The Magic Never Really Ends

The Magic Never Really Ends

  It seems as if the whole world is holding its breath in glorious expectation until they can once again enter into the magical world of Harry Potter. Advance ticket sales for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two have already reached 25 million dollars and are still climbing. It seems as if the only enemies in the world that Harry has are Lord Voldermort and the Death Eaters. But that hasn’t always been the case. It wasn’t all that long ago when not everyone was wild about Harry.
    When the first of the Potter movies came out, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Augusta Chronicle was flooded with letters to the editor denouncing the Boy who Lived. Why? Because there was concern that reading or watching Harry Potter would lead countless scores of people into the Dark Arts. Harry was denounced as being anti-Christian and a bad influence on children with its portrayal of magic and sorcery. Passages from the Bible were quoted to bolster the argument that to enter the world of Harry Potter was to enter the world of the devil. It’s hard to imagine now, but whether or not a Christian should see the movie or read the books, was a real controversy in evangelical circles.

     Fast forward ten years and the biggest controversy is to decide whether to brave the opening weekend crowds or wait a few days to see The Boy who Lived.
     So what has changed? For those of us who have always loved Harry, even amongst us clergy, there was always the understanding that this was a tale of good versus evil on an epic scale. At one point in The Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry asks his godfather Sirus Black if he, Harry, is a bad person. Sirus replies that Harry is a very good person to whom bad things have happened. It’s the goodness and courage of Harry in the face of evil that has made him so attractive.
    Not long after The Sorcerer’s Stone was first released, America faced pure evil with the attacks of September 11, 2001. You didn’t need to enter a magical world to face a power that did not wish us well; it was right here in our own back yard. For many, especially children, Harry became the face of resistance against evil; it didn’t matter how young you were, you still had the power to fight darkness and win. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against…the powers of this world…against this present darkness. Therefore take us the full armor of God that you may be able to resist in that evil day.” (Ephesians 6). That was the fight of Harry, Ron and Hermione and remains the struggle for each of us today.
     So what might be the biggest controversy with Harry today? That it is the last installment and the deep wish that J. K. Rowling would once go to her keyboard, unleash her talent, and once again lead us into the magical world of Harry Potter.

Sabbatical Prayers

Sabbatical Prayers

Things have been quiet on the God and Dog Travelogue front of late but that is because I’ve been traveling. I have left beautiful, cool Maine to return to the blazing heat of the South. I’ll update you all shortly about the trip back but first I wanted to thank you all for your continued prayers while I’ve been away.
As you might have guessed, I’m not in Paris. There are a couple of reasons for that but the main one I kept to myself for several weeks. Just as I began my Sabbath at Day Lily cottage I discovered a lump under my arm. Things like this happen to most women at some time in our lives so, in the proverbial words of my mother, I didn’t “borrow trouble”. I didn’t want to cut short my time in New England, so I waited until I could return to Georgia to see my physician. During the weeks of waiting, I practiced what I have preached to so many of you over the years – I did not go on the web and did not try to self diagnosis myself into a frenzy. God, I hate it when my words come back to haunt me! In addition to the lump, I was also having trouble with my contacts but that, I knew, could be easily remedied.
So today was spent seeing my family physician and my optometrist. And the news was good on all fronts. The lump turned out to be an infection which is being treated with antibiotics; but there was more good news. While I was waiting to be seen by the doctor, I had the usual work ups – weight, heart rate and blood pressure. And there were improvements in all areas. Several years ago I was diagnosed with hyper-tension and have been on blood pressure medicine ever since. Even with the meds, sometimes my blood pressure is still a bit too high, so I monitor it (see, I do pay attention Dr. Edwards!). Today my blood pressure was stellar, in a range I haven’t seen for years.
One doctor visit down, another to go. I went to my optometrist, whom I had just seen three months ago, and explained that my contacts weren’t working as well as they should. An examination should that my eyesight had dramatically improved. My prescription needed to be adjusted because I was seeing that much better! He didn’t really have an explanation for it but I do – and so do you! I know that all of this is due to this Sabbath time and to your continue prayers, and for that I am so grateful. So much of my sabbatical has been spent in learning to really see God’s world as God would have me see it. I needed to adjust my vision about the world and God and the dogs have been instrumental in allowing me to do just that. Now I have discovered that my vision has literally improved. Imagine that.
Thank you for your prayers. I am spending this last bit of time visiting family and deciding if I really want to redecorate my house. Since God has been redecorating my soul, why not?

The Patriot

            The Patriot – no, not the old Mel Gibson film, or even – gasp – Steven Segal’s movie.  I’m referring to the painting by Andrew Wythe.  This afternoon I visited the Farnsworth Museum which houses an amazing collection of art by the Wythe family.  I found myself particularly drawn to Andrew Wythe’s picture of what had to be a veteran of World War I, Ralph Cline, now know as The Patriot.  The copy pictured below doesn’t do the painting justice.  You can’t really see the twinkle in Cline’s eye, but then again, we can’t see what had to be a twinkle in Wythe’s eye when he was painting (or maybe it was a grimace).

            What captivated as much as the painting was what Wythe said about painting, in the accompanying captioned taken from a 1964 Life magazine article.  Wythe said, “You see, I don’t say I’m going to go out and find something to paint.  To hell with that.  You might as well stay home and have a good glass of whiskey.  Really, I just walk a great deal over the countryside.  I try to leave myself very blank – a kind of sounding board, all the time very open to catch a vibration, a tone from something or someone – like Ralph Cline.”

            I don’t know if Wythe would have described himself as a religious person or not but he was very much describing a religious experience, being open to a vibration a tone from something  or someone.  That is what we are all called to do – be open.  Be open to God, be open to God’s world, be open to what God wants to show you.  In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus heals a deaf mute with the word, Ephphatha, or be opened but those words could also be used to open our eyes to become more aware of the presence of Jesus in our lives. 

            In Eucharistic Prayer C we pray, “Lord God of our Fathers; God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (perhaps in future editions of the Prayer Book we can remember our foremothers as well); God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us.”  It sounds like a prayer Andrew Wythe may have said.  It sounds like a prayer we should all be saying. 

The Sacred Bond

The Sacred Bond

The Divine Link between Dogs and People

            Dogs are not people.  This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story that I am going to relate.[1]  Dogs are not people but we act as if they are; we call them our fur babies and count them as members of our family.  We dress them up in people clothes and feed them people food and sometimes even carry them around in purses or packs.  Not that there isn’t anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld would say. I myself am not immune from see my dogs as family but recreating dogs in our own image does them, and us, an injustice.  It diminishes the wonder and mystery that two entirely different species would share their lives together.  

            I prefer to see dogs as dogs, not people, so that they can open my eyes to see the world with heightened senses.  The most pronounced of the five senses in a dog is the sense of smell.  If you’ve ever had the privilege of watching a puppy be born then you would know that they don’t look so much like a puppy as they do a gerbil.  And yet this “gerbil” will immediately use its nose to find its way to his mother’s nipple to get that first taste of life giving milk.  Dogs have thousands of more receptors in their nose than humans do, which means that they have thousands of more things to explore and share with us, if we let them. 

This morning I took Jack and Kelsey for a walk.  We had a thunderstorm last night and it was still drizzling when we went out.  Gene Kelly notwithstanding, I usually try to stay inside when it is raining, rather than sing, but Jack and Kelsey had important business to attend to.  Business taken care of, they were on the hunt.  Kelsey followed the trail of the ever elusive chipmunk, frequently seen but never captured.  Jack was on the trail of something larger and led me to a large impression left in the wildflowers lining the yard.  Something big had slept here last night.  A deer?  A moose?  My dogs didn’t have the language to tell me or, more to the point,  I didn’t have the capacity to speak their language,  but they showed me their finds by leading me to each place that I would not have seen on my own.  That is just one aspect of the magic of inter-species communication, one that could never be experienced if we just hauled around our dogs in baby carriers rather than allowing them to show and share their world with us.

I don’t think it is a coincidence, to use that well worn phrase that Dog is God spelled backwards.  God wants so much to show us this world that God created but we want to limit God, contain God.  Over fifty years ago J. B. Phillips wrote a book whose title says it all, Your God is Too Small.  Its been said that God made humanity in His own image and that we have been trying to return the compliment ever since. It is nothing new to want to reduce God to something that we can carry around with us in our back pocket.  But to do so reduces the wonder and majesty of God’s relationship with us.  God chose to clothe Himself in humanity, to be one of us, so that He could lead the way, saying, “Look, your missing this path.  Or, did you notice this wonderful impression over here that was left last night?  What do you think it is?  What do you think it could mean?”  That is just one step from saying, “Did you notice the wonderful impression I have left on your heart?  What do you think it could mean?”

