Month: January 2019

When I was a kid, my brother loved to tease me. It was easy for him because he was 8 years older. Now, don’t get me wrong, my brother loved me fiercely, but he teased me. One of those was, “you have a face only a mother could love”! That was so mean but it was my brother, a teenager at the time.

Let’s consider that idea though, “a face only a mother could love”. This presumably mean statement is actually a statement of how we all are, we need to put a face to things. Have you not had conversations with people and said, I just can’t place his/her face. Or you meet someone and say, now I have a face to put with your name. One of the great enhancements to the internet and to online education has been the addition to video, so we can put a face with a voice.

I read recently that this is the reason God came to earth as a person named Jesus. The Divine knew that we were having trouble putting the name of God with the face of God. So, in the darkest time of our world we celebrate the very human face of God coming to us. Now, when we want to love God, we have that face that only the Father can love! We have that baby face/adult face named Jesus.

The living God among us, Jesus, put aside every ounce of divinity to give us a face of God we could love. But friends it does not stop there because once we have met God, we are the new face of God to the world. Think of what this means: are we living a life that gives the world a glimpse of God? And, do we see the human face of God in every person we see? We should, because we are called to see the world as our loving God sees it, “and it is good”.

TMM

I am old enough to know these words from a song that Sammy Davis Jr. sang a number of years ago. The old joke is that the only sure things are death and taxes. What has never been sure is who we are supposed to be. Most of us spend a lifetime trying to discover and then be who we are truly supposed to be.

I think the problem is that we are told who we are supposed to be so often growing up that we never really sit and consider who we “gotta be”. I know in my life, there have been too many times that I tried to be who others thought I should. This was especially negative from my childhood of never being good enough! It has followed and at times haunted me for so many years.

As a contemplative, I have learned of what Merton and others called the “false self” and “true self”. The first is who we believe we are supposed to be. Mind you, for many good Christian folks, they are trying so hard to be who they believe they are supposed to be as Christians. They are not evil, they are doing what church has told them they should be for many years. The problem is that is the “false self”. And, it is sinful. No, it is not bad or evil it is just “missing the mark”, which is what sin is.

We are called to be and embody love. To become the living “Christs” that God needs in the world, to reach the world. This is the essences of “take up your cross daily”, to put who I think I should be aside and be what I am, my “true self” in God. I am to be love in the world, Agape love, unmerited favor, to be given away to all who need love.

I get it, this is not easy and I work at being love every day. I often fail but it does not keep me from trying to be who I am called to be in God, the living Christ. That is not arrogant or trivial for me to say, it is instead incredibly humbling. I am going to make the effort to sing Sammy’s song in a different way. I need to sing each day, “I gotta be the True me”. Come on, you know you want to sing this song with me! If we are our True Selves, can you imagine what our world would become? Sing loud.

TMM

“That’s very risky”. “Do you really want to risk it?” “Take a risk for once”. All of these are phrases that are used daily in conversations. The real question should include what is being risked. It can be money, prestige, relationships and more. It can be positive or negative as in what if I risk this and fail? Or, if I take this risk I might end up with….

Have you ever risked anything? In my life, I have taken more than a few risks. None of those were life threatening, but some were life changing. It has been said “the greater the risk the greater the reward”. That can be true when money/wealth is involved or prestige. In my life, I have learned to take risks on others.

When my daughter was much younger, it always felt risky to let her find her own way. As a professor, I take educated risks on all of my students. The risk comes in the form of trusting them or letting them fail or excel without interfering with the process. It is risky because if too many of them fail, then my teaching or my program gets called into question. I am pretty sure if all of them excel, that is good for me and the program.

Here is a deeper question: Has anyone ever taken a risk for you? In my life it was a baseball coach, a school counselor and a Dean of Admissions. These were the first to take a risk on me. I won the position on the field and I graduated from Baylor University. It feels dangerous to take a risk on someone else (basically to trust them and God). It is humbling when someone takes a risk on us.

