Psalm 23:1-3 1 The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; 3 he restores my soul.*He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.
In the last several months I have been struggling to find the calm midst the shootings in Umpqua, the deaths of those fighting wild fires, more shootings (at least one a week), floods, earthquakes, and all of the other disasters that seem to be all that is ever reported by news media. I know I will not find any meaning in any of these crises, so, I am looking for a way through the noise and pain I hear, read about, and feel within. Yesterday I found my still point when I happened upon the following poem written by grandfather:
Commentary on the 23rd Psalm
“In pastures green?” Not always: sometimes Thou
who knoweth best, in kindness leadeth me
in weary ways, where heavy shadows be.
And by “still waters?” No not always so;
oft times the heavy tempest round me blow
and o’er my soul the waves and billows go
But where the storm beats loudest,
and I cry aloud for help, The Master standeth by
and whispers to my soul “Lo, it is I.”
So where He leads me I can safely go,
and in the blest hereafter I shall know,
why, in His wisdom, He hath lead me so.
By Grandfather Rufus Miller, 1937
As I read the familiar lines I remembered I don’t have to understand the why of things. I don’t have to carry the burdens of the world on my shoulders. I don’t even have try to carry all of the world’s problems. I can’t change the way people treat others, I have no control over how one person treats another. However, I do have control over how I treat those around me. I do have control of how I respond to the many crises trumpeted in the news.
My grandfather’s poem reminds me that life is not a bed or roses where everything will always be “hot coco, and peanut butter toast by the evening fire.” No there are bad people in the world and even though I, or my loved ones, have done nothing wrong, or done anything to cause a tragedy, other people will affect my life in both good ways and bad. I can’t stop it from happening. I know I can’t stop the hate, but, I can stop the hate from residing in my heart. I can stop myself from acting out of anger and rage. I can stop and take a deep breath and let the real me come up from deep inside. That is all I can do.
For the prayer practice this week I am offering a chant that helps me when I am feeling lost. It is the refrain of a hymn written by Marty Haugen and below is the score for the chant. Above is a video of Haugen’s complete hymn. Watch the above video and when you are feeling a little lost this week sing the refrain. You don’t have to chant out loud, and you can chant anytime of the day, driving, riding public transit, cooking dinner or even working on that paper for class or the boss.
I have been trying to think about what to say about the Umpqua shootings but my heart is breaking and my mind won’t process this. So I am asking you for your prayer this week to write letters to your legislators about gun legislation, talk to your neighbors about keeping safe, and get involved in your community and/or church youth programs. Talk kids and get to know your own children and the children they play with. Keep the kids involved with family and community and help them find safe ways to release anger and frustration. If you need a gun for hunting then talk to every member of the family about gun safety and keep your guns in a secure gun safe when you aren’t using them. I know that isn’t much but if all of us become more aware and involved in the efforts to regulate guns in a responsible manner than maybe, just maybe we won’t be speechless anymore.
We are all Homo Sapiens sapiens but we will never be Human Beings until we stop just surviving and begin to live in harmony with each other and all creation.
NO MORE
I have been trying to comprehend the shootings in South Carolina at the First Emanuel AME Church. Just as the acts in other mass shootings I simply can’t get my mind around a hatred that produces such evil. I have listened to the prayers for comfort and supplication. I have listened, unwillingly, to the NRA and other public speakers who blame the church pastor and members, or minimize the acts of the shooter. I can’t, or won’t, believe that 9 innocent people were the cause nor can I believe the shooter acted without encouragement.
You see, I believe we, you and I, are to blame for what happened in South Carolina. You and I, and everyone else regardless of skin color, privilege, ethnicity, or any other cultural classification are equally responsible for pulling the trigger and this is why I believe this.
We refuse to stand against acts of injustice, violence, discrimination, or the use of degrading speech. We listen politely and shake our heads and tell ourselves that offering a prayer that people will change is enough. We are afraid of what others might say about us if we stop someone in mid speech and tell them NO, I will not listen to this. We look the other way when someone abuses another. We tolerate public servants who degrade people of color, are poor, elderly, or have a religion they don’t follow. We have tolerated public servants who have spoken as if they are the only ones who matter, who have verbally abused our President and anyone else they disagree with or disagree with them.
We have created this atmosphere of hate and violence found in country today. Yes, I admit I am right there along with the rest of us. Have I stood up and defended someone being abused, sometimes yes but not always. I do it when it is convenient for me and that is not what we are called to do. We, you and I, are called by the Divine to be better than that.
This week I am recommending a spiritual practice of standing up and defending the voiceless. I am asking each of you to speak up when you hear someone abusing or degrading someone else. I am pleading with each of you to stand and be counted when you see injustice happening. As you go through this week remember this:
“8But he’s already made it plain how to live, what to do, what God is looking for in men and women.
