the incarnate, here: excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo from the public domain

I want to share a part of my past that has become an integral part of my today and tomorrow. A quarter-century ago, I was privileged to have been granted a summer (half of each week for over three months) lodged on an old ranch in southern California. A time of healing and rethinking . . . and life-sustaining revelation. It all happened that long ago, and still "happens," in a sense, every day. Every new day.

During my weekly sojourn there, I journaled daily. And left the pages in my files―until now. My book, Sky Mesa Journal, will be out in a few months (Wipf and Stock Publishers). I have lifted a favorite sketch from this work. I'd like you to meet a "beast" who spoke Life to me: Used with Permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

the incarnate, here

A donkey lives here. Linda is a sag of bones and ripple of tired muscle and thatch of unkempt pelt. Linda is a belly that looks ready to burst with foal; she is as old in donkey-years as Sarai was to Abraham, and her womb is long empty. Linda is two rheumy eyes that beg for something she cannot name and I cannot give. Linda leans with a sigh against the uncertain fence, or against my unfamiliar hand, and my heart aches. It is, perhaps, foolish to love a donkey so——and so quickly. But I am often foolish.

When I watch Linda, I am always struck by her patience. Donkeys are traditionally “temperamental.” Not so, not here! Linda lost her mate last winter. Surely the beasts of the field know grief and loneliness; I see it in her eyes. Perhaps it is this that gives her an air of quiet grace. That’s an unusual statement to make of a donkey——especially one with as broken-down a chassis as this one.

Somehow this gives me consolation——sharing this time and place with her. There is such a separation between human lives, the processes of getting along, getting ahead, getting by——and the natural world, that which we call wild, which struggles on, much too tangential to our own.

We see a flash or so of the other “order” in our passages between our life experiences, or perhaps more likely, when these experiences wane. We may dote upon the pets around our feet (and they are often vital, life-enriching―and sometimes, perhaps, our stead, our alter egos). But for most of us the breadth of the animal world exists mainly behind bars and barriers of place and purpose.

We cannot, by our minimal exposure, know the great heart of an elephant. Learn patience from the patterning of a covey of quail. Explain the explicit cosmos of the bee. We see too little value in the furry and feathery denizens of this planet, other than admiring their occasional beauty or oddity. Or granting our continual and anonymous picking clean of the bones of the edible.

But I see the incarnate, here―in this old gray lady-beast. An embodiment laid firmly, consciously, upon the earth-life all around me. In Linda’s gaunt dignity I am reminded of the promised Child who was carried lightly upon her once, the fullness in His mother’s womb.

I see the sorrow of the man-Christ, the weight of His burden for Jerusalem, for humanity . . . and how the weight of us all has bowed the back of this beast of burden.

It is not unkind to ride a donkey. But mankind has ridden too far, too long, on the back of nature, and has never reached Jerusalem.

Linda is “only” a beast, a domesticated animal rummaging at the fence-edge, at the far edge of a long and well-lived life.

When she leans her frowzy head against me, Christ weeps with us both.


And I would give life back to her, if it were my gift to give.

Finding and Losing The American Soul-A Tribute and a Tribulation

Recently, during a personal writing retreat in Colorado, I was involved in a group book reviews event. (To each his/her own choice.)  I presented a book that I am currently inching through fervently, riveted by the thesis, knowing it is a pivotal theme for any resolution of our national crisis. And yes, we are in a crisis.

The book: The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders by Jacob Needleman.  It has garnered increasing acceptance and acclaim since publication in 2002. At that pivotal moment, barely post-9/11, he saw, with extraordinary clarity,  the state of our disunion. Wiser minds than mine have churned through Needleman's tight and elastic  (both, paradoxically) explorations and summations, and said "YES!"

His theme? It could be multi-labeled, for all his applications and intimations, but Needleman basically assert s that our nation has  lost an incalculable gift of national and international particularity in a world that needed—and heeded—our unique and God-given/driven view of nationhood . . . and that we can only recover it by heading back to the creation of this great primal experiment in governing. For its primal wisdom. By revisiting our founding fathers—applying to the pursuit a soul-set we've never really attained before—we  identify who and what each had become as a person at that historical "moment."

