wendell.berry.sings.love.

On Earth Day: Song in a Year of Catastrophe

I began to be followed by a voice saying:
“It can’t last. It can’t last.
Harden yourself. Harden yourself.
Be ready. Be ready.”

“Go look under the leaves,”
it said, “for what is living there
is long dead in your tongue.”
And it said, “Put your hands
Into the earth. Live close
To the ground. Learn the darkness.
Gather round you all
The things that you love, name
Their names, prepare
To lose them. It will be
As if all you know were turned
Around within your body.”

And I went and put my hands
Into the ground, and they took root
And grew into a season’s harvest.
I looked behind the veil
Of the leaves, and heard voices
That I knew had been dead
In my tongue years before my birth.
I learned the dark.

And still the voice stayed with me.
Waking in the early mornings,
I could hear it, like a bird
Bemused among the leaves,
A mockingbird idly singing
In the autumn of catastrophe:

“Be ready. Be ready.
Harden yourself. Harden yourself.”

And I hear the sound
Of a great engine pounding
In the air, and a voice asking:
“Change or slavery?
Hardship or slavery?”
And voices answering:
“Slavery! Slavery!”
And I was afraid, loving
What I knew would be lost.

Then the voice following me said:
“You have not yet come close enough.
Come nearer the ground. Learn
From the woodcock in the woods
Whose feathering is a ritual
Of fallen leaves,
And from the nesting quail
Whose speckling her hard to see
In the long grass.
Study the coat of the mole.
For the farmer shall wear
The furrows and greenery
Of his fields, and bear
The long standing of the woods.”

And I asked: “You mean death then?”
“Yes,” the voice said. “Die
into what the earth requires of you.”
I let go all holds then, and sank
Like a hopeless swimmer into the earth,
And at last came fully into the ease
And the joy of that place,
All my lost ones returning.

dead.sea.mud. ;)

sparkling.wanderlied.

Wohl auf! Noch getrunken den funkelnden Wein!
Ade nun, ihr Lieben! Geschieden muss sein.
Ade nun, ihr Berge, du väterlich Haus!
Es treibt in die Ferne mich mächtig hinaus,

Die Sonne, sie bleibet am Himmel nicht steh’n,
Es treibt sie, durch Länder und Meere zu geh’n.
Die Woge nicht haftet am einsamen Strand,
Die Stürme, sie brausen mit Macht durch das Land.

Mit eilenden Wolken der Vogel dort zieht
Und singt in der Ferne ein heimatlich Lied.
So treibt es den Burschen durch Wälder und Feld,
Zu gleichen der Mutter, der wandernden Welt.

Da grüssen ihn Vögel bekannt über’m Meer,
Sie flogen von Fluren der Heimat hieher;
Da duften die Blumen vertraulich um ihn,
Sie triben vom Lande die Lüfte dahin.
Die Vögel, die kennen sein väterlich Haus,
Die Blumen, die pflanzt’ er der Liebe zum Strauss,
Und Liebe, die folgt ihm, sie geht ihm zur Hand :
So wird ihm zur Heimat das ferneste Land.


Wandering Song.

Well then, drink once more the sparkling wine!
Adieu then, my loved ones, we shall have to part.
Adieu then, you mountains, my paternal house!
A mighty force urges me to go to the distant lands.

The sun does not stand still in the sky,
It is driven over countries and seas.
The wave does not stay by the lonely shore,
The storms, they roar forcefully through the land.

With hurrying clouds the bird there flies,
And sings in the foreign land a song of homeland.
So it drives the young fellow through forest and field,
To resemble his mother, the wandering world.

There birds that he knows will greet him across sea,
They flew from the meadows of his homeland here;
There flowers surround him with intimate scent,
The breezes from the homeland wafted them here.
The birds, they know his paternal house,
The flowers he planted as a bouquet for love,
And love, it follows him, helps him along:
So he will find himself at home in the most distant land.

Well then, drink once more the sparkling wine!
Adieu then, my loved ones, we shall have to part.
Adieu then, you mountains, my paternal house!
A mighty force urges me to go to the distant lands.

one.plus.one.plus.one.equals.one.

