Walking in the Rain...

The beach was empty this morning when I went for my walk. There was a downpour for about 15 minutes and when the rain cleared, and some of the humidity had been taken from the air, the beach was peaceful. I walked for a couple of kilometres barefoot through the surf and the sand at the shoreline, sometimes going in up to my knees. The water was clear, but choppy and the wind whipped around me. There was no one around, so I sang to myself, skipped along, splashing in the water. I don’t think I’ve spent a lovelier hour than that in a while. Then back to reality, planning the worship services for a couple of nursing homes in the morning, finishing my little reflection and a Taize service in the evening, doing bulletins, while figuring out the details of a memorial service in a Church I’ve never been in and a burial in a Cemetery with a P.O. Box… Ahhh… Rural life!

wire-less life

This past month has been an interesting one. Not only because I have my own little church to look after for the summer, but I’ve done it wire-lessly – as in unconnected… without cables – without the internet at home – which is also my office! It has been in my mind a month long retreat from being in constant connection. I have been in contact, I have used the internet and my email… and yes, even MSN, but I haven’t left it running in the background of my life. I haven’t let it take over much of my unscheduled time.

I’ve had mixed reaction to this I have to say. I discovered just how much I’ve grown to rely on that little “bing” someone is online, or I’ve received another message, even if it is just Amazon telling me about specials on their books or Yves Rocher telling me of their latest sale on soapy scented things. But what it has allowed me to do is use my time better. To feel like I can relax. To get some reading that I’ve wanted to do for so long, but the last year of seminary just wasn’t conducive to doing it! And just generally try to find my feet. At first, I felt lost, I felt like I was away from all my social network, away from friends and family and it was pretty lonely. At the end of the month, I can look back and say that I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I untangled my mind and spirit from all those wires and ties upon my time, for I’ve been able to do some pretty cool things with time that I would have otherwise simply lost.

Now, my internet is up and running again. The month long experiment is over. I wonder if I can keep up with what I’ve learned – perhaps I’ll have to make it an annual wire-less week. But I hope not – sitting in my car outside a closed wireless café fighting off mosquitoes and confusing police officers as to what my intentions were, grew pretty old!

Israel

I leave for Israel in 17 hours, or rather I leave for the airport then. A suggested arrival time at the airport of 2:30pm, and a flight time of 5pm followed by an 11 hour flight.

I can't let myself get too excited yet - I still have a thesis to finish and hand in first thing in the morning... and I still have 10 pages to go!

Part of the trip is a course and involves writing two site meditations after I have visited these places... Perhaps I'll post these upon my return...

I can't hardly wait to be really excited, if this is how I feel and I'm trying to be restrained tomorrow will be fun! Hopefully by then I will have escaped the noose of my thesis and can say I am officially finished my M.Div!

Open letter to the Ontario Legislature

There is a debate beginning in the Ontario Legislature about the Lord's prayer. You can have your say by going here:

I have chosen to have my say and have included it for you.

Dear representatives of the Canadian people,

I am concerned by the knee jerk potential in this debate. The Lord's Prayer has a deep meaning for me as a Christian, and as a Canadian, I find it reassuring to know that before meetings my representatives in those in discussion are remembering in themselves why they are there, their purpose for being in public life and the desire to not only remember the marginalized in their decision-making process, but to ensure they are acting with integrity and justice.

Reginald Bibby in his book Restless Churches (p46) states; "We live by the creed of diversity and multiculturalism, Christians are extremely reluctant to claim a position of dominance and can be expected to be chastised if they do…[however] the Christian numerical monopoly is a demographic reality that is not about to change in the foreseeable future." The responsibility of this fact is that Christians are an integral part in ensuring that everyone has a seat at the table, regardless of faith or creed, remembering that this includes other Christians.

Given this, I do not feel that the Lord's Prayer is appropriate, but since when did Christians start worshiping the Lord's Prayer? It is at its base, a plea for sustenance and guidance on our path, mercy for our mistakes as we are called to give mercy to each others, and an acknowledgment reminding us not to seek our own selfish gains so that we may see the glory of compassion alive around us, in each other and within ourselves.

