Spirituality

Resting in Creation and in Love

Steve · July 20, 2022 · 3 Comments

A few weeks ago, Sue and I drove up the California coast from San Jose all the way up into Oregon. Along the way, we stood and walked and rested in the glory of God’s creation. The first half day of driving, north of San Francisco, it seemed like we were pulling into every single scenic view parking lot we encountered on the Pacific Coast Highway. We were so struck with the beauty of waves crashing into rock, so reminded of the power and dominion of the Creator.

Further north, we stopped the car on the side of a road that cut through Redwood National and State Parks. We got out, stretched our legs and looked up (and up and up) staring in utter amazement at the height and breadth and glory of these organisms that have stood witness to more than a thousand years of history and growth. We walked a hiking trail among them for several hours, slowly and resolutely and gratefully treading ground that felt ancient and holy, as is every acre of this planet.

After crossing into Oregon and hugging the coast for a few days, we headed east to visit the natural and incredible beauty of Crater Lake, which I had only seen in books and magazines. Nothing prepared us for our first glimpse, walking up a small incline from a parking lot, for the perfectly pristine and almost unreal blue of the lake, formed by a collapsed volcano 7,700 years ago. Later, we sat above another rise by the lake, resting in creation and amazed by the silence, the color, the grandeur of it all.

Over and over, we couldn’t help but sense the divine presence of our still-creating Creator. To those who do not believe in the role of a Creator, all I can say is that I see no other way, no reason or purpose for the beauty of it all without the moving and loving hand of “something else” bringing light, life and order. In the beginning (and in the end), everything in me screams, “there must be something else.” And I will rest in that.

In the beginning, God. That’s all.
Then standing, his smile wide with promise
the Creator begins the ritual building
the story we now repeat around the fire
not a wild and violent tale
but a gentle voice and hand
urging and molding all into life and light.

The ritual revealed form and purpose:
no mere architect
but artist and lover
a child playing in the dirt
creating love in his mind and finding it good
breathing his own breath into it
walking with this new life
in the cool and breezy part of the day
when the great light lowers itself into dry land.

Not content with just creating
the Creator decides to love those to whom he gave dominion
searches us out when we hide
sews garments to cover our shame.
And we live in this abundance of love still.
Today, whether restless or satisfied,
we rest in it, still.

Let Me Easter in You

Steve · April 24, 2022 · Leave a Comment

As spring comes to America’s Midwest, I am reminded of this reflection I wrote a couple of years ago for a group of spiritual directors. The conversations in it bounce back and forth between what I imagine the risen Christ might say to me and the common struggles of faith that spiritual directors often hear from those who share their stories with us (and also feel ourselves from time to time, of course). The title, “Let Me Easter in You,” was inspired by a poem by Gerard Hanley Hopkins.

“Let me Easter in you,” he says to me, handing me a piece of fish and a small helping of bread warm from the morning fire. We sit on the shore together and then he rises and looks out over the lake at his fishermen-disciples, earnestly but haplessly making their way and their living in the early morning light. He shakes his head and grins. “The fish are right there on the other side of the boat, and they can’t see them,” he says.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” she says to me, her head in her hands and her tears spilling out through her fingers like spring water through reeds. “I am hungry for something I cannot even name. I am searching for something in all the wrong places that for all my life I have been taught and assured should be easy to find. But it’s not. It never is.”

“Let’s Easter together,” I manage to say, handing her a tissue and giving her my attention.

“Let me Easter in you,” he says to me, breaking open the bread with the two men he met on the Emmaus road and inviting me to join in the sharing. The bread is warm in my hand, and he is as close to me as that heat. He turns away from the two men and toward me. He smiles and shakes his head as he speaks: “I walked with them for miles, and they didn’t know it was me.”

“I don’t know what it all is supposed to mean for me,” he says, “all the words and stories and rituals and prayers. I’m told it’s supposed to set my heart on fire but all I sense is a cold void. Isn’t there more? Shouldn’t there be more?”

“Let’s Easter together,” I whisper, inviting him to speak his own story.

“Let me Easter in you,” he says to me, folding the garments and placing them at the place where he had been lain. We walk together into the sun-lit morning and out into the field, and I notice his hand reaching out to touch a slender stem of wheat, cradling its spike in a kind of blessing of the food it will become. “She thought I was the gardener,” he says. “She just couldn’t see me.”

“I don’t know that I believe anymore,” she says. “What sense is there to an empty tomb, a folded cloth, broken bread and a risen man? Why should it matter? When has it ever — even once — changed my life?”

“Let’s Easter together,” I say. “Let’s see what we hear in the silence and dark of deepest and richest soil. Let’s allow ourselves to remain buried long enough for the light of the sun to warm us into life again. Let’s take our time but reach ever-upward. Let’s gently burst from the deadness of our seeds, sprouting and digging our way back to the surface, a little curl of green barely visible but ever hopeful.