We finally comprehend what they agonized over individually, thrashed out together and, finally, contracted, that created "the greatest nation in history." We are invited into a startling frame of reference on both character-building and nation-building. We are offered a "dynamic" that is historic in its integrity and diametrically alien to our present fragmenting life as a national and world entity.

Also intricately woven into Needleman's chain of premises—as equally indispensable, and perhaps even more stirring—is the compelling life witness of Abraham Lincoln. A breakthrough concept of our evolving history would be impoverished, incomplete, without this remarkable man at the helm during a pivot point in history.  In a meditation on this president, the author describes, with a depth that can only be called visionary, the impact upon him of the photos of Lincoln. And because Abe is the "continuity" that was requisite to our survival as a nation, he is shouldered firmly into the pantheon of heretofore  idealized non-idols who conceived the original "American dream."

The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders is a masterpiece of historical weaving, unraveling, reweaving. Ergo, my gratitude for a landing place for my constant, gnawing concern for this nation, and the stunning relief I experienced in finding a rationale for this concern. Here I found a practical and prophetic analysis of what we have lost . . . and what we must admit to—and grieve for. And yearn to discern in order to become once again, to survive and thrive as a people.

After Resurrection

Photo from the public domain

The morning after my mother died, a sparrow crashed into our large picture window. I rushed outside and stood looking down at it—a rumpled little female sparrow, her dangling head and convulsed feet and splayed wings telling the truth. One more small heartache.  I bent and picked her up, Dead. Except, when I folded her gently into my shaky hand, I felt a slow, frail  thump against my fingers. Her heart had not yet quit. I could not lay her down, could not give her up. For several hours I cradled this little body, stroked the twisted neck, untangled the  claws, folded the wings. Sang to her . . . and walked blindly through my chores, holding her close.

My mother's heart had beat slowly like this, a small, persistent thud-bump, a metronome, for days beyond the dying of her self. Now I had to wait it out, walk it through again, for reasons that I could not formulate.

At the end of a long morning, birdie suddenly stirred against my palm. Her eyes flicked open, shut, open, staring at me. No fear, simply "Who are you?" I talked to her softly, ran my finger lightly down her neck, and felt the sudden strength that straightened it. At that moment, Life was the sparrow and me, breaking through a barrier. There was nothing else. She wriggled suddenly, and I turned her over, stroking her disheveled back. Holding her just loosely enough to give her wiggle-room.

We walked around the yard thus while she squirmed, cocked her head, surveyed the landscape. I took her into the kitchen, slipped her gently onto the table.

At first she simply huddled there. And then, in a beautiful slow motion dance, she began to practice the patterns learned as a hatchling. Doing push-ups, getting the kinks out, maybe. Strengthening her matchstick legs—those springboards to a good takeoff, which every flying critter needs. Up and down, toenails gripping the tablecloth. She swiveled around now, perfectly content to use my table, my kitchen, for her pre-flight maneuvers—stretching her wings, nodding her head elaborately, like a dancer receiving Bravo's.

Slowly I reached, cupped her in my hand again without her protest, and carried her out on the deck. And then I heard it, for the first time: from a nearby pepper tree, a frantic bird call. A sparrow, of course, over and over, a small, shattering lament. I knew. Birdie knew.

I put her on the railing. She shook herself heartily, leaned ahead and cocked her head forward, one last time, like a runner at the chocks. Off she went, dipping a bit precariously . . . and then, and then she soared. A grand flutter of leaves high in the pepper, a raucous duet. Home.

Resurrection. A trail of tears that comes to an "impossible" end—Life renewed at the end of end. And yes, my frail little mama was Home, I knew.

A strange way to say miracle. But we always need new language, new framing for the housing of our hopes. For the phrasing of our falling and our rising. We too soon forget. That's what has happened, too often, too ubiquitously, to Resurrection. It's too often buried in the tomb, having died a thousand-thousand deaths by the hands and words . . . and yes, the hollowing of messengers who speak by rote, who have never fallen, broken by life . . . and soared.

