"a small voice..."

"a thousand prayers,
a million words,
but one Voice
was heard..."

Almost 20 years ago the video for Billy Gilman's "One Voice," was released. I remembered it this morning in light of this week's Bible lesson.

What has stood out to me -- from all the wonderful ideas and stories -- is one word: small. Specifically as it is used in this familiar Scripture from I Kings:

"And =, behold, the Lord passed by,
and a great and strong wind rent the mountains,
and brake in oyes the rocks before the Lord;
but the Lord was not in the wind.

And after the wind, an earthquake;
but the Lord was not in the earthquake.

And after the earthquake, a fire;
but the Lord was not in the fire.

And after the fire,
a still small voice..."

I've often thought about the stillness of the Voice of God. The quiet invariability. The nevertheless-ness of its comforting presence. The constancy of its calm assurance.

But I had never really thought of what it meant, that the Voice was small. I went to Strong's Hebrew Lexicon and found this definition of the word "small" as it relates to this specific passage:

"lean, fine,
nothing extraneous
simple, gaunt..."

I held my breath. Isn't this what I have been learning for the past decade -- and especially in the last year? The simplicity of the Christ message. The piercing clarity of Truth. Nothing extraneous. No exaggeration. The smallness of "the still small Voice..."

I immediately thought back to every healing I have experienced and witnessed of late. What did they have in common: the lean-ness of the Truth. The simple shape of The Word -- free of words. The raw childlike wonder of honest hearts.

This Truth is unencumbered by "more than enough," - because in its simple Allness, it is always infinite. Or as Mary Baker Eddy assures us:

"The Scriptures plainly declare
the allness and oneness of God
to be the premises of Truth..."

"God is one.
The allness of Deity
is His oneness."

So, I went back to sifting through all the mental chatter -- the human mind's thinking about God -- to what I know at the very root-of-the-root of my being. And it was that very word. Being.  I AM.

I started there. Not just in listening for spiritual guidance about my own experience, but in relation to those who had asked for treatment -- as well as, those whom my thoughts and prayers natural rested upon within the all-inclusiveness of spiritual community and care.

"I am." This statement of spiritual fact suffuses every molecule of conscious being.  It is constantly repeating itself to each of us.  This Truth is affirming the presence of God. I AM (the only name God give Himself in Scripture) over and over again throughout the day - and night.

In the morning, I wake to, "I am..." And as I close my eyes, I rest my day upon, "I am..." I trust that what follows that opening coda of Truth, is also spoken by the same Voice. I am whole. I am loved. I am loving. I am honest. I am able to "listen for Thy Voice, lest my footsteps stray..."

It is echoing still in the hearts and minds of individual and collective consciousness.

And one Voice was heard...


offered with Love,

Cate

"take these broken wings…"

"take these
broken wings
and learn to fly…"

This is my favorite song. This is my favorite version of my favorite song. Sarah McLaughlin's cover  of "Blackbird," from the "I Am Sam" soundtrack speaks to something in me that is deeper than bone.

This post is all about innocence. It is about purity. It is about sorrow. It is about resurrection and redemption. It is about a spiritual path to reclaiming what seems forever lost.

When most people think about lost innocence, they think of choice. We are led to believe that staying a virgin -- staying pure -- is something that a girl/woman chooses to do. If she has lost her virginity -- her innocence -- it must have been her choice. 

But for some it is not a choice, and the losing of it happens long before they even know it is something that they have.  Long before they learn it is something to be cherished, protected, or shared.


These are the little girls who have been violated without consent. They are the children without a childhood.  The ones who mourn a ghost self.

They are the girls who weep in secret, the girls who cut to feel, and starve themselves to prove they have some modicum of control in their lives. These are the women who read about lost innocence and wonder how it must have felt -- to have ever even glimpsed something so precious in themselves. They are the women who ache when they read about abstinence contracts, chastity pledges, and purity rings.  These are the girls who feel disconnected from themselves.

These are girls who dream of what they never knew. And for them, it isn't about a moral line crossed or a physical boundary broken. It is about a deep desire to know one's self as sweet and pure. To feel full of hope and promise and innocence.

For most of their lives, many of these girls feel like that blackbird who sings with a broken wing. Yes, they have learned how to act childlike -- but to truly know and feel childlikeness, is another matter altogether. You see, when a grown man begins violating a girl before she even enters puberty, it doesn't really feel as if something has been irrevocably lost -- just never known.

She wanders through the landscape of childhood -- one that should be filled with learning, and play, and imagination -- with a cloud of dark knowing, brooding over her at all times. She feels like a liar, a pretender, a fake in the vast pink kingdom of fairy princesses and happily ever after.

Her heart doesn't leap at songs like "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands." Her heart rips open - like a raw wound - with the first strains of "Blackbird singing in the dead of night…"

These girls discover that there is rarely somewhere safe to turn. Often, when she "tells," she is not mended, but broken further. When her tears spill over onto another's pillow, she is accused of darkening their path with the underbelly of society's horror story. 

Some women report that they wonder how to protect their loved ones from the pain and distrust that seems to come out of nowhere -- the confusion and anger that percolates just below the surface. For them, disassociation, divorce, death can often feel like the only way to save those they love from the sharp shards of their own shattered hearts.  

There are countless stories of brokenness - here and abroad.  Not all are dramatic and shocking.  Not all make us turn away in hopelessness and helplessness -- or even disgust.  But these girls with broken wings live among us. And their stories need to be redeemed -- and can be redeemed.  Mine was.  The particulars of my story are not important -- only that for many years I believed it defined me as someone who was irrevocably lost.

But this was where Love, divine Love -- God, found me. This is where the story of a crucified savior and a woman who had been saved -- saved me. 

I know that there is much academic speculation about whether Mary Magdalene was actually the same woman who washed Jesus' feet at the Pharisee's house. But this scholarship doesn't matter to me.  What matters -- and what mattered then -- is what her story meant to my heart decades ago on a cloudy spring day.  A day when I had lost all hope of every being worthy of love. 

You see, I needed to believe that a weeping girl of questionable reputation and broken innocence, washing the Savior's feet, was the same woman who kept vigil at the foot of the cross, and waited at the door of the sepulcher. Her story gave me hope. It saved me.

In my secret heart, I knew that I was just like that broken girl. But I also sensed -- in that moment -- that I could be just as courageous as that expectant, grateful woman.

Throughout my girlhood, an undaunted hope had lived just beneath the surface of my secret self-loathing. I'd prayed that I could find an innocent child buried within the rubble of my broken-ness.  I'd search "before" photos for a glimmer of her childlikeness.  I thought if I could find innocence in her eyes it would be familiar and I'd be able to remember how it felt and connect with those feeling.  But I never could.  I had all but given up hope of ever really knowing what it felt like to be a child.    

That hope was was kindled into an enlightened faith with the Magdalene's story. I realized that I not only could be saved from self-destruction, but that I actually had value beyond simple self-preservation.  I glimpsed that the resurrection of my own innocence could serve Christ's timeless mission of healing and salvation.

In reading her story, I glimpsed that this woman "out of whom Jesus had cast seven devils"  actually served as a reliable, vital, and unshakeable witness to the immortality of Life -- of innocence. She must have been unwavering in her certainty that what had been resurrected from the ashes of her own deadened life, was only a glimpse of what was true for Jesus. 

 It must have been absolutely unthinkable to her that Christ's life could be destroyed by hate. The resurrection of her own crucified purity had prepared her heart.  She was able to hold watch at the cross and an unwavering vigil at the sepulcher, while she waited for the inevitability of his resurrected life.

Her once-broken wings gave flight to humanity's hopes   -- and they were lifting mine two thousand years later.

Realizing that Mary Baker Eddy launches her chapter on "Christian Science Practice," -- or metaphysical healing -- with this woman's transformation, I have clung to her story  as scriptural precedence for a life redeemed -- and purposeful.  She has taught me how to serve Christ. She has unfolded for me a well-trod path towards reclaimed innocence, purity, our individual and collective intactness as daughters of God.

So, what does this Easter story mean to me -- it means we are all innocent. It means that her resurrection, was part and parcel to his resurrection. And that his resurrection was the promise of our resurrection -- each and every one of us.  We are all untouched by evil.  Inviolable in grace. We are children of God. Just think of it -- you are a child of God.  I am a child of God. I am an innocent, a babe, a pure sweet girl in the eyes of my Father who has given me wings to fly.

In a hymn written by William MacKenzie are the words:

"she knew the Christ,
undimmed by dying..." 

I know this Christ.  It is alive in me -- undimmed by dying, unsilenced by hate, unstoppable in Love. This Christ is the resurrected, ever-alive innocence in all of us.  It is the untouched purity, the inviolable hope which assures us that we are never lost, never broken, never entombed in the past.  For me, this is the Easter story that lives each day.

offered with Love,

Kate

"Everything is holy now..."

"And when I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don't happen still
But now I can't keep track
'Cause everything's a miracle
Everything, Everything
Everything's a miracle..."

I've been thinking about oil spilling from a broken pipe deep below the surface of the sea.  Peter Mayers' "Holy Now" has been a sweet reminder that I have every right to expect a "miracle" since, to me, "everything is holy now."  And it is.

Mary Baker Eddy says, in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, a practical guide to seeing everything spiritually:

"All that is made is the work of God,
and all is good.

and

"man has not two lives,
one to be destroyed
and the other to be made indestructible."

echoes what I believe Jesus admonished us to accept, when he said:

"Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets:
I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil."

And finally, what John puts the seal of time on in Revelation:

"...and there were great voices in heaven, saying,
The kingdoms of this world are become
the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ;
and he shall reign for ever and ever."

God creating everything, governing everything, fulfilling the spiritual reality of everything.  His "as in heaven, so on earth," echoing, reverberating, lifting the shades of gloom, sweeping away the cobwebs of materiality's self-justifying claims of creation, abolishing duality, and establishing this one and only reality.  And because this is His kingdom of heaven, on earth, everything...from "a blade of grass to a star," from "the mental molecule to infinity," from a drop of water to the vast seas...everything is holy now.

So, why does this song, and its message of non-dualism, make praying about the Deep Water oil spill less tentative, perhaps, maybe, "I sure hope God is out there somewhere" somehow?  Because in this prayer, we are not praying to use Spirit to fix a material problem in a material situation, on a material earth...we are resurrecting the holiness of each element.  Reclaiming its one, and only, spiritual substance and purpose.

Mary Baker Eddy, in the "Glossary" chapter of Science and Health, defines Oil. as:

"Consecration; charity; gentleness;
prayer; heavenly inspiration."

This is the only definition of "oil," I am accepting tonight.  And since I have only one life (not two - "one to be destroyed and the other to be made indestructible"), one creation, one reality, one truth...where everything is holy now, there is, there can be, no crude consecration to God, no slimy charity, no destructive gentleness, no toxic prayer, no suffocating heavenly inspiration in the environment of my thought, my consciousness of God's presence, "as in heaven, so on earth."  On earth..on earth!  Right here and right now!  In every blade of swamp grass, in every scarlet feather of a cardinal's wing, in every drop of sea water...God articulated, God dancing, singing, holding the stars in their courses and defending the purity of each grain of sand with perfect integrity.

Charity is gushing through the depths of humanity's hunger for compassion and understanding.  Consecration is coating every suggestion of selfish pride with the balm of Gilead...the desire to bring healing to the hurting daughters of "my people."

Heavenly inspiration is being dispersed abroad, gentleness is calming the roiling sea of fear and blame with the holiest of holies...kindness and mercy.

All that can wash up on the shores of my heart are the songs of angels, the the lapping, rhythmic reminder that "God is here, God is here, God is here."

The same God who pulled the waters back to reveal a path for his children, can pull the oil, precious, holy, God-sent oil, into its proper place and purpose as a useful, harmless, and indestructible element of creation.  The same God who made the axehead float so that it could be returned to the lender, who multiplied bread and fish to feed thousands, and turned water into wine, can turn oil into water...fresh, clear, clean, oxygen-blessed, kelp nourishing, navy buoying, mussel inhabiting sea water. 

Because, everything is His...and "everything is holy now."  Now...not tomorrow, or August, but now!  He promised!!

"...This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
It used to be a world half-there
Heaven's second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
'Cause everything is holy now."

Thank you for this reminder Peter...your music laps at the hull of my prayer ship and sings me to Him.

with Love,

Kate
Kate Robertson, CS