There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it. ~N. Scott Momaday from “House Made of Dawn”
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1
He was created of a mother whom He created. He was carried by hands that He formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy. He the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute. ~St. Augustine of Hippo
Will there really be a “Morning”? Is there such a thing as “Day”? Could I see it from the mountains If I were as tall as they?
Has it feet like Water lilies? Has it feathers like a Bird? Is it brought from famous countries Of which I have never heard?
Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor! Oh some Wise Men from the skies! Please to tell a little Pilgrim Where the place called “Morning” lies! ~Emily Dickinson
Something happened.
Something happened, lighting the darkness and overcoming nothingness.
Something happened and the story of the Beginning breathes within us.
Something happened when God’s word broke the silence as He spoke us into being.
Something happened and it was the Morning of forever.
His Word was in the Beginning, and always has been, and always will be.
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Night after night darkness enters the face of the lily which, lightly, closes its five walls around itself, and its purse of honey, and its fragrance, and is content to stand there in the garden, not quite sleeping, and, maybe, saying in lily language some small words we can’t hear even when there is no wind anywhere, its lips are so secret, its tongue is so hidden – or, maybe, it says nothing at all but just stands there with the patience of vegetables and saints until the whole earth has turned around and the silver moon becomes the golden sun – as the lily absolutely knew it would, which is itself, isn’t it, the perfect prayer? ~Mary Oliver “The Lily”
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin;yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Matthew 6:28b-29
I have been thinking about living like the lilies that blow in the fields.
They rise and fall in the edge of the wind, and have no shelter from the tongues of the cattle,
and have no closets or cupboards, and have no legs. Still I would like to be as wonderful
as the old idea. But if I were a lily I think I would wait all day for the green face
of the hummingbird to touch me. What I mean is, could I forget myself
even in those feathery fields? When Van Gogh preached to the poor of course he wanted to save someone–
most of all himself. He wasn’t a lily, and wandering through the bright fields only gave him more ideas
it would take his life to solve. I think I will always be lonely in this world, where the cattle graze like a black and white river–
where the vanishing lilies melt, without protest, on their tongues– where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss, just rises and floats away. ~Mary Oliver “Lilies”
From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention… pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.
Literature, painting, music— the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.
Is it too much to say that Stop, Look, and Listen is also the most basic lesson that the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches us? Listen to history is the cry of the ancient prophets of Israel. Listen to social injustice, says Amos; to head-in-the-sand religiosity, says Jeremiah; to international treacheries and power-plays, says Isaiah; because it is precisely through them that God speaks his word of judgment and command.
In a letter to a friend Emily Dickinson wrote that “Consider the lilies of the field” was the only commandment she never broke. She could have done a lot worse. Consider the lilies. It is the sine qua non of art and religion both. ~Frederick Buechner from Whistling in the Dark
I have failed to “consider the lilies” way too many times.
In my daily life, I am considering my own worries and concerns as I walk past beauty and purpose and holiness. My mind turns inward, often blind and deaf to what is outside me.
It is necessary to be reminded every day that I need to pay attention beyond myself, to love my neighbor, to remember what history has to teach us, to search for the sacred in all things.
Stop, Look, Listen, Consider: all is grace, all is gift, all is holiness brought to life – so stunning, so amazing, so wondrous.
Thank you to David and Lynne Nelson, David Vos of VanderGiessen Nursery, Arlene Van Ry, Tennant Lake Park and Western Washington University for making their lovely lilies available to me to photograph.
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When I drink in the stars and upward sink into the theater your words have wrought, I touch unfelt immensity and think— like Grandma used to pause in patient thought before an ordinary flower, awed by intricacies hidden in plain view, then say, “You didn’t have to do that, God!”— Surely a smaller universe would do!
