Christmas, 2015

Greetings, dear friends and family, and blessings on your celebrations at this end of the year when the days are short, yet the promise of the Light blesses us with its dawning!

What a year this has been, beginning with my knuckling down to complete my thesis for the M.A. degree in Culture & Spirituality I received in May.  Titled, “Hymns for a New Story”, the thesis critically examines the metaphors we use for the Holy in Protestant Christian hymnody.  It suggests new images in four new hymns I’ve written, one of which has been sung publicly six times, to wild enthusiasm in the parishes that have used it.  I can hardly believe the poetry that comes through me as I write and re-write hymns.  Graduation was in May, and now I am preparing to do my part in what Roman Catholic priest and environmentalist Thomas Berry called “The Great Work.”

“The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.”  (Thomas Berry)

Never to be content with what I have learned, I traveled twice to Colorado during the summer, to attend two classes with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of the book, Women Who Run With the Wolves.  She taught over 100 women and men how to facilitate a group to study and learn from this book, which contains lessons on the instinctual nature of humans, especially women, and does so through story.  In October, I convened a group of women who study with me once a month, and the sharing is deep, wide and very productive.  Early in 2016, I will start another group, and I’ll also attempt an online group for people who live in distant areas.

Finally this year, I began studying to become a spiritual mentor for people who are searching for their unique purpose in life: those who are asking the question, “How can I discover the unique soul gift I was meant to offer the world?”  The work is spiritually arduous and very rewarding, for I believe that the discovery of one’s gift and the offering of it to the world is the thing that produces a life deeply lived.  As the poet Mary Oliver says in her poem, “When Death Comes,”

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

 Neither do I.  And, I won’t.

But visit I did this year!  In addition to my Colorado trips, at a retreat center just north of Loveland, David and I took a two week road trip across Nevada in September, to Great Basin National Park and then to Southern Utah.  My goodness, I never knew that U.S. 50 going through Nevada was SO BEAUTIFUL!  We crossed range after range of mountains, singing, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”, stopped for the night in Kingston, which isn’t even on the map ‘cause there are only 80 people in the town, and then stayed outside of Great Basin in Baker, NV.  We did the hike to the Bristlecone Pines, trees which live at 10,000 feet and some of which are over 3,000 years old.  And the next day we participated in a special astronomy night with astronomers from the University of Utah among other places.  From there we dropped down to southern Utah where we rented a house from Air B&B and hiked in Zion (hid under a rock during a thunder and hail storm that ended up killing six), visited the North Rim of the Grand Canyon (where, across the canyon, we could see the trail we hiked, when we hiked to its bottom three years ago), and I volunteered to walk dogs for a day at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, UT.  From there it was north to Bryce Canyon and a spectacular hike, then to Valley of Fire State Park outside of Las Vegas, and back to CA via Paso Robles, wine tasting, and bluff hiking.  What a trip!

The last trip was a long weekend to Ashland, OR, where we saw “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and visited Crater Lake in the rain. 

Life is amazing!  I hope Mary Oliver agrees!  My son Peter returned to CA (San Diego) after living in Washington DC for two years, and Matt is living in Santa Cruz.  Both are in relationship with lovely, smart, accomplished women, who love them very much.  Kaisa the cat turned 17 in March and is still healthy and strong, though he is not beating up the neighborhood cats as he used to do in his younger days.  And David and I have completed five years of being together.

We are grateful in CA that it is raining; everything is pretty much soaked, and we hope the dangerously low level of water in the reservoirs rises, we hope that people will have compassion on each other and on the earth, our precious planet, and we hope to do more traveling around the country in 2016, as we attend each other’s high school reunions.

May your celebrations at this time of the year be blessed and may the returning Light of the New Year bring fullness to your lives and the lives of your loved ones!

Merry Christmas!          Happy Hanukah!          Happy Solstice!        Happy New Year!

Hymns for the New Story

Hymns are powerful teachers of faith and doctrine and exert enormous spiritual and emotional influence on the people who sing them.  As lyric poetry with regular rhyme and meter, they are easy to learn and easy to recall.  A congregation that sings hymns together is a united community of belief, whose hearts beat as one.  Their hymnals are teachers of theology at a grass-roots level and often influence the believers more than Scripture or creeds.  The hymnody has evolved since the early Christian times, from the first century Greek communities, through the Reformation and after.  Since hymns have been passed down through many generations, they have contributed to the worldview held by Christians today.

