Stir Up Prayers: Tuesday's Reflection

Stir up your power and come. 
Stir up our hearts.
Stir up your power and come.

I have always loved these brief words often recited in church during the four Sundays leading up to Christmas Day.

One year, decades ago, I mentioned to our pastor how meaningful those words were to me, and we decided to use them as the theme for our stewardship campaign. Everyone in the congregation was given a wooden spoon with the church's name stamped on it. We were invited to use the spoon to stir together batter for pancakes or cookies or other nourishing food and to remember our mission: stir up and be the love of God. 

This past weekend our little house was a stirred up mess! Bins pulled out of storage rimmed the edges of the living room and dining room walls. Tissue paper billowed underneath tables and chairs, as we unpacked Christmas ornaments and other decorations. Books and other items normally on display were stacked on the dining room table before being stored for the next few weeks. The house was whipped up into a frenzy, and it was hard to imagine how order, let alone beauty, would be restored.

Little by little, step by step, we stirred and stirred until all the individual ingredients, including our funny artificial Charlie Brown tree, became a new creation of peace and harmony and serenity. Even beauty. 

We were stirred up into action, and now we feel more prepared for this new season. 

The stir up prayers are a call to God to enter our lives and a call for each of us to respond to the call. To open our hearts and to use our gifts.

Many of us feel stirred up as we listen to or watch the news these days. We feel our heart rate increase. We shake our heads and sigh, worried about what seems to be happening. We talk to our friends, reporting the latest indignity or development, saying "How can this be?" Our emotions are on a rampage, energizing our fears. 

The "stir up" prayers invite us to move beyond those fears and disappointments and anxieties. The stir up prayers invite us to respond to what moves us. To serve a meal. To write a letter. To make a financial contribution. To shovel a sidewalk. To listen to someone who feels unheard. To examine an unchallenged belief. To show up. To stretch beyond our comfort zone. To live with compassion. To open to the ways God stirs up within us. 

In the next few weeks I will make many batches of cherry walnut bread, and each time, using the wooden spoon, I will stir up, gently, but deliberately, the flour and buttermilk and vanilla and cherries.

                       Stir up your power and come. 
                       Stir up our hearts.
                       Stir up your power and come. 

An Invitation
What stirs you up? How will you stir up your heart and invite a new power into your life? I would love to know. 

Getting Ready: Tuesday's Reflection

What a wonderful family time we had during the Thanksgiving holiday, and when our son and daughter-in-love left to begin the trek back to Cleveland, I felt withdrawal cross the threshold. 

But I had a plan: start decorating for Christmas. 

If the house was no longer filled with their presence, I could at least fill the house with anticipation of the next holiday. I could create the setting for Advent, my favorite liturgical season of the year.

Of course, that is easier said than done, but I love the process. At least that's what I tell myself each year when I face the mountain of plastic bins labeled "Christmas." 

But I have a plan: Start the way I always start -- unpack the Santas carved by our friend Al. In fact, the holiday actually begins not on the first Sunday in Advent, but when Al lets us know the new Santa is ready.  

I suppose I could consult my photo stream and arrange this happy collection the same as last year, but how fun would that be? Nope, one by one I find a place for Santa holding the lantern and Santa and Mrs Claus leaning in for a smooch and Santa with a bag of toys peeking over his shoulder. I tweak and adjust and stand back and study the composition and move this one or that one just a bit to the left. Voila! 

In the meantime Bruce delivered glitz into the house via our silly Charlie Brown tree. Turning this skinny, misshapen tree into a bit of silvery glam proves anything can be transformed. 

Little by little over the course of two days, Advent descended. Like the angel Gabriel's visit to Mary. 

And now we are ready. 

Ready to wait.

Ready to prepare. 

Ready to open to the magic of the season. The promise of the season.

Ready to open to whatever is next. 
To discover what this time means.

Observing Advent and Christmas may not be your tradition, but I am quite sure you have lived seasons of waiting, of preparation for what is not quite known. We can wait with each other. 

An Invitation

What calls to you right now? How are you preparing and how will you wait? I would love to know. 

Thursday's Reflection: The Habit of Christmas

Earlier this week I left my garret feeling a bit twisted and conflicted with thoughts of Christmas tasks struggling for dominance in my head. It was time to fix dinner, but, instead I was drawn by the soft lights in the living room. I have been reading a small book called Christmas on Jane Street http://www.harpercollins.com/9780061626425/christmas-on-jane-street by Billy Romp (Don't you love that name?) with Wanda Urbanska, a true story about a family in Vermont who go to New York City to sell Christmas trees every year for the month of December. It is one of those heart-warming stories reminding one of the importance of love and compassion and how keeping those values in view allows us to change and grow. 

I finished reading the book, sighing with pleasure at the end, and instead of weariness overtaking me, which is what sometimes happens if I relax right before fixing dinner, I felt lighter, calmer. Then, instead of listening to the news on the radio, my more normal routine while fixing dinner, I listened to Christmas music on one of my Pandora stations. Dinner was ordinary--scrambled eggs with ham and cheese, English muffins, and clementines--but each step felt more meditative. I was in the midst of a walking meditation. I breathed in and out, finding my own rhythm, releasing the unfinished list, opening my heart to Spirit's guidance. 

