Marinate

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.  I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
                              John 15:4-5

Jesus invites  us to spend time with him, to lean on him, and to be nourished by him—not just to serve him. Father Greg Boyle discussed abiding in Jesus as an invitation to "marinate in the intimacy of God." He writes, "Jesus chose to marinate in the God who is always greater than our tiny conception, the God 'who loves without measure and without regret.' To anchor yourself in this, to keep always before your eyes this God is to choose to be intoxicated, marinated in the fullness of God." To live out of our belovedness, we need to soak in the abundant love that God offers us. 

I don't think Jesus was criticizing us when he said we can't do anything without him (John 15:5); he was simply stating the reality. We need to be connected to our source as the branches need to be connected to the vine. We need God's wisdom, nourishment and life flowing through us.
 
Grace and peace, as we marinate, 

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation 

CS Lewis

Good things as well as bad, you know 
are caught by a kind of infection.

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire:
if you want to be wet you must get into the water.
If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life,
you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. ˆ

They are not a sort of prize which God could, 
if He chose, just hand out to anyone.
They are a great fountain of energy and beauty 
spurting up at the very centre of reality.
If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: 
if you are not, you will remain dry.

Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?
Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?

C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Juggling

Day

Each one is a gift, no doubt,  
mysteriously placed in your waking hand  
or set upon your forehead  
moments before you open your eyes…
Through the calm eye of the window  
everything is in its place  
but so precariously  
this day might be resting somehow 
on the one before it,  
all the days of the past stacked high  
like the impossible tower of dishes  
entertainers used to build on stage. 
No wonder you find yourself  
perched on the top of a tall ladder  
hoping to add one more.  
Just another Wednesday 
you whisper,  
then holding your breath,  
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer  
without the slightest clink.

Billy Collins

Some days feel like this: 
teetering at the top of a finite number of minutes and hours,
trying to not topple over a life so carefully balanced,
even as the wind blows and the fencing sharp
and the ladder of time feels rickety.
It is a balancing act –
this waking up to try on a new day
while juggling everything still in the air
from the days before.
To stay on solid ground,
while flowing with the river of time,
I anchor deep
into the calm eye of your unchanging love,
reminded, once again,
I’m held up from above
when everything beneath me feels precarious.

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation 

Gratitude

To be grateful is to be humble, recognising how much we receive from God and others.

To be grateful is to pay attention to all the good that is happening in our lives, and see God’s signature.

To be grateful is to be so thankful for our blessings that we try to be God’s blessing in someone else’s life.

To be grateful is to speak of Christ to others, and use our gifts generously in their service.

To be grateful is to remember the love and grace that has touched, changed and enabled us in Christ.

To be grateful is to look for the breeze of the Spirit rippling across the grain fields of our lives.

To be grateful is to begin each day glad to be alive, and determined to make each day count for God.

To be grateful, then, is to live in the joy of God, and to give thanks in all circumstances.

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Servant Girl at Emmaus

The Servant Girl at Emmaus
(A Painting by Velázquez)

She listens, listens, holding
her breath. Surely that voice
is his—the one
who had looked at her, once, across the crowd,
as no one ever had looked?
Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her?

Surely those hands were his,
taking the platter of bread from hers just now?
Hands he'd laid on the dying and made them well?

Surely that face—?

The man they'd crucified for sedition and blasphemy.
The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.
The man it was rumored now some women had seen this morning, alive?

Those who had brought this stranger home to their table
don't recognize yet with whom they sit.
But she in the kitchen, absently touching
           the winejug she's to take in,
a young Black servant intently listening,

swings round and sees
the light around him
and is sure.

Denise Levertov

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Memorizing

This week I got to thinking about the kids sharing their memory verses with the congregation on Family Sundays. When was the last time you memorized Scripture? Or anything??

Memorization has gone in and out of fashion in schools and churches over the decades, but I grew up in a time when memorizing Bible verses and poems was taken for granted. Texts have a way of becoming part of us, of getting inside of us and are available to us when we need a tether, an encouragement, a reminder of sacred reality.

Pascal said, “In times of difficulty, always keep something beautiful in your heart.” Memorizing a passage or poem, for me, allows me to live with it as if with a good friend, walking with it, breathing with it, learning from it, and often feeling consolation from it. Both things are important…the discipline required to memorize and the selection and value of what I choose to commit to memory.

I am curious what texts you try to keep in memory. And why. And when have you recalled it? It might be a poem, or a line from a book, it might be imperfectly recalled, but nonetheless permanently in you… What is it? And why?

 Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

A post-resurrection prayer

A post-resurrection prayer for us all:

Lord God, 
when the hungry are fed,
the sick healed,
the lonely made family,
the outcast brought in,
the sinner forgiven,
the tyrant transformed,
and the enemy reconciled, 
we know your work by the fruit it produces.
May our lives bear fruit
worthy of your name. 
Amen.

(Book of Common  Prayer for Ordinary Radicals)
 
Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation 

Last Supper image

The Last Supper account in John’s gospel contains a curious picture. The evangelist describes the beloved disciple as reclining on the breast of Jesus. What is contained in this image? A picture of how each of us should be focused as we look at the world.
            When you put your head on the breast of another, your ear is just above the person’s heart, and you are able to hear his or her heartbeat. Thus, in John’s image, we see the beloved disciple with his ear on Jesus’ heart and his eyes peering out at the world. 
            This is an image, a mystical one. Among other things, it is a picture of gentleness. What it shows, however is not a saccharine piety, a sweetness hard to swallow, but a softness that comes from being at peace, from being so rooted and centered in a love that one can look out at the world without bitterness, anger, jealousy, the sense of being cheated and the need to blame or compete with others.
            In John’s gospel, it is also a eucharistic image. What we see there, the image of a person with his ear on Jesus’ heart, is how John wants us to imagine ourselves when we are at communion. In its reality, that is what the eucharist is, a physical reclining on the breast of Jesus. It is also an image of how we should touch God and be sustained by him in solitude. 
                                    Ron Rolheiser
 
Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation 

Palm Sunday

Coming from the Mount of Olives, instead of riding a warhorse like Pilate, Jesus rides a donkey, and not even a full grown donkey, but a donkey's colt. His entry was from the opposite direction and the opposite manner, presenting Jerusalem with a stark contrast between the way of war and the way of peace. Jesus fulfilled the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!

Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!

Behold, your king is coming to you;

righteous and having salvation is he,

humble and mounted on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey

The Good Shepherd is walking towards his crucifixion and resurrection..
 
Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation 

Jesus wept

I’m going to offer you the beginning of a Lenten reflection for this week and the link to the full essay if you’d like to read more. I was reading in John 11 this week about Jesus’ response to the death of Lazarus and this really stirred me:
 
“I’ll be honest: the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is a hard one for me.  At many levels, I don’t understand it.  I don’t understand why Jesus dawdles when he first receives word of Lazarus’s illness.  I don’t understand why he allows his friends to suffer for the sake of “God’s glory.”  I don’t understand why he tells his disciples that Lazarus is “asleep” rather than dead.  I don’t understand why he sidesteps Martha’s tortured accusation: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  I don’t understand why Jesus raises just one man, leaving countless others in their graves. And I don’t understand why Lazarus virtually disappears from the Gospel narrative once his grave clothes fall off.  Why is he never heard from again?

In many ways, the story is shrouded in mystery.  But today, this week, now, I cling to the two words in the narrative I do understand:  “Jesus wept.”  Thank God — Jesus wept.  For me, this is the heart of the story as we (have lived) through the Covid-19 crisis: that grief takes hold of God and breaks him down. That Jesus — the most accurate revelation of the divine we will ever have — stands at the grave of his friend and cries.

Let me be clear: in focusing on Jesus’s tears, I’m not ignoring or minimizing the raising of the dead, the conquering of the grave, the unbinding of the bound.  I am a Christian because I believe in resurrection.  I believe it as metaphor and as symbol.  I believe that God can and will bring back to life all that is dead, buried, forgotten, and festering within us: old wounds, hardened hearts, stubborn addictions, fierce fears.  I believe that God is always and everywhere in the business of making us more fully and abundantly alive — alive to love, alive to hope, alive to each other, alive to Creation.”
 
Debie Thomas' Lectionary Essay: "When Jesus Wept."
 
Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation