Recreation

Creation, Yet Again

shelliwilliams CREATION, Easter, Life, New Creation, Recreation, Resurrection ,

Easter Lily (DT 8087007)

Scripture Text:  John 20: 1-18

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

 

THE LORD IS RISEN!

THE LORD IS RISEN INDEED!

Christ, the Lord, is risen today, Alleluia!   Sons of men and angels say, Alleluia!

Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!  Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply, Alleluia!

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!  Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!

Lo! the Sun’s eclipse is over, Alleluia!  Lo! He sets in blood no more, Alleluia!

Vain the stone, the watch, the seal, Alleluia!  Christ hath burst the gates of hell, Alleluia!

Death in vain forbids His rise, Alleluia!  Christ hath opened paradise, Alleluia!

Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!  Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!

Once He died our souls to save, Alleluia!  Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!

Soar we now where Christ hath led, Alleluia!  Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!

Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia!  Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

Hail, the Lord of earth and Heaven, Alleluia!  Praise to Thee by both be given, Alleluia!

Thee we greet triumphant now, Alleluia!  Hail, the resurrection, thou, Alleluia!

King of glory, Soul of bliss, Alleluia!  Everlasting life is this, Alleluia!

Thee to know, Thy power to prove, Alleluia!  Thus to sing and thus to love, Alleluia!

(Charles Wesley, 1739)

The day has arrived!  After all this time of anunciation and birth, of baptism and ministry, of teaching and healing, of calling and response, of temptation and darkness, of dying and crucifixion, this Day of Resurrection has dawned.  After this long and difficult journey that we have taken, we come to this day with new eyes and as a new creation.  Christ has risen!  Christ has risen indeed!

But lest we lapse into thinking of this day as a commemoration of The Resurrection of Christ, as a mere remembrance of what happened on that third day so long ago, as some sort of shallow anniversary of Christ’s rising, we need to realize that this day is not just about Jesus’ Resurrection; it is also about our own.  We who carried our cross, we who died to self, we who journeyed through the wilderness and through those gates, are this day given new life.  God has recreated us into who God calls us to be.  And, in a way, that is almost more scary than the dying.  There is no going back.  The self that we knew before is no more.  We are a new creation.  We are a re-creation.

We have risen! 

We have risen indeed!

From the void, from the darkness, God created Light and Life.  No, correct that.  The Scripture begins “while it was still dark”.  God did not wait until the light to come to begin the work of Creation and this time is no different.  While it was still dark, while we strained to see hope and grieved what had come to be, God began.  That is what we are called to do.  We cannot wait until the world is ready.  Our work begins in the darkness with God.

Truthfully, if you look at it from a literal view, nothing has really changed.  Jesus, sadly, is still dead.  The human Jesus, the Jesus born into this world on that long ago night in Bethlehem, was gone.   But through eyes that have been resurrected, nothing will ever be the same again.

Maybe resurrection comes not in raising one above life, but in raising life to where it is supposed to be.  Jesus was the first to cross that threshold between–between death and life, between the world and the sacred, between seeing with the eyes of the world and seeing with the eyes of the Divine.  Hell has been vanquished.  Wesley wrote that “Christ hath burst the gates of hell”.  What that means is that everything, everything that God has created, everything above, below, within, around, everything we see, everything we know, everything we wonder about, everything we do not understand, has been made anew.  Resurrection is not about being transplanted to a new world but rather being called to live in this one as a new creation.  It means being recreated into the one that God envisions you to be.  It means being given a new way of seeing where love is stronger than death, where hope abides, and where life has no end.  It means being capable of glimpsing the Holy and the Sacred, the promise of Life, even in this life, even now.  This day of Easter is now only about Jesus’ Resurrection; it is about ours!  So, what do you plan to do with your new life?

The end of all our exploring…will be to arrive where we started…and know the place for the first time. (T.S. Eliot)

 

King of glory, Soul of bliss, Alleluia! Everlasting life is this, Alleluia!

Thee to know, Thy power to prove, Alleluia! Thus to sing and thus to love, Alleluia!

Everlasting life is truly this!

Happy Easter!

Shelli

 

Unsaid

shelliwilliams CREATION, LENT, Listening, Recreation, Silence

The Sound of SilenceScripture Passage: Psalm 62: 1a

For God alone my soul waits in silence.

