Less Anxious Presence

Non-anxious Presence/ Or Less Anxious Presence

“The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift From the Sea. Pantheon Books 1955.

still waters in chaos. joanna campbell

Story: Our famous Jane from old school Dick and Jane loves her outreach ministry at her church, but sometimes there is chaos and sometimes people get upset at others and are “not Christian.” Maybe she should take a geographic cure and go to a more “Christian” church where people get along better.

Response: Former Bishop Maze teaches that if we do not engage in a ministry, we will not stay connected to our church. We discover the ministry God calls us to by learning about our gifts and then offering them to the ministry where the gifts seem to best fit. We follow the most quoted Buechner line about ministry. “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Then what happens?

We are humans. Church and all its ministries and groups are part of an organization that is “a hospital for sinners not a museum for saints.” We eventually are going to run into people problems and relationship difficulties, just like at home and work!

Anne Morrow Lindbergh describes our ideal or where we would like to be in all our relationships, waiting “choiceless” like the beach for the gifts from the sea.

Family Systems dynamics teach us that if in the midst of any conflict in a relationship with others, if we can maintain a state of having the least anxiety or be a non-anxious presence, we will make our best contribution to hold any tensions from growing and eventually solve the difficulty. I know of few who can remain non-anxious for it is not a human trait. Staying less anxious, however is a real possibility. If we can be the least anxious presence in any situation, we can keep the arteries in our body from tightening up that takes minutes, weeks off our lifespan. Our inner and outer presence will stay calmer and we become a vessel for the spirit to become a part of the relationship or situation or meeting or encounter or ministry.

Answer: So how do we become like the beach waiting for the gift from the sea as Lindbergh is describing? Easy? It involves spiritual disciplines. Prayer and meditation before, during, and after each ministry is a huge beginning. I am still in the process of trying to learn more from others about their many spiritual disciplines they follow, centering prayer, morning prayer, Yoga, following a rule of life, spiritual direction. worshipping together, study. There are many more. Our tradition, scripture, reason tell us that these disciplines are some of our many gifts from God to help us care for our souls and those of others.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com

Love Never Dies Again

Love Never Dies again

“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, p. 107, HarperCollins 1927.

In his Foreword to The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Russell Banks reminds us that at the memorial service in New York for British victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, British Prime Minister, Tony Blair read these closing sentences of Thornton Wilder’s novel. We want to be remembered by those we love. We want to tell them about those we loved such as our parents and siblings and grandparents that they may not have known.

I think that Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians and Wilder in this novel, each is telling us that the best of this love we have for each other never ever dies. This is a mystery, but I know in my heart it is true.

Today would have been my mother’s 97th birthday. We did not always appreciate each other, but today I feel her love. My parents died before I was ordained a deacon and before the birth of any of our grandchildren. They are not physically here, but their love still surrounds us and each of them. All of the people in this picture at my parents’ wedding are dead, but I so often feel surrounded and lifted up by them in prayer and love.

There are days I feel love whose only source may be from the God of love, but at other times I sense a love from specific individuals who have died.

I think of the group of women that I have been reading books with once a week for more years than I can count. Wilder’s was our most recent journey we undertook together thanks to the recommendation of one of our members, Lisa Brandom. I feel the love of each of them every time we meet. One friend reminds us that she would keep coming if we were only reading the phone book. I now know that I will feel their love even in years to come when for many reasons we can no longer meet.

Love is all we have to contribute to this life that will be lasting. Love is all we will carry with us into the life of the resurrection. Love is the bridge between these two territories.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Guest writer: Burton: In the Present

Guest Writer Burton: In the Present

“Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?” Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

My spiritual director patiently reminds me to be “in the present.” Good advice for a Type A personality like me. Good advice and good luck, my closest friends would add. But while on a week-long holiday recently, I found myself practicing being in the moment. It was a remarkable experience.

It is not as if I haven’t tried this before. I have failed at meditation more times than most people have tried. I still work at it. Of course, that is just the problem. Being present is not something to be done, it is more something to be experienced. When asked why I am in spiritual direction, I say, “People tried to make me think I was bad. God invited me into something better.” I guess it is not so strange that being present to the moment offers that “something better.”

When I first read Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, I saw the old pastor as an image of my father. Re-reading it now—at age 75—I relate more personally. A remark the minister makes rings truer now than it ever did: “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?”

During that week-long holiday, we went to hear the Brahms Requiem. It was a magisterial performance led by one of the world’s great conductors. Surprise washed over me when I realized the violins did not participate in the opening movement. I’ve sung the Requiem and been to at least a dozen performances. Never had I realized what anyone with a score in front of them or anyone who was really present already knew. The sounds of the violas, cellos and bases was transfixing. I had never really heard it before.

There were other moments, far more mundane, too. Not worrying about arriving, but rather enjoying the walk. Not being concerned about appearance, and instead experiencing a shining present moment. It was indeed “something better.”

Not to worry. This is not a tale of transformation from cocoon to butterfly. I’m still pretty much a slug—to mix my images. But that isn’t the point. The point is that I have had moments of being in the moment, of being present, and it is where I want to spend more time, not in the future, but…well you understand. This is a journey undertaken not because someone convinced me I was bad, stained, flawed; but rather a journey undertaken because God invited me—us—to something better.

Larry Burton