“Everything is waiting for you”

We stand so often at the threshold of presence: real, authentic presence. And here is our invitation to enter.  Here are the flames that dance above our heads.  Here is the breath of the wind blowing on our faces. And here is the conversation: the conversation that needs no translation.  The conversation with our life, with the truth of whom we really are and all that surrounds us, is waiting for us to join in.  We can decide it’s all too hard, and return to our stories and our lists.  Or we can dare in this season of fire and wind to rise up, like Lazarus, and walk towards the light.

PENTECOST, May 31, 2009                                                                   

Acts 2:1-21; Ps 104:25-35, 37; Rom8:22-27; John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

Everything is waiting for you

Jesus told them to wait: to go back to Jerusalem and wait.   So they did.  They went back to an upstairs room in the city, and spent their days constantly in prayer: that inner circle of the reconstituted twelve, together with Jesus’ mother, some other women and his brothers.

 They weren’t out doing the various deeds of power and teaching that we’ve been hearing about during these great fifty days: all those are yet to come.  No, instead they have been waiting: praying and waiting for the gift of the Holy Spirit that Jesus has told them was coming.

And does it come?  Oh yes, and how! With a sound from heaven like the rush of a violent wind, and divided tongues, as of fire, resting on each of them.  They were off and running: witnesses to the Gospel in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

It does seem to me that the church has missed a really valuable opportunity in the lectionary between Easter and Pentecost.  In our usual busy way, we have rushed into the excitement of the post-Pentecost spirit-filled teachings and healings.

We are not good at waiting.  We are so much better at getting on with things: writing our lists, crossing things off our lists: check, check, check.   The disciples could have got on with things. They could have organized themselves in various sensible and responsible ways, and got going.  Would they have had the same Pentecost experience?  I don’t think so.

I had the wonderful experience on Friday night of going up to Herbst theater to hear the poet David Whyte speak.  His talk was entitled, Thresholds of Presence – Courageous Conversations for difficult times.   

David Whyte, is unsurprisingly passionate about poetry.  About how poetry gives us the opportunity to let go of the ceaseless doing, and connect, be more present with our deeper, more authentic self.   He talks of how poetry can give each one of us the opportunity to find the vibrant, conversation that we should be having with our lives and all that surrounds us: the true conversation with the genius, the uniqueness of our particular life.  He proposes that each one of should read at least two lines of poetry every day of our lives in order that we might habituate ourselves to that deepening of awareness.  In a poem called The Lightest Touch, Whyte writes:

Good poetry begins with

the lightest touch,

a breeze arriving from nowhere,

a whispered healing arrival,

a word in your ear,

a settling into things,

then like a hand in the dark

it arrests the whole body,

steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows

a great line

you can feel Lazarus

deep inside

even the laziest, most deathly afraid

part of you,

lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

Do we have the courage? Do we actually want to have the truth of what’s actually going on in our lives revealed.  It can be pretty scary. There is so little that we really can know about the future, let alone right now.  So much just happens.  It is not surprising that we tell ourselves stories.  Stories can be comforting.  Stories make it seem as if there’s a clear plot to follow.  Stories can provide a safer container for the chaos, can cover over those things that can seem so very frightening.  And yet our stories can lead us astray. (We might remember the Enron debacle). Stories can lead us away from our truths, our God-given vocations. The disciples could have decided to return to their previous narratives.  They could have returned to their previous lives.  But they didn’t. They stayed in that upper room, and waited.

They could have waited passively:  huddled together, waiting for this thing, whatever it was, to happen.  But they didn’t do that either. What did they do?  They prayed unceasingly.  And as we know, you get what you pray for.  This was no ‘light touch’ of a line of good poetry.  This was the whole enchilada!  Suddenly they were filled with an extraordinary awareness of their lives’ purpose, and the enormity and universality of that mission

As I said before:  I do think we could have spent our post –Easter Sundays differently. That maybe we could have spent it in some kind of prayerful waiting, quiet questioning of our place in the holy mystery, questioning of what it might be saying to us, might be asking of us. The good news is that it’s not too late, will never be too late, even though it is the work of a life-time. If we can only take the time to allow ourselves to become truly present, to become awake to the power and enormity of who we really are, and the richness of our surroundings.  Take the time to breathe into our true selves that lie beneath the surface layer of busy-ness, distraction, and story telling. Our selves that know so much more of our connection and relationship to all things than we can possibly imagine. We don’t, in fact we cannot, do it alone, even if that’s what it can feel like.  David Whyte has written  a poem entitled:

EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU

Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone.  As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions.  To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings.  Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice.  You must note

the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things

to come, the doors have always been there

to frighten you and invite you,

and the tiny speaker in the phone

is your dream-ladder to divinity.

 

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into

the conversation.  The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last.  All the birds

and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves.  Everything is waiting for you.

We stand so often at the threshold of presence: real, authentic presence. And here is our invitation to enter.  Here are the flames that dance above our heads.  Here is the breath of the wind blowing on our faces. And here is the conversation: the conversation that needs no translation.  The conversation with our life, with the truth of whom we really are and all that surrounds us, is waiting for us to join in.  We can decide it’s all too hard, and return to our stories and our lists.  Or we can dare in this season of fire and wind to rise up, like Lazarus, and walk towards the light.