Cherish, Love, Advent, Peace

String after string of words. Variations on a theme. Trying to get it right.

Trying to find the paths that fit. Trying to find the support that you need in this season of anticipation.

Today when it’s so dangerous underfoot, I am largely free to stay home. This is my day of rest. So I can practice cherishing the lovely home I am grateful to have. It has great bones this old house. And I have great neighbors and landlords. That makes it a pretty good start. And my house is filled with my past — family, travels, art, color (oh, yes, color!). Some favorite books, some comfortable furniture. And candles for days!

Time to do a little cherishing. Time to do a little work I love in the midst of this beloved space. And then as it gets less slippy, time to wander off to “my” swimming pool and spend some time cherishing my body… and tonight, if the weather holds, I can lavish some attention on my husband and go watch him play.

Trying to keep it slow, so the careful tending of my life and my loves has a chance to be accomplished. Not an easy for a woman who often moves at warp speed.

But if I don’t take the time to cherish and to open my heart to Love, how do I give myself the time to pay attention to Peace?

Enjoy, Love, Advent, Peace, Sabbath

Eek… that’s a title! But it says it all… pretty simple.

Today is the start of the second week of Advent. The second candle is Love. Will you surround your dreams with loving approval? Can you accept the world and all its brokenness? This week’s prayer might read this way: “May I be generous; quick to open my heart to knew friends, new places and new ways of doing things. May I treasure what is brought me to today. May I be known as a lover of life, one who embraces all there is in this world. Blessed Be.”

Enjoy your life. Love the world. Expect great things. Settle into the Sabbath. Move toward Peace.

Appreciate, Hope, Advent, Peace

Appreciate. Esteem. Honor. To know the worth of and to value. To understand the implications of. To take seriously.

Hard work, all of these. Tricks of the trade too infrequently brought into play. We rarely even use the words, let alone exercise the skills….

For example, to appreciate Nelson Mandela is not simply to see who he was as he died, but to understand who he was to become that man. There’s such trash on the internets at the moment, decrying his early actions. Really, do you not understand how a man has to be someone spectacular to grow through everything that happened to him to become the man he was?

After two plus decades of hard labor he chose to leave bitterness and hatred behind. To appreciate Mandela is to esteem him, but it is also to understand those implications. He made space to transform himself and to be transformed. In that space he transformed his people, his country his world.

I appreciate his courage Peacemaking. I appreciate his journey. Not fully, I’m sure. Nothing has ever been that hard in my life. I pray that nothing ever will. And I pray that lack of hardship doesn’t limit my ability to pour myself into Peace. I pray it doesn’t hinder you. Let us Hope.

Believe, Hope, Advent Peace

How sad. A man who represented the best of Belief and Hope in my life is gone from this world. Generation after generation has found a hero to lead them. Mandela was a man for our time, and as the president said, for the ages.

His words about leaving his hatred and bitterness inside the cell he was leaving ring… We have to notice the evil, accept that it has happened to us, forgive ourselves and if we can “those who trespassed against us,” anticipate that the world can be better, believe in a new world.

My church choir is currently working on an anthem, entitled “You Are the New Day.” (words by John David. It’s a beautiful song about the impending nuclear holocaust and the hope that we can be the difference needed.

And isn’t that always the question. Can we be the difference needed? Those of us who lived with Mandela’s shining example, can only answer yes. We don’t really get to whine, “it’s too hard,” when you know that this quiet, dignified man underwent the greatest degradation and hardship. And through it all, he believed.

Mandela was not the only miracle maker in South Africa. Many other people did their work and lived in great dignity. But he was no less great for that. He accepted what happened and moved to make it better… through it all he believed. Shocking and wonderful. And shows us a way. Maybe in fact it was his Belief that transformed him and the whole world.

What do you believe in? And how is that Belief going to help you to make a difference? Because that’s the real question to ask of Belief. He believed in Peace and he led us all there. How do we, you and I, get to Peace…

Anticipate Hope Advent Peace

That’s a fun string of words!

I really can’t imagine why our culture doesn’t think anticipation is fun. It seems that when we want things, we want them NOW! but there’s so much pleasure in the waiting for it to appear. Think of the number of kids who bounce into Christmas Eve. Sure it’s about the presents, but it’s SANTA. and magic reindeer. and oh, my goodness, JOY.

Believers of all sorts look forward to the changes that the middle of December brings with the same bubbling delight. As of one date, life will be different.

That bubbling delight is something we can have — but we have to make space for it. With kids, it’s instantaneous, but then we train it out of them, and invite ennui to take its place. A friend told me about her girl’s over-the-top excitement because SHE’S GOING TO A CONCERT. In August. And she’s still spinning like a top. Good friends invited her and she’s always wanted to see this band and no one’s told her you can only get excited about what’s right here and now.

Advent, for me is about that. Lighting that candle at night (or in the afternoon — hooray for early dark) reminds me that something’s coming, something good. It allows me to plan for that.

My meditation at this time of year is about what I’d like to bring into the world this year. What particular seed of my soul am I willing to plant and bring to fruition. or… fruit! If we’re following the Wheel, we’ve spent the fall, sorting the bounty and then examining the gifts of our souls (our own rich soil) and now we get to consider what we want to coax out into the light when the time is right.

This is a long luxurious time, if we let it be. And I know, all the obligations of the season loom. But just because you go to a party, doesn’t mean you have to do more than show up and drift through. Life can be lovely, you just have to plan a bit and then… sit back and anticipate.

