One Year

We miss you. I miss you.

Here where we are it has been so much learning, so much knowing God.

There? There, too, it has been so much learning, so much knowing God.

You know joy as never before. And peace. 

That is comfort.

The Separation of Church and State

A book lay on the table between us.

His friend had been carting it around all day from room to room, opening it when the teachers weren't paying attention and reading hungrily. I knew that his friend wanted the words, but I didn't know he did, too. 

It is always startling when someone's soul looks out his eyes. He must've known it, because he turned and faced the window. 

"We'd run out of milk." 

It took two minutes of silent crying before he continued, looking up again. 

His mom's boyfriend made him use water in his cereal. Soggy, waterlogged rice crispies. When he said he didn't want them, the boyfriend took a strap to him. 

The words ricocheted quietly around the room, wall to wall to wall.

Abba, Abba, Abba.

The wounds that day after day have been buried deep were uncovered, exposed.

"They woke me and my sister up at 3:00 in the morning and dragged me off the top bunk to clean up their pot mess. I hit my head. They were all high, and they made us clean up after them."

"Me and my sister told him we didn't have school that day, but he dropped us off anyway. We sat outside on the curb for three hours."

These two--three when the third came in late--they want truth, and they want Bibles, and they want church inside these public school walls. 

They want You.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces.
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--
Christ--for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Words (To Think On)

This post will be precious few of my words, but instead the words of others that have been on my mind today. It's a smattering, but somehow it is all knitted together so tight in my heart and in my head right now that I wouldn't be able to see light if I held it up the the sun.

Expect to encounter adversity. [...] Anticipate coming face to face with impossibilities: situations totally beyond your ability to handle. This awareness of your inadequacy is not something you should try to evade. It is precisely where I want you--the best place to encounter Me.

[Excerpt from Jesus Calling by Sarah Young]

...Rid yourself before God of everything that might be considered a possession until you are a mere conscious human being standing before Him, and then give God that. That is where the battle is truly fought--in the realm of your will before God. [...] I can be so rich in my own poverty, or in the awareness of the fact that I am nobody, that I will never be a disciple of Jesus, Or I can be so rich in the awareness that I am somebody that I will never be a disciple. Am I willing to be destitute and poor even in my sense of awareness of my destitution and poverty? If not, that is why I become discouraged. Discouragement is disillusioned self-love, and self-love may be love for my devotion to Jesus--not love for Jesus Himself.

[Excerpt from My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers]

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope...

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

If God be for us, who can be against us?

Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

[Selections from Romans 8]

Dark Night of the Soul

(For J.)

Breathe in, breathe out. 

The words have always been the bones beneath her skin, the ribs around her breath. They give her grace and motion; they let her move in close to love. They make her fingers dexterous as she weaves, her hands tireless as she sows seeds in turned over earth. But when night comes she is kept awake by their throbbing ache. She says she's ill, but others say it's growing pains.

Her soul is like light on a summer day, shifting, changing, shades and shadows chasing each other. She is a forest floor dappled by a lacework of leaves and branches, a place where things grow quietly. Hers is a soul populated by ferns and fiddleheads, a place that smells of loamy earth and carries the prints of quiet creatures that quickly scamper to the treetops or hide behind bushes when an intruder walks in unknowing. By day the air is thick with calm, but dark cannot be staved off. Night is not friendly in this wood, and she is afraid.

Hush.

Sunrise is coming.

There is day after every dark.

Just wait.

October Day

In October, you don't need to go far away to find beautiful things. 

Every time I post pictures from my hikes I lament the fact that there are no sounds or smells attached. You'll just have to imagine the sound of rustling cornstalks and leaves underfoot, the pungent smell of cinnamon soil that hangs sweet in the air only in autumn.

You'll have to imagine the sound of birds' wings as they lift off from tree branches and the river as its cold eddies move maple leaves in a slow dance.

I am done with words for now. Have some pictures--far too many, probably of subjects I photographed last fall, and with an exorbitant number of duplicates. (Corn. Corn again. What do you know? Corn. More corn.)

(I couldn't help it.)

I tried to take pictures of the maple copters in the air, but alas, that would require a fancier camera than mine (and an hour of patience that I couldn't spare).

This. The best sound and smell of fall.

Faery branches.

Two.

Twins: inverted.

 Arch. 

(I think it may be Japanese knotweed, which is an invasive plant...but if I call it "kudzu" so it reminds me of a picture book I read when I was younger, it suddenly feels magical. So I call it kudzu in my head and feel very friendly towards it while I walk through it.)

October is a good month.

Green Glass God

There it lay gleaming in a hollow of moist earth

churned by wind breath and stream flow,

nestled half-buried in soil marked

by the eager thrust of duck bills

and the prints of creatures that hide

shyly, afraid, among the trees at water's edge.

The sides were worn smooth by tumbling,

the shape a surprising whorl 

with common dirt coating its crevices.

I held it beneath the rush of a cold autumn stream

until the dirt fell away, and when I lifted it

I could see a green world through it,

a world of bared branches and fallen leaves

turned suddenly the color of spring.

I do not know from where the green glass came,

but I took it home and wondered

who else has found a shard 

to wipe off, to keep, to carry home

and if their shards might somehow

fit softly, secretly into mine. 

Another One from Luci Shaw...

Odd Couples

Things are so often
at odds with their containers.

Our cat once nested her young
in a bureau drawer.

The copper kettle on the shelf
is boiling with partridge berries.

Other mixed metaphors rush
to be recognized:

That baby in the corncrib.
God in a sweaty carpenter's body.

Eternity spilled the third day
from a hole in the hill

for you, a painter-plumber,
me, a poet sorting socks,

all of us teetotalers drunk
on the Holy Ghost.

Poems of the Incarnation (For the First Snowfall)

Work punctuated by breaks for poetry reading is quite nice.

When I went to my alma mater for homecoming a couple of weeks ago to visit some college friends, I stopped in at the campus store. While Dad was still here and I was still there, whenever he and Mom took me back to campus he would go to the campus store to buy candy and a book or two. When I sat down on the floor to slowly look at the books of poetry on the shelves during this most recent visit, I could almost see him standing on the other side of the shelf, glasses sliding down his nose a bit and an open book in hand.

I gave myself permission to buy a few books in his memory.

One of them is a book entitled Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation by Luci Shaw. This is the first I've read Luci Shaw's work, and I'm enjoying it. Collected in this particular book are her year-after-year Advent poems. A couple of them echo yet inside my heart.

The first poem I only want to quote two lines from ("Bluff Edge, Whidbey Island"):

This is the ragged planet where Christ landed,
and we are his people, craggy and knotted and burled...

The second poem I'll give you in its entirety.

"Jordan River"

Naaman went down seven times.
Imagine it--the leprous skin coming
clear and soft, and the heart too.
But can you vision clean Jesus
under Jordan's water? John the Baptizer did, 
holding the thin white body down, 
seeing it muddied as any sinner's
against river bottom, grimed
by the ground of his being.

Rising then, he surfaced, a sudden
fountain. But who would have expected 
that thunderclap, the explosion of light
as the sky fell, the Spirit seizing him, 
violent, a whir of winged light and sound
witnessing his work, his worth,
shaking him until the drops
flew from his shoulders, wet and common
and holy, Baptized sprinkling baptizer.

A Handful of Snapshots and a Small Splash of Color

Today was the perfect day for a walk with good friends. Because of said friends being along, the picture-taking was sparse. Sometimes a camera gets in the way.

It was one of those balmy fall days that there simply aren't enough of.

Find #1: Caterpillar.

Find #2: Baby wood frog. [Way to go, Deirdre!]

Find #3: Evan and Caleb, Lords of the Lake at Oquaga Creek.

Thanks for a lovely day, friends. 

Fifty Years, Folks!

Last night was one of those evenings that was meant to be sipped like a fine wine, meant to be lingered over. It was not an evening spent in candlelight, nor was it spent beneath the stars and an open sky. It was not an evening pregnant with prolonged gazes or enriched with scintillating conversation.

No.

Last night I joined my mother at her fiftieth high school reunion. 

Mom wanted to go, but was unsure of herself. When she had gone to reunions in the past Dad had always accompanied her. This was another First without him (and not the last of the Firsts, I suspect). She  asked if I would go instead, never guessing how much I would truly enjoy it. Yes. Truly. 

I was surrounded for three hours by people from a different age, a different time, a different generation, by white heads and heads dyed young. I sat in the swirl of music from their youth punctuated by laughter--both gentle and raucous--and the quiet talk that comes with reminiscing. As I looked around, I saw the old who had aged well, and those who had aged graceless. I saw my mother and was so, so proud of her. She says she was a wallflower in high school, but if so then I am convinced that wallflowers make the best of mothers and the best of women.

I saw balding Lotharios and withering seductresses, I saw pomp and circumstance smelling of moths and cottonballs, and I saw how vapid a life without faith can become. I heard a prayer spoken in which God seemed like a stranger behind a closed door (but at least there was a prayer). I saw candles lit for those who had gone on behind that closed door themselves.

I met a woman who had undergone a brain aneurysm and a double stroke this past year, and was still here and well enough to sit at our table, speak in a rough voice about God and the people who prayed, and down two beers in twenty minutes flat. I met another woman who had been the class valedictorian and yet couldn’t seem to understand family--upon hearing how many children Mom and Dad had borne, she snidely remarked, “Did you finally figure out what was causing it?” 

I saw veterans stand up so they could be recognized, and afterwards I saw the tall one who looked like a grizzled version of the dapper soldiers on all of the old propaganda posters go around and quietly shake hands with the comrades he didn’t know he had. He didn’t know I heard. “Welcome home,” he said soberly. I’ll never know what they lived through.

Sitting there, I knew what fifty years felt like. Looking around, I felt the weight of eternity and the ethereal lightness of my mortality.

I am glad of chances to think on these things.

Wedding Day

It's one day, yes, but it is special. Back in September (on the 19th), a beautiful friend of mine was married off. She invited some of the children from Binghamton where we are part of a weekly kids' outreach, and I got to be their big-sister-aunt-mother-friend-grandma for the day, complete with a sleepover.

Alas, I have no real photographs of the bride and groom, but I do have some snapshots of the hours leading-up and following-after. This was the first wedding any of these girls had ever been to. Marriage is uncommon in lives like theirs.

The night before the wedding I had two of the three girls with me, a pair of sisters. Being sisters, when they wanted to play with my hair they obligingly did it the only fair way: they parted it down the middle and each had half a head to play with.

One sister decided to go for braided-tree-explosion-feather-elf. The other decided to try a more classic up-do.

On the day of the wedding we got all gussied up in our finery. 

It was an outdoor wedding, and there was a playground conveniently located near where the ceremony was held. 

The night ended with sparklers and paper lanterns. Somehow the blurry chiaroscuro of these photographs captures the emotion that surfaced as sunlight faded into starlight and sparkler light and lantern light.

God go with you, Jonny and Lydia.