Hear the voice of the Holy One whispering to you ...

Lately I’ve been feasting on the wisdom of Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho Tutu, as recorded in their book, made for goodness and why this makes all the difference.  Each chapter ends with a poem based on scripture, with reminders of God’s deep delight in us and invitation to us to live into this awesome reality. 

Hear the voice of the Holy One whispering to you ...

You are a child after my own heart.

Seek out your deepest joy and you will find me there.

Find that which makes you most perfectly yourself and know that I

     am at the heart of it.

Do what delights you

And you will be working with me,

Walking with me,

Finding your life

Hidden in me.

Ask me any question.

My answer is love.

When you want to hear my voice,

Listen for love.

How can you delight me?

I will tell you:

Love.

The tough, unbreakable, unshakable love.

Are you looking for me?

You will find me in love.

Would you know my secrets?

There is only one:

Love.

Do you want to know me?

Do you yearn to follow me?

Do you want to reach me?

Seek and serve love.

Sharon Copeman

Trusting in the melody of God

“It is not the nature of the task but the consecration that is the vital thing.”

 ~ Martin Buber

In a book from the 1940’s, The Reed of God, the author, Caryll Houselander, tells how painful it is to become a reed that carries the melody of God. The flute has to be carved and cut out, it has to have many openings for the breath to come through and for the music to be heard. So too in our lives. Our work will not always be pleasant and easy. There will be times of confusion  and frustration. We will not always want to do the things we are called to do. The pain and stress can be a means of hollowing out, of becoming more open to the music of God. These hollowing out experiences call for faith. Sometimes we simply have to trust in God’s melody and believe, in spite of few results and self doubt that we are each capable of being instruments of God’s dream.

Sometimes that is the wonder of it all. That we can carry the melody of God even  when we feel we cannot carry a tune. Thanks be to the spirit that continually creates harmony out of our lives.

TAKE HOME MESSAGE

A torrent of large and small mistakes and broken things have characterized these last ten weeks in our house.   Like the geothermal heat compressor and controls, the surge protectors, the smoke alarms: all destroyed as the result of a nasty power surge.  Like having to find a new house insurer.  Like the weather causing folks to cancel out, over and over.  Like the screen door lock and the back hall cabinet pull falling off in my hand.   Like the working relationship gone sideways, maybe upside down.  And this week, like the dog I was caring for running away and—in the midst of trying to find her—having a monster truck back into the car, ripping a hole in the hood.

I was whining about it all last night, and a friend said to me, “Well, what’s the message?”  I stared at her and said, “I don’t know!   That’s the problem!”

But on reflection I do know.  I just didn’t want to look too hard because frankly, I love the drama. 

In virtually every one of these situations, it’s all fine.  Things broken got repaired; there were warranties, there’s been generosity, there’s been help, there’s been insurance.  Even in the broken relationship, a chance to revisit priorities.  It seems like in the end, if we do the work, things generally come round right.

I get scared when things go wrong.  Some deep part of me, I think, is afraid that this means the end: I’ll starve, I’ll have no place to live, no one will love me, I’ll die.  But the chances of any of these except the last are remote.  And given that I’m professed to be a Christian, that last isn’t the end either, although I have to admit I’m a bit unclear on the details.

If there’s a take home message in the mess of the last months, I have to say that it is that everything really is fine.  If I do the work, toil like a real human being, take the irritations and sufferings as part of life rather than some insult or detour, then it all is really fine.  And so am I.

Therese desCamp

To Change ... (part 2)

“To change we must

hurt enough to need to,

learn enough to want to,

and feel safe enough to try.”

I began some thoughts on this quote in a blog post on Dec 11/10 on hurting and needing.

... to continue ... “learn enough to want to”

This is a profound shift of the heart. It feels like waking up. We wake up many times in our christian journey. For many people our initial experience of christian commitment often brings a spontaneous and effortless practice that is nurturing, filling and filled with new life. As newly minted disciples, discipline is freedom.

