A redemptive recognition of reality

Artist: Henri Rousseau

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Someone in crisis phoned me today and we talked for a while about reality testing. In the following passage, Benedictine monk Laurence Freeman asserts that questions - not anwers - help us in the recognition of what's real and what's not:

Unlike answers, questions attract and hold our attention. They are irresistible, like a half-open door. Answers, especially wrapped in dogmatic certainty or claiming to be right in this form for all time, soon come either to bore or oppress us. Even the best answers can be as unwelcoming as a door banged in our face when they exclude alternative responses. Rather than giving answers and making rules Jesus called people to experiential knowledge. By asking questions or telling stories he invited his hearers to a personal discovery of truth, a redemptive recognition of reality. Throughout the gospels it is his questions which magnetize and capture our attention. Often they also deftly turn the attacks of his hostile critics back on themselves. It is by questions that he leads his disciples into a deeper understanding of who we are and who he is. These are the inseparable twin insights of his gift to humanity.

Something about idolatry

Artist: Felice Giani

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I would assert that idolatry is far more seductive than most of us realize. For most of us it is not about exotic statues with many arms but rather about concepts, attitudes, entitled convictions. I think a disciplined spiritual life certainly includes being on the lookout for the idolatry within ourselves on a regular basis:

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words . . .

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

About not resisting our own true nature

Artist: Alexander Francis Lydon

Image from Wikimedia Commons

My experience has been that many people who come to talk to me about their spiritual lives are actually trying to resist their own natures - trying to be who and what they aren't. And so the following really resonates with me:

A fish cannot drown in water, a bird does not fall in air. In the fire of creation, gold does not vanish: the fire brightens. Each creature God made must live in its own true nature; how could I resist my nature, that lives for oneness with God?

-- St. Mechthild of Magdeburg

Where our feet take us

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Some time ago, reader Deacon's Wife sent me the link to a blog post entitled "The feet of a grasshopper without a leg". It starts off this way:

One of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, once wrote that "if you want to know who you are, if you are more than simply academically interested in this or that mystery, you could do a lot worse than look to your feet for the answer. ... When you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because, where your feet take you, that is who you are."

The entire post is quite touching and I recommend that you take a look.

Let's also, shall we, consider looking to our feet.
~~~

Small piercings of beauty

Artist: John William Godward

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I think when I was a little girl I kind of saw the soul like the pilot light mentioned here. Somewhere along the way I think I came to favor seeing it as "all the small piercings of beauty". What about it, dear people? How do you view the soul?

Soul. The word rebounded to me, and I wondered, as I often had, what it was exactly. People talked about it all the time, but did anybody actually know? Sometimes I'd pictured it like a pilot light burning inside a person--a drop of fire from the invisible inferno people called God. Or a squashy substance, like a piece of clay or dental mold, which collected the sum of a person's experiences--a million indentations of happiness, desperation, fear, all the small piercings of beauty we've ever known.

-- Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair

A task to perform

I want to pay my respects here to The Rev. Dr. Peter Gomes of Harvard University who died last night and whom I admired hugely.

Here's an excerpt from a sermon he delivered in 2008 as a guest preacher at Washington's National Cathedral:

Often I have said to my congregation, “If you have had problems with Easter, I can’t wait to tell you about the problems of the Ascension. People will sit around speculating as to the mechanics of it, the physics of it, and how it could be, when the real burden of the Ascension is how we now do Jesus’s work.” At Pentecost we will celebrate the empowering of the church to do that very work by the gift of the Holy Spirit, and I will not anticipate what the preachers of that day will say. I will say that we have a task to perform, we have an opportunity to perform it, and we are required to perform those tasks in the name of Jesus Christ, whose commission to us as he leaves us is to do the work his father has given him to do: to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison, wage peace and not war, love our enemy, take care of those who are on the margins and fringes, be salt in the world, be light in the darkness. Because we have heard it all before doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, and because we have heard it preached from this and thousands of other pulpits does not mean that it is not still good news. It means that these are our responsibilities, and that now that Jesus has left this world, all that remains of Jesus in this world is us. What an awesome responsibility, that we are meant to be the Christ-bearers in this world! We are not meant only to own his name, to pray to him, to be objects of devotion. We are meant to be Jesus in the world, not simply performing tricks or doing good works. People who have never seen Jesus Christ are to see him in us. What a responsibility! What a frightening task! What a glorious opportunity! I would say that we are meant to be Jehovah’s witnesses.

That might scare some of you, for you have encountered Jehovah’s Witnesses, I know, and you’ve had nothing to say to them. Never argue with a Jehovah’s Witness, for you can’t win. The only way to deal with them is to say, “I too am one of Jehovah’s witnesses, I too bear Christ in the world, and let me tell you about my Saviour…” What an extraordinary thing it would be if, when a Jehovah’s Witness knocked at the door of an Episcopalian the Episcopalian witnessed to the Jehovah’s Witness—the Witnesses would never come back to that house, I can assure you! Everybody would be saved by such an enterprise.

I can just imagine the howls of laughter that this suggestion surely prompted! I wish I had been there.

May he rest in peace and may light perpetual shine upon him.

