Category: power

Flare Up Like A Flame

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.
~Rainer Maria Rilke “Go the the Limits of Your Longing” from Book of Hours

…you mustn’t be frightened …
if a sadness rises in front of you,
larger than any you have ever seen;
if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows,
moves over your hands and over everything you do.
You must realize that something is happening to you,
that life has not forgotten you,
that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness,
any misery, any depression, since after all
you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?
~Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet

We were made for difficult times such as these:
we feel things deeply,
our joys and awe and fears ~
so much so we can feel swept away.

Feelings are not the final say
yet they both motivate and immobilize us.

God has told us to be His Light in the shadows;
we will find Him if we long for Him.

Though we may feel lost,
wandering, uncertain, hopeless
He takes us by the hand and leads us through.

Grab hold and hang on tight.

Tabby Cat Group Therapy

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

A happy arrangement:
many people prefer cats to other people,
and many cats prefer people to other cats.
~Mason Cooley

The real objection to the great majority of cats is their insufferable air of superiority. Cats, as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by the fact that in Ancient Egypt they were worshipped as gods. This makes them too prone to set themselves up as critics and censors of the frail and erring human beings whose lot they share. They stare rebukingly. They view with concern. And on a sensitive man this often has the worst effects, inducing an inferiority complex of the gravest kind.
~P.G.Wodehouse from The Story of Webster

Cat! who hast pass’d thy grand climacteric,
  How many mice and rats hast in thy days
  Destroy’d? How many tit bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears — but pr’ythee do not stick
  Thy latent talons in me — and upraise
  Thy gentle mew — and tell me all thy frays,
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists–
  For all thy wheezy asthma — and for all
Thy tail’s tip is nick’d off — and though the fists
  Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft, as when the lists
  In youth thou enter’dest on glass bottled wall.
~John Keats “Sonnet to Mrs. Reynold’s Cat”

Our farm cats tolerate one another. Barely.

Yet they agree on one thing: no additional cats are welcome here.
They are inhospitable to any wandering feral kitty who happens to pussy-foot through to check out the food dishes by the front porch and the back porch.

Those are run off with hisses and spits.

The cats have their own agreed-upon hierarchy about who approaches the food dish first and it is not negotiable.

And when it is time for an occasional necessary group therapy session to work out their differences, they practice social distancing with extreme care, so as not to offend one another.

These cats prefer a solitary life, unless forced into couples counseling by the farm owner because of a spat over shared territory. They are determined not to be dependent on anyone or anything and prefer to blend camouflaged into the background, ready to capture any rodent or bird who happens by.

Clearly, they know they are the superior species.
We exist to serve them.
And they tolerate us living here with them. Barely.

Come and See: Who Would Be First to Throw Stones?

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

They went each to their own house but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them.  

The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?”  This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him.

Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground.  

But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”  She said, “No one, Lord.”

And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”
John 7:53 – John 8:11

[The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53—8:11. A few manuscripts include these verses, wholly or in part, after John 7:36, John 21:25, Luke 21:38 or Luke 24:53.]

The adulterous woman is brought alone by the Jewish authorities for judgement, to be humiliated by serving as a test case for Jesus. This incident was not so much about justice as it was about seeing how Jesus would react to her situation.

His response is not what they expected.

He stoops to the ground, taking his time, avoiding their gaze, writing something (inscrutable to the reader) in the dirt. He then stands to look them in the eye to state what is necessary before acting out the law’s justice: only those who have not sinned will be first to cast the stone at a sinner.

Then he kneels again to trace His finger through the dirt —
outlining each person’s sin? naming names?
buying time for things to calm down?
keeping them guessing? just doodling?

The authorities, knowing their own burden of sin,
the oldest of them initially,
turn to leave one by one.
Soon only the accused woman and Jesus remain.

As St. Augustine writes about this powerful gospel story:
“relicti sunt duo, misera et misericordia” which translates to
“two were left: misery and mercy.”
She, standing in the misery of her sin;
He, standing in the glory of His mercy.

No longer condemned while He takes it all on Himself.
No stones to throw; free to go; sin no more.

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.

Come and See: Hidden in Plain Sight

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said,
“Is not this the man whom they seek to kill? 
And here he is, speaking openly, and they say nothing to him!
Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ? But we know where this man comes from, and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from.” 

So Jesus proclaimed, as he taught in the temple, 
“You know me, and you know where I come from.
But I have not come of my own accord. 
He who sent me is true, and him you do not know. 
I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me.”  

So they were seeking to arrest him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come. Yet many of the people believed in him. They said, “When the Christ appears, will he do more signs than this man has done?”

The Pharisees heard the crowd muttering these things about him, and the chief priests and Pharisees sent officers to arrest him. 
Jesus then said, “I will be with you a little longer, and then I am going to him who sent me. You will seek me and you will not find me. Where I am you cannot come.”  

The Jews said to one another, “Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him? Does he intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? 

What does he mean by saying, ‘You will seek me and you will not find me,’ and, ‘Where I am you cannot come’?”
John 7:25-36

Where is my God ? what hidden place
Conceals Thee still?
What covert dare eclipse Thy face?
Is it Thy will?

O let not that of anything;
Let rather brass,
Or steel, or mountains be Thy ring,
And I will pass.

Thy will such a strange distance is,
As that to it
East and West touch, the poles do kiss,
And parallels meet.
~George Herbert from “The Search”

I try to find you, yet you are not here.
I’ve studied absence, fought to fill it in –
courage comes easier with a grasp of why.

A secret’s camouflaged when unconcealed.
I chose to not see/saw the thing too near?
Absence turns thicker, muscled by its strain.

A moon in daylight, whitest blue on blue,
surprises briefly, to appear surreal
until it slips to rights…

… plain sight goes blind through chasing clarity.
I looked for you, so couldn’t see you gone.

I sensed your not-there in its burning life.
I listened out to feel its silence beat.
It does not speak with any human mouth.
~Denise Riley from “Hiding in Plain Sight” from Say Something Back 

Jesus arrived in Jerusalem in plain sight to the people there,
but they did not trust what they saw Him do
nor trust His Words, unable to fathom
He could be the long-awaited Christ.

Their partial understanding
of who they believe the Christ would be
blinds them to the Christ who is right before their eyes.

Later on, the resurrected Jesus –
appearing as a gardener,
a stranger on the road to Emmaus,
a figure cooking fish over a charcoal fire on the beach –
is the Christ hidden in plain sight.

Jesus’ presence among us –
a paradox from beginning to end.
Our limited vision and knowledge challenge us
to accept His divinity when we see only the man.
Yet He is so much more…

The veil pulls back to show us who He is.

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.

The Light and Shadow of Faith

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.
~Victor Hugo from Les Miserables

Be comforted; the world is very old,
  And generations pass, as they have passed,
  A troop of shadows moving with the sun;
Thousands of times has the old tale been told;
  The world belongs to those who come the last,
  They will find hope and strength as we have done.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from “A Shadow”

The shadow’s the thing. 
If I no longer see shadows as “dark marks,” 
as do the newly sighted,
then I see them as making some sort of sense of the light.
They give the light distance;
they put it in its place.
They inform my eyes of my location here, here O Israel,
here in the world’s flawed sculpture,
here in the flickering shade of the nothingness
between me and the light.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.
~Blaise Pascal

These days I find myself seeking safety hiding in the shadows under a rock where lukewarm moderates tend to congregate in times of disagreement and dispute.

Extremist views often predominate simply for the sake of differentiating one’s political turf from the opposition.

The chasm is most gaping in any discussion of faith issues. Religion and politics have become angry neighbors constantly arguing over how high to build the fence between them, what it should be made out of, what color it should be, should there be peek holes, should it be electrified with barbed wire to prevent moving back and forth, should there be a gate with or without a lock and who pays for the labor.

And so it goes. We bring out the worst in our leaders as facts are distorted, the truth is stretched or completely abandoned, unseemly pandering abounds and curried favors are served for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Enough already.
In the midst of this morass, we who believe still choose to believe.

There is just enough Light for those who seek it. No need to remain blinded in the shadowlands.

I’ll come out from under my rock if you do.

In fact…I think I just did.

Taking a Few More Steps to the Light

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?”  

And he looked around to see who had done it. 

But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. 

And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
Mark 5: 30, 32-34

…the whole experience of compline is in some way a touching of the hem of Christ’s garment: something has been given, something disclosed. And the person holding a candle at compline may hear a call, and make a journey, as another stressed woman once did, from touching the hem of Christ’s garment to meeting him face to face.

