Tag Archives: faith

Goodness

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Behold, God is doing a new old thing!

I am retired.

I am retired and the sense of being un fettered means I want to be out in the world.

Cooper and I have a new camper. We are rookies at the craft of camping. We have so much to learn and time in which to learn it.

This past week we celebrated our longest occupation of the camper. We were out and about and having made a detour to attend a funeral of a beloved, we were on our way to our second destination – Bayfield, Wisconsin.

Motoring along on highway 53 there was a bump followed quickly by the realization that something was very wrong. We pulled over to the side of the road and discovered an incomprehensible thing. It wasn’t a flat or a fractured axle. The cause of the problem was that the bolt coupling the hitch to our car was gone.

Gone.

The camper had slid on the power jack and was unhurt and the chains held but the camper was now down off the hitch and to the rhythm of cars whizzing past at 65 miles an hour was added our sense of NOW WHAT?

A man pulled up in a not-new car. He engaged Cooper in conversation. I watched Cooper’s body language to ascertain the gist of the interchange.

The man got out of the car and promptly got to work. He jacked up the camper. He assured us that this devastation was not a big deal. He called a friend who lived nearby who happened to have the right-sized bolt and pin to secure the camper in its rightful place. He went and got that pin and bolt and laid on his back to install it while cars whizzed by.

As we were thanking him we exchanged information and it turns out we are all ministers: Cooper and me in the UMC and the gentleman as a Jehovah’s Witness. He shared a pamphlet with us and offered to talk more with us about his faith.

As we pulled away the power of the goodness of the Samaritan who saw the plight of two pastors in the ditch was not lost on us.

He saw. He stopped. He helped to gentle our jangled nerves and he knew what to do to help us and he did it.

He showed us mercy, did our neighbor.

We seek to go and do likewise.

land forms

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My forebears came to this country from Scotland.

While visiting Scotland I felt at home. It was as if the land spoke the language of my soul.

After visiting Scotland, I understand why my ancestors settled in the Duluth area. Having spent precious growing up years in Duluth and having had the opportunity to raise my own children there, it is so very clear to me that northern Minnesota echoes with the rocky and chiseled power of Scotland.

Land forms us and helps us find our way.

After spending a tense three weeks navigating the emotional angst of having a very ill son, the coast became clear for some time away.

We headed for the north shore of Lake Superior and there the land held and blessed. We were able to clamber up rivers and sit in the flowing streams. The big lake soothed and the sun-warmed rocks leeched the tired and worn places of soul-clench.

My cells knew that I was home.

And so I am.

in a day

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This morning I was witness to holy leave taking.

A church member, vibrant of soul and young of age, breathed her last.

She was surrounded by the resonant beauty of her fine life: Her partner, mom and sister acted as resurrection midwives. She had prayed that her death might be grace filled. And so it was.

All day today the church has been alive with the sound of music.

Tomorrow we will celebrate the marriage of two amazing folk. They have collected a tribe of singers and dancers who will lead us in a full-hearted celebration of love. There is music happening in most every space available. Our day care children are in awe, as am I.

Love. It’s what life is all about.

Today as Lori let go and tomorrow as Drew and Cassie cleave it is love that moves the loosing and binding that is life.

Love.

Born in the heart of the Holy.

Savored by the wise.

weave

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This has been a summer of prayer school.

Sure. I talk about it. I teach it. I do it.

And then family hearts break because of impossible tragedy. Then the chaos of misery strikes my child.

Then I realize that I am held by a weave of hearts connecting to the Holy and in that weave I am grieving sister and aunt and wracked mother and I am raw want and I am held.

I am held.

Love breathes through prayer. The number of people who have prayed and are praying for my loves and for others in this God blessed world is wondrous.

The song of prayer, whispered and bellowed and sung minute by minute and heart by heart.

Prayer; the heart longing of God reached out and returned as the breath that is life.

I’m learning.

Hallowed be.

time and rivers

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Of time and rivers flowing
The seasons make a song
And we who live beside her
Still try to sing along
Of rivers, fish, and men
And the season still a-coming
When she’ll run clear again.

So many homeless sailors,
So many winds that blow
I asked the half blind scholars
Which way the currents flow
So cast your nets below
And the gods of moving waters
Will tell us all they know.

The circles of the planets
The circles of the moon
The circles of the atoms
All play a marching tune
And we who would join in
Can stand aside no longer
Now let us all begin.
                Pete Seeger

How is it we are given this gift of life?

Having returned from vacation a scant 24 hours ago, I officiated this morning at the funeral of a woman who blessed.  She blessed through laughter and quick humor.  She blessed through a willingness to “join in” as Seeger sings in the lyrics above.

She lived a singular life; unrepeatable and precious.

And so it is for each who join in.

I don’t know what tomorrow holds.  My prayers for my loves and the real clamor of my longings sound relentlessly in my soul.

Sometimes the “I want” is a gong noisy and clanging and that gong has the power to create such cacophony within that the still small assurances of the Holy are near overwhelmed.

And then I remember.

Mine is to cast my nets below; deep into the moving waters of grace that will tell me all I need to know.

Still.  Small.  Powerful.  Deep.

Let us all begin.

 

 

Advent Day 10

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If our lives are ruled by the spirit of Advent, this loving expectation of God, they will have a quality quite different from that of conventional piety. For they will be centered on an entire and conscious dependence upon the supernatural love which supports us; hence all self-confidence will be destroyed in them and replaced by perfect confidence in God.

Evelyn Underhill

Ah, self-confidence.  It is necessary and it is not sufficient.

Some of us struggle mightily to develop self-confidence.  Given our upbringing or our gender or our situation in life, sometimes we make a conscious effort to throw off the constraints that would make us small and choose instead to move with confidence into whatever the world might hold.

We work with our children to build a sense of their confidence.  Sometimes, in an attempt to protect ourselves from remembering our own young wounding, we seek to cocoon our children in a failure-free chrysalis, thinking that by shielding them from pain we are protecting and growing their beings.

Self confidence is a good thing.  And it is not sufficient, because we and our children are going to fail.  We are going to fall in spectacular ways off the pedestal of our own or our parent’s construction.  We will spend time wandering and wondering and nothing will feel familiar and in just such times the presence of something larger than our own surety is gift beyond price.

There will be times in life where self-confidence is laughable and confidence in God the only power that we draw upon; breath by breath, step by step.

We are Advent people.  We live – sometimes even mindfully – with a sense that there is more to life and star dance than our own will and being.

And we ground our very lives upon that love beyond us, don’t we?

As you mark this Advent day of waiting in the mystery, remember and give thanks for those times when you were lost and broken and frightened and somehow somehow somehow the song of the angel and the presence of God-With-Us led you to wholeness.

We walk in the mystery of Holy presence.

Thank God.

 

 

 

 

Advent Day Three

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O Come, O Come Emmanuel,

and ransom captive Israel,

that mourns in lowly exile here

until the Son of God appear.

Rejoice!  Rejoice!

Emmanuel shall come to thee,

O Israel.

 Somehow my soul has always leaned into the mournful power of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”.  Even as a child growing up, I felt the shiver of mystery whenever the above song of longing was sung.

The hymn begins with a prayer so deep we seldom name its power:  O Come, hope.  O Come, deliverance.  O Come, Dayspring from on high.

To begin the season of Advent, we name our soul longings.  Surrounded by the many stuffs of our lives, we name the places of echo and want.

We name the longings for peace in our world.

We name the loneliness that sounds in our soul.

We name the hunger we feel for compassion made food for the hungry.

We name the near desperate sense we have that the antidote for all the brokenness in creation seems so long in the coming.

O Come, thou Dayspring, come and cheer

our spirits by thy justice here;

disperse the gloomy clouds of night,

and death’s dark shadows put to flight.

Rejoice, Rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee

O Israel.

 In the midst of the bustle of this holiday preparation marathon there is melancholy.

There ought be melancholy.

The promise and the gifting that is Christ Jesus is light and witness to answered prayers and gut sung entreaties.

And we know him not; not really.

O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

On this day give to God these questions:

 

For what does my soul long?

 

Who will I pray for during this Advent season?

 

How will I know my own call to live the vision of Jesus?

 

 

Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay