Month: March 2011

Getting to a Thin Place

shelliwilliams Celtic, LENT, Liminality, Returning



The Celtic Spiral

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  I do not know of any true Irish blood in my family but my hodge-podge geneaology includes enough of the British Isles to at leaast come close.  So I have donned my green and I’m set for the day!
St. Patrick was said to have been born Maewyn Succat (Lat. Magonus Succetus) in Roman Britain (Scotland) around the year 387.  As the story goes, when he was sixteen, he was captured by Irish raiders and taken as a slave to Ireland, where he lived for six years before escaping and returning to his family.  He wrote that his faith grew in captivity and he prayed daily. The story is told that one day Patrick heard a voice saying “your ship is ready” and took it to mean that it was time to return home.  Fleeing his master, he traveled to a port two hundred miles away, found a ship, and sailed home.  He entered the church and later returned to Ireland as a missionary.  By the eighth century, he had become the patron saint of Ireland.

In this season of Lent, we are called to do our own returning.  Part of Lent is about returning to your source, to that from whence you came.  It is our season of returning to God, letting go of all the baggage that we’ve stacked up along the way, and beginning again.  Lent is about relearning to travel light.  Celtic spirituality is based primarily on pilgrimage.  Life, in this understanding, is about growing and moving and not “pitching our tent” in one place too long.  It is about connecting with all of Creation.  It is about connecting with God.  It is about recognizing the transcendent, those places where one meets God in his or her life.  In Celtic Spirituality, they are called “thin places”, those places where the spiritual spills into the material, where time and space are one, those places where we feel so connected to God, to our source, that the eternal is there for the taking.  It is those places that are in this life and in this world where one has the sense that one hears the harps eternal just over the not-too-distant hill.  It carries an understanding that all in life is sacred, that all in life is of God; we just have to return with new eyes and new ears and a new heart to see it.  Lent calls us to find our own thin places.  They are not the places where God exists but rather the places where we can finally sense the Presence of the One who is everywhere.

Legend credits St. Patrick for banishing all of the snakes from Ireland.  It is interesting to note, though, that evidence suggests that post-glacial Ireland never really had any snakes.  Perhaps it was an account of Patrick’s influence in the doing away with the belief in serpents that were so common in Druid belief.  Or perhaps it is a reminder to us what a life of true faith, a life of singular devotion to God, can mean.  When one returns to his or her source, when one finds that place where one knows God and senses the God who is all things and everywhere, all those things that haunt us, all those things that perch around corners and strike unexpectedly, all those things in life that we try to avoid, try not to step on, finally do not matter.  It is said that Patrick feared nothing, not even death, so complete was his trust in God.

So, in this Lenten journey, may you find your thin place.

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ at my right, Christ at my left,…
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
I bind to myself today the strong virtue of an invocation of the Trinity,
I believe the Trinity in the Unity,
The Creator of the Universe.  
(From The Prayer of St. Patrick’s Breastplate, supposedly composed by him in preparation for victory over Paganism.)

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

LENT 2A: Turning Right

shelliwilliams LENT, Repentance, Righteousness

LECTIONARY PASSAGE:  Romans 4: 1-5, 13-17
What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.

For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) —in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Driving in Houston is almost always a challenge, even for those savvy ones of us who grew up in the area and do it all the time.  There is something that you do not expect–a closed freeway (I actually think they do that every week-end whether they need to or not), a new pothole, or simply a major freeway or intersection that is completely stopped for no apparent reason.  In a city in which you can literally drive for two hours on a “good” traffic day and never actually leave the city, there is lots of room for things that get in your way.  One day not too long ago, I was driving on a road that I drive often.  I got to an intersection under the Southwest Freeway with which I was pretty familiar.  There is a sign there with an arrow on it that implies a right turn only onto the feeder from that lane.  But apparently one of the bolts had come out of the top of the sign and the sign had slid farther down the pole and upside down.  If I took the sign literally, it would have told me to turn the car around, go back from where I came, and turn the opposite direction.  No, that’s not right!
 
