It is at such moments I
am called, in a voice so pure
I have to close my eyes, and enter
the breathing darkness just beyond
my headlights. I have come back,
I think, to something I had
almost forgotten, a mouth
that waits patiently, sighs, speaks,
and falls silent. No one else
is alive. The blossoms are
white, and I am almost there.
~Robert Mezey from “White Blossoms”
“I know for a while again
the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valleyside,
the black woods wintry on
the hills, small clouds at sunset
passing across. And I know
that this is one of the thresholds
between Earth and Heaven,
from which even I may step
forth and be free.”
– Wendell Berry from “Sabbath Poems”
It is dry, hazy June weather.
We are more of the earth,
farther from heaven these days.
I pray that the life of this spring and summer
may ever lie fair in my memory.~Henry David Thoreau
…Christ does not banish tragedy but carries it into the heart of God.
…in the forty days that followed (the resurrection), Christ was not magically made whole but bore the marks of his passion, and would not rest until we placed our hands—and our hearts—inside them.
~Gregory Wolfe from Seattle Pacific University’s Image Journal, from “The Tragic Sense of Life”
This week brought local news from Seattle Pacific University of yet another person with mental illness making a conscious choice to end his own life by random killing of others. His personal and private pain becomes magnified exponentially through creating public pain and tragedy; in this age of “selfies”, it is the ultimate in self-absorption to purposely erase innocent lives just so he will be remembered.
I often see broken people in my work — it is the nature of a primary care clinic. The vast majority do not seek ways to break others; instead they seek the glue of compassion, a listening ear and sometimes medication that can be a balm of healing their wounds. A few harbor such anger and resentment that their anguish becomes such uncontrolled bleeding that society can only be a tourniquet to make it stop.
Christ showed the way to walk through such unimaginable pain and tragedy. He carried his bleeding wounds, though his pulse was stilled, straight into the heart of God. The marks he bore were from us, for us and about us, so we would always remember his sacrifice.
If we bleed, when we bleed … he returned to invite us to reach inside the wounds we inflicted and be forever healed.
I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse
…perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.
It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun;
and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike;
it may be that God makes every daisy separately,
but has never got tired of making them.
~G.K. Chesterton
There is a flower, a little flower
With silver crest and golden eye,
That welcomes every changing hour,
And weathers every sky.
~James Montgomery
Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune
I saw the white daisies go down to the sea,
A host in the sunshine, an army in June,
The people God sends us to set our heart free.
~William Bliss Carman
All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man’s evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.
~Wendell Berry “The Wish to be Generous”
Carpentry…. embodies the emotional: celebration, contemplation, mystery, and grief.
It is an art that is solitary and communal, one that transcends time and outlives us.
~Yusuf Komunyakaa from “Honor Thy Hands”
Wes Meyer learned how to build new things and repair old things from his carpenter dad, Pete, working side by side for many years. Although Wes was a magician with hammer and nails, taking raw materials and creating something beautiful and functional, his true artistry was when he was able to take something broken or failing and make it new. By never giving up on finding a solution to a problem, no matter how hard it was to fix, he transcended the limits and boundaries of others saying something was “too old to bother.”
Our almost 100 year old church building presented perpetual challenges to enhance Wes’ often solitary restoration skills, whether it was a leaking roof that required scaling the steep slopes, spraying a hornets’ nest in the belfry, replacing missing siding after a windstorm, sweeping up the glass from a window broken by vandals or a broken tree branch, or mopping up after the annual basement flooding when the rains fell too long and hard. He became our unofficial ambassador to the often wary county Planning Department, diplomatically negotiating permits for various repair projects and a fellowship hall expansion. At the annual congregational meeting, when it came his turn to report on the volunteer Buildings and Grounds Committee activities for the year, he would take off his ball cap, lean over the podium, look out at the rest of us non-carpenters, and say, “this building is really old!” and wearily shake his head. But rather than suggest a tear-down and start-over, he would outline a list of projects he had tackled in the previous year and what he figured would need doing the coming year and how much the materials would likely cost. He made it “our” communal duty to keep our church building glued together for the next generation and the next. The building needs to outlive us.
Wes, like any excellent craftsman, made sure it outlived him.
When he was diagnosed with acute leukemia 30 months ago, he had no problem turning his failing bone marrow over to the oncologists to fix and make new. He understood the process of patching up something that was broken, and that sometimes in the middle of a repair, things can look and feel worse than they were before, but you have to keep your eyes on the goal. With the support of his loving wife and daughter and an almost-man star athlete son who had grown far taller and stronger than his dad, and a remarkable extended family, Wes took on the cancer like yet another major remodel. He and his medical team gutted the leukemia cells with chemotherapy and rebuilt anew with his brother’s stem cells. It was a difficult repair and his body, like a customer demanding too many change orders, wasn’t all that keen on accepting the new cells. Wes and his doctors worked hard trying to address the new demands. It felt like a job that would never be done — all he wanted was to move on to other projects.
Sometimes even the best remodel has problems; sometimes the fissure in the foundation is just too wide, or the weight-supporting beams have hidden dry rot. Wes’ bone marrow harbored cancer cells that eventually reemerged and the next chemotherapy step was like falling into an old well hole with no ladder. He couldn’t climb out, his body too damaged, the burden too heavy, his time running out. A few days ago he was brought out of that deep pit to be home near his family and friends. Unlike his thriving church building, Wes was not nearly old enough to die last night, but he did. Sometimes the tear-down is necessary to build something even more beautiful and glorious. We all await that moment with trembling.
Those hands of his must be needed elsewhere, working on projects that last for eternity. No more repairs needed.
You love the roses – so do I. I wish
The sky would rain down roses, as they rain
From off the shaken bush. Why will it not?
Then all the valley would be pink and white
And soft to tread on. They would fall as light
As feathers, smelling sweet; and it would be
Like sleeping and like waking, all at once!
~George Eliot
Barnstorming 