"and I want to remember..."

"When children play on Christmas day
and snow is flung,

When I feel I haven't had a friend
since I was young,

When I'm feeling tired of myself
and everyone,

Lord remind me,
Lord remind me..."

This post (from last year) is my invitation to join in an "advent" celebration of the 24 questions and answers from the chapter "Recapitulation" from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. This deep, and reverent, dive has been transformative for me.  

But, this post is about so much more. It is about the meaning and power of Christmas in our lives. I hope you find it helpful -- and hopeful -- as you enter this blessed season....

I was looking for an Amy Grant song to keynote an earlier post when I stumbled upon this exquisite song by Jon and Valerie Guerra on Amy's Facebook page.

Sometimes a song comes along that begs its own post, "Lord Remind Me" is one of those songs.

The holiday season -- from Thanksgiving to the year's end -- has always been my favorite time of year. I cherish long-held traditions and nurture new ones that have found purchase in the sweet soil of our family home. The tree goes up the day before Thanksgiving, White Christmas. Little Women, The Holiday, and Love, Actually fill the screen that weekend. Then comes the Christmas music -- too many favorites to note. 

One of my favorite "traditions" comes between December 1st and the 25th, when I pray with each of the twenty-four questions in the chapter, "Recapitulation" from Mary Baker Eddy's textbook for spiritual healing, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as my version of an advent calendar. One question deeply pondered, each day, as we move towards Christmas.

But this year, while many loved traditions have been carried out, I have felt a bit detached. Perhaps it's because its the first year that none of the children were here for me to lasso into choosing the tree, watching White Christmas, or baking pies.  And although I felt a bit sad, I wasn't really doing anything about it. I was aware that the tree went up too quickly and I was alone in the kitchen while I baked cookies and listened to White Christmas, but I chalked it up to our version of empty nest syndrome after over three decades of day-to-day parenting.

That was when I came upon "Lord Remind Me," and fell to my knees. The true meaning of Christmas came alive in me. This wasn't about trees and cookies, films and carols. It wasn't even about traditions long-loved. It was about something timeless and humbling. It was about remembering that nothing was impossible to God. It was about forgiveness and healing, about kings that kneeled before a baby, and a boy who trusted angels. It was about a girl who said, "yes," and the message of "on earth peace, good will to men."

Is there anything we need more today? Is there any message more timely, or a time more hungry for this message?

As Jon and Valerie sing with such reverence and humility:

"when I hear the news,
and hear another war's begun,
and I wonder if God's
on the side f either one,
I hear bullet, nail, or handcuff
you bore all of them,
and in the light
my heart's as dark as anyone's.

Lord remind me, Lord remind me
that the shepherds head the angels
break the silence in the field,
that the wise men found a baby
and they could not help but kneel

Lord remind me, cause its Christmas
and I want to remember..." 

And I do want to remember. I want to feel the power of this story drive me to my knees. I want to feel it change my heart and break through any sense of brittle self-certainty and icy indifference that might have gathered, like frost, on the tender places where I want to feel the heartbreak of my brothers and sisters in Aleppo, or Chicago, or Washington, DC.

There is a sweet, holy cry for the Christ to enter the manger of our hearts in this song:

"Tell me, how He loves me,
tell me, how he wants me,
tell me the story
like I've never heard before..." 

This is the part that broke through to the softest, deepest part of me. The words split me open and love for Him spilled from every part of my being. To think what he gave. To remember what he did. To know his love -- it is everything.

"...and I'll sing it
like the angels sing it,
with my whole heart sing it,
to Him who's worth
a thousand songs and more..." 

Hymns and carols came alive in me. My heart was an angel's heart singing from the stars. I walked out into the cold night and sang for him who loves us so. I lifted my voice in praise, and hope, and humble adoration for the child who brought kings to their knees, and for the man who would be king of kings.

I sang through tears of repentance and joy:

"Glory in the highest,
glory in the lowest,
glory that shines when nothing
seems to shine at all

Glory in the highest,
glory in the lowest
glory, Immanuel..." 

And isn't this the message of messages, "Immanuel..." which is translated, "God with us..." So tonight, I raised my voice to the heavens and sang, "Glory in the highest, glory in the lowest, glory Immanuel..."  Then, a flock of geese rose from the lake, circled above, and -- I like to believe -- carried that message in their own voices to the far corners of the earth.


offered with Love,

Kate

"be still, be still, and know..."

"Be still, and know that I'm with you.
Be still, and know that I am here.
Be still, be still, and know..."

In the darkness, peace felt fragile. Every mistake I'd ever made seemed to parade itself across the backdrop of my closed eyes. Sleep evaded me.

I had been lying there for hours, rehashing decisions that seemed so much clearer in hindsight. I was so tired of being haunted by all the ways I could have done things differently: gone to the right -- instead of the left, paused for one minute longer, held my peace -- instead of speaking. I was exhausted from thinking and re-thinking.

I lay there awash in regret while the house breathed its winter sounds. I'd been praying -- without ceasing -- when a simple scripture from the Psalms -- and one that is central in this beautiful lyric from The Fray's, "Be Still." broke through.

Be still. And know. I am. It was the perfect reminder. I needed to get off the hamster wheel of human thinking. I needed to be still, and know. Not think, but know. I stilled, not just my thrashing, sheet-twined body, but my unsettled heart. I lay on my back, folded my hands, and took long deep breaths until I felt the sweetness of a quiet mind.

Then I asked myself: what do you know to be true? Not, what do you think is true? But what do you absolutely know to be true -- right now. Then I listened. Within moments it came. "I know I am." It was simple and pure. I know that I am conscious. I know that I am aware of loving my husband, my children. I know that I am capable of gratitude -- right now. I know that I still [always, persistently, nevertheless] love God, good. I know that I am able to be truthful, quiet, humble, loving.

It may not seem like a profound insight -- but in the dark, when the demons of regret are circling and thoughts rush around like wild creatures in an approaching storm -- it is like having the gentling hand of a divine Parent rest upon your heart.

I didn't fall asleep immediately that night. But the darkness changed from foreboding to comforting. I felt swaddled in the stillness like an infant -- it's closeness calming my heart and mind. Thinking gave way to knowing, and in that knowing there was a sweet peace.

In Scripture, John tell us:

"Yes shall know the Truth,
and the Truth shall make you free." 

He didn't say, "ye shall think the truth, and the truth shall make you free," but know. The different between thinking and knowing is a profound one for me. There is a peace in knowing what I know vs. thinking about something.

I didn't have to do battle with those demons -- Mind, God, had asserted Its divine authority. Knowing, overwhelmed human thought-taking. Gratitude for what I absolutely knew to be true, swept away the cobwebs of speculation, regret, memory, and imagination. The final chapter of Mary Baker Eddy's textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, titled "Fruitage," includes testimonies of healing. C.B.G. of Hudson, Massachusetts shares this experience - and it so perfectly describes what I felt that night -- and continue to feel, each time thinking yields to knowing:

"I closed the book and with head bowed in prayer
I waited with longing intensity for some answer.
How long I waited I do not know, but suddenly,
like a wonderful burst of sunlight after a storm,
came clearly this thought,

“Be still, and know that I am God.”

I held my breath — deep into my hungering thought
sank the infinite meaning of that “I.”
All self-conceit, egotism, selfishness, everything
that constitutes the mortal “I,” sank abashed
out of sight. I trod, as it were, on holy ground.
Words are inadequate to convey the fulness of that
spiritual uplifting, but others who have had similar
experiences will understand. From that hour I have had
an intelligent consciousness of the ever-presence
of an infinite God who is only good." 

For me, this knowing space, is a place of such profound peace that I never want to leave it. I find myself looking for ways to return to it throughout each day. I seek the quiet spaces, the covert places, where I can curl myself into the knowing -- the I am of being, the consciousness of Love alone as Life. It is the place of stillness -- nevertheless-ness. It is the place I love.

offered with Love,

Kate

"the babe of healing..."

"I am waiting
in a silent prayer..."

A friend's recent post on Facebook reminded me of an early December night, many years ago.  It was a time when all I wanted was a baby to love, to hold, and to cherish.

I'd called a friend and mentor during one of my darkest moments. I poured out my heart's sorrow. I could actually feel the compassion that filled the pregnant silence. It was as palpable as a hand reaching through the darkness. Soon, my weeping stilled, and my breathing evened.

Then, when he knew I was ready to listen, he asked me if I was ready to give birth to the most precious babe on earth -- the babe of Christian healing. I knew he was referencing a passage by Mary Baker Eddy from an article titled, "The Cry of Christmas-tide," published in her collected Miscellaneous Writings 1883 - 1896:

"Unto us a child is born,
unto us a son is given.

"In different ages the divine idea assumes
different forms, according to humanity’s needs.
In this age it assumes, more intelligently
than ever before, the form of Christian healing.
This is the babe we are to cherish."
 

He reminded me that, more than ever before, this was the babe I needed to cherish -- not just for myself, but for the world.

Then, he gently suggested that I return to a series of twenty-four questions and answers that make up the entire curriculum for Eddy's course on Christian Science healing. Questions that are found in the chapter "Recapitulation," from her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Beginning on page 465 and concluding on page 497 we are given a path for seeking -- and finding -- healing. Twenty-four questions on thirty-two pages.

He told me that each December, he did this himself. He took one question per day and studied her answer. Then he pondered how he might answer that same question, based on what he had experienced as a healer throughout the year.

He assured me that these next precious days of gestation would bring forth this "babe," and I would be ready to cherish it with my whole life's purpose. These questions would prepare my heart. They were the promise of a new birth.

So, I did. And I still do. Each December 1st, I begin with the first question: "What is God?" I deeply consider Eddy's simple, cogent, complete, and profound answer.  Then I ask myself, "Based on what you have learned this year, what is God to you?" 

You see, I long to know God, myself.  

I am profoundly grateful for Mary Baker Eddy's waymarks as she chronicled her own journey towards a deeper understanding of what it means to "know the Lord." 

But I don't want to simply read her travel diary, and look at her photos -- I want to go where she has gone.  I long to feel that landscape under my feet.  To breathe that holy air.  And by revisiting those questions -- and then searching my heart for answers that ring with a true tone -- I align myself with the I AM THAT I AM.  For me, it is one of the most holy traditions of the season.

Last night, I couldn't wait to begin this year's season of expectancy, gestation, and birth. In fact, I was so eager that I rose just after midnight and took up that first question. The brevity and clarity in her answer took my breath away:

Question. — What is God?

Answer. — God is incorporeal, 
divine, supreme, infinite Mind,
Spirit, Soul, Principle,
Life, Truth, Love.
 

And as I pondered my own journey --  with that question as a spiritual waymark -- my heart opened to new views. What a revelation! Everything that I've discovered about God's allness, power, and grace this year has deepened my trust in the spiritual reality of all things.  It has informed my understanding of healing.  Over and over again, it has been my spiritual anchor in moments self-doubt and uncertainty. I wrote down my most current answers to that first question, and filled page-after-page, long into the night.

Tomorrow I will take up the second question. Then the third. And each day I will feel this babe grow stronger in me -- again.

For me, this Christmas exercise -- first practiced over 25 years ago -- was (and is) life-transforming. It has continued to renew and refresh my understanding of how to realize the healing presence of God. In fact, I find myself repeating it throughout the year.  And although I've been blessed with inestimable joy in parenting each of our children, it is this "babe of Christian healing," that has filled my heart with purpose, and brought unfathomable peace when my womb felt empty.

From experience, I know that on December 25th I will be looking into the face of this beloved babe. I will see this healing Christ in the unwavering spiritual innocence of universal humanity. This is the babe that I will hold close, and never let go of.  This is the babe that will never let go of me.

And each day as I ponder these questions I will be waiting, as Amy Grant sings in "Breath of Heaven," in a silent prayer for the birth this babe in my own heart.

For me, this is the great gift -- healing.  It is what we all seek.  To know that we are whole, well, complete in the All-in-allness of God's great love.   Or, as Mary Baker Eddy promises in "The Cry of Christmas-tide:"

"This is the babe we are to cherish.

This is the babe
that twines its loving arms
about the neck of omnipotence,
and calls forth infinite care
from His loving heart."
 

offered with Love,

Kate

"Magic - it's all about distraction..."

A friend reminded me about this post from 2007 tonight...just when I needed a reminder that I always have the right to refuse to be distracted, and reclaim my focus...transfixing it on God, good. It's always there.

