Category Archives: Spiritual
Have We Missed the Point of Jesus?
If Jesus was about anything, it was that every person matters, no matter how socially unacceptable, how sinful, how irritating, how foreign, how old, how handicapped, or even how sick and contagious.
Jesus just flat out said that whatever we do to anyone, we do to him.
He also said, that in the family of God, when one suffers, all suffer. When one is diminished, all are.
And when he washed the disciples feet, he made it clear that ministry is about serving, not power.
Being ostensibly “religious” is no guarantee that we are not missing the whole point of Christianity.
Old Age : A Dangerous Excuse for Congenital Flakeyness
I was born lacking a sense of direction, blind to physical details, and inclined to value feelings more than logic and intuition more than facts.
The up-side of this is a gift for seeing creative possibilities and having the motivation to implement them for making people happier.
The down-side is having to always leave the house early, because you know you will end up taking a “scenic” route no matter how many times you’ve been there before and the odds are it will take at least fifteen minutes to find your car to get home from any parking lot.
When my friends and I began hitting retirement age, even those who were born with internal GPS’s and a penchant for noticing and remembering the exact number and level of parking spaces, seemed to be “losing” those enviable talents.
“Hooray!” I thought, “I can finally blame my inadequacies on age and won’t have to put up with my friends rolling their eyes whenever I get caught wandering about in my usual fog.”
My children have always said that no one will notice if I am losing it, since I never had it together.
I can still drive, while two friends, who were there for me when my life was in crisis years ago, no longer are able to drive. One lives with her daughter out in the country. Her daughter works full time, so Barbara is house bound all week.
My other friend, Hilde, lives fifty miles away in a very nice nursing home. Her daughter also works, so she spends most of her time reading in her room alone.
I have felt so blessed that I have the chance to be there for them by taking each of them out to lunch, window shopping, to a botanical garden, or art museum at least once a week. Both of them need to use a walker and I sometimes also need one for walking very far. Because of the distance between their residences and the complication of so many walkers, I usually take each of them out separately on different days each week.
Last week was shortened by a holiday with family and a trip out of town, so I decided to attempt taking them both out to the delightful Aquarium Restaurant in a huge mall about sixty miles from my house.
Whether from delusion or the onset of senility, I decided that I would be able to find it easily since I had been there several times before. NOT!
I parked close to what I thought was the mall entrance closest to the restaurant.
We just took their two walkers, because I wasn’t having any pain that day.
Naturally, I had mixed up the entrances and we found ourselves with a longer walk than we usually attempt. Since it wouldn’t take much longer than going back to the car, reloading and then unloading the walkers again at the next entrance, we made our way slowly through the crowded mall, with a few pauses to get our breath. But our two hour lunch made it worthwhile. The food was delicious and the fun of watching all the unusual fish was an interesting change from our normal days.
To save my friends from the longer walk, I positioned them seated on their walkers at the nearest exit, while I walked back to get the car. About the time my hip began to protest my pace, I realized that I had turned the wrong way and needed to retrace my steps back to where I left Barbara and Hilde and then go on to the next exit where we had parked. By the time I got back to Barbara and Hilde, both my hips were protesting painfully, so I just went on without stopping to tell them what I had done. A big mistake.
As I headed back through the mall, the pain became so severe that I had to find a chair and sit down for a few moments. Neither of my friends has a cell phone, so there was no way to let them know this was going to take a much longer time than we expected. The pain would let up and I would start walking again as long as I could bear it. Then I would find something to sit on for a few minutes. I finally made it to the right exit and went bravely out into the hot sun. No car anywhere. I felt sure I had parked very close to the door and in plain sight from it. By now sweat was running down my face and my hip pain was tempting me to sit down on the pavement until someone offered to help. As usual I had waited until I despaired to begin praying.
As I finally prayed, it occurred to me that a large SUV had pulled in between my car and the entrance and was completely blocking it from view. Thanks be to God! I made it to the car and turned it toward the exit where I hoped my friends were still waiting.
