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Jingle all the Way!!! Punjabi Jingle Bells

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:32:20 GMT

The Combined International Churches of Phnom Penh

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:25:43 GMT

Sherwin Togonon's photo of the Gr 2 Class - Logos International School

This morning I attended the "The Combined International Churches of Phnom Penh" service. It was four English-speaking Christian faith communities working together:

Church of Christ our Peace (Anglican)
International Christian Assembly (Assemblies of God/Pentacostal)
International Christian Fellowship (Interdenominational/Evangelical)
Roman Catholic Community (English-speaking)

The service took place in a big wedding venue... much red (carpet and chairs) with pink and gold swaths of fabric around the stage and huge floral bouquets decorating the wedding/banqueting hall. There were refreshments following with sweet fellowship with friends and strangers.

I have been attending Church of Christ our Peace (Anglican) and was able to catch a ride with one of the Music leaders (also co-worker)... I attended with several other co-workers. I was moved to tears by the closing "Prayer of Celebration". I approached the woman from the "Roman Catholic Community" and asked if I might have a copy of her prayer to use as my "Christmas Card" (I thought the bulletin had her name but it doesn't but I will discover it and attribute it to her soon.) This prayer/poem seemed to have an almost incantational power over me... and, as it is about the Incarnation, this seems fitting.

And the Word became flesh, and walked amongst us.

Father, Origin of the universe, Author of Life manifesting your presence in a tiny child. We thank you for the gift of your son Jesus,

Son of the living God, the infant is an act of hope, and in his heart the hidden spoke - in his soul infinity, about him ecstasy

Begotten, not made - of one being before time - Child but not, flesh but spirit, man but flame and in the mystery, blood and death and majesty....despite ------because of it, forgiveness, hope, embrace, bright mystery - trembling dawn - in us Father, let Him be born.

Brothers and sisters in Christ as we await the coming of the Lord - Let us create a new language of prayer. Free from creeds and cultures, borne of the one fire within us all the breath that gives us life.

Let us celebrate the love within and let us be one.

Gentle Lord make us whole, heal us in our frustrations and fears, hold us and be our day and our night our thought and our home

Lord as we celebrate your birth.

Possess us now with Love and bind us to each other

Be present in all we meet - walk with us, as we cast our out pain and heal the divisions between all your peoples, and let us shine for in your birth Love has overcome.

Amen

because of our love for Gramma...

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 22:49:38 GMT

From Christmas and more

Today is a day of remembering...
Today is a day of gratefulness...
Today is a day of carrying sadness together...
Today is a day of being together because of our love for Gramma...

As we remember, each of us will return to different events, different conversations, different moments in time. May we revisit the brightest and best in our hearts and minds... the shared laughter, the shared tears and the shared meals of celebration. For those of her generation, it will be memories of overcoming... of surviving dust blizzards, of bounty on rats tails, of re-usable wedding dresses and weighty conversations of things human and things Divine. For her children there will be memories of being well loved, of being kept clean, of being clothed and patched. There will be memories of supportive family, church and prairie communities. There will be memories of gardens, of harvest and of food on the table. Some will remember being fed... simply, yet in a kitchen that always had room for one more.

For the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, there will be memories of times on the farm in Alberta, playing in the barn, climbing hay bales, the various farm animals and pets and then her move to the farm further west. This next stage of life provided more opportunities for her to be a quiet and supportive presence at each family gathering. She continued to move in her gifts of hospitality, generosity and prayer. She also improved her Scrabble skills, devoted much time to her knitting and enjoyed her half-water-half-coffee drink to be had with something sweet.

As we are grateful, our hearts turn to the faithfulness of a shy woman who sought to serve her Lord without question. We are grateful for her devotion and faithfulness to her family. We will remember a woman who, though orphaned, chose to rely on the goodness of God in every circumstance. She believed Jesus had good plans for her, and provided her with a future full of hope. She lived in this hope and found strength in the promise of His faithfulness. Today, in this week before the celebration of Christ's birth, we are grateful as we realize she is truly Home for Christmas... she is celebrating her love of Jesus afresh with those who have gone before her... She is celebrating with Him in that place and at that table He has prepared for her. She has joined her cloud of witnesses. Now she will be one who will cheer each of us on in our journey Heaven-ward, toward our hearts' Home.

Yet we are sad... Many may feel the world is diminished, different and empty without her presence and faithful prayers. We will keenly miss her unobtrusiveness and desire to be in our midst even as age diminished her sight and hearing... she joked about not being able to see good, hear good or smell good. As infirmity became her constant companion, she graciously received the help she needed to make living at home possible. Finally, as she declined she remained grateful for all the love and care she received from others. Sadly, we release this loving spirit from the frail body which faithfully carried her for 91 years.

So, as we are together, let us tell those stories and share the thousands of simple moments we've shared through the years. This would have filled her heart with joy. This may also be a way to strengthen the upcoming generations. These stories of the firm foundations of faith, of the hardship and hilarity of farm life and of the abundance of support only large families can give and receive... stories have the power to carry some of the burden of our loss. Together we can use this time of remembering to care for each others' hearts. We can look forward to sharing this bright hope... this foretaste of glory. May this time prepare our Hearts to meet our Generous Creator. Then, like my grandmother, we can rejoice when the Shepherd comes to call each of us in his goodness and mercy. When we, too, are invited to sit at His table and dwell in the house of Lord forever.

Psalm 23
A Psalm of David.
The LORD is my shepherd;
         I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
         He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul;
         He leads me in the paths of righteousness
         For His name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
         I will fear no evil;
         For You are with me;
         Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
         You anoint my head with oil;
         My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
         All the days of my life;
         And I will dwell in the house of the LORD
         Forever.

May you go into your day blessed and anointed by the tenderness of a mother's love for her children and by a faithful woman's love of her Lord.

A eulogy written for my Grandmother's memorial service earlier in another time zone. The picture is from Christmas 2007. She is "Home" for Christmas. Thank you Ted for sending this clip of singing from the service.

"Let Reality Get at Me"- Richard Rohr

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:23:37 GMT

"Let Reality Get at Me"- Richard Rohr

Many of our people create for themselves a permanently maintained happiness in the midst of so much public suffering. That state is based on an illusion about the nature of reality. It can only work if we block ourselves from a certain degree of that reality. That's what is meant by denial. The Christian, though, is always saying, "Come, Lord Jesus." In other words, "Let reality get at me, the full reality, the Cosmic Christ, all that is." The Incarnation is the refusal of all denial. It is God saying yes to the muddy, the messy, the partial, the powerlessness of it all.

from Preparing for Christmas With Richard Rohr

Chastity and Christmas - Ron Rolheiser

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:26:17 GMT

Chastity and Christmas - Ron Rolheiser

Scripture and Christian tradition emphasize that Jesus could only be born out of a chaste womb, just as Christian Spirituality emphasizes he can only come to full bloom inside of a chaste heart. Why? Why this emphasis on chastity?

Chastity needs to be properly understood. For too long we have had an overly-narrow and mostly false concept of chastity. Chastity is too commonly identified with sexual abstinence and sexuality is then seen as something that, in itself, militates against chastity and spirituality. But chastity is not the same thing as celibacy; indeed it is not even, first and foremost, a sexual concept. Someone can be chaste but not celibate, just as someone can be celibate but not chaste. My parents were not celibate, they gave birth to a large family, but they were wonderfully chaste persons. The reverse can also be true. Someone can be celibate but far from chaste.

What is chastity? We are chaste when we stand before the world, others, and God in a way which allows them to be fully themselves without letting our own impatience, selfishness, or unwillingness to remain in tension violate their reality and their natural unfolding. What is meant by that?

Allow me to present three images for this:

• In her book, Holy The Firm, Annie Dillard shares this story: One evening, alone in her cabin, she was watching a moth slowly emerge from its cocoon. The process was fascinating but interminably slow. At a point she lost patience and needed to get on to other things, so she picked up a candle and applied a little heat to the process. It worked. The added heat sped up the process and the moth emerged more quickly from its cocoon, but, since a natural process had been interfered with and unnaturally rushed, the moth emerged with ill-formed wings which didn’t allow it to fly properly. A fault in chastity led to stunted growth.

