Tag: time

Grace leans out of the alley

As a people, we get in our own way a lot. We make ourselves so busy, so manic, so overscheduled, and so quick to be heard that we rarely listen. And what and to whom we listen are often suspect.

“[A]lmost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.”

David Foster Wallce, Infinite Jest

I dig David Foster Wallace’s image of destiny leaning out of the alley, but we’re too busy to hear it. And the reason destiny, the big, epic, cool, yummy ideas and things that could fill and direct our lives, is left hanging out in the alley is that we’ve unknowingly designed the cities that are our lives and that is the space we’ve often left the stuff that might really matter.

Yesterday (Ash Wednesday) was the beginning of Lent. In N.T. Wright’s devotional book, “Lent for Everyone: Matthew, Year A,” he gives us a reading and some thoughts each day of the season. He begins with reminding us that when God does something new, he often involves unlikely, frequently surprised or alarmed people:

“He asks them to trust him in a new way, to put aside their natural reactions, to listen humbly for a fresh word and to act on it without knowing exactly how it’s going to work out… we may have to put our initial reactions on hold and be prepared to hear new words, to think new thoughts, and to live them out.”

I wonder if destiny isn’t the only thing we’ve shoved in the alley; I wonder if we’ve put grace there too. As we head into Lent and look for fresh words, new thoughts, and seasonal and spiritual renewal–maybe grace leans out of the alley to remind us it is there for the taking, our taking, our lives, and our hearts.

Preaching at an Ash Wednesday service at Christ Church Easton, Fr. Bill Ortt put it like this:

You are loved
You are forgiven
God wants his grace to be a part of your life.

And he quoted Psalm 90, which says, “Teach us to number our days, so that we might apply our hearts to wisdom.” (verse 12, KJV)

Mortality has loomed large in our community lately. We don’t need reminders. But that is one thing that Ash Wednesday does for us anyway. We come from dust and to dust we shall return. So we need to use the time we have the best we can. In numbering our days, we feel and learn the urgency and necessity of wisdom.

Allowing grace to speak to us, allowing grace into our lives, living into forgiveness so that we can let go of our past and be present now, and step towards what will be.

Seen/scene during Ava’s stay at Children’s Hospital in DC for testing and observation.

After Ash Wednesday services, I headed to Children’s Hospital in DC, where younger daughter Ava is staying for a few days for tests and observation to see if they can learn more about her seizures and spells. As we’re sitting in her room after breakfast, she puts on “Into the Spider-Verse,” a movie we both love.

Miles Morales is a young teenager in a new school and he doesn’t have a clue how he fits in or who he is supposed to be. After he tries to fail his way out of the school, his physics teacher calls him out and assigns him an essay.

“I’m assigning you an essay, not about physics, but about you and what kind of person you want to be.”

That’s a question we need to continually ask ourselves; an ongoing conversation. During the course of the movie, Miles finds his own way, not the way that the other Spider-Men and Women have, but a way that is his. He takes the book “Great Expectations,” turns it into street art of “No Expectations,” and lives into his personal destiny.

Maybe grace is how we get to our destiny. Maybe by reconciling and letting go of our past and the world’s designs for who we are supposed to be, and stepping into God’s grace, forgiveness, and vision for us, we can become who we are meant to be.

“My name is Miles Morales. I was bitten by a radioactive spider, and for like two days, I’ve been the one and only Spider-Man. I think you know the rest. I finished my essay. Saved a bunch of people…. And when I feel alone, like no one understands what I’m going through, I remember my friends who get it. I never thought I’d be able to do any of this stuff, but I can. “

Through God’s grace, we can. So when destiny, clothed in grace, leans out of the alley, stop, lean in, and listen.

Walk this Way

Jesus walked. A lot. Walking, praying, eating with friends, hanging with the unruly–these are some of the things he spent the most time doing. The pace and intentionality of Jesus’ life are among his key examples for us.

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book “An Altar in the World,” talks about Jesus’ walking practice:

“Sometimes he had a destination and sometimes he didn’t. For many who followed him around, he was the destination. Whether he was going somewhere or nowhere at all, going with him was the point. Food tasted better at the pace he set. Stories lasted longer. Talk went deeper. While many of his present-day admirers pay close attention to what he said and did, they pay less attention to the pace at which he did it. Jesus was a walker, not a rider. He took his sweet time.”

[Aside: it makes it really hard to stomach when some bonehead says if Jesus lived today, he’d have a private jet to go around the world. You might want to go back and review the Sermon on the Mount, or say, anything he said in the Gospels…]

When I think about my best days, there is some part of each of them that have been spent walking, exploring, hiking, doing something at a slower, intentional pace, even if it’s around the yard. We’re in a hurry often enough, taking time to walk, to slow down, seems essential.

I like any chance I can get to drop some wisdom from Gary Snyder. In “Practice of the Wild,” he links walking with adventure and humility:

“Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.”

I think that’s part of it, the slow pace of walking and the vastness of the planet, it is humbling and beautiful at the same time.  It puts us in our bodies and lets our souls breathe.

If you’ve been around Oxford for any period of time, you’ve likely come across Bruce Mills. When I was growing up, Bruce lived down the street from us, and spent a lot of time in the park, playing electric guitar, spreading out black and white photographs he had taken and developed, laughing and philosophizing, later on doing Tai Chi. For the better part of a few decades, Bruce rides his bike from Trappe to Oxford to paint houses. The times that he’s had a car, he felt like he missed out.

“When I get into a car, I turn the key and I’m there,” he once said. “When I ride my bike, I can breathe, I can smell the earth, I can get my thoughts together, I take my time.”

I like so much about that. I think Jesus might have a bike if he lived bodily in today’s world. But it wouldn’t be a fancy, upscale bike, and I can’t see him decked out in spandex with a GPS and figuring out his pace and heart rate. Personally, I think Jesus would have a beach cruiser, letting go of the hurry, and smiling in the breeze.

Buechner on Eternity

I spent late Sunday on a bike and under a tree. The morning and afternoon had been music, prayer and fellowship of worship services, then blessing of pets (several dogs, a hedgehog, two guinea pigs, and a horse) at Christ Church Easton.

On a beautiful fall evening, I hopped on my bike and eased around Boone Creek and then found a tree on the shoreline of the Oxford Cemetery. I stretched my legs out and listened to geese in the cove, the breeze through the trees, conversations of boaters in Town Creek, and watched the sun dance on the water. I read David Bailey, Richard Rohr, and N.T. Wright. Mostly I sat, watched, listened, imbibed.

I was completely full. I didn’t try to give it words, just breath and feeling.

Yesterday I came across this passage from Frederick Buechner’s “Wishful Thinking,” and I realized Buechner had the words I was looking for:

ETERNITY IS NOT endless time or the opposite of time. It is the essence of time. 

If you spin a pinwheel fast enough, then all its colors blend into a single color—white—which is the essence of all the colors of the spectrum combined. 

If you spin time fast enough, then time-past, time-present, and time-to-come all blend into a single timelessness or eternity, which is the essence of all times combined. 

As human beings we know time as a passing of unrepeatable events in the course of which everything passes away including ourselves. As human beings, we also know occasions when we stand outside the passing of events and glimpse their meaning. Sometimes an event occurs in our lives (a birth, a death, a marriage—some event of unusual beauty, pain, joy) through which we catch a glimpse of what our lives are all about and maybe even what life itself is all about, and this glimpse of what “it’s all about” involves not just the present but the past and future too. 

Inhabitants of time that we are, we stand on such occasions with one foot in eternity. God, as Isaiah says (57:15) “inhabiteth eternity” but stands with one foot in time. The part of time where he stands most particularly is Christ, and thus in Christ we catch a glimpse of what eternity is all about, what God is all about, and what we ourselves are all about too.