On this morning’s beach walk my Minnesota heart knew these things:

Seagulls here have wild and crazy hair-dos.

My feet are happiest bare naked.

Watching a big billed pelican swoop in and dine in the company of a seagull hoping to share the action made for great reflections on the principles of economics.

Wandering without agenda or time crunch stretches the heart.

God has a great sense of creativity.  I met bodies of all kinds – lumpy and lean and old and young and held proudly and schlumped.  We were all there taking in creation’s show.

People in paradise greet each other.  It was good to be happy in the company of others who look up, see another and make connection.

Missing my church community is real on this day when for years I have looked into the eyes of kin in faith and rehearsed with them what we all know:  we will die someday and be enfolded into the mystery of ongoing life.  Ash Wednesday is a rich time of marking the presence of the Holy within and around us.  I will worship tonight in a new place where I will not lead.  I will be among the marked.  I will take my place in the procession and know blessing and within me I will carry the faces and presence of the community of the faithfilled at RUMC.

I am full.  I am wind blown.  I am sun kissed and space filled and alive.

Never are we alone.

This I know well even as I am lodging in a place I have never been before.  Outside my window are palm trees and growing things.  The Gulf is close at hand on one side, and the promise of a dolphin sighting on the other side and I am alone in this place.  Except I am not alone.

I am in the heart place of a huge hearted clan.  For decades, these walls have held laughter, celebration, and the good of time spent with no agenda beyond pleasure seeking.  It has been a pilgrimage site for a family that has welcomed in new members with amazing grace and they too have come to know holding in this place.  And so I am here, marvelling at how it is family matters.

We give our hearts to relationships.  We say “yes” each day to the challenge and wonder of claiming kin – blood and heart, both.  We weave life with people and we make life with people and we widen the net to include others and the glory that is loving and living is made shining because we have the courage to take what we have and offer it in the hopes that it will bless another.  We have the audacity and courage to offer ourselves.  And we are taken up. 

Never are we alone.  The cloud of witnesses that make for our lives travels with and blesses us.  And that cloud of grace wraps sojourners and kin alike.  Sacred trust savored with gratitude.  I like it here.

Battered and scarred and scared, I began a Lilly endowment program entitled “Women Touched by Grace”. The advertisement promised learning and the carrot of travel to Rome. I applied to the program through the nudging of the Holy. The dwindling capacity of my God-kissed heart to know its own washing in grace was real. The logo of the program: two women’s fingers reaching toward each other, ala the Sistine Chapel’s depiction of God reaching out life to Adam, was foreshadowing of the life I would receive. Life. Reached out to me. Through the Christ alive in women touched by grace.

The strange of worship soaked in silence. The odd of raising voices in the sort of chant that frowns on the trumpet of any one but rather pursues the communal weave of all. The sharing of conviction that thoughts, those convictions of my own badness and inadequacies that thronged my sensibilities and created trudge in my soul; those thoughts are in fact affront to the Holy and impediment to grace. The sharing of community with shining and human monastic women who chose as vocation worship and prayer. The telling of hurts and the holding of love and the safety of being known and the wonder of being unwrapped and bathed and held and claimed by the very God who brought me to the waters of this life.

John Wesley preached long and fiercely before his heart was “strangely warmed”. He didn’t come to know Christ as a loving grace-gift in his being until he was able to observe the faith grounding of another people – Moravians, in his case.

For me, a woman who has preached and believed and loved and grounded her life in the gospel provocation and gift of Christ Jesus, it was a group of women who reached out their fingers and hands and heart in the touch that has given me soul life.

I am whole. I believe the good news. I believe it not only for those with whom I share sermon and pastoring life. I believe it is so for me.

I unwrapped that gift in the community of saints both Protestant and Catholic at Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Beech Grove Indiana.

And my heart. My strangely warmed, unpacked, thirsty, and so profoundly grateful heart, will live its rebirth forever more.

This morning, the hugs were for my stepson who is off to Nicaragua to revisit a youth program he helped to establish.

Yesterday, the hugs welcomed my son who staggered off the train after an 18 hour trip.  Pulled by the power of Cupid, he wanted to spend Valentine’s Day with his beloved.  I’ll be hugging him goodbye tonight in order that he clack his way back to college.

My daughter is soon to arrive from Austin, Texas, where she was invited to participate in a conference hosted by Bill Clinton.  She and other passionate souls will lift the vision of an earth well tended and reverenced.  I will pick her up from the airport, provide a meal and an ear, and hug her on her way back to college.

They come and they go, they unfold and explore and the world is their parish, these loves of my life.

I marvel at it, even as I reflect on the teachings of Benedict and the dessert mothers and fathers about the power of place and stability.

My delight in their thirst for experiencing, learning, and giving is real.  It is crucial classroom, the vastness of the world.  They are enthusiastic students.

And my prayer is that they and the hug dispenser (that would be me) learn the power and honesty of finding a place in which to ground;  a place that sustains, challenges, and holds them.  A place where they are graced to learn the lessons of being.

Travelling mercies:  In the whee of doing.  In the sweet grace of being.

Well, I knew it would come to me during this three month renewal leave:  The itch to work.  It has me on this day when a long beloved program is coming to an end.  We are saying good-byes that have to hold us for two years and usually at such a time I pack my bags and land back in the midst of my role as pastor of a church.

But not this time.  Since I am on leave, I was able to tack on a few extra days of rest at the monastery.  The spaces no longer inhabited by my clergy sisters is huge and my default setting when things get empty feeling is to launch myself into work and doing but  not this time.  This time I have time to pay attention to the silence.  This time I have time to pay attention to what it feels like to be in this time.

