Quilt Square by Kathie Hempel
During this season, perhaps more than any other I think of those who have pilgrimaged before me and taught me about God. Those who have made sacrifices, and recorded their experiences, so I might know him.
As we celebrate the ultimate sacrifice made by God of his son Jesus, I am humbled by the others in my own life who walked the walk and set the best examples of love in action.
I remember my Aunt Mildred. My Dad’s sister was one of five girls in a family of 10. She lived to be 102 and five months. Her gift was one of tenacity and great humor. I remember visiting her in the nursing toward the end of her life and her telling me about how all the girls had to make a slip before their 12th birthday. I remember her demonstrating how she had hand-hemmed the slip and even though she held no material or needles you could tell how meticulously each stitch had been placed.
Oh, she could be ornery. Got in her head one day she was not sure she wanted to be around for her 100th birthday. “You’d better be here! I am driving 3 hours just to take your picture and you’d better show up. Besides I can just picture God looking down and saying: ‘that Mildred Vanstone. She is a wonderful Christian woman and she surely belongs here. But I have to think of the others. If only she would stop complaining.’”
A little while after I got home from that visit I got a call from my cousin, her daughter, Dorothy. “What did you say to Mom, Kathie?”
I was caught and had to admit, rather sheepishly, to the conversation. “Oh that explains it. I could not figure out what got into Mom. She was always complaining thinking staff was stealing her candy and bossing them around lately. When I went in today she was asking them how they felt, about their families and offering them her candy. I think she is trying to nice her way into heaven!”
Here the woman who I saw modeling the Christian family walk for all my life, showed that it is never too late to die to self. Her daughter and I had a wonderful laugh and obviously Aunt decided to stay around a few more years just to be sure. I never heard her complain again.
My friend of 33 years, Joan, was another one of my mentors in what a true understanding of God’s love can do. She had survived alcoholism and her physician husband, who had her committed so he might philander. Shock treatments had not dampened her spirit. When she finally mustered the courage to leave the abuse, she worked hard and long to forgive him. The settlement from the marriage, she had let her lawyer invest for her, she never saw. The lawyer stole it all. She forgave him too.
Joan showed me that forgiveness was so much more than words. It was action. It was something you did in person so the other could see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice. She said, “can you imagine that Jesus spent his last moments on earth forgiving those who had placed him on the cross and included the thief beside him, inviting him to join him in heaven? How little then is it for me to forgive those whose intent was to harm me.”
She was rewarded with the love of her five wonderful children and many more like myself, who called her friend. To the very end, she welcomed all who needed a moment of her time and her wisdom. Her generosity with her love and forgiveness was at a level I pray to achieve.
In the center of my dining room table cloth there is a single block of a very old quilt. It was one Aunt Mildred and her sisters sewed by hand when they were very young girls. It is all that is left after years of keeping generation after generation warm. The stitches are perfect.
These are but two Christ-centered models who join many who to me are “strangers in high places,” as Og Mandino refers to them in his book Mission Success, who have enriched my own walk with Christ over the years. These “strangers in high places’ include authors of the New Testament, the Desert Mothers and Fathers, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, C.S. Lewis, Oswald Chambers, Evelyn Underhill, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton and so many more.
Those who gather in this space continue through their writings to pass it on. May all these voices never be silenced and continue to live on through each of us.
As we draw to the end of this Lenten period, it is my prayer that we never forget those who showed us, by example, what Christ suffered to give us. May we do the same.
Photo by Kate Kennington Steer
Just hearing the question ‘what do you hunger for?’ is in itself enough to spark a
mini-cascade of doubt, and a landslide of panic and guilt in me. My mind immediately recalls Micah’s words about hungering for justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with my God. Am I?
At the back of my head I hear the excited murmur of a crowd on a hillside near a lake called Galilee in anticipation of the bread being handed round, and I become the small child offering my packed lunch – a paltry amount in the eyes of the world, the total sum of my riches in my own.
Would I?
It doesn’t take much to cast my mind back forty years and recall the first picture of a starving child I saw of my own age and the dawning understanding of the unequal distribution of the world’s resources and my own role in changing how I conspicuously consume a disproportionate amount.
Do I?
I fear I have failed, too often, to walk this Way of radical difference. I struggle to understand what difference I can make when so much of my life seems small, and is lived from bed. But the question ‘what do you hunger for?’ is a crucial one, for the answer cannot come from my place of guilt, doubt and panic, the place where my ego flies rampant in its destruction. The answer, if it is to be of any ‘use’, in other words if it is to be a true reply, must arise out of a heart voice not a head voice.
I am only haphazardly successful at hearing this whispered urge. But I am learning to recognize it as the voice that still speaks the same reply when all my desperate bewailed ‘I can’t’s run out of steam. I am learning to trust it as the heart voice that speaks the same prayer written over and again in my journal: ‘Lord, may I see.’ ‘Lord, give me eyes to see.’ ‘Lord, open my eyes’.
This prayer in all its variations, stills the guilt that leads me to question over and again where I give my tithing; it stills the despair that questions the use of signing an online protest questionnaire as a useless drop in the ocean of all that is unjust in this world; it stills the panic that fears I am a cop-out, that I have no service to make, and that the important radical healing work of the kingdom is happening elsewhere when all that has happened in my day is my struggle to pray for those I know and love.
This prayer speaks my heart voice, and my heart voice is my uniquely authentic voice given me by my Creator.
What do I hunger for? For the gift of vision, to see true the world around me, to see God in and of all created things, people, times and places. For I know that right seeing leads only to one thing in me: a brimming over need to communicate what I see in image and word. I want to shout God in colour and line and texture and form. I want to whisper God in poem and blog and essay. I want to proclaim God is in every detail, celebrate God who is in every moment. I hear my certain call as an artist, and sensing this vocation again quells all my doubts.
What do I hunger for? That, by Grace, I may be the means of bringing one person to see their loving God in the here and now. And that, by Grace, that person may in their turn, bring another face to face with their Lord. That by this chain of seeing, we may learn to recognize the coming Kingdom, and do our utmost to usher it in.
Today’s prayer is one I wrote a couple of years ago as I sat at mother’s bedside during her final illness. It has been revolving in my mind again over the last few days as Tom and I have said goodbye to yet another beloved member of our family – our golden retriever Bonnie.
In light of this it seemed very fitting to me that our theme for these last few days of Lent is DEATH and DARKNESS.
We like to turn away from death. Yet so often death in the form of a lost job or failed expectations is necessary for God’s newness to emerge. Sometimes when we look back we are aware that God has been prompting us in new directions for a while but the security and comfort of the old holds us bound. God in love and compassion forces us to die and let go.
Jesus says: If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it. (Matt 10:39)
Jesus did not cling to life. He needed to die for God’s new world to burst into being. And in the midst of his death the dreams and hopes of all his followers were put to death too.
But they too needed to die so that the new reality God wanted them to give birth to, a world of abundance, and wholeness and completeness could emerge.
The journey of faith is a cycle of birth, growth, fruit and death. And in the place of death we often find the seeds of new life – the longings and desires of our hearts that we have suppressed because change and radical newness threaten our comfortable status quo.
Like Jesus we endure death so that we can enter into life. We endure the loss and heartache that comes with losing people and things we love and look beyond to the new world of God. The center of the Easter story is resurrection not crucifixion. I think sometimes we forget that. We run away from death and yet in some ways we cling to it too.
Two questions emerge for me from this reflection. First: What does God want to put to death in your life that you are still clinging to?
For those who feel they are in a season of death: What are the seeds of newness God is planting within you during this season? What are your dreams and hopes from the past that might be birthed into something totally new at this time?
Skulls by Derek Olsen
By Derek Olsen
In the fourth chapter of his Rule, the chapter describing the spiritual tools for good works, St. Benedict calls his monks to “keep death daily before your eyes” (RB 4.47). In doing so—as with so much of his wise teaching—he was not expressing a new thought, but collecting and condensing spiritual wisdom passed down by broader humanity. This phrase comes through Cassian and the anonymous words of the fathers in a path that must also include the great Roman Stoic Seneca whose Letter 1 is a meditation on time and death.
Some of my favorite images of my favorite saints give this spiritual principle visual expression. Caravaggio’s St. Jerome sits at a desk on which a skull in prominently on display; in Zurbarán’s haunting “Saint Francis in his Tomb,” the cowled saint stares down at a skull cradled in his own hands. Many works of renaissance art include this motif to infuse a remembrance of mortality into the scene.
