As I look East through the windows of my prayer corner, I can see the sunrise. I imagine all the rest that lie east of me: my children with their families, my friends around the world, the griefs and sorrows of this aching world with its terror and pain, the groaning planet. I think of the Advent hymn, “People, Look East,” and take it as a template for my reflections this season.

People, look east, the time is near of the crowning of the year. Make your house fair as you are able; trim the hearth and set the   table.People, look east and sing today: Love, the Guest, is on the way. (Eleanor Farjeon)

I am longing to be a person with a heart of welcome this Advent. The sacred texts for the season are ones of invitation and anticipation, all looking forward to the celebration of the birth of Christ and looking ahead to the advent of the peaceable rule of God on the earth. If I am joining in that welcoming and hoping, into what space am I welcoming them?

We had guests for dinner last night, hoped-for guests that we had not seen for awhile. We would not have considered allowing them to come had we not made “the house fair as we were able…set the table.” So it required of us an un-cluttering, vacuuming, sweeping, then making a simple centerpiece with a candle, concocting a lovely stew that had no turkey after the Thanksgiving overage, and making sure the lights were set so we could all see one another well in conversation. Then we waited.Until the clarion shriek of the excited puppy let us know that they had arrived.

I am musing on what practices of heart are welcoming ones for this Advent season.

• an un-cluttering: letting go of those attitudes and habits that cloud my vision of the Holy One, present with me always, yet still wanting to lead me more deeply into the Mystery. The clutter consists in part of old lists of hurts and slights, old habits of acedia and sloth, and anticipatory anxiety instead of anticipatory hope. Spirit, come sweep away the things that clutter.
• making beauty: bringing Advent beauty slowly, gradually into the house, recognizing that there is still darkness that surrounds us–in the east and other places, yet I want to know Light and to share it with those who have no access to it. I begin with my Advent wreath, one candle only today, soaps with angels in the guest bathroom, a small bouquet of purple tulips to greet those with whom I sit in spiritual direction this week and music that replenishes, grounds and fills me up. Spirit, let you beauty be a creative spark in me.
• creating love gifts: beginning with  those who need it most– the lonely, the housebound, the estranged, the angry and the confused, For some it is a visit, a call or a card; for others it is a token of remembrance of a different time. Or maybe a cup of cold water. Spirit, fill me with love and a keen eye to take note of who needs your love the most.
• light up my heart: keep me from absorbing the darkness and gloom of others around me–in politics, in Church devolution, in sickness of systems, in brokenness of persons, in disappointments at what the aging process is asking of me. Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning. Spirit, lighten my darkness.

I am praying for a welcoming heart for the Guests that the Holy One sends me this Advent, and to that end I am engaging in practices that will welcome the Guest in whatever guise She appears.

Personal photo of sculpture by Judy Chicago in exhibit in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

When I was a little girl, leaving China with my missionary parents, throughout the arduous journey, for amusement my brother, sixteen months my junior, would join me in our first foray into singing in harmony. We knew the words to the old 19th C. hymn by Johnson Oatman called “Count Your Blessings.”

When along life’s journey you are tempest tossed, when you are discouraged, thinking all is lost, count your many blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.

I have clear memories of those two little waifs with their treble voices singing, “Count your blessings…” through the gorges of the Yangtze, under house arrest in Hankow, and isolated with chicken pox in Hong Kong. I am sure that at ages 7 and 8, we had very little knowledge of what blessings were or how to count them, but we did like to sing in harmony, and it kept us focused and occupied. The imprinting on my soul, however, was deep and wide for my lifetime. Maybe the singing itself was the blessing I learned to share.

November brings me to attending to blessings again. Despite the dramatic and quotidian ups and downs of the worlds in which we live, or maybe because of them I am still drawn, even compelled to count blessings, especially in this season of the year. Many of them have come to me in Grace as a particular individual. Many come by virtue of my being part of the middle-class in the United States. Many come by the providence of living and working and loving where I do. Despite the long drought in the landscape here in Southern California, I experience daily showers of blessing.

