For years I have been working to heal from my past.

I have been trying to heal as a product of my past, as a product of abuse and neglect.

I have been trying to heal as a product of sick family and as a product of abandonment. I have been trying to heal as a product of being used.

Somewhere along the way I believed that from all of this disruption I was born.

I forgot the truth. The past cannot be changed. But none of this either is something that I must heal from because this is not truly what I am a product of. With my human eyes, it is so easy to buy that story of forever being a victim. But look deeper. Remember the Truth. 

I am a product of God, of all that is pure Love. I am a product of perfection. 

“Yeah, but…” The fear fights for the hole it has rooted out in my mind. I’m not buying into that anymore.

I turn my eyes to God. 

God, I look around my life and I can no longer imagine that what I see -- the strife, the depression, the poverty, the illness, the doubt and fear -- is what you planned for me. Show me what I look like to you. Show me what my home looks like to you. Show me what my work looks like to you. Show me what my relationships look like to you. Show me what my capacity for giving looks like to you. Show me what my body, mind, spirit looks like to you. Show me what I look like to you as a sister, a mother, a wife, a daughter, an aunt, a grandchild, a steward of love. Show me what I look like to you as a writer and a healer. Show me the abundance that you see me living in. Show me what I look like as the light that you created to be here to nullify the darkness.

Amen.

Vacuum  

by Kristine Nesbitt

We humans
are tremendous taker-inners
like big vacuums
that can suck up anything 
and everything

What if
I set my vacuum
to only be
a sucker for Love
?

Busting Loose

We are each born into a grid-like sort of matrix that sets up the rules and expectations for what is considered right and fair. It functions as law. When we agree to play by its rules, we are bound by it, in return for belonging. Its validity, authority, and force depend upon the amount of divine sanctioning that can be attributed to it.  

By its very nature, the law forces us to measure ourselves and others against its standard. It forces us to compete with others for recognition, attention, worth, and value. Where we stand at any given time depends upon our place of birth, personality, ability, luck, etc. Some will have more status before the law than others. For those who don’t measure up, there is shame. For those who do, there is boasting.

By definition, however, we can never ever be good enough. Our goodness or badness is not absolutely good or bad; it is only good or bad relative to our matrix. As such, the law breeds rivalry and wrath. 

But have you not heard?! Have you not known?! The living God, who can be neither conceived nor manipulated, recognizes as righteous all who receive God’s recognition of themselves as God’s beloved. While God pours mercy and grace upon the righteous and unrighteous alike, the righteous under law despise God’s mercy because it mocks their matrix of justice, bypassing its authority.  

To be sure, the living God is not the lawmaker who stands over and above us to enforce some preordained will -- punishing failure, rewarding success. God is not revealed in or as the Law. The voice of the law is not the voice of God. 

Whenever you feel cursed or shamed by your failure to measure up, just know that it is not God who is cursing you—it’s your matrix. God blesses.

Facing the Void

I’ve been watching the new HBO series “The Pacific” with my 88 year-old father and World War II veteran. World War II was the “good war” that shaped my early outlook on the world. It galvanized a certain mythology that fed my imagination for many years. 

This glorious war was one of the socio-cultural memes that defined good and evil. My family, religion, culture, and nation—as influenced by Dad and his generation—was deemed unambiguously good. The white, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism of middle-class suburbia that valorized the bloody war was part of the sacred order of things. My nostalgia for what seemed so normal and my sense of loyalty to the traditions of my youth enabled me to overlook or justify the lapses of violence, scapegoating, and injustice. Things ordained by God are reproached only at great risk.

In my imagination, an elemental order of things was privileged. Yet my reading of the Bible, along with certain historical reinterpretations, has slowly but surely given me the eyes to see the degree to which my imaging of this yesteryear had been socially constructed. For all its actual worth, the politics, religion, and code of conduct that came with this construct were invested with divine authority. Isaiah and others like him would simply call it idolatrous.

I’m now caught in an in-between place: while my idols have been unmasked as dumb and powerless, my new identity as beloved of the living God is insecure and hesitant. Relinquishing my hold on the things from which I once drew security and belonging, leave me adrift with little to hang on to, apart from following Jesus. And Jesus assures me that to follow him means trouble. I’m dead either way: the old system doesn’t save and the Kingdom of God requires a cross continually.

Going with the Given

The lakes are full again and a flowering emerges from long dormancy. Powerful solar energy transforms the earth as it continues to turn upon its axis and move in response to unseen forces. There is mystery here. We have signs and there are traditions and reasoned hypotheses to give an account for the mystery. But we don’t know.

There is consternation among nations. Many seem to act with great assurance and conviction. We tend to imitate those we like and want what they want. We desire what seems good or right, but often do so on the basis of envy, religious tradition, cultural norms and practices. Nobody really knows. 

There are interruptions and prophetic pronouncements. Things happen to us. We wonder and are occasionally shaken. The wind blows, the moon waxes and wanes with respect to our movement around the sun. Things decompose and return to soil. 

But new relations also come into being and friendships are made. We find that we are loved and can love in return. We find moments of joy, hints of wholeness, and are touched by revelations of beauty. 

Then we wonder at the mystery and have awe and reverence before God, the One who addresses us from beyond, within, and between.

Awakened to Be All That We Are

While our mortal bodies decay and our powers wane, even at the grave we shout “Alleluia!”—for the Lord Jesus is risen from the dead. What could this possibly mean?! How does this even matter?!

In our mortal condition, we hunger, hurt, envy, and fear. Along the way, we learn to protect and secure ourselves by getting on top, hiding out, or falling asleep. 

But then, there are those interruptive agents who call us back into being. We find ourselves inspired through unexpected people and situations. Our carefully constructed equilibrium is thrown off balance, tearing a crack in the armor. A little light and fresh air gets in. In that moment, we regain some perspective and enough faith to get us hoping again. And hope does not disappoint: we take a deep breath and exhale fear, if only because it’s a new day and it’s all we’ve got. We dare to step forward, feeling less alone. We care again. We matter. We rejoin. Our mortality is appreciated for what it is: a gift, a means, a way. 

Then comes the surprise! Who exactly are the we who inhabit our mortality? We find that we are more than our mortality. We no longer give it the last word. We are awakened by the Word of the One who calls to us, welcoming us to a more excellent way. We respond in dialogue and power flows. The Anastasis Nekron happens, and we come alive from out of the dead ones. He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

Risen to the We

I don’t think that the biblical story is about our quest for God, but God’s quest for us. We do not find God; God finds us. 

On my own, seeking good, I dig deeper and deeper only to find myself buried in the shadows of my own self-consciousness. Then comes the hell of feeling unrecognized and all alone. I am unable to recognize the other except as the reflection of my own shame, or as the rival who possesses what I desire. I keep digging, bent with the mark of Cain. 

But as Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, “Our greatest problem is not how to continue but how to return.” Once pulled from the shadows by the One who seeks the lost, I return yet again—marked as Christ’s own partner. I join partnering persons everywhere to serve others. Again, Heschel: “The deepest wisdom human beings can attain is to know that their destiny is to aid, to serve … This is the meaning of death: the ultimate self-dedication to the Divine.”

Only the partnering person can see the other as other. Serving the other, we are given joy. Without joy, life is hell and our death is denied instead of given in self-dedication.

This week in Refractions, in honor of Tax Day, we are talking about matters of money, investment and commitment. Today, we add faith to that list. As you tend your garden, remember that you are the beloved of God. You are already more than enough.

Here is something Jesus had to say about faith and commitment in the story about Jesus called the Gospel of Luke:

Some of Jesus’ followers came up and said to him, "What you're asking of us is overwhelming. We want to do it. But please, give us more faith." 

But Jesus said, "You don't need more faith. There is no 'more' or 'less' in faith. If you have a bare kernel of faith, say the size of a poppy seed, you could say to this sycamore tree, 'Go jump in the lake,' and it would do it. So, just practice what I’m teaching you. You’re already more than enough.”

This week in Refractions, in honor of Tax Day, we are talking about matters of money, investment and commitment. As we render unto Ceasar our hard-earned cash, Robert Frost reminds us that their are other kinds of investments that give returns beyond price.

"The Investment" by Robert Frost

Over back where they speak of life as staying
('You couldn't call it living, for it ain't'),
There was an old, old house renewed with paint,
And in it a piano loudly playing.

Out in the plowed ground in the cold a digger,
Among unearthed potatoes standing still,
Was counting winter dinners, one a hill,
With half an ear to the piano's vigor.

All that piano and new paint back there,
Was it some money suddenly come into?
Or some extravagance young love had been to?
Or old love on an impulse not to care--

Not to sink under being man and wife,
But get some color and music out of life?

This week in Refractions, in honor of Tax Day, we are talking about matters of money, investment and commitment. During our recent worship series, we ask the question, "What have you done with the garden entrusted to you?" Our lives are gardens entrusted to us, the world around us is a garden entrusted to us. So are our children, our parents, our jobs and our homes. Tending these gardens requires time, love, effort, will and yes, sometimes money. Today, think on these words of wisdom from Hello, Dolly!: 

Money, you should pardon the expression, is like manure. It's not worth a thing unless you spread it around, encouraging young things to grow.