Morning meditation

 

Whatever else Christian faith has been about, it has always included the proclamation of new possibility, an opening to a new reality that transcends the present limits of ourselves and our lives.  Margaret A. Farley

Yesterday, to mark the beginning of Epiphany I invited you to read a poem and prayer for your house ~ your physical house and the house of this year.  The wonderful invitation in Epiphany is to bless both our physical house, the roof over our heads, the windows that let in the sunlight, the refrigerator that keeps food cold, and the table where we eat.  We bless our homes because our homes bless us in many ways.  

Home is not just an external structure, there are many rooms in your soul.  There are rooms where you can rest because you feel comfortable.  There are cellars where cobwebs cling to the corners and you store all the stuff/cardboard boxes of emotional or relational or spiritual things you have forgotten are down there, until someone says something that blows the dust of that box bringing it back into your consciousness.  There are rooms you have not yet explored in your soul, because our souls continually evolve and expand ~ just as God’s love does.  My invitation for you this Tuesday is to ask, where are you curious?  The Wise Ones let their curiosity loose on a long journey.  What awakens your sacred imagination?  Please note this could be something practical ~ like learning a new language for a trip.  Or it could be something spiritual ~ like forgiving or reading scripture or prayer. 

I love the quote above from Margaret Farley because she reminds us, God is not finished with any of us yet.  As long as you have a breath within you, God continues to clear away the clutter.  On Christmas Eve we opened the door to the stable like places of our lives to make a manger-size place for God.  The invitation was to do this, not only when singing Silent Night drenched in candlelight, but every day.  So today, open your soul to God’s stirring to see what our still Composing, Cooking, Creating, Collaborating Creator is up to in your life.  May you uncover and discover a new reality ~ that might feel risky as it did when you were a kid going down to the basement to get the Valentine’s decorations.  But you had courage then and can have courage now to explore your evolving faith.  Please remember, you don’t need to start with the risky place where you are curious, you don’t have to start with skydiving or wrestling alligators.  Maybe it is reading one book of the Bible.  Maybe it is calling one person.  What is stirring in your heart?  Lean in and listen for there in the manger size place within us is where we find the holy.  With God’s love to you this Epiphany week. 

Prayer for Your Home

 

January 6 is known as the Feast of the Epiphany.  This ends the Twelve Days of Christmas and when the church celebrates the arrival of the Wise Ones to worship Jesus.  You can find the story in Matthew 2, how the Wise Ones travel a great distance following a star, note that we are not told exactly how many were in this caravan of people.  Many believe the Wise Ones started their journey on the day of Jesus birth, when they saw the star.  Because there was no Delta Airlines to hop on, it might have taken a long time to reach Jesus.  Some suggest Jesus may have been 2 years old before the Wise Ones finally knocked on the door of his house bringing gifts.  Imagine Mary and Joseph surprise when they open the door and find these people they have never met before, weary and worn out from travel.  Perhaps they remembered their own exhaustion before Christ’s birth.  The Wise Ones bring gifts of great value that the family could have sold to help put food on the table. 

On Epiphany, there is an ancient practice of blessing your own, just as the Wise Ones blessed Jesus’ abode.  Here is a wonderful prayer from Jan Richardson.

 

The Year as a House: A Blessing

Think of the year as a house: door flung wide in welcome,
threshold swept and waiting, a graced spaciousness
opening and offering itself to you.

Let it be blessed in every room.
Let it be hallowed in every corner.
Let every nook be a refuge
and every object set to holy use.

Let it be here that safety will rest.
Let it be here that health will make its home.
Let it be here that peace will show its face.
Let it be here that love will find its way.

Here let the weary come
let the aching come
let the lost come
let the sorrowing come.

Here let them find their rest
and let them find their soothing
and let them find their place
and let them find their delight.

And may it be in this house of a year
that the seasons will spin in beauty,
and may it be in these turning days
that time will spiral with joy.
And may it be that its rooms will fill
with ordinary grace
and light spill from every window
to welcome the stranger home.

Wherever you make your home, may it be blessed, and may you

enter this Epiphany and the coming year in peace.

Amen.

Today, I invite you to go room to room in your home offering prayers of thanksgiving.  For the bedroom where you rest, for the warmth of the shower, the food in the refrigerator and the kitchen table soaked with stories.  For the living room where you can sit in your favorite chair ~ and say a prayer for your favorite chair.  Wander around your house blessing the walls and wood work and spaces as a physical place where you might encounter God in the house call 2024.  Amen.

