Category Archives: faith

Pretense and True Belief

Posted on August 16, 2010 | 3 comments



This is my body, peeled back, broken open for you.
In my palm blazed Suchness, a torn fragrant crust of What Is So.

Oh, Common One, you are so plain, so familiar, so simple that we miss you in our desire for some other novelty. We seek you in mystery, ritual, knowledge, magic – all the things we hope will take away our pain and imperfection. We think that if we can just become enlightened, then we will be one with you. But here you are, hurrying toward us, loving us so much, broken hearted, risking everything to be with us in our unenlightenment.
Jesus, you are things as they are. Here is where I meet you in such unassuming splendor and fullness. Over and over, as I bump up against imperfection, resistance, and fear I find you –
grinning at me, sanctifying the moment, redeeming in streaming satin rivers of Grace what is so.

When the dancer becomes the dance, the veil lifts. When the pray-er becomes the prayer, when nothing separates us from God – no self to comment, evaluate, compare – then the forms of prayer drop away and the heavenly hosts arrive packing picnic lunches and lawn chairs and settle in to watch the show.

Someone ought to open a School of True Belief where we could learn how to believe until there was nothing in us that was not a believer. Every June we could put on a recital. There we would solo in some show stopping number where we would cease watching what we are doing and just do it in the free spontaneous expression of the passion of our souls.

True believers are rare these days. There are many schools which teach us how to hone deceit and conceit to a fine art. To know nothing but Christ and him crucified, to be wholly available to God as God desires, one must be free of pretense. We cannot be pretending about what is real. Rather we must be full of faith in the context of the essential truths of our life.

Yet we learn by pretending. It may be a necessary step on the journey.  Pretending may be evidence of both our unbelief, and our devotion. Through the gift of the ability to make believe we can try out and imagine what seems unimaginable. The foundation of spiritual growth and theological hope lies in the ability to risk into what doesn’t make sense or seem possible. A lot of the time we look like kids traipsing around in mom’s high heels and old prom dress. We smear on lipstick and crouch in the tree house being the squirrel sisters, famous ice skating stars and novelists. We giggle and sip Kool Aid from the stemmed goblets we stole from the kitchen. It is all a sham of course. Pretty soon Karen’s little brother will come around and throw tomatoes at us. But we are practicing the fine and awesome art of becoming our dearest dreams.

I remember the wild longing of age ten when I sat in the sun eating purple grapes, warm and sweet, spitting out the seeds at my brother. Summer was interminable and nothing ever happened except the daily routine of my hopelessly mundane family and Andy Griffith reruns. That longing took me to the cool dim corridors of the public library hunting ecstasy. I would haul home stacks of Nancy Drew mysteries and American Girl magazines and read about other times and places where Nancy motored about the countryside in her roadster and something more interesting than hanging out the wash and canning chili sauce was always happening.

Can we share in the wonder and deep need of the Great Pretenders? Can we cherish our vulnerability and say:  “Go for it, pretend your hearts out! Go on. You be the Goddess of the Moon and I’ll be the Wise King. The back porch is our kingdom and the dogs can be our ladies-in-waiting. Here, you can walk on water and I’ll heal the sick.” Pretend and dress up and play until your dreams come true.

And this is how dreams come true. One day when you are playing, the ladies-in-waiting suddenly bolt, trailing their gowns made of old curtains across the lawn, to chase a squirrel. One day the Moon Goddess gets a mean streak and scribbles crayon all over your royal decrees. The castle you made of boxes gets rained on and the whole kingdom disintegrates. On a day like that, when all your pretending is exposed and you are just a little kid filled with an ache for bliss you cannot name, then someone like a Mother or a Father will come to you and pick you up and wipe your nose and tell you that you are beautiful just the way you are. And the wild hunger to be known and honored and loved for the Holy Child you are is at last met by the Holy Child of God.

And all the rules we made up when we were pretending will seem silly and useless. Like how you are supposed to eat your chips in your sack lunch first and save the gummy bears for last. How if you get home before your sister after school that means dad will take us out for a Dairy Queen after supper. How if you pray this way or believe that or wear this totem or light this candle things will turn out okay for you.

