NEW REFLECTIONS ON AN OCTOBER SUNDAY

1
Reading is my delicious place
Can not get enough
Of ideas
Of lives not mine
Of history
My smorgasbord
My pile of gifts to open
My unfailing delight
But it ain't prayer

2
When prayer gets true
It scares me a little
I'm going to be knocked off my perch
And I know it
How is the the heightened
Answer to come

3
We make faith so complicated
It'a just yes or no
To hope

SUCH A RELIEF!

I did a reading of my book Thursday night--that led to discussion.
What I liked was that we looked like a pretty average bunch of people
(Well not the dull kind of average, but no exaggerated stuff in the room)
And we began to share:
--the churches we have tried
--the fellowship at the churches that were the primary glue to attending
--the disillusionment with organized religion as it kicked some of us out or made it so we didn't want in
--how we prayed
--if we prayed
--what our prayer experience felt like
--the need for a better different kinder more compassionate world

And we were relieved to be talking about all of this with only curiosity and generosity. Relieved to share our experience, our disappointment, our continuing hunger for a place to dig deeper, beyond an only material definition of life. 

What a relief! To make this conversation legitimate with no need for large answers but to ask big enough questions. Such a relief.

READ PHYLLIS TICKLE

Isn't her name enough to make you want to read her?
I discovered her shortly after she died.
The Shaping of a Life is her autobiography and tells of her becoming acquainted with 'spirit'. She is so natural and pragmatic about it--until she has a much bigger experience of and 'after death' experience. I may get some of this wrong because I gobbled her book rather than digesting it. But she was a kid playing hide and go seek and hid in some thick backyard bushes. It was there that she had the sense of another world existing alongside the physical with only a thin membrane between. Phyllis was married to a doctor and had lots of children.
Her story about the development of faith was so trustworthy to me because she kept it real. In fact her husband didn't 'get' her 'after death' experience and so they didn't talk much about it. She didn't resent it. Phyllis simply said, "In a marriage there are things that you don't talk about for the good of the marriage" It sounded practical and wise and not at all repressed. 

Phyllis was the religious editor for Publishers' Weekly and so was in touch with new trends and issues. She wrote a book titled Emergent Christianity. It was such a helpful book for me.
I tend to pick up on trends intuitively. I did that in my work as an executive in food retailing
and I think my book I PRAY ANYWAY: Devotions for the Ambivalent is a voice for the confusion going on in organized religion. Phyllis talks about religion's need for an every five hundred year garage sale to get rid of the clutter and spiffing up the worthwhile.
She lays out an historical pattern for what is going on now in Christianity that makes
sense of my own disorientation that I explore in my book. I feel less crazy and less guilty and less quiet about my own spiritual hunger.

Enough. Read Phyllis Tickle!

I AM OFF MY PATH

Here's a kind of cranky reflection on stubbornly bad day, meaning I would take no comfort. (You don't have those?? Riiiiight.)

I am off my path
And baby I don't like it
PTSD and me
Don't get along
Don't demolish my family
And expect me to snap out of it
With no scars
I am scarred 
And on some days
The scars stretch to bursting
Ready to splatter my pain on every bit of love I've loved
But then I watch Orange Is The New Black
Or Food TV or drink wine
And the scars are soothed with the toxic balm of our time 
And prayer never enters my mind

DAYS OF AWE

I am not Jewish but I have always been attracted to and by the High Holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I first learned about them when visiting a Synagogue on an ecumenical field trip of some sort from my Methodist Church when I was in sixth grade. I was more interested in holding hands with my boy crush of the week but i was hit hard and was intrigued by the rituals and preparation for The Days of Awe.

Let's talk 'awe' for a minute. We've forgotten what awe is as we call everything 'awesome' from food to a movie. Awe is a very big deal--a kind of reverence and profundity mixed with a dash of fear leading to repentence. Methodists didn't do much awe when I was twelve but I knew it when I saw it.

Rosh Hashanah is what New Year's ought to be. You are held accountable.
The Book of Life is opened for the ten Days of Awe. And probably you've messed up quite a bit. So you have this protected and protracted time to sit yourself down and think about it. (Synagogue services are long and often during this time.) And here is the hard part and good part and the healing part, you are expected to ask people directly for forgiveness for any wrong you have done.
(Maybe ten days is not enough.) Then your name goes back in or stays in the Book of Life for another year. You stand in good stead. 

I like everything about The Days of Awe.
--enough time to be profound and not perfunctory
--communal remembering of history and lessons learned
--fasting to remind us of the ability to reject  temptation
--everyone in a community cleansing and healing at the same time
--individual and group accountability
--a sigh of relief and a renewed commitment to do and be better.

I always ask forgiveness of my Jewish friend Eileen during The Days of Awe.
It feels great.
Think if we took time for awe and accountability and forgiveness in a systematic way with our families. 'Awesome' would be the right word.