jazz

I picked up some wind chimes for the front porch. One set is a six-tube, double striker chime. The other is a set of temple bells. I sit out front and read or think, and if there's a breeze, I have music. It struck me that the music of the chimes sounds like some crazy free-jazz...random and intricate and beautiful. Today, sitting outside, it dawned on me that the wind that drives the chimes is not random. God's hand or breath or thought drives the wind that drives the chimes...creates the music. Then I thought about how God's hand or breath or thought that drives the wind also drives the clouds in their ever-changing and ultimately creative artistry. The wind turns the leaves that catch the sun and casts the shadows in just the right way. It goes on and on like that. Nothing is random. Everything is engineered perfectly.

discernment

I have come to what seems like a time of enormous change. I am very uncertain about these looming and immediate choices that we have to make. It's decision time, and the moves that we make in the next 48 hours or so will overwhelmingly impact and define our lives for at least the next seven years.
Maybe it's because I've never sat still for that long that it seems so scary to commit to sitting still. Maybe it's because things seem to be always in such a state of constant flux that my common sense tells me to "wait, wait...let things play out and see what happens".
We came here with next to nothing and entered into a life...entered into relationships...relationships with people, relationships with a potential church community, relationships with jobs, etc. Some of those relationships are great and blossoming. Some have wavered to the point where I don't know if it's something we can count on when the clinch tightens. Some relationships have almost completely fallen away.
My instinct is to push everything away, cut ties, and to run in a different direction. Running west always seems to make some sort of sense...that option is always hanging out in the periphery of my mind as if to say, "I know how you feel about me and I'll be here waiting here for you to choose me."
The word "discernment" never really meant much to me until now. But now, the concept of (and struggle for) discernment is presenting itself over and over.

humility

I blasted through the Rule of St Benedict yesterday. I thought it was a really interesting, humble, and well thought out Biblically-based writing. Obviously, one needs to relate what you are reading to this day and age, as we don't go asking our pastors for permission to strike someone else at church. At least I don't.
I appreciate the way that Benedict always humbly defers to the Bible as the source, and to his own book as a resource.
In the Rule, there are twelve steps of humility.
Humility is something that I naturally rail against. It's not something that comes naturally to me. Now, "humiliation"? That I have some background with. Maybe a lack of natural humility is a defense mechanism against being humiliated.
Coming out on top, having the last word, being the first or the best or the fastest or the whatever...these are things that have always resonated with me. After all, isn't this how we are programmed? In school, we are taught to try be the best. In sports, we must beat the other team at all costs. In business, there are ladders to be climbed and therefore heads and hands to be stepped on. In traffic, be the first off the line when the light turns green. Troll for the parking spot closest to the door of Barnes & Noble. Be sure to get on the shortest line at the supermarket...even if it means running back and forth trying to figure out exactly which line that is. These things are what we are programmed to do. But I don't think we were created for these things.
I am learning humility in real ways these days. I feel like I have a handful of chains attached to the ring in my nose (figuratively!). They pull this way and that...sometimes in different directions at the same time. Sometimes one of the chains gets dropped and it just drags. I'm trying to learn to react (or not react as the case may be) in appropriate ways. Because I don't want the programmed ways of the world to be my ways.

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By the way, if you are interested in reading the Rule of St Benedict, I found a really good version of it here. It is interspersed with helpful, gracious, and sometimes funny commentary by Philip Lawrence, OSB, Abbot of Christ in the Desert.