My Place Today...The Oak in North Branch, Mn

Writing & thinking...

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The Prodigal Son...

“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

~Julian of Norwich

Last year I began a practice of writing out all of my reflections from the previous year at the end of December. This year in the midst of reflecting on the previous year I had purchased Henri Nouwen’s book The Return of The Prodigal Son and the title and the painting by Rembrandt on the cover both conspired to speak to me the reality that I am the prodigal son and now I am returning -making my way back home, as T.S. Eliot has written “…and to know it for the first time.”

All this before even reading a page of the book – the last three years of my life have been lived in liminal space and there has been a great deal of vertigo of the soul that has wearied me and made me desire to rest. In 2011 I travelled a great deal around the world trying in many respects to out run my anxiety and depression and for a limited time and in small ways they both were alleviated but not extinguished. These words of Nouwen’s became my thoughts, “The world around me becomes dark. My heart grows heavy. My body is filled with sorrows. My life loses meaning. I have become a lost soul.”

Yet, in this place of liminal space, of wandering, of searching for what it is that will give my life meaning and significance God in his mysterious loving way has remained in the midst of my darkness. I am reminded of something Richard Rohr wrote in his book Falling Up, “People who fail to do it right, by even their own definition of right, are those who often break through to enlightenment & compassion.” As well as these lines from the Rich Mullins song Hard To Get, “I can’t see how you’re leading me unless you’ve led me here. Where I’m lost enough to let myself be led and so you’ve been here all along I guess. It’s just your ways and you are just plain hard to get.”

 The sentence, “…the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country…” (Luke 15: 13a TNIV) seemed very familiar to me and what Nouwen wrote, “I was dead tired, so much so that I could barely walk. I was anxious, lonely, restless, and very needy….I felt like a vulnerable little child who wanted to crawl onto its mother’s lap and cry” resonated with my soul. Also, what Nouwen sought is also what I have been feeling, “…the yearning for a final return, an unambiguous sense of safety, a lasting home.”  However, “Leaving home is living as though I do not yet have a home and must look far and wide to find one.” As such there is a, “…denial of the spiritual reality that I belong to God with every part of my being, that God holds me safe in an eternal embrace…” and I deny my belonging to God and the home he has made for me.

Further, Nouwen comments and I believe this to be all to true for me as well, “I have fled the hands of blessing and run off to faraway places searching for love! This is the great tragedy of my life and of the lives of so many I meet on my journey.”  When I did this and even when mistakes were made as they invariable are and choices made that did not lead to the best places in life there is still this that Simon Chan notes that, “What it does not mean is that even when we make mistakes, we cannot ultimately go wrong because love will redirect us to the right path” (Spiritual Theology: A Systematic Study of the Christian Life).

Yet while away from home I believe the concept of the marring of our divine image does occur, marring as Richard Foster describes in this way, ‘Theologically speaking, Orthodox belief would remind us that we are created “in the image of God,” so that we carry the “icon” of God within us. Sin, then, is the marring of the divine likeness. When we sin we inflict a wound in the original image of God. Salvation therefore consists in God restoring the full image of God. Christ came to restore the icon of God within us. This “restoring” involves rebirth, re-creation, and transfiguration into the image of Christ’ (Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christ).

The restoration begins when we turn for home.

What does all this mean in general and more specifically for me and my seemingly sporadic spiritual journey? Fundamentally this – God loves and waits for me and allows me in his love to leave home and in this freedom to be and to become what it is I choose to be and in the end we all do get what it is we want.

As Nouwen writes, “…the Father couldn’t compel his son to stay home. He couldn’t force his love on the Beloved. He had to let him go in freedom, even though he knew the pain it would cause both his son and himself….It was love that allowed him to let his son find his own life, even with the risk of losing it.”

At some point I, like Nouwen, like the prodigal son realize I have to turn and go home, my divine image had been marred enough and I need restoring, healing, and rest and then an ending becomes a beginning as, “…leaving the foreign country is only the beginning. The way home is arduous” (Nouwen). And the most difficult part of the journey home is to believe that, “…where my failings are great, ‘grace is always greater’” (Nouwen). To accept grace and forgiveness is the gravest and most daunting part of my journey even now, as Nouwen writes, “One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God’s forgiveness….Receiving forgiveness requires a total willingness to let God be God and do all the healing, restoring, and renewing.”

As I sit here and write this I still find myself struggling with the thought that God’s position is always one of being for me, loving me, desiring me, searching for and wanting to run and embrace me. I read about it, listen to songs about it – look at Rembrandt’s painting and the loving hands (both male and female) of the father/mother God on the shoulders of the prodigal son and the image moves and consoles me but the truth of the reality seems far off?

It is indeed so very hard for me to live and trust and have faith in this story – to be able to have faith as Paul Tillich defined it, “…accepting my own acceptance….” as I perceive myself to be so unacceptable.

