As through a long-abandoned half-standing house only someone lost could find,
which, with its paneless windows and sagging crossbeams, its hundred crevices in which a hundred creatures hoard and nest,
seems both ghost of the life that happened there and living spirit of this wasted place,
wind seeks and sings every wound in the wood that is open enough to receive it,
shatter me God into my thousand sounds.
~Christian Wiman “Small Prayer in a Hard Wind”from Every Riven Thing
the same abandoned school house near Rapalje, Montana a few years later, this photo by Joel DeWaard
May I, though sagging and gray, perilously leaning, be porous enough to allow life’s gusts to blow through me without pushing me over in a heap.
The wind may fill my every crack, crevice, and defect, causing me to sing out.
Someday, when I do shatter, toppling over into pieces into the ground, it will be amidst a mosaic of praises.
photo by Joel DeWaard
‘I am not a prophet. I am a farmer; the land has been my livelihood since my youth.’ If someone asks, ‘What are these wounds on your body?’ they will answer, ‘The wounds I was given at the house of my friends.’ Zechariah 13: 5-6
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. Isaiah 53:5
photo by Joel DeWaard
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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how the pale disk of moon caves to its own defeat,
cold as yesterday’s fish left over in the pan,
or miserly as a sliver of dried soap in a dish.
Oh for a sparkling froth of cloud, a little heat
from the sun! I shiver at the window where I plant
one perfect moon-round breath, as I liked to do as a girl
against the filthy glass of the yellow school bus
laboring up the hill, not thinking what I meant
but passionate, as if I were kissing my own life. ~Mary Jo Salter “Moon-Breath” from The Surveyors
At times, I’m amazed at the heat of my own breath. Forming a cloudy mist on a cold day, a round fog on the mirror or window, a warming of ungloved fingers.
This breath that I was given at my beginning is a gift I rarely think about, a gift I take for granted.
Nightly, as the moon honors the sun, reflecting its glory like a faint echo, I treasure the heat and heart of that first gift of breath so long ago.
Soli deo Gloria.
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Lord, who hast form’d me out of mud, And hast redeem’d me through thy blood, And sanctifi’d me to do good;
Purge all my sins done heretofore: For I confess my heavy score, And I will strive to sin no more.
Enrich my heart, mouth, hands in me, With faith, with hope, with charity; That I may run, rise, rest with thee. ~George Herbert “Trinity Sunday” (modernized)
Spend your life trying to understand it, and you will lose your mind; but deny it and you will lose your soul. St.Augustine in his work “On the Trinity”
In the Beginning, not in time or space, But in the quick before both space and time, In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace, In three in one and one in three, in rhyme…
Our God beyond, beside us and within. ~Malcolm Guite from “Trinity Sunday”
A story has been told that Augustine of Hippo was walking on the beach contemplating the mystery of the Trinity. Then he saw a boy in front of him who had dug a hole in the sand and was going out to the sea again and again and bringing some water to pour into the hole. Augustine asked him, “What are you doing?” “I’m going to pour the entire ocean into this hole.” “That is impossible, the whole ocean will not fit in the hole you have made” said Augustine. The boy replied, “And you cannot fit the Trinity in your tiny little brain.”
I accept that my tiny brain, ever so much tinier than St. Augustine’s, cannot possibly absorb or explain the Trinity – I will not try to put the entire ocean in that small hole. The many analogies used to help human understanding of the Trinity are dangerously limited in scope: vapor, water, ice shell, yolk, albumin height, width, depth apple peel, flesh, core past, present, future.
It is sufficient for me to know, as expressed by the 19th century Anglican pastor J.C. Ryle:
It was the whole Trinity, which at the beginning of creation said, “Let us make man”. It was the whole Trinity again, which at the beginning of the Gospel seemed to say, “Let us save man”.
All one, equal, harmonious, unchangeable, bound together with faith, with hope, with charity, to save us from ourselves.
I run, rise, rest in Thee, all Three.
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The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. John 3: 8
Question: What causes the wind? Why do I feel some way in wind?
Answer: Trees fan the wind as they sway. Bushes help. Your heart fills up. ~Annie Dillard from “Some Questions and Answers About Natural History from Tickets for a Prayer Wheel
Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside. 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 from “Let Evening Come”
We’re in the middle of an arctic outflow northeaster that is predicted to blow for several more days and bring snow. What felt like hints of spring have literally gone back underground – the peeper frogs’ song at night is gone, the shoots of snowdrops are frozen in place, delicate buds are in shock, daffodils that recently emerged are now held in suspense.
This is no gentle breeze nor is it a life threatening hurricane. Instead, it is a consistent bone-chilling reminder how vulnerable we are to forces far more powerful than our frail and temporary earthly bodies.
We are not in control, never have been. It helps to remember that.
So we sit tight indoors as much as possible, bundling up when we need to go out for farm chores, yet knowing eventually this bruising air will eventually go still. We ourselves are changed and humbled, with hearts full of the knowledge that God is within those unseen forces. Though we may be afraid of the buffeting sting of a strong chill wind, we pray for the inevitable calm and comfort to come.
And I have no doubt – God Himself will bring it.
This year’s Barnstorming Lenten theme is taken from 2 Corinthians 4: 18: So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
The congregation sang off key. The priest was rambling. The paint was peeling in the Sacristy.
A wayward pigeon, trapped in the church, flew wildly around for a while and then flew toward a stained glass window,
but it didn’t look like reality.
The ushers yawned, the dollar bills drifted lazily out of the collection baskets and a child in the front row began to cry.
Suddenly, the pigeon flew down low, swooping over the heads of the faithful like the Holy Ghost descending at Pentecost
Everyone took it to be a sign, Everyone wants so badly to believe. You can survive anything if you know that someone is looking out for you,
but the sky outside the stained glass window, doesn’t it look like home? ~June Beisch, “Holy Ghost” from Fatherless Women.
A little aside from the main road, becalmed in a last-century greyness, there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it. The traffic goes by, and the river goes by, and quick shadows of clouds, too, and the chapel settles a little deeper into the grass.
But here once on an evening like this, in the darkness that was about his hearers, a preacher caught fire and burned steadily before them with a strange light, so that they saw the splendour of the barren mountains about them and sang their amens fiercely, narrow but saved in a way that men are not now. ~R.S. Thomas “The Chapel”
The church knelt heavy above us as we attended Sunday School, circled by age group and hunkered on little wood folding chairs where we gave our nickels, said our verses, heard the stories, sang the solid, swinging songs.
It could have been God above in the pews, His restless love sifting with dust from the joists. We little seeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting to grow toward the light.
Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside, an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp- edged shadows back to their buildings, or how the winter air knifed after the dreamy basement.
Maybe the day we learned whatever would have kept me believing I was just watching light poke from the high, small window and tilt to the floor where I could make it a gold strap on my shoe, wrap my ankle, embrace any part of me. ~Maureen Ash “Church Basement”
There is much wrong with churches overall, comprised as they are of fallen people with broken wings and fractured faith. We seem odd, keen to find flaws in one another as we crack open and spill our own.
Yet what is right with the church is who we pray to, why we sing, feast together and share His Word. We are visible people joined together as a body bloodied and bruised. Someone is looking out for us despite our thoroughly motley messiness.
Our Lord of Heaven and Earth rains down His restless love upon our heads, no matter how humble a building we worship in, or how we look or feel today.
The dove descends upon us.
We are simply grateful to be alive, to raise our hands together, to sing and kneel and bow in a house, indeed a home that God calls His own.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
The old church leans nearby a well-worn road, Upon a hill that has no grass or tree, The winds from off the prairie now unload The dust they bring around it fitfully.
The path that leads up to the open door Is worn and grayed by many toiling feet Of us who listen to the Bible lore And once again the old-time hymns repeat.
