Tag: illumination

Daisy Morning Music

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See, the grass is full of stars,
Fallen in their brightness;
Hearts they have of shining gold,
Rays of shining whiteness.

Buttercups have honeyed hearts,
Bees they love the clover,
But I love the daisies’ dance
All the meadow over.

Blow, O blow, you happy winds,
Singing summer’s praises,
Up the field and down the field
A-dancing with the daisies.
~Marjorie Pickthall “Daisy Time”

I still can’t say what life is for, but it can’t be to pretend
     that every part of it is knowable, or that what appears to be
to the naked eye or in the middle ground or documented on paper
     approximates a person any better than a daisy does our sun.

When at a loss for what I am, I know I must be feeling it
     deep in the layers, where a turbulence gives rise to clouds
so massive they collapse in a bliss of gravity, condensing into this
      music I can daisy into morning as it daisies me into morning.
~Timothy Donnelly from “Habitable Nebula”

It is possible, I suppose that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what it means. I think this as I am crossing
from one field to another…

At my feet the white-petalled daisies display
the small suns of their center piece, their – if you don’t
mind my saying so – their hearts. Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?

But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;
for example – I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch –
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field.
~Mary Oliver from “Daisies”

I realize I can’t understand what all this world means.

No, I will remain in the dark until I cross from this daisy-strewn field to the next. I have to wait for heaven itself to see why we are illuminated by the Sun.

It is all cloud-covered mystery in the meantime, and sometimes a mean and joyless mystery – with pain and heartbreak and suffering, but just enough loving sacrifice to make it worthwhile.

How are we different from that stone, or that tree or that daisy?

We are breathed on.

God’s breath surges within us, as we laugh out loud, weep mightily and sing out His Words – struggling to be suitable for this field of stars, so often trampled and broken, but with plans to flourish under the illuminating stars created by the Son of heaven.

The Moon’s Mysterious Thereness

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Caught out in daylight, a rabbit’s
transparent pallor, the moon
is paired with a cloud of equal weight:
the heavenly congruence startles.

For what is the moon, that it haunts us,
this impudent companion immigrated
from the system’s less fortunate margins,
the realm of dust collected in orbs?

We grow up as children with it, a nursemaid
of a bonneted sort, round-faced and kind,
not burning too close like parents, or too far
to spare even a glance, like movie stars.

No star but in the zodiac of stars,
a stranger there, too big, it begs for love
(the man in it) and yet is diaphanous,
its thereness as mysterious as ours.
~John Updike “Half Moon, Small Cloud”

Children in a Garden with Nanny by Mary Cassatt

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

photo by Bob Tjoelker
a full moon in Ireland

Like a vigilant nanny watching from the skies, the moon keeps its pale eye on me, no matter where I am on the globe. There is comfort in seeing its illumination from various vantage points in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Yet, through no fault of its own, the moon is constantly inconstant in its “thereness”, phasing from full bright orb to missing-in-action.

I know my own inconstant “thereness” gets in my way all the time — casting a shadow of darkness on the light and beauty around me. With 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 in His divine and overpowering radiance.

It’s all about my blindness when I declare God “missing-in-action.”

He’s there, though partially hidden by my push to be front and center.
He’s there, His glory and truth manifest over me, if I look to see.
He’s there, gently instructing me to get out of His way.
He’s there, fully Light and fully Love.

I step back, in awe.

AI image created for this post

The Sunrise Shall Visit Us: A Column of Light

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Gabriel disembodied,
pure column of light.

Humble Mary, receiving the word
that the baby she carries is God’s.

Not good news, not news, even,
but rather the rightly enormous word,

Annunciation. She knew
they were chosen. She knew

he would suffer, as the chosen child
always suffers. Perhaps she knew

the dearest wish, mercy,
would be ever-inchoate,

like Gabriel: light that carries
possibility, illuminates,

but that can promise nothing but itself.
~Elizabeth Alexander “Tanner’s Annunciation”

Henry Ossawa Tanner “Annunciation”

…to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power –
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.

Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love –

but who was God.
~Denise Levertov from “Annunciation”

As the wise men of old brought gifts
   guided by a star
      to the humble birthplace

of the god of love,
   the devils
      as an old print shows
retreated in confusion.

What could a baby know
      of gold ornaments
or frankincense and myrrh,
   of priestly robes
      and devout genuflections?

But the imagination
   knows all stories
      before they are told
and knows the truth of this one
   past all defection

The rich gifts
   so unsuitable for a child
      though devoutly proffered,
stood for all that love can bring.

 The men were old
      how could they know
of a mother’s needs
   or a child’s
      appetite?

But as they kneeled
   the child was fed.
      They saw it
and
   gave praise!

A miracle
had taken place,
   hard gold to love,
a mother’s milk!
   before
      their wondering eyes.

The ass brayed
   the cattle lowed.
      It was their nature.

All men by their nature give praise.
   It is all
      they can do.

The very devils
   by their flight give praise.
      What is death,
beside this?

Nothing. The wise men
      came with gifts
and bowed down
   to worship
      this perfection.
~William Carlos Williams “The Gift”

The uncontained contained
infinite made finite
humble made worthy
a Deliverer delivered
hungry sated on mother’s milk
unsuitable made perfect
darkness illuminated with possibilities
the eternal here and now

How can you measure the love of a mother,
Or how can you write down a baby’s first cry?
Candlelight, angel light, firelight and starglow
Shine on his cradle till breaking of dawn.
Gloria, gloria in excelsis Deo!
Angels are singing; the Christ child is born.
Shepherds and wise men will kneel and adore him,
Seraphim round him their vigil will keep;
Nations proclaim him their Lord and their Saviour,
But Mary will hold him and sing him to sleep.
Find him at Bethlehem laid in a manger:
Christ our Redeemer asleep in the hay.
Godhead incarnate and hope of salvation:
A child with his mother that first Christmas Day.
~John Rutter – words and music

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

Rekindled and Ignited

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At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
~Albert Schweitzer

One kind word can warm three winter months…
~Japanese Proverb

Charis always demands the answer of eucharistia.
Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth.
Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo.
Gratitude follows grace like thunder and lightning.

…we are speaking of the grace of the God who is God for man, and of the gratitude of man as his response to this grace…
~Karl Barth (1886-1968) in Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation 

“Rekindling” happens without expectation. When I’m out of gas, spent and deflated, someone’s kind word, smile, gracious note or thank you makes all the difference. Suddenly I’m reignited and have fuel to spare. The spark plug comes alive once again and I’m up and running. I need to remember how this feels so I become the igniter and kindler for others.

I remember a moment in my work life in clinic as I was hurrying from one patient to another. A young woman stopped me as I was about to leave the exam room and said “Doctor, I am so grateful you were willing to see me so quickly today. I’ve been concerned about this for weeks, losing sleep with worry and now I feel so reassured it is nothing serious. Thank you!” 

I once received a hand written letter (something rare as hen’s teeth) from a patient I cared for years before. He wanted to tell me he was doing well and how he had appreciated my kindness to him. I was astonished that he remembered me; in his letter he was uncertain if I would remember him. Patients don’t always know how they dwell in their doctors’ consciousness, how they teach us and how much we learn. I surely did remember this patient, his struggles with drug dependency, his strong urge to kill himself, and his desperate search for a reason to keep on living.

He was alive, doing well. He remembered my caring about him. And I was wrapped in his comforting words through some chilly days.

So – I want to share this gift of grace with you,
as a recurring echo which follows a cry of joy,
a warm illumination pouring out on darkness,
through words and images that kindle hope each day.

I thunder loudly at the lightning spark from God,
an unending echo of thanks with my every breath.

The Dark Blooms and Sings

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Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.
~Linda Pastan “Why Are Your Poems So Dark?”

photo by Harry Rodenberger

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
~Wendell Berry “To Know the Dark” from Soul Food – Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds

photo by Bob Tjoelker

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

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”

When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
~John O’Donohue from “Beannacht”

photo by Josh Scholten

Ask what the moon has witnessed.
Ask what we, as fallen creatures, have witnessed.
Darkness was not banished by God in the beginning,
so we might search, blinded, for Him.

We are promised this in the Word: “and night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light… Revelation 22:5.

The Word in the beginning set a dark universe in motion.
The Word is both flesh and Savior to a world dwelling in darkness.
The Word as Spirit thrives eternally to enlighten our hearts, our minds and hands.

Darkness is not banished. But it is overcome.
And so, we shall have a lit pathway leading us home.

Walking Through the Littered Layers of History

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A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life—the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives—as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them.

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
~Annie Dillard from An American Childhood

photo by Joel DeWaard

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon

How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?

Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
~Stanley Kunitz from “The Layers”

…we become whole by having the courage to revisit and embrace all the layers of our lives, denying none of them, so that we’re finally able to say, “Yes, all of this is me, and all of this has helped make me who I am.”

When we get to that point, amazingly, we can look at all the layers together and see the beauty of the whole.
~Parker Palmer from “Embracing All the Layers of Your Life” in On Being

My favorite photos or paintings are ones where there are several “layers” to study, whether it is a still life of petals or a deep landscape with a foreground, middle and backdrop. The challenge is to decide where to look first, what to draw into sharp focus, and how to absorb it all as a whole. In fact, if I only see one aspect, I miss the entire point of the composition. The earth is wonderfully multi-faceted and multi-layered and that is how my own life is – complex with so much diverse and subtle shading.

If I try to suppress some darker part of my own life I wish to forget and blur out, I ignore the beauty of the contrast with the light that illuminates the rest.

The layers reflect who I was created to be as an image-bearer – complex, nuanced, illuminated in the presence of darkness:

Imaginatively composed like a fugue of recurring themes,
filled with the complexity of both harmony and discord,
and ultimately transformed into layers upon layers of beauty.

A Gradual Peeling Away

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So what is the finding of a friend
but the gradual peeling of an orange—
the tough rind begins to yield,
and the rich, juicy fruit drips in your hands,
and you taste sweetness
that quenches a life-thirst.
~Carol Bialock, “The Finding of a Friend” from Coral Castles

A poem should be palpable and mute   
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless   
As the flight of birds.

