Returning Home Again
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.
—Wendell Berry
It is Good Friday. I go into our garden, remembering another garden that became a place of prayer, entreaty, yearning, betrayal, and choosing a path that cost life to give life. A rosemary bush at the end of our stone wall has wintered, died back, and now demonstrates life beginning again. .Both the garden I am remembering and the garden where I walk are places of revelation.
a garden is a place of revelation
seeds that survive to grow
are containers that must open and change,
releasing all that they are
in order to become what they can be.
a garden is a place of repair
a wildflower stubbornly pushes through
a crack in the wall, filling that broken place
with green growing hope
a garden is a place pointing to resurrection
though whipped by winds and dried from drought,
shattered stalks lift up and flower
beginning again
a garden is a place of revelation
but not a place I can stay.
I cross its threshold
and remember.
I cannot count how many different greens appear in Springtime.
There is a blush of green on the trees covered with tiny buds trying to open
The changing green as leaves unfurl and fill branches of oak and elm
Sprouting snap peas, lettuces, and fledgling tomatoes are not the same color
Herbs have a whole palette of green of their own: sage, parsley, oregano, chives
Feathery dill and fennel, each uniquely green
All beginning again
All fresh and new
Every green an alleluia,
Singing Easter.
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” ~ Simone Weil
Recently when family gathered to help us celebrate our 50 years of being married, we were given a small white pot which contained a plastic bag filled with potting soil and a dried, brown ball with papery layers peeling back about the size of a small onion. It was an Amaryllis bulb. As long as I let the pot, the soil, and the bulb wait on my counter, nothing much happened. There was one place where a spot of green wanted to push through its crackly wrapping, but seemed to have grown weary and quit trying. But as soon as opened the soil packet and poured it into the pot, pushed the bulb down, set it in a window, and added water, I could almost hear the dry dirt begin to breathe a lullaby to hungry roots as they began to channel new life into stalk and leaf. Two sturdy stems soon grew heavy with swelling buds. Above, the first scarlet flower opens wide, stamens heavy with pollen.
Then there were three, so large it seemed they would topple. And just as the first bloom began to fade, the second stalk of buds began to open. In all, 6 magnificent delights have graced the plain white pot in my kitchen window. Without roots, this blooming would have stayed inside the brown bulb. The roots were a potential, but not a possibility until nourished with soil and light and water.
What nourishes my soul to satisfy this need for rooting? Do I choose that which roots and grows? These are questions I ask again in a soul’s wintering.
Grace
“After centuries of handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody’s much interested anymore. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left.
Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.
A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?
A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There’s nothing YOU have to do. There’s nothing you HAVE to do. There’s nothing you have to DO.
The grace of God means something like: “Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.”
There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it.
Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”
from Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner
Prayer for a New Year
Epiphany
On Epiphany day,
we are still the people walking.
We are still people in the dark,
and the darkness looms large around us,
beset as we are by fear,
anxiety,
brutality,
violence,
loss —
a dozen alienations that we cannot manage.
We are — we could be — people of your light.
So we pray for the light of your glorious presence
as we wait for your appearing;
we pray for the light of your glorious presence
as we exhaust our coping capacity;
we pray for your gift of newness that
will override our weariness;
we pray that we may see and know and hear and trust
in your good rule.
That we may have energy, courage, and freedom to enact
your rule through the demands of this day.
We submit our day to you and to your rule, with deep joy and high hope.
~ Walter Brueggemann
Temperatures dropped sharply today, so I went out to make sure plants were watered and covered if necessary. I almost missed this little pot of rosemary on the stone wall at the edge of our back porch, but when I saw the petals that had dropped from an nearby rose (yes, blooming in December!) I stopped in one of those moments I wrote about in yesterday’s post. Rosemary is the herb that stands for remembrance. How appropriate it should be hung with festive red. How we need to remember to believe.
There can be sudden unexpected moments in these Advent days that stretch my soul. It may be the way light comes through the stained glass hanging in the window over my kitchen sink, or the pleasure shining in my granddaughter’s face when she helps me make fudge or offers her grandfather a quilt when he says “Is it cold in here to you?” It may be hearing a violin play Ave Maria or when I begin to sing Adeste Fidelis with my church choir, and it most certainly happens when I am playing carols at the piano and my pregnant daughter-in-law tells me our newest granddaughter moves in joy at the music. Often, these moments come as I sit before dawn in our darkened living room with only the Christmas tree lighting the day, grateful for being at home, and the greater wonder of ” the place where God was homeless and all men are at home.”
THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.
A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost – how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.
This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
~G.K. Chesterton
“In a world that seems not only to be changing, but even to be dissolving, there are some tens of millions of us who want Christmas to be the same…with the same old greeting “Merry Christmas” and no other.
We long for the abiding love among men of good will which the season brings…
believeing in this ancient miracle of Christmas with its softening, sweetening influences to tug at our heart strings once again. We want to hold on to the old customs and traditions because they strengthen our family ties,
bind us to our friends,
make us one with all mankind
for whom the Child was born, and bring us back again to the God Who gave His only begotten Son, that “whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
So we will not “spend” Christmas…
nor “observe’ Christmas.
We will “keep” Christmas – keep it as it is…
in all the loveliness of its ancient traditions.
May we keep it in our hearts,
that we may be kept in its hope.”
from a sermon by Peter Marshall “Let’s Keep Christmas”
Stones and Feathers 