This past week I was listening to a group of people talk about how a particular political situation might unfold. One person made the statement that has had my mind reeling all week.” It really will be about the art of the question.”, he said. Sensing they were in the presence of wisdom and poetic wisdom at that, the panel of people actually stopped talking and took a breath together, something rarely witnessed in the often dry, didactic ways in which these conversations go.

The art of the question. The shaping of a good question, one that will illicit deep truth, exceptional creativity, a longed-for hope, is indeed an art. Crafting a question takes time to listen to the inward, intuitive voice. After the listening comes the sorting of the words that want to elbow their way into the spotlight, gently pushing them aside in favor of those that linger at the back of the stage. Carefully, this word and then that one is chosen until the question begins to come to life. Sometimes words are shifted around, like a puzzle, until they fit just perfectly. Then, and only then, does the punctuation mark get its proper place at the end of the outflowing letters. Spoken with that lilt upward at the end of the sentence, this artfully created question can lead to a new path, an answered longing, a definitive affirmative or a confident negative.

Hearing the phrase ‘the art of the question’, reminded me of those early days as a parent when children came home from school and I would begin the interrogation of the day in which I had had no part. Asking what were probably quite artless questions, I received the artless answers the questions deserved. “How did it go today?” “Fine.” “What did you like best today?” ”Recess.” (Or the second favorite answer, ‘lunch’.) “Did you learn anything new?” “ No.” Sound familiar to anyone? Over the years I think I learned to ask more well crafted questions and began to get a clearer sense of how our sons’ days were unfolding at school. It was all about how I asked the question.

Asking questions implies a relationship that can run deep. Asking questions says to another person that we care about their opinion, their feelings, their experience. And when we ask our questions well we also forge a connection between our own life experience and a new understanding grows. I tend to believe this to be Spirit-work…work that holds relationships in a tension with the unseen More… and work our world sorely needs.

Reflecting on questions this week, I was reminded of some that have stuck with me. “To be or not to be? That is the question.”, Hamlet ponders. “Who do you say I am?”, asks Jesus. “Tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”, writes poet Mary Oliver. Letting those three very different questions wrap themselves around me gives me pause and takes me in a million directions searching for the answers. This is only one of the gifts of a really good question. The asking allows the one who answers to reveal something deep and lasting and wonderful.

What questions are you walking with these days? Are the questions well formed or do they need the touch of your artist hand? Somehow I feel that these days in which we find ourselves will be best served by being present to the creative acts of listening, of crafting and asking good questions and listening, really listening, to the other. It is holy work. And just imagining it brings such hope for a way forward.

Last week I was revisiting one of Krista Tippett’s On Being podcasts. While I listen to this in real time each week, I often like to listen again to ones that are particularly rich. Her guest was Marilyn Nelson, a professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut and a poet. I remembered being taken with this interview when I heard it a few months ago and it was a joy to hear it again. In the hour long conversation, the two women spoke of ‘communal pondering’. It was a phrase that just jumped out and grabbed me. Communal pondering…an act of being in silence, or at least prolonged quiet, with others. The actual title of the podcast was ‘Communal Pondering in a Noisy World.’

Noisy world! There is so much ‘noise’ that makes up our days, isn’t there? I think of all the ways in which sound, noisy or otherwise is our daily bread. The sounds assaulting us are not always words, of course. Traffic sounds are background music. Machines of all kinds hum or clank or roar outside our windows.  All our devices with beeps, dings and inane tunes that signal someone is trying to reach us, tell us something often not that important, rarely urgent.

Communal pondering in the midst of all this seems so sane to me. Something born of a deep wisdom that often seems just outside our reach. Rolling the phrase around in my mind, I thought of the old hymn, ‘Praise to the Lord, the Almighty’ with its lyric’ Ponder anew, what the almighty can do.’ I laughed thinking about what the Almighty would have to do to get our attention in the flurry of the noise that often surrounds every waking moment.

As I listened to the women talk about this experience of communal pondering I began to realize that it was so much more than being alone in meditation or even prayer. It was more active than that. What they were inviting people to consider was the experience of sitting with, fully present to others around with the intention of being still enough, quiet enough, to hear not only our own breath but the breath of the other. In doing so, we also might be able to hear the Breath of the Other. We might actually hear ‘what the Almighty can do.’  It seems an invitation ripe for our time, doesn’t it? I wondered how much calmer my days would be if I turned from the seductive noise that calls to me like a siren song and instead engaged in the deliberate act of pondering. Something tells me it might make for more grounded days.

