You are not a decent little cottage.. you are so much more.............

 
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Why Dry Bones Dancing in Samaria?

I loved writing "Walking The Passage," my previous blog.  I loved the journey through vulnerability and learning that I actually wasn't the vulnerable person I thought I was, touching the fact that I calibrated my vulnerability and transparency based on my own comfort levels and was exposed by our Father as the hypocrite at times.

But I loved that journey. Loved touching beyond the culturally relevant terms of vulnerability and transparency and pushing forward to their more true places. I use the term, "love," with tender remembrances of the angst and arguments I had with our Creator as He would say things like, "that, write about that." In hindsight I love the journey I was on... while walking it I loved Him.

 I loved writing to those struggling with mental illness and to those who supported them, I loved writing to those exhausted by the religiosity and pains of modern day ministry, I loved writing to the seers and the dreamers and the imaginators.  I loved writing whimsically and I do believe that will always follow me as will those other topics.

But as things do we outgrow our closets and need to find a different wardrobe. 

I look upon who I was when I started writing WTP and who I have become and am so grateful for the role it has played in my journey.


I was a pile of dry bones for a very long time.  I thought I had awoken only to come to the place of realizing I was still a walking daydream.  Am I awake now? I don't fully know.  But I am stretching and feeling the new sinews that have been placed upon these muscles and I have never felt more breath in me then I do now.  Awake to awake is what I tell myself right now and I am ok with that.....

Why Dancing?

I can't dance.

 I am not coordinated.

 I get embarrassed easily.

People don't think that of me but I do...  But I am physically shy. Not emotionally shy but shy in my body, with my body and the Lord is in the business of changing that up right now and so I have chartered new ground in my life.  I place myself daily into a space where I use my body. Where I recognize that this is something I don't understand, this aspect of having a body, and am curious in my journey as to where God will bring me into understanding His desire in this regard.

As one who had been abused I learned very early and with great skill to extricate myself from my body.. ie, dissociate.  I didn't for the longest time understand, Why the body?" As Ruth Haley Barton, puts brilliantly in Invitation to Solitude and Silence,  " It can be hard and humbling to pay attention to your body, whatever state it is in, because it brings you face to face with your finiteness, your vulnerability. That in itself doesn't seem very relevant to the spiritual life.  You may resist giving any kind of attention to the body because somewhere along the line you have learned to put the spiritual and the physical in separate compartments. You may believe that the spiritual journey takes place in a realm completely separate from the body.  But the truth is that the spiritual journey is taken in a physical body, and there is a very real connection between caring for our body and deepening our relationship with God"

"What a surprise," she goes on to write, "it has been to find that, in the mist of my spiritual journey, I have been forced to face my profound ambivalence about life in a body.  Intent on trying to live up to a misguided spiritual ideal, I had relegated life in the body to some lesser category that warranted very little attention."

So dancing for me is very metaphoric about the reality of trust.

So dancing for me is very metaphoric about the reality of trust.

Will I trust God? Do I trust God?

I've been on this journey, to I have known not where, but I have followed...  I followed when He spoke to enter and touch silence, solitude, REST.. I followed when He asked me to withdraw and followed Him into a secret garden where He wanted me to meet me as He knew me not as I had tried to refashion me....  I followed and remembered how much I loved that He was a dancer.  (Go read the lyrics to one of my favorite songs.) I followed and I discovered beauty and phenomenal grace and mercy, and the largeness of God and the both the smallness and largeness of humanity.  He is the dancer poet gardener.  He is utterly magnificent and He is the best teacher I have ever had.

The Samaria business has been very new and yet it is all He will say to me as I journey into unknown places, He will whisper, laugh, roar..  "Mims, I went to Samaria...  trust me there is much to be found and salvaged there.. GO!"

In realizing He was taking me new places I did what I would normally do, try and create a road map.  With each topic I would quickly go to Amazon.Com and purchase books on the topic, Google search quotes, grope for understanding.  He would thwart my efforts and each time a new book would arrive, He would graciously say, "No," or "please not now.. trust me."

Tonight as I read in Invitation to Solitude and Silence, I wept.  I wept.. because again very deliberately He showed me how He has been leading, teaching and instructing me... Passage after passage I would read words as if they were jumping up from pages of my own journal.  And my soul exhaled and exclaimed, "You are God! You are leading me."  The understanding of having asked for bread He would not give me a stone landed deep, and trust sunk ever deeper.

My Samarias will not be yours.. But they are places I journey where the religious crowds of the day say things like, "we don't go there," "we don't touch that," (that being a human being at times), "we don't ____________"

My Samarias are the places where religious fear and the hidden agenda of  spiritual superiority expresses that the "real" people of faith don't travel to such a place or do such a thing. 