But you have walled us in with open seas unconquerable, wild with distant shores whose raging dawns are but your filigree across our vaulted skies. This art of yours, what Grandma held and I behold, these flames, frames truth which awes us more: You know our names. ~Michael Stalcup“The Shallows”
there will be sun, scalloped by clouds, ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong. It will be a temperate seventy-five, low humidity. For twenty-four hours, all politicians will be silent. Reality programs will vanish from TV, replaced by the “snow” that used to decorate our screens when reception wasn’t working. Soldiers will toss their weapons in the grass. The oceans will stop their inexorable rise. No one will have to sit on a committee. When twilight falls, the aurora borealis will cut off cell phones, scramble the Internet. We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek, decorate our hair with fireflies, spin until we’re dizzy, collapse on the dew-decked lawn and look up, perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines of cold code written in the stars. . . . ~Barbara Crooker “Tomorrow” from Some Glad Morning
But when Aurora, daughter of the dawn, With rosy lustre purpled o’er the lawn. ~Homer from the Odyssey
Aurora is the effort Of the Celestial Face Unconsciousness of Perfectness To simulate, to Us. ~Emily Dickinson
…for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Luke 23:45
A little over a year ago, an incredible display of aurora borealis paid a rare visit to our part of the Pacific Northwest. It felt appropriate to whoop and holler when the expanse of multicolored lights began to shimmer and shift above us.
Yet as the colors deepened and danced, what struck me most was the sense of how the heavens and earth seek a “thin place” where the space between God and us narrows to a hair-breadth, summoning us to communion with Him.
Just as the curtain barring us from the holy of holies in the temple was torn in two at Christ’s moment of death, with this display, the curtain between heaven and earth seems pulled apart allowing His Light to reach us.
All earthly matters which cause grief cease to matter, such as wars and talk of wars, with politicians grandstanding 24/7.
Sadly though, our flawed and fallen human foibles continue on, oblivious to the perfection of our Creator and His universe.
We are unable to separate ourselves from God’s grandeur and creation when He bids us to witness His celestial face.
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Today we feel the wind beneath our wings Today the hidden fountain flows and plays Today the church draws breath at last and sings As every flame becomes a Tongue of praise. This is the feast of fire, air, and water Poured out and breathed and kindled into earth. The earth herself awakens to her maker And is translated out of death to birth. The right words come today in their right order And every word spells freedom and release Today the gospel crosses every border All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace Today the lost are found in His translation. Whose mother tongue is Love in every nation. ~Malcolm Guite “Pentecost” from Sounding the Seasons
I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. ~Acts 2:19-21 The Holy Spirit Comes At Pentecost
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment
Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. ~T.S. Eliot from “East Coker”
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “God’s Grandeur”
Today, when we feel we are without hope, when faith feels frail, when love seems distant…
We wait, stilled, for the moment we are lit afire~ the Living God chose us to be seen, heard, named, loved, known.
God forever burning in our hearts in this moment and for a lifetime.
It is the dearest freshest deep down thing…
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People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within. ~ Elisabeth Kübler–Ross
The Methodist church of my childhood had a sanctuary lined by colorful rectangles of stained glass windows. Each church member had an opportunity to choose and place a colored pane matching his or her stage of life, to become a permanent part of the portrait of a diverse church family. Mosaics of colored sections represented the transition through life, moving from childhood in the windows at the entrance, on to adolescence, then to young adulthood, moving to middle age, and then finally to the elder years nearest the altar.
Rainbows of color crisscrossed the pews and aisles, starting with pale and barely defined green and yellow at the outset, blending into a blossom of blue, then becoming a startling fervor of red, fading into a tranquil purple past the center, and lastly immersed in the warmth of orange as one approached the brown of the wood paneled altar.
Depending on where one chose to sit, the light bearing a particular color combination was cast on open pages of scripture, or favorite hymns, or on the skin and clothing of the people, reflecting the essence of that life phase.
Included in the design was the seemingly random but intentional scattering of all of the colors in each panel. Gold and orange panes were sprinkled in the “youth” window predicting the wisdom to come, and a smattering of some greens, blues and reds were found throughout the “orange” window of old age, just like the “spark” of younger years so often seen in the eyes of the our eldest citizens.
The colored windows reflected the truth of God’s plan for our lives. There was certainty in the unrelenting passage of time; there was no turning back or turning away from what was to come.
Although each stage shone with its own unique beauty, none was as warm and welcoming as the fiery glow of the autumn of life. Those final windows focused their brilliance on the plain wood of the cross above the altar.
