On Thursday, for Epiphany, I chalked my door with the ancient formula 20+C+M+B+11, which remembers the three travelers, Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, who left families and kingdoms to follow a starry hope and bring worship to a child King.  For the rest of the year, it reminds me to pray every time I enter: Christus Mansionem Benedicat–May Christ bless this house.

On Saturday, I visited a church with friends Cathee, Bryan and daughter Sarah, and fell in love with the indoor tree two stories tall covered with a thousand white lights.  We sang Joy to the World one last time.

On Sunday, we celebrated the Baptism of Jesus and the final day of the Christmas season.

Today….

The advent wreath burned fiercely and quickly in a phoenix fire, to be remade anew in eleven months. The scent of pine and rosemary filled my little home, a clean and pungent smell of new beginnings.

Christmas decorations were put away in their little box.

The Liturgy of the Hours book changed from the blue volume to the brown one (with a pressed four-leaf clover tucked in its pages).

Snow fell.

The first day of Ordinary time.

Yet, extraordinarily full of grace.

Counting thanks…

Young Jack memorizing and singing to me the third verse of O Come all ye faithful, just in time to end the season.

Pages and pages of hand-written dissertation…embracing the one way of writing that never fills me with anxiety, but with peace and beauty and gives my thoughts time to collect.

Lunches and dinners and tea times with friends.

Worship… the morning dancing-shaker-eggs-guitar-praise of Bethany and the contemplative chants and incense of St Paul’s evening eucharist.

Visiting St Ignatius Chapel, a work of art. (More photos here.)

Ministry and teaching possibilities.

The fun of burning real Frankincense.

Snow falling slowly.

Bus drivers who stop between stops and give late-running me a ride.

Thai red curry. (Yummy!!)

Toward the end of the year, I start to reread my journals from past Decembers and Januaries–comparing what I was thinking and feeling then with life now.

It’s always humbling because I find I write the same things, struggle with the same questions, or learn the same lessons over and over, just in different situations.  After an hour or so of reading, I’m utterly tired of myself and imagine a big bonfire of burning journals.

This year was different. Well, I still got tired of the monologue, but rather than being saddened by the broken record of my journals, I was comforted that God sticks with me and keeps speaking, keeps forgiving, keeps showing possibilities in every moment. I’m starting to see my journals as a 25-year record of God’s faithfulness in the midst of my often melodramatic prose.

I also saw that there were certain resolutions that didn’t make it on the official lists, but were quiet and patiently relentless in the background. These were the ones that survived past January.

Two years ago, starting The Contemplative Cottage, was one of those resolutions that didn’t really feel like a resolution. Yet, if I were to list influential practices of the last two years, submitting to the blank page of the blog post is one of the most important.  The call to write, to reflect on contemplative living, to share gratitudes, knowing you are reading, has been a life-changing discipline. Receiving your comments and emails have spurred me on.

At the same time I started writing here, I started taking digital photos–ostensibly for the blog posts. I discovered a whole new world of light and color and way of seeing God’s creation and people, that still stuns me and fills me with awe.  Photography didn’t make it on my list of resolutions that year, but nonetheless, its impact has seeped into every corner of my life.

Photography made it into my prayer–”God, use this joy, please.”

Taking photos has become a way I worship God.  The surprises and joys keep coming.  This Lent, I’ve been invited to be Artist-in-Residence at St Paul’s Episcopal Church, taking photos in response to the Sunday lectionary texts and sharing them in worship. I cannot begin to describe the JOY and the wonderful-terrified-humbled feeling at being given this gift.

I’m also praying about how I might combine photography and short-term missions, a direction that could literally take me anywhere in the world. Joy. Wonderful-terror.

As I read my journals, I began to see a larger pattern in how I approached  life.  The main tasks, such as exams or dissertation writing, I lived in opposition to, so my resolutions were mostly about what I was going to do to take control and get things done.  But then there was  a whole world of un-resolutions, from which God’s cultivating hand brought fruit–joy and grace and LOVE.

While I needed to take some action, there was an indirectness about it all,

a certain hidden grace-full-ness.

Eugene Peterson talks about the relationship between work and grace.  Whatever task before us that God has placed in our lives can be a container for His grace. A concrete action, gift, task, or situation, can become a way to experience God’s grace operating in our lives and in the world.

