Ring out, Wild Bells... a New Year's Blessing

 


I won't write much for this very last Sunday of the first decade of the 21st Century. 

I will just say this:

Thank-you, to all who have read Sunday Song and Rumination, and listened to the weekly song. I've been doing this since September 2018, and I feel much closer to you, because of it. 

We've been mostly hanging out between the earthy, the toothy, and the seedy, and the Christ we find therein. Sometimes, we've been reaching out to the lofty, cosmic, starry night, that renders us so deeply insignificant, that we feel honoured to be here. (Interesting that "render" is a part of "surrender".)

But to begin the New Year, I am going to delve into something a little different. I had a conversation when on Iona, about healing and grief work. I don't think we're going to lead our children in the pathway of real righteousness without it. In other words, as I consistently quote Thomas Merton speaking to his novices: "the war in Vietnam is America working out its own neurosis." In other words, no matter where we are from, if we're farming out our grief, avoiding our ancestors, avoiding the part we've played, we're not really doing the work we were put here to do. A part of our agency is our healing, and the development of our wisdom, so we know how to die, and live.

So, for the beginning of the New Year, we will be doing a fresh walk through the album Sanctuary- Exploring the Healing Path with James Finley.

Many have written to me, saying this album has journeyed with them, through the valley of the shadow of death. I thought it might be a good thing, to revisit it. And to introduce it to new ears. This album in particular is one I would pray could be heard by every ear who needs/yearns to hear it. It is the distillation of James Finley's life's work as a depth psychologist, who has the eyes of a contemplative Christian master.

I delight in the thought of serving you, and being with you, in the New Year.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky. 

You are beloved. You are the wild. You are in Christ. Christ is in you.


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