Friday Prayer

 

Prayer for this Friday ~ God as the first full week of 2024 winds down and wraps up, draw near as my next breath.  I do not know what awaits me today, O God.  Sure, I have events scheduled in ink on my calendar as if I could control my days.  Sure, I have dreams about vacations next summer that I am plotting and planning with hotels.com, but honestly, God I have no idea what might happen.  Life is uncontrollable despite my planner.  Life is beautifully messy, like the less-than-perfect stable where You conspired to enter this world.  Life is.  Life is beyond words and descriptions, just as You are O God.  As the mystics say, “God” is just the word we toss and throw around like a blanket to cover mystery.  Life is just a word we try to cling to as if it is all up to us.  But I can’t make the sunshine or storms pass.  I don’t have a Harry Potter magic wand to make the wars cease and people realize that love is the way.  What I have is a light and Your presence woven into my life.  That is enough.  Thank you, God for Your presence that infuse and inspires this first Friday of.  Let me taste Your grace in bowls of cereal.  Let me feel Your love in hugs.  Let me smell Your presence in soup simmering and see traces of You like the wind whirling through the trees.  May Your strength take my hand and lead me on this day, trusting in You.  Amen.    

Blessing of this Moment

 

So far this week we have looked back at our life and looked around at the ordinariness of our days.  Today, I share with you a poem/prayer from Jan Richardson:

Blessing the Ordinary:

Let these words lay themselves
like a blessing upon your head (touch your head with your hands)
your shoulders (touch your shoulders with your hands)

as if, like hands, they could pass on to you what you most need for this day.

Pause ~ what do you need most today?  Maybe you immediately know or maybe you must search the cobwebbed corners of our soul through the boxes you forgot were stored/stashed there.  What do you need today?

as if God through your hands could anoint you not merely for the path ahead

but for this ordinary moment that opens itself to you—

opens itself like another hand that unfurls itself, (open your hands)
that reaches out to gather up these words – your words spoken and the ones unsaid
in the bowl of its palm.

Pause ~ form a bowl with your hands, image God is holding your very life right now.

You may think this blessing lives within these words

but I tell you it lives in the opening and in the reaching; (reach out your hands before you)

it lives in the ache where this blessing begins; (bring your hands to your heart)

it lives in the hollow made by the place where the hands of this blessing meet.

Pause ~ image God holding your hand now and every moment this day. Amen.

In Praise of the Ordinary

 

So far this week we have prayerfully pondered 2023 in review, the highlight and lowlight reel of the story of your life.  Yesterday, I encouraged you to pray your holy laments from last year, naming and noticing the woundedness where you need the balm of Gilead to meet you in the ache.  Today, I want to invite you to hold the beautiful ordinariness of life.  If we are not awake and aware, we can run the risk of going on autopilot in life.  This is found in the cliché of, “The days are long, but the years are short.”  Time is not neutral.  There is a weight to certain days, especially when we are grieving.  There is a lightness to other days when laughter comes easily.  Then there are days when nothing remarkable happened.  We don’t remember the taste of the meal or what we did because our calendar didn’t have any event listed.  We must have done something that September day, right?  But not every day is a mountain or a valley, there are days and weeks and sometimes months when the road is flat and minutes tick past.  Here is my prayer for the beautiful ordinariness of life.

God of bowls of oatmeal we eat as we scan the paper,

God of shopping trips and doctor’s appointments that blur into each other,

God of days when we sit and look out the window doing nothing in particular; not pondering any philosophical query,

There are moments when it feels like we are trying to chase or capture the wind.

Life flows like a river from day-to-day.

Here we are on the third day of this New Year.

We start to think about taking down the tree, packing up Christmas for another year.

We look at the dishes to be done or the laundry to be folded.

Help us realize that You hold our beautiful ordinary life each day this year.

Help us sense You in the suds of the dish soap.

Help us notice You in the vacuuming of tinsel from our carpet.

Help open us to You as we make our sandwich, slowly savoring the peanut butter.

When the wind knocks on our windows, may we open the door to Your spirit.

When we trudge out to the mailbox, help us listen to the song of the birds and wave our hand back at the palm trees.

When we turn on the news, sit with us amid all that we hear and see and the emotions the words provoke and evoke.

We need You, O God, every hour.  Not just in the good and bad and ugly, but right now in this hour as I read this prayer.  Let Your love enfold and hold, let Your grace guide, and let Your wisdom help me know the next right step as I move deeper into this New Year.  In the name of the One who is Emmanuel, God with us here and now on this Wednesday.  Amen.

Valley Moments

 

Yesterday, I invited you to rewind and review your calendar from 2023 prayerfully.  I encouraged you to hold both the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Today, I want to focus on the valley moments of life.  I think about funerals this last year for people whose fingerprints are on my heart.  I think about this new chapter called, “Empty Nest” that my wife and I are navigating and still trying to figure out how to write.  I think about moments of stress and strain that set heavy on my shoulders.  I think about times someone said or did something that felt like a thousand paper cuts. 

