Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Spring

Chapter Seven: Spring

This is the penultimate chapter of the first half of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  As Spring emerges, life makes itself visible again.  The word that captured me on this reading was heaves.  Life heaves from the ground, water lifts through the trees.  I wonder if we could be still and diligent at the same time.  Could we listen to bird-song with a sense of wonder?  In the Fall in Houston we could see thousands of birds competing for a place on the wires and telephone poles.  I would never stop to listen.  I might watch and wonder from inside the car, but I have better sense than to stand under the swirl of thousands of birds!

As with other chapters, Dillard wants us to pay attention to the extravagant life that surrounds us.  This Fall I read Justinian’s Flea by William Rosen.  He is talking about bubonic plague.  He reminds us that most of the biomass on earth is bacteria.  We don’t look.  And if we don’t look, then perhaps we do not have to consider or contemplate that life.  How are we similar to rotifers, plankton and paramecia, or bacteria?

 

The more we see, the more we consider the wonder and the awe.  There is life!  When we are willing to see it, I think it shapes our meta-narratives, the stories that define our lives, our context, our reality.  We live in a Design that grows and breathes.  We live in a world where energy comes from the sun, and miracles, weird and wonderful, happen.  Would we look Life in the eye?

 

Quotes:     

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.  There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing.  If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formulae for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant.  The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? (107)

Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does heave a ton of water every day.  A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn’t make one. (113)

I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany.  We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing, grows toward growing, and growing green and clean. (114)

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.  On a sunny day, the sun’s energy on a square acre of land or pond can equal 4500 horsepower.  These “horses” heave in every direction, like slaves building pyramids, and fashion, from the bottom up, a new and sturdy world.(119)

I don’t really look forward to these microscopic forays...I do it as a moral exercise; the microscope at my forehead is a kind of phylactery, a constant reminder of the facts of creation that I would just as soon forget. (122)

If I did not know about the rotifers and paramecia, and all the bloom of plankton clogging the dying pond, fine; but since I’ve seen it I must somehow deal with it, take it into account. (123)

Exodus as Intentional Family Curriculum

These are notes from a Sunday Morning class I taught on October 26 at North Street.

I want us to spend some time in Exodus.  This is the foundation for a series of lessons I plan to preach in March and April of next year.  This is gleaned from a lecture by Walter Brueggemann.

Grandparents help grandchildren remember.  Exodus is an antidote to amnesia. Exodus is about tracing out connections.  Exodus is about tracing our moral codes, providing expectations for life, painting the picture of a river of belonging.

What if we read this as a key to the whole?

Exodus 10:1-2 (NRSV) ¹ Then the Lord said to Moses, "Go to Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his officials, in order that I may show these signs of mine among them, ² and that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I have made fools of the Egyptians and what signs I have done among them—so that you may know that I am the Lord."

 

Exodus is intentional family curriculum.  It depicts the competition between Pharaoh and Yahweh. Youth (perhaps in every age) have no feeling of debt to the past. All of our grandparent’s stuff becomes antique and obsolete. 

Was it about amnesia?  The empire has a vested interest in local amnesia.  It makes for a group of people easy to control (or easier anyway).  Look to the theme of Deuteronomy 8, Don’t forget.

This was always in play.  The forces of forgetfulness would say, Join Alexander, Join Rome, forget particularity, jettison memory.

 Exodus

 1. Remember the midwives.  They are named Shiphrah and Puah. Pharaoh is not named.  The midwives are significant.  They refused imperial fear and coercion.  The future comes down to mothers.  They have seething courage.  They are the ones to hold up the pictures of the Disappeared (of Argentina).  These are the mothers who take a casserole to the grieving. These are the mothers who made fools of the commandos of Pharaoh.  They are HISTORY MAKERS. 

