Most Saturday mornings, I travel about 45 minutes west to the town of Woodstock, Illinois,  film location for the Bill Murray classic film, Groundhog’s Day, and home to the BlueLotus Buddhist Temple (BLT).  I’m about 25 years into a contemplative Christian mediation practice, mostly using the Ignatianpractices of Contemplation of Scripture, the Examine and Contemplation inAction.  I’ve had a Jesuit Spiritual Director for the past 25 years and am unimaginably grateful for their patience, wisdom and the gracious presence of the Holy Spirit in the living of my prayer.

About three years ago, I began to feel and discern that I was getting in my own way at prayer. I longed and desired to grown closer to our risen and incarnate Lord, but seemed unable to open my own mind to allow the Holy Spirit to lead me.  I was, also, after so many years, longing deeply for a spiritual community seeking the still small voice of the Holy in shared silence. This longing seemed congruent with my deep spiritual roots in Reformed Theology and its emphasis on Christ’s Covenant Community.   

With the encouragement of noble Buddhist friends, I made my way to the BLT and began to sit regular meditation with the sangha (the community of those gathered in Buddhist meditation).

A foundational Buddhist chant affirms Buddha’s teaching that all human experience springs from our minds “Mind is first.” It continues that our actions, for good or for ill are the result of our thoughts. There is no refuge in “the devil made me do it!” (sorry to  Geraldine and Flip Wilson), nor, is there the luxury of the convoluted hubris in Christian refuge of, “I give all the glory to God.” In Buddhism, for good or for ill, we are responsible for our actions and before that the thoughts that got us there.

I am not a Buddhist. In my Christian ontology, God knit us in our mother’s wombs and we are made with wonder and awe (Psalm 139). The loving grace of God’s creation precedes all that is, especially, my feeble mind. God’s forgiveness precedes my thoughts and actions, for good and ill.

Yet, it is exactly my thoughts, the order and the disorder of my thinking which is the pall that blinds my heart and mind  from experiencing and perceiving the exact same grace and forgiveness for which they long.    

Over the last three years, I have slowly, and with great unbidden resistance, only just begun to learn to so order my mind in silence so as to hear and know the leadings of the Holy Spirit into a more intimate relationship with our risen Lord.

Namaste and Amen.  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

It's About the Women: Advent from the Underside

Advent from the Underside is about the woman. It is about the birthing room’s gushing waters and blood, the point of God’s entry into the life of flesh and blood made holy. The groaning pain of childbirth, sanctified, all of creation pushing, crying, towards new life and hope. It is about the women,  the sister-mothers, aid, comfort, joy, the witnesses of the spirit, birthing Life among us. Emmanuel.  

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

Romans 8:22 (NIV)

 

Poem for Advent 2011

Barbara Marion

 

Ancestral midwives kneel in shadows

bringing aid and comfort
witness giving
to the pains and crying out and pushing,

Sister-mothers,
...prepare the way,
For birthing
in a gushing
mess with cries of gratitude and joy,

As water holy turned
to blood in breaking open paths and sacks
that spill out life
and milk and bread
from deepest springs of hope ferocious.

Beyond the burning ropes
and rapes
and silence, neglect and jailings all of them passed over
stories buried
never heard of more nor seen nor named for eons
but now we care and picture them and her with them and us.

And tell how even Sister-Mother-Midwife Allah
gave a tree bent down to shake
to give her fruit
and water in a rivulet
to bathe her tears and terrors.

And now we know that tales of her alone with no one near
are told from fear of what might be
with women’s arms around her.

To this very day they warn “You dare not, Women,
think of that. She’s not like you for were she that

God would never come through you.”

But sister, mother, holy one, around you waiting now as then
we sisters, mothers, holy ones are here with you to aid and comfort
wait with you and witness to
the work and spirit in you ready here and now is God.

