Reflections on the Highway - Spring 2024

Have you been struck by the reality of Jesus lately? Have you noticed that the Kingdom of God is always preaching itself: that there can be the revelation, an encounter, as a seam of gold, glimpsed at first then bursting forth with marvelous connections, all the way back and all the way forward. When one is in this reality, this disclosure, one is dancing in the heart of God.

Each year we pray about what gift we can send to thank our friends who support us financially. Last year it was the picture of the oak tree at Summerfield Farms, taken by an intensive retreatant and accompanied with a note describing his connection to the tree and his experience of Isaiah 61. This year, we are sending Oscar Romero’s book, The Scandal of Redemption, along with this Highway letter which includes the story of my discovering the book. My hope is that the connected stories in this letter alert us to a larger awareness of the Kingdom in our midst, transforming moments in time and urging us to stay the course of seeking, knocking, asking, listening, and celebrating. A way of prayer.

Early in January, I started my annual three-day solitude retreat at St. Francis Springs Prayer Center. I go there to reflect upon and write up the prior year and to listen for direction in the year now beginning. As I have reread the journal entries from these silent spaces, I sense there is the possibility of encountering a juncture, a moment, a connection that preaches the presence of God.

In a journal entry from an eight-day retreat at Eastern Point in 2016, I revisited a Scripture that my spiritual director had recommended for contemplation. The first verse is this: "The word of the Lord came to me.” - Jeremiah 1:4. Then the liturgy in the Eucharist emerged: "Just say the word, Lord, and my soul shall be healed". These verses coalesced in prayer and then a third: “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." - Luke 4:4. Listening, I began to focus on the word "word." Through what means will this revelation come? I re-read the verses given to me from Jeremiah.

               The word of the Lord came to me saying. Before I formed you
                in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart...

               Jeremiah 1:4,5.

               The word of the Lord came to me: "What do you see Jeremiah?"
               "I see the branch of an almond tree," I replied. "You have seen correctly
                for I am watching for my word to be fulfilled.
" Jeremiah 1: 11,12.

The faculty of seeing is a major avenue in the Spirit for the word of the Lord to come.
Paul prays for the Ephesians that the eyes of their heart would be opened. Ephesians
18a. And from the devotional Give Us This Day on January 3rd, I read:

                To see clearly comes to those with a deep prayer life and openness
                to God's presence in our midst.

I am reminded that the word of the Lord may come to me as I listen and read and
it may also come to me through seeing something I need to receive: the adventure of solitude and prayer.

I stay in the Oscar Romero cottage or Hermitage at St. Francis Springs. Romero was a Roman Catholic archbishop in El Salvador (1917 to 1980) during a time of great oppression and violence. Speaking boldly from the pulpit to the people but also to the government officials, soldiers, and to those in violent opposition. He was assassinated while preparing the Eucharist in the Carmelite Chapel of the Divine Providence hospital where he lived.

I stay in that cottage in honor of my two grandchildren of Salvadoran blood and of their grandfather, Rosalie Rivera, a full-blooded Salvadoran who laid all the beautiful and extensive stonework at St. Francis Springs. Recently, he set in place a columbarium which I could see through the window from my chair. What did I see? The place where I want my ashes to be placed. It was quite extraordinary and unexpected to sit in that space.

January 4, afternoon, I walked over to a bookcase. My eyes immediately focused on a brightly covered paperback with a man's facial image, The Scandal of Redemption, by Oscar Romero. Whether it had been there on other visits I do not know. It is a collection of sermons by Romero delivered in the teeth of the violence. The word came to me, and I sat down to read a portion but ended up transfixed by it and read it right through. It stunned me that this priest poured out the reality of Christ, the life of following Christ, and the place of the Church in the midst of that time.  He powerfully expressed to the government, the opposition, and the people caught in the trap, the third way of Jesus. Not under the banner of liberation theology but under the banner of Christ. I knew immediately that we needed to gift this book to our support team in the midst of our times. It was that fresh and powerful and cost him his life. It is all Christ. And the word came to me. What a gift.

I had planned to go to the National Prayer Breakfast in early February but was derailed by complications from hip surgery. The morning of the breakfast I stayed in bed to watch it unfold before an attentive crowd of Senators and Representatives and the President. The intimacy of the statuary room at the Capitol was the venue. Over at the Washington Hilton, hundreds gathered in support and prayer. That is where I would have been. I later found out that they only saw a portion of the morning which did not include the main speaker.

The President and the Speaker of the House were seated next to each other on the front row. Andrea Bocelli brought the music. Tracey Mann, one of the friends over the years, now a Republican Congressman too, co-hosted the time with a Democrat colleague. Chaplain Black, the Chaplain of the Senate, gave the main address. An African American, a retired Admiral from the Navy, and Chaplain of the Senate for over twenty years, he brought his sonorous voice to the podium. Like with Romero, the word of the Lord came to me as Chaplain Black spoke and went out from there after cascading over the leadership of the United States. With power, humor, personal story, and marvelous grasp of the Scriptures, he laid out the third way of Jesus, calling for the discipline of fasting and prayer throughout the world. Calling the leaders, the people (me), to weekly fasting and prayer. I was so excited I started calling everyone. It is available on YouTube here. (Cue to minute 30.) It was the most timely and impactful address that I have heard at the NPB over many, many years. These two men of the cloth are bringing it in the here and now and I felt God had set me aside, in solitude, to receive it.

God was not finished stringing these pearls for me, all the way back and all the way forward. I will close with this story so clearly connected in the Spirit to the other two. Our friend, Peter Radtke came to Greensboro on a business matter and later joined Todd Lipe and me on my porch to fellowship and share a cigar. I knew Peter had been to the NPB. I asked what he thought of Chaplain Black's message which he had been able to watch. Peter replied: "I was getting chill bumps."  He proceeded to tell us that two years ago he was prompted to try to contact Ukrainian President Zelensky to call his people to prayer in response to the overwhelming force attacking and killing the people. Peter did not know a path for making contact, so he enlisted Tony Hall, a former Congressman and ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. Tony is well known for engaging a fast in response to critical issues. Peter drafted a letter for Tony to sign. The letter referred to the same Scriptures Chaplain Black explicated and communicated the same message to a leader. By now, Peter was close to tears and the presence of the Lord thick upon the porch. We immediately got up and celebrated the Eucharist. We prayed that whether or not the letter got through, these messages would encourage Peter and Tony to continue the effort and that other strategic people would join in.

Folks, I will never know how many people will read Romero's sermons, watch Chaplain Black's message, or even work their way through this lengthy letter.  But I do know this: God is pouring out streams in the desert, manifesting and proclaiming the ways of the kingdom and letting us in on it. When we turn aside to the burning bush and take off our shoes in awe, we acknowledge his work is "continuous in time" and stand in the
rushing river of sacramental reality, not deferred but now.

Blessings,
Trip and Laurie

Reflections on the Highway - Fall 2023

They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to fellowship,
to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.  -- Acts 2:42

I am sure aging has something to do with it. Things seem to touch me more deeply and I often feel on the brink of tears, touched, grateful, sad. Ever since our late August Windy Gap Men's Retreat, images and feelings keep being replayed across my heart and so this Reflection. I realized as that review came that the unity, devotion, and elements of Acts 2:42 are played out powerfully and intimately in the Retreats, within the leadership core and the Retreat itself.

Some 45 years ago, Doug Coe challenged some younger men to visit the Southeast Region of the US and identify a faithful few in each state who were interested in gathering some friends together in the spirit of and around the person of Jesus. These visits and discussions led to a men's retreat being founded at the Young Life property, Windy Gap, near Weaverville, North Carolina.

The leadership, or core, of the Retreat, from the earliest time, was devoted to a few principles evidenced in the life of Jesus. These principles have been shared and taught among that core and spread out through the retreats to many hundreds year after year. There are identifiable men who carried this vision, many of whom have gone on to be fully in the presence of the Lord. The unity and agreement with them is remarkably consistent as others took their place, in the same spirit of non-hierarchical leadership, looking only to Jesus as the leader.

Within the core today, there is a smaller executive group, called the Wrigley group, in honor of Don Wrigley who we might say was the hands and feet of the Retreat until he passed a few years ago. The Wrigley group is the hands and feet of the Retreat, meeting together, calling us together, and stewarding all the administrative details. Keeping Jesus at the center of our friendships, is the glue that sets a table of welcome and fellowship each year. They also stay closely in touch with Doug Holladay who was one of the early founders and a visionary leader over the years. Doug's simple message has been: "We are beggers offering bread to beggers." That spirit of humility pervades the camp and, in the upside-down nature of the Kingdom, frees the Retreat in a most extraordinary way.

Another brilliant part of the early vision was to partner with a Young Life property. Years spent on that property sharing the reality of Jesus with high schoolers has steeped those grounds in the Spirit, Holy Ground. The beauty of the camp is stunning, and a sense of play is there as the men squeal down the zip lines and bounce off the blogs. Children. The Kingdom literally comes to meet us.

Breaking of bread occurs in mealtimes where the highlights are the sharing of individual men who tell their stories of challenge, sorrows, and joys in total vulnerability and safety before a packed dining hall. These windows of vulnerability open a spirit of intimacy and fellowship at a very deep level largely unknown in the day-to-day level among men. The meals are served by a special group of men who are overcoming addictions as they are discipled in Christ through ministries from a couple of states in the Region. This is a leaven of grace, a beautiful coming together in community and service.

Small groups are formed for discussion and fellowship after the meetings and carry through the weekend. The hope and prayer is that small groups form back home to foster the intimacy and friendships in Jesus. In fact, one could say that our prayers are that everything that happens at Windy Gap is recreated at home, becoming a leaven in the loaf of encouragement across the whole Region over many, many years.

A precious dynamic that has emerged over the years is the generational legacy of the time as fathers invite sons and sons invite fathers and grandfathers. My brother and I brought our father for many years and now our sons are with us catching the vision. One each of our sons was baptized in the lake this year amidst the cheering of several hundred of the men who gathered around the lake. Whether related by blood or not, there is a ministry going on continuously of older men learning from younger men and younger men from the older: Wisdom and encouragement flowing both ways in a spirit of humility and companionship. In the core team itself there is a mindful awareness of this for the leadership, younger men being raised up to lead now and, in the future, as we continue to remind each other of the one Spirit we operate in together.

Scriptures are shared in larger meetings and morning devotions. Worship is a huge focus as 350 men come together to sing in massive chorus to the God they know or are coming to know, led by Steve Lynam who has been the worship leader since the inception of the retreat. The retreat closes on Sunday morning with worship and the Eucharist, another breaking of bread in communion with the body and blood of Jesus.

Acts 2:42 today.

Blessings,

Trip

Reflections on the Highway - Summer 2023

The wind blows where it chooses, and you
hear the sound of it, but you do not know
where it comes from or where it is goes. So
  it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
-- John 3:8.


Nicodemus knew reality in one dimension only, the dimension of the mind, of experience, of the way things work, and the law. In that dimension, one plus one always equals two. The dimension of the Spirit is another Reality. I am hoping in this letter to communicate something very precious to me that is difficult to articulate and that is of the two realities intersecting in a moment of an ordinary day. I hope it will be meaningful in waking us up to moments that otherwise pass by, undetected.

I am going to begin by sharing a recent personal experience, although honestly there have been many of these over the years whereby grace, I became more attentive and more aware. It has been one of the great delights of my journey in Christ on this Highway.

My son Julian and I recently completed a 33-day examination of Joseph, the earth dad of Jesus and husband of Mary, his mother. The study, also called a consecration, included a litany of prayers and consideration of the character and qualities of Joseph venerated by the Church. Every morning, Julian would come to our home, and we would sit side by side at the table in communal exploration and prayer. This discipline mightily encouraged us in our roles as husbands, father/son, Julian's future role as father, and my current one as father also to Julian's four sisters and grandfather to nine grandchildren so far. This time also powerfully emphasized how Julian has drawn fully into Christ during the last two years in answer to years of prayers by Laurie and me and God's love. It is a gift beyond measure.

One morning, as we sat side by side, we needed to refer directly to Scripture. Julian spotted one of those huge family bibles lying flat on the bookcase shelf in our new home. Laurie had evidently brought it over and placed it there. I had not noticed it or, if I did, I did not open it. Julian brought it over and we looked at the inscription. To my utter shock and amazement, it was inscribed by my dad and dedicated to Laurie and me just before our wedding in 1979. I had no memory of ever seeing it. It read: "Laurie and Trip (Frank III), if you always live by this Book your problems will be as air bubbles." Signed Frank J. Sizemore, Jr. Julian and I sat there staring at the page and then at each other. Frank Julian Sizemore III and Frank Julian Sizemore IV being joined and blessed by Frank Julian Sizemore Jr. In the moment and in the midst of a focus on Joseph. Joined also by our Father in heaven by this unmistakable act of revelation. It was enchanting, mystical, and real. We felt the generations, committed to Christ and Scripture, being affirmed by God.

In his book, A SEVERE MERCY, a publication of an exchange of letters with C.S. Lewis concerning the grief over the loss of his wife, Sheldon Vanauken comments on the eternal significance and intervention of the moment Julian and I experienced:

                         If an event coming about in the ordinary course of nature
                         becomes to me the occasion of hope and faith and love
                         or increased efforts after virtue, do we suppose that this
                         result was unforeseen by, or is indifferent to, God. Obviously
                         not. What we should have called its fortuitous effects must
                         have been present to Him for all eternity. (p. 377).


The Scriptures and poets speak of these encounters and how we might respond as we grow in the awareness of their happening. Thus, in Exodus 3 there is this presentation concerning Moses:

                          There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of
                           fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush
                           was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, " I will
                           go over and see this strange sight-- why the bush does
                           not burn up."

                           God says to him, "Do not come any closer. Take off your
                           shoes, for the place where you are standing is holy ground...


In his Lenten devotional, THE WORD IN THE WILDERNESS, the poet and priest, Malcolm Guite publishes the poem on first Sunday, The Bright Field, by R.S. Thomas:

                            I have seen the sun break through
                            to illuminate a small field
                            for awhile, and gone my way
                            and forgotten it. But that was the
                            pearl of great price, the one field that had
                            treasure in it. I realize now
                            that I must give all I have
                            to possess it. Life is not hurrying
                            on to a receding future, not hankering after
                            an imagined past. It is the turning
                            aside like Moses to the miracle
                            of the lit bush. To a brightness
                            that seemed as transitory as your youth
                            once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

In his commentary, Guite turns to another poet who emphasizes the multiples that are possible in awareness. He writes and ends with three verses from the poem:

                            Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her long poem AURORA LEIGH
                            also brings us to such a moment; indeed she takes it further
                            suggesting that these glimpses of glory are not just a wistful
                            one-off in an otherwise empty desert but are richly available
                            to us always and everywhere, if we have eyes to see and time
                            to stop.

                            Earth's crammed with heaven,
                            And every common bush afire with God,
                            But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.


Then, in the book AWE, the author refers to such moments and recognition as "Everyday Epiphanies". Marvelous. Everyday Epiphanies, Glimpses of Glory, Fire-Bushes richly available to us "always and everywhere". YES.

Back to my dad and his re-entry. With this gentle giant of a man a memory pops up as I write, a picture in the present from the past. Remembrance bringing the image into the moment just as Jesus invites us to remember him in the Eucharist. My brother, Don, and I sitting on either side of my dad, in rockers, smoking cigars on the porch of our cabin in the midst of a retreat of several hundred men brought together in the Spirit of Jesus. We did this year after year and it continues, now with Don and I and our sons.

