The Door

This morning I was reminded that the symbol of St. Anne is the door,
she who was the door
through whom Our Lady Mother Mary
was born

Yesterday I asked, piteously, how a person becomes a professional retreat leader,
like Jan L. Richardson. "By writing a book" was the answer. "By being an artist, a poet - look at her work!"

Today I have been offered an opportunity to lead a vestry retreat.

The poem/prayer for this step on my pilgrimage inward, page 8 in Jan L. Richardson's self-guided retreat for a Women's Christmas, warns that it is probably a good thing we cannot see the entire road ahead in this pilgrimage, for we might not make the journey at all. And that there is a gift each of us has that only we can bring, and there will be a place to which to bring that gift.

So many doors
and I don't know the names of the half of them
I don't have the keys to them all
and some of the keys I have
are rusted
and some of the locks
are rusted
and the only way to tell
is to try them
St. Anne, pray for me
St. Anne, pray with me
St. Anne, pray in me

I am tempted to take all the piles and piles of keys that have accumulated in the church and toss out every last one of them.

Women's Christmas Retreat: The Map You Make Yourself

I have discovered the tradition, mostly Irish, of Women's Christmas: Epiphany being the time when women took the day off from making everyone happy and caring for everything.

Here is a link to a Jan L. Richardson site that just might be helpful. I posted this link on my primary blog, Ramblings With Lois, but I will speak more fully and regularly about this Women's Christmas on this blog.

I wrote on Ramblings:

"As a clergy woman, I am recognizing a tiredness normal to this time of year. In a year when Lent will begin so soon after Christmas and Epiphany - Ash Wednesday, February 13 - I pledge to myself to take these few weeks in between to take that pilgrimage within, to sort through where I want to be and go, where I might go, who I might be, and just to rest. To stop, and rest. And maybe stand outside or walk about once in awhile for not purpose at all.

"I hope you enjoy Jan. I have read her book Night Visions every day from the Monday before Christmas through the week after Epiphany for, oh, I guess 14 or 15 years now. It inspired me to, every year, to a piece of art and/or write each day as part of my daily devotions during that time of year. 

"One place in the Women's Christmas pilgrimage I want to go is to extend that spiritual practice to all the year round. Pray for me, if you will."

Well, I have begun this self-retreat and Oh cripes, she starts right out, doesn't she!?! and asks the questions, "Where do you want to go? What would it take?" In other words, what's stopping you?

Can't I work up to that? Do I have to dive right in? Well, after all, this is a map I am to make for myself. It might be nice to have some ideas where I might go. But, oh, this is a journey inward. The outward is merely the starting place. So yes, I get to work up to it.

So, to begin: The first thing that comes to mind is money. The second is time but money is the real thing stopping me. What would it take to make this happen? And where do I want to go? Almost anyplace in England, and to Lister in Norway. To take that pilgrimage on the milk boat to the land of my forebears. My mother's forebears.

Where do I want to inward? I will let that unfold.

Now, to rest a bit. Time for a cuppa. Harney's Earl Grey with silvertips - mmmmmm.

The Epiphany: a visual meditation

Who am I?

This past Friday and Saturday the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut met in annual convention. We don't sit in pews or chairs facing front anymore. We quit that last year. Now we gather around tables in groups of 8 or ten and we do Bible study in our groups and we have conversations around the theme of the convention.

This year the theme is Claiming, Equipping, and Sending.

The Friday morning Bible study was on the passage from Exodus in which Moses meets God in the burning bush, from the 3rd and 4th chapters of Exodus. God tells Moses to go to Egypt and speak God's words to the Hebrew people. Moses says he can't. He doesn't have the gift of public speaking. We ask ourselves if we have ever tried to run away from God's call to us to do or be something or someone.

God tells Moses he will give him Moses's brother Aaron to do the speaking. God will give Moses the words, and Moses will give them to Aaron and Aaron will speak to the people. We ask ourselves how Aaron must have felt, not having been consulted as to whether or not he wanted to become the mouthpiece for Moses.

