Tag: hidden

What is Waiting Behind the Wall

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If ever we see those gardens again,
The summer will be gone—at least our summer.
Some other mockingbird will concertize
Among the mulberries, and other vines
Will climb the high brick wall to disappear.

How many footpaths crossed the old estate—
The gracious acreage of a grander age—
So many trees to kiss or argue under,
And greenery enough for any mood.
What pleasure to be sad in such surroundings.

At least in retrospect. For even sorrow
Seems bearable when studied at a distance,
And if we speak of private suffering,
The pain becomes part of a well-turned tale
Describing someone else who shares our name.

Still, thinking of you, I sometimes play a game.
What if we had walked a different path one day,
Would some small incident have nudged us elsewhere
The way a pebble tossed into a brook
Might change the course a hundred miles downstream?

The trick is making memory a blessing,
To learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire,
Of wanting nothing more than what has been,
To know the past forever lost, yet seeing
Behind the wall a garden still in blossom.
~Dana Gioia “The Lost Garden” from Interrogations at Noon.

At present we are on the outside of the world,
the wrong side of the door. . . .
We cannot mingle with the splendours we see.
But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling
with the rumour that it will not always be so.
Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
C.S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory

Memory can play tricks,
either smoothing over
the many potholes in the road of life,
or digging the holes so deep,
I fall in and am lost.

Whenever I am feeling regret
for the things I have done,
or all that I have left undone,
I remember I have walked on
paths of beauty beyond imagining.

I wouldn’t change much about what has been,
knowing there is much more beauty to come.

I remember gates and doors I could not open.
Just a peek told me all I needed to know:
there is a hidden, lost garden just waiting,
still blooming, still inspiring, still brimming
full of everything any of us could ever need.

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Hiding Nothing

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You can hide nothing from God.
The mask you wear before men will do you no good before Him.
He wants to see you as you are,
He wants to be gracious to you.
You do not have to go on lying to yourself and your brothers,
as if you were without sin;
you can dare to be a sinner.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Life Together

In your hands

The dog, the donkey, surely they know
They are alive.
Who would argue otherwise?

But now, after years of consideration,
I am getting beyond that.
What about the sunflowers? What about
The tulips, and the pines?

Listen, all you have to do is start and
There’ll be no stopping.
What about mountains? What about water
Slipping over rocks?

And speaking of stones, what about
The little ones you can
Hold in your hands, their heartbeats
So secret, so hidden it may take years

Before, finally, you hear them?
~Mary Oliver “in your hands” from Swan: Prose and Poems

When I take myself to the doctor, I trust I’m seeing someone who tries to know me thoroughly enough that he or she can help me move out of illness into better health.

This is how acceptance feels: trusting someone enough to come out of hiding, allowing them to see the parts of me I prefer to keep hidden.

As a physician myself, I am reminded by the amount of “noticing” I did in the course of my work. Each patient, and there were so many,  deserved my full attention for the few minutes we were together.  I started my clinical evaluation the minute I entered the room and I began taking in all the complex verbal and non-verbal clues offered up, sometimes unwittingly, by another human being.

During the COVID pandemic, my interactions with patients became all “virtual” so I didn’t have the ability to observe as thoroughly as I usually did. Instead, I needed them to tell me outright what was going on in their lives, their minds and their hearts in both spoken or written words. I couldn’t ‘see’ them, even on a screen, in the same way as face to face in the same room.

How can someone call out their worries to me when they are hidden behind a camera lens?

I can’t witness first hand the trembling hands, their sweatiness, their scars of self injury.  Still, I am their audience and a witness to their struggle; even more, I must understand their fears to best help them. My brain must rise to the occasion of taking in another person, accepting them for who they are, with every wart and blemish, offering them the gift of compassion and simply be there for them at that moment.

God isn’t blinded in His Holy work as I am in my clinical duties. He knows us thoroughly because He made us; He knows our thoughts before we put them into words. There is no point in trying to stay hidden from Him.

He holds us, little pebbles that we are, in His Hand, and He listens to our secret heartbeats.

Those of us who believe we can remain effectively hidden will never be invisible to God.

