the juniper tree

Finding God in the Wilderness

[myfairynuffstuff]

Lesley Banks (b.1962) - Skye Croft, Twilight. Oil on canvas.

[willard-metcalf]

Child in Sunlight, 1915, Willard Metcalf

[artist-turner]

Rome From Monte Testaccio, William Turner

Medium: pencil,watercolor

[artist-mondrian]

Woman and child in front of a farm, 1899, Piet Mondrian

[juniperstories]

Signals in the Dark

"A Ritual To Read To Each Other" by William Stafford If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dyke. And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail, but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider- lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe-- should be clear: the darkness around us is deep. "A Ritual To Read To Each Other" by William Stafford from Stories That Could Be True. © Harper & Row, 1982.  

[juniperstories]

Buried

In this winter of our discontent, with a blitz of Boston blizzards rendering the whole world a frozen still-life, I am struck by the singular texture of our collective lamentations poured out on social media. All of New England, it seems, can't stop posting photos of impossibly long icicles and towering snow drifts. After a while, it's easy to become numb to the severity of this snow.

In some ways our incessant commentary on this historic weather mirrors the dullness of life in a season of grief or spiritual wilderness. To the person experiencing it, loss/dislocation feels urgent and all-encompassing, worthy of post after post of distress. See how buried I am! See how dangerous the ice dams are, how dire the future forecast continues to be, how brutal the wind chill, how impossible the promise of spring!  At some point, the words and images of calamity surely must blend into the tedium of a monochrome landscape. Aren't we all tired of seeing frozen photos on Facebook?

And yet, our hands blister from shoveling, our roofs leak from overload, our dogs limp pitifully from salty roads; our lives are just not the same right now, and it's distressing. So we post, reaching out for solace, even when no one wants to hear yet more tales of icy woe.

Perhaps it is the nature of life, to feel alone in that which drags on. Lostness in today's hyper-focused, warp-speed, Google-mapped culture feels mildly shameful, or at least inefficient. At what point does the timer ding, indicating enough already? What is the correct calculus, the acceptable actuary table of wilderness wandering or bereavement? 

Grief is a wildly uncontrollable state, universal and unavoidable, yet unique every time.  It can slice through cleanly or tear the heart raggedly, and healing can be complicated by extra layers: the loss of a loved one, and, the loss of normalcy. I recently learned of a Portuguese word, "saudade," which has no direct English translation. It roughly describes a state of profound yearning for something or someone who will never return. And in the Native American culture, there is something called, "ghost sickness," in which the loss of a loved one consumes a survivor, a "haunting" that leads to physical manifestations such as weakness, confusion, loss of appetite, sleep disruption, and even feelings of suffocation. My world (and who I was) before the clustered deaths of my mother, my sister, my dog, and my father is now gone forever. I cannot return to a time on planet Earth when my intact family was alive and breathing. And sadly, it appears as though I cannot return to who I was "before" either, which adds to the sense of being frozen in place. 

Last month, my mother's birthday came and went, the first since her passing one sunny day last May. It was a vacant feeling, to try to observe what was once a happy anniversary from an abandoned lot of loss. My heart felt like a trash-can fire propped against a chain-link fence: rustily-lit, but not throwing off enough warmth to thaw the cold of ache. I tried to rouse myself by getting a birthday cake . . a tangible attempt to keep concrete something that was now irrevocably ephemeral. I remembering standing before the bakery refrigerator case like a mannequin, staring dully at my options: icing balloons, flowers, or Dora the Explorer? Cheerful muzak tinkled in the background as I realized the absurdity of my purchase. Finally, I chose the balloons, imagining them filled with helium, capable of lifting me out of this refractory despair. Capable even of carrying me up higher and higher beyond the snow dunes, out beyond the arctic jet stream to a place of promise and new life........God's eternal spring, where the green blade riseth . . . resurrection when it's time, right on time.