I thought I remembered a Mexican Restaurant at that entrance, so I watched for the sign. And drove and watched and drove and watched and drove and watched, until I realized I had no idea where I was or where my friends were. I turned around illegally, then noticed the police car stopping across from me. I just kept going, driving slowly and praying desperately that I could find them without having to call in the police. I finally spotted them still waiting inside the doors to an entrance next to a Macaroni Grill, not a Mexican Restaurant.
Well they both start with an M.
They wheeled out to the car at warp speed, asking anxiously if I was all right. I threw the walkers into the back and sped off, determined to put distance between me and the police. As I described my adventures, my friends nodded empathetically.
I asked Barbara what she would have done, if I hadn’t returned when I did. She said there was a security policeman near-by and she was getting ready to give him my cell phone number and ask him to call me. I breathed a sigh of relief. The oldest of us three, Barbara at ninety, still had her wits about her.
Of course, when I finally got home, I realized that I hadn’t turned my cell phone on that day.
The challenge now is to convince their daughters that I’m not losing it. I’ve simply never had it together, but somehow I’ve always managed to get us all home safely as long ago as Hilde and my adventures getting lost consistently in our twenties and my doing the same with Barbara in my fifties.
If they think I’m senile, our days out may be cancelled. No more using age as an excuse for natural flakeyness.
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.
He Is Our God and We Are His People: Let Us Come Together in Cyberspace to Give God Thanks and Praise
Wherever we lift our hearts to God together is church. He is our God and we are His people. He has called us to this moment as an oasis of grace. It can be a special time when we come to Him with open hungry hearts.
He calls us in many ways: Through the beauty of His creation, through the laughter of children, the kindness of strangers, the tenderness of those who love us, our memories of many moments of grace.
He even calls us through nature’s terrible destructive power, that reminds us how fragile and helpless we really are, like falling leaves swirling in the wind.
But thanks to Jesus Christ, we know that the smallest one of us has infinite value and is held in the palm of God’s hand.
And thanks to Jesus, we also know that even when we, His people, still sin, there is forgiveness.
And that when we experience suffering and even heartbreak, there is grace.
Thanks to Jesus Christ we know that death is just a doorway to eternal life.
And there is no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
Let us join together wherever we are to give God thanksgiving and praise.
The Mystery of Suffering
These are quotes from Job and the Mystery of Suffering by Richard Rohr.
When suffering comes to you (and sooner or later it comes to everyone), don’t search for any special method of prayer. Just be.
Just sit and accept your cross: accept it totally in the depth of your being. How terribly anguishing, but terribly powerful this method of prayer is. There are many different experiences of suffering, but whatever yours is, don’t try to escape it. Don’t fight it. Just sit with your cross.
Rohr says, To be human means to be imperfect and in process. Grace brings us out of the question of why we are suffering to the amazing recognition, “My life is not about me.” This is the great and saving revelation that comes only from the whirlwind, and we are never ready for it…………We are a continuation of the incarnation, a continuation of the passion and resurrection-we extend the whole life of Christ.
In another chapter Rohr says: I believe that the opposite of subjectivity is not objectivity, but otherness. It is an openness to the other-as other-that frees us for creativity and originality in our response. It is always an encounter with otherness that changes me. If I am not open to beyond-me, I’m in trouble. Without the other, we are trapped inside a perpetual hall of mirrors that only validates and deepens my existing world views. The central theme of the bible is to call people to encounters with otherness: the alien, the sinner, the Samaritan, the Gentile, the hidden and denied self, angels unaware. We need practice in moving outside our comfort zones. It is never a natural response…………
The fruit of the biblical revelation depends more than anything else on having a Lord……..
Allowing God to be our Lord is not something we can do as easily as believing this, doing that…….It is always a process of a lifetime, a movement toward union that will always feel like a loss of self-importance and autonomy……..My experience is that, apart from suffering, failure, humiliation, and pain, none of us will naturally let go of our self-sufficiency. We will think that our story is about us. It isn’t.