I feel like a pressure cooker.  I have so many ideas and so much energy and I am feeling strongly the desire to be back at work.

But instead I’ll breathe deeply and give thanks and pay attention and stow away this yen for work for a time when I have an equally compelling yen for rest.

Balance is hard to find, maybe not possible, and probably not worth chasing after.  Instead I’ll pay attention to what is.

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Sister Mary Cecile is home.

She was doing the work she had long done – tending her parish – when she died unexpectedly, with her boots on.

I know this because I am folded into the community of Our Lady of Grace monastery outside of Indianapolis.  As guest of this house, I was here for Sister Mary Cecile’s homecoming. 

For four services of worship – morning prayer and noonday prayer, a wake and her funeral, her casket was open for the prayers that washed over her.  Prayers chanted, silence held, the gaze of her sisters who honored her with the caress of their eyes, stories told and tears shed.  Sister Mary Cecile was held by her community even as she was held by the God she had served for eight decades.

As the group moved out of the chapel and to the cemetary on the monastery grounds, the names of the saints were chanted, followed by the names of each woman from the community of Our Lady of Grace who had gone before.  The litany of the saints wove Sister Mary Cecile into the web of the community past, and it will weave her into the community future as her name is voiced with the passing of each sister who follows her home.

Ritual.  It holds us.  It reminds us of the huge of mystery and the power of what we can know:  the love and witness of holy flesh in the being of our beloveds.

Some day my name will be voiced as one who has moved into a new way of being and I pray that my soul too will know the washing of prayer and the weaving of witness borne on the lips of my community.

May it be so for us each.

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I’m in Indianapolis ensconced in a monastery that has become home for me.  For almost six years I have joined thirty other Protestant clergy women to gather for learning:  about Benedict, about communal spiritual life, and most of all, to learn what it is to be aware of how it is we are each immersed in grace. 

This is our last gathering.  I’m choosing not to think about that much as we greet each other after a year-plus of being apart.  We know each other’s stories – the parts that are shared – and catch up on children and partners and dreams and defeats and we are in a place where we are known as women touched by grace.  That common denominator is our core identity. 

And there is this.  My soul is bubbling with gratitude for these fine women and the Holy power that brought us together.  But also my soul is celebrating because a dear compatriot in the ministry and in the world is “back” after a serious heart attack.  I am so grateful.

We are touched by grace.  All of us.  Bubbles are good.

Salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

So I’m having fun.  I’m in a sea of  United Methodists and we who are present in this place (Florida in January.  No fools we!) are celebrated as maladjusted creative  subversive spirit-filled hope.  I like that.  The conference is called “Living the United Methodist Way:  Turning Worlds Upside Down” and it is so clear from speakers and preachers and the knowings of our own hearts that church as usual is killing us.  By that I mean church more concerned about boundaries and protocols and safety than the unleashing of the Spirit in this day and this world and this people.

This stuff gets me buzzing.  There are so many places and ways I could use the juice of my vocational life.  I just can’t shake church as the place I am called to be:  church as alive, church as movement and proclamation of hope, church as witness, church as binder of wounds and teller of stories and church as midwife of promise.  So I am in a sea of people who are groaning to bring this promise to life and I want to roll up my sleeves and jump into action and I am on leave.  All this energy has to be bottled and learned from and distilled into life practice. 

So I have time to digest.  And pray.  And tend the fire in my belly that gives thanks for a God who would call me and millions to creative maladjustment.  And together?  Oh, together there is a world sore in need of spiritual kooks – the people who celebrate being upside down.

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I have been in conversation with a soulful one.

Our conversation has been rich and roaming.  Most recently, it has touched upon a topic that has felt somehow dangerous:  how is it we are in relationship with all that is?  How does our answer to that question impact our sense of being in community?  And very much at the quick of this question, how does our answer to the question shape our communal policy making?

I think on this conversation as I read of layoffs and cutbacks and the crystalizing of economic values unfolding in these days.  As a people long unwilling to consider limits, we are being asked to consider what it means to pare down and pay attention.  The signs are ominous.  So many of us have so much.

And so many of us have so little. 

And we are all in it together.

How is it we can any longer afford a health care system that is not available to all?  How is it we can afford to cut spending to programs that equip and empower our children through early childhood programs and public education?  How is it we can imagine that the squandering of the potentiality of any does not impoverish us all?

In conversation with my mother-in-law yesterday she spoke of the ways she learned and lived through the Great Depression.  The community paid attention.  They sought to reach out to those struggling and there was no one in her town, she believed, who landed outside of the communal net of care woven by all.  

Idyllic fantasies?  No, faith bedrock.  Throughout scripture, poverty and the challenges it spawns is mentioned thousands of times as the concern of the community of God.  To be a person of faith is to know stewardship of the lives and hopes and potentials of creation.  Stewardship is engagement;  taking the considerable that we have and seeking the good. 

As we live into the rebuilding of these days, I pray for an awareness of how it is we are woven one with the other.

There is a cardinal singing outside.

Improbable and amazing, the splash of color and the insistence upon song on a morning when it is -15 and yet there it is.

I’m on renewal leave.  It is a time for letting the ground of my soul lie fallow.  I am taking this leave while the earth lies seemingly frozen and dead. 

And yet, cardinals sing.  Coffee is brewed.  Newspapers are leisured over.  The eyes and touches and sounds of beloveds are savored.  The silence experienced while not preaching or writing or teaching or leading or problem solving is dense with the song my soul has long ached to hear.  The song of being.

In the throat of the cardinal.  In the temple of my heart.

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