Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light… Isaiah 26:19
Now in the blessed days of more and less when the news about time is that each day there is less of it I know none of that as I walk out through the early garden only the day and I are here with no before or after and the dew looks up without a number or a present age ~W. S. Merwin “Dew Light” from The Moon Before Morning
Dear March—Come in— How glad I am— I hoped for you before— Put down your Hat— You must have walked— How out of Breath you are— ~Emily Dickinson
It seems I measure time by calendar page turns.
A “before” is turned under, covered up by what comes “after.” Day follows day, week follows week, month follows month, for now…
What I am aware of is how diminishing time is, how I live more and more in the “after.”
Each new month seems to arrive “out of breath.”
So I look to the sky to watch the sun come and go, as the moon rises and sets, knowing it will always be so.
The morning dew light blesses me now, no before or after. It is sent by the Lord; I feel breathless as witness.
How can this not always be the way of things?
This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is Ephesians 3:9:
…to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…
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Eventually balance moves out of us into the world; it’s the pull of rabbits grazing on the lawn as we talk, the slow talk of where and when, determining what and who we will become as we age.
We admire the new plants and the rings of mulch you made, we praise the rabbits eating the weeds’ sweet yellow flowers.
Behind our words the days serve each other as mother, father, cook, builder, and fixer; these float like the clouds beyond the trees.
It is a simple life, now, children grown, our living made and saved, our years our own, husband and wife,
but in our daily stride, the one that rises with the sun, the chosen pride, we lean on our other selves, lest we fall into a consuming fire and lose it all. ~Richard Maxson, “Otherwise” from Searching for Arkansas
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it(anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) I fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) I want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
May the sun bring you new energy by day, May the moon softly restore you by night, May the rain wash away your worries, May the breeze blow new strength into your being.
May you walk gently through the world, And know it’s beauty all the days of your life. ~Apache Blessing
Our days are slower now, less rushed, more reading and writing, walking and pondering, taking it all in and wondering what comes next.
I am so grateful not to hurry to work every day, planning how I should parcel out each moment when my energy and strength is waning.
Should I stay busy cooking, cleaning, sorting, giving away, simplifying our possessions so our children someday won’t have to? Might our grandchildren tire of my attention? Or should I find ways to be of service off the farm to feel worthy of each new day, each new breath?
This time of life is a gift of grace, waking most days with no agenda and few appointments. What comes next remains uncertain, as it always has been. In my busyness, I simply didn’t pay enough attention before.
So I lean lest I fall. I notice beauty and write about it. I carry as many hearts as I can hold. I keep breathing lest I forget how.
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I loved you before I was born. It doesn’t make sense, I know.
I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see. And I’ve lived longing for your ever look ever since. That longing entered time as this body. And the longing grew as this body waxed. And the longing grows as the body wanes. The longing will outlive this body.
I loved you before I was born. It doesn’t make sense, I know.
Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes. And I’ve been lonely for you from that instant. That loneliness appeared on earth as this body. And my share of time has been nothing but your name outrunning my ever saying it clearly. Your face fleeing my ever kissing it firmly once on the mouth.
In longing, I am most myself, rapt, my lamp mortal, my light hidden and singing.
The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater. — J. R. R. Tolkien from The Fellowship of the Ring
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief Isaiah 53:3
Shut out suffering, and you see only one side of this strange and fearful thing, the life of man. Christ saw both sides. He could be glad, he could rejoice with them that rejoice; and yet the settled tone of his disposition was a peculiar and subdued sadness.
That gave the calm depth to the character of Christ; he had got the true view of life by acquainting himself with grief. ~Frederick Robertson from a 1846 sermon entitled Typified by the Man of Sorrows, the Human Race
An elderly mother/grandmother apparently kidnapped from her home is yet to be heard from.
And another school shooting takes hold of my heart and breaks it.
Our sorrows fill a chasm so deep and dark that it is a fearsome thing to even peer from the edge. We join the helplessness of countless people in human history who have lived through times which appeared unendurable.
We don’t understand why inexplicable tragedy befalls good and gracious people, taking them when they are not yet finished with their work on earth.
From the unconscionable shootings of innocents, to quakes that topple buildings burying people, to waves that wipe out whole communities sweeping away thousands, to pathogens too swift and devastating for modern medicine —
we are reminded every day: we live on perilous ground and our time here has always been finite.
We don’t have control over the amount of time, but we do have control over how extensively our compassion for others is heard and spread.
There is assurance in knowing we do not weep alone; our Lord is acquainted with grief.
Our grieving is so familiar to a suffering God who too wept at the death of a beloved friend, when He faced a city about to condemn Him to death and He was tasked with enduring the unendurable.
There is comfort in knowing He too peered into the chasm of darkness; He willingly entered its depths to come to our rescue.
His has an incomparable capacity for Light, bringing to the world a Love that lasts an eternity.
Lyrics:
Angels, where you soar Up to God’s own light Take my own lost bird On your hearts tonight; And as grief once more Mounts to heaven and sings Let my love be heard Whispering in your wings ~Alfred Noyes
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The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur”
Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother; Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room, Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb. ~John Donne from “Annunciation”
I know this sound, first birds of morning. As a child, I waited for hours for the drape of night to roll up again. Leaning into the first hint of the fresh day, the fragile lace of hesitant light, the receding darkness dappled with bird song, able at last to close my eyes. I know this sound, some kind of redemption, waking me from scattered sleep, a healing fragment even as the work of the previous day marks my bones in notches. Night leaves its small fur as the dawn pushes, as the birds persist, and morning unfurls like a promise you hoped someone would keep. ~Susan Moorhead “First Light” from Carry Darkness, Carry Light
Our February farm sunrises have always been full of promise over the three decades we’ve been here. The birds are waking earlier each day and when mornings are soaked, dripping with light and color, the air itself is alive.
Nothing though quite matches the phenomenon in February 2015 (top photo) when a fall streak hole or “key hole” cloud formed over nearby foothills.
It looked to me as if angels were bursting through an unfurling break in heaven’s moving veil. Though it didn’t last long, it was seen for miles around us.
When morning breaks the night, it is like the first morning which came into being with His Words:
“Let there be light” — and there continues to be the most amazing light…
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Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. ~Naomi Shihab Nye from “Kindness” in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ― Mary Oliver
Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields… Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness. ~Mary Oliver from “Why I Wake Early”
Have you ever noticed how much of Christ’s life was spent in doing kind things – in merely doing kind things? … he spent a great proportion of his time simply in making people happy, in doing good turns to people.
There is only one thing greater than happiness in the world, and that is holiness; and it is not in our keeping. But what God has put in our power is the happiness of those about us, and that is largely to be secured by our being kind to them.…
I wonder why it is that we are not all kinder than we are. How much the world needs it. How easily it is done. How instantaneously it acts. How infallibly it is remembered. ~Henry Drummond from The Greatest Thing in the World
(to remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. ~Wendell Berry from “How to Be a Poet”
I wake up discouraged by the desecration of kindness in this world.
I share here what I pluck out of each morning’s sacred silence, sharing my thanks to God for what is astonishingly beautiful so as not to forget each moment.
And here you are, receiving my aching heart with gentleness, listening to what emerges from my “telling out” each morning, so often reacting with kindness and encouragement.
That is even more astonishing to me.
Thank you for being here to see what I discover. Thank you for sharing with others in your life. Thank you for letting me know it makes a difference.
Welcome back, each and every day. So happy you are here, kind souls – the only thing that makes sense anymore.
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For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. John 3:16-21
The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side. G.K. Chesterton (on his deathbed)
The world hides God from us, or we hide ourselves from God, or for reasons of his own God hides himself from us, but however you account for it, he is often more conspicuous by his absence than by his presence, and his absence is much of what we labor under and are heavy laden by. Just as sacramental theology speaks of a doctrine of the Real Presence, maybe it should speak also of a doctrine of the Real Absence because absence can be sacramental, too, a door left open,a chamber of the heart kept ready and waiting. ~Frederick Buechner from Telling the Truth
…my faith has weathered in a holy way; it’s larger, gentler, especially as I have learned to bear the needs of others, to pour myself out at least a little bit like God does for me. In that offering, I’ve learned a lot about God’s quiet, ever-present nourishment. A larger, patient acceptance has come to me. I haven’t found every answer, I still ‘want’ so much more of God than I have, and yet, I also have learned to live with the holy hunger that is the groaning of God’s Spirit within me as I wait for the full coming of the Kingdom. ~Sarah Clarkson reflecting on Buechner’s quote above
Lord Jesus, You are my righteousness, I am your sin. You took on you what was mine; yet set on me what was yours. You became what you were not, that I might become what I was not. ~Martin Luther
…faith is keeping Christ before our eyes — Christ incarnate, Christ in his ministry, Christ giving his life on the cross for us — beholding in Christ the very heart of God poured out in love. John points to Jesus and says this is what God is like; this is God’s heart for us. ~Pastor Nathan Chambersparaphrasing John Calvin
Choosing to step through the opened door into the light is not like choosing sides on teams in grade school, numbering off one-two-one-two until everyone knows which side they stand on – the weak and the strong thrown together by random chance.
It is not like an explosive election year where choosing sides means aligning with a political candidate with whom I vehemently disagree so as to avoid supporting the even worse opponent.
This is not like a Lincoln-Douglas debate tournament where I might represent one viewpoint for the first round, and then be asked to represent the opposite viewpoint in the second half.
