Was it Angels or Merely Sun rays? Does it matter?

The sky slanted--

gray shafts cloud to cloud

streaming silver bars

looked like angels,

not the kind with wings

blooming out of their shoulders

or the others with four faces

eyes, oh so many eyes

or a man who walked up

and wrestled hard, throwing out a hip.

But still looking into the sky

it was like I was seeing angels,

a whole company of light,

not like the golden shafts

that touch the ground

like Jacob’s ladder

that set a longing in me

for Jesus to come, to catch us up

to him in the sky,

that old, debunked story—rapture--

Christians delivered from God’s wrath.

that gave me comfort

as a weeping, lonely child,

in a world that hurt so much

I wanted to die.

These shafts didn’t drop

sun driven to earth.

They were silver beams

high as jets flying from Europe

over the pole,

over the clipped fields and a dairy farm.

Is it right to call this light angels

like I am really seeing them

on a mission high in the sky?

Is it right to see the world

as a child, to see the heavens

as more than clouds,

the planets more than spinning rocks and gas?

Or am I crazy, am I reaching too hard

to see what I’m still blind to see?

Then the next night, a good day

before the storms, thunder to blizzard,

the sky looked like a dragon--

long rippling flesh--

like Wyrm wrapped around the sky.

Last summer I saw a white rainbow—the newborn sun angled just right to throw it into the mist. Was it just some odd refraction of light or something more? Or was the white rainbow itself miracle enough?

This year a flock of redwing blackbirds have settled here. Last summer I greeted a couple as though they were my friends. Now when I walk, they settle on trees that are still twigs and billow their feathers calling. Our friendship seems real, not saint like, but real. Bruce says its normal for them to follow us.

How come it’s easier to experience the demonic, deep darkness that can attack in dreams than it is to perceive angels? How come we can sometimes feel that darkness twist up between people like a dust devil full of black dirt? Here’s a poem about how powerful those dust devils can be.

The drifts curl over

Snow shaped by wind

The banks with lips curled

Over the road shoulder

By the trees the snow is sucked back

As if the tree said back off

And the snow curls back

leaving a curved bowl

open to grass

like the woman I hugged

because the feeling,

how do I describe it

other than dread?

Something heavy, dark

that didn’t make sense

coming from either one of us

but coming between us.

The snow curled over itself

a cornice that could split

and slide down a hill

because I stepped into her space

like she has stepped into mine

calling me friend when we are not.

I wish I’d been honest

the snow roaring and tumbling

across the fields

blurring the line of sight

to other farms,

the township plow

clearing the roads.

If I’d said my peace,

instead of the silence

like we wield as women,

of snow falling, piling up

around our ankles, our knees,

wind so hard you fear

being knocked upside the head

by a branch flying off a steady tree.

Snow is no

match to the sun

and coming spring.

Do we not perceive them because angels are more furtive, humble, not showing off?

I know of evangelical authors who lost their audience and were condemned because they claimed they had spirit guides, angels. But do these spirit guides mean well, or are they creatures clothed in light, good at deception and accusation? I sure as heck don’t want one. A wise friend, heck a friend with enough quiet to give me space as they listen to my stories would do me just fine. Laughter too.

Aren’t we supposed to be like children so we can enter the kingdom? This week while I waited for my physical therapy, I was twenty minutes early from not reading my calendar, two little girls played with their stuffed toys, tossing them to each other, gentle, returning my smile with theirs. Simple toys. Simple play.

Let me tell you how an angel plunked down beside me and my little mixed breed Australian shepherd, Gweno, named after the morning star in Welsh. But it wasn’t just me that angel watched out for. Here’s a poem called “Feeding Hogs in the Ozarks”:

Three farmers drunk on whiskey

Took me with them to feed hogs.

They measured themselves

and the foreman asked

if I’d ever been raped.

They joked about a goat woman--

her screams were so loud--

Pete was so big.

I felt like I’d stepped

into snow shot with bright sun.

I could not see, but I could sleep

and think about when “Pete” tried

to make me dance on macadam.

I braced my arms against him

and tried not to drown in his breath.

He said the moon was a harvest.

“We might fall in love and elope.”

Hogs chucked a sack of corn

the farmers poured in the mud. Pete said

he wondered whether I liked men-

when I offered to help him haul feed

and refused to kiss because of his wife.1

I stepped out of that Suburban, parked back at the horse farm, where “Pete” was supposed to feed the mares and come right home. My dog and I caught a ride with him back to his home and my car. His wife had sent me to make him return home on time, to spend the Sunday with his family. Whiskey and Coke, I remember whiskey and coke. She looked me in the eye and said she trusted me because of my faith. Back in New York, my mother scolded me for playing this hard with fire, with my crush on this family because they sheltered me from the brutality of poetry school.

Fifty years later, “Pete’s” son found me on Facebook because I told him to “Listen to the Day.” Both he and his brother were the only two children I ever baby sat, while their parents went dancing. On our way back to their house, deep in the Ozarks, we stopped by the White River. The day was unusually quiet, no human sounds, no planes, no cars, no talk. I challenged them to listen. Being in poetry school, I wrote a poem, “Poster,” that my teacher called poeticky:

Skip a stone across the river.

Watch the circle widen from each step

you take as the world ripples for a minute.

Listen to the day.

Dip your sight into the current

Caught molten by the bridge-focused sun.

Sip blindness brewed in a locust whine.

Listen to the day.

Bury your fingers in light growing

Like moss between crags of the trees

Peel it back and smell the shade.

Listen to the day.

It wasn’t just me that angel was protecting, but it was Pete’s son, who would find me on Facebook and renew our friendship fifty years later. When he traveled throughout the country, he’d stop and listen for no human sounds. I believe he said he only found two places that were so utterly quiet. He found me when I wondered—What good am I? He offered a taste of the truth of the promise that the children of the barren woman will be more than she who had children:

Sing, O barren one, who did not

bear:

Break forth into singing and cry

aloud,

You who have not been in labor!

For the children of the desolate one

will be more

than the children of her who is

married,” says the Lord.2

Within a few weeks, “Will’s” trucking company sent him on a route that brought him within ten miles of our home. He got permission to stay overnight and parked his semi at our neighbor’s farm. Who would have thought a friendship begun fifty years ago and dropped for those years would rekindle? Who would have thought those minutes by a dried up stream would have so much impact? And those prayers, I used to whisper looking at moonlight out their guest room window, were answered, with “Will” and his family coming to faith in Jesus.

I guess I’m sharing this to let you know that those angels, though furtive, are nearby, and whispered prayers are heard, and one day we will sit at feast with the people whose lives we’ve touched for good, and even though our motives might be stained, God somehow figures out how to make it come right. As C.S. Lewis says,

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.3

References

1 Katie Andraski. When the Plow Cuts. 1988. p. 10

2 Isaiah 54:1, ESV

3 CS Lewis Weight of Glory. William B Eerdmans. 1975 p. 15

Photo by “Will” of the river where we talked about listening to the day.

I’m as gobsmacked by these recent years of quiet and contentment as I was by decades of steady difficulty. Bruce and I are both healthy. We get along. We are quiet with each other. We have found a synchrony that Ruth and Peco Gaskovski say happens with old married couples. In their essay with Inkwell, Marriage Coded: they say:

“When you put two pendulum clocks on the same surface, they eventually start swinging in synchrony. Something similar happens in close relationships: people synchronize. They learn how to turn-take in conversation and often know just what to say because they spend so much time paying attention to each other.”1

This ability to be content is a great and good gift and decades in coming. My mother used to quote: “There were two prisoners, one saw the bars the other the stars.” I saw the bars. After my folks and brother died, with difficult in laws, and a grinding hard job, my prayer became “Lord I don’t want to be a bitter old woman.” I kept walking even though I was angry and hurt. My blessed friends listened to hours of venting, affirming my pain. I wrote and rewrote my novel, along with several others seeing and seeing again until the pain eased into peace. I learned to bless people who hurt me. I am still practicing this to this day. It’s a grand way to give your mind positive thoughts if they take up residence in your head. This was a very long walk over several decades.

And the Lord answered that prayer. He answered the promise “weeping lasts for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”2 I’ve experienced the truth of Psalm 34: 8 – 10:

“Oh taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! Oh fear the lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack! The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.”3

These good gifts have worked on my fear of God’s love, my just plain fear of love4. They have been like a father delighting in giving presents to his daughter. (I had one like that.)

