Yet wisdom is at our elbow, whispering, as at his once: Progress is not with the machine; it is a turning aside, a bending over a still pool, where the bubbles arise from unseen depths, as from truth breathing, showing us by their roundness the roundness of our world. (R.S. Thomas 2004) This notion of “turning aside” has captivated me. It seems to be accompanied by stillness and whispers and mystical ideas like “truth breathing”. As Jesus demonstrated time and again, our notions of direction and hierarchy are imploded and there is an irruption of numinous wisdom, ever present, closer than we knew.  I knew a mathematician who studied the surfaces of bubbles. He received sizeable grants to do so! I remember being awed by this creativity and merger of science and amazement. I have a picture of our granddaughter mesmerized by a magnificent bubble. She is on the other side of it as though part of it, distorted by it and represented by it. I...

It is Saturday as the week turns into Sabbath...a new beginning. It is almost September as the summer turns into fall...another beginning. Inevitable changes filled with unwanted changes in these times. Let us pray to recognize the eternal which underlies and supports all change and is merciful and loving and just.  Blessing for a New Beginning In out-of-the-way places of the heart, Where your thoughts never think to wander, This beginning has been quietly forming, Waiting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time it has watched your desire, Feeling the emptiness growing inside you, Noticing how you willed yourself on, Still unable to leave what you had outgrown. It watched you play with the seduction of safety And the gray promises that sameness whispered, Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent, Wondered would you always live like this. Then the delight, when your courage kindled, And out you stepped onto new ground, Your eyes you...

“ Perhaps the wildness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.” Terry Tempest Williams How long dear Lord? How long? This lamenting question to God has been on our lips for more than 40 days, more than Noah, more than Lent. And so I have found myself trying to embrace this wilderness into which we have been cast, to receive it as I would a Rilke question, to love it as I would my enemy. It is not easy. Terry Tempest Williams has written a lot about wildernesses and their merciful characteristics.  The quote above seems to locate me in the wild pandemics with which we grapple. Layers upon layers of untamed power: virus, racism, narcissism, greed, lies, manipulation, politics and economics of selfishness. Like the layers of the wild: rapids, jagged mountains, wild animals, extreme weather. Who are we in these spaces? And how do we survive much les...

A dear friend was describing the emotion of dropping his son off for his freshman year at college in these uncertain times, filled with expectation, fear, hope, and disquiet. When I asked how he responded to the fragility and unpredictability, he said so simply and clearly: I tried to respond from a place of equanimity.   Amen. Finding, much less expressing, that in these anxious times, is like finding the balm in Gilead. And imagine the gift he shared. I heard the Christmas carol in my head and the line what have I to give but my heart.   This is surely grace. This is deepest wisdom.

“Perhaps the wildness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.” Terry Tempest Williams How long dear Lord? How long? This lamenting question to God has been on our lips for more than 40 days, more than Noah, more than Lent. And so I have found myself trying to embrace this wilderness into which we have been cast, to receive it as I would a Rilke question, to love it as I would my enemy. It is not easy. Terry Tempest Williams has written a lot about wildernesses and their merciful characteristics. The quote above seems to locate me in the wild pandemics with which we grapple. Layers upon layers of untamed power: virus, racism, narcissism, greed, lies, manipulation, politics and economics of selfishness. Like the layers of the wild: rapids, jagged mountains, wild animals, extreme weather. Who are we in these spaces? And how do we survive much less thrive? ...

Another word for disorder or disorientation is disquiet. As I sat with my reflection yesterday on disorder and heard from so many of you about feelings of disorientation I again thought of the liminal qualities of being in the disorientation and even embracing it. I remembered moments of change, of transformation, which are possible just beneath the surface. Richard Rohr calls this reorder; Walter Brueggemann reorientation.   There is a surrender in this space. And an accompanying awakening. This poem by David Whyte entitled Sometimes describes these disquieting yet expansive and formational moments which alter who we thought we were and show us who we might become. Sometimes disquiet is the “good trouble” we need.   SOMETIMES by David Whyte Sometimes if you move carefully through the forest, breathing like the ones in the old stories, who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but fr...

It was a wonder-filled time with mountains and lake and the sound of water and loons overlaid with magical moments with children. It was also a time in which anxiety was always close to the surface, even when the new was turned off. Usually a retreat or vacation is a time of rest and reorder and yet this year the disorder and disorientation was so close pervasive that it needed to be appreciated instead of analysed. Fortunately, Richard Rohr was offering meditations on “order, disorder and reorder” which triggered memories of Brueggemann’s psalmic orientation, disorientation and reorientation which in turn aligns with human development and how we learn and move through life, how our identities are formed. And so I found myself on the dock gazing at Rohr’s image of a Pollack painting and noticed myself. It was a hopeful if disorienting experience. I feel painted into a Jackson Pollack painting A red splat or a yellow sloop As though tossed rapidly and randomly onto a chaoti...

