Micro-retreat of the day

It's amazing how a tiny thing can lift me up and connect me to everything around me.

Today it's a new bird song heard as I walk with the dog along the bike trail between Union Park and Maple. It's not going anywhere, so I can take the time to stop, get a bearing on from where the song is coming, maybe even see the bird.

Just minutes before, another new song had me doing the same thing. I did see the two birds, hopping after one another, singing to one another, through the very tops of the trees. They were small. I had no field glasses. So I could not identify them.

This one, however, was hard not to see, once my ears told me where to look. A Baltimore Oriole! It's yellow-orange markings blazing in the early morning sun as it hopped around in the top of a black locust tree. The presence of me and my dog did not deter it in whatever work or pleasure it was doing up there. Nor does the official name change for this bird to Northern Oriole touch me in the least. Once I hear the notes of that song, there's no mistaking it, and here it is, in the city. I can hope it will nest there next to the bike trail. Whether he does or not, the memory of this morning's treat is something I can return to in my mind, to slow me, and remind me, to stop, feel, see, hear, and be. Even only for a moment.

"Teach me to pray"

Thus began "Practicing Prayer" at Grace Episcopal Church in Norwalk, Connecticut. Practicing Prayer has been going on, once a month, for over two years now. It began with people who felt they just weren't getting their prayers right and could the priest help them.

The first lesson was: There is no right way to pray.
The second lesson was: God prays through us.

Over the years we have learned, together, supporting one another, that prayer, the way we pray, can change over time.

There is no one, absolutely right way to pray. There is just the desire to pray, which in itself is prayer, through which God can make our lives the prayer of God for others and ourselves.

What does it mean to you, to pray?

Proverbs

I've been reading the Bible straight through since January. I'm at the book of Proverbs. I read a few days ago the proverb we mis-state as "spare the rod and spoil the child" - "Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them." (Prov. 13:24)

Today I have found even more like this:
"A wise child loves discipline..." (13:1a)
"Do not withhold discipline from your children;
if you beat them with a rod, they will not die.
If you beat them with the rod, you will save their lives from Sheol." (23:13-14)

The Bible is dangerous in the hands of those who insist every word is to be taken as law.
How many children have, indeed, died because of being beaten "with a rod"?

I repudiate these verses.

Meditation word for today

In the Zen Buddhist tradition, and that of the ancient Christian desert mothers and fathers, who, when asked, would offer a word by which to live, here is today's word:

Ah!

What shall you do with this word?