Bridge

This bridge, in the park where I often walk, has become so much a part of my internalized normal, and part of what I love about this park, that until I just now looked at this picture that I took this morning, it never struck me that it could look unwelcoming or pointless to the uninitiated. Because at the end of the bridge is a closed gate. And it is in fact a locked gate.

So it's a bridge you cross simply to then have to stop. And that sign you can see makes it clear that you are not to try to get over or around the bridge.

But I love the bridge because I think it's pretty. It's solid. I use it to do stretches. I look over the edge to watch ducks, fish, turtles, and when I'm lucky, a heron. I love to stand or lie down and just look at the sky.

And I love that closed gate that says "KEEP OUT."

Because it also says "WILDLIFE REFUGE."

I love that right here in the middle of a big city is a place set aside for wildlife. Wild life.

"We need the tonic of wildness" says the all-natural rose-scented facial tonic I bought at Whole Foods mainly just because I loved that quote. It's from Walden, by Thoreau, who went on to write, "At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."

When I was in college, an English major taking an American Lit class, I remember writing either in a paper or in my journal, that I thought I had been a Transcendentalist all my life without knowing it.

Well, I know more now and would not say that. But perhaps it's fair to say that I'm a Transcendental-ish Christian.

At any rate, I chose the bridge picture to represent yet one more transition, one more moving from one place to another, in that I really do hope to start writing more again. It feels as if my brain, and thus my mind, have recovered enough from the thesis writing and then the neck surgery I had this spring, to be able to write again. I even kind of feel the itch.

And for now this blog will be a sort of wildlife refuge for my writing, still meandering here and there. It's a mystery to me, a bit of a wild thing, still, where it may go.

But any readers are welcome to walk the bridge-- and you may also open the gate.

Epiphany Crowns and Haloes

"Adoration of the Magi," tapestry by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris

It's fascinating how various parts of daily life can manifest themselves in ways that intersect and surprise.

With Epiphany on the horizon, my mind had been returning to my blurry memory of the image above, which I used a couple of years ago in a presentation as part of my DMin degree, comparing this image to the image woven in words by the prophet Amos in chapter 6, where wealth and complacency accompany pride and are condemned.

I put a lot of work into that and was sad because I thought I had lost it forever, since I did it on the laptop that was stolen this summer;I had looked for it a couple of times in other places without success. But this evening one more search led me to find it in my emails.

I was reminded that the final sentence of what I wrote alluded to the choice between wearing crowns or being given haloes, because one thing that struck me in the tapestry is that all three kings have removed their crowns, and the one approaching Jesus has laid his on the ground, no doubt with an eye to Revelation 4:10 scene where the 24 elders cast their crowns before Jesus.

Whether kings or not (go here for a helpful article on the identity of these men), the wise men must have been wealthy to have traveled so far, and to spend their lives studying the stars. But they used their wealth to find and worship the Light of the world rather than as a means of gaining pleasure and status like the wealthy Amos addressed.

So, feeling happy that I'd discovered a copy of my work, and also being able to look again at the beautiful tapestry after finding the name and artist, I opened the book that we've been reading from throughout Advent and Christmas, to see what the reading for today is.

Here is what I found:

The child we seek

doesn't need our gold.

On love, on love alone

he will build his kingdom.

His piercéd hand will hold no scepter,

his haloed head will wear no crown;

his might will not be built

on your toil.

Swifter than lightning

he will soon walk among us.

He will bring us new life

and receive our death,

and the keys to his city

belong to the poor.

~Gian Carlo Menotti,

from "Amahl and the Night Visitors"

And there it is--"his haloed head will wear no crown." I may have read this poem before, but I had never noticed that line until tonight. It has felt like an evening among old friends, somehow, even though I'm sick with the flu and home alone. A sweet reunion of sorts.

If we all desired the holiness of the halo over the power and prestige of the crown, what a different world it would be. Literal crowns are rare, but the desire for wealth and power certainly isn't. We can at least put down our own crowns and hope and pray for this crown-crazed world. And like the wise men, look for the light and follow it to its Source.

