Kirkepiscatoid

(Painting of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

(This piece originally appeared in Episcopal Café's Speaking to the Soul, Sunday, November 6, 2011)

Readings For the Feast Day of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, Sunday, November 6:

Psalm 119: 97-104
Exodus 22:21-27
Ephesians 3:7-12
John 1:9-18 

In recent days, as I've been following the "Occupy Wall Street" movement spreading across different cities in the U.S., I keep thinking William Temple would have something to say about it.  In fact, were he alive today, he might have been in the midst of them.

William Temple was born in a setting of genteel Victorian privilege--his father served as Bishop of London, and, later, Archbishop of Canterbury--and he seemed destined for a similar kind of life.  He was a sickly child, suffering from gout and bad eyesight (he became blind in his right eye by age 40,) and by all accounts, an excellent scholar.  His road to ordination, however, was not entirely smooth.  His initial application for ordination was turned down by the Archbishop of Canterbury because he had "unconventional" notions about the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection.


Turns out that was not the only "unconventional" notion he'd have.

Temple became president of the Worker's Education Association in 1908, while tutoring at Queen's College, Oxford.  This organization was highly influenced by the philosophy of Anglican theologist Frederick Denison Maurice, the pioneer of the Christian Socialist movement.  Temple also joined the Labour Party around that time.  Over the next two decades, despite his privileged upbringing, he would become a champion for worker's rights, as well as social and economic reforms.  In his famous book, Christianity and the Social Order, he outlined six propositions for a Christian society:


Every child should find itself a member of a family housed with decency and dignity.
Every child should have an opportunity for education up to maturity.
Every citizen should have sufficient income to make a home and bring up his children properly.
Every worker should have a voice in the conduct of the business or industry in which he works.
Every citizen should have sufficient leisure—two days' rest in seven and an annual holiday with pay.
Every citizen should be guaranteed freedom of worship, speech, assembly and association.

Our readings today focus on several elements that speak to reform as a nidus of spiritual transformation.  Our Psalm speaks to the love of the law and the value of wise teachers.  Exodus discusses the evils of abusing the more vulnerable elements of society.  Paul's letter to the Ephesians reminds us of the virtues of servant leadership, and hearing the call in our Baptismal Covenant to seek and serve Christ in all people.  Finally, John's Gospel proclaims the power of phos--the luminous power of the Light of Christ's grace to illuminate the darkness of a hurting, broken world.

The life and personal theology of William Temple calls us to our own self examination as agents of the Light of Christ, changing the world, one act of kindness at a time.  How are each of us called to respond to the love of those who teach us about grace and tolerance?  How have we personally stood up to the abuse of the powerless?  How are we servant leaders in our parishes, our schools, or our communities?  How does the life of William Temple influence us in our tasks to be bearers of this true Light?

Perhaps the answer is in one of Temple's more famous quotes:  "It is a great mistake to suppose that God is only, or even chiefly, concerned with religion."




 

(You can also see the video on YouTube here.)

If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember
that your brother has something against you, leave your gift
there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your
brother, and then come and offer your gift.

--Offertory sentence, Book of Common Prayer, p. 376


I have to admit, when I was a kid, the "Dollar bill on a piece of fishing line" was one of my favorite pranks.  I was always amazed at how many grownups would bite on that one!  People will fall for that one again and again.  There's just something about a dollar bill that can tempt the most unobservant of us.


I think we also tend to be that way about truly letting go of the things that wound us.


Oh, we really DO desire to leave it on the altar...and maybe we even take it forward and place it there...but it is sooooo human nature to also tie a piece of monofilament line to it, and then give that line a pull and jerk it off the altar.  Maybe even more than once.  Sometimes we are as bad as Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football like that.  We'll take that old hurt, or that old resentment, that we placed on the altar, and yank it back to us, repeatedly...and like that old dollar bill on the string trick, once in a while someone else will grab it, so to speak...and we'll go around and hurt that new person with the same old resentment, even if they had nothing to do with the original one.


I started thinking about this in a different way lately.


