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.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Dark Hollow stream and me...
Growth of the human person takes place in the dark. Matthew Fox
Sabbath Rest Farm has a lovely little mountain stream, sometimes called a creek where I grew up, running through it. It begins at a spring with hidden underground water and is hardly worth noticing. The flow of water is puny and insignificant. Somehow as it travels through the narrow little valley on its way to our farm, it gathers strength until it becomes a full fledged stream bouncing over rocks on its way to the French Broad River. It isn’t large enough to fish in but it is full of life and its voice sings as it flows into our pond. The course of the stream winds its way through sunshine and shadow, widens and narrows, shoots over rocks and flows through flat shallows. Underground water...unseen until it breaks out to the light...
My friend James and I laugh about being members of a minority in American culture... introverts floating in a sea of extroverts. We married extroverts and we love them but they are so different from us. Our children are a mix of extrovert and introvert further adding to the confusion. James and I can turn on the extroversion as needed for parties, work, church or life in general but it is hard work for us, work that leaves us drained. So we look like extroverts in our behavior... “I can’t believe you are introverted. You are so good at speaking in public!”... but pay a hidden price for that effort.
Introverts are difficult to understand unless you are another introvert. So much of what goes on with us lies hidden to public view. Even those who love and live with us have difficulty deciphering our interior selves. In every introvert flows an underground river of great depth that occasionally breaks forth into the sunlight like Dark Hollow stream. We live with the unspoken judgement that finds us wanting because we cannot measure up to the cultural norm, be like everybody else. Our forays into the Land of Those Who Live Outside can be fun, frustrating, and enlightening for friends and family.
Matthew Fox’s quote reminds me that darkness, quietness, underground living is necessary. Like seeds that swell and burst underground, our souls require the removal from light and sound to grow. Whether we be extroverted or introverted, the chatter and busyness of daily living can clog up our soul stream, separate us from our Underground Source. Quiet time, time to settle, time to let that which has been hidden come to the surface, time to flow towards God... Like Dark Hollow stream, Lord, let me run towards you. Help me bubble up into the sunlight sharing my hidden self with you and the other children in our family. Keep me balanced in light and shadow, self revelation and self shielding. And someday, Lord, let me flow into your loving arms with all my darkness and hidden self fully revealed, loved without reservation or expectation, free at last to be the one I was created to be. Amen.
Sabbath Rest Farm has a lovely little mountain stream, sometimes called a creek where I grew up, running through it. It begins at a spring with hidden underground water and is hardly worth noticing. The flow of water is puny and insignificant. Somehow as it travels through the narrow little valley on its way to our farm, it gathers strength until it becomes a full fledged stream bouncing over rocks on its way to the French Broad River. It isn’t large enough to fish in but it is full of life and its voice sings as it flows into our pond. The course of the stream winds its way through sunshine and shadow, widens and narrows, shoots over rocks and flows through flat shallows. Underground water...unseen until it breaks out to the light...
My friend James and I laugh about being members of a minority in American culture... introverts floating in a sea of extroverts. We married extroverts and we love them but they are so different from us. Our children are a mix of extrovert and introvert further adding to the confusion. James and I can turn on the extroversion as needed for parties, work, church or life in general but it is hard work for us, work that leaves us drained. So we look like extroverts in our behavior... “I can’t believe you are introverted. You are so good at speaking in public!”... but pay a hidden price for that effort.
Introverts are difficult to understand unless you are another introvert. So much of what goes on with us lies hidden to public view. Even those who love and live with us have difficulty deciphering our interior selves. In every introvert flows an underground river of great depth that occasionally breaks forth into the sunlight like Dark Hollow stream. We live with the unspoken judgement that finds us wanting because we cannot measure up to the cultural norm, be like everybody else. Our forays into the Land of Those Who Live Outside can be fun, frustrating, and enlightening for friends and family.
Matthew Fox’s quote reminds me that darkness, quietness, underground living is necessary. Like seeds that swell and burst underground, our souls require the removal from light and sound to grow. Whether we be extroverted or introverted, the chatter and busyness of daily living can clog up our soul stream, separate us from our Underground Source. Quiet time, time to settle, time to let that which has been hidden come to the surface, time to flow towards God... Like Dark Hollow stream, Lord, let me run towards you. Help me bubble up into the sunlight sharing my hidden self with you and the other children in our family. Keep me balanced in light and shadow, self revelation and self shielding. And someday, Lord, let me flow into your loving arms with all my darkness and hidden self fully revealed, loved without reservation or expectation, free at last to be the one I was created to be. Amen.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
church 101
Last night was hard, hard work and strangely satisfying. We have been meeting for nearly two years initially trying to figure out how to stay in a church we had loved for many years. When that became impossible, our focus shifted and we began to meet for worship, house church. And now it is time to move on from that. Face to face, straight on, fears, hurts, anger, needy people that we are, last night church happened. We named the reality that has been staring us in the face. We are already church for one another. We don’t agree on everything. We are as different as night and day in theology, stages in life, worship needs, personality styles, life experiences and church history. But we are church for each other.
