The mail truck goes down the coast Carrying a single letter. At the end of a long pier The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air Of tragedies in the making. Last night you thought you heard television In the house next door. You were sure it was some new Horror they were reporting, So you went out to find out. Barefoot, wearing just shorts. It was only the sea sounding weary After so many lifetimes Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere And never getting anywhere.
This morning, it felt like Sunday. The heavens did their part By casting no shadow along the boardwalk Or the row of vacant cottages, Among them a small church With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close As if they, too, had the shivers. ~Charles Simic “Late September” from The Voice at 3:00 a.m.: Selected Late and New Poems
Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone. ~Miller Williams “Compassion” from The Ways We Touch: Poems.
Christians are called by God to be living so sacrificially and beautifully that the people around us, who don’t believe what we believe, will soon be unable to imagine the world without us. ~Pastor Tim Keller
As we walk this life of trouble and suffering, this Jericho Road together, we cannot pass by the brother, the sister, the child who lies dying in the ditch.
We must stop and help. We cannot turn away from others’ suffering.
By mere circumstances of our place of birth, it could be you or me there bleeding, beaten, abandoned until Someone, journeying along that road, comes looking for us.
He was sent to take our place, as Substitution so we can get up, cared for, loved, made whole again, and walk Home.
Maranatha.
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Every morning, cup of coffee in hand, I look out at the mountain. Ordinarily, it’s blue, but today it’s the color of an eggplant. And the sky turns from gray to pale apricot as the sun rolls up…
I study the cat’s face and find a trace of white around each eye, as if he made himself up today for a part in the opera. ~Jane Kenyon, from “In Several Colors” from Collected Poems.
If you notice anything it leads you to notice more and more.
And anyway I was so full of energy. I was always running around, looking at this and that.
If I stopped the pain was unbearable.
If I stopped and thought, maybe the world can’t be saved, the pain was unbearable. ~Mary Oliver from “The Moths” from Dream Work
I try to look at things in a new way as I wander about my day, my eyes scanning for how the hidden dusty corners of my life become illuminated by a penetrating morning sunbeam when the angle is just right.
The rest of the time, cobwebs, dust bunnies and smudges remain invisible to me until the searching light finds them.
What was “blue” becomes “eggplant” in the new light.
Trying to clean up a grungy messed-up upside-down world of pain is hard work.
It means admitting my own laziness, while falling down on the job again and again, I must always be willing to get back up.
If I stop acknowledging my own and others’ messiness, if I refuse to stay on top of the grime, if I give up the work of salvage and renewal, I then abandon God’s promise to transform this world.
He’s still here, ready and waiting, handing me a broom, a duster, and cleaning rags, so I shall keep at it – mopping up the messes I can reach, seeking what tries to stay hidden.
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Perhaps she came down for the apples, or was flushed out by the saws powering the far woods, or was simply lost, or was crossing one open space for another.
She was a figure approaching, a presence outside a kitchen window, framed by the leafless apple trees, the stiff blueberry bushes, the after-harvest corn, the just-before-rain sky,
a shape only narrow bones could hold, turning its full face upward, head tilted to one side, as if to speak.
Everything changing faster than we can respond: loss of jobs, research halting mid-study, inconsistency abounds, families shattered, uncertainty prevails.
What happened to of the people, by the people, for the people rather than dictated by just a few
We are so lost, how to find our way back to caring for the poor, the weak, the vulnerable with a spirit of commitment, compassion and sacrifice.
For God alone – no one else – remains our strength and shield. Lost and afraid, we want our lives back.
We need His Refuge where we may rest. We seek Sanctuary from this darkness, to once again awaken hopeful to a new morning.
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Walking in February A warm day after a long freeze On an old logging road Below Sumas Mountain Cut a walking stick of alder, Looked down through clouds On wet fields of the Nooksack— And stepped on the ice Of a frozen pool across the road. It creaked The white air under Sprang away, long cracks Shot out in the black, My cleated mountain boots Slipped on the hard slick —like thin ice—the sudden Feel of an old phrase made real— Instant of frozen leaf, Icewater, and staff in hand. “Like walking on thin ice—” I yelled back to a friend, It broke and I dropped Eight inches in ~Gary Snyder “Thin Ice”from No Nature
Everyone is treading on thin ice right now, unsure where to go next.
The trouble with overheated action and rhetoric in the middle of winter is that we all end up at risk of breaking through, no matter where we try to tread.
When we allow ourselves to be put in such peril, when we hear the creak with each step as a warning, we deserve to be doused by the chilly waters beneath our feet.
Lord, have mercy on us as we call your name in our fear and distress. Help us recognize the cracks forming with each step we take.
Put us on our knees before you and lead us to safety. Only you know where we need to be rather than where we are. You’ll be there to pull us out of the mess we’re in.
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I was your rebellious son, do you remember? Sometimes I wonder if you do remember, so complete has your forgiveness been.
So complete has your forgiveness been I wonder sometimes if it did not precede my wrong, and I erred, safe found, within your love,
prepared ahead of me, the way home, or my bed at night, so that almost I should forgive you, who perhaps foresaw the worst that I might do,
and forgave before I could act, causing me to smile now, looking back, to see how paltry was my worst, compared to your forgiveness of it
already given. And this, then, is the vision of that Heaven of which we have heard, where those who love each other have forgiven each other,
where, for that, the leaves are green, the light a music in the air, and all is unentangled, and all is undismayed. -Wendell Berry “To My Mother”
During barn chores, it did seem odd that one of our Haflinger geldings stood facing the back wall as I opened his stall door to give him his hay. For a moment I wondered if there was a problem with his appetite as he usually would dive right into his hay immediately. A closer look told me the problem was with his hind end, not his front end: his heavy white tail was wrapped snugly around a J hook hanging on the stall wall that is meant to hold his water bucket. Instead now he was hooked instead of the bucket — and he was stuck.
He had apparently been itching his butt back and forth, round and round on the handy hook and managed to wrap his tail into such tight knots on the hook that he was literally tethered to the wall. He was very calm about the whole thing – perhaps a little embarrassed.
He turned his head to glance at me, looking pitiful. How long he’d been standing there like that through the night was anyone’s guess.
I bet he no longer was itchy.
I started to work at untying the tail knots to free him and found them wound so tight that loosening them required significant cooperation from my 1200 pound buddy. Unfortunately, any time I managed to almost unloop a knot over the hook end, he would pull forward, snugging it even tighter.
Out of desperation I pulled out the scissors I keep in my barn jacket pocket. I cut one knot hoping that would be sufficient. Then I cut through another knot. Still not enough. I cut a third big knot and thank God Almighty, he was free at last.
He sauntered over to his hay now with a chunk of his tail in my hand and a big gap in what was still left hanging on him. It may take a year to grow that missing hair back out. But hey, it is only hair and at least someone kind and caring came along with a set of shears to release him painlessly from his captivity.
We aren’t all so lucky.
I know what it is like to get tangled up in things I should probably give wide berth. I have a tendency, like my horse, to butt in where I best not be and then become so bound I can’t get loose again. It can take forever to free myself, sometimes painfully leaving parts of my hide behind.
So when I inevitably get tied up in knots again, I hope someone will come along to save me. Better yet, I hope someone might warn me away from the things that hook me before I foolishly back right into them. I’ve got to loosen up and quit pulling the knots tighter.
It’s best to always have a forgiving detangler handy. You never know when you might need one.
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In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die.
…specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house. ~Philip Larkin from “Aubade”
Sharing an essay I wrote during Advent in 2003:
We are in our darkest of dark days today in our corner of the world–about 16 hours of darkness underwhelming our senses, restricting, confining and defining us in our little circles of artificial light that we depend on so mightily.
It is so tempting to be consumed and lost in these dark days, stumbling from one obligation to the next, one foot in front of the other, bumping and bruising ourselves and each other in our blindness. Lines are long at the stores, impatience runs high, people coughing and shivering with winter viruses, others stricken by loneliness and desperation.
So much grumbling in the dark.
Yesterday, I had a conversation with a patient of mine from my clinic at the University Student Health Center, a young college student recovering at the local hospital after a near-death experience. Her testimony made me acutely aware of my self-absorbent grumbling.