Before we make that final plunge into the unKnown—that precarious, breathless, extravagant  dip and rise upon sudden wings—we are granted many a rehearsal, many an encore. Learning to live fully and die often. Little deaths: a sudden snap between the synapses—ZAP!—and eternity breaks loose in the sludgy soul, the bloated brain, the brittle heart, and something new comes forth. A small, bare death, and a delicate cell of Truth is born, unfolds, flowers. An "Aha!" A new perception out of the muck of our last thought. The act of Genesis again. And ever again. Unending. That possibility which proves the impossibility of impossible.

Where we are called to live . . . in all the small and untidy and heartbreaking places.

Prayers with Wings

Dove in Flight-public domain

Oaks and a few struggling pines snug down into this pocket valley, offering refuge from the mid-day heat. Above the aged line of treetops, a barren hillock lunges upward, step by jagged step. From where I sit, this shady dent in the earth is the palm of God’s great hand.

Beyond me lies “the world” and all its machinations, its splendors, its complexities, its uncounted woes

A simplistic scenario, of course. Woe and splendor are played out here as elsewhere. But for the moment, I can settle back beneath the branches of this gnarly old behemoth and pretend we are sequestered here together.

We see beyond us the long, tangled-scrub heights, a fairly formidable barrier, and beyond that the great unknown where “the rest of the world lives and dies.” It is, for now, beyond our seeing.

Now let's imagine sudden wings upon our backs. We are able to rise above these “formidable” heights and see beyond. The heights have shrunk beneath us, and now breadth is our barrier. So much of a muchness! Too much to take in, to compress into a soul-scape sized to our perceiving.

And once again we are instantly equipped for this great transposition. We have only to lock our eyes upon some small, distant point . . . and we are there. It lies before us, demystified.

Now we see with unaccustomed clarity, close up, what once was simply an unknown―or a vague perplexity, a perhaps dangerous complexity, with attributes that distance had distorted. Now we know what is, and our response is subject to our sudden fuller vision.

Back and forth we go, from one compelling spot or scene to another, taking in the new landscape, perceiving what is in the context of all that lies around it―all we never really knew before.

And then, back once again in our familiar “pocket,” we are changed; we are spoiled for the old margins and myopias that so long constricted us. We will go out beyond the barriers of height and breadth, on the wing of expanded thought…on the Wing of Prayer. We will see, or more aptly, perceive, and we will know. And we will listen for the Word that puts it all in focus.

Vision . . . the point of this small, homely metaphor. Vision creates the kind of prayer that leaps all barriers of land and mind and spirit. And of course, prayer creates the kind of Vision that knows no barriers. It is this sacred synergy that draws us to that God-filled dimension, “a little lower than the angels,” where the real work of the Kingdom is done.

A great leap of faith indeed.

Vision . . . that insight/hindsight/foresight Begotten within us when we aren't gnawing on the bones of earth. We often have wings when we least expect and most need them—and now we feel the push and rush of wind beneath our aspirations. This is an uncommon-common gift of God, this perception. It is meant to be ordinary—which is why it is extraordinary.

Humanity is, by nature, bred to think beyond our small world-set, but it is our own questing thoughts (and those of others) that guide us. When God moves upon us, He infiltrates; it is a beautiful Awakening. Our responses to ordinary become, if we choose, extraordinary. Seeing beyond sight. Knowing beyond our staid or heated opinion. Our conjectures and mental-emotional particularities are confirmed or amended or shredded—with sudden and often compelling clarity. For the smallest reasons, by our reckoning. It is, perhaps, the difference between begrudging and believing. The schism between pouting and praying. It is meant to become our ordinary, this Second Sight—for greater reasons than we can imagine, by the reckoning of God. And this is the ground laid for prayer.

When this wonderfully real Gift comes, it comes at the point of sacrifice—our willing escape from that prison-of-mind which long constrained us. When we are touched by this costly commonality—unity—this hidden treasure released in us and by us, we are free. We become real. More real than we ever pretended to before. And everything looks different.

In our stumble of living, there is refuge from our raw responses. We are, when we plead, held in the palm of God’s great hand, to learn and to tell back what we now see.

Our prayers will have wings.