I had grasped God’s garment 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 plummetted. ~Denise Levertov “Suspended”
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for? ~Robert Browning from “Andrea Del Sarto”
As richly dressed as the world is this time of year, beauty abounds everywhere I look, it slips through my fingers when I try to capture it and hold on, I cannot save myself by my own grasp.
Yet I’m not allowed to plummet despite my flailing panic as the bottom drops out beneath my feet
The air around me is not empty~ it is full of His breath and where God breathes, He suspends the fallen.
Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention… And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng’s clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, O Lord, Creator, Hallowed one, You still, hour by hour sustain it. ~Denise Levertov from “Primary Wonder” from Sands of the Well
Here is the mystery, the secret, one might almost say the cunning, of the deep love of God: that it is bound to draw upon itself the hatred and pain and shame and anger and bitterness and rejection of the world, but to draw all those things on to itself is precisely the means chosen from all eternity by the generous, loving God, by which to rid his world of the evils which have resulted from human abuse of God-given freedom. ~N.T. Wright from The Crown and The Fire
Inundated by the constantly bad news of the world, I must cling to the mystery of His magnetism for my own weaknesses and flaws, my bitterness. He willingly pulls evil onto Himself, out of us. Hatred and pain and shame and anger disappear into the vortex of His love and beauty, the mucky corners of my heart vacuumed spotless.
We are let in on a secret: He is not sullied by absorbing the dirty messes of our lives. He is sustaining us; we are anything rather than void.
Created in His image, sustained and loved, thus reflecting Him, we are washed forever clean.
Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn in every guise… Thrust close your smile that we know you, terrible joy. ~Denise Levertov from “Matins”
A child is born, crowned in blood, and we lighten up. Sure, we see it every day, and yet this day, tradition says, is unlike any, which is true. It has never happened, and never will again, over and over the will to be reborn, to gasp and cry forgiveness, that is, like birth, difficult, scared, insurgent, brave with the stranger, the winter child, that blossoms through the wound. ~Bruce Bond from “Advent”
In sleep his infant mouth works in and out. He is so new, his silk skin has not yet been roughed by plane and wooden beam nor, so far, has he had to deal with human doubt.
He is in a dream of nipple found, of blue-white milk, of curving skin and, pulsing in his ear, the inner throb of a warm heart’s repeated sound.
His only memories float from fluid space. So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door, broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash, wept for the sad heart of the human race. ~Luci Shaw “Kenosis”
To the end of the way of the wandering star, To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless And all men are at home. ~G.K. Chesterton from “The House of Christmas” (1915)
To think that the original Breath stirring the dust of man led to this?
This mystery of God becoming man, growing within woman, fed from her breast, wounded and bleeding to save her who delivered him, emptied himself completely to then deliver all of us as newborns, sliding slippery into our new life.
And we gasp for breath, our nostrils no longer breathing dust, but filled by the fragrance of forgiveness and grace.
We blossom through his wounds, bursting into bloom.
Sometimes the mountain is hidden from me in veils of cloud, sometimes I am hidden from the mountain in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue, when I forget or refuse to go down to the shore or a few yards up the road, on a clear day, to reconfirm that witnessing presence. ~Denise Levertov “Witness”
Even on the days when the mountain is hidden behind a veil of clouds, I have every confidence it is there. In the off-chance that it might be visible if we took the time to drive up the highway to the foot of it, we did just that last night, risking seeing nothing but pea soup clouds at the higher elevation. Mount Baker remained behind its impenetrable veil, unseen.
A bit lower, at the foot of Mount Shuksan, initially massive clouds obscured it completely – invisible to us except the knowledge that we knew it was there as we had been in that exact spot before and witnessed it first hand. Yet due to powerful winds that blow in the Cascades, over the course of a few minutes Shuksan was exposed before our eyes in all its glory, first in shadowy profile and then crystal clear reality: it was there, movingly unmoved, a revelation of constancy.
No, it had not vanished overnight, gone to another county, blown up or melted down. My vision isn’t always penetrating enough to see it through cloud cover, but it is still there.
I know this and have faith it is true even when, within a few minutes, the clouds blew back over the mountain’s face and veiled it completely again.
Some days I simply don’t bother to look for the mountains, so preoccupied I walk right past their obvious grandeur and presence. Then they reach out to me and call me back. There are times when I turn a corner on the farm and glance up, and there Baker is, a silent and overwhelming witness to beauty and steadfastness. I literally gasp at not noticing before, at not remembering how I’m blessed by it being there even at the times I can’t be bothered.
