A Christmas Poem

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

There is a star above us,

merely one of a million-million glories

that absorb our awed perception.

But it flowers on our soul’s horizon

like a new-made moon, or the

primal  dawn of Truth—a singularity 

we may abandon all to follow.

We may camp here, shivering at the

edge of our heart’s own minor galaxy—

huddled suddenly against a star-strewn

hillside, lambs curled silently around

our feet. We will be shepherded;

we will hear the unvoiced universe

burst open and regather, singing

out—a counterpoint, a psalming.

A compline. Oh, an ecstasy of angels!

Proclaiming the Unknown God

Photo by Judith's daughter on a trip to Athens

On one of his never-easy missionary journeys, Paul was left in Athens, waiting for his companions. He was not prone to "wait" placidly. Athens was a hub city, a volatile mix of the fortunes and misfortunes of humanity. A hub, also, of gossip. And Paul could be expected to comment on his perception of the spiritual pot luck—the "wealth" of gods available for the pickin,' and well-displayed at the Areopagus on Mars Hill. In the midst of the panoply, he noted an empty altar with a stark "non-identity": TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Here was his opportunity to Name that unnamed God. And he did, to decidedly mixed reactions!

In this world despoiled by violence and hatred, wrenching poverty, shallowness, and rampant greed, we come face to face with this Unknown God—Whom we have come to know, and Whom we have chosen to serve: The eternal I AM …through Jesus, the Christ.

How do we faithfully serve a Savior whom we cannot “see,” who is hidden from the eyes of the world—this Eternal Being who straddles the universe even as He binds up our battered hearts?

How do we proclaim Him to a world “gone insane” with its various fratricides? It begins best with prayer. Always, with prayer, before we even open our mouths. Do we even know how to pray for (truly, against) such an unending tsunami of grief and horror as we see beyond and around us?

Like the disciples who gathered around Him, we can only say, “Lord, teach us….”

The Lord’s Prayer, the "Our Father..." is a good starting point. It is fairly radical. It leaves our own small perceptions and anticipations (or lack of them) behind and steps up to a new concept—a new conception, perhaps. It joins us with Him in seeing what we cannot fathom down here in the trenches. After all, HE prayed it to us, for us, from where He “stood!”

I call it, for lack of a better term, a Genesis Prayer. Prayer that creates “something out of nothing,” that separates Light from darkness, that can only begin where He begins (not in our own “mind-set”), and end where He “comes down.” Whether we’re praying for a person or a nation, a disaster or a blessing, we can only see the “tip of the iceberg” unless/until we have invaded the Kingdom for a larger vision. What we see, of course, has less to do with our spiritual giftedness than His yearning to bring us alongside to help Him do the heavy lifting. The yoke is fully weighted upon Him and rests lightly across our soul. We only have to listen.

When we pray this way, against the currents, so to speak, we are often on uncharted ground. But it is firm beneath us. We have only to follow the Spirit’s leading. Praying with Him, stumbling, perhaps, into prayer unformed before the very saying of it, our words teaching us, thought by thought, we learn as we go. We witness this only inwardly, at first, savoring the wonder of new comprehension. But soon or late, it begins to seep out through our spirit’s pores—like an invisible language—and becomes now an articulation, a quiet testimony to a Savior who reigns in the depths of chaos and the heights of Heaven. Our confidence lies in His “confiding in us.” We speak from this new understanding, and sometimes we speak words that whisper “Genesis!”

Like the words of Paul, who knew exactly what God had to say when he stood before those blank Athenian faces. From the unknown god to the suddenly knowable One, the I AM revealed. Out of darkness, Light.                                           

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.

The Elephants in Our Living Room, Part 3

Elephant Odyssey at the San Diego Zoo

Part Three of a Four-Part Post

A world without bees and butterflies, dancing flower to flower? It's happening.

Big Chem brews the dark magic that kills the weeds that kill the soil that kills the blooms that feed these tiny grace-notes. This is the house that Chem built.

Chemicals and escalating diseases and pests―and God knows what else―are the death of them.

There is no compensation for the demise of the honeybee. Or the Monarch, our king of butterflies, whose milkweed staple has been largely eradicated. Or, indeed, the great striped cat, pattern-perfect in its timeless life-rhythm. Or . . . in a lovely-strange, impossible sense, the elegant "caprice" that is a dolphin―so peculiarly akin to the lumbering grace of its brother, elephant. Immutable diversity, not a bone alike. But ah, such amazing tenderness; such wisdom . . . such humanness.

So unbelievably akin to us. Our shadow selves.

A frenzy of bees gone insane? A shark drowning in its own life-home-waters, fins hacked off for a few bowls of soup? The horns of a rhino ground for a useless tonic? This is a real insanity, a malignancy that metastasizes daily. The list goes on and on, swells and feeds and breeds. Different rationales, varying methods, one over-arcing mindset: Gain. Prospering. At any cost to environment and ultimately, life on earth.

Most of us, in our once-blessed LaLaLand, are not directly guilty. But by neglect we harbor the unconscionable among us―say, ivory dealers who, with virtual impunity (through native poachers) are steadily slaughtering earth's timeless herds―nearly a hundred a day, official estimate!* And what of those within our nation's boundaries who willfully trade with or provide transport for certain foreign fishing industries―despite their well-known brutality. Supporting the agonizing deaths of great fish―to stoke frivolous appetites far beyond our shores! Where is the anger at such desecration?