Job can be seen as the “pruning” of the branch of it’s pretense of autonomy and all the burden that goes with it-self-validation and self-criticism. Freedom is when you know that neither of them matters. My significance comes from who-I-am-in-God, who-I-am-as-part-of-a-much-larger-whole………..God is carrying me, both the good and the bad parts. There seem to be only two ways that we know this experientially: prayer and suffering.
Singing in the Spirit: Perfect Harmony
When the world seems to be a giant simmering pot of hatred and violence, I am able to cling to the hope for peace, because of an amazing experience I had many years ago.
I was at my first Charismatic Conference at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. Though ostensibly Catholic, there were Charismatics (Pentecostals) from many mainline protestant denominations. This particular year there were 20,000 of us gathered for Worship in the football stadium. At one point during the sermon the worshippers responded by singing in the Spirit. Singing in the Spirit is when each person sings whatever the Spirit gives them. For some it may just be terms of praise in the believer’s own language, but to an unknown melody given them by the Spirit, for many the words are in a language unknown to the singer and at the same time to an unknown melody. The words, languages, and melodies are all different
For a few moments, I hesitated, since I had never experienced this and I found myself distracted by the differences I heard close to me. But suddenly my own song came bubbling up from deep inside and as more and more voices joined together singing completely different words and melodies, the awesome harmony brought tears of joy.
I cannot normally sing anything without following the lead of a strong voice next to me. But when singing in the Spirit, my own surprisingly high notes stay true to me, yet blend with the whole. That many people singing different melodies in different languages simultaneously in beautiful harmony simply lifts you out of yourself. Somehow, the God within each of us, that is the God of the Universe, bring us together as one body.
I may seriously doubt that any person could teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, but I know first hand that the Spirit can.
And that keeps me praying and seeking and listening and learning to love, even when no country and no person, not even children, are safe from violence.
Dorothy’s Instantaneous Healing
Long ago in my thirties, I was in a Catholic Charismatic (Pentecostal) prayer group that was led by several Sisters of Mercy at their convent.
I, along with Pat, another woman member, were registered to attend the annual Charismatic Renewal Conference at Notre Dame University. At the prayer meeting two days before the conference, a young woman in her early twenties asked if she could go with us. We had spoken about a priest that led a small group of sisters and nurses in a healing ministry, and Dorothy had curvature of the spine with one leg shorter than the other. This caused her to have to wear an ugly built up shoe, it also sometimes caused her pain, and she feared that when she married and became pregnant it would cause more problems. It was too late to register her and probably too late to get her a room in the dorms, but we told her to bring a sleeping bag and stay in our room. So, Dorothy set off with us. We were running a little late and I was worried that we would miss the first large session in the gymnasium, which was the presentation on healing. A couple of weird time changes later we arrived just as it was beginning, but had to sit almost at the very top of the gymnasium. We were supposed to wait until it cleared at the end to find Pat’s sister, who was coming from Pittsburg. As the gym emptied, I prayed nervously about whether to take Dorothy down to the group with the healing ministry. I finally said, “God, if you want them to pray for Dorothy, please bring them up our aisle, and I’ll ask them to pray for her.” The gym was almost empty, but we had not spotted Pat’s sister, so we were still sitting almost at the top on an aisle. Just then, the priest and the others with the healing ministry started up our exact aisle on their way out. As they came near us, I spoke hesitantly, “Father, would you pray for Dorothy here. She has one leg shorter than the other.” He stopped his group and said, “Of course. Let Dorothy sit in your chair here on the aisle.” So, Dorothy moved into my seat and the several prayer members and Pat and I put our hands on her shoulders and held her hands, while the priest led us in a gentle quiet prayer asking God for healing in Jesus name. No frills, no dramatics. Then he stopped abruptly and asked Dorothy, “Did you feel that? I think your leg jumped.” Dorothy with tears flowing, agreed that it had. He then led us in prayers of thanksgiving, smiled, and continued on up the stairs.