As humanity has gained technological knowledge and skill, it has the capacity to destroy the earth faster than the earth can repair itself.  To address this situation, Thomas Berry calls for a “Great Work” in transitioning from a period of human devastation of the planet to a time when human presence would be beneficial both to humans and to the earth.  (Berry, The Great Work, 1999)  He asks that humanity develop a new story as a foundation to this effort.

But for the most part, the hymnody tells the old story of an external God who created all that exists and set it to run according to his order.  This God is both a King, sometimes a warrior-king, and a benevolent patriarch who is only distantly related to the world. All power is on God’s side, whether it be domination or benevolence.  Either way, humans are absolved of responsibility and cannot help themselves, but God cares for them and takes that responsibility himself.  Nature fades into the background in the hymns, and it is labeled seductive and distracting, or is simply an aid for praise of the Creator-Father-King.  The true human goal is redemption out of the world into which we were born, and the hymns are filled with images of our “true home” in heaven.  Finally, the hymns reinforce anthropocentrism with their failure to include the whole of creation, beyond humans, as capable of relating to the divine.

The metaphors in a very large percentage of the hymnody are at odds with what we have learned from science about evolution, the origins of the universe, relativity, and quantum physics.  And so the hymns seem to some to be irrelevant, not believable, and containing antiquated images.  They sing the old story while we are learning so much more.

Fortunately, new hymns are being written to address concerns, both about the earth, and about systemic oppression of people, non-human species and the natural world.  Slowly the new hymns are making their way into the established hymnody, but there is a need for more hymns to shift the focus toward a new story.

We need to sing our way into a new story.  Until we do, our old models will continue to hold, no matter how much we learn about the systems of the earth, the consciousness of creation, and our unfolding Universe.

I Speak for the Land: Indigenous People's Day, 2014

I speak for the land.

I have raised myself up and laid myself low, creating mountains and meadows, and furrows where the water runs to form creeks and rivers.  Living creatures die to me, and I take them into myself that their bodies may nourish future life.  I provide food for all, even for the animals that other animals feed upon.  Such is the cycle of life. 

Now, humans have built fences on me, of wood and wire, of roads of crushed stone, of steel rails laid on wood.  Now the herds of creatures can no longer wander freely, imprisoned by these fences, which cross the places where once the herds and the humans wandered freely. 

The humans have done this, in the name of something they call “private property.”  They trade pieces of paper and put up signs with the words, “No trespassing”.  They kill or imprison all who, without their permission, wander onto the land they think they own.

Private property.

Private.

They are indeed a private race, walled into their small definitions of who they are, living in fear behind their self-built fences, suspicious of any wanderer that they perceive as an invader.

They themselves have forgotten the Way of the Wanderer.  Their little “private” properties are their fortresses and their prisons.  How little freedom they allow themselves.  They equate “freedom” with the right to shoot an intruder, human or non-human. 

Would that they could all wander freely on me!  But the notion of wandering is abhorrent to them.  This they do not see, nor do they want to see it.  Each one is isolated from all around them, frightened of the others, willing to do harm to fellow brothers and sisters, the beasts, the plants, the rivers, the forests – even the mountains.

I, the Land, am not private.  Nor am I property.  You shall see and know that this is true.

Come To Birth

Come to Birth    

By Sharon L. Reinbott:  May, 2014

It began in the dark,

Flaring forth in the night,

Seeking space, making billions of stars.

And it swirled in the dust,

Gathered in to itself,

This beautiful planet of ours.

Chorus:

And it’s coming in closer

Like the foam on the incoming tide

It’s been groping its way

Through billions of ages

Til it comes to birth in you.

And it struggled to see

In the crystals of earth

All straining to find the light.

But it found its eyes

In the depths of the sea

In the waters it swam with new sight.

And it's coming in closer...

As it sought to know

It climbed onto the land

Grew green, reached upward and stood

And it roamed the earth

And it danced its dance

As if something had known that it would.

And it's coming in closer...

Will you give it birth?

Will you sing its song?

Will you let it dance wild and free?

Will you shine with its spark,

And live in the fire

Of all that is coming to be?

And it's coming in closer...

This is a Sacred World (Not my Father's World)

I have heard it said that when Roman Catholic women pray, they pray the Rosary; when Protestant women pray, they sing hymns.

Spiritual and religious practices, such as songs, dances, and ritual movements, bypass the intellect and induce joy, wonder, anguish, pain, and love at a feeling level.  This is especially true for Christian Protestant hymns, which often convey more theology than scripture. And since many of the hymns are more than 100 years old, they in part define a subculture of childlike obedience to a benevolent father who takes charge of the world, or of trembling obedience to a warrior who fights on their behalf, as long as they obey the rules.

Protestant hymns are rich in metaphor and often evoke God, the benevolent Father-King, who owns the world he created.  The metaphor encourages attitudes of benign passivity on the part of humans, who never grow up to take responsibility for their relationship to the earth and for the creation of themselves.  This is especially true of the hymn "This is My Father's World", written in the late 1800's.  To remain a child is seen as good; the hymn contains some reassurance that good will prevail over wrong, but there is no urgency of human participation in whatever might bring this about.  There is not even a nod to what science has learned about the origins and unfolding of the universe we know today.  

I have rewritten the text of the hymn, preserving the original tune, rhyme and meter, to isolate the words, metaphors, and ideas. 

The first verse sets the creation in the primeval flaring forth we call the “big bang”, the light of which our science has now learned to see.  It asserts that the universe created itself, out of itself, and was not created by a benevolent maker outside of it.  The second verse is a human response: humans as the creation reflecting on itself, allowing its wonder to enter and transform.  The third verse acknowledges that knowledge of death enables humans to show themselves by embracing their passions and that the primeval flame from the first flaring forth is, even now, alive in us.

Sacred World

This is a sacred world

The Universe Divine

Pours into night creative might

And we reflect its shine.

This is a sacred world

We see its first-born light

Creating stars, their worlds, and ours

Flared forth in deepest night.

This is a sacred world

It permeates our sense

The moon, the tree, the cloud, the sea,

In pure magnificence.

This is a sacred world

Oh may it all employ

To listen well, with every cell,

Transformed in wondrous joy.

This is a sacred world.

Though death will have its due

It makes me dare to live aware

My deepest dream pursue

This is a sacred world.

May I arise and see

Primeval flame, creation’s name

Now come to birth in me.

-- Text by Sharon L. Reinbott

Sermon: Vulnerable to Love: Mary Anoints the Feet of Jesus

John 12:1-8 Jesus, therefore, six days before the Passover, came to Bethany where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. 2 So they made Him a supper there, and Martha was serving; but Lazarus was one of those reclining at the table with Him. 3 Mary then took a pound of very costly perfume of pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 4 But Judas Iscariot, one of His disciples, who was intending to betray Him, *said, 5 “Why was this perfume not sold for [c]three hundred denarii and given to poor people?” 6 Now he said this, not because he was concerned about the poor, but because he was a thief, and as he had the money box, he used to pilfer what was put into it. 7 Therefore Jesus said, “Let her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. 8 For you always have the poor with you, but you do not always have Me.”

Picture the scene. All the men are seated at dinner; Martha is serving the meal when Mary enters with a jar of nard, very expensive and precious ointment. She pours it all over Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair. The whole house smells of the perfume. Judas, who kept their money (and who evidently took a little for himself), is outraged. “This ointment could have been sold and the money given to the poor!” Jesus’ stands up for Mary: “Let her alone. Let her keep it for my burial.” And then rebukes Judas with a statement more like, “Don’t worry, Judas. You’ll have plenty of poor to take care of after I’m gone.”

This is a story of extravagant love and vulnerability that transcend social norms, showing us how to give and receive love and devotion. There’s a dinner going on. Martha is serving, presumably as expected. Jesus hangs out with the men, reclining at dinner, as was the custom, when Mary comes in – as was definitely not the custom. Not only does she enter the men’s room, but she kneels at Jesus’ feet, breaks open a jar of costly perfume, pours it on his feet and wipes them with her hair.

Nard was so expensive, it cost a year’s salary! Think of what your annual salary is – that’s the number likely in the disciples’ heads. Mary enters the room, but not to serve the men. She touches a man who is not her husband, and in the presence of others! She kneels at his feet, pours expensive perfume on them, and in an act of unreserved intimacy and sensuality, wipes them with her hair. Her hair, no less! And what does Jesus do? He completely receives her love and devotion, opening himself to her extravagant expression while disregarding Judas’ criticism and the unspoken disapproval of the breaking of social norms that specified converse between women and men. Mary’s act was very public; not only did she perform it in the middle of a group of men, but the Gospel writer points out that the whole house reeked of the stuff. One can imagine that even people outside could smell it. Nard is extremely fragrant.

And how does Jesus react to this extravagant, shockingly wrong, public, sensual act of love and devotion? He receives it, receives it all.

What kind of person can do that?

Only one who is vulnerable and open enough to receive such a gift, who does not judge, who isn’t predicting the future and who definitely isn’t following the rules.