[juniperstories]

The Real Work

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."  -- Wendell Berry

(Contributed by Abby Shuman)

[juniperstories]

God's Pilot Light (guest blog by Abby Shuman)

With the magnitude of physical abuse that I experienced throughout my childhood, it never occurred to me that God might be present and speaking to me. When my only brother, who also happened to be my best friend and one of the roots of the tree of my being, died in 1988 at age 18 (when I was 22), I felt that I’d lost one of my limbs. I couldn’t imagine a God who would allow me or others in the world to experience such suffering. I raged at this God, which indicated that I had somehow shifted from not even being able to conceive that s/he might exist, to some form of engagement. I read Stephen Levine’s pivotal book Who Dies? and was privileged to have a group of friends, classmates, teachers, and other supporters who were willing to dive into the deep waters of my questions about the nature and meaning of existence.

Recently, at age 48, it has occurred to me that God may have always been present and speaking to me, but like a bad cell phone connection, I couldn’t hear her.

I am blessed to have three glorious Kates in my life (not counting Kate Hepburn here), and a few months ago I had a moving conversation with Kate L ("Katel") about how God seems to speak to some people in dramatic epiphanies, while remaining imperceptible to others. In talking about each of our experiences, we agreed that while this powerful experience of visitation or epiphany may happen for some, it doesn’t necessarily mean that God has been more present in their lives. Perhaps the ways God makes him/herself known in a person’s life is like the dial on a radio. God speak to us on different frequencies.

Maybe sometimes, for some of us, it’s a slow wave. One of my other beloved Kates, Kate R ("Kater"; you can see the system here) recently shared that she sees me as someone who has always had a pilot light on. Regardless of what has transpired in my life, that light has never gone out. The flame may have appeared to be “lower” at times of profound grief and despair—because I was alive in those times in a different way—but it has never, ever been extinguished.

Through these two conversations about radio dials and pilot lights, and many others that I’ve had in this past year in particular, I now feel that God has always been present with and for me, waiting patiently to see if I might be able to turn the dial to the ideal frequency/set the flame at the correct intensity to receive this message.

I can’t to hear what the next channel sounds like.

[juniperstories]

Hovering Love

Today I awakened to find my yard freshly covered in snow. This blanket of blankness paradoxically forms a noteworthy canvas, clearly capturing the scurried secret lives of animals, whose paw prints dip and cross in intricate patterns. Who knew that the nocturnal neighborhood was such a hive of activity? Apparently, every night I as I slumber, a bustling thoroughfare unfolds right outside my window. There is always so much more to this world than meets the eye.

Sometimes my life with God feels this way – passionate promise coursing just beneath perception, like blood flowing under skin. My ability to connect to this cloaked realm waxes and wanes in a most maddening way. Lately I have felt tired of the indirectness, impatient with the set-up. Why does it have to be this way? If we humans struggle to make contact with you, God, can’t you lay down a swatch of fresh metaphorical snow to show the footprints of your Spirit?

Ann Lamott recently lamented that it is often hard to hear God's voice: 

“I rarely do--almost never in fact, directly, which is one of my real problems with the Divine It. Like it would be so much skin off Its nose, to slip us notes or whisper in our tiny shell-shaped ears: ‘Get rid of this guy.’ ‘Yes, take the damn job.’ ‘Keep the sweater.’"

Knowing the beauty and mercy of God, I always blame for myself for spiritual deafness. Yet there are stark limitations to simply staring in the mirror, so lately I have strained to understand anew where God resides in the struggle. In my ponderings this week, I have been struck by the similarities of the Juniper Tree-style wilderness with the Creation account of Genesis 1:1-2:

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. . .".

Without form. Void. Dark. Eugene Peterson in The Message, renders it this way: “Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness.”  Aren’t these also are the words of spiritual wilderness? But what’s most interesting this Genesis account is the very location of God herself:

"--and the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. . . "

The Hebrew word used to describe God’s presence over the water is “rachaph,” the same verb found in Deuteronomy 32:11, when God is likened to an eagle “hovering” over a nestful of chicks. A word study of ‘rachaph’ finds variations: vibrate, flutter, move gently, brood, cherish, and even . . . fertilize!  What could it mean for us to realize that during our trying wilderness times that God is hovering like a mother bird over us?

