Prayer of St. Francis

~St. Francis of Assisi

O Lord, make me an instrument of Thy Peace!
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is discord, harmony.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sorrow, joy.

Oh Divine Master, grant that I may not
so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Jill Carroll

American journalist Jill Carroll was safely released by her kidnappers today. I know I don't have to comment on what an answer to prayer this is or how nice it is to hear some good news finally.

But I was interested in this online prayer circle on Jill's behalf and thought it might make interesting reading.

In other news, this article is about my colleague's husband who will soon be headed for Iraq. God bless Caren and Tommy and their three children.

Just Because

I've only just noticed that Blogger has added a nifty little "upload photo" button, so I decided to try it out by sharing pear blossoms o' Mississippi.

All this time I've thought my friends who were indiscriminately uploading photos were very clever and had learned whatever that other software was that you used to have to download in order to post photos to Blogger. You know, that one I never bothered to figure out because it just looked annoying.

Spring is here. Take time to smell the blossoms and learn a new trick or two along the way.

Defragging

There is a process in Microsoft Windows (probably in other computer systems as well) called defragmentation in which extra space is freed up on a disk by moving all of the little pieces of files closer together. It's always seemed to me like people need defragging as well.

The condition of contemporary life is often fragmented. We put pieces of ourselves into our work, pieces into our families, pieces into our friends, pieces into our church, pieces into our interests, and pretty soon we feel like there's no room left on the disk. We're like Bilbo Baggins (to shift metaphors for a moment): "Thin, like butter spread over too much bread."

Sometimes the answer is to start deleting files. Sometimes we really are trying to stuff too much into one life. That's not always the case, however. Sometimes we just need to bring all those pieces of ourselves closer together. We need to be ourselves, our whole selves, no matter where we are or what we are doing.

My thought for the day.

A Prayer of Protection

Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather,
all over the Earth the faces of living things are all alike.
With tenderness have these come up out of the ground.
Look upon these faces of children without number
and with children in their arms
that they may face the winds
and walk the good road to the day of quiet.

- Black Elk (1863-1950)

Witness

by Denise Levertov

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

Earthly Treasures

Matthew 6 (NIV)

19"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
22"The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. 23But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
24"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.


Remember this? Remember the old no earthly treasure mandate? It was in my Sunday School lesson for this week, but I didn’t read it because I was too busy working on earthly pursuits.

I have been thinking about it after the fact, however.

I went to an academic conference this past week, which I found very invigorating. It was great to meet new people and hear new ideas. It was also nice to have a chance to spout a few of my own opinions and watch the immediate feedback bouncing right back to me. I met some people who are like the rock stars of my profession, and I got some positive attention for my own little efforts at being academically active, and it was all pretty cool.

Earthly treasures.

I can’t think of who really benefited from me being there other than me. Maybe my students will benefit some down the road from what I’ve learned. Maybe I was able to say something another teacher found useful, and her students will somehow benefit from it. Maybe the people I met will gain untold blessings from having gotten the chance to get to know me. We can play the fantasy through several stages. It’s just a little writing pedagogy ministry I have going.

Earthly treasures.

Here’s what I think, though, and I thank David and Perrin and a few others in my little rogue Bible study group for helping me see it this way. It’s not about keeping count. We all have our earthly callings. We all have to put in our time of rendering unto Caesar. What matters is just what matters to us.

These passages like, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth," are meant as prompts for self-reflection. Priority check time. As long as we remember to question our priorities from time to time…as long as we have a clear sense of where our loyalties belong and where our hearts belong…as long as we are giving of our time, money, and talents in ways we know to be spiritually true…we’re probably okay.

Sometimes we can and should use our earthly treasure for heavenly good. What matters is that the treasure itself is not what matters to us.

Living Lent

I stumbled across this nice post on this interesting blog.

The blog is by Amy Butler, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in D.C.

It looks like a church I would visit if I ever happened to be in the area. I didn't see any denominational affiliations on the web site, but I don't think they are Southern Baptist, what with the girl preacher and all that. Maybe CBF or ABC.

Anyhow, the girl preacher has some good things to say. I'd put her on my blog roll if I'd ever bothered to make one. :)

Thought for the Day

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

~Henry David Thoreau

Parable of Faith

by Louise Gluck


Now, in twilight, on the palace steps
the king asks forgiveness of his lady.

He is not
duplicitous; he has tried to be
true to the moment; is there another way of being
true to the self?

The lady
hides her face, somewhat
assisted by the shadows. She weeps
for her past; when one has a secret life,

one's tears are never explained.