Let's be awake, turn aside and take off our shoes, acknowledging the God who is the Eternal Now.

Blessings, trip and laurie

Reflections on the Highway - December 2022

Year's end is a unique time in content, challenge, and rhythm. For many, it is a time of slowing down, creating space to savor and experience the conclusion of another year of life. For others, the challenge is the frenzy to get this in, or get that done before December 31, with Christmas pressing to boot. 

One constant for this month in content is that the mailbox fills with charity requests amidst the Christmas cards, the timing in large part driven by the Internal Revenue Code. Indeed, our Verbena Foundation sends out our one appeal  this time of year from a person whose life has been changed by the ministry of prayer. Often one third or more of our budget comes in from November 15 to January 15. It is clear then that we join the mailbox stuffing and often revisit the questions: "Why is asking others for financial support important? Is it a kingdom activity? How does one ask in the Spirit of the kingdom of heaven with gratefulness and confidence? If it seems that we are entirely dependent on the generosity of others, are we living in dependence on the Lord?
 
Our methods for raising support have been formed from the leading of the Holy Spirit through prayer.  In response to a clear leading 25 years ago, there would be no fee charged for the privilege of praying with folks in desperate need. The Verbena Board embraced Henri Nouwen's challenge to boldly tell the story of the ministry and embrace inviting others to give as a ministry to them. The folks we invite to give are not an impersonal mass but rather intimate friends. And, because prayer is the foundation and milieu of everything we do, particularly in intercession, we pray. Once the invitation is sent, we pray to the Lord of the harvest for laborers in the fields of financial support out of the same compassion Jesus had for the broken-hearted and desperate in Matthew 11:36-38.
 
Now I want to focus the conclusion of this letter on the ministry of giving and a precious work being lived out in Bethlehem. I heard about the Holy Family Hospital in Bethlehem at a church dinner several years ago where the president, Michelle Bowe, spoke. As most of you know, Verbena maintains close ties and contact with Israel through Magdala, Ashley Medford's work, Carol and George Madison's tours, and our own visits there. This year when the Holy Family’s giving appeal arrived it struck me that it came from Bethlehem with the Church of the Nativity just steps away, where Christmas is in constant celebration. There is a dwindling population of Christians there which the majority non-Christian Palestinian population sees as a negative development for the health and welfare of the city. So, Laurie and I give to support this hospital every year. It serves the whole population regardless of the ability to pay and without regard to ethnic or religious affiliation. Its central work is with the care and delivery of babies and their mothers. Here is what Michele Bowe says:
 

“Since the days of King David and the birth of Jesus, Bethlehem
has been overlooked, overshadowed by Jerusalem. Today, this
holds true. Few pilgrimages stay in Bethlehem, favoring Jerusalem.
Economic activity is only 15% of what it was in 2019.  Since 90%
of the economy relies on pilgrimages, most remain unemployed.
Bethlehem has slipped deeper into a persistent economic crisis.
Mothers arrive to the hospital in labor and hungry. The babies are
small and more fragile. The nutritional status of both mothers and
babies is compromised. Vitamin D and iron deficiency are pervasive.
A growing poverty is entrenched in the town.
 
For 25 years Holy Family Foundation has elevated the status of women
and children by ensuring the best care without regard to need or creed.
Accompanying the staff and patients, we are committing to keeping the
spotlight on Bethlehem. We share their joys, sorrows, and accomplishments
the care we provide. We share the good news: across our country and
beyond. The Foundation is committed to keeping Bethlehem in the forefront.
We work to create a better future-- one woman, one baby at a time.”

 
In re-reading and typing this message from Michele, I realized two stunning connections between the Verbena vision and that of the Holy Family Hospital. The visions were both birthed 25 years ago, and both are based on helping one person at a time. It is the mantra and the way for us both. I love it when God does this to say, "Hey, when you are working on this, I have a few hidden surprises." Yes.
 
Please give to Holy Family Hospital in Bethlehem in this special, year-end time of year.
 
Holy Family Hospital of Bethlehem Foundation
2000 P Street, NW, Suite 310
Washington DC 20036.
 

Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open
the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will
not be room enough to store it. Malachi 3: 10b.

 
Merry Christmas and blessings,
Trip and Laurie

Reflections on the Highway - Summer 2022

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue as was his custom. - Luke 4:16

I have been thinking about "church" quite often lately which surprisingly has connected me to my own church journey. I grew up in the South where church, famously, was part of the culture. Churches, by far most of them in the Protestant tradition, were on every corner it seemed with church steeples creating a forest if one were to look up.

My family attended Wesley Memorial Church in downtown High Point, North Carolina where I was baptized as an infant. The building was clothed in red brick, aged to a darker hue as I recall. I loved the stained-glass windows. After church we would sometimes go to the Chinese restaurant down the street where my grandfather introduced me to egg-rolls. I have been an addict ever since.

Early on I was also exposed to the Episcopal tradition, the church of my mother’s youth in Rochester, NY. She enrolled me in the choir of the local Episcopal church, St. Mary's, where a great aunt on my dad's side was the choir director. She was Moravian. I wore a black choir robe frock and a white blouse to sing. One Sunday, most of the choir headed to the communion rail for the weekly celebration of the Eucharist and I jumped in line to kneel at the rail. The priest, Dr. Price, noticed me and came over to ask if I had been confirmed in the church, knowing I was well below the age. I shook my head "No", not knowing what that meant. I do not know if I received a substitute blessing. That experience, I believe, was the beginning of a romance with the sacrament which remained hidden for years but became a singular passion in response to the actuality of Jesus' simple words and actions: This is my body broken for you. Eat this. This is my blood shed for you. Drink this. And I love the freedom and invitation in his "as often as you will."

I experienced Sunday school, Scouts, and youth group at Wesley Memorial. Eventually, a new church facility was erected farther out from downtown, not far from the country club. Huge, cathedral-like, and very beautiful if not somewhat imposing, we called it the Vatican. I learned the great hymns there and earned my God and Country award and Eagle rank in Scouts. My dad was an Eagle and now I was as well, all through the church. When my dad died, the enormous sanctuary was filled to overflowing.

For two summers in high school, I was a lifeguard at a mountain retreat property owned by the Methodist Church of North Carolina. Many pastors and church members summered there, enjoying the mountains and the lake in the center of the property, Lake Junaluska. Every Sunday I worshiped in the great assembly hall and then dashed off to rock hop the mountain streams with my friends. I celebrated my 16th birthday there, discovered youthful romance and great friendships. In addition, Duke University, my alma mater for both undergraduate and law, has had a long association with the Methodist Church. There is a famous and very beautiful Gothic cathedral in the center of the campus, the Duke Chapel. The divinity school is next door. Periodically I would attend service at the Chapel as an undergrad and hardly ever as a law student. Over the years since then, we have loved the presentation of the Messiah which we have attended many times in the Chapel.

In the summer before my third year of law school, I married a Duke coed whom I had dated through college. She was Catholic so we were married in a Catholic church in her hometown of Yardley, Pennsylvania. I asked a Methodist pastor, a family friend, to join in the ceremony. We did not go to church during eight years of marriage or pursue a relationship with Jesus. We were busy professionals in Washington DC. The marriage ended, childless, in divorce.

I returned to North Carolina, joining a large law firm in Greensboro. It seemed everyone in Greensboro went to church. Several of my colleagues’ families attended First Presbyterian Church, so I went there. It was a good and spacious place for re-entry. Over the course of that first year, I kept bumping into folks who liked Jesus and they kept bumping into me. The brokenness in my life began to open my heart. One night, alone in my condo, I wept all night. Jesus met me there. When the sun came up, there was a different quality to the light. I knew it.


Almost a year later, I married Laurie in First Presbyterian Church, her family church. Our first three children were dedicated there, and we were part of a vibrant, adult Sunday school class. We bought a home across from the church. During this season, we were introduced to several streams of evangelical outreach and para-church organizations which connected us relationally to many friends and began our grounding in the Scriptures. We began hosting a gathering of friends in our home for worship, fellowship and prayer. This eventually evolved into the formation of Grace Community Church, our home church for 30 years.

Six years ago, my journey took me to a Catholic parish. There were many encounters along the way that led me there. It is a place of rest for me, a place each Sunday to receive after giving out so much to others, and a place of community worship dynamic in sacramental reality. The blessing of the parish school to our three grandchildren who live with us, to us and to their mom, has been profound. The Boy Scout troop is dynamic and led by men and women who are as trustworthy and committed as they come. My grandson is hopefully on his way to Eagle. Coaches of the athletic teams are exemplary and encouraging. The church, pastor and staff have remarkable vision and leadership. I am grateful.

As I was finishing these reflections, I came across a commentary on Jesus' instructions to his followers as he is ascending. He instructs them to return to the city, Jerusalem, and wait. Fr. Rolheiser comments:

The Upper Room is not glamorous, not a Leonardo da Vinci painting. It always looks like the meeting in your local church. But it is there that Pentecost happened and will continue to happen. And so Jesus' advice to today's struggling believer is still the same as it was to a group of uncertain and shaky disciples at the time of his Ascension: return to the city and wait in the Upper Room. Or, as Peter Maurin put it: 'When you don't know what else to do, keep going to meetings because Pentecost happened at a meeting.' (Sacred Fire, p. 133)

And we correspondingly add this exhortation from Scripture:

And let us consider how we may spur one another on to love and good deeds, not giving up meeting
together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see
the Day approaching. - Hebrews 10:24, 25


Throughout our year, there are many gatherings that we are part of apart from the Sabbath but connected in the Spirit… These are meetings that the Spirit visits in powerful ways year after year. Every Wednesday morning six of us men meet as a small group which has been together for fellowship, friendship, prayer, and Scripture for 30 years. Directed solitude retreats with other pilgrims seeking the discipline of silence are a staple in our spiritual journey. The Windy Gap Men's Retreat gathers over 300 men from throughout the Southeast in the spirit of Jesus. Marvelous and transformational encounters, amid vigorous worship, occur every year, now for over 40 years. Our Verbena gatherings bring the anointing each time as we meet annually with our intercessor team and annually also in a larger group called a Verbena Gathering in alternating cities each year.

In these Upper Rooms we experience community as a devotional body, in the unity and celebration of the kingdom, happening now. We celebrate the Eucharist. Something like this is at work we hope:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. - Acts 2:42

This past Sunday, I went to church. We sang a particular hymn which reminded me that it is the Lord who gathers us and so we pray in song:

Gather your people, O Lord; Gather your people,
O Lord. One bread, one body, one spirit of love.
Gather your people, O Lord.

Draw us forth to the table of life, brothers and sisters,
each of us called to walk in your light.
Gather your people, O Lord; Gather your people, O
Lord. One bread, one body, one spirit of love. Gather
your people, O Lord.

We are parts of the body of Christ, needing each other,
each of the gifts the Spirit provides. Gather your people,
Gather your people, O Lord. One bread, one body, one
spirit of love. Gather your people, O Lord.


Blessings, trip and laurie

Reflections on the Highway - Fall 2021

I have been re-collecting myself frequently these days: a lost phone, a credit card left at a restaurant, another ball in the lake on hole 13. Memories too are flooding back from childhood on up. Recollections.

My encounter with the Psalms this past summer seems somehow to fit right in, presenting the recollections of God’s people in a contemporaneous, poetic, and often raw account of their experiences chronicled in the preceding history books. The Psalms have been aptly referred to as the internal account of those external circumstances.

This Reflection is also somewhat embarrassing. I have written before about my delight in discovering Malcolm Guite, the English priest, and poet. By following him, I found out that he was teaching a five-day seminar on the Psalms through Regent College over zoom. Through this course, I became truly embarrassed, even stunned, by my lack of engagement with the Psalter as a body of songs, poems, and prayer. I also realized that so many of the giants in all Christian faith traditions singled out the Psalms as central to their prayer life. From the Benedictine monasteries to the halls of Oxford and Cambridge, to Bono and to Regent College, these songs have lit up spiritual life. I found that Augustine, Brueggeman, Aquinas, NT Wright, Eugene Petersen, and many others had penned impassioned commentaries on the Psalms.

It is not that I had no familiarity with them over the years. I once visited a monastery where the Psalms were chanted. I knew several from memory but the magnitude of their witness and path for prayer did not penetrate. The Guite course convicted me that if I would accept this intersection with the Psalms in their entirety as a leading from God, even this late in life, my prayer life, and my connection with God would be energized in a new way... I realized too the weakness and inconsistency of my own prayers and how separated they were from my own struggles and those across the world. And so, it came to me: Why not pray them as my prayers, chant them, join Christ in them: do something to engage this path now set before me.

Guite introduced me to three additional resources outside the Scriptures: C.S. Lewis' REFLECTIONS on the PSALMS, David Taylor's OPEN and UNAFRAID (my favorite), and DAVID'S CROWN, Malcolm Guite's response in poetry to each one of the Psalms. Then, I recollected: Two years before on an 8-day retreat I had taken Eugene Petersen's book on the Psalms of Ascent, A LONG OBEDIENCE in the SAME DIRECTION, as a guide for the time. On my shelf, I had Reardon's CHRIST in the PSALMS which I had picked up at a Leanne Payne conference years before and never read. On my shelf also, I had a well-worn copy of Kathleen Norris' book, THE CLOISTER WALK, which I keep returning to without knowing exactly why. Maybe it is because she says things like this:

“I regard monks and poets as the best degenerates in America.

Both have a finely developed sense of the sacred potential in

all things; both value image and symbol over utilitarian purpose or

the bottom line; they recognize the transformative power hiding in

the simplest things, and it leads them to commit absurd acts: the

poem! the prayer! what nonsense!” (p.146).

In the midst of all this reflection, my brother sent me Cynthia Berguault's more recent book, CHANTING the PSALMS, complete with a disc to help with learning to chant. The book is a marvelous testimony to the transformative power of the Psalms in the inner life and their lasting connection to the contemplative way in the Church over centuries.

Confronted thus during the two and a half months after the course, I could either change my ways or consider it a passing interest. This question lingers: Can I devote myself to praying the Psalms? The word "devotion" has stuck with me ever since I read ACTS 2:42. “And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” Pray for me.

I would also invite you, my friends, into this singular focus with me because the Psalms are also communal, a peoples' authentic expression to their God. As an example, in the Psalms of Lament, there is a disconcerting and spacious ground for the expression of sadness, pain, anger, hostility, fear, and despair. Emotions and feelings we often suppress and ignore to the detriment of our own mental and physical health as well as community health. These Psalms also testify repeatedly to the goodness, lovingkindness, and steadfastness of God. Taylor comments:

“These words [concerning God's goodness] need to find

themselves on our lips and said out loud, again and

again, in the company of others with whom we can

share our pain so they can work their healing power

on us. They heal us by offering us an opportunity to

become whole, rather than leaving us fractured by our

losses and disoriented in our sadness. They heal us

by offering us hope in the form of words that name

realities, helping us to make sense of often senseless things.

And they heal us by bringing us face to face with a God

who is compassionate and gracious, abounding in love,

faithful to the end. (Ps. 86:15).”

The Psalms give expression to this and so much more and I hope in praying them they will touch in me, by the Spirit, those groans within me, my friends, the Church, and the world. Again, please pray for me. Your prayer could be Psalm 1:

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked.

nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers;

but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he

meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water

that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not whither. In all

that he does, he prospers.

