MORGAN'S MOMENT...
It was a dark and foggy night
      just right for staying by the fire…
      except I went out.
Rare for me to go out at night…
      at least without Jean…
      too many church meetings!
A winding highway
      then a gravel road
      then a long rutted driveway.
Other headlights soon followed
       until seven of us arrived
       for our Men's Book Club.
I'm not sure it’s legal any more
       to have a genderized meeting
       but we've done it for many years.
It’s a great group
       that has read and discussed
       lots and lots of books.
On this night we talked butterflies…
        yes…butterflies…
        men discussing butterflies!
Consider the lilies of the field
        and the birds of the air…
        and the butterflies!
— Art Morgan 

BOOK CORNER
Jean will be picking up some books for me from the County Bookmobile today.  I'm past due. To fill a gap I picked up one of my old books, “The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.” He makes me ashamed of my level of literacy. His essays are penetrating and amazingly current. Clergy (at least) should read his Address on “The Lord's Supper,” which was his last before resigning his famous pulpit in Boston in 1832. If you can find a copy of his “works,” buy it.
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MOMENT MINISTRIES
Dec. 8, 2006
home address:  25921 SW Airport Ave.
Corvallis, OR 97333   541-753-3942
email at a-morgan@peak.org
HOMELESS ON Christmas eve?
At our Advent Brunch at her house, Barbara Ross signed up some of us to help in a homeless shelter after Christmas. In fact, one good fellow signed up for Christmas Eve.
Many towns have a group of people, usually men, who spend many nights on the streets, under overpasses, in doorways or vacant properties.
Our community started a Community Outreach Center (originally “Sunflower House”) which served this category of people. The newer center houses more people than ever, often sleeping people on the floor. Their treatment guidelines exclude people who are currently using addictive drugs or alcohol.
This leaves a group of people with no place to go. Some don't want a shelter. Some really need in out of the cold.
Other communities attempt to solve this problem in other ways. They have “tent cities” that move from place to place every few months. The people provide the shelter, the community finds a suitable vacant lot.
In other places the churches open doors at night for any who have need. There are lots of problems involved. It’s not quite so simple as being willing to provide a warm floor and bathrooms.
Our Christmas Eve event at the Old World Deli and Pub is downtown right on Second Street. People of all ages and conditions mingle to some extent. Known homeless people have attended but not in any numbers.
People are still outside the Inn. All over the world. We resist acknowledging that our nation has been party to destroying homes in far countries, making people not only homeless but fatherless. Millions in many nations are both without homes and without a homeland. We can’t undo that. But it doesn't hurt to try to deal with some needs in our own town. Good for Barbara, and for those who do part of their Christmas (or anytime) helping out. (Call Barbara at 752-3605 to reserve a 7 – 11 time slot some evening).

CHRISTMAS EVE AT THE DELI
6:30
COME EARLY FOR SINGING AND A SEAT
COME EXTRA EARLY TO HELP SET UP

 
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HEY! HEY! ANYBODY LISTENING.. .ANYBODY CARE?

     Not every church has a champagne brunch for Advent Sunday. It’s a spirit day after all. We do our “service” after brunch. We started by allowing Barbara Ross a moment to recruit some of us to serve time at a homeless shelter she's trying to put together. This is for the “hard core” folks who have more drug, alcohol and mental illness problems than our Community Outreach program is equipped to handle. (They limit their nightly intake to non-addicted homeless).
     The mental illness part hits close to home in our community. Actually, in our neighborhood. I've written in years past about “Jason's Star” that is lighted every year at Christmas reminding us of a young high schooler whose meds didn't work well enough to prevent him taking his own life. Then just this week there was another guy down the road who lost his battle with the darkness. These two, among many in the community who live with bi-polar and other situations, lived in good homes and were active in daily life to the extent that almost everyone was shocked to hear of their deaths.
     But some are out on the streets, medications or not. No telling how they might act out.
     I don't know whether it is Christmas season that does it or the darkness of this time of year. Lots of people suffer depression to some degree or other. Many are living on the edge.
     I came across three promising words about mental illness.
     First, words by William Styron, a novelist that died in his 80’s last month who was apparently bi-polar all his life: “Some are cursed with a dark view of life...[yet]...depression is not the soul's annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace; it is conquerable.”
     Second, the words of a good friend that I visit yearly who has been troubled by mental illness for many years. She had been experiencing recent times of deep depression. Her letter came telling me that her psychiatrist had put her on a new medication that helped her a lot. She said “The darkness becomes light.” Sounds like Christmas.
     Third, this testimony by a woman who lives down from us a few miles in a village called Alpine. I found her words in the Newsletter of The Great Vow Monastery, the center for the Zen Community of Oregon. She credits her practice in Buddhism and direction from Jan Chozen Bays, leader and teacher. She was seeking a way out of the suffering she was experiencing in life and thought that Buddhist teachings made sense;
“I've been schizophrenic since I was nineteen, so deep listening means a number of different things to me. First, I just have to get past the auditory and other hallucinations that are a part of the brain disorder...”
      She talks a bit about “deep listening,” the kind of listening that blocks out “noise,” including thought. It’s a discipline to be learned and is the center of Buddhist “practice.”
“So deep listening means using various techniques to change my focus from the crazy noise within my head and if those techniques don't work — and sometimes they don't — then I just sit with the voices, or other kinesthetic distortions, or whatever my brain is presenting me with, and just be with it moment by moment."
      So she gets beyond those hallucinations to a place where she touches reality.
     My Sunday Advent thoughts pick up on the words “waiting,” “listening,” “hearing” and “silence.” Passive words, yet active. This season of noise does little for the spirit. Neither does it lead us to understand the unfathomable mystery of the notion that we humans can know God as the Christmas story tells us. Perhaps we should seek the silence. Listen to the carols of Christmas; "Silent Night, Holy Night” and “Little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.” I like “Hey! Hey! Anybody Listening...anybody care?” Listening may lead to caring. It may lead us to love one another, to do unto others as we would have others do to us, to be kind to one another. No one knows how desperately people very near to us may need it.
     The gift of presence comes out of silence, not noise. It comes from a still small voice, not words. It comes from within, not outside.
“How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given.
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.”
     So let's have a bit more quiet, for crying out loud! Amen.
─ Art Morgan, Advent 2006