The 60-Second Sabbath: March 2018

Good Friday, 2018

I stand in front of the dining room window,
ironing in the morning light,
trying my best to do so mindfully:

I observe the colors and patterns of the shirts,
feel their texture,
feel the warmth of the iron,
smell the fresh-laundered fabric,
watch wrinkles melt to smoothness,
and the steam rise through the slatted light
of the blinds.

At the end, I iron Easter dinner's nine napkins,
thinking as I do, of each of us who will gather:

This one for Kevin,
this one for Harriet,
...for Beth,
...for Stevan
...Darryn, Bridget, Sue, Tim, me.

I am here, now.

A few steps away,
the dishwasher sloshes its quiet way
through the wash cycle,
while just beyond, in the laundry room,
the furnace warms us,
the washing machine cleans our sheets,
and the dryer tumbles a load of lights.

All of this is life,
a home alive and loved and full.

And today is Good Friday.

Today is the day
history had its clearest,
most profound,
most unsettling
demonstration of pure, self-sacrificing love.

On that day, at noon in the Middle East,
while all of heaven held its collective breath,
.001% of the world's population
witnessed the upending of creation.

The rest of the world--
the 99.999%--
went about its daily tasks--
doing the laundry,
exchanging goods,
harvesting crops.
Children played or learned their lessons;
wives and husbands talked about finances;
donkeys hauled grain and bricks.

And to all of this,
    one person, willingly walking the via dolorosa,
said Yes,
    said Yes to my laundry and ironing,
    to the feeding cats and the walking of dogs,
to the dressing of children and the plowing of fields,
to all the tasks that fill our lives,
to the hour-by-hour seeking for happiness and stability and wholeness,
to all our journeys toward what is true and holy and most real.

Wherever today takes you,
listen for the eternal, echoing Yes.

It's your Yes;
it's your life.

Text and image © 2018 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
Visit PhotosByDirk.com for fine-art photography.
Visit The60SecondSabbath.com, where spirit and image merge.

Posted at 07:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Exiting Eden

Eve and Adam,
feeling low,
exit out the Garden gate,
each hefting a small suitcase
and a bag of fresh fruit.

She shakes her head;
he sighs.
This is not the future they had imagined.

The gate clanks shut behind them
startling them both--
finality.

And then a voice, also behind them, says,
"Well, that's that."

They turn, and it's God,
also outside the gate,
also lugging a suitcase, much larger than theirs.

"Wait. What are you doing?"
Eve asks.

"It wouldn't be paradise without the two of you,"
God says.

"So, you're coming with us?"
Adam asks.

"Of course.
What did you expect?"

The woman and man glance at each other in wonder,
then both start to grin.

"That's terrific," she says.
"Losing you was the worst thing about leaving."

Adam nods, then, pointing to God's suitcase, asks,
"And what's all that?"

"Oh, some memories...
and lots of possibilities."

All three stand together
looking out over rolling hills covered with tall grass,
waving like ocean waves in the afternoon breeze.

"All right, then," says God, leading the way,
"Let's see what happens next."

Text and image © 2018 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
Visit PhotosByDirk.com for fine-art photography.
Visit The60SecondSabbath.com, where spirit and image merge.

Posted at 06:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Pause

Act from the pause.

Act out of stillness.

God is in the pause;
God is of the stillness,
and you know this, intuitively.

In moments of quiet,
of emptiness,
you become aware
of the connection,
the presence.

The pause indicates receptivity,
openness;
the empty moments
are God moments,
connected moments.

So start in the pause,
and go from there.

Text and image © 2018 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
Visit PhotosByDirk.com for fine-art photography.
Visit The60SecondSabbath.com, where spirit and image merge.

Posted at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Enough

On Saturday,
    Tim and I attended a prayer service at St. John's
in memory of those whose lives have been lost in the last 20 years
    to gun violence.
We read their names, confessed our sins
and prayed for our country.
We then headed downtown (I'm estimating 400 of us)
to join the approximately 100,000 teens and children,
    parents and grandparents,
churches and teachers,
    people of faith,
and yes, even gun owners,
in Denver's March for Our Lives,
to raise our voices in support of
    a long-overdue end to gun violence.

And I know that many reading this also participated
in towns and cities across the country.
To you I say, "Thank you."
God marched with you,
the same God who fell and bled at Columbine,
at Sandy Hook,
at Virginia Tech,
in Orlando,
at Parkland...

While the NRA and many GOP politicians
    say and do what they can (shamefully)
to discredit these young people,
we listened to their stories,
    stories of horror and loss and grief,
    stories of courage and compassion and hope.
These teens and young adults
(and their family members),
many of them survivors of mass shootings,
put American adults to shame;
we have failed them;
we have allowed our country to become
    obsessed with the illusion
that guns give power,
that the right to own assault weapons
is more important than our lives.

How the hell did this happen?
(and my use of "hell" here is not swearing;
we have created hell by our negligence;
we are responsible).

These organizing teens are our new American heroes;
in a little over one month,
thanks to their savvy use of social media
and their passion to save their own and others' lives,
they pulled off the impossible:
800 worldwide rallies involving millions,
united around a single sentiment,
summed up in single word:

Enough.

God bless their efforts
(as God has already been doing)
and help us to listen to them.
As St. Paul said to Timothy,
"Don't let anyone tell you
that you are too young to speak.
You are capable of leading
where so many others have failed."

