Wild Beasts and Angels

Wild Beasts and Angels: A Meditation for Lent
(Based on Genesis 9:8-17 & Mark 1:9-15, common lectionary readings for the first Sunday of Lent, year B.)

Ten nights back, and the moon was still bright, just past its full, round glory, waning gibbous above the faithful remnant of snow. The wood stove had been well-fed, that night, and the warmth had poured up through the grate into our half-attic room. There, in the midst of February, the small room had become stifling. We opened the window half-way and settled in for the night, the bright moonshine spilling in over the sill.

For a while, all was quiet. Wrapped in the cares and business of the day, we gradually eased our whirring minds down into sleep. A truck went grumbling down the dirt road. Again, silence, then—blessed sleep, deep, restoring, healing sleep, peaceful oblivio—WHAT THE HECK WAS THAT?

We struggled awake, sat up in bed, and strained to make sense out of the unearthly series of noises, the rising, dipping pitches, the staccato yips and echoing, resonant howls. “Ohhhhh. Coyotes.”

Once or twice a year, in the deep eroded stream beds that carve through the 30-acre woods behind our house, the coyotes gather. It's often more than one pack that converges, and the range of voices is eerie and amazing. Have you ever heard the coyotes when they gather and begin to sing? One wild call rises into the night, answered by another. Other voices join, and they go on for hours, vying for attention, trying out for solos, and then breaking out into a rolling, wild cacophonous chorus that goes on almost too long to bear, full of spell-binding syncopation, intense dissonance and hackle-raising harmonies.

We lay there, in the over-warm house, in the cold blue moonlight, trapped between the security of our blankets and the unleashed wilderness just beyond our half-open window. And that's as good a place to begin as any. No matter where you are, it's a good place to begin the season of angels and wild beasts, the season of Lent.

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.

Immediately. It's one of Mark's favourite words. He is so eager to get out the Good News, so hungry to share the power of this life-altering experience, this world-transforming story! Never mind the baby in the stable. The gospel leaps right in at the Jordon, with Jesus being baptised by John. And immediately, the heavens are torn apart, and the Spirit descends like a dove, and a voice names him as God's Beloved child! And before we even have time to figure this all out—before JESUS has time to figure this all out—he's driven, lobbed, forcefully flung right out into the wilderness.

What would have happened if the story took a different direction? “Jesus was baptised, and then immediately went back home.” No, that's not how ministry works. “Jesus was baptised, and immediately went into town.” No, town is for commerce, not transformation.

He had just been baptised. He had gone under the surface of the water. He had been submerged in the flood, a ritual drowning of all the old ways, and he had broken the surface and emerged into light and air and possibility again. He was the new Noah, water streaming off of him, there with a dove of promise and God's voice to declare a new covenant. And, like Noah, in a radically altered landscape, he had to figure out life all over again. Yes. Wilderness. There, with the wild beasts, tended by angels.

Because wilderness isn't just a place we go. Wilderness is something inside of us. We each carry, inside our hearts and minds, a bewildering landscape full of barren places and tangled thickets. It is full of strange characters: shadowy schoolyard taunters, lost and lingering loves, and other ghosts that haunt us, the harsh or compassionate faces of our ancestors, the sweet and frightening demons of our dreams.

We wake and walk with this, move through the world with this wilderness inside us. And, in the neat compartments of home and school and office, in the blind repetition of the daily grind, we cannot expect this wildness to make sense. The paved roads and square rooms—the ones that work so well for machines—do not work so well for our suffering, searching souls.

There's a reason seekers have gone into the wilderness—or created quiet times and sanctuary spaces—for century after century. Whether we hike or paddle into actual wilderness or simply set aside time to pray, meditate, and wander our inner wilderness in God's good company, these spiritual adventures feed our souls.

