They work with herbs and penicillin. They work with gentleness and the scalpel. They dig out the cancer, close an incision and say a prayer to the poverty of the skin. They are not Gods though they would like to be; they are only human trying to fix up a human. Many humans die. They die like the tender, palpitating berries in November. But all along the doctors remember: First do no harm. They would kiss if it would heal. It would not heal.
If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest. If they are too proud, and some are, then they leave home on horseback but God returns them on foot. ~Anne Sexton “Doctors” from The Awful Rowing Toward God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility; humility is endless. ~T.S. Eliot from East Coker
Let me never forget how humbling it was to provide care for hurting people and not be 100% certain what I do would actually work, though I was trusted to recommend the best option…
which could include a tincture of time, just wait and see, try this or that.
Or witnessing a vaccine-preventable illness gallop through a university population, taking weeks to safely harness and control.
Not unlike other physicians who tumbled off while racing a pathogen, losing their balance between overconfidence and humility, I sometimes found myself unseated and stranded, having to return on foot to retrace my steps, reframe my words and hopes and do no harm – to try once again to make a difference.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
…by Easter Tuesday, we often find ourselves back in the shadows.
The cancer is still there. That financial struggle is not resolved. The depression returns. That relationship is still broken. We might ask, “If Christ is risen, why does the world still feel so broken?” This is not a lack of faith; it’s the honest lament of believers who are learning to walk in the tension of the now and the notyet.
This sacred tension calls us to rejoice and weep on Easter Tuesday.
Rejoice that Jesus is risen. We have a living hope. We are promised an eternal inheritance, which is being kept for us by the one who purchased it with his own life. But embrace the grief too. Sadness is the healing emotion of the soul. Sorrow is a gift from God that allows our souls to breathe and cope in a world that aches, longing for restoration. ~Brian Croft from “Embracing a Sacred Tension”
For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you. 5 The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers. 6 You destroy those who speak lies; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man. Psalm 5: 4-6
To invite Jesus to cleanse the temple of our hearts is not to ask for guilt and shame. It is to ask for healing. The same Lord who overturned tables did so not to destroy and humiliate, but to reclaim and restore. He interrupts only that which obstructs. He removes only that which hinders life and worship. His cleansing is never punitive; it is always redemptive. ~Scott Sauls from “What Would Jesus Overturn in Your Life?”
To live coram Deo is to live one’s entire life in the presence of God, under the authority of God, to the glory of God. To live in the presence of God is to understand that whatever we are doing and wherever we are doing it, we are acting under the gaze of God.
There is no place so remote that we can escape His penetrating gaze. To live all of life coram Deo is to live a life of integrity. It is a life of wholeness that finds its unity and coherency in the majesty of God.
Our lives are to be living sacrifices, oblations offered in a spirit of adoration and gratitude.
A fragmented life is a life of disintegration. It is marked by inconsistency, disharmony, confusion, conflict, contradiction, and chaos. Coram Deo … before the face of God. …a life that is open before God. …a life in which all that is done is done as to the Lord. …a life lived by principle, not expediency; by humility before God, not defiance. ~R.C. Sproulfrom “What Does “coram Deo” mean?”
On this Easter Tuesday, we cannot escape His gaze… all of us, all colors, shapes and size, even the leadership of our nation. We are created in His image, imago dei, so He looks at us as His reflections in the mirror of this troubled world.
What we do, how we speak and write, how we treat others – reflects the face of God.
Jesus is the embodied temple who brought His sacrifice to the people, rather than people coming to the temple with their sacrifices.
I cringe to think how hard we try to hide from His gaze.
Yet some don’t make a pretense of hiding – they make it quite public: our elected leader chooses Easter to publish a vile message filled with profanity, name-calling and threats, then gives a fragmented and disintegrated Easter speech, to celebrating families with children, with inconsistency, dishonesty, disharmony, confusion,conflict, contradiction, and chaos.
We drown together in the mud of our mutual guilt and lack of humility. All that we do to others, we do to God Himself.
We must be on our knees asking for cleansing, for the temples of our hearts to be overturned, our corruption scattered, our sorrows lifted.
Jesus comes to cleanse, repair, reclaim and restore – His mission to save us from ourselves.
Kind of takes one’s breath away.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Being thorough, I remove a holey sock to view a diabetic man’s filthy feet. I use the time to complete our talk of what drove him to live on the street as I wonder how any of this can help.
While he tells me more of his medical past, I run warm water into a stainless bowl. I immerse both his feet and begin to ask myself what good it does for this poor soul to allow himself to undergo this ablution.
Silently I sluice the water between his toes and soap the crusty callous at his heel. I marvel at his arch and notice how closely it fits my palm. I know he can feel this proximity too. He shuts his eyes.
