God is Love -- A Pentecost Proclamation

God is love, we say.


When I was a child, I was very confused by that assertion. My teachers believed in hell and in the Day of Judgment on which Christ, sitting on his throne in heaven, would separate good people from bad people and condemn the latter to an eternity of torture. There was no way I would ever be one of the good people, and so I was doomed. And what was loving about a God who would throw me into the fire as soon as I died? Perhaps he was righteous – certainly he was pure – but he was not loving by my way of reckoning it.

I was also confused by the fact that God’s love did not keep terrible things from happening. I and the people around me suffered, and God allowed this to happen. I decided that either God was a wimp or that he didn’t care all that much about what happened to me.

Little did I know that God was present in all the moments of my childhood as a goad to learning and to speaking the truth to myself and others. Little did I know that some of the very things that made me feel like a bad person were prompted by the whispers of God in my heart.  Little did I know that, while the Day of Judgment is a metaphor and hell is not a literal place, a fiery reckoning is part of the walk with Jesus, every single day. This reckoning happens when we look dispassionately, with the eye of truth, on our daily antics, and strive to live as Christ's people in the world.

Now that I’m almost 60, I understand that God’s love is not, in the language of psychologist Carl Rogers, Unconditional Positive Regard. Yes, God accepts me where I am and never gives up on me. We wouldn’t still be in relationship if that were not true. But God’s love is fierce and demanding. It strips away everything I might dream or imagine about myself, down to my essence, and only then does it speak to me, and only to that essence. And then, in a still, small voice, that love begins to make demands.

God’s love feels to me sometimes like the lion’s love for its prey. Have you ever seen this on nature videos, how the lion takes the gazelle in its teeth, caressing it like a lover? God’s hunger for me is like that.

And God is relentless. God will not take no for an answer. God waits outside every door I close. Open the door a tiny crack and suddenly God is inside, working transformation on me.

I have discovered that I was made for this relationship. I was made for following the erratic promptings of the Holy One in my heart. I was made to sing praises and make thanksgivings. I was made to worship, and, in my own unique way, to serve. Living as I was created to live makes me happy as nothing else can.

God is love all right.

Practical Tools: Forgiving

Today's post is a simple offering of tools.  I hope you find it helpful.

Forgiving is central to our life with God in community.  It is a difficult task, actually impossible without the help of our relationship with the Holy.  How can making art help?  Here's a concrete way.

The person who wrongs us takes something from us. They become indebted to us through the harm they have done. That's why we talk about retaliating as “getting even”.

What is the shape of the indebtedness? What does it look like? Perhaps it is as tangible as the TV they broke through carelessness. Often it is more nebulous: the lost sense of well being and safety; the innocence stolen; the self esteem destroyed. Write about, draw or paint the thing stolen. What did it mean and what does its loss mean?  What does it look like, feel like, to you?

Forgiving is releasing the person who harmed us from their debt to us. Now that you have a concrete item or set of items representing the debt, think of some gesture or ritual that will allow you to release the person responsible. The gesture might be cutting the metaphorical string that binds the perpetrator of harm to the debt. The ritual might be that you  hold the object up and saying three times, “(Name), I release you.”

It’s important in doing this ritual that you are ready to do it. That way it can be a truly meaningful act. Are you ready to let the other person walk away scott free? Are you ready to let go of him/her and that debt of theirs? God is witness; and your connection with the Holy will be what allows you to really cut the ties.

Even so, you may have to do it more than once.  That's okay.

Here is what not to do: Do not throw away or tear up or in some other way get rid of the object representing the debt. Whether it’s the broken TV or the loss of innocence, self-esteem, or well being, you are now responsible for it. It’s now in your hands. What will you do? Maybe it needs to be grieved and let go. Maybe it needs to be repaired and restored. These are separate actions from forgiving. They are what you need to do with your object next.

A couple of other things that are separate issues from forgiveness: Are you in harm’s way with the person you have forgiven? It is not part of forgiveness to leave yourself open to future damage. Are you protecting that person from justice? Forgiving doesn’t mean lying or covering up wrongs. Instead it means seeing the transgressions clearly, admitting them forthrightly. You don’t have to be complicit in a crime in order to forgive. Neither do you have to stay in a dangerous situation.

I hope you’ll tell me about your experiences with forgiving and about how this exercise goes. Blessings on your journey.

Variation on a Theme

In my dream I am with a little animal no bigger than the top joint of my finger, a cute little bunny-like creature with black furless ears that curl back over his shoulders. He hops into mischief at every turn, and I try to cage him -- for his safety and my peace of mind, I tell myself. But he is a shape shifter, and all my best efforts fail. He grows tiny and sneaks through the cracks or he grows large and pushes off the lids. By the end of the dream I am completely exhausted, and I realize it cannot be done. I climb into waking consciousness realizing I cannot contain him.

Later I find him again in the imaginal realm. He is sitting on the back of my living room sofa staring up toward the ceiling. He gathers himself, ready to spring away as I draw near.

I hold still. "Why must you be so hasty?" I ask. "I am only trying to keep you safe."

Suddenly roots grow from his feet, tearing apart my sofa and the floor beneath it -- muscle roots with long greedy tendrils. They thrust into the ground beneath my crawl space, plunging deep. A tree grows up from them, a great bark-knotted trunk pushing aside tables and lamps as it expands into the living room, growing branches that rip through my ceiling and the roof above and then divide and replicate in a million tiny fingers which each grows a leaf -- two or three leaves -- as I watch. A vast green canopy expands over my broken home.

I am speechless, gaping. It dawns on me that what I am seeing is very beautiful.

The leaves flutter, puff out a cloud of blue and yellow butterflies.

"Ok," I finally manage, "I guess you don't really need anybody to keep you safe."

The tree grows a pair of eyes, close to the ground. They glitter in the early morning light. They become great crystals. I see myself reflected in a thousand facets, and in each reflection I am anxious and worrying.

At first I am offended. But -- what can I say? "Yes," I acknowledge. "That is me."

The tree grows branches that reach for me. It's leaves fill the morning with wind song. I allow myself to be carried up into the bright dance of greens and blues, yellows and russets. I feel myself unraveling. Instinctively I reach to hold my atoms together. "Not again," I moan. Leaf songs soothe me. I grow blind with the chili pepper taste of sunlight on my tongue. I float into darkness and timelessness.

Later I am lying on my side on what is left of the floor in my living room. The tree is gone. The tiny shape shifter sits in front of me, where I can see him without moving.

"I don't get it," I tell him. "Are you saying I still cannot plan my life, tie anything down?"

He shows me movies, dozens of people making decisions. In each case something important that they could not know about happens just after they have chosen a course of action. In each case it would have been so much better -- for them or for the world -- had they not yet decided. In each case avenues are closed off, potentials snuffed out.

I groan. "That is the nature of human existence. That ALWAYS happens."

He watches me, nose twitching.

I sigh. Once again I give in. "Ok." And then, "How will I know?"

I will know. Suddenly that is the one thing I am most certain of: I will know.

My Shaman

Recently I did a collage, a window to the inner realm. As it took shape I began to realize it was revealing to me a very special advocate alive in my soul -- someone brand new and yet as familiar as sunlight or a pine-scented breeze. In the image sits an elder, a gentle man leaning on a cane, eyes closed, listening intently to the voice of Spirit. He wears a headdress of feathers and roses. He is a Shaman. In the image his world is hearth fire and new life, microscopic seeds and darkness, a passageway into the depths of the psyche, and the far cold reach of northern mountain vastness.

This morning, longing to be with him, I reach into the imaginal realm. I find myself walking through a high alpine meadow, lush with blazing verdent grasses and wildflowers of every imaginable color, toward a one room log cabin squatting at the crest of a little hill. More grasses and flowers adorn the roof of this dwelling, which is sod over pine poles and which sports a dented, rust-spattered stove pipe puffing smoke gently into the sunrise. As I draw near I can see that a lovely grey Pendleton blanket covers the doorway. A gnarled hand draws it aside, and my Shaman steps out.

