The findings and prospective findings of the Vera Rueben telescope are astonishing. The sea of stars and galaxies is large beyond our understanding. We seek words which can help us know what we yearn to do that we may live in peace and astonishment with our neighbours. We seek wisdom.
In our wider cultural history, as far back as Plato and Aristotle, the cosmic values of Truth, Goodness and Mercy have been values for seekers after Wisdom. These three values have been called, ‘The Three Transcendents.’ In recent years, a fourth virtue has been added to this list, the virtue of Unity.
There are and have been many Spiritual Leaders who help us in our search.
The Dalai Lama is a spiritual leader for many Buddhists and non-Buddhists. He is notably not a member of a religion because Buddhism is classified as a philosophy rather than a religion. With his many public appearances, the Dalai Lama has won our hearts with his gentle ways and open-hearted laugh. When he speaks, we listen. He has often said that his religion is kindness. He also says that his religion is compassion. Joy is one of his most noticeable characteristics. Joy and balance seem to follow and surround him. He says that compassion is an active position which flows from kindness. Compassion is defined in Merriam -Webster as :
sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.
The name which describes what most of the World religions and spiritual movements give this consciousness is ‘The Golden Rule. ‘
A few years ago, I witnessed the way ‘The Golden Rule’ was being studied by a group of Middle-schoolers near Toronto airport in the basement of a small heritage building, Ebenezer United Church, near Toronto airport. The students came from the houses of the neighbourhood. Many were homes of large multi-generational families. It was a community with many Sikh families and other families from backgrounds rich in diversity.
This was the church in which I was pastor during the early 90’s, in the three years before we moved from Toronto to Denver. On the day I am speaking of now, my husband and I had decided to drive by the church since it was near where we were staying. We heard laughter inside so we tried the church door and went in.
When I was the pastor, the church was not a heritage building. The simple structure sat just off the highway at the juncture of Gore Road and Ebenezer Road. The surroundings were farmland, farmhouses and dairy cattle.
On the day of our visit, inside the church the advent candles and Inclusive language books I had given them when I was the pastor were there on a shelf. The pews, pulpit, communion table and piano were still in their traditional places. I noticed a bulletin board that showed that this was still a functioning part of The United Church of Canada.
As my husband made himself comfortable in one of the pews, I made my way downstairs to where the kids’ voices led me. The students were seated in a circle around an attractive young woman, their teacher. Beside her on a white board was a square green blue and gold poster with the title, ‘The Golden Rule.’ On it was a list of 19 Religious symbols with the names of the religions, selected from a list of names of hundreds more. Each religion or spiritual group showed a name, a symbol and a definition of ‘The Golden Rule” from that group’s perspective.
The teacher asked me why I was visiting them there that day. I explained that my husband and I were in the region for the weekend attending the wedding of my sister’s son and his bride. The students noticed that my hands were painted with henna flowers. A girl asked about that and I explained that two nights before all the women of the young couple’s family had been dancing together in the home of a family. We mostly didn’t speak each other’s language, but dancing and smiling are good communication tools. There were murmurs of interest and lots of smiles.
The teacher asked me to tell something about what the church had been like when I was there. I told them that there had been no basement, no toilet and no modern heating. One of the farmers from the congregation rose early Sunday mornings to come to the church in cold weather to start up the old stove and perhaps shovel the parking lot. I told them that the congregation were mostly dairy farmers and the descendants of dairy farmers. They laughed when I told them that the elderly farmer who had lived across the road from the church used to drive his tractor backwards to church on Sunday mornings.
I told them about the ways the congregation had been loving and fun loving with each other and with me. We had lots of parties with wonderful goodies. The women of the congregation had fed their families and seasonal workers during harvest season. I told them that the minister in the church before I was there had been in the final stages of life when the congregation hired me. His cancer had progressed. He asked the congregation to ask me to come to visit him in hospital so he could give me his blessing in person. I went and then came back and told the congregation about it. It had been a great way for me to begin to get to know them all. The congregation also paid me to visit the local nursing home on their behalf.
I talked for about another 10 minutes. They were surprised to hear that a woman in her eighties came early every week to help me put on my white robe and to pray with me before the service.
