They work with herbs and penicillin. They work with gentleness and the scalpel. They dig out the cancer, close an incision and say a prayer to the poverty of the skin. They are not Gods though they would like to be; they are only human trying to fix up a human. Many humans die. They die like the tender, palpitating berries in November. But all along the doctors remember: First do no harm. They would kiss if it would heal. It would not heal.
If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest. If they are too proud, and some are, then they leave home on horseback but God returns them on foot. ~Anne Sexton “Doctors” from The Awful Rowing Toward God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility; humility is endless. ~T.S. Eliot from East Coker
Let me never forget how humbling it was to provide care for hurting people and not be 100% certain what I do would actually work, though I was trusted to recommend the best option…
which could include a tincture of time, just wait and see, try this or that.
Or witnessing a vaccine-preventable illness gallop through a university population, taking weeks to safely harness and control.
Not unlike other physicians who tumbled off while racing a pathogen, losing their balance between overconfidence and humility, I sometimes found myself unseated and stranded, having to return on foot to retrace my steps, reframe my words and hopes and do no harm – to try once again to make a difference.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! – These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest”
This poem is (in Hopkin’s own words) “the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the [River] Elwy.”
This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight; The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves; The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves, And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows. Under a tree in the park, Two little boys, lying flat on their faces, Were carefully gathering red berries To put in a pasteboard box.
Some day there will be no war, Then I shall take out this afternoon And turn it in my fingers, And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate, And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves. To-day I can only gather it And put it into my lunch-box, For I have time for nothing But the endeavour to balance myself Upon a broken world. ~Amy Lowell from “September 1918”
There is no point in seeing without responding; there is no way to respond without seeing.
Christian life and practice require both faith (the sight of the heart) and works (the lurch of the heart toward him in obedience). ~Kathleen Mulhern from “A Christ Sighting” from Dry Bones
Am I the only one who awoke this morning praying today might be a day of healing between peoples, when the barbarous becomes beautiful and we seek to become balanced rather than broken?
A day of no drone missiles being launched, no threats of annihilation and winner takes all, no one gunned down in the street, no vehicles used as weapons, no harsh and angry words spoken, no child misused, no one sold into slavery, no one overdosing, abandoned, homeless and starving.
Am I the only one who awakes and only seeks to watch the clouds to praise the heavens to see the leaves turn color to take out this one day and taste it and find that it is good, then put it away for self-keeping to share when and if I find someone else as hungry for grace and mercy as I am,
so as to balance myself somehow in the beauty of this world while teetering on its brokenness?
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do feel a responsibility to society. A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
A writer must reflect and interpret his society, his world; he must also provide inspiration and guidance and challenge. Much writing today strikes me as deprecating, destructive, and angry. There are good reasons for anger, and I have nothing against anger. But I think some writers have lost their sense of proportion, their sense of humor, and their sense of appreciation.
I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: one role of the writer today is to sound the alarm. The environment is disintegrating, the hour is late, and not much is being done. Instead of carting rocks from the moon, we should be carting the feces out of Lake Erie. …I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they happen to strike me. ~E.B. White 1969 (on writing)
It is tiresome always feeling angry about what it is happening in the world, feeling that everything has become political.
I’m tired of reading (and writing) words of frustration, but want to rail against the meanness that surrounds us, and push back the bully to seek out a balance of kindness, perspective and insight.
When I need to feel something other than mad, I walk as far as I can go, look up, revel in the gift of rays of light and bask in their warmth and promise.
I will accept what the Sun has to offer and tell about it so that my anger drains away like so much waste flushed down a pipe, never to be seen again.
Lyrics: Even before we call on Your name To ask You, O God, When we seek for the words to glorify You, You hear our prayer; Unceasing love, O unceasing love, Surpassing all we know.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Even with darkness sealing us in, We breathe Your name, And through all the days that follow so fast, We trust in You; Endless Your grace, O endless Your grace, Beyond all mortal dream.
Both now and forever, And unto ages and ages, Amen.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
‘Regret has to be useless or it’s not really regret.’ ~Simone de Beauvoir
Rescuers did not find my uncle’s body. But they found his axe at an icy altitude impossible to navigate without one.
A little higher up, they found my uncle ’s sleeping bag at an altitude unsurvivable without one.
You likely have a pen in purse or pocket. Take it out and write a list of all you need at your present altitude.
Next, change altitudes. Now, make another list: the two biggest regrets of your life. Take your time. Get it right. Because
here is all you need to know about need: That list of regrets—cross one off. You are going to need that space later. ~Jessica Goodfellow, “Unreachable” from Whiteout
I’ve known people who lost their lives while hiking/climbing in the mountains or due to some other tragedy – the cascade of decisions leading to their death are sources of regret for all who mourn them, even decades later. Somehow regret is a difficult feeling to let go; we cling to it as if it is somehow an essential part of us.
It is easy for me to come up with a long list of regrets in my life. They seem to grow like weeds – useless, unplanned, unwanted and prolific, threatening to take over any good fruit being produced.
Few of us volunteer to share openly about our current guilt or shame unless we are sitting in a therapy group, a confessional booth, or AA. Instead it gives us permission to beat ourselves up, going over and over in our minds how we could have done things differently.
As a physician, I heard about such heart-ache in my clinical encounters – a patient will regret an impulsive sexual encounter that turned out badly, or drinking and drugging too much, or regret an ongoing conflict with a family member, or wish they had decided to get that vaccine before becoming ill with a potentially preventable infection.
Our list of regrets can be endless and life-destroying.
I understand the pain of regret as I too am a flawed and fractured person with an eight-decade history of things done and left undone, words said and unsaid. Even if I think I can somehow manage to cross a regret off my own list – perhaps I apologized and was granted forgiveness, or I tried to make right what I’d messed up — I still know a new regret will occupy its place before long.
I can’t simply fix my own regret list.
No matter what altitude we’re at — down in the pits in the lowest of the low, or up in the highest imaginable, I have come to realize that forgiveness is only possible through a knowledge of God Himself. He came to walk beside us in our low spots and our high spots, no matter where we find ourselves. His work on earth has crossed off our regrets and mistakes and wiped us clean of them.
He did this because He understood our desperate need; thanks to His sacrifice and love, our heart-aches are left at the Cross.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
It’s the immemorial feelings I like the best: hunger, thirst, their satisfaction; work-weariness, earned rest; the falling again from loneliness to love; the green growth the mind takes from the pastures in March; the gayety in the stride of a good team of Belgian mares that seems to shudder from me through all my ancestry. ~Wendell Berry “Goods”
photo by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waard
The plow has savaged this sweet field Misshapen clods of earth kicked up Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view Last year’s growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life this way Turned over a whole history Looking for the roots of what went wrong Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.
Enough. The job is done. Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be Seedbed for the growing that’s to come. I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons—
The farmer plows to plant a greening season. ~Parker Palmer “Harrowing”
photo by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waard
It’s not likely anyone would say I didn’t work hard enough.
After all, I come from a long line of human work-horses who knew it takes sweat and tears, and sometimes bleeding.
Even so, all those years I know I could have plowed more deeply than I did.
I could have thrown myself more fully into the pull on the tugs, shared the load more effectively, shouldered the yoke with greater enthusiasm, bent my neck down low with unbroken determination.
You could say somewhere I lost the gayety in my stride, and you would be right — toward the end, I was trudging through the furrow, bruised from turning up too many submerged rocks, bumping into immoveable tree stumps, tripping on hidden roots, stuck in the deep mud of long and lonely post-midnight hours.
You might even say the knowledge of a job well-done lay at a depth my plow could ever reach.
I had seen others die in the harness, never able to rest easy.
A few years ago I knew the time had come to shrug off the yoke, shake off the bridle and bit, shudder free of the harness.
On this side of the ground, I find myself wondering and wandering, the blinkers no longer impeding my vision, feeling the morning sun on my unyoked withers.
Yet when I see an untilled field, something in me even now still tries to hold on to the plow —
photo by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waard
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off too. ~J.R.R. Tolkien – Bilbo to Frodo in Fellowship of the Rings
What if this road, that has held no surprises these many years, decided not to go home after all; what if it could turn left or right with no more ado than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin were like a long, supple bolt of cloth, that is shaken and rolled out, and takes a new shape from the contours beneath? And if it chose to lay itself down in a new way, around a blind corner, across hills you must climb without knowing what’s on the other side, who would not hanker to be going, at all risks? Who wants to know a story’s end, or where a road will go? ~Sheenagh Pugh “What if This Road?”
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. ~C.S. Lewis from The Great Divorce
We grow accustomed to the Dark — When Light is put away — As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp To witness her Good bye —
A Moment — We Uncertain step For newness of the night — Then — fit our Vision to the Dark — And meet the Road — erect —
And so of larger — Darknesses — Those Evenings of the Brain — When not a Moon disclose a sign — Or Star — come out — within —
The Bravest — grope a little — And sometimes hit a Tree Directly in the Forehead — But as they learn to see —
Either the Darkness alters — Or something in the sight Adjusts itself to Midnight — And Life steps almost straight. ~Emily Dickinson
So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it. ~Jane Hirschfield from “The Weighing”
I admit I stumble if not careful, bearing some bruises and scrapes from hazards hidden in darkness.
My eyes slowly adjust to such bare illumination, when the Lamp is dim and the road unfamiliar.
I’m feeling my way through uncertainty in this time of life.
I suspect there are fellow darkness travelers who also have lost their way and their Light, giving away what they can and sometimes more than they have.
And so, blinded as we each are, we run forehead-first into the Tree which has always been there and always will be, the symbol of our salvation.
Because of who we are and Who loves us, we, now free and forgiven, safely follow a darkened road made nearly straight, all the way Home.
Lyrics: Tell me where is the road I can call my own, That I left, that I lost, so long ago. All these years I have wondered, oh when will I know, There’s a way, there’s a road that will lead me home.
After wind, After rain, when the dark is done, As I wake from a dream, in the gold of day, Through the air there’s a calling from far away, There’s a voice I can hear that will lead me home.
Rise up, follow me, come away is the call With (the) love in your heart as the only song There is no such beauty as where you belong Rise up, follow me, I will lead you home.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
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.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all. ~Ada Limón“Instructions on Not Giving Up”
I thought I was emptied out – hollow and irretrievable – after a long drawn out winter of difficult news, and now these cold rainy spring days forecast even more bad news happening in the world.
Yet here I am ~ here we are ~ still among the living and breathing. I am swept away by what I see greening all around me.
The landscape begins to explode with layers of color and shadow. Standing close, I too am ignited. It is impossible to witness so much unfolding life and light and not be engulfed and heartened and singed around my edges.
It lures me outside where flames of green lap about my ankles as I stroll the fields and each fresh breeze fans the fires until I’ve nothing left of myself but ash and shadow.
Consumed and subsumed.
Combusted and busted.
What a way to go.
I’ll take it. I’ll take it all.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals.Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The day on which this took place was a Sabbath,and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.” But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ”
So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?” The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.
So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him.In his defense Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.”For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God. John 5: 1-18
I am overcome by ordinary contentment. What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment? How I love the small, swiftly beating heart of the bird singing in the great maples; its bright, unequivocal eye. ~Jane Kenyon from “Having it out with Melancholy”
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end?
…birds build—but not I build; no, but strain, Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Thou art indeed just, Lord”
It seems so obvious: someone lying on a mat near a healing pool for 38 years – an Old Testament reference to Israel’s wilderness journey and inability to enter the promised land – wants to get well.
Jesus knows this man’s heart is troubled.
Yet Jesus asks this paralyzed man whether he wants to be healed. Not if he is ready to be healed, but whether he wants to be well. It doesn’t seem like a hard question to answer, but at times in our own lives, we too may not feel ready for a transformation to wholeness?
Maybe we really aren’t sure what “well” and being healed will mean to our lives. We wander in the wilderness of weak, struggling bodies and minds, hoping and praying to be led into a promised land of no illness or limitations. But often we aren’t sure. We only know there are many compelling reasons – no help, no hope, isolation from family and friends – to explain why we are stuck where we are.
We can’t imagine it being any other way.
Some are born with disabilities determining what they can and can’t do, knowing no other existence than to be dependent on others for help and care. Others develop illness or experience injury that changes everything for them, creating overwhelming needs leading to profound discouragement.
Some try anything and everything, proven or unproven, to find relief from their symptoms, to find their way out of their wilderness — sometimes with lasting results, often with no improvement.
Jesus is asking this man and asking us: are you ready to live a full life that takes you beyond your current limits? If so, we are transformed from who we have been, to someone we and others may no longer recognize.
It is a scary prospect to pick up our mat, carry our own baggage and walk. But when Jesus enters our life and asks us, point blank, if we want to get well, to become whole, to leave our wilderness behind and join Him – we should not hesitate – wasting precious time explaining all the reasons it hasn’t worked so far.
Jesus is ready, willing and able. And we will be transformed.
…our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. Romans 8:18
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.
This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9: …to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Ms. Marcus says that an occasional poem is a poem written about something important or special that’s gonna happen or already did. Think of a specific occasion, she says—and write about it.
Like what?! Lamont asks. He’s all slouched down in his seat. I don’t feel like writing about no occasion.
How about your birthday? Ms. Marcus says. What about it? Just a birthday. Comes in June and it ain’t June, Lamont says. As a matter of fact, he says, it’s January and it’s snowing.
Then his voice gets real low and he says And when it’s January and all cold like this feels like June’s a long, long ways away.
The whole class looks at Ms. Marcus. Some of the kids are nodding.
Outside the sky looks like it’s made out of metal and the cold, cold air is rattling the windowpanes and coming underneath them too.
Then write about January, Ms. Marcus says, that’s an occasion. But she looks a little bit sad when she says it Like she’s sorry she ever brought the whole occasional poem thing up.
I was gonna write about Mama’s funeral but Lamont and Ms. Marcus going back and forth zapped all the ideas from my head.
I guess them arguing on a Tuesday in January’s an occasion So I guess this is an occasional poem. ~Jacqueline Woodson from “Occasional Poem”
I like these cold, gray winter days. Days like these let you savor a bad mood. – Bill Watterson in Calvin and Hobbes
The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued. ~Robert Frost “Dust of Snow”
Now one year later after the occasion of an inauguration, most of us wish things could be different than they are~ nothing feels right, rights feel like nothing, we’re more than out of sorts, grumpy, in a bad mood – we’re all sadly angry and angrily sad.
And we thought the pandemic was bad.
But moral decay at the highest level is doing more damage than any virus did. We’ve allowed politics to sow and reproduce discord, distrust, discouragement into our very beings.
There is no vaccine for this aching of the heart.
An infection of the spirit will far outlast any pandemic virus by spreading to future generations, eroding trust as we allow justice to decay, as human bonds break, withering our faith and our hope that our country can survive anything.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
