Category: forgiveness

More Precious than Roses

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I am not resigned to the shutting away
of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look,
the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses.
Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.
Fragrant is the blossom. I know.
But I do not approve. 
More precious was the light in your eyes
than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay “Dirge Without Music”

Each Memorial Day weekend without fail,
we gather with family, have lunch, reminisce,
and trek to a cemetery high above Puget Sound
to catch up with our relatives who lie there, still.

Some for over 110 years, some for barely more than a decade,
some we knew and loved and miss every day,
others not so much as they are unknown to us
except on genealogy charts,
names and dates and stones and stories:

the red-haired great-grandmother who died too young,
the aunt who was eight when lymphoma took her,
the grandmother who dreamed of world travel too late,
the great-grandfather Yukon river boat captain,
the grandfather logger and stump farmer,
the great aunt unmarried school teacher who hid an oil well,
the two in-laws who forever lie next to each other
but could not co-exist in the same room while they lived and breathed.

Yet we know each of these
(as we know ourselves and others)

could be tender and kind, though flawed and broken,
had been beautiful and strong, though wrinkled and frail,
was hopeful and faithful, though too soon in the ground.

We know this about them
as we know it about ourselves:
someday we too will feed roses,
the light in our eyes transformed into elegant swirls
emitting the fragrant scent of heaven.

No one asks if we approve.
Nor am I resigned to this
though I know:
So it is, so it has been, so it will be for me
someday.

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For a Little While…

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Flee for a while from your tasks;
hide yourself for a little space from the turmoil of your thoughts.
Come, cast aside your burdensome cares,
and put aside your laborious pursuits.
For a little while give your time to God,
and rest in him for a little while.
Enter into the inner chamber of your mind,
shut out all things save God
and whatever may aid you in seeking God;
and having barred the door of your chamber, seek him.
~Anselm of Canterbury from Major Works

There were clinic days when I needed to leave early:
near tears, physically spent, too fried
to keep listening, problem solving, comforting.

These were times I needed to feel anything
other than being needed.
I was the picture of neediness myself — 
a sorry place to be.

Feeling overwhelmed had happened before:
middle of the night mothering a feverish vomiting child,
middle of the night mothering my frail dying mother,
middle of the night mothering a troubled world.

Yet morning still comes, after a little while,
shining and wondrous because God never left.

In my need, if I gently close the door to all worries
that are not God,
I find Him looking for me
and waiting to hear what I have to say.

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We Are Lost…

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when the sun peeks over the horizon to greet
the day and spread golden honey warmth
to the dark, sleepy earth

when the birds begin to stir and twitter
and tune their songs to one another

when the trees rustle as the morning breeze
opens her eyes from slumber, and the dew is heavy
on the blades of grass

when I know morning has come once again
and we are not lost to the night, even as we
are not lost to the day

light dawns, and I can move again
breathing in streams of fresh morning air
lighting a candle for rejuvenation
and praying the day in with ginger and
salt and clay

oh how lovely it feels to be alive
how magical to wake with the light
and live
~Juniper Klatt, I was raised in a house of water

…deeds are done which appear so evil to us
and people suffer such terrible evils
that it does not seem as though any good will ever come of them;
and we consider this, sorrowing and grieving over it 

so that we cannot find peace in the blessed contemplation of God as we should do; 

and this is why:

our reasoning powers are so blind now, so humble and so simple

And this is what he means where he says, 
“You shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well”, 
as if he said, “Pay attention to this now, faithfully and confidently, 
and at the end of time you will truly see it in the fullness of joy.
~Julian of Norwich from Revelations of Divine Love

Even when,
yet again,
innocents – our children, our teachers –
do not wake, as if by magic, to see this golden morn

I’m heavy laden as the tears of this dewy dawn
touch every lost and grieving thing

there is no reason for this
to happen again and again and again
~we weep until we are dry as dust~

Pay attention to this now, to this mourning for innocents
who are lost to the night and the day.

If only we listen and act, shall this be made well.

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The Sunrise Shall Visit Us: Now Realigned

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Christmas sets the centre on the edge;
The edge of town, the outhouse of the inn,
The fringe of empire, far from privilege
And power, on the edge and outer spin
Of  turning worlds, a margin of small stars
That edge a galaxy itself light years
From some unguessed at cosmic origin.
Christmas sets the centre at the edge.

And from this day our  world is re-aligned
A tiny seed unfolding in the womb
Becomes the source from which we all unfold
And flower into being. We are healed,
The end begins, the tomb becomes a womb,
For now in him all things are re-aligned.
~Malcolm Guite “Christmas on the Edge”

When the barn doors opened
on a bright frosted Advent morning,
the inner darkness was illuminated by a beam of sunlight,
exposing an equine escapee.

His stall door stood ajar, the door mysteriously unlatched.
He meandered the unlit barn aisle lined with hay bales
munching his breakfast, lunch, and dinner
all of which lay strewn and ruined at his feet.

Not only did he somehow open his locked door
but also chose to leave poop piles
on every other horses’ breakfast, lunch, and dinner
as they watched helpless from behind their stall doors.

He had the run of the place all night~
obvious from countless hoof prints amid
overturned buckets, trampled halters, tangled baling twine,
twisted hoses, toppled bales and general chaos.

At least he didn’t reach up and start the tractor
or eat the cat food or pry open the grain barrel
or chew a saddle or two, or rip horse blankets apart,
but from the looks of things – I think he tried.

He nickered as the opened door highlighted his nocturnal escapade,
caught red-hoofed and boldly nonchalant, proclaiming his innocence.
Like a child asking for milk to go with a stolen cookie,
he approached me, begging for a carrot after feasting all night.

I grabbed a fist full of mane, pulled him back to double lock him in.
Surveying the mess, I was tempted to turn around, shut the barn doors
and banish it back to the cover of darkness,
to hide his sins now apparent in the light of day.

Instead, newly realigned in my wait for Christmas,
I remember all the messes I’ve made in my life.
So I clean his up, give him a hug,
and forgive as I’m forgiven.

Advent 2023 theme
…because of the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high 
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song

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Until There’s Nothing Left

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Walk noisily to declare your presence.
The rabbits and deer will leave
as soon as they hear you coming,
but the snakes need time
to process your intentions.

Take a moment to be certain
of what you’re cutting.
Many stems look alike
down close to the ground,
especially when they’re young.
Look up occasionally.

Don’t begrudge the wild roses
for whipping thorns across
your face and arms,
or the honeysuckle
for tangling your feet
and pulling the pruners
from your hands. You’d do
the same in their place.
Honor them with a clean cut.

Never begin when you’re angry
or you might not stop
until there’s nothing left
to hold the soil.

Always wear gloves
and keep your eye
on the blade.
~Jeff Coomer “Some Advice for Clearing Brush” from A Potentially Quite Remarkable Thursday.

photo by Josh Scholten

My father never quite adapted to his administrative desk job mid-career, working in a state job as a supervisor. He was a man of action, a former Marine and before that, a teenager whose young muscles were needed to tame the brush that grew out of control on his parents’ failing farm land. He learned young to swing a brush hook and later in life found it helped manage his desk-bound frustration to slash away at the vines and thorns and branches that stood between him and a sense of order on the land.

He would have been bemused, but impressed, that not just one, but two modern U.S. Presidents, Reagan and George W., found brush clearing to be therapeutic physical activity. Perhaps it helped them manage their anger impulses as well.

As soon as my dad got home from work, I remember him changing into denim overhauls and heavy duty gloves and boots. As long as there was daylight, he would head to our field and woods to battle back the brush thickets. He would swing his trusty brush hook, bringing down all manner of thick obstructing and unwanted plant life, then create numerous “brush piles” which he would let dry out and then burn in huge bonfires down to ashes in autumn until nothing was left but dust.

It was no small irony that he sometimes had to return in a few years to the same spot to clear it once again. It was a Sisyphean task, but yet somehow necessary for his general well-being.

I should have known there was something amiss when one year when I returned from college on a break, I found he had stopped clearing brush and chose instead to exercise on a stationary bicycle. Something in him had given up trying to make our fields and woods more habitable and useable. I figured he simply grew weary of perpetually ridding the land of thorn-bearing vines, thistles and weeds which had impeded his personal vision of the perfect park-like farmland.

Instead, he gave up and walked away from his marriage and his brush hook which he left hanging up in the barn. With nothing left to hold him there, he left, in search of something he felt was missing in his life.

We, my mom and his grown children, were left sifting through the ashes of what was left behind. It didn’t take long for the woods to become impenetrable in his absence.

We could not have known he would return a decade later, arising forgiven from the ashes he had left behind.

After all, there was more brush to clear and he was back to take care of it.

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Comings and Goings

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If I look down, a ferry is always
docking or pulling away from the shore.
I am not always aware of these goings on
anymore than I am my own breathing,
but, when I do take note,
the sense of overseeing this step
in a process that’s both
open-ended and fixed
fills me with a vague dread

while passengers,
whether boarding or landing,
may feel they are finally
getting somewhere
~Rae Armantrout “Somewhere” from Wobble

photo of the ferry Walla Walla run aground by Mike Reicher of the Seattle Times

We live in a state that depends on ferry travel to get across Puget Sound/Salish Sea from the mainland to the islands and peninsulas. Other than the occasional bumpy crossing in windy weather, it is usually a quiet interlude on our way to get somewhere, time to take a brief nap or a few deep breaths. No one thinks about the possibility of trouble when riding the ferry to work or back to home.

This past week, trouble happened. A generator failure aboard the ferry Walla Walla took out power mid-voyage, including ability to run the engine, so the ferry drifted to shore and ran aground. Over 500 passengers and crew were stuck on board with nowhere to go; certainly no routine coming or going except by rescue transport via smaller boats.

A vague dread indeed – I’ll be thinking of ferry rides a bit differently now. I’m relieved no one was hurt, but only inconvenienced. Thankfully I wasn’t on board this particular ferry run, stymied in my effort to try to get somewhere.

I have never been promised my journey to somewhere would be full of puppies and rainbows. In fact, I’ve run aground and had equipment failure aplenty. So when things do go smoothly, I need to acknowledge it for the blessing it is — just like breathing is a blessing of comings and goings.

Take a deep breath and bon voyage.

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The Forgiveness of Sleep

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The children have gone to bed.
We are so tired we could fold ourselves neatly
behind our eyes and sleep mid-word, sleep standing
warm among the creatures in the barn, lean together
and sleep, forgetting each other completely in the velvet,
the forgiveness of sleep.

Then the one small cry:
one strike of the match-head of sound:
one child’s voice:
and the hundred names of love are lit
as we rise and walk down the hall.

One hundred nights we wake like this,
wake out of our nowhere
to kneel by small beds in darkness.
One hundred flowers open in our hands,
a name for love written in each one.
~Annie Lighthart, from Iron String

I thought I had forgotten how to wake to the sound of a child’s voice in the night. I thought I wouldn’t remember how to gently open their bedroom door, entering their darkness from my own darkness, discerning what was distressing them, sensing how to soothe them back to slumber, wondering if I might sing or pray the words they needed to hear, bringing a blossoming peace and stillness to their night.

And then our son’s family arrived two months ago from thousands of miles away, to stay until they could settle in their own place, and I remembered my nights were never meant to be mine alone. As a child, I had so many night-wakenings that I’m sure my mother despaired that I would ever sleep through the night. She would come when I called, sitting beside my bed, rubbing my back until I forgot what woke me in the first place. She was patient and caring despite her own weariness, sleep problems and worriedness. She loved me and forgave me for needing her presence in the night, so her nights were never her own.

I too responded with compassion when my own children called out in the night. I woke regularly to phone calls from hospitals and patients during forty years of medical practice and listened and answered questions with grace and understanding. And now, for a time, I’m on call again, remembering the sweetness of being loved when the dark fears of the night need the light and promise of a new day coming, if only just a few hours away.

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The Beginning Shall Remind Us of the End: We Wait For We Have Seen His Footsteps

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I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
    and in his word I put my hope.
 My soul waits for the Lord
    more than watchmen wait for the morning,
    more than watchmen wait for the morning.
Psalm 130: 5-6 from a Song of Ascents

Waiting is essential to the spiritual life.
But waiting as a disciple of Jesus is not an empty waiting.
It is a waiting with a promise in our hearts
that makes already present what we are waiting for.

We wait during Advent for the birth of Jesus.
We wait after Easter for the coming of the Spirit,
and after the ascension of Jesus
we wait for his coming again in glory.

We are always waiting,
but it is a waiting in the conviction that
we have already seen God’s footsteps.
— Henri Nouwen from Bread For The Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith

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. 
I modernise the anachronism

of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews

at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resources have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?
~R.S. Thomas “The Absence”

To wait is hard when we know the value of the gift that awaits us. We know exactly what is in the package since we have watched it being carefully chosen, wrapped and presented to us to open.

We have seen His footprints on our landscape: in the hottest dessert, in the deepest snow, in the meadows and in the forests, in the mud and muck and mire of our lives; we know He has been here and wait for His return.

Not yet though, not quite yet.  So we wait, and continue to wait.

Even more so, we wait and hope for what we do not see but know is coming, like a groaning in the labor of childbirth.

The waiting is never easy; it is painful to be patient, staying alert to possibility and hope when we are exhausted, barely able to function.  Others won’t understand why we wait,  nor do they comprehend what we could possibly be waiting for when it remains unseen, with only the footprints left behind to remind us.

Yet we persevere together, with patience, watching and hoping, like Mary and Joseph, like Elizabeth and Zechariah, like the shepherds, like the Magi of the east, like Simeon and Anna in the temple.

This is the meaning of Advent:
we are a community groaning together in sweet anticipation and expectation of the gift of Morning to come.

photo by Josh Scholten

I pray my soul waits for the Lord
My hope is in His word
More than the watchman waits for dawn
My soul waits for the Lord

1) Out of the depths I cry to You;
From darkest places I will call.
Incline Your ear to me anew,
And hear my cry for mercy, Lord.
Were You to count my sinful ways
How could I come before Your throne?
Yet full forgiveness meets my gaze –
I stand redeemed by grace alone.

CHORUS I will wait for You, I will wait for You,
On Your word I will rely.
I will wait for You, surely wait for You
Till my soul is satisfied.

2) So put Your hope in God alone,
Take courage in His power to save;
Completely and forever won
By Christ emerging from the grave.

3) His steadfast love has made a way,
And God Himself has paid the price,
That all who trust in Him today Find healing in his sacrifice.

I will wait for You, I will wait for You
Through the storm and through the night.
I will wait for You, surely wait for You,
For Your love is my delight.

Wait for the Lord, his day is near
Wait for the Lord, be strong take heart
Prepare the way for the Lord
Make a straight path for Him
The Glory of the Lord shall be revealed
All the Earth will see the Lord
Rejoice in the Lord always
He is at Hand
Joy and gladness for all who seek the Lord

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”

The Delicate Sadness of Dusk

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The talkative guest has gone,
and we sit in the yard
saying nothing. The slender moon
comes over the peak of the barn.

The air is damp, and dense
with the scent of honeysuckle. . . .
The last clever story has been told
and answered with laughter.

With my sleeping self I met
my obligations, but now I am aware
of the silence, and your affection,
and the delicate sadness of dusk.
~Jane Kenyon, “The Visit” from Collected Poems

As we slowly adapt to evenings spent with family and friends again, taking off our masks to actually witness the emotion on a familiar, now unveiled, face:

There are smiles and laughter again. We are trying to remember how to be ourselves outside the fearfulness that contagion wrought. More important: there are tears again. And wistfulness. And regret. And longing.

This delicate sadness happened – even to those of us who were never directly touched by sickness. We will never be the same, never so light of heart again, remembering what this past year has cost.

It is a slow transition to dusk. We sit together now and watch it come.

Marshmallow Fields Forever

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Watch the sunrise at least once a year, put a lot of marshmallows in your hot chocolate, lie on your back and look at the stars… don’t overlook life’s small joys while searching for the big ones.
~H.Jackson Brown Jr. from “Life’s Little Instruction Book”

Life is a marshmallow, easy to chew but hard to swallow.
~Francis Bacon

And by and by Christopher Robin came to the end of things,
and he was silent,
and he sat there, looking out over the world,
just wishing it wouldn’t stop.
~A.A. Milne from The House at Pooh Corner

Always, no sometimes, think it’s me
But you know I know when it’s a dream
I think I know I mean a yes
But it’s all wrong
That is I think I disagree

Let me take you down
‘Cause I’m going to Marshmallow Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Marshmallows Fields forever
~with apologies to John Lennon and The Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever”

It’s marshmallow harvest season once again, just in time for this long holiday weekend’s camp fires, scary ghost stories, roasting sticks, chocolate bars and graham crackers.

After a year of isolation and loneliness, I am ready for our life together to begin again, seeking s’more to chew on, sticky, messy and oh so glorious.

I sit in silence looking out over the marshmallow fields, hoping the world won’t stop.

No, not ever again.

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