In the Ice

When freezing rain moved through in mid-January, it covered the trees and bushes with ice. The crabapple tree in my front yard still has a few fruits, not yet eaten by the birds, and they glistened through the ice like red jewels.

The ice-coated crabapples are like the soul that is frozen in grief or despair. Ice covers the fruit, stems, twigs, and branches, isolating them from the winter air, just as suffering isolates the spirit from joy and comfort. But the beauty of the soul is still visible. The fruit survives and will become food that sustains life. Within the fruit are the seeds that will grow into new life. The crabapple waits. Spring will come.

We are all connected to everything that is, even when we can’t feel it or even perceive it. We all have times of ice, times when we feel disconnected and paralyzed. But the Spirit of light and life is with us, even when we don’t believe it exists. The ice will melt.

Evidence

Thunder at a distance,
And the light fading at the end of day.
The wind stirs in the trees, little new leaves rustling.
I open the door and walk out into cool rain,
The air clean and warm and the wind lively against my skin.
The scent of earth and new growth fills me with every breath. 

God, let those who don’t believe in resurrection or rebirth
Have one May evening of fresh rain and a soft wind!

 

Sin and Celebration

Some people think we don’t have a sufficiently strong sense of sin in our culture today.  I’d say we don’t have a strong enough sense of the presence of God.

It’s our awareness of God’s presence in our lives that makes it possible for us to live in joy and love rather than sin.  Yes, we are flawed and broken beings.  We make bad choices, deliberately or by accident.  We sin by choice, and we sin unknowingly, out of ignorance or lack of understanding.  Even when we try with all our strength to do what we know is right, we make mistakes.  We are flawed and incomplete, and we stumble and fall.  So yes, we are all sinners.  We all need repentance, and we all need forgiveness.

We are also creatures who belong to God, made in the image of God, made the way we are.  God chose to give us free will.  Even though we can use our free will to make bad choices, we can also use it to choose God, choose love.  So we are more than sinners.  We are lovers, dreamers, beings who hope.  There’s more to our relationship with God than sin and forgiveness.

There are several problems with our contemporary Christian views of sin.  First of all, we’ve focused our notion of sin too narrowly.  We’ve made sin personal and too often ignored our corporate failings.  And then we’ve narrowed our idea of sin almost entirely to issues of sexuality.  We act as if we think the most important thing about our humanity is our sexual behavior.  Do we really think God’s primary concern about us is our sexuality?  Is God really like that?

Our sexuality probably pleases God when it is an expression of love, commitment, and joyful celebration.  I believe God mourns our sexual activity when it debases or abuses others, or when it is based on self-gratification rather than love.  But I also believe that there are other aspects of our daily behavior that cause God as much or more pain, aspects that we too often don’t even think of as sin.

Isn’t it sin to strive so hard to improve the “bottom line” that we force people out of work or require them to work for wages that make life anxious and miserable?  Isn’t it sin to confine food animals so that they live in their own excrement, unable to move, until they’re slaughtered for our dinner tables?  Isn’t it sin to hate others who are different from ourselves?  Isn’t it sin to exaggerate differences and demonize other people?  Isn’t it sin to allow fear to so control our lives that we cannot behave generously, kindly, lovingly toward others?  We’ve defined morality far too narrowly.

Here are some things I think are important moral issues that deserve our concern.

• Justice for everyone – equal and impartial justice.
• Recognition that individuals and groups of people are oppressed, and that oppression is wrong.
• Willingness to speak out against injustice and oppression.
• Kindness toward those in need and those who are suffering.
• Humility in the presence of God, and in the presence of other human beings.
• Responsibility for those who cannot provide for themselves, for whatever reason.
• Responsibility for the earth and everything on it.
• Concern for the safety and health of all.
• Acceptance and understanding of those who do not agree with us.
• Respect for those who think and believe differently.
• Readiness to cherish every individual life with which we are in contact.
• Willingness to pay a price for all these things.

I think these things matter to God, too.

There’s yet another problem with our notions of sin.  When we focus on sin as the most  important element in our relationship with God, we can become lost in our own imperfection.  We can get caught in a vicious circle of sin, repentance, and forgiveness.  Once caught, it can be hard to get out of a devastating awareness of our own imperfections and begin to grow in our relationship with God.  We focus on ourselves, instead of God.  If I’m focused on my own sin, I can come to believe that God’s main function in my life is to take note of my sins, acknowledge my repentance, and forgive me – until I sin again, which I surely will, since I’m a flawed mortal being.  I forget that there’s a whole lot more for God to do in my life.

