Holy.....a word for the year

Oliver bounced around the kitchen while I opened a can of tuna.  New Year’s Eve creates a certain excited energy for a 6 year old who’s always been sent to bed early without even knowing it and is suddenly clue-ing in that there’s an occasion at hand.  Lunch finally on his plate, I described that tonight we’d each have a chance to share words about our hopes for the coming new year and he could participate in that, or share a word that seems important to him for the new year.  “How about holy?” he asked.  I shouldn’t have been but nonetheless was taken by surprise and asked him to say more.  “It just makes me think of Jesus” he said.  “Is that a word you’d like for the new year?” I asked.  “No, it’s for you,” he replied.

Holy.

For me?  A year ago, for the first time, I thought I might consider a word for the year and unexpectedly heard ‘attend’ come my way.  It has proven a powerful word for me, the right word, a felt word.  On the face of it, the English suggests active attention but its roots pull on ligaments, tendons, stretching.  On risking, a space of discomfort yet still one of vital connection.  Intention….just beyond the stretch point.  I’d thought I might take it with me for another year.

                Holy.

And this might go with it.  It shouldn’t surprise me that this is the word my child might hear.  He surprises me often but in ways that completely make sense.  There is something to his spiritual sensitivity that seems both out of left field and also completely of-course.  I suspect this is true of children generally.  It is something I have ardently nurtured across his short life.  And it’s his own as well, something I’ve tried to remember finds its own space for itself regardless of my nurturing.  And here it is, alongside a can of tuna, unexpected gift for me.

What is holy attending?  This might be a year to explore that more.  The past year has felt as holy as any I’ve ever lived and I know in my crevices that God is deeper still, greater yet, closer than I have possibly felt even as much as every stretch has been toward solid mysteriousness. Holy. I feel very open to the presences of this word and its reality that I’ve known….and to stretching them.  May it be so.

Thy Will Be Done

Note....this post is at least as much of a bookmark for me as it is anything else....I was deeply moved this morning, something that rarely happens for me in church-the-way-people-usually-think-about-church.  It tapped into a number of things that run deep in me.

When we go to church in the "get up & go to church" kind of way, we usually go just a few miles from home to Edmonds United Methodist Church.  Pastor Sandy Brown is in the midst of a sermon series on The Lord’s Prayer and the phrase of focus today was here:  “thy will be done.”  Regardless of your spiritual leanings, have you ever thought about that line?  Really thought about it?  Have you ever said these words?  Really said them?  Trusting that, even knowing what was highest and most honorable in your longing in that moment, you too would be better served by at least uttering such a phrase and probably by the fulfillment of it?

In unfolding his thoughts on this line and the havoc wreaked in our societies and connections as we live for our own self-interests, he referenced a beautifully written obituary penned by the late Senator John McCain.  Read it at the link below.  The words of a man, about a man, both of whom understood what it was to hold fast to their convictions and in that to also honor holy humanity before them.  The service closed this morning with a hymn that speaks the same dynamic.  A third verse is added to the UMC hymnal but I offer the traditional first two in the below recording.

Salute To A Communist.  John S. McCain

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/opinion/john-mccain-salute-to-a-communist.html

This Is My Song

(recording here, lyrics below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvz9PvczUMI&list=RDCvz9PvczUMI&index=2

This is my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is,

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.

But other hearts in other lands are beating,

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine. 

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

Living From The Heart

It’s the strangest thing, really.  I’ve never been much of a baker.  But suddenly I found myself wondering about notes in mom’s recipe box and eyeing the bread pans in that lower drawer.  Noodling about the qualities of ‘chew’ and tasting the salts and dried herbs in my cupboard.  And feeling curious…is it true that wrapping a loaf in foil protects it from drying yet won’t turn the crust soft?  I found a book called “The Spirituality of Bread” and wandered down memory lane revisiting loaves across the globe.  Czech rye, French croissants, Italian ciabatta, German soft pretzels, English crumpets, San Francisco sourdough, grandma’s cornbread, bagels from Polish street vendors, Ethiopian injera, fresh warm tortillas, Alabama buttermilk biscuits, mom’s cinnamon rolls, a whole grain loaf from Katie’s oven three houses down, rosemary flatbreads baked over the Easter morning beach fire, croutons toasted on my stovetop, flatbread pizza at our favorite date spot after Taize.  And the elements they’ve been paired with.  Herb infused olive oil and decadently syrupy balsamic vinegar, warm goat cheese and parsley, crumbly parmesan, sauerkraut, garlicky hummus and bright green pesto straight from my food processor, the dozen mustards in my fridge, a loose pack of arugula and a runny yolk poached egg, my own Caesar salad dressing, spicy pizza sauce, a smear of avocado with a sprinkle of sea salt, homemade raspberry jam, thickly sliced tomatoes, Dad’s pickled herring, fire-in-your-mouth lentils, chopped egg with fresh dill.  I envisioned a weekly bread-making Friday with Oliver, his little hands kneading away, flour dusting his nose, music playing in the background, a special little bread-making blessing created just for our morning.  And sharing the loaves….I sketched in my mind a family-oriented communion meal around our table with friends….a blend of tasty evening nibbles, a beautiful salad, an awe-inspiring wine, the ceremonial slicing of the center loaf, a sensory liturgy.  So I searched for flour blends and bought the yeast packets and…..  Well, that’s all.  That’s as far as it got.

