by Christine Sine
This morning I spilt wax from my Lenten candle all over the special altar I had so carefully put together for the season. It splattered my palm crosses, made splotches on my rock with “let love speak” written on it, and ran down the front of my plastic tablecloth. It even landed on my fingers painfully reminding me that wax is hot. Of course it also disrupted the orderly pattern of my altar and I have not been able to get it off.
This happened just as I started reflecting on my question for the week: How do we use our freedom to serve others in love? and the splattered wax provided revelation for me. Love splattered on everything I thought, adhering in the most unlikely places, creating beauty in unexpected ways, giving birth to new patterns. That is what freedom is all about.
Love is the candle of God burning in our lives and as it burns the wax melts and tends to run out of the candle and splatter over everything in its path. (unless you have one of those fake electric candles or waxless candles). Random acts of kindness, a smile and unexpected greeting from a stranger, a meal shared with new neighbours, they are all like splattered wax. They adhere to our skin and our lives in unexpected ways. They can be painful because they make us vulnerable, but they free us from the order and rigidity of a life controlled by us rather than by God.
This sharing of love, this seeking after freedom is a messy business that frustrates us and disrupts the orderly patterns of our lives. It adheres to us in ways we don’t always find comfortable. Sometimes it hurts when it lands. Like wax, once the freedom of love has stuck, it is hard to get off. It tells us we are not alone. It connects us to each other. It tells us we look out for each other, we stick to each, we are made to be together.
What Is Your Response?
Sit quietly pondering the love-light of God shining in your life. If possible light a candle and watch the wax melt. Blow the candle out and allow the wax to splatter on your desk or altar, being careful not to burn yourself. Reflect on the pattern it has created.
Ask yourself: Where has God splattered love in life bringing freedom to you and to others? What actions of mine have spread it?
Think about the messiness that the freedom of love has created, the vulnerability and sometimes hurt it resulted in. Try to scrape the wax off yourself and your desk. Contemplate the messiness that results and the challenge of removing it. Love sticks. Love does not want to be scraped off.
Ask yourself: Where has love adhered to my life in ways that have pushed me out of my comfort zones and created messiness? What has been my response?
Prayerful consider your responses to these questions. Write them down, share them with your friends. Now watch the video below – the messiness and pain of freedom that love opens us to is profoundly. Is there a further response that God is asking of you?
Tom Sine —
Celtic cross Iona Scotland
In 1982, I took my first pilgrimage to Iona to experience the new discipline for me of listening for God in one of the holy places. I got more than I bargained for. I not only had a very deep experience of what Celtic Christians call “thin places” where the dimension between this world and the next becomes one.
As a result of that first pilgrimage I became acquainted with Patrick and a number of his friends and followers and it has radically changed my view of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
At age 16, Patrick was kidnapped from his home in England and was taken by Irish traders as slave to Ireland. He was forced to care for sheep. He learned about the people and Irish culture but being enslaved most importantly he learned a life of prayer was essential to his difficult life.
After 6 years, he escaped and returned to his family. Then God called him to return to Ireland as a missionary. In three decades Patrick and his compatriots saw Ireland become largely converted to Christianity. The Irish, Scots and English were introduced to much more of a whole life faith than was not common then or now.
What I have learned from Patrick, Columba, Hilda, Bridget and Cuthbert is that prayer is not 15 minute break in the day but prayer was intended to permeate all of life. Celtic Christians had prayers for rising in the morning, prayers planting seeds in the day and prayers for banking fires at night.
Celtic Christians not only were devoted to a life of prayer, but a love of God’s creation and a care for the poor. I find younger Christians who are hungry for a more authentic whole life faith are often drawn to Celtic Christian faith.
As we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, I invite you to join Saint Patrick and the many Celtic Saints in taking time to listen to our God by quietly repeating Patrick’s prayer and listening to what God might say to you.
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.
Comment and let me know what you hear from God as you quietly read Patrick’s prayer and listen for God’s whispers to you.
Tom Blogs at New Changemakers
As I looked over some poems I wrote years ago, this one jumped out at me. What struck me was how I still fight this temptation to remain uninvolved. Sometimes simply recognizing the battle is enough to spur me to action. “Really? You’re even considering ignoring your neighbor?” But more often I’m unconscious, not even noticing the situations, the people, I’ve ignored.
It’s easy to set our lives on autopilot, going through the motions of here and there yet barely registering what’s taken place. When you add into the equation our phones with all of their apps, it’s easy to see how quickly we can slip into the detached life. Perhaps there’s a Lenten discipline of being awake. What might that look like?
