Wow.  A lot of time, life, joy and angst have passed since I last wrote a blog post here.  Where have I been?  It is difficult to say, even more difficult to remember.  The last year has been a blur of trying to make a living, a struggle to keep the things I own, part time teaching, part time working, part time wandering around in a haze of confusion.  In summary, a full time struggle.

I realized that I have been in the vortex of the Buddha's First Noble Truth, driven by the Second Noble Truth.  I realized this today, actually, as I was reading from St. Francis de Sales The Devout Life.  My struggle, my craving as it is, is to keep things.  It is also to live as a Bodhisattva in this world.  These two struggles are in themselves futile.  One can never keep things, because one will ultimately die and in the end lose everything material.  One can not make oneself a Bodhisattva, that comes from a place that cannot be forced.  St Francis wrote that the more we struggle to be seen as humble and righteous, the less humble and righteous we become, and so it goes.

In one of the gospel readings for today, which is Pentecost Sunday in the liturgical Christian world, Jesus offers his disciples peace, not the peace that the world gives, but the peace that only comes from God, the peace he offers us through the coming of the Holy Spirit, the helper, the paraclete, after his death.  The peace that comes from surrender of the soul, the enlightenment through the Eight Fold Path, the secret to hacking the struggle.  It doesn't just happen, it takes effort.  But it shouldn't be a struggle.

"Open my lips, oh Lord, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise!  Create in me a clean heart, oh Lord and renew a right spirit within me."   Lines from the opening prayer of Morning Prayer for Individual Worship in Book of Common Prayer, taken from the lines of Psalm 51.  How many mornings have I repeated these lines and how many times during the day do I think them- as opposed to how many times I have actually put them into practice?

Not nearly enough, as my inconsistency in writing this blog attests.  I have been and remain one of those Christians who snarkily believe that my actions will reveal the light of the Holy Spirit in me, and that is enough.  But is it?  Is it enough to rely on works and actions, while good in their own right, or is it better to speak as well?  Especially in these times of meanness, where venomous language rolls off the tongues of so many, and from every direction.

Jesus brought a message of peace, forgiveness, acceptance and transition.  Transition is what redemption is all about in my estimation.  Redemption means that there is no longer a place for anything approaching hate, or fear for that matter.  Redemption means that what was there has been traded in for a better model, a different mode of thinking, seeing.

To me it means that conflict with the world is something I must put aside, and live freely in the light of God.  It doesn't mean that conflict goes away, it means looking at it with new light. In that light there is nothing other than living in the happiness of every new day.  I think John Lennon was trying to get to this idea in his much loved and reviled song "Imagine".  Taken literally it sounds foolish. Taken to heart it makes perfect sense.  Just like the Bible.  Just like Jesus. Just like all of the people that we love to resent.

The world wasn't made for a chosen handful, it was made for everyone, with term limits on each life.  Why waste life trying to control it for everyone else?  Open my lips, oh Lord, create in me a clean heart and a right spirit.  Teach me to live.

...and all these things....

Back around the beginning of winter, I lost my job.  The reasons aren't really relevant for this page, but in about 15 minutes every bit of security, future planning, retirement, health security, prestige, everything I built my temporal life on at that moment was pulled away, leaving me with nothing but my will to continue and my faith.

This is a place I have never been before. In 30 plus years of work, I have never been terminated. The shock of this was incredible, and the temptation to panic has been lurking out there lake a shadow in the dark of a terrifying dream.  But what of it in terms of my life and my faith?

I have been fortunate to have moral support from friends and family members.  It becomes a real litmus test of sorts in that area, the "real" people are there in many ways.  But they can only do so much.  Like everything in life it always comes down to me and what I am doing right now.  It also comes down to the way I think God works in my life and the purpose of his relationship to me, what is it really there for?  Why does God exist for me?

Everything that I do now raises my consciousness on this question, everything I read and see has a message.  Every relationship has meaning that I may not have seen before, and most importantly, the way I see myself is evolving.  God is real, the power of the Holy Spirit is real.

Things have not been going well in the job search, as a matter of fact, it isn't really going at all. Experience counts to employers, but maybe not 32 years worth.  My age is a problem in this respect, and I know that.  But a job is not the only way to make it in this world.  I am seeing that too. Yesterday I saw this, "I called on the LORD in my distress, the LORD answered by setting me free," Psalm 118, 5.  I am free.

When will things get better?