I find though that with each year I am more interested in ways I can give or be a blessing than enumerating my basket full of blessing accrued to me. Possibly it is a perspective from experience, but I am constantly aware of those around me who are in need of blessing, that touch or word or act that is prompted by the Spirit to comfort, to encourage or incarnate the Love of the Holy. Time and tide do ravage our human lives as people, made in the image of God, suffer loss, endure loneliness, get caught in snarled circumstances beyond their control. And they need, sometimes even long for, a blessing.

Jan Richardson and John O’Donahue have been wonderful exemplars for me in  their written blessings. They have taught me that there is no human condition too small, no complication too bollixed up that cannot accommodate room for a blessing. So as I go about in this season, moving intentionally toward Thanksgiving day here in the US, I am looking for people, places and things to bless–my breakfast partner and her new grandchild, my friends of old in their struggles with health, my gathering of women whose lives are full, both of grace and challenges. The blessings may look like attentive listening, a welcoming smile, or patience assistance. And as I want to bring blessing to the broken world, I may need to write another check, send another letter to my government leaders, or make sure that everyone is getting out to vote in the cycle of elections.

This prayer came to me this week from the Unity poet James Dillet Freeman:

Make me a blessing, Lord. Help me to assist those needing help, to be a blessing to my fellowmen. Instruct me to speak and when to hold my speech, when to be bold in giving and when to withhold; and if I have not strength enough, then give me strength…Lord, make me love myself and be tender to others. Let there be outpoured on me the gentleness to bless all who have need of gentleness. Give me a word, a touch to fill the lonely life, faith for the ill, and courage to keep hearts up though my own is feeling just as low….

I am blessed to have found this word from this Native American guide this week, and he has given my intention a boost, as I count the blessings I can give, maybe not one by one, but with open heart to the surprises that the Holy One continues to offer through my life.

No event in my life has shaped me more than loving a child that I have borne and brought into the world. I am not a “natural” mother, if by that designation one means someone who always longed to have children and found her identity in mothering. But I chose to have children, and on this birthday of my daughter, I am musing on how much my choice to be a mother has been an agency of Grace and Joy in my continuing to become the person I was created to be.

Loving a child has opened me to wonder and to the laughter and amazement at the ways the created world, with all its manifestations and movable parts. contribute to the art of living. The world is full of the grandeur of God, that I had always known. However, to see, hear and touch the world through the senses, first of a toddler, then a unique and rare human being emerging as her own person, with a wry sense of humor, a fearless belief that all things were possible and a determination to walk and soar despite all the impediments in her way, opened me to a kind of faith, hope and love that I had not known previously. The creative Spirit of the Holy One is much more imaginative, shocking and hilarious than I had ever known. And if this were the creature that God had brought into being, how much more could there be in this wide world and beyond that could tune my heart to sing God’s praise, to rejoice and be glad, and to deepen my trust that, indeed, all will be well!

To love a child also created in me some tiny seeds of strength and resolve as the caregiver of one who lives with great fierceness in her heart and bones. So much of my socialization in growing my own self has been to be adaptive, compliant, self-effacing and nice. I like those qualities in myself; however, they are not adequate to a life fully alive. I needed to continue to grow in being strong without being harsh, in being sure without being judgmental, in setting boundaries without repressing the irrepressible spirit who had been entrusted to me. Again, I had to examine and re-learn what it meant to be a parent, nurturing unconditional positive regard for my beloved one, while at the same time “drawing her with bands of love” to “keep protection near and danger afar.” And I confess, mistakes were made, even as leaps and bounds of learning to love wisely were made as well.

