Tag: known

We Are No Longer Alone: Unfolding

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

If God is adding to our spiritual stature,
unfolding the new nature within us,
it is a mistake to keep twitching at the petals
with our coarse fingers.
We must seek to let the Creative Hand alone.
~Henry Drummond from Beautiful Thoughts

photo by Josh Scholten

The unfolding of your words gives light;
it gives understanding to the simple.
Psalm 119:130

…they soon forgot what he had done
    and did not wait for his plan to unfold.
 In the desert they gave in to their craving;
    in the wilderness they put God to the test.
Psalm 106:13-14

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper, though
that, too, but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.
~A. R. Ammons, from “Poetics” from  A Coast of Trees

In the infinite wisdom of the Lord of all the earth,
each event falls with exact precision
into its proper place in the unfolding of His divine plan.
Nothing, however small, however strange,
occurs without His ordering,
or without its particular fitness for its place
in the working out of His purpose;
and the end of all shall be the manifestation of His glory,
and the accumulation of His praise.
B.B. Warfield

What is revealed by the unfolding of our faith
is the depth and width and height and completeness inside.

Unfolding means no longer staying hidden and unknown,
but opening ourselves up for all to see.

We become the page upon which God writes,
the palette upon which God paints,
the instrument that God plays,
the song that God composes.

We become beautiful unfolding,
each one of us, slowly, surely, gently,
in the Hands of our Creator God.

He knows how each of us began
as He was there from the beginning.
He remains the center of our unfolding forever.

AI image created for this post

This year’s Advent theme is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sermon on the First Sunday in Advent, December 2, 1928:

The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come. For these, it is enough to wait in humble fear until the Holy One himself comes down to us, God in the child in the manager.

God comes.

He is, and always will be now, with us in our sin, in our suffering, and at our death. We are no longer alone. God is with us and we are no longer homeless.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer – from Christmas Sermons

Alleluia! Alleluia!

A spotless rose is blowing,
Sprung from a tender root,
Of ancient seers foreshowing,
Of Jesse promised fruit;
Its fairest bud unfolds to light
Amid the cold, cold winder,
And in the dark midnight.

The rose which I am singing,
Whereof Isaiah said,
Is from its sweet root springing
In Mary purest maid;
For through our God’s great love and might,|
The Blessed Babe she bare us
In a cold, cold winter’s night.
Alleluia!

How do I grieve what I can’t let go?
It’s got a hold, it’s got a hold on me
How do I mourn what I cannot know?
It’s got a hold, it’s got a hold on me
Jesus Christ, I don’t know what I am
Am I a lost little lamb or a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
Oh, my God, I don’t know what this was
Am I the child of Your love or just chaos unfolding?
How do I keep what I cannot find?
I’m letting go, I’m letting go of You
I’m letting go How do I love what I left behind?
I’m letting go, I’m letting go of You I’m letting go
Am I just chaos unfolding? Am I just chaos unfolding?
Unknowing!

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Prepared for One Another

barnstormingblog2 Comments

Her fate seizes her and brings her
down. She is heavy with it. It
wrings her. The great weight
is heaved out of her. It eases.

She turns to the calf who has broken
out of the womb’s water and its veil.
He breathes. She licks his wet hair.
He gathers his legs under him
and rises. He stands, and his legs
wobble.

After the months of his pursuit of her now
they meet face to face.
From the beginnings of the world
his arrival and her welcome
have been prepared. They have always
known each other.
~Wendell Berry from “Her First Calf”

I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.
~Ada Limón from “The Raincoat”

Mothering is like the labor that starts birth –
barely able to breathe,
bombarded by the firehose of contractions and pushing
then emptying out
while filling up to overflowing
for nurturing of this child forever
– so much so fast. 

I knew them even before I met them. I knew them as they grew. They changed me; I became soft and cushiony, designed to gather in, hold tight, and then eventually, reluctantly and necessarily, let go.

All the while a mom does whatever she must to protect her children from getting overwhelmed and drenched by the storms of life.

Now that my children have children of their own, some already birthed, two soon to be birthed, I still try to throw my raincoat over them all to keep them from getting wet in inevitable downpours. 

My reach will never be far enough.

Time, like a firehose, pounds away both at me and them. It is ruffing and buffing me every single moment, each moment a unique opportunity to love deeply and completely this soul who I carried under my heart.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

¤10.00
¤25.00
¤50.00
¤5.00
¤15.00
¤100.00
¤5.00
¤15.00
¤100.00

Or enter a custom amount

¤

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Trusting All This to be True

barnstormingblog4 Comments

Trust that there is a tiger, muscular
Tasmanian, and sly, which has never been
seen and never will be seen by any human
eye. Trust that thirty thousand sword-
fish will never near a ship, that far
from cameras or cars elephant herds live
long elephant lives. Believe that bees
by the billions find unidentified flowers
on unmapped marshes and mountains. Safe
in caves of contentment, bears sleep.
Through vast canyons, horses run while slowly
snakes stretch beyond their skins in the sun.
I must trust all this to be true, though
the few birds at my feeder watch the window
with small flutters of fear, so like my own.
~Susan Kinsolving “Trust”

When I stand at the window watching the flickers, sparrows, finches, chickadees, and red-winged blackbirds come and go from the feeders, I wonder who is watching who.  They remain wary of me, fluttering away quickly if I approach.  They fear capture, even within a camera.  They have a life to be lived without my witness or participation.  So much happens that I never see or know about; it would be overwhelming to absorb it all.

