Under the Tree of Life...

My friend, Pastor Linda, is back at camp serving as the Program Director. She serves part-time in a congregation nine months and then in the summer goes back out to camp. Linda is out and about in creation among the lively new staff folks who are on their way to this weekend's training sessions as they anticipate the arrival of campers!

I talked to Linda today because I was in prayer about a family member and I needed to tell her, confide in her, share tears with her because she is also an adoptive mom. Adoptive moms have particularly perilous challenges (I know this because I am also a biological mom and a stepmom as well). Now in our fifties, while we still feel so very young at heart we ponder what it means to grow older into the new realms of grand parenting and the like. She shares my love of fun and laughter and connecting with young adults (she does this in her congregation that relates to a Roman Catholic private college nearby). Linda loves to do crafts. She is an avid quilter and leads quilting retreats. She knits, crochets and all those cool hand-crafty things. We both like glitter and pretty things, making art stuff with others and share a love for creation.

I was thinking about Linda as I am reading Gail Ramshaw's, Under the Tree of Life. I've been reading Gail's profound and humorous writing and laughing out loud. I imagine that as I read the most amusing portions aloud to Jack, that he doesn't think them as funny as I do. Gail is a feminist, Christian, liturgical, historian and theologian. She has sort of an Erma Bombeck-esque take on all matters "Church." And so I laugh - because it amuses me and sends me into deep thoughts about mystery, wonder, the holy and the wholly Other One. I love this. I love that Gail's book was a long ago birthday gift from another dear and wise friend, Victoria.

Gail says, "Religion approaches mystery with metaphor. By mystery I do not mean, as in a murder mystery, a puzzle, a maze we muddle through, bumping into walls, the author God having plotted out all the surprise dead-ends....religion's mystery is beyond the realm beyond our thinking and knowing. Mystery surrounds these inquiries: whether there is an ultimate reality; if there is, how can we connect ourselves with it; not how humans developed, but why; not the biology of human sexuality, but its powers and purposes; not the location of heaven, but the goal of consciousness and its actions" (p. 43).

Sadly, in our fraught time and culture of religious intolerance and scriptural literalism (in any faith community) the flattening of Holy Mystery and insistence by certain folks that they know the right way, the only way, the being-saved-or-everyone-else-is-going-to-hell way of religion there is a life-stealing, stifling, arid, desertification of holy life and religion. Somehow, as if in a grand, tiny-bug-like scuttling conspiracy over time, we have allowed the mashers of religions' mystery and metaphor, wonder, beauty, delight, to crush, siphon and suck it out of our view and away our souls. Only to spit all that out in the back alley of the restaurant with the trash as it it were a nasty swill from chewing tobacco; a by-product of religion and not essential.

Maybe akin to Richard Louv's "nature-deficit disorder," church folks (because those folks are the ones for whom I care deeply and those I have taken ordination vows to serve as a "steward of the mysteries of God") suffer from "Mystery-Deficit disorder." I think perhaps Gail might like this term. She might be sadly amused. I know I am.

So, I sat under my trees of life in the backyard this morning; watched hummingbirds again, saw a pair of gold finches, noticed the dragonflies, new bugs that have arrived - including a certain iridescent blue-greenish fly that is annoying. I thought and prayed more upon the beloved one for whom I am concerned, fretted a bit, prayed some more. Then I read more from Gail, laughed a bit and decided to write. Writing is good and great and holy.

Writing under the trees of life is even better - to behold and contemplate the holy mysteries. To wonder where my life is headed, how will it all turn out, will the oil geyser in the Gulf of Mexico kill so many dolphins, whales, sea turtle, sting rays, flying fish, coral reefs, plankton and every manner of minute sea life that people might actually rise up in rebellion and outrage over the debacle and catastrophic environmental nightmare that lurks and snakes under and on top of the azure blue, blessed waters of the Gulf of Mexico? The water upon which my dear Aikido-Florida friend, Penny gazed and then wrote: "Appreciating the Florida Keys. The ocean is flat, blue and crystal clear! the kids (now all in college) play on the wave runners dragging each other around on kneeboards and surfboards. the men fish. they caught 37! the ladies play with the kids, hang out on the boat, do some diving. everyone enjoys the dive browine. colorful floats in the water. smiling :) enjoying the wonder that is and praying for it to remain."

This makes me sad because I fear that the Keys will soon succumb to the globs-o-oil coming ashore and that as the Gulf Stream swirls past the tip of Key West, the oil will be swept up the east coast on its way to Norway and places beyond. Still and yet, I'm so very grateful that I have these friends who care and pray. For Linda, Victoria, Penny and all the rest of you who may read these musings of mine.

I pray and I pray some more...and again, I pray.

Blessed be!