• The movie, Sense and Sensibility, based on Jane Austen’s classic novel, presents its leading character, a woman played by Emma Thompson, as someone who is asked to carry an extremely painful tension for a long time, one having to do with unrequited and unconsummated love. She has no one with whom she can really share her pain and her circumstance requires her to carry on as if she was not carrying this pain. She carries that tension for a long time, sublimating her pain into a graciousness that she extends even to the very persons who are the source of her tension. Only after a long time is the tension is finally resolved and her forbearance in not forcing an earlier, premature resolution, her willingness to carry the tension to term, helps bring about deeper life for everyone, not least for herself. This is the essence of chastity.

• After the Italian, spiritual writer, Carlo Carretto, had spend a number of years living as a hermit in the Sahara desert, he was asked what message he would give to the world if someone asked him the question: What, in your solitude and prayer, do you hear God saying to those of us who are living active lives in the world? Carretto replied: God is saying: learn to wait, learn to wait for everything – for love, for fulfillment, for consummation, for God! Learning to wait, giving God and life the space to unfold as they need to, is the very essence of chastity.

In a number of his books, Nikos Kazantzakis, both fondly and bitterly, makes this assertion: God, it seems, is never in a hurry, while we are always in a hurry. He’s right: Life unfolds according to its own innate rhythms which try our patience and it will not let themselves be rushed, except at a cost. Life and love demand both the time and the space within which to unfold according to their own internal dictates. Whenever, because of impatience, selfishness, or our unwillingness to stay inside a tension, we short-circuit that process we, in slight or deep ways, violate their reality.

Chastity is the virtue that invites us to live in patience, to wait, to respect what’s other, and to carry tension long enough so that the other can truly be other and gift can unfold precisely as gift.

The word sublime takes its root in the word sublimation. Nothing can be sublime unless there is first sublimation. Nobody gives birth to a baby without a long period of gestation, nobody writes a doctoral thesis in two hours, nobody creates an artistic masterpiece without long hours of sweat and labor, and nobody becomes a heroic individual without carrying unbearable tension. Cinderella only got to go to the ball after she had spent sufficient time in the ashes. Jesus only got to the glory and freedom of Easter Sunday by first sweating blood in the garden.

That is why the Messiah can only be born from a chaste womb and come to life fully only inside of a chaste heart. Christmas allows for no shortcuts.

I'll be home for Christmas...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:24:52 GMT

I'm dreamin' tonight of a place I love
Even more then I usually do
And although I know it's a long road back
I promise you

I'll be home for Christmas
You can count on me
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents under the tree
Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love light beams
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams

Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love light beams
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams
If only in my dreams

My maternal grandmother, at 91, passed away a few hours ago... Tomorrow I will sew and as I do... I'll think of the pink eyelet dress with ruffles she made me when I was nine... and of her "fry bread" we call them Cheat-a-Bellies... here's a pict from 2007...

She is Home... Home for Christmas.

From Gramma's Birthday

Attaining Maturity - Jean Vanier

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 10:20:39 GMT

Attaining Maturity - Jean Vanier

Many of Aristotle's principles are valid for any ethics. Being human does not mean simply obeying laws that come from outside, but attaining maturity. Being human means becoming as perfectly accomplished as possible. If we do not become fully accomplished, someting is lost to the whole of humanity. For Aristotle this accomplishment derives from the most perfect activity: that of seeking the truth in all things, shunning lies and illusions, acting in accordance with justice, transcending oneself to act for the good of others in society. -

- Jean Vanier, Made For Happiness, quoted in Jean Vanier, Essential Writings, p. 27

to really understand somebody...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 05:41:32 GMT

"I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them"
- Ender's Game

Christmas Party Cambodian Style!

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 07:41:31 GMT

Yesterday was the Logos International Staff Christmas Party what a celebration!

An "Ask" for Your Prayers

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 07:33:09 GMT

An ask... for your prayer...

As you might imagine, there are many ways to help financially here... these are my favourites because they have or are planning to let me do quilting/patchwork lessons with them!

Please pray I might help others find joy in creativity and that I might continue to be faithful to the Love and Compassion of Jesus in this place. I'm so excited about the quilting supplies my church & family are sending & bringing over. The notions and tools will help with this small but fun endeavor! Thank you Helen, Jan and Mom!