After Psalm 90

Antiphon: Laugh with the joy of the spirit; Who stands with the humble and meek.

Dearest God, our hearts and souls are yours
And have been since time began

Before the earth brought forth mountains
And before the seas were formed
From everlasting to everlasting
You are God

At your will we return to dust and are forgotten
For a thousand years in your sight
Is like yesterday when it is past
Less than a watch in the night

Our days, our lives, even our times are swept away
They are like a dream,
Like grass that withers and dies
Grass that you renew in the morning, in the spring
With the rising of your Son.

LE

I like this.

Perhaps related: A worn courderoy kind of life

A Future Full of Stars

Arthur C Clarke, father of the idea of communications satelites and the idea of of using geosynchronous orbits for them, prolific author, polio survivor, scuba diver, and environmentalist passed on to his reward at his home in Sri Lanka today. He was 90 years old.

Wikipedia has a fairly good article on his life, and the Fox has a decent write-up from AP. I suggest reading them, and thinking about this life, where it started with the "War to End all Wars", how it was changed by World War II, and how this man with an active mind re-tooled himself, several times, and helped to change the world.

For me this passing is a milestone. Clarke came from the world that was, and wrote about the world that he thought might come to be, some of which came to be, and some of which still might come to pass. The story of his life and how it wove into the movement of history reminds us that the journey continues, to this day, and that the future continues unfolding for us. Our job is to continue, to work to breathe life and love into it.

May we find that it is full of stars.

Peace,
LE

Carnival or Shrove Tuesday?

Carnival has arrived this year wrapped in gauze.

Lent is early this year, arriving almost as early as it can, and today is Carnival.

And I don't feel festive.

Instead I feel in need of blankets and bandages.

Comfort and quiet.

Time to heal life's wounds.

Time to grow and seek quietly.

And so today's fog, the wet quietness of the day, the muffled shapes and sounds seem in tune with my mood.

A gauzey bandage over a bruised life.

A chance to heal.

A time of peace.

Today for me will be more of the 'Shrove Tuesday' than 'Carnival'.

Shrove Tuesday, when we confess our sins before our Lenten fast.

A time to confess and be healed.

May your Lent also start with the kind of day that you need.

LE

All Lenten Thoughts

ps: I am returning to rotating the meditation or antiphon that appears in this blog's description. I never intended to stop rotating it, but life got busy, and the one I had up seemed so appropriate; 'For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.'

pps: And look at the meditation that was up next: "I'm giving up being angry.". Great for the start of Lent, and great to follow my post 'The Others'. I think I smell the Holy Spirit in this...

Peace,
LE

Seeking Balance

How do we manage to live well-rounded lives?
How do we ensure that we invest enough in the right things?
How do we even decide what are the right things?

There are so many choices, and so many tasks. Life demands much of us: far too much paperwork and conformity. Others are always asking, asking, asking, and pushing, pushing, pushing, and we don't get the things done that we know we really should do: things that make a difference.

But we must have balance in our lives. Not balance like a tightrope walker, but balance like a portfolio of investments - investments we can move as necessary.

And our assets are limited:
We have only so much time,
Only so much energy,
Only so much money,
With wich to express God's infinite love.

We must put the love first
(What are our priorities?)
And see how that drives the tasks
That use our time
Our energy
And our money.

Happily, God's love is free.


Peace to you

-LE

Wasteland Pictures

Not so long ago, I published a post entitled Wasteland. I thought it might be neat if you got to see what I saw, and so here are some pictures from the very wasteland I was writing about:

Some grapes growing next to a cable supporting an electrical line...

Some immature raspberries... Today I see that some of them are ripe and that they are plump and lovely BLACK raspberries, and that many have been eaten by the little critters who live here.

And a funny bug on milkweed blossoms:

May your day be equally full of beauty in unexpected places.


P.S. I have replaced the picture on this blog of 'St Kevin's Chapel' with a picture of a grasshopper, as perhaps more appropriate. The insect in question was only briefly held and released back where it was captured. No grasshoppers were eaten or harmed in any way in the production of this blog.

Wednesdays

This post has been lightly edited since first posted

You might think that Monday starts the week
Or maybe Sunday.