We are not generally a silent people.  Even in the quietness of our homes, there is noise–lots and lots and lots of noise.  (Because a few minutes ago, Maynard the Black Lab was noisily demanding something–still not sure what!) Silence seems to elude us.  On some level, it takes a lot of time and that is a hard thing to come by. And, to be honest, in my world, I’m not even sure it exists.  There is always something making noise.  So how does my soul wait in silence?  How does my soul find that rhythm that it so desperately needs, the natural rhythm of noise and silence.  Maybe we could employ some of that white noise that is supposed to drown out other noises.  Would that work?  But isn’t that just more noise–a special noise designed to drown out other noise?  We work hard at honing our communication skills.  And yet, communication is not just about talking; it’s about that rhythm of expression and listening, of noise and silence.  We need silence sometimes.  It is part of the rhythm of life.  Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said that “we need to find God, and [God] cannot be found in noise and restlessness.  God is the friend of silence.  See how nature–trees, flowers, grass–grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, how they move in silence…we need silence to be able to touch souls.”

So, why is silence so hard to find?  Are we unsure of ourselves, a little reticent about what we might hear, perhaps a little fearful of what we might be asked to do? So, we try to fill the emptiness with noise.  Now, to be honest, I’m not sure that “pure” silence really exists.  There’s always something making noise.  Perhaps “keeping silence” is more about returning to a natural level of noise than it is stopping all noise itself.  In her book, When God is Silent, Barbara Brown Taylor talks about an experience by composer John Cage’s time in an anechoic chamber (a room without echoes).  With his perfect hearing, he picked up two distinct sounds–one high and one low.  When he described them to the engineer in charge, he was told that the high sound was his nervous sytem in operation, and the low one was his blood in circulation.  Noise is part of life.  Keeping silence is not about existing in pure silence; it is about living in pure life, in Creation.  And yet, most of us live most of our lives in noise–artificial noise, the noise of the world, rather than the noise of Creation.

If you go back and read the story of Creation, it began in silence.  I think it probably began in “pure” silence, in a void (implying that perhaps “pure” silence is not meant to exist at all).  And then God spoke us (along with everything else) into being.  In her book, Taylor says, “in his poetic eulogy “The World of Silence”, the French philosopher Max Picard says that silence is the central place of faith, where we give the Word back to the God from whom we first received it.  Surrendering the Word, we surrender the medium of our creation.  We unsay ourselves, voluntarily returning to the source of our being, where we must trust God to say us once again.”

In this Lenten journey, we talk about journeying, about surrendering. We talk about re-aligning our lives with what God envisions for us, and we talk about change.  But maybe the part we’re missing is where we don’t talk–I mean, INTENTIONALLY, enter into silence.  Shhhhh!  Let God say you into being again. (And now I’m going to quit talking!)

There is nothing so much like God in all the universe as silence. (Meister Eckhart)

At this point in your Lenten journey, just be silent.  Just listen.  Just wait to be unsaid.

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Return to Grace

shelliwilliams CREATION, Grace, LENT, Noah's Ark, Recreation, Redemption , , , , , , ,

Rainbow

Scripture Text:  Genesis 9:12-17

12God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” 17God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

This is actually the tale-end of the story of Noah and the famous ark filled to the brim with the remnants of Creation.  And here…after all this time of pounding rains, all this time cooped up with animals of all kinds, all this time rocking and swaying with the boat…here, God speaks.  The familiar bow of color is set in the clouds as a sign of the promise that God has made.  We usually take it as a sign that God will take care of us, that God will right the wrongs of the world and order them yet again, that God will somehow assuage our pain and grief and put things back the way they were.  Really?  THAT’S not what that says.

Now we can either look at this story as a sort of children’s story, complete with rainbows and pairs of elephants and zebras and orangutans or we can look at this story as one depicting a deity who was so angered by the rebellion of the Creation that God wiped it off the face of the earth. Truthfully, neither one works. Indeed, this is a story about rebellion and human sinfulness. (And to be honest, what story is NOT?) But the whole point is that no matter how far the human creation wandered from the Creator, there was a calling back, a return, an offering of love and forgiveness and a chance to begin again. Now, that’s hard for us to fathom too, possibly because we are not good at offering each other “do-overs”. We are not good at understanding a God who would dispense with all means of justified destruction and just offer Presence and Grace and a future filled with hope. It is hard for us to imagine that no matter what we do, no matter what we screw up or blow up or make up, God is offering a chance to return, a chance to be recreated into something that only God can imagine.

You see, the Celtic tradition would look upon the rainbow not as a promise that God would “fix” the world or “fix” us, but as a threshold, a point between what is and what will be.  So, the promise is not that God will fix everything, but that, always, there is a chance to begin again.  We always and forever, no matter what we’ve done or thought or how many times we’ve flaked out in life, have the chance to return to the beginning. God does not wipe what has happened.  God does not forget what we have done.  Rather God, knowing and remembering full well what the creatures have done in Creation, STILL God offers a threshold through which we can return to Grace–if we will only step through.