For the good of our souls, we need time and space away. We need stones under our feet. We need rough old trees. We need the purity of deserts, the rough angles of mountaintops. They help us unclutter our vision until we can see the wideness of God's love. They help us empty out all the competing voices until we can name our personal demons...and only those pure, elemental spaces can bring us the needed clarity. And we don't need to be afraid of this adventure. Remember what happened to Jesus when he went out:
...the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Yes, he faced temptation—really, more of a series of spiritual tests: hurdles to leap on a marathon journey of the soul. But Satan, the great tester, was not his only company. He was with the wild beasts, and angels waited on him. You see, they go together, those angels and wild beasts. God made the rainbow sign as a promise to all of Creation, every blessed thing that lives and breathes in that wonderful, fragile, ferocious, wild and wonderful community of life.

In the wilderness, Jesus was among his sisters and brothers—some furred, some leafy, some buzzing or burrowing, some smooth or scaled, some fringed, some feathered. There, with his wild kin, he was never isolated, not even in his deepest fear, rage, grief and anxiety. Tended by angels, he was shown the blessing of hidden springs and the beauty of unexpected wildflowers. His soul blossomed with them. And after forty days in such company, Jesus was ready to live into the promise of his baptism. He was ready to face the extraordinary work that God was calling him to do.

So, the adventure begins: immediately, whether we are ready or not. We can hide if we want to. We can pull the blankets over our heads or turn up the volume and stay hunched over our little glowing boxes. We can drive faster so we don't see the wild things moving beyond the pavement's edge. But the season of Lent beckons to our spirits, welcomes us into wider and wondrous possibility.

Listen: the wind is rising. Bulbs are starting to stir under snow and half-frozen mud, down in the dark earth. Listen: the stars are dancing above us, pulsing and shimmering to a celestial rhythm we were meant to notice, learn, and share. There are crows in the branches, throwing their glossy heads back with raucous laughter, joyfully urging us on with all their might. Listen: there are coyotes outside our windows, calling us out with their soaring songs.

Come, all you, baptised and blessed. Let us go, immediately, into this season of pilgrimage, these forty days of wild beasts and angels. Let us launch out, immediately, where our inner wilderness and God's creative wildness can meet!

Who Cooks for You?

Out along the edge of the moon-feathered woods, the Barred Owls sound their call: "Who cooks for YOU? Who cooks for YOU? Who cooks for YOU-all?"

Tonight, one of our farmhands has taken on the task, stepping gracefully into the gap on today's chore list. The Piper and I worked off the farm today and had resigned ourselves to bacon and eggs when we first noted no one had signed up for supper. Instead, I arrived home from a day of hospital chaplaincy and she arrived home from a day of social work to find...a three-course dinner kept warm on the stove. There are pork chops. There are apples simmered with raisins, spices, and nuts. There are buttery rosemary mashed potatoes. He shares the news of his day on the land: thirteen eggs collected, snowpeas and lettuce nearly sprouting in the hoop house, snowbanks melting away, healthy livestock and a well-exercised dog.

We aren't fools enough to count on good news, nor do we count on such feasts. The food was unexpected and tasted sweeter for the surprise. Weather changes, priorities change, people change, relationships require maintenance and even promises require occasional renegotiation. Besides all that, it's early Spring. Our muscles are twitchy and our brains are itchy. You just can't count on much, this time of year, except melting snow and a whole lot of mud.

So, we try to pry open the tight fists of Winter. We try to open up a bit, stretch our bodies and our minds and our spirits. We flex the muscles of gratitude and remind ourselves to meet each day on its own terms, with whatever grace and goodness we can muster. Sometimes, the firewood's all wet and we slip on the ice. Some days, all we can see is the mud. And some days, we walk wearily in and find a warm supper waiting, a farmstead well-tended, and owls calling at the edge of the woods, questioning each other sweetly under the great, round moon.

Sticker Shock

I was frightened the first time I saw it. The words were plastered to the bumper of a science professor's car, and although their purpose eluded me, I couldn't help feeling a deep sense of foreboding when I read the statement:
"The Universe is Expanding and Everything is On Schedule."



