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.
Eastern Bluebirds are flying in front of and behind me as I skate onto the Oxford Conservation Park loop. I’ve had their shade of blue and orange in my head since I first saw a bluebird years ago and they still quicken my heart.
It is a Saturday with nothing on the morning calendar and temperatures looking to move into the mid-90s. This early though, there is a breeze and it’s perfect sitting outside weather.
Books frequently open my mind and expand my worldview. The path I am walking (or skating) I owe in part to a Trappist monk named Thomas Merton. Recently I’ve encountered another Trappist monk Thomas, Thomas Keating.
“Grace is a participation in the Divine nature, it’s not just something added on like an overcoat. It’s a radical transformation of the whole of human nature so that it can be a divine human being, meaning it can exercise freedom, compassion, love…”
Fr. Thomas Keating
From reading his books to watching the documentary, “A Rising Tide of Silence,” Keating and a former student of his, an Episcopal priest named Cynthia Bourgeault, have pointed me to the practice of centering prayer. I’ve made this type of silent prayer part of my mornings for the past month or so, and I hope to keep it in my daily routine.
This morning, I want to go outside, to make this time under my sitting tree. After my bluebird greeting, I have a deer run across the cemetery loop about 10 feet in front of me.
I’m traveling light, just a notebook, pen, and binoculars, and I sit on my skateboard on the shoreline looking out onto the cove.
For centering prayer, they recommend picking a word that can bring you back to the moment, Bourgeault describes the word as being like windshield wipers to wipe away the thoughts that always jump in the way for attention. The word I have been using is “rest.” In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28). Psalm 37:7 says “Rest in the Lord,” which can also be translated as “Be still in the Lord,” meaning be at peace. I find that to be the right approach and mindset for me.
Sitting by the water, I breathe and close my eyes. A breeze is across my skin and in my ears like a conversation and listening, there is a constant concert of songbird voices. I can hear a fish jump in front of me to the left, and I open my eyes to see the rings it left–a cardinal flies low over the water, like it’s his cue to go on. The ascending sun reflects off the water to the right.
I am new to centering prayer, but even with my limited experience, I find that when I let my passing thoughts go, it gives me an opportunity to be closer to God. Keating’s quote that grace is for us a chance to participate in the work God is doing in the world and the love He has for us and for creation. And I can feel that this morning. And sitting alongside a cemetery, where my grandparents, family, and friends are buried, remembering and feeling them, I feel re-connected over and through time, like we are all sharing these remarkable moments.
Keating writes:
“When the presence of God emerges from our inmost being into our faculties, whether we walk down the street or drink a cup of soup, divine life is pouring into the world.”
For most of my life, this kind of quiet prayer time, these morning moments and experiences have been solo endeavors, an introvert’s delight. And I still need plenty of those. But I also find that I can be around people and still be at peace; I can even delight in what other people are doing. Like Keating says, walking down the street, or having a cup of coffee (too early for soup), I want to take those moments with me into the world, to be a part of that divine life pouring into the world . And I am not ready for the next phase of the day to start, so I head to the Oxford Park.
I stop through Oxford Social, the cafe right next to the park, for the first time. A birding friend from my Oxford Community Center days gets in line and we talk birds a bit, and about Third Haven Quaker Meeting House, and about seminary. I walk down to a bench by the river and sit with coffee, the view, conversations off to my right, kids playing on the swings to my left, and a young boy running with his dog.
I pick up John O’Donohue‘s book “Anam Cara,” a favorite book, which Rev. Susie Leight and I will be leading a book study of starting in July, and I come across this:
“Love is absolutely vital for a human life. For love alone can awaken what is divine with in you. In love, you grow and come to your self. When you learn to love and to let yourself be loved, you come home to the hearth of your own spirit… Love begins with paying attention to others, with an act of gracious self-forgetting. This is the condition in which we grow.”
John O’Donohue, “Anam Cara”
And it’s this openness, this paying attention to others, this self-forgetting, letting go of ourselves, letting go of myself, where I seem to be spending a lot of my time of late. O’Donohue continues:
“Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent.”
Maybe this has been a slow build over the last 50 years. Maybe all those different moments I can look back on and feel sitting here now, have all been hints and flickers, breadcrumbs or candles of encouragement. And each epiphany adds to a longing, pushes further into the search. Maybe with the state of the world, the worry, the suffering, the confusion, the time is coming that we need to look at differently and help others do the same; we need to live differently and help others do the same.
Maybe when we have moments of sitting quietly and emptying ourselves out, what’s there that we connect to, is Love (God is Love). And what could be more important to share with each other?
“There’s nothing as whole as a broken heart.” I read that sentence and just stopped. And sat. And let it wash over me. We have two different small groups reading Rachel Held Evans’ book “Wholehearted Faith,” during Lent at Christ Church Easton.
In a chapter titled “Where Stone Becomes Flesh,” she quotes Ezekiel:
“A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26)
If there is anything we need in the world today, it’s to be able to cast off our hard hearts and start working and living with hearts of flesh.
Evans explains it further. She quotes Rabbi Ariel Burger from an interview.
“There’s a Hasidic teaching, from Rebbe Nachman of Breslow: ‘There’s nothing as whole as a broken heart… In these traditions you cultivate a broken heart, which is very different from depression or sadness. It’s the kind of vulnerability, openness, and acute sensitivity to your own suffering and the suffering of others that becomes an opportunity for connection.”
On Thursday night discussing the chapter, someone read this passage, and then added, “I’ve got a broken heart. And if through that, I could help someone else…”
And that’s it. Right there. When we take what we’ve been through, the hurt, the pain, the suffering, and see it and use it and offer it as a way to help others, then love wins.
