by Lynn Domina
I recently came across a photograph of a large stone carved with the words, “Abandon all hope,” alluding to Dante’s Inferno and its warning outside the entrance to hell, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Throughout The Inferno, God is never mentioned directly, because hell is so absent of God that even the word itself cannot be spoken. That’s almost the definition of hell in The Inferno, a place where God is absolutely missing. It occurs to me now, though, as I think about that carving and its warning, that hell is also the place where hope is entirely missing.
Over the years of my long life, I have occasionally felt nearly hopeless, though I’ve always been able to cling to something, at least a hope for hope. And something or someone has always come through for me. I am able to live in hope because I have experienced so much kindness.
Living in the midst of a pandemic as we are now, it’s easy to forget kindness, to surrender to panic, even despair, instead. Every morning when I wake up, the death toll has risen by thousands. How could something so small and invisible as a virus have such power? How could experts not know when this will all end as they warn us to prepare for another wave? I think about our ancestors who experienced the plague, who didn’t know anything about transmission by fleas, who only knew when they spotted a black lump like a tumor in their armpit that they would be dead by nightfall. The other day when I felt hot and clammy, I took my temperature, and when I felt a scratchiness in my throat, I wondered if it was the beginning of something really bad. We’re right to fear the corona virus, to fear it enough to respect its power, to protect our neighbors from our potential contagion even when we feel fine. How ironic that this virus accelerated so furiously just as we were preparing to celebrate the greatest feast of the Christian year. Just as we prepared to greet each other with renewed life, we needed to consider our own potential as agents of death.
We are all heirs of people who survived the Black Death that overwhelmed much of Europe during the 14th century, or of the smallpox and measles epidemics that infected indigenous peoples of the Americas during the 16th century and later, or of similar diseases that have historically spread across every inhabited continent. In our lifetimes, we’ve witnessed millions of people die of AIDS and thousands of Ebola. And yet we have not abandoned hope. We have trusted physicians and scientists to discover causes, treatments, and cures; we’ve donated our resources and changed our behaviors to help o
ther people, many of them absolute strangers, survive.
During the spring of 2020 and maybe for quite a while longer, isolating ourselves is becoming an act of kindness for hundreds of others we may never even meet. It’s an act, not of panic but of hope. When I walk around my neighborhood, I see how many people have decorated their windows with hearts. I read story after story about people sewing and donating masks. I watched Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar that Andrew Lloyd Webber made freely available to all of us. I see photographs of children waving through the windows of their grandparents’ nursing homes. We’ll get through this. We’ll be together again. I hope we’ll be able to maintain the concern we’ve felt for each other once we feel secure and ordinary again. I believe we can.
If you’ve never read The Inferno, I encourage you to take a look. It ends with the word “stars,” as do all three sections of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Stars, those mysterious beckoning points of light that remind us how vast the universe is. And we’re part of it, all of the darkness and all of the light. The Inferno ends with stars, but it doesn’t really end even there, for it continues through The Purgatorio to The Paradiso, where it really ends, where we will all end, in paradise with stars.
The Earthkeepers Podcast promotes global connection among ecological Christians who believe that creation care is an integral part of Christian faith in everyday life. Through conversations about topics like ecology, climate change, gardening, farming, social enterprise, theology, environmental justice, outdoor recreation, conservation and community development, we aim to inspire a movement of ordinary earthkeepers who will change the church and heal the world.
In episode 3 (link below), contemplative author and gardener Christine Aroney-Sine offers a perspective from the Global South, and from an Australian point of view in particular. Drawing from her books The Gift of Wonder and To Garden with God, as well as from her blog Godspacelight, she shares her thoughts about the connection between gardening and community, and explains lectio tierra—the practice of sensing the presence of God in nature that is grounded in a theological understanding of creation as God’s revelation. We speak as well about the ways in which all of these things found expression in Celtic Christianity—an historical European indigenous worldview that is finding new relevance today among people who care about community development and creation care.
