Nothing But Questions...

Have you ever been hamstrung in prayer?

It’s been such a long time since I’ve prayed for specifics—truth is, I don’t know the path to Ultimate Good for individuals in my life. I can quickly pray for light and truth, for goodness and mercy, for hope, for open hearts and open minds, but I find it so hard this morning to say, “God, give him his job back.”

I don’t know the future, and I don’t know the path to Ultimate Goodness for him. What if the loss of this job IS part of the path to the Ultimate Good in his life.

It’s so damn hard.

I’ve been watching the road construction around our area with a lot of interest. I dreamed a number of years ago that roads were being torn up and there was a lot of mess and chaos because a new way was being built—a new overpass was going up.

And now, here we are in the middle of the mess with almost every major road in our little area under construction. Much of my day is spent taking detours, and I often hear in my spirit what I heard all those years ago in my dream, “You can’t get there from here anymore.”

It seems much of lives, both private and public, in our homes, in our country, and in the world around us is now “under construction.” Chaos is everywhere. Many lives are in chaos. The young are dying from addiction and/or boredom, our elderly are dying from neglect and poverty, our government is hamstrung in making decisions, and I suspect at least part of the truth is that we are in uncharted waters, everywhere. The world as we knew it has passed away. There’s not much safety or predictability anymore. Working for a living and saving for a rainy day doesn’t work anymore. The rules that were applicable in our parents’ day are simply not working today.

And I don’t seem to have an answer anymore. It used to be so easy, “God will supply all our needs,” except “he” doesn’t. People who love God die from starvation with their needs unmet. “Love will find a way,” except it doesn’t seem to for a lot of people. I had someone tell me yesterday that God has cursed them. I don’t believe that for a moment, but some lives sure look it.

So back to my prayer time this morning. My plea to God, to the Universe, to the Ultimate Good – how do I pray for people in my life who are in need of prayer—how do I pray with wisdom and compassion?

Romans 8 just flashed through my thoughts: For the Spirit prays for us when we in our weakness don’t know how to pray. I want his job back. I want for her to be happy, to feel safe, to find Love. But the truth is I don’t really know much of anything. And this morning, my heart just plain ole hurts. I am grieved—not just at the loss and unhappiness around me, but I’m grieved that life is so uncertain, and the future is so unpredictable. And I’m grieved that my platitudes don’t work for people anymore. And I’m grieved I can’t say them with conviction anymore.

So, this morning I offer my grief and uncertainty to the Ultimate Good and just whisper, “Help.” “Help him, help her, even help Congress…” And I trust “help” will come—it may not look like I expected or hoped, but I still believe “Love never fails”. Love will win when it’s all said and done. I think.

The Night of Pressing

It came unexpectedly
much quicker and quieter than I was prepared for –
the black hole, the dark night
the freefall - round and round,
over and over - no ground beneath my feet
no sense to it all.
Instead of the usual certitude
doubts filled my mind
and nothing but loneliness filled every cell of my body.

Nothing was real.
Nothing was settled.
Nothing was true.
Nothing was holy.
There was no friend to walk with me,
no one coming on a white horse to rescue me,
just the senseless freefall into black nothingness.

I didn’t realize it was Gethsemane.
This was too black to be a holy place,
too empty to be so full,
too senseless to compare with His dark night.

“He began to be grieved and agitated.”

Sorrow-full,
sadness filling every pore,
a sense of loss,
regret,
disappointment,
hopelessness
finality.

And the olive sits under the weight of the press -
for how long?
For me, it was five years.
An eternity separated from my God,
lost as lost can be,
the fairy tale over,
nothing left but the falling, the darkness, the void.

Is there any oil?
Who knew half the weight of the olive is oil.
There is oil,
but sometimes it takes a long time to press an olive.


As I painted this morning, I thought of a number of friends who seem to be going through a "pressing" of their own; they are in freefall. My prayers are for you this morning. No one knows when it's coming, no one knows how they'll respond to the pressing, and no one knows when the darn thing will ever end. It feels so good to feel the earth press beneath your feet as the freefall begins coming to an end. My prayer is that you'll just hang on until you land. There will be arms to catch you.

