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What Does Love Look Like?

June 18, 2015June 18, 2015 barnstormingblog5 Comments

What does love look like?
It has the hands to help others.
It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy.
It has eyes to see misery and want.
It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men.
That is what love looks like.
~St. Augustine

So many sighs and sorrows and tears today
for the martyring of Your people in South Carolina
for the color of their skin,
for their faith in You.

When will the hatred end?
When will we all be one people,
united in Your arms?

Only when our love looks like Your Love,
Love that sacrifices Himself for the good of others,
rather than sacrificing others for no good at all.

Lord, come quickly.

Waiting in Hope: Brought to our Senses

April 4, 2015 barnstormingblog4 Comments

By these three days all the world is called to attention.
Everything that is and ever was and ever will be,
the macro and the micro,
the galaxies beyond number and the microbes beyond notice –
everything is mysteriously entangled with what happened,
with what happens, in these days.…
Every human life,
conceived from eternity and destined to eternity,
here finds its story truly told.
In this killing that some call senseless
we are brought to our senses.
Here we find out who we most truly are because
here is the One who is what we are called to be.
The derelict cries, “Come, follow me.”
Follow him there?
We recoil.
We close our ears.
We hurry on to Easter.
But we will not know what to do with Easter’s light
if we shun the friendship of the darkness that is wisdom’s way to light.
~Richard Neuhaus from Death on a Friday Afternoon

So many killings in the last two weeks — needless, heartbreaking death at the hands of others — people abruptly wrenched from their routine lives, their families left with empty arms and filling eyes spilling endlessly with tears.

Such senseless tragedies, we say, recoiling and withdrawing as if we can close our ears to more bad news. How to make sense of deaths that arise from the darkness found in every soul?

This is the day in between when nothing makes sense; we are lost, hopeless, grieving.

Yet we are brought to our senses by this one Death, this premeditated killing, this senseless act that darkened the skies, shook the earth and tore down the curtained barriers to the Living Eternal God.
The worst has already happened, no matter how horrific are the events that fill the headlines.

Today we are in between, stumbling in the darkness but aware of hints of light, of buds, of life, of promised fruit to come.

The best has already happened. Happening now even when we are oblivious.

We move through this day, doing what is possible even when it feels senseless. Tomorrow it will all make sense: our hope brings us face to face with our God who only does the impossible.

The Holy Saturday of our life must be the preparation for Easter,
the persistent hope for the final glory of God.
The virtue of our daily life is the hope which does what is possible
and expects God to do the impossible.
To express it somewhat paradoxically, but nevertheless seriously:
the worst has actually already happened;
we exist,
and even death cannot deprive us of this.
Now is the Holy Saturday of our ordinary life,
but there will also be Easter, our true and eternal life.
~Karl Rahner “Holy Saturday” in The Great Church Year

In the Midst of Sorrow: A Terrible Question

April 3, 2015 barnstormingblog2 Comments

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?
~Frederich Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat

I live each day to kill death;
I die each day to beget life,
and in this dying unto death,
I die a thousand times and
am reborn another thousand
through that love.
~Julia Esquivel, Guatemalan poet and theologian

…{His is} the love for the enemy–
love for the one who does not love you
but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain.
The tortured’s love for the torturer.
This is God’s love. It conquers the world.
~Frederich Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat

This is God with a man’s beating heart,
who bleeds from open wounds of a man’s skin,
while nailed to a tree,
considering His torturers below
and forgives them.

This is God with a man’s dry tongue
thirsting for relief
who ensures His love for us
will never run dry.

This is God with a man’s compassion
who grants grace to another who
confesses his guilt and shame.

This is God with a son’s love for His mother
who entrusts her future
to the care of His beloved friend.

This is God with a man’s debt to carry
who pays it all,
finished and done.

This is God with a man’s frailty and fear,
feeling forsaken,
conquering death and hatred
by dying for us.

This is God with a man’s last breath
giving His spirit into the hands of His father
and in so doing, ensures we live forever.

