“We can use a difficult situation to encourage ourselves to take a leap, to step out into that ambiguity.” Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart As one who has always been fascinated with liminal space, the thin space, the betwixt and between, Chodron’s “stepping into ambiguity” speaks to me. Not just as another perspective on embracing non-dualism, but also as a practice or strategy for shifting or moving when we are stuck in crisis.   Often a crisis, a word related to cross, becomes defined by two seemingly irreconcilable conditions: life or death, poverty or wealth, war or peace, etc. But what happens at the “or”? I believe that as these terms, and so many others intersect, there is a space at the intersection which is blurred or “queered”. In my experience that space is filled with new possibilities. And yet we hesitate and retreat toward the endpoints because they are familiar.   Imagine what it might be like to accept Chodron’s invitation and “step into ambiguity”,...

  Recently I was honored to offer a sermon at my dear friend Dana’s ordination to the priesthood. As a result some new people were invited or led to my blog Blessing Imagination! Consequently I was asked why the title and why the image above of kintsugi pottery. In offering some kind of explanation memories of the past 3plus years flooded my soul. And I was able to place those blessed memories alongside more recent ones as well as discoveries along the way which help me fill in the gaps of what was once a tenuous title and frame for writing and meditation. In her memoir Tina Davidson recalls a seminar at which Stephen Levine when asked about the meaning of life responded: “…I think the meaning of life is to let your heart be broken.” Davidson adds: “Moist, dark soil, ready for new life to begin” spills out.  Or, I would note, fertile soil is exposed…and the work of reconstruction, reconciliation and redemption begins. The blog, the title, the writing began on March 17, 2020. I...

  Blessed be God who animates our lives and loves us beyond measure that we too might bring love into the world. AMEN What a joy and honor to be here! I have been privileged to journey with Dana and now, to witness with her cloud of witnesses the sacrament of ordination, is something to behold!  Anyone who knows Dana knows she is passionate about the two great commandments and one of the creative ways she marks this covenant of Love with a capital L is to point consistently to the Robert Indiana Sculpture, that famous square of L O V E! (parenthetically the work of art also marks her love of Philadelphia) But let me use Love as the jumping off point today for it seems to me that no matter what or where or when, the Gospels point us to the Love of God or more accurately toward the God who is Love. And this love is expressed and lived and surrounds us through the mysterious and powerful dynamic of the Trinity. Moreover in our precious sacramental lives, ordination being such a m...

  For Beauty by John O’Donohue As stillness in stone to silence is wed, May solitude foster your truth in word. As a river flows in ideal sequence, May your soul reveal where time is presence. As the moon absolves the dark of distance, May your style of thought bridge the indifference. As the breath of light awakens color, May the dawn anoint your eyes with wonder. As spring rain softens the earth with surprise, May your winter places be kissed by light. As the ocean dreams to the joy of dance, May the grace of change bring you elegance. As clay anchors a tree in light and wind, May your outer life grow from peace within. As twilight pervades the belief of night, May beauty sleep lightly within your heart. "For Beauty"  by John O'Donohue  To Bless the Space Between Us This is one of  my favorite blessings. I enjoy taking each line and pondering what it means.  Today I am especially drawn to “As twilight pervades the belief of night, May beauty sleep lightly...

  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...