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?

 

Christmas Resolutions?

Yesterday I posted something on Facebook about my Christmas resolution.  

Such an unexpected thing, now that I think about it.  Usually, resolutions are made at New Year's.

But the phrase -- and the reality of it in my heart, was out there before I had time to stop and re-think it.  It seemed deeply natural to be making a Christmas resolution.

Maybe it's from all those repeated annual viewings of "A Christmas Carol" and "It's a Wonderful Life" -- two stories about Christmas Eve as a time of life-changing reflection and life-saving resolve.  Maybe it's from reading and hearing about the new film, "The Man Who Invented Christmas," and the suggestion the Dickens, in the story of Scrooge, created for us the image of Christmas as a time for self-examination, repentance and conversion of life.

And why shouldn't Christmas Eve -- as much as New Year' Eve, be a time for life-changing reflection and resolution?

As far as New Year's Eve is concerned, of course we measure and mark our lives by calendar years, and January 1 is a nicely identifiable time of beginning and then tracking a new resolve.  There's a sense of beginning afresh that seems to invite a moment of intentional self-improvement or correction.  The calendar has a nice, clean look to it -- beckoning like a field of new-fallen snow graciously covering up the old ways, giving us the freedom to start carving new paths in their place. 

But is not the day we celebrate the birth of the Christ not also a good time to take stock of our own life journey, and of where at this moment we feel called to a truer way of life?  For he is the one we regard as the true human, God's Word of life and for life made flesh among us.  And each time we come to celebrate and see his birth, and see him so weak and vulnerable in the manger and in our care, is there not some change, some different path, some new commitment or re-commitment to true living ourselves that we feel called to?  

For me, I woke up Christmas Day knowing a desire to read daily something I have so far read only randomly -- Fr. Richard Rohr's daily online meditation.  It seems a little thing.  But Rohr in particular writes so lovingly and gently about the eternal Gospel invitation to grow up into our truest Self, that at this stage in my life-journey I know that daily reading of his experience, strength and hope in this direction cannot help but have good and growing effect on my own life and spirit.

And isn't that what resolutions -- at either New Years' or Christmas Eve, are about?  

Maybe the difference for me right now and at this stage of my journey, is that a clean, blank field covered in fresh, fallen snow doesn't quite give me the direction I think I need to necessarily begin carving out the new paths I really need.  

But coming to the stable, seeing what life is given to all of us there, and feeling what new directions it evokes and what next steps it inspires within me, does.

 

Do giving and receiving equal exchanging?

Recently I was chatting with a friend.  About what, I don't remember.

At one point in the conversation, though, I changed whatever the subject was, and asked, "About gifts," referring to Christmas gifts, since Christmas Day is less than a week away, "did we decide not to exchange any?" 

To me the question made sense when I asked it.  I have a few relationships in which over the past few years we have decided not to exchange gifts.  I thought maybe this may have been one of them, but I wasn't sure.  I just wanted to clarify the expectations.

My friend, though, seemed taken aback by the question.  "Well ...," she began, and I don't remember exactly how she phrased it, but it was instantly clear she had prepared a gift for me and for Japhia.  Separate gifts, in fact.  Simple, not expensive, thought-out, and hand-made.  She explained that whatever I did or didn't do was fine, but she just likes to give gifts. 

I wonder when I started to think of gifts as something we exchange.  Instead of simply give.

It's not like I haven't received gifts from people to whom I did not give one.  

Nor that I haven't also over my life simply and freely given something to others just for the pleasure of giving.  With the question of receiving something in return being irrelevant.

So I wonder about this concept of "gift exchange."  

And I marvel at the ability and willingness of the human heart just to give.