Who have you risked it for? Who has risked it for you? It seems to me the Creator of the University risked it all for us from the very beginning. The moment the Creator gave every human being free will, the greatest risk in all of history was taken. How can we not take a risk here and there for the betterment or development of another? It was done for us after all.

TMM

Okay, I will admit it, I am a bit of a nut about Christmas. I want to start playing Christmas carols before Thanksgiving, I want to put the tree up on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. Most of all, I want to start putting up the lights. I don’t want the ten thousand lights and everything tuned to music so that they flicker on cue. I want lots of lights tastefully done.

As a child, because of allergies to some kinds of evergreens, we had the quintessential aluminum Christmas tree with a color wheel. What can I say, it was the sixties. As false as that was, I still loved watching the lights change. Nowadays, I line the fences, sidewalks, driveway and the house with lights. I simply love that warm, welcoming glow that the lights give. I want it always to look like an invitation to come visit, not to drive by and just look.

I don’t stop with Christmas though. The sidewalk up to the front porch has lights along it. There are solar lights along the fence and the deck has lights to, again, create that warm inviting glow. I even like to have a fire pit so that the light is there to enjoy.

Christ said, “I am the light of the world” and that is why I think I love the lights so much. That warm and inviting glow of the lights speaks of His presence. I also believe that each day on the Christian journey, we are absorbing more of his light. That is how the idea of not hiding you light under a “bushel” makes sense. We cannot just absorb the light that Christ gives us on the path, we have to let it out.

We are to become him, become the Light ourselves. And as we are doing that, we cannot hide it, we must let it shine. Are some lights brighter than others? Of course they are. But each is still a light. The light within us all is the living Creator of the Universe. And, all that the Creator desires of us is to let the light grow and let it out. We are called to let that light out and we do that by learning simply to be the Light.

Shine on my friends,shine on.

TMM

These days, the word wall is getting thrown around non-stop. It is supposed to keep unwanted people out and protect those who are inside the wall. There are walls everywhere, around homes, abbeys, and castles too. They are intended to keep folks out, but don’t they also keep folks in?

A wall keeps things in. A retaining wall in yard or garden keeps the dirt from being washed away. It keeps dirt out. In Ireland, you can see ancient stone walls everywhere, though rarely more than about 4 feet high. Those walls separate one field from another and keep the sheep in that particular pasture. These walls, however, rarely block one’s vision of the surrounding world, they only serve to retain or delineate something.

In our own lives, we build walls between ourselves and those who might get too close to us. We hide behind those walls and think we are safe. We are not safe, we are trapped! Anything that keeps us from seeing the world around us traps us into one way to see things. We all have these walls, we build them emotionally when we are hurt or afraid. We just cannot let that happen to us again, whatever hurt or scared us. The problem is that we are trying to wall up something that simply cannot be walled up. Our feelings and emotions will come out, leak around or overflow the wall every time.

When Christ died on the cross, it was said that the veil in the Holy of Holys was torn apart. It had been used to hide the priest and God from the rest of the world. That simply won’t work with Christ. He was, He is God and there can be no veil, no wall between God and us. It can be frightening to take down a wall. In my lifetime, the Berlin wall was erected and then taken down. Tearing it down made it simple for people to see each other again but it was scary to tear it down, to let in (or out) the unknown.

What walls have you built? What is it that you don’t want to get to you? Or who is it you don’t want to get to you? Maybe, just maybe, those walls are keeping you trapped and not protecting you like you might think. In Christ, no walls are needed since they interrupt the flow of love within us and through us to the world. Take a breath and start tearing down the walls between you and the rest of the world. Do it one brick at a time if you need to, but let the light in and see the world. By the way, if you have tried to build a wall between you and God, I have good news…God has been inside the wall with you always.

TMM

My name actually means “lover of horses”. Now, I don’t hate horses and have a healthy respect for them but love them? No, I don’t love horses. We often name children haphazardly and that can be a real problem too. It has been said we should give a child a name they can live into. I am not sure that works all that well. If we look in the New Testament for my name, we find a doubter and a questioner of nearly everything……hey, wait a minute maybe this live into our name thing works!

