One - Not the date but the world and more

 

Time and the passing of it.  Hours turning into days and years. We think it's an inevitable part of life, but it's only an idea. Time is a construct, a framework we use to order the eternity into which we were born. In fact, when we start thinking about existence more as one whole thing rather than a collection of separate pieces, a lot of interesting things happen.

One Power

Evil is not a power and therefore does not need to be overcome because it is not eternal. Nothing that is not eternal has power over that which is eternal. The only power is God and His grace. Neither good nor evil, which only exist as worldly judgements, can alter God's perfection. 

Nothing we pray for (ask for) other than God's grace is grantable. God need not give what He has already given. Our job is merely to follow in the way He has shown us, to change ourselves and thus the world around us as we yield to Him

One Consciousness

In order to achieve God's highest, we have to let go of all people and places we love more than God. In the process, harm may come to them and to us, the this harm's purpose is to make us lean into God more and more, to know the Son of God already in us and to yield to it, to let what we love in the flesh fall apart around us, even to let our own flesh fall apart while we watch, knowing that both are opportunities to sink into the Son of God in us.

One Existence

There is no hope for this world in the sensory way we've come to think about it - that of good and bad, pleasure and pain. The temporal can never be perfected. Only God is perfect and we will find no peace or health except to the extent we yield to the eternal. 

Do not pray for more of God. Do not pray for anything. Just yield to what is already there. Do what is given to us to do and keep our mind on Him. 

Time doesn't matter. We are already safe in all the things that last. He is omnipotent. 

Image from istock

Looking for Bethlehem - Why to take your shoes off

 

Bethlehem. The star, the shepherds, the cows and the manger, that whole Christmas scene. It feels good. The nativity display in front of the church with Mary and Joseph and the sweet baby laying in the hay reminds us what Christmas is all about. 

Or does it?

In reality, that's not what Bethlehem looked like - not then, not now. When Jesus was born, the barn was more likely a cave and it took months, maybe years, for the three Kings (if they were kings, and if there where three of them) to show up. Today Bethlehem is a tourist destination that is home to about 25,000 people and pilgrims come to the Church of the Nativity where Christ was not born to remember that He was. 

It all sounds a little silly, more like Disney than a holy place, but its existence reminds us that many of us are looking for a place where we can connect our lives, our human lives, with God. Someplace where we are confident that He extends his finger to meet ours like He does in Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling.  And we think Bethlehem might be one of those this places where the veil between the physical and metaphysical is thin, one of those places where we can touch the finger of God.

This all reminds me of the trips I made to Italy in 2018 and 2025 and why I made them. I went to Italy thinking that Florence, seat of the Renaissance and home a prodigious collection of the Western world's most brilliant talents, might be one of those places. How could Dante, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, da Vinci, Galileo, and all their compatriots looking to express the glory of God have been able to do what they did if they didn't have a bead on some kind of divinity? They had to have a connection and I wanted to find our what it was. 

I was wrong, of course. 

Florence has no more connection to God than does Bethlehem. No place on Earth, no place, can help me find God. When we look to earthly places and things to find God, we don't find Him there. We just find more earthly places and things. In our rush to find easy access to Jesus, we forget what He told us. 

The kingdom of God is within you. - Luke 17:21.

Within you. We carry access to God around in us. We don't need to go looking for Him anywhere else. That's the reason He came in the first place - to show us what life in communion with God looks like. Not perfect. Not trouble-free, but always accessible if we're looking in the right place and following it.

That's why we take our shoes off when we meet God. Not because He is in the dirt or floor under our feet but because He is in the union of what He put in us and the rest of His creation. 

The Lord our God, the Lord is One - Deuteronomy 6:4

We are part of the One that is God - temple of the Holy Spirit (1Cor 3:16, 6:19), the hope of glory (Col 1:27). Bethlehem is sweet, but we don't need it anymore. We have Him. 

Photo credit: James Larkin

The Bark Before the Bite

 

Dogs are loud sometimes, and I suppose they were made that way for a reason - warning and protection - but when I'm walking in my neighborhood and a dog who I didn't see suddenly runs from the shelter of its yard right at me and starts barking, I am taken aback, startled. And the barking appears to be sinister. I am automatically afraid. I am the target and I don't like it.

Most of the time, though, the dog doesn't mean to threaten. I've run into this particular dog before and it does not appear to be mean. After all, it's often wagging its tail at the same time as it's making noise. That's what happened this morning. 

I was just walking along, minding my own business and my neighbor's dog, (unleashed) came running towards me, barking up a storm. The first thing I noticed was the noise - loud, harsh, and unrelenting. The second thing I noticed was that he was not connected to any restraint. Together, these things made me very cautious and I intentionally avoided eye contact with it because I'd heard somewhere that dogs are threatened by a human stare and I for sure did not want to do that.

The next things I noticed, surreptitiously, from the corner of my eye, was that the dog was little more than a puppy, a cute little guy, and that his tail was wagging. Hardly sinister.

That got me to thinking.

Thinking about the difference between how we say things and how others hear them. Instruction, Warning, Advice, Opinion. All of them can be shared in love and with an intent to constructive improvement, but I know without doubt that they are not always received that way. They are too often received as Judgement, Criticism, and Dismissal. The bark without any awareness of the desire to play. 

The thing with a dog is that their bark is pretty much one-dimensional. It's one bark, the only one they have. We should be able to do better. In our encounters, we have available many voices, many kinds of words. We have smiles to temper them, help to soften them, and gentle touches to emphasize them. And we don't always take the time to use them or even to take the time to think of them. We also have silence and patience, more powerful and helpful tools than we usually give them credit for.

It doesn't matter what we say if it's not heard they way it was meant. 

Like the dog this morning. I still don't know whether he wanted to play or would have bit me had I reached down to pet him. I suspect it was more the former than the latter, but I'll never know because I wasn't willing to risk the bite. The same is true, I think, of anyone I talk to. If they think I'm going to bite them, they'll turn around and keep walking. Not the result I'm looking for in any conversation I have. 

Now all I have to do when I get ready to open my mouth is remember the dog. 

Early Morning Reflection: Fragility and Reliance on the Precise Wording of Scripture

 

Early mornings have their own breath, before any birds sing or dogs bark or, in my neighborhood, before the neighbors fire up their Harleys to go to work. It's the space between the inhale of full night and the exhale of a new day. Soft and fragile, it comes when the sky turns velvet with the promise of a pink sunrise that hasn't yet come. 

Photos can't capture it because it comes only by feel, so still that its first motion comes from a mosquito that hovers near, not on, my skin. A breeze so insignificant that it gets absorbed into motion of the turning earth at any other time. 

And then it comes. The exhale. That subtle drop in temperature that starts every new day. The ambient movement that precedes first light, creating the slightest of cool breezes, the only one we will get on a day that promises to huddle with humidity and sizzle with sun. A shiver almost comes, but not quite. More a premonition that summer days aren't all beaches and state fairs, that nothing lasts forever, that footing isn't always as sure as it seems. 

And I think of Jerome. Poor, dear Jerome and his Latin Vulgate. 

It took him more than twenty years during the late fourth century and early fifth to translate both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament into the learned language of his day, Latin. The result, his Latin Vulgate translation, has been considered the gold standard by many churches ever since. In many ways, Jerome's translation has become our Bible, the one we have trusted all our lives.

And then comes the day when we understand the extent to which Jerome was just a man, inspired by God and prompted by devotion, but hampered by prejudices and the potential for error from misjudgment, illness, and just plain weariness. 

Then comes the day when we come to grips with examples of what effect the fragility of his humanity has on what we are so sure of. The Bible. Our Bible. What we take for granted as true beyond any capacity for doubt. 

Then comes the day when we learn that not every word of the Bible may be what it seems. 

Take Isaiah 7:14.

You most likely know it by heart:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

The Hebrew word used here is almah, a word that was commonly used for a young woman or maiden, a unmarried woman. Jerome knew, of course, that this verse is ideologically paired with Matthew 1:23 and undoubtedly wanted to make sure we made the connection, too:

The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel.

So Jerome in his zeal to clarify doctrine, substituted almah, a word meant to describe an unmarried woman with a word meant to describe a virgin instead. Not a terrible stretch, to be sure, but a stretch nonetheless. By Jerome's deft hand, the prophecy declared in Isaiah is fulfilled precisely in Matthew in a single language we couldn't mistake. Proof of Mary's virginity. Partial proof of Christ's divinity. Perfect. 

But not quite. 

While not quite a blatant mistranslation, it is an interpretation. A well-meaning one, but an interpretation even so. 

And that's the rub.

This doesn't mean that Mary, the mother of Christ, wasn't a virgin, of course. She probably was. Otherwise, what would have been all the fuss? It only means that the Bible, while an inspired document, isn't a word-for-word perfect document, especially in the English we probably all read. Not an infallible Guide for Living but signpost pointing to the God it tries to explain, intended to grow in us a desire for God that even His words will not satisfy.

The Bible is an invaluable guide and companion to a faith based not on its specific words but on God Himself. 

The Bible is a fragile connection to God sometimes, but it is a connection. Like our image in the mirror is not our complete self but a faithful representation, it still tells me valuable information about what I look like. Like the almost indetectable breeze from a mosquito's early morning wings tells me he's there, so does the Bible hover faithfully near to remind me where to look for the breath of God so that I long to turn to Him full-face so as to behold His glory. 