The mountains confirm my lack of witness and still stay put to hold me fast yet another day. And so I keep coming back to gaze, sometimes just at clouds, yearning to lift the veil, and lift my own veil, just one more time.
Birds afloat in air’s current, sacred breath? No, not breath of God, it seems, but God the air enveloping the whole globe of being. It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, in the sacred, leaves astir, our wings rising, ruffled — but only the saints take flight. We cower in cliff-crevice or edge out gingerly on branches close to the nest. The wind marks the passage of holy ones riding that ocean of air. Slowly their wake reaches us, rocks us. But storms or still, numb or poised in attention, we inhale, exhale, inhale, encompassed, encompassed. ~Denise Levertov “In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being“
God reminds us when we are at our most anxious and needy: He cares for the birds and feeds them, lifts their wings in the wind and their feathered down keeps them warm. He gives them air to ride upon and air to breathe.
If them, then He cherishes us as well.
We too breathe in, breathe out, ruffled and fluffed, surrounded by the air we need and the air that lifts us. Lacking down, it is His breath keeping us warm.
Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled to leave the house and search for what might lift me back to what I had fallen away from, I stood by the shore waiting. I had walked in the silent woods: the trees withdrew into their secrets. Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray. Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies afloat on their element as I was not on mine.
I turned homeward, unsatisfied. But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again to linger, to look North before nightfall-the expanse of calm, of calming water, last wafts of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded: the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying widewinged toward me, settled just offshore on his post, took up his vigil. If you ask why this cleared a fog from my spirit, I have no answer. ~Denise Levertov “A Reward” from Evening Train.
~Lustravit lampade terras~ (He has illumined the world with a lamp) The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter. – Blaise Pascal from “Miscellaneous Writings”
And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment … a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present… ~Wendell Berry from Hannah Coulter
Worry and sorrow and angst are more contagious than the flu. I mask up and wash my hands of it throughout the day. There should be a vaccination against unnamed fears.
I want to say to my patients and to myself: Stop now, this moment in time. Stop and stop and stop.
Stop needing to be numb to all discomfort. Stop resenting the gift of each breath. Just stop. Instead, simply be.
I want to say: this moment, foggy or fine, is yours alone, this moment of weeping and sharing and breath and pulse and light.
Shout for joy in it. Celebrate it.
Be thankful for tears that can flow over grateful lips just as rain can clear the fog. Stop holding them back.
Just be– be blessed in both the fine and the foggy days– in the now and now and now.
I have a small grain of hope–
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.
I need more.
I break off a fragment to send you.
Please take this grain of a grain of hope so that mine won’t shrink.
Please share your fragment so that yours will grow.
Only so, by division, will hope increase,
like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source–
clumsy and earth-covered–
of grace.
~Denise Levertov “For the New Year, 1981”
One autumn years ago, my sister-in-law brought several paper bags full of iris roots resting solemnly in earth-covered clumps: dirt–dry misshaped feet and fingers crippled with potential. Her garden had become overcrowded and for her iris to continue to thrive, she needed to divide and share the roots.
We were late getting them into the ground but their clustered grace rose up forgiving us our clumsiness. They took hold and transformed our little courtyard into a Van Gogh landscape.
These iris will continue to gladden our hearts until we too must divide them to pass on their gift of beauty to another garden. This act– “by division, will hope increase”–feels radical yet that is exactly what God did in sending His Son to become earth-covered.
A part of God was broken off to put down roots, grow, thrive and be divided, over and over and over again to increase the beauty and grace for those of us limited to this soil.
Each spring our garden blooms so all can see and know: hope lives here —
even in the last few hours of an old and tired year
passing haltingly, hesitantly
into something brand new.
“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be as you have said.” Luke 1: 38
…to bear in her womb Infinite weight and lightness; to carry in hidden, finite inwardness, nine months of Eternity; to contain in slender vase of being, the sum of power – in narrow flesh, the sum of light.
Then bring to birth, push out into air, a Man-child needing, like any other, milk and love –
but who was God. ~Denise Levertov, from “Annunciation”
The Annunciation by Henry Tanner, Philadelphia Museum of Art
I want it to be the way I want it: my plans, my timing, my hopes and dreams first and foremost.
And then life happens and suddenly nothing looks the way it was supposed to be. I feel abandoned and completely emptied.
Yet only then, as an empty vessel, can I be filled. How am I to respond to such a paradox?