The irises are in full bloom in our garden right now. They ask nothing more of me and anyone else that happens by than to ponder them. Ponder their beauty. Ponder their presence. Ponder the miracle of them. Ponder their fragility and their fleeting nature, not unlike our own. Perhaps, as I ponder their life, they are also pondering mine. If so, we are engaging in some very fine communal pondering.

The Almighty would be pleased, I believe.

“Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.”
~Lord Byron

I hadn’t thought of her in years. I can’t even remember her name. A distant memory of her was jogged when I read an article yesterday in the newspaper about two schools, a Catholic school for girls, and a Muslim school for girls. The wise adults, teachers, had had the brilliant, good sense to connect some of the girls as ‘pen pals’. Pen pals!  By email these young girls had been linked through the power of words and keyboards and the back and forth of language that moves slowly enough to allow thoughtful, gentle questions and answers, and the art of waiting for response.  And stories, I am sure, for what would pen pals be without sharing the stories of their lives?

When I was in sixth grade, I acquired a pen pal. I don’t remember which wise adult caused this to happen. Because I can’t remember her name, I will call her Elizabeth(which may be right). Though I can’t fully remember her name, I can however conjure up a grainy, image from black and white photos we sent back and forth several times. Elizabeth was special because she agreed to write to me. And she was special because she lived in the land of John, Paul, George and Ringo…England. She became a real-live connection with the land of the objects of my devotion and the recipients of all my allowance, the Beatles. Elizabeth and I wrote about what was happening in school, our families, our friends, what magazines we read, which Beatles songs we were crazy about at the time. It was the give and take of young girls’  letter writing. Writing to her introduced me to those tissue paper, blue, ‘air-mail’ foldable letter and envelope combinations. Walking to the post office in my small town and purchasing these seemingly exotic items meant for places I had never been but longed to go, fueled my desire to see the world, to know people whose lives were different than my own. It planted something in me that continues to this day.

In the newspaper, there is a picture of some of the girls from these two schools meeting for the first time. Their youthful, beautiful faces are full of excitement and expectation to meet the one whose words had passed between them. While their school uniforms could have marked their differences, the photos shone forth their faces full of welcome and recognition…and joy. What may have seemed difference was overshadowed by delight. I was excited for them and what they might be learning from one another. I thought of the seeds of understanding and hope that may have been passing between them. And I thought of how they were probably sharing the normal things girls that age share, just like my pen pal and I did those years ago.

Letter writing may have become a lost art. Some might say so. But the teachers in these two schools knew something and they acted on it. They knew that when people put words on paper, or a screen, and send them to one another, they become linked in significant ways. Their words become the invisible lines of connection where understanding and compassion can be built. Their words can become the world-expanding stage that catapults people to travel to places they never dreamed, to learn of ways of being in the world they never imagined. Their words can be the seeds of peace the world longs for and desperately needs.

Did you ever have a pen pal? When was the last time you wrote a letter? When was the last time you received one? I am thankful to have thought of ‘Elizabeth’ who was once my pen pal…across an ocean I dreamed of crossing…whose life helped opened me to the beauty of the world I longed to see and experience.

Maybe it is time for another pen pal.

Sometimes we need a wake up call…a moment when it becomes clear what matters, what is true, what binds us together as humans. In all the ways our last days and months have floated along the surface of roiling waters, words and pronouncements flying toward us so furiously that we are in a constant state of upheaval and confusion, it is so good to have at least a moment of reminding. Here. Look at this. Stay focused on that. Breathe. Deeply.

I had just such a moment on Saturday morning. It was a moment that extended into several minutes and held me in the rest of the way the day unfolded. I made my first trip of the year to the St. Paul Farmers Market. The colder, wetter weather and some weekend commitments had prevented it until Saturday. Parking a distance away, I began to see people, bags empty, walking in metered anticipation toward the rows of trucks and tables lining the street. There was a lightness in their step fueled by the Sun’s warm and glorious rays and the sweet smell of trees blooming along the boulevard.

Arriving at the market itself, I stopped and allowed the sights of both merchants and buyers moving to and fro to wash over me. I looked for the familiar…there were the ‘chicken sisters’, as I think of them, selling their organic eggs and various forms of popular poultry. There was the dear one named ‘Joy’ who sells gently used quilts, rag rugs and clothing, throwing her head back in the laughter that mirrors her name. There was the Hmong farmer whose lined and lovely face and dancing eyes always looks you square on as he hands you the veggies in season for that week. And standing near by, the maple syrup maker in his signature bib-overalls looking like an ad luring Scandinavians who might think of moving to Minnesota, beamed his seemingly ever-present smile. Ahh…yes. All this. Steady. Constant. True.

