T.S. Eliot, "A Song for Simeon"

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children's children
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat's path, and the fox's home,
Fleeing from foreign faces and the foreign swords.

Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel's consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

According to thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints' stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

Monster Cookies

It was in the middle of math class that he handed me the post-it note with his phone number.

"I'll call your parents and we can figure out a time for you to come over, okay?"

"Um, uh, how about tomorrow...?" with eyes downcast, voice a mumble.

"Well, I'm going to be getting my mom her Christmas tree tomorrow."

"Sunday then?"

He was one of God's children who didn't know his own name, not really. His hand went over his mouth because the words that came out might make him Less than he was while they were in his throat. His shoulders curved in a constant hunch and his arms knew the crossing of self-consciousness. When a smile did come, it was always accompanied by a quick glance up out of the corner of his eyes, half-guilty, not knowing if strangers like joy should be allowed inside.

The yard was amuck with the signs of a winter that can't make up its mind. Muddy and water-logged, we tromped up the steps.

Eyes darted, furtive, taking in the advent calendar on the wall, the photographs on the refrigerator, the cookie fixings sitting on the counter.

"Shall we make monster cookies? They're kind of a family secret."

Two and a half cups of peanut butter, nine cups of oatmeal, six eggs, white sugar, brown sugar, vanilla, baking soda, salt, chocolate chips, M&Ms slid, poured, cracked, sloshed.

It may seem silly, but there's a sort of knowing that comes in working shoulder to shoulder with hands deep in a mess of ingredients. A humanity that comes a bit nearer the surface, an unspoken yes, a movement toward the realization of our own names.

μάθημα

It is the berries under snow

the windows etched with ice

the smoke suspended, frozen, in air

the exhaust exiting the tailpipe

the steps slick as foot treads

the brown tree body creaking

the equation in the stars, 

it is the sheen of snow under lamplight,

 the shadow of branches under moonlight,

the crease of pages under candlelight

all in the hand

that gives and takes away, 

all beneath the finger 

that marks out the voids and the fillings, 

the additions and subtractions,

the arithmetic of grace.

Words from Here to There

I was going to try to write something here, but all I've done is stare at the screen and realize that my own words still fall flat. The only One hearing them right now is God. And for now, this is right.

Please pray, friends. 

For the little mother in the yellow house, the brothers, the sisters, the children, and if it isn't too much, for this heart, too. 

And pray for those who know more pain than us. This little taste has made me ache with the knowledge of what others must bear. 

God have mercy.

God has mercy. 

Praise be to God.

Prayer

                                          O Lord, the Scripture says, 

                                         'There is a time for silence,

                                          and a time for speech.'

                                          Saviour, teach me

                                          the silence of humility,

                                          the silence of wisdom,

                                          the silence of love, 

                                          the silence of perfection, 

                                          the silence that speaks without words,
                                          the silence of faith.

                                          Lord, teach me to silence my own heart

                                          that I may listen to the gentle movement 

                                          of the Holy Spirit within me

                                          and sense the depths which are of God.                                                    

                                          Frankfurt prayer, sixteenth century

Wednesday: Rilke

This poem tends toward the dramatic in the first stanza (excessively so, for what I mean to say), but within its second stanza nestles an image and a set of lines that have run like a refrain today. The poem is "Lament."

Lament

Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,

your path struggles on through incomprehensible

mankind. All the more futile perhaps

for keeping to its direction,

keeping on toward the future, 

toward what has been lost.

Once. You lamented? What was it? A fallen berry

of jubilation, unripe.

But now the whole tree of my jubilation

is breaking, in the storm it is breaking, my slow

tree of joy.

Loveliest in my invisible

landscape, you that made me more known

to the invisible angels.

When the following lines are threaded out of context to stand alone, the poem stands on its head. 

A fallen berry of jubilation, unripe--

Loveliest in my invisible

landscape, you that made me more known 

to the invisible angels.

This may mean something. Or nothing. But I do find it beautiful. And the invisible angels don't seem quite as invisible as they once did.