I believe that, for some amazing reason known only to Godself, God is more interested in growing us than in judging us.  The key to that growth is relationship.  God made us to be in relationship – with God, with one another, with everything in creation.  When my relationship with God is growing and strengthening, my decisions are less destructive, less self-centered.  When I’m aware of God’s presence in me and in everything around me, I sin less and love more.

It’s not though avoidance of sin that we enter into life with God – what some call the Kingdom of Heaven.  It’s through a relationship with God.  We can never completely avoid our own brokenness, but we can live out of our relationship with God rather than that brokenness.  When we allow our relationship with God to grow, we are living life eternal, here and now.  And in that life, our tendency to sin is diminished and even healed.

God made us to be joyful, to celebrate the goodness and beauty of existence.  We all suffer and sin.  But we all can also love, and out of that love comes celebration.  When we focus on our sin, we forget the importance of love and celebration.  Sin is important, but love trumps sin every time.  Jesus showed us that.

 

An Easter Journey

We are all creatures of suffering and joy.  Whether we recognize God or not, God is always with us in our suffering and our joy.The journey that Cleopas and his unnamed companion took to the village of Emmaus on the afternoon of the Resurrection was truly an Easter journey, moving through the mystery of the Cross to new life.  The revelation they encountered in Jesus is exactly where the cross was leading them – exactly where our journey to the cross leads us today.  Alleluia!

 

The Road To Emmaus

We wept as we walked, Cleopas and I,
Going along the dusty road to Emmaus,
Talking over the heavy news we carried to our friends there,
News of our Lord’s dying, nailed to the wooden cross,
Stripped and beaten and crowned with thorns,
The Romans jeering and the disciples scattered,
The sun darkened and the temple curtain torn in half.
We wept, and we remembered the last three days
Full of fear and the sound of weeping, stifled.
As we walked, a man came up with us
And asked us what sad thing we talked of.
So we told him of Jesus, and our hopes for redemption
From the trampling boot heels of the Romans,
And the death of all our hopes on the cross.
And we told him the strangest news of all,
The tomb empty in the morning light, the stone
Rolled away from the door, and the angel’s message.
Then he began to draw together strands of scripture,
Words of prophecy that, taken all together,
Laid forth the life and death of our Lord in a new light,
A clear message of salvation.
We ceased to weep, and our dead hopes, crushed beneath the heavy cross,
Stirred into the beginning of new life.
And then, when he broke bread with us that evening in the tiny village,
Children’s shouts still ringing at their dusty games in the gathering twilight,
We saw in the stranger’s face our risen Lord,
And suddenly the world was full of light,
And the beauty of the evening was piercingly intense,
More filled with hope than any hour had been before.
We were clean again, the marks of tears gone from our cheeks,
Fresh, the road’s dust and our sweat all gone.
Surrounded by light more brilliant than a thousand stars,
We moved back along the road to Jerusalem,
And our steps were as light as joy.

The End of Winter

In the last hour of winter,
(forty-seven degrees and cloudy),
I wait for the equinox.
Fifty minutes now to spring.
Snow lasted until ten days ago,
cold lingered longer.
The bulbs are only now showing a little green,
and the buds of the maples are tightly brown.
Will this bleak winter never end?

Of course spring will come, and summer after –
too hot, bleached, drought-defined.
But in the brief transition, longed-for,
awaited without patience,
there will be redbud hiding among the trees,
blazing forsythia and magnolias full of cream,
an Easter glory of dogwood and crabapples.

Tomorrow, the forecasters say,
will be sixty degrees and sunny.
How am I to wait?

Twilight

I
The sky is light,
But the frozen earth
Darkens into twilight.
Overhead, branches interlace
Against the deepening blue.
Winter lingers into March;
Snow lies in dirty heaps
At the edges of the road.

II
Between day and dark, between winter and spring,
We are beings in transition, moving from this dormant earth
Into whatever realms may be, or to oblivion.
Does it matter?
The day moves through crystalline shadow into night,
Signed by the elegant hieroglyphs of trees.
The dirty snow gives way to the buds of the maple.