The wicked are not so, but are like chaff which the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the

congregation of the righteous; for the Lord knows the way of the

righteous but the way of the wicked will perish. (RSV).

In closing, I share with you the beautiful, imaginative response by Guite. Enjoy:

Psalm 1: I Beatus vir qui non abit

Come to the place where every breath is praise,

And God is breathing through each passing breeze.

Be planted by the waterside and raise

Your arms with Christ beneath these rooted trees,

Who lift their breathing leaves up to the skies.

Be rooted too, as still and strong as these,

Open alike to sun and rain. Arise

From meditation by these waters. Bear

The fruit of that deep rootedness. Be wise

In the trees’ long wisdom. Learn to share

The secret of their patience. Pass the day

In their green fastness and their quiet air.

Slowly discern a life, a truth, a way,

Where simple being flowers in delight.

Then let the chaff of life just blow away.

Blessings to each of you.

Trip and Laurie

Reflections on the Highway - Summer 2021

Now may the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

Hebrews 13:20-21

Truly free people are operating in God-consciousness all the time. Hearing his voice and following him into the moments and connections of life. The deception and disobedience of the Fall plunged man and woman, the prize of God's creation, into self-consciousness where greed, individuality, self-protection, self-love (as well as self-hatred), and deception constructed an alternative reality to the divine Reality of God's presence and goodness. It supplanted God's love - that God is love - with all manner of substitutes, unleashing destructiveness in every sphere of life, including calling what is evil, good.

In following Jesus, ransomed by his blood alone and raised in his life, we are led into a great spaciousness of transformation to live out the incarnated life of Christ in us. Our minds, bodies, souls, and spirits are directed and empowered by the Holy Spirit to be instruments of God's love, working in his Vision, his Reality, which is the kingdom of heaven.

In his beautiful book, “Beyond Loneliness, the Gift of God's Friendship,” Trevor Hudson describes the God vision this way:

“From the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus' life and message revolve totally around God's dream for the world. In language familiar to first-century Jews, Jesus calls this dream "The Kingdom of God". God's kingdom is where God rules and reigns, where God's will is done, and where what God wants to happen happens. (Emphasis mine). Wherever Jesus goes, he makes that dream a reality. He lives out God's dream and calls every man, woman and child to join him.” (p.64)

I think that is a beautiful expression of the life of Jesus. Working in God's dream is no isolated task, in fact it is no task at all. To be real in the midst of hostility, oppression, brutality, control, and madness, Jesus built and is building a community, his body in Christ, of which he is the

head. To Hudson, the heart of this community is God's desire “to be friends with his people and for us to be friends with each other.” Hudson quotes William A. Barry, SJ, a powerful voice in the sphere of spiritual direction, enlarging that thought:

“God wants a world where we human beings live in harmony and friendship with God, with one another, and with the rest of creation, co-operating with God wherever we are.”

We see in the opening benediction from Hebrews that the absolute substitutionary work of God miraculously transforms our lives into:

What is pleasing to Him.

And Paul is ever preaching, as the writer of Hebrews does in this passage, that there is no peace and no resurrection life apart from the blood of Jesus. The blood is the narrow way that reopens friendship with God and is the passage through which each must pass to know the reality of the incarnational life of Christ and to live according to the Spirit. Sadly, I meet so many who are separated from the sacramental reality of the blood and only know it conceptually. In the flow of that blood, all the destructiveness, falseness, and shame are washed away, and we are newly created in Christ. We have a new Father, a new family, and a new bloodline in the genetics of Jesus. A whole new inheritance. The cataclysmic act of friendship, laying down his life, is the gift of God's friendship and an ongoing invitation into that reality.

The subject of friendship has confronted me in several different contexts and sources lately, so I am paying attention. My small men's group of over thirty years worked through Trevor Hudson’s book in our weekly meetings with remarkable results in intimacy and vulnerability; in the practical ways we discovered to help each other; in the attentive ways, we learned to listen to each other without the immediate need to move on to something else. We also found ourselves stopping in the moment to pray and bless the visible work of God in each other. None of these things were entirely new or unpracticed but the focus on Jesus' desire for friendship, and the calling to enter more deeply into God's Dream truly brought special clarity, direction, and depth.

God also prompted me to consider his friendship during a weekly zoom call with Jim Houston of Regent College, a 98-year-old follower of Jesus. The call is hosted by friends in other states and started this month. The whole topic is friendship with delightful stories by Jim, and commentary, and then group interaction. Another beautiful way this is of others cooperating with God, inviting me to pause and saying, "Ok, we are going deeper into this friendship thing now."

And where does Jesus emphasize the call to friendship more fully and plainly than in John 17? Although the shed blood of Jesus is offered to the whole world, it is his followers, the ones God has given him that he prays for before suffering the Cross. It is to these he has the power to give eternal life and intimacy with God the Father and God the Son. It is for these and through them, we come to know by their message. He prays each one would come to know the union that he and his Father have, and it is out of that vertical oneness that we can be one with each other horizontally. A community complete in love and unity which preaches the gospel, Jesus, to the world.

In closing, I am leaving you with my favorite poem on friendship with Christ and others. All our human friends pass on, most surely through death but also through distance, sometimes even distancing themselves. Loss. But the poem reminds us that Jesus, the Christ, is their “first, fast and last friend.” Ours too in their presence and absence and in our death. Poets say it best, I think.

The Lantern Out of Doors

Sometimes the lantern moves along the night

That interests our eyes. And who goes there?

I think, wherefrom and bound, I wonder, where,

With all down darkness wide, his wading light.

Men go by me whom either beauty bright

In mold or mind or what not else makes rare:

They rain against our much-thick and marsh air

Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

Death or distance soon consumes them: wind

What most I may eye after, be in at the end

I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.

Christ minds: Christ's interest, what to avow or amend

There eyes them, heart wants, care haunts, foot follows kind,

Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast last friend.

Gerard Manly Hopkins

I hope and pray that you have the rich beams of friends in your life, all found and kept in Christ.

I call you friends. -- Jesus

Blessings,

Trip and Laurie

Reflections on the Highway - Winter 2021

I am writing this letter on January 6, the day of Epiphany, the epiphany being that the light came into the world and that the bread of life (Bethlehem meaning "house of bread') is for all people. The three wise-men, representative of the Gentile nations, receive the inclusive message of salvation. Led by the star, they bring gifts honoring the baby as king, prophet, and priest, including the burial preparation gift of myrrh, foreshadowing that he came in birth to die.  What a time to revisit, by the Spirit, this dramatic encounter.

MEANING IN RETREAT AND DAILY

I am on a three-day retreat at St. Francis Springs Prayer Center, which I try to schedule at the beginning of each year. The protected and intentional separation allows me space to inventory the challenges, blessings, and insights from the past year as well as space to assess my journey in Christ. Also, the time is fruitful for listening, praying, and discerning the year ahead. Thus, the retreat time is also a bridge between two years, a transition.

Each year there also seems to be a special gift in the timing of the retreat. Last year the retreat fell on the final days of Father Louie's 15-year tenure as the Center’s director, visionary and spiritual energizer. His departure was news to me when I arrived. Louie and I became friends over the years, so it was a delight for me to be able to share meals and conversations as he closed his tenure. In fact, some years back, the Verbena intercessor team met here for a weekend, and the team, to a person, was struck by the realness, openness, and hospitality of Father Louie, one uniform expression being that, "He is more comfortable in his own skin than anyone I have ever met." Father Louie, a Franciscan priest, has that effect on everyone.

So, what a delight and surprise, tinged with sadness and uncertainty. I felt God's favor in being a witness to the closing celebration of Mass with all the volunteer partners gathered to honor Christ and Father Louie. It was a joyful celebration in song, worship, and liturgy. Louie delivered a precious homily which I recorded. The Eucharist elements were handed to each one by Father Louie as tears flooded his face. Later, so characteristic of him, he referred to allergies that had caused his eyes to water. There was just no coincidence that I was there. The recognition of that gift flooded back to me at the beginning of this current retreat.

My experience then is that meaning and timing line up in retreat in special ways that are gifts to me to recognize. I am finding that even in daily, outside retreat, there are gifts to receive if I am present and stand in the flow of the supernaturally arranged and intimate connection of the dots. Today, this retreat lines up with Epiphany. I want to be one with it, present to it "as the past returns to the present". 

SACRAMENTAL VISION OF REALITY

"Expectant" seems to be the word. From the beginning of Advent through today I have been flooded with resources bringing meaning each day. Our Christmas tree: I love Christmas trees.  This Christmas ours was particularly tall, wide, and beautifully shaped. It was decorated lovingly by Laurie, Mary Grace, and our grandchildren. Each morning I turned it on, sat in my nearby chair, and gazed up and down the tree: this ornament, that one, the star and the angel at the top with the spectacular green branches extending in all directions.

A dear friend gave me Michael Guite’s Advent devotional, Waiting on the Word.  It just showed up and I could not have felt more seen, more understood in the creativity of this devotional format. Each commentary for the day is preceded by a poem. The commentary explicates the poem and the connection to the artist's story and to sacred reality. The discovery of Malcolm Guite, his scholarship, his literary mind, and his stewardship of sacred thought, was a gift I was unwrapping every day.

In addition, a week or so before Christmas, the Wall Street Journal published an essay entitled "Finding the Sacred in the Delights of Christmas" by James Matthew Wilson, again an author unknown to me till then. Like Guite, he brings forth the reality within the reality. It is an amazing article which I cannot do justice to here. I hope you will read it and also take in the most amazing color reproductions.  Referring to the liturgical calendar marking Advent and Epiphany and ordering the year in meaning for believers, he notes:

                 By observing a fixed calendar, our private emotions become

                 an occasion for genuine communion with others, with the

                 whole cosmos and with the divine. What grounds that communion

                 is more than personal sentiment. For believers, Christmas makes

                 claim about how things are, asking us to think about reality in a

                 different way.

The main point, which I believe many begin to grasp through an intensive, even as I keep grasping it, is this:

                For Christians, this is the mystery of the incarnation...

                The particular no longer stands in opposition to the universal;

                rather the particular bears the universal within itself. Christians

                call this paradox the sacramental vision of reality, and it means

                that everything, even the smallest thing, is shot through with a

                significance that should awe us.

TETHERED

Let me attempt to illustrate this reality of sacramental vision through an experience in prayer with the Board of Verbena.  In reporting her experience in prayer, Mary Katherine Peters said that she saw a giant, multi-colored hot air balloon, which was tethered to stakes in the ground, pulling free from the tethers and rising. A few days after returning home, she spotted an actual multi-colored hot air balloon rising over her home. She filmed it and sent it to us. Wow. Coincidence? Arrangement? What message and to whom? Mary Katherine, the Peters, Charlottesville, Verbena, the Church, the country? Maybe all of the above and more as we keep pondering it in our hearts, as Mary did with the mysteries unfolding to her.  

From these communications, the word "tether" stuck with me, and I began to encounter the word in paradox. "Holding back", "holding down", "restraining", these were the images or synonyms I identified with. But then, from Wilson:

"Faith isn't about personal sentiments that come and go. Rather feelings are tethered to a reality that stands outside ourselves."

In addition, the word appears in the Reflection by Kathy Hendricks from "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread" this very day of Epiphany, January 6. The title in fact is "Tethered to Love". In examining the path out of fear, a restraining and debilitating "tether" if you will, she says this: "When we remain in God, we tether ourselves to love that will carry us through any storm." Tethered to and in Christ, we are untethered from fear, anxiety, deception, and the false self.  We are pulled up, tethered to Reality, soaring in the brilliant colors of our true self in communion with the whole body of Christ and that great cloud of witnesses. Community.

EXPECTANT

Expectant in this day. Yes. Expectant in this year. Yes. Expectant that God keeps all his promises in an arrangement and timing of his own making. Yes. Just as the star stood over Bethlehem; just as the body and blood, the bread of life, is ours today. Expectant because on this day of my departure, January 7, the gospel account is from Luke 4 as Jesus announces his ministry in the fulfillment of Isaiah 61, both texts central to the teaching and transformation in an intensive. My takeaway from this convergence is a strong, direct, and personal affirmation to continue on, in the ministry of healing and discipleship through prayer, one person at a time.

Finally, I am expectant that He is returning, as promised and arranged, in the fullness of time.

 

Happy New Year,

Trip and Laurie

Reflections on the Highway - Fall 2020

When Jesus emerged from 40 days and 40 nights of fasting and prayer he is confronted three times by the voice of deception, three distinct encounters with the devil.

The first temptation is for Jesus to feed himself. Something like this: "You are hungry, feed yourself and in doing so, perform a little miracle. Turn these stones into bread." Without getting into dialogue with that voice as Eve did, Jesus proclaims a larger reality by quoting Scripture: “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Jesus is not denying that as a man he needs the bread, only that there is another bread that man and woman need to feed on every day. This brings quite a deeper meaning to the prayer, "give us this day our daily bread." Give me this day, Lord, one word from you that I might feed on it today. God is speaking. Are we listening and asking for that Word?

I have always loved words. I love literature, poetry, and writing. I was an English major in college and then studied the law. Both disciplines are worlds of words. So, when I received last year seven words before a planned eight-day solitude, I was expectant. The seven words were "radical", "transition", "death", "beauty', "palm", "mercy", and "gratitude' or "gratefulness". A previous Highway letter (Summer 2019) gives the background and can be reexamined on our here. That letter focuses on the word "radical".

This letter focuses on the word "transition.” I was recently speaking with a friend and member of our Verbena prayer team when I noticed her use the word "transition" several times, both in reference to herself and also to describe a friend who was coming for an intensive. This affirmed what I had already been feeling: The Spirit was leading me to engage in the next word.

Transitions are often thought of as waystations, as a sub-reality to get through, to be endured. Last year, just before I left for the retreat, the teaching began during a session in Okinawan karate. My teacher (sensei), Alan Kent, was working me through a series of movements, a form called the kata. To my surprise and delight, he emphasized the importance of the transitions, that they could be the most important phases of the form. I began to think how many times I had regarded these interstices as impediments to getting to where I was going. In contrast, Alan emphasized that we must occupy the transition, engage it.

The time at Eastern Point Retreat House matched up with a portion of Lent. Lent itself is a transition between the birth of Jesus and his death and resurrection. During the retreat, I used Eugene Petersen's book, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, as one of my guides. It is a beautiful commentary on that portion of the Psalms known as the Psalms of Ascent, Psalms 120 to 134. The songs were sung by the Hebrew pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem, their "Aliyah." for the feasts. Petersen comments:

But the ascent was not only literal, it was also a metaphor:
the trip to Jerusalem acted out a life lived upward to God,
an existence that advanced from one level to another in
developing maturity-- what Paul describes as " the goal
where God is beckoning us onward to Jesus. (Phil. 3:4).”


He highlights the importance of the "in-between times" on the journey just as Alan did. He goes on to highlight Paul Tournier's book, A Place For You, stating that it "describes the experience of being in between -- between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bar and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support; it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, of extraordinary aliveness."

I realized as God brought me these elaborations on "transition," that silence itself is a transition, an in-between, filled with meaning through listening. In this time in history and in our own journeys, we might listen to Petersen's encouragement concerning engaging the Psalms of Ascent:

”Christians will recognize how appropriately the Psalms may be
sung between times: between the time we leave the world's
environment and arrive at the spirit's assembly; between the time
we leave sin and arrive at holiness; between the time we leave
home and arrive in church with the company of God's people;
between the time we leave the works of the law and arrive at
justification by faith. They are songs of TRANSITION (emphasis
mine), brief hymns that provide courage, support and inner direction
for getting us where God is leading us in Jesus Christ.”


