Turning Points

Turning Points

Time turns/ taking us where we would not choose to go. / Suddenly we pass a point/ we will never pass again. / Turning points interrupt us . . . / there must be some mistake! / Looking back we see them/for what they are: / bittersweet raw reality/ breakthrough to beatitude/ bedrock that gives us courage/ to give ourselves away. / The less we struggle with turning points/ the greater the strength/ to return/and turn again. (Author Unknown)
 

This weekend I listened to NPR and the speaker was discussing that there has been certain changes in words over the last century and particularly, their meanings. He spoke of how a variety of words today mean something totally different from the past – for example: “cookie” and "cookie" – (past and present) and when these two words bump up against each other’s meanings, there is a “semantic collision.”  I would share with you some of his words but I prefer to remain on neutral ground. I did some research myself and thought of a number of words that mean something totally different today from what  they would have meant 5, 10, or 20 years ago, simply because of the Internet!  Here are a few of my words: boot, virus, firewall, Java, desktop, mouse, worm, and spam . . . Are you following me???  Like the reading on Turning Points, “suddenly we pass a point we will never pass again.”  The Internet has turned our lives upside down and inside out. 

For most of us, no doubt, there are many turning points in our lives.  Some may be considered cataclysmic collisions- knocking us off balance in our philosophy, theology, ideology, accompanied with tremors and aftershocks that make us wobbly within causing us to reassess our spirituality, our emotional life, our physical and psychological well-being.  

The month of April has certainly provided cataclysmic collisions that have become major turning points for us as a people sharing this planet. We all have been affected by the bombings, the earthquakes, fires, the 8-story building collapse in Bangladesh, the flooding the world over, the on-going revolutions, wars, poverty, hunger, and  the bittersweet raw realities these have  become -  inviting us to breakthrough, and to a courage to give ourselves away – much like the first responders in the West Texas fertilizer warehouse fire, or the Boston Marathon bombings, or like the people searching for the survivors in the factory collapse. 

How do our spirits get grounded?  How do we find our true center amidst this chaos?  I share with you a reading that found me this week: “The Jewish and Christian creation stories are therefore true, but they’re true about us, not about Adam and Eve. What those stories tell us about ourselves and our world is that everything in creation exists in a balance with something else.  . . . This balance is vital for life, peace, harmony, understanding, and the survival of the earth. It provides the setting for all our understanding about God. In fact, being out of this balance is clearly the cause of pain, suffering, killing, poverty and death.” (A New Look at Prayer by Bill Huebsch)

• So what is the Good News for us this week? 
• Let us be aware of the turning points in our day or week?
• Let us be willing to ponder them and ask for the grace and courage to gently hold them as they invite us into transformation so to give ourselves away.
• Let us be willing to ponder the “collisions” in our daily lives, our government, our church, and in creation that summon us to make new choices and decisions that will upright our spirits so as to bring hope, understanding, harmony, peace, and balance to life within us and around us as we share this planet-home together!