“I beg you to keep me in this silence so that I may learn from it the word of your peace and the word of your gentleness to the world. And that through me perhaps your word of peace may make itself heard where it has not been possible for anyone to hear it for a long time. ” Thomas Merton
In the chaos and static of our inner and outer lives – the brewing anger, fear, shame, anguish, sorrow, and the constant push to produce or accomplish – we struggle to meet these deep desires of our hearts. Our perception of reality is obscured and distorted. St John of the Cross used the image of a dirty window to describe the process of spiritual maturing, which includes purification or cleansing. The prophet Malachi called for a good scrub with a steel wool pad of Fuller’s soap and the heat of a refiner’s fire.
We recognize that we cannot go on living in the way we have. Something needs to change and part of that is how we see ourselves, each other, and our beliefs about the God and the world.
NEW ISSUE OF HOLY GROUND If There Be Any Virtue . . . What clouds your window on the world? What disturbs your serenity? How do you change channels?
Three crows a sky-puppy a snatch of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ grandeur might be all it takes
“This effort to distinguish yourself is so hard on you.”
The summer issue of Holy Ground – What the Trees Said – celebrates the wonder of trees and how the natural world restores and draws us into God’s embrace. What is it in nature that calls you and makes you stop, still and wordless, as if held and absorbed in One beyond yourself?
Beloved one, how is your light? Do you know where it is? What is the quality of your light – a dim sputtering flame, a sparkler in the dark, a burning sun? Or has the injustice of the world gobbled up your light? We are all easy prey for the temptations of despair, fear, and hopelessness.
Nothing could prepare Jesus’s disciples for what it would mean to follow him. They just had to do it and be overcome by it. It will always be “too much.” Nothing can really prepare us for this process of inner and outer crucifixion and death to ourselves. Still, we each must kneel in our own Gethsemane and come to terms with that sticky web of self-deceit, confusion, and fear which binds our minds and bodies in endless knots that blind us to the brilliant light of God within us and our responsibility to lift it up for all to see.
A new self, a true self, a self, grounded, not in its own willfulness and endless needs, but in the abundant life in Christ, waits in the wings for its cue. To stand clueless and empty-handed in the midst of the mystery of our being is to dwell in the realm of God.
There truly is a place of calm and repose in every heart. I believe you have been there, have been held in the stillness, and been quietly nurtured by a forgiving, healing Presence greater than yourself. You may not have spent hours in prayer or engaged in various forms of meditation or spiritual practices in order to be held by this grace. More likely, you simply fell into it, that is, fell in Love.
What might get in the way of dwelling near to the heart of God? Evelyn Underhill writes about the temptation for turning toward what is new or odd or startling, as well as “a dusty crowd of devotional knickknacks that distract from the simplicity being present to the nearness of God.
Temperance requires a spirit of renunciation, checking the love of what is new, odd or startling, which so easily kills the taste for simple things and the tendency to assimilate odds and ends which swamp our few real treasures in a dusty crowd of devotional knickknacks. Temperance then is the teacher of humility and asks us to acknowledge the sacred character of the ordinary which was good enough for God to love and enter into in Jesus. Evelyn Underhill
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For me the cicada song is like waves crashing and receding on the shore of the ocean. The rhythmic sweep of sound from the trees carry me back to my childhood in Iowa on barefoot summer nights – fireflies, hide and seek, popsicles, and kids screaming with laughter, as we plucked the critters’ brown, brittle exoskeletons from trees and threw them at each other.
I long to abandon the brittle, cramped casing I call my “self” in a burst of resonant sound like my molting neighbors. I have been trying to die to myself this summer.
This was not my idea, and the notion has been at work in me for several years. It is one of those, pesky, persistent summons out of scripture, which keeps popping into one’s awareness in various ways – prayer, a book you randomly pick up and open, a conversation, a rhyme or song repeating itself. In my case I would add to these my own weariness with the burden of this self, which desires and grasps, resists and repels all real and imagined threats to its existence, as well as my self’s loud and raucous seizure of center stage in my life.
What does it mean to die to oneself? How does it feel? Self denial is not a popular notion. Many of us may feel that we have already denied or been denied more than enough times already.
Yet I have been wondering if self-denial out of love for God and others may be the particular spiritual work and mark of a Christian in our age. For the survival of our species and a remnant of a civil society, we need people who willingly set aside their own needs and desires, who divest themselves of their power and privilege, and say to our neighbors of all species, “I must decrease, and you must increase.”
Aim for the simple
hidden acts of love
which keep time ticking
like tiny golden gears
in the pocket-watch of the stars.
Reach for the ordinary goodness
that rarely makes the news
but forms the loamy ground on which we walk.
Paths our ancestors wore in the living of their days
now yield to our imprint, gently propelling us
out of the gravity of singularity
to leap beyond ourselves and see that I am
because they were and we are.
Take the unassuming
nondescript scrap
tossed by the wind across the parking lot
holding the list written in your hand
bread, eggs, fruit, mustard
milk
and
the essential
worker
driving the bus, behind the counter,
leaning over the patient.Care little for pithy memes and what is trending now
or the preening of curated selves
in your reflection on the screens.
It is you in that old ratty sweater
rising up
to lean down and put on your shoes,
pouring milk on your cereal
praying for your children
you
whom I am trusting in and living for.
The woman in the red hat
waiting at the corner for the light to change
waves back when I wave.
For a moment, an eternity,
the struck flame of connection
crackles between us
tugs us from our separate cells,
uniting to say
we are one here on this corner
and indeed, we are made of miracles.