Yet gladly would the king bear
the grief of his lady: his
is the generous heart,
in pain as in joy.

Do you know
what forgiveness means? it means
the world has sinned, the world
must be pardoned --

Count Your Happy Circumstances

Last week, I went to Austin, Texas for a conference. I drove out with a friend. We spent 20 hours in a car together, shared a room, and went to all of the conference events together without getting on each other’s nerves. That’s a pretty lucky event in itself, especially considering that we both tend to get a little wound up and a lot nervous before we have to do things like speak at academic conferences.

All along the way, though, we both kept pointing out how charmed we felt by how well everything was working out. We expected rain on the drive. It didn’t rain. We are both somewhat directionally challenged, yet we had no trouble getting there and back. Yes, okay, the drive was interstate the whole way, but we’re still taking credit. When we got there, we both ran into friends we hadn’t seen in years. Some of them we knew would be there; others we did not. We got to see lots of writers we admire. Several times when we thought we wouldn’t get to see someone we wanted to see because of schedule conflicts, that very same person would show up in another session unexpectedly. As it turned out our hotel was a just a nice walk away from the conference hotel, though we thought we’d have to drive or catch cabs in a strange city.

The whole trip was a series of happy circumstances, and we didn’t waste the chance to feel good about it in the least.

I believe there is a Divine Providence at work in our lives that takes care of us even when we do not know we need caring for. I believe there are times when we can just feel it happening even though we don’t exactly understand the whys or the hows.

I’ve spent a lot of time around cynical people. I’ve spent a lot of time in situations where taking pleasure in simple fortunes would be viewed as silly and/or not very bright.

But I’m here to tell you life is a whole lot better when we give ourselves permission to feel blessed, to be grateful for those simple fortunes and happy circumstances.

It’s been a hard year. My friend who rode with me to the conference lost her house, her car, and all of her belongings last August. Even if she chooses not to dwell on her problems, they are still looming right there, in plain sight, impossible for anyone to ignore. Still, she can give herself permission to feel blessed, to be appreciative of the simple gifts to be found in the middle of the struggles. If nothing else, that’s the lesson many of us here in Katrinaland have learned this year.

Give yourself permission to feel good about your happy circumstances. It won’t hurt you. Really. I promise.

The Enemy

This morning I heard a terrible banging and clanging racket in my house. As people do when they hear terrible rackets in their own homes, I hopped up to investigate. My cat was throwing himself repeatedly at a window. He was attacking his own reflection, and boy was he mad. His hair was standing on end. His ears were pulled back. He was growling and hissing and huffing (probably from having nearly knocked himself out several times).

How many times have you thrown yourself with all your might into fighting a perceived threat only to discover in the end the problem was you all along?

We all experience times when we don’t like what we see as we catch a glimpse of our own reflections. If we can manage to be a little less stubborn than a puffed up cat, though, we’ll realize lashing out doesn’t accomplish a thing...except perhaps a monster headache.

Giving is Receiving; Receiving is Giving

Sometimes when you won’t let people help you, you deprive them of a blessing.

~Larry Gerald

After my brother Keith’s wife was killed in a car accident, so many people offered to help that I think we all felt a little guilty about it. I have a large family, and we all wanted to keep busy. We didn’t feel like we should accept other people’s time and effort for things we could do for ourselves. That’s when my brother Larry reminded us that some of the people offering to bring food or to help out around the house probably needed to feel needed.

Self-sufficiency is a wonderful thing, and there’s just no substitute for a can-do attitude if we want to get ahead in life. Letting people help us isn’t always a bad thing, though. Life is about give and take, ebb and flow. Life without a giving spirit just isn’t worth much, but no one can hold up to being the giver all the time. And sometimes the best thing we can give is the opportunity for someone else to feel like he or she has something to offer.

Writing is Thinking; Thinking is Personal

I’ve been flipping through a Donald Murray book this morning in preparation for a conference I go to next week. It is a book I’ve read before, but it is one I’m always happy to pick up again. It’s not necessarily meant for entertainment, but it is pleasurable to me because it is about things that are close to my heart: writing and teaching.

Murray reminds us that “writing is thinking” (3). He quotes Peter Taylor: “Writing is how you discover what you think” (7).

These are pretty simple concepts, but they are profound to me. They are how I have lived my life. They are why I am writing this now.

Not everyone loves writing, but we do all need a place to think, a place to discover what we believe, what we care about, what our most important choices will be.

Writing is my sanctuary. It doesn’t matter to me whether I write for others or only for myself. Either way, it’s where I go to lay claim to my own thoughts—whether they be emotional, spiritual, academic, political, or social. They all become a very personal and reverent process for me as they move from the cluttered, chaotic stacks of information inside my head onto the page.

