GLORY THAT OOZES AND SEEPS

“The heavens declare the glory of God;

The skies proclaim the work of His hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

 Night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language

Where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,

Their words to the ends of the world.”

Psalm 19:1-4

Once I was a mean Freshman English teacher who made her students memorize poetry.  One of the poets I pushed the most was Gerard Manley Hopkins, a nineteenth-century Jesuit priest. His poetry reveals his intense love for nature, obviously inspired by his ravenous hunger for God, and is characterized by a delightfully unique and highly innovative structure.  I love his subtlety: he could fashion a bunch of words into an intricately stylized sonnet without letting his readers ever know he had accomplished such a literary feat until one decided to take it apart and analyze its meter.  That, to me, is true humility! It’s like an opera diva who is totally contented to sing in her shower. To express his feelings about the pervasiveness of God’s glory, he used words like “bleared,” “smeared,” “oozed,” and “smudged”—oddly ordinary, obliquely poetic, and some might even call too earthy or vulgar.  To me they were poignantly aromatic, spicy, tantalizing, and just plain delicious.

            He couldn’t help it! He was eaten up with revealing God’s handiwork.  I really get that because since I was just a little girl, I have loved reading and writing poetry.  I am magnetically drawn to the Psalms and next to Jesus, I love David above all other men in the Bible.

            When earth turns a page and suddenly changes chapters, I can hardly contain myself.  I dream about poetry and wake up spouting rhythm and rhyme.  I can hardly finish brushing my teeth before I grab the nearest scrap of paper and start scribbling.

Today is October 1, and it happened again. On my porch, drinking my coffee—

here came a parade of words to invade my devotional time. Literarily, they are nothing special; I have written dozens of others that I had rather share with you.  But I was so glad to remember that I am a poet who, like Hopkins and David, can’t help myself.  It’s been a long, hot, dry spell; I had begun to think I had lost the feel.  So, I offer you with Hopkinesque humility, my verses welcoming autumn.

The sun has tinted the shadowed sky blue;

Acorns clatter down tin roofs.

There’s no place else I’d rather be

In this world but right here, in truth.

A hummingbird sips as the train rumbles by;

Summer’s pink blossoms hang on.

My inner man is bathed in the Word

That I feasted upon at dawn.

A squirrel hides his treasures for winter;

In the pasture black mama cow bellows.

Autumn silently surrounds me

Preparing its oranges and yellows.

Stifling August is finally a memory;

Blustery gales yet to come.

While birdsong and blanket on the porch in October

Threaten to make me a bum!

            Hopkins was right.  God’s glory oozes out, smears itself everywhere.  God is so stuffed with Glory that it constantly seeps out of all creation: out of the autumn trees in the gypsy adornment of fiery foliage; out of the birds in pied feathers and lilting song; out of the bare, brown dirt in pink and purple petals; out of me in poetry; out of you in music.

TRAMPLING THE SOUR GRAPES

“I thank my God every time I remember you.”  Philippians 1:3

W

hen I meditate on my cherished past experiences that I will very likely never get to repeat, I realize two important truths:  The first is that what I am looking at in the picture, whether it is an actual photograph I can hold in my hand or just a vivid sketch on the palette of my memory that I see with my mind’s eye, was just the first time I did that thing.  That moment frozen by the lens was just the beginning of the full experience.  Stop reading and just think about this a minute. 

 If you are like me, your favorite memories have been revisited over and over again in your mind.  I have rekissed my husband at the altar, rewalked the trails, reswum the oceans, retraveled the roads, re-eaten the meals, replayed the games, reskiied the slopes, rediscovered the waterfalls, reforded the streams, reheld my brand new babies for the first time, rerocked them and reread to them in the big, green recliner, and reheard each of my grandchildren say their first “Nana” many, many times.  Who knows how much I have colored the actual occurrences, but who cares?  Who’s to know?  As far as I’m concerned, the memory is more important than the reality, because the memory, not the real thing, is what travels companionably with me through the years. And that’s just the first important truth.

