True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root, Must let their hands grow knotted as they move With a rough sensitivity about Under the earth, between the rock and shoot, Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit. And so I watched my mother’s hands grow scarred, She who could heal the wounded plant or friend With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love; I minded once to see her beauty gnarled, But now her truth is given me to live, As I learn for myself we must be hard To move among the tender with an open hand, And to stay sensitive up to the end Pay with some toughness for a gentle world. ~May Sarton “An Observation”
I’m reminded every spring, as my husband’s hands prepare the soil in the garden for that season’s planting, how challenging is the job of the gardener. His hands must fight the chaos of weeds and rocks to prepare a gentle bed for each seed.
A seed is a plain, unadorned and ordinary thing, a little boring even, practically forgotten once it is placed in the ground. Yet the ordinariness is only the outer dress; the extraordinary is contained inside, and within days a tender shoot braves all to come to the surface, bowed and humble. It establishes a tenacious root that ensures survival, grabbing hold in even the most inhospitable ground.
So it is with Jesus whose ordinary origins belied his holiness and majesty. Both hardy root and tender shoot, he reaches up to the heavens while his feet tread the soil, both at once. His toughness paid for our chance at a more gentle world.
And thanks to Him, we are fed.
For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; Isaiah 53:2a
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More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all. ~Ada Limón “Instructions on Not Giving Up”
It wasn’t until I paused under the huge silver maple tree in front of our house that I began to notice not the blossoms, but the way the leaves were unfurling. How suddenly a tree transformed back into a tree, with all its good green leaves. It felt like a lesson in resilience. The tree wasn’t giving up. The tree was just going to keep doing its tree thing. Noticing those leaves felt like the first moment of breath I’d had all winter. Under that tree, the line “it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me” came to me. ~Ada Limónwriting about how “Instructions on Not Giving Up” came to her
I watch daily as our farm’s trees reawaken in the spring. Some, like the maples and chestnuts turn green in April. The walnuts stay naked well into May, quite bohemian compared to their glossy green neighbors.
New growth is always an encouragement to me, especially after a brutally cold winter when branches have broken off in the snows or a tree has toppled over in exhaustion from resisting the winter wind.
As leaves swell and begin to unwrap in the spring sun, trees are feeling what I feel: the need for fresh air and renewal, absorbing the warmth of the sun while new nutrients surge in my sap.
Most trees find it is easy being green, as that is who they are and that is who I am. Some are colorful show-offs, putting me to shame for my plainness. They bloom their hearts out with the joy of living yet another spring, exuberant and wild, and oh so messy.
The trees’ resilience captures my heart. Dogwood and crabapple petals follow us inside the house stuck to our shoes, left scattered here and there on the floor. Perhaps they think they can remain bright and beautiful inside a different wooden home. I sweep them up to put them back outside on the ground where they, like I will someday, become part of the soil once again.
Exuberant in my messy plainness.
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There is a tree beyond this world In it’s ancient roots this song is curled I am the fool whose life’s been spent Between what’s said and what is meant ~Carrie Newcomer
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It started before Christmas. Now our son officially walks to school alone. Semi-alone, it’s accurate to say: I or his father track him on his way. He walks up on the east side of West End, we on the west side. Glances can extend (and do) across the street; not eye contact. Already ties are feeling and not fact. Straus Park is where these parallel paths part; he goes alone from there. The watcher’s heart stretches, elastic in its love and fear, toward him as we see him disappear, striding briskly. Where two weeks ago, holding a hand, he’d dawdle, dreamy, slow, he now is hustled forward by the pull of something far more powerful than school.
The mornings we turn back to are no more than forty minutes longer than before, but they feel vastly different–flimsy, strange, wavering in the eddies of this change, empty, unanchored, perilously light since the red hat vanished from our sight. ~Rachel Hadas “The Red Hat”
You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you. ~ Frederick Buechner
As a child, I lived just outside of city limits in a semi-rural area, only a half mile from my elementary school on a country road. By first grade, I was allowed to walk to school and home again, then when I was older, with my younger brother in tow. I don’t remember my parents watching me as I made the journey, but I do remember some practice walks on a weekend, to reinforce how to safely cross the roads and where to walk alongside the drainage ditch.
I don’t remember ever being worried about what might happen to me outside of my parents’ presence, and nothing scary ever did happen. I’m sure my parents were worried, but both as children had walked to their rural schools on their own – it simply was how things happened in the 20’s and 30’s.
For children growing up now, it feels different.
Our three children grew up on a farm seven miles from town, so rode a school bus or were taken to school by a parent or grandparent. They didn’t have that early independence that I did. Our grandchildren, especially those living in large cities, are even more protected. It didn’t hamper their desire to explore the world – they have traveled all over.
The difference is the anxiety of the parent, watching that child disappear around a corner on foot, or bike or eventually in a car. It is that empty feeling of letting go before one is ready, but when you know you must.
