The cute baby chicks have grown up. Out of fourteen peeping fluff balls, nine roosters emerged. Michael says sexing chickens is an acquired skill. Obviously we haven’t acquired it. Foghorn, Checkers, Marshmallow, Buff and the other roosters have been relocated and replaced with pullets leaving one lone rooster, a beautiful multi-colored Brown Leghorn to crow the morning sun up. Some of the new girls in the henhouse are mutts, mixtures of breeds. Four of the new pullets are younger and are keeping to themselves. They were used to being free range chickens so the henhouse community is foreign to them.
Only two are laying right now. Chickens begin to lay at different times depending upon their breed. Speedy, the Rhode Island Red, and the new California Grey girl are laying an egg a day. Speedy’s eggs are brown and she always lays them in the same place on the floor of the henhouse. Grey girl lays her white eggs out in the yard. Michael has to hunt to find them.
When chickens begin to lay, their eggs are small, mini eggs. These little starter eggs will slowly increase in size as the pullets grow into being hens, a process that takes about a year from chick to hen. With the right food (laying mash and crushed oyster shell) and time, the eggs will grow along with the pullets. Spring chickens become fall layers. Some will lay an egg every day, some every other day. Some eggs will be brown, others white, blue, green or cream. Every morning I can hear Speedy’s triumphant song as she lays that egg, the pullet version of the rooster crow.
Between watching the chickens and reading An Altar in the World, I’ve been thinking about the starter eggs of my faith. Barbara Brown Taylor identifies the practices that lead her to God in this world...vision, reverence, incarnation, etc.... and I am finding myself in the stories she tells. I am reading the second chapter for the second time. As a fast reader I find I often fly over words missing nuance and connection. Reading the second time helps me hear and see words and ideas I missed the first time through. This flying low through life is one of the characteristics of my ADD’ness. Often I will be leap frogging ahead of others, impatient to get on with it, frustrated by the slowness of my companions. So my first starter egg of faith is to slow down, take time, savor the moment, don’t hurry up through the days of my life. God has all the time in the world and is not on a schedule or working with a PDA.
The second chapter is titled “The Practice of Paying Attention... Reverence”, a logical follow up for my slowing down. I had always thought of reverence as an attitude you put on when you entered a sanctuary or traveled to a holy place. Taylor is helping me reshape myself into a reverent human being. “Some of the most reverent people I know decline to call themselves religious...The longer they stand before the holy of holies, the less adequate their formulations of faith seem to them. Angels reach down and shut their mouths.”
Albert Schweitzer advocated living with a reverence for life, all lives, and as a committed Christian, lived this reverence out in Africa, far from home. I am not Schweitzer living in Africa but I can live reverently here, at home on Sabbath Rest Farm. So today I will be paying attention to shutting my mouth about what I believe about God. I will live reverently, paying attention to God surrounding me in this world in the check out girl at Ingle’s, in Barney my big dog, in the rain that keeps on falling, in the old wild red tomcat dying in the hay barn, in the work of my hands, and all the brothers and sisters who cross my path today. In the world reverence, not out of the world...
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Two books... altars and machines as paths to God
“The day of my spiritual awakening I saw– and knew I saw– all things in God and God in all things.” Mechtild of Magdeburg
I love to read. I have loved reading since daddy taught me my first words from the newspaper. Reading National Geographic has been my window to worlds I will never visit and biographies have been introduction to people I will never meet. Devotional books of all kinds stretch my heart and mind towards God while murder mysteries are pure entertainment for me. My two current books are connected in a strange sort of way.
The first book, An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor, is subtitled a Geography of Faith. Like Brother Lawrence, she holds up the simple practices of daily living as opportunities to create altars, concrete discoveries of the sacred surrounding us in the mundane. This is one of those books I want to read slowly not at my usual breakneck speed. This book takes time to sink in and I want to practice each chapter before I move to the next one. I’m still on chapter one...The Practice of Waking Up to God... The Vision. The quote at the beginning of the chapter, the one at the beginning of this writing, hooked me and an unexpected sweet tender memory surfaced.
At nine years old, I had sat through two revivals a year for at least four years. I was wise in the way of preachers caught up in the fervor of soul saving as a calling. It was a form of entertainment and an opportunity to sit with friends, drawing and passing notes. As long as we were quiet, adults let us be and we observed the goings on with a detached amusement. These were the days before television, computer games and cell phones so we were reduced to finding fun everywhere we went, anyway we could. Multiple verses of “Just As I Am”, all eyes closed (not really because some of us peeked), we hummed along when we ran out of verses to sing, fervent prayers for those who raised their hands, and our prayers for somebody to walk the aisle so we could go outside and play, somebody please take Jesus as your personal Savior or at least re-dedicate your life so we can get on with our lives...
And then one day, as a little nine year old girl in a concrete block church in South Georgia, like Mechtild, I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things. My world shape shifted and I didn’t have words to tell what had happened. The only way I knew to honor this change was the way I had been taught, to claim Jesus as my way to God, and to join the church, being baptized by immersion.
