Tag: Faith

Begin to Rise

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Made for spirituality,
we wallow in introspection.
Made for joy,
we settle for pleasure.
Made for justice,
we clamor for vengeance.
Made for relationship,
we insist on our own way.
Made for beauty,
we are satisfied with sentiment.

But new creation has already begun.
The sun has begun to rise.

Christians are called to leave behind,
in the tomb of Jesus Christ,
all that belongs to the brokenness
and incompleteness of the present world. 
It is time, in the power of the Spirit,
to take up our proper role,
our fully human role,
as agents, heralds and stewards
of the new day that is dawning. 
That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian,
to follow Jesus Christ into the new world,
God’s new world,
which he has thrown open before us.
~N.T. Wright from Simply Christian

 

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Solidarity and Silence

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We hear so much today of the word solidarity. It has become a part of our vocabulary in the past twenty or thirty years. Today our solidarity with brothers and sisters of our faith, and of other faiths, in a part of the world where there is clearly an effort to eliminate them is something that we simply cannot in conscience ignore.

Often we are asked: “How was it possible that in human history atrocities occur?” They occur for two reasons: because there are those prepared to commit them, and then there are those who remain silent. And the actions in Iraq and in Syria today are happening to women, children, men—their displacement not the least. Things happening to them is something that we really are not free to ignore, and sometimes all we have to raise is our voice. . . .

I ask myself: Where are these voices? Where the voices of parliaments and congresses? Where are the voices of campuses? Where are the voices of community leaders? . . . Why a silence?
~Cardinal Donald Wuerl at the 2014 convocation at the Catholic University of America

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“Silence in the face of evil,” he said, “is evil itself. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Summer Will Come True

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photo by Harry Rodenberger
photo by Harry Rodenberger

 

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I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you.
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.
~C.S. Lewis

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photo by Kate Steensma

Listening to Lent — Often Enters Fear

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When amidst the storm I’m shaken
wearied by the wind and waves
Lord within me faith awaken
Jesus hear me call your name.

Not to take away the turmoil
Not to change the tempest tide
But to keep a constant vigil
Hold me through the sleepless night.

Chorus:

Be my rock, my steady love
Your grace, my all
For ’tis enough
Often enters fear so subtle
Weakening where once was love.
For despair trade hope eternal
For doubt exchange only trust

When my faith is firmly planted
Rooted in salvation’s hill
No deceiver, neither tempter can
collapse what Christ has built.
~Allie LaPointe

 

As He entered His final week
He knew His turmoil
could not be taken away
The awful tide could not be turned.

So He walked on in hope and trust
Away from fear and doubt and despair,
And now He shows me
What faith and grace can build.

It is enough.
Always enough.
Enough forever
and evermore.

 

Listening to Lent — Unchanging Love

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If thou but trust in God to guide thee,
and hope in God through all thy ways,
God will give strength, what e’er betide thee,
to bear thee through the evil days.
Who trusts in God’s unchanging love
builds on the rock that naught can move.

Only be still, and wait God’s leisure
in cheerful hope, with heart content
To take what e’er thy Maker’s pleasure
and all discerning love hath sent;
We know our inmost wants are known,
for we are called to be God’s own.

Sing, pray, and keep God’s ways unswerving;
so do thine own part faithfully,
And trust God’s word; though undeserving,
thou yet shalt find it true for thee.
God never yet forsook at need the soul
that trusted God in-deed.
~Georg Neumark

Trust~
a challenge for us
who are so volatile, so transient and fleeting,
to imagine an unchanging love
that lasts
through the worst storms and violent upheavals.

He of strength and hope
loves us~~
the weak, the broken, the undeserving.
He causes us to burst into bloom.

Farm Rhythms and Seasons

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photo by Lea Gibson

When I pull open the barn doors,
every morning
and each evening,
as my grandfathers did
one hundred years ago,
seven rumbling voices
rise in greeting.
We exchange scents,
nuzzle each others’ ears.

I do my chores faithfully
as my grandfathers once did–
draw fresh water
into buckets,
wheel away
the pungent mess underfoot,
release an armful of summer
from the bale,
reach under heavy manes
to stroke silken necks.

I don’t depend
on our horses’ strength
and willingness to
don harness
to carry me to town
or move the logs
or till the soil
as my grandfathers did.

Instead,
these soft eyed souls,
born on this farm
two long decades ago,
are simply grateful
for my constancy
morning and night
to serve their needs
until the day comes
they need no more.

And I depend on them
to depend on me
to be there
to open the doors;
their low whispering welcome
gives voice
to the blessings of
living on a farm
ripe with rhythms and seasons,
as if today and tomorrow are
just like one hundred years ago.

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photo by Emily Dieleman

A Bell is Rung

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“In the end,
coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming,
of picking up the threads of a lost life,
of responding to a bell that had long been ringing,
of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.”
~Malcolm Muggeridge

“I was still ringing.  I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

When that sense of belonging takes place,
when our eyes and heart have opened
and we know we have found home,
our joyful ringing never ceases.

We have been lifted and struck by coming to faith.

Warm Milk of Light

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portrait of Dan's mom, Emma Gibson, praying, by granddaughter Sara Lenssen
portrait of Emma Gibson, Dan’s mom in her later years, photo taken by granddaughter Sara Lenssen
I sit with braided fingers   
and closed eyes
in a span of late sunlight.   
The spokes are closing.
It is fall: warm milk of light,   
though from an aging breast.   
I do not mean to pray.   
The posture for thanks or   
supplication is the same   
as for weariness or relief.   
But I am glad for the luck   
of light. Surely it is godly,   
that it makes all things
begin, and appear, and become   
actual to each other.
Light that’s sucked into   
the eye, warming the brain   
with wires of color.
Light that hatched life
out of the cold egg of earth.
~May Swenson from “October”

The Trivial Transfigured

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A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a wind-mill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment,- -and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.
~Walter Pater from “The Renaissance”

The accident of light does happen, again and again, but when I least expect it.  I need to be ready for it; in a blink, it can be gone.  Yet in that moment, everything is changed and transformed forever.  The thing itself, trivial and transient becomes something other, merely because of how it is illuminated.  And so am I, trivial and transient, lit from outside myself, transfigured by a love and sacrifice that I can never expect or deserve. I need to be ready for it.

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