Prayer Coming out of Nowhere

Thank you God for - well - for all my gifts. Know what I like about you God? Everything! Sure, I’ve never seen you, never heard the sound of your voice (except inside me), and I never know for sure what you want of me, or for the world. But some strong thread connects me to you, and I’m not dangling on it but somehow sewed into your reality. Again, thanks for making my life seamlessly purposeful.Amen.

Editor's Request

My editor, Annie O'Shaughnessy of Soul Flares magazine, asked me to back track and tell her how and when Thomas Merton,spiritual writer came to be such an influence in my life. I took a few minutes to simply stream my thoughts:

"I still remember the day. I was a novice in the Sisters of St. Joseph, standing before the side book case looking for a good read. I caught the title: The Sign of Jonas. I pulled it down, opened it at random to read a journal entry about two black men observed by the author, Merton, who were sitting outside on a long log reading a newspaper, and happily laughing at something, maybe what they were reading? Merton commented: These men were having more fun than we who are supposed to know so much, like these uneducated guys knew more than the monastery gurus..

I took the book out on the long dock over the St. Lucie River in Jensen Beach, to the edge where the wind really blows. This wild monk and writer was blessedly piercing my soul, teaching me how to find more of God. Merton made it sound so easy, so fluid. But of course, it was tough work. Here he was saying I could just be me, as I was, with my stuff out of place, with my dreams askew. Yes, I could trust God. But more, I could trust myself.

And after that, I read every Merton book we had in the convent.

Years later, as a single woman with my own name, Ms Azar, I initiated a Merton Group in my home. People were drawn to his idea of holiness which, simply put, meant being and becoming more of who we were, which any fool knows is the hardest of holy paths to follow. That group ran for almost twelve years. Some friends stayed for all those years.

And of course, Annie, I met my future husband, Jim because of Merton. His mother had read Merton, and he easily contracted the spiritual disease.

I have, and can't seem to let go of them, almost every book Merton ever wrote. I read him still, almost daily. His journals make me think and pray and yes, despair about the way governments lead us into destruction. His government at the time was the Nixon era, the bomb shelter buildup, and the horror of the Vietnam War.

But how we just can't give up. He poo pooed Television, but was so inflamed when he saw police dogs going after black people in Selma (was that the place?) he decided that TV had a place since good television was able to affect hearts.

Merton believed that a spark of God lived in all of us, and we could never, no matter how bad we were, (Hitler included), extinguish that spark. I think because of Merton I was lead to work for peace, for prejudice reduction, for feeding the homeless, for Middle East resolution... well... you get the idea.

Enough said???

Blessings,

Adele

Branching To Another Desperately Needed Peace

I am an Arab American women who writes about making peace with our money. I'm also involved in praying for peace in the Middle East. In the 90's, I worked long and hard with devoted American Jews to bring Jews and Arabs, both Arab Christians and Arab Muslims to a greater understanding of each other. Many times, we succeeded and groups that had once been alienated from each other became friends.

I received this essay a few days ago. I weep that it is so, that the Middle East carnage continues. The essay was signed by over 109 Jews. I want to honor their word and print their sadness on my blog. I wanted you to know, many of my own Jewish friends mourn this reality as well.

------------------------------------------------------------
On the subject of celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel.

This article appeared in the Guardian (UK) on Wednesday April 30
2008

. It was last updated at00:00 on April 30 2008.
================

In May, Jewish organisations will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. This is understandable in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-semitism and Hitler's genocidal policies. As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians.
>
In April 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin and the mortar attack on Palestinian civilians in Haifa's market square, Plan Dalet was put into operation. This authorised the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state. We will not be celebrating.

>
In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda andRamleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. We will not be celebrating.

>
In all, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians (Israeli citizens) were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right. We will not be celebrating.

>

We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.


>We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.