Imagine, you’re on the road to Peace. You are. You. What fun will that be to get there!

Acknowledge, Hope, (Wonder), Peace

How did we get so frozen?

We can’t accept things the way they are. We can’t forgive ourselves for our screw-ups and missteps… what hebrew calls “missing the mark,” even though religious traditions all call for that, but ah, right, most of us aren’t part of a religious community. And then, we have a hard time acknowledging the things that are right.

What have we done to ourselves? Everything gets so strapped down, no place for the wonder. Because it seems that might grow on acknowledgement of things that are going along the way they should. If we acknowledge what’s right, at the same time we accept and forgive, BOOM! there they are Possibilities — and aren’t they beautiful.

Right here, right now, in this holiday season… Life, Potential, Possibility, Peace, growing by leaps and bounds and we get to wonder at the Beauty. Let me just tell you how grateful I am for all the amazing things you have done. You’re really quite talented. (Now say thank you!)

Forgive, Hope, Peace

Forgiveness keeps coming back. Probably because we never get done with it. It’s a messy, uncomfortable business. It’s hard to admit we were lacking or we missed the mark. (yeah, we were wrong.) It’s hard to acknowledge another’s human foibles. Sometimes it’s hard to forgive people for being better than we are at something we want to be good at.

And all of those things create a large barrier between us and Peace.

You know me, I’m not a new age forgiver. I believe that much of forgiveness is that verb we used yesterday… accept… as in accept the fact that we cannot change what has happened to us. I don’t know that you forgive your rapist, or if you do what that looks like. I do know if you do, a large portion of that forgiveness will have to be meted out toward yourself for having been vulnerable. I know I’m not at the place where I can let the rapists of my friends off the hook… but maybe forgiveness doesn’t do that. but it does acknowledge their humanity, however broken, whether or not they had a reason.

But if we can take down those bricks in the way of Peace, we won’t have to climb over them, or squeeze through the cracks between them every time we want to move forward in Love. That would help our hearts enormously.

Accept, Hope, Make Peace

Part of my Advent Meditation was to make a calendar with a verb a day that pertained to the candle of the week. The candle is Hope. Yesterday’s verb was notice (your assignment should you choose to accept it). Today’s verb is accept (should you choose to notice it!)

What made me think about it was the amount of time I (or perhaps also you?) spend lamenting what is. And it’s so easy to stop there. What’s harder for me is to just accept it. As my friend Lenore keeps trying to teach me: It is what it is.

Now what are we going to do about it?

And that’s what acceptance frees us for: Seeing the possibilities. Wondering what we do next.

May your acceptance of the world as it is lead you to a notion of how it could be better. And then may you jump into action… jump into Peace. Because everything goes better with Peace!

Advent, Sabbath, Hope, Peace

This is the first Sunday of Advent. I love this Season of Expectation. While I’ve traveled fairly far from my roots, the process of discerning what in fact I am expecting is a delightful, contemplative process, best undertaken in a lot of candlelight. It’s been interesting in that journey to discover Advent’s roots outside Christianity… Life is rich that way!

What in fact I am expecting in my life, in the world? Considering this will be fascinating this year as I’m in a very different place in my life than i was 6 months ago. In the midst of this great loss there is also a great deal of freedom of choice and a fair amount of indecision…

And along comes Advent. The first Sunday you light the candle of Hope. I wonder, what are the dreams you harbor for your life, for your family and for the world? What do I? This week’s prayer might be something like this:

May I be a person who believes that the world is a good place, that things can be made better and that I might be an instrument of Hope in the world. Blessed Be.

Light a candle, sit down where you can see it and think about that while relaxing into your Sabbath Peace. Notice what happens when you do that!

Accepting Peace

Choosing one’s own path to Peace is a challenge.

For many of us, I fear, we make our choices as we recognize that whatever place we’re in is not one that fosters Peace in us rather than catching sight of a vision that dazzles and attracts. No not everyone, but many.

Sadly, few of us are skilled in divining what we do want or daring to ask for it — let alone pursue it. It’s too easy to frame our choices against what is wrong with the world we’re leaving rather than what is right with the world we’re choosing.

Neither is it easy stepping out of the status quo. This is a big and powerful river headed in one direction, so swimming to an edge and finding another branch of that stream or climbing out on the land to search out a trail requires quite a bit of determination.

I don’t know if it’s possible to do such a thing freely, without defensiveness. Not choosing what our family, friends, lover choose makes them question their choices. Who likes that?

I do know, for our health and sanity as well as for the future of our relationships, we need to find that sweet, easy conviction about our decisions.

Watching a couple exchanges recently allowed me to look back and wince at my own movement from my theological/socialspiritual roots and consider how lurching a process that was. A good friend said to me then, “Annie, clarify what you DO believe, you can’t just NOT believe.” It was great (if painful at the time) advice. And life is so much easier since adjusting the mantle I’ve chosen to sit comfortably on my shoulders.

It’s a challenge to keep asking ourselves “what do I want” and looking for real answers. Not self-indulgent ones, not the preferencing of me over you… but the deep answer that allows me to be me in relationship, perhaps even consideration, with all others, because I know and take responsibility for who I am and what I believe. And then, finally, I take Joy in it. And in that Joy I find the fuel to move toward Peace.

Self-reflection’s a bitch, isn’t it? But oh, so worth it.

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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