Goodness. My last two posts have been cheery. Vultures and a Mayan altar for human sacrifice. I just ate some chocolate, so I am feeling better now. There may have been vultures in the front yard, but this is what was in the backyard this fall.

In the last two weeks or so I have lost two dear mentors (one a priest and one a bishop) and a dear parishioner to death. The Virginia Seminary Chapel where I prayed and worshiped for three of the most formative years of my life has burned down so that little remains. So we come to the season of Samhain -- the Pagan Celtic time of the dying earth at the close of summer that eventually got tangled up with the Christian festival of All Saints (or All Hallows) and Halloween. I am grappling with this sense of a closeness of the threshold with dying and decay and all that takes life. It is a strange place for me to remain. I usually eat enough chocolate to keep from such a morbid lingering. But I don't stay here because I want to, or because I just wish to feel bad. I am here to discover a new beginning. Always, the threshold that is an ending is also a beginning. The black vultures that took the dead deer's life from its remains near the road outside my house have brought their own life even as they cleaned up, so that we would not be diseased. It is this that makes Halloween a joy for me: it is not just about pretending and dressing up or candy, but about life and death and who we really are and how we grow through things -- even or maybe especially through dark things. We are all like vultures who must live off death. We grow through the dark times to find new light. We cannot waste the carcasses of our life, for even they have nourishment to show us new life. Thresholds are rich places to stand for a moment, but eventually we must walk through them to discover what new awaits. There is life to come out of things like the destruction of the seminary chapel. There is even life to find in the loss of my mentors Phil and Charles and my parishioner Margo. Always, always, the dying is really about life. The vultures in the tree outside my window are not ominous but virtuous. They portend new life to come.

Sacrifice (A visit to a Mayan ruin in Belize)

I climbed the steep grey steps in the heat of the day
Not thinking of what I would see at the top.

Below I had seen the baths and the market --
Hints of life and humanity from long ago.

The table is
Nothing --
Just fitted rocks,
Held together by the silt and clay of the beautiful green rainforest surrounding it.
It sits on the top of the tallest mounded pyramid, with silent stone faces larger than a man on the way up.
It is about four feet in diameter.
Not long enough for an entire body --
Just a bit too short.
It is round.
A strange shape amidst the jagged pyramids and pointed arches.
It must have held, as best it could, many a sacrifice.
Humans.
Hearts beating.
And then not.

I touched it.
It spoke it‘s stone words.
Soaked in the blood of the martyrs,
It seemed to bask in the sun today like all the others.

And I pulled my hand back.

No one else wanted to touch the thing
But part of me wanted to lie down on the stone as best I might fit and see what happened.
Part of me knew I was the priest to perform the sacrifice also.

There was agony
That ages of sun and rain could not deny.
There was the strangely shaped human ability to destroy life
With the hope of something good or holy or right to come of it.
The stones.

We Shall All Break

We shall all break --
In spite of our selves and our hard shells --
Like the dawn.
Just over that distant hill
Or through the old gnarled tree branches that
Yearn and search and weep.
Break.

In the black shadow of the oak
Where even the lichen will not hold;
In the dark hollow of the hill
Where all appears black together
And sorrow and joy stumble in tandem
Experienced yet not known.

That silent, blind realm opens the
Broken word to speak
Scouring space to raise the brow
And prepare the wound
To see the healing.

Fraction your life.
Offer bits and crumbs
Abundant yet unsatisfied.
Parse it out
Not in miserly portions, but
Pour it out -- humpty dumpty --
For gravity to assume.

Assumed we join
A star blazing into one light
And a sun rising into wholeness.
Then, we shall break
Like the dawn.

I am always amazed at the folks who seem to find their religious identity in a rigid and certain belief that is unchanging. Where does such a way of believing come from in this world? It seems to me faith is precisely not having that kind of certainty, but depending on something or someone we only hope to be dependable. As one of my favorite writers, Frederick Buechner puts it colorfully: "doubt is the ants in the pants of faith." Here is a little poem full of ants. (The picture is a walking iris flower opening in faith to a spring morning.)

Faithful Despair

Unglued jumble
Hesitating skip
And stumble
Falsely humble
Heartbeat out of tempo
Half-formed questions
Answers scorned.
This is where faith is born
To grow
The swallow turned to gulp
That does not satisfy
Or comfort
But draws us
Out
Empty
Lost
To God.

The photo is of Nat, my second son, trying his hand at surfing at Manhattan beach last summer. And the poem is from an experience I had at the Atlantic a few summers back now on an early morning. Nat -- do you remember your moment's pearl?

Sandman and the Crab

The tiny crab's eyes folded down and then popped up again Like the nursery rhymed weasel. Before us the waves had formed a new mound of sand With a design on its back to imitate the crab's. And the waves still rolled, of course, Clapping every now and then to keep me awake to the dawn. They created a small inlet at the side of their mound And crept back behind it . . . to rest? Or, when boldness and the tide gave the impulse, They would push their dirty white foam right over the mound to slip down the other side. And as the wave left again, returning to where it came from, The mound's back glowed with the water's pearl For a second, or longer if your eyes were popped, And your mind awake with the last clap. Then the mound would swallow and sift the pearl into itself Out to the wave's edge And back to the pond's edge on the opposite side of the wave's mound. The crab and I both saw it, I think, and sensed our part, For, as I rose to return to the day, The crab scuttled sideways into this sand cave To search out the moment's pearl, a dry glory, And the bold impulse to Awaken.

If nature is God's first word to us before we can even read a Scripture, then surely one way I have experienced God is in my fascination with collecting rocks. It goes well with my other obsession with plants, since the rocks can be lovely additions to the garden or the planter. But as I hope you will see here below, I think they do much more than just add a decorating flair!

Geologos

Rocks. I confess. I have a love affair with rocks.
Not faithful to one, but groping faithfulness
For them all, I -- and we -- strain like blocks
Of wall leaning one into the others to bless
The whole with stability, depend on grace in gravity
The rocks know so well -- even though, at times,
A fine round flat one skips a brevity
And walks on water's surface, climbs
The air, before it settles sweetly in the deep.

Stone-mongering may be my life's best task,
Although these creatures of the earth will keep
Long past my final sleep, I, cornered then, must ask
To hold them for a day, a breath, a life
Then let them pass to find another way
To sun warm in the morning's chill and ending wear away -- strife
For these rocks, a past creation, born of pressure's morphing play
And sometimes sun-flare heat, or spit like watermelon seed from earth's red groin
To rocket high the crusty life we know to join.

I keep them in my pocket now -- one at a time -- where my right
Hand surprised can rediscover their whole, dense solidness -- or
Pull them out to watch and glint in my half-sight
A hint of something bright within, that is before,
Was now, and holds its own. Beyond, for me, my youthful
Breath in Gabriel's angelic mountains, when I
Homed at the feet of Old St. Luke, whose snow-white rule
And crown beckoned my child's light to rise with it, explore, and sigh,
Annunciating births my pocket wombs but cannot hold.

Science's disinterest cannot our relationship design;
The rocks do not experiment with me. But we enfold
In experience, roll up together, to hone a moment fine,
Or more finally, to pound out heart sublime. Carbon dating
Is not our way. I do not use the rocks to list and know
But bow vulnerable and bare my dusty self with them, bating
The holy dirt between us, the mud of us to flow, and to grow
To show us who we were and are to be. I scrape in roughened palm
Obsidian's glass Alice and Narcissus to avoid, expelled with nature's balm.

I finger topographies of basalt, whisper what truth I guess into
Unaccountable holes of limestone, allow the quartzite
Light to laser through my center to discover, perhaps, that I too imbue
Refracted color, bent yet true. A bit of shale crumbles at my touch right
Beneath my wandering boot -- at appointed fissures, turns to dust.
Breathless, these rocks and I explore like lovers first undressed
To discover one another, to plumb love. Amidst the orange rust,
The bodies naked, flawed and cracked w muscle ourselves blessed.
Rock face, stone grace, inanimate trace -- a glance of space where Logos dwells.

I fairly new friend has been sharing with me her absolutely amazing photos of butterflies. I can never get them right in a photo myself. They close up their wings right when I want to take the shot or they flit when I need them to float. But I have caught them a bit in a poem I wrote a few years back now.

Fritillary Dance

Guessing when to tighten the muscle
So that delicate sails rise to attention,
And when to lay out flat in honest proclamation.
Knowing in your weightless being
The grace to soar in the warmth
Or pull and flap through a lull
And how to fall.
Living the design of your wings,
Trusting the breeze,
Tasting the blossom at your feet,
Resting on the outstretched finger of a leaf.
Arching through the sky's mutability
To write God's current name
In the breathless light of a day.

