Cat's Light

I love twilight. It's my favorite time of day. I sat on my bed tonight observing the sun go down behind Montour Ridge in the southwest and the sky gradually darken from sky blue with gray and white clouds to the deep rich dark blue of twilight. I love the bare trees silhouetted against the clouds of the late afternoon sky and then against the twilight sky. I remember summer nights sitting on the back porch of our house in Hartford during the twilight. Watching the flock of pigeons someone had circling the block, their wings catching the last of the sunlight that day. The quiet and calm of that block in the midst of the city--gardens and grapevines and clotheslines and rose bushes and the beagles next door. So much nature in the midst of the city. The cat from next door I called Friend because she was so friendly and visited quite often. We were pregnant at the same time and I felt a kinship with her. She even brought her kittens visiting a few times.

And later afternoons in our house in Turbotville, walking down the road to see a view of the sun just disappearing over the hills to the west. Watching the sun actually getting smaller as the hills gradually hide it. Catching that moment when there is just a dot of light, then suddenly it's gone. Here on Montour Ridge, we watch the sun set through gaps in the trees, so we don't get a gorgeous sunset unless we are driving home through the fields below to the North--there we have spectacular views of the fields and distant hills topped by the western sky. Sometimes I stop to catch that moment when the sun winks out.

And here, at home on the Ridge, sitting on the back stoop; don't do that as often as I did in Hartford in the days before children, but I do it sometimes and I do often sit in my room and watch the sky at this time. I remember one night early in our days here being outside by the apples trees at twilight with the cats roaming around outside--cat's light, the twilight is called and it's appropriate. It's such a peaceful time of day. A time to turn on the lights of home and pause for a breath. The work of the day is winding down and that makes life more peaceful.

(I'm updating the look of my blog--still trying to find a good photo for the title.)

Just Me

I don't do heroics
I don't aspire to sainthood
of the canonical kind
Martyrdom, extreme suffering
are not for me
It's not that I don't love you, Lord
I'm just not cut of the same cloth
as St. Teresa or John of the Cross
I just want to be faithful
in everyday matters
Become more kind and more generous
little by little
day by day

No fasts of heroic proportions
No levitations or miracles
No millions saved or thousands fed
Just to become more
patient with my kids
less critical of my husband
more thankful and prayerful
Is enough for me

I don't want to be great, Lord
I just want to be
who You made me to be
Please don't expect
big things of me
Detachment and sacrifice are scary words
I just want to love better
the people in my life
I just want to appreciate
the gifts You give
To be awed at
Your love and creativity
I just want to live
present and peaceful
with what is before me
I just want to be a better me
'cause You made me and love me
and are always with me
And especially I never want to forget that
but live with awareness of Your
constant companionship

I want to be little and obscure
content with the roles I'm in
faithful to the tasks at hand
true to the relationships I'm in
open to You

Just me
I just want to be me
with You
Not the old me
the false me of sin
but me cleansed and free
The me You envisioned
when the world began
when You endured the cross
when You look at me now
Just me

Vocation

I read this morning that just like God made each flower with it’s own ‘personality’–shape, color, texture, habitat–He made each of us unique yet doesn’t want us to stand alone. He wants to place us with others to create a stunning ‘bouquet.’ So the question came to me, where do I fit? What am I called to do with my life and where? I think this question of vocation is one that many struggle with.

Perhaps my views of vocation are mistaken, leading me to miss my true vocation and the fact that I am already walking in it. I tend to think of vocation as one specific thing I will be called to do for the rest of my life, or at least for a long period. I tend to see it as an exterior ministry to others that I am fulfilling. I tend to see it as something I discover God has gifted me for and that in doing I find fulfillment and joy. But when I look at Jesus’ earthly life, I’m not sure I see this pattern.

Jesus spent most of his thirty years of his life in obscurity in His hometown of Nazareth working at a carpenter’s trade. Was this His vocation? Then he wandered around preaching, healing and being with his followers for nearly three years. Was that His vocation? His greatest achievement in terms of impact was His death and resurrection setting us free from sin and death. Was that His vocation? Or were they all His vocations for those specific periods of His life? At one point He said his food was to do the will of God (John 4:34). Another time He said, “the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever He does, that the Son does likewise.” Did Jesus think about vocation or did He just listen to God and follow the Spirit? And did He find joy in it or great sorrow, or a mixture of both? Several times He expressed exasperation with His disciples for their cluelessness. Neither did He find joy in every aspect of His ministry, though He did have expectations of future joy: “...for the joy that was set before Him [He] endured the cross,” And the most important question I can ponder is whether vocation something I am called to do or someone I am called to be. Jesus was the Beloved Son of God. Is His life defined by what He did or by who He was which was expressed in what He did?

As Catherine Doherty looking back on her life in her 77th year she realized that, though this activity and that activity she tried eventually failed, all the time she was walking in her true vocation which was really an interior one. In leaving her native Russia after the Revolution and coming as a refugee to Canada, living in a foreign land, speaking a foreign language, learning foreign ways, she was living her true vocation of being a poustinik, a desert dweller, a vocation of solitude, silence and prayer, a vocation of loneliness and sharing in the loneliness of God. She lived out this vocation in various places and various stages of her life. She didn’t even realize she was living it for she thought she was always seeking it. In seeking to follow God, to do His will, she was unknowingly living her vocation, being and becoming who God designed her to be, fitting into the bouquet of His body through her ministry of prayer, teaching and identifying with the poor as God led her.

I imagine I’ll keep stumbling over the question of vocation because I do so every so often. But when I do, God usually reminds me that in living in relationship with Him, in seeking to do His will, in allowing who He made me to be to blossom, I will walk in my calling contributing my uniqueness to His bouquet, perhaps without really knowing it.

July 14, 2009

Seeing

O, to see Your glory in the windward dance of trees.

O, to see Your glory in the ragged scudding clouds.

O, to see Your glory in bird prints etched on snow.

O, to see Your glory in star-spattered midnight blue sky

and frosty topped waves assailing glinty shore.

O, to hear Your glory in a child's desperate wail and a teenager's shy giggle.

In every taste--chocolate & coffee, sweat and wine.

In every smell--hyacinth & sulfur, manure and soap.

To feel You in every touch -- caress of wind, pain of burn, child's handclasp, friend's hug.

O, to see You peeking at me from every nook and cranny and blade and hair of creation!

To hear You whisper in every moan and whistle and bleat and wuther of live, living Life!

Open my eyes to see, Lord, for where I look, You are.

I wrote this several years ago when I was first learning to really see, really learning to live in the present moment and be in the present moment. Yet, looking back over my life, especially thinking of my childhood and youth, days spent wandering my family's 50 acres of woods and overgrown fields, noticing wild flowers and leaves, laying in a pastures gazing at clouds, marveling at the mass of purple violets filling the stream hollow, I realize I was seeing then, and though I didn't know it, God was at my side.

I've been reading a book about seeing in which the author says, "We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness. Little do we realize that God is maintaining us in existence with every breath we take." (Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs, p. 29) This echoes Acts 17:24-28, "The God who made the world and everything in it ... gives to all men life and breath and everything. ... he is not far from each one of us,
for `In him we live and move and have our being.' as well as Colossians 1:17 "in him all things hold together."

What we need, the author contends (and Jesus, as well as Buddha and many religious leaders and mystics) is to see, to become aware. God is already present in our lives. We don't need to look in the past, the future, the next state, the next church, the next relationship, the next book, the next retreat center. When we look at what is before us with openness and humility and faith, we will truly see. What is, is our teacher that will open our hearts to God's presence. Like a cup, we can be open and still, waiting to receive the gift of awareness of Presence.

The Folly of Hope

"Which of you walks in darkness and sees no light?
Let him trust in the name of Yahweh and lean on his God."
Isaiah 50:10

What a wonderful promise!
Where do I see little or no light?

As I ponder this question of where I see little or no light, I can come up with quite a depressing list in both in my immediate circle of concern and nation and world wide. Entrenched negative attitudes hurting the loved ones who hold them. On-going dryness in a friend’s life. Uncertainty regarding my childrens’ education. Declining morality in the US and Europe. Continued violence and suffering in Sudan. Persecution of Christians in Indonesia and many other countries. My own long-term sins.

