Ragamuffin ~

One of the first things I learned this morning, between walking my dog and sipping my coffee and deciding if I could get away with this messy hair on a Saturday, is that Brennan Manning died.

I was sitting on the couch when I found out, and I burst into tears.

I never met him. I heard him speak only once, and that was years ago in a small college-town auditorium where some friends and I were stashed away in the cheap seats, so far from the stage that his small frame was barely visible.

But his dog-eared, highlighted and underlined books are tucked into every shelf space in my home.

His words are carved into quiet, internal places I return to when I need to hear the voice that reminds me that I am God's beloved child, that we all bear that identity.

Brennan Manning was one of the first Christ-lovers who helped me to see a life of faith with new eyes, with a new heart; not as an endless, duty-filled list of assignments: to do, to do more, to do better, to do it all with great strength and without fail.

Instead, he invited me to see myself as he saw himself, as a ragamuffin: a bit bedraggled, a bit scruffy, a bit of a mess. Not the kind of person marked by perfection and sought out by power and influence and beauty; but rather, a person marked by a growing awareness of their belovedness, an awareness that comes from letting God come a little closer, and then closer still, over time, and finding in that gritty intimacy, all that a life of faith can bring: famine and feast, brokenness and wholeness, waiting and wonder, disappointment and hope, death and life, every bit of it held by a God who has come so near that I get to call him "Abba" ... daddy. 

I'm so grateful I was introduced to Brennan Manning, to his faith, to his heart, to his journey. I'm so glad to have his books in my home, his words tucked away in those quiet, internal places.

"My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ, and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it." - from The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning

God bless Brennan Manning, God bless us in our missing his presence. God bless us in living into our belovedness.

Mourning Into Dancing ~

You have turned my mourning into dancing

You have turned my mourning

You have turned my mourning into dancing

You have turned my mourning

You are clothing me with gladness

You are clothing me with joy

My sack-cloth and my ashes fall away

(from Psalm 30)

There are so many things that draw me to the liturgical church. The prayers, the creeds, the seasons and the colors, the vestments and the candles, the rituals. The repetition, the sacred tending to ancient practices. The Lectionary. It is brilliant to me, that in the course of a few years, years A, B and C, a person in one of many liturgical churches will read the same scriptures and pray the same prayers as those being read and prayed by seekers, believers, skeptics and wonderers all around the world.

Every few months, to help sketch out a few musical ideas for my parish, I get a sneak peek at the upcoming scripture readings, the Lectionary. The information is available on a thousand websites, but I am old school and like the feel of paper sifting through my fingers, so I wander now and then into the parish office and reach into the oak drawer where Hazel stashes the bulletin inserts. I get to look ahead at the next several weeks of readings,  I get to experience a sense of the the arc, the trajectory we're on with the story God is still telling. I love knowing what's coming up. It's better than getting my OPB member magazine in the mail.

A few months ago, as I was leafing through my newly absconded readings from Hazel's stash,  I saw that a reading from Psalm 30 was fast approaching: "You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have put off my sack-cloth and clothed me with joy."

The timing seemed sweet, as this bit of scripture had been winding itself through my heart and mind for awhile.

A practice of mine is to try to craft simple songs for worship and meditation that are drawn from scripture. This is something I've enjoyed for years, much of the enjoyment coming from the thought that, with putting scripture to music, there's a decent chance that the words won't be dumb.

This particular passage, the one where mourning is transformed and we're given something new to wear to the dance we're invited to, this passage was the one I'd most recently spent time with at my piano, noodling around until my fingers found their way to a singable melody.

Something about where God has me right now, something in the tone and tenor of God's voice in my ear, is all about turning: fear into courage, resignation into openness, mourning into dancing.

The thing is, I'm not much of a dancer. I can't imagine it's my clunky frame or awkward social anxiety or general lack of coordination below the knees. Nah. Couldn't be me. I blame my grandfather.

He was a Conservative Baptist preacher for over fifty years. I loved the twinkle in his eye, the way he called me "sugar", his broad shoulders and the funky eyeglasses he wore. But this sweet man knew how to wield a leash, and he rarely loosened his grip on the one he had on my childhood, even from miles and miles away. Dancing, movies, cards, all were 'tools of the devil' according to grandpa, so, while we got away with a few hands of Old Maid now and then, movies and dances were simply not allowed, and dances were particularly characterized with vivid warnings as the playground of all sorts of naughtiness, so, on the off-chance that grandpa would somehow find out, dances were strictly off-limits.

I'm sure he meant well.  I know I mean well, when I'm being bossy and controlling. Oh, I mean well.

I do recall sneaking into one school dance for just a few minutes during the sixth grade. The evening included a mix of parent/teacher meet-ups, a display of student macaroni-art in the hallways, while in the gym, the 4th, 5th and 6th graders were sock-hopping to some 70s top-twenty hits played on cassette tapes over a crackly audio system. I ditched my mother and the macaroni art-gallery and wandered into the gym with a friend, you know, just to see what the cool kids were doing, and to see who my crushes, Tim and Tony, were dancing with. I leaned against the wall, took in the lights and the music and the naughtiness all around me, dropped my jaw like a baby bird reaching for her first fat worm, and waited for the ground to crack open, swallow me up and hurl me straight into the belly of hell. Yea, a tight grip on that leash my grandpa held. I'm sure I looked over my shoulder to make sure he hadn't walked into the gym at that very moment. I fled and never set foot on a dance floor again.

Until now. I've been asked to receive and respond to God's kind invitation. I've been asked to allow for my mourning to become my dancing. What might this transformation look like to a girl who doesn't know how to allow for one to become the other? How does a girl find her way from the wall to the dance floor? What does a girl do, when she doesn't know how to dance?

She takes off her sack-cloth called shame, and her ashes called sorrow. She allows them to fall away. She straps on her sparkly shoes called gladness, she buttons up her fancy dress called joy, she unties the leash that’s kept her tethered in fear and she stumbles onto the dance floor, where she’s met with a strong hand and a kind voice to help her find her footing. She leans into the music, lets herself be held, lets herself be led, and lets herself begin to dance. Step, step, turn. Step, step, turn. Mourning into dancing. Ashes into gladness. Sack-cloth into joy.

I’m not looking over my shoulder anymore, afraid that grandpa will show up and see what naughtiness I’m up to.  He died several years ago, well into his 90s, after giving his life away in ministry. And knowing what he knows now, freed himself from his own tethers, I can only imagine that he's been dancing all the while.