Like Snow

Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly,
leaving nothing out.

-Wendell Berry-

Rejoice

"There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice." [John Calvin]

July 14, 2012

RING SONG

Think of the secret rings carved in the tree

that, on the day you took my hand

and lit it with this shining band,

screened us from the summer heat.

Our future too will be engraved:

each year a circus ring of living braved,

then sheathed by time and memory to stand:

a lived and living thing that offers shade.

---

There are sounds that have a ring,

that catch the light,

that sparkle, as bright

as this diamond I wear.

I leave you the ring of these words in the air:

I love you.

Eden was a garden

First I hoe.  The dirt beneath my bare feet bakes my soles, and a puff of dust coughs up around my ankles every step I take.  Above my head the pale blue sky rings with brightness.  Cooking in my own perspiration, I drag the hoe over the ground stroke after stroke after stroke, enjoying the feel of the earth cracking then crumbling then churning beneath it.  I enjoy the toughness of the task, the strain of it, the way it makes my heart pound a little, the way I can find a tempo to work within that silences my brain.  This brain-silence is no robotic mindlessness, but rather a vibrant clarity of purpose that focuses me so completely in each moment that all other concerns are eclipsed. 
When I finish hoeing the final row of corn I chuck the hoe over the garden fence and grab the handle of my weed bucket, my shoulders burning and my shirt drenched, a brilliance behind my eyeballs that aches.  After the driving beat of the hoe, the silence that enfolds me is a rich relief.  My heartbeat remembers its natural rhythm and as it calms I find my mind kindling awake. 

I love this part the most.  Hunkering on my heels, I inspect the first bean plant, grazing fingertips over the flowering sprouts, combing fingers up from the stem through the branching leaves, just feeling the shape and the texture of it.  I could almost weed by touch alone at this point, so familiar am I with the contours of my own plants, although I would never be so reckless.  Besides, I love to look at them as much as I love to touch them: their particular green coated with dust and sunshine, the dainty flowers adorning each ripening bunch.  I love the way the air espouses their scent when I touch them, love knowing that I’ve stirred to life the earthy fragrances that fill the air I’m breathing. 

After inspecting each plant, I clear the earth around them of weeds, filling my bucket several times over as I move from my bean rows into the luxuriant jungle of my tomato vines (bursting wildly out of their wire cages), and then the sprawl of my melons (lifting scratchy tendrils to drag up weeds from beneath them, correcting the path of the rambling ones that have sought sunshine in the corn or beyond the perimeter of my patch), and then my peppers (sighing over their blighted produce and wilting leaves), and finally the hardy potato bushes, the rows and rows of sturdy corn, already knee high.  I follow the same routine with each plant.  First attentive scrutiny.   Then the loosening of my mind as I pull weeds that leaves me room to note the bigger world:  distant traffic, children’s voices, insects jamboreeing, doors slamming, lawn mowers purring, even on occasion the crack of fireworks.
   
This is the summer I learned to love gardening: the blending of labor and languor, of concentration and abstraction, of sunshine and soil and sweat.  All five senses get their moment.  Mind and body are equally engaged. 

I would declare that I am--heart, mind, soul, and strength--the happiest creature on God’s green earth. 

shine like transfiguration

I’ve spent the morning cleaning while it has thunderstormed gloriously.  The living room of my apartment is on the third floor, and the south facing wall has a huge windowed door that opens onto a trim balcony with a cast iron rail, and a tangle of leafy branches beyond.  Once I’d stowed the vacuum, as the rainfall made it inadvisable for me to seek my usual morning retreat in the wicker comfort of the balcony furniture, I retired to my living room to drink my morning coffee instead.  With the door pulled open the lush sound of the rain still reaches me freely and the cooled air carries its scent and taste into the room.  Janie stands guard on the rug before the door, her nose lifted and tremulous, picking up signals from the verdant breezes that are wasted on me. 

Yesterday was Father’s Day, and I spent it at my sister’s house in rural Ontario to celebrate the baptism of her youngest child.  My father (“Poppy” as the other two children clamouringly call him) came along, as well as my mom (“Grammy”) and two of my brothers.  These occasions are always a special treat because we see our Hannah and her husband and children so rarely.  The children change drastically between visits, although there is always that inimitable something that marks them, reassuringly enduring although impossible to put into words.  Sammy’s Sammy-ness.  Ava’s Ava-ness.  Natalie I met for the first time, her abundance of chins and her turned-up nose and the blue eyes that already might be darkening to hazel.  The household is as rowdy as you would expect with three children aged three and under, and no doubt the presence of five adoring relatives rather catalyzed the tendency to chaos. 

