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You are here: Home / Archives for Presence

Christmas Eve 2022: Presents? No, presence…

December 24, 2022 by Cam Miller

A link to YouTube video version is available at the end of the text

Right here, right now
is the eye of the Christmas storm.
I love it when we get to Christmas Eve
and we get to be here.

Here’s what I mean.
According to Pew Research,
96% of Americans celebrate Christmas.
Not 96% of Christian,
but 96% of people whether or not
they feel any affinity with our religion
or any religion.
32% of Jews decorate a Christmas tree.
More than 75% of American Buddhists and Hindus celebrate Christmas.

So less than half of those who observe Christmas
see it as primarily a religious event,
or their religious event.

I love that there is still something
that so many of us share —
a common ritual of some kind.

I just wish I could tell everyone
that underneath this grand secularized holiday
there is a secret of sorts, that is hidden in plain sight.

And it isn’t even really about Jesus —
the Jesus Story
points to it
and reveals it even,
but it is about…God.

But I have gotten ahead of myself
so let me back up —
about 35 years to be exact.

When I was a new dad
I would marvel that my parents or Katy’s mom
would say they couldn’t remember something —
something we would ask them
about when we were small children —
perhaps to help fill in the gaps
of what we didn’t know as new parents.
But sometimes
about some things
they would say they couldn’t remember.
And I remember thinking,
”How could you forget something like that?”

Zoom thirty years ahead
and what I don’t remember
would fill the ocean.

But, there is something I do remember
and it is lodged in my brain
like a knot in wood.
In part, perhaps, because I had a refresher
with both my grandsons.

It is the experience
of rocking a baby in my arms,
her or him sleeping
as I peer down my chest
and watch that little puffy, puckered face
and hear that snuffly breathing
from a sleeping baby.

A baby’s presence is powerful,
whether quiet like that or screaming.
The presence of a baby
demands attention must be paid.

But in those afternoons
or late nights
of rocking a baby
back and forth
back and forth,
and softly singing sometimes too,
pretty soon that baby’s powerful presence
would pull me in.

You may remember what it feels like
when you become present
only to that moment
in that time
at that spot.
All else is obliterated,
even if only for a moment.

Being totally present in the moment.
There are many ways that can happen —
total presence.

Another, less idyllic version,
one I may have already mentioned before,
was when I was a chaplain intern
at New England Deaconess Hospital.
For several weeks that summer, I was called upon
to sit with a young man about my age
who had been burned over much of his body.
He was in some kind of hyperbaric oxygen treatment
and couldn’t talk well, only a few words here or there.

My job was to go sit with him for awhile every day –
just to be present.
He was in agony, of course,
and there was nothing I could do for him –
except sit there, be present.
”Is it okay if I sit for awhile,” I would ask.
He would gesture the best he could
in a way that welcomed me to do so.

While rocking a baby pulled me into
simple presence,
I had to work at simply being present
to the young man I sat with.
The baby too, if I’m honest.
It isn’t easy any time
to simply be with someone
and do nothing.

Random thoughts
will begin to cloud the brain,
call to us about things done
and left undone,
rain down emotions
that splatter
and wiggle
and writhe.

But learning to be simply present
in the presence of suffering
or even when we are just tired
or anxious
or otherwise distracted,
takes a lot of effort.

Simple presence,
being present with us,
is what Christmas is about.

If Christmas was a book title,
the subtitle would be, “God makes it in.”
”The Story of Christmas, God makes it in.”

Did you ever have the experience
of God slipping into your grief?
Did that ever happen to you?
Maybe it did
and you didn’t think of it as God?
And maybe it didn’t even feel good at the time
but you look back now and are grateful for it?

I’m talking about a dark moment of loss
or a shattering moment of powerlessness
or a moment so anxious
you wanted to jump out of your skin.
Those kinds of moments.

And in such moments,
when you don’t think you can take any more,
something or someone happens…and
you realize you can take it…and
you have taken it…and
there is some kind of way
forward.

That someone or something
that gave you a hand to hold
or a sliver of light to hope toward,
may have been mere serendipity or
may have been a gift.

We do not get to actually know for sure
but in those moments of despair
or shattering grief
or deep, dark depression —
when we felt overwhelmed
or powerless —
we were empowered.
We were given something
or felt something
or heard something
that moved us.
Something entered into the darkness
and empowered us.
And then we made it to Christmas Eve
to a nest of community
where we know people love us.

I am not saying we get rescued
or saved
from every and all hazardous situations.at
That would be pure fantasy.

