steadfast

Posted on January 17, 2013 by emacaulay

Today we celebrated the life of a woman who lived 101 years.

Gathered for worship were her children and grandchildren and friends and folk who knew themselves to have spent time and life with a graceful powerhouse.

We do that at church. We hold the space for celebrations and life markings. We welcome people we may never see again and for a time we share voices in song and stories through hearts.

There are times when the beleaguer of “doing church” can make the heart heavy. The tending of relationships and buildings and protocols and brusings can near obscure the reason for our being.

And then there are services that remind us that community in Christ matters. It matters deeply.

For 101 years the woman we celebrated today held space in her being for the power of God in her life. The fruit of her faith was palpable in her people and in the air and prayer we shared.

I’m grateful. I’m grateful for the steadfast devotion that has prompted people to support a church that has held funerals for nearly 160 years. I’m grateful for the privilege of weaving worship that names resurrection and wonder. I’m grateful for the hands that bake bars and pour coffee.

I’m grateful for the reminder that “doing church” matters. It matters a lot.

Advent 18

Posted on December 19, 2012 by emacaulay

My mom is coming for Christmas.

It’s a seemingly simple sentence dense in power.

We are, we two, not unlike lots of moms and daughters. We have spent the 55 years of my life clashing wills and life views.

My mother is a woman who knows with certainty what is seemly and what is not and her surety has extended to the needful state of cupboards (pristine!) and planned menus for each meal.

Her daughter? Not so much. For some reason my mother was presented with a girl-child who resisted blacks and whites and rebelled against imposed order.

We have lived, we two, a challenge.

I don’t know what it is about mothers and daughters. The desire to protect, the temptation to create in our own image or the image of what we wish we had been able to able to call our own; so many things swirl beneath the surface of this elemental heart dance.

What I know is that my relationship with my mother affects my daughters and will affect their daughters. If there is work to do, running from it robs not only me and my mom but the generations that follow.

So we have worked. When it might have made sense to let it go and play it safe, we have engaged with each other and risked the hurt and vulnerability of letting each other know that it matters. Our honest hearts won’t let go of each other.

My mom is coming for Christmas. She will be in the midst of the feasting and the laughter and I know full well that she will bite back comments about how things might be better organized and I know full well that sometimes those comments will slip their way out of her mouth and into my ear.

But they don’t have to take up space in my heart.

What takes up space in my heart is profound admiration for the mighty mite that is my mom. She has endured much, lived much, and loved much. She has not let go of me.

Gathering for Christmas means readying our hearts. We will mourn those absent, mark in our hearts the shifts and losses and remember years gone past when things were different.

But oh, the chance to be present to the wonder of the Word Made Flesh in our midst is stunning gift. We get to learn what it is to love.

My mom is coming for Christmas.

Thanks be to God.

Advent 17

Posted on December 18, 2012 by emacaulay

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of God has spoken it. Micah 4: 3 – 4

Home is… what?

Home is warmth and light at the end of a long day.

Home is choices about space and sound and interactions.

Home is safety and a sense of secure wrap.

During Advent, we await the birth of a child born apart from that warmth and securitycalled “home”. Why is it that the Word would choose to become flesh in such absurd vulnerability? What was God thinking?!

The Word became flesh in the straw of a manger warmed by the bodies of animals because we are to know that our God inhabits the pain of want and the pain of living with fear. In precisely such a place Jesus was born in order that we might consider the no-room-in-the-inn reality of all too many of God’s children.

This year we are encouraging our church to give and give generously in order that we might provide home for homeless youth in the southwest metro area of Minneapolis. These are young people (250 on any given night) who long for their own “fig tree and vine” (see Micah above) in order that they might feel secure in this world. We are working with Portico, an interfaith consortium of people who believe that homelessness leaves Jesus on the streets; cold, hungry, promising, and so afraid.

Ours is to work for a world in which compassion lights the streets.

You may choose to give to Portico or another organization that ends homelessness. You may choose not to give. The reality is that we live the privilege of making choices day after day.

But whatever it is you choose, be aware: you are choosing. From the taken-for-granted safety and warmth of your home, you are choosing.

How it is you will shine Christ light in this , God’s world?