1 + 1 + 1 = 1. yes, es la verdad. on this Chorale tour, we learned that this is true. before the wheels roll, each person checks to makes sure that one (myself) plus one (the person who stands on my right in mixed formation) plus one (the person who stands on my left in mixed formation) equals one (the whole unified Chorale).

highlights:

1. singing at the Holmstad, a retirement home in Batavia, IL, and meeting George, an outgoing old guy who grew up as an MK in Venezuela and then spent most of his life as an international airline pilot, calling Hong Kong home for a while and seeing all kinds of other places. he and i chatted for quite a while, and then i think he found almost every other MK in the Chorale and talked to them at length, too. he was so overjoyed to find young people, young MKs using their talents, and he talked about being inspired to maybe find the college MK groups in his area to advise or encourage them or just see what they're up to these days. also, after the concert i ran into my childhood doctor and his wife, who were good friends with my grandparents back in the day, and recognized my name in the program! small, small world.
+
1. singing at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, for their free noon-time concert series, where a number of homeless guys were sleeping in the pews when we walked in, and i had tears squeezing from my soul and eyes when we got to sing "on Christ the solid Rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand," because i knew that those guys truly had nowhere else to go, nothing else to stand on or build their lives on, and i wanted so much for the words we sang to sink into their hearts and invite them to put their hope in him if they couldn't put it in the street crowd, and make their home in him if they couldn't make it in an apartment or even a shelter, and be bathed in his unchanging love if not in a hot shower, and be fed by the bread of life if not by a bagel or a burger...but i wanted to do those things for them, too. and i met T.J., bless his heart, who told it to us straight about the hard life he was living, and about how he sometimes walks the streets and freezes and cries, or comes into Fourth Pres and chills on a pew and cries out to God, praying and trusting that there's a purpose for him to be so downtrodden these days and months, maybe God's gonna raise him up, or just use him wherever he is to be a blessing, whenever someone blesses him he shares, he passes it on to his friends on the street who having a hard time, and he prays, prays and cries, cries and prays. it ripped at me to leave him there, to know there are so many more beautiful souls living just as painfully all throughout the cities of this country and the world. i am so pitifully rich; it is a pity that i don't give away more of what i have more freely to those who need it more than i do.
+
1. singing at Elmbrook church in Brookfield, WI - the home church of Brad Larson, one of the students who was killed in the Taylor van accident my freshman year. his parents invited the Chorale to come and sing, kind of as a memorial for him and a gathering of Taylor alumni. so emotional - Solid Rock was what we sang at the memorial service the year after the accident, impossible to keep dry eyes when the memories flowed back so freely and we were singing straight into the teary eyes and tender hearts of his parents. almost three years later, but how can you recover from losing a son, seriously? everything and everyone on earth we could possibly put our hope in may fail us and leave us, but "our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness". and our children are not naturally supposed to get to our heavenly home before us, but if they do, we can trust in the promise that we're coming too!
=
1. one beautiful, blessed, final Chorale tour. sadness that it's over, but gladness that it happened and that the God of grace and God of glory made himself so deeply present throughout all of it, carrying our heavy burdens and preaching peace into us and revealing his dwelling place inside each person we met.

haha, i just remembered that Chorale Officer Matthew wanted to call it the 'Trinity Check', and i liked it ecstatically but then had to agree with Officer Mark that it sounded semi-blasphemous. ;-) but it is actually a pretty good expression of the mystery of the real Trinity, right? one (Father) plus one (Son) plus one (Holy Spirit) equals ONE!!!

peace, people. "shower the people you love with love"

ashes.ashes.we.all.fall.

Ash Wednesday is today. i love going to the service and getting the little cross on my forehead. this is maybe not the real meaning of it that they'll be explaining to us in church this evening, but in my own little world i think it's like a gentle touch-whisper of a reminder that i am a creation of the Creator, a child of the Father, a sister of the Savior, a mind being molded to love Jesus and love like the Christ, a temporary temple of a body that will so soon creak and rattle and decay and turn to dust, and also a glorious soul that will receive a new body free from the temptations and fears and fights and tears of this life. and that we are living in the meantime, the in-between. and that the reality of the One who dwells within us should be evident on our faces and in our speech and through the work of our hands. and that the Word, the living story of the embodiment of Love, is written on our hearts. and that someday we will see the I AM face to face, even if we can only see God's back for now [read Exodus 33]. mientras que esperamos...

i'm always curious what other people are doing to observe Lent.


for my Personal Foundations for Ministry class, we have to make a plan for practicing a spiritual discipline over the next 8 weeks or so. how convenient. i'm excited about it because i was getting inklings and advice about a couple of things i should instigate more intentionally in my life even before i thought about this project. no, friends, it's not fasting. :-P and i don't plan on saying much more than that about it, but would definitely appreciate prayer as i try to stick to this commitment and let the Spirit work through it!

i found this set of poems by T.S. Eliot, entitled Ash Wednesday, written shortly after his commitment to Christ within the Anglican Church. they are somewhat inscrutable in parts, maybe i just don't get a lot of the allusions he's making, but he writes so lyrically, and even where i don't understand it lends an air of mystery that is strangely comforting to me. like language can't contain everything there is or even everything we know, which is such a small portion of everything there is and why everything is anyway.

for someone who loves putting words together and pulling meaning out of them, who worries when words are left unsaid or badly said [which i do ALL THE TIME] or misinterpreted or ignored, it is good to hear, from poem V (five):

"If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word."

[it sounds like a tongue-twister at first, but makes more sense after reading through a few times]

'beauty for ashes', i need to go make a playlist of all the songs that are titled that. [like the one by Shane and Shane, and this one by Jinny Kim...]

chau for now.

this.old.world.

oh this messy spinning world. sometimes it just makes me wanna go home early, like Psalm 90:1 says LORD, in all generations you have been our home. or as a family friend of ours, a Southern preacher kind of guy, used to say to his son when he did something that got on his nerves, "Son?! you wanna meet Jesus early?!! well you just keep on doin that there and you will!" sometimes i think i would really kind of like that. send me to meet Jesus early, Mr. Williams, sir!

but then i get to see a roomful of salt-and-pepper-haired soft-wrinkled faces smile and tear up as my choir sings "swing low, sweet chariot", and i'm glad again that i've got a little (God-knows-how-much) more time left in life to make people smile and cry.

life.together.

i'm reading Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for a class, but it's more like a discussion group and prayer group than a class. and i'm reading my mom's old copy that she must have had in high school or college because it has her maiden name written in the front. it's kind of funny discovering her notes in the margins, and realizing that i tend to react in similar ways to some of his ideas, especially agreeing with things like recognizing the presence of Christ in a special way in people who are poor, hungry, weak, or seem insignificant, and emphatically disagreeing with the assertion that God is not a God of the emotions - he Is, too! he must be, otherwise i'd be a hopeless wreck! (well, i'm still kind of a wreck. but now i have hope! ;-)

we just finished reading and talking about chapter 2. Bonhoeffer insists on some pretty strong ideas about how Christians should go about living in community and having common devotions - rising early every morning, praying the Psalms, singing hymns in unison only, and then having a longer reading from the Old or New Testament. even the suggestions that seem a little extreme for our context today, he has some pretty solid and convicting reasoning to back them up.

also, he liked Gandhi a lot (or his nonviolent ideas, anyway), so much that he almost went and visited him in India. but instead he stayed in Germany and helped found an underground/secret seminary, which is where he wrote this book living in community with the pastor-students. and he was a double agent working for the Nazis but helping Jews. and he was part of a plot to assassinate Hitler...i don't know about the rightness of that, but he was in a tough position and he did not take the decision lightly, and he never made the claim that it was absolutely the right thing to do, and ultimately he didn't go through with it. well, i guess that was because they arrested him and eventually sent him to be killed in one of the death camps. people who knew him in the prison camps said he was someone "for whom God was real and always near." wow. i know maybe one or two people like that, who you can just tell that they are constantly aware of God's presence within them, and everything they say and do just exudes genuine love and beauty. how does one become that person??? i guess i should read on!

keys.to.life.?.

my dear friends, here is a good tip for life: try not to lock your keys in your car. but if you do, try really hard not to leave your cell phone in the locked car, too. oh, and if all else fails, just please, PLEASE, try not to have it happen on a day when you have to be at a meeting within an hour and a half with the Refugee Education Committee at the Department of Education, where you have never been before, with your internship supervisor and about 10 other education professionals all in attendance there.

but, even if that whole scenario is absolutely unavoidable by this point, and you've trekked over to an office where they let you use a phone, but you can't get ahold of the people across town who could potentially bring you your extra set of your car keys.....you never know if it could turn out to be the highlight of your day. you know, you might even make a new friend.

i did!

well, just so you know, it's especially helpful if that friend is a friendly, assertive lady who has leased cars for 8 years from the same dealer your car happens to be from, and knows exactly where the closest dealership is, and calls them and finds out all your options. especially if she finds out that it will take about 5 minutes and 5 bucks to cut a new key, instead of the 55 minutes it would take your other friends to drive to you with your key, or the 45 minutes it would take for a roadside assistance professional to come and break open your car for $50. and it's kind of great if she offers to take her lunch break and drive you to the dealership, and if she tells you all about her high school sons who she says are strong Christians and good at everything under the sun, and her 20-something niece who has traveled all over the world and speaks French and Chinese fluently and sounds like she could be the President someday. annnnnnd if you check 'yes' to all of the above, then hey, it's probably a good idea to buy her lunch on the way back, even though that is a totally inadequate thank-you for all she's done for you.

but if all this is true, then you may find yourself in a state of some dismay that she doesn't seem to want much thanks at all. you get the feeling that what she really wants you to do is to thank God.

which is, really, by that time, all you can do.