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Beloved:
Every now and then I hanker for a different house. Something smaller to neglect like I neglect my current rooms and flower beds. Just the thought of moving kills the hankering, and I remember that I can only ever occupy a single spot on earth – so how about I occupy this one fully? I might choose to watch the seasons pass through the trees of this backyard. To learn the different sounds of traffic on this stretch of highway. Were I to pay attention long enough, I might become an expert of this place, the expert not only of this plot of ground but the terrain of this particular human heart. If I could just stay here, of course, which is the hardest exercise of all. Trusting there’s nothing inside the memories and dreams which I cannot afford to sift through, like forgotten souvenirs. “They can be ours to relive and be glad for, or to weep over and forgive,” Richard Rohr* writes, “without ever having to fix them.” So, practicing the wanting to stay put is my thing these days. It hardly rolls off the tongue like prayer or contemplation but amounts to pretty much the same. Be here, Now. In this house, with these people. On this ground, with these plants and animals. In this body. In this mind. In this heart with all its shadows and regrets. Visit often and stay longer every time, long enough to discover that there is always more to see and hear. More light. More beauty. More life, than we can ever, ever hope to comprehend. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette * Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs - The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, Crossroads Publishing, 2003
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September 18, 2018
Beloved: A little one in church this week had an especially hard time sitting still. At children’s story time she roamed up to my lap and then took a lap around the room on her way back to her seat, sing-songing all the way. Later we had a little chat, about how important it is to listen. As if I know anything at all to be giving her advice. Of all the time I say I spend at prayer, it’s but a fraction that I’m praying. My thoughts wander like a herd of goats to every corner of my mind. Things I need to do today . . . what I ate last week . . . the weeds that fill my garden . . . is that bird a rooster or a hen . . . is that a freckle or do I have cancer? Nothing is too small a speculation to pull me from my prayers. Every saint I’ve ever read reports the same phenomenon: the impossibility of prayer – along with its grace; how, despite its aggravations, the very act of trying has some way of righting the world just a little more. One says that his prayers are like a donkey that keeps escaping from the barn. The work of prayer is gently leading him back every single time. For all her wiggly antics, the little one at church loves church. She’s always glad to be there. She dances during hymns and sings when it’s not her turn. She passes out hugs like candy canes on Christmas. Who’s to say she’s not way ahead of us, when it comes to knowing how to be when we come before the Lord? Do take care, dear people. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
Turns out my ash tree isn’t special but just another victim in a scourge that begin in Michigan sixteen years ago. A pretty little green bug apparently crossed the ocean hiding in a wooden Chinese shipping crate and her family migrated in every direction. Emerald ash borer is her common name, and one clan can suck the life from a small elm in months, from a giant one like mine in three or four years. They’ve killed tens of millions of trees in North America and Canada already, and they are found further from Michigan all the time. I am both horrified and wildly impressed at the industry of such tiny creatures. What they do with their jaws humans can only do with hard hats and rigging. Oh, and saws. Lots of very noisy saws! There must be millions of bugs in my tree by now, chewing all the time. I wonder what it sounds like to their little ears. Do they have some tiny noise-cancelling earmuffs built into their tiny heads? Of course I’ve never stood and listened to my tree. Maybe it’s alive with sound to those with ears to hear. My neighbors already think I’m crazy, so I might as well go take a listen. I can’t afford five thousand nor for the tree to fall on my house, so we agreed that he will take down one of the four giant trunks and let the rest fall into my yard and forest, tomorrow or next year. Then the day will last a little longer, since the giant ash tree is to the west. The sun sinks behind it for several minutes before touching the next treetop line. I will miss her but I rather like knowing these are our last days together. I’ll pay better attention to her now, I think, and be grateful that we were here at the same time. All of life is so fleeting, isn’t it, and yet each moment is so full. I pray the day is full of life and love for you today. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette September 4, 2018
Beloved: Nature is the hiding place of God. ~ Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs Within another paragraph or two I want to close the book and scream, I feel so overwhelmed. In the simplest of terms, Rohr exposes God’s movement in the cicada buzzing on my porch floor, the begonia at my elbow, quivering a breeze too slight for me to feel. Once seen, it cannot be unseen and seeing is painful, both for its beauty and its sorrow. What kind of people might we be, could we live as seeing people, treasuring every element as the heart of life itself? How might we regard each other, with tenderness at the very least, rightly shy to ruin something presently so fine? We humans mostly choose a different course, one that seems less sorrowful to bear. We narrow down our focus to the necessary duties of one job, one house, one family. “This is more than I can manage,” we say, and mostly it feels true. “I’d like to manage something else” is the harder truth to tell. There’s awesome pressure in this world to have the perfect family, house, career; kids competent in class and sports; and colleagues convinced you pull your weight. Who has time to see a hummingbird flitting at the glass when there are bills to pay this week? Here’s the part of seeing that is so overwhelming: once seen, God cannot be unseen. God is at the grocery store - in the cheerful clerk teaching the Chinese student how the checkout line works, while her line backs up endlessly. God is in the power of those legs on the high school soccer field. Right there, buried in our to-do lists, God is hiding in plain sight. More than I can bear, almost, for the beauty of its presence and the sorrow of having missed it even once before. How can anyone sit still for so profound a revelation! ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette August 28, 2018 Beloved: The light and air are changing from summer to September. It’s still hot as blazes everywhere but I see my daisies and tomatoes passing from their prime. The sedum won’t peak for a few more weeks, nor the Purple Beautyberry (calicarpa americana) shrub. They are the stars of their own show. The racket in the woods sounds like elephants but is actually just squirrels. They drag enormous dead leaf bundles up the trees to refurbish winter nests.  Mornings on the porch are precious time to me. Connecting with my neighborhood of trees and birds and dogs, the squirrels who rob my garden. I like imagining they don’t know this is my house, that I’m the one making mortgage payments. That to them it’s just another part of home, a nice gutter for a nest, a rest stop for some nectar, a pipe to store this winter’s nuts. A good housekeeper drives them away. A good neighbor shares the space. My hope is to split the middle. The nuts stored in my drainage tile never go away and cause all kinds of water problems, so I blast that with a power hose. The next can stay until the babies fly away or it falls into the downspout - whichever one comes first. Spider webs can stay forever because of the way dew beads hang there like diamonds in the morning.
