Wednesday, September 24, 2014

A new drive to work



The new job I started last year changed the route I drive to work, with the view of the downtown courthouse dome looming above the trees. Actually, it isn’t the new route at all—I still drive down Walnut before the same left turn on Grimes. Rather, what has changed is haiku.

I’ve been dabbling in haiku for a couple years but the pace has picked up. I see them rolling across the lawn… like dandelion puffs. Well, not our lawn because my partner chemically eliminates them, but other lawns. Maybe I should say, like a leaf rolling across the lawn. Either way, as I have first dabbled, then studied, and taken on a haiku mind, haiku have started happening to me. I don’t so much write them as see them already there, offering themselves to me.

Like the drive to work with the courthouse dome downtown. The haiku call out to me:

two mornings this week
sun flashing off the courthouse
before I turn west

morning’s golden glow
on the courthouse dome downtown
on my drive to work

there above the trees
the browned courthouse dome is perched
the end of summer

But, like I said, it isn’t the drive that has changed at all—but me. There is grace that begs to be noticed on the drive to work. Or in the patient rooms of the hospital where I work. Or the walk to my car after work.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

A Crazy Thing Called Prayer

I haven't written in forever. I half feel like I should say something like, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

I was thinking about prayer tonight at my evening prayer—it’s what I call prayer, anyway… for me. Prayer is something I try to start and end each day with. I know many tend to think that’s over kill but I need it. I don’t know if prayer changes things—but it certainly changes me.

For the longest time after coming out of the closet and leaving my fundamentalist Pentecostal life, I didn’t know what to do with prayer—what to make of it. Wasn’t prayer superstitious and mired in a theology that no longer worked for me? If I wasn’t praying asking for things, what was prayer anyway?

But an oblate is expected to pray and I was called to be an oblate—of that I am very sure but I can write about that more later.

Prayer for me is a time of reflection… and introspection. I read a psalm and then either scripture or some spiritual writing. In the morning I do lectio divina with the reading, asking what word or phrase called out to me; what does this word or words mean to me… for me. In the evening I do examen, asking what event from my day calls out to me, where did I see—or miss seeing—from this day?

But in between the psalm and the reading I started including my concerns, and my joys, too—a colleague’s family, my own family, the Interfaith Winter Homeless Shelter where I volunteer, Bread for the World, etc. I don’t make specific requests. I just bring these and others into my time of being intentional in relationship with the Holy. I just bring them. I’m not expecting hocus pocus.

I don’t know what happens with things we bring into prayer with us. I tend to think speaking these names can cause something cosmically to happen that I don’t understand. Here again, it causes something in me.

As I end each evening prayer, One thing I ask for, and this I seek after, that I may dwell in your Presence all the days of my life, to behold your beauty, and to inquire in You. Amen.