20 July 2008

Greetings Friends!

My goodness, summer is half over! Already the store shelves are filled with school supplies - signaling that very soon school will begin and the busyness of our lives will once again pick up pace. Whether or not we have school-age children, it just seems fall becomes a busy season for many of us. Thus I find it even more pressing in my own life to take some of the time left of this summer season to pause and enjoy before the "work" of fall begins - the clearing of leaves from our yards, the cleaning out of the the garden, the readying of the house for the winter months to come. Just the mere thought of all those things causes me to long for the quietness and what I have come to consider a "lost art".

In our day and age of technology, many scheduled activities, and fast-paced living, I muse over what it must have been like in the days before television, radio, telephone, cars, etc. During my own childhood years, Sunday afternoons were spent visiting elder relatives. Conversation, playfulness, and, of course, Aunt Edna's famous chicken dinner and Aunt Agnes' melt-in-you-mouth molasses cookies to top off the day were the norm. Woven within those weekly excursions to the country farm, were stories - stories of what was going on in each person's life, stories of relatives who lived far away, stories of ancestors long gone from earthly life, stories of immigration from the "old country". This is the "lost art" of which I speak - that of story telling. How often these days do we take the time to engage in telling the stories or our life - past, present, and future; our memories and our dreams and visions? I could be wring, but I dare say not nearly enough.

As a young child sitting on grandma's lap I would often ask, "Grandma, what was it like when you were my age?" And grandma would tell me in ways she knew my young mind could understand. This is how Jesus taught in our gospel today (Matthew 13:24-43)- in parables, stories... "The kingdom of God is like...a man who sowed good seed...a mustard seed...yeast". He explained what God's kingdom was like, not in some high theological language, but in words and ways that everyone would be able to understand. And not only that, through his parables Jesus also taught that the kingdom was not some pie in the sky idea but was and is within the grasp of everyone and is indeed already here as well as "not yet".

Let us take time to listen to and ponder the stories, the parables, of Jesus and find within them the knowledge of who we are and we we are to be. These are the stories of the abundant love God has for each and every one of us!

Peace on the Journey