Support System

Turbulence shakes his balance, and his hand flashes for steadying,
something sure, like a seatback,
but my shoulder, curved and strong too, will do.

Never turning or noticing the feel of bone, he presses hard, and I know purpose,

a body made like a staff.

Lord, who today would You have me undergird, uphold?

(Photo: collecting luggage, cluster of thoughts, in Detroit airport)

I left on a jet plane... and am back again, the bags unpacked, mind settling. Now to collect thoughts, offer thanks for the grace ... grow. Thoughts from the journey....

Of Poets & Saints & All Waking to Glory

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every moment?”

It’s a haunting, probing question, one asked in Thornton Wilder’s play, “Our Town.”

And so comes the incisive answer offered by one of the characters, “No.... the saints and poets, maybe. They do, some.”

No, no one ever realizes life while they live it. Except, maybe, the poets and saints.




Poets and Saints. Don’t we rather dismiss both? Roll our eyes. Poets and Saints. The flighty ones, with their saccharine rose-colored glasses. Out of touch with the grit that chafes hard between the toes of those who walk this orbiting clump of sod. Poets and Saints. As if there are many of either, most being relegated to dissection on austere chalkboards, or musty manuscripts of the uneducated and superstitious.

And then I wonder even if they, those poets and saints, if they ever realize life while living it—every, every moment? Or is life something that can only be realized when you are losing it, it slipping through fingers like water. Can life only be realized for what it is—its glory and grandeur and unspeakable beauty—only when it is gone, a memory, like catching a glimpse of earth’s magnificence only from a rocket’s portal, the perspective of distance.

Perhaps mothers, those women related to poets and saints, grasp the import of breathing and living, for they look intimately into the faces of babies, new life losing life endlessly, shedding now and seeking larger and larger skins. Does watching this daily death of who once was, this quotidian emerging of children into someone who just now is, does this enlighten mothers? Aren’t the faces of our children, ever changing, mirrors of our own mortality? Yes, maybe, in that way, mothers realize the wondrous stuff of life. And, there are days, not so much.

Why only the poets and saints who realize the amazement of life? (And why don’t the rest of us want to? That is, why don’t we all want to be poets or saints, if that is what it takes to comprehend the daily miracle we inhale?) I wonder if it is because poets and saints attend. That they live awake. And not only to what they can physically touch and inventory, but they live conscious of that which transcends, the invisible threads that connect and web the worlds seen and unseen.

Maybe the rest of us don’t want to realize the immensity of this extraordinary common thing called life because it is hard to keep alert, to live with our eyes always wide open, our ears attentive. Drowsing is more natural, common sleepwalking through our days more comfortable. Realizing takes effort, proactive intent. Poets and saints live thinking, live praying, live engaged. The work of really seeing, really hearing, really feeling, it seems more demanding than the pseudo- work we deem vital, that of amassing, consuming, attaining. And yet, though arguably more challenging, isn’t the work of waking worth it?

Yes, Poets and Saints, maybe--they do some. The Psalmist David was both. His words, millennia later, resonate with the tenor of a soul deeply attuned to the spectacle of life.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hand. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech of language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world…

The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord thunders over the might waters…the voice of the Lord twists the oaks and strips the forests bare.

And in his temple all cry, “Glory.” (Ps. 19:1-4,29:2-5,9)

All cry, “Glory.” Poets and saints… and all of us too? Do we hear it reverberating throughout the heights, the voice of God over the waters, pouring forth from the heavens that surround us? And so our response spills voluntary, spontaneously, echoing through the temple of earth, all crying, “Glory, Glory, Glory.”

And then I think: does it sound trite? True, some rather disdain any talk of wonder and beauty, regard such domains as not as edgy, as provocative, as stimulating as the echelons of politics, the tangle of global economics, the finer, critical aspects of theological debate. But, I wonder, is the mocking dismissal just semantics to mask the truth: that we begrudge those poets and saints living awake to something, SomeOne, to Whom we are frustratingly oblivious?

Perhaps, I wonder, instead of scorning the poets and saints, we should forsake this maniacal race we call normalcy and wake up to the richness of real living. Maybe I could try thinking on a different plane… the reality of the transcendental.

The poets have invited us to, with this month of April christened National Poetry Month. They call us to carry a poem a day around in the pocket, sharing it, thinking on it, letting it rub off and penetrate skin and soul.

Maybe for this month of April, I’ll rouse, startled by life, like not only the poets, but, ultimately the saints. So not merely a poem a day, but a psalm a day, not in the pocket, but etched on the heart.

Such do us lay poets and saints realize life every, every moment, all crying: “Glory, glory, glory.”


Lord, maybe the poets and saints live alive because they are doing what we were made for: Worship. Today, cause me to.


(HT: Amy)

The Psalm in the Pocket of my Heart

The Psalm I've tucked in the pocket of my heart today...

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens.

From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?

You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.

You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! ~Ps.8

While the children run ahead, she pauses

to say good bye to

Winter all worn through,

weary and frayed about

her dingy, graying hem,

dissolving everywhere into silver pools

reflecting pewter sky.



White gulls on snow's white fringe,

those tufts on pencil-line stilts

encircle her sterling puddling,

Spring come with water to scrub earth clean,

And there in her threadbare places

Hope pokes through.

Father, use the places where I wear thin as places for Your glory to shine.

Empty!