I find this mothering image of the Divine enormously comforting, not the least because it underscores a sense of “touching but not touching,” or close proximity without actual contact. Perhaps this particular spatial relationship allows independent growth, protective without being smothering. God is very near, despite the lameness of our senses. Indeed, God is doing more than just hanging out in the background, bored or horrified with our tragic foibles. The verb “rachaph” indicates action! It takes a lot of energy to hover in place instead of landing—think of a hummingbird’s furiously vibrating wings. One imagines this energy arising out of nurturing watchfulness, or what one writer calls “a creative posture of patience.” Like an artist tending to materials in a desire to bring something to life, apparently God trusts raw possibility, hovering steadfastly because God is certain that our potential as creation will come to fruition in due time.   

If God attends to us as a hovering mother, can we adopt the same patience with ourselves? This is my great challenge. Whenever we find ourselves in the wilderness—whether because of grief or vocational change or broken relationships or any other triggering incident—can we tap into the mindset of “artistic hovering,” thereby allowing ourselves the time needed to grow strong enough again to fly?

 “In a desert land God found her,     in a barren and howling waste. God shielded her and cared for her;     he guarded her as the apple of God’s eye, 11 like an eagle that stirs up its nest     and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them     and carries them aloft.”             

(--Deut. 32: 11, pronouns mine)

Age after age as this world founders in desperate struggle, it is comforting to know that we are not abandoned to the dark primordial chaos. The Spirit of Creation hovers and broods and moves over us, patiently waiting for us to grow up.

[juniperstories]

On the Eve of a New Year

The second-to-last time I saw Mike, I gave him my lunch. I had bought two lunches, one for a member of our street community in celebration of his birthday, and another just like it for me. It was cold out, and I was hungry, and A's lunch request sounded good: hot and sour soup and chicken fried rice. But as I headed to a nearby park to eat, there was Mike, sitting on the cold ground in his usual spot, huddled head-to-toe in his usual off-white blanket, like a monk fallen on hard times. It took a moment’s struggle, but compassion won out. I walked over and handed Mike the take-out-bag. He thanked me—one of the few times I heard him speak. He was so quiet and so alone. He had no friends, never hung out with anyone else. He seemed as wrapped in his own world as in that off-white banket.

The last time I saw him was New Year's Eve. My husband and I were walking through the Square passing out tiny goody bags with notes from The Friday Café, and spotted Mike in the park where he used to hang out, wrapped in his blanket, asleep on a bench. We tucked a goody back into his shopping cart, speaking softly so as not to disturb him, and kept walking.

That night, Mike froze to death. On New Year’s Eve. For all I know he was dying or had already died when we went up to him. I don’t know at what temperature hypothermia sets in, or how long it takes for it to become fatal. I don’t know whether to blame myself or not. I’m used to giving people their space, trusting them to know what they need. Each time I’ve expressed concern to people who sleep out in winter, they’ve told me, “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I know what I’m doing.” Besides, it wasn’t especially cold that night, by the standards of a New England winter.

Should I have woken Mike up? Should I have called the police? Was I right to leave him be?

“Honestly,” A. said to me when he told me today, “I think he’s in a better place.” He had had multiple surgery to trim dead tissue from his frostbitten feet. He was ill and haggard and alone, by choice. He could have taken shelter under an overhang that night, as he often had before. A. thinks he chose not to. Perhaps the thought of a new year was more than he could bear.

When you minister to people on the streets, you have to tell yourself every day, “I’m not here to save people.”

Or to fix them, or to pressure them to make better choices, or to rescue them.

All I’m here to do is offer acceptance and hope.

But still. I walked away. One of the last people, perhaps the very last person, who did.

[juniperstories]

Trail of Glory

New day, new month, new year. 

Peeling off the sheets of last year's kitchen calendar feels like pulling off furniture coverings at a beach house reopening for spring. Even in the dead teeth of winter, I feel suddenly sunny as I marvel at the clean, blank expanse of 2015. Empty days, o bliss! Glancing down at the crumple of papers in my hand, I shudder at the chicken-scratch scribble of December days choked and overrun by too many events, tasks, reminders, and commitments. The blank space of now feels liberating, not boring, which itself feels vaguely disconcerting. Am I--the eternal extrovert--descending finally into a resigned burrowing-in, a withdrawal wrought by advancing age? Are the blank January days like little white flags of surrender, an acceptance of the small pleasures of the unextended life?

In fact, as this new year begins, the blankness feels like just another manifestation of the dune-like expanse of the wilderness which has been my home now for so many months. How embarrassing to still be in the midst of Nowheresville. Like a home improvement project gone awry, I have been taken down to the "studs," followed by little visible progress of rebuilding. Am I an abandoned construction project, at the mercy of an absentee construction crew? The blueprints of possibility, once so exciting, now feel like a chimera. I am reduced to simply hoping now for a better tarp overhead to keep out bad weather. 

It's hard to wait, isn't it? For a better "us".....whatever than means. Sometimes we seem to wait in vain..........for a new job, a better school, lost pounds, or an awaited soul mate. Maybe we are waiting for better lab results, a longed-for pregnancy, or grief to loosen its f*ing grip. Every January, our culture taunts us with New Year expectations to make quicker progress in ascending to our ideal selves. Apparently, patience in the daily construction of what it means to be a human is a prime manifestation of faith. Do what we must, chip away at what we can, accept what is beyond our hammer and nails.

I have friends who bought a mountain house at the start of their marriage, a ramshackle lodge in need of a complete overhaul. With great enthusiasm at the start, they built a small barn with an upstairs apartment to live in while the larger house was renovated. The early work went very fast......the tearing down of the old, the putting up of a grand new scaffolding. Then a curious thing happened: when it came time to actually flesh out the frame with sheet rock and tile, electrical wiring and fixtures, they became paralyzed with indecision. Years have now gone by. Rather than risk living into their future, they remain huddled in the tiny barn apartment. The large, beautifully-framed skeleton of a dream house stands hollow and empty, an unfinished reproach towering among the trees. 

Sounds familiar. We all accept the cramped substitute of the status quo sometimes, don't we? As if we do not deserve all that is possible.

Here is what I want. Whether 2015 brings you and me to the threshold of a bright shining new path, or we remain stuck in the way stations of wilderness wanting, let's vow together to remember one thing. In the gaping holes of our half-constructed dreams, may we never lose sight of the vast night sky, in which God's presence burns as steadfastly as the North Star, inscrutable but always glowing with an ethereal light.  Let us make friends with the shadows of not being able to see a damn thing sometimes, not even our hands stretched out blindly in longing before us.

At the precipice of this new year, let us yield to this God of the gloaming, saying:

 Make of me a twilight; wake of color, trail of glory.

In the evening of life transform me into a song of gratitude… 

Make me your holy darkness, your blessed night. 

Fashion me into one who sees with the eyes of the soul. 

Make of me your night prayer.

-Macrina Wiederkehr 

(thanks, Donna)

[juniperstories]

A Tender Fontanel

December is the one month of the year when the flow of time feels very, very pronounced. It’s as if Christmas day is an imploded star, pulling all other days towards it with an irresistible energy force. This force can feel as overwhelming as a rip tide, especially now that the American consumption machine—our voracious capitalist retail system—has merged (kidnapped?) the religious holiday. These days the run-up to Christmas can feel like a Dorothy-style tornado, but instead of Antie Em, ToTo, the Bad Witch, and Oz all swirling together, we have Santa, Rudolph, Elf on a Shelf, Amazon, Best Buy, wonder, joy, stress, overspending, overeating, twinkling lights, goodwill, and mobs at malls.

 Christmas is a minefield of paradoxes.  While this holiday is enshrined in our dominant cultural as the ‘most wonderful time of the year,' it is also the most awful time of the year if your life fails to resemble the hallowed Hallmark version. If death has snatched away loved ones, or if ill health or relationship struggles or low funds in your bank account mean you can't really play the Christmas game properly, then bah humbug on you! The mandate to be happy is immense: travel long miles to gather with family around groaning tables of home-cooked food, haul home a big tree to decorate, bake cookies . . . and tip the mailman, hairdresser, newspaper delivery guy, cleaners, school crossing guard. Don’t forget teachers, neighbors, the needy….stuff the Sally Army red kettle, the offertory plate at church, the envelopes of mailed appeals from every charity you've ever supported. Rush, rush, rush, or the opposite: wander aimlessly though Netflix at night with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, willing the clock to tick its way faster out of December because presently, for myriad reasons, you are all alone for the holidays this year.

 The imploded star pulls on us to go fast, faster.

Many of us have fought the crazed Noel tornado this month by turning to the Christian liturgical calendar, which offers the season of practiced waiting, Advent. Underneath our culture's shrieking Mazak version of Christmas, Advent is like a strong secret bass chord struck from an old instrument, reverberating richly underfoot.

Advent is a palate-cleansing tartness among so much sugar.  

Of course, Advent isn’t for everyone. So sometimes it gets reduced to a cheerful, motherly bromide: oh please just slow down a little, darlings. Namaste!  But if you go a little deeper, Advent gets strange: 

MAKE SPACE, you. Not just by decluttering your shelves in preparation for a flood of parcels delivered by brown UPS trucks, but make space for the sacred.

WAIT, you. Not just for those impossible parking spaces at the infernal maelstrom of a mall, but for Almighty God. 

 Advent (adventus) means 'coming', and it's the Holy Spirit who is arriving, always arriving. And that’s the strangest thing of all about Advent: time becomes elastic. In the lectionary, the commencement of Advent abruptly tears us away from an adult Jesus, forcing us to wildly jump backwards to wait innocently for Christ the baby to be born. Whaat? Why pretend to wait for something that has already happened? Why pretend to re-enact it live instead of just remembering it fondly?  Why is it “O Come all ye Faithful” not “The Faithful came to Bethlehem.”

 In the swirl of Advent, the Past and Future are dropped off at our homes as if Advent was an airport taxi bringing relatives home for Christmas.  Stepping onto our front steps, laughing and singing, Past and Future come weighed down with both baggage and gifts. Of course, the Past is always tired and needing help with heavy bags (she seems incapable of packing light) while her sister, the Future, is usually restless and wanting to be the center of attention, regaling all with tales of possibilities or dire predictions. The Christian experience of Christmas insists that you welcome both, integrating what has happened and what will happen, with what.....is. Emmanuel was born a long time ago, will be born again this Christmas, and will be born yet again in all the Decembers to come. Was/is/will be. God entered time, enters time, will enter time. As a BABY! Another time distortion: why enter as a newborn?

The incarnation leads us to the unimaginable conclusion that God insists on coming to us as both ultimate reality and unripened potential. The fruit is in the seed: the world-changing Messiah is in the manger. Geez, what a twist. I mean, we are used to this plot, but it’s just really, really shocking. And man, if you need a savior, like right now, isn’t it hard to get behind God as an infant? For that matter, a Messiah on a cross doesn’t seem much more helpful.

Christmas teaches us that God intersects time completely--past, present, and future because God is always here.....to save us, to be with us……..not as a king or a magician or warrior, but, as unending Love draped in the soft skin of vulnerability. How terrifying. No wonder we so often anesthetize ourselves by stepping willingly into the vortex of frenetic season of buying and consuming.

 Through time and space, Christmas eternally asks us to be brave enough to align ourselves with a Baby, facing the horrors of a broken world with our mortality unshielded—our faith but a tender fontanel stretching thinly over our vulnerable hearts. If we can accept this naked exposure, this defenselessness, then we can glimpse what it means to be fully human, fully alive. In the midst of the whirlwind of garish glitter and sugarplum glee, it is the greatest gift of all.  

