Tag: truth

In the Light-Charged Air

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When I saw the figure on the crown of the hill,
high above the city, standing perfectly still

against a sky so saturated with the late-
afternoon, late-summer Pacific light

that granules of it seemed to have come out
of solution, like a fine precipitate

of crystals hanging in the brightened air,
I thought whoever it was standing up there

must be experiencing some heightened state
of being, or thinking—or its opposite,

thoughtlessly enraptured by the view.
Or maybe, looking again, it was a statue

of Jesus or a saint, placed there to bestow
a ceaseless blessing on the city below.

Only after a good five minutes did I see
that the figure was actually a tree—

some kind of cypress, probably, or cedar.
I was both amused and let down by my error.

Not only had I made the tree a person,
but I’d also given it a vision,

which seemed to linger in the light-charged air
around the tree’s green flame, then disappear.
~Jeffrey Harrison “The Figure on the Hill” from Into Daylight

Who was it who suggested that the opposite of war
Is not so much peace as civilisation? He knew
Our assassinated Catholic greengrocer who died
At Christmas in the arms of our Methodist minister,
And our ice-cream man whose continuing requiem
Is the twenty-one flavours children have by heart.
Our cobbler mends shoes for everybody; our butcher
Blends into his best sausages leeks, garlic, honey;
Our cornershop sells everything from bread to kindling.
Who can bring peace to people who are not civilised?
All of these people, alive or dead, are civilised.
~Michael Longley “All of These People”  from Collected Poems

Who among us appear
in the light-charged air,
visible on the crown of the hill of life –
who might be mistaken
for a martyr or a saint or a visionary,
when each one of us is
merely a person
responsible to a family,
committed to help friends,
dedicated to serve a community,
placed in this world to steady a broken civilization.

There is the simple truth that we need a person
with roots deep in the ground,
branches that reach up and out,
bearing fruit to share with those around us.

But surely not
this misery, not this blight, not this trouble,
certainly not these murders,
which only bears and shares
a heart-rending, horrible grief.

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We Are No Longer Alone: Visited

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The Visitation by Mariotto Albertinelli
Annunciation by Bartolome Esteban Perez Murillo

…we should not try to escape a sense of awe, almost a sense of fright, at what God has done. Nothing can alter the fact that we live on a visited planet…
We shall be celebrating no beautiful myth, no lovely piece of traditional folklore, but a solemn fact.
God has been here once historically, but he will come again with the same silence and same devastating humility into any human heart ready to receive him.
J.B. Phillips from Watch for the Light

Angels Announcing the Birth of Christ by Govert Flinck

I want to be like the visited Mary in her daily routine, awed yet accepting, as the angel interrupts her with an incredible announcement.

I want to be like the visited Elizabeth, overjoyed, along with the leaping baby in her womb, seeing her cousin Mary pregnant with her Lord.

I want to be like the visited shepherds, silenced and aghast, flattened with so much fear that they need the reassurance “do not be afraid” and immediately go to find the baby in a manger.

I want to be like the visited Joseph whose life would never be the same again, as my own self-sufficiency and sense of “how things should be” is shot through and leaking dry.

I too need interruption – to be overjoyed, aghast, my expectations upended, eager to find this new gift of life.

Only then is my heart ready to receive and welcome this visitor. 
Only then.

The Dream of Saint Joseph by Anton Raphael Mengs, 1773

This year’s Advent theme is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sermon on the First Sunday in Advent, December 2, 1928:

The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come. For these, it is enough to wait in humble fear until the Holy One himself comes down to us, God in the child in the manager.

God comes.

He is, and always will be now, with us in our sin, in our suffering, and at our death. We are no longer alone. God is with us and we are no longer homeless.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer – from Christmas Sermons

1. This is the truth sent from above,
The truth of God, the God of love;
Therefore don’t turn me from your door,
But hearken all both rich and poor.

2. The first thing which I do relate,
Is That God did man create
The next thing which to you I tell,
Woman was made with man to dwell.

3. Then after this was God’s own choice
To place them both in Paradise,
There to remain from evil free
Except they eat of such a tree.

