Excerpt from Margaret’s Nature Journal
Spring Equinox. 8:20 AM
Wind moving through the tall trees. A cool breeze on my face.
Patches of blue in the sky. High white clouds, with low grey clouds moving below them, coming toward me from the south and east.
Last year’s grass and this year’s grass share the meadow.
dandelion greens
making spring rain
spring rain
From Margaret’s Nature Journal
This morning when I settled in for centering prayer (meditation), a robin was chirruping — loud! — just outside. Then a frog — loud! — started to croak, I swear in time with the chirrups. As if answering back.
At first I thought, Don’t distract me! Then relaxed & opened up, and the chirrups & croaks joined the rhythm of my breath, and were were all there, present, one.
Then the neighbor’s cock started to crow.
And I had to smile. Then breathe, and breathe, all together, sharing the being of being.
Colloquy On New Life
Between
Ezekiel & Carolyn
A new heart I will give you,
A heart of clay
To shape, to mold
To give form as I desireAnd a new spirit I will put within you;
A spirit of joy
A spirit of tolerance
A spirit of compassion
I. Good Friday; Lent is all but finished.
I am, curiously, uninvolved – no emotional
Connection. What meaning has it this year?
I look around, distracted, barely attentive.
My wife sits beside me, eyes closed, praying.
No prayerful sorrow wells up within me – nothing.
Relentlessly banal, I spiral inward – tirelessly
Self-absorbed – an itch here, a stray thought there.
by
Margaret D. McGee
Click here to listen to Margaret deliver this sermon at St. Paul’s.
Greetings, fellow mortals.
We are creatures, you and I. Created beings, living through time.
Scanned from my nature journal.
Mid-afternoon at the compost pile. Much rain lately. Right now, only an occasional drip from the trees when the air moves.
No … wait … starting to rain again.
Frogs calling back and forth in the woods, God bless them. The cluck of the neighbor’s hen, and then the rooster crows, and crows again. Continue reading
The labyrinth at H.J. Carroll Park in Chimacum, Washington, the way it looks most of the time.
On New Year’s Eve, I took a morning drive out to H.J. Carroll Park to help repair the labyrinth.
A day or two before Christmas, news had spread among local labyrinthers that the meditative path in the park was all kerfuffled.
Someone—likely more than one person—had come into the secluded glade, pushed stones around, cut branches off encircling cedars, and spread the branches on the labyrinth floor. Continue reading
Responsive Prayers by Tom Robb, for use on the first Sunday of Lent.
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With Lenten prayer and Lenten hope the Spirit beckons us on toward Jerusalem.
In Moses’ dusty footsteps we follow Jesus into the howling wilderness – comfort only a memory.
by
Margaret D. McGee
Click here to listen to Margaret deliver this sermon at St. Paul’s.
We need someone to bring us the good Word. Someone with a new perspective, who can shine a light on the path ahead, and clear the way for new life.
We need someone to bring us the good Word because, again and again, we find ourselves entangled in a deadly existence. Picking our way through trivialities and energy-sucking tasks. Falling back into patterns we’d hoped to escape. And in frustration, losing the path to kindness. Seeing moments in which we might have been kind slip away. All the while longing for just one more chance at love, one more chance to give love, be loved in return.
If God really is love, and sin is whatever separates us from that Love, then a good part of ordinary life is thorny with sin.
It’s hard find the way out of the briar patch by ourselves, because it’s so dense and dark in there, and because we don’t clearly remember how we got entangled in the first place. We end up lost, anxiety-ridden, disappointed, and often confused. Speaking for myself, it isn’t simply that I can’t see the forest for the trees. (Of course I can’t – I’m in the middle of it.) It’s that, a lot of the time, I barely see the tree before I run into it and fall over.
Can it possibly be six years? When I look through the Courtyard archives, I know it’s true. We launched this site in Advent 2006. Now Advent 2012 is just around the corner. And yet, the work still feels new to me … maybe because it is constantly re-inventing itself.