Lately I’ve read writers who say to be wary of contentment. Just this week I read the following from Stephen Freeman:

“And so, once again, if we have learned anything at all in our theological education, spiritual formation and pastoral service, we have learned to beware, and to be wary, of all contentment, consolation and comfort before our co-crucifixion in love with Christ.”5

But doesn’t Paul in Philippians say,

“Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am in to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”6

Isn’t it a work to learn contentment in all circumstances? Aren’t we denying our discontent, our complaint by learning contentment in everything, even abundance? I say abundance because there are cultural whispers guilt tripping us to feel sorry for comfort. Might it be a bit of pride to reject the gifts when they are given? Are we as Christians addicted to suffering? Have we made the cross an idol? Wasn’t Jesus, dead and gone to Sheol, taken down from the cross, grabbing the keys to death and hades, but not staying there? Isn’t he now sitting at God’s right hand? Aren’t we also, covered in glory like Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration only we don’t see it?

Eugene Terkhin in The Dangerous Safety of Perfect Protection: The Soul Encounters Light Only Through Cracks says,

“The worst thing that can happen to a human being in this imperfect world is to be perfectly protected. Perfect protection renders the soul prayerless. A praying soul instinctively seeks vulnerability, because it knows that the experience of light is the best protection from evil.”7

Except that my soul isn’t prayer less, even though my life is quiet and happy. In fact I’ve been learning the mundane, day to day, work of praying, both centering and intercessory prayer. Aren’t monastics the most protected in their cloisters with a regular routine and abbots watching over them? (I am aware the fun often begins, as a person wrestles with their inner demons in their cell.)

Can we be so captured by the virtue of suffering that in the midst of trial, we wonder when the crying stops and a little happiness rises, shouldn’t we still be crying? This happened often as I grieved my parents’ deaths. I often wondered why I wasn’t crying more, when I got home, after I’d wept in church. Grief moves in waves, where the tears come and then they ease. Joy can rise in those moments.

Pressure release is how you train a horse. Release can be as educational as pressure because the animal knows this is the behavior the rider is looking for. When the tension increases, the horse knows that’s not the way to go. When I was in poetry school, I learned the most when Miller Williams marked the lines that worked. I leaned into those lines and wrote good, uncluttered poems.

For years I have wondered when do we get to the resurrection, the new creation? And once we are there how do we behave?

If we get a break, can’t we be grateful? Even that dreadful Psalm that begins with My God, my God why have you forsaken me includes:

“Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. In you our fathers trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried and were rescued; in you they trusted and were not put to shame.”8

I know this is Lent, when the church is focused on Jesus’ walk towards the cross. This is the season of self-denial. But I wonder if one thing we might want to deny is suffering, beating ourselves up because it appears godly, well, because Jesus and the cross.

Sure there have been losses for me in this season, blooming grief, grinding loneliness during these years of quiet, but the pain is nothing compared to my working years.

And yes I am filled with dread because at 70 Bruce and I are on the downhill run, with decrease in our future—downsizing our home, minimizing our stuff, saying goodbye to beloved friends. One of us is likely to precede the other in death. There’s no telling how our bodies will fail. A physical therapist told me our bodies will age, aches and pains are normal, deal with it. But that’s why I’m there, to stave off the ache in my legs, how it hurts to climb the stairs. Why not avoid a walker by doing some exercises? We can take comfort in Jesus who thought not equality to be grasped but became in the likeness of a servant. Our savior has walked that road ahead. But I feel as vulnerable as Job, knowing disaster will come. But if life is good right now, why not relish the release, why not shout for joy and simply be grateful for the simple, good things that come to us daily?

References

1. Marriage Coded. Ruth and Peco Gaskovski and Inkwell. https://open.substack.com/pub/inkwellct/p/marriage-coded?r=2jx39&utm_medium=ios

2. Psalm 30:5

3. Psalm 34: 8 – 10

4. Here’s a poem I wrote that describes this:

THIS TERROR

This terror before my husband is the terror

in a thunderstorm when there is nothing

protecting me and my house but the luck

of the lightning stroke. I taste it.

My horses in the barn would have no chance

against straw in flame and locked fear.

I sit the farthest inside my house. The windows

are silver with rain so hard I can’t see

the cedars, willow, lilac a few yards off.

I sit with a Bible open to First John

where it says God is love and perfect love

casts off fear. But God is so raw in the sudden thunder,

I must sit in terror until the storm moves east.

With my husband I freeze as the child I was

and kiss with fear scuddling along my teeth.

God is raw when we come to love a man

who could die quick as lightning. But sun

does break up the storm, horses still stand

in the barn, waiting for pasture. One apple

tree down that my parents left to be an arbor

for bittersweet I picked for centerpieces.

5. Thomas Hopko, Cross of Christ. Glory to God for All things. Stephen Freeman https://glory2godforallthings.com/2026/03/13/hopko-on-the-cross-of-christ-3/

6. Philippians 4: 10 - 13

7. Eugene Terekhin

8. Psalm 22: 3 - 5

Sunday, March 8, 2026

The wind is brisk this morning. The sky so clear and clean I could see the faded gibbous moon off to the east. When the moon is like this at night, I get spooked. It’s lopsided, faded, fat. It doesn’t feel clean and joyous like the little crescent following the sun down to the horizon. Or the shouting full moon throwing shadows, glorious shadow. But today it was faded over the horizon a bit of a ways from setting.

Aiden wanted to chase the redwing blackbird that swooped in front of us, but he strained on ahead. He’s gotten better. His fault is with me, reinforcing when he wants to work, and letting him break off and go about his business. He was awful at dog class because I haven’t worked with him. But his circuits get blown too. And once he focuses on something like grabbing my treat bag, he won’t beg off, not matter what I do. “Leave it” the way the trainer tells us doesn’t register with me. I’ve worked with my dogs since I was a child, but Aiden is beyond me, too much dog, too joyous. And too often my regret for bringing him home, for betraying Omalola, as an only dog, shows up in my face.

Aiden behaves better with Bruce. He’s the first dog where Bruce is taking time to spend with him. Aiden will quiet around Bruce, lying in his crate or alongside it. He knows the living room. (My office is a fun house full of paper to tear.) And I’ve shrieked at him too many times. Aiden crashes into my space when I’m reading or writing and crashes into real irritation. When I push him away, I see it in his eyes—hurt, shutting down. I’ve broken the relationship for him to listen. Correcting him makes him more insistent. I told him the other day I should place him. He knows this. He sees my regret in my face, my body.

This happened with Mrs. Horse. She came to us as a coming yearling as a companion horse for Tessie. I kept saying to myself this horse could hurt me, until I realized she had not. I realized through an exercise from Ben Hart that no she wasn’t going to hurt me, that she could have and she had not. The look on my face and my body language changed. That’s when the fights between the two mares began, but that’s another story.

In an interview with Dr. Zachery Porcu, Journey to Reality DeSecularize Your Life Jonathan Pageau affirms this idea:

I really do have this intuition that in some ways, when Christ is saying, you know, to not judge your brother, it’s like, it’s actually a training mechanism. It’s actually, it’s like, it’s actually training yourself to see the right patterns, you know, so that when you encounter someone, you’re always encountering Christ in them. And you’re actually calling that person, you’re actually calling that person into becoming that by encountering that.

Like, if I encounter you and I see in you the best aspect of you and I see, you know, the highest aspect of you and I, you can see that in my face. So that’s what I’m encountering. It’s like, I’m actually calling you to become that. 1

This rings like a bell with regards to people I find difficult. If I treat them like they are Christ, if I view them that way, then I’m calling them to become like him. Even though Aiden is not made in the image of God, he is still God’s creature, with things to teach about patience, boundaries and seeing him with acceptance--we chose to bring him to our home--not regret--he’s created substantial friction because of the extra tasks he’s added to my day. But that friction is good because too much open time can devolve into too much screen time.

The other day I was listening to Dr Roger McFillin on his Radically Genuine podcast. In a Yale MD on Angels, Telepathy and the Spiritual Root of the Mental Health Epidemic, Dr. Anna Yusim says something similar to what Pageau is saying. She says we should hold space for people and she offers an exercise how to do this:

“And when I work with couples and even when I work with individuals who want to see change in their child, their husband, their wife, et cetera, I always teach them the concept of holding space, which is a very simple concept.

And that concept is, you know, oftentimes we see people as they are, as opposed to as they could be. And for five minutes a day, five could be a lot, maybe starting with one minute, twice a day, being able to hold space for that person to be the best version of themselves as they can be. More loving, more whole, less addicted, whatever it is that they need.

And when a person is holding space for their significant other, or for a child, or for someone they love, they want to invoke all of their senses. So what does that person look like? Sound like, smell like, everything, invoke like feel, who is that person in their ultimate form?