His hair is startlingly white, like Rosean's. He wears roses tucked behind an ear and a pink shirt with red polka dots, jarring to look at. He smiles as he draws in a breath of cool mountain air, smiles even more broadly as his gaze turns to me. I see he has his cane hooked over an arm and that he wears soft leather slippers and soft denim jeans.

He looks a question out of his gentle brown eyes. I realize we already know one another very well. It comes to me that I've always called him grandpa.

"I am sad today, grandpa," I tell him, speaking the words of the lump that is in my throat. "I miss my mum."

He nods. His face is all easy light, all kindness. "She has not done well by you, TF," he says. I realize he has always called me this: "TF". I think I might even remember why.

"I think I have missed her since I was very little," I tell him. "I am lonely with the missing of her. I don't fit anywhere. I am a wind howling at the edges of houses, lifting roof tiles and bits of siding, desperate to be inside."

He has been holding a pelt, a soft animal skin, white with brown highlights. He brushes it with his fingers and puts it down gently on the ground. It fills out as I watch, becoming a living rabbit, and instantly streaks off across the meadow, ears laid back and hindquarters pumping. Startled, I watch it's little cotton-swab tail disappear into a clump of bushes.

He chuckles softly. "You have a bit of the wolf in you this morning. You've scared my bunny." My eyebrows go up, but I don't ask. He puts his arm across my shoulders and draws me in against his side. I feel myself relax. "Walk with me a bit," he says.

Suddenly we are at the edge of a vast lake. White birds accompany us as we stroll near the shore line across wet sand full of puddles in which minnows swarm. Mist is rising from the surface of the water and my grief rises with it like oily black smoke. A voice in my heart whispers in time to our foot falls, "Letting go, letting go, letting go, all the way down." The tension in my throat eases a little.

We walk for a long time. Then we stop. My Shaman draws a circle around me in the sand with his cane. "You are beloved," he tells me, and steps back a step.

I feel myself dissolve, become one with the lake. I am fluid of many layers, many colors, many temperatures. Fish swim in my depths. Ducks and cormorants ride on my surface. I am water droplets skating down the air currents, reflecting light. I am tiny bits of breathing liquid in which small minnows swim. All life emerges from me. All life returns to me. I feel my arms and legs dissolve, my nose and face and ears fall away. My belly is everywhere. My eyes see from a thousand perspectives.

In my depths is a heartbeat. For a long time I listen to it without thinking. Then I realize it is the heartbeat of the Mother. It is the heartbeat of Motherly love. I feel it in me and through me. It is a part of me, as intrinsic to me as my own heartbeat, my own breath. "Love, love," it pulses, sending me nutrients along its pathways.

I am back again in a dream landscape from many years ago. A tall woman has grabbed me by the back of the neck and is pouring water into the top of my head. I look down at my chest and see the water sloshing around inside me, as though I were a glass container. "You are my aquarium," the tall woman tells me. I have been her aquarium. But something is required of me in this moment.

This is God. This is the Mother God. I belong to her completely, always have. "Yes," I pledge to her. "I am your aquarium. With your help."

Things swirl away in a cacophany of color. I come back to myself after many minutes, and I realize that I am once again at my Shaman's lake, and I am kneeling on the sand. He is standing near me, and when he sees I have come back to him he gives me a hand and pulls me to my feet. He pats me in mock solicitude. "Much better," he informs me.

At his cabin later we share a cup of tea and talk about how the afternoon thunder storms will build behind the mountains and water this little meadow on their way to the plains. From time to time I spy a rabbit nosing about in the grasses and I watch appreciatively until it disappears. Around the fourth time this happens I realize I can feel its heartbeat. I can feel its heartbeat while the rabbit is in the meadow, and I can feel it after the rabbit has disappeared. The rabbit's heartbeat courses through my blood. I know where the rabbit is. There is no separation between us, absolutely none at all.

My Shaman smiles at me beautifically and pats me on the back of the hand, spilling a bit of my tea.

The Feather Touch of Joy

It comes to me softly, like the feather touch of joy. I have awakened in the deepest part of the night, body suddenly an oven. Moonlight silvers the leaves outside the bedroom window, making them skitter like minnows in a great black sea. I have emerged from some deep dream -- there is something -- something like a warm room.

My grief has awakened with me, strong in the early morning quiet. I watch it swell. Just so. It is hard work and it makes me feel brittle and tired. But behind it I can feel the prayers of my friends, a weaving of support and love like hands linked all around my soul.


That warm place. I feel it now like a small point of golden light, no bigger than my hope. I chase after it as I lie in the darkness, and suddenly I am inside.

It is not a room. It is somewhere apart from space. It is as though I am held by some mammoth person. I feel his arms around me -- it is a "he" -- protective and comforting. This shocks me back into my quiet nighttime bedroom. It is truly novel; I don't think it has ever happened to me before, not at least that I remember; that a man has held me in this way.

Amazed, I return to my imagination. I am leaning against a huge chest. Arms still hold me and the deep booming beat of a heart is in my ear. Tears leak from my eyes as I recognize that aspect of Father I never knew -- or knew before speech, before abandonment.

Revelation follows, in the way of such moments, in a cascading series of understandings. I realize that The Father can be warm rather than judgmental, that he can claim me as his own. Perhaps this is the attraction in God the Father -- an image of God I've never before appreciated. He stands in a different relationship with me. The Mother offers nurturing, life, dance, connection, the power of holy anger, home and a place to which to return. The Father offers understanding and forgiveness. Having a Father, I suddenly have a place to stand in community -- and that leaves me with much less to do, much less to prove. I have never felt shielded quite like this before.

Behind me a voice rumbles like thunder, "I am proud of you, and pleased with you."

This meets some need in me so basic that I can barely stand it. A hard knot inside me releases. I suddenly realize I am feeling very little -- the little kid in me wide-eyed and totally vulnerable. "If you are just a product of my wishful thinking," I say to the great force behind me, "I will kill you." I recognize the absurdity of this statement but can't think of anything else to promise.

I hear an ozone-creating boom of laughter. "Dream on, bucko," says the huge voice.

I have a feeling that much more will come. For now it is just enough to feel the arms around me and the beat of the heart. I think of my son Mike, how when he was very little he used to lean against me as though I were a deck chair, arms folded behind his head and legs crossed. He'd tell me stories as he reclined there.

I think of sitting in this warm place as though it were a deck chair. I think of leaning back, arms behind my head, and telling stories. Something about how totally comfortable I feel with that image makes me grin. I drift back to sleep from that warm place, that tickling feather touch of joy.

Messenger from the Void

Raven watches me out of his sideways eye, which is black and ringed with gold like a wedding band around the abyss. Today he is Odin’s bird. I plunge into the Void through his dark vision.

There the blue ice ghosts of warriors swarm until I come among them, and then they draw aside to let me go further and alone. No light comes from anywhere. I have no sense of direction other than “on”. “Back” may be the same as “on” for all I know; the doorway seems to have vanished. I can see nothing, in any direction, except blackness. This is strangely restful.

I go “on” until I stop. Then I simply hang in space. No light, no sound – I think of Odin hanging on his tree -- nine days and nine nights until the Universe explodes. I float as though submerged in water. I am neither hot nor cold.

Suddenly light blossoms, gas-flame blue light which appears to be at some distance and which defines a horizon. It rises and cascades, eerie and silent like the Northern Lights. I watch, admiring the beauty. The light never changes color, but it ebbs and flows, dancing like flame.

I watch for a very long time. "I don't understand," I think, "what this has to say to me." Perhaps it has nothing to say to me. Perhaps I am nothing.

Slowly it dawns on me that this is no place for a human being. It is beautiful and restful but empty of human scale and connection. In a moment of extreme panic I realize I do not know the way out. I turn this way and that, but the same view greets me on every side. The icy horizon surrounds me. I try “swimming”, flailing my arms and legs to move through the void. Nothing seems to change. I can’t move that way. Or moving makes no difference, doesn’t get me anywhere.

It occurs I ought to will myself elsewhere. I open my eyes. Now I am out of the realm of imagination and back in the everyday world. But I realize my soul is still in the limbo of the Abyss. My grief seems to have been leached away, but I feel hollow and empty, not healthy. I walk about in the house, but can’t set my mind to any task. I am listless and restless. Everything seems pointless. My creativity has been Voided, as has my energy. I long for my tears.

I decide to call out to the energies of Psyche and beg them to release me. I return to the dark and empty place of my imagination. The Northern Light display has disappeared, and I am again in total darkness.

Hanging there, I reach out. “Raven,” I call first. There is no answer. Nothing changes. I call then for the Mother. Still there is no change. I plead with Coyote, with the Little People, with Baba Yaga the Great Witch. In all cases, nothing changes. These are not the gods of this place. They cannot set me free.

Finally I reach in a direction I haven't tried for a very long time. "Father," I whisper. Sorrow hits me like a silent tidal wave. It spews me out of soundless emptiness and into my studio. I take a breath. Sure enough, I am present once again to myself here and now. Reproachfully I look at the window ledge where Raven has been sitting while he watches me. He is gone. I remain very, very sad.

Church Signs

Last week Rosean and I drove by a church sign that read:

WHY DIDN'T NOAH SWAT THE 2 MOSQUITOES?

Rosean laughed and amended it:

WHY DIDN'T NOAH SWAT THE 2 MOSQUITOES AS HE FLOATED DOWN THE WEST NILE?

What Noah didn't know (ah).

Friday and Saturday morning Rosean and I got up early and went out to Fossil Creek Reservoir with our coffees. (In case you ever need to know, Human Bean opens at 5 a.m.) With binoculars and a rather dated bird book we strolled to one of the bird blinds, sat a bit, strolled to the other blind, sat a bit more. We are not birders; we don't know anything about the culture and protocol of bird watching. We just witness all these little lives out at the Reservoir, each with its passions and trials, desires and attempts at fulfilment, births and endings. Yesterday two scarlet-eyed grebes called to each other in a way that caused my Scorpio partner to opine, "they want to get some." I was skeptical, but sure enough, soon they lifted their bodies and arched their necks in an elegant mating dance, a sort of side by side promenade across the surface of the water. We just loved this dance. We love all the dances, even the ones that make us sad.

I'm sure there are dozens of excellent sermons on the theme of Noah and the mosquitoes. After all, if we didn't have mosquitoes we wouldn't have swallows, those jewel-like darters. We wouldn't have the waterfowl who feast on larvae. In a terrible domino effect we'd lose entire ecosystems -- maybe the entire biosphere. Yet, in spite of our understanding of this fact, if it were entirely up to us we really would kill off all the mosquitoes. We'd have some rationale.

And, archetypally, the story of Noah really is wonderful. Imagine building a great hulking boat when you're living on a desert. Imagine waiting 40 years to be vindicated, 40 years before the waters rise. Imagine carrying the seeds of all future life with you on your ark, the craft shaped by your own hands and toil. And amongst the creatures is the mosquito. It works, you know?

But I think of all the little lives at the reservoir, and of the lives surrounding the reservoir in all the little (and not so little) houses, and of the lives in trees and at the edges of lawns. And I think, you know, we're Christian. We should put up one church sign and leave it until all the little plastic letters crumble and fall away, a sign like this:

CAN YOU EVEN F--ING BELIEVE THAT GOD WOULD PUT ON HUMAN FLESH AND LIVE AMONG US?

Or, as Saturday's Saint du Jour (St. Cyril of Alexandria) put it in the little daily meditation booklet Rosean and I read:

THE MOTHER OF GOD CONTAINED THE INFINITE GOD UNDER HER HEART, THE GOD WHOM NO SPACE CAN CONTAIN

Can you believe this message? It's the sort of fact that unravels your socks and sets your hair on fire so you have to get baptized just to put the flames out!