Here's the backstory:

Thanks, S.

"Talkin' about magic..."

“Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart
How the music can free her, whenever it starts
And it's magic, if the music is groovy
It makes you feel happy like an old-time movie
I'll tell you about the magic, and it'll free your soul
But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll”
- John Sebastian

This question surfaces constantly: “If God is good, and is all, how is it that we experience illness, depression, sorrow, evil?”

I too have asked this question of myself, and of others…teachers, pastors, sages, professors…but especially of God.

At one point in my study of Christian Science, this question seemed to be all I could think about.  I took Mary Baker Eddy’s route towards discovery.  I “searched the Scriptures and read little else”…well, except her best-selling book on spirituality, Science and Health. 

One day during a particularly intense search for answers, it was in this book that I found a clue that seemed to stand out in relief as if highlighted in yellow neon.  My research had led me to focus my inquiry on a chapter titled “Animal Magnetism Unmasked” in which she explores with her reader this topic that she defines in these six brief pages, in part, as “mesmerism,” that which “leads to moral and physical death,” “a mere negation,” “a specific term for error,” “mortal mind,” a “suppositional lie,”…etc.  Not a light topic.  But one that seemed to have me stopped in my tracks like a deer in the headlights. 

Through the course of my daily spiritual practice, I would study, ponder and pray out from other spiritual facts, but this question seemed to loom just at the back of every question I brought to the closet in prayer.    One day I was sitting in my office, once again reading through those six pages, and I came across this sentence:

“Any seeming benefit derived from it  [animal magnetism]
is proportional to one’s faith in esoteric magic.”

Hmm….what could be the connection between this topic of animal magnetism and magic?  I spent the next year investigating that question. 

And I got nowhere…slowly.  Granted, I was busy. I had a full-time public practice in spiritual healing, as well as the parenting three children, and a consulting project with an international speakers’ bureau, to navigate each day.  My plate was full, but there always seemed to be space for that question about Eddy's use of the term "magic," in connection with "animal magnetism," to surface.

After a year of scouring library, bookstore, and “strange little out of the way magic shop” shelves for some clue as to the connection between spiritual healing and esoteric magic, I was frustrated and ready to give up.  I had read lots, but felt no closer to something I could make my own, feel the strength of, and find practical as a healer. 

I decided to give it another try one Saturday in early April.  It was one of those perfect crocus-popping spring days.  Temperatures in the 60s, a deep blue cloudless sky, and robins singing from the trees like that deranged bird in Mary Poppins during the “Spoonful of Sugar” sequence… all assertive and cheery.  But I digress…

The girls were playing happily with their dad, so I slipped away for an hour after the breakfast dishes were done for a cup of tea and some study at my favorite coffeehouse in our village center, just outside of Boston, while our older daughter was in a ballet workshop.  I arrived early enough to garner one of the few tables outside on the wide sidewalk, and settled in.  Before long, I was more frustrated than ever.  I just didn’t get it. 

I was ready to resign to the possibility that I would never get the connection between magic and the practice of spiritual healing, when a man approached my table balancing his coffee mug on a book, and carrying his brioche on the plate in his other hand, while a copy of the Boston Globe seemed to be ready to spill out from under his arm.  He asked if he could share my table...glancing about, as if to encourage me to notice that there were no vacant seats, except the chair on which I had placed my small traveling library.  As I reached to move the books and papers, I looked right into his face and allowed all of the frustration I was feeling about my search, to pour out in seven words that surprised us both. 

“Yes, but it’s going to cost you!” 

Normally I would never have said such a thing. I’d have met his request with a cheerful nod, and then within a few moments excused myself and left for home, or the car, to wait for our daughter to finish her ballet workshop.  But this time I was so absorbed in my question that I had blurted out the conditions of my demand, before thinking.

I don‘t believe he could have ever imagined it coming from the benignly studious person he had approached.  There I was in jeans, a white men’s dress shirt ten sizes too large and rolled up at the sleeves, a pair of old scuffed pick ballet slippers, the arms of a nubby grey sweater tied around my shoulders, my reading glasses clinging precariously to the tip of my nose, and my white hair bursting wildly from the pencils that anchored it up into a bun.  I was anything but the image of a coquette-ish schoolgirl flirting with a stranger.  Thank goodness for his ability to process that visual information quickly enough to respond with patient good humor.

“What’s it going to cost me?” he asked with a curious, and hesitant, smile. 

I was relieved that he hadn’t given me a “what a weirdo” look, and just turned his back.  I smiled and said, “You have to tell me everything you know about magic!” 

I could see relief seep through the wariness in his face.  As he placed his coffee and brioche, book and morning paper on the table, he replied, “Piece of cake, I’m a professional magician.” 

I was stunned, but didn’t waste precious time.

“Good," I said, "tell me about magic in layman's terms, in three or four sentences, so that I understand the fundamental principles behind how it works.”

“I can tell you in one word: distraction.” 

He then explained it to me. 

When a magician is performing a trick he diverts your focus from watching what his hands are doing so that you aren’t aware of the "trick" that is going on right in front of your eyes.  He then lets go of your focus, allowing it to return to where you think it has been all along.  And voila…a rabbit pops out of a hat.  While he had distracted you, or pulled your focus off of what he is doing...by suggesting that you look at his sequined, flashy assistant...he has retrieved the rabbit from a box under the table, and placed it in the hat in full view right in front of you.  When he released your focus and then pulled the rabbit out of the hat, you thought it was magic. 

For me it was just the key I needed for unlocking an important door in my practice of spiritual healing...one that I've alluded to, in a previous post titled, "And immediately the fever left her..." 

Sickness, sin, disease, war, violence are just, at their roots, the suggestion that God is absent. They, like the magician, would like to be able to pull my focus from the allness of God, good, that is always right in front of me. To pull my eyes off center to where it is jumping up and down, screaming “God is absent…God is absent.”   But at any given moment I can say “No…I have the right to see what is right in front of me."  I have the right to reclaim my focus and see that God is present. And that any instance of good, however faint, points to the allness of good. .  That when Love is at all present, in some expression of kindness or affection…even if it is just the very moment of loving that you are bringing to bear on the situation by doing something kind for another...it is all-present -- since there is only one measure, or portion of Love, God, and that is infinite, all..  To realize that it is enough to realize that Mind is present in the very questioning you are doing, as you search for answers. 

By reclaiming your focus, holding it on the presence of God, appreciating any indication of God’s presence, you are refusing to consent to the absence of God in any measure, degree or form.  This focus, the appreciation...awareness of, and gratitude for...good, results in the appreciat-ing...ensuent growth in value, of goodness in all its manifestations. And acting out from this presence of God, good, is to begin living with spiritual (God-based) authority without condition or measure.

Mary Baker Eddy further supports this way of living and seeing when she asserts:

“No evidence before the material senses
can close my eyes to the scientific proof
that God, good, is supreme.”

There is never a moment when we cannot be the love “the magician” is trying to convince us is absent, or to ask the question that affirms the presence of Mind, Love, Truth, Life that this same trickster would try to assert has left the room.

Eddy goes on to say,

“Love is especially near in times of hate,
and never so near as when one can be just
amid lawlessness, and render good for evil.”

I left the café that day with a new friend…a magician…and a fresh, vital way of thinking about my work, my world, and my right to stay focused on the presence of God--the presence of good--throughout every day.

“I'll tell you about the magic, and it'll free your soul
But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll”
- John Sebastian

Here's a link to John Sebastian, and the Lovin' Spoonful singing ""Do you believe in magic..."

with Love,

Kate

"Dust in the wind..."

"I close my eyes,
only for a moment,
and the moment's gone

All my dreams,
pass before my eyes,
a curiosity

Dust in the wind,
all they are is dust in the wind...."

The actual sound of, and the lyrics to, Kansas' "Dust in the Wind," always make me want to cry softly in my pillow for something I can't quite put my finger on.  But, it was the first song that tiptoed across my heart when, a few weeks ago, I found this statement, by Anne Frank, scribbled on a piece of notebook paper in an old journal:

"I have one outstanding trait in my character, which must strike anyone who knows me for any length of time, and that is my knowledge of myself.

I can watch myself and my actions, just like an outsider. The Anne of every day, I can face entirely without prejudice, without making excuses for her, and watch what's good and what's bad about her.

This 'self-consciousness' haunts me, and every time I open my mouth I know as soon as I've spoken whether 'that ought to have been different' or 'that was right as it was.'

There are so many things about myself that I condemn; I couldn't begin to name them all. I understand more and more how true Daddy's words were when he said: 'All children must look after their own upbringing.'

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands."

Anne Frank

I haven't been able to let it go.  It sits on my desk as a reminder...a haunting reminder of the inconsequence of "age" in assessing a "child's" spiritual maturity, and self-awareness. 

In 1945, Holocaust victim Annelies Marie Frank, passed on at the age of fifteen, while interred as a prisoner in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.  She is best known as the author of "The Diary of a Young Girl," which records her family's experience, while in hiding (before their capture, separation, and imprisonment), during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.  The pathos, and power, of its heart-rending honesty  have been wept over by readers of all ages since its publication in 1947.  

It's impact on my girlhood was life-altering.  I began journaling.  I felt like I had a friend in Anne.  She was a girl like me.  She found herself in a situation that often left her feeling a bit discouraged, but she never stopped dreaming about love, finding life-purpose in the simple act of recording her thoughts, and living with a heart full of hope.

In relationship to Anne, I especially remember being twelve.  In so many ways, I felt helpless.  I didn't have many friends because we moved so often.  Sometimes I was overwhelmed by my family...they were wonderful, but there were so many of them.  Mom, dad, and five siblings all cozied (or crowded) up together in one little house, after another.  And once the twins came along..some years later, we would be a family of ten.

I remember one particular Saturday when, while wandering the stacks at the public library...unable to decide on the next book to disappear into...when I came across my old friend, Anne's slim volume, tucked between two fat novels.

I'd read "The Diary of a Young Girl" a number of times before, but that particular day it was like walking down the street of a foreign city, feeling terribly lonely, unable to speak the language, and then, quite serendipitously, running into an old friend.  Every plan you have had, up till that moment, for how you might spend the day, disappears like "Dust in the Wind," and you can't imagine doing anything but sitting across from her, and listening, and listening...just catching up.

I pulled the small, slim, clothbound book, from between the broad shoulders of her beefy shelfmates, and took it to a quiet corner filled with sunlight.  There, I fell into the hidden rooms,  the whispered dinners, the unspoken fears, the closeted spaces of the Frank family...their courage, their simple joys, the sweet affection, their terrifying ordeal...through their daughter's eyes, and her musings on love and hope.  As the sun moved from east to west that day,  my family complaints...our tiny house, the cacophony of sharing a small bedroom with three sisters, a tight budget, and no privacy...all seemed so silly, petty, selfish, the annoyances of a selfish child...not the concerns of a person of character, courage, self-knowledge, and grace.  Not the concerns of someone worthy of being Anne Frank's friend.  

I read it through, completely, from cover-to-cover, before I left the library that day.  Then I carried it to the librarian's desk and checked it out.  I needed to take Anne home with me.  She would think that my family privileged,  living like American royalty.  Open windows, fresh air, full tummies, baths.  So that I wouldn't forget what I had, I would also visit her home "in hiding" again, and again, before returning her diary to the library when it was due.  Later I would buy my own copy of her diary from the dusty shelves of a used bookstore.   I think my visits with Anne's family,  changed the kind of daughter, and sister, I became...at least for a while.  It's a "place" I think I need to return to more frequently.

Mary Baker Eddy says, in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"Thou art right, immortal Shakespeare, great poet of humanity:

Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

Trials teach mortals not to lean on a material staff, -  a broken reed, which pierces the heart. We do not half remember this in the sunshine of joy and prosperity. Sorrow is salutary. Through great tribulation we enter the kingdom. Trials are proofs of God's care. Spiritual development germinates not from seed sown in the soil of material hopes, but when these decay, Love propagates anew the higher joys of Spirit, which have no taint of earth. Each successive stage of experience unfolds new views of divine goodness and love."

I believe this is true.  I pray that my friend, Anne...that funny, smart, creative, deeply kind, ridiculously hopeful friend, Anne...found beauty, new views of divine goodness and love wherever her journey has taken her.  That she is enjoying "the higher joys of Spirit, which have no taint of earth."

It is this "taint of earth" that, like "dust in the wind" only lasts for a moment, and then, those moments...of fear, worry, doubt, plotting and planning...are gone.  But what remains has weight, substance...is good,  real, lasting, eternal, and pure.  Like Anne's thought they take root, they germinate in thoughts, they grow wild in us as deeds, and they bear rich, abundant, bountiful fruit...the fruit of lives lived humbly, joyfully, gracefully, simply in service to God, and to mankind.  

If an ordeal-free life is the goal, the measure, the outcome of a well-prayed spirirual existence, none of my heroes have succeeded.  Jesus Christ, Mary Baker Eddy, Julian of Norwich, Anne Frank, Ghandhi, Nelson Mandela, my mom,  my mentor, my best friend..none of them has passed through this human experience without a detour throught a fire, a prison, a war, a loss, a trial, persecution...or two.  But if the measure of a man, woman,...or child, is the self-knowledge, humility, love...and grace...with which he or she,  travels that journey, then my heroes...as well as each of you...are champions. Those fiery ordeals have only served to melt away the dross...the dust, the chaff, the tares...and reveal the substance...the gold...the true metal of who you are. 

Eddy, in her definition of "children," says that they are:

"not in embryo, but in maturity."

Rarely has this statement rung so true, as in the heart of Annelise Marie Frank.  I love her childlike wisdom.  I love the raw self-knowledge, humility, and love she shares with us in the passage above, that opens this post.  I just love her. 

always her friend...and yours,

Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

[lead photo credit:  St. George Island - Ryan Kingsbery 2010]

"Show me the river that leads to my home..."

"...Show me the river that leads to my home
back to the one that I love
show me the wind that constantly blows
and I will fly away, fly away home..."
- EastMountainSouth "Show Me the River"*

For the most part, when I have wandered off course it has always been in a way that, to a casual onlooker, might go unnoticed.  And although to someone glancing in my direction it may seem as if I am still sitting in my normal place...in the chair by the window...I'm sometimes quite alone and far away  My wanderings sometimes take me so far away from "home" that I am left shivering inside like an abandoned pioneer child on the windswept edges of a barren winter prairie...grasses beige with cold and the sky steely and lowering with a gathering storm in the East.

This "space" of desolation was where I found myself bedded down one night a few years back.  Long after my family was fast asleep under heavy quilts...dreaming with heads upon soft downy pillows, I was tossing and turning on the hard frozen ground of a Kansas prairie...or so it felt.   I finally realized that I'd mentally left my warm bed, when I found I was shivering, arms wrapped around me, as if I were grasping a threadbare shawl about my shoulders in order to stay warm.  It was this very clutching of "my tatters close about me" that wakened me from the aimless mental wandering and stopped me in my tracks, and allowed the words from East Mountain South's "Show Me the River" to penetrate through a deep-seated cold, bringing the much-needed inspiration that would begin to wing me "homeward".

I love rivers.  I love the spiritual metaphors they evoke, the visual inspiration I find while sitting on their banks, the realization that a congregation of individual drops of water when flowing in a single direction can carve canyons out of mountains and buoy a fleet of schooners down the Nile, the Amazon, or the St. Lawrence.  But mostly, I love Mary Baker Eddy's definition of "River" in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: 

" Channel of thought. When smooth and unobstructed,
it typifies the course of Truth; but muddy, foaming,
and dashing, it is a type of error."

It was this definition, following EastMountainSouth's wake-up call to me while I lay cold and shivering on that barren stretch of mental prairie, that pointed me in the direction that would lead "home".   I could imagine lowering myself into the calm waters of a warm river, a channel of thoughts...smooth and unobstructed. When rocks or debris crossed my path, the river would either flow around them...dismissing them as inconsequential...or calmly and persistently dissolve the hardness of those suggestions with an unrelenting spiritual confidence.  Any rigidity in my thinking, any suggestion that I should be afraid, doubt the "supremacy of Spirit" or ever think that my life...or the life of anyone...was out of His control, was washed away in the affluence of God's abiding Love.

Having reached new mental shores I could rise up out of the river's arms, be dried by the warm sunshine of Soul's ever-reminding evidence of beauty, love, and peace surrounding me and calling to me from every direction...the gentleness of my daughter's touch, the precise placement of the stars hanging above me in the cloudless winter sky, the constancy of Life proven in every leaf that falls and bud that bursts from the rich Spring soil...then allow myself to be lifted and carried by the winds of Spirit towards the familiar landscapes of peace, faith, and grace-filled moments of trust in His care.

"Wind" is my other favorite spiritual "element." a term that Eddy, in part, defines as:

"That which indicates the might of omnipotence
and the movements of God's spiritual government,
encompassing all things."

I like thinking of myself (and others) as God-blown, God-carried, God-choreographed, God-sent, God-breathed...as a blessing upon the earth.   Not one of my movements is self-determined or "born of a woman"...even myself...but borne on the wings of God's divine breath.

As I let myself be carried from the cold barren landscape of fear and doubt by a river of trust and faith, around the inconsequential obstacles of confusion and the boulders of self-doubt,  dissolving the bleak suggestions of "remember when" and "what if"....I could feel the constancy of His deep, low song, "I am All, I am here"...singing me all the way home.

Finding my way onto the shores of His kingdom within...I could finally rest in His arms...I was home.

If you find yourself far from home in the middle of a dark night of doubt, or even in the glaring light of a busy day, lower yourself into the river of God's presence, surrender to the constant flow of His peace-filled thoughts, be carried towards new landscapes of opportunity for blessing others, then rising and rising on the winds of His breath... let yourself be God-blown towards home.

with Love,
Kate

*this is the only video I could find with the soundtrack of this song...if you don't like superman, I'm sorry...please feel free to just listen to the music.

"And the seasons they go round and round..."

"And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
Were captive on the carousel of time
We cant return
we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game..."

As the seasons change and patterns seem to emerge, both good and…well, not so good, I find myself humming this song almost unconsciously.  I love Joni Mitchell, and I love this song. There is a magic to it that is all wrapped up in being a young woman with dreams of staving off the slow slide into a life of consumerism and conformity, and living a purpose driven existence full of social activism and global responsibility.  Just hearing Joni's voice is like a clarion call to something noble and selfless. 

But as much as I love this song…any Joni song…Circle Game does seem to be an anthem for the kind of carousel riding – round and round, up and down and you can't get off –thinking that leave you feeling a bit unsettled and dizzy with blurred vision.

One symptom of this kind of thinking…thinking that seemed to surface every year for me as winter approached, was influenza…or the flu.  That unwelcome cycle of colds and coughs which tried to get my attention by screaming "my turn, my turn…let me jump on the carousel with you and sit on the next horse chattering all the way…round and round, up and down…can I, can I, can I?".  And before I knew it I would find myself running in place at a full gallop, with a running nose, but getting nowhere …before I realized it.

For a long time I would just battle with the whole suggestion that there could even be cycles.  I would avoid carousels at all cost.  I would absolutely deny the premise that anything could return, repeat, persist, or persevere.  But one day I came across this statement from one of my favorite passages (passage below with this particular statement in bold) from Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,

"The physical healing of Christian Science results now,
as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle,
before which sin and disease lose their reality in human
consciousness and disappear as naturally and as
necessarily as darkness gives place to light
and sin to reformation.
Now, as then, these mighty works are not supernatural,
but supremely natural. 
They are the sign of Immanuel, or "God with us,"
--a divine influence ever present in human
consciousness and repeating itself,
coming now as was promised aforetime,

To preach deliverance to the captives [of sense],
And recovering of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty them that are bruised.

This was a powerful realization for me.  I wasn't in the business of destroying the "repetitive", but of claiming it for God.  The only influenza, or influence that was repeating itself in my life, or in the life of my children or neighbors…local and global…was that divine influence.  And this divine influence had as its source God as Mind…the only Mind that even had the intelligence to remember, to recall, to repeat…and the divine could only repeat the truth…that which was good, perfect, enduringly present in human consciousness.

All that can go "round and round and round" within our schools, our neighborhoods, our villages, and outposts is this divine influence.  It spreads quickly through our system warming us with its promise of love, grace, joy.  It's radiant love shows itself in selfless behavior, it's flush of joy is evidenced in bright smiles, it's persistent song is "peace, be still" echoing through the chambers of thought and it circulates a message of "God is All-in-all" through every heart…it is the music on my carousel.

Truth is repeating itself.  Truth is insistent, health is imperative, purity is assertive, and God is All-in-all.

This is what goes "round and round and round" in my heart today…
Kate

Colorado Rocky Mountain High

"He was born in the summer
of his twenty-seventh year
Comin' home
To a place he'd never been before…"
- John Denver

Well, it wasn't my twenty-seventh year, but close.  The first time I drove through the gates of the Adventure Unlimited Ranches I was "coming home to a place I'd never been before".  But the story of my relationship to this place nestled high in the Rocky Mountains at the base of Columbia, started when I was 11 years old.

My best friend from Sunday School, Becky (and her younger sister Suzy, who was my sister Nancy's best friend) went to Adventure Unlimited every summer for weeks of horseback riding, canoeing, singing camp songs, and sleeping under the stars.  Preparation for "camp" however started in the spring.  There were shopping trips for boots, cowgirl shirts and hats, jeans, pocket knifes and flashlight.  And my sister and I loved being included in any way we could. 

We were the eldest children in a family of eight and camp was not an option on an already stretched budget.  But rather than feeling jealous or resentful, something that still surprises me, we felt so happy to be able to participate in "camp" through the shopping expeditions and the long Saturday afternoons of taking turns standing at the ironing board pressing name labels into every piece of clothing they would take with them.

Once school was out in early June, the four of us, with Becky and Suzy's mother, Jane, would kick into high gear.  We would scour the packing list looking to see if there was anything we missed.  I felt like I carried that list in my head with me.  I would go over and over it as I drifted off to sleep at night.  Did we have enough bandanas, did we remember to label Becky's new belt, how would we pack the cowboy boots so that they didn't take up too much room. 

By the time we were actually ready to put everything in the big trunks with the chrome corner "bumpers" and the wide leather handle, I had already done so in my head a hundred times.  I had done it so often that I had to sit on my hands when, to my surprise, Becky's mom put the jeans on the left, instead of in the middle next to the cowgirl shirts with the pearl snaps and pointy pocket flaps.  Didn't she realize that they went together?

Nancy and I were included in everything right down to taking Becky and Suzy to the airport.  And that was really where it all started…at least for me.  Becky was a great best friend.  She knew how much I longed to be there with her.  So she wrote me almost every day describing everything about camp.  She drew maps and told me stories.  I would write back with my questions about names of horses, what they had for breakfast, and the love lives of counselors.

I would try to follow the camp schedule from my bunkbed and suburban neighborhood back home. 

And when she returned at the end of her Colorado summer, we could hardly wait for her photographs to come back from the lab.  We would pour over them…me asking hundreds of questions and Becky patiently answering all of them.

By the summer of my almost, but not quite, twenty-seventh year, although my dad had passed on, we had found a way for each of my younger siblings (who wanted to) to go to camp.  And although I had been very active in local youth activities sponsored by the Adventure Unlimited organization's regional chapters, serving on teen boards and volunteering throughout high school, I had never been to "the ranches".

That first drive through the gates of "A/U" was truly a homecoming.  Thanks to Becky's maps, sketches, photographs, letters, and endless patience with my bottomless pit of questions, I knew this property like the back of my hand…or more accurately…like the landscape of my heart.

But there was, however, one place that surprised me…Marianne's chapel.  It was named for one of the real heriones of my lifetime (I had many historical and fictional ones…Mary Baker Eddy, Jo March, Elizabeth Bennett, Isaak Dinesen, Joan of Arc), Marianne Andrews, who with her husband, John (affectionately called Cap) founded the Adventure Unlimited Ranches. Since it had been built in her memory some years after Becky had stopped coming to camp I had never heard about it and so was astonished to have something new to add to the map etched on my heart.  After I had climbed the stairs to the Chuckwagon loft… letting my fingers drift across sun-bleached and faded spines of score of old blue cloth covered Nancy Drew mysteries, well-loved but weary hymnals, and Audubon field guides, lay on a bottom bunk in Horseshoe cabin L…reading the names of girls I might have known engraved in the bed slats above me, and sat in the middle of the island at Valerie Lake…straining to hear the sounds of camp songs echoing through the decades and across the valley - I wandered down the path to the chapel.

