A new Psalm - The Lord is My Pilot

The Lord is my pilot and I shall not want

When I surrender to his command I lack nothing

He makes me comfortable and secure in my seat either in the aisle or by the window - even in the middle seat he looks after me

He takes the aircraft higher and higher

Into safe air spaces and he restores my soul

He navigates the best way through the air for me - choosing the altitude that suits me best

He does this for his names sake

And even though I might encounter some turbulence which seems like the shadow of death

Especially then I trust in him as my captain

Then I don’t fear because I know he is in the cockpit and he knows what he is doing

His skill and his sovereignty

It comforts me

Even in the darkest of times when it seems like the clouds and strong winds are going to cause me to crash into the sea, He anoints my head and I feel safe

Because when I surrender to him, my pilot , his goodness, his mercy, his love go before me and make safe passage

All the days of my life

As I dwell in the safe place with Him

In the clouds

And as I put my feet on solid ground

Wherever he flies me, I am with him

Forever

On Love

“Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its “content,” its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses… Love is responsibility of an I for a Thou. In this lies the likeness — impossible in any feeling whatsoever — of all who love, from the smallest to the greatest and from the blessedly protected man, whose life is rounded in that of a loved being, to him who is all his life nailed to the cross of the world, and who ventures to bring himself to the dreadful point — to love all men.”

Martin Buber, I and Thou

Do You Love Me x 3

Why do I love Jesus ? This was the question posed. Come with answers was the brief.

That word, love. Perhaps easier to answer a question like, 'Why do you believe'? Or why do you agree with the Bible?

John 21

Peter denies Jesus three times. He thinks Jesus is dead and won't find out. Then, later on, he comes face to face with Jesus.

Now, if a friend denied that they knew me because they didn't want to associate themselves with me and I found out and met them in the street. I would say,… Hey, why did you do that? How dare you lie about me.

If one of my sons did something like stealing money or lied about me …. The next time I saw him, I would say, 'Hey, I thought I brought you up better than this. What is the deal? I would want to punish him somehow or at least let him know how displeased I am and teach him a lesson.

But what does Jesus say to Peter?

Do you love me?

Three times.

Jesus knows Peter loves him. Like I know my children really love me.

Jesus knows the answers, and yet, he asks.

It is a beautiful scene.

The main reason Jesus came to earth was for us to fall in love with him and his Father. To have a relationship with him.

He knows better than anyone how imperfect Peter is and how imperfect we are …. But what he longs to hear is our love spoken out.

Going To Market

I wonder if we can experience religion or spirituality as a seasonal delight.

Like fruits that are more tasty in Autumn or berries that you can pick yourself or like grapes that have been fermented and turned into wine.... like bananas picked green and then manipulated to yellow and ripen. What if faith was like that- seasonal- changing- sometimes wild and then sometimes at its best when 'doctored' by others ...., in reality that is the way of the spirit - like a kiwi fruit that is squishy when its ripe unlike the snappy pink lady in her prime. Both perfect.

like a wind that is sometimes known as a breeze- a lovely breeze- and sometimes bears the title of monsoon that reeks devastation and flooding.....

all things are possible - maybe there are more mutations of faith that remain not only possible but acceptable to God.

Faith Forensics

If my people, my God-defined people, respond by humbling themselves, praying, seeking my presence, and turning their backs on their wicked lives, I'll be there ready for you: I'll listen from heaven, forgive their sins, and restore their land to health.

2 Chronicles 7:14


My father regularly took me and my siblings to the local tip (the Australian word for recycling centre). He was an avid gardener. He would connect his small, rusty trailer to the car. We would help him haul the greenery from the garden until the trailer was filled with cuttings like eucalyptus trimmings or grassy weeds and tied up with ropes. We could head off on an adventure which would end with the faint smell of compost on our jeans and our mouths feeling grimy as that unmistakable garbage dump smell permeated our skin.

We were allowed to wander and pick through the piles of other peoples' junk. We found dolls and suitcases and furniture and would beg my father to let us take stuff home. It seems a ridiculous adventure, considering the risk of germs and sharp objects. Still, in simpler times, it was just a treasure trove. We learned to salvage, rescue, and save. We learnt that one man's trash could be another man's treasure. Those grimy things can be cleaned. Everything can be redeemed.

In this century, we are on course to see better use of resources globally and a more respectful relationship to our shocking waste buildup. We are simultaneously dealing with deep piles of justice fallout that have been rotting in the global tip for decades. We are picking through the garbage of the past. It is worth noting that we are trying to solve both global problems, physical (ecological) and spiritual (human). Both indeed fit in the story of our reconciliation with God. We read in Genesis that God breathed life into the earth and then into humankind. He wants to see reconciliation in both our earth and all humanity. He came to earth, our second Adam, to demonstrate how serious he is about helping us escape our mess.

If the natural speaks of the spiritual in any way, our efforts to right ecological wrongs might mirror or foreshadow the redeeming of the soul of man. Creating a humanity intent on treasuring all humanity, animals, and the planet. A humanity that owns up to the injustices of the past. A society moving away from a clinical, frightened sort of separateness and glorification of the individual.

As we comb through the piles of garbage - the trash of wars, apartheid, racism and tribal brutality, I remain hopeful. But it is messy, and the risks are high.

Pin the Tail on the Donkey

I have spent the past 15 years or so playing a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. You know, the party game where someone is given a mock-up of a donkey's tail, blindfolded, spun around and around until they are dizzy, and, then, has to try and find the right place to attach the tail to the poster of the Donkey in front of them.

It's been a time of reconnecting myself to reality so that my spirit, mind and body can better synchronize.

For a large swath of my time as a believer, I was obsessed with this notion of 'you are in the world but not of the world .' I viewed myself as an alien. A citizen of heaven rather than this world. I was set apart for great things. I knew that as I was living and breathing, catching buses, painting toenails, and eating hamburgers, I was in the world. But, I was determined not to succumb to its profanity. Wow. What a trip.

Recently, I took time to contemplate and rethink the passage in the Gospel of John.

Jesus says as part of his farewell speech in Chapter 17:14, "I have shared your message with them, and the world has shown hatred towards them because they belong to you and not to the world. They are not a part of this world, just as I am not. While I do not ask that you take them out of the world, I do pray that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it". Later, Jesus commissions them to be sent into the world just as he was sent.

So there we have it. I get it. I didn't make it up.

I had attempted to follow this to the letter and live my best life in two partitions - two zones.

One, the world, inherently suspect and possibly evil. I considered the actions mentioned earlier as worldly, never sacred practices. The other side was my spiritual world of worship, prayer, mission and engagement with God.

I was forever trying to discard my humanness and wriggle into my Jesus clothes. I strived towards perfect status. I didn't look for places of connectivity. There was a dividing line separating the profane and the sacred.

Now, I have become so fascinated with the places where my humanness and my spirituality can mesh together. Indeed, that's the sublime part. Dancing and twirling and then having a go at stabbing my pin into the real world and finding my place. Enjoying the mix.

It is as if I am sitting at a sewing machine with different types of cloth before me. I am trying to piece together outfits that will not only be pleasing to God but also make my sojourn in the world more enjoyable and purposeful.

The Bible has something to say about patches - and possibly donkeys tails. Matthew advises in his gospel that you can't easily tack a piece of unshrunk cloth onto an old piece of cloth. The integrity of the fabric will be compromised. This confounds me now. The God that redeems all things makes my humanity and my spirit hold together despite the awkward joins. We are perfectly imperfect and supernaturally natural.

We can applaud, laugh, and cry as we whip off the blindfold and find we either are way off the mark or have performed the consummate party trick!

The patch is usually visible – only the expert seamstress can make the place of the patch invisible. Nevertheless, God sees the seam and delights in our attempt to marry up the sacred with the everyday things.

We wear our human garments as designed and our spiritual fashions together. A good life can make them cohesive and functional – and beautiful! This task demands authentic behaviour - to act genuinely and sincerely and have a shameless acceptance that people will notice the seams. – the tag will be exposed - and occasionally, I'll wear something inside out and display all the messy seams.

Lions dressed up as lambs. Lambs with giant pink bows on their tails. Elephants in tutus. Donkeys with no tail.

We are only human, after all. Right?

The Continuous Thread

I’ve discovered the writings and photography of Eudora Welty ( 1909- 2001) lately …

We come to terms as well as we can with our lifelong exposure to the world, and we use whatever devices we may need to survive. But eventually, of course, our knowledge depends upon the living relationship between what we see going on and ourselves. If exposure is essential, still more so is the reflection. Insight doesn’t happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within. The sharpest recognition is surely that which is charged with sympathy as well as with shock — it is a form of human vision. And that is of course a gift. We struggle through any pain or darkness in nothing but hope that we may receive it, and through any term of work in the prayer to keep it.