Everyone needs this. My father works in his garden and goes for long walks in the woods. My niece listens to music. My sister rearranges the furniture in her house. Some friends cook. Others shop. A few run or bicycle or do yoga. However we go about it, we all crave a place inside our own heads we can rely on, a place we can go to for decompression, a place where we can discover what we think and feel.

Because I teach writing classes, it is so important to remember this. It isn’t just about an academic skill. It is always personal. It is always sacred. Murray says writing is “a product of the interaction of the global and the particular” (5). It is also a product of the interaction between the persona we are willing to present to the world and the person we see when we look within.

I am about to start writing down what I will say about personal writing and composition students at the conference next week. This is what I will most likely not say. This is my discovery draft, my pre-writing, my warm up. This is where I am practicing what I will later preach.

In order to accomplish something real with writing, or with any decision making process, we have to first spend quality time in that place inside our own selves where we remember what is most important to us, where we understand what it is we honestly think.

Post-Christianity

I’ve heard a great deal lately about the post-Christian era. Everyone seems to be armed with statistics to prove that we either are or are not falling away from organized religion. Here in Mississippi I’ve witnessed both a falling away and a reemergence of the church. Some churches are dying. Others are thriving. Largely, however, we do live in a post-Christian society in which those actively practicing a personal faith are seen as misfits, artifacts of another age.

This begs the question, “What do we have to show for it?”

There is a country song with the line, “I don’t know why you are so angry all the time,” that almost seems to sum up society as a whole, not just one disgruntled wife. We have disallowed everything sacred other than self-esteem, and for that we are raising the Prozac Generation. People are angry and dissatisfied as a way of life. So many people have gotten themselves diagnosed with chemical imbalances and personality disorders as to almost render the terms meaningless. At what point are we allowed to say that people are suffering from character flaws rather than disorders beyond their own control?

People need something to believe in. They need something to work toward. This is human nature. Our psyches fall apart without a sense of where we belong, to whom we belong, and to what end.

Max Lucado’s latest book, Cure for the Common Life, says that people live in their “sweet spots” when they fulfill their own unique God-given purpose.

This kind of thinking in a post-Christian era usually results in people quoting Karl Marx: “Religion is the opium of the people.”

It is true, however, that there is a kind of satisfaction and fulfillment that can only come from living by what we believe in our hearts to be right.

Ask the volunteers who show up in disaster zones if they are happy. Ask a retired missionary who has lived her whole life in service to others if she is happy. Ask the father who coaches his daughter’s softball team despite the fact that he can ill-afford the time if he is happy.

No need to ask. We all know these people, and their faces are all the witness they require. We can see for ourselves that they are somehow exempt from the standard-issue angst of our time.

Perhaps religion is a drug. Perhaps we live in a world that has gotten too smart to fall for dogma. But as drugs go, dedication to a God-given purpose is far more effective than the army of anti-depressants now available at your local pharmacy.

Of course, there is a time and a place for everything, and I am not against seeking medical and/or psychological help as necessary. I’m just saying we can’t all be chemically maladapted. Some of us really do have character flaws. Some of us really are unhappy because we’ve made bad choices. Some of us really are dissatisfied because we have nothing to believe in. I’m just saying.

A Life Well Lived

A friend once asked me, “What is the reward for a life well lived?”

She was grieving. She had just lost a baby. She was questioning why she would be punished like that. She was asking why she would be asked to suffer so when she had done nothing to deserve it.

I didn’t know what to tell her. This is always a tough question, even more so during times of great grief. I’m afraid I was no help at all.

I have often pondered the question, though. Once I asked someone I thought might know. His answer to “the reward for a life well lived” was “a bigger house in Heaven.”

That answer seemed absurd to me and not the kind that would be of any help at all to a grieving mother. Do some people have bigger houses in Heaven? I don’t know. I do know that the safety of my family is far more important than the size of a house. I also know that, in my mind, houses and material riches have very little to do with the rewards that await us in eternity.

I went to a youth service with my niece after Katrina. The question came up of “Why do bad things happen?”

The youth minister answered, “We can’t always know why bad things happen, but we can always know that God is there for us.”

That seemed as good an answer as any to me. If we start trying to find something to blame for tragedy, soon we’ll start sounding like Pat Robertson, and nobody wants that.

As for the question of “the reward for a life well lived,” after years of pondering this I’ve come to the conclusion that the reward is “a life well lived.”

