Of Poetry and Puppies

I bought a new book the other day “Love Poems from God” Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West edited by Daniel Ladinsky. It has poems by Hafiz, Rumi, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Catherine of Siena, Rabia, and a few others. I read most of it yesterday. I find that with poetry I need to swim around in it for a while before I can start to understand where the current is leading me.

There is a bit of everything in these poems: tenderness, beauty, humor, sensuality, honesty and even the occasional bawdiness, but the overall theme is the mutality of our love for God and God’s love for us. As I was rereading it this morning my awareness of how God sees me – us was recalibrated. I felt the tenderness of God’s love for all of creation and I felt the preciousness of both beauty and suffering. It was warm and fuzzy, but I sensed that it wasn’t meant to end there.

An hour or two later I was reading a book for my spiritual direction practicum and came across another poem describing God’s response to the Soul.  One of the lines said, “For I yearn to be loved” and I just stopped.  “For I yearn to be loved.” Wow. I think I had forgotten that.  Or at the very least distorted it.

I have been aware of my longing for God and my desire to please God and yet have rarely spent much time thinking about God’s desire for me. What does it mean that God yearns to be loved by me? What would that be like for my strongest awarenss to be not what do I need to do for God, but that God is longing for my love.  How might I then offer my love if I truly believed that my love was the most important thing?

I was talking about this with my husband over lunch. We asked ourselves “What does God’s longing look like?”  and then proceeded each to go about our day’s work.  I just now got up and saw my dog sitting on my husband’s lap as he works on the other computer.  She was sitting there – not lying down and sleeping as is her usual habit – but sitting there watching him – just wanting to be loved.  It was a perfect picture of God. There were no demands – my husband kept on working and they were there together and that was enough.

WHEREVER YOU MAY LOOK

Wisdom is

so kind and wise

that wherever you may look

you can learn something

about God.

Why

would not

the omnipresent

teach that

way?

St. Catherine of Siena

Check out the quote section of SoulStream website for more poems as the month goes by.  I have decided to offer Valentines to and from God for the entire month and will be changing them every few days.

Peace.

T/F: Winner Takes It All

Well here we are again after a long and unexplained hiatus. I still don’t really understand why I stopped writing, life happened, work piled up and I think that by the time I had the time to write, I was too scared to look. So maybe I do understand.  I take a deep breath and begin again.

All my life I have wanted to be a spiritual director. Oh, I had no idea that spiritual directors existed or that I could be one, I just knew that the best thing that ever happened to me were the times I got to talk to people about their experience of God. Even as a child and a teenager I loved it – it was like a high. I was conscious of the people talking and sharing and being held and loved by God in the midst of it. I explored every avenue to try and find it: missions, church ministries, my own prayer life, books and lectures. I was so thrilled when SoulStream came along and offered the chance to explore even more deeply the contemplative life and spiritual direction.  My deepest desire was to graduate as a director and start seeing directees and then happily continue for the next forty years growing in wisdom and love and spending the majority of my time listening to people as they were held by God.  Sweet. Simple. Spiritual.

Strangely enough, that is not what happened. I’ve graduated and I have some directees but the oddest thing has snuck up on me and inserted itself into the mix: a career. You’ll notice that in my aforementioned heaven on earth there was nary a mention of work or a career. I thought I’d leave that to others who were driven, ambitious, interested, and I would sit in my happy place listening and praying like an undercover nun.

Four years ago my husband Merle and I started a landscaping company. He would do the work and I would answer the phone and be the supportive wife. But then I started putting my two cents into things, and began to get more involved. After a while I wasn’t so sure about all this work and started to pull back.  I wanted to go back to the supportive wife bit, and leave all the stress and worry for my husband which left him feeling abandoned. I started to realize that maybe God was asking something different of me than what I wanted to give.

I prayed for grace and tried again. I asked God to help me see my contribution as valuable and that my newly discovered natural abilities in design and client relations weren’t to be taken for granted. It was a very long process and not nearly as trite as it sounds to me as I write about it now. I struggled with wanting to spend my time doing more overtly spiritual things. Through several book reports in my sd training I had come to understand work as spirituality expressed in another way, but I preferred to be contemplating “higher” things than trusting the spirituality inherent in determining where the hostas should go.

As I collaborated with Merle on designs and even began to act as principle designer on some projects I felt like a fraud. Most other designers had certifications and training.  All I had was an eye for pretty things and memories of my mother’s garden. Even though I knew the designs were good, which gave me confidence with clients, I didn’t think I was a good designer, or more accurately – a real designer.  I was finally giving what God was asking of me, but I was convinced it wasn’t good enough. It became apparent that not only was God asking for what I had, but I was going to have to learn more and grow as a designer and a business owner – maybe at the cost of time spent growing as a spiritual director.

Last week we were notified that we had been awarded a provincial landscaping Award of Excellence on a project we designed and built. I was flying high! I couldn’t sleep that night from the feeling of relief that flooded over me. It was like God had said, “Katherine you are not a fraud.  Let me prove it to you.” All of a sudden I didn’t need to convince myself anymore. I could trust what God was doing in me – who God had made me to be. I could finally exhale, and I did over and over, lying in bed, breathing out the fears and the pain.

