Category Archives: Prayer
Art as Sacred (Excerpt from the Blog, Make Believe Boutique)
Be. Here. This moment. Now is all there is, don’t go seeking another. Discover the sacred in your artist’s tools; they are the vessels of the altar of your own unfolding. Look at this cup of holy water, washing clean the brushes. See the blank page, awaiting your blessing. Gaze on the colors before you, each one a name of God: Saffron, Cobalt, Azure, Ruby. Say each one slowly and taste its juice in your mouth Let this be your prayer. Brush them across the page. First the small strokes, then the larger sweeps. Lose track of all time. This too is prayer. Listen for the words that rise up: Awaken. Envision. Sing. Alleluia. Place marks on the page saying I am here. Watch as word and image dance together. Luminous. Illuminated. This is your sacred text. This is where God’s words are spoken, sometimes in whispers, sometimes in shouts. Be there to catch them as they pass over those sacred lips, tumbling so generously into your open arms…..Christine Valters Paintner
Become Peacemakers: Wars Kill Our Souls
From The Upper Room August 6, 2013:
A reflection on Ephesians 4:32
Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.
I hated the Americans who massacred so many people, including my sister, with the atomic bomb when I was fourteen. For many years I could neither forgive nor forget what they had done. But as I started to read the Bible, I was challenged and changed by the words of Jesus, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.”(Luke 23:34)
In the Lord’s Prayer we pray for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done. We ask for our daily food, forgiveness, and salvation from evil. Then we affirm God’s dominion, power, and glory. For me, forgiveness is a strong and powerful attitude.
Paul said,”Be kind to one another” and “tenderhearted.” When we allow God to make our hearts tender, we become able to forgive. For me forgiveness is given so strongly and so powerfully from God through Jesus, that it breaks through the hatred caused by the atomic bomb. Contributed by Haruyoshi Fujimoto
My reflections:
War and fear breed hatred beyond understanding and war leaves wounds too deep for human healing.
In 2003, I visited the small town of Shrewsbury, England. I went to their tiny, but ancient, Military Museum. There were relics and accounts of literally millennia of wars. There was a captured American regiment’s flag from our own Revolutionary War with England. There were long lists of local men killed in war after war after war. Many of the family names on the lists were the same for generation after generation. Most of the wars were with countries that are now England’s allies. Unbelievably, this small rather insignificant museum had actually been damaged by an IRA bomb a year before. My maiden name is O’Leary, so I felt saddened by that, though after visiting Ireland and seeing the evidence of England’s repression and injustice to the Irish, I did finally understand the conflict. Seeing the lists of those lost to war, of families decimated, of enemies now allies, and allies now enemies, realizing that in all those other countries there were matching lists, I thought of all the little people who bear the brunt of wars and even the survivors who are never the same. My life experiences have taught me that there are no good guys in wars. And now my beloved America was following in England’s footsteps. Sorrow overwhelmed me.
During WWII my mother was Personnel Director for a large American Army Post. Part of her job was keeping up morale and this required showing movies of our soldiers cornering Japanese soldiers in caves. When the Japanese soldiers came out of the caves with their hands up, our soldiers set them on fire with flame throwers, and the civilian personnel watching these movies would all cheer. Mom came home sick and unable to sleep after having to show and watch these.
Some years ago, I worked in a Christian Book Store. A young man, about nineteen or twenty years old, came in to buy a bible and we got to talking. He began to tell me about being in the army and just returning from fighting in Panama. With tears in his eyes he told me about his squad being ordered to take over a building where enemy soldiers were thought to be hiding. As they approached, people suddenly came running out of the building, and he and his fellow soldiers responded with machine gun fire. It turned out that it was a school and the people running out were teachers and their young students.
Almost thirty years ago, I was a Civil Service employee on an U.S. Army Post. Technically, I was an Education Specialist-Religion in the Chaplains’ Division. I was Associate Director of All Religious Education for the Post and Director of the Catholic Religious Education Program for the 9,000 Catholics on Post. Central America was at that time a hotbed of political revolution with America unofficially supporting various sides. I had many military men and women volunteers teaching in our Sunday children’s classes. I learned quickly to make sure each of our fifty classes had two teachers, with at least one of them being civilian, since overnight without any warning, all the military would disappear and I’d end up with classrooms full of children without teachers. I never knew exactly where they went. Everyone just said people had gone “south.” There were no official declarations of war and often we ended up fighting in support of blatantly evil dictators, because the communists were supporting the rebels.
The individuals I met in the military are amazing people. They spend their lives far away from their families of origin, so they form close bonds among themselves, which they renew when their paths crisscross over the years. With both men and women now serving all over the world, their families and their communities are small versions of the United Nations Assembly. In civilian life, people coming from other countries tend to cling together and to their native cultures. The army life more or less forces the military to live with, work with, learn with, and support each other across races, nationalities, and cultures. Marriage with citizens of other countries and cultures is common place and families are multi-racial and cultural. Frequent separations make marriage harder than normal and many blended families may have children of several different racial and national backgrounds. It is a paradox that the rank and file of the military are the greatest witness to hope for peace among diverse people, I have ever encountered. When we protest against war, these are not the people causing them. These are the people dying in them. War is political. We civilians are just as much a part of the political systems that create wars.
One of my friends did training for Religious Education teachers for the nearest Catholic Diocese. She also happened to be a leader in the local Peace and Justice movement. I invited her to come lead one of our Teacher Training Workshops. I think the title was: Teaching as Jesus Taught, which stressed using stories like Jesus did. Our Religious Ed Department included a large combination Library/Conference Room, which we used for this workshop. It just so happened the room was already set up for a Chaplains’ conference on ministering to soldiers when battles involved limited nuclear weapons. The set up included horrifying photos, that I hoped were only simulated, all around the walls. My friend was a kind and sensitive woman, who did not intend to cause me any problems by being offensively anti-military. She did not need to. As she gently led us in listening to Jesus’s words, one of the teachers noticed the photos and called attention to them. No words could have illustrated the gap between the world’s way and the way of Jesus better. The photos said it all.
God forgive us all, for we know not what we do.
Whom do you see as the “bad guys” in your world? Your parents’ world? Your grandparents’ world? Your children’s world? Your grandchildren’s world?How do we become peacemakers? Where do we start? What helps you be peace filled? What has helped bring about reconciliation in your life?
Blessings of Blogging
The last couple of weeks have been full of tests of faith. I always fail tests of faith. Luckily, God seems to grade on the curve and I am not alone in being in his “slow to get it” class.
At seventy-seven my husband is still working six, nine-hour days a week. But since he now spends quite a few minutes a day looking for his glasses, the phone book, and his computer passwords, it seems like an uphill battle against the law of diminishing returns.
Being self-employed has meant that our retirement is what our investments have managed to accumulate over a career that spanned a couple of serious recessions and raising five children. Unfortunately our timing for retiring hits before those investments have had time to recover from the most recent recession.
We finally decided that the only way he could at least cut back on his work days was if we sold our house and office and moved to an apartment with an extra bedroom as an office. Week before last we met with a realtor to set this in motion. However, after three days of going through fifty years of architectural drawings stored in the office basement, my husband’s allergies to dust and mold sent him to the hospital fighting for breath and too shaky to walk on his own. Eight days in hospitals on steroids and antibiotics, after having numerous tests, have finally brought him home breathing, but still weak and wobbly. I considered just covering him with a spread while he lies on the couch, and warning potential buyers to not sit there, but I finally took pity and postponed showing the house.
I confess that I too am exhausted from staying overnight at the hospital, overwhelmed by the challenges we are facing, and am very nervous about a biopsy I have scheduled for next Monday.
This morning I wearily crawled out of bed, got some coffee, and went on-line to one of my favorite blogs, Unshakeable Hope.
