Contents 2004:
At
the birth of the Christ, all heaven and earth rejoiced.
In
Matthew the sparkling star becomes the Messiah’s star.
In
Luke the angels declare to the shepherds the good news
of
Jesus’ birth to all creation. “Peace on earth . . .”
While the innocents were being massacred who says
that flowers didn’t bloom, that air didn’t
breathe bewildering scents
that birds didn’t rise to the heights of their
most accomplished songs
that young lovers didn’t twine in love’s embraces
But would it have been fitting if a scribe of the
time had shown this
and not the monstrous uproar on a street drenched
with blood
the wild screams of mothers with infants torn
from their arms
the scuffling, the senseless laughter of soldiers
aroused by the touch of women’s bodies and young
breasts warm with milk
Flaming torches tumbled down stone steps
There seemed no hope of rescue
and violent horror soon gave way to the still
more awful
numbness of despair
At that moment covered by the southern night’s
light shadow
a bearded man leaning on a staff
and a girl with a child in her arms
were fleeing lands ruled by the cruel tyrant
carrying the world’s hope to a safer place
beneath silent stars in which these events
had been recorded centuries ago
Now morning being come, Christian looked
back, not out of desire to return, but to see, by the light of the day, what
hazards he had gone through in the dark. So he saw more perfectly the ditch
that was on the one hand and the cowage that was on the other, also how
narrow the way was which lay betwixt them both. Also now he saw the dragons
of the pit, but all afar off, for after the break of day they came not
nigh. Yet they were discovered to him, according to that which is written,
He discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out of light the
shadow of death. About this time the sun was rising, and this was another
mercy to Christian. Then he said, His candle shineth on my head, and by his
light I go through darkness.
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Deep peace of
the running wave to you,
of water flowing, rising and falling,
sometimes advancing, sometimes receding . . .
May the stream of your life flow unimpeded!
Deep peace of the running wave to you!
Deep peace of the flowing air to you,
which fans your face on a sultry day,
the air which you breathe deeply, rhythmically,
which imparts to you energy, consciousness, life.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you!
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you,
who, herself unmoving, harbors the movements
and facilitates the life of the ten thousand
creatures,
while resting contented, stable, tranquil.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you!
Deep peace of the shining stars to you,
which stay invisible till darkness falls
and discloses their pure and shining presence
beaming down in compassion on our turning world.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you!
Deep peace of the watching shepherds to you,
of unpretentious folk who, watching and waiting,
spend long hours out on the hillside,
expecting in simplicity some Coming of the Lord.
Deep peace of the watching shepherds to you!
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you,
who, swift as the wave and pervasive as the air,
quiet as the earth and shining like a star,
breathes into us His Peace and His Spirit.
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you!
Mary Rogers,
adapted from the Gaelic
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“The Name Cuts Deep”
Here’s another one.
A boy, eight days old.
It’s time: time to cut away
Unneeded flesh, to sign the scar
Of God in manchild’s private place.
No one else will know but him and his.
The rite calls for a name.
Have you a name yet, son?
What shall we call you, little giant?
Call his name “Jesus”? Why?
Because he’ll save his people?
What a huge load for such little shoulders.
What dreams parents have, what expectancies.
Poor little child, to have God’s work
Assigned so soon.
Cut the name in deep. Tattoo it indelibly on tortured Hebrew flesh.
Scar it with raw wounds to acquaint you early
With cross and barb and nail.
You’ll be Jew soon enough to know
The Name cuts deep in certain flesh.
Now you belong to God.
There’s no escaping that.
His name is for eternity. Get used to it now.
“Jesus” is the handle you’ll get used to.
You’ll wish you could change your name
Into incognito, when the whole world
Calls it out in curse and prayer.
Go home for now, lacerated boy.
Don’t grow up too soon.
(Wayne Saffron; see Luke 2:21)
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“Joy Shall Come”
Joy shall come even to the wilderness,
And the parched land shall then know great gladness;
As the rose, as the rose shall deserts blossom,
Deserts like a garden blossom.
For the living springs shall give cool water,
In the deserts streams shall flow,
For living springs shall give cool water,
In the desert streams shall flow.
(Hebrew Traditional)
The desert will sing and rejoice
and the wilderness will blossom with flowers;
and will see the Lord’s splendor
see the Lord’s greatness and power.
Tell everyone who is anxious:
Be strong and don’t be afraid.
The blind will be able to see;
the deaf will be able to hear;
the lame will leap and dance;
those who can’t speak shall shout.
They will hammer their swords into ploughs
and their spears into pruning-knives;
the nations will live in peace;
they will train for war no more.
This is the promise of God;
God’s promise will be fulfilled.
(Iona Community Worship Book)
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“Beckoning Grace”
We Peters / Walking on Life’s sea / Implore / Beckoning grace
In the face / Of heaving waves / Oh let us be / Dear God
However weak / Intent to lean / On Thee
Kathy Keay
“Simplicity”
How happy is the little stone / That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers, / And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown / A Passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun, / Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree / In casual simplicity.
