From Last February, As Winter Approaches

We have canceled Sunday activities at church for tomorrow

but you won't cancel worship, will you?

For coming safely through a storm,

For making safe choices about travel,

and about shoveling,

For making caring choices about checking in with neighbors,

and making sure you drink enough water.

For those who are in distress,

from cold,

from injury,

and any other kind of danger.

Holy One, in your loving mercy, Hear our prayer!

For throwing snow at your brother on a snowy deck,

For working side by side on a big task,

For having something special like cookies in the oven,

For the gladness of neighbors,

For the power of the plow, the blower, and the shovel,

For having prepared,

For laughing with delight at the beauty of this creation,

this new world,

And for all angels, in balaclavas, in weather centers, and in the snow,

Holy One, with joyful hearts, We give you thanks!

A Morning Offering

I bless the night that nourished my heart

To set the ghosts of longing free

Into the flow and figure of dream

That went to harvest from the dark

Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me

Welcome the wonder of this day,

The field of brightness it creates

Offering time for each thing

To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:

The quiet loyalty of breath,

The tent of thought where I shelter,

Wave of desire I am shore to

And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today

To the invisible geography

That invites me to new frontiers,

To break the dead shell of yesterdays,

To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today

To live the life that I would love,

To postpone my dream no longer

But do at last what I came here for

And waste my heart on fear no more.

~ John O'Donohue ~

from Bless the Space Between Us

Prayer

Dear Lord,

You are life and the foundation of life

            Now we test your design; to draw upon your strength.

You are Jesus, bridging and crossing the bridge to us.

            Now we set our feet upon your bridge.

You accompany us and keep us company.

            Now we lean on you.

This is all your creation,

            yet we call upon you to create again and again.

You said  you would be with us to the end,

            yet we search for you in every face we see.

Your whirlwind and your silence speak out

            yet we wish you would interrupt us, shake us awake, and be plain.

(Take a deep breath.  Take three.)

Thy will be done.

Your will be done.

Not mine but thy will be done.

Poised Between

Just at the end of Genesis 3, the story reads, "After Noah was five hundred years old…"  Five hundred years old!  This is the beginning of the story of Noah and the Ark and The Great Flood. History begins again at the moment the ark, laden with animals, begins to float through the driving rain, and everything else that had come before matters no longer. 

            Is it a story of creation?  Is it a story of destruction?

            There is the strong element of God's disgust with the sorry state of the world, an emotion we and all readers are expected to share.  There is the idea to wipe everything out and start with a clean slate, which we are expected to go along with since it's God's idea (and maybe you've felt so frustrated with some situation in your life or in the world that you've had the idea yourself.)  And then there's the sheer power of flooding the whole world.  Here the power of nature and the power of God are one; irresistible force and an immovable, deaf-eared, embodiment of judgment.

            In the midst of destruction is a creation.  All the animals, enough of all kinds of food, and a whole family of human animals to help out, are held safe in that ark.  The ark is like a basket of groceries with all the ingredients for a feast inside.  God takes a mulligan on the whole Adam and Eve thing and starts a new world with suitable provision.

            God expresses deep regret, once the waters had settled, and promises not to wipe us all out ever again.  Still, there was no going back to the way things were before.  Had everything changed?  Well, yes and no.  Certainly a lot was just gone.  Yet Noah and his family lived on and they had memories.  The animals represented some substantial evolutionary adaptations and those are embedded in their continuing lives.  And the earth was restored to the wonderful, habitable place it had been.  So there was some carryover from the earlier times.

            We are, each of us, asked to live in history.  We have a past in which we were formed and in which we formed ourselves.  Our challenges include dealing with that trail of stories, of learning, of accumulated wisdom and regret, and all the ways in which we've started over again; again and again.

            We are also asked to look to the future.  We will face new challenges.  Our challenges include adapting, changing ourselves to deal the parade of joys and difficulties that tomorrow and the rest of our lives will bring.

