On Fireflies, Tarantellas, Love, Letting go...Meditation on Today's Writer's Almanac Poem

Poem: ""Fireflies" by Richard Newman from Borrowed Towns. © Word Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Fireflies

Tonight my yard is full of fireflies—
a glitterfest of green, blinking by hundreds,
exactly like last year, when she and I
drove out into the Missouri countryside
to talk about our marriage. It was thick
with greenery. The air was hot and thick,
and we had decided to try and stay together,
though by first light she'd changed her mind again,
and, to be honest, our eleventh hour
hope and promise lacked the weight of truth.
We wandered off the rocky dirt road
over weeds and brambles, through branches
and spiderwebs, and pressed into a clearing,
and it was like a pocket in the darkness
that surrounded us-the misty night
backlit with thousands of glittering fireflies
bettering the stars. It was a mating dance,
and we gazed into a sputtering green sea
of desire-such irresistible beckoning.
Ours was, too-a death-dance of mating,
a slower, indecisive tarantella,
and she asked me never to write about this,
but I knew then that I had nothing to lose,
that at that moment there was nothing I wanted
more than to write about the fireflies.


***
To be ablaze in light. To illuminate fully in the dark. To steady yourself and fly directly toward love. To be captured, die contained....

I think about all these things reflecting on Richard Newman's poem. I recall being 7 or 8 and outside at our rural house in Norfolk, Nebraska. It's dark, and I'm with my brother Ben, maybe a cousin Kristi or Jeff. We have jars. We are searching, seeking these blazing and buzzing insects: creatures of air, wings, fire. We want to make lanterns. We want this light all for ourselves. All to ourselves.

And how is this like our journeys in love?
How much are we the fireflies? How much are we seeking that magic, mystery of possessing illumination?
What do our dances look like in falling in and out of love?

I know the poem extends beyond this image of fireflies. I love how Newman casts this evening with other creatures and aspects of landscape. The web, the bramble, the tarantualla, that green sea of desire, the death-dance of mating. Whew! He's not playing around with words and emotion and who we are moving in and out of love.

I'm happiest thinking of the light, the wings, the night, and the notion of having "nothing to lose."

Yes.

Happy contemplating,
Melissa

Post-Mass Reflection and Prayer

So Mark's Gospel reading today centers around this child possessed by a spirit, and the boy's father making a request of Jesus to drive it out. He says,

"Teacher, I have brought to you my son possessed by a mute spirit. Wherever it seizes him, it throws him down; he foams at the mouth, grinds his teeth, and becomes rigid. I asked your disciples to drive it out, but they were unable to do so."

In reflecting on this tonight with the Visitation Sisters, I was struck by this image of a foaming mouth. This gurgling unattractiveness, the rigidity of the body, and grinding teeth. When I hear that it is a "mute spirit" taken hold of the child, I think of how captive this boy must be. No words are uttered, only this fixed and foaming, unwell presence....

I'm taken so many places around the planet where foaming, frothy, unattractive, spaces of rigidity and unwellness seem to be:

Yes, this image of a boy foaming at the mouth is most unpleasant, but took me to so much of unpleasant foaming in the world....

The hunger in Somalia, in Haiti, in so many countries.... The violence in Johannesburg around immigrants from warring countries.... The scarred psyches of the Chinese citizens in the aftermath of the earthquake.... The craze and disruption in Zimbabwe since the "election"... The clinging and desire to control information and recovery in Burma.... The civil war still ravaging people in Iraq.... The mute voices of racism, abuse, dysfunction, hatred in our countries, in leadership, in our court systems... The terror right here in our own hearts and communities... So much foaming...

And Jesus says,

"this will only be healed by prayer."

Let's pray for that kind of prayer. That kind of healing. Let's ask for the wisdom and ways free from all that inhabits us in unwell ways. Let's pray for that which dispels the silent terrors; pray for freedom from all that takes hold of us, that ravages us to the ground, that freezes us with its possession.

May fullness be known. Liberation. Healing. New Life. Now.

Peace,
Melissa

Jesus and Cinderella: A couple poems of Magic, Mystery, Emotion

In the Catholic Church, we are in Ordinary Time. My days as a Catholic, as contemplative, feel anything but ordinary. What follows are a couple poems born from the wonderings, wanderings of my own heart, spirit, doubt, deep faith.

