OUT OF PLACE, BURIED NOT FAR UNDERNEATH

Rave on John Donne, rave on thy Holy fool
Down through the weeks of ages
In the moss borne dark dank pools

Rave on, down through the industrial revolution
Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age
Rave on down through time and space down through the corridors
Rave on words on printed page

Rave on, you left us infinity
And well pressed pages torn to fade
Drive on with wild abandon
Uptempo, frenzied heels

Rave on, Walt Whitman, nose down in wet grass
Rave on fill the senses
On nature’s bright green shady path

Rave on Omar Khayyam, Rave on Kahlil Gibran
Oh, what sweet wine we drinketh
The celebration will be held
We will partake the wine and break the Holy bread

Rave on let a man come out of Ireland
Rave on on Mr. Yeats,
Rave on down through the Holy Rosey Cross
Rave on down through theosophy, and the Golden Dawn
Rave on through the writing of “A Vision”
Rave on, Rave on, Rave on, Rave on, Rave on, Rave on

Rave on John Donne, rave on thy Holy fool
Down through the weeks of ages
In the moss borne dark dank pools

Rave on, down though the industrial revolution
Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age

Van Morrison

WHO DO YA LOVE!?!?!

Last night I attended a Homelessness public hearing that was part of the 2010-2015 consolidated plan to end homelessness.  Overall the meeting was informative, giving anyone who desired the opportunity to speak before the board.  Many individuals representing social service organizations spoke, as well as people who had or are currently experiencing homelessness.  What bothers me and what distracted me through out the entire hearing was what took place during the introduction.  The Gentleman who opened up the forum and introduced the board took a moment and asked all city officials to raise their hand so that they could be acknowledged, I looked around the room as he was saying this and… not a single hand was raised.     We have the highest unemployment rate in the country, more families are living without permanent housing than ever before, the number of homeless in Portland is continuing to increase, it is currently against the law  sleep outside in Portland, people will freeze this winter and NOT ONE CITY OFFICIAL FELT IT NECESSARY TO LISTEN TO PORTLAND CITIZENS PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE?  No one raised their hand.  Most of those that heard the stories already knew them.

I feel angry, but really my heart is broken for those that are continually ignored by the same individuals who say that they care.

Prayer: please do something about the apathy that pisses me off and disappoints my hope and the hope of some many other.  Amen

I find encouragement in history; when I go back to the lives of women before me I can remember that is was harder once and maybe if I keep going it wont be so hard for future daughters or anyone that has ever felt second or third place.

For those of you that don’t know Lucretia Mott was a Quaker, a suffragist and abolitionist. A close friend of Elizibeth Cady Stanton the two women co-founded the Seneca Falls Woman’s convention ( the first woman’s rights convention in history).  Lucretia, devoted her life to the injustice and oppression that existed in her America.  I am given encouragement when I read quotes from her and although I do realize that her struggle for justice was much different then mine, I am also reminded that almost two hundred years later so much and not much has changed.

“It is time that Christians were judged more by their likeness to Christ than their notions of Christ. Were this sentiment generally admitted we should not see such tenacious adherence to what men deem the opinions and doctrines of Christ while at the same time in every day practise is exhibited anything but a likeness to Christ”.

I have been trying to find a way to make my words say this and all I can come up with is: Stop sitting around talking about what you know and starts proving it.

“The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source”.

It is easy to make the assumption that we are all equal and the idea of that could get you all warm and fuzzy.  The truth is that when I stand next to a man I am not given the same recognition or attention and for every dollar a man makes a women makes 78 cents  doing the same job and Hispanic and African American women make even less.

” It is not Christianity, but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her.”

Jesus was a liberator not an oppressor.

Prayer:  Jesus, I am pissed and angry and I feel alone.  Please show me how you would deal with this crap.

God’s acceptance and forgiveness does not say that everything we have done and left undone is all right. It says that we can pick up from here and move on. Freed from the burden of guilt, we can live with our real, sinful sleves, accepting ourselves because God accepts us and esteeming ourselves because if God prizes us, how can we do otherwise?

- Martha Graybeal Rowlett, from her book In Spirit and in Truth

It would be wonderful if we could all work to give others the same things we want God to give to us.  I am so sick and tired of listening to people talk about serving and loving but not actually doing anything (I am judgmental) and I am frustrated by the apathy I see all around me (i am powerless to change people).  Yes it is hard to love people from our gut and I suck at it a lot of the time. But we have been embraced by a God who love us and shouldn’t we do the same if only to save our own lives.  We get from this life what we put into it… so if all you you put into it is hot airy opinions, that’s what you will have is your own opinions.  If you but your heart and tiers and hope and love into life, you will have a heart that breaks wide open and although its broken it is full.  If I’m wrong about this I don’t really care at least I made an attempt to really live and so did the people I love.

Prayer: God I want to stay home and talk to myself, its so much safe that way. Please teach me how to let love move me.

I am my worst enemy.  There have been times in my life that I have held myself hostage, I have allowed my fear, my pride, my anger, my broken heart, all my insecurities to shut everything else out. The bible says that Jesus “gave his life in exchange for the many who had been held hostage.” Even being told this as a little girl it failed to register at the core of me.  As I think about it now, that freedom has been offered that exchange with Jesus, His life for my freedom is there but I am often so traped in my own disfunction to truly embrace what all that really means.

CS Lewis says: To Love is to be vulnerable… I f you want to make sure of keeping (your heart) intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal.  Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness.  But in that casket-safe, dark motionless, airless- it will change.  It will not be broken- it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable… the only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the danger of love is Hell.

If Lewis is right and I think he is, I have tried to guard my heart so much that I have cut myself off from love.  Loving my friends who live outside is painful sometime and I can feel myself inching back or hiding my heart.  I get afraid to love someone in the middle of their hurt and pain without being able to change it.  I get paralyzed by those I have lost to death or addiction and those things keep me from reaching out and giving the love that has been given to me by Jesus and by those that love him.  In my human nature I want to love you in a way that solves all you problems: I show up love love love and fix things and everything is all better.  But loving people who live under a mass amount of stress all the time can’t always be like that and I need to remember that a lot of the time the love of Jesus looks like me consistently showing up with out a solution just being there over and over.  That is after all what Jesus does.

Prayer:  Teach me that I don’t in fact know everything and sometimes being quiet but still being there is enough.

Last Sunday my community at HOMEpdx ordained me.  Ken and I had been talking for almost a year about my future/potential ordination at HOME and what it would/should look like for our community.  What ended up happening last Sunday was so incredibly different then what my head thought would happen.  I had put of the idea of ordination for a while, and my excuses ranged from: it doesn’t matter for what we do downtown, we are to busy, I don’t think people will care on way or another and so on.  I have a lot of ideas and opinions about everything and as it turns out my ideas and opinions are not always God’s ideas and opinions (although I like to believe they are and well… you can guess were that gets me).  Leading up to Sunday people were congratulating me and that felt weird and they wanted to know how I felt about the ordination and what I was thinking and I don’t know what to tell them, so there is a lot me saying: it feels weird, I don’t know yet and yea, wow, crazy.

God and I don’t have the sort of relationship that is like a Thomas Kinkade painting, where he is walking me through the meadow of life and I see glimpses of him everywhere, nor is it like the forth of July and the fireworks are His voice.  Most of the time God has to talk to me like I am a child in a preschool class, they sit on the mat, the teacher holds up a picture of something, like a cat and the child know what a cat is, the teacher makes consequences very clear and the child gets punished.  So God knows I need to be led by the hand and He also knows that unless He makes it very clear what he is doing in my life and my community I will miss it because I am a preschooler and I get distracted.

Taking into account my assumptions about how my ordination would go down, my inability to understand what it was I was feeling leading up to the ordination and my preschool relationship with God, He couldn’t have made himself more clear.  The best way to describe downtown last Sunday would be to say that my community owned my Ordination; it belonged to them and was as much my being recognized as it was their opportunity to demonstrate their oneness.  In the middle of cope circle more than 50 friends laid hands on me and prayed for me, men and women crying and laughing together and then all singing: “amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a retch like me”.  In my preschool brain things like this don’t happen, but what I realized standing in the middle of all of that oneness and love and witnessing what can only be described as revival, is that things like this do happen.  I believe that what I and all of my friends experienced so clearly is what God sees every time he look at HOMEpdx.  Most Sundays I am caught up in responsibilities and holding shit together and in all of that is very easy to miss the things that God might see or do, but something like last Sunday happens and boom He is there and he has weaved himself in the lives of each individual and he has weaved us together.  And when he looks at us every Sunday what He sees is revival and worship and last Sunday I was given a glimpse into Gods heart and the opportunity to see very clearly what he sees.  I don’t think that there is a an adequate way to describe last Sunday, or any Sunday for that matter but to say that Jesus is very real downtown and if you are looking for him in the way that you have seen him before you will miss him, but if you shut your opinions up and let him show you might be changed forever.

God, help me see what you see, because I suck at paying attention most of the time.

Amen

I could venture to guess that many of my friends without houses suffer from invisiblemanitus.  Or maybe its the rest of us suffer from couldn’tbebothereditus?

I was born in the church; the raise your hands, shout to the Lord, I am a sinner kind of church and they taught me how to talk to God.  When I was young I prayed like a child terrified that in my sleep I might die or someone I love might die and without realizing it we may have forgotten to ask forgiveness for one thing or another and as a result we would spend eternity with satan in the flames of hell.  Those kind of prayers sounded like: Dear Jesus please forgive me for (insert everything you can possibly think of), don’t let (insert everyone you love) die.  I’m sorry, I’m sorry amen.

It is not until know that I am truly learning how to take to God and that the whole concept of prayer has been given to me as a way to not be so crazy or at least manage my crazy.  Because of childhood prayer and growing up in dysfunctional church I spent a long time giving God and my emotions the silent treatment, I was angry and had not gotten the results I wanted so I gave communication with God the big “F you”.  Now after a long battle with myself I realize that prayer (that word is still hard for me) does not need to be goofy, orchestrated, well behaved, or even my original thought.  I am learning how to talk to God from other people that have descent results in the talking to God department.

Anne Lamott’s two prayers. “Help me, help me, help me.” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

A friend of mine starts everyday with a simple prayer “Show me how to be.”

The prayer of Saint Francis has become a favorite of mine.  There are moments when I feel crazy and I can pull out parts of this pray, like when I am filled with rage and want to do something awful I can say to myself and to God, where there is hatred let me sow love.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.


O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

I have recently discovered that my prayers can often simply be me acknowledging how I am feeling, sort of like: “I feel so fucking angry right now and I don’t know what to do.” or “I can’t save these people I love like I want to, it is breaking my heart, I hate feeling powerless, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!” As a survivor of abuse and also a drunk I am not naturally good at understanding how I am feeling at a given time, I am learning that because of this it can be spiritual and powerful for me to say out loud or even in the secret parts of my heart what I am feeling.  The practice of being honest with my heart has become a prayer.  I believe God already knows what is going on inside of me and I am offered a solution to my insanity in the act of saying my shit out loud.

As of right now I am not so good at giving God my own words, so I will borrow others prayers until I feel comfortable making my own.

I actually don’t… I’m working on that though.