Be silent. Be still. Alone. Empty Before your God. Say nothing. Ask nothing. Be silent. Be still. Let your God look upon you. That is all. God knows. God understands. God loves you With an enormous love, And only wants To look upon you With that love. Quiet. Still. Be.
On a Sabbath day, I try to be still and silent but fail miserably in my attempts to rest. So much to do, so much to fix, so much to say.
I have forgotten the original reason for the seventh day.
God simply wanted to look down at what He made, declare it good and love it.
The least I can do is stop what I’m doing, look up, hold still and listen…
1 O love of God, how strong and true, eternal and yet ever new, uncomprehended and unbought, beyond all knowledge and all thought! O love of God, how deep and great, far deeper than man’s deepest hate; self-fed, self-kindled like the light, changeless, eternal, infinite.
2 O heav’nly love, how precious still, in days of weariness and ill, in nights of pain and helplessness, to heal, to comfort, and to bless! O wide-embracing, wondrous love! We read you in the sky above, we read you in the earth below, in seas that swell and streams that flow.
3 We read you best in him who came bearing for us the cross of shame; sent by the Father from on high, our life to live, our death to die. We read your pow’r to bless and save, e’en in the darkness of the grave; still more in resurrection light we read the fullness of your might.
4 O love of God, our shield and stay through all the perils of our way! Eternal love, in you we rest, forever safe, forever blest. We will exalt you, God and King, and we will ever praise your name; we will extol you ev’ry day, and evermore your praise proclaim. ~Horatius Bonar
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Season of ripening fruit and seeds, depart; There is no harvest ripening in the heart.
Bring the frost that strikes the dahlias down In one cruel night.The blackened buds, the brown And wilted heads, the crippled stems, we crave – All beauty withered, crumbling to the grave. Wind, strip off the leaves, and harden, ground, Till in your frozen crust no break is found.
Then only, when man’s inner world is one With barren earth and branches bared to bone, Then only can the heart begin to know The seeds of hope asleep beneath the snow; Then only can the chastened spirit tap The hidden faith still pulsing in the sap. ~Anne Morrow Lindberghfrom The Unicorn and Other Poems
After the ranks of stubble have laid bare, And field mice and finches’ beaks have found The last spilled seed corn left upon the ground; And no more swallows miracle in air;
When the green tuft no longer hides the hare, And dropping starling flights at evening come; When birds, except the robin, have gone dumb, And leaves are rustling downwards everywhere;
Then out, with the great horses, come the ploughs, And all day long the slow procession goes, Darkening the stubble fields with broadening strips. Grey sea-gulls settle after to carouse:
Harvest prepares upon the harvest’s close, Before the blackbird pecks the scarlet hips. ~John Masefield “Autumn Ploughing”
photo by Joel De Waard
Our farm has been changing gradually over the past several weeks, each day moving a little closer to the reality of winter around the corner. Most of the fruit which is not residing in our freezer has fallen from the trees, and the walnut husks are hanging lonesome and bulbous as a windstorm pulled many leaves to the ground creating a multi-colored carpet everywhere I walk.
Readying for winter’s sleep is quite a glamorous affair for some trees on our farm–they are clothed in rich crimson and gold like the most alluring and ostentatious negligee. However the majority of tree leaves turn drab yellow or brown, as if donning a practical flannel nightgown or an oversized t-shirt without any pretense of grandeur. Even our Haflinger horses laze about, comfortable in their soft winter woolie coats and feathered slippers, happy with their gift of hay. I understand their contentment as I prefer fluffy flannel myself.
I’m ill at ease with the autumnal transition, as unready as a small child who resists the approach of bedtime, even when exhausted to the point of meltdown. It takes someone to quietly sit down with me to read a good bedtime story and to sing a soft hymn of lullaby. I keep leaping up, eyes propped open, pushing on, aware there are still too many “miles to go before I sleep”.
Yet I know the nighttimes of autumn and winter are the best time to be contemplative, to be still, to have eyes closed in prayer.
The time to sleep will come. Just as a storm brings the leaves to the ground, so I too shall be laid to rest, waiting to be restored in fullness and light when the time is right.
Maybe I should think about wearing that bright red flannel nightie.
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The best kind of rain, of course, is a cozy rain. This is the kind of rain that falls on a day when you’d just as soon stay in bed a little longer, write letters or read a good book by the fire, take early tea with hot scones and jam, and look out the streaked window with complacency. ~ Susan Allen Tothfrom England for All Seasons
Cozy rains typically don’t happen on weekdays. There are always things to do, places to be, people to impress, rain or shine. On weekdays rain tends to be a drag-us-down, smotheringly gray inconvenience of wet shoes, damp jackets, impossibly limp hair in school and work place.
But on a Saturday? The same drops from the same cloudy skies become a comfy, tuck-me-in-once-again and snuggle-down kind of rain. There is no schedule to follow, no structured day, no required attendance, no need to even poke my nose out the door (unless living on a farm with hungry critters in the barn).
This is why most northwest natives are rainophilics, anticipating this quiet time of year with great longing. We are granted permission by precipitation to be complacent, slowed down, contemplative, and yes, even lazy… * * * Okay, enough of that. Gotta get up, get going, laundry to do, house to clean, barn to muck out, bills to pay, meals to prepare.
Maybe in the morning the rain will still be falling and there will be a chance to sit with hot tea cup in hand after church, gazing through streaked windows. Cozy rain all day on a Sabbath Sunday. With scones. And jam. Bliss… that is, until Monday.
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Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn, moving up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop in the oats, to air in the lung let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come. ~Jane Kenyon “Let Evening Come”
We resist the arrival of the evening of our lives. I wish I could remain forever sunshiny, vital and irreplaceable, living each moment of the day with the energy I feel with the morning light. But I know that the forward momentum of time inevitably will wind me down to sunset.
The poet Jane Kenyon learned this at far too young an age, diagnosed and beginning treatment for leukemia before turning fifty. I thought of Jane’s poem above when I learned today of the death of a courageous local nurse in her thirties who survived six years of treatment for metastatic cancer after being diagnosed only a few months after the birth of her first and only child. She and her family and medical team tried to postpone her evening coming for as long as possible, knowing God ultimately counts our days.
This week, her evening has come. God comforts those who weep with the loss of this remarkable loving wife, mother, daughter – a woman who trusted her heavenly Father for all the things she needed.
We all are created in the image of a God who remembered to rest. We are not alone in our need to catch our breath.
So let evening come, as it will – there is no stopping it – allowing our lungs to be filled with the loving breath of God, our Creator. To Him, we are most definitely irreplaceable.
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The difficulty to think at the end of day, When the shapeless shadow covers the sun And nothing is left except light on your fur—
There was the cat slopping its milk all day, Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk and August the most peaceful month.
To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time, Without that monument of cat, The cat forgotten on the moon; And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light In which everything is meant for you And nothing need be explained;
Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself; And east rushes west and west rushes down, No matter. The grass is full
And full of yourself. The trees around are for you, The whole of the wideness of night is for you, A self that touches all edges,
You become a self that fills the four corners of night. The red cat hides away in the fur-light And there you are humped high, humped up,
You are humped higher and higher, black as stone — You sit with your head like a carving in space And the little green cat is a bug in the grass. ~Wallace Stevens, from “A Rabbit As King of the Ghosts”
This summer has brimmed with fullness ready for emptying: a spilling over of light and sun and heat and life, almost too much to take in.
I tried to blend in, almost disappear into my surroundings, as evening fell, catching me just-so, immobile, captured by failing light as the day darkened.
Then I prepared to dream unthinkingly peaceful in the night when all is stilled anticipation.
With pulsing vessels in twitching transparent ears, both warming and cooling, aglow yet fading, my empty spaces are filled.
I welcome the relief of sitting still as a statue in the cool whiff of this misty August morning.
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I believe the world would be a better place if we all could stop in the middle of the day and just rest our eyes for awhile — to look at the inside of our eyelids for a few minutes, to pause, to pray, to purr with contentment…
…perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub.
Perhaps, we might wake with a new perspective and an improved attitude. Works like a charm for our grandchildren.
And for me as well…
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In the afternoon of summer, sounds come through the window: a tractor muttering to itself as it
Pivots at the corner of the hay field, stalled for a moment as the green row feeds into the baler.
The wind slips a whisper behind an ear; the noise of the highway is like the dark green stem of a rose.
From the kitchen the blunt banging of cupboard doors and wooden chairs makes a lonely echo in the floor.
Somewhere, between the breeze and the faraway sound of a train, comes a line of birdsong, lightly threading the heavy cloth of dream. ~Joyce Sutphen, “Soundings” from Naming the Stars
As a young child, I remember waking from my summer afternoon naps to the sights and sounds of our rural community. I could hear tractors working fields in the distance, farm trucks rumbling by on the road, the cows and horses in the fields, a train whistle in the distance and the ever-present birdsong from dawn to dusk.
These were the sounds of contentment and productivity, both together. Surely this is how heaven must be: always a sense of something wonderful happening, always a reason to celebrate, always a profound sense of respite and sanctuary.
Even now, there is that moment of awakening of my heart and soul from a summer nap when I try to listen for the chorus of angels outside my open window.
photo by Harry Rodenberger
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For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning – not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last. ~Frederick Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat
Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it – because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it – his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak… With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. ~Thomas Merton from Watch for the Light
As a physician, I’ve provided care to many homeless people, but I’ve never known homelessness myself. However, I have been room-less and those experiences were enough to acquaint me with the dilemma for Joseph and Mary searching for a place to sleep in Bethlehem.
It was my ninth birthday, July 26, 1963, and my family was driving to Washington D.C. for a few days of sightseeing. We had planned to spend the night in a motel somewhere in eastern Ohio or western Pennsylvania but my father, ever the determined traveler, felt we should push on closer to our destination. By the time 11 PM rolled around, we were all tired and not just a little cranky so we started looking for vacancy signs at road-side motels. Most were posted no vacancy by that time of night, and many simply had shut off their lights. We stopped at a few with vacancy still lit, but all they had available would never accommodate a family of five.
We kept driving east, and though I was hungry for sleep, I became ever more anxious that we really would never find a place to lay our heads. My eyes grew wider and I was more awake than ever, having never stayed up beyond 1 AM before and certainly, I’d never had the experience of being awake all night long. It still goes down in my annals as my longest birthday on record.
By 2 AM we arrived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and my dad had reached his driving limit and my mom had declared we were not traveling another mile. We headed downtown where the brick Harrisburg Hotel stood some 10 stories high, an old structure in a questionable area of town, but the lights were on and there were signs of life inside.
They did have a room that gave us two saggy double beds to share for eight dollars, with sheets and blankets with dubious laundering history, a bare light bulb that turned on with a chain and a bathroom down the hall. I’m surprised my mother even considered laying down on that bed, but she did. I don’t remember getting much sleep that night, but it was a place to rest, and the sirens and shouts out on the street did make for interesting background noise.
Some 12 years later, I had another experience of finding no room to lay my head after arriving late at night in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, with supposed reservations at the local YMCA for myself and my three student friends traveling together on our way to Gombe to study wild chimpanzees. We landed at the airport after midnight after a day long flight from Brussels, managed to make it through customs intact and find a taxi, only to arrive at the Y to find it dark and locked. It took some loud knocking to rouse anyone and with our poor Swahili, we were able to explain our dilemma–we were supposed to have two rooms reserved for the four of us. He said clearly “no room, all rooms taken”.
