God’s Porch

If you just lost everything in a fire
If the floods have taken it all away
If the diagnosis is worse
than anything you imagined
If the pain just won’t let up

If you are afraid for the life
of your grown-up child
If you can’t keep a baby growing
If your failing parent is far far away
And you can’t afford to travel

If you spend every day in the car outside
the worksite of your toddler’s father
singing to the baby and praying each moment
that ICE won’t come today

If you are hiding in the hills with no place to go
because the trailers for the workers
burned down

If you can’t go outside
without some jerk shouting comments
about every aspect of your body

If you fear for your life
when you see a police car
If you fear for the life of your son

If you worry every day
about what kind of world
this is for raising your children
If you’re scared of the man
with his hand on the button
If you’re afraid of what’s happening
to your marriage

Come to my house.

Come sit on the porch a while.

Look up at the trees. Listen to the quiet.
Allow peace to enter your heart.
A dragonfly darts to and fro above the yard
and butterflies silently flutter.
Hummingbirds drink from the feeders
and bees work in the clover.

There are wind chimes of metal
and one of bamboo
and they sway
sometimes sounding
in the breeze.

Come sit on the porch,
or lie down if you prefer.
We have many different kinds of chairs.
Breathe in the sweet air.
Gaze up into blue sky.
See the bright colors of the zinnias.

I will bring you something
delicious to drink
and if it is cool I will tuck you in
with a blanket

You can lie back and rest and relax
And just leave it all to me.

My love will wrap around you
and you will know you are safe
and nothing will ever hurt you
again.

Come sit on the porch a while.
Come on up and rest.

I am here waiting
just
for you.

Strawberries

strawberry-1453283_640

A perfect strawberry, Farmer Robert says,
is red all over.
No green,
no white anywhere,
not even on the point.
It is a full,
bright
RED.
Shape and size do not matter.

The perfect strawberry
is picked,
fully ripe,
from its parent plant.
To find it
you must crawl through the dirt on your knees
seeking for bright red fruit
in nests of green leaves.

Some strawberries are tricky
tantalizing you with a bright shiny top
but when you turn them over
you find blotchy orange underneath,
or white or even a green hard place
at the tip of the fruit.
On these you must pass.
They will come into their own in time.

I would hold communion
out here in the strawberry patch.
All of us kneeling in the warm soil,
bright sun overhead.

Gently placing a strawberry
in each pair of cupped hands,
I would say,
“The Body of God.
The Body of God.
The Body of God.”
And we would all take, and eat.

 

Beloveds:  By popular demand, this poem comes out every spring,  with the strawberries.  In my garden they are just now perfectly ripe.  May you too taste the Body of God in the fruit of your choice, and may the juice run down your chin.

Her Wild, Wild Beauty

For Rebecca

(Beloveds: You have seen this before, but it is my favorite spring poem, and I wanted to share it again.)

 

I met God again at the river today.

Not in one of Her more glamorous guises,
only as an alder tree.

Only a plain simple alder tree
crouching by the water—you know how they do—
reaching out to dip its lower branches in
with new spring leaves fully unfurled.

Not even a very big alder tree
just a simple small one,
and I contemplated the simplicity of God:
the way God is just there
all the time
in the background
making oxygen
so we can breathe.

And then four swallows swooped in
and rose up
and swooped and dived
and rose up again
in ecstatic aerial ballet

And then a pair of mergansers flew
wings pumping fast and hard
across my line of sight

And then a redbud tree
extravagantly decorated in deep pink blossom
waved its branches a little
and the bright orange poppies
demurely nodded their heads

And I could no longer contemplate
the simplicity of God
but only Her wild, wild beauty.

 

Incarnation

It has been said
that when Jesus was born
God became flesh
and dwelt among us…

but God is always present here.

The mystery of incarnation
is not that it happened once
but that it happens in every moment,
a continual process
of which all beings are part.

If you don’t believe me,
look at the black-haired baby
crawling on the floor
in her little red tutu:
she beams when she reaches
someone she loves
and stands with a mighty effort.