"On whose schedule?" I wondered. On whose agenda, with what printing press? And if everything was expanding, did that mean the very stuff of life itself was being pulled gradually apart? I wasn't sure of its meaning, but that odd little bumper sticker disturbed me enough that I started averting my gaze when I walked through that parking lot on the way to class. Perhaps it was right--it probably was--but I didn't know how it should impact my life and it made me feel anxious. I resolved to avoid it. And yet, every time I walked through that lot and averted my gaze, that sticker's text would swim back into my mind's eye. The very discomfort of it had imprinted it, indelibly, on my awareness.

Last Friday we went to see environmental writer and educator, Bill McKibben. His lecture was part of a series entitled, "Sustainability: Transitions to Resilience." But what McKibben really came to talk about was his current work, a worldwide consciousness-raising initiative called "350.org." 350 parts per million: the level of carbon in the atmosphere above which "life on the earth, as we know it, becomes unsustainable." He spoke with great excitement of displays created on every continent, images sent in from desert villages, metropolitan high-rises, rain forests and glaciers, all proclaiming "350 ppm." Then, almost as an aside, he mentioned that the level of carbon NOW in the atmosphere is actually around...oh, 390 ppm. Oh. Dear.

I found myself right back in that university parking lot, staring at the back of that science professor's car. Two little numbers--two little factoids backed up with reams of evidence--had sent me plummeting into anxiety and fear, despair and depression. Where's the sustainability, the "transition to resilience" in THAT?

Science and religion both have their sacred litanies, their liminal lists of power and persuasion. The litany of environmental degradation inspires its own special terror and awe:

More plastic in the oceans now than plankton...
More heat and moisture in the air than we've ever known...
More cancer-causing poisons in water and soil...
The coral reefs dying...
The topsoil being stripped away...
The Arctic Ocean ice-free in our lifetime...
Less than 5% of the old-growth forests left...
1% of species going extinct every year...

How long, O Earth? How long?
We believe, O Earth.
Help our unbelief.

Despair and depression serve neither the Earth nor the God of Creation. Of this I am convinced. But how shall we respond, in the face of such overwhelming and condemning facts? How shall we pry ourselves off the dead center of ignorance and denial? How shall we transform the self-medicating culture of wasteful, careless consumption that is leading us toward our collective death?

An unquiet mind is a fertile, creative space. So is a troubled heart. Perhaps this is where we begin: in that wild teetering on the edge of the void, where the view can, by turns, terrify and inspire. Perhaps it begins with a willingness to engage, fully, with claims both profound and irreverent, to reach out our aching arms and enter the dance with partners we never thought we'd claim.

I'm still not sure about that bumper sticker. I'm still not sure about its creator's intent. I'm no more certain how to live in an expanding universe than I am sure of how to live in a world that appears to be dying. But bumper-sticker statements offer little in the way of wisdom, and science and technology have failed us--and our planet--repeatedly.

I'm not saying I deny the harsh evidence. I know the great evil and great destruction of which we are capable. But here is what I believe: that our deepest identity is that of creatures, and as creatures we are connected to the entirety of the Cosmos, the Community of Life. I believe we are called, as human creatures, to meet our present challenges with all the soaring, joy-bringing creativity we can summon from the core of our beings. If the universe is expanding, we dare not shrink away into depression and silence.

We had best open our hearts, open our ears, expand our lungs and learn how to tune our voices to Creation's own harmonies. We had best reach out our hands to heal the weary earth. We had best learn how to unplug from all the pretty little energy-sucking techno-pacifiers and reconnect ourselves to the Creating, Redeeming, Sustaining powers of the Universe itself.


And that won't fit on a bumper sticker.


(image source: galaxy)

Friday Five- time out edition

Being a farmer is part of my calling, but it is only one of my vocational passions. I have recently been working to reweave the threads of a rather tattered call to ordained ministry, a call I plan to pursue in the United Church of Christ. (This is a rather new denomination for me, but I've worked in a wide range of churches before, including United Methodist, Disciples of Christ, Presbyterian, and Mennonite congregations.) Now I am struggling to reconnect the different aspects of my vocational life. I've recently joined a webring full of wise, wild and wonderful women--and a few men--who inspire and support this process. Today I'm doing my first official "RevGalBlogPals Meme."