Episode Three: Gardens, Community, and God-Presence: Christine Aroney-Sine can be found on every major podcast platform, or you can link to it directly at:
https://www.circlewood.online/podcast
If you are interested in helping Earthkeepers reach the world:
- Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
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by Christine Sine
A Meditation on love
Over the last week, inspired by readings by Evelyn Underhill and John O’Donohue, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the love of God because I think that in this challenging season all of us need to know that we are loved and cared for.
I have read through Romans 8:35-39 and other scriptures that refer to the love of God several times and this meditation is the result.
Not surprisingly, as I began, I decided to create a new contemplative garden.
As you can see I have left the owl wing that was the focal point in my last garden in place but have removed the other feathers and added a couple of teacup gardens instead. I have also added all the heart shaped stones I could find – some of them that have been given to me and others that I have picked up on my journeys.
Several thoughts came to me as I worked on this:
- Under God’s protective wings is where I feel most secure in the divine love which is why I felt that the owl wing still needed to have a prominent place in my garden.
- At the centre, not surprisingly, is God’s huge heart of love which permeates the universe and fills all of creation.
- I was very aware as I placed my teacup gardens in here that the love of God doesn’t just reside in my heart but it overflows from there into the world around me. That’s why the other heart shaped rocks fill so much of the garden. God’s love is abundant. It doesn’t just fill you and me but it fills the whole of creation.
If you have a heart shaped stone, hold it in your hand. Or you might like to pause and draw a heart, or make a collage to use as you participation this exercise.
Reflecting With Evelyn Underhill
Contemplative Love of God garden – Christine Sine
Just like so many of the psalms, Evelyn Underhill reminds us that to love and praise the God of creation is what creation is for.
As I reflected on my garden a couple of quotes from her meditation on The Lord’s prayer which both emphasize this and expand on it, caught my attention:
“Love is always to be recognized and adored for it is the signature of God lying upon creation; often smudged and faded, almost blotted out, yet legible to the eyes which have been cleansed by prayer.”
“Our Father which art in heaven yet present here and now in and with our struggling lives, on whom we depend utterly as children of the Eternal perfect whose nature and whose name is love.” According to Underhill one aspect of redemptions to show us how to love this perfect and ever present God – this God who created all things, fills all things and desires to see all things filled once more with the radiance of divine love.
Wow, wow, wow – as I hold this heart shaped love stone in my hands I feel the embrace of God’s love and I wanted to be drawn into this loving presence and be filled once more with the radiance of divine love I was designed to participate in and to share.
Inspired by John O’Donohue
heart collage
John O’Donohue in his book Anam Cara talks about the wellspring of love that resides deep within all of us – this radiant and divine love that is meant to be the centre of our lives. He talks about imagining this divine love welling up though our bodies and into the entire world. So I thought that I would walk you through an expanded version of the exercise he suggests. I will then read the poem that flowed out of my heart as I completed this meditation and end by reading Romans 8:35-39 in The Passion Translation.
So settle yourself into a quiet, comfortable and safe space.
Close your eyes and imagine that wellspring of love that resides deep within you in that hidden place at the root of you soul. It is here that our Creator still resides in glorious splendor and freedom, the image of God waiting to be set free.
Sit still, breathe deeply. Imagine opening the doors of your heart to give freedom to this love. Picture its nourishing stream of light and life welling up in a river that washes over your anxieties and fears with a beautiful sense of belonging, ease, peace and delight.
Sit still, breathe deeply, feel these refreshing waters breaking out and gradually flowing up through the arid earth of the starved and neglected part of your heart.
Imagine it seeping through that hardened circle around your heart and dissolving the fears and anxieties, the self centeredness and pride that beset you.
Sit still, breathe deeply. Offer this love that flows from the very heart of God, as a blessing, first to your own heart and then out into the world to people who are desperate, starving, trapped in hospitals, tormented and in their own barren places.