Behold the young girl
who has gathered hundreds of blankets
to give to those with no shelter.

Watch the expressions
on the faces of the children
as they pass the light
from candle to candle.
Watch the faces of the wrinkly elders
as they watch the lovely children.

And when you go out
into the dark cold night
and you hear Owl calling
or see Coyote slip by
in the moonlight
shining on the trees

you will know
that God is always present here.

God, Being

Look, there…

Among the dry stones
rainwater has collected
into a pool.

A single yellow leaf
floats on the surface.

The stones are round
from a thousand years’ travel together.

The water is perfectly clear.

Look.
Do you see?

None of this was arranged just for you.

Stones, water, leaf…

They have been doing this
since the beginning of time
and they will continue
until the end.

This is God, being.

You can walk on,
unaware…

or you can stop, and
wade in.

Not the Opposite of Life

Aditi by Peg Green

I have a joyful story to share with you today.  Some years ago, my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer.  Three years after that, she died.  Whoa, whoa, back up, stop.  You might be wondering if you heard me right.

“What did she say?  Her grandmother ?  Her grandmother died of cancer?”

“How could that possibly be a joyful story?  Should this person be a minister, this woman who can so cheerfully announce the death of a loved one, from an illness so dreadful?  Is she crazy?”

Well, I might be crazy, but if I am, I got it from my grandmother.  My grandmother’s given name was Helen, but starting in her mid-seventies, she went by a different name, Pam, because she liked having a secret identity.  What my friends used to say when they met her was, wow, she’s a real character.  She was kind of like Lucille Ball, and Auntie Mame, and a slender Mae West all rolled up into one.  I can’t tell you how old she was when she died because according to her, a lady never reveals her age, but at that very advanced age, she was absolutely beautiful, with bright orange hair and a perfect figure.  She was an elementary school teacher, but people were always asking her, “Were you On Stage?”–in capital letters—because she was so dramatic, and so gifted at making people laugh, and she knew so much poetry by heart.

For about ten years, Pam lived in a retirement community a mile from my home. Friends told me how lucky I was to have such a vibrant woman as my role model for old age.  What they didn’t know was that for as long as I can remember, my grandmother went around neighborhoods and peered into other people’s windows when they weren’t home.  She also picked flowers from their yards!  And while my friends heard her recite Shakespeare and Robert Frost, they did not hear her repertoire of dirty limericks, nor her poems of horror.  Here’s one of her favorites:  “Love to eat them mousies, mousies what I love to eat, bite they little heads off, nibble on they tiny feet.”

And none of my friends ever knew Pam’s greatest secret, which I received her permission to reveal after she was diagnosed with cancer.  For the last twelve years of her life, what Pam wanted most in this world was to die, or as she put it, to “shuffle off this mortal coil.” She hated being old.  She missed her late husband.  For all her bright wit and beauty, she was depressed.

When this started, my mother was alarmed.  She took my grandmother to the doctor and they got her on antidepressants.  After a while Pam felt a bit less depressed, but the conversation about wanting to die stayed the same.   She put “DO NOT RESCUSCITATE” signs up all over her apartment, and made sure she had a copy of her DNR paperwork taped to her refrigerator.   She researched the Hemlock Society.  She researched methods of suicide.  She joined the ACLU so she could fight for the right to die.  She repeated at every opportunity:  “he yearns for immortality who doesn’t know what to do with himself on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

But here’s the strange thing.  During all those years, every time Pam’s heart rate got too high, or she fell, or got very sick, she called me in a panic and demanded to go to the emergency room.  She had dozens of near-death experiences, and she lived through every one.  She could have simply let go, but she did not.  Instead, she continued to loudly lament living.  I remember once when my then-college-age son and daughter visited her, and she brought out her scrapbook of information on how to commit suicide.  There the two tall kids sat, one on either side of their dear great-grandmother, nodding attentively, as she explained the helium method of dying.

Then, in 2009, my grandmother began to take to her bed for days at a time.  She gave up many of her activities because she had no energy.  My mother took her in for some tests, and we learned that she had between six months and two years to live.

With this terminal diagnosis, my grandmother bounded out of bed and resumed most of her activities.  When hospice came to meet with our family, they asked her where the patient was.  Soon, I could hardly get hold of her because she was so busy, and she said she had more energy than she’d had in years.

So this is why the terminal diagnosis was good news:  My grandmother was finally getting what she wanted.  She was going to die.  And we, her long-suffering family, began to cherish each moment we had with her.  We began to see her foibles not as unbearable, but quirky.  And best of all, once my grandmother knew that she was really and truly dying, she began to love her life.

This simple truth is at the heart of many religious teachings about life and death.  Francois de la Rochefoucauld said:  “You cannot stare into the face of the sun, or death.”[1] But religion—our religion–tells us that while staring into the face of the sun would blind us, staring directly at death can instead deepen and clarify our vision.

Death is something many people deeply fear.  Some fear it so much that they refuse to think about it or to acknowledge it will actually happen to them.  They won’t sign up for life insurance or make wills or advance directives or do anything that might bring death closer to their consciousness.

Others go to the opposite extreme and obsess over death, spending their nights sweating with anxiety.  This is particularly prone to happen when we get a strange test result, or develop a new health issue.

There is a simple reason for our fear:  the reptilian part of our brain.  Actually, both the reptilian brainstem, and the mammalian limbic system, are programmed to do all they can to keep us alive.  That’s why my grandmother used to go to the emergency room every time she was in trouble.  That ancient, instinctive fear is what makes it so hard for us to look directly at death.  But as long as we avoid the topic of death, especially our particular death, the fear prevents us from living fully.  Only if we confront it squarely can we overcome our fear and truly live.

How do we do that?  How do we learn to stare death in the face without flinching?

Well, there are many things we can do.  All of them may seem morbid to people who normally avoid thinking about death, but in fact they are anything but.

One is to be present at the deaths of others.  In this way we learn everything we can about what death looks like up close and personal; we learn that death, like birth, is a sacred transformation.

Another is to celebrate autumn festivals like Samhain, and Dia de los Muertos, in which we invite those who have died before us to join us in celebrating their lives.  When we join in these kinds of celebrations, we begin to understand that death is not truly the end of anyone.

A third thing we can do, and the one I really want to focus on today, is a particular spiritual practice around death.  It’s common to most of the religions of the world, though it takes a slightly different form in each.  This is contemplating the moment of death.

Episcopal priest Alan Jones writes:

“In my tradition we try to practice dying every day so that we may be fully alive.  What I understand of my prayer life is to place myself on the threshold of death, to participate in my dying, so that I may live each day and each moment as a gift.  What I cultivate is a grateful heart; each moment then becomes a new thing.  My gratitude comes from the sheer gift of life itself.”[2]

Joanna Macy, Buddhist teacher and ecological activist, explains:

“To confront and accept the inevitability of our dying releases us from triviality and frees us to live boldly.  Meditation on the twofold fact that ‘death is certain,’ and ‘the time of death is uncertain’…  jolts us awake to life’s vividness, its miraculous quality, heightening our awareness of the beauty and uniqueness of each object and each being.”[3]

Now, if we are going to meditate on our death, or practice dying, this means imagining what happens to our consciousness at that moment.   This is where our theology comes in, or our idea of ultimate reality.

In my experience, some ideas about ultimate reality are helpful when it comes to death and some are not.  I worked as a chaplain for a year, in a hospital where many people died.  I noticed that the people most afraid of dying were fundamentalist Christians whose idea of God was that vengeful deity who would condemn some people to hell.  The people who were least afraid were Buddhists, and Christians whose concept of God was all loving.

Buddhists hope to achieve nirvana, the state of enlightenment in which the ephemeral self disappears.  Why should the disappearance of self be desired?  Because it disappears as a separate, fearful, grasping thing, into oneness with all that is: from small and limited it becomes infinite. But if the Buddhist does not achieve nirvana, he or she is reborn as another being with another chance to achieve enlightenment.  So there is nothing to fear.