Now we have to figure out how to provide church friends for Hannah, a group for our teenagers, worship that meets our needs enough to keep us going, mission to the community outside our small group, a 501 3c, find a central place to meet, and a name for this great adventure. Music and laughter and love and being known, love for God which is usually easy, and the really hard work of loving the child of God sitting next to me who just ticked me off or who must be nuts to think that way, teaching our young, witnessing to the world beyond our small group, how crazy these followers of Jesus must be to think they can be a church. We are crazy in love with God and with each other. One of our group, a newer member, put it nicely. She said, “I come here to find God and to just hang out with you guys. I love you.” And like all crazy love, the ragged edges pinch like a pair of new stiff shoes.
We are a room full of Chiefs and few Indians. Each of us has baggage from other church experiences, fear and hope living side by side in our hearts. We know how very, very good real church can be and we also know how badly it can hurt, how hard it is to do the work of being church. But, we can’t help ourselves because our longing for being with God and with each other in a “real church” has brought us to this place. And somewhere deep down in my heart, I wonder if God knew this was coming.
I pray a lot for God’s pillar of fire to lead us through the murky stages of our shift in being. I pray for this little Family of God, all the aunts and uncles, cousins, sisters and brothers, who are bound together in the ties that bind... faith, hope and love. The greatest of these is love. Somehow we will figure the other stuff out, find a place to be, organize ourselves into a self-governing body of believers, tend to those among us who need the care of a pastor and reach out to others in need, teach our children (and ourselves) about the life and ways of Jesus, and lay our lives down for each other.
We meet again in two weeks on a Wednesday night ( Oh, Lord... bi-monthly business meetings!) to hear what possibilities for place our search team has found for us. We will decide where to go and then we will continue the work begun last night, creating a map for this road trip. Everybody has something they can do and everybody has something they want to do. So here we go, like Columbus, sailing off to the end of the earth as we have known it, saying our prayers and trusting in the Providence of God to provide for us what we need even when we cannot name what we need. “He loves us and delights in us, and so he wills us to love him and delight in him and trust mightily in him, and all shall be well... you will see it for yourself, that everything shall be well.” I am taking Julian of Norwich at her word, trusting everything shall be well.
Now we have to figure out how to provide church friends for Hannah, a group for our teenagers, worship that meets our needs enough to keep us going, mission to the community outside our small group, a 501 3c, find a central place to meet, and a name for this great adventure. Music and laughter and love and being known, love for God which is usually easy, and the really hard work of loving the child of God sitting next to me who just ticked me off or who must be nuts to think that way, teaching our young, witnessing to the world beyond our small group, how crazy these followers of Jesus must be to think they can be a church. We are crazy in love with God and with each other. One of our group, a newer member, put it nicely. She said, “I come here to find God and to just hang out with you guys. I love you.” And like all crazy love, the ragged edges pinch like a pair of new stiff shoes.
We are a room full of Chiefs and few Indians. Each of us has baggage from other church experiences, fear and hope living side by side in our hearts. We know how very, very good real church can be and we also know how badly it can hurt, how hard it is to do the work of being church. But, we can’t help ourselves because our longing for being with God and with each other in a “real church” has brought us to this place. And somewhere deep down in my heart, I wonder if God knew this was coming.
I pray a lot for God’s pillar of fire to lead us through the murky stages of our shift in being. I pray for this little Family of God, all the aunts and uncles, cousins, sisters and brothers, who are bound together in the ties that bind... faith, hope and love. The greatest of these is love. Somehow we will figure the other stuff out, find a place to be, organize ourselves into a self-governing body of believers, tend to those among us who need the care of a pastor and reach out to others in need, teach our children (and ourselves) about the life and ways of Jesus, and lay our lives down for each other.
We meet again in two weeks on a Wednesday night ( Oh, Lord... bi-monthly business meetings!) to hear what possibilities for place our search team has found for us. We will decide where to go and then we will continue the work begun last night, creating a map for this road trip. Everybody has something they can do and everybody has something they want to do. So here we go, like Columbus, sailing off to the end of the earth as we have known it, saying our prayers and trusting in the Providence of God to provide for us what we need even when we cannot name what we need. “He loves us and delights in us, and so he wills us to love him and delight in him and trust mightily in him, and all shall be well... you will see it for yourself, that everything shall be well.” I am taking Julian of Norwich at her word, trusting everything shall be well.
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