This blog is written by a husband and father with ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He has had this for over seventeen years, since his children were young. He is now paralyzed and only able to write on the computer with his eyes.
His blog is honest and real, not at all pollyanna like, but his faith always overcomes his doubts and fears. Today’s post was Prioritizing Our Hopes and spoke perfectly to my situation. What a blessing. I was both humbled and strengthened.
Another blog that has touched and changed my life is everyday gurus which was the launching pad for B4Peace, a blogging group writing about peace. This challenged me to start with myself and has brought about significant forgiveness and reconciliation in some important broken relationships.
Another is Yogaleigh’s Not Just Sassy on the Inside, which has added a call to other bloggers to pray or chant for peace each Sunday evening, including praying for specific people that we find unloveable. See her post Collective Prayer Sundays. Attempting to be faithful in this has continued my process of healing and reconciliation that started with B4Peace.
This in turn has motivated me to support and participate in a Scripture based class in conflict resolution using the book Resolving Everyday Conflict by Ken Sande and Kevin Johnson.
And this book has introduced me to Peacemaker Ministries and their resources that are available through http://www.Peacemaker.net
Another blog, Raising 5 Kids with Disabilities and Remaining Sane has given me awesome insights and deep hope for one of my grandchildren who suffers from Autism.
There are many other blogs, such as Make Believe Boutique that have touched, challenged, and taught me in amazingly diverse areas and ways over the last fourteen months. Blogging continues to enrich, inform, bless, and even transform my life at seventy-six.
Blogging is like reading favorite books exactly when you most need them and being able to talk with the author at the same time.
Conflict Resolution: Just Cutting People Out of Your Life Is Conflict, Not Peace
A women’s group at my church, known as The Doves, is having a Scripture based class on Conflict Resolution. Several people have stopped coming to our church because someone hurt their feelings, sometimes even just because someone seemed to ignore them. But when I invited them to the class, they said they didn’t have any conflicts to resolve.
In the past avoidance was one of my favorite ways of escaping conflict. I have shared before about getting my feelings hurt, then just cutting people out of my life, and even letting them die before ever resolving or reconciling. These people didn’t even know they had hurt me, because it was unintentional. With age I have gained a new perspective on many things, and I deeply regret abandoning these friends.
During the first gathering of the new class, a lot of unresolved hurt came out, even with each other in the class. But almost no one spoke in anger or in judgment. We simply admitted our feelings of hurt and listened when people explained a situation from another viewpoint or when someone pointed out the good in the offending person.
No one is perfect and we all bump into each other. Most times when we get seriously offended, it is because the other person has unwittingly blundered into an area where we feel particularly vulnerable.
Some people deal with the world mostly through logic and fact. And often are unaware of their own or others’ feelings. Since truth is their highest value, they do not automatically understand the effect it might have on another person’s feelings.
On the other hand, many of us simply see the world through our feeling values and respond to it straight from our feelings. Often, we have great difficulty working through them to logic.
For those whose values are truth, fact, and logic, even ordinary everyday conversations with feeling types are like exploring a minefield without a map.
Learning either how to say the truth tactfully, or when it might be more diplomatic to not say anything, is a serious challenge for them.
For those of us who live in our feelings, it helps to become aware of areas of insecurity and try to become free of them, and failing that, to learn to risk telling others how what they said made us feel. At least in a long term relationship, this will give the truth and logic partners a map of the minefield!
I have a friend who told me that when she was about six or seven, there was a rich little girl who came to their Sunday School in fancy clothes and white Mary Jane shoes. My friend was jealous of the little girl and took advantage of every chance she got, to scuff the bottom of her shoe across the pure white top of her Mary Jane shoes.
Sometimes, we really consciously mean to hurt others, but most of the time it is either inadvertent or an unconscious response.
I discovered late in life that I quite often scuff people’s Mary Janes in more subtle and less conscious ways, but it still leaves people feeling diminished. Most times before the last decade or so, I was not conscious of it, and sometimes the victims didn’t even know exactly what made them feel scuffed.