We are asked to publicly claim one gift we have been given - maybe even one we run away from. I claim the gift of silence. That's all I say. "Silence." The table wants to know more. What can I say? I say I like to create spaces of silence, in worship, in retreats, in quiet days, in working to create retreats that don't require any words, so all people of any language or ability or none can come together to sit before Jesus.

I claim silence.

And then, the whole rest of convention, I have to school myself to keep silent and listen instead of planning what brilliant piece of personal experience I know everyone absolutely must hear because it's so very brilliant.

On day two, I have the job of being one of over forty table presiders. Immediately, during all the discussions at table about the business of convention, everyone turns to me to answer their questions. I spend all day talking, as if I actually know something or other.

Now, today, I will try to protect a day of silence for myself. And here, on my desk, is a name and phone number a parishioner gave me at the door after worship yesterday, someone who is a member, who needs a phone call, someone I am pretty sure I don't know, because I don't recognize the name, but that doesn't matter. He needs to hear from the church.

Silence. Just what did I mean when I claimed silence as a gift? And not only that, I said it is my core gift, the core of my being - Silence. What did I mean?

Maybe it was a wish, a prayer. Maybe it is what I most want to have and to be. Silence. Not a gift already actualized, but one yearning to be made alive.

Rainfall

When rain falls overnight,
and creeks fill,
and grasses turn from brown to green,
my heart is full.

Writings from Vacation

I keep reading online that people thirty, forty and fifty decades younger than me demand that people and institutions, like the church, be authentic. I know how I think of myself - artist, painter, musician, writer, poet - and I know I rarely live into that self-image. Mostly because I'm afraid. Afraid what I do won't be good enough. So I don't write or draw or play the piano or scrawl out a poem hardly ever. And when I do, it's often that I force myself. Never mind that I feel most truly myself when I do, most authentic. I have no idea what the authentic "me" would look like.

I've been reading Kathleen Norris - The Cloister Walk - and Lauren f. Winner - Still - and find they too have lived with this sense of being other, of not fitting in, whether with themselves or in the culture or the society or company in which they live. It's nice to know I'm not alone.

Norris finds comfort in accepting that being "other" - not fitting in, always being a beat behind or on a different track from everyone else - is a calling. All three of us trace our sense of otherness back to our beginnings. I think I was born "other". I have struggled with this, worried over this, fought with myself and God because of this for my whole life, trying to fix those things about me that make me different so I won't feel so wrong about everything.

From my journal this morning, written on the deck as the sun broke over the top of the mountain in front of me: "I am other. I have always been other. Never fitting in.
      Kathleen accepts the necessity of being other
      She takes it up as a cross is taken up
      She embraces it
My angst-filled, self-questioning, self-justifying writings are symptoms of my own eternal other-ness.
The isolation of my life as a child - created by abuse and dysfunction> or me created as a necessary isolate? - is/may be in itself a call.
I have always been, tho without knowing it, free to accept it as a call, or not. The authenticity, then, is in living into my self-doubts and letting go of the need to seem to know-it-all. As Jeremiah [the prophet] challenged and questioned God, authenticity would be to know when to do so myself."

I end my journal entry with this question: Does everyone feel other, as I do? And does a calling to be other, then, once accepted, become a calling to point others to freedom?

In other words, a person who always feels out of step is authentically herself keeping on being out of step and embracing it as a calling. Jesus said, "Take up your cross and follow me." In this, he said, we will find life. Jesus is the number one "Other". He took up the cross of otherness and chose life.

Choose life.

Vacation

Vacation - to vacate
To vacate a place
To vacate a work
To vacate oneself
To leave behind
And
To take on
rest
peace
noticing
enjoying
delight
for a time
so as not to forget what these things are like-
beauty, water, earth, play, play, play
so as to store them up
to be remembered
after vacating
when one takes up again
the daily round