The Beautiful No

Donald Miller announced the winner to the story contest yesterday, sadly it was not me. I realized along the process that wanting/wishing/hoping/asking is the most important "winning" I could do. Somewhere along my 44 (almost 45) years I have had the hoping taken out of me. I am a positive person and usually quite content, so this surprised me when I realized it. Between the last week when they originally were supposed to announce the winner and yesterday I began to realize that not hoping/wishing/wanting somehow happened because I thought I was too fragile to be disappointed. I truly am not.

I don't like disappointment, but I would far rather hear the beautiful "NO" than live a life that is void of hoping. I also want to be able to hear the beautiful "NO" if it is one that protects me from ruin. Looking back the hard "No's" that I/we have received along our path have always been the best answer. That house we had our hearts set on - big, beautiful and a money pit - that no saved us from financial ruin as I can now see how much the current owners are having to do to keep up. How much more life giving our real home is because it doesn't need everything done to make it livable. That NO was truly a gift. We didn't think so at the time, but looking back truly understand it's beauty.

So, I am not fragile, and I will keep hoping/wishing/wanting/dreaming and listening for that beautiful no, even if it disappoints - because everything truly is unfolding as it should.

When the mind and heart are one

This echos so much of what I said in my last talk at church - I agree wholeheartedly and find that comfort with which we divide ourselves is so commonplace that we don't even question it any more.

Richard Rohr:

When our brain is separated from our heart we will invariably think dualistically, because we ourselves are split. The last 500 years, when we came to rely upon printed words for truth, rational thinking was idealized into what we ironically call “The Enlightenment” (largely beginning in the18th century). This period separated the mind from the heart rather totally, and we might add, since this time war has been almost non stop, and Christianity began to divide into all head people or all heart people, as we often still have today. Both lose half of the picture.

When the human person is split, we find ourselves either in a “war culture”—or in the culture wars that we have in America today—or both. It seems we have to hate somebody or something when we cannot resolve the contradictions that are everywhere—first of all within ourselves. As Jesus said, “the lamp of the body is the eye” (Luke 11:34). And the eye sees most truthfully when it looks out from that place where the mind and the heart are one.

Raising my voice

When a man is singing and cannot lift his voice, and another comes and sings with him, another who can lift his voice, the first will be able to lift his voice too. That is the secret of the bond between spirits.

Source: Martin Buber, Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings

Add your thoughts at inward/outward

How can suffering be redemptive?

The Gospel was first heard by people who were longing and thirsty, who were poor and oppressed in one sense or another. They knew their need and their emptiness. So we must go to the same place within ourselves to hear the Gospel. We must find the rejected and fearful parts within each of us and try to live there, if life has not yet put us there. That should allow us a deeper communion with the oppressed of the world, who are by far the majority of the human race since the beginnings of humanity.

If we wish to enter more deeply into this mystery of redemptive suffering—which also means somehow entering more deeply into the heart of God—we have to ask God to allow us to feel some of their pain and loneliness, not just to know it intellectually. It is what we feel that we finally act on. Knowing is often just that, and nothing more.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Job and the Mystery of Suffering, p. 15

All the Good Words are Taken

From one of my favorite wordsmiths: Cheryl Lawrie

all the good words are taken
so i will use them anyway
and mean something else:

i am blessed.

I will not say it to mean i am lucky to have what i do;
especially bestowed with something
that others lack
due to my good luck
or god’s good nature
or something between the two.

but i will mean
that i choose to live
as though in this next moment
and action
i have been given the chance
to be a person of grace.

i am blessed.

AAUGH!!

“You can’t create humor out of happiness. I’m astonished at the number of people who write to me saying, ‘Why can’t you create happy stories for us? Why does Charlie Brown always have to lose? Why can’t you let him kick the football?’ Well, there is nothing funny about the person who gets to kick the football.”

- Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Me (via All Things Charlie Brown)

We are her best dreams coming true…

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells of a dream of a time she was telling a story. She felt someone tapping on her toe. Looking down she realized with surprise that she was standing on the shoulders of an old woman. She tried to encourage the woman up to stand on her shoulders so she could see and the woman reassured her that no, this was the way. Upon looking down she saw the old woman too was standing on the shoulders of an even older woman and the ladder stretched far away.

I was raised in a sect of faith that tells women that they have no stories to tell in public. Stories are for home, for children and other women. It affected me deeply because I believed them. I believed that it made God happy if I was silent. It restored creation order. So I willingly agreed to keep my stories to myself. I knew in my heart that God’s happiness was far more important than my own.

But then one day I gave birth to the most beautiful, porcelain skinned baby girl and I realized that it was no longer just about my happiness. I had a world to give her, would it be one of silence or one with a voice? Heavily I weighed these things I had been given from such a tender age.

