The Cross of Christ has certainly divided people over the history of our world, despite its intent to heal the world. On a hill in Lithuania thousands of Crosses, brought by pilgrims from all over the world, stand as a living testimony to the prayers of many for peace. A friend of mine recently traveled there and offers this photo meditation for those who cannot witness its beauty first hand.
Prayer and Time: Starting Fires with the Christian Seasons Calendar
I’m sitting in the outdoor food court called 7+Fig. It’s in the Ernst and Young Plaza at Figueroa and 7th in downtown L.A., and it's Farmer's Market day. A marvelous setting in the midst of a teeming city. It’s early afternoon and most folks here are finishing a late lunch, some anxiously glancing at the time on their iPhones and Blackberries . . . or for messages. They’re clearly aware of the few moments they have left before hustling back to offices that ring this plaza like the pigeons watching the scene from high above, anxious for a scrap or two. We all have a relationship to time, but most of us blow through it without much thought given to the kind of time we’re living.
I’m watching a young couple, dressed to the nines in power attire. I’m sure they’re married. They’re both wearing a wedding band. And they’re sitting alone, but clearly take each other for granted. Work associates would be engaged with each other. But this couple is bored . . . or tired. They have this little squeeze of time, but aren’t alert to it. Not present to it. Or to each other within it. They’re elsewhere. The past. The future. But not here, in the present. Failing the time they have now, they’re failing each other, and they're failing love.
We spend the large part of our lives with minds hooked by the past or lured by the future. But we can’t meet God in either of those places. Only here. Only now. There is no other time but the present.
This is why I celebrate a time-healing project by a small congregation in Vancouver, British Columbia. What started out as an effort by a handful of disciples to dwell in the present time with full awareness of its meaning, the Christian Seasons Calendar has become a global phenomenon. Says Eugene Peterson, “This calendar brings fresh awareness to the essential sacredness of what is so easily profaned by hurry or sloth.”
Most people in this plaza live their lives by calendars—paper or electronic. But few of those calendars tell them anything about the sacredness of the day or season they’re living. Right now it's the long season after Pentecost for Christians (or Kingdomtide) and daily we live alert to the mischief of the Spirit, Who might come down on us like a pigeon diving for food . . . or Who could just as surprisingly kindle within in this couple a new flame of love.
Time-keeping is revolutionary in big and small ways. Right now, I’m wishing this dear couple before me was more alert to the sacredness of what’s so easily profaned by the tediousness of the calendar they’re forced to live by. Not only would they live more alert to God, they’d love each other more fully as well.
I pray to see their eyes connect for just a flash, their hands touch . . . and fire fall right here and now at the corner of 7th and Fig. If not now, maybe tonight when they fall into bed.
"Teach Us to Pray" :: Prayer as Dance
From Facebook, Lydia Morris commented yesterday on my Flamenco and Prayer post. “Wish I could pray like that,” she says, “strong, fearless, bold, and with all of my everything. Oh how the enemy will tremble when the we fall madly, insanely in love with our God, and can dance and pray with nothing held back. I see Jesus now inviting His beloved to dance.”
Last December 31, 2008, I wrote this poem that improvises on the same theme:
Teach Us to Pray
And this is what I saw–
Leviathan leaping, full length, in radiant delight, up from the dark depths of Mystery.
The night sky, clear; the moon full casting its silver light across the whale-fractured sea.
And then, she crashes full length A million silver shards dancing their holy glee.
As she disappears again into the dark, silent depths, to soak in Thee.
Why then pray like some dead fish in this, God’s sea?
Dance, fly, play, plunge. That’s what prayer is meant to be.
Flamenco and Prayer
On a recent hot evening in Fresno, La Canela and El Quijote and Cerro Negro, gathered some fifty of us, crowded into the courtyard of our host’s home, into the spirit of Flamenco. I’ve known Flamenco, even traveled several times to Andalusia, the southern region of Spain, which is home to Flamenco. But there I’d encountered only commercial Flamenco. Though beautiful, it’s commercialization misses the true spirit of Flamenco.
Flamenco is more than music, song, and dance. Traditional Flamenco, the Flamenco of the gypsies is communal, spiritual, even contemplative. In Flamenco—not performed on a stage, but in the round—all participate. All are together in the sound and movement. All are caught up in the ecstasy and agony that is the soul of Flamenco.
It’s not saying too much to say that Flamenco is prayer. And Flamenco helps me see more fully the nature of expressly religious prayer—the kind of prayer I’d be better off praying. Sadly, like commercial Flamenco, much praying misses the ecstasy and agony that is true prayer.
The art of Flamenco makes me wonder how I’d pray the Psalms, for example, if I let the gypsies show me how to pray them—for the Psalms contain the full anatomy of the human soul. Too often I pray them as if I were reading a menu.
Dissatisfied With a Bland Way of Life
The trouble started some fifteen years earlier with a very specific event—a vision, though I was then too blind to see it as one. There was no ecstatic trance, no audible voice of God. Nor was I knocked off my horse. Rather a slant of light broke through, for just a fleeting moment, and left something of itself within me that’s kept me restless ever since.
Presbyterians gather regularly as pastors and elders of local congregations to worship and pray, deliberate and decide. We eat pie and have our after-the-meeting-parking-lot-meetings where the real business gets talked about. The meetings are mixed with testimonies to the church in mission, periods of haggling over policy matters, arguing the finer points of parliamentary procedure, and all too rarely an honest to goodness theological debate. Much of these gatherings, as you might imagine, is rather dull and tedious. It was during a rather tedious moment that, Stan, a pastor of one of our tall-steepled congregations tried to give a little life to his presentation about recent happenings at one of our conference centers. Our camp and conference centers are often operating on a shoestring budget and in order to keep afloat try all kinds of things to bring in a little revenue. Stan chaired the board of a one of our Presbyterian conference centers, which had recently rented its facility to a Hindu group for a spiritual retreat. Stan was clearly aware that some Presbyterians might wonder why one of our mission organizations had opened its doors to welcome a bunch of Hindus.
After describing the Hindu gathering and the money we’d got hosting them, he told us about the moment when the Hindu leader had introduced him to the Hindu community. “This,” the Hindu had said, “is the Presbyterian holy man.” Telling the story, Stan burst into laughter and said, “Now there’s an oxymoron for you!” And we all laughed, including me. But as I laughed something cut at me, deep within. In that laughter, that nervous dismissal, I felt a wound sliced open, a pain, a longing, a deep dissatisfaction with the bland state of pastoral life that could make us all laugh at holiness. In that moment, a holy light pierced me and called out to me.
I think it was at that very moment that I resolved somewhere deep inside to become a saint, though I didn’t have the foggiest idea how. Sadly, I didn’t know a single person who could show me the way.