Daily Signet

“Through me is the way into the woeful city.… Leave every hope, ye who enter!” Would that more theologians were Dantes, able to convert their tremendous theological content into a poetry of doctrine, into melodies of theology that one simply can’t get out of one’s head. With unforgettable lines, characters, and images, the poet/theologian takes technical, dogmatic detail and forms melodies that everyone can hum. Eternally rich expressions, they are universal, but never trivial in their simplicity and appeal, like folk tunes that appear over and over again woven into even far more complex theological symphonies.

“The Mission of Virgil” by William Blake; @birminghamuseumstrust on Unsplash

After passing through the gates of Hell, Dante meets up with Casella, an old musician friend of his, and Dante asks him to sing again of the song of love which was wont to quiet all his longings. “Love which in my mind discourses with me,” he then began, "so sweetly that the sweetness still within me sounds.” May all Christuman theology be of such sound: may all our syllogisms be written on the heart, the seat of song:  be propounded not just from believing, but from beloving, written as if by magnificent amateur theologians/composers transcribing melodies of the love with which our minds discourse. May our theology be written and lived in melodies so sublime that they resound within us eternally, converting faith to understanding and understanding to delight.                                                                               

Teri Martin

Daily Signet

Photo credit @v2osk on Unsplash

How often the experience of grace begins in dark, earthy matter, and is stirred awake by the wash of tears – of frustration, joy, sorrow. And yet, from the mix of dark matter and tears, something graceful begins to grows and strengthens and finds its way – even on those days that seem locked in an impasse, close-fisted even and all bound up. Then, suddenly, without warning, in a surprising burst, grace opens up into a multi-petaled, richly colored, intricately-designed bloom with a unique beauty all its own. If we were naïve enough and not desensitized by our need to insulate our direct experience of the world by labeling it with an abstraction such as, “Oh, that’s just a rose” or “a daisy” or “a lotus”, how much more would we directly experience the beauty, the aesthetically pleasing sight of each such flower and the sweet scent, the soft buttery touch of its petal. As Buckminster Fuller, the American futurist, would counsel us: “Dare to be naïve.” For if we were naïve enough, if we were receptive enough, we might receive and experience in our inner sight the realization of a manifestation of grace in some of our darkest moments, the riotous experience of something graceful bursting open into the fruit of the human. If we were but naïve enough how much more would we experience the sight and scent of the bloom of light that is our calling, our joy. The 15th c theologian, Nicholas of Cusa said: “Lord, Thou hast given me my being of such a nature that it can continually make itself more able to receive thy grace and goodness.”  If we were but naïve enough, who knows the unintended effects of our excursions into such floral rewards? How much more of such grace and goodness would we be able to perceive and receive, the pollination unto good of the intricate bloom of still more such grace.  

Benjamin Martin

On This Day…

Birthday of George Washington

Edna St. Vincent Millay born 1892 in Rockland, Maine, died 1950: Pulitzer Prize recipient for her poetry. Works: A Few Figs From Thistle, Love Is Not All, The Ballad of the Harp Weaver
Quotes: “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another, it’s one damn thing over and over again.”

Daily Signet

Three mornings a week, Nina’s daughter brought her to the Alzheimer’s Day Program. When she arrived, the feeling in the room changed. Nearly a hundred years old, Nina was a tiny person made of love. Her face was a rosy brown, generously wrinkled—she looked like rich earth which held the sun’s warmth. Her white hair was pulled into a skinny braid that wandered down her back. Her first act, before even taking off her coat, was to go around to each person, reaching up her small hands to illicit us to bend down for her hug. If a new person were there, Nina did not hang back for an introduction—they too were hugged. Murmuring Spanish in her growly little voice, she patted our cheeks and looked into our eyes, loving us quite thoroughly. When all had been tended, she could remove her wraps and sit down for coffee. I began to notice that after morning snack, when people were moving about the room to whatever activities they might join, Nina would always go over to the kitchen sink and, standing on tip-toe, fill her empty cup with water. Setting it down on the counter, she would put her hand in her pocket and take out a small, white pill. This she held in her left hand, and closing her eyes, crossed herself, murmuring a brief blessing. Then she would take the medicine for her blood pressure. This astounded me each time I saw it. I was shamed for my usual attitude of wishing I didn’t have to take pills, or just mindlessly swallowing them down. Now as I stand at my sink, blessing the pills in my hand, I also bless the spirit of dear Nina who has now left this earth, for such a lesson of grace.

Donna Piper Leichtling

On This Day…

W. H. Auden born 1907 in York, England, died 1973: poet. Works: The Age of Anxiety; Look, Strangers; Another Time
Quotes: “Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.” “A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.”

Daily Signet

Photo credit @zenoeffect on Unsplash

The 9th Christuman Foundation reads, “We seek to marry the vision and the action through a true beloving.” I think this to be the most difficult of all our foundations for it calls upon us to consummate our love with God—to take the pitch of our passions and joy and find ways to unite with him—and still we must work, attend committee meetings, clean up messes, feed the animals, tend to the details. I remember my daughter’s statement when she stepped off the merry-go-round and started to stagger: “Oops! I almost lost my conscience." How she had come to associate “conscience” with balance, I’ll never know. But I thought it a most brilliant insight—that the moral compass of the human conscience was somehow interrelated with keeping a balance.

I think there is something heroic in seeking the balance between the vision and the action. I don’t think this is done by giving twelve hours to prayer and meditation and twelve hours to action. Somehow it is finding a way to saturate your actions, our work be with a full awareness of the divine. There are days when I want to stop the madness, retire to the house on the hill and just focus on the vision. But my work is where the vision, the beloving, the challenge of becoming human occurs. Even though I am confronted with a web of foibles and conflicts that I can’t seem to untangle, I still press on the accelerator and let in the fuel to sustain the momentum.

I pray that we can retreat from the division of “time for God” and then “time for everything else,” retreat from seeing what we do as mundane and that only time in worship or in prayer is a sacred moment. I hope that as a community we can serve as reminders to each other to make sacred the daily actions of our days and continue to converse with God that we may be alight with his flame in everything we do. May it be so.                                        

Benjamin Martin

Daily Signet

Daniel Kish lost his sight from cancer at 13 months of age. Determined to freely navigate his world, young Daniel set out to master the technique of echolocation. Used by animals such as bats and dolphins, Daniel would make a clicking noise to create reverberations that enabled him to determine where objects are in space. This auditory feedback allowed him not only to find where objects were in space, it allowed him to create an image of the world in his mind—a world, he says, he can “see.” He practiced this daily, taking tumbles, colliding into undetected objects, and suffering countless bruises, breaks, and scrapes. Despite parental neglect and the disapproval of neighbors and authorities, he persisted until he could seamlessly navigate not only his way to school on his bike, but unpredictable terrain such as mountain trails or unfamiliar biking paths. 

I believe we have our own sort of spiritual echolocation: that given our spiritual blindness, when faced with the darkness of the unknown, fearful of what unseen obstacle may suddenly present itself, we can send out sounds through prayer and meditation and wait for the echo, for the feedback from the Divine. While we do not receive the reverberations through our ears, instead we open our hearts, for this is where the call and response occurs. It is through our love of the Divine that we sense and discover our inner world, and then, with the grace of pure vision, “see” a clearer path. Saint-Exupery says in The Little Prince, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” 

In ballet, dancers are seen as graceful when they use only the muscles necessary for each particular movement, without thinking about it. This ability is not a natural gift, but comes from years of daily practice. Just as Daniel practiced echolocation for years before being able to move confidently through the world. For us, it is through a daily practice of prayer and meditation that we can let go of all that is unnecessary, all that is self-conscious, and open our hearts to receive the echo of the Divine, to perceive a grace-filled life.  

Alexis Drabek

On This Day…

Shinto day of remembrance for the beginning of internment in the United States of loyal Japanese citizens for the duration of the war (1942)

Carson McCullers born 1917 in Columbus, Georgia, died 1967: novelist. Works: The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, A Member of the Wedding, Ballad of the Sad Café
Quotes: “I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.” “There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.”