Reflection: Calling - PG# 5004 (2006/2007)
by Vicki Garvey
When I wash my hands, I wash my hands. Thoughtfully. Attentively. Even lovingly. When I read to the kids, I read to the kids. Or shop for groceries or weed the garden or, well, you know. Novelist Gail Godwin calls it “the grace of daily obligations.” When I pay attention I gain an appreciation for the stuff around me: for bodies and other people and food, even dirt. And that appreciation leads me to an awareness of the sacredness inherent in all this stuff. And then I get it. All of creation – mudbugs as well as Michelangelo – reflects in some way, the One who made it. And the One who made us called us – it says so right there on page one of the Bible – called us to care for all that is, the magnificent as well as the mundane stuff of our daily lives.
Reflection: Compassion - PG# 5406 (2010/2011)
by Vicki Garvey
Walking to my office from the train station, I often meet a fellow who is certainly poor and possibly homeless. He never asks me for anything. But every morning he greets me and every woman he sees with a cheerful “Hello, princess!” and he tips an imaginary hat for us and for the men he salutes with an equally upbeat “Good day, my lord.” He has become something of a gift for me, something like a prophet of the dawn, and he provides an excellent start to my day.
Just last week I met his brother in spirit. Out on an errand, I came upon a man who is indeed homeless. I gave him something to help him get lunch. And as I turned away, intent on important things to do, he asked me to wait, told me he thought I must have the most beautiful smile and then he walked me over to a window, pointed out my by now grinning face, and reminded me of what a gift it was to smile. And then he offered me change for my own paltry hand-out to him.
Most of the time I think we think of compassion as something “the haves” in life do for others more needful than themselves. But the main character in the parable of the Good Samaritan isn’t the Samaritan but the poor guy left for dead, the only character in the story from beginning to end. Sometimes, compassion is what we learn by receiving it from the most unlikely of sources.
Reflection: Conversion - PG# 5317 (2009/2010)
by Vicki Garvey
Like a lot of you, I’ve been driving since I was sixteen. It’s an automatic skill. I don’t have to think through all the steps: start the car, steer, brake, check mirrors and all that anymore. Driving is second nature. But one Saturday morning, while driving around doing errands and listening to NPR’s “Car Talk,” I learned that something I’ve been doing from the first time I got behind the wheel is wrong. I was taught that when I made a turn, I should do it by crossover: one hand on the wheel, the other crossing it to grab the wheel and move it.
But now with air bags that’s become a no-no. In an accident: bag deploys, smashes arm which smashes nose and face. Not good. Now the method is feed-the-wheel from one hand to the other leaving arm and face out of harm’s way. Great! So I’m relearning how to drive and making some progress. I do catch myself doing the old crossover sometimes. That’s understandable because what I’m trying to change is habitual behavior and that’s not easy. It takes time and patience and practice and the belief that the change is worth the trouble. So I learn all over again that the unexamined life can be a pitfall in a car and in my life. Auto-pilot is, in fact, not a particularly helpful way either to drive a car or to steer my way through the life of faith.
Reflection: Diversity - PG# 5015 (2006/2007)
by Vicki Garvey
For the annual Christmas pageant at our congregation, I invite the kiddos to tell the story in their own words. Children interpret in ways that adults have forgotten, and their insights are dynamite. The first year we tried this approach, we had three donkeys with speaking parts – the film Shrek was big that year – a gorilla, some horses and four Marys among others in our cast. When the adults heard about it, some of them were horrified. "Four Marys? How can you have four Marys? What are the children learning?" What the kids knew instinctively was that the faith story is so important it takes multiple tellings. And it takes multiple tellers. In our case, one Mary couldn't shoulder the whole thing and do it justice. And beyond us, the whole story of God and God's people is richer and wider and deeper than one faith tradition's take on it can ever be.
