Just before the green begins there is the hint of green a blush of color, and the red buds thicken the ends of the maple’s branches and everything is poised before the start of a new world, which is really the same world just moving forward from bud to flower to blossom to fruit to harvest to sweet sleep, and the roots await the next signal, every signal every call a miracle and the switchboard is lighting up and the operators are standing by in the pledge drive we’ve all been listening to: Go make the call. ~Stuart Kestenbaum “April Prayer”
These buds have been poised for weeks and then, as if responding to the Conductor’s uplifted arms, readying for a momentous downstroke, they let go of all their pent up potential~ exploding with harmonious energy enough to carry them all the way to autumn when they fly, gone with the wind.
We wait impatiently until next spring, operators standing by to take our pledge, for the next encore performance.
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Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my work’s in vain, but then the holy spirit revives my soul again. ~ African-AmericanSpiritual “There is a Balm in Gilead”
Since my people are crushed, I am crushed; I mourn, and horror grips me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people? Jeremiah 8:21-22
We never have tried harvesting any of the cottonwood resin, but I’ve found the presence of this grand tree in the field seems balm enough when I find myself discouraged. The tall tree adapts so dramatically over the course of the seasons, remaining a fixture of stability and beauty whether golden in the autumn, blowing cottony seeds in the spring, bare with snow in the winter or flourishing with summer leaves. It is steadfast and reassuring.
Discouragement is so familiar to us, a constant pandemic companion, and certainly is rampant over the past week with images of war filling our screens. No tree resin is capable of fighting a virus or stopping a war but the balm of Gilead in Jeremiah has the power of the Holy Spirit, able to heal our sin sick souls.
The love of our Savior is the balm for us, the wounded. We will become whole again.
cottonwood seedscottonwood seed
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…
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul.
Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my works in vain, but then the holy spirit revives my soul again.
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul.
Don’t ever feel discouraged for Jesus is your friend and if you lack for knowledge he’ll ne’er refuse to lend.
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I do not like to think about my life, one lived too often without original fire.
I would rather walk among the serious trees, hooded by important weather, by immense silences.
I’d rather unravel the wind’s calligraphies, letter by letter, and spell myself into the world,
a glittering altar of atoms, all aswirl. Who can know what will happen to each of us,
as time’s currents bend and assail us, as gravity pulls us further into ourselves?
Better to be buoyed skyward, to modestly reach out to the palaver of raindrops, to the silky leaves,
so that the air’s amazement stirs an answering ripple among my own heavy branches.
Let me lose myself in the star’s mute company, among the steady wanderers of night
whose eyes ignite a cupola of yearnings. Crown me with a wreath of stars unmoored
from desire, untampered by this ache for a blaze beyond the tremor of my fingertips. ~Maurya Simon, “A Thousand Acres of Light” from Cartographies
I take myself too seriously, thinking everything in my life must be planned so I am prepared for what could happen next –
Of course it is impossible as who can know?
Each day the unexpected happens if I am willing to recognize it: the rush of the wind, the drenching of raindrops, the tingle of the winter sun on my face.
In that moment I might find endless perfection.
Even the thriving among us may lie down this night and fail to wake tomorrow, atoms toppled over, leaves shriveled, roots exposed, no longer needing to breathe much sooner than planned.
Let me lose myself in that thought: what is lost here is more than replaced by the joy of beholding the Face of the Eternal God.
Faire is the heav’n, where happy souls have place, In full enjoyment of felicitie, Whence they doe still behold the glorious face Of the divine, eternall Majestie…
Yet farre more faire be those bright Cherubins Which all with golden wings are overdight, And those eternall burning Seraphins, Which from their faces dart out fierie light; Yer fairer than they both, and much more bright, Be th’ Angels and Archangels which attend On God’s owne person, without rest or end.
These then is faire each other farre excelling As to the Highest they approach more neare, Yet is that Highest farre beyond all telling Fairer than all the rest which there appeare, Though all their beauties joynd together were: How then can mortall tongue hope to expresse The image of such endlesse perfectnesse? ~Edmund Spenser
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So slim and flexible I could have rung my fingers round that skinny trunk. Oh, you are built to survive a vernal storm. Listen to me, though—
endure the wind’s force without resistance. Lean with the fury.
When you’re nearly bowed over think broad trunk think sturdy bark. Someday you won’t bend nearly so—
and to that scared little girl the one I saw yesterday in the department store
hiding under the dress rack enduring a mother’s torrent—
I’m sorry. You won’t bend nearly so after you’re grown. ~Christine Bodine, “late apology to the scared little girl in the department store” from Souvenirs of Myself
I know a psychiatrist colleague, soon to be 80 years old and still seeing patients, who recommends people should aim to be more like a willow than a chestnut tree. His long clinical practice has given him a perspective of who survives and who becomes irretrievably broken when the forces of life hit hard.
I know I am not one to freely yield to the wind or ice storm. More chestnut than willow or birch, I can tend toward inflexibility rather than suppleness.
This means I easily break when anger and fury abound in the world around me, rather than leaning and bending. What’s left is broken pieces awaiting salvage, feeding the flames of the brush pile with all the rest of the rigid and unyielding.
Yea, if I don’t bow like a willow, I fall broken upon the rock.
photo by Harry Rodenberger
I will bow and be simple, I will bow and be free, I will bow and be humble, Yea, bow like the willow tree.
I will bow, this is the token, I will wear the easy yoke, I will bow and will be broken, Yea, I’ll fall upon the rock. Shaker melody
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A silence slipping around like death, Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath, One group of trees, lean, naked and cold, Inking their crest ‘gainst a sky green-gold, One path that knows where the corn flowers were; Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir; And over it softly leaning down, One star that I loved ere the fields went brown. ~Angelina Weld Grimke “A Winter Twilight”
Some ask for the world and are diminished in the receiving of it. You gave me only this small pool that the more I drink from, the more overflows me with sourceless light. ~R.S. Thomas “Gift”from Experimenting with an Amen
I am astonished my thirstiness is slaked by such simple things as a moment of pink in the sky, a burst of birdsong, a tree standing steadfast on the hill through the seasons, a glimpse of tomorrow over the fading horizon of today.
Even After All this time The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”
Look What happens With a love like that, It lights the Whole Sky. ~Daniel Ladinsky, from “The Gift”
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These are amazing: each Joining a neighbor, as though speech Were a still performance. Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning From the world as agreeing With it, you and I Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are: That their merely being there Means something;
A silence already filled with noises, A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning. Placed in a puzzling light… ~John Ashbery from “Some Trees”
Surrounded as we are by special trees on this farm, I watch them carefully through the seasons. I hope to learn what they have to teach me about adaptation to change through the driest of hot days, to the coloring and loss of their leafy wardrobes, to the barren nakedness of winter, to the renewal of buds adorning spring branches.
Trees have plenty to say, but all in invisible silence. I’ve read about the communication that takes place underground between them via their roots and I have to say — I feel left out knowing I don’t speak or understand their language.
So I learn from trees by observing what is visible above the ground, especially when the light is just right.
Simply by merely being here, year after year – that means something.
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Contorted by wind, mere armatures for ice or snow, the trees resolve to endure for now,
they will leaf out in April. And I must be as patient as the trees— a winter resolution
I break all over again, as the cold presses its sharp blade against my throat. ~Linda Pastan “January”from The Months
A year has come to us as though out of hiding It has arrived from an unknown distance From beyond the visions of the old Everyone waited for it by the wrong roads And it is hard for us now to be sure it is here A stranger to nothing In our hiding places ~W. S. Merwin “Early January” from The Lice
January can be a rough month for most of us: the beginning-of-winter doldrums can be fierce after the hubbub of holidays. It doesn’t help the new year I hoped for is nothing like the unfamiliar road I find myself following – full of twists and turns and switchbacks, as well as being stalled at times, iced firmly in place, a stranger to myself.
So resolutions have been set aside, travel plans postponed, priorities changed; what I need most is the patience to endure, trusting things do change over time, like the seasons.
Winter will not last forever. I will, like the bare trees around me, leaf out again.
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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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Hanging old ornaments on a fresh cut tree, I take each red glass bulb and tinfoil seraph And blow away the dust. Anyone else Would throw them out. They are so scratched and shabby.
My mother had so little joy to share She kept it in a box to hide away. But on the darkest winter nights—voilà— She opened it resplendently to shine.
How carefully she hung each thread of tinsel, Or touched each dime-store bauble with delight. Blessed by the frankincense of fragrant fir, Nothing was too little to be loved.
Why do the dead insist on bringing gifts We can’t reciprocate? We wrap her hopes Around the tree crowned with a fragile star. No holiday is holy without ghosts. ~Dana Gioia, “Tinsel, Frankincense, and Fir”
Whenthe song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart. ~Howard Thurman from The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations
There are plenty of ghosts hiding in the boxes of ornaments I place on our Christmas tree.
Closing my eyes, I can see my father struggling to straighten our wild cut trees from our woods, mumbling under his breath in his frustration as he lies prone under the branches. I can see my mother, tears in her eyes, arranging ornaments from her parents’ childhoods, remembering times in her childhood that were fraught and fragile.
Each memory, every scratched-up glass ball is so easily breakable, a mere symbol for the fragility of us all this time of year.
Our real work of Christmas isn’t just during these frantic weeks of Advent but lasts year-long — often very hard intensive work, not just fa-la-la-la-la and jingle bells, but badly needed labor in this broken world with its homelessness, hunger, disease, conflict, addictions, depression and pain.
Even so, we enter winter next week replete with a startling splash of orange red that paints the skies in the evenings, the stark and gorgeous snow covered peaks surrounding us during the day, the grace of bald eagles and trumpeter swans flying overhead, the heavenly lights that twinkle every night, the shining globe that circles full above us, and the loving support of the Hand that rocks us to sleep when we are wailing loud.
Once again, I prepare myself to do the real work of Christmas, acknowledging the stark reality that the labor that happened in a barn that night was only the beginning of the labor required to salvage this world begun by an infant in a manger.
We don’t need a fragrant fir, full stockings on the hearth, Christmas villages on the side table, or a star on the top of the tree to know the comfort of His care and the astounding beauty of His creation, available for us without batteries, electrical plug ins, or the need of a ladder.
The ghosts and memories of Christmas tend to pull me up from my doldrums, alive to the possibility that even I, broken and fragile, scratched and showing my age, can make a difference, in His name, all year.
Nothing is too little to be loved…even me.
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”
It’s when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart: not to a flower, not to a dolphin, to no innocent form but to this creature vainly sure it and no other is god-like, God (out of compassion for our ugly failure to evolve) entrusts, as guest, as brother, the Word. ~Denise Levertov “The Mystery of the Incarnation”
In the Christmas story, God … takes the risk of incarnation. The flesh God chooses is not that of a warrior but of a vulnerable baby, a claim that brought me tears of wonderment when I was young. But my adult knowledge of that infant’s fate — a fate shared by so many who have devoted their lives to love, truth, and justice — brings tears of anger and grief, along with a primal fear of what might happen if I followed suit.
…I know I’m called to share in the risk of incarnation. Amid the world’s dangers, I’m asked to embody my values and beliefs, my identity and integrity, to allow good words to take flesh in me. Constrained by fear, I often fall short — yet I still aspire to incarnate words of life, however imperfectly.
What good words wait to be born in us, and how can we love one another in ways that midwife their incarnation? ~Parker Palmer from “The Risk of Incarnation”
I, like you, am entrusted to care for the Word in its earthly incarnation: born into impoverished, humble, and homeless circumstances, He has no where to dwell except within me and within you.
And that is no small price for Him to pay, as my human heart can be inhospitable, hardened, cold and cracked. I am capable of the worst our kind can do.
So it is up to me to embody the Word in what I say and do, even if it means rejection as He suffered, even knowing that is the risk I must take. For me, it feels as vulnerable as if I were a bare tree standing naked in the chill winter wind. I’m fearful I might break or topple over. Yet if I’m created to harbor the incarnated Word, I must reach my roots deep, stand tall and find others who will stand alongside me.
This Advent, Iet us midwife the Word here on earth, to deliver it straight to receptive, warm, and loving hearts.
Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life: Such a Way, as gives us breath: Such a Truth, as ends all strife: Such a Life, as killeth death.
Come, My Light, my Feast, my Strength: Such a Light, as shows a feast: Such a Feast, as mends in length: Such a Strength, as makes his guest.
Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart: Such a Joy, as none can move: Such a Love, as none can part: Such a Heart, as joys in love. ~George Herbert “The Call”
1.Let all mortal flesh keep silence, And with fear and trembling stand; Ponder nothing earthly-minded, For with blessing in his hand, Christ our God to earth descendeth, Our full homage to demand.
2.King of kings, yet born of Mary, As of old on 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.
3.At his feet the six-winged seraph, Cherubim, with sleepless eye, Veil their faces to the presence, As with ceaseless voice they cry: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Lord Most High!
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”
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