A forfeiture that too often comes with nothing more than a "Tsk!" or a woeful shake of head. The world is dying of Tsk!.

All this, and more―infinitely more―is transacted daily from our shores with our implied "consent." With our consent―us, enlightened America? The land of the free and the brave?

Where are the brave hiding out? God bless the burgeoning movements, the NGO's and enviro-activists, and others who carry their placards and call out our spineless ways. But they are too few, spread thin among the battlefields of this age's travesties.

We in the background of this legacy of death-based greed go on with our undeniably busy lives with little thought for such atrocities . . . offering little-to-no demand for reproach and restriction. It simply doesn't fit into the needs, the mindsets of our already complicated state of being. But by this unawareness, or passivity, or disengagement, we allow evil to triumph. And yes, our earth's historic die-off is largely that. A historic betrayal indeed.

Why the disconnect? Because we do not care enough to see enough to do enough? To say "STOP!"?         

To find a way to do "STOP!"?

to be continued...

The Elephants in Our Living Room, Part 2

Photo in the Public Domain from The Dodo.com

Part Two of a Four-Part Post

A couple of years back, late summer, Southern California in unending drought:

The bees searched my shriveling yard day after day for fresh blossoms. Not speaking bee, I couldn't explain this dearth to them. Finally, one-overheated morning, and with an undeniably overheated heart, I fed them―from shallow pans laid out across the patio. Each container was dribbled with thin tides of sweet-water brew, dotted and criss-crossed with small rocks and gnarly twigs for landing.

They came, these sleekly shaggy little refugees. A few, and more. And more. Day after day they met me at the back door, waiting. Learning me, knowing. They circled me in a halo, walked my skin, tangled in my hair, sometimes nibbled me―a slight tickle, perhaps to see if I were made of sugar. They never "bit the hand that fed them." And around the rims of each pan they clustered and waited. Waited for life.

For more than a few days, it was like this―calm enough, and almost routine. Something of a fairy tale, a small and intimate cross-species undertaking-understanding. One bee hovered on the tip of my finger, and I whispered to it, consoled it, watched its tiny  mandibles twitch, as if wringing its hands in telling of its hunger.

Somehow, strangely, I was mama, and these, my diminutive family. And a shared grief.

But then the newbie's suddenly showed up. The word had spread. Wave after wave of bees, several varieties. It was bedlam. Oh, what was wrong with them? They fought, climbed savagely over each other, drowned in the sparse quarter-inch of brew, a tide of floating bodies―or jerked through the air and dropped to the pavement in a witless frenzy  . . .spinning, twitching until their lifeless little selves were spent.

They came to me in extremis. Beyond feeding. As suddenly as it began, it ended. It had to. I gathered up my pans and my pain.

Strangely, a year later, bees returned―as if their clan had been told the story. A few, at first, scoping the scene, I guess. Never many, and not for long, but they greeted me once more beyond the door, circled me . . . with hope and hunger. I stood in silence. And left, and left them hungry. A day or two of dwindling and it was over.

The ache in my guts and soul have never dimmed. I had become, in my well-meant ignorance, a part of their death-dance. Their plaint still echoes through me like a buzz-saw in an emptied room, describing absence.

And so I have a hive―oh, a wealth of flourishing hives!―back here behind my eyes, anchored in field after field of clover.

to be continued....

A Prayer for Artists

Photo by Judith Deem Dupree

Originally posted on the Ruminate Magazine Blog on 20 December 2013

Dear Father Creator, you have created within us a yearning that is never fully satisfied, a longing that leaves us ever hungry. A spaciousness that is often cramped by life. Sorrow unhealed and joy beyond describing. It is You, oh Holy One, author and crafter of Life, Whom we seek—Whom we forever hide from and always search for beyond our heart’s own rubble and the world’s afflictions.

Find us, where we hide. Coax our wizened souls out of the half-dark of our own thoughts. Grant us that inner Sabbath which was wrapped in the flesh and timeless consciousness of Your beloved Son.

Teach us, oh Holy One, with the fine probe of Your Thought, that our very neurons will hum with the inner Life that Your Spirit solely bestows. In Him Who came in Your Name, solely for Your purpose, we see the fluidity, the audacity, the precocity of that hidden Life! Truly, we are meant to stand in the flow of such a steady and illimitable understanding. This is Your promise . . . genesis and fulfillment.

This, this is our Genesis—to live in that endless Creation which flows from your heart. To be wrapped in the warp and weave, the seamless robe of Your Son. To lay our smallness against His brokenness, and grow large with His humility, great with His passion and compassion, timeless with His understanding. When we see more wholly, the gifts of Your imagining will become—will engender and struggle up within our own soul’s soil. We will not be afraid of life, nor death. Our pulse will hum with Your artistry and purpose.

Here, Father—hear my own plea for my own completion: Oh, grasp my reluctant hand, and draw me into Rest! I pledge to forfeit all my heap of sin and sorrow, and to become a part of the Word spoken, an image of the Image of the Living Christ. Draw my portrait as You see it. Out of this great bestowal I choose to live and move and have my being. Cloaked in this comprehension, I will to walk into the world again, readied for life. Readied for giving more than is mine, purposed to evolve and evoke and to recreate Life in His Image, and yearning with your Father-heart over the broken earth.

Amen.