4. But they did eat, which was a sin,
And thus their ruin did begin —
Ruin’d themselves, both you and me,
And all of their posterity.

5. Thus we were as heirs to endless woes,
Till God the Lord did interpose
And so a promise soon did run
That He would redeem us by His Son.
~the Herefordshire Carol
Collected by E. M. Williams from Mr. W. Jenkins, Kings Pyon, Herefordshire, July, 1909. Music Noted by R. Vaughan William

and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
John 8:32

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An Ache Nothing Can Satisfy

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At the alder-darkened brink
Where the stream slows to a lucid jet
I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat,
And see, before I can drink,

A startled inchling trout
Of spotted near-transparency,
Trawling a shadow solider than he.
He swerves now, darting out

To where, in a flicked slew
Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves
Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,
And butts then out of view

Beneath a sliding glass
Crazed by the skimming of a brace
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,
In which deep cloudlets pass

And a white precipice
Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.
How shall I drink all this?

Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.
~Richard Wilbur “Hamlen Brook”

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

How can I take it all in?

Like so many others right now, I’m thirsty for honest, respectful discussion and debate about the state of the world. Instead, I’m left dry and wanting, ready to blow away with the next gust.

So I ache to witness fading colors, fallen leaves, swift winds and pouring rain, as all creatures great and small prepare for winter’s chill. There is stark honesty among all soon to fall asleep.

I yearn to hear God’s Truth spoken out loud.
How amazing it would be — to be dumbstruck with joy.

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Clearing the Fog of Medical Advice

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Be obscure clearly.
Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign … think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear!
~E.B. White from his classic book on writing well –The Elements of Style

As a family doctor with over forty years of clinical practice under my belt, I have found the E.B. White’s advice for writing can be applied to the field of medicine. I tried my best to clarify the obscurity of the human condition in my job, hoping my patients could provide me the information I needed to make a sound diagnosis and treatment recommendation.

Communication is hard work for many patients, especially when they are depressed and anxious on top of whatever they are experiencing physically. There is still plenty of unknowns in the psychology and physiology of humans. Then, throw in a disease process or two or three to complicate what appears to be “normal” and further consider the side effects and complications of various treatments.

Evidence-based decision making isn’t always perfectly equipped to produce the best and only solution to one individual’s problem.

Sometimes the solution to a patient’s symptom is foggy, muddy, and obscure, not at all pristine and clear. It is the physician’s job to try to bring everything into the best focus possible. Then it is our job to communicate our thinking and decision process in a way that respects the patient’s right to be skeptical.

A physician’s clinical work is challenging on the best of days when everything goes well. We see things we have never seen before, expect the unexpected, learn skills we never thought we’d need to know, and attempt to make the best choice between competing treatment alternatives. Physicians constantly unlearn things we thought were gospel truth, but have just been disproven by the latest, double-blind controlled study, which may soon be reversed by a newer study.

We find ourselves standing on evidence-based quicksand even though our patients trust that we are giving them rock-solid advice based on a foundation of truth learned over years of education and training. Add in medical decision-making that is driven by cultural, political, or financial outcomes, rather than what works best for the individual, and our hoped-for clinical clarity becomes even more obscured.

Forty-two years of doctoring in the midst of the mystery of medicine means learning, unlearning, listening, discerning, explaining, guessing, hoping, and remaining very humble in the face of a disease process or a public health threat like COVID. What works well for one patient may not be appropriate for another despite what the best evidence says or what insurance companies and the government are willing to cover. Each individual we see deserves the clarity of a fresh look and perspective, instead of being treated by cook-book algorithm.

So, as a physician and healer, be obscure clearly. 
A life may depend on it.

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God’s Righteous Frown: With Steady Gaze

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Directly in front of me
he is here,
him on this quiet morning
in a room of the Byzantine Museum, Athens,
in the hundred-degree heat and dust
of a city not yet fully awake.
Here, and I am suddenly confronted—
the oldest icon in existence—with
his image.

The rest of the room evaporates,
and all I see is him:
Pure mystery, great and wondrous,
dizzying and terrible.