There comes a time when we leave the mountain top and go back to the valley. After enlightenment ... the laundry.

We naturally hit dry times, times when familiar practices and disciplines aren’t working. This is not surprising as we are changed from our practice, and as our understanding of God matures. So here is one way that the ‘hurting’ arises, dry times, and we have the choice of learning about and testing practices and disciplines to sustain us.

We can “learn enough” that our desperation and need shifts to wanting and desiring’. There are some wonderful ‘personality roadmaps’ in the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and the Enneagram that can identify things that may work for you.

Here is a pitfall where you may relate to my experience. That knowing about a practice substitutes for doing it. Centering Prayer is sustaining (and changing) me well, now that I have a few years of daily practice. I had a decade during which I learned it at several introductory workshops, felt inspired and didn’t do it. And I lost my desperation and desire. As I pondered this blog post I asked about the experience of several people in my Centering Prayer group. They had come to their first Introduction, started the next day, came to the weekly group and have rarely missed a day in over 4 years! They seemed to take to it so easily. When I asked how they could make such a significant change in their life one said “It’s simple Bill, I was teachable. It was a teachable moment. I was ready.” The rest agreed. “And this group support to my work on my own was essential.”

There it is, a ‘teachable’ moment is found in the movement from hurting through learning to safety. From needing to wanting to trying.

How does this movement fit your experience?

Are you being formed in the desert to be teachable?

Please share in the comments !

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Once upon a time, long before the founding of Hogwarts, before there were Star Treks or Wars, before Indiana Jones ever conceived of adventure, even before the discovery of Middle Earth, there was Narnia, a magical land of mythical beasts, talking animals and children's adventures. Immune to the appetites of the movie industry for many years, the third instalment of the 7 story series by C.S.Lewis has now been rendered into film.  Beginning in 2005 with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and continuing in 2008 with Prince Caspian (an amalgam of two original written works), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader finds the “franchise” in a new studio, as 20th Century Fox boldly goes where Disney Studios decided not to tread.

        In the interest of disclosing the bias in my writing, I confess that I was a fan of C.S.Lewis fantasy literature from about the age of 8. The only thing wrong with The Chronicles of Narnia was that they came to an end!  What was a boy to do to replace such a rich imaginal world?  Lewis’s space trilogy was a hallucinogenic enigma. His theological works were rife with a pietism that left me cold. Ever since, I have been pining ... for what? An equally engrossing fantasy? (Thank God for Guy Gavriel Kaye.) A lost childhood? The wonder and delight of those stories has never been equalled and among them, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader stood out as the pinnacle of Lewis’s oeuvre.

        What then to make of this translation from print to screen?  Bluntly, the book was better. Where the story as literature is a contemplation of the journey of faith, a pilgrimage to the edges of human self understanding, a Pilgrim’s Progress for kids, the movie is an uneven, poorly construed swashbuckler which is in thrall not to the muse of wonder and enlightenment but to the demands of the studio’s marketing department.  Therein lies the Achilles' heel of this piece of film. May God have mercy on the screen writers and editors who cobbled this together; even the cross of Christ was more elegantly constructed. Scenes come and go with little or no relation to each other: is this a story or a collage? Most glaringly, where Lewis weaves the problem of evil into his narrative as an intrinsic existential possibility, the director, Michael Apted, resorts to cheap gimmickry by representing the presence of the malign with a boiling green mist.  Shades of Cecil B. DeMille!  Will we ever be rid of this cinematic heresy?  Not, it seems, in my lifetime. And what about Aslan? Coming and going arbitrarily like an absentee landlord, the leonine One (voiced with great gravitas by Liam Neeson) becomes an oracle of moral observation with no particular investment in the course of the action. Although Lewis’s image of Holy transcendence is thus preserved, the vulnerability and compassion of his original is gone. Instead of a God who is radically free to the point of wildness, we’re left with a deus ex machina who exercises no power to save.

        The CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) is good - all the requisite images are clear and stylish, so impressive in fact that the mortal actors shrink by comparison, an ironic reversal of the original, where the development of the main characters occupies the centre of attention.  Here, the characters remain two dimensional throughout: Lucy (Georgia Henley) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes) dutifully mouth their lines and while Eustace (Will Poulter) manages to be appropriately irritating, all are upstaged by the gallant Reepicheep (voiced by Simon Pegg), a mouse more human than any of his counterparts in the film or even his own literary manifestation as an upper class prig!

However, at the culmination of the journey, it’s left to Caspian (Ben Barnes) to deliver the coup de grace to the rich metaphor of Narnia as Lewis’s realized commonwealth of justice, compassion and humility.  With his leaden assertion, “I want to be a better king”, Caspian transforms the vision that Lewis articulated so eloquently - a world where righteousness and leadership are intricately woven - into an anachronism, an embarrassingly out of date image that has no pertinence to a post modern world.

        Consequently, this movie itself becomes a metaphor that encapsulates the dilemma of the church.  The circumstance of this story in the grip of this studio is an apt image for the situation of the Christian faith in hands of the Western world.  As we struggle to secure our place in the market of post modern inventions, as we bootstrap our story into the optics of the 21st century, how much do we sacrifice the integrity of our faith on the altar of entertainment and economic viability?  At what cost to the former is success in the latter?

        It’s been said that the revenues from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader were sufficient to justify the risk that 20th Century Fox took by investing in the project; the movie “performed” well enough to generate the possibility of a next episode.  The mind races to imagine what that might be.  Will they engage the rubrics of Creation (The Magicians Nephew)?  Perhaps Muslim/Christian relations (The Horse and his Boy)?  How about apocalypse (The Last Battle)?  Given the evidence of this film, I can wait.

Submitted by Murray Groom, SCN Network Chair

Let Your God Love You

Here we are in the midst of AGMs, budget struggles, and trying to plan this year's Lenten series. Didn't we just journey to Bethlehem? How can we be facing Jerusalem so quickly? Time flies, we race from one meeting to the next, from one crisis to the next and wonder if what we are doing makes any difference at all. We empty ourselves of all the grace and love that God has given us and our own souls gasp for even a sip of life-giving water. We long to reach for the robe of Jesus' hem, if we could just find it in the crowded days of our lives. And so I offer this poem, shared by a colleague, that invites you to "Let Your God Love You". Blessings on your journey.

Let Your God Love You

Be silent.
Be still.
Alone.
Empty
Before your God.
Say nothing.
Ask nothing.
Be silent.
Be still.
Let your God look upon you.
That is all.
God knows.
God understands.
God loves you
With an enormous love,
And only wants
To look upon you
With that love.
Quiet.
Still.
Be.

Let your God—
Love you.

~ Edwina Gateley

Shalom,

Ivy

Count your blessings

Last October, a number of us gathered to participate in the 'Sowing Promise, Growing Leaders' event.  It was an amazing time under the leadership of Peter Short.  Some of what we shared has appeared in this blog already... most notably the poem Litany by Billy Collins.  We all enjoyed reminding ourselves that 'we are not the pine scented air'!  But another of the little gems that Peter offered is the commissioning that he offers at the end of most worship services:

Count your blessings

Practice your faith

Never look down on a struggle for life

Remember that nowhere you go on God’s green earth is bereft of the spirit

A simple list and a helpful reminder in the midst of our busy lives.