As Father Richard Rohr says, “Pain that is not processed is passed along.”  We need to lament honestly the hurt and heartbreak.  The cultural narrative that is preached is to just “get over and get on with it.”  We are taught and told to keep a stiff upper lip and not whine.  And yet, that is not what Scripture describes or prescribes.  We know that over half the psalms are laments, crying out about feeling God-forsaken and forgotten (Psalm 22).  We know that Hannah raises her voice in the temple, angry at God for being barren.  We know that Naomi in the book of Ruth goes back to Bethlehem and say, “Call me Mara,” which means “bitter” because that was the taste on the tip of her tongue after her husband and sons died.  We know Jesus wept in the garden and asked for the cup of the cross to pass by him on the other side.  Holy lament is part of life.  As the dust settles from your New Years celebrations, what do you need to grieve from last year?  Where do you feel bitter or broken in more pieces than Humpty Dumpty?  What sits uneasy in your soul?  And while the gospel of the world may preach and proclaim that you should just shove the sharp shattered shards of unanswered prayers and unrealized dreams into the cobwebbed corners of your soul, I am saying, let’s bring all that into the light of God’s hope, peace, joy, and love that still burn brightly this year.  While I don’t think that God will instantly and immediately make everything better so it can be a New Year, New You…I do think God holds the ache with us.  In Exodus, when God calls Moses to go to Pharoah to let God’s people go, God says I have heard the cries of my people.  And this is not a distant or disconnected hearing, but a hearing that feels like a punch in God’s gut.  God doesn’t just hear but aches with you in the valley moments, God feels that with you.  As you hold the hurt as we do, join me in praying a version of the 23^rd Psalm (note you are welcome to pray any version of this psalm you would like).

 

The Eternal is my shepherd, God cares for me always.
God provides me rest in rich, green fields
    beside streams of refreshing water.
    The Eternal soothes my fears;
 The Mystery makes me whole again,
    steering me off worn, hard paths
    to roads where truth and righteousness echo Conductor’s name.

Even in the unending shadows of death’s darkness,
    I am not overcome by fear.
Because You are with me in those dark moments,
    near with Your protection and guidance,
    I am comforted.

 You spread out a table before me,
    provisions in the midst of attack from my enemies;
You care for all my needs, anointing my head with soothing, fragrant oil,
    filling my cup again and again with Your grace.
Certainly Your faithful protection and loving provision will pursue me
    where I go, always, everywhere.
I will always be with the Eternal,
    in Your house forever.  Amen.

New Year Invitation

 

May the unconditional and unceasing and unexpected love of God, born in a barn and laid in a feeding trough, be with you.  May the peace of Christ who let loose the light of grace and shattered the gospels of domination, revenge, purification, and pain surround you.  May the creative and conducting Spirit swirl within you in ways that awaken you to the holy every day this year.

 

I invite you this week to pray with your calendar from 2023 before you throw/toss it into the recycling bin.  Before you move on to, “New Year, New Me” mantas and resolutions and clean slates of 2024, it is good to pause.  Breathe in with me and slowly exhale.  As you settle in, I want to invite you to do a year-in-review with me. 

 

You will need a piece of paper as I believe there is something tactile and tangible about writing down moments from this last year.  You will also need to have your calendar from 2023.  Going week-by-week, I invite you to review the appointments, experiences, and encounters.  For example, I look back at January and notice funerals, meals shared, and meetings.  I notice pastoral visits and times with friends.  I see volunteer experiences and birthday parties.  As I continue through the months I note my daughter’s graduation, weddings I performed, and vacations taken.  I notice our sanctuary renovation project and bible studies held.  Then, there are these ordinary days tucked between the mountain moments and valley times when the calendar was more open.  Rewind, review, and remember what left an imprint upon your soul last year.  Name and notice the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Hold all of it because God holds all of it.

 

There is a great line from the musical Rent, Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes. How do you measure, measure a year? In daylights? In sunsets? In midnights? In cups of coffee? In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife?

 

How do you measure a life?  How do you measure your life, because the truth is there is no universal metric system for meaning in your life.  What is meaningful to you, a mountain top moment, may leave another person glancing at her watch wondering, “What’s for lunch?”.  We are all beautifully and uniquely created in God’s image.  And, therein lies the tension because we want people to agree and affirm and accept us.  If I think taking photos in Sedona was amazing and life giving.  But when you hear Sedona your first response was “Meh”…then I feel defensive.  On behalf of the good citizens of this corner of God’s earth I may mount a defense of why you are wrong, which may make you wonder, “Why is he so passionate about a place he doesn’t live?”  I am not asking you to defend, but to hold lightly.  I am not asking you to grade your last year, but to look back with hindsight and insight and foresight ~ the truth is just because you put up a new calendar today doesn’t mean we leave all 2023 behind.  Often the past does impact the present.  Hold your life today for the unfathomable mystery and marvel it is.  Write down what stirred your soul, what drained your soul, and those beautiful ordinary moments that at the time you might have missed.  Then, come back tomorrow and we will continue to lean in and listen to our lives.

God of every day of 2023, on this first day of 2024, open us to how You are still moving and mixing and mingling in our lives every day.  Let the coming year be filled with Your hope, peace, joy, and love that continues to light our way in these days after Christmas.  Amen.