That business of intending to leave my resentments on the altar, then having something bubble up and me snatching it back, is an old habit of mine.  That old compulsive nature of mine wants to nurse those grudges, or stew with those resentments, rather than truly leave them on the altar.  I remember a time that I was trying to give up my resentments about a particular situation by taking the advice of someone I trusted---his advice was to pray for that person for two solid weeks--wish him or her every good thing and every blessing I'd wish for myself--and I'd get part way through and darned if another resentment didn't pop up.  When it was all said and done--when I had actually managed to pray for that person two solid weeks and feel no resentment--it had taken nine months.  It was not lost on me that this was the same time period as a pregnancy.


I have to admit, the advice worked--but I think it took a little longer than usual.


Something I've come to realize now that I've thought about this process of bringing our gifts--even if our gifts are, on any given day, a resentment or a piece of our woundedness--is that the moment we mentally placed them on that altar, they become consecrated along with the bread and the wine--they are no longer made of the same stuff.  They are covered with holy stuff.  To take them back and nurse them and hold onto them, is really taking something holy and not treating it with the respect a holy thing is due.  I'm generally not a person who wants to mistreat holy things.  So by thinking of it in this way, I find myself being able to put it back and leave it be more quickly.


It's better, I think, to leave our resentment there and instead focus on the messy business of reconciliation.  When we are spending time toying with our resentments instead of reconciling, we're just sort of spinning our wheels.  When we can leave it on the altar, I'm learning something that is just the opposite as the dollar bill on a string occurs.  Oh, there's a string all right.  But instead of us yanking the string, when we can truly leave something like that on the altar, IT pulls on the string and draws US closer to the altar--and isn't that where we should have been all along?

(Lance Berkman's 10th inning game-tying single, Game 6, 2011 World Series, October 27, 2011, courtesy of Yahoo Sports)

(This piece originally appeared in Daily Episcopalian on Tuesday, November 3, 2011) 


From the opening lines in our Book of Common Prayer's Rite II Holy Eucharist, and in several of the BCP prayers and collects, we affirm that God's kingdom is "now and forever."  But the truth be known, I suspect we are usually thinking "forever" more than "now"--well, really, more like "Sometime later that I don't really understand, after I'm dead, and I'll think about that one later."


Most of us know that "living in the now" or "living in the moment" is a highly prized spiritual discipline.  For folks in various twelve step programs, "Just for today" is a key facet of their recovery.  Many of us have read Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" more than once.  I imagine many of us with spiritual leanings like to claim at least novice, and maybe even intermediate, mastery of this discipline.  The evidence in our minds is that it allows us some degree of spiritual peace, so it's our tendency to have, or at least fake, passable knowledge in the concept.


Yet the fact remains that it's way easier to think about the Realm of God as being a "later" rather than a "now" proposition.  If anything, the world tends to scream its broken-ness at us on TV and in the news, as well as our own personal relationships.  How can God's kingdom exist now, when the world is rife with violent crime, abject poverty, personal failure, natural disasters, and constant disappointment?


We find ourselves in a paradox--we can intellectually sign on to the concept of the "now" of holiness, but our heart tells us otherwise too many times  It seems to be an acceptance of risk we dare not bear.


I only know one place in my experiential realm where I really, truly understand the "now" of "now and forever"--it is in the final half of the final inning of an important baseball game with two out, and the home team behind.  Sporting events with clocks teach us there's a place where the outcome is academic, and our best efforts become for our own self-esteem rather than affect the outcome.  The clock-less aspect of baseball, however, reminds us that we truly are building God's kingdom as we speak and it reminds us that it requires living in a tension we'd rather avoid.


I was reminded of this in an almost unfathomable place--the tail end of the sixth game of the 2011 World Series.  As a loyal St. Louis Cardinals fan for all of the cognitive aspects of my 51 years, the product of my grandmother's loyalty prior to that, going back to 1926, I can no more fathom "not being a Cardinals fan" any more than I can fathom being any religion than Christian--because I was reared that way.  It's who I am.  So right from the get-go I have a barrier to the "now," because the past is a tap root to my groundedness.  As I watched David Freese at the plate, wearing #23, I could not help but remember that was Ted Simmons' number in another era of my Cardinal-ness.