Perhaps they might speak to you?

Love, In the fullness of now,
Melissa


Jesus and Cinderella
By Melissa Borgmann

There's no fairy tale.
Even the resurrection sucked.
Seriously.
People standing around wondering.
"Uhh, what gives?"
The doubt is a kill joy. Suckage, my friend. Suckage.
So get over any princess and prince and kissing and magical endings where light shines and birds dance and things twinkle.
There's no marriage.
There's no life that we see after death.
Just this rolled open emptiness and mice lurking around thinking perhaps they were in attendance at something cool.
These furry, low-to-the-ground, tailed creatures: are hallucinating vermin.
We all are.
Jesus and Cinderella are silly and cruel jokes.



Climbing into Christ’s Wounds
By Melissa Borgmann

He is so large when I see him across the room.
Tall, brownish, handsome.
Open arms. I love these open arms. They are always extended. Palms up, ready.
We are in Brazil.
He is statuesque, looming, omnipresent, benevolent, asking me to climb up and in.
I feel shy at times.
Like He may not want me.
But He doesn't blink.
Come.
I step closer and He remains.
I grab hold.
No toppling. He can bear my weight.
And then I'm there.
Inside of his palms, He lets me wiggle and writhe and roll over.
And I feel safe.
I am little, a child. In my grandfather's lap. Only in this other fellow's hands.
And then inside.
I am sinking into His wounds.
They are open, too.
Even there, I am safe.
I recognize some kind of one-ness.
These are not another's ouchies.
They are mine.
They are the world's.
Brazil aches. I ache. Johannesburg aches. St. Paul aches. McClellan aches. Fort Benning aches. Tripoli aches. China aches. Burma weeps. He weeps. I writhe, He writhes. Somalia hungers. He hungers. Obama persists. He persists. Bush descends. He descends. Clinton steps, He steps. She shouts with joy, He shouts with joy.

And the benefits of these wounds?
We all can find them. Locate them on our own exteriors, interiors.
Battling, bleeding, beat up, we are.

Inside the palm, at least I know unification.
I am held.
He lives.
Amen.

"Your Inner Fish" a Bit on Neil Shubin's Book

Greetings!

Has anyone caught an interview with this paleontologist, Neil Shubin?
I was listening to him this past week on Minnesota Public Radio, as he discussed his work digging around in the Arctic Circle, collecting fossils of fish evolving with fingers and necks. It's freaking fascinating stuff!

I love it, as a woman who reveres science, and so deeply enjoys the
literal and figurative applications to my human and spiritual self.

Literally: If we all evolved from fish, what must our lung capacities
be?

Figuratively: What abilities to dive deeply, and immerse ourselves in
oceanic atmospheres do we possess?
How are our inner fishes really great for sustaining us in these
turbulent, and ever-changing waters of life?

Here's a passage from the Newsweek article that cracks me up with
info and Shubin's humor:

"Your Inner Fish," Shubin explains how a range of medical conditions, from hiccups to heart disease, are the byproducts of our clunky evolution. "The extraordinary disconnect between our past and our human present means that our bodies fall apart in certain predictable ways," he says. "Our circulatory systems are a good example. They were designed for activity, but we now have the lifestyles of spuds."

Here's the link to the Newsweek article. Check it out if you have time!

http://www.newsweek.com/id/96399

xoxo,
Melissa

Political Stuff: Chuck Hagel and Barack Obama

The following is excerpted from our Borgmann Family-List-serve. It was written following a broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio of Kerri Miller interviewing Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska. Ms. Miller framed her conversation with this idea that Hagel could be Barrack's running mate, should Obama get the endorsement.

It's all premature speculation, this business of Senator Chuck Hagel and Barack Obama. But I do enjoy the notion of a ticket that fuses the parties.

I got into some trouble at the beginning of this season's primary campaigns with Frederico, (of Frederico and Fannie), a former political journalist from the Domican Republic. This is the house I would clean in every Wednesday, and where these two beautiful people would be running a day care in the basement. Frederico seemed fascinated with my political leanings and ideas, and would come up and ask me questions when I'd have Public Radio turned on.

