2017.07.27 At Play With God

When I am on vacation on this island called Nantucket, I swear my mind goes fallow, or at least I feel plowed and unsown waiting to be seeded as I sit on the beach and stare blankly into the vastness of god-ness spread out before me with no end: the sea, the sky, the stretch of beach and sparkling white sand—even the tang of salt on my sun-dried legs. When I was young I swam in the ocean. Now I wade in it.

I listen to the sounds of silence punctuated by the surf’s splash and the occasional shouts of delight from children who dash toward the breaking waves and, suddenly frightened, race back—over and over and over. This is how I behave sometimes with God—boldly approaching with my words, my prayers, my theological assertions, and then, with no warning, I feel too big and too small at once, and retreat. I feel playful. Such a Mystery where mess and blessing collide.

I’m just back home in the city and still hearing, smelling, and feeling the island landscape and its lazy mood. I would not want to live there all the time—too isolated. Even an introvert like me could get claustrophobic here in winter, though I’m not sure about that. Nantucket is 30 miles out from mainland Cape Cod, a small scoop of land in the Atlantic Ocean. Every year the beaches recede almost imperceptibly. Climate change fears jump into my mind and jump out again—fast.  Not today. Today, I give my imagination full play.

I would be sad if we couldn’t return summer after summer for our two weeks in our small cottage at the west end of the island. It is quiet there. There's little ground light, so we sit outside and look up and see what looks like every single star in the cosmos and the milky way—better than any movie or television show we could watch. We actually ate by candlelight a couple of evenings, talked, and even cried a little—not sad just, dare I say, age appropriately age- aware, stoked by the power of 40 years of memories. These surge in and out of our minds and our conversation like the waves, bearing echoes of our children’s and grandchildren’s voices. And we said I love you more that we usually do. This is as close as we get to romantic. Godde, how strikingly irresponsible. Playing.

An island, such as Nantucket, is limited space thriving within limitless sky, sand, water, and air—a very playful image of God, I’d say.

Oh yes, I know there’s plenty of garish affluence among the stereotypical  “beautiful island people” who wander from store to store in Nantucket town and never stop spending. I do that, too sometimes, and this year nearly spent $200 (Ok reduced to $189.99) on a pair of fashion jeans that actually fit my skinny legs—nearly. I’m too old, not wise just old. And too, there’s plenty of loud partying among the young. I used to do that too. They are having fun, playing. 

How little we play in this present worried culture and gravely serious church. How little we let ourselves go and revel in godness wherever we sense it—be it idyllic natural scapes or on the sooty curbs of city streets where beggars gather to chat, compare the day’s wage, tell jokes. I’ve seen them play and seem them quarrel. But seriously, beggars in Boston smile, laugh, and say God bless you more than any other passerby caught in the rush.

In all this I imagine the face of a Creator-God exploding with delight watching Creation unfold, day by day, like a child inventing a new game. In Proverbs, Wisdom is portrayed as being God’s playmate:  “ . .  . beside God like a little child, I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” (Proverbs 9)

God at play, playing like children play, and adults play when they are free enough, exploding with delight at almost anything that bounces onto the cosmic scene. It is this image I seek, it is this image I play with—not to ignore sorrow or suffering or evil or decay, but to recognize and acknowledge what deeply matters, what gives the world and its creatures energy abundant.

Well of course! It would take unimaginable—beyond nucleic— energy to pull off a Big Bang.

2017.05.21 The Way It Is—Words of Wisdom

     Wisdom, to me, is the fruit of much well-digested life experience combined with intellectual knowledge, the kind that comes with “school”. 

    The dictionary defines wisdom as “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment”. Pretty close, but I called the “good judgment” part, well-digested.

    A popular aphorism of Benjamin Franklin advises:"Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”  For some strange reason this advice wasn’t meant for women. :0)

    The Bible calls Wisdom divine and names her Sophia (in Greek), a feminine name because Wisdom is portrayed in biblical Wisdom literature as a woman, her shadowy counterpart named Folly.

