"have mercy on the traveler..."

"Lord, make soft
the stranger's bed;

rest the weary feet
see the mother,
see the father
see the child,
have mercy on the traveler..."

This summer I've been a traveler. Thousands of miles. Tonight, as I think about beginning my long journey home, Sara Groves song touches me deeply. If you haven't heard  "Jesus, See the Traveler,"  I hope you will take a moment to hear this prayer.

Jesus saw the traveler. He was with them on the road.  Not the Pharaoh carried by slaves in a livery. Not the King in a golden coach.  Not the soldier high in the saddle on a noble horse. No, he spoke to, and of, the stranger in a strange land. The son who wanders from the security of his father's home. The Levite who is robbed on the road and left for half dead until another stranger - a  Samaritan - binds up his wounds. The Canaanite woman who brings her daughter to a strange land for healing.  And he is a stranger who asks for water in a foreign village.

He ministers to the ten lepers he meets on the road. He, himself, a traveler - from city-to-city - preaching the gospel of the kingdom. A stranger, a wanderer, a man in exile, an errant son, an immigrant, a border crosser - these were his people.

When I was preparing to leave home for my own 7 week journey this summer, I was not fleeing anything but familiarity and routine.  But still, I was wakeful for nights learning up to my departure.  Was my car sound enough for such a long drive?  Would our pups think I'd disappeared?  Would my children feel that I'd gone "on holiday," when they were working so hard.  Was I being fair asking my husband to take on my household chores in addition to his own? What if I broke down on the highway? Where would I sleep in the middle of the night?

Knowing that I am an intelligent woman with a car, a credit card, and a love for road trips - you might think that these are silly concerns. But they were insinuating themselves aggressively. I had my car trip-checked my our mechanic twice within a two week period. I called my credit card company and back to let them know exactly what states I would be driving through so that my cards would not be rejected.

And then I thought of the many refugees and asylum seekers who are may be fleeing hostile countries with small children -- and I wept. I had so many resources, and still I was anxious. How must it feel to leave all that is familiar with just what you could carry, with children needing your assistance?

I remember when the girls were little and we would drive from the Midwest to camp each summer. I would get tired and need to rest. I would pull into a rest area and because it was often quite warm -- even at night -- I would leave the car running and tell the girls that "mommy just needs to closer her eyes for a minute" -- but I couldn't rest. I worried that somehow the car would engage into gear and start rolling. I would fret that the girls would figure out how to open their doors -- even though I had the child locks set. I worried about how to keep them safe while I rested. I was not a mother with a baby on her back crossing the desert. I was in a luxury SUV with air=conditioning, snacks, movies, and child locks.

I sorely felt my privilege in the context of their circumstances. How could I be anxious? Yet, I was. However, it was what we had in common that finally brought me peace. Each and every one of us -- as travelers -- has the same, "God with us."

And we have the example of the ultimate spiritual traveler. A man who carried no credit card -- or even a scrip for holding resources, gathering victuals, or saving something for later. This traveler knew that whether he was crossing the wilderness, sleeping in the desert, or navigating a storm-tossed sea, His Father was with him. Paving the way, providing what he needed, comforting him in the night, bringing him to a place of rest.

He had hundreds of precedent setting cases of spiritual trust to refer to. He knew the story of Moses parting the Red Sea, of Hagar finding water flowing from a rock, and the prophet's promise that there would be streams in the desert. He trusted that his Father loved him, just as much as he loved Moses, and Elijah, and Joseph, and Abraham, and...

As I prepare for the next leg of this journey, I am following him into a deeper trust. This passage from Mary Baker Eddy's Science and health with Key to the Scriptures is a traveler's prayer:

"As the children of Israel were guided triumphantly through the Red Sea, the dark ebbing and flowing tides of human fear, — as they were led through the wilderness, walking wearily through the great desert of human hopes, and anticipating the promised joy, — so shall the spiritual idea guide all right desires in their passage from sense to Soul, from a material sense of existence to the spiritual, up to the glory prepared for them who love God. Stately Science pauses not, but moves before them, a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, leading to divine heights."

Whether your summer travels are finished, still in progress, or ready to begin again; -- I pray you feel God's presence guiding you and guarding your every step, mile, boarder-crossing.

offered with Love,

Cate 

"You will miss these days…"

"suddenly,
there's a shadow
hanging over me…"
- Lennon/McCartney

"There will come a time, when you will miss these days," he said with a sigh. I was sure he was either as mad-as-a-hatter, or worse yet, just-plain-mean, for saying this to me.

