Verse of the day
Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute. Speak out; judge righteously; defend the rights of the poor and needy.
– Proverbs 31:8-9
Voice of the day
Let us remember that our voice is a precious gift and we must use it.
– Claudia Flores
Prayer of the day
Let us speak for those who cannot speak. We pray that when we cannot speak, others will speak out for us.
Some food for thought as we begin our retreat at Epworth By the Sea tomorrow.
It seems to me that I have greater peace and am close to God when I am not “trying to be a contemplative,” or trying to be anything special, but simply orienting my life fully and completely towards what seems to be required of a man like me at a time like this. — Thomas Merton (January 23 and 24, 1958, p. 159 — A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True LifeThe Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 3: 1952-1960)
Verse of the day
A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
– Ezekiel 36:26
Voice of the day
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Dispossessed” (1974)
Prayer of the day
Lord, break down the walls we have built around our hearts. Give us hearts of flesh that beat to the rhythms of justice.
This is our first Longest Night or Winter Solstice without our parents and Betty who was Denise’s sons’ grandma. We attended our first Blue Christmas service at St. Agatha’s Episcopal Church in DeFuniak Springs, Florida in 2014. It was a powerful and moving experience for us and for all who attended. We took this worship tradition with us to Estes Park when I was called to PCCR in 2015.
The service occurs on the longest night of the year or Winter Solstice which falls on December 21st. During this season, so many people are focused on last minute Christmas shopping or family gatherings and the expectation is that everyone is happy and excited for Christmas. Often though, that isn’t the case. During my thirty-six years of ministry the season leading up to Christmas was often exhausting. It was an incredible blessing when we discovered this beautiful opportunity to reflect on the reality of grief and loss that gets pushed aside in the race to Christmas Day.
Tonight we attended a lovely service with two pastoral colleagues who also happen to be dear friends. As we gathered, candles were lit, music played, prayers were lifted, and a time of reflection was offered. Kim and Christy gave all who gathered a beautiful gift. In the midst of this season of commercialism and “false smiles” we were given the opportunity to simply be still… be still with our grief… be still with our loneliness and pain… to be still with the One who loves us unconditionally.
This Advent season can be full of distractions and false expectations. It can be full of disappointments and heartache. Yet when I think about that first season of preparation for an unusual birth, I can’t even imagine what was going through the hearts of Mary and Joseph as they made their way to Bethlehem.
Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. — Thomas Merton, “The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room” in Raids on the Unspeakable, pages 51-52
Here’s some food for thought as we enter this new year with all of its possibilities and all of its concerns. I find myself looking for that space where I can center down as Howard Thurman wrote in his book Meditations of the Heart (p. 28).
How good it is to center down!
To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!
The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic;
Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,
While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment
and the resting lull.
With full intensity we seek, ere the quiet passes, a fresh sense
of order in our living;
A direction, a strong sure purpose that will structure our confusion
and bring meaning in our chaos.
We look at ourselves in this waiting moment –
the kinds of people we are.
The questions persist: what are we doing with our lives? –
what are the motives that order our days?
What is the end of our doings?
Where are we trying to go?
Where do we put the emphasis and where are our values focused?
For what end do we make sacrifices?
Where is my treasure and what do I love most in life?
What do I hate most in life and to what am I true?
Over and over the questions beat in upon the waiting moment.
As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes of our turbulence,
there is a sound of another kind –
A deeper note which only the stillness of the heart makes clear.
It moves directly to the core of our being.
Our questions are answered,
Our spirits refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of our daily round
With the peace of the Eternal in our step.
How good it is to center down!
Ah how good it is to center down. In years past January would be a time to recover from the Advent and Christmas schedule. This year my heart goes out to my colleagues who are in active ministry and get to scamper to prepare for a very early Ash Wednesday. It’s in mid-February and on Valentine’s Day to boot. Uff Dah!
In addition to Thurman’s poem How Good to Center Down, yesterday’s reading from A Year with Thomas Merton spoke to me and reminded me that such a space and time to enter down is found in the deepening of the present in solitude.
Solitude is not found so much by looking outside the boundaries of your dwelling, as by staying within. Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for solitude in the present, you will never find it. — Thomas Merton (Entering the Silence: Becoming A Monk and A Writer, The Journals of Thomas Merton, volume 2, January 3, 1950)
As I look back, 2023 was the year of walking with Swift Presbyterian Church through some challenges and joys, it was also a time to walk with my Dad through his final journey as he made his way through the veil and into his eternal home. It was also a time to retire from active ministry so that Denise and I could begin to care for ourselves after so many years of caring for others.