However, the time spent with this prayer IS vitally important, and should not be consumed by the start of the meeting, but another general thanksgiving or declaration be given which includes all people of faith and those of no declared religion. This time of direction must not be merely reduced to a stunned silence, then in a few years dropped because its significance is unknown. We are much more than just physical bodies; we are beings with psyches, egos and active minds. But there is more to us still. We are spiritual creatures. To recognize the whole person, we need to recognize that we are made up of body, mind, and spirit. It is not possible to leave our spiritual selves at the door of our employment (or this honourable legislature) and enter expecting to simply do a job.

May we be frugal with our time on this debate, may all engaged feel free to speak remembering that, "Religionizing only one part of life secularizes the rest of it." (as quoted from Abraham Maslow in Corinne Wares book, Connecting to God p76).

Thank you for your consideration

Blessing

This is one of the blessings used by the Iona community, I just found it by chance, and quite like the fact that Bishop Gene Robinson is using it!

Prayer

I have learned that I am a visual person. I pray best within physical tangible experiences as opposed to mental gymnastics. Wonderful pious language sings in my ears and I can read it with passion. The words come from my mouth with the right intonation and expression, but they sit in my heart like a stone. They merely weigh down my experiences, making me believe there must be some sort of deficit in me if I these words don’t speak to me. It forces me to ask what am I missing? Why can I not see what generations before me have seen in Julian of Norwich or Catherine of Siena? What is it that prevents me from taking their language and realizing it is speaking of experiences that touched them so profoundly that their lives were altered? Many people that I speak to have been touched by the writings of these experiences, but at the moment, in my own journey of faith, they simply feel empty and pointless.

Trying to pray in a variety of ways has often lead me to either struggle with deafening silences, or simply become too busy to undertake what it is that others expect me to try in prayer for fear of those deafening silences; and sometimes, silence is scary. I know that I am stubborn. I don’t like to be told how I should pray, what I should experience, and yet I love trying suggestions and gentle offerings from people who have tried different forms of prayer and found them life giving. I love being exposed to ways that other people have been able to connect with God. That is how I discovered the prayers in the Carmina Gadelica as compiled by Alexander Carmichael in the late 1800’s. These words have struck me as so much more than just words to be recited, but prayers that were integrated into the very fabric of daily life in the Irish and Scottish cultures. They weren’t learned and recited by rote, but grew from their collective experiences. It was a thanksgiving in the midst of harsh conditions. I first read these when I was volunteering on the isle of Iona. I spent six weeks was doing menial tasks as a housekeeper in the Abbey. Making bed, scrubbing floors, washing dishes and taking purposeful time away from my secular job and my life in Canada trying to discern what it was that I felt called to. These prayers don’t just speak to people who prayed them in the past, but their simplicity works now. I may not have sheep to feed or cloth to weave, but I can be thankful that I can go and buy groceries and walk to have lunch with a friend. I can recall God’s presence in the moment, reminding me of how I treat others, what I do with my time. Simple little things of the day that let me see the face of Christ in everyone I meet.

I have walked the empty shores, certain that no one is anywhere nearby, with the cold winds whipping around me and the seas crashing on the stony shoreline, and these words spoke to me about who God is. Then in lighting a fire, on the cool Scottish nights, talking with new friends and strangers from all over the world, these prayers illuminated what I was feeling. They have the same sort of otherness about them, differences in culture, time and space that the Julian’s and Catherine’s have, but I have come to understand better since they echo my own personal experience of the Divine. It’s not only in those shores that I found God, but also in bringing thanksgiving into my life, in Toronto traffic, within the walls of my cubicle or anywhere I found myself.

This has been a difficult journey because I have spent years separating out what is church and what is life; what is prayer, and what is business; what is fun and what is expected. These prayers were a catalyst for me in my spiritual experience that started me down a path to try to reunite my spiritual and my secular self. Now they feel like an old friend, comfortable and nurturing precisely because these prayers speak of everyday experiences. They taught me to go beyond what my experiences of prayer have been in the childish ways of ‘now I lay me down to sleep.’ Growing up without a tradition of prayer to grow with me, I was left with an elementary understanding of prayer that didn’t fit in my adult life, and only pushed me further from God. These prayers taught me that prayer is not an external experience to revere God, but an inward understanding of what it means to be created in the image and likeness of God, with all the faults, frailties and oddities that are associated with being human. These prayers are grateful and thankful and thoughtful. They call their attention to God in the everyday. In the morning rising, in the evening and in the smooring of the fires. Instead of suddenly being struck by the ordinariness of extraordinary events in life, they see the extraordinary in the absolute ordinariness that surrounds.

Here is one of my favourites, but all are listed in Carmina Gadelica

Advent 2 sermon...

This is the day that the Lord has made – let us rejoice and be glad in it!
In the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Happy Second Sunday in Advent!!!

Now I see some of you looking at me with … lets call it… mild amusement:

Because truly, this doesn’t sound much like a proclamation. It doesn’t really have the same emotional quality that we feel reverberate in our hearts with the ringing of the Easter bells and the lighting of the candles on Holy Saturday. And the proclamation that “Jesus Christ is risen today!”

It also doesn’t feel like being surrounded by the hushed singing voices that remember the words to silent night so clearly it is almost as if they have been etched into our very beings. “For unto us a Child has been born, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Those feel like proclamations to me!

Advent is different. It isn’t an event, it’s a journey – and like all journeys, they are as unique as each one of us.

So I wonder what Advent feels like for you this year?

I would bet it will be different from what you felt last year, subtly perhaps, or perhaps not so subtle… Because you are not the same as you were last year – none of us are the same as we were last year. Between then and now has been an entire year of life, of experiences – of joys, sorrows, new births, deaths, losses, excitements – a year filled with living!

I wonder now what is it like to be back here in this place?
Or here for the first time exploring… anticipating - What does the birth of this Christ child mean for me?




Our common tradition tells us that advent is the time we prepare for the great celebration of Christmas. We prepare to hear again the birth story with all the unlikely and sometimes dubious characters - the shepherds and wisemen, families, and innkeepers, and the great star leading to the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes.

All this is coming. But its not here yet. We have to wait for it.

I wonder if waiting is as hard for you as it is for me!

Because I am an impatient person. I have a tendency to speak too quickly. I don’t like line ups. In fact, if I’m truly honest… I never used to like surprises at all. Waiting for Christmas was horrible! I wouldn’t consider myself a very theologically advanced kid, I knew Christmas had something to do with Jesus, and wasn’t all about presents, but on the other hand… as a kid… for me… it was all about presents. So it may not surprise you to know, that as a kid, I’d go looking for them.
This would usually start around the end of November. I would come home on the bus from school, before either of my parents were home from work, and I’d begin to casually look around.
Peeking into closets, under beds, sofa’s – even the high shelves that I needed a chair to see on top of.
Then there were the more obscure places, like the little room in the basement that had the freezer in it or the crawl space under the house where all the electrical wires and plumbing were – I was not to be deterred by the fact that it had a sand floor!

Nothing was safe from my prying eyes!

My mom never caught on – she never knew this is what I did. But slowly I came to a realization. I was losing the joy of Christmas. I knew what I would find as I unwrapped the gifts that were given in so much love. I had stolen away my own joy through my impatience. I had focussed on the end instead of the anticipation. I had given up the experience, because I just wanted to know.





It’s so tempting to rush into the Christmas story – to take the cue from society around us
We live in an instant, on demand sort of a world – a place that has had Christmas decorations in the stores since September!
A secular society that make this one day such a huge event.

As much as instinct tells us to rush it, to get there - we’re not there yet.
The manger is empty, yet God is still with us, just as the cross is empty, but Christ is among us still. These are the wonderful tensions that as Christians our traditions and common story hold together. And we continue this tension, anticipating the future, yet living in the present.

Christmas is coming – but it isn’t today. Today, is the Lords day - Let’s rejoice in our story, this Second Sunday of Advent.

Because today we hear the proclamation that someone BIG is coming – someone who is going to turn the world on it’s head.

John tells us that it is someone much more important than he is. Someone so important he doesn’t feel worthy to carry his sandals. And sandals were the humblest part of a persons clothing - good custom would dictate that anyone entering a home would have their sandals taken off and have their feet washed by the lowliest servant.
So here, John is calling himself lower than the lowliest servant in God’s household.

We hear the Gospel writer recalling the words of the prophet Isaiah, and proclaiming that John the Baptist, in his strange clothing, and his bizarre diet IS:
“the voice of one crying out in the wilderness –
prepare the way of the Lord.
Make his path straight.”

But to whom is he making this proclamation?
What is this wilderness he is speaking of?

Preparation is not a passive activity – just ask anyone preparing a Christmas dinner for 12. It is part anticipation and part action.
It is about understanding what is to come and taking an active role in the future, through living today.
This voice in the wilderness of our lives is crying out that we repent from our actions and turn away from the things in our lives that drive us from the love of God and from the love of each other.
John is blunt. Start living now, don’t rely on our ancestral roots, but prepare our path – don’t leave it to chance, live it into existence, leave behind the things that pull us off the path of who we are in God.
(Pause)

So I’d say that today is vitally important.
It is as important as Christmas.
It is as important as Easter.
It is as important as yesterday and tomorrow, it is none of these and all of these.
So today we celebrate today.

Because sometimes in the waiting, in the anticipation, we put off living.

Sneaking a peek at my presents ruined the surprise. But it didn’t change the story. Those were still my presents – it just changed my experience. Jumping ahead to the wonders of Christmas, doesn’t change the story. Christ was born, he lived, and laughed and taught and died and was raised to new life. It changes our experience and bends our paths - we can miss out on the journey to manger, to the cross and beyond.
Advent isn’t simply an event to be celebrated, it is a stony path full of twists and turns that the voice who cries out in the wilderness calls us to make straight, calls us to understand and calls us to rejoice in.

This Advent, its my hope that we can each make time in our busy lives to try to straighten our path.

To wonder our way out of our own personal wildernesses and hear that voice calling us to new birth, calling us to new life - TODAY.
After all… this is the day that the Lord has made – let us rejoice and be glad in it!

Amen.

a "U2'charist"???

Hmm.... this is... well - I don't know what this is...

Ash Wednesday

Lent – purple – Spring!
Doesn’t look much like spring out there today!
I've always had a hard time connecting spring and ashes
Spring represents life – ashes represent death
Forests where the burning is done purposely in order to renew the soil and let the vegetation grow back and renew the forest floor.
Out of the ash, new life can emerge
Out of the snow and death of winter, new life can emerge

Ashes are a reminder that we are just that, carbon and water, yet if you were to simply mix the two, you could never have it create beautiful works of art or compose heartbreakingly wonderful music. We can do that because in addition to carbon and water, we are spirit. Animated Stardust.

In the funeral liturgy, we say Ashes to ashes, Dust to dust. When we die, and our human body breaks down, we are not lost. What makes us who we are as children of God, little sparks of the divine, lives on. We take those memories with us, the good the bad the hurts, the loves, the terrible things we've done, the beautiful things we've done, those whose lives we have touched and those who have touched our lives. We don't just live on in the memories of those left behind, we live on in spirit with God.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust… Spirit to Spirit

Sometimes on this journey we choose what is wrong. We make mistakes and we fall short of becoming who our Creator and Redeemer is calling us to be. Today is a time where we honestly face and admit our frailties, using the ancient sign of ashes.

We acknowledge and ask God for forgiveness in our failure to be who it is we are called to be.

our lack of love

our tempers

our hatred

our ego

our pride

our jelously

our half-hearted Christian committment

our attempts to make ourselves feel better through others suffering

and the list goes on...

But it's not about guilt - it's about God's grace.

Today doesn't end with ashes, our lives don't end with ashes. We are pure spirit, and by the Grace of God we are able to rejoice in life after life.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust.... Spirit to Spirit

Thanks be to God!

Pilgrimage

This will be the view in my not so distant future... Yes folks, you read it right. I'm going back to Iona. I leave July 22nd and return on August 6th. This is my anticipated reward for a grueling summer of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) at Toronto Western Hospital, and after the conclusion of my full time parish internship. All this is in preparation for next year. I still don't quite know what I've gotten myself (and Jonathan!) into... co-head of Divinity... I'm looking forward to the challenge - but I'm also looking forward to this much needed break! I'm going to be staying with my friend who is a resident on the island in a little house called Dunsmeorach (I know I've spelled that wrong...!). She came last year to stay with me here in Toronto, and may come back next year when she's finished her 3 year stint on the island.

We are going to end the trip with a tour of Glasgow - see the sights generally have some fun!

I am so unbelievably excited. I'm going back. I'm going home. The little island that (as a friend wrote) calls me by whistle and by prayer.

In Iona of my heart,

Iona of my love,

instead of monks' voices

shall be lowing of cattle;

but ere the world

come to an end,

Iona shall be as it was.