Preaching
Like most things in this life, I guess,
It's a funny thing to preach the Gospel.
It's a strange and wondrous thing,
A dangerous and challenging thing,
To chew on your own life and the world
And God's Word and ways if you can get
A bite of them all into our mouth at once
While a whole gang watches and waits
And listens.
And you try not to leave them there
Just on the sideline mistaking the view for
The experience.
No, you want them to get the nourishment,
to taste the goodness and all the rest of it too
In their own mouths.
Sometimes it seems the only way to do this
Is to hit them square
So they get the black eye that shows God's rainbow promise
Or swallow the blood from their own tongues
To taste the Savior's wine.
Still, a preacher's best shot most of the time
Is a glancing blow
That leaves some things to the imagination of the heart
And creates enough friction to warm them up to the possibilities.
If you miss your angle,
You can leave folks with false idols
Full of sweet words and comfort
Empty of all that really chews
And gives life
So that they all go home
Shaking your hand for the nice sermon
To grab their remote control
As they ease into just passing the time.
Do that a few Sundays straight
And you can loose your way,
Forget the Spirit of strange holiness,
And wander into myths
Of keeping the church doors open
And the people happy
And God in the prayers
But out of the way.
Don't let it happen.
Don't slip when you stumble.
Don't go down without a fight.
It's all beyond holding still
Or keeping straight.
It's much more than that.
You have to float
And turn
And sting.
You have to punch at the reality
And swing at the surprise
And always,
Always,
Let it bruise you too
Bruise you well.
Get in there and give it your face.
It's not the stigmata,
But it's real blood.
It's living.
It's honest struggle.
There is where the bush burns
And the voice and vision whisper
So that you are carried through the sea
To words you didn't know
Were even there
And muscle
For the fight
That speaks and calls and yearns beyond you
To the people you are called to preach with
So that God preaches in you all and the
Word chews the flesh
To create.

Out in the west where I grew up there is an experience that is like no other I know of. You drive for hours through painted desert rocks and sands, past Navaho women weaving blankets and boys herding sheep through the dried brush and emptiness. Then you get out of the car and walk up to a place where it appears the world ends . . . or perhaps begins. The ground stops abruptly and you look out over the great empty expanse of the Grand Canyon. Nothing can prepare you for the awesomeness of what is to be found in the middle of what looks like desolation. Nothing can prepare you for the new emptiness that is so miraculous and beautiful. At the rim of the canyon, you meet the overwhelming beauty of life in all its emptiness and power and fullness too. You meet something so much bigger than you; where you saw a mile at most through the desert near those sheep, you now see miles and miles in every direction including beneath you. And perhaps you see a new depth inside yourself as well. The sense of who you are and how you exist changes before the Grand Canyon. There is something at the rim of the canyon that brings us to our edge as well, to that place where we must reach beyond what we thought we knew for sure, beyond what we expected to be always there, beyond what we thought we could do and be, .
The Grand Canyon has long been a metaphor for me of my relationship with God. It is so immense and beyond me, yet I have been there and seen the Colorado River snake it’s way miles below, I have touched the sun-warmed rocks on a chilly morning, and I have breathed the sigh of disbelief before the sheer unbelievable nature that is the Grand Canyon. There is the danger of slipping at its edge or on one of the canyon paths that reach down to the river. And there is the yearning to explore and remain and love not the rock of the valley so much as the empty entirety of the space. God is like that for me. God surprises me by showing up when I least expect it – just when I was getting used to the monotony of the rolling, rocky plain that is my life much of the time. Or even just when I thought things could not get worse.
Every once in a while we are given the blessing of seeing beyond what we usually see; we are given the blessing of having the wind knocked out of us by the sheer grandeur of life. It comes when we least expect it: at a funeral, or a doctor’s office, or driving down the road, or doing the same dishes we do every evening. It does not come because it was invited, but because it is always there and we only seldom risk to wander to the edge to see it.
As we explore the joys of summer, I hope and pray for each of you that you will find the edge, catch your breath, and worship in the beauty of holiness the grand God we each are blessed to know and experience.

I am reading David Whyte, poet and author. In The Three Marriages he writes:
"Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. Just as people lost in the wilderness, on a cliff face or in a blizzard pay attention with a kind o f acuity that they would not have if they thought they knew where they were. Why? Because for those who are really lost, their life depends on paying real attention. If you think you know where you are, you stop looking."

Here's a blessing I am using at the end of worship these days. I was inspired by a Christmas blessing by Fra Giovanni who died in about 1513.

A Blessing

May God bless you with eyes to see God – God who is all that you need – and that God is very near at hand.

May God bless you with the courage to find heaven in your heart. For you cannot find it elsewhere. Find heaven.

May God bless you with the patience to discover the fullness of God’s Peace which is not to be awaited in some grand or far-off future, but is in the face of your neighbor today. Find peace.

May God bless you with a hope that sees beyond any gloom in your life today, that sees through the shadow of this present hour to what is more true in the light behind the shadow, God’s joy. Find joy.

God’s Day is breaking here and always. May you be blessed by the God who is all in all and may you take this ever real God to everyone you meet that they may be blessed also. Amen.

Chocolate

One of my friends noticed that the title to this blog promises musings about many things and that the musings have delivered each and all except . . . chocolate. How could I go so long with nothing about chocolate? This is not like me. Especially in difficult and challenging times such as I find myself right now (more on that in other posts to come). I have always sided with J.K. Rowling who says in her Harry Potter books that chocolate can send away the dementors (the dark forces). At any rate, I shall try to find more to say about chocolate. Let this just suffice to at least make the heading on the blog correct that there is indeed chocolate mentioned here! I even found a picture of some chocolate. This is my son, Josh, celebrating his 19th birthday with a chocolate cake! You can see the dementors running away in his smile even before he takes a bite!

Sky blue home
Delicate as a kiss
Surrounds like a caress
The green life.

It will only last a spring's brief week
If that,
But home will remain
In the amphibian
Heart
On those summer nights when he is sated
With flies and mosquitoes.

Home will call
And he will yearn
Sated but unsatisfied
Until he find again
The ephemeral kiss of home
And the caress
Of the blue sky.

You said you do not like

Silly books of fantasy.

But what remains without them?

Just analysis and games.

(And even they do not escape it.)

I cannot see this world

Except with fantastic eyes

That dream

Imagine

Hope.

Puck magicks Shakespeare now

And angels message God.

The truth lives in the gap

Between

What is and what

Might be.

Fantasized, we journey

We soar.

Dreamless, we only sleep.

Poems, for me, are usually gifts that I receive. It may take hours and days to unwrap them and work with them, but they come to me a pure grace that I must refine in order to find the best of the gift. This morning early, I received this gift below. Hopefully, I have worked my part out to dig up the grace of it.

Yesterday, in the freshly turned earth
I sprinkled seed
With green hope that the wet, dark grit
That boasts the sweet smell of transformation
Would birth basil for fall pesto
And summer marigolds of yellow and orange.

This morning I find that others also have
Spring fever.
The red maple across the yard
Has flung its red propellored wings to the promising soil.
And among the veined, delicate embryos
More wings
White
And triangular
From a night moth
Whose body has gone to feed the wren chicks.

The Swan

I am reading a marvelous little book by Mary Oliver right now called Winter Hours. If you don't know Mary, you might look for her poems on line or dig into a library volume. She is a great New England poet of our own age after so many that have written before her. Mary speaks honestly and simply about what a poem must be for her in winter hours; and her honesty is disarming and lovely. She says, among other things, that at their best moments her poems ask a question and leave it unanswered. I know, I think, what she means. But I am not sure if it is really to leave the question unanswered so much as to be faithful and courageous enough to ask the questions and point at answers that are all beyond the light our human eyes can see -- to reach in the shadows of something greater than we will ever know with our minds or words or touching or chewing. For me the best poetry doesn't just ask questions, but it looks beyond questions to the deeper challenge where wordy questions fall apart, crack under the strain, and become so much distance between the truth and our little brains. I am not sure she -- Mary Oliver -- would disagree with me here. She lets her luminous poem, The Swan, speak of this in ways her simple words in the prelude to the poem cannot. The Swan does ask a question without an answer. But the question itself already points beyond the words to white wings and other shores beyond our knowing. May we never, in poetry or life, settle for even good questions without answers but always journey beyond.

A poem to begin

Guide us
Slowly
To Holy Ground
Remove what protects us from place.
Barefoot, ignite us, Sinai's bush,
To flame and fire your pace and call
And loose creation's harsh clenched fist
To plant your garden, one and all,
Where silence speaks
Whispers again
To ground us
Neighbors
Foe and friend
With hoeing dance
And wind's sung toil.
Spring us, spirit us
To wholly rest --
A sabbath always our center
Where green life
Awakens
To stretch
And breaks our hard coat
Opening
Us
To the earth
Where we expand,
Tentatively,
First down
Then up
To rise
Rooted
Spread forth
To sun --
Wild word
Cultivated
In rich soil.