As we sat stunned into silence, Pat’s sister appeared next to us. Following her out of the gym, we excitedly recounted our experience with a mixture of laughter and tears of joy. Dorothy suddenly stopped and said in amazement, “I’m limping. My built up shoe is making me lopsided.” So, she took off her shoes and continued on, literally ‘leaping and dancing and praising God.’
After we got to our dorm room, my inner Twin to Thomas kicked in. It ‘just so happened’ that Pat was a physical therapist. For the next hour, I kept making Pat measure Dorothy’s legs over and over. Pat kept reassuring me that they truly matched. No doubt about it. But there was still some visible curvature of her spine. When, in the wee hours of the morning, we began to tire, Pat went to the communal dorm bathroom to brush her teeth. There she met an older woman and told her of our experience, ending with the curious fact that Dorothy’s spine was still curved. The woman reassured her by telling her that her own husband’s leg, which had been a whole inch shorter than his other one, had been healed the year before at this conference. She said that the leg grew immediately, but it took six months for the atrophied muscles to develop fully back to normal.
We finally all went to sleep exhausted, wonderous, thankful, and at peace.
Funnily, since Dorothy now had no shoes to wear, two days of June’s hot sidewalks left her with some blisters on the bottoms of her feet. Maybe we should have prayed some preventative prayers also 🙂
Over the next several months I, of little faith, looked each time our prayer group met to assure myself that Dorothy was indeed happily wearing sandals, flip flops, or tennis shoes.
And almost ten years later, now married and the mother of two children, Dorothy came to our parish to tell her story to our women’s group.
Yes, she was still happily and painlessly wearing sandals.
The Gold in the Golden Years
Whatever time is left
Use it up
Wear it down
Regardless how thin
The fabric becomes
It is rich with the sounds
Of laughter
Salty with tears and
Friends.
From the poem Time on the blog: poetry, photos, and musings, oh my – by lea
Six years ago, my ninety-one year old friend Barbara, who was on a walker from a painful hip surgery, expressed her despair from feeling useless. But as we shared lattes with a friend in her mid sixties, who has slow growing cancer, we laughingly imagined walkers for us like baby walkers with crinoline skirts to hide them, and small secret Porta-Potties built in. Then, in the parking lot as we attempted to help Barbara into the van, somehow she got stuck bent over half way in. We tried to gently boost her backside without hurting her hip, until the giggles overtook us. Frozen in place, the three of us laughed helplessly, humor overcoming even our fears of age weakened bladders. When I called Barbara the next morning to make sure she hadn’t been hurt, she started laughing all over again, insisting she had been laughing all morning just thinking about it, and even wished we had a photograph.
The next day, I visited my friend with dementia in a nursing home in Nashville. She had once again dreamed of her parents’ death as a present day event and had awakened overwhelmed by loss and frantic about funeral arrangements. Each time she grieves anew, I can only hold her hand and ache for her endless losses. But later, seeing the wonder in her eyes, when she listened to me telling one of the caregivers about her courage and faith and her kindness to so many in her life, I recognize a moment of grace even in the now worn fabric of our lives.
The following day, my alarm went off three hours too early and I had the coffee made before I finally noticed the actual time. Later, I realized on my first stop of the day, that I had my coat on inside out. That night at a my sister-in-law’s eightieth birthday celebration in an upscale restaurant, I somehow managed on my second trip to the bathroom, to go into the men’s room. Then when leaving, I couldn’t find my coat check number in my tiny purse. Since I don’t drink, I couldn’t even blame it on something temporary. At least it’s fodder for a blog post.
The Gold in the Golden Years are our friendships and shared memories, but perhaps most of all, the freedom to laugh at ourselves. Laughter is carbonated grace.
Wishing all of you a joyous Christmas season filled with laughter. Eileen
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 