Jesus, Apple of God’s eye, dangling solitaire on leafless tree, bursting red.
As he drops New Eden dawns and once again we Adams choose: God’s first fruit or death. ~Christine F. Nordquist “Eden Inversed”
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:20-23
It has always been our choice, yet this one is no longer forbidden.
We are offered this first fruit.
He hangs from the tree broken open
so our hearts might burst red with Him
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans, Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads Tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Useless to think you’ll park and capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. ~Seamus Heaney “Postscript” from The Spirit Level
…they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs.
Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom. ~James Wright from “The Blessing”
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread. ~William Butler Yeats from “The Wild Swans at Coole”
‘Tis strange that death should sing. I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan, Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death, And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings His soul and body to their lasting rest. ~William Shakespeare from “King John”
Walking outside before the sun was up on a recent rainy morning, I heard overhead the swishing hush of wings in flight and the trumpeter swans’ doleful call as dozens passed above me in a long meandering line against the early dawn grayness.
The swan flocks predictably arrive here in late autumn to eat their fill, feasting in the harvested cornfields surrounding our farm, their bright white plumage a stark contrast to the dulling muddy soil. Usually, they stick around until spring, as they lift their long graceful necks and fan out their wings to be picked up the wind, leaving us behind and beneath, moving on to their next feeding and breeding grounds.
These incredible creatures bring such joy with their annual arrival, while their leave-taking reminds me, once again, nothing on earth can last.
My heart recently caught off guard still beats. God’s love heals our earthly hearts.
“‘Tis strange that death should sing…”
I give myself over to their beauty, and walk with lighter tread, singing a new song: I am grateful my heart someday will soar beyond this soil.
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison,as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 16-18
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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We come across a ridge and hear a cowbell in the cove beyond, a tinkle sweetening the air with vague rubato as the breeze erases tones and then the notes resume like echoes from the past or from a cave inside the cliff, a still, calm voice in dialect and keeping its own company, both out of time and long as time, both here and from a higher sphere, as if the voice of history were intimate as memory. ~Robert Morgan “Cowbell”
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life. ~James Wright “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”
photo by Kate Steensma from Steensma Creamery
One of the lullabies I remember hearing as a youngster were cowbells in the pasture outside my bedroom window on our small family farm. Each of our three milking Guernsey cows wore a bell on her neck so my dad could tell where they were in our wooded field. He’d whistle and call “Come Bossy!” and they would walk single file into the barn, ringing and tinkling with each step, for their twice daily grain and hand-milking.
When I was old enough, I liked to perch on top of their bony backs while my dad leaned his head into their flank, whistling a tune while he milked them, the steaming stream of milk hitting the metal bucket with a high-pitched whine. The bells on their necks still chimed as the cows chewed, moving their heads up and down to finish their meal.
This was divine music that soothed and reassured me and I felt I could follow it anywhere. All was right with the world, thanks to the cows and their intrinsic tunes created by their movements, as if they were created to charm their keepers.
There are moments when I believe we are hearing what heaven must sound like.
Now, seven decades later, the soft harmony of cowbells is replaced by the random chords of wind chimes hanging outside our house.
The memory of cowbell music remains a reminder: I have not wasted my life if I can taste heaven through such simple things and magical moments.
But I still need more cowbell…
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
and because there is always a need for more cowbell…
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The first time I saw him it was just a flash of gray ringed tail disappearing into autumn night mist as I opened the back door to pour kibble into the empty cat dish on the porch: just another stray cat among many who visit the farm.
A few stay.
So he did, keeping a distance in the shadows under the trees, a gray tabby with white nose and bib, serious yet skittish, watching me as I moved about feeding dogs, cats, birds, horses, creeping to the cat dish only when the others drifted away.
There was something in the way he held his head, an oddly forward ear; a stilted swivel of the neck. I startled him one day as he ate his fill at the dish.
He ran, the back of his head flashing red, scalp completely gone.
Not oozing, nor something new, but recent. A nearly mortal scar from an encounter with coyote, or eagle or bobcat. This cat thrived despite trauma and pain, tissue still raw, trying to heal.
He had chosen to live; life had chosen him.
My first thought was to trap him, to put him humanely to sleep to end his suffering, in truth to end my distress at seeing him every day, envisioning florid flesh even as he hunkered invisible in the shadowlands of the barnyard.
Yet the scar did not keep him from eating well or licking clean his pristine fur.
As much as I want to look away, to avoid confronting his mutilation, I always greet him from a distance, a nod to his maimed courage, through wintry icy blasts and four foot snow, through spring rains and summer heat with flies.
His wounds remain unhealed, a reminder of his inevitable fate.
I never will stroke that silky fur, or feel his burly purr, assuming he still knows how, but still feed his daily fill, as he feeds my need to know: the value of a life so broken, each breath taken filled with sacred air.
The depth of his wounds shows how much he still bleeds.
