Category: Poetry

Sacred Scatteredness

Living by faith in such a time as this is perhaps more a radical exercise in lavish broadcast sowing than in precise and planned row by row planting.

Listen! A sower went out to sow.

Matthew 13:3b

As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains and being gathered together became one, so may your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom . . . 

from The Didache, First Century, CE

I decided to plant radish and lettuce seeds this week. Nothing out of the ordinary about that for me. Sheila saved seeds from last year and ‘tis the season. What makes this ordinary activity extraordinary this spring is the backdrop scenery of spiraling graphs and avalanching news reports and stumbling spirits as COVID-19 raids our individual, communal, and global lives. 

Often during crises, a sanctuary for troubled hearts is an actual church sanctuary. Many people in my Christian tradition as well as in other spiritual traditions find solace in gathering together in person to pray, worship, sing, laugh, and lament. We experience strength in numbers, hope in the embodied knowing that we are all in this together—

except the embodied knowing–meeting together in physical church buildings
–is not a safe option for everyone when a virus like COVID-19 is on the loose in our midst. 

So we are scattered. Sunday sanctuaries are empty. Many preachers are preaching to empty pews or peering as they pray through digital looking glasses to connect with their communities. 

I celebrate the persistent creativity of so many pastoral leaders who sought on Sunday to offer a hopeful word through social media resources. I am also aware of how isolated and even afraid some people feel as public health leaders urge us to flatten the Covid-19 curve through social distancing. (Even these terms are novel to our everyday vocabularies.) 

We are scattered. 

Seeing this sentence on a friend’s Facebook feed on Sunday sparked a memory for me. In 2011, then Dean Gail R. O’Day spoke to graduating Wake Forest University Master of Divinity students about sowing seeds. She based her remarks on The Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13. The image she lifted out from this ancient story has stayed with me:

A farmer, or an urban or suburban gardener, fills a bucket with seeds, reaches into the bucket and grabs a handful of seeds, and then scatters those seeds broadly and widely across the terrain. 

from Gail R. O’Day’s remarks at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity diploma ceremony, May 2011.

That commencement day, Dr. O’Day focused not on the soil in the parable (as so many interpreters do) but instead emphasized the radical generosity in the sower’s actions of broadcast sowing.

Jesus calls disciples to imagine the kingdom of God as  a landscape planted by a lavish, generous sower—who is unstinting in her broadcast sowing of seeds that may grow to new life.  The kingdom of God is shaped first by the unrelenting determination to sow seeds of new life . . . 

“Ministry,” Dr. O’Day said, “is the ultimate exercise in broadcast sowing.” The ministry we all have to offer is “to reach down into the store of gifts that we have received. . . and throw seeds of hope and possibility out into the world where they can grow to new life for all.”

We are scattered because of an unexpected virus. But we are not alone. We are connected, interwoven as a human community in ways we perhaps never before realized or imagined. What if there are equally unexpected possibilities sown into these days. What if our lives–our persistent faith and kindness during these days–are God’s seeds, God’s hope and grace, being broadcast across diverse media throughout our towns and cities.

I am praying in these uncertain days for those in our communities most vulnerable to the virus. Economic inequities and other vulnerabilities become even more accentuated in times like these. I pray, too, that God will give me the wisdom to look for and embody in my actions what Dr. O’Day called “the joyous surprise of an unexpected glimpse of the kingdom of God” during these days of scattered sacredness. 

Living by faith in such a time as this is perhaps more a radical exercise in lavish broadcast sowing than in precise and planned row by row planting. Maybe I will forego my usual radish and snow pea plumb lines and broadcast some seeds this spring. And as I do so, I will offer up to prayers for communal and global recovery and healing. 

Beneath Our Feet; In Our Hands

Jack Frost is curled up,
Napping in my bones.
Backyard grass crunches,
Frozen beneath my feet.
Summer sunflowers hibernate,
Silent in my heart.

