A rose - even dry, dusty and crushed, never stops being a rose

Really?  

Ash Wednesday is February 14?

Valentine's Day is Ash Wednesday?

Really?

So I wonder how your day has gone?  Off to church in the morning or at noon to confess your brokenness and receive the sign of ashes ... and then out for a candlelit dinner with your sweetie, hoping the low lights will help keep un-noticed the smudge on your forehead so your partner won't ask what you had to confess? 

Can you really do romance and confession on the same day?  Can sweet-talking to your honey and honest soul-searching with your priest and your faith community be done in the same 24 hours?

Maybe. Maybe it's even a wonderful gift that the calendar has given us this year.  (And just wait till you see when we get to celebrate Easter Sunday this year!)

Anyway ... back to Ash-Valentine's Wednesday.  

Roses are good (and yes, I still have to go out and buy some because I forgot on my way home!), and I'm sure Japhia will be glad for them, and I will be glad I got them.

But equally good and gladdening to us, I think, are the messy smudges of dried-out, dusty and even burned-in-the-cauldron-of-hurt-and-anger-and-honesty rose petal ashes we wear as the sign of being compelled to work over the years -- the last few especially, at the parts of life and relationship that lie beyond the first and even second or third blush of the roses. 

Thoughts (and action) on a snowy day

Snowed again today.

It's stopped now and the sun is shining.  But all morning and into early afternoon the air was full of big flakes, and a thick, fluffy fresh blanket of white was being laid upon the earth.

Today I loved it.  It looked beautiful.  It was easy to shovel.  It was such a nice day to be outside.  The snow was a wondrous excuse to get some exercise on a gorgeous day.

But I also know it was terrible for commuters; I saw the traffic reports.  Bad too for people with mobility issues; not many at the seniors' gym this morning.  And not good for people on the streets, the homeless, the vulnerable.

So I wonder about that little voice inside me that feels such an immediate need in most situations to evaluate and judge whether something is good or bad.  

It all depends, doesn't it? 

And maybe the real question in most situations -- today's snow included, is not whether it's good or bad, but what it calls from me.

Today I loved the snow, so I went out in it, cleaned off the car and drove to the gym, came home and shovelled the sidewalk and street, and loved every minute of it.  I felt blessed and gave thanks.

And when I think about the people inconvenienced or even threatened by the snow, what's to stop me from doing something to help them -- from showing love in some way?  Like contributing to a mission that brings sandwiches and new socks to people on the street.  Or like also shovelling the sidewalk (and it's a corner lot -- a lot of sidewalk) of the woman who lives next door, is older than me, and for the health of her heart should not be shovelling?

So I wonder.  Maybe the question in most situations of life is not at all, is it good or bad?  Maybe the better question that makes more sense is rather, what does it mean and what are the possibilities in this situation for me to be a person of love -- to feel loved and to show love to others?

The question of good and bad is impossible.  The question of how I feel loved and how I can show love to others really does seem much better.

A few moments of shared grace in the sanctuary of St Tim's

He was so happy to be able to share the good news with me.  I think he was as close as I have ever seen any person to being a cup of blessing that over-runneth.

I was sitting in Tim Horton's.  Not exactly just minding my own business.  I was sharing a tea break with a young man who has been attending our church for a few months.

And as soon as he (the joyfully over-flowing bearer of good news, not the young man I was chatting with) came into the Tim's and saw me, he came over and began talking.  Quite loudly and exuberantly.  With the biggest smile on his face, the most honest joy in his eyes, and the wonder of what he was sharing with me animating his whole body.

It was about the love of God shown to us in Jesus.  How Jesus died to save all people.  And that it really means all.  Not just the good people.  Not just the people who believe the right things.  Not just the people who do the things that make them (and us) count as "Christian" in the eyes of others.

But everyone.  Absolutely everyone.  Regardless of the limits and boundaries that we so often put on God's loving forgiveness and embrace.

Over and over the message spilled out of him.  That God's saving love embraces every single person in the world.  And how can this not affect the way I look at every person?  And how I look at what I consider all the things I do to make God love me (more than others)?

Only once and for a few fleeting seconds did I wonder what other people, not being able not to overhear, thought of this.  ("Hey honey, I went to Tim's today, and I think a church service broke out.")