                         *               

A poem should be motionless in time   
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time   
As the moon climbs.

                         *               

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean   
But be.
~Archibald Macleish (1892-1982) “Ars Poetica” from Collected Poems 1917 to 1982

A poem is a good friend who is revealed gradually,
someone you get to know so well you want to hear
once again the sound of its voice.

Its words quench your thirst for insight,
yet its silence is also part of the rhythm.

It is cyclical as the phases of the moon, ever-changing
yet never-changing, entangling your mind before setting you free.

It may take on a new appearance on the next reading,
opening up questions and a new destination.

It leans into you, in comfort, and
offers illumination.

Like a good friend, a poem simply becomes…
…what you seek,
…what you want,
…what you need.

No Synonym for Light

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I hope my life was penned
in such a way that when time
comes to write my epitaph
someone might think to say
not that I was good so much
as kind and that I wrote
quite well beyond my means
because it was the wind of grace
blown down that gave me words
and moved my sluggish hands,
and that I always sought
to know the unseen things
and though I loved the breadth
of language for my art,
my heart always seemed fixed
on a day when all the sound
and words would fall away,
and that I was quite hopeful
to the last if anyone would choose
one line to inscribe my memory
in stone it surely should be
the simple supposition I know right:
there merely is no synonym for light.
~Margaret Ingraham “Epitaph” from Exploring This Terrain

This world can feel like a fearsome place
with endless stories of tragedy and loss,
so much pain and suffering,
blinding me in darkness
so I struggle to see each day’s emerging light.

How to describe a Light
transforming all that is bleak?

With these Words:

Be not afraid
Come have breakfast
Touch and see
Follow me
Do you love me?
Feed my sheep
Peace be with you

I am mere breath and bone,
a wisp in a moment of time,
so His truths anchor my heart
and illuminate my soul:
I am called forth into a Light
which needs no other words.

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead thou me on.
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
Through love to light!
Oh, wonderful the way
That leads from darkness to the perfect day!
From darkness and from sorrow of the night
To morning that comes singing o’er the sea.
Through love to light!
Through light, O God, to thee,
Who art the love of love, the eternal light of light!

Fixing Eyes on the Unseen: Because the Sun Has Risen

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I believe in God as I believe that the Sun has risen,
not only because I see it,
but because by it I see everything else.
~C.S. Lewis from “They Asked For A Paper,” in Is Theology Poetry?

I see your world in light that shines behind me,
Lit by a sun whose rays I cannot see,
The smallest gleam of light still seems to find me
Or find the child who’s hiding deep inside me.
I see your light reflected in the water,
Or kindled suddenly in someone’s eyes,
It shimmers through the living leaves of summer,
Or spills from silver veins in leaden skies,
It gathers in the candles at our vespers
It concentrates in tiny drops of dew
At times it sings for joy, at times it whispers,
But all the time it calls me back to you.
I follow you upstream through this dark night
My saviour, source, and spring, my life and light.
~Malcolm Guite “I am the Light of the World”

Without God’s Light that comes reliably every morning, I would be hopelessly casting about in the dark, stumbling and fumbling my way without the benefit of His illumination.

It feels like a fresh gift each time, whether brilliantly painted, or much of the time, a sullen and sodden gray.

I fix my eyes on the unseen, as it is lit in the Lord.
And then:
was blind, but now I see…

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

All Here is Well…

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Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving   
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t   
be afraid. God does not leave us 
comfortless, so let evening come.
~Jane Kenyon “Let Evening Come”

And into nights when bats were on the wing
Over the rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared
From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking.
The dark gulfed like a roof-space. 
~Seamus Heaney from “The Barn”

The barn is awake,
There is no mistake,
Something wonderful is happening here.
Yellow panes glowing, it begins snowing.
Over rafters a hoot owl takes flight.
A safe place to dwell—all here is well— when we’re in the barn at night.
~Michelle Houts from “Barn at Night”

Usually, after turning out that forgotten barn light, I sit on the edge of the tractor bucket for a few minutes and let my eyes adjust to the night outside. City people always notice the darkness here, but it’s never very dark if you wait till your eyes owl out a little….

I’m always glad to have to walk down to the barn in the night, and I always forget that it makes me glad. I heave on my coat, stomp into my barn boots and trudge down toward the barn light, muttering at myself. But then I sit in the dark, and I remember this gladness, and I walk back up to the gleaming house, listening for the horses.
~Verlyn Klinkenborg from A Light in the Barn

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.
~Ted Kooser “Flying at Night”

The night barn is a type of beacon as darkness falls.
Light falls through the cracks to guide our footsteps.
It becomes protection from wind and rain and snow.
It provides creatures comfort so their keepers can sleep soundly.
It is safe and warm – full of steaming breath and overall contentment.
It is a kind of sanctuary: a cathedral sans stained glass grandeur or organ hymns.

Yet the only true sanctuary isn’t found in a weather-beaten barn of rough-hewn old growth timbers vulnerable to the winds of life.

An illuminated night barn happens within me, in the depths of my soul, comforted by the encompassing and salvaging arms of God. There I am held, transformed and restored, grateful beyond measure: all is well here.