Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities— his eternal power and divine nature— have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. Romans 1:20
We weren’t conceived by random happenstance – not even the unwelcomed millions wished or washed away before ever taking a breath.
We are here because we were earnestly needed and wanted, by a power and divinity with a capacity for love and compassion beyond anything we are capable of.
We aren’t a cosmic joke, or random couplings of DNA. We aren’t pawns in the universe’s chess game.
We have the capacity to see the image of God in one another, and in the mirror, yet we ignore it.
God won’t be ignored nor does He accept feeble excuses.
We are invited by Christ Himself to “come and see.” (John 1:39)
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Opening the book at a bright window above a wide pasture after five years I find I am still standing on a stone bridge looking down with my mother at dusk into a river hearing the current as hers in her lifetime
now it comes to me that that was the day she told me of seeing my father alive for the last time and he waved her back from the door as she was leaving took her hand for a while and said nothing
at some signal in a band of sunlight all the black cows flow down the pasture together to turn uphill and stand as the dark rain touches them. ~W.S. Merwin “Sun and Rain” from Flower & Hand.
All day the stars watch from long ago my mother said I am going now when you are alone you will be all right whether or not you know you will know look at the old house in the dawn rain all the flowers are forms of water the sun reminds them through a white cloud touches the patchwork spread on the hill the washed colors of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born see how they wake without a question even though the whole world is burning ~W. S. Merwin “Rain Light”from The Shadow of Sirius
We want so much to leave a legacy for our children that will carry them through their lives, long after we are gone. Then they pass that on to their children, and on and on, like the strands of DNA we leave behind in our descendants.
But words and rituals of faith and covenant can be lost so quickly from one generation to the next. Our DNA passed down is a given, but nothing surpasses the teaching about the eternal love of God and His purpose for His people.
This day, three of our young grandsons are baptized by their church, ushering them into a life in fulfillment of God’s promise within them. As children, they may not yet fully understand how this manifests in their lives, but with the love and guidance of their church, parents, extended family and godparents, they will know His Love as they witness it in His people.
The washing with water from God’s creation, like rain from heaven, gives me hope for the future.
Though the world may be burning, Jesus is right alongside us through it all – I know our children and grandchildren will be all right.
Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it?
…rejoice that your uncertainty is God’s will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty…
…be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. ~Paul Harding in Tinkers
I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God. ~Flannery O’Connor from The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor
Nothing that comes from God, even the greatest miracle, can be proven like 2 x 2 = 4. It touches one; it is only seen and grasped when the heart is open and the spirit purged of self. Then it awakens faith. … the heart is not overcome by faith, there is no force or violence there, compelling belief by rigid certitudes. What comes from God touches gently, comes quietly; does not disturb freedom; leads to quiet, profound, peaceful resolve within the heart. ~Romano Guardini from The Living God
On my doubting days, days too frequent and tormenting, I recall how the risen Christ invited Thomas to place his hand in His wounds, gently guiding Thomas to His reality, so it became Thomas’s new reality. Thomas left it up to a God whose open wounds called out Thomas’s mind and heart. Christ’s flesh and blood awakened a hidden faith by a simple touch.
…he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” John 20: 27-28
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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Directly in front of me he is here, him on this quiet morning in a room of the Byzantine Museum, Athens, in the hundred-degree heat and dust of a city not yet fully awake. Here, and I am suddenly confronted— the oldest icon in existence—with his image.
The rest of the room evaporates, and all I see is him: Pure mystery, great and wondrous, dizzying and terrible.
How can wood and pigment egg yolk and animal skin convey such ethereal truth, intensify the power, captivate Christian eye and heart?
Christ of Sinai looks at me with steady gaze. His eyes—the famed twins Justice and Mercy— see straight through me piercing the whitewashed tomb of my exterior till it hurts. One eye is dark, foreboding shadows between the brow and lid deepening and on the verge of righteous anger— the other eye embraces all even my unworthy soul. I stand and cannot pray. My eyes swell with tears. I cannot look anymore. ~Ed Higgins from “Icon: Christ of Sinai” from Near Truth Only
I was not raised with religious icons. I have little understanding about how they may comfort and encourage those who value and even worship them. Yet I do understand inspiring art and words may deepen our faith in God. This has been true for millennia.
This particular Byzantine icon, the oldest known of Christ, is preserved from the 6th century, an early representation with an intense gaze from eyes that are both from man and God.
I look for tears in those eyes. My own fill up knowing Christ is able to see the depths beyond my white-washed exterior.
I look away, ashamed.
Because He sees what we try to keep from Him, Jesus weeps, knowing the truth about us, yet loving us anyway.
the right and left sides of the icon shown in mirror image, illustrating the dual nature of divine and human
You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. Matthew 23:27
Detail from “Descent from the Cross” by Rogier van der Weyden
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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Ihad grasped God’s garments in the void but my hand slipped on the rich silk of it.