This is my only close photo of our wounded farm guest
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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Overcome us that, so overcome, we may be ourselves: we desire the beginning of your reign as we desire dawn and dew, wetness at the birth of light. ~C.S. Lewis from The Great Divorce
When all nature is at rest, not a leaf moving, then at evening the dew comes down — no eye to see the pearly drops descending, no ear to hear them falling on the verdant grass — so does the Spirit come to you who believe. When the heart is at rest in Jesus — unseen, unheard by the world — the Spirit comes, and softly fills the believing soul, quickening all, renewing all within. ~Robert Murray McCheynefrom The Love of Christ
The seed will grow well, the vine will yield its fruit, the ground will produce its crops, and the heavens will drop their dew. I will give all these things as an inheritance to the remnant of this people. Zechariah 8:12
I have had opportunity to fly over a vast ocean to three different continents in my life. Each time, I adjusted my internal clock due to disorientation about what day and time it was.
But my reassurance came from the consistency of the sun rising and setting, washing the world with a refreshing dew the next morning.
Overcome that I could witness dawn wherever I awoke, I felt the familiarity of home, even in far off lands.
I am reminded the Son rises over a vast Kingdom without borders, without corruption, without alienation, without end.
No matter where I sleep, I am covered by His cleansing dew.
Do not be overwhelmed with evil but overcome evil with good. Romans 12:21
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the Just One.
Latin lyrics: Rorate caeli desuper, et nubes pluant iustum.
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To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness , is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness- especially in the wilderness – you shall love him. ~Frederick Buechnerfrom A Room Called Remember
The wilderness might be a distant peak far removed from anything or anyone, where there is bleak darkness.
The wilderness might be the darkest corner of the human heart we keep far away from anything and anyone.
From my kitchen window on a clear day, I sometimes see a distant mountain wilderness, when the cloud cover moves away.
During decades of perching on a round stool in clinic exam rooms, I was given access to hearts lost in the wilderness many times every day.
Sometimes the commandment to love God seems impossible. We are too self-sufficient, too broken, too frightened, too wary to trust God with our love and devotion.
Recognizing a diagnosis of wilderness of the heart is straight forward: despair, discouragement,disappointment, lack of gratitude, lack of hope.
The treatment is to allow the healing power of the Father who sent His own Son to navigate the wilderness in our place.
He reaches for our bitter, wary, and broken hearts that beat within our bodies, to bring us home from the dark wilderness of our souls.
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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Morning of buttered toast; of coffee, sweetened, with milk.
Out the window, snow-spruces step from their cobwebs. Flurry of chickadees, feeding then gone. A single cardinal stipples an empty branch— one maple leaf lifted back.
I turn my blessings like photographs into the light; over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:
Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love, not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured; not-yet-
Not-yet-not.
I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure, I ask him only to stay. ~Jane Hirshfield “Not Yet”from The Lives of the Heart.
To wait for the “not yet” is a hard sweet tension.
There is tension in knowing that something profound is happening – today’s vernal equinox, a brilliant sunrise, a fading sunset, new life growing, but the transformation is not yet complete, and I’m unsure when it will be.
I am still unfinished business and so is everyone else.
Soon, I will be reminded of what is yet to come.
I will know the shock of the empty tomb. My heart will burn within me as more is revealed, through the simple act of bread breaking.
Waiting is never easy; it is painful to be patient, to be unfinished, staying open to possibility and hope.
Others don’t understand why I wait, nor do they comprehend what I could possibly be waiting for.
I’m all-ready, not-yet-finished, but sometime soon.
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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When the moon scrapes past obscuring clouds, there is the startle of pale-yellow light escaping the sky onto the pasture, where I walk my two young whippets in early spring listening to chorus frogs shamelessly seeking mates in the marsh-ponds spring rain has become in my back pasture. And then coyotes too on the far hill startling the dogs with their turbulent yips joining the necessary summoning for more of this tipping into spring, night-ascending prayers to the moon and watching stars. But the moonlight’s caught sounds of fecundity are deceiving—cold north wind needles my cheeks, embraces my earlobes despite the upturned hood on my too-thin jacket. A light frost on pasture-grass licks against my winter chore boots. Despite the whetted signs and sounds of approaching spring, there is yet to be early crocus, daffodils filling the yard, or leaves on the maple trees that will later shade the pigs in summer now shivering in the night’s transition in the barnyard. ~Ed Higgins, “Transitions” from Near Truth Only
Only another day until the spring equinox.
I confess to being impatient to transition away from winter, although we had snow and hail only a few days ago, our mornings are chilly with cold north breezes and our nights leave frosty icing on the barn roofs.
Even so, all the signs are there: the marsh frogs have been chorusing for nearly a month, coyotes are yipping it up, the pastures show a hint of green, early plum trees have broken open their tiny blossoms, crocus and daffodils have erupted in cheer and hope.
Some seasonal and life transitions are welcome. Some not at all. Some take my breath away. One won’t give my breath back.
Whatever we face in this life, we will face it together, knowing the arms of God surround us when we’re weary, when we’re ill, when we’re discouraged.
