Your voice, with clear location of June days, Called me- outside the window. You were there, Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare Of uncontested summer all things raise Plainly their seeming into seamless air.
Then your love looked as simple and entire As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace, Which promise always wine, by mottled fire More fatal flashed than ever human grace.
And your gay gift – Oh when I saw it fall Into my hands, through all that naive light, It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight As must have been the first great gift of all. ~Richard Wilbur “June Light”
June, so green, so prolific, can have the feel of the first Garden. Our trees are heavy with growing fruit and, thankfully, none are forbidden. I tread quietly through the sunlit orchard, not wanting to spoil this glad gift of a morning.
Later in the summer, when a ripe pear loosens its grip from the branch and settles into my hands, I will share of its pure grace and taste. With gratitude, I will offer it up, glistening with dew and truth, to you.
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I’ve learned that evenwhen I have pains, I don’t have to be one … I’ve learned that: people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. ~Maya Angelouon her 70th birthday, citing a quote from Carl Buehner
I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household, to cube home-canned pears and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point. I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know the deceased, to press the moist hands of the living, to look in their eyes and offer sympathy, as though I understood loss even then. I learned that whatever we say means nothing, what anyone will remember is that we came. I learned to believe I had the power to ease awful pains materially like an angel. Like a doctor, I learned to create from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once you know how to do this, you can never refuse. To every house you enter, you must offer healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch. ~Julie Kasdorf– “What I Learned from my Mother”
Moms often know best about these things — how to love others when and how they need it — the ways to ease pain, rather than become one. Despite years of practice, I don’t always get it right; others often do it better.
Showing up with food is always a good thing but it is the showing up part that is the real food; bringing a cake is simply the icing.
Working as a physician over four decades, my usefulness tended to depend on the severity of another’s worries and misery. If no illness, no symptoms, no fear, why bother seeing a doctor? Since retiring, the help I offer no longer means writing a prescription for a medication, or performing a minor surgery. I have to simply offer up me for what it’s worth, without the M.D.
To be useful without a stethoscope, I aim to be like any good mom or grandma. I press my hand into another’s, hug when needed, smile and listen and nod and sometimes weep when someone has something they need to say. No advanced degree needed.
Oh, and bring flowers. Cut up fruit. Bake a cake. Leave the ants at home.
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Here, I place a blue glazed cup where the wood is slightly whitened. Here, I lay down two bright spoons, our breakfast saucers, napkins white and smooth as milk.
I am stirring at the sink, I am stirring the amount of dew you can gather in two hands, folding it into the fragile quiet of the house. Before the eggs, before the coffee heaving like a warm cat, I step out to the feeder— one foot, then the other, alive on wet blades. Air lifts my gown—I might fly—
This thistle seed I pour is for the tiny birds. This ritual, for all things frail and imperiled. Wings surround me, frothing the air. I am struck by what becomes holy.
A woman who lost her teenage child to an illness without mercy, said that at the end, her daughter sat up in her hospital bed and asked:
What should I do? What should I do?
Into a white enamel bath I lower four brown eggs. You fill the door frame, warm and rumpled, kiss the crown of my head. I know how the topmost leaves of dusty trees feel at the advent of the monsoon rains.
I carry the woman with the lost child in my pocket, where she murmurs her love song without end: Just this, each day: Bear yourself up on small wings to receive what is given. Feed one another with such tenderness, it could almost be an answer. ~Marcia F. Brown “Morning Song”
I am comforted by rituals, as most of us are. The feeding, the cleaning, the washing, the nurture, smoothing of the wrinkled and ruffled, noticing who or what is near me, the sacred time of soothing rest.
It is those small things that get us through the day, that create holiness in each breath, each moment.
What should we do next? What might we do?
No need to wonder. With loving tenderness, we shall feed the hungry all our days.
Come, Holy Spirit, bending or not bending the grasses, appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame, at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow covers crippled firs… ~Czeslaw Milosz from “Veni Creator” inSelected and Last Poems
Unless the eye catch fire, Then God will not be seen. Unless the ear catch fire Then God will not be heard. Unless the tongue catch fire Then God will not be named. Unless the heart catch fire, Then God will not be loved. Unless the mind catch fire, Then God will not be known. ~William Blake from “Pentecost”
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “God’s Grandeur”
Love flows from God into man, Like a bird Who rivers the air Without moving her wings. Thus we move in His world, One in body and soul, Though outwardly separate in form. As the Source strikes the note, Humanity sings– The Holy Spirit is our harpist, And all strings Which are touched in Love Must sound. ~Mechtild of Magdeburg 1207-1297 “Effortlessly” trans. Jane Hirshfield
May the Divine rain down in strange syllables yet with an ancient familiarity, a knowing borne in the blood, the ear, the tongue, bringing the clarity that comes not in stone or in steel but in fire, in flame.