~dedicated to the brutal murders of over one hundred Christian college students in Kenya this week in yet another persecution of our faith~

Prepare for Sorrow: Pounding on the Door of the Soul

March 26, 2015March 26, 2015 barnstormingblog7 Comments

This morning when I awoke, I first read the essay below by Morton Kelsey from the Lenten devotional book Bread and Wine.

Only afterward did I read the news about the possible intentional crashing of a German airliner by an apparently rogue co-pilot, killing all 150 individuals on board while the captain was locked outside the cockpit, pounding on the door trying in vain to open it to prevent the destruction. Imagining the fear and panic of all on board in their final minutes sits heavily on us all; here is yet another reason to contemplate the darkness of the human condition as we move toward the reality of Good Friday next week.

May the souls of the tragic and innocent victims find rest in God; may we who are yet living answer the pounding on the door of the cellar of our darkened souls:

Scratch the surface of a human being and the demons of hate and revenge … and sheer destructiveness break forth.

The cross stands before us to remind us of this depth of ourselves so that we can never forget. These forces continue to break forth in many parts of the world now, and many of us would like to forget how in some places in the United States we treat a person whose skin is black.

Again and again we read the stories of violence in our daily papers, of the mass murders and ethnic wars still occurring in numerous parts of our world. But how often do we say to ourselves: “What seizes people like that, even young people, to make them forget family and friends, and suddenly kill other human beings?” We don’t always ask the question in that manner. Sometimes we are likely to think, almost smugly: “How different those horrible creatures are from the rest of us. How fortunate I am that I could never kill or hurt other people like they did.”

I do not like to stop and, in the silence, look within, but when I do I hear a pounding on the floor of my soul. When I open the trap door into the deep darkness I see the monsters emerge for me to deal with. How painful it is to bear all this, but it is there to bear in all of us. Freud called it the death wish, Jung the demonic darkness. If I do not deal with it, it deals with me. The cross reminds me of all this.

This inhumanity of human to human is tamed most of the time by law and order in most of our communities, but there are not laws strong enough to make men and women simply cease their cruelty and bitterness. This destructiveness within us can seldom be transformed until we squarely face it in ourselves. This confrontation often leads us into the pit. The empty cross is planted there to remind us that suffering is real but not the end, that victory still is possible…
~Morton Kelsey from “The Cross and the Cellar”

Prepare for Joy: Dissolve My Hard Heart

March 6, 2015 barnstormingblog1 Comment

My love is weak,
my heart imperfect,
so I have great need of You.
I need your strengthening and your comfort,
your instruction and your freedom.
Let your love dissolve my hard heart.
Let your love lift me up.
Let your love reveal to me joy beyond imagination.
Let my soul exhaust itself in singing praises of your love.
~Thomas Kempis “A Prayer of Need”

As we gently transition here in the northwest to spring, with backlit sky and buds opening to the new light, there are plenty of places around the country still deep and frozen under feet of snow. The hardness it takes to outlast winter can weaken the the most enduring loving and warm heart.

And too there is a hardness in the hearts of people of faith when we watch our brothers slaughtered while singing praises of their love for God, captured children placed in cages, women sold into slavery. We want to somehow rise above such senseless violence and not resort to it, not become one with extremism yet feeling helpless to stop it.

For this our God died, carrying man’s terrible burden of sin and selfishness to the grave, burying it deep and leaving it there. We still weep and lament, we still suffer and groan, whether near the rolled-away stone, or for the 21 kneeling Christians on a far-off beach several weeks ago. We can respond with joy that we recognize Him when He calls our name. He knows us, each and every one.

We may be exhausted, but lifted up and dissolved by the gentle softness of His love.

Prepare for Joy: Unshaken

February 28, 2015February 28, 2015 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish;
but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.
A sum can be put right:
but only by going back til you find the error
and working it afresh from that point,
never by simply going on.