And then the very powerlessness and need of childhood that drove us to pretending in the first place, the very unacceptability of ordinary being, that tender vulnerability at the mercy of powers greater than us, and all that we did to impose sense and order – then that unfinished irredeemable self becomes the holy ground of redemption.

I do not know if our pretense amuses or offends God. I do know there is a time for us to stop pretending about what is not and bless what is. For when I stop acting out my fantasies and stay here to drink this cup poured out and eat the bread of this moment, then I meet Jesus, the one who came and keeps on coming into the world just the way it is, not to condemn it, but that it might be saved through him.

This post is adapted from my book Letters from the Holy Ground – Seeing God Where You Are
Read more about prayer at The Sanctuary Foundation for Prayer website
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A Legacy of Love

Posted on August 2, 2010 | 2 comments
My brother reads from a letter my sister sent to my parents in 1956. She was a young bride living in Washington, DC in her first teaching job. “Here is your history,” he says, handing her the pile of typed correspondence. Neatly bound in boxes tied with string, stacked in baskets, stashed in closets, my mother saved every greeting card and letter she received.
We find our baby clothes – tiny booties, bonnets, and blankets – saved in the original boxes. My sister looks over a list of the names of people who came to visit when she was born. Holding the evidence in her hands, she says, “I was well loved. I was doted on.”
There are other treasures, Grandma’s pin, which on sight immediately conjures the navy blue dress she wore it on, and her austere, no nonsense personality. We all agreed that the most boring place on earth was Grandma’s house on an endless Sunday afternoon, listening to the clock ticking.
We find Great Grandmother’s worn, wooden butter paddle, carefully preserved and handed down to the eldest granddaughter. The paddle was saved in an enameled box along with an ivory fan from Switzerland. The enclosed note explained that the fan was brought back from a trip abroad by one of two women preachers in the family, Great Aunt Hannah Beard.
We are sifting the memories, treasures, and love from the chaff of well lived lives. As a friend put it, we are discovering the essence, the pure, best parts of what our parents and their parents and their parents have given us. My father died in 2001 at ninety three. My mother celebrates her ninety seventh birthday this week.
When I went to visit her, after a day of sorting and remembering, we ate some pop corn. Before she put a kernel in her mouth, she told me she likes to look at it to see what is there. “Look! Two eyes, ears.. a rabbit! Now what is in this one?” She turns the kernel over and then laughs, “Oh dear. Well, here is one leg, and another, and see what is in between?” We hoot and cackle till tears run down our cheeks, and we give that one to the dog. She holds out another kernel, “Now this one, tell me what you see in it.”
She has a poet’s ear, an artist’s eye, and a sense of humor born of suffering, endurance, and the grace of God. She sees the hidden essence of things and then sets out to show the rest of us. The house is full of paintings, wood carvings, sketch books, poetry, and natural history books. My father’s notebooks of clippings and tales of local history line the book shelves.
Dad, hunting arrow heads in the soil heaved up by spring plowing, and Mom, peering into pop corn kernels, were always scratching below the surface, turning up treasures their whole lives. My siblings and I wonder if we need a dumpster or a museum.
Love – between the legs, the eyes, the ears, and the beat of our hearts – expresses itself and leaves traces all over the place. Love sees beneath the surface of things, hopes enough to save what is special and worth doting on, passes on its truth and generosity, and leaves a priceless legacy. “We loved you so. You are so special to us,” the piles of boxes say.

Read more about prayer at www.fromholyground.org Tracking Holiness – Newsletter
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How the Light Gets In

