Handel's Harpsichord

Can music be specific to any one particular season? Perhaps and perhaps not.  Yet Vivaldi seemed to think so, and Handel's Harpsichord Suite No.2 in F major seemed to me to appropriately represent Winter's fragile finery.


In a rush of harpsichord joy
Are scales of flowing snowflakes,
Trills of brave morning birdsong.

Brief rests between movements
Are the pauses between puffs of white breath;
Chords the crunch of footfall.

Staccato notes are surely
Bare tree-tips reaching thin point
Perplexed in persistent effort
To pierce the low-hanging sky.

Stark brittle beauty
The cold stream singing notes
Of fumbling round ice and rough white-patched rocks.

Thin of ice and harpsichord sounds,
Gracing sweep of covered land:
Enamor
            open eyes and ears.

Snowstorm

Thick empty white sky hanging

   Blank like the face of a vacant stranger

Endless white ground stretching and soaring

  Mounting upward forward backward

     (Deceptively spotless seagull arcs)

Both dissolving, disintegrating

   Into a swirling middle

Shreds from above and below frantically

   Now triumphantly

       (like an eraser scrub the last

        bits of pencil or color scratch markings)

   Gaining inch by foot

Overcoming the space in between.

Whitewashed

O Winter,

when you bleached the color

out of every last inch of the world,

whitewashing walls and windows

to your windy heart's content,

could you not have left

a little more

within my soul?

Upon the Altar of the World

"What if God's priests, if empty-handed, might consecrate at sunrise each day is that day's development: all that the evolving world will gain and produce, and all it will lose in exhaustion and suffering.  These the priest could raise and offer.

In China again, four years later yet, [Teilhard] rode a pony north in the Mongolian grasslands and traced Quaternary strata.  Every day still he said to himself what he now called his Mass upon the altar of the world, 'To divinize the new day': 'Since once more, my Lord, not now in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia, I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, I your priest, on the altar of the whole earth, the toil and sorrow of the world.' " 

                             - Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, 128

These words in my reading caught me, held me, compel me.
I get so caught up sometimes in my daily world that I forget about my priest-role.

It strikes me that Teilhard's words and actions are the truth, and what he represents is an act of holiness and love.
But what is a true and good and holy thing, it seems to me, is also a dangerous thing.

To give God thus all the "toil and sorrow" of each day in one's community is to open oneself to seeing the community, one's people, and their toils and cares, as God does.

This too is a holy and beautiful thing, but it is a powerful thing and heavy.  There is undoubtedly significant joy, but O what weight of sorrow is infused in people's daily lives!  To be willing to see them as God does therefore entails great suffering.

Perhaps Teilhard's exercise is a guard against excess heaviness--that in the consecration of the day he simultaneously opens himself to it and hands it over to God.  He recognizes necessarily that it is beyond the scope of his heart or his own two hands.  He must trust the wisdom and compassion of the heart of God and the sovereign control of God. 

Both acts of submission must take place or we become blind and calloused, or else worn down, heavy, and eventually cynical.  Whatever God gives us to see and hold onto in this world is never truly our own and by consecrating all that we see and do not, by opening our eyes and hearts to see the "toil and sorrow" and then offering it back to Him on the altar, we acknowledge His ultimate control.  We learn our responsibilities to what we see, and the ways He would use us to do His work.  But I must never forget that in the end, it is not my work.

In doing this, are we not becoming more like Christ? 

And as always, I have much to learn.

Words

Do we not know,
   you and I,
That we hold the power of the gods
   and not of men?
That in our words are the powers
   of all life and death—

That we speak these words
   and mostly
that rambling idle nonsense
   we think to be
     harmlessly
        in between.

And Death, too
  wears many faces.

Winter Psalm

Winter has unfolded
   in crisp, clean lines
Sharp like the telephone wires
   and bare branches against the sky,
Sharp like the cold stars
   before dawn.

And the world moves and lives on
   in all the bustling human ways,
And in flocks of birds and burning wind.

O sing, you people, and dance;
   hearken, and be still.

For the Lord our God
   who waits for us in stillness
Is a God of stillness but not static;
   He who created our bones to run and dance
Is in the movement as well as the quiet.

His wind burns our hearts like fire,
   with joy, like flocks of birds,
Enduring like the trees
   silent against the sky,
Like stars in the deep before dawn.

A Couple Word-Plays

Hebrews 4

In spite
Of our spite
He is
Respite.



Eternal Mysteries

Inspire
Expire
Holy Fire

Church spire
Funeral pyre
Resurrection higher.

Plans, part two: Dreams in Open Hands

A long time ago, nearly four years ago now, God asked me to relinquish my plans for my life, however grand and enthralling, and trust His, whatever they may be.  I wrote about it here, Plans, part one, and began the long process of obeying.

Mainly for me at the time, it meant giving up my dream of getting married.  "Can you trust that I can still fulfill you and provide for you if you were to remain single?" God asked me.  My first response, as I wrote about it in the poem, was not so certain.  My hands were closed tightly around my plans, I could see them, and I liked them.  God's plans belonged to the scary unknown.

But with some wrestling over the course of a semester or so, I gave up my dreams. I learned to say "if I get married" instead of "when I get married," and learned to be careful about participating, if at all, in the many conversations college girls will have in dorms in which they plan their weddings and pick out names for their children.  (Most of the said girls in these conversations at the time didn't even have boyfriends, which made them particularly unconstructive.)  I assumed, for all intents and purposes, that I would be single for the rest of my life.  It was hard, and it was liberating.

And God smiled at my open hands and, after many unexpected plot twists, I'm getting married this April to a wonderful man of God who loves books and ministry as much as I do and is already close with my family.  So I am learning what it means to dream again, but together, and with open hands.  This too is a process, and has been over the past few years.

So here is the poem of that process, a fitting response and second part to my old "Plans" sketch, a sonnet for my Jonathan and I and the journey before us.


We whispered dreams, you and I:
And so we shall again and again
By candles or cold front stoops.
Yet what are our tremulous dreams but dust?
What are dreams ever but dust, fragile,
     Spun to catch the light like gold?

I am of dust and you are of dust
And He remembers our form--
If we are ignoble it is not of our wind-blown origins.
Spirit is wind-breathing life:
     Illuminate, ennervate, beautify, penetrate.

Spirit-wind, blow into our dreams
Life and hope and fire; illuminate
     Our dust into something more like life or gold.


Allison

Death's Last Stand

This is Death's last lonely stand,

Outpost of pain in the most verdant land:
That Love's deepest unearthly power
Of being faithfully present to all places and men;
The gift of un-self though adversity tower;
Of seeking to better with heart, hands, mind, and then—
To find in oneself a piece of that place, that friend
That growth, separation, or their pain can rend
Into suffering as Love, which love itself cannot mend.

To love truly is fierce joy and pain as one—
Not to love, Death has certainly won—
Nay, Love's last triumph in sore human soul
Shall be Death's last chain broken,

Our hearts made more whole.

Monday Morning Musings: Of Autumn & Death to Self

It is October now, and the trees have begun to transform into their autumn glory.  It is inevitable, observing the world and reading fall poetry, not to think of death as everything appears to lose color and life for the barren beauty of winter.  And as I watch the trees I cannot help but think to myself: If only we could accept our daily, weekly, yearly deaths with such exquisite grace!  If only we could bow and joyfully, humbly give up the adornments of self, our very selves, and whatever else the Lord may ask.

Can we trust that He bares our branches for His greater glory and the triumph of Spring? Can we trust You shall still consent to walk alongside us in our barren state?  O give me grace to die to myself every day, graceful and obedient as the autumn tree!