Failure…and Beginning

I fail Lent. And I fail blogging.

Life has been so up and down and round about and what’s going on and where am I going lately that it’s been enough of a Lenten discipline to calm my heart and mind each day and I haven’t been doing the outer disciplines to match the inner.

But I think the Big J will forgive me.

Once he like, raises from the dead and everything.

In all of this craziness, I have been stustained by phone calls and stories from friends, by a good dose of laying on the couch watching DVDs of Alias, and by a little book the oldies at church gave to me – a pocket sized transliteration of the rule of St. Benedict.

The first rule is simply this:

life this life
and do whatever is done,
in a spirit of Thanksgiving.

Abandon attempts to achieve security,
they are futile,

give up the search for wealth,
it is demeaning,

quit the search for salvation,
it is selfish,

and come to comfortable rest
in the certainty that those who
participate in this life
with an attitude of Thanksgiving
will receive its full promise.

Always, we begin again.

Feb 8 – Feb 11

So, this Lenten journey is going to have to get a bit more disciplined. Things I’ve wished I had my camera to take pictures of: icicles on the branches of a tree with the sun shining through them – right before I slipped on the ice and added to the collection of bruises on my body. Four old, heavy, balding men sitting in front of me when I went to see Atonement.

Here are the actual pictures, so far.

February 8: The view of downtown from our bathroom window.

February 9: Blue skies in February – would never happen in Indiana.

February 10: The cover of the Sunday bulletin from St. Barnabas, which I still can’t stop smiling at.

February 11: The FOX news truck, taken from my office window while they were downstairs interviewing Tammy about the food shortages we’ve been experiencing. (finally!)

the Observance of a Holy Lent.

I love Lent.

Yesterday I was telling Beth about how much I love Lent and she was like, “Don’t you love Advent?”

And I said “Yes. I love Lent too!”

I love the times of waiting, of preparation – the time we set aside so that we can realizing the presence of the Holy in such a radical new way.

When I was thinking about Lent this year, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. It would be financially difficult to change my diet. Giving up chocolate or television or the internet doesn’t really seem like pursuit of the holy to me. So I decided on two things.

First, Peter and I are praying the daily office – morning, noon, dusk, and night.

More importantly for this medium though, I’ve decided that my Lenten activity will be pictures. One picture a day, in an effort to see what is beautiful in my midst.

I’ve obviously started out on a bad foot already. My camera battery is dead and so I’ve missed the first two days of lent without even trying.

But St. Benedict tells us always to begin again.

And so now, the evening after Ash Wednesday, I will begin…for the first time…the discipline of recognizing and sharing the beauty around me with some pictures from the past.

The worship space at Taize – a place that symbolizes for me all that is beautiful and true in the search for God’s Kingdom. A place that means peace and solitude and self-awardness and forgiveness and recognition of calling. What could be more beautiful?

The Clarks, the Neylons and I – shortly after their sudden bursting into “he’s got the whole world in his hands” left me startled and confused and all of us laughing hysterically after a post-Christmas therpy session of dinner and Apples to Apples. The beauty of friends and family.

On the 15

Today, I rode the bus downtown.
As I exited the bus, the driver handed me $5…
and asked me to give it to the homeless vet sitting on the street corner.

There’s something beautiful in that.

Where there is no suffering…

“You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud, you cannot have a lotus flower. Without suffering, you have no ways in order to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. that’s why my definition of the kingdom of God is not a place where suffering is not, where there is no suffering…because I could not like to go to a place where there is no suffering. I could not like to send my children to a place where there is not suffering because, in such a place, they have no way to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. And the kingdom of God is a place where there is understanding and compassion, and therefore, suffering should exist.

“Suffering and happiness, they are both organic, like a flower and garbage. If the flower is on her way to become a piece of garbage, the garbage can be on her way to becoming a flower. That is why you are not afraid of garbage. I think we have suffered a lot during the 20th century. We have created a lot of garbage…That is why it is now very important for us to learn how to transform the garbage we have created into flowers.”

- Brother Thich Nhat Hanh, Speaking of Faith, January 4, 2007

Flowers and garbage.
Joy and suffering.
Love and lonliness.
Peace and conflict.
Compassion and anger.

The feelings and emotions we so often try to “pray away” are the foundations for the formation and appreciation of their opposites. We live not in a world of dichtomies, but in a constant cycle of negative and positive. We develop compassion. We develop understanding of ourselves, our neighbors and our world. Paradox brings life.

Even Jesus said, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.”

In the garbage and the suffering, the lonliness, the conflict, the anger – there is the seed of the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God is among you.

Among:
1. in or through the midst of: surrounded by <hidden among the trees>
2. in company or association with <living among artists>
3. by or through aggregate of <discontent among the poor>
4. in the number or class of <wittiest among poets>
5. in shares to each of <divided among them>
6a. through the reciprocal acts of <quarrel among themselves> b. through the joint action of <made a fortune among themselves>

The Kingdom of God is among you.