Reflection: Faith - PG# 5006 (2006/2007)
by Vicki Garvey
Back when I was teaching at an all girls high school, I had a class folks called "the baddies". I taught religion. I assigned the first chapter of Genesis. I asked them what they thought of it. Silence. The kind of silence that some 15 year olds do better than anybody. I tried again: "What did you think about the word 'good' that pops up all over the chapter?" Silence. "What do you think it might mean that after the creation of the human beings, God says 'Very Good!'?" Rolling of the eyes. So I looked at each young woman, in turn, and said, "What it means is that you're very good and you're very good..." One of them began to cry. "Did you mean what you said?" "Yes." "No one has ever told us that we were good." Faith is a matter of the giving of the heart. Ours to God, ours to one another as best we can. And God's heart to us. And that makes all the difference.
Reflection: Hope - PG# 5001 (2006/2007)
by Vicki Garvey
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed something disturbing. I realized as I was walking to the office I was commenting in my head on the appearance of the folks I was passing. As in: "Oh, lady, is that ever the wrong color for you!" Or: "What's with you, buster, looking so sour this lovely morning?" It took me a while to figure out what I was doing and then I was really horrified; here I was merrily slashing people right and left if only in the privacy of my own head. Not good. For me or for anybody else. So, I decided right then and there that something had to be done. I still look at others while I walk, but now, in the spirit of Genesis, I say to myself: "Image of God... Image of God." I say it maybe a few hundred times on that walk. And it makes me smile the whole way. Hope, even hope for the world, starts with tiny individual steps in the right direction.
Reflection: Identity - PG# 5411 (2010/2011)
by Vicki Garvey
A writer I admire once wondered what it would be like if at our baptism we Christians had been sealed with the sign of the cross on our foreheads with indelible ink instead of consecrated oil. No matter where we went or whom we met, we’d be instantly identifiable as Christians, as Christ’s ambassadors in the world.
It’s a nice thought I guess, but knowing me, I figure I’d get used to it, forget it was there and tilt my merry way without a thought about the sign I carried for all the world to see. I’d forget that my every action, my every word, would say something not only about me, but also about my tribe and about my God, all because of that visible seal above my brow.
I still don’t have that mark up there, but I do have a bumper sticker on the rear window of my car. Not only does it name my denomination in word and symbol, it also tells anyone who sees it what we’re about here in northern Illinois. Now, whenever I glance into my rear view mirror, I’m reminded that I’m not an anonymous driver. Now how I drive, what I do when cut off in traffic, says something about me of course, but also, because of that blessed decal, reminds me of who I am called to be. My best self, even in Chicago’s rush hour traffic.
Reflection: God the Doter - PG# 5307 (2009/2010)
by Vicki Garvey
I saw a bumper sticker that said, “If God had a wallet your picture would be in it.” I know. I know. God doesn’t have a wallet or a purse or a pants pocket to put it in. But just think: What would it be like if we believed that our pictures—yours and mine and even crabby uncle Cornelius who kvetches about everything—what if all of our pictures were in God’s wallet and taped to God’s refrigerator and posted as screen savers on God’s mega-computer in the sky? What might that mean?
When we pull out our own wallets, what do we see? Pictures of the ones who mean the most to us: parents and children and lovers and friends. We don’t hang onto any old pictures. Those faces mean something to us. There are whole stories, and precious ones at that, behind those grinning or sulky or somber or even dorky poses. So what about God? Here’s the thing at the center of the life of faith: God treasures us, knows our gnarly, knotted peculiar stories and still loves us each prodigally, illimitably, beyond anything we can ask or imagine, not because of anything we’ve done but just because we are. Take a moment every now and then to imagine this splendid mystery: God’s got your picture and smiles while looking at it. How’s that make you feel? And what are you going to do about it?
Reflection: God in Our Image - PG# 5312 (2009/2010)
by Vicki Garvey
I was once asked to consider occasions when I have been a stumbling block to God’s grace. I immediately had a bunch of examples. And every one of them had to do with what I call “the God in my eye.”
We’ve all learned some dominant image of God. From stories we were told, or in religious school, or from a sermon or maybe during worship itself. What God looks like or how God interacts with me and you and all of creation. That image we carry has everything to do with how we operate in the world: how we think about ourselves, how we treat children and animals and other people, even how we vote.
The image isn’t good or bad, and it’s never neutral. But it’s hard to remember that it’s not the only image and it’s certainly not “the true one” against which every other image must compete. There’s the problem. Particularly when I disagree with someone about something that really matters, I get the impression deep down inside that my idea of God is clearly the best and if you disagree, you must be downright wrong. And that’s when I get to be the obstacle that blocks you from God’s grace. And when I block you, I also block me. But here’s the grace of that realization: I know that my vision is myopic if the God in my eye does not see the God in yours and recognize and welcome it.
Reflection: Heeding the Call - PG# 5302 (2009/2010)
by Vicki Garvey
Our Celtic ancestors celebrated what they called “thin times and thin places,” occasions and settings when the membrane between our space/time and eternity is its most gossamer and permeable. I think of Moses out minding his own business and his father-in-law’s sheep at the foot of a mountain one fine day, when a bush called his name. Or of a young woman named Mary in a backwater town in a Roman outpost doing whatever a young woman of the 1st century would do, when an angel came to visit.
I wonder if there were other Moseses before the one we’ve come to know, others who ignored the strange sight and stranger voice. I wonder if there were other Marys before the one we hail as blessed, others who said “no thanks” to the angel’s startling news. I wonder what it was that made these two receptive enough to hear a call from God and agree to it. I wonder if it wasn’t their willingness to be surprised by the sacred. Perhaps they saw all that is as divinely potentialed.
I wonder what it would be like if we dared do the same. I wonder how differently we’d see the world, each other, ourselves if we imagined that we might encounter God around the next corner, across the street, down the block or in a stranger’s face.
Reflection: Joy - PG# 5024 (2006/2007)
by Vicki Garvey
I was watching an interview with Dustin Hoffman the other day. Did you know he stumbled into acting because he was flunking everything else in college? In acting class, the students pulled parts out of a hat and when he got up on stage and started reading those lines. "Whoosh," he said, "time and space fell away, it all…you know what I mean?" Actually, I do know.
Sometimes joy ambushes me like that. Comes out of nowhere at me and time and space fall away. Now, I'm an extrovert, so when something like this happens, I want to tell the world. And sometimes I do. It's a Psalm 8 kind of thing: "When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars…what are we that you pay attention to us, mortal us that you care to visit us? Yet you made us a little like you, crowned us with God-stuff." Wow.
Reflection: Justice - PG# 5011 (2006/2007)
by Vicki Garvey
A friend of mine was sitting with his 4 year old one day shortly before dinner. On the counter was a bag of dried apples chips, which the 4 year old was eyeing with obvious interest. "Dinner soon. No chips for you," the Dad said. But they looked so enticing. So the little girl reached up and…she hadn't realized that the bag was already open. Apple chips everywhere, and a four year old with trembling lip and dread in her eyes. My friend stiffened. He could feel the anger, but he paused and said: "I know you didn't mean to spill them... Okay, then." And the two of them bent together to clean up the mess. And his daughter started kissing his head. Pick up an apple chip, kiss daddy. Pick up another apple chip, kiss daddy. There's justice and then there's justice. Reminds me of the prodigal parent of Gospel fame. And that fellow who recommended forgiving 70 times 7.
Reflection: Peace - PG# 5414 (2010/2011)
by Vicki Garvey
The little boy in the film The Sixth Sense, speaking of the dead people he sees, says: “They only see what they want to see.” Some people see peace as quiet or lack of anxiety or freedom from disturbance or, on a larger scale, the absence of hostility between neighbors here and abroad. As the Bible has known for millennia, peace is all of those things, but not simply all of those things. Peace is something more.
When my nephew was on the cusp of three, he was given two balloons one day at the shopping mall. As he and his grandparents walked along, they heard the sort of high-pitched screeching that means some little kiddo is having a terribly bad day. Her embarrassed parents were shushing away to no avail; onlookers gave the trio a wide berth, disapproval etched in their faces. No peace for anyone in earshot of the tantrum at the mall that day. Until my nephew disengaged his little hands from his grandparents, went over to the screaming child, knelt, looked into her face, said softly, “Don’t cry, little girl,” and handed her one of his balloons.
Some day, God willing, when all of us finally look into the face of another and see not a stranger, but another self, then the peace that passes all understanding, the peaceable kingdom promised so long ago, will finally find a home here on Earth.
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