Share the Joy for Advent Peace

Sharing the Joy… and most specifically my joy in you and all you can do.

When I stop and think about my life, I’m astonished to realize how many wonderful people I know and encounter. Sure there are those, who, shall we say, fail to live up to their potential. But then, if I look in the other direction, there are hosts of people who are quite lovely and filled with talents and gifts that they’re quietly realizing.

It’s a lot about where we put our energy and our focus isn’t it?

And if I’m looking at you with awe and wonder, why would I fail to share that with the world? Because if I can help them take a wonder-filled work, and they can help others, pretty soon Peace will begin to break out.

So try it — notice how grand a couple people are and then share that with them and with the world. Fill up with joy and let it bubble over. Share the Joy. Live for Peace. The holidays are hard enough with all the frenzy. Give your self a chance to count some blessings and get centered in how abundant your life — and the world — really is, and, then, celebrate!

Thrill to Love & Advent Peace

I love my work. I really love most aspects of it. Some of it’s challenging. I’m just learning how to raise money and awareness, but when the fundraising/difference making thing works, I can feel the quiver of joy happen. But the ritual stuff. ah. I love it. Even in middle of my most focused work when celebrating, I’m aware of the rightness of what I’m doing. This? is what Tiggers do. No question.

I’m privileged, I know that. Not everyone gets that opportunity. But I’ve taken a lot of risks to be able to do that. Compromised my financial present and future to be able to do what matters to me. Not everyone is built for that kind of risk taking and not everyone can live life on the edge comfortably.

But I’m not moving back. I don’t do it for the thrill, as much as I love it, I do it because it makes a difference. Celebrating life and trying to give people a better shot at it matter. And the thrill is a pretty big bonus. I don’t know what else I’d do, or how else I’d live my life, but I know I’m making a difference, even if it’s only a little one… or a big one in a small number of people’s lives.

I wish that for you. I wish you to look forward and backward in your life, thrilling both to possibilities and accomplishments. Live your life large, whatever that means. As far as we know, whatever we hope, we only get one shot at it. So why waste what we’ve got. Let’s set our hearts on Peace and thrill to its possibilities. Because we can. And with Peace and thrilling, if we can, we probably should. And I think Love makes both the thrilling and the Peace possible.

To Please. To Love. Advent Peace

Taking the time to consider another, to please them in some small way can change the way they think of the world.

So much of the world is hurried and inconsiderate. Small sweet gestures of kindness can be like lit candles in the dark to tired and wounded people. Everyone needs kindness.

So appropriate for Lucia day, which custom says is when light is called back from the South to the North. (one more holiday in this season of holidays.)

What candle of kindness will you carry today to give to another person? How will you please them, let them know that they matter? Will you dare to take a moment to be kind to a stranger? To a loved one? To please them by giving them something they’ve wanted… or perhaps not even known that they’ve needed?

Where do we find the balance, to think enough of self to care for another, to give them Peace? How do we move to the place where we understand that pleasing others enriches rather than depletes us. I’m not thinking about the self-effacing kindness that the world urges, particularly on women and children, where everyone matters more than you do, but rather a self-conscious kindness… a caring for the other based on your awareness of the fullness of your heart and life. Sometimes we need to take a calculated risk even when we understand that there will be cost to us.

Kindness is the work of Peace. Pleasing others is not the if I please you, you will like me thing we were taught or maybe just learned as children, it is the I will please you because it makes the world sweeter, easier in some small way. In that way we move closer to Peace, and we move together.

Encourage Love during Advent Peace

To encourage the Love. Is there anything more important that we can do in this world?

And the sacred season of Advent is built for exactly this possibility. Of all the holidays I left behind as I became Post-Christian, Advent is the one that has most called to me across our differences. I have been unable to release the feeling — don’t you hear Leonard Bernstein’s “Something’s coming, something Good — I don’t know when…”

For that to happen, we have to make space in our lives, our hearts, our souls. We have to encourage it. I started writing about Peace in these musings a year ago. My sense that it is possible has only grown — and I haven’t even left Dodge! I know more people for whom this is a concern. I know more people who are not like me and we are forging conversations and even doing good work. Little Dreams are taking root, and growing.

It’s got to happen where we are — here where I am, there where you are. And as it spreads. As we relax into Love, we relax into Peace. We start naming it, we start letting it be important. We start doing things that are not, perhaps, on the surface about Peace, but which create Peace in their wake. Because we’re caring for people. We’re feeding them. We’re fighting pollution in their name. We’re standing up against ecological disaster. We’re each doing the things we do, and widening our scope a little. Perhaps even gentling our touch.

There’s something that each of us can do to encourage Love. One of the great things about it is that it’s habit forming. If we’re kind. If we’re generous. If we’re thoughtful or resourceful or determined. The Love makes the setbacks bearable. The Possibilities of Peace illuminate the journey. We have a place we’re bound. There is more Love, more Peace, more Grace. And I’ve found it in your company.

Oh who you are and the work you do are worthy of all the encouragement I can give you.

Surrender to Love, Advent Peace

It’s funny how the words go together during this advent mash-up…

We don’t look very often, for Love can be overwhelming… not just the “I love you” kinda love, but that too… but the look at how much love there is kinda love.

And once in a while, it’s good to allow yourself to be washed away in the Love. (I know it’s a bit of a cold metaphor for a winter’s day, but it’s how it feels… hmmm should i have used sledding? oh, too late. surf city here we come!

Right now, with the work we’ve been doing at church, there are a whole bunch of possibilities that may come about, simply because we decided we could make a difference. We have done stuff so much differently this year as a result. But the part that’s overwhelming is that it’s changing what’s going on around us.

Clapping for Tinkerbelle works. Magic requires a lot of hard work, that’s the part we forget, but then it becomes magic. or maybe just exponential. But we don’t want me to be doing math metaphors… eek. Love can go viral. There a nice internet metaphor. and when it does, we should throw up our hands and squeal with delight (Knoebel’s roller coaster metaphor) and ride the ride. Because the squealing with delight is part of the fun.

So surrender to it. And ride the wave, or the roller coaster, or the interwebs! Delighted squealing for Peace. Delighted squealing as a prayer path. Let’s hear it!

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.

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.

No Love, No Peace

It’s easy to mourn from a distance. It’s easy to be infuriated. It’s not my tradition. It’s not my rights, either to marry or to perform a ceremony that are being abrogated. I am not married because some of you cannot marry, but that was an easy gesture for Steve and me to make; we had no compelling need to marry.

But I’m far sadder than I thought I’d be, both because of the hatefulness and the willingness to allow hate to overshadow their very real responsibilities to Love.

I believe in church. I always have. It is where I have found meaning. It’s true that the meaning I have sought and found has changed over the years. I’m very happy being a Unitarian Universalist for all so many reasons. (you know spell check really should learn to recognize Universalism as a religion and stop telling me I’m wrong!)

But this is where I have immigrated, it isn’t where I was raised. That was sweet and wonderful time for me that eventually didn’t hold the meaning I needed. We held my sister’s memorial in the church we grew up in, and it was clear that that may not have been the best choice theologically, although it was an emotional tie. Too long gone. And way too much theological distance between us.

My early tradition taught me to choose Love. And when I did. When I realized that I would have to grow or lose the friends who were discovering or uncovering their sexuality, I chose Love. This may have been my first step into adulthood (the first step out of Eden?). I danced in and out of that garden gate for a while and eventually left.

And now it seems barbaric to waste time, energy and resources fighting about people’s Love (a pastor’s for his congregation, a father’s for his son, a son’s for his husband) and not about real injustice. Jesus never enjoined folk to hate. “Do you love me, feed my children.”

This year more Americans are going to go hungry. It seems people who style themselves as religious ought to be worrying about that.

I’m sorry for my clergy friends in other traditions who are living with these limitations. I pray for your finding your way forward. I’m sorrier for the differently-loving that you are told, over and over again, that your Love is not worthy. Those who tell you that are flat wrong. My prayers are with you all.

And I’m really, really sorry, that too many of today’s mainline churches would rather pick nits than do justice… and in the name of nit-picking commit sad and sorry injustice.

More Lion Peace

Writing a blog is such a fascinating process. When you sit down, you believe you know what direction you’re headed. Usually that’s true. Revelations that come are often small and pithy. But once in a while, they’re grand and sweeping.

Yesterday’s post was such a one. I really thought the lion was a curiosity. Something to explore because it had been dear to my dad and yet commemorated a massacre of Swiss guards at the Tuilleries during the French Revolution. If I think about why Dad may have had that, it takes a while. Aunt Jennie, my Gram’s aunt, used to take women on ‘Grand Tours’ around Europe. It must have been she who visited the Lion Monument in Lucerne and brought back this memento. So it’s entirely possible that it wasn’t Daddy who cherished it, or at least cherished it first, but rather Aunt Jenny, who had magical status in her niece’s eyes and then it was bequeathed to Helen. And then Sammy. And now me.

But when I looked up the inscription about loyalty and bravery and began to write about that, it was Deb’s courage and faithfulness that came to mind. She fretted after mom died that I would be ok. Was glad that Steve had come into my life, certainly for my sake, but also for hers. I think she knew she’d die before me, and felt better knowing I’d have love.

And there’s so much Love. I never worry about not being Loved. There is Love, more Love, everywhere you look. But of course when one love disappears, the heart breaks. And while the dead are always with us, where and how are questions that need to be sorted out over time. time when we want everything to happen right now, darnit.

If the Lion has taught his lesson, then what do I do with it? I’m the fourth generation lion holder. Is there another generation who wants it? What home does stuff seek when it has served? Who will have to clean this out when I’m dead? Too much stuff. All of it precious. Go figure. but luckily I’ll wait a while. I have loving to do on my husband! And we all need to be cherishing our partners. I heard from a college buddy, one I’d lived with when I went to seminary, one whose wedding ceremony I’d performed. Her husband died suddenly.

This is what happens in life. Stay present. Listen to the Lions. Make a lot of memories. and Love outrageously. This is all part of the bumpy road to Peace.

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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