I always enjoyed God as He,
Father, Dad;
a relationship of strength
and intimacy.
Not wrong, but perhaps
incomplete.
I have been exploring God as She,
Mother, Ma;
a different kind of intimacy
and strength.
The Aramaic word translated ‘Father’
that Jesus would have used
is Abwoon,
Father-womb,
encompassing father and mother
but more of a verb than a noun,
parenting,
our on-going flowing
from our divine source.
What difference does it make
knowing God is verb
not noun,
active and involved
not separate and distinct?
Prayer is not mouthing
empty words at God.
It is not asking God to do something
then waiting to see if God answers.
It is holding a prayer, a plan, an image,
with God,
voicing it, believing it,
picturing it, thanking God for it.
Prayer is embodying
a future possibility before it is born.
Prayer becomes substance,
a thought form, a blueprint,
a hope in the heart
with roots in the mind.
It is the first stage
of creating a new reality.
Prayer
takes us into the world of Spirit.
Prayer
is co-creating with God.
Winter is about finding a different kind of life to the one we miss from the summer, different colours of soul that we do not notice when full-blown and bright. As the trees go bare we add layers of clothes to our bodies but the dark can lay bare our souls. This is the time of year when deaths and breakdowns can peak, when we are vulnerable to the footsteps beyond our walls. In winter we need to be held by the network of love our lives have woven. Love that warms the winter cold and lights fires to burn the dross we have carried through the year. Love that faces our mistakes without losing its smile. Love that links us to our own strengths when we struggle, to friends when we are alone, to God when we are afraid. Love that fits our size, the smallness we feel in the large space of world. Love that wears the clothes of this bare season, not a sugar covering that dissolves in the dark. Winter is the time to find the bones of love.
It is so easy to think of our planet as being ‘out there’, as if we don’t belong and we can only experience it when outside with the trees and birds and bees. However wonderful that is, we are an inherent part of our planet too and we take it wherever we go.
Dust
I am inside today, facing the furniture, noticing the dust. Dust, the thin, clinging stuff that covers our fancies and dreams. We only see it as something to be gone, hiding and dirtying our substance and treasure, quietly measuring their days.
What is the value of dust? I can draw in it with my finger, print my name, leave a smiley face, connect to earth. I can polish it away, put love and work into my ornaments and surfaces that otherwise would be unremembered. I can blow it to haze the air, a breath of spirit to clean my crystals, to create new patterns as it falls back for another time. I can adjust my seeing so I see it with a smile not a frown, a lens to see the world by.
I can own it, for it is mostly the cells of my skin I have finished with, a testament to my growth and being. I can know it for it is of earth and I am of earth. It is a daily deposit of the substance of this universe that reminds me that I am alive, I am here, I am spirit made flesh, I can worship with hands and knees, I can tread time, I can create and choose and move and love and listen. This gift of earth, of physicality, of cause and effect and learning, of beauty and spoiling, of history and remembering, of wanting and having, of complex dynamic relationship with each person and plant and being, is my arena.