Posted on July 12, 2010 | 2 comments
Weeping before the box, she lifts out the pieces and places them on the counter. All but one or two are broken.
Two weeks before when the boxes arrived, I had carried, heartsick, this one filled with the chink and clatter of broken pottery to the basement. Then I forgot all about the box of broken dreams, until I heard her carrying it up the stairs, shards rattling like a chest of huge coins.
She moves the pieces on the counter, sorting and fitting parts together.
In a distant city another young woman also picks out the ruins of herself from the broken jar of illusion.
So much is broken – plans, relationships, jobs, dreams – and rattles around inside us. We take out the pieces, hold them to the light, and try to fit them together. This confrontation with our fallibility and that nothing earthly lasts forever brings deep suffering. Loss is always more painful than the books can say, the scriptures convey, or the prophets of prosperity preach. We need a picture.
A man at the end of his own dance with mortality, hunched over on his knees in a dark garden, tears rolling down his face. He says to his father, the Heaven Dweller, “Take this cup from me.” And to his friends, “Can you not stay with me one hour in this agony?”
There may be something harder than watching one’s children suffer, but on this day I do not know what it is. The hardest thing I do in this work of ministry, prayer, and listening to souls in their journey to God is staying awake with others in their pain. This is to say, that the hardest thing is staying awake with Jesus as he suffers in others.
Some days I fail. I numb out. I fall asleep. I deny the suffering, blame the sufferer, quibble and become annoyed and irritated with how the person expresses her pain. The other day I thought of one family, “Always lots of drama in this family system.” I suppose, applying the same cynical criteria, one would have to say that Jesus was the all time drama queen.
Can’t you just stay with me in this torment? Can we just be there, trusting God and the soul to figure things out? Respecting the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in the awesome autonomy of an individual life, while lifting up the candles of faith, hope, and love seem to be my task.
I fidget. I want to fix things, pass out band aids. Leaning over her shattered treasures, she tries to wire one sculpture back together, fashioning a frame of cardboard.
“We need some glue. I’ll get some glue,” I say. “Let’s go to the store and get some good glue.”
She refuses.
Finally I stop.
Several days later I ask about the box of jumbled shards on the porch. “Oh, I don’t care what you do with it,” she tells me, as she heads off with her eyes on new heights.
To love, to know passion, and bliss is also to have our hearts broken. I know of no way to get around this and anyone who tries to tell you different is a liar. To live, we must die. To touch transcendence and eternity is also to gaze upon and weep over the box of our own finitude, our broken handiwork, our illusions, and limited understanding. “Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” sings Leonard Cohen.
The man in the dark garden gets up. It is time, he says, to be broken.
It is time
for us to be made whole.

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.

Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
 Leonard Cohen
Dear Hearts: Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up. For fun – A couple of video versions of Cohen’s Anthem.
You Tube: Cohen in concert singing Anthem
You Tube: Photo interpretation of Anthem
Read more about prayer at www.fromholyground.org
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Consider the Maple Keys

Posted on May 3, 2010 | 4 comments
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;
they toil not, neither do they spin.
The helicopters have landed. I returned home last week to find them scattered across my lawn, piled in drifts along the curbs, and clogging the gutters.
Maple keys are on an exuberant mission of fertility. Formed after the early spring flowers bloom on the maple’s branches, they hang in thick green clusters. As the fruit ripens, the color drains out of the wings. They thin to paper husks and release themselves, sailing off in dizzy circles.
These single winged wonders propel themselves by the auto gyrating principle of flight. The wing, which reminds me of a tiny squirrel tail, is counterbalanced by the weight of the seed or fruit.
Helicopters in the backyard, grass growing like weeds, a new crop of bunnies down the alley … Life wants to live, to express its live-li-ness. It cannot help itself. What Dylan Thomas called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” is at work here in Kansas. What sucked Jesus up from that cold slab and put him back on his feet, trotting down to Galilee, is loose in the world propagating itself in heedless prodigality.
Lately I have been noticing that how I evaluate, or interpret my experience and people is less and less important. Oh, my thoughts may be of riveting interest to me. Those closely held opinions, my ego defining and enhancing assessments about how things ought to be can enthrall me.
But now, really, am I not merely one maple key turning, floating lazy in one of millions of backyards? Am I not, too, heading for some crack in the sidewalk to insert myself into this good earth? Will I not lie resting, as my skin dries and peels away, as my seed splits and a tiny root weaves down into the substance of things hoped for?
What interests me more than my opinions is the seed – being itself, that hidden fuse in the mortal soul, which has amazing resilience and determination to express itself, to live.
I see this life in others more and more. I hear it in the subtext of conversation, hidden beneath the skin of things. It murmurs, like leaves whispering in a breeze. The ache and thrust to live, to sink into some welcoming soil, to be seen, heard, and received is an awesome power encased in the fragile, tissue thin, vulnerability of humankind.
As a species we seem always to be wanting things or not wanting things, or being angry or hurt, or disappointed, when our desires are frustrated or denied. Sometimes as rampant anxiety, sometimes as a yearning that tears and consumes, sometimes as a sigh at the end of the day, the seed strains against its waxy membrane, splitting its boundary with the need to grow and endure, sending out seeking tendrils asking: Am I all right? Will things be okay? Am I doing what I am supposed to? Will I get what I want?
When I see this collective longing buried under our anger, cynicism, cruelty, and fear, my criticism turn to compassion, my fretting to trust, and my impatience to surrender to the wind.
Life possesses us. And it will live through us. Do not believe for a moment that you can stop it. Not oil spills, economic downturns, illness, failure, not even death, not even death can stop it. For life owns death, makes it bow before it, and will reclaim all losses.
Consider the maple keys, loose in the skies. Catch a ride. And for God’s sake, for all our sakes, allow the life in your unique and splendid aerodynamic design live.
Read more about prayer at
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lross@fromholyground.org, www.fbook.me/sanctuary
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The Morning After

