Tag: holy

Ignore It or See It

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Divinity is not playful.
The universe was not made in jest
but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
By a power that is unfathomably secret,
and holy, and fleet.
There is nothing to be done about it,
but ignore it,
or see. 
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

For since the creation of the world
God’s invisible qualities—
his eternal power and divine nature—
have been clearly seen,
being understood from what has been made,
so that people are without excuse.
Romans 1:20

We weren’t conceived by random happenstance –
not even the unwelcomed millions wished or washed away
before ever taking a breath.

We are here because we were earnestly needed and wanted,
by a power and divinity with a capacity for love and compassion
beyond anything we are capable of.

We aren’t a cosmic joke,
or random couplings of DNA.
We aren’t pawns in the universe’s chess game.

We have the capacity to see
the image of God in one another,
and in the mirror,
yet we ignore it.

God won’t be ignored nor does He accept feeble excuses.

We are invited by Christ Himself to
“come and see.” (John 1:39)

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The Flower Unfurled

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Mid-January and still
the last amaryllis refuses.
Planted in October,
it just now raises
a green bud tip
to the bright window. 
Inside the plain package
waits a blaring red,
the flower furled,
held like breath
in the trumpeter’s body.
~Francesca Bell “Late Blooming” from What Small Sound

Sometimes when you’re in a dark place
you think you’ve been buried,
but actually you’ve been planted.
~Christine Caine

It came home with me over a month ago,
a non-descript bulb with a green sword-blade shoot
emerging shyly from the top.

Its care and feeding
was a lot of “watch and wait”
and just a little water.
It has been our winter morning entertainment
as we munched down cereal,
gauging how many centimeters
it rose over night.

It took over the kitchen table~
two tall stalks topped with tight-fisted buds
which opened oh-so-slowly over several days
like a drowsy student after Christmas break,
not yet ready to meet and greet the world
but once the commitment to wake is made,
there is no other blossoming quite like it anywhere.

How can we possibly understand,
while still buried in the dark,
that we too rest planted in holy ground,
waiting for the wakening
that calls us forth to bloom, and fruit, and amaze.

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To Be Seen Through With a Glance

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…whenever you mark a horse, or a dog,
with a peculiarly mild, calm, deep-seated eye,
be sure he is an Aristotle or a Kant,
tranquilly speculating upon the mysteries in man. 
No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.
They see through us at a glance.
But there is a touch of divinity ….
and a special halo about a horse…
~Herman Melville from Redburn: His First Voyage

There are some animals (and people) who will not look you in the eye.  It may be a reluctance to appear too bold (as direct eye contact can imply), or it may be a reluctance to expose too much of their own inner world and feelings.

Because eyes don’t lie.

When you empty yourself into another being’s eyes and feel both understanding and understood, that is a touch of divinity at work. 

The eye is a mirror, a gazing ball and a collecting pool to reveal,  reflect and absorb. May we take the time and gather the courage to look deeply for the holy within one another.

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A Better Steward of Holiness

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Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:2

We live in an imperfect world, with imperfect characters to match.
Our imperfections should not keep us from dreaming of better things,
or even from trying, within our limits, to be better stewards of the soil,
and more ardent strivers after beauty and a responsible serenity.
~Jane Kenyon from “A Garden of My Dreams”

Holy is right outside my back door, whether it is growing in the soil, unfurling in a misty dawn moment or settling beneath an early twilight rainbow serenade. 

As a steward for serenity, I want to find beauty in all things and people, aiding its growth and helping it flourish.

I’m not giving up the search. 

Even when things get ugly,
I’m determined to keep trying,
searching out holiness wherever I look
and in whoever I meet.

Perhaps that might change my little part of this world.

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To Seek the Whole…

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… why should I not sit, every morning of my life,
on the hillside, looking into the shining world?
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don’t think so.
 
Be ignited, or be gone.
~Mary Oliver from “What I Have Learned So Far”

How often do we miss the fainter note
Or fail to see the more exquisite hue,
Blind to the tiny streamlet at our feet,
Eyes fixed upon some other, further view.
What chimes of harmonies escape our ears,
How many rainbows must elude our sight,
We see a field but do not see the grass,
Each blade a miracle of shade and light.
How then to keep the greater end in eye
And watch the sunlight on the distant peak,
And yet not tread on any leaf of love,
Nor miss a word the eager children speak?
Ah, what demand upon the narrow heart,
To seek the whole, yet not ignore the part.
~Philip Britts “Sonnet 1” from Water at the Roots

We are born nearly blinded, focused solely on our emptiness – a hunger to be filled and our need to be held.  As we grow, our focus sharpens to fall in love with those who feed and nurture us.

Eventually we discover, challenge and worship He who made us. I need to seek out and harvest the beauty growing in each moment.

This world is often too much for me to take in as a whole — an exquisite view of shadow and light, color and gray, loneliness and embrace, sorrow and joy.

With more years and a broader vision, I scan for the finer details within the whole before it disappears with the changing light.  Time’s a wasting (and so am I) as I try to capture it all with the lenses of our eyes and hearts.