Advent 16

Posted on December 17, 2012 by emacaulay

A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse. The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. Isaiah 11: 1a, 6

Children were our ministers.

We arrived at church yesterday morning heavy of heart, raw, and peeled back. After hearing the news of bullets unleashed in an elementary school and after seeing the faces of snuffed lives, there was an almost physical need to gather together. We needed the Word. We needed to see each other and remember the larger story that this recent violence could not dim.

We needed to be church.

On the docket for the morning was precisely what our hearts longed for: our children up front, in a place where we could sing their beauty with our eyes. They were sharing the annual pageant; the telling of the time when a holy – as all children are – child was born into astounding vulnerability.

There were singing angels and wrestling shepherds and sheep with pink tights and a Mary and baby Jesus with matching red hair and a proudly sentinel Joseph and there were in the sanctuary people with their hearts bruised, open, and hungry for hope.

The children were our ministers.

There is unfathomable pain in this world, this we know. The quiet desperation lived by too many erupts in innocence-crushing ways. We wonder at such times if there is any Balm in Gilead powerful enough to be antidote. Because we are willing to summon the courage to be open to all that life has to offer us, we are bound, one to the other, in the ache provoked by unspeakable violence.

As a people who seek to follow the teachings of a babe born in a manger who dared to call us to love, we were reminded by the children that there is more to the story than executions.

There is resurrection; resurrection practiced in hugs and tears and gathering and remembering and choosing to live in such a way that maybe, just maybe, we will practice love in the living of our days.

On Sunday we were reminded that angels sing yet. In the swirl of pain, angels sing yet.

Led by our children, we could remember.

Advent Day 12

Posted on December 13, 2012 by emacaulay

Rejoice in Christ always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. Jesus is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4: 4 – 7

Here is what I see: I see gentleness being lived in community.

Every Wednesday at 8:00 AM I meet with men from the church for bible study. They have been at this for years. They are seasoned souls who have lived a lot of life and they are beautiful.

And, they are getting on in years. We check in with each other weekly and the list of bodily challenges is as varied as the men around the table. There is a constancy in the sharing: Growing older involves the deeply spiritual discipline of letting go.

Some of the men around the table have “had the talk” with their children. In a poigniant and circular playing out of love, their children have asked to share with them a fact of life: they are worried about their parents driving. They believe that getting behind the wheel of a car is not safe any longer. They love their dads enough to share their concerns.

It is hard to go from being the co-maker of family law to the recepient of same.

The beauty that I see is their willingness to reflect upon the changes they are experiencing. There is laughter thrown in and there is a lot of grace.

What moved me in the “let your gentleness be known to everyone” department happened as I was leaving for a meeting directly following bible study. Out in the parking lot, the men who drive were loading up their cars with the bible study members who no longer drive.

They ushered each other into the waiting chariots with a sense of reverence and care.

The promise of “Jesus is near” was made flesh in the parking lot of our church. Ninety-three year olds drive the snowy streets of South Minneapolis in order that their brothers might sit at table and unpack scripture.

Jesus lives.

Advent 11

Posted on December 12, 2012 by emacaulay

Tonight at 6:00 PM we gather for worship. The service is one of the most powerful we offer at Richfield UMC.

We call it an Advent Service of Hope and Healing.

While around us the culture seems intent upon denying and sidestepping places of loneliness and loss in this season, we pause as faith community and mark the wisdom of our heart aches.

There is something about the Advent season of purposeful waiting for the light of hope that stirs in us awareness of loss. We miss the physical presence of people in our lives who have blessed and vexed us. We miss the ways we used to encounter life in a way that felt simpler and less tentacled. We miss our children’s footie-jammied presence in our daily life. We miss, we mark, we name, and we are present to all of the major and minor losses that make for honest living.

Tonight during worship we bow before those losses and ask for them to lead us into wholeness and wisdom.

We will savor scripture and silence. We will allow the singing of Silent Night to move us. We will light candles to mark our questions and we will know the power of giving over to God the burdens and beauty of our souls.

I hope you will join us. If you cannot, I hope you will pause at some point on this day and listen to the wisdom of your heart.

Folded into the power of community or sitting in a moment of mindfulness, may we each name the power of stumble and question, healing and hope.