So I am dancing upon my own fears and treading at time upon ground I wouldn't necessarily have found on my own, but my Lord has beckoned me to follow Him to the ends of the earth.. and that includes all the Samarias.

I didn't outgrow Walking the Passage per se, as much as I grew into a new place... a new passage that for now needed a new space..............  follow me here and like this blog and journey with me as we dance our way with the Lord of the Dance.  The light is increasing upon the way and the door is wide open for discovery.. Perfect love is casting out fear and bringing forth quite the journey.

I don't know...

My heart feels grief and sorrow at times fills my eyes. The steps don't feel laborsome though. They feel magnetic.  The pull forward towards more... towards Him.  It is away from the known, the safe, that which has been and it is a journey into an unknowning and an unchartered place.

I am so utterly reminded of Thomas Merton's prayer and my dear Episcopal priest friend who has read it to me often.

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

I love when we sit in his office and converse on all things transitional.  And I love when he has pulled out the little card that sits upon his desk and reads this prayer to me, over me, into me... And we sit in silence as the words echo into the recesses of my being.  

But I believe  that the desire to please you does  in fact please you.  

I let those words sit upon my being and bring their peace.  It is reminiscent of my own daily prayer/ pleas of asking Holy Spirit to lead me into all truth.  

The answers to those prayers aren't taking me where I thought or anticipated they would.  At times they have led me down paths that feel quite opposite to the directions I would take on my own.  

So I check myself throughout each day.

Pray to Holy Spirit again and cling to the reality that I must believe His capacity to lead me is greater than any power existing that could deceive me.  Including self and religion.

I daily examin my steps.  Ignatian tradition has taught me well. And upon examining the infantile fruit, trying to peer through soil at baby seeds and seedlings that have yet to sprout, I feel different.  Empowered. More like Him.  Less full of religious fear and more full of holy awe and reverence.

I want to see Christ as He is, undressed from the imposed Westernization of who He was and is and what the ideas of what a follower of Him looks like.  

In His own time He was called everything from insane to demonic.. accused (accurately) of consorting with all the wrong types of people and doing all sorts of inappropriate things.  In the end He would not live up to but far exceed everybody's thoughts of who He was. 

I do not desire to be wise in my own eyes just His.  Childlike exploration. His wisdom is imploring me and pulling me into Him. Into higher places that are full of wonder and beauty and a majestic nature that knows no boundaries. 

I long to discover Him ever deeper... It isn't that the deep darknesses of Moses or the unknowing isn't terrifying at times, it's just that I am more terrified of not taking the journey. I am more terrified of who or what I would become without the pilgrimage into the deepest darknesses of our Lord.

I can't or don't want to remember who I was even upon the more recent of yesterdays, for each day pulls me in closer, deeper...and each day I find myself both more and less afraid.  

I don't know and find myself frightened often at the bends in the path.. then He reminds me of Samaria (it His favorite thing to recall to my mind.. He went to the places He was not supposed to go.. that no good Jew would go.. That no rabbi would go...  He does remind me of that daily these days and seemingly delights in doing so.)  He talks to me about the lepers, those healed upon the sabbath, tables being toppled, women touching His cloak, loving Matthew, the tax-collector.  He talks to me about Peter's vision and the removal of unclean towards any food.  He reminds me of the angst felt over the removal of circumcision for an entrance and prerequisite into salvation and faith. 

He reminds me of the road He walked and how the religious judged Him voraciously and then He reminds me that it was for freedom that He came and to show us all the very heart of the Father...

And then that is all I need...  And my prayer, even if through trembling lips, becomes .. May I do the same in my lifetime....

From ghetto to garden..... Let's be the WE

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”

― Søren Kierkegaard


 I have lived in ghettos.
Not the actual ones that reside within the homelands of our cities but ghetto is still the term that describes most perfectly.
Draw upon that image. Pause. Think. Picture.

Ghetto

Close your eyes. Let the words come in... Let the images come...



























It is good for me to reminisce.

It is good for me to think upon such things...

But what am I talking about...

I have not ever lived in an actual ghetto.  I have never had to touch the realities of danger or fear or poverty that come with such a life.  I have never had to lived in apartments where the wind howls in during the winter and the steam of the hot Summer days equate to violence.  I have never had to live in a physical ghetto.  I have chosen in the past to live in spiritual ones and there is truly comparisons beyond comparisons to be made.

I am not talking about interior places either.  These are actually places where we, as Christians, reside more than naught.  The ghettos of our specific denominations or non-denominations, the ghettos of our faith that scream be afraid.. don't touch.. don't look.. don't go....

The things I have heard as I have come to faith and spent decades in the church  .. we do it this way, we don't do that, we don't go there, they have it wrong...
The "they's," the "us's" the "DNA" comments that have even come out of my own mouth...

I would get glimpses to step away but then be pulled back, allured by the sense of belonging that it granted to be a part of an "us."

I remember once saying to someone who was about to plant a church within one such ghetto that I had lived within, that the things that empowered this person to step into the future would be the very things that were not exactly the "DNA," of the ghetto. Unbeknown to me the person had just come from a meeting where he had been told that they were concerned he wasn't of their ghetto enough.

Now I just shake my head.  Now I just grieve for my own participation within all that stupidity.  And the grief calls me forth to find a more excellent way.

A garden has fruit. A garden has vegetables. A garden has color.  A garden has variation.  A garden has life and growth and hope. It has its own weeds and manure of a different sort. Sadly there is no utopia.  But I would  chose a garden over a ghetto.

We know nothing of our Lord when we act more like the Pharisees he held contempt for; when we won't go into Samaria, when we don't touch the lepers, the tax collectors, the prostitutes.When the Protestants remain ignorant of their Catholic brothers and sisters. When non-denominational critique main line brothers and sisters.  When we in our ignorance think ourselves wise and we step away from today Zachesus'.  It's to their houses we are called to go, regardless of which "ghetto," we come from and where they reside.

I want to have the lepers, the women, the tax-collectors... I want to be where they are...

Think again. Close your eyes. Picture all you know or think you know of a ghetto.  What aspects of your faith communities operate as such?  Where is there poverty of belief? Of practice? Of love? Of cooperation? Where do we risk our sacred cows? Where do we challenge long held practices? Where do we ask the hard questions of ourselves and our beliefs?

I was saved by a visitation.  I can say like Paul in Galatians; "for I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ." (Galatians 1:12)  I believed nothing and yet out of desperation opened my  mouth to pray to an unknown deity.  He soundly introduced Himself that day... with light and presence and quite the display.  I knew five things that day... He shared that He indeed was God, that He had to do with Jesus Christ, the Cross, and the Bible and He was going to lead me somewhere where He would teach me more about Himself.  That was what was important for Him for me to know in those very first moments.  He does indeed exist.  His name and identity will be found in Jesus Christ. The cross is of utmost importance to Him as is His Word.  And more than anything He promised to lead me.  That is His job after all.. One of Holy Spirit's main tasks in this world is to lead us into all truth.

I didn't know what I didn't know in those days.  I would learn soon enough.

But what I have learned through 24 years and what I return to is mercy, justice and humility. There is a language we can all speak.  There is spiritual truth that reverberates throughout creation.  We must learn that language.

Jesus came and He touched those who the religious said should not be touched, those that would make Him unclean would touch Him.. He walked into places where who He was was questioned because He sat with those He sat with....  He overturned privately held tables that had been placed in His Father's home.

I don't know where or what my journey will comprise of... If asked even weeks ago about places I step into now I wouldn't have known what to answer...  But the quote that began all of this won't leave me alone...

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

I will lose my footing but I can not but lose myself except to Christ and more often then nought I have lost it to man's opinions and thoughts.  I lay down my life  and in that I chose to trust that His capacity to lead me is greater than anything else would be to deceive me....

I am willing to lose my way and my footing in the garden as to never live in the ghettos of men ever again.... the poverty of that mentality left me frail and weak and vulnerable.  He came for freedom, chastising those who would impinge upon the freedom of others.  He granted us free will to choose or not choose, and to explore and to create and to be like Him.  He did not grasp equality with His Father but became a servant for all that His Spirit would fall upon all.....

There is a way of life and liberty that honors Him and to that discovery I will lose myself... I will dwell in the garden of His hope and His life and His joy and His ways that are higher and more magnificent then anything we could think or imagine.....  He is so much bigger.. He is so much richer.. He is so much kinder than our narrow ghetto like ideologies.   His priestly prayer at the end of His life cried forth His greatest desire that we would be one as He and the Father are one... To that end I journey away from the confines of "us," and "them."  I hunger to find the WE... and I know that it too is bigger and brighter and more precious than anything I have ever thought or imagined....

Looking Forward to the 29th...............

I first saw it listed on Facebook...
It drew me even then...
And now.. well, now I wait for the 29th and the full release...

When I first heard it I thought of a friend of mine and then I thought of lots of friends of mine....  A friend had had a picture of herself living in a bird cage but the door was open but within the cage she still resided.  When I heard this song I thought of that image and burst into tears and intercession and laughter and joy and as weeping and laughing kissed, I thought of the freedom that would come to so many from this song and I rejoiced....

I thought of all the birds flying free ...
All the birds flying out of cages...
I thought of all the dry bones dancing....

And I would eventually realize that the song of dry bones dancing is one that I want to play and replay over and over and over again... To all the daughters and sons of our God who need to take flight and arise from the valley....

Misty Edwards is coming out with a new album on the 29th and this song Little Bird has captured my heart and set it free...

LYRICS

Little girl, little girl with the big round eyes
Little bird, little bird, one day you’ll fly
A breathtaking flight of life you’ll fly
Then little bird, little bird, you will die

Because life, life is a vapor
But the brevity is what makes it a treasure
So feel it all like a love letter
To the One you will live with forever
His eye is on the sparrow
His eye is on you

What then, what then when it’s all over?
Little bones, little bones the dust will cover
Little spirit, little spirit you’ll live on
With the soul of the bird that goes on and on
Then little bones, little bones
You will rise and little girl, little girl
You will fly
Fly


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqkOd8TOfcM

And the keys upon my laptop are singing again.....

Days turned to weeks and weeks to months...

In a corner it just laid...

When I write my laptop becomes my piano.  I close my eyes. I place my fingers upon the keys.  I breath and I go.  I let go.  But it changed....

It changed and I couldn't touch the keys that once had held the vibrations and symphonies of words for me.

Was it losing her that silenced my voice?
Was it losing her ? In losing her did I lose my song?

Was it losing her that once again had me open my eyes and see deeper? Longer?
Was it losing her that took my breath away?
Was it losing her?


I had been saying for a while that there was so much I couldn't do anymore. Did it really matter?  I didn't want to live in the negative and so I lived feeling like I was dangling, clinging desperately to a trapeze bar suspended in mid air blind to what lay before me.

I couldn't see...  It was as if the thickest of fog had settled in and I couldn't touch the next step.  But the problem wasn't some proverbial fog.  It was in seeing I didn't want to see.  Without understanding I had allowed the fog to come because for it to dissipate would mean decisions, choices... forward movement that I wasn't yet ready to touch.

I was living Matthew 13:12-17.

For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says,

‘You will keep on hearing, but will not understand;
You will keep on seeing, but will not perceive;
For the heart of this people has become dull,
With their ears they scarcely hear,
And they have closed their eyes,
Otherwise they would see with their eyes,
Hear with their ears,
And understand with their heart and return,
And I would heal them.’

But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. For truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.

I was no different then the man at the pool of Bethsiada.  The age old question.. Do you want to be made well?

There is a cost to hearing.  There is a cost to seeing.  There is a cost to knowing and having understanding.  The place I found myself was at the brink.  The place of no return.  The place when once you see you can not pretend to have not seen.  I invited fog unknowingly, unconsciously...  I invited the fog because of the clarity of the new day was hard to touch. Frightened I chose stupidity for a moment. Ignorance instead of enlightenment. Safety instead of faith.

Except there was a song whose melodies saturated past the thickening atmosphere that beckoned me to hear its alluring melody.  It was full of life... It was full of breath... It was full of the sounds of the Lord. Full of the sounds of perfected love that know how to blow the fogs of fear away.

It was the songs of Ezekiel calling forth dry bones to walk again. "Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they come to life."  Upon the air movement.  Upon the atmosphere a wind.  And I could no longer resist the pull of that which resided beyond the fog.

What?

....  That is the question.....

And now it is time to discover...  

I have come from this and this has haunted my dreams and quenched my heart.... This is the picture of Westernized ministry that I have not been able to shed.  The consumption of resources of men and women; their lives, their livelihoods, their marriages, their children, their friends, their very own lives at times....  and men and women paying any price not of the Lord but of lords and allowing men to lord over at any cost for scrap at tables.  Children of God being no more then dogs begging for a seat at a table.

But this is not the story I am destined to tell any longer....

The choice bore down upon me to reach beyond the fog and touch and see that which lay in the distance.  The songs to do so were beautiful and provoking.  The songs were full of life and energy.  The melodies showed my heart the grave and cage that the fog was and beseeched me to touch the reality that it was for freedom not slavery that He came.

So I know not the way but I know The Way.  And He who is called the Light has also called me the light and there is no more hiding.

The terrain of the valley has changed.  No longer do I see the bloodied bodies of those I know spread out upon the fields of religion and ministry.  Their blood soaking the ground and making it red. 

I have tasted and seen beyond the fog and am learning the songs of the new thing.... They are vibrant and tenacious and beautiful and full of life.... When dry bones arise the chorus they sing is an exceedingly strong and penetrating and some what haunting and challenging melody.  For those who have been brought back to life have touched a death that they no longer can allow to enslave them... Theirs is the song of freedom...  

And the keys upon my laptop are singing again............