Love means to learn to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart, Without knowing it, from various ills— A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things So that they stand in the glow of ripeness. It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves: Who serves best doesn’t always understand. ~Czeslaw Milosz “Love” from New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001
Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass, And look at light reflected by the ground. There he will find everything we have lost… ~Czeslaw Milosz from “The Sun”
It’s not easy to subdue the needy ego and let the life-giving soul take control, even though doing so saves us grief and serves the world well. So if you see me on the street one day, quietly muttering, “Only one thing among many, only one thing among many…,” you’ll know I’m still working on it, or it’s still working on me. ~Parker Palmer “The Big Question: Does My Life Have Meaning?”
It is always tempting to be self-absorbed; since my heart stent placement nearly 8 months ago, I tend to analyze every sensation in my chest, fuss over how many steps I take daily, and get discouraged when the scale doesn’t register the sacrifices I think I’m making in my diet.
In other words, in my efforts to heal my physically-broken heart, I become the center of my attention, rather than just one among many things in the days/months/years I have left. I need to look at myself from a distance rather than under a microscope.
It is a skewed and futile perspective, seeking meaning and purpose in life by navel gazing.
Instead, I should be concentrating on the ripeness of each day. I’ve been given a second chance to recalibrate my journey through the time I have left, focusing outward, gazing at the wonders around me, sometimes getting down on my knees.
I don’t fully understand how I might serve others by what I share here online, or what I do in my local community with my hands and feet. I now know not to miss the moments basking in the glow of loving those around me, including you friends I may never meet on this side of the veil.
May you glow in ripeness as well.
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Every morning I walk through folds of fields searching.
Slants of sun sink through triangled bones of leaves: bold cold refuted.
Sparrows flutter warm in given nests, ungriefed, caught, sustained by common grace.
Faith is the tenderness of banked coals in a grate, Braeburn apples on a windowsill, winding crisp with possibility. The steadiness of conversations embered over decades; a fire that has never left off crackling – on this my soul has warmed her hands. Divine ardor: too strong and sweet for the many years I’ve walked on earth.
Love without hesitation has swept my floorboards for seasons. Deep and longing in and out of time the soul reaches out – and He, grasps entire. Hold – and tender. Incandescent. ~Claire Hellar “A Search in Autumn”
A second crop of hay lies cut and turned. Five gleaming crows search and peck between the rows. They make a low, companionable squawk, and like midwives and undertakers possess a weird authority.
Crickets leap from the stubble, parting before me like the Red Sea. The garden sprawls and spoils.
Cloud shadows rush over drying hay, fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine. The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod brighten the margins of the woods.
Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts; water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.
*
The cicada’s dry monotony breaks over me. The days are bright and free, bright and free.
Then why did I cry today for an hour, with my whole body, the way babies cry?
*
A white, indifferent morning sky, and a crow, hectoring from its nest high in the hemlock, a nest as big as a laundry basket …
In my childhood I stood under a dripping oak, while autumnal fog eddied around my feet, waiting for the school bus with a dread that took my breath away.
The damp dirt road gave off this same complex organic scent. I had the new books—words, numbers, and operations with numbers I did not comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled by use, in a blue canvas satchel with red leather straps.
Spruce, inadequate, and alien I stood at the side of the road. It was the only life I had. ~Jane Kenyon from “Three Songs at the End of Summer”
Yesterday, my son taught me the sign for lockdown— different than locking a door, or the shutdown we invented at the start of the pandemic. Little fistfuls of locks swept quickly between us, a sign designed especially for school.
My son spent his first years a different kind of locked up—an orphanage in Bangkok, where he didn’t speak and they couldn’t sign. He came home, age four, silent. We thought being here could open doors. It has, of course. He’s learned so much at the deaf school; the speech therapist calls it a Language Explosion. I keep lists of the words he’s gathered: vanilla, buckle, castle, stay. And lockdown. He absorbs it like the rest. Now the schools he builds with Magna-Tiles have lockdowns. I worry in trying to give him keys, we’ve only changed the locks.
To lock down a deaf school, we use a special strobe. When it flashes, we flip switches and sign through darkness. The children know to stay beneath the windows. Every five minutes a robot texts: “Shelter in place is still in effect. Please await further instructions.” Then we pull the fire alarm, a tactical move to unsettle the shooter. Hearing people can’t think with noise like that. A piercing thing we don’t detect, to cover the sounds we make, the sounds we don’t know we’re making. ~Sara Nović “Lockdown at the School for the Deaf”
The first day back to school now isn’t always the day after Labor Day as it was when I was growing up. Some students have been in classes for a couple weeks already, others started a few days ago to ease into the transition more gently.
Some return to the routine this morning – school buses roar past our farm brimming with eager young faces and stuffed back packs amid a combination of excitement and anxiety.
I remember well that foreboding that accompanied a return to school — the strict schedule, the inflexible rules and the often harsh adjustment of social hierarchies and friend groups. Even as a good learner and obedient student, I was a square peg being pushed into a round hole when I returned to the classroom. The students who struggled academically and who pushed against the boundaries of rules must have felt even more so. We all felt alien and inadequate to the immense task before us to fit in with one another, allow teachers to structure and open our minds to new thoughts, and to become something and someone more than who we were before.
Growth is so very hard, our stretching so painful, the tug and pull of friendships stressful. And for the last two decades, there is the additional fear of lockdowns and active shooters.
I worked with students on an academic calendar for over 30 years, yet though I’m now retired, I still don’t sleep well in anticipation of all this day means.
So I take a deep breath on a foggy post-Labor Day morning and am immediately taken back to the anxieties and fears of a skinny little girl in a new home-made corduroy jumper and saddle shoes, waiting for the schoolbus on our drippy wooded country road.
She is still me — just buried deeply in the fog of who I became after all those years of schooling, hidden somewhere under all the piled-on layers of learning and growing and hurting and stretching — I do remember her well.
Like every student starting a new adventure today, we could all use a hug.
Lo! I am come to autumn, When all the leaves are gold; Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out The year and I are old.
In youth I sought the prince of men, Captain in cosmic wars, Our Titan, even the weeds would show Defiant, to the stars.
But now a great thing in the street Seems any human nod, Where shift in strange democracy The million masks of God.
In youth I sought the golden flower Hidden in wood or wold, But I am come to autumn, When all the leaves are gold. ~G.K. Chesterton “Gold Leaves”
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Without realizing it, we fill important places in each others’ lives. It’s that way with the guy at the corner grocery, the mechanic at the local garage, the family doctor, teachers, neighbors, coworkers.
Good people who are always “there,” who can be relied upon in small,important ways. People who teach us, bless us, encourage us, support us, uplift us in the dailiness of life.
We never tell them. I don’t know why, but we don’t.
And, of course, we fill that role ourselves. There are those who depend on us,watch us, learn from us, take from us. And we never know.
You may never have proof of your importance, but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn’t do without you. The rub is that you don’t always know who. ~Robert Fulghumfrom All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
If there is one thing living through the pandemic taught me, it’s noticing the people in my life who may have not been as obvious to me before. I hadn’t realized how many folks truly are front-line serving others day-in and day-out.
It’s not only health care workers, grocery store clerks and school teachers but the list of essential workers is large, including law enforcement, plumbers and electricians, child care workers, water, sanitation and sewer maintenance, pastors, postal clerks, technicians who fix our cars and appliances and the farmers who tend the crops and livestock we need to live, as well as scores of others.
We are remarkably interdependent and need each other.
I realized how oblivious I had been before not taking the time to acknowledge the daily services I received from so many varied people. In fact, it has become more urgent for me to tell my family members and friends – some thousands of miles away from me – how much they mean to me.