Of course, we can just endure and wait it out. Or we can feed on the Word in ever greater depth, exploring by God's grace the message, the song, the meaning. Words are symbols. The hidden reality is revealed in the exercise of the imagination and obedient attention. It is another dimension altogether that sparkles with the stimulation of discourse with God. There is a deep peace in accepting and receiving transitions in this way. I felt God saying to me, and possibly to you: "By dismissing transitions, you shorten your life by not living into a good part of it, the in-between." By being fully present to the transition we have the possibility of hearing words like this: "Behold I am doing a new thing. Can you see it?"

Many blessings in the many transitions of 2020 and beyond,
Trip and Laurie

Reflections on the Highway - Summer 2020

Sometimes, as at this time, things coalesce and become very clear. As disciples of Jesus, the kingdom of God in our midst should be our focus, as the body of Christ -The Church- concerned in every way and circumstance with the kingdom of Heaven. For years now I have been growing in my awareness of the depth and reality of the Eucharist and also the way it may have been trivialized over time along with the Cross. For me the Eucharist is an intense and kingdom response to the world, to violence, to the broken relationships of humanity and all other crises and causes which elevate the world's crises and turn our responses to the ways of the world, no matter how sincere these responses may be. This subverts the reality of the Cross as the redemptive path in every case: “[For he] has reconciled all things to himself ...by making peace through his blood shed on the Cross.” Col. 1:20. No blood, no peace. This may not satisfy those who howl for final solutions of all manner of things but to followers of Jesus, it must be the present and final word on all the unreconciled places in humanity, individual and collective and to all cruelty. Indeed, in the alternative, we are speaking of sacramental reality in the midst of a broken and fallen world. As Chambers intones concerning incarnational reality through us and, in this case, in and through the sacrament: “broken bread and poured out wine.”

As the deeper reality, meaning and celebration of the Eucharist came clear to me as a powerful response and resistance to the way of the world in crisis, God brought me affirmation, I am sure through the words and convictions of several giants in the faith, saying the same thing but better and giving articulate and depth of meaning to what I engaged so deeply in my heart as the Church's unified response to the ‘what are we going to do’ questions. In the remainder of this letter I will share what two of these saints have to say. You will have to read their referenced books to get the expansion on their thinking but the quotes provided from the prefaces are indeed powerful in this offer of an alternative resistance and redemptive path.

Alexander Schmemann died in 1983 after a marvelous life of pastoring, teaching and writing in the Orthodox and liturgical tradition. His book, The Eucharist, is unmatched in depth on our subject. The leaflet promo says this: “Man was created for unity, for faith, for offering and sacrifice, for love, for thanksgiving and worship, and, above all, for the kingdom, for communion with his Creator. All this the eucharist tells us, and the purpose of this book is to help us hear it.”

Then, Schmemann in his preface as if he is standing among in these times and describing them including the devaluing of the Eucharist.

“Thoughts and questions on this subject (the eucharist), which go back to early adolescence, have filled my whole life with joy - but, alas not only with joy. For the more real became my experience of the eucharistic liturgy, the sacrament of Christ's victory and of his glory the stronger became my feeling that there is a eucharistic crisis in the Church. In the tradition of the Church, nothing has changed. What has changed is the perception of the eucharist, the perception of its very essence. Essentially, this crisis consists in a lack of connection and cohesion between what is accomplished in the eucharist and how it is perceived, understood and lived.  ...

“Meanwhile, it can be said without exaggeration that we live in a frightening and spiritually dangerous age. It is frightening not just because of its hatred, division and bloodshed. It is frightening above all because it is characterized by a mounting rebellion against God and his kingdom. (emphasis mine throughout). Not God but man has become the measure of all things. Not faith but ideology and utopian escapism are determining the spiritual state of the world. At a certain point, Western Christianity accepted this point of view: almost at once one or another 'theology of liberation' was born. Issues relating to economics, politics and psychology have replaced a Christian vision of the world at the service of God. Theologians, clergy and other professional 'religious' run busily around the world defending --from God? -- this or that right, however perverse, and all this in the name of peace, unity and brotherhood. Yet in fact, the peace, unity and brotherhood are not the peace, unity and brotherhood that has been brought to us by our Lord Jesus Christ.

“Perhaps, many people will be astonished that, in response to this crisis, I propose that we turn our attention not to its various aspects but rather to the sacrament of the eucharist and to the Church whose very life flows from that sacrament. Yes, I do believe, that precisely here, in this holy of holies of the Church, in this ascent to the table of the Lord in his kingdom, is the source of that renewal for which we hope..." 

Alongside this introduction by Schmemann, I would offer some equally clarifying remarks by Walter Brueggamann, an ordained minister in the Church of Christ, a prolific author and a professor at Columbia Theological Seminary:

"I have come to think that the moment of giving the Bread of Eucharist as a gift is the quintessential center of the notion of Sabbatical rest in Christian tradition. It is a gift. We receive it in gratitude. Imagine having a sacrament named "thanks”! We are on the receiving end, without accomplishment, achievement or qualification. It is a gift and we are grateful. That moment of gift is a peaceable alternative that many who are 'weary and heavy-laden, cumbered with a load of care' receive gladly. The offer of free gift, faithful to Judaism, might let us learn enough to halt the dramatic anti-neighborliness to which our society is madly and uncritically committed.  Preface, Sabbath as Resistance, pp. xvi and xvii, Westminster John Knox Press 2017.

Then, in his seminal work, The Prophetic Imagination, published over 40 years ago and republished in 2018 in a celebratory 40th anniversary edition, he quotes William T. Cavanagh from his book, Torture and Eucharist: Politics and Body of Christ.  I won't try to recapitulate the discussion of the book which concerns the Church's response to the Pinochet reign of torture and terror in Chile. Cavanaugh described the Bishops and other church leadership as “asleep at the switch” and “passively conced[ing] everything to the regime.”

Cavanagh states, as summarized by Brueggamann: “After a certain point, however, the bishops of the church began to realize that the community - forming miracle of the Eucharist was a vehicle for the rule of God and a practical instrument for generating communities of resistance to the state.”

Then, Brueggamann analyzes Cavanaugh's commentary on a novel by Laurence Thornton entitled Imagining Argentina. The set-up is between two imaginations, that of the torture state and that of “an imagination… defined as nothing less than 'the magnificent cause of being.'” Then, Cavanagh quotes from the novel concerning alternative realities, a thrilling passage to me concerning the Eucharist:

"To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God's imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul are incorporated into the performance of Christ's corpus verum, they resist the state's ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture."

What I hope this discussion will spark is the question of whose imagination we are living in - in these times and in our responses. Could we consider together the path to live in God's imagination, the kingdom of heaven, and the Eucharist as reality and answer?

Finally, I also refer you to two recent commentaries by our friend, Luther Alexander. They are linked below. Luther is a lifelong friend of Todd Lipe, the coordinator of our intercessor team. Luther is a Chaplain to the chaplains in military and civil service at the most sensitive levels. He has become a friend of mine for which I am grateful. He is an African American who lays out the teachings of Jesus which are central to every intensive we have, and which call us to that third way of Jesus. Laid out there is the central reality for making disciples after Jesus, following him ourselves in the power of the Holy Spirit. These teachings are not principles or practices but an active participation in the victory of Jesus. They are realities of obedience in the Spirit, yoked to Jesus. Please spend some time with it.

Blessings, trip

Reflections on the Highway - March 2020

Dear Friends,

I have been invited by several folks in the last week, including our Board and a couple of our intercessors, to communicate to our Verbena friends in the midst of the Coronavirus declared pandemic. I'll start off by saying this: Surely the people of God must have a Spirit-led response in the midst of any storm, crisis or challenge that brings light and hope into darkness, anxiety, panic and fear, while at the same time obeying the authorities and being prudent in all circumstances.

When I began to draft this piece last Friday, following a Board call, I found that many other believing leaders were doing the same thing and in far greater depth and research informed than I am able to do here. Here is a link to one of the most exhaustive lay responses I have seen. Please read it all the way through. It is wise, thorough and a call to unique responses as citizens of the kingdom of heaven as well as one to the pragmatic based on good authority. It dovetails with my own thoughts in many ways, which I will summarize here…

First of all, we must pray. This is a call to intercession on behalf of the whole world, and the heart of Verbena is intercession. We believe this changes everything, including us, as we seek the mercy and intervention of a loving and good God. Oswald Chambers once asserted that God changes things in response to prayer. That hit me with the force of transforming thunder 22 years ago, and we have believed it and practiced it for every person coming for an intensive in the most damaging of circumstances and memory. God is aware of this crisis, as He has been of every other the world has faced over time... So, let’s pray.

Here is what my pastor invites us to pray for:

We pray not only for ourselves, but for all who have been impacted, indeed devastated, by this virus. Pray for those who have lost their lives and their livelihoods and those who are helping them; pray for the medical teams and first responders who are on the front lines of our health defense and those doing research and working behind the scene to end this. Pray for those who lead our nation and states as well as leaders the world over that a coordinated cooperative effort may bring about a swifter resolution to a health crisis.

He concludes with this statement which I wholeheartedly pass on to you. "Prayer is a good antidote to panic." He then quotes Philippians 4:6-7 (NIV), "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." Let’s do this together and with our children.

Continue as often as you will to receive the Eucharist. If your church is closed, meet in a small group and with your family to receive. We believe in the Real Presence so let’s receive it, administering in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, asking God through the descending power of the Holy Spirit to make these elements for us the sacramental reality of His body and blood as He declared it is.  Appeal to your church leaders to make the sacrament available to smaller units of folks at various times throughout the week as opposed to shutting everything down.

Continue to meet together for worship and prayer in small groups, as Hebrews 10 instructs, encouraging one another in the today of this crisis and while we still call it Today. 

Help the poor and displaced. What an opportunity to stand in the gap, not hoarding but sharing with those losing jobs, losing meals and losing housing. Meeting the pressing needs of our neighbors right where we are. This can be accomplished with the appropriate and advised social distancing.  And powerfully preach the love of God.

Obey the authorities. Be prudent and wise, informed and gentle. Read The Wall Street Journal article of March 14th entitled "America's Long Fight Against Contagion." I am in the demographic most at risk by age and by underlying conditions. Elderly, really? Laurie asked me if I were concerned for myself. I said, "No, not really,” but I will take all the precautions recommended.

Jesus is the same today as he has been through every contagion and catastrophe and He is the way, the truth, and the life. And so, I trust in God for my going out and coming in and for yours. I will stay at my post. Would I like your prayers for my protection? "Yes." Do I wash my hands, and do I elbow pump when the putt rolls into the hole? "Yes." Am I at risk? "Yes." Am I at peace? "Yes." Am I praying? "Yes."

Forgive me if you think this next paragraph is out of place in addressing the subject, but I feel deeply convicted in my spirit to express it. The biggest threat to America and its people, and to the world and its people, is not this virus. It is a threat for sure and to the most vulnerable: this for the elderly as polio was to the children. But there is a virus growing more lethal and pervasive. It is the ever-present virus of deception and unbelief in the goodness of God and calling evil good and good evil. We pray for the elderly in this current crisis. All lives are precious, including the most vulnerable of all, the unborn, dying in massively greater proportion. With this in mind, I pray: 

Father, use all crises to bring many to Christ and open all eyes to the truth. And use them more clearly in us to conform us more nearly to the image of your Son according to your purpose. In that way, all things work together for good for those who love the Lord and who are called according to that purpose that He, Jesus, might be the first born among many bearing that family likeness.

Finally, the Covid-19 crisis is causing us to pause and reorder. It also comes in intensity here during Lent, a recurring time to pause and reorder in the rhythm of time eternal. It is a concurrent time to pause to believe, maybe a nudge to silence and contemplation on that which is Eternal and an exposing of idols in how we spend our time. I am filling some of that Lenten space and reordering to the Sabbath. I am reading Sabbath as Resistance by Walter Brueggemann. He describes the Sabbath pause, and you could even say this dual pause we are in is transformational:

"In this (Hebrew) interpretive tradition, Sabbath is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for reimagining all social life away from coercion and competition to compassionate solidarity. Such solidarity is imaginable and capable of performance only when the drivenness of acquisitive is broken. Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. Whereas Israelites are always tempted to acquisitiveness, Sabbath is an invitation to receptivity, an acknowledgement that what is needed is given and need not be seized." (p. 45)

Will you join me in this Lenten Sabbath, all the more spacious in light of these recent developments? Let’s redeem the time in many ways with our eyes fixed on Jesus.  And remember this redemptive promise and invitation contingent on repentance and prayer. So we are back where we started, with prayer:

When I shut up the heavens so that there is no more rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among the people, if my people, who are called by my name (that is us), will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will turn from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. (2 Chronicles 7:14)

Bless you all in every way.

Trip and Laurie

Refections on the Highway - Summer 2019

I came to the eight day retreat at Eastern Point on Cape Anne, MA this year expectant and energized. Lent was underway for 2019 and I had prepared more than usual for the 40 days which would include the 8 days of silence for Laurie and me. On the backend, we take an extra night in Boston that gives us time to share our encounters with our Lord and our surroundings from our solitude and to name some takeaways.

So even with several intensives and the week around the National Prayer Breakfast concluded, I had intentionally spent more time listening to the ways God may be communicating about the time. In Washington, our friend Richard Treacy mentioned that he was praying through Lent using Eugene Petersen"s book on the Psalms of Ascent (Psalms 120-134), A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It immediately resonated with my spirit as Richard and I laughed uproariously at our choice this year of ascent over descent for Lent. We decided to join the Hebrews as they make their Alyiah-- going up to Jerusalem and Jesus as he makes his way up from the Kidron Valley to the same Jerusalem and the Cross.

This also offered consideration of my own direction, past, present, and future. Is it obedient? Is it the same direction? Has it been and will it continue to be steadfast? All of this input seemingly important for a lengthy pause to listen to God about it. Helpfully, over the past couple of years, I have also become aware of God speaking into each day, presently as I listened, in big things and small. It is a growing awareness and practice and an increasing delight to grow in the reality of trusting what one hears and acting on it. Increasingly, it has opened up spaciousness, a more relaxed presence and actually extending the days. It has also made me far more intentional.

In that way, as I prepared for the retreat and the Lenten vigil, I believe the Lord brought seven words to my conscious mind and I wrote them down to bring to the retreat time. The words were radical, beauty, palm, transition, death, mercy, and gratitude or gratefulness. In this writing I share how the "radical" was fleshed out during solitude. I will also say that each word was encountered and filled with meaning and messages through the homilies, devotional texts, daily Scriptures, spiritual direction and encounter with the great outdoors. Each word has its own story of revelation, connection, and path and together form a grid of unity -- a fabric -- each one informing the other as I listened. I cannot overstate how thrilling, informative, and encouraging this was and is. It emphasizes to me, and I hope to you in your journey, that each day can be alive in the Spirit as we learn that "man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” God is speaking. Am I listening? God created as the Word is spoken and his ongoing creativity invites collaborative participation in the work of the Spirit. The unfolding of each of the words is a full story in itself.

