Weeds

I took a left turn off the country road, out into a field, cleared for plowing.  I followed the ruts left by tractor or truck.  The weeds were knee high.  Wild flowers stood out here and there, white Queen Ann’s Lace, yellow Butter cups, purple Clover, gifts to the coming equinox.  Birds were having a field day, literally.  Their trajectories bringing bugs home to the little ones nested in the tree line, wild roses and cedars giving way to maple, ash, and oak.   Others on the wing finding in the disturbed soil easy access to the worms that were making the soil more fertile by the minute.  I saw a chipmunk shoving his cheeks full of seeds up on his hind legs watching for the black and yellow snake hunting.  No worry.  The snake was twenty feet away and the munk had his eye on him.

The piece of blue plastic caught my attention, fluttering on the two foot stake.  New wood, blond and split, bought by the pack at the lumber yard.   It fluttered, caught by a staple, driven into the meadow.  It was clearly a marker.  I stopped and scanned the field, picking up three more at a glance, below the level of the growing wild flowers and grass, but bright enough to catch the eye.  There was another one. 

When grass sprouts in a pot of petunias, I pull it out.  It doesn’t belong there.  I get the root so it won't sprout again.  Then I heel a depression into a bald spot in the yard and push the rooted grass in.  With a little water it might take hold there. 

The plastic markers weren’t weeds, but they were going to destroy this blooming meadow.  They’d been hammered in and were about to guide the machines that would gouge and tear the earth, to plant roads and foundations and ranch houses, or center hall colonials.   The birds and the chipmunks, even the snake had no idea that their world was about to be paved over.  And I have this thing about wild flowers.

So I weeded.  I found ten of them.  I carried them down the road to a trash can.  But the blue flags will sprout again, fertilized by some obscenities.  The roads and the driveways will have their way.  Such is life.  But today, today the field belongs to the wild flowers, the birds, and the critters.  Today.

 

Resolutions

   It’s that time of year again, time to look back and forward at the same time.  We tend to be too busy dealing with the now to spend any time doing either one.  Our form of looking back is regret and guilt.  Our way of looking forward is planning how to fit more doing or running into the moments we see ahead.  Our way of looking back is mostly regret that fuels the anxieties that have something to do with the more doing and running.

   Such are not contemplative disciplines of the spirit.  Neither are they effective at pouring the footings for our construction of a creative life style. 

   With this in mind I try to spend some moments, sitting still, considering the successes and failures, the moments of joy and grief.  I try to put them into the context of who I’d like to be and to become.  It takes a while, and sometimes it’s hard to hold myself to the task.  I tend to drift away from the focus.  Anxiety and guilt have a way of tangling us in their sticky webs.

   The results of my excursions produce a list.  They are in reality a bridge from then to there, constructed of hopes and dreams as much as stuff.  They may be grounded in the common, everyday activities.  And they may be potential alterations of the landscape of my life.  Or better, alterations of my pathway through the landscape of my life.  I go back to them now and then throughout the year, to keep my moments of clarity in mind.

   It’s time.  Happy new year.  May it be full of moments of clarity for us all.

Fear Not

Luke 2:1-14

 

   Whenever I hear the words of the King James translation of this passage, chills go up my back.   The season trembles around me.  ‘And it came to pass in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.’  It’s a switch that initiates all the pageantry and wonder speaking from places of shadowed mystery.  It whispers of beings beyond our understanding, presenting themselves to teenaged girls and blue collar workers.  Poetic words that open an epic made of anything but heroes.           

   Woven into the all too human story are these beings from beyond, messengers from the creator of all that was, is, and shall be.  Ever since I was a child I couldn’t buy the way people spoke of and pictured these messengers.  They were cute, sentimental projections of anything but the majesty and glory that messengers from beyond our understanding could be.

   I can understand why the pictures and stories of angels are done so.  There is no way to portray such beings.  It is beyond our capability.  So we give them wings, we give them halos.  But more, we reduce them, because beings of power and glory intruding on us are fearful.  We don’t want to fear in this time of sentiment and affection.  We want the security and affirmation that Christmas stands for. 

   I collect angels.  Most of them are beautiful, graceful human figures with flowing robes, dancing through space.  In this season they change our home into a preserve, a safe landing zone in these three dimensions for these bringers of God’s Word, reflections of the Maker’s glory.  They still tell a story of grace, a very human story begun so long ago, at least according to our perspective.  It is not only a story of one child’s birth, but also of that birth here and now, in this house, in this family. 

   They speak of memories, of songs sung at birth and death, of moments of affection and the new joy of relationships.  They speak of new faith, of heart felt understanding where before there were only words and human traditions.  They speak of the miracles that are ours to embrace.  So the multidimensional conduits of God’s news here and now in these beautiful, yet limited forms speak of our limited apprehension of God’s mystery and glory.  They speak of this incarnate specificity, born to us a savior.  They play human instruments.  They read and sing from manuscripts.  And they remind us that this is a season for us, we limited, needy, broken beings.  And so the multidimensional beings, here and now are beautiful, graceful, winged dancers, rather than reason defying, sense violating, terrifying beings. 

