At the alder-darkened brink Where the stream slows to a lucid jet I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat, And see, before I can drink,
A startled inchling trout Of spotted near-transparency, Trawling a shadow solider than he. He swerves now, darting out
To where, in a flicked slew Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves, And butts then out of view
Beneath a sliding glass Crazed by the skimming of a brace Of burnished dragon-flies across its face, In which deep cloudlets pass
And a white precipice Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down Toward where the azures of the zenith drown. How shall I drink all this?
Joy’s trick is to supply Dry lips with what can cool and slake, Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache Nothing can satisfy. ~Richard Wilbur “Hamlen Brook”
Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. Psalm 30:5
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. ~Wendell Berry “The Peace of Wild Things”
I too thirst for stillness – for peace and lack of worry. If only for a few minutes, I want to stand outside my own thoughts and concerns to absorb the beauty of this world. At times, the loveliness around me makes me ache, knowing there is much more than this, just out of reach.
Dumbstruck at the thought.
I know what I see here is temporary; it pales in comparison to what remains unseen and eternal. The best is yet to come. The best is forever.
Joy comes in the morning.
dragonfly wings photo by Josh Scholten
This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is taken from 2 Corinthians 4: 18: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
The sound of quiet. The sky indigo, steeping deeper from the top, like tea. In the absence of anything else, my own breathing became obscene. I heard the beating of bats’ wings before the air troubled above my head, turned to look and saw them gone. On the surface of the black lake, a swan and the moon stayed perfectly still. I knew this was a perfect moment. Which would only hurt me to remember and never live again. My God. How lucky to have lived a life I would die for. ~Leila Chatti “I Went Out to Hear”
I am reminded every day I am living the life I had hoped for, dreamed of, prayed for…
if for one minute I forget that in a momentary (or prolonged) lapse of grumbling, I only need a plum-colored sunset to come alongside me to remind me.
Or a vision of swans overhead, their wings swishing the silent air. Or a moon rising slow and steady, peering through the blinds to see what I’m up to.
Yes, I would die for a life like this, as someday I must, bidding it farewell like I wave to the morning moon when it fades away, knowing it will return. I’m told someday I will too, at a time when all moments are forever-perfect moments.
How lucky am I, steeped deeply in this knowledge. How blessed are we all…
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May the wind always be in her hair May the sky always be wide with hope above her And may all the hills be an exhilaration the trials but a trail, all the stones but stairs to God. May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts… ~Ann Voskamp from “A Prayer for a Daughter”
Nate and Ben and brand new baby LeaDaddy and Lea
Mommy and Lea
“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is – in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as she was when she was born, when she learned to walk, as she was at any age — at any time, even when the child is fully grown….” ~Diana Gabaldon from Voyager
Just checking to see if she is real…
Your rolling and stretching had grown quieter that stormy winter night thirty years ago, but still no labor came as it should. Already a week overdue post-Christmas, you clung to amnion and womb, not yet ready. Then as the wind blew more wicked and snow flew sideways, landing in piling drifts, the roads became more impassable, nearly impossible to traverse.
So your dad and I tried, concerned about your stillness and my advanced age, worried about being stranded on the farm far from town. When a neighbor came to stay with your brothers overnight, we headed down the road and our car got stuck in a snowpile in the deep darkness, our tires spinning, whining against the snow. Another neighbor’s earth mover dug us out to freedom.
You floated silent and still, knowing your time was not yet.
Creeping slowly through the dark night blizzard, we arrived to the warm glow of the hospital, your heartbeat checked out steady, all seemed fine.
I slept not at all.
The morning’s sun glistened off sculptured snow as your heart ominously slowed. You and I were jostled, turned, oxygenated, but nothing changed. You beat even more slowly, threatening to let go your tenuous grip on life.
The nurses’ eyes told me we had trouble. The doctor, grim faced, announced delivery must happen quickly, taking you now, hoping we were not too late. I was rolled, numbed, stunned, clasping your father’s hand, closing my eyes, not wanting to see the bustle around me, trying not to hear the shouted orders, the tension in the voices, the quiet at the moment of opening when it was unknown what would be found.