The heart stretches to encompass one’s child out in the world, out of sight, no longer anchored at home. After all, we are that elastic and that resilient.
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Spring comes quickly: overnight the plum tree blossoms, the warm air fills with bird calls.
In the plowed dirt, someone has drawn a picture of the sun with rays coming out all around but because the background is dirt, the sun is black. There is no signature.
Alas, very soon everything will disappear: the bird calls, the delicate blossoms. In the end, even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.
Nevertheless, the artist intends a mood of celebration.
How beautiful the blossoms are — emblems of the resilience of life. The birds approach eagerly. ~Louise Glück “Primavera”
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring – When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring”
And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true. ” Revelation 21:5
Given a choice, humanity chose sour over the sweetness we were created for ~ giving up walks together in the cool of the day to feed an appetite that could never be sated.
God made a choice to bring us back with His own blood as if we are worthy of Him.
He says we are. He dies to prove it.
Every day I choose to believe earth can be sweet and beautiful again. Each spring becomes a celebration of our resilience.
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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections, but overwhelmingly in spite of them…” ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. ~Herman Melville from Moby Dick
We all bear chew marks, some fresher or deeper than others. Maybe they came during childhood from the constant nibbles of a competitive sibling, or from the intentionally painful wounds left by a bully at school or work. Some folks grew up in home environments that continually gnawed away at their self-confidence rather than feeding their sense of value.
Somehow – despite our eating whatever we find tasty and being eaten because we ourselves are tasty – most of us continue to get along, frayed and fragmented as we are, searching for an eventual mending of our wounds and filling of our empty spots.
Like the marks in a trunk where a missing limb used to be, or the notch holes left by the springboards loggers stood on to saw down an immense tree for lumber, our scars represent the price of being a living sacrifice. We persist because nothing we endure are as deep and wide as the scars that were accepted by the Word made Flesh on our behalf, nor as wondrous as the Love that oozed from them, nor as amazing as the grace that abounds to this day because of the promise spelled out by them.
Our scars have become beautiful as a result.
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Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my work’s in vain, but then the holy spirit revives my soul again. ~ African-AmericanSpiritual “There is a Balm in Gilead”
Since my people are crushed, I am crushed; I mourn, and horror grips me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people? Jeremiah 8:21-22
We never have tried harvesting any of the cottonwood resin, but I’ve found the presence of this grand tree in the field seems balm enough when I find myself discouraged. The tall tree adapts so dramatically over the course of the seasons, remaining a fixture of stability and beauty whether golden in the autumn, blowing cottony seeds in the spring, bare with snow in the winter or flourishing with summer leaves. It is steadfast and reassuring.
Discouragement is so familiar to us, a constant pandemic companion, and certainly is rampant over the past week with images of war filling our screens. No tree resin is capable of fighting a virus or stopping a war but the balm of Gilead in Jeremiah has the power of the Holy Spirit, able to heal our sin sick souls.
The love of our Savior is the balm for us, the wounded. We will become whole again.
cottonwood seedscottonwood seed
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…
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul.
Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my works in vain, but then the holy spirit revives my soul again.
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul.
Don’t ever feel discouraged for Jesus is your friend and if you lack for knowledge he’ll ne’er refuse to lend.
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Everything in the garden is dead, killed by a sudden hard freeze, the beans, the tomatoes, fruit still clinging to the branches. It’s all heaped up ready to go to the compost pile: rhubarb leaves, nasturtiums, pea vines, even the geraniums. It’s too bad. The garden was so beautiful, green and fresh, but then we were all beautiful once. Everything dies, we understand. But the mind of the observer, which cannot imagine not imagining, goes on. The dynasties are cut down like the generations of grass, the bodies blacken and turn into coal. The waters rise and cover the earth and the mind broods on the face of the deep, and learns nothing. ~Louis Jenkins, “Freeze” from Where Your House is Near: New and Selected Poems
This week was our first hard freeze of autumn, following on the heels of the worst flooding in a half century in our county. The land and all that grows here experienced a one-two punch – when the waters pulled back into the streams and rivers, what was left behind looked frozen, soaked and miserable. The people whose homes were devastated are so much more than miserable; they are mudding out by removing everything down to the studs to try to begin again. With hundreds of volunteers and disaster teams helping, there are piles of kitchen appliances, dry wall, carpet and every household item along the main streets of nearby towns, waiting to be hauled off.
Surveying our dying garden is small potatoes in comparison to a flooded town only a few miles away. The memories of how beautiful our garden was a 2-3 months ago is nothing in contrast to the families who lost their stored heirlooms and cherished memories to the muck and mire of deep waters.
