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"Oh Lord, please light the fire that once burned bright and clear" |
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The following preface is free writing, journal style, not cleaned up for viewing and too personal for rating. It's sort of the "back story" for the meditations I intend to write here. I wanted to keep it, and here is as good a place as any; but I may move it to someplace not so obvious. One day recently, I looked on the iTunes site to find some music by Keith Green. I can’t remember why, other than I haven’t put much of anything I wanted on the iPod, not caring much about it. Where his name came from, I don’t recall. Maybe I found an old cassette case of his—I know I had one once and lost the tape. It had “So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt” on it, and I’d hunted for it to play at EFM as we studied the Exodus. Bill wanted to see what I was looking at; or, more probably, I wanted to show Bill what I was looking at, and selected a song to play for him. It had been a favorite of mine, and one I’d used as a prayer during Cursillo before I gave a talk. “Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful.” I instantly regretted picking this piece because it’s emotional—in a way I don’t particularly like mixed with religion, not histrionic but…I can’t think of the word. Oh, sentimental. And I thought it was going to be repetitive, and I know he doesn’t like that and I don’t much either. So I was surprised when I heard the second verse, which brought tears to my eyes and does again as I think of it. Oh Lord, please light the fire that once burnt bright and clear. Re-light (?) the lamp of my first love that burns with holy fear. I’ve known I needed to be in touch. I’ve let so many relationships slide, and as they get just out of reach, not out of sight, I’m embarrassed and want to retreat instead of moving forward. Knowing and feeling are different. There was a knowledge that I needed to make the move, but I needed the yearning, the attraction, the memory of the lure to get me started. That verse brought it home. How have I gotten so far away? Maybe the question is: when was I last close? I can’t remember for sure. Probably in EFM, before the divorce. Since then? I don’t know. “When” is irrelevant. “How” is relevant. Even before I was ordained I had a need, a burden as some would say, to call out, “The emperor has no clothes!” to some of what goes by the name of Christian spirituality. And, somehow akin to that, to be able to see the church working in the world not always under the name of the church. To see the commonality between “humanists” and real Christians, as opposed to these sentimental, swooning for Jesus types. I’ve never put that in writing before, but I think that describes my mission, so to speak. The mission of my heart anyway. How can that be? It’s an intellectual thing I’m talking about isn’t it? Theology? Head stuff, not heart stuff. A quest, maybe that’s a better word than mission. A quest for authenticity. Now, that’s beginning to sound awfully stuffy, but I’m just trying to define the urge I’ve had forever. When one discovers a truth, one tends to express it in terms that are too absolute. Later on, one speaks of it with more moderation, but at the risk of losing its essence.* Paul Tournier This is the second day I’ve been home “sick” with the stomach flu, except it really never got bad. No urping to justify staying home maybe. But it was exactly what I wanted to do, needed to do, as I discovered when I wrote a poem, two poems yesterday. One was begun last week as I left the nursing home at sunset, and finished yesterday as I tied the two experiences together. The other was more of a plea, or prayer if you will, to know what I should be doing right now with my life. Oh dear, that sounds as if it’s presupposed, and I don’t really believe that. I’ll try again. A plea to know if God wants me to continue working with hospice, because it’s getting harder and harder to do the job, and I’m doing it less and less well with less and less good feelings about it. This morning I clicked on the Daily Office from the Mission St. Claire. At the end, I went from an ECUSA site to a chaplain’s site at Georgia Southern. It had pictures of Christ, all kinds, in its ad for students to discuss. Among them was a picture of a stained glass window by Marc Chagall that was outstanding, and took me in that direction. Then I looked under devotions, read one from The Upper Room, then read about devotion writing workshops this spring; then went back to the daily and wrote one. Finally got to WDC and found that the troubadour had posted my plea poem, which I’d written in response to his blog. Dragonfly then mentioned my Sundown poem, and I got several good reviews of it. There was also an email from Tony Green saying I hadn’t been very productive on the site (?), and that I should start a file called Sermons that Almost Got Away. So I did, and put the meditation in it. I may put this there too, although it’s neither a meditation nor a sermon. So this afternoon, as I came out of the laundry room, looking idly around the cluttered basement for a short project, a stack of books I could put in a box to go to St. Vincent’s, I found Paul Tournier’s The Healing of Persons.* I took it alone upstairs with the idea that maybe I was “meant” to read it finally. (There I go again with the “meant to” idea. It must be a comfortable way to look at things, but for now I won’t discount it, despite the dubious theology.) Here is the sentence at the end of the preface:He who does not go forward, goes back. Physical, psychical, and spiritual health is not a haven in which we can take refuge in a sort of final security, but a daily battle in which our very destiny is constantly at stake. |
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