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A Musing Amma

~ Gathering the pieces of our lives together under the eyes of the Holy

A Musing Amma

Category Archives: creation

Take Delight–in Creation

13 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by Elizabeth Nordquist in creation, delight, paying attention, praise, Uncategorized

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creation, delight, paying attention

Lent I==All creation cries!

A group of us reflected this week on knowing God through creation and how it is leading us to a deeper and wider connection with everything that God has made. We did this in readiness for being open to what we are invited, even mandated, to do for the sake of the created world. We had planned to go on retreat to a nature preserve, but the weather (yes, even here in Southern California!) was cold, gloomy, and even though it wasn’t raining, the threats seems imminent. We huddled in my living room over hot drinks and coffeecake at first, shared times when the Holy One had seemed very present to us in nature–the sacred places, the “aha” moments, the times when out of doors, when the Spirit gobsmacked us with Mystery and Grace! Then we went into silence, with the choice to go outside, parkas, shawls and all, to encounter holiness! As we reassembled, the energy was palpable–the ornamental plum trees, the birds chirping, the bee, tracing his bee-like way through the blue flowers, and the spent camellia with a yellow leaf and abandoned twig making a collage for the focus of our contemplation and prayer–all had called us into love, wonder and praise for the Creator.

Then, as if we had not been bathed in praise already, as one of our number drove home, she was showered with a migration of a host of Painted Lady butterflies, on their way north. Another person encountered them farther on, and then another, and the next morning, as I sat in my living room, I watched them parade for over an hour on their appointed route to the north. Amazing!

Several traditions tell us that God is revealed to us both in sacred text and in nature. I felt that I had encountered the Holy in a number of ways in the created world. Certainly I observed the Beauty–of color, shape, variety, process, growth, texture. And I felt the way that Beauty–in all of it manifestations–activated and sharpened my senses, in the words of the hymn, “tuning my heart to sing God’s praise!” But, I also felt some of the teaching of God through nature in the metaphors it offered–the connected-ness of the vines, the cycle of rising and falling, blooming and dying. I found that John Calvin, Reformer and pastor had said, “As soon as we acknowledge God to be the supreme Architect, who has erected the beauteous fabric of the universe, our minds must necessarily be ravished with wonder at his infinite goodness, wisdom and power.” (cited in Easter Gospel, by Sam Hamilton-Poore).

So this week for Lent I am taking delight in God’s earth, as I walk, go places, peer out my windows, with two questions: 1) what am I seeing about the creativity of the Holy One? and 2) how am I being invited to steward this web of creation of which I am apart? Taking Delight! Indeed!

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The Turn of the Year

06 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Elizabeth Nordquist in beauty, body, creation, grace, gratitude, Mindfulness, Mystery, paying attention, presence

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gratitude, mystery, peace, seeing

coloradoaspens

Two years ago as the season turned from summer to fall, I was driving through Colorado and northern New Mexico, and saw the stunning harbingers of the season in the forests of aspens.

plazaresort

Last year as the summer became fall I was on the west coast of Florida to see my children, the beauty of a completely different order, serenity of a different hue and promise.

These summer and fall seasons I have felt sidelined from the turning of the season because of surgery and recovery. I watch as the children go back to school through my front window. I follow the many adventures of my friends and colleagues as they take their sojourns to exciting or exotic locations. I notice that committees and kick-off events are happening without me. Since here in Southern California there are not critical changes in the weather, I look up our current predictions for the day, all usually well within the temperate zone, which tell me that Fall has come.

But my focus is here where I am, with the resources that I have this moment, looking over the place where I have been planted.

backyardlabyrnth

It is a lovely place, a place of stability that I have been given to savor and to share, even as the world turns. It has many moments of deep stillness, a capacity to invite and enjoy host of beloved ones or just one. I have a window to the street and another window to the sunrise. Many birds visit, along with our dog, the squirrels and the occasional unwelcome possum. I live in God’s world, as well as God’s season, God’s time, God’s rhythm. I have been reminded again in this season of relative confinement that it is all Grace, and that the only appropriate response to Grace is gratitude–for bringing me safe this far–in Love, in Beauty, in Joy. So let the season turn–in me, around me!

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The Green Spirit

15 Sunday May 2016

Posted by Elizabeth Nordquist in blessing, creation, earth, gratitude, Mystery, reflection, refreshment, renewal, Spirit

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Holy Spirit, Maren Tirabassi, Rebecca Button Prichard

images-4And so Pentecost comes! Traditionally the liturgical colors are red with yellow, reflecting the fire that alighted on the heads of the faithful in Act’s story of that event, signifying the illumination and power of the Holy Spirit. But Maren Tirabassi, contemporary liturgist and prophet, has called our attention to the fact that in some circumstances, this year, for instance, flame and wind are not positive and encouraging symbols; in the case of the horrendous fire in Alberta, Canada, and in other places around our planet, fire is only a force for destruction and devastation. So she in her winsome and provocative blog, Gifts In Open Hands, has lifted up other metaphors for the Holy Spirit. Her musings immediately pointed me to that earlier medieval liturgist and prophet, Hildegard of Bingen.

From one of her visions Hidegard sees God declare:

I am the breeze that nurtures all things green…I am the rain coming from the dew that causes the grass to laugh with joy of life…I am the yearning for the good.

It is the greenness of the Spirit I am longing for this year. Dr. Rebecca Button Prichard in her book Sensing the Spirit (Chalice Press, 1999), says:

The Spirit of greenness is visible in a way that transcends metaphor, analogy and imagery. The Creativity that causes leaves to unfold and buds to flower is the Creator Spirit, the One who broods over creation still. (50)

So many people and places in life I encounter need the greening from the Spirit inside to bring life back, to bring healing throughout, to spring back into fruitful encounter with the Holy and the world. And I feel the need of it in places in me. I often pray that poetic voice of T.S. Eliot, “Oh, thou Lord of Life, send my roots rain!”

I am looking at new plantings of a more drought resistant grass in the small patch of lawn in my back yard. They are bright green as they take root, and they need much less water than our previous sward. They remind me of places where I would invite the Spirit to bring her nurture into greenness–my energy for coming alongside others, my patience for sitting still and listening as the Holy One speaks, my perseverance in doing those things that will bring good for others, now and in the future, my openness to hearing, seeing and sensing what is new. I would love my life of prayer to become jade green, shining and gem-like in its consistency and beauty. I would like to wander down forest green paths of Mystery that I have not yet discovered. I pray that my encounters with those I meet be bright kelly green, sparking with mutual compassion and  appreciation. The colors of all life will be brightened with a fresh infusion of the greening of the Spirit.

After this Eastertide past with equal shares of Light and Darkness in our world, I find myself needing to sing this hymn for Easter and beyond:

Now the green blade rises from the buried grain, wheat that in the dark  earth many days has lain; love lives again, that with the dead has been: love is come again like wheat arising green.

When our hearts are wintry, grieving or in pain, your touch can call us back to life again; fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been: love is come again like wheat arising green. (John M.C. Crum, 1928)

Come, Holy Spirit, green my heart!

Image created by Marcy Hall for Abbey of the Arts

Lent 2: Discovering the Goodness of Creation

23 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by Elizabeth Nordquist in beauty, creation, discovery, earth, Lent, Mystery

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creation, earthliness, Lent

yellowflowers

As I continue to follow the recommendations of the reflections of Joyce Rupp, I am practicing another the emphases of Celtic spirituality this week–discovering the goodness of Creation. She suggests “listening to creation,” pausing to look at what you see, finding something new to you, and letting creation reveal its deeper meaning. This is much more challenging to me than last week’s call to see God’s presence in the ordinary, in my case blessing each of my children morning and night. I seem, either by nature or nurture, to need to work at connecting with creation.

I have been working hard at trying to engage what Calvin calls the “second book of revelation,” the natural world, and so this invitation to a focused practice is welcome, though not easy. However, I have received a gift that has made the practice more central in this past year which is the installation and blossoming of a drought-resistant garden in our front yard. We chose to embark upon this project for practical reasons: the merciless drought in Southern California has frightened and threatened us all. We have been given standards by which we need to decrease our water usage, and have been seeking ways to be good stewards of the water we do have. The garden took longer to install and cost more than we first estimated, despite the rebate that came from the state government. Yet what has developed where our lawn used to be is a constantly unfolding display of wonder and beauty. Under the tutelage of the marvelous Merilee, a garden designer, we were able to create and execute a garden that not only saves water for our parched land, but gives us examples of the ways that God’s mercies are new every morning, much to our surprise.

It begins in the dark. It is full of surprise. I am never sure when I go to bed at night what I will find in the morning that has blossomed. During Advent our purple bearded iris on the south patch kept us entranced with a new bloom almost every day, a continual parade of glory from one violet sentinel to the next. Now in Lent the white iris on the north side sheltered by the salvia has begun the same array, one blossom per day; is it marching us toward Easter?

The variety seems infinite. Just when I think I have noticed each plant and flower, another one emerges in shape and color utterly different than the one next to it. What are those little neon green capsules all in a row? What are those tall drapy red leaves in a bush? What color are those tiny florets hiding behind that prominent plant? Creation, when I focus my attention, has more manifestations of beauty and design than I can count.

I continue to be challenged by beauty. I have long known that I am “buoyed by beauty,” a phrase that I read in a narrative describing my beloved isle and community of Iona in Scotland. But my own little clusters of drought-resistant plants in front of my house keeps expanding my definition of what beauty is–not only vivid color, now only shapely fronds, not only striking succulents–but odd outcroppings, angular leaves and open patches are beautiful too. And how glad it makes me.

This week I am taking care to observe–truly, madly, deeply–the creative array that proliferates in my front yard, and ask myself how this reveals the Holy One to me. Calvin teaches me that there is much about the Mystery that can become known in creation. I am hoping that is discovering the goodness that is there, I will also have a deeper intimation of the goodness of God.

Personal photo from front garden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All Things Bright and Beautiful

30 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by Elizabeth Nordquist in creation, earth, teaching

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creation, earthliness, the Holy

ColoradoAspens2014I am learning slowly slowly, slowly, to let the created world teach me about its revelation of the Holy. Somehow my early experiences and teaching left me without the sensibilities that could easily sense God in Creation. I certainly appreciated glorious sunrises and sunsets, loved any place I could get close to the ocean, and delighted in the parade of dogs that marched through our growing family. However, I don’t seem to have the natural affinity for Nature that comes to others easily that is a part of our faith journey–the understanding of the Holy in the natural world, which Calvin calls the second book of revelation, after the written sacred texts.

Two events have coincided this past year to pique my attention and to ground my intention to seek the Holy in becoming a deeper lover of the beauty of this Earth God made, and to be a more faithful steward of its resources. First, partly in response to California’s desperate drought, we have replaced our front lawn with a drought resistant garden last summer. I am sure we had no idea of the complexities of what we were doing, but with the help of a landscape designer and our long time gardener, my husband brought together an array of native plants and flowers that have become a garden of earth grown delights.Iriswelcom6715 Each morning as I go out the door, I am reminded that God’s mercies are new every morning. And I am often surprised: irises bloom, bees hum, the lavender bush is full of tiny birds–wrens maybe?

All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small/all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.                    Hymn words: Cecil Frances Alexander, 1848

The other stream of opening awareness has come from the urgent writings about the care for the Earth by theologians, as well as by scientists, sociologists and other people of faith who are stepping up their banner call to care of the earth as part of the spiritual journey. My own consciousness was raised initially by my former colleague, Dr. Sam Hamilton-Poore, in his lyric book, Earth Gospel, in which he creates a four week set of daily liturgies and reflections, garnered from ancient and modern sources, all focused on caring for Creation in the way humans are intended to do. I found that singing and praying with eyes and ears open to goodness of God expressed in Creation began in me a more organic reflection of my own connection to all of the earth. Sam’s blessing for a Saturday morning has given shape to my own reality: May I see the glory of God in sun and sky; may I hear the Creator’s song in bird and breeze; and may the grace of Christ’s Spirit course though me, body and soul. (Hamilton-Poore, 33)

With my soul primed to learn and practice more stewarding of the earth, I have read the compelling books of Beldon Lane, retired professor and Presbyterian minister, in which he lays out both the this theology and his practice of experiencing the Presence of the Holy in nature. In reading a compilation of the essays of Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson, I was further enlightened and inspired by her clarity on her premise that a person of faith mus embrace caring for Creation, particularly in its present crisis. Then, a colleague referred me to Pope Francis’ new encyclical, Laudate Si’, as a gripping and important perspective of the Church in the 21st Century in relationship to the Earth, a document I am eager to read. My intellectual awareness has become replete with ideas and premises that are beginning to re-shape the lens with which I view the natural world.

So as I went away with my family to a campground last weekend, I chose as my spiritual practice to attend as closely as I was able to what was there in the natural world, to watch it closely, and to trust that the Holy One could speak to me through what I was experiencing. In a canyon that led to the beach in the California sunshine, I saw all kinds of birds–bullying scrub jays, swooping ravens, supersonic hummingbirds; and as evening fell, the was a huge bevy of quail walking across the road, then ascending to the sky as a noise disturbed them. I sat in stillness under a bright half moon, and listened to the quiet. And I also noticed the bright red poison oak, and heard about the distressed sycamore trees, suffering from lack of water. One writer from my reading had posited that each particular created thing brings glory to God by being exactly what it is, nothing more, nothing less. And that was the Word for me, among the  variegated array of God’s ingenuity–I am to be myself–nothing more, nothing less– and by so doing, I am bringing glory to God. I can rest, beloved and grateful, in the Presence of the One who made us all bright and beautiful!

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