Brilliant In the shadows

These are some of the wayang gedog, gedog puppets or shadow puppets, first created and used in 16th century Indonesia....which of course wasn't yet Indonesia.  I saw them yesterday on a visit to Taman Mini cultural center, here in Jakarta.  I was quite taken by them...mesmerized, really.  Carved from water buffalo leather,they have extraordinary detail--the tiniest curls of hair, the finest line of a moustache--and are sumptuously painted though the puppets would only ever be seen in shadow form from the other side of a screen.

It was a moment of...what? Profound connection...a certain roomy looseness and generosity in the Cosmos...a deep breath of Aha.... to see them.  When I saw these characters, these puppets, I could immediately see/hear the stories they wanted to tell--good versus evil, beautiful princesses, nasty witches...it was nearly as though the puppets spoke to me...or to the part of me that enters into and understands Story.  Story Universal.

And That was something that truly moved me...the puppets represent something that I understand already--but teach me even more about it, make it something more full, more whole, because it comes alive in different clothing, different languages, different contexts.  This element of relationship between what is deeply known/felt/recognized and learning even more about it by the experience of difference seems to me to have everything to do with freedom and integration... of expanding toward the infinity of God and becoming more deeply, fully, who I am as created by God.

And that expansion/contraction movement, the flow of inner~outer~inner, is the heartbeat of true Home...it is an exquisite, intricately unique and astoundingly beautiful dance between God and each one of us.

Jakarta, Entry II

Dalam nama Bapa, dan Putera, dan Roh Kudus....

(In the name of the Father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit...)

I renewed my vows in Indonesian yesterday!  It was a beautiful celebration of the Feast of the Sacred Heart...we had mass in the house here with the entire area minus two who are away--fifteen people, five nationalities...the local pastor celebrated with us.  There was a chorus of novices and postulants who sing beautiful harmonies together, accompanied by guitar...everyone sitting on the wooden floor and the altar perhaps at the height of your knees when sitting.  The front of the tabernacle in the chapel here is beautiful...it is a very thin layer of tough paper that looks like horn...it is batiked with an image of the open heart so when the light shines behind the chapel, you see the light through this door and the image is illuminated.  Quite something.  Afterwards, serious feasting on chicken, fish, rice, rice, rice, veggies, salad, juice, and a pound cake topped with shredded cheese--a nice flavor combo, actually.  And, to go with the cake, fruit salad flavored icecream that tastes EXACTLY like "Frozen Fruit Salad"  that my great-grandmother/mother used to make!!  We all then gathered in the living room for much laughter and a game involving everyone's names.  Just as has been true in other places, my name is a source of curiosity and amusement for people...it sounds Asian to many and reminds people of Kimberly Clark the paper company, King Kong, the ape...and is difficult to sort out first name from last.  I juggled fruit from the basket--my contribution to group entertainment... :)

The morning of the Feast (Friday) I was up when I have been all week--around 4.  I write for a while, I pray for a while.  That morning I was especially moved...because in the midst of the morning call to prayer happening all around me, there I was praying...and it being Friday, the holy day for both Muslims and Jews...I was adding my prayer to untold millions of others from major world faiths all happening at the same time... the image that came to me was of a shimmering, undulating wind that smells of spice and flowers, love and tragedy...a wind that blesses, refreshes, and can also part the sea.

The day before was a trip to the local market to buy food for the celebration.  As I later wrote--The market was something else...PACKED with people and stalls everywhere selling everything from diapers to dried fish, bins of chipped, fried radishes, peanuts, snakefruit, a whole variety of chilis, the biggest chunks of ginger I have ever seen (wrist to elbow), fashion head scarves, sandals of all sorts, incense, and a hot almond nougat wrapped in corn husk and sold by the 2X4.  There was more there than I could hope to describe that all came together to ears, nose, mouth, and eyes as a nearly overwhelming sensual cacophany... It was intense and it was amazing.

A New Corner of the Sky

I am sitting in a kitchen not my own...in a city not my own...in a state not my own... and yet, as I head out into the coming Adventure, I am feeling quite at home.

These last days have been days filled with walking for miles each afternoon, long morning thinks accompanied by a strong mug of coffee, plenty of time to write, and lots of time to pray.  It actually hasn't felt so much that prayer has been a separate time, to tell the truth.  It has been a week of presence, of conversation with Jesus whether in Mass or stopping to notice a bee stuffing his sacs with sweetness, conversation while walking, conversation while listening, and the silent exchanges of love between those known to one another who can share quiet with joy and ease.

I include here some lines from my notebook...

If I think truthfully about my life...about the desire I have to serve the international Society, I realize that this desire to live "in geographic breadth" is a way to live aligned with the call of God in my life and how I most readily experience God.  It is like I have sought a coherent way to respond in living to the way I experience God...the way God has revealed God's self to me...the way I experience who God IS.


It feels organic, this desire...and something that is also part of the joy of being known by name by people who speak other languages and being able to respond... So often it is by circumstance and not intention that this happens...I am at a meeting here or there, someone is here or there visiting and I happen to be there too...I find something organic in this.  The spread of people I have known and that I know... I talk with everyone at school...moving between circles...knowing what is happening in Primary as well as in Eighth grade... I don't know, but thinking on it now, I am caught by the relationship between this gift you have given me and one of the facets I find most attractive about you.

I see you as a depth and a breadth...an Infinite in human form...and I am so attracted to this.  You are more than I can imagine and at the same time you are real, a human who walked and walks the earth and who has said to me "Nothing can separate you from my love."  Part of the importance of this, the strength of this reality is that I hear--and more than hear, I feel, that you are telling me that I too can live with a breadth and a depth of love...and that precisely That is your desire for me too--that at the same time I want to draw near to you, you are drawing near to me.  And when I don't remember, or don't believe it, or don't feel it, or when I fail or make mistakes--in those times, too, you persue me, you draw near.

Several days later, while praying and thinking about this image of Jesus as a breadth and a depth, a vulnerable Infinite in human form, a poem that touched me deeply returned to my heart.  In a biography of Janet Erskine Stuart, RSCJ, her biographer quotes GK Chesterton--

There are more ways than the wind knows,
or eyes that see the sun,
In the light of the lost window
and the wind of the doors undone.

For out of the third lattice
under low eaves like wings,
is a new corner of the sky
and the other side of things.

I think somehow that Breadth and Depth that I experience as Jesus, IS the other side of things....is what can be seen from out of the third lattice and under the low eaves... and seeking that new corner of the sky is entering the pierced heart, receiving fullness and eternity of life from the fountain of love that is there, alive, waiting, breathing, refreshing, cooling, offering respite... that the journey home might continue.

Adventure untold awaits me this month as I head to Indonesia in a few hours to work on organizing a library that is there... a library that is quite literally, if only geographically, on the other side of things...on the other side of things I know... 

What a thrill that there is always more to discover...more to reveal and have revealed...

Preparations

Of late, I have spent some considerable time thinking about and engaged in preparations for various things:  helping other faculty and staff prepare for the end of the school year craziness; creating a morning prayer for our provincial assembly this summer; getting the library ready for its summer rest--checking in and shelving all returned materials, final book orders and cataloging, shelf-reading, clearing the tops of shelves, straightening the books on the shelves; creating and producing the summer reading packets for the lower school students;and preparing to leave in three weeks for a little over a month of helping in another area of the Society...   Also, insofar as I am able,I have in a way been preparing my body for healing...trying to do what I can to allow for a best response to treatment for a bug that has been with me now for six weeks or so.

I like being prepared...I tend to travel prepared...whether in the course of an average day or over longer times and distances...and yet, as a wondrous friend gently and helpfully reminded me the other day when I was beginning to fret intensely about whether my voice will ever return and several other things all at the same time, all of the preparation in the world can not account for all events that happen...and when and if those events happen, you do what is needed and necessary. 

Meanwhile,  be aware and attentive, yes...but also, meanwhile, head on into the Unknown Ahead...

Head into the adventure...lean into it, lean into God who is here now and also ahead...and do so in freedom, trust, desire, openness, and faith.


...which made me think of both John the Baptist in the Gospels and John the Baptist in Godspell...

And that perhaps this disposition of heart is itself, ultimately, what prepares the way...and leads us to deepest home and widest horizon.

Birthmarks

Ink Stains

The  thanksgivings of
humming-new
images or ideas
that linger with me
while they test their wings,
still damp with the
blue love of birth.

c. MperiodPress 


I wrote this after noticing my hands yesterday as I penned several pages in my journal.  I looked down and saw the filled in fingerprints of thumb and index finger and random splotch on my left hand from an errant drip in the inking of my pen.  It didn't bother me..these were the birthmarks of words, ideas, images brought forth from listening for them, and setting them onto the page...which, really, is only a resting place...

