What God arranges for us to experience at each moment
is the holiest thing that could happen to us.
~Jean-Pierre Caussade
I know there are moments
when there is no holiness in sight,
and even God hides His face;
certainly His Son cried out in anguish too.
So we tread barefoot and bloodied on this holy ground,
whether rocky, muddy, crumbling or cushioned,
and He is there, walking before us,
ready to pick us up if we fall.
You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
~ Frederick Buechner
Once again we bid goodbye. It never gets easier to part from one’s family members when their calling is far away.
I began writing regularly 14 years ago to consider more deeply my time left on this earth and what my family meant to me, here and now, and for eternity.
Family is carried inside the words I write without my often writing about them directly. They inspire and challenge me, they love and stretch me, and as our children have now gone out into the world, two now married, I am assured they are sustained by what they have carried away from this home.
Life is not just about living in the world but what world you carry deep inside. We can never really be lonely; our hearts will never be empty. We have each other forever, even miles and miles and lifetimes apart.
I sustain myself with the love of family.
― Maya Angelou
We live in an unbelieving age
but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual…
an age that has domesticated despair
and learned to live with it happily.
There is something in us
that demands the redemptive act,
that demands that what falls
at least be offered the chance to be restored.
…what <modern man> has forgotten is the cost of it.
His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether,
and so he has forgotten the price of restoration.
This is an unlimited God
and one who has revealed himself specifically.
It is one who became man
and rose from the dead.
It is one who confounds the senses and the sensibilities,
one known early on as a stumbling block.
There is no way to gloss over this specification
or to make it more acceptable to modern thought.
This God is the object of ultimate concern
and he has a name.
~Flannery O’Connor from a 1963 lecture published in Mystery and Manners
He has a name,
this God of specificity,
and asks us to say His name.
It sounds like a breath,
so we say it
with each breath we take
even when we don’t believe.
And He knows our name
and calls out to us
even if we don’t listen.
Worship grounds me again
in the real world of God’s creation,
dislodging me from whatever world
I have imagined for myself.
I have come to believe
when we despair of praise,
when the wonder of creation and our place in it are lost to us,
it’s often because we’ve lost sight of our true role as creatures
– we have tried to do too much,
pretending to be in such control of things
that we are indispensable.
It’s a hedge against mortality and,
if you’re like me,
you take a kind of comfort in being busy.
The danger is that we will come to feel
too useful,
so full of purpose
and the necessity of fulfilling obligations
that we lose sight
of God’s play with creation,
and with ourselves.
~Kathleen Norris from The Quotidian Mysteries
Too busy to notice,
too busy to care,
losing sight in our real purpose:
we are here as creatures,
not creators.
So we must cease all other pursuits
and pursue worship,
praising God that we are made
in His image,
not He in our image.
People who grow up in the Pacific Northwest suffer from peculiar climate-related disorders unique to only to us. This deserves a page in the next version of the DSM — the diagnostic psychiatric manual: we in the PNW don’t feel 100% normal unless it is raining. Summer, especially this summer, can be a very difficult time for us.
In fact, we born and bred web-footers can feel downright depressed when it is sunny all the time. This summer — actually since May — we’ve had only an inch or so of rain, yielding weeks of nothing but blue skies, dusty paths, dried up creeks, wilting greenery, brown pasture and wildfires. We groan inwardly when yet another day dawns bright instead of gray, we start to look longingly at accumulating clouds, and we get positively giddy when morning starts with a drizzly mist.
It’s difficult to say what exactly is at work in brain chemistry in cases like this. It is the opposite effect of classically described Seasonal Affective Disorder diagnosed especially in those transplants from more southerly climates who get sadder and slowed down with darker days and longer nights. In people like me, born a stone’s throw from Puget Sound, the more sunlight there is, the more doldrums I feel: desolaration (desolation from too much solar exposure). The grayer the day, the wetter the sky–> a lightening of the heart and the spirit: precipilicity (felicity arising from precipitation).
Like most northwesterners, I have low Vitamin D levels even in the summer. It just isn’t seemly to expose all that skin to UV light.
So I’m longing for the profound relief of a rainy summer day, thank you. There would be no internal conflict about feeling compelled to go outside to work up a sweat and soak up the elusive sun rays. There would only be the cozy invitation to stay inside to read and write and sleep.
I know I’m not alone in this disorder. Many of us are closet sufferers but would never admit it in polite company. To complain about sunny days is perceived as meteorologically incorrect. It is time to acknowledge that many of us are in this together.
Robert Frost (definitely not a northwesterner) confessed his own case of desolaration in the first stanza of his poem November Guest:
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
And Jack Handey, the satirist, summarizes the real reason for the guilty pleasure of the northwest native in liking rain:
“If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying.’
And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did.”
Okay, okay, perhaps this is the explanation for our extended drought. It appears this summer we’ve all been far too well-behaved.
It’s time to do something about it…
Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions,
beneath our religion or lack of it,
we are all vulnerable both to the storm without
and to the storm within.
~Frederick Buechner – from Telling the Truth
We are so complicit and compliant
in pleasant and peaceful appearance,
sitting in silence allowing
our inner storm to stay well hidden;
if called and compelled to face wrongs boldly,
the tempest can no longer be contained.
Silence in the face of evil
must itself be shattered,
even the rocks will cry out,
as our storm spills forth
speaking the truth.
Silence in the face of evil is itself evil:
God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak.
Not to act is to act.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound.
By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi,
the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty.
There seem to be two sides of this world, presented us at different times,
as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death.
And seen with the eye of the poet,
as God sees them,
all things are alive and beautiful.
~Henry David Thoreau (journal)
Posting it again so it shows up where it belongs! Sorry for the duplication.
On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God –
a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside
this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope
it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.
~Mary Oliver “Song of the Builders”
I should watch more than build,
think more about God and how He is building me
than try to change His universe.
Like the sunrise this morning
with its line of demarcation
between what is lit and what is not yet,
I’m a work in progress,
waiting to be fully in the Son.
Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them…
~A.A.Milne from Winnie the Pooh (Eeyore)
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O Let them be left, wildness and wet:
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid
A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic
I’ve always identified with weeds more than cultivated blooms. I tend to be fluffy, spread out where I’m not necessarily wanted or needed, and seem to be resilient through drought or flood. Their persistence helps me let them be. EPG
All at once I saw what looked like a Martian spaceship whirling towards me in the air. It flashed borrowed light like a propeller. Its forward motion greatly outran its fall. As I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovered pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally came to rest. I found it in the grass; it was a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair. Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world’s rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down. O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, o welcome, cheers.
And the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish as of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes I will think, two maple keys. If I am a maple key falling, at least I can twirl.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I think a lot about wings — particularly when I’m sitting belted in a seat looking out at them bouncing in turbulence, marveling at how they keep hundreds of people and an entire aircraft miles above ground. Wings, no matter what they belong to, are marvelous structures that combine strength and lift and lightness and expanse and mobility, with the ability to rise up and ease back to earth.
And so ideally I am blown rather than flung along my fitful windy days, rising and falling as those thin veined wings guide me, twirling, swirling as I fall, oh so slowly.
Barnstorming 