Even with signs all around us, we know the rules.  We know what it normal.  We know the way.  And in that respect, we are no different from those in the Roman Empire to which Paul was writing this passage that is part of our lectionary readings for this week.  They all knew that if they followed the rules and did what was expected, everything would be fine.  They would get what they deserved.  They would end up where they needed to be.  They would receive their reward.  But now Paul was telling them that these things that they thought would make them “right” with God didn’t really matter at all.  That was not the way it worked.  It had to be hard for them to hear.  According to Paul (and possibly a surprise to many of these first century hearers and a few of us!), God is not waiting around for us to do the “right thing” so that we can be in “right relationship” with God.  God blesses all of us, all of humanity, as children of God.
 
Paul claims that the right relationship is not something that Abraham had earned because he had done the right thing.  It was freely offered by God.  Abraham’s belief did not create the “right relationship”; it was because of it.  Paul is almost contending that our belief is a fruit, rather than a reason, for our right relationship with God.  The right relationship is a free and undeserved gift.  (Hey, that sounds like grace to me!)  The relationship is already there.  We just have to live into it.  We don’t have to create it; we just have to turn toward it.  That’s what this season of Lent is about–not cleaning up your act, but turning toward God.
 
So, TURN RIGHT!
 
Grace and Peace,
 
Shelli

Receiving and Giving

shelliwilliams Change, CREATION, Light, Transformation

During both of the “high” seasons of the church year, we talk a lot about change and growth.  Both of them point toward a “high point” and tell us that we have to prepare, that we have to get ready.  When you think about it, Advent points us toward a birth and Lent points us toward a re-birth.  During Advent, we are told over and over again that we have to open our lives and open our heart so that we can receive the Christ-child into our heart, so that we will know what it means for Jesus Christ to enter our life.  In essence, we have to be virgin, pure, open to receive and birth Christ in our own life.  Tis the season of receiving!

During this season of Lent, though, things change.  It is not just about receiving Christ or believing that Christ was resurrected or viewing Christ as the Messiah, or the Savior, or God Incarnate.  We have to do more than just believe the story.  We have to do more than just believe in Jesus Christ.  The only way to prepare oneself to walk this way of the Cross is through total and complete surrender of everything one thinks and everything one is.  We have to begin to become one with the Risen Christ.  We have to enter the Way of Christ. We have to give our lives and our hearts and everything we know over to God.  We become one with God.  You see, the point, I think, is that Jesus did not merely die on the cross to wipe my sin away or insure me everlasting life.  I think it was a bigger deal than that.  The cross is the point of recreation.  God took something so horrific, so unimagineable, so inhumane, and turned it into life.  All of Creation, all that we know, all that we thought changed at that moment.  The earth shook and gasped because nothing would ever be the same again.  The intention was not to just clean each of us and set us back on the same path.  We really are supposed to become something new.  And without death (as in “dying to self”), without handing over one’s life, without letting go of all those things to which you hold so tightly that really have meaning only to you, without giving all that you have and all that you are, God cannot make something new.  God cannot create life.  Tis the season of giving!

There are very few people who realize what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves into [God’s] hands and let themselves be formed by grace.  (St. Ignatius of Loyola, 16th century)

So, follow the one who came that you might have life!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

LENT 2A: Parshas Lech Lecha

shelliwilliams Blessing, Calling, LENT

LECTIONARY PASSAGE:  Genesis 12: 1-4a
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him.

It means “to be a blessing”, parshas lech lecha.  This passage begins what is often called the Patriarchal history of Genesis. All of a sudden the camera zooms into a single family of nomads in a small town in Mesopotamia and, finally, to a single individual.  This is where the history of Israel begins.  The truth is, Abram never saw his future.  And yet his response shaped it.  Abram is chosen to be the one through whom God’s blessing is showered upon the whole world. But in order for this to happen, Abram is told to leave what he knows, to in effect sever ties and go to a new place. (We at this point immediately jump to what that would mean for us–to leave our home, our family, our life.  What, we imagine, a great act of faith!) But remember that Abram’s family was nomadic. They probably didn’t really have a concept of home anyway. And there really wasn’t a family, to speak of—Abram had probably long ago outlived his parents and he had no children. So what was he leaving? Maybe God was calling him away from hopelessness and loneliness and finally showing him purpose, showing him home.