You might think Friday ends the week, or maybe Sunday again.

But Wednesday is the middle.
Most certainly the middle,
The center of the week.

Thursday and Friday and Saturday and Sunday have particular liturgical connotations. Church Fathers, Christian theologians and mystics have suggested that Sunday and every day be a participation in the great Eighth Day, when Jesus rose; and that Saturdays remind us of Holy Saturday in holy week, and that Fridays all remind us of Good Friday, and that Thursdays remind us of Maundy (or perhaps Agape) Thursday. Each is rich in tradition.

But Wednesday is kind of like the end of 'ordinary time' - the last day before the mystery and passion is revealed.

Where does Wednesday sit liturgically?

And what devotions do you add to Wednesday?

Perhaps Wednesday should remind us of Ash Wednesday?

Should Wednesday be a solemn day of preparation?

Or is it the last regular day before you start thinking about the weekend?

Much as I like a good party, our current culture's celebration of 'hump day' seems wrong-headed.

Is what we are doing with our work-days, our weeks so very useless, unfulfilling, and without reward that we must celebrate when the week is half over?

It seems like a disgraceful way to view what we do with our lives, and not how we should value or spend our limited time here.

Instead, perhaps Wednesday, in the weekly cycle, is where we make our transition from living in the eighth day, to preparing to meditate on Christ's passion again.

A joyful but serious day, a day of preparation. A day to express love, to share, to care, to help, to do little things, a day to finish one thing and begin anew.

May God bless you in all your days.

Love,
locust-eater

Wasteland

...
Railroads are by their nature surrounded by wasteland.

Their roadbeds are not usually considered pretty, their switching areas, rusting signals and overhead electric lines are eyesores, and the trains that travel them are loud, discoraging the close encroachment of the neat lawns and dwellings of residential suburbia.

And the odd angles that the rail-beds make with roads, property lines, and each other create wedges of land that are virtually impossible to put to any use, even if someone wanted to do so.

And so they are left fallow, ...and life finds them and springs up.

The odd-shaped wedge behind the train station where I wait in the morning teams with life and is laden with ripening wild fruit;

raspberries and blackberries and grapes and choke-cherries, rose-hips and milkweed, and wild herbs and seeds - eaten by silly baltimore orioles (singing 'oh-boyeee!') and robins and sparrows and mocking-birds and chipmunks. ...and these are likely just the bold ones, who dare show themselves while I am there.

The amount of life per square foot is amazing. And to create this beauty, we just had to give it space. We abandoned it. We ignored it. We left it alone.

This was a waste-land, useless.

Sometimes we feel that way about ourselves, about parts of our lives, about people and places. But perhaps they need just a little space, some light, and a bit of water. Just a wee opportunity for growth and creation; time and space for God to enter in, and fill the wasteland with life.

May God enter all the abandoned places in our lives, all our waste-lands, and make them bloom and be fruitful.

And may we be wise enough to allow space for life, to leave spaces for the wild magic of God to take place.

Love,
Locust Eater

Related:
Wasteland Pictures
Seeing Truth in the Wasteland
God’s Sheep are Confused

After Psalm 33

...
Praise and thank God for our many blessings, because we are truly blessed.
Thank God with music, with dance, and with art
Proclaim your love and praise God loudly, so all can hear and see - because God is good and God's every deed is done in faithfulness.

God loves Mercy and Justice; the world is full of the steadfast love of the Lord;
God spoke and the universe was created, and God's breath lives within all life. God knows the fish of the sea, and the stars of the sky, every one by its own name.

God is awesome; God stands before time and also after; God was concerned with the events of your life before your eldest ancestor crept from the sea, and lovingly contemplates the echo of your features in the descendants of generations to come.

There is nothing that is hidden from God, and each of us is in God's sight. God knows us from the inside out, in our most shameful secrets and our hidden joys.

Nations, leaders and movements plot and plan, and seek to own the world, but the world is in God's hands, and God frustrates their plans. God's direction is clear and unchanged. Judgment and time belong to God, and from God no wealth, no power, and no physical strength can save you.

Happy are the people who follow in God's footsteps, who enter into God's labors. God watches over the faithful, who find eternal life in his steadfast love, and manna in the midst of want.

