A Photographer's Glance
There are a few times when things just click and you know it is terrific to be alive.
The rocks are terrific.
The light, the water, the colour, the barnacled rocks. It’s the beach.
And the light just glances fabulously off the water around the sand and over the rocks.
When one sees the world with lies, it is never good for oneself and for all.
When one sees the world of beauty it is always a sense of grace that prevails for oneself and others.
On this May Day, a festival of dance and spring, maypoles and cakes, a day of workers’ recognition and honour: Dance this day, full of hope and joy. The creation awaits your participation in its rebirth.
My Love,
On this May Day baptismal day we celebrate not only a small child’s baptism, but all baptisms, including our own: that God is a Gracious and Loving God, to have created this universe, and us with it, knowing what we would do, what God would have to do, what Jesus would suffer, what the Holy Spirit could do, and what we would do with all that to ignore all that God has done for us.
There is a wonder, in you, a miracle of reality. God created as child grown to a respected slim, silver haired elder woman, guided by grace in all you do, with a mind that flips your focused reality from short term to long term memory with concentration and focus, that lives in the world of emotions and sorts them, gives meaning to them and is able to see what others are blind to; and you use that information with grace for people to move forward in life. And your heart of compassion, kindness, grace, generosity, persistence and hope moves you and people around you into a world where God’s grace abounds. You face issues that others shrink from and give space for others to be as they will, yet insist that they hear the vision of justice that you bring, the vision of grace that you bring, the vision of understanding and compassion for all people.
In you our sons have a model for hope against hope. In you I have received my self again. In you God has made a miracle, a reflector of God’s light and music so that the dance, though by broken people shines with colours and rhythm that reveals the infinite in our limited finite reality.
On this May Day, a festival of dance and spring, maypoles and cakes, a day of workers’ recognition and honour: Dance this day, full of hope and joy. The creation awaits your participation in its rebirth.
And this is what it can look like, adjusting the photo for the human eyes tremendous flexibility.
Last evening we went for an ice walk, a date with each other and a camera, after a great meal and getting a mattress that is good for my back, and the kids can use the soft plush mattress, if their backs can hold up to it.
The view of course starts not on the ice in the marina, but across the street, in the eat ..ery called Clarkes
Clarkes General Store and Eatery, where the light plays and the sign begs for activity, hunger, patronage … and stands in defiance to the economy, which is so slowed down with oil prices so low, one wonders what will happen. All will dry up here, companies once robust and bold will become withered remains and reminders of the wasteful years and the Saudis will continue to be beyond belief wealthy, capable, and ruthless. Always the ruthless win, with lies and deceptions, and without conscience or concern for others.
But then freedom from all that as we descend into the Marina from the boardwalk, on to the snow covered ice.
At -14 C with even a slight breeze one needs the correct clothing and protection. And it would be so nice to have my cameras again. But the Nikon D7000 will do, and I did keep the tripod. It’s a tool of precision and stability, a companion with so many photo outings, so light and familiar. A connection with the past before it was so broken, and so powerful, allowing this kind of exposure at night: clear, colourful, dazzling and promising … if only I had skates on and the snow were cleared ….
Facing the other way
There is less draw into than a shove from the golden coloured Marina
away out into the darkness
past piles of snow.
And with ever so slightly a shift on the tripod the scene is less a push and less golden and all around less
Even though it is just seconds later.
The scene is not the photo, the camera and tripod do not make the photo …
The heart and eye and imagination of the photographer make the photo with what’s there and what equipment is brought to along and used.
There actually is a place to skate, cleared from last evenings snow with a tired vehicle but not skated on by seemingly anyone in the oh so cold – which indeed does require the proper clothing, but is simply harsh in comparison to the mild, mild winter we’ve had so far. Really, above zero (freezing for those that do not reference temperatures in Celcius) temperatures in February, I mean even 10 above! It’s been a wonderful break from the potential -20, -30 and -40 that we know is normal.
And what is coming; so often I hear someone marveling at the mild temperatures and then they ruin it all with an anxiety of what is to come: March will for sure be too cold!
And I respond simply: it’s been a marvelous February, no harsh temperatures. And one month of cold (because April maybe snowy or even below zero, but it would be really odd if it were -30 or even -20!) during March is not something that we do not know how to survive and more than survive, but enjoy and delight in. And then … well then the wonders of Spring.
There is hope. And even optimism.
Hope: the ability to imagine and trust God that the future, despite having no basis in the practical concrete reality and events of one’s days and nights, … that the future will bring goodness, also to us, to oneself.
Optimism: the perspective on the practical concrete reality and events of one’s days and nights that so colours these events so as to block out the negative part of reality so that one is left with overpowering evidence that the future will continue just like this partial or skewed perspective of the past.