I was reminded of something I wrote:

                        Where the Imago Dei is, the Father is…

   Where the Truth is, the Son is…

  Where Life is, the Spirit is…

                    And where pain and suffering and loss are

All three are

As there can be no experiencing of the Trinity

Except through pain, grieve and loss as it is through these

That grace gives way to joy and then to love.

“You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy." ~Jesus

Kris Kristofferson - The Pilgrim Chapter 33...Prodigal Sons - Finding Our Way Home...

"He's a poet, he's a picker
He's a prophet, he's a pusher
He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned
He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin' ev'ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home..."

"He has tasted good and evil in your bedrooms and your bars,
And he's traded in tomorrow for today
Runnin' from his devils, Lord, and reachin' for the stars,
And losin' all he's loved along the way
But if this world keeps right on turnin' for the better or the worse,
And all he ever gets is older and around
From the rockin' of the cradle to the rollin' of the hearse,
The goin' up was worth the comin' down..."

A Song and A Prayer...

"I know that it's not easy,
To be calm when you've found something going on..."

~ Cat Stevens

Help me Father to be strong now and follow your Son. Please give me both vision and clarity and I need your strength Jesus, your grace Father and I need your power Spirit.

All three – Trinity, come now and fill me with your Presence – please come! Please fill me!

I know things are happening Father. I feel you and I know you are with me.

The Bible...

"For most human failings, there is a biblical character to provide company for our misery."

~ Alyce M. Mckenzie



The bible is a poetic, epic story that reveals the rhythms of all that is life, a meta-narrative - brilliant because all that is written on its pages, “… is common to us all…” and as such gives each of us hope in a God that relentlessly loves and desires to be with his/her creation regardless of where we find ourselves in life.

Brian Mclaren put it this way, “…whatever the Bible is, it simply is not a constitution. I would like to propose that it is something far more interesting and important: it’s the library of a culture and community—the culture and community of people who trace their history back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…. I’m recommending we read the Bible as an inspired library. This inspired library preserves, presents, and inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed” {McLaren, Brian D. (2010-02-09). A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (p. 81,83). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition}. 

This way of reading, thinking, imagining the bible really resonates with me and I believe that if the bible is read as a library of life as opposed to a constitution of rules there is richness and a profoundness that is resplendent.

Just this past week in preparation for the Gospels class that I will be taking I was reading the book of Isaiah and I was so struck with its depth when read through the prism of Jesus – a Christological hermeneutic. The words from the book of Isaiah illuminated my imagination in a new way, new life to the words on the page. Indeed, as I read the bible this way, it, “…inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed.”

I guess what I am trying to say is that the bible is real and meaningful for me because it is my story, my story with God and not only my story but the story of everyone I meet. It is a grand story of what it means to be human and to be part of history and in reading it I learn more and more of what life is all about and how magnificent the love and grace of God is for everyone!

What Would of Been Twenty...January 12, 1992...Please Remember Me...

“When all our tears have reached the sea
Part of you will live in me
Way down deep inside my heart…”

“Remember me when you're out walkin'
When snow falls high outside your door
Late at night when you're not sleepin'
And moonlight falls across your floor
When I can't hurt you anymore…”

“Your absence has gone

Through me

Like thread through a needle

Everything I do is

Stitched with its color.”

~ W.S. Merwin, Separation

The Converstion Continues - John Shore: An Open Letter From Christians to Gay People

"Last night I dreamed that I was standing in the sanctuary of an immense church. Broad beams of light colored like jewelery cut across the air above me, coming to land upon a majestic pulpit. Sensing that something important was in the pulpit, I climbed its many broad stairs to see. Before taking the final step onto that great platform I paused; elevated above the pews is no place for me. But where the speaker would rest his papers I saw waiting a sheaf of parchment, upon which there was writing. I stepped up into the pulpit, crossed it, and looked down upon the carefully printed words. There I read this:

To All Gay Persons:"

Read More Here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-shore/an-open-letter-from-christians-to-gay-people_b_1197269.html?ref=religion

Divine Mileau...Rod Stewart - Handbags and Gladrags...Memories from Freo, March 2011

My Place Today ...

Carmody's Pub - Duluth, Mn drinking a Smithwicks with a Guinness head & writing.

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Paris...

Small old apartment with a skylight

Resplendent bohemian – a place to loaf

Work at anything, to make money to get by

Write

Sit outside at café’s and drink coffee, red wine and absinthe

Walk along the Seine

Let the city fill and infatuate my senses

Expatriate, lover, explorer

A journey that may never be returned from.

Splashes of Light....

"When you are praying alone, and your spirit is dejected,and you are wearied and oppressed by your lonliness, remember then, as always, that God the Trinity looks upon you with eyes brighter than the sun."

-St. John of Kronstadt

“Splashes of light…”

Illumination of a vacant identity

Anonymous

The turning of a page

Of an obscure, dark, cold life

A face without eyes

Expressionless emotion

Books without words

Limitless blank grace

Breaking through the cracks of stone

Broken body, empty soul

Gazed upon now by the stare of the Trinity

“….eyes brighter than the sun.”

“Splashes of light…”