Of Joy (or, Beyond the Chicken)

Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”

"If you knew the gift of God, 

and who it is that is saying to you, 

'Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, 

and he would have given you living water ... 

a spring of water welling up to eternal life."  (John 4)

There's a life beyond the chicken.  And all the guilt.

It took me a long while to realize it.  (It's hard to get over ugly scenes or messes.  Yes.  Yes, it is.  It takes time.  And a measure of grace large enough to bathe in hourly.)  So, I heard a conversation the other day, and it's what the topic wasn't about that matters.  (It wasn't about guilt.)  It started out something like this:

"It gives me pleasure, daughter, when you trust Me with the thing that gives you joy."

(pause)

"Father?"

"Your delight is found in Me.  I am your joy.  Drink and be satisfied."

(Was it a command?  No, it was an invitation - adorned for one's heart. Oh What to do now.)

"Literally?  You mean literally to drink of you, from you?"

"Yes, child, quite literally."

"Father, forgive me for not drinking.  You mean for me to come to You."

"Yes, literally."

"To be satisfied?"

"Yes, satisfied."

(Oh, most definitely, and Most Really.) 

Do you notice what is absent in this conversation?  It's what drew me up short.  It's so "other" and so different than where I usually track on my own.  You see, there is no mention of chickens.  Or beams.  Or condemnation.  Not a nary bit.  And I must wonder why there is none of it.  I'm beginning to suspect something else is the point:  It's not our guilt that the Lord is most concerned about.  Yes, he graciously pays for it, our debt; he removes it from our souls. Quite literally.  He does it.  Because it is a necessary removal.   A washing and cleansing of the best sort which speaks of who He is (holy Abba). And because it gets in the way of something more, he removes it.

Do we understand that it's about far more?  Far, far more. Can we see (pause, and read slowly):  It is for Joy that he endured so much.  (Hebrews 12:1-2).  A particular joy.  Do we have any idea of what sort?  Shh, Listen.  I can hear one coming, coming near, with The Invitation.  It's written, elegantly, beautifully and simply, "Come."  To a wedding.  And a feast.  It's a union.  Of rich, deep Joy.  It's where our life and his own intersect.  It's where we ought dwell, where our roots sink deepest and best.  Into Joy.  It's where longing and desire meet together expectantly, where mercy and truth kiss each other, tenderly.  It's how we are made well.  Rooted in His love, and having been rooted there, Joy grows and we are made strong.  Is this what Jesus meant when he said, "Come to me all those who labor and are heavy laden"? (That is, to those who are weary and pause long enough to admit it is that way, every day.)  We're to come.  And meet with promise.

 So, what do I do with such an Invitation?  (It is a very personal thing, that which we do.)


"The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song."  (Psalm 28)

A Thing Most Real

Coming ~ responding to Invitation ~ is never an abstraction.  It's a very real act, and a very real place.  A literal dressage and attire with which we come tells something of who we are and where we have been. Are we in jeans and t-shirts or a promenade gown?  Does it matter?  Do we come clutching things like Memories and Joys already spent, or Pain and Sorrows overgrown? Perhaps what really matters is that The Invitation has been sent, and now we are here.  

