Open the window, and let the air Freshly blow upon face and hair, And fill the room, as it fills the night, With the breath of the rain’s sweet might.
Not a blink shall burn to-night In my chamber, of sordid light; Nought will I have, not a window-pane, ‘Twixt me and the air and the great good rain, Which ever shall sing me sharp lullabies; And God’s own darkness shall close mine eyes; And I will sleep, with all things blest, In the pure earth-shadow of natural rest.
We humans contribute to the world’s gloom,
like dark shadows on a dark landscape.…
But now this man from Nazareth comes to us
and invites us to mirror God’s image,
and shows us how.
He says:
you too can become light, as God is light.
What is all around you is not hell,
but rather a world waiting to be filled with hope and faith.
This world is your home as surely as the God who created and wrought it is love.
You may not believe it, but you can love this world.
It is a place of God.
It has a purpose.
Its beauty is not a delusion.
You can lead a meaningful life in it. ~Jörg Zink “Doors to the Feast”
In this dark world we search for inspiration and a sense of purpose in the most unlikely places:
this past week, we were awestruck by the devotion of a mother killer whale in nearby Puget Sound who has carried her dead baby on her nose for over a week, unwilling to abandon the lifeless body to the sea.
There is tragic beauty in such demonstration of profound love, a recognition of our own losses and helplessness in the face of death.
We too are carried by our Savior through His relentless devotion and love for us, never to abandon us.
Even in the face of loss and consumed by the darkness of the world, we love as we are loved, body of His body.
Lo, let that night be desolate;
let no joyful voice come therein.
Let them curse it that curse the day,
who are ready to rouse up leviathan.
—Job 3:7-8
Orioles live in the elms, and in classical verse the length of the vowels alone determines the measure. Once and once only a year nature knows quantity stretched to the limit, as in Homer’s meter. O this is a day that yawns like a caesura: serene from the start, almost painfully slowed. Oxen browse in the field, and a golden languor keeps me from drawing a rich, whole note from my reed. ~Osip Mandelstam “Summer Solstice” translated from Russian by Stanley Kunitz
Summer is a pause calculated carefully by the Creator — a caesura of daylight so long drawn out, luxurious and indulgent, we forget our need for darkness.
To sleep these short warm nights, we curve inward just as we curled in the womb, floating on the hope and relief cool mornings bring, a rebirth into light.
This love is like the jade flower, A perfect, waxen curl, Embalmed by the sea, Blue-green, Succulent, Arrested in time and space, A swollen cesura Of hope curved back on itself Into fetal consolation. ~Serena J. Fox, “Jade Flower” from Night Shift
A girl comes out of the barn, holding a lantern like a bucket of milk
or like a lantern. Her shadow’s there. They pump a bucket of water and loosen their blouses,
they lead the mare out from the field their thin legs blending with the wheat.
Crack a green kernel in your teeth. Mist in the fields, along the clay road
the mare’s footsteps fill up with milk. ~Franz Wright “Morning”
Each morning as I rise to let the horses out to graze for the day,
I’m once again that girl who woke early
to climb on horseback to greet the summer dawn,
with mist in my hair and dew on my boots,
picking ripe blackberries and blueberries as we rode past.
The angled light always drew sharper shadow lines as the sun rose
until I knew it was time to turn around, each hoof step taking us home
to clean barn, do chores, hang the laundry, weed the garden until sunset.
Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful
than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone– and how it slides again
out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the world, like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils, say, on a morning in early summer, at its perfect imperial distance– and have you ever felt for anything such wild love– do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word billowing enough for the pleasure
that fills you, as the sun reaches out, as it warms you
as you stand there, empty-handed– or have you too turned from this world–
or have you too gone crazy for power, for things? ~Mary Oliver, The Sun
On this day of transition
we stand together, wavering,
barely balancing
on the cusp of light and shadow~
this knowledge of a now diminishing sun
rests heavy in my bones as I struggle
with letting this glorious light
slip through my fingers~
I stand empty-handed
as I attend to less important things.
As darkness begins to claim our days again,
I seek to rise like a full moon
illuminating the long night,
burnishing my readiness for eternity.
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Carrion Comfort”
These mounting deaths by one’s own hand
make grim headlines and solemn statistics.
In my clinic, patient after patient says the same thing:
this struggle with life
makes one frantic to avoid the fight and flee
to feel no more bruising and bleed no more,
to become nothing but chaff and ashes.
they contemplate suicide as
they can not recognize the love of
a God who cares enough to
wrestle them relentlessly–
who heaven-handling flung them here by
breathing life into their nostrils
Perhaps they can’t imagine
a God
(who He Himself created
doubters
sore afraid
of His caring
enough to die for us)
The children have gone to bed. We are so tired we could fold ourselves neatly behind our eyes and sleep mid-word, sleep standing warm among the creatures in the barn, lean together and sleep, forgetting each other completely in the velvet, the forgiveness of that sleep.
Then the one small cry: one strike of the match-head of sound: one child’s voice: and the hundred names of love are lit as we rise and walk down the hall.
One hundred nights we wake like this, wake out of our nowhere to kneel by small beds in darkness. One hundred flowers open in our hands, a name for love written in each one. ~Annie Lighthart “The Hundred Names of Love”
Each of many nights of a child wakening,
each of many moments of rocking them in the dark,
lulling them back to that soft velvet of sleep,
I feel my budding love
unfurling in fragrance
of blossomed fullness,
unfurling until there is no inner spiral left,
and each petal, one by one, drops away,
grateful.
Take me as I drive alone
Through the dark countryside.
As the strong beams clear a path,
Picking out fences, weeds, late
Flowering trees, everything
That streams back into the past
Without sound. I smell the grass
And the rich chemical sleep
Of the fields. An open moon
Sails above, and a stalk
Of red lights blinks, miles away.
It is at such moments I Am called, in a voice so pure I have to close my eyes and enter The breathing darkness just beyond My headlights. I have come back. I think, to something I had Almost forgotten, a mouth That waits patiently, sighs, speaks, And falls silent. No one else Is alive. The blossoms are White, and I am almost there. Robert Mezey “White Blossoms” from Collected Poems
So much of our lives, we travel in near darkness, barely discerning where we are headed, the beams of the headlights only reaching so far. It is disconcerting not knowing the destination or when the journey will end.
Traveling blind, so to speak.
Yet there is much to see and hear and touch along the way, so we stay awake and pay attention.
The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side. ~G. K. Chesterton
…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
and we choose too often to be 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 shall we choose when He so clearly chooses us?
“There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions.2 So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’
3 “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg—4 I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’
5 “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’
6 “‘Nine hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied.
“The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’
7 “Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’
“‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied.
“He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’
8 “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. Luke 16:1-8
I don’t easily understand how this parable is teaching better Christian living. It describes a calculating and opportunistic manager who, being booted out the door when his dishonest practices are discovered, nevertheless manipulates his rich employer to ensure his future security. Prudent? apparently. Shrewd? yes. Unethical? absolutely.
Yet the employer commends his former manager for his forward-thinking actions, as self-serving as they are. And no, he doesn’t get his job back. He is part of the world and its darkness.
But “people of the light” should be even more plan-full and prudent with the resources we are given so richly. As we are illuminated by the Spirit, so shall we illuminate.
The Light is turned on.
May my eyes see, my ears hear, my heart understand. He prepares me with parable.
Barnstorming 