Author: itoccurstocp

In my meandering thoughts today this one occurred to me – blessings to baggage.  There is this human capacity (one I fear I have highly developed) to take blessings and turn them into “baggage.”  Work from a good job becomes life’s driving force.  Having money, one becomes focused with how to handle it.  Food, hobbies, and of course the family and friends in our lives, all blessings, can easily be turned into “baggage.”  One thought that occurs to me here is that this (the perception of “blessing” or “baggage”) is in large part (if not fully) a matter of perspective.

Photo taken on the beach in Malibu, California.

I read this today from Address to the Lord by John Berryman.  While I am not sure there is such a thing as a “perfect prayer” for all occasions, this one strikes me as such here, now:

“Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,

Inimitable contriver,

endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,

thank you for such as it is my gift….

…Whatever your end may be, accept my amazement.

May I stand until death forever at attention

for any your least instruction or enlightenment.

I even feel sure you will assist me again, Master of insight and beauty.”

Amen

Photo taken recently in California.

“Be though my vision, or Lord of my heart.  Naught be all else to me save that thou art. Thou my best thought, by day or by night, waking or sleeping Thy presence my light.”

The lyrics from Be Thou My Vision popped into my head this morning.  If I gotta have a song in my head all day, this beats most!

“People are not finished business.”  Johathan Rowson

I heard this in a podcast yesterday and it immediately stuck.  What a freeing agent in a messy world.  It provides a means of understanding why that schmuck cut me off in traffic, why I don’t seem to be able to ________, and why that thing that _______ does annoys the hell out of me – all indicators that we are all “unfinished business.”

It would take someone smarter than me to understand this concept on a deeper level, but what I know is that somehow the thought that people, including myself, are unfinished business not only makes logical sense (I regularly see empirical proof of it) but it also somehow helps to remember that – “People are unfinished business.”

From Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar In The World, this on the spiritual practice of getting lost:

“In my life, I have lost my way many times more than I can count.  I have set out to be married and ended up divorced.  I have set out to be healthy and ended up sick.  I have set out to live in New England and ended up in Georgia….  While none of these displacements were pleasant at first, I would not give a single one of them back.  I have found things while I was lost that I might not have ever discovered if I had stayed on the path.  I have lived though parts of life that no one in her right mind would ever willingly have chosen, finding enough overlooked treasure in them to outweigh my projected wages in the life I had planned.”

This rings true to me – getting lost is not an exception to life, not an appendage of life — it is part of life.  For all my best intentions, my retentiveness, my desire to plan things out so the path ahead is well-lit and clearly marked, I still find myself lost/clueless/out of ideas from time to time.  But that recognition is more an admission of reality, not an admission of defeat.  Which leads to Taylor’s punchline:

“I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead.  The Bible is a great help to me in this practice, since it reminds me that God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.”

So there.  When next lost, I need not be frustrated or embarrassed.  I can simply acknowledge that I am engaging in the spiritual practice of getting lost, and (hopefully) move aside long enough to allow God to do some of his best work.

I often have a song rolling around in my head.  Sometimes it just appears for reasons I can’t explain, at other times it is prompted by something I see, hear, or think of in the course of a day.  This morning, these two lines from Prayers, by Stephen Kellogg greeted me for an as yet unknown reason:  “Every unkind word we say leads to our unhappiness.”  And in the next verse: “Every unkind word we say, only drives the love away.”  Should be an interesting day!

In Genesis 28 a tormented Jacob sets out on a journey (more of a flight) from Beersheba to Haran.  The text (v. 11) tells us only that he chose his spot for the night “because the sun had set.”  In other words, this was no special place.  Yet this is where “Jacob’s Ladder” dream occurred.  Thereafter, he thinks to himself: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it….  How awesome is this place!  This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of Heaven.”  What made the place so “awesome?” What made it “the gate of heaven?”  It occurs to me that what made it special was that this was a spot where Jacob’s mind was open to God’s presence.  That is, of course, what can transition any place to an “awesome” place.

“Enough” as defined in my dictionary is “as much as is needed or required.”  It is a tricky thing, enough.  Even in a state of “enoughness,” if I am not careful, my focus turns to scarcity, to times when I did not have enough, or to the concern that while I may have “enough” now I might not have “enough” in the future.  That is, I can squander my ability to enjoy “enough” now because I am focused on having “more” later.