In Memoriam

It happened six years ago, this week.   I ran over a chicken. Yes, we were mortified ~ Mother in the proverbial sense, and Chicken quite literally.  (The kids thought it was pretty cool, disgusting and a bit adventurous.  After all, something actually happened on our quiet little-country hilltop.) Here's how it all happened.  But indulge me, won't you? And let us begin at the end.  For that's where it happened.  The end of the pen, or its backside.  Tail feathers and all.   After moving the large chicken pen by tractor, by chaining it and dragging it forward, one of the meat birds lay wedged beneath the bottom beam on the backside with its neck doing a goofy flip-flop sort of thing.  Imagine my consternation.  Horror or horrors.  It was not supposed to happen.  And I was responsible.  I was driving the tractor.  While glancing over my shoulder as the pen slowly crept forward, I had watched the many little fowl scatter here and there.  I was optimistic.  (In this story, please allow me to admit a form of gross negligence, or, in other words, Denial of risk.) The children watched as Mother pulled the load forward. In short, poor chicken didn't turn out well.  The pull just was not slow enough for the little gal.  And I was the dumb-head who forgot to adjust the throttle back to its lowest position. Sure, the gears were set just fine, but the throttle, well - minor detail.  Right? (No!) She would have gladly waited for a more glorious day, the day when the rest of her flock flapped their wings and leaped into "De crock."  Voila. (Seriously, isn't that how it works?) At this point, credit must be given to my then 9-year-old son who was eager and more than willing to pull the squashed fowl from beneath the pen, using the garden hoe while Mom precariously bounced upon the handle of a shovel attempting to lift the beam from the bird.  What a thing to write about.  Seriously.  Why can't I just forget about it?  Gosh, how do you ever forget such a thing?!!  It doesn't help when her remains lie in the bottom of the third turn of the kids' dirt kart track.  (The mud was soft, easy digging.  It was, well, unceremonious.) But in her honor, that turn shall forever be called The Chicken Turn. Tomorrow?  Well, let's see.  Tomorrow shall become "Ode to Miss Chicken."

The Lifted Veil

"But their minds were hardened. For to this day ... that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away ...  But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.  Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit."

 (Paul the Apostle - to the Corinthians)

Join me, won't you, in beholding the glory of the Lord?  

Of Beholding

 "The eye is the lamp of the body."

(Jesus speaking - Matthew 6)

A blind woman runs her fingers across the hem of her dress and notices a tear.  She slips her hand over the smooth edge of a plate on which spring lettuce and colorful ripe tomatoes are held; she notices a chip in the porcelain.  She has beheld, if only by touch.

But she has yet to behold the colorful food.

Or maybe she glances the delicate leafs and cold, soft succulent tomatoes with the tips of her fingers, and she lifts them to her tongue and tastes, with heightened sensitivity, the squish of the fruit in her mouth.  Yes, she has beheld.  Truly, has she not? Maybe with limitation, but she has seen much.

The eye.
A lamp.
Of the body.

Our bodies quiver at sensations.  We can behold or perceive any number of ways.  So why does Jesus point us to this metaphor of eye is the lamp?

The EYE has everything to do with THINGS, a myriad of things, both material and immaterial, and the function of beholding them.  Receiving them into ourselves.  Another way to say it is the eye has everything to do with the Nouns in our lives - the people, the places, the things or ideas that surround us and touch us - or we them - daily.  In other words, our eyes and our surroundings, whether they be material or ideological, are deeply relational, whether we mean for them to be or not.

And like any relationship with which we engage, we are altered by degrees.

Jesus has a far superior way of talking about all of this. Read with me, won't you?

"So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness."

Imagine for a single moment, a human light bulb.  Seriously.  Sounds ridiculous, I agree.  But, by contrast, imagine a human body without light.  (What do you see?)  I know what I see.  I see death.  A casket with a man.  Or a woman.  Expired.  Lights out. 

Or a young boy who has lost hope, no spark or light shines from his eyes, his soul.  Or a young woman who sits despondently on a park bench at the center of a lazy town, alone.  I see a one-year-old who is held securely in the arms of her foster father, just newly received into their loving home.  She has yet to behold (and to trust) the love embracing her.  She lacks expression.  No light.  No smiles.  Only a weariness that no baby girl ought to know.  She wears the look of care worn by a 25-year-old with three kids and no husband, not of an infant.  What has happened?  I don't know what happened to one so young, but today I watch her play and her sweetness is adorable.  She's a happy preschooler today, she smiles freely (a bit shyly, but easily grins) and brings so much joy to me every time I visit with her family.  No more sadness.  None like before.

 Most of us have functioning vision.  But seeing, do we ever see?  And seeing, what do we see? 