Most theologies I’ve been taught say that people who did not live good lives can and sometimes do find redemption in the end and get the same rewards in eternity as people who lived like Mother Theresa. Maybe that doesn’t always seem fair, but if we really have love and compassion in our hearts for others, we wouldn’t ask that they get what they deserve. We’d ask that they get the same mercy we want for ourselves.

A life full of bad choices and bad behaviors is punishment in itself, though. It is a life full of turmoil and instability. It is a life full of distrust and disconnectedness. It is a life full of consequences.

A life well lived is a gift in and of itself. It won’t shield us from tragedy, but it will bring us the strength to get through the bad times, and it will bring us peace and stability and trusting relationships with others. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

Thought for the Day

Honesty isn’t a policy at all; it’s a state of mind or it isn’t honesty.

~Eugene L’Hote

No One Gets Cheated

No one gets cheated by God.
~Phillip Reynolds

This is what I heard in church yesterday. I’m sure there were lots of other things said, but this is what I heard and what I continued to hear all day.

There are many things about my childhood among the Pharisees that I forget for long periods of time. Then someone says something so simple and innocent, and the floods come rushing back.

I had a friend when I was a child who was Lutheran. The day I discovered that Lutherans don’t believe you have to be saved to go to Heaven was a dark day for me. Even today I don’t actually know what Lutherans do believe, but I know that my friend didn’t know anything about going down to the altar at revival meetings and getting saved.

I said, “Daddy, she’s not ever going to believe she has to be saved because her parents have taught her she doesn’t. Will she still go to Hell even though she never had a chance?”

Daddy said yes. He was afraid so. The Bible said you had to be saved, and that was that.

To my horror, I then remembered the “if you never heard about it you get out of Hell free” rule. But that was already shot. I was the one who had told her about having to get saved. She had heard it. She wasn’t going to ever believe it. She was going to go to Hell because she didn’t believe it, and it was all my fault.

I hadn’t even gotten to junior high yet, and I was already sending my friends to Hell.

It was a dark day indeed.

Now they tell me, thirty years later and way too late to apologize to anyone for my tears and my pleading, that there is a theology that says no one gets cheated.

I have to admit that I don’t understand. I am here to learn.

This I Believe

My religion is kindness.

I first heard this from the poet Gwendolyn Brooks at a meeting I attended in Chicago some years ago. Later, I read that the Dalai Lama said it. He also said that "the best person to teach kindness is an enemy."

For years on end, while I was not going to church, I would repeat this as a kind of mantra when questioned about my beliefs—My religion is kindness.

It didn’t escape my notice that the lesson I learned via poets and Buddhist leaders had also been taught by Jesus.

“This is my commandment,” he said. “That you love one another as I have loved you. (John 15:12)

And, “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you.” (Matthew 5:44)

This I believe. We were put on this earth by our Creator to show as much kindness and love to others as is in our power, friends and enemies alike. Whether you are a Buddhist or a Baptist, if your religion is not kindness, you are doing it wrong. You have missed the whole point.

This I believe.

Dust Thou Art

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

This is from the Ash Wednesday service at my church last night. I learned some things there.

1) Lent is not just for Catholics.
2) Lent is an observance of Christ’s sacrifices, and that is why people sacrifice things in their own lives during Lent. It is a preparation for the observance of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.
3) Sundays don’t count during Lent. If I gave up Diet Cokes, I could drink them all day on Sundays if I wanted.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

This is obviously a lesson in humility. I’m not sure how I was supposed to take it, but this is how I did take it.

1) Instead of dwelling on yourself and your own life, take time to contemplate the vastness and greatness of all creation and be thankful for it.
2) This life on this earth is fleeting. There is nothing you can accomplish on your own to change that fact.
3) Whatever you have and whatever you are, it does not come from you but from your Creator.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Ash Wednesday

If yesterday was Fat Tuesday, today must be the first day of Lent. I’m not Catholic, but every year I feel the urge to give up something around this time of year. Usually, I want to give up something silly like Pixie Sticks or hearts of palm or something I probably wouldn’t have run across anyway. When I’m really serious about it, I’ll pick something like chocolate or Diet Coke. Usually, I fall short of actually promising the Lord to give up Diet Coke, though. Maybe I’ll promise the cat or a friend or two, but that’s as far as it goes. Still, I believe that making big promises about how we will change our lives for the better and really meaning them is something we all ought to do. I also believe this is a lifelong process, not just something to be done once and feel satisfied with.

When was the last time you devoted yourself, really devoted yourself, to cleansing your life of something harmful in a true and deliberate spirit of prayer and meditation?

Something worth thinking about.