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For My Soul: Hidden Grain

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  “All Christian thinking is resurrection thinking.” —Jay Parini
Let this sorrow be a fallow field
and grief the seeding rain.
Then may I be hidden, a grain
in night’s still mystery,
until the day
I’m risen, yield
bound in sheaves of joy,
and Negev is an ecstasy.
~Franchot Ballinger, “Let Me Be Like Those Who Dream” from Crossings

Ears of Wheat – Vincent Van Gogh
Wheat Field with Sheaves -Vincent Van Gogh
Sheaves of Wheat in a Field –Vincent Van Gogh

The love of God most High for our soul
is so wonderful that it surpasses all
knowledge. No created being can fully know
the greatness, the sweetness, the
tenderness, of the love that our Maker has
for us. By his Grace and help therefore let
us in spirit stand in awe and gaze, eternally
marveling at the supreme, surpassing,
single-minded, incalculable love that God,
Who is all goodness, has for us.
~Juliana of Norwich “God’s Love for Us”

…you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God;  for

“All flesh is like grass
    and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
    and the flower falls,
 but the word of the Lord remains forever.”
1Peter 1:23-25

The fields around our farm still show no signs of wakening.
They are stubble and moss, mole hills and mud.
It is unimaginable they might soon produce anything.

Then grief rains down on buried seed and the grain will rise.

All winter everything, everyone,
has been so dead, so hidden, so hopeless;
His touch calls us back to life.
Nothing can be more hopeful than the barren made fruitful,
the ugly made beautiful,
the dead made alive.

Love is come again, digging deep
into the fallow fields of our hearts.

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”

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Absence of Secrecy

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I came here to study hard things – rock mountain and salt sea –
and to temper my spirit on their edges. 
“Teach me thy ways, O Lord” is, like all prayers, a rash one,
and one I cannot but recommend. 
These mountains — Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan,
the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula —
are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world…. 
That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft,
holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain,
makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist,
only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy.
~Annie Dillard from Holy the Firm

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatique,
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.  It has not moved in the night, gone to another county, blown up or melted down. My vision isn’t penetrating enough to see it through cloud cover today, but it will return to my line of sight, if not tomorrow, perhaps the next day, maybe not until next week. 

I know this and have faith it is true – the mountain does not keep itself a secret.

On the days when I am not bothering to look for it, too preoccupied so walk right past its obvious grandeur and presence, then it reaches out to me and calls me back, refocusing me. 

There are times when I turn a corner on the farm and glance up, and there it 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.

It witnesses my lack of witness and, so in its mysterious way of being in plain sight, stays 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 as a result, lift my veil, just one more time.

photo by Nate Gibson

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Getting Out of the Way

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Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to.
You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see
and my self is the earth’s shadow
that keeps me from seeing all the moon.
The crescent is very beautiful
and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see;
but what I am afraid of, dear God,
is that my self shadow will grow so large
that it blocks the whole moon,
and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.

I do not know You God
because I am in the way.
Please help me to push myself aside.
~Flannery O’Connor from her journals

I get in God’s way all the time — as if I were a photobomb of a shadow casting darkness on all that is light and beauty. With my human “blinders” on,  I can’t see beyond where I stand, where I move, what I feel, what I fear, what I see and hear.

And I certainly get in the way of my knowing God. I think all this is about me.

It’s not.

He’s here, though partially hidden in my need to be front and center.
He’s here, His glory and truth manifest behind me, if only I would turn to see.
He’s here, gently instructing me to get out of my own way and His way.
He’s here, fully radiant, once I step back in awe to actually look at Who really matters.

photo by Harry Rodenberger
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An Enticing Driveway

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What lies at the end of enticing
country driveways, curving
off among trees?

The big trees enclose
an expanse of sky, trees and sky
together protect the clearing.
One is sheltered here
from the assaultive world
as if escaped from it, and yet
once arrived, is given (oneself
and others being a part of that world)
a generous welcome.
It’s paradise
as a paradigm for how
to live on earth,
how to be private and open
quiet and richly eloquent.

It is paradise, and paradise
is a kind of poem; it has
a poem’s characteristics:
inspiration; starting with the given;
unexpected harmonies; revelations.
It’s rare among
the worlds one finds
at the end of enticing driveways.
~Denise Levertov, “A Clearing” from This Great Unknowing.

I’d made up my mind to it, I’d stay in and read.
But a light shower, earlier, had imbued the woods
with a peculiar sweetness
that drifted in through the open window
and tempted me out of doors.

