The Long Winter

Well it has been a long cold winter for me, just coming through another loss of sorts. Daughter Julianne and kids rejoined her husband in a nice home near the school. I took the time to spread out my wings (and furniture) throughout the spacious place. I have five desks and am constantly running between them. My work is all over the place where I used to be in two little rooms earlier. But these are all inanimate objects that keep me busy, the real story is just below the surface. How am I doing? Well...I just don't know. I am still as confused as ever about my life and the direction it's taking. I know there is movement, because every morning I put one foot in front of the other. But spring has not arrived, spiritually speaking, and I wonder if I will ever get out of the cocoon of my sheltered life. I feel frozen most of the time, unsure whether to go left or right. It's a debilitating season. My wings have been clipped and I cannot even go from tree to tree anymore. My groom still lies in the upper valley and I only make it up there every two weeks. I change the flowers/decoration every season and soon I will have to have a room just for them. So I don't think this is working out well. Surely there is a better plan. Plus the expense of buying decoration is increasing. I know Hans would rather I buy food. I spent three days in the dark last week, the electricity was turned off. Oddly enough it was an enlightening time for me. I was quite happy inspite of the terrible inconvenience of not having heat or light in the evening. Most of the day was spent traveling around in my car charging my phone. Simplicity is the goal or at least one of the goals. I spent half of my life building my nest and the second half taking it down. Where is the sense in that?

Todays meditation is about living a life in harmony and balance. Many of us can suffer from wanting too much. I think I fall into this camp. Last night at Jume's, the lectio was from Mark 3. The story of Jesus' family coming to rescue him thinking that he had lost his mind. The story begins with the statement, "There were so many people surrounding him that he didn't even have a place or time to eat." Jesus' family is coming to claim "custody" over him and take him home.  But Jesus has this startling thing to say when he is told that they are outside looking for him. He virtually denies knowing them. Instead he looks at the ragtag group surrounding him and says "You are my family." I take it to mean that he is saying, "My loyalties are to you." Clarifying he says, "Whoever does the will of the Father is my brother, mother, etc.," I pondered this and wondered what were these simple folks doing that qualified them as "doing the will of the God?" I long to do the will of God as well. In fact, I am simply feverish about it. So...these people were doing it. Sitting around His feet. That is the simple answer. I know this sounds ridiculously corny, but this is what is revealed. This is God's will. But I want to do...and I suppose there is a time in which we will be "sent out." But first we must sit at his feet.

I keep thinking about the warning that the OT gives against false prophets. It says, that "those evil men who prophesy in my name, did not even bother to darken my counsels, did not stand in My chamber—did not receive My word for My people." I suppose this is what it means to first sit at his feet. And I believe it is possible to want too much, if we can't even sit at his feet and listen to him. All who went —first sat.

The reading for today from the online retreat from Creighton asked the question, "Who do you admire?" "Who is your model for living a life in balance and harmony." A life that is free—free from the desire to be famous, successful, materially rich, sensuously blessed, etc., It took me a long time to find three people who I admire and who I want to emulate. But I finally found them. First there was Martin Luther, Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. They all had something in common, or threads of my life showed up in theirs. These are the qualities I admire: long hours of dedicated study, good scholarship, pondering over the hidden meanings of the Bible, the hidden manna or wisdom. 2) long hours of dedicated prayer and communion with God. 3) The ability to write, teach and preach. These are the things to which I want to dedicate the rest of my life. Emulation precedes imitation they say. I also think that these people had the courage to say what they thought. I tend to couch my language in terms that are culturally relevant to people and politically correct. At least in the sense that they won't stumble over them. But this often has the effect of blunting the prophetic edge in them.

I wonder, what else can be lost, if I do this, just give myself over to this endeavor. What is the cost of this life? My mentor says, that we must be willing to give up all things that do not lend themselves to the end for which we were created. And conversely to use all things toward that end if needed. That is a good paradigm for living, although it doesn't sound very balanced does it?

Last night I saw some new faces...emerging leaders and young adults. It shows the cycle of life in process and for that I am grateful.

At the End of the Day?

What makes up a human life? I am sorting through things in my life in order to arrive at a greater level of simplicity. Yesterday in order to prepare for the tax season filings, I threw away seven years worth of check stubs and old barely readable receipts from 2008-9.  But I also found old check book covers, registers, medical records, etc., and all of them went into the recycle bin. I kept a few of the Hans and Judy account deposit slips, but the majority went into the trash bin. This morning I feel rather bleak. I feel sad, as if part of me was thrown away as well....as if part of my life was thrown out without a second thought. What is it that makes up my life anyway?

I remember the circumscion we underwent when we left Oxford. I had help in making decisions about what to keep since it meant moving to a much smaller house. Literally a ton of things were thrown or given away. One loss in particular was a set of anthropology booklets put out by Eugene Nida, Donald McGavran and a few other "fathers" of the contemporary missionary movement. They were my peculiar treasure. I remember the first time I found these booklets in Hans' library. I was starving for knowledge, having been a missionary for several years and virtually powerless in my endeavors. Finding these booklets was like finding THE cure for cancer. But 2010 came and they had to go. I was no longer teaching missiology and my life was taking a turn to the unknown. And so they were tossed along with all the other bits of our life. I had already transferred these particular booklets several times in the last twenty years. It was their time.

But ten years worth of binders with tax information soon followed, as well as 1040's, 990's and hundreds of duplicate check binders. Also included were enough books to fill a garage and then years worth of the journal we published for ten years. On one hand it was liberating to free from the weight of these possessions, but each one was also connected to a precious memory. It was painful, so I didn't look as the girls tossed things about.

I remember when Charlie Brown died and we thought we were helping the widow by getting rid of an old ugly couch that she had hated, but had been a particular treasure to him. He had brought it with him from the east coast in the move to El Paso. The moment we pulled out of the driveway with the old thing, she said, Well there goes Charlie! The couch was like Charlie himself!

The personal effects of my first husband, including his body having been donated to science, don't exist anymore. Perhaps a tiny pair of handcuffs that he wore as a necktie pin is all that remains. At first he left all of his political science journals, some clothes, but over time that has been absorbed by the dust,  left behind in the trek through the wilderness. Things you just can't carry it with you. The journey is too hard, too long, too hot, and too treacherous in some places. You must get rid of things that weigh you down. But...it's you is that being left behind, pieces of you.

For months before Hans died, he spent hours cleaning up his computer unbeknownst to me. Later I went to look for his drafts and they were all gone. I sure he thought he was doing me a favor, but I felt robbed, cheated of "the stuggle to compose" his sermons and his courses. But I am doing the same thing today—going through all the bits and pieces of my thought life written on scraps of paper all over the office.  These scraps might be meaningful to my kids someday, but today they are just a heavy weight on my shoulders. Perhaps I need to rethink these things, maybe these scraps are not mine alone, but belong to the ones I leave behind. In any case, I shall organize them and spin my story the way I would want them finally perceive the culminulative life of their mother.

I think about the clothes that I have given away and I  miss them. It's not that "I might need them someday" but that "I might miss them someday." There was a me that is gone and I can longer retrieve her. It so strange that when you hold up a dress to give away, at the time, it is just an "old thing" but years after it is gone, it is part of who you used to be.

 The personal effects of Hans have been moved from his old desk to the stand next to my bed, just as they were when he lived—in a sort of carefully crafted chaos. His towel, razors, boots and undies all remain in his closet. His library remains intact. Nothing has changed in that regard. His hats grace the tops of the bookshelves, his wallet, watch and glasses are in the glass cabinet. Why do I do this? Because this is all we have left, his robe, his clothes, his pitiful shoes. Yet the Scriptures say that blessed are those who die in the Lord, for they have ceased from their labors and have entered into their rest, having their works go with them, part of the fruit that remains. That's all we can take with us, our works. Our works are the things deemed of eternal value, not wood, hay or stubble. But for me, his life, my life, is embedded in these things, because memories are attached to them.

 As I look at my jewelry bin, I think everything I have brought into this house is an item which has the potential to become one of those things I attach to and therefore at some point must suffer its loss.  What do I want my remains, my "effects" to be? Well perhaps the things I imparted to others of a more "spiritual nature" such as my words or my intellectual works. Although Henry Nouwen is dead today, his spirit lives on because his words are available. So too are the words of Art Katz. This is the intellecual properties of men who were prophets to their own generation and their words remain. They were actually the words of God spoken through men who were the oracles of God, which is why their words remain. I pray that mine may be like that as well.

 So I want my physical possessions to get smaller and smaller and my thoughts, hopefully, to get larger and larger and written down in such as way that my heart may remain with you. For everytime I read from Henri or Art is like they are speaking to me from beyond the grave. These words were the substance of their lives and the fruit of their suffering as they came to know God in deeper and deeper ways. I don't know if I will teach anymore, perhaps my days of service are over in the spoken realm, but I can write them down and if they are God's words, they will remain.

In a sermon recently given, someone said, "The poor have no history." I pondered this statement until I understood its meaning, which is to say, that the poor live and die without a legacy. They have nothing to give their kids, no inheritance, no riches, they are raised out of the earth and return to it as faceless people not having created a history, a story, to leave their children. Better had they not even been born. I wonder if my generation will leave behind a legacy of riches or simply no legacy at all. Have we eaten all the grain of the fields and leave nothing for our children? Then perhaps we really are the church of Laodacia? Having thought we were rich we were really poor.

What will I leave my children? I hope in the physical it is just dust.  In a book I read not too long ago, Journey of Simplicity, Traveling Light, were listed were the personal effects of:

Thomas Merton: Timex watch, one pair of dark glasses, tortoise frame, two pairs of reading glasses, plastic frames; two Cisterian leather bound brevaries; one rosary (broken); one small icon on wood; Virgin and Child. A one room hermitage with desk and chair, books and firewood for heating.

Father Fossima: russian monk and elder of the monastery: narrow iron bedstand; strip of felt for a mattrew; candles in the corner; a reading desk; a cross and the Gospel.

Ephraim M'kiara (Kenyan mountaineer and elder in the Pentecostal church of East Africa: battered leather bag; huge bible; thin blanket; piece of hemp rope; small package of food; kitchen knife to cut footholds in ice; a thin jacket and barefoot.

Bilbo Baggins: a borrowed dark green hood; a borrowed dark green robe; alot of pocket hankerchiefs; pipe, tobacco, walking stick and money.

Bill Washovwitz (New jersey backwoodman, born again Christian): sturdy saltbox in the woods; enameled cabinet and kerosene stove; small table, sleeping bag; kerosene lamp, rifle; lined writing paper, papers with words written on; Bible correspondence course; huge bible and dictionary.

Jesus: a loin cloth and his disciples.

Frank O'Malley (greatest educator of our time): Lived at the university dormitory, a bed lumpy with books; old essays by students, old books by former students; old checks from student repaying loans, never cashed.

Mohandras Gandi: two dinner bowls; a wooden fork and spoon; diary; prayer book; eyeglasses, three porcelain monkeys speak no evil, hear no evil, hear no evil; watch, spittoon; letter opener; two pairs of sandals.

Yet all of these men and women changed the world—having given their all for the cause of others.

Well, you don't want to see my list. Me and Emelda Marcos would be sisters. Not to mention the number of devices I currently own. So I am going to continue to purge and also think about these things. What is mine and what belongs to the future? I don't want to leave only rags behind but neither do I want to be shamed by the extravagance of the western lifestyle.

 These are not simple things to sort through, but clearly, our true riches are in the love we shared with others and perhaps the wisdom....or the life we modeled for others in pursuit of the pearl of great price!

Loss in the Face of Eternity

I think I get it. A secret of life. It bears writing down if only for the aged. I presume it is linked to the way Americans handle time. We more or less live in the future and everything in the present is a sort of waiting period for the future where my "can't waits" live. But when we are old we wake up and discover it is not like that all. Life is about change and loss.  Change happens anytime the Cloud moves. But sitting in camp, day after day, makes you think that the Cloud has forgotten it is on a journey. We get up, do our daily but tedious duties and wonder if we will ever make it to the Promise Land—you know that place of milk and honey.  I might say that while we are in camp, we are fitful and discomforted. Things are not perfect in camp, they are makeshift at best. But then suddenly, the tedious becomes the past and the Cloud has moved and you are scrambling to catch up. We are never ready for change.

For example, we got a ghastly diagnosis in December 2009. The life we called the "Abbey Experience" ended, a sort of death if you will. Seven years of fellowship, preaching, teaching, praying, children growing up, cleaning and sorted ended in a twinkling of an eye.  The tedium of planning schedules, printing the bulletins and finding nuggets of gold to share became both its charm and a source of loss. Then came fourteen months of nothing but pure rest. Hans writing, me reading, eating out, endless appointments at the oncologist office. For the majority of the time he was in good health. However, the undercurrent of the unknown was always present with us even though our daily life was pleasant,  our only responsibility was getting to the doctor on time. But everyday there was a "waiting." Everyday death was with us. Yet everyday we had each other and everyday we said, "When will we return to normal? When will we return to the life we had once known?"  Those days of "resting" ended on April 25, 2011, 14 months later. The "quiet" we  lived out everyday was over. Like a seed, he was buried in the ground, hallowing the Mesilla Valley.

And a new life began for those of us left behind. A year of waiting for a return to something we call normal. And then it came. A year of life under the sun and heat, sleeping late, homework, shopping,, cooking and visits to the grave. We lived in a cocoon after Hans' death, each one carrying his or her grief in an unspoken way.  Then school started and that idyllic life ended. An entire life died...and new people came into our lives, Katie, Timothy and Gilbert. Pressures came in, expectations and late night homework projects and a broken heart—basketball games and field trips were part of the adventure.

Then the cloud moved and Gilbert and Julianne decided to give their marriage another try, having found friendship in the last seven years of separation. And looking for a new house became the new normal. Gilbert became a daily presence in our house. And a new center for their lives was forged. I had gotten used to the sounds of footsteps in the kitchen, the spoon making noise in the kitchen late at night as a bowl of cereal was eaten, and Emmie running into the bedroom to see if I was still alive. I had gotten used to the late night chats with Julianne over this or that, or endless episodes of cutting out magazine pictures on a scattered dining room table. Today they close on their new home and this life that I have known for almost three years, is over. They will never live here again. I will face my aloneness once and for all.. They will not come "home" anymore and their lives will spin off somewhere else—fertile vines in the fields of the Lord.

The point is that patterns develop, we get used to certain emotional comforts and we live in them, not dealing with the fact that they are temporary and that we should give thanks. But it's kind of like a child giving thanks over dinner and thanking God for the silverware. They are the mundane things of life we taken for granted. But then they are gone. Kind of like the cat that you bend over to feed for the umpteenth time, wishing he or she would stop their incessant meowing,  then suddenly they don't come home, gone, missing and never to return. You would give anything now to reach down and feed that cat again.

I think the list could go on and on and perhaps this IS the wisdom of aging. I remember moving into my first house with Hans and the exhilaration of that event is indelibly impressed upon heart. The thrill of  moving into my dream house with my dream man, how can I deny that thrill to my children as they grow and move into their own destinies. Yet these things are temporal, they fade away, they end. We ourselves are also moving on..to our end...and for us it is another new beginning, an eternal now in which things shall never end. The end of all loss and grief...a perpetual rest for the people of God. Compare that to hell which is endless remorse and regret.

So what do we do in the meantime,while the Cloud stands still? How do we live in the camp in the "unfinished moment?" I think I am beginning to see that a large part of it has to do with undoing the complexity of American life with all of "its dreams" so that the moment can be fully lived and revered. Please see the blog http://theurbanabbess.blogspot.com/view/classic where I try to solve the riddle of   shalom in the American experience. But a lot of it is the reality of "old things passing away" and the "new" which Jesus has wrought coming into being. We are positioned in the "way" of old and new and this tension fills our creaturely part with dread and fear. We long for an established world—this one having been subjected to futility. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.

A Light in My Darkness

After a period of weeks of nothing of note coming forth, I finally have seen (under the light of heaven) that my behavior in recent weeks has been as one who is drunk. But not with alcohol, but with hidden grief. By hidden I mean, not perceived. My language and emotions have been violent and wild, speaking without thinking, feeling without fear of consequence, a drunk ravaged heart wandering in its own desert. This is why it is helpful not to judge people, who knows what is really going on in the human heart, but God alone, who at the right time, comes in from the desert riding on a donkey. There are some places in the human heart that only a donkey can travail. I am ravaged and mad like King Saul in grief who needed a gentle David to sooth his soul—or like a wild lion who suffers from the decay of a rotten tooth and cannot extract the dreaded fire within his mouth.  Who would have known this? Save the gentle nurse from heaven who pours His oil on me in drops...of which my head and heart hungrily search. I reproach myself daily to "get on with life" not knowing that the condition of my soul is not so friendly, but starving, lunatic from loss of a peculiar hand to guide me. 

Thank  God it is the season of Epiphany and the brothers of the Jesus Initiative have soothed my fire with liquid balm. It is the only thing that calms the irrational beast within.  I will try to copy a portion of it for your reading. 

The Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord:

Epiphany is a Greek word, which indicates a showing, a manifestation, usually of divine glory—what we might today call a revelation. The incarnation is an event that not only changes our world, but the way in which we know and understand God. It is His self revelation and the liturgy invites us to journey into this mystery. Yet for such a momentous event in history and in our understanding, it is given, even with the angelic proclamation, soto voce, revealed almost in secret to Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth, then shepherds and now to strangers from foreign lands. It is as if we are witnesses to a seed that is planted and given a vision to what it will become. But we know that we must wait. 


In this sense we  conclude our Christmas celebration but begin our vigil of watching and following, wondering where is God going to take us. Every epiphany or revelation is not just given to our eyes, our seeing, must also be accompanied by understanding. The test of our understanding will be in the response that it evokes. For understanding even the smallest part of this gift of Christ, requires a response, a movement of the heart and of the will. How do you understand this gift from God? 


We have been well tutored by the season, and by the people who have brought us to this moment—Mary and Joseph in their accepted consent to God's plan, the shepherds in their response to the angels and now the Magi and their response to the star. For all of them things will change, their lives will change— they come, they see, they ponder. They are not drawn into some escapist reverie, for they are to return to their people and to their world and  they are to continue their journey, but now with new eyes, new  understanding, new hearts into a new world, a new hope that God is now one with us, and that the darkness is finally giving way to the light which has come into this world. 


This is the great movement of this Christmas season as it reshapes and reforms our lives. And it opens us not only to the Epiphany of Christ but to the Epiphany of humanity in Christ, a new way of being and acting, of living and loving and hoping. All of this is contained in the feast we celebrate today. But it is given to us in a picture told with color and economy by Matthew. 

We are introduced first to these strangers, the Magi, who are the masters of an ancient wisdom, a science which is not part of the revelation that Israel alone possesses—yet points to it. They are the seekers and they have the courage to trust their wisdom and follow where it leads. Here too there is  humility, because they know that for all their skill in searching, for all  their knowledge of the skies—that knowledge is incomplete, it remains a riddle and a hope that cannot find fulfillment, until it comes to the Scriptures wherein is found the revelation that God gives of Himself to His people. Unless [their seeking]  leads  to this, it remains a futile searching, and a sterile wisdom which  cannot answer the deeper longings of the questing of the human spirit. What deep longings does the coming of Christ fulfill for you? 

Then there is Herod, whom we know of from other sources outside Scripture, we know that he is a cunning political operator, who is finely attuned to the lines of power in his world. When we dust away the layers of sentiment that have built up over the  ages, we find in the Gospel a stark, austere realism into which this child is born—a world of ruthless power and political treachery.  It is a world where the poor have no voice and no history. It is world of calculated violence. It is our world. What feelings stir in you as you contemplate this? 

In both Matthew as Luke, the infancy narratives with their gentle and quiet confidence show the unfolding of God's plan within the tragic and grotesque history that we make for ourselves. It is a new history that has been written by the Spirit in which the poor have a voice. It is a their history and it is the history of God's freedom which cannot be imprisoned  within the iron cage of empty human plans for power. Is this something you can do this year? Let God's plan for you unfold without letting yourself interfere?

The gifts of the Magi are prophetic gifts. They are not only rooted in the ancient visions but they also look forward to the journey that the newly born Christ Child must make in order to heal the broken nations of the world. Gold for His Kingship, which is not dependent on any worldly power or politics but on the sovereignty of God.  Frankincense  for the worship that is his due as Son of God and Myrrh as the mark of His suffering through which He will heal our humanity. As we contemplate the picture of the adoration of the Magi as the Gospel of Matthew paints for us, we might linger and ponder the depths of its beauty and of the mystery it invites us to enter. 

The Magi went back "another way". So we too are sent back into our world by "another way". The way that He has already traveled for us. The way in which we find him  walking with us. The way that leads us back, rejoicing,  to the Father. Let us pray that 2012 will bring us closer to Him and to the light which is our goal. Let us pray that He who has come to us in His poverty will find us like the Magi, on our journey to adore Him [with our gifts of faith, worship and sacrifice.) 

Glory be the the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

And it is here after contemplating the Scriptures that my irrational soul becomes sane again and in short, I am allowed to live again. So do, must you, in your grief and in the 'Great Sadness" that so often consumes us be made whole again. A light in our darkness has come.