    In the Book of Proverbs, it is written that Wisdom as a child was present with God from the beginning when God created the world. Then again in Proverbs (1ff), a much-neglected yet often taken literally and over-quoted, book, it is written (paraphrased):
    “Wisdom has build her house. She has set her table. . . .  She calls: ‘Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity. Live, and walk in the way of insight.’”  

A biblical scholar once proffered this as a good invitation to the table of Holy Communion. We took him up on the idea and used it in a former parish.

"Groves of redwoods . . .are often compared to the naves of great cathedrals: the silence; the green, filtered, numinous light. A single banyan, each with its multitude of trunks, is like a temple or mosque—a living colonnade. But the metaphor should be the other way around. The cathedrals and mosques emulate the trees. The trees are innately holy."  Colin Tudge, "The Secret of Trees"



Socrates, a wise thinker in ancient times, said. “Wisdom begins in wonder.” If I were delivering a  commencement I would use this wisdom, elaborate very little and dismiss the grads with this advice: Whatever you do, always remember to wonder—and too, allow yourself to be wonderstruck.


American Poet Laureate, William Stafford (1914-1993) offers a recipe for daily life wisdom.

There’s a straw you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the straw.

Personal wisdom: Whatever comes your way in life is an opportunity to enhance or impede the flow of divine Love. That's ministry. That’s my “straw.”

Madame Owl sits among trees, observes, and wonders.

2013.11.20 Thank You Mr. Lincoln

The famed Gettysburg Address was delivered by America’s 16th President, Abraham Lincoln,   November 19, 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Lincoln’s words remain wise and true, a good example of spiritual writing, not just because he used religious vocabulary, like “consecrate” and “hallow” and "perish,"  but because he went right to the heart and soul of what mattered most to him, personally as the leader of a vast war-torn and bloodied country, but also to Americans whose identity and future depended on keeping alive its founding vision as written in the Declaration of Independence of 1776—87 (four score and seven) years earlier.  

Founding events are important, defining, like the Exodus for Jews, Jesus Christ for Christians, or Muhammed for Islam.  Even individuals have such spiritual touchstones. Mine, as many of you know, was meeting God under the table as a child and learning, unequivocally, that I mattered, no matter what.  What is yours?

Near miraculous to me as a writer is that Lincoln spoke the essence of what mattered in just 272 words!!!  (He'd have loved Twitter.) Oh, envy! I have not a brevity bone in my body, as you can see.  I plan to channel Lincoln as I attempt to get my memoir manuscript’s pages over the transom of a publishing house—in just 250 words. 

When asked in junior high who we thought was the greatest person in the world, I wrote Abraham Lincoln without hesitation.  Later, I felt a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t written Jesus Christ, but I didn’t know him very well yet. Even later, I felt another twinge that I hadn’t written a woman’s name, but all I could think of was Jane Eyre. I suppose therein were planted some early feminist seeds: why were all the upfront famous figures men?  

Lincoln said all men were created equal, as was the linguistic habit of his day. But why couldn’t we just say what we meant? Even at 14 I knew we weren’t all equal. Who lives all the way up to their vision?  We try. Yet I knew from my childhood experience that women were included in the equality vision. Girls mattered to Godde. 

To travel to Gettysburg, Lincoln left a fevered son and a distraught wife. He was exhausted with war, politics and from writing personal letters to everyone who wrote to him in their bereavement.  Then he stayed up all night working on his speech, which he read to a crowd of 20,000 from a single handwritten page. When he finished there was a long silence, followed by thunderous applause. And on the way home he contracted small pox, from which he recovered.

Lincoln was right about the “people.” That day they were the voice; they were the government;  they knew the vision had to prevail And they were the ones, on all sides of the issue, who sacrificed the most for the vision.  The biblical Book of Proverbs proclaims: Without a vision the people perish—all the people.  Lincoln knew that. And Jesus knew that. Both men died for the vision but so far neither our nation not Christianity has perished. It’s close.

I leave you with the words of a great man, and a vision to remember. It’s a prayer. Do you think that if we pray it we will come closer to living it, to uniting under it?  Can we feel compassion—for all?

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
 
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
 
"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."