Such an experience, all our lives bumping against each other in that summery household, almost makes the bond of love a palpable thing.  Perhaps there is a science that God sees in it, invisible to us aside from its effects—as though, in peering into the windows of the living room where we all congregated, what he might see would be a very intricate sort of chemistry: each soul uniquely bonded to each other soul, all of them interacting according to their individual natures and by universal laws under various circumstances to produce a beautiful result, a result that they feel but do not perhaps perceive as he does. 

For instance, there was a moment when I was briefly alone in the living room, and Hannah was within eyesight stooping to pick up a purple-faced squalling Natalie, and the thought struck me that she and I have been alive for the exact same number of seconds, although our first gulps of oxygen were eleven minutes apart. I was taken with the realization of what a rare relationship the two of us shared.  Meanwhile she was oblivious to me, cradling Natalie and smiling and murmuring soothing words, feeling an utterly different sort of fierce bond with this child she had made and carried and brought into the world.  And Natalie was bonded to her, and I was bonded to Natalie, in singular and powerful ways as well.  Maybe what was a moment’s brief mute flare of interacting and overlapping fellowship to the three of us was in the eyes of God and his angels like color, or light winking off a wave.  Maybe we are as unaware of the phenomena we create as the elements of the periodic table are. 

The idea takes me to Christ.  If that is true, what of the Incarnation, of divinity dressing in our nature and entering the periodic table of humanity?  That is what God did.  A painter infuses his identity into a painting, and God’s Spirit has indeed filled Creation with intimations of God’s nature.  But God went so far as to become His creature.  He did not stop at portrayal, at artistic rendering from a specific vantage point.  He entered the picture he was creating and created it from the inside out as well as the outside in. 

As I watched the minister of that tiny congregation in Burgessville Ontario dip his fingers into water and sprinkle drops onto Natalie’s crinkled forehead, my heart pounded.  My mind was still taken with the idea of love as a transcendent physical phenomenon, and I felt an acute awareness of the mass of faces turned on Natalie in that room, of their bonds to each other.  Beyond that, though, I had a supreme sense of God’s very presence: his Spirit in the words the pastor intoned, in the hearts upon which the words fell.  The knowledge that the water on Natalie’s young flesh represented blood of all things: Christ’s blood, his claim on her that transcended even the claim of a Creator.  The bond that the triune God was establishing in covenant with her surpassed all the other powerful human bonds that existed in that sanctuary.  Marvelously enough, it was a bond that he had also established with my own soul, and with most if not all of the other souls present.

This world, this life, is richer beyond the powers of my human soul to grasp, and the tantalizing glimpses I receive are a grace for which I constantly thirst.  I spend most of my time blinded by the ordinary, allowing its veil to prevent me from catching intimations of the true world.  It is so easy to despise the day of small things.  When things are taking their “ordinary” course, it’s hard to remember what matters. 


In Robinson’s Gilead, the narrator speculates upon what relationship this present reality bears to ultimate reality.  I love the conclusion he reaches, and my heart rises to the challenge he expresses:


“It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life.  And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. …But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than that thought seems to imply.  Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.  You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.” 

favorite chore

Taking out the trash: my chore again tonight.  I heave the third stretchy black bag, redolent of rot and sickly sweet, onto the chipped yellow wagon parked outside the far exit and reach for the handle. 

As I pull the squeaking cart out of its pebbled ruts and onto the walkway, I find myself awakening to the surrounding world, as though I myself am being pulled out of the pebbled ruts of my work life, loaded with the cargo that exudes the odor of a day's worth of anxieties and burdens, onto some smoother ontological plane that gently, beautifully eclipses each individual sense.  Birds fill my ears with sweet infrequent questionings over the humming backdrop of cicadas and treefrogs.  The air is warm and soft on my skin, a friendly presence.  Smoke from a nearby bonfire lends it a convivial tang, which mingles with the fragrances of growing grass and spring flowers. Above my head the constellations have been flung across the darkening sky, and they seem to gain in brilliancy with every passing moment as their backdrop deepens toward nightfall.  I walk through intensifying shadow towards the hulking dumpsters at the far end of the estate, dragging my little wagon, adding the scrape of my footsoles and the churning wagon wheels and trash stink and my own coffee breath to the lavishness that surrounds me--shedding them somehow with every step I take.

This particular night I am thinking about all the times I have taken out the trash over the years, and how charmed those forays so often have been--as this foray is, tonight.  The break they have afforded me from other labor, the sometimes shocking refreshment of slipping outside and remembering that the world is still there waiting, no matter how stultified and stagnant my day has felt up until then.  These brief journeys have been, so many times, the cool hand of God on my burning forehead. 

I fling the dumpster lid open and hoist the heavy bags into its black maw, pause before I close the lid again to watch the headlights illumine the street several yards away, revelling in my invisibility.  Then I take again the handle of my emptied yellow wagon and retrace my steps, down the drive, through the cast iron gate and the little path in the hedge, back onto the pebbled parking space, to a crooked halt.  Usually by this point my own heart feels relieved of the waste that had accumulated over the course of the day, stilled and receptive. 

I pull open the door and return to work. 

It Happened Overnight

Stranded in Minneapolis during the collapse of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, December 11, 2010

 Trapped in the airport far from home
I watch the scene from every screen.
Less than a week of falling fluff
(soft noiseless stuff) had felled the dome.
 At first, beneath the weighty drift
a telling swell, snow dusting light.
Then the sudden give and cave,
the drift a drop of driving white--
the air ashake.  And I, awake.

All that night I cannot sleep.
Over the arena of my heart
thoughts of you fall thick and deep.

wonderful work

I am tucking one of the residents in bed for the night.  We've shared a laughter-lush afternoon and evening, and she takes my hand and kisses the top of it as I perch on the edge of her bed and make sure her head is elevated properly. 

"I like you, honey," she informs me--one of many sweet refrains that she frequently addresses to those privileged to spend any amount of time with her. 

"And I love you!" I gush my usual reply, turning her hand over in mine to plant a reciprocal kiss on its wrinkled top. 

"Thank you for kissing my hand," she murmurs.

"You sleep so well, and let me know if you need anything, okay?" 

She reaches her arms up to wrap me in a long hug and says, "I will, honey."

Then I am on my feet and thinking ahead to the work that remains for me to do once I leave the dark bedroom.  I notice, as I cast a parting smile in her direction, that her face is quizzical.  "Is everything okay?" I ask, pausing in the chink of hall light to await her response. 

She hesitates, and then says vaguely, "I need something."

I turn my full attention on her again.  "What can I do for you?"

Her eyes widen and she scootches upright in her bed, declaring with enthusiastic abruptness--as though she's made a compelling discovery--

"I need another hug!" 

---

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in a haystack of light...

(Mary Oliver)

Waiting

Three months had been lived (what a grace!) since my last checkup, and so I find myself walking down Cherry Street in downtown Grand Rapids yet again.  The wind skips like a fool behind me, shoving my shoulders and ruffling my hair, a young and lively and rakish spring wind.  He swings me around the corner of the brick building to the entrance, and I wave at the familiar red-suspendered figure of the valet as I duck through the automatic doors.   The wind does not stick around: one icy farewell gust, which nonetheless warms my spirit, and he's gone, and I'm wrapped in silence and the chillingly institutional warmth of the building. 

The smell hits me instantly: soap smell, clean and chemical and, to my remembering nose, faintly nauseating.  Each visit it bothers me less. 

I pass by the information desk and round the corner, past the elevator, to the Lack's Infusion Center, where the receptionist is giving directions to a smiling man in a sharp black suit.  He steps back deferentially to let me check in, and she calls my name to mind after a quick glance at her computer screen.  After verifying that my information has undergone no changes since my last appointment, she nods me over to the waiting room, calling to my back, "You look great!" 

The waiting room is a space within a space, like an organ of the body.  The far end of it curves to follow the curve of an exterior staircase, and part of the wall that curves is made of chunky cloudy glass squares, through which it is possible to discern the distorted shadows of people as they climb up or down the staircase.  There are no windows--just that milky glass and, on the other end of the room, an aquarium embedded in the wall with its disinterested culture of fish and bubbles. 

I choose a seat beside the mannequins, three red-lipped pouting stares on tiered shelves behind glass, with silken scarves around their long plastic necks and fashionable wigs covering their shiny bald heads.    They separate me from the nearest human occupants of the waiting room: an old man and two very young healthy-looking boys.  One of the boys catches my eye and I grin at him.  For a few moments we play a little game: he turns away from me, I pretend not to see him, and then--ha!  I catch his eye and grin, and he burrows his face against the old man's arm.  The game ends when a panting gray-haired lady steps into the waiting room and announces, "I'm done.  Let's get out of here."  The three men flurry around her, boys clutching her hands, man solicitously taking her purse from her and offering his arm. When they have left, I open my book and scan a few sentences.

Women in scrubs poke heads into the room and call names in conjunction with the name of a doctor.  People rise when summoned, vanish, and reappear after a few moments with bandages taped to the crook of their arms, or, after a longer timespan, to retrieve their moral support and belongings, shrug into their coats, and depart. 

I find myself regarding the carpet, which consists of huge blocks of various earth tones: green, yellow, brown, red, orange.  It looks to me like the colors are afflicted themselves with some disease, some cancer that has leeched them of brightness.  Suddenly I am seeing disease everywhere.  In the carpet, dull and stained and pulling apart at the seams.  In the mechanical wheezing of the computers across the room from me, which I know from experience are ridden with viruses, slow and outdated and destined for the junkyard before long.  In the glass wall's clouded vision.  In the half-empty styrofoam cup of coffee left to congeal on the puzzle table.  Every chip in the furniture catches my eye, every scratch in the shabby yellow paint.  I remember that the room is cut off from telephone tower reception, and even though I have no reason to call anyone, the thought troubles me.

The music begins to bother me, too.  It is elevator music, waiting room music, aimless and anesthetizing, empty technique.  It does not invite a response--if anything, it encourages disengagement of the emotions, lulls you into not-feeling. 

Heaps of magazines cover coffee tables and bulge out of shelves on the walls.  Two circular tables stand supporting unfinished puzzles.  I think about all the fingertips that have marked them, and about all the sets of brains that have regarded them.  All the lives on hold, penned up in this little waiting room.

Memories of previous visits always descend upon me eventually in this room.  First always is the image of one very ill woman who had been wheeled into the waiting room soon after I and my parents had arrived for our first consultation with my doctor, and the sick fright I had felt as I saw her piteous hollow unforgettable face--how like a death's head it looked when she smiled.  I don't let myself wonder about her long, a year since our paths crossed, because I think it unlikely that she is yet living, and that assumption twists my gut with a sort of baffled survivor's guilt.

Then I am remembering my first morning of chemo, a week after my discharge from the hospital, sitting with my father and my friend and the man I love on that very couch where today the old man with the gray ponytail is dozing alone.  I had been so relieved to have a conversation with a woman who was waiting for her mother to emerge from the chemo ward, to divert my mind by entering someone else's trouble, distancing myself from my own imminent treatment.  I remember how it hurt to sit and stand when my name was called, each movement tearing at the stitches that still zippered my stomach together.

The recollection has me jumping to my feet,  relieved at how easy and good the gesture feels, striding to the puzzle table, where this morbid bent in my brain has me dwelling on the--is it irony?--of placing enormous difficult puzzles in a waiting room to divert people who are grappling with enormous difficult problems in their lives.  And that awful artwork on the wall, disembodied hands releasing bright balloons into a blue sky.  Letting Go it is labeled, and seems to preside over those partially finished jigsaws and their jumbled unrealized potential. 

It happens every time I return here: this recognition that no matter how long I live, I will never be able to sit in this or any other waiting room and feel like I have done all I can.   The spectre of unfinished business will ever haunt me in places like this, spaces that bring me face to face with the fact of my finitude.  It is good for me to remember this.  It makes me weigh the potentials of my life in the scales of eternity.  It forces me to prioritize again, to shake my heart back into perspective.  And it drives me back to the Alpha and Omega, the only One who can give me grace to run my race, fight the good fight, keep the faith. 

Always I end up lost in prayer, waiting on God in the waiting room.

The wind is waiting for me as I stride back outdoors after my checkup and I draw in deep lungfuls of spring air as we walk back up Cherry Street towards my parked car, where I put the key in the ignition and resume things for as long as they are there for me to resume.  This side of Eden, resuming and faithfully resuming are my task.  I leave perfection to heaven.

"Forbid my vision / To take itself for a curious angel..."

A few nights ago I had a long visit with some work friends.  For awhile, our conversation engaged the topic of what God's purpose could possibly be in permitting disabilities to exist.  The three of us work as aides in a home for adults with severe mental and physical disabilities, so the topic is one we have each had cause to ponder in a very personal way.

My brain fills with a rush of reactions all at once whenever the idea of God's tolerance of disability is broached in my presence. I feel the need to point out that that question is just one tiny branch of the immense question of why God tolerates any distortion of His Creation at all...including the disabilities that we all suffer in this fallen world. And then I am bursting with reasons I am so glad that God has placed these people on earth, in my life, as I reflect on what they have taught me about myself, about God, and about how to live...and also as I fondly picture my friendships with each one.

I have not struggled as much with the theodicy inherent in any discussion of the disabled population as my coworkers have.  This does not mean that I do not sorrow for the way sin manifests itself in the world; merely that I can entrust its outcomes to God.  I recognize that some would see this response as taking an easy way out of a difficult problem, but I disagree.  I believe that bitterness is easy. Unbelief is easy. Despair is easy.  Faith in God is hard. Believing that He is Who He claims to be, in the face of evil, is not easy. So when someone asks why God allows children to be born with mental and physical impairments, I do not say it carelessly, but I do say confidently, "If He does it, it is for good."  Perhaps I'll flesh that topic out more thoroughly later--you can't explain a theodicy satisfactorily in a paragraph (indeed, perhaps you can't explain a theodicy "satisfactorily" at all!  Terms are slippery!).  For now, leaving that difficult issue in God's hands, I can still affirm the powerful personal impact these people have had on me. 

None of us right now is what God created us to be. Working with disabled people has given me insight into what I myself must look like against heavenly standards. My physical body is ridden with the effects of sin.  My strength and stamina and coordination (even at my best) have definite constraints, I am vulnerable to disease and injury, and what mobility and powers I do possess are sure to be lost over time.  The same sort of impediments afflict me mentally: my thoughts are cloudy, and I am limited in how much I can learn, and in how to use that learning.  I am mostly and most disproportionately consumed with myself...I lack true perspective.  And I am oblivious, for the most part, to how deeply disabled I am!  Blind even to the fact of my blindness.  These impairments affect my behavior, leading me to commit absurd follies and grievous offenses that defy the good law that God has set in place (for my happiness).  When I see these impairments from which I suffer "writ large" in the persons with whom I work, I realize that what separates me from them is the degree of impairment, not the fact of it.

And that leads me to praise!  Like these people, I am not left to live out my days in neglect and suffering.  Like them, I still have within me the ability to experience the delights of this created world, to interact mentally and emotionally and spiritually with God and with others...even if those experiences and interactions are flawed and curbed by my disabilities.  And, like them, I have been given more than I could ever have known to ask for if left to myself--more than I could ever have imagined.  I have a Caretaker, and He not only meets my barest human needs, He also daily lavishes love and attention upon me, gives my life richness and purpose, and helps me to better myself.  He is divinely patient with my weaknesses and failings.  In becoming acquainted with the residents under my care, I have been ushered into an infinitely humbling and breathlessly heroic vision of what God's love means.  The idea of providence has taken on a dazzling luster.  I cannot but praise Him when I think of it. 

Of course, having experienced God's tender provision in my own life, I feel compelled to communicate what I've been given, as much as I am able, to those beneath my care.  In this way, they have assisted me by inspiring me to godliness.  Not a day passes without these dear people challenging me to tend the fruits of the Spirit in the garden of my soul.   They give me a thousand opportunities to practice love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.  And by practice, I mean practice, because (they daily remind me) such graces do not come easily to my disabled heart!  Things like training my touch to a patient tenderness while assisting with cares that could be executed faster if done with more roughness, less compassion.  Or striving to be a tranquil presence that warms them with care and attention, when I would rather spend my time conversing with staff members or getting ahead on my chores. Responding to even the most trying situations with composure and grace and cheerfulness rather than frustration and rudeness and ill will.  Being faithful in the little things--food quality and housekeeping--that contribute to making the building feel like a home, when it would be so easy to cut corners and let things slide.  Each day spent with them shows me how lacking my care for them is in comparison to how I have myself been cared for, and it drives me to seek to serve them better. 

Not to mention, they are simply delightful human beings! There is intrinsic pleasure that results from learning to communicate with them, knowing what makes them happy or upset, what causes them discomfort and how to alleviate it.  Also in seeing them respond to my attention and interest with affection, realizing that they recognize and respond to my voice, and arriving at a relational level where we even have inside jokes and practices.  Along with all they have taught me, I am blessed to be able to also claim them as friends. 

So, fallen disabled human being that I am, I am grateful that God has filled my life with these other fallen disabled human beings.  I hate to witness the effects of their impairments, which (like the impairments themselves) are often so much more severe than the effects of my own.  I yearn for their future restoration, even as I yearn for my own future restoration. 

In the meantime, I love them and praise God for them. 

I am convinced that this world is better because they are in it. 

I always find myself returning to Richard Wilbur's The Eye, particularly Part II.  I am ever claiming it as a prayer for my own life, and it certainly is an appropriate way to end this particular rumination. 

Preserve us, Lucy,

From the eye's nonsense, you by whom

Benighted Dante was beheld,

To whom he was beholden.

If the salesman's head

Rolls on the seat-back of the 'bus

In ugly sleep, his open mouth

Banjo-strung with spittle,

Forbid my vision

To take itself for a curious angel.

Remind me that I am here in body,

A passenger, and rumpled.

Charge me to see

In all bodies the beat of spirit,

Not merely in the tout en l'air

Or double pike with layout

But in the strong,

Shouldering gait of the legless man,

The calm walk of the blind young woman

Whose cane touches the curbstone.

Correct my view

That the far mountain is much diminished,

That the fovea is prime composer,

That the lid's closure frees me.

Let me be touched

By the alien hands of love forever,

That this eye not be folly's loophole

But giver of due regard.

Morning Ritual

A steady rain was falling, grasses greening beneath a smear of grey. 

Janie shadowed me as I took up a lighter and lit wicks on bookshelves and coffee tables, filling the house with a cozy glow. Then we both settled in the living room and waited for the water I'd set on the stovetop to boil, her tail an inconstant beat on the floor that quickened if I looked her way, accelerated when I addressed her, and died out whenever my attention drifted. 

My canine lady in waiting trailed me into the kitchen after the water had boiled and watched me pour coffee beans into the grinder (cowering as I reduced them to grounds in the noisy machine) and tap them into the French press.  I carefully poured steaming water over the grounds and stirred the mixture till it bloomed rich and foamy, then set it aside to steep. 

I stared out the kitchen window at the fat squirrels plundering Oma's birdfeeders and waited.  Meanwhile, Janie was sniffing the garbage closet, her tail wagging at least as enthusiastically as it had in response to my most affectionate tones--an observation guaranteed to keep me humble.

Four minutes later I returned to the counter. Janie padded across the kitchen to me and leaned her warm weight against my legs while I stood there and pressed down the plunger with my palm.

I poured myself that simple, essential thing: a cup of coffee. 

A steady rain was falling, grasses greening beneath a smear of grey, while I drank it lazily in the living room.

It’s a flirtatious March day.  The sunshine winks at me from the windshields of passing cars, and the wind is toying with my curls, and here I sit at a sticky outdoor table with my laptop and my coffee mug.  I should be working.  I should be clearing the backyard of a winter’s worth of dog poop, or purging my closets and drawers of wool and flannel, or at the very least gathering some of those blooming daffodils for the pitcher on my bookshelf.  Instead I am googling everything from “poems about spring” to “how to start a garden,” and inundating my system with cup after cup of the most ordinary Maxwell House brew.  

I will not argue that I could have used the free bright hours of this afternoon much more productively.  Even so, I do not consider them wasted or misspent.  I claimed them, in my own small way.  I have found some good poems.  I have seeded my heart with Edenic aspirations that I hope to one day realize in the sunshine and soil of my future. 

And now remains to me the long-lit length of early evening, to do the tasks I’ve been postponing. 



Change takes real intentionality, like a woman bent over her garden beds every day with a spade and the determined will to grow up something good.  -Ann Voskamp

"And those little captains, the chickadees, swift to the feeder and swift away..." -Robert Hass

March morning

Janie is relishing the sunlight this morning.  It patterns the floorboards of the living room in bright squares that slant kitchen-ward.  She nuzzles up to the largest pool of light, tail twirling, and turns a series of tight circles.  Then she falls belly-up in a furry crescent against the light's sharp angles, her tail describing a diminishing arc across the gloss of the upper righthand corner. 

I love watching this early morning geometry from my corner in the kitchen, my fingers curled around a mug of coffee and my toes toasting in the warmth that whispers up from the register on the floor.  It is March with a vengeance outside, tangling the windchimes in the yard and snapping the flag across the street.  Inside, however, it is still and shining, and the heat purrs and the coffee steams and Janie's paws twitch while she dreams. 

I have been spinning to-do lists in my brain as I've sat here basking, and suppose that now it is time to do them.  Just one more mug of coffee, and I'll begin.  Cross my shining heart. 

It was late autumn atop Lookout Mountain, a leaf-haunted wind-raked day typical of the season, the walkways and architecture of the college campus embalmed in fog, earth scents mingling in the air.  I had received an invitation earlier that day to a small end-of-the-semester gathering at a friend’s apartment, and that most hospitable of phrases—“a pot of chili”— had been uttered.  It was the sort of summons that no college student on a meal plan would reject lightly, even during the strain of final exams.  All day the notion of eating a home-cooked meal in an actual home had cheered me as I arranged my work and school schedule to accommodate it.  Having at last completed my final hour of carpet cleaning duty and hefted my textbooks on my desk, I was eager to catch my ride in the parking circle down the hill from my dormitory and enjoy my reward. 

I remember stepping out of Founders Hall into the luminous fog, feeling the icy air suck my breath clean off of my ribs as I hunched my shoulders and set off down the hill, when my attention was diverted by the unlikely emergence of voices from a patio to my right.  This patio, so full of student activity during the early sun-soaked days of the semester, was usually abandoned to dead leaves and litter this late in the term.  Tonight, however, a handful of students had gathered around one of the grills and started a fire, likely fueling it with expired classes’ notebooks and handouts.  Their shadows were exaggerated to aboriginal dimensions in the fog and the firelight, and their voices sounded eerie, carried with the stinging whiff of campfire on the breeze. Flurries of sparks kindled the smoke around their hoods. 

My Shakespeare class had ended only days earlier with the topic of “King Lear,” and my professor had enriched our study of this tragedy by integrating it with numerous passages from the book of Job.  Little wonder, then, that the phrase, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” came to my exam-primed mind as I beheld this small conflagration. 

I found myself revisiting that twilit night three years later as I sat in the waiting room of Georgetown Physicians after hours on a cold February dusk, my hands folded against my strangely protuberant belly while I forced small talk with my parents and waited to be called in for my hastily scheduled consultation.  I had seen a physician’s assistant earlier that morning to discuss my experience of recurring urinary tract infections and encumbering sciatica.  She had taken one look at my stomach and scheduled a CT scan for that very afternoon.  When the results of the scan had come in, I was summoned to this late meeting, and told to bring my parents as well.  The late hour, the hurried nature of it all, and the suggestion of parental involvement conditioned the three of us to feel anxious indeed. 

Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.  There in that waiting room I heard Job’s bleak wisdom yet again.  It occurred to me that people speak this way of their callings: “I was born to do this!”  If this was trouble—and how could it not be, considering these circumstances—then I was born to it. Such a perspective shift emboldened me to face the diagnosis of ovarian cancer in the oncologist’s consultation room several days later, to steel myself for the surgery and treatments that followed. 

Like all big troubles, my hardship was the sort of experience that made the “big questions” in life uncomfortably pressing, that laid an imperative upon my soul to seek out answers.   My (oh so human) reaction to my diagnosis was, predictably enough, that chestnut of a question: WHY?  It found a ready and absolute answer, if not an easy one, in the pages of Scripture.  The phrase “under the curse” is an old-fashioned one, one that evokes an atmosphere of fairytale, but it portrays a truth that is all too evident in this vale of tears where we pitch our earthly tents.  Unfortunately, its very obviousness makes it the sort of truth from which we tend to get diverted.  In a sense, this curse is like a beast to which we all are chained as a condition of our entrance into life.  We learn to accept our beast as an unpleasant but inescapable part of life, a part of life we prefer to ignore, or simply fall into the habit of ignoring, when there are so many other matters that call for our notice.  We allow ourselves to be distracted from the knowledge that the “way of all flesh” is ultimate destruction at the claws of the beast. Looking about, we see that almost everyone else lives in a sort of habituated truce with his beast, and so we feel comfortable doing the same. And when the evil thing strikes at last, we are always taken off guard.  

It was thus with myself.  I might have acknowledged intellectually that in this world I would have trouble, but my shock when this prophecy came true made it clear that I had not before understood the nature of this beast to which I was chained. For the first time I truly understood that I was a part of that group, man¸ that was born to trouble.  Rather than distinguishing me in some way from the human world around me, my trouble confirmed me as a member of it.  Reluctantly I realized what this meant for my behavior as I coped with cancer: that I could not wallow in my trial, flaunt it as an emblem of distinction, or lug it around with me as a justification of or pretext for my deficiencies—actions that my family and I jokingly described as “playing the C-card.”  The C-card wasn’t mine to play.  Or rather, perhaps, it was, but only in the sense that in my father Adam I had played it on myself.  It’s no wonder that that old sad story took on deeper poignancy for me as I considered my own unfolding drama in its baleful light. 

The Scriptures taught me more than this, however.  I am so grateful that, as I wrangled with these difficult ideas, I was also able to know that the God of my trust was a personal God, a God who was involved in every detail of my life, a God who numbered the hairs on my balding head. And this God, who loved me to the unspeakable extreme (how I love to speak it!) of dying in my stead and carrying in His perfect person the taint of my sin, this God sent me this particular inheritance of trouble.  By His grace I never doubted that His will was good both for me and for His kingdom.  He had proven Himself to me over and over, and my heart was gloriously at rest in His love, from which I knew I could never be estranged. On these grounds, I boldly approached the Creator of the Universe to request further insight into the nature of my mission. Why had He chosen this specific portion for me?  It was not a complaint (at least most of the time it was not a complaint), but rather a sincere endeavor to acquaint myself better with His will—because if this was His will for my life, I wanted to search it out and live in accordance with it as fully as possible. 

I decided, as I reflected upon His purposes, that God had given me cancer at least partly as an opportunity to pause my life in medias res and roam its frozen landscape.  I would never have thought to do this on my own.  And even had I desired to, I could never have afforded the bounty of time that God in His kindness lavished upon me.  My new life was a treasury of empty hours!  As I waded through them and wondered how God meant for me to fill them, that line from Milton’s Sonnet 318 “On His Blindness” rang frequently in my mind.  They also serve who only stand and wait.  It gave me a place to start.  I tried to regard it as my calling to stand my heart at attention before God, for there was little else I was equipped to do.   Stripped of the strength and opportunity to pursue many of the things that would normally have occupied my time, I waited on Him.  In the cushioned recliners at the Lack’s Cancer Center Infusion Ward I waited.  In the long still hours in my empty house I waited. 

I thought that it would be easy service, this standing and waiting.  Perhaps it was the phrasing of Milton’s words, that disarming little “only” he inserted into the meter: They also serve who only stand and wait.   I quickly realized how wrong I was!  Most of the time my mind was too preoccupied with chasing after its unruly flock of thoughts to fix its whole focus, or even most of its focus, on heaven.  How difficult it is to seek God with a pure heart, even for someone living a life of solitude and reflection!  So often my spirit echoed the cry of Fredrick Buechner’s saint, the hermit Godric, who agonized, “What kind of hermit can he be whose heart gads about the very world he’s left for Christ?”  There in the wilderness of chemotherapy and weakness, with the heedless capriciousness of an infant at a funeral parlor, my heart was still gadding about the world. 

This humbling realization of my own frivolity forced me into an internal conversation that I ought to have begun long ago: a discussion about what was truly valuable and worthy of attention in this life.

In her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard urges aspiring writers to “Write as if you were dying.  At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.  That is, after all, the case.”  Her advice bears pondering even outside the realm of literature, for this world does indeed consist solely of terminal patients, and our lives ought to be expressive of the solemnity such a state of affairs requires.  She goes on to pose this sobering question: “What would you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”  

Especially in the uncertain early days between tentative diagnosis and surgery, when I was not yet sure of my survival prospects, I was given the gift of fleeting insight into what my life might look like to a terminal patient.  Peering through the lens of my mortality, the triviality that my life communicated to me was indeed enraging.  In the hermit months that followed, I had daily cause to reflect with consternation on the waste and vanity of the life I had led, and to ponder the shape that my few remaining mortal days ought to take.  I desperately wanted my life to be an expression of truth, a message that imparted meaning, and certainly not a mere doodle or limerick or hollow platitude.  I wanted the terminally ill to be able to look at my life and find reason to hope and rejoice and be at peace.  In a word, I longed for my life to express CHRIST.  I wanted my testimony to be that of the Apostle Paul, who jubilated that to live is Christ and, recognizing the terminal diagnosis afflicting his audience, to die is gain.

Is this partly what Christ meant when He said that I must lose my life in order to find it?  Looking at my distracted and frivolous life from the Spartan battlements of my disease, I did not regret the loss, for it was all vanity.  My outer body was wasting away but I had found my life in Christ. 

It has been ten months now since I completed my final chemotherapy treatment.  My life teems with duties and delights, and I have renewed strength to accomplish them and faculties to enjoy them—daily labor and pots of chili alike, and in good measure!  It is so easy to forget the cold dark space between the two, the sparks flying upward.  Often I behave as though my tomorrows will never cease, as though I have world enough and time to gad about this Vanity Fair and revel in its distractions.  That is why I sometimes feel a sense of nostalgia when I remember how clarifying cancer was, those spacious hours of frailty and vision.  Their memory anchors my straying heart, challenging me to live a life that expresses the truth of my salvation: a life that values time, holds the things of this world loosely, and waits for my eternal "happily ever after," confident that, because Christ broke the curse, it will be mine to enjoy. 

Even so, come quickly...

"Annunciation"

'Hail, space for the uncontained God'
From the Agathistos Hymn, Greece, VIc

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.
                    Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.

But we are told of meek obedience.  No one mentions
courage.
                    The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
                                                      God waited.
She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.

Aren't there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
                       Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehendingly.
                                   More often
those moments
            when roads of light and storm
            open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
                                        God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

--Denise Levertov--