Wisdom from the Woods 1

I love to spend time near water. I'm very fortunate that right behind my house there is a beautiful trail by a river. I love to spend time there, walking by the edge of the river or sitting on a rock watching the water flow by. It immediately calms me down and opens me up to the Spirit. Yesterday was Thursday, my sermon writing day, and enticed by the beautiful weather, I decided to take a pad of paper with me into the woods to write my sermon by the river. Here's a picture of my pad with my foot next to it, sporting the hot pink sneakers I got to run the Bishop's 5K - which is tomorrow! OMG - why did I ever think I could run a race?! If I ever needed the river to calm me down, this would be the week.

Anyway, I found myself doing a lot more contemplating than writing. Writing a sermon by hand is a romantic notion I often think I aspire to (after all, my first and most respected mentor wrote all his sermons by hand, claiming that it gave him the neccesary time and room to really think about what he was saying), but the truth is that I really prefer writing on the computer. I learned to write papers with pen and paper, a stack of index cards and a typewriter, but I've been utterly and completely converted to computer writing. I like the creativity of being able to edit things on the screen, move sentences and paragraphs all around and change things as I go.

But taking my pad of paper out into the woods served my deeper purpose well. It slowed me down. In fact, it slowed me down so much that it was at least three hours before I came out of the woods again. I discovered that I had my camera in my pocket and enjoyed taking lots of pictures of my favorite spots, which I think I'll share here over the next few days. My time in the woods centered me as it always does, and made me wonder, as I always do, why I don't spend time there more often. Oh, and I did come up with at least a basic outline for the sermon...

It is a really healing and rejuvinating thing to put something beautiful into your day, as is finding some time for a little solitude. Whenever I take the time to go down this lovely trail, I am blessed with both at once. Isaiah wrote, "In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength." I couldn't agree more.

Holy Week

The past week has been very, very wet. Soggy, in fact. Depressingly, endlessly rainy and chilly and damp and now our cellar has flooded and smells bad. Holy Week is not a cheerful time. And I'm feeling a physical longing for warmth on my skin - for sun in my eyes. They're predicting lovely weather for the weekend, and if they're right, Easter will truly feel like new life this year. But Holy Week is not letting Easter arrive early. The dafodils that are valiantly blooming in the rain are heavy and sodden, overburdened and stressed. They look like I feel.

While taking a walk during one of the short respites from rain, I saw this crocus trying to bloom by the side of the road. It was coming up in an overgrown area that no one tends to. It's an ugly little area, full of dirty sand and dead leaves, cigarette butts and lots of trash thrown from the windows of passing cars. It's an eyesore, to tell the truth. But there in the midst of all that ugliness this crocus was coming up. It stopped me in my tracks. In an ugly little patch of ground, something of beauty was doing its best to emerge.


On Maundy Thursday we will have a footwashing service. I love this service. Sometimes people are shy about having their feet washed. "My feet are so ugly," they say, or they worry that their feet smell bad. They react like Peter, saying, "You'll never wash my feet." But when Jesus has only one more chance to show his disciples how much he loves them that night in the upper room, he doesn't compliment them on the shine of their hair, the color of their eyes, or how well dressed they are that evening. Instead, he gets down on his knees to lovingly care for his friends' dirty, calloused and stinky feet. Jesus loved the less glamorous parts of people and also the less glamorous parts of society. He liked to break bread, not with winners, but with sinners.

Later that evening, Jesus calls his disciples to love one another as he had loved them. So, if we are to follow the way of Jesus, we must get down on our knees and honor even the ugly, embarassing and fallen parts of each other. We need to accept the ugly, embarssing and fallen parts of ourselves. And we need to believe that God loves us through and through - not just the parts we manage to make pretty. We need to believe that love is present everywhere - not just in the clean, well designed and well ordered parts of the world.

When I'm in search of God, I don't think of looking in ugly abandoned lots first. So when I saw this flower reaching skyward despite the cold rain and its ugly surroundings, I received it as a sign of God's deep love for me, even for my brokenness - even during the darkest days of Holy Week - and as a sign of God's love for all creation - just as it is.