I thought to myself, no wonder this space seemed to be a place of goodness suitable for students like them to study what might help them learn to become more loving and wise.
Then I thanked them, and they and their teacher thanked me. I climbed the stairs and my husband and I went on to catch our airplane home to Vancouver.
I love to remember the energy for understanding the richness of diversity that group seemed to have. This week I found this dear old church on the internet. It has been redone to be very solid. On the website you can see a sketch of the old church and photos of what is new. www.oldebenezerchapel.com
We, in this time, seem to be encouraging ourselves and others to create positive experiences where we can meet other people and share compassionate loving relationship.
A few weeks ago, a link came into my email from my son, who has been, among other things, a teacher. The link connects to a lovely and exciting story about compassionate care for others who need encouragement and friendly relationship.
It is about a restaurant in Tokyo called, ‘The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders.’ The link shows delightful film clips of people with friendly smiles meeting each other in a restaurant. The notice on the front of the restaurant says that all the food served to the diners will be delicious even though it may not be exactly what the diners had ordered. This is because all the wait staff are in reasonably manageable stages of dementia. Mistakes will be made and graciousness will prevail. What is being given by the organizers, the wait staff and the diners is an opportunity for people to meet and be friendly and compassionate with each other. It is meant to build relationships.
I hope you open the link and enjoy the film footage. I hope you learn new ideas for meeting others in the spirit of compassionate love.
We are in grief as well as expectation. The words for which Pope Francis is most famous are, “todos, todos, todos,” which means everyone, everyone, everyone, and, at the same time, everything, everything, everything. I think this means, inclusion, inclusion, inclusion.
I like the way American poet, Tom Hennen, in his poem, “Love for Other Things,” in his book, Darkness Sticks to Everything, shows the challenge in choosing to love everything:
It is easy to love a deer But try to care about bugs and scrawny trees. Love the puddle of lukewarm water From last week’s rain… Get close to things that slide away in the dark.
For me, choices about what we love call for contemplation and growth of a consciousness born of Love. I have heard from Roman Catholics that Pope Leo is spoken of as a man of contemplation who has a peaceful yet strong presence. Many people are thirsty for helpful words and prayers from all the traditions. We pray for leaders who are ready to serve. We are grateful and hopeful.
Roger Keyes is a poet who is also an art historian and scholar of East Asian Studies. He wrote the following poem about a famous Japanese artist of the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries. The subject of the poem is known for his images of landscapes and the natural world. You would probably recognize his images of waves.
Katsushika Hokusai Says Hokusai says look carefully. He says pay attention, notice… It matters that you care. It matters that you feel. It matters that you notice. It matters that life lives through you… He says don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Look, feel, let life take you by the hand. Let life live through you.
We want to be open and vulnerable to others. We do want to be inclusive and make authentic connections with people we meet and people we already know. We want to listen carefully and lovingly to other people’s stories and to tell our stories in ways that are friendly.
Hannah Arendt, who lived through World War Two as a European Jew, is famous for her writing on the theory of totalitarianism, the philosophy of history and the philosophy of modernity. She wrote that friendship is one of the active modes of being alive. She highly valued love and friendship.
There is also helpful wisdom that comes down to us from Graham Greene, who wrote the novel, The Power and the Glory in 1940. I have heard this wisdom told many times throughout my life as advice about being lovingly present with persons who are from backgrounds different to ours. The idea is something like this:
When we notice the way another person’s eyes and mouth go up in times of gladness and down in times of sadness, we recognize the other person as kindred to us, created as we are created. We recognize them as fellow human beings.
These are challenging times for us. We would like to be open and vulnerable in ways that can be joyful and serious, ways that are friendly. I like these final lines of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke which was published in 1918. The poem is “God speaks to each of us as he makes us,” and is from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.
…Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.
Here are some of my favourite lines of poetry. I don’t know what to say about them except I hope you who are reading this like them with me. They were written during the first half of the 20th century by English poet, e.e.cummings
Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, Live by love though the stars walk backwards.
My husband and I are on vacation experiencing wine tasting in Avignon.
Mistral winds blow cold and fallout from the actions of seemingly heartless leaders across the world swirl around us and within us. What counsel will help us now?
Rilke, one of the greatest poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote:
…Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me…
These lines are from the poem, ‘God speaks to each of us as he makes us,’ in Rilke’s Book Of Hours: Love Poems to God. This is Rilke’s take on what God is sharing with him as counsel. This translation from the German is by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. I particularly like, ‘Don’t let yourself lose me.’
A little more than twenty years ago, my friend, American nun, Sister Mary Luke Tobin, the only woman invited to Vatican II and close friend to Thomas Merton, wrote to me as she retired to the Mother House of The Sisters of Loretto in Kentucky. About the same time, I and my husband returned to live in Canada after nearly a decade of living in the southwest of the U.S. The character-building advice Mary Luke gave me was this:
Just give yourself away in everything you do.
In 1961, Dag Hammarskjold the second Secretary General of the United Nations, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was honoured this way because, despite many setbacks, he always worked towards peace. The peace he worked towards included integrity and justice.
Here is a prayer by Dag Hammarskjold which for decades has deeply influenced people learning to be peacemakers. They are from his book, Markings: Spiritual Poems and Meditations:
Give us pure hearts that we may see thee, a humble heart that we may hear thee, a heart of love that we may serve thee, a heart of faith that we may live thee.
Today, on a white board in a room which holds slightly vanilla scented oak barrels containing the finest aging red wine at the Chateauneuf du Pape winery in Avignon, I read these words. They were printed in French blue block letters and are indelibly in my consciousness:
Rien ne se perd Tout se transforme. (This translates into English as ‘Nothing is lost. Everything is transformed.’)
We will receive counsel in these fraught times and always. We will likely give some counsel, whether we are conscious of it or not, to others who will remember what we say. My hope is that we and others will set our intentions that we act from loving hearts.
Last month we were on vacation in Nayarit, Mexico. The photo which my husband, David, took of this Snowy Egret reminds me of the holiness of the lives and homes of everyone.
He stays very still on his golden slippers until he sees food for him – salamanders, frogs, insects, fish, crustaceans or more. Sometimes he stirs up the bottom with his golden slippers in order to stir up his food. He seems to be enjoying his life. Later, on the afternoon when we took this Snowy Egret’s photo, we witnessed a Cayman or Crocodile attack and within seconds swallow a small feral cat. Living is complicated. Living our lives in ways that honour the other members of creation requires our careful attention. Good community and good leadership help us with this.
I hope that my new pantoum, which I wrote when we were in Mexico, will interest you.
This year, twice in the week before Christmas, our outdoor Christmas lights, which are set to go on at dusk, flashed on before ten in the morning and stayed on all day. It has been a dark, damp and cool December. The tension of this time broke as the days of Christmas and the light of the winter solstice entered our consciousness. Christmas arrived. Peace and trust in God’s promises were strengthened.
I have for many years appreciated that this time of Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, is a time of preparing for transformation. As usual, a flurry of shopping and welcome yet distracting parties with friends and family inserted itself into what we had hoped would be quiet times for contemplation, preparing ourselves for the birth and rebirth of God in us and the world.
This year I was again aware of the yearning in the hearts of people I spoke with who were hoping for this miracle in themselves and in their communities. People spoke of their efforts to surrender their desire for self-control. The hope is that we will surrender what we have wrongly prioritised above our relationship with truth and goodness and our Creator. It is very demanding work to surrender old habits that hold our hearts hostage. It is difficult to clear the space within us and within our communities that takes up the space the new birth will need if it is to be viable. Our hope, our goal, is that our emptiness will be enough to make room for the new birth.
We want the nothing within us to become the gift that is everything. We dearly want our hands to be open to receive this gift.
We fail in many ways to achieve this emptiness. The miracle arrives anyway. It fills us with gladness and hope that we will be able to nurture and protect this new birth. Our awareness that the miracle is gift fills us with awe. We realize we are all in this together. We say yes to the miracle of being given everything.
Part of the Christmas miracle is that we are better able to see ourselves as part of our world in our time. We are not anymore the babies we were at our births. We are grown- up people who can find ways to serve our hurting brothers and sisters who are made in God’s image. We are ready to participate in new ways.
Here are words that came to me as a gift over the past ten years. They fit into the beloved music of Gustave Holtz’s Jupiter from The Planets. The tune is known as Thaxted.
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