Beyond the stained glass, as life fades from the richest of colors to the earthy tones of dusty frames, the kaleidoscope of God’s illumination continues to shine, glorious.
We are like windows Stained with colors of the rainbow Set in a darkened room Till the bridegroom comes to shining through
Then the colors fall around our feet Over those we meet Covering all the gray that we see Rainbow colors of assorted hues Come exchange your blues For His love that you see shining through me
We are His daughters and sons We are the colorful ones We are the kids of the King Rejoice in everything
My colors grow so dim When I start to fall away from Him But up comes the strongest wind That he sends to blow me back into his arms again
And then the colors fall around my feet Over those I meet Changing all the gray that I see Rainbow colors of the Risen Son Reflect the One The One who came to set us all free
We are His daughters and sons We are the colorful ones We are the kids of the King Rejoice in everything
We are like windows Stained with colors of the rainbow No longer set in a darkened room Cause the bridegroom wants to shine from you
No longer set in a darkened room Cause the bridegroom wants to shine from you
The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side. ~G. K. Chesterton, on his death bed
God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else – something it never entered your head to conceive – comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left?
For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature.
It will be too late then to choose your side.
There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not.
Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. ~C.S. Lewis – from Mere Christianity
…our hands have always been able to heal as much as harm. …since the dawn of humanity, each of us contains three people— the angel, the demon, and the one who decides which we will obey. ~Billy Coffey
It shouldn’t take plunging into a profound darkness, swallowed in a pit of sadness and sorrow to experience God’s immense capacity for love and compassion, but that is when our need for light and forgiveness is greatest.
It should not take sin and suffering to remind us life is precious and worthy of our protection, no matter how tempted we are to choose otherwise.
We are created, from the beginning, in the beginning, with the capacity to choose sides between darkness and light.
We choose too often to remain cloaked in darkness.
Our God chooses to shine the light of His Creation, to conquer our darkness through illuminating grace, dispersing our shadows, suffering the deepest darkness on our behalf to guarantee we are eternally worthy of His loving protection.
How then will we choose when He so clearly chooses us?
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Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east. ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody’s voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?
All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. ~William Butler Yeats from “Easter, 1916”
So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. ~Wendell Berry from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
It had been a slow coming of spring this year, seeming in no hurry whatsoever. Snow has remained in the foothills and the greening of the fields only begun.
Bravely, flowering plum and cherry trees burst into bloom despite a continued chill, and the pink dogwood and apple blossoms are now emerging. The perfumed air of spring permeates the dawn.
Such variability is disorienting, much like standing blinded in a sudden spotlight in a darkened room, practicing resurrection.
Yet this is exactly what eastering is like. It is awakening out of a restless sleep, opening a door to let in fresh fragrant air, and the heavy stone locking us in the dark is rolled back.
Overnight all changed, and changed utterly.
He is not only risen. He is given indeed.
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Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall…
It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His Flesh: ours. ~John Updike from “Seven Stanzas at Easter”
Our flesh is so weak, so temporary, as ephemeral as a dew drop on a petal yet with our earthly vision it is all we know of ourselves and it is what we trust knowing of Him.
He was born as our flesh, from our flesh. He walked and hungered and thirsted and slept as our flesh. He died, His flesh hanging in tatters, blood spilling freely breath fading to nought, speaking Words our ears can never forget.
And He rose again as His flesh like ours to walk and hunger and thirst alongside us and here on this hill we meet together, –flesh of His flesh– here among us He is risen –flesh of our flesh– married forever as the Church and its fragile, flawed and everlasting body.
“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!” Luke 24: 5-6
Thank you for following along during this Lenten season. May you have a blessed Easter celebration to carry with you through the weeks, months and years ahead.
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My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? 2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. 15 My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.
16 Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. 17 All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. 18 They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.
