought it would be a good one to share again…
May I…may you…may we…
May I live this day Compassionate of heart, Clear in word, Gracious in awareness, Courageous in thought, Generous in love.
–from Matins, by John O’Donohue
What we do with our time, how we spend our days, months, years, lives is who we are to those we encounter. Our inward lives of thoughts, dreams, desires, may be infinite, but our worldly lives are the result of our time and actions.
Part Four of John O’Donohue’s book “Anam Cara,” looks at “Work as a Poetics of Growth.” The work that we do in the world helps shape us, helps us grow.
Thinking about this chapter, two quotes that come up a lot for me came to mind. The first is by writer Annie Dillard, who said:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
And the second is by poet Mary Oliver, who wrote:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one precious life?”
How we use our time matters. It is so easy to let one day run into the next without thinking about it, but when these days string together, they can become large stretches of our lives if we don’t pay attention.
O’Donohue writes:
“Everything alive is in movement. This movement we call growth. The most exciting form of growth is not mere physical growth but the inner growth of one’s soul and life. It is here that the holy longing within the heart brings one’s life into motion. The deepest wish of the heart is that this motion does not remain broken or jagged but develops sufficient fluency to become the rhythm of one’s life.”
In the preceding chapters, he has taken us through our senses, our interior lives, our solitude, and now he is pointing out that these interior lives, our thoughts, dreams, and gifts, want to be brought into motion in our outward lives. It’s not enough to have them swirling around within us, we have to find a way to give them expression.
This is our work.
But in our society, there is a bit of a rub. Let’s think about what happens when we meet someone. We say ‘Hello, how are you?’, we make some small talk, and often the next question is ‘What do you do?’ Generally speaking we mean, what do you do for a living, what is your job?
If you feel like your job is a good reflection of your life, or points in the direction of who you are, then that is great. But if you don’t, how much better do we know someone, or do they know us by knowing what job we do?
Maybe you work construction, but your passion is being on the water fishing. Maybe you work an office job, but the thing you most look forward to is tutoring or coaching kids. Maybe you are a server, but you get home and paint or write or garden or have some way to express your creativity.
Our work is bigger than our day or night jobs. O’Donohue writes about a gravestone in London:
“Here lies Jeremy Brown born a man and died a grocer.” Often people’s identities, that wild inner complexity of soul and color of spirit, become shrunken to their work identities.”
This takes nothing away from our work identities, which can be life affirming. If people think of your kindness, your smile, your creativity and talent and know you as a teacher, a landscaper, a bartender, a boat builder, a painter, then that is a wonderful thing. But we are more than our professions–we are also sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, friends, partners, etc.
Part of the problem, O’Donohue poses, is that we get stuck looking at life, jobs, the world around us in one particular way and that can become limiting. He suggests that we visualize the mind as a tower of windows that we are looking out.
“Sadly, many people remain trapped at the one window, looking out every day at the same scene in the same way. Real growth is experienced when you draw back from that one window, turn, and walk around the inner tower of the soul and see all the different windows that greet your gaze. Through these different windows, you see new vistas of possibility, presence, and creativity.”
In the last chapter we discussed that how we look at things determines what we see, what we find. In that same way, looking at things, including our work and our lives, in different ways can be so important.
Each day brings us new opportunities.
I recently got to be the grunt labor, branch-hauler for a tree expert friend who helped me cut up a downed branch that reached over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. Listening to him talk about his love for trees and hearing his knowledge, then watching him work chainsaws and pole-saws like an artist, I knew I was watching someone do the thing they were created to do. It was a joyful and awe-inspiring experience. I’ve felt the same thing when I was a line cook watching an incredible chef do what they do. I’ve seen it in gardeners, teachers, preachers, and watermen. I’ve experienced it being around parents and grandparents, around birdwatchers, and skateboarders. I’ve seen it in a friend listening intently to someone sharing something that was big for them.
When we witness or experience those moments of calling, meaning, and connection, time moves differently.
Do we make time to do the things we love? Do we find ways to express our inner-longings in our daily lives? If we don’t, what will our lives become?
“In order to feel real. we need to bring that inner invisible world to expression.”
We want to seen, known, valued for who we are. In order for people to know us in that way, we have to find a way to express who we are in our lives. If we aren’t doing that, people can’t know us and we can feel frustrated that we aren’t finding a way to express ourselves. It can’t stay inside us. O’Donohue points out that if we want to change our lives, until it enters the practices of our days, it is all talk.
Work is maybe a misleading word here. O’Donohue also talks about the danger of productivity becoming God, which reduces each individual to a function. He talks about needing to think less about competition and more about working together. And he talks about the danger of reducing time to an achievement, when time should also be for wonder and creativity.
