Vamping

Vamping

“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.” ― Kahlil Gibran

Austin Chan  Unsplash

 Once a week I play harp duets with a very talented harpist who tolerates my missed or absent notes and tries to teach an old harpist new tricks and fingering. Today Pam also taught me a new word, vamping. She said,  “I will vamp you in.” She plays a short series of chords before I start my part of the piece. I really like the word. Vamping. It means we play a simple cord or beat  usually as we wait for someone else to start and then perhaps keep quietly  playing the background chords as they take the melody.

I think this is what meeting with a spiritual friend is like. I may ask a simple question like, “Where did you see God in your life today.” I may repeat the question when the subject seems to change.  Often I keep saying prayers that the Holy Spirit will guide us. These prayers are my cords. Our job is to stay connected to the beat, as we listen for the rhythm and melody of the presence of the Holy Spirit. We are to stay in the background and support and stay present to the person we are with.

We keep the beat going and listen and pray so the Holy Spirit can do its part guiding and directing us both.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com  

Rohr: Forgiveness

Richard Rohr: Forgiveness

“As long as you can deal with evil by some means other than forgiveness, you will keep projecting, fearing, and attacking it over there, instead of “gazing” on it within and “weeping” over it within yourself and all of us. Forgiveness demands three new simultaneous ‘seeings’: I must see God in the other; I must access God in myself; and I must experience God in a new way that is larger than an ‘Enforcer.’” Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 193-194. from Center for Action and Contemplation, Richard Rohr Daily Meditation, April 30, 2017.

Graham Covington Unsplash

Richard Rohr is  teaching us more basic lessons about how to forgive. It involves seeing the Christ, God in the person we are forgiving as well as seeing God or Christ in ourselves. That makes sense. But then Rohr throws in this third condition. We must see that God is more, larger than a hall monitor handing out detention slips, checking a list, looking at our every action and judging whether we and our neighbors are behaving on the side of right or wrong.

My experience is that we are called to enlarge our God to become a God of love. How do we do this? We place ourselves with other people who seem to be experiencing God’s love. We observe how they know how to forgive others.

 As we begin to see the Christ in those who live with the Christ, the God of love, the Christ in us awakens and slowly, often very slowly we begin to see the Christ in those who have harmed us. We begin to see what tragedies brought them to the place of hurting others. This often occurs as we pray daily, sometimes hourly for the person who has harmed us.

We realize we are still carrying around a heavy load of resentment for that person that is like a cancer, destroying the joy in our lives a little each day. They are still hurting us. They are becoming our higher power, our God, because more and more that is all we can think about.

As we daily pray for them, they may never change, but my experience is that we will.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com

Muir: Nature

Nature

“ Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.” John Muir

 A Forward Day By Day writer today reminded us of this quote from John Muir, one of our country’s most famous naturalist and conservationist who was instrumental in forming the National Park Service and the Sierra Club. In spiritual direction when I ask someone, “where do you find or feel closest to God,” the most frequent answer in “outdoors in nature.” In photosynthesis, trees transform light energy into chemical energy. I believe that the trees, the sun, the sky, the ocean, the mountains also transform some energy inside of us when we are outdoors among them. We see beauty alive and well at times where before we could only see ugliness in parts of our lives. We realize there is something greater than ourselves, something greater than our own problems. It is there for us. We do not owe it. It is a gift.

My experience is that when I have difficulty sleeping because of physical, mental, or spiritual pain, I sit outside or sit by a window and watch the sunrise in the morning, even on a cloudy day. The sunrise, the world outside can be a constant reminder of a new day, a new beginning, that there may be a new way to look at things.

Muir stands out as someone to remind us of the marvel of nature, particularly the wilderness, but he also reminds us of our stewardship of this gift.

Consider viewing nature, the outdoors, as one of our most important life-saving, life renewing remedies. It is better than drugs but like our own soul also needs care and love.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com