A Question of Balance

Someone asked me today how I balance the math & physics side of myself with my creative, literary side. I said:

"Life is all about balance, isn't it? It's about standing under the sky at night and dancing with the stars. It's about love poems to the setting sun and sharing grief with the predawn moon. It's about walking in the wilderness and knowing that even if I die, some part of me will walk out whole, ready to enter the land of milk and honey.

"It's about looking at those around me and caring more about what they need than what I want. It's about laughter and joy and being gentle with myself when I do get knocked awry. It's about believing. And I choose to believe deeply in God, in good, in love, in those around me. I believe."

Unfurl Your Wings

Where are you taking me, Lord?

"To love & wholeness & joy & deep satisfaction. Why worry, child? It only clouds your spirit. Give me your worries, just put them in My hands & let them go. They are not yours to hold.

"Unfurl your wings & let them beat, for they beat in time to My heart, which is the pulse of the Universe. Fly, child. Fly.

"Love. Don't hold back. I will provide the governing - trust me, & love."

How do you Measure Light?

What do you have for me, my dear crazy God? You are crazy by any human measure, crazy judged by what you have us do, crazy beyond measure. Sane beyond measure. Beyond measure, truly.

How do you measure light? How do you measure the darkness? How do you measure when both burst in far beyond human capacity to experience, yet register deeply on the human soul? What am I to do with the darkness, Lord? What am I to do with the light?

You push me - I think you push too far. Do you delight in exploding this fragile earthen jar again & again?

I see your face ever before me. Playful yet intense, & always asking "Can you stay with me now?" Your dark eyes are filled with love & concern & support...and desire. Patient desire, but desire all the same. You want me. You want my heart, my soul, my mind, my all.

Go Forth as a Fierce Messenger of a Wild Joy

What do you have for me, Lord?

The response: "In this time of holiday celebration, go deeper. Reach inside the season."

I see an explosion of glittering red. Red for sacrifice. Red for passion. Red for wild joy. I see glimmering shards of deep red Christmas glass, each one capable of piercing the human heart with a fierce joy that changes the way we view the world, that changes the world itself.

I am pierced. My heart is torn as the shard enters. The blood, my blood, nurtures the sharp sliver of glass. My heart becomes a womb which quickly bursts forth with the birth of a new batch of glimmering red, shooting through my body & out my fingers & toes.

"Go forth as a fierce messenger of a wild joy - shower others with shards as well, so that one may pierce through each heart and they in turn may be seized by fierce joy. It is joy and love that conquers the world."

For the Sake of Love

Me: "God, was it necessary for my husband to die in order for me to be spiritually & creatively where I am now?"

God: "No child. There were many other paths to this moment. This has been a sorrowful walk, indeed."

I realize that God's pain is even deeper than mine. Without compassion, God cannot be God. Choosing to be with us, where we are, means taking on our sorrow, too, more deeply than we can feel - for the sake of compassion. For the sake of Love.

Perfect in God's Eyes

"Oh, child, you are perfect. You do not need to change yourself. Just come close, mold yourself against Me - let Me shape you with My loving embrace. Come, come cling to Me. You are my delight, just as you are..."

Dance in the Downpour

God says, "You dwell upon the wrong things, child. Don't cower at passing troubles. Instead, walk boldly forward. Look at the showers pouring over you - love, family, friends. Hold your arms up & dance in the downpour. Live. Love. Serve. Rejoice."

Things You Need to Know, part five

The point of religion is to make us better able to see Spirit, to BE Spirit. It is deep love, deep passion, deep thought. To be alive, to connect with Spirit - which is every bit of matter, living & quiescent - this is 'esse', the essential part. All the rest comes after.

Things You Need to Know, part four

Spirit is not some ephemeral, intellectual abstract. It is love, it is tangible, it is palpable, it is both real & true.

Soaring with the Spirit

What would it look like to let go completely, so stop trying to use my own frail strength to forge the godly relationship? I picture the Spirit holding me back to belly, her arms gently & safely around me, as we soar above the earth together - looking down upon the world in mutual delight, pointing out to each other trees, flowers, rocks, people. Delight. Total delight.

That's how we are supposed to live. Held in the unfailing arms of the Spirit, buoyed into a lightness of being that allows us to delight in God's creation, in communion with our Deity, full of love & joy.

The Mighty Mountain of God

I picture God as a mountain. There are many paths already worn up and around this mountain: major paths like Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism & Islam, as well as less-worn paths. Most of us choose a path whose entry point is near us – Christianity in the West or Hinduism in India, for example.

Those who say, “I will forge my own path to God,” rarely ascend beyond the foothills. It is a lofty goal to strive to be in the trail-blazing company of Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad & others. The danger of ‘my own path’ is that it is very difficult to forge a new way. It is much more likely that we will miss out on most of the journey by giving up while still on the gentle slopes, after using up our energy hacking through thorns & brush. ‘My own path’ is usually a short track that leads only to a shallow spirituality.

Agnostics refuse to step foot upon the mountain, reasoning that because they cannot see the summit, they cannot commit to a path that claims to climb. Atheists spend their lives with averted eyes, claiming that the mountain does not exist.

The rest of us scrabble blindly upon the mountain on our hands & knees, unseeing but determined to forge ahead. How blessed are those saints who light the path for us, at least for a few steps! They illuminate, for a glimmering moment, our journey’s end: granting us a vision of beauty, love, hope & joy, & giving us the strength to clamber on.

The Madness of Mercy

We who have no hope must yet hope. We who have tasted death must look through it to life. We must journey & believe that we will arrive, though we suspect we cannot.

We must wear our inside on the outside, & believe that we can internalize that which is external, believe that we can transform it through our spiritual bowels into hope.

What madness is this?

