Month: March 2020

Contributing a Verse

Sometimes it’s there, just below the surface. My mind is distracted, looking for the familiar, but knowing it won’t come from there. It’s something new.

A beautiful morning, or evening, outside, smelling cut grass, swooning in the start of spring. It seems like normal. But go to grab groceries and it hits: it’s eerie. Off. Something is not right. You can feel it.

We are all called to respond in our own ways. To stay home, yes, but also called to look differently, think differently, maybe to live and be differently. I’ve been trying to get my head around it.

Before COVID-19 arrived, Fr. Bill Ortt put out a Lenten challenge at Christ Church Easton: 1) Find a word that speaks to you; 2) choose a Bible verse that uses your word; 3) Memorize your verse and pray, meditate, reflect on your word/verse as a Lenten mantra of sorts; 4) Write your word on one of the small, wooden crosses the church gives out. And if you are inspired to, take a picture and share your cross-verse.

There have been some wholly wonderful responses. “Heal,” “light,” “love,” “pray,” “faith”–it’s been inspiring to see and read how people came to their word (or their word came to them) and what they are doing with the experience.

My word wasn’t there at first. Or it was, but I wasn’t listening.

As a church, when it was clear that we weren’t going to be gathering together for a time, we had to figure out what that meant; what it looked like; how to stay relevant, be there for people; how to continue to shine a light; how to connect; how to help people be hopeful. We had to do things differently.

We had to create something new. Or at least new to us. We moved our meetings, small groups, and prayer gatherings to ZOOM. Worship services (what would worship look like now?) to Facebook Live. And our music ministries became video artists–I stop every time I hear/watch “Hold Us Together,” “Stand in Your Love / Chain Breaker,” or “Be Still My Soul.” These are videos that have been viewed tens of thousands of times now on Facebook and shared widely. They strike a chord, they speak to hope and faith and love and connection. They weren’t a priority before social distancing, until they became one of the key ways to communicate. This is a time that is teaching us how to create, how to be differently, how to look at what’s important. And it’s not about adapting to a temporary predicament–it’s about moving toward, embracing something new.

I am fascinated by stories. As a writer, I read them, listen to them, think about them, and hope to share and tell them in new and interesting ways. But with between work, two teenage daughters, life, it’s not always easy to make time to write.

As I sat, prayed, reflected, my word, both professionally and personally was there all along: CREATE. And when I started looking through Bible verses, Isaiah practically smacked me upside the head:

“For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.”

Isaiah, 65:17

In this time, our time, maybe we are called to look at our lives with an eye towards creating better lives.

Maybe we are called to look at our personal and collective stories, and tell new ones.

If our world is necessarily knocked off its axis, perhaps we can look at how to get it spinning around love, kindness, community, sustainability, and creativity.

If I stay home, simply waiting, doing things as I’ve always done them, and at the other end of this pandemic, just shrug, and go back to business as usual, what have I learned or gained from the experience?

This isn’t meant to be some Pollyanna motivational speech. I know my shortcomings. I know I will be lazy, I will fall short, I will miss opportunities. I try to own my humanity, my flaws, and my mistakes. But the idea behind a word, a mantra, a verse to think, pray, reflect on, is what I set my eyes to–what I aim towards, what I strive for. And in the face of a global virus the world is responding to in ways that none of us have seen in our lifetimes, it is a legitimate time to look at our lives and think about where and how we are and where we want to be.

Each spring, I go back to Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” It’s become a way to enter the season of rebirth, of resurrection. And this year I am hit especially by his “O ME! O LIFE!” in the same space and way that Robin Williams quoted it in Dead Poets Society.

We are here. We exist. It didn’t have to be, but it is. And in life’s powerful play, we may contribute a verse. That is what we create. But it’s up to us.

I want to wake up open to what it is God is creating in the world and creating in me.

“Create in my a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.”

(Psalm 51:10-12)

One bloom might hold it all

The magnolia in the front yard is a ten-day tree. For maybe ten days at most, there is nothing like it; it’s in full blaze glory. Then it drops its bloom and doesn’t say much the rest of the year. But those ten days.