And how do you feel in the presence of that person? So it’s like you’re essentially planting a seed in the cosmos and holding space for one minute, twice a day for that person to step into the best version of themselves. This is something Henry Grayson taught me a long time ago, and I’ve been doing it with patients with amazing results because you’re exactly right.2

When I have held space, I have been even more quiet, literally holding space, listening with no preset idea. That’s one reason why I hate the Enneagram because the other person is spending brain power, figuring out what number I am instead of allowing me to reveal yourself, instead of holding space.

No I hold space by listening, by being empty, by allowing the person to reveal themselves and reveal me as we interact. Well Aiden has revealed my panic at not knowing what to do with him because he was a bit feral when he came—because he was unclaimed for six months and lived in a kennel. When I’ve expressed this at the vet’s office, they’ve reminded me I’ve gone through wild puppy stuff with Omalola.

He’s revealed how I don’t like my space invaded. My gosh, I’ve gone to the wild, angry, side so quickly with him. He’s been shrieked at. I’ve learned to put him in his crate, when he’s unbearable, so we can both calm down. What an awful mother I would have been, even now when I’ve made lots of peace with myself and my past. I would have been a screamer and like my mother too much in my creativity to pay attention.

Dog class has been painful to attend. I feel shame because he’s so wild and I’ve not had it in me to train him. He would not leave off jumping for my treat bag, and he was panting and distracted by the other dogs. He can’t hold a sit or down stay more than five seconds.

If I did the above version of holding space with Aiden I could imagine a dog lying quietly in the room while I did my work. I could imagine those bright eyes, Watching, while we heel past other dogs. And letting me shake hands with someone with another dog while sitting quietly next to me. Lying down quietly when he needed a break. And not jumping for my treat pouch. He’d leave it. At home he’d not jump on counters (they both do).

As soon as we got home, he heeled beautifully as we walked around our path for a potty break.

Monique Anistee says we should be interesting to our dogs, make training a game, which reframes training for me because I often find sit, heel, stay boring.3 A game rather than train. Even as a teacher I knew to ask my students to play with writing by taking out some crayons and paper.

The redwing blackbirds are back. They honored us by settling in our trees. This morning one flirted with me as I walked the dogs. Oh and the killdeer too, trotting ahead of us. I stood before our oak trees and watched and listened as they made a joyful noise to each other. We’ve not had flocks of birds stop here in years past. Bruce says because our farm is out in the open.

Last summer I made friends with a few redwing blackbirds who followed me from electric wire to electric wire on my walks. And a few killdeer who walked on ahead. It’s good to see them back.

Monday, March 9, 2026

I walked the dogs to the willows surrounding a tiny stream that disappears at our field and a pile of rocks where the water way runs through our field and the neighbor’s. The stream has a name that I don’t remember. They were alive with redwing blackbirds, settled and singing. The weather forecasters’ warnings about terrible weather blooming the next day seemed like a fable, the sun bright, the air warm, the birds celebrating.

This week I read that magical verse in I Corinthians 4:5;

Do not pronounce judgement before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God.4

Commendation. Not condemnation.

Once I thought I experienced what felt like God’s judgement, harsh, condemning, because those years that’s I knew God and my relationship with him—unsettled, comforting but also a sense of being never enough. (Maybe I still feel that way. Those hell fire sermons from childhood left their mark.) I know how I fail to live up to the image of God in me. Inertia and reading my phone wins over silence. If there’s a snack out or chocolate I will grab it. If I want a book, despite the stack in my too be read pile, I’ll order it. I yell at the dog. I could go on.

I’d walked to my conference with Howard Nemerov, my coveralls on. I was fresh from cleaning stalls for Frank and Jeanette Gladd, trainers who broke Thoroughbreds and quarter horses for the track. He held my poems in his hand. He said there wasn’t much good in the poems. “You might want to give up poetry and take up farming.” I was stunned silent. I tried not to cry. He asked me if I was all right. He gave me a poem of his to critique. That summer a farmer became my muse and I wrote good poems that earned me my MFA and became my poetry collection: When the Plow Cuts. Standing before God felt like standing before Nemerov with his steel gray hair and the authority of the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize behind him. Years later I was told he did that to poets often.

Standing before judgement has felt like sitting with a neuropsychologist and her saying with a grim look on her face that I have mild cognitive impairment. “But that doesn’t mean, that doesn’t mean you’ll get dementia,” she said. And your doc thinks memory drugs might help, which I didn’t take. This was during Covid..And after the next test, my IQ improved, the doctor gruff with the good news I don’t need him and I couldn’t hear his good news. The insight that I’m a smart ass, uh intelligent, helps with how hard it’s been to find friends and how I need to keep challenging my mind. I have a hard time hearing the good news. Commendation. Not condemnation.

Standing before judgement has felt like Aiden wagging his butt, after I’ve shrieked, still joyous, mischievous, naughty, but still welcoming, glad to see me.

Standing before judgement has felt like receiving a note from a childhood friend thanking me for introducing them to Jesus even though I was an obnoxious evangelical/fundamentalist preaching the gospel. It’s like hearing from the only boy I babysat, thanking me for telling me to listen to the day, finding me to say he’s walking with the Lord. There will be a long table of people we sit down with whose lives we’ve touched.

Friday, March 13, 2026

The violent storms passed south of us, throwing grapefruit sized hail and a tornado that killed two and leveled whole towns. We got blessed, hard rain. Bruce and I took Omalola for a recheck on her lymph node and urine. Her insides look healthy on ultrasound but protein showed up in her urine. We’re waiting to hear about the additional test.

Wind as hard as a thunderstorm hit us in the middle of the night and has continued all day. I did not walk the dogs through the trees or along the road, as afraid of powerlines snapping as not hearing pickups drive up behind me. The trees have held steady in fifty mile an hour wind, even though one has some rot in it. A few small branches have fallen. The squirrels and birds are silent. I hope they have come to ground and not been beaten by the wind.

Well, they did come to ground. When I walked out at sunset, the dogs needing a potty break, I saw a flock of robins scattered on the soybean field, feeding. So many birds have settled around here. At least for now.

References

1. The Symbolic World: 440 - Dr. Zachary Porcu - Journey to Reality: De-Secularize Your Life, Mar 12, 2026. The Symbolic World 440

2. Radically Genuine Podcast with Dr. Roger McFillin: 221. A Yale MD on Angels, Telepathy & the Spiritual Root of the Mental Health Epidemic, Mar 5, 2026

3. Monique hosts the Lift Your Leg podcast, which is very helpful. And she has published the helpful guide to dog behavior: As a Dog Thinketh.

4. I Corinthians 4:5, ESV

If you’d like to offer a financial pat on the back:

The following are poems that sprang out of my journal. I’ve been taking a class in contemplative writing that has opened the gate for my words, however they want to run. Research has shown handwriting can avert dementia. Even as a young woman I could feel poems rising, when my mind clouded over, cluttered. But I forgot. The less I pack my brain with pixels the more my own thoughts rise. It’s as if I didn’t think my thoughts were worthy, so I flicked open my phone at every spare minute. But they are worthy. Right now, I’m weary of prose. Poets Ted Kooser,Sherman Alexie, Joseph Massey, Tanya Runyan write magic with their words. So Poetry, the call to be a poet, well, I’m back, at least this week. I hope you enjoy these.

The first one was inspired by Martin Shaw’s story “We Will Know Spring” where he braids a long night in the airport with the Wedding in Cana. The second comes from Psalm 71:9. The third from Psalm 71:4 and the fourth from Kingdom Code, on Substack.

1.

Water into wine--

thirst quencher to joy giver to blunt pain

that makes the world swirl a bit.

At least for me.

Jesus’ first grace to his people.

The best for last.

Well, he says the last shall be first, the first last.

How ever would I be happy at a feast?

Sure, I step forward at the eucharist,

stand, take the wafer, sip the wine,

stand with people I don’t know,

some I don’t like.

I look Pastor in the eye—

eyes like hayfields

coming green.

I sure as hell don’t know how to party.

I have never been to a wedding party,

where I relaxed and danced.

I don’t know how to dance.

And the food was stilted, except for the cake.

And the talk around the table as quiet,

as the talk around funeral luncheons

with strangers brought together by the deceased.

After we speak about the weather,

I am silent.

They are silent with me.

My seat the safest place,

until the ride home, away from the small, rural town,

away from the town postmistress, quilter, basket weaver.

Now ashes in a box.

Now in her husband’s broken heart.

2.

“Do not cast me off in the time of old age;

Forsake me not when my strength is spent.”