This next week I’m going to try to approach life with more alertness, more curiosity, more engagement. I’m going to try to play a game of sorts. I’ll call it, “Awake!” I plan to pay attention to:
- How many new things I can notice in my ordinary day?
- How many people do I make eye contact with? (being careful, as this could easily become really creepy really fast!)
- I could simply say inside my head “God bless you” as I notice each person. Maybe this would cause me to notice more deeply.
- If I’m tempted not to engage a situation, I’ll ask myself why, and then engage anyway. I’ll try to notice
- How does it change me to say yes rather than no?
- How is the other impacted?
- What were my fears, concerns, or other motives for not wanting to engage?
- Where do those thoughts and feelings come from?
Ready to wake up?
Lent.
Speak to me.
A word that holds such hidden depths.
Take me on your hallowed ground,
untouched, and unturned
yet by heart or mind.
Show me your intents,
what you’re yet to unveil.
I wait here still, with bated breath,
to hear your name revealed.
Lent.
Lead me on.
Winter I know is a season
through which we all must pilgrimage
I am told your name means ‘Spring’.
I wait for you to blossom.
Though the deserts an experience,
we all must endure,
Lent teaches us to delve for life
when there’s no evidence of it at all.
For Lent
in truth is life.
And just as we come to our birth,
through a dark passage;
grown to fullness,
hidden from the world.
So Lent teaches us
to sow in tears, and then reap.
To wait in the wilderness,
until Easter springs at our feet.
Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
Ash Wednesday, 2017
“The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus…”
Isaiah 35:1
By Keren Dibbens-Wyatt —
At Fresh Mercies this year, I have been blogging about sight. Whether inner or outer, physical or spiritual, teamed with contemplation, It’s the primary tool of a mystic. Trouble is, I’m now a middle aged, rather myopic mystic, so new glasses are one of the things I see in my not too distant future.
We’ve been looking at preparing for Lent here at Godspace, and thinking about the practices we might be going to bring to this time. I am starting to feel strongly that the practice I am being called to learn as we lead up to Easter is about sight as well, but not as I had imagined.
The Lord wants me to think about turning the tables, specifically, each time I feel like judging or ridiculing someone, to stop, turn the tables, and imagine how things would look from that person’s side of things.
This is quite a hard challenge politically and economically. I am one of those left-wing liberals that like to rail about justice and equality. But I feel challenged to look at the world with different eyes for a while. Let’s take a topical example. Supposing, as I stand and shout on social media with the No DAPL protestors, vehement in my beliefs that clean water and safeguarding the environment is more important than rich shareholders taking home yet more cash, that I turn the tables in that outrage, and am placed in the shoes of the CEO of a bank who are deeply invested in that pipeline. How might I feel?
I’ve been employed to run a profitable business. My priority is to keep the stockholders happy and keep my job. I cannot allow myself to ponder the rights and wrongs of the actual investment. If I did that with every dollar I’d never be able to get anywhere! I’ve been trained to see that as my emotions interfering with my work. I am good at making tough decisions and holding on through difficulties. This is how I earned both my place and the respect of my peers. I want to stay at the top. If I resigned over it, or lost my job taking a stand, someone else would be put in my place who would do the right thing by the investors anyway. I’d have lost my position and endangered the security of my co-workers and family for nothing.
There is no point, in any case, worrying about the environment, because everyone around me tells me that the scientists are wrong, that the protestors are just whining, that there is no real cause for alarm, that the earth can look after itself, and I am also, knowing myself to be canny, investing in renewable energy as well as fossil fuels, though perhaps with less enthusiasm. If that starts to get anywhere, my bank and I will be right behind that too. These things have a way of working out. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.
In fact, the longer I spend imagining that mindset, the easier it is to realise that the problem does not lie with individuals but is largely systemic. It is hopelessly easy to believe whatever is most profitable to me to believe, what I’ve been brought up to believe, what sustains myself and those around me. Rarely does a challenge come from within the establishment. It has been built up with safeguards in place precisely so that does not happen. Until we can find and live out alternatives to the hierarchy driven by money, power and status, we are doomed to existing within the systems where they rule.
Back in my own skin, I can talk about morals and green issues and the good of future generations to come until I am blue in the face, but someone on the “other side” of the fence will simply not be able to hear me, or has been given the tools by the system to discredit me in their way of seeing the world.
But here’s the thing. If I can look at the world for a while through their eyes (and of course I am biased and it will be woefully inaccurate in lots of ways), then there is more hope for dialogue. There will be more understanding, less stonewalling, more willingness to bend the light of my seeing through the prism of other lenses.
