Tag: sorrow

A World of Hurt

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The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.
~C.S. Lewis from A Grief Observed

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. 
~James A. Baldwin

We pay for hate with our lives, and that’s too big a price to pay.
~Brené Brown from Braving the Wilderness

We live in a world of hurt. We are consumed with hatred for all that is unjust and unfair because we are people who are in fear and in pain.

We get angry at what we don’t like or don’t understand and that includes the mystery of the ways of God.

We are a people struggling with profound irritability of the spirit.
We give no one the benefit of the doubt any more,
and that includes God.

We ask God why He doesn’t do something about the suffering we see everywhere, or the terrible hurt we feel ourselves. We want answers, and that includes answers from God.

Instead He asks us the same question right back:
What are we doing about the suffering of others?
What are we doing to understand our own misery?
Where are we seeking answers if not from His own Words?

God knows suffering and hurt.
He knows fear.
He knows what it is to be hated, far more than we do.
He took it all on Himself,
loving us so much because His pain was
part of the deal He made with us to rescue us.

With that realization,
we trade our pain for hope in Him,
our fear for trust in His promises,
and our hatred gives way to His sacrificial love.

Only then are we ready to respond to His call,
wrap ourselves within and around Him,
cling to His Word,
and feel His comfort for His people.

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear..
1 John 4:18a

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A World Going to Pieces

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Here is the world.
Beautiful and terrible things will happen.
Don’t be afraid.
~Frederich Buechner

…the heart of this country does not beat in Washington, DC, nor does its soul lie in a seat of power, nor does its destiny lie in which party occupies which section of government.

No, those things all lie with… people like you and me, people who get up and go to work and love their tiny plot of Earth and whose hands are rough and hardened by loving and giving.
~Billy Coffey from “The Heart of this Land”

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
~Martin Luther

…as the land around turns rocky and hollow…
I’d never suspected: every day,
Although the nation is done for,
I find new flowers.
~Donald Revell from “Election Year”

This morning I search for any hint of beauty
trying its best to thrive in
the rocky hollowed-out cracks of our foundation.

I look for something (anything)
kind and gentle and hopeful to share here.

But we, the people, have chosen a vengeful meanness to rule us,
to crush, bloody and fracture us apart.

I fear beauty and goodness have gone into hiding.

Even so, we are reminded of
Words spoken again and again and again
to a troubled world:

if only we can hear them for ourselves
if only we can reassure one another
to keep planting, growing, feeding
and caring for one another

The Son came to be with us
when we needed saving from ourselves,
and will not abandon us:

do not be afraid
do not be afraid
do not be afraid

Be Sunlight on a Stream

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Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.

Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again tho’ cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.
~Christina Rossetti “Echo”

The real world reverberates with echoes of our losses – so much in the news pulls us down every day. When filled with tears and sorrow, we try to retreat to the safety of our dreams rather than face fear and uncertainty.

But we can’t stay in our heads or give up hope.

There is too much the world needs from us.

Like sunlight on a stream, we become the promise of illumination of the dark depths. When doors remain closed to those who need help most, we are the key meant for the lock.

Love is that light and key. God equips us with the pulse and breath to make a difference to others. And we can make a difference: one word, one smile, one vote at a time.

Such a Strange Sweet Sorrow

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The passing of the summer fills again
my heart with strange sweet sorrow, and I find
the very moments precious in my palm.
Each dawn I did not see, each night the stars
in spangled pattern shone, unknown to me,
are counted out against me by my God,
who charges me to see all lovely things…
~Jane Tyson Clement from “Autumn” in No One Can Stem the Tide

I have missed too much over my life time:
one-of-a-kind masterpieces hung briefly in the sky
at the beginning and the ending of each day.

For too long, I didn’t notice,
being asleep to beauty,
oblivious to a rare and loving Artist.

We’re already a month into autumn.
I’ve had a hard time letting go of summer.
Until the last week of heavy rain and wind,
our days have been filled with blue skies,
warm temps and no killing frosts.

In short, it felt like perfection:
sweater weather filled with vibrant leaf color, clear moonlit nights, northern lights and some outstanding sunrises.

