Spark And Remnant

There is the space within me

there

where there is nothing

The silent spark

and remnant nestles in

a point of my heart

still hanging unattached

God's

elemental point

Temple of temples

Holy of holies

need I say it again

Love

The abbey

is within me

my truth resides there too

living out from in

It's not the rule

which makes the monk

it's the monk

which makes the rule

What rule

directs the birds to sing

what purposes known but to them

what given beauty do they bring

in voice to break the silence

Posits

Do we prefer guilt over healing to avoid the painful cleaning of our wounds?

Hanging

There

the invitation

hangs

There

where I intersect

my vertical journey

across time and space

There

in the spiral dance

around the moment

and willingness

There

to choose

to interject

honest love into

presence

There

at the crossing

bearing weight

on heart and mind

There

hangs the balance

awaiting only

the slightest push

There

rests the temptation

to ever remain

nailed down

There

the soul longs

to leap from sleep

into light

Posits

Must I forever remain a neophyte?

God willing!

Posits

Radicals

Jesus calls us to be disciples, radical as he.

Paul calls us to dare to be radical, to actually consider changing one's mind, to be transformed. It is radical indeed to consider discipleship. It is radical to truly ponder changing my mind, my self-perception as unchanging, to truly consider I need changing.

Be transformed!

It is radical to love without forethought but as a simple response to The First Love.

But be not hard on yourself.

Most often the most radical thing to do is to simply Believe.

Prayer

This prayer came to me while meditating during a time of difficulties and self doubt. It reminds me of my source, center and purpose.

God is love.

God is with me now and always.

God is the loving compassion at my center.

God is the courage and confidence of my heart.

God is my speed and strength.

God is the clarity of my mind and the joy of my heart and soul.

God is my healing and bearer of my pain.

God is with me now and always.

Can I Love God Apart From Loving Justice?

"While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted."

Flannery O'Conner

There is no doubt that the church (all Christianity) is haunted by Jesus as it struggles, more than ever, to be relevant in the modern world and its web of inter-relationships and conflicts arising from the pressing anxieties of politics, economics, freedom and justice.

Two percent of the world's population hoard 98% of the world's wealth and resources. The church strives to be relevant to the world in need, where 98% people who populate the world struggle to share the remaining 2% of wealth.

In the eyes of the suffering world, the church struggles to be more than buffoonish caricatures of cynical moralists. The church struggles with sharing political allegiances with the wealthiest and most powerful portions of the society, while ignoring the oppression and violence of poverty on the poor.

Homelessness, starvation, lack of even meager healthcare abound, and where is the church?

Where am I? Am I Christ-haunted or Christ-centered?

Poverty is not a natural state. Poverty is created, intentionally and willfully, by humans upon humans. Poverty is not a matter of fate, it is a predisposition of domination by humans over humans. The hoarding of wealth and resources is not natural, it is like any other hoarding, a sickness.

Poverty is violence upon the people of God's creation.

The Old Testament prophets condemned the priests, rulers and wealthy of ancient Israel for abusing and ignoring the suffering of the poor, the sick and helpless. The Prophets condemned them for misleading the people, equating wealth as proof of righteousness and of having God's favor.

Jesus did likewise. Jesus also ridiculed his disciples for their concerns for themselves over their serving the needs of the suffering.

As Jesus is spending his last night together with his disciples, Matthew reports an argument breaks out among the disciples over who is to be the greatest among them, who will be most righteous, most blessed, who will be closest to Jesus. Sound familiar? It does to me. So many claim to hold God's favor over and against others, because of practices or abstinences, or because they claim God hates fleshy vices more than their own particular vices, or that Jesus hates certain people over others... are they reading the Gospel?

In Matthew Jesus rebukes the disciples not only for their petty self-interests, but for still missing again the point of his earthly mission to direct us towards justice, God's justice, for all people. Because we are called to love God in loving each other, to love the world as he does, we are called to provide justice. What is justice in Jesus's directive to us?

In Matthew 25, Jesus tells his squabbling followers a prophetic story where the just, the righteous, receive their reward. Not so surprising, the just being rewarded. But what is very interesting to me, being raised in the western Christ-haunted church, catholic and protestant, dominated by sexually obsessed Augustinian, Lutheran and Calvinist moralistic theology, is this: Jesus makes no mention of morality as a factor for the rewards of the righteous.

What also is of great interest, and even funny, is that the just who he calls to paradise are surprised to be receiving a reward! Jesus tells them they are being rewarded for caring for him. They ask when did we care for you? Jesus tells them that by the care they provided to the poor, sick, friendless and needy was in truth their giving care to God, that by loving "the least of these", they loved God. They didn't even know it. This is the first surprise.

The second surprise is this, their acts of love weren't done so to gain a reward. They were surprised at being rewarded. Remember, they asked when did we care for you? The just weren't caring for the poor in hopes of a reward, the just simply acted with justice towards those suffering the injustice of poverty. They acted justly because it is the loving thing to do, they loved through being Christ-centered. Loving is being Christ-centered.

The Prophets and Jesus make clear to me that my true worship and sacrifice, my faithfulness, are in the living of God's loving justice for the world. How do I call myself a follower of Jesus if I don't take him seriously when I know him to say, "Whatever you do to others, even the poorest of people, you do to me?"

The challenge before me is to serve the suffering. Like Jesus, I must make petty morality the last concern and put the ending of suffering, Jesus' ethical center of me, at front and center of my concerns.

This is the calling. This is the practical functional call to answer the world's suffering injustice. God is calling us to answer the call to love God through loving the suffering. Do I then respond to God's love call by more deeply loving the world? Do I demand my political leaders to answer God's call for justice? Surely I must.

This is the agape ethic of Jesus, the tangible centering of Christ, to love God in loving each other. This is for me God's call to justice, to care for those who are suffering the legion injustices of poverty. For me, for my Christianity to have any real bearing on the world, I must answer God's call to love kindness and justice, the call to live God's justice for the poor of the world. God is calling us to relevance.

What Is Lent Calling Me To?

When I was a child, Lent used to mean giving up sweets. As I got older it meant giving up alcohol or sex. Lent also carried the weight of guilt. It was the time of year when even a cradle Episcopalian, such as myself, could embrace a good healthy dose of guilt... embracing the "Catholic" aspect of my Anglo-Catholic heritage.

Even as I grew up and Lent became more about "spirituality" and fasting as a means to further "mature" my relationship with God, it still bore a notion of self-denial and lingering guilt born of the misbegotten childhood notion that My Sin was So Bad that some notion of a God requiring a blood sacrifice was needed to wash it away... so happy to have put that childish thing aside.

So as I now know, accept and embrace the perfectly loving God revealed in Jesus, who could never require a human blood sacrifice as the price of atonement, as the price of my admission into the Salvation Club, Lent is no longer the great cosmic guilt trip.

So what is Lent then if not the guilt trip to end all guilt trips?

After years of not knowing what Lent is, after it having been liberated from the guilt trip connotations of childhood, I would still go to Ash Wednesday service, still fast, and wonder about it. Then a couple of years ago at an Ash Wednesday service, the priest was smearing oil and ashes onto my forehead in the sign of the cross and a notion crossed my mind. The priest was exercising the imposition of ashes. In my mind I saw myself looking into a mirror with the ashes crossed on my forehead and realized I had taken something on.

There it was, on my forehead, an imposition, I literally had taken something onto myself. From that moment on Lent had become about taking things on instead of denying myself things. It was no longer about denying myself things because I am a sinner of countless sins. Lent was now about taking on the challenge of understanding my transgressionss as symptomatic of what was/is lacking in my life... love.

For me Lent is now about responding to God's love and God's loving call in a very focused way, in taking on self-examination but not to wallow in the guilt of my transgressions, my lack of loving towards creation, but instead to seek out what it is in my life which acts as the barrier between God's love, me and you. As Jesus answered God's call by going into the wilderness, we too can answer God's call to enter the wilderness of our fears, our shame, and examine them and their sources in our lives and how they serve as barriers from our freedom in God's healing love.

This can be very hard work, much harder than bearing guilt, which may be why we sometime choose guilt over healing. Sometimes the examination and cleansing of a wound hurts more than the wound itself, but it is necessary for healing to occur and that's what salvation is: healing.

Honestly over the years, answering the call to discipleship has involved giving-up things, attitudes and emotions. Some things have been surrendered out of necessity, but the lasting choices have been in response to God's love. The choices of these kind have been the building blocks of the lasting changes. When one ceases to make choices because they're the "right ones" or because of expectations of some reward, emotional or material, but makes choices because they are loving choices, the loving choices begin to feed on themselves in our lives and the lives of others. We begin to choose loving as the natural choice.

This way of living, responding to and in anticipation of God's love, is the promise of God's freedom and as close to heaven on earth as I've ever known. This way, the way of Jesus, is the way in which I've found healing and will continue to do so as long as I keep taking on the promise of God's love. In my often distracted life, returning to love's promise and taking on love's promise is what keeps me moving and building upon itself. It's like how a tree just keeps building and building upon itself, ring after ring of growth, one upon the other.

To me it's not about giving things up to be better, but taking on the choices to be loving, to be well. It's about taking on the responsibilities of loving in response to love, to being loved. Whether Lent means taking on a new way to serve the suffering of the community, or finding wounds to be cleaned and healed, or in some other way to express love to God in each other and creation, these are all responses to God's call to love. After all, if we are loving more, then we must naturally be transgressing less.

What is Lent calling us to this year?

Changes

It's been quite a while since I've posted something other than a poem. The past several months have seen me take a new job (yay!)and begin postulancy in The Order of St. Anthony the Great, an Episcopal monastic order in the Celtic tradition.

The new job is with Senior Connections, I'm a driver in the Meals on Wheels division. I love the work. It is good work. I deliver meals to a school, to senior centers and to elderly stay-at-homes. Yet the demands of time-tables and trying to maintain them in the pressures of nutty Atlanta traffic has been quite stressful on my right-brained nature. That, along with being out of "work shape" from a year and a half of unemployment and learning the job more or less on the fly has left me frazzled.

I've also had classes or meetings three to four nights a week. There is also the educational aspects of my postulancy, all of which has kinda left me worn out in general.

I also have Post-Concussion Syndrome which means I have memory and cognitive function challenges, high susceptibility to anxiety, depression and emotional outbursts. To manage PCS without medication requires a great deal of effort and is very fatiguing.

The first eight weeks of the job exhausted me and challenged me to find ways of dealing with the fatigue and stress. Yet I was comforted and enjoyed time spent teaching a class in my parish around the LTQ2 series. I'm also taking the Education for Ministry classes. Also time with family and my four legged companion Faldo was helpful. All these thing restored me and sustained me in balance against the initial stress of work.

The nature of my job requires a great deal of time driving between stops, which allows me time to breathe, to pray and contemplate upon the situation, and to hold my loved ones in my heart and mind which is a wonderful "distraction" from the stress. I also knew that adjusting to the job was just a matter of time.

I wake at 3:30 am, walk Faldo and meditate on gratitude. I also adopted an experimental prayer form, I pre-forgive the troubles which surely come with every day. I pre-forgive the negative or hurtful stuff that may come in the course of the day, accidental and intentional, I forgive too those who may seek to hurt me or dis-regard me. I also forgive myself for taking "it all" too seriously and personally so to keep things in proper perspective. This has lowered my stress, anxiety and agitation in very measurable ways. I am calmer than I have been in a long time. I am also more open to and less critical of those around me, all very good things.

I also practice Lectio after my meditations. Lectio is my favorite form of prayer as it seems to bring my whole being into prayerful state. In Lectio soul, mind, heart and body are all working together in a tangible way in reading and meditating in the material. After, I feel integrated as an individual and connected to life as a whole, centered in the heart of all being and moved to remain in communion throughout the day in all I experience and in all those people I encounter. I am ready for the day, and grateful.

A few weeks ago I had a breakthrough in the process of working. I had enough repetition to finally know the job to act without having to think about every single movement, which freed up my mind to be creative to find ways around the aspects of the job which were for me wasteful in performing the job accurately and efficiently which has diminished the stress greatly. The process is now a breeze in which I've created more time within the confines of timetables to have greater latitude in responding to the unexpected.

I also must say my co-workers are fantastic. I have never worked with such a great bunch of people, very helpful people, people who "get it", people who are teamer's. I shouldn't be surprised as people who work in non-profits aren't in it for the money, so they are going to have people centered values. Yet, I am grateful for them all, their help and their great humor.

I'm also grateful for my family, their love and willingness to just let me hang-out and veg or fall asleep, wake me, feed me, love me and send me on my way. I'm also grateful for my parish family, The Order and the elemental balance of spirit they bring to my life.

I will soon be moving into the monkhouse which will relieve great economic pressure and will add to my sense of communion with the brothers and sisters in The Order. Some volunteer responsibilities I took on while unemployed will wind down which will give me a little more time to again write and also gain a little more rest.

The changes brought with being laid-off in 2009, continue. It has been hard, but so rewarding. I have taken comfort in the graces of Mother Spirit's wisdom, in the living example of Christ Jesus and in the love of God given to me by so many in the widening circles of family and friends. I have kept the faith. I have lost it. When I have lost it, I have known the great faith of those around me who never lost faith in me. How could life ever had been better than that?

POEM FIFTY-TWO

In the blue screened light of my laptop
I wonder about the economists’ problem
about not creating enough wealth

The problem isn’t about
creating enough wealth
is it

Ask the Four Percent

They hoard more than enough

My dog looks at me as I consider
the problem isn’t creating wealth

Indeed
it’s that too much poverty
is being created

Like charts, graphs and projections
poverty is an entirely
human creation

With
Intention

the poor are created
so that wealth may be horded

Four percent of the population
willfully create states of poverty

This is the fundamental understanding
of the rational mind
remember science class
cause and effect

While putting gas in the car
I wondered about natural resources
things both worshipped and wasted
depending on which side of the market
one sits on

And I considered the greatest natural resource

People
undervalued
and wasted

My dog gets up
losing patience
wanting to walk

The thought occurs to me
as we walk in moonlight

As weapons are intentionally
manufactured and violently deployed
so is poverty

Likewise is poverty
intentionally
manufactured and deployed

Violently

Poverty is practiced violence
exploding hollow-points into
individuals families and communities

Poverty is the violent rape
of our most precious resource
humans
people
children

Neighbors

Poverty is the torture and death
of starvation for countless people

Poverty is calculated
poverty is Four Percent waging
violent war on the rest

A lone goose calls across the lake
as my heart turns to spirit

Call it what it is

Poverty is violence

Where is my
WWJD
bracelet when I need it

Peace be with you

POEM EIGHT

The relentless thirst I own seems
unquenchable

My mouth is dust
for your cool clean water

Life is in
your liquid

So deep is the well of your water

And short is the buckets' rope

POEM THREE

The storms of our conjuring

Floods of consciousness rush to pillage the
landscape of my mind
reshaping the geography between my ears
to flood the delta of my heart
the river of life
over its banks
down
into the sea of being
to be remixed and remade

Yet on the now barren banks
such lushness and life will fill them again

Merry Christmas

May you all know again and share the joy and peace of God's loving light born again to us all.

POEM EIGHTEEN

I miss the mountains
and the youth who climbed them

I miss sunset
from Shining Rock
eating from the blueberries
which smother its base

Ever been there
where a part of you
forever remains behind

Still
in my slowly
aging dreams
I hear giggling angels
in the tumbling creeks

I still smell the cinnamon musk
of rain wet rhododendron
the incense of innocence

I remember love as
what we are
not as a calculation

Those aren't tears tracking
from cheek to jaw
they're only liquid
remembrances
of what's to come

h a i k u 4

every moment
passing through eternity

as wind through the leaves

POEM SIX

I missed the towns and sights
lost in the journey

In the journey
I saw flowers and fire
rain and dust
and birds flitting around
roadside carrion

While I'm lost
along
the way
back

POEM NINETEEN

Let the broken heart be
blessed as blessed bread is
broken to feed healing hearts

Gather the crumbs for
the feast

Pass the cup
collect tears turned
to sweetest wine

Passing the bread
and cup
call us all
to the broken union
restored
again and again and again
as lovers
restored
to their first passion

Timeless
eternal
moments
enveloped in
common call

Hear
the voice
of the first lover's call

Remember
the first touch
the first kiss

Live them

Give them away
again and again
and again
as bread
for the feast
of the multitudes

h a i k u 3

tumbling face first
with popsicle stick wings I
choose again to leap

h a i k u 2

from the northwest breeze
ripples under heron blue
I can see my breath

h a i k u 1

by sorrow or joy
the salt in the tears remain
holding their flavor