In fact, there will come a time
when we no longer go forward.
We know that —
it is a condition we call “Life.”
It ends.
But I like to think
that death is the mirror image
of birth.
In that manger
God slipped into Life
and in the manger we call death,
we slip into God.

I like to trust my experience like that.
When someone asks me to believe something
I have never witnessed or experienced
I just can’t do it.

I don’t necessarily reject
what I have not experienced out of hand,
I mostly just remain agnostic about it — as in,
”I don’t know.”

But so far in my life
my experience is that God slips in
somehow
some time
some way
and some times I don’t even recognize it
until much latter, looking back.
That makes me trust God
and trust God unto death
and trust God unto birth.

God slips into life
and eventually, we all slip into God.

That is the Jesus story, it seems to me,
taken as a whole.
Christmas Eve
to the night before he died for us
to the afternoon of Good Friday
to Easter morning
is all one seamless story.

There is some Episcopal prayer about that:
from the hard wood of the manger
to the rough wood of the cross, it says.

Anyway, God slips into life to be present with us
even if there is nothing to be done
to change our situation.

And we know, as the saying goes,
the difference between pain and suffering
is that suffering is pain
endured in isolation.
When we endure pain all by ourselves
and let no one know
or have no one to know,
then the pain grows into suffering.

It is almost miraculous
what a difference it makes
to open the door of our pain
so that people who care about us
can come be with us in it.

Like I said, in the moment
it may not jump out at us
but over the length of days
or looking back,
we will see and know
what a difference it made.

I do not for a minute
think that God was absent
before Jesus was born and died.
But in this story that was given to us
we have it revealed.
Our eyes were opened to it in a new way
and we could see something
that was always true —
God is with us.

And God’s presence with us
is so pervasive in this life,
when we experience it and even when we don’t,
that I cannot imagine
there is a time
or a place
or a realm
or an orbit
or a dimension
or a Black Hole
or a death
where God is not also present.

God slips into Life
and we slip into God.
Merry Christmas.

 

 

 

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Christmas Eve & December 26: Who is with us…in the darkness

December 25, 2021 by Cam Miller

 

Scroll down for a video presentation if you prefer to watch

I spent some time
trying to think of
another historical figure —
or even someone personally known to us —
whose birth story
has such a robust narrative
that it travels over time
and across history and borders
in good times and bad.
I couldn’t think of any.

There are some historical figures with stories,
some even miraculous stories.
But none of them do we gather around
every year —
at great expense,
with celebratory preparation,
and these days,
at some personal risk.

There are of course,
solid, unmiraculous, and explicable reasons
that this birth is what it is for us —
historical reasons,
sociological reasons,
economic reasons,
theological reasons,
personal and family reasons.
But there is yet something else.

There is something more.

This story,
this birth narrative,
is our story.
And I do not mean merely a Christian story.
It is the human story
writ large and profoundly
upon the pages of our lives.

It’s a story that happens in darkness.

No matter how safe and secure
our affluence allows us to feel,
we know we are vulnerable
to forces beyond our control.
We begin to know that as early as three
or four years old.
Somehow the existential truth
of irreverability
gets known very early for us humans.

This year, once again,
a microorganism invisible to the human eye,
is a threat to all of us.
Covid is not unique, merely
another agent of hazard stalking the world
we share with hundreds of billions of them.

A baby, his anguished mother and father,
huddled in darkness
surrounded by agents of harm —
human and otherwise — is us.

Now we do not explicitly recognize this
when we hear the Christmas story,
nor hover over it
as if a detail central to its plot.
But deep down
we recognize it
because we live it
over and over and over again.

What is with us in this darkness?
Who is with us in this darkness?
Who and what can we always count on
to be with us — to be present
no matter how this story unfolds?

We know, or intuit, or fear
the hazards that inhabit our darkness,
but who or what else
is present — to be
with us?

That is what matters to us,
what really matters.
Who is present with us?
Not to protect us — we understand
our vulnerability
and come to terms with it
somehow.
But who is present with us?

In this story that we tell every year,
the Christmas story,
that presence is symbolized by light.
Whether it is the star
or brilliance of angels —
depending upon whether we are reading
Matthew or luke —
light is the metaphor for presence.

It points to that presence within us
that allows us to hold the darkness
when we cannot see our hand in front of our face
or know what is in the next moment.
Presence.
Simple presence.
The power of simple presence
that turns out to be enough to hold the darkness.

My words are limited this year
to keep our time together briefer than usual —
because our vulnerability this year
is clearer than in most years.

So this is as far as I can go with you,
but it is far enough.
It is the whole story in brief.

We understand the darkness
we sojourn —
it is composed of our vulnerabilities.