Could it be—
When I hold this dried out husk
Springtime rests on wintertide fingertips?
Infinitesimal harbinger of arugula and radishes;
Holder of stories–fields plowed,
Dirt collected under ungloved fingernails.
Death—in autumn–
Birth–in spring–
When tender-strong seedlings
Unfurl from soil-stained shells,
And push up through the earth
Hungry for the sun—

Dirt weeps sometimes too,
And calls to us: We are stronger than we imagine.
Justice—in wilderness places—
Freedom—in a kernel—
An orchard redeemed—blossoming
Sweet succulent promises of life overflowing.

So we take our shoes off to
Absorb holy ground nutrients
Beneath our feet.
And we water with salt-seasoned tears
This garden we hold in our hand.

Shattering Snowglobes

Neither triumphal nor cozy, the Story is powerful and prophetic in its truth-telling.

Reflections for the First Week of Christmas

shattered globe
womb-water gushes out
mingles with sacrificed innocence
in war-wilderness streets
mama and daddy
smuggle their baby
across jagged borders
feet pierced by fractured pieces
of heart-pondered dreams
escape into broken reality
birth half-remembered blessings
beneath the light of a new moon

Anna and Simeon. Their faces map all that they have seen of life. Luke tells us Anna is 84 years old. People have come and gone in her life. Life and death have danced together and then danced some more as the earth has spun and spun again on its axis. Yes, Anna and Simeon have seen and heard and felt in their bones the hopes and fears of many years. Then, when Mary and Joseph appear in the Jerusalem temple with Jesus, Anna and Simeon burst forth in a Spirit-seasoned duet of praise.

After everything they have encountered over many decades—after all that has gone awry in their lives and world—how do they know that this stable-born child is “destined for the rising and falling of many in Israel” (Luke 2:34)? What recognition stirs in Simeon to release from his spirit letting-go lyrics about his own mortality, his world-weary soul settling into a serene certainty about the future as he looks into the untested face of Jesus? What story still to be sung does Anna hear in the rhythms of Mary’s pondering heart? What truth does she imagine that baby holding in those tender, tiny hands?

Perhaps many of us ask questions like these during that space betwixt-and-between December 25 and January 1. What does it mean—the Advent waiting and Christmas caroling? Because the stories we hear in the Gospels after Jesus’ birth and before Anna’s song of delight in the temple? They fracture nostalgic Christmas dreams.

The Gospel stories just after Christmas unfold as Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple to be blessed. The image is moving. Anna and Simeon have waited many years to see the sacred promise they glimpse in this child’s eyes. But we cannot delight in this hope-filled encounter in the temple—or see its prophetic truth—without journeying through the nightmarish readings for December 28.

In the Fifth Century, the Latin church instituted a day (observed on December 28 in the West) to remember and lament the Massacre of the Holy Innocents. The refrain of this remembrance? “A voice goes up in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children” (Matthew 2:13-23). Herod, wanting to protect his political power and fearing that the people would embrace Jesus as their king, orders the genocide of all baby boys under two years old. Jesus “grew and became strong”(Luke 2:40); Rachel wept (Matthew 2).

Rachel still weeps today, her inconsolable cries piercing our Christmas cradlesongs. Too many mamas and daddies today groan in travail for wounded sons and daughters. Too many children risk tender feet and hearts on streets littered by violence-shattered reflections of who they can—could—yearn to—be, if only…

The Gospel’s stories just after Jesus is born remind us. This is where Nativity happens—in an uncertain world where people face danger at the hands of death-dealing forces everyday—just as Mary and Joseph and Jesus did. Just as Rachel and her children did. This is where we see the live Nativity—in those half-remembered places just beyond the glow of the crèche where nightmares haunt innocent dreams.

So, the question again: what did it mean, the birth of the Christ child? What does it mean for our world today?

Perhaps Rachel’s counterpointing lament joins with Anna’s and Simeon’s duet and the three ancient voices together urge us to see the whole raw-edged arc of the Nativity. The snow globe is shattered, and Mary and Joseph and Jesus seek refuge in a real and dangerous world. Neither triumphal nor cozy, the Story is powerful and prophetic in its truth-telling. And this unabridged Nativity tale is relentless in calling us—the body of Christ—to break through life-limiting membranes to birth anew each day God’s grace and peace.