Cast, a horse caught in a stall, curled up.

Legs helpless to lift them.

The panic of being frozen.

Stuck against the walls.

The panic of a mind going blank.

Nothing there, nothing there, nothing there

when I am talking and her name is gone.

I can’t name her.

I can’t say so and so

with her sitting across the room.

I drop the talk.

A silence billows,

That’s supposed to mean sainthood,

supposed to mean God

who billows into Presence.

Cast, frozen against a wall.

Four strong legs helpless to lift,

to move when the panic

kicks my sides to rise, gallop

across the fields, wind combing

through my hair.

Oh Lord, cast me not away

in my old age.

Forsake me not when my strength is spent.

3.

“Rescue me from the hand of the wicked.”

The sun sets dropping gold into the sky.

The ark of the covenant covered in gold.

The wisdom of man not the wisdom of God.

When I talk to the man

who says saints flow inside and out

some good, some not so good

I have walked into a valley

cool with vegetation and sink holes.

It’s a hard walk back to the farm

through the sumac flaming

with berries the color of dried blood

and taller than I am.

There’s the train again.

The honest horn marking road crossings

our road to the east and to the west.

As far as the east is from the west,

our transgressions thrown from us.

That night I pray for the poet to protect me.

The next day our neighbor’s burn pile ignites

for no reason--no hot ash, no lithium,

no sun magnified to catch tinder,

just a gray curl of smoke.

I am talking to my priest friend

when I get word the fire

has lapped up cornstalks,

run down the fenceline

patted the oak tree I look to all day.

The priest shows me an icon he’s made

surrounded by a swirl like Van Gogh’s starry night

wings with eyes, wings with stripes, wings with eyes,

curled around each other

a tiny face peering out the middle.

4.

On Substack I saw a man saw an ammonite,

the steel saw sharp enough to cut stone,

his fingers dangerously close.

The stone wet, living flesh.

Whitby Island writhed with snakes

St. Hilda turning each to stone.

Cuthbert followed, cutting off each head.

The stone wet, living flesh.

When the saw stopped,

the stone glistened,

iridescent like a rainbow

or a fish just drawn from water.

The man pulled the stone apart

to show a spiral staircase,

a spiral galaxy,

a spiral spiritual climb to God.

Below are the sources for this poem.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/snakestones-ammonites-myth-magic-science.html

February 4, 2026

Last night the contrails looked like pick up sticks tossed out on the floor, with the challenge to pick them up without disturbing them.

Then Orion clear and high in the sky. Finally got a picture of him towering over our house, the pine tree and an arrow pointed straight at him. (I didn’t know if anything would show because the phone showed only black. I barely held both dogs still but the image did appear.)

Joshua Sturgill in the Symbolic World Course, The Art of Imitating Heaven, says,

“If you study the stars you will become like them. And that come back to an idea I think is very important, and that’s that you are what you observe. So if we observe the heavens which is the greatest and most majestic thing presented to our senses, then we will become like the heavens. There’s a benefit in just seeing, just gazing, just observing without any knowledge.”1

February 22, 2026

My brain has gone blank from hard cleaning the house and listening to podcasts that kept me focused on swiping weeks’ old dust, bits of hay and wood shavings. By the time Bruce and I sat down to pray I couldn’t think of people I’d promised to pray for. I had no capacity to carry on an intellectual conversation with someone on Messenger. Even as a young woman those voices in my ears erased thought.

Omalola needed a walk, and Bruce deserved a break from graciously offering to walk the dogs, so I walked out on a bitter cold night. It seems I always walk out and there’s a train coming, the headlamp off in the distance.

As far as the east is from the west, so far has he put your transgressions from you. My dad used to quote that. I can be bathed in sin—how I benefit from the unjust use of coal, natural gas, solar and wind, that hurt the earth.

As Martin Shaw says in Snowy Tower:

The taking of the earth’s virginity is the first spilling of blood on soil from malice, and the movement away from the Frail accord between animals, earth, heavens. Those terrible lists of what is required to keep the king from dying from his wounds is every oil dig, every deforestation every column of black smoke in a blue sky. A grotesque processional of damage.” 2

Every time I pick up my phone, I pick up slave labor that assembled it. I pick up a data center that is sucking power from a community and sucking its water. I drive a car.

And then there are my own sins—taking forever to write my Compassion kids3, not helping Bruce clean up after supper, complaining about a business, not getting back in touch with a very old and very good friend. I could go on and on and on.

But here it is: As far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us. My sins are hurled past the line of trees, the fields where the headlamp of the locomotive has appeared. Hurled past the sunset and sun rise. Moon rise and moon set. The headlamp moving closer, the train louder. I watch that light pass the warning lights in the ditch and push light against the trees, the train hidden but the light bathed the trees, moved at the speed of train towards the other crossing, another horn bellowing.

I carry the transgression of the tankers full of ethanol hauled towards Chicago, how me and mine use that energy to power our cars, the gorgeous tractors and combines working the earth to make the corn to feed refineries and livestock.

“For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear hm; as far as the east is from the west; so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”4

Snow was barely falling. When I turned the corner behind the shed, I saw light bars aimed at heaven from two local towns. Sure, they’re light from main streets flying up, catching the just barely snow fall. But maybe they are fabric worn thin between earth and heaven. Maybe they are angels standing tall, watching over the countryside.

February 23, 2026

I walked out. The half-moon was bright enough to throw shadows. I looked up in the sky and thought I saw an aurora because the clouds were sheer like curtains in a spring breeze. I walked back to the house to retrieve my phone for pictures. When I got back out, I stood on the leash and asked Aiden to stand still long enough for the camera to capture the image, which is an ask for him. Those clouds swept up, bent over like a chorus of angels that anointed Jesus’ birth two millennia ago. An ear worm of a hymn ran through my mind, but I don’t remember which one.

The times this week I’ve walked out, as painful as the cold is, I’ve seen things.

Bruce has been walking the dog, but he’s been taking my steps, steps I need for my soft body and aching legs. He sees me sitting, watching a storyline on TV or reading one in a book. But Aiden is making signs like he needs to go outside. So Bruce gets up and puts on his boots and coveralls and walks out.

He’s taking my steps. And pointing to my guilt though he doesn’t know it. He’s taking my steps and taking away my call to deny myself, deny that place in my book, that climax in the TV drama, deny my staying warm and cozy when the wind is bitter, my hands get cold giving treats to the dogs.

I’m not sure I want to track my shame, but here—as a little girl being potty trained begging my mother to get off the phone to help me with the toilet, as a young woman who demanded my Rottweiler wait all damn day and evening so I could go skiing with some boy, boarding him for two weeks so I could go on vacation, leaving him for two days a week at the vet so I could go to work. Oh Cane dog, dog of my grief, holding me through my parents’ deaths, my brother’s death and meeting Bruce, loved by him.

As far as the east is from the west so far has He removed our transgressions from us. As far as the east, past the airlines hovering over O’Hare like a swarm of bees, past where those jets mount up to swing over the curve of the earth, my transgressions thrown way past Chicago and Lake Michigan, so far gone I don’t have to carry them.

And now, these days, Bruce often walks the dogs, and they are becoming his friends as well as mine. A very good thing. Aiden minds him better than me. He checks the cat’s food and water dishes last thing. And my heart leaps up.

And so this shows up in my letting Bruce take my steps, when there are wonders in the night. And I have always been a woman who walks out into the night.

The clouds, mere clouds, looked like a chorus of angels rejoicing over the earth, just before they were going to appear to human eyes.

February 24, 2026

I walk out, early the wind bitter and the sky dark and lowering. A shelf heavy over a distant town we drive through to get to the bigger town, the city lights, lighting clouds underneath. I turn the corner behind the shed and look up at the moon, the clouds around it moving, so it looked like an eye watching, that didn’t stop watching, through the clouds.

Bruce went to bed after the State of the Union, so it was up to me to walk the dogs the last time. I walked out to a sky that startled me no longer cloud covered but clear as a bell. The moon bright enough to throw shadows. The train to the south blew a distant horn. The stars pierced like well-cut diamonds. Did you know that the ancients thought each person had their own stars and that stars were not just balls of gas but living beings?

The ancients have said we can make ourselves better people by looking at the heavens, even just the clouds. Even in the city we can recognize Orion, Venus, the moon and sun. We can watch clouds, that can be cloaked in all kinds of colors not just at sun set or sun rise. They can buck and cavort. They can bubble up like temples and shoot lightning. And whirl like a dervish, catching wind, catching spirit.