Additionally, baseball is filled with "tomorrows."  Rain delay?  We'll play tomorrow.  Disappointing series against the Cubs?  There will be another.  Lousy year?  Simply adopt the motto of the old Brooklyn Dodgers--"Wait till next year."

It's easier to live in the glories of the past, or fantasize about the projections of the future, than to simply breathe and be alive during that last out in the last inning. I thought about how stressful it was for me, a mere fan to watch David Freese stand in the batter's box with two down in the 9th and tie it up, and my palpable disappointment in stranding the go-ahead run in that inning.  If that wasn't enough, I was not even given the mercy to live it once and be done with it--I had to repeat the same process with Lance Berkman in the 10th, but with a different outcome--Freese's walk-off home run that followed.  Every pitch became excruciating.  I wanted to turn off the TV and go to bed, to save myself the stress.  I wanted to distract myself with junk mail or get a snack and have the possibility of loss not be in my direct vision.  But I didn't, because I could not, and remain loyal to myself.  Even then, in my faith, I wavered--more than once I thought, "Well, just don't strike out looking.  Be swinging if you strike out."


That's also true with our spiritual lives in community.  It's just way easier to think about how God interacted with people in Biblical times, or brush aside any of our pains, paradoxes, or puzzlements with a wave of the hand and a curt, "Well, it will be different in Heaven."  We don't like to stay too long in the idea of what we are doing right at this moment in the here and now has the ability to help shape and form the Heaven that will be--even in the act of our failures and disappointments.  We don't like to do mission and consider the possibility it will fall flat, while we are doing it.  We don't like to come to church in difficult or uncomfortable parish times when there's the risk we could actually be snubbed at the Peace.  We don't like to throw our heart into a new activity for the Glory of God and find that almost no one came.  Those things hurt--brutally so, in fact, and there's just no good way of saying otherwise.  

I think that's true from the clergy side, too.  I can't imagine the priest or deacon of an angry or dysfunctional parish relishes stepping into the fray every Sunday.  The pain of following a call, that ends with the curt vestry meeting and the call to the Bishop to ask to "dissolve the bonds of pastoral affection" can't possibly feel like God's plan is working at that moment.  

But when I am sitting in a good place in my spirituality, and look back, I discover that the good parts of who I am at this moment and who our communities are at this moment would not have been the same, had these awful things not occurred.  When we open ourselves up to the possibility that these times are merely lessons in formation, rather than things where our control yielded "right" and "wrong" choices, we discover that it wasn't about "us" at all.  We just happened to be that batter in the lineup at that time, and what we did simultaneously mattered and didn't matter.  It was not an "either/or" proposition, but instead, it was "now and forever" working simultaneously.


I believe we are probably most fully in the now of "now and forever," not when we feel secure and confident about seeing God in everything, but when seeing God in everything is the hardest.  The faith to the notion that we are continually loved by God--that our striking out or getting on base does not affect this love, it only affects how we view each other in community--is a fearful proposition.  But if we can merely stay in the batter's box, it is when we begin to see our own shape and form within the Kingdom of Heaven, and the Heaven of Forever gets a little closer to the Heaven of Now.

"Live this life and do what ever is done in a spirit of thanksgiving. Abandon attempts to achieve security, they are futile. Give up the search for wealth, it is demeaning. Quit the search for salvation, it is selfish. And come to comfortable rest in the certainty that those who participate in this life with an attitude of thanksgiving will receive its full promise." 

-- St. Benedict

Recently, I watched the movie "Wit" again, in a rather paradoxical week centered around "health." It's hard to believe it's been almost ten years since I saw it.  The first time I saw it, I had not been relocated to Kirksville for long, and it was before I found my way back to the church, and in some ways, my life was starting over.  But it was very easy for me to identify with Emma Thompson's portrayal of English professor Vivian Bearing--an early middle aged, solo woman, tough and acerbic, who paradoxically taught about "love" through the poetry of John Donne with a very analytical, dispassionate surface.  In the movie we see that this journey from the world of the healthy living to the world of the terminal cancer patient is more solo than we would like, simply because it's a journey others cannot physically take.  But we also see how her personality makes this even more solo--she is involved with a clinical research trial in which very few people can withstand its rigor.  Her toughness, I believe, is a part of her ability to endure it.


Yet, we discover she endures it to die anyway.  We feel the futility in that, although there are many layers more than simply "futility."  It's also what we don't see that is important.  We don't see her reaching out to a support group, we see relatively few people in this movie other than the health care team.  There is no sudden need to embrace humanity in a different way.  This might not seem fulfilling to some watching the movie, but as a person possibly cut a little bit out of this mold myself, I get that.  I saw it more as "this is kind of who she was before her ovarian cancer, and this is who she chooses to remain to be in this journey."  She stays more or less true to herself.  We see a few regrets in the flashbacks she experiences, the times she realizes she was a little less than kind to others, at times she yearns for a little more kindness.  Yes, she is transformed in this experience, but it's a transformation that remains true to her deepest essence of self.


This most recent time I watched it, I had just finished my annual run of "health maintenance" with its usual paradoxes.  Once again, in some ways, this year, I am the picture of health.  It's not typical these days to be over 50 and be on no medications whatsoever.  But in other ways, my chronic demons still dog me.  I habitually get "run around the barn" over my mammograms, partly because of the problem with small, dense breasts, and partly because of a family history of a mother who had a significantly sized breast cancer with positive nodes at age 48.  I had to deal with additional mammos again this year; in years past, this has also included ultrasounds and breast MRI's, and visits to breast cancer specialists.  I am no fool--although I've managed to escape biopsy year after year, I realize I have a high chance this will not happen forever.


I had a little fun bragging about not being on any meds at my age on Facebook, but I also was being quite mum about the mammogram run-around.  Oddly, I don't have much apprehension about that anymore and am rather fatalistic about it.  I have given up worrying about it.  It's out of my control.  I find myself more irritated about the hassle associated with it than anything.


But this time, I keyed up on something entirely different in the movie.  It was the part towards the end of the movie when the decision is made by Vivian's oncologist to put her on a morphine drip rather than patient-controlled analgesia (PCA.)  The first time I watched the movie, I felt anger over her doctor not giving her an option to control her pain herself.  I felt a sense of betrayal to her on the part of the physicians.  It felt like, "Well, she's no good to them now because the chemo failed, so they just don't care how she feels about it."  

I'm no stranger to dying people and what "morphine drip" means.  Once someone is put on a morphine drip, he or she is basically no longer going to be functioning in our world.  It's a time that death is imminent.  It's the beginning of being in a very thin place between this world and the next.  When I watched it this time, I no longer felt that anger.  What I came to realize is all Vivian wanted was for the pain to stop.  What I saw was Vivian's nurse's projections about the PCA.  Her nurse was wanting the option.  I'm not sure, now, seeing this again, that Vivian herself truly cared.  I heard her physician say something that I glossed over the first time I watched it--"She's earned her rest."  What I came to realize this conflict was as much about the fact her nurse had begun to feel a caregiver's intimacy towards Vivian, and she was not ready to end the relationship.


What I realize has happened in the ten years since I first saw this movie, is that I have changed.  Ten years ago, when I projected myself in the place of someone with terminal ovarian cancer, I would have wrestled for every shred of control I could have bargained for in this scenario.  I would have wanted the illusion of control of the PCA pump for as long as I could have withstood it.  You see, there's some control with PCA, but there is also an illusion.  Once you reach the maximum dose per time, you push the button, you hear the "ding," but it doesn't give you any more morphine beyond the programmed limit.  It's a placebo.  It's an illusion of control.  It may or may not control the pain.


Also, ten years ago, I think I would have been more alone in this journey than I believe I would now.  I would have kept everyone at arms' length.  I would still do that to some extent now, but I believe there would be more people allowed closer now.  In the ten years that have elapsed since I first saw this movie, I have entered into community in a different way.  I think when I project myself in this scenario now, I would opt for control of my pain only until I had the opportunity to sacramentalize moving to that thin place in the world of the morphine drip.  I think I'd get the folks I care about the most to be with me, we'd celebrate the Eucharist together, and then, when we all said our goodbyes, it would be time for the morphine drip.