Secular Sanctity

As you know, the title of my book is Money As Sacrament. Back in 1984, Father Edward Hays wrote about money in one of his many books, Secular Sanctity. Only last year I found his book. What Joy. He wasn't a bit shy about calling money sacramental. At the time, ten years later that I had decided on my title, I was definitely feeling I was in new and scary waters. Sacraments in the Catholic church, were just seven. Yes, seven and only seven. How many times as a Catholic Nun had I taught these church truths. So besides feeling that I was original by using that title -not any longer- I really wondered if the church might kick me out.

Well, they didn't kick me out and I've been spreading this truth: That when we use money with integrity, honesty, and good will, we bring God into the process and our exchange with another becomes sacramental. This truth is catching on and I'm feeling blessed about the whole matter.

Won't you spread the idea as well?

Here are a few paragraphs from Father Hays thoughts on the sacramental use of money:

First we should love our money and take pride in it. It is good to be proud of having earned it, for money is one sign of a job well done. Every paycheck is a pat on the back.

Next, mindful that our money is a sacrament in which we can say “This is me... this is my sweat and toil...” we should use it to nourish our bodies, which it represents. So, part of our income goes for food, clothing, shelter and also for entertainment and fun. This expression of self-love is good and holy.

The dollar bills in your billfold are not only a sign of you, but also of the community to which you belong. They are the frequent reminder that you belong to a certain nation whose money you use symbolically. So, with part of your money you pay taxes. You should rejoice that this communion of self helps to build highways, pay teachers’ salaries and patch up the potholes in the street in front of your house...

Some of your money goes into our Social Security system and is given to the elderly and the needy. So a part of you puts food on the plate of some aged man or woman or helps pay the rent of an elderly person. By means of this withholding payment you are able to put flesh on the words that Jesus speaks about seeing him in those who are in need...

Finally, in numerous ways we are inclined to use parts of our money on gifts to those we love, to friends, and to those organizations, and activities we feel are important to the world and to growth of the human spirit. Whenever we give a gift of money we could seal it with a kiss or a wink...saying, “This is my body...this is me...this is my love.”

Edward Hays. Secular Sanctity, Leavenworth, Kansas, Forest Press of Peace, 1984, 41.
===========================================================
Dear reader, you can see why I fell in love with the words of this unknown priest from Kansas. He had prepared the way for my own thinking and I didn't even know it.

Moving Beyond the Bruise

Recently reading the French word, “chantepleure” brought to mind the emotion I felt when I suffered the loss of five thousand dollars in an attempt to learn Arabic at Vermont’s Middlebury College. Chantepleure means to weep and sing at the same time.

I had enrolled in Middlebury’s immersion program. I contracted to speak no English for nine weeks in order to read and write this Middle Eastern Language. I desperately wanted to take on Arabic since I was involved here in Orlando in Middle East peacemaking. I would bond more easily with the local Arabic people.

As the class progressed, there was no doubt. Arabic’s strange calligraphy and guttural sounds were leading me into a depression so strong that one day I simply got up from class, tears rolling down my cheeks, and walked down to the river’s old Middlebury bridge. To this day, I remember staring down long and hard at the dancing rapids inviting me to join them.

That night, I lay in bed, eyes swollen after that long cry. I could not talk to anyone there. Unlike hermits who value their silence, I felt desperately alone by my imposed quiet. Never before had I been so violently thrown apart from a community, so beaten down as if I were a nobody, a dunce. I was fifty-five years old. It shouldn’t be happening to me.

At some point that next morning, with the help a bright beaming sun, I began to reinvent the entire experience, wondering if I could turn trauma into triumph. Could I discover something far more essential? I decided to skip class and let my bike take me to the Middlebury library. Something sparked as I moved among the library shelves, pulling off books, dropping some in my haste, taking them outside onto the lawn chairs, desperately hopeful to heal my drooping spirit. I sat reading and rereading. I marked passages in my notebook, studied stories, poured over self-help books, bios. I asked God to speak to me through these familiar letters and words in the author’s English language.

English was singing in my head, and I realized how much I had missed its loving melodies. For weeks, I had not spoken or listened to this native language. I threw down that promise not to speak or write English and under leafy Maples, I pulled out my notebook. My pen pushed into my story, my questions to myself. I wrote Dear God letters and letters to my bruised spirit. I felt sweet kinship with the whistling birds in tree tops. Little did I suspect but my ability to write was being born from that quiet of times under Vermont’s green.

