Yielding

Tags

centering prayer, Finding the On-Ramp to You Spiritual Life, Jan Phillips, journey, opportunities, resistance, spiritual path, spiritual practices, surrender, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, yield

In looking ahead to possibilities for the autumn “semester” at the Sophia Center, I began re-reading Finding the On-Ramp to Your Spiritual Life, a little book by Jan Phillips. The impetus came from two different conversations – one with Jan and another with a member of my Spiritual Practices Circle who is considering reading the book with a group in her Church. It’s a catchy title and the idea of using traffic signs as chapter titles was, it seems to me, quite an inspired idea. It’s part of Jan’s genius, I think, to see deep meaning in the connections that exist everywhere and use everyday experiences to mine deep truth. Think about all you could say about “STOP” or “DIVIDED HIGHWAY” or even “FALLING ROCKS AHEAD.” (Actually, that’s not a bad idea. What would you say about each of those things vis-à-vis your life?)

Last night I read the chapter entitled YIELD, which is a familiar concept to someone who learns the daily letting go in the practice of centering prayer. Here’s how Jan began that reflection.

The word yield has a variety of meanings. On the road, it means to surrender, to give way. In nature, it means to engender, to bear fruit. On the spiritual path, one leads to the other. Once we give up our notion of how life “should be,” we free ourselves to experience the lives that we do have.

Simple, right? But not easy, of course. Give it some time today as you drive or shop or interact with others…See how yielding is a better choice than resistance and bow to the opportunities that so often just show up to help us along on our journey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reminding God

Tags

care, confidence, failure, God, goodness, humble heart, lost, love, path, permission, psalm 25, surrender, teach, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, trust, wandering

Psalm 25 is clearly one in which we can see that the psalmist has an ongoing relationship with God. This morning, in an alternative translation of the psalm, I got the notion that God needed reminding of the responsibility of mutuality in that relationship. The lectionary only gives verses 4-8 for our consideration but I want to introduce the text with verse one because it made me smile (as in a parent saying to children who are acting up in some way: “Don’t make me come up there…”). The psalmist begins by reminding God: To you I surrender up my soul, O God. In you I place my deepest trust. May I not regret this wanton act of love; may it never be defeated by some foe.

Perhaps I’m misinterpreting the tone of the psalmist. It may be desire rather than expectation that is being expressed, but I rather like the thought that one might have the confidence that gives permission for such presumption in relationship with God. However you interpret the following verses, the prayer seems a good one for today.

Lead me out upon the path of highest truth that I may learn your wisdom, Lord my God, my saving help day after day. Remember all you’ve ever been to us; from ancient times till now we’ve known your constant care. Remember me, O God, and forget the times when in my youth I failed you. In your great goodness put all this behind, and show the path again to me, even when I’m lost and wandering far away. For you are ever just and fair, you guide all those of humble heart and teach the gentle ones your ways.

 

 

 

 

 

Into the Silence

Tags

blessings, centering prayer, freedom, Hallelujah Farm, light, multi-tasking, pray, reflect, retreat, sacred movement, silence, Spirit of God, surrender

Late yesterday after a glorious five-hour drive through the beauty of Upstate New York and then the Green Mountains of Vermont I arrived at Hallelujah Farm, a beautiful, sacred place in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, just over the border from Brattleboro, Vermont. I have come here for a week of retreat. This time with a small group of people is to be totally silent, filled with centering prayer, sacred movement, the conscious work of preparing silent meals and cleaning up after ourselves, other small household tasks that provide us with opportunities to pay attention to what we’re doing when we’re doing it…as well as our own private time to pray and reflect. I have the privilege of rising early to provide coffee for my companions. Knowing how important that is for myself, I am happy to provide it for those who share this experience with me.

Silence is a rare commodity in our world today. Noise comes in many ways – from inside us as well as outside. Multi-tasking keeps our minds busy and our hearts asleep, at least sometimes. It has been suggested to us that this time be a week for us to be totally “unplugged” from all our normal activities so that we are not – for any reason, however admirable – diverted from our silence. To this end, I will suspend this morning activity until next Monday. It’s interesting to me that even writing that calls me to the discomfort of surrender – a tiny awareness lesson to start the day. The flip side of the surrender is the feeling of freedom – not to be bound by any need other than to listen deeply to the stirrings of the Spirit of God within and around me.

Light is coming to the landscape outside where soon I hope to see the presence of the “four-footed” friends who inhabit this land. I will take them and all who are reading this into the silence of the week with me. Blessings to all until next Monday!

 

 

 

 

 

Giving In

Tags

cold, grateful, heal, health, illness, rest, surrender, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

I’m feeling like the weather today: gray and rainy, not much air moving…I was grateful when my doctor told me last Friday that what she found was not serious, just “a little virus” that would, unfortunately, probably hang on for awhile. My scratchy throat is gone and now distress is virtually “all in my head” but it amazes me how debilitating such a little thing can be. I think of my good friend and my sister-in-law, both suffering from pneumonia this month, and of all the people who are chronically ill, who daily have to struggle not to give in to the lassitude that has been my constant companion now for almost a week. I remember in my early days of teaching school when, during a class observation by the principal (my first), my eyes were running so fiercely from a head cold that I could hardly see and my fear was that Father Owens would think I was nervous. There was no luxury of staying home then; work was work, after all.

Today I am grateful for the privilege of rest, the ability to postpone appointments for the benefit of my health (and probably the health of others I could infect!), and the knowledge that my body will heal itself in the near future. All I need to do is cooperate. This hiatus is a good lesson in surrender for me and, for probably the first time in my life, I do not feel a need to resist! I guess I’ll go for my second cup of coffee now, and then…maybe a nap…

Considering Light

Tags

Colossians, dance, holy ones, inheritance, light, metaphor, silence, St. Paul, surrender, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, willingness, wisdom

It appears that we will be snowed in here today. The effort of the meeting facilitators yesterday to finish early today – by noon – was futile as there is a new and complicating wind advisory in the path of most of us toward home. Up early, we have already been checking maps and forecasts on television or computer or both. Nothing changes as we watch. It is only our willingness to surrender to this first winter event that will change anything (read: us!). So what will we do with this time that will likely stretch until at least tomorrow?

When I began to read today’s selection from St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians, the first verse gave me pause. Brothers and sisters, he said, let us give thanks to God who has made you worthy to share the inheritance of the holy ones in light. (COL 1:12) That line is, in itself, worthy of reflection but I found it serendipitously more intriguing because of an e-mail message I received late yesterday. The e-mail came from the same person who had started the chain involving our “wisdom community” that I quoted here after our national elections. Rebecca wrote: So there is something about light that is drawing me, urgent in its continuing to show up. Physical Light, the metaphor of Light, the way the eye sees and the brain – it’s coming from lots of places. So I’m writing to ask you to play with me on this – what do you know about light?

This is an attractive thought for what may indeed become a “play date” with God and God’s friends. I rarely feel that I have the luxury of this kind of “day off” but today the invitation is strong with – apparently – nowhere else I need to go. So why not engage the silence that will be necessary to open up deeper channels of knowing…of seeing…of considering Light? There is already in my inbox an amazing response by one of our more poetic companions.

Question: What would it cost you to enter our playing field or engage your own circle in the dance? Whatever you choose, have a nice day.

Summer Vacation

Tags

Daniel Ladinsky, freedom, Hafiz, heart, joy, light, love, play, rejuvenate, spirits, Sufi, surrender, The Gift, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, vacation, wings

The fireworks have stopped booming in the nearby locations – and probably everywhere for now – after yesterday’s celebration of Independence Day. Today most of us will be heading back to work or at least to responsibilities that were suspended in many cases for the long holiday weekend. But school is out and the atmosphere is warmer and slower, portending vacation for many during these next two months – an ocean beach, a mountain lake or a pool, at least, for the lucky ones. For all of us – especially those of us who have trouble taking time to rejuvenate because there is always so much to accomplish – I just found some advice from Hafiz, a 14th century Sufi poet, in a book called The Gift by Daniel Ladinsky. I hope to follow it, at least for today.

