Michigan Poem

My favorite part is the 5 seasons of Michigan... plus they correctly call us Michi-ganders not Michi-genners.

Everyone Loves a Parade

The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failure and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism. It is just ultimate and humiliating realism, which for some reason demands a lot of forgiveness of almost everything. Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it--even before we change it. This is perhaps our major stumbling stone, the price we must pay to keep the human heart from closing down and to keep the soul open for something more. 

FALLING UPWARD, Richard Rohr

Mystery and Transformation

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of “common sense,” of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful “Beatrice.” The true faith journey only begins at this point. Up to now everything is mere preparation. Finally, we leave a container strong enough to hold the contents of our real life, which is always filled with contradictions and adventures and immense challenges. Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things. Wholeness and holiness will always stretch us beyond our small comfort zone. How could they not?    

...it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the false self, and is very often the very birth of the soul. Instead of being ego driven, you will begin to be soul drawn…  

St. John of the Cross taught that God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery/transformation/God/grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process. No one oversees his or her own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying.

FALLING UPWARD, Richard Rohr  

I began reading this book last week and it has stirred many questions in me. Am I still in the first half of life? Have the essential questions, "What makes me significant?" "How can I support myself?" and "Who will go with me?" been answered enough to create a proper container in which to start living the second half? It doesn't feel like they have been.

I wonder if I have more of a container than I can see, if believing I don't have the answers to these questions is really a lie? If that is why it feels full of risk, of trust, of surrender?

When I think of it as "falling upward," it feels much more about the "very birth of the soul," and that really challenges my dread and my fear in some of the choices that I need to be making in the near future.

Isaiah 26:12-15

Lord, you establish peace for us;
    all that we have accomplished you have done for us.
Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us,
    but your name alone do we honor.
They are now dead, they live no more;
    their spirits do not rise.
You punished them and brought them to ruin;
    you wiped out all memory of them.
You enlarged the nation, Lord;
    you have enlarged the nation.
You have gained glory for yourself;
    you have extended all the borders of the land.

These are verses I first read as in high school during a time when I was fighting with my best friend. In those years I was simply caught up by the peace God offered. But over the years these verses have grown with me as I have returned to them over and over. He is about removing anything that rules over us in order to extend his glory.

(Thanks to Renee Neiser Lorincz, my high school volleyball coach who encouraged me to turn to God and the Scriptures when life felt hard)