Walking among the rows of tables filled with early produce…rhubarb, asparagus, radishes…and other veggies that have been grown in greenhouses, I felt my shoulders relax and my breathing deepen. It was a walking meditation of sorts. I caught the eye of certain farmers filled with the hope and promise of what is yet to be in this early season. I watched as vendor and customer greeted one another with hugs of recognition happy to see that both had survived yet another winter. They had easily fallen into another season and it was unfolding for my very eyes. Periodically, I stopped and drank in the color of flowers destined for decks and yards and porches. An awesome array of brilliance and bounty! Children gawked from strollers as their adults traded money for the sugary donut treat of a Saturday morning.

“What a wonderful world!”, I thought. And how easily I forget and believe only in the steady stream of the negative always in abundant supply. Yet, here it was. So much of what is right, of what matters, was shining everywhere around me like fireworks after a 4th of July picnic. The promise of seed teamed with soil and sun, water and hard work sparkled…food full of sacrifice and lusciousness. Gifts of Creation and Creator.  People connecting, hands clasping, arms reaching out, sharing what people need to fuel body and soul. The simplicity of humanity coming together in the beauty of a spring morning, being present to one another and the gift of the day. All the arguments, harsh words, threats and fears, real or imagined, paled in the magnitude of this scene, this experience. Confronted with much of what really matters, the preoccupation with the tight-fisted nature of the past week seemed a waste of precious energy, precious life.

Headed back to my car, my bag full of beautiful food and my heart full of hope, I thought of Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for Living a Life:  Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” It seemed to make so much more sense than anything I had heard all week.

I am glad I allowed myself the gift of paying attention. I am humbled by the astonishment. And I am privileged to tell about it.

We are a thirsty people. I was reminded of it this week when we gathered around a beautiful labyrinth painted to resemble a beach and the water that lapped against it and on it. We gathered, a thirsty people, to pray for those around the world who live with a scarcity of water. Or water that stands stagnant and poison. Or water that is laced with chemicals too dangerous for children or other living things. Or water that must be carried for long distances in fragile and fractured vessels by women whose work is already heavy and thankless.

I was reminded of the thirst we humans share when I prayed this prayer written by Edward Hoyt, CRS:

And was we gaze upon this land that so thirsts for your water
Let it remind us of all the thirsts of the world:
The thirst for justice
The thirst for peace
The thirst for opportunity
The thirst for reconciliation
The thirst for hope.

So many thirsty longings. We know that our bodies can live quite a long time without food. Though hungry, our bodies will continue to feed off itself as muscle and fat wastes away. But we perish without water…that element that makes up the largest part of who we are. Our thirst is what can be our undoing.

I am thinking now of the children of Flint, Michigan and all the other places where literal water has been harmful to the growth and future of those who call it home. I am thinking about all the children who are thirsty for nurturing words, kind touch, affirming actions. I am thinking of the wise ones, old with years, who ache for companionship, who suffer the dehydration of loneliness. I am thinking about all those who are thirsty for another chance to prove their worth, to show what they can do, to offer their gifts. I am thinking of all those who thirst to be seen, to be heard, to be known.

We are a thirsty people. Our thirsts run deep and our connections are often frayed. But I believe we harbor within a cup of compassion that is held out to us by the One who breathed us all into being, the One who longs to quench thirst and bring life.

And when your blessings rain from the sky
As assuredly they will
And we kneel again at the pools and fountains
Teach us to cup our hands
And gently,
gracefully,
in solidarity
Turn first, and share with one another.

May it be so. May it be so.

On Wednesday I joined with countless other people who make their faith home in the Christian household in receiving ashes on my forehead for Ash Wednesday. With this we the began the season of Lent. It is not a practice I was raised with in my Protestant, Baptist-influenced United Methodist Church in Ohio. I probably had not seen evidence of the black smudges until I went to college. It was there that I observed certain members of my community, in classes and in the dorm, walking around for a full day with what seemed a dirty face. Curious, I learned what it was and maybe even why it was. But it still had little meaning to me. It did not seem to include me in its visual sign of being a part of the faithful.

Over the years, many outside the Roman Catholic tradition have embraced this practice and now in most protestant churches the beginning of the forty days of Lent begin with some kind of service of ashes. It has become one of my favorite services of the church year. It is tactile. It is earthy. It is rife with truth and deep in emotion. It gets to the grit of what it means to be a spiritual being having a bodily experience.

“From the earth you have come…and to the earth you will return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The only other time we hear these words, the only other time I say them is at the graveside of a dear one who has made the fullness of their journey. Birth. Life. Death. Rebirth. Looking into the eyes of someone fully alive, standing right in front of you, breathing, and saying these words is powerful beyond measure. Fingers laced with the black of ashes created by the palms of last year’s palm fronds, I touch the sometimes furrowed, often shiny, soft, weathered, sensitive skin of another. The mark from my finger stays on the face of one who is also God’s Face in the world. It stays with me for the days that follow.

Before receiving the ashes, we all are reminded through scripture, song, prayer and confessing words, that over the last year, since last Lent, we have fallen short of God’s original blessing in us, the blessing God speaks over Jesus at his baptism and at the birth of each of us: “You are my beloved…I take great pleasure in you.” Since last year we, each of us, has known brokenness, been hurtful, excluded, shamed, oppressed, maimed the spirit of another blessed creature of the One who breathed us all into being. Ash Wednesday gives us the time to fess up, make amends, and remember that our lives are finite. In that, we pray, we hope, we intend to live more fully, more gently, more kindly, more lovingly, after the example of our brother Jesus.

Doing the work that I do, privileged and blessed work, I am aware of that finite nature. The cycle of birth, life, and death does not always come at an age that is full in years. We know this. We try to forget. We want to believe that we have all the time in the world. And then we think of all those we know who did not, who do not. The practice of receiving ashes can be a reminder, if we let it, that we are all on an uncertain journey of time but one that can return us again and again to the Holy, the One who meets us face to face, touches us gently and asks that we live fully now. Now.

Jan L. Richardson, artist and poet ends a poem blessing for Ash Wednesday in this way:

……..This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are
but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

And to this I simply say, amen.

Like many people, the last several months have left me at a loss for words. While our airwaves are filled with more syllables than most normal humans can process in a day, I have been rendered somewhat mute by the state of our nation and our world. This lack has carried over into my ability to write in this space or nearly any other. The fact of the matter is, with my Mother’s voice not far from my consciousness “If you can’t something nice, don’t say anything at all.”, I have been unable to speak or write anything at all. The inability to find the right words, the best words, the kind words, the balanced words,the sensible words, has been a constant, silent companion.

Perhaps this has not been the worst thing. Over and over again in my life I have been, as most people have, in the presence of people who speak without thinking, whose opinions fly quickly from their lips,often to their own embarrassment or even peril. Those who allow their mouths to move without a measured thought process can often cause more harm than good. I would like to believe that, at least in the last several months, I have not been among them. If I have, I apologize and hope that any words I have said have not been harmful to anyone’s spirit.

The other side of this coin is that words are important to me. I love them. I love to use them. This place of silence or of silencing myself has come at a cost. And so, as we enter the season those in the Christian household call Lent, I am making my way back to words. I believe it will be a slow process and one I will not take lightly. At least, I hope not. My hope is that I will walk these days measuring my words with wisdom and care. Lent, after all, is meant to remind us of the counter-cultural lifestyle we are called to live after the example of Jesus. A man of measured words. A man of kindness and well chosen stories. A man who knew the power of silence and the practice of prayer.

This walk back into words actually came through a phrase I heard yesterday on a radio broadcast, a phrase that points toward a wordless act. I heard the story of a nun whose work was ‘the prayer of the loving gaze.’ This sister of an unnamed religious order, when at a loss for words in her prayer life, practiced focusing her eyes with love toward what was right in front of her. Another sister. The stranger on the bus. A flower blooming in a frigid winter. The sunrise. The sunset. All those whose faces and lives passed through her ordinary day. She fixed her gaze with love on the fullness of Creation, one view at a time. No words necessary. Only a full bodied presence and an open heart.

For some reason, the seeming ease of this lived prayer opened my heart and my mouth to words again. And for that I am grateful. This nameless, faithful sister’s practice offered itself to me and gave me a way of traveling into not only these days of Lent but into these often harsh days in which we live. Perhaps the words will continue to be difficult. And when they are, I will turn to the ‘prayer of the loving gaze.’ My sense is it might be what will help me be faithful…to the beauty, the terror, the gift, the grace, the challenge, and the Presence of the One who holds it all.