Send it out from the bountifulness of your own love. Let it reach into the lives of others to heal them, to free them, to bless them, to nourish them and to make them whole.
A prayer of love
Heart shaped rocks
Glorious and eternal One,
Creator of all things,
Architect of earth itself,
I praise and adore your glorious name.
From you all love comes,
All light radiates,
All life flows.
It permeates the universe
and fills all things,
Yet resides within my soul,
In a deep and often hidden well of peace and freedom.
The image of God waiting to be set free.
Let it soak into the depths of my being,
And immerse me in your presence.
May it fill every fibre of my being,
Until I awaken fully to your love,
And my heart becomes your dwelling place.
May it seep through the hardened circle of fear and anxiety,
Until it becomes
The air I breathe,
The food I eat,
The wine I thirst for.
Let your love fill me to overflowing,
So that I ache with your desires,
And weep with your compassion.
I offer your love as a blessing
First to my own heart to cleanse and free me,
And then to our hurting world,
To people who are desperate, starving, trapped in hospitals,
Tormented and in their own barren places
I reach out wit the desire for justice and mercy and generosity
From this bountiful well of Eternal Love bubbling up within,
Sending it out to heal, to free, to bless and to nourish.
Continue Reading
Please continue reading Romans 8:35-39 The Passion Translation
You may also like to read this beautiful love poem by Father Pedro Arrupe’s beautiful prayer Falling In Love With God.
Once again Saint Andrews Episcopal church in Seattle has provided us with a beautiful Taize style contemplative service and morning prayer service. I am so grateful for these resources.
Carrie Grace Littauer, prayer leader, with music by Kester Limner and Andy Myers.
Permission to web stream or podcast music in this service is granted under One License number A-710-756. www.saintandrewsseattle.org.
Morning Prayer, Sunday May 3rd, 2020, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church View the bulletin for this service here:
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-710-756.
Every year I wonder whether to write something to mark Beltaine, the Celtic feast which celebrates a cross-quarter day in the year’s wheel, the end of the dark half of the year and the beginning of its half of light. I celebrate the waxing of the arc the sun’s path makes across the little slice of sky I can see from my bedroom window, lengthening the daylight, extending the twilight, elongating the stirrings before sun-up. The mystic in me reaches back in time to dance with the Celts round their fires, hearing their circling prayers as they do so, being bound with them into the Great Wheel. I reach back to listen to the songs of the May-day, Mary-Day, celebrations, watching young women entering into the mysteries of the holy feminine, embracing their potential to birth the Holy, to tend the sacred in the everyday, to serve the earth and all it feeds. Amongst this cloud of witnesses, I also hear the shouts of workers banded together on Labour Day, revelling in the freedom of a ‘bank’ holy-day, their passion for justice and equality being an energy to which I could pay more heed, a demand for fair pay and right treatment fuelling an anger whose spark is still needed in so many places as we each fail to fulfill fair-trade agreements in the light of demands for our own comfort.
Such voices take on names, then grow into faces as my ancestors appear before me, my name ‘Kate’ receding back down the generations, and I thank God for those women who have gone into the making of me. I thank their God and mine because the beginning of May marks my birthday, signalled by the beech hedges beginning to burst tight buds, when cracked, dry brown drops away to reveal such a fresh green it causes my eyes to hurt with joy.
