Waiting for God

Waiting for God

 “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,

My eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

But, I have calmed and quieted my soul,

Like a weaned child with its mother;

My soul is like the weaned child that is with me.” Psalm 131

I come to early church with all the concerns of the day, the present week, and the past week. I am not playing the harp because I have difficulty putting in new strings for two recently broken ones. It is the first meeting for discernment for the Daughters of the King at St. Mark’s. We have a wellness forum during the adult formation hour that I have been working on. Some pages are missing in the Eucharistic Prayer for the next service in the Altar Book.

I decide to go sit at the back of the church and try to quieten the busyness about these concerns and more. The church is absolutely quiet. The long green season hangings are more calming and simplistic with a hint of the ornamental. The candles are lighted and flickering. The summer flowers are in honor of the mother of a friend.

 I am in a beautiful place built to bring us closer to God, but my head is still a mess. How can I see or taste a glimpse of the holy before the service starts? Must I wait for some moment during the liturgy, at the scripture, in the prayers, the sermon, the music, the Eucharist? I pray for guidance, actually for help. The message comes. Start intercessory prayers. You did not say your private prayers this morning before church. Too busy. I start praying for those I have committed to pray for each day. If I know them, I imagine them with Jesus. Almost immediately, I feel that peace that passes understanding, a calm.

Time after time, this is my experience. I begin to know a peace whenever I can get out of myself and my world and my concerns, and send love to my neighbor by visiting, calling, writing, serving, or a multitude of other ways, but especially in intercessory prayer. I rarely know how these prayers affect those I pray for, but with each prayer, my mind and my body also take me to find Jesus as I try to connect others to that healing love.

Joanna joannaseibert.com    https://www.joannaseibert.com/

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 in Gift from the Sea (Pantheon 1955, 1991).

Anne Morrow Lindbergh describes our ideal position in our relationships and ministries. We are waiting “choiceless” like the beach for the gift from the sea to know the next direction, the next words, especially in any decision or conflict.

Family Systems dynamics teach us that in tension in relationships with others, if we can remain a non-anxious presence, we may keep tensions from growing and eventually solve any dilemma. I know 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, which takes minutes, weeks off our lifespan. Our inner and outer presence will stay calmer. We become a vessel for the spirit to become part of the relationship, decision, situation, meeting, encounter, or ministry.

Answer: How do we become like the beach waiting for the gift from the sea Lindbergh describes? It certainly involves spiritual disciplines. Prayer and meditation before, during, and after each decision, ministry, and relationship are a huge beginning. We learn from our own spiritual disciplines and from hearing the experience of spiritual disciplines that others follow: centering prayer, morning prayer, yoga, a rule of life, spiritual direction, corporate worship, and study. There are many more. Our tradition, scripture, and reason tell us that these disciplines are gifts from God to help us care for our souls and those of others.

 But we should never forget Lindbergh’s central message. The world in nature outside our confined world is also the primary setting to learn, know, and feel the rhythm of waiting to receive Lindbergh’s gift from the sea.

Joanna  https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Transfiguration and the Last Sunday of Epiphany

Transfiguration and Last Sunday of Epiphany

"If we want to find God, then honor God within ourselves, and we will always see God beyond us. For it is only God in us who knows where and how to look for God."­—­­ Richard Rohr Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 159-161.

Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany, where we say goodbye to Alleluia and prepare for Ash Wednesday tomorrow and the first day of Lent. Sunday, we heard the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus when he is revealed on a high mountain to three of his disciples as the incarnation of God. Anyone in 12-step recovery can identify immediately with transfiguration, seeing the light, a moment of clarity, encountering the God who has been there all along within us, but we never saw before because we were busy making "dwellings" for other idols, alcohol, food, drugs, work, etc.

Moments of transfiguration occur in our lives when we are transported from our deep unconscious sleep to a moment of conscious bright light when we see, feel, taste, and touch God. Transfiguration is also about experiencing our true nature, the part of God inside us. It is the moment when all else falls away, and we are simply of God and desire to turn our life and our will over to the care of God. It is that moment when we let go and let God.

Richard Rohr believes we cannot see God in others until we first see God within ourselves. So, recovery is seeing God first within ourselves, which leads us to being able to see God in others. We encounter that person who once annoyed us, and we begin to notice a tiny glimpse of the face of God, and our only response is now love.

Frederick Buechner reminds us that as we see God within ourselves, we begin to see God in situations we never saw before: "the face of a man walking his child in the park, a woman picking peas in the garden, sometimes even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just sitting with friends at a Saturday baseball game in July. Every once in so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it's almost beyond bearing." 1

Transfiguration is the message and the promise of a new way of living, seeing God's face in others and ourselves.

Today, we are gathered on the internet over many miles to celebrate the new eyes that Transfiguration continually brings to our lives and the face of every person we encounter.

1Frederick Buechner in Whistling in the Dark (HarperSanFrancisco 1988), p. 120.