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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: illumination

Blessing the Light That Comes

01 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by Elizabeth Nordquist in candlemas, illumination, Light, Uncategorized

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candlemas, Light

Candlemas 2020

While writing my Advent blog posts, I was anticipating a brilliant coming of Light for the twelve days of Christmas, beginning Christmas Day. Instead on the third day of Christmas, I was in the hospital with my husband who was having emergency surgery, to be ensconced there for the next 9 days. New Year’s Eve and Day passed in a great grayness, less in fear, more in what Carrie Newcomer calls, “learning to live without knowing,” The light we had was Santa Monica sunshine through hospital windows during the day, and fluorescent glow by night. No candles allowed!

Therefore, it is with great anticipation, gratitude and hope that I welcome Candlemas. In one part of the tradition, it is the day when people bring their candles they will use for the next year and seek a blessing for them, with the intention of letting each of them be a reflection of the Light that has come into the world. As I look back at the days of Christmastide, there were so many places that Light was shining: meals offered and brought; cards, call and texts received; errands run; surprise gifts to cheer our spirits and a providential meeting with a willing and able dog walker who can handle our ever-so-so energetic, eternally youthful puppy. Prayers were rising from many corners of our past and present lives. The Light kept shining!

So it is with a hopeful and reassured heart that I assemble some of the candles in my life that I hope to light in this coming season: the ones that accompany me when I am engaged in sacred conversation; the beeswax one that illuminates the table where meals are shared, all the while reminding us of the need to keep our natural world as clean and safe as we can; the gifts that remind me in scent and depth that love and caring keep shining even in the most opaque darkness; the tall beacons that call attention to the world, wide and deep, with need for wholeness, for repair, for truth-telling. And I ask for blessing for the calling of each one as it is lighted and spreads it gift in the place where it is planted.

The lighting of candles sometimes seems to me so small when held up to the bonfires and furnaces of the world’s needs. Yet, I am trusting that with each one I light with blessing, there will be love shone, wisdom made clear, discernment seen for those in its periphery. The words of George Sand give me perspective, especially in these times of confusion and acrimony: It is high time that we had lights that are not incendiary torches. Yes, I mean to look for those lights, pass them one, even be one myself!

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The Light is Emerging

13 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by Elizabeth Nordquist in illumination, Light, Love, Uncategorized

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Tags

Light, Valentine's Day

from Dale Chihuly, St. Petersburg, FL

I savored the weekend two week ago when we took note of the Feast of St. Brigid and Candlemas. Neither of these is part of my primary tradition of worship, but each of them struck a chord in me, of my longing for Light when the dominating motif is earth and sky seems so dark.

Brigid, the Celtic saint, is known for her keeping the flame alive. When we visited Kildare, we marveled the big space just outside the cathedral where a huge bonfire is created on her Feast Day to celebrate the Light of Christ that she carried, and wants other to keep on carrying. On Candelmas in some traditions, people of faith bring their year’s supply of candles to be used at home or in worship into sacred space to receive a blessing on the Light that will shine from them.

I look around my house and see candles perched in so many places, so that when we settle, we can light them again. Even thought they don’t provide the primary illumination by which we do our work, they are a reminder of the Light that never is put out, the Light that gives warmth, comfort and vision to all of us. As I sit writing this morning, I have lighted a candle next to me to be that reminder. It is a candle, one of a whole train of candles, that has illuminated many sacred conversations in this room, many on my computer, in which the primary focus is looking for Light and how to keep it going when the way ahead seems dark.

Tonight we take a turn into Valentine’s Day, and I am aware once again at how Love is so often the Light that brightens the darkness. I am touched when I am reminded how Love has lightened up my life—generously, gratuitously, sometimes imperfectly, sometimes lavishly, sometimes against all odds. My story is replete with family, friends, teachers, soulmates, who have brought a candle of love to my life–fat pillar candles of grace, tall thin tapers of acceptance, tea lights of laughter and joy, all letting me know that I am loved in one way or another, and all of that Love comes from the Light that never fails.

Outside the impending rain is already glowering, the headlines have heat but no clarity, but here inside our candles are alight, and as I look at them, I am reminded that neither rain nor hysteria can keep me from the Light that lights up my life, and the Love it engenders! Sacred text tells us that that Light is for me, as it was for Brigid, a kind of armor, not so that I can be in denial about the storms–atmospheric, political and interpersonal–but can be a source of energy to light the lights of others who need it. I am grateful for Love! I am grateful for Light! Shine on!

Longing for Light to Follow

06 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Elizabeth Nordquist in Christmas, Epiphany, Hope, illumination, pilgrimage, wisdom

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Tags

discernment, Epiphany, Jesus, pilgrimage

Today is Epiphany, the daychihulyTampa when the Church remembers and celebrates the arrival of the wise ones who have been following the Light in the shape of a Star in the East and now have stopped over that place where the Child was. I do not envy them the journey over miles and years, but I do envy the vision and clarity of the Star that took them right to the place where their hearts longed to be.

In reading one of my gifts from Christmas, Alexander McCall Smith’s The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine, I saw myself reflected in Mma Precious Ramotswe’s self-reflection after her colleague suggests she might want a holiday:

Mma Ramotswe looked down at her hands, folded passively on her lap. Was she getting stale? She looked at her shoes. at her faithful brown shoes with their broad soles and their flat heels. Were these the shoes of a stale person?  (21)

My shoes are not broad, brown and flat, but  I am wondering if parts of me are stale. I do know that when I have been musing on this part of the Christmas season, my heart is lightened when I think of this part of the ancient story of Epiphany, of wisdom meeting new life, of coming into new territory, of being filled with joy. And I have a longing for some of that lightness.

I didn’t make New Year’s resolutions this year, I usually don’t. However, I did find myself praying for Light and Hope, but the prayers were nestled in vows I took long ago when I was ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament. In those vows I promised each time I recited them at each new call,  that I would seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination and love. So my prayer this year has become that I will encounter the Star of Light that will burnish my energy, intelligence, imagination and love, so that they more shine more brightly in me and through me to the people I am given to care for. I am aware that after thirty years, each of those intentions might have become stale–or maybe are just in need of re-calibration after an encounter with the Holy One.

In this decade of my life my energy is not the same as when it needed to meet the requirements of the rhythms of life that tried to balance my calling at church or seminary, commuting, raising children, caring for aging parents and keeping loving alive. My brain does not retain new information, nor does it remember familiar facts with the facility it once did. In some ways my imagination is more lithe and fantastic than it used to be, now that I put it to use only with taking flight with grand-children or hoping for outcomes not constricted by by-laws; that one glistens more brightly. And there is love! Always the Word–the greatest of these, always coming to me from Grace. But in some places and times it has felt more taxing. Weariness in well-doing has tarnished some of that first love; or that sense that one has lived long enough to say with the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, “there is nothing new under the sun,” and it seems that no new thing to savor, to take delight in, no new face to enchant with affection.

And so my prayer on this Epiphany is that the Star will shine in me, for me and through me:

Star of Wonder, shine on and energize my body and spirit so that I can make the treks over mountains and deserts to offer who I am to those who are ready to receive me.

Star of Beauty Bright, enliven my synapses and retrieve my skill sets, so that I can continue to bring ideas and strategies to the tables of conversation and cooperation in the things that make for peace.

Star of Night, shine through my dreams so that my imagination will be further illuminated with things that my eyes have not yet seen or my ears have not heard, but that add beauty and grace to the world around me.

Star of my Heart, keep the fires of Love burning, stoked and warm, brilliant and comforting, as long as my heart will beat.

In the name of that Bright and Morning Star, Amen.

 

 

Personal photo from Dale Chihuly Center, St. Petersburg, FL.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advent IV: Love, the Star

20 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by Elizabeth Nordquist in advent, illumination, pilgrimage, seeing

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Advent, pilgrimage, watching

th

I keep looking to the east this Advent. How I long for a Star in the east that would bring us goodness and light!

Stars, keep the watch. When night is dim one more light the bowl shall brim, shining beyond the frosty weather, bright as the sun and moon together. People, look east and sing today: Love, the Star is on the way. (Eleanor Farjeon)

The promise is that the Holy One has visited/is coming in this season. When I look out east from my prayer corner, I don’t see stars. The ambient light has faded them away, or daylight is overtaking the night sky. The same is true for the anticipatory longing looks in my soul. But I trust that there is a Star shining beyond the frosty weather, bright as the sun and moon together who has appeared and will appear in my heart and in the world. So I pray in these last days of Advent:

Come, O Star of Wonder, fill me with wonder–at your created beauty, at your amazing diversity, at the endless surprises in making a way where there is no way. Shine in me and through me, so that I am a bearer of wonder along the trails that I wander, and bring delight to my companions on the way.

Come, O Star of Night, into our world of opaqueness and myopia–shine into the crevices and crannies where the Light seems absent and impossible. Shine into my own darkness, which I know is not dark to you, and shine through me so that I can go boldly into places along my path that are longing for light.

Come, O Star of Beauty, buoy me with the beauty I see in your star-shine in the world–in faces of peacemakers, in random acts of kindness by strangers, in the artistic renderings of painter, poet and composer, in birds and trees and friendly beasts. Shine your beauty on and in me that I may bring brightness to the neighborhood and city and nation awash with the smudges and soot of trying to make it through the day, trying to make sense of things, trying to make ends meet.

Come, O Star of Grace, illuminate my own own understanding of how you are present in our world, from the knottiest and most complicated issues of the day to the tiniest and most fragile of connections between people and your created world. Shine your Grace upon me that I can walk with Grace, in Grace, gracefully.

May your Love, the Star, keep shining, giving us great Light, in us and around us, until we are able to see it and follow it! Amen.

 

 

 

 

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