For the record, healthy or best is to be always overwhelmingly hopeful, somewhat optimistic and wisely pessimistic and strongly realistic and practical. Another Paradox to describe health, well-being, flourishing, and claiming one’s baptism, that one is a child of God … also a participant in the Kingdom of God on earth … by grace.
Technology and the cross in lights.
Can one be optimistic because of technology, hope because of the cross, and still stand back and wonder at what we’ve done to that symbol of torture of the Romans, the cross. We’ve put it everywhere, even in neon lights on the sky line of our lives.
There are so many lies hurled …
So many lies banked on …
So many lies embraced …
So many lies acted upon …
And there are cracks in everything, and that is how the light gets in (nod to Leonard Cohen.)
When will the light get in?
It was dark and this shows the dark but it misses something unseen while shooting.
This evening I took a walk, short but sweet, to catch the light in the snow.
And there is nothing quite like a wintery night
Frozen but still warm enough to not be dangerous or painful, so that one can delight
Here we can see it, with full light bright throughout the photo, but the sense of night is gone, too.
In
This is the dark, shining brightly through the photo, but not everything is showing.
The little things
And here the action, location and mode of transportation to and back.
That make it all okay.
It is something to be systematically attacked to the point that one has no support left, and then how does one hang on? Like Mandela in prison, Bonnhoeffer in prison, like Ghandi in prison and afterwards, all accused, all braved it out and all had something else in front of them, but Bonnhoeffer never made it back to normal life.
Who will be killed next time, will it be us, or worse them, or we all?
Life, choose life. Please choose life.
There is little in this world that is spectacular beyond breath, but there is much in this world that is spectacular beyond breath!
One needs to listen and hear, look and see, feel and experience everything knowing the Grace of God is always at work, in abundance.
Yesterday I went looking and after a few other stops found the Emeralds, a band with saxophone, voice and keyboards … and more. And their schedule had them playing in north Edmonton. So I called for more details, precious few were available on line.
And we went to dinner and dance.
Great Food! Great Music!!! And SPECTACULAR dancing!!!!!
To be able to dance and move and change the step to fit the music or the density of the dance floor or the mood … it doesn’t get much better. And there were dancer of age, spectacular in what they could do to the music!
Oh, heaven broke through from the infinite to the finite and there was … Grace!
And we worked on this sermon, for this morning. And Linda challenged me with my nose in my phone, thinking I was playing games. And when I explained, she read some and asked that the sermon get posted, shared. So here it is.
Oh, the celebration so precious and costly and over the top?
Ukrainian New Year’s Eve.
We could not stay real late, with this morning looming and plumbing half finished … But it was a part of a wonderful life!
And now the requested sermon:
The banquet of the kingdom of God is not a special snack for a few friends and close associates. It is a huge gathering with the tables weighed down, bursting with good food for everyone. God’s generosity results in spontaneous words of gratitude and praise.
In her book The Spark, Kristine Barnett tells the story of her son Jake.
At a year and a half, Jake started to crawl into his shell, by 2 he was rarely speaking or making eye contact. When he was diagnosed with autism, everyone predicted what was not possible, including that Jake would not speak or be able to communicate at all long before 16.
Instead, at age 16, we see little Jake, a boy small for his age standing and talking animatedly and easy with a math professor. Giving the others a head start Jake waits to join one of the groups of college students working on the problem the professor has given them and then he stands to the whiteboard to write a few equations. He turns and, giving the students leading questions, entices and invites the others to understand what he sees clearly in a multitude of ways.
Soon one, two and four students from the other groups come across to Jake’s board. Soon most of the students are there listening, eagerly absorbing what Jake offers them, until first one, then another, and then most of them nod understanding and return to their own whiteboards to work through the problem before them.
God gives us abundance, over abundance, just over the top, overwhelming abundance. It’s amazingly perfect wine flowing freely for us.
In today’s Gospel from John we get a taste of this wonderful stuff: In the Bible being out of wine is not just a social faux pas. It is a sign that God’s blessings have run dry. Wine was a sign of the harvest, of God’s abundance, of joy and gladness and hospitality. So when they run short on wine they run short on blessing. And that is a tragedy. A sign that God did not bless the marriage.
And there is even more to be said. If you don’t know it yourselves yet, here is nugget of wisdom we receive from our Jewish brothers and sisters: for those who are married the blessings of being in love with your spouse is the most important thing. It is the blessing of blessings, the one blessing that makes your whole world right. It is the one gift that’s worth everything you have and are, – the most significant gift that you can pass on to your kids. Nothing else can replace it. And nothing else is out of reach if you have it. So when the wine runs flat out: it’s a sign of sure disaster!