"Who are you voting for?" He asked me point blank one day.

Rather than immediately respond, I gave him my honest question of contemplation:
"What would it look like if Obama and McCain would run together?"

This was in December, before Iowa. Whew. But it made Frederico mad.
"Do you want more war?! McCain will take this country into more war!" he said.

My whole point was about alignment across political lines, party affiliation. Actually, the opposite of war: a demonstration of a capacity to hold the tensions and complexities of this nation across black/white; yes/no; right/wrong/; privileged/poor; gay/ straight; republican/democrat divides. Please.

I'm ready for a really mature citizenry - and a transformed consciousness of the electorate - that allows for leadership to look and be different from what we've known in the past.

This speculation and questioning, is my attempt at leading through contemplation.

What do our imaginations allow and hope for?

Peace,
Melissa

A Prayer for a Time of Transition

When aren't we in transition? This is my question!

The following is a beautiful prayer written by Cindy Boggs and the Transition Team at the Church of St. Phillips, in North Minneapolis.

Our parish is awaiting a new priest to lead us. In the meantime, we wait, we pray, we celebrate who we are NOW - as Church, as family, as God's people, who have the greatest kind of leadership this earth has known in one called, "Christ."
Thank God for the Holy Spirit, that helps fuse our gifts and the Divine In-Dwelling, to know we are enough now, beloved now, as we live into this uncertain future - one held by God, by Love.

Yes!
Amen.
Melissa

A PRAYER FOR A TIME OF TRANSITION

Ever-living, ever-loving God,
We thank you for the gift of your love,
and for the joy of sharing that love with others,
in and through this faith community.
We thank you for the pastoral leaders
and dedicated parishioners
who have gone before us.
We know that it is because of their devoted prayer
and hard work over the past one-hundred years,
that we are able worship you here today
in this holy place, on this sacred ground.
We pray for courage and strength,
for energy and enthusiasm
to carry on your mission,
particularly during this time of waiting.
We ask you to fill us with hope
and to inspire us with trust.
Send us your Spirit, renew our hearts,
and enkindle in us the fire of your love.
Sustain us during this time of waiting and change.
Open our minds and ready our hearts
to receive and to warmly welcome a new pastor.
Whomever you are preparing to come to us,
bless him and keep him,
encourage him to respond soon,
and with a full and enthusiastic 'yes'!
God of all goodness,
giver of all that is good and holy,
we ask this through your Son Jesus Christ,
our Lord.
Amen.

Me and the Buddha: How many Paths to "Enlightenment"?

Good God, but I had a moment yesterday with this blessed Buddha statue that I have to share...

As part of my daily meditation practice, I pull out a tea light, strike a match, and place it squarely in the base of my Buddha. It's a devotional routine, that helps me move into an intentional space conducive to my own brand of Centering prayer/ Buddhist Meditation/ Medicine Wheel work.

Yesterday, I leaned over to kiss this statue's sweet cheeks, and my hair caught on fire.

I laugh out loud now, thinking,

"Another kind of enlightenment, eh?"

I'm thinking I'll be writing more about my encounters in meditation in coming days, as I'm naming for myself that this is the most important transformational work of my life. Listening to this conference, "Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening - Finding the Four Noble Truths in the Heart of the Gospel" recorded at the Center for Contemplation and Action, in New Mexico, is also nudging me in this direction.

James Finley, a former Trappist Monk, who studied under the guidance of Thomas Merton, said today, "It's possible to be a devout Buddhist and Devout Christian." And that really rocked my world.

Ohhhhweee!

I like being given permission to be on fire in faith and love! It sort of just mirrors what I already am experiencing in this crazy life of mine.

In peace, love, light,
Melissa

Night....into Day? A Reflection on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem

Poem: "Night" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Public Domain.

Night

Into the darkness and the hush of night
Slowly the landscape sinks, and fades away,
And with it fade the phantoms of the day,
The ghosts of men and things, that haunt the
light.
The crowd, the clamor, the pursuit, the flight,
The unprofitable splendor and display,
The agitations, and the cares that prey
Upon our hearts, all vanish out of sight.
The better life begins; the world no more
Molests us; all its records we erase
From the dull common-place book of our lives,
That like a palimpsest is written o'er
With trivial incidents of time and place,
And lo! the ideal, hidden beneath, revives.