Angels

I have never really paid much attention to angels, or really believed in them.  I guess I have always slotted them into the category of ‘New Age’ flakiness- until recently I read this from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury:

God had made what we can see and manage and what we can’t see and can never manage, a universe some of which we can get a grasp of and some of which we can’t.  This isn’t a recommendation not to try to understand, but simply a reminder that not everything is going to be made sense of from our point of view.  We don’t get to the end of being baffled and amazed.  I sometimes think that this is the importance of talking about angels in Christian teaching.  Odd as it may sound, thinking about these mysterious agents of God’s purpose, who belong to a different order of being, can be at least a powerful symbol for all those dimensions of the universe about which we have no real idea.  Round the corner of our vision things are going on in the universe, glorious and wonderful things, of which we know nothing.  We’re so used to sentimentalizing and trivializing angels- they are often reduced to Christmas decorations…,But in the Bible angels are often rather terrifying beings occasionally sweeping across the field of our vision; they do God strange services that we don’t fully see; they provide a steady backdrop in the universe of praise and worship.  They are great ‘beasts’, ‘living creatures’, flying serpents burning with flames, carrying the chariot of God, filling the Temple in Jerusalem with bellows of adoration, echoing to one another like whales in the ocean.  These are …anything but Christmas card material.  And sometimes a human form appears to give a message from God and something in the event tells the people involved that this is a moment of terror and truth, and they recognized that they have met an angel in disguise.

            Now whether or not you feel inclined to believe literally in angels- and a lot of modern Christians have a few problems with them- it’s worth thinking of them as at the very least a sort of shorthand description of everything that’s ‘round the corner’ of our perception and understanding in the universe- including the universal song of praise that surrounds us always.  If we try and rationalize all this away, we miss out on something vital to do with the exuberance and extravagance of the work of God, who has made this universe not just as a theatre for you and me to develop our agenda, but as an overwhelming abundance of variety and strangeness.

-from Tokens of Trust, Westminster John Knox Press, 2007, p. 51.

So now I wonder about the angels that are ‘round the corner’ and take comfort in their strangeness and the services they do for God and in the universal song of praise that they sing on behalf of us and on behalf of all of the creation that we can’t imagine and know nothing about.  On this Valentine’s Day I trust that Cupid, the angel of Love, is round the corner, in the service of God, lavishing acts of love on this world in fierce and strange and mysterious ways.  And I hope that we will notice when he comes sweeping across our field of vision.

Blessings on this day,

Lori Megley-Best

The Way It Is

                             William Strafford

There is a thread you follow.  It goes among

things that change.  But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what things you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread,

but it’s 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 grow old.

Nothing you do can stop times unfolding.

But you don’t ever let go of the thread.

A friend included this poem in a collection of favorites given as a gift, and I love it.  It reads to me like a dropped pebble sinking into a calm pool of water, the words going deeper and deeper to a quiet place.  And the reminder to us all of what really matters: don’t ever let go of the thread.

Our lives are woven together by people and experiences and so, naturally, we write about our thread-bare lives.   Dropped Threads, a book in celebration of Canadian authors, is a reminder of how we do, actually, sometimes drop even the most important connections that weave us together and, when dropped, leave us frayed at the edges.  Not at all perfect.

I also remember coming across a poem in seminary written by the great African American minister, preacher and author, Howard Thurman.  In this poem/prayer, Thurman reflects on all the threads in his life that he holds in his hand, threads of relationships, roles and responsibilities.  Some of these threads get dropped in spite of our best efforts, leaving us more ragged and sad.  Some of the threads are like lifelines of energy and hope.  But there’s one thread that holds him, and that is the thread of God.  

Of all the threads that weave together your life, what is the thread that you must never let go of?

Dan Chambers

3-year-old recites poem, "Litany" by Billy Collins

Litany

Some of us from B.C. conference had the privilege of being at the Sowing Seeds Growing Promise Leadership program earlier this year. Peter Short Shared with us "Litany" by Billy Collins. This poem touched many of us. Reminding us of who we are. For me it reminded me that I have both gifts and limits and it is as I live and breathe into who God has created me to be it that I come to fullness. I wanted to share with you a UTube post that many of us have seen now. But for me it is a beautiful reminder of both that event and what I constantly need to learn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVu4Me_n91Y

and remember somehow... you are the wine!

Ubuntu and Love

If you attended Epiphany Explorations in Victoria, at First Met UC, a week ago, as I did, you may have heard Naomi Tutu, daughter of Desmond Tutu,  speaking about “ubuntu”.  Since hearing her I have been intrigued with how ubuntu enlightens Paul’s words about love in his first letter to the Corinthian church.  You know the text - love is patient, and kind, not envious, nor boastful, nor arrogant, nor rude... and love never ends.

Naomi began by reminding us that we are all Homosapiens, in this world, but we learn how to be human in the context of our culture, by watching the elders, and by being corrected when we are wrong.  This, she said, is the process of coming to ubuntu.  Ubuntu, as I understood her, acknowledges that a person is a person through other people.  She spoke of her childhood, and said that in her home and family the oldest child must remember that their personhood depends on their recognizing the personhood of those others who are younger... when all the children eat at the table sharing from one bowl of food.  If you demean someone else you demean your self.  She said this was evident in the home, but hard to see outside the family, in the real world in which she was growing up in South Africa.  Her parents would say, “You will come to see...”

This black South African girl, growing up under the oppression of Apartheid South Africa, came to realize that white South Africans were also oppressed - by their fear of losing their privilege.  

In Naomi’s culture, to say someone has ubuntu is the highest compliment, the highest estimation of a person.  Ubuntu is not about doing, it is more than that - ubuntu is about seeing and recognizing the humanity of others.  It is a way of being in relationships of mutual respect and acceptance.  She gave us an example of a program in US churches where homeless people are fed very well, but no one sits down with them to eat together, to share the meal.  The homeless who are fed do not feel seen, nor respected - in this offering of food, no one has ubuntu.

To have ubuntu means to be able to see the common humanity we share with all “others” - the ones who do not feel as we do, do not see the world as we do, don’t respect the same way we do, don’t care as we do.

When we look at another person or group of people who are evidently in some way different from us, and fail to really see them, fail to recognize that these others who we think are so different from us are actually basically like us, we let ourselves off the hook and fail to identify with them and we do not seek to know what their story really is - to hear their story from their own lips, in their words.  Ubuntu calls us to simply recognize that those whom we see as “other” and know are against us are actually as human as we are.

When Jesus was asked to name the greatest commandment, he said “Love...”  Love God, with everything you have and are, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.  And when he was asked who was his neighbor, he identified the one least likely to be considered - the one who would never even be seen - the Samaritan.  Ubuntu and love.

Love is not easy.  We want it to be, and we sometimes pretend it could be, if only...  But the truth is that love is a challenge.  I’ve read Paul’s words about love at many weddings.  And when I do, I always speak about the fact that after the wedding these two people will not magically melt into each other and become one.  They will, in fact, continue to be two strong individuals, with unique perspectives, and opinions, and wisdom, and ideas that have been shaped and formed and learned in their families of origin... and because of this they are going to need to take the time to listen to one another, to check for understanding, to express themselves clearly, and share how they are thinking and feeling - in short - to communicate openly, and honestly, and with mutual respect and caring.  This is true for all of us, in all our relationships.

Those Christians in that little church (probably a house church) in Corinth were very enthusiastic, and diligent, and opinionated, and certain that they were on the right track in this new faith - and that was getting them into trouble with one another!  They went into great detail in outlining life as a person of faith - and there were differences among them.  Paul was reminding them that the way of Jesus was the way of loving relationship.  And Paul went into great detail about what that did and didn’t mean.  

I won’t post this text in the blog, but if you are inclined, I’d invite you to read Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13 in The Message.  He concludes with “Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly.  And the best of the three is love.”

I’ve always believed that, as a church and a congregation, the most important thing we can do for our children is to let them know that the church is a place where they are loved unconditionally, where they can come for assurance that they are special and awesome and wanted and welcome.  That means we must be a safe place.  I think Naomi Tutu’s description of ubuntu is a wonderful description of what that looks like... a place where everyone’s worthiness is recognized - everyone’s humanity is celebrated.  This is what Paul’s letter calls us to.  This is the love that is in the heart of God, and spreads among us, and fills us, and gives us the courage to share loving relationships.  Thanks be to God.

Sharon Copeman