On Monday (August 15), the same day our class met, Frederick Buechner died at 96 years old. Buechner has been one of the most influential writers, thinkers, and theologians in my own spiritual growth. And he has written a lot about vocation. Vocation might be a more complete word to use here instead of work. Buechner has called vocation, “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”
That says so much, but Buechner explained a bit more. He points out that vocation as a word comes from:
“Vocare, to call, of course, and a person’s vocation is a person’s calling. It is the work that they are called to in this world, the thing they are summoned to spend their life doing. We can speak of a person choosing their vocation, but perhaps it is at least as accurate to speak of a vocation’s choosing a person, of a call’s being given and a person hearing it, or not hearing it. And maybe that is the place to start: the business of listening and hearing. A person’s life is full of all sorts of voices calling them in all sorts of directions. Some of them are voices from inside and some of them are voices from outside. The more alive and alert we are, the more clamorous our lives are. Which do we listen to? What kind of voice do we listen for?
Vocation. Listening and hearing. Where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.
Our friend and brother Bruce Richards recently died. He spent his professional career as a pilot–in the Air Force during Vietnam, then as a commercial pilot. He was retired when he moved to Easton; he came to Christ Church Easton to buy a crab cake during the Waterfowl Festival and for the next 18 years helped create a new caregiving ministry, took Communion to nursing homes, and was an inspiration and loving friend to everyone he encountered. He was living out a vocation.
Bruce worked closely with Carol Callaghan, who was a mentor to him and to so many people. Carol was a school teacher who found and felt a calling to ordination later in her life and became the first woman ordained as a Deacon at Christ Church Easton. Carol paved the way for Rev. Barbara Coleman, Rev. Susie Leight, and those of us who are now discerning and following a path that may lead to that same place.
Like Bruce and Carol, may we all find a calling, a vocation that speaks to our inner longing; that connects us to God; and that inspires and encourages others to live lives of love, creativity, and service.
Let’s close with O’Donohue’s blessing at the end of the chapter:
May the light of your soul guide you. May the light of your soul bless the work you do with the secret love and warmth of your heart. May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul. May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light, and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and receive your work. May your work never weary you. May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment, inspiration, and excitement. May you be present in what you do. May you never become lost in the bland absences. May the day never burden. May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities, and promises. May evening find you gracious and fulfilled. May you go into the night blessed, sheltered, and protected. May your soul calm, console, and renew you.
We need our sense of awe, of wonder, kickstarted. When I look at any given week ahead, at the to-do list, at the bills, at the schedule, it’s easy to get lost in the details.
Everyone has a soapbox they frequently stand on. Wonder is one of my few soapboxes. Carl Sagan gets it. Let Carl get you going. When he says dot, he means the Earth:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
That’s the kind of perspective I need from time to time. The history of humankind–our dreams, accomplishments, stories, are all a speck in the cosmos. Get your head into the stars.
What are your go-to activities, places, or ways to amp up your sense of wonder and awe? For me, getting outside is as big as it gets. Watching the sun come up or set on a river, bay, ocean; hiking, trail running, skateboarding; gardening where I take the time to look at the details of what is growing or blooming. And obviously, books.
Some wonder-sparking books that were nearby while I was typing.
Here’s a thought from Pablo Neruda:
“We the mortals touch the metals, the wind, the ocean shores, the stones, knowing they will go on, inert or burning, and I was discovering, naming all the these things: it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.”
Again with our brief time here, the span of time before and after us, and yet, there are times when we can feel connected to, a part of everything around us.
Let’s play that out. We are here. We were created. You and I have consciousness and questions and feelings. So the same Creator that made all of the wonder-filled, awe-stoking Universe, made you and made me.
“The story of our faith beings with the Creation narratives, in which the act of Creation itself becomes the unfolding of God’s love for the whole world.
God’s love is written all over creation. It begins when God takes the deep and the darkness and, instead of destroying these things, makes them a part of creation. God calls it very good, and we are all created together by a loving God who destroys nothing in creating–deep and darkness, earth and light, knit together in a creation that is both unified and diverse…
Nature is sacred; it was made by the same creator who made us. If we want to love, worship, and be with God, then it makes sense for us to stand in the midst of creation. The closer we are to nature, the nearer we most be to the heart and desire of the Creator.”
Let that wash over you for a minute. That sense of awe and wonder in us, that connection to the larger Universe, to creation, can be a means for us to get to know God and draw closer to Him. Even if we are a blip on the screen, we are still a part of it and we can do something with our time.
We were made to wonder. We were made to dream. We were made to enjoy and take part of the beauty of the Creation of which we are a part. And by doing so, we find ourselves a gateway to God.
