Some days, words simply don’t come. I am stilled and plain – silent in darkness. God is in the depth of these empty hours. He is there – waiting alongside me.
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
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The night after she returned from the hospital the uneven rumbly liquid breathing of one soon
to go under kept me at the surface of thoughts I couldn’t escape. Clonazepam, Lorazepam,
not even Ambien could pull or sink me. And in the morning, sure enough, we couldn’t coax or shake her awake
except for a few seconds when someone or thing wrenched her eyes open and let her answer no
to every question in a scornful voice we’d never heard before before pulling her down to that rocky undertow.
Through the morning and afternoon every breath, a grunt, a rattling that soaked the bedclothes and pillows in sweat.
Then at 3 pm, she returned—recognizing her two daughters speaking her own name and the name of the president.
The hospice nurse put a line through the word “Comatose” scrawled at the top of her chart and for the next few hours
a light or absence seemed to emanate from her almost emptied irises. No sentences. No speech as the white
nimbus of hair, thick and lively around her head nodded yes to sitting up and getting dressed—
to sweet potatoes and Jeopardy! as though part of her remained in that rheumy underwater place
that took her breath away and wiped out the syntax of explanation and inquiry, leaving only
no I won’t and certainly not and don’t ever wake me up again. ~Lisa Sewell “The Land of Nod”
Vigil at my mother’s bedside
Where do your dreams take you? At times you wake in your childhood home of Rolling wheat fields, boundless days of freedom. Other naps take you to your student and teaching days Grammar and drama, speech and essays. Yesterday you were a young mother again Juggling babies, farm and your wistful dreams.
Today you looked about your empty nest Disguised as hospital bed, Wondering aloud about Children grown, flown. You still control through worry and tell me: It’s foggy out there Travel safe through the dark Call me when you get there Take time to eat Sleep sound, ready to wake fresh tomorrow
I dress you as you dressed me I clean you as you cleaned me I love you as you loved me You try my patience as I tried yours. I wonder if I have the strength to Mother my mother For as long as she needs.
When I tell you the truth of where you are Your brow furrows as it used to do When I disappointed you~ This cannot be A bed in a room in a sterile place Waiting Waiting for death, Waiting for heaven, Waiting for the light
And I tell you: It’s foggy Travel safe through the darkness Eat something, please eat Sleep sound, ready to wake fresh tomorrow Call me when you get there.
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
Wake, Awake for Night is Flying Let the shadows be forsaken, The time has come for us to waken, And to the Day our lives entrust. Search the sky for heaven’s portal: The clouds shall rain the Light Immortal, And earth will soon bud forth the Just.
Of one pearl each shining portal, where, dwelling with the choir immortal, we gather ’round Your dazzling light. No eye has seen, no ear has yet been trained to hear what joy is ours! ~Philipp Nicolai
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Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Carrion Comfort”
Once again, the mounting deaths by one’s own hand make grim headlines announcing solemn statistics.
I heard it over and over during decades in my clinic; patient after patient said the same thing: I can no more...
this agonizing struggle with despair makes one frantic to avoid the fight and flee, to feel no more bruising and bleed no more, to become nothing but chaff and ashes.
suicide seems a solution when one can not feel the love of a God who, in reality, cares enough to wrestle with us relentlessly– who heaven-handling flung us here by breathing life into our nostrils –
and continues to breathe with us…
perhaps we can’t possibly imagine a God caring enough to be killed for us (He Himself created us who doubt, us who are so sore afraid)
because He loves us, no one is ever now, nor ever will be,
~nothing~
My God! such darkness is now done forever.
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The woods is shining this morning. Red, gold and green, the leaves lie on the ground, or fall, or hang full of light in the air still. Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes the place it has been coming to forever. It has not hastened here, or lagged. See how surely it has sought itself, its roots passing lordly through the earth. See how without confusion it is all that it is, and how flawless its grace is. Running or walking, the way is the same. Be still. Be still. “He moves your bones, and the way is clear.” ~Wendell Berry “Grace”
If I’m confused (as I often am) about where I’ve been, where I am, where I’m going, I look to the cycles of the seasons to be reminded all things (and I) come round
what is barren will warm to the sun and bud, what buds will open up in blossom, what blossoms will grow lush and fruit, what flourishes will feed, fade and fall, come to rest and be still.
All things come round, making the way clear. Grace forges a path my bones must follow.
To shine in His stillness. How flawless His grace.
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Be comforted; the world is very old, And generations pass, as they have passed, A troop of shadows moving with the sun; Thousands of times has the old tale been told; The world belongs to those who come the last, They will find hope and strength as we have done. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “A Shadow”
The shadow’s the thing. If I no longer see shadows as “dark marks,” as do the newly sighted, then I see them as making some sort of sense of the light. They give the light distance; they put it in its place. They inform my eyes of my location here, here O Israel, here in the world’s flawed sculpture, here in the flickering shade of the nothingness between me and the light. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground. ~Victor Hugo from Les Miserables
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t. ~Blaise Pascal
These days I find myself seeking safety hiding in the shadows under a rock where “not-really-conservative and not-really-liberal” moderates like me tend to gather to seek safety and commiserate together.
Extremist views predominate simply for the sake of differentiating one’s political turf from the opposition. There is barely any discussion of compromise, negotiation or collaboration as that would be perceived as a sign of weakness.
Instead it is “my way or the wrong way.”
I say “no way,” as both sides act intolerably intolerant of the other.
The chasm particularly gapes wider in any discussion of faith issues. Religion and politics have become angry neighbors constantly arguing over how high to build the fence between them, what it should be made out of, what color it should be, should there be peek holes, should it be electrified with barbed wire to prevent moving back and forth, should there be a gate with or without a lock, who pays for the labor and whether an immigrant with a work permit is available to do the labor. In a country founded on the principle of freedom of religion and the pursuit of happiness, far more people now believe our forefathers’ blood was shed for freedom from religion in order to be happy.
Give us the right to believe in nothing whatsoever or give us death. Perhaps both go together.
And so it goes. We bring out the worst in potential leaders as facts are distorted, ethics abandoned, the truth stretched or completely abandoned, unseemly pandering abounds and curried favors are served for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Enough already.
In the midst of this morass, we who want to believe will still choose to believe and our next challenge is for believers to actually get along with one another. This is no longer a given. We have chosen to reside in the shadows of conflict, argument, and abuse of our fellow believers.
Still, there is Light for those who seek it out. No need to remain hiding in the shadowlands.
I’ll come out from under my rock to face the onslaught, if you do.
In fact…I think I just did.
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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
A walk around our farm in October is more or less, before or after, now and then, a timelessness of shifting seasons and fading days.
A prayer becomes like dew from above, me looking up to the God who was, is and ever will be, who already knows what I am about to say. He knows I don’t tend to say anything new.
He blesses me with the light of His dew.
I write every day to explain myself to people I will never meet. Perhaps, every day, I am trying to explain myself to God.
God is, (if I stop to look and listen), yesterday, today, tomorrow – more or less, before or after, now and then, but most especially forever and ever.
Amen.
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I go to the mountain side of the house to cut saplings, and clear a view to snow on the mountain. But when I look up, saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in the uppermost branches. I don’t cut that one. I don’t cut the others either. Suddenly, in every tree, an unseen nest where a mountain would be. ~Tess Gallagher “Choices” from Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems
Might I be capable of such tenderness? Might I consider the needs of others, by saving not just one nest, but all future nests, rather than exercise my right to an unimpeded view, wanting the world to be exactly how I want it?
I must not forget: my right to choose demands that I choose to do right by those who have no choice.
One minute I’m meandering down a country road on a magnificent fall day, lost in thought, radio playing, and the next minute I feel my wheels
on the loose gravel of the shoulder, there’s a deafening bang and I’m climbing out of what’s left of my car. The cop who came to investigate
was pretty sure I’d been speeding but settled for lecturing me about how lucky I was to walk away from such a crash, that I’d be dead if my car had hit the tree
just six inches further to the left. Anyone could see that what he said was true, but it also struck me as I stood there watching his car flash red and blue
that it was equally true the accident would not have happened at all if a raging storm some sixty years ago hadn’t blown an acorn six inches closer
to the road than where it would’ve landed on a day as sunny and calm as the one we were in. It was a point I thought deserved serious exploration—though perhaps
not just then, I decided, with a hundred birds singing their tiny hearts out overhead and the sky raining down yellow leaves, and definitely not with the cop. ~Jeff Coomer “Six Inches” from A Potentially Quite Remarkable Thursday.
For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn’t know we needed and take us places where we didn’t know we didn’t want to go. ~Kathleen Norris from Cloister Walk
Grace and mercy salvaged me when I didn’t know I needed saving, handed me what I didn’t think I needed, so never asked for, and taken me where I never planned to be because I thought I was just fine where I was.
Grace is not about giving me what I want; not a reward for following the rules, for being “good” or staying out of trouble. It is rescue from a fate of meaninglessness – a gift of God’s heart buoying me in weakness when I deserve nothing whatsoever.
This grace is like an acorn falling to the exact spot where I needed a serious exploration of where I was heading, then decades later, finding a tree standing in my path, ready and waiting to stop my recklessness.
I am grateful, so very grateful, for what I did not know I needed to know.
And now I know…
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They lie on the ground after the deer have left after the bear has had her fill they
lie under the stars and under the sun in a cloud of brambles the ripest ones fall first become black jam in the thatch. as a boy I hated picking blackberries the pail never full like one half of a slow conversation.
Now their taste is sweeter in memory the insect buzz the branches too high the blue summer never quite over before the fall begins. ~Richard Terrell from “Blackberries” from What Falls Away is Always
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full, Until the tinkling bottom had been covered With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre. But when the bath was filled we found a fur, A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not. ~Seamus Heaney from “Blackberry Picking”
In the early morning an old woman is picking blackberries in the shade. It will be too hot later but right now there’s dew.