            We encounter a deep spiritual truth when we see that each moment we live, this moment right now for instance, is a moment in which we choose how much from the past we rely on and how much to change.  It is a recurring dance between what we know, or believe, has worked before (write a letter and mail it) and what we choose to do afresh (video-chat with relatives far away.)

            This may feel uncomfortable to you and you may feel anxious.  How are you supposed to dance this dance?  Perhaps another deep spiritual truth will open a way for you. 

            Each of these moments, poised between destruction and creation, poised between past and future, poised between repetition of the known or entering the new, each of these moments is its own "now."  We only really live in this moment.  So look at your hands.  Look up at the space around you right now.  Then clasp your hands together and look at them, at the choice you have made to hold your own hands.  And offer up a prayer of thanksgiving; for all that has been, for the day or days that lie before you, and for this moment, this precious now.  Here's a prayer you could use, if you like.

Dear God, you have been there always and you choose to be in the future to which I'm going right now.  Thank you for each of these moments of choice.  Thank you for my capacity to observe "the now" of now.  Let me rest in your regard, in your everlasting arms for a little while.  Then I will take up my life, our life that you and I are building together out of the past, and move forward with you into our future together.  I lift you up as you lift me.  Amen.

Spirituality 101

I don't frequently look up definitions, do you?  I seem to hold the belief that the last time I needed to look at a dictionary was in school, that whatever I think a word means is good enough. 

Perhaps you recognize the reference to Humpty Dumpty's pronouncement in Alice In Wonderland?  "'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less.'"  Of course, the author, Lewis Carroll, wants to show that Humpty Dumpty is an arrogant egg.  With good British wit, however, Carroll's H.D. is also speaking the truth.  For even though we acknowledge that words have meanings, the layers of meanings in what we say modify generally accepted meanings thoroughly.  

Consider the word "green.'" 

Or how about the word "Christian?" 

From our conversations about "spirituality," we've discovered a variety of meanings and an uncertainty, for some of us, about any meaning.  Perhaps some definitions will help.

-- Spirituality: having to do with the human spirit.  That's a good start, although it kind of postpones an answer. 

-- Spirituality: having to do with the soul, incorporeal, not pertaining to material things but to intangibles.  That helps a little more, I think.  We are in the domain of the 'intangible.'  For those of us who like concrete information, this suggests, we're likely to be unsatisfied.  Spirituality is not something concrete, not something you can touch. 

-- Spirituality: to be distinguished from our physical experience, our material body.  This is helpful.  It is a very old idea, embedded in much of the Bible, that the material body and the spirit, or spirituality, are separate domains.  Do you agree?  Separating spirituality or spirit from the physical experience of being a human is helpful, up to a point.  It helps us to see clearly.  However, it also makes a false distinction between mind and body.  For we are mind and body – one entity.  There is no mind separate from the physical and chemical activity of heart, lungs, brain, etc. 

-- Spirituality: belief in an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality.  Do you believe that there is a reality beyond what we can perceive?  Do you assert that there is  "more?" 

-- Spirituality: an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being.  That's an interesting one, isn't it?  Now the definition is leading us to consider not so much how the cosmos is arranged or the nature of reality but how we experience and use this thing we name spirituality.  

I think we can stop there for this posting.

Would you consider these aspects of spirituality and let me know your thoughts?  I'm not asking you to go find more definitions, although you certainly may do so.  Rather, I invite you to consider the questions posed so far in this survey of meaning.  Spirituality's intangibleness, the idea of a separation between you as a physical body that is alive and you as something spiritual, the idea that there is something, some reality that is "more" than our concrete experience of reality, and especially, that there is an inner path which, by taking it, you can discover the essence of your being.

And pray with me too.  

Dear God, Dearest God, reveal to us sufficient insight into the mystery of  ourselves and our relationship to this wonderful creation.  We attribute our creation and all creation to you and so we give you our attention, our love, our praise, and all the glory.  Amen.