THE TWO MOST BEAUTIFUL WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

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Henry James once wrote that “the two most beautiful words in the English Language were Summer Afternoon.” I, for one, couldn’t agree more.  So, instead of any sort of diatribe, here, instead, is my little ode to summer memories:

Summer Snapshots

Take a sip of Clarity

Roll it around with your tongue

Like a fine red wine

Like a warm cup of chocolate.

Savor

Moments Divine are just that.

Moments

Nourishment for the spiritual journey.  Allow yourself these thimbles of quiet joy, let them go.

Skipping down the jetty/Skimming flat smooth rocks/Slate blue Brick red Stone gray granite

Counting tiny waves

Then

Watch gnarled driftwood float on by.

Summer breeze flaps the skirt’s fabric/Tightly around spindly legs/Catching a band-aid on the right knee.

Vivacity

In a coral gingham pinafore

Swinging on her new metal swing set in the backyard.

Watermelon dripping down a chin

While

Wispy clouds waft perfume

Old-fashioned roses

Thorns and All.

Climbing up the Lattice/White wooden trellis

Just a little linger/Just a little longer.

A verdigris weathered vane remains as muse. 

Russet equinox autumnal

Churns maple walnut ice cream

Marks the end of scallop season.

Dense breads and muffins

Soul food for dark days to come.

Shortbread is my name/Wrapped in a linen handkerchief/Tied with a spool of sage green satin.

Apples steeped in caramel

Candy wrappers strewn/”No shenanigans here please!”/Nighttime escapades suspended

I just want to lay on the sofa awhile

Remembering the last yellow leaves of the Aspen, the last tasty clam fritter.

Each season with its own paraphernalia

Containing moments the size of an atom

Simpatico with the whole of the universe, where all is now.

Amen

HERE’S YOUR HAT-WHAT’S YOUR HURRY?

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There was a hit country and western song some years back with this refrain:

I’m in a hurry to get things done/Well, I rush and rush until life’s no fun/All I really gotta do is live and die/But I’m in a hurry and don’t know why

It seems the popularity of that song could have been the fact that so many people in Western culture (Americans, in particular) can relate to its message.  The “rat race”, the “to do” list, and the attending “road rage” are shared and common images in our culture.  Knowing that others are as out of sorts as we are makes us feel that we are not alone, right? 

In addition, if that’s the way it is, maybe we should just learn to grin and bear it  After all, removing ourselves from the status quo, changing, is scary and a discipline and hard work.  The truth is the “quick, get me a band-aid” balm that we all want so badly in order to continue on our own well-worn path, with its arteries of impulses and ingrained habits, creates such lasting infections of mind, body, and soul that the journey back to any semblance of wholeness becomes treacherous indeed.

We do not need a specialist to tell us that this manner of living is not healthy.  But the questions remains:  what do we do?  There remains a chasm between knowing something is out of whack and doing something about it.  For me, God bridges that ravine.  Developing a relationship with the God of my understanding has given me the wide perspective of eternity and a comfort that I am being cradled in God’s ever and ever presence.  God is the breath that I take and closer than that.  With this knowledge, I can challenge that clamor of my days with the breadth of my life.

Like all relationships, this takes commitment, time, and attention.  The fruit of blending the rushed routine of our everyday self with the person who we are, way down deep, is a kind of spiritual maturity that does not jump at every tugging.  Of course, in order to find a slower cadence in the flurry of daily activities requires us to stop at intervals throughout the day.  In my experience, without time for prayer and meditation, true inner peace cannot be sustained in any meaningful way. 

Once an ongoing sense of the Presence of God has been established in the subtleties that encompass and extend well beyond the epiphany moments of our lives, the roominess of eternity can get good and cozy in our souls.  The erratic pace kept up in averting the eyes from death, is like the proverbial ghost in the closet.  He frightens us less and less, as we come to know him more and more. 

From the lazy river of a timeless spirit, our cup overflows.  We can promote peace, bring mercy, and be comforted.  We can then wholeheartedly ask that “Thy will be done.”  As Howard Thurman states, “the will of God is native to my spirit.  It is the fundamental character of me.  It is the foundation of my mental, physical, and spiritual structure.  It is what I find when I am most myself.  It is what I find when I get down to the deepest things in me.  It is what is revealed when all the superficial things are sloughed off and I am essentially laid bare.”  Then, and only then, can Thy will be done.