         WE HAVE NOT COME TO TAKE PRISONERS

We have not come here to take prisoners, but to surrender ever more deeply to freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world to hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear, from anything that may not strengthen your precious budding wings. Run like hell my dear, from anyone likely to put a sharp knife into the sacred, tender vision of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend those aspects of obedience that stand outside of our house and shout  to our reason “O please, O please, come out and play.”

For we have not come here to take prisoners or to confine our wonderful spirits, but to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom and Light!

A Word from James

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agendas, humility, letter of james, letting go, live in the present moment, surrender, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

I have always found the Letter of James in the Bible very down-to-earth and “say it like it is.” Today’s text (JAS 4:13-17), the first thing I read for the day, woke me up immediately with a reality that I preach but sometimes forget to practice. He says this: Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we shall go into such and such a town, spend a year there doing business, and make a profit.” You have no idea what your life will be like  tomorrow. You are like a puff of smoke that appears briefly and then disappears. How’s that for a reminder to live in the present moment? He is correct, of course, that ultimately we have no idea how long we will live or what it is that will end our life. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t make plans but rather that we should hold them lightly and be able to let them go without grumbling or despair if they need to be altered for some reason. Letting go of our small agendas for some worthy purpose is always a good preparation for a time when something large and unexpected occurs. And then there’s the line about our identity being “like a puff of smoke.” That reminder to keep working on our humility rather than holding on to our agendas as if they were the most important plans in the universe also furthers the possibility of surrender in the event of some greater project.

God bless the writer of the Letter of James whose words have endured to give me that wake up call for my Wednesday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Power in Simplicity

Tags

Augeries of Innocence, celebrate, chants, Christianity, cross, crucifixion, eternity, Good Friday, Great Vigil of Easter, Jesus, resolve, Sacred Scripture, silence, suffering, surrender, taize, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, transformation, William Blake, willingness

I had never read the entirety of William Blake’s poem, Augeries of Innocence, until just now but the first lines, so familiar, came to me as I sat to write about my experience of last evening – the second step on my Triduum journey. I chose to participate in a service that comes from the monks of Taize, an ecumenical community in a tiny village in France. The prayer is steeped in silence, punctuated by repetitive chants and occasional readings from Sacred Scripture or the writings of early Christianity. Having experienced and led many services in the manner of Taize, it was an easy decision for me to make that my formal prayer for Good Friday.

Blake’s poem begins: To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower   Hold infinity in your hand and eternity in an hour. Entering into a darkened church with two Sisters from my community, having greeted the music director at the door, was a fitting beginning to this hour of prayer. When I see Jan, the organist, I am always thrown back to images of him, a seven-year-old boy, practicing at the piano in his home while a group of us rolled meatballs with his Italian mother for a school fundraiser. How has he become such a virtuoso, now a man with his own grown children, in the proverbial “blink of an eye?”

We sing a repeated refrain: All you who pass this way, look at me, while Jan describes in verse the sufferings of Jesus on the cross. The music rises and falls while I alternately close my eyes and open to the images of the large wooden cross at the foot of the sanctuary and the painting of the crucifixion scene over the altar, the only lighted spot in the church. After more emotionally stunning music and a long period of silence, I watch my 82-year old friend of 45 years pull herself up out of her seat next to me to join the procession of people on their way to kiss or touch the cross. Seeing it as holy, they bend in gratitude for the willingness of Jesus to take on the sins of the world. Watching my friend struggle up the aisle, I see that same willingness. After falling three times over the past year, sustaining permanent injury to her back, she is now a witness to the power of her resolve not to give up on life. I weep for the loss of her younger self, all the while knowing that now is her inner reward.

All of the elements of this service come together in reflection on the power of what is happening to Jesus as we sing the hymn that recognizes the transformation that is afoot. O Christe Domine Jesu, O Christe Domine Jesu…we chant. My eyes travel up to the archway above the crucifixion scene where the Christ is seated in the glory of heaven, having passed through death to resurrection. “He was known to be of human estate,” Paul writes, “and it was thus that he humbled himself, obediently accepting even death, death on a cross. Because of this, God highly exalted him…”  As that quotation flashed into my mind, I knew something that I had never seen as clearly, something I can only describe as the efficacy and transforming power of willingness to surrender everything for the life of the world. And in that moment, that surrender, the Jesus of history – the suffering servant – was also the Christ of my faith. Time was erased. Jan was both that young boy struggling with his musical scales and this accomplished musician, playing for God. Florence was both the dynamic high school biology teacher loved by her students and the struggling octogenarian determined to live as fully as possible in praise of God’s goodness to her.