And the Lord promises that Abram will not be alone. And, more than that, God promises blessing. No longer is this just one person or one family; it is the conduit to God showering blessing throughout the world.
Abram is called to be a blessing, the Hebrew Parshas Lech Lecha. It becomes an integral part of the Genesis story and is used eighty-eight times in the book. A blessing is a gift. It involves every sphere of existence. It is more than what we 21st century hearers have allowed it to be. It is not payment for a life well-lived. “Being blessed” is being recreated. (For Abram, this meant moving from a life of nomadic purposelessness to being the “father of a great nation” and, thousands of years later, the patriarch of three world religions.) It takes time. I think to be a blessing means that one enters the story. God calls, God promises, and God walks with us. That is how God is revealed. But the blessing doesn’t come and the blessing doesn’t continue unless one enters the story. God calls, God promises, and God blesses.

Blessing is one of the ways that God makes the presence of God known here and now.  (Joan Chittister)

So, go and be a blessing!
 
Grace and Peace,
 
Shelli

Lenten Discipline: Seeking and Tuning

shelliwilliams LENT, Spiritual Disciplines, Spiritual Journey

Today we lost an hour to the dreaded Daylight Savings Time adjustment.  I hate this day.  What is that about?  The claim is that we get “more daylight”.  Really? Have these people not had math or astronomy?  It is very bizarre.  So, I woke up at 5:00 (which was really, as my body clock pointed out to me, 4:00).  And while I went around and did all of my Sunday morning things for what was already an early day, Maynard (the dog) slept in.  He knew better and just didn’t want to be bothered with anything that might get in the way of his schedule.  Maynard is a rescue lab that I got in August and as this was our first “spring forward” day together, I think it confirmed to him that I really am nuts. 

I drove to the church at the time that I was usually privileged to view the sunrise on Sunday mornings.  There was no sunrise but rather a sky that held varying degrees of light as the sunrise began to stretch and get ready for the day, not really wanting to be bothered with anything that might get in the way of its schedule.  It really was rather beautiful, though (sans light, of course).  I stopped at the same red light at the same intersection that I do twice each year. It seems that I always change my car clock at the same place.  And I always have to once again figure out how to do it.  You punch “Clock” and then the radio screen lights up with the directions:  “H-Seek…M-Tune”.  (It’s telling you to use the “seek” and “tune” buttons to recalibrate your time and adjust its setting so that it makes more sense.)

The meaning was not lost on me even in my somewhat blurry state.  What a great metaphor for this Lenten season–seeking and tuning.  Usually when we see the word “seek”, our finely-trained minds go immediately to “finding”.  But on this spiritual path, that doesn’t work as well.  This is not a path of seeking and finding God.  God is not lost.  God is not hiding out waiting for some grand hide and seek game to end.  God is right here waiting for us, waiting for us to hear, waiting for us to listen.  And so this time of Lent is a time of our seeking and tuning, a time of recalibrating our lives so that we will be in line with the time of God, a time of adjusting our setting, so to speak, so that it will make more sense.  God is never out of the bounds of our life; sometimes we just have to stop and tune ourselves to the music that was there all along.  And once a year, the church year gives us a chance to do just that.  My memory is a little rusty.  I usually have to figure out how to do it all over again.  But God is patiently waiting for me to spiritually tune myself.  And if I don’t get it completely right, God, in infinite grace and mercy, always moves a little closer to me anyway.

So in this Season of Lent, tune yourself to the place where you best connect with God!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

LENT 1A: Ego-Control

shelliwilliams LENT, Temptation

LECTIONARY PASSAGE:  Matthew 4: 1-11
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

The Judean Wilderness, Israel
February, 2010

Well, here we are back at the temptation story.  I suppose that means it’s the first Sunday in Lent.  It doesn’t even matter what lectionary year you’re in. All three synoptic Gospels have it in some form. So it just seems to find us each and every year on this Sunday.  It is the day that never budges on our spiritual itinerary, as if  it is a place through which we have to pass to get to anywhere else.  So, is the point that you have to travail the wilderness or that you have to survive the temptation?  I think maybe it’s both those things, but the main thing is that wherever we are and whatever we are doing, now is the time to get our egos under control.  This Lenten journey is not for the faint of heart.  It is serious business.  We have to get our own selves out of the way before we can continue.  Maybe that’s why we read this story every single year on the first Sunday in  Lent.  It’s our annual spring cleaning of all that stuff that is piled up in our way so that the path to Jerusalem will be visible.

