Obviously I have not  been posting. But think about this. The last post with text was called When Advent Comes.  Now I have  been appointed to Advent United Methodist Church but when that post was made in November I had no idea that would be in my future.  And the date, November 11, 2011, would also be 11-11-11 which happens to be my wife's favorite and we enjoy noting  11:11 time signals as good omens,   But my "sign" is that the post after Advent simply says : "God in All" 
I look forward to ministry at Advent trusting that God is in it all!

God In All

God In All

When Advent Comes

I will revisit these words and listen for the Advent terms!

Hope
By Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

Source: The Cure at Troy

posted at inward/outward on 11-11-2011

N. Gordon Cosby quoted at inward/outward
If you feel you can't tolerate the mess, the only advice I can give to you is this: choose what for you is a better mess, if you can find it. But wherever you go, you go to the next mess. You may take a couple of years to find out how messy it is, but you will find it to be a mess. God has tolerated many messes for many eons.

Henri Nouwen on Loving the Church

Loving the Church often seems close to impossible. Still, we must keep reminding ourselves that all people in the Church - whether powerful or powerless, conservative or progressive, tolerant or fanatic - belong to that long line of witnesses moving through this valley of tears, singing songs of praise and thanksgiving, listening to the voice of their Lord, and eating together from the bread that keeps multiplying as it is shared. When we remember that, we may be able to say, "I love the Church, and I am glad to belong to it."

Loving the Church is our sacred duty. Without a true love for the Church, we cannot live in it in joy and peace. And without a true love for the Church, we cannot call people to it.

from inward/outward

Eugenio Zolli
The books of Sacred Scripture contain much more than what is written in them. Our soul also has depths unknown to us. On the sacred pages and in our soul, there are melodies we do not hear. In the spaces of the world there are melodies which no one catches because no one listens.

Source: Before the Dawn

From Richard Rohr

CONTEMPLATION


Could meditation/contemplation be the very thing that has the power to both democratize, reform, and and mature Christianity? It alone does not demand major education, does not need a hierarchy of decision makers, does not need to argue about gender issues in leadership or liturgy, does not need preachers and bishops, and does not need membership requirements that include and exclude. Contemplation’s non-verbal character makes all our arguments about “the right words” and the perfectly correct understanding of those words largely useless. We clergy are almost put out of business.

Deep prayer on the inside heals the outside and the in-between simply by reconnecting everything at its core and at our Center. And let us be honest–Jesus talked a lot more about praying and healing than any of the issues that continue to preoccupy most of our churches.

Adapted from A Lever and A Place to Stand:
The Contemplative Stance, The Active Prayer, pp. 58-59