The word "radical" posed this question to me: "What does "radical" describe for me going forth into the fourth quarter of my life as a disciple of Jesus and an elder in the faith. I began with the dictionary which presents two distinct meanings. The first is "arising from or going to the root or source; fundamental; basic. The radical sign in mathematics is a symbol placed before a quantity to indicate its root is to abstracted. Lots to work with there. Secondly, and more familiar to us as commonly articulated and descriptive of a position: "carried to the farthest limit; extreme; sweeping." "Radical social change" is the usage example. Plenty of space to play in also.

At the retreat, a slim devotional volume was made available for Lent. I used it alongside Petersen’s book. One day the devotional entry was titled  "Radical Faithfulness." It jumped off the page. It had my attention. The Scripture was Jesus' calling of Levi, now called Matthew, the tax collector and his response: "And leaving everything behind, he got up and followed him."

Luke 5:27-28. The writer comments:

       “Unlike Matthew, we do not necessarily have to leave
        our families and our belongings behind, but if we do
        it right (in following Jesus) we do have to be radical
        about it because, quite frankly, everything about Jesus
        is radical. I often say that if I could grasp with my
        human mind the reality of who Jesus is and what he
        has given to me, my life would change in radical and
        transformational ways.”

The fact that these verses and this commentary showed up concerning the word "radical" felt like a gift and affirmation at the same time, and the gifts kept coming. It drew me to simplicity and making a smaller footprint of stuff. Traveling lighter in the fourth quarter. Shedding along the way so to speak, and enjoying all the more what God has given me, materially and relationally. When these convergences so clearly occur, God's faithfulness, his actuality is preached to me. I sit in the silence marveling that He is saying to me: "Hey, I am working with you. I am communicating. Receive it. Continue to listen, believe and obey. Believe what you see and hear in the smallest of things. Act on it." And these verses pile on: "Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door  will be opened to you." In all things, "pray without ceasing". "My sheep know my voice and follow me. They will not follow a stranger." A simple, obedient and, yes, radical way to live.

So the foregoing is one impactful meaning for "radical" in my journey and maybe has some bearing on yours. Another dimension and meaning opened up for me as I read Psalm 126 with Petersen's commentary. I realized that over the last three years in particular a sense and practice of celebration and its expression as gratitude to God, honor to people and daily remarking on something delightful in that day had taken hold of me. "Isn't that wonderful. Let's celebrate it now." Could this be a developing, radical way to live out my life. Psalm 126 and Petersen say "Yes". In his discourse, he emphasizes laughter and joy. He quotes his Message translation of Philippians 4: 4-5:

      "Celebrate God all day, everyday. I mean revel in him. 
      Make it as clear as you can to all you meet that you are
      on their side, working with them, and not against them.
      Help them see that the Master is about to arrive. He may
      show up any minute."

Maybe here, in living out the Christ life to the full, we get closer to a vitality, an overflow, a spirit radical in celebration of the goodness of God. Thus at this point "radical" seems more like energetic, anticipatory, visionary, and alive. Not competing but blessing; at home in the present and articulating in all circumstances the hope that is within. It seems to be all about being certain about God and living on the basis, and loving on the basis, of who He is. Joy.

This, of course, is not to deny suffering in oneself, in others and throughout the world. It does not mean separating from grief instead of grieving. Petersen says this about suffering, and we intercede with this confidence in every intensive before the Cross:

       "All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is
       seed. Sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy 
       from it....The joy comes because God knows how to wipe
       away tears, and in his resurrection work, create the smile
       of new life. Joy is what God gives, not what we work up."

Radical seeks and delights in and is stunned by beauty. Radical is patient in transition, not passing one by but seeing transitions as necessary to move from one place of growth to another, changed from one form of glory to the next. Radical opens the hands; it also raises the palms in praise and extends the hands in welcome. Radical does not fear death and treasures each moment of life, knowing death is transition itself. Radical is mercy. Gratefulness, gratitude is a radical response to a radical love.

May the succeeding days of my life and yours, dear friends, be filled radically with the life of Christ, an un-self-conscious witness that we are delighted to be chosen and called and that we are ready with the answer in radical obedience to His voice. Shall we encourage each other in this? Shall we shout it together from the rooftops? Let’s.

Blessings,
Trip and Laurie

In Memoriam

Laurie and I, and the Verbena friends and partners, pay special tribute and honor to Jean Vanier, the founder and visionary of the L'Arche communities. Laurie and I were privileged to attend, with Ron Ivey and others, the last English speaking retreat Jean led. The retreat was at La Ferme in France, the original L'Arche community and Jean's home. We are saddened by his passing but so grateful for his life.  His mentoring and sharing of the gospel through introducing his friends numbered among the disabled helped us see our own disabilities and laugh together. Verbena is committed to partnering with L'Arche any way we can. 

Reflections on the Highway - Winter 2019

Happy New Year to you. I am writing this letter from a personal retreat I try to take each year at St. Francis Springs Prayer Center about 30 miles north of Greensboro. I take three days and three nights there beginning on January 2nd. The purpose is at least two-fold. First and foremost it is a time of reflection and writing concerning the year that has passed: a chronicle, an evaluation (or examen as Ignatius puts it) and a report on that year in all the spheres of life.

As I reflect and write, it is a time to celebrate the amazing things brought our way in family, ministry, relationship, spiritual growth and physical health. As I record these multiple times of blessing it is almost overwhelming. Gratitude just poured forth as I would re-experience them in reflection. Then, I just as carefully seek to re-visit and record the places of sorrow, hurt and conflict; also, times of frustration, fear and anger that move me to find peace and forgiveness often of myself and others. It is a cleansing time for moving into the New Year.

Thus, reflection looms large in this space. In my devotions I am struck by how often Mary's journey is mentioned by commentators encouraging reflection. Two writings follow which encourage a pause at the beginning of the year and may still encourage you to do so. One commenter says this:

In the midst of all this looking ahead, I take great comfort in the
example that Mary gives at the start of it all. After the birth of Jesus
and the visit of the shepherds, Luke tells us Mary "kept all these
things, reflecting on them in her heart (Luke 2:19). The New Year
begins not with Mary straining forward or "leaning in", but "bending
back". It begins in reflection from (flectere, "to bend"). Instead of our
secular ritual of the New Year's resolution - those well-intentioned
promises that we know we will never keep - Mary models a different
practice: prayerful consideration of what has already taken place.

Hahnenberg, Give us this Day (January 2019, p.5).

Another author puts it this way in relation to a "yes" to what God’s call may be us to in the new year:

The dawning of a new year causes many of us to reflect in our heart.
We have turned the page on the old calendar with gratitude, with
some Auld Lang Syne wistfulness, or with regrets or even deep remorse
over things we have done or failed to do. For some of us the old
year brought crushing sorrow- or incandescent joy. The new year
may bring either or both of these extremes, or it may simply bring
a normal ebb and flow of life's disappointments and delights....
Mary carried an equanimity and an unfolding wisdom born of saying
"yes" to the new. May we follow her example and notice in this new
year where God is offering opportunities for us to offer a "yes" of our own.


This brings us to my second purpose for drawing aside at this time, namely in prayer for growth in discernment and listening and an attentive ear for this new year while I am alone and in solitude. It so helps to reconcile with the joys and sorrows of the prior year as we pray for wisdom and a growth in love, compassion and thanksgiving in this present one. So I want to share with you a prayer I came across in relation to the year opening up before us. I pray this for myself, my family, for you and for the many constituencies of the Verbena vision and invite you to join in on all those levels as we pray.

Prayer for Guidance

Steer the ship of my life Lord, to your quiet harbor,
where I can be safe from the storms of sin and conflict.
Show me the course I should take.
Renew in me the gift of discernment
So that I can always see the right direction in which I should go.
And give me the strength and the courage to choose the
right course, even when the seas are rough and the waves high,
Knowing that through enduring hardship and danger we
shall find comfort and peace.

-- St. Basil of Caesarea.

Now, I am moved to pray for healing and wholeness for the folks who come for prayer this year and those God brings to you. And a deepening prayer of mine for is for healing and unity in the whole body of Christ - the Church. Just as intentionally, I pray for a renewal and increase in the gift of hospitality as Laurie and I welcome people into our home before an intensive and as I receive each one for prayer the days they are here, the warmth of hospitality being critical to a sense of safety and connection. I pray the same for your home and for every gathering we host, large or small. This is a prayer on those two fronts that it would be powerful to pray in unity together this year:

Prayer for Wholeness and Healing

We come together,
broken, shaken, shattered, barely standing.
As a church and a people
we are holding tight to a reality that we are
struggling to understand.

We come together as the People of God,
simply together, without rank or hierarchy,
seeking a glimpse of the
Divine that is Love.

We come together to pray
Words cannot utter our heart.
Images constrain our mind.

God knows what is deepest in our hearts.
We sit open to this understanding.
God show each of us what is needed.

We gather as the people of God
angry, distraught, called to action.

We gather
seeking a unifying love that can only come from the
presence of the Divine One.

Love's greatest design
is for wholeness and healing.
We gather as the people of God,
called to incarnate this
great design to whom all we encounter.

-- Sr. Linda Buck, CSJ

Another source of my devotions here is a book that Henri Nouwen wrote, his last book before he died: Can You Drink The Cup?. It is meditative and slim and weaves in the stories and companions of those last years in the community of L'Arche Dayspring in Canada. The unfolding meditation tracks the gestures in engaging a cup, holding, lifting, drinking and the application to the follower of Jesus as only Nouwen in profound simplicity can express it. Consider this one thought on drinking the cup and the accompanying commentary from the introduction by Ron Hansen in pursuing authenticity in who we are and in our vocational obedience:

Drinking the cup of life is fully appropriating and internalizing
our own unique existence with all its sorrows and joys
. (Nouwen p. 13)

It is the challenge to forthrightly acknowledge who we are, to
forsake the entrapments of our addictions, compulsions and sins,
and to be as fully trusting in God as Jesus was when he, in a
spirit of unconditional love accepted his ministry with all its con-
sequences.
(Hansen, p. 13).

Nouwen explores this and so much more for a life in discipleship and contemplation. For those wanting and walking this way of love, he says this about lifting the cup, namely the absolute need for community which we heartily affirm in our ministry and through Verbena:

Lifting our cup means sharing our life so we can celebrate it. When
we truly believe we are called to lay down our lives for our friends,
we must dare to take the risk to let others know what we are living.
The important question is, "Do we have a circle of trustworthy friends
where we feel safe enough to be intimately known and called to an
always greater maturity?"


May it be so among us with you and you with us. It is so affirming and encouraging and life giving to be able to answer that question "Yes" we have such a circle as we enter our 22nd year of praying with people.

Finally, after quoting so much for you to pray and consider from my time away, it is fitting and necessary to conclude with a blessing to you which I receive in my life and vocation in solitude that is straight from Scripture. I pass on to you that which I receive:

The Lord said to Moses: "Speak to Aaron and his sons and tell them:
This is how you shall bless the Israelites. Say to them:/ The Lord let
his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you!/ The Lord look upon
you kindly and give you peace./ So shall they invoke my name upon
the Israelites, and I will bless them.


Much love and blessing in this New Year.

Trip and Laurie

Reflections on the Highway - Summer 2018

I realize that reading a Highway letter is somewhat of a commitment. Rather than being a one pager or a daily devotion, it is more an attempt to communicate how a vision is being unfolded in time, through a framework of prayer and discernment. Hopefully, it also can spark something in your own journey of faith as we believe together in the One He has sent. Thank you for taking the time. Any response or feedback is a welcome dialogue.
 
I am focusing in this Reflection on the connection and importance of community and the ministry of presence in relation to the working out of the kingdom of heaven together. I have been ruminating on this topic for some time as we have been experiencing the value of that connection in multiple ways. One very clear expansion of the Verbena vision in the last several years has been the call to travel to communities across the country, and more recently internationally, where those who have been to Greensboro for an intensive prayer time reside and who indicate a desire to stay connected to us and our work.
 
As I was preparing to write on this theme, I was handed a copy of Pope Francis' March 19, 2018 Apostolic Exhortation entitled "On the Call to Holiness in Today's World". Todd Lipe, one of our intercessors and a close companion day-to-day, passed it along to me from a lifelong friend of his who ministers to folks in a strategic U.S Agency worldwide. Neither of these men are members of the Roman Catholic Church and both are Jesus people recognizing the call to unity across the whole body of Christ and the wisdom that can be shared. As the Creed expresses: One holy, catholic and apostolic church.
 
The Verbena conversation continues to unfold and our vision is to pray for the realized union with Christ in the individual believer, also in the marriages represented and then in the whole of the mystical body of Christ, the Church, past, present and future. In that prayer, we join Jesus in his prayer (the whole of John 17) that we may be one with the Father and the Son, even as they are one, in the unity of the Holy Spirit individually and collectively and thus witness his love to the whole world. (For more on this, see our November 3, 2015 Highway Reflection here.)
 
As I became quiet during the last several days of precious solitude for writing, prayer and reflection, I read the whole of Francis' exhortation, which I highly recommend to each of you as a reminder of the depth and immediacy of the Gospel reality. Particularly though, in light of the theme coming to me, and after coming off visits to Kansas City, Denver, Annapolis and Rome over several months and powerful connections in Durham, Tulsa, DC, Paris and Israel in the prior few years, I was riveted by the sections on community and prayer which are so passionately and beautifully articulated.  Francis' themes are so in union with the vision for Verbena and are being practically worked out in our current experience, one by one and community by community. In recognition of that union, and wisdom beyond my own, I am going to share selections of Francis' thoughts and claim them also as an inspiration for a growing vision to be lived out among us. As Francis outlines, our commitment to be with others is a witness of Jesus' commitment to be with us always and in everything. Our willingness to listen and to go and be with; the invitation for people to come into space for healing and the commitment to community and family are all distinct calls to the disciples of Jesus throughout the Scriptures.
 
The opposite, the negative or shadow side, living in selfish isolation, as expressed by Francis, is dangerous in the extreme to ourselves and others: "When we live apart from others, it is very difficult to fight against concupiscence (lust, greed, sensuality), the snares of temptations of the devil and the selfishness of the world. Bombarded by so many enticements, we can grow too isolated, lose our sense of reality and inner clarity, and easily succumb." (para. 140)
 
The path in light includes this: "Growth in holiness is a journey in community, side by side with others." This living alongside is witnessed in holy matrimony as well as in the broader communal life. "In many holy marriages too, each spouse becomes a means used by Christ for the sanctification of the other. Living and working alongside others is surely a path to spiritual growth. St. John Of the Cross told one of his followers:  'You are living with others to be fashioned and tried.' " (para. 141).
 
Creating space for others permits the sharing of realties invited by Jesus that reveal himself in our midst. "Each community (whether with one other or many) is called to create a 'God-enlightened space in which to experience the hidden presence of the risen Lord'. Sharing the word and the Eucharist together fosters fraternity and makes us a holy and missionary community." (para. 142). "The common life whether in family, the parish, the religious community or any other, is made up of small everyday things. This was true of the holy community formed by Jesus, Mary and Joseph, which reflected in a beautiful way the beauty of the Trinitarian Community. It was also true of the life Jesus shared with his disciples and with ordinary people." (para. 143).
 
The ministry of presence then is sharing the life Jesus shares and bringing that life to each encounter with another. There is also the ministry of presence to be received in the mutuality of encounter. We experience this mutuality in each community we enter and with each person who comes to Greensboro, no matter the depth of their pain. In the communities, we stand in the midst of families, the children all around, and in the midst of generations, in the gathering of friends sharing the Eucharist and song and in the neighborhoods. The warm and gracious hospitality of our hosts and the friends they invite, the children that play are all the expression of this mutuality.
 
