One of my colleagues has been entranced by an artist who creates shrines. I love watching him as he speaks about this art. His face lights up, his hands and arms become animated and, as he speaks, you can feel the energy change in him….and in the room. Clearly these creations lift him above the ordinary, which I believe is one of the intentions of art.

Shrines….it is not a word or concept we speak of very often in the Protestant church. I find this unfortunate. The truth is we create shrines all the time. In both of my sons’ bedrooms there are shrines…..honoring various soccer players, basketball stars…..and those that also mark the high points of their own lives, awards and ribbons lovingly and intentionally placed on a shelf, away from the clutter of their ordinary objects. Most homes have family shrines, those places where important family photos and heirlooms are arranged in a place of honor, a place of remembrance.

For me it all started with a tiny little icon painted on a small cylindrical piece of wood. Madonna and child, in diffused colors given to me by a friend who brought it back from a journey of his own, placed on a table. Then came the painting brought to me by a parishioner knowing that "you just love Mary." Soon there was another icon of a Madonna and child from another country purchased because it was so beautiful I couldn’t resist. Then, came the wooden statue of a farm woman dressed in a simple dress and white apron, arms lifted heavenward yet extending over a stalk of corn.A Grant Wood kind of Mary. Next there was my simple attempt at making a stained glass candle placed with intention right in the midst of it all. A shrine…..celebrating what? Honoring whom?

My friend was right, of course. Even as a good Protestant girl, I have always loved Mary…her fierce love of her son, her willingness to be a vessel of the Holy, her earthiness, her loyalty, unconditional love and ever-faithful presence. Mary was the one in the scriptures most like my own mother…..what is not to love? And so this shrine is the place I go to when my child or another’s is hurting, is in trouble, is lost. I go there and I light that candle created with my own hands. I light that flame and stand with all the women everywhere who have held on, stood watch, prayed throughout the night with the depth of love that comes from knowing the fragility of life, because they have carried it within their body.

So here is a question to ponder on these icy cold days……What are the shrines you have made that honor the life you live?

"Faith in not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart." Abraham Heschel

"I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding"
         John O’Donohue

I learned yesterday of the death of John O’Donohue, poet, Celtic Christian, writer, dreamer, scholar,mystic. For more than ten years I have read and re-read his work. His understanding of Celtic Christianity, the unique beauty of the Celtic view of the world and the Divine, has informed my life, my theology and my writing. His death was a shock. His voice was gentle and lilting, full of Irish wit and charisma. To know that it has been silenced fills me with great loss.

I remember sitting at a conference at the College of St. Catherine several years ago. We were all held spellbound by his rich storytelling….making us laugh one minute and cry the next, always nudging us to look for the divine twinkle in the eye of Holy One.  His book Anam Cara taught me about the special relationship one can have with a ‘soul friend’, someone who listens with you for how the Sacred moves in your life. His writing called me to a deeper place of knowing…..myself, the world, the other, God. His wisdom invited me to hold the sacred both gently and lightly, a lesson it seems I need to learn over and over.

I did not know John O’Donohue personally but I have felt his imprint on some of the most important parts of who I am. So today I will celebrate his life, by offering a blessing he has written in his book Eternal Echoes:Exploring Our Yearning to Belong. If you have never read his work, I commend it to you. In that way his wisdom will continue to flow like a river into the world, unfolding over and over.

May you listen to your longing to be free.
May the frames of your belonging be large enough
  for the dreams of your soul.
May you arise each day with a voice of blessing
  whispering in your heart that something good is going
  to happen to you.
May you find a harmony between your soul and your life.
May the mansion of your soul never become a haunted place.
May you know the eternal longing which lives at the heart
  of time.
May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.
May you never place walls between the light and yourself.
May your angel free you from the prisons of guilt,
  fear, disappointment, and despair.
May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to
  gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.
                                         John O’Donohue  1954-2008

Amen, So be it.

"Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look what they do when they stick together." Verna M. Kelly

It snowed in Baghdad today. According to reports, this has not happened in more than a hundred years. News reports show the delighted faces of children looking up at the puffs of white falling gently from the sky. Veiled women and men in dark clothing stood with umbrellas staring out from under their protective domes with eyes of wonder.

And then someone said it:"Perhaps this is a sign of peace." For those of us who live several months out of every year with snow piled all around us, it seems like a ridiculous thought. Snow is most often a nuisance to us. But, why not? For those who have lived all of their lives in a state of war and fear, why couldn’t these miraculous bundles of ice be a sign of what they long for so deeply? Manna from heaven in the form of snowflakes, each a unique fanciful creation of beauty, each a magical sign dropping from above.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, instead of being a possible sign of climate change and its results, this snow falling was a sign of peace to come? Oh, to stick out tongues and feel the cool, melting presence of peace, and swallowing its refreshment. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?

In her poem "Amazing Peace: A Celebration" Maya Angelou speaks of the Christmas season in this way: "It is the Glad Season. Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner. Floodwaters recede into memory. Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us as we make our way to higher ground."

Any effort for peace is founded on higher ground. On giving up our need to control. On relinquishing our fear. On allowing that we do not have the full picture of any situation. On humility, compassion, empathy, and a great love. It is as fragile as a snowflake.

A sign of peace? Only God knows…..but we can pray it is so. As for me, I don’t know that I will ever look again at a snowflake without thinking, "I remember when it snowed in Baghdad one day."

Have a blessed weekend…………………

As of last evening, we have another son in our home. For the next ten days we are hosting a young man from Guadalahara, Mexico. Esteban will live with us, no doubt observe us, hopefully come to, at least, like us and take this little snapshot of life in America home with him. Not many families would want to be seen as the ‘typical American family’, the family by which the world knows all American families. Our hope is that he has enough experiences going from house to house of other host families so we will be only one of many pictures he takes home with him. Hopefully he will also come to know a little about our life and we, his.

One of the great things(and there are many) about hosting someone from another country in your home, is that you see your world through their ‘fresh eyes’. Your daily routine, which you rarely think about, becomes something you reflect upon. The rooms in your home, where people normally sit to read the paper or do homework, get shifted around as you take another person in to account. And then there is the little subject of snow…ice…snowmen….Christmas lights still up well after Christmas…..why almost all Minnesotans take their shoes off when they come in the door.

Watching this group of young people from Mexico realize right away that a ritual of coming into someone’s home means also creating this mini-shoe shrine made me think back to the my first winter in Minnesota. My Ohio roots never prepared me for taking off shoes as you came into the house….no salt or sand had ever clung to my light weight, year-round shoes. Now, I too enter and remove just like I was born and bred here.

Hopefully our ‘fresh eyes’ will also include learning about how he spends his days at home, what foods he loves and which he’d rather not see on his plate, what he dreams for his future, how he likes to spend his vacations, what his family values. My personal hope is that I may come away with a few words of Spanish that I can actually use in my daily walk. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of all those around the world who learn to speak my language and I know almost none of theirs. It throws a mirror up to my humble eyes.

I am reminded of the early Celts who were tribal people. In an effort to ensure that they were not a warring people, families would turn their children over to families of other tribes to live in their homes, be cared for by other adults. It was a preventive measure.It was a way of building bridges between cultures and a way of praying for peace with their very living.

And so last night two other parents that we may never meet entrusted their beloved child to our care. While we slept a bridge was built between our house and a house where the sun is warm and people are wearing their shoes.

"After Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea,, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking:"Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? We observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage." Matthew 2:1-12

What star are you following? In our worshiping community we have been asking one another this question and will continue to do so during this season of Epiphany. Epiphany…an appearance or manifestation of God…the revelation of Christ in our midst…..a moment of sudden intuitive understanding…a flash of insight, says Webster. Epiphany….a realization that the Holy One is indeed all mixed up, at the center of, our very living, our one and only life….says I.

I don’t know about you but I often am blinded by lights that are not so helpful in my life. Success. Things I can buy. Power. Control. Greed. Economic security. Self-centeredness. To name only a few. I can hitch my dreams to any of those stars and follow until I am all used up.   When I am busy being led by those light beams, I am often unable to see the revelation of God that walks with me, that wrestles with me, that nudges me to wake up, to see.

It’s important, I think, to take stock of what stars we follow or we can be led into places that can keep us from the rich experiences of being awake to the sacred. The magi can be metaphor for us of the wise, yet humble, ones who put aside what they knew, personal comfort, common sense, all to follow a star that led them to a deeper understanding of how God breaks into the world."They set out and there ahead of them went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy."

So, what star are you following? My prayer is that the star that leads you will bring you to a place, a flash of insight, an Epiphany, that will find you standing, looking up to the heavens, overwhelmed with joy.

"Every man, plant and creature in Existence, Every woman, child, vein and note is a servant of our Beloved-a harbinger of joy, the harbinger of Light."   Hafiz

"Those who in youth and childhood wander alone in woods and wild places, ever after carry in their hearts a secret well of quietness."  W.B. Yeats

The powers that be, I believe, are conspiring to remind me that I am taking myself too seriously these days.They are putting little hints in my path….little bits of words here and there…so I will get the message. Lighten up. Play more.Remember the joys of your childhood.It seems no matter what I pick up to read, there is some overt message about letting go of the seriousness of life and finding ,what in fairy tales, is often referred to by Caitlin Matthews as the "well at world’s end." It is the place that one comes to after searching,working, being tricked by this creature or another until we arrive by drawing on our deep instinct, finally drinking from the pure waters. Refreshed.

I am reminded of the times that I have observed my children or other’s playing. The freedom they moved with from swing to swing, from wall to tree, running, jumping, full of the freedom of sheer play. Imagination took them from superhero to warrior, from circus performer to animal, endlessly moving from one playful moment to the next. There was never the sense that anything was impossible to become. I want to remember how to be that way.

A few months ago, I talked with a mother whose son ran up and down our church hallways. Jeans and teeshirt were accessorized by,what else? A cape. As this young child moved through his play he was both boy and so much more. Who knew when he might be called upon to save the world? As the mom and I talked,I told her how I’d like to keep a cape in my office. On days when I felt I needed a little ‘something more’ to get the job done, I’d wear my cape.I’d put it on and walk about the office, solving this problem and the next with the toss of my cape.My office friends would see me coming and breathe a sigh of relief. I could also keep it in a special place, easily accessible, for my colleagues to borrow when they, too, needed a little more power to deal with what needed to be done.

Those tricks of our childhood run deep within us and are told over and over again in the stories we cherish and tell our children, our grandchildren. Dragons can be slain, trolls that hide under bridges cannot harm us because we know the secret word,nourishing wells can be found at the end of a dangerous journey, a journey we have used our wits and courage to complete. Stories of heroes and heroines, stories of hope and triumph, stories that hold happy endings.

Now all I need is a really cool cape……………..

"Religion has not tended to create seekers or searchers, has not tended to create honest humble people who trust that God is always beyond them. We aren’t focused on the great mystery. Religion has, rather, tended to create people who think they have God in their pockets, people with quick,easy, glib answers. That’s why so much of the West is understandably abandoning religion. People know the great mystery cannot be that simple and facile. If the great mystery is indeed the Great Mystery, it will lead us into paradox, into darkness, into journeys that never cease….That is what prayer is about." Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs

If you receive the Star Tribune newspaper you may have read an editorial this past Saturday by an English teacher at St. Thomas Academy about "Why I assigned reading over the holiday break." It was an article that made my heart sing. It did so not only because it was well written and carried a message I believe in…the importance and power of reading…but also because it held a deeper truth about how we live out our spiritual lives. I made it ‘required reading ‘ for the two young men who share our home.

In the article Christine Brunkhorst explains that she gives her students the vacation assignment of reading a novel, any novel, and then discussing it with an adult in their home. She says she does so because she is "concerned for their imaginations, which in some cases are sorely in need of exercise." Ms. Brunkhorst goes on to explain a lesson in which she asks her students to imagine being driven to school where they go to class and then after school the basketball coach comes into the classroom to show the players films of players running drills. This is followed by going home, eating dinner, watching basketball players play games on television. They do this day after day. Then she asks the question:"Will you become a better basketball player?"

The answer of course is no. Muscles grow weak, flab sets in around the middle, eye/hand coordination loses its response, it isn’t so easy to see the quick move that will create a winning game. The same is true with our imagination. Without exercise our imagination grows stale,docile, unresponsive.

Of course, Ms. Brunkhorst’s goal was to help her students exercise their imaginations through reading, through entering into the lives of others through stories that open their world. The same can be said of the church and our spiritual growing. If we continue to worship in the same way, sing the same songs, pray the same prayers, observe rather than going out on the limb of participation, our spiritual imagination grows stale, docile, unresponsive.

For me, the great gift of the scriptures, the great gift of the life of liturgy, is that it invites us to be continually using our imagination, asking ourselves "Where is God in all this? How did the Holy show up in my life, in this story, today? What is Spirit nudging me to discover in this situation?" The stories of scripture beg us to interact with them, to question them, to look for the missing pieces, to use our imaginations. When we do we become actors in a Great Mystery play in which the curtain never falls. When we do, our very living, becomes a prayer…..an on-going act of communing with God.

What a big idea!

"The journey we begin as we answer the call is long,and filled with all we have been and all that we will become." Caristonia Worthington

In preparation for Lent which, believe it or not, begins in four weeks, I have been reading about pilgrimage and journey. This concept will be a part of our Lenten theme. The result of this reading is that I have been thinking about my own spiritual journey, its twists and turns, its rest areas, its time of great turbulence, its long periods of going nowhere. I share this because experience tells me I am not alone in this. Reflecting at all on the spiritual life brings with it ambiguity,doubt, general messiness along with revelation.

Caitlin Matthews writes:"Our spiritual journey leads us through many stations of experience. We feel the need to travel in company with others:we join churches, courses, movements, and groups, learning all that we can from the leaders and exponents. Sometimes sharing the journey is helpful and supportive to our unique spiritual call; other times it is very dissatisfying, causing us to give up and continue our journey elsewhere. This period of spiritual nomadism can be lengthy, as we move from place to place, from religious movement or spiritual group in search of the meaning beneath the meaning."

It has been a privilege of my life…my spiritual life…to have known so many people who have done such ardent searching. Their curiosity and deep longing has kept their spiritual life rich and growing, yet often painful. In our conversations I have grown and deepened my own faith life, my own journey. Being on a path with those who seek to understand the "meaning beneath the meaning" helps me discern my own long quest and how the Holy walks with each of us in traditional and very nontraditional ways. It one of the great gifts of being in community, of being a spiritual being having a bodily experience.

Every Christmas Eve my family gathers with life-long friends and others we’ve come to know and love throughout the year. Years ago,one of our ‘tribe’ began sharing a tradition handed down from her mother. We gather in a circle and she hands out to each of us this wafer-like cracker. Making the circle once again, she puts a drop of honey on the wafer. After we have our sweet white treat in hand, she says:"Now, during this year if you are ever lost in the woods, remember who you are with right now and you will find your way home."

For many years the children in the group heard these words and thought of fairy tales they knew. The teenagers often rolled their eyes. But as a group we somehow know that this ritual is both fun and very deep, a metaphor for walking the journey together, for sharing the spiritual path, for finding a way home to rest in the meaning beneath the meaning.

