Part of this comes from the deeply place-oriented theology of early Celtic Christian spirituality, where pilgrimage and sacred sites are important and prayers abound for milking the cow and for launching the fishing skiff.

I’m not the only one ruminating in this field.  Len Hjalmarson at NextReformation is also.  His post is very worthwhile.

It’s coming to rest in a deep desire to feel grounded in geography – something like what the wandering Celtic monks called “finding your place of resurrection”.  I can’t say that I’ve found it yet, but I trust that the desire is a good thing.

I’m feeling drawn to space and land, partly as we’re thinking about buying property to put a cabin on that is warmer and sunnier than where our home is, and which has trees and fishable water and access to good motorcycle roads (whether dirt or street).

I’m noticing that I feel drawn to plants and birds, watching both from my back deck as I look at the mountain and listen to them all speak.  We’ve put up four bird feeders and are cleaning up the landscaping in our overgrown backyard jungle, and even in the midst of being eaten by thornbushes, I feel a sense of accomplishment.

These books have been especially helpful to me recently:

• Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation (Resources for Reconciliation)  //  (Goodreads)

• Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible  // (Goodreads)

I’m also thinking hard about the themes in work by Wendell Berry and by Kathleen Norris.  Place matters.  Dirt matters.

I’ll say more here when I get confirmation, but I’m excited to continue with this content in this institution, and am very excited to have the opportunity to dig deeper for my own understanding as well.

GOD, bless to me the new day,
Never vouchsafed to me before;
It is to bless Thine own presence
Thou hast given me this time, O God.

Bless Thou to me mine eye,
May mine eye bless all it sees;
I will bless my neighbour,
May my neighbour bless me.

God, give me a clean heart,
Let me not from sight of Thine eye;
Bless to me my children and my wife,
And bless to me my means and my cattle.

As with many other elements of this Christian tradition, I love how it speaks to me and for me.

I love how it recognizes that each day is given as a new wonder, for the purpose of being present with God.

I love that it asks that my eye is baptized, and that my eye baptizes what it takes in.

I love that it reminds me to initiate being good to my neighbor, whether or not they are good to me.

I love the constant reminder to be clean in heart and within God’s sight.

I love the inclusion and priority on wife and children, job and household items.

+May 2011 be a fresh start for you, rooted deeply in the presence of God and family and neighbor.+

In recent months, I have been eager to learn from the wisdom of Christians who lived their lives before us, and to see if their traditions provide words of prayer that I could try on as my own voice. Today I looked through the “Carmina Gadelica, Vol. I & II: Hymns and Incantations (Forgotten Books)” (Alexander Carmichael) to see what I might find about thankfulness. The Carmina Gadelica is a collection of the prayers, poems and sayings that Alexander Carmichael gathered from the residents of the outer Hebrides in the late 1800′s, and it represents many generations of spiritual and cultural tradition.

In it, I found this blessing:

AN TINNSGANN (THE DEDICATION) 42, p.99
THANKS to Thee, God,
Who brought’st me from yesterday
To the beginning of to-day,
Everlasting joy
To earn for my soul
With good intent.
And for every gift of peace
Thou bestowest on me,
My thoughts, my words,
My deeds, my desires
I dedicate to Thee.
I supplicate Thee,
I beseech Thee,
To keep me from offence,
And to shield me to-night,
For the sake of Thy Wounds
With Thine offering of grace.

I pray that today, as we gather friends and family and neighbors, we may remember with great thanksgiving that God brought us from yesterday to today, and that these are his gifts of peace to us: Our thoughts, our words, our deeds, and our desires.

May God keep us all from offense today, in our thoughts, words, deeds and desires, by God’s grace.

God’s grace to you and yours!

And is there a way to answer these questions in an engaging story form, rather than yet another “What’s wrong with the Church and what I propose to fix it?” textbook?

This is the goal of this book:

“Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale” (Ian M Cron)

Ian Cron’s novel tells the story of a megachurch pastor who is struck with questions that he cannot answer simply, for the first time in his life and much to his consternation. He seeks advice from his uncle, a Franciscan friar, who invites him onto a pilgrimage following the story of Francis of Assisi as a way to discover a larger Christian heritage and a way to connect his questions and his soul to God.

Cron’s story is well written and engaging. I had a few laugh-out-loud moments reading witty dialogue, and I learned quite a bit about St. Francis and contemporary Franciscan spirituality along the way. The plot has a few heavy-handed moments along the way, but on the whole, the story is well worth your time, especially if you are curious about pre-Reformation spiritualities in today’s culture.

Make sure you check out the individual and group study guide at the back of the book, which would make it very useful for a small group. There’s an excellent biography as well.

I found the book to be very similar in form to Brian McLaren’s trilogy of “A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey, “The Story We Find Ourselves In, and “The Last Word and the Word after That: A Tale of Faith, Doubt, and a New Kind of Christianity, which were helpful to many of us in proposing an alternative way to view our Christian story.

I’m looking forward to reading more from Ian Cron.

As for my own personal impact, I found myself looking not just at Franciscan spirituality but more to the Celtic spirituality which informed Francis. Franciscan scholars say that Francis took his monastic training at the monastery in Bobbio, in northern Italy – Bobbio was founded by Celtic St. Columban. Certainly Francis’ themes of humility and simplicity, his emphasis on artistic creativity, his peer relationships with female leaders such as Claire, and his recognition of the God speaking from within nature are Celtic themes as well.

At the same time, there is a well-developed lay Franciscan framework which has done a wonderful job of engaging “everyday” Christians as third order members and expanding a spirituality which encompasses peacemaking and service of the poor.   

Anyone interested in either Celtic or Franciscan spirituality would be well served to investigate both histories and learning from these close cousins.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising

#ChasingFrancisSpeakEasy

If we are going to see life as a succession of thresholds to be crossed, we are reminded of the journeys of the people of Israel in the desert, and we then find symbols and images that we can apply to our own experience…

The psalms are the journey songs of the people who made that passage. Time and again they raised a fist to God and shouted angrily at him, asking him where his will was in their lives. Had he forgotten or betrayed his faithful people? If we try to sanitize, edit, or sentimentalize the psalms, they lose their power. They are the songs of a people who were moving away from a known situation into the unknown, and they were often angry with a God who removed all those certainties, who instead seemed to be leading them along an apparently precarious path. They did not sit down for long beside gently flowing streams or linger in lush meadows. When we pray the psalms as they did, we, too, are compelled to stay “at the raw edge,” in the words of Walter Brueggemann.

- from “To Pause at the Threshold: Reflections on Living on the Border” (Esther de Waal), p. 54-55

Esther de Waal writes on Benedictine and Celtic spirituality. In this book, she writes about the borders and transitions we face in our lives and how we can live through them and learn from them.

I love her thoughts on the Psalms above. I’ve been deeply rooted in psalms in recent months. I am finding myself at home knowing that, because they are the prayer book of the church’s long history, my relationship of prayer with God can take the heat of difficult times.. The breadth and depth of emotion I feel are not to be hidden, but to be experienced, and brought before God in raw, unvarnished form.

I find great comfort in the reality of a questioning, wounded, confused people who turn to God and are heard. I have no use whatsoever for comfortable Americanized Christianity, in which I have to put on a happy face before approaching God or other Christians. Sometimes – often, even – life sucks, the way ahead is unknown, and if I can’t be real in experiencing and expressing those feelings, what kind of worthless faith is that?

“To Pause at the Threshold: Reflections on Living on the Border” (Esther De Waal)

To Pause at the Threshold

by Esther de Waal

Morehouse (2001)

Description of the Book

To Pause at the Threshold is a short exploration of the boundary spaces in our lives and our response to these thresholds. In our everyday lives, we are often so busy that we don’t pause and consider the changes we’re going through, and therefore we miss the opportunity to gain something from these threshold moments.

This idea is similar to and also refers to the monastic practice of statio, or leaving time to stand still and let go of the demands of the previous activity, and allowing oneself to prepare a space for the work of God.

Interpretation of the Book

The author begins by discussing border places, writing from her home at the border between Wales and England. She then writes an interlude based upon the role of the porter in St. Benedict’s Rule. The porter’s role is to work at the edge of the monastery and provide deep hospitality to those who come from outside the monastery inside its walls.

The book continues with a look at the transitions between nighttime and daytime, and from season to season. Next, the author describes the life transitions revolving around rites of passage and rituals of transition, encouraging us to see the Psalms as the prayer book for such real changes. The next section deals with transitions between the inner life and the outer life, and then finishes with a challenge to be open to outsiders and those different from us in order to learn from them and be changed by them.

Application

I find myself nodding and highlighting when reading this book. I am one of those whom de Waal describes, busily plowing through transition points in my day and in my life, without reflecting upon those transitions. This is perhaps why I sense the Spirit of God inviting me to practice mindfulness and attentiveness in the moment, and to also live a more contemplative and reflective life in the midst of my busy schedule.

I enjoyed the Celtic practice of celebrating the transition of the seasons; these transitions happen earlier in the year than our contemporary marking points. I am trying to find a good online calendar of these days and other holy days (especially the feast days of Celtic saints) so that I can incorporate these rhythms into my daily and yearly calendar.

I loved de Waal’s challenge to learn from the land, watching the way it changes and moves. As a renewed gardener, I am learning much about the rhythms of life from this glimpse of nature.

We believe in God above us,

maker and sustainer of all life,

of sun and moon, of water and earth,

of male and female.

We believe in God beside us,

Jesus Christ, the word made flesh,

born of a woman, servant of the poor,

tortured and nailed to a tree.

A man of sorrows, he died forseaken.

He descendend into the earth

to the place of death.

On the third day he rose from the tomb.

He ascended into heaven,

to be everywhere present,

and His kingdom will come on earth.

We believe in God within us,

the Holy Spirit of Pentecostal fire,

life-giving breath of the Church,

Spirit of healing and forgiveness,

source of resurrection and of eternal life.

Amen

I recently found this Celtic Affirmation of Faith on the Facebook group for Celtic Christianity. It appears to have come from Brother John-Anthony of Our Lady of the Rock Hermitage, just west of me in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. I love its earthy, powerful nature.

The final chapter of this book is the one I enjoyed and appreciated the most.

Titled The Time Between The Times, it looks at how we live with those twilight moments when something is dawning or is in its dusk phase (whether that “something” is the sunshine or something less tangible.

de Waal writes about Holy Saturday, that day of tension between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, which we usually gloss over in a haze of party planning and church decorations and cooking for the potluck. However, that day can best be experienced in the wonder and the mystery of this day. It’s hard for us to allow ourselves to remain uncomfortable in this tension, though. We want to resolve our tension and move into comfort.

The reality of God as Trinity helps us here. The Trinity is unity in diversity; diversity in unity. A person in interdependent relationship.

The first step in listening, learning, and changing is to see that different is not dangerous; the second is to be happy and willing to live with uncertainty; the third is to rejoice in ambiguity and to embrace it. It all means giving up the comfort of certainty and realizing that uncertainty can be good. As soon as I realize this, I find that I must ask myself: what is my first task in approaching another people?

I have here set out my response as a meditation that is simultaneously as a form of prayer. It is inspired by something I saw pinned up in a Roman Catholic convent in Harare on a recent trip to Zimbabwe:

My first task in approaching another people

another culture

another religion

Is to take off my shoes.

For the place that I am approaching is holy.

Otherwise I may find myself

treading on another’s dreams,

their memories, their stories,

More serious still – I might forget

that God was there … (p. 86-87)

One of the most powerful thresholds we’re allowed to encounter is the uniqueness of another person – a different person, someone with a different history and story and experience.

Perhaps there is something prophetic about living on the border. I want a Christianity that brings me comfort, but also dis-comfort… Listening to other voices asks me not only to be attentive to the place where I stand and to ask questions of myself, but also to be open and willing to recognize where the other might bring a corrective, a deepening or strengthening. (p. 92)

Who do you listen to? Whose voices which are unlike yours are you discomforted by? Who do you allow to correct, deepen or strengthen you?

