Dear God,
let us prepare for winter.
The sun has turned away from us
and the nest of summer hangs broken in a tree.
Life slips through our fingers
and, as darkness gathers, our hands grow cold.
It is time to go inside.
It is time for reflection and resonance.
It is time for contemplation.
Let us go inside.
Amen
Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer, Collins Dove, 1990.
"Meister Eckhart believed that 'God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away.' The challenge to the churches at the moment is to unveil whether there might be a divine presence in so much contemporary darkness, and to encourage the energy that is still there in people's lives to listen out for the divine coughs and tickles."
Mark Oakley, "Reclaiming Faith," in Spirituality in the City, edited by Andrew Walker, 1-14. London: SPCK, 2005.
"From time to time I ask myself what God's final questions of me will be. They keep changing. At this moment I have a hunch that they may be these: Have you lived passionately, made music, given freely, prayed extravagantly, labored in prayer for the suffering, created useless beauty, attempted spontaneous kindness, pondered deeply, shaped gently what you touched--and let yourself go, deliriously, becoming lost in Me? That is, Paul, have you loved beauty?"
W. Paul Jones. A Table in the Desert: Making Space Holy, Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2001, 224.
Andrew made some comments today that struck a chord with some things I’ve wondered about this past month. He talks about the awkward, perhaps strained relationship between our honourable bent to planning and goal-setting and the disquieting fact that so much of life lies beyond our control.
This resonates on two levels. Firstly, I have long been in the practice of setting out on paper my aspirations for the year ahead. The consequent ‘annual manifesto’ often verges on the side of grand and comprehensive. This year, feeling just a little weary of the grand, I summarized my aspirations simply as these: get healthy, be a good neighbour, and write a book. As goals go, they’re not terribly noble, encapsulating, or even especially ‘spiritual’. Still, each represents a choice that is, to a large extent, one I need to make and re-make in my daily routine. Beyond that: ‘Go easy on yourself!’ was the sage advice of a friend late last year. I’m trying.
Secondly, as a new academic year approaches and I map out course plans, learning objectives and prepare lectures, there is only so much that I can plan with any degree of confidence. In a sense, all I can do is provide the bones to a good and challenging unit for my students. Adding the ‘flesh’ is beyond me. Will they engage? Will they read? Will they be changed in some small or significant way? I don’t know. I can only hope so.
Howard Thurman’s words are reassuring:
“There are many forces over which the individual can exercise no control whatsoever. A man plants a seed in the ground and the seed sprouts and grows. The weather, the winds, the elements, cannot be controlled by the farmer. The result is never a sure thing. So what does the farmer do? He plants. Always he plants. Again and again he works at it—the ultimate confidence and assurance that even though his seed does not grow to fruition, seeds do grow and they do come to fruition.
The task of those who work for the Kingdom of God is to work for the Kingdom of God. The result beyond this demand is not in their hands. He who keeps his eyes on results cannot give himself wholeheartedly to his task, however simple or complex that task may be.”______________________________
Howard Thurman, For The Inward Journey, Friends United Press, 1984.
Milton over at Don't Eat Alone often inspires me with his gentleness and insight. The fact that he's a chef with a passion for theology and a love for writing makes me smile. His most recent post, try to remember, in no exception: a reflection on memory, significance and a life lived well. It's worth reading in full, but his concluding words are these:
"The point of life is not to be permanent, but to be present. None of us is going to be remembered much once we’re gone. But when we are, it will not be because someone came across us in a hard drive file, or put our name on a building, but because of a shared event when we left an indelible mark on someone who mattered to us. The things we do remember stack up like stones in an altar, putting us back together, one step closer to wholeness."
The Australian writer Terry Monagle is dying. When his illness was originally diagnosed, he was told he could expect around three more years. He calculated this to be "about 1000 sleeps." At the time his book Claws of Fire was published, those 1000 sleeps had passed.
Similarly to his earlier Fragments: Moments of Intimacy, this book is more journal than story, more a gathering of reflections than a thesis—poetry and prose mingled together. Mongale writes honestly, beautifully, intimately. That said, this book is far from an easy read; deeply sad though not depressing, raw though never self-indulgent. It's certainly not a page-turner. It takes time ... in my case some months of picking up and putting aside. Sometimes it's just too much.
For me, this book is spiritual writing at its best. I say 'for me', because I know that some others who read Monagle's earlier Fragments at my prompting failed to see in it what I did. Like relationships, I suppose books are always a unique encounter ... never the same twice. Still, for me Monagle's writing is always personal in the best sense of that word, intelligent, never 'preachy' or 'churchy' but compelling, calling me to live more deeply while affirming my life where and as it is.
Granted, part of what makes Monagle's writing so immediate to me is its place. Monagle lives here in Melbourne, in Kensington. He writes of places, cafes and street corners that I know. What's more, he finds God there, as sure and as profoundly as God is anywhere else. I like that.
A couple (or more) of links worth noting:
Amy Butler, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Washington (DC, USA), has a great post about her conversations with the mystic Julian of Norwich. Think spirituality and solitary tennis ... it's worth a read.
Another Washingtonian (is that what they're called?) Amy McClurg reflects on a recent brush with her mortality and her new found love for her body, that "pudgy container that has carried me through life mostly without complaint."
Then there's Californian (and Fullertonian?) Richard Mouw who has designated 2008 'the year of beholding'.
"Gradually I remembered what I had known all along, which is that church is not a stopping place but a starting place for discerning God's presence in the world. By offering people a place where they may engage the steady practice of listening to divine words and celebrating divine sacraments, church can help people gain a feel for how God shows up--not only in Holy Bibles and Holy Communion but also in near neighbors, mysterious strangers, sliced bread, and grocery store wine. That way, when they leave church, they no more leave God than God leaves them. They simply carry what they have learned into the wide, wide world, where there is a crying need for people who will recognize the holiness in things and hold them up to God."
"I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive an any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape. Neither I nor anyone else knows how these stories will turn out, since at this point they involve more blood than ink. The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me, it to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words in the world for God's sake. For me, this willing conversion of ink back to blood is the full substance of faith."
"The demands of parish ministry routinely cut me off from the resources that enabled me to do parish ministry. I knew where God's fire was burning, but I could not get to it. I knew how to pray, how to bank the coals and call the Spirit, but by the time I got home each night it was all I could do to pay the bills and go to bed. I pecked God on the cheek the same way I did Ed, drying up on the inside for want of making love."
"Once I begun crying on a regular basis, I realized just how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs. The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts. 'Behold, I bring you good tiding of great joy ...' 'Behold the Lamb of God ...' 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock ...'"
"My role and my soul were eating each other alive. I wanted out of the belief business and back into the beholding business. I wanted to recover the kind of faith that has nothing to do with being sure what I believe and everything to do with trusting God to catch me though I am not sure of anything."
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