The ministry of presence also opens up the ministry of absence. When one leaves to go, the absence is felt and real -- particularly in the care of children and other responsibilities. This where there is the opportunity for the Lord in his mercy to fill that space and for loving members of the family and community to step in. There is always a cost to going. And, of course, in coming and going, and in receiving others, we have to mindful and committed to stay connected to our families, local communities, friends, parishes and churches. It is always good and a more solid witness to come from a real place and back again, a place – home, which has an authenticity in intimacy at every level.
 
Francis then turns to the subject and practice of prayer in its many forms. Each one, and its atmosphere, we seek to practice and to grow in in our own journey of faith. I will only mention a couple in closing that we find vital. First and emphatically he emphasizes that the call to community is not a call away from solitude and silence. It is not selfish isolation but an entering in soul, alone to God in communion. It is to be with God in community, to listen, to stay connected vertically first. Apart from it can we really know when and where to go, when to stay and when to play and whom to receive? In silence, we listen to one voice.  In contemplation, we fellowship with the one who occupies our inmost part and invites us there. In quiet discernment, we come to know the way rather than make our own haphazard plans, which may actually work against community, unity and love.
 
Francis says it this way: "In that silence, we can discern in light of the spirit, the paths of holiness to which the Lord is calling us. Otherwise, any decisions we make may only be window-dressing that, rather than exalting the Gospel in our lives, will mask or submerge it. For each disciple, it essential to spend time with the Master, to listen to his words, and to learn from him always. Unless we listen all our words (and actions) will be nothing but chatter." (para. 150).
 
So vital in the journey of an intensive – and in our own – is where the gaze has been and where it becomes fixed through prayer. We find in every case as the eyes of the heart are opening, as Francis says that "contemplation of the face of Jesus, died and risen, restores our humanity, even when it has been broken by the troubles of this life or marred by sin. We must not domesticate the power of the face of Christ." The "abode of divine mercy," the place of healing and transformation is "to enter into the Lord's heart, into his wounds." From the gaze into that reality, Francis promises, and we have seen it fulfilled, that your words and witness will catch fire. (para. 151).
 
Finally, then, on the power and necessity of intercessory prayer, I leave with each of you and especially our team of intercessors in deep gratitude, this encouragement by Francis: "Intercessory prayer is an expansion of our fraternal concern for others, since we are able to embrace their lives, their deepest troubles and their loftiest dreams. Of those who commit themselves generously to intercessory prayer we can apply these words of Scripture: 'This is a man (this is a woman) who loves the brethren and prays much for the people'. " 2 Mac. 15:14. (para 154).
 
This is a powerful reminder to us all that every intensive is an intercession, undergirded by the prayers of the saints, including our team, and joining Jesus in his intercession for us.
 
Much love and blessings,
Trip and Laurie

P.S. - To read the full Apostolic Exhortation "On the Call to Holiness in Today's World" click here.

 

Reflections on the Highway - Fall 2017

Where there is no vision, the people perish; but he that keepeth the law,

Happy is he. - Proverbs 29:18 (KJV)

 

Where there is no revelation, people cast off restraint: but blessed is

Is the one who heeds wisdom's instruction. - Proverbs 29:18 (NIV)

 

If people can't see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves;

But when they attend to what he reveals, they are most blessed.  - Proverbs 29:18 (The Message)

 

Where there is ignorance of God, crime runs wild; but what a wonderful

Thing it is for a nation to know and keep his laws. - Proverbs 29:18 (The Living Bible)

 

I have written about the arresting nature of convergences before--intersections in our lives that call attention to a meaning far deeper than the ordinary flow of events. They can be both deeply personal and also have a larger, universal application. If I am attentive enough, I have found them to be opportunities to pause, reflect and be informed in mystery.

The prompting revealed in this reflection concerns music, musicians and concert goers. Our paths seemed to cross so intimately and tragically in this year 2017. What to make of it?

Several months ago, I had some rare time alone in our home. I had finished an intensive three-day prayer session, full of its preciousness and the privilege to be with a person. I turned to the Netflix documentary section. Many of you know that I love and have devoured scores of biographies and many documentaries on the lives of artists from all genres. I believe there is a close connection in the Spirit between artistry and imagination involved in prayer intercession for another. The imaginative world of the arts, whether music, literature (including by all means poetry), painting, iconography, photography, and other art forms including film and architecture tap the mystical elements of a person. A strategic part of the Verbena vision is to keep a dialogue alive concerning these shared experiences in transcendence and creativity.

My Netflix search lighted upon a three-hour Tom Petty documentary. I only barely knew of him, having heard a song of his here and there but not always knowing his sound. I was transfixed by the story of this rock music man played out through concerts, collaborations and fights with the music industry. He had a grit and a vision that drove 40 years of music production into places where opposition, intimidation, scarce resources and limited vision of others would have stopped other gifted men and women in their tracks. But I also encountered a joyous humility in him as he would include others in his journey and join them in theirs. He often celebrated the gifts of folks like Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and George Harrison, as collaboration and friendship overtook being in the singular spotlight. His fight over the right to his own music was truly a David and Goliath triumph. His victory set a distinct and valuable marker in the music industry for other artists. That underlying fierceness, undoubtedly formed by some brutal childhood hurts, was always tempered, it seems, by his willingness to see and care for a person, whether fan or colleague.

Just a couple months later: Las Vegas, a country concert drawing hundreds from all over the country. Open air, friendships, & celebrations: a community drawn together by music becomes a shooting gallery. Before the shooting, "America, the Beautiful" sung in unison to hundreds of lighters illuminating the scene. Then, the horror of carnage rained down on the trapped, unsuspecting and unprotected concert-goers. This violence linked in malevolence if not in cause, to the other tragedies experienced worldwide: innocent, unsuspecting folks trampled, blown-up, beheaded, shot and run over. This is a truly malignant and virulent unleashing of demonic force and overtaking that we are loathed to name. In our denial of supernatural evil, we deny the power and existence of supernatural good. We deny the sudden flash of Gabriel coming from another place to intersect a young women's destiny with a new narrative of both suffering and glory.  We lose the reality of Saul being knocked off his high horse by a blinding light, this holy interruption intersecting his journey of destruction and changing his heart and his future.

Three other convergences emerged, one shortly before I began to form these thoughts and the other two in the midst of writing. Last week, Laurie and I attended a Rhiannon Giddens concert at UNCG in Greensboro. Rhiannon is a youthful though now seasoned performer, a believer in Jesus, African-American in descent and historian of music particularly of music being lost from early black culture in America. Her original group in Greensboro was named the Chocolate Drops and now she is a Grammy winner living in Ireland. She is a wife, a mother and performer: singer and song-writer, violinist and fiddler as well as banjo player. Toward the end of the concert, she called out to us concert-goers: " You know this has been a hard week. Las Vegas and Tom Petty dying.” There it was. This beautiful young woman, standing in the midst of her band (which included her sister) crying out: " Shall we do a Tom Petty song?" We erupted in acclaim and she and the band kicked into a rousing, defiant (but not angry) and convicted rendition of " I won't back down". She said we need this in the face of what is happening.

Laurie and I left for the beach this week for a much-needed break and a chance to reflect and to write. I told her of the waves of thought breaking over my consciousness, intersecting my world of impression. As I read through the names, pictures and bios of the precious victims of the Las Vegas shooting, I felt a force of gravity, the deepest disturbance. I told her I wanted to understand the meaning of these events and experiences juxtaposed in such a short timeframe and then to write about it.

The next morning, she just started playing Greg Allman's last album, Southern Blood, released in September. Greg died earlier in 2017 than Petty. He died of lung cancer, untreated so that he could sing on, fearing that treatment would destroy his voice. Like Petty, he just completed his last concert tour before he died. The album, Laurie tells me, has only one original song. He had run out of energy to work on others so the rest of the album is covers of songs sung by Greg that he felt connected to by southern blood and that helped interpret his life. He chokes up in the course of "Song for Adam", a Jackson Browne cover, as his late brother Dwayne comes to mind. Jackson steps in to finish the harmony on his song about losing a friend to death. Her selection reminded me of a previous reading of Greg Allman's autobiography. It was a story of pain, music, recovery and redemption.

Obviously, these musicians, like us, are flawed. They struggle with addictions, broken relationships, losses and difficult childhoods. They also fought to play their music and to sing. The concert goers and fans there to hear them sing and join in. Their stories underscore the presence and activity of this malevolent force, more active and unleashed as our societies’ vision is lost and even repudiated. It is far from being just mental illness. This force tries to kill the singing in the universe and supplant it with fear and terror. It seizes from within and puts life into a mausoleum. Maybe this is not a startling revelation but it has converged on me and brought forth intense emotion and grieving. In my grief, I am discerning that this malevolence is the same force trying to destroy the song in each one we accompany in prayer.

But the Psalmist also says that God will give us a new song. Can we hear it? Can we learn to sing it together in the midst of horror, loss, and death. We have to listen for it and I admire those who fight to sing and write songs in various ways. They join in the creative celebration of the children of God. In fact, we have a musician, a music maker, in our midst. Our son, Julian, is a gifted artist, singer, song-writer and in my opinion virtuoso piano, keyboard and organ player and a beautiful guitarist. He has confronted his own fears and addictions and lives to make music as a solo act and with his band. He has been inspired more by his mother, a true keeper of the mystery and delight of music more than by my periodic belts of Elvis over the years. Keep singing, Julian.

I am going to close this Reflection as we walk in this way of singing together, with the third interposition contemporaneous with this writing. It makes my point I hope in its unpretentiousness and sincerity. Yesterday, as I was finishing the draft of this piece, I received an email from Carol Patrick, one of our intercessors. Years ago, I prayed with this single woman for healing in great brokenness. She has sought and received healing relentlessly and courageously despite much opposition and misunderstanding. She has grown immensely in the Spirit and maintains a great sense of humor. She has also begun to write poetry and has been sharing it with me. She had no idea that I was writing or what I was writing but in her email she expressed her deepest angst over the events in Las Vegas. She then shared that she stepped outside into the darkest of night and was stunned by the brilliance and clarity of the fullest of moons. Transfixed by the light she created a poem. She threw it out to the darkness and stood her ground, solitary but aware. I believe this holy defiance makes a difference in the universe. Her artistic expression, fledgling as it is, gives voice to the hope within her and testifies to the light that has come into the world that the darkness cannot extinguish: Jesus. There is not another answer and Christ in you is the hope of glory right where you are and in the whole world. Don't back down. Shout out to me not to.  Let’s sing our songs and let it rise. Her poem:

                    Oh, the full moon shining so bright

                     in the early morning night.

                     God's creation for lighting the dark night

                     to remind us that He is the one and only Light.

                     Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord,

                     for he cares for the night.

                     The darkness can never outshine the light.

 

And from Isaiah 61 in the closing verses:

                      As a garden causes seeds to grow and a sprout to come up

                      So the Sovereign Lord will cause righteousness and praise

                      to spring up in every nation.

 

Blessings,

Trip and Laurie

 

Reflections on the Highway - Spring 2017

Psalm 16:11
You have made known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures in your right hand.


Has it been writer's cramp, the press of circumstances or the jumble of the mind that has kept me from writing this letter for six months?   Or maybe I had nothing to say... which may have been a relief to many.  I try to write a Highway letter quarterly to reflect something to you, my friends, of my path with God and others that might be helpful as you consider your journey.  I also desire to share some of the things that inform this journey of prayer, creativity and discipleship that we have named Verbena.

I wrote the last one as I turned 70 and had in that year experienced Israel and our first Verbena Gathering. I asked for the kindness of taking it aside in some place of quiet to honor the more personal nature of that communication. Thanks to those of you who were able to do that. I hope there was something meaningful to your own journey, as you took that care in some measure of contemplation.
 
This year, Laurie and I were privileged to resume our annual eight days of retreat in silence at Eastern Point, a Jesuit (Society of Jesus) retreat property near Gloucester, Massachusetts.  The facility had been closed for two years for a major renovation.  In the absence of this annual retreat option, our need for the safety, respite and rhythm which we had become attached to had become acute.  In that setting, we were among thirty to forty souls in need of rehabilitation. We stayed in separate quarters for men and women, ate our meals together, took walks, watched fires in the fireplace turn to coals, and spent our individual prayer times, all entirely in silence. The desire, of course, is to meet with God -- but often the first few days of silence brings up all the struggles, demons, hurts and insecurities that conscious life has suppressed; all that purging is necessary and, we trust, under the watchful presence of the Lord. It can be very painful and disturbing.

February marked my seventh year of retreat at Eastern Point and Laurie's fourth. I have one journal that exclusively chronicles each one of the retreats. This seventh retreat almost filled it up completely. Seven is a sacred number in Scripture, denoting completeness, unity and fulfillment which was a powerful way to view this time and receive it. And, in going forward, it also points to the eighth, the day or time to follow in new life, new beginnings-- resurrection. Each retreat chapter of the journal is filled with battles, insights from spiritual direction, quotations from books and poems I read during the time, listenings from prayer and walks, and early mornings watching the sun rise over the enormous rocks and ocean expanse. These encounters are carefully recorded amidst the constant interaction with the beauty, majesty, mystery and fierceness at times with the created nature surrounding us.

The journal really does trace a journey in faith of my own heart, mapping a deeper sense and clarity of purpose and consistency and communication from our God over time. In reviewing it, I find it life-giving and vision-imparting and actually lived out at some level, not necessarily consciously but more palpably in reflection.

I found myself asking the Lord in the closing days of the retreat for two summaries (or you might say leading from two different perspectives) ... The first is for a take-away exhortation, a change in attitude, something to bring up when the dips come or to remind myself at the beginning of each day. The seventh was no different in this respect. As the tangles and thorns cleared and intimacy and peace and union grew, the unmistakable exhortation for me to take away was this: "Slow everything down and be grateful." An elaboration may be: "Let gratitude be your attitude in everything as you become aware -- mindful -- of all the things I have been doing in and with your life and will continue to do as I use you up for my purpose which is always in love."

I also asked for more clarity of purpose, something that explains myself to myself and gives me a place to keep working from, even if it is a more or less concealed place. In silence, some things are able to stand out in bold relief to encapsulate in truth a desire, an authenticity that expresses the inner meaning behind the visible.  This is the vision driving the vision, one that cannot be fully revealed in the work, or the relationships or the family. Thus, in deep communion with Christ, I am seeking the clarity or affirmation or re-affirmation of the way forward as also reflected in the way already traveled. This is the bedrock. The question being: "Is there a purer motivation that, stated more accurately, may be God's motivation in shaping my life and work and relationships?" This is the bedrock I have to know when facing conflict, fear, choices and the temptation to compromise, to restrict or reduce that which I am actually seeing for something less elusive, more interpretable and accepting. Bedrock is something you know that you know, and you keep on knowing it and seeing it and restating it as the actual fire of vision. When one sees it or hears it, one's very heartbeat says "Yes" or "I am one with that."

The clarity of re-statement, of affirmation, came to me from two encounters both connected to personal retreat. At the very beginning of this year, I planned a three day retreat closer to home at the St. Francis Springs Prayer Center. On my way there, I stopped by my church that happened to be hosting a traveling exhibit of Mother Teresa's life. It contained panels with pictures and commentary, as well as video footage. In one place in the video, Mother Teresa makes this statement to the trainees in her Order:

                    "Our vocation is not our work; 
                     Our vocation is to belong to Jesus."

