And God held in his hand A small globe. Look, he said. The son looked. Far off, As through water, he saw A scorched land of fierce Colour. The light burned There; crusted buildings Cast their shadows; a bright Serpent, a river Uncoiled itself, radiant With slime. On a bare Hill a bare tree saddened The sky. Many people Held out their thin arms To it, as though waiting For a vanished April To return to its crossed Boughs. The son watched Them. Let me go there, he said. ~R.S. Thomas “The Coming”
“Let me go there”
And He did. Knowing what awaited Him.
As a result, we are forever changed.
Fifty weeks of dirt rows Plain and unnoticed. Could be corn, could be beans Could be anything; Drive-by fly-over dull.
Yet April ignites an explosion: Dazzling retinal hues Singed and scorched, crying Grateful tears for such as this Grounded rainbow on Earth
Transient, incandescent Brilliance hoped for. Remembered in dreams, Promises realized, Housed in crystal before shattering.
Praise be that this thin mark, this sound Can form the word that takes on flesh To enter where no flesh can go To fill each other’s emptiness. To words and how they live between us To us and how we live between the worth
And in between the sound of words I hear your silent, sounding soul Where one abides in solitude Who keeps us one when speech shall go ~Carrie Newcomer and Parker Palmer “Two Toasts”
In the quiet of a room they sigh. In candle’s glow they live under An icon’s shadow and an unheard cry And the Truth-bearing words that thunder– Those Sacred Silences who tenderly await the soul.
They speak of His coming, not delayed, but near for etched in unknown depths, they say, the same Image of the One whose patient tear slays the heart and gives all away– In those Sacred Silences who tenderly await the soul.
Let saving truth’s grammar unbound Those lips thirsting for syllables of love To drink deep the wisdom in whose font resound Those words below of the Word above: As enveloped in great silences The soul awaits His coming. ~Anthony Lilles
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1: 1-5
Somewhere between the Word in the beginning and the Word that becomes flesh and the Word that now exists in our hearts and hands, there is the sacred silence of God.
Advent is a time of quiet stillness, awaiting the Light brought by the Word; a flint is struck to our wick, the Darkness abolished in the eternal glow of His illuminating Word.
Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand; Ponder nothing earthly minded, For with blessing is His hand, Christ our God to earth descendeth, Our full homage to demand. King of kings, Yet born of Mary, As of old earth He stood, Lord of lords, In human vesture, In the body and the blood; He will give to all the faithful. His own self for heavenly food. Rank on rank the host of heaven spreads its vanguard on the way, As Light of light descendeth from the realms of endless day, That the powers of hell may vanish as the darkness clears away. At His feet the six-winged seraph, Cherubim, With sleepless eye, Veil their faces to His presence as with ceaseless voice they cry: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Lord Most High!
One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun… ~C.S. Lewis
photos by Nate Gibson
We so easily forget from Whom and Where we come, the purpose for which we are created and sent forth, how bright and everlasting our origins. If we fail to live and serve as intended, it is from our own frailty, not that of the Creator.
When light shines so that others might see, we are simply the beam and not the source. The path leads back to the Triune God and we are but a mere pathway.
Definite beliefs are what make the radical mystery — those moments when we suddenly know there is a God about whom we “know” absolutely nothing –– accessible to us and our ordinary, unmysterious lives.
And more crucially: definite beliefs enable us to withstand the storms of suffering that come into every life, and that tend to destroy any spiritual disposition that does not have deep roots. ~Christian Wiman from My Bright Abyss
photo of Wiser Lake Chapel sanctuary by Barb Hoelle
Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. ~Annie Dillard from Teaching a Stone to Talk
Unexpected God, your advent alarms us. Wake us from drowsy worship, from the sleep that neglects love, and the sedative of misdirected frenzy. Awaken us now to your coming, and bend our angers into your peace. Amen. ~Revised Common Lectionary First Sunday of Advent
We are only a few weeks away from the beginning of Advent, a time when I am very guilty of blithely invoking the gentle story of Christmas Eve’s silent night, the sleeping infant away in a manger, the devoted parents hovering, the humble shepherds peering in the stable door.
The reality, I’m confident, was far different.