How can wood and pigment
egg yolk and animal skin convey
such ethereal truth,
intensify the power,
captivate Christian eye and heart?

Christ of Sinai looks at me
with steady gaze.
His eyes—the famed twins
Justice and Mercy—
see straight through me
piercing the whitewashed tomb
of my exterior till it hurts.
One eye is dark, foreboding
shadows between the brow and lid
deepening and on the verge of righteous anger—
the other eye embraces all
even my unworthy soul.
I stand and cannot pray. My eyes swell with tears.
I cannot look anymore.
~Ed Higgins from “Icon: Christ of Sinai” from Near Truth Only 

Icon of Christ Pantocrator

I was not raised with religious icons. I have little understanding about how they may comfort and encourage those who value and even worship them. Yet I do understand inspiring art and words may deepen our faith in God. This has been true for millennia.

This particular Byzantine icon, the oldest known of Christ, is preserved from the 6th century, an early representation with an intense gaze from eyes that are both from man and God.

I look for tears in those eyes. My own fill up knowing Christ is able to see the depths beyond my white-washed exterior.

I look away, ashamed.

Because He sees what we try to keep from Him, Jesus weeps,
knowing the truth about us, yet loving us anyway.

the right and left sides of the icon shown in mirror image, illustrating the dual nature of divine and human

You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.
Matthew 23:27

Detail from “Descent from the Cross” by Rogier van der Weyden

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”

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Truth is Found in Silence

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If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost
piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table
or somewhere slowly falling
into the brook
to be swallowed by water,
then you have seen beauty
and know it for its transience.
And if you have gone out in the snow
for only the pleasure
of walking barely protected
from the galaxies,
the flakes settling on your parka
like the dust from just-born stars,
the cold waking you
as if from long sleeping,
then you can understand
how, more often than not,
truth is found in silence,
how the natural world comes to you
if you go out to meet it,
its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,
its vacant birdhouses, and dens
full of the sleeping.
But this is the slowed down season
held fast by darkness
and if no one comes to keep you company
then keep watch over your own solitude.
In that stillness, you will learn
with your whole body
the significance of cold
and the night,
which is otherwise always eluding you.
~Patricia Fargnoli “Winter Grace” from Hallowed

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
~Emily Dickinson (1263)

If the truth is revealed all at once, I tend to hide from it.

Sometimes I need to see it emerge slowly and silently, a gentle dawning as if a rising sun is transforming night to day. If truth is an illuminating back drop reflecting onto my life, I am less likely to be blinded by its brilliance.

Instead it transforms me, dazzled and dazed.

I once was lost, but now am found.  Was blind but now I see.

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A Clamor of Questions

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I’m scrambling an egg for my daughter.
“Why are you always whistling?” she asks.
“Because I’m happy.”
And it’s true,
Though it stuns me to say it aloud;
There was a time when I wouldn’t
Have seen it as my future.
It’s partly a matter
Of who is there to eat the egg:
The self fallen out of love with itself
Through the tedium of familiarity,
Or this little self,
So curious, so hungry,
Who emerged from the woman I love,
A woman who loves me in a way
I’ve come to think I deserve,
Now that it arrives from outside me.
Everything changes, we’re told,
And now the changes are everywhere:
The house with its morning light
That fills me like a revelation,
The yard with its trees
That cast a bit more shade each summer,
The love of a woman
That both is and isn’t confounding,
And the love
Of this clamor of questions at my waist.
Clamor of questions,
You clamor of answers,
Here’s your egg.
~C.G. Hanzlicek “Egg” from Against Dreaming.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
~Emily Dickinson

When a grandchild asks a question, it is like a smooth and perfect egg safely in the nest, awaiting the exact moment to open up to breathe deeply of the world.

Sometimes my answer, try as I might, results in broken shell fragments, the insides all scrambled and released too soon.

I’m confounded by my love for childrens’ innocence in a harsh and painful world – I don’t always know the best thing to say when the truth has bits of hard shell in it. I end up telling the truth a bit slant so it might dazzle them gradually.

So I encourage them to keep asking their clamor of questions, and I do my best to answer in a way so they stay hungry for more, filled with truths without being blinded.

