Today I am offering not a prayer of my own making but rather one offered to me in my time of stress by a good friend. Soulful Nature is a Lakota Prayer that has brought me some peace. I hope it finds a place within you to offer you rest.
Soulful Nature
Wakan Tanka, Great Mystery,
teach me how to trust my heart,
my mind, my intuition,
my inner knowing,
the senses of my body,
the blessings of my spirit.
Teach me to trust these things
so that I may enter my Sacred Space
and love beyond my fear,
and thus Walk in Balance
with the passing of each glorious sun.
~Lakota Prayer~
The Sacred Space is the space between exaltation and inhalation.
To Walk in Balance is to have Heaven (spirituality) Earth (physicality) in Harmony
YouTube
On Eagles Wings by Michael Joncas 1979
Sung by Josh Groban
Psalm 91:9-12 9 Because you have made the LORD your refuge,
the Most High your dwelling-place,
10 no evil shall befall you,
no scourge come near your tent. 11 For God will command the angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways.
12 On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
Date: Wednesday August 15, 2012
Time: about 4:30 pm
Place: the office of Dr. Michel X
Dr. X: well, the ultrasound of your left carotid artery shows it is 80 to 90 percent blocked and I really don’t know how you have missed having a massive stroke. I want you in surgery tomorrow, so I am scheduling you for 9 am at ES hospital.
For a week now I’ve been trying to articulate what the events of August 15th -17th have honestly meant to me and with the greatest of difficulties I am writing now. For the last week I have responded to the news of emergency surgery and questions about it with a joke or a laugh as if it was just an everyday occurrence. It wasn’t and I know that. What I do know is for the last 5 to 6 years I have complained of several physical symptoms to a series of medical specialists and none of them correlated the symptoms with a blocked artery in my neck. In the last 5 years I have traveled extensively, had several medical procedures done, including surgeries, actively exercised and I NEVER HAD A STROKE. So what I am trying to understand is why me. What or who kept me protected.
When Dr. X came in to tell me I could go home he said “the blockage was so bad the blood flow in your left eye was reversed, you are so lucky to be alive and not incapacitated by a stroke.” I don’t believe ‘luck’ had anything to do with. I believe someone(s) was watching over me.
The hymn “On Eagles Wing” written by Michael Joncas in 1979 is based on Psalm 91 and Isaiah 40:31 and that hymn and Psalm popped into my head on Thursday morning just before surgery. Ok so you might say, it’s not so unusual for a person well versed in theology to think about a favorite hymn or a comforting piece of scripture in times of stress and maybe your right. Life is often about where you put your trust and the path your thoughts take in times of crises. But I will tell you this that when I let go of my fear and give it to that invisible, but tangible presence, I not only feel protected, I am protected. The trust I place in the Holy Spirit is not the kind of trust that says I’m going to be a millionaire, a celebrity, or live a life of ease. Those are things I might want but not need. The trust I’m talking about is trusting that what I NEED will be there, not what I want. It is also recognizing that what I think I need isn’t always what God thinks I need and that again comes down to the difference between “I want” and “I need.”
God needs me to follow the path laid out by Jesus and that is to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly beside my God. That is my model for living. I must admit I don’t always follow that path. It seems I am always drifting off one side of the path or another and when I reach a fork in the road my ego is strong enough to take the wrong one. Such wanderings do make it difficult on the Holy Spirit in guiding me back to the path, the Great Divine is telling me all along the way back “if you had just gone the way I told you to this would have been a lot easier.” Problem is I’m not a good listener and I have a really poor memory. But, just as many people I do come home to the shelter of those comforting wings eventually, most often in times of trouble. Last week I came home real quick!
I don’t want you to think that simply giving into what I believe God wants will make my, or any, life easy because it won’t. In fact if I really follow the path laid out by Jesus, my life will have a heck of number of pitfalls, road blocks, crises, and just plain hard times. The thing of it is I probably won’t notice those hard times. I will see instead the joy of being a partner in God’s creation, the smiles on the faces of those who never had a friend before, and the satisfaction of knowing that something wrong has been made right. Its knowing life isn’t about me, it’s about being part of the plan, about feeling the presence and hearing a swarm of angel’s wings knowing I am just a small cog in a huge plan to bring everyone under the shelter of those wings.