I feel I must try to absorb it all, to witness and record and savor it. 
God convicted us to see, listen, taste and believe.

Can there be a more merciful sentence for His children,
given the trouble we people have been to Him? 
Yet He loves us still, despite the strange sweet sorrow we cause.

See, listen, taste and believe.  I do and I will.

Nor Spare a Sigh…

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~to a young child~

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring and Fall”

As the leaves tumble down, I think of Hopkins’ Márgarét
and her vanishing goldengrove path,
she who weeps for the loss of autumn leaves,
not knowing or remembering they will return.

And I, now older, know spring comes again,
even though wistful and sighing deeply
at the loss of beauty and innocence each autumn,
weeping for what was and may never be again.

In this blighted plight,
I tend to forget the promise made:
there is much more to come after the Fall.

My grief is not for nothing.
Christ comforts those who weep,
who mourn loss and wander lost.

I have hope and faith.
I will see beauty again.
I follow the goldengrove that leads to Him.

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A Painful Wuthering

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Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.
~Emily Brontë “Fall, Leaves, Fall”

It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.
~Emily Brontë from Wuthering Heights

The loudest crows
cawing over the tops of the oaks
call me to autumn already,
and though my back is to the window,

I know the sky must be a gray wuthering,
and the curlews are crying. The wind
must be moaning as it goes sweeping
across heath and moors and the spikes
of purple heather thousands of miles away
from where my body sits; yet

I feel the gorse
grazing my ankles as I go.
~Andrea Potos “Brontean Morning” from Her Joy Becomes

I avoid watching sad movies and will close a book that is clearly heading for a weepy ending.

I don’t need to wrap myself around things that hurt when there is enough sadness and pain in the world already. Deep emotion sticks to me like velcro, even when I know the tragedy is not my own. I take it on as if it is.

As a result, the Brontë novel Wuthering Heights is not my cup of tea. I suffered through the book as well as the movie versions. It is grim with wild, destructive passions that only lead to more sorrow. I become immersed in those desperately gray “wuthering” scenes feeling the sharp thorns of the words I read that end up drawing blood from me.

But most suffering is not at all fictional. When I become aware of tragedy happening far away, when the hurricane leaves behind terrible devastation or bombs and bullets rip communities to shreds, even though there is little I can physically do to help, I can’t turn away and not look. I can’t close the book that makes me sad and uncomfortable.

I too must feel the hurt, embracing the thorns rather than avoiding them.

Jesus did just that, taking it all upon Himself. He never turned away and still, now, today, He is pierced, bloodied for our sake.

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Edges So Sharp

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The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one 
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something undone.

Today’s edges
are so sharp

they might cut
anything that moved.

The way a lost
word

will come back
unbidden.

You’re not interested
in it now,

only
in knowing
where it’s been.
~Rae Armantrout from “Unbidden”

I wish for you the blessing
of a room where strangers sit
breathing unashamed
into a chosen silence

Not the gasping breath
of travelers on a crowded plane
or the tenuous wheeze
of the waiting room

May you know the power
of those who have decided
to submit to the silence
to enter the mystery
be consumed by it
and emerge transformed

May you belong among those
who inhale the stillness
as if it is keeping us
because it is
keeping us alive
~Bethany Lee, “To Enter the Mystery” from Etude for Belonging: poems for practicing courage and hope

The grace of God means something like:
Here is your life.
You might never have been, but you are…
Here is the world.
Beautiful and terrible things will happen.
Don’t be afraid.
I am with you.
~Frederick Buechner in “Wishful Thinking and later” in Beyond Words

Twenty three years ago,
a day started with bright sun above
and ended in tears and bloodshed below.

This is a day for recollection;
we live out remembrance of
the torrential red that flowed that day;

Two decades later, far-away streets still course
with the blood of innocents.

What have we learned from all this?

That terrible day’s edges were so sharp
we all bled and still bear the scars.

So do not be afraid: we are able to still breathe and weep.

A Mind Blurred

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For all
the pain

passed down
the genes

or latent
in the very grain

of being;
for the lordless

mornings,
the smear

of spirit
words intuit

and inter;
for all

the nightfall
neverness

inking
into me

even now,
my prayer

is that a mind
blurred

by anxiety
or despair

might find
here

a trace
of peace.
~Christian Wiman “Prayer” from Once in the West

We all have times when nothing makes sense. The mind blurs with stress or fear or a sense of unreality – all focus is lost and the world becomes simultaneously fuzzy and prickly.

If that happens here in these pages, through these words and photos I share, it is because I need reminding: things often don’t make sense to me when tragedy, pain and suffering happen to people on the other side of the earth, or just down the road from here, or to those I love.

Or to me.

It still makes sense to God. He has clear vision I will never have.

He doesn’t make bad things happen; He grieves it too.
He is the focus when all else is blurry.

God calls to us out of the haze that obscures. Only then peace begins.

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Taking Sadness Into Myself

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All that summer the sun refused to open
On the sky, and the river carried rain-spots
Down and over the weir, and by the footbridge
Swans’ eggs chilled in their nest. I saw them, rained on,
Blue and dead as the moon the clouds were hiding
Every night when I looked to find it. What could
Live, neglected like that? The wind, cold and green
With the smell of the hawthorn flowering, came
Brooding over the fens, but what could it bring me,
Who had chosen to view the world with sadness,
Or had taken its sadness into myself,
Gift and charism? One day, though, I saw them,
Triple vee-wakes on dark tree-printed currents:
One ahead of the others, big and whiter 
Than the cloud-pale sky. Two cygnets, gray, living,
Broken free from the death I’d assumed for them.

Well, their ways are not my ways. The next summer, 
Walking that same towpath, heavy with a child
Who had come to me after years of asking —
Who was taking his time just then, head downward,
Happy where he was — I saw them paddling
Under the bridge, where it laid out its shadow,
Current-rumpled. The same swans? Or three strangers
Hummed down onto a river pricked with sunlight,
Strange and new as the season? I can’t say now.
I remember the baby’s head engaging, 
Heavy, ready, real, an impending pressure. 
I remember the wakes widening, the river
Flowing down in the sun, and by the footbridge, 
Gray, empty, the mess of twigs, leaves, and feathers.
~Sally Thomas “Swans”

Decades ago, there were several years when I took sadness into myself, feeling empty and barren with no hope that could change.

Sorrow became the bridge I walked across, unaware what I would find on the other side, assuming only it would be more of the same.

If I had listened to my own tearful prayers, I might have understood –even the most comfortable nests are abandoned when it is time to break free from the sadness.

I gave up my timing and my plans to let things be according to His will.

And life happened. And sadness no longer found a place in me.
The empty was filled, the sorrow overwhelmed with blessing.
Babies born, grown, now flown away to a life and babies of their own.

All from the one nest, emptied, as ever it should be.

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Carried Away

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For a long time I was sure
it should be “Jumping Jack Flash,” then
the adagio from Schubert’s C major Quintet,
but right now I want Oscar Peterson’s

“You Look Good to Me.” That’s my request.
Play it at the end of the service,
after my friends have spoken.
I don’t believe I’ll be listening in,

but sitting here I’m imagining
you could be feeling what I’d like to feel—
defiance from the Stones, grief
and resignation with Schubert, but now

Peterson and Ray Brown are making
the moment sound like some kind
of release. Sad enough
at first, but doesn’t it slide into

tapping your feet, then clapping
your hands, maybe standing up
in that shadowy hall in Paris
in the late sixties when this was recorded,

getting up and dancing
as I would not have done,
and being dead, cannot, but might
wish for you, who would then

understand what a poem—or perhaps only
the making of a poem, just that moment
when it starts, when so much
is still possible—

has allowed me to feel.
Happy to be there. Carried away.
~Lawrence Raab “Request” from Visible Signs

The point of a funeral is to be carried away – by words and songs and tears and yes, flowers.

Not just for the soul who has been released from this earth,
but for the rest of us left behind…

We are reminded how short our days are, just as flowers wither;
we do our best cherishing their beauty, then let them pass.

Sometimes acceptance, sometimes sorrow, sometimes anger –
yet on the cusp of something filled with hope and possibility.

It’s enough to carry us away.
It is well with my soul.
And it’s all right now.

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