I walk to the center

On my wall in my office I have a quilted batique of a labyrinth (with slightly more concentric circles that the one pictured above) that I made a number of years ago in seminary. Sometimes when I need to quiet myself or focus or take break from whatever I’m working (as I am now) on I’ll lean back in my chair and let my eyes follow it’s path. It almost never fails that the center comes as a little holy surprise. This happens no matter how many times I walk it, either with my eyes or with my feet.

The first time I walked the labyrinth it was even more dramatic. It was a chilly early early April evening in northern Indiana. I entered the labyrinth with little expectation – even a slight skepticism – and began to walk in the half-light. I simply followed the path. One step after the other until suddenly and unexpectedly I was there, the center. I remember feeling an almost physical sensation of windedness. In that instant the light shone and the choir sang. Yet it remained still and dim and silent. It was like the presence of the Spirit was revealed.

I fell to my knees on the damp grass and just breathed in the silence and the brightening stars. I don’t remember hearing words or a voice from heaven or anything like that, but I was changed. I realized that God could indeed work in ways that I don’t expect. I didn’t want to leave that spot that seemed so magical. Some of that has lingered every time I travel the labyrinth although mostly to a much lesser extend.

Today as my eyes traveled the path of the labyrinth, the center was a bit of a surprise but it was the end of the labyrinth on the way out that caught me off guard more than most times. It came sooner than I was expecting. My eyes wanted to keep wandering and meandering. I wasn’t ready to be thrown out into the disconnected. I wanted to remain in proximity to the center and be bound by the safety of that gravitational pull. Even now my eyes keep returning to it.

I am glad. I do yearn for the center. I do want to remain in the gravitational pull of the Spirit. I do hope that even though my orbit swings me away and pulls me close, my sun is always Christ.

There is a song in the Sing the Story Mennonite Hymnal supplement that I was reminded of as I wrote:

"Jesus be the center"

Jesus, be the center
Be my source, be my light, Jesus.
Jesus, be the center.
Be my hope, be my guide, Jesus.

Be the fire in my heart.
Be the wind in my sails.
Be the reason that I live, Jesus.

Jesus, be my vision.
Be my path, be my guide, Jesus.
Jesus, be the center.
Be my source, be my light, Jesus.

Afire

Another favorite poem...

...Earth's crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God;
And only she who sees takes off her shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware...

Elizabeth Barret Browning, from Aurora Leigh
(adapted for feminine language)

The Nature of a Parenting God

With Heidi's encouragement I post the following...

A short walk from my house is the Thornton Creek Watershed, a park that contains wooded area and a large pond into which Thornton Creek and other small waterways empty. It's home to beavers, muskrats, fish, frogs, turtles and all manner of water fowl, all of which are wonderful to watch as the evening light stretches later and later through the days of spring.

One evening as I was watching a family of ducks - a mother and her ducklings - the image of God as mother hen (or duck, in this case) was so clearly illustrated. The mother duck lit on a log by the edge of the pond and began to groom herself, then to honk softly. One by one her babies followed her, launching themselves awkwardly and gracefully onto the mossy log beside her, shaking the water from their downy feathers and reaching around the groom their backs. And then one by one they found places under their mothers soft wings.

While many of the ducklings disappeared under their mama, one wayward and adventurous duckling continued to swim. She poked her way through buried reeds, checked out floating twigs and generally ignored her still gently honking mother. Eventually though, she too came home. Mama goose kept calling until even her last baby found a place nestled under her feathers. And all that was left to be seen of those babies was the subtle pulse of life, like the heartbeat of six tiny duckling hearts.

Shortly after this walk I was in a meeting with the Worship Oversight Committee from my church. We were invited into reflection on this passage from Psalm 139:7-12:

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night," even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

As one person commented on the meaningfulness of the image of God's hands leading and holding fast, I thought about the way I use my own hands. Naomi is learning to walk right now. She seems to have no fear. She often plunges literally headfirst in the direction that she wants to go without thinking of the close edge of the couch, the steepness of the stairs or the sharp object that might be in her way. I use my hands to hold her up, to keep her safe, to move danger out of her way, to keep her from falling and to comfort her when she's taken too big a risk and hurt herself.

I allow Naomi a lot of liberty in exploring her world but I also try my best to keep her safe. God's hands for me are so much like my hands for my daughter. It brought tears to my eyes to think that however much I love Naomi, God's love for me is infinitely more, holding me fast. And here I thought also of the Biblical image of God the Father guiding the infant in it's tentative steps. We parents offer both guidance and freedom for exploration, both correction and comfort, whether we are human or animal. We are created in the image of God and God has offered us the same gifts as our Mother in heaven, as so much more. Thanks be to God!

Thousand Red Birds

Here is another poem that I think fits really well with Pentecost. The spirit calls us to proclamation! I was interested and glad to see that it made it into the new Mennonite hymnal supplement 'Sing the Journey' as a responsive reading.

Thousand Red Birds

We clutch our tiny bits of faith in tight fists
shoved firmly in our pockets.
We clutch it suspiciously, so unwilling to let it go -
we don't want to lose it.
We clutch is fearing that once it is spent,
we will be without hope,
cast adrift, out of luck.

Help us to loosen our grip.
Help us to pull our hand out of our pockets.
Help us to uncurl fingers stiffened over time.

to grow,
to shimmer,
to pulse,
to explode into the air

like a thousand red birds.


-Phil Porter

A comment about my last two posts...

Not that I have a whole lot of readers, but I want to qualify my last two entries and say that I am not obsessed with birth - just that 'tis the season. I didn't even look to see what my last entry had been about otherwise I might not have posted something so thematically similar. The most recent post was an article for the church newsletter.

Pentecost

It is a season of celebration and we have much to celebrate. One year ago I was given the gift of my daughter, after not a small amount of effort and labour. This season we celebrate another birthday much more significant than Naomi’s. Words from our new songbook Sing the Story speak this invocation: “Come, Holy Spirit. lamplighter, midwife of change, comforter, disturber, inspirer, and advocate.” God’s spirit midwifed the church into being that day. And though the Spirit Midwife gave the amazing gifts of comfort, inspiration and advocacy, she also accompanied change, pain and a labour into a new life in Christ.

I am learning as a parent that labour does not end in the birthing room and that it is mingled with love, great joy and celebration in one’s relationship with a child. As a child myself I know well that one’s relationship with parents too is often full of both joy and difficulty. We are children of the One who sent the Spirit to birth the church into being and we continue to struggle along with each other and in our growing relationship with God our parent. We need to continue to invite the Spirit to be present in this struggle. Because though we experience the pain, the unease with the new, She will always be our comforter, our advocate and inspirer.

As the same prayer quoted above continues we must invite the Spirit to come, “fill the church with the gifts [we] can neither produce nor afford.” We need the gifts that the Spirit Midwife has to offer. Today our children will invite us to identify one of these gifts that we feel an affinity with for this day or this season. But the Spirit’s gifts are many and she offers in abundance even as she both identifies and moves with us through the struggle.

Thematically unrelated, I found a poem about Pentecost that I like quite a bit...

Pentecost

In the upper room
   Pentecostal wind
   swirled like a tornado of grace
   and fiery tongues
   burned language into stutterers.

   O Spirit,
   stir our passion again!
   Light wildfires
   and spin them past
   our tame intentions.

   Huff and puff till you blow down
   the shutters we hide in,
   scarred by earlier zests,
   more cowardly and cynical
   than once upon a time

   when we inhaled your fire
   and gulped your windstorms
   like tap water
   and laughed at those
who counseled
caution.

--Sr. Patricia Schnapp, RSM Adrian, Mich.

Christ the Midwife

This may or may not be the title for my sermon this week. I was initially excited about the upcoming series at our church about healing. Yet as I began to think further on it I became more and more anxious - feeling inadequate. I have never experienced dramatic suffering, I have never undergone miraculous healing. And then I thought about the last time that I had an experience of intense pain.

When I was in labor with Naomi, I was in the worst pain I have ever felt. Now labor is interesting because really, there was nothing 'wrong' with me. I did not have a disease, I was not ill, I did not need to be cured. And yet there I was in the hospital, surrounded by nurses and doctors. I did not have a midwife, but by friend Julie and my husband Joe coached and accompanied me through the birth process. They held my hand and helped we ride the waves of pain until at last Naomi was born and my body could begin the process of healing itself.

