A Poem for All Saints

Where I’m From
--George Ella Lyon

I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back porch.
(Black, glistening
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush,
the Dutch elm
whose long gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.

I’m from fudge and eyeglasses,
from Imogene and Alafair.
I’m from the know-it-alls
and the pass-it-ons,
from perk-up and pipe down.
I’m from He restoreth my soul
with a cottontail lamb
and ten verses I can say myself.

I’m from Artemus and Billie’s branch,
fried corn and strong coffee.
From the finger my grandfather lost
to the auger
the eye my father shut to keep his sight.

Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments—
snapped before I budded—
leaf-fall from the family tree.

A (Broad) Song for All Saints

The roots of all things interweave
and grow so close together
that when we pull the crowding weed
the wheat is also severed.

The hummingbird that works its wings
to hover near a flower
will aid the wind that drives the cloud
that forms the distant shower.

Along with God we co-create
a vast, connecting story
and shape a common destiny
and trail a common glory.

The world is one community,
bound root and soul forever;
and if we are to grow at all,
we all must grow together.

Suggested tune: St. Columba

The Grace of the World

Wendell Berry gives rich gifts....

5 Creation

This we know...
All things are connected
like the blood
which unites one family. . . .

Whatever befalls the earth,
befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life;
he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
he does to himself.

Attributed to Chief Seattle

All Saints: Lazarus Unbound

We have a powerful story, this Sunday, of a human-being raised to life. At some point in our journey those of us who follow Jesus have, like Lazarus, been called out of a tomb. In one way and another life has been given fresh to us as only God can give it.

But emerging from the tomb, like Lazarus, we need a whole 'nother kind of help. Like him, we need to be unwrapped. Yards and yards of unwrapping. This is why they pay us Christians the big bucks---it's for the after-care, the miles and miles of unwinding.

Thank God for that burst of life that bears us. Thank God for the friends' hands that spool our bandages one turn, two turns, three turns....

All the saints raised up in this life. All those hands removing what keeps us each from light and life, breath and sight.

Another Voice

A Song for Bartimaeus

Sightless and useless in the eyes of many,

pushed to the edges of a people’s notice,

one yet has courage, and will not keep silent,

calling to Jesus.

Hearing the one cry raised above the many,

sensing a quick soul slowed by the unseeing,

bearing compassion and the hope of wholeness,

Jesus comes nearer.

Touched by God’s goodness, one among the many

gains understanding and the gift of vision,

and with a wide world bright and undiscovered,

one follows Jesus.

Suggested tune: Bickford

Exuberant Need

Loud people often make other people nervous. In this week's gospel, we have one loud person and a lot of nervous people.

JESUS, help ME! the blind beggar blares out.

Shhhhhhhh! lots of proper people insist.

Yet the people who remember and pass this story on to us seem, in hindsight at least, to apprecriate this man's over-the-top energy (look at all the 'big energy' words in these few sentences).

A question that seems really pregnant to me is, What is it about this blind man's exuberant need that is good news for the rest of us?

Religion Unprobed

Religious beliefs—especially those concerning the nature of powers that create and animate—become an effective part of ecological systems. They attract the power of will and channel the forces of labor toward purposive transformations. Religious rituals model relations with material life and transmit habits of practice and attitudes of mind to succeeding generations.

This is not simply to say that religious thoughts occasionally touch the world and leave traces that accumulate over time. The matter is the other way around. From the point of view of environmental studies, religious worldviews propel communities into the world with predispositions toward it because such religious worldviews are primordial, all-encompassing, and unique….

In the struggle to sustain the earth’s environment as viable for future generations, environmental studies has thus far left the role of religion unprobed. This contrasts starkly with the emphasis given, for example, the role of science and technology in threatening or sustaining the ecology. Ignorance of religion prevents environmental studies from achieving its goals, however, for though science and technology share many important features of human culture with religion, they leave unexplored essential wellsprings of human motivation and concern that shape the world as we know it. No understanding of the environment is adequate without a grasp of the religious life that constitutes the human societies which saturate the natural environment. --Lawrence E. Sullivan

The Holiness of Life

Our Contemporary lesson for the third week of the Creation Cycle is about servant leadership, too. We share life from a common Creator. We share life in common with everything created. Wholeness and holiness are utterly related in this shared (consciously or not) in-common-ness.

In the reading for Sunday Wendell Berry writes that we can't know the holiness of life if instead of serving it we 'diminish its possibility.'

"The Bible leaves no doubt at all about the sanctity of the act of world-making (creation), or of the world that was made, or of creaturely or bodily life in this world. We are holy creatures living among other holy creatures in a world that is holy. Some people know this, and some do not. Nobody, of course, knows it all the time…. "The sense of the holiness of life" is not compatible with an exploitive economy. You cannot know that life is holy if you are content to live from economic practices that daily destroy life and diminish its possibility."

Wendell Berry, Berry Behind the Pulpit

Servant Leadership as Creative Response

My friend Frazer Crocker sent the following R. S. Thomas translation of an anonymous Welsh folk stanza this morning. It reminds me how resilient people can be. The sentence following the stanza is Frazer's, too.

Let the stranger, if he will,
Have his way with the glen;
But give us to live
At the bright hem of God
In the heather, in the heather

The lines come from the time when the English bought up the best lowland farms, forcing the native Welsh farmers up into the hills to eke out a living.

Congruence

There's a nice congruence between the Gospel and the Creation Cycle reading for this Sunday. Both are below in earlier posts.

Mary Oliver asks, "Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Wouldn't we love to go back and ask that question of the rich young ruler. What would he say? An hour before he met Jesus? An hour after Jesus left? A year--or twenty years--later?

I don't think many of us would have gone with Jesus that day on the terms the rich young man was offered. But does that end it? Is it a one-shot deal?

It doesn't seem that way to me.

Ms. Oliver's question may feel bigger in our 20s when we're choosing a vocation, but it's a question we get to live into every day. Even though we've missed the mark one way and another every day up to this point.

What is it we'll do? Even though we probably won't ever sell all that we own, will we let go of what holds us back a little more today and a little more tomorrow? We'll never catch Jesus. And following his remarkable (daunting) path is as hard as ever. Nevertheless...

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The Summer Day

Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

--Mary Oliver

Mark 10:17-3

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.'" He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth." Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!" And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." They were greatly astounded and said to one another, "Then who can be saved?" Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible."

Peter began to say to him, "Look, we have left everything and followed you." Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age--houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions--and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first."