So here we are, ten days into 2024 and we have a lot on our plate. Go figure, eh? We are heading to a conference this weekend at St Simon’s Island where we will have the opportunity to meet new people and be fed and challenged by such speakers as Cole Arthur Riley (a wonderful writer, speaker, theologian, and activist), Diana Butler Bass (also a wonderful writer, speaker, theologian, and activist), and Brian McLaren (yes, another wonderful writer, speaker, theologian, and activist). Upon our return we should be closing on a house in Mobile, Alabama where we plan on settling down and discerning what God is calling us to do next.
A mentor of mine from the US Air Force Chaplain Corps once described retirement as driving into the pitstop on a race track. The crew checks the car over, puts new tires on the car (re-tiring it), before the driver goes back onto the track and continues the race. We are both excited to see what God has in store for us while at the same time we are also excited to explore centering down and be in the present as Thurman and Merton both described in different ways.
Well, as we begin our next chapter in this thing called life, my prayer for you, dear reader, is that you will find those moments where you can center down and simply be still. It is a privilege to walk with you through this journey called life.
For years I would end my daily Evening Prayer on my blog with this: Dona Nobis Pacem.
May we be filled with that peace. I invite you to enjoy this beautiful rendition of Dona Nobis Pacem from Julie Gaulke.
Verse of the day
And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.
– 1 Corinthians 13:13
Voice of the day
And that’s when I learned / that when you are afraid, / love always comes running. / Love says, “I can stay.”
– Sarah (Are) Speed, “Sanctified Art from Generation to Generation Advent Devotional: God Meets Us In Our Fear”
Prayer of the day
God of love, you come running when we are afraid. Let us also embody this love, to be the ones who come running when our neighbors are afraid.
“If we are not transforming ourselves, we are recycling the violence.”—Peter Dougherty, cofounder of Meta Peace Team, in The Work of Nonviolence
As the calendar turned over from 2023 to 2024 I kept thinking about chapter 106 (CVI) in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s book/poem In Memoriam A. H. A.. Specifically this line kept jumping out at me.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
To consider ringing out the civic slander and the spite seems especially poignant as the 2024 elections in the United States continue to draw closer. To be blunt, I am sick and tired of the hatred and outright lies that are being told, sold, and believed by far too many in this country. I find it difficult at times to remember that those whom I call “enemies” aren’t actually enemies, but rather they are, like me, human beings created in the image of God. As Tennyson said earlier in his poem, perhaps I need to Ring out a slowly dying cause, and ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Perhaps one of those nobler modes of life is the call to love
In his letter to Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton said the following about loving others: Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy. (December 20, 1961, Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters)
Today I was intentionally reading Merton after a long absence. Life has been hectic and it seems as though the first few months of my “retirement” from active ministry has been filled with taking care of my Dad’s estate, walking with Denise as we both continue to process the loss of our parents and her former mother-in-law, our very dear friend Betty. Since 2016, we (especially Denise with all of the traveling she had to do) had been so busy with ministry and caring for our parents that we never took the time to truly process our own losses and grieve those losses. In addition, we have spent several months searching for a house to call our home as we begin this journey called retirement. So today, I picked up Thomas Merton: Essential Writings and this passage spoke to me.
We must believe in love and in peace. We must believe in the power of love. We must recognize that our being itself is grounded in love; that is to say, that we come into being because we are loved and because we are meant to love others. The failure to do believe this and to live accordingly creates instead a deep mistrust, a suspicion of others, a hatred of others, a failure to love. When an individual attempts to live by and for themselves alone, they become a little “island” of hate, greed, suspicion, fear, desire. Then their whole outlook is falsified. All their judgements are affected by that untruth. In order to recover the true perspective, which is that of love and compassion, they must once again learn, in simplicity, truth, and peace, that “No man is an island.” – Thomas Merton (Preface to the Vietnamese edition of No Man Is an Island found in Thomas Merton: Essential Writings, p. 116)
When so many are encouraging us to fear and hate others it is challenging to remember that such fear and hatred is not what our Creator wishes for us. Our challenge, dear reader, is to swim against the tide of hatred and fear. Our challenge is to love and be an example of the love that Merton talked about and what I believe is at the foundation of Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells.” I know that for myself this isn’t an easy task.
This challenge calls me to essentially re-wire my brain and my heart. Of course, I cannot do that on my own and therefore I must follow the One who is Love. When he was challenged by the Pharisees, who asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus replied: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 22:37-40.
Will you join with me as we, in the words of Tennyson, Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace… the larger heart, the kindlier hand?
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers [and sisters],
To make music in the heart.
Howard Thurman (The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations, p. 23 as found in The Work of Christmas: The Twelve Days of Christmas with Howard Thurman, Bruce G. Epperly)
“Satyagraha—Gandhi’s word for nonviolence—means holding fast to truth whatever the cost may be. King sought not only to discover these truths and to hold fast to them but to attempt in his life to live and give full manifestation to the truths he said he believed. He knew that truth unlived is not truth, that truth proclaimed in words alone cannot sustain us in our hunger.”—Vincent Harding
