Here in the time between snow and the bud of the rhododendron, we watch the robins, look into
the gray, and narrow our view to the patches of wild grasses coming green. The pile of ashes
in the fireplace, haphazard sticks on the paths and gardens, leaves tangled in the ivy and periwinkle
lie in wait against our will. This drawing near of renewal, of stems and blossoms, the hesitant return
of the anarchy of mud and seed says not yet to the blood’s crawl. When the deer along the stream
look back at us, we know again we have left them. We pull a blanket over us when we sleep.
As if living in a prayer, we say amen to the late arrival of red, the stun of green, the muted yellow
at the end of every twig. We will lift up our eyes unto the trees hoping to discover a gnarled nest within
the branches’ negative space. And we will watch for a fox sparrow rustling in the dead leaves underneath. ~Jack Ridl “Here in the Time Between” from Practicing to Walk Like a Heron
We live in an in-between time: we see the coming glory of spring and rebirth yet winter’s mud and ice still grasps at us.
We want to crawl back under the blankets, hoping to wake again on a brighter day.
Praying to emerge from the mud of in-between and not-yet, we are ready to bud and blossom and wholly bloom.
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Spring comes quickly: overnight the plum tree blossoms, the warm air fills with bird calls.
In the plowed dirt, someone has drawn a picture of the sun with rays coming out all around but because the background is dirt, the sun is black. There is no signature.
Alas, very soon everything will disappear: the bird calls, the delicate blossoms. In the end, even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.
Nevertheless, the artist intends a mood of celebration.
How beautiful the blossoms are — emblems of the resilience of life. The birds approach eagerly. ~Louise Glück “Primavera”
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring – When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring”
And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true. ” Revelation 21:5
Given a choice, humanity chose sour over the sweetness we were created for ~ giving up walks together in the cool of the day to feed an appetite that could never be sated.
God made a choice to bring us back with His own blood as if we are worthy of Him.
He says we are. He dies to prove it.
Every day I choose to believe earth can be sweet and beautiful again. Each spring becomes a celebration of our resilience.
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Trust your bones Trust the pull of the earth And the earth itself Trust the hearts of trees The stone at the edge of the sea And all else true
Trust that water will bear you up Trust the moon to keep faith With ebb and flow Trust the leafing The chrysalis, the seed And every other way Death gives birth to resurrection ~Bethany Lee, “To Keep Faith” from The Breath Between
Over the last several weeks, roots have become shoots and their green blades are rising chaotically, uneven and awkward like a bad haircut. And like a bad haircut, another two weeks will make all the difference — sprouts will cover all the bare earth, breaking through crusted soil to create a smooth carpet of green.
There is nothing more mysterious than the barren made fruitful, the ugly made beautiful, the dead made alive.
The muddy winter field of my heart will recover, bathed in new light; I trust love will come again like shoots that spring up green.
Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed… 1 Corinthians 15:51–52
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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March. I am beginning to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost where the moles have nosed up their cold castings, and the ground cover in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice around foliage and stem night by night,
but as the light lengthens, preacher of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches, his large gestures beckon green out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting from the cotoneasters. A single bee finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow aconites glowing, low to the ground like little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up a purple hand here, there, as I stand on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat and light like a bud welcoming resurrection, and my hand up, too, ready to sign on for conversion. ~Luci Shaw “Revival” from What the Light was Like
The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled Out in the sun, After frightful operation. She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun, To be healed, Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind, Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little. While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know She is not going to die. ~Ted Hughes from ” A March Morning Unlike Others” from Ted Hughes. Collected Poems
Spring is emerging slowly from this haggard and droopy winter. All growing things are still stuck in morning frost for another week at least. Then, like the old “Wizard of Oz” movie, the landscape will suddenly turn from monochrome to technicolor, the soundtrack from forlorn to glorious birdsong.
Yearning for spring to commence, I tap my foot impatiently as if owed a timely seasonal transformation from dormant to verdant. We all have been waiting for the Physician’s announcement that this patient survived some intricate life-changing procedure: “I’m happy to say the Earth is alive after all, now revived and restored, wounded but healing, breathing on her own but too sedated for a visit just yet.”