Months of useless layers peel away, revealing layers useless weeks ago. Removing the tough brown hide of yesterday yields clean pink skin, but we both know this ritual will be useless days from now.
Still, this moment may withstand time’s test, teaching us each lessons unknown before. I learn the medicine of selflessness. He learns what medicine is really for– the hope that basin, soap and touch can bear. ~Robert Fawcett “Washing Feet”
Jesus washing the feet of his disciples by Finnish artist Albert Gustaf Edelfelt
What e’er the soul has felt or suffered long, Oh, heart! this one thing should not be forgot: Christ washed the feet of Judas. ~George Marion McClellan from “The Feet of Judas” in The Book of American Negro Poetry 1922
Ford Maddox Brown — Washing Peter’s Feet
As an aide in a rest home caring for the crippled feet of the elderly, as a medical student in an inner city hospital seeing the homeless whose socks had to be peeled off carefully to avoid pulling off gangrenous toes, as a doctor working with the down and out detox patients from the streets who had no access to soap and water for weeks,
I’ve washed feet as part of my job.
People always protest, just as Peter did when Jesus started to wash his feet. We never believe our feet, those homely gnarled bunioned claw-toed calloused parts of us, deserve that attention, and certainly not love.
We are ashamed to have someone care about them, care for them, when we don’t care enough on our own.
I have never washed the feet of someone about to betray me, leading me to my death.
I have never had my feet washed by someone who understood my heart needed cleansing even more than my feet, who loved me that much.
Until now.
This one thing should not be forgot: Kneeling, He wears the humility and towels of a servant as His only raiments. He gently cups our heels in His palms, washes and dries our soles and arches and toes, but our hearts are held, still beating, in His loving hands.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
After this, Jesus and his disciples went out into the Judean countryside, where he spent some time with them, and baptized. Now John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because there was plenty of water, and people were coming and being baptized. (This was before John was put in prison.) An argument developed between some of John’s disciples and a certain Jew over the matter of ceremonial washing.They came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, that man who was with you on the other side of the Jordan—the one you testified about—look, he is baptizing, and everyone is going to him.”
To this John replied, “A person can receive only what is given them from heaven. You yourselves can testify that I said, ‘I am not the Messiah but am sent ahead of him.’The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete.He must become greater; I must become less.”
The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all.He testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony.Whoever has accepted it has certified that God is truthful.For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them. John 3: 22-36
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me. ~St. Patrick
To come down and wear our skin is for you to know our frailty: our bruises and callouses, our sunburns and warts, our tears and our bleeding, our spasming backs, and toothaches.
To come down to pulse within our hearts, is for you to know our temptation for self-promotion, and our desire to fill our own emptiness before first loving and serving others.
To inhabit our souls you humbled yourself to pull together our millions of broken pieces, feeding us with yourself, your spirit becoming the adhesive to glue us back wholly, God loving us by becoming us, so we don’t simply crumble to dust.
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.
Humble and Human, willing to bend You are Fashioned of flesh and the fire of life, You are Not too proud to wear our skin To know this weary world we’re in Humble, humble Jesus
Humble in sorrow, You gladly carried Your cross Never refusing Your life to the weakest of us Not too proud to bear our sin To feel this brokenness we’re in Humble, humble Jesus
We bow our knees We must decrease You must increase We lift You high
Humble in greatness, born in the likeness of man Name above all names, holding our world in Your hands Not too proud to dwell with us, to live in us, to die for us Humble, humble Jesus
I arise today through the strength of heaven Light of sun, radiance of moon Splendor of fire, speed of lightning Swiftness of wind, depth of the sea Stability of earth, firmness of rock
I arise today through God’s strength to pilot me God’s eye to look before me God’s wisdom to guide me God’s way to lie before me God’s shield to protect me
From all who shall wish me ill Afar and a-near Alone and in a multitude Against every cruel, merciless power That may oppose my body and soul
Christ with me, Christ before me Christ behind me, Christ in me Christ beneath me, Christ above me Christ on my right, Christ on my left Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down Christ when I arise, Christ to shield me
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me
I arise today. ~St. Patrick’s Breastplate
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Let me remember you, voices of little insects, Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters, Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us, Snow-hushed and heavy.
Over my soul murmur your mute benediction, While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest, As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to, Lest they forget them. ~Sara Teasdale from “September Midnight”
The tumult and the shouting dies; The Captains and the Kings depart: Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! ~Rudyard Kipling from “Recessional”
If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God. ~Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn from his 1983 acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize
Lest I forget…
I look long in the eyes I lean to…
whether a loved one, or the mountains, or summer-weary fields, or the face of God Himself.
