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