The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to remember must have upheld my leaden weight from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel nothing, no embrace, I have not plummeted. ~Denise Levertov “Suspended” from Evening Train
Reaching out in hopeless grasp to save myself, sinking down, prepared to fall, yet twisting and turning in a chill wind, in helpless wait for what is to come.
Now I dangle suspended rather than plummet, held fast through sheer grace by a slender thread of faith.
This is my Rescuer revealed, here is my Salvation holding me fast from above when I was sure I was lost forever.
Rescue me from the mire, do not let me sink Psalm 69:14
…even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. Psalm 139:10
This Lenten season will reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “The Windhover”
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river? Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air – An armful of white blossoms, A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies, Biting the air with its black beak? Did you hear it, fluting and whistling A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall Knifing down the black ledges? And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds – A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life? ~Mary Oliver from “The Swan”
I hold my heart in hiding, trying to protect that tender core of who I am from being pierced and shredded by the slings and arrows of every day life. It can be a bruising and bumpy ride.
Yet to live fully, as I am created to live, I must fling myself into the open, wimpling wings spread, the wind holding me up, hovering and ready to soar.
To stay aloft, I must change as the wind changes around me.
I take my chances, knowing the fall will come. My wounds shall be healed, even as they bleed.
There is no lack of wonder. So stirred. So much beauty to behold. So much heart to take out of hiding and share freely, no matter the buffeting.
Ah… Ah, my dear.
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When everyone had gone I sat in the library With the small silent tree, She and I alone. How softly she shone!
And for the first time then For the first time this year, I felt reborn again, I knew love’s presence near.
Love distant, love detached And strangely without weight, Was with me in the night When everyone had gone And the garland of pure light Stayed on, stayed on. ~May Sarton “Christmas Light” from Collected Poems
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree: Let him continue in the spirit of wonder…
The accumulated memories of annual emotion May be concentrated into a great joy Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion When fear came upon every soul: Because the beginning shall remind us of the end And the first coming of the second coming. ~T.S. Eliot from “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”
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”
There are plenty of ghosts hiding in the boxes of ornaments and garlands of lights 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.
He is the garland of pure Light, staying on, staying on.
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.
Advent 2023 theme …because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song
The tree of life my soul hath seen, Laden with fruit, and always green; The trees of nature fruitless be Compared with Christ the apple tree. This beauty doth all things excel; By faith I know, but ne’er can tell The glory which I now can see In Jesus Christ the apple tree. The tree of life . . . For happiness I long have sought, And pleasure dearly I have bought; I missed for all, but now I see ’Tis found in Christ the apple tree. 2 I’m wearied with my former toil, Here I shall sit and rest awhile; Under the shadow I will be Of Jesus Christ the apple tree. The tree of life . . . This fruit doth make my soul to thrive, It keeps my dying faith alive; Which makes my soul in haste to be With Jesus Christ the apple tree. The tree of life . . . (from the collection of Joshua Smith, New Hampshire, 1784)
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The work, not of men, but of angels. —Gerald of Wales
With quills and ink of iron gall on folded vellum, monks in their cells labored in hives of stone, producing pages that glistened like honey, sweetening the word of God. On this page, the chi commands the eye, its arm swooping to the left in an elegant scrawl, the smaller rho and iota nestled to the right. Knotwork fills each letter to the brim. Three angels fly from the crossed arms, heaven and earth intertwined, coiled spirals connected by curves. Despite the gleam, no gold is used, just layers of color built up like enamel. In the interstices, creatures of air: birds and moths; creatures of sea: fish and otters; creatures of land: cats and mice. For the whole world was holy, not just parts of it. The world was the Book of God. The alphabet shimmered and buzzed with beauty. ~Barbara Crooker “Book of Kells: Chi Rho”
In the summer of 2013, Dan and I wrapped up our 3 week Ireland trip with one day in Dublin before flying home. I wasn’t sure I could take in one more thing into my super-saturated brain but am grateful Dan gently led me to the exhibit of the Book of Kells at Trinity College along with the incredible library right above it.
I needed to see the amazing things of which man is capable. My weariness was paltry compared to the immense effort of these dedicated writers and artists.
The Book of Kells is an intricately illustrated ninth century version of the four Gospels on the Isle of Iona, meticulously decorated by young Irish monks with quill pens and the finest of brushes and artistic flourish. Two original pages are on display at the library, changed every eight weeks – the brief look one is allowed scarcely does justice to the painstaking detail contained in every shimmering letter and design. No photography is allowed of the book itself.
Upstairs, is the “Long Room” of 200,000 antiquarian books dating back centuries, lined by busts of writers and philosophers. It is inspiring to think of the millions of hours of illuminated thought contained within those leather bindings.
The written word is precious but so transient on earth; it takes preservationist specialists to keep these ancient books from crumbling to dust, a slowly disintegrating alphabet of letters potentially lost forever to future generations.