[juniperstories]

All I Want for Christmas

"Once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands. …And that taught me you can’t have any thing, you can’t have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone."  -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Beautiful and the Damned"

This is the season of desire.

“O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” —that’s how the church year begins. “O, that you would tear open the heavens!” Like a child tearing wrapping paper on Christmas morning to get at the gift beneath. “O come, O come Emmanuel… Come, Wisdom, Come, Desire of nations…” We need you.

It’s a hard thing to admit.

But this is how the new church year begins, with this cry from the depths, a cry of raw longing for the One who is both with us and beyond us. Source of our helpless yearning, and its answer.

Interesting, isn’t it, the way our culture transmutes that longing every year into craving for more stuff? Is it the invitation into Love’s mystery that sets off this frenzy of consuming within us and around us—blazing lights, frantic busyness, crowds, displays, loudspeakers to muffle our misgivings in the same sentimental tunes… and enthroned amidst it all, the jolly god of having and wanting, clad in red, drawing us in, claiming our hearts, promising to satisfy our emptiness once and for all…

Meanwhile, off to the side, the child lies in the manger—empty-handed, naked, helpless, homeless, and in need. He brings no host present because he is the gift, wrapped in torn strips of cloth. The gift and the giver both. The immeasurable longing, and its answer. What is his desire for us? What cry from his depths is trying to make itself heard through the honking horns and the 97th repetition of “All I Want for Christmas Is You”?

Or maybe that is the cry.

Whose desire is for whom, at Christmas time? Is it our desire for God, or God’s for us?

This Advent season, instead of the usual word of one or two syllables, my prayer in meditation is this: “You are the desire of my heart.”

You, and not my cravings or my anxiety or my resentments or my sense of responsibility or my lurking shame or my need to please or even my insatiable need to understand…

You are the desire of my heart.

Sometimes it is me saying it to Jesus. Sometimes it is Jesus saying it to me: You are the desire of my heart... not your dotted i's or crossed t's, not your oh-so-consciencious behavior or your guilt or your anxiety about letting me down or how nice a person you're able to be today, but you. You are the desire of my heart.

Really.

Come, Emmanuel, God with us. Come, desire of our hearts.

[juniperstories]

#notaspectatorsport

Sometimes when I wade into my Facebook stream and see a parade of posts/photos/videos drift past, I can’t quite shake the feeling of voyeurism. I gawk, therefore I am? Oddly, this feeling is heightened when it comes to cries for action about causes. As it turns out, a good percentage of my FB village is comprised of religious & spiritual folk—ministers, social workers, contemplatives and good-hearted souls from my denomination, the left-leaning United Church of Christ. When social injustices erupt in our world . . . such as the heart-wrenching double tragedies of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, just to name two . . . my social media feed becomes quickly flooded with powerful testimonials and urgent appeals. After watching the video of Garner’s murder, how can anyone breathe easy? I am regularly awed and inspired by the longing and lament expressed by so many social justice advocates, even beyond the riveting national events of late. But occasionally, I feel the voyeur element bubble up unbidden, a feeling of unwarranted satisfaction that just by reading about a cause I have somehow participated. Sitting in my computer chair, I feel almost as if I am part of a Roman coliseum mob charged with watching and judging, and my role is simply to boo and offer a “thumbs down” gesture when I witness brutality.

I want more.

More than gestures, more than words. But how? How to move from my comfortable perch in the anonymous crowd to a spot closer to the blood, sweat and tears on the dirt floor where the lions are mauling the innocents?

As Franchesca Ramsey, of digital aggregator Upworthy, recently posted: *"I just hope people contributing to #CrimingWhileWhite are vocal about these disparities offline. Great, you're trending but we need action.” * Yes, action. There is a risk in not moving from virtual hashtags to bricks n’ mortar activism.

Let me be clear: protest is critical. The very word comes from the Latin protestari, which means to “declare publically.” Public discourse—heated, messy, and political—is foundational for any social justice moment. The great revolutions of history did not occur in silence, and the impact of social media today in fomenting and organizing democratic, non-violent uprisings cannot be underestimated. And yet, there is a danger to imagine that posting alone (especially when offered to curated tribal clusters of friends) is enough.