I understand:  I fear being captured too.

Even if only for a moment as an image preserved forever, I know it doesn’t represent all I am, all I’ve done, all I feel, all my moments put together.  The birds are, and I am, so much more than one moment.

Only God sees me fully in every moment that I exist, witness to my freedom and captivity, my loneliness and grief, my joy and tears, knowing my very best and my very worst.

And He is not overwhelmed by what He sees of me. He knows me so well, in Him I must trust.

photo by Larry Goldman (Gombe National Park, Tanzania)

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

¤5.00
¤10.00
¤20.00
¤5.00
¤15.00
¤100.00
¤5.00
¤15.00
¤100.00

Or enter a custom amount

¤

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

An Absence of Secrecy

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

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, fatigue,
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 like today 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.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support Barnstorming

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

¤5.00
¤10.00
¤20.00
¤5.00
¤15.00
¤100.00
¤5.00
¤15.00
¤100.00

Or enter a custom amount

¤

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

The Beginning Shall Remind Us of the End: Unlocked and Opened Wide

barnstormingblog1 Comment

What seemed to be the end proved to be the beginning…
Suddenly a wall becomes a gate.
~Henri Nouwen from Gracias! A Letter of Consolation

As Christians we do not believe in walls,
but that life lies open before us;
that the gate can always be unbarred;
that there is no final abandonment or desertion.
We do not believe that it can ever be “too late.”

We believe that the world is full of doors that can be opened. Between us and others.
Between the people around us.
Between today and tomorrow.
Our own inner person can be unlocked too:
even within our own selves,
there are doors that need to be opened.

If we open them and enter,
we can unlock ourselves, too,
and so await whatever is coming to free us and make us whole.
~ Jörg Zink from “Doors to the Feast”

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
~T.S. Eliot from “Little Gidding” The Four Quartets


We stand outside the gate, incapable of opening it ourselves,
watching as God Himself throws it open wide. 
We choose to enter this unknown unremembered gate
into the endless length of days,
or we choose to remain outside,
lingering in the familiar confines of what we know,
though it destroys us.

There we shall rest and we shall see;
we shall see and we shall love;
we shall love and we shall praise.
Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end.
~Augustine of Hippo

1 Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates; 
behold, the King of glory waits; 
the King of kings is drawing near; 
the Savior of the world is here!

2 Fling wide the portals of your heart; 
make it a temple, set apart 
from earthly use for heaven’s employ, 
adorned with prayer and love and joy.

3 Redeemer, come, with us abide; 
our hearts to thee we open wide; 
let us thy inner presence feel; 
thy grace and love in us reveal.

4 Thy Holy Spirit lead us on 
until our glorious goal is won; 
eternal praise, eternal fame 
be offered, Savior, to thy name!

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”

A book of beauty in words and photography, available to order here:

Waiting in Wilderness: The Known and the Unknown

barnstormingblog1 Comment
Though I have never caught the word
Of God from any calling bird,
I hear all that the ancients heard. 
Though I have seen no deity
Enter or leave a twilit tree,
I see all that the seers see. 

A common stone can still reveal
Something not stone, not seen, yet real.
What may a common stone conceal? 

Nothing is far that once was near.
Nothing is hid that once was clear.
Nothing was God that is not here. 

Here is the bird, the tree, the stone.
Here in the sun I sit alone
Between the known and the unknown.
~Robert Francis, “Nothing Is Far” from Collected Poems, 1936-1976

We live out our lives between heaven and earth, sometimes in an uneasy tug-of-war between the two. We feel not quite ready for heaven as our roots go deep here, yet the challenges of daily life on this soil can seem overwhelmingly difficult and we often seek relief, begging for mercy.

We are living “in between” where we are now and where we soon will be, between the “known” of the birds and trees and stones of this world and the “unknown” of what comes next.

Christ, incarnate as the Son on earth and still King in heaven, maintains an eternal connection to above and below. Nothing was God that is not still here on earth. In His hands and under His protection, we are safe no matter where we are and where He takes us.

We, His children, have stony hearts no more. We are known to Him.

Castlerigg Stone Circle in Cumbria

This child through David’s city
   Shall ride in triumph by;
      The palm shall strew its branches,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry,
      Though heavy, dull, and dumb,
         And lie within the roadway
   To pave his kingdom come.

