Sanctifying Spaces

All is yellow. All is wet. These alternating truths can only mean one thing: spring has arrived.

It's the time of year when lawnmowers and weed-eaters emerge from their hibernation, ready to feast on winter weeds unwelcome in the newly green grass. There is work to do in the world just outside our doors, and the song of spring beckons us to begin.

There is something sacred to me in all of this cutting and cultivating that happens when things once again begin to grow each year. It reminds me of the relationship I have to this place where I live. Most days, I drive my vehicle right into its midst, step out onto the paved driveway, and am indoors within a matter of a few steps. I have barely breathed the air. But now my feet are once again on the grass. My hands are once again in the earth. I am now in the sunlight, and now in the shade of the trees with which I share this space. My task is to care for it all, to do what I can to make it beautiful.

How to Glorify God

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field...
Genesis 3:1

What is true of the serpent is true of his inventions. The most deadly sins are the most subtle, pride being chief among them. Sure, pride can be noisy and brash, an ugly display of self-important pomp. But in this way, pride is often like the obvious swindler who, eliciting our devout rejection, enables his partner to pick our pockets in the diversion. Subtle is the pride that comes from being selfless. There is a way of glorifying God which is really a way of glorifying ourselves. This is the serpent's insidious masterpiece, one that I am learning to guard against.

D'Artagnan and the Meaning of Devotion

In the classics book club I belong to, we recently read The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. The Three Musketeers, as you may know, is a tale of swashbuckling heroes who are such friends that one may gamble with the others' money after squandering his own, who are so brave that they are ready to fight to the death upon so much as an insult to the color of their horses, and who are so devoted as to risk life and limb in service to their lord or mission. Put that way, the story sounds quite interesting. In truth, none of us in the club liked it much.

For me, the biggest take-away from The Three Musketeers was a single word, one I've already used to describe our heroes: devoted. The word was spoken by the main character, D'Artagnan, who ironically is not one of the three musketeers of the book's title. While he pursued his love interest, Madame Bonacieux, with irresistable romantic charm, D'Artagnan told her that he was completely devoted to the Queen of France. He did not mean by this word what we might mistake him to mean.

Hourglass

And the more the sand sinks
the faster it falls
Burying our moments like fossils
in the deepening bottom
Until at last, all we hold dear
slips slowly through our hands
and quickly beyond our reach

Not lost - but saved
in the storehouse of a coming Age
When the Time Keeper breathes
life into lives long returned to dust
And revived, we mine those memories
like diamonds
or favorite toys in the sandbox

The Soundness of Silence

And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never share

And no one dared

Disturb the sound of silence

- Paul Simon

In my last post, I made my best attempt at expressing the beauty and necessity of what can often be one of the most challenging spiritual disciplines. Yet even in its difficulty, silence really is profoundly beneficial as well as foundational to the Advent season. I began thinking that for all the poetic attempts of the last blog entry, there wasn't much offered in terms of what silence might actually look like in our day-to-day life. After all, most of our daily interactions require verbal communication on some level. While I certainly am no expert on the subject, I would like to suggest just one way that we can practice silence and maybe begin to enter more deeply into the reality of God's presence: take rests.

The Language of Advent

This morning I woke up early for band practice before church. The sun rose, as it seemed to me, even earlier, unaffected by the numbers on my alarm clock and the recent time change reflected there. It filtered new rays of light through a canopy of misty clouds, sending with them what may be the last remains of the season's warmth. A cool breeze blew through branches overhead, teasing the leaves still holding fast to near-winter branches while their less tenacious rusty-brown brethren rustled together across the driveway.

I stood there for a moment, looking and listening. A shaggy black dog shifted down the street, sniffing from mailbox to mailbox. He found nothing, the squirrels nestled away in their nests. The birds had abandoned the trees like the leaves, taking their early morning canticles with them. There was no other stirring, no other sound. The wind whispered a hush over the neighborhood like the Spirit silencing Zechariah when he doubted the angel.

Always Looking

Although we are brand new customers of TIC Federal Credit Union, I have never been inside one of their buildings. TIC happened to be the institution that the car dealership used to help us finance our new vehicle. Last week, I had no idea where to find a local TIC branch to make good on our first payment. The website claimed there was a branch in our hometown of Smiths but provided no address. Smiths isn't a big place, and I've lived here all my life. I thought I could picture where it was probably located.

So off I went in search of TIC. But when I arrived at my targeted destination, what I found instead was a Wells Fargo. I know Smiths like the back of my hand. Where else could this place be? I was running out of time, and I had to pick up my kids from school. The payment would have to wait. After all, I'm sure there's a grace period. Then, on the way to my kids' school, I spotted what I had been searching for. There was the local TIC branch directly in front of Walmart. Now, although I almost never enjoy going to Walmart, I must say that I have been there countless numbers of times. How long had I driven past this very TIC and never paid it one ounce of attention? Why had I never seen it before? Why couldn't I find a place that I had been next door to for years?

When my son, Noah, was younger, he would find coins on the ground almost everywhere we took him. Like a little hawk, he would pick up coins in his sight that we would have stepped right over. I always thought it was because he was closer to the ground. One day I asked him, "Noah, how do you always find money on the ground?" He replied, "Because I'm always looking."