 Not only can we never lose the best part of all of our past experiences, we have also been forever affected, somehow eternally changed by each one of them.  By our experiences we have grown into who we have become.  So, this is another way we didn’t just eat those times like food that left us after a few hours: they are still a part of us, and not just when we remember them.  I believe that my mind that thinks and my heart that feels are for the most part composed of what I have taken with me from all those experiences.  I learned to think these thoughts in the way that I think them, to feel these emotions in the ways that I feel them because of all of my experiences.  These times whose loss I might be tempted to grieve are really not lost.  I am a walking reservoir of them, in more ways than one.  

We have no reason to believe that God, who has been faithfully growing us through the past, has plans to quit doing that now.  This might be a stiller, less exotic season, but I am confident, and I hope you are too, that God’s resources are not limited to the exotic and the expensive.

THE SOUR GRAPES MYTH

“I thank my God every time I remember you.”  Philippians 1:3

           

 I get the feeling when I read this verse that Paul enjoyed remembering these Christian friends in Philippi. He seemed to think of them with deep longing but still to be able to rest in the comfort of his memories. He didn’t seem in any way haunted or saddened by remembering them, even though he was writing this letter from prison in faraway Rome and had no guarantee that he would ever see them again to take up making more memories with these he loved so well.

            But this isn’t the way remembering goes always.  Some people hate remembering.

Are you in a season of life when, because of a leanness of finances or health, you can’t do some of the things you used to do?  Maybe you’ve lived a life of traveling here and there, seeing new places and experiencing a periodic freshness of vision that so often comes with vacating the norm and heading out for places unknown.  Maybe you cherish a history of hiking, mountain climbing, running marathons; perhaps your bookshelves are full of photo albums testifying to grand adventures and exotic experiences that you can, for one reason or another, no longer afford.  Even worse, maybe you have reached a place where you must realize that more adventures like these are not just up ahead around some foreseeable bend, but must truly now be tucked away and entrusted  into the arms of memory.

            Although we might at first feel discouraged, sad, even depressed at such a realization, I am beginning to understand that there is another way to approach such a seemingly sad situation with a certain kind of joy.  In fact, I am inclined to identify this kind of camouflaged joy as what Nehemiah meant by “the joy of the Lord.”

            There are two ways to approach those photo albums of times gone by. 

Our Enemy wants us to choose to leave them on the shelf and assign them to the dust.  He wants us to dread seeing evidence of “better” days and brighter moments, since now we are on this other side, looking at life in its plain, vanilla dullness with no chocolate anywhere on the horizon.  A dramatized, Hollywood version of what is happening to us might filter in tragic tones of doom and color the landscape in the somberness of dull, parched hues: a life that’s reached a dead-end road, a heart that is consigned to the pitiful existence of the haunting memories of beautiful fulfillment, eyes that strain for bygone inspiration that is getting smaller and smaller on the horizon.  This is the attitude that if I can’t still have it, it’s just too sad to think about.  Remembering only rips open the wounds. 

But there is another way to think about where we are now in relation to where we used to be.  If we think that the only good of all those sweet times came when they were actually happening, then of course we will bemoan having lost them.  But if we consider that such an idea is a lie of the devil, we might be able to open our minds to a different, clearer, truer way of thinking. 

It is true that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, (although that axiom has always made better sense to me when you turn it around and say, “You can’t eat your cake and have it too” because right up until the time you eat the cake, you actually do still have it!) This might very well be true for cakes, but what we’re talking about here is not cake.  Memories are not digestible things that go into our systems on one end and get spat out of the other end, like cake.  The places we have been, the wonders we have seen, the adventures we have experienced entered into our lives and stayed!  We didn’t just go there, do that, and then lose it all when we left.

God’s truth, as opposed to the devil’s lie, is that the highlights of our lives are not experiences that came and went.  We have no reason to mourn their loss. In a very real sense, the best of those times is yet to come.

 Just as age ferments wine into its prime, so does God use our past to enrich our future. We don’t have to let our sweet memories ferment into sour grapes.