There is a traditional saying of ancient wisdom: “A threshold is a sacred thing.” (p. 1)

We have thresholds, transition points, throughout our lives. In our culture, we tend to rush through them, or not even notice that we’re blasting through thresholds. However, if we pay attention to those thresholds and turn our attention to God, these can be helpful transitions for us.

All our lives are inevitably made of a succession of borders and thresholds, which open up into the new and promise excitement or fear. (p. 5)

de Waal writes from a home on the physical border between Wales and England, whose location provides depth to her understanding of thresholds.

I can only learn from this border countryside landscape when I let its presence reveal itself to me gently, so that I begin to sense its patterns – those hill rhythms and water rhythms… (p.

We should approach thresholds by paying attention to what they’re trying to show us.

Am I willing to cross the threshold of new understanding by being open and receptive, not closed in and defensive? [..] The most profound threshold, however, remains that between the inner and the outer, between going deeper into the interior self and emerging to meet the world beyond the self without protective defenses, as friend not as foe.” (p. 9-10)

In the next section of the book, de Waal writes about the Benedictine practice of hospitality, especially in the form of the porter described in chapter 62 of the Rule of Benedict. The role of the porter is to live on the threshold of the monastery and to offer warmth, hospitality and welcome to those outside the threshold.

In my own thinking and praying I have extended the image of the man on the margin to include the greeting of new circumstances, new situations, and new demands, so that even when they appear unexpectedly and I feel unready and ill equipped, I am yet prepared to welcome them. This image of being simultaneously rooted yet open, planted on either side of the threshold of the interior and the exterior, is one that I now want to apply elsewhere in my own personal experience. (p. 26-27)

Places give us a sense of seasons changing, of sunrise and sunset. If we’re in places where these things more easily impact us, we can get a rhythm from them. For those of us in busier, more urban environments, we’re distracted from these rhythms.

For many of us, time has become yet one more commodity of the consumer world, a commodity at the mercy of the dictates of deadlines and contracts, valued in terms of achievement and productivity. It is not easy to regain a sense of the changes of time and season when the night sky with all its gentle and subtle changes is blotted out by the sullen orange glow of the sodium light, denying us what should rightly be the timeless heritage of the movement of moon and stars. When the imported luxuries of the world stare us in the face on every visit to the supermarket, we are denied any sense of the coming and going of successive seasons of the year, with the expectation and delight that each will bring its own particular gift. If the kiwi fruits and the tomatoes and the strawberries are endlessly available, there is no longer that waiting on the threshold for each new season to bring its appropriate contribution of fruitfulness.

Yet living here I cannot fail to be aware of the movement, the movement of water, of light and dark, of the coming and going of each season in turn, and with it the underlying theme of ebb and flow, of death and life, the dying down of nature and the new seed of creation and recreation, experienced again and again, year in year out, just as it will be repeated again throughout our lives. (p.30-31)

de Waal has connected these rhythms to the Celtic sense of seasons.

In recent years I have begun quite consciously to live the pattern of time in the Celtic way and it has given me much joy because now I value change as I never did before. What I most appreciate is that four times in each year there is a pause, a festival, a named day, marking the transitional moment between one season and the next. (p. 39-40)

The year began at Samhaine on November 1. Spring arrives with Imbolc on February 1 (also the feast of St. Brigid). Beltaine, the feast of summer, is on May 1, and Lammas on August 1 marks the feast of harvests.

Thresholds also can be marked at birth, death, coming-of-age, marriage, and other change points.

So we create rhythms and still spaces within us, to help us to process these thresholds.

There are so many ways of describing this still center: the cave of the heart, the hidden poustinia, the innermost cloister. Each one of us has our own picture. Essentially it is that deep place where God finds us and we find him. We enter into silence and hear God’s conversation and take our proper part in it – and if we heed ancient wisdom, that means trying not to say too much ourselves.(p. 69)

(to be continued)