Many people struggle a bit with this story.  After all, he was Jesus–as in the Christ–as in God Incarnate–as in the Savior of the World.  Shouldn’t he have been above all that?  But, remember, Jesus was human, fully human.  And even the ones in our midst who do humanness the best have things that get in the way of our relationship with God from time time.  If Jesus had been “above it all”, so to speak, what, really would have been the point at all?  Jesus was not a superhero.  Jesus was showing us the way to God.  And along the way, Jesus was enough of a realist and loved us enough to be honest about what all of us would encounter on this journey.  Jesus’ style was not really to show us all the stuff that we were messing up; rather, he showed us how to name and own what comes along so that we would have the strength and the grace and the faith not to walk away but to walk through it, to leave it behind as we continue on.  I think that’s a whole lot better than a superhero that just flies above the fray and scoops us out of harm’s way at the last minute.

Henri Nouwen says that the three temptations depicted are what we all encounter–the desire to be relevant, spectacular, and powerful.  Who doesn’t want to be relevant, to be liked, to be affirmed, to realize that you have made an impact?  The ironic thing is that most of us spiritual ones live our whole lives like that.  We are told that we are supposed to bear fruit.  And yet how many of us forget who planted it in the first place?  And, at least once in a while, it would feel good to be spectacular.  And the third?  Well, good grief, our whole society is about power.  If we are not one of the powerful, then we are one of the powerless, right?  In a society with a caste system such as ours (yes, I said caste system), there has to be SOMEBODY on the top!  But, here’s the crux…to those who are relevant, spectacular, and powerful, Jerusalem looks like a failure, a dark blotch on an otherwise pristine story.  But to those who have left their egos at this first week, Jerusalem looks like life. 

So get your egos in check and prepare for the journey!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli 

LENT 1A: Tsinami

shelliwilliams Forgiveness, LENT, Sin

LECTIONARY PASSAGE:  Romans 5: 12-19
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned— sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

As I watch the news coverage of the tsunami wave rolling across the earth, I am at this moment somewhat painfully aware of how interdependent this whole of Creation is.  The beginnings of an earthquake are probably considered almost nothing, something that on the surface doesn’t even matter at all.  And yet what begins as a shift in the depths of the earth, something that seemingly is nothing more than a veritable sigh, releases a force that shakes the earth at is very core, taking life with it, and then sending its waves far beyond itself, to lands that it barely knows.  By the time it gets to our country’s western coast in a few hours, it will have pulled all of humanity and all of Creation into its deadly force.  And when it is finally snared by a stretch of calm, peaceful flatlands, its wake will contain pieces of lives that will never be the same again.

In our lectionary epistle this week, Paul mentions sin or some form of it (sinner, transgression, disobedience, etc.) sixteen times by my count.  In fact, five of the mentions are in the first sentence!  Do you think he was trying to make a point?  Sin, I’m afraid, is a fact of life.  It is part of all us.  We claim that perhaps our own sins are not that bad.  You’ve heard all the claims and the questions:  So, if I don’t KNOW I’m sinning, is it really sin?  So which sins are the “unforgiveable” ones? I mean, really, it was only a little sin, just a little “white lie”.  Yes, in the big scheme of things, it was probably nothing more than a veritable sigh of a sin.

But in our interconnectedness, sin affects us all.  And even the smallest of sins can release such a force that none of us can control it.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I do not in any way believe that “sin” is something outside of us.  It is not a “force to be reckoned with”, so to speak.  I’m pretty clear that when I sin, it is me.  It is my bad choice.  It is me that has messed up, that has not honored myself or my place in the beauty of this interconnected Creation, rather than it being caused by some sort of little red man with horns or something.  I am the one to be blamed.  I have to own it.  It is mine.  It is mine, that is, until it is done.  And then it spills into Creation and begins cutting a path with a force more powerful than anything I imagined, a veritable “tsinami” of destruction through this interdependent earth.  (And you thought I spelled the title of this blog wrong!)

But as Paul reminds us, we are forgiven.  We are forgiven with a force greater than any of our sin.  Christ came that we would know that.  I don’t really think in terms of Christ forgiving my little white lie.  It’s bigger than that.  “Christ came to take away the sin of the earth.”  Christ came not to take away the sins, ticking them off one by one or keeping track of whether or not I’ve reached my quota.  Christ came to take that tsinami away from us, that collective ball of SIN that ravages the earth and leaves destruction in its path.  God does what we cannot.  And in forgiveness, we finally find peace–not innocence, but real peace.  And then we will pick the pieces of our lives up and continue walking with God.

In the Name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli