The New Modern Art Wing opens at the Art Institute of Chicago

The new and much anticipated Modern Art Wing opens tomorrow at the Art Institute of Chicago. The AI has always been a favoite place to refresh and renew. In that spirit:

“The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being."
Wassily Kandinsky, December 4, 1866 – December 13, 1944

May we come in prayer this week seeking to bring into being through our living the true art which lies in the profound mystery of our souls. May we pray that those gifts find life and breath and being in the lives of all who come to us seeking comfort and healing for their own souls. Only here will we find the true reality of our existence. Amen.

First There was Florence Nightingale

I was first asked to develop a service for the Blessing of Hands about fifteen years ago in preparation for Nurses Week at another hospital. In that preparation I “discovered” the writings of Florence Nightingale. Since that day I have been an unabashed fan of the Nightingale. Both the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America celebrate a feast day dedicated to the Nightingale’s life of faith ad service which was a blend of prayer and mystical union with God, especially in the service of others. Truly a woman of pioneering spirit and vision she prefigured Gandhi, Dr. King, Thomas Merton and many others who would seek to bring about God’s justice and compassion in the lives of God’s suffering children, not only by tending the suffering of individuals but by changing the structures and systems of care by which society sought to care for those most in need and vulnerable in their midst.

The Episcopal Lectionary writes: “In her diary, an entry shortly before her seventeenth birthday Florence Nightingale wrote: ‘On February 7th, 1837, God spoke to me and called me to his service.’ She did not know what the service would be, and therefore decided that she must remain single, so as to have no encumbrances and be ready for anything. With this in mind, she rejected a proposal of marriage from a young man whom she dearly loved. She suffered from "trances" or "dreaming" spells, in which she would lose consciousness for several minutes or longer, and be unaware when she recovered that time had passed. (Could this be a form of petit mal epilepsy? No biographer of hers that I have read uses the word.) She found the knowledge that she was subject to such spells terrifying, and feared that they meant that she was unworthy of her calling, particularly since she did not hear the voice of God again for many years. In the spring of 1844 she came to believe that her calling was to nurse the sick. In 1850 her family sent her on a tour of Egypt for her health. Some extracts from her diary follow:

“March 7. God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for Him, for Him alone without the reputation.
March 9. During half an hour I had by myself in my cabin, settled the question with God.

April 1. Not able to go out but wished God to have it all His own way. I like Him to do exactly as He likes without even telling me the reason.

May 12. Today I am thirty--the age Christ began his mission.
Now no more childish things. No more love. No more marriage. Now Lord let me think only of Thy Will, what Thou willest me to do. Oh Lord Thy Will, Thy Will.

June 10. The Lord spoke to me; he said, Give five minutes every hour to the thought of Me. Coudst thou but love Me as Lizzie loves her husband, how happy wouldst thou be." But Lizzie does not give five minutes every hour to the thought of her husband, she thinks of him every minute, spontaneously.”
Every one of us in health care is her heir. Our patients benefit everyday because of the Nightingale’s deep commitment to not only caring for the sick, the injured the lonely, those in pain and suffering, but also for insisting that the means and methods by which all others render them care upheld highest standards of quality and compassion. May each of us take time during nurses week to reflect on the Nightingale’s heart of compassion, her heart’s commitment to the highest standards of care, courage to lead others along her way and her heart’s longing for union with the One in whose name she sought to heal.

Near the end of her life, “on Christmas Day when she was sixty-five, she wrote: ‘Today, O Lord, let me dedicate this crumbling old woman to thee. Behold the handmaid of the Lord. I was thy handmaid as a girl. Since then, I have backslid.’"
“A few years before her death, she was the first woman to receive the Order of Merit from the British government. She died at ninety, and, by her directions, her tombstone read simply, ‘F.N. 1820-1910’".

Prayer of the Episcopal Church for Nightingale’s Feast Day
Life-giving God, who alone has power over life and death, over health and sickness: Give power, wisdom, and gentleness to those who follow the lead of your servant Florence Nightingale, that they, bearing with them your presence, may not only heal but bless, and shine as lanterns of hope in the darkest hours of pain and fear; through Jesus Christ, the healer of body and soul, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Happy Nurses Week! All

Prayer for the brightness of God's goodness

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, for what’s a heaven for.
God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.
I show you doubt to prove that faith exists.
The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say, if faith or comes doubt.
When the fight begins within himself, a man’s worth something.
Then welcome each rebuff that turns earth’s smoothness rough.
Each string that bids, nor sit, nor stand, but go.
Be our joys three parts pain, strive and hold cheap the strain.
Learn nor account the pang.
Dare, never grudge the throw.
What I aspire to be and was not, comforts me.
There shall never be one lost good.
What will shall live as before.
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound.
What was good shall be good, with for evil, so much good the more.
On the earth, the broken arcs in the heaven make perfect round.
It’s wiser being good than bad.
It’s safer being meek than fierce.
It’s fitter being sane than mad.
My own hope is the sun shall pierce the thickest cloud earth ever stretched.
That after last returns the first.
Though a wide compass round be fetched, that what began best can end worst.
Nor what God blessed once, prove accursed.”

