Encounter with Infinity

There are a lot of distractions in our lives -- things to do, things to worry about, fun to be had, and sorrow to feel. My friend, Katy Stokes, whom I miss very much, once said that as she drove to church each Sunday, when she came to the turn under the twin bridges, she would always slow down and take a moment to take in to view -- because if you look between the columns of the first bridge support, you'll notice it's a square shape; and if you look beyond that to the next set of columns, you'll see another square shape, smaller this time, and beyond that, another one, and on and on, smaller and smaller, so that it seems you are gazing into infinity. And Katy said that looking under those bridges was a reminder to her that she was on her way to encounter the Infinite, as indeed we all are.  So set aside your distractions and your worries this morning, and be here.  We are here to encounter the Infinite.

The Sacred Ordinary

Homily from staff retreat, June 2011

Things aren’t always what they seem to be; in fact, they almost never are. Jesus said, “Whatever you do unto the least of these you do it unto me.” Really? So we should treat everyone as Christ? If that’s the case, then every person you encounter is your teacher and your path to transformation. It seems like these are good things to remember in a room full of people with whom you spend 40 hours a week. Can you see Christ in each of your co-workers as you look around this room at these 13 faces? Can you see Christ in the students we interact with? What about the homeless person downtown? How about the people you live with? Do you love them all as if they were the Son of God? If you’re honest, you’ll admit that there are plenty of people who don’t elicit a Christ-like response from you. But it’s kind of like in the Bob Newhart show – remember the character Darryl? He’d say “hi, I’m Darryl, and this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl.” Think about that sometime, whenever you’re so angry with someone you could spit…hmmm…this is my brother Jesus and there’s my other brother Jesus, and on and on until Jesus is everyone you meet.

I once heard a story about two Christian monks in a Russian Orthodox monastery. And the older monk tells the younger one: "I have finally learned to accept people as they are. Whatever they are in the world, a prostitute, a prime minister, it is all the same to me. But sometimes I see a stranger coming up the road and I say, 'Oh, Jesus Christ, is it you again?'"

And not only every person, but each and every thing you see and touch is a part of God’s creation and is therefore…holy…without him there was nothing made. And everything you do or say is only possible because of God. In him we live and move and have our being.

One of my favorite songwriters, Carrie Newcomer, has a wonderful song about the sacredness of everyday things. It’s called Holy as the day is Spent.

holy is the dish and drain
the soap and sink, and the cup and plate
and the warm wool socks, and the cold white tile
showerheads and good dry towels
and frying eggs sound like psalms
with bits of salt measured in my palm
it’s all a part of a sacrament
as holy as a day is spent

holy is the busy street
and cars that boom with passion’s beat
and the check out girl, counting change
and the hands that shook my hands today
and hymns of geese fly overhead
and spread their wings like their parents did

holy is the familiar room
and quiet moments in the afternoon
and folding sheets like folding hands
to pray as only laundry can
i’m letting go of all my fear
like autumn leaves made of earth and air
for the summer came and the summer went
as holy as a day is spent

holy is the place i stand
to give whatever small good i can
and the empty page, and the open book
redemption everywhere i look
unknowingly we slow our pace
in the shade of unexpected grace
and with grateful smiles and sad lament
as holy as a day is spent

Just ordinary things. Ordinary life. We could add a few lines of our own:

Holy is the BCR
And the birds that poop upon my car
And ringing phones in the middle of May
And the money I gave to United Way
The expense report sent through campus mail
And the auditors who are on my tail
And the way a paper clip is bent
As holy as a day is spent

You know, what seems to be happening at the moment is never the true story of what is really going on (Thomas Merton). We see through a glass darkly. Don’t assume that you are fully awake to what is.

Cynthia Bourgeault tells a little story (The Wisdom Way of Knowing) that I love that illustrates how what we assume we are isn’t necessarily true, and that by dying to ourselves, as Christ taught us, we can become what we were created to be. It's called "Acornology."

Once upon a time, in a not-so-faraway land, there was a kingdom of acorns, nestled at the foot of a grand old oak tree. Since the citizens of this kingdom were modern, fully Westernized acorns, they went about their business with purposeful energy; and since they were midlife, baby-boomer acorns, they engaged in a lot of self-help courses. There were seminars called "Getting All You Can out of Your Shell." There were woundedness and recovery groups for acorns who had been bruised in their original fall from the tree. There were spas for oiling and polishing those shells and various acornopathic therapies to enhance longevity and well-being.

