All Saints Day

All Saints Day

Guest Writer: Karen Dubert

All Saints’ Day: a Crowd of Saints  2020

 “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation.”— Rev 7:9.

All Saints Hilary West

My solitude of social distance is suddenly congested

by reminders of the great cloud:

that crowd of witnesses huddled over there in eternity,

peering into time

from vast margins of timelessness,

voids of space.

dancing saints Icon St. Gregory Nyssa Episcopal Church david sanger

How is it that we eternal beings—

embedded in time,

prehistoric insects in amber—

How is it we so obsess over the amber

that we imagine ourselves the focus?

We sing of saints “who from their labours rest”

possibly imagining

eternity as an endless “rest" of watching us—

Dreary infinitude.

This amber chamber in which we live and move and be

confounds, imprisons us

defining our vision

regulating our expression;

so we envision the ancestors of millennia

eagerly peering over each other’s shoulders

to catch glimpses of us—

“the living ones”

The irony catches in my throat,

a log hung up on the flotsam of a cosmic flood.

That our amber-vision defines us

rather than enabling us

to gaze beyond and marvel that

out of here, somewhere

amberlessness means

movement.

(revised 2 Nov 2021)

Karen Dubert

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Take Another Look

Nouwen: Reimaging and Reimagining

“When we believe that we are created in the image of God himself and come to realize that Christ came to let us reimagine this, then meditation and prayer can lead us to our true identity.” —Henri Nouwen in You Are the Beloved (Convergent Books, 2017).

Much of my professional life has been imaging children with X-rays, ultrasound, nuclear imaging, CT, and MRI. I am intrigued by Nouwen’s insight that the Incarnation is a reimaging or a reimagining of God. Reimaging in radiology usually means taking a second look. We make another image if we are not entirely sure of what we saw the first time. When we see something we cannot quite understand, we produce another image to see if it is still there. We want to verify that what we saw the first time was real, so we take another picture, sometimes at a different angle.

Reimagining, on the other hand, means forming a new concept. Jesus came to reimage God, to show us a God of love with skin on. He also came to help us reimagine God and realize a new relationship with a loving God. The Incarnation is pivotal in introducing new concepts of love into our relationships with each other and with God.

Today, reimage and reimagine the people we encounter through Jesus’ eyes of love. Take another look and form a new relationship through the eyes of love.

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

Living into Our Questions and Doubts. Desert Spirituality

Living into our Questions and Doubts. Desert Spirituality

“The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”—Alan Jones.

I first heard this quote attributed to Alan Jones, former dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, at a Trinity Wall Street conference at Kanuga in 2001. It warmed my heart when I heard Jones affirm this, and I have shared it with many others. Anne Lamott is also a writer and speaker to whom many attribute the quote. Theological friends tell me it is actually from Paul Tillich’s work, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, pp. 116-117!

I will stop tracking it down, but I am confident the sentence is scriptural in its wisdom. I share it with many who come for spiritual direction regarding their doubts.  

In his book Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality, Jones writes about doubt and the discovery and nurturing of the soul in the spirituality of the Desert Fathers. The spirituality of the desert involves encountering God, then feeling God’s absence, and finally experiencing the divine joy of God’s presence again. Jones describes this threefold experience of soul-making after awakening with the first conversion, which entails self-knowledge, often with tears; the second conversion, in which things seem to fall apart; and the third conversion, which occurs when we enter the life of contemplation.

These awakening periods have recurred for me: at church camps, when I suddenly decided to go to medical school, during my discernment process for the diaconate, and at Cursillo. The conversion of self-knowledge with tears came to me, and the falling apart when I decided my only hope to survive was to enter a 12-step program. It also came when people close to me: my grandfather, my mother, my father, and my brother died, and now, as my mobility becomes increasingly limited. 

Often, only at the death of a loved one do we clearly recognize the nature of genuine love, as many of us did in years past with the death of our dear friend and deacon Linda Brown.

 Jones describes those tears as like the breaking of the waters of the womb before a child’s birth.

 The task of love, as experienced in the “desert,” is to free us of our well-built-up exoskeleton.

Soul-making is paying attention to invisible things that do not lend themselves to manipulation and control. It requires receptivity to the life of the mystic rather than being a problem solver. Too often, we spend most of our energy building up our frail ego by setting dozens and dozens of minor situations before it, while the life of the soul is aborted. If the world is to change, we must first change, which happens when we live more deeply into our questions and doubts.

 Sharing our doubts can sometimes bring us together more effectively than sharing our faith, as our faith eventually strengthens. It is a paradox.

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