~~~

(Note: I was intrigued to find the 15th century miniature of the Ascension posted above. Notice that Christ is not depicted. Rather the angel is asking that marvelous question, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven?)

~~~

Illusion-piercing insight

Artist: Simon Alexandre-Clément Denis

Image from Wikimedia Commons

One of the reasons I've had something of a bumpy road along the way regarding my life within the institutional church is that I've often been expected to preach and teach a domesticated God and I simply will not do it; in fact, I don't really think I'm capable of doing it. Here's something that expresses what I mean here rather well:

Unfortunately, religion often works to shrink and tame the very wild and mysterious forces that first drew our wonder. In the process of making the inexplicable safe for the masses, the possibilities for real illusion-piercing insight becomes reduced. One might say that they are only available to those who dare to ride the breaking crest of direct life-altering experience.

-- Stephen K. Hayes

Our search for the holy

Artist: Anna Munthe-Norstedt

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I really like the spiritual writings of Macrina Wiederkehr. Here's a brief passage from her book, Seasons of Your Heart:

In our search for the holy, there are times when our restless preparations smother the very truth for which are searching. We decorate our rooms and make elaborate preparations for our prayer, when a single flower and a moment of waiting are all we need to meet the One Who Comes.

You know, many people are resistant to the idea of spending some time in meditation each day. I think it is because they believe the dedicated time needs to be long. I start meditation students off with literally one minute of giving relaxed attention to something beautiful. Yes, we do gradually build up to longer sittings but if one minute with a single flower each day is all a person does, it will be very beneficial.

I also really like Wiederkehr's name for the Divine here: the One Who Comes. It seems to me that this name is a great respecter of Mystery as well as a reminder that there is so much that we just don't know or understand.

~~~

Something about self-acceptance

Artist: John Singer Sargent

Image from Wikimedia Commons

You know, I agree with this:

