Zechariah's prayer

this year i feel prompted to look at the Luke reading that gifts us with Zechariah's prayer.
I think this is, in part, due to my need for a hopeful response to darkness. I love this poem by Carter Heyward which i think is a response to this gospel.

And you whose spirit is sad and unsure, try to remember
the very best parts of your life, the loveliest
feelings in your body self,
occasions of bold delight and quiet confidence,
moments of unambivalent commitment and unrestrained joy.
Try to remember when you have believed passionately in
something or someone human or divine.
Try to imagine that someone now believes in you
because she trusts your loveliest feelings
… commitments… confidence… joy.
She goes with us as we are called forth to go, with one
another, evoked by historical memory
and voices audible only to ears that can hear the
power of God in history.
Her name is love.
Carter Heyward:

The place called the skull

haiku for those who scoff.

It is called The Skull,

this place where problems are fixed

in time-honoured ways.

Bodies are broken

and causes brought to an end,

Hopes meet their nadir.

People standing by

join their leaders' scoffing cries.

Soldiers also mock.

The man saved others;

if he is God's chosen one,

let him save himself!

Not much sympathy

from one who also hangs there;

he joins the mockers

Are you not the Christ?

Save yourself! While you're at it

spare a thought for us.

The third man protests:

He's not deserving of this!

Asks: Remember me.

Not permitting pain

to determine love's limits,

Jesus answers: Yes.

© Ken Rookes 2016

Take Heart

You Were Made For This

By Clarissa Pinkola Estes

My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people. 
You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. 
Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.
I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able vessels in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.
Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless. 
In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails. 
We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn't you say you were a believer? Didn't you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn't you ask for grace? Don't you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. 
What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale. 
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. 
Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do. 
There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.
The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.

Waste

WASTE

Waste of Muscle, waste of Brain,
Waste of Patience, waste of Pain,
Waste of Manhood, waste of Health,
Waste of Beauty, waste of Wealth,
Waste of Blood, and waste of Tears,
Waste of Youth’s most precious years,
Waste of ways the Saints have trod,
Waste of Glory, waste of God,– War!

G A Studdert Kennedy,  !st world war chaplain

Remembrance day

End time warnings

End-time warnings are stock-in-trade for the literalists

who delight in making pronouncements on behalf of the almighty.

These words tell of the fragility of human existence,

of the imperative to mend our ways,

and of the need to be ready.

Accusations, betrayal, hatred, death!

(Rest assured, not a hair of your head will perish!

Work that one out.)

Wars, earthquakes, famines, plagues

and other portents!

I was never much interested in eschatological speculations.

And yet with the planet soon to bake in an atmospheric oven,

and life as we know it most likely changing for ever,

Darwin may yet prevail. If not over the Almighty,

then at least over the self-declared faithful.

All those biblical warnings about end-times

are conveniently ignored by those who doubt the science

and who also refuse to pay the cost.

It seems that the temple and the planet might both be cast down,

neither of which would appear to have much hope of restoration.

© Ken Rookes 2016

The Holy Longing

Janis Joplin was once asked what it was like being a rock star. She replied: "It's pretty hard sometimes. You go on stage, make love to fifteen thousand people. Then you go home and sleep alone."
   Jesus was once asked, as a test: If a woman marries seven times and all her husbands die before she dies, whose wife will she be after the resurrection? He answered that, after the resurrection, we will no longer marry or be given in marriage.
   These two answers, Janis Joplin's and Jesus', are not unconnected. Each, in its own way, says something about the all-embracing intent of our sexuality. What Janis Joplin is saying is that, in our sexuality and our creativity, we are ultimately trying to make love to everyone.
   What Jesus is saying is not that we will be celibate in heaven, but rather that, in heaven, all will be married to all. In heaven, unlike life here on earth where that is not possible, our sexuality will finally be able to embrace everyone. In heaven, everyone will make love to everyone else and, already now, we hunger for that within every cell of our being. Sexually our hungers are very wide. We are built to ultimately embrace the universe and everything in it.
-Ronald Rolheiser OMI
The Holy Longing

“Indeed they cannot die anymore… being children of the resurrection.”

"Those words sound radical, almost too good to be true. They encompass more than a physical death, but perhaps aim at the littler (but not little at all) deaths which come to mark our existence. If Paul Tillich was right, that death isn’t a moment, but a process we are living every day fulfilled finally in one moment, what does it mean for us to be progressing in death while simultaneously progressing in life? Just as physical death is the culmination of the slow dying that is life lived, is the resurrection of the body also the culmination of the slow living that is death dying away?

In Li-Young Lee’s poem entitled “From Blossoms,” these words snag me in similar ways to how those of Jesus do:

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background, from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom."

 http://www.ekklesiaproject.org/blog/2013/11/to-sweet-impossible-blossom/

The day of the Dead

Halloween and the 'Day of the dead' are big news this week. They reflect our understandable fascination with death and the after-life. The gospel this week tells the story of yet another smart-alec trying to trick Jesus with an ethics-twister of a question and yet again Jesus turns it all around. The Sadducees asked Jesus a question about the after-life and the nature of family and judgement and power. I remember once when i had just finished a grave-side funeral service, being approached by a friend of the family who was concerned that the person who had died had not been a Christian and therefore would not be 'saved'. I was taken aback by the question and the timing, but answered her that i felt that if we take Jesus' teachings about the after-life, then his main teaching was that only God knows the nature of that space after death. Just like in today's gospel, he gives an answer that points us more towards mystery that clarity. On the occasions that Jesus does speak clearly about the afterlife he tells us stories like that of Lazarus and the rich man that focus on the tables being turned and on justice for the poor and merciful. Much of our modern teaching about life-after-death is more tradition than theology. Our funerals imply that their is a heaven where we will meet our lost loved-ones, but this is not the church's teaching. Strictly speaking, the traditional teaching of the church is that the faithful will be physically resurrected on the day of judgement. This is one of the reasons behind the Roman Catholic church's seemingly strange pronouncements against the scattering of ashes.
For myself, i am happy enough to stay with the mystery that Jesus implies, and to rest in the spirituality that acts from the certainty that 'nothing can separate us from the love of God.'
Rev Gordon Bannon

In the resurrection, therefore.

Nine haiku for us sceptics

The Saducees ask

good questions: What does it mean:

resurrection life?

They already know

there is no life hereafter;

but does the teacher?

In the age to come?

The question is audacious;

It won't be like that!

God of Abraham,

God of Isaac and Jacob;

life with God goes on.

God of the living

with whom those who have long passed

share resurrection.

There can be no death

for those who find life in God;

they are God's children.

Jesus spoke of life

washed with eternal purpose.

They will die no more.

The disciple knows

that resurrection living

happens here on earth.

Can a Sadducee

also be a disciple?

Would that be all right?

© Ken Rookes 2016

Zacheus colouring