"Once a little jumping spider, on a porch railing, came to my hand, and stood up on its back legs and stared, with exquisite green eyes, into my face. You can say that is wasn't so; it was so. This was on a warm summer day. A few sailboats were gliding around the harbor that stretches out and becomes ocean, and who knows where the world ends. Good luck, little spider of the keyhole. Live as long as you can." Mary Oliver

Now that the weather has turned officially cold and winter is settling in, so are the box elders and the lady bugs.They have been settling into our home for weeks now. The spiders also have been visible trying to find places to rest, spots to spin their lace, out of the danger of winter wind.

It is a curious relationship to forge, living with insects. On the one hand I do not want to find myself or any of my family visibly bitten by a spider. I usually react to their bites and on at least one occasion had to take medication to soothe the itching and the spreading welts. On the other hand, I respect their right to walk this Earth with me, their legs more numerous and thinner than my own. I know they are only trying to do the work to which they were called, the same as I. And so it can be said for the other bugs I have mentioned. Truth be told, there is something hopeful in seeing the sweet orange body of a ladybug when ice is frozen outside your window.

Over the last weeks when I have seen these fellow travelers, I have simply placed a piece of paper in their path. They seem obliged to continue crawling and make their way onto the out stretched paper. I then open the door and send them outside. In doing so I do not know their fate. They most likely die as they would have if I had squashed them like others might. Or maybe…and this is my hope…they find a warmer place among leaves or in a bed of stones, where their life is extended.

I would pray that, if our size differential were reversed, they would do the same for me.

There are days that are more vibrant than others. They are filled with moments that make you want to shout your praise for simply being alive. Colors are brighter, smells sweeter, the eyes of a friend shine out at you from a face you love but have taken for granted. The arms a partner are warmer, gentler than you can remember and you want to spend the day resting in their embrace.There are days like this.

Many times these days are brought on by a wonderful miraculous experience, like the birth of a new baby or the news that something you've worked for for so long has come to fruition. But more often these days are brought on because you feel you've brushed close to having the gifts of this life snatched away from you. You pass by the scene of an accident where there are clearly grave injuries. Or you yourself stop or swerve just in time to miss being part of a similar scene. There are test results that come back clear and phone messages that signal the joyous voice of a family member or friend over this good news. There are days like this.

We spend the majority of our time treading the waters of our lives. It is a fact and one that, in some ways, makes the world go round. We find ourselves in the rhythm of routines that can dull our senses and our hearts to the sheer joy of walking this glorious Earth. We go to meetings, do the laundry, eat without paying attention to the food or our companions. And then something happens and our awareness changes. Our senses become heightened and our eyes see the world as if for the first time. There are days like this.

Perhaps it is the nature of being human, of trying to make sense of who we are, that allows us to become  aware of these experiences where we recognize the gift of this life, this living. Do other animals feel the exhilaration of having outrun the hand of death in the form of the speeding car? Do they then enjoy their running or flying or swimming more for at least the next few days? I don't know.

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, today might be a day to really look around you and see the gifts of your life. Today might be the day to smile broader, to kiss longer, to order dessert, to give a gift anonymously. Today might be a day to fall in love with your life…..without benefit of any dramatic event…..but simply because you can.

“Hands are the heart’s landscape.”

  ~Pope John Paul II

Last Friday I went to the Vatican Splendors exhibit that is currently showing at the Minnesota History Museum. It is a remarkable traveling exhibit of paintings, sculpture, uniforms, vestments and many other items that are housed in the several museums that make up the Vatican collection. The collection spans centuries and contains art from every century. This exhibit does a wonderful job of keeping the interest of adults and the numerous school groups that were present while I was there. I observed several young men who looked quite bored while looking at religious paintings perk up when they turned a corner and saw the uniforms and weapons of the Swiss Guard! 

Of particular interest was a section where they had re-created what it must have felt like to be Michelangelo as he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The scaffolding suspended just four feet from the ceiling gave you an idea of how uncomfortable and claustrophobic that work must have been. How he had any visual perspective from his vantage point of how the art would look from the floor is beyond my understanding.

The entire exhibit was wonderful. But my favorite piece was one near the very end. It was a sculpture made of brass, about the size of a small car table. Rising out of the center of the square was a caste of the praying hands of Pope John Paul II. The hands were actually situated on their side so the back of his hand was on top, not in the usual visual of praying hands. A small placard invited people to put their hand on top of his. I looked at the brass, how it had been rubbed shiny by all those who had reached out to lay their hand on this brass image of this seeming sweet, kind, compassionate, yet larger-than-life man. 

