The world does not need words. It articulates itself in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted. The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being…
The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds, painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it. The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always– greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon. ~Dana Giola from “Words”
The words the world needs is only the Word itself; we exist because He breathed breath into us, saying it was good.
Whatever we have to say about His Creation pales compared to His it is good
But we try over and over again to use words of wonder and praise to express our awe and gratitude and amazement while painted golden by His breath of Light.
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Obscurely yet most surely called to praise, As sometimes summer calls us all, I said The hills are heavens full of branching ways Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead; I said the trees are mines in air, I said See how the sparrow burrows in the sky! And then I wondered why this mad instead Perverts our praise to uncreation, why Such savour’s in this wrenching things awry. Does sense so stale that it must needs derange The world to know it? To a praiseful eye Should it not be enough of fresh and strange That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay, And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day? ~Richard Wilbur “Praise in Summer”
It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. ~G.K.Chesterton from Orthodoxy
I need no help to imagine this world feels upside down much of the time. When I read the headlines, I have difficulty understanding how anything makes any sense anymore.
Creation inversed: the birds somehow soar through the earth beneath us and the moles and mushrooms are populating the clouds. Instead of stars in the sky, there are innumerable molehills gracing the hillside. We are all mixed up in our perspective, turning creation on its head.
Thank goodness and thank God that everything is put back where it belongs when we are in sore need of reorientation. When we forget our purpose in creation, He reminds us by restoring predictable order and rhythms. When we destroy, He heals and protects. When we get bored with how things are – desperate for innovation and excitement in our attempt to turn the world upside down – He demonstrates contentment with how things were created, and turns it back to right again.
There is enough to keep us busy in this world: crazy weather, global pandemics, volcanic eruptions and quaking ground. We don’t need to complicate an already complicated creation with our designed messes.
We’re meant to admire the birds’ soaring in the skies and appreciate that grubs and gophers course through the soil beneath us. We can praise the sun as it rises each morning and the moon’s varied journey at night – so predictable and reliable and meant to be that way from the very beginning.
Keep it going, God. Do it again.
AI image created for this post
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We were familiar with the night. We knew its favourite colours, its sullen silence and its small, disturbing sounds, its unprovoked rages, its savage dreams.
We slept by turns, attentive to the flock. We said little. Night after night, there was little to say. But sometimes one of us, skilled in that way, would pipe a tune of how things were for us.
They say that once, almost before time, the stars with shining voices serenaded the new born world. The night could not contain their boundless praise.
We thought that just a poem — until the night a song of solar glory, unutterable, unearthly, eclipsed the luminaries of the night, as though the world were exorcised of dark and, coming to itself, began again.
Later we returned to the flock. The night was ominously black. The stars were silent as the sheep. Nights pass, year on year. We clutch our meagre cloaks against the cold. Our aging piper’s fumbling fingers play, night after night, an earthly echo of the song that banished dark. It has stayed with us. ~Richard Bauckham “Song of the Shepherds”
There is no specific “song of the shepherds” recorded in scripture. They were unlikely people inspired to use flowery words and memorable turns of phrase. Scripture says simply they looked at each other and agreed to get to Bethlehem as fast as possible and see for themselves what they had been told by God. There was no time to waste singing out praises and thanksgiving; they “went with haste” to a dark and primitive place that served the purpose of housing animals.
It most assuredly was plain and humble, smelling of manure and urine, and animal fur. Yet it also would have smelled of the sweetness of stored forage, and there would have been the reassuring sounds of animals chewing and breathing deeply. It was truly the only place a group of scruffy shepherds could have felt welcomed without being tossed out as unsuitable visitors– they undoubtedly arrived at the threshold in bad need of a bath, smelly, dirty and terrified and yet left transformed, returning to their fields full of praise and wonder, telling all they met what they had seen.
There could not have been a more suitable place for this birth that was to change the world: the promise of cleansing hope and peace in the midst of filth. Despite our sorry state, we are welcomed into the sanctuary of the stable, sown, grown, pruned and harvested to become seed and food for others.
Witnessing an appearance of the heavenly host followed by seeing for themselves the incarnation of the living God in a manger must have been overwhelming to those who otherwise spent much time alone. They must have been simply bubbling over with everything they had heard and been shown, shocking anyone they met. At least scripture does tell us the effect the shepherds’ witnessing words had on others: “and all who heard it wondered…”
I don’t think people wondered if the shepherds were embroidering the story, or had a group hallucination, or were flat out fabricating for reasons of their own. I suspect Mary and Joseph and the townspeople who heard what the shepherds had to say were flabbergasted at the passion and excitement being shared about what had just taken place. Seeing became believing and all could see how completely the shepherds believed by how enthusiastically they shared everything they knew. If the shepherds had become a harvest of hope, then surely so can we.
We know what the shepherds had to say, minimalist conversationalists that they are. So we too should respond with similar wonder at what they have told us all.
And simply believe it was (and is) as wonderful as they say.
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
We stood on the hills, Lady, Our day’s work done, Watching the frosted meadows That winter had won.
The evening was calm, Lady, The air so still, Silence more lovely than music Folded the hill.
There was a star, Lady, Shone in the night, Larger than Venus it was And bright, so bright.
Oh, a voice from the sky, Lady, It seemed to us then Telling of God being born In the world of men.
And so we have come, Lady, Our day’s work done, Our love, our hopes, ourselves, We give to your son. ~Bob Chillcott “The Shepherd’s Carol”
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Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Pied Beauty”
The unconventional and unnoticed beauty, freckled, spare and strange– helps me feel beautiful too. The interplay of light and shadow within every moment of our existence, some moments darker than others, some brilliant and dazzling.
I try to find the sweet and sour, knowing I’m capturing my own dappled essence – a reflection of the Fathering that loves us even in our fickleness, who possibly could know how?
There is no perfection outside of Him; His reflected beauty, His transfigured face has no uniformity yet is past changing.
We give Him glory in our imperfection, through defects and blemishes which only He can make whole.
Who knows why He does this? Yet He does.
Glory be.
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A blue horse turns into a streak of lightning, then the sun — relating the difference between sadness and the need to praise that which makes us joyful, I can’t calculate how the earth tips hungrily toward the sun – then soaks up rain — or the density of this unbearable need to be next to you. It’s a palpable thing — this earth philosophy and familiar in the dark like your skin under my hand. We are a small earth. It’s no simple thing. Eventually we will be dust together; can be used to make a house, to stop a flood or grow food for those who will never remember who we were, or know that we loved fiercely. Laughter and sadness eventually become the same song turning us toward the nearest star — a star constructed of eternity and elements of dust barely visible in the twilight as you travel east. I run with the blue horses of electricity who surround the heart and imagine a promise made when no promise was possible. ~Joy Harjo “Promise of Blue Horses” from How We Became Human
Birds embody the shapes of my heart these days
holding the warmth of a hug in their feathers
the gleam of a kiss in their eyes
building a home for my love in their beaks
and spreading, with their song, the promise of blue horses.
“A blue horse turns into a streak of lightning, then the sun— relating the difference between sadness and the need to praise that which makes us joyful.” ~Marjorie Moorhead, “That Which Makes Us Joyful” from Literary North
Even when my heart isn’t feeling it, especially when I’m blue (along with much of the rest of the world on this September 11 anniversary), I need to remember to whisper hymns of praise to the Creator of all that is blue as well as every other color.
I’m reminded of the goodness of a God who provides me with the words to sing and a voice to sing them out loud.
That reality alone makes me joyful. That alone is reason to worship Him. That alone is enough to turn blue days, blue horses and blue hearts gold again.
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All day I try to say nothing but thank you, breathe the syllables in and out with every step I take through the rooms of my house and outside into a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.
I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy after a hot shower, when loosened muscles work, when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly hair combs into place.
Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute, and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I remember who I am, a woman learning to praise something as small as dandelion petals floating on the steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup, my happy savoring tongue. ~Jeanne Lohmann “To Say Nothing But Thank You”
It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak. ~Mary Oliver “Praying”
As this long winter has finally given way to spring, I am grateful to pay attention to the small things around me, to breathe my silent thanks for this privilege of being witness to the soil of this life, this farm, this faith. More days than not, I savor it as someone who is hungry and thirsty for beauty and meaning.
In my thankfulness, I must pay attention to who I am: I still yearn to grow, to bloom and fruit, harvesting what I can to share with others.
It often feels like a dialogue with the invisible.
With deep gratitude to all who come here daily to read these words and enjoy my pictures and who let me know how it makes a difference in your day.
You and I may never meet in this life yet your generous comments always make a difference to me!
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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”
surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven’t deserved of days and solitude, your body’s immoderate good health that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs you never intended. At the end there may be no answers and only a few very simple questions: did I love, finish my task in the world? Learn at least one of the many names of God? At the intersections, the boundaries where one life began and another ended, the jumping-off places between fear and possibility, at the ragged edges of pain, did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy? ~Jeanne Lohmann “Praise What Comes”from The Light Invisible Bodies”
The ragged edge of sadness and sorrow is a box full of darkness handed to me by Someone who knows my name.
It takes a lifetime to understand, if I ever do, this gift with which I am entrusted is meant to be passed on to another and another whom I love just as deeply.
He cracked open the box of shadows to allow His light in where none dwelled before, seeping into my brokenness from a deep well of holiness, giving me a glimpse of all Love can do.
Another sleepless night I’m turning in my bed Long before the red sun rises In these early hours I’m falling again Into the river of my worries When the river runs away I find a shelter in your name
Jesus, only light on the shore Only hope in the storm Jesus, let me fly to your side There I would hide, Jesus
Hear my anxious prayer The beating of my heart The pulse and the measure of my unbelief Speak your words to me Before I come apart Help me believe in what I cannot see Before the river runs away I will call upon your name
Jesus, only light on the shore Only hope in the storm Jesus, let me fly to your side There I would hide, Jesus ~Elaine Rubenstein, Fernando Ortega
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All shall be Amen and Alleluia. We shall rest and we shall see. We shall see and we shall know. We shall know and we shall love. We shall love and we shall praise. Behold our end, which is no end. ~St. Augustine “Resurrection Prayer”
The journey begins when Christians leave their homes and beds. They leave, indeed, their life in this present and concrete world, and whether they have to drive 15 miles or walk a few blocks, a sacramental act is already taking place…
For they are now on their way to constitute the Church, or to be more exact, to be transformed into the Church of God. They have been individuals, some white, some black, some poor, some rich, they have been the ‘natural’ world and a natural community. And now they have been called to “come together in one place,” to bring their lives, their very world with them and to be more than what they were: a new community with a new life.
We are already far beyond the categories of common worship and prayer. The purpose of this ‘coming together’ is not simply to add a religious dimension to the natural community, to make it ‘better’ – more responsible, more Christian.
The purpose is to fulfill the Church, and that means to make present the One in whom all things are at their end, and all things are at their beginning. ~ Father Alexander Schmemann from For the Life of the World
As the calendar approaches Holy Week, this week can feel somewhat like an ending of how things have been, or perhaps it is the wrap-up of the beginning of my awareness of my need for Christ’s redemptive power in my life.
I’m feeling very “in-between” right now – already but not yet.
Nevertheless, this is a world without end and I trust God’s leading me – from my beginning to an eternal life with Him.
In a different context, but nevertheless not so different as we are still a world at war with one another:
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. ~Winston Churchill
Glory be to the Father, Glory be to the Son, Glory be to the Holy Ghost, As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen
This year’s Lenten theme for Barnstorming is a daily selection from songs and hymns about Christ’s profound sacrifice on our behalf.
If we remain silent about Him, the stones themselves will shout out and start to sing (Luke 19:40).
In His name, may we sing…
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Day and night A fragrance of hope Day and night She pleads for the lost and broken Day and night Until He comes ~Keith and Kristyn Getty
There was also a prophet, Anna, the daughter of Penuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was very old; she had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and then was a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying.Coming up to them at that very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem. Luke 2: 36-38
What’s enough? Countless times I’ve watched the sun rise like God’s tender mercy to gently lift the dark blanket from the earth, and countless more times I’ve watched the sun set in such a splendiferous farewell that it must reflect the fringe on God’s robe. I’ve seen the sky define blue and endless. I’ve watched rivers run to the sea, full as life runs to God. I’ve felt the sea roll in on the eternal note of mystery and assurance.
I’ve scratched the ears of dogs, laughed at the ballet of cats. I’ve heard the cry and gurgle of the newborn, played with children, rocked with grandmothers, learned from hundreds of teachers, some of them homeless, poor, and uneducated.
I’ve been loved and forgiven beyond all deserving, and all breath to tell of it, by family and friends and God.
I’ve been shaken, changed, and blessed a thousand times — and still — by the prophets, and by Christ. I’ve felt the touch of God, each time before I realized that’s what it was. I’ve shared in the cantankerous yet remarkable family of faith called the church. I’m conscious of being conscious and alive. And all that’s just for starters.
How much does it take to praise God? I have a couple of trips around the Milky Way past enough for that, no matter if I never receive another thing.
So I best get on with it . . . and praise God that I can. — Ted Loder from The Haunt of Grace
Unlike Anna the prophet, I tend to forget, in my ever-inward focus, I was created for worship and to give all glory to God. I was given a mouth to sing, hands to clasp, eyes to witness His wonders, profound forgiveness through day and night, night and day.
Unlike Anna who waited so long, I’m not sure I would recognize the touch of God.
May I – praying alongside others who are also flawed and broken – be a fragrance of hope, praising God that we are able to praise Him.
What greater reason is there to exist?
This year’s Lenten theme for Barnstorming is a daily selection from songs and hymns about Christ’s profound sacrifice on our behalf.
If we remain silent about Him, the stones themselves will shout out and start to sing (Luke 19:40).
In His name, may we sing…
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Sing to the God who turns our sighs into a song. Sing to the One who mends our broken hearts with music. Sing to the One who fills our empty hearts with love. Sing to the One who gives us light to step into the darkest night. Sing to the God who turns our sighs into a song. ~Susan Boersma
Sixty-seven years, oh Lord, to look at the clouds, the trees in deep, moist summer,
daisies and morning glories opening every morning
their small, ecstatic faces— Or maybe I should just say
how I wish I had a voice like the meadowlark’s,
sweet, clear, and reliably slurring all day long
from the fencepost, or the long grass where it lives
in a tiny but adequate grass hut beside the mullein and the everlasting,
the faint-pink roses that have never been improved, but come to bud
then open like little soft sighs under the meadowlark’s whistle, its breath-praise,
Each day opens to new possibility with a sigh, a breath and thankfulness-
once in awhile tears, sometimes heartbreak, and flat out fear of what comes next.
Even so, through it all I sing a song of praise, an alleluia that reminds me why I am and who I live for.
All is well, it is well with my soul.
This year’s Lenten theme for Barnstorming is a daily selection from songs and hymns about Christ’s profound sacrifice on our behalf.
If we remain silent about Him, the stones themselves will shout out and start to sing (Luke 19:40).
In His name, may we sing…
When time sweeps yesterday away, It leaves behind an empty heart, Weeping through the night so dark and long. When words are lost among the tears, When sadness steals another day, God hears our cries and turns our sighs into a song.
Sing to the One who mends our broken hearts with music. Sing to the One who fills our empty hearts with love. Sing to the One who gives us light to step into the darkest night. Sing to the God who turns our sighs into a song.
From heaven falls a mercy sweet, The time for weeping now is gone; God hears our sighs and gives us His eternal song. Sing to the One who mends our broken hearts with music. Sing to the One who fills our empty hearts with love.
Translation: Lord, protect Ukraine. Give us strength, faith, and hope, our Father. Amen
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