 Yet he shall be forsaken,
   And yielded up to die;
      The sky shall groan and darken,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry
      For stony hearts of men:
         God’s blood upon the spearhead,
   God’s love refused again.
~Richard Wilbur from “A Christmas Hymn”

Waiting in Wilderness: In the Interstices

barnstormingblog1 Comment

As the deer pants for the water so my soul pants for you, God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
As with a deadly wound in my bones,
my adversaries taunt me,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”
from Psalm 42

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.
~R.S. Thomas “Via Negativa”

We are treated as impostors, and yet are true;
as unknown, and yet well known;
as dying, and behold, we live;
as punished, and yet not killed;
as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing;
as poor, yet making many rich;
as having nothing, yet possessing everything.
2 Corinthians 6: 8b-10

The way of negation (via negativa) – describing who God is by describing who He is not — is like describing the interstitial spaces between my cells rather than the cells themselves, or the blackness between stars rather than the light that emanates from them.

It is impossible to understand God unless I absorb what He says about Himself. Yet I am too finite and He is too infinite to grasp fully.

So, like a deer panting for water, I thirst for Him, seeking more than a reflection of water for my real thirst. I want Him tangible and warm before me like Thomas thrusting his hand into Jesus’ wound, crying “My Lord and My God!”

The mystery of God is how He is so much more than mere reflection and the spaces in between what I see and feel in this existence. He is all things, all at once.

So I continue to seek Him, thirsting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQUfS2n33g4

Known and Unknown

barnstormingblog3 Comments

As a fond mother, when the day is o’er,
   Leads by the hand her little child to bed,
   Half willing, half reluctant to be led,
   And leave his broken playthings on the floor,
Still gazing at them through the open door,
   Nor wholly reassured and comforted
   By promises of others in their stead,
   Which, though more splendid, may not please him more;
So Nature deals with us, and takes away
   Our playthings one by one, and by the hand
   Leads us to rest so gently, that we go
Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,
   Being too full of sleep to understand
   How far the unknown transcends the what we know.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “Nature”

I remember being reluctant to go to bed as a child; I could miss something important that the adults waited to do until after I was asleep, or I wasn’t sure that I wanted to turn myself over to my dreams.

I had a period of time when I was in third grade (during the Cuban missile crisis) when I really was terrified to go to sleep, and ended up reading comic books during the night hours, trying to keep myself distracted from whatever fears I harbored. My mother, frantic for sleep herself during this worrisome time, consulted my pediatrician who prescribed orange juice with a tablespoon of brandy – for me, not for her. She was outraged at the thought, being a teetotaler, so bought no brandy for me (or for herself). I eventually got over my sleep issues, but not my worried heart.

The unknown is always more frightening than the known, and the older I got, the more I learned during 24 years of formal education and training, the more I realized I didn’t know. There would be no end to it. Even though I still spend several hours a week reading for required and non-required continuing medical education, I don’t crack the surface of everything that is news in my profession. There is a whole lot that I need to un-learn because it is now proven that it is no longer valid as it originally was over four decades of medical practice.

During the last three months of COVID-19, it is like drinking from several firehoses at once, as data on this previously unknown virus comes piecemeal from countless sources: the studies are rushed and sample sizes are small, conclusions are tentative, often barely peer-reviewed and sometimes disproven the next week by another study. What was considered “fact” a month ago may no longer be so.

So I know I must settle into the reality that there will always be plenty of unknowns, particularly as I reluctantly let go of life’s playthings one by one.

The unknown will always transcend the known on this side of the veil so I appreciate that I am gently led, in faith, to that long-awaited sleep that was so elusive before.

A Sense of Sadness

barnstormingblog2 Comments

Then summer fades and passes
and October comes and goes.
We’ll smell smoke then,
and feel an unexpected sharpness,
a thrill of nervousness,
swift elation,
a sense of sadness and departure.
~ Thomas Wolfe

November begins bittersweet, heralding the inevitable slow down to winter stillness.

The garden is put to bed, lawnmowers put away, pruning shears not yet readied for the work of refinement and shaping.

The air sparkles, sharp-edged in the lungs.

I am never ready for this crush of dark hours descending so quickly. Yet it comes with the promise of the light to come.

And so we wait on the known and patiently ponder the unknown.

Between the Known and Unknown

barnstormingblog3 Comments
chickadee2

 

breakfastoctober

 

 

rockvine

Though I have never caught the word
Of God from any calling bird,
I hear all that the ancients heard.
 
Though I have seen no deity
Enter or leave a twilit tree,
I see all that the seers see.
 
A common stone can still reveal
Something not stone, not seen, yet real.
What may a common stone conceal?
 
Nothing is far that once was near.
Nothing is hid that once was clear.
Nothing was God that is not here.
 
Here is the bird, the tree, the stone.
Here in the sun I sit alone
Between the known and the unknown.
~Robert Francis “Nothing is Far”
 morning1110174
danpnp
Heaven and earth are only three feet apart,
but in the thin places that distance is even smaller.
A thin place is where the veil that separates heaven and earth is lifted
and one is able to receive a glimpse of the glory of God.
~Celtic saying
octmornnorth
octevening2912
A few times
in a few places
I have felt like I can almost reach out
and touch heaven
~His glory is that close~
but too soon I pull back,
put my hand back in my pocket,
rock back on my heels,
balancing barely
between the known
and the unknown.
octmorning167
octmorning169