But we are a resilient community. We are people of persistence and creativity and there will eventually be beauty again here. Driving on a newly opened road beside the still-surging river where a few days ago several feet of water covered a cornfield, I spotted a trumpeter swan, standing in glorious spotless white, picking her way through the mud-stained cornstalks, hoping to find something of value left behind in the devastation.
There is still hope; it did not wash away. We only need to use our imagination to find it.
“Like Mary, we have no way of knowing… We can ask for courage, however, and trust that God has not led us into this new land only to abandon us there.” ~Kathleen Norrisfrom God With Us
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always the tall lily. Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings, the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering, whom she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions courage. The engendering Spirit did not enter her without consent. God waited.
She was free to accept or to refuse, choice integral to humanness.
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Aren’t there annunciations of one sort or another in most lives? Some unwillingly undertake great destinies, enact them in sullen pride, uncomprehending. More often those moments when roads of light and storm open from darkness in a man or woman, are turned away from in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair and with relief. Ordinary lives continue. God does not smite them. But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
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She had been a child who played, ate, slept like any other child – but unlike others, wept only for pity, laughed in joy not triumph. Compassion and intelligence fused in her, indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous than any in all of Time, she did not quail, only asked a simple, ‘How can this be?’ and gravely, courteously, took to heart the angel’s reply, perceiving instantly the astounding ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb Infinite weight and lightness; to carry in hidden, finite inwardness, nine months of Eternity; to contain in slender vase of being, the sum of power – in narrow flesh, the sum of light. Then bring to birth, push out into air, a Man-child needing, like any other, milk and love –
but who was God.
This was the moment no one speaks of, when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed, Spirit, suspended, waiting.
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She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’ Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’ She did not submit with gritted teeth, raging, coerced. Bravest of all humans, consent illumined her. The room filled with its light, the lily glowed in it, and the iridescent wings. Consent, courage unparalleled, opened her utterly. ~Denise Levertov “The Annunciation”
Like most people living in 2020, I want things to be the way I want them: my plans, my timing, my hopes and dreams first and foremost.
And then the unexpected happens and suddenly nothing looks the way it was supposed to be. There is infinite weight within infinite emptiness.
Only then, as an emptied vessel, can I be filled.
In my forty years of clinical work, I’ve never before seen such an epidemic of hopelessness. Debts seem too great, reserves too limited, foundations too shaky, plans dashed, the future too uncertain.
In the annunciation of the angel approaching a young woman out of the blue, Mary’s response to this overwhelming event is a model for us all when we are hit by the unexpected.
She is prepared; she has studied and knows God’s Word and His promise to His people, even in the midst of trouble. She is able to articulate it beautifully in the song she sings as her response. She gives up her so-carefully-planned-out life to give life to God within her.
Her resilience reverberates through the ages and to each one of us in our own multi-faceted and overwhelming troubles: may it be to me as you say.
May it be. Your plans, Your purpose, Your promise – all embodied within me.
Let it be.
Even if it pierces my soul as with a sword so that I leak out to empty; you are there to plug the bleeding hole, filling me with your infinite light.
Everything inside me cries for order Everything inside me wants to hide Is this shadow an angel or a warrior? If God is pleased with me, why am I so terrified? Someone tell me I am only dreaming Somehow help me see with Heaven’s eyes And before my head agrees, My heart is on its knees Holy is He. Blessed am I.
Be born in me Be born in me Trembling heart, somehow I believe That You chose me I’ll hold you in the beginning You will hold me in the end Every moment in the middle, Make my heart your Bethlehem Be born in me
All this time we’ve waited for the promise All this time You’ve waited for my arms Did You wrap yourself inside the unexpected So we might know that Love would go that far?
Be born in me Be born in me Trembling heart, somehow I believe That You chose me I’ll hold you in the beginning You will hold me in the end Every moment in the middle, Make my heart your Bethlehem Be born in me
I am not brave I’ll never be The only thing my heart can offer is a vacancy I’m just a girl Nothing more But I am willing, I am Yours Be born in me Be born in me Trembling heart, somehow I believe That You chose me I’ll hold you in the beginning You will hold me in the end Every moment in the middle, Make my heart your Bethlehem Be born in me
The heart’s reasons seen clearly, even the hardest will carry its whip-marks and sadness and must be forgiven.
As the drought-starved eland forgives the drought-starved lion who finally takes her, enters willingly then the life she cannot refuse, and is lion, is fed, and does not remember the other.
So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it. ~Jane Hirshfield “The Weighing” from The Beauty
So many right now feel they have no more left to give; so much has been asked, so much sacrificed, the scale feels broken, forever out of balance.
Yet more strength is needed, more requested, and somehow in some way, the scale steadies, rebalances because of that extra effort.
We can’t give up now. We need each other to give a little more try a little harder go a little farther smile behind the mask while showing our smile above the mask.
It only takes a little love to balance out all the rest.
from “Feats of Strength” by Tom Otterness at Western Washington University
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