How many times have I asked this question or heard others ask it?  Can't count them all.  We tend to think that we are living in the most interesting of times, that our problems are unique.  Not so. Are our problems greater than those of pre-war America, are our decisions more daunting than those which had to be made about what to do in Europe?  How about the 1500's in England when no one could keep up with whether their country was Catholic or Protestant this week, and supporting either would not just bring ridicule, but could cost you your head?  At any time in history the record is laced with turmoil, threats from the powerful, fear, disease, all of the same things that plague this planet now.  Want to talk about deforestation?  I grew up in a place in this country that was "clear cut" by a Chicago timber company around the beginning of the 20th Century, where not much of anything was left standing.  Truly, nothing is new under the sun.

Even my own present situation is not unique.  There are so many people in the same situation I am in right now.  Many more will experience it.  The key is to not allow fear to win the day, to not allow myself to make decisions I will soon and definitely regret.  I have been there before too, because I chose out of panic or sentiment, not relying on what the Holy Spirit was insisting I hear, but relying on my own judgement as a broken man.

There has been cause to reach out to God time and time again.  As the psalmist wrote:
       
            Deliver me, my God, from the hand of the wicked, 
                  from the clutches of the oppressor.
            In you, O lord, I have taken refuge.
            You have showed me great troubles and adversities, 
                 but you will restore my life and bring me        
                 up again from the deep places of the earth.
            I shall always wait in patience and shall praise you more and more.

Comforting words, indeed.  But these words, written centuries ago, are also great reminders that there are always things to overcome.  God doesn't fix, he gives me the ability to do the job.  The trick is that I have to listen, trust and surrender all that I hold onto with my fearful self.  I must take refuge, and I will be brought up.  Trusting in the power of God never fails, as long as I understand what I am trusting in.

Forgive, even when it seems ridiculous.

I recently lost my job.  In losing it, I also lost a lot more.  The feeling of security that comes from knowing that there will be another paycheck in two weeks.  The various types of insurance, the contribution to the 401k plan, and the time I put into the system toward retirement- I lost that too, as I was only two weeks away from being fully vested.  I lost it all.  And the most remarkable thing is that I still don't know why exactly.  I know what they said, but I don't understand it.  I broke no laws, no rules, nothing was taken, no one was injured, I hurt no one, etc, etc.- they didn't think I fit there, and I was shown the parking lot.

If anyone ever had a reason to be mad, hurt, humiliated and down right vengeful, I would think it would be me.  What have I ever done to anyone, I ask God, I've tried to be a light to everyone I meet, I've tried to do my job, I've never been a problem to others, so why was this done to me?  I could smolder into a state of hatred for those who made this decision, seeing them as elitist, false judges of character.  I could do all of that and worse, and feel justified in all of it.  At times I have been on the verge, call the lawyers! my inner man shouts.

Then, this morning God speaks directly to me again and reminds me that I must get back on the path. This is life, he says through the pen of St. Paul, these things will happen because you are alive.  You will be humiliated. You will be hurt.  You will be judged falsely and you will feel like you have suffered for no reason other than you exist.  But, you have a new life in Jesus and you know what that means.

Time and time again I am reassured that because of faith, there is hope.  Time and time again I am reminded not to worry about the things of this life, but focus on the life that comes from God.  Now, I am not of the mind that God will call up Marietta Electric and take care of the electric bill this month, but know it will be taken care of.  I know that with faith and with the attitude that comes from trusting in God in my life that I will be able to make it happen. But only if I let all of that dark matter go.  That only slows me down.  I know that those people have their own issues to deal with and that has nothing to do with me.  I must forgive them, even though it seems ridiculous to do so. Not doing so only prevents me from living my life and that is what Jesus wants me to do.  He said as much.

So, thank you Holy Angels for prompting me to open today's meditation from Oswald Chambers, and thank you for piquing my curiosity to read Colossians chapter 3 once again and thank you God for speaking to me.  We will move forward, and I will return to the path.

It has been along time since I  have been here.  I don't think I am alone in noticing that spirituality is cyclical, it strengthens and wanes, just like everything else in nature.  One who claims to be in a constant state of spiritual bliss is either telling a fib or has reached a supernatural state of nirvana that not many have lived to see.  I find that when I am in the low part of the cycle, when I need to meditate and pray and find that special closeness to God, is the time when its the most difficult to do.  I am happy to say, however, that persistence pays off!  One of those happened today in fact.

This morning I was reading the selection in the Anglican Cycle for daily prayer, or the Daily Office.  It was the story from the the book of Acts (Ch.12) where Herod has Peter imprisoned, presumably to behead him as he had just done with James, the brother of John.  In the night, the Angel of the Lord comes to Peter and frees him by causing his shackles to fall from his wrists, then leads him past the outer guards and through the gate "which opened for them of itself".  Peter was free.  Just prior to this action we are told that the entire church was praying for him.
 