   And the songs they sing allow us to rest in the Good News that we, as we are, are loved. 

 Merry Christmas.

“O rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.”

 

Decorating

 

Christmas begins in the McKirachan house, after Thanksgiving with the migration of angels, flocks of them, fleets of them, a veritable population of the winged beings.  There is a troop of Santa’s too but the rooms are transformed by the representations of the multi-dimensional messengers.  It’s more than tradition, it’s like the leaves changing color.  It’s a seasonal reality. 

This year, after discussion with my wife, we decided to begin the migration earlier.  Such a simple change.  But it’s like a snow storm in August.  It’s unnatural.  But  I’m sticking to it.  The boxes and tins are coming down from the attic.  And the messengers are intruding into our space.  I guess that’s what it’s all about.

Behold the days are coming.

Where’s Christmas?

Here we are a whole week into Advent and we’re already up to our ears, eyes, nose in just about everything except the gift that is coming.  Christmas is a celebration of something so far beyond our logic, beyond our sentiments, beyond our cookies and tinsel that it is ridiculous to even consider the limits of our frenzy as we approach the experiences described in the Gospels.  And the ordeal of our celebration leaves us with anything but hope, peace, joy, or love. 

Yet we yearn for Christmas.  And as we reach toward something more than tinsel perhaps the yearning itself, reaching toward something more, something beyond all the dead ends that we’ve lived with, invested in, been disappointed by, perhaps that  yearning is what the holy day is about. 

Perhaps the words of the prophet of ‘Comfort ye my people…’ reach toward more than treaties and disarmament.  Perhaps they point toward the hurt we carry away from hard words from a friend, from Christian leaders forgetting vows of reconciliation, from people using love and punishment in the same sentence, from all the moments we’ve neglected the least of these. 

Prophetic visions see far beyond this or that moment.  They reveal a landscape that is founded in a reality beyond time, bound in mystery.  They speak truth that cannot be pinned down with calendars or three dimensional measurements.  If we to hear the prophet speak, really hear him we need to look beyond our small specificities into the cloudy places of the heart.  Out there where we yearn and dare to believe that the angels sing to us.

And ye beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low

Who toil along the climbing way, with painful steps and slow

Look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing

Oh rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.

 

Being a Fan

 

Each season I look forward to football season.  So call me a testosterone addled idiot.  Worse, I’m a Giants fan.  I have a strange relationship with this enthusiasm.  The team has always been a strange mixture of clumsy and sad stirred in with amazing miracle workers.  They seem unable to be consistently good, but have been known to pull off impossible victories against a seeming landslide of impossible opponents.  It’s hard to watch some of the games.  Moments of victory turn into moments of tragedy.  And then back again.  It’s probably not that good for the adrenal system.  I know some people who refuse to watch the games.  I can understand that.  But Big Blue is my team.   

Such loyalty is a strange thing.  But it is instructive.  It allows me to understand the value of identity more clearly.  It has little or nothing to do with success.  It has more to do with a consistency, a willingness to be faithful in the face of even embarrassing defeat. 

I would hate to be predictable.  But, by claiming some bits and pieces of reality as ours and sticking to them, we establish a home in this here and now, which is mostly defined by change.  The question is, what bits and pieces will we choose?  Some of that decision must be carefully weighed, ethics and practicality, spiritual truths and the hope of the Kingdom of God, not to mention how it touches the least of these are all critical.  And then there’s the extra wing nut that doesn’t seem to match the functioning of the machine.  It’s part of who we are. 

Call me what you will, I’ll still be a Giants fan.  And someday, against impossible odds, we’ll be stunned to watch them win another super bowl.  For whatever that’s worth. 

Go Big Blue!

Sick

I’ve spent a good amount of time sick and in pain.  Let’s have a collective awwww…  I find it interesting all the different kinds of limitations sickness and pain dump into our living.  They slow us down, they get in our way, they confine us to prisons of beds and hospitals, and in worst case scenarios end our lives. 

But during a recent go round with a bug, one I’ve been blessed with before, I realized something else about such situations.  A pawl falls over our existence, limiting our ability to focus on anything but the plod between the bed and the bathroom.  Sleep is unconsciousness, and not much different than the strange twilight of being awake.  And time becomes a very strange tangle.  Memories of what was and is and things that are imagined, the order of events, time itself are tangle and swirl like a half melted chocolate fudge sundae.   

Fatigue that is based on physical exhaustion and boredom allow us to simply lay back into our illness like mud, clogging any possibility of moving, thinking, or appreciating.  It’s taken me a lot of years to realize how limited we are when we’re sick.  It think we tend to forget it when we climb out of bed and reenter our lives.  I guess we can learn even when we’re submerged in the body’s battle with bugs.  I hope I’ll remember this next time I visit or see someone who’s where I’ve been recently.  It’s nice to climb out of the mud.