But there is hope. I believe a kind of hinge or fault line exists between our digital and physical worlds, a place where intense energy is released when the two tectonic plates overlap and rub against each other. Ideas, collective wisdom, outrage and great hope heats up beautifully in the cauldrons of social media platforms – we just need to pair physical world opportunities with our digital inspiration. One place this can occur is in faith communities, who already know from scripture that following the Way of Jesus is not a spectator sport.

This is the moment for the mainline Protestant Church to arise and reclaim its place as a relevant, transcendent interface between intention and action. People have the power, as Patti Smith once sang, and God has the grace.

Blogging about taking action is rather ironic. Oh please, can you help me get to my feet?

[juniperstories]

Advent Calendar

"He will come like last fall’s leaf fall. One night when the November wind has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth wakes choking on the mould, the soft shroud’s folding. He will come like frost. One morning when the shrinking earth opens on mist, to find itself arrested in the net of alien, sword-set beauty. He will come like dark. One evening when the bursting red December sun draws up the sheet and penny-masks its eye to yield the star-snowed fields of sky. He will come, will come, will come like crying in the night, like blood, like breaking, as the earth writhes to toss him free. He will come like child."  -- Rowan Williams

[juniperstories]

Altars and Images

"EVERYTHING BUT GOD In Europe you can see cathedrals from far away. As you drive toward them across the country they are visible—stony and roosted on the land—even before the towns that surround them. In New York you come upon them with no warning, turn a corner and there one is: on 5th Avenue St. Patrick’s, spiny and white as a shell in a gift shop; dark St. Agnes lost near a canal and some housing projects in Brooklyn; or St. John the Divine,
 listed in every guidebook yet seeming always
 like a momentary vision on Amsterdam
 Avenue, with its ragged halo of trees, wide stone steps ascending directly out of traffic.

 Lately I have found myself unable to pass by. The candles’ anonymous
 wishes waver and flame near the entrance, bright numerous, transitory and eternal
 as a migration: the birds that fly away are never exactly the same as those that return. The gray, flowering arches’ ribs rise until they fade, the bones so large and old they belong to an undetected time on earth. Here and there people’s small backs in prayer, the windowed saints’ robes’ orchid glow, the shadows—ghosts of a long nocturnal snow from a sky below when we did not yet exist, with our questions tender as burns."  -- Anne Pearson Wiese

When Google Street View debuted in 2007, it received numerous complaints from people who wound up being unwillingly featured in photographs on the site—sometimes in compromising ways or situations. So it developed a face-blurring technology that would automatically recognize and blur out faces, rendering subjects anonymous.

Hilarious result: blurred statue faces.

You can see more of them here:

Blurred statue faces, or, to go right to metaphor… images from religion, politics, and folklore towering above landscapes whose modern inhabitants can no longer see them clearly—for whom the past and its values have become, at best, blurred.

What do we do with the heritage of the past, when change comes suddenly instead of slowly—when social and technological revolution comes storming through the times we’re living through, sweeping the young along with it, leaving their parents and grandparents behind to mourn what was? Not that there’s always such a neat generational divide between the embracers and the resisters. But how to understand college students can’t answer questions like "Who won the civil war?"

I’ll be honest: Watching this video, I wanted to snatch the “smart” phones out of these young people’s hands and toss them down the nearest manhole. Next thing, I’ll be standing on my front porch yelling, “You kids get off my lawn!”

Okay, deep, conscious breath. (I learned about “deep conscious breaths” on the Internet. From some followers of Thích Nhất Hạnh. I love technology.)

Question: Are blurred statues really such a bad thing?

How important is it that we leave religious monuments, or any monuments, so long as we’re handing on what has been most deeply true and lifegiving to us, what has helped us to keep growing in compassion, vision, and grace?