Several days ago, she was snowshoeing up to Artist Point with two other students in the bright sun above the clouds at the foot of nearby Mt. Baker. A sudden avalanche buried all three–she remembers the roar and then the deathly quiet of being covered up, and the deep darkness that surrounded her. She was buried hunched over, with the weight of the snow above her too much to break through. She had a pocket of air beneath her and in this crouching kneeling position, she could only pray–not move, not shout, not anything else. Only God was with her in that small dark place. She believes that 45 minutes later, rescuers dug her out to safety from beneath that three feet of snow. In actuality, it was 24 hours later.
She had been wrapped in the cocoon of her prayers in that deep dark pocket of air, and miraculously, kept safe and warm enough to survive. Her hands and legs, blackish purple when she was pulled out of the snow, turned pink with the rewarming process at the hospital.
When I visited her, she glowed with a light that came only from within –somehow, it had kept her alive.
Tragically, one of her friends died in that avalanche, never having a chance of survival because of how she was trapped and covered with the suffocating snow. Her other friend struggled for nearly 24 hours to free himself, bravely fighting the dark and the cold to reach the light, then calling for help from nearby skiers to try to rescue his friends.
At times we must fight with the dark–wrestle it and rale against it, bruised and beaten up in the process, but so necessary to save ourselves and others from being consumed. At other times we must kneel in the darkness and wait– praying, hoping, knowing the light is to come, one way or the other. Grateful, grace-filled, not giving up to grumbling.
May the Light find and rescue you this week in your moments of darkness.
Merry merry Christmas.
The story of the avalanche and rescue is written here in the Seattle Times.
The first thing I heard this morning was a rapid flapping sound, soft, insistent—
wings against glass as it turned out downstairs when I saw the small bird rioting in the frame of a high window, trying to hurl itself through the enigma of glass into the spacious light.
Then a noise in the throat of the cat who was hunkered on the rug told me how the bird had gotten inside, carried in the cold night through the flap of a basement door, and later released from the soft grip of teeth.
On a chair, I trapped its pulsations in a shirt and got it to the door, so weightless it seemed to have vanished into the nest of cloth.
But outside, when I uncupped my hands, it burst into its element, dipping over the dormant garden in a spasm of wingbeats then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.
For the rest of the day, I could feel its wild thrumming against my palms as I wondered about the hours it must have spent pent in the shadows of that room, hidden in the spiky branches of our decorated tree, breathing there among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn, its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight picturing this rare, lucky sparrow tucked into a holly bush now, a light snow tumbling through the windless dark. ~Billy Collins “Christmas Sparrow” from Aimless Love
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…the low is lifted high; the stars shall bend their voices, and every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry in praises of the child by whose descent among us the worlds are reconciled. ~Richard Wilburfrom “A Christmas Hymn”
Gentlemen, I have lived a long time and am convinced that God governs in the affairs of men.
If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?
I move that prayer imploring the assistance of Heaven be held every morning before we proceed to business. – Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention of 1787
We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. – 2 Corinthians 5:20
Come, let us now resolve at last To live and love in quiet; We’ll tie the knot so very fast That Time shall ne’er untie it.
The truest joys they seldom prove Who free from quarrels live: ‘Tis the most tender part of love Each other to forgive.
When least I seem’d concern’d, I took No pleasure nor no rest; And when I feign’d an angry look, Alas! I loved you best.
Own but the same to me—you’ll find How blest will be our fate. O to be happy—to be kind— Sure never is too late! ~John Sheffield “The Reconciliation”
It did seem odd this morning during my barn chores that our Haflinger gelding stood facing the back wall as I opened his stall door to give him his hay. For a moment I wondered if there was a problem with his appetite as he usually would dive right into his hay as soon as I threw it to him. A closer look told me the problem was with his hind end, not his front end: his heavy white tail was wrapped snugly around a J hook hanging on the stall wall meant to hold his water bucket. Instead now it held him — and wasn’t letting go. He had apparently been itching his butt back and forth, round and round on the handy hook and managed to wrap his tail into such tight knots on the hook that he was literally tethered to the wall. He was very calm about the whole thing; maybe just a little embarrassed.
He turned his head to look at me, appearing a wee bit pitiful. How long he’d been standing there like that through the night was anyone’s guess. I bet he no longer felt itchy.
I started to work at untying the tail knots to free him and found them wound so tight that loosening them required significant cooperation from my 1200 pound buddy. Unfortunately, any time I managed to almost unloop a knot over the hook end, he would pull forward, snugging it even tighter.
Out of desperation I pulled out the scissors I keep in my barnjacket pocket. I cut one knot hoping that would be sufficient. Then I cut through another knot. Still not enough. I cut a third big knot and thank God Almighty, he was free at last. He sauntered over to his hay now with a chunk of his tail in my hand and a big gap in what was still left hanging on him. It may take a year to grow that missing hair back out. But hey, it is only hair and at least someone kind and caring came along with a set of shears to release him painlessly from his captivity.
I know what it is like to get tangled up in things I should give wide berth. I have a tendency, like my horse, to butt in where I best not be and then become so bound I can’t get loose again. It can take forever to free myself, sometimes painfully leaving parts of my hide behind.
So when I inevitably get tied up in knots again, or when I fall out of my comfortable, secure nest, I pray someone will come along to save me. Better yet, I hope someone might warn me away from the things that hook me before I foolishly back right into them.
I’ve got to loosen up and quit pulling the knots tighter.
I am humbled in my need. I am humbled by my helplessness.
So I implore God for His steadfast, reconciling assistance – as the sparrow on the ground, fallen from the nest, as the horse bound by his knotted tail to the wall.
I trust God’s protecting, rescuing, forgiving Hand.
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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
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and a certain allowance of time had summoned you out of your wrappings, and there you were,
so many legs hardening, maybe even more than one pair of eyes
and the whole world in front of you? And what if you had wings and flew
into the garden, then fell into the up-tipped face
of a white flower, and what if you had a sort of mouth, a lip
to place close to the skim of honey that kept offering itself –
what would you think then of the world as, night and day, you were kept there –
oh happy prisoner – sighing, humming, roaming that deep cup? ~Mary Oliver “How Everything Adores Being Alive” from “Why I Wake Early?”
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. ~Annie Dillard from The Force That Drives the Flower
What inference might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works? An inordinate fondness for beetles. The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other. ~ J.B.S. Haldane, British biologist
Indeed, we stranded folk have encountered a God who flips us back onto our feet when we lie helplessly waving our arms and legs in the air, stuck and pitiful. God knows all about the helplessness of suffering and hears our cry for mercy.
Once we are righted back to our feet, we walk forth changed forever. We are restored to the world, ready to help anyone we encounter who finds themselves stuck upside down in their misery.
When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles… …they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle. ~ Dr. Seuss from Fox in Socks
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at either end of day. The work of wings was always freedom, fastening one heart to every falling thing. ~Li-Young Lee “One Heart” from Book of My Nights
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.” And tonight the heavy earth is falling away from all other stars in the loneliness. We’re all falling. This hand here is falling. And look at the other one. It’s in them all. And yet there is Someone, whose hands infinitely calm, holding up all this falling. ~Rainer Maria Rilke from “Autumn” translated by Robert Bly
Sometimes I wake from my sleep with a palpitating start: dreaming of falling, an intense sinking down, my body pitching and tumbling yet somehow I land, ~oh so softly~ in my bed, my fear quashed and cushioned by wakening safe.
I feel caught up, and held tightly, rescued amid the fall. Like leaves drifting down from heaven’s orchard, like wings that lift me to freedom, the bed of earth rises to greet me and Someone is waiting to cradle me there.
Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. Psalm 90:10
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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Ihad grasped God’s garments in the void but my hand slipped on the rich silk of it.
The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to remember must have upheld my leaden weight from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel nothing, no embrace, I have not plummeted. ~Denise Levertov “Suspended” from Evening Train
Reaching out in hopeless grasp to save myself, sinking down, prepared to fall, yet twisting and turning in a chill wind, in helpless wait for what is to come.
Now I dangle suspended rather than plummet, held fast through sheer grace by a slender thread of faith.
This is my Rescuer revealed, here is my Salvation holding me fast from above when I was sure I was lost forever.
Rescue me from the mire, do not let me sink Psalm 69:14
…even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. Psalm 139:10
This Lenten season will reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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