We can lift up our eyes to heavens that are more ordered than earth, so ordered NASA was able to put people on the moon. The sun and moon, the planets moved in ordered sequences so predictable that the ancients were able to construct calendars and work out when they should plant and harvest by looking at the sky. They could navigate by the stars.

Joshua Sturgill, on a Symbolic World Podcast says,

“Why is it that writers, philosophers, and prophets from many times and places have all told us that contemplating the night sky makes our own souls similarly more beautiful and more ordered?

Hebrew and Hindu, Greek and Chinese, they’ve all told us that looking up is the same as looking in, and that we are as much citizens of the sky as we are of Earth.”5

What a wonder, that we need to know we belong to the heavens as much as we belong to the earth, that we become what we look to, and if we look to the heavens we might capture some of the order and beauty we see when we look up. I am reminded of Jesus words, after warning his disciples that trouble was coming, and I fear trouble is barreling down on us, “When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”6

Aiden and Omalola are soft on the leash. Both take their potty break. I was going to walk behind the garden, behind the shed, but stopped by the front of the house. The coyotes, a whole pack of them were yipping to the north. Both dogs stood on point. I did not have my light, that lets me look for eyes. We turned back. Our little black cat came to sleep on the corner of our bed, watching over Bruce and I.

References

* Joshua Sturgill, The Art of Imitating Heaven. Circle Feb.

* Martin Shaw. Snowy Tower. Cista Mystica Press. p. 173

* Compassion International encourages people sponsoring children around the world to frequently write letters to encourage them.

* Psalm 103: 11 – 12, ESV

* From The Symbolic World: 434 - Immigration and Tolerance: Christians Are Not Called to Be “Nice”, Feb 12, 2026

6.Luke 21:28

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My gosh the train was loud this morning, so loud it hurt my ears. I watched two engines pulling tankers to the east. My phone dinged, so I checked it and Mr. Dog, who has been walking out kindly, thought it was cute to grab the leash and pull, grab my shoelaces and pull. Like Mrs. Horse, when my attention strays, the playful joker in him arrives. (Mrs. Horse would stop if my mind wandered while we were driving.)

The redwing blackbirds are back. Three were calling each other from assorted electric wires and trees.

It’s the day after Ash Wednesday. We are in the season of sin—we’re supposed to weep over how we failed God, how we don’t live up to what God had in mind, how we hurt others-what we have done and what we have left undone.

But it’s bigger than just my individual failings. Stephen Freeman quotes Saint. Sophrony of Essex in “Adam’s Sin and the Sin of All”:

So, each time we refuse to take on ourselves the blame for our common evil, for the actions of our neighbour, we are repeating the same sin and likewise shattering the unity of Man.1

Good grief, so I’m guilty for the ICE agents shooting the protesters in Minneapolis, and for anti-law-and-order instigation of those protests? The weight of this is too heavy and sounds too much like social justice, a narrative I don’t particularly trust because I don’t trust the behavior I’d observed from people who practice this. But I am part of this country’s community.

Though this morning the daily office took me to a passage in Ezekial that says:

The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.2

So there’s a tension between being part of the community of humans and being an individual with regards to what I have done and left undone.

Taking the blame for our common evil has shown up on a more personal level when the scars of being rejected ache. I came across a Facebook posting about a friend who long ago walked away and excluded me from her group. I’d sent a friend request years ago. It was still open. I canceled it, unfriended her husband. And said a few prayers for them, grateful to not be in her inner circle, because the cost would have been too high. Reading Psalm 88 reminded me:

You have caused my companions to shun me; You have made me a horror to them. I am shut in so that I cannot escaped; my eye grows dim through sorrow.3

This is that time of year when I invited several church people to lunch and they were too busy. Funny how the church year and the longer days can pull up memories. Despite knowing how this hurts, I too have walked away from people because my gut protested so loudly, no friendship could happen. I confess that I have sinned against you by what I have done and left undone.

In Journey to the Cross Paul David Tripp says outright. “It’s good to mourn. It’s healthy to be sad, and it’s appropriate to groan. Something is wrong with us, something is missing in our hearts and our understanding of life, if we are able to look around and look inside and not grieve”4. Well all right, but I deeply dislike it when writers lay their own experience on their readers as a mandate.

Right now, I don’t have the gift of tears, that weeping and gnashing of teeth, where God draws near and I know in those tears how I’ve failed, how I need to throw myself on God’s mercy. I fear my own awareness of sin would bore down so hard I can’t function. When tears do come, I have slid into the pit. I wept every day for many of my teenage years because I took original sin to heart. I claimed the name wretch.

The year we renovated our house and my workplace had a mass shooting, my tears flowed easily. It was tough on Bruce. I am just as connected to the young woman who knew the depth of her sin and the cost of the cross in her heart and in her tears as I am to the seventy year old me who has found a quiet and contentment, contentment that St. Paul says is great gain.

As the Lutheran confession says, “we confess that by nature we are sinful and unclean.” If I’m paying attention, I close my mouth. This feels like heresy when God made us in his own image. God’s image is not by nature sinful and unclean. (There is enough that works in our Missouri Synod church with thoughtful, Christ focused pastors, I can be careful not to say those words.)

In Adam’s Sin and the Sin of Others Stephen Freeman offers hope, a more positive way of looking at the repentance that makes sin into an idol because it has become our focus.

The season of Great Lent is a call to true repentance. It is not an entanglement in our private wrong-doings and failures – it is a movement towards the truth of our existence, the fullness of the “whole Adam” (as St. Silouan often called it). Our fragmentation and disintegration into our private worlds is a contradiction of God’s intention for human well-being.5

What a relief not to be tangled with those failures. I’ve been reminded lately of some long past transgressions—all I can do is confess them and lean on His mercy and pray that in God’s good economy he can redeem those times. Only God can draw me into the “fullness of the ‘whole Adam’” Contrary to what the live-your best-life folks say, it’s not up to me to decide what my best life is, or how to get there. I’m not wise enough.

In Modern Lent Freeman elaborates on this:

What is at stake in the modern world is our humanity. The notion that we are self-authenticating individuals is simply false. We obviously do not bring ourselves into existence – it is a gift. And the larger part of what constitutes our lives is simply a given – a gift. It is not always a gift that someone is happy with – we would like ourselves to be other than we are. But the myth of the modern world is that we, in fact, do create ourselves and our lives – our identities are imagined to be of our own making. We are only who we choose to be. It is a myth that is extremely well-suited for undergirding a culture built on consumption. Identity can be had at a price. The wealthy have a far greater range of identities available to them – the poor are largely stuck with being who they really are.6

Maybe an important spiritual discipline is learning to bless the Lord for who we are—flaws and strengths. Maybe we should bless the Lord for the life he has given us and trust that both the joy and suffering are molding us into the people he had in mind when he made us. And yes when we step out of God’s idea for how he made us, confess our failure and turn back to him.

February 20, 2026

This morning the wind is roaring so hard I don’t take the dogs down the road because I can’t hear when a car is coming. Even though I walk facing traffic, I need to know what’s behind me. I feed Mrs. Horse behind the barn so the hay doesn’t blow away in the forty mile an hour west wind.

When I bring her in for the night, she crow hops in front of the door. She’s been battered by wind all day and looked longingly between the fence rails when I walked the dogs. She’s lost hair during the warm spell. She must be chilled. The wind batters us. The Holy Spirit batters us. But our trees hold.

Fasting

During Ash Wednesday, our pastor preached a brilliant sermon on fasting, a spiritual practice I’ve been curious about. I’ve been nudged by God? to try this spiritual discipline, so it was a gift that Pastor C brought it up. Self-denial is good training for taking up our cross and even for martyrdom. Pastor made the point that our faith is physical and that fasting shows us in our bodies how we are dependent on God’s gifts and how our physical hunger can teach us about our spiritual hunger for Christ.

Pastor C talked about the sin of gluttony—of eating more than we need, of having too much stuff. He encouraged us to skip a meal or several. “Don’t tell me about it,” he said because Jesus said to shut up about fasting:

“When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.7

My relationship with food is complicated from growing up in the era of Twiggy, where the ideal woman looked more like a boy than a woman. No way could adolescent me look rail thin like her, though I longed for those slender hips and flat stomach. I tried fasting in college, but wasn’t good at it, a relief because it might have been easy to slide into an eating disorder. Weight Watchers showed me how much I could eat. Eventually I’ve learned there are no bad foods. The point is to stop eating when you’re satisfied.

Right after church we went out to lunch, I ordered a Diet Coke, even though I have pretty much eased out of my addiction. Then ate a few candies from the feed store, and a few bites of cheesecake from our visit to the Cheesecake factory.

