Finding our Way Home

Prayer of One Who Feels Lost

by Joyce Rupp

Dear God,

why do I keep fighting you off?

One part of me wants you desperately,

another part of me unknowingly

pushes you back and runs away.

What is there in me that

so contradicts my desire for you?

These transition days, these passage ways,

are calling me to let go of old securities,

to give myself over into your hands.

Like Jesus who struggled with the pain

I, too, fight the “let it all be done.”

Loneliness, lostness, non-belonging,

all these hurts strike out at me,

leaving me pained with this present goodbye.

I want to be more but I fight the growing.

I want to be new but I hang unto the old.

I want to live but I won’t face the dying.

I want to be whole but cannot bear

to gather up the pieces into one.

Is it that I refuse to be out of control,

to let the tears take their humbling journey,

to allow my spirit to feel its depression,

to stay with the insecurity of “no home”?

Now is the time. You call to me,

begging me to let you have my life,

inviting me to taste the darkness

so I can be filled with the light,

allowing me to lose my direction

so that I will find my way home to you

How to be found when you are lost...

There is a very special restaurant on Main Street in Rockland, ME called "The Brass Compass." The local folk gather there and ignore all the news from the Bobby Flay Thrown Down -- and owner Lyn Archer's win with her famous triple decker club lobster (called "lobstah") roll.  Sure, she won but they were not really so surprised at that.  What makes the place special goes beyond the cook'n to the groups that gather--spin their yarns, and find their way in the world through each other. 

I've sat in that place and overheard my share of conversations. It's the interaction that matters--the connection that forms, that leads them beyond themselves to new pathways. 

Paul talked relentlessly about "the body of Christ," the image for the followers of Jesus.  With each other, they made up far more than a group of individuals.  The whole was truly greater than the sum of the parts.  Each life broken in their living--found and formed a new wholeness with each other.  "Every day new" for Christians was the truth of their faith. Life was always more, far more than any individual--and yet, and yet! the individual was most profoundly herself/himself when in the Body.

Ash Wednesday

"Remember that you are dust 

and to dust you shall return."

What a day of paradox.  We claim our mortality and we find our eternity.  We acknowledge who we are as frail children, and we touch on our divinity in Christ.  And so the first shall be last and last first--and the meek shall inherit the earth at the same time that 5,000 are fed from a few fish and barley loaves.  The Good news.  We claim creation. We find the Creator.  Ashes marked on our foreheads burst into flame with the reality and identity that only God gives.  Somewhere, even in Lent, over in the corner of the nave as the faithful come forward for ashes--an angel hovers and whispers--alleluia. 

Mardi Gras Madness

For an evening, the Lord of Misrule reigns over Fat Tuesday--the peculiar custom to let sin run rampant so that grace may abound.  New Orleans continues as the capital for the hurrah of the day--the excuse for riotous living before the discipline of lent. Somewhere along the way, the day got mixed up with pancakes for some reason.  Why is it that before a season of sacrifice we justify the day of gluttony and things that ultimately glaze glum over spirits?  We do the same thing with All Hallow's Eve and the night of ghosts, goblins and demons--before the high feast day of All Saints that celebrates the very best of what God creates in us.  Like the two masks above--a roller coaster with the ups and downs of the human spirit.

Maybe we should recall the day before Lent begins that there is a thread of grace that runs through the best of times and the worst of times--the feast days and the days of discipline.  As St. Paul finally learned--how to rejoice in all matters of things because of the thread of grace that ties it all together. 

The Next Life

It is said that we only need two lives--not the nine of a cat!  There is the life that we practice with.  There is the life that we finally decide to live.  Where is the tipping point that moves us to the recognition of where we are?

Let me take the finality out of the choice. Can't we go from the practiced life to the next life and then step up from there?  Perhaps the biggest worry we may have is to stop that movement, to give up practicing, and forget the grace of starting again....from our knees, the place of prayer, where Holy Spirit touches human spirit and lifts us up. 

Transfiguration!

How exactly do you depict what happened on the Mountain of Transfiguration?  The disciples saw Jesus for who he really IS (not was).  Or, God the Father through the Holy Spirit revealed the Son to the disciples.  In other words, the fullness of God came nearer to them--God showed himself, his glory in the face of his Son,.

The Gospel accounts say he was bright, bleached white--or could we say pure light, the Light of the World just as he said he was?  What they took away was the reality of that Light, the perception of divinity, the eyes to look into the heart of reality and know once and for all--our vision only looks on the appearance of things. God grants the light to see things as they really and truly are. 

Off to the Wilderness

 

How much the wilderness desert looks like wilderness of snow!

I am off the Kalamazoo, MI and might as well be headed for the wilderness--except that it is covered with snow!  It is a far different world from where I am now--cold alright, but not the snow covered world, the umbrella over everything green with life stored underground.  Sometimes the best we can do is change the location, switch out the role, walk in a new way--with the assurance that the Spirit drives you there just as it did Jesus--out into the wilderness where we meet God.  The demons are only our resistance, of what we place between ourselves and God--and these in the wilderness of any kind, are self-made illusions that evaporate by the love of God we went there in the first place.

How much this world looks like the wilderness!