"Now is the time for us to be about the good work God has given us to do. Let us not wait for another to come to do it for us or wait until we feel we have all the resources we need to carry out the task. Let us make a start. Let us take on the job with wise planning and dedicated purpose. If we act, others will act. If we stand, others will join us. Let us be joyful agents of change, full of the energy of the Spirit. Now is the time to make change happen. Now the moment God always intended for us to inhabit."
Now is the time for which I was created, born, made. I could also say that any particular moment in my life has been the time for which I was made, and I would also have to add the caveat that some moments I was not made for, nor was anyone else been made for the moment of an assault, for instance, or sudden death. I will say, though, the words, "Now [is] the moment God always intended for us to inhabit" ring true for me now, in this moment of my life.
I am the aggregate of all the moments in my life including the ones no one should ever have to have as part of their life. Having had those experiences, I cannot deny they have gone into making me who I am now, at this moment. And neither are they the sum total of the experiences which have made me who I am today.
If my parents didn't love music and singing, I might not have been sustained through the dark years of alienation from God. Music was my sole connection with the Eternal and it continues to sustain me as it has all my life.
If my mother, born and raised a Baptist by her mother from Vermont living in New York City during the depression, had not given up being a Baptist in order to have the Episcopal Church form her children as Episcopalian Christians, I might never have recognized the rightness of suddenly finding myself to be a contemplative, who prays not so much with words as with being and presence.
If my father had not loved boat and airplane and automobile engines so much, and if my brothers instead of me had loved hanging out under the hood of the car with him, I might never have appreciated my spouse.
The list is long of the blessings of my life that shaped me just as much as did the pain and outrages.
All of them, however, were present on that Friday as I drove home from vacation and heard myself saying to myself "I'm going home to an adventure", out of context and outside my knowledge of myself. I'm not, or I was not, the kind of person to think that sort of thing without some evidence, some artifact that said, "Aha - this is an adventure!". No, this was a hope. A thing not seen in that present, a thing not seen before. Simply hope.
That hope said to me, "You have things you love to do. Things to offer to Christianity as it is evolving in this time in history. Passions to pass on. Let's see what they are and how they might be useful. Let's look for signs pointing to what you might do. Let's look back and see what in the past is useful to bring forward. Let's keep mind and eyes and heart and spirit open to see what each moment holds that shows you what work it is that God has given you to do from this time forward."
The result of this openness these past two weeks is saying "Yes" to a request for my resume from a non-church chaplaincy organization. And an "Aha!" to the idea to set up a Facebook page to share spiritual insights, signposts, possibilities. The page will be named Julian House Retreats, as is this blog.
I am drawn to the craze for eco-friendly small houses - little one room abodes and lots less stuff. I am reminded that Julian of Norwich, for whom this blog and any home in which my spouse and I live are named, spent most of her adult life in a small one or two room cell built into the wall of the church of Saint Julian (a male saint popular in the medieval period) in Norwich, England. The paradox is that the whole world, metaphorically speaking, came to the window of Julian's cell for spiritual food. The hazlenut, a small thing, represented for Julian the whole of creation and the love of God for that creation. Those words, inserted unbidden into my thoughts as I drove home through the Catskill Mountains of New York, were a small thing. And they are informing everything I have experienced since that moment.
It is possible I am reinventing myself as a priest. This, which at the time the church I was serving closed seemed overwhelming and impossible, too huge to get my head around, now seems the time for which I was made, the time I was created to inhabit. I am not waiting to have all the resources I will need. I am on an adventure of discovery. And I'm finding, so far, that everything I need, I already have.
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