Category: Main blog

I’m Here, I’m Listening

Spoken word poet Amena Brown responds to the question, “How do you know when you’re hearing from God?”

She said, “How do you know when you are hearing from God?”  
I didn’t know how to explain … 
My words never felt so small, so useless, so incapable  

I wanted to say  
Put your hand in the middle of your chest 
Feel the rhythm there 
I wanted to say you will find the holy text in so many places 
On crinkly pages of scripture 
In dusty hymnals 
In the creases of a grandmother’s smile 

God’s ears are here for the babies 
For the immigrant, for the refugee 
For the depressed, for the lonely 
For the dreamers 
The widow, the orphan 
The oppressed and the helpless 
Those about to make a mess or caught in the middle of cleaning one up 
Dirt don’t scare God’s ears 
God is a gardener 
God knows things can’t grow without sun, rain, and soil … 

I want to tell her God is always waiting  
Lingering after the doors close  
And the phone doesn’t ring  
And we are finally alone  
God is always saying  
I love you  
I am here  
Don’t go, stay  
Please  

I try to explain how God is pleading with us  
To trust  
To love  
To listen  
That God’s voice is melody and bass lines and whisper and thunder and grace  

Sometimes when I pray, I think of her  
How the voice of God was lingering in her very question  
How so many of us just like her  
Just like me  
Just like you  
Are still searching  
Still questioning, still doubting  
I know I don’t have all the answers  
I know I never will  
That sometimes the best thing we can do is put our hands in the middle of our chest  
Feel the rhythm there  
Turn down the noise in our minds, in our lives  
And whisper,  
God  
Whatever you want to say  
I’m here  
I’m listening 

Amena Brown, “She said, ‘How do you know when you are hearing from God?’,” in A Rhythm of Prayer: A Collection of Meditations for Renewal, ed. Sarah Bessey (New York: Convergent Books, 2020), 7, 8, 9, 10–11. Used with permission of author. 

Once again, gratitude to sister Amina who posted this on her blog, Love, Harmony & Beauty #134, this week.

Is the soul solid, like iron?

Or is it tender and breakable,

like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?

Who has it, and who doesn’t?

I keep looking around me.

The face of the moose is as sad

as the face of Jesus.

The swan opens her white wings slowly.

In the fall, the black bear

carries leaves into the darkness.

One question leads to another.

Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?

Like the eye of a hummingbird?

Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?

Why should I have it, and not the anteater who loves her children?

Why should I have it, and not the camel?

Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?

What about the blue iris?

What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?

What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?

What about the grass?  

~  Mary Oliver

Gratitude to FR Richard Rohr and the Center for Action and Contemplation. This meditation was posted in their most recent Daily Meditations blog.

Breathing in Enoughness

We share a guided meditation from Kaira Jewel Lingo, a former resident of Plum Village and student of Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022), to help readers settle into a moment of “just this” awareness. 

Let’s begin our practice by finding a comfortable position of dignity and ease.  

Let’s really take our seats, let’s really occupy this moment. If there are parts of ourselves somewhere else, in some other time, past or future, invite them all to come back. We’ll be here, we’ll be now. Settling into just being here. With all the tumult that may be in your life, still you can breathe in and out, with presence, recollecting yourself.  

Feel the contact between your body and the floor, whether through the soles of your feet or your legs, knowing that the Earth is supporting you in this moment.  

Allow the in-breath and the out-breath to flow naturally. Experience how the breath arrives, what happens as you breathe in. Feel how the out-breath just does what it does, quite naturally.  

Breathing in, aware of the body. Breathing out, allowing the body to rest, calming the body.  

Aware of the body with the in-breath. Calming, resting, with the out-breath.  

If you notice that your mind wanders into thinking, planning, worrying, acknowledge that it is happening, knowing you can return to focus on your thoughts later. For now, engage again with the exercise of attending to this moment.  

Inhale and open up to the awareness that this moment is enough, that what we need, it’s already here.  

As you exhale, practice to accept that life is as it is in this moment. Allow it to be here, just as it is. Inhaling the sense of enoughness, of contentment, that actually things are okay right here and right now, we don’t need anything more. Exhaling acceptance of how things are.  

Breathing in enoughness, breathing out acceptance. 

Kaira Jewel Lingo, We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons on Moving through Change, Loss, and Disruption (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2021), 34–35.

I’m a conditional atheist

God does not exist for me on
the tip of a sharpened sword

or on the lips of a sermonizing
hate-evangelist who is foaming at the mouth

or in the licking flames of a torch held
by a marching bigot

or in any dogma that have been soaked in the ancient poison of guilt and self-shame 

the divine doesn’t
exist for me anywhere
where wounds are being
caused in its name

I don’t know about
how any of this works
but I’ve never found
much of God in the towering
hierarchy of unchecked power

the Great Mystery isn’t a cracking whip
or a flag or an internet manifesto
or a pointed finger or a political party
or a dividing line or a box of ammo
or a corvette driven by a tv preacher
or a specific gender or a book bonfire

Creation is more of a florist
than she is a fundamentalist

the Weaver of Life is more interested
in stitching us together into a quilt
than how to separate us into metal bins

to come into relationship
with Unending Love shouldn’t
require us to loathe ourselves

~ it should be the exact opposite

to know ourselves
is to know God

to love ourselves
is to love God

my love,

I believe that the divine
is just about everywhere

~ except in the slow-poison
sands of fear and control
where so many have built temples
for us to worship inside

~ in those places
I am an atheist

but everywhere else

there is so much
fertile soil

where we can let the sunflowers
of empathy grow wildly in
the spaces between us

and I’ve heard
that if we remain still

and listen so very closely
these evangelizing sunflowers
will whisper to each of us
a secret we once knew while we
were cooking in the cosmic womb:

“We are all loved equally.”

~ john roedel

Sometimes a poem just stops me in my tracks and makes me say, “wow”! This poem did so today and I wanted to share it.

Flight One 

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen
This is your Captain speaking.

We are flying at an unknown altitude
And an incalculable speed.
The temperature outside is beyond words.

If you look out the window you will see
Many ruined cities and enduring seas
But if you wish to sleep please close the blinds.

My navigator has been ill for many years
And we are on Automatic Pilot; regrettably
I cannot foresee our ultimate destination.

Have a pleasant trip.
You may smoke, you may drink, you may dance
You may die.
We may even land oneday.

~ Gwendolyn Margaret MacEwen (1941–1987)

I received this from an online community hosted by Mirabai Starr and Willow Brook called Holy Lament. https://www.wildheart.space/holylament

It is a poignant reminder that we can hold our broken hearts with our unbroken souls.

The Unbroken

There is a brokenness

out of which comes the unbroken,

a shatteredness

out of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is a sorrow

beyond all grief which leads to joy

and a fragility

out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space

too vast for words

through which we pass with each loss,

out of whose darkness

we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound

whose serrated edges cut the heart

as we break open to the place inside

which is unbreakable and whole,

while learning to sing.

 -Rashani Reá

From one of my most beloved and trusted indigenous teachers, Dine elder Pat McCabe and the excellent podcast “The Mythic Masculine” by Ian McKenzie, comes this profound and valuable interview called “Thriving Life & A Prayer for All Men” where Pat McCabe reminds us, “Men are not the Patriarchy.”

We can indeed choose our paradigm and reclaim our mythologies as stewards and lovers. I promise this is well worth the hour of your life you will spend listening.

https://www.themythicmasculine.com/episodes/pat-mccabe?mc_cid=dfd197cbed&mc_eid=aba969cd81

Divine Feminine Prayer

Spiritual teacher and friend Mirabai Starr guides us in a prayer to God using feminine language. We invite you to breathe intentionally for a few moments, feel your breath as it moves through your body, and receive the words of this prayer. Click here or on the image below. 

Beloved One 

Shekinah 

Indwelling  

Feminine Presence 

Immanence 

Embodiment 

Mother-Heart 

Please come flowing into every open window in our souls right now, 

as we call to you.  

Infuse every cell of our bodies with your fierce and tender Mother-Wisdom.  

Give us the strength to speak truth to power in these fractured times.  

Give us the tenderness and humility to listen deeply 

to those that we are conditioned to otherize. 

And remind us again and again when we forget that we belong to each other,  

and we belong to you.  

Amen. 

Mirabai Starr, “Divine Feminine Blessing,” Center for Action and Contemplation, March 1, 2023, YouTube video, 3:29.  

As people of faith, in whatever one looks to for inspiration – we feel the suffering and despair and we choose to rise again each day with a prayer for guidance toward ways we can lift up the humans and more than humans around us.

This beautiful video/song is inspiration for us all:

In my life these days, I am feeling a call to pause. To acknowledge change. To grieve loss. To celebrate new blossoms. To appreciate beauty.

From the micro level of my own body, through the spiritual and activist communities I participate with, to the macro level of the planet and all its beings, human and more than human – I am sensing a deep need to pause, breathe, reflect, and emerge refreshed.

These quotes from Fr. Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation blog say it well –

“We will normally do anything to keep the old thing from falling apart, yet this is when we need patience and guidance, and the freedom to let go instead of tightening our controls and certitudes.” —Richard Rohr 

“Perhaps you can look at this world in transition and dare to echo God in Genesis: behold, it is good … it is very good. Perhaps you can see transition as an essential part of that goodness that is better than perfection.” —Brian McLaren 

“Liminality is a form of holding the tension between one space and another. It is in these transitional moments of our lives that authentic transformation can happen. Otherwise, it is just business as usual and an eternally boring, status quo existence.” —Richard Rohr 

“Transitions can only take place if we are willing to let go of what we have known, the worlds we have created, and our assumptions about “how things are.” To let go is the precursor to being reborn.” —Barbara A. Holmes 

They then offer the following practice which is one I try to do often and recommend.

Holy Pausing

Artist and retreat leader Christine Valters Paintner suggests the ancient monastic practice of statio as a way to remind ourselves of the holiness of transitions:  

In the monastic tradition, statio is the practice of stopping one thing before beginning another. It is the acknowledgment that in the space of transition and threshold is a sacred dimension, a holy pause full of possibility. This place between is a place of stillness, where we let go of what came before and prepare ourselves to enter fully into what comes next.  

When we pause between activities or spaces or moments in our days, we open ourselves to the possibility of discovering a new kind of presence to the darkness of in-between times. When we rush from one thing to another, we skim over the surface of life, losing the sacred attentiveness that brings forth revelations in the most ordinary of moments.  

Statio calls us to a sense of reverence for slowness, for mindfulness, and for the fertile dark spaces between our goals where we can pause and center ourselves, and listen. We can open up a space within for God to work. We can become fully conscious of what we are about to do rather than mindlessly completing another task. 

Paintner reminds us that thresholds, physical places of transition, are ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and that we can use them for our spiritual practice: 

In the days ahead, become aware of all the times you cross a threshold. This might be moving from one space to another—entering through a doorway, transitioning from one activity to the next, or tending the thresholds of the day, especially at dawn and dusk. Pause at each and offer a short blessing, simply becoming aware of the possibilities alive in the moment. See if the threshold helps call forth the thinness of this moment, making the voice of the divine more accessible. 

Christine Valters Paintner, The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2018), 9, 8.