I am grateful to be here to write this, I pray all of you will feel and hear your own angels as they guide you on your own path. May the grace of God go with you
All surrounding Spirit,
just as we are, we come to praise your name.
We bring before you all that we are,
the good,
the not so good,
and the things we’d rather not talk about.
We come knowing you will forgive us,
showering us with your grace and love.
As children in the faith we come
with hurts to be healed
and as adult partners in creation we come
to offer our gifts for the growth of the Kingdom.
As children we long for your arms for comfort
and as adults we search for your face to be renewed in our efforts to grow stronger in our faith
and when we come in truth we are never disappointed in what we seek.
Our prayer is to be steady on the path that leads to truth,
forgiveness of others and for ourselves,
humbly laying at your feet
our love in the Spirit.
The Lord said:
She created me, formed me
Tells me “Don’t fear”
She calls me by name and I am hers
I will not be overwhelmed
I can walk through all dark shadows,
and dangerous paths,
I will not be harmed
She ransomed me, bought me
Rescued me from my enemies
Because, She loves me, . . . ME!
I will not fear because GOD is with me
“And God saw that it was good.” Genesis 1:18b (NRSV)
June is the month of the summer solstice, Mid-Summer, a time of picnics, camping and celebrations of the earth’s abundance. But here in Washington it never seems very celebratory to me. After all we have only just begun having warm weather and I always think it’s unfair that the world is turning to winter before summer even begins. Here in our beloved northwest summer often comes and goes before we even have warm weather, fall and spring are often non-existent and, winter rains and snow hang on with a vise like grip. We often seem to be just a little out of synch with the rest of the country; warm when everyone else is cool and way too cool when everyone else is scorching. What’s worse is if we wait 15 minutes everything will change around us. What was the creator thinking when She formed the American Northwest? Our changing land and weather must bring great joy and laughter to the Creator.
Yet when the sky clears and the sun shines in a canopy of blinding blue we know the special blessing of our home. We live in a graced land of diversity. Mountains so high they have snow on them all year, yet deep within their hearts lies the fire of the planet; ground that seems solid beneath our feet yet can shake like a bowl of jelly turning our world upside down. Inviting looking lakes so cold with water from snow melt you can’t swim in them for very long without protection. An ocean with depths that hide a treasure of animal life found nowhere else like giant octopus nearly as intelligent as we are and whales and salmon of course, can’t forget the salmon. So I guess God knew what she was doing when she created the magical land we live in. Each season whether they be hot or cold, wet or dry, cloudy or blinding sun bright gives character, beauty, challenges, change and balance, . . . life to the place we call home.
The summer solstice, longest day of the year is a time to enjoy the beauty of life in abundance. Yet it is also the beginning of shorter days and the slide down to winter rains, and snowy days. The creator never wants us to be bored; always there is change in the air. The rich smell of roses will change into the smell of wood smoke on the wind and icy blasts will bring the smell of snow and rain down from the mountains; all to be repeated next year. Change, is what keeps us alive and on June 20th the Earth will begin again to tip away from the warmth of Mother Sun. But today celebrate the light, revel in the warmth, for tomorrow change will come, to the mountains, the sea, and the land. Enjoy today the smell of fresh mown grass and roses and listen to song of the robin and of water falling over rock. Tomorrow will bring more change, so live in the moment, enjoy the now, and wait with breathless anticipation for the change that comes tomorrow.
mid-summer
The smell of roses fill the air
and Iris dance in the twilight
of Mid-summer evening
Children race through
the meadow, rings of daisy’s
crown their heads
Creator smiles
blows blessing on the wind
bringing
forgetfulness
of winter past
So often we miss God because it doesn’t “look” like what we think God should look like. But, what does God look like? Who knows – no one – so look for God in the unexpected; dirty, shining, poor, rich, hard working, lazy, all are God. God looks like the unknowable, like anything I can’t describe.
Scripture: Job 2:9-109Then his wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.”10But he said to her, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
I am taking a class on “Job and the Mystery of Suffering” this quarter and when we were assigned this passage to write on for this week I found it way more interesting than I thought I would. The book of Job is a difficult book at its best and when I read it the first time I started having questions about Job’s wife but couldn’t find anything about her. She is mentioned only twice and is never named and in a culture where remembering your name when you’ve died is your immortality that is complete death. So I want to take her part, I want to be her advocate, I only have questions
I get the feeling here that Job’s wife is feeling real pain; she has after all, just like Job, lost everything and is grieving deeply. While this may be the story of Job his wife, who is allowed to live through this experience with him, is always forgotten. You can hear her frustration and pain most clearly in the paraphrase bible, The Message, where she says: “Still holding on to your precious integrity, are you? Curse God and be done with it!” Here is a woman in pain whose feelings are being ignored not just by Job but by God as well. Job tells her to quit talking like a “Shameless, Harlot, Fool,” and accept whatever God hands them. (Mind you he is kind enough not to call her those things, just stop talking like them.) She is a side effect of the Adversaries bet with God, and if Job doesn’t deserve such suffering, she certainly doesn’t. According to the bet with God the Adversary was to test Job not his wife, so why is she being tested along with him? Or is this one of those patriarchal editorial jobs that just manages to forget to add that Job’s wife was just as faithful to God as Job was and she too was being tested? I have only questions because there is no information on this forgotten lady, even her name is gone and in a name forgotten was true death.
One of the reasons I am asking these questions is because of what Crenshaw (Crenshaw, James L.; Reading Job, a Literary and Theological Commentary, Smyth & Helwys, Macon GA, 1984, pg 45) says concerning the Hebrew word for curse, barak, which he says is difficult to interpret and may actually mean blessing, which changes the meaning of the wife’s words to “Bless Elohim and die victoriously.” Now that is interesting, because the wife in that version seems to be saying just be done with it, if God wants Job dead, then be done with it and die a virtuous man. Job, on the on the other hand, tells her I’m not giving up, I will accept what I’m given, if I’ve done anything to offend God then I deserve what I’ve gotten. Job doesn’t know what he did but he’s going to stick around and demand more information. As I looked for reasons for Job’s stubbornness I looked back at the Pentateuch and found in Deuteronomy 28:1-68 something rather interesting. In this chapter Moses tells the people of God that if they follow all of God’s commandments they will be blessed and if they don’t then they will be cursed. In fact, Deuteronomy 28:38 (“The LORD will afflict you at the knees and thighs with a severe inflammation, from which you shall never recover—from the sole of your foot to the crown of your head” [italics mine]) describes exactly what the Adversary does to Job in verse 2:7 (“The Adversary departed from the presence of the LORD and inflicted a severe inflammation on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” [italics mine]). If Job is as faithful to God as the prologue says then he knew full well what was said in Mosaic Law and that meant he must have done something wrong, he just doesn’t know what it was. Job’s wife is ready to give up and go to her rest, Job is not.
The world is cold, white and dark
a soft blanket drapes over tree,
bush, and building
a small bird stops at the feeder
fluffed out to keep the warmth in
I may be blessed by a warm house
but my brother sleeps in an alley
cold, wet, hungry
my sister huddles in a doorway
wrapped in a worn blanket
We are not so different
my sister, my brother and me
except by circumstance If things were just a little different
I would be alongside them, sharing our warmth
Who ordains who is blessed and who is not
why do we, . . . my sister, my brother . . .
walk such different paths
what choices made by us, God, or others
led to this place in our lives
Some say God punishes
I say we choose how we live
I thank others sometimes make our choices for us
I believe God cry’s every time someone
huddles in a doorway
Isaiah 64:8 Yet, O Lord, you are our Father: we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.
November 27th is the first Sunday in Advent, and Advent means waiting. Now that we have stuffed ourselves on good food, and reveled in the company of family and friends we will have to wait for that magical moment when we remember the Birth of Jesus. I have often wondered what God felt at the moment when woman and man were created. I have watched potters and I know there are many false starts and mistakes, did God have that problem. After a long day of trying maybe God got tired and put aside the project until that magic moment.
The Potter’s Wheel
God placed the lump of clay
Onto the wheel, and said
“What will I make today?”
Slowly the wheel turns
Picking up speed
God’s hands surround the cool slippery mass.
Slowly a shape takes place,
Maybe a vessel, for holding light ….
Water … Air … Fire …?
Something to hold love?
Something to hold compassion?
I’m tired, it will wait until tomorrow.
A Quiet Walk 