——-
My wish, indeed my continuing passion, would be not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.

Excerpts from One time, One place: Mississippi in the depression; a snapshot album by Eudora Welty (1971)

Hummingbird eyes

Beauty like too much coffee on a hot day

Dry mouth and eyes like hummingbird wings

Tourist, accidental or not

Vanishing in cities

Reappearing on the green side

I didn’t die on the street

So

Poliziotti will not know me

Now leaving breathless

Wealthless

Ugly in fig-stained ripe Pyjamas

And a plastic Tigre tote

For 1 Euro.

Papa Francis wasn’t home

And whoever the hotshot on Milan train

remains our mystery man

Splinter

Faith change is like a splinter

I hold it there

Foreign body

Knowing it would take something like tweezers

I don't have handy

to free it but knowing it was partly a gift for the journey

I'm careful how I walk

Careful what I carry for a season

Then it's gone

I forget it was ever there

I walk without a care

Like Paul and his splinter.

Beauty Unaware

Finding something or someone unaware of their own beauty is rare these days. Everyone has the tools at hand and it is difficult to be unaffected by the proliferation of image makers.

Occasionally you can some across a little thrift store that does not realise it is hosting precious antiques. We have two thrift stores in our town. One is open only twice a week and the prices are so low - you can find a treasure for next to nothing. The other one is run by a very savvy owner. He knows the worth of his things. No surprises - no good finds. Everything is priced according to the expected value.

This little restaurant in the centre of Schwyz seems totally unaware of its beauty. It is timeless and quaint. It offered us more than a ‘Kafe Complet’. it offered up an authenticity that caught us unaware. It hugged us and then held us close for our 60 minute breakfast stop.

As I grow older I am looking for the hidden beauty. The stone unturned. The surprising place or person. It’s fun. It’s the adventure.


The Big Me trounces on The Other

Strange how, as we have desperately tried to tear down stereotypes and prejudices over the past decades, it has resulted in the reverse - increased labelling and boxing up of our identity cues. 

Our newly normalized signature lines professing preferred him/her/they only serve to categorize more precisely. The cult of individualism is messing up the work of removing prejudices. What happened to our fight to be known as just ‘human’ - all made equal and in the image of God? That 'Big Me' vibe says it's all about my rights and makes itself more important than our work towards blending with The Other.

We are pushed into boxes- Click Here to Choose your Identity kits AVAILABLE NOW. 

Identity, instead of being a definable space with definable value, is far more malleable. We change - that is the beauty of life. I am a mother, a grandmother, a woman, a Jesus follower - that is complex - my identity is complex and mixed up. I'm an ant when I'm seated in an arena at a football game, yet I can claim Queen Bee status on my wedding day. Identity and agency change. There are multiple iterations of me. Ignoring this makes us wooden, unreal, disconnected and brittle. We become unable to swing and change. But the Big Me in reality finds it hard to give away agency and allow another to shine or even offer up a seat on the bus. It's my right, and I paid for it! We are so hungry for significance - we steal it from others. 

Rights are a totally complicated beast. Always have been and always will. 

For example, I can both feel compassion for the woman who is forced to search for an abortion clinic outside her state (her body/her right) as well as be present and comfort those arguing that we should side with the preservation of life inside the womb (the rights of the unborn). 

I can watch the gaudy pride parade for the 3-min news segment and have complex feelings. Do the drag queens represent the gay community I know and love here in my city? Not really. Is the parade an important tool for the movement? Yes. My prediction is that its cache is running out. Needs a refresh.

Refuse the Mental ghetto.

Don't listen only to those voices in your lane. Swerve. Plow into oncoming ideas. Say no to the increasingly dangerous and divided world. If we take sides and deny the tension, it is not helpful; we are being carried back to dualism.  

Stay connected. Stay thoughtful and informed. Reconnect with your senses. Your soul. Your God. 

But now, for the time being, you are merely wandering with your five senses, which, without your usual self-absorptions, are uncannily alive…..I reenter the woods and rivers with a moment-by-moment sense of the glories of creation, of the natural world as a living fabric of existence, so that I'm both young again, but also seventy thousand years old.

                                                                                           Jim Harrison, poet

Think for yourself - use your senses.

Hold me up

I was listening to the story of Moses this morning. I saw humanity as a Moses-type. We are sometimes reluctant heroes in the life story - occasionally strong in leadership, often realistic and offtimes fragile because of that same realism. At one point in the story, Moses is totally done - can’t go on. Those closest to him - Aaron and Hur - hold up his arms and give him strength. Not strangers but family and people that know and love him. Creating communities of Aarons and Hurs sounds like a vision. 

When Moses’ hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up—one on one side, one on the other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset.
— Exodus 17:12



God Kin

I walked past a man-boy today. I looked. I could have been his mother. We looked alike, but he didn't know me. Our eyes locked. I saw his pain. You know God walks amongst us every day. He looks something like us. We are made in His image. We lock eyes. No recognition. Sometimes only reminding us of pain and loss. Our future Beloved. Perhaps. Possibilities.

Hope's friend ----- memory

 

Walter Brueggemann says hope is often grounded in memory. I remember the strange joy I felt amidst my cancer journey. I hoped for a return to what I knew of life – a hope grounded in memory. I wanted my old life back. Research on disaster victims has documented the tremendous sense of hope as they formulate plans and actively work to return to something they know. Rebecca Solnit[1] is a writer prying into the 'hidden, transformative histories inside and after events we chronicle as disasters.' We are forced to find hope in times of uncertainty. Just as the practice of yoga hones in on our breath lest we forget, so do times of stress remind us to hope lest we perish. We can forget to hope, and crisis can re-activate hope.

In an almost playful way, in times of uncertainty and crisis, we breed a particular sort of hope – this 'do or die' sport of the mind happens when we can't imagine any sucky, romantic future . So we must replace it with a hope rooted in memory or past experience.

Advent calls us to hold our breath in anticipation - as we have in the FIFA World Cup penalty shootouts, the recent Nasa landing, waiting upon results of a scan or simply awaiting forecasted snow. Being a grown-up doesn't mean that you don't feel breathless but that your story informs you, i.e. you will breathe again.

I wonder at the harm done by the Hallmark storybooking of Advent. Fifteen sleeps until Christmas. The carols. The Santas. The elves on the shelves. Many can't identify with a 'home for the holiday' hologram. Brueggemann's comments make me curious. How much of our Advent vibe is founded in memory?

I am struggling to find a rhythm this Advent. I had tea with a friend who was so enjoying the season and her special devotions and spiritual practices. I felt rather lame. My church traditions have not pushed the Advent calendar. Nothing has caught my eye or my passion. In fact, because I spent many years in a non-Advent practicing spiritual community, I suffer with a blocked Advent artery. The implementation of a  prosperity-style gospel offered a manufactured hope when all else failed. I didn't have to pull on my memory parachute but merely recite a bible verse like 'all things work together for good….' and you know the trick. As I rewrite my hope thesis, Mr.Brueggemann has given me something upon which to dwell. Being a theological simpleton, this might be enough to kick-start my Advent engine.

The amazing thing about our communities of faith, evident in our common life, is that memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair. Ponder that: memory produces hope. We Jews and Christians are people who recall the defining memories and miracles of their lives. We hope in and trust the God who has done these past miracles, and we dare to affirm that the God who has done past acts of transformation and generosity will do future acts of transformation and generosity. By a profound, elemental, and unshakable trust, Jews affirm that the deep loss of Jerusalem did not disrupt God's power and resolve in the world. By a profound, elemental and unshakable faith, Christians affirm that the deep loss in the death of Jesus did not disrupt God's power and resolve in the world. And that is the key issue in hope. If our embrace of God's past is thin, we may imagine that God is now defeated. If our embrace of God's past is thick and palpable, we will continue to trust in that same God.

                             Suffering Produces Hope Walter Brueggemann[2]

And so, I scour my memory bank for the gems of hope. Maybe the times that I felt the incarnational rousings and yet thought were just 'throwaways' – a conversation on the bus, a night babysitting somewhere or an ordinary meal with friends.. Even a particular movie scene can create a hope memory. All have a role in forming memory to register hope. We have a colossal catalogue of stories and events that comprise our library of hope. Get on with your remembering this Advent!

 



[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/15/rebecca-solnit-hope-in-the-dark-new-essay-embrace-unknown

[2] Walter Brueggemann Edited text of a paper presented in Baltimore, MD on April 2, 1998, on the occasion of the Dr. A. Vanlier Hunter, Jr. Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies.