Tag: witness

Come and See: Bearing Witness to the Light

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There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh
nor of the will of man, but of God.
John 1:6-13

God, Who made the sun, also made the moon.
The moon does not take away from the brilliance of the sun.
The moon would be only a burnt-out cinder floating in the immensity of space were it not for the sun. All its light is reflected from the sun. On dark nights we are grateful for the moon; when we see it shining, we know there must be a sun. So in this dark night of the world when men turn their backs on Him Who is the Light of the World, we … await the sunrise.
~Archbishop Fulton Sheen from The World’s First Love

John the Baptist was clear: he was a witness to the True Light Jesus, not the light himself.

He reflected the origin of light, like the moon reflects the sun.

We are naturally wary of prophets, not knowing who to believe and who leads us astray. God warns us about false prophets, yet we have difficulty discerning truth, so turn our backs to it, missing the Light.

Instead, when I see moonlight, I try to remember the message of John the Baptist: seeing the moon glow reminds me the Sun is the true origin of Light. And so as God’s children, we are to reflect the Light as well, bearing witness in the darkness.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. At the beginning of each week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

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Window of the Unknown

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Stay here at the precipice, quiet.
Quiet as the sun rises
over the rooftops
across the street
and the cats watch, rapt.
Quiet as the coffee deepens
its creamy sweet acidity.
How many mornings
have I woken like this, early
and called to listen
at the window of the unknown?
Sometimes it speaks to me.
Sometimes it listens back.
~Brooke McNamara “Listen Back” from Bury the Seed


Each dawn, I’m given a fresh chance and renewed focus.
As the hills are limned by morning light,
I face the unknowns in the shadows.
I am rapt, watching.
I am silent, listening.
I have much to say, but don’t.
It is enough to be here – a witness.

AI image generated for this post

When the dawn
O’er hill and dale
Throws her bright veil
Think of me!

When the laugh
With silver sound
Goes echoing round
Think of me!

When the rain
With starry show’rs
Fills all the flow’rs
Think of me!

When the wind
Sweeps along,
Loud and strong,
Think of me!

When the earth
Sleeping sound
Swings round and round
Think of me!

When the night
With solemn eyes
Looks from the skies
Think of me!
~Frances Anne Kemble

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Something of Lasting Value

barnstormingblog2 Comments

And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before
death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s
self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “The Golden Echo”

…writing was one way to let something of lasting value emerge
from the pains and fears of my little, quickly passing life.
Each time life required me to take a new step into unknown spiritual territory, I felt a deep, inner urge to tell my story to others–
Perhaps as a need for companionship but maybe, too,
out of an awareness that my deepest vocation is to be a witness to the glimpses of God I have been allowed to catch.
~Henri Nouwen from Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life

“Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

For too much of my life I have focused on my foreshortening future, bypassing the present in my headlong rush to what lies ahead. There is always a goal to achieve, a conclusion becoming commencement of the next phase, a sunset turning right around in a few hours to become sunrise.

Yet the most precious times occur when the present is so over-whelming, so riveting, so tenderly full of beauty that I believe I can see a brief glimpse of God. I must grab hold with all my strength to try and secret it away and keep it forever. Of course the present still slips away from me, elusive and evasive, torn to bits by the unrelenting movement of time.

Even when I’m able to take a photo to lock it to a page or screen, it is not enough. No matter how I choose to preserve the essence of this moment, it is already passed, ebbing away, never to return.

So I write to harvest those times to make them last a little bit longer although they will inevitably be lost downstream into the ether of unread words.

Where have all the words, all the flowers, all those moments gone?

Even if unread, I am learning that words, which had power in the Beginning to create life itself, still can bring tenderness and meaning back to my life. How blessed to live the gift twice: not just in the moment itself but in recording in words that preserve and treasure it all up, if only for that ephemeral blooming moment.

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Longing to Touch the Mountain

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The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.
~ C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

He found himself wondering at times, especially in the Autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams. He began to say to himself ‘Perhaps I shall cross the river myself one day.’ To which the other half of his mind always replied ‘Not yet.’
~J.R.R. Tolkien — Frodo in Fellowship of the Rings

When you live in Whatcom County, as we do, it is possible to cross the river (several times) over 90 minutes of two lane highway switchbacks to arrive in these wild lands, breathless and overcome by their majesty.

Visions of mountains from our dreams become an overwhelming 360 degree reality, nearly reachable if I just stretch out my hand far enough.

God touches every square inch of earth as if He owns the place. These square inches are particularly marked by His artistry. It is a place to feel truly whelmed by His magnificence. As insignificant and transient as I am as a part of His creation, I still may bear witness.

I am left to wonder about the wild lands, much like Tolkien’s Frodo, pondering what bridges God is building to bring us back home to Him.

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Each Thing Noticed

barnstormingblog2 Comments

The Old Testament book of Micah answers the question
of why we are here with another:
“What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly,
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
We are here to abet creation and to witness it,
to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.
Together we notice not only each mountain shadow
and each stone on the beach
but we notice each other’s beautiful face
and complex nature so that creation need not play
to an empty house.
~Annie Dillard from Life Magazine’s “The Meaning of Life”

I started out a noticer,
a child who crawled on the ground
to follow winding ant trails from their hills,
then watched nests bloom with birds,
sitting still as a lizard sunning himself on a rock.

Next I was a student researcher of great apes,
following wild chimpanzees deep into an exotic forest
to observe their life in a community so much like our own.

Then came a profession and parenting and daughtering,
with mounting responsibilities and worries and cares,
and I stopped noticing any more,
too much inside the drama
to witness it from outside.

Creation played to an empty house
and the empty house was me.

Slowly now,
I’ve returned to noticing again~
buying my ticket, finding my seat,
smiling and nodding
applauding
hooting and hollering
begging for an encore.

It’s a non-stop show of the miraculous
where I’m an appreciative audience
preparing to write a great review.

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Hard to Hide

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I saw a deer skeleton
gracing the roadside
and didn’t stop to wonder
where the flesh had gone,
why just a tuft of fur clung,
a bit of tail.
Didn’t pause to ponder
its change from leaping-warmth
to cold, clean bones.
Didn’t stop but glimpsed
crisp, dark lines against snow,
rib cage, long legs, perfect spine—
what we with mounded dirt,
neat lawn, and flowered stones
seek so hard to hide—
I drove quickly by.
~Laura Foley, “Intuition” from  It’s This

I drive a night-darkened country road, white lines sweeping past,
aware of advancing frost in the evening haze,
anxious to return home to fireplace light.

Nearing a familiar corner, a stop sign looms,
to the right, a rural cemetery sits silently expectant.

Open iron gates and tenebrous headstones,
in the middle path, incongruous, a car’s headlights beam bright.
I slow, thinking: lovers or vandals might seek inky cover of night.

Instead, these lights illuminate a lone figure, kneeling graveside,
one hand resting heavily on a stone, head bowed in prayer.

A stark moment of solitary sorrow,
invisible grieving of the heart focused in twin beams,
impossible to hide.

A benediction of mourning; light piercing the heart’s blackness,
as gentle fingertips trace the engraved letters of a beloved name.

As an uneasy witness, I withdraw as if touched myself
and drive on into the night, struggling to see
through the thickening mist of my eyes and the road.

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Something to Behold

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Sometimes I just sit like this at the window and watch
the darkness come. If I’m smart, I’ll put on Bach.

I’m thinking now of how far it always seems there is to go.
Maybe it is too easy that I speak so often

of late last light on a December day,
of that stubborn grass that somehow still remains green

behind the broken chain link fence on the corner.
But the need is so great for the way light looks

as it takes its leave of us. We say
what we can to each other of these things,

we who are such thieves, stealing first
one breath and then the next. Bach, keep going

just this slowly, show me the way to believe
that what matters in this world has already happened

and will go on happening forever.
The way light falls on the last

of the stricken leaves of the copper beech
at the end of the block is something to behold.
~Jim Moore “The Need Is So Great”

No matter
No matter what happens between the sunrise and the sunset
No matter what happens between the sunset and the sunrise
It is something to behold.

To witness the return of light:
the rise and the set
the set and the rise

it keeps coming and going
through troubles
and sickness
joy and heartbreak
birth and death
loss and gain
it keeps coming and going
something to behold

the earth continues
to turn
to grant
a new start
a new day
something to behold

then settles
serenely
a quiet night
a respite from light

which matters so much
more than anything in between
so much more to behold
so much
so

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Where the Joy Came In

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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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Dialogue With the Invisible

barnstormingblog5 Comments

All day I try to say nothing but thank you,
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I
take through the rooms of my house and outside into
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring
and to the cold wind of its changes.
Gratitude comes easy after a hot shower,
when loosened muscles work,
when eyes and mind begin to clear
and even unruly hair combs into place.

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as
I remember who I am, a woman learning to praise something
as small as dandelion petals floating
on the steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup,
my happy savoring tongue.
~Jeanne Lohmann “To Say Nothing But Thank You”

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
~Mary Oliver “Praying”

As this long winter has finally given way to spring, I am grateful to pay attention to the small things around me, to breathe my silent thanks for this privilege of being witness to the soil of this life, this farm, this faith. More days than not, I savor it as someone who is hungry and thirsty for beauty and meaning.

In my thankfulness, I must pay attention to who I am: I still yearn to grow, to bloom and fruit, harvesting what I can to share with others.

It often feels like a dialogue with the invisible.

With deep gratitude to all who come here daily to read these words and enjoy my pictures and who let me know how it makes a difference in your day.

You and I may never meet in this life yet your generous comments always make a difference to me!

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A Puzzling Light

barnstormingblog2 Comments

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something;

A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light…
~John Ashbery from “Some Trees”

Surrounded as we are by special trees on this farm, I watch them carefully through the seasons.
I hope to learn what they have to teach me about adaptation to change
through the driest of hot days,
to the coloring and loss of their leafy wardrobes,
to the barren nakedness of winter,
to the renewal of buds adorning spring branches.

Trees have plenty to say, but all in invisible silence. I’ve read about the communication that takes place underground between them via their roots and I have to say — I feel left out knowing I don’t speak or understand their language.

So I learn from trees by observing what is visible above the ground, especially when the light is just right.

Simply by merely being here, year after year – that means something.

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