As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “As kingfishers catch fire”
These first few days of spring are a reawakening of nature’s rebirthing rhythms, with increased activity of all the wild creatures and birds around us, and most importantly, God’s renewal of our weary wintery hearts.
Some late winter and early spring mornings still are pitch black with blustering winds and rain, even hail – looking and feeling like the bleakest of December mornings about to plunge into the death spiral of winter all over again.
What self-respecting God would birth Himself into recalcitrant hearts as dark as night?
This God would.
He labors in our bleakest of hearts for good reason. We are unformed and unready to meet Him in the light, clinging as we do to our dark ways and thoughts. Though we soon celebrate the rebirth of springtime, it is just so much talk until we accept the change of being transformed ourselves.
Though the woodpeckers are already noisily hammering on the bark, the birds singing their hearts out and the frogs chorusing in the warming ponds, we, His people, are silenced as He prepares for birth within us. The labor pains are His, not ours; we are awed witnesses to His first and last breath when He makes all things, including us, new again.
The world with its creatures, including us, is reborn — even where dark reigned before, even where it is bleakest, especially inside our healing wintery hearts.
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…
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God is within all things, but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things but not aloof; below all things but not debased. ~St. Bonaventure, 14th C. philosopher and theologian
Beauty, to the Japanese of old, held together the ephemeral with the sacred. Cherry blossoms are most beautiful as they fall, and that experience of appreciation lead the Japanese to consider their mortality.
Hakanai bi (ephemeral beauty) denotes sadness, and yet in the awareness of the pathos of life, the Japanese found profound beauty.
For the Japanese, the sense of beauty is deeply tragic, tied to the inevitability of death.
Jesus’ tears were also ephemeral and beautiful. His tears remain with us as an enduring reminder of the Savior who weeps. Rather than to despair, though, Jesus’ tears lead the way to the greatest hope of the resurrection. Rather than suicide, Jesus’ tears lead to abundant life. ~Makoto Fujimura
Everyone feels grief when cherry blossoms scatter. Might they then be tears – those drops of moisture falling in the gentle rains of spring? ~Otomo no Juronushi (late 9th century)
fallen sakura petals in Tokyo (photo by Nate Gibson)fallen sakura blossoms in Tokyo, photo by Nate Gibson
For four decades, as a family physician, I saw patients struggling with depression, some contemplating whether living another day was worth the pain and effort.
Most described their feelings completely dry-eyed, unwilling to let their emotions flow from inside and flood their outsides. Others sat soaking in tears of hopelessness and despair.
Their weeping moved and reassured me — it is a raw and authentic spilling over when the internal dam is breaking. It is so human, yet we also know tears contain the divine.
When I read that Jesus weeps as He witnesses the tears of grief of His dear friends, I am comforted. He understands and feels what we feel, His tears just as plentiful and salty, His overwhelming feelings of love brimming so full they must be let go and cannot be held back.
Our Jesus who wept with us became a promise of ultimate joy.
There is beauty in this: His rain of tears, the spilling of the divine onto our mortal soil like the unsettled petals of spring.
photo by Nate Gibson
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…
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The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled Out in the sun, After frightful operation. She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun, To be healed, Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind, Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little. While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know She is not going to die. ~Ted Hughes from “A March Morning Unlike Others” from Ted Hughes. Collected Poems
March. I am beginning to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost where the moles have nosed up their cold castings, and the ground cover in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice around foliage and stem night by night,
but as the light lengthens, preacher of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches, his large gestures beckon green out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting from the cotoneasters. A single bee finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow aconites glowing, low to the ground like little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up a purple hand here, there, as I stand on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat and light like a bud welcoming resurrection, and my hand up, too, ready to sign on for conversion. ~Luci Shaw “Revival” from What the Light Was Like.
This year, spring has been emerging early from an exceptionally warm and un-snowy winter, yet blizzard conditions last night closed the Cascade mountain passes with high winds causing extensive power outages in the Puget Sound region.
Our hilltop farm was spared overnight – we are grateful for light and heat this morning.