Posted on April 10, 2010 | 1 comment
Well, it’s over, thank
goodness.
The lilies droop.
The chocolate bunnies hunch
half eaten in the plastic grass.
Mrs. Mitchell runs the sweeper
in the sanctuary
sucking up the alleluias.
It’s over
and we made it.
We said it wouldn’t be easy.
We said we would be taking up the cross.
But the pain catches us
off guard
and we hunt
for other causes.
We said, “Yes, Lord, we will follow,”
and sauntered into lent
with the nonchalance of toddlers reeling
along some sheer drop off
all ignorant of our peril.
So when it comes.
The event, the person, the inner turmoil
which nudges us to embrace
the cross’s hideous face,
we forget
and call it irreconcilable differences
or stress or heartburn.
_____________
Once I went through a very painful period of deep suffering. When I talked with my spiritual director about it, he asked, “What have you been praying for?”
“To be conformed to God’s will.”
“Well, what did you expect?” he said.
We have an uncanny way of compartmentalizing our life in God. For some of us the things we say to God in church, the prayers, and songs, appear to have little connection to the life we lead outside church. How many times have we prayed “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” and then gone home and worried all week about the state of the economy, our nation, or our families?
Several people lately confided to me how afraid they are about the world. These are deeply faithful people, yet they are afraid. As for me, I, too, fretted most of last week – those useless “what should I do next” worries. The one we follow has explicitly told us not to fear. Yet we try to justify our fear by hunting around for the cause of our discomfort and call it whatever is fashionable – midlife crisis, the government, the economy.
In doing that we subvert the process of growth and maturity God has initiated within us, usually at our request. Think about it. What sort of things have you been asking of God lately?
The sacred action of transformation within our souls as individuals and nations will create turmoil, uncertainty, painful loss, and suffering. This is the cross. At the same time it is purposeful, hopeful, and to those who remain grounded in faith will, absolutely, result in new life and greater freedom to love and serve one another.
For me the bottom line is this, where do I get my news?  What is my foundation, the central fact and eternal truth of my life?  CNN, FOX News, my wimpy ego, or the Risen One calling me to trust in the hidden life and power of God around every bend in the road?
Now – go eat the rest of that chocolate bunny and have a day full of wonders!

Read more about prayer at  www.fromholyground.org Tracking Holiness – Newsletter
Contact Loretta at  lross@fromholyground.org www.fbook.me/sanctuary
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Being Trued

Posted on February 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

The dog is gnawing his bone, snorting and snuffling. I am curled on the couch at the end of a long day. The furnace fan shuts off. The house is quiet. I am tired. My throat is scratchy. I feel like I am coming down with a cold.

I think of you – your life, your sorrows and burdens. I wonder what you had to deal with today, and if you are at peace. When I write, I want more than anything that what I say is  true, is real. This means that I want to be trued, made straight, conformed to Truth. I don’t mean that what I write has to be perfect or factually correct (though I want to do my best on that score). I just want it to be aligned with a larger true Reality I know as God. I want what I write to have integrity in that sense.