19 But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me. ~Psalm 22: 1-2, 14-19
his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness— so he will sprinkle many nations, and kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand. Isaiah 52: 13-15
When I was wounded whether by God, the devil, or myself —I don’t know yet which— it was seeing the sparrows again and clumps of clover, after three days, that told me I hadn’t died. When I was young, all it took were those sparrows, those lush little leaves, for me to sing praises, dedicate operas to the Lord. But a dog who’s been beaten is slow to go back to barking and making a fuss over his owner —an animal, not a person like me who can ask: Why do you beat me? Which is why, despite the sparrows and the clover, a subtle shadow still hovers over my spirit. May whoever hurt me, forgive me. ~Adelia Prado “Divine Wrath” translated from BrazilianPortuguese by Ellen Doré Watson
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“My God, My God,” goes Psalm 22, “hear me, why have you forsaken me?”
This is the anguish all we of Godforsaken heart know well. But hear the revelation to which Christ directs us, further in the same psalm:
For He has not despised nor scorned the beggar’s supplication, Nor has He turned away His face from me; And when I cried out to Him, He heard me.
He hears us, and he knows, because he has suffered as one Godforsaken. Which means that you and I, even in our darkest hours, are not forsaken. Though we may hear nothing, feel nothing, believe nothing, we are not forsaken, and so we need not despair.
And that is everything.
That is Good Friday and it is hope, it is life in this darkened age, and it is the life of the world to come. ~Tony Woodlief from “We are Not Forsaken”
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Emmett Till’s mother speaking over the radio
She tells in a comforting voice what it was like to touch her dead boy’s face,
how she’d lingered and traced the broken jaw, the crushed eyes–
the face that badly beaten, disfigured— before confirming his identity.
And then she compares his face to the face of Jesus, dying on the cross.
This mother says no, she’d not recognize her Lord, for he was beaten far, far worse
than the son she loved with all her heart. For, she said, she could still discern her son’s curved earlobe,
but the face of Christ was beaten to death by the whole world. ~Richard Jones “The Face” fromBetween Midnight and Dawn
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In a daring and beautiful creative reversal, God takes the worse we can do to Him and turns it into the very best He can do for us. ~Malcolm Guite from The Word in the Wilderness
Strangely enough~ it is the nail, not the hammer, that fastens us together~ becoming the glue, the security, the permanence of solid foundation and strong supports, or protecting roof.
The hammer is only a tool to pound in the nail to where it binds so tightly; the nail can’t blend in or be forgotten, where the hole it leaves behind is a forever wounded reminder of what the hammer has done, yet, how thoroughly the hammer, and we, are forgiven.
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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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. Sproulfrom “What Does “coram Deo” mean?”
We cannot escape His gaze…all of us, all colors, shapes and sizes… Created in His image, imago dei, so He looks at us as His reflections in the mirror of the world.
What we do, how we speak, how we treat others reflects the face of God. Jesus is the embodied temple, bringing His sacrifice to the people, rather than people coming to the temple with their sacrifices.
I cringe to think how we hide from His gaze. All I see around me and within me is: inconsistency, dishonesty, disharmony, confusion, conflict, contradiction, and chaos.
Everywhere, everyone is saying: only I know what is best.
We call hypocrisy on one another, holding fast to moral high ground when the reality is: we drown together in the mud of our mutual guilt and lack of humility. All that we have done to others, we have done to God Himself.
It is time for us to be on our knees asking for cleansing, for the temples of our hearts to be overturned, our corruption scattered.
Jesus comes to cleanse, repair, reclaim and restore – us.
Kind of takes one’s breath away.
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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VERSE 1 It is not death to die To leave this weary road And join the saints who dwell on high Who’ve found their home with God It is not death to close The eyes long dimmed by tears And wake in joy before Your throne Delivered from our fears CHORUS O Jesus, conquering the grave Your precious blood has power to save Those who trust in You Will in Your mercy find That it is not death to die VERSE 2 It is not death to fling Aside this earthly dust And rise with strong and noble wing To live among the just It is not death to hear The key unlock the door That sets us free from mortal years T To praise You evermore Original words by Henri Malan (1787-1864). Translated by George Bethune (1847)
Angels, where you soar Up to God’s own light Take my own lost bird On your hearts tonight; And as grief once more Mounts to heaven and sings Let my love be heard Whispering in your wings
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