Seriously, though, as I write this, the scripture from the lectionary is describing the baptism of Jesus. I have always wondered why a person without sin needed to be baptized for the remission of sin. Is it possible baptism means something else? Many are taught that we are “buried with Christ in baptism, raised to walk in newness of life”. I think that is true, except how do we know he was baptized by immersion?

I don’t think the how matters much, for all I know the Jordan River where he was baptized might not be all that deep. Raised to walk in newness of life does work. My favorite pastor (okay my daughter if you must know) delivered a sermon recently that I believe captures the point: Jesus’ baptism by John was that moment when Jesus’ real name was pronounced by God, Beloved.

Now this makes sense to me, baptism teaches us who we really are, the Beloved of God. Since we know forgiveness and sin were resolved at the Cross, perhaps we have been seeing baptism incorrectly. Maybe when we are called to “remember our baptism” during church, we are to remember who we are and whose we are. We remember that we are Beloved,our true name.

TMM

I had just turned 40 and suddenly (it seemed) I just couldn’t see quite as well to read and my eyes were tired and hurting. I went to the doctor and sure enough, presbyopia….old eyes! Ouch, that hurt but with reading glasses and later multi-focal contacts, I can read and type on a computer and my eyes aren’t tired.

We have spiritual “eyes” as well, ones that are often trained to see things a certain way. This training comes from parents and church most often, though friends and mentors also affect how our “eyes” work. The danger of these spiritual “eyes” can be how we focus on what we see. The spiritual glasses we put on can truly sharpen our vision, but if they are the wrong prescription, they can just as easily make us blind.

There are several examples of Jesus healing the blind throughout the New Testament. I wonder what kind of vision Jesus gave these “new seers”? I am betting it was more than just the ability to physically see. I am betting, well no, I fully believe that the greater healing was of the spiritual “eyes” of each one of them. Perhaps this new vision helped them to see who they really were or who Jesus really was. And perhaps this was the whole point of the healings of the blind, to make them whole, both physical and spiritual vision restored.

What prescription are you using to see the world? Does it see through the lenses of love? Does it help you see that the Kingdom of God is truly among us and within us? Does that prescription (or vision) we use to see spiritually make us more like Christ or less? If it does, you have keen spiritual eyesight. If it doesn’t, perhaps it is time to as the Divine Physician for a new prescription.

TMM

When we think of wilderness we usually think of forests or jungles full of wild animals. Areas that are undeveloped. Living in the Piney Woods of East Texas, we have some areas designated as National forests and wilderness areas. These are places we often seek out to find some peace and quiet, away from all of the things we are responsible for and all of those we are responsible to on a daily basis.

A trip to the wilderness is highly recommended. There we experience some solitude and the silence of creation. This silence includes the silence of the expectations and demands of the world, the silence of our own egos telling us who and what we should be. The silence that opens our spiritual ears to listen for that still small voice.

Often, when we think of the wilderness, we think of it as desolate, lonely and kind of frightening. What if that isn’t exactly the case? What if the wilderness is us without all of the trappings of the world? A place where we wrestle with who we are in the world and who we are before God. Think of this example: as soon as Jesus was baptized, he learned that he was the beloved and the Spirit descended on him like a dove and that spirit drove him out into the wilderness.

It was in that wilderness that the Spirit led him to that Jesus experienced the temptations, each of which boiled down to doing things his own way and not the way of the Father. Are we not the same? When we learn our true name before God (most often called salvation and grace) we are then in the wilderness of our own lives and have to decide how to deal with the temptations of this world.

The wilderness can be frightening because our ego and most base desires reside there. We have to experience the wilderness to know whether we will go our own way or if we will choose a “more excellent way”. Stop avoiding the wilderness and enter it often. St. Ignatius taught the Examen (to look at our whole life each day, good and bad) and that has to be done in the wilderness. The wilderness is the solitude and silence of our very souls, where the Creator of All tells us, over and over again, that we are Beloved.

TMM