Our work is loving the world...

Our work is loving the world. (from Mary Oliver)

Just look. Just touch. Just taste, just smell, just listen. Close your eyes and breathe and rest in gratitude that you have been given a mind and a heart and all these body-clothes. Rest in attentive silence, and I want you to feel the power of the collective meditation. It is not your meditation or mine. It is ours. Yours, mine, the children’s, the mockingbird’s, the clouds’, and the cicadas’. It is a blessedness of the spirit that we create by giving ourselves to it. This silence is a collaborative work of art.

Now, tell me, and be honest. I want you to hush the voices in your head that all the grown-ups said about how you are supposed to be humble, and extinguish the worse voices that said in no uncertain terms not only are you not so great, but you're damaged goods. Lock all the grown-up voices in the small, dark closet of your fear and leave them there. Don’t you know, in your heart of hearts. that in the fairy tale world you are the princess or the handsome prince who rescues her with a kiss?

In the fairy tale world did you ever cast yourself as anyone other than Cinderella or Prince Charming? Not a one of us ever said, "I think I identify with the second ugly stepsister, or the stringy coachman, or even the fairy godmother." No, we know we are the star. Maybe you were a changeling, the child who must have been switched at birth and you grew up in the wrong family when of course you were the son or daughter of the king and queen, who have been longing for you ever since the day you vanished. Even though we trudge through life, emptying the ashes from the fireplace, battling the endlessly annoying beasts that block our paths, don’t we all know that the loving reunion is just past the turn in the path, just over the horizon or at the far edge of the forest?

See, is the message of the Bible all that different from fairy tales? We are God’s own beloved. Our resemblance is obvious once we see the family pictures. And there is no question about it. Our place is set at the table. The sheets are turned down on our beds. Our crowns and robes are waiting for us and the king stands on the porch all night every night scanning the horizon for our arrival. I know I've said it before, but I believe all the gospel is contained in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Even if we've been hanging out with the pigs and haven't had time to change our clothes or shower, there is nothing we can do that makes us anything less than the crown prince or princess. Nothing that will keep our loving parent from wrapping her arms around us. The kingdom is ours and the Lord wants us to delight in it.

Obviously, I am talking about all of us, so that means that the kingdom is the ultimate work of art that we create together, all of us, with the Creator of all. We are sensible enough to know we can't do much on our own. Even the most self-sufficient of us knows that we rely on others for much of what sustains us. We are all parts of the 'luminous web' of creation, and our individual gifts are like the fragments of glass that tumble and are rearranged when a kaleidoscope is turned. What we have to bring to this art is bright and fragmented and necessary for the composition of the whole.

How you are exploring yourself and your world and discovering that the boundary between them is porous.  It is astonishing to admit that we can never ever see our own faces except in reflection. I can see myself only in two-dimensional form in a mirror or photograph and know that that is not how others see me. I can't be myself except in relation to those who know me, and of course it is God alone who knows us truly. I imagine you'll soon see the presence of others, the other authors of our lives, who may be unaware that they are shaping our narratives as we participate in shaping theirs.

We are all collaborators, then, consciously or not, and of course it is raising our awareness that awakens us to make choices with design and foresight. To collaborate in art and in life may be as graceful as a dance. We bring our energy and presence and move in harmony with the other.

We guide and are guided. We are careful not to step on each other's toes. We become ever more sensitive to what our partner has to share, and that in turn fills the well of what we have to offer.

I remember being at the great cathedral of Chartres, a monument to collaboration, built in the 12th and 13th centuries. Even the name of the architect is unknown, let alone the stonemasons or glaziers of the most incredible windows in the world. It was a gray October Sunday afternoon and the bells were pealing and the guard at the entrance told us we could not go inside because it was time for worship. We immediately transformed ourselves from tourists into pilgrims and were admitted to what turned out to be the ordination of a priest. For three long hours we worshiped. The procession was 200 bishops, priests, and deacons long, and the litany of the saints was ecstatically interminable, and the great vaults were filled with music and incense and prayer.

And it was all about this one man, but it wasn't. It was about all of us. It was about all holiness that is encased in flesh and breath and life. It was about the laborer who put that triangle of blue glass in Mary's dress, the one who carved the lamb in David's arms, the Englishman who has been giving tours every morning at eleven o'clock for fifty years now, and the clueless tourists who just show up not knowing what to expect.

And it is about going with Plan B. Working with the variables of the world, our visions are not always feasible. What we see or hear in our minds and hearts may be beyond the craft of our hands, or our partner may have two left feet or possibly two left wings.

We come, ready to give what we have to give, but -- and it is a lesson we learn over and over -- we are not in charge, none of us, and yet God invites us to this dance. God accepts our gifts and our initiatives. It is about us and it is not about us and it is about us. As William Butler Yeats writes in "Among School Children,"

Labor is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Summer Sundays

8-3-12

This is the first church in which I felt God's presence.


To this day I can smell the fragrance of the balsam, the dried needles we collected from the forest floor and sewed into calico cushions to take home with us for the winter.
I can hear the rustle of the birch leaves and the calls of the birds that woke us in the mornings and the owls and loons that sang us to sleep. And the bugles that told us the time of day and signaled to us the presence of the boys camp across the lake.

My mother took my brother and sister and me to St. Paul's on most Sundays, but the thing that made the biggest impression on me was the General Confession in which we claimed that we were miserable offenders and that there was no health in us. Sunday School was OK, but I didn't love church.

But at camp on Sunday mornings we began with special breakfast...pancakes or waffles or blueberry muffins served in the open-sided dining hall as the mist rose off the lake, where we'd free swim later in the day, and later, dressed in our crisp green shorts and white blouses, we'd go to the Quarry, where older campers and counselors would lead us in worship. What must it have sounded like to hear all those little girls' voices singing 'Oh, master let me walk with thee,' and 'This is my father's world'?

Camp, unlike home and school, was not a place of shoulds and oughts and reminders of all the ways in which I fell short, whether it was my hair being unruly (which it was) or my room being messy (which it was) or there being something wrong with me because I was not an extravert like my mother. Camp was a place of acceptance, where I learned I could sing and was given the role of YumYum in The Mikado. It was a place of wonder, each day beginning with a question to be explored in the nature hut. It was a place of possibilities, where I could weave a basket and paddle a canoe and hike to a granite quarry and read to my heart's content during rest time.

I remember a few of the names of other campers. Clare Morison. Marcia Whitney. Anne Ogden. Pat Latimer. I wonder where they are now. I wonder if they treasure these memories as I do. Whether they do or not, we were very much in that sacred circle together.