 I have an under-developed sense of concrete perception, because by temperament and by habit, I "focus" on abstracts versus concrete objects.  This means I do not properly see my environment unless I am deliberately focusing on it, thinking about its details, such as, the serrated leaf on a beech nut tree, or the scurry of an ant across the dry mulch around the lilies just outside my window.  I have to focus, or attend, to really perceive a thing.  For example, my mind right now is focused on the abstraction of vision, not the physical components of the eye.  I am focused on making words appear on a screen, but even that has little to do with the physical pecking at the alphabet in front of me.  It's about the idea.  So, I am attending my nouns, but not concretely.  Until just this moment I was unaware of the firmness of the old oak teacher's chair upholding me, and the pressure of my right elbow on the edge of my desk, antique and finished in provincial-colonial stain.  Or, perhaps, later if I am not attending, I will miss the breeze of this warm summer day moving deliciously across my face and arms.  Yes, sensory vision.  It richly feeds our souls.  

A healthy eye.  What does this mean? The answer is tucked in this clause, "your whole body will be full of light."  And the assertion that follows, " ... but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness."

 What makes our body full of darkness (and decay)?

A bad eye.

The stuff we perceive sneaks past our retinas and leaps down into our souls, torquing our hearts if we are not careful.  Or it fills us with strength in time of need.  But, if it's torquing our souls, then where lies the trouble?  

Or another way to ask it: What makes the eye bad?  I suspect that it's something that a trip to your local optometrist can't do a thing about.  It's not glaucoma, or allergies, or cataracts, or retinal detachment or macular pucker (whatever that is, it's not that.)

A bad eye (or a good eye) has EVERYTHING to do with the THING we behold, and not just our beholding a thing, but the manner in which we take it into our souls and particularly our perception of a thing and the naming of it.  In fact, a bad eye vs. a healthy eye is fundamentally a linguistic problem, and more specifically, a Truth problem.  That may sound crazy-odd, but without language, a truth cannot be fully apprehended.  We cannot taste, feel, smell, listen, or see any thing with particular meaning unless we can name it, and in naming, we touch the smooth skin of the plum; we hear the pounding waves of a high tide; we smell the salty air; and watch the soaring eagle.   

Of beholding, we can do something about it, at least, if the eye is working normally and the brain is processing information as it should.  Beholding is all about the act.  It IS the observing, the attending, the being still and taking time to really see a thing (like the hundreds of tiny petals on a Queen Anne's lace growing in a grassy field or along the untrimmed edge of a country lane.  Or the contemplation that love is like a balmy kiss on a cool brow).

Beholding.

The other part of beholding uses the function of our PERCEPTION of the thing itself, and this is another matter entirely, differing from the manner (physiologically, speaking).  Perception moves us beyond the act into the linguistic-moral mode, the mode that discerns fact from fiction; truth from error; forgiveness from vengeance; love from hate; justice from perversion; or, discerns whether it's the time to cast away stones or the time to gather stones; the time to embrace from the time to refrain; the time to laugh from the time to weep.

I can see the thing, but can I comprehend the beauty - or the truth?  I can see the hole in the tale pipe, right?  I can smell the smoke on the evening breeze.  I can hear the crying of the child.  I can feel the balmy kiss.  But what do they mean? Is my body filled with confusion - or darkness?  Or light?  What have I beheld up to this point?  (Do I have a choice?)

"If then the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness."  (That's how Jesus said it).   

I can feel the pain of a gash on my foot, or the fissure left in my soul, long and old.  I can attend to the sounds of a whispering, echoing condemnation.  Or I can behold the words of love from a friend, knowing it's okay for once to perceive rightly just how good they are and okay to drink in like honey from a comb, and, so, brightening the face, giving light to the eyes, dispelling darkness.  You see, Jesus over time, in beautiful settings, heals perception.  All those wrong-headed things we've beheld in sinful places, all those things that make dense and opaque our bodies with darkness, Jesus replaces with himself -- the Truth.

Have we beheld Him? The person as truth, the Truth - an abstract no more - deeply relational. 

It reminds me of a blind man and something Jesus did for him one day.  

The fellow, blind as a stone, yet perceiving through his other senses, sat in a public place.  He heard the crowd gathering.  He understood what his eyes could not. He cried loudly:

"Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"

Do you see him?  Can you hear him?  Lots of people pushing, tugging, elbowing, some telling him to shush.  But, he just wouldn't.  He rightly perceived his condition and the Master.  He needed help.  He cried out, unashamed.  What did Jesus do?  He responded.  He called the man to himself and fixed his own holy eyes on the blind beggar, and he proclaimed:

"Go your way, your faith has made you well." 

Do we see?  Jesus saw.  He saw the man's vision ~ his faith, the ability to see what others could not, and the man, exerting himself with all his strength toward another man, Jesus, who bid him come, the man went in faith and beheld Jesus.  

It changed his life forever.

Important Things (or, of things holy)

It is important to skip small rocks across a pond, to climb a hill on all four, stand up tall and sing a song.  It is important to plant hydrangeas and pansies, and in a meadow pick daisies.  It is important to drink the sun in a raspberry patch, to scoop into your mouth red or black.  It is important to barefoot tread in cool mud, along laughing, gurgling streams; to climb a tree, rough skinned, it is important to scrape your knee.  It is important to heal the skin, important for the sin.  It is important to take some time, important to be well, important to hear it is okay, and important to believe. It is important to gather a happy toddler into your arms, and important to hold a crying daughter.   It is important to rub the back of a sleeping boy and hug him still when he’s a man.  It is important to bake biscotti and serve iced tea, to care for the elderly; to swab a brow with furrows tilled on aged face and heart. It is important to gently touch her traveled feet, to massage with love, with lightest balm and richest lavender, what toil calloused, to gaze into her face, to watch silent words spill like flickering sunbeams from blue eyes, to know a grandmother at the end.  It is important to dig a grave for your dog when he is done, and it is important to snuggle a kitten who was born. It is important to bow in worship, important to fall in adoration, prone upon the dirt. It is important to let yourself be gathered up like a basket of blossoms and held near, treasured for being, for simply being.  It is important to feel the brush of friendship upon your cheek, it is important to let it touch your heart.  It is important to sit with a friend, for hours immeasurable and meandering talks, until long shadows from a retiring sun gather like piles of quilts, reminding we are snug and warm, and tomorrow’s hope will come again.   It is important to write to live well; it is important to breathe to sing the anthem well, to sing what is worth singing.  It is important to dance with hair unfurled, to twirl amidst the holy.  It is important to embrace the person embracing, to know you touch the image of God, in part.  So many things important, so many things holy, so much to ponder, for which to give thanks. Oh, come with me, we'll pull up a bit of earth and lie down flat and worship a little while longer.

Reflections of Mercy: Psalm 23

"Surely Goodness and Mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."  (Ps. 23)

Goodness and Mercy are literal things, like sunshine falling unexpectedly across the living room floor.  Like the brush of a kiss on a sleeping face.  Like silk wrapped around a sorrowing wound.  Goodness and Mercy, waters from God, rush in us, through us, around us.  Gathering droplets, Mercyfalls down like rain. It covers the morning earth, and we step onto the grass, leaving barefooted prints.  Fears, regrets and sorrows of sins grown old, wash from our skin. Their voices blend into a harmony, calling, softly, then loudly, like rolling foam beneath the falls, laughing, joyfully speaking, "Yes, my Dear, the water's clear and it's clean; take a plunge, and when you step away, let its Beauty flow from your soul."

The Lady rose - a young maiden regaled in gowns that now lay aside upon the bank of  dense laurel.  She stood in silence.  Her head bare and hair unfurled, with dark, bright eyes she looked deeply into an azure sky. Translucent silk falling, cascading around her shoulders, down to her knees, swayed softly against the water's surface.  She stepped further, carefully into the fresh natural pool, until her waist grew dim.  The pale gown rippled gently, swirling downward with the tension of a sequenced bodice, jewels glittering in the morning light.  She stirred slightly and then dipped beneath the dark water's surface; upon her rising, the water broke apart, rushing-baptizing, and returning into the emerald calm.  She stood calmly, watching once more.  Turning a hidden face toward the earthen jar upon the bank, she waded back, and kneeling, she lifted and dipped it into the pool, raised it over her head and let fall the spring-tide stream upon her lightly clothed skin. Silence enshrouded her bathing ritual and hung upon the morning air like honeysuckle.  She preferred the stillness of early morning, the mists rising from the hidden pools of the forest.  The seclusion of the hemlocks and the wildness of delicate blossoms and tender ferns drew her there repeatedly.