Robert Browning, May 7, 1812 – December 12, 1889

May we come this week in prayer with hearts filled with all that which exceeds our grasp, and all that causes us to doubt God’s rightness in this world, and all that tumult and rebuff within ourselves. For only there can the sun pierce these thickening clouds and God’s goodness shine within so much brighter than before. Amen.

Happy Birthday Annie Dillard, April 30, 1945

“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...” Annie Dillard, April 30, 1945. Won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, published in 1974.

Frayed and nibbled as we are, may we this week bring our longing hearts to prayer. Only there will they find what we need to survive in this fallen world—that food which will truly sustain against that which is eating at our souls. In hearts at prayer is the only nourishment which will allow us to travel beyond the clean and shining beauty in which all seems to fit, perhaps, too well. There joining on a journey to an awesome place. Free passage, tending a splintered wreck, place of safest passage for us and our gnawed and bloodied, scarred and delicate companions whose beauty, daily, brings us to our knees. Amen.

Tomorrow the Bard

This year’s celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, on April 23, (recall that the actual identity of the Bard is a topic of hot dispute among scholars) has an added dimension as it is also the 400th anniversary of the publication of his wonderful Sonnets.

“Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”


May our hearts come to prayer this week seeking love from the Source beyond all time and frail human notions of love’s depth and breadth and power. May we come, seeking to love, thus, all who would come our way, even though they dwell on the edge of doom. Amen.

Easter Hope

Grace and peace on this Easter afternoon:

I don't know why I mourned so deeply, not only my three Dear Little Ones today, but also my parents -- gone so long -- and so very much of myself which was lost with them all. Somewhere deep within, Jesus still seems deeply in the grave, despite the “Halleluiahs!” and shouts of “Christ is risen!” which surround.

So many years on grief's journey now, I doubt that anyone noticed when I attended Church or when I proclaimed the Resurrection in the worship service I led for our psychiatric inpatients, (it was a wonderful service), how very sad I am, how deeply my heart grieves, and how badly I need the victory over suffering and death to be made real in my own life. All I can do, in Resurrection hope, is bring my suffering and grief, sorrow and pain and loss to Jesus—dead and buried in the grave and pray for strength and willingness to linger there with him in whatever hope, he dying, found to give himself over to the only One who could have saved him but allowed him to die. Somehow from this horror, hope was born and new life and love were made real in the lives of women and men so long ago. How I yearn for the Resurrection to be made real in my life.

Looking for words of hope and encouragement, I came to a favorite blog writer of mine, the Velveteen Rabbi, and found a link to the lovely and hopeful collection of poems on miscarriage, Through. Longing for some Word of God’s victory in my heart on this day, I found it here in the tradition of Judaism: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback_book/through/6133670. The download is free. If you find it of value in your griefs journey, I commend it to you.

Wishing all gentle days.
Ol’Hound

Remembering the First Easter

But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”
Mark 16:6-7

Harvard lecturer and Presbyterian minister, Fredrick Buechner writes: “When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

“For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I'm feeling most ghost-like, it is your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I'm feeling sad, it's my consolation. When I'm feeling happy, it's part of why I feel that way.

“If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget, part of who I am will be gone. "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.”

The Luke’s tradition says that good thief, asked Jesus to remember him in his kingdom. I am so powerfully drawn to his prayer. “Jesus remember me….” I’m suffering here for all my wrong doing and grief, sorrow and pain. Carry me with you when you travel to your Father; our Father. Don’t forget who I am when you get there.

I like to think that this is the Resurrection, Jesus did not forget the good thief—Jesus remembered him. And he remembered the women of great faith who never failed him. And Peter and James and John and all the rest of his disciples too, myself included, who failed him miserably. Jesus remembers all, no matter what we’ve done, no matter how horribly we fail him, not a one of us is ever entirely lost. No matter how hard we try, we can never completely disappear, especially when we are most absent from ourselves. Jesus remembers us and his kingdom, the Resurrection is not some future event to await patiently in our misery, but is alive in him here and now. Today.

On Easter we celebrate this mysterious and eternal truth for our living. We remember Jesus and his disciples and those world-altering days so very long ago. How somehow their memories of him left his mark on who they were. And how somehow he remembered each of them as his kingdom came, enabling them to see his face, hear his voice and know him deep within their hearts. He came, not as a ghost to them, but as someone who truly existed, offering consolation in their deep, deep sadness and disappointment. He appeared to them, real, even though death and the grave and despair and time stood between them.

So as we come this month to tell again the stories of Easter, remembering Jesus who remembers us; Jesus whose kingdom is come—with us on earth as it is in heaven. In this he returns to us across the centuries and miles. We meet him again and we know him. We see his face. Hear his voice. And know him speaking to our hearts. “Jesus remember me…” we pray. He remembers. Not a one of us is ever lost. Amen.