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

~Boris Pasternak

So why do people beat themselves up so badly because they've fallen or stumbled? That saddens me when I observe it. I wonder if they realize that they would not be very likeable at all if they were as perfect as they wish to be.

~~~

This transitory life

Artist: Vladimir Kormout

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I bless the day I discovered the works of John O'Donohue, the Irish poet-philosopher who died much too soon in 2008. Although his writing is luminously beautiful when simply experienced in print, I recommend the recordings of him reading his own work as the best introduction to his thought and verbal artistry.

Here are several passages about impermanence and time that are good springboards for contemplation:

Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night. In this way transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.
...
On its outer surface time is vulnerable to transience. Regardless of its sadness or beauty, each day empties and vanishes. In its deeper heart, time is transfiguration. Time minds possibility and makes sure that nothing is lost or forgotten. That which seems to pass away on the surface of time is in fact transfigured and housed in the tabernacle of memory.
...
Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.

An open window

Artist: Ekaterina Iliynskaya

Image from Wikimedia Commons

This is a marvelous articulation of how icons are vehicles for us not only of devotion but also of insight:

The figure in the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, or what Mary looked like, nor the child, Jesus. But, the orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless. The icon of Jesus may not look like the man Jesus two thousand years ago, but it represents some quality of Jesus, or his mother, or his followers, and so becomes an open window through which we can be given a new glimpse of the love of God.

-- Madeleine L'Engle

Something about believing

Artist: Viktor Vasnetsov

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?

-- Yann Martel (from Life of Pi)

(Just to put the above quotation in context, you might like to read about Life of Pi right here.)

Redemption and the human condition

Hello, friends. I want to tell you about something I found this morning that moves me very much although I realize it will not be some folks' cup of tea exactly.

Over on YouTube there are several videos of Handel's Messiah staged in operatic form. It's filmed from a live 2009 performance in Vienna. The various scenes depict the human condition as experienced in various situations - grief, anxiety, despair, confusion, joy, redemption - using symbolic props, movement, dance and sign language for the deaf. I thought I was not going to like it but the more I watched video after video, the more deeply moved I found myself becoming.

It helps that the chorus and orchestra are truly magnificent and the musical interpretation is very much in line with how I've been trained in baroque playing and singing. Nevertheless, one must be willing to experience this as theater - and theater in a very stylized form as well.

Here's one of the simpler scenes:

Here is the first one that I watched:

And here is another one that I think is very moving:



There are more.

In case you don't already know this, you can click on the title of an embedded video and it will take you directly to the where it is posted on the YouTube site. There you will find the others on the sidebar.

~~~

UPDATE: I just found the DVD of this production on Amazon right here. Please do click through and read the first review - the one written on Christmas Day. It gives you more information about everything to do with this staged version.

Can we purify our thoughts?

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Hmmmm. Here's something that cthat conveys a lot of wisdom:isciple cameo the celebrated Master of the Good Name with a question. “Rabbi, how are we to distinguish between a true master and a fake?” And the master of the good name said, “When you meet a person who poses as a master, ask him a question: whether he knows how to purify your thoughts. If he says that he knows, then he is a fake."

A disciple came to the celebrated Master of the Good Name with a question. “Rabbi, how are we to distinguish between a true master and a fake?” And the master of the good name said, “When you meet a person who poses as a master, ask him a question: whether he knows how to purify your thoughts. If he says that he knows, then he is a fake."

-- Elie Wiesel

Yes, we can try to purify our thoughts. We will not succeed. The master who does not know this is not a master.

~~~

Gratitude and oblation

Artist: Christopher Rådlund

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I don't think I've recommended the Gratefulness.org website recently. Let me hereby remedy that situation. It was founded by the contemplative monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast, whom I've sincerely admired for many years now. There's a wonderful feature for lighting a virtual candle (among other riches you can find on the site) and also a Word for the Day. Here is today's "word":

Even if I should be locked up in a narrow cell and a cloud should drift past my small barred window, then I shall bring you that cloud, Oh God, while there is still the strength in me to do so.

-- Etty Hillesum

Back in the early days of my own monastic commitment, I made a practice of actively seeking out concentration camp stories. I was (still am) particularly interested in how people respond to the extremes of the human experience. Etty Hillesum definitely became one of my heroes.

May she be one of yours as well.

~~~

The goal of dancing

Artist: Auguste Renoir

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Over the years, I have had a number of luminous, numinous dreams in which I was dancing with a partner. In each of these dreams I experienced such indescribable happiness that, upon awakening, I knew that my dance was indeed with the Lord of the Dance.

And so you will understand why I really like this:

God wants to dance with us. The goal of dancing is NOT to learn the steps. The goal of dancing is to enjoy your partner. We learn the steps but only so we don't have to look down at our feet. We are free to look into the eyes of the one we love.

-- Nicole Johnson

The Generative Mystery

Artist: Thomas Moran

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I was captivated by the word, "godfulness" which is partly why I'm offering this quotation today. But then I also really like the word "generative". And then, again, I love this last sentence here:

Godfulness is simply recognizing the primacy of a presence of love, spaciousness, grace, generativity, caring, and creativity in the world and in myself. How can a mere financial crisis compare to that? The Generative Mystery cannot go bankrupt. It is not subject to scarcity. We never run out of God.