When I think of that conversation, and my mentor's sigh, it's not so much the lyrics from Lennon and McCartney's, "Yesterday," that come to mind, but its tone that rings true.

I'd called my friend because my life was falling apart. Everything -- my marriage, my career, my body, my dreams -- were all coming loose at the seams and I couldn't hold it together. I was afraid and empty.  And the only thing that took away that feeling of total panic and hopelessness, was a book: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy.

I'm not saying that everything between the book's covers made sense to me, just that reading it seemed to lift the fog that engulfed every other moment.  I was tired, I'd been very ill, and I was feeling more alone than I'd ever felt in my life. I didn't have a job, and I didn't know how to navigate this landscape -- at all.

I needed to be useful, so I begged a friend to let me volunteer in her department.  Those hours spent in service to others, kept me from going mad. I sat at a desk outside her office, answered her phone, did odd office jobs, and read from the copy of Science and Health that I kept in the top right drawer  - laying open on top of pens, pencils, paper clips, and rubber bands.

It helped, but I wanted more than relief. I was hungry for healing. I was aching to find peace from the pain. I was starving for the Truth that would make it all go away -- the sorrow, the confusion, the emptiness.

All the truths I'd thought I understood -- about being a good human -- had just dissolved before my eyes. I couldn't believe that I had studied scripture, prayed daily, served my church faithfully, and was still facing such a "dark night of the soul."

But I was. And my friend was right. There would come a time when I would miss those days. There would come a day -- in the not too distant further -- when I would miss the raw ache of wanting a deeper spiritual understanding, in the midst of human delusion. And there have been days, since then, when I have yearned for the kind of "on my knees, begging for spiritual nourishment"  moments which I so sorely felt in those weeks and months of spiritual hunger. But there have also been days when I wondered why I missed them so. 

They still come, but today, I know enough to not be so afraid when I am facing the darkness. I have discovered that these are "the best of times," in what my human sense of things calls, "the worst of times." 

And I understand my mentor's sigh now. I think back to how every word of Scripture felt like a drop of water on my cracked and thirsty heart. I tear-up with gratitude for having walked that path, and for having found the waymarks left along the way by Biblical (and contemporary) spiritual travelers who must have known that others -- like me -- would follow, and need their encouragement to keep going.

And I did find a new view of things. It's funny, recently someone told me that I never remember to say, "and the healing came…" I am often remiss in acknowledging that there was a shift in my experience because I get so caught up in the stark beauty of the spiritual journey.  But there was a shift -- many shifts.

And I am so very grateful. There were so many fingerposts along the way. Small messages of encouragement that kept my head above water, and saved me from drowning in despair.

For example, I remember the first time I read this Beatitude, from Jesus' "Sermon on the Mount," in the book of Matthew with new eyes:

"Blessed are they
which do hunger and thirst
after righteousness:
for they
shall be filled." 

To realize that the primary blessing was in the hungering and thirsting. And that the "being filled," was almost an after thought -- "oh yes, and they shall be filled." This gave me such a sense of peace.

And then there was that moment when I read this note of encouragement from Eddy's Science and Health:

"Our disappointments
and ceaseless woes
turn us like tired children
to the arms of divine Love,
then we begin
to learn life in divine Science.” 

and realized that facing disappointments and ceaseless woes wasn't the end of my spiritual journey -- the equivalent of a rejection button on my failed prayers. But that these moments were actually the beginning of learning something new about life in divine Science -- now that was a big sigh moment.

Today, having faced many moments of disappointment and woe -- my own, or another's -- I've come to accept and embrace them with less fear, and more grace. They can still shake me, but they can't touch what I know to be true: that these are not days of failure, but days filled with spiritual hunger.  And these are the days that I will miss. Because these are often the days when the light of Truth is most clearly seen in the context of human disappointment and woe.

I've also discovered that I have it in me to really love this hunger. I know that I want these experiences that lead me deeper and deeper into the fields of the Lord -- gleaning every fallen seed.  So now, it is me that is sighing - with a sweet, sober sense of expectation and love.  I sigh, because I know, that when my world seems to be falling apart, I am just beginning a new journey.

offered with Love,

Kate

"Not all Who Wander are Lost"

Not all who wander are lost.
                    - J. R. R. Tolkien

Graduating from high school in 1972 this was as far from my motto as any truism could be.  I had dreamed, planned and saved for my own version of the fast-track out of a family of 10 and into one of the top 10 universities in the nation.  An academic resume I was proud of and thought would secure my successful admittance by the time I was 18 made my lofty goals appear attainable. 

My trip was well-planned, the ticket purchased, and the destination clearly in sight. 