2. Remember the terrorist activity of Pharaoh (and Moses).  Someone had to act.  The action did not come by innocence.  It was in Moses’ mis-adventure (murder of the Egyptian) that he challenged the status quo.  The truth is that oppression, forced labor, and exploitation requires confrontation. How?  We wrestle with that!
3. Remember the theophony. The bush burns.  The Voice of Holiness calls.  It is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  We can expect an interruption from God.  He answers the cry of his people.  Exodus 3:10 (NRSV) ¹⁰ So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt." 

1. Who? Me?  Yahweh says, “I will go with you.”
2. What is your name?  YHWH.  Tell them.
3. I have no power!  What if they will not listen?  What is that in your hand?  Put your hand in your cloak.  It will be a contest of power against power. (I am thinking he will need that with Zipporah, too!)
4. And there will be a renovation of the economy.  The Nile will turn to blood.  The cattle and the land and the laws of inheritance will all be demolished.
5. I can’t speak well.  I will speak through you.
6. Send someone else.  No! 

4. Remember the Bricks. 

1. Produce bricks, and when it seems you have too much time, time for worship on your hands, then you could work harder.  Meet the quota.
2. It is oppressive.  It is coercive economic theory.  That is true in academics, sports, sales, and church.
3. There is no oasis unless you depart!!
4. We have a tendency to absolutize the present power arrangements. If our grandparents knew that this was not always the way things were they could give us hope in the face of acquisitive power. 

5. Remember the death of the Firstborn and the Passover.

• The death of the first born raises a loud cry!  Every arrogant power is humiliated.  Pharaoh says, "Rise up, go away from my people, both you and the Israelites! Go, worship the Lord, as you said. ³² Take your flocks and your herds, as you said, and be gone. And bring a blessing on me too!" Exodus 12:31-32 (NRSV).
• Truth and pain are brought against power by YHWH (not by rebellion, not by force of arms, but by ‘the death of a first born – Jesus).

When the people LEFT what they knew, they were afraid.  I understand that.  It is the place where you lose control.  They grumbled.  Moses told them, ‘You have only to be still.’

On the other side of the water we hear a moment of song. 

In chapter 15 Miriam sings.  The Lord will reign forever.  There is a regime change.  There is a new order.

There is no short cut for this story.  You cannot begin to live this out where you wish.  You have to live it out.

Michael Walzer, ( Exodus and Revolution, 149)

• first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;
  
• second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;
  
• and third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.”  There is no other way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.
  

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - The Present

We spend so much of our lives getting ready to live.  Years ago I heard a mantra from Randy Harris that I think is terrific.  It has four parts.  I will be incompetent.  That is not a goal, but a confession before the fact.  The standards I am pursuing are idealistic and important.  I will not abandon the ideal.  I will be incompetent.  I will be fully present.  I will see Christ in the face of every person I encounter.  I will be Christ in every situation I encounter. 

 

When Annie Dillard speaks of The Present, she is living in the now.  I wonder how long we can pay attention to one thing.  How long does an experience last?  I wonder if we could pay more attention.  Consciousness is an interesting concept.  When the lights flicker on behind the eyes, when the neural network opens for reactive input, do we have any control?  Consciousness is vital, but self-consciousness is (or can be) a hindrance to being fully present.

 

Have you had those moments that you wish would at least pause?  We want to soak in it, or soak it in.  It is too much to think it could last forever, but it could slow, couldn’t it?  I am sure that is why we love photographs, or paintings.  We will even call it ‘a capture.’  But that is not really true.  The ‘capture’ is in our memory, and the ‘capture’ is nothing more than an aide for remembering.

 

Dillard writes:

 

