ELEVEN!

It's Lunasdal Eve, 2012.

Lunasdal, (a.k.a. Lughnasadh or Lammas), the old Celtic feast of the grain harvest, has been my mini-New Year for these last eleven years, ever since I boarded a plane in Scotland and ended up in Maine on August 1st to begin my post-seminary life on a new coast. Each year at this time, I do my own bit of in-gathering as I consider the harvest the past twelve months have brought.

I hardly remember that first year, except for the waves of grief and despair that washed over me and lapped at the edges of every small, anxious attempt to explore new ways of working, thinking, loving and being. Just prior to my month-long Trip of a Lifetime in Scotland, I'd been told by the pastor of my home church that my gifts were not evident and my vocation to Christian ministry was unwelcome. Just prior to that, I'd graduated from seminary with honours in a beautiful ceremony that abounded with signs of grace, welcome, and radical inclusion. The pastor's words were a spiritual sucker-punch from which it took years to thaw out, heal, and recover.

The Scotland trip passed in a blur, my intended joyful adventure lost in a fog of pain and betrayal. How I'd love to go back and experience those things while fully alive, fully engaged, fully awake! Still, it was a good gift and I tried to make the most of it, intellectually if not emotionally. There was a week at Ceolas, the traditional Scottish arts school on the isle of South Uist. The Piper and her two sons travelled with me. During the days, I studied traditional singing with Margaret Stewart while The Piper and her eldest son studied with Allan Macdonald and other tradition-bearers. There was a week at Sabhal Mor Ostaig on the isle of Skye, where I took an immersion class in intermediate Scottish Gaelic with Muriel Fisher. There were wonderful rambles up and down and around the Highlands and Islands, with stops in Lewis, Harris, Mallaig and Oban. Finally, there was a week on Iona, place of dream-pilgrimage, heart-home of Celtic Christians the world over.

When I returned to the States, my head was buzzing with cultural riches and vocational longings, neither of which had any apparent outlet. I had only one firm plan in place: get to Maine and find a small place just big enough for my and my shadow to set up housekeeping. Essentially, I went underground, hoping that the old promises of seed and harvest would still prove true, hoping that time wrapped in darkness would one day lead to emergence and fruition.

It was not the darkness of death. My Piper lived only one town away, and her constancy kept the darkness warm and rich and full of earthy promises. Slowly, slowly, I began to put down roots. Slowly, slowly, my new life began to unfurl. The string of hand-to-mouth jobs included barista, deli worker, house-cleaner, nanny, farm-sitter, craftswoman, Gaelic teacher, concert promoter, and "educational technician." Yet there were also days spent tending The Piper's garden and talking together of how we might create a shared life, a shared farm. There were nights among friends, singing our hearts out and playing centuries-old tunes into the "wee smas." While my seminary colleagues were out serving churches, raising families, and organizing labour unions, I was arduously seeking my place in the grand scheme, listening for the sometimes faint, but always present, whispers of guidance from a loving Cosmos.

Many days, my conversations with God felt like the Burnistoun elevator sketch, where two office workers in Glasgow try to direct an elevator's voice-recognition system to reach floor number eleven. (Watch it here. Note: contains a smattering of terms common to frustrated Glaswegians.) There were so many things I wanted to share, wanted to give, wanted to offer up to my community and the world beyond, but I no longer trusted myself to communicate in ways that would reach others or be recognized. And then, one day, I found myself in church again--not the denomination I'd grown up in, but a different one, where I'd heard that all people were actively welcomed. Four years later, I have now passed my Ecclesiastical Council and Examination for Ordination in the United Church of Christ, and I'm now in the process of seeking a church to serve as a local part-time pastor. Yeeeeee-haaaaaaw!!!

Eleven years: eleven season-cycles of fallow time, planting, growth, and harvest. In that time, I've planted fruit trees and watched them bear, taught students and watched them thrive, served churches and felt the Spirit move in our midst. (In between, there have been plenty of failures, plenty of frustration, plenty of hand-wringing and exhaustion!) I've come to understand that my vocation to ministry includes this history-rich, nutrient-poor parcel of land on which The Piper and I have created our farm. Here, rooted in this place, surrounded by love and all the challenges and joys of our rural community, my spirit has been nurtured and restored. Other travellers have found their way here for a weekend, a fortnight, a season...and they have been restored and nourished too. Their paths toward wisdom have varied widely and rarely matched mine. This, too, has been a source of richness!

