Luci Shaw – Page 5 – Barnstorming

God Was Here: Knit to Man’s Nature

December 4, 2017 barnstormingblog1 Comment

“infinity walled in a womb…”
~Luci Shaw from “Made flesh,” in Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation

“…inside her the mind
of Christ, cloaked in blood,
lodges and begins to grow.”
~Jane Kenyon from “Mosaic of the Nativity”

There is nothing more finite than the space inside the womb–it gets crowded in there quickly over a scant few months.

Yet there Infinity dwelled within the finite.

As I am no theologian, I’m not capable of discussing the intricacy of the reformational argument of finitum capax infiniti (the finite is capable of the infinite) vs finitum non capax infiniti (the finite is not capable of the infinite) which has to do with Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist.

As a mother, I try to understand that finite Mary carried the infinite within
–“inside her the mind of Christ”…

The incarnation of God knit together with the nature of Man is far more profound than the joining of flute and drum to make joyous dancing music. We historically have trivialized the birth of Jesus to scale it to a size more comfortable for our limited comprehension with little drummer boys, kindly oxen, loyal donkey, cute angels, lots of tu-re-lus and pat-a-pans.

The reality is: nothing is the same as it was when the finite met with the infinite
– a big bang –
but this one happened in our hearts.
By coming and joining to us, God changed everything and us.

How is it, now knowing this, can anyone be glum?
How can we not dance and sing?

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
~William Blake from Auguries of Innocence

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day;
I would my true love did so chance
To see the legend of my play,
To call my true love to my dance;

Sing, oh! my love, oh! my love, my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love

Then was I born of a virgin pure,
Of her I took fleshly substance
Thus was I knit to man's nature
To call my true love to my dance. 

In a manger laid, and wrapped I was
So very poor, this was my chance
Betwixt an ox and a silly poor ass
To call my true love to my dance.

God Was Here: A Flower of Grace

December 3, 2017December 3, 2017 barnstormingblog1 Comment

Here God lives, burrowing among

the petals, cross-

pollinating. Here is Christ’s mind

juiced, joined, fleshed, celled.

Here is the clash,

the roil, an invasion, not gentle

as dew; the rose is unfurled

violently until the scent explodes

and detonates in the air

And oh, it trembles—

thousands of seeds ripen in it as

it reels in the wind
~Luci Shaw from “Flower head”

It was gardener/author Alphonse Karr in the mid-19th century who wrote that even though most people grumble about roses having thorns, he was grateful that thorns have roses. After all, there was a time when thorns were not part of our world, when we knew nothing of suffering and death, but pursuing and desiring more than we were already generously given, we received a bit more than we bargained for.

We continue to reel under the thorns our choices produce — indeed every day there is more bloodletting.

So a rose was sent to adorn the thorns and even then we chose thorns to make Him bleed and still do to this day.

Yes, a fragrant flower of grace blooms beautiful,
bleeding amid the thorns,
and will to the endless day
that ever was and ever shall be.

There is a flower sprung from a tree,
The root thereof is called Jesse,
A flower of great worth;
There is no other such in paradise.

This flower is fair and fresh of hue;
It fades never, but ever is new;
The blessed branch where this flower grew
Was Mary mild who bore Jesu —
A flower of grace,
Against all sorrow it is solace.

The seed thereof was of God’s sending,
Which God himself sowed with his hand;
In Bethlehem, in that holy land,
Within her garden he found her there.
This blessed flower
Sprang never but in Mary’s bower.

When Gabriel this maiden met,
With “Ave, Maria,” he her greeted
Between them two this flower was set,
And was kept, no man should know it,
Until one day
In Bethlehem, it began to spread and spray.

When that flower began to spread,
And his blossom to bud,
Rich and poor of every seed,
They marvelled how this flower might spread,
Until kings three
That blessed flower came to see.

Angels there came out of their tower
To look upon this fresh flower —
How fair he was in his colour,
And how sweet in his savour —
And to behold
How such a flower might spring amid the cold.

Of lily, of rose on branch,
Of primrose, and of fleur-de-lys,
Of all the flowers I can think of,
That flower of Jesse yet bears the prize,
As the best remedy
To ease our sorrows in every part.

I pray you, flowers of this country,
Wherever ye go, wherever ye be,
Hold up the flower of good Jesse,
Above your freshness and your beauty,
As fairest of all,
Which ever was and ever shall be.
~John Audelay 15th century priest (translated from old English)

Mere Mist

September 14, 2017 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
James 4:14

…Noticing
a spider’s web under the olive trees
splendidly hung with early drops, already
vanishing up the vortex of the air
…a heaven-sent refreshment? or a curtain
cutting out the light?
And I must ask it now
(small moisture that I am) under the sun of God’s great grace on me:
Which am I–dew, or fog?
~Luci Shaw from “…for you are a mist“

To be mere mist that clarifies
rather than opacifies,
that reflects new worlds
rather than absorbs,
that replenishes grace
rather than depletes~

at once evaporating heaven-ward within His warmth
while glistening from His descended touch.

Green and Glorious

April 26, 2017 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

I wished to wade in the trillium
and be warmed near the white flames.
I imagined the arch of my foot
massaged by the mosses.
This field immersed in gravity
defying growth. Green and glorious.
It let me know that out of the
soil came I, and green I shall be.
Whether an unnamed weed or a
wild strawberry I will join in
the hymn.
~Luci Shaw from “Spring Song, Very Early Morning”

Spring is finally in full swing here on the farm. Grass grows so fast that mowing could be a twice a week activity, dandelions are dotting the fields in a yellow carpet, the flowering plums and cherries are peaking, the daffodils are spent and the tulips are bursting forth.

The koi and goldfish in our pond have decided to surface from underneath all the winter debris and have grown to another 6 inches over the winter and now are busy feasting on mosquito larvae as the insects have awakened as well. At times I feel so overwhelmed by the accelerated pace of growth and activity that I sheepishly long for the dark quiet gray days of winter, if just for the respite of a nap.

Instead of a nap, I hunt for trillium. They are the traditional harbinger of spring and without them, it all seems like just so much pretending. These are somber plants that will only grow in certain conditions of woods and shade, with leafy mulched soil. Once established, they reliably spring up from their bulbs every spring with their rich green trio of leaves on each stem that are at once soft and slightly shimmery, and at the top the purest of three white petals, one per leaf cluster. The blossoms last a week or two, then turn purplish and fade away, followed weeks later by the fading of the foliage, not to arise again from the soil until the following year.

Picking a trillium blossom necessitates picking the leaf foliage beneath it, and that in turn destroys the bulb’s ability to nourish and regenerate, and the plant never forms again. I think I have known this from my earliest childhood days as I was a compulsive wildflower gatherer as a little kid, having devastated more than my share of trillium bulbs until I learned the awful truth of the damage I had done. I have since treated them as sacrosanct and untouchable.

There are trillium blossoms to be found on our farm, a few steadfast survivors, yet completely vulnerable to someone’s impulse to bring the beauty indoors for a few days in a vase. What a tenuous grip on life when people are desiring to pluck them, with their resulting oblivion. How unknowingly destructive we are in our blind selfish pursuit of beauty for our own pleasure and purposes. These pure triad blossoms and leaves, representing all that is preciously drawn from the earth and enriched and nourished by sunlight, can be obliterated, never to return, never to bloom, never to rise again from the dust to be green and glorious.

How much more precious is that which rises again to bloom and flourish forever despite our senseless destructiveness? And He is here, among us, waiting for us, forgiving us for our thoughtless actions.

I look at the trillium longingly, wanting to touch them, wanting to own them and hold them, and knowing I never will. They are meant to stay where they are, as I hope to remain, rooted and thriving, yet still fragile in the everlasting soil of life.

Turn Aside and Look: To Anticipate a Thaw

March 5, 2017 barnstormingblog3 Comments

March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened
for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice
around foliage and stem
night by night,

but as the light lengthens, preacher
of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches,
his large gestures beckon green
out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting
from the cotoneasters. A single bee
finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow
aconites glowing, low to the ground like
little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up
a purple hand here, there, as I stand
on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat
and light like a bud welcoming resurrection,
and my hand up, too, ready to sign on
for conversion.
~Luci Shaw “Revival” from What the Light was Like

These frozen days anticipate what is to come,
beg us to turn aside from the distractions of this age~
to see the fire that burns but does not consume,
listen to the voice that beckons us heed,
feel the revival of our spirits that have been dead too long.

The thaw is at hand; a new day is dawning.

Fernando Ortega — Revive Me Again

Preparing the Heart: A Quickening Spirit

December 17, 2016 barnstormingblog1 Comment

So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a quickening spirit.
~1Corinthians 15:45

All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.

Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God.
~Romans 8:22-28 from The Message by Eugene Petersen

…like Mary, I believe that we too can become pregnant with God.
~Luci Shaw

There is a distinct and memorable moment in pregnancy, around 16 weeks, when there is an undeniable awareness of movement within the womb–initially a fluttery feeling, but then over the next few days, there are tickly sensations, then rolling, then pushes. It is referred to clinically as “quickening”–an emphatic evidence of life within–and there is a profound acknowledgment that one’s life is no longer one’s own. It is now shared.

Jesus is called the “second Adam” through his death and resurrection, a quickening spirit now shared with us, so much more than the simple life and breath of the first Adam. The spirit lives and breathes within us, fluttering and rolling, pushing us from inside, creating in us more than we ever could become on our own. We are startled by its presence, amazed by its touch, forever transformed, pregnant with possibility and never, never to be the same again.

Preparing the Heart: Forgiveness Blossoms Through the Wound

December 12, 2016December 12, 2016 barnstormingblog1 Comment

When she heard infinity
whispered in her ear, did the flashing
scissors in her fingers fall
to the wooden floor and the spool unravel,
the spider’s sly cradle
tremble with love?

Imagine

How the dry fields leaned
toward the news and she heard, for a moment,
the households of crickets –
When she answered, all things shifted, the moon
in its river of milk.

