Movie Date

Movie Date

“I have a theory that movies operate on the level of dreams, where you dream yourself.” Meryl Streep

My granddaughter, Zoe, and I have been having a date for many years on Friday afternoon to watch old movies. I wish we could swim together or walk in the woods or walk down some of Little Rock’s beautiful trails, but my physical disability makes that too difficult. But we can curl up in the king bed in our bedroom each covered by our favorite blankets with all the lights out, eat popcorn, and watch movies. We have watched almost every musical made. Occasionally we watch drama and less often comedy. This week Zoe saw for the first time, Some Like It Hot. I forgot to mention that Zoe is going into the ninth grade and usually I get permission from her parents for certain movies. We usually talk a little about the movie after it is over. Sometimes there is much to talk about, at other times, very little.

In the past I have shown her paintings from my favorite art museums and rarely have we read poetry together.  There is so much grandparents want to share with their precious grandchildren. Mostly, however, it is just the pleasure of being in their presence. I have learned to drop everything I am doing and be with her if she sends a text about a possible movie date.

This movie date has become for me an icon of what prayer time may be about. I think there is some built in homing device where both we and God yearn for each other’s presence. Prayer is occasionally words, but mostly presence. I think God longs to share God’s experience, God’s amazing world with us, but mostly God longs for our presence just as there is a conscious and maybe even a stronger unconscious longing in us just to be in God’s presence as well.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

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