I AM

Tags

Exodus, feet, gratitude, holy, holy ground, I AM, Israelites, Moses, pure being, reverence, sandals, simple joy of being, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

I often say that if I lived in a warmer climate, one of the best things about that would be not having to wear shoes all the time. I much prefer to feel the ground under my feet, especially if it is grassy, but even a stony path connects me to the earth in a way that is impossible if mediated by shoes or boots. One advantage that I often take while on retreat is to bring “slipper socks” and spend the days shoeless. Sometimes in those situations I’m even conscious of a connection with Moses whom God directed to remove his shoes at the sight of the burning bush. “Remove the sandals from your feet,” God said, “because you are standing on holy ground.” Shoes or not, that directive took on palpable energy in a song some years ago in a song entitled Holy Ground.

This is holy ground, the lyrics said. You’re standing on holy ground, for the Lord is present and where God is is holy. The second verse was a perfect accompaniment to the anointing that often concluded a retreat. These are holy hands. God’s given us holy hands. God works through these hands and so these hands are holy. As I was signing or being signed with oil as those words were proclaiming God’s presence, not only in the room but in each of the participants, the reality of our call to serve was always clear and our motivation strong.

The deeper recognition from this morning’s reading (EX 3:1-8,13-15) comes from the exchange between Moses and God when Moses asks God about the message to the Israelites whom God is planning to save through the agency of Moses. “When I go to the Israelites,” Moses says, “and say that the God of your ancestors has sent me, if they ask your name, what do I tell them?” God answers, “Say: ‘I AM sent me to you.'” God is saying, it seems, that God’s identity is pure being, not necessarily connected with any doing (as in ‘the God of the Harvest’ or the God of War, etc.) It follows for me, then, that if we are made in the image and likeness of God, we ought to be more concerned with how we are being than with what we are doing. We not only have holy hands; we have holy bodies, holy minds and holy spirits. So the question for today for me is: How am I manifesting the holiness of “I AM” presence in this world? It is, of course, our responsibility to do our best at whatever we do but the doing should flow from our understanding of the primacy of our being. So today, let us walk on God’s holy ground in gratitude for life and the call to live it with reverence and the simple joy of being.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Be Patient

Tags

Canaanite woman, Israelites, Jesus, keep faith, live the questions, love the questions, Matthew, Numbers, patient, Rainer Maria Rilke, struggle, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

This morning’s readings are about struggle, first of the Israelites in the desert who are convinced that God brought them out of Egypt to die because their situation was discontinuous from the miracle of their escape through the Red Sea. (NM 13 & 14) The Canaanite woman in the gospel presents an opposite view. An outsider, she was willing to approach and then challenge the negative response of Jesus to her cry for help, such that in the end her request was granted. (MT 15:21-28)

Sometimes it’s hard to keep faith when things are difficult and there seems no end to struggle in sight. As often happens for me when I am looking for a “way out” or something that will keep me going, I opened a book this morning to find a quote by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet. It speaks of what I know as successful process as I look back on the life I’ve lived so far, and seems appropriate advice in times of struggle.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Do not seek the answers that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gladly, without even noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Good Food to You

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bread alone, food, Israelites, Jesus, manna, Matthew, Numbers, psalm 81, The Awakening Tales, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, the spiritual center, wisdom

Everything in today’s readings speaks of food. The Israelites in the desert grumble because instead of fish or meat to eat they have the manna sent from heaven. (NM 11:4-15). Jesus feeds a huge crowd with five loaves and two fish. (MT 14:13-21) Psalm 81 ends with the promise: I myself will feed you from the finest wheat. I will satisfy your longing for earth’s sweetest food, with honey I so carefully extracted from the rock. But it is the verse before the gospel that brings it all together with the lesson I will carry with me through the day. One does not live on bread alone, it says, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God. (MT 4:4).

There is a lovely story* familiar to many of our friends and the people who come to our home, the Spiritual Center, for retreats or workshops. Set in a beautiful glen, inhabited by animals and a wise, kindly Wizard, it tells of the day a human comes to the Glen. He arrives just as some of the animals are sharing breakfast at the Crystal Pool. When Fawn approaches him with a greeting of “Good food to you!” the man retorts, “Strange way to say ‘Good morning.'” Fawn replies, “Mornings are always good. It’s food I wish for you, stranger.” Then follows a wonderful exercise where the animals show the man what they mean. At the Crystal Pool, Fawn and Joyhopper, the Rabbit, stand close to the water, first look into each other’s eyes and then into the Crystal Pool saying, “Good food of sweet grass to you, Fawn” and “Good food of young carrots to you, Joyhopper.” The wind stirs the water and miraculously a bunch of young carrots and a pile of sweet grass appear in front of the animals. The man, Alan Stuck, misunderstands the miracle and thinks that he has a way to obtain treasure, going to the pool and commanding, “Jewels!” (Nothing happens.) “Gold,” he yells. (Nothing.) “Steak with all the trimmings!” (No luck.) It takes a lesson from the Indigo Wizard for Alan to understand that it is in generosity and community that one receives the food necessary to live well.

So my wish today is for “Good Food to all.” May the God of wisdom grant us all that we need to make the world a better place.

*The book, The Awakening Tales (book one of The Tales of the Indigo Wizard) is available by writing to hrtcenter12@gmail.com for more information.

A Higher Law

Tags

covenant, creation, Deuteronomy, God, heart, Israelites, Jesus, letting go, Lord, love, Matthew, perfect, perfection, Sermon on the Mount, soul, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Much more comfortable with readings that speak plainly of love than of law, I wasn’t thrilled this morning to see Deuteronomy show up with a first line of “this day the Lord God commands you…” I was pleasantly surprised, however as I read on and heard that the observation of the law was to be not with the mind and will (although that would necessarily be involved) but with “all your heart and all your soul.” The entire section (DT 26:16-19) was based on an agreement that sounded quite mutual, resulting in the Israelites becoming “a people peculiarly his own, as he promised.”

Jesus took this theme and expanded it at the end of the Sermon on the Mount (MT 5:43-48) – an extraordinary section that calls us to love those we would not and sometimes think we could not: our enemies and those who hate us. There is that line at the end that people (including myself) are always trying to translate in a softer way than what we learned as children. It says be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. What dawned on me this morning, however, in putting the two readings together (I really am a slow learner sometimes!) is that the perfection is not the perfection that comes from the mind – working hard at while still resisting internally what the “law” calls for. Rather, Jesus is talking about that law of the covenant in Deuteronomy, that agreement of God with his people that comes from the heart and the soul. That law is not about resisting anything but rather letting go of what holds us back and allowing love to flow through us as God does in the entire creation. The perfection of love is what God already is. It is only in God that we can accept the terms of this law and move toward it each day anew so that, in the end, when we see God “face to face” we will recognize ourselves in God’s eyes the way that God already sees us.

Bread for the Journey

Tags

bread and wine, communion, Corpus Christi, Israelites, Jesus, John, manna, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

This morning’s readings move through what I have learned to call “salvation history” beginning with the story of God’s gift of “manna” in the desert – the bread that sustained the Israelites as they wandered toward the Promised Land. In the Christian Scriptures, Jesus speaks of himself in John’s gospel as the “bread that has come down from heaven” that will lead us to life. We become, we are told, the true, mystical body of Christ. This is truly a mystery and in our day we are coming to see new and deeper meanings that derive from this truth. Christians speak of the “communion of the body of Christ” celebrated in the ritual of Eucharist and see that communion in the bread and wine that we share in the living memory (anamnesis) of what Jesus did at what we call “the Last Supper” before his death and resurrection. The unity of his body is becoming clearer as we join with others across the Christian spectrum for ecumenical dialog. We find that what joins us is so much more than what separates us so that while we reverence our own tradition, we embrace those all over the world whom we are coming to know as brothers and sisters. It is this sense of unity that impels us further to interfaith dialog where we find the possibility of understanding even beyond the borders of Christianity toward the hope of unity that recognizes all those who journey toward God (however we envision or name God) as our companions.

On this feast of Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ) then, let us pray for one world, a unity of hearts yearning for peace and fellowship that we trust to be possible if we will widen our hearts in the unified embrace of God.