I cannot risk forgetting Who must be remembered — He is encased in my heart like a treasured photograph, like a precious gem, like a benediction soothing me quiet when anxious.
It is His ultimate promise: Neither will He forget me – looking long in my eyes that lean in to Him.
[And the Lord answered] Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yes, they may forget, yet I will not forget you. Isaiah 49:15
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
To understand the meek picture a great stallion at full gallop in a meadow, who— at his master’s voice—seizes up to a stunned but instant halt. So with the strain of holding that great power in check, the muscles along the arched neck keep eddying, and only the velvet ears prick forward, awaiting the next order. ~Mary Karr from “Who The Meek Are Not”
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5
Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God. James 1: 19-20
I’ve seen meekness like this, first hand.
Our stallion allowed his strength and passion to be under control. He was eager to listen. He wanted to see what we might ask of him. He took instruction eagerly. He never lashed back in anger. He simply wanted to be with us.
Meekness and humility make no sense given the world’s demand now for “strongman” leadership: someone who submits to no one, apologizes to no one, blames others for what goes wrong, feels compassion for no one.
Globally and individually, we have desperate need of meekness. True strength is when someone knows the extent of their power but resists the need to prove it to anyone else.
The meek love this God who shares Himself, who sacrifices for the bereft, and whose great strength is obvious, yet directed completely to our salvation.
Humble and Human, willing to bend You are Fashioned of flesh and the fire of life, You are Not too proud to wear our skin To know this weary world we’re in Humble, humble Jesus
Humble in sorrow, You gladly carried Your cross Never refusing Your life to the weakest of us Not too proud to bear our sin To feel this brokenness we’re in
Humble, humble Jesus We bow our knees We must decrease You must increase We lift You high
Humble in greatness, born in the likeness of man Name above all names, holding our world in Your hands Not too proud to dwell with us, to live in us, to die for us
Humble, humble Jesus We bow our knees We must decrease You must increase We lift You high We bow our knees We must decrease You must increase We lift You high
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
…we are faced with the shocking reality: Jesus stands at the door and knocks, in complete reality. He asks you for help in the form of a beggar, in the form of a ruined human being in torn clothing. He confronts you in every person that you meet.
Christ walks on the earth as your neighbor as long as there are people. He walks on the earth as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you and makes his demands. That is the greatest seriousness and the greatest blessedness of the Advent message. Christ stands at the door. Will you keep the door locked or open it to him? ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his Advent Sermon “The Coming of Jesus into our Midst”from God is in the Manger
Upon the darkish, thin, half-broken ice There seemed to lie a barrel-sized, heart-shaped snowball, Frozen hard, its white identical with the untrodden white of the lake shore. Closer, its somber face— Mask and beak—came clear, the neck’s Long cylinder, and the splayed feet, balanced, Weary, immobile. Black water traced, behind it, An abandoned gesture. Soft in still air, snowflakes Fell and fell. Silence Deepened, deepened. The short day Suspended itself, endless. ~Denise Levertov “Swan in Falling Snow”
When we witness suffering, when the stranger in ragged clothes approaches and asks for help, how do we respond?
I too easily forget: I am also the least of these, desperate for rescue, suspended, immobile, in a darkening quiet, waiting, waiting.
He patiently stands at the closed door. His tender mercy lifts our deepening state, waits for us to open up, gives us wings to the eternal, endlessly forgiven, endlessly loved, endlessly endless.
Advent 2023 theme …because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
The essence of America, that which really unites us, is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion. It is an idea, and what an idea it is—that you can come from humble circumstances and do great things.That it doesn’t matter where you came from but where you are going. ~Condoleezza Rice
We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! ~Abraham Lincolnfrom Proclamation 97 – Appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer (March 1863)
Perhaps Independence Day should actually become a day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer, as Lincoln proclaimed in March 1863. Goodness knows, after all we’ve been through as a nation, the U.S.A. still struggles with understanding who we are and how to live out the brilliant idea that began our government nearly 250 years ago.
Even for those coming from the most humble of backgrounds, it is possible for any person to do great things here. The key is to never forget the blessings bestowed upon us by the courage and perseverance of our forebears. So much blood has been shed to bring us the freedoms we take for granted.
Today is a day to be grateful and prayerful, not proud. Let us not forget amid the cacophony of fireworks, the overabundant picnic food and unending parades – we the people must vow together that our unity be strengthened by single-minded commitment to peace and harmony rather than be destroyed by division and conflict.
Our God does not abandon the humble in spirit. Let us not forget such a God.
photo by Joel DeWaard
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
Consider The lilies of the field whose bloom is brief:— We are as they; Like them we fade away, As doth a leaf.
