On the Incarnation: Wild Indigo Guild #8 “Your Own Hands”
Standing woman feeding her child, Etching. Käthe Kollwitz, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
How does God keep in touch with you through your own hands?
What are you often doing when you sense the approach of a sense of inner quiet, a making-peace within, and a path to do so without, the rise of gratitude, generosity, good energy, confidence, grounded hope, of compassion for self and others?
Some activities can wrap us up tighter than a fiddle string with anxiety, weary us with care and worry, drive us with ego and ambition, or set in a mood to spark with irritation and irascibility. Some activities and involvements indeed become idols, energy and attention draining stand-ins that draw us away from God and our everyday opportunities to show-up in compassion, faithfulness, humility, creativity, commitment, care, friendship, generosity, and mutual-help.
But not all. In the midst of some creative works and useful activities of daily living, we find peace, contentment and gentleness in attending to what is at hand. Some works and activities engage our senses, mind, and hearts through the work of our own hands, preparing us to receive a moment of contemplative quiet, new perspective on a difficult situation, or a child unexpectedly bidding for our love and attention.
And if you can put down the knitting, whittling or bill-paying, and turn to the one who approaches you with kindness, openness of heart, listening and joy, then you have known the presence and working of true prayer.
And we need to see and lift up those things in our lives, whether they are creative pursuits, activities of daily living, or vocational tasks done well, as key places where God draws near, and we ‘practice the presence of God.’
In the Wild Indigo Guild formation pathway, we move through 8 themes, or gateways to experience and learning, arriving at the eighth and final theme-Working with your own hands. (1 Thess 4:11)
We might expand the quote a bit more, and say working with your own hands as a participant in God’s work of holistic restoration and new creation here and now.
We want to help one another (re)gain a sense of confidence in our ability to act in a restorative and healing way for the earth.
Many of us absorb enough voices that prophesy doom, such that what we humans then imagine that we can do little or nothing in the face of such global issues as climate change or biodiversity collapse. Or we get used to the thought on offer that humans are the problem, so it would be better if ‘we’ didn’t exist. And so anxiety and despair oppress us, fueled by what some modern therapies, and the desert fathers and mothers, would call “bad thoughts.”
Or we are handed a narrowed band of effective actions, such as individual consumer choices, or performative activism. We need better choices for consumption and political action. But when narrowed, these don’t hold out much for people who don’t already practice skills and codes for civic engagement with confidence, or possess the wealth to go out and buy a new electric car. Such frames for perception and options for action can deplete our own senses of “power, the ability to act,” leaving us less organized internally and externally for right action and generative work, less in touch with the truth of ourselves and of God.
Instead, the work of our own hands, undertaken in community and guided by inner truth, can be fruitful and life-changing today for you and the earth. And we can trust that as we begin again with what your hands know how to do, and with the peace of God which passes all understanding, a long-term, indeed eternal horizon, guides our steps. And humans made of earth, breathed with spirit, belong with God and the whole creation.
Hand from Chauvet Cave, copy, Claude Valette, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
And so, we ask for God to illumine those activities within your reach, to which your hands return, which call you forward with a sense of wonder, love, commitment and delight. Those works of your own hands promise a taste of peace and inner quiet, which allow your heart, mind and whole being begin to find a way forward, even, maybe especially in difficult situations. Such work of your own hands can bring true prayer, and a grounded sense of connection with body, earth, the holy One. Being so grounded, we may also receive a spirit of discernment and right action.
And such prayer may also be the work and prayer God has given you in order to participate in the divine work of salvation, the healing and restoration of humankind and all creation. What starts as picking up trash in a vacant lot may grow into a dependable habit of showing up for neighbors, and daily noticing what life grows up from the old foundations and street edges and wild corners of the life you share.
At this season of Christmas, (12 days!) we celebrate God drawing near to humankind and all creation in the birth of Jesus Christ. The incarnation means that God came to be with us in such a fashion that Jesus’s revelation of divine-humanity required the care, involvement, skill, thought, joy, mutual aid, boundaries, excess, good judgment, hurry, patience... and love of many other persons.
Where would the infant Jesus, the living word, creative wisdom, have wound up, without Mary and her treasuring heart, which knew wonder and grief, perseverance and poetic acclamation of justice and and God’s ability to act, without Elizabeth, who knew and loved Mary, surrounded her in loving connections and community, and joined her in hope and peace in her waiting, without Joseph’s commitment, roots, readiness for the road, building skill and design prudence, and openness to dreams? Jesus the child depended on the caring, guiding hands of other humans, and their hearts formed in tandem with their hands.
The Holy Family, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, drawing, 1750s, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
So, we celebrate who God is and how God is with us and all creation very fittingly in simple little ways, like cutting out sweet cookies in the forms of hearts, stars, animals, and angels. As we savor their sweet goodness, those symbols also draw our hearts upward, in a movement beyond words, to the one who has joined with all manner of matter, and restored the whole creation to a pathway with God.
And we even hear of the coming of God in crisp words and image that could have been spoken by a tree-planter or gardener, who has spent hours of close attention to plants while their hands dug, pruned, and planted.
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
Along with the prophet Isaiah’s wonder-ful glimpse of God, we have heard many such glimpses of the divine one present and at work in the wider creation. And we have heard stories of how that wonder often re-appears as glimpses and as an ongoing companion in the works of our own hands. People tell of those works of their own hands that help them draw near to God, to ‘taste and see that the lord is good.’ What they have shared might help you look to the coming year with a sense of faithful simplicity, seeing more of God at work in you and around you everyday.
Gardening, composting, planting trees, walking, playing music, fishing, hunting, paddling, watching birds, drawing, cooking, weeding, quilting, picking wild berries from the forest edges and vacant corners, folding them in dough in the way your grandmothers hands did, sharing the good from the land with children and elders…
There are many ways that God draws near in the work of our hands.
What about you?
How does God keep in touch with you thru your hands?
How is God calling you to participate in the simple little way of restoring creation?