And then you cried. A hearty healthy husky cry, a welcomed song of life uninterrupted. Perturbed and disturbed from the warmth of womb, to the cold shock of a bright lit operating room, your first vocal solo brought applause from the surrounding audience who admired your purplish pink skin, your shock of damp red hair, your blue eyes squeezed tight, then blinking open, wondering and wondrous, emerging and saved from a storm within and without.
You were brought wrapped for me to see and touch before you were whisked away to be checked over thoroughly, your father trailing behind the parade to the nursery. I closed my eyes, swirling in a brain blizzard of what-ifs.
If no snow storm had come, you would have fallen asleep forever within my womb, no longer nurtured by my aging and failing placenta, cut off from what you needed to stay alive. There would have been only our soft weeping, knowing what could have been if we had only known, if God had provided a sign to go for help.
So you were saved by a providential storm and dug out from a drift: I celebrate when I hear your voice singing- your students love you as their teacher and mentor, you are a thread born to knit and mend hearts, all because of a night of blowing snow.
My annual retelling of the most remarkable day of my life thirty years ago today when our daughter Eleanor (“Lea”) Sarah Gibson was born, hale and hearty because the good Lord sent a wind and snow storm to blow us into the hospital in time to save her. She is now married to her true love Brian–another gift sent from the Lord; we know you will be awesome parents when your turn comes!
Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road, my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first
through the woods, then out into the open fields past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop
and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue, green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.
I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening
a prayer for being here, today, now, alive in this life, in this evening, under this sky. ~David Budbill “Winter: Tonight: Sunset”from While We’ve Still Got Feet
I thank you God for most this amazing day For the leaping greenly spirits of trees And a blue true dream of sky And for everything that is natural, which is infinite, which is yes I who have died am alive again today And this is the sun’s birthday This is the birth day of life and of love and wings And of the gay great happening illimitably earth How should tasting, touching, hearing, seeing, breathing any Lifted from the no of all nothing Human merely being doubt unimaginable You? Now the ears of my ears awake And now the eyes of my eyes are opened ~E. E. Cummings~
Each day, no matter how things feel, no matter how tired or distracted I am, no matter how empty or discouraged, no matter how worried, or fearful or heartsick:
it is up to me to distill my very existence down to this moment of beauty that will never come again; I’m given the unimaginable opportunity to be loving with every cell of my being.
One breath, one blink, one pause, one whispered word again and again: thanks, thanks, thanks be to God.
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Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they are all on their knees,” An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease. We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, “Come; see the oxen kneel, “In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,” I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so. ~Thomas Hardy “The Oxen”
Says a country legend told every year: Go to the barn on Christmas Eve and see what the creatures do as that long night tips over. Down on their knees they will go, the fire of an old memory whistling through their minds!
So I went. Wrapped to my eyes against the cold I creaked back the barn door and peered in. From town the church bells spilled their midnight music, and the beasts listened – yet they lay in their stalls like stone.
Oh the heretics! Not to remember Bethlehem, or the star as bright as a sun, or the child born on a bed of straw! To know only of the dissolving Now!
Still they drowsed on – citizens of the pure, the physical world, they loomed in the dark: powerful of body, peaceful of mind, innocent of history.
Brothers! I whispered. It is Christmas! And you are no heretics, but a miracle, immaculate still as when you thundered forth on the morning of creation! As for Bethlehem, that blazing star still sailed the dark, but only looked for me. Caught in its light, listening again to its story, I curled against some sleepy beast, who nuzzled my hair as though I were a child, and warmed me the best it could all night. ~Mary Oliver“Christmas Poem” from Goodness and Light
The winds were scornful, Passing by; And gathering Angels Wondered why
A burdened Mother Did not mind That only animals Were kind.