And so Lent begins….

A few weeks ago I met a friend for coffee at one of my favorite haunts on St. Paul’s Eastside. It is a cozy place that always displays local artist’s work on the walls and up a sunny staircase. I settled in with my cup of strong coffee and one of their signature spice cookies with brown-butter icing and began taking in the paintings that lined the equally buttery colored walls. Most were shadowy prints of people…probably musicians I know nothing about. But one painting grabbed my attention and I had to snap a photo of it…for its truth and its confrontation.

“We are all horrible & wonderful & figuring it out.” I thought of the truth of that statement and how I most often want it to be one or the other. We live, particularly in these days, in  a world that draws stark black and white, either-or, dualistic pictures of our fellow humans. Being horrible usually means those who don’t agree with my way of seeing things, my way of being in the world. Being wonderful means, of course, all those folks who see the world with a lens pretty similar to my own. Walking the balance of this tightrope is a constant battle.

While I may argue with the notion of being horrible, I have certainly done horrible things and will likely do many more before I leave this Earth. I wish it weren’t so. All humans have done horrible acts. As one who holds with the idea that each of us is created in the image of the Sacred, I lean toward the idea of being wonderful. And that shade of wonderful is a gift to everyone…even those who have a drastically different take of what Creation holds than I do. It is humbling.

But the part of this piece of artwork that is most compelling to me is the “ & figuring it out” piece. Every day is an act and an art of ‘figuring it out’, isn’t it? Every day I get up and am confronted once again with the myriad choices of horrible and wonderful. It becomes the breakfast cereal of dailiness…horrible? wonderful? And sometimes the fine line between those two carry shadows that make choice perplexing.

This morning I read the teaching of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn: “I take one breath to let go, one breath to be here, one breath to ask now what?” It seems to me this is our daily work as those who are both horrible & wonderful & figuring it out. Breathe in..let go what might be nudging us toward horrible. Breathe…be here and embrace the wonderful in us and in the world. Breathe…as we figure out the ‘now what’? Over and over and over.

Each day is another opportunity to figure it out. The energy and presence we bring to the world is our chance to shine forth the wonderful image of the Holy in which we were all created. It will, I believe, take much deep breathing.

Ready, set, go….

Another year, come and gone. It is a year that has known highs and lows…like all years. It is a year that has seen beauty and tragedy…like all years. It is a year that has seen moments of peace and deep divide…like all years. It is a year when love has been strong and hate an unwelcome companion…like all years. We have seen births that have brought joy and deaths that have ripped at our hearts. Illness has visited. Inspiration has triumphed. Creativity has blossomed. Failure has cut us to the quick. Despair and delight have been our dance partners.

And now we stand at the cusp of another year. Resolutions have been made. Goals have been set. Regrets have been named, forgiveness is within our reach. Hopes are ever present as they always are when the page on the calendar is turned and its newness, its blank canvas is before us. And while the numbering of days and the shift of the year is in some ways artificial, created for order from our human need, there is something about the turn of New Year. It spells another chance to become the fullness of who we believe ourselves capable of being.

As I have looked ahead to this new year with some trepidation, I have thought of a very short two verse poem written by Coleman Barks that made its way into a collection of poetry compiled for the turn of the millennium. Remember that? The power and promise of the year 2000!  Barks writes: “A child stood on his seat in a restaurant, holding the railing of the chairback, as though to address a courtroom, ‘Nobody knows what’s going to happen next.’ Then his turning-slide back down to his food, relieved and proud to say the truth, as were we to hear it.”

I remember the first time I read this, I laughed out loud…at the wisdom and audacity of the child…as I imagined the people in the restaurant’s reactions…as I imagined what my own might have been. But each time I read these words, I am struck again by their truth. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen next.” We may plan. We may hope. We may speculate. We may wring our hands and drop to our knees in fear or prayer or both. What will happen next still eludes us, is often outside our ability to shape it.

There is a deep sense of uncertainty that abounds as we enter this new year. Perhaps it is an uncertainty that many of us have never felt so profoundly. And still the truth is that we do not know what is going to happen next. And yet, as I have shared in the uncertainty and even given in to anxiety, the one thing that prevails for me is that I believe the Holy is in the midst of it all. I continue to believe that the Universe tilts toward goodness and that light is always stronger than any darkness that threatens.

And so I step into 2017 knowing little about what will happen next but confident of the One who breathed us all into being and walks with us through uncertainty each and every day and onward into eternity.

Blessed New Year to you all….