Consider The sparrows of the air of small account: Our God doth view Whether they fall or mount,— He guards us too.
Consider The lilies that do neither spin nor toil, Yet are most fair:— What profits all this care And all this coil?
Consider The birds that have no barn nor harvest-weeks; God gives them food:— Much more our Father seeks To do us good. ~Christina Rossetti from “Consider”
…if I were a lily I think I would wait all day for the green face of the hummingbird to touch me. ~Mary Oliver from “Lilies”
Homer Smith: [the final English lesson] Oh, *I* built a chapel…
All of the sisters: *I* built a chapel.
Homer Smith: *You* built a chapel…
All of the sisters: *You* built a chapel.
Homer Smith: *We” built a chapel…
Mother Maria: [points to heaven] *He* built a chapel.
From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention… pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.
Literature, painting, music—the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.
Is it too much to say that Stop, Look, and Listen is also the most basic lesson that the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches us? Listen to history is the cry of the ancient prophets of Israel. Listen to social injustice, says Amos; to head-in-the-sand religiosity, says Jeremiah; to international treacheries and power-plays, says Isaiah; because it is precisely through them that God speaks his word of judgment and command.
And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention. If we are to love God, we must first stop, look, and listen for him in what is happening around us and inside us. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
In a letter to a friend Emily Dickinson wrote that “Consider the lilies of the field” was the only commandment she never broke. She could have done a lot worse. Consider the lilies. It is the sine qua non of art and religion both. ~Frederick Buechner from Whistling in the Dark
I have broken the Biblical mandate to “consider the lilies” way too many times. In my daily life I am considering almost anything else – my own worries and concerns as I walk past so much beauty and meaning and holiness. My mind dwells within, blind and deaf to what is outside.
It is so necessary to be reminded that I need to pay attention beyond my own bubble, to be reminded to love and care for my neighbor, to remember what history has to teach us, to search for the sacred in all things.
Stop, Look, Listen, Consider: all is grace, all is gift, all is holiness brought to life – stunning, amazing, wondrous.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave, He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave, So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave, Our God is marching on.
(Chorus) Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! While God is marching on. ~Julia Ward Howe — final original verses of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts
On the outskirts of Jerusalem the donkey waited. Not especially brave, or filled with understanding, he stood and waited.
How horses, turned out into the meadow, leap with delight! How doves, released from their cages, clatter away, splashed with sunlight.
But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited. Then he let himself be led away. Then he let the stranger mount.
Never had he seen such crowds! And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen. Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark, obedient.
I hope, finally, he felt brave. I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him, as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward. ~Mary Oliver “The Poet thinks about the donkey” from her book Thirst.
With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings…
The tattered outlaw of the earth, Of ancient crooked will; Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour; One far fierce hour and sweet: There was a shout about my ears, And palms before my feet. G. K. Chesterton from “The Donkey”
Palm Sunday is a day of dissonance and dichotomy in the church year, very much like the donkey who figured as a central character that day.
Sadly, a donkey gets no respect, then or now – for his plain and awkward hairy looks, for his loud and inharmonious voice, for his apparent lack of strength — yet he was the chosen mode of transportation for a King riding to His death.
There was a motley parade to Jerusalem: cloaks and palms laid at the feet of the donkey bearing the Son of God, disorderly shouts of adoration and blessings, the rebuke of the Pharisees to quiet the people, His response that “even the stones will cry out” knowing what is to come.
But the welcoming crowd waving palm branches, shouting sweet hosannas and laying down their cloaks did not understand the fierce transformation to come, did not know within days they would be a mob shouting words of derision and rejection and condemnation.
The donkey knew because he had been derided, rejected and condemned himself, yet still kept serving. Just as he was given voice and understanding centuries before to protect Balaam from going the wrong way, he could have opened his mouth to tell them, suffering beatings for his effort. Instead, just as he bore the unborn Jesus to Bethlehem and stood over Him sleeping in the manger, just as he bore a mother and child all the way to Egypt to hide from Herod, the donkey would keep his secret well.
Who, after all, would ever listen to a mere donkey?
We would do well to pay attention to this braying wisdom.
The donkey knows – he’s a believer.
He bears the burden we have shirked. He treads with heavy heart over the palms and cloaks we lay down as meaningless symbols of honor. He is the ultimate servant to the Servant.
A day of dichotomy — of honor and glory laid underfoot only to be stepped on, of blessings and praise turning to curses, of the beginning of the end becoming a new beginning for us all.
And so He wept, knowing all this. I suspect the donkey bearing Him wept as well, in his own simple, plain and honest way, and I’m quite sure he kept it as his special secret.
This year’s Lenten theme: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 18
and just for fun on April 1st, I can’t resist sharing this one ….
