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...

  As I continue to “practice resurrection” in these 50 days of Easter I am guided by Sister Joan Chittister’s book The Monastic Mind: 50 simple practices for a contemplative and fulfilling life.   I am also discovering new significance for incarnation as most of the tenets affect the body, like breathing, like kneeling….like being in silence and all the bodily emotions that illicits. My body and I have a love/hate relationship. Yet as I age and as I creek and stiffen, I am more aware of what I am able to do and grateful for renewed focus. I find myself developing a new relationship with breathing, not just because of that blasted, blessed, CPAP machine but because of its singular calming contemplative value in silence. Silence for me has become the fertilizer for growth. As Chittister notes: “concentration on the empty counterclaims of life - its fruitless promises - and contemplation of the Word will, together, bring us to the stilled fullness of our selves.” Everything sacre...

  As Kingfishers Catch Fire BY  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;  As tumbled over rim in roundy wells  Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's  Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;  Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:  Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;  Selves — goes itself;  myself  it speaks and spells,  Crying  Whát I dó is me: for that I came.   I say móre: the just man justices;  Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;  Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —  Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,  Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his  To the Father through the features of men's faces.  The 40 days of Lent turn almost like an imperceptible dawn into 50 days of Easter. We emerge from a wilderness, limp through Jerusalem like that donkey bearing Jesus, and fall at...

  When I think about tracks in new fallen snow, it rarely occurs to me that any are in the "wrong direction". Rather there is a creative purpose to all marks of emergence from the storm no matter how random or circular. Below is a post from another Easter and I am intrigued with a shift in my own perspective, perhaps due to rigorous practice or perhaps due to aging... The shift is subtle and incorporates what has gone before; it is itself reflective of tracks laid down with purpose even if the purpose was mere wandering.  Some of the tracks approach the empty tomb; some retreat. However, the thing about tracks is that is difficult to measure or discern the resting, remaining and staying, not to mention the learning. If one were to take an arial perpective of a wilderness journey it would not only reveal beautiful patterns and disjointed meanderings. It would also appear as though an exquisite thread was being woven through and around the path...

  There it is…that light in the darkness coming into us! I awoke this morning and though it is not Easter dawn, it is a sign of hope that indeed the tears of Good Friday are being transformed into a dawning love. I/we often move quickly from Good Friday to Easter Sunday! We aren’t quite sure what to “do”?! We aren’t quite sure “how” to wait for a Mystery. Martin Smith helps me when he says that when we get to Holy Saturday there are simply no words. “The church puts a finger to her lips…To be silent in awe is different, though, from being mute out of ignorance.” To paraphrase: our imaginations have been taken to their breaking-point in following Jesus to the utmost limit of his solidarity with us. So lest I be disingenuous and go on and on with words, let me take my breaking imagination to a “breaking in” of love and light which comes to a fullness in the resurrection. Let me watch, gaze and listen…to mystery. I will gaze at the dawn and its aftermath; I will gaze at the vastness o...

  This morning I am meditating on the word, “precious”. Perhaps a strange word with which to enter Holy Week and yet, it has often been a word which surfaced at the cross, as a mother waited with her son, as others began to realize the “preciousness” of their salvation, the preciousness of a moment in time. I began to list in my mind things precious to me in addition to Christ. My babies’ faces, my mother’s lambs and bunnies, every thought of my grandchildren. Synonyms like ‘dear’ and ‘cherished’ and even ‘sacred’ come to mind. All are wrapped somehow in visions of Love. There is a gentleness about precious. There is a tenderness.  And so I was caught up short by the title of a recent OnBeing podcast with the geographer (human geographer no less) Ruth Wilson Gilmore which was: Where life is precious, life is precious. She of course goes on to explain what she means but I was already off in my own meanderings… To me it speaks to the eternal, unchangeable nature of that which is...