I know I said I was retreating and yet, when I came across this quote I knew it had to be for you!  "Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful Stranger or Must ask permission to know it and be known." David Wagoner Thus, begins the chapter on the Dark Night of the Soul in Barbara Brown Taylor's book Learning to Walk In the Dark. Thus stands a quote I had forgotten and in the reminding was consoled like melting into a familiar chair in my homecoming.  To know something or someone and to be known is at the heart of our becoming who we truly are. There is something poignant in that truism as we realize this process of salvation continues and even strengthens in the midst of pandemics plural.  I now leave to stand among the trees and bushes and rocks and waters of New Hampshire with the reassurance that they are not lost and somehow neither am I. 

I have written these liturgeemails without missing a day since March 17. I have also posted them on my blog, blessingimagination. I have actually amazed myself that it has never, not once, felt like a chore. It has saved me.   I am going to spend some time in the next two weeks vacationing and organizing them into some kind of “book”!   Who knows I may be moved by the Spirit to send something spontaneously as I will miss you but I wanted to invite you to rest with me, to review the entries since March 17 with new eyes and heart. I leave with these words of Madeleine L’Engle about the Word on my heart. I feel the need to be tender and gentle with language. I look forward to returning to something more regular and refreshed in two weeks. Bless you! “Word” by Madeleine L’Engle I, who live by words, am wordless when I try my words in prayer. All language turns To silence. Prayer will take my words and then Reveal their emptiness. The stilled voice learns To ...

Today we had no power still in Sharon so sermon did not get printed nor read as the beautiful setting of worshipping outdoors simply lent itself to spontaneity in the Spirit. We paused periodically to wave to power trucks going by. We summoned at least one observer to join us. It was nothing short of wonderfilled!   Below are the thoughts I might have preached but even they never coalesced. Instead I talked about riptides. I learned early on at the Delaware and NJ shores that instead of fighting a riptide one had to try to relax. This was a life lesson which comes back to me often when I face or recognize my fear, fight, flight amygdala reptilean brain.   This week as though anxiety were not high enough we found ourselves like the disciples in the boat at sea, in turbulent waters. A tornado left all of us without power and now 5 days later most of us have still not been restored.   As in the riptide or in the disciples’ boat, fear can sink us. By breathin...

What a week! I pray you all are safe and sheltered. Today we just don’t know when we get power, actually or metaphorically, but we know from whence our help comes. It comes in the name of the Lord. So let’s pray this today as we call God to calm our storms. Lord and Holy Protector, like the disciples who were caught in their tiny boat in the midst of a mighty storm, we come together to seek Your help. We are fearful as we are surrounded by danger. We feel helpless and small before the great power of this perilous time, a power which is beyond our control. We are fearful as we are surrounded by danger. While everything seems dark and dangerous, we place our trust in You, our Lord and God. Sheltered here in our home we are also shielded by Your love against all that might harm us. We know that You hear all prayers; so we now, filled with confidence, lift up our petitions to You, our God. AMEN by Edward Hayes May the peace of Christ be with y...

In Teaching a Stone to Talk Annie Dillard has more to say about the relationship between nature and silence, sound and stillness. As I re-read and make copious notes I am suddenly called up short by one line: “Now I am ready”.   Wouldn’t that be nice! I put my pen down and spend some time simply being in the created mystery of her observation hoping it brings me closer to that “readiness”.   Dillard, much like Mary Oliver, simply pays attention, excruciatingly close attention.   When one does this, silence prevails. It seems to lie at the heart of all noise and activity. It seems to be some kind of convergence or consolidation of the sounds creation makes into a holy silence. Silence may then be the gathering up of the fragments of sound into a divine harmony. What does that have to do with being ready? I am thinking the readiness of which Dillard speaks is the readiness to surrender and let God be God. To cut through extraneous noise and center down. So ...

Having written about the stones of time in the river, I revisited Annie Dillard’s Teaching A Stone To Talk. The story itself springs from an eccentric who is literally “training” a stone as one would a dog or a horse. But that exercise observed by Dillard becomes the prompt for a meditation on noise and silence and language.   Dillard takes us through a litany of “noises” in nature and in Scripture. Hills speak, valleys comfort, winds whisper, stones cry (Habbukuk). Whales breach, birds sing, and even the smallest of pebbles rumble when moved by tides in community. She pronounces “I call these noises silence.”   I feel myself breathing more freely and deeply. I notice a sigh of relief. My soul says yes.   Yesterday, in the aftermath of a tornado when I was absorbing news of restored electricity taking days, no gas, tremendous heat, and simply feeling like I did not have the capacity to endure, I felt a panic. Then I walked the dogs, I lit some candles and sat in the cooli...

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure. Somewhere we know that without a lonely place our actions quickly become empty gestures. The careful balance between silence and words, withdrawal and involvement, distance and closeness, solitude and community forms the basis of the Christian life and should, therefore, be the subject of our most personal attention. Henry Nouwen These words by Henry Nouwen speak to me of balance, equanimity, non-duality and integration. As I revisit the post the other day on remaking the world, I am reminded again of the complementarity and synergies of apparent opposites. I am reminded of the Prayer of St Francis.   In these times of grief and loss and doubt and fear, a theology of non-duality not only fosters compassion (itself a word of fusion not disillusion) but encourages hope.   For me today as one who crave...

“Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”   ― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through it and Other Stories I have written perhaps a dozen versions of my “spiritual biography”, for seminary, for ordination, for Education F...