It is the holy of holy days. It is the day we wish would never come. It is the long night we wish we didn’t have to sit through. The light is in short supply.
I sit through this darkness, and lose track of my daytime senses. I let myself dissolve into the void. It is the coming apart before creation. It is the letting go of everything I know or thought I knew. It is the absolute blindness of not knowing what may happen next, or if, really, there is anything next. To trust in this moment is a …
” At Christmas, we celebrate the birth of things that save us. Sometimes salvation can come as much from freedom and letting go as from creation. What pent up wildness have you released? How has that saved you or someone else” -Order of Service, Christmas Eve
Solstice, Christmas, New Years. All of these holidays turn my introspective self even deeper inwards. As I sat in the service Christmas Eve and contemplated the questions above, I was filled with gratitude. I was overwhelmed by gratitude. I’m not going to lie, it’s been a hard year. It’s been a year …
I had a discussion with a friend about the creative process and the idea that Life comes in all forms, even if at first it looks ugly or unsettling. Sometimes what we turn away from holds a profound gift that we never get to if we are unwilling to look deeply, look past appearances and see what might be there for us. The process of choosing Life is a parallel to the creative process as our engagement with Spirit can quickly move from what we thought we knew into a more complicated, wilder, more dangerous feeling arena. Holding with grief,
Dawn was obscured this morning by thick clouds. The world lightened, but still the day is so short. The cold is coming, the after effect of the dark. When the light comes, even in increments, even in a dull gray instead of a full golden burst it changes everything.
I often meditate in the spring on the bulbs in the ground. They are nestled in the cold and dark. Every year the new season comes and coaxes them out of the ground. What must it feel like to be immersed in the darkness and find yourself changing…your body changing from …
This is the middle space of our transformation when we have seen something new, or tasted something that so entices and awakens us that we are utterly changed
Today I was sitting with beautiful poetry by Hafiz-
“I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?
I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question
What is God?
If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening
Called the mouth,
O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly Laughing-
Now!”
I admit that I tend toward the serious. I tend toward the gravity of “important things” and I have been reminded as of late that humor can be a blessing to move us toward flexibility and love.
Last week in my Spirit Play class, one of the children was working with the Celebration of New Lives story.
This has been a popular story to work with in our class. The baby dolls in the story have been amply blessed with water and dirt making some fantastically muddy babies. The blessing by beauty takes place with a rose that is gently stroked down the baby’s cheek in our church’s ritual. We have enough artificial flowers for all the children in our room and I observed this child as she held big bunches of …
This last week I taught my Spirit Play friends about the 7 Principles of Unitarian Universalism. We have not used this lesson before when I have been teaching. Church staff and I looked over the text and modified it slightly to match the bedtime prayer that we have been teaching to the families in our community. I started by telling the children that they might already know this lesson, even if they had never heard it before. Sure enough as I made my way through the Principles, one child enthusiastically reported that he DID know this lesson already.
Sometimes folks joke with me when I tell them I am a Spiritual Director. They ask me, “What direction are you going?” I have had to develop a short elevator speech for this moment and now am well practiced at centering my body and bringing my hands to my chest.
“We go deep inside, and then out into the Mystery”, finishing with my arms outstretched. This is true. I believe the heart of the spiritual life and the heart of my work is to go deeply within my core to find my own truth and …
This week in my Spirit Play class, one of my friends wanted to show me the block structure he made. As with all our classroom materials, they are intended to be used one way, in this case to build churches, and they are actually used in a multiplicity of ways. I crawled over to his structure and he began telling me about it.
He told me that inside were the “bad guys” and that he had made towers with guns to shoot them. I listened. I lost my center for a moment. Here I was at church, …