The next morning I was terrified. What did this award mean? If God was solidifying me as a designer and as a business owner then that must mean there is a long road ahead. It means I need to stop looking for an exit to “Spiritual Direction and Contemplation Land” where I can waft about with like minded people. It meant that God was even more present here than I was ready to believe.

So I took this to our practicum lab for a twenty minute session!  (Poor B!)  In that session I sat with Jesus around the joy of winning and confirmation and celebration and the pain of “so this is really what I’m supposed to be doing.”  I let the weight of the award sink in and speak to the part of me that named me “Fraud”. As God renamed me “Award of Excellence-winning designer” what I started to notice that it wasn’t the designer part that mattered – it was the whole of my identity. My struggles were noticed, and my work didn’t need to look like anyone else’s. Who I was – even my broken, reluctant and often petulant self was worthy. It was like God saw me as the woman in Proverbs 31: working, providing, being respected by her peers at the city gates. I was blown away by the extent of God’s healing grace.

So here I am with a question (and a small homage to Meryl Streep)

Does the winner take it all?

Does the winner give all?

Or is it perhaps that the winner has been given all?

Peace.

A Paper Bag Kingdom

Halloween got me thinking.  A group of us had decided to get dressed up this year. Usually we don’t dress up because one we are too busy having a birthday party for one of our friends whose birthday is on halloween, but this year we decided to go for it.  I decided to be the Paper Bag Princess from the Robert Munsch children’s story.

It’s a story of a “princessy” princess engaged to a prince, gets attacked by a dragon who kidnaps her fiance Prince Robert, burns everything and leaves the princess with only a paper bag to wear as she sets off to defeat the dragon and rescue her love – only to hear the jerky Prince Robert say, “”You smell like ashes, your hair is all tangled and you are wearing a dirty old paper bag. Come back when you are dressed like a real princess.”  So she leaves him with the dragon and goes to live her own life.   The End.

Everybody with me?

Naturally I couldn’t just wear a bag with arm/head holes – I decided to make a princess dress out of paper.  It was tonnes of  fun and was kind of Project Runway meets kindergarten:all A-line panels and craft glue.  Maybe it’s just because I’m a Four on the enneagram and, according to one book, Fours “often feel like aristocrats in exile,” but the metaphor was working for me. I thought a lot about the story: the fairy tale beginning, the dragon, loss, rebirth, adventure, lack of acceptance by loved ones, and finally the guts to be oneself.

I love how God disguises the truth in fun ways for us to find. The overarching story of the gospel echoed in a children’s book and brought to life for me in a halloween costume.  I contemplated the reality of the princess – fallen, broken, bereft, but still a princess.  I identified very strongly with it all.  I was a child of God. The pretty trappings have long gone; my crown is dented, wonky, and rather precariously worn, I have dirt on my face, but nothing can take away my heritage. When I wrote the previous post about membership, I thought about how the church sometimes sounded an awful lot like Prince Robert, “…come back when you are dressed like a real princess.” And yet, I know the same thing comes out my mouth far more often than I know.  Am I smugly aware that I am a paper bag princess and yet still requiring that others come back when they’re pretty?        Yup.

Thank God that it doesn’t have to end there. There are still adventures to be lived. There are people that want to be free from their dragons –  and who are okay with the fact that we are just survivors and not the Saviour.

Welcome to the Paper Bag Kingdom.

The Promise of New Life

This past weekend I had the privilege of officially becoming part of the SoulStream family.  It was a beautiful and deeply touching ceremony full of depth and richness.  It felt like a cross between a baptism and a wedding with a sacred declaration of following Jesus and the covenanting of journeying together for life.  We even had a champagne reception!  What a contrast to my last membership experience where following Jesus wasn’t enough.  Our (former) church’s membership covenant required that we “love Jesus by: …”  and listed a dozen or so ways we promised to show our love, and then another ten ways that we had to promise to “serve Jesus faithfully by: …” and then came a third list of required behaviours for participation in the church community.  Every time a new member came into the church, the entire congregation had to stand up and read aloud the membership covenant displayed on the power point screen.  But I couldn’t do it – I felt sick every time thinking that this was what the church said God is about. Thank God for the New Covenant!

The evening after our welcoming ceremony several of us gathered for dinner and SoulCare, and as we offered each other communion the phrase “The Promise of New Life” kept reverberating in my head.  This is what Jesus is about and this is what SoulStream is also about – New Life.  We are no longer bound by the old covenant of rules and behaviours. We are set free to live as we have been created to live – in Christ’s freedom and love.

I am profoundly grateful to have found a home in SoulStream. As we journey forward we will discover what dispersed community is like for us.  My desire for this blog is to simply share my life with you, to invite you to join me as I search for God in the hard places and celebrate God’s presence in the joyful times.  My prayer is that we will see Jesus in each other’s stories and be encouraged. May the ground that is between us, instead of simply being distance, become sacred.