Stardust of Experiences and Encounters Part 3

 

Too often, in the hustle and bustle of to-do items to be crossed off, projects completed, and calendar spaces to be filled, I can miss the Holy humming quietly in my life.  For the last week and a half, I have invited you to listen to your life for the holy mystery/symphony/unfolding and unfinished story it is.  As Karl Rahner wrote, "In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to realize that, in this life, all symphonies must remain unfinished."  Pause with me.  Re-read that quote, both its rough edges and beautiful invitations.  Rahner reminds us that life has a quality of feeling like not enough or that there is more to life that we are not tasting, seeing, or experiencing.  The insufficiency Rahner writes about is the constant desiring of more, and this can leave us with the frustrating incompleteness of what is.  You buy a pair of shoes you love, only to find another pair you love more on sale the next time you are at the store.  You go on a retreat, there in that place, you have what you think is a life-changing experience, only four months later, to fall back into the ruts and routines of life before you went.  The not-enough-ness of our lives is what marketing and social media and streaming platforms bank on.  We are continually shown new products being rolled out, and we are being rolled over by the steady stream of more/more/more every day.  The market is flooded not only politically, but also in our consumeristic culture.

 

Okay, philosophical soapbox sermon over.  (I hear your sigh of relief).  My point is that your holy summer homework project of listening to your shy soul sing might feel like one more thing to do.  I pray it isn’t.  Today, I encourage you to breathe in the beauty of God, who is still authoring your story.  The beauty of stars that shine in the deepest ink-spilled night skies.  The beauty of places where the dust beneath the soles of your feet has sunk into your soul.  The beauty of people who linger in your imagination, even if their presence is to remind you what you don’t want to be.  Look at what you have on the paper before you.  Rectangles drawn with places named.  Circles of people who included you, embraced and enfolded you, and perhaps people who have heartbreakingly excluded you.  You’ve added stars of moments and memories that left dust in your life.  Your masterpiece of life doesn’t need to be finished and handed in for a grade, although I would love to talk to you about what you are discovering or discerning in listening to your life.  Today, sit quietly with the incompleteness of what you’ve done so far, especially if you have had to cross things out or scribble over names or add one more star to an already cramped and crowded space.  Your life doesn’t need to be a Picasso-winning art; rather, your life is the beautiful unfinished symphony of God.  Amen.

Stardust of Experiences and Encounters Part 2

 

How did charting the stars of your life go yesterday?  You have a whole galaxy shining within you.  Your past forms constellations that never stop spinning, swirling, expanding, and evolving.  In the shifting patterns of life, sometimes a moment that might have been a lowlight for you in the past suddenly starts to glimmer or glisten in a new way.  Or maybe a moment you thought shone so brightly loses some of its luster.  The stories we tell are not meant to grow stagnant.  But sometimes we repeat and replay a memory so many times it becomes worn and weathered.  Sometimes our stories become stale because we keep saying the same words in the same way, never allowing the story to find new life as what mixes and mingles with what is right now.  No matter how we try to put our stories/lives/faith in a Tupperware container on the shelf for safekeeping, time will keep reforming what has been, considering what is. It is when we step back with a wider lens/perspective/hindsight to witness how the various parts and pieces are connected and re-connecting in ways we never noticed before.  Today, keep adding new stars to your chart and art.  Maybe you now remember that play in High School that filled you with joy, or that job you lost because you stood up for a co-worker, or that ordinary day when you were not expecting God to pay a visit, but suddenly the Sacred showed up.  Keep listening to your life for the beautiful mystery it is; keep exploring your life like it is a new space you’ve never been in; keep remembering and recalling how spaces hold memories…that events are tied to a specific moment in time.  May this holy summer homework open you to the One who is continuing to help you revise and re-story your life every day.  Amen.

