Happy Holidays: Welcome Back, Inner Child

About the middle of November each year The Child in me becomes restless, wanting to come out and play. He emerges from the secret place where's he's been hiding in my innermost being for the past year. The Child waits to see if I'll take his hand and let him lead me. He reminds me it is time to think about Thanksgiving and then to Advent and on to Christmas further down the line. I welcome The Child with joy after so long an absence. We frolic around the house, play games like Cheat-the-Devil and Fox and Geese, if there's snow outside of course. He and I laugh and sing songs and make fools of ourselves and long before either of us is tired of the antics Christmas becomes fixed in my mind and I warn the Child not to go too far away because great and wonderful things are coming down the pike, just over the horizon.

It takes me a while to grow accustomed to this change of seasons but The Child takes the lead. Before I know it I'm thinking pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce and the first Sunday in Advent and after that the journey to refuge far from Herod. Such thoughts take me back each year to my own childhood, to years past. I remember the richness of memory, wonderful things happening, a few defeats, more victories, gains and losses, and those times then when something so magical, so mysterious even, brought tears to my eyes. There was birth and death, pain and healing from pain, so much joy it sometimes nearly smothered me. My need to love often overwhelms me, love for that child next door who is being shuffled around between separated parents, the Thanksgiving dinner for folks at the Salvation Army, the birds that sing so cheerfully in the cold.

My Inner Child is like Christopher Robin in disguise. I hear Christopher Robin say to Pooh, "Promise me you'll always remember, you're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think."

The Inner Child that's hidden away in each of us is restless to break out from the long year's confinement. We can make room for him/her and while That Child waits for us to take him by the hand to go out to play we can read the opening lines on page 74 of WHIRLWINDS AND SMALL VOICES, www.wordplay.ca, Robbins/McConkey.

So, come now, Child, let's you and I go tearing down the path into the woods. Why? Because we're both children, that's why, and because that's what children do.

The Joy of Blogging

I got to wondering the other day why the word "blog" is so loosely defined in the nomenclature of internet language. We know what an email is, we know what 'Send' means and we know precisely how to Spell Check. What we don't seem to know is how to define "blog" except to say it is an exercise in opionating (which is a word not found in my dictionary so that's consistent with the nebulous nature of "blogging."). All this has to do, if indeed it has to do with anything, with getting something off our chests (which hasn't anything to do with chests but with our brains because that's where ideas are). I like to think there's something really profound back of all this, but for the life of me I can't think of what it is.

That's the joy of blogging you see, a blog can mean whatever the blogger wants it to mean and whatever the reader of the blog thinks it means. One thing I do know, it's what's written on page 42 of WHIRLWINDS AND SMALL VOICES, (Robbins-McConkey; Wordplay.ca, 2008:
Waters of mountains, waters of God
Cleanse us, renew us, so shabbily shod
Rios de Chile, streams of burnt snow
Melt us, toe us, beyond friend or foe.
Currents so fast, pools deep and clear
Tune us, quiet our hearts still to hear
Lord of the River, God of the Stream
Teach us your song, our dryness redeem.
-Carla Piette

My love for you, Sister Piette, is saddened by your death by drowning in El Salvador while rescuing a political prisoner.

Music–Divine Therapy for Inner Harmony

My music calendar shows me that this is the 218th anniversary of the premier of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" in Vienna, with Mozart himself furnishing the background music from the harpsichord. After 218 years the music from this opera, however many times we've heard it, still inspires, thrills and even sometimes brings tears of laughter and sadness to our eyes. Music does this, poetry does this, a good book can do this and certainly love can do this. I like to think that music that "hath charms to soothe the savage breast" is something that comes directly from God as a part of faith's consolation and therapy. My daughter Amy and I will be speaking at a conference in Scottsdale, Arizona over the weekend and one of the things I want to say in my "brief hour on the stage" is music was created in the heavenly realm to compensate for our inability, or refusal, to hear the Divine Voice in any other way, such as through art, literature or the wisdom of children.

I think Mozart knew a thing or two about God that we, who are less than he himself or Beethoven or John Denver, have trouble hearing. A child born deaf or who loses hearing through a childhood disease may very well hear celestial things hidden from those of us who have “normal hearing." In our book Whirlwinds and Small Voices, Amy and I write of ways in which the Creator/creating God uses music to do the soothing of our distresses. As the troubled Saul looked to the singing of David for rest and peace so in like manner can we use such divine therapy for our own inner harmony. It works; try it! Sing, hum, whistle, croak it out, make a sound, the whole world will hear you and thank you. Perhaps you’ll share with us a way that music has led you to an inner harmony.

Happy Monday... remember Tuesday, too

I've often had the thought that there must have been something clever (Godlike?) about the way life is fixed so we automatically pass from one day to the next. If a day didn't pass, actually end, until we had done everything we needed to do, did the forgiving we needed to do, the loving we needed to do, the getting over our mistakes we needed to do, most of us would still be on the first Monday of our lives. Thanks be to God we're going to be given Tuesday however we might have messed up Monday. Tuesday is often a better time to straighten up Monday than if we tried to do it on Monday. I personally like the last line of the poem, “New Every Morning” on page 15 of WHIRLWINDS AND SMALL VOICES (Wordplay.ca):

Every day is a fresh beginning
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
And in spite of old sorrows
And older sinning
Troubles forecasted
And possible pain,
Take heart with the day and begin again.
- Susan Coolidge

"Take heart with the day and begin again." See what a new day can do? I was supposed to write this blog yesterday but I blew it. Now there is opportunity to do it in a new day. What a blast! Today I may even forgive those bunnies out there eating away at my garden. Yesterday I wasn't ready to do that, today I am., AMAZING! Who have you forgiven today now that you've had time to sleep on it? I'm going to get out of here and go bake a bunch of peanut butter cookies and take them down to my shut-in neighbor. Wanna come with me? Just send me your affirmative and good for you! Onward Christian soldiers, going as to war with peanut butter cookies!!!

BLOG # 1

Lots of things around these days telling us about creation. We've got History Channel, Science channels, National Geographic, academia, journals and magazines all along the library bookshelf. This is good because it keeps us up to date on stars, planets, black holes, novas, galaxies and new discoveries from OUT THERE!!! What is lacking in this surfeit of things related to the universe we inhabit is RE-CREATION, making things new, starting over, doing it from the ground up, becoming something we've not been so far. Can't start the universe over but we can start ourselves over. A great book just off the publisher's press, WHIRLWINDS AND SMALL VOICES, co-authored by me and my daughter, Amy McConkey Robbins.

It says exactly what the Re-Creation process is for any living human being. Looking out like toward the Milky Way is one thing but it doesn't change the Milky Way. Looking inward can change everything. The authors tell us how this can be done. In this blog, I will take you through the seven-day cycle of re-creation of the spirit, just as Genesis tells of the seven-day cycle of Creation. In short segments, you’ll get a sense of both the spiritual and secular practices that contribute to one’s re-creation. By the way, others have told us that this is a great book! Get a copy at Wordplay Publishing, www.wordplay.ca for only $14.95 plus shipping. Or just read the blog and see what wonders of re-creation are in store for you!