It’s quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love,
And don’t take yourself too seriously— take God seriously.” Micah 6:8 The Message (MSG)
In the last weeks God’s creation has seemed anything but good. Terrorist attacks, ambushing of police, and police shootings of unarmed young men continue to rent the very fabric of our society. Yet God did not create an evil world, in fact God proclaims this world a good world where everyone, and I mean everyone, has what they need to live and be the person they are meant to be. It is our choice’s, not God’s, that have created a world that is unsafe.
Spending time in silent contemplation with a focus on what we could have been, and still could be, seemed the only way for me to center myself and see the world as good. So today I offer as our prayer of the week another Visio Divina using the above painting of the Garden of Eden by Jan Brueghel.
Prayer Practice:
1. Study the picture slowly, taking a first glance noting the colors, the placement of the plants, animals and, people. Remain with the image for one to two minutes. If you would like, jot down a few words about the image.
Take a second, deeper, look. Where is there movement? What relationships do you see? Engage your imagination. Where are you in the artwork? What do you see from that perspective? What deeper meaning emerges? What feelings about the world rise in you? Are there any images that you are particularly drawn too?
Respond to the image with prayer for the world. Did the image remind you of an experience, person or issue for which you’d like to offer thanksgiving or intercession? Offer that prayer to God.
Find your quiet center. Breathe deeply. Relax your shoulders, arms and legs. Rest in this quiet. Let God pray in you. God prays beyond words.
Please do not let your belief, or non-belief, in the Garden of Eden and the subsequent fall from grace prevent you from seeing the good things in creation. Our world is in need of prayer right now. All of our people, all of creation is crying and in pain. Let your prayers go out into the world and let them lead you to be the person God has always wanted you to be.
As I am personally preparing for Christmas I have been disturbed by the amount of violence and death around the world. Peace on earth does not seem near. So as part of my morning ritual I have been doing Lectio Divina with the Psalms. They have brought me some comfort but this Psalm struck a chord within me and I wanted to share that with you. So this is a little different from most of my postings, as it is part of my journaling during my meditation. I am letting you in on a small part of my conversations I held with the Psalmist and God. They are my insights of the moment, so if I say something you disagree with please be gentle, it is after all a private conversation you are overhearing. At the end of my journaling you will find the steps for Lectio Divina. For your own Lectio Divina meditation you may use the whole Psalm, as I did, or only a verse or two.
Psalm 10, The Message (MSG)
1-2 God, are you avoiding me? Where are you when I need you?
Full of hot air, the wicked are hot on the trail of the poor.
Trip them up, tangle them up in their fine-tuned plots.
I am in the process of preparing for a Longest Night worship service and in reading this Psalm I was struck by how it matched my gut feelings this Advent. Every day the news is filled with stories from around the world of someone killing someone one else, often many someone’s. Just last night news came of a hostage situation in Sidney, Australia, just one more story to add to the Ferguson, New Town, Cleveland, Seattle, Portland, Houston, Afghanistan, and Iraq stories of the last number of years. The list is too long, too many people have died, and too many children have died. Like the Psalmist I am left wondering “where are you God.”
3-4 The wicked are windbags, the swindlers have foul breath.
The wicked snub God, their noses stuck high in the air.
Their graffiti are scrawled on the walls: “Catch us if you can!” “God is dead.”
This is supposed to be a time of joy and celebration but I do not feel like celebrating. Our elected leader’s mouth words from the Bible I read every day, yet, their actions tell me they do not believe what they speak. Are they wicked? Are they windbags? Well the wicked part can only be determined by God but the windbag part . . .. Yes they are windbags, hoping that we who at least try to live a life of compassion will not notice their plans to take the last ounce of God’s abundance all for themselves. They write bills and say “try and stop me, from denying the basic necessities to those who cannot help being poor, sick, elderly, or a child.
5-6 They care nothing for what you think; if you get in their way, they blow you off.
They live (they think) a charmed life: “We can’t go wrong. This is our lucky year!”
These insufferable, so called leaders lie and twist the truth until even the best of us are confused and dazed by the avalanche of untruths they let loose on the public. Whether they are religious fundamentalist, political leaders, in the United States, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, British Isles or anywhere they claim the spotlight and they believe no one can stop them. They are on a role and the rest of us “be damned.”
7-8 They carry a mouthful of hexes, their tongues spit venom like adders.
They hide behind ordinary people, then pounce on their victims.
9 They mark the luckless, then wait like a hunter in a blind;
When the poor wretch wanders too close, they stab him in the back.
10-11 The hapless fool is kicked to the ground, the unlucky victim is brutally axed.
He thinks God has dumped him, he’s sure that God is indifferent to his plight.
The words they spit from their mouths cause fear in those who have minds that are weak and malleable. Letting these poor souls do the violence they pretend to abhor only to turn on them when they caught in their snares.
12-13 Time to get up, God—get moving.
The luckless think they’re Godforsaken.
They wonder why the wicked scorn God
and get away with it,
Why the wicked are so cocksure
they’ll never come up for audit.
We wait for you O God to respond, to let us know you haven’t forgotten us. We wait and we wait.
14 But you know all about it— the contempt, the abuse.
I dare to believe that the luckless will get lucky someday in you.