I am faced once again in this reading with a remarkable story of miraculous deeds attributed to prayer and the appearance of the Angel of the Lord.  My 21st Century brain has to attempt to process all of this in light of what I know, or at least, what I have been taught and what I have taught myself about how things work in the universe.  And, it is precisely at places like this where many will exit the bus of religion, because they think it is trying to take them to some type of land of Oz.  I used to blindly accept the magic of these stories and think to myself, who am I to be so arrogant as to challenge the reality of the power of God?

But there is another way, a way that takes me to the core of my being and that leaves the Godly miracle completely intact.  By seeing what this scripture is saying, rather than by looking for the proof of the written action, these stories take on a powerful dimension that enables me to see straight to what the Holy Spirit is all about.  Perhaps the people of year zero needed to have a miraculous story to believe in the God of Jesus, or maybe, they just needed a story, period.  They were all about stories after all.  And they were far more clever about understanding the meaning and function of stories than we are today.

Here is what this is for me.  I am imprisoned on an almost daily basis by something.  Usually something very worldly- money, self doubt, what other people think my favorite football team- stuff that in the long run doesn't really matter.  It is not the literal chain and shackle of imprisonment, but these things can take on the character of the real thing, stopping me dead in my tracks and making me go in directions much darker than I would like.  But here is the point, the point of most religion, really.  The Angel of the Lord is always here, always ready to remove those shackles, often miraculously, and to have the gate of the prison open of its own accord allowing me to walk right out to freedom.  Like waking from a nightmare and being so relieved to realize that I was just dreaming. 

This is what God does.  For me at least.  God is the miracle worker, the angel who removes the chains and provides the light for me to able to walk out of the darkness.  It is a long walk  more often than not, and it is strewn with heartache and fear, but there is always freedom beyond the gate.  The writer of Acts knew that.  I know that.

God is.....

My wife and I enjoy reading the meditations of the late Rev. Oswald Chambers in his book My Utmost for His Highest each morning. (At least on the mornings when no alarm is set and we don't oversleep.)  The reading for January 9th turned out to be one of those thought provoking entries, in that it deals with the ubiquitous Holy Spirit and how it preserves us through the trials of life.  The key for us this morning was Rev. Oswald's instruction to read Psalm 139 in connection with his commentary. We did.

Psalm 139 is labeled in the The Harper Collins Study Bible, NRSV, as"The Inescapable God". The first 18 verses describe God as the all knowing, all seeing and all encompassing spirit.  "Where can I go from your spirit?", he asks, "..where can I flee from your presence?"  The psalmist makes the famous assertion that it was God who formed him and knit him together in his mother's womb, that it is God who laid out the plan of his days as written "In your book".  And finally comes the plea to "Search me, O God and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts."

There must have been something in the coffee this morning, because after this we picked up  Day by Day from the Forward Movement, and read in the meditation on Acts 19:2, "I much prefer the word Spirit to God.  The latter has been anthropomorhphized from an unseen but undeniable force into male qualities:  the white-haired old man and the blue-eyed suffereing son.  God is boxed into a certain form we think we can know and understand."

I believe that the Psalmist and the authors of today's meditations are all saying the same thing, and it is a thing I have felt to be true in my soul since the occurrence of the transforming moment of enlightenment I had as a youth-  We can never know or understand God on our terms, we can not put God in a box and claim to know who or what he really is.  God has made life as God is, and has made our understanding as it is- infinite and mysterious.  One knows there is God, but there is no way to define God with anything other than descriptions that are limitied by the number of nouns and adjectives we have in a our vocabulary.  A mystical experience, a sacremental moment, communion with the Holy Spirit, are things felt and experienced, but always inadeqately described.

The psalmist makes clear that God transcends anything we can know or think.  That God is part of everything, living and dead, animate, inanimate.  God is the air, the rocks and the sea; God is our thoughts, our happiness and our sadness.  God is the dark space between the stars and the planets. We are all a part of the fabric of God and God is a part of all that is, both seen and unseen. God knows us so well because we are all fundamentally the same, we are driven by the same inteligence, the same madness. 

Can anyone ever prove God?  Why is there a need to when God simply is?  Trying to make a literal being out of such an ephemeral concept is foolishness, and the results of such foolishness are always in our face, every day.  Look no further than the newspaper or the evening news.

God is.  I pray that we can allow him to be that.  Only then can we be like him.