“Fret not” the psalmist says “because of evil doers. Be not envious of wrongdoers! For they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart”8

Maybe my stubbornness—no I don’t want to—is itself a kind of evil doer with the promise they will fade like the grass. Even while it bubbled up, I can turn to the Lord, trust him and do good., even if that doing good is small like walking the dog or dusting the house or petting the cat. Perhaps if I delight in him and my desires will align with his desires for me.

I used to say, sure I’ll do whatever was being asked of me from the pulpit, but now I find a rod of iron along my breastbone saying, “No, not going to do it. Lord make me willing to be willing and help my unbelief.”

Once when I mentioned fasting as a spiritual discipline, a friend reminded me how she was conflicted about it because of our culture’s emphasis on dieting. Good point. As a woman who has tried to limit calories for diets, it would be easy to slip into an unhealthy relationship with food. I’ve been there. Knowing I could eat anything eventually freed me.

All I know that with the Diet Coke thing I turned it over to God and asked him for help and he gave it. I paid attention to how it tastes, how it stifles my sense of thirst, though there are times when Diet Coke is a good gift, when I’m not feeling good. As a free woman in Christ, I can drink it and give thanks but I don’t like how quickly it becomes an addiction.

When I opened Stephen Freeman’s essay, Modern Lent, I was encouraged by his practical advice on how to practice Lent. Do check out Freeman’s blog Glory to God for All Things. It often bolsters my walk with the Lord.

Few things are as difficult in the modern world as fasting. It is not simply the action of changing our eating habits that we find problematic – it’s the whole concept of fasting and what it truly entails. It comes from another world.9

These days it’s so easy to view our modern world with all its conveniences, the noise that comes from our screens and the push to improve ourselves as progress, as a better world, than the past. Maybe the ancient church has ways of showing us how we can be in relationship with God.

Freeman suggests we stop trying to fix ourselves. When we fast we should use that extra time not preparing food and eating to pray, otherwise he says, “fasting without praying is the fast of demons.” 10

Lent is also a time to focus on being generous to others. Freeman reminds us that you cannot be too generous. Sometimes people don’t know how to receive gifts but that shouldn’t stop us. Receiving those gifts can be as much a dying to self as giving them. Lent is a time for attending those Wednesday evening Lenten services. And a time to ease back on screens—both the gossip that comes through social media and the outrage that often catches us while scrolling or watching the news. Freeman encourages us to:

Fast from watching/reading the news and having/expressing opinions. The news is not presented in order to keep you informed. It is often inaccurate and serves the primary purpose of political propaganda and consumer frenzy. Neither are good for the soul. Opinions can be deeply destructive to the soul’s health. Most opinions are not properly considered, necessary beliefs. They are passions that pass themselves off as thoughts or beliefs. The need to express them reveals their passionate nature. Though opinions are a necessary part of life – they easily come to dominate us. Reducing the need to express how we feel about everything that comes our way (as opposed to silently weighing and considering and patiently speaking what we know to be true) is an important part of ascesis and self-control.11

This. This. This affirms my commitment not to speak my peace about the news, even though somedays it’s hard not say, “What about?” It’s hard not to tangle with someone because, after all, it’s on me to save our culture. Not. Freeman is wise telling us to hold off. Several friends have asked for my political opinions so they can understand my perspective. This affirms my sense that no good can come of those conversations. There is so much more to our friendship than political opinions.

Several mornings the news has chattered in the background and I’ve lost my peace to outrage. My opinions won’t change anything, though I can pray for justice.

February 21, 2026

First thing I watched five squirrels play with their trees. They looked like cars on a roller coaster running along branches, leaping between them. They ran and jumped across the tree line from the black walnut all the way to the lilacs, then down to the ground, running one right after the other across our driveway. The Redwing blackbirds haven’t been shagged off by the hard wind and cold. The day is blessedly quiet except for their song.

References:

1 Stephen Freeman. Glory to God for All Things. Adam’s Sin and the Sin of All. Glory to God for All Things. https://glory2godforallthings.com/2026/02/17/adams-sin-and-the-sin-of-all/

2 Ezekiel 18:20 ESV

3 Psalm 88:8 – 9a

4 Paul David Tripp. Journey to the Cross. Wheaton, Crossway. 2021. p. 7

5 Stephen Freeman. Glory to God for All Things. Adam’s Sin and the Sin of All.

6 Stephen Freeman. Glory to God for All Things. Modern Lent. https://glory2godforallthings.com/2026/02/20/a-modern-lent-4/

7 Matt 6: 16 – 18, NIV

8 Psalm 37: 1-4, ESV.

9 Stephen Freeman. Modern Lent.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

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Do you think Abraham studied the stars, so that when God found him, and said, “Your descendents will be as many as the stars and as the sand of the sea that he was gut punched with the enormity of the promise, as he looked at stars so bright they burned his eyes, and at the Milky Way so clear it looked like a distant front, clouds billowing, pregnant with rain?

It’s Hagar’s story I wonder about, especially since the angel of the Lord appeared to her twice. Questions rolled out in my journal. Here they are along with what my imagination came up with.

Was she one of the gifts Pharoah gave Abram, when he said Sarai was his sister and he almost took her as his wife? Did she serve in Pharoah’s harem? Was Hagar smitten by Sarai’s beauty when she was brought into the palace? Sarai’s beauty was so stunning, that Abram was terrified he’d be killed if Pharoah knew she was his wife. I wonder if they spoke to each other. Did they become friends in the harem, or was Hagar given to Abraham, as one of Pharoah’s gifts to honor his sister wife’s beauty? Was she stricken with the plague or spared?

How did she feel leaving the comforts of Egypt, the abundant food, to live in tents with herdsmen? How did she hide her disgust as a cosmopolitan servant sent to the country?

What kind of man was Abram, this scion of faith who was so afraid of Pharoah he disowned his wife, called her his sister? What did that do to their marital relations? What does that say about God’s faithfulness to us when we are so afraid we do stupid and cruel things? Thousands of years later Abraham was commended for setting out to an unknown land, and for trusting his son would be resurrected. Sarah who laughed when the angel said she’d conceive, was commended because the writer to the Hebrews said it was her faith that allowed her to conceive when she was well into menopause.1

Were Hagar and Sarai so close that Sarai thought she could trust her with her husband? Wouldn’t you think they were friends despite the mistress, servant relationship? It’s not like they were in a city where they could go to market and socialize with other women. Or did they go to Sodom on occasion and buy goods, visit Lot’s wife? Had companionable silences built up between them as they kneaded bread and prepared animals for meals, or sewed clothing?

What of the deep sleep and smoking fire pot and the promise God made that he would give the land to Abraham’s descendants? He said they would be as many as the stars in the sky. Did Sarai’s ache for a child cry inside her? Did her breasts ache when Abram nuzzled her, aching to nurse a baby? Did she envy the cows and ewes, their tiny babies wobbling, seeking them out, finding nourishment? Every month, Sarai’s womb emptied and her heart broke until it withered into bitter acceptance. God never promised the heir would be her son.

Since Sarai owned her servant Hagar, she thought maybe that’s how God would give Abraham those descendants like the stars in the sky.

How did Hagar feel being sent to Abram’s bed? Did she secretly have a crush on him or was he just a man she had to work around? Did Sarai share intimacies? Did they giggle about them? Was Hagar taken by Abram’s mystical experiences? Did she feel a Presence in the camp? Did it frighten her or did it remind her of the mysteries in her religion back home?

What did Abram think of Sarai’s idea? A good one? Did she badger him and he reluctantly agreed? After all he’d heard God’s promise that his son would be the heir.

Was Abraham a lover or was it wham bam thank you mam? Because his wife would be waiting outside the tent, the next morning, was he careful not to love her? Or did Hager’s younger, fertile body grab his heart?

When she found out she was pregnant, did Hagar exaggerate her morning sickness? Did she flick her hair at Sarah when Sarah asked her to card the wool? Did she make eyes at Abraham? Did he make eyes back? Did she slow walk her tasks, after all she was with child? Did Abram raise his hands, “do as you please”, when Sarai said, it’s either her or me? Was it Sarai’s cold shoulder, the hard tasks she could not complete in the time given that finally drove Hagar to the desert?

Did she recognize the angel of the Lord when he walked up to her from the times he appeared to Abram? Or was she afraid this strange man might have his way with her? What did she think when he asked, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” How did he know her name?

“I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai.”

“Return to your mistress and submit to her.”