But aside from those few regrettable seconds of self-consciousness, I was honestly happy to listen, to witness his joy, to take in the good news, and consciously let it shape the way I looked at others around me, and looked at myself as well.

The incident reminded me of taking my father-in-law to Tim Horton's in the later years of his life when some of his filters had begun to fade.  On one occasion as we stood waiting our turn to order our coffee and muffins, he turned to face the person behind us in line, looked the startled man in the eye, placed his right hand on the man's left shoulder, and said quite simply, "I would like to share a blessing with you, that I hope may change your life.  May I?"

The man said yes, probably not knowing what else he could say safely.

Then with all the easy solemnity of a man who had spoken these words at the end of many liturgies all his life, Bill said in a quiet, conversational tone: "The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace."

All the while looking the man straight in the eye and with his right hand resting on the man's left shoulder.  Then he dropped his hand.  He and the other man both smiled.

And we turned to go to the counter to order our coffee and muffins, and then go find a place to sit.

Who says that church -- or at least, the shared memory of God's love, can't break out anywhere we go?

Hallowing the days

Today was my fifth work-out at the gym since I began last week.

Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 8 am.  Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday barring illness or emergency.

The work-out feels good physically.  And just as good for my spirit is the simple regularity of the practice, and my grateful commitment to it.

I've long known about, admired and sometimes experienced the formative and healing effects of living in a way akin to monastic hours -- regular, daily practice of a wholistic cycle of activity, rest, study and prayer.  The most healing summer vacation I ever experienced, for instance (and my frazzled, fragmented spirit at that time really really needed it to be healing) was two weeks of rising at 6:30 or 7 am, having breakfast with Japhia and driving her to work, coming home for 2-3 hours of physical labour on some project around the house or yard, stopping for lunch (that I would take time to prepare and enjoy), then spending 2-3 hours in the afternoon on the back deck reading, reflecting and journaling, until Japhia returned home and we had supper and the evening together.

I realize that having one's day and even one's whole week structured and routinized is not unique.  So I wonder what makes some structures and routines formative and healing -- like living within a sacred rhythm of monastic hours; and what makes other structures and routines deadening and exhausting -- like living on a hamster wheel or in an endless, mindless, repeating maze.

Whatever the difference is, I am glad to be feeling like I'm living the first of the two right now.  Such a welcome change from how I have lived at other times.

And as the new year continues to unfold, and you have your own opportunities to shape and re-shape the regularities of your life that in turn shape you, may you find your way into whatever monastic-houred kind of life is good for you.

I used to tell Aaron life isn't always fair, but it can be good. Can I live it? And live with it?

I wanted him to win.

No.  Not the guy in the picture above.  

I mean the man that Japhia and I have been reading about.  Dion McLean, who lived and then wrote the story of Gobi, the dog that changed his life.

I wanted him to win the five-day, 155-mile ultra-marathon that he was running with a hundred others across the Gobi Desert in heat as high as 135 degrees.  He had suffered so much already in his life and in the course of this race, that I didn't want him to have to interrupt his own race on day four, to take precious time and energy to save the life of a runner just behind him who, by the way, a day or two before had gone out of his way to sabotage Dion and cause him grief.

But Dion was a better man in running his race than I was in reading about it and wanting him to win at any cost. He stopped and went back to help save the other runner from possibly fatal delirium and heat exhaustion -- a sacrifice that guaranteed him not being able to win.  

And at the end of the day the media gave the other runner more attention and praise for surviving, than they did Dion did for saving him.  None of it seemed fair. 

But Dion knew something about "winning" that I was missing at that point.  He also seemed to know that hanging on to an abstract (and usually self-serving) ideal of "fairness" doesn't hold a candle to the actual practice of goodness for the well-being of another.

I wonder what in me was willing to leave the other runner to his fate?  I am embarrassed to admit the feeling.  But there it was, as I was immersed in the story.  No excuse.  

The need to win can be strong and deeply rooted.  To be number one.  On top.  At the head of the class.  Great -- either again or still. 

And why?  What need does it really meet?

Is that really what makes anyone a winner.  And what helps make the world -- or myself, good for anyone? 

Leaving an air of sacredness wherever we go?

Sunday's sermon about the visit of the magi suggested that in the gift of frankincense to Jesus we see a reference to his and our calling, like priests censing a chapel to sanctify it and all within it for holy worship, to "help to cleanse the world of evil and bring an air of sacredness to everything and everyone we touch."  