… just occasionally, it opens into deeper things, on to more ultimate questions. Just occasionally, there is an opening of heart and soul, which in some sense the liturgy itself has made possible; and then it is that, just sometimes, someone takes a few more steps on that journey from the hem of his garment to the light of his countenance.
~Malcolm Guite from Poet’s Corner

Most of us are like that desperate woman
hoping for healing by reaching out
to touch the hem of His robe –
ashamed to be so needy,
hoping to go unnoticed,
not actually wanting to bother anyone,
but still helpless –
so very helpless, but not without hope.

He knows when we reach out in desperation;
He feels it.

So He lifts us up as we begin our journey to His light –
from a touch of His hem to seeing His face.

It starts with reaching out.
It starts with taking a few more steps.
It starts with hope in the Light.

Before the ending of the day,
Creator of the world, we pray
That with Thy wonted favour Thou
Wouldst be our guard and keeper now.

From all ill dreams defend our eyes,
From nightly fears and fantasies;
Tread under foot our ghostly foe
That no pollution we may know.

O Father, that we ask be done
Through Jesus Christ, thine only Son,
Who with the Holy Ghost and Thee
Dost live and reign eternally.

Come and See: Why Be Angry?

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

About the middle of the feast Jesus went up into the temple and began teaching. The Jews therefore marveled, saying, “How is it that this man has learning, when he has never studied?” 
So Jesus answered them, 
“My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me. If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority. The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and in him there is no falsehood. Has not Moses given you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law. Why do you seek to kill me?” 
The crowd answered, 
“You have a demon! Who is seeking to kill you?” 
Jesus answered them, 
“I did one work, and you all marvel at it. Moses gave you circumcision (not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers), and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath. If on the Sabbath a man receives circumcision, so that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because on the Sabbath I made a man’s whole body well? Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”
John 7:14-24

The onening, she saw, the onening
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies
– sands of the sea, of the desert –
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when He took Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:
within the mesh of the web, Himself
woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole, Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.
~Denise Levertov from “On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX”

Jesus seems perplexed:
He came to deliver a new covenant with God’s people so why did those He came to save now seek to kill him?

Why are they angry when He healed one of their own, no matter what day of the week?

This makes no sense to the One who shares human cells
with those who now want Him dead,
with whom He came alongside to become “one,”
experiencing all our pain and sorrows and loneliness.

He is “one-ning” with those who seek to crush Him.

Jesus is – incredibly – our kin within our skin, woven within us and yet, knowing all our sins, He still loves us and wants to bring us home to Him.

Amazing grace.

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.

Not One Will Know

barnstormingblogLeave a comment
photo by Josh Scholten

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
~Sara Teasdale “War Time  There will come soft rains”

photo by Josh Scholten

Not much to me is yonder lane  
 Where I go every day;  
But when there’s been a shower of rain  
 And hedge-birds whistle gay,  
I know my lad that’s out in France
 With fearsome things to see  
Would give his eyes for just one glance  
 At our white hawthorn tree.

.    .    .    .  

Not much to me is yonder lane  
 Where he so longs to tread:
But when there’s been a shower of rain  
I think I’ll never weep again  
 Until I’ve heard he’s dead.
~Siegfried Sassoon “The Hawthorn Tree”

…war spreading,
families dying,
the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside,
sowing clover…
~by Wendell Berry, “February 2, 1968”, from The Peace of Wild Things

The headlines talk about ceasefires on several fronts –
Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Gaza, Iran/U.S.
yet they seem unconvincing.

Still, with talks of peace, drone bombs fly and reap destruction,
their fire and smoke overpowering any negotiations to stop killings.

Modern war attacks remotely
but death is never remote.
It is real and devastating and final.

So the soft rains come,
like long-held-back tears,
trying to heal scarred land
and despairing hearts.

We keep planting for the future,
sowing hope in weary bloody ground.

Remembering Who I Am

barnstormingblog4 Comments

All day I try to say nothing but thank you,
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I
take through the rooms of my house and outside into
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring
and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy
after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work,
when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly
hair combs into place.

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I
remember who I am, a woman learning to praise
something as small as dandelion petals floating on the
steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup,
my happy, savoring tongue.
~Jeanne Lohmann “To Say Nothing But Thank You”

Returned from long travel, I sit
in the familiar, sun-streaked pew, waiting
for the bread and wine of holy Communion.
The old comfort does not rise in me, only
apathy and bafflement.