Thank you Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Garrison Keillor and the Writer's Almanac, for bringing this forward. I'm struck by sinking landscapes and fading phantoms, vanishing clamorous pursuits, splendor. Yes! I'm excited by this notion of the better life beginning, a cessation of things that molest our spirits our hearts. (How about that for a word, "molest"? Yikes!)
And this image of a palimpsest! That a sheath, a record could possess the mutual stories (truths?) of the past, with inscribed new tales, details over the top. Oh, the discovery of the original underneath is like this dawning of a new day. Sunrise! Light! Fresh eyes! Revived Spirits! Longfellow gives this poem the title of 'Night" - but the Hope rests in the imminent rising of what seems to have been hidden. Yes! The sun will appear. It just does. As will any written-over-record of truth. Behind clouds now, this light, this ideal radiance is: ready to emerge.

Are you ready?

Peace, Happy Contemplating!
Melissa

May Sarton's "Fruit of Loneliness"

Poem: "Fruit of Loneliness" by May Sarton, from Encounter in April. © Houghton Mifflin, 1937. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) Thank you Garrison Keillor and Writer's Almanac.

Fruit of Loneliness

Now for a little I have fed on loneliness
As on some strange fruit from a frost-touched vine—
Persimmon in its yellow comeliness,
Of pomegranate-juice color of wine,
The pucker-mouth crab apple, or late plum—
On fruit of loneliness have I been fed.
But now after short absence I am come
Back from felicity to the wine and bread.
For, being mortal, this luxurious heart
Would starve for you, my dear, I must admit,
If it were held another hour apart
From that food which alone can comfort it—
I am come home to you, for at the end
I find I cannot live without you, friend.

(1930)

Today's Poem: Meditation on "The Quarter" by Jim Harrison

From the Writer's Almanac. (Thank you Garrison Keillor and MPR.)

Poem: "The Quarter" by Jim Harrison. Used with permission of the poet.

The Quarter

Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of gods when I was seven. At first they weren't harmful and only showed themselves as fish, birds, especially herons and loons, turtles, a bobcat and a small bear, but not deer and rabbits who only offered themselves as food. And maybe I spent too much time inside the water of lakes and rivers. Underwater seemed like the safest church I could go to. And sleeping
outside that young might have seeped too much dark into my brain and bones. It was not for me to ever recover. The other day I found a quarter in the driveway I lost at the Mecosta State Fair in 1947 and missed out on five rides including the Ferris wheel and the Tilt-A-Whirl. I sat in anger for hours in the bull barn mourning my lost quarter on which the entire tragic history
of earth is written. I looked up into the holes of the bulls' massive noses and at the brass rings puncturing their noses which allowed them to be led. It would have been an easier life if I had allowed a ring in my nose but so many years later I still find the spore of the gods here and there but never in the vicinity of quarters.

Point.
I notice....
Something of God. Something of money. Something about seeing The Divine in fish. Something about sorrow and anger and possibly experiencing dark-side-seepage by virtue of sleeping outdoors. Hmmmmm....The woe of not riding the ferris wheel. What losing his money stirred in him, emotion wise. Hmmmm.... And this business of being a bull lead by the nose?

Question.
I wonder....
Who are we in our faith?
Who am I in my relationship to money?
What do the rivers and fish teach us?
What does the poet want me to think?
Is the "wrong crowd of gods" really fish and birds in nature?
How could the "spore of gods" ever be found in the vicinity of a quarter?

Speculate.
I think....
Jim Harrison and I have a lot in common when it comes to where we find our church.
He invites us to contemplate being lead by the nose with him, a pierced ring that perhaps might get us to the "right" place.

What do you think?

May Sarton and A Sugar Maple: Meditation through the Two Inch Window

Poem: "April in Maine" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems: 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

April in Maine

The days are cold and brown,
Brown fields, no sign of green,
Brown twigs, not even swelling,
And dirty snow in the woods.

But as the dark flows in
The tree frogs begin
Their shrill sweet singing,
And we lie on our beds
Through the ecstatic night,
Wide awake, cracked open.

There will be no going back.


