“The measure of true kindness — which is different from nicety, different from politeness — is often revealed in those challenging instances when we must rise above the impulse toward its opposite, ignited by fear and anger and despair.” Naomi Shihab Nye The above quote inspired Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem Kindness. I have been struck by the manifestations of this impulse recently and kindness, like the poem, is saving me. Fear, anger and despair indeed have threatened but acts of kindness even at a distance transcend the tragic gap and weave love and mercy into the frightening fabric of our lives. I invite you to ponder “the tender gravity” of kindness, offered and received today: KINDNESS Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the ...

Today I am reprising Brian Doyle’s Shimmer of Something. It too is saving me as it has before especially the line: “We touch each other when we have no other way to speak.” Since COVID and the intensifying awareness and importance of Black Lives Matter, physical touch has become a precious topic. I am wondering how we touch each other differently. Perhaps with gestures of grace and authentic care. Today I bow to the invisible love which permeates even in times of crisis and oppression. As I bow I pray, another connective act, that we continue to find and focus on ways of being “wise and wild” in our affections. A Shimmer of Something Well, the aged mother of the woman who married me died, And there are so many stories both sad and hilarious to tell, But let me tell you just one, because it is little and not little. At her Mass, after the miracle, but before the electric bread Went into every soul, as people are shuffling slowly toward The altar, everyone in the...

May you know love and welcome and nourishment this Sabbath:  Love (III)                by George Herbert Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back                                Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack                               From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,                              If I lacked any thing. A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:                              Love said, You shall be he. I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,                     ...

A week of shorter reflections on the redemptive power of poetry. Coming to water saves me and even pondering its power to heal and reflect and hold reminds me of God.  We are always arriving... COMING TO WATER (Nicola Slee) COME TO water.  It may be lake, river or sea. It does not matter, so long as the source is clean. Each makes its own kind of poultice for sickness. Here you will find healing, though it may not be in the form you are seeking. You must build a necessary hunger before you get there. You must be needy. You must be hurting. You must be lonely as the seabird’s cry far out near the horizon. After arriving, you must wait for a long while. You will still be arriving. Walk and walk and walk by the water’s edge. Sit for long stretches at a time gazing out at its many surfaces. Think of nothing. Let time and the passages of daylight and darkness pass over and under you. If it is dry and the sun beats golden on you, ...

Today I have the opportunity to do two of my favorite things: attend a book discussion with Bishop Laura and co-host a poetry sharing group loosely entitled Love in the Time of Covid. Little did I know that there would be for me an almost perfect convergence of the themes: Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin B. Curtice is the book and Redemptive Resources: What is Saving Us In These Times? is the poetry theme.   Native dropped into my lap several weeks ago as one thread of research on white privilege led to another and voila! Redemptive Resources was inspired by Krista Tippett bemoaning that journalists failed to attend to redemptive features of our landscape.   Imagine my surprise and delight when Curtice not only uses poetry to express many of her stories and memories and insights, but also speaks of the redemptive power for Indigenous people of the land and ancestors and memories. And so I offer one of the excerpts which particularly wov...

Into what are we being redeemed? From what or whom? From whence?  Redemption is something I have been praying about for a long time and writing about intentionally this week. I have not defined it however. I believe we are being saved from all that is not of God. I believe it is a process. And I believe that as we are sanctified and saved by grace, a gift, we are called to engage in the process of all salvation. This is hard work and joyful work. The result of the work is the revealing of a deeper Presence. The other side of redemption is perfect freedom. The other side of redemption is a truer more genuine integrated self. Below Rilke helps me embrace and process the sadnesses of life just as he calls us to live the questions. As we all seek the love which saves us especially now in dual pandemics, may we live into the tensions that we might emerge closer to One, closer to the Beloved Community, which Rilke calls fate: “It seems to me that almost all our sadne...

“Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.” John O’Donohue Beauty with a capital B is saving me. The quote above is taken from an interview John O’Donohue had with Krista Tippett ONBEING (I cannot recommend it more highly). When I read his book entitled Beauty, I was struck by the sensation that every time he used the word “Beauty”, I was reading God onto it. Like synonyms or   like concepts from diverse languages, I realized that Beauty is as good a definition of the undefineable and immeasureable God as anything else. God is Love, God is Mercy, God is Grace, God is Beauty. And on and on... What really intrigues me, however, is that Beauty may be about “substantial becoming” and that gives me hope for us an...

I dedicate this little book to the mountain that ever visits my window. Sometimes the sun sears it, Sometimes the sun caresses it. Often the rain scourges it. Now and then the snow gently envelops it. I have never heard the mountain complain about the heat of the cold. It has never charged anything for its majestic beauty. It has never even asked for thanks. It simply gives of itself free of charge. It is no less majestic when the sun caresses it thank when the wind lashes it. It does not care or get upset if people scrutinize it or climb it. The mountain is like God. It supports everything, endures everything, welcomes and shelters everything. God behaves in the same way. That is why the mountain is a sacrament of God, revealing, reminding, pointing to, sending us back to. Because the mountian is like that I gratefully dedicate this book to it. This book attempts to speak the sacramental language that the mountain does not speak but...

the Shawshank Redemption I have decided to try a theme on for the next few weeks! I have tried this before but God has steered me elsewhere and yet I have some accumulated thoughts which need to be placed in a stream of living water. Perhaps that is true of all of these musings but these hopefully are a little tighter?! The theme is redemptive landscapes or what is saving us now? So much has been written about death and disaster, injustice and systemic oppression, hate and tragedy. In trying to rebel against my dualistic tendencies which put bad things in one column and good things in another, I am coming to understand a little better how non-dualism and contemplation assist not only in revealing the good but also the divine. And the divine or holy exists within and alongside the bad and the ugly.   Before going to the obvious quote: the good the bad and the ugly, I want to use another, and to me more redemptive, one. As the great mystic Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel s...

Blessed be God who animates our lives and receives us into the household of all saints that we might know perfect freedom. AMEN It seems particularly appropriate that on this Sunday we return to in person worship we do so in the context of our baptism. We intentionally wrote the protocols for reopening with the theology of baptism as our guide: to respect the dignity of every human being and to love our neighbor as ourself and to work perpetually for justice. Paul’s letter to the Romans meets us at that moment where we were and are and ever will be baptized into Christ’s death. And moreover he reminds us that that death by baptism is always and only linked with the resurrection.   As we look around us in the world today, death and gasping for one’s last breath are in high relief. Whether in the pandemic of COVID or the more clearly identified virus of racial injustice, breathing actually and metaphorically is in the forefront of our lives together. Individual breath ...