Blending

The rolled pork stuffed with spinach and goat cheese was the highlight of the family Christmas meal. There were plenty of leftovers to take to a family member who had returned from the hospital on Christmas day. However, the real surprise came when the chef decided to deglaze the roasting pans with the pork juices and “blend” them with the pan from the charcoal grill.

I like to slow cook meat on a charcoal grill. The meat melts in your mouth. But this takes extra time, so you need to find the patience. I had recently slowed cooked a pork roast on a charcoal grill for six hours. This grilled has been used to smoke various kinds of meat this fall season. The juices from the grilled pork were caught in the pan below but what I did not know was that the juices had captured the smoky flavors from all the prior grilling.

The chef had an idea to combine the Christmas pork juices with the pork dripping that had been captured in the grill. When the juices were mixed together, there were a lot of crispy trimmings that were difficult to reduce. So the chef reached for the Christmas gift, a Cuisinart blender spoon and they were able to grind up the pork trimmings that made an awesome sauce that you would die for.

Something miraculous happened in the blending. You see the pork trimmings that were captured in the grill also contained the smoky flavors from a season of grilling. Add the juices from the stuffed pork that contained the goat chesses and spinach and the blending make a sauce that would make the saints in heaven scream for more.

I like to think that a faith community is a blending of many different cultures, traditions, and experiences. What gives each faith community flavor is the spirit to experiment and try for something unique that makes the light of Christ’s loves present in their community. The blending might result in a potluck supper to help pay the medical expenses of a neighbor’s cancer treatment. Or it might be a request to donate blankets and warm socks to a local clothing shelter. It might be a dream to rebuild a former parish complex into a retreat center located in a valley where people might want to walk and commune with God in the woods.

Yes, all faith communities are a blending of God’s love that has no boundaries and cannot be contained by any faith tradition. Jesus, our master chef, brings all the ingredients together so that each one may add their seasoning to the pot. The result is a taste of heaven here on earth where people feel the warmth and forgiveness of the newborn Savior, the Iron Chef of peace and good will to all God’s children

Immanuel watches over us as we reflect: “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. (Psalm 34:8).

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends who you have blessed with many flavors and talents. May they open their hearts to Your creative hands as You stir their hearts and blend their spirits to bring Your sweetness and love.

Crossing OIver

One of my favorite Christmas movies is “Home Alone.” There is one tender scene when Kevin is walking outside the church looking at the outdoor manger scene and you hear the choir singing from inside the church.

Kevin has been abandoned by his family. Supposedly he was inadverterly forgotten by his parents as they traveled to France for Christmas vacation. We find Kevin “all alone” in the pew listening to the carols when he spots his next door neighbor across the aisle. You see terror in this little boy’s eyes because he has been led to believe that Marley is a killer who has never been caught. Shockingly, Marley “crosses the aisle and walks up to the panic-stricken boy, smiles, and says “Merry Christmas.”

The dialogue is memorable if you ever had the feeling of not being wanted by your family, your religion or you think God no longer accepts you. Marley explains that he had come to church to hear his little granddaughter sing in the choir. He can only see her in church because he is afraid to go to her home. Marley explains that he and his son had a quarrel many years ago. He was told by that he was no longer welcomed in his son’s home.

Kevin innocently asks Marley what keeps him away. Marley very sadly says that he s afraid. “The older you get the more afraid you become.” Little Kevin confesses that sometimes he has not been very nice to his family. But he loves his dad very much and even though they had a quarrel he stills loves him and would go back to see him if they had a fight.

You can sense how sad Marley feels being estranged from his family. Finally, Kevin says to Marley: “You should call home.” Marley winces at this suggestion yet you sense he desperately wants to trust this child’s words. If only he could believe.

Many people are afraid to return to their churches on Christmas because they feel unworthy. Perhaps, you had a quarrel with someone in the church; perhaps, you no longer feel welcomed because we have been told that we are not living up to the norms of the institution. Many good people are “home alone” in their hearts.

I like to think that there is a voice calling from the manger to everyone who has felt like Marley and Kevin. We have been made to feel unworthy. How sad that some use their power to make the rest of us feel inferior. We are not living the Christian life or worse others have condemned us by their words and actions.

We need to call home. We need to “believe.” I encourage everyone this Christmas to come back to your churches and kneel by the manger scene. Look closely into the eyes of this tiny babe and can you not see the warmth and love. You have never been forgotten. Despite the harshness of life, God wants us to know that we are loved and waits for us to accept his embrace no matter how we choose to worship or practice our faith.

It is time my friends to come back to your churches and surrender your fears. Allow the power of God’s understanding and peace to take root in your souls again and walk along side of your God who loves you more than you know.

Immanuel watches over us as we reflect: “Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” (Matthew 10:40).

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends who feel left out in the cold by the harshness of this world. Help them to surrender their fears and give them the courage to come back to a faith community that welcomes all who feel unworthy. Believe and your heart will find peace.

Blessing of the First Snow

The first snow of the season is a blessing from God. The trees and shrubs have a light dusting of white resting quietly on each limb. Along the stream bank, the rocks and roots are sprinkled with laces of white that make the most exquisite of designs. God is speaking to us in a conversation that can only be heard in your heart.

Remember the meaning of blue during this Advent season. How it represents the darkness of the night that gives way to the bright light of morning. Well imagine yourself in your attic or basement trying to sort the clutter of last Christmas. You are searching for wrapping paper and ribbons amid the mess of boxes, ribbons and boxes. However, the shrapnel of memory begins to overwhelm you.

As you reach across the mess, you come upon a card of an old friend. Suddenly something very unexpected tugs at your heart. You recall the good times you had together and then all of a sudden those good memories faded and you think about all the mistakes that you and your special friend had made.

An emptiness, sadness seemed to settle into your heart. God sees what in your heart and noticed in the middle of the floor a little blue box. When you think about what the blue box was, your countenance begins to change as you recall all of the notes of encouragement that lay within that blue box.

They are the promises of God that keeps us going after our heartbreaking breakup with our friend. Inside the blue box are the reminders of the friendship that we have developed with God during the darkest time of our life.

What we can imagine next is like the gente snow that covers each branch of the tree. Suddenly our floor (our soul) is no longer filled with memories of pain and hurt but now it is just a bunch of trash and a very special blue box.

Sometimes we try to cling to our past, and the bad memories that haunt us. Sometimes the best thing to do is just throw it all away and with God’s help, just move forward!

Immanuel watches over us as we reflect: “The Lord says, Do not cling to events of the past or dwell on what happened long ago. Watch for the new thing I am going to do. It is happening already-you can see it now. (Isaiah 43:18-19).

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that walking in the first snow of the season we can listen to your gentle voice melting our fears that bring us comfort and peace.

Longing

Advent is about getting in touch with our longing. It’s about letting our yearnings raise our spiritual temperatures so that we are pushed to eventually let down our guard, hope in new ways, and risk intimacy.

John of the Cross had a similar image: Intimacy with God and with each other will only take place, he says, when we reach a certain kindling temperature. For too much of our lives, he suggests, we lie around as damp, green logs inside the fire of love, waiting to come to flame but never bursting into flame because of our dampness. Before we can burst into flame, we must first dry out and come to kindling temperature. We do that, as does a damp log inside a fire, by first sizzling for a long time in the flames so as to dry out.

How do we sizzle spiritually? For John of the Cross, we do that through the pain of loneliness, restlessness, disquiet, anxiety, frustration, and unrequited desire. In the torment of incompleteness our spiritual temperature rises so that eventually we come to kindling temperature and, there, we finally open ourselves to God and one another in new ways. That is an image for advent.

Advent is all about loneliness. Nobel Prize winning author, Toni Morrison describes it this way: “There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smoothes and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seems to come from a far-off place.”

All of us know exactly what she is describing, especially the latter type, the roaming kind of loneliness or what I like to call “noisy brain” that haunts the soul and makes us, all too often, too restless to sleep at night and too uncomfortable to be inside our own skins during the day.

What we learn from loneliness is that we are more than any moment in our lives, more than any situation we are in, more than any humiliation we have experienced, more than any rejection we have endured, and more than all the limits within which we find ourselves. Loneliness and longing take us beyond ourselves. How?

Loneliness and longing let us touch, through desire, God’s ultimate design for us. In our longing, the mystics tell us, we intuit the kingdom of God. What that means is that in our desires we sense the deeper blueprint for things. And what is that?

Scripture tells us that the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, of simple bodily pleasure, but a coming together in justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, that is what we ache for in our loneliness and longing: oneness, intimacy, completeness, harmony, peace, and justice.

Our loneliness and longing are a hunger and an energy that drive us, always, beyond the present moment. In them we do intuit the kingdom of God.

Advent is about longing, about getting in touch with it, about heightening it, about letting it raise our spiritual temperatures, about sizzling as damp, green logs inside the fires of intimacy, about intuiting the kingdom of God by seeing, through desire, that our world bears the imprint of God.

Immanuel watches over us as we reflect: “All my longings lie open before you, Lord; my signing is not hidden from you. (Psalm 38:9).

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that this Advent we learn that our loneliness and longing are not to be feared but God’s ways of bringing us closer to the spirit of harmony and peace.