As our unplanned retreat/social distancing kicks in, we are in the middle of ten-day Magnolia time. It’s an excuse to sit on the bench under the tree, to walk around it, to put my head between blooms and breathe in. If I’m honest, I don’t need a virus to do this, it’s life everyday as long as I’m paying attention.

The sky is still dark, but the birds are noisy. It’s transition time, just before the sun changes the horizon’s color. Morning routine: coffee, prayer, reading, writing. Cat purring on the armrest against my left arm, dog curled up against my right thigh–demanding bookends with fur. As it warms, morning time will be on the deck or in the writing shed.

This early dark time matters. It frames the day with attention. It sets the tone before the day’s demands start. Lately, I’ve been thinking about writing, storytelling, the force of words that point to something words can’t really get to.

One of the books currently traveling with me–in the car, in waiting rooms, to work, the spare minutes picking the girls up from school.

In the preface to “The Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction,” the Rose Metal Press folks point to Bernard Cooper’s notion that short nonfiction needs “an alertness to detail, a quickening of the senses, a focusing of the literary lens… until one has magnified some small aspect of what it means to be human.”

Mull that last phrase as you sit to pray, read, or write, “some small aspect of what it means to be human.”

Overshadowed by the Coronavirus these days, is Lent, a season where we look to pare away those things that distract us so that we can draw closer to God. When I spend time in the Bible, it’s the Gospels that sing. It’s not Paul’s letters, it’s Jesus’ stories. Christ tries to show us and tell us what it means to be human in a way we too often overlook.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

Matthew 13:31-32

Ummm… thanks, Jesus. What the heck are we supposed to do with that? Even his followers want to know why he always talks in parables. And this is a parable told after the Parable of the Sower and after Jesus broke it down for them. It was part of our reading in N.T. Wright’s “Lent for Everyone,” on Saturday. Wright points out that, Jesus, “told parables because what he was doing was so different, so explosive, and so dangerous, that the only way he could talk about it was to use stories. They are earthly, and sometimes heavenly, stories with an emphatically earthly meaning. They explain the full meaning not of distant, timeless truths, but of what Jesus was up to then and there. This is what is going on, they say, if only you had eyes to see. Or, indeed, as Jesus frequently says, ears to hear… Jesus’ parables invite the hearer, to look at the world, and particularly at Jesus himself, in a whole new way.”

I am guilty of not catching anything the first time, or first several times, I hear it. It takes time for me to learn things, to let them sink in. I need seeds. I need seeds that take time to take root, take time to grow, but once they are there, they stick, and maybe they bloom in each of us uniquely, in ways that can only be made manifest in the exact way, with our particular eyes and ears.

Often my eyes and ears work against me. Words I’ve heard or used too many times or sights that have become ordinary and overlooked. We don’t see God if we don’t look, or take the time to make the connection. Maybe the more we connect, the more we awaken ourselves to His presence.

American Goldfinch, by Michael Brown. Macaulay Library at Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Reading further in the Flash Field Guide, there is an essay by Lia Purpura called, “Augury.” She walks up on a dead Goldfinch hanging in a tree, caught up in fishing line. It’s jarring, disturbing, unexpected, confusing. It’s wrong for what is supposed to be there, how things are supposed to be.

Her description of this moment, this encounter is eerie and uncanny and beautiful all at once. In maybe a why moment for the experience, she latches onto, “It’s good to stand beneath a thing that takes words away. It’s good to be in a place where thought can’t form the usual way.”

Experiencing things that take words away, where thoughts can’t form the usual way.

I prefer my encounters to be with live Goldfinches, as I am sure Purpura does as well. But I appreciate her flash essay in the way it helps me to look at Goldfinches with new eyes. It helps me to look at writing with new eyes. Hopefully it helps me look at life with new eyes.

Life and death loom large. While I sit here, for the time I have, life looms larger. It’s part of the ten-day tree time. New birds, Goldfinches included, are appearing at the feeders, and at the edge of woods where I hike or trail run. Crisp, spring sunrises and sunsets are punctuated with cool, clear night skies full of stars. in the midst of it all, the magnolia makes a statement.

If I have eyes to see, one bloom might hold it all.