Postscript: I believe the way I originally discovered this tapestry was via the blog of my friend Janet a couple of years ago. Her poem based on it, which I've linked to, is worth reading, also.

How Out of It I've Been and Something Funny and Lovely

It seems I have now set a new record in the length of time between blog posts. From May 31 until now would be close to four months.

It's beyond my ability right now to remember whether or not I have said anything definitive on this blog about why I have written so little in recent months and even a couple of years or more.

A rather fascinating story lies behind just about everything in life, and that's true for this as well, but for now suffice it to say that around the same time I decided to return to school to work on a doctoral degree in ministry, my mom began to have significant health problems. The combination of these things has simply (and in quite complicated ways at times) demanded my focus, my time, my energy more than I could ever have anticipated.

In late April, I turned in my last paper for school. And at some point in the summer I turned in the official prospectus for my thesis. And after that all the paperwork for approval from the Institutional Review Board. I'm now officially in the thesis phase of the degree. Since I had "levelling" work to do (extra classes because I didn't go into the degree with a Master of Divinity degree already), this means I am now freer than I have been in three years. Not free, but not continually under the pressure of huge reading lists and deadlines.

So slowly, slowly, life has been shifting to a more liveable pace. I'm returning to the routines and rhythms that were interrupted pretty severely for almost three years.

And so, at some point in the late spring or early summer, I began noticing the straggling green things out in the pots on our deck, and I thought, oh, one of these days I will have time to plant flowers again. Planting flowers has not been completely neglected, but it has not been the regulary activity that it once was, so that something was blooming pretty much all year round. Where we live, it usually means pansies in the winter and impatiens and petunias for the spring and summer.

Of course I had to get that prospectus turned in and all the IRB paperwork. But in the back of my mind I was dreaming of buying and planting petunias, at least a few, to enjoy through the heat of the summer. I also remember noticing with the peripheral vision of my awareness that those plants out in the pots still had blooms, and it seemed awfully late and hot for that. Pansies don't generally make it into the summer heat in full sun.

On July 30, I finally actually walked out there and watered and weeded, thinking there was still time to plant some petunias, if I could find any for sale that late in the summer.

And for the first time, I realized . . . these were petunias!

Which meant they had been planted early LAST summer, and that I had never planted any pansies in the fall. These guys had made it through the winter and come back to life.

So, I did of course water them, and I pulled out the amazing little weeds that find their way through the air into the pots. And I pulled off the dead blooms.

And I laughed at myself and at how crazy life can get, and smiled at how beautiful it is that these flowers made it through with absolutely no help from me or anyone--just the sunshine, the soil and whatever rain fell on them over the course of most of a year. (And this was the coldest winter we've had since we've lived here.)

It felt as if they were saying, "Surprise! Welcome back!"

"We're still alive, and so are you. It's time to stretch and breathe and grow again."

I've been watering them and pulling the occasional weeds and the spent blooms, and they've continued to grow through the heat of the summer, and as the air has begun to turn toward fall's shorter days and cooler temperatures.

The spearmint from last year made it through, too, not surprisingly. Mmmmm.....

Maybe soon I'll even clean these pots so they can be as pretty as what grows in them.

And I even dare to hope that I may manage to get pansies planted for this fall and winter.

It's hard to know how to describe the past three years. A lot has happened, a lot has had to cease for a while. "Upheaval" comes to mind as a one-word description that avoids the extreme emotional content other words would carry with them.

But these flowers bring to mind other words, words that remind me in a comforting way that while my life matters, and each person's life matters in ways we surely cannot fathom, each life is also part of a whole that gives us meaning and hope and comfort beyond what we could ever come up with on our own. These beautiful words--

While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.

After three years of pursuing a "Doctor of Ministry degree in missional and spiritual formation," I may have learned more about spiritual formation from these sweet petunias that came as "missionaries" to assure me of the good news that life is much bigger than my life, and strength and resilience and beauty are everywhere in the midst of it all. Even when I'm exhausted and oblivious.