One day in the midst of this kingdom there suddenly appeared a knotty little stranger, apparently dropped "out of the blue" by a passing bird. He was capless and dirty, making an immediate negative impression on his fellow acorns. And couched beneath the oak tree, he stammered out a wild tale. Pointing upward at the tree, he said, "We . . . are . . . that!"

Delusional thinking, obviously, the other acorns concluded, but one of them continued to engage him in conversation: "So tell us, how would we become that tree?" "Well," said he, pointing downward, "it has something to do with going into the ground . . . and cracking open the shell." "Insane," they responded. "Totally morbid! Why, then we wouldn't be acorns anymore."

Things aren’t always what they seem. Most of us sleepwalk through our days. We work in our sleep, we eat in our sleep, we speak in our sleep. More than anything, we need to wake up, we need to go into the ground and crack open our shell, and this is where prayer is so important. Jesus said when we pray we should go into our inner room and close the door. And he wasn’t talking about locking yourself in a closet in your house. Your inner room is the room of your heart…and this is where God dwells. And prayer is not only, as most of us grew up thinking, talking to God, but it is also listening to God. And listening to God, just like in listening to anyone, is best done by doing just that: listening…. Stop your chatter! How can we learn to know God better if we never give Him a chance to get a word in edgewise? Listening to God requires shutting up on every level it is possible for us to shut up, including our thinking. Be still and know that I am God…quiet your mouth and quiet your mind. It is in silence that we will come to know God as he is (and ourselves) as we truly are. Speaking to God is also good, don’t get me wrong, but so often our prayers are a one-sided conversation – do you think that we can tell God anything he doesn’t already know? Whenever you pray, but especially when you are still before God, you are recognizing and surrendering to a power greater than you. Prayer, especially those prayers that happen when we realize our own sinfulness, when we are at the end of our rope…those times when a prayer of words seems meaningless and words just seem to bounce off the ceiling...those prayers when we fall to our knees and cry out to God and we admit we can’t do it on our own…these prayers are like going into the ground and feeling our shells split wide open. This is when we grow…in prayer we are transformed. Pray without ceasing…can you begin to see that life itself is prayer?

I’d like to close with a quote from Mother Teresa with a few small additions of my own.

Let no one glory in their success but refer all to God in deepest thankfulness; on the other hand, no failure should dishearten them as long as they have done their best. God sees only our love. God will not ask how many books we have read, how many miracles we have worked, [how many applications we have processed, what our average GRE is, how good our website looks, or how much we overspent our 9300 budget] but whether we have done our best for the love of him. Have we played well? Slept well? Eaten well? Nothing is small for God.

Amen.

Feel the Burn

It’s a bright and sunny August Sunday. The weather forecast for this week is HOT: Sunday 104, Monday 103, Tuesday 101, Wednesday 101, and Thursday 102…and if that isn’t bad enough, the lectionary readings for today seem to be conspiring with the weather to turn up the heat as well. Lots of talk about fire; lots of uncomfortable words in the scriptures and in the worship guide, too – “swords, division, crises, unsettle, conflicts, difficulties, bloodstained, nervous, unsafe, broken, dangers”…. All of this seems to say to us today that, in case we were thinking otherwise, Christianity is not an insulation from pain – that our God isn’t just asking us to be nice and to enjoy a life of ease and comfort. The Christ is calling us to awaken – to feel the burn – it’s the fire that creates that edge where change is possible – and so you are invited to bring your scars and your woundedness – to feel the rawness of that, and to open yourselves to God’s consuming, fiery presence – and to be transformed.

A New Year

From the worship service at DaySpring Baptist Church
January 3, 2010

This is a part of our service that we call the “Call to Worship,” and I’d like to call us to worship on the first Sunday of this new year with a few thoughts about how God calls us to this community, to this sanctuary.

Around here, we sometimes talk about the spiritual journey as a journey of awakening and we use words like "dying to self" to describe that journey. I’m sure all of you here have had moments over the past year in which you were awakened in some small way -- awakened to the love of God…miracles clothed in the commonplace -- and probably, too, over the past year, parts of you have died along the way.