-- David Spangler

On miracles

Artist: Yakov Kapkov

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I think if we took the following to heart, a large portion of the seeming conflict between religion and science would dissolve:

Miracles...rest not so much upon...healing power coming suddenly near us from afar but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that, for a moment, our eyes can see....what is there around us always.

-- Willa Cather

And this one:

Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to that which is known to us of nature.

-- St. Augustine

Where is God?

Artist: Walter Gramatté

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Oh, my. It is a very short quotation that I'm bringing you today but it is one that pierces my heart - truly.

O Lord, I am further away from me than from You!

-- Sorin Cerin

I am happy to have found the quotation. Happy, as well, to have found out about its author.

This quotation reminds me that St. John of the Cross emphasized the teaching that to know oneself is to know God. He was not at all saying that the self is identical to God. No, he was saying that the only obstacle to knowing God is the self.

~~~

Truly a keeper of a prayer

Artist: Viktor Vasnetsov

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I'm choosing to cross post today, dear people, because this beautiful prayer is so, so good. (Yes, I posted this over on The Anchorhold as well today.) My dear priest friend, Wilma (from South Africa - currently serving in California), sent me the following:

Eternal One,

Silence

from whom my words come;

Questioner

from whom my questions arise;

Lover

of whom all my loves are hints;

Disturber

in whom alone I find my rest;

Mystery

in whose depths I find healing and myself;

enfold me now in your presence;

restore to me your peace;

renew me through your power;

and ground me in your grace.

This is so powerful, isn't it? I know it's going to offer me many, many hours of reflection and contemplation.

Existence and meaning

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I was in my 20s, I think, when I first came across the wonderful book, Markings by the late U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. This work had a profound and lasting effect on me. It is his journal, actually, and is mostly a collection of his own fairly short meditations and sayings. Here's one of my favorites:

I don't know Who - or what - put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone - or Something - and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

The Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple

The detail above of Simeon and Anna recognizing the savior is from a larger work by the 14th century artist Lorenzetti Ambrogio. You can see the complete work right here.

This day is also known as Candlemas. It commemorates the occasion when St. Simeon recited the Nunc Dimittis. I'm offering you a translation in English and the truly ethereal setting by Rachmaninoff:

Lord, now Thou lettest Thy servant depart,
According to Thy word, in peace.
For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation
Thou has prepared before the face of all people,
A Light to illuminate the Gentiles
And the glory of Thy people Israel.

Perception and Shadowlands

Artist: Childe Hassam

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Ever since I took my first philosophy class and spent some time studying epistemology, I have trained myself to sit loose to the idea that human perception necessarily gives us accurate information about reality:

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

-- Herman Melville

May we remember, then, to cultivate a willingness to embrace the mystery of what is.

~~~

Finding your song

Artist: Gerard van Honthorst

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Recently, a reader commented somewhere on this blog that not everyone is gifted in the realm of contemplation as we usually understand that practice. I agree. And so I really appreciate the following:

You can help yourself hear God by creating harmony and rhythm in your life. This does not mean you need silence. It means you have to find your song, and you have to surround yourself with sounds that are part of your rhythm. Different people have different songs: some might find theirs in a machine shop, others in the woods, others shut alone in their study. Engine noises or the rustling of leaves or the ticking of a clock or silence will distract some of us but will be part of the orchestration for others. If you find your own harmonious way and listen carefully, you will hear the voice of God. It is always available, but the sounds may be very subtle. God leaves it to us to set our antennae in the right direction, be still, and listen.

-- Bernie Siegel

"The gate of Heaven is everywhere."

Yes. I would also claim that Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander is my favorite of Merton's works.

Conceding that we are who we are

"Talking in the Rain" by Margret Hofheinz-Döring

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I regularly remind directees (and myself, for that matter) that we are all mixtures and that trying to fulfill an idealized self-image is both impossible and spiritually damaging. Here's a little something about that:

Maybe one day we'll grow weary of whining and celebrate the rain, the manna, the half-filled glass of water, the little gifts from heaven that make each day bearable. Instead of cloaking ourselves in the armor of pessimism, maybe we'll concede that we are who we are: capricious, unfortune, wonderful, delicate, alive. Forgiven.

