A COUPLE OF PRAYER/POEMS

Here are a couple of prayers from my book I PRAY ANYWAY--Devotions for the Ambivalent.  The book is written.  Now if I could just get excited about the right cover.  The question is how sassy do I want to be? It is not a provocative book but it is reverently irreverent.  Ideas?


Prayer 356

I want to growl I read
Too precious spiritual language
Love is blah blah blah
Make our own miracle
Affirm yourself silly
Sing la la la la la
Sit smack down with the lepers and say the same
Then you'll be doing love



Prayer174

My gluttony is so huge
(How else could gluttony be?)
I want to read every book
I want to taste every food
I want to visit every country
I want I want I want
When I have I have I have
So much


The book has 365 prayer poems interspersed by my history of spiritual highs and lows and also a little primer about my kind of prayer

I'M AMBIVALENT ABOUT MY OWN AMBIVALENCE!

My book, I PRAY ANYWAY--Devotions For The Ambivalent is finished 
I will publish it on Amazon.
But I am stuck.  Not writer's block. Maybe soul block.
It is 365 prayer poems interspersed by 12 segment that tell of my spiritual journey. 
I start out very new to praying (again).
And I end with a realization that I will probably have an active prayer life for the rest of mine.

So.  Am I ambivalent?
My own devotion time is not a dreaded discipline?
I am no longer committed to any one approach to the divine.
I am committed to prayer because it is validated by my own experience.

So----.  I have a conundrum.
I started the book in one place and am now in another.
I PRAY ANYWAY but I am ambivalent about any one path or THE truth.

Thanks. I feel better.

TO CHURCH OR NOT TO CHURCH???

I get tired just thinking about that question.
My ambivalence comes to the fore.
I have sampled churches throughout my adult life but never stuck to any one.
They were boring or demanding of my social life.
Too club, too little Spirit
Lifeless.
Rote.
(Just writing that makes me want to recant my judgmental approach when I never gave "joining" much of a chance.)  

I now have two churches that I trust and that give me an experience of faith.
One is The Green Memorial AME Zion church in Portland Maine.
I trust it for its joy and sense of Spirit during the church service.
I trust it's humility and devotion and sincerity.
And I trust the pastor completely to be real in life and faith.
I go and I bask and I leave with joy for my spiritual searching and a commitment  to be a much better person.

The other church is in Mexico—in San Miguel de Allende.
We spend part of the year there in a small Mexican community.
The church is Colonial and both beautiful and not.
Tiny, old Talavera tiles, gold leaf, stone, elaborate altar AND neon lights and grotesque dusty statues of suffering.
It is a community church with bells that tell what's going on—a death, a wedding, a 'get to church lazy bones', an alarm if needed.  It is modest on the outside with two pine trees in its courtyard i.e.. concrete slab.
The priest's voice comes out of a large cone speaker to the outside. People come in humble dress and circumstance and with humility and love for their Jesus who suffered like they do. I mumble mass in Spanish and kneel with the others on the concrete in silence and communion.
I trust this church for the love people have for it
I trust this church for its unbroken traditions.
I trust it for its simplicity.
I go as an outsider and am calmed and set right.

One church is all joyous and boisterous and spontaneous.
One is quiet submission along side suffering and comfort.
I trust both.
I go to both, not regularly
These churches are where I can dip my toe into organized religion and explore my questions and spiritual curiosity and yearning.

DONE WRONG? FAILED AN OBLIGATION?

Welcome to the orientation of most religions--guilt.
Why do we get locked into making other people so wrong?
Why do we see ourselves so wrong so often? It doesn't work.

Feeling inherently wrong:
Kills hope
Smothers joy
Destroys motivation for good works
Creates stuckness and depression
Turns people away from faith
Sucks the life out of loving

Yes, we need standards for our behavior.
Yes, we can do great wrong.
Yes, we need to know it.
We need the insight of "guilt" not the perpetual burden of wrong doing and failure.

    

I share a story written by my brother-in-law.

It is the kind of mini-miracle I want to notice.  And he did.

Watch for them in your life and share them too, please.

They are an extra-ordinary good fortune that is unexpected and unusually good. Mini-miracles have a sense of quickening to them no matter how small.
My brother-in-law recognized this.  Here it is:

   A Christmas Story

I had an interesting Christmas experience.  It was shaping up to be a very difficult day.  This was the time two years ago that we were struggling to save Romie’s life.  In addition I was faced with the prospect of being alone Christmas Eve and morning for the first time in my life.  My son John and his wife Cara come down mid day after they visit his wife’s Mom and my son Eric and his wife Jackie normally come home for the holiday from CA but he is not well at the moment and could not travel.  That in itself was tragic.  So what to do?  I found that Romie’s sister was going to also be alone so I spent Christmas Eve with her.  In the morning I planned to go to church even though this has been very emotional for me in the past few years.  Shirley in the parish has been very supportive and I normally sit with her but she was going to church Christmas Eve.  Nonetheless I thought I would find someone I knew.  In the morning I fired up my courage, found my old red Christmas sweater at the bottom of a trunk, and ventured off to church.  When I arrived there was only one car there and I then suddenly realized that most go to church Christmas Eve.  I was faced with the prospect of sitting alone and it occurred to me that this might be the occasion where I finally came completely unstuck.  I was not looking forward to going into church.  At that moment another car pulled up and a very animated guy emerged and came quickly to where I was standing.  “Good morning, Merry Christmas and how are you doing today.”  He was a stranger and so animated and friendly that my first reaction was that he was some sort of aberration.  Strangers are not normally that outgoing and I really expected that after we greeted he would disappear in a puff of smoke.  Not so he was a real person and we went into church together.  The ones who were there were all sitting on the left but my family has always sat in the same pew on the right.  The prospect was that I would be really alone there so I asked the stranger if he would care to join me and he was very pleased.  We visited a bit before the service.  It turned out that he lives in Florida and was visiting the area.  He is an Episcopalian and very familiar with the service and had researched the local churches to find ours. He was very friendly and outgoing so much so that this saved the day for me.  During the service I spent some time wiping away tears and I think he noticed.  At the end we got onto the subject of what ails me and he was enormously supportive.  Out of the blue he suggested “why don’t you become a deacon?”  This was odd in that I have been thinking about what I could do in the future that might benefit mankind in some way.  Becoming a deacon was not under consideration but not knowing what I have been contemplating how did he happen to suggest something on a humanitarian level?  Further on in the conversation he said “you are fortunate that your wife went first and she does not have to suffer as you are doing.”  This was also odd in that this has been my train of thought as well.

All of this struck me as unusual so I have written it down.  There are several scenarios that might explain the experience.  One is that this man who is very outgoing happened to arrive at the right time and happened to meet someone who needed support.  The minimum take away is that there can be a profound effect when one human meets another on this level.  Another scenario is that his being there was the result of intervention on a divine level.  How did it happen that an outgoing empathetic stranger arrived just then?  It turned out to be a good day.

PEACE ON EARTH HAS TO BE POSSIBLE!!

If Peace on Earth HAS to (no choice, must happen) possible, what would you do differently?  
I'm thinking about my own answers.  Send me yours.
We'll talk next week.

PEACE ON EARTH HAS TO BE POSSIBLE

Read my very personal message at www.truthburps.blogspot.com
for my thoughts about Peace on Earth.
Back to I PRAY ANYWAY next week.