This is a choice of where I would rather be: in the light of God’s love and presence, or hiding from Him in the shadows.
And it isn’t only my choice, but it is being chosen, just as I am, my weakness and sin and darkness taken on by Christ’s enormous love so that I might become what I was not before.
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.
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The birds do not sing in these mornings. The skies are white all day. The Canadian geese fly over high up in the moonlight with the lonely sound of their discontent. Going south. Now the rains and soon the snow. The black trees are leafless, the flowers gone. Only cabbages are left in the bedraggled garden. Truth becomes visible, the architecture of the soul begins to show through. God has put off his panoply and is at home with us. We are returned to what lay beneath the beauty. We have resumed our lives. There is no hurry now. We make love without rushing and find ourselves afterward with someone we know well. Time to be what we are getting ready to be next. This loving, this relishing, our gladness, this being puts down roots and comes back again year after year. ~Jack Gilbert “Half the Truth” from Collected Poems.
In the shape of this night, in the still fall of snow, Father In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds and children… Before the bells ring, before this little point in time has rushed us on Before this clean moment has gone, before this night turns to face tomorrow, Father There is this high singing in the air Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window And there are other bells that we would ring, Father Other bells that we would ring. ~Kenneth Patchen from “At the New Year”
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul… ~G.K.Chesterton from A Chesterton Calendar
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be. ~Lord Alfred Tennyson from “In Memoriam”
Often when something is ending we discover within it the spore of new beginning, and a whole new train of possibility is in motion before we even realize it. When the heart is ready for a fresh beginning, unforeseen things can emerge. And in a sense, this is exactly what a beginning does. It is an opening for surprises. ~John O’Donohue from “To Bless the Space Between Us”
No heralding trumpets – Just softening shadows, Timed and tracked.
Fingers of light flaring amber Over the eastern ridge of foothills, Caress the slopes of snow capped peaks. So I bid this past year farewell.
Each earthly thing bathed in gold Glimpsed and grasped without fanfare Yet wholly miraculous. Too soon this day, this year, becomes ordinary again Although it is truth: we can be born anew, year after year.
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I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night. — Khaled Hosseini from The Kite Runner
The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming.
We cling to the present out of wariness of the past.
But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us.
The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived. ~Frederick Buechner from A Room Called Remember
age nineage 14age 15
Something went wrong, says the empty house in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste. And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard like branches after a storm—a rubber cow, a rusty tractor with a broken plow, a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say. ~Ted Kooser, from “Abandoned Farmhouse” from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems.
In 1959, when I was five years old, my father took a new job so our family moved from a large 3 story farm house in a rural community to a 1950’s newer rambler-style home just outside the city limits of the state capitol.
It was a big adjustment to move to a much smaller house without a basement or upper story, no garage, and no large haybarn nor chicken coop. It meant most things we owned didn’t make the move with us.
The rambler had two side-by-side mirror image rooms as the primary central living space between the kitchen/dining area on one side and the hallway to the bedrooms on the other. The living room could only be entered through the front door and the family room was accessed through the back door with a shared sandstone hearth in the center, containing a fireplace in each room. The only opening between the rooms had a folding door shut most of the year. In December, the door was opened to accommodate a Christmas tree, so it sat partially in the living room and depending on its generous width, spilled over into the family room. That way it was visible from both rooms, and didn’t take up too much floor space.
The living room, because it contained the only carpeting in the house, and our “best” furniture, was strictly off-limits. In order to keep our two matching sectional knobby gray fabric sofas, a green upholstered chair and gold crushed velvet covered love seat in pristine condition, the room was to be avoided unless we had company. The carpet was never to develop a traffic pattern, there would be no food, beverage, or pet ever allowed in that room, and the front door was not to be used unless a visitor arrived. The hearth never saw a fire lit on that side because of the potential of messy ashes or smoke smell.
This was not a room for toys or games. The chiming clock next to the hearth, wound with weighted cones on the end of chains, called out the hours without an audience.
One week before Christmas, a tree was chosen to fit in the space where it could overflow into the family room. I particularly enjoyed decorating the “family room” side of the tree, using all my favorite ornaments that were less likely to break if they fell on the linoleum floor on that side of the door.
It was almost as if the Christmas tree itself became divided, with a “formal” side in the living room and a “real life” face on the other side where the living (and hurting) was actually taking place.
The tree straddled more than just two rooms. Every year that tree’s branches reached out to shelter a family that was slowly, almost imperceptibly, falling apart, like the fir needles dropping to the floor to be swept away.
Something was going wrong, only I didn’t see it at the time.
Each year since, our Christmas tree, bearing those old ornaments from my childhood, reminds me of that still room of memories.
No longer am I wary of the past. As I sweep up the fir needles that inevitably drop, I no longer weep.
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