Seeking Authentic Voice

 Rev Pat Raube, over at RevGals offers this Friday Five: 1. First, do you come from a tradition in which the Advent season is embraced? This is not true for all of us. If you do, what is your personal preference? Do you love it or hate it? Embrace it or want it to go away already? How enthusiastically does your church enter into Advent? The church of my childhood was not a liturgical church, we did not practice the seasons of the year. Every Sunday was Sunday, except for the two Sunday's when we celebrated Christmas and Easter. Learning about the seasons, including Advent and Lent, was a bit of learning curve for me. I left church as a teenager and returned - to a very different denomination - as an adult, much had changed. But I have found that practicing Advent enhances my faith life and spirituality and makes the season more meaningful. The churches I have been in and worked in since returning to church as an adult have all practiced Advent. We use the Advent wreath, s...

In this morning's meditation Jan Richardson , at the Illuminated Advent Retreat, asks us to ponder the concept of "emptying." She writes: ".... worship begins not only with the presence of call and response, with the meeting of God and of one another, but with the emptying that makes the meeting possible, the emptying involved in preparing of a space of welcome for the Word to make a home. What kind of space are you preparing in this season? How do you make ready, make way, make room for the sacred in these days? What distracts you; what drowns out the Word? Is there some piece you need to release or to simplify? In this second week of Advent, what draws your attention to the liturgy of your life?" Yesterday I wrote a bit about how busy and full my life is these days. It is a challenge to find time to do all that I want and need to do. But I am working at it. I am trying to rise early enough in the morning to take care of that which feeds me. I...

I have been so busy lately that I have literally had no time to reflect, let alone read and write. I have managed, more or less, to maintain my exercise routine. My hope is for both, mornings when I can read, reflect, write, and exercise. This means I need about three hours most mornings. Seriously, who has that kind of time while also working a full time job as a parish priest, being a wife and mom, and  having three dogs and two cats? Sigh. So I exercise most days and read and write as I am able. Life is full and good and I am not complaining, I am just honoring the urges within and my inability to satisfy the many diverse directions my life is pulled in. The philosophy book I am slowly making my way through has moved on from pondering the question of the "ultimate, that which one finds when one reaches the very heart of existence" to the idea of "being" and "becoming." Ultimate, according the various philosophers who have pondered this question ma...

Recent headline of the San Francisco Chronicle. Female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spiderweb of crab traps and line weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, tail, torso and a line tugging in her mouth. A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her. They worked for hours and eventually freed her. When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around as she was thanking them. Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time,...

The Sun Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone – and how it slides again out of the blackness every morning, on the other side of the world, like a red flower streaming upward on it heavenly oils, say, on a morning in early summer, at its perfect imperial distance – and have you ever felt for anything such wild love – do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word billowing enough for the pleasure that fills you, as the sun reaches out, as it warms you as you stand there, empty-handed – or have you too turned from this world – or have you too gone crazy for power, for things? from New and Selected Poems, Volume One, by Mary Oliver, 1992 I've been very busy lately. And when I haven't been busy I've been sick. I haven't written much, a...

  A reflection on the readings for Advent 1C: Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36 A few years ago I was fascinated as I watched a documentary on the process by which large buildings and skyscrapers are torn down. One of the best ways to do this is to implode the building into itself. This requires careful analysis by trained professionals. They do a thorough study of the building and its construction to gage the way it will collapse. Then they place dynamite in strategic places through out the building and ignite the dynamite in a particular sequence so as to cause the building to implode, or collapse into itself, rather than explode out. The principle is simple: If you remove the support structure of a building at a certain point you will cause the layer above to collapse on the layer below the point. The explosives are just the trigger for the collapse because gravity is what brings the building down. Imploding contains the debris and protects buildings and land that surrou...

Mary Beth, over at RevGals offers this Friday Five: 1. If you suddenly received a ton of money and could open up some kind of store or service just for the pleasure of having it (assume it wouldn’t have to be too financially successful!), what would it be? I'd offer holistic health care that paid the therapists a living wage and made the treatments available to everyone. We'd have yoga, massage therapy, acupuncture, Reike, shiatsu, chiropractic, sauna and steam rooms, and a whirlpool, health classes on vitamins and diet, meditation classes, religion and spirituality resources, and a tea room where one could eat a simple healthy meal, drink delicious tea, and read. 2. What service or store that no longer exists do you miss most? I can't think of anything. However, what I wish for is a good old fashioned vegetarian restaurant - although we have lots of veggie options of the Middle Eastern variety, I'd love a vegetarian restaurant like we had in Chicago: Blind Fait...