Spring changes

It has been four months since I posted to my blog and much of that absence has been spent in deep pondering and a profound wilderness.  Now it is lent, a time when the Christian church recognizes the space where Jesus lived before the crucifixion and resurrection story unfolds.  A time of deep and profound exploration into the dark places in our soul. This purpose-filled exploration may reveal places where the conscious mind cannot go.  It is hard work.  However, by doing this work one uncovers a vast and wonderful place within our own existence.  As Thomas Moore says in his book, Dark Nights of the Soul on page 46, "Your dark night may be a rite of passage" and take you someplace wonderful.

In Christian language the words "sabbath" and "salvation" are used.  I have reclaimed them into my own life even while deeply discerning my own spiritual journey.  As I find "sabbath" which means rest, I have heard the wee small voice, that which is my deepest desires crying out to be married to the person I am on the outside.  My "salvation" comes when I make space for this wee small voice to come out and visit the world I live in and see how it manifests.  This purposeful rest and making space has created a new awareness of my inner and outer world.

Just this past week I was honoured when a friend said to me, "You look fantastic!"  I thanked her and felt amazed how now I have allowed the inner depths of my soul to shine through it is revealed to others.  I shared with her that I finally feel that if someone was to reach into the piggy bank slot in the top of my head, grab my soul and flip me inside out I would look the same.  This has been the result of purpose-filled intentional discernment into my beliefs and my spiritual journey.  It has been life changing.

As I turn 55 this summer I will do so with a clear consciousness that I am on the right path.  Walking a good journey and beginning yet again knowing the most important things in life are family relationships, loving friends and being truthful to your own spirit.  One of my soul mates posted this picture today to Facebook and it is very true.  What is holding you tethered?  What imaginary bondage are you bowing to? What is keeping you chained?  Free yourself, find your sabbath and your salvation and reclaim the true meaning of these words.

As one chapter is complete and another chapter is beginning I hope you will be part of my spiritual growth and the work I intend to do.  LesMar Respite Elder Care is part of this journey.  It would help me so much if you would "like" my page on Facebook and watch for the launch of my website.

The path continues to be revealed as I walk along .... how about you?

Advent One - Hope!

Hope? Today candle one. How do we find hope in what feels like a hopeless world? Last night, a song service of lament for a 26 yr. old... dead. Overdose. Today viewing of the body by family.. how do I as a pastoral person offer hope? I offer it by asking the family to look around. Before the song service the family held birthday celebrations for the bro's of the dead boy and there in the midst was Oliver. Less than a year old sucking on his bottle oblivious to the pain and suffering of this world. The hope is in a baby born with hope of the future. Hope is in rising above all the pain of this human existence and choosing to go on with a happy heart.

Hope is in my grandson's smile.  The hope that he will be loved by those who watch over him.  A baby in a basket.  A baby changes everything.  Causes chaos and yet joy.  Uproots us and changes our priorities.  As you reflect on this Advent season and make your way down to the Christian celebration may the birth of hope bring you a changed world, a renewed chaos and a sense of fire in your belly.  If you are of another faith I wish you best of the holiday season and also hope for you a renewed hope in your spirit and your world.  

Start Here...

Today is a new beginning and I am going to "start here".  While working through the series "LtQ2" one of the women interviewed shared the observations of an old Rabbi.  He has said, "no one can become observant all at once.  There are 631 Jewish laws, pick one and start."  So today I will start.  This is not the first time I have chosen to have a fresh start and it won't be the last.  The point is I continue to choose to begin again and let go of my resentments and pick up the pieces of my shattered life and begin again.  I continue to choose to search and look at myself and see where I am my own worst enemy.  I continue to evaluate where I see the sacred mystery in my life and continue to ask how can I engage with it.

I just spent five days with new friends, colleagues and faces which will journey with me from now on.  I am blessed and I am grateful for these people.  They are the face of God to me.  A God, which is caring, supportive and loving in my life and a God that I can share with all those I meet.  A God which does not need praise or adoration but a God that can walk beside me in human form, Jesus and a God which I feel created me in the grand scheme of the universal creation story and a God from which my spirit continually is attached and fed with a sacred umbilical cord.   A God for which I can be truly and authentically thankful to and for.  That is my definition of God.

Missing links...

Yesterday morning while I was hiking before worship I was walking a familiar road.  This road is a logging road that I walk each morning with some other women.  One morning as we were walking I spotted in the gravel this chain. When I asked the women they said it was tying the road back to the mountain because years ago when the logging company first came in here there was no road.  So they built a road in order to get equipment, trucks and people back in here to Clayton Falls.  Clayton Falls a beautiful place here in Bella Coola and a place where I have been walking to since I arrived here.  Clayton Falls is the home of fish who return to spawn and die.  Clayton Falls provides hydro and is a place where the water falls is tapped into and turns on the lights.  A place where I have watched the water ebb and flow from a small stream to a raging river.