III
God, if you are God, surely you live
In the transitions of our lives,
And we are your fingers in the earth.

 

A Spiral Journey

Some of the most beautiful things we encounter are spirals.  Think of a spiral staircase, a nautilus shell, a galaxy spinning in space.  Some of the most terrifying things we encounter are spirals.  Think of a tornado, a cyclone, a hurricane, a whirlpool.

The journey inward is a spiral, and it can be terrifying or beautiful.  If you’ve never practiced introspection, the very thought of looking inward can be frightening, like a dark passageway in an unknown neighborhood.  It’s hard not to think of what might be there.  If you’ve cultivated a habit of introspection, however, you know that you’re more likely to gain understanding, balance, and peace when you look within.  What you encounter on the journey may be painful, difficult, depressing, or frustrating.  But it will not destroy you; it will strengthen you and open you to God’s work in you.

There are certain questions that are useful in self-exploration.  Not surprisingly, they can be summed up in the journalist’s old list:  who, what, where, when, why, and how.  There are endless permutations on these six basic questions.  Here are a few to begin with.

Who am I?

What are the forces that have shaped me?

Where am I in the universe?

When am I in time?

Why do I exist?

How do I respond to my existence?

These questions and their many variations do not form a simple line or a straightforward melody.  They’re more like motifs in a fugue, or shapes in an abstract painting.  They turn back in on themselves, each leading to another and another and back again, in a complex spiral.  Exploring one leads us to all the others and back again to the first, but not at the same point where we began.  As we re-encounter each question, it presents itself in a more complex form, requiring further investigation and deeper understanding.  The journey never ends.  We spiral more and more deeply into self-awareness and self-understanding.  Along the way, we come to better know our world-self and our soul-self, and we find the sacred within us.

World-Self, Soul-Self

Part of the inward journey is the discovery that the self we are in the world – in our work, our relationships, our daily activities – is not all there is to us.  Some wisdom traditions speak of the true self, that inward, God-connected self that is different from the false self we present to the world.  The false self, in this way of thinking, is the mask we wear in the world, the roles we play, the façade we put up to prevent our flaws and weaknesses from being known.  This false self is seen as the work of the ego, that part of us that is concerned with our individual safety and well-being.  In this view, part of our job is to overcome the promptings of the ego and live as fully as possible in our true selves.  Our task is to let go of the demands of the ego for security, status, achievement, approval, and pleasure, and live and act out of that true self that is connected to God.

I have some problems with this way of thinking.  It’s too much like dualism, which argues that the material world is bad and only the things of the spirit good.  Dualism requires the rejection of much of life and experience.  If the concrete, physical elements of my self are bad or weak or false and I am to overcome the flesh and the world, and live in the spirit, then I must reject a major part of myself.

I’d rather look at it all from a more inclusive perspective.  My world-self, the self that lives in a world full of challenges, competition, struggles, relationships, loss, deprivation, fulfillment, and enjoyment, is a very real part of me.  That self can be petty, negative, frightened, anxious, and judgmental.  It can lead me to live in ways that are spiritually and physically destructive.  It makes a lot of mistakes.  It’s dominated by the self-protective story-maker we call the ego, and it’s very selfish.

Behind that self, its foundation and support, is my soul-self, the image of what God created me to be.  When I recognize and come to know that soul-self, I can learn to put my world-self in context, and my experiences in the world in perspective.  My goal is not to empty myself or put away all that I am in the world.  My goal is to accept my world-self as a part of me, and to allow my soul-self to fill up all the empty places in my world-self, fill out its flawed and limited outlines, so that I become more nearly complete and able to allow God’s Spirit in me to flow out into the world as I encounter it.

The world-self is not evil.  It’s not even bad.  It’s probably necessary for our survival in the physical world.  But it doesn’t have to be in charge of who I am and what I do.  Its fears and anxieties don’t have to dominate my life.  The more aware I become of my soul-self, the more I live out of that inner self, the less important the demands of the ego become.  I can accept the losses, threats, suffering, pleasure, and excitement of ordinary life as part of what is, and part of me – and let them go.  When I understand and accept all that I am, I can choose to allow love and connection to dominate my actions and responses.  When that happens, I can begin to see God in others.  When that happens, I become part of the great flow of giving and receiving, emptying and filling, that is the truest and most real form of living.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, 2013

What becomes of them, the wise, the visionary, the passionate,
After they have been made legend, source of tales for schoolchildren,
Cause of national holidays?
What becomes of their passions, their faith, their beliefs?
Where do their dreams go to fade into public speeches?
Where do those who shared their dreams find strength to move?