The grace of God means something like:  Here is your life.  You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.  Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don’t be afraid.  I am with you.  Nothing can ever separate us…There’s only one catch.  Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it.  Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.  (Frederick Buechner)

FOR TODAY:  What does it mean to return to grace?  What does it mean not to forget what has happened, not to forget what you have done, but to allow yourself to step through the threshold that God has opened wide, to allow yourself to begin again?

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Comfort, O Comfort My People

shelliwilliams ADVENT, Awakening, Awareness, CREATION, Jerusalem, New Creation, Recreation, Transformation , , , , ,

 

 

Scripture Text:  Isaiah 40: 1-5Road through the desert

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.  A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

“Comfort, O Comfort my people.”  That sounds nice.  It sounds warm and inviting, something that we can just sort of fold ourselves into and relax and let God take care of us.  Well, maybe.  But then what happens?  What we do with our lives after that?  The truth is, as much as we like to imagine a warm and fuzzy God that heaps everything we desire and everything we need to make our lives easy and comfortable on us, that’s not exactly the way it always is.  Here, comfort is not solace; here comfort is transformation.  God is promising something new.  These words begin with God’s initiative–to bring the exiles home.  Sure, it will mean ending their suffering and making their lives better.  But it is more.  It means that they will become something new–a new creation.  The former things have passed away.  God is not in the habit of rebuilding or “fixing” the way it is easy for us to imagine could happen.  God is the Creator, the great I AM, the one who brings newness and life.

 

So, God prepares a highway through the wilderness.  Now, don’t think that there wasn’t already a road there.  In the year 539 BCE, Cyrus of Persia conquered the Babylonians. Now he tended to be sort of a benign and tolerant ruler and so he allowed those who had been previously exiled from Jerusalem the chance to return home. So the people are beginning to return home, but to a home that was nothing like it was before. If you can imagine, these waves upon waves of people on this highway that leads toward Jerusalem—a Jerusalem that now lies in ruins without the Temple that used to be in the center of its life. This highway, a highway through the desert that, typical of the ancient world, was originally built to accommodate royal processions. Everything was done to make the highway smooth and clear.   The road was there, already made straight and smooth for the royals to travel.  And so the exiles, returning to “who knows what?” were on this road.

 

But, wait, look, over here.  God also promises a highway, smoothed and cleared of mountains and deep, treacherous valleys that would impede the journey.  God promises a holy highway built for a grand procession led by the Almighty God.  It’s still a road that you have to travel, but, rather than leading you to the ruins of the life you once knew, THIS road leads you Home.  And as we travel this road, God is creating and creating and creating the whole time, unfolding our life before us as long as we keep our eyes open to see what God is doing.  This is the way that the Glory of the Lord shall be revealed.

 

This is the road that Advent shows us.  It’s not one that takes us to the place that we’ve always known.  Advent shows us the newness that God is offering.  In the Advent season, we remember those generations upon generations that waited for a Savior.  We also prepare ourselves to remember once again how Christ came and comes.  But there’s another part of Advent that we miss.  It is this road, this road that we’re on that leads us to finally see things in a different light.  There is a Maori proverb that says “turn your face to the sun and the shadows will fall behind you.”  “Comfort, O Comfort my people.”  The Light is changing and you, even you, even now, are being made new.  “Then the Glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together.”

 

Learn to see and then you’ll know there is no end to the new worlds of our vision.  (Carlos Castaneda)

 

FOR TODAY:  What newness has God created in your life?  During this Advent, what newness can you find on the road?

 

Grace and Peace,

 

Shelli

Re-Creation

shelliwilliams CREATION, Easter, Life, New Creation, Recreation, Resurrection ,

Easter Lily (DT 8087007)

Scripture Text:  John 20: 1-18

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

 

THE LORD IS RISEN!

THE LORD IS RISEN INDEED!

Christ, the Lord, is risen today, Alleluia!   Sons of men and angels say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!  Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply, Alleluia!

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!  Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Lo! the Sun’s eclipse is over, Alleluia!  Lo! He sets in blood no more, Alleluia!

Vain the stone, the watch, the seal, Alleluia!  Christ hath burst the gates of hell, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids His rise, Alleluia!  Christ hath opened paradise, Alleluia!

Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!  Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once He died our souls to save, Alleluia!  Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!

Soar we now where Christ hath led, Alleluia!  Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia!  Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

Hail, the Lord of earth and Heaven, Alleluia!  Praise to Thee by both be given, Alleluia!
Thee we greet triumphant now, Alleluia!  Hail, the resurrection, thou, Alleluia!