A friend of mine who has been considering joining our church, but who still feels a little conflicted about it, shared with our pastor that she likes Jesus, she just isn’t sure about the Son of God part. She’s still in process. “Well, let me ask you this,” Dan said. “Do you feel like you want to be as much like Jesus as possible?” My friend didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” she said. Dan said that was good enough for him, if it was good enough for her.

It’s good enough for me too—confirmed old Trinitarian that I am. I used to secretly chafe when people didn’t take Jesus as seriously as I felt I needed to take him. As a convert, I had fallen hard for the Great Tradition, and wanted others to feel the same way.

But theological words and concepts have come to seem less sharp in their contours since I took up meditation—or maybe it's all the other changes I’ve been through. I’m not sure. It’s been kind of a blur. The point is I can’t get too roused up about the Son of God thing any more. I’m too caught up in the power of grace, transforming the landscape of my inner self, and the landscape of my relationships and my ministry and my church. I guess I got swept up.

I wouldn’t go back for anything.

[juniperstories]

Elemental

In ancient classical thought, it was believed that life was built upon four basic elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. I recently learned that there was a fifth element, aether, which described everything beyond the material world. Sometimes I like to imagine categorizing 'aether' as a periodic table, naming the elements of spirituality such as faith, hope, and love. Perhaps we could name the dark elements too: greed, hate, judgment, fear.

This list is just a lark of course, but it is interesting to try to reduce human experience down to the most primal. Of all the darker elements of 'aether,' I believe fear is the most powerful, in no small part perhaps because it is often the most insidious. Fear gets up underneath the fingernails of things, a kind of grime that is hard to wash away completely. Certainly fear is necessary in the right doses--beware the hot stove--but left alone, it is emotional kudzu.

I should know. My family tree, if placed in an arboretum, would likely have an identifier species plaque that would say something like "myrtaceae anxietās, a southern tree known for its lovely leaves that tremble in the slightest breeze." I carry anxiety in my DNA, I am a hypervigalent from a long line of worry-warts, so I have a kind of 'night vision' acuity for spotting subtle glimmerings of fear in daily life. But sometimes microscopic cells of fear can lurk undetected. I hit a patch this past week that surprised me.

On Friday, my therapy dog Maestro and I were invited into a new ministry created by my good friend, Rev. Kate Layzer, at First Church Cambridge... a homeless hospitality outreach called "The Friday Cafe." The Friday Cafe welcomes homeless women and men with an afternoon off the streets, via radiator warmth, great food, hot coffee, companionship, liturgy/communion, communal art, and clean socks & winter coats to-go. There will be many things to say about this fledgling ministry as it grows in luminous ways, but let me start with just this wee confession.

I was a little apprehensive going in.

Even though I am an ordained minister, and even though I work regularly at the edgy Boston Medical Center downtown, by sheer happenstance my contact with the homeless population in Boston has been abbreviated. I don't think I realized until The Friday Cafe just how impacted I've been by cultural, media-fed ignorance. Let me say, I felt very clear in understanding my own humble solidarity with a homeless person, and I felt only yearning to be in close quarters on a human level. Yet, although in my hospital work I have come to know the smells, sounds, and visuals of humans with heartbreakingly meager supplies, I did worry suddenly if safety would be an issue at the Cafe. What if it got crowded or unruly, what if an unmedicated schizophrenic ignited in rage? There would be no security guards or police officers around. It would be just us.

When the first homeless guests arrived, I thought they were more volunteers. Throughout the afternoon, it became a common pattern. I was surprised time and time again as guests came in, whether it was by their neat appearance, undaunted friendliness, zesty intelligence or hilarious wit. Boundaries dissolved. My ignorance became educated. There was no volunteer-do-gooder-ministering-to-a-needy-person. We were simply all God's children, needy in our own ways, gathered around circular tables, sipping coffee and petting Maestro and telling stories. It felt like there was a hearth in our midst, lit by a holy fire. In the end, it was a microcosm of God's vision for this world. Everyone had a place at the table, because we were all one family.

And that, of course, is the foundational element of the human periodic table. Love.