Emily Dickinson, 1830-86
“The Faith of a Child”
In the old days there were angels who came and took men [sic] by the hand and
led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now.
But yet men are led from a threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs,
which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look
no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.
from Silas Marner, George Eliot, 1819-80
from the “Climbing” section of Dancing on
Mountains:
An Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Writings,
Kathy Keay
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“God’s
Dance of Creation”
In our quest for God, / we think too much,
reflect too much. / Even
when we look
at the dance we call
creation / we are all the time
thinking, / analyzing. /
Words. / Noise.
Be silent / and
contemplate the Dance.
Just look. / A star, / a
flower, / a fading leaf,
A bird, / a stone / --
any fragment will do.
India
“Come
Spirit”
Sing, my soul, a Spirit
song,
calling all to sing
along.
Fill the world with
joyful sounds:
God is here and grace
abounds
Come, Spirit, come and
be a new reality.
Your touch is
guarantee of love alive in me.
Dance, my heart, at your
rebirth.
partner to the dance of
earth.
Thirsting spirit, drink
your fill:
love goes dancing where
it will.
Come, Spirit, come and
be a new reality.
Your touch is
guarantee of love alive in me.
When constrained by
thoughts or things,
hear the word the Spirit
brings:
life is larger than it
seems,
hope is the harbinger of
dreams.
Come, Spirit, Come and
be a new reality.
Your touch is
guarantee of love alive in me.
Miriam
Therese Winter
from the “Dreaming”
section of Dancing on Mountains:
An Anthology of Women’s
Spiritual Writings, Kathy Keay
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November 21, 2004
Dixie Jennings-Teats,
Associate Pastor of Carson City UMC, was Guest Preacher today
Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day –
and to her soil: rich, rare, and sweet
in our minds so be it
Gratitude to Plants: the sun-facing light-changing leaf
and fine root-hairs; standing still through wind
and rain; their dance is in the flowing spiral grain
in our minds so be it
Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and the silent
Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
clear spirit breeze
in our minds so be it
Gratitude to Wild beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;
self-complete, brave, and aware
in our minds so be it
Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
in our minds so be it
Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep – he who wakes us –
in our minds so be it
Gratitude to the Great Sky
who holds billions of stars – and goes yet beyond that –
beyond all powers and thoughts
and yet is within us –
Grandfather Space.
The Mind is his Wife.
so be it.
Gary Snyder (after a Mohawk prayer)
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"When you're pushing seventy, that's exercise enough...We worry too much
about something to live on - and too little about something to live
for...Too many folks spend their lives aging instead of maturing"
former president Jimmy Carter
"Aging does not need to be hidden or denied, but can be understood, affirmed
and experienced as a process of growing by which the mystery of life is
slowly revealed."
Henri Nouwen & Walter Gaffney
"A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if
this longevity had no meaning for the species...The afternoon of human life
must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful
appendage to life's morning."
Carl Jung
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“There is no
way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the
sun.”
Thomas Merton
Those
who gather to worship God in the name of Jesus are never alone. There is a wider “communion of
saints” that unites believers across all boundaries of time and space,
even across such a boundary as divides this world from the next.
This
communion with those who have “died in the Lord” was a vivid reality
to the early Christians. They
liked to gather at the graves of the martyrs to remember their heroic
witness and to commemorate the anniversaries of their deaths. . . .
There
was a time when martyrdom was virtually the defining characteristic of
sainthood. . . . The saints, it seemed, were more to be venerated than
imitated. . . .
This
is one reason, apart from humility, that holy people are loath to be
called saints. As Dorothy
Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, used to say, “Don’t
call me a saint. I don’t
want to be dismissed that easily.”
By putting saints on a pedestal, we imply that their example
poses no personal challenge. . . . The saints are those who, in some
partial way, embody – literally incarnate – the challenge of faith
in their time and place. In
doing so, they open a path that others might follow. . . .
Previous
models of sanctity tended to emphasize a world-denying asceticism; today
we need examples of discipline and self-denial in service to the world
and in solidarity with a suffering humanity. There are countless saints who
exhibited the virtue of charity; we need saints who combine charity with
a prophetic thirst for justice. Much
of Christian history has been written with male hands; we need to recall
the example and the gifts of holy and prophetic women. The traditional list of saints
has been dominated by the clergy and those in religious life; we need to
give special attention to the witness of lay people – those whose
vocation is to infuse the “world” with the spirit of the gospel. Church history tends to be
written in Western terms; in this era of the “world church” we need
to remember the struggle of saints who translated the gospel into the
idiom of local, non-Western cultures, who engaged the wisdom of other
religious paths, and who tried to understand their faith in terms of new
intellectual and cultural horizons.
We need examples of holiness beyond the cloister: saints immersed
in the worlds of art, literature, scholarship, in political struggle,
and in everyday life. We
need prophets who challenge the church as well as the world to better
reflect the justice and mercy of God.