Do I have a Word for you? Is there a Word from on high for us this evening?

The dog rests his muzzle against my foot, then plops down beside me. He sighs. Then we grow silent and still. I stop grasping for words and thoughts. I wait.

“Tell them that I love them.”

Oh rats. This fills me with a kind of frustration and sadness. The phrase God loves you has become so clichéd. I could just as well write, You are in good hands with Allstate. Ok I will try anyway. Do you get that, really know, that the Creator and Sustainer of the deepest Truth and Reality loves and cares about you? Do I?

Then: “Stop living your life as though I did not exist. Stop behaving as if I am not real.”

Ah, here is the being true part. Does your life, as you live it, reflect your prayer, as you pray it? How about today, Loretta, and this weary stressed out self you are bringing to God? How much of what you did and said and thought and felt denied the reality of Christ and cut you off from the source of life and strength?

I grin, recalling something that came to me a few weeks ago while I was praying with John 14: 1-9.  In this passage Jesus tells his disciples not to worry, but to trust in God and in himself. He tells them in his Father’s house there are many rooms, and he wouldn’t be telling them this, if it wasn’t true. He promises that he is going to his Father’s house and will prepare a place for them. And he will come back and take them with him to his Father. Then he says that they know the way to where he is going.

But Thomas responds, “Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

Then Philip pipes up with, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

And Jesus, shaking his head, maybe even rolling his eyes, says, “Philip, have I been with you this long and you still do not understand?”

Good grief – how many miracles, healings, parables, and sermons on the mount is it going to take?

As I pondered this text, what I heard was, “Quit acting like you are confused. You know the Father. You know me.”

I laughed out loud. It was a call to grow up, to maturity. Stop the confusion act, sweetie. Get congruent. Be true. Line up what you believe and know in your heart with how you live your life. Stop fussing around worrying and fretting like you do not know me and do not have a home on high. Have I been with you this long and you still do not get it?

It makes me sad, carrying on like Jesus is not here, like God didn’t love us so much that he died and rose for us. Me – like some self indulgent, disingenuous little twit saying with Philip, “Just show us the Father, then we will all believe. Meanwhile we’ll put our trust in Allstate.”

Oh, long suffering Savior, have mercy on us sinners, one and all.


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Clueless

Posted on January 8, 2010 | 3 comments
For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  I Corinthians 2:2

“He went out, not knowing where he was going,” says the writer of Hebrews.  Abraham,  the father of our faith, didn’t have a clue where he was headed, no map, five year plan, or GPS device. Just faith.

Most of us want a little more than simple obedience to the word of the Lord burning in our hearts. We want a backup plan, some insurance policy to guarantee that our wandering about in the dark and hard work will be justified. We do not want to look back in shame or sorrow at the choices we made.

Most of all, when someone asks what our plans are for this year, we want that calm sense of security that comes with being able to answer clearly: My goal for this year is to plant a garden, go to Greece, or graduate from the Neuroscience Institute. You need something with a nice ring, which wins a nod of approval, or even better envy. So we consult a bevy of advisors. How long do I have, Doc? Madame Sylvia looks in her crystal ball. We check our horoscope and give our broker a call.

In our sleepless nights we pray, “God… please… let me know things will be all right.”

Instead of a five year plan in the mail, we get the present moment.

This frayed and tattered now.

My old buddy, Oswald Chambers, writes in his January 2 entry in  “My Utmost for His Highest”:

One of the most difficult questions to answer in Christian work is, “What do you expect to do?” You do not know what you are going to do. The only thing you know is that God knows what he is doing….. Have you been asking God what He is going to do? He will never tell you. God does not tell you what he is going to do – He reveals to you who He is. … You must learn to “go out” through your own convictions, creeds, or experiences until you come to the point in your faith where there is nothing between yourself and God.

Wanting to know the future, and to possess absolute clarity about where one is going is the last stronghold of the ego and a defense against intimacy with God, where the way is revealed only as I have surrendered my desire to know anything, except, as St. Paul puts it, “Christ and him crucified.”