Stardust of Experiences and encounters

 

Last week, you pondered the places and people that left impressions on your soul.  The four walls where you received snail mail still reside and rest in the cobwebbed corners of your soul.  Perhaps you felt a bit of nostalgia; the Israelites, even though Egypt was a place of oppression, still wanted to return.  You may have some longing to go back to a place in your past, as Dorothy longed for Kansas.  In addition to our homes, countless people have crossed our paths, leaving traces of grace and grime on us.  People can live rent-free in our minds, and we can’t seem to evict them.  We may discover that we are volunteering at a particular place today because we want to impress our mother, who died years ago.  We may be trying to quiet that inner critic who will never be satisfied, even if you leapt over a tall building in one jump while solving world hunger and forever bringing world peace.  The truth is that everywhere we’ve been shapes us, and everyone we’ve spent more than a few seconds with can take control of the steering wheel or choose the radio station as you drive down the highway of life. 

 

This week, we will add to the chart and art of the story we tell ourselves.  In the space beneath the places/people, I invite you to add stars that reflect some of your experiences/encounters in that place.  The moments that left a lingering/lasting impression.  For example, under Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where I was born, I might write down times I went fishing with my family, and we cooked breakfast on a propane grill (yes, the pancakes got burnt to a crisp, and no amount of sugary syrup helped).  From my time in seminary in Minnesota, I could write about meeting my wife, which was/still is the best day ever!  Also, consider some of the challenging times.  From my childhood, I might have written down my dad losing his job.  During my time living in Minnesota, I would write down, trying to figure out if I was cut out for local church ministry after my first internship.  You can do this in chart form.  Or if you want to let loose your inner artist, draw a star.  At each of the points, write down the spontaneous joy times for that location in life and also the difficult or demanding moments. 

 

I choose stars as a symbol because we have both soil and stardust in our souls.  You are a stunning, sometimes scattered, sacred mixture of people, places, events, and experiences that have gone into the recipe of your life.  The story you tell yourself about yourself, the narratives you repeat at a party when you meet someone for the first time, are a combination and culmination of the past and present.  The stories of yesterday shape us and point us, like a star, toward the future.  Please remember that if all this is feeling too much right now, you have permission (not that you really need it) to not do any of this.  This invitation does not have an expiration date.  You can pick up this prayer practice of listening to your one wild and precious life anytime your shy soul says, “Let’s do that together; it would be fun!!” 

 

It is my prayer as you rewind and remember, reflect and review, God would stir up the beautiful dustiness (remember this image from Genesis 2 ~ God crafting the first human out of dust, which is true for you too).  My prayer is that you would hear God hovering and humming to you.  While God may not call your name from burning bushes, God can be heard in family and ordinary days and beautiful ways.  May you and I discover the Divine who has been part of us and led us thus far on the way.  Amen.

The Places You've Lived that Live in You Prayer

 

God of all places, spaces, forming and fashioning people whose path crosses mine in ways that help and sometimes hurt.  For this fragile, fabulous adventure of life, thank you.  For new insights into the ways spaces and places have/continue to shape me, thank you.  For hearing afresh the ways stories of my parents still sit on the shoulder of my life, whispering in my ear, thank you.  For people, those who blessed me in beautiful ways and those who were like south stars teaching me how not to be, thank you.  For this invitation to listen to my life in all its complexity, contradictions, and cohesion as I superglue parts of my life together in the art project of each day, thank you.  Help me taste the individual parts of my life that have been brought together and blended in the mixer of my soul.  For the places I’ve lived.  For the people I’ve loved.  For the lessons I heard.  For the stories I still tell.  May all these individual ingredients find a blessing in You, O God, in these July days.  Amen. 

The Places You've Lived that Live in You ~ Part 4

 

So far this week, you’ve made rectangles of places and circles of people; you’ve looked at the lessons learned from each plot of land where the soles of your feet touched the soil of the earth.  You’ve paid attention to the stories that went with belonging to the tribe of people who orbited your sphere and life.  Today, I invite you to hold your one wild and precious life.  I need to be reminded not to grade my life.  I need permission to breathe and be.  The color commentary in my mind can be quick to say, “Welp, Wes, if only you had realized that sooner, we wouldn’t be in this fine mess of life.”  I often speak more harshly to myself than I ever would to anyone else.  Breathe in the breath of God.  God has been, is, and will always be in those rectangular places of life.  And God can never be confined or contained in any space and always invites us to break down the boundaries and barriers that hem us in with a liberating love.  You don’t have to do anything else with your artwork of life today.  Let God, who is right there as close as your next breath, hold you as you behold where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what lessons you’ve learned and the ways you’ve been shaped not only into the beautiful image of God but also by the world where you found yourself.  May God, whose love never lets you go, be felt in real ways this day.  Amen.