This experience came back to me this morning as I consider this Good Shepherd/Vocation Sunday in the liturgical cycle.  I thought about the shepherd who knows all the sheep...how the shepherd must somehow bear the mark of each one in eye and heart to be able to distinguish one from another.  And likewise, each sheep bears the mark of the shepherd's voice, likely the first human voice to welcome it into the world.  

Each is bound to the other.

Likewise, we are each borne in the eye and heart and hand of God...and we each bear the mark of God in our very being-ness...the creative expression and image of God in our self and all that incorporates.  I find myself considering my own vocation and how it is as though through time and circumstance, prayer and discernment, challenge and acceptance, that there is not so much distance there as there once was.  Love is the indelible mark that names us as God's own and I have learned to give in to my desire for that Love...in a sense, to let Love respond to Love.  There is a sense of wholeness, an ever growing  "union and conformity with the Heart of Jesus," as our Constitutions puts it, that comes from responding to the call of Love.  Responding again and again and again...because the call of God is unceasing, ever inviting, enticing, challenging, and the deepest sense of home that I know.  

And it seems that this Vocations Sunday is all about that...the invitation to finding that deep home in God.  Listening from there. Responding from there.  And letting what is birthed from that rest in the world, take wing in the hearts of others, and bring us all a little further along the journey.

Filling up and Spilling Over...

It began as an issue of volume when second graders were reading aloud in the global studies class I co-teach.  It became a remarkable conversation on the power of an individual voice and using that power well.

I have been without my regular speaking voice for about two weeks now...what I do have is at times crackly, squeaky, airy, or just plain absent.  This, naturally, has required a certain adjustment on my part as far as working with my students.  To that end, today I had second graders reading aloud Lon Po Po, the Chinese version of Little Red Riding Hood.  They did a fine job except when it came to volume.

I stopped everything about ten minutes before class was over and had the kids all push in their chairs, plant their feet, and stand strong.  "Now, what I'd like to you do," I croaked, alone in appreciating the irony, "is breathe without moving your shoulders."  We spent a number of moments talking about the power of the voice living somewhere just above the belt and how breath should fill us out, not up.  Speaking from there allows the speaker to fill a space with voice, not a yell or a screech, but a full, round, voice.  We used the imagery of a balloon--the rounder the balloon, the more full the balloon, the more space the balloon takes.  The rounder the voice, the more full the voice...the more space the voice fills...

"But!, it is not only your voice that can fill a room... One person can also fill a room with quiet."

One child turned her head toward her shoulder and asked "How do you do that?"

I said nothing. But looked out the window.

She said nothing.

Soon no one was saying anything.

After a moment or two passed, the same child said "That's how..."

And we closed class talking about how that sort of quiet felt, the full round-ness of quiet--how we were all there, each one, with all of our thoughts, with all that we each have in our hearts...not at all empty...but yes, quiet...and the choice they have in whether to fill a space with their voice or with quiet...both exceedingly powerful options that they already have at their age.  And how important it is to enjoy these gifts...how important it is practice those options, learn from them, how to use them, share them, set them free for the sake of others....to believe that they can fill a space, that they are worthy of being heard in full voice or accompanied in full quiet....and that they can help make it okay for others, too.

I was so incredibly grateful at the end of class for the opportunity to share that with my kids.

A Different View

At the invitation of Silvana, here is a different look at Quiet Mind--this one using Wordle.

It’s a visual representation of word frequency in a block of text—the larger the font, the more frequent the use.

It is certainly an interesting and clear way to see themes...God, mind, quiet, thoughts, images, glorious (twice!)... but I love even more the "throw it in the pot and stir" spill of language that allows words to settle into new places and create even more.  I am rather fond of frequently well-thumbed as well as wonder loving.  Glorious pairing-quiet God is one of my favorites.  And there are even short poems all on their own...Open sat vastness/blooming God's glorious images.  Or perhaps a new invitation...Write revelation moon.

This Wordle excersise makes me realize in a new way the generative life within well selected words.  As a writer, I put them together in a certain way to create certain images or convey particular ideas.  But clearly, tossed together in a different way, those same words have much more to say, reveal.

Frankly, I think that's cool.