It is a beautiful place were I have sat by the river and recorded the sounds of the water fall.  A place where I spiritually feel fulfilled and love the surroundings.  As I pondered the hands that built this road that takes me to a beautiful place so special to me does the fact a chain holds the road in place erode where I go?  Does this knowledge that people had a hand in this road make the destination any less special?  Not for me.

Soooo... why does the fact that the we now understand scripture to be written by people who wanted to document their understanding of a deity in their time and place make our evolved understanding anything less?  Why is it as we look at a 21st century understanding of science, astronomy, medicine does our understanding of mystery and a divine desire have to stall.  In the past few weeks I have had conversations with people who question Bruce Sanguin's writings that evolution happened?  People who are challenged as creationists and people who believe the bible in such a way they cannot accept evolution because it undermines their belief in scripture.

Like this road, just because there is a chain that holds it to the mountain, it didn't just appear in the mountains, someone built it and had an experience while doing so.  The road did not just appear.  Evolution of the human needs on this planet created a need to build a road.  My need to better understand my faith, my divine connection with the mystery of all that is, creates in me a need to see what was once seen as a divine handing down of scripture is no longer the case.  But it does not undermine or erode my love of what it is I can hold on to as the mystery of creation and something greater than me which is linked to all that I call life!

... a little bread, a little wine, a little faith and a little new thinking...

Symbols ... This picture is of the wood shed at the manse and it is prepared and stacked with wood.  This week I had exhausted the supply of wood in the stairwell and had to do the task of bringing in more.  A few pieces at a time I trampled down the grass, dropped wood chips and moved methodically back and forth from the wood shed to the in house storage.  This is preparation.  Preparation that is necessary because as the days grow more dark than light I know I am going to need wood to keep the house warm.  This wood is the key ingredient I need to stoke the air-tight, cast iron stove that is in the lower level.  This wood is the symbol of heat and warmth.  This wood is my security and a cost saving measure, because this wood saves on oil.  This wood, although simply chunks of what was once trees, is my life-line.  A symbol of what is to come ...

This morning in the wee dark hours, as usual I layed awake in my bed with the red numbers of the clock staring at me from my dresser top. 5:15 AM.  The vertical blinds, while drawn, hung quietly, soundlessley covering the window and I could feel the pillow under my head and it was warm.  So I flipped it over and felt the coolness of the other side.  I reached out into the darkness and wrapped my hand around the tall glass from the night stand, bringing it to my lips and drank from it.  Water, cool and refreshing, slid down my throat.  It had been an uneventful night, thankfully, one free from hot flashes, nightmares or noises from the street.  A restful night which is, for me, rare in these days of uncertainty.  Maybe this is a symbol of what is yet to come....

In the wood pile there were pieces of wood that I wondered what I would do with.  Pieces that I know will not fit into the stove because they are gnarly, gangling, and cumbersome.  Pieces I wonder what I will do with so I leave them behind in the shed. These are symbols of choice.

What is in store for the future?  What is it I am called to do in this world that will make a difference? What symbols should I be looking for that are the signs of hope for the future?  Where do I turn when there is a sense of hopelessness in my existence?  How do I balance that which is moving forward and that which I am called to leave behind?  I am called to be present with the world as it is.  I believe this is the symbol of my future.

This Sunday marks the first time I will create, preside and share in communion in the Christian church were I am serving.  A little bread, a little wine and a table ... according to scripture, symbols used on the night before Jesus died.  According to the accounts in the bible, he called them together, broke the bread, poured the wine and said, "holy crap, I am in trouble! Tomorrow is the day that I knew was coming but now it is here."  He asked them, these people who were his friends, will you remember me?  Will you take my message forward?  Will you share it with the world?  Or will I have died in vain?

My sister and her husband celebrated 50 years married today (Oct. 4).  I was four, and the flower girl.  It was the symbol of their love for each other and just what you did in 1963.  It was the year Martin Luther King died.  It was the year JFK was fatally shot.  It was a year of things we remember.  Many of you won't remember my sister's wedding but you sure remember JFK and MLK.  They both are imprinted on your very soul.  Both symbols of change and remarkable hard work.  Both deaths symbols of a moment when the world stopped, a collective breath was taken, and a second in time when many wondered if they could go on. As Jesus was executed on that day so long ago, his friends must have felt that moment, that second in time where they wondered if they could go on.  Some denied him out of fear, some walked out of the city in disbelief and some dropped to their knees at the foot of the cross screaming.  It is through the symbols of a little bread and a little wine that we realize that life can go on as we remember the past.

But does this mean we cannot change or let go of what we have been indoctrinated with that does not fit with what is real and hopeful?  Jesus died that I can say with certainty.  But was he the product of a god that purposefully impregnated a woman, via the spirit, only to grow to be killed?  For the vegans and vegetarians of the world that thought is as distasteful as birthing cattle just so we have beef on our tables.  Housing chickens in cages and force feeding them to the point of their legs buckling so we have succulent breast meat. For this Christian vegan I cannot believe in a supernatural force that would be that calculating and bold.   This reality is a symbol that I am thinking.  This realization is a symbol that I am part of the world and not a pawn or a piece in a "God's" game of chess.

I have faith in a divine force that is part of a greater universe story.  I have faith in the evolution of mystery where I can sense when all is right in my world and when I am not following a good path.  I have faith that I am part of the Jesus story that he told so long ago.  I reach for the Christian symbols of bread and wine and do so with a heart full of love for what I can accomplish with Jesus as my teacher, mentor and guide.  I can use the scripture as witness to that story as is has been handed down by the great story tellers of the time.  I can in my heart know I am Christian because people will know I am Christian by my love, by my love.  As I find my life and suss it out in the mountains of British Columbia, there is a presence always of those symbols. Symbols that the divine in me is desperately reaching out to the divine in you.

Have a blessed day, raise your voice in justice and speak your own authentic truth.

Four Directions..

Do you ever feel like the guy on the table?  The one who has been hit with a rock and it has not only knocked you out but knocked some sense into you?  I feel this way often since being catapulted from Ontario to British Columbia so quickly.  I have now been here three months, that is 12 Sundays there-abouts.  Listening, watching and re-acting.  Hearing, seeing and advancing.  Some days it is painful and others it is glorious.  Much of my learning is steeped in First Nation's teachings and I am very aware of the "four directions".

This morning I looked out my office window and there it was.  The most beautiful rainbow .. So I ran and got my phone and started snapping pictures. It was so beautiful and seemed to glow right there. The end of it seemed to be focused on the church; the pot of gold is in the church.   I know that but how do I uncover the treasure that is here?  I am not sure. As I looked around I thought of the four directions and how each gives me a different view.  The mystery of the divine is so much like that.  Looks different every time you turn it over and see it from a different direction.

 It is here in these mountains I can see the mystery and hear her voice.  The spirit calls me to be faithful and true.  To look and see what is really there.  Peel back the layers and unveil the treasure there is to behold.  Buried deep under pain and scarring is the face of the child, that baby that comes to us each year in the manger.  A reminder that a baby changes everything.

Wham!  There is that rock, knocking me off my "know-it-all" pedestal.  Slamming me to the earth skinning my knees and breaking the soft skin of my hands.  But as I am there, on my knees looking up at this beauty I am reminded the sun will come out and I will see the way, if I just humble myself to watch and wait for it.  I turn a different direction and see the dark cloudy rain.  I turn once again and there is white fog and blue sky and it is then I turn back to the rainbow.  There it is, the promise of life yet to come, a pot of gold holding the treasures of divine love, a reminder that no matter what I am loved.

The old song from Annie, the sun will come out tomorrow is one that I will take with me into the winter of my existence.  The promise is that tomorrow is another day and if we have faith, hope and trust in something beyond us that creates rainbows and sunshine then there is always a reason to smile.

"Life does and will go on whether I fail at geometry or not" Anne of Green Gables.  It is our choice whether we welcome this life with all its warts or choose to reject it.  I choose to live and I choose to be happy and I choose to be faithful.  I also choose to look at the divine from all directions because some days one direction is easier to take than others.  That is what makes it so great.  We have choices...

Blessings my friends blessings ...

torn between two worlds...

As I prepare for my morning walk, reading and surfing a little, I look at my favorite writers and bloggers.  It is here I find this:

Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me
         cannot be my disciple.
         None of you can become my disciple
         if you do not give up all your possessions. 
                  —Luke 14. 27, 33

I am torn between two worlds.  The material, human world in which I live and work and the spiritual world in which I seek to be part of.  In adhering to this passage to those who claim to be disciples and followers and those who live in the material world I am a misfit.  I have given up all my possessions. I do not possess a need to cling to this human life.  I have moved into a spirit place where I live here but know there is more than we see. 

Being steeped so much in death that is not directly connected to me it gives me the opportunity to see from a distance.  I can see the grief and the lack of true spiritual trust.  When we trust this is only a temporary place then how can we be in despair when those we love move on?  Should we not be joyous on their behalf.  I have heard it said, "I am so sad for {the deceased}!"  How can we be sad for the dead?  

Giving up my possessions has freed me from this world, but not without a cost.  It is this cost I work with every day in order to do effective work.