Part of my recent prayer, is meditating on all that I can view through a two-inch window. Inspired by an Anne Lamott, I began this practice - intentionally working to slow down my approach toward all that seems to BEG FOR MY ATTENTION - in this crazy, amazing, wonderful world of ours.
Here's my attempt: publishing photographs from my front yard of the sugar maple leaves working to become themselves, alongside a May Sarton poem, reproduced from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. (Much gratitude!)

Peace, Happy Meditating!

Happy Birthday Harper Lee!

From Garrison's "Writers Almanac," comes this delightful tale of Nelle Harper Lee.

I love Scout and Jem and Atticus and Boo Radley, and the woman's mind/ spirit/ heart from which these characters all sprang....I think, too, of Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell, and what all must have shaped Ms. Lee's life: her navigation of such experiences, whether lived or just powerfully encountered in her psyche and imagination...Yes!
Here's to the author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the parents that birthed her!

Here's, too, to the Public Encouragement Lee sought, as well as private kind that buoyed her!

Peace!
Melissa

It's the birthday of (Nelle) Harper Lee, (books by this author) the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), born in Monroeville, Alabama (1926), the daughter of a local newspaper editor and lawyer. She was a friend from childhood of Truman Capote, and she later traveled to Kansas with him to help with the research of his work for In Cold Blood (1966). In college, she worked on the humor magazine Ramma-Jamma. She attended law school at the University of Alabama, but dropped out before earning a degree, moving to New York to pursue a writing career. She later said that her years in law school were "good training for a writer."

To support herself while writing, she worked for several years as a reservation clerk at British Overseas Airline Corporation and at Eastern Air Lines. In December of 1956, some of her New York friends gave her a year's salary along with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." She decided to devote herself to writing and moved into an apartment with only cold water and improvised furniture.

Lee wrote very slowly, extensively revising for two and a half years on the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird (which she had called at different times "Go Set a Watchman" and "Atticus"). She called herself "more a rewriter than writer," and on a winter night in 1958, she was so frustrated with the progress of her novel and its many drafts that she threw the manuscripts out the window of her New York apartment into the deep snow below. She called her editor to tell him, and he convinced her to go outside and collect the papers.

To Kill a Mockingbird came out in 1960 and was immediately a popular and critical success. Lee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. A review in The Washington Post read,

"A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird."

Lee later said, "I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected."

Fr. Richard Rohr: On Prayer

"Prayer Is a Place"

Prayer is a psychological place, a spiritual place, a place where we go to get out of ourselves, a place created and inhabited by God. Whatever disciplines can help us to get to where reality can get at us (the Real in its ultimate sense being God) I would call prayer. That opens up many possibilities and styles. Prayer is whatever calls us to detach from our own self, from our own compulsions and addictions, from our own ego, from our own "place." We are all too trapped in our own places by virtue of the egocentricity of the human person. In prayer the Spirit entices us outside of our narrow comfort zone. No wonder we avoid prayer: We have to change place.

from Catholic Agitator, "Finding a Place for Prayer"

On Suicide: A Reflection in Questions

This article in the New York Times about the increasing number of people committing suicide in their Midlife fascinates me. "Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers"

The article reports:

A new five-year analysis of the nation’s death rates recently released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the suicide rate among 45-to-54-year-olds increased nearly 20 percent from 1999 to 2004, the latest year studied, far outpacing changes in nearly every other age group. (All figures are adjusted for population.)

The topic strikes close to home, as I recall the people who have taken their lives in my immediate circle of family, friends: classmate Greg Schulte, sister's friend Blue Mackey, brother's peer, and my sister-in-law's cousin Mike Claussen; and most recently, my neighbor: Harold.)

What is at the core of this problem?

Why does someone commit suicide?

Believing that we must be more? We are not enough as we are?

Battling depression, addiction, abuse of some kind? Always: dealing with our own battered psyches, spirits, yes?

What is the core reason for depression?

What is the root cause of not loving yourself?

Where do messages of "you are not enough" come from?
Where do messages of "you are enough" come from?

How do we address this in our psyches?

What is our responsibility as a society to examine this?

As a family?

What is my responsibility as an individual?

Just some questions, that I pose in prayer.