So many questions in their minds and mine.
So many eggs to open gently so the truth remains whole.

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Reading the World

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Hear me: sometimes thunder is just thunder.
The dog barking is only a dog. Leaves fall
from the trees because the days are getting shorter,
by which I mean not the days we have left,
but the actual length of time, given the tilt of earth
and distance from the sun. My nephew used to see
a therapist who mentioned that, at play,
he sank a toy ship and tried to save the captain.
Not, he said, that we want to read anything into that.
Who can read the world? Its paragraphs
of cloud and alphabets of dust. Just now
a night bird outside my window made a single,
plaintive cry that wafted up between the trees.
Not, I’m sure, that it was meant for me.
~Danusa Laméris “Night Bird” from Poetry

These days, I tend to read meaning into nearly everything.

Somehow, I imagine a purpose for whatever takes place, whether quotidian and mundane, or the dramatic and unforgettable. It seems to me I should derive meaning from all around me, learn from it, be inspired by it, or grieve over it.

How do we live out the days we have left – an unknowable number?
I want to not miss a thing, knowing, through inattention and distraction and carelessness, I have missed so much over the past seventy years.

Even so, here I am now, reading the world for all it has to offer – even the fine print – trying to make sense of the messiness, the orneriness, the unexplainable, and the breathtaking.

Surely it is the only way to know what is true. I need to witness it all, and wonder.

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Heading Toward Whatever is Beyond

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The fern fronds glow with a clean, green light,
and I lift one and point out the spores, curled
like sleep on the back, the rows so straight,
so even, that I might be convinced of Providence
at this moment. My daughter is seven.
She looks at the spores, at the leaf, at the plant,
at this wise, wide forest we are in, and sighs
at my pointing out yet another Nature Fact.
But look, I say, each one is a baby ready
to grow. Each one can become its own fern.
But she is already moving down the path
toward the bridge and whatever’s beyond.
~Gillian Wegener “Nature Walk” from This Sweet Haphazard

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
~Robert Frost “For Once, Then, Something”

I took many nature walks by myself as a kid living on 7 acres of woods and pasture. There wasn’t much that I didn’t scrutinize carefully throughout the seasons, keeping track of how things changed, died, reappeared and thrived.

I knew the woods of my childhood would not be my forever home as that home was sold after my parents’ divorce. I dwelled for nearly a decade in the city before settling in with my husband on this rural road over thirty years ago. We want to remain here for as long as we are able to manage it.

What I see on my work around our farm is what I share here. Some of you like the nature walks I offer. Others have moved on ahead of me, heading to the bridge to a destination beyond.

I understand that need to move on. I’ve done it as well.

Those of you who stick with me on my walk, day in and day out – you are very special to me. I hear from some of you (thank you!) every day, when you see your reflection in the waterwell of these photos and words.

Most of you are too shy or busy or don’t think it matters that I know you have seen and read and listened what I post here. In fact, I love to know you have visited. If you haven’t connected with me for awhile or never at all, I appreciate knowing if:
for once, then, something touched you here.

That indeed is the truth – our walk together, for now, is a blessing. The bridge to whatever is beyond will be waiting when we’re ready.

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A Telling So Soft

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Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other

lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.

When all other things seem lively and real,
this one fades. Yet the notes of it

touch as gently as fingertips, as the sound
of the names laid over each child at birth.

I want to stay in that music without striving or cover.
If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,

the telling is so soft
that this mortal time, this irrevocable change,

becomes beautiful. I stop and stop again
to hear the second music.

I hear the children in the yard, a train, then birds.
All this is in it and will be gone. I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.
~ Annie Lighthart, “The Second Music” – author of Pax

So many themes run through our daily existence. Usually we can only attend to one thing at a time, most often the loudest. Yet if we listen and look closely, there is a softer telling just discernible under all the noise. Sometimes, like a fugue or canon, the themes trade places, one softer which becomes more apparent and insistent, then fading to soft again.

I want to hear the heart beat of the river of life that flows through me. May I never forget what is underneath all the noise.

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