The Wonderment

Rapture, Freedom, & Agency

Today is a good day for rapture. So is tomorrow. And the day after that. Every day is a good day to be caught up in the experience of wonder, where the rest of the world, our cares and worries, our fear and anger, our cynicism and grief fall away for a little while. Every day is a good day to be caught by life, by the holy oneness. I recommend rapture every day, as a basic spiritual practice, to be, like the Holy, Lovers of Life, caught up in the joy of being, in the resilience of creation, in the wow that passes out of understanding and sings the great song of joy. That’s the rapture that frees us, that gives us back holy hearts, that grants us daily experience of grace, and calls us daily to sacred responsibility.

 

 

No one need be left behind in this holy rapture. I’ve experienced it in some truly terrifying and terrible moments. I’ve experienced it when I haven’t known if there will be a next hour, let alone a next day. Rapture frees us when we’re otherwise perishing, withering in our lives, blasted by sickness, danger, exploitation, oppression, hatred, and grief. Because rapture costs nothing, because rapture restores our spirits and heals us, encourages us, and calls us on through the narrow places of our lives, when we live in rapture, we live free.

 

 

Often, we feel constrained to act. We feel too ill, too weary, not powerful enough, somehow not the right person, because we don’t have that superhero costume in our pocket and even if we did, there are very few phone booths to change into these days, let alone a spare tardis and a time lord to invite us to action. Rapture frees us from those fetters of life and recalls us to our true selves, our wholeness that belongs to the Lover of Life and to the life of love.

 

You can experience it in the worst of places, the most broken-hearted of spaces. It just takes practice. Maybe you already know how a particular song takes you out of the chains of woe. Or how when the light is soft and tinted with orange and pink there’s amazement to be found in what we’ve thought is an abandoned or desecrated place. Or how a holy text or a prayer takes you out of the rocky defile and gives you the awe and refreshing air of the mountaintop. It isn’t the same dropping out and dropping away that we seek in addiction, even if the destructive forces of addiction use those same pathways that resound with joy when we know true rapture. Because in the wonderment, we’re simultaneously aware of who we are and where we are and how we are in the world, free to act for goodness, being called to that action, and also aware of how  we are part of the whole – the good, the bad, the indifferent.  The wonderment is within us, around us, always with us; we’re just not always paying attention to it.

 

When we know rapture, we’re freed to be who we really are sung into being to be. When we know rapture, we’re restored to how we can act, without having to worry about being enough, because we’re filled with the knowledge that what we do contributes toward that enoughness.  Together in our apartness we ruin the world; together, as lovers of life, we’re part of that healing.

 

Today’s an excellent day for rapture.

 

Practice of Love - Love God

“What is love?”  the Unitarian Universalist Salon asks in the May big question blog.  I want to answer, “it’s what we’re supposed to do,” but you know that’s not sufficient. And although we might know the encouragements to love God, to love our neighbor, to love our selves, and to love our enemies, just what’s required of each of us can be very different given who we are and how we’re called to be in the world.

 

That’s why I’m grateful for the Civitas Press project, The Practices of Love, which collects stories illustrating the struggle to love in different individuals’ lives. I’m a contributor, but not to the section I want to write about today. Today, I want to write about loving God, because I was saddened and moved and grateful for the stories in this section.

 

Just because we don’t know God is with us, doesn’t mean God isn’t there. Anna Snoeyenbos writes of the emptiness she felt in her Unitarian Universalism without a sense of God being present. She met God in a few places, but she didn’t know if she could love God within the context of Unitarian Universalism (UU). Then she does, praying with her UU minister at a Chinese buffet, and God is there. Anna writes, “God had been with me all along, and I can open my heart to Him whenever I need him; if God was there at the Chinese buffet, He can’t be that hard to find.” God’s abundance is ready to meet us when we’re ready to meet God, but we have to take the risk to try that meeting.

 

Jason Coker approaches loving God from the sense so many of us have: of not having much to offer God. In conversation with his children and sharing the tale of the cobbler’s gift, we love God most when we gift who and what we are right now, even if we don’t think that’s much. That’s risky faithing – for none of us want to be found wonting – and yet, what is love except when we risk our whole selves in care and devotion?

 

Lori Wilson wonders how to live with reverence in every minute, which includes the calling to approach every person as bearing God’s image. Lori admits, “My children, my husband, my neighbors and friends…most of the time, the invitation to look for the image of God in them is an inspiring and rewarding one. I want  to see God reflected in the ones I love.” But then you know there are times when that’s more of a struggle. Practicing love asks us to enter our discomfort, our fears, in order to reverence the image of God imprinted on people who scare or anger or aggrieve us.

 

Alise Wright struggles with her anger at her husband leaving church – at him, at the church, at God. Anger can be overwhelming and Alise writes, “I forgot about love. And I nearly forgot about the One who Is Love”. There’s a time of being adrift in that anger. I laughed with recognition at Alise’s comment, “The thing I’ve noticed about God is that He’s not pushy. He gives me space to find Him.” Love does that by choice. By choice, we can keep seeking and in that seeking be surprised by meeting.

 

Phil Shepherd writes about learning to love God through terrible chronic pain and in the wake of losing his father and father-in-law. The exhaustion and grief which grinds away at his faith is certainly recognizable to me – and I think will be to others who’ve lived with chronic pain or mourned deeply people they’ve loved. But then he reaches an epiphany, in trying to make sense of this pain and sorrow. He writes, “My anger, my mourning, my silence, my fear, my workaholism and my physical pain had affected every fiber of my being…Being able to recognize true restoration began…in the shelter of the reassurance of my God, even under the pouring rain. I was not alone.” In his awareness that God was with him through his pain, he found permission to learn to love himself again, creation, and the Creator.

 

Raelene Roth and Marian Struble both struggle with turning to love God while dealing with injustice in their lives – Roth as she’s imprisoned and yearning for freedom and Struble as her husband is accused and convicted unjustly. Both teach through their stories that things might not work out as we wish, but that doesn’t mean God doesn’t love us – or that we can’t find relief and freedom in resting in God’s love during those times of trouble.

 

Kathy Escobar writes about loving God by making the invisible visible – especially the people who are forgotten by the rest of society or rendered invisible through the social stigma they carry. She writes, “Part of loving God is seeing with our hearts into the real and sacred stories of each other’s lives and actively participating in making the invisible visible by calling out the dignity, beauty, and worth of every human being…”

 

What is love? Seeking and meeting through fear and anger, trouble, sadness, and despair. Loving ourselves. Loving our neighbors. Making the invisible visible. Approaching all of life with reverence. And that’s just the first section.

 

The Practice of Love, edited by Jonathan Brink is currently available.

 

Litany for Mother's Day 2011

Singer of Our Lives, we gather today in thanksgiving and celebration, in tears of gratitude and tears of grief, in wondering and in certainty, in hope and in fear. Grant us mercy along this journey, space to be with one another in every way we feel, and the deep knowing that no matter what, to you we belong, to you we return. You call us to goodness and to learning, to healing and to being courageous bearers of compassion and justice, to generosity of spirit, self, and blessings, to praise, to gratitude, and to love better than we can imagine, imperfectly and yet wholly.

 

Today, we celebrate the courage to parent and the courage to grow,

 

            We give thanks for our lives and those who gave us life

 

It is good to give thanks for those who find gracious parenting natural and for those who learn all they can, for those who open their homes and hearts to us, whether bound by blood or by calling.

 

            We dedicate ourselves to the common calling to nurture, to teach, to learn, to encourage, and to make welcome, whether parent or child, friend, neighbor, stranger, or exile.

 

We boldly dream with one another for the very best for each and every child born, that they may know abiding love, may be able to give their special gifts to life, may sing a new song of hope and join in shared celebration and responsibility for our world.

 

            We dream boldly and we dedicate ourselves to acting upon that dream that the earth will be made whole again.

 

We remember those who have fostered such dreams in ourselves, those who had the care to teach us we could act for goodness, for peace, for healing, those who dreamed and tried and taught us to be resilient, prepared for the long haul and to love this very moment, breath by breath.

 

            We remember them in tears and in laughter, giving thanks for their lives mentoring, parenting, teaching, and attending our own.

 

We remember those who could not stay with us, those who struggled with their own demons and trials, those who hurt us from their own hurting, those who had to go on or go away and who absence still ache, whose injuries still teach. Sometimes we are so lost in pain and hurt that there are no others that seem real. And yet, this day, too honors and remembers them.

 

            We remember them and hope for their rest and, if still living, their healing. If they have died, we hope they know peace at last, and our own journey of forgiveness, acceptance, and healing transformation.

 

We remember those who loved us and who love us still, and in that remembering we find our own calling again to love strongly, tenderly, hopefully, and generously, no matter our place in family, no matter what we have failed to do before, no matter how easy or how difficult we find this love, for here we are, hearts beating, still learning, still on this journey.

 

Lover of Life grant us courage to love boldly and to be with you in transforming this world through love.

 

We sing in thanksgiving and in celebration, in thanks for this life – with trials and with joys – and gratitude for this calling to love, a calling we’ve heard and learned in trouble and in the great goodness of those who lived lovingly, courageously and boldly, reaching out to us in care and in wonder to know the gifts we bear, to give thanks for the gifts they have offered us, and to in turn bless this world for peace and for joy.

 

Amen.