• This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain.  And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy.  (80)
• Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall. (82)
• There are a few live seasons.  Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present. (83)
• Michael Goldman wrote in a poem, ‘When the Muse comes She doesn’t tell you to write; / She says get up for a minute, I’ve something to show you, stand here.’ (85)
• I want to come at the subject of the present by showing how consciousness dashes and ambles around the labyrinthine tracks of the mind, returning again and again, however briefly, to the senses. (88)
• Dorothy Dunnett: There is no reply, in clear terrain, to an archer in cover. Invisibility is the all-time great cover; and the one infinite power deals so extravagantly and unfathomably in death ... makes that power an archer, there is no getting around it. (91)
• The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child. (91)
• Arthur Koestler wrote, “In his review of the literature on the psychological present, Woodrow found that its maximum span is estimated to lie between 2.3 and 12 seconds.” (93-4)
• In the top inch of forest soil, biologists found ‘an average of 1,356 living creatures present in each square foot, including 865 mites, 265 spring tails, 22 millipedes, 19 adult beetles and various members of 12 other forms ... Had an estimate also been made of the microscopic population, it might have ranged up to two billion bacteria and many millions of fungi, protozoa and algae – in a mere teaspoon of soil.’ (95)
• The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. (98)
• Like water flow: Ease is the way of perfection, letting fall. (102)
• You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets.  You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.  You’ll have fish left over. (104)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Untying the Knot

Via Positiva

Chapter Five: Untying the Knot

 “I wonder how long it would take you to notice the recurrence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth.  What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and night? ... How long would you have to live on earth before you could feel with any assurance that any one particular period of cold would, in fact, end?” (75)

 

This idea sends me off thinking in several directions. 

• The first is that we are so fond of ‘trending.’  Can you imagine living in the first warming trend?  You are coming out of winter, the temperature is rising.  Where will it peak (like the price of gasoline, or the stock-market, or your weight!)?  If the temperature continues to rise at this rate, say 5 degrees a day, we will burn up by next month!!
• The second is our cultural fascination with seasons.  People are trekking to the Northeast to see the season turn!  Last year I was in Gettysburg in November and it was stunning!  We celebrate the changes.  We look forward to the first freeze.  We marvel at the first snow!  On Christmas Eve, was it 2004, we were having our Christmas Eve service in Houston and it was snowing!  It was beautiful, wonderful, stunning.  And in the spring, when the trees bud, when the grass greens, we are comforted.  We were made for rhythm.
• The third is our need to reassure one another.  This will not last forever.  It was the summer of 1980.  How many days was it that it was over a 100 degrees in Texas?  Wichita Falls recorded a high of 117!  And I wonder if that is the way of life.  The Great Depression was not permanent.  I have been reading about the Bubonic Plague in the last days of the Roman Empire (during the reign of Justinian).  Would it ever end?  In the midst, you think it will never end.  However, so far, those who have lived though the cycles will tell you, this too shall pass.
• Then, someday, the knot will untie.  That is the witness of Scripture anyway.  Someday the cycle will cease.  Can we even imagine?  

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - The Fixed

Via Positiva

 Chapter Four: The Fixed

Life and the world, the universe (whatever that is) is a curious combination of the fluid (changing and dynamic) and the fixed.  I wonder if we are not in the image of God to the degree that we can occasionally interrupt the fixed.  We are not really talented at it. Our interruptions are often clumsy and yield unintended consequences.

When your eyes are open to this world, what do you see?  It seems to me that it is not always neat and clean according to my sensibilities.  I would say it is rough and rowdy, profligate (extravagant) and deadly.  Biochemistry is making things happen in amazing and weird ways!

• Praying Mantis: “If the eggs survive ants, woodpeckers, and mice – and most – then you get the fun of seeing the new mantises hatch, and the smug feeling of knowing, all summer long, that they’re out there in your garden devouring gruesome numbers of fellow insects all nice and organically.  When a mantis has crunched up the last shed of its victim, it cleans its smooth green face like a cat.” (56)
  
• Adult mantises eat more or less everything that breathes and is small enough to capture. (56)
• The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says, in effect, “No, don’t go near her, you fool, she’ll eat you alive”  At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, “Yes, by all means, now and forever, yes.”  While the male is making up what passes for his mind, the female tips the balance in her favor by eating his head. (59) (She has her reproductive way with headless him. Then she eats him!)
• Polyphemus moth: The whole cocoon twisted and slapped around in the bottom of the jar.  The teacher fades, the classmates fade, I fade: I don’t remember anything but that things struggle to be a moth or die trying. (62)
• He couldn’t spread his wings.  There was no room.  The chemical that coated his wings like varnish, stiffening them permanently, dried and hardened his wings as they were.  He was a monster in a Mason jar. (62)
• Fish gotta swim and bird gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another. (64)

