Steve

Today’s Word: Vestige

Steve · September 5, 2014 · 6 Comments

Hay1 — Hay field off Ballard Branch, near Weaverville, NC. SJG photo.

St. Bonaventure wrote that all of creation is the fingerprint and the footprint of the Divine One (vestigia Dei). By definition, this “vestige” is a small reminder, a trace of something that is no longer present. So if “all creation” is a vestige of the Creator, how big, indeed, must that Divine One be? Huge. Beyond comprehension and without bounds or the ability to be possessed.

So is it any wonder we are left speechless and in awe when confronted with the grandeur of the natural world? For somewhere deep inside we know this world is merely God’s calling card, God’s way of reminding us that — although seemingly out of sight — the Divine is nevertheless as present as the rain on our nose, the sound of the stream in our ears, the smell of the rose and the taste of the fruit of the vine. And while our churches give us sacraments — visible signs of the divine in the forms of water, wine, bread, oil, hands — the world around us is an ever-living, ever-moving, ever-changing sacrament of our never-changing, ever-present God.

I spent last week in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and I can’t shake the vision of stone and tree, stream and fog, mountain and valley. I still groan in wonder when I think of the view from the top of Grandfather Mountain or the early morning veiled hay field that snatched my breath away. It was the view, yes, but it was really the glimpse that got me.

Ask yourself in silence: What in nature beckons me to see God? Where is the sacred in my life?

Today’s Word: Bee-loud

Steve · August 28, 2014 · 11 Comments

My favorite poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, begins with these four lines:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

glade — Craggy Gardens Bald, NC. SJG photo.

I always loved the sense of silence, stillness and peace that Yeats paints for us in this poem, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I was really aware of what it might be like to live in a bee-loud glade. Yesterday we hiked Craggy Gardens Trail, a path right off the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, which promised a trail to “craggy flats through a high mountain Rhododendron bald.” I had never been surrounded by the bone-like Rhododendron before, and I became mesmerized by the bare branches clawing their way skyward, seemingly dead and yet holding life in the glossy leaves at the end of their limbs. Perhaps another word for another day…

rhodo — Rhododendron in Blue Ridge Mountains, NC. SJG photo.

When we arrived at the top and walked out onto the bald of the hill, I found myself virtually encircled by bees busy doing what bees do, not caring a buzz that I was tramping through their livelihood. But the sound! It took me a few seconds to realize that the roar in my ears was the chorus of the workers. Going about their life and livelihood, I wondered if they knew the sound they made. Yeats’ words immediately surfaced and I smiled. Bee-loud glad indeed. He knew. He knew because he paid attention, as I was doing now.

So often we don’t act because we don’t think we make a difference, as if one voice doesn’t matter, as if the buzz that comes off of our lives is insignificant. But that mindset negates the power of community — of people who put their heads down and work and get the job done, of singers who lift one voice and form a chorus, of worshippers who gather around a common table and form one body in Christ. That’s the buzz of our lives, the bee-loud glade of our existence. We are not made to be alone.

Ask yourself in silence: When do I feel insignificant? When do I feel alive and part of something larger than myself?

Today’s Word: Landscape

Steve · August 25, 2014 · 2 Comments

Linville Falls, NC. SJG photo.

“Geography is simply a visible form of theology.”
– Jon D. Levenson

I’m traveling this week through the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. At the same time, I’m reading my new friend Belden Lane’s book (The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality [Oxford Press]) on the power of landscape in our spiritual lives. Belden’s book takes an especially close look at the rough and barren landscapes of the American southwest and Israel. He is drawn to these mountains and deserts (the word toou in the Coptic language stands for both mountains and deserts, I learned) just as the early church desert fathers drew inspiration from the via negativa, the negative or opposite way of thinking that uses no analogies for God since they are all “ultimately inadequate.”

In the negative space of the deserts and mountains, we come to find God and ourselves for what God and we are not. Belden writes: “Only at the periphery of our lives, where we and our understanding of God alike are undone, can we understand bewilderment as occasioning another way of knowing.”

It’s a beautiful, insightful, ancient way of thinking about God, and I have felt that sense of nothingness and yet everything important standing among the red rocks and dry earth of Sedona, Arizona. And yet, here I stand in the opposite of all that, in the resplendent and verdant ridges and valleys of the Appalachians. So where is God in all this green and fecundity, in these rivers and streams and orchards and fields? God is here, too, of course.

Belden’s book and his other writings have opened my eyes to the role that landscape plays in our spiritual lives, in the ways that we see and sense the sacred all around us. Again, he writes: “[Landscape] plays a central role in constructing human subjectivity, including the way one envisions the holy. The place where we live tells us who we are — how we relate to other people, to the larger world around us, even to God.”

view2 — Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina. SJG photo.

I don’t live here — I’m just visiting for a week — and yet this larger world around me is so big that I cannot take it all in, cannot begin to fathom the Creator and the extent of the creation. And yet I know it to be true, feel it to be truth at the center of my being. I need this landscape like I need the air that I breathe, like I need sacred scripture and the community of others and the bread and wine offered on the table of thanksgiving.

There’s nothing magical about these mountains, just as there is nothing magical in the toou of Belden’s book. We find God when we open ourselves to God, in that place where we allow ourselves to be empty enough to allow God to enter and be present. God, as Belden writes, “cannot be had.” And as the unknown author of the Cloud of Unknowing once wrote: “God is a desert to be entered and loved, never an object to be grasped or understood.”

Wherever we are, whatever our landscape, at our core we must not be possessors of God and faith but rather empty vessels, ready to receive the flowing love of an incomprehensible God.

Ask yourself in silence: What landscape speaks to me of God? Why?

Today’s Word: Reveal

Steve · August 16, 2014 · 8 Comments

Taipei skyline with Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world. SJG photo.

“Truly, Yahweh was always in this place all the time, and I never knew it.” Genesis 28:16

Two things — among others — that most greatly affect our vision are perspective and optics. Where we stand and what we look through as we view the world around us create very different versions of the same thing. Last year as I stood on the street outside of my hotel in Taipei, Taiwan, all I saw at first glance was a wall of towering concrete and steel buildings. Interesting, to be sure, but not what I would immediately think of as beauty. Only later, from my perch on some impossibly high floor and looking through a telephoto lens, was I able to see the beauty of the city, spot a number of tiny, exquisitely planned rooftop gardens or see the mountains in the distance. Perspective and optics.

We cannot see what we don’t put ourselves in the position to view. Nor can we envision the finer details of beauty and grace with eyesight that needs correction. We can’t see the molecule without the microscope or the faraway galaxy without a telescope. And we can’t see the speck in our neighbor’s eye without removing the plank from our own.

We sometimes cannot see and understand the pain and the needs of others — especially those somehow “different” for any myriad of reasons — unless we have the courage to change and challenge our own comfortable position and perspective and perhaps correct or enhance our vision. The adage that we cannot trust our own eyes just might be true. Sometimes our most deeply ingrained prejudices are simply those things we’re not willing to look at more closely, seeking a new perspective and clarity of vision that allows us to see others for what they are: children of God.

And the same goes for our ongoing search for God. God never leaves and does not change, yet we often fail to see the Divine as it intertwines and insinuates itself in our lives. Faith is not about God “coming” to us, for God is always present. Faith is about turning toward some whisper, some gentle nudge and acknowledging, “Ah, there you are. Why didn’t I see you sooner?”

Ask yourself in silence: What can I do to better see God and others in need? What perspectives do I need to change? How does my vision need correcting or enhancing?

Today’s Word: Listen

Steve · August 10, 2014 · 9 Comments

Ibby's Butterfly Garden, Washington University in St. Louis. SJG Photo.

“If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” Psalm 95:7-8

If any of us were to hear the voice of God — really and truly hear it and know for sure what was being said and who was saying it — who among us could harden our hearts against it? Even an atheist would have a hard time resisting the pull and call of such a certain God.

But hearing the voice of God is, unfortunately, not so simple. Hearing the voice of God demands listening for the voice of God, an act of active contemplation that demands silence, attention and a willingness and openness to receive the divine. That in itself is an act of faith. We will never hear the voice of God until we get it in our heads and hearts what God might sound like — and not sound like. God is never the voice of anger, telling us to hate or kill in his name. God is not the voice telling us to judge others, to segregate and separate, to give privilege and abundance to some and allow disadvantage and poverty to others. The voice of God is much more challenging than that.

The voice of God is the voice that tells us to love beyond all else. It is the voice that calls us to union with itself and communion with all those around us. The voice of God tells us we have meaning and purpose, that we can be forgiven regardless of the sin and that we should forgive others over and over again, even if we cannot forget or accept what they have done. God’s voice calls out into the wilderness of our lives (and, yes, we all live in the wilderness…just watch the news): “There is a better way. There is more than all this. Come to me. Follow me.”

When you hear this today — and you will hear it in a dozen different ways if you will only listen — open your heart to it. Take it in like a breath of fresh air on a crisp fall morning and let it fill your life with a new message of love, hope, grace and peace.

Ask yourself in silence: What’s keeping me from hearing the voice of God?