mercy seat home...

I am a homemaker... a home maker. Some of my most treasured compliments come from people who visit us for the first time and say “This feels like home. Can I come again?” Slipcovers can be washed and the painted coffee table does not need coasters. Under the coffee table are books and games. The two most important games are Chinese Checkers and the Trouble game. Our children played Trouble with their grandma and our grandchildren play Trouble with us. When they are old enough, I will teach them Chinese Checkers just as my grandma taught me. The wood floor can be mopped and the rugs are inexpensive rag and shag. The front door squeaks and the wooden walls like me, not quite perfect. It is a little cluttered with treasures from the past and the furniture all has a story. Our families are remembered in many of the items our rolling stone lives have collected... the huge grain scythe and cradle that Daddy began using as a twelve year old boy hangs in our great room, the blacksmith anvil from Michael’s blacksmith granddaddy sits on our hearth, the friendship quilt created by his grandmother’s girlfriends for her wedding hangs over the dining table, my great-grandfather’s brass fireplace fender sits in front of the fireplace, my grandma’s cut crystal bowl sparkles in the light in the kitchen glass cabinet. And our treasures... the first furniture we bought, an old round table and chairs, sits in the dining room... the old bank clock with Westminster chimes still sings the hours and quarter hours thirty nine years after we bought it... the old upright piano that I had as a child... these tell some of our story of home.
This past week I have been clearing out winter and ushering in spring to our home. I folded all the wool comforters and stored them. Cotton coverlets now wait to be used on the sofa and chairs. Candles have been relocated and renewed. The color yellow, the color of sunshine and butter (two of my favorite things) pops up all around the room in pillows, flowers and flower pots, lemons in bowls. The slipcovers have been changed and some of the rugs removed. Barefoot time is coming and cool wooden floors feel so good to my feet. Soon we will remove the glass panels from the back porch and put in the screens. Windows will be open even though our furnace man cringes at the thought of the humidity and pollen that will come in. It is the only way we can hear the bird song in the morning and smell the crab apple blossoms in the spring. I need to hear and smell and see and taste and touch spring in as many ways as I can. I know how to gather home together, how to gather those who need home, how to make home for my heart and for the hearts of others.
The old hymns we sang...The Home Over There, I Will Sing You a Song... told of faraway homes for the soul. One old hymn, From Every Stormy Wind, has two verses that are my vision of home here on earth. “ From every stormy wind that blows, from every swelling tide of woes, There is a calm, a sure retreat; ‘Tis found beneath the mercy seat. There is a place where spirits blend, where friend holds fellowship with friend, Tho’ sundered far, by faith they meet around one common mercy seat.”
In Exodus 22 I read the description of the mercy seat on the top of the Ark. It was beautiful. Gold cherubim surrounded the mercy seat on the ark of the testimony where God would come to meet with the people. Theologically it was also a place of atonement ( at-one-ness because of recognition and repentance) as well as a place of communion between God and priest. You were safe while God was in the mercy seat. All was known, all was forgiven, all was well. A mercy seat, a place of grace, a place and space in time where one can meet God, meet one’s friends and family, home, sweet home... I am a home maker. I am a mercy seat... a place where God can come rest, speak to me and I can rest and speak to him.

Love Divine and the kitchen sink...

I miss the old hymns. The language, the images, like poetry from another time and place in our Christian history, can be both memory and inspiration. One of my favorites, Love Divine, written by Charles Wesley, was a favorite of our song director Mrs. Morris at Clayattville Baptist Church. It was a little high in spots for most of us but we loved hearing her clear sweet soprano voice hit that e flat. As a child I understood most of the words, all the important ones, and it remains one of the theme songs for my life.
“Love divine, all love excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down!” That exclamation point sets the tone for the whole hymn. Everything that really matters to me is contained in that one phrase. God, who is love beyond our understanding, joy of heaven, came to earth and is still coming to earth. Each of the verses that follow, like a good paragraph, begins with a topic phrase. “Breathe, O breathe thy loving Spirit into every troubled breast!... Come Almighty to deliver, let us all thy life receive;...Finish then thy new creation, pure and spotless let us be...”The breath we breathe can become the loving Spirit of God. We can receive new life in love, become a finished new creation, pure and spotless.
The old timers had no problem with asking God’s help, naming how God could help, believing God would help and it was personal. “Take away our bent to sinning; Alpha and Omega be; End of faith as its beginning, set our hearts at liberty.” Every morning I need to pray this prayer. Like Paul what I would do, I do not do. What I ought to do, I don’t. Those things I shouldn’t do, I do them every time! The deliciousness of doing good and the equal tastiness of doing what I shouldn’t...what a contradiction in being!
Sin is a four letter word for most of us these days but no other word works for me in naming how I fall short of the glory of God. It is a curious paradox that recognition of myself as a sinner sets me free. I do not have to try to be perfect, get it all done, get it all done right, save the world and myself and all the generations to come. I do my part, small though it might be, and leave perfection, perfect Love, up to God. And in letting go of the dream of the perfect me, of being in control of me, I find the beginning and the end of my faith, Alpha and Omega. A heart set at liberty can sing a song of praise and thanksgiving for the wonderful complicated mysterious gift of life.
I think I’ll go play the piano and sing for awhile... let the dishes sit in the sink while I remember where I came from and where I am going.

Spring wretchedness...