Only one who can accept himself or herself as the Beloved. Think about that. What would it be like to open to love in such a way that you accept yourself as the Beloved? You are the Beloved. You are the Beloved. This is Jesus’ example to us. He is the Beloved. Mary is the Beloved. Judas is the Beloved. And you and I – we are the Beloved. The Beloved doesn’t need to put off love using all of our tricky ways. The Beloved accepts him or her self as exactly that, and from that place, opens to receive.

And Mary… We can safely assume that she didn’t simply take one jar from her stash of nard in the closet. This was an extravagant act, pouring herself out with the perfume. It was an act of bravery and purpose, flaunting the social custom of the day by entering that room. It was an act of sensual devotion, wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair.

What kind of person can do that? Only one whose love cannot be contained, who is brave enough to risk embarrassment, scorn and criticism. Only a person that knows herself as the Beloved is that brave and that overflowing with love.

The Beloved can risk it all – the Beloved can feel the pain of betrayal and the hurts that life and people inflict. The Beloved will feel the pain, but the Beloved’s center, deep in the heart, is not perturbed.

Contrast Judas’ predictable and disciplined reaction, likely a projection of his thievery. Judas says it’s a waste of money. Some of us would argue that it’s also a waste of effort and that such a display is not only unnecessary, it is also unseemly and embarrassing and should be reserved for private time, away from view of others. Martha could have argued (and did, in another story) that Mary should have gotten up and gotten back into her female role of servant of the men, and helped her. What unnecessary extravagance!

So, let’s all enter the room. Where are we in this room? I suppose we’re with Judas, making some sort of protest. Now, Judas is right, in that the ointment could indeed have been sold. The money could have helped some poor people. And here’s where we get confounded by our own protests. It’s hard to disagree, when what’s being said contains some element of truth. Jesus, of course, has the answer. “Don’t worry, Judas, there will be plenty of poor folks for you to ‘help’ after I’m gone.” But let’s look deeper into ourselves and why we tend to side with Judas, when we’d long to be in the place of Mary and Jesus. Let’s look at our lack of vulnerability that keeps us from receiving extravagant and intimate gestures of love. Let’s look, knowing that everything we tell ourselves, to shield us from the vulnerably of receiving love, like Judas’ remark, contains a grain of truth.

• “Let’s not waste it. Just use a little and there will be more left for next time.”
• “Oh, I don’t need that. Use it for yourself.”
• “Oh, you shouldn’t have.”
• “I don’t want to make a scene.”
• “Really, you don’t have to do this. I know you love me.”
• “In our family, we don’t waste what is valuable.”

All fine sentiments, all containing some truth, IF they aren’t used as vulnerability shields. Yes, they all represent some virtue: frugality, modesty, unselfishness. But what is their function? I’d argue that their function is to protect us from the vulnerability of giving and receiving extravagant expressions of love and devotion. Isn’t that what we do with each other? Isn’t that what we do with God?

I would invite you to consider the statements you may make that are like the examples I gave. As you find yourself saying or thinking these, ask yourself, “Did I just shield myself from vulnerability?” Become aware of when you do this. Curiously aware, without judgment, as you watch yourself shield your heart from opening to gestures of love – especially extravagant ones! Remember at these times that you are the Beloved. And from that place, imagine what it would be like for you, to be in Jesus’ place, accepting acts of love and devotion. Imagine being Mary, risking criticism by defying social norms. Can you imagine it, from the place of the Beloved?

Yes, we do need these devoted gestures. Yes, we do need to be open and vulnerable to receiving such extravagance, such love. Because if we were open to this extravagant love of God, Jesus would never have had to show us this example.

Judas, and the other disciples in this Gospel story, put the wall up. “Extravagant waste! Give the money to the poor!” I’d guess that they, like us sometimes, are not willing to dig deep, to the place where they and we are crying out to give and receive this extravagant, intimate, sensual gesture of love. So, I invite you: Dig deep, past the half truths of “really, you don’t have to do this, I don’t need it, use the money to help others, take the spotlight off of me, even if it’s the spotlight of love.” Dig deeper, to your heart which is crying out to give and receive this deep love. Dig past the hardness, the fear, the family rules, the societal rules, the embarrassment, to the vulnerability of the Beloved, which I promise you is there.

Because if it wasn’t, Jesus would never have shown us what we could be. He would have sided with Judas. But he didn’t. We don’t have to either.

Poem: What if My Words

What if my words

got stuck in the ink of my pen,

refused to flow onto the

page, no matter how many times I

clicked the clicker,

shook my hand,

jumped up and down,

hammered on the floor,

til the whole pen broke, 

and the ink flowed out

in a blot on the rug?

Oh, I said.

They just wanted to be

that free.