Did the authority of the angel’s words give her the quiet backbone she would need to submit to Sarai? Would Sarai’s hurt at having no child simmer into regret that she’d offered Hagar to bear Abraham’s heir? Did it simmer into the slow burn that can rise between women who were close but no longer, a slow burn that never goes out? How would Hagar submit to those continually burning embers?

Or was it the promise? The angel’s words, “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude? Was it the words that would vaguely echo thousands of years later, the words he spoke to Mary:

“Behold you are pregnant

and shall bear a son.

You shall call his name Ishmael

because the Lord has listened to

your affliction.

He shall be a wild donkey of a man,

his hand against everyone

and everyone’s hand against him,

and he shall dwell over against all

his kinsmen.”2

How was it Hagar got to see an angel and give him the name-- “You are a God of seeing.” Who gets to name God? Are we seeing how God loves the servant, even the one who slips into contempt, but the one humble enough to say, “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.”3

How many of us lean into those words: Him who looks after me?

How was it that a woman, a slave girl, came to name the well, Beer-lahai-roi—the well of the living one who sees me. The living one who sees me. The living one who sees us.4

Wells and women—a well where Rebecca drew water for Isaac’s servant’s camels, a well where Jacob fell in love with Rachel, a well, where Moses met his wife, a well where Jesus sat with a woman, promising that he could her “a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”5

The second time Sarah, now with a new name, and her own son, kicks Hagar and Ishmael out, because Ishmael was playing what my generation called “doctor”**with Isaac and she will not share Isaac’s inheritance with Ishmael. Abraham is gut punched because he loved his firstborn, when God says do as your wife says. He slings a skin of water and a bag of bread on her shoulder.

The two wander in the wilderness until the water is gone. Did she long for the angel to come again as the water runs out, the bread gets eaten? Hagar’s head throbs from dehydration. Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. Her son keeps repeating, “I’m thirsty” until he goes quiet. She lays him by a bush, not able to bear his death and walks away. She has forgotten the angel’s promise that he will be the father of many. She sobs. She is blind to the well in front of her.

She hears a voice, speaking from the sky. “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Stand up. Pick him up. Hold him with your hand. I will make him a great nation.”6

What was it like for her eyes to be opened? To see the well right in front of her, to bend down, dunk the skin in the cool, clean water, and give it to her son. How did she feel when he revived? Did she feel the Presence when he learned to shoot arrows and feed them both?

One day this week when I walked the dogs, Aiden stopped, looked up. He looked one way and then the next, one way and then the next. I looked up, saw no birds, no bugs. I swear this dog sees the powers. This time it felt like an angel flying overhead.

References

1 Hebrews 11: 9 – 12, ESV

2 Genesis 16: 10 – 12, ESV

3 Genesis 16: 13, ESV

4 Check out Stephen Freeman’s essay To See Him Face to Face to read more on face to face encounters with God looked like through scripture, perhaps beginning with our first gazing into our mothers’ eyes.

5 John 4: 13, ESV

6 Genesis 21: 19, ESV

**I’ve read that “laughing” was a euphemism for Ishmael’s molesting Isaac.

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I walked up to the horse farm and back listening to Martin Shaw’s I Set my Mind on the City. It was the first walk back after the bitter cold kept my walks short. And underneath his words quiet, the fields themselves quiet after the work of the big machines planting and harvesting, the work of cranes laying a new natural gas pipeline, the noise of gorgeous pickup trucks running back and forth, the men inside nodding as they pass. The Peterson’s house is quiet now too, with both Chuck and Donna gone on to the Lord. They knew to stop in and visit, a habit, that’s gone missing in the younger farmers.

Dr. Martin Shaw in his Sunday The House of Beasts and Vines has begun telling the Genesis stories in his own voice and imagination. The sentence that grabbed me in his retelling of the Cain and Abel story, I Set My Mind on the City was:

“It’s a creative act in a terrible kind of way, to kill someone. I say if you live or die, not just Maker. We slaughter parts of ourselves, suffocate or deny to extinction. And yet Maker still seeks us--” words to think on here. 1

What parts have we suffocated? Letting them breathe, can be a work of courage and intimacy with the Presence. The Psalms give voice to letting those parts breathe with heart cries that range from “Save me O God! For the waters have come up to my neck” to “More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause” to “Let their eyes be darkened so they cannot see” to “Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger over take them” to “I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify him with thanksgiving” all in one Psalm2.

Blessing someone, and those parts of ourselves we’ve denied, that often show up in the people who make us itch, is a sure way to healing. Maybe it’s why Jesus urged us to bless our enemies, because that blessing unhooks us from the attachment that hurt and anger brings.

It’s the things we hate in others, the gift from our enemies that points us back to ourselves. If I have a strong reaction, even to a political leader, if I see him or her as a fascist, an authoritarian, maybe I might want to look at how I am an authoritarian, how I want to take control of others’ lives.

The authoritarian in me has shown up as gossip—I’ve caught myself telling Bruce this is how she should live her life. When I was a young woman, I was free with voicing my perceptions until I realized that I was playing God. Back then we called it venting, blowing off the pressure that rises with difficult, human relationships. As a young woman I vented often, not necessarily with people who kept my confidence. I knew my stories flew through them to others, but I felt I was going to burn up if I didn’t talk. I was grateful for the listening. It took years but I quieted. My life quieted. And my gossip partners wandered away. I found it was better for Bruce and I, not to talk about him except to God, and God has gotten an earful at times.

My priest friend hesitated to tell me a story about a person who hurt him. He pressed his finger on his lips and crossed them. That cross marking his lips has cautioned me to hold still when I offer judgements about others, even to Bruce.

What parts have I suffocated?

The part that blurts out how I see the truth. The part that sets boundaries, that feels, “You know I don’t want to talk with you now” but my desire to serve, to be available overrides how I might be tapped out or feeling used or just don’t want to hear it.

What parts have I suffocated? The part that speaks like a prophet, the truth people don’t want to hear. The part that simply stands up for herself.

For several years I worked on making peace with the lion in me—the lioness carrying her kitten, fierce in protecting the weak, the roaring lion, with a flowing mane, regal with authority. How do I let the mother in me, carry her little ones? How do I claim the authority we have sitting hidden at the right hand of God, and still be humble?

The woman with tusks for teeth, a dog’s snout, ears like a bear and braided eyebrows, bristles down her back and tall, the strange woman, Cundrie, a woman of the forest, of the outskirts, rode into the Arthurian feast and told Parzival he failed to heal the wounded Fisher King, she’s the one I identify with—out of all the characters in Shaw’s retelling of the Parzival story, she’s the one, a fierce woman riding in on a warhorse, a woolen cloak thrown over her head. She hurls words at Parzival, the young knight who visited the Grail castle.

And you. You who were in the presence of the angler and you failed to free him from his sighs! He carried his grief on clear display and still your heart remained closed. You feathered hook. Viper’s tongue. He even presented you with a sword you had not earned. Did a word escape those glorious lips of yours? Nothing. You saw the Grail, the bleeding lance, mystery on mystery and still you kept silent?3

Youthful Parzival had been told not to ask so many questions, so when he sat down to the feast, in the Fisher King’s castle, he remained silent. He was in the presence of the Holy Grail, an object that sparked many knights’ quests. He did not ask the simple question: “What ails you?” Seems like these days, we’ve stopped asking the simple question: “How are you?” And if it is asked, it can be too painful to answer. Often a person has no room to hear or hold the answer. It’s easier to talk about the weather.

Or maybe I’m closer to the grief woman who first confronts Parzival after he has returned from the Grail castle. Shaw characterizes Siqune, a woman who grieved her dead husband until his flesh rotted off his bones:

To have accord with Sigune is to make peace with the part of ourselves that is in grief, is private, is ugly to the cosmetic world…We are all grieving something, somewhere, the clearer the passageway to the linden tree, the more distinct the messages. She prefers the terrible truth to the beautiful lie, her steel gaze peering through the platitudes of societies optimisms, cradling the head of her dead lover. Women like Sigune have something stripped and clear within them, truth-tellers.4

It’s a terror to speak truth. This week I dreamed that I was speaking to an audience. I did not hold onto my words because I wanted to go back to sleep, though I think they had to do with sexuality I woke to electric shocks in my feet as if someone slammed them with a cattle prod. It took minutes for my feet to settle.5

How does a person speak truth without playing God? How does a person have the wisdom to speak it, especially with regards to someone else’s life, something you see clear as day, that might help. But I know, I know, I know how painful it is for someone to tell me who I am without my telling them. It’s no fun to hear about blind spots. Boyfriends did this to me, and it felt more like a dominance trick, than insight. I’ve had several encounters with charismatic Christians who weren’t afraid to lay their “prophesies” on me. They were ugly images that offered no footing to walk out. They did not know me. And when I have blurted my perceptions, I’ve paid a price. The person was done. See why the terror?

