"where no fear was..."

"where no fear was..."

This will be a very brief post. My friend, Nancy, shared this extraordinary recording of "Psalm Fifty-three," in Aramaic -- as it was sung in a Georgian church for the Pope's visit.

I couldn't help but wonder, "why the 53rd Psalm?" So I went to my Bible and read along -- not that I thought, for a moment, that I would have the words in the right place - but the sounds were there. Yes, they were plaintive, hungry, hopeful. But it was when my eyes landed on this passage from Psalm 53:5, that I felt it in my bones:

“There were they
in great fear,
where no fear was..."
 

For me, this is the entire message of the 53rd Psalm. One doesn't have to get the words in the right place, in order to feel the power of this psalm in the language Jesus would have known it in.

I can't help but wonder, if, as David wrote this psalm, he wasn't looking into his own heart and feeling the power of self-examination. Was he the "fool" he is referring to in opening passage? Is he the one whom he realizes is seeing his brother man as "corrupt." Is this the fear that he, later in the psalm, realizes - "no fear was?"

I found it so moving to hear this psalm in Aramaic - the language of Jesus, who knew these songs of his ancestor so well. Jesus, who experienced them so deeply. Who, as we know - from his referencing Psalm 22, on the cross - turned to them in times of heartbreak and trial. Would he have recited them, or sung them out from a heart full of longing?  Would he have hungered to know when "the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion, and Israel would rejoice."

Just as these psalms were "at hand" for Jesus, they are here for us -- to turn to in moments of isolation, darkness, and hope.

We - as brothers and sisters in God's love - are as one in our longing to feel His grace resonating through us, and resting on our loved ones, our neighbors, and our global care-community -- as this choir is in its deeper harmonies.

offered with Love,

Kate


You might also like this beautiful recording of our "Lord's Prayer," in Aramaic.

"a need for solitude..."

"I have a need for solitude
I never feel peace
in crowded rooms.
I like the sound
of silence coming on..."

The following, remarkable photo taken by my friend, Todd Herzer, was the perfect reminder to revisit the following post from 2010 - about my once, insatiable need for solitude.

  
Sometimes re-visiting the depths of my own spiritual journey starts with a photograph or a song. Mary Chapin Carpenter has sung me down many a dusty road.  With my hands on the wheel, sobbing, driving hard and fast just to get away from the sadness, her songs have been the answer to my  prayers for a song that will make me feel less alone.

Her CD "The Age of Miracles," was borne on the wings of her own "miraculous" adventure through a life-threatening health-related crisis.  A wilderness experience that led her into a period of what she characterized as" painful depression, fear, and anxiety." 

The lyrical content of this CD is masterful, sobering, intuitive, and deeply moving. What it takes me hundreds of words to hint at, she hammers home with three verses.  When married to her musical vision, it is a CD that makes my heart weep, sing, and soar.  Her songs have always reminded me that I am not alone on this wilderness path.

There are cuts on this CD that I can't help but listen to with my eyes closed.  It is almost as if I am remembering how it felt to have lived through the moments that gave the song birth.  She is singing from her own experience, but like a tuning fork, it is resonating with my own.

There is one song that, when I read its title, "I Have a Need for Solitude," I couldn't help but wonder if we weren't actually "twin daughters of different mothers."

For me, solitude is not just a refreshing interruption from the otherwise social norms of people and events. Solitude is my natural habitat -- like salt water to a sea anemone. I need it. 

It is the oxygen I begin to gasp for, after a long day of truly wonderful conversations, and deeply inspiring interactions with people who I truly love. And it has only been by the grace of God, that I have learned to accept and appreciate the importance of these shifting levels of aloneness in my life.  But that was not always the case.

There was a time when I seemed to need solitude in a way that was almost crippling. My need to be alone felt insistent.

There were days when taking our daughters to school, or having people come into our home, was terrifying. It was as if the sound of other people's voices, their shapes slicing through the changing light, the movement of air, the rustling of atmospheric ions as they stole from room-to-room, felt like someone was sucking all of the carefully negotiated alone-ness out of my perfect solitude -- and I couldn't breathe.

Unfortunately, my profession as a spiritual healer seemed to give me an endless supply of "get out of jail" cards --justifications for why I needed to leave a party, a gathering, a dinner.  My work gave me one great excuse after another for demanding my solitude. 

I would seek it out from daybreak to well-past midnight.  Often staying up through the night, because it was only after my family went to bed, that I could most easily find it.   

There was a point in this chapter, when my favorite place in the world was a three foot by five foot windowless, cedar-lined closet under the eaves of our house where I had a little chair, table, lamp and fan. I would take my phone, and go there for hours on end, just to take be alone in the dark, take calls and pray. For me,  it was a slice of heaven. It became a self-imposed tomb that I never wanted to leave.

Yes, I did learn to cope with the need to be out-and-about as a mother, wife, professional, and member of my community.  But it was a coping - not the peaceful shift from alone to "in company" that I knew was balanced and right.  The ache for solitude was never far from reach. I took it with me wherever I went. And when society became too much, I would retreat. I would leave. I would excuse myself and find a place to hide - a bathroom, a closet, the backseat of my car, under a quilt, in my head -- all alone. 

Social gatherings felt cloying, dense, and paralyzing. Solitude was like walking into a fresh, sweet, light-filled clearing -- a high mountain meadow, fragrant with the scent of chamomile and pine. 

But as much as I loved it, and as happy as it made me,  it was not freeing or liberating.  I truly thought that I couldn't be "me" anywhere else. My need for solitude had become a prison, instead of the open space I thought it was.  I was trapped in the self-certainty that without solitude I could not be inspired or creative. It felt like madness, and I didn't know how I would find my way out of the labyrinth of my own creating -- or if I even wanted to.

And then something quite beautiful happened. 

On a very ordinary day - while I was sitting all alone in my perfectly silent kitchen - I realized, that in all spiritual actuality, solitude was impossible. 

And in that moment, I started to feel the grip of my need to be alone, relax.   Solitude was no longer the holy grail in my life. Just like that.

As I sat there surrounded by blue and white gingham and bathed in golden light, I found myself asking, "Why would I  want something that was never going to be true in God's eyes."

It was as clear as day to me that I couldn't be me - truly me - all alone, without you. And not just the "you" of my immediate friends and family -- my husband, my children, my friends.  But all who I am blessed to have waft through my life -- like the perfume of hyacinth blossoms on a warm spring day.

I realized that I could express love, without "you."  I could not discover myself as generous, kind, compassionate, honest, forgiving -- without you. Each of the you-s in my life, allow me to more fully be who I am. God's beloved and be-loving child. 

Although it's been a struggle at times to remember that I really do want to be this "best me," -- and not someone who seeks out closets and solitude like a drug -- I now find, that even in those lovely moments when the gift of solitude does descend like a divine surprise upon my day, I am no longer more at peace than in a crowded room or a noisy kitchen. I've stopped seeking something spiritually unattainable -- since, in Truth, we can never really be alone anyways. We live together as "one universal family, held in the gospel [the good news] of Love."

We are not, as Mary Baker Eddy states in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "isolated, solitary ideas." We are each, and all, members of the body of Christ, the spiritual collective called "man." In Truth, we are but individual saplings - the branchings of a vast root system.  We are the offshoots of one spiritual organism -- one that is even larger than "the aspen grove," which stretches its arms across the Continental Divide. We are one with "the earth and the sky, one with everything in life," -- and I am as much you, as I am myself. We are His.

Yes, to answer the unasked question, I still love my solitude.  I love my alone time when the house is clean, the silence is golden, scent trails of lavender swirl with the shifting breeze. In that space figurative notation paper hangs in the air -- just waiting for poetry and music to find their positions, like birds on a wire, and become a song or a prayer. 

 But I no longer like my life better without people in it. I no longer think that I need soliude to be myself -- to breathe, to feel peaceful, or to hear God's voice. 

And yet, as Mary Chapin Carpenter sings, I will always love, and welcome, "the sound of silence coming on." 

Thank you MCC -- so grateful you are in our world.  I have missed your voice.  Thank you for your words, your music, your heart that sings to us of miracles. Thank you for bringing this statement to life for me:

"My sense of nature's rich gloom,
is that loneness lacks but one charm
to make it half divine — a friend,
with whom to whisper, 
"Solitude is sweet."

- Mary Baker Eddy  

I smile when I think of this verse today. In it, I am sitting in the forest with my back to the trunk of a sturdy tree -- but not all alone, just all quiet.  Around me are countless other solitude lovers -- basking in the pine-filtered light, the wind-hushed quiet, in our aloneness -- together.


offered with gratitude -- and with Love,

Kate

"Deep enough...to face a storm"

"Deep enough to dream
in brilliant colors I have never seen..."

In his song "Deep Enough to Dream,"   Chris Rice hones in on  an essential element of the work we all when we approach life from a prayer-based perspective. He sings of a rich depth of vision, a peace that he finds in the sacred space of prayer. It reminds me of the feeling I had as a girl one summer at the lake, where my aunt and uncle had rented a house for the season. 

My brothers, sisters, cousins and I would arrive early in the day to set up "camp".  We'd lay down our towels, staking out territory according to age and gender.  The older girls in one section, surrounded by books, magazines, bottles of baby oil that had been laced with iodine, cans of TAB, journals or diaries to write in,  and ryecrisp crackers.  

The boys (all in late grade school) were as far from us as we could convince them to be.  Their world was full of peanut butter and plastic things that blew up and could be floated on.  The littlest kids...toddlers and babies...were all near the moms, they were loud and full of sand and jelly. 

When I grew tired of all the noisy splashing I  would swim out as far as I was permitted.  At first I held my breath while floating on the surface.  But eventually I felt the noise from the shoreline penetrate my silence.  So I'd let out my breath, releasing the air that had kept me buoyed.  I then allowed my own body weight to take me under.  I descended well below the surface to find a peace so deep and impenetrable that I could actually feel the quiet. 

I did this over and over again.  Eventually I became so suffused with this deep peace that I could take it back to my towel on the beach.  Then I would actually be that island of quiet for myself that I was searching for. It allowed me to read Jane Austen’s  “Pride and Prejudice” without even hearing the splashing and screeching of a dozen infant to thirteen year olds. 

I was able to inhabit a world of Cotswold cottages and cobbled lanes, garden teas and diaphanous lawn dresses with my toes dug into the sand and my cousin just inches away sighing over the latest issue of Tiger Beat magazine.   Even today when I pray, I...as Rice sings...am able to use my memories, of how it felt to descend into the quiet of the lake, to take me:

"...Deep enough to reach out and touch
The face of the One who made me
And oh, the love I feel…”

Rice goes on to talk about what one sees in this place of deep peace. 

For me this “seeing” is not about taking in images and translating them into information that can be interpreted as reality.  It is about vision…about beholding…it is about seeing out from what God knows…and what I have the right to know as I reflect (think deeply about and ponder) Him, His nature, His All-in-allness as my life, in the universe... and as the only source of my reality.  (One of Webster’s definitions of reality that I cling to is “that which is actually occurring.”)

This beholding is often quite contrary to the images that are being presented as information to my “receptors”...eyes, ears…

But I have discovered that  a God-based, or spiritual sense of things is more about transmitting than reception.  I have the right to transmit or project this God-based vision…about anything or anyone…rather than feel imposed upon by images that are presented to me as reality...whether it relate to non-profit projects and initiatives I may have been invited to contribute ideas for, or the minutiae of everyday living.

I believe that it is this sense of vision that Mary Baker Eddy talks about when she relates:

“Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man,
who appeared to him where sinning mortal man
appears to mortals. 
In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness,
and this correct view of man healed the sick.
Thus Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is intact,
universal, and that man is pure and holy.”

Whether we are seeing out from this God-based sense of reality about man, family, government, the environment, or the weather…it is this vision-based sense of reality that we can begin to experience not only in the most simple details of our day, but on a global level.

I have had many opportunities to apply this kind of vision-based “beholding” over the last two decades, but I am reminded of one particularly clear example when I hear references in songs, poems or essays, to seeing or beholding “the face of God” as Rice does in his "Deep Enough to Dream".

In her biography of spiritual thought-leader and healer, Mary Baker Eddy, titled, Christian Healer, my good friend, Yvonne von Fettweiss, relates an experience shared in the memoirs of Adelaide Still,  one of the workers in Eddy’s household.  The account was profoundly helpful to me one summer afternoon some years ago.

I was the Christian Science practitioner on duty at a camp for teenagers who wanted to approach the adventure experience from a spiritual perspective.  One element of their two-week curriculum was a three-day outcamp trip. Some of the patrols were rafting the Arkansas River all day and sleeping under the stars on shore at night.  Other patrols were peaking 14,000-foot mountains or riding horses high into the canyons.  Each patrol would set up camp in the early evening, cook dinner, and then sleep in tents or under tarps. 

While these groups were out of camp I was often the only person on site.  My job was to spiritually support the harmony and safety of their trips and stay available should prayer-based care be needed for any of the counselors or campers during the trips. 

It was late afternoon on the day of trip departures and everyone was finally on their way.  The last patrol of horses and riders had clip-clopped their way past my cabin waving their goodbyes as they ascended a nearby trail.  I had eased myself into the Adirondack rocker on my front porch and let the quiet of an empty camp seep into my heart.  I looked to the east where I could see beyond Valerie Lake towards the Sleeping Indian range and miles of Colorado sky stretched before me like a canvas waiting for the paint of evening colors….pink, lavender and finally a deep velvety midnight blue…to wash across it. 

I was entranced with watching clouds drift into my view when suddenly I realized that those clouds were no longer puffy and white, or even heavy and gray.  They were black…black, angry thunderheads filled with rain and pierced every few moments from the far south with lightning. 

I was horrified that I had just let myself sit there and be mesmerized by the dramatic beauty of it all.  I didn’t have the luxury of watching a pretty mountain storm from the dry safety of my cabin perch.  I had campers out on the river, in the canyons and hiking through scree fields above treeline.  I was there for a purpose and it wasn’t to enjoy the scene being played out in front of me in Technicolor. 

For a split second I let my sense of guilt give me a good shaking.  Then I walked into my cabin and reached for something to give focus to my prayer.  The first thing I saw was Yvonne’s book.  My daughter had been assigned it as a summer Sunday School reading project and I had decided I would read it again with her, so had taken my copy to camp with me.  I knew that it was indexed, in part, according to healings witnessed.  I had remembered that there were among other things a reference or two that addressed storms.  I quickly came upon one of the references “Storm Dispelled” and went back onto the porch to read:

Adelaide Still reminisces:

“On several occasions I saw Mrs. Eddy dispel a storm; the first time was on August 3, 1907, in the late afternoon.  The sky was overcast and it was very dark.  Mrs. Eddy sat in her chair in the tower corner of her study, watching the clouds with a smile and a rapt expression on her face.  She seemed to be seeing something beyond her present surroundings, and I do not think that she was conscious of my presence.  In a few moments the clouds broke and flecked, and the storm was dissolved into its native nothingness.  About have an hour later I took her supper tray to her, and she said to me, “Ada, did you see the sky?”  I replied, “Yes, Mrs. Eddy.”  The she said, “It (meaning the cloud) never was;  God’s face was never clouded.”  This agrees with what another student has recorded as having been said by Mrs. Eddy, namely, “When I wanted to dispel a storm.  I did not say, ‘there is no thunder, and no lightning.’ But I said, ‘God’s face is there, and I do see it.’”

I decided that since spiritual laws are not personally or historically defined as true, but universally applicable…"if it was good enough for her…it was good enough for me".

I used my memories of exhaling and letting myself go deep beneath the surface at the lake…or as Eddy says in her how-to book on spiritual healing, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

“We must look deep into realism
instead of accepting only
the outward sense of things.”

I looked into the sky focusing on a tiny patch of blue that seemed to be in the process of being swallowed up by hostile black storm clouds.  I allowed myself to see this as the “face of God” expressed as clarity, light, and…vision.

I maintained that focus, and these focused prayers seemed to serve as a paintbrush washing beautifully colored thoughts about God as Mind...the only Mind... across the canvas of sky before me.  God was expressing Himself as clarity, light and wisdom...in the guidance that counselors were finding as they sought direction in leading campers on new trails...or as a whispered thought that calmed the horses who, through their silent gentleness, were themselves helping  novice campers find a sense of secure peace on their strong backs.  Mind was washing away any sense of disturbance with broad spiritual brushstrokes of peace and calm.  I had almost forgotten the storm when I realized that the sun was shining brightly onto the meadow in the foreground of my periphery. 

I was almost stunned.  I sat there with tears of realization running down my face.  I had seen the “face of God” and I felt as if “he was pleased with me”.

I will never forget the feeling of sitting on that porch for the rest of the evening...long after the last of the storm clouds had flecked and dissolved... and watching the sky go from blue to pink to salmon to lavender to a blanket of deep midnight blue velvet covered with diamonds.  Through each of those brilliant colors I was still seeing the face of God.

I love the sense of vision Chris Rice further brings to his lyrics:

"...'cause peace is pouring over my soul
See the lambs and the lions playin'
I join in and I drink the music
Holiness is the air I'm breathin'
My faithful heroes break the bread
And answer all of my questions
Not to mention what the streets are made of
My heart's held hostage by this love

And these brilliant colors I have never seen
I join a billion people for a wedding feast
And I reach out and touch the face of the One who made me
And oh, the love I feel, and oh the peace
Do I ever have to wake up?..."

I ask myself “Do I really ever have to wake up to a reality that isn’t God-based?”

No…I think I’ll stay out here in the middle of the lake looking up through the water to see the sun, God’s face, reaching through to touch me with light.

The water’s perfect…come on in…

Here is a video clip of Chris' song "Deep Enough to Dream"   it wasn't available when I first posted this piece...but now it is.  I hope you enjoy it.

with great love,

Kate
Kate Robertson, CS