I used to think that "bravery in the face of terminal illness" meant fighting as long as I could.  As the years go by, and I watch people I know move from this world to the next, I have come to realize the true bravery is more about making the best choices--best not just for self, but in the way that creates more lasting meaning for those left to carry on.  I have become more willing to accept that the true bravery is knowing when to enter the thin places with an accepting heart.


The other striking thing about this movie is just before her death, the return of her mentor, now quite aged, for one last visit.  In the end, it is not the multilayered, complex words of John Donne that give Vivian comfort--in fact, even in her opiated state she makes it clear it is NOT what she desires.  Instead, it is the words of the childhood story, "The Runaway Bunny."  Yet we see the multiple metaphorical layers just the same.


It is why I am grateful I have many modest-sized chunks of the Book of Common Prayer embedded in my neurons.  I think even if I were in a state where my sensorium was clouded, some of those would never leave me.  In that sense, I would never be alone in the thin places.


Ten years later, this is still a fascinating and deep enough movie to move me to tears--but in different places now.  I feel less of the anger I used to feel about the dance of medicine, terminal illness, and self than I used to--and I am now reminded that as children of God, we should never fear the thin places.

(This post originally appeared in Daily Episcopalian, November 1, 2011)

Sometimes the saint is loved not simply for his closeness to God but for his patent humanity.  The saint has a temper, flies off the handle, loses his or her cool in pursuit of a great ideal.  St. Jerome, the first translator of the Bible into Latin, was famously irascible, once writing that one of his detractors "walked like a tortoise."  To take another example, St. Peter is beloved not only because he was a great apostle, but for his many flaws: denying Jesus three times before the crucifixion, among them.  Holiness makes its home in humanity.  That insight says, “They’re not perfect.  Maybe I could aspire to this level of achievement.”

--James Martin 


Nothing separates "The people who are good at crafts" from "The people who are ordinary at crafts" quite like an origami bird.


Now, at its most basic level, an origami bird is a rather simple thing.  After all, children do origami all the time.  But give some origami paper to adults, and it can suddenly morph from a child's fun pastime to a relentless exercise in self-browbeating.

One of the things we decided to do for All Saints Sunday was make strings of origami cranes that folks could write names of the departed "saints" in their lives and string the birds around the sanctuary, as if they were winging their way through the gap between Heaven and Earth.


Easy, right?


Two of my best friends in the parish decided to take on the task of folding the cranes.  Now, they are both what we call "crafty women" in these parts.  Not crafty like devious or sneaky, but they are really good at those little crafts that lots of women like to do.  They take to that stuff like a duck to water (or should I say a crane to water?)


Well, one of them went out of town on vacation and the other one was feeling a little challenged by the number of cranes that needed to be made.  Quintessential dummy me, I blurted out, "Oh, I made origami birds in grade school all the time!  I know how to do that!"  Next thing I knew, I was meeting her at the store to buy paper that met her approval, and was given a sheet of instructions and one made by the person who left town, to use as a model.


I gulped.  Hers was perfect.


As I looked at that crane, I started feeling the weight of every flashback I could muster from grade school art class.  Nothing I ever made in art class was ever "the best."  I think only one time was any of my art ever shown in the display cases in the hall, and I think the art teacher felt sorry for me that time.  When we had fundraisers at school using "kid art," no one bid on my creations (the fact my own family never bid on it, either, ought to have told me something.)


I realized I was doing this because of loyalty to my two friends, and possibly so that their slightly imperfect cranes would look "good enough" next to my definitely imperfect cranes.  Mine looked fairly okay, but they chronically seemed to have a bill problem.  Some of them could have passed for pelicans.  Some of them, it looked like a cat had grazed their tails.  I had some problems with blowing gently into them to "puff them up."  I had to trash a few of them from blowing so hard their spines exploded.


It was another of those times I was reminded there was a reason I went into a medical specialty that the job was to take things apart rather than sew them together.


The other important thing I learned was "Don't make origami cranes when you're watching the Cardinals blow a lead in the fifth game of the World Series."  My cranes met with a couple of casualties--a few got tossed at the TV, and hapless, unfortunate member of my paper aviary got his little head ripped off.  (Interestingly enough, I decapitated a red one.  Coincidence?  I think not.)


