Not much to me is yonder lane Where I go every day; But when there’s been a shower of rain And hedge-birds whistle gay, I know my lad that’s out in France With fearsome things to see Would give his eyes for just one glance At our white hawthorn tree.
. . . .
Not much to me is yonder lane Where he so longs to tread: But when there’s been a shower of rain I think I’ll never weep again Until I’ve heard he’s dead. ~Siegfried Sassoon“The Hawthorn Tree”
After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him.
Now the Jews’ Feast of Booths was at hand. So his brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works you are doing. For no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.” For not even his brothers believed in him.
Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil.“
“You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.”
After saying this, he remained in Galilee. But after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly but in private. The Jews were looking for him at the feast, and saying, “Where is he?”
And there was much muttering about him among the people. While some said, “He is a good man,” others said, “No, he is leading the people astray.” Yet for fear of the Jews no one spoke openly of him. John 7:1-13
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night, That interests our eyes. And who goes there? I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where, With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?
Men go by me whom either beauty bright In mould or mind or what not else makes rare: They rain against our much-thick and marsh air Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.
Death or distance soon consumes them: wind What most I may eye after, be in at the end I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.
Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot fóllows kínd, Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “The Lantern Out of Doors”
As swimmers dare to lie face to the sky and water bears them, as hawks rest upon air and air sustains them, so would I learn to attain free fall, and float into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace, knowing no effort earns that all-surrounding grace. ~Denise Levertov “The Avowal”
Where is my God? what hidden place Conceals thee still? What covert dare eclipse thy face? Is it thy will? When thou dost turn, and wilt be neare; What edge so keen, What point so piercing can appeare To come between? For as thy absence doth excell, All distance known: So doth thy nearenesse bear the bell, Making two one. ~George Herbert from “The Search”
It’s so easy to look and see what we pass through in this world, but we don’t. If you’re like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what’s there. ~Frederick Buechner from The Remarkable Ordinary
Who goes there?
Deep in the darkness of time passing, when we are uncertain who or what we see, Christ is there, sometimes hidden from our awareness.
He is our friend, He is our ransom, our rescue, our refuge. Even when we can’t see him clearly.
We float, without effort on our part, in His grace. When it is His time, we will know, when His Light is no longer hidden.
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.
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Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days. Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals. Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices. Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you. Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart. Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope, where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all the things you did and could have done. Remember treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes pointing again and again down, down into the black depths. ~ Dan Albergotti “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale” from The Boatloads
“In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry. You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me. I said, ‘I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple.’ The engulfing waters threatened me,[b] the deep surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head. To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever. But you, Lord my God, brought my life up from the pit.
“When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple.
“Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them.
But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord.“
“It is a childish work—the whale has the head of a dog and Jonah looks suspiciously fresh.” —www.artbible.info
In candied red, the white-bearded prophet emerges hands still clasped in prayer, clean, really clean, maybe too clean, first-day- of-school clean, baptism clean. It is a childish painting, perhaps, the punished coming up for air after a three-day, divine timeout, his begging and pleading inside this flesh box, sincere or not, but he’s out, old and fresh in a world around him, Brueghel is sure to make clear, swirling blue-black and solid brown, the earth’s bruising, perhaps a wish of healing yellow in the distance, a light faded behind the eye’s focus. The dogfish eyes big and rolling back mouth open
like the cave like the tomb like the brown creek carp we refuse to touch hate to catch squishy and formless but counted nonetheless. But he will dirty himself again after Nineveh under the vine cussing at God telling God His own business, and he will forget the welcoming red the fresh fruit color of that cloak—the thin (or thinning) clearing in the background beyond sea and storm, even the mouth as exit as release. He will soon forget to consider how suspicious it is for a man like him sitting in death’s darkness for three days to come out so clean so bright so forgiven. ~Jacob Stratman “a poem for my sons when they yell at God” from Christian Century
As I grumble about what I think is wrong with the world, I fail to understand that God has heard much grumbling from His children before. And much of what is wrong with the world is also wrong with me.