We are nearest to God when we have gone out from our egos – our own knowing, our worries, and desires – and are vulnerably present to Holiness. As we become present to the Presence, we discover a relationship so wholesome, nourishing, and tender in its embrace that our notion of direction and purpose is transformed. My life’s direction is not something I grasp by knowing, but rather is given to me as I allow myself to be known in the mutual exchange of love that is  our relationship with Christ.

This seeking, palpable, grace filled Presence of Christ is what allows us to go out into the unknown, empty handed and clueless. Jesus told his followers: “Take nothing for the journey – no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.”  Luke 9: 3

We learn to trust more in the ever present power of the One who sends us, than in our own preparations. And oh how much easier life becomes then!

How does one do this? Be aware. Allow space in your consciousness for God. Shovel away your lists and agendas, goals and objectives. Make a clear path through the snow drifts of your ego to the great I Am.

This is how I tried to do that today. All morning I prayed in the sunshine pouring through my window. I began with a list. A stream of words and worries that gradually slowed to a trickle.  Still in my pajamas and robe at 11:00, I am happy as a clam. Wrapped in love, I do not want to stop.

Often when I pray with others it is like this. Saying amen is a strain; lifting my head and opening my eyes, an effort. The magnetic pull of God captures me. To pull away is a sorrow, a sudden brutal severing from the heart’s true home. But the hour is up, the person who has come for prayer needs to go and is wondering if I am half crazy. So I return to “normal,” which seems ever more strange and artificial to me.

I know. I am weird. I also know many of you share this sense of God drawing you into Love.

I prayed for you this morning, for nothing in particular beyond peace, love, and joy. It is true I may not know you, yet I feel an oceanic rush of love and desire for your well being that hollows me out and leaves me breathless. I think it must be God’s love for you passing through my awareness. I hope it sweeps you off your feet today and tosses you hither and yon without a clue as to where you are going.

And on this cold day may you, beloved object of God’s devotion,

feel His warm breath upon your cheek.

Tell me about your prayer, the love song God is singing to you today.

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Contact Loretta at lross@fromholyground.org, www.fbook.me/sanctuary

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The Shepherd’s Story

Posted on December 23, 2009 | 3 comments

 

Once in the fields in a storm
hunched down in a cave
I saw a red tongue of fire
leap from the heavens
lick down a cedar,
and split it in two.

The cloven tree shuddered
and screeched
as it crashed to the ground,
like an animal in the jaw
of some great beast.

________

It wasn’t what you’d think –
lovely heavenly hosts
in neat rows and pretty song.

It was mostly wings and terror.

Cold night
stars like ice
fire down to coals
flock settled in the fold.

Some scattered for cover, crying
the world is ending
which it was,
but not the way you think.

Fear –
tomorrow’s frets
yesterday’s regrets –
that ember of anxiety
that never goes out
no matter how much religion
you throw at it –

fear rose up and choked me.

The great heaping clouds
of wings
and the Word that wrote itself
in the marrow of my bones
split me
into before and after
and left me puddled
on the ground
soaking into mystery.

Most don’t reckon the sheer terror
of God crashing into their lives.
I learned fear was not my enemy,
but a sign of His presence.

Ignorant and blind as a wood tick
on a lamb’s flank,
I’d been crawling
through a patch of fleece
and a bit of warm skin
without a clue
as to what is really going on.

I froze, stupefied.

The sovereign almighty God was asking
something of me,
God wanted me,
my will,
the way I held my world together in my
wood tick brain
my perceptions and understanding
my sense of competence,
my adequacy
seized and consumed by wings.

A master’s painting?
A Messiah chorus?
A quiet pastoral scene?

It was gasping for air,
trying to stay upright
with not a thing to hang onto.

What’s the Almighty to do –
all hobbled up with majesty
finally having to slip in the back
door
of the world
through a virgin’s womb?

It was Truth
taking aim
condensing its enormity –
its hosts and universes,
its fire and power and goodness –
and homing into me
like a dove returning to her nest
like a lamb turning to the breast.

It wasn’t what you’d think.
It was mostly wings and terror.

Then, something so plain
and ordinary,
a baby,
and a Love small enough
for me to carry.