Maybe more than anything, loving a child threw me on the mercy of God with a kind of vulnerability I never quite fathomed before. Bring the kind of person who sought “how-to” books long before they were a cottage industry, I followed every worthy expert, read every latest expert, went to classes with others. Only to find, that there were were so many things outside of my control–the unique personality of each child, the dynamics of the neighborhood in which we lived, the ethos of the schools to which they went, the tenor of the programs for children in the churches to which we belonged, the trend of the media—long before it was social. All these were forces which were much more powerful than the intentions, even the good and prayerful ones, of a parent who wanted to do the right thing. At some “click” moment in my parenting, I came awake to the understanding that God, the Holy One, loved and would always love, my children more than I possibly could, and though I needed to continue to be all that i could be as a mother, both of them were in the loving care of the One who made them just they way they were, was continuing to live in them by the Spirit, and would never let them go. Out of my control, they were still Beloved and Whole, just the way they were.

As they became adults, and now have children of their own, they are responsible for their own lives, yet they still invite me to be part of theirs too. My current loving of them is still full of wonder, still tenacious, and still vulnerable. But today as I celebrate my daughter on her birthday and my son in his active, adventuresome life, I give thanks for the way they have shaped me on my journey, and for teaching me dimensions of divine love I might never have known without them.

Oil painting, “In the Garden,” by Mary Cassatt, 1904

A Zen proverb says, “After Enlightenment, the laundry.” So, as I was trying to resume my blog this week, after travel, after a lovely family encounter, after reading, after being virtual witness to the headlines of acclaim, of narcissism and of tragedy, I found I could not muse with enough clarity to articulate something “spiritual,” something wise, even something true. I had admit that before I could sit down at the computer to find my voice, I needed to take care of business, the first item of which was the laundry.

When I compare my chores of laundry doing with most of the rest of the world, there is nothing onerous about them at all. I have a washing machine with dials that adjusts for speed, size of load and temperature. No water carrying, no beating with a stick, no scrubbing necessary. Adjacent to it, I have a dryer, again with capability for adjustment. I have detergent, and fabric softener, electricity, water that fills the tank, and air and heat that blow the wet wash as dry as I need. and as one who is of the designation Empty Nester, even then I only do laundry for half the nest. So where does the Spirit inhabit This Which Must be Done?

I found once again this week that engaging the laundry invited me to settle into a context, a framework, where I could slow down my brain and my body to focus on the “one thing necessary” while I worked. Saints of many tradition and eras have known this. Jean-Pierre De Caussade in the 18th Century in the book of his musings wrote:

To live by faith, then, is to live in joy, confidence, certainty and trust in all there is to do and suffer each moment as ordained by God. (22, The Sacrament of the Present Moment).

So matching socks (if they both can be found!), hanging shirts, folding towels can all be experienced as a place where the Holy lives, if I am paying attention. It can call me to be at peace, it can prod me to patience, it compels me to faithfulness to myself and my nest from which I offer hospitality. And while I am engaged in such a simple exercise, I am prodded to pray for those for whom the issue of cleanliness and laundry are elusive at best, sometimes absent altogether. As we know more and more about people being displaced from homelands, fleeing for their lives, perhaps finding landfall, but with no sure welcome in the country in which they have landed, I am prompted to seek more concrete ways to express the compassion of Jesus to those who are suffering, from right here in my neighborhood to the impacted shores of Europe and the war and disease ravaged land masses of Africa. And while stacking the T-shirts, I can listen for the Voice that will tell me, “This is the way; walk in it.”

It isn’t only laundry that needs doing. It is car maintenance, paying bills, emptying the fridge and making a grocery list, answering e-mails, arranging fresh flowers, checking on the neighbor who is not well, wrapping packages to be mailed; all give me opportunity to encounter and share the Light by which the world is Enlightened.  Thus, I do not need to dread the quotidian tasks or put them off; sometimes they are the first lines of where the Spirit comes to me with Truth and Grace.

And enlightenment may come, or seem not to, and then there is the reality that those tasks much be done again, tomorrow and the next day. However, it is the moment by moment awareness that there is nothing that can separate us from the Love of God, and that there is nothing that we can/should/or will do that is not a window through which the Holy shines that energizes and empowers us in our perserverence. On to the new day, the new week, the new season in the Light of the Spirit!

