It occurs to me…

This beautiful excerpt/thought that I’d like to calmly recite to each (and I mean each) of our Senators and Representatives while shaking each soundly comes from the poem, Blackbirds by Julie Caldwallader Staub:

“but instead we live and move and have our being

here, in this curving and soaring world

that is not our own

so when mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives

and when, even more rarely, we unite and move together

toward a common good,

we can think to ourselves:

ah, yes, that’s how it’s meant to.”

From time to time I need to and in fact do find something that allows me to call out that cynical, skeptical pessimist that seems to live in my mirror for the scoundrel that he is.  Here’s today’s sweet medicine.

Sometimes – Sheenagh Pugh

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,

from bad to worse.  Some years, muscadel

faces down frost, green thrives, the crops don’t fail,

sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

 

A people sometimes will step back from war,

elect an honest man, decide they care

enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for.

 

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

This photo taken a few years back near Austin resurfaced recently, as did the Barbara Brown Taylor quote from An Altar In the World.

“Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.”  Luke 17:25

For all the efforts to hunt it down all the travels, the books read, the services gone to, the acts done and foregone, “the kingdom of God is within you.”  Who woulda thought!  In this I am reminded, yet again, of this from Barbara Brown Taylor:

“No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it.  The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company.  All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need.  The only thing missing is our consent to be who we are.”

One more time, for the slow learner in me – “The treasure [I] seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company.  All [I] lack is the willingness to imagine that [I] already have everything [I] need.  The only thing missing is [my consent to be who [I am]” because “the kingdom of God is within [me]”

In more modern day terms, Jesus is shaking his head as he points out that the cell phone I am looking for is in my hand.  Duh!

 

As many times as it occurs, logic would dictate that I wouldn’t, on reading some collection of words strung on a page, on hearing something said or sung, feel as if the world stopped spinning, if only for an instant, while I took those words in and pondered them – or maybe it is in that instant that they take ME in and ponder me, search me?  Regardless, those words today are from Lawrence Raab’s poem, My Life Before I Knew it:

“One day, one of those strangers would introduce herself to me, and then the life I’d never been able to foresee would begin, and everything before I became myself would appear necessary to the rest of the story.”

It is a two-quote day:

“The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it has nothing else in the universe to do.”  Galileo Galilei

The quote reminds me that it is easy to take things for granted, not just small things, like the gift of a smile, or a light that turns green as I approach it, but big things, like the sun.  (In my defense, the sun IS 93,000,000 miles away.)  I am also, sheepishly, reminded of how easy it is for me to confuse myself with the sun.  Note to self – I/we ain’t the sun.  That position is already filled, and the universe (at least in terms of planetary orbits) is functioning just fine.

Still, there are things for me to do, to be.  Which somehow connects to the second quote:

“There are no passengers on spaceship earth.  We are all crew.”  Marshall McLuhan.

So what are my assignments for today?

Merging a patchwork of some things read over the past few days, so hang with me on this:

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis notes: “Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, nor obvious, not what you expect….  Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed.”  That rings true to me.

In that I was reminded of this line from Baz Luhrmann’s Sunscreen: “Don’t worry about the future, or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum.  The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind.  The kind what blindside you at 4:00 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.”

And then there’s 2 Cor. 5:16-18: “Therefore we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”

It occurs to me in all this that those odd twists in life, those things that come out of left field, are not exceptions to life, they ARE life.  As Lewis notes, reality is odd, and as Luhrmannn notes, we get blindsided.  Which takes us back to the seemingly enigmatic punchline in 2 Cor. 5:18 – “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.”

 

I don’t know, I can shake a stick at a lot.

You can beat a dead horse,

but I wouldn’t  bet on it.

You can ride a gravy train,

but don’t let it scald you,

and for God’s sakes, don’t add water.

It may not be your first rodeo,

but the bull you are on doesn’t care,

and odds are it ain’t his first.

Bear hunting with a branch is fine;

it is the bear finding with a branch that gets dicey.

It seems to me that hen’s teeth are about as plentiful as they need to be.

Granted, the latch on the outhouse door is handy,

but who opens an outhouse door without first knocking or calling out?

Is “y’all” the only amusing contraction?

Has anyone ever admitted to recently falling off a turnip truck;

or for that matter, has anyone ever seen a turnip truck?

That’s a lot of turnips.

But not more than I can shake a stick at.

“… continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling….”  Philippians 12:2.

This, in and of itself, can be a bit intimidating.  What often gets lost in the “fear and trembling” part is what follows: “for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.”

God works in me.  That is, I am not in this alone – there is help!  This reflects the “partnership with God” that my friend Steve Kinney speaks of so often.  And that is the good news, really good news, ‘cause I can use that help, particularly when I start to thinking I don’t really need it and I got this covered on my own.

Lost and Found

Have you ever wandered around looking for a set of keys you had in your pocket,

a hat on your head, a phone in you hand?

I think my search for “enough” is like that –

I am spending an inordinate amount of time searching for something I already have.