Wild Geese

I am traveling over the 4^th Sunday in Advent. So far this month I have offered an on-line weekly zoom meditation but the travel we have planned will keep me out in the world and not near my computer during the time I normally open up the Zoom conference window. Of course I sent an email out to the handful of folks who have indicated an interest in the meditation and I called the weekend “Quiet 4^th Sunday” on the subject line without a lot of thought.

And now I’m thinking about it.

If we went to worship, we’d probably hear the Luke text about Mary’s journey to her cousin, Elizabeth. Both are pregnant in unexpected ways. Elizabeth is too old to be pregnant and Mary carries the impossible within her. Elizabeth’s child leaps about in Elizabeth’s womb as Elizabeth greets her cousin and the child with a prophesy of salvation. Mary responds with the Magnificat, the speech that claims that God is restoring hope and righteousness for all of God’s creation. 

That’s a lot of talking for a quiet 4^th Sunday in Advent.

Its safe to say that I’m the one looking for the quiet when the church is busy proclaiming this weekend.

Or even more honest to say that I’m looking for a different kind of quiet. 

Continue reading “Advent C4 – Quiet Time”

The incarnation of God in human body is a mystery.
I don’t have a better way to say this.
Unless I add the adjective Impossible to modify the word mystery.
Because the world does not contain God.

The world can’t contain God. 
The world is smaller then God. 

However, God may be in the world, testified to by the world, but be sure. God is not just the world or the universe or star dust. We’re star dust, God is something different from all that.

Which is a whole other mystery.
Or several mysteries actually…

Like Where does God come from?
Like Why does God exist and can we even use that word“exist” which implies limitations  of life and death or being and not being?
Like What does God want from us? 

Continue reading “Advent C3 – Mystery”

As I begin the first draft of this meditation, I want to start with telling you that it is 10:24 in the morning on the 30th of November and a big wind storm is blowing through Munich.

With Snow.

Which swirls up in grand circles or rushes by in straight lines both marking the wind’s energy and passion.

My apartment is on the top floor of a 110 year old building that was remodeled over 40 years ago. The window frames do not seal well and the wind pushes its way around the edges. The clouds are thick, low, and even. It is true winter light bouncing off the snow on the ground, in the air, waiting to fall.

I look at this and think, this is the weather of all the old Advent carols. Maybe if we were alive in those times, we’d trudge through snow and head off to the village church or along very cold monastery halls to the chapel to make repentance or listen to the end-of-the-world readings in order to be ready for the God-baby.

Continue reading “Advent C2 – Real Advent”

In the old times, very old times, new days began at sunset and new years began at the end of harvest. I like the idea that new things begin in hidden spaces, unseen and unnamed until they emerge hours and months later. It was the Romans who decided the new day started at the opposite of Noon. Even then, the new time starts at a hidden hour, a time when we are already asleep or starting to head for bed.  Meanwhile, much of plant life in the Northern Hemisphere is withdrawing their energy to underground safety. Seeds have been sown, leaves have been shed, insects, birds, and other animals take shelter. It looks like everything is ending, but this is the time that ancient humanity claimed as the beginning – not the end. 

Is it true to say that when something new begins, it actually begins with silence? With rest? With hiddeness? Unseen? Unnamed? 

Continue reading “Advent C1 – Waiting”

The Tree of Life is an idea, a symbol that has been with us for a long time. In this spoken meditation I explore how the metaphor of God as Tree of Life can be helpful to our thinking about God at work in this world.

This not-very-produced recording is about 18 minutes long. It has several breaks built in. The hope is that you will take this recording along as you head out for a walk or a simple presence in some area with at least one tree. More is better. However, we all live where we live and our life runs as it does. Feel free to ignore all my suggestions and just listen wherever you find yourself. I hope its helpful.

Continue reading “Meditation to Go – Tree of Life”

I’ve been organizing a weekly meditation via Zoom for a handful of folks since Advent. I have very much appreciated the women who have chosen to share this practice with me for the last four months. Now that warmer weather is returning, I want to expand the work offered to an audio/written script for personal walk about. I want to keep this practice centered in being outside, being someplace where God is still at work in our world and while zoom keeps us connected, it also keeps us indoors and close to our wi-fi box.

I’ve also become intrigued by some research that says trees may be more then what we see: tall plants, some with fruit and seeds and others with just leaves. It turns out that trees are often an active part of a community, exchanging resources and giving warnings to each other. It makes think what a God who exists in the community of the Trinity may be inclined to create when creating a world system.

So, this is the trial run. Here is an mp3 file for you to download and take with you on your walk. Or print out the PDF and read from that from time to time. The whole thing is as long or as short as you want it to be. I hope it is of interest to you. I hope you look at trees with wonder again.

The next Meditation-to-go will probably focus on the symbol of the Tree of Life. Not surprisingly, many many cultures see trees as something more then just something to chop down and carve up.

Audio (MP3):

PDF Base Script:

When do you think Spring starts? Is it the Vernal Equinox, March 21^st, one of the two mid points between Winter and Summer solstice? Is it March 1^st, the beginning of the second season in the Meteorological record keeping system? Or (if you are ancient Celtic inclined) is it around the beginning of February which marks Groundhog day (how much more winter still to come?), St. Brigid feast day (and a few other major saints), the Presentation of Jesus at the temple, Candlemas (blessing of candles for use by the church and at home), and Imbolc, the point midway between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox?

You don’t know Imbolc? Imbolc is the pre-Christian Celtic fest day of Spring’s beginning. While it is tied to the mid-point between Winter Solstice and Vernal Equinox, it is also tied to the beginning of the lambing season and so can drift by a couple of weeks in either direction. The lambs make the season.