Eleven years--and was it really two years ago that we bought the farm, after all those years of agonizing? Last year, we bought a Highland bull, a Tamworth boar, and a Devon sow. This year, with the help of friends and WWOOF volunteers, we've raised two greenhouses and an artisanal outhouse. We've welcomed a new heifer calf (born at Bealtuinn/Beltane) and Welsummer hens. A friend stopped by for a music session a few weeks ago, sized up the new greenhouses, and said, approvingly, "You know, this place is really shapin' up to look like a farm."

Happy Lunasdal, Y'all. May your own hardscrabble efforts blossom and bear. May you be blessed with the riches of harvest, joyfully welcomed and safely gathered in.

Crackpot Jesus and the Bottle-Diggin' Pig

Sermon for the First Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 10, 2012

(copyright Mainecelt 2012, based on Mark 3:20-34 & 2 Cor. 4:7-5:1)

Bridie, like most pigs, is a great digger. Ever since we expanded her fencing, our one-year-old Devon sow has been exploring her new digs—literally. Where once there was green lawn, there's now a lovely patch of dark, upturned earth punctuated by the portly form of a very happy pig.

The first day or two she was mostly concerned with digging up the sod. But midway through the week, one of our farmhands found her chewing on something that was definitely not a proper pig chew-toy, something that went “screek!” and “clink” against her sharp piggy teeth. We managed to distract her with some two-day-old baked goods and took the object inside and rinsed it off. It turned out to be a sixty-odd-year-old broken glass bottle, the words “Casco bottling company” still clear on the scratched and dirt-filled glass.

We were surprised—and we weren't surprised. Like most old farms, our land is littered with the detritus of generations. Each time we turn up new soil, we find all manner of broken bits and artifacts. Mostly, we find old leather soles from children's shoes—the legacy of the eleven Edwards orphans who ran the farm in the fifties,hardscrabble to the extreme. The next two most common discoveries are broken crockery—mostly bean-pots—and the glass shards of old bleach bottles.

The Edwards children became orphans during a hurricane, when their parents drove out through the storm and the floods to get some food. With the water over the road, they couldn't see that the bridge wasn't just covered with water. The bridge wasn't even there. Eleven children, motherless and fatherless, the secure structures of their family suddenly broken apart, and in the midst of their grief, forced to work the land all on their own, to feed eleven hungry mouths... sometimes we just stop and look around our land, our thoughts heavy with the memory of all that suffering.

Jesus understood what it's like when the strong walls, earthen vessel of family, begin to crack. In fact, his family had strong views about this idea as well, as we see in our Gospel lesson. Jesus is out there with the crowd, doing his thing, and his mother and brothers show up to bring him home and pound some sense into his fool head. They're pretty sure, based on reports through the local grapevine,that he's gone right off the deep end. One translation says, “they heard he was beside himself.” And the scribes who'd come down from Jerusalem—a group with a tendency to leap to conclusions—claimed Jesus was possessed by the Prince of Demons.

Basically, the word on the street was that Jesus was an absolute crackpot, and his family was determined to haul him home, even if they had to resort to hog-tying and carrying:

Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside,asking for you." And he replied, "Who are my mother and

my brothers?" And looking at those who sat around him, he said,"Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

They must have been some upset. There they were, trying to get their crackpot relative out of the public eye before he brought shame on the whole household, and what did he do when they called him out? Well, he turned right around and returned the favour, saying he wasn't much pleased to have them as kinfolk either.

See,the household was what they called the “primary social and economic unit” of the first-century Middle East. There was no escaping it. The household you were born into determined everything that happened to you for the rest of your life: your social position, your choices for work, the approved vocabulary of your speech, the cut of your clothes, the way you wore your hair, and—especially--the other sorts of people you could spend time with, who all had to be from the same sort of household as yours.

Now,on the surface, it's easy to take this story as the standard sharp-tongued retort of any rebellious young man. Nobody likes their mother—or their siblings—to embarrass them in public. We get that—and, if we don't, our young people are quick to remind us. But Jesus says something new, something different—something that proves to his birth family that he's a crackpot for sure. He redefines, completely, what a family can be.

