Today is Twelfth Night (or day) as tradition would have it.  Being an English major in my undergraduate work, and Shakespeare being a major portion of study, The Twelfth Night was a familiar work, but Twelfth Night was never a part of my Christmas celebration or awareness as I grew up. The feasts celebrated in the Christian tradition were not celebrated in my tradition, other than Christmas and Easter, the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. As my faith has matured and become foundational to my life, so has my desire to know and understand in more depth the history and traditions of my Christian faith. 

These traditions are interesting to me as historical traditions, but they are alive with new meaning  because of the underlying reality that they are conveying in and through the celebration. The Twelfth Night is observed as the feast of the epiphany, celebrated on January 6, or the evening of the 5th, depending on when you observe the beginning of the day.  "Epiphany comes from the Greek word epiphaneia, which is translated both as "coming" and as "manifestation" or "appearing." While Christmas celebrates Christ's coming in the Incarnation event, Epiphany celebrates manifestation--the ways in which the Incarnation is revealed to us" (God with us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas, 165).

God is very real and alive to me; Jesus comes and is with me. I know this because I experience this reality; I have conversation and communion with him. The Spirit of God is present and manifests God to me in palpable and tangible ways. I notice and attend to this spiritual reality very intentionally and have grown into recognizing God's presence all around, among and within--incarnation and manifestation. I celebrate today as a closure to the Christmas season, but also as beginning to a new year filled with awareness of manifestation--God 's revelation of God's manifest presence to each of us. I pray for God's manifest presence to be known and experienced in greater measure this year for each of us on earth.

I share Emilie Griffin's prayer today for the new year:

Dear Lord, give me a new depth of vision to understand the mysteries of your revelation. Let me grasp the full revolution brought about by your reign. Let me absorb the wisdom of your ancient story, which sets aside the domination of kings like Herod and ushers in kings who worship, who surrender, who are awed by dimensions of divine power. Give me also, Lord, a spirit of celebration, so I can revel in the magnitude of your joy and your renewal of the human heart. Amen. 

My soul was disturbed, deeply disturbed.

 It took me a bit to name the anger that manifested as being “disturbed in my soul.” I had attended an educational forum on human trafficking and my awareness soared to a new level. It was disturbing to know that trafficking is a billion-dollar industry that sells women and children, boys and girls, into slavery, sex slavery as well as forced labor. It was disturbing to know that this kind of slavery not only exists, it is widespread, and is in our own backyard.  I had been aware, but now I was awakened to a new reality. 

At my worst, I would like to go back to sleep, to discount, or minimize this human-perpetrated evil that is supported by buying and selling human beings for profit and for the sex act that gratifies at a base, animalistic level—predator and prey. There must be seller, as well as a buyer for this to happen.  Both sides of this particular economic equation are a devastating evil and I would like to not know what I now do know. 

At my best, I am in prayer and compassionate action working out of God’s very intention for our world, for the ways and person of Christ to be known. Christ who was for the outcast, the beggars, the lepers, the prostitutes, the demonized, the victimized.  Christ saw, spoke, touched, healed, set free, delivered, victims and perpetrators alike.  Bearing the Spirit of Christ, I cannot look the other way.

I have been pondering the words from Romans 13 (The Message) as I have thought of my own awakening:

But make sure that you don't get so absorbed and exhausted in taking care of all your day-by-day obligations that you lose track of the time and doze off, oblivious to God. The night is about over, dawn is about to break. Be up and awake to what God is doing! God is putting the finishing touches on the salvation work he began when we first believed. We can't afford to waste a minute, must not squander these precious daylight hours in frivolity and indulgence, in sleeping around and dissipation, in bickering and grabbing everything in sight. Get out of bed and get dressed! Don't loiter and linger, waiting until the very last minute. Dress yourselves in Christ, and be up and about!