Julian, Lewis, and Hopkins: A Trio for This Night

It is sooth that sin is cause of all this pain; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

***

Images of the Holy easily become holy images--sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? 

[...] We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

***

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; 

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent 

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

For the Man Who Loved Obituaries

My dad was a man oddly fascinated by obituaries his whole life, cutting out those of complete strangers when he found them compelling. We wanted his to be the sort he would cut out.

Calling hours are at Coleman & Daniels Funeral Home in Endicott, NY on Thursday, November 13 from 5-7. The memorial service, also at Coleman & Daniels, will be on Friday, November 14 at 11:00. We welcome any who would like to be a part of celebrating dad's life.

Farewell, Until We Meet Again

Dad went home to be with God this morning. Thank you all for your prayers and love.

Night Air

That particular window, the one above the kitchen sink, has no screen. The air comes in just as it is. This night's air carried news of a Life hanging by a thread, and it carried the plaintive voices of autumn's last flock of geese flying to a fairer place. The cries of geese carry greater weight now that they've broken this stillness, wept on this night air.

Patience

My last memory with my dear old Pops before the sickness came is a tender one. This particular memory is a gift straight from the God Who knew I would need just such a one to pull out and hold on days like these.

It was a rainy day, really. Gray, and the kind of wet that seeps into your shoes and sloshes around. The week had been trying, and both body and spirit felt a bit trodden down, worn out, downright exhausted.  I didn't know how I was going get everything done for school and grad class and all the other things filling up the cracks. Dad, lovable worrywart that he is, is always telling me to drink some caffeine as I drive to and from my grad class in the evening so I won't drift off at the wheel.

He must have thought caffeine wouldn't be enough that Wednesday.

During my lunch break at school, I felt my own weakness all too deeply. That's when I listened to the voicemail and heard his voice telling me that he and mom were going to come pick me up after school and chauffeur me to class. And they did. Dad made sure there were pillows in the van so I could sleep. He and mom came in our trusty, too-old van (a true Johnson jalopy), windows all fogged up from the heat pouring out the vents while rain slid down the glass. And so I slept. While I was in class they bought groceries to stuff my rather mournfully empty refrigerator once we got back to Bainbridge.

Dad is no-nonsense most of the time. I'm a Grown-Up, you see, and I can care for my needs. But it is nice, so nice, to be able to pull out a memory like this one.

Even Grown-Ups need to be taken care of.

Rest at last.

And so we wait. God's arms are heavy with my family right now, but His are the arms that don't grow weary of holding.

When Love Comes In a Box...

...it looks something like this.

Thank you, Jori, for loving.

When Flowers Bloom in the Dark

It's been a few days since the little world I inhabit was turned inside out.

These past few years I've been learning that there is life in vulnerability, that the body of Christ works best when I hold up my brokenness to others just as I wish them to hold up their brokenness to me. Because the dexterity of God mends broken things. The love of God works wonders with weakness. This faith I hold, this Christ Whose name I--in all my frailty--try to bear, is the very Heart of things.

As I write this, my human heart is swelling with a mingling of grief and gratitude that makes absolutely no sense but yet is somehow the most truthful thing I could possibly feel. The grace of Abba Father cuts like a knife, but it also binds up the brokenhearted.

My dad is dying. Three days ago I was on my way to Binghamton when my sister called to tell me that he was in the hospital and had just gotten a diagnosis of acute myocardial leukemia. Right now, just three days later, he's lying on a new hospital bed in Rochester with lungs that aren't working right and a body that is breaking down. The doctor has been honest--it's a matter of time at this point. We don't know how long.

Yes, it is hard. I have cried until I feel like there is nothing left. I have prayed until I run out of words. Thank you to those of you who are supplying words to Abba in my stead. I am learning the exhaustion of wakeful nights.

But still, God is good.

My family has gathered close. Dad and I have shared more tenderness these past 3 days than we've felt free to show for many years, and I don't think I'm the only one of my family who would say that. We are all being bound together in this farewell.

I don't know how much time Dad will have before God takes his hand and leads him Up and In, but I know it will be the right number of minutes, hours, days, weeks.