When we see nature acting in this way – wasps squeezing the honey out of a honeybee, licking the honey from the bee’s tongue while a mantis comes and clutches the wasp and begins to saw and gnaw while the wasp continues to feast in the throws of death – what is communicated about the Intelligent Designer? That God experiments?  That there is no end to creativity?  That there is a world that we often refuse to see because these are not thoughts we wish to think?  Insects make up a considerable about of the world’s biomass.  Maybe we should be looking at bacteria, the life form that takes up the greatest percentage of the world’s biomass.  It all challenges one’s view of the cosmos. 

Winter - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Via Positiva

 Chapter Three: Winter

 This chapter is a bit of a travel log.  She speaks of Starlings and spiders and coots and the weather.  Everywhere she is respecting both life and death.  She is in awe of the work that life does.  Have you ever hesitated to disturb a spider web, knowing that the spider has worked so diligently?  Have you ever looked at your old insect collection and thought that maybe is was a cruel exercise in presumed sovereignty?

 

Desiderata:

• Starlings: “According to Edwin Way Teale, ‘Their coming was the result of one man’s fancy.  That man was Eugene Shieffelin, a wealthy New York drug manufacturer.  His curious hobby was the introduction to America of all the birds mentioned in William Shakespeare.’” (37)  (He released 100 in Central Park in NYC. Now Starlings are ubiquitous and stubbornly entrenched.)
• “Winter clear-cuts and reseeds the easy way.  Everywhere paths unclog.” (40)
• “All that summer conceals, winter reveals” (40)  (In winter, when the leaves are dropped, there is something different to see.)
• “I’m getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully cruel.” (43)
• “When his father was young, he used to walk out on Great South Bay, which has frozen over, and frozen the gulls to it.  Some of the gulls were already dead.  He would take a hunk of driftwood and brain the living gulls; then with a steel knife he hacked them free below the body and rammed them into a burlap sack.  The family ate herring gull all winter, close around a lighted table in a steamy room.  And out on the Bay, the ice was studded with paired, red stumps” (43)  (Something in this made me laugh, is that the cheerfully cruel in me?)
• “Things out of place are ill.” (53) (She says this when she has a cocoon of spiders in her pocket! Out of place and ill.)

Seeing - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Via Positiva

 Chapter Two

 Seeing

 ·         “I have been thinking about seeing.  There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises.” (17)

·         “What you see is what you get.” (17)

Her point is that it may seem mundane, the things you can see.  It is like finding pennies.  Are you delighted to find a penny, or is that beneath you?  So much of our world passes us by without our thinking that it is remarkable.  It is like reading Scripture.  We think we know, so we are kept from hearing.  How often to you gaze at the stars and think about what you see?  How often do you look at an ant bed and think about what you see?

 

When it comes to nature, the sights are fleeting.  Nature is pervasive, but it also is fleeting.  Life is on the move.  One has to pay attention in order to take it in.  If you will take it in, there is wonder.

·         “If I can’t see the minutia, I still try to keep my eyes open.” (19)

·         “After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests. … An uneasy pink here, an unfathomable blue there, gave great suggestion to lurking beings.  Things were going on.” (22)

·         “At this latitude I’m spinning 836 miles an hour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the dive of dolphins, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face.  I orbit around the sun I’m moving 64,800 miles an hour.” (23)

·         “If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light.”  (24)  One example is a meteor shower in the middle of the day.

·         “We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree.  Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful, taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.” (25)

·         “This looking business is risky.” (25)

 When your eyes are open, you can look millions of light years into space.  When your eyes are open you can see the abundance of life in a glass or bowl of pond water.  It is extravagant!