There are only two kinds of people in the end:
those who say to God,
“Thy will be done,”
and those to whom God says, in the end,
“Thy will be done.”
All that are in Hell, choose it.
Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.
No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.
Those who seek find.
To those who knock
it is opened.

Everything becomes more and more itself.
Here is joy that cannot be shaken.
Our light can swallow up your darkness;
but your darkness cannot now infect our light.
~C.S. Lewis excerpts from A Great Divorce

So much value is placed on choice — our country thrives on it: the choice to abort or let live, the choice to vaccinate or let nature take its course, the choice to recycle or overwhelm landfills, the choice to marry whom you wish or not at all, the choice to believe or decide there is nothing worth believing in.

Each fork in the road forces a choice. Which is the “right” road? How can we ever know?

Each time I’ve chosen a road that ends up darkening to the point of invisibility or covered in brambles, potholes or muddy mire, I must choose again: keep going deeper into the darkness, or turn around and choose again. I backtrack, rethink, make mistakes, get lost, try again. When I finally come to my senses and whisper to God, “Thy will be done,” only then does His light lead the way and swallow up my darkness.

My joy at seeking the light remains unshaken: He is God and always has been, and I am not and never will be.

Bearing the Marks

June 7, 2014 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

…Christ does not banish tragedy but carries it into the heart of God.
…in the forty days that followed (the resurrection), Christ was not magically made whole but bore the marks of his passion, and would not rest until we placed our hands—and our hearts—inside them.
~Gregory Wolfe from Seattle Pacific University’s Image Journal, from “The Tragic Sense of Life”

This week brought local news from Seattle Pacific University of yet another person with mental illness making a conscious choice to end his own life by random killing of others. His personal and private pain becomes magnified exponentially through creating public pain and tragedy; in this age of “selfies”, it is the ultimate in self-absorption to purposely erase innocent lives just so he will be remembered.

I often see broken people in my work — it is the nature of a primary care clinic. The vast majority do not seek ways to break others; instead they seek the glue of compassion, a listening ear and sometimes medication that can be a balm of healing their wounds. A few harbor such anger and resentment that their anguish becomes such uncontrolled bleeding that society can only be a tourniquet to make it stop.

Christ showed the way to walk through such unimaginable pain and tragedy. He carried his bleeding wounds, though his pulse was stilled, straight into the heart of God. The marks he bore were from us, for us and about us, so we would always remember his sacrifice.

If we bleed, when we bleed … he returned to invite us to reach inside the wounds we inflicted and be forever healed.

The Ravaged Field

May 21, 2013 barnstormingblog1 Comment

Photo of Moore Oklahoma following May 20 earthquake taken by Steve Gooch for the Associated Press — Aerial photo of Moore Oklahoma following May 20 earthquake taken by Steve Gooch for the Associated Press

Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?

…These things happen … the soul’s bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses …

The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.
~Jane Kenyon from “Twilight: After Haying”

Celebration is a sign of life in the rubble, the bliss of those arising from an ash heap to walk and breathe again. Heartache is the sight of death in the rubble, the suffering of those trapped and crushed by a roaring force too immense to imagine yet devastatingly real.

Bliss and suffering are bound together like the grasses; we are grasses torn from our roots, ravaged.

Tears flow as they must, wetting the stubble left behind like dew. We weep in sorrow for those lost; we weep in joy for those spared.

What else can a soul do but weep at parting and weep at welcoming?

These things happen, oh yes, these awe-full awful things, they happen.

Our days on earth are like grass; like wildflowers, we bloom and die.
~Psalm 103: 15

Advent Cries: Overcoming Fear

December 15, 2012December 15, 2012 barnstormingblog3 Comments

We forget that God is right there, waiting for us to turn to him, no matter how dire our situation. We forget the reassuring words of his messengers: “Fear not.”
God always seeks to draw close to us — even in the depths of hell.

…it comes down to this: the only way to truly overcome our fear of death is to live life in such a way that its meaning cannot be taken away by death. It means fighting the impulse to live for ourselves, instead of for others. It means choosing generosity over greed. It also means living humbly, rather than seeking influence and power. Finally, it means being ready to die again and again — to ourselves, and to every self-serving opinion or agenda.
~Johann Christoph Arnold

There is a cacophony of debates about where to place the blame for the current epidemic of senseless mass shootings of innocent people; these arguments are flying around kitchen tables, in barber shops, through countless comments on online blogs and news reports. We want to place the blame somewhere: the easy access to the weapons used, the lack of access to mental illness treatment, the overparenting, the lack of parenting, the violence of video games and movies, the lack of foundational spiritual faith, the overabundance of fundamentalist spiritual faith.

None of it meets the real problem head on: evil exists no matter what the weapon used or the mental illness left untreated. As we learned after the airplanes-as-weapons tragedies of 911, massive expense and legislation barely keeps evil at bay, simply moving its practitioners on to some other means. No place on this earthly soil is truly secure and no amount of money nor new laws will create that place, as hard as we might want to believe that can happen.

So we must fall back on what we were told long ago: fear not.
Do not be overwhelmed with evil but overcome evil with good. We have seen it yet again in the case of the heroes in this most recent tragedy: teachers and staff who made themselves the targets, placing themselves in front of those children who depended on them.

The goal of this life is to live for others, to be ready to die, living in a way such that death cannot erase the meaning and significance of a life.
Give up our selfish agendas in order to consider the needs of the greater good.
Cherish life, all lives, especially those of our precious children — including the unborn — the unwanted, inconvenient, wrong-gendered or genetically impaired.
And we must cherish, rather than intentionally hastening, the final months, weeks, days and hours of our completely dependent and disabled terminally ill and elderly. If we do not protect the lives of the weakest among us, we are turning them over (and we will soon follow) to the darkness.

Our only defense against evil is God’s offense; only He will lead us to the light where everything sad will come untrue.
Only then will there be no more fear — not ever — ever again.

Advent Cries: The Shadow of Death

December 14, 2012December 15, 2012 barnstormingblog6 Comments

Rachel weeping for children who are no more, sculptor Sondra Jonson

A voice is heard in Ramah,
    mourning and great weeping,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.
Matthew 2:18 and Jeremiah 31:15

In mourning for the people of Newtown, Connecticut

There is no consolation for these families.
Their arms aching with emptiness tonight,
beds and pillows lying cold and unused,
dolls and stuffed animals awaiting all night hugs
that will never come again.

There can be no consolation;
only mourning and great weeping,
sobbing that wrings dry
every human cell,
leaving dust behind,
dust, only dust
which is beginning
and end.

He came to us
for times such as this,
born of
the dust of woman and
the breath of Spirit,
God who bent down to
lie in barn dust,
walk on roads of dust,
die and be laid to rest as dust
in order to conquer
such evil as this
that could horrify masses
and massacre innocents.

He became dust to be
like us
He began a mere speck in a womb
like us
so often too easily washed away
as unwanted.

His heart beat
like ours
breathing each breath
like ours
until a fearful fallen world
took His
and our breath
away.

He shines through
the shadows of death
to guide our stumbling uncertain feet.
His tender mercies flow freely
when there is no consolation
when there is no comfort.

He hears our cries
as He cried too.
He knows our tears
as He wept too.
He knows our mourning
as He mourned too.
He knows our dying
as He died too.

God wept
as this happened.
Evil comes not from God
yet humankind embraces it.
Sin is our choice
we made from the beginning,
the choice we continue to make.

Only God can glue together
what evil has shattered.
He just asks us to hand Him
the pieces of our broken hearts.

We will know His peace
when He comes
to bring us home,
our tears will finally be dried,
our cells no longer
just dust,
never only dust
as we are glued together
by the breath of God
forevermore.

the tender mercy of our God,
by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
to shine on those living in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.
Luke 1: 78-79

Wood sculpture of Rachel weeping, located at Our Lady of Guadelupe Abbey, Texas

: Rachel weeping for the children who are no more
Sculptor Sondra Jonson

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