Hebrews 11:1 tells us that, "Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen." I’ve learned over the years that I can rely on God, even when all seems dark and I can't see how light will come in dark situations. I can lean on Him and somehow, someway, in the end, all will be well. Maybe all won’t be the way I want it and all problems won’t be solved, but I can trust God and be at peace because His wise, loving ways will prevail. Even a godless king learned this lesson:

When the time was over, I, Nebuchadnessar, raised my eyes to heaven: my reason returned. And I blessed the Most High,
praising and glorifying him who lives forever,
for his empire is an everlasting empire,
his kingship endures, age after age.
All who dwell on earth count for nothing;
as he thinks fit, he disposes the army of heaven
and those who dwell on earth.
No one can arrest his hand
or ask him, "What have you done?"
Daniel 4:31-32

That we ‘count for nothing’ doesn’t mean that God doesn’t care for us–the Bible is abundantly clear that He does–but it does mean that compared to his power and ability, ours is nothing and, in the end, His will can’t be thwarted by us and that somehow, unbelievable as it seems, all will work out as he plans.

Thomas Merton says this well in Seasons of Celebration:
"The fact that the world is other than it might be does not alter the truth that Christ is present in it and that his plan has been neither frustrated nor changed: indeed, all will be done according to His will. Our Advent is a celebration of this hope. That is the audacity of Faith, the folly of Hope–to proclaim Him when all is crumbling and violent–the antithesis of a loving, merciful God who saves. (pp. 90-91)

And this is what we are called to do: to proclaim a Loving, Might God who ways will prevail when all is dark and hope seems foolish.

Chanticleer Garden

This past Wednesday a friend and I went to Chanticleer Garden outside Philly to spend the day. Since the trip was like a mini-retreat and the photos were part of my meditation, I direct you to them: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2023359&id=1462133121&l=cd22a3d34e

The Holy Trinity

Today is Trinity Sunday. While a three person in one God is impossible for us to truly comprehend, I like what I've read in recent years about the relational aspect of God this reveals to us and how we are invited to enter into the love relationship among the Godhead--Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Often metaphors help us to understand spiritual truths like the Trinity. St. Patrick used the shamrock to illustrate the three-in-oneness of the Trinity, the shamrock being like a clover with three distinct lobes on one leaf. One day last September, a metaphor came to me about the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity is like a tree with roots, trunk and leaves. The Holy Spirit is the roots supplying water. The Father is the trunk supplying support and tying all together. Jesus is the leaves, the most noticeable part of the tree, which fall to earth for a time then appear anew. The tree is all the parts together. They don't exist as separate entities yet each is distinct and has a distinct function in their integral union as does the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Distinct yet undivided
One in essence, three in Being
Mystery of Trinity.

Another significance for me of the Holy Trinity is related to the name I took when I was clothed in the Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites, Elizabeth of the Sacred Heart. This name has much significance for me, but I'll only share the Trinity-related one now. One of the Discalced Carmelite nuns I admire is Elizabeth of the Trinity who was a French Carmelite nun with a strong devotion to the Trinity. One of my favorite quotes from her is,

"I have found heaven on earth,
Because heaven is God
and God is in my soul. ...
Seeing that He is always with me,
prayer, heart-to-heart communication,
can never have an end."

My third Trinitarian thought is from Henry Nouwen on the Holy Trinity icon written by the Russian icon painter Andrew Rublev (http://tars.rollins.edu/Foreign_Lang/Russian/trinity.html) which portrays the Holy Trinity as the three guests who visit Abraham in Genesis 18. In his book, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons, Nouwen points out the invitation in this icon to enter the loving fellowship of the Trinity and to find our home within this House of Love.

"How lovely is thy dwelling place, O LORD of hosts!"
My soul longs, yea, faints for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God
Even the sparrow finds a home,

and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young, at thy altars, O LORD of hosts, my King and my God."
Psalm 84:1-3 Revised Standard Version