Washington's Mudslide

The Mudslide:  Before and After

The Before and After pictures of the mudslide tell all--complete and utter devastation, an entire ecosystem changed in an instant.  The loss of life in seconds...  The area had been warned of the highest risks possible for exactly this kind of avalanche--it is that unstable.  Yet something there is in us that ignores the warnings and goes about life anyway.  Until that is--we lose it.  No explanations or "they were warned" suffice in the enormity of such loss.  There's no covering up such agony of loss. 
"Teach us O Lord to number our days by your grace," writes the Psalmist--and writes of the only true foundation for life.  All of life is a high risk zone.  One enzyme gone awry, a blood clot, a texting driver, an asthma attack--and suddenly, life is gone.  Only when we realize that life itself was the absolute gift do we muster the words of thanksgiving that we have what we have and can shape our lives by the choice of living thankfully while we have it.  There is also a before and after picture of lives that never knew, then lived in grace.  It reverses the above...into new growth, life, Life is found! 

The last voice of taps....

I heard the voice of bugler sounding
through the trumpet,
and my head bowed to honor the dead.
I thought of the one who died,
but the sound was a roll call for those,
buried in sacred ground,
who stood for just a moment to salute,
one new life who joined them
a nation's gratitude then eternal rest.  

The Search for Flight 370

Malaysian Authorities at News Conference

Can we possibly overlook the dramatic contrast going on in our world--between the cooperation of nations to find the mission flight #370 and Putin's Land grab?  There is of course the noticeable lack of Russian support for the search, and after all, they busy gobbling up another country.  It is as if they see themselves back in a colonial period of entitlement to any nation where the Russian language is spoken.  Whereas the difference in languages does not hinder the multi-nation search 1500 miles off Australia.

For those on Lenten journeys, we recall Jesus' wilderness sojourn and his walk toward the cross.  The powers and principalities at his birth were just as nonchalant at the end of his life until the charge of sedition and Pilate's political expediency nailed him to the cross.  He was killed because of what others thought he threatened -- they could have ignored him.  Somehow, we are called to make our call--who was he and who is he now for us? 

The Divine Breath

I was leaving Costco the other day, when a checkout lady said to me, "We are in for more snow next week--have you heard that?"  I said facetiously--"Oh the retail stores put out their own weather reports to boost sales!"  For some reason, that one off-handed comment really made her laugh.  And as I was leaving the store, she was repeating it again.  "Listen to what I just heard..." and off she went. 

It reminded me of the Buddhist first commitment to do no harm, which starts with what we put into the air for others to breathe.  That's right--do we harm others by what we say and put into the air? Can we possibly restrain ourselves from the crap we say--so that others do not have to breathe it? 

That same afternoon, I was visiting a friend in the hospital.  I pulled up to parking space while a person pulled out.  Another car approached from the other lane, a good bit after I had been waiting.  As I pulled into the spot, the other drive sat on her horn and then she yelled an obscenity as whizzed past.  Talk about polluting the air!  Then I had to work with that first commitment not to repeat that story over and over to "pollute me" and then the people I was visiting. 

Seems to me that the breath God gave us in the Creation Story is what we are called to breathe back into world and other people to renew them as the souls they were created to be.  It's like the light breaking through the darkness of clouds and remembering that we were created to be the children of the Light of Christ...and we can do that with our words. 

Finding the Kingdom

You can learn new things at any time in your life if you're willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you.

Barbara Sher
American Author and Career Counselor

Jesus took a child, whom he put among them, ³and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. ⁴Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. ⁵

                                                                                                  Matthew 18:2ff    

There is a huge irony that we spend our lives growing up only to learn that we have to reverse the process--and become like trusting children of God--without the illusion of a life's work to say that we are independent!  

John Lennon Wisdom

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.  When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wrote down ‘happy’.  They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, 

and I told them they didn’t understand life.     –John Lennon

How many us truly understand the assignment we were given when we were born? Oh yeah, that was a very long time ago for some of us.  But to the very end, the assignment stays the same.  Buddha would say that happiness means letting go of resisting change in life which creates suffering, let go and go with the flow.  Jesus would say that happiness is to seek first the Kingdom of God when all things will then be given to you.  One appears to be the inward journey.  The other -- the outward journey.  What they have in common is stepping outside yourself and no longer making yourself the object of your life.  What a paradox!  You find your happiness when you let go of yourself.  By the way, notice how the quotation was written?  With "understand life" for its own line?  I think we only do that when we let go of our own life and walk into Life itself.  

The Real Hunger of Lent

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

“Church Going,” last stanza—

Philip Larkin 

 Lent is all about journey—that takes us through the
wilderness sojourn to Jerusalem to outside the city gates and the cross.   

After that, well, you’re on your own!  It is a journey of faith, basic trust in the
God of Jesus Christ who seeks us out.   

Enter Philip Larkin and “Church Going.”  All of the preceding stanzas walk you through
the ruins of a church, or at least one that has aged in disrepair.  There is an inkling 

it is still used and that
he has been there before.  The presence of God moves under the appearance of things, invisible 

to those who visit it as
a museum.  The last stanza touches on the soul’s hunger for which only this place can satisfy—

at least for Larkin, he
realizes the hunger which is somehow satisfied only by the sheer holiness of
the place.  Such is the journey of Lent.  To awaken—wake up to!—the soul’s true hunger and food, 

the life of the resurrection now.