The End is Always Near

                                                                                                

First Sunday of Advent 2015, from the Underside

Kintsugi Meditations for a Broken World 

Luke 21: 25-28:  “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

This is not an easy passage to preach, especially, when those in the pew are still recovering from a weekend of turkey coma, Black Friday shopping, initial Christmas decorating  and surviving annual visits with extended family. Hope is the liturgical theme for the first Sunday of Advent, but picture of hope here in Luke’s gospel is in the midst of distressing times filled with bleak struggle and fear. Not kind of thing we want bouncing around in our minds when we’re trying to pick out the fullest and most symmetrical White Pine on Boy Scout Troop 108’s lot before we head home to football on the couch….

But they are powerful words of hope for these days. Even on the couch in our own living rooms, we cannot avoid the intrusion of violence, and death, refugees and protests, a nation divided over race and power, privilege and the absence of hope. Human life is always filled with destruction and violence, Luke and, our difficult times lived early in the digital-age of perpetual news cycle sources all around us, simply call a reality, most of us do our best to avoid, into sharp focus. Luke’s assurance, is exactly what  we are needing to hear: when things seem the most hopeless, our redemption, our hope, is drawing near.

What can we do? The passage makes it clear, we are not to turn away, of faith with fear and foreboding. We are to raise up, to take a stand, to open our hears and lives to the hope that is our faith, to seek to draw near to our Redeemer even as he is drawing near to us.

What will you do this Advent to draw closer to our Redeemer, to be the light of Hope in the darkness of our world?  

Kintsugi Meditation for the First Sunday of Advent:

Invite Jesus, our Redeemer, to be present with you. Call to your mind’s eye an image that speaks to you of Jesus’ love and protection, grace and hope.

Focus on your breath, sit silently, allow Jesus’ love and protection, grace and hope to fill you. 

Relax. Relax. Relax. Pray the Holy Spirit guide you and open your heart to the Still Small Voice during this sacred time.   

Pray Jesus keep you safe, well, happy and peaceful.

Ask Jesus to keep you safe, to keep your heart safely within his own heart, to keep your mind safely within his wisdom. Pray that Jesus keep you safe.

Pausing….. Focus on your breath.

Pray Jesus keep you well. That he would keep you from times of trial, from the despairs of suffering and grief, from the grasping for false idols in anxiety and fear. May Jesus keep me well.  

Pausing….. Focus on your breath.

Pray Jesus open you to happiness, that he open your heart and mind to the truth of your own divine wonder and awe, knit into you in the womb of your mother. Ask that you know the joy of living your birthright, the authenticity of the blessed beauty of who you were created to be.

Pausing….. Focus on your breath.

Pray that Jesus grant you the peace that surpasses all human understanding, that your heart and mind, that your entire being is so joined with his love and forgiveness that you are not dependent on the things or situations of this word for peace, hope and joy, but on Him.

Pausing….. Focus on your breath.

A brief prayer of gratitude for this time…. Our Father…. Amen. 

“Starry Night on the Rhone,” Van Gogh


Psalm 19

“The precepts of the LORD are right,

giving joy to the heart.

The commands of the LORD are radiant,

giving light to the eyes.” v.8.

“Discerning the will of God is therefore not something one can do on ones own, from one’s own knowledge of good an evil. It is…—for those who are ready to live in the will of God because the will of God has already been carried out in their lives.” (Dietrich Bonheoffer, Ethics)

As we bring our wondering, questioning, struggling hearts prayer this week, may we ask for the grace that they might find some rest in the recollection before God of the joys they have already known. May their dark corners be illumined by the soft and ancient glow which has guided them through their darkest nights and gloom filled days. May they seek in these days to live in the confidence of joy, as yet unknown, and by that light which comes only in their darkest hours. Amen

Pray Carpe Diem

You never know in life, this might be my last win as a golfer,” Yang, smiling, said through an interpreter. “But this is a great day. It’s going to be a great foundation for me to continue playing on the PGA Tour. It means the world right now. It hasn’t sunken in, but I do know the significance of it.” New York Times, August, 17, 2009, Y. E. Yang, quoted, Sunday at Hazeltine National after shooting a two-under-par 70 in the final round to win the P.G.A. Championship with a score of eight-under 280.