So many voices fill the sound waves, and all seem to be clamoring to be heard. But I am listening for the voice that is meant for me, that will give me nourishment and direction, the voice that is directed to me…meant for my ears. When I set out to Listen Carefully last week, I had no trouble hearing sounds, noises, bird calls, traffic, airplanes… but I found that in my intention to Listen, I wanted to hear what the Word is for me today. Too often the proliferation of noise around me devolves into an unclear murmuration of indistinguishable sounds, like the teacher, Miss Othmar, in the Charlie Brown cartoons. So my prayer became the boy Samuel’s: “Speak, O Holy One, I am listening. (And make it clear!)”

What I discovered as I paid attention was that when there was a particular Word for me, I had an almost whole body response when I heard it– a heart-knowing, a breath intake, a click—something that shimmered or caught my attention. It came in several modalities over the days I was intentionally Listening. There was a letter from a pastor to the Pope in anticipation of his American visit that brought me joy and challenge. An address from a theologian of great wisdom and passion for justice for women gave me hope and encouragement. I wandered thought the family room where I heard the strains of Allison Krause singing with Yo-Yo Ma, “‘Tis gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free, ’tis a gift to come down where you ought to be…” And then as a surprise from far away, a Youtube clip of someone I had known in a former life, whose road diverged from mine over thirty years ago, was  offering peace, joy and welcome to those who longed to know the Holy more nearly and dearly in a winsome and winning way; I was surprised and blessed.

Each time a “voice” addressed to me distinguished itself from the pack, I had resonance in my entire being, that this was a Word for me that brought Life, than affirmed Love and that challenged my intention to be more of what I am created to be. So when I read from the book of Romans later in the week that “The Word is very near you, on your lips and in your heart,” I knew that what i had heard in my Listening was striking a chord with what the Spirit has already put in my being, and that my listening needed to be inward as well as attuned to the Word that come from outside. What I am invited to do is to pay attention with an open heart.

The practice to which I need to be faithful is whatever makes it possible and probable that I will hear the Word I need to hear, over and over again. Rumi says: A voice comes to your soul saying, Lift your foot, cross over, move into the emptiness of question, answer and question. And so the journey of Spirit goes with my whole Self at attention for the Word for this day, the next and next.

Personal photo taken of Judy Chicago’s “Song of Miriam” in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Heaviness looms around this time and space:

• the weather is unremittingly humid and hot
• the pictures of refugees from Europe and its neighbors is tragic
• the forests of California are ablaze with wild racing fires
• the contours of the lives of so many beloved ones are  locked in and hopeless
• more news this morning of a sudden death of a youngish husband of a colleague
• a childhood friend is suffering
• someone’s partner suddenly stumbles into an utterly surprising critical diagnosis
• a companion on the Camino went missing, and her body is found murdered in a local village

And so it goes. And I scour my heart and resources to know how to pray, what to do, how to live under the weight of all of the earth’s heaviness. I went to my oldest concordance to see if there were any words from sacred text about heaviness; in older translations there are many, but newer versions have chosen other words for heaviness:

sorrow, grief, despair, anxiety, lamentation, mourning, anguish, distress, dejection

Yes, those will do…they begin to spell out the apt particulars of some of this heaviness–the sadness, the fear, the anger, the hopelessness. Yet, all of these expressions are offered out into the safe container of the Mystery we call God, Whom the crier doesn’t see or hear at the moment, but is sure can receive these feelings without personal diminishment or judgement. So I take both shelter and energy in the words of Jesus:

Come to me, all you that are weary and heavy laden; and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me…(Mt. 11:28)

I pray from the Book of Common Worship: Lift heavy sorrow and give us good hope in Jesus…

And the learning and lifting comes slowly, slowly, slowly, point of Light after point of Light…an opportunity to contribute to relief for those who suffer, both here and across the sea; an insight for a gift that can be offered as respite care; a connection that I can make from a resource I know to someone who can use it; words of comforting presence and solidarity that can be uttered; a surprise of joy that suddenly appears, like the butterfly at my window. And with each step or movement I can feel the heaviness become more navigable, even bearable, with some openings for hope, even as I continue to lament and ask for justice.