Or so I thought....later that year my dad would pass on suddenly leaving a wife and 8 children without insurance, pension or homeownership.  I was the oldest and suddenly my well-planned itinerary was sent fluttering into the nearby Atlantic and I was a "wanderer"....it took me a long time to realize, however, that I was not lost.

I have begun to ask myself....what would it take for the wanderer to be lost?  Something is not lost on it's own, something is lost to someone.  If I had been lost I would not have been lost to myself, but to someone....to God.

That just isn't possible if my concept of God is all-knowing, always present, and omnipotent as the Bible and Mary Baker Eddy aver. 

There is a time in Jesus' career when one of the rulers of the Pharisees comes to him and states that he must be a teacher come from God because of the miracles he is doing.  The Pharisee is trying to make connections....it's as if he is saying, "Okay, because you are doing all these amazing things you must have this "bloodline".  Jesus doesn't just take it as a compliment and a justification for his works, he says something quite strange.  He replies to this acknowledgment of his spiritual lineage with the statement "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."   HUH???

That was Nicodemus' response too, "how can a man be born again when he is old?  Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born again?  For many years I was like our friend Nicodemus....just not as courageous in my questioning.  I wanted to say each time I read these passages, "Hey, I don't get this at all!'  But I'd read them aloud in church or in private when they appeared as part of a scriptural selection without hesitation. 

Jesus goes on to reply, "Except a man be born of the water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.  That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.  Marvel not that I say unto thee, Ye must be born again."

This is usually where the selection would end and I would be just as baffled as poor old Nicodemus was when the Master said it to him over 2,000 years ago.  That was until one summer when these same citations appeared in a weekly lesson of study designed to serve as a suggested guide for that week's spiritual journey. 

As I read the citations once again I started to become a tad frustrated.  "What in the world was he trying to say?'  "Why did the guy have to be so cryptic?"  I came to the end of the selection and there, what seemed like, out of the blue, was this statement, "The wind bloweth where it listed, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit."

Wow, I thought...what strange juxtapositioning of statements from the Scriptures....born again AND the wind blowing where it listeth...then I looked up to where the citation sources are listed and dang if this wasn't actually an uninterrupted sequence of statements on the Master's part. 

As I sat there pondering what relationship those two statements had to one another...both statements that had left me bewildered and baffled in the past...an almost weightless piece of seed fluff from a burst pod blew across the porch of my cabin in the Rocky Mountains where I was serving as a spiritual healer for the summer at camp for teens.

I didn't move.

Now, I am a language deconstructionist at heart....I love taking words apart and finding their roots and discovering obscure uses and applications...my tools are usually a stack of dictionaries...but this day all it took was that one seed blowing where the wind was sending it.  Being BORNE of the spirit (Pneuma, wind)....

Ahah (and this message could have been only for me)....but I had my answer, my healing truth about this passage for me...in my own life. Here is what God said to me on the porch of my cabin that day: 

We are not born into families with their DNA, birth orders, financial profile or ethnic proclivities...we are not born blindly (see also story of Jesus healing the man who was born blind John 9) from disaster to opportunity, from financial misstep to educational legacy, from parental mistakes and sins to "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" philosophies and academic hierarchy...we are being borne (carried, sent) by the Spirit (inspiration, revelation) and, therefore, although our path may seem tangential and circuitous...compared to someone else's....it is always governed by an omnipotent and all-knowing good God who loves us and knows exactly where we need to be at each moment in our journey...at each intersection...in order to fulfill His purpose for us.

So...can those who seem to be wandering EVER be lost.  Not to an all-knowing, all-powerful, good Father-Mother God who loves us. 

I eventually ended up studying at two of those universities I had my heart set on (among others I would end up attending over the course of my academic sojourning)...maybe not in the way I had planned with an itinerary in hand, ticket purchased, and a quick flight on the Concorde to Paris...but more like this...as I got in the car to drive to the airport I ran into a hippie on the side of the road who needed a ride to Nova Scotia to care for his mother, so I drove him there, then since I need to head South I drove along the coast and got waylaid in a charming village and ended up living with a woman who ran an orphanage and decided to take the children traveling throughout the country visiting churches and synagogues singing for their supper  who invited me to join them when they decided to hop a schooner for Africa but got waylaid in Southern France and ended up joining a troupe of gypsies working the vineyards and juggling for pennies in Provence....eventually we made it to Paris as street performers....but hey, we got there....

Wouldn't that have been fun!  So was my journey....I am here where the Wind has blown me...and I know now that I was never lost....just wandering...and I am so grateful.   He always knew where I was...He had sent me there...provided me with perfect traveling companions... carried on His breath of purpose....





K