Every year this season of another year’s uncurling brings mixed feelings, a new noticing of my own transformational ‘unfurling’ process into becoming the woman God has created me to be. Every year the occurrence of Beltane creates in me a tremendous mix of thanksgiving joy, welling grief, and longing grace. The paradoxical weakness of this year’s potent buds (the earth’s resurrection mirrored in me and vice versa) marks the beginning of my 31st year of learning to live with a chronic illness. I recognise again the times I tried to push through the pain, mess and discomfort, and the periods I could do nothing but stop for a paralysed rest. I glimpse the ways in which I tried to seek different employment, before each career attempt was brought to a close by the next wave of demands from my body and mind. Alongside such sadnesses, I can pick out my experience of individual days going back years by remembering the photographs I received and the images I made, knowing who I was with, and how the light smelt. I can see favourite, and feared, places by colour. I can note swathes of time passing by the creativity I explored, the poetry of #practicingresurrection with the community at Abbey of the Arts in 2015, the multi-media Oak Tree project when my ceiling collapsed in 2016, a summer #projectyellow marking a slide into intense depression in 2017, a painting adventure into ‘little Katie’s’ eyes in 2018, bringing a cosmic smash book on self-trust into being whilst in hospital in 2019.
There is so much to be so thankful for. In allthe gifts from darknesses that have punctuated the last 31 years there are indeed such spots of ‘bright fire’ (Bel-Taine) to celebrate and honour. There, where the power of God was made present to my weakness and Spirit transfigured frailty into outpourings. So as I move across this sacred timely threshold again and for the first time in the midst of all that is strange and familiar about the circumstances of COVID lockdown, I pause, praise and give thanks.I hear again and for the first time Abba Moses ask me ‘why not become fire?’.
May my inner flame be strengthened to its fullness in bright depths of colour, may they thrill and fuel both my creativity and my compassion, so that Grace can call forth from me all that I have been designed to be just exactly for this moment in time, for whomsoever I mightmeet in my isolation.
May this year’s cycle of unfurling begin.
(all images copyright Kate Kennington Steer)
by Lilly Lewin
Today, I confess that I need The true shalom of God!
by Barbie Perks
These past weeks have been a process for me, and maybe for many others as well. A process of coming to terms with the changes that have been forced on us, as well as a time to reflect on things we have pushed away because they have been too painful to deal with. Spending Easter locked down and away from opportunities of congregational worship and fellowship have highlighted for me the loss of social contact we are experiencing. As the weeks drag on, silence, solitude and introspection become an opportunity for God to speak into our normally frantic, busy and noisy hearts.
- If this is connecting with you, why not draw up a little mind-map of what you are reflecting on, and see where it leads you.
The Resurrection Sunday Bible reading describes the double sense of loss that Mary experienced at the tomb. First, she was grieving the loss of Jesus, going to find comfort at the tomb, and then discovering the tomb was empty, she seeks to find the body and bring him back to the tomb. When she hears Jesus call her by name and realizes he is raised to life, she runs to him, but is told “do not hold on to me…” (John 20:15-17)
I have a very strong impression that God is telling me to let go of loss today. And it’s not just the immediate loss of having to have my home in Tanzania packed up for me because the landlord wants it back. It’s a cumulation of a series of losses over the years, losses that I have perhaps grieved too long and hard over, losses that I have allowed to define the way I think and behave, losses that have turned me from a carefree, kind of happy-go-lucky personality into a more thoughtful, careful and maybe even dour personality!
- Have you ever thought of how grief and loss might have changed you as a person?
There is a picture in my mind of a person lying on top of a cliff holding on for dear life to something that has fallen over the edge. Energy and strength draining out, and down over the cliff. If she just opens her grip and lets go, she can rest, regain strength and energy, get up and walk away, back into …what?
Leaning into Jesus, with open hands and arms no longer filled with losses that weigh us down. Paul’s words in Philippians 3:7-10 are worth thinking on:
7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, … 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own.. but that which is through faith in[a] Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. 10 I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection …
When we are so busy holding on to the losses that anchor us to that cliff, it is difficult to look up and see the hand of Christ reaching down, it is even harder to reach out with open hands to take hold of the hope of resurrection that Christ offers. Hebrews 6:18b-10a talk about God’s promises to those who believe in him – “…we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. 19 We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure…”
- Lean in, open your hands, in faith trust him to heal you from the losses. Let them no longer define you – let God raise you up to be a new creation today.
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