Lighting the world...

Within me is a love song. It sings of loving winter, loving the snow, and especially loving the moon when it rises so fat and beautiful over the mountain and the whole dark world begins to glow!

And then I ask myself - how can I make the world glow too? What's mine to do, my calling, that place, (as Frederic Buechner describes it), “where my deep joy meets the world's deep need”... I love Buechner’s naming of the Holy at work within us. How generous is the Holy of Holies that our life-work can become known to us by the deep joy it elicits in our entire beings!

For me, this past year has been a time of greater and greater clarity about my own life-work. Urgency grows in me for the well-being of the earth, for our connection with this generosity of a planet that we lucked out to exist on! ‘Course it wasn’t really luck since there was the Creator behind it all, yet there is within me the sense of luck, of unlooked for blessing – would that be ‘grace’, maybe...?

Having received this incredible vulnerable gift of a human body to inhabit, and the equally incredible and equally vulnerable gift of a beautiful planet to dwell upon, I am continually seized with the intense desire to respond in kind. For me, this means offering retreats where people get to come and reconnect with that child’s delight we all once knew.

Remember what treasure it was when a day stretched before you with unlimited possibilities? When there was the prospect of climbing trees, playing in dirt or sand or snow, collecting rocks or leaves or insects, building roads or forts or faery grottos….. That was you living intimately with the earth. That was you in deep relationship with our beautiful planet. And that is what I dangle in front of people’s noses and hearts. Remember that feeling? Wasn’t it grand!

And the great thing is it’s not something that belongs only to children. It belongs to you as an adult too. So I dangle it not to torment or taunt, but to invite and affirm. This is your heritage, your inheritance, your legacy. And it is waiting for you to reclaim it, waiting for your home-coming.

We are all prodigal daughters and sons here on the earth and our home-coming will be celebrated because it will mean the end of neglecting the planet. It will mean the end of pretending we haven’t noticed the consequences of what we name ‘civilization’. It will mean the end of standing by, helplessly, as we see climate change accelerating.

When we love something or someone openly, we step into a place of accountability. When we have a relationship of unconcealed intimacy, we choose to be known for who and what we love. When we allow our hearts to be pierced with tenderness and enchantment, we will protect what we love with all we have.

I would. Wouldn’t you?