Today is the waiting day, a day to hold the eternity of last night in my hand, reflecting on how willing I am to be transformed in response to what I now know, so that when I go tonight to re-enact the Great Vigil of Easter, I will truly be able to celebrate – with all my companion travelers – the joy and mystery of resurrection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Palm Sunday

Tags

bad news, betrayal, crucifixion, death, faithfulness, Good News, Holy Week, Isaiah, Jerusalem, Luke, Palm Sunday, Philippians, praise, psalm 22, surrender, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, torture, trust

We have often heard the adage: “Good news, bad news – who knows!” The caution in this statement is about holding out until the end, when the final conclusion allows an informed assessment of whether the situation under consideration is, in fact, good or bad news.

Palm Sunday is the epitome of a good news/bad news story. We begin with Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem to jubilant chants of “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” (LK 19: 28-40) and end with the crucifixion, death and burial of Jesus as Luke tells the story (LK 22:14-23:56). Admittedly there is some telescoping of the time frame as we know the incidents happened over several days rather than all at once, but it is nevertheless a stunning example of the vicissitudes of crowd mentality.

Reflecting on this Sunday’s readings one realizes that the need for the faithful to wait for “the rest of the story” is implicit at each step. Isaiah’s words (IS 50: 4-7) paint a fearful picture of what the servant suffers in trying to speak God’s word to the weary: beatings, plucking of his beard, buffets and spitting. The message to us, however, is in the last verse where the prophet witnesses to God’s faithfulness in all the violence he has endured. The Lord God is my help, he says, therefore I am not disgraced. I have set my face like flint, knowing I shall not be put to shame.

The refrain of the responsorial psalm (PS 22): My God, my God, why have you abandoned me could be interpreted as despair of the crucified Jesus. Not so! Jesus, who likely knew all 150 psalms by heart, knew the ending. Like Isaiah, he trusted that whatever happened, God was faithful and worthy of praise: I will proclaim your name to my brethren, the psalmist sings; in the midst of the assembly I will praise him. (vs.23)

Even as we focus on reciprocal fidelity as the linchpin of relationship between God and Jesus, we know that the suffering endured in the Paschal Mystery was monumental. From betrayal of friends to physical torture and death, Luke’s gospel reminds us that Jesus trusted God and poured himself out in love for our sake. It would behoove us to spend time with this text seeing anew each compassionate encounter on his path from the Last Supper to the cross.

Only the Letter to the Philippians speaks from a post-resurrection perspective today (PHIL 2:6-11). It is the willingness of Jesus to surrender everything that leads to his exaltation as Lord. But let us not be too hasty to reach the finish line. Let us rather take every step of this Holy Week with Jesus, trusting as he did that the Lord God is our help.

The Angelic Doctor

Tags

divine revelation, enlightenment, limits, philosopher, reason, St. Thomas Aquinas, surrender, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, The Summa Theologiae, theologian, visionary

St. Thomas Aquinas is “by universal consent…the preeminent spokesman of the  Catholic tradition of reason and of divine revelation. He is one of the great teachers of the medieval Catholic Church, honored with the titles Doctor of the Church and Angelic Doctor.” (http://www.americancatholic.org) Thus begins a brief but interesting biography of the saint whose feast the Catholic Church celebrates today. The less well-known but, in my opinion, most important feature of his history is the last paragraph of today’s narrative. Even though Thomas was a brilliant philosopher and theologian, he came to realize the limits of what we humans can know or understand by reason. Here is the conclusion of the text:

“The Summa Theologiae, his last and, unfortunately, uncompleted work, deals with the whole of Catholic theology. He stopped work on it after celebrating Mass on December 6, 1273. When asked why he stopped writing, he replied, ‘I cannot go on…All that I have written seems to me like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.’ He died March 7, 1274.”

Blessed be those who come to the enlightenment that is far beyond anything we can ask or imagine! Blessed also those who surrender everything in bowing to that gift.