When Way Closes

Image by Shon Egai, from Pixabay, with thanks.

“When Paul and his companions . . . came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to.”   Acts 16:6

We’ve come to the end of 2021, in many ways a very challenging year.  Though we have experienced grief, loss and restriction, there has also been joy and gratitude for the simpler things in life, for healing and growth.  It’s good to pause and contemplate for a moment before we step into the future.

Perhaps we need to make sure that we don’t drag old debts along with us into a new year.  Perhaps we need to let go of old grudges.  “To mourn a mischief that is past gone, Is the next way to draw new mischief on,” says Shakespeare (Othello).

Perhaps there are dreams or relationships that haven’t worked out as we had hoped, but it’s unproductive to keep banging away on locked doors.  We need to turn around and discover what else God might have in mind for us.

Our daughter has a dog-walking business, and for a number of years, happily rented farmland to allow the dogs freedom to run.  But things became complicated when the neighbours there had young children come to live with them.  By itself that may not have been a problem, but when food was also set out on this adjacent property as hunting bait, the dogs were continually attracted to it.  Snow fence barriers and other tactics were tried, but nothing proved effective.  Eventually it was clear that the old arrangement was no longer workable.  In perfect timing, a farm just up the road was now available.  If this had come up sooner, that option would not have existed as the pasture had been let for grazing cattle.  It took some adjustments, but the dogs are now happily exploring their new environment.

It is sometimes very difficult to discern the way ahead.  But, regardless of our circumstances, one thing is certain.  The way back, the past,  is closed.  Like a baby coming to term, our current safe place will eventually banish us.  Like an eagle trains her young, life becomes increasingly uncomfortable until we are forced to fly.

In his book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker J. Palmer tells of his friend Ruth’s wisdom at a time of searching in his life:

“I’m a birthright Friend,” she said somberly, “and in sixty-plus years of living, way has never opened in front of me.” She paused, and I started sinking into despair. Was this wise woman telling me that the Quaker concept of God’s guidance was a hoax?
Then she spoke again, this time with a grin. “But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.”

Our perspective can be narrow.  It’s only later that we see the wisdom of not having gotten our way when we desperately wanted it.   God’s guidance for us always comes out of love, whether it’s “Yes” or “No.”  His timing will always be perfect, so we can trust that.

Through way closing, or way opening, may you experience God’s guidance to live abundantly in the year ahead!

 

Winter Solstice

The romance of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Abridged from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur by Alfred W. Pollard. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Published 1920 by Macmillan in New York, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

In the cold northern hemisphere, it’s the shortest day of the year.  The long nights of a wintry season have always provided ideal opportunity for a community’s storytellers to spin their stories of historical figures, folk and fairy tales, as their listeners sat spellbound around a flickering fire.

Though the light now comes from my computer screen, I am no less enthralled by the stories of King Arthur, told in a library Great Course by Dorsey Armstrong.  After the Romans left Britain, Arthur was the courageous leader who turned back the Anglo-Saxon tide invading from the east, around 4-500 AD.   No one can really tell how many of these legends are fact, or whether they’ve been added to or exaggerated over time.  Many of them have fantastical elements that stretch our credulity, but we still lean forward to listen, get caught up in their danger and suspense.

Our local Elgin Writer’s Guild hosted Kayla Geitzler as our virtual writer-in-residence this past fall.  Especially interesting was the workshop on (Re)Telling Your Own Fairy Tale.  Admittedly, I am someone who took a whole course on Cinderella as part of my English studies.  These stories have survived, been handed down, because their message rings true.   They often favor the vulnerable and the underdog, and highlight the importance of the details of our lives.   Words can be charms, spells, or curses.  Objects can be magical.  Heroes are sent on quests, must pass some kind of test,  or resist strong temptation.

In the years when my work was housecleaning, I often felt that, like Cinderella, I was missing out on a glamorous ball somewhere.  At that time, the Prins in my life was working for a shoe company called Tender Tootsies.  We used to joke about his deliveries of soles and heels.  So there was a visceral recognition when Kayla noted that fairy tale themes often include feet and shoes.  And who’s to say that fairy godmothers aren’t present?  Perhaps they exist in our very genes.

As in folk tales, words and kind actions are still magical today.  They can make a great difference in someone’s life.  In his discussion of addiction,  Gabor Mate writes, “there are also many subtle, invisible (factors) that may positively influence our psychic strength and our capacity for choice:  a kind  word spoken long ago, a fortuitous circumstance, a new relationship, a flash of insight, a memory of love, a sudden opening to faith.”   We not only live our own mythical lives, but participate in the stories of others.

Sometimes the darkness can be too difficult to navigate alone.  We need to gather, in whatever way possible, to give and receive from others, whether they are people in our lives or people who lived long ago.  We need the cautionary tales, the admonitions to pay attention to the circumstances of our lives, the mirroring to confront ourselves.

Stories have many different facets that we comprehend only after returning to them again and again.  They open up their insights as we ourselves change.  And our story reveals itself as part of a much greater story.

“Every man’s life is a fairy tale written by God’s fingers.”  Hans Christian Andersen

 

 

Our Father

With beautiful poetry,  imagery and stark honesty, the Old Testament Psalms can exert a gravitational pull that draws us in to worship, to question, to lament, to give thanks.   Jesus quoted from the Psalms, his life story already portrayed in the truth of its words.  The psalmist looks at the awesome world around him and marvels at God’s presence and power in the universe around him, but also in the heights and depths of human emotions.

Recently, I have been meditating on The Lord’s Prayer, a prayer I’ve heard hundreds of times., said so often in rote that it can come tripping off my tongue without comprehension.  The language is archaic, and the association of a heavenly Father is difficult for many who have no idea of what that would mean in their lives. Our earthly father contributes the X or Y gene that determines our gender.   A loving father assumes responsibility for the care of his child even before it is born.

It occurred to me that there could be a psalm-like metaphor that would work well with the Lord’s Prayer.   We aren’t like the ancients, who worshipped the sun.  Science has proved that the sun is a star, burning hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.  But we understand God as Light of light, the world’s Light-giver, the generative force behind all that we see in the earth.  Our Father.

Our Father, in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.   Like the sunlight diffuses over all, giving life and sustenance and hope, may You be known in all the earth.

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.  May we respond to God’s fatherly love as the earth responds to spring sunlight, track you as the sunflower follows the sun.

Give us this day our daily bread.  Nothing in our fields will thrive without exposure to this sunlight during the growing season.  We are totally dependent on it for our food.

Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us.  When we have so lavishly received the light of your grace, please don’t let us block that light from others in the shade canopy under us.  They have sinned against us in lesser ways than we have sinned against God.  Grace light is to be shared, not hoarded, God allows the sun to rise on both evil and good.

That we not be led into temptation, deliver us from evil.  When we are tempted to wrongdoing or want to cower in shame, keep us from hiding away from the light.  We need its clarity to have vision, to keep from stumbling on treacherous paths.  We need its healing properties to address our pain.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.  Amen.  We pray for a kingdom where our Father’s justice, and power, and glory shines forth each day, and forever.  In some small way, to do the things that already reflect this reality, and someday look forward to its complete fulfillment.

No, we aren’t sun-worshippers.  Though, once, as a shaft of sunlight broke majestically through the clouds, the toddler in my car shouted, “Hi, God!”  Our Father, the Creator of the sun,  reveals who He is by his handiwork, and so “forward we travel, from light into Light.” *

 

  • From hymn “Let All Things Now Living”, by Katherine K. Davis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Runaways

Pixabay.com, photo by klimkin.

Recently, I dropped by someone’s place for the first time, and was astonished to find chickens clucking around her front yard.  The property was near a busy intersection and I wondered aloud whether she wasn’t worried about her chickens getting hit by a car.   She replied that she wasn’t concerned, because they knew to stick around home.  Only in recounting the incident did I realize I’d effectively asked her the old riddle “why didn’t the chickens cross the road?”

Late one Sunday afternoon, we caught a glimpse of our neighbours running past our living room window.  When my husband opened the door to greet them, they explained that they were just trying to catch their pet, a foster dog they had recently adopted.  It was missing a limb, and she explained that it was soon going to receive a bionic leg.   If they couldn’t keep up with a three-legged dog, I don’t know how they will manage when it has four!

My father spent his 50th birthday in a memorable way, not celebrating, but rounding up runaway cattle with friends and family.  As each successive group showed up to search, enthusiasm ran high, which quickly waned as they navigated difficult terrain on acres of bush and fields.  There was danger that a cow could run onto a road and cause an accident, or that it would leave hoofprints on a golf club’s manicured lawns, or trample crops.  It was September, so the corn stood tall in the fields, and my uncle brought a horse to ride so that he could see over the stalks.  It was a gong show.  Weeks went by before all the cows were found and returned to our pasture.

Animal lessons aren’t necessarily limited to children’s storybooks.  I understand the attraction of being free of fences, and how the grass seems greener on the other side.  Sometimes I’ve wished I could just run away from difficult circumstances or restrictions myself.  Unfortunately, running away usually just creates a host of new problems.

Unlike animals, humans can think through more options, grant themselves little freedoms.  We can resist coercion and calculate the cost of our choices.   We have free will, and even free won’t.  Even if all appears to be lost, Viktor Frankl said that that we still can have the last of human freedoms, “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Limits don’t have to hamper freedom, and in fact often are a catalyst in creatively working out new solutions.  Sometimes, it just makes sense to stay close to home.

 

 

The Work of our Hands

The large afghan I’m working on, lengthening as the nights lengthen, serves the dual purpose of giving me something to do. and contributing to my warmth as fall air grows chillier. This particular enterprise has been dragging on over several winters, partly because I’m cautious about muscle strain and partly because my old incentive to produce material goods has lost some steam. It seems the focus should be more about taking away things instead of adding them at this point.  I am eyeing our possessions through the lens of adult children who will one day sift through everything we own.

Still, there’s something magical about conjuring something useful up from strands of yarn. I was once very comforted by a kind person who tucked around me a handmade knitted blanket she’d received as a wedding present. My mother went through a phase of gifting knitted Phentex slippers for others: warm and sturdy, they were worn until worn out.  There were blankets, sweaters, hats, scarves, dolls that have been created over the years.   Before COVID struck, our Itty Bitty Knitting Committee at the local library enjoyed conviviality while clicking away, admiring the creativity of each other’s work.

This is a skill that has been passed down through generations and cultures, taught by mothers and neighbours and volunteers who gave of their time at local schools. Some of these teachers patiently and cheerfully untangled knots and picked up dropped stitches while still managing to encourage would-be yarn artists. And, in my turn,  it was a joy to spend time teaching the grand-daughter who found my casual knitting so intriguing that she clamored to learn. This summer, we worked on a little knitted bear, but also took an opportunity to add crochet to her skills.

As the family prepared to drive home, her mother at the last minute noticed that a large ball of yarn, still attached to the crocheting in her hands, had fallen out of the back car door on to the driveway. How far down the road that ball could have been unwinding!

Seven hours away is quite a distance, and so that yarn could never connect us, but in a strange way, conveying this skill was in itself an invisible bonding.  Yarn and patterns are only material things, and so may fall short, but the time spent together between teacher and student is like a synapse that relays essential knowledge.  It’s only a beginning, but there’s opportunity for discovery and growth and experimentation.  And, for our loved ones, it’s also about creating heart strings that will hopefully span great distances of space and time.

Teddy for Tragedies pattern

                                                                                              May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us;  establish the work of our hands for us – yes,  establish the work of our hands.”  Psalm 90:17