“Thou takest the pen – and the lines dance. Thou takest the flute – and the notes shimmer.
Thou takest the brush – and the colors sing. So all things have meaning and beauty in that space beyond where Thou art.
How, then, can I hold anything back from Thee.”
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
_
Please do click on this photo and listen to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra singing "Glory to God" from Handel's Messiah.
Here are the lyrics:
Glory to God!
Glory to God in the highest,
And peace on earth.
Glory to God!
Glory to God! Glory to God in the highest,
And peace on earth.
Goodwill toward men.
Glory to God!
Glory to God in the highest,
And peace on earth.
Goodwill toward men.
Goodwill.
Glory to God!
Glory to God in the highest!
At the start of Advent, my sister gave me a book, A Weary World: Reflections for a Blue Christmas by Kathy Escobar. I don't remember when I first learned the term "Blue Christmas," apart from when Elvis used it in a song long ago, but last year my church held a Blue Christmas service on the night of the winter solstice for those of us whose holiday spirit was dampened by any aspect of grief or loneliness or fear or depression or [fill in the blank for anything apart from the traditional spirit of Ho-Ho-Ho]. It was a beautiful service, one with meaning that has stayed with me. Little did we know then what would be coming in 2020 on a personal and corporate level. I'm glad now that I have had this book with me for these four weeks.
In one of the readings for this week, Escobar offers words on peace. Peace in blue times is worth gold. I remember many years ago, in the days and weeks after losing a baby halfway through a pregnancy, the words of peace from Jesus in the book of John are what got me through, minute by minute. I would repeat over and over again to myself, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give as the world gives." While a part of me questions why I should include that sad little story here now during Advent, I'll let it stand because so many of us have had one loss or another in recent months, and a word of the peace of Christ, an outcome of Advent and all that followed, is never more relevant than in such times.
Here are some of Escobar's words about peace. Maybe if you are having a Blue Christmas, you will find them helpful. Even if you're not having a holiday of any sort of blue, I hope that you will still find this encouragement toward peace to be a helpful and worthwhile read:
"For me, one of the most compelling images of peace in chaos is a tree in a winter storm—harsh and cold winds whipping through, yet still rooted; battered, bruised, its branches starkly stripped of leaves but somehow still standing, planted into the earth, gathering an unexplainable strength from the Source. Surviving, enduring, living despite it all.
Peace doesn't mean our circumstances will change.
Peace doesn't mean our hearts are completely still and settled.
Peace doesn't mean we don't still weep or wail or feel afraid.
Peace means that in the middle of the storm we can be strengthened by God, by something bigger than us, by the comfort and presence of the Holy Spirit, the Prince of Peace—and that we can be rooted, grounded, and tethered in the midst of chaos."
A book on loneliness was released this past week, and I highly recommend it to you: The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other by Charlotte Boyd Donlon. If you and I are friends on social media you may have seen my post about it on Facebook or Instagram a couple weeks ago after I received a preview copy. I wondered then, before even reading it, how Donlon could have known while writing it in pre-Covid days that her book on loneliness would be released during the most lonely time in recent history. I'm grateful for the book's arrival.
Instead of spelling out "Ten Ways to To Beat Loneliness," Donlon, a spiritual director, instead models for us how to be curious about loneliness, and by being curious, to discover what there is to discover because of loneliness. Through curiosity, loneliness shifts from being something to avoid at all costs toward instead becoming a kind of wise companion on the journey of life. Through her meditations and stories, Donlon asks us to consider what loneliness is teaching us and to consider how God's grace supports us in our loneliness.
"Loneliness doesn't always teach me a nice lesson. Sometimes it offers me a chance to slow down and encourages me to reach out to my husband or a friend. Sometimes it asks me to grieve the loss of a relationship or the loss of what I hoped a relationship might one day become. At other times my loneliness is silent, with nothing to give—a child with her jaw clenched tight and her arms crossed, stubborn and refusing to speak. But I want to keep sitting with her whenever she shows up, because I never know when she might open her arms and pull me close. I never know when she might whisper some wisdom into my ear."
Charlotte Donlon also has a podcast you might be interested in: Hope for the Lonely
~
When I finished reading Donlon's book, I thought about a poem I've long loved by the Persian poet Hafiz. Years ago I wrote it out on a card and have kept it tucked inside a daily notebook ever since.
Absolutely Clear
Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,
My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.
~
[Photo: taken on a recent walk. The leafless birch speak to many things, not the least of which are loneliness and also beauty.]