The Music Playing Behind The Door Of Despair

I am so grateful to be part of a Centering Prayer group at St. Timothy’s. For the past few months, we’ve been chewing on Martin Laird’s little book, Into The Silent Land, A Guide To The Christian Practice of Contemplation, and it’s been a delicious “chew”. I have a tendency to skim through lots and lots of books, so taking a chapter a week, sometimes only a half-chapter, has forced me to slow down, chew well, and digest. Now isn’t that a picture for a fast eater like me?!

We’re nearing the end of the book and the past couple of readings have been on our “wounds”. It’s so good: “When the student’s ready, the teacher comes.”

I’ve been thinking of someone I know, and praying for them—and wondering how to get past “the blame game”. We all get caught up in it so often—how do we get past it? How do we turn off the tapes so that transformation can seriously begin?

And this morning, Martin Laird has been my teacher.

“Sometimes…self-loathing masquerades as a compulsive need to blame others for things that go wrong…The problem is that this is just another mind game. Self-loathing is just another video we’ve learned to watch. This is actually an obstacle to the humility required to see straight through our wounds into God. For true humility is the wide open space of self-knowledge that opens onto God…Self-knowledge cannot end in the awareness of our faults and failings. It opens onto God…Perfect humility is meeting the unfathomable love of God, who is the ground of our being…In order for humility to mature it must blossom into self-forgetfulness.”

I know from experience that I blame others because I can’t stand the finger pointing at me. And I forget just how fickle “self-esteem” is.

For several years back in the 90’s, I listened to a guy named Mike Bickle who’s one-stringed guitar constantly played the tune of the Beauty of God. He didn’t encourage us to look at our sin, our guilt or our shame, but taught us instead to behold ourselves in the face of the Beloved. He taught me to see myself in God’s face. Meister Eckhart said, “The eye with which I see god is the same eye with which God sees me.” And Bickle has taught thousands that God sees us as beautiful, kind, good, complete, and whole. I will forever be grateful for his teaching.

But when I forget that teaching, I tend to blame in order not to be seen at all. We all tend to blame—it’s easier than looking through our garbage until we see the face of God—pure unbounded LOVE. And that’s where we discover the truth of ourselves.

Laird quotes part of a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, entitled, “From Failure Up”:

“O God: can a man find you when he lies with his face
downwards
And his nose in the rubble that was his achievement?
Is the music playing behind the door of despair?”

Laird confirms that silence and contemplation are precisely where we learn “to listen, not to confusing shrills of despair, but to ‘the music behind the door of despair.’”

So that’s what I pray for my friend this morning—and for all of us when we are playing the blame game—that we will stop, be quiet, and listen through all the shrill noise of self-loathing, all the way through to the other side, the music of God’s Everlasting and Always Sure Love, the very ground from which we are made.

The Harrowing of Hell

A couple of weeks ago, the conversation on our Coming Home FB page got around to the subject of hell, and a friend reminded me of Cynthia Bourgeault's discussion of hell in her book, The Wisdom Jesus.

Part of her discussion includes this exerpt from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

"That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, fired into it, a blue streak of non-being, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very compromising terms that are the only ones that being offers.

"The world has to sign a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which everything, even every hydrogen atom is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die...The world came into being with the signing of that contract."
(end of quote)

Dillard's picture of that "blue streak of non-being" set Bourgeault to thinking. She continues writing:

"It had not previously occurred to me that this irreducible brokenness might in fact be part of the givens of this realm itself. It was simply not one of the options that my classical theological training would lead me to consider. In our usual theological take on the Christian mystery, with the emphasis so much on personal sin, we lose sight of the fact that death and finitude really are collective, the backdrop against which everything else unfolds."

She takes the conversation further by writing about the Christian take on darkness and light, and tells about a woman who questioned, "How could this darkness exist? How can we remove this darkness from the planet."