Calmly resting in the serene landscape of Vermont, I found my sanity returning from this language freedom. I sang, other times wept, chantepleure happening in its deepest meaning. It was abundantly clear. I was the caterpillar gestating and longing in the moments to break free.

Now, only with years passed, can I look back with gratitude for that summer’s chantepleure. That writing of a heartbreak exchange between pain and loss included prayers to God who, in the entire process, had never failed to move me forward to a place where, unknown to me, I really wanted to go. It was not so much wanting to stand up as an Arabic speaking communicator, but to enter a field where my communicating words would inspire others by life’s good twists and turns.

Eventually, my writing focused on a subject that grew out of the $5000 loss. I spent that money, not to learn Arabic, but to fall in love with my native language. I published my first book, Money As Sacrament, the product of a silent hope, a gift to others and most especially, God’s gift to me.

A Soulfull Orange tree

The backyard garden calls forth a deep happiness. I walk its pathways amid flowering and fruited gifts and peeking weeds. There is stability here. It grows on me. Papaya, grapefruit and orange trees rest in their familiar places, green and growing. They beam in smiling sunlight.


It was my delight to enter each into the ground. I watered, fed. and picked off enemy bugs. I talked with them. Today, they answer me: heavy oranges and grapefruits hang low on thick branches. I laugh, pulling them off as many as my arms can carry. Some roll off and even more as I bend to pick them up.

I am my immigrant father of years ago who honored and worshiped his first Florida orange tree. “Florida is sunshine itself.” He bowed before that first planted fruit tree as if bowing at the communion rail... as if holy bread had been given from the hands of the priest as if this tree had come directly from God.

I too, bow and can’t help but exclaim as I hold the round balls above me: “God, You shower me with earthly benedictions, planting me in a bed of delight.”

The more I get into this experiment called life, I resonate with something called “enough” I focus more on what I’ve gained rather than what I might have lost. This garden carries me through, connects me with that place of contentment. I am rich and and the flow doesn’t stop.

Enlightened Money

Enlightened Money

A deep yearning exists in each of us to find the sacred, yes, the holy even in that medium of exchange we call money. It is this vital tool of our culture that sustains and comforts. So how can we better see its blessedness. How can we know its goodness, not only in the work of commerce, but in our philanthropic insights.

Let me be clear: any fool knows it’s not the paper money that is holy but the human will, the heart, the good intention of the user that makes this symbol sacred. And when it happens, I’m right there.

I chanced upon an article in Ode Magazine, a magazine that refuses to publish “doom and gloom,” characteristic of so much media, but spreads good news, publishes the reality stories that say people are making a difference.

When I came to this banking story, a corporation that is all about money, I was thrilled to read how the ShoreBank Enterprise Cascadi lives up to its motto: “Let’s change the World.”

This dedicated institution is doing just that. Their stated mission is to support rural communities, people who have poor credit, or who are low-income, or otherwise ignored by the “normal” banking world. In 2007, they provided $13.7 million in loans, eighty percent of them in rural communities.

Most recently, when the landlords of Tryon Life Community Farm in Portland decided to sell their land to a residential developer to build 23 upscale homes, the Farm’s resident renters faced eviction. This Portland farm community had to raise more than $1.4 million to buy the land themselves. They went after the money, fundraising and seeking help from all sectors of the Portland community. ShoreBank loaned them $600,000.

The president of the Farm’s board of directors had this to say: "Other people (banks) would have just shaken their heads and said, ‘You have no track record. You’re hippies. No Way.’ But ShoreBank thought that what we were doing was important.”

Oh, if only the myopic American banking system could be that enlightened, could aim not only toward profit but balance financial goals with the needs of the communities. I believe that when our institutions do this kind of good with their money, they bring a bit of divinity into our commercial world. No one really loses. Communities would thrive, and yes, the banks would thrive as well. Where good will is practiced, there is always something of God at work.