It must get tiresome, listening to it.
Perhaps that is why Jonah, who wanted to die rather than deal with the sinful city he had been sent to redeem, was given a little respite for three days to think things over until he understood what his role was.
By counting all those ribs inside the whale, he was thinking about all the things he had done wrong and all the things he should have done, but didn’t.
Whenever I stand in a structure with powerful beams towering over and surrounding me, I too feel swallowed whole. I am no more than a tiny speck within a vast organism.
Nevertheless, small as I am, I still matter to God. I am being prepared to be spit out, to do what I’m supposed to do, and not be concerned nearly as much with my disgruntlement with the rest of the world as with my disgruntlement with myself.
Swallowed whole by hope. Spit out forgiven.
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There we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end. ~St. Augustine: ‘The City of God,’ Bk. XXII, Chap. 30.
The cows know. Standing still in the pasture, chewing cud and steadily swishing flies. With those enormous eyes, they look for all the world as if they know.
The wind knows. It whispers to the grass. The grass tells the trees who pass it on to the birds. The crickets discover it all on their own.
But you and I, we don’t. Though on a day like today when the sun is bright and the cattails let loose a flurry of tiny parachutes, we sense there’s something the world knows.
A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him. No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo but he’s not marked. Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing. He hears the hum of a boy’s dream deep inside him.
We’re not going to be able to live in this world if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing with one another.
The road will only be wide. The rain will never stop falling. ~Naomi Shihab Nye “Shoulder” from Red Suitcase
And just what is it that we should know? What are we missing that the cows, the wind, the trees, the grass, the birds, the crickets, the cattails, and certainly dogs know that we struggle to understand?
Simply this: be content, live aware of each moment as it comes, be grateful for it and say so, then have hope for the next moment, no matter how hard it may be.
Cherish whatever and whoever depends on us, love them with all we’ve got. Provide the shoulder that someone else needs. Give ourselves away without expecting something in return. Write it down so it is not lost.
We can see it deep in our dogs’ eyes. They know.
photo by Nate Gibson
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First of all, we’ve been using the wrong word all these years. It means without rhythm. The only arrhythmia is asystole, I tell my students. That’s the flat line accompanied by the clang of alarms in all the television dramas. There’s not much you can do about it; the patient is dead and usually stays dead. The correct word to describe all the ways a heart can dance and die is dysrhythmia, which means a disordered rhythm. There’s the soldiered march of ventricular tachycardia or the pirouette twirl of Torsades. Ventricular fibrillation simply quivers on the monitor. When these rhythms occur, the patient is pulseless and sometimes you give magnesium, usually shock, and always pump their chest to the beat of whatever song lives in your head. Once I was speaking with a man who stopped in the middle of a word, and I watched the rhythm on the monitor change. When I didn’t feel a pulse, I started CPR, and then we placed the paddles on his chest and shouted, Clear, just like in the movies. And it worked. He opened his eyes and looked at me and said, I don’t feel good. And I said, It’s okay, I’m going to get you better and smoothed the fair from his forehead, but then the alarms blared and the V tach returned, and we did it all over again—the drugs and compressions and shocks, and his eyes opened one more time and he mouthed I’m scared around the tube I’d placed in his throat, and I said, I’m here with you. But that was the last time he said anything. We didn’t stop for thirty minutes or more. He’d waved to his family when the medics loaded him into the ambulance with just a little chest pain, so they were shocked when I entered the small consult room to tell them he had died. His teenage son collapsed and landed on his knees and punched the ground and said, But we were fighting, and I think the last thing I said was I hate you.
If you break break going out not in. How you live your life I don’t care but I’ll sell my arms for you, hold your secrets for ever.