I grasped that there was much that I was willing to sacrifice for myself, but my daughter was not, and should not be, one of those things. She was growing up in a brand new world, a world where the female voice was not only welcomed, but invited. I saw that this silence was taking far more than it was giving and slowly it occurred to me that if I did not tell my stories no one would.

I remember watching my own mother navigate the silence. It was not where she was raised. She came to the silence late in life. She too longed to make God smile. Her heart was good, but her voice was strong. It was a constant battle for her to keep silent and not tell her stories. She had a rich voice and a deep laugh. I remember being awakened in the early morning as she sat at her Smith-Corona letting her voice pour out her fingers and onto scrap paper, her frustration mounting as she tried desperately to find a story that would please the publishers so she could have a voice again. Her silence magnified her sickness. She died at the age I am now. 44. Unpublished and voiceless.

After her death, and the birth of my daughter Alinea, I began to understand that a God that silences half the population of his creation to restore some order isn’t truly the God of creation, but a sad, mean idol created in the image of men threatened desperately as they tried to find their own stories. I found that upon telling my story it restored much, which in turn made God rejoice. This was a full throated God, not threatened by truth or spirit, but one with broad shoulders and warm thick arms to wrap all the stories together.

This was a world where I could raise a daughter, this was a God who was worthy of my service and worship. You see this daughter of mine has a way with the pen, the keyboard and the language. She is the magnification all of the good that her grandmother possessed, and the entire bottled up story that fell silent so long in me. It flows through her so naturally, so beautifully. She stands on these shoulders as I stand on my mum’s. If I could I’d raise her up to stand on my hands. Raise her up as high above my head as I am able. We are my mother’s best dreams coming true.

So I write today, Mr. Miller, Donald, if I may, to ask you to help me raise her up, help me to help her by learning to tell my own story, and live my life fully and provide her with every tool possible to do that in the very best of ways.

If there was any way to get us there I’d do it. Portland was our family destination 2 years ago for a reunion and we adore it. There is just no way we can get from our coast to yours on our own. So I'm asking you to help me. I don’t even know if we’re eligible to win. If it’s residency we are out, you see we live about six blocks from the Maine border in New Brunswick, Canada. But if it’s about social security numbers and being American there is a possibility we could qualify. Either way I knew that I needed to enter to verbalize these things that are birthing in me.

I have a dear friend who makes wishes and prayers and releases them by writing them on tiny strips of paper and then tying them into knots and setting them in a safe place. She said it was a way to dream big dreams and allow yourself to ask for things you’ve always been told you shouldn’t ask for. That was a few months ago, about the same time you announced this event. With hands shaking and skepticism in my heart I wrote my very first (and only) little prayer.

“I want to go to Portland at the end of September to see Donald Miller & Aunt Peg.”

I told no one. It was my little experiment. Then I saw your contest and knew that I had to enter.
We meet regularly with some others in our community here to pray and try to figure out a way to create something locally to help people, especially children, out of the generational poverty that has eroded much of the foundation of life away from so many. We have seen that children raised in this level of poverty have no chance at hope and freedom. We have been talking about a Million Miles and the Mentoring Project as inspiration to think far outside regular nonprofit walls to begin to change the direction of the erosion; rerouting the water flow so that it works against the desolation instead of the hope.

Also, because this will be read by people who you care about and care for you, I want you to know that I am truly grateful. You have swamped the well of stories for the church and the old, ugly stories are falling away so that new, more life giving stories can be found. Your humility and ability to engage the soul changes everything and I want you to know I'm so thankful. I know you stand on the shoulders of some truly wonderful people and with your words you lift us all up.

Thank you.

Your friend,

HeidiRenee

This is my entry for the Living A Better Story Conference

Living a Better Story Seminar from All Things Converge Podcast on Vimeo.

Putting poison into the public reservoir

"No one can keep the consequences of any evil to himself. They seep through his individual life, and run out into the community. When the Scripture says, "Be sure your sin will find you out," it does not mean "will be found out." It means what it says, "will find you out," track you down, spoil your character, destroy your happiness, ruin your influence; and because it does that, it will find your friends out, will tend to pull them down with you, will surely make goodness harder for them, and within your family circle will roll upon those who love you a burden of vicarious suffering.

If one could sin privately, he might allow himself the ignoble self-indulgence. But he cannot. Somebody else always is involved. The whole world is involved, for the man has deprived the world of a good life and given it a bad life instead. Sinning, even in its most private forms, is putting poison into the public reservoir, and sooner or later everybody is the worse for the pollution."

Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Meaning of Prayer, pg. 175-176 [X-c]

Bleu Lavande

A sensory gift from my dear Quebecois friend Annick - handmade lavender soap from Fitch Bay, Quebec - the blue of the soap is the color of the glass tile back splash in my kitchen - and it smells so good I want to eat it! It is the most authentic scent of lavender I have ever smelled - it's like walking in a field of flowers. Glorious!

Blue Lavande

Seriously crushing on Peanuts

via

May it be so

This was written for me by a friend and left in comments and I think it is too precious to hide there. Thank you Kel!

as you sit by this grave
daring to name memories
and mourning resultant loss
may you feel the presence of
the one
who as you said
carried this for you
until you were ready

at the foot of this gravestone
i see a rosebud
i believe it will bloom and unfurl
into the fully fragrant rose
it was created to be

may it be so

Splitting my world wide open

"Most writers, like most children, need to tell.

The only problem is that much of what they need to tell will provoke the ire of parent-critics, who are determined to tell writer-children what they can and cannot say.

Unless you have sufficient ego and feel entitled to tell your story, you will be stymied in your effort to create.

You think you can't write, but the truth is you can't tell.

Writing is nothing if not breaking the silence."

--Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers

Image Credit - Tara F - Slow Traveler

I ended last year with this quote. It summed up where I had been in my inability to blog and give voice to my thoughts. Sadly, six months later, this is still true. Now that school is over and I have a bit more time on my hands I'd like to change that, and I think that taking a risk is the best way to begin.

Anyone who really knows me can tell you that I am quite able to give voice to things that most people would or could never say out loud - I am able to talk about the things that silence most people.

Ironically the thing that silences me is that I have a voice. That I am a teacher, even a preacher and that I have opinions and beliefs that might be different than those around me. I have not wanted to bear the rejection that could come with owning that.

It feels like a big risk. My blog isn't a random internet address anymore, it's linked to my Facebook page and hundreds of friends who have known me throughout my life. Many of those from a time when I was silent and head-covered.

I do not want to hurt or offend or ostracize any of those people or myself, or to provoke their ire, but I long to own who I am and what I am and stop being ashamed of that any longer.

"By their fruit, you will know them."

The crazy thing is that when I am given the opportunity to teach there is fruit. Good, wholesome fruit. I am not a rebel by any means, but owning this feels so rebellious, so risky. So I asked myself, what are the real risks?

Will owning this make me loose some friends on Facebook?

Possibly, but as I'd tell my kids they probably weren't my real friends in the first place.

Will it cause me to be secretly judged?

Always - I can't seem to do anything without that happening.

So why then should I stay silent?

Why then should I not own this very important part of myself?

I truly have no idea.

All I know is that it feels so risky.

I love this part of me, I treasure it, it feels like the pearls of my life - and I know I have no control over the audience. I don't know if it would even find their radar screens, but what I do know is that there are so many people I adore who do truly love me for who I am. I am in a place where my voice is heard, welcomed and invited. I have a place at the table, and I treasure it.

Another quote I found while looking for the one above made me feel warm inside:

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.

Source: Muriel Rukeyser,From Cries of the Spirit, edited by Marilyn Sewell

Crack, crack, crack...


So here is my big risk. Here is my voice.

This is a link to my talk I gave a couple of weeks ago at my church, I'm really happy with it:

Roll Away Your Stone by Heidi Renee Turner

farmerpages.com

For all of your farming questions, needs and supplies go to farmerpages.com

You're welcome Chris :)

James K.A. Smith on Redemption

Beautiful thoughts on redemption from James K.A. Smith - Via Cardus:

So our redemption is not some supplement to being human; it's what makes it possible to be really human, to take up the mission that marks us as God's image bearers. Saint Irenaeus captures this succinctly: "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." Redemption doesn't tack on some spiritual appendage, nor does it liberate us from being human in order to achieve some sort of angelhood. Rather, redemption is the restoration of our humanity, and our humanity is bound up with our mission of being God's co-creative culture-makers.

While God's redemption is cosmic, not anthropocentric, it nonetheless operates according to that original creational scandal whereby humanity is commissioned as ambassador, and even co-creator, for the sake of the world. In an equally scandalous way, we are now commissioned as co-redeemers. Redemption is the re-orientation and re-direction of our culture-making capacities. It is we who have invented the twisted cultural systems that deface and despoil this good world; restoring creation to its lush plenitude and fecundity will not happen by divine fiat or magic—it will require the hard, patient, Spirit-inspired work of building wellordered systems, creation-caring institutions and life-giving habits.

Complete article here: The Story: Creation > > Fall > > Redemption

God Alone is Enough by Claudia Mair Burney

My long-time blogger bestie Claudia Mair Burney has just published her first non-fiction work for Paraclete Press. Titled God Alone is Enough, a Spirited Journey with St. Teresa of Avila - it is such a joy to hold the work of my dear friend in my hands. We have read each others words for more years than I can count and watching her journey has been a true joy.