Somewhere in the middle of the baking aisle, the romance and the reality collided.  The flour dusting on Oliver’s nose turned into a bag of flour dumped all over the floor.  The yeast packet turned into yeast lost because the water was too cold and it never activated.  The sweet time with my boy turned into the frustrations of parenting.  The gathering devolved from an I’m-perfectly-ok-with-child-energy-around-the-table vision to a let’s-just-get-through-this disappointment as the buzz of evening meals with lots of little people peppered my imagination.  The airy quality of the loaves we were making fell flat.  I couldn’t decide on meal accompaniments.  Would Oliver take a nap that day and be good to go, or would he be unable to sleep and turn into a hot mess around 4:37pm?  I wanted to open the bottle now.  Forget it, I thought.  It can’t work to host these things in this season of life.  Just forget the whole thing.

Mindy.

The voice was quiet.

There’s a fresh loaf there on the counter.

Oh.

There’s a bottle in the pantry.

There is?

Sit.  Eat.  Drink.  Do this in remembrance of ME.

***

I'm part of a 9 month cohort in a course called Living From The Heart offered through The Selah Center (which I also work for....full disclosure).   Each module folds together a cohort day retreat, ongoing individual spiritual direction, a soul care group, reading, reflective project, and contemplative practices.  This is my reflection launching from our opening retreat, David Benner's Surrender To Love, and Henry Nouwen's The Way of the Heart.

©2016 Mindy Danylak

Breathing Underwater

In fifth grade I was invited to a school friend's birthday party.  I remember sitting in the car after school one day, seeing my friend's mom jump out of their car and talk to my mom for a minute.  When she slid back behind the steering wheel, Mom said that there would be a movie shown at the party and my friend's mom just wanted to make sure it was ok for me to see it.  Apparently it was ok because I went to the party.  The movie, Splash, is the only thing about the party that I remember.  Other than the old reel-to-reel films shown in school and the time Mom took my sister and I to see The Sound of Music at the public library, I'd never seen a movie before.  Any movie.  Ever.  And I haven't seen Splash since but I still recall scenes from it in vivid detail....Daryl Hannah as the mermaid in a lab tank, incompatible salination of the water causing her distress and making her tail flake and peel....love and vision prompting Tom Hanks to shed his known life on the beach and risk diving into the waves at the end, discovering not only companionship in life but that he could breathe in his new, underwater world.

Fast forward several years to my sophomore year of high school.  My brother had a Nintendo system our parents had given him.  We didn't have a TV so we played games on the computer monitor they'd gotten for the Nintendo.  I'm not sure what prompted it but we decided to rent a movie.  Dead Poets Society.  (The irony of that choice is not lost on me.)  We picked up the movie and a VCR (also rentable at that time) and headed home where we escaped to the basement to hook up the VCR and watch the movie on that computer monitor.  That is, after shutting up the house like we'd all died.  Blinds closed on all the windows.  Doors locked and deadbolts secured.  Every upstairs and outdoor light turned off.  No one could know we were watching a movie (was it a Saturday night? if so, then especially then).  No one should know we were even home.  Even the door from the garage to the kitchen was locked, a door no one could have reached unless they'd broken into the garage to begin with.  To have any chance of seeing the flicker of a screen, someone would've had to have parked, come along the side of the house, opened a tall gate, and snuck down to the middle of the lower level of the backyard in order to peer in through a single window....a venture likely to be unsuccessful because we'd pulled the blinds down.  None of those things....breaking into the house, sneaking around the property....would have been undertaken by the kind souls in our church.  Our ministers did have a key so the element of being surprised was certainly real, but they generally didn't come in the evenings.  Definitely not on a Saturday night.