May we pray this week in gratitude and joy for what we have been allowed to accomplish with the gifts we have been given. May we celebrate the living of these days with gladness and a heart of thanksgiving. And may we be made ever aware of the foundation of mercy and grace upon which our future rests, whatever it may bring. Amen.

The Ah-h-h-h! of Prayer

joy
“Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else's pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even stranger than the world.” The Rev. Frederick Buechner.

May we come this week seeking that which is more familiar than ourselves and more strange than the world. May we come in sighs too deep for words and with hearts filled with joy and pain for the hearts which are held by our own. May we be filled with ah-h-h! and lose our selves in the odd silence. May we pray the daily-ness of our living and the living of the lives we love. Amen.

Loving Frank

“God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, June 8 1867 – June 6 1959

With the Wright anniversaries approaching I'm thinking more and more about some of his beautiful homes which were so a part of the town in which I grew up. I'm grateful to have the legacy of appreciation for such grace and beauty. Reading Nancy Horan's fresh novel, Loving Frank, about Wright and his affair with Mamah Borthwick Cheney. She and two of her children died horribly in the fire which destroyed, Taliesin, Wright's studio, school, home in Spring Green Wisconsin, which he later rebuilt. It is pictured above. Its resurrection seems a fitting sign of Wright's devotion to the great mystery of his own motivation to create.

May our prayers this week draw us deeply into the great mysteries of nature. May we find there some enduring sense of the God who brought us into being. In so doing may we seek God’s promise for our living that we are a part of a part of a body whose joys and sorrows, happiness’s and griefs, livings and dyings are of a purpose which is far greater than we can ever comprehend. And may our life in that mystery motivate us towards living its grace and beauty, peace and hopefulness for our days. Amen.

Listening for Joy

After reading two of the postings from this site
at our local Writers Workshop on Wednesday
(my first time reading—an experience not for the faint of heart),
a wise member—
with several books published in English and in Hebrew!— challenged me to write about joy the next time I present.
So much of my life and work is engaged looking for hope
in the most tragic of life circumstances,
I do forget about joy.
He is correct.
He is also consistent
with wise Spiritual Director,
only the week before
asking me to listen more closely
to God’s blessings.

Both these statements blessing in themselves.

Reminding me of Paul: “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about theses things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.” (Philippians 4:8-9).

Always a good antidote for an ailing soul.

Listening closely for the antidote I found this poem by Gerald Locklin in an anthology compiled by Garrison Keillor, Good Poems for Hard Times, commended to me on Thursday by another wise man. When I read it this morning I knew my life was changed forever.

Three wise men and a changed life and its still 123 days until Christmas.

No Longer A Teenager

my daughter, who turns twenty tomorrow,
has become truly independent.
she doesn't need her father to help her
deal with the bureaucracies of schools,
hmo's, insurance, the dmv.
she is quite capable of handling
landlords, bosses, and auto repair shops.
also boyfriends and roommates.
and her mother.

frankly it's been a big relief.
the teenage years were often stressful.
sometimes, though, i feel a little useless.

but when she drove down from northern California
to visit us for a couple of days,
she came through the door with the

biggest, warmest hug in the world for me.
and when we all went out for lunch,
she said, affecting a little girl's voice,
"i'm going to sit next to my daddy,"
and she did, and slid over close to me
so i could put my arm around her shoulder
until the food arrived.

i've been keeping busy since she's been gone,
mainly with my teaching and writing,
a little travel connected with both,
but i realized now how long it had been
since i had felt deep emotion.

when she left i said, simply,
"i love you,"
and she replied, quietly,
"i love you too."
you know it isn't always easy for
a twenty-year-old to say that;
it isn't always easy for a father.

literature and opera are full of
characters who die for love:
i stay alive for her.