For me to be up and about, I had to do one thing, just one thing, to have some sense of being a part of abolishing human slavery and trafficking.  I went online to the Not For Sale website at www.notforsalecampaign.org and purchased a freedom journal, made in India. Then I re-centered myself in prayer, bringing my attention to the God who creates, loves, guides, heals and restores. This poem by Wendell Berry brought me to another place of stillness.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

And I wake in the night at the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water; and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

Who do not tax their lives with forethought

Or grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

Waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Writing this article is the next right thing. 

Sustainable Spirituality

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself (Mt. 22:37-40). These words, spoken by Jesus Christ as the first and second greatest commandments, are divine words of invitation to us. They are divine words that invite a response from us. They are an invitation to become lovers of God, lovers of our true selves, and lovers of others—to become passionately engaged in God’s vision and persistent revelation to our world.

In the final book of the Bible, Revelation, we hear the words spoken to the churches. They include words of affirmation, yet words of loving challenge to remain attentive, to stay alert and aware: Remember your first love—do not lose sight of nor turn away from the passion that infuses a first-love experience. Remain alert and faith-filled, remain attentive to the One who searches and knows the depths of your hearts and minds and reaches into the hidden most parts of your being to bring light and truth. Stay alert—be aware and attentive to your words and actions being congruent. Become who you claim to be. Turn again and again, day after day, moment by moment, into God. Live with fidelity of heart. Remain attentive, passionate, filled with God’s love and passion, faithful to His wooing. 

Lukewarm spirituality gets spit out!  Having one's heart gripped by God, or taken hold of by God, infuses one with a first-love experience. We journey forward in becoming people who take hold of that which has taken hold of us. God launches this interior strategy of the heart. We are invited to become partners with God as we allow God to work within us and to transform us.
Robert Slocum stated in Maximize your Ministry: How You as a Lay Person Can Impact Your World for Jesus Christ, "As God reveals His thoughts, feelings, discernment of good and evil, and will, people's hearts grow and are transformed. The goal of an interior strategy of the heart is to reshape the interior of our lives according to God's plans for the heart. When this happens, God can use his people to reshape the church and world" (p. 90).

The Gift of Dissonance

I don't think we even know at times that we may be acting in a way incongruous with how we would really want to be living.  It  seems the case, at least to me, that what we may hold in our mind as a belief or a value we have for our life may at times be inconsistent, or dissonant, with what actually manifests in our reactions and actions.  Becoming someone who is responsive, or able to respond, in ways that we would want requires intentional work.  I think it requires being one who is willing to become more self aware and reflective, to be willing to enter a process with another or others in which you are willing to allow your life and perhaps those with whom you work or minister to become "living documents."  Living document is a descriptive term that is used in clinical pastoral education settings - the learning process that one willingly enters in order to become more effective in one's lived out practice of ministry and life. This "supervision" process is the place where I have personally found great growth in integration within myself and diminishing of my own experience of dissonance. For me, the gift of dissonance, was recognizing and processing it, not denying it or dismissing it. Out of a place of discomfort with myself came the greater gift of self awareness and integration.

It was a gift for me to be in congregational pastoral ministry for 14 years prior to establishing a center outside the walls of traditional church in order for people to come for personal and group spiritual direction and soul care ministry. We also now offer supervision for pastors and ministers, providing a safe place for processing and presenting oneself as a "living document" for the gift of greater growth and integration for one's practice of pastoral ministry. At this time when being a pastor is more and more stressful and challenging, "supervision" becomes essential. This kind of supervision offers space for theological reflection, to acknowledge dissonance and desire for growing self-awareness, for embracing a process that leads to authenticity and ethical actions, and a supportive place of prayer and ministry for the pastor's soul. This presents a model for ministry leadership that fosters leading from within, from a place of centered quiet and strength.

So what?

I am in a place of wondering again. Wondering about the "so what" that seems to linger after being Scripture, in prayer, in offering myself to the ministry I find myself in each day. Someone once said to me, "You seem to have so many questions."  I guess I do and it seems a good gift for me.  The questions seem to bring me to greater life. The questions emerge out of the cries of my heart and my deep longing for God. They come from longing to be the same person on the outside as I am on the inside. They come from no longer wanting to live out of the bondage of fear but to live the life I long for (John O'Donohue, To Bless The Space Between Us).  The questions, the longings speak to the deepest desire of my heart.  I long to let this desire for God to be the primary desire of my life, to stop putting lids on such desire, but to let it out, let it flow freely from my heart, to become words and places of life, love and beauty for for those in my path. So many times the stories of Jesus are all about people he encountered "along the road" when he and his disciples were on their way somewhere. He offered a touch, healing, words of love, life and truth. These stories evoke desire and longing in me. Something to notice.

Trust Betrayed

A team from Restoration Ministries traveled to Chicago a few weeks ago, invited to present a workshop at the national SNAP conference. SNAP is the Survivor’s Network of those Abused by Priests and Clergy. Our specific workshop was entitled, “Hope for Healing.” The vastness of the numbers of those affected by this kind of abuse was overwhelming. The tragedy of any kind of abuse is heartbreaking and fractures the lives of those affected, but the spiritual injuries that result from abuse by those in roles of spiritual authority and representatives of God add a dimension and deeper layers of despair. Many have walked away from God completely and I find that very understandable as well as grievous.


I am still sifting and sorting through my own inner responses and continually needing to resist categorizing and defining others in boxes of good or bad, evil or not evil, dark or light. I think when I do that the focus is on externals and takes away the necessary inner work that all are called to do, especially those in ministry and church leadership. Camps are set up, sides are drawn, hostilities and divisions escalate; fear pervades, truth is buried in denial and cover-ups happen.

An interview with Parker Palmer published in Leader to Leader Journal (Fall 2001) included the following in the dialogue:

As the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker said, "If it ain’t in your heart, it ain’t in your horn." We can hear the horns everywhere, but if they’re not being played from the heart, then certain negative consequences follow.


I know from experience inside corporations and large-scale organizations that everybody is sizing up the leader and asking, "Is this a divided person or a person of integrity? Is what we see what we get? Is he or she the same on the inside as on the outside?”


Students ask this about teachers in the classroom. Employees ask it about their bosses. Citizens ask it about their politicians. When the answer is, ‘No, what we see on the outside is not the same as who they are on the inside,’ then things start to fall apart.


I have just described an unsafe situation when leaders with the power to call the tune and shape the dance are perceived as lacking congruence or integrity, they create unsafe situations.”

Trust is a tenuous thing. We know betrayal of trust when those we thought we could trust betray that trust, whether parents, spouses, co-workers, supervisors, corporate heads, pastors and priests. The road to forgiveness and healing can be long; it requires courage and truth; grace, mercy and humility.

Again quoting Parker Palmer: “The best leaders work from a place of integrity in themselves, from their hearts. If they don’t they can’t inspire trustful relationships. In the absence of trust, organizations fall apart.” I don’t think this just happens, this inner work requires intention and attention – it is a way of being, cultivated by openness, willingness and honesty. I believe that resources within the therapeutic community and those in spiritual formation and direction ministries foster these intentions. I believe that all ministry leaders, pastors and priests need relationships in which they can be honest and open with their thoughts and emotions in order to grow in integrity and congruency in their own hearts and leadership. The need for organizations such as SNAP is clear. Intervention and prevention is critical.

A friend recently shared with me this prose poem by Mary Oliver.  I thought I would share it here as well. 

"You are young, So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart's little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks--when you hear the unmistakable pounding--when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the battlement, the long falls plunging and steaming--then row, row for your life toward it."

Someone else likened this poetic piece to what John expressed in John 3:16.  "For God loved the world so much, that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life."  

Living for and from love probably doesn't mean taking the safest, most predictable route on the journey.  Living for and from love may mean embracing that which is painful, fearful or unknown, in order to love in greater measure.