My Senses Are Awakened to Read God’s Presence.

In The Gift of Wonder, I talk about the practice of Lectio Tierra, a great way to attune our senses to the wonder of God. This practice is similar to Lectio Divina from which it is adapted. However, for me, it is a deeper experience because it involves movement and engages all the senses. 

Heading out into God’s very good creation, I read the environment around me. How is God present? What might God be using to catch my eye and draw me closer?  As I walk slowly and deliberately through the forest, I might stop to and examine an ancient tree, or casually walking through my garden I brush against my lavender bush and am captivated by the wonderful aroma, or on a day trip to Snoqualmie Falls I listen to the music of water cascading over rocks, my senses are awakened to “read” God’s presence. This is a practice that engages all the senses, my eyes, ears, touch, smell and sometimes taste, all open to what God might reveal to me. Anything that catches my attention and shimmers with the presence of God provides fuel for reflection.

A couple of weeks ago, my eyes were drawn to the gnarled and twisted branches of my old sage bush growing vigorously in my back yard.

I stop, look and listen, not forcing a revelation but waiting in silence for God to nudge me. I reached out and picked a leaf, and gasped in awe at the fragrance that clings to my fingers. I remember the times I picked leaves to flavour soups and chicken dishes for hospitality meals. We made smudge sticks and the burning of them provided a rich and pungent fragrance to the air. What other stories does it hold I wonder? How might it speak to me of God, now, today? 

Now I Meditate

Now I meditate. What lessons Jesus do you want me to learn through this sage bush, this leaf? I run my hands along the soft furry surface, of the leaf, then crush it between my fingers and am transported back in time. Sage has a very long and rich history due to both its medicinal and culinary uses. At one time, the French produced bountiful crops of sage for tea. Ironically the Chinese became enamored with French sage tea and would trade four pounds of Chinese tea for every one pound of sage tea. The Romans considered it had healing properties and for native Americans it is an important ceremonial plant, used by many tribes as an incense and purifying herb. I know it best for its culinary properties. I love to use it when I roast chicken or make vegetable soup.

It is possible that the burning bush in Exodus 3 is sage I remember. Should I like Moses take off my shoes as I meditate and acknowledge that in the presence of this small part of God’s creation I stand on holy ground?

I Pray

Now I pray. I thank God for this gift to so many cultures across the globe and throughout time and am reminded of Revelation 8:4 “The smoke of the incense mixed with the prayers of God’s people and billowed up before God.” I thank God for the fragrance that clings to me, and for the incense that rises from my life as I too am crushed and prepared for use. Perhaps others will brush against me and be awed by the incense of God in my life. Perhaps others will seek me out to add to their lives and savor who they are with the presence of God. I hope that my fragrance and flavor will continue to cling to others and be shared with all that I meet.

Lastly I contemplate

The last step is contemplation. I pause, running my hands over the fragrant fragments in my hand. I look around at the other plants in my garden. Some are greening after a long winter’s rest. Others are in bloom vibrant with color and fragrant with their own perfume. I am not alone. Incense rises to God from every part of this garden and from every person to raises a prayer to God. I breathe in and absorb the insights God has given me that enable me to move into a place of rest and peace. I can receive love, healing and grace from God, together with those around me, and with the witnesses of every tribe and nation that have gone before me. I feel at one with God’s world and will all that help me move towards God’s wholeness.

Often in response to this experience I write poetry. Today I finish with this Ute prayer that I found many years ago and my heart overflows with thanksgiving.

Earth Teach Me to Remember
Earth teach me stillness
as the grasses are stilled with light.
Earth teach me suffering
as old stones suffer with memory.
Earth teach me humility
as blossoms are humble with beginning.
Earth Teach me caring
as the mother who secures her young.
Earth teach me courage
as the tree which stands alone.
Earth teach me limitation
as the ant which crawls on the ground.
Earth teach me freedom
as the eagle which soars in the sky.
Earth teach me resignation
as the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me regeneration
as the seed which rises in the spring.
Earth teach me to forget myself
as melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me to remember kindness
as dry fields weep in the rain.

What might it look like to enter into Lectio Tierra?

To hone my focus, I created a Lenten Garden which sits on my desk to guide my meditations each morning. My first step was to decorate a stone and write the words “For love of the world God did foolish things around the decoration. This sits as the centre-piece for the garden. Around it I planted several succulents to represent the desert of Christ’s 40 days of temptation, and then sprinkled it with sand and placed several heart shaped rocks around the garden.

I love the process of creating a contemplative garden like this. It always begins with dreaming, then moves through the gathering of materials to creation before I get to the stage at which it is ready to be used for meditation. Finally, after Easter I will enter the last stage of the garden’s life – letting go, a hard but necessary step. As I comment in my book Digging Deeper: The Art of Contemplative Gardening, “Accepting and incorporating impermanence into our rituals enables us to accept and embrace change in a healthy and liberating way. We let go of our desire for permanence, of control, of acquisitiveness and even of our creative process. It is hard but we learn a lot in the process about ourselves, about God and God’s good creation.” It seems even more relevant as Lent slides into Easter.

As I painted my stone, and created my garden, I had plenty of time to think about what practices I wanted to do throughout Lent this year. I pulled out my bible and read two scriptures:

“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.” (Matthew 22:37, 38 CEB)

These verses hold the essence of God’s love and of the purpose of Lent from my perspective. Lent is meant to be about learning to love God more fully and expressing that love out into the world that God loves. It is about letting go of distractions that keep me from the path God intends me to tread, a path that is meant to draw me closer to God, to neighbours and to God’s good creation. It is also a time to grab hold of new commitments to actions that will transform my life and the lives of others, as they bring glimpses of God’s eternal world into being. In other words, this is a time to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds and love our neighbours as ourselves.

As I reflected on this, three questions, that I will return to throughout Lent formed in my mind:

For love of God, what am I willing to give up?

For love of my neighbours and of God’s world, what am I willing to give up?

And for love of myself and my own wellbeing what am I willing to give up? 

Interestingly, as I share these questions with others, it is the second question “For love of my neighbours and of God’s world, what am I willing to give up, that people struggle with the most. Lent is about preparing ourselves for the life of God’s eternal world, a world in which there is no more pain or suffering or destruction. It is a time to commit to actions that will bring glimpses of God’s shalom world into being. Is there an organization that works with the poor, the unjustly treated or the disabled you would like to volunteer with during Lent?  Could you help clean up the environment in your neighbourhood, maybe commit to at least one day a week car free? Or is this the time to start gardening? Perhaps there are privileges of wealth and education we need to give up. Or prejudice against those of other faiths, sexual orientations, or ethnic groups. Or you might consider giving up your car or the heat in your house for several days. Whatever you choose it might make you look foolish in the eyes of your friends or the world but if it makes God’s world a better place it is worth it.

As Lent began this year, I launched a new podcast The Liturgical Rebels (https://godspacelight.com/liturgical-rebels-podcast-is-live).This podcast is for those who feel restricted to traditional spiritual practices that often seem outdated and of little relevance in today’s world. It is for those who are discouraged to express their own creative talents and develop spiritual practices that are uniquely them. The Liturgical Rebels podcast is for people who want to reimagine and reconstruct their faith and spiritual practices.

What I was not prepared for was the need to give up other commitments that it made necessary. This week I found myself letting go of webinars and unwritten blog posts that I no longer have time for. It has been a hard decision because I love what I do and like most of us I rationalize that this means I should hold on as long as possible. However, Lent is about relinquishment. It confronts us with our mortality, our vulnerability, our ambitions. It confronts us with how seriously we will follow Jesus into the future and challenges us with the need to do foolish things, like giving up ministry and practices that has been important for years.

I hope you will consider joining The Liturgical Rebels this year. Step outside the box of convention and triviality and do something more than giving up chocolate or reading a short devotional each morning. Take Lent seriously and do something foolish for God.

For love of God
For love of the world,
This beautiful yet pain filled earth
On which we live,
God does foolish things.
How strange and unwise,
To send a much beloved son
To dwell amongst us,
Knowing he would die
A tragic and painful death.
Only love would be so reckless,
And so vulnerable.
Only God would care so much
For those who
despised and rejected Holy love.
For love of the world,
God does foolish things,
That turn the world upside down.
And bring life where we expected death.

According to New Testament theologian Kenneth Bailey in his wonderful book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, Middle Eastern cultures are known for their hospitality and Joseph was coming home with a new wife and an expected first child. The whole family was gathering, aunts and uncles, cousins and brothers and sisters. All of them coming home. Yes there was a census that brought them together but in a fun loving culture like this it would not have diminished the welcome or the excitement of a homecoming gathering. The expectation of a baby to be born in their midst would only have increased the excitement.

As Kenneth Bailey explains, the Greek word (katalyma or kataluma) translated as ‘inn’ in Luke 2:7 does not mean a commercial building with rooms for travelers. It’s a guest space, typically the upper room of a common village home.

“A simple village home in the time of King David, up until the Second World War, in the Holy Land, had two rooms—one for guests, one for the family. The family room had an area, usually about four feet lower, for the family donkey, the family cow, and two or three sheep. They are brought in last thing at night and taken out and tied up in the courtyard first thing in the morning.

“Out of the stone floor of the living room, close to family animals, you dig mangers or make a small one out of wood for sheep. Jesus is clearly welcomed into a family home,” (54)

It was to this simple village home that the shepherds and wise men came. Shepherds despised and regarded as unclean by their society, are visited by angels and invited to join the great home coming celebration that marks the coming of the child who will become the Messiah. For them to be invited into a family home is far more remarkable than an invitation to a stable. This is good news indeed for the outcast and the despised.

Then the wise men come, according to Bailey, rich men on camels, probably from Arabia. And they come not to the city of Jerusalem where the Jews thought God’s glory would shine, but to the child born in a manager around whom there is already a great light. The wise men come to find a new home, a new place of belonging that has beckoned to them across the world. This too is remarkable and good news for people of all nations who long for a place to call home.

Bailey tells us that the birth stories of Jesus “de-Zionize” the Messianic traditions. Hopes and expectations for the city of Jerusalem are fulfilled in the birth of the child Jesus. (p54) The new family, the community that will be formed around this child, does not look to the earthly Jerusalem as its home, but to the heavenly Jerusalem which will come down from heaven as a gift of God at the end of history. (Revelation 21:1-4). And it is to this home, a place with no more tears, or oppression or starvation that all of us are beckoned by the birth of Christ.

I love this imagery. Even in the birth of Jesus we are called towards a new family and a new home. There are family and friends and animals. And special invitations by angels for the despised and rejected, and a star to guide the strangers and those who seem far off. The new family and the home envisioned in the birth of Jesus is inclusive of all who accept God’s invitation.

In A Journey Toward Home: Soul Travel for Advent to Lent,one of the reflections in it is on the French custom of santons:

Santons are, literally, “little saints.” Part of a typical French Nöel crèche, santons come in work clothes to visit the Holy Family. They bring the Christ Child presents they have made or grown, hunted or sold. They perform or offer simple gestures of thoughtfulness…..

The shepherds summon all Provençal villagers. They bring their unique gifts to honor the newborn child: the baker (or his son) with typical Provençal breads like la banette and le pain Calendal (a round country loaf marked with a cross and baked only at Christmastime), the vegetable merchant, the cheese vendor, the basket maker, the wine grower, the humble woman or man who brings only a bundle of sticks for a fire to keep the baby warm.

A poor old man, who thinks he has nothing to give the Baby, holds his lantern and offers to light the way for others. His gift of thoughtfulness and courtesy earns him a place in the scene.

I love this custom that invites all the people of our community to stand around the manger with us, whether they are rich, or poor black or white, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or transexual. The question for all of us during Advent is, “To where will we welcome Jesus and who will we welcome with him?” Do we really want him moving into our homes or is it easier to relegate him to the stable, to see him as an outsider, not really part of the family? Seeing Jesus in an out-of-the-way place where disreputable people like shepherds can come to worship without us having to worry about them messing up our homes makes life easy for us. We get that glow that tells us Jesus is here, but there is very little commitment required of us.

Do we really want to make room for the excluded and the ignored – the prostitutes, the drug traffickers, the illegal immigrants, the disabled and the socially unacceptable – at the manger in our homes? Will we gather with friends and strangers around the manger in church, in homeless shelters, in refugee camps, on the borders that keep out the unwanted? How will we extend an invitation through our churches or faith communities so that everyone feels welcome together at the birth of Christ?

This year I feel I need the season more than ever yet like many in our churches I struggle to find much to be grateful for. The ongoing challenge of COVID, the turmoil caused by racism, economic inequality, political turmoil and our anxieties about climate change weigh heavily on all of us. Talk about a gratitude gap. The escalating war in Israel/Palestine and the heart wrenching images of death and destruction pull at our heart strings. Yet in the midst of these horrors we need to express gratitude. In fact, the practice of gratitude is one of the tools we all need to cope with the exhaustion and looming burnout that besets us.

In preparation for the season, I reread Diana Butler Bass’s book Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks. She helped me realize that one reason we struggle to establish gratitude as a way of life is because we do not fully understand what gratitude is. She explains that gratitude involves both emotion and ethics (moral principles). We feel grateful when we see something beautiful or receive unexpected gifts from someone – that is definitely emotion. Writing a thank you note to show we appreciate the gift is a choice, an ethical decision that comes from our belief that thank you notes matter.

Bass points out, that most of us have a distorted view of gratitude, usually relegating it to feel good emotions that come and go in our lives. It is this confusion that makes it so difficult to choose to practice gratitude whether we “feel” grateful or not. Depression, anxiety and stress strip away the gratitude emotions.

“Gratitude is not only the emotional response to random experiences, but even in the darkest times of life, gratitude waits to be seen, recognized and acted upon more thoughtfully and with a sense of purpose. Gratitude is a feeling, but it is also more than that. And it is much more than a spiritual technique to achieve peace of mind or prosperity. Gratitude is a habit of awareness that reshapes our self-understanding and the moral choices we make in the world.” (Grateful 60)

Don’t you love that? Gratitude is a habit of awareness that reshapes our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. In other words, we can choose to be grateful people and establish practices that develop it into a lifelong habit. In the process we become happier, healthier and less stressed people. Teaching gratitude as a way of life to our families and our congregations, is, I think, essential to help us overcome burn-out.

As I read Bass’s words, I was reminded of the words of 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “Give thanks in every situation because this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” Not give thanks FOR every situation as some interpret it but IN. Not give thanks for disasters but for the first responders who put their lives at risk to help others. Not give thanks for the destruction of God’s beautiful creation but for the many activists who work tirelessly to see nature restored. Not give thanks for the wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine but for the people that work in the midst of these horrors to bring peace and reconciliation.

One aspect of gratitude I have not considered until recently is its relationship to grief. We cannot talk about gratitude without also talking about grief. We cannot develop effective rituals for expressing gratitude without creating equally powerful rituals for processing grief.

In The Geography of Sorrow – Francis Weller on Navigating Our Losses, Tim McKee points out that most of us hold huge wells of unexpressed grief inside us because we live in a culture where grief is unwelcome, something we need to get over quickly. We are ashamed to grieve.  As a consequence, we are prone to addiction, depression, violence, suicide, possibly cancer, heart disease and I would add PTSD.

The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend towards cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible. (The Geography of Sorrow) 

We need rituals that help us grieve, and these rituals should be communal. This doesn’t mean we don’t go off and weep in solitude, but after we do we should be welcomed back into a group where we can pour out and empty our sorrows together in an environment of comfort and mutual support.  I love the ritual that Lilly Lewin introduced us to in her recent Freerange Friday: “God Holds Our Tears” where she used a pitcher of water to represent our tears. It was very profound. These are the types of practices we all need to help us maintain the grief/gratitude balance.

In healthy cultures one person’s wound is an opportunity for another to bring medicine. But if you are silent about your suffering, then your friends stay spiritually unemployed. In Navajo culture, for example, illness and loss are seen as communal concerns, not as the responsibility of the individual. Healing is a matter of restoring hozho – beauty/harmony in the community. (The Geography of Sorrow)

We should approach grief with reverence, engaging it, sitting with it, mulling it over and recognizing it is worthy of our time.  This is particularly important at the moment. We all came out of the pandemic with a load of grief weighing us down. Since them we confronted not just the horrors of war in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine, but also earthquakes in Turkey and Afghanistan and the climate crisis that overwhelms us. We are encouraged to feel we should get over our grief quickly, or pretend there is no grief weighing us down. We are encouraged get back to normal, maybe go on a shopping spree and enjoy life again. Grief is seen as something to be ashamed of, not something to embrace. It is easy to dismiss the need for rituals of grief especially as the consumer culture hypes up for the Christmas season. After all isn’t Christmas meant to be “the happiest season of all?”

Here are a few of my suggestions on rituals that can help us process our grief and move towards gratitude in the coming months:

• Sit around the table with your family or a few close friends and talk about those things from the past that still need to be grieved over. I have sat around tables with a cup of tea in the most unlikely circumstances grieving together with friends and family. I still vividly remember when I was in medical practice in Christchurch New Zealand and a teenager died of cancer. I sat, with his family as we created a circle around his body and they shared stories about his life. Just talking about these together can bring a measure of healing. Discuss other ways that you could support each other as you process your grief.
• Plan a celebration for All Saints’ Day at the beginning of November. Celebrating, grieving and giving thanks for those who have gone before are all interwoven in these important days on the church calendar. I love the ribbons of remembrance that our church creates every year. We all have an opportunity to write the names of our loved ones on ribbons that later are woven around the altar rail or hung around the church.
• Plan a Blue Christmas celebration. At Godspace we provide a growing set of resources to help with this celebration. During the COVID lockdown, I participated in a powerful and extremely meaningful online Blue Christmas service where we interwove liturgy, creativity, scripture and music together.
• Plan regular retreat days over the next few months to help you slow down, grieve and find that much needed balance between grief and gratitude. Part of the wonder of the Advent and Christmas story which we are quickly moving towards is the recounting of both joy and tragedy. If you follow the liturgical calendar, you know that December 28th is Holy Innocents Day when we commemorate the execution of the innocent, male children in Bethlehem as told in Matthew 2:16. It is an uncomfortable day that I always want to skip over, but this year I know it is worthy of remembering. So many innocents have died in the last year from hunger, disease, violence and natural disasters. This story gives us the foundations for grieving our own losses. It is just as easy for us to skip over the tragedy because of our desire to focus on the joy. This year we need to make space for both.
• Write or read poetry, create a piece of artwork, take a photo that juxtaposes grief and gratitude. This was one of my responses to the horrors going on in Israel/Palestine. This poem flowed out of my heart as I look at what is happening and was overcome by grief. It was inspired by Matt 5:43-47 and Colossians 1:18-20 in The Message. As I wrote it, I found myself giving thanks for the many places in scripture where grief and gratitude come together Is our world broken beyond repair?

Will we always meet violence
With more violence?
Death with death?
Hate with hate?
What happened to love?
What have we done with Jesus,
With the One who holds all things together
And promises to fix,
All the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe.
The One who told us:
Love your enemies
Let them bring out the best in you
Not the worst
Live out your God-created identity,
Live generously and graciously towards others.
Be loving in all circumstances.
God is love.

• Listen to Leonard Cohen’s incredible song Hallelujah which I listen to regularly to help me process some of my grief burden and help me find the silver linings of gratitude often hidden in its midst.
• Journal about your grief feelings. Read Psalm 130. Allow the words to resonate in your heart. It begins with grief and ends in praise and often it is easier to pray with someone else’s words then trying to form our own. Sit in the presence of your feelings and allow God to bring healing. As I did that this week, this simple poem grew in my mind. Perhaps you would like to use it to express your own grief.

Is our world broken beyond repair?
Will we always meet violence
With more violence?
Death with death?
Hate with hate?
What happened to love?
What have we done with Jesus,
With the One who holds all things together
And promises to fix,
All the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe.
The One who told us:
Love your enemies
Let them bring out the best in you
Not the worst
Live out your God-created identity,
Live generously and graciously towards others.
Be loving in all circumstances.
God is love.