“LIFE-WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU WHILE YOU’RE BUSY OUT MAKING OTHER PLANS”

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John Lennon wrote these lines for his song “Beautiful Boy”.  A bit of wit and concise wisdom, these words have been a refrain of mine for some years. They remind me that my BIG plans for the day, week, month, or year are just that…plans.  As an example, many of us have had similar experiences like this one: you’re about to go for a hike and as you walk out the door, you hear a loud banging sound coming from the washing machine. Water is seeping onto the floor.  You are not going for a hike, you are going to have either fix it yourself or call a plumber, or least get the water to stop running and then go for the hike. 

This is life. We need to be easy in our saddle for when life interrupts our agenda. The little annoyances, which are more numerous,  can be viewed as daily practice drills for developing spiritual and emotional resilience, gaining a modicum of patience, and as a way to avoid the soul’s arch-enemy, complacency.

I, for one, need to be continually reminded of this.  Generally speaking, I consider myself a good-natured, happy sort of person.  When life goes really smoothly for any length of time, my human tendency is, I want it to continue! I don’t want (notice how many times I am using I) to have to deal with unexpected unpleasantness.  Yet it is the perennial curve balls that are a part of life that polish us our edges and hopefully keep us humble and grateful.  There is always grace in  “embracing the whole catastrophe”. 

That includes the REAL (i.e. IMPORTANT) stuff too.  Not just the washing machine, the flat tire; but the sick kid, the dying parent, the divorce… the losses that take our life’s journey as we  had known it and catapult it onto another plane entirely. We are temporarily disillusioned, disoriented, and at times, disheartened.  It is these big things that can and do stop us in our tracks, seize us (for a time) from the endless being busy making other plans.  We are present in a way that only suffering and great change provides.

Now I’m not a believer that everything happens for a reason or that God saves some people in a car crash while letting others die.  I don’t want a Puritanical God who like Jonathan Edwards envisioned, “holds us like tiny spiders over an open pit.”  If there is a tally maker up in the sky counting transgressions, He/She/It has too much time on their hands.  I know that sometimes things make no sense, and that bad things happen randomly and without warning.  I believe God is our co-conspirator in grieving, in healing, and in finding creative ways to make some larger meanings in our life from ALL of our experiences.  I do.  I have witnessed it too many times to doubt it. 

It’s necessary to make plans. It’s good to be busy (as long as we also take some time to just be).  Yet it is those surprising events (in turns gleeful and terrifying), chance meetings, or tiny disasters that change us.  Take courage. If we let them, our life will grow in miraculous ways.

Some food for thought from a great little book entitled “The Right Questions” by Debbie Ford:  “Will I use this situation as a catalyst to grow and evolve or will I use it to beat myself up?”   

When someone whines, “life is just one thing after another”, I always think, yeah, right, life IS just one thing after another.  The difference in whining about it or in simple acceptance is Your REALITY.

CAN YOU DIG A HOLE TO CHINA?

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As a kid, I can recall long summer days on the beach when my brother, sister, cousins, and sometimes just random kids would spend a better part of an afternoon helping to dig a hole to China. It was largely a group effort, the attempt being short lived if you were solo.  Invariably, however, we would be shoveling madly, with our plastic jelly bean colored diggers when we would hit water.  I suppose that’s what would happen in real life, if you tried to dig to China with big fancy high-tech equipment, your hole would eventually fill up with water.

Still the concept behind digging to China (besides keeping gainfully busy on the beach) was the idea that we could create a portal to take us to another place, a foreign world.  What would they think of us when we showed up in our bathing suits and pail and shovels?  Where there children in China at that very moment digging to Cape Cod?  What would we eat?  How far do you think we have to go; how far do you think we’ve gotten? We would discuss all sorts of thoughts like these while digging.   

It’s summer. Summer is a time for the imagination to run wild.  Good ole’ Will Shakespeare knew this only too well.  He let loose a host of fairy fantasties and sultry shenanigans in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“The cowslips tall her pensioners be/In their gold coats spots you see/Those be rubies, fairy favours/In those freckles live their savours/I must go seek some dewdrops here/And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.”  The fairy’s description of cowslips as gentlemen who wait upon the fairy queen. 

