Holding the Center

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

                                    William Butler Yeats

 

            When people asked me how I was doing during my last week at church, I usually answered, "I feel like I am in a whirlpool."  Emotions were strong within me and around me.  How is it possible to say goodbye to those I have prayed for, loved and served for years?  My heart was breaking and I had no control over the increasingly fast moving pace.  Where had my strong sense of peace and centeredness gone?

All was focused on the final Sunday.  That day came and was too quickly gone, like a wedding.  It was suddenly and too quickly over after months of anticipation and planning.  In the memory of the day's glowing warmth I feel the love flowing,  I hear the laughter and I look at the generous gifts so thoughtfully and carefully created just to please and delight me.  It is grace, undeserved yet given to me.  Receiving gifts of grace in such a time as that I simply cannot take in.  I need some space.

I need to find and touch my center.  I know I need to look in a different direction, to use my peripheral vision.  In order to absorb this time of intense love, I need space.  It is like seeing a star more clearly and brightly by looking at it out of the corner of our eye than by looking directly at it.  So we are heading out on a road trip on to the open highway where distance can sharpen my inner vision.  Time and space away from the busy distractions at home will quiet me gently allowing me to return to my center. 

How grateful I am that I know my center is with God and that my compass and loadstone is Christ Jesus.  I trust this center does hold no matter what happens in my life.  I know in this time of change, all is well.  Indeed, there is nothing else it can be when my center is eternal.   

Letting Go

October 23, 2008

Dear Friends,

My mother indelibly imprinted upon me the idea we always leave a place cleaner and better than we found it. It didn't matter if it were a rented cabin at the beach, a campsite or the house we were moving out of. Perhaps that explains that as I leave the church I've served for the past four years, I felt a ferociously need to clean out.

To that end, I invited a good friend of the church, one most generous with his time, on a date to go to the dump with me. He accepted. I brought the pick-up truck and he provided the major amount of muscle. We loaded up the detritus from all the corners of the church: broken chairs, an old bent drainpipe, old sofa cushions, decaying garden pots, an old moldy wooden room divider, bent out of shape wrought iron fence and much more. I even snuck in a few things from home. It was harder work than I imagined and we both worked up quite a sweat. As I drove slowly on the local streets, I held my breath and never stopped suddenly so the precariously tied on items wouldn't fall off or crash through the back window of the truck. We must have looked dangerous because cars left us a wide swath.

When we got to the transfer shed at the Marin Sanitary District, we only needed to throw the items off the truck into the pit and we would be done with this task. The dust, the noise, the smells were intense. Flinging off the trash, I noticed it felt strangely liturgical. I began to see myself not only flinging trash, but casting off old moldy festering hurts, worn out beliefs I'd clung to for far too long. Oh, it felt so good!

Back at the church I washed my dirty hands. With the water running over them, a deep peace came upon me as once again the memory of the waters of baptism flowed over me and I knew it was good to let go.

In great gratitude for everything,
Julianne

Holding it All

I have been enjoying contemplatively the wonders outside my window. When one has something spectacular there all the time, it is easy to begin to take it for granted. We have an amazingly beautiful view of San Francisco Bay yet there are many days I don’t even raise the shades. I watched the recent fire on Angel Island. It was eerily beautiful with the destructive red orange tongues crowning the island against the dark night sky. And then at dawn the next morning, the full moon set over Mount Tamalpais, its light reflected on the Bay like a long golden road as the morning sky lightened and the sunrise’s pink glow dusted the hills.
Maybe it was the stark contrast from such beauty that hit me when I walked 7th Street on my weekly trip into the jail. I was sickened by the strong nauseating reek of urine on the dirty and trashy streets. It smelled worse than I could ever remembered. I found myself muttering about responsibility. What is happening to me, I wondered? I see no beauty here. As incarnated beings we are called into real life to love real life even people who carelessly cast their trash onto city streets, even the homeless who foul the city streets are also God’s creations.
Jesus tells us we are love all people. Nobody is outside the circle of God’s radical love! I find it is so much easier to love everyone, theoretically, like on a silent retreat where all my needs are met and I can ignore anyone who offends me than thinking about loving the people who so offend my senses.
What a challenge it is to hold both the beauty and the ugliness of life. Can we, I wonder, hold the beauty and ugliness even within ourselves? It’s hard. Maybe that is why we project blame, the badness out on to others. Are there ways in which we also contribute, perhaps with the unintended consequences of our actions, to trashing the planet I wish I had the answer (actually I don’t think there is an answer that applies to everyone all the time). What I do know is that self-awareness leads to understanding and that gratitude leads to praise. Real life is sometimes smelly and gritty but also radically beautiful. It is all God’s creation---the beautiful and the smelly. It is our job to live with awareness and careful intention and with hearts full of gratitude for everything.

Open your eyes

Last Sunday the Mission Board at our church gave the sermon. It had been planned for a long time. Four women volunteered and we divided up agencies that our church supports. The point was for each person to find a story and to inform the congregation of how their mission dollars serve local needs. For the children’s story, we decided to do a little skit. One mission board member got the children to help her set up a table labeled Ritter Center and she began to explain what the center did. That was my cue to come in as a client. As I walked down the aisle at church, I asked folks where I could get some help.

What was so very incredible was that I did very little to change my appearance. All I did was to put on an old coat of my husbands, a knitted cap that hid my hair and an old pair of glasses. That is all. And no one recognized me, at least not until I spoke. For all these years I’ve been standing up conspicuously in the front of the church and yet no one recognized me. At first I couldn’t understand and then it hit me, we really don’t see each other at all.

Brain scientists tell us our brains generalize, that we don’t really see what is before us. We see a minister in a robe up in front of the church or a homeless person on the corner. We see a politician or a woman with a head scarf and with the initial identification of our brain comes a surge of unconscious judgments. Good minister, scary homeless person, untrustworthy politician, foreign terrorist. To label and box up anyone is a terrible loss, yet that is what our brains do. Each of us is so much more than just one thing. I don’t tell you this to judge the good people of church but to raise up in your mind the awareness of how we all do this all the time. The only hope is to recognize what our brains do automatically for us and then to take a second deeper look at each other. Each of us is a child of God, uniquely created, with our own unique experiences. What wonders are right here before our eyes and yet most of us miss them without even knowing that we do.

Open your eyes. Become conscious!