Every day
communion is served on a corner near you
eucharist pours from heaven
runs down the street
children jump in the puddles -
maybe you do too.
My friend, my client, the pastor, shaking their heads, confided to me, “I just don’t know what to do.” I hear this within myself, and also from organizations as they struggle to cope with change. What should we do? What we must do something!
Please show us how to fix this, repair this breech, heal these wounds, right these wrongs, stop this dying! is a chorus running through the subtext of communities that haunts our days and keeps us awake at night.
Asking such questions is the vital and anguishing work of weighing motivation, desire, and call in the context of chaos and loss. Anxiety rises, tempers flare in the urgency of taking action, any action, of doing something. Yet periods of great pain and suffering – when we do not know what to do and have little control over the situation, and no answer seems to be right – may not require us so much as to decide what to do, as to consider the kind of people that this moment is calling and forming us to become.
So much of our sense of identity and worth are tied up in what we do, accomplish, achieve, and fashion with our hands, minds, machines, and technology. When we fail, mess up, and make terrible mistakes in our personal lives, institutions, and systems, we must face the truth that we are not who we thought we were.
Here, perhaps, a different question emerges, “What kind of people are we becoming? What kind of people is this period of history crying out for us to be? These issues are not just about us, our little tribes, communities, or social media followers. We need space to gather with all stakeholders for shared listening, for stillness, and prolonged silence to allow the emergence of a larger, kinder and more generous knowing than our own.
We need space to divest ourselves of our need to be right and of our weapons of defense. We need a desire within us to open our hearts to each other with a willingness to be wrong. We need to make space for humility.
How can we know what to do, if we do not really know who we are, who we are becoming, and what our responsibilities are to each other? Answering those questions require much more honesty, grief, and repentance than some of us are willing to give.
In the past several years I have been asking what should I do regarding several areas of my life, as a citizen of the USA, and a member of the homo sapiens species on this planet. Then this morning came these words:
What is true.
What is good.
What is necessary.
Hmm, that might help. To start each new moment with those words as my guide might enable me to be more present to what is (even when I do not prefer what is). As I trust, as life unfolds, minute by minute, perhaps knowing what to do will be obvious, clear, and attainable, as I ask what is true? What is good? What is necessary?
Actually this approach is very difficult for most of us, who like a neat guide or handy app for-what-to-do-and-how-to-always-make-good-decisions-and please,-we-cannot-afford-to-just-sit-around-in-silence-looking-at-our-navels-now, can we?
The urge of our faithless egos to take center stage and control the process prevents our access to the ever-present, ever-beyond our control Spirit of guidance, inspiration, creativity and power.
I say, let that ego fume, and whine and pontificate. It will wear itself out if you stop paying so much attention to it. And defy the fear with turning toward What is true. What is good. What is necessary. Of course, friends, this approach is not original with me. You know its origin. Read it over again here. See if it helps clear your vision.
Finally, beloved,
whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise,
think about these things.
Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you. Philippians 4:8-9
Peace, Loretta
Coming up soon is the Summer Issue of Holy Ground. Yes it is still summer in my world.This issue is called Forerunners. It is about the people who go ahead, as they seek to decrease that others may increase. You are probably a Forerunner yourself.
By the way – Are you weary of reading on screens, virtual reality, and technology in general? Would you like something to hold in your hands, doodle and spill your coffee on?
Get real andread the print version of Holy Ground for just $35.00 for four copies each year.
(Ok if you insist, you can find the e-version here as well. I am just trying to get you to slow down and relax.)
Disappointed? Didn’t get what you expected? Maybe something more is going on, than what meets your eye and hurts your heart.
Life has a way of disappointing us and exposing our assumptions and faulty beliefs. Disillusionment can be a brutal, disturbing experience. Like all adaptation and change, it takes time to accept what we have lost and begin to see what we have gained.
Yet, ultimately, to be disillusioned is to be set free. This action of grace removes the plank in our own eyes, dethrones our egos, and much of the healing process is hidden from our conscious awareness.
And then, there is Paul and his experience of disillusionment. Read his testimony. Does it sound like something you are going through?
See here, see the proof is in my groping blindness my stunned, numbed, nauseous soul stumbling in a foreign land.
There are ones who can testify that I saw well enough before, that I did not wear this unveiled shocked look of the newly blind. There are ones who can remember the zeal and pulse of desire in me.
Oh, Spendthrift Love,
Oh, Lay Me Down Love,
even from the tree
you coax: follow me.
Oh, Love That Never Dies,
could I love
like the pear tree loves
in heedless
scarlet surrender
to the grey autumn sky?
Could I run breathless
bearing bright bouquets
across the fields to you?
Could I with mad extravagance
pour out all my oil
upon your brow?
Could I throw caution
to the wind
and fling myself
over the lake
in a flurry
of milkweed seeds
and cattail fur?
Could we rendezvous
in every crack and cranny
of creation
where you issue
in sweet tenderness?
Could I be held
enthralled by wonder
unable to move
across a room
for need to kneel
at every step in praise?
Could I place my palm
upon the surface
of any cheek
and trace
the contours
of grace
with a finger?
Oh Love That Never Dies,
teach my heart
to love again.
Teach me desire
that draws life
from dry bones
like orange flames
leaping
from kindling sticks.
Oh Way is Narrow Love,
Oh Take Up Your Cross Love,
teach me
resurrection passion.
I've had enough of death.
Perhaps you have had enough of death, as well. Take a chance. Go outside. Fling yourself into the arms of your existence. Let yourself be held in a long embrace. Such amazing goodness and mercy is waiting for you.
The Praying Life 