Up until now, all growing things have been several weeks ahead of the usual budding/blooming schedule when, like the old “Wizard of Oz” movie, the landscape suddenly turns from monochrome to technicolor with a soundtrack going from forlorn to glorious.
Like most folks, I too yearn for spring to commence, tapping my foot impatiently as if I’m personally owed an extravagant seasonal transformation from dormant to verdant.
We wait for the Great Physician’s announcement that His patient survived winter once again: “I’m happy to say the Earth is alive and restored, wounded but healing, breathing on her own but too addled by last night’s windstorm for you to expect much from her just yet.”
As we celebrate her imminent healing, we are reassured His Creation is still very much alive- we rejoice in this temporary home of ours. A promising prognosis for this patient coming out of the fog of winter: she lives, she breathes, she thrives, to bloom and sing with everything she’s got. So soon, so will I.
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…
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Yesterday, running slowly in the gravel I saw a tiny bird feathered pulsating globe of white and gray on its back black pinprick eyes pointing up to the sky. I stooped down closely to peer. We stared at one another— creature to creature— for a small eternity. I scooped him into my hands and placed him gently an offering upright onto the grass whispering a prayer to the One who sees and knows each one every sparrow and every sorrow. ~Karen Swallow Prior “Creature to Creature”
Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows. Luke 12:6-7
God of the sparrow, care for us, Speak in our sorrow, Lord of grief. Sing us Your music, lift our hearts, Pour out Your mercy, send relief. ~Craig Courtney (link to song below)
A little bird, with plumage brown, Beside my window flutters down, A moment chirps its little strain, Then taps upon my window-pane, And chirps again, and hops along, To call my notice to its song; But I work on, nor heed its lay, Till, in neglect, it flies away.
So birds of peace and hope and love Come fluttering earthward from above, To settle on life’s window-sills, And ease our load of earthly ills; But we, in traffic’s rush and din Too deep engaged to let them in, With deadened heart and sense plod on, Nor know our loss till they are gone. ~Paul Laurence Dunbar “The Sparrow”
The first thing I heard this morning was a soft, insistent rustle, the rapid flapping of wings against glass as it turned out,
a small bird rioting in the frame of a high window, trying to hurl itself through the enigma of transparency into the spacious light.
A noise in the throat of the cat hunkered on the rug told me how the bird had gotten inside, carried in the cold night through the flap in a basement door, and later released from the soft clench of teeth.
Up on a chair, I trapped its pulsations in a small towel and carried it to the door, so weightless it seemed to have vanished into the nest of cloth.
But outside, it burst from my uncupped hands into its element, dipping over the dormant garden in a spasm of wingbeats and disappearing over a tall row of hemlocks.
Still, for the rest of the day, I could feel its wild thrumming against my palms whenever I thought about the hours the bird must have spent pent in the shadows of that room, hidden in the spiky branches of our decorated tree, breathing there among metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,
its eyes open, like mine as I lie here tonight picturing this rare, lucky sparrow tucked into a holly bush now, a light snow tumbling through the windless dark. ~Billy Collins “The Christmas Sparrow”from Aimless Love
Through the winter, I feed the sparrows, the woodpeckers and chickadees, the juncos and finches and towhees, and yes — even the starlings.
They all would be fine without my daily contribution to their well-being, but in return for my provision of seeds, I am able to enjoy their spirited liveliness and their gracious ability to share the bounty with one another.
These birds give back to me simply by showing up, without ever realizing what their presence means to me.
How much more does God lay out for me on a daily basis to sustain me even if I fail to show up for Him?
How oblivious am I to His gracious and profound gifts?
How willingly do I share these gifts with others?
Unlike the birds, I could never survive on my own without His watchful care.
When life feels overwhelming, when I am filled with worries, sorrow, regrets and pain, I seek out this God who cares even for sparrows. He knows how to quiet my troubles and strengthen my faith and perseverance, a comfort that extends far beyond sunflower seeds.
photo by Harry Rodenberger
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…
God of the sparrow, sing through us Songs of deliv’rance, songs of peace. Helpless we seek You, God our joy, Quiet our troubles, bid them cease, Quiet our troubles, bid them cease. Alleluia.