The Healing Time

                                                Finally on my way to yes
                                                I bump into
                                                all the places
                                                where I said no
                                                to my life
                                                all the untended wounds
                                                the red and purple scars
                                                those hieroglyphs of pain
                                                carved into my skin, my bones,
                                                those coded messages
                                                that send me down
                                                the wrong street
                                                again and again
                                                where I find them
                                                the old wounds
                                                the old misdirections
                                                and I lift them
                                                one by one
                                                close to my heart
                                                and I say    holy
                                                holy.

roots

Posted on August 2, 2012 by emacaulay

We are rooted.

Today the Roto-rooter team is coming to pulverize our basement floor in order to tame the roots that have taken over our sewage system.

@#$% indeed!

Cooper spent a fine Wednesday dealing with the geysers that erupted in our basement.

Today we live into the healing of the problem, complete with a 24 hour no-water-use edict.

This root addressing comes on the heels of a wedding weekend that still has my heart humming. Family came together to celebrate the wedding of Cooper’s youngest and on the dance floor and throughout the weekend we were a weaving of those who have gone before us and so very powerfully we participated in weaving that which is yet to be.

Blending families is no small adventure. Those seeking to create the new are rooted in systems unquestioned and ways of being passed on from generation to generation. In coming together through divorce and re-marriage, the ground shifts and sometimes it feels like nothing will ever feel stable again.

But oh, the fruit of years of negotiating and breathing and praying is heart luscious!

We are a different people now. Somehow, in marking the powerful rite of passage that comes in joining families and hearts, we know ourselves to be rooted and grounded in amazing grace and we are whole and we know this.

We know this.

So the roots strangling our pipes? They can be dealt with and matter not much (except for the obscene amount of money leaving our house with them).

The roots that ground and nourish heart are alive and well and we are family and thank you thank you thank you God for roots.

Ground is good.

seven years

Posted on June 16, 2012 by emacaulay

Seven years ago today I married Cooper Wiggen.

We stood by the shore of a lake, attended by three others, and promised to love one another in covenanted and holy ways. We eloped, since life being what it was we were buying a house, Cooper was commencing with a new church community, and we wanted to begin our living-together life as those allowed to marry in this state.

A month later we had a church wedding where we again spoke words of commitment; this time in the presence of our children and communities.

It has been a heart stretching endeavor, this marriage. We each brought three children into this new thing. We each tend two goodly-sized churches. We each carried the wounds of divorce. We each are a jumble of past hurts and core longings.

And we are yet alive, together.

I encountered awhile back an interview with an ardent feminist who had been in a marriage for decades. She was nuts about her husband. The interviewer made mention of her surprise that one can be an ardent feminist and a profoundly grateful lover of her male mate. How could that be, the interviewer asked.

The answer was this: in all the years of their life together, the woman never could predict what her husband was going to say or what he was thinking. This to her was passion elixir.

I get it.

Through all the rips and wonder of blending families and life, I have been married to a man who fascinates and draws me. The tender human to whom I have pledged my troth is gift.

On this day, I am remembering the joy and sometimes trudge of making this life we now share. Seven years of meals and tears and laughter and love. Seven years of stretch and soar.

Seven years.

Gratitude sings.

strength

Posted on May 18, 2012 by emacaulay

Spirit is a nebulous and visceral thing.

My mother is now home. In less than two weeks she has gone from the ICU to a regular hospital room to a transitional care facility to home.

Today, one day after returning home, she motored herself up to her church for her regular volunteering gig. It was Thursday. That’s what she does. Of course.

I find myself celebrating the grit of the woman. She is tiny of stature and humongous of will.

There are still diagnostic questions to be answered. She is aware of that. And, she will drive the discovery when she feels it is time.

In the meantime, we who claim her as mom and love are taking deep and grateful breaths. Mom is out in the world. We each encounter our days with a deeper sense of ground.

And this daughter is thinking plenty about how it is such strength got planted deep into the soul of Barbara Jane Fawcett Macaulay Forrest.

I thank God for that strength and for her ability to wield it.

All is right in the world.

My mom is in it.

Living Waters

Celebrating the Sacred

Category Archives: healing