As I filled our plates--Christmas dishes which always remind me of my mother, for she started us on this collection--I thought about how the habits of Christmas can haunt us; how the way we have always done something can stay with us long after its usefulness. That can be true, also, with the pace we whip ourselves into during this holiday or other busy times of our lives. When we were raising our families and working full-time and being active in communities whether it was our faith communities, schools, or neighborhoods, adding in all the must-do's of Christmas was exhausting. The pace was frenetic. 

 There were years when it all seemed overwhelming, and days were not long enough to do all the Christmas-related tasks I wanted to do or felt compelled to do. Rush, rush, rush. Too much to do in too little time. 

That was then and this is now. 

Yes, there is still lots to do, but now I am in a different stage of life; one in which the taffy-pull of life isn't as intense, but unless I intentionally move in a walking meditation, I still find myself reverting to those former years when Advent was more a time of deadlines and expectations than sacred waiting and anticipation.  I sometimes get caught in the rush-hour habits of those earlier years. 

What I try to do now, want to do now is focus on those aspects of Christmas preparations I love the most.

* I love the decorating, surrounding myself with the context for the other tasks. Re-imagining the house for these days of magic and expectation. 

* I love picking out Christmas cards and writing our annual Christmas letter, as well as more personal notes. When I write our letter I think about the highlights of our year that would be shared over a glass of wine, if we were to meet in person. Is there news that is cause for rejoicing or news that is hard to share, but those who have known us over the years would want to know? I try to express a new learning or understanding, a piece of spiritual growth and deepening that I hope will resonate our ongoing connection. 

* I love the music of the season, the Advent hymns, the carols. Most of the time I write with silence as my background, but this year I can't get enough of the sounds. The music reminds me to listen with the ears of my heart. 

Of course, I love the family times and gathering of friends and family in our home. I even enjoy the shopping and finding gifts that will be enjoyed, although wrapping is not my favorite Christmas activity. And while I love to cook, baking cookies is not my thing. I will make our traditional cherry walnut bread, and I better get started doing that next week, but leave the plates of a dozen different varieties of cookies to someone else. That decision is one way I have chosen to decrease that crazy, swirling out of control feeling of earlier years. 

This year I am trying to be present to each day and not think about the new year yet. Thoughts about what I want to do come January--the organizing typical of the new year, my writing goals, my reading plans--hover near the surface, but I won't have this day ever again, and this is the day, this Advent day, that needs to be lived to the best of my ability with love and joy and openness. 

Thanks be to God. 

An Invitation
What Christmas expectations can you set aside? Do you know what you most love to do during this season? Is that what you are doing? I would love to know.  

Tuesday's Reflection: Christmas Decorating

Even though we have celebrated Christmas heartily and merrily the last two years, something has been missing--the look of Christmas in our homes. One year we were in the midst of trying to sell our house in Madison and yes, people do house hunt in December. We kept decorations to a minimum. Not even a tree. The next year we moved into our St Paul house over Thanksgiving weekend, but our Madison house was still on the market and our bins of decorations were packed away, way in the back of the storage unit we were renting. Plus, we were tired, for it had been a busy and stressful fall. Decorating was not at the top of list. 

That was then and this is now! We spent almost the entire weekend  redressing the house, discovering what this house is meant to be during the holiday season. First, we unloaded bin after bin after bin--I didn't count how many bins, for I don't want to embarrass myself. No one would believe we have downsized or have been trying to simplify our stuff if they had seen our stacks of bins with Christmas decorations. Yet, I know over the last few years we have  eliminated other bins of Christmas decorations, but I can't quite recall exactly what went to Goodwill and the hospice resale shop, especially when I see what we still have.

Opening each bin was like unwrapping a present. Oh, I forgot about that large chalkware Santa going through his list of who has been naughty and who has been nice. Oooh, look at this box of vintage ornaments. I knew right away I would fill a large glass container with those--all that color jumbled together. Every bin was a delight, not only filled with treasures and memories of how they have been used in the past, but they became a vision for creating and living our Christmas lives in this house. 















As we converted corners into vignettes of Christmas cheer and hung garland and lights and filled a cupboard with our collection of Santas carved by our talented friend Al, and stationed in the entry area our Charlie Brown tree, which has survived several moves, and somehow found room in the kitchen for Christmas dishes, our house seemed to relax into a new stage of its long life. I wondered if the house thought perhaps it had forgotten how to "do" and "be Christmas. No way. 

Transformation is possible at any time. 

Joan Chittister in her book The Gift of Years, Growing Older Gracefully, quotes Meridel LeSeur, who lived to be 96, "I am luminous with age."(p. 39) Glowing, gleaming, glittering, glimmering, shimmering. Our house in its Christmas lights reminds me to enjoy this time of my life as a time of transformation--a transformation from the roles I have worn to the potential luminosity of my own inner being. Chittister says the "blessing of these years is the transformation of the self to be, at long last, the self I have been becoming all my life… (p. 43) and this is the "softening season when everything in us is meant to achieve its sweetest, richest, most unique self." (p. 49)


I know there will come a time when we won't want to do the full-scale extravagant decorating we have just completed, but for this year we are relishing the transformative presence of Christmas in our home and welcoming the chance to be luminous in our own lives. 

An Invitation
What transformations are you currently experiencing? What does this season, whether you celebrate Christmas or not, call you to transform in your lives? I would love to know.