Some berries fall: those are for squirrels. Some are unripe, reserved for bears. Some go into the metal bowl. Those are for you, so you may taste them just for a moment. That’s good times: one little sweetness after another, then quickly gone.
Once, this old woman I’m conjuring up for you would have been my grandmother. Today it’s me. Years from now it might be you, if you’re quite lucky.
The hands reaching in among the leaves and spines were once my mother’s. I’ve passed them on. Decades ahead, you’ll study your own temporary hands, and you’ll remember. Don’t cry, this is what happens.
Look! The steel bowl is almost full. Enough for all of us. The blackberries gleam like glass, like the glass ornaments we hang on trees in December to remind ourselves to be grateful for snow.
Some berries occur in sun, but they are smaller. It’s as I always told you: the best ones grow in shadow. ~Margaret Atwood “Blackberries” from Dearly
I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry-eating in late September. ~Galway Kinnell “Blackberry Eating”
Blackberry vines are trouble 90% of the year – always growing where they are not welcome – reaching out to grab passersby without discriminating between human, dog or horse. But for a month in late summer and early fall, they yield black gold – bursting, swelling, unimaginably sweet fruit that is worth the hassle tolerated the rest of the weeks of the year.
It has been an unusually dry summer here in the Pacific Northwest with little rain until recently, so the fields are brown and even the usually lush blackberry vines have started to dry and color up. The berries themselves are rich from the sun but starting now to shrivel and mold.
Our Haflinger horses have been fed hay for the past several weeks as there is not enough pasture for them without the supplement–we are about 6 weeks ahead of schedule in feeding hay. I had grown a little suspicious the last couple nights as I brought the Haflingers into the barn for the night. Two of the mares turned out in the back field had purplish stains on their chests and front legs. Hmmmm. Raiding the berries. Desperate drought forage behavior in an extremely efficient eating machine.
So this evening I headed toward the berries. When the mares saw the bowl in my hand, that was it. They mobbed me. I was irresistible.
So with mares in tow, I approached a berry bank. It was ravaged. Trampled. Haflinger poop piles everywhere. All that were left were some clusters of gleaming black berries up high overhead, barely reachable on my tip toes, and only reachable if I walked directly into the thicket. The mares stood in a little line behind me, pondering me as I pondered my dilemma.
I set to work picking what I could reach, snagging, ripping and bloodying my hands and arms, despite my sleeves. Pretty soon I had mares on either side of me, diving into the brambles and reaching up to pick what they could reach as well, unconcerned about the thorns that tore at their sides and muzzles. They were like sharks in bloody water–completely focused on their prey and amazingly skilled at grabbing just the black berries, and not the pale green or red ones.
Plump Haflingers and one *plumpish* woman were willingly accumulating scars in the name of sweetness.
When my bowl was full, I extracted myself from the brambles and contemplated how I was going to safely make it back to the barn without being mare-mugged. Instead, they obediently trailed behind me, happy to be put in their stalls for their evening hay, accepting a gift from me with no thorns or vines attached.
Clearly, thorns are part of our everyday life. Thorns stand in front of much that is sweet and good and precious to us. They tear us up, bloody us, make us cry, make us beg for mercy.
Yet thorns have been overcome. They did not stop our salvation, did not stop goodness raining down on us, did not stop the taste of sweetness given as a gracious gift.
If we hesitate, thorns only proliferate unchecked.
So, desperate and hungry, we dive right in, to taste and eat.
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In Summer, in a burst of summertime Following falls and falls of rain, When the air was sweet-and-sour of the flown fineflower of Those goldnails and their gaylinks that hang along a lime… ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Cheery Beggar”
What I wanted wasn’t to let in the wetness. That can be mopped.
Nor the cold. There are blankets.
What I wanted was the siren, the thunder, the neighbor, the fireworks, the dog’s bark.
Which of them didn’t matter?
Yes, this world is perfect, all things as they are.
But I wanted not to be the one sleeping soundly, on a soft pillow, clean sheets untroubled, dreaming there still might be time,
Sweet and sour extends far beyond a Chinese menu; it is the air we breathe. Dichotomy is in our life and times – the bittersweet of simple pleasures laced with twinges and tears.
I am but a cheery beggar in this world, desiring to hang tight to the overwhelming sweetness of each glorious moment:
the startling late summer sunrise, the renewed green coming through the dead of spent fields, the warm hug of a compassionate word, a house filled with love and laughter.
But as beggars aren’t choosers, I can’t only have sweet alone; I must endure the sour that comes as part of the package —
the deepening dark of a sleepless and restless night, the muddy muck that comes after endless rain, the sting of a biting critique, the emptiness when younger ones head home.
So I slog through sour to revel some day in sweet.
Months of manure-permeated air is overcome one miraculous morning by the unexpected and undeserved fragrance of apple blossoms, so sweet, so pure, so full of promise of the wholesome fruit to come.
The manure makes the sweet sweeter months later, long after the stench is gone.
And I breathe in deeply now, content and grateful for this moment of grace and bliss, wanting to hold it in the depths of my lungs forever, its mercy overwhelming the power of sour.
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