On this day of Pentecost, when we feel we are without hope, when the bent world reels in blood and violence, when faith feels frail, when love seems distant:
We wait stilled and silent for the moment we are lit afire by the Holy Spirit ~ when the Living God is seen, heard, named, loved, known forever burning in our hearts deep down, brooded over by His bright wings
We are His dearest and freshest in this moment and for eternity.
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Once I am sure there’s nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new- Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t. Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce “Here endeth” much more loudly than I’d meant. The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence, Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do, And always end much at a loss like this, Wondering what to look for; wondering, too, When churches fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep A few cathedrals chronically on show, Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases, And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt So long and equably what since is found Only in separation – marriage, and birth, And death, and thoughts of these – for whom was built This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round. ~Philip Larkin from “Church-going”
Even an empty shell of a church invites in silent witness- even those of us who struggle with unbelief, who stop only to rest a moment, to mock or sigh, breathe in the musty history of such a place.
Over the centuries, there has been much wrong with churches, comprised as they are of fallen people with broken wings and fractured faith. They seem anachronistic, from another time and place, echoing of baptisms and eucharist, weddings and funerals.
Yet we still return, fragmented souls that we are, acknowledging the flaws in one another as we crack open to spill our own.
What is right with the church goes beyond silence: Who we pray to, why we sing and feast together on the grace and generosity of His Word. We are restless noisy people joined together as a body bloodied, bruised, redeemed.
Dear Lord of Heaven and Earth, look out for us in our motley messiness, rain down Your restless love upon our heads, no matter how frowsty a building we worship in, or how we look or feel today.
Be unignorable, so we might come back, again and again.
We stand, stirred, in silence, simply grateful to be alive, to raise our hands together, then sing and kneel and bow in such an odd and humble house, indeed a home God might call His own.
pulpit peonies
The old church leans nearby a well-worn road, Upon a hill that has no grass or tree, The winds from off the prairie now unload The dust they bring around it fitfully.
The path that leads up to the open door Is worn and grayed by many toiling feet Of us who listen to the Bible lore And once again the old-time hymns repeat.
And ev’ry Sabbath morning we are still Returning to the altar waiting there. A hush, a prayer, a pause, and voices fill The Master’s House with a triumphant air.
The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us and God. ~Stephen Paulus
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Is it true that after this life of ours we shall one day be awakened by a terrifying clamour of trumpets? Forgive me God, but I console myself that the beginning and resurrection of all of us dead will simply be announced by the crowing of the cock.
After that we’ll remain lying down a while… The first to get up will be Mother…We’ll hear her quietly laying the fire, quietly putting the kettle on the stove and cosily taking the teapot out of the cupboard. We’ll be home once more. ~Vladimir Holan “Resurrection”
I acknowledge the anachronism of my early childhood years living in a two-story farm house with my Mom cooking on a wood-burning stove in a large kitchen. I look back on it with a nostalgic fondness, yet knowing it was early morning work for my parents to get up to light the fire to warm up the center of the house while we kids lay cozy in our comfy beds. My Dad would head out to the barn to hand milk our three dairy cows and feed the chickens, while Mom started Dad’s coffee percolator and her tea, prepared the milk pasteurizer for the stove while the oatmeal simmered, awaiting the cream poured on top.
It took plenty of effort to transform that big drafty house into a home – a warm and welcoming place for those who lived there and anyone who came to visit. I grew up immersed in the security of family and farm and faith. I realize how rare that is in this world now, 65 years later.
Finding and returning home is what we each long for – where one is loved and accepted, and simply belongs. It may not look like a farm kitchen for everyone, but it is for me. I’ve tried over the years to make our own small farmhouse a foretaste of what home might feel like for eternity though as I wipe countertops and mop the floor, I know what is coming is so much better than the blessings I hold dear now.
When that day of resurrection comes, whether I hear trumpets blow or a rooster crow, I hope I’ll remember I’m being called back home – a place of love and beauty.
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Here is the source of every sacrament, The all-transforming presence of the Lord, Replenishing our every element Remaking us in his creative Word.
For here the earth herself gives bread and wine, The air delights to bear his Spirit’s speech, The fire dances where the candles shine, The waters cleanse us with His gentle touch.
And here He shows the full extent of love To us whose love is always incomplete, In vain we search the heavens high above, The God of love is kneeling at our feet.
Though we betray Him, though it is the night. He meets us here and loves us into light. ~Malcolm Guite “Maundy Thursday”
On this Maundy Thursday we are called to draw near Him, to gather together among the hungry and thirsty to the Supper He has prepared.
He washes the dirt off our feet; we look away, mortified. He serves us from Himself; we fret about whether we are worthy.
We are not.
Starving and parched, grimy and weary, hardly presentable to be guests at His table, we are made worthy only because He has made us so.
This year’s Lenten theme: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 18
By the magnet of Christ I am drawn to stillness My joy is to live as a recluse of Love Resting my head on the heart of all Mercy Living in the presence of the Presence
This is my home where I will live forever: Hidden with Christ in God
This breath and this heartbeat, the rhythm of my praising, sounding to the wing-beats of angel-song. My will is an anchor in the depths of silence – Living in the presence of the Presence
Each morning I rise in the Holy of Holies to sacrifice each moment of time. Burning like a lamp with the oil of gladness – Living in the presence of the Presence
Fasting from all things to feast on your manna, bread in the wilderness gathered each dawn. Tasting your sweetness in quiet communion – Living in the presence of the Presence
With my prayer I am sowing / sewing the seeds of heaven, a garden of paradise to bloom on earth. Spinning and weaving, revealing the beauty of Living in the presence of the Presence
In the silence of the senses I know only Being – the vast fields of heaven in the smallest thing. Unknowable mystery that cannot be spoken living in the presence of the Presence ~Kathleen Deignan
We do not want merely to see beauty… we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. ~C.S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory
Part of the joy of beauty is the realization that it is part of a larger whole, most of which appears to be just out of sight. We are drawn forward toward something… and left waiting, wondering. ~N.T. Wright from Life, God and Other Small Topics
Each day brings headlines that tear at us, pull us down and rub us with mud. We are grimy by association, sullied and smeared.
Still, in our state of disgrace, Beauty is offered up to us, sometimes out of the blue, unexpected but so welcome.
In His last act with those He loved, Jesus shared Himself through a communal meal, then washed and toweled their dirty feet clean, immersing them, despite their protests, in all that is beautiful and clean. He made the ugly beautiful.
He took on and wore their grime on a towel around His waist.
It is now our turn to help wash away the dirt from whoever is in need. He showed us how to help others look for the good parts.
This year’s Lenten theme: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 18
More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them.
It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems.
My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress.
But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them. ~Henri Nouwen from The Practice of the Presence of God
For too many years, I was wrapped up in the trappings of the “useful” life – meetings, committees, schedules, strategic priorities – and I forgot there is so much living usefully that I neglected to do.
There needs to be more potlucks, more “oh, by the way” conversations, more connections “just because,” more showing up when extra hands are needed.
If only I could invite you all over for breakfast. We’d have a wonderful chin wag…
Actually, now that I think of it — you ARE invited for breakfast – Sunday, April 9, 2023 at 7 AM. Dress warmly. Wear boots. Come hungry and thirsty for the Word and ready for hugs. Easter Sunrise on our hill.
photo by Joel De Waard
This year’s Lenten theme: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 18
I believe in God as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. ~C.S. Lewis from “They Asked For A Paper,” in Is Theology Poetry?
I see your world in light that shines behind me, Lit by a sun whose rays I cannot see, The smallest gleam of light still seems to find me Or find the child who’s hiding deep inside me. I see your light reflected in the water, Or kindled suddenly in someone’s eyes, It shimmers through the living leaves of summer, Or spills from silver veins in leaden skies, It gathers in the candles at our vespers It concentrates in tiny drops of dew At times it sings for joy, at times it whispers, But all the time it calls me back to you. I follow you upstream through this dark night My saviour, source, and spring, my life and light. ~Malcolm Guite “I am the Light of the World”
Without God’s Light that comes reliably every morning, I would be hopelessly casting about in the dark, stumbling and fumbling my way without the benefit of His illumination.
It feels like a fresh gift each time, whether brilliantly painted, or much of the time, a sullen and sodden gray.
I fix my eyes on the unseen, as it is lit in the Lord. And then: was blind, but now I see…
This year’s Lenten theme: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 18
Barnstorming 