For me, and maybe for others of you, the past year has been an awakening to the fact that I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT ANYTHING! It has been an awakening to that small, ugly part of me that is, in the words of George Bernard Shaw “a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making me happy.” Yeah, I’m not really all that perfect, but don’t tell Terry…he doesn’t know yet.

And there has been a lot of dying over the past year, too -- every time a friend was hurting, I died a little death; when my child was in pain, a part of me died then; and when I was the cause of the pain of my husband, my child, my friends, it was like a nail in my coffin; and… a part of me died every single time I entered this sanctuary. I love the word sanctuary -- a place of refuge -- because wherever you are in your journey of awakening, you are welcome here. And because there is something else that echoes back to me from the past year -- something our pastor said to a beautiful friend who was surely dying inside…he said, “My grace is sufficient for you…my grace is sufficient for you.”

This isn’t a place where you have to pretend. You can bring all of yourself into this sanctuary. In this season of Christmas, know this: that God, the creator of all, the great mystery, has come into the world as one of us. Emmanuel - God with us - LOVE with us. Love with us here in this sanctuary holding us together - in all of our weakness, in our joys and sorrows, in our belief and in our doubt, in our dying and in our waking. And this is my prayer for myself for the new year: May I decrease so that Christ may increase. And for DaySpring: May we decrease so that Christ may increase. Amen.

Thoughts on Detachment and Awakening

Spirituality means waking up.

Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep.

They're born asleep, they live asleep,

they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep,

they die in their sleep without ever waking up.

They never understand the loveliness

and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.

Eckhart Tolle relates a story about spiritual teacher, Krishnamurti, who travelled for 50 years, lecturing and speaking about something that cannot be conveyed by words. At one talk late in his life, he stopped and just said, "Do you want to know my secret?" The audience was on the edge of their seats, having followed him for decades and not "gotten it". What he said was: "This is my secret: I don't mind what happens."

This is key in detachment…not minding what happens, not being affected by what happens, what someone says, what someone thinks…even if it’s someone you love very much…being able to calmly respond, “Is that so?” instead of drowning in the emotion that results from being totally identified with defending ourselves, being right, being trusted, even with being loved. It’s obvious that most of the time we DO mind what happens...very much! Of course we do..it’s a normal, human reaction…but we’re being called into a deeper place, and because we’re being called we can also count on the Spirit to provide us with the grace we need to move to that deeper level. Live into this grace. We can’t do it on our own, but we can practice detachment while waiting for the grace to live it.

Is there anything I can do to make myself Enlightened?
As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.
Then of what use are the spiritual excercises you prescribe?
To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.

Take a deep breath and look inward..say as little as possible. Remember, love calls us to a deeper place. Deep calls unto deep. These are the fruits of prayerful consent. We are on the path…awaken, beloved ones.

Quotes from One Minute Wisdom
by Anthony De Mello

Prayers That Are Made Out of Grass

Oh, good scholar, I say to myself,

how can you help but grow wise

with such teachings as these -

the untrimmable light of the world,

the ocean’s shine,

the prayers that are made out of grass?*

......

It is a cold and misty December morning. My friend Katy waits just inside her front door and her face brightens as she sees me drive up. "You get back in the car!" she exclaims as I hasten to take her arm and assist her along the sidewalk and into my idling car. I grin at her protests. Katy is eighty-something, she is wearing a bright red tam cap, and I am glad to spend a few moments walking through the drizzle with the soft, damp leaves underfoot to guide her safely down the path. She tells me that she has had the red cap since she was a girl. The trees alongside the street are gray in the mist. "Oh, how I love this rainy, misty weather!" Katy exults. I know what she means. "It makes one feel poetic, doesn't it?" I ask her. That is exactly the word she is looking for, she tells me. Katy's voice becomes thoughtful and melodic:

When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep...

.....

It is a beautiful poem by William Butler Yeats**, and I ask Katy if she knows the whole poem. She does indeed and proceeds to recite for me the entire piece, and suddenly this day seems very precious and golden. I wish that the sacredness of this moment would go on forever. And maybe it does go on forever...the veil is pulled back and we catch a glimpse, but always, always that sacred, golden light is here just beyond the veil. The sacred exists all around us for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see: prayers made out of grass, holiness growing in a flower pot, love falling softly from the gray clouds.... Come and see.

*from "Mindful" by Mary Oliver

**"When You Are Old"