My heart leapt and resonated from within. Her words inspired the next three days of contemplative prayer as I also pondered the preceding year and considered the year to come. My vocation is not to help people. My vocation is to belong to Jesus and He will help them. This is bedrock. There is no compartmentalizing anything in that.

Then, in the last days of the retreat at Eastern Point, about six weeks after encountering Mother Teresa, I was confronted with Merton's explanation of his motivation, of his aim with people and hope for himself which similarly struck a resonant cord in me and something I prayed could become more and more real in me.

               "I would not try to sell anybody anything. My function
                would be (as it must be in any case) to be a man of God,
                a man belonging to Christ, in simplicity, to be the friend of
                all of those who are interested in spiritual things, whether
                of art or of prayer, or anything valid, simply to be their friend,
                to be someone who could speak to them and to whom they
                speak to encourage one another."

This struck me as simple, straightforward and non-manipulative. An expression from bedrock.

My friends, I am sharing this with you as I return from Israel and Magdala, the place so special to me as shared in the last letter. It is Easter. He is risen. As I share these discoveries with you "along the highway" (Isaiah 35), I share them as a journey of faith together, the adventure and discipline of walking with God and listening for his voice. Please pray with us and for us, as we pray for you.

Luke 1:35
Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up
left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.


Blessings,
Trip

Reflections on the Highway - Summer 2016

Dear friends, this is a longer letter than we usually send. It will not lend itself to being read among a series of emails. So, if you decide to read it, try carving out some time alone, in quiet, with coffee or whatever morning comfort you choose. That would honor me and this more personal letter and I thank you.
 
This week I turned 70. That seems big in the scheme of things. Psalm 90, in the older text of Scripture, says this:
                 The days of our years are three score and ten;
                 And if by reason of strength they become fourscore years,
                 Yet is their strength labor and sorrow;
                 For it is soon cut off, and we fly away. (KJV 1900).
 
Whatever the extension by grace beyond this point, we are able by that same grace to call today "today" and to celebrate, as children, the presence of the Kingdom as we come unto Him this very day. I look forward to this next decade or so, which in the strength of labor and sorrow I may come to know more fully the strength of love, vitality and joy. Many think this to be an illusion to assuage the inevitability that there is a "cut off" and I do believe that at every age, maybe every day, we are fighting the inevitability of death in unconscious fidelity to its truth. We should speak more openly of it, I think, precisely because there is so much of God in it for those who believe. There the ordinariness of life becomes the treasure of a moment, a gesture, a physical touch that is stored in the eternal moment of the soul.
 
Increasingly then, and I do not defend it, I am unwilling or unable to fit into the impress of time on someone else's schedule of living life in the way of busyness. It is harder for me to celebrate in that space or experience celebration and connection. Thus, I resist it, in futility, I suppose, and at some loss. Nevertheless, with alacrity and untroubled embrace, I enter solitude in exchange. This may be an advantage of age where creating meaningful space becomes an economy more precious than gold. Poetry, it seems, does this in the sparest way possible as does contemplative prayer. This simplicity is also one of the essences of the mystery and beauty of the Eucharist. “This is.” "Eat this." "Do this." Simple obedience as Jesus invites us into the spaciousness of real food.
 
Now the truth of all life fully lived and eternal is that there is a merger taking place, moment by moment, into God which is an extraordinary desire for union with God and by God that can grow in our awareness now. It can intersect at points where the air grows thin and there is the "intimation of immortality" of which the poet speaks. I want to share one of these in my life, as clearly as I can in writing, which falls short of communicating in the ministry of presence, which falls short of the actual experience. However, when I shared this at our recent Verbena gathering there was hardly a dry eye in the crowded room, man or woman, as the Spirit communicated the reality reproduced, even if diminished in time. It is both a personal experience of what I hope is one measure of my final destiny of merger, and some deposit and encouragement along that way. It also seems to carry wider implications, a reach beyond my small self. Imagination is essential to the engagement of Reality and yet it too can be overtaken by Reality itself.
 
 
Encounter at Magdala
 
Laurie and I were dispatched to Israel in May. There were many points of conviction preceding the trip, some of which I chronicled in a previous Highway letter but did not realize at the time that they were points leading us to Israel. Although this was the most transformational trip we have ever taken and many stories can be told, especially of Jerusalem, this one involves Galilee and continues to live, breathe and inform like no other.
 
About a week into our trip, with Ashley Medford, we set out for Jerusalem with our sights set on the Sea of Galilee. Ashley's presence in Jerusalem for the past two years was one of our convicting points, as she is a member of the Verbena intercessory team and had prayed with me many years before. She was an extraordinary host and guide for our time. When we reached our destination, we found the view from the guesthouse to overlook the Sea of Galilee. It immediately brought to life, without the actual visits yet, all the gospel accounts of Jesus in and around this geography of place.
 
The first evening there, I was sitting on the guesthouse veranda overlooking the sea when I heard a chair pulled up roughly behind me. When I turned, I encountered a young woman whom I had no doubt wanted to encounter me, so we began to chat. She was, and is, a young Israeli, 25, who was in the finishing stretch of a hike through the wilderness from Tel Aviv to the sea. She had completed her military service and I am told many young Israelis wander about in travel after that time. Her name is Shir. The next morning I introduced her to Laurie and Ashley and she ended up in our car spending the whole day visiting the various ‘Jesus connection’ sites around the sea.
 
Eventually we came to Magdala the home territory of Mary of Magdala or Mary Magdalene, a young woman Jesus set free from seven demonic spirits and who became one of his most devoted followers. There we met Hermana Viljoen, a South African woman who had befriended Ashley in Jerusalem and who had been living and working in Israel for a few years. Years before our meeting she had become involved in the vision and work of a Catholic priest, Father John (Juan Maria Solano, a member of the Catholic order of the Legionnaires for Christ) who had been assigned by the Vatican to direct the work of the Notre Dame Pontifical Institute in Jerusalem. Hermana wrote and published a book chronicling Father John's passion and realization of a ministry site to women in Magdala, entitled “Magdala, God Really Loves Women”
 
What I will say for our purposes is this: what this priest has done to establish this site on the sea is more than extraordinary - it is miraculous. It took millions to purchase the site and work through the legal tangles and multiple ownerships involved in putting together any parcel of land anywhere in Israel but particularly right on the shores of the sea of Galilee. And before even a spade of earth can be turned of the soil, the government sends a team to examine the site for antiquities. The parcel, to the shock of Father John, housed a first century synagogue, just below the surface and the remains of a town. Rarest of finds in Israel is a first century synagogue and there it was. Seemingly an impediment to the vision, this hidden treasure became a gathering place for people from around the world to participate in the excavation and preservation of the site. Once the excavation was complete, Father John was permitted to proceed with his plan to build a Spirituality Center on the site as a ministry to women. He oversaw the building of a beautiful structure combining modern, byzantine and first century synagogue motifs and architecture. One end of the facility looks out to the sea from an altar in the shape of a first century fishing boat. He named the facility "Duc in Altum" which means, "Put out into the Deep", Jesus' words to his disciples following their futile night of fishing. Father John has plans to build a hosting center and lodging for pilgrims, all underway now and carefully without disturbing the first century site, which without a doubt Jesus frequented during his time in Magdala.
 
Back to our sojourn and our personal encounter at Duc in Altum. Hermana met us at the temporary intake center at the site. The synagogue excavation stretched out before us with the Spirituality Center in the background facing the sea. We sat down and began to talk. As I am prone to do, I asked Hermana to tell me some of her struggles and weaknesses. She is such a visionary and strong presence in her own right that I was curious. She did not hesitate and shared with me. She then returned the question. Immediately I gave my answers through reference to the Enneagram, a time honored spiritual direction tool traceable back to the desert fathers. My friend, Rob McKinnon, an executive coach, had administered the test a couple years ago and interpreted the results. I cannot go into much detail here about but it opened up a way for me to see my journey going forward and retrospectively. I shared with Hermana that I tested as an eight on the scale, a powerful presence but unhealed operating out of challenge, the need to be right and opposition. The healing eight is moving toward transformation in mercy, a two on the scale. I had been focused on this path for some time now and I told her of praying before this trip that I would encounter somehow more of the reality of mercy. I was also aware that Pope Francis had declared the whole of 2016 as the Year of Mercy.
 
From that conversation the five women and myself proceeded straight to the Center. As we entered the structure, Hermana immediately led us down the stairs into the expansiveness of a below ground chamber. I did not know until later that this space is designated the Encounter Chapel. As you enter the Chapel, you face a large wall that is covered by a painting that confronts one as soon as you step into the chamber. It captures, in lifelike size, the sandaled feet of many men with the artist’s point of view topping out no higher than the beginning of the calf. The hem of a robe touches the top of one sandaled foot guarded by all the others like trees in a forest. A hand with finger extended just above and parallel to the ground emerges from the cuff of a garment. The finger, reaching for the hem above the sandaled foot, through the forest of legs and feet, meets a point of bright and stunning light, enveloping the hem corner and the finger. We identified the scene as that of the hemorrhaging woman reaching out in desperation to touch the hem of Jesus' robe and being healed as the power went out. Her uncleanness as designated by law, the significance of the hem and her courage in identifying herself upon risk of death are all caught up in this scene. It also stunned me as I realized that the story of this woman is always part of the teaching in an intensive.
 
We went back up the stairs to the atrium. Hermana spoke of the eight columns, six of which memorialize specific women mentioned in the gospels who were close to Jesus. Of the remaining two, one was dedicated to other unnamed women around Jesus, and one to all the women through the ages who love and follow Jesus. I interrupted and said, "I think we need to pray now.” Hermana said immediately, "Okay, lets move over here." I said, "No, I think we need to go back downstairs to the chamber below" and I burst into tears, sobbing uncontrollably and heading that way. Down we went.
 
We seated ourselves along the stone surface encircling and attached to the walls of the room. Our decided place was to the left of the painting. I was seated closest to the painting. Shir was at the far end, Laurie next and then Hermana's assistant, then Ashley, then me. Hermana took her seat on the floor facing us. I was dissolved in tears, aware, but literally taken over. I could not stop.
 
Hermana started to speak, then stopped and said, "Trip, I think" and before she could go on I blurted out: "I know what you are going to say and ask and I will do it." Through the deluge, I began to confess sin against women to the women gathered round there, who were also standing in for all women. I confessed my sin and the sin of man as I wept. I apologized. "I am so sorry," I said. This took several minutes. I was aware that I was not formulating the words. They just came. Then that stopped, but not the tears, and the words moved directly into a father's blessing of them as daughters and as the beautiful creation that each one of them is. The blessing flowed out and over them. Hermana asked Ashley to respond which she was, at that point, unable to do. There was a gap of time and I felt lost in tears. Laurie got up from the other end, came around, knelt before me and said, “Trip, I forgive you and men.” This released me and the weeping stopped.
 
Well, we were all transfixed and stunned by the encounter. Hermana asked if anyone wanted to pray or say anything and Ashley responded to the father's blessing. Then I spotted Shir. What could she be thinking? I asked her if she wanted to pray or make a comment. She paused and then said, "Do you mean you can pray whatever you are feeling? We have these written prayers. We pray them and it is done." Hermana responded to her in a beautiful and respectful way. When we dropped her back at the guesthouse on our way back to Jerusalem, she hugged each one of us, warmly. I told her that she was one of my daughters and must come visit us in the States. Then, we journeyed on to Jerusalem.
 
I will let all this speak for itself except for the part that pertains to me. I had expressed a desire to know mercy, to be closer to mercy, to be transformed into mercy and Mercy literally took me over and expressed itself. I became one with Mercy, one with God in mercy, for a time. The incarnation of Mercy. Later, maybe, I will be in Mercy forever, after labor and sorrow have fully run their course to the cut off. To me, God has met me in his mercy in a perfect intersect with my life of prayer one-on-one with the broken-hearted for 20 years. Especially for those times, he seemed to be saying that his mercy lives in me and is present soul-to-soul. He told me by this experience in Magdala what my deep heart is, even though I have lots of spots for cleansing. He was and is saying that Father John's heart and mine are one and that we met there in the center of God's heart, Jesus. He is saying “I will keep showing you your deep heart made in My image that fuels your one-on-one encounters, whether man or woman, and that fuels the expansion of the vision of Verbena, a passion for the healing of the whole body, the Church. Gaze fully into My face of Mercy with the inner eye and I will gaze back at you. I am going to keep changing you and others from one form of glory to the next until you fully confront Mercy face to face, when I bring you fully into Me.” Let this lead in mystery, vision and obedience.
 
When we returned to Greensboro, we heard from Ashley. She had met with her friend, Lisa. Lisa ministers through Springs of Hope and is currently engaged in Iraq to meet, welcome, house and help with the healing of the Yezidi women. We had an opportunity to lunch with Lisa before we went to Galilee. The Yezidi sect has been targeted by ISIS and women have been brutalized, emotionally, physically and sexually. When Ashley told Lisa of our encounter at Magdala they both wept. Lisa asked Ashley if I would write up something in that same confessional and father's blessing that she could translate into Kurdish and hand to the women as they emerged. Below this letter is a copy of that blessing.
 
Then, just a week ago, I was scheduled to lead a weekend Men's retreat with my good friend Steve Lynam, at Tom and Priscilla Flory's beautiful property amidst the Blue Ridge in Virginia. On the Wednesday before the retreat Priscilla called to tell me that she had received an email forwarded by a woman friend in Lynchburg. This friend’s husband was coming to the retreat and both they and the Florys are deeply connected with Israel. Priscilla related that as she was perusing this forwarded e-mail, she stumbled across my name. It contained and discussed my letter to the Yezidi women.
 
Saturday night of the retreat, I invited Priscilla to join us men around the campfire. I told the story of Magdala and she told the story of it coming all the way back to her and meeting us here. She then, briefly, told her story of wounding by men and that in her healing she had found many brothers. Then she got up, stood before each man, hugged them, blessed them and called them precious.
 
Not by power, not by might but by my Spirit, sayeth the Lord.

Blessings,
Trip and Laurie
 

A Prayer of Confession & Blessing

Women of the Yezidi. My eyes are full of tears and my sobbing is out of my control, so that I can say from the depths of my soul these things to you. I stand in for all men to say to you that I am so sorry for the way you have been abused, hurt, ignored and frightened by men. I am sorry and apologize for all physical and emotional violence against you and your personhood. I am so sorry that you have been treated this way and for the way it brought great damage to you as a person, as a woman. I renounce the spirit of misogyny in these actions against you and I apologize for it. I am deeply sorry. I am sorry your voice has not been heard. I am sorry it has been stifled and must be rediscovered all over again as you begin to heal in body, mind, soul and spirit. I grieve on your behalf and we would like to help you heal.

Now, too, I bless you as a father blesses a daughter. You are precious. You are beautiful inside and out. You are a special and unique creation that now, in freedom and safety, can begin to open again like a flower stretching to open to the sun, bringing a special fragrance into the world as you walk in this blessing. Blessed daughters, rise and live. May the fullness of this father's blessing take root in you from the inside and may it also pour out over you and on you, settling like the dew. As you glisten inside and out in the beauty of the creation that you are, may you bring hope as the blessing pours out of you to others.