And now, with the mountains reflecting
that last slanting light
that dusts everything in gold,
there was no help for it;
I felt an enchantment
that encouraged me to venture to deeper realms,
deeper far and more mysterious
than my favorite armchair would have allowed.

I paused at an opening in the trees,
where a russet needled path
beckoned inward with an irresistible charm.

Under a canopy of branches,
a tiny bird flitted back and forth,
as if to guide me on my way;
and, on either side, forget-me-nots nodded,
sprinkled there, no doubt, from a truant elf’s watering can.

A curve ahead…
and I took the strange fancy that at its end
I would find a thatched cottage
with a chubby “Hansel” peeking ‘round the corner.

Ah, such is the magical quality of a little lane
winding its way through the woods.
I will return often to wander here,
where dreams and reality
merge and meet
in the moment.
~Melody Rhodes “A Country Lane”

I have always longed to live at the end of a long driveway but have not ever had that opportunity despite living in some lovely rural settings. I think I come from highly practical people who saw long driveways as unnecessary fluff when you can build your home right next to a road.

So, driveway-deprived as I am, I look for enticing country lanes wherever I go. It is partly the anticipation of what my imagination might find beyond the curve and the trees, but much of my pleasure is in looking for the perfect lane to make the mental journey.

Life of course is never perfect and certainly there is plenty that impedes the journey to my destination. Yet I know what all is promised and how I must persist to get to that most heavenly of homes, waiting just around that curve.

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A Cache of Love

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January’s drop-down menu
leaves everything to the imagination:
splotch the ice, splice the light,
remake the spirit…

Just get on with it,
doing what you have to do
with the gray palette that lies
to hand. The sun’s coming soon.

A future, then, of warmth and runoff,
and old faces surprised to see us.
A cache of love, I’d call it,
opened up, vernal, refreshed.
~Sidney Burris “Runoff”

When I reach the end of January in all its grayest pallor, it is hard to imagine another six weeks of winter ahead. It can feel like nature offers only a few options, take your pick: a soupy foggy morning, a drizzly mid-day, a crisp northeast wind, an unexpected snow flurry, a soggy evening.

Every once in awhile the January drop-down menu will add a special surprise: icy spikes on grass blades, frozen droplets on birch branches, hair ice on wood, crystallized weeds like jewelry in the sun, a pink flannel blanket sunrise, an ocean-of-orange sunset.

Then I realize January’s gray palette is merely preparation for what has been hidden from me the whole time. There is Love cached away, and as it is revealed, it will not let me go.

photo of hair ice in King County, Washington taken by Laura Reifel

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thy ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O Joy that seeks me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.
~George Matheson

(“O Love” was inspired by the words of Scottish minister, George Matheson in 1882. Blinded at the age of nineteen, his fiancé called off their engagement and his sister cared for him as he endured new challenges.  Years later, on the eve of his sister’s wedding, he faced the painful reminder of his own heartache and loss as he penned the words to this hymn.) from ElaineHagenborg.com

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Calling Out

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The geese

slicing this frozen sky know
where they are going—
and want to get there.

Their call, both strange
and familiar, calls
to the strange and familiar

heart, and the landscape
becomes the landscape
of being, which becomes

the bright silos and snowy
fields over which the nuanced
and muscular geese

are calling—while time
and the heart take measure.
~Jane Mead, “The Geese” from To the Wren

Vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats
awakens me and I look up
at a minute-long string of black geese’
following low past the moon the white
course of the snow-covered river and
by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly bear the beauty of this world
~Franz Wright from “Cloudless Snowfall”

A psalm of geese
labours overland

cajoling each other
near half…

The din grew immense.
No need to look up.

All you had to do
was sit in the sound

and put it down
as best you could…

It’s not a lonesome sound
but a panic,

a calling out to the others
to see if they’re there;

it’s not the lung-full thrust of the prong of arrival
in late October;
not the slow togetherness

of the shape they take
on the empty land
on the days before Christmas:

this is different, this is a broken family,
the young go the wrong way,

then at daybreak, rise up and follow their elders
again filled with dread,
at the returning sound of the journey ahead.
~Dermot Healy from A Fool’s Errand 

We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times.

Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.
~Annie Dillard from The Meaning of Life 

As I am at once strange and familiar,
I call out to God to see if He’s there;
He knows me as He came to earth
both strange and familiar.