I ask for prayers. That Dad would see the face of Christ, know His love, experience His peace, find intimacy with the One Who'll be leading him home. That he would be ready, as Dad himself phrases it, "to leave the porch and go inside." That my mom would rest in God, that His Spirit would be her comforter, that these last moments with Dad would be sweet, precious. That all of us children would face things with faith and a love that passes any miles spanning between us, that we could help bear each other's grief and point one another toward the God Whose name is Love. That God would give the doctors wisdom in making decisions. And in the end, that God's will would be done, whether that means lingering or passing quickly into His arms.

We're under God's wings right now.

Speaking for myself? I'm breaking, but God is mending me even as I crack.

Here are a few songs a friend shared with me. They say a lot, and they say it more beautifully than I can.

A Thousand Things   

How Emptiness Sings

Come Close Now             

Unspoken Sermons

{Excerpts from Unspoken Sermons by George MacDonald}

It is with the holiest fear that we should approach the terrible fact of the sufferings of our Lord. Let no one think that those were less because he was more. The more delicate the nature, the more alive to all that is lovely and true, lawful and right, the more does it feel the antagonism of pain, the inroad of death upon life; the more dreadful is that breach of the harmony of things whose sound is torture. He felt more than man could feel, because he had a larger feeling. He was even therefore worn out sooner than another man would have been. These sufferings were awful indeed when they began to invade the region about the will; when the struggle to keep consciously trusting in God began to sink in darkness; when the Will of The Man put forth its last determined effort in that cry after the vanishing vision of the Father: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Never had it been so with him before. Never before had he been unable to see God beside him. Yet never was God nearer him than now. For never was Jesus more divine. He could not see, could not feel him near; and yet it it "My God" that he cries. Thus the will of Jesus, in the very moment when his faith seems about to yield, is finally triumphant. It has no feeling now to support it, no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in his soul and tortured, as he stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure and simple and surrounded by fire, it declares for God. The sacrifice ascends in the cry, My God. The cry comes not out of happiness, out of peace, out of hope. Not even out of suffering comes that cry. It was a cry in desolation, but it came out of Faith. It is the last voice of Truth, speaking when it can but cry. The divine horror of that moment is unfathomable by the human soul. It was blackness of darkness. And yet he would believe. Yet he would hold fast. God was his God yet. My God-- and in the cry came forth the Victory, and all was over soon.

[...] But wherein or what can this alpine apex of faith have to do with the creatures who call themselves Christians, creeping about in the valleys, hardly knowing that there are mountains above them, save that they take offense at and stumble over the pebbles washed across their path by the glacier streams? I will tell you. We are and remain such creeping Christians because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments, instead of up at the snows of purity, whither the soul of Christ clomb. Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor's footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master's, although it is but his own. 

[...] The true self is that which can look Jesus in the face, and say My Lord.

[...] Say to him, "My God, I am very dull and low and hard; but thou art wise and high and tender, and thou art my God. I am thy child. Forsake me not." Then fold the arms of thy faith, and wait in quietness until light goes up in thy darkness.

                                                                  ***

Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is, or even, seeing what he is, could express in a name-word the sum and harmony of what he sees. To whom is this name given? To him that overcometh. When is it given? When he has overcome. Does God then not know what a man is going to become? As surely as he sees the oak which he put there lying in the heart of the acorn. Why then does he wait till the man has become by overcoming ere he settles what his name shall be? He does not wait; he knows his name from the first. But as--although repentance comes because God pardons--yet the man becomes aware of the pardon only in the repentance; so it is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it, for then first can he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completion, that determines the name; and God foresees that from the first, because he made it so; but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear, and could not know what the word meant, which, in representing its own unarrived  completeness, named itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name.

Dress-Up

The Years had sneaked in the back door, crowding into the cracks and crevices, sitting at her kitchen table, making themselves tea and using her good china.

She used to imagine greeting each one by name, with a smile and a cheery hello. They would have time to get acquainted, to get to know each other. She used to think she'd see their faces before she saw their backs, shake their hands before they started rifling through her pantry and complaining that their favorite cereal was missing and that, really, they'd never wanted an orange kitchen. They'd pictured it yellow, like the house where they grew up, the house where their mother had filled the air with the smell of zucchini casserole, pumpkin pie, chicken soup, or honey-glazed ham (depending on the season).

And yet here she was, rubbing shoulders with Years she'd never even seen before as she walked the few feet down the hallway to her bedroom. She'd never pictured it this way. 

She tried to stretch to fit the place she lived in, but as she grew so did the space she occupied.

And sometimes she went to bed feeling like a little girl playing dress-up.

The World Is Ablaze

...and yesterday I couldn't just sit inside and waste it.

If I could choose a season to bottle up, it would be fall. The pungent spice of wild apples, the smell of loamy earth and mushrooms and moss, the sound of drying leaves skittering against each other, the feel of sunshine and wind, the trees all aflame. It's the kind of beauty that hurts.

Unfortunately, I couldn't entirely leave work behind, so armed with a backpack, some water, and a textbook, I headed out to soak in some glory. [I was gone for four hours, and to tell the complete truth I hiked about 85% of the time, daydreamed about 10%, and read about 5%. Can you blame me?]

It was a regular adventure, complete with oddities and treasures and enough color to make my eyes wish they didn't have to blink.

Apprehended! I caught him brown-handed.

I spied this little fellow hurrying across the road. He tried to tell me news about the coming winter as he rushed by, but, alas, I don't speak Woolly Bear.

Moss-bridge.

Wild apples.

(a.k.a. Debbie's mid-afternoon snack)

It's difficult when one feels like a turtle with one's house on one's back.

This is one of those cemeteries where you like to stay awhile. He was just a little bit younger than I. Perhaps that is why the willow weeps.

Treasure. You should have seen me...I looked like a squirrel, scrabbling. I had all sorts of odd lumps and bulges all over me from sticking things in pockets.

Fungi. Each time I spotted a new one I was ridiculously delighted.

I've named this one Fungulily.

It has a secret, too. This one lets you see its insides. See that hole?

It hides a fire-opal within.

Puffballs will forever remind me of my childhood. 

Here are a few landscape shots. They don't even come close to doing it justice--multiply the colors by ten, and you'll be getting there.

Silent sentinel.

The best part of the walk was the colors. The sunbeams were lighting everything up with a perfect translucence.

It was one of those days where it seems like heaven has sprung out of cracks in the clouds and loosed itself on earth.

I was sad to leave, but I took some color home with me.

My Haunt

I figured it might be nice to show you where I spend my days. 

Welcome to my classroom.

(I wish you could see the whole thing at once, as it doesn't look as nice chopped up into so many different photographs...). 

The fancy-schmancy room label made by one of the boys who is now over at the middle school. Golly, I miss him. I couldn't get rid of this. I'll probably have it as long as I teach:

   

Exhibit A: 

Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

Exhibit D:

Exhibit E:

A note on Exhibit E. The Wall of Fame is something I've had up since my first year, but I'm especially pleased with some of the things on it right now. Take a gander at a few of them close-up.

She's reading!!! Really, this is pretty exciting.

His name was even announced over the loudspeaker. A couple of students from each grade are chosen each week. It says why he was awarded it on the back. The reason? Being a true friend to one of the students from the self-contained Life Skills classroom when they pushed into regular math class. The particular student J. was kind to has a pretty debilitating disability that significantly affects his physical appearance. My favorite part was that J. connected it to a novel he read in class with me last year; one of the characters in the book had a stigmatizing disability but was portrayed in a rich way, a complex way, a really good way. We had many discussions revolving around that character, and he connected getting this award to what he learned from reading that book. Books do things to people, I'm telling you.

I love this boy to his bones. His very bones. For the first time in the year and almost-a-half I've known him, he did homework. You have no idea what this means. It was so much bigger than the homework. I grin every time I see it.

So there you have it. A bare-bones glimpse into the daily life of Debbie. I wish you could meet all of my children. They're so much nicer than the room I teach them in.