I hope too that my prayers for those who differ from me will be more empathetic and generous. As with the new glasses I’m hoping to get, if I make Lent this year about learning to see with different eyes, maybe my sight will be just that little bit clearer and more objective. Maybe, if I get into the habit of it, I might even bring loving grace into that seeing.
by Christine Sine
Over these first few weeks of Lent I have spent a lot of time reflecting on the theme Let Fear Become Love. I started with thinking about what I am afraid of and how I could overcome those fears. Then I reflected on what kind of a response would come if I allowed love to speak. This week I contemplated the words Let Fear Become Love. I have coloured large letters of my theme in Zenfyrkalt font. It has been both fun and profound.
To be honest I was not sure how much I would enjoy this. I have not been able to enter into the current craze for colouring books. I find myself a little overwhelmed by the complexity of the patterns and the amount of colouring that needs to be done to complete a picture. A single letter is another matter. I can complete it in a couple of minutes. I recite my words as I colour, and easily see the pattern even when it is not complete.
I have followed this with a bible search of the word “love”, starting last week in the Old Testament and this week focusing on the New. Once again it was an unexpected verse that stood out for me.
I was reminded of Thomas Merton’s Seasons of Celebration where he says:
God’s People first came into existence when the children of Israel were delivered from slavery in Egypt and called out into the desert to be educated in freedom, to learn how to live with no other master but God himself.”
Our so called freedoms are so often dependent on the enslavement or exploitation of others. I don’t think any of us will be truly free until all who are created in God’s image are free. In some ways we are all still living in the wilderness learning to live for God alone.
Adversity encourages mutuality, sharing, generosity and cooperation. It encourages us to take notice of the weak and vulnerable and hopefully to accept our responsibility to care for them. It writes the laws of God on our hearts not just on our minds. In fact I wonder if as a world society we need periodic seasons of Lent in which we can be educated into the freedoms of life lived in a covenantal relationship with God.
As Walter Brueggemann reminds us: Biblical faith is an invitation away from autonomy to covenantal existence that binds the self to the holy, faithful God and to neighbors who are members in a common economy. (Quoted from From Anxiety and Greed to Milk and Honey in Sojourner’s Magazine)
True freedom, the freedom that flows from the heart of our loving God grows by sharing love. God’s love in us grows as we enter into this freedom. It seemed very appropriate to contemplate this in today’s world. We live in a world in which many are afraid of losing their freedom. They build walls to protect themselves from those who are different, yet their actions are more likely to increase their bondage and their fear.
What Is Your Response?
It is only as we reach out to those who are different with love, compassion and generosity that we find true freedom.
Think about your own life. Are there places where you have given up freedom and become bound because of our lack of love towards others?
Take some time to ponder this. Read through Galatians 5: 13-15, and then that great passage on love, 1 Corinthians 13. As I did so this prayer bubbled up from my heart.
I look for your love Lord.
Plant it in our hearts.
Water it, grow it,
Nurture it to maturity.
Let it bear the fruit of freedom,
the harvest of loving others as we love ourselves.
Free us from the bondage of fear, and hate and anger.
Let us not lose our grip on your love, Lord.
Help us to trust you from the bottom of our hearts.
Let your love speak to us, Lord.
May it prompt us to be forgiving,
To seek to restore that which is broken,
In us, in others, in your creation.
Let our fear become love,
Abounding in patience, kindness and compassion.
Sharing generously, justly and faithfully,
Proclaiming justice, righteousness and truth.
Let our fear be transformed into love.
Love never gives up
Never loses faith,
Is always hopeful,
Endures through all circumstances.
This love will never die.
It will last forever.
Looks deceive, dead seed pods
and limbs bereft of leaves.
Grey leaden sky,
and chilling winter breeze.
We hunker down,
layered like the earth beneath.
Wondering what still lives,
what might still breathe.
But looks, they deceive.
For under the pile of cast-off broken leaves,
as quiet as the tomb,
the earth holds its breath.
And waits. Just as we awake,
breathe and stretch towards the light,
so the earth waits,
still, and expectant of life.
Yes looks deceive,
for underneath, stirring and lengthening,
are seeds, growing to bursting;
awaiting the turning seasons.
We too are mistaken,
to believe nothing is happening;
brittle hearts covered,
in last year’s debris and bracken.
Wondering how renewal and restoration,
can appear a possibility,
when all is sodden?
But lo behold, life is coming.
Like sun on snow,
our hearts begin thawing.
Like light on the hills,
spring ascends the horizon.
Not one moment too soon, nor too late,
in arriving.
Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
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