Two months since I last posted, and now it's late in February, which means blog anniversary time. Time to post, even in the absence of an opening image. Even without something clear to say or discover.
In summer I drink my coffee at the table in the backyard. I look around and there's always something to kick off a blog post: dog-walkers outside the fence, sparrows rattling the aluminum gutters, jets or helicopters passing overhead, overgrown thyme creeping onto the patio, cardinals on the fence or high in the tree across the street.
In the living room in late winter the scene is all my clutter. Books recently opened, books awaiting their turn in the queue. Yarn of pink and purple tinged with gold whose destiny remains TBD. Yarn that's becoming a sweater to be worn before it spring arrives. The knitting is tight. My hands are tired. There are photos, a crumpled up piece of paper that's been sitting on the piano bench for a couple days, a small journal with a pen clipped inside that's collecting — collects.
A week ago, in the spirit of good things to keep doing post-pandemic, I attended an online collect-writing workshop from the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The speaker was Irish poet, storyteller and public theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama.
Within the liturgy collects (accent on the first syllable) collect (accent on the second syllable) the intentions of the people into a prayer, often a single sentence, with the emphasis on a single petition, preferably terse. In the interest of not creating run-on sentences, I would argue that it might be wise to punctuate a collect with more than one period, thus creating multiple sentences, while remembering that a sentence must include a verb to be a true sentence. The goal is terseness.
A collect has five parts: 1) naming God; 2) saying a little more about God; 3) stating what you're asking for; 4) explaining briefly why that's a thing, or what that thing will produce in you or in the world; and 5) a closing, which might be a doxology or another formula or a simple amen. Padraig calls this "a bird of praise" which invokes, to me, whimsy. You leave the prayer with a smile and a wink, because God understands what it's like to be human.
I left the Sunday afternoon session willing to try writing "a collect a day." Like many good intentions (including this blog), it didn't last long without some modification. I've written something in the little collect journal three times in the last seven days, which is not nothing, but which is not strong conviction either.
These things don't flow out of me. There's a lot of ink on the page that's crossed out. There's a moment in the writing where you really have to think. Kind of like where you in Wordle after your second guess, when it's going to take some paring away of possibilities to arrive at an answer.
At the online collect-writing session, the first prompt was "A Samaritan woman came to draw water ... " Everyone, it seemed, was familiar with the story of the Samaritan woman's encounter with Jesus at the well in John 4:4-26. In fact, to a group of mostly female spiritual seekers, this was like catnip. The prayers that were shared with in-person readings and in the Zoom chat had thirst and living water imagery flowing all over the place, and they were lovely, all of them.
(Just now, auto-correct twice turned my mis-typing of "thirst" into "Christ." Is this how signs and wonders appear in the digital age?)
My collect was inspired by the daily work of drawing water:
Jesus the carpenter, who hauled the wood and swept up the sawdust at the end of the day, help me to be careful and deliberate in my routine tasks, so that as I complete these jobs, I am free to think more deeply when those chances come. Amen.
(God forbid I should do the obvious.)
Forms and structure are limits, and limits force insight. You have to make choices and your choices are limited. Naming God puts you in a relationship where you have to figure out what you want from God. Identifying a human need will point to a name or quality of God that fulfills the need. The collects I've scribbled down lately tend to start with part 4 of the form -- what am I trying to do better in the world or what do I seem unable to do and really need help with. I may (perversely) have something backwards here — God as seen through my head rather than God as an absolute something standing (or otherwise metaphor-a-sized) way outside of me.
It's been a long winter, with more gray days, it seems, than usual. I've been preoccupied with snow and cold and car repairs, along with sinus headaches and quirky aches from a January fall on the ice. I've spent almost two hours on this blog post and the caffeine that got it going is wearing off. I've been at this blogging thing for 15 years, though less productively of late. My second post advocated for yielding, and I did not know then how much I would have yielded by now.
But here I am (or here I stand, if I want to be Luther-esque about it), still trying to collect a few thoughts, turn them around at different angles, puzzle my way through a post, hoping that when I go back to read it later, it's more coherent than I thought it was when I wrote it. I may have to compose a collect about that later.