I am the ninth step on a blog tour through the book and was asked to blog on Chapter nine - Ecstasy is Not a Drug - an appropriate chapter for a "redemption junkie" :)

Before talking about Chapter 9, I want to explain the book to those who aren't following the tour.

Claudia makes Theresa's writings so accessible. It is a beautiful primer for the saint(s) - and a beautiful introduction to centering prayer. It is fun, funny and filled with the reality of both the author's and the saint's struggles and joys. The only criticism I might make is that the cover shows a prim and proper woman in prayer - it belies the very nature of this book. If this book was my neighbor I wouldn't have to clean my kitchen, or even get out of my pj's before I invited her over for tea. It is as real as it is lively - just like my friend Mair.

I think a more "Rosie the Riveter" kind of sister on the cover would have been a more accurate visual representation of the sense of the book. Don't get me wrong - it is a beautiful cover - I just am such a visual person that I do unfortunately, at times, judge by said cover. Okay, on to chapter 9...

If anyone is at all familiar with St. Theresa and her Interior Castle you will know of her ecstasy.Theresa opines that there are four stages of prayer that the learner passes through. She uses the metaphor of watering a garden to explain:

"Now let's see how we need to water the garden, so we'll understand what we have to do, how much the labor will cost us, if the time and work we put into it is worth it, and how long it will last. Our garden can be watered in four ways: We can draw water from a well, which is a lot of work. Or you can get the water by turning the crank of a waterwheel and drawing it through an aqueducts. I've tried this myself and know it's not as much trouble to do as the first way. And you get more water.

Or you can channel the water from the flow of a river or stream. The garden is watered much better this way because the ground is saturated and you don't have to water it as frequently. This is a lot less work for the gardener.

Or the water may come from an abundant rain pouring on the soul; the Lord waters the garden himself, without any work on our part. This is by far the best method of all." (pg. 43, 44)

Chapter 9 is focusing on that fourth level of centering prayer - when God sends the rain - Theresa calls it "that sacred kiss" - this is the intimacy of the ecstasy with God that very few, myself included have ever experienced. Theresa explains, "The soul detaches itself from everything, daughter, so it can abide more fully in me. It is no longer the soul that lives but I. Since it is not capable of comprehending what it understands, there is an understanding by not understanding."

The holy longing for that level of intimacy with God - where our soul is joined with God has been lost to most of the church these days. We spend our time hauling water and building aqueducts instead of praying for rain. Centering prayer is a lost art form to the evangelical church and we are poorer for its lack.

This is a book I will be passing on to my daughter and one I'd use regularly with teen girls to teach on centering prayer. Thank you Mair, both for the book and for venturing into non-fiction. I adore your story and look forward to one day holding THAT book in my hands.

Finding the right name

There is nothing in your life
too terrible or too sad
that will not be your friend
when you find the right name to call it,
and calling it by its own name
hastening
it will come upright to your side.

--Laurens van der Post

Step 1

FFFOUND!

Mumford & Sons - Roll Away Your Stone

My Madi has introduced me to a new to me band - I am far behind on the amazing music scene - but will catch up quickly with Mumford & Sons - oh my. I watched "The Cave" on her fb page this a.m. and scooted over to their website and found their new live video on their song Roll Away Your Stone - black and white, foot stomping glorious!



Lyrics to Roll Away Your Stone :

Roll away your stone I will roll away mine
Together we can see what we will find
Don't leave me alone at this time
For I am afraid of what I will discover inside

You told me that I wouldn't find a home
Beneath the fragile substance of my soul
And I have filled this void with things unreal
And all the while my character it steals

Darkness is a harsh term don't you think
Yet it dominates the things I see

It seems that all my bridges have been burned
But you say 'That's exactly how this grace thing works’
It's not the long walk home that will change this heart
But the welcome I receive with every start

Darkness is a harsh term don't you think
And yet it dominates the things I see
Darkness is a harsh term don't you think
And yet it dominates the things I see

Stars hide your fires
For these here are my desires
And I won't give them up to you this time around
And so I will be found
With my stake stuck in the ground
Marking the territory of this newly impassioned soul

And you, you've gone too far this time
You have neither reason nor rhyme
With which to take this soul that is so rightfully mine

First with ourselves

Openness is the sign of a fully human life. It leads to the capacity to give life to others. It is important to know our own selves, and that we are different from others, and to be compassionate, first with ourselves.

- Jean Vanier, A Human Future, November 04.

My new tag line

Blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.

Groucho Marx