I heard the voice of Jesus say, “I am this dark world’s Light; Look unto Me, thy morn shall rise, And all thy day be bright.” I looked to Jesus, and I found In Him my Star, my Sun; And in that light of life I’ll walk, Till trav’ling days are done. ~Horatius Bonar
I am always wistful at the end of the day as I watch the sun drop lower in the sky. Sometimes its descent paints an unforgettable palette and sometimes it drops out of sight with bare notice it is disappearing.
I consider, very briefly, whether I will see another sunrise and so I must reconcile myself to the darkness.
Yet the Lord sends the stars from afar to light the night, along with a waxing and waning moon. I am not left without hope, seeing His Light reflected in the heavens.
With the rise of the sun in the morning, I am given another chance. I am given new sight, new breath, a new day to try to set things around me right. And so it shall be until my traveling days are done.
Until that day, I follow the Light, missing it when it fades from my view and rejoicing when it returns to light my path.
This year’s Lenten theme for Barnstorming is a daily selection from songs and hymns about Christ’s profound sacrifice on our behalf.
If we remain silent about Him, the stones themselves will shout out and start to sing (Luke 19:40).
In His name, may we sing…
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There are times when lifting our voices in song is the only way to express what our hearts are feeling, especially now as we witness the distress of the Ukrainian people who are relying on their cultural bonds, their spiritual faith and their trust that good people of the world will support their defense of their culture and their government.
May our voices be raised along with them, today and whenever freedom is threatened in the future. How else can we live?
How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom
as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious ~Lisel Mueller “In Passing”
None of us will remain as we are now.
For some, that is a source of deep regret as outer beauty fades, hair is lost or graying, skin wrinkles and strength weakens. Pulled along time’s ever-rolling stream to something new and eternal, we will become something far more precious than what our frail bodies could ever yield.
It is a special mystery with which God surrounds us: a thousand years is like an evening gone to Him. He guards us through our troubles now like irreplaceable treasures, even when we feel hopelessly lost.
We are mere buds now, waiting to open wide to a world far more glorious.
A thousand ages in thy sight Are like an evening gone; Short as the watch that ends the night Before the rising sun.
The busy tribes of flesh and blood, With all their lives and cares, Are carried downwards by thy flood, And lost in following years.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day.
Like flowery fields the nations stand, Pleased with the morning light; The flowers beneath the mower’s hand Lie withering e’er ’tis night.
Our God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Be thou our guard while troubles last, And our eternal home. ~Isaac Watts
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What is beauty for— sunset searing my soul without thought or plan?
Dawn green beauty, bee hum honey, stone in hand so silky the long sea worked centuries to ravish?
And what for pain—thorn in heart for my hurt child, dumb ache for my brother gone
thirty years, slow burn of disgrace when I fail at what I am to do: to see my country bruised and torn?
So, to make good things— a song, a kind act, a friendship— feed on beauty at every turn.
And to make truth, feed on sorrows, gnash their salty structures, bite the bitter rind. ~Kim Stafford, “Advice from a Raindrop” from Singer Come From Afar
Beauty is always right outside my back door, whether it is growing in the soil, as ephemeral as a raindrop, unfurling in a frosty dawn or settling into an early twilight serenade.
The truth of beauty heals me after an imperfect day and an imperfect night’s sleep.
Today I want to be different. I will strive to be a steward for serenity, striving to find beauty in all things and all people, aiding their growth and helping them flourish.
Never perfect but I’m not giving up on the truth. Never perfect but serene with the responsibility of always trying, always wanting to be different than I am and change what I can in this little part of the world.
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When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “No answer.”
It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze.
As though he shook his head not in refusal but waiving the question.Like, “Peace, child; you don’t understand.”
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round?
Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that. ~C.S. Lewis from A Grief Observed
I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. ~C.S. Lewis from Till We Have Faces
And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life? ~Frederick Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat
God will only give you what you would have asked for if you knew everything he knows. ~Tim Keller
And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?” ~Mary Oliver from Long Life
An hour later, the fog has lifted
This morning, it is impossible to stay a silent observer of the world. I have to say something; I seek out answers to the unanswerable.
Overnight, our farm was covered with a freezing fog resembling a massive sponge soaking up all the light. A chill has returned: both in the air and in ongoing events in the headlines.
There can be no complacency in witnessing this life in progress. It blusters, rips, drenches, swallows up, buries. Nothing remains as it was.
Yet here I am, alive. Awed, a witness to another day. Called to ask questions and make a comment. Dying to hear a response.
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January’s drop-down menu leaves everything to the imagination: splotch the ice, splice the light, remake the spirit…
Just get on with it, doing what you have to do with the gray palette that lies to hand. The sun’s coming soon.
A future, then, of warmth and runoff, and old faces surprised to see us. A cache of love, I’d call it, opened up, vernal, refreshed. ~Sidney Burris “Runoff”
When I reach the end of January in all its grayest pallor, it is hard to imagine another six weeks of winter ahead. It can feel like nature offers only a few options, take your pick: a soupy foggy morning, a drizzly mid-day, a crisp northeast wind, an unexpected snow flurry, a soggy evening.
Every once in awhile the January drop-down menu will add a special surprise: icy spikes on grass blades, frozen droplets on birch branches, hair ice on wood, crystallized weeds like jewelry in the sun, a pink flannel blanket sunrise, an ocean-of-orange sunset.
Then I realize January’s gray palette is merely preparation for what has been hidden from me the whole time. There is Love cached away, and as it is revealed, it will not let me go.
photo of hair ice in King County, Washington taken by Laura Reifel
O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee; I give thee back the life I owe, That in thy ocean depths its flow May richer, fuller be.
O Joy that seeks me through pain, I cannot close my heart to thee; I trace the rainbow through the rain, And feel the promise is not vain, That morn shall tearless be. ~George Matheson
(“O Love” was inspired by the words of Scottish minister, George Matheson in 1882. Blinded at the age of nineteen, his fiancé called off their engagement and his sister cared for him as he endured new challenges. Years later, on the eve of his sister’s wedding, he faced the painful reminder of his own heartache and loss as he penned the words to this hymn.) from ElaineHagenborg.com
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slicing this frozen sky know where they are going— and want to get there.
Their call, both strange and familiar, calls to the strange and familiar
heart, and the landscape becomes the landscape of being, which becomes
the bright silos and snowy fields over which the nuanced and muscular geese
are calling—while time and the heart take measure. ~Jane Mead, “The Geese” from To the Wren
Vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats awakens me and I look up at a minute-long string of black geese’ following low past the moon the white course of the snow-covered river and by the way thank You for keeping Your face hidden, I can hardly bear the beauty of this world ~Franz Wright from “Cloudless Snowfall”
A psalm of geese labours overland
cajoling each other near half…
The din grew immense. No need to look up.
All you had to do was sit in the sound
and put it down as best you could…
It’s not a lonesome sound but a panic,
a calling out to the others to see if they’re there;
it’s not the lung-full thrust of the prong of arrival in late October; not the slow togetherness
of the shape they take on the empty land on the days before Christmas:
this is different, this is a broken family, the young go the wrong way,
then at daybreak, rise up and follow their elders again filled with dread, at the returning sound of the journey ahead. ~Dermot Healy from A Fool’s Errand
We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times.
Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house. ~Annie Dillard from The Meaning of Life
As I am at once strange and familiar, I call out to God to see if He’s there; He knows me as He came to earth both strange and familiar.
His face is no longer hidden yet I hide my face from Him.
When I call out to Him I try to conceal the tremble of my hands, my eyes welling up, breathing out the deep sigh of doubt — He witnesses my struggle, offering me the gift of being noticed and heard.
There is beauty in this world and in His face, and through it all, my eyes are on you.
It is well.
A book of beauty in words and photographs – available to order here:
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? ~Robert Hayden “Those Winter Sundays”
As a child growing up, I was oblivious to the sacrifices my parents made to keep the house warm, place food on the table, teaching us the importance of being steadfast, to crack the door of opportunity open, so we could walk through to a better life and we did.
It was no small offering to keep dry seasoned fire and stove wood always at the doorstep, to milk the cows twice a day, to grow and preserve fruits and vegetables months in advance, to raise and care for livestock, to read books together every night, to sit with us over homework and drive us to 4H, Cub Scouts and Camp Fire, to music lessons and sports, to sit together for meals, and never miss a Sunday to worship God.
This was their love, so often invisible, too often imperfect, yet its encompassing warmth splintered and broke the grip of cold that can overwhelm and freeze a family’s heart and soul.
What did I know? What did I know? Too little then, so much more now yet still – never enough.
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As once a Child was planted in a womb (and later, erected on a hill, a wooden cross) one year we dug a hole to plant a tree. Our choice, a Cornus Kousa with its fine, pink, four-petaled bracts, each curving lip touched with a red as deep as human blood. It rooted well, and every year it grows more glorious, bursting free in Spring—bud into full flower, flame-colored, flushed as wine. Even the slim sapling’s roughened bark speaks of that tree, nail-pierced and dark. Now, each new year, fresh blossoms shine radiant, and each cross-blessed, as if all love and loveliness has been compressed into a flower’s face, fresh as the Son’s new-born presence, a life only just begun.
The dogwood leaves turn iron red in Fall, their centers fully ripening—into small seeded balls, each one a fruit vivid as Mary’s love, and edible. The sciontree, once sprung from Jesse’s root, speaks pain and life and love compressed and taken in, eye, mouth, heart. Incredible that now all Eucharists in our year suggest the living Jesus is our Christmas guest. ~Luci Shaw “Dogwood Tree” from Eye of the Beholder
God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer from God Is in the Manger
I ponder the paradox of Christ, the Son of God, coming to the world through the womb of a woman, born homeless in order to bring us home with Him.
The uncontainable contained the infinite made finite the Deliverer delivered the Eternal dwelling here and now already but not yet.
As only one child of many of the Very God of Very God, (He is and was and always will be) I am cross-blessed to realize my life feels fresh-born – only just begun – yet we all have been known to the Creator from the start of time.
(If you are interested in hearing an old old story about the dogwood tree in song, and you don’t mind old-timey honky-tonk music, there is this….)
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The end of all things is at hand. We all Stand in the balance trembling as we stand; Or if not trembling, tottering to a fall. The end of all things is at hand.
O hearts of men, covet the unending land! O hearts of men, covet the musical, Sweet, never-ending waters of that strand!
While Earth shows poor, a slippery rolling ball, And Hell looms vast, a gulf unplumbed, unspanned, And Heaven flings wide its gates to great and small, The end of all things is at hand. ~Christina Rossetti “Sunday Before Advent”
Dawn was defeating now the last hours sung by night, which fled before it. And far away I recognized the tremblings of the sea. Alone, we walked along the open plain, as though, returning to a path we’d lost, our steps, until we came to that, were vain. Then, at a place in shadow where the dew still fought against the sun and, cooled by breeze, had scarcely yet been sent out into vapor, my master placed the palms of both his hands, spread wide, lightly and gently on the tender grass. And I, aware of what his purpose was, offered my tear-stained cheeks to meet his touch. At which, he made once more entirely clean the color that the dark of Hell had hidden. ~Dante from The Divine Comedy, II Purgatorio,Canto 1 lines 115−29
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 2 Corinthians 4: 6
God brings forth Light through His Word, not once but at least three times:
In the beginning, He creates the sun and the moon to penetrate and illuminate the creation of our hearts and our souls.
In the stable He comes to light the world from below as well as from above so our darkened hearts and souls could be saved from self-destruction.
In the tomb, He rolls back the stone, allowing the sun to penetrate the ultimate night – raising His Son from the dead, in an ultimate defeat of darkness.
He flings open the gates of heaven to the likes of me and in response, I fling my heart through, following the Light.
Showered with the cleansing dew of His light, I am lit by the glory of God reflected in the many faces of Jesus: as vulnerable newborn, child teacher, working carpenter, healer, itinerant preacher, unjustly condemned, dying and dead, raised and ascended Son of God.
Let the dark days come as they certainly will. They cannot overwhelm my heart now, as I am lit from within, cleansed inside and out, no matter how deep the darkness that oppresses on the outside.
I know His promise. I know His face. He knows I know.
This year’s Barnstorming Advent theme “… the Beginning shall remind us of the End” is taken from the final lines in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”
1. Hail the blest morn! when the great Mediator Down from the mansions of glory descends; Shepherds, go worship the babe in the manger, Lo! for his guard the bright angels attend.
Chorus: Brightest and best of the sons of the morning.
Dawn on our darkness, and lend us thine aid; Star in the east, the horizon adorning, Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.
2. Cold on his cradle the dew-drops are shining; Low lies his head with the beasts of the stall: Angels adore him, in slumbers reclining; Wise men and shepherds before him do fall. Chorus
3. Say, shall we yield him, in costly devotion, Odors of Edom, and offerings divine, Gems from the mountains, and pearls from the ocean, Myrrh from the forest, and gold from the mine? Chorus
4. Vainly we offer each ample oblation, Vainly with gifts would his favor secure; Richer by far is the heart’s adoration, Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor. Chorus
How do you capture the wind on the water? How do you count all the stars in the sky? How do you measure the love of a mother Or how can you write down a baby’s first cry?
Chorus: Candlelight, angel light, firelight and star-glow Shine on his cradle till breaking of dawn Silent night, holy night, all is calm and all is bright 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
Chorus
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
Chorus ~John Rutter “Candlelight Carol”
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