Many Christians who believe in an all-loving God believe that at death, they will become one with God, meaning they will rest in a love so large that it holds all that is.  We might say this is another way that the small self disappears, into the infinite Self of God.  This is what our Universalist ancestor Hosea Ballou taught:  that at the moment of death, all people are immediately united with God, which is love.  All pain, all sorrow, all illness vanishes as we are welcomed into infinite love.

My own understanding of ultimate reality is informed by my life experience as an ecologist and mystic.  It falls somewhere between the perspectives of religious naturalism and process theology.  Religious naturalism says our starry universe and this living planet are worthy of reverence for their own sake.  It says that when we die, our molecules disperse into the larger universe and become available for the creation of new life, and that this is such an astounding and beautiful thing that we need not look for any further meaning.

But I am also a mystic, and I often experience the universe as having not just more meaning, but consciousness.  At those times I lean toward process theology.  Process theology is a union of contemporary physics and mysticism.  It says the universe is alive, in a constant process of becoming. What some people call “God” is the creative, generative love that animates the universe and is its consciousness; the universe is the Body of God.  Humans and all other beings are members of this body and this consciousness, so that we are in God and God is in us.  We ourselves are ever in process, changing from one moment to the next, influenced by and influencing all other beings.  Thus we are co-creators of all that is.

In process theology, our death is merely a change from one being-state to another:  when we die, the energy and matter of our bodies, as well as our consciousness, are gathered back into the larger whole, which continues to body forth in new and beautiful forms.  Life and death are two halves of a cycle, neither of which is possible without the other.

This is the way of things, here, within the divine body:  each time something dies, something new begins.  This is the great and sacred mystery.

All of these ways of understanding the moment of death—Buddhist, Christian, religious naturalism, process theology, — all have something in common.  This is a deep knowing that we are part of something larger than ourselves, so that when we die, instead of being forever separated from all we love, we actually become forever part of it.

So, far from being morbid or life-denying, practices of looking death in the face are deeply life-affirming.  This is why nearly every indigenous culture in the world has a festival like the Day of the Dead, and why nearly every religion recommends contemplating death.

So I invite you to try this practice.  Put on some soft music, or go out to a sacred place, and meditate on the moment of your death.  Practice dying.  Imagine what happens at each step.  Imagine your self dissolving into a love, or a consciousness, or a starry universe so vast you cannot comprehend it.  In doing this, may you be freed from fear.  May you be awakened to the vivid beauty of this life.  And may you seize the time you have to live boldly.

May it ever be so.

[1] De La Rochefoucauld, Francois, as quoted on p. iii in Yalom, Irvin D., Staring at the Sun:  Overcoming the Terror of Death.  (San Francisco, California, Jossey-Bass, 2008, 2009.)

[2] Jones, Alan, p. 23 in Stillwater, Michael, and  Gary Remal Malkin, (eds.)  Graceful Passages: A Companion for

Living and Dying. (Novato, California, Wisdom of the World, Inc., 2003.)

[3]Macy, Joanna, and Molly Young Brown, p. 187 in Coming Back to Life:  Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World.  (Vancouver, Canada, New Society Publishers, 1998.)

Let It Shine

Sometimes despair creeps in during the night and I wake to a world from which all hope and possibility have vanished.  It feels as if the sky is roiling with clouds that blot out all light.  At those times I long to pray to the God of my childhood, that omnipotent deity who could make everything better if only He chose, if only enough of us prayed hard enough to move His heart.  I long to say, “Dear God in Heaven, help us.  Won’t you help us, please, our world is coming apart.  The people in power have something wrong with them and they are destroying everything.”

I long for a ray of light to suddenly come down through the clouds in response, moving across the face of the earth and healing and repairing everything it touches: the burned hills, the war zones, the polluted waters, the dying animals, the shriveled hearts of the people who have brought us to this pass, the broken hearts and bodies of the people whom they have harmed.  In its wake the light would leave green meadows and trees and whole mountains, clear rushing streams and lakes and rivers, plentiful singing whales and smiling turtles and giraffes and polar bears, laughing children with their loving parents, leaders of all genders who nurture and protect life, humans of all shapes and sizes and colors dancing together and singing.