Now, in non-pandemic times, I try to tell others – the grocery cashier, the medical assistant, the office receptionist – as simply and clearly as I can, whenever possible, that I appreciate what they have done and what they continue to do, how they make life better for us all.
I also need to continue to nurture relationships with family and friends crucial to my own well-being. I need them all.
I need you all.
And it is important to me that you know.
Well over a thousand of you receive these daily Barnstorming emails and posts – a handful of you communicate with me regularly. I treasure those messages, thank you!
We all need encouragement that we are making a positive difference in others’ lives and you all make a difference to me.
O! for a horse with wings! ~William Shakespeare from Cymbeline
photo by Bette Vander Haakphoto by Bette Vander Haak
Be winged. Be the father of all flying horses. ~C.S. Lewis from The Magician’s Nephew
photo by Bette Vander Haak
photo by Bette Vander Haak
One reason why birds and horses are happy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses. ~Dale Carnegie
photo by Bette Vander Haak
When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; ~William Shakespeare from Henry V
We all need someone along for the ride with us, blessing us with their company — a precious friend who has our back and scratches it wonderfully – helping to keep the biting flies away by gobbling them up.
It is symbiosis at its best: a relationship built on mutual trust and helpfulness. In exchange for relief from annoying insects that a tail can’t flick off, a Haflinger horse serves up bugs on a smorgasbord landing platform located safely above farm cats and marauding coyotes.
Thanks to their perpetual full meal deals, these cowbirds do leave generous “deposits” behind that need to be brushed off at the end of the day. Like any good friendship, tidying up the little messes left behind is a small price to pay for the bliss of companionable comradeship.
We’re buds after all – best forever friends, trotting the air while the earth sings along.
And this is exactly what friends are for: one provides the feast while the other provides the wings, even if things get messy.
Be winged. Be fed. Cleaning up together.
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I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them.
The church, I think, is God’s way of saying, “What I have in the pot is yours, and what I have is a group of misfits whom you need more than you know and who need you more than they know.”
“Take, and eat,” he says, “and take, and eat, until the day, and it is coming, that you knock on my door. I will open it, and you will see me face to face.”
He is preparing a table. He will welcome us in. Jesus will be there, smiling and holy, holding out a green bean casserole. And at that moment, what we say, what we think, and what we believe will be the same: “I didn’t know how badly I needed this.” ~Jeremy Clive Huggins from “The Church Potluck”
We celebrate end of winter’s overlong stay, And find a respite from embittered mood, Ignore our sagging incomes for a day, With shared potluck communion of comfort food.
Beef stew stocked with veggies and potatoes, Drizzled bread cubes over macaroni and cheese, Salted nachos dotted with ripened tomatoes, Meat loaf topped with ketchup please.
Home made bread from the oven, steaming and soft Fresh hot chocolate and coffee provide reason to stay, Remember the smell of shared food will lazily waft So welcome and hardy with no debt to pay.
When the job is lost or the family is sour, Too many nights lonely and aching in pain, Fellowship together for only an hour, Nurtured and nourished, is never in vain.
Once gratefully finishing up the last crumb, When life’s feast is done, the journey’s end near Hang on to your fork awaiting dessert that’s to come Instead of clinging to worry and unknown fear.
Keep your fork when uncertain about what comes tomorrow It will remind you of what you can not yet see; The meal’s not quite over, there’ll be sweetness, not sorrow: We’ll celebrate together, the best is yet to be.
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It’s so easy to look and see what we pass through in this world, but we don’t. If you’re like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what’s there. ~Frederick Buechner from The Remarkable Ordinary
Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. John 21:12
It is too easy, by the next day, to let go of Easter — to slide back into the Monday routine, managing our best to get through each day, our jaws set, our teeth gritted, as we have before.
We are blinded by our grief, shivering in misery, thinking Him only the Gardener as He passed by. We don’t pay attention to Who is right before us, Who is always tending us: the new Adam, caring for a world desperate for rescue.