Eyes to see, Jesus said over and over, eyes to see. Eyes to see the riches money can never buy. Knowing even still that time to sit and watch the morning is the privilege of a few. A chair, a porch, coffee in the quiet . . . . . eyes to see the privilege I enjoy. Would that seeing would become believing that this privilege is so much more than blessing. It’s an arsenal, a deep, deep reservoir of power and advantage with which to bend this world’s ways in the direction of justice, decency, goodness, kindness and grace. For all of us with time for early morning prayers, may the strength we draw be strength we spend on the work to which God has called us. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
August 7, 2018 Beloved: This morning’s prayer book wanted me to reflect on vulnerability, and the resistance in me was deep and wide. I kept wanting to modify the topic to humility, as though humility is a virtue while vulnerability is a condition to be borne. Deep in me lies the assumption that vulnerability is a word that I apply to the poor and weak who are systematically vulnerable to many dangers, toils and snares that more privileged people like me easily avoid. Wide is my preference to use the word humility when thinking and speaking of the choice to be smaller rather than larger, quieter rather than louder, to take less instead of more, to give more instead of less.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. ~ Philippians 2:5-8 [NRSV] Paul’s hymn, just like my Scottish prayer book, reads as if humble and vulnerable are far closer than my embedded definitions. Vulnerability may be chosen by anyone who calls herself Christ’s own.
~peace & prayers, pastor annette July 31, 2018
Beloved: Another whole month of summer to go and the garden I put in has exploded. All I did this year was gourds, tomatoes, zinnias, sunflowers, and herbs. The chickens scratched up all the sunflowers and half the zinnias and gourds but I still have loads of blooms and fat fruit on the vine. I am ever amazed at how much the ground gives back compared to how little effort I put in. Also, the rain. It has rained and rained for days. Scout and Rosie lay in the garage and sigh for all the smells they’re missing. Or maybe they sigh to smell the rain. For now, they’ve passed out from starvation because I haven’t made their breakfast. On other calendars, summer is nearly gone. The lull of a college town summer lasts just long enough to be shocked when they return. “Were there this many students last year?” say all the townies every August. School supplies around here include crayons and cars. So many cars. I once saw a Mercedes delivered to a dorm! I read there will be approximately 43,000 IU students this year and as we know they can go a little crazy when they first arrive. But one blessing is when don’t have to wonder what our job is, pray and watch. We can pray for them like we pray for our own kids: that they’ll be smarter and safer than their own brains invite them to be. I am ever grateful for the Georgia mom who stopped and stayed with my own college kid after a scary car wreck. I don’t even know her name but she is everything to me. Just to be here to pray and watch may mean everything to people the world over, whose darlings have been entrusted to us. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
The struggle to enjoy my house without loving it too much is something of a quandary; a quotidian mystery, Kathleen Norris calls it. The great privilege of having things and the great responsibility to have them rightly. The ease with which we slip into assuming we have earned them, suggesting people with less haven’t worked as hard. The terrible sin of complaining about their upkeep – the time, the money, the energy – as if we are somehow beset with trouble for having a roof that needs replacing.
This world is our poorest teacher when it comes to what we need. Prayer is our only hope. Father Richard writes that the only person who prays well is the person who prays often.* I’m trying and mostly failing to learn not to pray from my belly or my brain, from what my body and my feelings say I need. Mostly they don’t know. Mostly anxiety, fear and boredom are telling them what to say. “You are fine,” the Spirit says, another voice to whom I can choose to listen . . . and believe, should I choose to live by the faith I claim I do. All that we possess is so much less than the spirit of God within and among us even now. Knowing so and living so are nothing like the same. Only living so brings about the greater graces of our faith, namely peace. Peace with our place in the world. Peace in our relationship with others. Peace with our possessions. So easily said, while the practice takes a lifetime. I wish you much courage on this day of our journey. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette *Richard Rohr, Simplicity; The Freedom of Letting Go, (Crossroads Publishing: New York, 1991), p. 100. July 17, 2018 For Sarah A. who reminded me that people are waiting patiently to hear what is going on with my chickens.
Would that we might also find the peace that comes with trusting in the One who designed the system in the first place, that we all might eat and drink and sleep in peace.
~ peace & prayers, pastor annette |
I write a Tuesday morning devotional to members and friends of UBC. It is also posted here.
Enjoy! Pastor Annette Copyright
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