More soon,

Melissa

Sr. Rafael Correspondence: On God, People, the Pope

The following words arrived in an email from my friend, Sr. Rafael Tilton. She's a Franciscan nun at Assisi Heights in Rochester, MN. I adore her.

These words follow from my own musings about the Pope's visit to the United States. Perhaps they'll speak to you...?

I don't know what to say about the way some people think about and are hearing the pope. Like with God, everybody is hurt by something somebody does. I say, God tries to get the message across. I try. The pope tries. Everybody tries. God feels bad. I feel bad. Everybody feels bad. Maybe it hurts because we are made in God's image and God is hurting. How can I tell? How can you tell? God tries. Everybody tries. What more can be said? Better luck next time!! That doesn't sound right, either. There is hope! I like that. I try to make it better. God tries. Everybody tries.

Peace and All Good
Sr. Rafael

To echo Rafael:
"Peace and All Good" to you!
Melissa

(Photos Courtesy of Brian Mogren,
taken at St. Jane's House)

Resurrection Questions: Fr. Richard vs. Sr. Melissa

"The Gift of Life"

On this earth nothing lives unless something else dies. It's true in the animal world, it's true in the chemistry world, it's true in the whole physical world. Jesus comes into this world and says, I, your God in your midst, will die so that you can live. Our vocation is to be like him, to die and be bread that is broken to feed the hungry world so that the world can live. When we can acknowledge that no one owes us anything, that all of life is a gift, we move toward freedom. And in that freedom, the amazing thing is, we're able to enjoy our life, because we don't have to grasp it anymore. We don't have to prove or assert it anymore. We're finally allowed to sit back and to enjoy God's presence, and to enjoy our own, too. Now we can enjoy other people because we don't need them to meet our so-called needs. We are called to live in the beautiful place of dying and living. It's the mystery of faith that we shout at the center of the Eucharist Prayer. As I give him my dying, as I say, "Welcome, sister death," as I hand myself over, God gives back life in new form. Now I've lived long enough to see the pattern played out for myself. To me the pattern is evident. I can believe the dying and the rising of Jesus is the pattern that connects all things. I believe that it is the mystery of this world, in all of the cosmos, in all of the stars, in all of nature, in water, in plants, in animals and in my human flesh. Christ is dying, Christ is risen, this Christ will show himself in all ages and all things.

-Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM in The Price of Peoplehood

Here's my meditation on Fr. Rohr's words, with a healthy dose of doubt and questions! Ha! Love!


What is Fr. Rohr challenging me to do today?
I have to die?
How am I bread broken for the hungry? PLEASE!
What's up with this "no one owing me anything" business? What if I've worked my booty off for a long time, am I not supposed to get some kind of sweet compensation?!
What do I "grasp"? What do I "assert"?
Where is my ego, anyway?
Can someone point to it?
What happens if I let go of control and desire and my will?
Isn't that sort of like surrender?
Does God like a wimp? Would I like myself in such circumstances?
What patterns have I established in my life?
What pattern is this guy speaking about?
How can a pattern connect all things?
What does that look like?
Can I ignore this message?

Plants, animals, science: these are not my subject materials!

And Jesus? Dying? Rising? Please! What if I'm a Buddhist or Hindu?! This simply doesn't apply!

Right?

Fr. Richard Rohr - A bit on Parenting in a Radical Way

"The Prodigal Son's Father"

The Father who Jesus knew looks amazingly like what most cultures would call mother. In Luke 15, the story of the prodigal son, Jesus makes his most complete presentation of the character of this Father, whom he called God. The father is in every way the total opposite of the male patriarch and even rejects his older son's appeal to a world of worthiness and merit. He not only allows the younger son to make choices against him, but even empowers him to do so by giving him money! After the son's bad mistakes, the father still refuses his own right to restore order or impose a penance, even though the prodigal son offers to serve as a hired servant. Both his leaving and his returning are treated as necessary but painful acts of adult freedom. In every way he can, the father makes mutuality and vulnerability possible.

from Radical Grace, "Is This 'Women-Stuff' Important?" by Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM

Henri Nouwen on Freedom

Freedom Attracts

When you are interiorly free you call others to freedom, whether you know it or not. Freedom attracts wherever it appears. A free man or a free woman creates a space where others feel safe and want to dwell. Our world is so full of conditions, demands, requirements, and obligations that we often wonder what is expected of us. But when we meet a truly free person, there are no expectations, only an invitation to reach into ourselves and discover there our own freedom.

Where true inner freedom is, there is God. And where God is, there we want to be.

-Fr. Henri Nouwen

A Bit on Hunger....Words from the Director of the World Food Program - and Bob Marley

The article, "Across the Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger " - in the New York Times today - took me to contemplations of hunger in our world:

Why are there empty bellies on this planet?
What is the relationship between hunger and poverty?
What is at the heart of poverty?
How can we not have enough? How are the problems of people in Haiti, Cairo, Burkina Faso, Malaysia, the problems of me in St. Paul, Minnesota?
What is it like to go to bed without food? What is it like to be constantly full?
How is hunger related to war?
How is hunger related to love?
How can we know a sustainable and peaceful response to such questions?
Where is Jesus, God, Jah, Love in this?
What are we invited to examine with such stories?
What wealth do I possess?
What privilege am I privy to?
What is my poverty? Where is my hunger? How am I called?
How is this all gift?
What do such stories inspire me to create?
What do we need to be able to hold in order to respond?
How does this call us to some greater consciousness and action?

Okay. Some questions. Here, then, are a line of text from the New York Times article, and a song of Bob Marley's -- as one kind of response to all that is coming forward in my own prayer and contemplation on Hunger and Love.

"Why are these riots happening?" asked Arif Husain, senior food security analyst at the World Food Program, which has issued urgent appeals for donations. "The human instinct is to survive, and people are going to do no matter what to survive. And if you're hungry you get angry quicker."

Bob Marley - Them Belly Full (But We Hungry) Lyrics

Them belly full but we hungry
A hungry mob is an angry mob
A rain a fall but the dirt it tough
A pot a cook but the food no 'nough

You're gonna dance to jah music, dance,
We're gonna dance to jah music, dance,

Forget your troubles and dance,
Forget your sorrows and dance,
Forget your sickness and dance,
Forget your weakness and dance

Cost of livin' gets so high
Rich and poor they start to cry
Now the weak must get strong
They say oh, what a tribulation
Them belly full but we hungry
A hungry mob is an angry mob
A rain a fall but the dirt it tough
A pot a cook but you no 'nough

We're gonna chuck to jah music chuckin'
We're chuckin' to jah music, we're chuckin'

Belly full but them hungry.
A hungry mob is an angry mob
A rain a fall but the dirt it tough
A pot a cook but the food no 'nough
A hungry mob is an angry mob

St. Bonaventure, St. Francis, Archbishop Tutu, Richard Rohr: Wise and Joyful Guys...

"Wisdom From St. Bonaventure"

Self-conscious prayer is not necessarily the best or the only form of prayer. To be praying, you don't need to know you are praying! How else could the Apostle Paul tell us to pray without ceasing? Paul was not naive or unaware of practical demands. He was, quite simply, mature in his spirituality. He was a "contemplative charismatic": Life and religion were synthesized; he had the vision of the whole. St. Bonaventure, building on the Franciscan

experience of the Incarnation, saw the "traces" or "footprints" of God everywhere. The "journey of the mind to God" was to learn how to see the unity of all being, how to listen to the hidden God and how to read the footprints that were everywhere evident. The result was a life of gratitude and reverence and simple joy - a Franciscan spirituality. Thus Bonaventure, like most great saints, combined a highly contemplative personality with very active and effective ministry in secular and practical affairs.

Fr. Richard Rohr in Catholic Charismatic, "To Be and to Let Be: The Life of Reverence"

These words of Fr. Rohr's take me to Archbishop Tutu. I'm fully fascinated and drawn by the juxtaposition of all these men: St. Bonaventure, St. Francis, Desmond Tutu, Richard Rohr.

How does Love hold it all?

What is conveyed in the contemplation of all four?

What joy exists in each of them? In us?

How do our interior lives manifest in exterior ways?

What expression shows our gratitude?

What do our actions convey?

How does my prayerful life manifest in practical and secular affairs?

Peace, Happy Contemplating!

Melissa