Christ is the one who stands beside in our pain and through it births something new. Maybe a new part of ourselves, maybe a new creation, a new relationship. A friend who is a doctor in a hospice setting talked to me this morning about the different between the 'illusion of cure' and healing. So many people think that being cured is making things the same as they were before. Instead we should be seeking the newness that is possible out of an experience with pain. In hospice, that new thing is often a realization of peace at coming death. My body is not the same, to say nothing of by life, as it was before child birth. But a new way of being has been birthed and the scars and stretch marks (and flabby belly) are the reminder of a wonderful new relationship in my life.

In Mark 10, Jesus encounters Bartimeus, or 'son of honor' in Hebrew. Bartimeus is blind and a beggar - the opposite of honorable, in fact. His sits by the side of the road, calling out to people to have mercy on him. And when Jesus walks by, his cry is the same, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me." What is the cry for mercy asking? For sight? For alms? For forgiveness for an unknown sin? The crowd shushes him, yet Jesus calls him near and says to him 'What do you want me to do for you? He does not assume, and when he asks for his sight, Jesus proclaims that Bartimeus' faith has made him well. Through Jesus, Bartimeus is born again. Not only into a body that is sighted, but into a life of honor and discipleship, following his healer and teacher.

Lately when I have imagined Christ, I've come up with the image of a woman. Older than me but still young, strong, gentle. She knows me but she waits for me to speak my need to her. Jesus Christ is waiting for each one of us to call out in our pain. He is waiting to accompany us but has given us the power to ask for what we want.



Sophia Christ, Wisdom of God who was present at the birth of Creation,
Be present now as Creation groans,
as we long for healing and new life.

Hold the hands of those who cry out, of those who mourn
Brace up the ones who are struggling and weak,

Help us to live in eager eager anticipation of the new birth,
Even as we breathe through the agony of labor.
Amen

Knocked Up Like Mary

This year in advent I sat through a sermon about Mary and Elizabeth that was preached by a man, all the time thinking, 'that should be me preaching this sermon.' It had never bothered me before. Last year during advent I had been so frustrated with the birth imagery, the reminders in the daily devotion (for women) that I was doing that for women creativity is like birth. Even then, a little over a year ago, I still felt very ambiguous about giving birth and about my own role in bring new life into a crazy mixed up world.

And then I got pregnant. It's not that I don't have doubts about the presumption of bringing yet another human life into an already busting-out planet. Nor do I have complete confidence in my ability to raise and nurture a strong and confident daughter in a world that is still so misogynistic in many ways. But I also now realize that all those things people say about the miracle of pregnancy, and the hope of childbearing is true.

My openness to bringing my daughter into the world speaks to my hope both for her and in what God can do here. And her growing in me makes me constantly amazed at the actual fully unique human being that God is creating inside. In spite of my worries about the future, the tension I feel about being a parent, I cannot wait to meet my baby, to discover how she is like me and my husband, to see how she is totally her own person, to get to know her. And there she is in me, two months away from coming into the world and it is an indescribably feeling and joy every time she moves - even when it's in the direction of my already squeezed bladder.

I hear the Luke passages about Mary and Elizabeth and the babies jumping in their wombs in a whole new way. Jesus was just like the baby growing in me, and that blows my mind. God's greatest hope for the salvation of the world was just like my own daughter.

Celebrating the 4th of July – fireworks and ‘bombs bursting on air’

I like fireworks. I think they’re pretty and except when people operate them carelessly, and when they burn up docks on Lake Union, that they are harmless. But, I've been challenged to think about this supposedly harmless celebration of the nation’s independence. Joe and I stood on our roof on July 4th and watched explosions going off all over the city, and I came the closest I’ve ever come (or maybe will come) to feeling what it might be like to be surrounded by bomb blasts and gunfire. And amid the violent symbolism was an air of joy.