And when she wanted to pluck
her heart from her breast, did she remember
a commotion of wings, or the stirring
of dust?
~Kathleen Wakefield “Mary’s Poem”

A child is born,
crowned in blood, and we lighten up.
Sure, we see it every day, and yet
this day, tradition says, is unlike any,
which is true. It has never happened,
and never will again, over and over
the will to be reborn, to gasp and cry
forgiveness, that is, like birth, difficult,
scared, insurgent, brave with the stranger,
the winter child, that blossoms through the wound.
~Bruce Bond from “Advent”

In sleep his infant mouth works in and out.
He is so new, his silk skin has not yet
been roughed by plane and wooden beam
nor, so far, has he had to deal with human doubt.

He is in a dream of nipple found,
of blue-white milk, of curving skin
and, pulsing in his ear, the inner throb
of a warm heart’s repeated sound.

His only memories float from fluid space.
So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door,
broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash,
wept for the sad heart of the human race.
~Luci Shaw “Kenosis”

To think that the original Breath stirring the dust of man led to this?

This mystery of God becoming man, growing within woman, fed from her breast, wounded and bleeding to save her who delivered him, emptied himself completely to then deliver all of us as newborns, sliding slippery into our new life.

And we gasp for breath, our nostrils no longer breathing dust, but filled by the fragrance of forgiveness and grace.

We blossom through his wounds, bursting into bloom.

Preparing the Heart: Light in Dark

December 4, 2016December 4, 2016 barnstormingblog3 Comments

Salvation to all that will is nigh;
That All, which always is all everywhere,
Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,
Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,
Lo! faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb; and though He there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He’ll wear,
Taken from thence, flesh, which death’s force may try.

Ere by the spheres time was created thou
Wast in His mind, who is thy Son, and Brother;
Whom thou conceivest, conceived; yea, thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother,
Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room
Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb.
~John Donne “Annunciation”

What next, she wonders,
with the angel disappearing, and her room
suddenly gone dark.

The loneliness of her news
possesses her. She ponders
how to tell her mother.

Still, the secret at her heart burns like
a sun rising. How to hold it in—
that which cannot be contained.

She nestles into herself, half-convinced
it was some kind of good dream,
she its visionary.

But then, part dazzled, part prescient—
she hugs her body, a pod with a seed
that will split her.
~Luci Shaw “Mary Considers Her Situation”

Sometimes
for the light to replace
where darkness thrives,
there must be wounding
that tears us open,
cleaving us so joy can enter into
where we hurt the most.

Piecing Together the Scraps

August 18, 2016August 23, 2016 barnstormingblog6 Comments

“I make them warm to keep my family from freezing;

I make them beautiful to keep my heart from breaking.”

–From the journal of a prairie woman, 1870

To keep a husband and five children warm,

she quilts them covers thick as drifts against

the door. Through every fleshy square white threads

needle their almost invisible tracks; her hours

count each small suture that holds together

the raw-cut, uncolored edges of her life.

She pieces each one beautiful, and summer bright

to thaw her frozen soul. Under her fingers

the scraps grow to green birds and purple

improbable leaves; deeper than calico, her mid-winter

mind bursts into flowers. She watches them unfold

between the double stars, the wedding rings.
~Luci Shaw “Quiltmaker”

It could be the world was made this way:
piecemeal, the parts fitting together
as if made for one another~
disparate and separate
coming together in harmony.
The point of its creation
to be forever functional,
a blanket of warmth and security
but its result is so much more:
beauty arising from scraps,
the broken stitched to broken
to become holy and whole.

(all quilts here are on display this week at the Northwest Washington Fair in Lynden)

Contentment Beyond Telling

May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 barnstormingblog1 Comment

irisdepth

sunsetdandy51166

13173153_1290213661007944_8371190478800636920_o — “Last Light” photo of Twin Sisters at dusk by Joel DeWaard

How wonderful it was to love something
without the compromise of language.
~Jim Harrison

To plunge headlong into
the heart of a blossom, its amber eyes
inscrutably focusing on your own,
magnified by a lens of dew.
Whose scent, invisible,
drowns you in opulence, and for which
you can find nothing adequate to say.

Words stumble, cheapen, like when you try
and fail to describe to someone what
yesterday’s shadows looked like, racing
over the five layers of far hills, or how
the mountain stream muttered its way
between valley stones.

You sense that you are loved wholly,
yet are quite unable to understand why.
But then, you lift your face,
creased with the ordinary, to a heaven
that is breaking into blue,
and find your contentment utterly beyond
telling, unspeakable, uncontained.~Luci Shaw “Speechless” from her new collection Sea Glass

irispetal

wwupinks13

fuschia1

Although it doesn’t always take words to know
how deeply we love,
and are loved,
the Word is love
personified,
embodied,
bloodied,
unforgettable.

peony42816

thesisters2

	Chandra Lynn on Reflecting Light Like Drops of…
	covenantwmn on The Soul Creeps Out of the Tre…
	Betsy Tumbas on Just a Little Catastrophic Thi…
	covenantwmn on A Latticework of Bones
	covenantwmn on Comprehending the Difference