For Jesus, a true family is not the household into which you're born, but a community of people united by the love of God, a community of shared purpose, dedicated to seeking and doing the will of God in the world. It is a gathering of cracked pots, people united by an awareness that the world is broken—and WE are broken—and God wants something different and more wonderful than anything the world's rules and powers have ever offered up.

It's a bit like the old story of the water-bearer:

Once upon a time, in a village in India, there was a man whose job was to bring water from the river to his Master's house. It had been his father's job, too, and his father before him—for he came from a servant class that was expected to spend their lives doing just this sort of heavy, repetitive labour. Now, this man, like his father and his father before him, was very poor. He had very little in the world besides the clothes on his back and the work-gear his father had left him: two clay water jars and a wooden yoke from which they hung, so he could carry them from the river to his master's house,over and over.

One of the clay pots was perfect in every way for its purpose. The other pot had once been just like the first one, but on the day the water-bearer's father died—when his old heart had stopped in the middle of his journey—the pot had fallen against a stone and developed a crack. Now, though the water-bearer had tried to patch it, the fact was: that pot leaked.

It leaked so badly, in fact, that no matter how the water-bearer hurried from the river to his master's house each day, he never successfully arrived with that pot more than half-full of the precious water on which the whole household relied. He couldn't run too much faster,or he might spill the water from both jars. So every day he worked as hard as he could, making trip after trip, always with the fear that his master might decide he was unfit and hire another water-bearer for the job. Every night he lay down, bone-tired, and worried. He was miserable.

Finally,one day, he mustered up his courage and went to his master. "Master,” he said, “I am so very sorry. I work hard, hard as I can. Yet, because one of my pots is cracked, I've only been able to deliver a portion of the water to your household, and you don't get all you deserve from my poor efforts."

The Master smiled at the water bearer, and invited him to go for a walk down to the river. “I know you work hard.” said the Master. “And because you try to make every step count, I know you watch the ground beneath your feet as you carry water to my house each day. Now, as we walk back from the river, I want you to lift your head. See what a beautiful place this is? People say my estate is like an oasis. Look around. Notice the lush greenery, the fragrant flowers."

Indeed, as they climbed the path from the river to the Master's house the water-bearer took notice of the sunlight touching the beautiful flowers along the side of the path, and he noticed how the winds were softened by the leaves of young fruit trees. But when they reached their destination, his sadness returned. "Master, thank you for the honour of your presence and for sharing the beauty of your estate,” he said, "But I still must apologize for my failure."

The Master said, "Dear water-bearer, you haven't understood what I was trying to show you. Did you notice that the flowers and trees only grew on one side of the path? That's because of your cracked pot. I planted flower seeds and saplings on that side of the path,and everyday as you walked from the river the water that leaks from your pot has watered them. I could have hired a new water-bearer, but I preferred to grow flowers and trees. With those flowers, I have perfumed and decorated many rooms, and these last few seasons the fruit of those trees has graced many tables."

We are all gathered into this community of faith as earthen vessels,each with our own rough edges, our chips and our cracks. As Paul says, in his letter to the Christians at Corinth,

... We have this treasure in clay jars ...We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.

“Yes,”he says, “we're all cracked pots.” We carry, in our fragile human bodies, both the death and the life of Jesus, and it shines through every crack and broken edge. For our lives, in faith, are formed from clay and fire, into something beautiful and broken that God can use for Glory.

So,this is how we show ourselves as brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. We root around. We find the shards and jagged edges, the chipped and broken vessels, and we wonder whether they have any use in this world. And then we open ourselves in prayer, inviting God to use all this brokenness, inviting God's healing spirit to bless it and use it to make something beautiful.

We are all cracked pots, and we follow a crackpot Savior who challenged the structures of his day, busted the bonds of death and cracked open the gates of heaven. We are his family, each one of us broken, each one of us holy. Praise be to God!

(Thanks to Rev. Peter Heinrichs, from whom I learned the story of the water-bearer--and thanks to our WWOOF volunteers, who keep our livestock safe from sharp objects!)

St. Patrick's Confession

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! Here's my latest hand-crafted "Wise Tiny Creature" to greet you. He has a wee confession to make:

















PATRICK'S CONFESSION

Serpents of Ireland, I'm sorry.
You did not then, nor now, deserve my ire.
These last few centuries,
I've learned a thing or two,
Cooling my heels under the gentle rains,
Conversing with worms in the earth.
They have taught me with their slender, winding ways
Of the goodness of snakes,
How even our Dear Lord loved them,
Telling his disciples to be as wise.

Yes, I've been thinking,
Hidden away from the weary tread of pilgrim feet--
No zealot now, no fire-starter,
This dark cradle a subtler, slower crucible of sorts--
As I and earth transform
Into each other
And shallow shamrock roots
Spread a ticklish carpeting over my head
How did I ever believe
The Trinity could be my Own Big Thing
In the already ancient, intimately wise
Thousand-green three-in-oneness
Of this scarred and shining land?

Serpents of Ireland, I'm sorry.
In my arrogance, I sinned against you.
You, no less than all God's other creatures
Deserve to live unmolested,
Blessed, not cursed, from the beginning.
These things--at last--I understand
Now that I, too, have shed my skin.

--copyright MaineCelt 3/2012

The Knights Who Say, "KNEE!"

It's been a few weeks now since the Piper underwent surgery to repair her knee. I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that some cartilage ended up somewhere it really ought not to have been, and the surgeon was, well, impressed--not in the way you WANT a surgeon to be.

After months of debilitating pain, followed by a fairly uncomfortable post-surgery recovery, the Piper is inching toward full farmerdom again. Last week, she sat in the midst of everyone else's activity and snipped branches down into kindling. Now she is proudly--if gingerly--hauling cartfuls of whey-soaked bread and wilted veggies down to the pigs in the name of "therapeutic strengthening."

The piper is not one to sit still while others work, so these past few months have been especially hard on her, even with WWOOFers cheerfully pitching in to take over her chores and ease my burden of managing the farm alone. She doesn't respond well to requests to slow down, rest, or be careful. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that she's an avid Red Sox fan, I'm not sure how I would have gotten her to slow down at all--thank heavens for the concept of the "DL" (Disabled List). Only after a reminder that "even star players end up on the DL for months at a time..." could she be convinced to lay down with an ice pack for the afternoon. (It also helped that, thanks to the clock radio, she was able to lay there and listen to baseball games!)

She found the first couple of post-surgery therapy visits pretty excruciating. The muscles hadn't been engaging properly due to the inflammation and misplaced cartilage, so her kneecap was no longer being held in place and riding smoothly where it ought to be. The Piper dutifully performed her prescribed strengthening exercises and acquired a special brace to keep the kneecap from "floating."

Last week, she came home from physical therapy with a new look. Like so many other veterans of Wounded Knee before her, the Piper had borne her suffering bravely and displayed tremendous courage and fortitude. The therapist recognized these qualities and sent her home a newly-decorated hero:

Stuck.

STUCK

Down beneath the chicken pen,
Under many an egg and hen,
There's a shadowy sort of a glen
Just the right size for a piglet.

Under the floorboards, dusty and dark,
Free from the farmdog's pesky bark,
Down in the dirt, the piglets park,
Indulgently digging their diglet.

Nothing but noses poking out
As piglets under the barnboards scout
or doze with a now-and-then twitch of the snout
While chickens pass by, unperturbing.

But oh, how they grow, those dear little hams--
Just as their uncles and cousins and grams--
'Til half-way-out some porker jams
With a noise that's quite disturbing.

What's to be done? The shingles shake.
The terror-struck pig's sides heave and quake.
We fear for the hens. Will barnboards break,
In this battle between hog and hovel?

We look at the posts. We peer at the beams.
The pig in question screams and screams.
The farmer tires of tragic themes.
She leaves, then returns with a shovel.

Some jobs are little. Some jobs are big,
Some holes are harder than others to dig,
Especially round a stuck, thrashing pig.
But the critter was freed, fat and fine.

---

Now we're digging no longer for pigs, but for gold,
As onto our farm we strive hard to hold.
May our efforts bear fruit. May our strivings be bold,
And may all of our work turn out swine.


(Image and text copyright Mainecelt 2009)

What the Gussuck Said

I went to college in Alaska, where the Alaskan Native students sometimes referred to us pale-skinned incomers as "Gussucks." The word was sometimes a playful jest, sometimes a stronger epithet. I understood it to mean, to them, what "Yankee" means to a Southerner and what "Sassanach" means to a Gael. Even when used among friends, with winks and grins, the word has a cutting edge. It was not, shall we say, a compliment.

This morning I participated in a sunrise ceremony to cap a week of indigenous observances known as "Wabanaki Days." The clergyman who usually shares in the service was unable to attend, so I was invited midweek to step in. I was asked to offer a Gaelic invocation and a brief homily that would acknowledge the connection between Euro-American immigrant heritage and our state's indigenous peoples.

This was not an easy situation--Native elders would be participating with drumming and prayers from their traditions, and I was not only the new kid on the block, ceremonially speaking, but a gussuck as well. The invocation wasn't worrying--I had a volume of the great Hebridean ethnographic work, Alexander Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica, and it was full of prayers honoring the elements, creatures, and Creation. I drew on prayers to the sun and the new moon, as well as a blessing that speaks of "power of raven, power of eagle...power of storm, power of land, power of sea..." These ancient prayers allow the Gaelic tradition to speak for itself, while affirming other indigenous earth-centered traditions.

The homily was harder. I knew the sight of a clergyperson in an alb could trigger anger, distrust, and generations of resentment. I debated whether to wear my alb at all, but I wanted to wrestle with the challenge-- the challenge to myself, to conduct myself with utmost humility and respect, and the challenge to them, that my witness might move them to reconsider their long-held assumptions about the general toxicity of anything associated with the Church. My offering of words would be a part of that witness...but hey, no pressure, right?

When we arrived, the stone ridgeback of the point was shrouded in heavy fog. Only barely could we make out the shapes of others emerging from their vehicles in the pearly half-light of dawn. I saw one of the elders cast a disapproving glance my way as I pulled on my alb over my regular clothes. A couple minutes later, she came up to me and asked what church I came from. I said, truthfully, that I'd worked with many different groups and gatherings, but I was a part of the U.C.C. (United Church of Christ.) She leaned close and looked me squarely in the eye. "Is that one of them conservative churches, or liberal?"

"Progressive...er...liberal." (I tend to stumble when using the L-word, as I find it an unhelpful and troublesome term, but I knew she was waiting to hear one or the other of the words she'd offered me.)

She leaned even closer, her eyes squinting slightly, pinioning me with her glare. "So, which kinds of folks does your church exclude?"

An unintended smile of pure relief spread across my face. Of course she had every right to be suspicious, to be angry. But what a wonderful question, and how deeply satisfying to say, with absolute honesty, "why, we belong to this church because it doesn't exclude anybody! We welcome everyone!"

It wasn't the answer she was expecting. She actually looked a little disappointed, a little unsettled by my response. But by then people were joining the circle, gathering to take part in the ceremony. We both turned our attention to the work at hand: the acknowledgement of arrivals, the hailing of honored guests, and the clearing and blessing of this sea-carved, salt-washed, mist-wreathed sacred space.

There were words of welcome. A match was set to a small bundle of sacred leaves cradled in a seashell, and the smoke wafted among us, ritually purifying all that it touched. The drummer lifted his drum and sang, in its rhythm, words our bodies could all feel even if some of our minds could not comprehend. Two elders shook rattles in time to the drum. They spoke more words, some in their native languages and some in translation, for the benefit of us gussucks. At their invitation--a nod in my direction with the statement, "Now, I guess we're gonna hear some Christian-churchy-Lord-in-heaven prayers..." I offered the Gaelic invocation I'd prepared, along with an English translation. Two tongues, two languages, slowly revealed the meaning of the prayer, and with each stanza their eyes widened. "Oh King of the elements, be ours a goodly purpose toward each creature in Creation..."

Perhaps they felt a little of the shock of recognition I felt, when first I discovered those words more than a decade ago. My Pacific Northwest upbringing had exposed me to the stories and teachings of many Native peoples, and the words of Black Elk and Chief Seattle were regarded with the same respect accorded to the Christian Gospels. I grew up hungry to embrace teachings that honored the Earth, yet I was fiercely aware of the innate wrongness of "playing Indian." Only when a visiting bard--David Whyte--gave a lecture series on "The Celtic Imagination," did I discover the mythic characters of Salmon, Raven, and Deer in a context I could wholly embrace without borrowing the cultural trappings of others.

Other words, silence, and music followed. The Piper offered her own musical gift, and as she struck in to an eerie tune on the pipes, the elders reached out and signaled for all of us to take hands and make a circle around her. The thrum of the drones, like the beat of the drum, moved in our blood and our bones as well as the mist-laden morning air. It seemed like a suitable and satisfying end. I tucked my now-damp folded notes behind my back, hoping I was off the homiletical hook. No such luck. The same elder who had confronted me at the beginning fixed me, once again, in her sights. She nodded to me. What was I doing there? I was no elder, no great storyteller. Surely I didn't belong... But she was, after all, in charge, and she was telling me to speak. I took out my notes, apologized for relying on them, and began:

We are border people. Like a basket's woven design or Celtic knotwork carved into stone, our life shows most clearly at the edges. What beauty we have lies where pieces are split and broken, where the ragged ends are tucked and woven in.

We are journeying people. Along these edges we move, back and forth, backward and forward, and we carry this history on our back. It weighs us down, like a creel full of seaweed. It pulls and presses, like a basket heavy with stones.

My ancestors were Scottish and Scots-Irish immigrants to Maine. They came on ships from the lands of their people, the coastlines and hillsides that knew them best, held their stories, held their bones. They came as unwilling passengers on packet ships. They arrived awkward and ignorant and scared, like many of their fellow immigrants, having been burned out of their homes and pushed off their land by poverty, circumstance, or government agents.

A story: The British government spent years conducting military campaigns against the Scots and the Irish before they made their raids on the so-called New World. Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and others used Ireland as a proving ground, a convenient neighborhood of savages to be cleaned up and cleared out. After four years on the blood-soaked frontier, one English correspondent sent this description back:
“Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth on their hands, for their legs would not bear them. They looked anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves... in short space there were none almost left and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast.” The “void” meant vacant lands for English resettlement. This was the Irish frontier in 1596.

Meanwhile, the SSPCK--the Society in Scotland for Propagating of Christian Knowledge--was intent on stamping out “the barbarian tongue” of Gaelic, the first step towards civilizing the “Wild Scots” of the Highlands. They also busied themselves with New World heathens. In 1735, they began a search for a missionary to preach to Native Americans in the Colonial territory of Georgia. They settled on one Reverend Iain MacLeoid. A Gaelic-speaker, they believed, would be able to converse with the natives quite easily--one barbarian to another.

Less than a generation later, my ancestors came. Like other immigrants, they came for many reasons. Some were good reasons. Some were less than good. Whatever their reasons, they did not arrive entirely without skills--they may have known how to weave and spin, how to carve stone or tend livestock, how to write or keep accounts, but they did not know all that was needed to survive in this unfamiliar land.

Some were so used to fighting, they never learned how to unclench their fists. Kicked out of their own land, they signed up as soldiers to shove other people off their ancestral lands. They remembered how to fight, but they lost touch with the ancient codes of honour that once governed their battles. We cannot be proud of what they did, but we can try to understand the reasons behind their ignorance and fear. We remember them as we remember the dark length of our shadows in the clear light of the rising sun. We cannot shake their darkness away from us. It will follow us always.

Some of our ancestors did not forget the old ways. They remembered that, at the shining heart of their culture, there were sacred rules of hospitality. They understood what it meant to offer food to hungry wanderers, to offer shelter to a stranger. They were humbled to receive the compassion and care of this land's Native Peoples. Without this kind and patient guidance, they would never have survived the biting cold and the bitter winds. With it, they endured beyond the edges of starvation. And because some of them kept the old ways alive, they understood that such actions bind people together and create community, as surely as two colours interwoven become a beautiful design.

We are still travelers, still border people, living at the thresholds of land and sea, standing between cultures, standing at the threshold of survival itself. We still reach, blindly, in our dreams, for that sweet promise of a land called home. We still struggle to find our place in Creation's intricate design, a place in the great pattern of justice and peace where we genuinely belong.

What we must acknowledge is this: we have not made our own way in this world. We arrived here and survived here through the care of countless others, people who helped us over the threshold, cared for our bodies and souls, and ensured our survival in a thousand different ways. We live as a result of their risks, their gifts, their love.

