Each month our Vestry meeting opens with a prayer circle followed by a short meditation. Here is the meditation that opened tonight’s meeting.
Transformation. Salvation. Redemption. These are oh-so-human words, necessary because our humanity is not always felicitously expressed. We are known for nailing things down, exacting full payment, getting what’s coming to us, adhering to procedures, defining ourselves, protecting our reputations. We tie up loose ends, zip up loose lips, shore up loose morals, get rid of loose cannons, and generally like to run a tight ship. While there’s no reason anyone can’t wake up in the morning and simply jump overboard, we don’t. Mostly, we don’t even raise our sails. We might loosen some screws.
My favorite fairy tale is “Snow White and Rose Red,” those two good girls who opened their door one wintry night, to a cold and snow-covered bear. Into their good, warm home they invited the dark, cold mystery of a great beast, who revisited them each night of the long winter to sleep by the fire while they combed its glistening fur. In the spring, the bear left them, returning only once more, to destroy the evil dwarf who held them captive – to release them, along with all the treasure the dwarf had stolen and hoarded in his cave, all counted and recounted and accounted for, every penny, locked up and utterly useless.
Salvation. Redemption. Transformation. A Mystery of unprecedented proportions knocks at the door. It is our salvation and our worst fear, from beyond our tame lives, asking to be let in, to be welcomed and tended, combed and made human. Our redemption may lie in an act of kindness in the face of that fear – a trust in ultimate goodness that transforms the strange into the loved, or a bear into a prince.
God, this I pray: that my arms remain open. That from somewhere the Angel comes, dressed as a bear or a child, and enters my door to sleep by my fire, to offer its rough and shining fur to me for smoothing, and that I might inhale the scent of high mountains and deep caves once more.
On Christmas night, my granddaughter asked, “What is it, to be called? How does it happen? How do you know?
Oh my dear, you are a fish in the sea, and God is a fisherman. Look for the shining lure. Some day it will be there, large or small, but worth the risk. You may count the cost or not, but you will pay it, in money or time or tears, and be glad. Later, maybe much later, you will see how it led you away from the fixed, the nailed down, and set you free. Looking back, you may find that you have been part of God’s work of redemption in the world, and that you played a part that only you could play, and that there was no other choice you could have made, really, than to take that lure, hook and all, and be pulled up and out into a transformed and transforming life.
But most of us do not know, in the dead of winter, in the middle of the night, that we are being called to attend a birth of the Christ child within ourselves. What you are more likely to hear is a knock on the door. The one who loves you is there, his wild fur full of snow. Without thinking, let him in.
