Tuesday. 4th of July, 2023. American Independence Day. Three days after Canada Day. The day before tomorrow, also known as, today. Always a good place to start I figure.
My itinerary:
Pages of Bono’s “we-moir”, Surrender. He is perhaps the most compelling artist-writer of a generation or two.
A cafetière of the good stuff to settle accounts with the day.
Black ink on blank pages to begin my regular process of over-thinking my under-living.
Perhaps a few quiet moments presenting myself to myself, huddled up, tucked in, and rolled up in the bosom of Jesus.
Then, another slow journey to and through my weekly practice of Sabbath – my Tuesday hunt for shalom.
Today is North Berwick – Scotland’s version of tea ‘n tidy posh b’ gosh along her sniffling east coast. The North Sea is never satisfied to sit still but insists upon itself in childish guffaws, jumping around in an effort to stretch her restless legs.
My mind, gradually calling itself back to ground zero, is settled on few things these days. If age reveals anything at all (if you’re open to its ranting) it is that wisdom is about the law of misdirection, of diminishing returns. The longer we live, the less we have left to live. The older we get, the younger we wish we were. The more we know, the less we truly know. The more we pursue it, the farther away it appears. The wider we open our eyes to see, the more blinded are we by the light of all there is to see. Says Bono, “Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience” (Surrender, pg. 527).
I am under no false illusions that these days of reflection, reading, writing, pretentious decaf oat lattés in pretentious places, and mental gymnastics are making me smarter, let alone wiser, let alone better. But they do, in a sense, grease the skids for what might inevitably do so. Usually it shows up as failure, naïveté wrapped in narcissism, or just willful blindness. I take ordinary days for ordinary things so that, somewhere along the road, befuddled and betwixt and bemused as it may be, I might transform into something marginally better than I am right here, right now. God’s alchemy of extraordinary from ordinary. Divinity from detritus.
And, I’m good with that. I guess I’ll have to be since it appears God is seldom in the mood to reveal trade secrets. She loves to stay at the center of things but play in our peripheral vision. That way, we’re never caught like a deer in the headlights of God’s withering gaze. Instead, our head is pressed up tight to Her bosom, listening to that cosmic heart of perfect love.
I come to North Berwick often. Set upon gently sloping shoulders bared to the North Sea, it boasts a braggadocious profile in a golf swing swagger. A country club smile with tea cozy sensibilities. It is, in a word, sublime. Better still, it is pouring. Only my fellow petrichorians understand why this is so delightful.
The sea and I have an understanding. It needs to do nothing other than slosh about in its normal routine, twerking her waves at me while I lollygag at its shores sufficiently attentive to the needs of my soul. Rough ‘n tumble or quaint ‘n quiet, I’ll take it how it comes. I didn’t grow up near the ocean (the sea here in Scotland), having instead the daily reminder of my ineptitude as either a cowboy, oil roughneck, geologist, or economist, the generals in Calgary, Alberta’s army. That only made my lifelong yearning for ocean that much hotter, more insistent.
On these days of Sabbath, my thoughts inevitably drift to matters of faith and fury. My bugaboos bashing at heaven’s door in search of understanding. I reflect, usually with book and journal in hand, upon the life I’ve been given; the one I’m living, the places from which I’ve come, those toward which I’m heading, and the life to which I’m called in my best moments. Increasingly, I see them all as one. We are always living the life to which we are called. Our holiest moments are the same as our most mundane. When everything is holy, nothing is wasted, everything belongs (thank you Richard Rohr), and we can live in constant gratitude.
I end these brief recollections with Bono’s words:
“…faith is…more like a daily discipline, a daily surrender and rebirth. It’s more likely that church is not a place but a practice, and the practice becomes the place. There is no promised land. Only the promised journey, the pilgrimage. We search through the noise for signal, and we learn to ask better questions of ourselves and each other.
I call the signal “God” and search my life for clues that betray the location of the eternal presence. For starters we look to who is standing beside us or down the road, the ones whose roof we share or the ones around the corner who have no roof. The mystics tell us God is present in the present, what Dr. King described as “the fierce urgency of now.”
God is present in the love between us…In the way we meet the world.”
This has been an extraordinarily ordinary day. I’ll take it.
innerwoven 