And ev’ry Sabbath morning we are still Returning to the altar waiting there. A hush, a prayer, a pause, and voices fill The Master’s House with a triumphant air.
The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us and God. ~Stephen Paulus
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Now you hear what the house has to say. Pipes clanking, water running in the dark, the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort, and voices mounting in an endless drone of small complaints like the sounds of a family that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.
But now you must listen to the things you own, all that you’ve worked for these past years, the murmur of property, of things in disrepair, the moving parts about to come undone, and twisting in the sheets remember all the faces you could not bring yourself to love.
How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark. The terrible clarity this moment brings, the useless insight, the unbroken dark. ~Dana Gioia, “Insomnia” from 99 Poems: New and Selected.
The almost disturbing scent of peonies presses through the screens, and I know without looking how those heavy white heads lean down under the moon’s light. A cricket chafes and pauses, chafes and pauses, as if distracted or preoccupied.
When I open my eyes to document my sleeplessness by the clock, a point of greenish light pulses near the ceiling. A firefly . . . In childhood I ran out at dusk, a jar in one hand, lid pierced with airholes in the other, getting soaked to the knees in the long wet grass.
The light moves unsteadily, like someone whose balance is uncertain after traveling many hours, coming a long way. Get up. Get up and let it out.
But I leave it hovering overhead, in case it’s my father, come back from the dead to ask, “Why are you still awake? You can put grass in their jar in the morning.” ~Jane Kenyon from “Insomnia” from Collected Poems
Sleep comes its little while. Then I wake in the valley of midnight or three a.m. to the first fragrances of spring which is coming, all by itself, no matter what My heart says, what you thought you have you do not have. My body says, will this pounding ever stop? My heart says: there, there, be a good student. My body says: let me up and out, I want to fondle those soft white flowers, open in the night ~Mary Oliver from A Thousand Morning Poems
Our house does make sounds at night. It has many stories to tell, and does.
I’ve become accustomed to its various voices after almost thirty years sleeping (and too often not sleeping) here, yet hearing new noises are disconcerting – whether thumps that come from the attic, pattering of little feet across the roof, clinking and clunking of the furnace, or inexplicable wild sounds right outside the bedroom window.
Listening in the night reminds me I’m a mere visitor here. The house, the farm, all that surrounds me here remains long after I’m gone. Awake or asleep, I want to spend my time well here; tossing and turning in my thoughts gives me a chance to consider what the house, the land, the the wild and not-so-wild critters outside have to say. The “terrible clarity” of the unbroken dark is often disconcerting and downright frightening.
It is then, and only then – God’s still, small voice breaks the dark. Always has. Always will.
I will seek You Lord Search with all my heart till I find You Waiting patiently Longing for one word to breath new life Your words are life
I will listen, ever listen For Your still small voice Lord I’m longing to know You more So I will listen for Your still small voice
Take me to a place Sheltered from the noise and distraction Lord be my escape Open up my heart to whispers of Your life and love
I will listen, ever listen For Your still small voice Lord I’m longing to know You more So I will listen for Your still small voice
I will listen, ever listen For Your still small voice Lord I’m longing to know You more So I will listen for Your still small voice ~Jay Stocker
Original Barnstorming artwork note cards available as a gift to you with a $50 donation to support Barnstorming – information here
Incurable and unbelieving in any truth but the truth of grieving, I saw a tree inside a tree rise kaleidoscopically as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close to the pane as I could get to watch that fitful, fluent spirit that seemed a single being undefined or countless beings of one mind haul its strange cohesion beyond the limits of my vision over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.
Of course that old tree stood exactly as it had and would (but why should it seem fuller now?) and though a man’s mind might endow even a tree with some excess of life to which a man seems witness, that life is not the life of men. And that is where the joy came in. ~Christian Wiman, “From a Window” from Every Riven Thing.