As a teen-ager,  Spring actually started with the first sight of crocuses and daffodils on my way to and from school in the rainy, wet, cold Pacific Northwest winter. Those hope giving little pokes of new green leaves and stems showed up thankfully in early February.  As a suburban girl, I didn’t know about sheep but I did have those little fragile bits of white, purple, and yellow colors promising more to come.  

Continue reading “Everything Happens at Once and Sooner then You Thought”

For years I have honored Winter Solstice as a kind of a landmark of survival. We made it this far into the dark night (huray!) and now we start turning back into the summer sun. My personal tradition was to toast the sun at sundown even if was so cloudy that I had to go look up the exact moment on a weather internet site. I turned off all the lights in my house and start a fire in the fireplace. In one of my old houses I had a fireplace in the kitchen. I prepared a whole meal over by candlelight and over the fire. I invited friends over and we’d all drink too much and I’d try to read poems or liturgies about light. At the end of the meal we’d all peel an orange to honor the slow return of daylight.

It was a lot of fun but the whole thing was also a complete resistance to the darkening season. A denial that there could be anything good in the dark and cold. In this winter of disease, ill-governance, ongoing climatic change, isolation, sudden disruption of our lives and economies, it finally occurred to me that maybe there is something important for us to find in the dark.

As I’ve read other people’s writings and thinking about Soltice, they also try to frame this hinge day with light. Some try to reach back past living memory to a time when everyone lived by daylight and firelight. We really didn’t start to exert day and night control over our light until the late 1700s. If we call a generation as around 20 years, then we have exerted control over our light for about 10, 12 generations or so. Is it dark at 5:30 p.m? That’s okay, turn on a light and pick up a book or take food out of the refrigerator. Turn up the radiator, draw the curtains close. Winter darkness, winter cold has no control over our daily life. We can go about the same projects and tasks as if we were in June or March or September.

But sometimes not with the same energy. We may not remember what it was like to live at the mercy of the sunset and the sunrise but our bodies remember. My daughters, myself, my parents, my friends – all of us slow down at this time of year. We lose energy, we become sad or angry. My worst grades always came in the third quarter when I was in school. Here in Germany, the medical people prescribe vitamin D as a mood lifter and the internet is full of solar lights for sale to try and fool our bodies back into full summer performance levels.

I think we’re caught up in a culture that demands full performance from everyone at all times. There is little room for weakness. There is no patience for the time necessary to grounding, for rest, for regeneration. Our need for rest is denied and worse, we buy in and participate in the medicalization and stigmalization of what is perhaps a normal response to the world as we have found it for millennia and still find it today. Creation all around us, even here in the cities, clearly takes a step back from production both as a way to survive this cold season but also as a way to prepare for the next growth season. Maybe we should do this too.

We have always known about solstice. We’ve clearly had a long standing need to know which days frame the sun’s journey from low on the winter horizon to the heights of the summer sky. Ancient structures from simple stones to complex temples were built all over the world with a window or a door or even just a simple slit in the stone that would light up when the sun reached the end of its seasonal swing. Clearly we have wanted to know where we are in these twin seasons of light and darkness.

We can imagine that each swing of sun would be met with celebrations of bonfire, food and drink, gatherings as well as any other ritual we could think of at the time. I certainly understand the desire to see hope as we move back toward a longer day. As I’ve said before, I’ve personally set up significant celebrations for the lessening of darkness. I’m not the only one. Many of the major religions include some sort of festival of light around this time of year.

Christianity centers the birth of Christ around this time of darkness. Christianity, at its ancient, pre-marketing culture core, also treats Advent as a time of penance, of self-examination and preparation for the entry of God into this world. Advent is a time to get ready for the community to began again retelling the story of how death itself is overcome for everyone. The middle of a dark winter is a great time to think about death. We can’t help it, no matter how much we’d prefer to change the subject. Yet, like darkness, it still comes along with all its mysteries. What is it like to die? What comes next?

Winter solstice is a season of darkness. It is the day of maximum darkness. Is there a gift for us in this darkness? Is there a message, a way of seeing or living when we allow ourselves to be centered in the night? Shall we pull out our Jungian text books or our Joseph Campbell Myth reclaiming videos and then ask ourselves what do we fear right now? What are we hiding from? What parts of ourself terrify us so much that we try to shut it out of our daylight minds? What happens if we notice the the darts of movement outside our campfire’s circle of light? If we observe the sounds that come to use in the middle of the night?

What happens if we invite one of those sounds to come into the light with us so we can see its form and shape?

Not all of the sounds and shapes, just one.

Who or what dances in our internal darkness that is ready to be seen? That we are ready to see?

I think this year for Solstice I will still light a candle but not because I want to continue to resist the darkness. Instead I think I’ll sit in the darkness first for a while before I strike match to flame. I will ask the darkness to tell me what I am hiding from, what I need to see. The darkness may keep its peace.

Eventually then I will light the candle not as a resistance but as an act of hope and celebration. Darkness can be embraced if we know it is not the only story for us to live. We know that light and green growing is also a part of our story.

Strange things can happen in the darkness. Angels can suddenly appear to shepherds, or to anyone really, singing incredible stories about new life for the whole world still hidden within a new born infant. Dreams can come to men and women with direction to act as protectors of the hidden gift.

We can find Hope itself in times of darkness, out there on the edge of light and dark.

This year I want to ask what is hidden and wants to be seen by me. And then I will put fire to the candle because light returns. It always returns and the darkness can not overcome it.