The original Word is even more precious, abiding forever in the hearts and minds of men, and exists everlasting sitting at the right hand of God, never to turn to dust. He is the inspiration for the intricate beauty of the illustrated Gospels we saw that day.
God is the ultimate source of wisdom for civilization’s greatest writers and poets. He alone has turned darkness into light even in man’s most desperate hours. Our weariness dissipates along with the shadows.
God is no stranger to us – He meets us in His Word and our reading is our ladder up to Him. In that meeting, we are forever His.
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When, in the science museum, I arrive at the overview of our galaxy, with its tiny arrow pointing to You are here (which really ought to be We are here), and see that the two to four hundred billion stars of our local cluster are drifting or chasing or dreaming after each other in circles within milky circles, I can’t help but think of those ancient paintings and rock engravings, discovered all over our celestial body, of that one line which begins at whatever point it can, then curls outward, or inward, toward nothing anyone can define—the oldest shape revered by Aborigine and Celt, by mathematician and engineer and Burning Man reveler alike, and even accorded a place of honor among the mess of thoughts on my desk, as a nifty paper clip of copper.
But it’s already there in the florets of the sunflower crisscrossing with the precision of a logarithm, and in the pin-wheel shape of the Nautilus shell, and in the coiling neurons of the cochlea that let us tell Art Tatum from a three year old’s improvisation.
Call it what you will—“God’s fingerprint,” “the soul unfolding through time,” “the passageway into the Self”— I can’t help but admire, even fear, something as mundane as a flush of the toilet, when its swirling is a variation on our sidereal drift, our existential pain.
And then there’s that famous falcon, “turning and turning in a widening gyre,” a portentous symbol of our own circling into some dread, some pernicious chaos we thought we had just escaped, one town burning a decade behind us, a millennium before that, and into next week, next year, next whenever.
And when the two of us took that winding road an infinity of others had wound down before us and would wind down again, our spirits hushed by the crosses and bouquets at each dead man’s curve and just burning in the dry heat to touch each other, wasn’t that a wondrous and terrible turning? ~Thomas Centolella “Why I’m in Awe of the Spiral”
photo by Kate Steensma
Photo by Kate Steensma
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? ~William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming”
I look for the way things will turn out spiralling from a center, the shape things will take to come forth in
so that the birch tree white touched black at branches will stand out wind-glittering totally its apparent self:
I look for the forms things want to come as
from what black wells of possibility, how a thing will unfold:
not the shape on paper, though that, too, but the uninterfering means on paper:
not so much looking for the shape as being available to any shape that may be summoning itself through me from the self not mine but ours. ~A. R. Ammons, “Poetics” from A Coast of Trees
Our very origin as a unique organism is a process of unfolding and spiraling: from our very first doubling after conception expanding to a complexity of trillions of cells powering our every thought and movement.
Now I look everywhere in my backyard world for beginnings and endings, wanting to understand where I fit and where I am in the unfolding process of this spiraling life. As I grow older, I find myself more peripheral than central, just as I am meant to be – I have more perspective now having spun out from the vortex.
I can see where I came from, and have a sense of where I am headed.
We unfurl slowly, surely, gently, in the Hands of our Creator God. He knows how each of us began as He was there from the beginning, forming the very center of us. He remains at the core of our being, as our unfolding lasts forever.
My uncle in East Germany points to the unicorn in the painting and explains it is now extinct. We correct him, say such a creature never existed. He does not argue, but we know he does not believe us. He is certain power and gentleness must have gone hand in hand once. A prisoner of war even after the war was over, my uncle needs to believe in something that could not be captured except by love, whose single luminous horn redeemed the murderous forest and, dipped into foul water, would turn it pure. This world, this terrible world we live in, is not the only possible one, his eighty-year-old eyes insist, dry wells that fill so easily now. ~Lisel Mueller “The Exhibit”
This is the animal that never was. Not knowing that, they loved it anyway; its bearing, its stride, its high, clear whinny, right down to the still light of its gaze.
It never was. And yet such was their love the beast arose, where they had cleared the space; and in the stable of its nothingness it shook its white mane out and stamped its hoof.
And so they fed it, not with hay or corn but with the chance that it might come to pass. All this gave the creature such a power
its brow put out a horn; one single horn. It grew inside a young girl’s looking glass, then one day walked out and passed into her. ~Rainer Maria Rilke “Unicorn”
I sometimes feel the need for magical thinking to help restore goodness in the sad ways of this world. We have fouled our own nest, destroying each other and the extravagant garden we were given.
Hope for restoration feels almost mythical and the stuff of legends.
Power and gentleness do come together in the story of our redemption. We are delivered into a new world by the sacrifice of the most pure and generous Spirit.
Our dry well is filled by a love that quenches all our thirst, promising that our belief in goodness is not myth or legend, but real and true.
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