Gift of Christmas Season on the Tenth Day

Brueggemann: Gift of the Christmas Season, Tenth Day of Christmas

“Christmas is especially for those of us whose lives are scarred and hurt in debilitating ways. Of course, that means all of us. Christmas is about a word from God addressed to the world in its exhaustion. ..Behold, I am doing a new thing. Christmas is a day to stop and notice the newness God is giving that lets our life start over in a fresh place.”—Walter Brueggemann, Devotion for Advent, Celebrating Abundance. pp. 68-69.

We have connected much of our life to schools and colleges. The twelve days of the church’s Christmas season, especially between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, is traditionally a slow-down time for higher education when people are on vacation or less busy. It is incredible how my body and mind have been conditioned over the years to live at a different pace during this Christmas Season.

It is a Christmas gift.

The days are shorter. I can sleep until seven am, go to my window, and still watch the world yawn and wake up around me. This morning is rainy and wet with a dense fog. There are fewer leaves. Even with the thick mist, I can see at a greater distance with a broader worldview. I watch the deer gallop away together by my window, back to the woods, as they hear the sound of cars.

The busy territorial squirrels chase each other up and down trees. The cardinals and bluejays come to the feeder by my window and share space with smaller birds whose markings I cannot read. I have time to listen to the rhythm of the rain. It is as hypnotic as ocean waves, but the ocean is like a Souza march, keeping perfect time while the rain changes, and is slower, faster, softer, and then louder like jazz improvisation.

I switch gears and turn inside. I open my memory book to recent and past Christmas, re-enter those scenes, and bring them alive. Remembering. Decorating the tree with grandchildren. Traveling to the beach. Shopping with children and grandchildren. Going to the movies. Ice skating. Family dinners. Watching slides. Leftovers.

I read new or old books in a “to read” stack by my desk. Writing. We visited family we missed during the year. Spending time with old and new friends, I have neglected because of my busyness. Resting.

The church year gives us a few more days for this short Christmas season and extends it to Epiphany, the celebration of the arrival of the Wise Men on January 6.

I pray today that I will open this gift and treasure this Christmas season’s precious present.

Rohr: Dance of Contemplation and Action

Rohr: Dance of Contemplation and Action

“The dance of action and contemplation is an art form that will take your entire life to master. Like Moses at the burning bush, many of us begin with a mystical moment and end with social action or what looks like politics.”—Richard Rohr Daily Meditations, July 5, 2017. Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 6, 11.

Life indeed is a dance where we first sit out the dance as we contemplate the love of God as a mystic. Later, we bravely go on the dance floor as activists for those harmed by fear. An ideal is to do both, but balance often is never our strong suit.

When I returned to the life of a “religious” after a five-year interlude from God, I had an insatiable hunger to read and study about God. I think this came from my medical training. If we want to know about a subject, we research and study in-depth what has already been written about it. Then, I wrote about what I was experiencing for some unknown reason. This may have come from my immersion in academic medicine, which spilled into my spiritual life with the call to “publish or perish.”

 One December night, I remember reading an Advent piece at an early Christmas gathering of the women of St. Mark’s. Mrs. Metcalf, a renowned speech teacher who also sat on our pew at the church, said to me in passing as we picked up our plates for dinner, “It is good to see another mystic.”

Mystic, I never considered myself a mystic, but suddenly, I knew a master had just anointed me. Again, I believe seeing God’s presence at work in the world came from my medical specialty. My job as a radiologist was to look for the unknown in the shadows, often in the dark, by imaging techniques, X-rays, CT, MRI, or ultrasound, examining a hidden inside world.

 God uses every part of our experience. No past experience is wasted. Eventually, over many, many years of just writing about this experience, I have been moved to action, making phone calls, writing letters, marching, visiting the sick and dying, working with those who have difficulty getting groceries, advocating for prisoners and immigrants, supporting homeless veterans, working with people in recovery.

As long as we can see the love of God in our contemplation and in our actions, my experience is that we will know peace, one of the fruit of the spirit. I know I am off track when that peace or “piece” is missing.

I share this dance on the ninth day of the Christmas season and look forward to learning from other “mystics” who also seek to know more about what will be next on our dance cards.

Joanna   https://www.joannaseibert.com/




Living in the Present Moment

The Present

“What comes next? The answer is we never know. No matter how smart we are, how carefully we have planned, or how much data we have gathered, we are still only mortals who can never control the future. We live in the now, in the eternally changing series of spaces we call the present. The now is where we shine. In the now, we can have an impact, be creative, shape reality, and build relationships that can withstand change.

What happens tomorrow may always be a surprise, but what happens today can still feel our presence. In fact, we are the artists of the now. We can turn a moment into a memory, a glance into a promise, an idea into a vision that will last forever.” —Steven Charleston Daily Facebook Page.

seibert girls living and enjoying the present moment

I think I became aware of the gift of living in the present moment in the 1980s when I bought Spencer Johnson’s 80-page book, The Precious Presence, as a Christmas present for my husband and decided to read it first. It is a practical parable of a man living in our fast-paced world trying to find meaning and peace, opening the most precious present. Later, during my self-help period, I would read two more of Spencer’s books, The One Minute Manager and Who Moved the Cheese, trying to cope with the demands of a busy pediatric radiology practice.

Then, I was reminded again of the power of living in the present when I read from C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters that God meets us only in the present moment. “The Present is the point at which time touches eternity.” This is where God lives in our lives. God is not in the past or the future but is there to greet us in the present moment.

living in the present moment

 How do we stay in the present moment? Anthony DeMello in Sadhana teaches us that living in our body and not living out of our head keeps us grounded in the present moment. Likewise, spending time in nature connects us to the present.

Being with children keeps us in the present. Children live there and invite us into all its possibilities. We set up a creche with nativity figures that increase each week in Advent in our narthex or entrance or lobby area of our church. Most adults hurry right by it, but almost all the children stop and look and even want to touch it.

In this new year, may we learn to live into the miracles that happen in the present moment, every day, every moment, every second.