Oh, how I long for this with every fiber of my being.  Yet the only way such repair can occur is if we ourselves take charge of it.  We are the ones whose hearts must be moved.  We ourselves must be God’s hands; we ourselves must beam God’s light out into the world to heal it.

This is a lot to ask of people who are weary and sad and afraid.  It is a lot to ask of people who can see how very many things are wrong and how very little each one of us can do.

But we are not alone, because God is not somewhere far away.  God is not an omnipotent being who is separate from us. God is the force of life that moves in and through us and in all beings, which we feel in our hearts as love, and which calls us, always, toward healing.

The force of life is so powerful that a tiny seed can sprout into a shoot that grows right through pavement and becomes a plant that breaks the pavement as if it were nothing at all. Love is so powerful that it can survive anything, even death.  All we need do is align ourselves with life and with love.  All we need do is let God move in us and through us, and God’s light will shine from us, and we will indeed heal the world.

Singing

Spirit of Life,
You who rise greening in our hearts
as well as in the vines of zucchini plants:

Now is a time of great abundance,
when fruits and vegetables of every kind
are piled in great heaps in the markets.

Queen Anne’s Lace blooms in the meadows,
the clear pools of the river beckon,
and the trees are so fragrant
we want to gulp in the delicious air.

Yet fire season has already begun
taking the homes and lives of many beings,
little children are still crying for their parents,
and many we love are sick and in pain.

Help us know that
this is the way of things here,
on this little blue planet
hurtling through the vast starry deeps:
there is always both at once.

Both ravishing beauty and terrible suffering,
both immense joy and agonizing pain,
both glorious celebration and overwhelming grief.

Help us know that whatever we are experiencing
You are with us, whatever we call You—
Love, God, Universe, or no name at all—

for You are the love that binds all wounds
dries all tears
and frees all who are captive
and You are right here in our hearts
singing.

Blessed be.

Artwork: Aditi – Goddess of the Boundless Sky by Peg Green

This Great Throng of Life

Spirit of Life, source and ground of our being:

The days come early and stay late now
their colors blue and green,
their fragrance rose and peony and jasmine.
The evenings are long with golden light
slanting through leaves and across fields.
The fluting call of a thrush
descends from high in the trees
and at night the frogs and the crickets
sing of love.

The beauty is so great
it near stops our hearts
and yet at the very same time
little children are being torn from their parents
teens are being shot in their schools
unarmed protestors are being massacred
and sea levels continue to rise.
The list goes on and on.

Spirit of Life, Love that holds all,
we need you now.
It is long past time for us
to pour out into the streets
and do what needs to be done.

And yet we are afraid.
You call us and call us
and we are afraid.

Help us remember Moses.

When G*d called him to lead his people
out of slavery
Moses was afraid
and said he couldn’t do it.
“I don’t speak well,” he said.
“I don’t know how to lead.”
G*d did not say
“Go do it by yourself!”
G*d said
“Then take your brother Aaron.”

Help us remember this
when we hear you calling
and we are afraid:
we do not have to do it alone.

You are with us
and so are all the beings
of this beautiful earth:
the blue skies and the green trees
the fragrant flowers and the birds
the crickets and the frogs
the children with their shining eyes
and our many friends and companions.

In this great throng of life
we are never alone
and we have more than enough power
to be the change we seek.
Help us rise up.

It is time.

Blessed be.

Gathered Here In One Strong Body

If you notice one thing, notice this:
they are not alone.

They stand surrounded by their friends.
Their hands are intertwined.
Their arms are around one another.
They are crowded together,
all different kinds:
some girls and some boys
and some who are in between
and some who are none of the above
and they stand body to body.

When one speaks,
the others stay close.
They hold each other up.
They are all together.
They have gathered here
and they are strong
and they are bringing change
and this is how God moves
in this world.

(Photo from JustJared)