Daily Dose (Mar 26 – 29)
TUESDAY —
“Do you have any idea who I am?” The man, a passenger, apoplectic with flushed cheeks, pounding the counter, shouting at the airline agent. Everyone in the departure lounge can hear, and is on edge. (Although, a few take out their phones poised for a YouTube worthy video.)
“This will not do,” he harangued. “Do you know who I am? Get your boss down here. I’m going to have your job and I’m going to have their job. Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with?”
The young woman behind the counter didn’t flinch or shout back. Remarkable really. She was, indeed, a non-anxious presence. Instead, she got on the public address system and said, “Ladies and gentlemen in the departure lounge, I need your help. There’s a man at the counter who apparently doesn’t know who he is.”
Lord have mercy, I still laugh every time I remember the young attendant’s wisdom.
And I shake my head, because I know that in different ways, I have “pounded my share of counters.” In other words, I give my identity over (become a prisoner to) an identity that is not my own. Where did Terry go?
This is not surprising in a world where we are encouraged to look for our identity in all the wrong places—the human ego enamored by roles, titles, status (concocted self-images, and yes to brokenness (when life turns left). These identities are not objectively “real,” nor are they my true and deepest self. But the bottom line, I hide the best me. In other words, I lose track of Parker Palmer’s reminder that “our strongest gifts are usually the ones we’re barely aware of possessing.”
No doubt that when our world (or life) feels up in the air, it messes with our belief are about things working smoothly, or in a particular way.
And when they don’t, we wonder (and take to heart), is this who I want to be?
Am I at the mercy of the way others see me?
Passover is on its way (April 22 – 23). One year, Rabbi Ted Falcon reminded me that Jewish tradition translates Mitzrayim, Hebrew for Egypt, as mi tzarim, “from out of the tight places.” Yes. We all meet tight places in our lives, where we find ourselves stuck. But the deeper kind of enslavement is stuckness in an untruthful ego identity.
Gratefully, from the stuckness, there can be rebirth, reawakening, and yes, resurrection.
Rabbi Naomi Levy reminds us, “Finding your way in life is not so much about choosing a direction. It’s about uncovering the voice of the soul, the call that is already imprinted inside you, and then finding the courage to face down your fears and let your true voice be heard. One of my favorite verses from the Song of Songs is when the lover calls out, ‘let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet.’ The ancient rabbis insisted it was God who was speaking those words to each one of us, ‘Let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet.’”
“Our hearts are more capacious than we could have imagined.” (Thank you Rabbi Sharon Brous)
WEDNESDAY —
A visual from several years ago, frequently comes to mind. A national magazine ad sponsored by the Humane Society, looking for homes for homeless pets. A photo of a puppy and kitten—looking up at you from the page. It catches your eye, and your heart. But it’s the affirmation on the top of the ad that sticks, “It’s who owns them that makes them important.”
In this culture of consumption, spectacle and labeling, many things can own us. The list is long. So, it is no surprise that we often, may not feel at home in our own skin.
And here is what is important to us today: we do not set out—on any journey—in order to acquire this identity.
Or this meaning. Or this home. (Knowing on the search, we’re not certain where home is.)
Gratefully, this week, the reminder that love brings us home. In the words of Henri Nouwen, “It means a gradual process of coming home to where we belong and listening there to the voice, which desires our attention. Home is the place where that first love dwells and speaks gently to us.”
Rabbi Naomi Levy’s affirmation for us this week, “Finding your way in life is not so much about choosing a direction. It’s about uncovering the voice of the soul, the call that is already imprinted inside you, and then finding the courage to face down your fears and let your true voice be heard. One of my favorite verses from the Song of Songs is when the lover calls out, ‘let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet.’ The ancient rabbis insisted it was God who was speaking those words to each one of us, ‘Let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet.’”
(My confession; I’ve been reading these words several times a day, just to let it connect with my heart.)
So. During this Easter week, as a reminder and invitation about where our identity is grounded, we hear, and take to heart, the words of John O’Donohue. “On this Easter morning, let us look again at the lives we have been so generously given and let us let fall away the useless baggage that we carry—old pains, old habits, old ways of seeing and feeling—and let us have the courage to begin again.
Life is very short, and we are no sooner here than it is time to depart again, and we should use to the full the time that we still have. We don’t realize all the good we can do. A kind, encouraging word or helping hand can bring many a person through dark valleys in their lives. We weren’t put here to make money or to acquire status or reputation. We were sent here to search for the light of Easter in our hearts, and when we find it we are meant to give it away generously.
May the spirit and light of this Easter morning and the special spirit and light of this abbey at Corcomroe bless us all, watch over us and protect us on our journey, open us from the darkness into the light of peace and hope and transfiguration.” (Dawn Mass Reflections at Corcomroe Abbey, Walking in Wonder)
THURSDAY —
“Finding your way in life is not so much about choosing a direction. It’s about uncovering the voice of the soul, the call that is already imprinted inside you, and then finding the courage to face down your fears and let your true voice be heard. One of my favorite verses from the Song of Songs is when the lover calls out, ‘let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet.’ The ancient rabbis insisted it was God who was speaking those words to each one of us, ‘Let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet.’” Rabbi Naomi Levy
(My confession; I’ve been reading these words several times a day this week, just to let it connect with my heart.)
And here’s the good news: we hear that voice from one another. From our brothers and sisters on the journey.
A life-giving reminder today, Maundy Thursday, the holy day that commemorates the washing of the feet and the Last Supper.
And this, from Diana Butler Bass, did my heart good.
“Jesus loved meals. They knew that. They’d shared so many. Go back through the gospels and see how many of the stories take place at tables, distributing food, or inviting people to supper. Indeed, some have suggested that Jesus primary work was organizing suppers as a way to embody the coming kingdom of God. Throughout his ministry, Jesus welcomed everyone — to the point of contention with his critics — to the table. Tax collectors, sinners, women, Gentiles, the poor, faithful Jews, and ones less so. Jesus was sloppy with supper invitations. He never thought about who would be seated next to whom. He made the disciples crazy with his lax ideas about dinner parties. All he wanted was for everybody to come, to be at the table, and share food and conversation.
‘I think of Jesus,’ wrote theologian Beatrice Bruteau, ‘setting up these Suppers somewhat on the order of the ‘base communities’ of liberation theology.’ Gatherings of the Kingdom of God.
Bruteau continues by quoting Rabbi Kushner on Sabbath meals: And the laughing. The sharing. And the singing. One melody is scarcely spent when another comes forward. We don’t even notice the racket of the children. There is a great holiness in this room. It grows with the sharing. (I take a large ceramic Kiddush cup, fill it with wine, offer it to my wife and then to the man next to me, who) hands it to his wife with the solemn instruction, ‘Here, keep it going.’ And we do. From hand to hand. Drunk from and refilled. Time and time again.
Sabbath. A vision of the kingdom of God. The meal reminds us and continues the promise.
What if Maundy Thursday was that? The Last Supper of the Old World. The last meal under Rome, the last meal under any empire. And it is the First Feast of the Kingdom That Has Come. The first meal of the new age, the world of mutual service, reciprocity, equality, abundance, generosity, and unending thanksgiving. Pass the cup, keep it going, hand to hand, filled and refilled, time after time. This night is the final night of dominion, the end of slavery; and this night is the first night of communion, the beginning of true freedom: ‘I will no longer call you servants but friends.’
This table is the hinge of history. The table is the point. Thursday is the Last Supper and the First Feast. The Holy Thursday Revolution.
Pull up a chair. Bring a friend.”
(Diana Butler Bass, The Cottage)
FRIDAY —
“I think it’s not just relevant, like, but I think it’s actually necessary, because I think that beauty is not a luxury, but I think it ennobles the heart and reminds us of the infinity that is within us,” John O’Donohue wrote. “I always love what Mandela said when he came out — and I was actually in his cell in Robben Island one time, when I was in South Africa. After 27 years in confinement for a wrong you never committed, he turned himself into a huge priest and came out of this sentence, where he said that ‘What we are afraid of is not so much our limitations, but the infinite within us.’ And I think that that is in everybody.”
Yes. Rabbi Naomi Levy’s reminder, “God who was speaking those words to each one of us, ‘Let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet.’”
So, here’s our question. How do we remind one another of the infinity that is within us, when times are tough, dark and hurtful?
And how do we remember, even in the belittling and demanding places, that we can hear and affirm that voice, and with it, walk one another home?
Nelson Mandela served 18 of his 27 years in Robben Island. Margaret Wheatley tells this story of a time that she had the unique privilege of touring Robben Island (now a UNESCO World Heritage Centre).
The tour group stood in a long narrow room that had been used as a prison cell for dozens of freedom fighters. Picture yourself in a space crowded, cramped and barren. The prisoners lived without cots or furniture, cement floors now their beds. The only light entered through narrow windows near the ceiling.
The tour group listened to their guide’s narration. “I was a prisoner in this very room,” the guide tells them. The gravity of his words co-mingles with the cold seeping up through the floor. There is a chill.
The group stares through prison bars, surveys the lifeless cell, and tries to imagine the stories about the suffering from relentless threats and capricious brutality.
The guide pauses, as if remembering, gazing the length of his former cell. Speaking quietly, almost a whisper, he says, “Sometimes, to pass the time here, we taught each other ballroom dancing.”
Okay, when I first read this story, I wasn’t ready for that ending. Even with the gut-wrenching bleakness, I confess to grinning, and then, admiringly, laughing out loud.
Ballroom dancing? A group of demoralized and weary men, beaten down and brutalized, teaching one another to dance. The affirmation of the infinity within. You gotta love it.
“Liberation begins with an awareness that you are worthy of so much more than whatever form your chains have taken today.” Cole Arthur Riley
And I wish to all, a very blessed Easter.
Prayer for our week…
Jesus said that peacemakers
would be known as the children of God.
Not the fear mongers.
Not the authoritarians.
Not the gatekeepers.
Not those who see their religion
as a war against the world.
He said, “blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.”
Wherever there is peace being made
there are the children of God at work.
Rev. Benjamin Cremer
Photo… “Greetings Terry. We found ourselves on the porch looking at clouds in the Rocklin, CA. sky today. So I thought I’d send some for your enjoyment. Love your ministry and enjoy reading it each time. Hope today finds you blessed. Sincerely yours,” Joe Drab…