If I speak of death which you fear now, greatly, it is without answers, except that each one we know is in our blood. Don’t recall graves. Memory is permanent. ~Michael Ondaatje from “To a Sad Daughter”
I was still a kid interning at State he reminisces late in the meal— It was a young red-headed woman looked like my sister when the lines went flat I fell apart shook like a car with a broken axle Went to the head surgeon a fatherly man Boy, he said, you got to fill a graveyard before you know this business and you just did row one, plot one. ~Alicia Suskin Ostriker, “The Surgeon” from The Book of Seventy
Like many other medical professionals who have worked in the trenches of frontline healthcare, I too am fascinated by the emergency room streaming drama “The Pitt.”
At first, I couldn’t watch without feeling I too should be working at the bedside alongside the ER team, trying my best to do the task assigned to me, responding to each new instruction, grateful when things go as hoped, crushed when nothing helps and the patient is lost.
The Pitt is the newest addition to the canon of medical dramas and feels like the real thing. All the technology is there, the medical terminology and procedures are real, in addition to the fraught interaction of professionals under stress. Most of all, it feels real because it shows patients and their families trying to cope with the worst day of their lives.
And medical miracles do happen, on TV and in real life.
Recently, a church friend was rescued in a drowning event, was unconscious on a ventilator for nearly a week, with much uncertainty about how much damage his brain had endured while under water. Several weeks later, he is now home, dealing with some memory gaps and muscle weakness, but improving strength daily.
Last week, I had the privilege of meeting a middle-aged pastor who was saved a few weeks ago when his heart stopped in his sleep. His wife started CPR, paramedics shocked his heart in the field more than once, he was stabilized in the ER, unconscious on a ventilator, cooled down to a lower body temperature to preserve his brain function.
His care team, along with family and friends, watched and waited and prayed, uncertain what would be the rest of his story.
When he was warmed up 24 hours later, he woke up, able to breathe on his own. Other than no memory for those brief hours of unconsciousness, he is still himself – living with a new awareness of his vulnerability and an immense gratitude, now with an implanted defibrillator in his chest.
The right words after being brought back from the dead? The right words when we never know if they will be the last words we utter or the last we will ever hear?
I know what they would be for me. I carry them in my heart…
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To rest before the sheaves are bound, toss the scythes aside, bare the feet and sink into the nearest haystack, release the undone task and consent to sleep while the brightest hour burns an arc across its stretch of sky: this is the body’s prayer, mid-day angelus whispered in mingled breath while the limbs stretch in thanksgiving and the body turns toward the beloved.
This is the prayer of trust: what’s left undone will wait. The unattended child, the uncut acre, cracked wheel, broken fence that are occupations of the waking mind soften into shadow in the semi-darkness of dream. All shall be well. Little depends on us. The turning world is held and borne in love. We give good measure in our toil and, meet and right, obey the body when it calls us to rest. ~Marilyn Chandler McEntyre “Noon Rest (after Millet: 1890)” from “The Color of Light: Poems on Van Gogh’s Late Paintings”
When you lie down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet. Proverbs 3:24
Thanks to retirement, I have learned to love mid-day naps.
After forty-plus years of 10 hour work days, then awakened with calls at night, I managed to semi-thrive on minimal sleep.
Not any more.
In my new reality, I have discovered that it is possible to leave things undone, something that was never possible during doctoring and patient care. Now it is okay to set a task aside and think about it later. All this hasn’t come naturally to me, but I’m learning.
So it is time to kick off my shoes, pull a quilt up to my chin and close my eyes, just for a little while.
All will be well. The world keeps turning, even when I’m not the one pedaling to keep it going.
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I will seek a letter at the mailbox’s red flag, how many more times? Walk this puddled gravel drive with the dog and cat, how many more times?
Dislike the sight, row of brown molehills risen like my own petty complaints? Be here to hear the just-before-spring birds tune up, how many more times?
My life, ordinary as unmown grass, tattered and dormant in fencerows…. Sons asleep upstairs under quilts pieced of castoff jeans, how many more times?
Witness sunrise over the barn, frost on the grass, deer by the pines? Think of “Jesus asking that man, Do you want to be made well? How many more times?
Think of Him asking me. Of walking back to the mailbox in late afternoon, of pulling it open, reaching in again, how many more times? ~Daye Phillippo “Ordinary Ghazal” from Thunderhead
…it’s easy to forget that the ordinary is just the extraordinary that’s happened over and over again. Sometimes the beauty of your life is apparent. Sometimes you have to go looking for it. And just because you have to look for it doesn’t mean it’s not there. God, grant me the grace of a normal day. ~Billy Coffey
I tend to get complacent in my daily routines, confident in the knowledge that tomorrow will be very much like yesterday.
I look out on plenty of unmown grass.
The reality is there is nothing ordinary about the events of this day or any other – it might have been otherwise and some day it will be otherwise.
I am reminded to stop rushing, take a look around and actually revel in the quiet moments of daily work, chats, walks, meals, and sleep, and yes, lawn mowing. As both of us suffered, one after the other, through a spring cold which interrupted our plans and schedules, we still knew how remarkable it is to just be here living life together.
We are granted peace even, maybe especially, when not feeling well.
Christ came to earth to remind us to dwell richly in the experience of these moments, to live, wanting to be well, despite our limitations.
God knows, such is a foretaste of the heaven which is to come.
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There is weather on the day you are born and weather on the day you die. There is the year of drought, and the year of floods, when everything rises and swells, the year when winter will not stop falling, and the year when summer lightning burns the prairie, makes it disappear. There are the weathervanes, dizzy on top of farmhouses, hurricanes curled like cats on a map of sky: there are cows under the trees outlined in flies. There is the weather that blows a stranger into town and the weather that changes suddenly: an argument, a sickness, a baby born too soon. Crops fail and a field becomes a study in hunger; storm clouds billow over the sea; tornadoes appear like the drunk trunks of elephants. People talking about weather are people who don’t know what to say and yet the weather is what happens to all of us: the blizzard that makes our neighborhoods strange, the flood that carries away our plans. We are getting ready for the weather, or cleaning up after the weather, or enduring the weather. We are drenched in rain or sweat: we are looking for an umbrella, a second mitten; we are gathering wood to build a fire. ~Faith Shearin “Weather” from Orpheus, Turning.
On the planet the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades… Lick a finger, feel the now. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I’m still discovering, right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God. ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from The Cost of Discipleship
Never before in the history of humanity have we had the ability to pull the weather forecast out of our pocket and know not only what to anticipate in the next 24 hours or 10 days, but even what is happening right now.
Prior to phone apps, we scanned the skies, checked the barometer, looked at where the weather vane points, monitored the thermometer, and put a licked finger up to test the wind direction.
As obsolete as those measures seem now, I confess they still make sense to me.
It’s a little silly if my phone says it is raining at “my location” and I can’t find a single cloud.
I want to know what is happening around me from my own observation, trust my own eyes, feel my own sweat in the heat, my chilly goose bumps in the cold, my wet head in the rain, my hair messy in the wind.
I want to know we’re all in this together, right now.
I want to live completely in this world, living now, finger held to the wind.
Then, having the information I need, I throw myself completely into the arms of God.
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But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them,
“Do you take offense at this?Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.”
(For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”
After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.
So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?”
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”
Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the twelve? And yet one of you is a devil.” He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was going to betray him. John 6: 61-71
When God at first made man, Having a glass of blessings standing by, “Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can. Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie, Contract into a span.”
So strength first made a way; Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure. When almost all was out, God made a stay, Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure, Rest in the bottom lay.
“For if I should,” said he, “Bestow this jewel also on my creature, He would adore my gifts instead of me, And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature; So both should losers be.
“Yet let him keep the rest, But keep them with repining restlessness; Let him be rich and weary, that at least, If goodness lead him not, yet weariness May toss him to my breast.” ~George Herbert “The Pulley”
Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee. St. Augustine of Hippo in Confessions Book 1, Chapter 1
It is this great absence that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just gone, the vestibule for the arrival of one who has not yet come.
