Turn

Photo by Bill Burkhart

1) Long ago I trained as a dancer so I leapt at the chance to blog on turning. I trained I leapt I turned.  My verbs could be an outline of my faith journey. Which is on-going. Which is why I love the seasons of the church year. They keep me turning. And coming back. To learn and leap and turn again.

2) At the time of the year when the world expects us to be most externally focused: parties, presents JOY! turn in. Let yourself say no to something. Set aside some time and space. Say Dec 9th. Let yourself be confined. A baby is to be born. Nestle in to the womb of your own sweet soul and wait for it.  Maybe the baby who needs to be born is you.

3) I remember the first time I went to an Easter vigil service. The one with the fire on the steps and the banging on the door and the literal turning to face the back of the church to denounce sin and then turning back to the altar and to God. I LOVED it. My soul needs this I thought! I need practices that embody a faith I cannot simply understand with my mind. But that matters. And that matters more and more each day if I let myself take in even one iota of the pain and loneliness out there.  I need practices and new words to give this faith renewed traction in the world outside and the world inside the chambers of my own heart.  So my faith doesn’t just stay shut up in the prayer book all week but can walk abroad in the world. I want to learn to ride this faith like I once learned to ride a bicycle, not just on the smooth pavement of a church service but over the thick and stubborn grass in the backyard on a dark November afternoon.

4) Resist the spin. Stop being turned by the world. Intentionally turn towards a love that the mind can’t parse, and the world may not recognize but that the body recognizes as living water. This at least is what helps me recognize when I am turning in the right direction. My eyes water. Literally. My heart of stone becomes a heart of flesh. This is no small feat. I am a card carrying yankee person, a flinty chip off some old Plymouth block, longing to be reborn as a real live human being. Like the velveteen rabbit.

5) I am less than human frequently. I am also very average. Usually what I need and want in order to be healed is what a whole bunch of people need and want. I’m not very original in my needs.

6) Try saying “Jesus, help me.”

7) You don’t need to understand exactly what this means to say it. No less than the Archbishop of Canterbury said this week.  “It is extraordinarily important as Christians that we remember that the definitive revelation of who God is was not in words, but in the word of God who we call Jesus Christ. We can’t pin God down.” There is so much room for the saving grace of individual interpretation and personal spiritual experience in there. So much mystery and ambiguity.  So go ahead. Be really broad-minded. Turn, learn and make a leap of faith. Let God in.

8) A hunger so deep and a thirst so specific must have once been satisfied for us to still long for it.  There is something eternal and true that we once knew but have forgotten. This is TRUTH with a capital T that we can’t parse intellectually or ever claim to own but that we can sense when we hush the hammering of the world and the clamor inside ourselves and clear a space, a womb and wait for our own quiet annunciation.

9) “Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water–-peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing–-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”

From Marilynne Robinson “Housekeeping”

10) The world will be made whole.

Wait for it.

May God bless you this week as we wait together.

Post by Mary Barnett