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From the Pastor ...
There is a zen teaching I think of often - particularly as each new year begins:
Life is like a river, and in ordinary life we experience it moment by
moment. One moment we are drifting in a lazy current, sun-dappled
and lulled by friendly bird song. Another moment we are thrown
from our raft and immersed - either in pleasure or pain, chaos or
creativity, love or fear. We weather white water rapids. We
clutch our flimsy canoes as we approach a waterfall ... and we
fall. We capsize, we crash, we climb back to safety. We
bruise. We break. We sail. (In Minnesota, we skate and slide and
slip through the ice!) This is life! It is, however, possible to
climb above the river; to stand on a bluff high above, and experience
the river whole, as far as the eye can see. Here it is other than
a sheer wash of moment by moment experience. It has shape: it
bends and winds. See the strength of enduring water, how it
carves a path. See the beauty of the waterfall from the outside,
where rainbows dance and clouds of vapor rise. This is life, too.
It is the habit of New Years to take stock as the calendar flips.
Top Ten television programs present retrospectives. Radio prophets make
predictions. Resolutions run amok. Gyms offer "Start the Year Out Fit"
specials and students promise to buckle down this semester.
What place does this have in a life concerned with spiritual practice?
How do we put our past in order and proceed toward our priorities? When
I look to scripture - a spiritual practice in itself - I find
expressions of the presence of God from a perspective as high and vast
as the bluff mentioned above. Think of the sweeping first creation
story in Genesis, or the voice that speaks from the whirlwind in the
book of Job. These are views that lift us beyond human vision and
connect us to all of creation. And I also see the nativity story
we have just celebrated in Christmas, and the utter specificity of one
infant child, in one manger, under one star - pricked by straw and held
to a mother's breast. We call this child Emmanuel, God with us, as we
try to get at how it is possible that what is holy enters into life and
tangles in mortality, moment by moment; how God's holiness meshed into
life is our salvation.
This is the glory and grace of spiritual practice; to be utterly
present on and in the river that carries us, and to soar high above it
- in vision, or faith, or imagination - to see the shape and the power
of our path.
In this coming year, here is a question to consider: What does it
mean to be made in the image of an everywhere-always present God,
incarnate in the face of a child?
Wild blessings, and Happy New Year!
Chris
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