A group of friends—some old, some new—gathered on Zoom last week to discuss a book we'd all just read, Waging Peace: One Soldier’s Story of Putting Love First by Diana Oestreich. The book is a soldier's memoir about Oestreich's journey toward putting love first, in all circumstances. An Iraqi "enemy" modeled for her this way of being in the world and it changed everything for Oestreich. Many years later and no longer in army fatigues, she continues to live to love others, even to be the first to love, even when it costs. My friends and I were drawn to the challenge her life suggested to us.
"As a family, we decided to blackmail ourselves to love first. This meant that the usual strings we attached to who we showed up for—like agreement, sharing the same faith, politics, or being friends—would no longer apply. Choosing to love first meant everyone would be in our jurisdiction now. No one would be outside of our yes....
We decided that we would be the first to love, every single time, because love never fails. We were going to throw kindness around like confetti, to love like it was growing on trees, without need to determine if the person in front of us deserved it or not. This was our family's battle cry. Committing ahead of time to show up with people meant our decision was already made. We stopped talking about what peace might mean and started being peace. We did it because peace isn't the absence of conflict; it's showing up in the middle of it."
I particularly love this line: "We were going to throw kindness around like confetti." Without even needing to give any thought to a grand plan of loving every person, this sentence makes the barrier to entry to such a life of love toward others attainable.
Throw kindness around like confetti.
“[A]s Sister Theresa said a few months ago at Saint John’s Abbey, God is walking with us regardless of what particulars we believe at any given moment, and life is long. Who knows where exactly we will end up!”
A friend of mine, Stina Kielsmeier-Cook, has just had her first book published, Blessed Are the Nones (InterVarsity Press). I first met Stina online a couple years ago through the Collegeville Institute, and then just before Covid struck, I met her in person at a newly formed writing group here in Minneapolis. Blessed Are the Nones is a spiritual memoir that tells the story of her marriage as she came to terms with her husband leaving their shared Christian faith even as they stayed very much together.
Stina meets the monastic Salesian nuns who live in an ordinary house not far from hers while she and her husband were out trick-or-treating with their young children one Halloween. Befriended by these nuns, Stina wrote that discovering that they were in her neighborhood was as if God were winking at her. These nuns and their hospitality to Stina become a doorway through which she learns to live in the vital juncture of spiritual singleness and spiritual community.
Just as a good spiritual memoir should, the story Stina tells is not just her story, and the gains and losses she describes are not only hers. Blessed Are the Nones speaks to the faith journey of so many of us. For some, the way seems to get more and more sure; for others, the way veers in a different direction. For others, doubt visits, prompting a pause of short or long or unknown duration. Stina shares Bonhoeffer’s warning to love people more than our own visions of life.
Blessed Are the Nones shows that deep love can transcend dissimilar faith journeys and that God offers community to sustain us on the way. Echoing her words earlier in the book, and shown at the start of this post, near the book’s end Stina writes, “I rest in Sister Theresa’s wisdom that everyone is on a journey with God, whether they know it or not.”
Last week I was on a vacation/writing retreat. Sitting on a bookshelf where I stayed was the book, To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation by Laura Kelly Fanucci. This wonderful poem by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin jumped off a page for me, and I want to share it with you. It speaks to the challenge of finding our way in life, the challenge of being patient when things take ever so long, and the challenge of understanding the apparent slow timing of God.
Read it and see if it doesn’t resonate with something in your life, if it doesn’t give you some hope for being on the way.
“Patient Trust”
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We would like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.
And yet, it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(In: To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation, Laura Kelly Fanucci, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017. In: Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits, edited by Michael Harter, 58. Chestnut Hill, MA: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1993.)
~
[Photo: taken of gray-headed coneflowers that I passed on a recent prairie walk]
On the same day here in Minneapolis, Memorial Day 2020, my mother died of Covid infection and George Floyd was killed by police. It took about 6 weeks for me to sufficiently steady the mix of grief inside before I could make the pilgrimage to 38th St and Chicago Ave where Floyd was killed, just a few miles from where I live. Yes, there were banners of outrage and memorial painted across outside walls. Yes, there were flowers heaped at the corner of his death. Yes, the intersection’s core was a growing ad hoc monument to the mattering of Floyd’s life and black lives. But there on the quieter northwest side of the intersection was a garden someone had started, with dirt and mulch and plants of all varieties right along the edge of Chicago Ave, right where the tires of a thousand and one cars have splashed through standing water and where a thousand and one cigarette butts and candy wrappers have in the past been tossed. Into that garden, someone had placed painted rocks, and the rocks spoke of beauty and hope in the midst of grief of multiple varieties.
