Lined with light the twigs are stubby arrows. A gilded trunk writhes Upward from the roots, from the pit of the black tentacles.
In the book of spring a bare-limbed torso is the first illustration.
Light teaches the tree to beget leaves, to embroider itself all over with green reality, until summer becomes its steady portrait and birds bring their lifetime to the boughs.
Then even the corpse light copies from below may shimmer, dreaming it feels the cheeks of blossom. ~May Swenson “April Light”
For over two years, we have been surrounded by a shimmering corpse light hovering close, masked and wary when we needed each other most.
Even so, the world is not defeated by death.
An unprecedented illumination emerged from the tomb on a bright Sabbath morning to guarantee that we struggling people, we who became no more than bare twigs and stubs, we who feel at times hardly alive, are now begetting green, ready to burst into blossom, our glowing cheeks pink with life, a picture of our future fruitfulness.
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All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. ~William Butler Yeats from “Easter, 1916”
Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east. ― Gerard Manley Hopkins from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
It has been a slow coming of spring this year, seeming in no hurry whatsoever. Snow, sleet and hail fell on our farm just this past week with the mountains piled high with white and the greening of the fields yet to begin.
The soil is too cold and damp to plant and our animals want to hang onto their winter hair, reluctant to give it up in chill winds.
Like Narnia, winter still has its terrible grip on us – and not just in terms of weather trends. We live in a world at war and we as individuals continue to find ways to argue among ourselves after a two year pandemic.
So here we are, frozen in a darkened world, thawed by a Risen Son who shines and actually warms us from our prolonged dormancy.
This is exactly what eastering is. It is awakening out of a restless sleep, opening the door to let in fresh air, and the heavy stone that locked us in the dark is now rolled back, never to cover us again.
Underground is where life begins My heart will rejoice in the hiddenness Beyond the burial there’s a resurrection ~Kristene DiMarco
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law,to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption… Galatians 4: 4-5
“In the fullness of time” is one of my favorite expressions to remind myself that God’s timing is not linear so much as it is spherical – we find ourselves in the midst of His plans, surrounded by Him rather than journeying from point A to point B.
The sowing of the seed, its hidden growth underground, its taking root and sprouting, its dependency on the soil and water and sun to rise up, its development and maturation and fruition, its harvest and completion to feed and become seed yet again.
It is a circle, not a line.
I must rise boldly when He calls me forth from the darkness.
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…
In the quiet of the morning When no one knows and no one needs to know You speak to me, You give me strength There’s nothing like the secret place
Underground is where life begins My heart will rejoice in the hiddenness Beyond the burial there’s a resurrection Your will be done in me In the stillness all around You are working all the details out What’s in me will grow someday I trust Your timing and Your ways
Underground is where life begins My heart will rejoice in the hiddenness Beyond the burial there’s a resurrection
Your will be done in me Oh let my roots go deep I will rise, I will rise He holds the time that I will rise I will rise, I will rise He holds the time that I will rise I will rise, I will rise God through my life be lifted high I will rise, I will rise God through my life be lifted high Let Jesus rise, Jesus rise God through my life be glorified
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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
Dear March—Come in— How glad I am— I hoped for you before— Put down your Hat— You must have walked— How out of Breath you are— ~Emily Dickinson
I measure time by calendar page turns…
there is less left of time each day as I look to the sky to see the sun come and the sun go
I greet the new month as the old one passes reminding myself there won’t be another like it
The morning dew light fades without a before or after only a moment of blessing now.
How can this not be the way of things?
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Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but actually you’ve been planted. ~Christine Caine
I love a wild daffodil, the one that grows where she’s planted— along a wooded highway left to her own abandon, but not abandoned. Her big yellow head leaning toward or away from the sun. Not excluded but exclusive, her trumpet heralds no one, not even the Canada geese— their long-necked honks announcing their journey. She’ll be here less than a season, grace us with green slender stems, strong enough to withstand rain and spring’s early chill. And when she goes, what remains she’ll bury deep inside the bulb of her, take a part of me with her until she returns. ~January Gill O’Neil, “For Ella” from Rewilding
Our farm was homesteaded by the Lawrence family over one hundred years ago — soon afterward, someone decided to bury daffodil bulbs scattered around the yard. All these decades later, dozens of faithful heralds of spring still come up as the sun and extra hours of light call them forth. Some years they bloom in February, but most typically they wait for a more predictable welcome from the weather in March.
They are very tender, easily injured by a strong wind or late snowfall – mostly an old antique variety of fluffy double blooms, but some traditional trumpet blossoms still come up called forth by the trumpeting of the geese and swans passing over far above them.
For me, their blooming with abandon is inspiration in faithfulness and persistence, especially because of the 44 weeks per year they remain silent and buried out of sight. I have a general sense where they will appear each February, but am still surprised and impressed when they do push up through the ground. I walk around them carefully, knowing I could crush them with one firm inadvertent boot step if I am not cautious.
Once the daffodils are blooming, they encourage my hope and a promise of the spring just ahead. When the blooms wither and fade, the green spiky stems must gather the strength the bulb needs for another cycle of dormancy, so I mow around them to allow as much time as needed to replenish before disappearing underground again.
I still don’t understand how these gentle blooms somehow manage to pull me down with them into the bulb, waiting my turn alongside them while buried deep in the dark. Perhaps it is because God plants each one of us here in His holy ground, to await the ultimate wakening that calls us forth to bloom everlasting.
