Death

Up early sitting in the dark under the stars.  Last week I sat and looked at a white casket shining like a new car with the afternoon sun reflecting off its polished surface.  Inside, hidden from view, were all that remained of a dear friend. 

My wife wants to be cremated.  It repelled me at first but she cares nothing for her funeral.  I guess I will as well.  We are making a family graveyard here at Fair Haven and ordering stones for Betty’s parents to be buried here.  We will be as well. 

Yesterday my lover, my dog, and I visited my dad's grave.  I sat on his tombstone.       

Death.  I hate death.   I think Damien Hurst’s title The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is one of the most sincere titles for an artwork.   We rale against death.  I was supposed to give a eulogy once, but I was struggling with my anger.   A friend of mine reminded me anger is a natural response to death.  He said we are made eternal so to have death interrupt eternity is as wicked a thing as we can imagine.  Death is being wronged in every way, to have such a glorious thing as the human being pass away, die, decease, is the greatest wrong.  

I cannot write longer on this.  It is giving too much quarter to something worthy of none.  Oh death where is thy sting?  In the hearts of those left living.  But our hearts are not without hope.  

Hirst and his work, "The Impossibility..."

        

 

SOOOOUUUULLLLL TRAIN

We Played a flute for you, and you did not dance.   

“The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.” 

“Well done, good and faithful servant (tree)! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!”

I attended church yesterday preached actually.  The house was filled with my grandchildren and people of all colors.  It was a dancing, joyous affair, MoTown-esque.  My lover wept in joy.  I imagine we were practicing Heaven.  We better get ready; soon, we will be joining the pros, that great cloud of witnesses who dance with the trees and play with the saints on Soooooooouuul Train.   

 

 

The Hound of Heaven

I am a lost man found.  I am struggling with Francis Thompson’s poem The Hound of Heaven.  I see it is about me but I cannot unlock its secret beauty, the beauty of each word to beautifully describe my own salvation.  I was cut to shreds laying in a hallway knowing I had walked every step of the way to where I was, dreadfully.  It was thirty-some-odd years ago and, I think, I even said aloud; “I give up!”  There was The Hound of Heaven as I lay before Him.  This is the jist of the poem but its ecstasy, the beauty of every word chosen, picked perfectly to fit the one before and after to tell the ‘greatest story ever told’ I cannot unlock.  The poem is like a beautiful rose which I cannot see because I hold only its petals.  I have sat with the learned in English Literature and had poet and poetry opened up by their professors.  Have known what I couldn't understand.  Thus I am before this great poem.  But one thing I do know; I am a lost man found.    

I found this piece of stained glass lying on my truck
window after my lover and I had finished our morning bike ride yesterday.  
I can often see The Joy better than I can hear Him.

Joy or Missing Hell

The joy of salvation isn’t missing hell, albeit that is a great advantage.  The joy of salvation is the awakening to life, the life of God in Christ, the life we have, and the life that surrounds us.  Humans have become so much more beautiful, interesting, and worthy.  Your lover, spouse, more singularly intriguing.  Children born and unborn, treasures.  Frogs and trees, mountains and stars all become glories.  Discovery and adventures are commands, and intricate designs are everywhere.  Reborn is the only verb that applies; you know you before and after and the only way to describe it is, “I was dead and now I have been given  life.”  So one can see that missing hell is the shallowest of all responses to the joy of being born again.  

        

 

The Way We Were

Watching night become day.  

Peace abides on the flowing river, silver sky, and clarinet sounds circling around the early dawn.  Growing old is the most ancient melody, a sweet surrendering of most things held dear to cling to the sun, moon, and forest.  Those things that are of the primeval, the things building the double helix that intertwine my heart and soul to Him. But there is one other greater still.  Love abounds.  Like the living air around me now, presses on, encases me, “living water” pouring forth to all the world and all that abideth therein.  This primordial thing, gifted me, flowing through me, Eden’s other river, that now begins to carry me along toward that coming crossing over the other river, Jordan.  Oh, the greater knowing of the “greatest of these” like the still whisper of The Way We Were assuring this is the way I will soon be.   

 

Skip To My Loo

Has all of life turned on its head and silly seems the heinous things and laughter fills all the hauntings of old?  Has all my years I have come been a long journey to dregs, to sit by the silt and see only barrenness wave above the plains?  The gild is off the lily, the polish tarnished, the silver sold, the gold cold.  Send in the clowns, the circus failed, three rings of fools charging millions their trillions.  Pledging death, throw the baby out with the baptismal, anointing blood to soothe the saints.  I hear the anthem, haggard played, a snowball headed for hell, and all along they "skip to my loo, can’t get a red bird, a jay bird’ll do"…until you hear the dreaded screeching of that bird’ll never do.  

Oh for the balm of midnight sigh singing…

“Let everything that has breath praise the LORD.  Praise the LORD!”   

Come, Lord Jesus!  Come!

 

Well Done Thy Good and Faithful Tree

After being away for a few days, yesterday, as is my habit, I made my way around Fair Haven to allow her to seep back into me.  On the side of the mountain, I found a great oak had fallen, broken off a few feet above the ground.  It hurt as I sat and looked at it lying still across the hill where it would die for the next several days.  It has served God well and now has been welcomed into His Kingdom as a faithful tree, a servant of His, who has served well.  I returned to the house and got my lover so she could also bear witness to its passing.  This morning after reading Psalms 148 and Romans 8:18-25 I wrote a prayer for it and for the wonderful kindness God allows us to see and care for His exuberant works, thanking Him and allowing me to note His trees passing.

 

Thoughts While Hiking Yesterday

There are two great gifts of retirement.  One is the overwhelming peace of knowing you can do whatever you please with each new day.  The second is knowing no matter where you are on the earth you get to go home to Fair Haven.  

 

A Lover on a Cold Body

I arose early and sat in the dark.  It was a cold dark morning which has made this writing more of a pounding as I have to force my fingers to bear down on the keys as if they were those on the old Royal typewriter my daddy owned.  But the difficulty of my old fingers sing when beholding the beauty of another night become day.  This is one of the great glories one can afford, to see the dark become light.  Not like turning on a light but the whole of the world, from horizon to horizon becoming light.  It is vague at first but then first colors are beheld and then “Morning has broken, like the first morning”  Yes it is inexpensive, supply is always in surplus for lack of demand, but watching a cold night become a warm morning is a bargain liken unto the warmth of a lover on a cold body seeping in to awaken one's soul.  

 

Oh To Make Myself an Ant

Studying Job for my sermon on Sunday.  

It would be like me looking down and seeing an ant struggling to take a tiny crumb home to his family for breakfast. Having just eaten the biscuits for my breakfast, I might smile at the ant and at our new relationship together, but there is nothing the ant can do to impact me, add or subtract from me, or be of any consequence to me.  Nor can the ant know of how grander I am than he or how I have supplied his family with its meal today, that it lives on my porch, or that I mind all the world he lives upon, ensuring it is kept and nice.  Yes, the ant and I are in a relationship but not so much that the ant knows or could even understand.   Imagine how sad the ant's life is for he does not know me...Unless I could make myself an ant.        

On The Bumble Bee and Job

I sit quietly on the porch having read the most ancient man Job, in the most Ancient Text.  I am listening to Nat King Cole, his fingers trotting softly up and down the piano, giving my time with Him, I AM, a musical background.  I marvel at the lake beyond and the kindness of putting such glory in the fingers of a single man, and I sip my coffee and think the same of the coffee bean.  Job was forced to face the fact that grace was enough.  It is a hard fact to face when all ten of your children have violently died.  I have a pot of flowers that sits beside me every morning. Grace is displayed before me as morning after morning the bumble bee buries itself in the nourishment he finds in leaves but never once flies up to the flower the leaves support to marvel at its beauty.  What divine thing must lie in the crevices between stem and leaf the bee finds so filling?  Grace!!! 

 

The Poetics of Grass

Outside of the Word of God, or Divine revelation, or perhaps a sermon here or there, there is nothing so demanding a decision of life or death than the grass releasing its smell as it is cut down.  The grass lays green, soft, abundant, and mostly ignored until the blade slices it in half and its aroma floats fragrantly on the wind.  Its scent can send us years away to summer's bliss, fall days of love and youth, it spreads over us an air of joy, of peace, of all the earth being right.  Even the hardest heart smiles at its scent.  On our very best day, who would have conceived of putting that into cut grass or thought of its symbology of the fragrance of Christ’s love being released only after He is crushed on the cross?  Oh, thy worthy grass, thy fragrance the smell of angel choirs, its singing bouquet going up to God, declaring “You are worthy, worthy O Lord for all the earth to declare Your Lordship!”