I have thought a lot about what it means to be a Christian in my adopted home, a nation of fierce national pride and and almost religious patriotic identity. I’ve thought about what it means to swear oaths, pledge allegiance to the flag, sing an anthem, all in honour of, not primarily a Christian identity but of a nation. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not okay with any of those things. And I think making Christian identity primary is equally important for all Christians not just those of us who live in the US. Our Anabaptist forebears were not okay with identifying first with prince and nation, and they put their allegiance first and only in Christ. If it was good enough for them…

But another key belief of mine and of the Mennonite church is in non-violence. So the Chinese invented gunpowder and fireworks as a tool to create beauty. Western technology got a hold of it and thought, ‘How can I use this to kill people?’ – a thing of power and beauty adopted for the purposes violence and domination.

Frances Scott Key wrote the American national anthem celebrating the star spangled banner flying against a sky alight with the fireworks of war: ‘freedom’ won through violence and bloodshed. I already know that true freedom is found only in Christ. And I eschew violence because that was what Christ taught. Having so committed, can I be comfortable enjoying a 4^th of July fireworks display? I certainly won’t see those beautiful and brilliant sparkles without also remembering soberly what kinds of horror that same tool has wrought.

In Canada on November 11^th, Remembrance Day (like Veterans’ Day here in the States) it is a tradition to wear red poppies reminiscent of the poem "In Flanders Fields" which celebrates the bravery of soldiers lost in the second World War. MCC distributes as an alternative bright red poppy-like pins pins that say ‘to remember is to work for peace’. I want to continue to enjoy the beauty and awesomeness of a fireworks display. But I also don’t want to forget that there will always be ways to work to make the only fireworks shot into the sky the pretty and colourful ones that we use in celebration.

X-men and the Bible

I was recently told, when discussing the idea that follows, "Just because you see a metaphor doesn’t mean you have to use it." But I just can’t let it go. It didn't make it into the sermon, but this is what blogs were made for…a forum for personal musings and inane comparisons of the biblical figures to popular comic book and movie characters.

I just saw the most recent instalment of the X-men movies - The Last Stand. I liked the character of Rogue (played by Anna Paquin) in the previous two movies and would have hoped that the writers would have developed her better in this ‘final’ instalment of the series. (I guess they can only do so much when there are twenty five characters to develop and there’s a butt-kicking quota). Each of the mutant/superhero/supervillain characters in the series have different powers. Rogue’s power is that she adopts the powers of anyone she touches. as well as the person's thoughts. While Rogue takes on the powers of the person she touches, that person is drained of power. She doesn’t know how to control her ability to do this, and to keep from harming anyone she comes in contact with. Since she can't control it, it controls her. She is unable to touch anyone without harming them and this is most painful to her, a teenage girl, where it comes to her relationship with a boy she cares about.

So in the same span of time that I saw X-Men I was working on a sermon on Mark 5:21-43 about Jesus healing a girl and a woman. So maybe it's true and drawing a comparison between Rogue and the woman in this story is stretching it. But in some ways, this woman is like Rogue. First of all, she is isolated because her disease. She has endured 12 years of vaginal bleeding (there you go…if you were ever wondering what ‘haemorrhaging’ meant) which makes her unable to touch or come into close contact with anyone without transferring her uncleanness to that person. It isolates her from society. Second, more specifically, what would have been especially hard: she is unable to marry or be with a man because having sex with a woman who is bleeding goes beyond unclean. Levitical law calls for death. In that culture not only does her disease rob her of the intimacy of marriage, it robs her of the status that only comes to women when they can be a wife and mother.

In the movie, Rogue sneaks off to the evil Magneto for the ‘cure’ to the mutant gene that causes her to be able to take power from others. The bleeding woman sneaks up to Jesus. And there the comparison comes to a big fat end. Jesus is the one with the power and no-one else - no super hero, no individual by her own power, not even doctors, though we are grateful for the gifts that God gave them. Jesus' power to save is for any of us who will reach out an touch him in faith. We too are gifted by the Holy Spirit to love and to heal and to restore relationships. Yet when we use this power, give it to others we are not depleted, but only grow stronger.

There is no villain in the story of the woman, except disease and isolation itself. And the ‘hero’ is Jesus and his power to save us not for the next life, but to be whole and holy in this one.