On my desk, I go one better than this. Seriously. They have one skull; I’ve got two! Unlike the skulls depicted in art, no one would suspect that either of mine are the real thing, though. Mementos of by-gone Halloweens, they both originally had candles in them, long since melted away. One is white ceramic; the other, black cut glass. They each have names. Each morning when I come down to my office to start work, I say hello to them, and think on a psalm passage.
In our spiritual tradition, the remembrance of death has multiple themes running through it, multiple spiritual purposes. Perhaps if I were a saint, one skull would be sufficient for me to grasp them all within a single object, but I’m not. Hence, I have two to remind me of two crucial principles.
The black cut glass skull is named Justin, a single name simultaneously indicating two pop stars. When I greet him, I think on Psalm 90:3-5: “You turn us back to the dust and say, ‘Go back, O child of earth.’ For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past and like a watch in the night. You sweep us away like a dream; we fade away suddenly like the grass.” To me, Justin represents the fleeting, fickle, illusory desires that we chase in this world: fame, fortune, beauty, power. These are the lusts of this life. At the end of the day, they are fundamentally meaningless. A prayer book collect asks for grace to love things heavenly, the grace that “while we are placed among things that are passing away, to cleave to those that shall abide.” Because the grand scheme of things is great and grand, and we—no matter who are—are quite infinitesimally small in the midst of it all.
However, if taken too far this theme can drive us into a Gnosticism that denies the goodness of our created world, and an overly heaven-focused gaze that misses the opportunity to embrace things that abide even within our incarnate life: love, mercy, justice. So, after I greet Justin, I turn to the other.
The white ceramic skull is named Thomas, and is specifically named for Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominic theologian and author. As I say hello to Thomas, I think on Psalm 90:12: “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” Thomas represents the potential for goodness, for light, for flourishing that we possess if we have the discipline to structure our existence meaningfully. Our time may be short when viewed from God’s perspective, and we have no idea how much of it we have been allotted. But in that time, we have opportunities for love and joy, and—furthermore—to share that love and joy with those around us, all those whom our lives might touch. We have a duty to embrace our God-given gifts to continually point towards the reconciliation of all created things back to God as accomplished in Jesus Christ.
Although a learned academician and disputer, Thomas Aquinas wrote his principal work, his great Summa Theologica, as an introductory textbook, an primer for beginners. I think of all the things he could have written—could have focused his brilliant mind upon—and that likely might have been a lot more fun to write. And yet, what wisdom, what humility, there was in choosing a basic textbook as the pinnacle of his work.
Lent reminds us of our common mortality. That we die; that we will die. Meditation on mortality is not terribly in vogue these days. And yet, I find my simple ritual a helpful daily reminder: the life we’ve been granted is brief in the grand scheme of things—so make it matter. Let us number our days, however many or few they may be, that we might apply our hearts to wisdom, to peace, to love.
“Joy Is Measurable” by Funkybug. Used with permission
By Esther Hizsa
“I’ve told you these things for a purpose: that my joy might be your joy, and your joy wholly mature. This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you.” John 15:11 (The Message)
The seven-year-old downed his third tiny glass of grape juice and licked the last drop from the bottom, oblivious of the perfect purple ring around his lips. Perhaps it was his eager grin as he went for the fourth glass that prompted three women to spring into action. The older woman, horrified with what the boy was doing, let out a mild shriek and reached out to stop him as his mother stepped between innocence and offence. She knelt down and spoke kindly to her son. Meanwhile, the third woman, who saw the incident unfold, turned her attention to her elder and moved into her line of sight.
“Millie,” she said, smiling. “It’s okay. It’s o-kay. I know how you feel. The communion elements are sacred, but to him, they are just little glasses of grape juice.”
Within minutes Millie was calm again, the mother relieved, the boy unaware a crime had been committed, and my friend, who interceded, was satisfied.
When she told me what happened, I could easily imagine it all taking place–especially since the boy was my grandson, Hadrian, and his mother, my daughter, Heidi.
As I thought about the incident, I saw how each player reflected God’s character. I loved my grandson’s delight in finding wonderful gifts laid out for him. Like a mother hen with her chicks, my daughter protected her son from wrath and, like Jesus, she got down on his level to enlarge his understanding. The older woman was passionate to preserve the sacredness of the Lord’s Supper, which had been given at great cost. Meanwhile, the peacemaker saw the pure intentions in all three hearts and, like the Spirit, brought reconciliation to her community.