And when we breath with you and help you with the birth
we bring it all
to life among us
all a’groaning to be saved and free
and all in all, Good Women,
in you, with you, for you all
in God’s good healing time.

Emmanuel

Featured image: "Mary and the Midwives." " by artist Janet McKenzie. commissioned by Barbara Marian.

Loving Your Enemy as Yourself

 

 

Lent starts tomorrow. A truly meaningful Lenten spiritual practice is often hard for me to settle into. The whole point is not to torture myself like I did the year at seminary when I gave up beef and, by holy week almost attacked the... check cashier at the local grocery simply because he was having a hamburger for lunch. The whole point,  is to engage in a daily practice that turns my heart and mind toward God even more closely, drawing me more deeply into the relationship. Not one that sends me over the counter, through the bulletproof glass to snatch a half-eaten burger.

This summer our denomination, (the PCUSA) will vote on changing our rules to allow clergy, at their discretion, to preform same sex marriages; this only the most visible of the many seismic shifts that we will be living into as a church and a society for the foreseeable future. Everyday, I go to work as a hospital chaplain. Healthcare is one of the places in our society where the sweeping changes that are effecting us all is being figured out, worked through and live out in real lives and real time, everyday.

All this change is stressful. Produces anxiety. And, anxiety and stress, as we all know from uncomfortable experience, comes out backward and sideways when we least expect it if we spend too much time and more energy than we really have trying to stuff them down, down, down, deep inside, pretending that we aren’t being effected.

This Lent, I want, to paraphrase what I think is a popular misquote of Gandhi, ask God’s help in trying to become some small part of the change… Jesus asked us to live lives that incarnate the unimaginable grace of the Resurrection, doing what seems to impossible, “love our enemies.” To do this, we must sacrifice the hubristic protections of our anger and fear, out cherished notions of what is right and good and just and, even  what is“Jesusy.”

For my Lenten Practice, I'll be reading, Love Your Enemies:How To Break the Anger Habit and Be a Whole Lot Happier, by Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman. Thurman, Columbia University's, Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies observes that Jesus’ work helping people draw closer to God spanned only three short years while Buddha’s teaching career spanned three decades. Over all those years, Buddha had time to figure out how to help the ever-resistant human mind and heart to align themselves and our living more closely with the impossibility of loving the enemy before us and within us.  

 

My prayer this Lent will be to prayerfully ask the Holy Spirit's help in loving my enemies as myself; even those I find coyly hidden deeply with myself.

It Is A Horrible Thing To Trust

I am frequently slow and dull to the Lord’s prompting despite my hubris which lulls me into the belief that I am somewhat attentive, on some days, to the movements of the Holy Spirit in my heart. Last Sunday’s Psalm 51 invited me to pray with it all week; being especially drawn to verse 8b, “let bones you have crushed rejoice,” “let me hear joy and gladness” (verse 8a).

Dearest Jesus, crush the bones of my anger, they feel hard and stiff within me and provide the framework for so much that I pray the Holy Spirit would remove from me, for my anger separates me from my sisters and brothers, and most especially from you: “For it is against you and you alone that I have sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (v.4). Crush these bones that I might hear, ever more clearly, your still small voice speaking from the depths of joy and gladness for my soul. Amen.

Today in church I lifted heart and mind with my sisters and brothers in confessing: “Ruler of all, we confess that we have sought to please ourselves instead of glorifying you. We have set aside the fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom, and have relied upon our own strength rather than upon your Spirit.

“Forgive our stubborn insistence on doing things our own way, and serving you on our own terms; teach us to seek your kingdom first, and your justice above all else, confident that your care for us is fully trustworthy, and hear our prayers which we offer to you in silence.”

In silence the Spirit prayed: It is a horrible thing to trust your pain to the comfort of God’s love rather than the solace of your own anger.

Yes it is. So much of this journey is not so much about faith, but about learning to live within toward even deeper levels of trust and hope. May the Spirit guide me in the coming days, to seek to comfort and compassion of Jesus for all those pains, real and imagined, which keep me from loving my sisters and brothers as fully as I can. For, dear Jesus, it is only in loving them that I can love you as you love me. Amen.

Speaking From Silence: Vocare to a Life Solitude I

Marc Chagall, Solitude


“When we have lived long enough alone with the reality around us,
our veneration will learn how to bring forth a few good words
about it from the silence which is the mother of Truth,”
(Merton, Thoughts in Solitude).

There is wisdom which circulates among courageous souls who are called to share compassion’s journey with sufferers who come seeking healing of mind and heart and spirit: nothing happens along that way until the sufferer is ready. Lately, several things have happened which have drawn me more even more deeply into suffering and grief at the brief lives of my three Dear Little Ones and more closely to my long-slow smoldering rage at living this unbidden childlessness of mine. Only a few shy of twenty years, I have struggled minute-by-minute to keep them at a distance for fear they would consume what little of me remained. All the while, they still consumed me in every battle I waged against their power. I am exhausted now. And they have come again. I have no fight left in me, so I must succumb and find the ways to welcome them into the solitary practice of my daily living. Only here, in the great silence of these sorrows and the sins and griefs they bear can my spirit’s sighing find the Word which might hear the silent death of my fecundity into speech. Only here in mute surrender, in the solitude of this rage too deep for words can the Spirit’s sighs reach the shattered weakness of my heart and intercede for good, for love for a will and purpose which are my vocare, my call.

My very wise Jesuit Spiritual Director has, with great patience, persistence and good humor, consistently offered a hermeneutical frame for my living which I have resisted mightily for several years. The central point of discernment in this struggle—if God created us for relationships, how is God present in all that I have lost? Adoption, mother’s alcoholism, father’s terminal illness, two sets of parents gone before I was twenty-five, three children dead before they drew a breath, and the potential for ever bearing a child of my own with them, extended family caught up I the hubris of blood over emotional and relational bonds, a ten year marriage turned horribly public in the revelation of its truth in clergy sexual misconduct and that same horrible truth lurking in the shadows of the church where I turned for support. The vocare says very wise Jesuit Spiritual Director, is the very thing which I hate, rail against, resist, resent, refuse… my aloneness. Who in there right minds would want it, to be alone, to grieve these many losses, with no family to give and to receive love and the common bonds of daily living which offer our lives their shape and form and meaning?

For these many years, I have listened with particular attention to the brave preacher’s words on the painfully difficult passage from Mark 10: “Peter began to say to him, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’” (Mark 10:28-31). Never have I heard uttered a word, or an inflection or an inference to lead me to believe that the preacher’s heart would truly be willing to give up family or home or community or livelihood to follow Jesus. How, I have often wondered, might that preacher live, if he or she had no choice but to lose all that they loved and held dearest in the world? Would they still try to follow Jesus? Would they still be so certain of the smug platitude of God’s goodness and their heart’s willingness to follow, or convicted of such righteous sociopolitical truths?

It is not their hearts I am questioning but my own. In some long dormant hidden place I know this journey is mine and mine alone, and just as I must remind myself that I will never be able to find a family at grocery in the produce section among the avocados and artichokes, so I must remind myself that no heart should ever have to comprehend, no less endure, the shattering of the simple safe assumptions of their benevolent and equitable worlds. No one of them should ever have to endure year after year of shattered hopes for life shrouded in fears of death. Nor should their deepest longings and most tender dreams ever be pushed aside for the arrogance and hubris’ gains.

But I am, after all a Presbyterian, we do spirituality more in the spirit of Rabbi Abraham Heschel marching from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. King, “Even without words our march was worship. I felt my legs praying,” than we do in the spirit of St. Paul in Romans 8, waiting in our weakness for the Spirit to intercede. This does not come easily to me, this vocare, this silence. I feel my legs still longing to march, to pray deliverance from this evil. Amen.