That’s part of what we are here for. That’s the work that God has given us to do. To love one another.
Loneliness hits us all. So do suffering, loss, and pain. Hopefully so do joy, wonder, and love. But it’s easy to feel like we’re on an island. And then something happens, when maybe just for a moment, we find a connection. Someone says something or we read something and it washes over us–someone else feels that way, or ‘yes, that’s it–that’s the feeling!’ or ‘I can’t believe someone else thinks that!’
So often it’s language that connects us. It gives words to our feelings, our thoughts, our pain, our joy, our curiosity. If you are like me, that’s a feeling I get from reading, and from some writers and poets more than others.
I knew what my first tattoo was going to be the first day we studied William Blake in Dr. Gillin’s British Romanticism class at Washington College. I was 24 years old and we were discussing Blake’s poem, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” It’s a big, unwieldy, hard to get your head around, free form puzzle on first glance and I remember thinking that I didn’t know you could do that in poetry. This morning, looking over different sections of “Proverbs of Hell,” I got that awestruck feeling all over again. Here are some dropped in at random:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
What is now proved was once only imagined.
They are like hand grenades that go off in your mind. He changed what I thought you could do with writing. He spoke things that I hadn’t yet found words for. And now I carry around his engraving “The Ancient of Days” (at the top of the page) on my left shoulder. I remember Dr. Gillin talking about the art saying it was God creating order in the universe.
In that same class we encountered William Wordsworth. And he is a poet who wrote about connected to nature and wonder the way I felt and thought about them. I can’t tell you how many times I have read, quoted, and contemplated his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”
This past fall I had coffee with friend and mentor John Miller. John has been a long-time instructor at Chesapeake Forum, dating back to when it began as “The Academy for Lifelong Learning” at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, where we worked together.
John and I have gotten together for coffee and to talk literature and life over the past couple years, including talking about the passing and great memories of our friend, former co-worker, and John’s co-leader in countless literature classes, John Ford.
As we sat outside along the street in September, John Miller had something on his mind. He started reading aloud from John Milton’s elegy “Lycidas,” in which Milton mourns the drowning of a friend, class mate, and fellow poet and wonders about his own mortality and if our struggle is all worth it.
And the thing we kept coming back to was the way language, the way poetry, can give voice to all the things we feel and think and encounter in this business of being human. The power of language to help us get our heads and hearts around being human.
And Blake and Wordsworth were two other poets who came up in the discussion. And we went back and forth over e-mail and phone calls and what we have coming up over three Zoom sessions on Thursdays, January 27, February 3 and 10, from 10:00 to 11:30am is Milton, Blake and Wordsworth: On Being Human.
This is not an academic study of poetry. This is a look at how poetry can give us the words to help us connect to each other; to help us make some kind of sense of what it is to live a life, to grieve, to see into the heart of things; to connect to God through nature.
I go back to a line that Robin Williams delivers as John Keating, the English teacher in Dead Poets Society:
“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.”
I have held that notion to be exactly so and tried to live my life, at least in part, along those lines.
And that’s the spirit we will approach Milton, Blake and Wordsworth with, as we discuss what it is to be human, and how language and poetry can connect us.
When I worked in restaurants, being “in the weeds” meant you were up to your eyeballs in orders, trying to make sense of everything and get the food out, and kindly don’t talk to me right now unless you are here to help. When I was writing for the Coast Guard, it meant something different.
If you were in a meeting and someone said you were “in the weeds,” it meant you were too far down into the finer details to see the big picture. You needed to zoom out.
Last night, watching the sun and blue sky battling against a weekend’s worth of gray clouds, or this morning, skateboarding around the Oxford Conservation Park and cemetery, “in the weeds” means looking from a different perspective. It is looking at the sky from the terrestrial perspective of being in the weeds. And it shifts things.
It is a way of being grounded, balancing lofty with land. There are times when it is helpful to look closer.
There is a non-profit organization called “The Moth,” which is dedicated to storytelling; to helping people tell their stories, “live, onstage, and without notes.” If we know each other’s stories, we become human to one another. I’m just beginning a book they put together called “Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible.” It’s a collection of stories told on stage, collected around a theme, some by famous people, some by people you’ll meet along the way. As for the title, it:
comes from a story told by Vietnam veteran Larry Kerr. It’s about his intense love for a young woman named Omie, whom he describes as “smart, meltingly lovely, and strong, with a fierce belief in the possibility of occasional magic.” Occasional magic refers to those moments of beauty, wonder, and clarity, often stumbled upon, where we suddenly see a piece of truth about our life. (from the introduction by Catherine Burns)
What if we took the time to get to know people’s stories? Like each of us, stories can be everyday, they can be epic, they can be heartbreaking, they can be uplifting, they can be tragic, they can be miraculous, they can be filled with hope, they can be funny, or some combination of each of those and more. There are more stories than people. And in taking the time to get to know them, we recognize ourselves in each other.
Maybe, on Memorial Day, we can wrap our minds and hearts around the stories of the men and women who have died while serving our country. We can remember them not as numbers or statistics, or even names, but as individuals, with stories and connections; with families, dreams, hometowns, friends; and think about the thread that they are, woven into the tapestry that is our collective story. Each thread is a story, each story a person.
These are stories to remember. And if you remember their stories, tell them.
“Sharing tales of those we’ve lost is how we keep from really losing them.”
Mitch Albom
Today, as I think about being in the weeds, I think about shifting my perspective, being grounded, being connected, seeing into the heart of something too easily overlooked. I think about people and their stories, and remembering them.