“Then a stem…a few leaves…a flourish of grain, something to be plucked and ground by stone, mixed and patted and baked and served as nourishment for another. Let’s Easter together, grasping a new chance at life when it is offered.”

A Blessing for Prodigals (Like Us)

Steve · March 27, 2022 · 8 Comments

Yesterday, I presented a day-long retreat on the Parable of the Prodigal Son to a group of friends and alumni of the Aquinas Institute of Theology, where I received my training in spiritual direction and now serve as a trustee.

I ended the day with this new prayer of blessing, a reminder of the four important life lessons embedded in the parable that lead to a deeper understanding and experience of God’s extravagant love for us — Stop. Turnaround. Be reconciled. Change.

As you head into these final weeks of lent, remember it’s not too late to do something that may change you forever.

May God bless us in our stopping, in our listening to a gentle inner voice that says: “Enough! This is not the way.” That says: “You know better than this. There is no life in this. Stop doing what you hate and what destroys.”

May God bless us in our turning, in the effort it takes to switch direction when we would rather not, and head in the direction of a home we know we can trust, back to the arms of a forgiving God, a slow and steady movement to an unchanging changer who is also the all-forgiving giver of everything that is good and holy and right.

May God bless us on our journey back to reconciliation and forgiveness, beaten down and tired and hungry and aching as we are, longing for something we know only God can give.

May God bless us as we arise each day and seek to find the holy and the sacred in the ordinary and mundane, as well as in the extraordinary. May we see them all as gift and may we trust God to give us what we need each day as we raise our hands in gratitude for all we have been given and in sorrow for all the ways we have failed to recognize a God who is so clearly evident.

May God bless us and by doing so transform us into God’s own image, full of mercy and healing and service and love. May we be perfectly compassionate as God is perfect in compassion.

Merry Christmas, friends!

Steve · December 25, 2021 · 4 Comments

Just a short note today to say Merry Christmas and thank you for reading and commenting throughout the year. Enjoy this holy day, and remember it’s just the beginning…

A (Very) Short Story of Joseph of Nazareth

Steve · December 18, 2021 · 6 Comments

All in all, Joseph gets pretty short shrift in the Gospel Christmas narratives, and very little is said about him after that. He’s the quiet guy standing in the back by the shepherds and the sheep. We don’t know how long he lived but it seems clear that he did not live to see Jesus begin his ministry. He’s not mentioned after Jesus’ “missing years,” even when Mary is.

But I like to imagine the role he played in raising Jesus to manhood — to teaching him a trade, showing him the right way to build things that last, and modeling for Jesus the best way to be a gentle man in an often-violent world.

So imagine yourself with the opportunity to meet him. Sit on a hill with him overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Feel the breeze coming off the water and listen as he tells you the improbable but true story of how he came to be the father and guardian of the Son of God. He is a bit older now, wise in his ways, and eager to tell the story of how the whole thing started. Listen…

I want to tell you an improbable story. Even now, in my old age, I can scarcely believe all that happened to me back then, but I can never forget it. Even as other memories of my life begin to fade, there is nothing — not even the vagaries of a fading memory — that can steal this incredible story from me. It is, first of all, the story of how the birth of my son, Jesus, came about. But even beyond that miraculous day, it is a story about how I was changed forever in a single moment. I want to tell you that story. Do you have a few minutes?

It all began when I was betrothed to Mary, a beautiful young woman with so much spirit and faith and promise, but before we had lived together or had done so much as hold hands while walking in the olive grove on the hill behind her parents’ home. It was in that very olive grove on a cool spring day that she came to me with what was, at first, devastating and heart-wrenching news: She was expecting a child.

She told me a story that, as much as I loved her and wanted to marry her, was incredulous. She said the child was a miracle, a gift, the fruit — not of an elicit encounter with another man, but through an encounter with God’s holy spirit. How I wished that could be true. But I could not believe her. I was no fool.

But I did not want to shame her, to leave her open to ridicule or worse. I knew there was a way to sever this relationship in an honorable way, a simple decree of divorce. She would find a way to move on, to care for her child and get on with her life. That’s all I wanted for her. I made plans the next day to visit the temple to begin to quietly make the arrangements. I went home.

But that night, I had a dream unlike any dream I had ever had. A dream, but so much more than a dream. In it, an angel — it had to have been an angel — said to me, as clear as day:

“Joseph, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

And when I awoke in the morning, I knew something had changed in me in that dreamlike moment I could have never seen coming. Something softened. Something opened up. I remembered the stories of the prophets, the ones I had heard since I was a child. Something in me came alive, and I began to put the pieces together. And these ancient words of holy scripture came to me from somewhere deep inside:

“Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.”

I knew what I needed to do. I ran to Mary’s house and knocked on the door. It was early but she was up, sitting in the corner near the fire, stirring the pot. She didn’t look surprised to see me at all. It was as if she knew I was coming and knew what I was going to say.

I held her face in my hands and she smiled up at me. I knew everything had changed. I knew I would never be the same. I said to her, “Yes. Together we will do this improbable thing. Yes.”