I wait impatiently to celebrate her return to health, knowing this temporary home of ours is still very much alive. She breathes, she thrives, blooming and singing with everything she’s got. And so will I.
He sends his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly. 16 He spreads the snow like wool and scatters the frost like ashes. 17 He hurls down his hail like pebbles. Who can withstand his icy blast? 18 He sends his word and melts them; he stirs up his breezes, and the waters flow. Psalm 147: 15-18
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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Mid-January and still the last amaryllis refuses. Planted in October, it just now raises a green bud tip to the bright window. Inside the plain package waits a blaring red, the flower furled, held like breath in the trumpeter’s body. ~Francesca Bell “Late Blooming” from What Small Sound
Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but actually you’ve been planted. ~Christine Caine
It came home with me over a month ago, a non-descript bulb with a green sword-blade shoot emerging shyly from the top.
Its care and feeding was a lot of “watch and wait” and just a little water. It has been our winter morning entertainment as we munched down cereal, gauging how many centimeters it rose over night.
It took over the kitchen table~ two tall stalks topped with tight-fisted buds which opened oh-so-slowly over several days like a drowsy student after Christmas break, not yet ready to meet and greet the world but once the commitment to wake is made, there is no other blossoming quite like it anywhere.
How can we possibly understand, while still buried in the dark, that we too rest planted in holy ground, waiting for the wakening that calls us forth to bloom, and fruit, and amaze.
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You never know what may cause them. The sight of the ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow…
You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure.Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next. ~Frederick Buechner fromWhistling in the Dark
photo by Emily Vander Haak
I’m not paying close enough attention to the meaning of my leaking eyes if I’m constantly looking for kleenex to stem the flow. During the holidays, it seems I have more than ample opportunity to find out the secret of who I am, where I have come from, and where I am to be next.
So I keep my pockets loaded with kleenex, and there is a box ready in every room of the house.
It mostly has to do with welcoming our three children, their spouses, and six grandchildren back home for a few days to become a full-out, noisy, messy, chaotic household again. There will be puzzles and games and music and laughter and unending laundry and constant meal preparation and consumption. It is about singing grace together in five-part harmony before we eat, praying precious words of gratitude.
It is about remembering the drama of our youngest’s birthday thirty-one years ago today, as if it were only yesterday, when her life was saved by a snowstorm. Now she and her husband bring their own son for visits back to the farm.
It certainly has to do with bidding farewell again, gathering them all in for that final hug and then letting go.
We have urged and encouraged them to go where their hearts are telling them they are needed and called to be, even if that means miles away from their one-time home on the farm. For our oldest son’s family, that means returning and settling in just down the road.
I too was let go once and though I would try to look back, too often in tears, I set my face toward the future. It led me here, to this marriage, this family, this farm, this work, our church, to more tears, to more letting go if I’m granted more years to weep again and again with gusto and grace and gravitas.
This is what I’m sure is the secret of me: to love so much and so deeply that letting go is so hard that tears are no longer unexpected or a mystery to me or my children and grandchildren. It is a given that Grandma will weep at a drop of a hat, at a hug, or a hymn. My tears are the spill-over of fullness that can no longer be contained: God’s still small voice spills down my cheeks drop by drop like wax from a burning candle.
No kleenex are needed with these tears.
Let them flow as I let them go. It is as it should be.
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The angel said there would be no end to his kingdom. So for three hundred days I carried rivers and cedars and mountains. Stars spilled in my belly when he turned. Now I can’t stop touching his hands, the pink pebbles of his knuckles, the soft wrinkle of flesh between his forefinger and thumb. I rub his fingernails as we drift in and out of sleep. They are small and smooth, like almond petals. Forever, I will need nothing but these.
But all night, the visitors crowd around us. I press his palms to my lips in silence. They look down in anticipation, as if they expect him to suddenly spill coins from his hands or raise a gold scepter and turn swine into angels.
Isn’t this wonder enough that yesterday he was inside me, and now he nuzzles next to my heart? That he wraps his hand around my finger and holds on? ~Tania Runyan “Mary” from Nativity Suite
Now, newborn, in wide-eyed wonder he gazes up at his creation. His hand that hurled the world holds tight his mother’s finger. Holy light spills across her face and she weeps silent wondering tears to know she holds the One who has so long held her. ~Joan Rae Mills from “Mary”in the Light Upon Light Anthology by Sara Arthur
Madonna and Child detail by Pompeo Batoni
The grip of the newborn is, in fact, superhuman. It is one of the tests of natural infant reflexes that are checked medically to confirm an intact nervous system in the newborn. A new baby can hold their own weight with the power of their hand hold, and Jesus would have been no different, except in one aspect:
He also held the world in His infant hands.
We have been held from the very Beginning, and have not been let go. Try as we might to wiggle free to go our own way, He keeps a powerful grip on us.
We know the strength of the Lord whose hands “hurled the world” into being.
This is what our good God has done for us… He hangs on tight.
Advent 2023 theme …because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song
Good people all, this Christmas time Consider well and bear in mind What our good God for us has done In sending his beloved son
With Mary holy we should pray To God with love this Christmas Day In Bethlehem upon that morn There was a blessed Messiah born
Near Bethlehem did shepherds keep Their flocks of lambs and feeding sheep To whom God’s angels did appear Which put the shepherds in great fear’
Prepare and go, ‘ the angels said ‘To Bethlehem, be not afraid For there you’ll find, this happy morn A princely babe, sweet Jesus born
With thankful heart and joyful mind The shepherds went, this babe to find And as God’s angel had foretold They did our saviour Christ behold
Within a manger he was laid And by his side the virgin maid Attending on the Lord of life Who came on earth to end all strife
Good people all, this Christmas time Consider well and bear in mind What our good God for us has done In sending his beloved Son
With Mary holy we should pray To God with love this Christmas day In Bethlehem upon that morn There was a blessed Messiah born
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Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning from “Aurora Leigh”
(Jesus said) I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! Luke 12:49
It is difficult to undo our own damage… It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. ~Annie Dillard from Teaching a Stone to Talk
When I drink in the stars and upward sink into the theater your words have wrought, I touch unfelt immensity and think— like Grandma used to pause in patient thought before an ordinary flower, awed by intricacies hidden in plain view, then say, You didn’t have to do that, God!— Surely a smaller universe would do!
But you have walled us in with open seas unconquerable, wild with distant shores whose raging dawns are but your filigree across our vaulted skies. This art of yours, what Grandma held and I behold, these flames, frame truth which awes us more: You know our names. ~Michael Stalcup “The Shallows”
I need to turn aside and look, to see, as if for the first and last time, the kindled fire that illuminates even the darkest day and never dies away.
We are invited by name, by no less than God Himself, through the burning bush that is never consumed: to shed our shoes, to walk barefoot and vulnerable, and approach the bright and burning dawn, even when it is the darkest midnight, even when it is a babe in a manger lighting a fire in each one of us.
Only then, only then can I say: “Here I am! Consume me!”
Advent 2023 theme …because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song
Within our darkest night, you kindle the fire that never dies away, that never dies away. Within our darkest night, you kindle the fire that never dies away, that never dies away. ~Taize
I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been; Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair. I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see. For still there are so many things that I have never seen: in every wood in every spring there is a different green. I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago and people who will see a world that I shall never know. But all the while I sit and think of times there were before, I listen for returning feet and voices at the door. ~J.R.R. Tolkien
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We were familiar with the night. We knew its favourite colours, its sullen silence and its small, disturbing sounds, its unprovoked rages, its savage dreams.
We slept by turns, attentive to the flock. We said little. Night after night, there was little to say. But sometimes one of us, skilled in that way, would pipe a tune of how things were for us.
They say that once, almost before time, the stars with shining voices serenaded the new born world. The night could not contain their boundless praise.
We thought that just a poem — until the night a song of solar glory, unutterable, unearthly, eclipsed the luminaries of the night, as though the world were exorcised of dark and, coming to itself, began again.
Later we returned to the flock. The night was ominously black. The stars were silent as the sheep. Nights pass, year on year. We clutch our meagre cloaks against the cold. Our aging piper’s fumbling fingers play, night after night, an earthly echo of the song that banished dark. It has stayed with us. ~Richard Bauckham “Song of the Shepherds”
There is no specific “song of the shepherds” recorded in scripture. They were unlikely people inspired to use flowery words and memorable turns of phrase. Scripture says simply they looked at each other and agreed to get to Bethlehem as fast as possible and see for themselves what they had been told by God. There was no time to waste singing out praises and thanksgiving; they “went with haste” to a dark and primitive place that served the purpose of housing animals.