Sally over at RevGalBlogPals writes:
"Holy Week is almost upon us, I suspect that ordained or not, other revgal/pals calendars look a bit like mine, FULL, FULL, FULL.....

Jesus was great at teaching us to take time out, even in that last week, right up to Maundy Thursday he withdrew, John's gospel tells us he hid! He hid not because he was afraid, but because he knew that he needed physical, mental and spiritual strength to get through...

So faced with a busy week:


1. What restores you physically?
Singing. It is one of the most healing pursuits I know. It helps me breathe. The sound moving through my body shakes loose my grief, releases my joy, and awakens a resonance in my bones. I don't sing often enough, but when I do, every part of my being is energized. They say the same space in the brain that processes music also serves to modulate the space between ourselves and others. When we are worn down by community stress and difficult relationships, no wonder there's such healing power in singing together!

2. What strengthens you emotionally/ mentally?
My friendships with strong women and gentle men, and the laughter and understanding that move back and forth between us. Another source of strength is my sense of rootedness: in my American pioneer and Celtic immigrant heritage, in the multigenerational wisdom and stories of my mentors and kinfolk, and in my own sense of calling and connection to the sea and the land. I grew up on an island and have learned that my emotions and thoughts have their own tidal rhythms. It is only when I forget to attend to these rhythms that I lose my balance.

3. What encourages you spiritually?
Gardening! When I plant and tend and nourish and harvest in the garden, I do these things for my soul as well. The garden has always been a safe, restorative spiritual space for me, even with all the weeds and pests and the chickens pecking holes in the tomatoes. I grew up gardening, and even when my mother and I quarreled and misunderstood each other, we always spoke gently and lovingly together as we shared the work of gardening. When I neglect the garden, I often find I am neglecting myself as well. When I'm angry and despairing, there's nothing like a session of weed-pulling to settle my spirit. The herbal scents, the touch of wind, the feel of dirt on my hands, the hoped-for "just desserts" of ripe fruit, the satisfaction of wrongs immediately righted... ahhh!

4. Share a favourite poem or piece of music from the coming week.
Gerard Manley Hopkins is, for me, the ultimate Holy Week poet, but I'm hard-pressed to choose between "Carrion Comfort," "Peace," "God's Grandeur," and "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire..."

5.There may be many services for you to attend/ lead over the next week, which one are you most looking forward to and why? If there aren't do you have a favourite day in Holy week if so which one is it?
I have always had a deep appreciation for Maundy Thursday and the Tenebrae service. How many other rituals allow us to name, accept, and embrace the shadows that haunt us and surround us? So much of Christian worship--and pop culture--is focused on light and brightness and "being of good cheer..." I find myself hungry for these rare opportunities to acknowledge the darkness--the blank emptiness of despair and the gestational, dream-filled fullness of the Soul's Dark Night.

Home On The Plain?

"You're always saying that." It was The Bagpiper's younger son, invoking his youthful right to hold his elders accountable for words and actions, and I had to admit he nailed it.

"You're always saying the place ALMOST feels ready, ALMOST could be called a real home." He was impatient with me, which was fair enough. I'm already pretty impatient with myself. Our construction project has played out like most budget-restricted ventures, slowly, with much frustration along the way. When WILL we be ready to say, for certain, that this site of our intellectual and physical labours is more than just another worksite? When WILL we step into this space, breathe deeply, relax into the peace of it, and say to ourselves and each other, "We're home"?

