“I wish that throughout my middle years I had been more aware, so that I wasn’t now trucking pile after pile of things I don’t need to the dumpster and ultimately to the landfill. It’s sobering and embarrassing.”
“The realm of emotion is also a place of fickleness. Sometimes I feel God’s presence there and sometimes I have only ashes in my heart. I can feel a deep joy in a melody, the winging of a goose over the rooftops, the prisms in a snowflake. But just as quickly I can be crushed by loss, fear or illness.”
“And now let us open our eyes. It is time to slip into the big Self perspective. We are not alone, we are not lost, and we are overwhelmed with abundance. Abundance comes. He takes our breath completely away. We’re shoved out of the attitude of thinking we know how it all will go. We are not in charge – not even close.”
“We know that the roots of systemic racism run all through our hillsides. We don’t like to look at how bad it really is, because that would turn the ground we stand on into mush. Wrong attitudes about what we can own, who we can keep at a distance and what is owed us keep the ground from shifting too badly. But what do we lose by keeping those particular hillsides in place?”
“When I reflect on the passage from Corinthians that is our second lesson for the day, I imagine a Body of Christ that is so diverse that every single one of us has a place in it, just as we are. Our spiritual gifts include not just the named functions like preaching and praying, but also the unnamed ones, like the way each of us responds to what gives us joy, and the creative ways in which we love one another in fully reciprocal relationships.”
“Soon I am carried out into the sunlight, where I am poured and poured, again and again, bringing happiness and wonder to all whom I serve. I am deeply satisfied and full of joy myself. Regardless of what happens next, it is this moment for which I was born.”
“None of us is the Messiah, of course. But we each are children of God, and, as such, we are more than we usually imagine ourselves to be. We were conceived before the world began to be a unique part of God’s holy plan. Do we know who we really are and what our mission is?”
“So, thinking of today’s readings, I wonder at a young man and woman willing to uproot themselves, to take only what they could carry on their backs and to go somewhere totally foreign and new, just on the basis of warnings in a dream. Sure, dreams probably had a lot more weight back then than they do now, but even so. I’m sure it wasn’t the usual way to respond.”
“How many sunrises I have waited for: trying to stay awake on a cross country car trip; huddled in inadequate blankets in a desert night; coiled against an intense pain I irrationally hope will ease with daylight; waiting on Christmas morning for that moment when I can go out to the living room to see what Santa brought.”
“For us the angel is often not even discernable, let alone understandable. We cannot see Gabriel among the bright lights and constant noise of contemporary civilization. Our cell phones get in the way, as do our constant cycles of meetings and obligations. The only thing we have to guide us and give us the tiniest inkling of hope is prayer.”