His face is no longer hidden
yet I hide my face from Him.

When I call out to Him
I try to conceal
the tremble of my hands,
my eyes welling up,
breathing out the deep sigh of doubt — 
He witnesses my struggle,
offering me the gift of being noticed
and heard.

There is beauty in this world and
in His face,
and through it all, my eyes are on you.

It is well.

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The Beginning Shall Remind Us of the End: Calling Out

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Vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats
awakens me and I look up
at a minute-long string of black geese
following low past the moon the white
course of the snow-covered river and
by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly bear the beauty of this world
~Franz Wright from “Cloudless Snowfall”

A psalm of geese
labours overland

cajoling each other
near half…

The din grew immense.
No need to look up.

All you had to do
was sit in the sound

and put it down
as best you could…

It’s not a lonesome sound
but a panic,

a calling out to the others
to see if they’re there…
~Dermot Healy from A Fool’s Errand 

Hear my prayer, Lord;
    let my cry for help come to you.
Do not hide Your face from me in the day of my distress;
Incline Your ear to me;
In the day when I call answer me quickly.
Psalm 102:1-2

We are here to witness the creation and abet it.
We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow
and each stone on the beach but, especially,
we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other.

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
We witness our generation and our times.
We watch the weather.
Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.
~Annie Dillard from The Meaning of Life edited by David Friend

We tend to keep our faces hidden from each other, even when we want to be recognized and known, especially when we are distressed.

What someone tells me about what they are feeling may not always match what I notice: trembling hands, a deep sigh, eyes filling with tears.  I am audience and witness to their burden and struggle; even more, I am called to listen, offering them the gift of being noticed and being there for them, just them, at that moment.

I know this because it is how God cares for me: when I call out to Him, sometimes in a panic to see if He is there, I know I am not playing or praying to an empty house. God is ready and listening, loving us enough to show us His face in the form of a helpless infant.

This is a God who allows Himself to be vulnerable to those He loves, whether laid to sleep in a wooden manager or dying nailed to a tree.

He calls out to us to see if we are there, ready to listen.

Psalm 102: 1 Hear my prayer, Lord; let my cry for help come to you.

This year’s Barnstorming Advent theme “… the Beginning shall remind us of the End” is taken from the final lines in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”

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By the Shade of Thought and Dreams

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In the high woods that crest our hills,
Upon a steep, rough slope of forest ground,
Where few flowers grow, sweet blooms today I found
Of the Autumn Crocus, blowing pale and fair.
Dim falls the sunlight there;
And a mild fragrance the lone thicket fills.

Languidly curved, the long white stems
Their purple flowers’ gold treasure scarce display:
Lost were their leaves since in the distant spring,

Their February sisters showed so gay.
Roses of June, ye too have followed fleet!
Forsaken now, and shaded as by thought,
As by the human shade of thought and dreams,
They bloom ‘mid the dark wood, whose air has wrought
With what soft nights and mornings of still dew!
Into their slender petals that clear hue,
Like paleness in fresh cheeks; a thing
On earth, I vowed, ne’er grew
More delicately pure, more shyly sweet.

Child of the pensive autumn woods!
So lovely, though thou dwell obscure and lone,
And though thy flush and gaiety be gone;
Say, among flowers of the sad, human mind,
Where shall I ever find
So rare a grace? in what shy solitudes?
~Robert Laurence Binyon “Autumn Crocus”

The early September emergence
of autumn crocus is always unexpected,
surprising even when I know where they hide
in the shade of spent peony bushes.

They are bound in waning summer dreams beneath the surface,
their incubation triggered by retreating light from above,
unlike their springtime cousins who emerge to the sun through snow.

The autumn crocus waits with thoughtful temerity,
summoned forth from earthly grime
to remind us the end of summer is not the end of them or us.

A luminous gift of hope and beauty
borne from a humble bulb;
plain and only soil-adorned.

Slowly unfurling on a pale leggy stem,
the tender lavender petals peel back to reveal golden crowns of saffron,
brazenly blooming when all else is dying back.

In the end, they too painfully wilt, deeply bruised and purple –
under the Sun’s reflection made manifest;
returning defeated, inglorious, fallen, to dust.

Yet we know – they remind us – they (and we) will rise again.

…we know what is coming behind the crocus. The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned. . . It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.
C.S. Lewis from God in the Dock

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