What shall we do about this?” I asked
my God…
~Jane Kenyon from “Woman, Why Are You Weeping?”

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
~Jane Kenyon “Let Evening Come”

We resist nightfall in our lives.

We fear the dark of violence and threats of war,
the suffering of innocent people who are harmed directly,
and those harmed by lack of resources
which go to bomb-making and dropping.

I wish I could remain forever sunshiny, vital and irreplaceable, living each moment with the energy I feel at dawn.

Yet I know that the forward momentum of time
inevitably winds me down to twilight.

We are not alone in our need to catch our breath,
to be still and grateful for each little thing –
each petal, each taste, each sun ray illuminating the dark.

What shall we do about this? we ask our God.

We savor what we will, with gratitude, as evening comes.
There is no stopping it as
our lungs fill with the breath of God, our Creator.

We are not left comfortless.

A World So Broken: This Sacred Tension

barnstormingblog1 Comment

…by Easter Tuesday, we often find ourselves back in the shadows.

The cancer is still there. That financial struggle is not resolved. The depression returns. That relationship is still broken. We might ask, “If Christ is risen, why does the world still feel so broken?” This is not a lack of faith; it’s the honest lament of believers who are learning to walk in the tension of the now and the not yet. 

This sacred tension calls us to rejoice and weep on Easter Tuesday.

Rejoice that Jesus is risen. We have a living hope. We are promised an eternal inheritance, which is being kept for us by the one who purchased it with his own life. But embrace the grief too. Sadness is the healing emotion of the soul. Sorrow is a gift from God that allows our souls to breathe and cope in a world that aches, longing for restoration. 
~Brian Croft from “Embracing a Sacred Tension”

For you are not a God who delights in wickedness;
    evil may not dwell with you.
5 The boastful shall not stand before your eyes;
    you hate all evildoers.
6 You destroy those who speak lies;
    the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.
Psalm 5: 4-6

To invite Jesus to cleanse the temple of our hearts
is not to ask for guilt and shame.
It is to ask for healing.
The same Lord who overturned tables did so
not to destroy and humiliate,
but to reclaim and restore.
He interrupts only that which obstructs.
He removes only that which hinders life and worship.
His cleansing is never punitive; it is always redemptive.
~Scott Sauls from “What Would Jesus Overturn in Your Life?”

To live coram Deo is to live one’s entire life
in the presence of God,
under the authority of God,
to the glory of God. 

To live in the presence of God is to understand
that whatever we are doing and wherever we are doing it,
we are acting under the gaze of God.

There is no place so remote that we can escape His penetrating gaze.

To live all of life coram Deo is to live a life of integrity.
It is a life of wholeness that finds
its unity and coherency
in the majesty of God.

Our lives are to be living sacrifices,
oblations offered in a spirit of adoration and gratitude.

A fragmented life is a life of disintegration.
It is marked by inconsistency, disharmony, confusion,
conflict, contradiction, and chaos.

Coram Deo … before the face of God.
…a life that is open before God.
…a life in which all that is done is done as to the Lord.
…a life lived by principle, not expediency; by humility before God,
not defiance.
~R.C. Sproul from “What Does “coram Deo” mean?”

On this Easter Tuesday, we cannot escape His gaze…
all of us, all colors, shapes and size, even the leadership of our nation.
We are created in His image, imago dei, so He looks at us
as His reflections in the mirror of this troubled world.

What we do, how we speak and write, how we treat others –
reflects the face of God.

Jesus is the embodied temple who brought His sacrifice to the people,
rather than people coming to the temple with their sacrifices.

I cringe to think how hard we try to hide from His gaze.

Yet some don’t make a pretense of hiding – they make it quite public:
our elected leader chooses Easter to publish a vile message filled with profanity, name-calling and threats, then gives a fragmented and disintegrated Easter speech, to celebrating families with children, with
inconsistency, dishonesty, disharmony, confusion, conflict, contradiction, and chaos.

We drown together in the mud of our mutual guilt and lack of humility. All that we do to others, we do to God Himself.

We must be on our knees asking for cleansing,
for the temples of our hearts to be overturned,
our corruption scattered, our sorrows lifted.

Jesus comes to cleanse, repair, reclaim and restore –
His mission to save us from ourselves.

Kind of takes one’s breath away.