But after a while, I realized when I looked in my plastic bag of imperfect cranes and feeling a little grumpy that mine "were not as good," they looked back with quite a few colors.  In my compulsion to make "perfect" cranes and setting unrealistically high expectations for myself, and over-obsessing about each and every little fold, I had neglected to notice that, subconsciously, I was choosing paper from every shade and hue of the rainbow.


Suddenly, another flashback came to me from those grade school art years.  A long buried memory emerged--I used to love to try to use every color that was given to me in an art project.


Historically, on All Saints Day, we focus on the "perfection" of the saints--that they are models of holiness, and we feel we can never attain that kind of perfection.  But the more I read about the lives of the saints, the more I recognize they were wildly, crazily IM-perfect.  St. Ignatius of Loyola is my favorite case in point--he was on his way to kill a fellow for profaning the Blessed Virgin Mary, and had it not been for his mule taking a particular fork in the road, he would have been a murderer instead of a saint.


When we over-focus on that illusion of perfection in holiness, we miss the bigger and better message--the spectrum of hues and tones and bright and muted colors that make up the Company of Heaven.  We forget to see the holiness within irascibility--incredible holiness, actually, because it is when the Light of Christ streams through the cracks and fissures of our caked-on layers of human irascibility that it is most noticeable and intense.  We don't always want to believe that the saints, more often than not, are clothed in a robe with grease stains, wear rusty, crooked halos, and have muddy shoes.  Those muddy shoes?  Feet of clay--exactly like our own.


When we accept that possibility, the saints lose their two-dimensionality.  They can no longer remain monochromatic.  Much like the citizenry in the movie "Pleasantville," they gain the power of living color and depth, as the revealed truth washes over them.  They truly become, as the old hymn proclaims, sacred people that you have met "in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea."

("John Wyclif reading the Bible at Gannet," by Ford Madox Brown, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

(This post originally appeared on the Speaking to the Soul blog, Sunday, Oct. 30, 2011)

Readings for the feast day of John Wyclif, October 30:
Psalm 33:4-11
Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 43:26-33
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 4:13-20


John Wyclif was noted for his belief that believers had a direct relationship with God, with no requirement for the church or the priestly caste to act as intermediary, and this is most manifest in his translating the Latin Vulgate Bible into English.  Through this contribution to the Anglicanism, he most personifies the opening words of today's reading from Hebrews--"Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart." (NRSV)


I first learned about the business of separating joints from marrow around age 10, when it became one of my household duties to "cut up the chicken." Now, this was one of my favorite tasks, because I was allowed to use large, sharp knives with very little supervision and very little admonishment other than "Don't cut your finger off."  My mother, to save money, usually bought a whole chicken at the grocery store rather than pre-cut parts.  I learned very quickly there was both a bit of skill and a great deal of satisfaction in learning to cut through the joints of a whole fryer.


One of the tricks I learned was to let the weight of the chicken help me.  I quickly learned to hold up the whole chicken by the wing, find the joint space, and "pop" it through the dangling chicken, letting it fall on the cutting board.  I also learned to cut the breast in such a way there would be a "wishbone piece" in it.  Having the ability to get to make a wish every time we had fried chicken was a real treat.


Having a relationship with God through the living and revealed Word is not much different, really.  We can sit in the pews on Sunday and have Scripture served up for us, like a plate of fried chicken, and enjoy a very fine feast, courtesy of the lector, the deacon, and the priest, but it's just not the same as when you are allowed to "cut it up yourself."  Nothing opens up Christianity quite like taking up the Bible as a daily spiritual discipline, and it's pleasantly surprising how easy it becomes in a short time.  The Episcopal Church's Daily Office allows us to go through the bulk of the Bible in two years' time (and the Psalms every seven weeks!)


Granted, our initial attempts at regular Bible reading may feel clumsy, and our ability to cut into it incisively at first might seem a little tentative, but a good commentary, study Bible, or study group can act as a whetstone for the knife edge of our spiritual imaginations.  In fact, there are several sites on the Web that make use of the Daily Office readings.  Help is readily available--there's no chance of "cutting our fingers off."

What we discover over time is once we stop worrying that we can't wrap our minds around the Bible in the same way a seminary graduate can, the words start miraculously wrapping around our hearts.  Hearing the Psalms over and over causes certain verses and phrases to stand out, and hearing the familiar words of the Gospel begin to knit themselves to our own sinews.  Suddenly, the stories are not about ancient people in ancient times, they are about us, in the present moment.  There's something spiritually satisfying about popping through the joint of a parable and feeling the relief of the weight of the world drop from us, with a lighter heart.  Most importantly, it becomes as much of a daily habit as brushing our teeth, and we will begin to miss it, if circumstances cause us to accidentally omit it.


Then, when we do hear these words on Sunday, they take on new meaning and allow us to become more discerning oracles in our community of faith.  We start seeing everyone else's faults a little differently, forgive ourselves a little more easily, and begin to reach out to others in ways we could not imagine.  Because we allowed the people of Biblical times into our imaginations, the people we used to think of as "the other" begin to look and feel more like "us."


Thanks to the life and efforts of John Wyclif, we can taste for ourselves the white meat and dark meat of the revealed Word, and live in the hope that there's always a wishbone.

(Taken on my walk between the lake cabins and Campground #1, Mo. Highway 157, Thousand Hills State Park,  Kirksville, MO, October 7, 2011)

May today there be peace within.
May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.
May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.
May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.
May you be content knowing you are a child of God.
Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise, and love.
It is there for each and every one of us.

--Therese Martin (Therese of Liseaux)


One of the most amazing things about my "stay-cation" in the first part of October was deciding--literally on a whim--to spend the night in one of the cabins at Thousand Hills Lake.  Turned out I was there literally during the peak foliage week.  I could not have planned it.


I'm beginning to be a believer more in the unplanned than in the planned.


Oh, don't get me wrong.  I love it when the things I've planned turn out just right.  There's a pleasure in that.  But there's also an apprehension.  All planned things have a dose of the "what if?" in them.  In all planned things, we have to at least think ahead on them enough so that if something doesn't go perfectly, we have a fallback option.  If, for some reason, imperfections occur, they can overshadow the good, and instead of seeing the good, and instead of a reasonably pleasant experience, we see failure.  It really brings home that old saying, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."


Now, that's not to say I didn't plan this overnight foray at all.  I made my list of what to bring on short notice, and decided I would accept the fact that, if I forgot something, well, I just forgot it, and I would live with the consequences.  I would use my wits to have an acceptable alternative.  I did forget to bring paper towels.  But I solved the problem by inviting one of my friends to a dinner that I grilled on the fire, and the "price of admission" for her was a few paper towels.


Years ago, I used to plan my vacation weeks right down to where I'd stay on which nights, and have expected destinations and set itineraries for each day.  For the last three years, my vacations have been, "I'll go there and see what I see, and do what strikes me."  The only timetables have been tickets for planes and trains.  I've discovered I like this better.


It's also not to say some things DO need precise planning.  For instance, it would be foolhardy and potentially fatal to start across Death Valley--even in a car--without water, or to set out into the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota with no survival gear, no food, and no compass.


But what we discover when we let ourselves be just a little less planned and a little more vulnerable about it, is that we will undoubtedly see and experience things we did not expect.  Whether those things are good or bad is not the point.  It's being aware of the experience and being awake throughout it that matters.


This is true for our spiritual lives as well.  I've thought about Sundays that I have attended worship in times of strife, or turmoil, or uncertainty with a preconceived notion of "what I need to get out of it" on that particular day.  I almost never get it.  Yet, even if I have the same kinds of stressors in my life on a different Sunday, and I go with the notion that I will go simply to see what shakes out that is of value to me, and see it and accept it for what it is, I almost always find I got more than I imagined I would from the experience.  Sometimes, emotionally overwelmingly so. 


That phenomenon is not just about worship.  It's about every single thing I've offered of myself in service to God, and about most of the times I've actually felt the presence of God.  God doesn't tell us, "I'll meet you at 10:35 by the food court and I'll have a red shirt on."  

What I have come to understand is this:  In my plans, I generally have one perfect outcome.  When I give them up, and accept God's plans--plans that do not require either/or decisions or everyone in the story doing my will or following my desires--the possibility opens up for multiple perfect outcomes.