Dillard tells of people who are newly sighted.  They have been blind from birth.  They have learned to navigate the world in a particular way.  When they receive sight, they may refuse to use it.  It is disorienting.  It is overwhelming.  One girl, aged 21, would close her eyes whenever she went out of the house. 

• “She is never happier than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness.” (30)
  
• “Some delight in their sight and give themselves over to the visual world.” (31)
• “Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization.  Unless I call attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.” (33)
• “When I see this way I analyze and pry, I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head.” (33)
• “But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go.  When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied.  The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera.  When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter.  When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut.” (33)

How can you do it?  How can you see?  She says that the challenge of her life is to quiet the interior conversation in her head.  The secret, she says, is the pearl of great price.  It can be found, but probably not by pursuit.  The discipline is to practice openness, to be ready to see.  I think this is true all over God’s world.  I need to practice being non-self-absorbed.  Then I can see in the dark and in the light.  I can see, so to say, with a camera, or even in the ecstasy of being the camera, taking it all in with wonder and awe.

• “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment I was lifted and struck.”

I cannot tell you how that resonates with me.  Oh, for the openness to position ourselves to see, to perceive, to be in the place where the moment of realization of who you are and where you are is understood.

Heaven and Earth In Jest

Via Positiva

It is the known, or perhaps that is an overstatement. There are some things that we can see. We try to make sense of what we see. Annie Dillard has written a book about seeing. She is walking near Tinker Creek, Virginia and she sees some things in nature. Nature has a voice. It is difficult to see clearly. It is also presumptuous to say that we understand what we see. However, we ought to look and we ought to think. What kind of world is this?

As I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I am another step removed from seeing. I am listening as Annie Dillard sees. She thinks and I think along with her. Then I begin to pay attention to the world, to see for myself, and to live in wonder at the sight, the sound, the voice.

Chapter One

Heaven and Earth In Jest

• “I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.” (4)


• “And just as I looked at him (a frog), he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. ... An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. ... ‘Giant water bug’ is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown bug. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs – all but the skin – and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim’s body, reduced to a juice.” (8)


• “That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise.” (9)


• “What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? ... If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then be made in earnest?” (9)


• Einstein: ‘God is subtle, but not malicious.” (9)


• Her question is: What does nature say? Is it violent and cruel? Yes. Is it powerful and beautiful and somehow awe inspiring to us? Undoubtedly.

“We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what is going on here.” (11)

Dangerous and Exciting Preaching?

Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation
Walter Brueggemann
1989, Augsburg Fortress, Minneapolis

Preaching as an act of interpretation is in our time demanding, daring, and dangerous. (ix)

The gospel is too readily heard and taken for granted, as though it contained no unsettling news and no unwelcome threat. (1)

Partly, the gospel is simply an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned. (1)

When we embrace ideology uncritically, it is assumed that the Bible squares easily with capitalist ideology, or narcissistic psychology, or revolutionary politics, or conformist morality, or romantic liberalism. There is no danger, no energy, no possibility, no opening for newness! (2)

Poetic speech is the only proclamation worth doing in a situation of reductionism, the only proclamation, I submit, that is worthy of the name preaching. Such preaching is not moral instruction or problem solving or doctrinal clarification. It is not good advice, nor is it romantic caressing, nor is it a soothing god humor. It is, rather, the ready, steady, surprising proposal that the real world in which God invites us to live is not one made available by the rulers of this age.(3)

The poet/prophet is a voice that shatters settled reality and evokes new possibility in the listening assembly. (4)

....

I can testify that this approach can be hazardous. However, I think it makes the gathering of believers on a Sunday morning worth the trouble. We live in a culture that seeks mastery. If we could boil things down to the simplist form, then we can remember or own it. We can stop thinking about it, or being troubled by it. In church (or somehwere, in some relationship) we need not to reduce, but dig and think. We need to have hearts that are open to being stunned.

Attitude is a Choice

I came across this quote this week.  

Viktor Frankl– Man’s Search for Meaning

"We who live in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

Could we choose to be an encourager in desperate circumstances?  Would we give away our last morsels of bread?  And then, I think, would we only do that in the most heroic of circumstances?  Or could we do that in a thousand small ways?  Could we do it for people who could offer nothing in return?  

I have been reading about Robert Moses (The Power Broker), who transformed the landscape of Long Island in the 1920's and '30's.  He accomplished great things, but he walked on the powerless in order to accomplish his objectives.  It has made me wonder about our dreams, our ambition.  How does one get their hopes and dreams realized?  I am sure that RM chose his attitude.  I would characterize it as an arrogant attitude, especially in certain seasons of his life.  Others might say he was singleminded, fearless, indomitable. 

When you choose your attitude, and I suspect that we all do, what will it be?

The Lanyard

The Lanyard by Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly-
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift-not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even．　

The Gaps

Annie Dillard writes:

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have not ‘gone up into the gaps.’  The gaps are the thing.  The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound.  The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery.  Go up into the gaps.  If you can find them; they shift and vanish too.  Stalk the gaps.  Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock – more than a maple – a universe.  This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon.  Spend the afternoon.  You can’t take it with you.

Can you see?  There is a reason to believe in God.  We have to break out of our grinding routines and look around, look up, look in the ground beneath our feet.  There is life all around.  We should dare to introduce ourselves to strangers. 

Can you see?  Stalk the gaps.  It will take some effort.  You will have to risk by thinking, seeing, feeling, learning.  You will be submitting to change, because when you are paying attention there is no way to remain who you were.  This is the currency of your life.  You were meant to spend it!

Day 36 – Thirty Six Days

Not much is said in the Bible about Saturday, the day after Jesus died.  I am writing this on a Saturday, the day after ‘Good Friday,’ and the day before Easter.  I am imagining what it must have been like.  Last week a young man was killed in a wreck.  He was twenty-nine.  He was killed on a Wednesday and the funeral was not until this last Tuesday.  Every day was hard.  I wonder if that was the experience of the disciples.  I wonder if they were shocked.  Jesus, who had been their teacher, the leader of their lives for the last three years, was brutally executed.  Were they ‘at loose ends’?  Did they wonder what they should do with their lives now, in this new reality?  Was it all over?

 

The gospel writers pick up the story on Sunday morning.  It begins with Mary Magdalene.  Jesus had had a profound impact on her life.  She was determined to honor him in his death.  She and another Mary had gone to the tomb.  The stone had been rolled away.  I am sure that it was for their benefit.  I doubt if Jesus needed help getting out.  Jesus revealed himself to Mary and sent her to tell the ‘brothers.’  They investigated, but were still in this post-death shock.

 

That evening, on the first day of the week, they were behind locked doors (John 20:19) and Jesus came and stood among them.  He said, “Peace be with you.”  That is what they needed.  And that is what we needed and need.

 

The message is, “This is not over.  This death is not the last word.  You are not at loose ends.  Peace be with you.  I have something for you to do.  Don’t be selfish.  Don’t quit.  As the Father sent me, so I send you.” 

 

When the waiting is over, this is the answer.  You can go on.  Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  He was saying, “God will be with you.  You are not without power.  You have the capacity to ‘so love the world.’  Peace is no fantasy.”

Day 34 - Thirty Six Days

Matthew 27:45-46 (NRSV) From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. 46 And about three o'clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

One of the greatest challenges that I face as a teacher is what people think they already know. Once we learn, it is hard to unlearn. That is especially true with the Bible and matters of faith. I wonder if there is something in us that thinks that knowing the right thing will get us to heaven. If we discover that we still need to learn something, we somehow we have a sense of ‘lostness.’

Consider this. Some people have been taught that God turned his back on his Son while on the cross. Does the passage above teach that Jesus was godforsaken? Was the sin that he bore more than God could bear to see?

I once thought that. However, what I now see is that Jesus is quoting from Psalm 22. He is giving the first line. Psalms 22:1 (NRSV) My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

The truth is that God is not so far away from helping. God is near. God is paying close attention. God hears and knows. The psalm goes on to say, For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him (Psalms 22:24).