The Bible showcases the way. It points to the path. 

The goal is not the Bible. The goal is God.

 

Mosquito image: Dreamstime

Horizon Image: From my window at Castello di Solfagnano, Perugia, Umbria, Italy, May, 2025

Jerome image: Ascension Press

Gateway image: Entrance from chapel courtyard to garden, Castello de Solfagnano

Ben Franklin on what happens when you sweep your doorstep

Ben Franklin is well known for his respect for the industrious. His Poor Richard alter ego is responsible for familiar advice like "No pain, no gain", "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise", and even "God helps those who help themselves" (No, it's not in the Bible). I just finished his autobiography and realized that tomorrow is the 4th of July, so I thought another of his observations and the actions it prompted might make a good subject for discussion.

When Ben lived in Philadelphia as a youngish man who had already started a flourishing printing business, it was still a very young city, just getting started on what was to become a notable future, the same as the man himself. One might say they grew up together. One might even say they helped one another along and one way they did so began pretty humbly - by Ben observing a woman sweeping the street in front of her house.

In those days, none of Philly's streets were paved and it takes little imagination to understand what happened when it rained. Carriages and horses made the dirt streets a quagmire through which not only they, but men and women, had to trudge, all dragging through clinging mud, towing it with them wherever they went. 

One day, Ben observed a woman sweeping away the loose dirt in front of her house and asked why she did that. When she told him that it kept the mud down there when it rained, he, because he was Ben Franklin, had an idea. What if they paved the streets with bricks? It sounded like a fine idea and as things turned out, Ben got it done. But the way he got it done was what impressed me. He found the bricks, and found the people to do the work, then got the immediate neighbors to pitch in a little bit, just a few pennies each, to finance the work done in front of their house. Just their house, the part from which they would directly benefit. 

And something happened.

Actually, two somethings.

First, the street got paved. The mud abated. When it rained, everybody looked at their improved circumstances and took pleasure in the results. A good thing for everyone.

Also, however, something else happened. Now, Ben didn't write about this, but I got to thinking. When Philadelphians looked at their lovely paved streets, they had to be thinking, "Look what we did." Emphasis on the WE. Everyone who benefited from the project, from the residents to the bricklayers, realized not only a practical benefit from it, but could see their own participation in it. Every day, when they swept the newly laid bricks outside of their own homes. 

And that happened, I believe, because the project was accomplished not through taxes by some amorphous THEY but by people they talked to. People who had a recognizable face and with whom they'd had conversation. Neighbors. Friends. Strangers who helped each other. They'd built something. Together. And they enjoyed the fruits of their labors together. 

And they celebrated every day by sweeping.

Don't think people sweep their sidewalks anymore? You're wrong. The first time I went to Italy, on my first morning in Rome, we were staying in an Airbnb on a quiet street and I woke to singing. When I opened the shutters, I looked down. There, in front of the shop below our apartment, the shopkeeper was sweeping the sidewalk outside of his store, singing some pleasant little ditty I couldn't understand, and happy. Happy to be sweeping. Happy to have a sidewalk to sweep. Happy. 

And he was beautiful. Like Ben. Like working together for the common good with people we can embrace when the work is done. Projects that have human faces. 

I smile to think what might still be possible. Happy Fourth.

First Photo credit: Wisconsin Historical Society

Second Photo credit: Alamy

Posture

 

Stand Up Straight.

Put Your Shoulders Back.

Lift your chin.

LOOK AT ME.

All my life. The reminder to have good posture. I still think about it, looking at recent photographs of an old woman with back bent, walking with determination sometimes, but now needing to consciously adjust my spine so as to even approximate something straight. 

The years did it.

The flower is worn for sure, but the stem doesn't reach up rightly anymore, either. I look often at the ground rather than the sky. It looks likes defeat. It looks used up, and maybe it is, or nearly.

There are times when insight and adventure still reign, and the 'A' side of life still takes hold - when I buy a ticket for Italy or hop on the Queen Mary, or sign up for college - but on many days, I'd rather just take a Tylenol for the aches, lay down on the couch, and nod off, realizing that someday, sooner rather than later, I won't wake up. 

I pretty much know what it is. Something happened to the angst of living, the tortured thoughts that provided steam for my engine, the knowing that what I had was not all there was to have in this world. That there was more, and I wanted to taste it. At first it was more money or more excitement, but became later desire for more understanding, more light, more space.

And I found a lot of it. It turned out not to be too complicated. It was simple, and still is, God lays it before me every day. The wonders of clean breath. The golden light of evening. The feeling of sand on bare feet. The sound of someone calling me grandma. I remember (or think I do) an interview with Raymond Burr when he retired and was asked what he was going to do with himself, saying something like "I'm going to sit in my garden and watch my lemons grow." I didn't get it at the time. Now, I do. 

It was a shock to be done with achieving, but most days, it leaves me content. Now that my job is more giving away then grasping, I can relax a little. 

It doesn't look all that great, but it feels pretty good.

Photos by the author from her garden

Mary's Great Commission

 

I been reading a book called Tattoos on the Heart by Greg Boyle, a Catholic priest. He is the founder of Homeboy Industries in the Los Angeles neighborhood that is the gang capital of the world and Homeboy provides them a way back into a godly and productive life.

As a part of what he does, Greg celebrates a lot of church services in detention facilities and to do it, he had to learn a whole new language – not only Spanish, but Homie. And the Homies he tries to help have to learn a new language too because when he teaches them the Bible, he uses a lot of words they don’t know, so both sides have to do the best they can to make themselves understood and what happens is that when they engage in conversation, the homies substitute words they do know for words they don’t. The results are sad, awkward, and funny like these:

A young Homie who wants to read a Bible verse in church might say:  "This is a  reading from the letter of St. Paul to the Filipinos". Or someone who was hungry and looked for help might tell him: "I had to go eat at the Starvation army". Once one of the young men who worked in his office gave him this phone message: "Professor Davis at UC wants you to give a talk and he says to be sure to tell that you will be constipated".

 But we do the same thing. We can’t help it. We only know what we know and when we talk about what we don’t know, we have no choice but to do it in terms of what we do know. It’s the only way we can relate to something. It even happens when we read the Bible. Like this passage:

 Luke 10: 1-2,: After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.

Or this one:

Matthew 28:18-20: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you". 

The likeliest way to read these is as evangelists, that it means we are to go to work for God. It's a thing, and a familiar one. We want to be one of those to whom God says, Well done, at our life’s end. To get there, we must work. Work is what we know. Work is our language of faith.

But I keep running into a problem with this. Quietly, in the background, something else is going on.

John 12:1-8, Luke 10:38-42: Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. Then Mary took about a pint[a] of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.

“Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken away from her.”

 If the highest service we can render to God is to do the work that must be done, to bring in the harvest, to spread the gospel, then where does this come from? Mary, Jesus says, has the better part. The better part of what? Of Jesus? Of obedience? Of a life of faith? I think the answer to all of these is yes, but that’s the problem. Mary’s approach is one of contemplation, not work. All she did was make a frivolous gesture of love and then sit and listen at Jesus’ feet. Nothing got done. No souls were won. No additional seats at their table were filled with converts. But this, Jesus said, was the better part. This is for us, like for the homies, the part we don’t know.

 The fields may be ripe and we may be asked to be fishers of men, but this kind of work may not be the only kind of work Jesus is talking about. After all, when you think about it, God does not need us to win souls to Him. He is perfectly capable of doing it all on His own. In fact, the little bit we can do would be useless without the part only God can do. This is what Jesus called the better part. We can’t do what He can and somehow, we have to understand that without Him, all of our outward kingdom work will fall short.

In the end, we can’t convert anyone. We can’t bestow faith. But we can do something we are repeatedly asked to do. Love. Love God and love one another. The Bible tells us to work for the kingdom a handful of times, but tells us to love more than 500 times and that love for God just because He is God is the highest love there is. Not because of something He did or because of something He gave, but just because He is God. 

 Mary and Martha did not agree about the best way to love Jesus and they’re a great example of the tug of war we still fight between the active ways to love God and the contemplative ways to love God. Contemplation – sitting and waiting at Jesus’ feet – is not productive. It is not measurable. It doesn’t get anything done but according to Jesus, it is the better way.

Ok, I know that someone needs to mow the lawn and take the garbage out to the curb on Thursday evening. And, if we are going to open our church doors for community events, someone needs to bake and grill hot dogs and do dishes. Beware, however, of patting ourselves too vigorously on the back when those things are done and we go no further. We have given our work to God and He is undoubtedly pleased with it. But unless we go to that secret place where only we two are together in mutual love, we have not given Him that one thing He wants most. We also spread the gospel by being it rather than by doing it.

The Homies used words they knew to deal with concepts they didn’t know. They were often clumsy doing it, but Greg, their spiritual advisor, loved them for the effort. Mary spilled perfume on Jesus’ feet because she didn’t know any other way to show Him how extravagantly she loved Him. It was awkward and wasteful, but Jesus loved her for it – not in spite of it, but because of it. Find a way to show your love for God that doesn’t involve a lawnmower or a kitchen or study or evangelizing, a way that doesn’t involve anyone else but you and God. An intimate act of love. Sing. Ponder. Pray. And give it all you have, because it all belongs to God, anyway.