His love is a sentinel beacon welcoming us home.
He is the constant when all else is in transition.
photo by Bob Tjoelker of our sentinel tree
Let nothing disturb thee, Nothing affright thee; All things are passing; God never changeth; Patient endurance attaineth to all things; Who God possesseth in nothing is wanting; Alone God sufficeth. – St. Teresa of Avila“Prayer”
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. – It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip – if you could call it a lip grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels- until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go. ~Elizabeth Bishop from “The Fish”
...the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish.When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away. Matthew 13: 47-48
All my life, I’ve taken care of a variety of fish in tanks. As a child, I would watch, mesmerized, as our tropical fish glided around, happily exploring their little ten gallon world. I willingly cleaned away the algae, rinsed the gravel and changed the filter. As a teenager, I boasted at least three different tanks aerating away in my bedroom, my own little aquacultural world.
During college and medical school, I chose to share my room with goldfish and bettas, thriving on their contentment within a clear glass bowl. I didn’t think of them as emotional support animals, but there was a joy obvious in their albeit limited existence: they still thrived when I was away, not missing me, but were always thrilled when I fed them, and tolerated my messing with their home maintenance.
My current aquarium is over thirty years old and boasts a dozen fish and plenty of furry algae and plants. Some of my watery friends have lived a decade or more and when they pass, I miss them. Even the koi and goldfish in our farm pond have expressive faces and individual personalities that I’ve gotten to know well. They come when I call.
I’m not a fisherman so can’t imagine sorting my finned friends good from bad as the parable suggests will happen in the kingdom of God.
I know the heart of compassion I feel for these animals I’m responsible for, as I know and have experienced the compassion of our Creator when He sorts out His creatures.
I would hope when I end up in His net, He’ll look at my blemishes and wounds and the number of hooks in my mouth from the times I’ve been caught and escaped. If He’s not yet ready to take me home, or deems me not yet ready to leave this troubled world, He’ll throw me back in the water to keep trying to get it right.
I believe that happened last month when I had a bit of a heart emergency – He let me go, throwing me back in to keep on swimming, giving what I’ve still got to give.
Rainbows, rainbows, rainbows.
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This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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Be still and know that I am God. Be still and know that I am. Be still and know. Be still. Be.
Down Cathedral, Downpatrick, IrelandSt. Patrick’s grave marker
I rise today in the power’s strength, invoking the Trinity believing in threeness, confessing the oneness, of creation’s Creator.
I rise today in heaven’s might, in sun’s brightness, in moon’s radiance, in fire’s glory, in lightning’s quickness, in wind’s swiftness, in sea’s depth, in earth’s stability, in rock’s fixity.
I rise today with the power of God to pilot me, God’s strength to sustain me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s eye to look ahead for me, God’s ear to hear me, God’s word to speak for me, God’s hand to protect me, God’s way before me, God’s shield to defend me, God’s host to deliver me, from snares of devils, from evil temptations, from nature’s failings, from all who wish to harm me, far or near, alone and in a crowd.
Around me I gather today all these powers against every cruel and merciless force to attack my body and soul.
May Christ protect me today against poison and burning, against drowning and wounding, so that I may have abundant reward; Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me; Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me; Christ to the right of me, Christ to the left of me; Christ in my lying, Christ in my sitting, Christ in my rising; Christ in the heart of all who think of me, Christ on the tongue of all who speak to me, Christ in the eye of all who see me, Christ in the ear of all who hear me.
For to the Lord belongs salvation, and to the Lord belongs salvation and to Christ belongs salvation. May your salvation, Lord, be with us always.
—”Saint Patrick’s Breastplate,” Old Irish, eighth-century prayer.
Six years a slave, and then you slipped the yoke, Till Christ recalled you, through your captors cries! Patrick, you had the courage to turn back, With open love to your old enemies, Serving them now in Christ, not in their chains, Bringing the freedom He gave you to share. You heard the voice of Ireland, in your veins Her passion and compassion burned like fire.
Now you rejoice amidst the three-in-one, Refreshed in love and blessing all you knew, Look back on us and bless us, Ireland’s son, And plant the staff of prayer in all we do: A gospel seed that flowers in belief, A greening glory, coming into leaf. ~Malcolm Guite — A St. Patrick Sonnet
Every year on March 17, St. Patrick is little remembered for his selfless missionary work in Ireland in the fifth century. We visited his grave in Downpatrick, Ireland some years ago. It is a humble stone fixed upon on a hilltop next to Down Cathedral overlooking the sea.
I wondered what he would make of how this day, dubbed with his name, is celebrated now in the United States.
Perhaps Patrick would observe we have lost sight of our commitment to faith and purpose in our rush to be the first, greatest, wealthiest, and most dominant.
Patrick, in his prayer, urges us instead to know only God as the power of protection in our lives, knowing our human weakness and need for salvation.
He would advise us to be still and know. Be still. Be
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This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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