King of glory, Soul of bliss, Alleluia!  Everlasting life is this, Alleluia!
Thee to know, Thy power to prove, Alleluia!  Thus to sing and thus to love, Alleluia!

(Charles Wesley, 1739)

The day has arrived!  After all this time of anunciation and birth, of baptism and ministry, of teaching and healing, of calling and response, of temptation and darkness, of dying and crucifixion, this Day of Resurrection has dawned.  After this long and difficult journey that we have taken, we come to this day with new eyes and as a new creation.  Christ has risen!  Christ has risen indeed!

But lest we lapse into thinking of this day as a commemoration of The Resurrection of Christ, as a mere remembrance of what happened on that third day so long ago, as some sort of shallow anniversary of Christ’s rising, we need to realize that this day is not just about Jesus’ Resurrection; it is also about our own.  We who carried our cross, we who died to self, we who journeyed through the wilderness and through those gates, are this day given new life.  God has recreated us into who God calls us to be.  And, in a way, that is almost more scary than the dying.  There is no going back.  The self that we knew before is no more.  We are a new creation.  We are a re-creation.

We have risen! 

We have risen indeed!

From the void, from the darkness, God created Light and Life.  Truthfully, if you look at it from a literal view, nothing has really changed.  Jesus, sadly, is still dead.  The human Jesus, the Jesus born into this world on that long ago night in Bethlehem, was gone.   But through eyes that have been resurrected, nothing will ever be the same again.

Maybe resurrection comes not in raising one above life, but in raising life to where it is supposed to be.  Jesus was the first to cross that threshold between–between death and life, between the world and the sacred, between seeing with the eyes of the world and seeing with the eyes of the Divine.  Hell has been vanquished.  Wesley wrote that “Christ hath burst the gates of hell”.  What that means is that everything, everything that God has created, everything above, below, within, around, everything we see, everything we know, everything we wonder about, everything we do not understand, has been made anew.  Resurrection is not about being transplanted to a new world but rather being called to live in this one as a new creation.  It means being recreated into the one that God envisions you to be.  It means being given a new way of seeing where love is stronger than death, where hope abides, and where life has no end.  It means being capable of glimpsing the Holy and the Sacred, the promise of Life, even in this life, even now.  This day of Easter is now only about Jesus’ Resurrection; it is about ours!  So, what do you plan to do with your new life?

The end of all our exploring…will be to arrive where we started…and know the place for the first time. (T.S. Eliot)

 

King of glory, Soul of bliss, Alleluia! Everlasting life is this, Alleluia!
Thee to know, Thy power to prove, Alleluia! Thus to sing and thus to love, Alleluia!

Everlasting life is truly this!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

 

Psalm 121: A Season for Blessing

shelliwilliams Blessing, Darkness, Death, Faith, Journey, LENT, Presence of God, Recreation

BlessingPsalter for Today:  Psalm 121

I lift up my eyes to the hills— from where will my help come?  My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.  He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.  He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.  The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand.  The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.  The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.  The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.

Several months ago, I was about to leave a wedding rehearsal that I had just finished when the bride’s parents came up to me and asked if I could give them a blessing.  I have to admit that I was surprised.  We give blessings at baptisms and blessings at weddings.  We bless meals and houses and ships and new buildings.  We even bless our animal companions once a year or so.  But for some reason, blessings just for the sake of blessing, just for the sake of being, has become almost non-existent. Perhaps we’ve become almost distrustful of it, as if it’s some sort of implied expectation that God will shower good things upon us.  Our language has taken that concept of being “blessed” as some sort of reward, as if God has somehow built a bubble of good things and protection around us.  Well, truthfully, that’s just bad theology.  No where are we promised that God will shield us from bad things or continually shower us with good.  Faithful living does not guarantee that one will become healthy, wealthy, and wise.  The promise is that God will journey WITH us through all that life holds, even through the valley of the shadow of death.

This Psalm is known by some as one of the psalms of ascent, a traveler’s psalm.  It was often used as one began a journey and was a reminder to look to that place where God was, to know that God was there, a traveler with the traveler.  It is also a Psalm of blessing, a blessing for one who is about to begin a journey.  In our translation, the scripture begins with a question.  But since there’s no real punctuation in the original Hebrew in which it was written, this may or may not be intended this way.  Maybe, rather than a sojourner looking for help, it is one who acknowledges that he or she is not alone.  “I lift up mine eyes to the hills from where my help will come.”  This is the Lord who, no matter what happens, will keep your life–through all that life holds, darkness and life.  The Lord is always and forever present, never drifting away or slumbering. The chorus from Elijah (Mendelssohn) uses this theme.  “He, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps.”  God is always there.  This is the promise of faith.