Spring melancholy... It seems like a contradiction in spirit, to be slightly sad during a season of unbounded overflowing blooming birdsong joy. But, there it is, a fine mist that blurs the edges and settles in the valley of the soul. Fall and winter melancholy seems rational. Leaves are dying, light is fading, cold and darkness are increasing. The contrast in the outer world and the inner world is more startling and unsettling in the spring.
I forget that walking through the valley of the shadow of death with friends and family takes its toll. The twilight of grief is lightened some by the season. Resurrection is ablaze all around us in creation’s expansive glory. The contrast between my sputtering soul lamp and the bright sunrising season also heightens my awareness of loss and grief.
It doesn’t help that the taxman cometh in the spring. For those who are self employed and must pay the government without the comfort of a benefits package or a housing allowance, the month is cleft in twain with before and after... anxiety about what the bill will be before and weak kneed relief or fear after the final tally is in.
The monkey grass is running amok in the flower beds as monkeys are wont to do. The grass has brown bald patches. The weeds seem to be springing up all over the place with dandelions leading the charge. Spring pruning waits for no one’s schedule to lighten up and I am behind the eight ball. Gardens must be plowed and pastures bush hogged in preparation for the growing season.
How do I find rest for my weary soul? How can I not just rest but find the deep flowing well of bubbling up joy again? Where are the buds of soulfulness breaking through the crusted over winter hardened soil in my heart? Who can help me?
You wouldn’t expect to find the answers to those questions in the book of Numbers but there it is. The eleventh chapter tells the story of Moses wearing out taking care of his people. They had been in the wilderness awhile and the shine had worn off freedom as boredom with manna set in. So Moses had a “Come to Jesus Meeting” with God and put it straight. “I am not able to carry all this people alone, the burden is too heavy for me. If thou wilt deal thus with me, kill me at once... that I may not see my wretchedness.” This was especially amazing since Moses is described as the meekest man on the face of the earth (Numbers 12). The Lord’s response was immediate and practical. God instructed Moses to gather a group of elders together. God would down and take some of the spirit which was upon Moses and put it upon them. That burden would then be shared and Moses would no longer carry the weight of leadership alone.
So there it is... the answer to the spring melancholy or any other struggle of the soul. Tell it to Jesus and God, then tell it to your elders and friends. Share your spirit so that you might no longer wander in the wilderness alone. Gather together, hold hands, hug, let your spirit rest in the loving embrace of a resurrection God who bings our worlds back to life after death. Smell the flowers, breathe the soft air, feel the wind, get wet in the warm rain, walk in the mud and give thanks for all the seasons of the soul. We are not alone.

Do you hear what I hear?

Last night as our group was gathered around the fire, my curiosity got the better of me. I asked if anyone there had a transcendent experience of God. In most groups, you can talk about sex, theology, painful personal experiences and all sorts of struggles rather freely. We’ve grown accustomed to doing what my Grandma used to call hanging out our dirty laundry for all the world to see. But sharing an inexplicable outside the reality realm experience of God, a time when you were at your most vulnerable and connected to some shimmering sense of all that is Holy, that is most difficult.
It is difficult for several reasons, I think. One reason is the sheer inability of words to transmit the Reality which cannot be confined to words. Jewish tradition has it right. We cannot say the Name of God no matter how many words we use. I told my story of sitting on a mountain top at the end of a hike, surrounded by friends and strangers, watching the sun rise, seeing and feeling the world ablaze with the Glory of God, being caught up as one with creation. At the end of my telling, my friend Janet said, “Is that all? Is there more?” I laughed at the absurdity of trying to capture God experience, God presence, God among us in prosaic words.
Yet we must try to share our experiences of the mystical movements of God in our soul lives. How else can we know and be known by others who are struggling as we ourselves are, trying to find God in our daily living? How else can God know that we noticed His/Her presence among us unless we tell what happened, poor substitute though it might be for the Reality we felt in our whole selves? So some of us tell of hearing God’s voice speak, hearing a Word that brought new revelation to our lives. One tells the story of being at an Easter sunrise service at the Grand Canyon, led by a Freewill Baptist pastor, turning as the sun rose to see, really see the faces of believers lit not just by the sun but by the sure knowledge that death is vanquished because Jesus still lives. Our stories were different but in the telling of them, for a fleeting moment in time, our faces and hearts were illuminated and warmed by the memory of God among us.
Another reason we don’t share our mystical memories of God is fear of being judged and found wanting. In this new Age of Reason, mystics are prophets without honor in their hometowns. We give awards for preaching and a good preacher can write a book of sermons. Peace and social justice activists get newspaper stories and have flesh and blood people and programs to work with and on. Teachers have students who learn the books and stories of the Bible, students who ask questions and learn the faith of their fathers and mothers as they craft a faith of their own. Mystics have themselves and God.
During Eastertide, I give thanks for all those women and men two thousand years ago who shared the inexplicable experience of Resurrection with their world and with me. The stories I read in the Bible can no more capture the reality of their experiences than my words can capture my mountain top experience. Thank God they kept on telling the story whether they were believed or not, whether they were judged or not, whether they were understood or not. The retelling of those stories, the rehearing of those words, the renewal of life after death grows more powerful each year as my treasure chest of God Presence continues to be filled.
It is enough that I speak my story, that others speak their stories, and that we honor our mystical knowledge of God. Like the people at Pentecost, we all are amazed and perplexed, wondering what it all means, but willing to speak our truths whether we are understood or not. Someone hears, and Someone understands. I am content.