Reflections on the Highway - Fall 2015

In this year's Fall letter, we are going to begin exploring Jesus’ heart for unity, for oneness. The topic is the main passion fueling the Verbena vision and it has come forth as a result of meeting with hundreds of men and women over almost two decades and seeing the Spirit unify and integrate these believers in their inner person. We have expressed on the website that this passion for unity extends not only to the individual but also to the body of Christ worldwide, namely the Church. We are staking out ground in this engagement, though the topic is monumental, and we are inviting others into the conversation wherever we are. We won’t get very far in this short space but will lay some meaningful groundwork for ongoing discussion. Please join in with us.

Isaiah 35:8 is the source for the title of the "Reflections" since the letter’s inception more than 15 years ago. We believe the "highway" spoken of there describes the way of unity of the believer in union life with Christ and describes the way of unity for the whole Church, stating that "only the redeemed will walk there and the ransomed of the Lord will return."
 
John 17, Jesus’ passionate prayer to his Father in heaven just prior to his Crucifixion, is also a foundational Scripture for our work in prayer with people and for our work in joining Jesus in his prayer for the oneness first of each follower in Him and then for the oneness of all believers. Isaiah 35 and John 17 powerfully communicate a way in the Spirit, His way, Himself as "the way, the truth and the life."
 
When we pray John 17 with Jesus, we join Him in his posture of prayer: His face turned toward heaven - His voice addressing His Father in heaven, whom His teaching on prayer has already made clear, is also our Father in heaven (Luke 11). Joined in this prayer we are joining in the very heart of God for his creation, the very heart of discipleship and evangelism and the "hope of glory." His prayer unifies in time each believer and the community of believers: 

             "My prayer is not for them alone" (those given to him during his time
              when the Word became flesh), "I pray also for those who believe in me
              through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you
              are in me. May they also be in us so the world may believe that you
              have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me that they
              may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be
              brought into complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and
              have loved them even as you have loved me …I have made you known
              to them, and will continue to make known in order that the love you have
              for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them."

There is obviously much mystery here as we encounter the prayer that the incarnate Christ be made manifest in each of his followers and through that union made manifest throughout his Church. So often the horizontal unity is emphasized in the first order - as if were we to work hard enough to bring it about it would eventually happen. In the Spirit, we might say that they are both being worked together but it is difficult to fathom, and seems proved by history, that individual believers not unified themselves by Christ and in Christ could be unified as a body which would communicate the love of God to the whole world. And it should give everyone confidence in praying for the one, no matter how deep the pain, no matter how great the barrier, no matter how great the abuse, how traumatic the story, that Jesus' prayer will be answered by His Father. He will be the way and bring unity within, deeper intimacy of a life in Christ and Christ’s life lived in a person. You in Christ, Christ in you: Christ. This is the fulfillment of John 17 that the whole body may come to complete unity in Christ.

Do we have our part in the fulfillment of John 17?  Clearly we do. Henri Nouwen puts it to each one this way: “Do you really want to be converted? Are you willing to be transformed? Or do you keep clutching your old ways of life with one hand while with the other you beg people to help you.”  He goes on:

              "Conversion is certainly not something you can bring about yourself.
              It is not a question of will power. You have to trust the inner voice that
              shows the way. You know that inner voice. You turn to it often. But after
              you have heard with clarity what you are asked to do, you start raising
              questions, fabricating objections and asking everyone else’s opinion.
              Thus you become entangled in countless contradictory thoughts,
              feelings and ideas and lose touch with the God within you. Only by
              attending constantly to the inner voice can you be converted to a
              new life of freedom and joy."

So part of the way is a simple turning from all that is not. Then, we turn our face up and out in search of what is, a search for the transcendent real, and that very quest says Sandra Schneiders, author and professor of theology and spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, CA, "exercises a fascination in the life of a person that ‘relativizes’ the ‘normal’ concerns of life." The passion for the "ear to hear" that voice and obey is such a quest.

We believe that God has put a dream in each of our hearts that would draw us to seek more deeply that oneness with Jesus. That voice: His. That face: His. Ears of the heart attentive to that voice and eyes of the heart locked gaze to gaze with his in the watch within:

              "The promise," says Schneiders, "that the dream is true deep within our
               hearts keep us open to the call, fresh to join forces with those who see it
               too. The longing, and the following, are themselves evidence that the truth
               is in us and has prevailed in the face of all the evil surrounding us.  The
               very desire to follow Jesus is Jesus."

Isn’t that a great encouragement? That the Jesus praying in John 17 is the Jesus praying in you to the same end that we would be one. We pray to see more, to hear more and "to join forces with all those who see it too."  “See, there it is." 

Come, join the conversation and pray with us.

Trip and Laurie
The Verbena Foundation

 

Reflections on the Highway - Spring 2015

Jesus calls us out as spring does.  This spring has been magnificent here in North Carolina. Shimmering light in the morning, greened up terrain like Augusta... the clematis, Sweet William, peonies, shrub roses, cherry trees and dogwoods all require a response of celebration, anticipation and invocation.  Shall we get out into it; shall we stand in awe, in utter amazement at the quality of light and air, color and arrangement: absorbing it, receiving it, blessing it and tending it?  Yes. 

Jesus calls us out. "Come unto me."  "Follow me."  "Let your light so shine..." "Love one another."  We are invited, you might even say instructed, to "walk in the light as He is in the light" and "make My joy complete in you."  All of this and so much more for the Kingdom of God to be revealed in our midst, through us and in our response to the call, just as spring bursts forth in the promise of all of Creation being redeemed and restored in the brilliance of original intent.  And where are we on the spectrum?  Can the incandescent light of the Spirit be seen in you and in me as we grow in our place like the whitest, startling white of the peonies?

Or, sadly, is His joy being robbed and displaced?  Is it egoistic to let your light shine or do we hide it under a bushel of false humility?  It may be egoistic to "think" of it or to try to measure it; but it is decidedly not egoistic to "be" that light, that joy, that manifest kingdom within that is His light, His joy, His Kingdom.  And this is particularly true, and a calling, in the midst of death and darkness, deceit and betrayal, atrocity and fear.  He calls us out to live in this stellar amazement, the startling, irrepressible expression of life lived in abandon to God.

In her remarkable book, The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris adapted an observation of Teilard d. Chardin to describe her descent into malaise: 

"I 'had allowed the resistance of the world to good' (to shake) my faith in the Kingdom of God."

She continues to explain that "a secular world view, terribly sophisticated but of little use to me in the long run, had taken hold of me in my early twenties and in Teilard's words I had begun 'to regard the world as radically and incurably corrupt.' Consequently, (I had) allowed the fire to die down in my own heart."  Twenty years later, she awakes and is transformed in the realization that "the end of our control" is "the beginning of God's reign."  Is this not the spirit of Jesus' exhortation to "let the little children come unto me, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven?"

Just as spring declares itself in the now, so does the kingdom declare itself in the now.  We are called to be his witness, that is the living witness of his own reality, the living expression of the life of Christ bursting forth. The Kingdom of Heaven is not waiting to happen; it is happening.  Extend that hand now, lay those hands on now, smile now with confident hope in the boundless goodness of God.  If the fire has died down in your own heart, reset the path that relights the blaze...now.  It can be the simplest thing in an ordinary day, the simplest act that releases control and testifies that God reigns.

I have seen this occur in the face of death in most remarkable ways but I have also seen it occur in what seems most ordinary but becomes extraordinary, in both cases teaching us the sight, sounds and signs of the Kingdom. In the ordinary, it happened this way: I came home from work one afternoon.  It was at the end of three days of intensive prayer, the times I spend with a person praying through that one life. Kason and Aliyah, our 5 and 4 year old grandchildren, were sitting at the top of the driveway in the midst of bikes, a plastic swimming pool, chalk drawings on the driveway - all remnants of the play that Laurie had led.  We have had these two with us for the better part of their years so far and Laurie has been a constant presence and angel to them.  Kason was sitting in the chair, a bit tuckered but also seeming a bit bored. 

My plan was that I was going to hit golf balls and my motivation was that I deserved it and that my game needed the undistracted attention in order to be competitive. Particularly at my age.  But, there was that little fella who has so captured our hearts. No Dad.  In an instant, and to my surprise, I found myself saying: "Kason, would you like to hit some balls with me?"  My gosh, on went the light in his eyes.  It was as if he could not believe I had asked.  "Yes, Papa, Yes."  Up he got and he disappeared into the house.  He emerged with clothes changed, a short sleeved, checkered and button up shirt, blue matching shorts, shoes and socks.  He wasn't finished.  He said he needed a hat and grabbed a visor off the hook.  He was assured a visor was a legitimate golf hat.  Michelson wears one.  That sufficed and on it goes.  He looked so golf ready and chic that Laurie and I just stared.  When had he taken in how a golfer dresses and one upped Ian Poulter?  Was he ready?  Yes.

Off we went, God's reign in full bloom.  It was the best time I ever had at the range or riding out to the range.  I got a large bag and gave him a good portion of balls.  I gave him some tees.  He loves tees.  I would look over at this little guy carefully adjusting the ball on the tee, the club swinging back once, then twice, then pow. "Look, Papa, that is my ball still rolling all the way out there."  The grass, the sky, the range had never looked more alive.  I promise you, it was like standing in the midst of technicolor.  I not only saw delight but delight came into me.  Joy came in, and I got a few swings in too.

The world is resistant to good and we are confronted with that resistance in graphic terms worldwide. Jesus, knowing more about that resistance than anyone else could, that resistance would kill him, said this: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become as one of these (little ones) you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven."  There is, my friends, the Kingdom in our midst, truly, and in every follower of Jesus. We embrace the boundless goodness of God.  "Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done. On earth (and in earth, you and me) just as it is in Heaven."  Bring it here, bring it right here in the now.  That is prayer.  Spring has sprung: the living signs of the Kingdom.  

How poised are we to embrace the Kingdom this day? 

Blessings,
Trip and Laurie 
The Verbena Foundation

Reflections on the Highway - Christmas 2014

My friend, Nancy Turner, and I were sitting on the back patio of her porch one summer morning this year in Tulsa and I was listening.  Ever since Kirk, her husband, came out here to pray many years ago, we have all been close friends and companions. I try to visit there every year. They have helped to keep us going by great generosity and encouragement.

I have come to value listening. When folks come here for prayer, I spend many hours listening to them. Listening is not passive and it is often informed by asking questions that prompt more listening. Active listening is an art and a work of the Spirit. Most people, I find, have not been listened to; they have never been able to fully express those voices of destruction that are constantly speaking and to get them out.  Listening creates space for a person to find their own voice. There is also a need to listen to wise people.
 
So, when space is created with a person like Nancy, I pay attention. After a discussion with Nancy and Kirk the night before, I was convinced I needed to listen to her concerning a subject that she was passionate and well-informed about, the return of Jesus and its signs and implications for believers in Jesus and our friends, the Jews, and the State of Israel. Until then, I had paid little attention to "end times" discussions except to be clear about the truth that he is coming back. I love the liturgical reminder and conviction: "Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again." Mainly, I thought, " let all that take care of itself. This is the age of grace and we have work to do." All true but an age has an end in time and prayer had been teaching me how to better number the days and listen to the Spirit.
 
I decided to really listen to this very passionate and smart woman, wife, mother of two sons and a lover of the verbena flower, at the top of the many flowers and plants she enjoys in her garden. She began to tell me what time it is, not the day or the hour (Luke 24:36), but the signs in the fullness of time. I had always responded to inquiries concerning his return: "Well, it is closer than it was. " This is true, but now I could feel the prompting of the Spirit to get into this. We had this space and I wanted to listen. I wanted to be taught and I was. She also sent me home with four books, all of which I have read, including their Biblical references in both Testaments.
 
Later in the Fall, I found myself among a whole flock of Jewish friends whom I had shared almost seven years of life with while working in Washington DC after law school. I was there for the funeral of one of those friends, a precious woman, Sherry, and dear wife of Cary Sherman. Cary and Sherry were next door neighbors of mine in the 1970's. They were best friends of Gary and Rainey Klein. Gary and I were both working at the same law firm. We all became friends together. There was a time in my life that only these friends shared and some of it was very painful, especially as my first marriage fell apart.  Given their love, their shared pain at the loss of their “closer than a friend”, Sherry, their affection for me and their conviction that Cary would be impacted for good after, I overcame every obstacle in getting there on hours notice. They literally called me back into their lives. We gathered in the Klein’s kitchen for coffee. We gathered at the synagogue for service. We hugged. We cried as this beautiful life of a person I had known spilled forth from family, friends, husband and the Rabbi. I only knew that it was good for me to be there. I could only hope and pray it was good for Cary and my friends.
 
I have realized that God was reconnecting me at this time, through this great grief, and impressing upon me his own great love for the Jewish people even as it was welling up in my own heart for my friends. At the same time, I was studying the signs concerning Israel. Also a member of our intercessory prayer team is in Israel and is communicating with us from her perch in Jerusalem and we with her. Convergences like these have deep personal meaning and very well may have larger meaning.
 
For now, for me, these convergences free me up to communicate a brief message concerning the signs and to encourage you, at this time in time, to make your own examination. Of course, many or most of you may be well ahead of me and some may dismiss the subject altogether. 
 
All of the reading and conversations in the last few months concerning the signs argue that certain signs in the heavens, during the year September 2014 to September 2015, have huge significance for Israel and for us. At the end of 2014, I bring it up because, frankly, in many of the circles I travel in it is a rare topic. There is also a call upon us from Jesus' words, and an admonition, in Matthew  24:45-51 to continue in our devotion and work in the kingdom with greater passion and love and to get our lives in better order: to examine ourselves, our work concerning the kingdom of heaven, our comfort level and our love quotient for the Lord and each other, still not knowing the hour or the day of his coming, but being attentive.
 
In exhortation, then, I would urge a careful and prayerful reading of Matthew 24, also known as the beginning of the Mount of Olives discourse between Jesus and his disciples. They bring up the very question to Jesus in a private time with him. "Tell us," they ask, "when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?"  Second, examine what some authors are saying concerning the signs in the heavens for 2014 / 2015. This concerns the four blood moons, or Tetrad, that are lining up with the feasts of Israel, the Feast of the Tabernacles and Passover, in both years, and in a Shemittah (sabbath) year according to the Hebrew calendar. The Shemittah year, occurring every seven years, at this time coincides exactly with the first day (Sept. 25, 2014) of the Feast of the trumpets or Jewish New Year and ends at the beginning of the next New Year feast (Sept. 13, 2015). A total eclipse of the sun will also occur during the blood moon series.
 
"There will be signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars ...Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to happen, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near." --  Luke 21:25, 27-28
 
These signs and convergences of moon and sun and feasts and sabbath year, noted above, are more than extremely rare. One author calls them astronomically rare.  
 
Finally, consider (and how can we not?) what is occurring in around the State of Israel. Consider the quantity and scope of natural disasters. Look at our country's condition and its position toward Israel, as well as the realignment of nations. Even if these are the beginning of “birth pains” that Jesus speaks of in Matthew 24, they are telling.  Let us look, examine, be alert, watch, listen and pray. It matters what time it is without regard to the more disputed issues within the Church concerning the “end times”.

"Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come." -- Matthew 24:42

"Be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man." -- Luke 21:36 
 

At this time of preparing for his birth, as we examine in Advent, and as we prepare in Lent for his death and resurrection, shall we not also prepare and watch, at this time, and say with John to Jesus, who says in the last verse in the Bible:

                                                    "Yes, I am coming soon.
                                                    Amen, Come, Lord Jesus." 

 
                                                                                           -- Revelation 22:20                  
Christmas blessings and manifold thanks,
 
Trip and Laurie 
The Verbena Foundation