The Hebrew call to be a blessing (Parshas Lech Lecha) is used eighty-eight times in the Book of Genesis.  A blessing is a gift.  It involves every sphere of our existence.  It is not, as our language and our culture seems to depict, payment for a life well-lived; it is not taking the bad things of life as God’s way of strengthening us or something; it is not somehow straining to proclaim the bad as good; and it is certainly not living some unreal existence where darkness does not seep in at all.  Being blessed means to be recreated.  It takes time.  To be a blessing is to enter the story.  God calls, God promises, and, as the Psalmist depicts, God walks with us, ever-present and ever-faithful.  That is how God is revealed.  When we enter the story, we are truly blessed.  We begin again.  We are blessed to be a blessing, one who journeys with God.

A Blessing is a beginning, a new beginning, an acknowledgment that, even now, recreation is happening.  Life is a blessing.  Even darkness and wilderness and desert spaces in our lives are blessings as they look ahead for the Light to come.  On Ash Wednesday, we were blessed with ashes as this Lenten journey began, as we were reminded who and whose we are.  We began again.  God walks with us on this journey.  We know that.  Intellectually, we know that.  But knowing it deep within our being is what being blessed is all about.

Blessing is one of the ways that God makes the presence of God known here and now. (Joan Chittister, in Listen with the Heart:  Sacred Moments in Everyday Life, p. 8)

On this second Sunday of our Lenten journey, know yourself blessed, know yourself recreated, know yourself as you begin again.

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Unsaid

shelliwilliams CREATION, LENT, Listening, Recreation, Silence

The Sound of SilenceScripture Passage: Psalm 62: 1a

For God alone my soul waits in silence.

We are not generally a silent people.  Even in the quietness of our homes, there is noise–lots and lots and lots of noise.  (Because there is a somewhat demanding Black Lab barking at me right now!) Silence seems to elude us.  On some level, it takes a lot of time and that is a hard thing to come by. And, to be honest, in my world, I’m not even sure it exists.  There is always something making noise.  So how does my soul wait in silence?  How does my soul find that rhythm that it so desperately needs, the natural rhythm of noise and silence.  Maybe we could employ some of that white noise that is supposed to drown out other noises.  Would that work?  But isn’t that just more noise?  We work hard at honing our communication skills.  And yet, communication is not just about talking; it’s about that rhythm of expression and listening, of noise and silence.  We need silence sometimes.  It is part of the rhythm of life.  Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said that “we need to find God, and [God] cannot be found in noise and restlessness.  God is the friend of silence.  See how nature–trees, flowers, grass–grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, how they move in silence…we need silence to be able to touch souls.”

So, why is silence so hard to find?  Are we unsure of ourselves, a little reticent about what we might hear, perhaps a little fearful of what we might be asked to do? So, we try to fill the emptiness with noise.  Now, to be honest, I’m not sure that “pure” silence really exists.  There’s always something making noise.  Perhaps “keeping silence” is more about returning to a natural level of noise than it is stopping all noise itself.  In her book, When God is Silent, Barbara Brown Taylor talks about an experience by composer John Cage’s time in an anechoic chamber (a room without echoes).  With his perfect hearing, he picked up two distinct sounds–one high and one low.  When he described them to the engineer in charge, he was told that the high sound was his nervous sytem in operation, and the low one was his blood in circulation.  Noise is part of life.  Keeping silence is not about existing in pure silence; it is about living in pure life, in Creation.  And yet, most of us live most of our lives in noise–artificial noise, the noise of the world, rather than the noise of Creation.

If you go back and read the story of Creation, it began in silence.  I think it probably began in “pure” silence, in a void (implying that perhaps “pure” silence is not meant to exist at all).  And then God spoke us (along with everything else) into being.  In her book, Taylor says, “in his poetic eulogy “The World of Silence”, the French philosopher Max Picard says that silence is the central place of faith, where we give the Word back to the God from whom we first received it.  Surrendering the Word, we surrender the medium of our creation.  We unsay ourselves, voluntarily returning to the source of our being, where we must trust God to say us once again.”

In this Lenten journey, we talk about journeying, about surrendering. We talk about re-aligning our lives with what God envisions for us, and we talk about change.  But maybe the part we’re missing is where we don’t talk–I mean, INTENTIONALLY, enter into silence.  Shhhhh!  Let God say you into being again. (And now I’m going to quit talking!)

There is nothing so much like God in all the universe as silence. (Meister Eckhart)

At this point in your Lenten journey, just be silent.  Just listen.  Just wait to be unsaid.

Grace and Peace,

Shelli