The Christmas story
reminds us
of what we also know:
that there is a presence with us,
some say a power greater than ourselves,
that is with us
in every moment and in every darkness.
A simple presence
that travels with us
and turns out to be enormously powerful.
Powerful enough to staunch our fear
and pierce our anxiety
and calm our tremors
with something
we cannot quite name.

We know there are COVIDS
and Deltas and Omicrons
and lions and tigers and bears, oh my,
that make up a constellation of hazards
which darken the skies within us.
But we also know
there is a presence.
And even though we more often than not
want protection more than anything,
we also know,
can also feel,
that somehow
that simple presence is enough.

In this beautiful moment,
present to one another
and together
holding the darkness,

I wish you a blessed, healing,
and hope-filled Christmas.

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7 Pentecost B, 2021: If I were a Prophet

July 11, 2021 by Cam Miller

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist

When we have stories that feature
John the Baptist like we do today,
I repeatedly feel the need to pay our respects
to the Mandaeans,
followers of John the Baptist
that continue on in the world today.

There are roughly seventy thousand Mandaeans
spread from Indonesia to Iraq to Sweden.
They have their own sacred text, the Ginza,
and they continue to baptize – every week
rather than once in a lifetime.

Whereas Christians turned baptism
into a once in a lifetime sacrament,
the Mandaeans use it in every celebration
from weddings to funerals.
Many Mandaeans still speak
a unique form of Aramaic —
the language we assume
was Jesus’ first tongue.

But that said, I feel uninspired
by Mark’s peculiar
and somewhat inaccurate review of events
from so long ago.

I must confess that sometimes
I suffer from B.F.S. – Bible Fatigue Syndrome.
It is not a great ailment for a preacher
but maybe a professional hazard.

Sometimes I get tired translating arcane stories
into contemporary meaning.
Sometimes, not too often,
but sometimes,
I just look at the readings and say to myself,
“Really? This again?”

Anyway, I know I’ve got Bible-fatigue
when I feel that way
even with one of my very favorite prophets — Amos.

Amos encountered fatigue himself.

You see, early in the short book of the prophet Amos,
Amos talks God out of an angry
and torturous punishment of Israel —
the threat was first a scourge of locusts
and then consumption by fire.
But seven chapters into
the little nine chapter book,
Amos has given up talking God
out of anything.

He silently shrugs in resignation
as he is compelled
to report to the king and false prophets of Israel,
yet another vision of destruction.
The plumb line
is dangled
and the nation doesn’t measure up…again.

So, Amos warns,
the wall of inequity, Israel, will fall.

Amos doesn’t even try to talk God out of it this time,
and in Biblical literature,
talking God out of smiting people
is a special talent of a prophet.

I forgot to mention that last week
when I was talking about prophets.
They have a special gift
for soothing divine indignation.
But Amos doesn’t use his super power
for calming God this time.
He just lets the bad news hang in the air
because he knows God is right.

He know the people are just going to fail again
to measure up to God’s requirements.

I feel a special relationship to that image
of the plumb line
because I am one of those people
who can’t draw a straight line —
even with a ruler or a square.
When I used to make things,
I couldn’t make a square corner
if my life depended upon it.
I think I just see crooked.

I used to watch my dad work on a project
and build beautiful things
that came out square, level, and smooth.

Not me.
I’d be the one listening to Amos’ image
of the wall leaning away
from the vertical plumb line, and say:
Yep, looks pretty straight to me.”

But Bible-fatigue has taken hold of my mind this week
and I looked at this personal favorite from Amos
and that terribly interesting beheading in Mark
and shrugged my shoulders.
So what?
What’s in it for us?

So I am grateful to Robert Francis
for his more immediately accessible poem.
The punch line of which, is: “Here I sit,
between the known and the unknown.”

“Nothing was far that once was near.
Nothing is hid that once was clear.
Nothing was God that is not here.”

If it does not get me into too much trouble with God,
I am going to play prophet for a moment,
and echo this poem
and leave Amos and Mark
to speak for themselves.
And that may be the kindest
and wisest thing

I ever did for Amos and Mark.

Anyway, here is the wisdom
I want to leave us with today,
because there is no deeper or greater wisdom
that I know of anyway,
about God and the life of the spirit.

God is not available to us
in the past
nor in the future,
but only here,
only now.

The past can show us tracks —
the footprint of the holy on human history —
but it is not God.

The future is total mystery
toward which we can only blow a kiss
and wish.

God exists only here,
only now,
only in the present.

Our struggle, as Francis points to,
is that we constantly wander
between the past and the future —
the known and the unknown,
a pinball bouncing off each.

We linger in memories,
savor sentiment,
pine for how it used to be.
We reach for what is next,
and anticipate with great desire or anxiety
what is yet to come.
But rarely do we sit alone
between the known and the unknown —
present to the moment,
present with God.

I am not wise enough to know
why we are so bad at this,
but I do know that to sit alone
in the present,
can be filled with anxiety,
ghosts,
pain,
and all manner of dread.

It is a place we do not go
because to be alone in the present
is to see and hear and feel things
that unsettle us.
And yet there in that place,
in the midst of those things —
both underneath
and among them —
is God.

It is the only place God is.
Sit with that for a moment.

 

We go looking in cathedrals
and Grand Canyons
and lakeside,
when God is present in a diner,
in the recliner,
in the shower for crying out loud.

When we get good
at turning off the noise around us
and listening to the noise within us
and allow it all to settle a little bit —
not trying to get rid of it
but listening through it —
then we begin to notice the presence
of something or someone else.

We cannot find God in scripture
or in nature —
we only find tracks there —
tracks that resonate God’s presence in the past.
But God is not there
in the grand beauty of the natural world
nor in the intricacies of Scripture.

God is here:
right now
right here
in each present moment.

If I were a prophet…
that is the message I would proclaim.
If we seek God in the present moment
we may not only discover God,
but we will discover more nearly
ourselves.

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4 Easter: That Terrible Trinity

May 12, 2019 by Cam Miller

Okay, this is a little weird for a sermon,
but it’s all I got for today.

Of all the creatures on this blue planet,
the two with whom we have
the most generous relationship,
are cats and dogs.
Here is a basic difference between
cats, dogs, and humans.

I have lived 23,861 days
give or take a few.
A dog would have no concept of days,
every minute of every day being all there is.
A cat could care less about the past,
and its only concern about the future
is how to get the best out of it.

A human
can actually calculate the number of days,
obsess about what was missed
and fret about what is to come
all without ever stopping
to experience the moment that is.

Now the truth is,
we have no idea what it is like
inside the mind of a cat or dog, it is
just our projection.
In this case, mine.

But being human,
we all share that
like germs on a grease spot.

Past, present, and future are so human –
maybe even uniquely human
among the creatures on this planet.

Each one of us lives in a hall of mirrors
made up of those three panels –
past, present, and future.
We cannot escape it,
it is what defines us,
and how well we manage
those relationships
will determine our wellness –
spiritual and otherwise.

The past, only lived out in the memory,
is chock full of
nostalgia,
melancholy,
resentment,
trauma,
happiness,
bitterness,
and sorrow.

The future, only lived out in fantasies
or projections of the mind, is where
anxiety,
fear,
dread,
hope,
and anticipation live.

Everything else hangs out in the present.
Love, joy, grief, pain, and gratitude
are all present tense.

Time, like manna, cannot be collected
or stacked up in a pile like dirty dishes
nor stored like plasma
or last summers canned tomatoes.

Time is a use-it-or-lose-itkind of thing.
And yet we act as if time
is a hand of cards we hold –
the pastare the tricks we have collected
and stacked in neat little piles
at our place at the table,
while the future
is a brand new deck
we are about to draw from.

But in fact, we only have
what we are holding at the moment.
We can no more stack our days
in the sleeve of memories
than we can predict the future;
and we can no more re-live our memories
than we can play the future
as if it were a sequence on a DVD.

Re-living the past and predicting the future
are equally illusory
and equally seductive.
The proof of this pudding
is that Goddoes not reside
in either the past or the future,

That is why we have great difficulty
encountering God.
God only resides in the present.
Encountering the holy
is elusive and capricious,
and darn impossible to hold onto,
and hard on us humans.

Of that terribly Trinity
– past, present, future –
we love two and hate the other.
We fondle the past with great pleasure,
and beg the future
as a pauper at the feet of a king.
But from the present,
we hide our face as if
the moment were a horrible
misshapen victim.

Joan Borysenko helped me
to understand the power
of living in the moment,
something I had heard so much about
from every religion I studied
but found elusive.

She is a physician and researcher
who was on staff at
the Harvard Mind/Body Institute
before peeling off on her own publishing career.
I once heard her describe the power
of the present moment
as she discovered it in her own life.

She told us that as a very young child
she was gripped with a debilitating obsessive/compulsive disorder.
Everything had to be just so for her,
counted and placed to perfection
before she could go anywhere or do anything.
She described her liberation
from this prison of rigid compulsion
when she discovered
the perfect freedom
of the present moment.
All of a sudden one day
at a young age, as if
by spontaneous healing,
she found herself in the present moment
instead of living in anxiety about the future.