We need the witness of the martyrs, ancient and new, who have
laid down their lives for their faith and for their neighbors. We must attend the vision of the
mystics, who see through the shades of everydayness and so remind us of
the God who is ever-greater than our theologies or our imaginations.
Intro to Robert
Ellsberg, All Saints:
Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time
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“Costumes,” Sharon Charde
My mother made my
sisters / nuns for Halloween in 1952.
By hand, she
stitched black / serge, carefully pleated
flat bodices,
starched white / linen for the wimples. Gauzy
veils attached with
pins, / my father’s dark belts
for the waist,
their own / rosaries. She worked
hard
on these costumes
for her two / youngest, who carried her pride
in their holiness
and hers out / into the night to the neighbors
along with their
brown paper bags / for candy. I
didn’t want to walk
with them.
I think I was a
tramp that year, / ripped men’s pants tied with a rope,
an old felt hat and
a scary mask. / I dressed as the other sex, clear
even then it was a
costume I’d need / in the world I hadn’t entered yet,
clear my mother’s
designs wouldn’t / dress me, clear that a woman’s life
had rules I would
have to rescind.
from “Halloween,” Kirsty MacColl
You must have
followed me back home / And hid behind my back
No one could find
me on their own / I’m off the beaten track
Well I was scared
before / But I’m afraid no more
And nothing’s as
it seems / Halloween
The spirits of the
past / The costumes and the masks
To me they don’t
disguise / The presence in your eyes
They turn their
heads to see / If we were meant to be
A nightmare or a
dream / Oh Halloween
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October 24, 2004
The
Prayer of Saint Francis
Lord, make me an instrument of thy
peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow
love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we
receive,
it is in pardoning that we are
pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born
to eternal life.
Francis
of Assisi, Italy, 13th cent.
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Why must people kneel down to pray?
If I really wanted to pray
I'll tell you what I'd do.
I'd go out into a great big field
all
alone
or into
the deep, deep woods,
and I'd look up into the sky
up
- up - up -
into that lovely blue sky
that looks as if there was no end to its blueness.
And then I'd just feel a prayer."
Lucy
Maud Montgomery
Anne of
Green Gables
God, You see us as you call
us to be.
Give us faith so that we
can envision your world according to Your ways,
living in hope, confidence and
love.
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Most high,
all-powerful, all-good, Lord!
All praise
is yours, all glory, all honor and blessing.
To you,
alone, Most High, do they belong.
No mortal
lips are worthy to pronounce your name.
All praise
be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,,
and my
first my Lord Brother Sun, who brings the day;
and light
you give to us through him.
How
beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you,
Most High, he bears the likeness.
All praise
be yours, my Lord, through Sister Moon and Stars;
in the
heavens you have made them,
bright and
precious and fair.
All praise
be yours, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
and fair
and stormy, all the weather’s moods,
by which
you cherish all that you have made.
All praise
be yours, my Lord, through Sister Water,
so useful,
lowly, precious and pure.
All praise
be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through
whom you brighten up the night.
How
beautiful is he, how cheerful, full of power and strength.
All praise
be yours, my Lord, through Sister Earth, our mother,
who feeds
us in her sovereignty
and
produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.
All praise
be yours, my Lord,
through
those who grant pardon for love of you;
through
those who endure sickness and trial.
Happy
those who endure in peace,
By you,
Most High, they will be crowned.
All praise
be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,
from whose
embrace no mortal can escape.
Woe to
those who die in mortal sin!
Happy
those she finds doing your will!
The second
death can do no harm to them.
Praise and
bless my Lord, and give him thanks,
and serve
him with great humility.
-- St. Francis, “Canticle of Brother Sun”
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They went together
– those wrinkled hands and tattered book.
And something in
the awe with which she held it made me think she held a sacred fire.
The old
brass-bound Bible came to her from her mother, and hers before that, too,
through more
generations than I know how to reckon – faded, cracked, worn with use.
I wonder how it
felt to hold the past within her hands –
how many broken
hearts found comfort there, how many searching minds were fed;
how many fears
were calmed in its reading;
what songs of joy
were hummed over it;
what secret tears
still stain its pages?
I loved to hear
her talk to God, and when she prayed,
I sometimes
imagined I felt God near.
It was a very safe
place to be – with God and her.
I liked her God,
so wrapped up in the small goings-on of daily life –
not too far away
and busy with eternal things to take notice of one small child.
The Bible became
mine today, and my smooth hands look somehow out of place –
and somehow right
at home.
Like her, I hold
the accumulated joys and sorrows of my heritage
and join my life
with theirs.
There is a
strength to it – forged by faithful living in the presence of a loving God.
The line still
holds –
all those who have
gone before, myself, and those who are to come.
n
Marie Livingston Roy
“The Faith of the Bible’s Timothy”
Faith is what
is handed down from mother to daughter to son,
but not merely
as a package passed from one generation to another,
but as “a
faith which was alive” in mother daughter
and which now
lives in the child of the third generation.
n
Carl R. Holladay
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