For who in all the world Could guess That God would search out Loneliness. ~Sr. M. Chrysostom, O.S.B. “The Stable”
Growing up on my childhood farm, remembering the magic of Christmas eve night, I bundled myself up to stay warm in our barn, to witness an unbelievable sight.
At midnight we knew the animals knelt down, speaking words we could all understand, to worship a Child born in Bethlehem town, in a barn, long ago in a far away land.
They were there that night, to see and to hear, the blessings that came from the sky. They patiently stood watch at the manger near, in a barn, while shepherds and kings stopped by.
My trips to the barn were always too late, our cows would be chewing, our chickens asleep, our horses breathing softly, cats climbing the gate, in our barn, there was never a neigh, moo or peep.
But I knew they had done it, I just missed it again! They were plainly so calm, well-fed and at peace in the sweet smelling straw, all snug in their pens, in a barn, a mystery, once more, took place.
Even now, I still bundle to go out Christmas eve, in the hope I’ll catch them just once more this time. Though I’m older and grayer, I still firmly believe in the barn, a Birth happened amid cobwebs and grime.
Our horses sigh low as they hear me come near, that tells me the time I hope for is now, they will drop to their knees without any fear in our barn, as worship, all living things bow.
I wonder anew at God’s immense trust for His creatures so sheltered that darkening night – the mystery of why of all places, His Son must begin life in a barn: a welcoming most holy and right. ~ “In the Barn” (written Christmas Eve 1999)
Latin text O magnum mysterium, et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum, iacentem in praesepio! Beata Virgo, cujus viscera meruerunt portare Dominum Iesum Christum. Alleluia!
English translation O great mystery, and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the newborn Lord, lying in a manger! Blessed is the virgin whose womb was worthy to bear the Lord, Jesus Christ. Alleluia!
Jesus our brother, strong and good Was humbly born in a stable rude And the friendly beasts around him stood Jesus our brother, strong and good “I, ” said the donkey, shaggy and brown “I carried his mother up hill and down I carried his mother to Bethlehem town” “I, ” said the donkey, shaggy and brown “I, ” said the cow, all white and red “I gave him my manger for his bed I gave him my hay to pillow his head” “I, ” said the cow, all white and red “I, ” said the sheep with curly horn “I gave him my wool for his blanket warm He wore my coat on Christmas morn” “I, ” said the sheep with curly horn “I, ” said the dove from the rafters high “I cooed him to sleep so he would not cry We cooed him to sleep, my mate and I” “I, ” said the dove from rafters high Thus every beast by some good spell In the stable dark was glad to tell Of the gifts they gave Emmanuel Of the gifts they gave Emmanuel
With a century old choral society With a Christmas tradition of singing Handel’s Messiah.
Sixty-some enthusiastic singers recruited without auditions Through church bulletin announcements:
Farmers, store clerks, machinists, students Grade schoolers to senior citizens
Gather in an unheated church for six weeks of rehearsal To perform one man’s great gift to sacred music.
Handel, given a libretto commissioned to compose, Isolated himself for 24 days – barely ate or slept,
Believed himself confronted by all heaven itself To see the face of God,
And so created overture, symphony, arias, oratorios Soaring, interwoven themes repeating, resounding
With despair, mourning, anticipation Renewal, redemption, restoration, triumph.
Delicate appoggiaturas and melismata Of astounding complexity and intricacy.
A tapestry of sound and sensation unparalleled, To be shouted from the soul, wrung from the heart.
This changing group of rural people gathers annually to join voices Honoring faith foretold, realized, proclaimed.
Ably led by a forgiving director with a sense of humor And a nimble organist with flying feet and fingers.
The lilting sopranos with angel song, The altos a steadfast harmonic support,
The tenors echo plaintive prophecy The base voices remain full and resonant.
The strings paint a heaven-sent refrain In a duet of counterpoint melody.
The audience sits, eyes closed Remembering oft-repeated familiar verses.
The sanctuary overflows With thankfulness and praise as we shall be changed.
Glory to God! For unto us a Child is born And all the people, whether singers or listeners, are comforted.