The end of life comes too soon, when once again my vision blurs and the world fades away from view. I will hunger yet again to be filled and held.

And then heaven itself will seem almost too much to take in – my heart full to bursting with light and promise for the rest of eternity.

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Catching a Small Glimpse of Holy

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Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
~Mary Oliver, “The Uses of Sorrow”

surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven’t deserved
of days and solitude, your body’s immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise
talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books
that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks
before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps
you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,
finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another
ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?
~Jeanne Lohmann “Praise What Comes” from The Light Invisible Bodies”

The ragged edge of sadness and sorrow
is a box full of darkness handed to me
by Someone who knows my name.

It takes a lifetime to understand,
if I ever do,
this gift with which I am entrusted
is meant to be passed on
to another and another
whom I love just as deeply.

He cracked open the box of shadows
to allow His light in
where none dwelled before,
seeping into my brokenness
from a deep well of holiness,
giving me a glimpse of all Love can do.

Another sleepless night
I’m turning in my bed
Long before the red sun rises
In these early hours
I’m falling again
Into the river of my worries
When the river runs away
I find a shelter in your name

Jesus, only light on the shore
Only hope in the storm
Jesus, let me fly to your side
There I would hide, Jesus

Hear my anxious prayer
The beating of my heart
The pulse and the measure of my unbelief
Speak your words to me
Before I come apart
Help me believe in what I cannot see
Before the river runs away
I will call upon your name

Jesus, only light on the shore
Only hope in the storm
Jesus, let me fly to your side
There I would hide, Jesus
~Elaine Rubenstein, Fernando Ortega

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Much Too Beautiful to Stay

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I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There’s something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.

I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.
~Elinor Wylie from “Wild Peaches”

An amber light stretches from sky to ground
this beautiful morning, another mid-summer dawning-
today a clone of yesterday’s and the day before.

A stretch of forty identical days cannot last and will not stay.
I long again for rain and chill nights.

Drying up and pock-marked with holes,
I feel punched and withering in this browning landscape,
wondering on this Sabbath day of communing together
where holiness is to be found.

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Standing Ajar

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It is enough to enter

the templar
halls of museums, for

example, or
the chambers of churches,

and admire
no more than the beauty

there, or
remember the graveness

of stone, or
whatever. You don’t

have to do any
better. You don’t have to

understand
the liturgy or know history

to feel holy
in a gallery or presbytery.

It is enough
to have come just so far.

You need
not be opened any more

than does
a door, standing ajar.
~Todd Boss “It is Enough to Enter”
photo by Barb Hoelle

It is enough to be open.

It is enough to have come this far.

I don’t need to have my questions answered.

I don’t need to have places to be, things to do, people to see.

It is enough to stand ajar like an unlocked door, looking in and wondering what or who might pass through.

Who knows what might happen next?

the wardrobe from C.S. Lewis’ childhood home built by his grandfather, later to serve as his inspiration for “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” from his home “The Kilns” at Oxford. Now at the Marion Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois

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The Snow of Home

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You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there–
the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall.
All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home,
which is no less shimmering and white as it falls.

The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence.
It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at,
but unless the child in you is entirely dead,
it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way,
before your defenses are up.

It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed.
~Frederick Buechner “Sudden Snow”

There will be rest, and sure stars shining
     Over the roof-tops crowned with snow,
A reign of rest, serene forgetting,
     The music of stillness holy and low.

I will make this world of my devising
     Out of a dream in my lonely mind.
I shall find the crystal of peace, – above me
     Stars I shall find.
~Sara Teasdale “There Will Be Rest”

We had a surprise snowfall on the first day of winter last week.

In the Pacific Northwest, snow is often a once-a-winter event and usually doesn’t stay long. Here in the upper NW corner close to the Canadian border, it is accompanied by frigid northeast winds, blowing and drifting and making us all frankly miserable.

Yet this fresh-into-winter snowfall came down gently for several hours, without wind or drifts. It covered a multitude of messes that had accumulated over the previous year, making all things shimmer with newness. It made magic where before previously there had been drudgery.

And it silently lingered, like a long-lost memory I wanted to cling to, rolling it over and over in my mind like a snow ball that grows with each turn.

After a night of warm rain, it vanished and all was back to as it was.
Yet I am better for having been visited by an unexpected snow, reminding me how my memories and dreams are not buried so deep that they are lost forever.

For Sheer Delight and Gratitude

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Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy
and very important day

for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles
for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,
or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?

Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air
as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine
and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude –

believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.

I beg of you,
do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.
~Mary Oliver “An Invitation”

…for here there is no place
that does not see you.
You must change your life.
~Rainer Maria Rilke from “Archaic Torso of Apollo”

Just to be alive means everything~~

Despite all the brokenness in this world
and our own cracks in need of glue,
we need healing.

I welcome the change; a new day
of delight and gratitude.

Do not walk by.
Pause.
Linger.
Change.
You are welcome.