Dogs are not people.  This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story that I am going to relate.  And people are not God. Let dogs be dogs and God be God and see what wonderful things can come out of their Story.

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[1] With apologies to Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.

Stay

Stay

     In obedience competition one of the more difficult things we ask of our dogs is to remain in a stay line. All the competing dogs, having already completed their individual exercises, are asked to form a line and they either remain sitting or lying down, as their handler walks away from them across the ring. They have to remain in a stay line for at least three minutes without moving. In advance obedience, the handler moves out of sight from the dogs.
     It is the last exercise of the obedience routine. More than one team, coming into this final portion of the trial with a near perfect score, has been disqualified because their dog moved in the stay line. It may be that the dog decided to lie down, rather than remain seated, or visa versa. Sometimes a dog will decide that there is something more interesting across the way that demands their immediate attention. Once, during a competition with Jack, we had completely our individual exercises satisfactorily. We did the first part of the stay line with Jack sitting perfectly. Yes! It looked like we were finally on our way to getting our first title. We came to the last exercise, the long down. Jack lay down and I walked across the ring, turned and faced Jack just in time to see him fly through the air. Disqualified! It didn’t matter that someone in the next ring had flipped the mat Jack was lying on (accidentally). He had moved and we were finished. It is hard to stay, even when you’re trying.
     It is hard to stay. In Soul Friends: Finding Healing with Animals, by Kate Nicoll, MSW, she writes, “The stay in a line of dogs demonstrates the ability for both the dog and the human to be in sync; the communication is clear, consistent and the picture is one of self-containment.” Stay means to “stay in place even as the world moves around you, stay in place even as I leave you, stay in a vulnerable position even when I walk away and stay true to yourself even when everyone else moves on. The metaphors are potentially endless and powerful.”
     It isn’t just dogs who find it difficult to stay in one place; we humans have a hard time staying put. One of the first pieces of Scripture that I learned in my Old Testament class in seminary was, “A wandering Aramean was my father…,” referring to the call of Father Abraham. Sometimes, like Abraham, we are called by God to wander. “Not all who wander are lost” J.R.R. Tolkien writes, in The Lord of the Rings. But more likely for the rest of us, it is just our curiosity to see what lies down the road that causes us to break the stay line. We are afraid that we may miss something. What we don’t realize is just how much we are already missing by always being on the move, always sniffing around; we fail to really see what’s before us. In the Rule of Saint Benedict, staying in one place, staying in community, was one of the primary rules that Benedict set down for his community. It became a rule, because even in the 5th century, Christians were seized with a sense that God was best apprehended out there rather than in here.

     When my sister Mary was here we drove up and down the coast of Maine with her family trying to see as much as we could in the short time they had here, leaving us all a bit tired and frazzled. But our favorite part was just staying in the cottage, drinking coffee on the back deck, watching sail boats and telling stories or just drinking in the silence and companionship. Stay. Stay in place even as the world moves around you. Mary, I wish you were still here. Stay. At least, here in my heart, I know that you’ll stay.

Past Times

Past Times

Things were simpler back then. It doesn’t seem to matter what decade we came of age, whether we were a child of the 50’s, 60’s or 70’s or beyond, we tend to look back on our childhood as a simpler time. Most of my childhood was spent in a small town in South Carolina – Sumter. When I think back on those days I remember them with fondness and with a tinge of nostalgia. Things did seem simpler then. We had one movie theatre, The Sumter Theatre, located downtown in the old Opera House. To the right side of the theatre was the police station. The alley between the theatre and the police station had a white line painted down the middle which we assumed was used to see if the local drunks could walk a straight line. While we kids waited to see the latest Saturday matinee, we would test our own balance at walking the white line, laughing when one of us would trip and fall to the side. Finally the doors of the theatre would open and we would pour in to see the latest Tarzan movie and enjoy the air conditioning.
One of the things we looked forward to all year was the annual parade held in honor of the Iris Festival. The highlight of the parade was seeing the Shriners buzz around in their miniature cars while wearing a fez, with their tassels flying in the air. It didn’t take much to amuse us way back when.
So imagine my surprise when I came to Belfast, Maine and felt the clock turn back forty or so years. There is only one movie theatre, The Colonial, which is about to celebrate its 100th birthday. And the Shriners were in town, gathering for a parade. My sister Mary Wyatt, along with her husband Mitch and their two boys, Adam and Alex, went with me to see the parade. We cheered on every unit of the parade from the Shriners driving their miniature cars to what can only be described as Jelly Bellies – men with bare midriffs, painted to look like faces. It was a hoot. After the parade we went to The Colonial to watch a Saturday matinee of Super Eight. There was no white line in an adjoining alley, but other than that I could have been back at the old Sumter Theatre.