This, then, is how we honor your ancestors and ours: we come back to this place of rough edges, and with the Creator's gracious Spirit and the Travelers’ tales to guide us, we remember. We strive not to repeat the mistakes of our oppressors, who called everyone savages and brutes and other less-than human names. Instead, we humbly recognize that we share this land and this fully human story. We humbly acknowledge that we must listen more deeply as stories and old ways are shared. We are called to move together in this open space, to weave together, from our rough edges, a design of healing and promise, a design of wisdom and beauty.

--copyright Mainecelt July 2009

Source notes: this homily made use of material from the following history texts: Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, (Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1993)

Michael Newton, We’re Indians Sure Enough: The Legacy of the Scottish Highlanders in the United States, (Saorsa Media, Auburn, NH, 2001)

Photo of Alaska Native mask found here.
Basket image from Diane Kopec collection at the Abbe Museum.

Into the Gap...

The Bluebirds of Gappiness showed up again on Saturday. This time, it was a mated pair, flitting between milkweed stalks and fenceposts by sudden, urgent turns. I wonder how much longer these messengers will remain before they start their annual migration, leaving Wise Old Raven behind as official mystic courier of the Frozen North. Perhaps they'll make the switch at Samhainn, (pronounced "sow-when"), which literally means, "Summer's end."

It's almost time... which, as a person with so-called A.D.D., is a state of being with which I'm most familiar. (I prefer to think of myself as "multifocal," since it's not a lack of attention, but non-singular attention, that best describes my style of engagement.) One book about A.D.D. describes the afflicted as "hunters in a farmer's world." While it's true that hunters spend a lot of time scanning their horizons, I don't buy this idea either. I've never met a farmer who DIDN'T have to keep their minds on a hundred things at once.

The more I study my Celtic roots, the less my so-called disability distresses me. Celts, it seems, have always understood the complex and flexible nature of time. Celtic philosophers and theologians have long recognized time as an embroidered tapestry, a mesh of the interwoven, the knotted, and the wrapped. An old Gaelic hymn to the Christ Child includes the declaration that, "although You are not yet born, people are praising the great things you've already done." The Divine Child is both "already" and "not yet." This speaks deeply to me. It describes my state of being, much of the time. It also reminds me that, as a Chronos-bound creature, I have my work cut out for me. I know, full well, that I can't afford to stop TRYING to do things "on time." I will never stop struggling to do business promptly and show up prior to the official start-time of shifts, classes, and meetings. This may never be an arena of particular personal grace.

Yet Grace does come--and it comes, most often, when it's "About Time." It is when I am most awkward, most unsure, and most open that the Holy Spirit shimmers and flutters and blazes into view. Poet Ted Loder calls this, "teetering on the edge of a maybe." I perch on the edge of self-doubt, which strangely doubles as the edge of cosmic acceptance. Grace unfolds in those awkward spaces between naughts and oughts. I am challenged, continually, to live more fully and step more willingly into the gaps.

And now it is Almost Time for one of my favorite Gaps of all: Samhainn, the Celtic New Year. Like Christmas and Fat Tuesday, this has long been celebrated as a "time beyond time" when the shackles of society are shaken off in favor of wildness. Yes, there's a sinister side--tricks can be cruel and damage may be done--but the essence of this time is a holy one. Where and when else, in our fast-paced, artificially brightened lives, are we given permission to see and acknowledge the dark?

Like the Jewish people and many other ancient agricultural societies, the Celts recognized darkness as the necessary time/place for all beginnings. Each new day begins at sundown. The year starts when the cold creeps in, the light wanes and the hard labours of harvest come to an end. It's a welcome respite, a seasonal sabbath. Seeds rest in the soil, new life sleeps in the dark womb, and all wise people take time to laugh and rest, doing the crucial work of re-creation, singing and sharing tales among deep shadows and flickering light.

Among the shadows: not an easy place to be. Yet our shadows demand attention, as our brightness continually invents them. Samhainn may wear the disguise of No-Man's Land, but what it really offers is Common Ground, a place for honest hopes and unreasonable fears to meet. Here is one meeting I will not miss. Here is one lesson for which I dare not show up late. (Hurry! Finish the wiring in our new house, so we can turn off all the lights!) Now is the time to step into the darkness, dance and wrestle with the darkness, shake the grief loose from my bones, mourn for all things returned to earth, and dream of new life that shall spring.

Happy New Year! May this "Almost Time" become a celebration. May we dance and weep around the bonfires of loss, feast on the richness of our memories, and--in dreams--step into the future's blessed embrace.