The Places You've Lived that Live in You ~ Part 3

 

This week you’ve named the places and spaces you’ve called home.  You’ve honored people whose lives and light you connected with.  You’ve reflected a bit on the lessons you learned that you carry in the soil of your soul.  Now, I invite you to ponder the family narratives you were taught and caught.  Every family has a gospel…but sometimes it isn’t such great news.  Maybe you come from a family where the story was “Not enough”.  You’d come home with one B on your report card, and your parents would berate you, making you fear you would never get into Harvard with those grades.  Maybe you come from a family where everyone was against you or out to get you.  Maybe you come from a family where you always had to be optimistic.  Every family has propaganda.  Psychologists call this “Your Family of Origin Story.”  You were served these stories alongside bowls of mashed potatoes passed around the table.  You consumed these stories sometimes without realizing what you were digesting. You were served this in parents’ reactions and responses.  You picked this up as part of your beautiful survival technique, as we all want to make sure we don’t get kicked out of our tribe.  While your family probably didn’t sit around a fire telling these stories, the truth is our families still have a narrative that can be subtle and subversive and gets into our souls to inform the stories we tell about ourselves.  There is a great line in scripture, Jeremiah 31:29, “In those days people will no longer say, ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’”  In other words, the sins of our parents don’t need to confine or contain us.  As the mystics say, the truth may set us free, but first it may make you miserable!  Did your parents ever say to you, “In this family, we (fill in the blank)” ~ tell the truth; do whatever it takes to get ahead; never ask for help because we help others; are there for one another.  Or maybe it wasn’t as explicit…more implicit.  You asked for help, only to have your parents say, “You are on your own.  Gotta learn sometime to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.”  Listen to the phrases that still reverberate in the cobwebbed corners of your soul as you rewind and remember the places and people that still rest and reside in you.  Amen.

The Places You've Lived that Live in You ~ Part 2

 

One of my favorite stories in the book of Exodus is after God’s liberating love made a way when there was no way by parting the Red Sea…as you’ve all seen in the movie The 10 Commandments.  After Miriam led a worship service on the other side of the Red Sea, she took a tambourine into her hands and singing prayer/praise to God.  After the people of God had walked a few steps into what would be a 40-year-long journey, they didn’t know it, because if we knew then what we know now, how many of us would choose to travel the roads that have brought us here?  A few steps into the wilderness, the people start mumbling and grumbling about how much they miss Egypt.  You know, where they were enslaved and forced into hard labor.  You know, where there were whips and oppression.  You know, where they barely had enough food to live on and longed for freedom.  You know…the good ole days!?  One of the truths of Exodus is that even when the people of God leave Egypt, Egypt doesn’t leave the people of God.  It takes time to get the soil of oppression out of their souls.  In fact, some might suggest that we are all still enslaved, captive, beholden to something.  This could be everything from addictions to drugs, alcohol, work, shopping, vacation, meaningful experiences, and even needing to be needed. 

 

The soil of the places you’ve called home still resides in your soul.  You will compare where you are to where you have been.  For example, one of the truths of growing up in Iowa was that frugality was next to godliness.  Couple this with the fact that I grew up in a working-class family that rarely had extra money, and I won’t spend one cent if I don’t have to.  This can be good.  But it can also have consequences when I delay a decision, pouring money into something that is clearly broken.  Look back over the places you’ve lived because there were lessons from those places and people left in you.  You may want to jot down one lesson you learned in each place you’ve lived.  I learned about Minnesota nice, New England stoicism, Wisconsin love of all things cheese and football, and now Florida family that connects people to people beyond DNA.  You can make a few notes under each rectangle about the good and not-so-great lessons of the land where you’ve received snail mail and where you laid your head down to sleep and prayed the Lord your soul to keep.  May this invitation awaken you to the way that the soil of a space gets into your soul and impacts the story you tell yourself today.  Amen.