Bourgeault's respnse was, "Don't you see that by judging it you only make it worse? By trying to stop the black, to make it all white, all good; by saying that this we can accept, and this we must reject, you keep empowering that cycle of polarization that creates the problem in the first place." Bourgeault continues, "I think this has always been the fatal trap in the 'God is Light' roadmap, the orientation that cleaves to the light by trying to deny or reject the shadow."

Then she began writing about The Harrowing of Hell, the idea that Jesus descended to hell before he rose from the dead. That's not found in Scripture, but it is a huge part of Christian Tradition, with the idea even being included in the Creed. So, what did Jesus do there? Tradition teaches that he preached to the unbaptized, but I do love Bourgeault's take...What was Jesus doing there?

"He was just sitting there--surrounded by the darkest, deepest, most alienated, most constricted states of pained consciousness; sitting, if we can imagine it, among all those mirroring faces of the collective false self that we encountered earlier in the crucifixion narrative: the anguish of Judas, the indecision of Pilate, the cowardice of Peter, the sanctimony of the Pharisees; sitting there in the midst of all this blackness, not judging, not fixing, just letting it be in love. And in doing so, he was allowing love to go deeper, pressing all the way to the innermost ground out of which the opposites arise and holding that to the light. A quiet, harmonizing love was infiltrating even the deepest places of darkness and blackness, in a way that didn't override them, or cancel them, but gently reconnected them to the whole."

Thanks for putting up with the long quote, but these are ideas that I've thought myself and now someone's put voice/and words to it. I've pondered Dillard's "blue streak of non-being" that's shot through the whole of creation, and I've pondered Jesus just sitting in hell with us until the light comes--I've pondered it all through Lent. I've gone through my own dark night, and Jesus sat with me. The light's coming again. And I have friends who are sitting in their own hell--their own darkness, and I know Jesus is sitting with them. They may not know it, but I know it, and I can pray it for them--that he stay with them until the light comes again for them.

This isn't one of those paintings I want hanging over my sofa. Not sure I'll ever even enter it in a show; all I know is that I had to paint it as a "Thank you" to the One who is always with us, whether we know it or not or whether we believe it or not.

This I know, True Love Wins--every time.

Ponder Jesus with you in your darkness on this Holy Saturday, then have a blessed Easter tomorrow.

Ash Witness Exhibit - My Lenten Blessing

The consolation, the dignity, the joy of life are that discouragements and lapses, depressions and darknesses, come to one only as one stands without -- I mean without the luminous paradise of art. As soon as I really re-enter it -- cross the loved threshold -- stand in the high chamber, and the gardens divine -- the whole realm widens out again before me and around me -- the air of life fills my lungs -- the light of achievement flushes over all the place, and I believe, I see, I do.

Quote from - Henry James (compliments of Rod McIver)


I love this quote. It was posted by a dear friend this morning Facebook. It perfectly expresses what painting and poetry do for me when I'm in a low place. Lent is kind of sorta that for most of us Christians--it's the depression, darkness, and discouragement before the Dawn breaks. We remember--we remember not having done it well. We remember those we've lost during the last year--especially as we remember what's said when our foreheads are marked: you came from dust; you're going back to dust. Most of us don't want to think of death. There's acutally not much appreciation for it here in the west. But as one of my favorite teachers once said, "You can't be born again without dying first." Truth.

Anyway, a lot of folks don't particularly like Lent, especially because it is our darkess before dawn, our death before resurrection period.

But this year, our pastor Liz Parker caught wind of the Spirit and heard an invitation to the parishoners of St. Timothy's to meditate on our ashes and write or draw or express in some other way what the ashes mean to us. This last Ash Wednesday was one of the most moving I've ever to, and the project of a few of us turning this vast array of photos, paintings and drawings, poetry and prose into an exhibit became one of the most intense Lenten Blessings I can imagine having.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Liz for asking me to help. And a debt of gratitude to the parishioners of St. Timothy's for participating. The Exhibit is YOURS.

Photos of the exhibit may be viewed here: St. Timothy's Ash Witness Exhibit

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

I invited him in
Told him this was his house
“Take off your shoes, stay awhile
make yourself at home.”

“Rearrange the furniture if you like.
You can discard whatever’s in your way,
even if it seems precious to me.”

“Here,
here in my heart,
in this space
make a room of your own
to just be.”

He came in, looked around and smiled,
then walked to the mantle in the Great Room.
He noticed something was missing.
He cleared a place,

then put Her picture there.

I was surprised. He was pleased.
He was home.

The Grasses Know

The Grasses Know

Waves

upon waves

upon waves

purple heads
float on oceans of green
and ochre grasses...

Malkatuh walks through,
and the grasses know.

She is.



My pre-dawn walk yielded little bits of poetry this morning. As I rounded the bend on my return home, the tall grasses moved in the wind. I've seen it before, but today I bowed and whispered "Namaste", and the poem came.

The first write yielded "Ruah" as her name. But as I sat with the Aramaic words of Jesus this morning, expanding on my understanding of the prayer he taught us to pray, I read these lines:

(begin quote)

"Malkuthakh" refers to a quality of rulership...that guide[s] our life toward unity. It could justifiably be translated either "kingdom" or "queendom". From the ancient roots, the word carries the image of a "fruitful arm" poised to create, or a coiled spring that is ready to unwind with all the verdant potential of the earth. It is what says "I can" within us...The word "Malkatuh", based on the same root, was a name of the Great Mother in the Middle East thousands of years before Jesus. The ancients saw in the earth and all around them a divine quality that everywhere takes responsibility and says "I can".

(end quote)

I remembered the grasses blowing in the wind just before dawn, and I remembered the sense that She was walking through them as they recognized her, and I knew they also recognized their own "I can".

That's when I knew Ruah had introduced me to Another, Malkatuh, the "I can".

It's been a happy morning.

Poetry - Journey of a Curious Cat

The Journey of a Curious Cat
(“Get out of your father’s boat
and follow Me;
and let’s go sailing
on the Bottomless Sea”.)

This curious cat has survived her 9th life
by embarking on the journey of a lifetime,
one began with a single step
and a lot of questions.

Yearning for adventure and faraway places,
she’s now sails on the Bottomless Sea,
far from the familiar shore,
smelling the salt air,
watching the birds fly free,
and following her own dreams, thank you very much.

“Home” is where my heart takes me.
“Home” is living my own “I AM-ness.”

(10/23/10 Poetry Retreat, Richard Osler, Surfside Beach)

TO UPSET THE ORDINARY

That was our challenge today while we sat in a circle in a beautiful home on Surfside Beach...13 ordinary human beings were challenged to upset the ordinary and risk becoming poets. We laughed! Last year, we wrote poems describing a bromilead...this year? This time we were thrown into the deep end, and our writing assignments were designed to challenge us and to stretch us enough to allow our unformed wings to unfurl. Richard gave us a couple of exercises. One was called, Secret Identity--we had two minutes to write about our secret identity...

My secret identity is...
I am an eagle soaring...
How high?
How wide is the sky?

Richard, our teacher and mentor graced us with "safe space" and a bag full of tools to aid us in our writing journey. As the afternoon wound down, Richard gave us all a small stone, then shared these words from Adalia Prado with us:

Once in a while God takes poetry away from me.
I look at a stone. I see a stone.

Richard challenged us to see beyond our stones and write what we saw and heard.



I wrote:

Story of a Stone
(raise up a child in the way he should go…)

The teacher explains the difference between rock and stone:
a rock is something we pick up that’s been touched only by nature;
a stone is something fashioned into use by man.

So, who decides the greater value?
What makes one decide the rock has something to offer?

A rock left to nature alone is always and only a rock.
But a rock chosen
then chiseled and tumbled until rough edges are smoothed
becomes a stone—

if we’re lucky and skilled,
a precious stone.

Perhaps value lies in what’s seen with the Unusual Eye.

We were gifted in wonderful ways this beautiful October day. We were given the joy of words and tools to use that grace our words. We were held in a safe place to spread our wings and fly, to begin living our lives as the poets we are.



Thank you Richard for coming and sharing with us. Thank you Andy for nurturing the poet in us. Thank you Sweet Spirit for flowing through us--every single one of us. Today was gift.