For conflict resolution to become an effective tool, it first takes commitment on everyone’s part and a willingness to become self-aware, even uncomfortably so.
Our group cares about each other and most of us have learned to love even the people we don’t always like. But still it’s a scary venture into our dark sides.
Prayer and knowing we are loved unconditionally, at least by God, will hopefully give us the grace to learn to use this tool for peace. All prayer for grace for us is greatly appreciated.
Praying that My Son and A Grown Grandson Will Be Peace Bearers in Cambodia and Indonesia
As I pray for peace tonight, my twenty-two year old grandson leaves home to teach fifth graders in Indonesia for two years. And one of my sons prepares to return to Cambodia for a year, possibly forever, to work with orphans born HIV positive. He has spent one to three months there for several years and loves the children and people of Cambodia. Please join me in praying both for their safety and for them to be peace bearers.
Equally Offensive to All Religions by a Born Again, Baptized in the Spirit, Catholic Mystic, Liberal Presbyterian, Humanitarian Heretic, Loved – though Imperfect – Child of God
Wake up religions! This is not about you. This is about God being in imperfect human lives, all human lives.
No religion has a monopoly on God and no religious institution controls grace.
It’s not about spiritual country clubs, spiritual insurance policies or power.
It’s about human grace filled spiritual encounters with a living God incarnate in every moment, every place, every relationship, every stranger, every struggle, every person.
The church is called to awaken us to them, to pray for us and others to experience them, to encourage and support us in our spiritual journey and to celebrate our encounters of grace with us. But that is all.
Religions are actually obscuring God under their religious baskets by claiming the power to limit and control the human experience of grace. And religions are wasting their gifts by crying out against others instead of shouting out the good news of grace.
Institutions can: tell the world they believe in God; be a witness to the reality of a personal relationship with God through their own love of ALL the children of God; share, nourish, and celebrate others’ relationships with God and one another.
But institutions cannot create, control, deny, or teaspoon grace out according to their own current interpretations of any particular holy writings. That is Hubris, with a capital H.
Religions: Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, etc. etc. etc., YOU ARE NOT GOD. Get over yourselves.
God is bigger than your bread boxes, bigger than your temples, cathedrals, mosques, holy mountains or holy places, bigger than any nation, bigger than any person’s or group’s limited human understanding of any holy writings or rules.
ALL see through the glass darkly. Religions are like the three blind men who each pictured the whole elephant by the small part they personally encountered. None of us has the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because we are NOT God. We are not even close approximations. We do the best we can and seek the grace to do better, but the more we listen to one another, the better our chance of actually recognizing God among us.
The Sacraments are the grace incarnated in our daily lives and our relationships.
The institutional church is there to call us: to recognize, experience and respond to the grace in our lives; to share it with each other; to celebrate it together.
The church celebrations are not the sacraments. God is the sacrament and God just IS. That’s why God’s name is I AM.
God is:
IN our tiny imperfect daily lives,
IN our tiny imperfect selves,
IN our relationships,
IN our natural world,
IN the universes and beyond.
IN people and communities witnessing to faith in a God of love/forgiveness through both declaring it and living it (declaring faith and living it are inseparable),
IN individuals, families and communities recognizing the presence of God IN the sharing of our daily bread with others,
IN our responding to the gift of faith by seeking to be pruned and filled by God’s Spirit within us,
IN an ongoing circle of experiencing God’s forgiveness and forgiving others,
IN our acknowledgement of most humans’ need for the grace found in the intimacy of marriage (in the challenge of learning to love another imperfect human being “up close and personal” in a relationship of commitment).
IN witnessing to our faith in the power of God to heal through acknowledging our own need for spiritual and physical healing by both asking others for prayer and by praying for others and being willing to be healed.
Our daily personal encounters with grace are acknowledged in our communal Sacraments: God incarnate in both our personal and communal lives, in our ongoing human need to be forgiven and to forgive, and in our relationships with one another and our world.
To sum up, the heart of the spiritual life is a personal journey of recognizing our human weakness, learning we are loved unconditionally and responding by growing ever more loving of others in the same way. And the heart of unconditional love is forgiveness. No one is perfect. Everyone needs forgiveness and new beginnings all their lives. Truly accepting forgiveness and forgiving others are inseparable. Forgiveness and love are interdependent. You don’t get or give one without the other.
True religion begins with spirituality, which is a personal relationship with God of experiencing being forgiven and loved, so we too can learn to forgive and love. Then and only then does it become communal. If our faith communities are not made up of people with a humble personal relationship with God based on our ongoing needing and receiving forgiveness, our faith communities will become legalistic, judgmental, unforgiving, worldly, about pride and power, and then conflict ridden.
Each day we are called to open our hearts and minds to God, to find God’s grace in : a first cup of coffee, morning birdsong and sunlight, star filled skies, storms, fear, beauty, a tearful child, a faithful pet, sharing our daily bread, our own and others’ brokenness, sorrow, joy, forgiving, laughter, loss, love, in every moment, every human experience, every human relationship, in every human being.
Do Not Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good: Be Perfect Only in Forgiveness
I did not manage to pray or meditate on peace exactly last Sunday. But I was praying and working my way through articulating a request for forgiveness from the Elders (Session) in my church. I have been alienated from my church for over two years.
I have prayed and struggled with this the whole time, but only recently saw that I have made choices that increased the mutual estrangement, instead of moving us toward reconciliation.
Several times over my seventy-six years, I have taken offense at what friends said and cut off the relationships. Two particular women, a decade or more older than I was, had done many kind and generous things for me and my family, but unfortunately they said things that hit me where I felt most vulnerable. And I let them literally die without ever saying I was sorry or even telling them why I became alienated.
I realized when beginning to be a part of B4Peace and the Sunday night prayers/chants for peace, that since I have had several small strokes and three clogged arteries in my head recently, I might not get a chance to reconcile, if I postpone saying that I am sorry very long.
Asking to be on the agenda for a Session meeting, sitting waiting for it to begin, feeling like the elephant in the room that nobody was mentioning, trying not to say anything accusatory, just to take responsibility for my part, was just about the hardest thing I ever remember doing.
With some encouragement from our minister, most, maybe all, said that they accepted my apology. But the response was less than warm and no one volunteered any apology for their part in the conflict. By the time I got to my car, I was in danger of getting angry once again. What I realized is, that forgiveness takes one side, reconciliation takes both sides. And that forgiving them was my problem, because forgiving them reconciled me to God. Their being sorry was their problem.
In working through aspects of this estrangement, I have realized that an area of oversensitivity caused by my own inability to admit a weakness, blew everything out of proportion. Admitting to the reality of that particular limit has set me free of a source of fear and defensiveness.
Another outcome of this spiritual struggle has been recognizing how my idealism often gives me a critical spirit. The truth is that God is much more realistic about our human limits than we are. Yes, we aim for the ideal. Yes, we encourage and share insights with others in our spiritual journey. But, at any given time our vision may not be the same as God’s. He/She may have an entirely different agenda. Letting go of our preconceived ideas, at least holding our vision lightly with fingers open, is the only way we will ever hear God and the only way we will ever have peace.
I have already forgotten the source, but a quote helped me at a crucial point in coming to grips with how destructive my unrealistic expectations have been: “Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.”
I do not tend to see the glass as either half empty or half full. I see it as a challenge. I start imagining possible ways to fill it to overflowing. There have been times that this trait was perfect for my situation/job/project. I was in the right place at the right time with enough resources and talented support people who shared my vision.
But recently , I’ve recognized that the situation I am in now does not have the resources or people with the shared vision. And I cannot accomplish my goals alone, nor should I, even if I could. If God wants it and I’m willing to do whatever, God will supply what else is needed. Otherwise, instead of either trying to force my oughts and shoulds on others or silently judging them as falling short, I need to wait on God. He may know that here and now, a half empty glass is all that is needed to accomplish His purposes, which are more important than my need to feel important or successful or smart or superior.
My wanting to always make everything bigger and better is like having only a hammer, when what may be needed is only a dust cloth.
How peaceful it is to be still and know that He is God, and I am not.
What a gift!
Thank you, God, for setting me free.
Peace and the Personal Commitment to Forgiveness
Once again, a miracle: I, of the erratic memory, did remember to join in praying for peace this Sunday evening. I am unexpectedly peaceful about being a part of this. I decided long ago that inner peace is quiet joy. And that is exactly the gift this experience brought me. I got so caught up in prayer and reflection that I lost track of time. Prayer for both my own and others’ broken relationships stretched out as I thought of more and more needing healing. When I reached the stage of praying for peace for all people, because of my own recent experience of reconciliation, I actually felt hopeful that events small or large would begin to happen in the lives of every person to help them become a tiny bit more peaceful. It made me want to not only persevere, but to gather more and more others to commit to praying for peace on a regular basis.
This year, when Kozo, through his ‘B4Peace’ blogging project, invited us all to begin blogging about peace at least once a month, it challenged me to become more open and committed to the healing of some broken personal relationships. My most serious alienation happened about two years ago and had not only gone unresolved, but had caused complications with other relationships. I knew this wasn’t going to be easy, but if I was going to write about peace, I needed to at least start dealing with my own conflicts.
As I began praying for the grace to let go of my bitterness and allow God to heal the hurts that fed it, I was invited by friends to participate in a Spiritual Growth Class based on the book, Soul Feast, by Marjorie Thompson. I read the book and found it challenging and exciting, but one of the two facilitators of this class would be the man whose words had both wounded me and set off the very painful chain of events that resulted in more broken relationships. It hit me that this might be the answer to my prayer for grace and healing, so I joined the class, but chose a seat safely far down the long table from my adversary.
For several months, we managed to interact civilly, but cautiously. We tiptoed around anything relating to our controversy, while finding shared ideas on spirituality. I could tell that both of us were truly trying to apply the insights in the book.
Out of the blue, a conflict developed between my male nemesis and the female co-facilitator. He quickly became so defensive and verbally combative, that she left in the middle of the class. No one knew what to do, but when he began to just go on with the class, as if nothing had happened, I asked if we could pray for our friend who was hurting. I said that I didn’t believe any of us really wanted to hurt each other, but Christians or not, conflicts happened, and we all needed grace for healing. We said a simple prayer for healing of hurt and then we went on with the class.
Within two days time they had reconciled completely. He had called her after class. Though she didn’t take his call while she was still furious, by the next day, she had prayed her way through to understanding and forgiveness, and so had he when she went to see him.
As I witnessed this, I immediately realized that I should have gone to him soon after being hurt, explained how I felt, and trusted God to give us the grace to overcome our differences. But, I also recognized that I hadn’t, because he had unwittingly blundered into my worst minefield of insecurity. Now, in praying about and coming to grips with that particular personal demon, I finally experienced a greatly needed new freedom. Then, I was not only able to reconcile with him, but to share with our class how powerful seeing the human frailty of our co-facilitators being healed by their commitment to love was.
I don’t think any words in a book or sermon could have had that power. We really are called to flesh out the gospel for others, not by pretending to be perfect, but by our commitment to forgiveness. I am now praying and working on reconciliation of the other broken relationships set off by this one. Thanks again, Kozo for challenging me to do this.
god does not need our worship.
God does not need our praise or even our worship. Rather, we need to praise and worship God. Praise and worship lift our hearts and minds beyond our tiny selves. They open us to the glory of God; infinite beauty, truth, power,goodness, tenderness, and love.
As we grow in our ability to focus on God, we simply overflow with the love of God for others.
This is not only the point of worship, this is the purpose of our lives.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 