Proverbs 3.3

“Do not let mercy and truth forsake you; bind them round your neck,

write them on the tablet of your heart.”

In the Hebrew Bible, the word ‘emeth, is often translated into English as truth or faithfulness implying a divine, religious or ethical context.


In the last book of C.S. Lewis’ classic series of children’s literature, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, there is a character named Emeth. Emeth has lived his whole life outside of Narnia, the mystical land where animals talk, magic is common and good eventually, always, conquers evil; a land whose true ruler is the Christ figure, Aslan, a talking Lion.

Emeth’s country, Calormene, is a conquering and violent place where people worship a violent and spiteful god named Tash. In the Last Battle, it seems that perhaps, this time, the good Narnians will succumb to the Calormene’s, evil and the dreadful followers of Tash. Among the followers of Tash, Emeth, seems cut from a different mold, a seeker of truth and the good amid the violence and evil, one whose heart is pure. As the Last Battle closes, Narnia is coming to the end of time. Aslan has returned to his people, his army, at long last, has defeated the evil Calormene. Aslan is leading all the characters who are still with him “higher up and further in” to a place that can only be heaven. Somehow, among them is it the “evil foreigner” and follower of the “violent Tash,” Emeth. The others wonder out loud to Emeth how he comes to be among them. Emeth recounts for them an earlier conversation with the Christ figure Lion:


‘Lord, is it then true… that thou and Tash are one?’ The Lion growled so that the earth shook and said, ‘It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites.


For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child?’ I said, ‘Lord, thou knowest how much I understand.’


But I said also, ‘Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days.’ ‘Beloved,’ said the Glorious One, ‘unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.’ The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis.

Let us bring our hearts of prayer asking to live as seekers of Truth wherever it may lead. May we pray to follow our hearts, that they be opened to Mercy as our guide, the truest north on all the journeys of our living. And may our living become our fervently prayer of mercy and truth in the world. Amen.

John Rutter- "For the Beauty of the Earth"

John Rutter's "For the Beauty of the Earth" one of my absolute favorites. It would be impossible to come up with a more fitting 100th post. With most sincere apologies to our amazing church choir who sang this so beautifully this mourning,  the above, by the Paya Labor Methodist Girls School Choir, Singapore is wonderful.

Since I was a little girl destroying the pretty dresses my mother dressed me in by playing in the vacant lot next door, I have found myself at most at home and closest to God in the beauty of the earth. Please enjoy.

Prayer Grieving My Mother in Adoption

THE MOTHER CONNECTION

The New York Times Sunday Magazine, August 17, 1997

Hope Edelman

It rained the day of my grandmother’s funeral, a fine drizzle that clung to our dark coats like a silver veil. She died this past December, a few weeks short of her 90th birthday. We buried her in the family plot just behind my mother, who died at 42. The official documents listed my grandmother’s cause of death as acute respiratory and coronary failure, backed up by advanced breast cancer – an absolute calamity of the chest – but I believe otherwise: that despite all her ailments, she died of loneliness and quite possibly a broken heart. She kept asking for my mother until the very end.


The bonds between mothers and daughters have always been tight in my family – too tight, most of us have complained. It’s as if the women believe that the harder they cling, the more they can protect. If only that were true. Our stories are marked by departure and longings, by frustration and despair. My great-grandmother, Ida, leaving Russia at 36 with three children, saying goodbye to the mother she would never see again. My grandmother, Faye, a stubborn, willful woman with a love so enduring and irrational that it often drove my mother to slam down the telephone or retreat into her bedroom to scream at the walls. My own mother, whose early death from breast cancer left behind two angry teen-age daughters and a mother who walked around for months refusing to accept – was never able to accept – the truth.


In the full Bonwit Teller shopping bags my grandmother used to carry wherever she went, she kept a framed photograph of her mother, a serious woman in a dark print dress who died before I was born. I used to laugh at her for this, teasing her for dragging around a picture of an old woman in the bottom of a tattered paper bag. My mother would hush me, telling me to leave Grandma alone. Only later did I realize the poignancy of this act, how important those bags were to my grandmother’s feelings of safety and well-being, and how the image of her mother must have provided the same: how my mother understood this and how, by gently quieting her daughter, she showed loyalty to an aging mother who at other times nearly drove her mad.


I treasure these memories now, along with the stories these women told me about their lives. As we sat around the kitchen table or took long drives in the car, they handed down women’s culture, replete with all its tales of hardship and triumph, loss and rebirth. My grandmother spoke of her mother’s ability to stretch a piece of meat far enough to feed seven, and about how she herself studied to become a lawyer only to find she didn’t have enough money for the exam fee. My mother told stories about maturing faster that her peers, about how her mother hadn’t prepared her for her menstruation and how she swore, at age 9, that she would tell her daughter in advance. (She did, when I was 8).


But now there is no one left who can verify my memories of these women, who heard the exact stories they told me, or can add to them, or tell me which details I’ve got wrong. At 32, I’m the only woman left in my maternal line, and few things I’ve encountered have made me feel quite so alone.


I was acutely aware of this as I stood at my grandmother’s grave in the gentle rain. Damn it! I wanted to cry out. The last one gone! I understood that I represented a symbolic end point, but I did not yet realize that I could represent a beginning, too. So it is perhaps not all that surprising that when I learned I was pregnant less than two months after the funeral, I received the news with uncharacteristic calm. It was a statistical fluke, one of those birth-control failures that pull effective rates down into the 90-odd percentiles, or so the gynecologist said. I didn’t disagree. In the frenzy that followed – planning a wedding, buying a house and all those doctor’s visits – there wasn’t much time to sit and reflect. Which is probably why I didn’t notice for months that this year I’m bridging the gap between death and birth. I’ve lost all my mothers, but I’m in the process of becoming one, and it’s a sweet and healing continuity that added an unexpectedly profound twist to Mother’s Day this year.


I cried when the ultrasound technician told me the baby is a girl. How will I protect her? How will I accept that I can’t? Each time I feel one of her kicks, already signaling her independence, I feel a blend of joy and wonder and fear and grief unlike anything I’ve known before. And this is what I think: that maybe this child wasn’t an accident after all. Maybe in a family where the love between mothers and daughters was always unquestioned and absolute, a vacuum can’t exist for long. Maybe, just maybe, when the last mother dies, a new one must be born.

"Ask any woman whose mother has died and she will tell you that she is irrevocably altered, as profoundly changed by her mother's death as she was by her mother's life."

~Hope Edelmann

Twenty-eighty years since her death there is integrity, dignity and grace, in the ongoing struggle of grieving my mother. My adopted mother. The only mother I have only known. My Mother's Day prayer asks Jesus to help me find those places within myself which are her bests gifts to me; those places where she can live on.  With Jesus' help, I pray live in ways which offer to those in need of connection and care those gifts which were her gifts to me. Amen. 

For Mother's Day, Chagall's

"Mother and Child in Front of Notre Dame" 1953.

In my 50's, at long last more able to be true to my self: I can see more clearly in the shadows within, some pale reflection of birthmother, Patricia. I can hold, with gentleness and compassion, both the extreme brokenness and frail blessedness of my mother, Frances. And, I can speak softly in my heart, and in my living, of my own three Dear Little Ones whose tender hearts have rested for so long with my own dear mother’s. With gratitude, Happy Mother's Day.

Psalm 9

9The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed,

a stronghold in times of trouble.

10And those who know your name put their trust in you,

for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you.

May we bring our hearts in prayer asking to commit them to the care of the One whose promise of strength always holds true. May we seek to rest our hearts even more fully in the One whose presence we have known when all else seemed beyond our strength, when our suffering seemed far too much for us to bear, and when the pains of our daily living seemed more than we could endure. Let us come calling upon the Name of the One who is the stronghold of our hearts, asking to trust them and all that is our daily living, to the care of the One whose strength has always proven true. Amen.

(Psalm 71: 1-2)

“Lord, I have come to you for protection;

Never let me be defeated!

Because you are righteous, help me and rescue me.

Listen to me and save me!”

“Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being ‘drawn toward.’ Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.


"Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of (the disenfranchised and), the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. ….

“For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called ‘love.’ Love is a choice -- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity -- a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.”
Passion for Justice, the Rev., Dr. Carter Heyward, Episcopal Priest and Howard Chandler Robbins Professor of Theology, Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA.


In the thought of the Hebrew Bible, it is only because God’s intrinsic nature is righteousness (tsaw-dak)—to be just, to bring about justice and to save—that God actively chose us for mutually beneficial and reciprocal relationship. It is only because this loving relationship involves a commitment, a sometimes seemingly irrational one on the part of God, that we have dared across so many millennia to ask that our prayers for protection, victory, help, rescues and salvation be heard.


Let us come this week in prayer. Let our hearts of prayer speak boldly our deepest longings for protection, victory, help, rescue and salvation. Let us pray with the confidence of our faith across centuries of this commitment to the love and healing of broken lives in our broken world. Let us pray with hope, remembering that our faith is an ancient choice made for us by the One whose very essence is very essence is to save us, love us, heal, protect and defend us. Let us pray for the faith to choose to love and heal other broken lives in our broken world. Amen.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge….”

(Proverbs 1:7a)

Yir’ah, is the Hebrew word translated here as fear. But the Hebrew concept of fear of God is not the stomach knotting, heat-up-the-back-of-the-neck, trembling that causes us to freeze and cringe or make panicked choices. Yir’ah is more akin to awe; the feeling that we can get when we look up at the night sky and feel overwhelmed by the immensity of space and simultaneously terrified at the thought of our own smallness. The feeling of being overtaken by the truth that there is a reality far, far greater than ourselves and our own lives and that somehow we are intimately and inextricably a part of it and its purposes.

Living a life in “fear of the Lord” is to live a life in trembling awareness that our living has ultimate meaning. That the choices we make have an ultimate significance far beyond our abilities to think or feel or ascertain their value. It is living our days in trembling awareness of the Divine presence all around us.

Albert Einstein wrote: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive form so this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.”

May we come in prayer this week seeking the Diving presence in all that is around us. Many we come asking that our small and prayerful hearts be opened to the truth of the impenetrable mystery of our existence; to the depth of wisdom, of radiant beauty, of awe which is at once incomprehensible to us and woven most intimately into our very beings. May we seek there to make choices for our living which will deepen our knowledge of the Divine reality by which grace we are free to know and choose. Amen.