I have spent much time since Saturday
    processing and feeling;
I could write for a week,
but the single, most important realization I had
was to understand that these students,
    who have lived through these nightmares
(along with their families, their teachers, the first-responders)
    have, in a way the rest of us have not,

awakened.

Their experiences
awakened them to activism.
My suspicion is that any one of us
who would survive the terror of a mass shooting
would similarly awaken.
Laws would quickly change
if 49 U.S. senators and representatives
died in a mass shooting at the Capitol
(as party-goers did at Orlando's Pulse nightclub).

Laws would change
if 17 children and their parents were slaughtered
in a mass shooting on the White House lawn
during the annual Easter egg hunt
(as students and teachers were in Parkland).

Laws would change
if 58 were gunned down
at a Franklin Graham revival meeting
(as concert-goers were at the Las Vegas Root 91 Harvest Festival).

There would finally be an awakening
that would result
in swift and comprehensive change.

What will it take?

May God (and the survivors in Parkland)
wake us all
before we face our own Sandy Hook,
Aurora theater
or Sutherland Springs.

Text and image © 2018 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
Visit PhotosByDirk.com for fine-art photography.
Visit The60SecondSabbath.com, where spirit and image merge.

Posted at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My Nothingness

If I am nothing,
it's okay.

If all I've done comes to nothing,
it's okay.

Out of my nothingness,
within that emptiness,
God arises,
the Divine is born,
and God is all.

----

    God is utter stillness,
    birthless,
        deathless.

Motionless, still, quiet,
I enter the eternal silence.

----

In my nothingness
I am complete.

Text and image © 2018 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
Visit PhotosByDirk.com for fine-art photography.
Visit The60SecondSabbath.com, where spirit and image merge.

Posted at 07:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sophia Dreaming

For the first time since we'd met,
I surprised her,
and I enjoyed it.
She'd fallen asleep on our guest room bed.
(Does she need to sleep?)

"Sophia?"

Her eyes opened
and she mumbled something unintelligible,
then followed that with:
"No idea of God is God."

"What now?" I asked.

She shook her head to clear it.
"Oh, my.
How long have I been here?"

"A moment?" I suggested,
"an eternity?
You'd have to tell me."

She sat up.

"And you just said,
No idea of God is God.
Were you dreaming?"

"I must have been."
She ran her hand through her hair,
    smoothing it.
"Yes. Yes, I was.
I remember now:
    The three of us stood in front of a group of people...
who were asking us questions...
    grilling us, really.
They weren't very friendly."

I sat in the rocking chair by the bed.
"And...?

"This one woman kept saying,
over and over,
'But you're nothing like I expected.
This just doesn't fit for me.'
At which point I said something like,
'Well, it's not about how we fit for you,
is it, sweetie?
I wonder who might better do the fitting,
and why?'
At which point she blurted, quite loudly,
'You are not my idea of God!'"

"And that's when you told her,
No idea of God is God."

"Right,
No idea of God is God.
By the woman's reaction,
you'd have thought I'd just announced
the end of the creation
instead of an obvious statement
about the general reality of things.
God can't be contained in any concept,
theological formula, etc.
God wouldn't be God in that case.
No idea of God is God."

"I get that," I said,
"though as a human
I need to hold onto something
that helps me relate,
some concepts or ideas or feelings.
Maybe some day I'll be able to flow with the unknown,
but it helps to have some sense of personhood,
of identifiable traits..."

"I know.
And many of your ideas of God
    manage to glimpse bits and pieces of the whole,
like love and peace
    and innocence and wonder.
But it just grieves us when you
    (and I mean you plural),
mistake that for the whole,
    and act from that mistake,
and have no clue how limited your vision is,
    and hurt others (and yourselves) because of it."

I nodded.
"Sometimes it's hard to stay humble
when talking of things
so personally important,
and importantly personal.
This is me at my most essential."

"Think of it this way:
No idea of Dirk is Dirk.
Does that help?"

I let that sink in.

"I need some tea," she said,
"with caffeine."

"Two mugs of tea,
coming up."

Posted at 07:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Vulnerability

What you seek
may be found
just the other side
of vulnerability.

Vulnerability
is the right of passage
to closeness, to oneness
with others (partner, spouse, friend)
and with God.

Posted at 06:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Those Parts of You

In your quieter moments,
you know the truth of this:

There are parts of yourself
      that you constantly attack.
These parts desperately need compassion;
      they need to be held and treated
            with utmost respect and honor.
They need to be loved.

Doing so
heals and liberates.

This is God's grace
mediated in you,
by you.

You can start today.

Posted at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seeing Dimly

It is very challenging
to see the limits--
the horizon--
of one's own assumptions.

We each live as if in a tower
with an unobstructed, 360° view
of our history and culture,
from which we can competently, accurately assess
the current state of things
(politically, socially, spiritually, intellectually...).

But the reality is,
    we are all human,
each living within the confines
    of a rather small, isolated, ground-level shack,
with one or two grimy windows
    through which we see--
    as the Bible suggests--
dimly.

Only as we acknowledge
    the necessary, near edges of our vision,
can we begin to explore
    what lies beyond...
with humility, with receptivity,
perhaps with greater silence
      than we're accustomed to.