 

 

 

 

 

 
For who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? Malachi 3:2
One Christmas I got a good dose of the awesome power of God. I wrote this poem in an attempt to describe that experience.  I love the way Annie Dillard puts it: “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.”
May the Almighty God knock your socks off this Christmas!

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An Advent Story

Posted on December 4, 2009 | 1 comment

The people gathered in small clumps, on this Sunday early in Advent, chatting and laughing before entering the sanctuary.  Some sipped coffee while they caught up on the week’s events.  Outside in the bright sun the children were playing.  A man with a yellow dog who was walking by the church stopped and asked the children for directions to the rail yards.

The children invited the man into the church.  They tied his dog outside and brought it a bowl of water and someone gave it a cupcake.  They led the man to the preacher, telling him that the stranger needed directions and a little money for food.

The preacher, tall, well-groomed in his black robe and satin stole looked at the man and caught the smell of whiskey.  He invited the man to worship and said that afterwards we’d see about some food.

That Sunday amid the handsome suits and stylish dresses, the colorful wool sweaters, and the neatly styled hair and deodorized bodies, sat a man in a torn jacket, baggy pants and wearing shoes with cracked soles. 

They had gathered on this morning to keep their observance of Advent.  They spoke and sang of things to come, of waiting, of expectation, and of hope.  The minister admonished the people to be alert, on the look-out, for Christ might come at any moment.  Afterwards the people went downstairs for a pot-luck lunch and an afternoon of games and songs and making gifts for shut-ins.

The man in the torn coat did not join them, though he was invited.  He sat on a gray folding chair upstairs and talked about Jesus and wept.  He said he knew he had done bad, that he was just a bum.  He rode in empty boxcars across the country with his dog.  Then he said his father sold him when he was six for a case of beer.

The pastor was uneasy.  He needed to be downstairs to say the grace.  Was the man’s story true?  How many other churches had he been to that morning?  He handed him a sack of food and drove the man and his yellow dog to the rail yards.

The children who had found the man asked their teacher why he had no money and why he wouldn’t stay with them and how could your parents sell you and wasn’t his dog wonderful and would he come again?  “I don’t think so,” said the teacher.

Christ entered our midst, right on schedule with our liturgical calendar, wearing a torn jacket.  His only follower was a yellow dog.  There was whiskey on his breath.  He saw quickly how the inn was full. 

We told him politely as possible that we just didn’t have much room for folks who ride boxcars and have a problem with alcohol.

Once a young student asked a rabbi how it was that no one ever saw God any more.  The rabbi responded:  “Because nowadays no one is willing to stoop so low.”

Think of the person you have most despised, whom you have found utterly repulsive, revolting.  See that person in your mind.  Recall your disgust.  Now answer this question:  Who did you think it was that needed to be loved, anyway?

For God so loved the world . . .

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crowstoburnaby/170684833/
                                                 

This post is an excerpt from a Reader’s Drama I wrote many years ago, titled Adventually – Waiting for the Messiah. It is also a true story.

 

More about prayer:   www.fromholyground.org

Contact Loretta at
lross@fromholyground.org, www.fbook.me/sanctuary

 Follow at http://twitter.com/lfross

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Prayer Boots – Part 2

Posted on November 20, 2009 | Leave a comment

This post is a continuation of last week’s, Prayer Boots – Part 1, a chapter from my book, Letters from the Holy Ground.

This summer a friend and I had a yard sale.  For a week I hauled boxes from attic and basement.  The children and I lugged baby clothes and infant swings to the dining room, where the kids promptly set up house.  “Remember this?  O Mom, look!  I remember this cute little dress.  I really looked so sweet in it, didn’t I?” they chirped sounding like they were eighty years old.  Cicelia spent two hours playing with the Johnson and Johnson baby blocks.  They had a tea party with the chipped china sitting at the little red table with their knees up to their chins.  Each box held wonder.  “Look mom, these beautiful curtains.  Can I have them in my room?”  Diana crowed, pulling out the tattered remains of the drapes that hung in our first apartment.

 Later that evening she came to me.  Holding a tiny blue sock to her lip and tucking her head under my arm, she said softly, eyes glowing with the rapt smile of one who has seen a vision of angels, “Oh Mommie, I remember me.”

Something forgotten, something precious, tender and pure that Diana called me had been recovered for her in that tiny sock.  When I asked what she meant, she said, “Well I just remember myself when I was a baby.”  That tiny sock I could never keep on her foot took her back to a pre-verbal time where she was held, rocked, nursed, sung to. It was a place where me dwelled, the essence of her being in the holy ground of the womb.  And she stilled her non-stop seven year old inquisitive mind to forget herself, to pay attention, and remember who she is: a child cradled in the loving bliss of One who is larger, kinder and more beautiful than she, and in whom she lives and moves and has her being.

She still crawls in bed with me in the mornings, her coltish long legs and arms poking, thrashing around, giggling, telling me jokes and that she loves me so much. She seeks herself in that safe place, before she bolts into her day of dolls and math and spelling and exuberant surprises. I wish we could all come to our prayer with her trust, playfulness and devotion.

I stared in shock whenever I passed the dining room with all those cartons brimming over with my past.  This is the room where we gather to pray, to recount our salvation history, to remember and receive the Eucharist.  Boxes lined the walls.  Infant seats and infant carriers and infant bottles and infant sleepers, undershirts and socks spilled all over the space where we sing songs of love to Mary’s baby.

My daughters poked about in their past, where we come to poke in our past, holding it to the light, turning it over in our palms, wondering what sort of price it would bring, praying God to be merciful.

The sale was one day only.  My friend and I sweated it out, swilling ice tea, tallying our profits and losses. During lulls in business, stricken with visions of having to haul all the stuff to the dump, we rushed about with markers slashing our prices.  “Everything must go,” we resolved, as we paused to fold one last time the sleeper we had laundered and folded so many occasions we had lost count.  We smoothed tiny collars and wrote $.10 on the stickers.

The Age of Aquarius macrame went, along with the tires, decrepit lounger, ice crusher, and malt maker.  We carted off my friend’s wedding gown, the fondue pot and five or six boxes of baby clothes to the thrift shop.

It was afterwards as I was picking up hangers and empty boxes from the floor of the room where we, breaking the bread and lifting the cup, do as he asked. Gathering up scraps of newspaper and tags, I saw the little nightie on the table.  It was then, forgetting myself in the mystery that rocks us all, and holding the soft worn flannel, sweet with baby scent to my cheek, that I remembered me.

One of the deepest mysteries of holy ground is the mystery of identity.  When God meets Moses at the burning bush, the two exchange their identities.  God calls, “Moses, Moses.”  The call is unique, distinct.  There can be no mistaking who is being summoned.

Moses’ response is the classic prophetic response to a call from God:  Henanni, or Here I Am.  After Moses receives his mission, he presses this burning Reality for its identity.  “Who shall I say sent me?” he asks.  And God responds, “Tell them that I Am.”

Holy ground is the place of exchange where I Am meets Here I Am, where What I Have Been will be transformed by Who I Am Becoming, where I forget what I thought I was and remember I am.

On just about every communion table I have ever seen are carved the words:  “Do this in remembrance.”  The little sacraments of our lives are those graced moments of holy communion when we do something prayerfully and in remembrance.  We release our grasping and coping. Then bread is transformed into the body of Christ, a blue sock into an angel’s wing, and a mortal being into a being in God.

God instructed Moses on Mt. Sinai to make holy garments for Aaron and his sons, including a plate of gold engraved with the words “Holy to the Lord,” which Aaron was to wear on his forehead, apparently to help everyone keep their parts straight.  My boots came with a tag that read: “Genuine Leather, Ozark Trail.”  They didn’t have any with gold plates.  I’ll try to remember my part anyway.

These days you can buy all kinds of prayer paraphernalia:  crystals, incense, podcasts of famous pray-ers, cds of words of power, icons, statues, pictures of Jesus in a startling array of poses, holy bells and whistles, oils and unguents.  My hunch is that it’s best to travel light, and you could do a lot worse than to get a good pair of boots.

Why not do it in remembrance?  Maybe we’ll meet on the trail.

Read more about prayer at
www.fromholyground.org

Contact Loretta at
lross@fromholyground.org, www.fbook.me/sanctuary

 Follow at http://twitter.com/lfross

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