Baptists in my time wanted children to be at the age of accountability and reason when they made that decision. Being people of the Book, they read the story of Jesus in the temple and chose the age of twelve as the appropriate time for children to begin their faith journey. Some exceptions were made, but they were exceptions not the norm in my church. My daddy held to that tenet and refused my plea to be allowed to join the church. So I waited and watched for three years, joining the church on the first Sunday after my twelfth birthday. The public affirmation of a private revelation honored my earlier awakening to God.
My current murder mystery, Blasphemy, by Douglas Preston, presents a wonderful puzzle and is a thriller about science and religion of all things. Philosophy, science, religion, politics, love story... what a mixture of opposites that are a piece of the whole. In this book, one man’s life history connects with another man’s quest to shake the world up. A fundamentalist television preacher, politicos, the President, various and sundry all too human scientists, Navajos, southwest desert, atheists and true believers, computers, quantum physics and God... This book challenges my usual mystical experiences of God with a scientific world view that is foreign to me, uncharted territory on the road map to God. Rationality, proofs and bottom lines, scientific process are the structure that lead to another mystical experience of sorts.
Fifty four years later I am still seeing God in my world in new ways. The immanence, the permanent pervasiveness of God in this world, still takes my breath away when I take time to see the vision, feel the presence. I know the awakening that began so long ago is still dawning in my soul as I live now at the end of my life, not its beginning. My earliest truth about God, the one I knew at age nine still holds fast for me today at sixty three. Whatever the means, however one gets there, God is still in all things and all things are in God. So I rest in the sure and certain knowledge that I am in God and God is in me. Thanks be to God for my life and God’s living in me.
I love to read. I have loved reading since daddy taught me my first words from the newspaper. Reading National Geographic has been my window to worlds I will never visit and biographies have been introduction to people I will never meet. Devotional books of all kinds stretch my heart and mind towards God while murder mysteries are pure entertainment for me. My two current books are connected in a strange sort of way.
The first book, An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor, is subtitled a Geography of Faith. Like Brother Lawrence, she holds up the simple practices of daily living as opportunities to create altars, concrete discoveries of the sacred surrounding us in the mundane. This is one of those books I want to read slowly not at my usual breakneck speed. This book takes time to sink in and I want to practice each chapter before I move to the next one. I’m still on chapter one...The Practice of Waking Up to God... The Vision. The quote at the beginning of the chapter, the one at the beginning of this writing, hooked me and an unexpected sweet tender memory surfaced.
At nine years old, I had sat through two revivals a year for at least four years. I was wise in the way of preachers caught up in the fervor of soul saving as a calling. It was a form of entertainment and an opportunity to sit with friends, drawing and passing notes. As long as we were quiet, adults let us be and we observed the goings on with a detached amusement. These were the days before television, computer games and cell phones so we were reduced to finding fun everywhere we went, anyway we could. Multiple verses of “Just As I Am”, all eyes closed (not really because some of us peeked), we hummed along when we ran out of verses to sing, fervent prayers for those who raised their hands, and our prayers for somebody to walk the aisle so we could go outside and play, somebody please take Jesus as your personal Savior or at least re-dedicate your life so we can get on with our lives...
And then one day, as a little nine year old girl in a concrete block church in South Georgia, like Mechtild, I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things. My world shape shifted and I didn’t have words to tell what had happened. The only way I knew to honor this change was the way I had been taught, to claim Jesus as my way to God, and to join the church, being baptized by immersion.
Baptists in my time wanted children to be at the age of accountability and reason when they made that decision. Being people of the Book, they read the story of Jesus in the temple and chose the age of twelve as the appropriate time for children to begin their faith journey. Some exceptions were made, but they were exceptions not the norm in my church. My daddy held to that tenet and refused my plea to be allowed to join the church. So I waited and watched for three years, joining the church on the first Sunday after my twelfth birthday. The public affirmation of a private revelation honored my earlier awakening to God.
My current murder mystery, Blasphemy, by Douglas Preston, presents a wonderful puzzle and is a thriller about science and religion of all things. Philosophy, science, religion, politics, love story... what a mixture of opposites that are a piece of the whole. In this book, one man’s life history connects with another man’s quest to shake the world up. A fundamentalist television preacher, politicos, the President, various and sundry all too human scientists, Navajos, southwest desert, atheists and true believers, computers, quantum physics and God... This book challenges my usual mystical experiences of God with a scientific world view that is foreign to me, uncharted territory on the road map to God. Rationality, proofs and bottom lines, scientific process are the structure that lead to another mystical experience of sorts.
Fifty four years later I am still seeing God in my world in new ways. The immanence, the permanent pervasiveness of God in this world, still takes my breath away when I take time to see the vision, feel the presence. I know the awakening that began so long ago is still dawning in my soul as I live now at the end of my life, not its beginning. My earliest truth about God, the one I knew at age nine still holds fast for me today at sixty three. Whatever the means, however one gets there, God is still in all things and all things are in God. So I rest in the sure and certain knowledge that I am in God and God is in me. Thanks be to God for my life and God’s living in me.
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