Dan and Emily after the 2008 Messiah performance
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
When, in the cavern darkness, the child first opened his mouth (even before his eyes widened to see the supple world his lungs had breathed into being), could he have known that breathing trumps seeing? Did he love the way air sighs as it brushes in and out through flesh to sustain the tiny heart’s iambic beating, tramping the crossroads of the brain like donkey tracks, the blood dazzling and invisible, the corpuscles skittering to the earlobes and toenails? Did he have any idea it would take all his breath to speak in stories that would change the world? ~Luci Shaw “Breath” from Accompanied By Angels: Poems of the Incarnation
Blue homespun and the bend of my breast keep warm this small hot naked star fallen to my arms. (Rest… you who have had so far to come.) Now nearness satisfies the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps whose eyelids have not closed before. His breath (so light it seems no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices, the whisper of straw, he dreams, hearing no music from his other spheres. Breath, mouth, ears, eyes he is curtailed who overflowed all skies, all years. Older than eternity, now he is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed to my poor planet, caught that I might be free, blind in my womb to know my darkness ended, brought to this birth for me to be new-born, and for him to see me mended I must see him torn. ~Luci Shaw “Mary’s Song” from Accompanied By Angels: Poems of the Incarnation
This is the irrational season When love blooms bright and wild. Had Mary been filled with reason There’d have been no room for the child. ~Madeleine L’Engle “After Annunciation” from A Cry Like A Bell
He who has come to men dwells where we cannot tell nor sight reveal him, until the hour has struck when the small heart does break with hunger for him;
those who do merit least, those whom no tongue does praise the first to know him, and on the face of the earth the poorest village street blossoming for him. ~Jane Tyson Clement from Watch for the Light
There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. ~Li-Young Lee, from “From Blossoms” from Rose.
To think that the original Breath stirring the dust into man led to this moment?
This mystery of God becoming human, growing within woman, feeding from her breast, being wounded and bleeding to save the one who delivered him, emptying himself completely to deliver all of us as newborns, sliding slippery into our new life, a new existence, a transformed heaven and earth.
So we gasp for breath, our nostrils no longer breathing dust, but filled with the fragrance of forgiveness and grace.
Through His sacrifice, we too impossibly blossom, bursting forth into bloom.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
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Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age, God’s breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r, Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days world transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, Exalted manna, gladness of the best, Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, The milky way, the bird of Paradise, Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood, The land of spices; something understood. ~George Herbert “Prayer”
A kind of tune, a music everywhere And nowhere. Love’s long lovely undersong, A trace in time, a grace-note in the air, Borne to us from the place where we belong On every passing breeze and in the breath Of every creature. All things hear and fear, For faintly, through our fall, we too may hear The strong song of the Son that undoes death.
And one day we will hear it unimpaired: The joy of all the sorrowful, the song Of all the saints who cry “how long,” The hidden hope of all who have despaired. He sang it to his mother in the womb And now it echoes from his empty tomb. ~Malcolm Guite “A Kind of Tune”
When the sky is painted in pastels and the air is brisk with breath and movement, I sense a kind of tune leading me back to thankfulness and wonder rather than worry and fretfulness.
Even in ordinary times of stress – yet especially when we are drowning in sadness reaching for any rescue at hand, the song Christ sings to us is the prayer He taught us to pray – Thy will be done.
“How long, O Lord, how long,” will be answered in the fullness of time – in a manger, in a tomb, in the skies of heaven. Heaven is found in the ordinary but with God and His gift of His son, nothing, but nothing will be ordinary.
For Thine is the glory forever…
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
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The congregation sang off key. The priest was rambling. The paint was peeling in the Sacristy.
A wayward pigeon, trapped in the church, flew wildly around for a while and then flew toward a stained glass window,
but it didn’t look like reality.
The ushers yawned, the dollar bills drifted lazily out of the collection baskets and a child in the front row began to cry.
Suddenly, the pigeon flew down low, swooping over the heads of the faithful like the Holy Ghost descending at Pentecost
Everyone took it to be a sign, Everyone wants so badly to believe. You can survive anything if you know that someone is looking out for you,
but the sky outside the stained glass window, doesn’t it look like home? ~June Beisch, “Holy Ghost” from Fatherless Women.
A little aside from the main road, becalmed in a last-century greyness, there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it. The traffic goes by, and the river goes by, and quick shadows of clouds, too, and the chapel settles a little deeper into the grass.
But here once on an evening like this, in the darkness that was about his hearers, a preacher caught fire and burned steadily before them with a strange light, so that they saw the splendour of the barren mountains about them and sang their amens fiercely, narrow but saved in a way that men are not now. ~R.S. Thomas “The Chapel”
The church knelt heavy above us as we attended Sunday School, circled by age group and hunkered on little wood folding chairs where we gave our nickels, said our verses, heard the stories, sang the solid, swinging songs.
It could have been God above in the pews, His restless love sifting with dust from the joists. We little seeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting to grow toward the light.
Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside, an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp- edged shadows back to their buildings, or how the winter air knifed after the dreamy basement.
Maybe the day we learned whatever would have kept me believing I was just watching light poke from the high, small window and tilt to the floor where I could make it a gold strap on my shoe, wrap my ankle, embrace any part of me. ~Maureen Ash “Church Basement”
There is much wrong with churches overall, comprised as they are of fallen people with broken wings and fractured faith. We seem odd, keen to find flaws in one another as we crack open and spill our own.
Yet what is right with the church is who we pray to, why we sing, feast together and share His Word. We are visible people joined together as a body bloodied and bruised. Someone is looking out for us despite our thoroughly motley messiness.
Our Lord of Heaven and Earth rains down His restless love upon our heads, no matter how humble a building we worship in, or how we look or feel today.
The dove descends upon us.
We are simply grateful to be alive, to raise our hands together, to sing and kneel and bow in a house, indeed a home that God calls His own.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
The old church leans nearby a well-worn road, Upon a hill that has no grass or tree, The winds from off the prairie now unload The dust they bring around it fitfully.
The path that leads up to the open door Is worn and grayed by many toiling feet Of us who listen to the Bible lore And once again the old-time hymns repeat.
And ev’ry Sabbath morning we are still Returning to the altar waiting there. A hush, a prayer, a pause, and voices fill The Master’s House with a triumphant air.
The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us and God. ~Stephen Paulus
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Item: a yellow tulip opens; at its center a star of greenish indigo, a subtle wash of ink at the base of each of six large petals. The black stamens are dotted with white. At the core, the ovary, applegreen fullness tapering to proffer—sheltered in the wide cup of primary yellow—its triune stigma, clove of green and gold.
That’s one, at nightfall of a day which brought
a dozen treasures, exotic surprises, landscapes,
music, words, acts of friendship, all of them wrapped
in mysterious silk, each unique.
How is it possible?
The yellow tulip in the room’s warmth opens. ~Denise Levertov “A Yellow Tulip” from Sands of the Well
I feel like I’m constantly aware of the world’s anguish, reminded in headlines, and radio news updates. The knowledge of others’ grief and mourning, their losses and struggles can be overwhelming. This world is a darkened place of pain and tears for so many, so much of the time.
So who am I to write of a moment of incredible encouragement and beauty, to post pictures of the latest masterpiece painted through sunrise and sunset, to search out and share the gifts that exist all around me – while people are suffering?
We were not created to wallow in anguish – yet here we are, trying to every way to climb our way out of the mess.
I only know this Advent promise: I am but one of countless witnesses to the dawn which has been sent to diminish and overwhelm our darkest times. I seek an oasis of restoration in the desert dust that comprise our days.
I cannot turn away from the gifts laid at my feet — they are as unexpected and awe-inspiring as the angel chorus must have been to lonely shepherds that glorious night. Suddenly, for those isolated people, nothing was the same ever again.
How is it possible?
So too, I open: waiting, watching, longing for the glory. Nothing will be the same, ever again.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darknessand lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
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