It is the madness of mercy. It is God's mercy, which transforms all things into glory through love, mixing & blending all - good, evil, up, down, right, wrong - into a mad swirl Beyond our senses. We Name the swirl Nirvana, Heaven, Paradise - unknowable & yet deeply known.

We are Never Alone

I walk a labyrinth. I walk slowly, in deep meditation. With each step, I feel an increasing heaviness, as though the weight of my life and my sorrows are increasing. In the center of the labyrinth is an altar. I hesitate before entering. I admit to feeling a little disappointed. I’ve never walked a labyrinth before, and I expected a mystical experience, a magical presence. But I haven’t felt anything but heaviness.

I step into the center, and he is there. The Christ. Really, truly present. I take the waiting bread and wine, and I try not to cry as I stand with him. As I turn to retrace my steps and conclude the labyrinthian journey, I sense him walking beside me. With each step, I feel more and more people walking with us, saints from untold years past, until we are legion.

“This is real, isn’t it?” I whisper to Christ. “I mean, you’re really here with me, aren’t you?”

“Did you think I was make-believe? Did you think the words, ‘Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the age’, were pretend?”

I am never alone. I am totally surrounded by all the saints of every faith and every age; by all people past, present and future. The Christ walks with us at all times, whether or not we sense the Presence. We are never alone.

Stay in the Box

Kneeling before candle and cross, I ask the Eternal – “What do you have for me today?” I have a vision of Jesus standing in front of me, looking earnestly at me. His knees are slightly bent, and he reaches out and takes my hands in his as though he is going to teach me to roller-skate. His hands hold me securely, keeping me safe from falls.

“Can you stay with me now?” he asks earnestly. There is no condemnation in that question, only concern and love. It is a check to see how I’m doing.

“I think so,” I respond.

My late husband is suddenly standing beside me, watching. “Hold your feet still,” he admonishes, just as he coached children standing in the batter’s box. “Don't step away. Hold your feet still.”
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The next week, I kneel before cross and candle. “What do you have for me tonight?”

The vision of Christ holding my hands returns. “Are you ready? Can you stay with me now?” At my nod, he suddenly grabs my upper arms and draws me to him in a strong, urgent embrace, the embrace of an impatient and eager lover.

I am held tightly against him, and then suddenly I am falling, falling through him, passing through his heart, covered with blood as I go. I am not pleased with the sensation. I don’t like getting dirty – it’s probably why I don’t like painting.

“It’s OK,” I tell myself. “It’s just blood.”

Then I’m through him and on the other side (though I don't know what that means) and I can feel the blood interacting with the cells of my body, sort of a foaming, stinging sensation. I look down. My body is transformed - I'm brighter somehow, and I feel...solid, even though I think I might be glowing. It’s still me, but I realize it’s an imperishable me. “So that’s how it works!” I think. I look around, squinting into blinding whiteness. “But where am I?”

Suddenly, I’m back in the chapel by candle and cross. I’m dizzy and overwhelmed.

And I’m left with the distinct impression that I have been given a vision of life, not death – a vision of something that is available to me and to us all, right now, if we can only find the path.

The Beauty of Brokenness

While kneeling before cross & candle at a Taize service, I heard the voice of the Eternal.

“This candlelight is beautiful & holy. But if you could see the people around you with My eyes, you would see such a blessed brightness that you could scarcely bear it through squinted eyes.”

Then I saw a vision of beams of light shining brightly from each person in their broken places, intersecting & colliding with beams from others, dashing off at odd angles & creating beautiful patterns of light in the air & glorious prisms of color at each intersection. I viewed flash after flash of rainbow light, and I was blinded by the glory of those loving & loved faces gathered there.

It occurred to me that I had no idea what pain and hurt must exist in that room, to create such beauty.

The Gift of Matter

A few years ago, I sat in St. Mary’s Cathedral in Mount Angel, enjoying a choir concert. My son was in the choir, and as the men took a solo section, I could hear his voice, sounding faintly like his father's. I wished my late husband was there to listen. Then it occurred to me that all the departed saints and all the hosts of heaven could very well fit into the vaulted ceiling of the sanctuary, because they were energy, not matter. Perhaps he was there, after all.

And it struck me what a great gift matter is. Spirit beings stand in awe of us because we are matter. We can experience things they cannot. All the angel choirs of heaven cannot produce the sound of a human voice raised in song.

I think that it was not easy for the Eternal to produce matter. Even for an omnipotent Being, this was a Herculean task. But into this effort, the Eternal poured her love – the love of creatures, her children.

And so, our very matter is a gift, a joy, a blessing. Even in our pain, even in our sorrow and our dying, the gift of matter is an awesome one. We sometimes wander this earth feeling clumsy and awkward in our flesh wrapping, but it is a miracle and a blessing. To feel, to see, to smell, to taste and sense with our fleshly bodies is a unique and holy gift.

Broken Vessels

There is a reason that the Hebrew word for ‘Spirit’ is the same as for ‘breath’. It is not a metaphor, but a reality. With every breath, we truly renew our Spirit. We bring the Holy (eternal, greater) Spirit into our bodies with each inhalation. It is when we cease to bring the eternal into ourselves that our spirit flees and we die.

I have a vision of sinking into holy waters and taking a deep breath of Spirit. The Spirit waters are viscous and I am struck with terror, for I am choking and drowning. My lungs, accustomed to vapid air, are not prepared for the rich nourishment of Spirit.

Then the feeling passes and I feel euphoric. It is as though this is the first time I’ve ever truly breathed. I look down. Through the patchwork of cracks in my shattered self, light shines brightly through, casting a beautiful and complex design upon the Spirit waters around me. I realize that the light is love, pouring through me because of the cracks in my being. I realize that this Love light shines brightest through the most broken vessels. It can shine brightly through me only because of my brokenness.