 Whether you are revisiting the surreal world of Alice in Wonderland this summer or are, like The Beach Boys dreaming of an Endless Summer;  I, for one, second that notion.  The pulse of life, the green on the trees, the warmth of the sun, the joys of being plant or animal, all revels in the present moment during this time of long days.  We’re not waiting for summer to be over.  We’re just happy it’s here.  Anything is possible, anything can happen. 

We can plant a garden, build a castle made of sand, sit on a beach all day and read a novel, bike, swim, sail, and row….or we can simply be.  The whole of it is just like one giant prayer.  Mystic and theologican Meister Eckhart once said that if in your whole life you only said one prayer, “Thank You” that would be enough.  I’ve heard this many times.  Right now I mean it, Thank you.

QUANTUM PHYSICS AND GOD

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Science as a discipline often eluded me in school.  Basic botany and geology were OK; I was good at memorizing Latin names and identifying basic stone and strata.  However, my mind would begin to spin and whirl at the thought of light years and black holes, the calibration of physics, complex chemical compounds, and the formulas that made up the anatomy of well, everything.   

Yet while I couldn’t quite grasp these ideas, they intrigued and fascinated me.  Why do things do what they do?  How do they do them?  What is out there?  What is in here?  In the last hundred years, we have taken giant leaps in understanding and explaining a bit of the workings of this wide and wonderful universe of ours.  As a theologian, I guess you could say that I was born at a good time in the evolution of science.  These discoveries have also come to inform and inspire running streams and rivulets of conversation in religion. For that, I am truly grateful. 

As Rebecca Parker comments in her book A House for Hope, “Up until the birth of relativity theory and quantum physics, Western science conceived of the “stuff” of reality as tiny bits of hard matter that built up into structures from atoms to rocks….at it’s foundation, the “real world” was formed from an aggregation of atoms…in keeping with this scientific worldview, God’s reality was imagined to itself be like that of an ordinary rock: solid, unfeeling, unchanging, able to affect other things, but not itself affected.”

Today we live in a world of complexity that has taken us beyond many of the predictable concepts that Sir Issac Newton put forth.  Atoms, DNA, the building blocks of our universe are not static pieces of matter after all but rather ever-moving infinitesimal activities.  Parker says, “Science now reveals to us a world that is relational, interactive, codeterminate, chaotic, intermittent, and ever-changing.”         

Through the ongoing work of science, religion is enriched and provided with new and life affirming paradigms to re-imagine concepts about God.  Theologies do not necessarily need to be taken down to their bare studs.  Rather they can be renovated in a way that creates space to include more people of diverse backgrounds and ideologies. For instance, if God’s qualities reflect what quantum physics is telling us about the nature of the universe, then God is not just Creator, but the Creative Process itself.  Codeterminate, Relational, and Perennial Changing can be ways of thinking about God.  These kinds of attributes will expand our connections with others and with God without limiting God within a doctrine or dogma.

If we find that we have outgrown some of our older, more cumbersome theological “apparel”, we can cast off the worn out and oppressive garments that have sometimes served to divide us, weigh us down, or competitively identify our religious “team” without fear of recrimination.  Instead, like the constant and lively movement of all matter, we too will make room to move and be moved.  Theologies CAN be fluid enough to not mandate uniformity or require a litmus test of  identical creedal statements.  Instead, our faith can settle into uncertainty and be surprised by new discoveries. We contain DNA like both rock and tree, and we too can be steady and strong in the storm while adapting to locate shelter and shade in the seasons that blister and to steer towards clear open light when darkness pervades.

I affirm the slogan of the United Church of Christ, “God is still speaking.”  And we are still asking questions. In this manner, both science and religion will continue to grow and flourish.

I DON’T NEED A GURU, BUT A GUIDE CAN BE GOOD

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Several tattered and dog-eared books rest on my shelves that have been pored over time and again for their guidance, inspiration, and comfort.  Two in particular have been indispensable on my spiritual journey, The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila and Amazing Grace (A Vocabulary of Faith) by Kathleen Norris.  These authors, with their voices ancient and modern respectively, resonate with wisdom and perennially provide new insights into concepts which are meant to evolve as I am.

A sixteenth century Spanish mystic and prolific writer, St. Theresa of Avila continues to be one of my greatest spiritual mentors.  Hers is a soul I can relate to.  Teresa was not the archetype of the mild-mannered, retiring convent sister.  A complex personality, she was fiery, passionate, wild, and worldly.  She had dry times in prayers, doubts, and earthly irritations.  Divinity is brought to earth in Teresa; her honest words lend authenticity to the fact that this is truly a human endeavor we are about. 

She once wrote, “God deliver me from people so spiritual they want to turn everything into perfect contemplation no matter what.”  She did, out of necessity spend much time in contemplation herself, but toiled each day to know and live spiritually in the world.   

Courageous, she championed the reformation of the Carmelite monasteries with the Spanish Inquisitors growling at her door.  One biographer dubbed her the “warrior bride.”  For Teresa “was born with a warrior’s heart locked inside a woman’s body.”  In her burning desire to know her own soul and God’s relationship with it, she widened the notions of the sacred and added paths to holiness. 

Together with her curiosity of the natural world, Teresa provides concrete and practical advice for spiritual growth in any age.  Her poetic images of the soul, “the soul is a castle made entirely out of a diamond or a very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms,” continue to inspire my own writing.

Kathleen Norris, in the vernacular of the twentieth century, re-presents the Trinity, Christianity, and a myriad of ecclesiastical (church) practices in terms accessible to the laity.  For instance, she likens the Trinity to quarks.  These are subatomic particles that exist in threes.  There is no such thing as one quark, but only three interdependent beings, “part of the atomic glue that holds this world together.”  These kinds of analogies run through her writing, providing unusual and earthy examples to help us interpret difficult theological ideas.  For those that find much in religion too much myth, Norris reminds me to look beyond to the cycling power of metaphors.

Unique and unyielding, her questions act as steam for loosening “sacred” ambiguities, while allowing space to be enveloped in those same mysteries.  She prods the endless definitions and redefinitions of prayer as “stumbling over modern self-consciousness…with our addiction to ‘self-help’ and ‘how-to’ no wonder we have difficulty with prayer, for which the best how-to is Psalm 46: ‘be still and know that I am God.'” She states, “This can happen in an instant; it can also constitute a life’s work.”  Norris’ musings share the heart of true spiritual classics by revealing ways to unburden the intellect, disengage the ego, and surrender the whole self to the wonder of God.

The progressives among us, myself included, do well to reclaim and embrace these two women’s philosophies.

ON BEING A HERMIT

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Sometimes it feels like the “world is too much with us”.  It’s a busy time of the year and I, for one, start to get to feeling like a hamster on a wheel. Graduations, weddings, end of the year concerts and recitals, and their attending to-do lists can leave little time for the prayer and meditation that helps to slow us down.  You’ll may have noticed I haven’t provided a post in over a week.

The idea of being a hermit begins to look like an attractive alternative.  Well, maybe just the solitary part, for three or four days…

For to be a true hermit in the spiritual sense is to muster more than a modicum of self-discipline and a sustained commitment to embrace the demands of soul work.  The word hermit comes from the  Latin word eremita, meaning desert.  While hermits are found in many religious traditions, “desert spirituality” or “desert theology” as it is called, has an aged Christian history.  The idea of going into the desert to remove oneself from the world and its distractions in order to form a more complete union with God can be found in both the Old and the New Testaments.  In Exodus, the Jews wandered for 40 years in the desert, and in Matthew, Jesus was tempted in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights.

The harsh and unforgiving nature of the desert becomes a means of surrender to God, physically and metaphorically.  The earliest “Desert Fathers” practiced this solitary living as part of a wholly ascetic life.  They would live in caves and huts away from civilization for years at a time, attempting to “pray without ceasing”.  Utilizing a centering prayer (meditation), they were undergoing the grueling task of training the mind to continually turn toward God.  Hunger, lust, memories, all kinds of distracting thoughts were all part of the inner struggle to reach a spiritual union.  Their prayers and their own penance would then also become a means to absolve others of their transgressions.

In this vein, it was not a selfish act to live as an ascetic, but a way to better serve others spiritually as well.  Examples of Christian hermits abound, the first two being St. Paul of Thebes in Egypt (in the 3rd century) and his disciple St. Anthony of Egypt (251-356CE). They were said to have miraculous powers and were sought out for advice and blessings.  As news spread that some of the hermits had “powers”, it became increasingly difficult for them to remain solitary. 

 At the time of Robin Hood (this is Nun Tuck’s Almanac!), many of the hermits lived in the woods, on the outskirts of communities where they might earn a living, or they lived as a monk or a nun in a monastery. From the earliest forms of Christian monasticism, religious communities arose that incorporated the basic premise of solitary life with the necessity for human relationships.  Orders of monks and nuns devoted solely to God began with the name of their founder to identify them.  Benedictines, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Dominicans lived spartan lives of prayer, meditation, and service.  Members often have a simple cell within the monastery where their quiet lives follow an obedient rhythm of silence, solitude, and devotions.

Like the Buddha, himself a hermit for a time, the practitioner needs to give up worldly pleasures and go within to experience the insight, wisdom, and peace that passeth all understanding.  It is then, and only then, that he can come back and share it with others.

Book of the Day, Teresa of Avila: Ecstasy and Common Sense by Tessa Bielecki 

Quote from the Book of the Day:  “Beginners in prayer, we can say, are those who draw water from the well.  This involves a lot of work on their own part, as I have said.  They must tire themselves in trying to recollect their senses.  Since they are accustomed to being distracted, this recollection requires much effort. They need to get accustomed to caring nothing at all about seeing or hearing, to practicing the hours of prayer, and thus to solitude and withdrawal- and to thinking on their past life.”   St. Teresa of Avila

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SUNNI AND SHI’A?

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Differences between the two main branches of the Muslim faith go back to the very beginnings of Islam.  The origins of Sunni and Shi’a  began as a political dispute over who the rightful successor should be to follow the Prophet Muhammad as the head of the Muslim state and community he founded.  Muhammad’s senior followers were called the Caliphate.  There are various definitions of what a Caliph is, but essentially it means a deputy or successor, and sometimes is synonomous with “commander”.  For instance, during medieval times, the Caliph was the supreme sovereign of the Islamic empire.  This pervasive kind of  power has waned significantly in most modern Muslim states.

The first Caliph after Muhammad was Abu Bakr, his closest friend and one of the very first converts to Islam.  While  Bakr was known as Abu Bakr “al-Siddiq”, meaning the “upright and truthful”, and many writings indicate this to be accurate, he was not a blood  relative of the Prophet.  For the Sunnis, (whose name comes from the word  sunna meaning the well worn path, the practices of the Prophet) his lineage was irrelevant.  They believed that the leaders of the community were to choose a successor, on the basis of worthiness. However, the Shi’a thought this method of choosing illegitimate, that the Sunnis were usurping power by making this decision.  The Shi’a believed that succession belonged by right to the Prophet’s family.  Muhammad had no son, but a daughter Fatima, who married his cousin Ali.  Shi’a literally means “Party of Ali”.

This tension led to a series of armed insurrections in the years following the Prophet’s death.  There was coups overthrowing those in power.  Of the first four caliphs who succeeded the Prophet, three were murdered, and their reigns ended in civil war.  Ali’s sons, Hasan and Husayn were both martyred.  Then there followed a series of claimants to the caliphate, known as Imams (this word is more broadly defined today to include religious teachers) who all  claimed to be descendents of Ali and Fatima.

As an aside, by all accounts, Abu Bakr was a thoughtful and strong leader. It was Abu Bakr who ordered the scattered portions of the Quran to be collected shortly after Muhammad’s death, thereby allowing for an authorized version to be completed within 25 years of the Prophet’s death.  (The immediate occasion of this command was the death in battle of a large number of men who knew much or all of it by heart and the concern that parts of it could be lost forever).  Many of the surahs (chapters) of the Quran are said to have been written down on palm leaves, white stones, the breastbones of humans, animal leather, bits of papyrus (essentially any material until paper was known around the 8th century), but much of the Quran was communicated through oral transmission.  

In addition, Abu Bakr’s daughter Aisha was and is (aside from Khadijah, Muhammad’s first wife) the most beloved by Muslims, a gifted leader of the faith in her own right and an example of virtuous living. These early founders continue to be beacons for both Sunni and Shi’a as they practice Islam in their own ways.

The majority of the world’s Muslims are Sunni.  The majority of the world’s Muslims, including the Shi’a, practice a moderate and life affirming faith.  Tomorrow I will look at the different sects within these two “denominations” and provide an overview of some of the extremist offshoots as well.

Book of the Day, Muhammad, A Prophet For Our Time by Karen Armstrong, “Those who kept the faith were not simply “believers”.  Their faith must be expressed in practical actions: they must pray, share their wealth, and in matters that concerned the community, “consult among themselves” to preserve the unity of the ummah.  If attacked, they could defend themselves, but instead of lashing out in an uncontrolled way, they must always be prepared to forgive an injury…”Hence, whoever pardons his foe and makes peace, his reward rests with God”, the Quran insists tirelessly.”

THE POWER OF PLACE

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There is power in place to move us and feed our spirit.

Nature has the perennial power to return us to ourselves and find unity and harmony in nature. Lots of  places are people made places built especially for worship, for prayer and meditation. Houses of worship with their spires, their domes, their minarets.  Inside, there are altars and private corners, to listen, to light a candle, or unload a burden.  Outside, there may be a sanctuary where one can quietly reflect. These are sacred spaces.

There are also the spaces we make for ourselves.  It could be an Adirondack chair we set up purposefully near a shady tree or bird bath.  Writer Sarah Ban Breathnach tells of a “meditation table” she set up in her bedroom.  She gathered items that had meaning for her: “a large golden pillar candle, a Victorian lithograph of an angel, a print of the Madonna and Child, pictures of family and pets, a small blue and white vase for fresh flowers….this encourages me to meditate more often.”

Down the main road from me, there is a man who has been building a cairn for several years now.  A cairn (Gaelic, old Scottish) is essentially a pile of stones, sometimes elaborately stacked with smooth and rounded rocks which act as a land marker or as a memorial.  They often appeared inspired, like sculpture, works of art.  This guy down the road… his is a tower.  I don’t know how he does it.  It’s been climbing upwards for several years now.  It’s like the game where you don’t want to be the last person to knock all the marbles down.  Every time I drive by, I think, “How is he doing it”?

Then I found out what this marker is for.  Each rock stands  for each month our country has been in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He wanted to have some tangible way to show how long it’s been, he is keeping watch and  remembering.  Those stones are both marker and memorial.  This cairn is no longer just a thing of beauty, it reminds me in a haunting way that as I run through my busy day, others are in harm’s way.

Personally, three places come to mind that rarely fail to inspire, heal, and quiet my soul.  The first is the Cape Cod seashore.  There are particular beaches I could mention, but what’s important is the time of day. The early morning and just at dusk, times when the beach is empty or almost so, and I can sit and listen to the promise of each new wave, watch the sandpipers scurry after their infinitesimal food, and become peacefully blurred into the expanse of sea and sky.  As JFK once noted, there is indeed something about the ocean and humans, something about how we are mostly made of water and it may because we all came from it.  I don’t know. I know it’s powerful.

And my antique French pine writing desk with its worn top and soft yellow cabriolet legs holds my sacred menagerie.  There are funky framed  photos of my children (when they were little and sweet!), stacks of favorite, dog eared books, watercolors by my artist daughter, always a brightly colored coffee mug, and a giant jar filled with writing utensils where I have taped a poem by William Henry Channing.  Outside my window is a very old apple tree (now blossoming) and birds of all sorts stop by to delight.

Where are your places?  What is it that moves you about them?  Is is time for you to create your own space?  Or is time to return a place that perhaps is a long overdue visit?

Professor Joseph Campbell (another folk hero of mine) spoke many times about the importance of finding or creating a sacred space: Quote of the Day: “You must have a room or a certain hour of the day or so where you do no know what was in the morning paper…a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are, and what you might be…At first you may find nothing’s happening…But if you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen.”

Check it out…I added photos to all my posts…

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