You Are Not In Control

It began with a cough on Tuesday. By Wednesday I was feeling worse. By Thursday, I had a fever, canceled all my commitments, and stayed in bed. The dreaded flu! I usually get a flu shot, but never got around to it this year.

I say to God, “Really? You let me get sick just before Holy Week? The busiest time of the year?” And I hear Her respond, “You would rather you were ill during Holy Week?” That quiets me as I humbly offer apologies and thanks. He has a point.

In the meantime, with my poor fevered brain only at half-mast, I must rely on the wisdom of others this week. Upon hearing that I was sick, a kind parishioner emailed me: “there is always some kind of lesson that comes out of times like this.  The obvious one is: we are not ultimately in control of our lives. I was going to wish you a speedy recovery, but the truth of the matter is that the flu is going to last as long as it wants to last.... So rather than wish you a speedy recovery, I wish you a blessed and fruitful sickness.”

What an unusual blessing, and yet it warms my heart! She is right. We save ourselves a lot of grief by accepting what is, accepting our limits, and learning what we can where we are placed, even if it doesn’t match our plans. So I am doing my best to ensure a fruitful sickness, even amidst the tissues and aches. This I do primarily by counting my blessings and recognizing that I am not in control – God is. So this day I wish you all blessedness and fruitfulness wherever God has placed you in this moment.

Epiphany Blessings

Throughout my ministry, I have been the privileged confidante of concerns and fears of my parishioners. There was the elderly couple whose grandson was a drug addict. How do they save him? There was the empty nester couple who son transitioned to a woman. Will their friends at church ever talk to them again? There was the grandmother who worried that her grandchildren weren’t being baptized. Will they go to hell?

Today, January 6, we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany to honor the revelation of Jesus, of salvation, to the whole world. The wise men who came to worship the Christ child were not Jewish, but Gentile. Traditionally they have been understood as coming from the three known continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe, thereby representing the whole world. Epiphany is a recognition that God isn’t sending a Messiah just for the Israelites, but for all people. At the time, this was unprecedented! People were convinced down to their bones that they knew who God loved and who God didn’t. Epiphany is an “ah-ha” moment. Maybe God has a bigger plan and love for humanity than we sometimes realize. Maybe our little boxes of who is in and who is out don’t matter to God..

In this New Year, may we all have many “ah-ha” moments of seeing the love of God at work in our lives and those around us, even those whose choices, or intrinsic natures, are very different from ours.

(image above by J. C. Leyendecker)

The Divine Dance

 

Last night Bill was away, the kids were with their Dad, and I was uncharacteristically alone. So I danced. Our home is in the woods overlooking a marsh. At sunset I cued up the Itunes, plugged in the earphones, and danced in the dark with the trees, the cattails, and the sky. Pagan as it may sound it was, rather, a release and reverence for God’s good creation. Music as flow. Embodying Spirit. Dance allows us a means to express the Holy Spirit. I felt the Spirit; I stomped on the ground; I lifted my hands to the stars; I hugged the trees; I experienced the Divine. I believe dance to be a way to know God as profoundly as prayer and meditation.

In John 3:16 “God so love the world that he gave his only son” to enter into the creation, becoming flesh and blood. If God can create it, and enter into it, there is something to be celebrated in being physical. Through it we can know the Divine. There is a harmony to moving with music, with spirit, so that our body and essence are living outside of our binary brains. We are beyond the rational and into flow.

There is an apocryphal story, which even if it isn’t true should be, that when Native American medicine men talk to the sick, they usually ask three questions: When was the last time you sang? When was the last time you danced? When was the last time you told your story? Living in the flow is part of what it means to be a healthy human. It is joy.

We can experience this flow, this harmony, not only in dance, but in singing, art, or in playing an instrument. God gives us these means of alignment with the Divine as practice for how all our lives are to be lived: in harmony with the physical world, the Spirit, and each other. This harmony, this expression of self beyond self and in synchronicity with the Spirit, can be realized in any activity.

I have often experienced this communally in worship. There are some Sundays when the service is greater than the sum of its parts. The people, the prayers, the music, the words, the poetry, the laughter, the spirit, the energy swirl and combine to create something breathtaking. God is not found in some pallid other-world, but right here, right now, embodied, in this gift of our physical selves (God will be in the next world too, and it will be brilliant!). But to deny this existence is blasphemous! Dance! Sing! Jump for joy! Walk in the woods! Bask in the Spirit in attentive silence! And in all ways connect with the flow which will guide you and your body in the divine dance.

Flatland

When I was a teenager our high school had a special assembly for which we had to read a book ahead of time. It was the book Flatland by the Rev. Dr. Edwin Abbott. The assembly included a special guest speaker who gave a riveting lecture, using the book as a springboard, on geometry and the possibility of the fourth dimension. No small task given his audience. More than most things in high school that lecture, and its possibilities, have stayed with me over the years. This week I reread the book Flatland.

It is a little fable from 1884 which has been used for years to instruct children about mathematical concepts. It is also an amusing satire on English Victorian society. But its true genius is its ability to help us imagine a world beyond this one as well as explain our inability of describing it using language. 

The story takes place in a world called Flatland, which has only two dimensions. It is told from the perspective of a square. Over the course of the book the square visits “Lineland,” a world of one dimension, and “Pointland,” a world of no dimensions. He discovers he cannot get the Beings in these dimensions to believe in or even conceive of the two dimensions in which he lives. Then the Square is visited himself by a sphere from “Spaceland,” and is taken out of Flatland and brought to this world of three dimensions. The Square is flabbergasted at the difference. When he returns to Flatland, he tries to explain to his fellow citizens about this new dimension, this place that is beyond their world, but bigger, with entirely new ways of being. He cannot put it into words. For instance, in trying to describe “depth,” a concept unheard of in Flatland, the best he can come up with is the phrase “Upward, not Northward.” While technically correct, it doesn’t explain the reality of three dimensions at all.

This brilliant, humorous, unassuming book challenges us to imagine worlds beyond ours. And at only 82 pages, I highly recommend it.

It reminds me of the stories of people who have had near-death experiences, or those who have had mystical experiences, or those who have been overwhelmed with an experience of the Divine in church or elsewhere. How do you put such a thing into words? There is no language, because all language falls woefully short. Language can point to God, but it cannot capture God.

I think the parables of Jesus were Christ’s attempt to come as close as he could to describing the Reign of God using limited human language. The parables are not simple fables, as many believe, but instead are complex stories that are meant to be shocking and weird. This oddness allows them to be read on many different levels. God’s reality is too magnificent to be explained by mere words. Parables, stories that point to the truth of the glory of God, stories that leave space and unanswered questions for the complex reality of God to shine through, are ultimately more accurate than a simple black and white fable.

I am reminded of the wonderful poem by Emily Dickinson entitled, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” 

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —