Tag Archives: growing

Adventure of Grace and Joy

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Grace

Days which lead up to Mother’s Day are a time of reflection and remembering..  I savor the model of mothering provided to me by my mother and grandmothers, express gratitude for their lives, and remember the simple tradition which marked Mother’s Day for me as a child:  picking a red rose to wear to church in honor of Mother.  Those whose mothers were no longer with them wore a white rose. It was a sweet gesture, and I miss it.

I cherish the images and thoughts of my sons as babies and little boys, and bask in the light of their lives as strong men of faith and integrity who have become faithful husbands and loving fathers. They love me and tell me so in word and actions. From the beginning, being a mother has been an adventure of faith and grace and joy.  I have often spoken of the fact that parenting has shown me more about God’s love and care for me than any other element of my life.  On Mother’s Day, our church’s order of service included a statement that affirmed this.

“It has been the amazing, often painful, often ecstatic adventure of being a parent that has most formed me. It is parenting that has made, unmade, and remade me into someone who comes up hard against the great religious questions that have always been part of the human quest:

Who in fact am I?.

What is a life well led?

What is most essential, permanent, and foundational?

What responsibility do I have to others?

How do I deal with evil and fear?

What is “the good?”

How do I love well?

How do I move in this wild and worrisome world with some grace and joy?

Wendy Wright,   Seasons of a Family’s Life: Cultivating the Contemplative Spirit at Home 

 

                            

Remembering

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IMG_1704It is Good Friday.  I go into our garden, remembering another garden that became a place of prayer, entreaty, yearning, betrayal, and choosing a path that cost life to give life.  A rosemary bush at the end of our stone wall has wintered, died back, and now demonstrates life beginning again. .Both  the garden I  am remembering and the garden where I walk are places of revelation.

a garden is a place of revelation

seeds that survive to grow

are containers that must open and change,

releasing all that they are

in order to become what they can be.

 

a garden is a place of repair

a wildflower stubbornly pushes through

a crack in the wall, filling that broken place

with green growing hope

 

a garden is a place pointing to resurrection

though whipped by winds and dried from drought,

shattered stalks lift up and flower

beginning again

 

a garden is a place of revelation

but not a place I can stay.

I cross its threshold

and remember.

 

 

 

Green Alleluias

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I cannot count how many different greens appear in Springtime.

There is a blush of green on the trees covered with tiny buds trying to open

The changing green as leaves unfurl and fill branches of oak and elm

Sprouting snap peas, lettuces, and fledgling tomatoes are not the same color

Herbs have a whole palette of green of their own: sage, parsley, oregano, chives

Feathery dill and fennel, each uniquely green

All beginning again

All fresh and new

Every green an alleluia,

Singing Easter.

Taking the Day Off

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Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.

~ Mary Oliver, “Today” from, ‘A Thousand Mornings’

Seed Time

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“Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers – plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun’s warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life’s stir and push- for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature’s pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.”

— Lorraine Anderson

Rooted

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“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”                        ~ Simone Weil

Recently when family gathered to help us celebrate our 50 years of being married, we were given a small white pot which contained a plastic bag filled with potting soil and a dried, brown ball with papery layers peeling back about the size  of a small onion. It was an Amaryllis bulb.  As long as I let the pot, the soil, and the bulb wait on my counter, nothing much happened.  There was one place where a spot of green wanted to push through its crackly wrapping, but seemed to have grown weary and quit trying.  But as soon as opened the soil packet and poured it into the pot, pushed the bulb down, set it in a window, and added water, I could almost hear the dry dirt begin to breathe a lullaby to hungry roots as they began to channel new life into stalk and leaf. Two sturdy stems soon grew heavy with swelling buds.  Above, the first scarlet flower opens wide, stamens heavy with pollen.

026Then there were three, so large it seemed they would topple. And just as the first bloom began to fade, the second stalk of buds began to open.  In all, 6 magnificent delights have graced the plain white pot in my kitchen window. Without roots, this blooming would have stayed inside the brown bulb.  The roots were a potential, but not a possibility until nourished with soil and light and water.

What nourishes my soul to satisfy this need for rooting?  Do I choose that which roots and grows?  These are questions I ask again in a soul’s wintering.

Grace, Simply a Gift

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Grace

“After centuries of handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody’s much interested anymore. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left.

Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.

A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?

A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There’s nothing YOU have to do. There’s nothing you HAVE to do. There’s nothing you have to DO.

The grace of God means something like: “Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.”

There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it.

Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”

from Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner

Magnificat

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100_0934When I find a feather, I have long believed that it is a sign –  God sending me a reminder that he is with me, and that small things can be important in helping me know that.  I find feathers often and in strange places.  Once, a tiny feather blew across and stuck to my windshield on a drizzly day. One afternoon when I sat on my back porch, praying through a troubled time, I looked up to see what seemed to be a snowflake because of the way it drifted down to the flagstone path.  I looked up to see a dove on the edge of our roof – her bit of breast feather fluttering to the ground.

No wonder then, that I like Luci Shaw’s poem, Magnificat, published in the collection titled The Angles of Light.  

“I am singing my Advent to you, God: How all year

I’ve felt your thrusts, every sound and sight piercing

like a little sword – the creak of gulls, the racket

as waves jostle pebbles, the road after rain –

shining like a river, the scrub of wind on the cheek, a flute

trilling – clean as a knife, the immeasurable chants of green,

of sky: messages, announcements. But of what? Who?

Then, last Tuesday, one peacock feather (surprise!)

spoke from the grass; Flannery called hers “a genuine

word of the Lord.” And I – as startled as Mary, nearly,

at your arrival in her chamber (the invisible

suddenly seen, urgent, iridescent, having put on light

for her regard) – I brim over like her, quickening. I can’t

stop singing, thoroughly pregnant with Word! ”

Lucy Shaw, Magnificat, part of collection published in  Angles of Light

Let Christmas Unfold

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008In our garden we plant host plants like Milkweed, fennel,dill and parsley  for butterflies. Once the larvae ravenously feed on these and undergo the change to chrysalis, nothing much seems to be happening until, metamorphosis complete, the limp wet wings begin to emerge and struggle to unfurl.  During this process if there is any attempt to help or rush the struggle, averting the necessary conditions for growth and transformation, the butterfly will not fly or live.

In many ways, Advent is a similar process of waiting and transformation. We may be tempted to rush the slow but steady journey but we need to take the time to live and lean into the meaning and experience of the coming of Christ.  It is not yet Christmas.  It is Advent, a time to anticipate the story and meaning.  In her book Simply Wait, Pamela Hawkins suggests that we take a walk through our home, room by room, and say a short blessing in each space.  “Take your time, imagine how you will live in this time and place over the next few weeks in ways that could help you not to hurry Christmas.”

What other ways help you be present to this Advent day and let Christmas unfold?