"Here - take this."
What is it?
It is new Life.
I can't tell if it's a weed or a flower.
It is new Life.
I'd like to know what it will grow into.
It is Life.  I offer you new Life.
That's what you say, but what is it?
I offer you new Life ...will you accept what I am giving you?"
Well first, I really wish you'd tell me what it is and what it will become;
and how it will affect me and ....
It is new Life ..."

If you reflect on the Nativity narrative, what you may see is that the core plot of the story is the concept of receiving new life.  In some ways that seems obvious since Christmas is the celebration of birth, however, in order to birth new life each person had to say yes to receiving New Life that made no sense.

Mary, a virgin, was asked to say yes to conceiving from the Holy Spirit.  Joseph was asked to say yes to a story that interrupted his plans and required a completely new way of perceiving.  Elizabeth was asked to believe new life was growing within her after she had accepted that she was barren.  The Shepherds left their duty and responsibility: their fields and flocks to joyously confirm a message they had not been expecting. Oh, and the Three Kings, we haven't touched on their story yet but they said yes to new life which meant leaving their power, security and comfort in order to bring Mary confirmation of what the Angel had told her.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I wrote in my journal, "it is a very strange experience to feel life growing and blooming within me while at the same time being aware of a great sadness and sorrow.  Joy and sorrow ... life and death ... somehow they are intimately linked."

Because it was my first pregnancy I did not understand the words I wrote.  It took birthing and growing into my role as a mother before I had an inkling as to why I had written them.  Today I understand them well: not only was I growing a new life, I was simultaneously surrendering my old life.  On some very instinctive level, I knew saying yes to new life would entail an ending to a self and way of living that had been comfortable and familiar.

Accepting new life always means dying to an old way of perceiving. Often the longer we live, the more difficult it becomes to say yes: we know that something we are comfortable with will die - most of us would therefore like an outline of what will happen BEFORE saying yes. Faith however, asks for acceptance of the New Life offered.

This truth is poignantly real to me this year.  Much happened in my way of living and like Elizabeth, I accepted what seemed to be a barrenness; an aching loneliness.  I understand the concept of being a virgin for the new life that quietly grew was not result of deliberate planning; it was more like the tiny sprout pictured here that I noticed and then began to nurture: not knowing what kind of seed it came from. Like Joseph, in order to accept the story of new life, I surrendered to a new way of perceiving and therefore, my way of living was altered.

Throughout this past year, joy and sorrow have intermingled and entwined themselves into a new image of living.  Honestly, I cannot tell you that I fully see the image being created, nor can I tell you that I fully understand it.  What I can say is that this year I am particularly grateful to hear Mary's story once again with her words, "let it be done unto me according to Thy will."

My hope is that you are able to peer into your living this past year and name the sprouts of new life with gratitude - even if like me, you have no idea of what kind of seed they are growing from or how New Life will alter your living.

Thursday - third week in Advent

The glow of God's light shining from a human being.

Pictured is one of the important messages of our Advent journey: remembering we are called to be human in the manner Mary showed us: if we knowingly say 'yes', our joy of living will be found by birthing the Light of God into the world.

Often in mythologies, only gods birth gods but not in our Christian story.  Our Christian story tells us that God depends upon we human creations of God to carry God into the world:  We, imperfect, flawed vessels of flesh and blood are designed to emit Light that is not human.

I've always believed Great Stories remain alive, no matter how long ago they were formed, because Great Stories contain truth.  Even when we do not fully understand the truth of a story, our gut resonates or our heart sings and the story keeps finding hearts and minds to live from.

For me, one of the truths of the incarnation is found in Mary's role: our humanness is not only used, it is essential to God's plan. The gospel of Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus: a long line of human beings who kept the promise of the Messiah alive through centuries. Luke gives us the Nativity narrative and the people so familiar to our telling of the birth of the Christ child. And John offers the gorgeously poetic: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God ...and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory."

Those who 'beheld His glory' were so altered by the experience that the trajectory of religious history was forever changed. Each 'beholders' heart was ignited when the Spirit of God came upon them; in the form of an angel, a dream, a star far, far away, a flame of love, the hearing of a story - God has infinite ways of offering the opportunity for 'yes.' For over 2000 years, millions of people have whispered yes to the God in their heart.

Oh, you'll find flaws in every person (except maybe Mary) who answered 'yes.' Read the Gospels carefully and you'll discover the disciples were at times very slow learners; they screwed up in almost every manner possible except one: they loved Jesus and desired most of all to learn to how to love as He showed them.

Read scripture carefully and you'll find multitudes of unique personalities and wildly varying ways they loved. Why?  Well, it seems to me this affirms the idea that God needs a diversity of lovers to fully illustrate His story of love.  Or at least that's my take as I believe each person is a creation of God, deliberately chosen to live on earth and tell a story of loving that can only be told through their living.  Each individual creation of God has a purpose for being alive.

But there's a paradox to God's design for bringing His light of love into the world.  My love of stories leads me to suspect that perhaps it is the paradox that keeps us telling the story over and over as we travel the circular liturgical calendar.  Each journey through the seasons allows us to glimmer the story's message in greater and greater fullness.

The paradox of God's design for bringing love into the world is our humanness.  We must be fully human in order to be fully alive, and living the story God has entrusted us demands we be fully alive. Both realities: humanness and relationship with God, must be embraced.  The is no 'cure' for being a flawed and imperfect human - this is the design.  There is however a 'remedy' for the various miseries of being  flawed, imperfect, cantankerous humans:  we glimpse the beginning of this truth in Mary's story.

Wednesday - third week in Advent

Cookies - luscious cookies: one of the wonderful treats of Christmas season!  I've been baking a lot the past couple weeks and I'm always a little amazed by the magic of creating cookies.  For most of my living I was not much of a baker; a good 'dump and pour' cook yes, baking however requires following directions, accurate measurement and patience - it is not a dump and pour process.

The patience needed for baking is what tripped me up: learning to cream butter and sugar thoroughly, learning to add the ingredients in order; mixing each addition carefully so they were fully combined: united into a new substance. Baking requires awareness and attention.

The foundation for good cookies lies in the creaming of butter and sugar: mixing these two very different ingredients until they are totally absorbed into one another and become a fluffy pool able to cheerfully accept the "hardness" of the flour binding the sweet buttery goodness into the cookie that will make your mouth smile.

I disliked the time it took for butter and sugar to be completely absorbed into one another: I'd dump the two together and then, for what seemed like a ridiculous amount of time, whir the beaters over and over through the lumpy butter and grainy sugar: fluffy took a long time to achieve.  One day not so long ago I was reading something about baking and it said: "when creaming butter and sugar, first cream the butter alone so it opens and more readily receives the sugar."  

Wow - a new idea.  New idea that really works and, as I've discovered, not only decreases the combining of the two substances into half the time, the combining is much more complete and the fluffiness is lovely: my enjoyment of cookie making took a giant leap forward.

Yesterday as I creamed  butter into a pool of softened goodness, preparing it to receiving the sugar, it hit me that combining butter and sugar in this new way was similar to another discovery that came into my life.

A little over a decade ago I read a line that changed my way of perceiving life and living: "All God asks is that you be open to seeing and receiving the one hundred blessings placed in your life each day."  One HUNDRED blessings every day gifted to me !!  The number seemed huge, how could this be?  Oh, my head could grasp the concept, but feeling the experience of receiving as I went through the day was a little elusive until one day, my spirit seemed to open in a new way.

My heart is like butter that generally needs to sit and soften before it is ready to be mixed and opened into receiving the sugar. Getting up and having my first action of the day be to take some time to just sit in stillness and bring my self into the presence of God is the first step toward softening. As I then begin my prayers of gratitude, I feel my softened heart expanding beyond my little self and opening my Being to the immensity of God's love and blessings.

Blessings are the sugar of life. Just as I've discovered that creaming butter and sugar is much, much easier if the butter is first softened and creamed, so too are blessings more easily recognized and received throughout the day if my heart has first been opened and expanded.

Oh, and that fluffy pool of sweet goodness resulting from butter and sugar thoroughly creamed? That in now my self  ready to receive the ingredients of living.  I've discovered that I take bit of time to pause every now during the  day, and say thank you for the blessings, well, it seems as though Love then bakes the day into a tasty cookie making my heart smile.

Tuesday - third week in Advent

Last summer I did something really dumb.  I went up north to the family cabin for five glorious days out of the summer desert heat and although I gave the plants a good watering before I left, I neglected to provide additional water for my pot of mini-roses.  When I descended from the mountain into high summer the pot contained brown sticks and soil littered with brown leaves.  I cannot tell you have sad and pissed off I was at my stupidity for I had loved and babied the pot of  mini-bushes for almost two years.

My normal tendency when I've done something resulting in feeling sad and stupid, and where a remedy does not seem available is to get rid of the evidence so to not  be reminded of being sad and dumb.  I thought seriously of throwing away the pot, but since I couldn't bring myself to throw away a good pot, I began to pick through the wreckage. Hidden midst the dead stalks was one with a tiny bit of green: such a tiny bit of green I thought I might be imagining it, but I left it intact and watered.

For weeks my pot with one tiny semi-green stalk looked sad and lonely but as it's my optimistic nature to encourage life, I continued watering, gave it some Miracle Grow and moved the pot about hoping to give it the right amount amount of sun and not have it's tiny life snuffed out by our desert summer sun. The itty-bitty stalk hung in there and began to show a bit more green.  Ah-ha!  I wasn't hallucinating.

Some mornings, actually most mornings, I'd hopefully peer into the pot looking for signs of life and one blessed day I saw tiny fuzzy leaf buds: life was reappearing!  Thank you, thank you, thank you I whispered to the small plant.  I continued to nurture and nourish the tiny life.

Today, what had been just the merest possibility of new life, is robust and blooming.  Not only has the plant come back to life, it has more life than before: it's spreading new branches and bright green leaves cover almost half the space in the pot.  Not only is the bush life larger than I ever believed possible, the blooms are literally twice the size they were last year: they are tea roses and not mini-roses!

The disaster of the pot of mini-rose bushes occurred during a time of my living that was extremely challenging: a great many changes had happened suddenly and clustered together: a lot of what I had personally loved and found comforting was no longer a part of my life.  It would have been easy to throw away the pot of apparently dead plants as simply another 'tragedy.'

However, I have been taught all my life, and happen to believe, that my actions speak more loudly than any words I might jabber: if I believe God, who loves me and therefore desires the fullness of life for me, ceaselessly sends new life, then, no what outer circumstances might indicate, it is up to me to water whatever bit of green I might discover - even when it appears that I might be hallucinating !

Again I think of Isaiah who prophesied during a time when the promised Messiah appeared to be a cosmic joke.  Yet, there he was, watering the faith of the people saying: "See.  I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up: do you not see it?  I a making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland."  Isaiah 43:19

"It was You who created my inmost self,
and put me together in my mothers womb.
For all these mysteries I thank you:
for the wonder of myself, for the wonder of Your works."
(psalm 139:13-14)

When I first read this psalm - and it's my favorite - I was struck by the imagery of God deliberately creating 'my inmost self' and I was also grateful for the psalmist adding that this was a mystery.  The longer I lived with the words and imagery, the more I wondered, how do I discover from all the parts of 'my self' what might be the inmost self created by God?

The image chosen for today is of clay being shaped by a potter's hand because clay is not so mysterious to me. When my boys were young we spent many an afternoon with clay and play-dough.  I loved this activity so much I never minded the mess it created as we squished it,  rolled it into 'snakes' to coil into pots, pressed our hands into the lump and created an opening or thumped and pressed it flat so cookie cutters could be used to make shapes.

There is a wondrous feeling attached to playing with clay or play-dough.  Part of the feeling is creativity; I have this lump of possibility just crying to become something.  The other part of the wonder is a sense of power; I can do anything I want with this lump.

Our life, our 'self' is an awfully lot like clay: our potential; the gifts of this inmost being God created are the soft moist lump crying out to be used: to be kneaded, thumped and formed into something. The ability to shape this lump of self gives a sense of power which comes from what theologians refer to as free will or choice.

Free will is the gift God gave us in order that we might truly become artists in our living for creativity requires making choice. However, as most of us are well aware by mid-life, the power of free will and choice also creates mistakes, pain, and doubt. Sometimes by mid-life, the disappointment of our choices causes us to give up being artists and we settle for simply observing life or reducing our living to tasks and a kind of martyred duty.  Often without being aware, we have become passive, we wish for life rather than actively engaging the hope of faith.

Advent, the beginning of a new year of walking spiritually, trumpets hope with the call: 'wake up and begin anew: carry into birthing the life I have put in you."  To quote the prophet Isaiah "do not consider the things of old or the former things, I am doing a new thing; it springs forth, do you not perceiving it?"

Remember my experience seeing the Pieta and being aware that Michelangelo felt the story he was creating so completely that this love and passion was carved into the marble and I could feel the compassionate love still radiating centuries later? If Michelangelo, a human like myself could create a sculpture radiating love from marble, how much more powerful would be God as the sculpting hands of me? What might I become if I allow my living to become the partnership of potter and clay with God?,

Living from this choice requires faith.  Faith that the God who created me did so with love and continues to desire only what love does: that the fullness of life be revealed and lived. "Can I not do with you as this potter has done? says the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in My hand." (Jeremiah 18:6)

Thinking on this I am reminded of a quote attributed to Michelangelo, who when asked how he was able to create the magnificent forms he sculpted, seemed perplexed by the question and said simply, 'oh, the form is already there, I just remove the excess that hides it."  

God knows the inmost self he created and desires nothing more than my willingness to trust His loving hands to remove the excess baggage of my living. Today as I light my candle, I offer my willingness to believe this truth and ask that obstacles to it's grace be removed so the wonder created by you Oh God, may be revealed and I might live the story entrusted to me.

Sunday - third week in Advent

"It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness."

Yesterday when moving stuff off the table and onto a bookcase in order to create room for cookies to cool I made a discovery.  There in a stack of paperbacks was a book I took from my parent's home after they died: Three Minutes A Day.

At dinner each night when I was young either Mom or Day would read us a story from this book.  The stories were very short - literally three minutes to read aloud - and each story illustrated the motto of The Christophers: "it is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness."  I loved hearing those stories and if the one read at dinner had been particularly good, after the table was cleared I would snatch the book, go to my room to read more stories about how each person can make a difference in the world.

The belief that each person "is unique and has a responsibility to help transform society" motivated Fr. Jim Keller, a Maryknoll priest to begin the movement he named The Christophers in 1946. He chose the name Christophers  from the Greek word for Christbearer: an individual who sought to apply the principles of The Gospel in the marketplace of everyday life.

Fr. Keller believed that each person living on earth has a job to do that can be done by no other.  To this end, The Christophers began spreading the news of The Gospel as lived out in individual lives through newsletters, radio and television broadcasts as well as the book of little stories published yearly, Three Minutes A Day.

Thumbing through my copy of the book I was struck by words from it's introduction: "in these pages are 365 reminders that God loves you completely and eternally and that He has a particular mission for you. Some pages may make you smile, some will inform you, but all will encourage you to reflect on your role in the larger scheme of things: you are essential to God's plan of salvation."

The intention of an Advent journey toward Christmas is very simple: we take time to reflect, not only on the joy of the Christ Child's anticipated birth, but on the other reality: I, and you, are within our living of life, essential to God's plan of salvation; we also have been given life in order to bring Light to the world.

Today we light the rose colored candle signifying joy: the new life is growing larger; the time of birth is coming near.  As the fire of flame shimmers before you, consider asking God for the courage to live as a single candle that casts light in the darkness of the world.

Saturday - second week in Advent

Yesterday I tried to wrap my mind around the deaths of twenty children and six adults murdered in an elementary school. But it was not possible for me to rationally make sense of what happened and so I turned to my two default behaviors: I baked cookies and prayed.

The prayer that ran through my heart and mind was one I learned at my family dinner table as we prayed The Memorare every night at dinner:

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary,
that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, 
implored thy help, or sought thine intercession was left unaided.
Inspired by this confidence, 
I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my mother; 
to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. 
O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, 
but in thy mercy hear and answer me.
Amen.

Over and over, these familiar words ran through my mind and heart yesterday. As I prayed, the awareness grew that I had complete confidence in Mary's ability to intercede and bring  her presence of comforting love and mercy to those in need.  Mary, mother of Jesus knows the pain of the people touched by this tragedy.

Mary knows the pain of the death of a beloved child for she received into her arms the body of her son when it was removed from the cross. Michelangelo's glorious sculpture depicts the love and sorrow of a mother holding the child she carried in her body, birthed into life and now holds in death.

When I was a child  living in Pennsylvania, the Pieta (pictured above) by Michelangelo was displayed at the New York World Fair.  Since we literally "ate" the Memorare daily, it made sense that my parents gathered up we children and took us to experience the magnificent work of art they believed embodied our daily prayer.  

Fifty years later I still remember standing transfixed on the moving sidewalk slowly taking us past the sculpture. It was not only the glorious beauty of the art that held me in absolute stillness: no, I remember feeling intense compassionate love; not simply within me for what I saw, but radiating from the sculpture.

The energy I felt was not fanciful, it is the energy of the artist who felt this story so intensely it became part of the marble he carved with his hands.  This is precisely the power of great art; the ability of a human being to create in such a way the rest of us are transported out of our little lives and glimpse the transcendent.

The circular design of the liturgical calendar is a form of art.  Over and over we travel through the stories of human beings and God interacting.  Each year we begin the stories exactly where we are today: in the season of Advent preparing for the birth of the Christ child.  Our journey of spiritual living during Advent has us ask ourselves once again:  Can I, like Mary and thousands of 'saints' after her, trust God enough to say 'Thy will be done unto me."  Am I willing to live in faith and joy trusting God as life unfolds? 

When I chose the image of the Pieta, the thought 'this is how the story of Advent ended' flashed through my mind, but I caught the words and said no, that's not true. 

The story of God Present With US did not end on the cross, nor at the Resurrection nor even the Ascension.  Jesus was the beginning of a story that never ends for each of us comes to earth carrying the love of God within our spirits. Our calling - our purpose for living - is not unlike Michelangelo: we have the ability to give form to this love through our living: through living our lives as prayerful-art we are able to make God's goodness real in our world today.

Earlier this week I stated that kindness is the action of love. My suggestion for this day in Advent as we continue our journey toward Christmas with sorrowful hearts aching with yesterday's news, is that you consider what action of  kindness you can do today.  An action of kindness concretely affirms I have heard God's invitation and yes, I am willing to birth God's love into the world.

I cannot birth this love as perfectly as Mary the Mother of Jesus.  But I am not asked to do that: I am asked if I am willing to birth God's light and love to the best of my flawed ability as me. I think this horrible tragedy is a reminder that our answer is especially important right now.