In my work in a University Health Center, I see this struggle in the lives of young adults: a tremendous lack of resiliency, an inability to ride the waves that crash and overwhelm. One of the most common responses to the unexpected is to panic, facing uncontrollable anxiety that interferes with eating, sleeping, working, studying. A common response to anxiety is to self-medicate in any way easily accessible: alcohol, marijuana, nicotine, sex, a friend’s prescription drugs. A little isn’t working so a lot might be better. The anxiety is compounded and descends into deepening depression.
The sadness and hopelessness, even anger –is a discouragement stemming from the lack of control of circumstances, feeling there is no way out, being unable to find another path to a different future. This leads too frequently to thoughts of ending one’s life as it seems too painful and pointless to continue, and more rarely, taking others’ lives at the same time in an attempt to make sure everyone else knows the depth of the pain.
There is an epidemic of hopelessness among our society’s young people that I’ve never before seen to this extent in my forty years of clinical work. To them, their debts seem too great, their reserves too limited, their foundations too shaky, their hope nonexistent, their future too dim. They cannot ride the waves without feeling they are drowning. So they look for any way out.
In the annunciation of the angel approaching a young woman out of the blue, Mary’s response to this overwhelming circumstance is a model for us all when we are hit by a wave we didn’t expect and had not prepared for.
She is prepared; she has studied and knows God’s Word and His promise to His people, even in the midst of trouble. She is able to articulate it beautifully in the song she sings as her response. She gives up her so-carefully-planned-out life to give life to God within her.
Her resilience sings through the ages and to each one of us in our troubles: may it be to me as you say.
May it be.
Your plans, Your purpose, Your promise.
Let it be.
Even if it may pierce my soul as with a sword so that I leak out to empty.
You are there to plug the bleeding hole and fill me.
So I sing through my fear, through my weariness, through my tears.
“Like Mary, we have no way of knowing… We can ask for courage, however, and trust that God has not led us into this new land only to abandon us there.” ~Kathleen Norrisfrom God With Us
Matthias Stomer’s Annunciation
Everything inside me cries for order Everything inside me wants to hide Is this shadow an angel or a warrior? If God is pleased with me, why am I so terrified? Someone tell me I am only dreaming Somehow help me see with Heaven’s eyes And before my head agrees, My heart is on its knees Holy is He. Blessed am I.
Be born in me Be born in me Trembling heart, somehow I believe That You chose me I’ll hold you in the beginning You will hold me in the end Every moment in the middle, Make my heart your Bethlehem Be born in me
All this time we’ve waited for the promise All this time You’ve waited for my arms Did You wrap yourself inside the unexpected So we might know that Love would go that far?
Be born in me Be born in me Trembling heart, somehow I believe That You chose me I’ll hold you in the beginning You will hold me in the end Every moment in the middle, Make my heart your Bethlehem Be born in me
I am not brave I’ll never be The only thing my heart can offer is a vacancy I’m just a girl Nothing more But I am willing, I am Yours Be born in me Be born in me Trembling heart, somehow I believe That You chose me I’ll hold you in the beginning You will hold me in the end Every moment in the middle, Make my heart your Bethlehem Be born in me
Praise the wet snow falling early. Praise the shadow my neighbor’s chimney casts on the tile roof even this gray October day that should, they say, have been golden. Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney’s shadow. Praise god or the gods, the unknown, that which imagined us, which stays our hand, our murderous hand, and gives us still, in the shadow of death, our daily life, and the dream still of goodwill, of peace on earth. Praise flow and change, night and the pulse of day. ~Denise Levertov from “Gloria”, an excerpt from Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus
Yes. It is true.
Our murderous hand
is not stayed nearly enough.
We continue to witness the deaths of innocents,
so many homeless cast aside,
and what to do for refugees seeking sanctuary
who may not believe as we do,
who do not look or talk or act like
us.
We are not them. They are not us.
But all image bearers.
Yet shadows are cast on the grayest of days
only because there is light still there,
hidden though it may be.
Be illuminated by mercy without the shadow cast.
Be mercy.
Be stilled by the pulse of life in others who are not us.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. ~T.S. Eliot from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear. ~Denise Levertov,The Breathing
Up to my knees in fog ~
some days up to my eyebrows
and how much longer will my head stay in the light.
I am drawn to fog
that absorbs light and color
and me.
Doing chores this foggy morning is a baptism:
complete immersion in the soft exhalation
of breath
when all God’s people say Amen.