God knows this about us. So He invites us to breakfast on Monday and every day thereafter.
He feeds us, a tangible and meaningful act of nourishing us in our most basic human needs though we’ve done nothing to deserve the gift. He cooks up fish on a beach at dawn and welcomes us to join Him, as if nothing extraordinary has just happened.
Just yesterday evening he reviewed His Word and broke bread in Emmaus, opening the eyes and hearts of those like us who failed to see Who this is walking beside them.
This is no ordinary Gardener.
When He offers up a meal of His Word, the gift is nothing less than Himself.
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The church, I think, is God’s way of saying, “What I have in the pot is yours, and what I have is a group of misfits whom you need more than you know and who need you more than they know.”
“Take, and eat,” he says, “and take, and eat, until the day, and it is coming, that you knock on my door. I will open it, and you will see me face to face.”
He is preparing a table. He will welcome us in. Jesus will be there, smiling and holy, holding out a green bean casserole. And at that moment, what we say, what we think, and what we believe will be the same: “I didn’t know how badly I needed this.” ~Jeremy Clive Huggins from “The Church Potluck”
“When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. 9 If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. 10 But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. 11 For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
“When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. 13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” Luke 14: 7-14
In the unspoken hierarchy of what makes a church function, I’m a kitchen lady and always will be. I remember those very women from my childhood church of the fifties and sixties– their tight-knit ability to function as if one organism, swarming in aprons among tables set up in the fellowship hall and bustling around in the back by the stoves with steaming pots and pans and the occasionally dropped plate.
They kept the rest of us alive, those church ladies, by feeding us efficiently and plentifully and never ever sitting down. I would occasionally see them eating standing up in the back of the hall, chatting amiably among themselves after the rest of us were served, but I knew they carefully wrapped up the leftovers during the clean up to deliver to shut-ins who couldn’t make it to the church supper.
I knew I was destined to become a kitchen lady, shy and introverted as I am, hiding myself behind huge plates of food and piles of dish cloths. Our church potlucks together every Sunday after our evening worship. For me, it is a welcoming place of comfort and clean up filled with plenty of leftovers for anyone who needs them.
That perfectly describes the kingdom of God in my book and His Book.
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This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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…we all suffer. For we all prize and love; and in this present existence of ours, prizing and loving yield suffering. Love in our world is suffering love. Some do not suffer much, though, for they do not love much. Suffering is for the loving. This, said Jesus, is the command of the Holy One: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In commanding us to love, God invites us to suffer.
Over there, you are of no help. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench. ~Nicholas Wolterstorff from Lament for a Son
I wondered if 7:30 AM was too early to call her. As a sleep-deprived fourth year medical student finishing a long night admitting patients in the hospital, I selfishly needed to hear her voice.
I wanted to know how Margy was doing with the latest round of chemotherapy for breast cancer; I knew she was not sleeping well these days. She was wearing a new halo brace—a metal contraption that wrapped around her head like a scaffolding to secure her degenerating cervical spine from collapsing from metastatic tumor growths in her bones.
She knew, we all knew, she was trying to buy more time from a life of rapidly diminishing days.
Each patient I had seen the previous 24 hours while working in the Emergency Room benefited from the interviewing skills Margy had taught each medical student in our class. She reminded us that each patient had an important story to tell, and no matter how pressured our time, we needed to ask questions that gave permission for that story to be told. As a former nun now married with two teenage children, Margy had become our de facto therapist at a time no medical school hired supportive counselors.
She insisted physicians-in-training remember the suffering soul thriving inside the broken body.
“Just let the patient know with certainty, through your eyes, your body language, your words, that you want to hear what they have to say. You can heal so much hurt simply by sitting beside them and caring enough to listen…”
After her diagnosis with stage 4 cancer, Margy herself became the broken vessel who needed the glue of a good listener. She continued to teach, often from her bed at home. I planned to visit her that day, maybe help out by cleaning her house, or take her for a drive as a diversion.
Her phone rang only once after I dialed her number. There was a long pause; I could hear a clearing of her throat. A deep dam of tears welled behind a muffled “Hello?”
“Margy?”
“Yes? Emily? ”
“Margy? What is it? What’s wrong?”
Her voice shattered like glass into fragments, strangling on words that struggled to form.
“A policeman just left. He told us our boy is dead.”
I sat in stunned silence, listening to her sobs, completely unequipped to know how to respond.
None of this made sense. I knew her son was on college spring break, heading to Mexico for a missions trip.
“I’m here, what’s happened?”
“The doorbell rang about an hour ago. Larry got up to answer it. I heard him talking to someone downstairs, so I decided to try to get up and go see what was going on. There was a policeman sitting with Larry on the couch. I knew it had to be about Gordy.”
She paused and took in a shuddering breath.
“The group was driving through the night in California. He was asleep in the back of the camper. They think he was sleepwalking and walked right out of the back of the moving camper and was hit by another car.”
Silence. A strangling choking silence.
“They’ll bring him home to me, won’t they? I need to know I can see my boy again. I need to tell him how much I love him.”
“They’ll bring him home to you, Margy. I’m on my way to help you get ready…“
God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. … It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor. … Instead of explaining our suffering, God shares it. ~Nicholas Wolterstorff from Lament for a Son
This year’s Lenten theme:
…where you go I will go… Ruth 1:16
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Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man. Colossians 4: 6
Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, with all malice,and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Ephesians 4: 31-32
You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Matthew 5:43-45
And whom do I call my enemy? An enemy must be worthy of engagement. I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking. It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind. The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun. It sees and knows everything. It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing. The door to the mind should only open from the heart. An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend. ~Joy Harjo “This Morning I Pray For My Enemies”
I have a heart full of questions Quieting all my suggestions What is the meaning of Christian In this American life?
Is there a way to love always? Living in enemy hallways Don’t know my foes from my friends and Don’t know my friends anymore Power has several prizes Handcuffs can come in all sizes Love has a million disguises But winning is simply not one ~Jon Guerra from “Citizens”
…{His is} the love for the enemy– love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world. ~Frederich Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat
After watching the appalling ambush of disrespect and rudeness by our country’s two leaders in the Oval Office yesterday toward visiting Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, I find myself gnashing my teeth in anger.
Now – who indeed is the friend, and who is the enemy?
This was not the time or forum for a public, rather than private high stakes discussion: the presence of cameras encourages bullies to have their say in front of a vast audience, determined to intimidate in order to “make good television.”
Simply agreeing to disagree on some issues in a difficult negotiation no longer seems an option. Why can’t a debate honor the other side enough to facilitate a civil discussion? Instead, if someone doesn’t see it your way, they’re perceived as ungrateful, morally deficient, hostile or worst of all, they have become the enemy.
But Ukraine is not the enemy and never wants to be. They want to remain whole and free to govern themselves and need help to withstand the attacks of their neighborhood bully.
Those of us who have been around awhile know: bellowing hateful words puts a match to angry feelings that burn hot inside and outside. Usually a fruitful political debate over polarizing opinions can inspire a profound sense of purpose and compromise, yet if there is no respect or honor shown, it burns to ashes.
I disagree vehemently with what our leaders are doing and in particular, the boorish and foolish way they are doing it. Their school yard behavior is a far cry from the biblical command to exhibit grace and compassion instead of hostility and retribution.
Fickle things are those angry words – someone lights a match to them, keeps stoking the fire with new fuel, over and over again until nothing remains standing.
Let us refuse to be the kindling as our leaders seek our attention daily by inflicting more trauma and angst, not just to the citizens of Ukraine and Europe, but to the U.S. citizens to whom they are ultimately accountable.
Let us resist our own angry gnashing of teeth by praying that only God’s transforming love for enemies can soften the hearts and minds of the bullies of the world.
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