On Eagle’s Wings
Seventy-four was the right age to do it.
To quit needing to belong, to stop letting a group define me,
to give up seeking courage through numbers.
By trying to always fit in, I somehow lost my sharp corners,
becoming rounded off with small, but important parts lost in the process.
It was a hard year of letting go, but it’s paid off with new life at seventy-five.
Choosing to be whole, not a chameleon, is like rising up on eagles’ wings.
Distinguishing between wants and needs, mine and others, so I can get to know and celebrate my unfinished self,
and begin again to grow more like the person I was created to be.
This Is My Bliss
To try to both encourage and challenge others by sharing stories of my journey. To flesh it out with seventy-five years of experiences of failure and perseverance, weakness and grace, aging and humor, seeking and insight, sorrow and joy.
The Fart
A fart
like a burglar
dropping the silver
shocking the night silence
and creating its own pin drop quiet
freezing everyone’s natural responses
leaving all innocent by-standers pregnant
with explosive tension nervously repressed.
No one can think of any appropriate action to take.
Off Line for a Week. I’m Not Really Addicted to Blogging, I Only Gained Four Pounds.
Challenging week. Car in shop. Husband in ER for four hours. (OK now.) I broke off front tooth. Have to get whole new upper partial. Can’t get new one for a week, since taking Plavix. Ran into deaf friend, I haven’t seen in two years. Very brief conversation. Deaf people can’t read lips if you have your hand over your toothless mouth. Internet still down at home after a week. Lightning fried modem, router, and ? Using office computer. Need to let husband get back to work on it.
I am not addicted to email. I am not addicted to face book. I am not addicted to blogging. I am not addicted to lying about my addictions.
I am addicted to cake. Must sign off. On way to bakery.
Judge Not, Lest………………………….
Nobody but God knows our whole story, not even ourselves. So, only God has the necessary information to judge anyone. One of the reasons we are sensitive to others’ criticism is that we are already judging ourselves.
But we don’t know the hand we, or others, were dealt. We don’t know the combination of genes, the effects of time in the womb, the combination of personality and life experiences, hormonal imbalances, even the effects health issues long forgotten have had on us.
Two very trivial experiences, that I became aware of, illustrate this. Most of my life, though I love yellow flowers, I have always disliked forsythia intensely. Once while talking with others about memories of being disciplined in childhood, I surprised myself by saying, “My grandmother always stripped the long Forsythia branches to use for spanking us.”
Bingo!
It took me years to overcome an antipathy to classical music, only to finally remember at ten years of age having measles and standing shaking and miserable as my mother hemmed my Easter dress and my father insisted I listen appreciatively to Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
In mid-life I spent some time recording my dreams in order to better hear what was going on in my unconscious. My children were grown and gone and I still hadn’t figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up.
There was an interesting “character” that re-occurred in my dreams, a competent, practical, assured woman (not a reflection of my conscious self at that time, for sure). In this particular dream, I was playing cards and when it was my time to deal, I realized that I wasn’t playing with a full deck. (It’s ok to laugh here!) So, in the dream I went into a storage closet to look for the missing cards. The woman came into the room at that point and said with authority, “Eileen, get back in the game and play the hand you were dealt.”
I have come to realize that many of my parents’, teachers’, and my own expectations for me were probably delusional.
In college I wrote an essay entitled Breathes There a Man with Pride So Dead, Who Never to Himself Has Said, “I Am NOT the Common Man.”
In mid-life, I had to come to terms with the possibility that my struggle to not be mediocre (common) might not be the real issue. It might be that I have to struggle to become mediocre!
We are only called to play the hand we were dealt.
Ultimately, the judging of how well we do that ends up back in God’s court.
My 3 minutes of Fame
Thanks so much to my favorite loyal blog reader, Betty Harper, for coming to my first experience of an open mike. It helps considerably to pack the house with friends and family. It’s a fairly small place, just this side of a hole in the wall, so our party of twelve represented a large part of the “gate,” so to speak.
Though I’m sure my excitement is way out of proportion to the actual achievement, it is still a milestone for me. Thanks friends and family for being there. All those friendly faces made it fun instead of frightening.
Meanwhile back at the blog…………………..more tomorrow.
Got a Gig Tonight
Ready for Gig
Whoo Hoo!
I get to do a couple of my blog posts at an open mike tonight. What fun to do for the first time at seventy-five. I think this is going to be a great age.
My gig is at The Open Hand, a coffee house behind Cat’s Music in Pomona after 7pm. I’m doing my posts, Grace a la Manure and God’s Spiritually Challenged.
I lead devotionals at a nursing home, so I figure even an empty house can’t be a very much harder audience than there, since many are stone deaf and some are living a whole different reality.
Please feel free to pray anyway.
The Dialogue between Faith and Reason
Part One
Faith untempered by reason quickly becomes superstition. Reason that is unwilling to take the risk of faith becomes hubris.
The challenge of the spiritual life is maintaining an ongoing dialogue between faith and reason that stretches and refines both.
The historical paradox of Jesus being divine, yet fully human, does not require an either/or solution. We can focus on one aspect to better understand it, but if we emphasize one to the detriment of the other, we lose the meaning, purpose, and power of the mystery.
One of the most amazing and freeing aspects of the humanity of Jesus, as illustrated by the stories in the Scriptures, is that he grew in wisdom and holiness. He, like us, was until the moment of his death in a process of growth in understanding of his mission, in his understanding of the nature of love, and in the faith and courage to accept death .
Even more surprising was that often the people who guided and challenged him in this process were women, women with no religious or political credibility, even gentile women, and women considered unclean.
Recognizing the humility of the human Jesus can free us to both face our own incompleteness and to believe in our potential for growth.
And risking the leap of faith to accept Jesus as the expression of the unconditional love of the creator of all that exists for us personally is the saving grace that can carry us through the doorway of death.
God is love and Jesus is the human expression of that perfect love. Jesus is the Word of God to us.
Our own difficulty in grasping the paradox of the divinity and the humanity of Jesus, is simply just that, our difficulty, because of where we are in our own growth process. Sometimes our leap of faith is like putting something we don’t understand into an open file labeled Possibility and then living with an openness to the Spirit of God speaking, guiding, challenging, calling, teaching through the everyday events and people in our lives and then empowering us through Her quiet voice within.
(to be continued at a later date)
Does God Have a Weird Sense of Humor or What?
This is a story from a member of a traveling Christian repertory theater ministry.
Sarah, a nineteen year old, made very little money in this ministry from September through May, so she spent the summers at home working as a temp to supplement her meager income.
Since she had no car, she walked to and from work. At the first of the summer, she found this a blessing of time spent in prayer and reflection. As the temperatures rose it became less a blessing than an ordeal and she began to ask God to send her a ride somehow. After asking everyday for a week to no avail, as she was walking once again to work, she finally prayed,
“Lord, I can see that I might not find the time to spend with you, if I had a ride. And the heat is only uncomfortable, not dangerous, so the walking is healthy for me. But would you just let me know that you heard my prayer please.”
She had just finished this prayer, when a small boy on a tricycle, towing a little red wagon, came along side her. As he passed he called out, “Hey, lady. Want a ride?”