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There are times when lifting our voices in song is the only way to express what our hearts are feeling, especially now as we witness the distress of the Ukrainian people who are relying on their cultural bonds, their spiritual faith and their trust that good people of the world will support their defense of their culture and their government.
May our voices be raised along with them, today and whenever freedom is threatened in the future. How else can we live?
[The Incarnation is like] a wave of the sea which, rushing up on the flat beach, runs out, even thinner and more transparent, and does not return to its source but sinks into the sand and disappears. ~Hans Urs von Balthasar from Origen: Spirit and Fire
The Word became flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light.
Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God… who for us and for our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from heaven.” Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast. ~Frederick Buechner from Whistling in the Dark
Down he came from up, and in from out, and here from there. A long leap, an incandescent fall from magnificent to naked, frail, small, through space, between stars, into our chill night air, shrunk, in infant grace, to our damp, cramped earthy place among all the shivering sheep.
And now, after all, there he lies, fast asleep. ~Luci Shaw “Descent” from Accompanied By Angels
Perhaps it is the mystery of the thing that brings us back, again and again, to read the story of how God came down and disappeared into us.
How can this be? God appearing on earth first to animals, then the most humble of humans.
How can He be? Through the will of the Father and the breath of the Spirit, the Son was, and is and yet to be.
O great mystery beyond all understanding.
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”
O magnum mysterium, et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum, jacentem in praesepio! Beata Virgo, cujus viscera meruerunt portare Dominum Christum. Alleluia!
O great mystery and wondrous sacrament, that animals should see the new-born Lord lying in their Manger! Blessed is the Virgin whose womb was worthy to bear the Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia!
The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me. I have a lord in heaven called the sun, and open for him, showing him the fire of my own heart, fire like his presence. What could such glory be if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters, were you like me once, long ago, before you were human? Did you permit yourselves to open once, who would never open again? Because in truth I am speaking now the way you do. I speak because I am shattered. ~Louise Glück“The Red Poppy”
What would poppies tell me if they could speak?
They would remind me that my existence is solely dependent on my Creator God who made me from dust, just like a seed. My color and fullness and growth is due to His sun and His rain and His breath blowing life and soul into me.
So I open slowly, eager to be known, to be loved and to love until the fire shining in the heart of me is like His fire, reflecting His glory.
And so I will shatter here — yet I know there is more. Even my God planted himself here, opening up His beauty, thrived, then died here, and raised from the dark here.
God shatters so I can thrive and flourish, to be ready to open again.
Forever and ever.
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I have a small grain of hope– one small crystal that gleams clear colors out of transparency.
I need more.
I break off a fragment to send you.
Please take this grain of a grain of hope so that mine won’t shrink.
Please share your fragment so that yours will grow.
Only so, by division, will hope increase,
like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower unless you distribute the clustered roots, unlikely source– clumsy and earth-covered– of grace. ~Denise Levertov “For the New Year, 1981”
Years ago, my newly widowed sister-in-law was trying to bring order to her late husband’s large yard and flower garden, overgrown following the shock of his sudden cardiac death. In her ongoing ebb and flow with her grief, she brought to us several paper bags full of bearded iris roots resting solemnly in clumps of dirt. They appeared to be such unlikely sources of beauty, hope and healing: dry misshapen knobby feet and fingers, crippled-appearing and homely.
We got them into the ground late in the year yet they rewarded us with immense forgiveness. They took hold in their new space and transformed our little courtyard into a Van Gogh landscape. Over the years they have continued to gladden our hearts until we too must, to save them, divide them to pass on their gift of beauty to another garden.
This act– “by division, will hope increase”–feels radical yet that is exactly what God did: sending Himself to become dusty, grime and earth-covered, so plain, so broken, so full of hope ready to bloom.
A part of God put down roots among us to grow, thrive and be divided, over and over and over again to increase the beauty and grace for those of us limited to this soil.
Just so — our garden blooms so all can see and know: hope grows here from clustered roots of grace.
Van Gogh “Irises” owned by J. Paul Getty Museum, California
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hankerchief tree (Ireland)Baby Barn Owlet hiding in the rocks and grassRiver carp (2-3 feet long) in Higashi-Kurume, Tokyo
Gardens are also good places to sulk. You pass beds of spiky voodoo lilies and trip over the roots of a sweet gum tree, in search of medieval plants whose leaves, when they drop off turn into birds if they fall on land, and colored carp if they plop into water.
Suddenly the archetypal human desire for peace with every other species wells up in you. The lion and the lamb cuddling up. The snake and the snail, kissing. Even the prick of the thistle, queen of the weeds, revives your secret belief in perpetual spring, your faith that for every hurt there is a leaf to cure it. ~Amy Gerstler “Perpetual Spring” from Bitter Angel
photo by Tomomi Gibson
We all want to fix what ails us: that was the point of my many years of medical training and over 40 years “practicing” that art. We want to know there is a cure for every hurt, an answer for every question, a resolution to every mystery, or peace for every conflict.
And there is. It just isn’t always on our timeline, nor is it always the answer we expect, nor the conflict magically dissolved. The mystery shall remain mystery until every tear is dried, as we stand before the Face of our Holy God who both loves and judges our hearts.
Sometimes this life hurts – a lot – but I believe in the perpetual Spring and Resurrection that guarantees our complete healing.
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