The Wonderment

Practices of Love

How well are you practicing love? Loving God? Loving your self? Loving your neighbor? What about loving your enemy? A new book sharing life stories of loving through promise and challenge, ideals and reality will be released from Civitas Press on Sunday, May 1: The Practices of Love.

 

I’ve struggled personally with all those practices, and I’m looking forward to reading the whole book. Personally, I wrote for the section on loving your enemy. I’ve been the enemy and I’ve had enemies and I’ve learned a lot about loving into difference and fear as a matter of faith from every encounter in both roles.  I was honored and delighted to be included in the collection and joining the company of so many great authors, including another Unitarian Universalist Christian, Anna Snoeyenbos.

 

Tuning into the news or traveling around the streets of my community, it seems to me like the world could use a lot more love. How will you practice living into love today?

 

Chromatic Words: Poetry & Wonder

When I need to dance in wonder, I often turn to poetry familiar and unfamiliar, poets that are well-known and ones I cherish and wish the world knew better. I love poetry that is angry and tattered, lean as rusted wire, and lush oases of celebration. It is often hard poetry, because I have my sorrows for the world and sometimes am unable to speak it. But the prophet poet gives me voice as assuredly as a psalm. Poets deal out images and songs that capture the ephemeral ineffable, the wonder of wonders, the silence in sorrow.

 The poetry I love best is filled with chromatic words, saturated in color, layered in emotion. Helene Johnson, who created that beautiful phrase, chromatic words, is one of the poets I appreciate and wish more people cherished. Check her out some day, especially her poems, “Let Me Sing My Song” and “A Moment of Dignity”. There are parables upon parables in those poems.

 

Gary Lawless is another poet I wish people knew better. His chapbook Cariboudhism is a nature poet’s breviary, thick in cedar and full of ravens.

 

There’s so much wonderful poetry that is being written right this minute, right here in Florida. How could I not laugh with joy and recognition and go to ponder self and emptiness all over again when I read Denise Duhamel’s “Buddhist Barbie”? How could I not reflect on both woundedness and parent-child relationships with Michael Hettich’s “The Father”?

These are but two among many.

 

Here’s a challenge for your heart and spirit this week: seek out a poet new to you, one whose words invite you into the dance of wonder. Share that poet with someone else (even here in the comments). You may encounter some poems that leave you cold, but then, that’s part of life’s adventure. And then, when you meet a poem that takes you on a new journey or accompanies you on your current way? Ah, that’s the thrilling wonder and joy that makes the quest so very worthwhile.

Gifts of the World

One of the best gifts I ever received was learning to read. The corollary gift that has brought me tens of thousands of hours of joy, excitement, intrigue, concern, inspiration, prayer, concentration, relief, awe, fear, anger, hope, and courage is my library card. The current social media gifts that bring me so much today are the blogosphere and Twitter. Today is International Literacy Day, a day to share the gift and love of reading and writing with others. I feel like every day is Literacy Day, with the gift of the world’s stories being shared one person to another, but I am also glad for the reminder of a true holiday.

 

 

Literacy is a crucial aspect of my spiritual life, and one of my major practices for whirling in life’s embrace. I read daily offices, scriptures, and wisdom classics. I spend hours with spiritual teaching stories, which so very often are filled with wise tricksters and poke fun at the stupid things we human beings do over and over again. 

 

I think about spiritual literacy a lot: being soaked in the juicy wisdom of various ages and diverse cultures and knowing intimately at least one tradition. The people I know who are truly spiritually literate have a zest for life that in turn inspires and encourages me. When I am struggling, I take a long swim in the great oceans of wisdom literature, and inevitably emerge with a brighter and better perspective.

 

Take a few moments today to share some bit of wisdom that inspires you and take another turn of the page through the wisdom works, classics and newly inspired. They are gifts of the world, for the world, just like you.