There I let myself be "born again.  I let Marianne's dream of nurturing the best in children …cherishing their spiritual maturity, witnessing their boundless bliss, and giving them a laboratory, through this camp, to practice practical scientific Christianity…become my own. 

When the wind whispers through the aspens above my cabin and the breeze sings through the pines…when the little stream murmurs a prayer just beyond my porch and the hummingbirds whir and weave around me while I sit, looking out across Valerie Lake, and pray…it is God's message of grace I hear…but the voices are those of Marianne, Becky, Maree, Cap, Mac, Annie, Deb, Alison, and so many more...I hear the voices of all the teens who have filled this valley with healing, songs, tears, and laughter...and my heart...and my home are full.

This is my home…but it is not a place on a map.  It was my home long before I ever stepped on this piece of geographical real estate in the Arkansas Valley.  This place existed in my heart for almost a dozen years before felt it's sage and ochre landscape under my feet.  I could come here at a moment's notice and never needed a penny to have access to her promise.

Coming here was "coming home…" but carrying her with me…her mission, her opportunities, her purpose and promise…has grounded me on a rock through many personal storms.

Last night, when the words to "Rocky Mountain High" wafted up from the campfire to my cabin porch I wept tears of deep gratitude and peace. Not just for the gift of being graced with another year of serving her purpose through this office.  But my tears were also for the gift of knowing that each of those teens (and maybe even a friend or sibling they might be sharing letters with back home) now has a home that can never be taken from them.  This is a home where they can always go and rediscover something pure and good and selfless in themselves…a place they will carry within their heart forever.  And, I hope, it is a  place where the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures became a "key to every door".

"He was born in the summer
of his twenty-seventh year.
Comin' home
To a place he'd never been before.
He left yesterday behind him,
You might say he was born again.
You might say he found the key to every door.

Colorado Rocky Mountain high,
I've seen it rainin' fir in the sky
The shadow from the starlight
Is softer than a lullaby,
Rocky Mountain High…
Colorado"

It 's good to be home,
Kate

"Talkin' about magic..."

“Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart
How the music can free her, whenever it starts
And it's magic, if the music is groovy
It makes you feel happy like an old-time movie
I'll tell you about the magic, and it'll free your soul
But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll”
- John Sebastian

This question surfaces constantly: “If God is good, and is all, how is it that we experience illness, depression, sorrow, evil?”

I too have asked this question of myself, of others…teachers, pastors, sages, professors…and especially of God.

At one point in my study of Christian Science, this question seemed to be all I could think about.  I took Mary Baker Eddy’s route towards discovery.  I “searched the Scriptures and read little else”…well, except her best-selling book on spirituality, Science and Health. 

One day during a particularly intense search for answers, it was in this book that I found a clue that seemed to stand out in relief as if highlighted in yellow neon.  My research had led me to focus my inquiry on a chapter titled “Animal Magnetism Unmasked” in which she explores with her reader this topic that she defines in these six brief pages, in part, as “mesmerism”, as that which “leads to moral and physical death”, “a mere negation”, “a specific term for error”, “mortal mind”, a “suppositional lie”…etc.  Not a light topic.  But one that seemed to have me stopped in my tracks like a deer in the headlights. 

I would study, ponder and pray out from other spiritual facts, but this question seemed to loom just at the back of every question I brought to the closet of prayer.    One day I was sitting in my office, once again reading through those six pages and I came across this sentence:

“Any seeming benefit derived from it  [animal magnetism]
is proportional to one’s faith in esoteric magic.”

Hmm….what could be the connection between this topic of animal magnetism and magic?  I spent the next year investigating that question. 

And I got nowhere…slowly.  I had a full-time public practice in spiritual healing as well as my parenting three children and consulting/training for an international speakers’ bureau on a broad range of  topics.  My plate was full, but there always seemed to be a space for that question about magic to surface.

After a year of scouring library, bookstore and “strange little out of the way magic shop” shelves for some clue as to the connection between spiritual healing and esoteric magic, I was frustrated and ready to give up.  I had read LOTS, but felt no closer to something I could make my own, feel the strength of, and make practical as a healer. 

I decided to give it another try one Saturday in early April.  It was one of those perfect early spring days.  Temperatures in the 60s, a deep blue cloudless sky, and robins singing from the trees like that deranged bird in Mary Poppins during the “Spoonful of Sugar” sequence… all assertive and cheery.  But I digress…

The girls were playing happily with their dad nearby and I slipped away for an hour after the breakfast dishes were done for a cup of tea and some study at my favorite coffeehouse in downtown Newtonville, just outside of Boston.  I arrived early enough to garner one of the few tables outside on the wide sidewalk, and I settled in.  Soon I was more frustrated than ever.  I just didn’t get it. 

I was ready to resign to never getting it, this connection between magic and the practice of spiritual healing, when a man approached my table balancing his coffee mug on a book and carrying his brioche on the plate in his other hand while a copy of the Boston Globe seemed to spill from under his arm.  He asked if he could share my table, glancing about as if to lead me to see that there were no vacant seats except the chair on which I had placed my small traveling library.  As I reached to move the books and papers, I looked right into his face and allowed all of the frustration I was feeling about my search pour out in seven words that surprised us both. 

“Yes, but it’s going to cost you!” 

Normally I would never have said such a thing. I’d have met his request with a nod and then within a few moments excused myself and left for home.  But this time I was so absorbed with my question that I had blurted out this demand before thinking.

I don‘t believe he could have ever imagined it coming from the benignly studious person he had approached.  There I was in jeans, a white men’s dress shirt ten sizes too large and rolled up at the sleeves, a pair of old scuffed pick ballet slippers, the arms of a nubby grey sweater tied around my shoulders, my reading glasses clinging precariously to the tip of my nose, and my white hair bursting wildly from the pencils that anchored it up into a bun.  I was anything but the image of a coquetteish schoolgirl flirting with a stranger.  Thank goodness for his ability to process that visual information quickly enough to respond with patient good humor.

“What’s it going to cost me?” he asked with a curious and hesitant smile. 

I was relieved that he hadn’t given me a “what a weirdo” look and just turned his back.  I smiled and said, “You have to tell me everything you know about magic!” 

I could see relief seep through the wariness in his face.  As he placed his coffee and brioche, book and morning paper onto the table, he replied, “Piece of cake, I’m a professional magician.” 

I was stunned, but didn’t waste precious time.

“Good, tell me about magic in three or four sentences so I understand the principles behind how it works.”

“I can tell you in one word: distraction.” 

He then explained it to me. 

When a magician is performing a trick he diverts your focus from watching what his hands are doing so that you aren’t aware of what is going on right in front of your eyes.  He then lets go of your focus, allowing it to return to where you think it has been all along.  And voila…a rabbit pops out of a hat.  While he had distracted you, or pulled your focus, he had retrieved the rabbit from a box under the table, and placed it in the hat in full view right in front of you.  When he released your focus and then pulled the rabbit out of the hat, you thought it was magic. 

For me it was just the key I needed for unlocking an important door in my practice of spiritual healing…one that I alluded to in the previous post.  Sickness, sin, disease, war, violence are just, at their roots, the suggestion that God is absent. They, like the magician, would like to be able to pull your eyes from the allness of God that is always right in front of you, off to the side where it jumps up and down and screams “God is absent…God is absent”.  But at any given moment you can say “No…I have the right to see what is right in front of me.  That God is present as an instance, however faint, of goodness and grace.  That Love is present in some expression of kindness or affection…even if it is just the moment of loving that you bring to bear on the situation by doing something generous for another.  That Mind is present in the very questioning you are doing as you search for your answers. 

By reclaiming your focus, holding it on the presence of God, appreciating this indication of God’s presence, you are refusing to consent to the absence of God in any measure, degree or form.  The focus, appreciation (awareness of and gratitude for), appreciat-ing (its ensuent growth in value) and acting out from this presence of God…this is living with spiritual (God-based) authority without condition or measure.

Mary Baker Eddy further supports this way of living and seeing when she asserts:

“No evidence before the material senses
can close my eyes to the scientific proof
that God, good, is supreme.”

There is never a moment when we cannot be the love “the magician” is trying to convince us is absent, or to ask the question that affirms the presence of Mind that this same trickster would try to assert has left the room.

Eddy goes on to say,

“Love is especially near in times of hate,
and never so near as when one can be just
amid lawlessness, and render good for evil.”

I left the café that day with a new friend…a magician…and a way of thinking about my work, my world, and my right to stay focused on the presence of God--the presence of good--throughout every day.

“I'll tell you about the magic, and it'll free your soul
But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll”
- John Sebastian

Here's a link to John Sebastian, and the Lovin' Spoonful singing ""Do you believe in magic..."

with Love,

Kate

A prayer for your wedding....

"May Christ, Truth, be present at every bridal altar
to turn the water into wine and to give to
human life an inspiration by which man's spiritual
and eternal existence may be discerned.
- Mary Baker Eddy

Someone I care for dearly is being married this weekend.  This has inspired me to revisit the above statement from the Chapter "Marriage" in Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and ponder its message, not only in reference to their marriage, but to all marriages -- including my own.

At a time when reality television offers us a peek into the best and the worst of weddings -- through programming as sweet as TLC's A Wedding Story, to the most uncharitable kind of voyeurism through the lens of Lifetime's Bridezilla -- this statement provides a spiritual grounding that brings me peace as I ponder this step for any couple.

Eddy's prayer - and I like to think of this statement as a prayer - asks that Christ be present at every bridal altar.  From simple vows taken and given in a silent chapel, to the elaborate drama of a hollywood gala with helicopters circling.  From one performed in the dust of an African village, to one officiated in a Scottish castle.  From a first marriage with the bride and groom having dated only each other - since middle school, to the fourth marriage of an octogenarian who met her beloved while in a wheelchair aerobics class.  

Each and every bridal altar deserves the benediction of Christ, Truth.  Each bridal altar is an opportunity for Christ to be present --  turning the water into wine.  Turning the purity of new love - which has refreshed hope and cleansed the palate of the past -  into a laboratory for enriching and un-selfing our better selves.  New opportunities to live with another - in communion and cooperation - as husband and wife.   

This week, I have been thinking about what makes every bridal altar so deserving of this prayer.  And my prayer have led me to one word -- hope.   It takes remarkable hope to approach the bridal altar -- at any stage in one's life.  Hope that self can be subdued by love.  Hope that grace will reign in our hearts and  homes.   Hope that our lives will be an inspiration of hope to others who may feel gun-shy or weary.  Those who may have given up on their dreams,  or are protecting tender hearts from another hurt. 

So today, I am celebrating hope.  Not only with this dear couple, but with their  children who hope that their parents have found their "one true love." -- again.   I am celebrating with parents who are hoping and praying that their sons and daughters will be cherished and supported in their dreams and desires.  I am celebrating with the friends and families who hope that their loved ones will be "in love" forever and ever, amen" as Randy Travis sings.

One of my favorite lyricists, Don Henley, sings his prayer in, "For My Wedding,"  It's a song that he wrote for his own marriage.  This song speaks to the hope I pray we all bring to the altar -- as brides, grooms, attendants, officiants, guests, parents, friends, and the children of couples who have found fresh hope.  it has been my prayer -- each day since the first time I heard it on the radio a few years ago:

To want what I have
To take what I'm given with grace
For this I pray
On my wedding day

For my wedding, I don't want violins
Or sentimental songs about thick and thin
I want a moment of silence and a moment of prayer
For the love we'll need to make it in the world out there

To want what I have
To take what I'm given with grace
For this I pray
On my wedding day
On my wedding day

I dream, and my dreams are all glory and light
That's what I've wanted for my life
And if it hasn't always been that way
Well, I can dream and I can pray
On my wedding day

So what makes us any different from all the others
Who have tried and failed before us
Maybe nothing, maybe nothing at all
But I pray we're the lucky ones; I pray we never fall

To want what we have
To take what we're given with grace
For these things I pray
On my wedding day
On my wedding day

 

Dearest ones -- on your wedding day, when you are making a "sanctuary of your heart,"  I pray you are blessed with many things -- great love, profound kindness, deep faith, persistent patience, abiding tenderness, laughter -- but most of all -- hope.

Recently someone share this definition of "hope" with me: 

"to trust an unknown future to a known God"

For this I pray -- on your wedding day.

with all my love,

K