I ask for eyes to see, ears to hear, heart to sense the openings, sinews to hold me in a stance of hopefulness against all odds, courage to keep facing and observing the brokenness and willfulness that piles on God’s people and the earth that leads to such heaviness.

And it is the writers of the sacred text that give me direction me out of their own experience:

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall yet praise him, my help and my God. (Ps.42:5)

And so I am practicing hope: hope for the displaced ones, hope for the suffering ones, hope for the grieving ones.In hope once again turn to my go-to prayer from Augustine:

Watch, O Lord, with those who wake, or watch, or weep tonight, and give Your angels and saints charge over those who sleep. Tend Your sick ones, Lord Christ. Rest Your weary ones. Bless Your dying ones. Soothe Your suffering ones. Shield Your joyous ones, and all for Your love’s sake. Amen.

And I pray for the heaviness to lift! May it be so!

My daily rhythms are no longer calibrated to the academic year, but my body, mind and spirit still greet September with a sense of welcome–a new season is beginning with new opportunities, new chances, even new people.

I am creating a new address book, which for the moment has no crossed out addresses and phone numbers. I have perused my refrigerator door, deciding which postcards, magnets and pictures can be retired in light of the present moment. I have  new calendars, ones that represent this fall season and ones I anticipate putting in use when January comes.

I have found myself rearranging the tray on the table where I pray with new symbols representing the focus of my heart. Some parts of my spiritual practice remain energizing and provocative–my prayers with a calendar of art that changes weekly, my happiness diary given to me by my daughter. But some of the other routines, books and rituals are a little dusty, so I am examining what needs to stay and what can give way to something different–maybe even already used–that can bring me into a deeper awareness of Holy Presence.

I know that I need to continue to dwell in sacred text. But I am persuaded that whatever finds me to read needs a slowing down, a pondering, more reflection. Maybe I can return to my much beloved lectio divina practice, even as I do it alone. Maybe fewer amounts, but deeper contemplation is what I am being called to this new year of learning

On the other hand, my list of people and worlds events that need Divine Attention gets wider and longer. I have become so impressed with the up-closeness we have to all other humans and the groaning of all of creation. The needs of the particular and the general spill out into my awareness in a flood of anguish and despair; there are days in which I feel as if it is so much that I need to throw in my prayer towel. Yet, I believe that I need to be constant in two kinds of prayer–that which faces inward, opening myself to the Beloved, saying “Here I am, Loving God;” and that which participates in healing the broken threads of the world in lifting it to the Light. Again, I may need to slow down, be willing to take the time that is worthy of this holy ministry, maybe in this part of my life, the most important thing that I do. I need guidance in showing me how to lengthen my attention span and deepen my compassion.

And once again, I wake up to the fact that my body need to be part of my spiritual practice–my labyrinth, my neighborhood, my stretching, my piano playing, my healthy eating, my reaching out to those around me–beloved, friendly, or folks unknown. I am learning how to understand that all of my life is a spiritual practice, if and when I can pay attention to the Light within it. Some things I will continue to do as I have done, yet I want to expand my soul, become more elastic and welcoming. Work still to do!

The picture of the painting by Agnes Martin above resides in a museum in Taos, and is  called “Friendship.” But this week it is reminding me of the blank notebooks with which the school season begins, blank spaces to fill with inspiration and learnings yet awaiting me as I open myself to this new year of learning with the Spirit. Maybe this year I can choose again with Rilke to “Resolve to be always beginning–to always be a beginner.” From that posture I can once again learn that God is making all things new, Holy Mercies are new every morning, and this new year is a gift of living into a new thing that the Spirit is doing in me.