As I too reached out to lay my hand on his, I thought how good it felt. His hands were much larger than I had imagined. He always seemed a slight person to me. I lay my hand where others had and wondered what each person thought when they did so. Certainly the most devote Roman Catholics had a different experience than I. (I am sure the children were glad to finally be able to touch something.) Those places, rubbed to glistening gold by the hand prints of so many, shone into the darkness of the exhibit hall. So many hands who had reached out to touch the hand of this man who had been through so much, who so many believed to be the most powerful man in the world. It was a quiet act some would see as nothing of significance. But I have thought about it over and over. It felt like a holy moment.

"O Beauty, ever ancient, ever new. Too late have I loved you. I was outside and you were within me, and I never found you until I found you within myself." St. Augustine

The last few days I have been reading the offerings people have made for our upcoming Advent devotional. This is always a very holy time for me. The process begins with a theme being chosen, a few words that invite people to reflection, prayer and then the writing. Many people write original work. Still others know that they have just the perfect poem or prayer tucked away in those places we tuck things we want to keep forever.

This year's theme is "Journey in the Heartbeat of God." In some ways it is more abstract than others we have chosen. The theme has prompted several phone calls asking:"Now let me see if I understand where you want us to go. Is this what you meant"? The conversation plays out and the caller heads off to write. I personally find the process overwhelmingly exciting. To put only a few words out there to which people can respond and then to receive such lovely and inspiring words is a gift. Though most people don't think of it this way, I see it as an an of spiritual formation. When people really respond to the words from their own faith perspective, their own experience of God, they come to know and articulate for others a glimpse into their spiritual selves. Writer and reader are transformed in the process.

This year our devotional will be graced by the lovely artwork of one of our members, Amanda Hunter. Amanda's art will mirror the very large banners that will hang in our sanctuary beginning the first Sunday of Advent. Her visual interpretation of incarnation, God with and within, is strikingly beautiful. It will challenge some to perhaps open their understanding of God's presence among us.

As for me, I have seen that God-within present in the stories people have told. I have seen the grace and transformation experienced in the poetry people have written. I have been blessed by the journey of this creative process which is, itself, infused with the Heartbeat of God.

The devotional will be available on-line so watch for it. In the meantime, you are invited to also reflect upon what "Journey In the Heartbeat of God" means to you. I suspect your spirit may be renewed in the reflection.

Have a blessed weekend…………………….

"……But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me……."
~Billy Collins

I hit the alarm and drifted back asleep only to wake up with the clear sense that something was different about this morning. As my eyes adjusted to wakefulness I realized that the usual morning light was tinged with blue. I sat up and looked out the window to see the rooftop covered with snow, the breaking morning reflecting off its whiteness causing that unnameable blue when sky and snowy ground meet. It was really only a couple of inches of snow, and it will be gone probably by the end of the day, but nevertheless it is the first snow of the season. A day to mark on the calendar which some will celebrate while others curse.

This excerpt of the poem Shoveling Snow with Buddha calls to mind, I think, one of the great gifts of snow and the winter months. Snow calls us to a contemplative place, allows us to see water and its gifts in a new way, as something solid, fluffy, malleable. What usually drips, floats, or evaporates, becomes visible and lasting…at least for awhile. Snow causes us to slow down, to stare into the middle distance. As I look out my window right now the flakes, clumped together in community, sit precariously on the now bare branches of the trees. Their whiteness provides dressing where leaves have let go. I somehow think it must be comforting to the trees.

We've just come through a very intense time. Elections are over for the most part. The economy still rests on a roller coaster. Thanksgiving will be here in a few days and the Christmas season is visible in malls everywhere. And so it seems the contemplative snow has arrived just in time. Just in time to slow us down, to encourage us to walk more gently because are footsteps can become so very visible. The snow has come just in time to remind us that water can wash us clean and can also blanket us with beauty. Like most things, it has many properties, some we can see and others that are only visible to us at very special times.It is good to be reminded.

Sometimes it take the poets and the Buddhists among us help us to remember to stay in the present moment long enough to learn the lesson.

"Life
will break you.  Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone
won't either, for solitude will also break you with it's yearning.  You
have to love.  You have to feel.  It is the reason you are here on
earth.  You are here to risk your heart.  You are here to be swallowed
up.  And when it happens that you are broken or betrayed, or left, or
hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and
listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their
sweetness.  Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could."

~Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

A friend sent this quote to me after we mined the metaphor of story and its importance in our lives during our worship yesterday. They are beautiful words, ones to be read over and over, rolling them around in both mouth and mind. They speak to what it means to live, truly live and to come to those important moments of truth and to walk from them with little or no regret. How many of us cane say we do this? I know I have many times, at least in the small moments of my days, when I can dance the steps of regret. Oh, if only I had said this, done that, felt this way, thought this thought. It is a path of little joy.

These past days I have been in the ever moving process of saying goodbye to a friend and colleague who is moving away from Minnesota. At the least little word or memory, we can dissolve into tears…some of laughter and some of sadness. There is no way of out running the ways in which life will break us. But if our loving has been real and our feeling has been full, the breaking seems somehow worth it all. It brings meaning, real meaning, to our lives. It is not a sentimental meaning, like a well crafted Hallmark card poem framed in lace and meant to be preserved between the well kept pages of a heavy book.. It is the loving and feeling of risk….heart-risk….which is most often messy and leaves us ripped and our edges torn but feeling more alive than is believable. This kind of loving,this kind of risk means we've really given our selves to another, to the world, which is probably the true definition of living.

The trees in Minnesota have lost all their leaves now. They stand like naked sentinels connecting Earth with Heaven. Their leaves have fallen, been blown away and are beginning this very moment to nurture the soil beneath their trunks. I pray that I have been as present to the beauty of the spring, summer and fall of 2008 as I could. When spring arrives next year, my friend will not be here to see the buds open on the Minnesota birch and maples. As she goes on to new adventures in a place where spring comes much earlier and lasts much longer, it is the sweetness of friendship I will remember…..and feel blessed.

"Eternal God, lead me now out of the familiar setting of my doubts and fears, beyond my pride and and my need to be secure into a strange and graceful ease with my true proportions and with yours; that in boundless silence I may grow strong enough to endure and flexible enough to share your grace."  ~ Ted Loder

This week Eboo Patel spoke at our church. Mr. Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that promotes interfaith cooperation. Hundreds of young people and others of all ages streamed into our sanctuary on Wednesday evening to hear him speak. The space was buzzing with excitement.

On Thursday morning I heard Mr. Patel make this statement: "Hope is free. Fear is very expensive." I was listening to him in an interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio. He spoke quite eloquently about the need for interfaith dialogue and experiences for all people, youth especially, as they become the leaders of tomorrow.. But it was this statement that stayed with me, that caused me to dissect it and examine the truth in it.

Hope is free. Hope is primarily a function of imaginative faith.Hope causes us to open our arms, our minds and our hearts to something that is not yet realized. It costs us nothing but has the ability to produce amazing returns. Hope is something we rest in, something we long for, something we cannot buy but can give birth to. Hope expands us.

Fear on the other hand causes us to begin to accumulate an arsenal, to build fences, to close off the doors of who we are. In doing so, we lose our sensibilities and isolate ourselves. Fear leads us to be suspicious, to cut people out of our lives, to make our world smaller and smaller. Fear causes some to buy guns, others to medicate themselves in unhealthy ways, and still others to lash out with little understanding of those perceived to be 'different', 'dangerous'. It starts with one person and breeds but instead of causing growth it instead causes stagnation.  We have seen its effects in individual lives, in the lives of our country and the world. Fear is, indeed, expensive.

Perhaps the costly nature of fear is what led those who wrote the Bible to write these particular words more than any other: "Do not be afraid."  The angels say it, the psalmists, the prophets, the disciples and Jesus say it over and over again. "Do not be afraid." It is too great an expense in a life meant to be lived fully, with joy and thanksgiving, grace and compassion. "Do not be afraid. "

Winter seems to have made an entrance in Minnesota this morning…..enjoy the weekend.

"From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded." Luke 12:48

In the church, right before Thanksgiving and before Advent is the time known to most as stewardship season. It the time of year when churches go to their communities and ask for each household's financial pledge for the following year. Each church does this somewhat differently but with the same goal: to create a budget for the coming year that will match the dreams for ministry of the congregation. The church staff and those who are involved in the ministries of any given congregation are aware of the needs of their neighborhoods, the church members,and  those who seek solace within their sanctuaries.Most churches are also involved in ministries that take them far away from their own life experiences to places of great need in the world. Each community discerns this financial need through their understanding of God's call in the life of their church.

This year in particular could be a challenging time in the life of any church. As we see the great needs around us, we also see people in our community losing their jobs while others watch the money they had counted on dribble away. We simply don't know what the next year will hold from an economic standpoint. How might life be different this time next year, for instance?

The truth is we have never known the answer to that question. We can only speculate, act wisely and be prayerful in our living. As I have been thinking about these acts of stewardship which we make, I remembered my Mother's words to me which were actually the words of Jesus: "To whom much has been given, much will be required." She said it most often when I was complaining about something I didn't want to do, something I wanted to ignore. In saying it she always reminded me of the gifts of my life. Though those gifts were most often not monetary, she reminded me of the many gifts I had that others didn't….a loving home, adequate food, a good education, a faithful community. She reminded me that because of the blessings of my life I was asked to share myself with others, that I had a responsibility to share the resources of my life with the world.