Whereas she was used to living in the dread
of “what if,” she discovered
that by residing in the present moment
there was no anxiety or remorse,
only what was happening right then and there.
That revelation freed her
from stacking, sorting, counting, and planning.
Her life-long recovery had begun.

Now most of us do not live with the tyranny
of that kind of powerful obsession
but many people struggle with something.
Any recovering alcoholic or drug user
can tell us about the power
of living in the present moment,
when memory calls for a drink
and anxiety insists on getting high.
“Living one day at a time,”
or one hour at a time,
or one minute at a time,
even when it is not the happiest moment,
leads to freedom from past and future.

Being in the moment
keeps us from obsessing
on what was or what will be
and allows us to focus on
just now– even if just now
is a struggle, actually, especially
if just nowis a struggle.

Everything else
is what one Buddhist meditation teacher
calls our “planning mind.”

Planning mind is that mental tendency we have
to race ahead of this moment
in anticipation of what we need to do,
what we have left undone, and
what we have forgotten.

Then again, sometimes
our thoughts fall back into yesterday
where we do comparison shopping
with the present.
By which I mean that
sometimes we nurseour nostalgia
as if it were honeyed mother’s milk
we could never give up.

Sometimes we suck on resentments
as if a straw in a snow cone,
knowing that the sweetest stuff
is still down there somewhere
if we can just get to it.

So the past draws us with power,
as does the future
even though both are at least somewhat illusion.

For example,
memory is not a photographic essay
of what happened once,
nor video evidence
of who was there and what happened.
Memory always wears the lens of the present,
coloring what would otherwise
be a grainy old black and white movie.
Memory adds details that were never there,
fitting it for the present mood or cause,
changing it with or without
intention and yet forever.
Memory is indeed a trickster.
It is a great gift, of course,
but one that can confuse our senses,
color what was,
and blind us to the present moment.

Likewise our “planning mind,”
while a benefit,
can cut us off from the present
like a butcher knife.
While acknowledging and embracing
our “planning mind,” which stutters over
what has not yet happened,
we must also learn to discipline its voice
to only speak when spoken to.
Indeed, we need memory
to call to us from out of the past
and remind us of what we have learned.
And we need our planning mind
to patiently stay in place, silent
in the future
until evoked for a specific purpose.
Focusing on either the past or future
can be tremendously helpful to humans
when used surgically for a specific task.
But they are a terribly debilitating
blunt instrument when used indiscriminately.

Practicing simple presence,
being held in the moment
and refusing to look back or forward,
is an exercise we need in our repertoire.

Now, why in the world,
did I get on this subject today?

Because…
Psalm 23 and John’s Jesus
talking about hearing his voice,
are all about our ability
to enter and hold
the present moment.

The guidance of still waters,
following pathways of justice,
enduring the vale of death’s shadow,
the consolation of God’s presence
in the face of foes…all of it,
is only available in the present moment.

The voice of the holy,
whether we ascribe it to Jesus
or the Holy Spirit
or a still small voice,
is cradled only in the present moment.
We can remember such times from the past
and hope for such times in the future,
but what was and is to come
are trustworthy only when mediated
by the voice of God in the present.

This should probably be a “how-to” sermon,
but in truth, every liturgy
is a practice session in mindfulness,
or being present in the moment.
That is what we are invited to do,
enter into this moment
and experience the presence of God among us.
The prayers,
the music,
the candles,
the bread and wine…
that is what all of this invites us into:
here and now
in the presence of God.
The one fly in the ointment
is this thing – is the sermon.

The sermon pulls us into memory
or points us toward action
and so messes with the whole thing.

Which means that once again,
I am part of the problem and not the solution!

Anyway, for what it is worth, mindfulness
or being held in the present moment,
is something we can practice.
In fact, it needs to be a part
of our spiritual practice.
I would go so far as to say, it needs to be
part of our baptismal practice.
The shepherd –
the voice, the rod, staff, and all that we seek –
are found in the present.
What’s crazy, is my dog already knows that.

 

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Trinity Place

 Trinity Place, An Open Space for Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts

“Open Space” means open and inclusive, welcoming the Geneva and FLX community to use our space, and to partner with us in building an inclusive community for spiritual inquiry and wellness. 

“Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts” means we are pointed toward a particular dimension of life, specifically that which strengthens the relationship of body, mind, and spirit. 

Trinity is a Christian community of worship and spiritual practice welcoming all, and an Episcopal Church in particular. However, we welcome all spiritual traditions and those who have no particular spiritual background but are engaged in a mission consistent with ours. We are looking for partners in mission not members (although we love to welcome new members too).

 

 

 

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