Many watchings of Dead Poets Society (and other movies) later, we were old pros at the routine.  Go get the movie, come home and secure the house, steal away downstairs.  At the hint of the doorbell, the volume would be silenced.  The walls in that house were 10" thick and the front door a floor away, but there wouldn't be any taking chances.  I'm not sure what we thought would happen in the extraordinarily unlikely case that we were 'found out'.  One of my aunts was married to a man who wasn't in the church and they had a TV in their basement, we'd heard of others who had one in their closet, I dated a guy whose family actually went to the theater....something I did for the first time my senior year when my AP American Lit class went to see Huckleberry Finn during school hours.  And nothing bad happened.  But hide away we did.  Movies were not allowed.  And while my family walked the line on some things, that wasn't one of them.  At least, not publicly.

A few years later when we were moving towards leaving the church our leaving was a closely kept family secret until the very last minute.  You don't grow up in this group unscathed.  You certainly do not walk away from it without consequence.  My mom was adamant that she was leaving on her own terms, not being excommunicated, and my parents knew a number of people to whom that had happened.  The upheaval would be difficult enough...uprooting from the center of life-long social and cultural connections....choosing something that would automatically disrupt extended family ties for a long while and bring a swift end to friendships...  We did a lot of work ahead of time to try to mitigate some of the impact that leaving would bring, but you can't necessarily mitigate the relationship side of that kind of thing.

Over sushi downtown last weekend, a dear friend asked me what my life would be like if I'd stayed in the group.  Tears came to my eyes.  I found myself unable to even think such a thing.  When I was 19 I'd determined to leave no matter what, even if that had to happen before my parents were ready to leave.  I wasn't sure how that would play out, and I had some fears about how it would affect them if that were to be the order of how it happened, but I knew I was done.  I lived my entire life with that tension....being inside and trying desperately to live authentically but even as a child not completely buying into it.  If I'd stayed...I can't imagine.  I'd be utterly depressed, possibly suicidal.  You cannot have your spirit squashed the way mine was and survive.  Which is why I knew I had to get out.

I knew it would all be worth it.  So worth it.  Not without considerable costs, but gaining something invaluable.  Discovering that what I trusted to be true is actually true....that I can, in fact, breathe underwater.


©2015 Mindy Danylak

Monday of the Third Week of Lent: Prayer

The moment my baby boy was born he was placed on my chest where he rested quietly for the next four hours.  We were each attended to with him lying right there.  He gazed at me and blinked but mostly he was still and watchful as we began the process of seeing one another.  I did not experience childbirth as particularly painful; rather, intense.intense.intense, and demanding complete focus, relaxation, and calm.  I felt good when he arrived but I was admittedly exhausted.  It had been hard work.  Very hard work.  "Thank you Jesus!" were my spontaneous words when he finally emerged.

Three days later I stepped into the shower at home and the tears finally came, streaming until the water ran cold.  I believe tears are one of the body’s deepest languages.  There was simply so much to express…my entire life frame moving from pregnancy to labor to birth in a matter of hours, the profoundly cellular engagement every nerve of my body participated in during those hours.  There is no way to process any of it as it happens…you just move through it moment by moment and go about the integrating work later.  But that work happens on the go, blended with the early days of having a newborn and moving into a new life.  Over the coming weeks and months I would find myself at my wits’ end, depressed and feeling utterly lost.  It seemed nothing was the same and I was unfamiliar to myself.  I was tired, yes, although that wasn’t the hardest part.  My baby had a dream temperament but I was in the throes of an adjustment that felt more like crawling through thick mud at midnight.  There were some very, very dark days.  I recall one afternoon when my sweet babe was barely a month old, sitting with him in the bedroom, tears drenching my face and thinking, "I have died.  Something in me has died, and it's just going to be this way.  Maybe in a few years I’ll come back but right now I’m just gone.”

Richard Rohr calls the soul the place where the human meets the divine.  While my prayer upon my son’s birth was a two word offering of gratitude, my prayers during the ensuing several months were one word long.  Or less.  And some combined with words I rarely use.  And there were lots of those prayers.  I gave up mascara for the first few months because I cried so much.  I don’t recall exactly but I think the leaves had turned colors before my husband could leave for work most days without seeing me in tears.  But trying to feel God in the midst of the blur kept me closer to some semblance of self-connection even as I felt pretty unhinged.  Often crying was all the language I had, and I used it unsparingly.  I had to.  And I couldn’t help but do it.  I had to voice what was going on in some way.  And it helped remind me that I was actually alive, with a sliver of hope in my heart.  My soul was right there.

I don't have strong traditions around Lent, but this year Jonathan and I are reading through a collection of poetry, one each evening.  The poets range from Alcuin to Anne Bradstreet to Bob Dylan, and span several centuries with everything from slave spirituals to church hymns to modern day jazz lyrics.  We're loving it.  A couple weeks ago I posted a beautiful piece from Joyce Rupp and this evening I have to share George Herbert's thoughts on prayer.  Prayer can be a bit of a moving target...it's not an end in itself but it somehow seems prone to gathering moss along the way, becoming a 'technique' with a list of required elements, and often laden with expectation.  Herbert disallows that.  His list is a little more sunny than I’d like – there are some less “pretty” ways of authentically praying that he doesn’t mention – but I like it nonetheless.  There have been times when I’ve borrowed ancient prayers and times when I’ve cried out with a simple “Help” and times when my heart was simply known to God.  I’m confident we could all add our own lines to Herbert’s list...the varied ways in which people pray is limitless.  For me, this sonnet underscores the living nature of prayer, the breathing of it.  As I reflect this Lent on the past several months, I’m grateful – deeply grateful – for the voice of prayer, for the intertwining of rest and movement in life even when it feels stuck, and that prayer, even when all seems as dross, is yet dynamic as a reach toward hope and liveliness.

Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
     God's breath in man returning to his birth,
     The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;

Engine against th' Almightie, sinners' towre,
     Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
     The six-daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
     Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
     Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The Milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

     Church-bels beyond the stares heard, the soul's bloud,
     The land of spices; something understood.

Prayer (I) by George Herbert, 1633

---------------------
©2014 Mindy Danylak (except George Herbert poem)

The Cosmos Dreams In Me

The cosmos dreams in me
 while I wait in stillness,
 ready to lean a little further
 into the heart of the Holy.

I, a little blip of life,
 a wisp of unassuming love,
 a quickly passing breeze,
 come once more into Lent.

 No need to sign me
 with the black bleeding ash
 of palms, fried and baked.
 I know my humus place.

This Lent I will sail
 on the graced wings of desire,
 yearning to go deeper
 to the place where
 I am one in the One.

 Oh, may I go there soon,
 in the same breath
 that takes me to the stars
 when the cosmos dreams in me.

-- Joyce Rupp --

Seeing Through Fog

The small town I grew up in nestles near the foothills of the Blue Mountains.  In winter, fog settles in like a close friend, creating layers of gray that bathe everything like a soft focus lens.  To this day, I completely love fog....its gentle envelopment and quiet mystery.  I feel comforted and held by fog.  It's sacred space for me.  Rest and solitude.  Light and voice.

Where I live now, I am just a few minutes' walk from Puget Sound where vessels large and small make their way through the steel waters all night long.  This week, the fog arrived....mornings of opaque misty gray, amazing banks of clouds hovering over the waves, lit at night by the full autumn moon.  Tonight a symphony of foghorns sound their way across the water into my home.  It's cold out but my windows are open, inviting in the deep resonating tones as boats make their way through the night.  It's a lonely sound and a calling out.

My sweet baby is down, cuddled in soft pajamas and blankets, his ear inclined toward the open window and the foghorns across the way.  He had a long day with little napping so he's somewhat agitated in his sleep.  He cries out periodically and I go to him, offer the gentle pressure of my hand on his little body, lay my head next to his.  He gently sighs his way to letting go.  His tiny hands wrap mine to his chest even in his semi-sleep.  I listen to the foghorns as he sounds his way to rest, warm tears dampening my cheeks as the struggles of this journey flood my heart.  Even with moments of clarity and the growth of an intensely deep and abiding love, the last four months have been foggy.  This is so hard.  And this moment is so right.

I am saying goodbye to a friend this week, a woman I've known for a short period but whose space in my heart is marked indelibly.  Our tears today were hard.  Very hard.  I don't want to let her go.  I listen to the foghorns and reflect on her experiences.  She has taught me about reaching out, about making moves one at a time, about risks toward unseen hopes, about staying in and naming realities, about the "-ing" of faith and in human relationships.  She reminds me that we do not wrap up life in our places, that we take our stories as we move.  She is courageous and loyal and seeks living honestly, and I am better for her voice.  Our relationship reminds me that when the future, even the very moment, is foggy, there is still a sounding to do.

The foghorns are peace for me tonight as I say goodbye to my friend, pause to settle my sleeping child, wait to hear the resonance of my own heart in the moment.

Despite the dangers in movement, the ship dares not be silent nor still. 
We must move through fog.  And the only way to do that is one layer at a time.