What resources have I other than the emptiness without him of my whole being, a vacuum he may not abhor? ~R.S. Thomas from “The Absence”
Why no! I never thought other than That God is that great absence In our lives, the empty silence Within, the place where we go Seeking, not in hope to Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices In our knowledge, the darkness Between stars. His are the echoes We follow, the footprints he has just Left. We put our hands in His side hoping to find It warm. We look at people And places as though he had looked At them, too; but miss the reflection. ~R.S. Thomas “Via Negativa”
… to be consumed by God’s holy fire can be the best thing to ever happen to us. As one of my favorite authors Marilynne Robinson writes in her novel Gilead, “The idea of grace had been so much on my mind, grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.”
To walk with Jesus is to leave some things behind, but I now know that the life he’s called me in to is one of beauty and grace, provision and purpose, relief and restoration — a life with all of the essentials. ~Grace Leuenberger from “Spiritual Formation Dropout” in Mockingbird
We are called to life in Him, containing all the essentials, even when we aren’t sure, don’t know and don’t care.
He knows this about us; He sees some turn back and walk away.
He knows they seek an easier life. He knows how hard it is to follow Him.
He knows our restlessness; He knows our impatience.
His footprints remain for us to find again. The pulley that lets us go will draw us back to Him.
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.
Text from Christina Rossetti None other Lamb, none other Name, None other hope in Heav’n or earth or sea, None other hiding place from guilt and shame, None beside Thee!
My faith burns low, my hope burns low; Only my heart’s desire cries out in me By the deep thunder of its want and woe, Cries out to Thee.
Lord, Thou art Life, though I be dead; Love’s fire Thou art, however cold I be: Nor Heav’n have I, nor place to lay my head, Nor home, but Thee.
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Every morning I sit across from you at the same small table, the sun all over the breakfast things— curve of a blue-and-white pitcher, a dish of berries— me in a sweatshirt or robe, you invisible.
Most days, we are suspended over a deep pool of silence. I stare straight through you or look out the window at the garden, the powerful sky, a cloud passing behind a tree.
There is no need to pass the toast, the pot of jam, or pour you a cup of tea, and I can hide behind the paper, rotate in its drum of calamitous news.
But some days I may notice a little door swinging open in the morning air, and maybe the tea leaves of some dream will be stuck to the china slope of the hour— then I will lean forward, elbows on the table, with something to tell you, and you look up, as always, your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen. ~Billy Collins “A Portrait of the Reader With a Bowl of Cereal”from Picnic, Lightning
The smell of that buttered toast simply spoke to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cozy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries. ~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Some of what we do, we do to make things happen, the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc, the car to start.
The rest of what we do, we do trying to keep something from doing something the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting, the truth from getting out.
With yes and no like the poles of a battery powering our passage through the days, we move, as we call it, forward, wanting to be wanted, wanting not to lose the rain forest, wanting the water to boil, wanting not to have cancer, wanting to be home by dark, wanting not to run out of gas,
as each of us wants the other watching at the end, as both want not to leave the other alone, as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone, we gaze across breakfast and pretend. ~Miller Williams “Love Poem with Toast” from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems
“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?” ― J.R.R. Tolkienfrom Lord of the Rings
In our despairing moments, we hold on to memories most precious to us, recalling what makes each moment, indeed life itself, special and worthwhile.
It can be something so seemingly simple becoming cherished and retrievable– the aroma of cinnamon in a warm kitchen, the splash of colors in a carefully tended garden spot, the cooing of mourning doves as light begins to dawn, the velvety soft of a newborn foal’s fur, the embrace of welcoming arms.
This morning, dear reader, I lean forward, elbows on the table, with something to tell you, and you look up, as always, in the middle of whatever you are doing, ready to listen.
That is no small thing. Thank you.
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