It most assuredly was plain and humble, smelling of manure and urine, and animal fur. Yet it also would have smelled of the sweetness of stored forage, and there would have been the reassuring sounds of animals chewing and breathing deeply. It was truly the only place a group of scruffy shepherds could have felt welcomed without being tossed out as unsuitable visitors– they undoubtedly arrived at the threshold in bad need of a bath, smelly, dirty and terrified and yet left transformed, returning to their fields full of praise and wonder, telling all they met what they had seen.
There could not have been a more suitable place for this birth that was to change the world: the promise of cleansing hope and peace in the midst of filth. Despite our sorry state, we are welcomed into the sanctuary of the stable, sown, grown, pruned and harvested to become seed and food for others.
Witnessing an appearance of the heavenly host followed by seeing for themselves the incarnation of the living God in a manger must have been overwhelming to those who otherwise spent much time alone. They must have been simply bubbling over with everything they had heard and been shown, shocking anyone they met. At least scripture does tell us the effect the shepherds’ witnessing words had on others: “and all who heard it wondered…”
I don’t think people wondered if the shepherds were embroidering the story, or had a group hallucination, or were flat out fabricating for reasons of their own. I suspect Mary and Joseph and the townspeople who heard what the shepherds had to say were flabbergasted at the passion and excitement being shared about what had just taken place. Seeing became believing and all could see how completely the shepherds believed by how enthusiastically they shared everything they knew. If the shepherds had become a harvest of hope, then surely so can we.
We know what the shepherds had to say, minimalist conversationalists that they are. So we too should respond with similar wonder at what they have told us all.
And simply believe it was (and is) as wonderful as they say.
Advent 2023 theme …because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song
We stood on the hills, Lady, Our day’s work done, Watching the frosted meadows That winter had won.
The evening was calm, Lady, The air so still, Silence more lovely than music Folded the hill.
There was a star, Lady, Shone in the night, Larger than Venus it was And bright, so bright.
Oh, a voice from the sky, Lady, It seemed to us then Telling of God being born In the world of men.
And so we have come, Lady, Our day’s work done, Our love, our hopes, ourselves, We give to your son. ~Bob Chillcott “The Shepherd’s Carol”
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…to bear in her womb Infinite weight and lightness; to carry in hidden, finite inwardness, nine months of Eternity; to contain in slender vase of being, the sum of power – in narrow flesh, the sum of light.
Then bring to birth, push out into air, a Man-child needing, like any other, milk and love –
What could a baby know of gold ornaments or frankincense and myrrh, of priestly robes and devout genuflections?
But the imagination knows all stories before they are told and knows the truth of this one past all defection
The rich gifts so unsuitable for a child though devoutly proffered, stood for all that love can bring.
The men were old how could they know of a mother’s needs or a child’s appetite?
But as they kneeled the child was fed. They saw it and gave praise!
A miracle had taken place, hard gold to love, a mother’s milk! before their wondering eyes.
The ass brayed the cattle lowed. It was their nature.
All men by their nature give praise. It is all they can do.
The very devils by their flight give praise. What is death, beside this?
Nothing. The wise men came with gifts and bowed down to worship this perfection. ~William Carlos Williams “The Gift”
The uncontained contained infinite made finite humble made worthy a Deliverer delivered hungry sated on mother’s milk unsuitable made perfect darkness illuminated with possibilities the eternal here and now
How can you measure the love of a mother, Or how can you write down a baby’s first cry? Candlelight, angel light, firelight and starglow Shine on his cradle till breaking of dawn. Gloria, gloria in excelsis Deo! Angels are singing; the Christ child is born. Shepherds and wise men will kneel and adore him, Seraphim round him their vigil will keep; Nations proclaim him their Lord and their Saviour, But Mary will hold him and sing him to sleep. Find him at Bethlehem laid in a manger: Christ our Redeemer asleep in the hay. Godhead incarnate and hope of salvation: A child with his mother that first Christmas Day. ~John Rutter – words and music
Advent 2023 theme …because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song
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