At first, what stood out for me in this story was the way Heidi was with Hadrian. I love how God comes between me and the critical voices and protects my child-like desire to savor every drop of life.
But later, I saw myself in Millie. It’s humbling to think that God has had to intervene between me and the recipients of my criticism. Yet, I also see God smiling at me the way my friend smiled at Millie, inviting me to be gentle with myself.
As you envision this story with God, I wonder what you see.
Photo by Ana Lisa De Jong
‘Each morning I will look to you in heaven, and lay my requests before you, praying earnestly.’
Psalm 5:3
I LOOK FOR YOU
I look for you.
I look for you without realising it.
It is always you that I seek.
As I look for you in all whom I love, all whom I meet.
And as another day draws to an end,
where I have gone misunderstood, where I have felt neglect.
I become aware that it is only you,
no-one else, in whose love I can be truly complete.
That without you, like half a heart,
or an empty vessel, I only know a lonely ache.
For there’s only one, only one that exists
whose love I can rest in – replete.
So I look for you.
And never find you, or at least only in part.
Each person I meet, imperfect yet
reflecting a portion of your perfect heart.
But they can’t fulfil.
They never will – they were never made to.
All I can do is try and grasp
in others, what you mean for me – for us.
‘Relationship’ – with the only one
who knows each ebb and flow of my heart.
Who will ever perceive my deepest self;
what brings us together, what keeps us apart.
So I look for you.
And I finally find you, but only when I have given up.
When I am ready to lay myself down, appreciate others as they are;
quietened by your love.
This side of heaven, between the trees
there will only ever be discontent, and unfulfilled dreams.
If we try to do it all alone,
without your love to fulfil our deepest needs.
Your love that makes up for a multitude;
that mends what is broken, fills the gaps.
That transforms our half hearts into whole;
completes us, and provides all that we lack.
I look for you.
And I find you, when I am willing to see.
That everyone is a part of the whole, including me.
That I need everyone, but no ‘one’ too –
for in the end – its only You.
Photo by Joy Lenton
By Joy Lenton
World news rocks our equilibrium on a daily basis. Most of us suffer from overload of information. Hot on its heels can come compassion fatigue.
Because who can keep paying attention when we receive such saturation?
Overexposure often leaves us numb. We can so easily become overwhelmed, making feelings flatten and interest wane.
But if we pause and reflect, we are reminded of being Christ’s ambassadors in a needy world – His grace givers, light bearers and Truth sharers.
God’s heart never stops aching for wounded humanity.
His love encompasses the whole world.
His grace provides hope in every hurting place.
We live with one foot in the world and the other in God’s kingdom.
We are torn and made tender when we survey life as Jesus does.
We live with the birth pangs of a world crying for release and an earth aching to be renewed in the fullness of the kingdom-to-come.
We wonder how to live well without drowning under a world’s pain. As we ponder and pray and seek God’s wisdom, we discover just what our individual contribution might be.
Then we can help one another to see we are not as alone as we may feel.
Hungering to help
I hunger to be a voice for the voiceless
dispossessed, cast aside and marginalised
refugees, orphans and widows who long
to find safe resting place, a home
For the weary, wounded and weak
and all who bear deep hurt and pain
who live in shadowlands of shame
Those who are guilt-ridden, captive
bound to a past they have ached
for so long to break free from
I hunger for the hungry to be fed
for this land to be led by righteousness
for justice to rule and reign
so all can breathe freely again
Those who are thirsty to be filled
from a fountain’s never-ending stream
For people of any age to still dare
to believe and follow their dream
I hunger for the sick to find solace
freedom from all that ails them
as they sit with illness, distress
I long to have an open, caring heart
that is tender, rich in compassion
and mercy, one that won’t stand apart
from those who suffer and are in need
I yearn to live as Jesus-with-skin-on
for those who have never known Him
who ache to be shown His love and
need to see how His mercy and grace
embrace and offer us all an open door
©JoyLenton2016
Dear Lord of Light and Life,
It can feel so overwhelming when we view a world dark with great need. Please show us how we can be salt and light for You in the midst of such pain and distress.
We may not all be able to help physically or financially in times of crisis, but we could be present if possible, provide support, a listening ear, friendship and prayer.
Show us how to offer love, grace and mercy to others, especially those within our sphere of influence. Help us to live well as Your ambassadors here.
May we be given wisdom and discernment about the means of ministry at our disposal and the strength to carry it out.
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