Coming to Christianity is like color slowly aching into things, the world becoming brilliantly, abradingly alive. “Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality,” Simone Weil writes, and that’s what I had, a joy that was at once so overflowing that it enlarged existence, and yet so rooted in actual things that, again for the first time, that’s what I began to feel: rootedness. ~Christian Wiman “Gazing Into the Abyss”
Nothing is to be taken for granted. Nothing remains as it was.
Like this old pink dogwood tree, I now lean over more, I have a few bare branches with no leaves, I have my share of broken limbs, I have my share of blight and curl.
Yet each stage and transition of life has its own beauty: bursting forth with leaves and blooms after a long winter of nakedness adorned only by feathered friends destined to fly away.
Color has literally seeped in overnight, resulting in a riot of joy.
Yet what matters most is what grows unseen, underground, in a network that feeds and thrives no matter what happens above ground, steadfast roots of faith remain a reason to believe.
Nothing is to be taken for granted. Nothing remains as it was. Especially me. Oh, and especially me.
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The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us, and God. ~Stephen Paulus “The Old Church”
A little aside from the main road, becalmed in a last-century greyness, there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it. The traffic goes by, and the river goes by, and quick shadows of clouds, too, and the chapel settles a little deeper into the grass.
But here once on an evening like this, in the darkness that was about his hearers, a preacher caught fire and burned steadily before them with a strange light, so that they saw the splendour of the barren mountains about them and sang their amens fiercely, narrow but saved in a way that men are not now. ~R.S. Thomas “The Chapel”
It’s just a boarded-up shack with a tower Under the blazing summer sky On a back road seldom traveled Where the shadows of tall trees Graze peacefully like a row of gallows…
The congregation may still be at prayer. Farm folk from flyspecked photos Standing in rows with their heads bowed As if listening to your approaching steps. So slow they are, you must be asking yourself How come we are here one minute And in the very next gone forever? Try the locked door, then knock once.
High above you, there is the leaning spire Still feeling the blow of the last storm. And then the silence of the afternoon . . . Even the unbeliever must feel its force. ~Charles Simic, from “Wooden Church” from The Voice at 3:00 A.M.
The church knelt heavy above us as we attended Sunday School, circled by age group and hunkered on little wood folding chairs where we gave our nickels, said our verses, heard the stories, sang the solid, swinging songs.
It could have been God above in the pews, His restless love sifting with dust from the joists. We little seeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting to grow toward the light.
Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside, an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp- edged shadows back to their buildings, or how the winter air knifed after the dreamy basement.
Maybe the day we learned whatever would have kept me believing I was just watching light poke from the high, small window and tilt to the floor where I could make it a gold strap on my shoe, wrap my ankle, embrace any part of me. ~Maureen Ash “Church Basement”
Mom, You raised your hands while we sang this morning like I’ve never known you to, but I guess until recently I’ve never really known you in a church that let you feel alive.
There is so much wrong with churches overall, comprised as they are of fallen people with broken wings and fractured faith, we who look odd and lean awry, so keen to find flaws in one another when we are cracked open and spilling with our own.
Yet what is right with the church is who we pray to, why we sing and absorb the Word- we are visible people joined together as a body so bloodied, bruised, being healed despite our thoroughly motley messiness.
Our Lord of Heaven and Earth rains down His restless love upon our heads no matter how humble a building we worship in, or how we look or feel today.
We are simply grateful to be alive, to raise our hands, to kneel and bow in a house God calls His own.
The old church leans nearby a well-worn road, Upon a hill that has no grass or tree, The winds from off the prairie now unload The dust they bring around it fitfully.
The path that leads up to the open door Is worn and grayed by many toiling feet Of us who listen to the Bible lore And once again the old-time hymns repeat.
And ev’ry Sabbath morning we are still Returning to the altar waiting there. A hush, a prayer, a pause, and voices fill The Master’s House with a triumphant air.
The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us and God. ~Stephen Paulus
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I came here to study hard things – rock mountain and salt sea – and to temper my spirit on their edges. “Teach me thy ways, O Lord” is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend.
These mountains — Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan, the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula — are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world….
That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft, holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain, makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist, only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy. ~Annie Dillard from Holy the Firm
Sometimes the mountain is hidden from me in veils of cloud, sometimes I am hidden from the mountain in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue, when I forget or refuse to go down to the shore or a few yards up the road, on a clear day, to reconfirm that witnessing presence. ~Denise Levertov “Witness”
Even on the days like today when the mountain is hidden behind a veil of clouds, I have every confidence it is there. It has not moved in the night, gone to another county, blown up or melted down. My vision isn’t penetrating enough to see it through cloud cover today, but it will return to my line of sight, if not tomorrow, perhaps the next day, maybe not until next week.
I know this and have faith it is true – the mountain does not keep itself a secret.
On the days when I am not bothering to look for it, too preoccupied so walk right past its obvious grandeur and presence, then it reaches out to me and calls me back, refocusing me.
There are times when I turn a corner on the farm and glance up, and there it is, a silent and overwhelming witness to beauty and steadfastness. I literally gasp at not noticing before, at not remembering how I’m blessed by it being there even at the times I can’t be bothered.
It witnesses my lack of witness and, so in its mysterious way of being in plain sight, stays put to hold me fast yet another day. And so I keep coming back to gaze, sometimes just at clouds, yearning to lift the veil, and as a result, lift my veil, just one more time.
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Unclench your fists Hold out your hands. Take mine. Let us hold each other. Thus is his Glory Manifest. ~Madeleine L’Engle “Epiphany”
Journeying God, pitch your tent with mine so that I may not become deterred by hardship, strangeness, doubt. Show me the movement I must make
toward a wealth not dependent on possessions toward a wisdom not based on books toward a strength not bolstered by might toward a God not confined to heaven
Imagine the Lord, for the first time, from darkness, and stranded Immensely in distance, recognizing Himself in the Son Of Man: His homelessness plain to him now in a homeless one. ~Joseph Brodsky from “Nativity Poem” (translated by Seamus Heaney)
‘A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.’
A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly.
…And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we lead all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. ~T.S.Eliot from “Journey of the Magi”
In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; In weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. 2 Corinthians 11:26-27
Oh, when we are journeying through the murky night and the dark woods of affliction and sorrow, it is something to find here and there a spray broken, or a leafy stem bent down with the tread of His foot and the brush of His hand as He passed; and to remember that the path He trod He has hallowed, and thus to find lingering fragrance and hidden strength in the remembrance of Him as “in all points tempted like as we are,” bearing grief for us, bearing grief with us, bearing grief like us. ~Alexander MacLaren from Sermons Preached in Manchester: First series
We are called to journey into the unfamiliar; some go no further than the backyard, some to the ends of the earth, some to the moon and back.
The journey is not about the miles covered; it is an internal trek we all must make on the crooked road of our hearts, by relaxing our clenched fists, taking the offered hand and being led to that straight path back to God.
Much of the journey is perilous. We may become both sacrament and sacrifice.
He has been down that road before us, knowing the temptations, and bearing the grief we face.
There is but one map available and one map maker. This road leads home and home is where He patiently waits for us.
January 6, the traditional day of celebrating “Epiphany” as the manifestation of God on earth in the form of His incarnate Son, calls us to deeper scrutiny of our earthly journey — away from our anger, our shame and our resultant homelessness, to the restoration of our souls, resting in the sacrifice of Christ Himself.
1. On this day earth shall ring with the song children sing Praising the young King, who was born to save us And the maiden who brought Him forth to save us.
2. His the doom, ours the mirth, when he came to earth, Bethlehem saw his birth, ox and ass beside him, He came to vanquish the Prince of Darkness.
3. God’s bright star o’er his head, Wise men come seeking Him, They kneel and lay their gifts beside Him and adore Him, They offer gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh
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