The host was plainly perplexed at what to do with four Americans in the middle of the night. He decided to parse us out one each to occupied rooms and hope that the occupants were willing to share. He looked at me, a skinny white girl with short hair and decided I was some kind of strange looking guy, and tried to stick me in a room with a rather intoxicated French man and I said absolutely not. Instead my female traveling partner and I ended up sharing a cot (sort of) in a room with a German couple who allowed us into their room, which I thought was an amazing act of generosity at 2 AM in the morning. I didn’t sleep a wink, amazed at the magical sounds and smells of my first dawn in Africa, hearing the morning prayers coming from the mosque across the street, only a few hours later.
So I can relate in a small way to what it must have felt like over 2000 years ago to have traveled over hard roads to arrive in a dirty little town temporarily crammed with too many people, and find there were no rooms anywhere to be had. And to have doors shut abruptly on a young woman in obvious full term pregnancy is another matter altogether. They must have felt a growing sense of panic that there would be no safe and clean place to rest and possibly deliver this Child.
Then there came the offer of an animals’ dwelling, with fodder for bedding and some minimal shelter. A stable and its stone manger became sanctuary for the weary and burdened. We are all invited in to rest there, and I never enter a barn without somehow acknowledging that fact and feeling welcomed.
There are so many ways we continue to refuse access and shut the doors in the faces of those two (plus One) weary travelers, forcing them to look elsewhere to stay. We say “no room” dozens of times every day, not realizing who and what we are shutting out.
With all the material distractions of our age, it is small wonder we pay no attention to who is waiting patiently outside the back door of our lives, where it is inhospitable and cold and dank. Few of us would invite our special company into the barn first and foremost. Yet these travelers don’t seek an invitation to come in the front door, with fancy meals and feather beds and fresh flowers on the cupboard. It is the dark and manure strewn parts of our lives where they are needed most. That is where He was born to dwell amid our messiness, and that is where He remains, in the humblest parts of our being, the parts we do not want to show off, and indeed, most often want to hide.
And that is, of course, a place where there is always plenty of room.
This year’s Barnstorming Advent theme “… the Beginning shall remind us of the End” is taken from the final lines in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”
Jesus, Jesus, rest your head. You has got a manger bed. All the evil folk on earth Sleep in feathers at their birth. Jesus, Jesus, rest your head. You has got a manger bed.
1. Have you heard about our Jesus? Have you heard about his fate? How his mammy went to the stable On that Christmas Eve so late? Winds were blowing, cows were lowing, Stars were glowing, glowing, glowing. Refrain
2. To the manger came the Wise Men. Bringing from hin and yon, For the mother and the father, And the blessed little Son. Milkmaids left their fields and flocks And sat beside the ass and ox. Refrain
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Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.
Within the ongoing havoc the woods this morning is almost unnaturally still. Through stalled air, unshadowed light, a few leaves fall of their own weight.
The sky is gray. It begins in mist almost at the ground and rises forever. The trees rise in silence almost natural, but not quite, almost eternal, but not quite.
What more did I think I wanted? Here is what has always been. Here is what will always be. Even in me, the Maker of all this returns in rest, even to the slightest of His works, a yellow leaf slowly falling, and is pleased. ~Wendell Berry “VII”
What more did I think I wanted?
To know that as long as I’m able to hold on, I can be a spot of light in a dark and bleak world. Once I let go, it is finished and worthwhile, seeing His knowing smile.
A book of beauty in words and photography, available to order here:
…I’m taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I’m traveling a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors into the temple. ~Mary Oliver from “Today” from A Thousand Mornings
Some days warrant stillness. On this Sabbath day of rest, seek to be quiet as a feather, silently in place, listening.
Maybe, hear each other again. Surely, hear the Word of God.
A funny thing about feathers: alone, each one is merely fluff and air. Together — feathers become lift and power, with strength and will to soar beyond the tether of gravity’s pull on our flawed humanity back to dust.
As quiet as a feather, joined and united, one overlapping another, rise above and fly as far as your life and breath can take you.
May peace be still.
Thank you, once again, to the chickens displayed at the NW Washington Fair in Lynden last week, who struggled to be still in their cages for these close-up feather photos….
More Barnstorming photos and poems from Lois Edstrom are available in this book from Barnstorming. Order here:
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