Just as God does not forsake Jesus in this critical moment, so also he does not turn away from you in yours. Whatever your predicament, God does not turn away. You may feel godforsaken, but it is not true.

Day 30 - Thirty Six Days

Let me just say something about the sacrifice of Jesus. The beatings were not the sacrifice. The death was not the limit of the sacrifice. Crucifixion was common in the times of Jesus. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, were crucified. Jesus was not the first innocent person to die, either. The sacrifice began at his birth. He stopped being the eternal Word.

Philippians 2:7 (NRSV) ...but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form...

In the beginning was The Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

He becomes a baby, and person, a nephesh chaya, a living being.
He suffered like you and me. You could not out suffer him.
He had been with God for an eternity in close fellowship. Closer than we can say. Then he was torn from the Father and he will never be able to return to that connection. It is a forever sacrifice. It is not a temporary suffering. It is not a three-day death. Jesus is changed. When he returns we will see him as he went (Acts 2:11).

Day 29 - Thirty Six Days

Mark 8:34 (NRSV) He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

The cross is coming. If we want to be disciples, a cross is required. No one wants that.

The Roman orator Cicero said this about ‘the cross.’ “...the executioner, the veiling of the head and the very word ‘cross’ should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but his thoughts, his eyes and his ears. For it is not only the actual occurrence of these things but the very mention of them, that is unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man” (Rabirius Perd. 16).

My teachers, Fred Aquino and Jeff Childers, say, “Jesus proclaimed that the way to true health leads through suffering and that new life comes only to those ready to die each day. His unjust and inhumane death drove that message home, providing his disciples with a pattern to imitate.”

What we see in Jesus on the cross is God’s participation in our lives from the bottom up. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, even among the least of these.

Do you have a glimpse of that kind of love? Wouldn’t you love to have Someone who would come and be with you. Wouldn’t you love to have Someone who would not flee from your troubles, or your heartache, or your mess, from your truest self? This Someone comes to sit with you, to look you in the eyes, to appreciate you, to encourage you, to show you what love really means. This Someone comes to send you to do the same. That is what the cross means.

Day 28 - Thirty Six Days

Matthew 26:26-28 (NRSV) While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”


Jesus and his disciples were having an early Passover meal. The Passover was a celebration that came from the Exodus. I remember the scene from The Ten Commandments movie starring Charlton Heston. The last plague that was inflicted on Egypt, prying the Israelites out of slavery, was the death of the first born. In the movie the death angel was green smoke winding through the streets of Egyptian cities. One could escape that plague, that judgment, if one had marked their homes with the blood of a lamb.

The Passover was a meal made up of lamb and wine and traveling bread. In this scene, Jesus is the host, but he is also in a metaphorical way, the lamb. He is the bread, manna in the wilderness. He is the red wine, the blood of the lamb that would mark our households and our very lives. He is the lamb who died that we might live.
When we share this meal with Jesus we are reminded (and we are proclaiming our intention) that it is God who sustains us, who passes over us in judgment, who forgives.

Day 27 - Thirty Six Days

Matthew 21:2-3 (NRSV) saying to them, "Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, 'The Lord needs them.' And he will send them immediately."

This is an interesting story. Jesus tells some of his disciples to ‘borrow’ a burro. He has need of it. He is going to make a declaration of who he is. To come riding into Jerusalem on a donkey was a sign of the coming of a new age. The prophet Zechariah had said, “See your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey” (9:9).
However, I don’t think I want the job of going into the village and untying someone’s donkey. I can just imagine the owner (especially in Texas) being a little irritated by the rustling of his burro. Jesus says, “Just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ Couldn’t he send me with money?

Following Jesus is not always a comfortable thing. Faith is required. He sends. We go. We trust that there will be people who will give a donkey, when that is required. I think we find ourselves on both sides of this episode. Sometimes he sends us to do difficult things. Sometimes we surrender a donkey.

Not my will, Lord, but yours, be done.