It sounded good when I preached it.  Still sounds true when I read it now three days later.  

But as I navigate rain-wet, slush-bordered streets, careful of neither splashing nor alarming pedestrians tip-toeing tricky sidewalks, and wary of Hamilton drivers seemingly feeling increasingly entitled at delayed-green left turns and now-simply-roll-through right-hand-turns-on-red, I find myself doing something uncommon enough to me to be noticeable.

Another vehicle and mine approach a four-way stop almost simultaneously driving at right angles.  I think I stop a second or so before the other driver.  It's close enough to be open to debate, but because I am on his right and he on my left, I think I am pretty sure I probably have the right-of-way.  I think.

But without hesitating I gently wave him through.  The other driver takes the hint.  Drives through.  And as he crosses the intersection ahead of me, he flashed me two fingers.

Two fingers.  Not one.  Two fingers in a Peace Sign.

I feel gratified.  I also feel as respected and honoured by him as I hope he felt by me.

I'm not a particularly virtuous or charitable driver by habit.  This was a whim more than either a habit or an intention.

But I wonder, are whims at least sometimes simply the stirrings of the fetal Spirit within us, longing and labouring always towards new and newer birth within and through us?

The frankincense used by priests to sanctify space and life is the resin -- the oozed-out sap, in effect, of the frankincense tree -- gathered and burned in little bits.

I wonder ... if it is true that we are sons and daughters of God, created in God's image, part of God's family tree ... then does it make sense to see that something as simple as common (or maybe uncommon) courtesy at an intersection on a dreary Wednesday afternoon is really no less than one more little offering of an oozing of the life-juice of God through the rough bark of life, cleansing at least that little space of evil at least for that moment and for the two of us involved (and does the effect ever stop at just two?), and bringing a sweet air of sacred compassion into the simplest of interactions and intersections?

Can it really be that simple ... to be a priest? 

Still Messiah after all these years?

Jesus Christus -- Gestern und Heute, Derselbe auch de Ewigkeit

 Jesus Christ -- yesterday and today, the same also to eternity

This framed work of scherenschnitte (a centuries-old German and Swiss art of paper-cutting design) recently came back to me.  My sisters, when they saw it, immediately thought it must have belonged to our grand-parents on our dad's side.  It is the kind of thing they would have had on the walls of their house.  And it has that air of unchanged and unchanging family inheritance.

But it's something my first wife and I gave to my parents years ago, after she found it in an antique store.  We thought they -- my dad especially, would like it.  It went back to her after his passing.  And now it's come to me.

Funny how Jesus gets around.  

And stays always the same?  

I wonder, is that your experience of him?

In my childhood, I knew two sides of Jesus: from Sunday school stories, a person long ago able to help people with miracles of healing and feeding -- someone to love as a friend; and from the much-larger-than-life Garden-of-Gethsemane portrait that hung at the front of the sanctuary, a solitary, gentle man of lonely, abandoned prayer -- someone to admire and feel sorry for, but who you couldn't really get close to.

At age 12, though, I began to cling to him as someone sent from God to save me after I died, from falling into hell and the hands of the devil -- both of which God had made.  From there it was a short step to know Jesus as a prophet of apocalyptic judgement on all the world, come both to announce judgement and to offer escape at the same time -- someone I needed to tell others about, for their own ultimate well-being.

Then things changed.  More and more Jesus became an on-going revelation, embodiment and enabler of God's good will for life in this world in the here and now -- someone to look up to happily, and learn from if you could.

And now?  I think Jesus for me right now is a window or door through which I am beckoned to enter into, and be opened to the mystery of God-in-us and of Spirit-ual life myself -- someone whose way of reconciled and divine life I am called to grow into myself after a lifetime of fragmentation and duality.

Jesus does get around.   

Or is it maybe that over the course of a lifetime, we get around.  As we circle around him, coming to see the one known as "God-with-us" from different perspectives and a variety of angles?  He is, after all, much bigger than any teaching, tradition or vision of him.

And one of the more intriguing, oddly enlightening, deeply encouraging visions of Jesus that I've been touched by recently is an image that's emerged in the group of young people currently in the confirmation program at our church.  It's Jesus as "the perfect pancake."

It makes sense to us.  And who's to say it isn't as perfect an image of the eternal Jesus as any?