You won’t let them down: orphans won’t be orphans forever.
The Psalmist sings of your knowledge of the violence we see every day. But do you really hear the cries of the children who have lost limbs to bombs, to parents who have watched as their children are killed in front of them, as ISIS hangs those with different beliefs, as children shoot children? Have we not sent enough children, parents, loved ones to you to serve as a sacrifice? Do you care?
15-16 Break the wicked right arms, break all the evil left arms.
Search and destroy every sign of crime.
God’s grace and order wins; godlessness loses.
My heart wants to believe as the Psalmist did that you will intervene in the bloodletting of this world, but I know you will not. It is not up to you, O God, to set this world back on the track of compassion, justice and peace. That really is our job. We are the ones who created these people who mock everything you have wanted for all. We are the ones who must “gird up our loins” and speak out against injustice, violence, hatred, and war. Only we who believe in justice, mercy, kindness, peace, compassion will change the lives of those who are oppressed, abused, injured, and starved by those who mock the world as you, O God, planned it. We must stop cowering in our homes and our places of faith and become the prophets, the messengers, the hands, feet and voice that will bring down those who would enslave us to a life of poverty and misery. Then, and only then, will the Psalmist’s dream come true.
17-18 The victim’s faint pulse picks up; the hearts of the hopeless pump red blood as you put your ear to their lips.
Orphans get parents, the homeless get homes.
The reign of terror is over, the rule of the gang lords is ended.
Gracious Spirit I thank you for this time of blessed meditation. May the words and images I have seen transform my actions into walking with you in greater joy. AMEN
Practicing Lectio Divina
Choose the portion of the Scripture you wish to pray.
Place yourself in a comfortable position and allow yourself to become silent, focus for a few moments on your breathing.
Read the chosen text through, slowly and gently. Listen to yourself read, let yourself to savor each word and phrase.
Read the text a second time. What words or phrases stick out for you? Remember God speaks to us in silence and in our listening. The words that pop out do so for a reason, pay attention to them.
Read the text a third time. Are there any other words that speak to you?
Sit now in silence, letting the words you have heard, speak to you and for you in your prayer, your conversation with God. What images, ideas, words spring forward? Or maybe all of them are present in mediation. Sit with those insights as you experience the presence of God. Give your insights to God. Do the insights give you new meaning or transformation of your actions, or prayer life?
Now rest in God’s arms. Let God’s presence give you comfort. Do you feel the pull to return to your meditations? Then begin again. If not close with a prayer of gratitude for the time you have spent in God’s presence and the insights you have received.
My thoughts over the last couple of months have been over whelmed by the violence, the bullying, the tragedy, and the anger that has played across my TV screen, computer, radio and newspaper in the last couple of months. I have seen the quote by some famous person that reads “those who keep silent in the face of evil are giving their approval,” or the pictures’ displaying one perspective versus another and which one has the greatest validity. I am left speechless and in pain. Yes I have heard that even one small act of mercy changes someone and I have used those very words myself many times. Do what you can and ‘wait,’ wait for minds to change, or for hearts to open, . . . wait for what.
The scripture for Sunday came from Isaiah and begins with “Comfort, O Comfort my people” (40:1), but, I’m sorry I don’t feel that comfort. I offer prayers, I read, and I listen. I volunteer at the King County Juvenile Detention Center, here at church, and lead the occasional spiritual retreat and labyrinth walk, yet, except for Juvenile Detention CTR, I feel as if I am “preaching to the choir,” so to speak. Where in all of these days of suffering, and confusion does the offering come that provides more than my comfort and brings a justly faithful, hopeful, loving comfort to those who do not share my skin color, or language, or culture, or gender, or abilities, or whatever makes them different from the so called “main stream” of the population.
This meditation was intended to be an inspirational moment. But I am not feeling very inspirational, just too much has happened in the last couple of months. So I ask your forgiveness for talking through some of my thoughts. I live in a world that appears to be falling apart as I sit my comfortable, warm home. I keep asking what will stop the building blocks our lives from tumbling into the abyss.
I am afraid we are headed into a storm of our own making that will destroy us. We won’t need to be invaded, no; we are doing a grand job of destruction all by ourselves. Voices of change and compassion, justice, mercy, and peace are drowned out by hateful speech by bullies in high places. The actions and words of those high placed bullies give permission to those who fear the unknown to be violent and destructive at the ground roots level. Hateful speech and actions becomes a cancer eating away at our will to fight against justice and mercy.
So I sit in my little home office, offering prayers, and volunteering when the opportunity arises. I do my small acts that I pray are being added to other small acts, but I don’t know if any of it will be enough. Our denominations GLBQ organization used the slogan “All Means ALL” at our last national General Assembly. They wanted to get the message across that everyone matters, despite gender identification, skin color, religion, or culture everyone is important. There are very few slogans I actually believe in, but I believe in that one. If I can do nothing other than let each and every person know how much they matter in my life, in the life of my Faith Community, and in the life of the greater community we are all part of then I have done the best I can. That will have to be enough.
A Quiet Walk 