Tonight when our family was gathered around the family room Mitch asked the boys what had been their favorite things they had done in Maine. The parade was first on their list, followed by the movie. Simple things still count. This weekend has been about creating memories. For me it has been an intersection of the past and the present. I know that at some point in the future, my nephews will look back on this vacation as a golden time.
I give thanks to God for recognizing this time for what it is – a precious gift – and I have savored every moment. This morning the Wyatts and I went to church and I realized that I could not remember the last time when I sat in a pew with my family in worship. It is a rare even to have any member of my family present when I preach or officiate at worship, but to sit with them as part of a congregation…well, I don’t know when that last happened. Literally. So I savor this time and put it in my memory box. Past times, present times. All time is in God’s hands and all moments are holy, if only we have the eyes to see.

Wait

I’ve been away from home for several weeks now with just Jack and Kelsey, my trusty corgis, as companions. I have been exploring new places and meeting new people as we travel through New England, but all the travels have been solitary and I find that I’m missing friends and family. Tomorrow I will see some much beloved faces when my sister Mary and her family come to Day Lily cottage for a week long visit. And I can’t wait!
Waiting is one of the hardest things we do as human beings. It is also one of the primary commands that we give to our dogs, who find waiting equally hard. In her book, Soul Friends: Finding Healing with Animals by Kate Nicoll, she writes, “Learning wait is an exercise in patience, understanding, communication and compassion. The wait we request of our dogs is for safety, manners and connection…Learning to wait is an important life skill for humans and animals. Wait requires a high level of connection and thought process. Think of yourself as a toddler; wait was never on your mind, this was something you learned through childhood and into adulthood. It requires the ability to truly understand the anticipated object or person will not go away. If you turn your back, it will not disappear forever or be obliterated. Wait requires trust, as well as awareness and appreciation of the other object or person…the command wait demands you pay attention to the now.”
Both Jack and Kelsey know the wait command, although it is not one of their favorites. I make them wait to go out the door, wait for treats, and sometimes just wait, so that their focus is on me. Even after all these years, Jack and Kelsey and I are still working on wait, learning to trust one another. The prophet Isaiah wrote, “But they who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings, like eagles. They shall run and not be weary; they shall run and not faint.”(Isaiah 40:31) The Message transposes that verse as:

Why would you ever complain, O Jacob,
or, whine, Israel, saying,
"God has lost track of me.
He doesn't care what happens to me"?
Don't you know anything? Haven't you been listening?
God doesn't come and go. God lasts.
He's Creator of all you can see or imagine.
He doesn't get tired out, doesn't pause to catch his breath.
And he knows everything, inside and out.
He energizes those who get tired,
gives fresh strength to dropouts.
For even young people tire and drop out,
young folk in their prime stumble and fall.
But those who wait upon God get fresh strength.
They spread their wings and soar like eagles,
They run and don't get tired,
they walk and don't lag behind.

Waiting is a time to recollect ourselves – literally to re-collect ourselves and who we are as Children of God. With dogs, it is a time to get them to re-focus on me. Perhaps God is doing the same. Wait. Something or Someone is coming. It will be worth the wait. And while you are waiting, your strength will build and I, the Lord, will fill you with my Spirit, so pay attention to the now.
I can’t wait to see Mary and her husband Mitch and my terrific nephews Adam and Alex. They will be here soon enough. But while I’m waiting, I’m paying attention to my surroundings, to Jack and Kelsey, to the lessons of Scripture and to the prayers. And I’m waiting to see what God in Jesus is working in me.