There was nothing gentle about a teenage mother giving birth in a stable, laying her baby in a feed trough–I’m sure there were times when Mary could have used a life preserver. There was nothing gentle about the heavenly host appearing to the shepherds, shouting and singing the glories and leaving them “sore afraid.” The shepherds needed crash helmets. There was nothing gentle about Herod’s response to the news that a Messiah had been born–he swept overboard a legion of male children whose parents undoubtedly begged for mercy, clinging to their children about to be murdered. There was nothing gentle about a family’s flight to Egypt to flee that fate for their only Son. There was nothing gentle about the life Jesus eventually led during his ministry: itinerant and homeless, tempted and fasting in the wilderness for forty days, owning nothing, rejected by his own people, betrayed by his disciples, sentenced to death by acclamation before Pilate, tortured and hung on a cross until he took his last breath.
Yet he understood the power that originally brought him to earth and would return him to heaven, and back again someday. No signal flares needed there.
When I hear skeptics scoff at Christianity as a “crutch for the weak”, they underestimate the courage it takes to walk into church each week as a desperate person who will never ever save oneself. We cling to the life preserver found in the Word, lashed to our seats and hanging on. It is only because of grace that we survive the tempests of temptation, guilt and self-doubt to let go of our own anger in order to confront the reality of the radical mystery of God.
It is not for the faint of heart, this finding a “definite belief” within our ordinary unmysterious lives and giving it deep roots to thrive. It is reasonable and necessary to be “sore afraid” and “bend our anger” into His peace.
We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always easy to penetrate. The real labor is to remember to attend. In fact to come awake. Still more to remain awake. ~C.S. Lewis from “Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer”
God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on his side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else – something it never entered your head to conceive – comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left?
For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side.
There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. ~C.S. Lewis fromMere Christianity
The older I get, the more I recognize the need to be alert and awake to the presence of God in the crowded world around me. It doesn’t come naturally. We humans have an attention deficit, choosing to focus inwardly on self and ignoring the rest. If it isn’t for me, or like me, or about me, it somehow is not worthy of my consideration.
We wear blinders, asleep, unaware we must choose an incognito God; we think His invisible immensity must be obvious, like a lightning flash.
And so – He has come and walked among us in plain sight. No longer incognito. The time to choose has come.
photo of lightning over Anacortes, Washington from Komonews.com
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”
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment
Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. ~T.S. Eliot from “East Coker”
Today, if we feel we are without hope, if faith feels frail, if love seems distant, we must wait, stilled, for the moment we are lit afire~ when the Living God is seen, heard, named, loved, known, forever burning in our hearts in this moment, for a lifetime and for eternity. Here and now ceases to matter.
I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
~Acts 2:19-21 The Holy Spirit Comes At Pentecost
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
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”
The cows munched or stirred or were still. I was at home and lonely, both in good measure. Until the sudden angel affrighted me––light effacing my feeble beam, a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying: but the cows as before were calm, and nothing was burning, nothing but I, as that hand of fire touched my lips and scorched by tongue and pulled by voice into the ring of the dance. ~Denise Levertov from “Caedmon” inBreathing the Water
Today, when we feel we are without hope,
as mute and dumb as cattle chewing our cud,
when the bent world reels in blood and violence,
as we remain in hiding:
when faith feels frail,
when love seems distant:
We wait too stilled
for the moment we are lit afire ~
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, freshest
in this moment
and for eternity.
…Do not be afraid, though briers and thorns are all around you… Ezekiel 2:6
Christ … is a thorn in the brain. Christ is God crying I am here, and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends, and degrades you, here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God. To walk through the fog of God toward the clarity of Christ is difficult because of how unlovely, how ungodly that clarity often turns out to be. ~Christian Wiman from Image Journal essay “Varieties of Quiet”
Gardener/author Alphonse Karr in the mid-19th century wrote that even though most people grumble about roses having thorns, he was grateful that thorns have roses.
After all, there was a time when thorns were not part of our world, when we knew nothing of suffering and death. In desiring more than we were already generously given, we have received more than we bargained for.
We reel under the thorns we have chosen to wander through — indeed every day there is more bloodletting, barricading us from all that is sweet and good and precious. Thorns tear us up, bloody us, make us cry out in pain and grief, deepen our fear that we may never overcome them.
Yet even the most brutal crown of thorns did not stop the loving sacrifice, can never thwart the sweetness of redemption, will not spoil the goodness, nor destroy the promise of salvation to come.
The Lord, our Rose, has mercy upon us.
“the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds;
God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God;
begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father,
by whom all things were made”
~from the Nicene Creed
1. Maria walks amid the thorn, Kyrie eleison. Maria walks amid the thorn, Which seven years no leaf has born. Jesus and Maria.
2. What ‘neath her heart doth Mary bear? Kyrie eleison. A little child doth Mary bear, Beneath her heart He nestles there. Jesus and Maria.
3. And as the two are passing near, Kyrie eleison, Lo! roses on the thorns appear, Lo! roses on the thorns appear. Jesus and Maria.
This Flower, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air, Dispels with glorious splendor the darkness everywhere; True Man, yet very God, from sin and death He saves us, And lightens every load.
~from “Lo! How a Rose”
Down he came from up, and in from out, and here from there. A long leap, an incandescent fall from magnificent to naked, frail, small, through space, between stars, into our chill night air, shrunk, in infant grace, to our damp, cramped earthy place among all the shivering sheep.
And now, after all, there he lies, fast asleep. ~Luci Shaw “Descent” from Accompanied By Angels
The Lord brings death and makes alive; he brings down to the grave and raises up. ~1 Samuel 2: 6 from the Song of Hannah
Hannah’s prayer describes the Lord in all His paradox of reversals: the strong are broken and those who stumble strengthened, the satisfied end up working for food and the hungry become filled, the barren woman bears children while the mother of many pines away, the poor and needy are lifted up to sit with princes.
He humbles and exalts–we have read the stories of how the Lord uses such reversals to instruct His people.
Yet nothing Hannah says is as radical and unprecedented as being brought down to the grave and then raised up, the Lord causing death and making alive. This makes no sense. Once in the grave, there is no escape. Death cannot be reversed like the weak becoming strong, the hungry filled, the barren fertile, the poor enriched.
Hannah sings that this will indeed happen, just as the other reversals happened. It would take centuries, but her prayer is fulfilled in the child born to Mary, who lives and dies and lives again in the greatest reversal of all.
There can be no greater mystery than a God who chooses to walk the earth as a man among the poor, the needy, the helpless, the sick, the blind, the lame, the wicked, the barren, the hungry, the weak.
There can be no greater reversal than God Himself dying–put away down into the grave– and then rising up, glorious, in the ultimate defeat of darkness and death.
Hannah already knew this as a barren woman made full through the blessing of the Lord, choosing to empty herself by giving her son back to God.
Mary knew this as a virgin overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, choosing to empty herself by bearing, raising and giving her Son back to the Father.
The angels knew this, welcoming the Son of God to a throne in a manger as He is born to bring light to the darkness, and peace to a torn and ruptured world.
We know this too. We are the weak, the hungry, the poor, the dying filled completely through the love and sacrifice of the Triune God, and so give ourselves up to Him.
From down to up. It can be done. And He has done it.
Have you heard the sound of the angel voices ringing out so sweetly, ringing out so clear? Have you seen the star shining out so brightly as a sign from God that Christ the Lord is here?
Have you heard the news that they bring from heaven to the humble shepherds who have waited long? Gloria in excelsis Deo! Gloria in excelsis Deo! Hear the angels sing their joyful song.
He is come in peace in the winter’s stillness, like a gentle snowfall in the gentle night. He is come in joy, like the sun at morning, filling all the world with radiance and with light.
He is come in love as the child of Mary. In a simple stable we have seen his birth. Gloria in excelsis Deo! Gloria in excelsis Deo! Hear the angels singing ‘Peace on earth’.
He will bring new light to a world in darkness, like a bright star shining in the skies above. He will bring new hope to the waiting nations, when he comes to reign in purity and love.
Let the earth rejoice at the Saviour’s coming. Let the heavens answer with a joyful morn: Gloria in excelsis Deo! Gloria in excelsis Deo! Hear the angels singing, ‘christ is born’ Hear the angels singing, ‘christ is born’
~John Rutter “Angels’ Carol”
God empties himself into the earth like a cloud. God takes the substance, contours of a man, and keeps them, dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion. Annie Dillard from “Feast Days” in Tickets for a Prayer Wheel
We soon will enter the season of Advent, an opportunity to reflect on a God who “takes the substance, contours of a man”, as He “empties himself into the earth like a cloud.” Like drought-stricken parched ground, we prepare to respond to the drenching of the Spirit, ready to spring up with growth anew.
He walked among us before His dying, and then rising up, He walked among us again, appearing where least expected, sharing a meal, burning our hearts within us, inviting us to touch and know Him.
His invitation remains open-ended.
I think of that every time the clouds open and empty. He freely falls to earth, soaking us completely, through and through and through.
Barnstorming 