Mary tells Jesus about it. He sidesteps the problem. She places it back on his lap. What follows is Jesus’ first miraculous sign that teaches us what grace looks like: God intends for us to be blessed beyond blessing, beyond imagining. Jesus doesn’t just turn some water into some wine. Jesus turns a huge volume of water into the best wine of all time, and there’s enough of it to last … and last …. and … last.
We human beings are hardwired to pay attention to scarcity. It’s a survival thing. If you have too many potatoes or meat it’s not really dangerous. But if you’ve got nothing to eat, that requires attention and energy focused on it so that you can survive!
So we pay attention to scarcity. Like low oil prices, dropping provincial revenues, dropping house values. We pay attention to failing health, dropping membership in churches, disastrous events in our communities.
We may even feel privileged that in this area the economy may not be so bad. Our attendance is better than most small rural congregations, and we have people who are willing to serve on committees and Council. Yet said that way, it brings to mind a fundamental fear, a fear that elsewhere it is worse than here and it’ll catch us sooner or later! Fear…, fear,… fear!!
But God wants us to live without fear! God wants us to know that there’s enough blessing to transform the world for every million years it’s going to exist! God inundated us with so many blessings that it’s overwhelming!
A man once calculated the amount of water [Jesus turned] into [that spectacular] wine. He presented his estimate to St. Jerome and asked if the guests at Cana had really drunk all that wine. [It was close to an additional 1000 bottles!] Jerome responded, “No, no, definitely not. We are still drinking of it today.”
Love, being in love, not just for a day or a few months, the kind that God gives us when we fall freshly in love; but the long-term kind -being in love for a lifetime – requires choosing to be there each day, choosing to do what it takes to be in love. It means continuing to do the loving thing through everything that could destroy love, and doing those things every day whether you feel like it or not…. That kind of doing love, of making your love … that is like Jesus’ wine, the blessing that God gives us … every minute of every day … of every week … of every month … of every year of our lives.
Knowing this what are we to do?
First pay attention: listen and hear; look and see; notice and feel; fully experience God’s abundance. God’s generosity is something other than what we normally see going on in this wonderful world.
Second – know there is not a thing you can do to change God’s generosity. You cannot earn it, deserve it, do anything right with it, or turn it into something more useful. Not only can we not; we don’t have to. God has already done all that for us.
Third, we can respond, we should respond, and we can respond well … but we don’t have to. God will still place the blessings in front of us, give them to us, shower us with them, and call us to move forward with them, and acknowledge that God is there with us.
This is the fabulous wine that overwhelms, the awesome love that carries us perpetually through every challenge.
And knowing this, we can remain humble and live life full of gratitude. As our second reading teaches, everything is a gift! First and foremost: God gives us faith, faith to see what God is up to, around us, in us, and between us!
In the 2nd reading today we are reminded that the people of the congregation in Corinth are richly blessed. God gives them many gifts for building up the community, but those very gifts become a source of contention. Several of the people accept the conclusion that the gifts varied in value and therefore the gifts reflect the worth of the person. Paul writes to the Corinthians, hoping to bring a healthy kind of harmony to the group. “Your gifts,” he tells them, “are just that, gifts, and they all are from the same Spirit. They have been given to you, not as reward, nor to increase your own personal worth or power within the community. They come as pure grace to be used in the service of the Lord. They are for the common good of the whole community. Their gifts each and every one support our confession that “Jesus is Lord.”
Jake, that autistic boy who everyone, except his own mother, everyone thought would never talk, well that boy got his first summer job when he was 12.
As a research assistant at the university where he studied, the youngest research assistant so far in our modern world, each day he’d get assignments to finish. And finish them he would … on the 20 minute drive home! ! Jake told his mom the LAST assignment was more bothersome, because he wasn’t sure if he could get it done.
His mom just gave him her best advice and encouragement and a bit of fire in the pants by telling him that he needed to apply himself, and to work at it until it was done. Every other night Jake would play outside with his friends. He had lots of free time.
That night Jake went to his room to complete the assignment. Within two hours Jake’s mom looked up and saw him outside playing with his brothers. She called to him. He confirmed that he wasn’t sure, but he thought he had something for the assignment. So she let him play.
The next day the professor called to thank her for supporting Jake through the summer of research. Then he told her what Jake had done the night before. He’d been assigned an open problem in math. No one had ever solved it. In less than two hours, the boy who everyone had given up on and said would not even talk, this boy Jake with autism had taken a problem that no one ever had come up with a solution for, and – in part because his mother didn’t’ know, and partly because she just always trusted that he was given some extraordinary gifts and he was to use them, – Jake solved an open problem!!, a problem deemed unsolvable!!!
Years before (at age 10) Jake had been able to propose a new unique theory of light and relativity that fixes some of the problems left over from Einstein’s theory of relativity. His theory is not complete but it’s possible that this boy may do something more significant than what Einstein did for us all.
God’s gifts are given to each of us, not just Jake, in an astounding over-abundance.
We don’t have to respond. We are not going to get rid of death and illness and decline and decay and poverty and pain and war and abuse and any of the other really horrific things we humans are too good at.
But we can respond well to God’s over abundance for us … if we want to.
And then we can, no, … then we will change the world!
Be not afraid!
Have a wonderful week.
Know that you are blessed to be a blessing. Your cup and your neighbor’s cup, is overflowing with God’s amazing, abundant wine given at that wedding in Cana.
Amen
So far the sermon.
This past year there have been many things, so abundantly filled with Grace:
This for Simon and Cyrus, Simon’s whose passion is soccer, who does math relating to the way he can see the field while he plays, And Cyrus who is always there practicing hour after hour with Simon, giving him a goalie, an opponent, a companion.
And this M’s grandma. A reworking of her old postage stamp photo into gifts for Grandma’s three daughters.
And this: as it turns out, the last opportunity for Phoebe to venture to drive the tractor, and she does with gusto!
Lights
The darkness is immense, wallowing in all the corners deep across the time and space of an ordinary day.
There is no Other that sits so well as oneself alone, with all the others simply servants, not real ones, all lined up to give an illusion of reality.
But there is no goal if there is no Other.
Is there a light to light this darkness like no other? Is there a hope of a cure that everyone says does not exist.
And in the moment that artificial light will hit the trees of snow covered in agony and loneliness.
Where, Oh Where, Is the Hope in the Dark, if not in the Light from the Day.
While watching efforts to regain art, the Woman in Gold,
which was stolen by the Nazis,
a gingerbread house is being constructed.
Hope.
Where is the wrong in what was originally private,
then stolen by the Nazis,
and now a national treasure of the Austrian government,
except for it to be taken away from Austria, private again
in a new homeland.
Where is the wrong …
Where is the wrong in cutting off the children?
It is amazing to wake up and be loved and be able to love one who will receive love.
It is painful … to remember what has died, to relive the black hole of being not.
And to know all that will be mimicked, as if authentic.
And it will all be manipulated, and ….
What is this life for, without the light of Trust, Love, Hope?
Without Grace are we anything at all?
Here the light is simple.
And here the light is simple.
And here
But what happens without light?
Or what happens when the light is spectacular? Or specular?
The Darkness makes the Light more obvious, more spectacular.
Only by Grace are we able to come out of the dark, breath and live in the light.
Chose Life. Chose Love.
Be Grace!
Look!
Look
At me, here among the many celebrating
Advent in the splendor of a perfect concert hall.
Songs and lessons and organ pieces that rock the hall decorations
of green wreaths, red ribbons and candles.
And me a guest of the sponsors.
With lights and acoustics that rival the best in the world.
Look
At me after being abused: so thoroughly demeaned, criticized and exiled as if there were something wrong with me! As if I were worthless, as if I could be expelled with the sewer.
Look
At those who worked with lies against me. What they said about and did to me says very little about me.
Though hardly perfect I am God’s child,
a saint by Grace alone,
fully worthy of unconditional love and joy.
Look
At all these others, like me,
also controlled, cut off, accused of our partner’s wrongs,
made out to be a monster of evil proportions,
held in captivity, bound by our own principles never to harm those we love, trusting the same of our beloved until it is too late:
and harm is too obvious to us;
and wholly captive we still sought every way to please,
and more to offer health and life to the one we loved.
And we offered our very breath to transform our life to death,
and our beloved’s death to life …
And even then even more was taken from us …
Until. …
And perhaps,
for some of us,
now freed
we still must navigate the landmines,
no
the heart-mines,
that populate our paths.
So we celebrate Advent, waiting
for our Lord to come
and set us free.
Look
What they said and did reflects who they are …
desperately needing the Light of the world to scour
their hearts and minds and souls clean …
the perfect forgiveness of Grace.
Would it be enough …
enough to cure their
disease
and
dis
integration?!
Look
And see the joy.
Look
At the angels,
the Emmanuel,
the Faithful,
the sweet Silent Night,
the manger,
the baby boy,
the wonders of his love.
God be with you all
until we meet again
at Jesus feet.
It is not often that one can eat so much that one wished one did not have so much to eat.
And even this year at Thanksgiving it was not so.
The wine was Mosel Riesling and I only wish we could find the Kabinett in a good year. But this was okay with the turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberries, peas, yam, and …
The meal was terrific, the company fabulous and the dessert … well pumpkin pie is my favourite. And these were homemade by yours truly, the easy way (pre-made crusts.) Not too sweet, not to bland, just spicy enough.
And with coffee …
Ice cream it is out of this world.
I hope yours was as well a celebration of life.