Blessing That Undoes Us, by Jan Richardson   On the day you are wearing your certainty like a cloak and your sureness goes before you like a shield or like a sword,   may the sound of God's name spill from your lips as you have never heard it before.   May your knowing be undone. May your mystery confound your understanding.   May the Divine rain down in strange syllables yet with an ancient familiarity, a knowing borne  in the blood, the ear, the tongue, bringing clarity that comes not in stone or in steel but in fire, in flame.   May there come one searing word-- enough to bare you to the bone,, enough to set your heart ablaze, enough to make you whole again.  I confess that most of my life I was wedded to certainty. I sought and too often found false answers and sat in a stasis or fixity which was anything but consoling. Pentecost has come…again…and that Holy Spirit which never leaves somehow swept in. This year it really did feel like a...

  Optimism  by Jane Hirshfield More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth. I have always thought that hope and optimism were not the same things but reading this poem I am thinking now that resilience is the common thread. I could use some optimism/hope right now, in this world of persistent fear and anxiety. And it often assists to draw back and disengage from the cacophony and sit still with the simple eternal things and rhythms. The real "persistence", the hopeful kind, is not of bias and ill deeds; the real persistence is that which returns day after day, sunrise and sunset again and again, and reveals soothing sounds like the lapping at...

  Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings, vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle, unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat. Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it nor tongue utter it; only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure and silent, merge with the formless truth. As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself; you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever is at peace. Whole, you enter the Whole. Your personal self returns to its radiant, intimate, deathless source. Mundaka Upanishad Oh my, these words are to me like a psalm or prayer which refracts so many glimmering truths as a prism in light.  “As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself;/you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever is at peace.” This is the particle upon which I rest today as “freedom” feels suddenly and slowly approaching. While I may never arrive, I am confident of revelations and beckoning. Perhaps all of...

  Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die? Frederick Buechner I am endlessly intrigued by the word “easter” used as a verb. Not only am I reminded of those who believe, as I do, that God is a verb, but eastering seems to bring me closer to the mysterious and ineffable, to notions like resurrection and incarnation. It fosters our witness to miracles on earth. “something easters up out of the dimness” is a phrase which assists me in my contemplation of these 50 days when intentionally practicing resurrection. It calls me to pause in the dimnesses of life, of which there are too many these days, and instead of assuming the dimness is fatal darkness, to stay.  I imagine remaining at a dim, empty tomb with all its frightening aspects and being surprised by the ghost of a gardener or the apparition of an angel. Staying in unexpected, uncomfortable moments offers the opportun...

  Luther says, “Grace is the experience of being delivered from experience.”   I think that if grace is indeed a gift, a mysterious divine gift, then this must feel like floating. After all, being delivered from experience sounds a lot like deliverance from a false tether, a letting go. And it is in letting go of earthly, material expectations that we are met with … grace! I am trying to think of such a moment in my life when I felt this unbearable lightness of being. What comes to mind is the night after giving birth to my first child. The hospital, never devoid of sounds, seemed as though it were. The darkness upon which I gazed was at once a brightly  lit  city and also twinkling of stars piercing a beautiful darkness. I remember feeling suspended as though in a bubble dancing in space. Starry starry night/paint your palette blue and green...How you tried to set them free... I felt as though I were floating in a sea, or space, of grace. No earthly experience or ex...