mother's prayer :: holiness for them

Can you take this mother-wretch and make me holy?

Not for my sake, but for theirs?

I can live with my ugliness, but they do not deserve to. 

Take the bitter, the sharp, the crushing, 

and make me sweet, smooth, uplifting. 

There must be grace for this,

grace greater than the gaping hole of my failures.

There must be holiness for this,

holiness purer than my puffed-up self and gnashing flesh.

Holiness for them.

Not for me to spit and polish and show off - 

But for their beauty. 

Only your spit and mud salve can make me see, 

make me clean, make me a fitting funnel for your kindness.

Oh Lord, you who wash our feet,

let me stoop with you awhile. 

Let me not lord over them with my airs,

but serve them with your graces.

Even now you pour the water on my cracks and callouses,

reminding me where the power of authority begins. 

I will lay aside the garment of my false entitlement.

Toe by toe, you make what I have trampled into holy ground. 

Hear the heart’s cry - Not only my feet, but my hands and head as well.

When I am at the end of myself, you can begin, even again. 

Let me love them to your ends. 

~lg

S.D.G.

Do the Juncos Know It's Ash Wednesday?

Do the juncos know it's Ash Wednesday, flitting from willows to crusted snow, seeking the half buried seeds? Their diet is unchanged today, and their winter foraging, their flight and fight for survival, goes on.

And yet, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This I share with all creatures, those who dance in the cerulean heavens and those who seem intent on bringing hell to earth.

I sip my bitter coffee, this small denial, offer it up in fasting and prayer. No sugar. No sweetness on the tongue for forty days. In its absence I remember those who struggle for bread, let alone sugar, who struggle for life in the looming of death, for hope in the heavy drifts of despair.

I am one person, one graced by hope, one surrounded by beauty so myriad I almost feel guilty. I am one who falters on the pilgrim path, all too aware of my own tendencies to sin and selfishness. I am one who wonders how best to spend this life and the inheritance given, how to direct my energies into the howling vacuum of need at my fingertips.

And so I fast. And so I pray. And so I live Lent remembering that all I am is marked by this smudge of a cross, the unlikely mark in which all things must find their definition, in which my own life is defined and made clear, and is made somehow more than the sum of its dust.

The best way I know to reshape this life with all its passions, to order its loves to a fitting end, is through prayer. This is my prayer: form me into a woman who prays, for whom prayer is second gifted nature. For the one who prays seeks the face of God, from whom all blessings flow, from whom love bleeds out to join with human suffering, from whom all creatures live and move and have their being. And in the seeking, perchance to find, perhaps to see - aye, here's the rub! - and in seeing to be seen. For You are El Roi, the God who sees.

And Your gaze is my undoing, and my repentance, and in my repentance my remaking.

Remake me to be worthy of the shape of the cross. Remake me into a fitting vessel of love. Remake me so all my sweetness is found in the beauty of holiness.

Remake me so that in praying for those nearest and those distant I may be formed into your answer. Give me courage to be your arrows, flung into the heart of my aching prayers.

The juncos dash for the seeds, and there is a merry desperation in their movement. One flits, hovers near the window, flings a glance with its shining black eye to my strange indoor world. I suppose it's safer in here. But there are seeds to be had in the snow, with a little digging, and the slow but steady increase of the sun's reach, and the whole free sky.


~lg

Run for Covenant

What I want to say is this: In the face of the bewildering nature of human interaction, there is nothing better than to throw oneself headlong into those relationships defined by covenant. When you want to run for cover, run for covenant. When restlessness calls like the mythical merfolk out beyond the sandbars, don’t waste your time splashing in the tidepools straining to hear more. Turn and run for the hills, to the Mount Zion of your relational landscape. Run to the shelter of timber and hearth before the storm surges up and sweeps you out to sea. Run to the fortress of covenant.

The only true freedom to be had is that of obedience, and the sacred bonds of spoken vows will only chafe unless you are close enough to run together. It is not restriction – it is the place of revelation. It is not limitation – it is the face of love, whose lines can only be traced, caressed, transfigured in the constant whispering of the covenant oath.

Here is grace.

Here is truth, when the tempter’s lies buffet.

Here is trust, when trials should come.

Our original response to original sin is a patchwork cover threaded with shame. And there are days when the old bruised heel still aches along the stony way of life. But even though the path back may be laced with thorns, the healing balm is held by the hands of covenant.

It is the covering for shame.

It is the context for sanctification.

It is the geography whose contours lead to the horizon of hope and whose ridges all rise in ascent to the holy city.

What I want to say is this: Run for the covenant. For Christ Himself will always be found in the relationships He institutes. He is present in the sacramental mystery as King of the mountain. He is its heart. So run for covenant. Run for love. Run for your lives. Run to Christ.

~lg