New Moon

Tonight is a new moon. Which means that the moon lies directly between the earth and the sun and all the light falling on the moon is being deflected away from the earth. In essence, we are on the dark side of the moon. In Wicca, from my understanding, this is a time of hopes, new beginnings, fresh starts. It is also a time of uncertainty. What will this new moon bring? What will be revealed in the growing light of the waxing moon?

While not a Wiccan myself, I do certainly wish I took more time to scan the heavens for more signs of meaning, change, life. If the moon can move the oceans and a woman's reproductive cycle, why wouldn't it move me and my spirit as well? Its easy to laugh off ancient theology as pre-scientific superstition or new-age WASPy escapism, but in an age when our uber-scientific mindedness is destroying our planet at an incalculable rate, maybe we should take ourselves and the marvel of modern man a little less seriously.

A psychologist once told me that the point of therapy/counseling/mental check-ups is not to address the immediate situation (the break-up, the anxiety, the depression) but to identify the patterns we as individuals follow. Sometimes we identify them so we can break them, sometimes we identify them merely so that we can live into them rather than fight them. It is only when we see ourselves and our lives in the light of these patterns that we can even begin to understand and then address the problems we face.

This lunar cycle I want to try and live into rhythm of life that is greater than me and my petty worries, than paychecks and dirty dishes, and hope to hear a little more clearly God's plan for me. Perhaps by using the lunar model as a guide for my spiritual walk this month, I will find myself stepping into a rhythm, danced to which, my life becomes more intelligible.

There are four basic moon phases. So far as I can tell, these are their super-simplified significances:

New Moon: Rest and Rejuvenation

Waxing Moon: Time of growth and increase

Full Moon: Fullest potential, celebration of abundance

Waning moon: Time of cleansing, decrease

Maybe I'll use them as a guide to my prayer life or other spiritual disciplines, maybe i'll just spend some time looking at the moon, maybe I'll meditate, maybe I'll just not be so neurotic and try to live all these phases at once...

Thoughts/Visions

We are no more than God's thoughts, no less than God's vision. As I sat in the Live Oak Friends Meeting House yesterday morning, I began meditating on these words. I wish I could say that they were by some famous philosopher or theologian, but no. I'm not much of a meditator (?) and so as I was floundering for something to guide me in the silence of my first Quaker meeting, I made them up (though I'm sure I'm not the first). I began to repeat them to myself as they flowed in nice smooth circles around the empty spaces of my mind, sweeping away dust and thought debris in an ever expanding circle of quietness. We are no more than thoughts, no less than a vision. A reminder of both my smallness and my potential, my temporality and my specificity.

I don't really believe in a God who thinks thoughts, don't really believe in a God with a singular limited consciousness in the linear verbal communication sort of way. And yet there is something nice in the whispyness of a thought that reminds us of the vitality of our spark rather than the sadness of a short lived weed or flower. It's a nice metaphor. In a thought there is continuity, one leading to another: one thought feeding the next, making it more, but of little value in and of itself. A sentence of Faulkner alone on a page. When seen in the incredible brilliance of the thinker, the thought has infinite value, a piece of an uber-complicated logic puzzle; each fragment: key. But alone it can seem a bit of jibberish (like much modern art).

I was at summer camp this past week as the arts and crafts director for 63 ten and eleven year olds. In reality, there were three of us acting as arts and crafts directors, which meant there was plenty of time to just relax and play once our two-and-a-half hour daily time slot had been filled. Each day we took one line of the Lord's Prayer as our theme, sometimes reverently, sometimes not so reverently. One day we threw bread at the teacher when he asked for his daily bread, another we put on cammo and went trespassing on other campsites before asking for forgiveness.

The Director of the camp had early on told us that his philosophy was simple: Camp, for us, as staff, was about having fun with the kids. Camp, for the kids, was about doing all the things they couldn't do at home (those would be, after all, the things they would remember most) like dancing on the tables, raiding the cookie pantry and spraying shaving cream on each other.

But when it came down to it, Camp for everyone was about finding a safe place to be their authentic self, whether that meant dancing the handjive to Jersey Boys, playing four square for three straight hours or braiding an entire spool of lanyard string into tiny plastic crosses. Listed like that these seem like tiny quirks, unnoticeable, insignificant whims in the trajectory of a life, but when witnessed as a whole: when you stand in the center of the room and have 63 children and 10 counselors shouting silly cheers at the top of their lungs directly at you while you try and pick out the best cheer, you hear in the din the whispers of the kingdom.

In that way, I believe each of us contains the fullness of God's vision, each thought the brilliance of the thinker. And it is our duty to find that light within ourselves as well as all those wit whom we come in contact. I wasn't led to Camp to teach the Gospel in words but to be authentic with a child and ask nothing less in return. To dance with abandon and invite everyone else to join in. I wish every day could be summer camp. I think God does too.

Belief

Last Sunday, Joe Reynolds preached an excellent sermon. I wasn't there to witness it, but so say folks who were. He preached on belief. Not what we believe, but more what it means, or could mean (and not mean) to believe, and why its important TO believe. As this is my first real post for Houston Belief I thought it might be an appropriate subject to take on and wrestle with for a few lines.

Joe (the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral here in Houston) said, quite poetically,

"The important thing – the most important thing – is what you seek, what you yearn for, what you reach for. The reason that is so important is because what you look for is what you will find. What we believe in, really believe in, is what we will make happen."

Now, this is not a statement about the creation of God, that old joke that God created man in his image and man returned the favor, this is a statement about defining belief more broadly, really examining what we believe and how it makes us who we are. So often we get caught up in "believing in" that we overlook the power of simply believing in the first place.

In the Episcopal church we cast a fairly wide net, many would say too wide. But as a born and raised Episcopalian I keep wanting to challenge the edges of the net: who else might we include? Every Sunday morning for the majority of my life (aside from a few lost college years) I have woken and gone to some building to gather with other folks with whom I have very little in common aside from that little red book in your pew pockets that we like to call the Book of Common Prayer. That little book and the liturgies it contains have always been for me a symbol of the simple fact that everyone who picks it up is choosing to look beyond themselves, choosing, even for just an hour (or 15 minute compline) to not know, but to hope and to look, to praise and to worship. And it's that choice which binds us, that choice that I call belief, not belief in, cuz I don't know what you believe, but the choice to believe (period).

And it's a powerful choice, as Joe alluded to in his sermon, when we believe we change the world. When we acknowledge that we are small and limited but choose to not accept limits, then we become agents of change, of growth and of hope. The reason I think this site is so great is because its not about faith which we strive to have, or religion which we are often given, but about belief, which we choose. Unlike faith and religion pages, Houston Belief acknowledges the lack of knowing, the lack of certainty "in" something but the simple and profound act of believing itself.