Final Lenten Post

A Few Words From Thomas Merton

Christians are not trying to steal something from God that God does not want them to have.

On the contrary, they are striving with their whole heart to fulfill the will of God and lay hands upon that which God created them to receive.

And what is that?

It is nothing else nut a participation in the life, and wisdom, and joy and peace of God's own self.

FromThe Desert: An Anthology for Lent, by John Moses, Morehouse Publishing, 1997, pp.113.

Psalm 95

God is before all things, and in God, all things hold together.

                                                                                                                                 -Colossians 1:17

Psalm 95

¹ O come, let us sing to the Lord;
   let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! 
² Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
   let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! 
³ For the Lord is a great God,
   and a great King above all gods. 
⁴ In his hand are the depths of the earth;
   the heights of the mountains are his also. 
⁵ The sea is his, for he made it,
   and the dry land, which his hands have formed. 

⁶ O come, let us worship and bow down,
   let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! 
⁷ For he is our God,
   and we are the people of his pasture,
   and the sheep of his hand. 

O that today you would listen to his voice! 
⁸   Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
   as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, 
⁹ when your ancestors tested me,
   and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. 
¹⁰ For forty years I loathed that generation
   and said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,
   and they do not regard my ways.’ 
¹¹ Therefore in my anger I swore,
   ‘They shall not enter my rest.’

A Meditation on Psalm 131

A Meditation on Psalm 131

by Rev'd. Gretchen Grimshaw

Psalm 131

A Song of Ascents. Of David.


O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,

  

my eyes are not raised too high;


I do not occupy myself with things
 too great and too marvellous for me. 


But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
  

 like a weaned child with its mother;
  

my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.


O Israel, hope in the Lord
 from this time on and for evermore.

A Meditation on Psalm 131

Gracious God of hope from this time on and forevermore,

Here I am, again. Standing before you in need of….so many things.

Here I am, again. Standing before you with such humility.

Again, here I am. Kneeling before you

with eyes that have witnessed too much, and seen too little.

Again, here I am. Wanting before you,

with a heart that has beaten itself and broken its promises.

O God, how can you trust me?

Marvelous Creator of hope from this time on and forevermore,

Here I am, once more.

Having encountered so many transgressions  against justice & love, 
by my own hand.

Here I am, once more.

Having settled at least a part of the score with my own conscience.

One more time, here I am.

As a child of some experience, but little understanding.

One more time, here I am.

As I try to let loose another piece of my beastly independence.

O God, how can you believe in me?

Great Source of life and hope from this time on and forevermore,

Here I am, with You etched on my heart.

Here I am, with Your likeness shining through my eyes.

Here I am, with Your breath in my lungs.

Here I am, with Your promise in my bones.

O God, how can anything be too great or too marvelous for us?

A Word from the Wise

From William Sloan Coffin's Credo

All saving ideas are born small. 
God comes to earth as a child so that we can finally grow up, 
which means that we can 
stop blaming God 
for being absent when we ourselves were not present, 
stop blaming God 
for the ills of the world as if we had been laboring to cure them, 
and stop making God 
responsible for all the thinking and doing we should be undertaking on our own. 

I've said it before and will probably say it many times again: 
God provides minimum protection, maximum support - 
support to help us grow up, 
to stretch our minds and hearts until they are as wide as God's universe. 
God doesn't want us narrow minded, priggish, and subservient, 
but joyful and loving, 
as free for one another 
as God's love was freely poured out for us at Christmas 
in that babe in the manger.

From Credo, by William Sloan Coffin, Westminster John Knox Press, pg. 10

We Live in Hope!

Here In The Time Between

by Jack Ridl


Here in the time between snow
and the bud of the rhododendron,
we watch the robins, look into

the gray, and narrow our view
to the patches of wild grasses
coming green. The pile of ashes

in the fireplace, haphazard sticks
on the paths and gardens, leaves
tangled in the ivy and periwinkle

lie in wait against our will. This
drawing near of renewal, of stems
and blossoms, the hesitant return

of the anarchy of mud and seed
says not yet to the blood's crawl.
When the deer along the stream

look back at us, we know again
we have left them. We pull
a blanket over us when we sleep.

As if living in a prayer, we say
amen to the late arrival of red,
the stun of green, the muted yellow

at the end of every twig. We will
lift up our eyes unto the trees hoping
to discover a gnarled nest within

the branches' negative space. And
we will watch for a fox sparrow
rustling in the dead leaves underneath.

"Here in the Time Between" by Jack Ridl, from Practicing to Walk Like a Heron. © Wayne State University Press, 2013. 

Today's Prayer

Prayer in My Boot

by Naomi Shihab Nye

For the wind no one expected

For the boy who does not know the answer

For the graceful handle I found in a field
attached to nothing
pray it is universally applicable

For our tracks which disappear
the moment we leave them

For the face peering through the cafe window
as we sip our soup

For cheerful American classrooms sparkling
with crisp colored alphabets
happy cat posters
the cage of the guinea pig
the dog with division flying out of his tail
and the classrooms of our cousins
on the other side of the earth
how solemn they are
how gray or green or plain
how there is nothing dangling
nothing striped or polka-dotted or cheery
no self-portraits or visions of cupids
and in these rooms the students raise their hands
and learn the stories of the world

For library books in alphabetical order
and family businesses that failed
and the house with the boarded windows
and the gap in the middle of a sentence
and the envelope we keep mailing ourselves

For every hopeful morning given and given
and every future rough edge
and every afternoon
turning over in its sleep

"Prayer in My Boot" by Naomi Shihab Nye, from 19 Varieties of Gazelle. © Greenwillow Books, 2005. 

Psalm 126

Below is today's Psalm 126. And above the text of the psalm is a Wordle of that psalm. A Wordle is a cloud of words taken from a piece of text, which is weighted according to the usage of words in the text. So, a Wordle is a visual depiction of the language in a particular piece of text.

So, here is the Wordle of Psalm 126, followed by the New Revised Standard Version translation. 

Before you read the text of the psalm, see if you can imagine it in your mind. Based on the Wordle, what is this psalm about? What is the tone? What is the context? Where is the pain? Where is the comfort? What os the promise?

Psalm 126

A Harvest of Joy

A Song of Ascents.
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
   we were like those who dream. 
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
   and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations,
   ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ 
The Lord has done great things for us,
   and we rejoiced. 

Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
   like the watercourses in the Negeb. 
May those who sow in tears
   reap with shouts of joy. 
Those who go out weeping,
   bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
   carrying their sheaves.

Upside Down

New Religion

by Bill Horn

This morning no sound but the loud
breathing of the sea. Suppose that under
all that salt water lived the god
that humans have spent ten thousand years
trawling the heavens for.
We caught the wrong metaphor.
Real space is wet and underneath,
the church of shark and whale and cod.
The noise of those vast lungs
exhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.
Heaven's not up but down, and hell
is to evaporate in air. Salvation,
to drown and breathe
forever with the sea.

"New Religion" by Bill Holm, from The Chain Letter of the Soul: New & Selected Poems. 

© Milkweed Editions, 2009. 

The Ides of March and Such

Today is known as The Ides of March, the date when Julius Caesar was  assassinated, in the year 44 before the common era,  by a contingent of his political enemies who were tragically led by his good friend Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger. This day in our Western calendar is a day when the best of this life, a deep and abiding friendship, meets the worst in this life, death by the greedy hand of one's own friend. It is a day when our human condition is front and center, and is shown to be almost more baffling and confusing and convoluted than our wildest imaginations can envision.  
And so today's meditation, on this Ides of March, is offered in remembrance of another such confluence of dichotomous phenomena.  
This year, our Holy Week calendar features Palm Sunday on March 24th, and the feast day on which we celebrate the Annunciation of our Lord Jesus Christ to the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is Monday, March 25th. These two observances could not be stranger bedfellows in the context of Holy Week. One feast celebrates the coming of the New Creation, and the other, it's suffering and death. And even though we know that resurrection is just around the corner, the celebration of God's announcemnet of Jesus' birth coming one day after the human community has sentenced him to death, well, it is almost too much to contemplate or bear. 
But that is how the human condition goes. And that is the terrain through which we walk with God in this this season of Lent.....and this season of  life. So I invite us to spend a few minutes this day with the following poem by the great Anglican Metaphysical Poet and Priest, John Donne, who wrote of this confluence of unthinkable events in 1608.


THE ANNUNCIATION AND PASSION.
by John Donne

TAMELY, frail body, abstain to-day ; to-day
My soul eats twice, Christ hither and away. 
She sees Him man, so like God made in this,
That of them both a circle emblem is,
Whose first and last concur ; this doubtful day
Of feast or fast, Christ came, and went away ; 
She sees Him nothing, twice at once, who's all ;
She sees a cedar plant itself, and fall ;
Her Maker put to making, and the head
Of life at once not yet alive, yet dead ; 
She sees at once the Virgin Mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha ;
Sad and rejoiced she's seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteen ; 
At once a son is promised her, and gone ;
Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John ;
Not fully a mother, she's in orbity ;
At once receiver and the legacy. 
All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
Th' abridgement of Christ's story, which makes one—
As in plain maps, the furthest west is east—
Of th' angels Ave, and Consummatum est. 
How well the Church, God's Court of Faculties,
Deals, in sometimes, and seldom joining these. 
As by the self-fix'd Pole we never do
Direct our course, but the next star thereto,
Which shows where th'other is, and which we say
—Because it strays not far—doth never stray,
So God by His Church, nearest to him, we know,
And stand firm, if we by her motion go.
His Spirit, as His fiery pillar, doth
Lead, and His Church, as cloud ; to one end both. 
This Church by letting those days join, hath shown
Death and conception in mankind is one ;
Or 'twas in Him the same humility,
That He would be a man, and leave to be ;
Or as creation He hath made, as God,
With the last judgment but one period,
His imitating spouse would join in one
Manhood's extremes ; He shall come, He is gone ;
Or as though one blood drop, which thence did fall,
Accepted, would have served, He yet shed all,
So though the least of His pains, deeds, or words,
Would busy a life, she all this day affords.
This treasure then, in gross, my soul, uplay,
And in my life retail it every day. 

---

Source:
Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I.
E. K. Chambers, ed.
London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 170-171.

---

March Madness

Goods by Wendell Berry It's the immemorial feelings I like the best: hunger, thirst, their satisfaction; work-weariness, earned rest; the falling again from loneliness to love; the green growth the mind takes from the pastures in March; The gayety in the stride of a good team of Belgian mares that seems to shudder from me through all my ancestry. "Goods" by Wendell Berry, from New Collected Poems.  © Counterpoint Press, 2012.

Abide in God's Time

Turtle

by Kay Ryan

Who would be a turtle who could help it?


A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,


she can ill afford the chances she must take


in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.


Her track is graceless, like dragging


a packing case places, and almost any slope


defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,


she's often stuck up to the axle on her way


to something edible. With everything optimal,


she skirts the ditch which would convert


her shell into a serving dish. She lives


below luck-level, never imagining some lottery


will change her load of pottery to wings.


Her only levity is patience,


the sport of truly chastened things.

"Turtle" by Kay Ryan, from The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. © Grove Press, 2010.

A Meditation on John 6:1-15

A Meditation on the Gospel According to John 6:1-15

by Dr. Meghan McGrath

Jesus said, ‘Make the people sit down.’ Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they^* sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’

Many extol hunger for beauty, wisdom or justice as a powerful force for good, but some even extend this description of hunger to include the hunger for food.  Social activist, Dorothy Fisher tells us that “hunger teaches the value of food.” Playwright Miguel Cervantes seems to go one step further when he writes, “There's no sauce in the world like hunger.”

But these statements speak to a sort of hunger that is in one’s control, a hunger that enriches rather than depletes us. These statements speak to a hunger that we who have enough, who have plenty, sometimes use as a corrective to our condition of over abundance. But for those who do not even have enough, those who are starving rather than fasting, hunger is not a spiritual practice, it is a matter of life and death. As musician and humanitarian Bob Geldof puts it, “It's really very simple…. When people are hungry they die.”

The United Nations estimates that there are about the billion people in this world who are chronically hungry; and not by choice. And so we who have more than enough would be well to remember that we live in a world where one billion people do not have enough, where one billion people are hungry, seemingly without hope. What is it like to be hungry without hope?

Real hunger imposes so many limits on this life, limits on growth, on our perceptions, and on the possibilities and liberties that should be inherent in our birth. But as Adlai Stevenson said: “a hungry man is not a free man.” And as Pearl Buck wrote:  "A hungry man can't see right or wrong. He just sees food.”

The miracle in today’s Gospel reading described by John involves Jesus miraculously turning five loaves of bread and some fish into enough food to feed the crowd of five thousand, with enough leftover to fill twelve baskets of leftovers.  For early Christians, this over-the-top miracle of plenty must have been stunning.  How do we, with our comforts of modern life, with leftovers in our fridge and the need to exert “portion control” in restaurants, understand what it means to be truly hungry?  How can we connect with those in our world who are truly hungry, as we live with more than enough. What sign do we need, we who have plenty, to proclaim with those who have less than enough, that:  “this is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world?”