Tag Archives: Soul Care

A Candlelit Path

19 Monday Apr 2010

Posted by in Prayer, Soul Care

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“Give me a candle of the Spirit, O God,
as I go down into the deep of my own being.
Show me the hidden things.
Take me down to the spring of my life,
and tell me my nature and my name.
Give me freedom to grow so that I may become my true self –
the fulfillment of the seed which you planted in me at my making.
Out of the deep, I cry unto thee, O God.”   Amen
— George Appleton

Sitting on a hard plastic chair that night, in the basement of St. Luke’s Methodist Church, I did not know that I had ‘signed up’ to uncover my true self.    I had no particular interest in that bit of fact-finding.   My purpose was much simpler:  I came to pray.  That’s all.  I came to pray and to meet people who also desired nothing more than to pray.

As with most of everyday life, we get more or less than we bargain for.  In my experience as a student at HeartPaths Spirituality Centre, I received more.   It began that first night, reciting that first printed prayer of George Appleton’s with a few others — a small community of students and two leaders — from the first of many handouts I would come to receive as a student at HeartPaths.

Every HeartPaths session begins by lighting a candle.  The lit candle symbolizes the light of God.   Candlelight shimmers soft and invites confidences.  Never is it harsh and circling like a  penetrating searchlight.   Instead, everyone and everything looks better in candlelight.

Candlelight slows life down.  When traveling by candlelight, we tread carefully.  Not every bump in the road is illuminated.  It requires us to sometimes retrace our steps for a missed turn.  Like life itself, candlelight will not clearly define answers  or destinations.  Yet, candlelight bids us forward into the darkness.  As we step in, questions previously covered by darkness grow into recognizable shapes of answers and if not destinations, that at least rest stops along the way.

I have not arrived at my destination of becoming my true self.   The prayer I recited that first night in class is not yet fully answered.  Paradoxically, the more I know about myself, the more I find there is to know.  Does anyone ever arrive at Xanadu?

Yet, with the help of prayer by candlelight, I do know myself better than I did four years ago.  I’ve uncovered both warts and beauty spots.  And in the topsy-turvy truth of life, traits I once viewed as warts I’ve since come to know as beauty spots — and yes, some of those areas I once called beauty spots I’ve found to be nothing more than worldly warts.   But here, I get ahead of myself, as I am apt to do.

Backing up to the start, I see that self-knowledge (and self-acceptance) is where true growth begins.  And as it happens, along the way, I’ve learned that prayer is no more than being yourself before God.

Fancy that.  Looks like I got exactly what I signed up for.  And more.  In worldly terms, this candlelit path was a true bargain.

Irish Sensibility

17 Saturday Apr 2010

Posted by in In the Garden, Life at Home, Soul Care, The Great Outdoors

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I listen to wet tires whoosh down Walker Avenue.  I hear soft rain piddle its tune upon wet stone.  They are bits of grace,  from a soft Irish rain falling outside my window.

A rain like this always soothes my spirit.  It makes me drowsy.  It makes me long for the comfort of my soft bed.  And even though it’s on the cool side — mid-fifties, I think  —  I’m going to crack my bedside window and cuddle up in warm blankets.

It has been a dry Spring.  The parched dirt must be quenching its thirst with this lovely Irish blessing.  The garden glistens like glass.  Twenty-four hours of straight rain has made my garden happy and plump with wet green.

What is it about a gentle rain that fills me with hope?  It makes me think baptism.  I feel wash cleaned.  Fresh.  The rain makes all things new.  The rain is holy, like that dove that swept down from heaven, all those years ago.

Perhaps a small drop will cure my spider bite scar, that even a week later, is still warm and tender with fever.  Or better yet, maybe it could wipe away Daddy’s pneumonia.  The nurse is worried about “Pappy.”  That’s her name for my father — who in younger days, was a more respectful ‘Mr. Pappas.’

Pappy, indeed.  The nurse says it’s hard for the elderly to bounce back.  Is she trying to prepare me?  Or herself?  I should have told her, if anyone can bounce back, my father can.  Doesn’t that sound just like a child, bragging about what her daddy can do?

Do raindrops taste as good as when I was a child?  Back then, I didn’t care whether I stayed dry or got wet.  Before I ‘got’  better sense, I would turn my small face up to the sky.  Open my mouth.  Wide.   Wider.   And catch raindrops with my tongue.   Sweet success.

I was  a young thirsty flower with no need for doctors or tongue depressors to tell me to say “Ahh.”  I knew good medicine when it hit me in the face.

Prescribed Meditations

08 Thursday Apr 2010

Posted by in Prayer, Soul Care

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Blue Lobelia in Cobalt Blue

Ever so often I stumble upon truth.

I’m surprised when it happens.  Even when it comes during my normally prescribed meeting time with God.

Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I always expect truth when something of God is let loose in my life.  But it’s when truth comes veiled as a ready response to questions I’ve just posed that I grow still with shock, as if I’ve just been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.

Just a few days ago, I wrote of my tendency to focus more of questions of doing.  Not being.   For “no matter how much time we devote toward self-knowledge, for now, we must be content to scratch the surface…”

What I didn’t know then, was that an answer I wasn’t looking for would come bounding into my world this morning, set loose long ago by Frederick Buechner’s pen, as it scratched out these few words on paper:

“…I believe that in sibilants life is trying to tell us something.  The trees, ghosts, dreams, faces, the waking up and eating and working of life, are trying to tell us something, to take us somewhere.  If this is above all a Christ-making universe, then the place where we are being taken is the place where the silk purse in finally made out of the sow’s ear, and the word that life is trying to speak to us is that little by little, squealing and snuffling all the way, a pig either starts turning into at least the first primal porcine version of a hero, or else is put out of his piggish misery.  At the heart of reality — who would have guessed it?– there is room for dying and being born again.”

It was Buechner’s use of the phrases “sow’s ear “and “silk purses” that first snagged my attention.  For as I acknowledged a few days ago, taking on sow’s ear projects with the hope of turning them into a proverbial silk purse has always been part of who I am.

Buechner scratchings invited me to scratch the surface of my own truth, to see that my doings, my deepest desires, reflect what I most long to become myself.  It’s not just the untended gardens or untended houses that I wish to make silk purses.  Underneath all the doings, it’s me that wishes  to become the silk purse.  I want the sow’s ear part of me to die.  And like the renewal that comes with Spring and Easter, I wish to be born again as a silk purse.

It’s ironic that today’s prescribed med, from Buechner’s Listen to Your Life, was appropriately titled:  Trying to Tell Us Something.