The blog writing, the photography…I got out of the way and these became containers for grace. And God’s grace does amazing, joyful and transformative things when we let it.

What would it be like to live this way? What it would it mean to approach all of life like these quiet but relentlessly patient un-resolutions?

To get in on the action, but out of the way of God’s grace.

To no longer live in opposition to life,

write no more take-control-lists,

but bring it all in worship to the foot of the Throne,

and see what God does….

(to be continued!)

****

Today, I am thank-full:

God’s faithfulness through the years. And the un-resolution of 25 years ago to start journaling, so today I have a record of His faithfulness and patience.

God’s grace and all the containers He fills to overflowing.

A new way to think about the dissertation writing….as worship!

My camera, every single day.

My parents singing to me on New Year’s.

Young Jack singing to me O Come All Ye Faithful, two verses memorized!

The community of St Paul’s Episcopal and their faithful welcome.

A quiet day of sunshine, writing and prayer…deep in Advent waiting, working on my dissertation and cooking a batch of soup.

“Instead of asking why the help has not come, the person at prayer learns to look carefully at what is actually going on in his or her life,… and ask, ‘Could this be the help that God is providing?’” (Eugene Peterson, Earth and Altar, 76)

Meditating on this poem by Teilhard de Chardin as I write:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown,
something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time
– that is to say, grace –
and circumstances
acting on your own good will
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming in you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Sometimes I’m sure I rattle when I walk or think or talk or simply stand, paralyzed.

Chains, binding and heavy, clank about me.  Doubt. Worry. Fear. Sadness.

I read about children in Ethiopia, whose home is a pile a trash, who drink rain water that collects among the garbage and eat whatever they can scavenge.  I pace my apartment, feeling the weight. I read the article and unmistakable rattling echoes under the words. My heart hurts. All is not well. The chains are not only on me, but on the world.

Clanking and whispers. What good can an easily-tired introvert do?

I can pray. Love and pray. For the children, for people who can go and give homes and food and water and love. For the strength to do something myself.

Amid the whispers and rattling, I wish I had one of those awesome magic swords like in the stories I love.  High King Peter’s Rhindon. The Sword of Griffyndor. Frodo’s Sting. Arthur’s Excalibur.  With it, I would go to work breaking the chains that bind, myself, the children, the world.

Clank, rattle. Those swords don’t exist.

Then, suddenly, surprising me, my thoughts change. A real sword breaks a chain, out of the blue.  Snap!

“Take up the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” (Eph 6:17)

Jesus answered Satan’s temptations with scripture as he fasted in the desert (Luke 4:1-13). So today, I pray Ephesians 1:16-23 for you, me, and the world:

That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give us a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of our hearts enlightened, that we may know what is the hope to which he has called us, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Jesus, may we live the power of love you have given us. May we hear the sound of chains breaking.

***

In gratitude today for…

The Word of God and the words of Ephesians.

The bible found in the garbage by one of the Ethiopian children, and his ability to read it and share the Word with others. A person threw away the Word of God and God used it!

For the YWAM team who visited the children and brought help. For the photographer who makes these young faces real and present to me thousands of miles away.

God’s faithfulness as I wrestle with words to write.

Tim Dearborn’s sermon of hope yesterday.

Advent wreath making at Holiday Magic.

Reconnecting with my friend Amy.

Watching young Jack create a aluminum foil suit of armor so he can play High King Peter.

Music, especially “Of the Father’s Love Begotten.”

My immersion in Eugene Peterson’s books continued this past week with Practicing Resurrection. Alongside Answering God, it is one of his finest, and a great introduction to the lovely way his theology of God meshes with his theology of prayer and church and intimacy and God-human relationship, using Ephesians as the starting text.

Reading the book was more like having a series of conversations about life and faith with Peterson in front of a fire on a winter’s evening, drinking hot chocolate, all the while attentively reflecting on Paul’s text.  Gentle, yet direct, encouraging, yet challenging, he shares his love for Jesus and writes of subjects close to his heart. His words spurred me on to pray for and love others, more and more.

In fact, by the end of the book, I was even more convinced that loving and praying, and pursuing a life that cultivates loving and praying (not as abstractions, but loving real people and allowing my heart to break in prayer for concrete situations) is the best way to live.  Over the next few posts, I will be sharing more about this.

The book also confirmed a little desire that has been growing in me for awhile: to memorize an entire book of the bible.  As I’ve been slowly recovering the sacredness of words this past year, my love of scripture has been rekindled. Encouraged by Ann Voscamp at A Holy Experience to create a memory book, and then catching Peterson’s own love for Ephesians, I started last week.

Memorizing does not take much daily time–20 minutes of re-reading the verses each day is enough to let the verses sink in deeply. And, memorizing gives me permission (and that is key!) to spend a week on the same verses, rather than move to new ones each day.  The focus is now on the verses, not on the scripture reading plan!

Memorizing is also a natural partner to the ancient Christian practice of lectio divina (Latin for divine reading), a centuries old way of reading and praying scripture (here is an intro). The movements of lectio divina are often described as a meal: reading the verses is eating, meditating on them is chewing, praying them is digestion, and contemplating them is that lovely full feeling after a good meal–and the words (the Word) are now nourishing our very being. Memorizing fits well into the reading stage and is closer to what Christians would have done in earlier times.

If you are interested in making your own memory book, an example is here. Here is a lovely reflection on memorization as well as lots of suggestions.

If you’ve never memorized scripture, then start with a verse or two (and see how easy it is!)  Here is a great musical version of Philippians 4:6-7. I guarantee you will have the verses memorized by the end of the video!

***

Thankful today for…

“the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us (drenched us!) in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” (Eph 1:3)

Scripture and the written witness of Christians centuries ago to the presence and power of Christ in their lives.

Eugene Peterson’s books and the privilege of this time to immerse myself in them.

A wonderful thanksgiving feast with dear friends.

Wind swept views.

Friendship…over time and experiences and years of conversation, grateful for the knowing and the being known.

My godson Ben.

Worried about the future, a woman stepped out of the campus library into the cold winter darkness. Decisions yet to be made pressed in upon her. Hungry and tired, she waited for the bus in the street lamp’s glare, wearily wondering where God had gone.  She worried at the question as she worried at her frayed sleeve, plucking threads and watching the fabric unravel. Familiar tears prickled at the corners of her eyes.  She clenched her teeth against the ache and shoved her hands in her pockets, roughly setting her thoughts and eyes to look for distant headlights.

That’s when she saw them, on the sidewalk, just at the edge between light and dark:

Paw prints.

Large paw prints, like some gigantic creature only meant for the wilds had stepped through paint and then sprinted into the night.

She half-turned away. It was cold. Late. The tiny lights of a bus appeared in the distance. She imagined supper and bed, warmth and sleep.

Yet a little spark of adventure flickered to life in her heart, a little less weariness weighed down her limbs.

She hardly noticed stepping out from the certainty of the stop, questions stilled by curiosity.

She followed up and around, down and back, street lamps lighting her way, one moment certain she had lost the trail only to find it again further up and further in, until the paw prints finally stopped.

And she stopped, breathing deep from the chase, hope of a deeper magic rising in her heart.

At the end of the trail, scrawled joyfully on the pavement, were two shimmering words from her childhood, catching her up in the story, breaking past all her doubts, filling the ache, until her heart spilled over in laughter and tears and laughter again:

ASLAN LIVES!!

Today I am grateful…

That Christ is risen indeed!

For C.S. Lewis, whom I remember today, and how the Narnia stories still speak to me of The Story, and that children are still reading them.

For the paw prints of God’s guidance: I may not know where following them will take me, but I know Who waits at the end.

For the story kernel, based on Deborah Smith Douglas’ mention of actually finding paw prints on Duke University’s campus and following them to the joyful words.  She writes: “I simply, with all my heart, recognized the transforming truth of the affirmation. Aslan is alive. Resurrection happens. Christ is risen.  In a single leap, Aslan had bounded past the watchful dragons of my mind and all the intervening years to return…Because my whole childhood rose up to greet the Lion, my tenuously sophisticated young-adult self had no defenses against the saving “allelujah!” truth of that moment.” (Weavings, Jan/Feb 1997, 21)

For my young friend, Jack, who has read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on his own for the first time.

And for this morning, like going through the Wardrobe, I look out on a snowy world,

and the feathered friends who eat breakfast with me: