It was a warm sunny Sunday so we decided to worship outside. Our table, draped in green with the prayer bowl and candle, was against the brick wall and we sat with our backs to the sun. As we waited for Mark to start, Janet and I began a conversation about boundaries. Others joined in. No white shoes after Labor Day... girls can be nurses but not doctors... don’t get above your raising... The consensus was some boundaries are made to be broken but some boundaries are a necessity. This age of few limits and boundaries can be treacherous to navigate without a some fenceposts along the way.
Worship focused on the story of Hannah, her husband, and his other wife, a story that could have been told in one of today’s tabloids. Beloved wife is sterile, second wife bears many children and taunts her rival, husband doesn’t get it, beloved wife prays for deliverance through children and her prayer is answered, she offers her firstborn as a servant to the God who heard her prayer. Mark, who has an eclectic taste in music, played the Dionne Warwick hit song, “I Say a Little Prayer for You” and the group read the drama out loud. I came home and read the rest of the story in First Samuel.
The rest of the story is about God coming to the end of the rope with old Eli’s sons who were breaking all the commandments. Eli was hearing from everybody how bad his boys were. They wouldn’t listen when their daddy tried to rein them in. They were having too much fun living on the wild side. So a man of God came to Eli with a vision he revealed, a vision that told of the death of his sons, “There will not be an old man in your house”, and the beginning of a new priesthood. Enough is enough, said the Lord God.
No instantaneous miraculous death dealing in this story, though. It comes true through the years as Samuel continues to grow up with Eli at the temple. “And the word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision”. That verse could have been written about my life... no frequent vision, rare connection to the Love of my Life, trouble listening and seeing God at work in the history of my life. Slight break here while I go mop up after the beagle who just threw up after eating a decorative birds nest he filched from the table top...no wonder I have difficulty with my God vision.
God works within the boundaries of time and space, allows the gradual unfolding of his purposes in our lives, lets us have some room to run and some time to find our way back. And when we pray, sometimes the answers to our prayers come in the form of those people of God who are living their lives next to us. The long slow working of God in our lives often cannot be understood until our lives are nearly complete. Like Eli, we hear the voices of the young Samuels around us and say, “Listen to the voice of the Lord and do what seems good.” Remember your raising, don’t wear white after Labor Day and girls can be anything they want to be...
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Writing... my prayer of the heart
Those who have made the prayer of the heart a daily practice come to experience it as a simple, yet beautiful way to their true home. It gradually leads us away from the house of fear and moves us closer to the house of love, God’s house. Henri Nouwen
Someone asked me last night why I write... how did I learn to write... As far back as my memory goes (and that is pretty far back now) I have loved words. I couldn’t wait to read and pestered my daddy into teaching me using the newspaper and maps as my first books. He and mama read every night and our home was full of magazines and books. When school began, I could hardly wait to see what our reader was for the year. I would sit in class and read ahead, bored with just keeping up.
The good teachers caught me at it and gave me more books to read just to keep me occupied. Mrs. Dees, my fourth grade teacher, required a term paper and taught us the intricacies of foot notes and note cards. My tenth grade English teacher, a part time Methodist minister in our small village who taught to make a living wage, set up a special reading program for me introducing me to Flaubert and Darwin and Steinbeck among others. Mrs. Adams, my senior English Literature teacher, shared her love of the written word with an extensive reading course designed to turn little South Georgia rednecks into reasonable facsimiles of cultured persons. A college course in T.S. Eliot’s poetry introduced me to the wonderful world of poetry with layered meanings.
A town librarian who overlooked my age and let me check out anything I wanted from the adult section set my mind to roaming through all those lovely books shelved in the Carnegie Library. My grandmother ignored all the basic chores in life and let me read all day if I wanted to, sitting on the front porch of Cloverly or curled up on the old green horsehair Victorian sofa in the front parlor. She had a bookshelf full of potboiler romance novels from the turn of the century and I loved all those stories of high minded young women and men suffering the pangs of love.
Verbal communication was not a skill my father practiced. He belonged to the school of thought that actions provided proof of love and affection and anger was an emotion only adults could indulge in. There was very little teaching of appropriate expression of feelings with spoken words. Writing and reading, however, were seen as valuable evidence of education and written expression (daddy wrote a lot of letters to congressmen and senators) was an acceptable way to express feelings. One of my learning curves in marriage has been to acquire the ability to express emotion in words without chin quivers and tears. I would much rather write it out than speak it.
So when I read the Nouwen quote this morning in my little prayer book, I laughed at the synchronicity of the Holy Spirit. Writing is my daily prayer of the heart, my way out of the house of fear, my way home to the house of Love. I cannot speak with the tongues of angels. I get choked up and have not yet found a way to cry and speak effectively at the same time. But, I can write. I am grateful for all my teachers in the art of writing and reading. It has been and continues to be a lifeline that connects my inner self with the outside world, an important survival tool for an introvert like me. So I write because I can, because I must, because it leads me home to myself and God.
We are all different, unique in our choice of ways to travel home to the house of love. I write, others speak, others use actions or service, some sing and some create art, some meditate and chant, others pray without ceasing. However we get there, by mule or horse, by Model T or Corvette, by train or bus, it is important that we be conscious in our travels of our final destination and “keep our eyes on the prize.” Thanks be to God for the journey.
Someone asked me last night why I write... how did I learn to write... As far back as my memory goes (and that is pretty far back now) I have loved words. I couldn’t wait to read and pestered my daddy into teaching me using the newspaper and maps as my first books. He and mama read every night and our home was full of magazines and books. When school began, I could hardly wait to see what our reader was for the year. I would sit in class and read ahead, bored with just keeping up.
The good teachers caught me at it and gave me more books to read just to keep me occupied. Mrs. Dees, my fourth grade teacher, required a term paper and taught us the intricacies of foot notes and note cards. My tenth grade English teacher, a part time Methodist minister in our small village who taught to make a living wage, set up a special reading program for me introducing me to Flaubert and Darwin and Steinbeck among others. Mrs. Adams, my senior English Literature teacher, shared her love of the written word with an extensive reading course designed to turn little South Georgia rednecks into reasonable facsimiles of cultured persons. A college course in T.S. Eliot’s poetry introduced me to the wonderful world of poetry with layered meanings.
A town librarian who overlooked my age and let me check out anything I wanted from the adult section set my mind to roaming through all those lovely books shelved in the Carnegie Library. My grandmother ignored all the basic chores in life and let me read all day if I wanted to, sitting on the front porch of Cloverly or curled up on the old green horsehair Victorian sofa in the front parlor. She had a bookshelf full of potboiler romance novels from the turn of the century and I loved all those stories of high minded young women and men suffering the pangs of love.
Verbal communication was not a skill my father practiced. He belonged to the school of thought that actions provided proof of love and affection and anger was an emotion only adults could indulge in. There was very little teaching of appropriate expression of feelings with spoken words. Writing and reading, however, were seen as valuable evidence of education and written expression (daddy wrote a lot of letters to congressmen and senators) was an acceptable way to express feelings. One of my learning curves in marriage has been to acquire the ability to express emotion in words without chin quivers and tears. I would much rather write it out than speak it.
So when I read the Nouwen quote this morning in my little prayer book, I laughed at the synchronicity of the Holy Spirit. Writing is my daily prayer of the heart, my way out of the house of fear, my way home to the house of Love. I cannot speak with the tongues of angels. I get choked up and have not yet found a way to cry and speak effectively at the same time. But, I can write. I am grateful for all my teachers in the art of writing and reading. It has been and continues to be a lifeline that connects my inner self with the outside world, an important survival tool for an introvert like me. So I write because I can, because I must, because it leads me home to myself and God.
We are all different, unique in our choice of ways to travel home to the house of love. I write, others speak, others use actions or service, some sing and some create art, some meditate and chant, others pray without ceasing. However we get there, by mule or horse, by Model T or Corvette, by train or bus, it is important that we be conscious in our travels of our final destination and “keep our eyes on the prize.” Thanks be to God for the journey.
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