Life at the intersection of faith, nature, history and art
A blessed and happy Easter to you all. Thanks for listening and reading. I hope you all have a joyous and restful day with just those closest to you. Today I will offer a special prayer for all those who are alone and all those who have to work to keep us safe and protected. God bless you all.
Greetings, friends and readers. Today I offer you four resources for prayer and reflection on this Good Friday.
The first is the conclusion of my seven-part video series on the Seven Last Words of Jesus. If you missed any of them, they are all available here on my blog, of course. Today’s message is from the gospel of Luke and gives us Jesus’ last words to his father at the very moment of his death.
“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Luke 23: 44-46
Next up is a short poem and image for reflection, another in the daily series I have been offering during this time of the pandemic.
Below is a new music video for an older song, composed back in 2002 with my friend and collaborator, Phil Cooper, “Consider the Nails.”
Finally, if you’re available this afternoon at 3 p.m. (Central Time), I will be presenting “Crossroads: Stations of the Cross for a Time of Change” on Facebook Live from the Marianist Retreat and Conference Center, just outside of St. Louis. If you want to join in and pray with us live (or view it afterwards at your leisure), you can find the Center’s Facebook page here:
Blessed Triduum and a Happy Easter to you all!
Steve
An image and memory from a recent walk, a poem of reflection and shadow for a mid-winter day…
A Shadow of My Present Self
Walking through the woods near the lake
at the end of a warm winter’s day
the sun so near the horizon
that it sends its golden carpet unfurling
recklessly across the earth,
I catch myself walking beside me.
A shadow thrown
in black-on-orange-on-oak-brown,
A temporary photograph
reminding me who I am at that moment.
Wandering, quiet, willing to be surprised.
Trying hard to see and be aware.
A child, after all these 60 years,
of the source of light
shining in and through and around me.
Sometimes, the quiet we seek is not mere silence. Rather, it is silence enough to hear a whisper, the voice of God calling out to us in the sounds of the earth. For this sunny, warming Sunday morning, I offer a poem about what we can hear if we dare silence ourselves.
Within this holy quiet
I hear your word in the wind
blowing through trees
in the caw caw caw of crows
(always three times, it seems)
in the rat-a-tat-tat of a singular distant woodpecker
in the slap of water against a mid-stream rock
at the bottom of the hill.
“Going nowhere…isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.” – Leonard Cohen
Last weekend, I helped lead an advent retreat at the Marianist Retreat & Conference Center just west of St. Louis. Whenever I return to this beautifully spiritual place, I feel like I am returning to “nowhere,” as Cohen writes above, to a place where I can step away for a while and see everything a bit more clearly. And I think I begin to hear more clearly and succinctly, too, as the noise of the city and everyday life melts away and I find myself surrounded more and more by silence.
In that silence, I have found, I can often “hear” what God is saying to me, can begin to discern more clearly what God perhaps has been saying all along when I was too busy to listen and life was just too loud. Sitting in the chapel late last Friday night, I began to think of this silence in terms of music, which is itself made up of both sound and quiet, of course. In the “music” of this all-to-hard-to-find silence, I began to feel myself drawn in the direction of the master composer and musician, the One who brings all to life, throws beauty over the world like a prayer shawl, and invites us all to “waste time with him” every once in a while. So I wrote this short poem:
The light in the chapel has been dimmed
the retreatants retreated to their rooms
the silence of night surrounding me and ringing in my ears
a present but somehow unheard concerto.
Quiet like the drawing of a bow across invisible strings within
a soundless song that yet angles me in your direction
points me toward your presence
floating in the room like a single bright yellow fan of a gingko leaf
dropping slowly and freely and yet
demanding my attention
asking for my consent and response
requiring my awe like a whispered sigh from my lips.
A song, yet not sung
as silence demands itself to be heard alone.
O you, who make the leaves fall noiselessly.
O you, who make the silence sing.
O you, who compose and give life
and demand we play it through to the orchestrated end.
Only you, O God.
Only you.
Happy third Sunday of Advent to you. It’s a time to stand still and learn to be amazed. In the immortal words of E.B. White’s sage spider, Charlotte: “Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.” For it’s there.