In Eugene Peterson's interpretation of this scripture verse, he has Jesus sharing these words: "Great gifts mean great responsibilities; greater gifts, greater responsibilities! "  How we use what we have been given, some which we never worked to attain but were just passed on to us, is a huge responsibility. How we choose to share the bounty of our lives is also a gift.  A gift to be shared.

"Didn't you love the things that they stood for?
Didn't they try to find some good for you and me?"
          ~Dion

Today, in some ways, is a day of reflection. I grew up on the idealism of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy and the songwriters of the songs of the '60s. At a time when my view of the world was most malleable, these were the voices that inspired me. The words of these people, full of what a more peaceful, unified world might look like were planted deep in the rich soil of my evolving adulthood. Because I was also an odd adolescent, in love with the church, I interpreted the messages of these leaders in light of my faith, my understanding of this illusive community of God. Some of this happened consciously, most happened without my even knowing. I dreamed, along with Dr. King, of a world in which race would not be an issue, where all people would work together for a time of peace. From my faith perspective this was in line with what I understood to be the call of God on each of our lives.

Waking up this morning I found myself thinking about that young girl, wide eyes, open heart, ready to take giant steps in the world. I am not sure I ever thought about a day when the country I call home, the country I love, would take the steps to elect a person of color to the highest office in our land. As I watched the images of celebrations across the country last night, young, fresh, faces full of their future, I felt once again that sense of hope and possibility, the belief in being able to change the world, perhaps being able to realize a time when the things that divide us will become immaterial in the pursuit of the common good.

I thought of my high school friend, Marlene Cofer. Marlene was a tall, lanky light skinned African American who loved language. She moved through a room with grace and class, quietly being a presence in a room. I will not make any claims that we were 'best friends'. That was not a real possibility in a small town in southern Ohio during my teen years. It just wasn't done. But we shared a love of reading, of poetry. When I was with her I had the sense that I was a part of something fuller than when I was with only my white friends. At a high school reunion a few years ago Marlene arrived with a thick anthology of poetry in which her work had been included. There were no other published authors in our class. I was so proud of her for being persistent, for continuing to pursue what she loved while working as a bank teller.

Not long after that reunion, I learned that Marlene had died of a rare and fast moving cancer. Her beautiful voice, her graceful presence had been silenced. But not before it was preserved in the black and white writers chase their whole lives.

In Marlene's presence I knew a fuller picture of what it means to be the whole people of God. In my adult years I have known that experience many more times, I am happy to say. And now, perhaps as a country, we might also open our eyes and our hearts to what it means to be the fullness of the American people.

It seems the seeds those powerful voices planted in my soul continue to find ways to be reborn.

"I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a
deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence –
providing they have the facts, providing they have the information." ~Studs Terkel

I think I was in college when I read Studs Terkel's book Working, a series of interviews with people about their daily work. The stories of a teacher, construction worker, nurse, and newspaper boy, to name a few, captured my attention. Later when it was turned into a successful musical by the same name fueled the notion that the work we do is really the art of our living. With our work we paint the picture of what it means to be the people of the day and time of our time in history.

In the book, Mr. Terkel, through these interviews, paints some very real pictures of people's dreams and disappointments, their hopes for their future and those places of great joy. After reading this book, I will never see a construction worker using a jackhammer and not remember the account of the man who comes home from work, dirty and tired, to sit in his recliner and watch the much-needed respite of television. As he sits his body still drums with the rhythm of the hammer that shaped his day. His body, internally, never stops the incessant thumping.

And then there is the story of the young boy who delivered the morning newspaper in his neighborhood. Riding his bike, the freedom of the early morning pulsing in his veins, he winds up with the power of a major league pitcher, throwing the paper toward the doorstep of the houses. His joy? To hear the sound of "boing!" as the paper hits its landing.

Studs Terkel died this past week at the age of 96.He lived a good life in which he said his work was "listening to what people tell me." He documented the context in which people lived. In so doing he made their lives real to the rest of us, making them somehow more human, more understandable.

Tomorrow we head to the election polls. As we do, each of us carries with us the context of our lives, our work and those values, beliefs, hopes and dreams that have shaped us. This will guide how we vote and for whom. It can really be no other way. In some ways it is like the real estate adage, it is 'location, location, location." I had a seminary professor who said we shape our theology in much the same way. Our location, where we live, our work, our life experiences,shapes what we believe and what we don't, and guides our understanding of God.

The real task of being a citizen is to try as much as we can to see, not just our own lives, but the lives of others, the whole of what it means to be the most privileged country in the world, as we make our choices. The real task is to look toward what will be the good for all the people and not just our own particular context. It is a difficult thing to do. But if being a citizen of the United States of American means anything it must mean that we work in all the ways we can to be just that….united.

It is a privilege not to be taken lightly. Vote.

So here we are. We have a choice to make. ~Studs Terkel