The Bagpiper and I have been taking turns, the past few weeks, reading aloud from a small book called "The Plain Reader: Essays on Making a Simple Life." (Ed. Scott Savage, ISBN 0-345-41434-9). It is a collection of speeches and essays from Amish and Quaker perspectives. The work grew out of The Center for Plain Living and their 1996 event, "The Second Luddite Congress." (I may draw some ire for mentioning this event on the internet, which they do not believe to be an appropriate forum for discussion of such ideas, but I'll take the risk because I think the ideas matter.)

The book features many of the Thinkers of Big Thoughts that led us to this farm, the spiritual guides and on-location reporters of The Settled, Rooted, Intentional Life: Wendell Berry, Jerry Mander, and Gene Logsdon are featured alongside essays on draft horses and washing clothes by hand. I don't agree with all their reasons and perspectives, but I do agree with the premise offered by Bill McKibben in the book's foreword:

"This book is...a manual for subverting your own life. And after that, perhaps, the lives of those around you. In an odd sense, when every taboo has fallen, then the only way to be subversive is to have more fun than other people--to fill your heart and your home with more joy and warmth and pleasure than the frantic, slightly pathetic, ersatz happiness offered by Disney and the mall and the chat room. This is a book, finally, about joy. You may despair when you read it, and then you may do something magnificent." --pg. xiii, The Plain Reader, c.1998 Center for Plain Living.

That last sentence sounds a lot like the season of Lent. There is something mightily compelling about that movement from despair to magnificent action. As we've read through the essays and discussed them together, we've tried to reflect on the sources of our own despair--and the seeds we struggle to plant and tend, the seeds of what we hope will be our contribution to that nebulous, longed-for magnificence.

We read about people who willingly chose to live without television, as we have chosen ourselves. We read about a pastor who wrestled with appropriate technology and compromised with the use of a laptop for sermon-writing, as hours were freed up for more human interactions. We read about people who gave up their cars for horses and buggies, people who willingly live without running water, in order to honour the needs of the rest of Creation.

This is a thought that has prodded at the edges of my mind for many weeks--that our petty suffering and sense of inconvenience SHOULD move us away from selfish conceits towards solidarity with the greater human condition, where clean, running, heated water is a rarity. It would be more radical, more faithful, to freely and actively give up plumbing for Lent. (The hard part, for us, was not having the choice.) It would be even more radical to give it up for longer, perhaps for life. Think of the bills saved, the water unwasted. Think of the effort and care required to give one's wastes back to the earth in a way that ensures health and sustainability. Would this be a retreat to something more primitive, or would it be an advance?

I try to imagine Jesus and his closest friends on a farm. Judas would be the guy stressing about the composting toilet, worrying about livestock feed consumption and the daily accounting of eggs laid. Those things are important, but there must also be room for Mary of Bethany who broke open her precious jar, anointed Jesus, and earned a place in Christian history for her bold, fragrant, prophetic act. This is the central challenge of Lent, I believe, and the reason we felt moved to revisit "The Plain Reader." In a time when resources seem scarce and human kindness scarcer, we are called to push the edges of generosity. In a time of destructive patterns and impulses, we are called to greater creativity. In a time when pundits declare "it's all over" and "the sky is falling", we are called--as stewards of the earth--to boldly feed the soil, plant and tend seeds, shore up and mend the sheltering power of the earth, and joyfully declare that abundance shall reign again.

It's still Lent. We are oh, so broken and the times are oh, so dark. But, as the seed must break open in the dark earth, so we must turn our efforts towards dreaming of New Creation in all the tumbling glory of its myriad, colourful forms. We must beat the swords into plowshares and till our despair under. We must turn the graves into furrows. We must reclaim joy and laughter as we play in the dirt, and proclaim the promise in the rhythms of our work-songs.

The time will come when we live into something creative, something magnificent. The time will come when jars will break open, when blossoms will burst forth, when bowls will brim and overspill with berries.

In the dreaming of it, in the waking of it, and in the making of it,
We are almost home.

Cold Pipes and Warm Ashes

I'm giving up plumbing for Lent.

Just kidding. If you've been following our story, you know that we've been living without plumbing since early January, when we moved into our unfinished cottage out of a desperate desire to stay warm. After a succession of unfortunate plumbers (or lack thereof), I am cautiously happy to report that we seem to have secured the services of a generous retired plumber, due to start about two weeks hence. Frankly, I'll believe it when I pee it--and afterwards, we'll all be flushed with pride!

Bathroom humour aside, it IS Lent, when many people of faith engage themselves with the spiritual discipline of self-denial. Chocolate is a common choice. Frivolous entertainment is another--though it may mean less to give up movies or tv shows now that they're easily accessed through downloads/Netflix. While I embrace the idea of personal sacrifice readily enough, my Lenten choices are always complicated by my birthday, which usually falls in the early part of Lent. My idea of spiritual discipline does not extend to include the denial of one's own birthday cake. I don't think God would be particularly enriched, honoured, or eddified by this. If I read the scriptures correctly, Jesus himself was a "life is short; let's have some cake together" kind of guy.

This year, my birthday came on Ash Wednesday. Instead of blowing out candles on some big ol' homemade cake, I went to a pancake supper at our church, helped clear away the paper plates and rearrange the folding chairs, then attended a brief evening service where my forehead was marked with ashes.

"Remember that from dust you came and to dust you will return." Not exactly what one wants to hear on one's birthday. For a brief, macabre moment, I felt sucked into the pages of Lemony Snicket's "Series of Unfortunate Events." In the span of the past few months, I had weathered burst pipes, sub-zero temperatures, huge bills for an unseasonal excavation, missing plumbers, a car crash, and a drastic cut in available hours at my off-farm job. Now here it was, my birthday, and I was being asked to contemplate my personal dustiness? As much as I appreciate Lent and its rich array of symbolism, I just didn't feel ready to welcome the spiritual "journey into the wilderness" this year.

This morning, though, we had communion. Being "deacon of the month" (a title which implies personalized trading cards or a box of treats delivered, every thirty days, right to your door), I arrived a bit early to pour the grape juice into the chalice and prepare the communion bread. In spite of my early arrival, several of the Pillars of the Congregation were already there, calmly tending to devotional details. They wore blues and purples, colours appropriate to the ecclesiastical season. In my dark greens and browns, I hoped I was subdued enough to be "Lenty..." But the effect was somewhat spoiled by my dusty red shoes. I'd opted for them as the only ones clean enough, and in good enough repair, for church, but their jolly colour--even slightly faded--was admittedly inappropriate. I was fretting over this when our minister rushed up to confer on the morning's logistics. I admired her well-tailored black robe and lovingly-handmade quilted stole. Then I noticed her shoes.

Peeking out from underneath her very professional and appropriate preacher's outfit were a pair of red shoes--bright red shoes. Whether she caught my downward gaze or not, I don't know, but she lifted one of her feet and playfully wiggled it. "Maybe I shouldn't have worn these. They're better for Pentecost than Lent." She shrugged, laughed, and--before I could even mention my own footwear concerns--went back to preparing for the service.

Without knowing it, she resolved, by example, my conflicted approach to Lent. Her shoes and her laughter reminded me that, wherever there's smoke (or ashes, or dust), there's fire. Underneath the dark clouds, the somber moods, and the heavy robes, there's a promise of passion and a trace of flame.

This year's journey has taken me into snowdrifts, not the shifting desert sands. While Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness, I find the devil in the details: the cost of feed for our animals, the dwindling firewood pile, and the daily struggle to pay our bills. I need to feel the heat and light of the Lenten story. I need to wrestle angels to get warm. I need to move close to the fire.

They say firewood warms a person four times: once in the cutting of it, once in the splitting of it, once in the stacking of it, and once in the burning of it. As I move into my own Lenten journey, my discipline is this: not to give something up, exactly, but rather to stay engaged: to dwell between embers and dancing shadows, mindful of the passion that binds us and the fire that transforms us all.

P.S. And if some of that transformative fire shows up at the end of a plumber's torch while copper pipes are being soldered, we'll welcome that fire too.