Poem Prayer for Today

 

Tomorrow you might be planning a picnic or to fire up the grill or to send fireworks up into the sky.  Tomorrow you might reflect on what it means to call this plot of land home, this rock called “earth” hurling through space.  Tomorrow you might lament the struggles we face, especially divisions and cynicism.  Tomorrow you might sing songs with people you’ve never met but realize are fellow citizens.  Tomorrow you might wonder about the election coming up.  Tomorrow you might think about how far we’ve come as people in the experiment of democracy and how far we must go.  And today, I offer you this beautiful poem and prayer from Langston Hughes

 

I, Too

 

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

 

My prayer is that we, as a country, find a place at the table for all; for at the center of our faith is Christ inviting all to the feast of God.  Amen.

The "We" of Me

 

Yesterday, I shared a few of my favorite quotes from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights.  Here is one more:

 

“The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking.”

 

That single sentence stops me in my tracks.  Who am I caretaking?  Who is caretaking me?  These tangled and twisted threads of our lives are like the back of a quilt.  We assume and preach an individualistic gospel, and yet we are more interconnected than we care to admit or accept.  When do I hold the mystery that there is no me without “we”?  The “we” of my past ~ the family and friends and formational moments that accompanied me to this place, this day.  The “we” of the present that I see in the smudges of fingerprints on our refrigerator door and dirty plate left for someone else to put in the dishwasher or the person at the meeting who seems to delight in saying the opposite of what I am trying to suggest.  The “we” of the future, people who I do not even know exist but will cross my path in the road ahead and the creatures I might encounter on the hiking trip out to New Mexico in September or see on the sidewalks as I make my way down the street.   The “we” who will become our new Director of Music at some point – we pray – in the future.

 

The “we” that gathers every Sunday.

The “we” that includes voices of saints woven into the woodwork and walls of the church.

The “we” of people who tentatively cross the threshold of the entry way door because they are unsure that the church of a warm welcome really means it, lives it.

The “we” of voices that rumble around my mind that might sound like my mother at one time and my professor at another and in those still small moments like my own authentic voice.

 

The “we” of me…and the me that is a “we”.  This committee work of life that you and I are about in our lives, our church, our community, our country, and with creation that is singing in the choir with us.  May caretaking be the vocation that I pour my energy and effort into this day.  Amen.

Summer Reflections

 

This week marks the midpoint of this year; we are halfway through 2024.  Insert confetti being thrown here.  This is also a good week to reflect on the past 182 days.  How is the art project of your life going?  What images, events, experiences, thoughts, emotions are settling into your soul?  What has filled the past 4,368 hours?  What is bringing you joy right now?  When has delight danced in your soul and caused goosebumps to race/run up and down your spine?  Too often, for me, it feels like the scriptwriters for my life are Eeyore and Grumpy Dwarf with a bit of the Incredible Hulk mixed in for fun.  How do we hold the tension that there is suffering and struggling without letting that be the truth, whole truth, and nothing but the truth?  How does joy, laughter, and song become teachers where we can sit in their classrooms too?  Ross Gay spent an entire year writing essays about what he saw in the world that delighted him.  I encourage you to look up some of Ross’ work.  Here is a quote from The Book of Delights:

 

“I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it.”

 

Ponder what delights have you shared with others so far this year?  When?  Who shared that delight with you?  Who joined you in the chorus of laughter or singing or silent awe as you watched the sunset?  What moments strangely warmed your heart and stirred your soul?

 

Gay goes on to say in an interview with Krista Tippett: “Joy is the labor that will make the life that I want possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.”

 

What stirs in response to this quote?

 

Finally, hear how Gay can hold the beautiful and broken together in this essay from The Book of Delights:

 

“Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be, she said: ‘What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.  “And what if the wilderness — perhaps the densest wild in there — thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) — is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the ‘intolerable.’ It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?

“Is sorrow the true wild?

“And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that?

“For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.

“What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.

“I’m saying: What if that is joy?”

 

May your sorrow in the swampy wilderness of the world today meet a companion that together you might discover joy for the remaining days of 2024.  Amen.