Seven Stanzas at Easter ~John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

~John Updike

Photo: Empty Garden Tomb--sxc -- Nota

Essence of Faith

I half, fold, crease the winter stitches

pressing patches down into blanket box darkness,

then shake out Easter quilts bright

as wind shakes panes

and ruffles the feathers of a huddle of sparrows

skittering atop ice crusted knoll

heralding, with calendar page, the first day of Spring,

the day for the changing of the quilts,

the hanging of resurrection hope

while the snow blows hard.

Photo: Easter quilts hanging on ladder in living room by bucket of pussy willows, branches for Easter Tree

Embracing Storm Work

The frozen still

jolts night into morning

waking us to a petrified world,
hushed and soundless,

of dunes,

carved in the howl,
forged in the storm,
sculpted masterpiece,

now shimmering in light.

Glimpses of Stored Treasure

:::

Leaves rustle across the path. Boards creek.

The way is worn by those who have gone before us.

Time wears, rounds, these stones.

We give thanks for the time of now, that we've been allowed two.

And more.

:::

The milkweed has ripened, swelled.
Seeds, feathery, delicate, have taken to the winds.
Though the plant dies, she soars. And bears more.
So we too give thanks for our aging, our daily dying.
In this, through Him, comes new life.
Fall is about the rising to come.

:::
Soundlessly, a solitary leaf skates across thin panes of ice, tracing frost's tracks.
I too, finger time's veins.
I remember.
God, too, walks this way. Today, close.
Bow low, bow low.

:::
Poetry of John Donne:

"O eternal and most gracious God,
you have reserved your perfect joy and perfect glory
for the future when we will possess, forever,
all that can in any way conduce to our happiness.

Yet here also in this world,
you grant us earnests full of payment,
glimpses of that stored treasure.

Nature reaches out her hand and offers corn, and wine, and oil, and milk;
but it was you who filled the hand of nature with such bounty."

Photos from an early morning walk through autumn in all His glory...

Introversion

~Introversion, Evelyn Underhill

"What do you find within, O Soul, my Brother?
What do you find within?
I find great quiet where no noises come.
Without, the world’s din:
Silence in my home.

Whom do you find within, O Soul, my Brother?
Whom do you find within?
I find a friend that in secret came:
His scarred hands within
He shields a faint flame.

What would you do within, O Soul, my Brother?
What would you do within?
Bar door and window that none may see:
That alone we may be
(Alone! face to face, In that flame-lit place!)
When first we begin
To speak one with another." ~Evelyn Underhill

Lord, quiet me today... that You, with scarred hands, and I, seeking, knocking, finding, may speak one with another. That alone we may be together, wherever we are. I introvert into You, dwelling within.

Decision

The pillows prop me, Grandma’s double wedding ring quilt covering.

The keys lay on my lap, as I stretch out upon this bed, my toes pressing upon the cold windowpane, night dark waiting patiently too for the kindling of day’s warmth. My face reflects starkly in the black window frame, highlighted by the blue light of this screen. Shalom drapes over my arms, snuggling close to keys and thoughts and me.

If l lean ahead just so, I see the moon, a slipping crescent of luminosity hanging overhead, softened by a veil of clouds. Alone in the before dawn sky, she dances with a solitary star of brilliance across the velvet heavens. Are they watching us, or we them?

Shalom whispers, “A blue moon.”

Her and I, we dance with keys and this blue screen, under that waltzing blue moon, serenading day to come forth. But maybe not too soon.

“Where da moon go?” she whispers, laying beside the window, gazing up.

I leave off keys, and look up too.

No, moon’s choreographed tread across the heavens leads her farther away, as a streak of glowing day leaks over the horizon. Is that a sliver of her dress, there, beyond the towering spruce?

“She hides up in the trees, Shalom.”

“I need to find her.”

“I need to kiss you.” I bead the pearls of her bare little toes.

“After I find da moon.”

She stretches to see the tips of the line of spruce trees. I caress her heel, soft and curved.

And it strikes me: this moment, slow, unhurried, is poetry, stirring me inside.

Warm radiance seeps over the rim of the world, and day brightens night sky.

In the still, I quietly decide: I will take today slow too.
I do not want to miss the poetry of His kiss.

Lord, thank you for leading me beside quiet waters. Today, a new week, comes forth and I have decided: I am in no hurry. I am resting in You. Today brings the decision: I want to slow to read Your poetry.

Thinking more today on this...

A Sense of Quiet

"Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning

can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day

- like writing a poem,
or saying a prayer."

~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Father? Whisper to me in the noise of today to keep whispering to You. Therein lies Quiet.

Trusting

"Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown,
something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time
-- that is to say, grace --
and circumstances
acting on your own good will
will make you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new Spirit
gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that His hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
our loving vine-dresser."

~Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit

Lord, I'd like to skip the intermediate stages. But I am trusting Your work today. Keep pruning. Won't the Harvest of fruit...someday... be grand?

A (Homeschooling) Mother's Noon Lamentations

Cold and splashing,
Clear and flashing,
I pour it out,
my heart like water.

These are my prayers,
running out, spilling over,
These are my tears,
flowing like a river.

Your hands like a cup
For tears gathered up,
You are my basin
who hold all I am.

Catch me, net me.
Hold me, contain me.

Me, who is a heart poured out like water.

"Pour out your hearts like water to the Lord.
Lift up your hands to him in prayer,
pleading for your children." ~Lamentations 2:19