Are we not still bound, still subject –
Not to kings but to political and corporate power,
Decisions that can ruin lives made far above us
In the mists of wealth and brute strength?
Are we not still terrorized by angry forces
Mangled in the pits that power creates?
Are we not still bigots, afraid of what we cannot understand?
Are we not still slaves to forces that we dimly see and cannot resist?
Are we not still devoted to self-defense, rejection, aggression, hatred?

Where are the dreams we had – freedom, equality, justice, love?

I still remember that black day of a dark April in a dreadful year of destruction,
Remember endless waves of shock and horror and despair.
Most of all fear.  Who were we, that such death could happen?

We are who we are, corrupt, self-serving, frightened.

On this particular day and others like it, we speak of heroes and martyrs,
People who lifted us to our higher selves for a moment.
We make them legends, forgetting who they were.
We speak of them as from a distance, safe from the fire of their dreams,
Safe from their righteous anger, their all-consuming love.
We are diminished from vision to revision to television.

We are who we are, divided, self-centered, judgmental, afraid.

On this particular day, we watched a half-African man –
Fit symbol of our contentious melting-pot of a nation –
Celebrate his second inauguration,
Knowing that his dreams, too, are thwarted and defeated
By powers beyond his control, or ours.

Those powers are us, writ large.
We are who we are, suspicious, angry, uncertain, terrified.

And yet we remember hope, and love, and dreams, if distantly.
We remember passions spurred by generosity and grace,
Indignation and anger fuelled by thoughts of justice,
Purpose without defense.

We are who we are.
Perhaps the buried dreams will rise again.

The Griefs and Gifts of Being Alone

Family-oriented holidays are difficult times for people who are alone.  Anyone who has lost a close family member or a dear friend knows how hard the first holidays are without that person’s presence.  Fortunately, most people have other family members to help them through those times of remembering and grieving.

People who are now single through death or divorce, but who have children and grandchildren, still have family and a strong connection to coming generations.  But that connection is much weaker for those who are widowed or divorced and childless, and those who have never married.  People who don’t have close family members to be with in those times of loss carry an extra burden of grief.

This came home to me with special poignance recently, when an older friend died.  She and her family had generously shared many special holiday times with me.  Of all the friends we had in common, I’m the only one who has no children and grandchildren.  Our friends’ primary relationships are with their families.  My primary relationships are with my friends.  The loss of such a close friend is hard.

For those who are alone, daily life is quite different from the lives of people with family.  We have work to do and friends to see, but many of our hours are passed in silence.  No one shares the burdens and tasks of everyday life; if we don’t cook or clean or shop or pay bills, it doesn’t get done.

We may have learned how to be alone without being lonely, but we still can feel the lack of intimate companionship.  We feel the lack of physical touch, and the lack of the warmth of another presence in our lives.  If we are sick, there is no one to bring us a glass of water or take us to the doctor.  If we are unhappy, there is no one to share our thoughts or cheer us up.  If we are joyful, there is no one to laugh with us.

The blessing in being alone is the room it can make for God.  In stillness, the presence of God is easier to feel.  People with families may have to work much harder than we do to find that stillness.  When there is no human person to share joys and sorrows, it can become very natural and simple to share them openly with God.  God is with us all, all of the time, but it may be easier for those who are alone to be conscious of that presence.

What we need in our aloneness is complex and difficult to define.  Some of us need support and encouragement in dealing with health problems or the burdens of financial problems or even poverty, problems that are especially hard for people without families.  Some of us need fellowship in doing things that people with partners take for granted – going to movies and concerts, eating out, social gatherings, hiking in the woods.

Some of us are hungry for spiritual growth in directions that are more difficult for persons with family responsibilities to take.  We may not be as interested in building intimate relationships with human beings as we are in building intimate relationships with God.

When we find one another, we are blessed by a feeling that we are not so peculiar, after all.  When we find one another, we have a lot to share.  We need better ways to find one another.