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| Planting Out Joy Williams source |
What is in front of you this week welcoming you to embrace life?
Every Riven ThingGod goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky, man who sees and sings and wonders whyGod goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into the stillness whereGod goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to seeGod goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made
Christian Wiman, from Every Riven Thing (2010).
all readings for the day: Psalm 20; Judges 9:7-15; 1 John 2:18-28
May the Lord answer us in the day of trouble!
May the name of the God of Jacob protect us!
May he send us help from the sanctuary
and give us support from Zion!
May he remember all our offerings
and regard with favor our burnt sacrifices! SelahMay he grant us our heart's desire
and fulfill all our plans!
May we shout for joy over our salvation,
and in the name of our God set up our banners!
May the Lord fulfill all our petitions!Now I know that the Lord saves his anointed;
he will answer us from his holy heaven
with the saving might of his right hand.
Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.
They collapse and fall,
but we rise and stand upright.O Lord, save the king!
May he answer us when we call.
Write a poem prayer to God today. If you feel like you can't write your own words, use those of a Psalm or a poem and adapt it to your own life and desires.
"The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides."
Ice Storm
Jane Kenyon
For the hemlocks and broad-leafed evergreens
a beautiful and precarious state of being. . . .
Here in the suburbs of New Haven
nature, unrestrained, lops the weaker limbs
of shrubs and trees with a sense of aesthetics
that is practical and sinister. . . .
I am the guest in this house.
On the bedside table Good Housekeeping, and
A Nietzsche Reader. . . . The others are still asleep.
The most painful longing comes over me.
A longing not of the body. . . .
It could be for beauty-
I mean what Keats was panting after,
for which I love and honor him;
it could be for the promises of God,
or for oblivion, nada; or some condition even more
extreme, which I intuit, but can't quite name.
"I could not count count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response, I read something in the paper that I would normally have read to him. I notice some change in the neighborhood that would interest him: [...] I recall coming in from Central Park one morning in mid-August with urgent news to report: the deep summer green has faded overnight from the trees, the season is already changing. We need to make a plan for the fall, I remember thinking. We need to decide where we want to be at Thanksgiving, Christmas, the end of the year.
I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back. "I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense," C.S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. "It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs."I wish that Ms. Didion had been able to draw on a more substantive grasp of the reality of resurrection hope in some of her conclusions. The sort of deep magic that grounds us all -- doomed for the sitting down to death in an ordinary instant -- to the most real thinking of all.
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We were ready for a congregation. But where? |
"And now ten years later I was not only a Presbyterian but, of all things, a Presbyterian pastor. The move from Pentecostal to Presbyterian didn't seem like a big thing at the time. It still doesn't. Certainly nothing that could be called a crisis. I was not aware that I was changing any part of what I believed, and certainly not how I lived . But was I still Pentecostal?
I assumed I was. I hadn't renounced anything that I had grown up believing. I wasn't aware that my Christian identity had eroded in any way.
[...] I was not aware of choosing to be a Presbyterian. I didn't go over the options available to me, study them, interview representative men and women, assess the pros and cons, pray for discernment, and then apply for membership. The Presbyterians needed a coach for their basketball team. I knew how to do that and did it. But as the months added up to years, I kept being assigned to Presbyterian churches for seminary fieldwork. I was never self-consciously a Presbyterian. I am still not. But something was goin on, incrementally, that formed an identity that vocationally fused Pentecostal and Presbyterian. Later I learned that there was a name for it: presbycostal.
What I needed, but didn't know that I needed, the Presbyterians offered me: the gift of a living tradition. I grew up in the West in a town that was only forty-three years old when I was born. Pentecostalism as a denomination was even younger than that. I was a child of the first generation of Pentecostalism in America. Growing up, I had almost no knowledge or awareness, maybe none,t hat anything of Christian significance had taken place between the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem ten days after Jesus had ascended into heaven and the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles in 1903 that marked the birth of Pentecostalism in America. My church history consisted of the names of half a dozen evangelists holding tent revivals in the Northwest.
[...] As an adolescent, I much preferred [evangelist] Jimmy McGinnis - I knew his son [from playing each other in high school basketball] - to Martin Luther, who had been dead five hundred years. As a Pentecostal, church history was a current event. I felt sorry for my Lutheran friends who had to dig out their stories from the cemeteries. But now as a Presbyterian adult, I was discovering that my Christian family tree had roots all over the world and through twenty centuries. Presbyterianism grafted me into immense continuities of prayer and worship, of saints and artists, of countries and continents. I begant to relish the sense of stability, of continuity, of being on speaking terms with personal names that held stories that touched my own and extended it. There was texture and depth to be explored, intricacy and complexity. There was far more to learn and assimilate about the Christian way than the latest stories, wonderful as they were, of Jimmy McGinnis and his ilk. ...
[...] I wasn't about to give up any of my Pentecostal identity -- but I also realized that I could never be a pastor worth his salt if I couldn't integrate it into my Presbyterianism, a tradition that puts me into a comprehensive speaking relation with all my brothers and sisters in all forms that the church takes across the country and through the centuries...
Pentecostalism and Presbyterianism were for me both irreplaceable gifts, polarities that made a continuum, not opposites in tension."
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Reading The Pastor with Brian, April 2011 |
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Reading The Pastor with Brian (and Leo), September 2015 |
“The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees--
to learn something of being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention”
-- Mary Oliver, “Entering the Kingdom”
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| via Death to the Stock Photo |
Get us to the place
A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain. This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines -- they are a way of sowing to the Spirit. The Disciplines are God's way of getting us into the ground; they put us where he can work within us and transform us. By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.
Richard Foster , Celebration of Discipline
via the daily asterisk*
"I'm choosing not to write so that I can make space to follow God in other things He's asking me to do right now."Probably the most true way to say it is this:
"I'm choosing not to write because on some days I'm trying to obey God and make space for other things He's asking me to do. On other days I'm just plain pissed about the things God's asking me to do and not writing is my way of getting even."Truth is, God gave us these amazing gifts of four children and a move to Austin to pursue Brian's ordination and relationship in a vibrant, healthy worship community, and an introduction to creamy jalapeno sauce. Growing up requires me to recognize that good gifts come with responsibility. My having to work full time, or lose sleep over my kids being flung hither and yon into adulthood, or deal with anxiety related to becoming a priest's wife, or roll up my sleeves to invest in this healthy worship community, or start eating more vegetables and fewer tacos are all decisions grown up people make in order to steward the abundance of good gifts that come down like lights from the Father.
“Sabbath is the time set aside to do nothing so that we can receive everything, to set aside our anxious attempts to make ourselves useful, to set aside our tense restlessness, to set aside our media-satiated boredom. Sabbath is the time to receive silence and let it deepen into gratitude, to receive quiet into which forgotten faces and voices unobtrusively make themselves present, to receive the days of the just completed week and absorb the wonder and miracle still reverberating from each one, to receive our Lord's amazing grace.” ― Eugene H. Peterson, Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers
In what ways do you practice Sabbath?
What art speaks to you of rest -- in general or in a particular work?
It would mean so much to me to hear from you.