God of the sparrow, God of hope, Tenderly guide us, be our song, God of affliction, pain and hurt, Comfort Your children, make us strong, Comfort Your children, make us strong. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
God of the sparrow, care for us, Speak in our sorrow, Lord of grief. Sing us Your music, lift our hearts, Pour out Your mercy, send relief.
God, like the sparrow, we abide In Your protection, love and grace. Just as the sparrow in Your care, May Your love keep us all our days, May Your love keep us all our days. Amen. ~Craig Courtney
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Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light… Isaiah 26:19
Now in the blessed days of more and less when the news about time is that each day there is less of it I know none of that as I walk out through the early garden only the day and I are here with no before or after and the dew looks up without a number or a present age ~W. S. Merwin “Dew Light” from The Moon Before Morning
Dear March—Come in— How glad I am— I hoped for you before— Put down your Hat— You must have walked— How out of Breath you are— ~Emily Dickinson
It seems I measure time by calendar page turns.
A “before” is turned under, covered up by what comes “after.” Day follows day, week follows week, month follows month, for now…
What I am aware of is how diminishing time is, how I live more and more in the “after.”
Each new month seems to arrive “out of breath.”
So I look to the sky to watch the sun come and go, as the moon rises and sets, knowing it will always be so.
The morning dew light blesses me now, no before or after. It is sent by the Lord; I feel breathless as witness.
How can this not always be the way of things?
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…
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Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” Genesis 3:8-9
We’ve moved into a bigger house. Now our voices wander among the rooms calling, Where are you?
And what we can’t forget of other houses confuses us as we answer back and forth, Over here!
It’s a little like returning to the village where you were born, the sad bewilderment of discrepancies between what you remember and what’s there.
No. It’s more like a memory of heaven. Voices coming closer, voices moving away,
and what we thought we knew about life on earth confounding us.
And then that question from which all the other questions begin. ~Li-Young Lee “Discrepancies, Happy and Sad” fromBook of My Nights
You can hide nothing from God. The mask you wear before men will do you no good before Him. He wants to see you as you are, He wants to be gracious to you. You do not have to go on lying to yourself and your brothers, as if you were without sin; you can dare to be a sinner. ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Life Together
Ready or not, you tell me, here I come! And so I know I’m hiding, and I know My hiding-place is useless. You will come And find me. You are searching high and low. Today I’m hiding low, down here, below, Below the sunlit surface others see. Oh find me quickly, quickly come to me. And here you come and here I come to you. I come to you because you come to me. You know my hiding places. I know you, I reach you through your hiding-places too; Touching the slender thread, but now I see – Even in darkness I can see you shine, Risen in bread, and revelling in wine. ~Malcolm Guite “Hide and Seek”
When I go to the doctor, I trust I’m seeing someone who tries to know me thoroughly enough that they will help me move out of illness into better health. There are times when, as a patient, I need to be asked: Where are you in your life right now? What are your worries and fears? How can I support you through this?
This is how acceptance feels: trusting someone enough to come out of hiding, even when ashamed or fearful or feeling hopeless.
As a physician myself, I am reminded by the amount of “noticing” I needed to do in the course of my work over the decades. Each patient (and there were so many) deserved my full attention for the few minutes we are together. I started my clinical evaluation the minute we sat down together and I began taking in all the complex verbal and non-verbal clues they offered up, sometimes unwittingly.
As their audience, I become a witness to their struggle; even more, I must understand it in order to best assist them. My brain must rise to the occasion of taking in another person, accepting them for who they are, offering them the gift of compassion and simply be there for them – just them – right then.
God doesn’t struggle in His Holy work as I did in my clinical duties. He knows us so thoroughly because He made us; He knows our thoughts before we put them into words. There is no point in hiding from Him.
He can hold us in His Hand, discerns our secret heartbeats.
We, the no longer hidden, are His. His alone.
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…
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So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel. For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will. For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.”
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.“
“Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man.
Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voiceand come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.“ John 5 19-29
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”
…with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver. See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair Is, hair of the head, numbered. Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept, This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold What while we, while we slumbered. O then, weary then whý should we tread? why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered… ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “The Golden Echo”
An hour is coming, we don’t know when, but He has told us to listen to His words and believe it will come.
We, weary and discouraged, are in need of rest. He knows this about us. He sees us so restless and pulls us into His arms.
Our resurrection is assured through Him. We do not give up hope despite our weariness, when life tosses up storms and troubles.
An hour is coming. It comes for us all.
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.
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…
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I have no wit, no words, no tears; My heart within me like a stone Is numb’d too much for hopes or fears; Look right, look left, I dwell alone; I lift mine eyes, but dimm’d with grief No everlasting hills I see; My life is in the falling leaf: O Jesus, quicken me.
My life is like a faded leaf, My harvest dwindled to a husk: Truly my life is void and brief And tedious in the barren dusk; My life is like a frozen thing, No bud nor greenness can I see: Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring; O Jesus, rise in me. ~Christina Rossetti from “A Better Resurrection”
<Peter> saw the linen cloths lying there,and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. John 20: 6-7
It dawned on me that perhaps the first thing the risen Lord did after he defeated death, as his heart once again began to beat, was to fold his grave clothes.
This seemed to me to be good news for laundry doers everywhere—and especially to moms who probably still carry out the bulk of this mundane chore.
The risen Christ folded his laundry.
I suppose the angels could have done it but angels probably don’t have much experience with laundry. ~Doug Basler from “The Poetry of a Pastor” from Ekstasis Magazine
I remember, as a child, my panicky feeling, when my mother would help me take off a sweater with a particularly tight neck opening, as my head would get “stuck” momentarily until she could free me.
It caused an intense feeling of being unable to breathe or see anything around me – literally being frozen in place. I was trapped and held captive by something as innocuous as a piece of cloth, but the panic was real.
That same feeling still overwhelms me at times when I find myself stuck in my worries and fears, anxious and struggling to loosen what binds me, unable to look right or left, up or down.
My impulse, once free of whatever is smothering me, is to toss it as far away from me as possible. I want to be rid of it and never touch it again.
I certainly don’t take time to gently fold it up for all to see.
Jesus took the time to carefully fold His facial death cloth and leave it where anyone who entered the tomb would recognize it as proof that His body wasn’t stolen.
He had risen, leaving a clear message that all was in good order, as He said it would be.
Understanding that, I now find folding laundry more meaningful, not nearly as mundane. It is a reminder that a tidy and empty tomb is something to celebrate: new life quickens like spring sap rising from a fallen, faded leaf.
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…
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I am struck by the otherness of things rather than their same- ness. The way a tiny pile of snow perches in the crook of a branch in the tall pine, away by itself, high enough not to be noticed by people, out of reach of stray dogs. It leans against the scaly pine bark, busy at some existence that does not need me.
It is the differences of objects that I love, that lift me toward the rest of the universe, that amaze me. That each thing on earth has its own soul, its own life, that each tree, each clod is filled with the mud of its own star. I watch where I step and see that the fallen leaf, old broken grass, an icy stone are placed in exactly the right spot on the earth, carefully, royalty in their own country. ~Tom Hennen “Looking for the Differences” from Darkness Sticks to Everything.
We dwell so much on our differences rather than our similarities, especially during intense political times.
There is nothing wrong with “otherness” if each “other” is seen as God sees us.
We each are one of His precious and specially-made creations, worthy of existence even in our muddy, rocky, fragile state.
These days, although a “snowflake” is disparaged in the political banter of the day as weak and overly sensitive, there is nothing more uniquely “other” than an individual crystalline creation falling from heaven to the exact spot where it is intended to land. Something so unique becomes part of something far greater than it could be on its own, blending in, infinitely stronger, but never lost.
I am placed here, weak as I am, in the exact right spot, for reasons I continue to uncover and discover. I try every day, as best as I can, to not get lost and, of course, to manage to stay out of the mud.
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…
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