— Mark Collins in On the Road to Emmaus

Protective prayer

Image from Wikimedia Commons

This is just beautiful. I think that's all I want to say right now:

I draw prayer round me like a dark protective wall, withdraw inside it as one might into a convent cell and then step outside again, calmer and stronger and more collected again.

-- Etty Hillesum

(Do click through on Etty Hillesum's name for a truly beautiful essay on her life.)

~~~

Learning, working, valuing, noticing

Artist: Rueland Frueauf the Younger

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Today is the feast day of St. Francis de Sales who wrote Introduction to the Devout Life.

Here a few things he said that are worth thinking about:

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, work byworking and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.
...
There was never an angry man that thought his anger unjust.
...
We must never undervalue any person. The workman loves not that his work should be despised in his presence. Now God is present everywhere, and every person is His work.

I like them all - especially the last one.
~~~

Oh, this is amazing:

Sarum prayer

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I grew up on this prayer. There's a musical setting in the Hymnal 1940 that we sang frequently when I was in junior choir and so it's deeply imbedded in my consciousness. I continue to experience these words as both consoling and challenging:

God be in my head
and in my understanding.
God be in my eyes
and in my looking.
God be in my mouth
and in my speaking.
God be in my heart
and in my thinking.
God be at my end
and at my departing.

The parable of divine love

19th Century Russian Icon

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I'm not sure I understand this but it makes me think. And that, I would submit, is valuable:

Christ does not save us by acting a parable of divine love; He acts the parable of divine love by saving us. That is the Christian faith.

-- Austin Farber

For your contemplative practice:

This is wonderfully focusing and soothing at the same time. I really love the way each icon gently moves into the next without any abruptness. Some of these are most unusual. I am particularly interested in the icon you find from about 5:22 until 5:52.

The problem with pride

"Haughtiness"

Artist: Antoine Wiertz

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Now this is a very interesting observation. It makes a whole lot of sense, actually:

Pride makes us hate our equals because they are our equals; our inferiors from the fear that they may equal us; our superiors because they are above us.

-- St. John Vianney (the Curé d'Ars)

There's something to be said for learning how to be ordinary and to experience being ordinary as a great relief!

Good religion, bad religion

Artist: Fra Angelico

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Here's something I just came across that explains the situation very well, I think:

Good religion teaches us about a good God and encourages us to be like Him to the people of the world. Bad religion teaches us about a good God and encourages us to look down on the people of the world because they are not as good as God is.

~ Harold J. Duarte-Bernhardt

A prayer of profound surrender

Artist: Wilhelm Trübner

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Maybe I ought to have saved this for Lent but I found it today and liked it very much even though it's about hard awarenesses. It occurs to me that we need prayers like this throughout the year:

Penetrate these murky corners
where we hide our memories
and tendencies on which we do not care to look,
but which we will not yield freely up to you,
that you may purify and transmute them.
The persistent buried grudge,
the half-acknowledged enmity
which is still smouldering,
the bitterness of that loss
we have not turned into sacrifice,
the private comfort we cling to,
the secret fear of failure which saps our
initiative and is really inverted pride,
the pessimism which is an insult to your joy.
Lord, we bring all these to you, and we review them
with shame and penitence
in your steadfast light.

-- Evelyn Underhill

Icon for your meditation

Artist: Ekaterina Iliynskaya

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Epiphany 1

Image from Wikimedia Commons

This is the day on the Church's calendar that the Baptism of Our Lord is remembered and honored. We also look at the meaning and function of our own baptisms.

Here's something about this great sacrament of initiation that is very worthy of serious reflection, I think:

Baptism is not a bath, but a funeral bier. If it was a bath, you would need it again and again. But since it is a death and new life, it is a once for all picture of the transformation that has taken place in our lives. Baptism is not about your goodness; it's about God's Grace.

-- Dr. Mickey Anders

The difference between faith and belief

Photographer: Argos'Dad

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Here are two quotations by the great Archbishop William Temple:

Faith is not the holding of correct doctrines, but personal fellowship with the Living God... What is offered to man's apprehension in any specific revelation is not truth concerning God but the Living God Himself.
...
The life of faith does not earn eternal life: it is eternal life. And Christ is its vehicle.

I do get weary sometimes by the assertions of certain conservatives that what we believe about God or Christ is the most important thing.

But then, I have a very high doctrine of the Indwelling. I recommend it.
~~~

Beauty and presence

Artist: Anna Ancher

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Yes, this is very true:

All art that really draws us to look at it deeply is spiritual. Art accepts all the sadness, and transforms it implicitly affirming that beauty is essentially the presence of God.

— Sister Wendy Beckett in The Mystical Now

The Magi

Artist: Edward Burne-Jones
Image from Wikimedia Commons

Every year at the Epiphany, I make a point of reading T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi. This year I found a recording of Eliot reading it himself. Oh my:

The Feast of the Epiphany

This is an astonishingly precise and mature performance by a school choir. Really lovely:

For another interpretation of this same tune, please go on over to The Anchorhold and have a listen.
~~~

Prayer in the totality of life

Artist: Margret Hofheinz-Döring

Image from Wikimedia Commons

God to enfold me,
God to surround me,
God in my speaking,
God in my thinking.

God in my sleeping,
God in my waking,
God in my watching,
God in my hoping.

God in my life,
God in my lips,
God in my soul,
God in my heart.

God in my sufficing,
God in my slumber,
God in mine ever-living soul,
God in mine eternity.

-- Carmina Gadelica

I've always loved the Celtic prayers that acknowledge the divine in every aspect of both being and action. The above is one example. Such a prayer is a good way to start off the new year and then to turn to frequently. This kind of praise and invocation (for it is both) help us avoid artificially compartmentalizing our lives into the wordly versus the spiritual.

Awe

Christmas, if it is anything, is time of awe. So is Epiphany - that season which is fast approaching. Here's something about awe that I think is utterly beautiful:

Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.

-- Abraham Joshua Heschel

(The image, from Wikimedia Commons, is a detail from a Leonardo da Vinci painting.)

Blessing and joy

Image from Wikimedia Commons

The following quotation is really describing the act of blessing as a meditative support. We are being encouraged here to bless as a remedy for distractions. Very interesting indeed:

As our awareness of blessing grows, so does our joy. When we bless something, we center our attention on a very holy moment, for the power of blessing will tend to focus our mind, regardless of where it may have been wandering. We are brought to joy.

-- Avram Davis in The Way of Flame

A resolution that's easy to keep!

Hello, everyone. I'm asking everyone who stops by this blog to read the following and consider helping me out here:

A Very Easy Way to Help the Center

(with no cost to yourself)

~

I want to appeal to everyone who believes that St. John’s Center does good work here in Tulsa to check out GoodSearch (http://www.goodsearch.com/) along with its sister site, GoodShop (which you can access by clicking on the “Shop Now” button from the GoodSearch home page.)

GoodSearch is a search engine that gives 50% of its profits to the non-profit organization of a person’s choice. The Center is registered with them. The more you search, the more money we raise. It’s that simple!

All you do is go to the home page and fill in our entire name where it says “What charity do you goodsearch for?”

St. John’s Center for Spiritual Formation

~

Then click on the button that says “Verify”.

If you have cookies enabled, your computer will remember this.

The easiest way to use the search engine is to download its toolbar. Then you can easily click on it whenever you want to.

Even if you really love Google, we are asking our supporters to use GoodSearch at least part of the time – especially for really straightforward searches for which you don’t need a particularly powerful or sophisticated search engine. GoodSearch is powered by Yahoo so it’s a very good engine.

Also, GoodShop has a huge number of very fine and well known businesses listed if you like to order things on line. The Center will get an average of 3% per sale. (Many businesses offer much more than that.) The donations really add up!

We are a small non-profit organization and we operate on a shoestring. So we really need all the contributions we’re able to encourage.

If you have the toolbar already downloaded then whenever you do a search on an item you want to purchase, GoodShop participants will be highlighted in yellow on your search results. It’s so easy and it really helps us.

Thank you so much for reading this!

Every blessing to each one of you and Happy New Year!

Sr. Ellen E. Finlay
Executive Director
St. John’s Center for Spiritual Formation
~~~

Glory

Detail from "The Worship of the Shepherds" window at Trinity Church, Boston

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Phillips Brooks, as you undoubtedly know, was one of our great preachers. I remember, shortly after I moved to Boston, visiting Trinity Church where he was rector and that being such a thrill for me! Did you know that Trinity had the first free standing altar in the U.S. and this, in the late 19th century?

Here's something he said that I think is worthy of reflection as we are saying good-bye to one year and beginning to welcome in another:

The glory of the star, the glory of the sun--we must not lose either in the other.We must not be so full of the hope of heaven that we cannot do our work on the earth;we must not be so lost in the work of the earth that we shall not be inspired by the hope of heaven.

The true wonder

Artist: Lorenzo Costa

Image from Wikimedia Commons

While it may well help to have a musical background in order to tap into the wisdom of the following, I think we have all heard a song badly sung while still realizing on a deep level the perfection of the song itself:

The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love. The idea of God that humans have in their being is the wonder of all wonders. They have felt in the depths of their lives that what appears as imperfect is the manifestation of the perfect; just as a person who has an ear for music realized the perfection of a song, while in fact he or she is only listening to a succession of notes.

-- Victor Gollancz

So now it's time to get the word out, people!

This day the Christ is born!

WOW!

Christmas Eve

Artist: Bramantino

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Do you know the works of Willa Cather? The following is from a newspaper column she produced toward the beginning of her writing career. I can't determine exactly when this was written but it had to have been quite early in the 20th century. Somehow these paragraphs seem wonderfully apppropriate for tonight:

Up in the Negro church one Christmas the congregation were singing the "Peace on Earth." When the plaintive music stopped an old gray-haired Negro in a frock coat and wearing two pairs of glasses arose and began reading the old, old story of the men who were watching their flocks by night and of the babe who was born in the city of David. He became very excited as he read, and his voice trembled and he unconsciously put the words to measure and chanted them slowly. When he finished he looked up at the ceiling with eager misty eyes as though he could see the light of the heavenly messenger shining in upon him.

It is a beautiful story, this of the holiest and purest childhood on earth, beautiful even to those who cannot understand it, as dreams are sweet to men without hope. After all, if we cannot hear the carol and see the heavenly messenger, it is because our ears are deaf and our eyes are blind, not that we turn willfully away from love or beauty.

No one is antagonistic by preference. Almost any of us who doubt would give the little we know or hope to know to go down upon our knees among the lowly and experience a great faith or a great conviction.

God with us

Image from Wikimedia Commons

We moving ever so inexorably toward the yearly observance of a great and mighty wonder - the Mystery of the Incarnation. Here's something rather lovely about that:

If the grandfather of the grandfather of Jesus had known what was hidden within him, he would have stood humble and awe-struck before his soul.

-- Kahlil Gibran

Moving toward the day!

This is THE interpretation, dear people. John Eliot Gardiner simply cannot be beat when it comes to Baroque interpretation. Same for the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists.

And the opening strains of this oratorio (that timpani bit at the very beginning) simply announce "Christmas!" to me like nothing else. I will play my CD of this while I trim my tree on Friday. It's a tradition I absolutely love!

A candle to pray by

I think maybe I've blogged this before somewhere. It seems as good a time as any for a repeat.

Knowing we're in it together

Artist: John Leech

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I don't know if this is still true or if it was ever true, really. What I know is that we would all benefit by seeing each other as "fellow-passengers to the grave..." rather than completely different sorts of beings:

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on their journeys.

~

-- Charles Dickens from A Christmas Carol

Fourth Sunday of Advent

Image from Wikimedia Commons

In today's gospel reading, Joseph has a crisis. Mary is pregnant and the baby is not his. An angel then reassures him in a dream and he is off on the adventure of his life. Here's something about how to process the crises in our lives:

None of us avoids crisis. All of us have trouble in the course of our lives. Because this is so, the great difference between people does not lie between those free from trouble and the rest of us. The great difference appears between those people who are vanquished by their problems and those people who find in their problems something worthwhile that redeems the rest.

-- Charles Hoffacker