We wait upon the love of God, who is our help and protector. In God we find our joy and in God's name renewal. O Lord, be with us and bless us, even as we hope in you.

Peace,
Locust Eater

Finding God In Our Moments

I saw the girl-fox again today
She went dancing overhead
While I was sitting in traffic.
She on a railroad trestle
Me on the road
She in the wild that is so closely knit
With the roads and parking-lots and shops of suburbia.

Knowing foxes, I know her schedule.
I know that when I was rolling over for another 30 'Z's, another 20 winks,
She had already been up for an hour and a half.

I used to keep a schedule like hers, you see,
And daily meet one of her cousins a couple hours before sunrise.
At another railroad crossing,
Many miles from here.

Funnily enough, my train will take me in the direction she was headed,
As she set off for perhaps her third time already this morning.

But I still had to wait for my train;
The rails heating up and expanding in the warm sun,
The wooden ties creaking and clicking in response,
While song-birds fill the air with their music,
And the breeze shifts the grasses.

Today the train is late.
And that's just fine.

Half-Measures

What we want in life is whole-measures.
Or more-than-whole-measures.

We don't just want our daily bread, we want extra, enough to share at best, or a gluttonous amount at worst.

And that leads us to demand more than whole-measures from those around us.

Unreasonably, we want our whims satisfied instantly, and our intentions translated into fact without our having to work out the details.

We want our waiter's full attention, even though he or she has a large number of tables, perhaps a headache, and an insane boss to keep satisfied.

We want our employees and service providers to start work at 8:00am, to end work at 9:00pm, and to remember our every demand, and we probably pay them far too little to live where we do, and then we complain when they are outsourced, and speak with an accent.

We are greedy, unfair, and gluttonous. So my instruction to you is to try to find ways to be more real, to allow those around you to live real lives, to live a real life yourself.

Take your time...
Tip and pay living wages, let people leave at 5pm.

Go home to your family, they will appreciate it, even if they don't say so.

If you don't have a life, find one. Visit friends, get out, write, draw, paint.

Give your life more than half measures.

You will be glad you did.

Five Tasks

Share truth

Create peace

Give space

Make time

Be good



Share truth, because truth is the coin of wisdom, the river that life swims in, and the raw material of civilization.

Create peace, because noise, enimity, and war are poison to thought, care, and life

Give space, because space is the dwelling place of dignity and honor, and food for the spirit.

Make time, because within moments of time are found infinities that can be turned powerfully to the service of light.

Be good, because in being good, you instantiate God.

Don't Feed Satan

Christ charges us to be wise in our efforts and prudent with our resources, and for good reason.

It is very easy to hear the word, and rejoice, and try to serve, but have all one's efforts be absorbed in dealing with the unimportant cares of this world.

It is not in the best interests of The Light if you find yourself spending your time and treasure on that which does not last, or which helps few.

There are needy people in the world who will absorb every ounce of your effort and money. There are greedy people in the world who will do the same. The government can absorb huge amounts of money and paperwork.

Where you can, you should minimize the time and money spent on these things. To the degree you can, you must cut Satan out of your payroll, and out of your schedule.

Don't spend your efforts on endeavors which are gone in a moment.
Don't do 'what is percieved as proper' if that time and treasure could be spent getting someone to a new place, teaching someone, creating opportunities, or doing something else of real long-term worth.

To some degree the world will insist you waste your time and treasure. It will insist that you feed Satan. And you can spend all your time fighting to keep your treasure out of Satan's hands, or vice-versa.

Here is where we must be wise in our use of our time. Cut Satan out wherever you can, but don't waste your time on battles that you won't win, and that will use up your time.

Come up with an idea of what your time is worth, and use it to evaluate your efforts. Spend your time and treasure generously, but wisely.

Make Satan work for your money, and spend for his time with you. Make him make appointments with you, take out your trash, help someone along the way. But be diligent, lest in shorting Satan, you are unjust to someone else. Be as wise as you are able, and as kind as you can afford.

But don't ever miss a chance to share love, if you can help it. Because love, unlike time and treasure, only increases when it is spent.

All My Love to You