Blessings on your weekend journeys…………………

"The first thing, the last thing, start from where you
are."   Dale Pendell

I had copied this quote down on the top of a sheet of paper. It seems like one of those ridiculously simple statements that cause some people to say, "well,duh!" Yet, for whatever reason, I had jotted it down to remember…maybe for this day. At what other point might I start than where I am?

Yet, here we are at the beginning of another new calendar year. Many people have made a list of resolutions a mile long that really are planted in old soil, moldy thoughts, thirsty dreams.There is not a drive to start from ‘where you are’ just a push to rehash all the old stuff packed in our bags for years.

Perhaps I thought of this quote because the beginning…..where I am today….started out in such an amazing way. Driving my son to school, I was mesmerized by the light reflecting off the snow. Blue as blue could be…..blue snow.…making a bed for the jet black sticks of trees rising toward the burgeoning light. Then I saw it. First a sea shell pink gently washed across the pale blue horizon….a baby blanket of a sky. Before I could even take in that subtle beauty, brilliant yellow streaked out of those colors…how does that happen? Sunflower yellow gave way to blaze orange and then all the colors moved(without my being able to see the movement)and became a canvas that reached across the eastern horizon. I stopped. I took it all in, this gift of an unimaginable painting on the morning sky. Right where I was.

Gathering my wits I turned west, making my way toward my morning meeting. But, no….the beauty would not stop hounding me. That canvas of shining sky had the audacity to throw its light further and further until there it was….The Ruby City….Minneapolis’ glass skyscrapers reflecting the gift of the morning sunrise for all to see. Right where I was.

So I ask myself….I ask you…on a day so miraculous, how could we want to start any place else? The gift of this morning, the gift of this day. This is where we begin…bathed in art not of our own making, walking in a world filled with miracles yet to behold. Right where we are.

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth…and I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals."  Revelation 21:1-3

So today begins another year of using new things. Things received as gifts, things purchased on clearance tables, surprising things found when looking through those boxes you open once a year which hold things once new, now not so. Yesterday I took down the calendar from 2007 consisting of photos of the stained glass windows in the National Cathedral. I have saved these, cut them out for use in, who knows what? Some other new thing…a bookmark, a card, a collage…..made out of an old thing…that will always hold a memory of the year just past. The 2008 calendar now hangs in its place boasting beautiful pictures of environmental art. Next year it, too, will be retired. Another ‘new thing’ that will be used up this year and find another use in the new year.

Tonight I will take the time to record phone numbers and addresses in my new personal calendar. Yes, I am one of ‘those people’ who still use a paper calendar and ink to schedule the daily events that make up my life. I have never been able to give in to a palm pilot or other technological calendar. I need the pictures, the photos, the little bits of wisdom that graces each day. Take today, January 2nd, for instance. The message simply says "Appreciate time". As I look back at yesterday I  am encouraged to ‘envision peace’ because January 1st, in addition to being the beginning of a new year, is also World Peace Day. Did you know? I didn’t and would not have known if I hadn’t chosen this calendar to travel with me throughout this year.

I spend a great deal of time choosing calendars. It is a commitment. They will, after all, be with me all year….in boring and exciting meetings, for birthdays and dental appointments, for planning vacations and school release days, as a reference point for that very special dinner party that is yet to be created. As far as I am concerned, choosing a calendar is a decision that takes time and a certain amount of reflection. Once or twice I have even had to abandon a calendar that was chosen too quickly. It was a disappointment.

As I think about these new calendars they take on the presence of a traveling companion. What will we see together this year? Will the days fill up with joyful and creative experiences? Will too many days fly by with little, if anything, recorded? Will the times and events be gifts or simply obligations? When I retire this calendar, once new, will I look fondly back over the year’s experiences or be happy that they were survived? Three hundred and sixty-three days will tell the story.

A new year. A new calendar. An open book of spaces and places yet to be recorded,discovered,lived.

"Now is the time to know that all you do is sacred."  Hafiz