Tag: christianity

Blossom Cheeks

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Lined with light
the twigs are stubby arrows.
A gilded trunk writhes
Upward from the roots,
from the pit of the black tentacles.

In the book of spring
a bare-limbed torso
is the first illustration.

Light teaches the tree
to beget leaves,
to embroider itself all over
with green reality,
until summer becomes
its steady portrait
and birds bring their lifetime
to the boughs.

Then even the corpse
light copies from below
may shimmer, dreaming it feels
the cheeks of blossom.
~May Swenson “April Light”

 

Only a week ago we waited
on corpse light~
a mysterious illumination that came alive
on a bright Sabbath morning,
taking bare stubs of people.
begetting them green,
bursting them into blossom,
their cheeks pink with life,
in promise of faithful fruitfulness.

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The Wait’s Begun Again

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…I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel.
For that rare, random descent.
~Sylvia Plath from “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”

 

But it is no trick of radiance nor random.
It was planned and real, this descent,
and yes,
He seizes us and does not let go.
No reason to fear neutrality
as He makes it impossible to be neutral.
We wait, a long wait
and tire of waiting,
but there is content in the wait.
A wide awake, eyelids-now-opened
content.

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Prepare for Joy: A God Who Weeps

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Charis-Kairos (The Tears of Christ) by Makoto Fujimura

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33 When Jesus saw her weeping,
and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping,
he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.
34 “Where have you laid him?” he asked.
“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.
35 Jesus wept.
36 Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”
John 11:33-36

 

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

 

Daily I see patients in my clinic who are struggling with depression, who are contemplating whether living another day is worth the pain and effort.  Most describe their feelings completely dry-eyed, unwilling to let their emotions flow from inside and flood their outsides.  Others sit soaking in tears of tragedy and despair.

Their weeping moves and reassures me — it is a raw and honest spilling over when the internal dam is breaking.  It is so human.

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.

photo by Nate Gibson from Higashi-Kurume, Tokyo
photo by Nate Gibson from Higashi-Kurume, Tokyo
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the “pink rain” of sakura blossoms in Higashi-Kurume, photo by Nate Gibson

 

Prepare for Joy: An Unlovely Thorn

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Christ … is a thorn in the brain.
Christ is God crying I am here,
and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you,
but here in what appalls, offends, and degrades you,
here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God.
To walk through the fog of God
toward the clarity of Christ is difficult
because of how unlovely,
how ungodly that clarity often turns out to be.
~Christian Wiman from Image Journal “Varieties of Quiet”

We spent over 20 hours traveling yesterday, through two train stations, finding a crowded bus shuttle on the streets of New York City, then passing through four airports, enduring one cancellation and another delay.  It was a painfully difficult trial of endurance, something so ungodly and unlovely after experiencing wonderfully clarifying and nurturing visits with beloved family members.

Yet we made it home despite the long lines, the packed planes and trains, the noise, the security pat downs, the overpriced everything, the sea of humanity everywhere.

We would endure anything in order to be together with family — Christ endured so much more to bring us into His family, declaring “I am here for you!”   He leads us through the fog to come home to Him — even though the process may be appalling, offensive, degrading, and requiring painful endurance.

We are home, clearly one of His family.

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Prepare for Joy: Immensity Cloistered

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Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother;
Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.
~John Donne “Annunciation”

Yesterday as I headed out to the barn underneath the pink glow of a glorious Sunday morning sunrise, there was something unusual forming in the horizon above the foothills.   It began as a solid gray streak across the rosy clouds, almost shadow-like, but then in a matter of a few minutes, at its origin,  it became a vortex of brilliance surrounded by clear skies.  It was, indeed, womb-like, as if something was imminently to be delivered from the heavens.  Instead, it dissipated as quickly as it arose.

No trumpets sounding, not today…

I found out later this was most likely a phenomenon called a “fallstreak hole” and photos were published from across the region, but none seemed to quite capture this perspective from our farm.

Still, it didn’t make me think of rapture.  It looked to me like John Donne’s “immensity cloistered” womb, His Light illuminating the internal darkness of this world, this Incarnation born of woman but heaven-sent.

He is no longer “shutst in little room” but continues to transform the wombs of our hearts.

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Prepare for Joy: A Handful of Dust

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…And I will show you something that is different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
~T.S.Eliot from “The Wasteland”

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This shadowland we live in
is not all there is
nor will ever be.We are tangible dust
arising from the ground
and settling back into it
when the soil reclaims us.
There need be no fear
moving beyond shadow to the light
that created it.
Morning, as always, sets fire to doubt.

By the sweat of your face You will eat bread,
Till you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.
Genesis 3:19

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Ordinary Sunday

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Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday.
It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain.
You can feel the silent and invisible life.
~Marilynne Robinson from Gilead

 

As I am covered with Sabbath rest
quiet and deep
as if being planted in soil
just warming from a too long winter~
I know there is nothing ordinary
about what is happening.

I am called by the Light
to push out against darkness,
reaching to the sky
touched by the Source of all
that makes me thrive.

Nothing more extraordinary
than an ordinary Sunday.

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Where We Wander

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And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country

We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams

And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows

Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.
~Anne Porter from “Music”

 

as cold days linger in interminable gray
when energy wanes
sleep as refuge
instead of restoration

to wander this wintry path
alongside the One who
readies us for radiance
of bird song and sleigh bell frog chorus

a remembrance
of a promise kept~
this is not all there is

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Irreducible Clarity

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If that’s what he means,’ says the student to the poetry teacher, ‘why doesn’t he just say it?’
‘If God is real,’ says the parishioner to the preacher, ‘why doesn’t he simply storm into our lives and convince us?’
The questions are vastly different in scale and relative importance,
but their answers are similar.
A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense
means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight;
it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity.
A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it,
though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive.
Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor,
which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths.
Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, and image,
which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it.
~Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

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A Shudder of the Heart

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Follow Breanna and Jim Randall on burmachronicle.com

…you must not swerve from the engagements God offers you.  These will occur in the most unlikely places, and with people for whom your first instinct may be aversion.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that Christ is always stronger in our brother’s heart than in our own, which is to say, first, that we depend on others for our faith, and second, that the love of Christ is not something you can ever hoard.  Human love catalyzes the love of Christ.  And this explains why that love seems at once so forceful and so fugitive, and why “while we speak of this, and yearn toward it,” as Augustine says, “we barely touch it in a quick shudder of the heart.”
~Christian Wiman from My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

This young couple and their unborn child leave for Asia today to serve as long term missionaries to strife-filled Myanmar.  I’ve known them both for over a decade and for the last several months they have stayed at our farm waiting for this day when they had enough funding and support to leave for a place few people visit, and where even fewer would choose to live and raise a family.  Yet off they go, with so many hugs and hopes accompanying them.

Breanna’s family had arrived at our church over ten years ago with three very blonde daughters in tow — Breanna the oldest.  I have watched her grow through her teens into a determined woman of faith, seeking where she might best serve and never leaving a doubt in any of our minds that God would direct her to where she was needed most, whether it was to use her writing or cooking skills, or to share her entrepreneurial spirit to help others plan and execute their own business.

Jim knows Myanmar well, having served as a missionary there for much of the last seven years, learning the language and working on an updated translation of the Burmese Bible.  He first came to our church as part of a small group of local university students who sought a worship home that was steeped in scripture and dedicated to mutual support of the church body, both here and abroad.  He sat at our kitchen table ten years ago and talked about his computer programming major and how he hoped somehow to make a difference in the world with the skills he was learning.   We (and he) could not have imagined his hope would lead him to a rural village in Burma and the challenging itinerant life of a missionary.   He would return to the States occasionally to report on what he was seeing and experiencing, and on his most recent visit home two years ago, there was Breanna in the front row, all grown up and full of questions for him about life in missions.

Ten years ago no one expected these two would find each other.   Yet God has plans for His people that we can never guess at, swerve from nor try to circumvent.  Their love for each other catalyzes the love of Christ in people they reach out to — never hoarding, never shrinking from a call to go to a place unlikely and unappealing.

For those of us they leave behind, it has been a time of farewells and tears and no few “shudders of the heart” as we bid them Godspeed to their new home far away.

For Jim and Breanna, the seemingly endless goodbyes now become hellos as they bring a love so yearned for to new brothers and sisters on the other side of the earth.