An Act of Creation a day...

"In the time that I have been sitting and looking at the screen or staring off into the seemingly greener grass distance, I could be making scones."

This is the salvific thought I had this afternoon.

Words are no more at the ready than they were before and my thoughts are no more ordered, but an act of creation has been accomplished and there is something to be said about that.

There is something to be said that something new has been brought into being at my hand and shared with others...something which will bring joy, something which offers interesting flavor for the spirit (cardamon-lime), and something which is even better when accompanied... In this case, by French roast.

Simply said, I feel better, more even, less wrinkly, having created something...having stuck my hands into the essential ingredients, having spooned and folded and zested, having been messy and having cleaned, having learned and having touched the process all the way through.

I am hoping words come again soon... But for now, yes, scones will do...and do nicely.

 

Mystical Immediate

Late afternoon this past Tuesday, I returned from a month of helping out with an RSCJ project in Cuba. Over the course of three weeks, we put on 11 different day-camps at different sites for over 360 children. It was a phenomenal experience and I offer below some reflections from my journal....

14 July, 2013.

I am hotter than Hades, I am certain that I stink, and I ache almost everywhere possible. I have seen a waterfall, watched red ants congregate, seen termites in trees, burros roaming, a spider with a cylindrical back side, and a peacock who looked almost embarrassed to be molting. And I walked through breezes of dozens and dozens of butterflies.

19 July, 2013

Amazing as it is to say it, I am looking at the Caribbean while surrounded by children for whom this view is common and yet who do not have enough to eat and barely enough to survive. I am seeing blues and greens as God created them and not simply as painters have interpreted them. It makes a difference. I just spent a good long while throwing a ball for a huge lot of kids in the water (Tira, profe! Tira! Yo, yo!). Never has one tennis ball made so many people so happy at the same time. And I include myself in that absolute joy.

23 July, 2013

Thank you for the sleep. My eyes closed last night before finishing my first impressions of Natividad. When we were about to make superhéroes, I asked the group, ¿y si tu fueras un superhéroe, que sería tu poder? (If you were a superhero, what would your power be?) y sin pensar por quince segundos, El niño Artúr dijo, "Salvar a la gente." Ni modo si para mucha gente estos niños son los olvidados, tú estás aquí. Tú estás tan presente aquí. Tú siempre vas a recordarles. (And without thinking for fifteen seconds, the child Artúr said Save the people. Whether or not these children are the forgotten ones for many, you are here. You are so very present here. You will always remember them.)

July, 24, 2013

Note to self: Looking down is sometimes vital. Looking up also has its merits. Completely cracked my head on a cast iron pump handle today in Camino de Santa Cruz and did so with such oomph that I had to sit rest while several of the women offered consolation, including taking turns holding a frozen water bottle on my head and fanning me with their hands. The men thought it was hilarious in the best good natured way...which it was, really. One of them stripped off his tee shirt and tied it onto the handle so I would see it. It was such honest care and laughter, both. A deep appreciation for the humor of a situation and an extraordinary attentiveness to caring...what a wonderful combination.

Then after returning to the house, I took a nap and for the third day in a row dreamed of the whole process of my death...

I am curious about the meaning of dreaming my death three days running. Part of me hopes that it has to do with dying to old ways and opening up to something new...and part of me hopes that it is not anticipatory, though I have to say that there was no fear in my dream and the experience nearly beautiful...nearly because as yet, I find it hard to imagine my own death as a beautiful thing.

29 July, 2013

The other night at evening prayer I had said that people would ask me what I had done in Cuba during this past month and that I had been thinking about what I would say. My first instinct, and what I shared that night, is that I have seen the Cuban face of God and received God's gaze in return. This morning while washing a passel of breakfast dishes (pan y café y tanta vajilla...nunca voy a entender-- bread and coffee and yet so many dishes...I will never understand) another considerable learning came to me--> I have experienced here that many things are far more precious and far more precarious than I knew them to be before. That is to say, what I have known about this internally--whether in heart or head or both--has been grounded in a mystical immediacy...In a lived reality where every moment is lived fully in its time, where I feel like I am touching the ground and touching humanity within myself and in others, and where (from Wisdom...) the pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty is witnessed in acts of extraordinary welcome and generosity by those who have few material goods, in relationship, in laughter, in witnessing to the possibility of hope, in sitting together and listening to one another...in the solidarity of the Heart.

 

 

An Adventure

It isn't as though I don't know that an adventure is coming. I have been making piles for a while now and going over lists. I have purchased what new is needed and found what has been tucked away since the last time. I have washed, folded, selected, bagged, and packed. I have copied documents, checked on a map, read articles, and called or messaged with people who are important to me.

Yet, it is when I removed my keys from my bag and placed them carefully in the center of my dresser this evening that I felt it most deeply in my heart. The thrill of freedom and the wonder of whether the next branch will hold me when I fold my wings for the night. The genuine curiosity to go and see and learn and offer what help I can and the awareness that the keys to some of what I find comforting are not with me in the same way. The feeling of being loose around the edges without the the concrete grounding of keys to a known home and yet believing that there is nothing, nothing. that can separate me from the love of God so shoulder up the satchel of necessaries and head on into discovery and revelation.

Oddly, I am glad for this combination of feelings because it speaks to me of God and of love. I'm not sure I'd be so keen on it if leaving were too easy or if I believed that it didn't matter that I returned...

I am a firm believer in the reality that I am not indispensable... But I also find grace filled consolation in believing that it matters that I return as much as it matters that I leave. Love has taught me that. It is the blending of Remain in me and I will remain in you and go out to all the world and tell the good news.

And so I go this Friday...away for a month...without much if any access to the Internet...to help an rscj project in another country...and I will be back in August...holding the keys again, but I suspect, entering my home in a different way. And that is part of the adventure.

Kindred Company

Of late I have been reading Paul Elie's book, The Life You Save may be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Hmm...reading it...no, that is not entirely accurate. Savoring it. Sipping it slowly. Feeling it bloom within me, warming me, teasing my senses with hints of something familiar and yet a distinct combination of flavors all its own...

It brings together Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Thomas Merton and weaves their stories of faith and the role of writing, conversion and seeking, desire and determination to listen to God within their own experience and beyond.

I was telling my friend last night about this book and how much I was enjoying it...how good it is for my heart to read of them. She added, and to touch a world you understand.

Yes! Yes, exactly. In certain respects, they are each people with whom I can identify...people who could not leave the company of God...people who made conscious choices about God, about their lives of faith, people who moved through life as seekers, not settlers, people for whom the pen is a sacramental and the written word a testament and invitation, a call, a way to help them mediate the fullness of life surrounding.

Two excerpts from my notebook about what I have read so far...

Dorothy Day's motivating desire behind her writing--"to give reason for the faith that is in us..." I LOVE that...and will find a way to use that...blog, wall quotation, something. To what end the witness of our lives? To give reason for the faith that is in us, Therefore, live with a fullness and be not afraid. Express, share, own the truth as it is experienced. Discover, reveal, make manifest, the stunning constancy of God in sadness and challenge as well as in joy and easier times. To give reason is not to defend, but to reveal...to seek to live and to write with such openness, aperture, divine permeability, that it is God's love and the humanity of Jesus in the daily lived reality that is seen, heard, read...

And on Merton and his keeping of a journal...

"The balcony was his outpost, his observation deck, his open-air hermitage. There, his journal, a series of exercises in observing and recalling, thinking and writing, became a religious devotion." AUGH, I love that and I GET that. To so intimately link God and the daily whatnot of living that can be seen for a balcony...and not even that...it ISN'T making the link, it is revealing it...noticing it, allowing it to pierce, pass through, to be, to bloom, to challenge, to change the self... YES!!

In so many ways and for so many reasons, is good to be together with these four for a while... to listen to them and learn from them and know them as kindred souls... The sort of souls for whom Jessica Powers wrote the following, I think...

The Second Giving

The second giving of God is the great giving

out of the portions of the seraphim,

abundances with which the soul is laden

once it has given up all things for Him.

The second growth of God is the rich growing,

with fruits no constant gathering can remove,

the flourishing of those who by God’s mercy

have cut themselves down to the roots of love.

God seeks a heart with bold and boundless hungers

that sees itself and earth as paltry stuff;

God loves a soul that cast down all He gave it

and stands and cries that it was not enough.

Jessica Powers

 

Here and There: Cartography.

I recently began reading a book about maps and the influence of cartography on society throughout history. It sounds weighty, but honestly, it is a fascinating and humorously engaging read.

One of the things it has made me think about is the fact that far from the fixed and firm directional tools many maps are today, original maps were much more about relationships. Where is one landmass in relationship to another, where are the edges, where does the wind begin, and where are the monsters. And the people drawing these maps were not the travelers themselves, but those who heard their stories: those who lived in port cities, those who had the means and the tools to draw, those who had the sort of mind that could envision a world far beyond their own experience...those who wondered and dreamed, who were trying to make sense of things. I'm not sure even that accuracy was an aim, at first. It was more about getting something down that might help frame an adventurous, possibly dangerous, exotic and wondrous, whole.

I can't help but think about the awe of first realizing that there is more. And then being able to see it! At least, on papyrus. All of a sudden here could change and there became a possibility. Was that comforting for people? Scary? Inconceivable, heretical, mystical, preposterous?

 

What a powerful thing that realization can be, though... Even though there is quite possibly unknown, unfamiliar, and not necessarily better or even all that different. For me, knowing about the existence of there is freeing, curiosity piquing, and even, oddly, confirming of my presence in the here. I know of there and yet my being is not there..therefore I am here. For now. Because there is more.

Some of my awareness of this comes from lots of hands on experience beginning at a young age. I have never lived in any one place for more than four sequential years over the course of my life. In my adult life I have also had different opportunities to travel to lands beyond the borders of my known landmass.

Thinking about Eratosthenes who calculated the circumference of the earth with surprising accuracy and limited movement and the maps that are still in existence dating from the 4th century BC China, makes me think about other ways I have come to know of the cartography of relationships. Stories are certainly one of those ways.

Books are welcome maps to new places, new people, new experience...and they allow me to engage my memories and my dreams, my experience and my hopes, my wonders and my marvels. With a flip of the page, I can be there in the book and over there in my mind and here in body. Stories tell me of others who have walked a similar path or chosen differently or might fill in details from someone else's map and help me understand something in a whole new way...find new connections or relationships or forge ahead choosing the way by which fewer have travelled to make my own observations.

Love is another map that teaches me, informs me, and frees me, by relationships. Those times when I have wondered how on earth I will navigate my way through something, love has been the consistent directional. Love has invited me to turn toward the unknown and walk onward. I have trusted in love when it asked me to leave a here because there needed me too and I have been saved by love when here was not good and the way to there unclear.

Hm...this makes me think about the expression You can't get there from here. As someone with a less than crisp edged sense of direction, I can completely understand that position. It has happened to me many a time. But, I also muse on that and wonder if it doesn't make a big difference what map it is that is being used. And, too, the relationship of there to here.

I remember looking at conventional maps as a child and longing to interpret the lines, numbers, symbols...longing to understand. Now, I find myself saying instead, please, walk with me and show me the way. Help me see with a heart of relationship, help me dream of connections and understanding, help me when I wander too far, help me know more of the whole.

 

A Continuation of a series...

Oh Mary (a continuation of a series...)

Oh Mary could you come and cool my eyes...

could you calm my mind with your ripple water lullaby...

could you settle my spirit with a story of would you believe…

could you show my soul how to swing with an if you please…

Oh Mary could you come in your confident grace and cool…

cool my wild wandering self into colors of peace. 

c. MperiodPress

Feast of the Sacred Heart 2013

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/spices

Even though I have read the readings that will be proclaimed at today's liturgy, I confess that my thoughts wander from them when I think about the Sacred Heart this year. Time and again, my mind, my senses, return to a path that is scented and stimulating, piquant and curious, colorful, subtle, and mysterious.

It seems that there are images that remain from these last days of new food experiences, new flavors, new metaphors.But nonetheless, they are images not so far removed, I believe, from the Heart.

My life has included all manner of spice...bitter, pungent, freeing, lively, harmonious, faceted, intriguing and upon rare occasion No thank you, never again. I have tasted them, learned from them, and tried to live them in the complexity of their coming together. Sometimes the fullness of their mingling means teasing apart their distinct elements is difficult...but I know that it takes such a combination to yield a richly nuanced whole.

When any one bit is missing or too emphasized...hmm... Well, it makes me think back to the triangles of several days ago. Instead of connecting, or complementing and strengthening the shape, lines and angles might become over run, or left obtuse, acute, or incomplete. Spending time in the kitchen of experience, learning the equilibrium, incorporating newly discovered tastes and subtleties into the heady swirl...this is the art of a nourishing lifetime.

Today, on this Feast of the Sacred Heart, I realize in these new images the wisdom and generosity of God...because ultimately, these flavors all together absolutely work. And the greatest Whole is where they meet in extraordinary fullness...they meet at the harmony of all that is most completely human and gloriously divine...they meet in the Sacred Heart, they meet in Love.

www.kristinmillerquilts.com

Trusting in the fidelity of God and in the love of my sisters, it is in the name of that Love, desiring to live and share that Love, thankful for that Love given to each one wholly, completely, and without reservation, that I will renew my vows today alongside each rscj in the international Society.