My answer has been to take those insights to prayer. I tell God what I see, knowing he will sift my words, knowing that underneath the Spirit is groaning, calling us to become like Him. He’ll shape the prayer into what can be heard and answered.

Three times I invited Martin Shaw to visit our raggedy mini-farm during his three-day visit to Chicago as part of his author tour for Liturgies of the Wild. I know from experience how exhausting and disorienting author tours can be, from my own experiences of being on the road with Francis and Edith Schaeffer and their son Frank. I know the quiet that has been laid down on our road and the fields surrounding us. I know the implacable horizon as the sun rises and sets. And my husband Bruce, even with tired eyes, is a master craftsman and so emptied I swear he is a saint.

I imagined what other woman who read those invitations wondered, “Who does she think she is?” I wondered it myself, but something new has birthed in me, the sense that I am as much gift as Shaw is to me, the sense that maybe just maybe I’m being called to being a spiritual mama. Aren’t we all, when we’re called to go and make disciples?

I did not clean or declutter my house except for the standard vacuuming to pick up flakes of hay and shavings. I did not think he’d drive out of Chicago, but I had fun imagining what it must have felt like to be Zaccheaus, who climbed in the Sycamore tree to see Jesus.

Remember the song? “Zaccheaus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he?” He was an outsider, a tax collector, who charged more than the people owed. And like us, they didn’t have extra to give a neighbor who betrayed them. I imagined he might have been mocked for being small. And the Lord saw him, said, “Get down, I’m coming to your house today.” Zaccheaus climbed down and made a feast. He promised to pay back manifold what he stole from people. I bet that change came the minute Jesus looked up at him, said I’m coming over. Jesus said, “Today, salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraha. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”6

Shaw has done that for me, sending The Red Bead Woman book, nodding to my writing, calling me friend. If he’d come to the farm I would have brushed Mrs. Horse’s coat so it blew hair up his nose and caught in his beard. And I would have said see the linden tree, that you said is a powerful presence because it marks change, and shelters our house, a tree that was smuggled here from Berlin as a slip in a woman’s boot. I’d show him the oak, the landmark that I look to, day and night when I walk out. Shaw’s encouraging my writing work has been like an oak that farmers used to aim toward to set their plow lines straight.

References

1 I Set My Mind on the City. Feb 1.

2 Psalm 69: 1, 4, 23,24, 30

3 Snowy Tower. 140

4 Ibid, 122

5 My speaking dream, ending in the terror of electric shocks to my feet makes a kind of sense because the essay collection I’m working on stands up to cultural narratives. A most vulnerable piece about sexual identity was almost published and I trembled because of what it might cost. A writing teacher once said, “Just because you write it doesn’t mean you need to publish it. (I need an editor to stand by, hold the ropes so to speak, and call forth what is there. I wonder if there is an audience for this book, but feel compelled, despite the resistance to work on it.

6 Luke 19: 9

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Last week my reader @Mama reminded me of John’s words about Jesus: “In him was life and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. 1 And Jesus words about himself, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”2 So I thought I’d post pictures of light showing up around the farm.

This is a good reminder because these days powers of darkness are jerking our chains, so we are at war with each other, so we “other” each other, so the country spins apart, is spinning apart. Remember light quenches darkness.

Thursday, January 29

First thing I saw, when I went downstairs were two doves, huddled on the black walnut branches. Two squirrels rooted around the ground. Not long after, I saw a propane truck turn up the road that walks me into the sun. Another one turned up the same road early in the afternoon. I don’t envy our neighbors the expense of those fills. The bitter cold has been burning through our energy. Our electric bill was over $500 last month. Our geothermal was not made for days of single digit with wind chill temperatures. (The warmth of the ground warms the unit and then the auxiliary heater fills in the rest.) I’ve pulled on coveralls in the house. The other day, while it was still dark, I watched a livestock trailer, all lit up like it was Christmas, come up our road, likely taking cattle to market. The farmer probably had to book his appointment at the processor a year ago. It felt ominous, a feeling that comes sometimes when vehicles pass.

This week a friend of this blog, texted about how she couldn’t take her eyes off the national drama. She said the chaos got ahold of her like a powerful, addicting drug. I know how it feels. I’ve barely started taking my Mission St. Clare app with morning prayer and my Bible, and closing myself in our pocket door room, with a door I can slide shut, to mute the TV news. It’s been work but soul restoring to do this instead of looking at Facebook and a practice I don’t always get right even though I feel more grounded.

I’ve been thinking about Psalm 46 since it came up in the Daily Office a few weeks ago.

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”3

A refuge like a wildlife refuge where lions can live without being hunted? A refuge set aside where prairie grasses and flowers can grow without being mowed or sprayed? A city where murderers can hide as was offered in Levitical law? A cave you can barely see from the road, a mountain’s worth of rock surrounding you? The strong arms and chest, warm all around cradling you? The reassuring words: All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well? A story where you find yourself?

“Even though the mountains fall into the sea.” 4

It starts with miniscule cracks, that widen, that crumble as boulders and rocks and gravel and sand and dirt slip, nothing to stop them, slip into the sea, the sea the place of chaos. The mountains, the nations, cracking, coming apart, gravity pulling them down, pulling them into the ocean, blocking roads, crushing houses, burying people in the way.

The sea roiling, an image for chaos. The Holy Spirit moved over the face of the waters. Jonah plunged into the depths, cried out to God, was vomited onto land. The Lord Jesus Christ was plunged into its waters, bringing his presence down into the depths and back up again.

“The Lord is our refuge,” this Jesus, who plunged into the depths of the waters, into the depths of Sheol, who kicked death in the ass, who walks through the valley of the shadow. His followers are plunged into the waters, plunged into death, and pulled back up again, water streaming, water needing to be wiped out of eyes, to new creation.

Mostly I’ve watched, mouth open, reading assorted perspectives on the current chaos. It’s like a movie where the action could leap out and grab you by the neck. My British friend reminds me that our country is a big country made up of all sorts of regions and cultures even if there is a MacDonalds in nearly every town.

Some preachers, poets cheer the crumbling, the roaring, the dust rising up, saying law and order is an idol, but I say so is chaos. Some people say Empire should be undone, and yet St Paul urged a different response:

First of all then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgiving be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth5

“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the most high.”6

Ezekiel said a river would pour from the south end of temple. The river pouring out with trees beside whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. The water Jesus blessed by being baptized. The water Jesus told the woman at the well that “Everyone who drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.”7 The water where we join him at the start of our walk with him, that pours out of us when we walk.

“The nations rage, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice the earth melts.”8

How many civilizations have crumbled? How many laments? How many deaths? But go back to the beginning, God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. God a very present help.

“God who makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear. He burns the chariots with fire.”9

How long oh Lord? How long? War has broken out around the world. 35,000 Iranians killed by the mullahs. 2 million dead from the Ukrainian/Russian War. Over 73,000 killed in the Gaza war. Nigerian Christians slaughtered. More than I’ve named here. You know Lord. You told us wars and rumors of wars and the end will come, that’s what you said. If the earth cried out with Abel’s blood, surely it’s been wailing for the last many thousand years. How long until the end?

Lord couldn’t you at least break the bow, shatter the spears that are being raised, the strings pulled back, ready to let fly arrows, pointed at other Americans? Couldn’t you at least throw water on the vengeance rising in people’s hearts because vengeance makes internet addled people feel alive? Couldn’t we hear the call to repent? Don’t we know the winnowing fork is in your hand? That you will clear the chaff and burn it with unquenchable fire?10

But not just us, Lord, break the bow, shatter the spear for the the nations of the world.

You know what he says?

Be still and know that I am God.11

Be still.

And know.

There is a whole creation that speaks of him. And the stars. And Holy Writ. And the early fathers and saints and good writers and mostly our neighbors who bear the Image. Our neighbors with that very same river, that living water that makes glad the city of God, that runs through us.Though the splinters become cracks, the cracks become gulleys, the mountains slip and slide into the sea, boulders, stones, gravel, sand dirt, pour over roads, houses, people, dumping it all into the roiling waters, he says I am your refuge. Be still. Be still. And know. That I am God. Your refuge. My presence with you, in the roiling waters, my very present help, my presence. Be still.

I watched Mrs. Dog grab Mr. Dog’s neck, growling, then saw them break away and run as fast as they could go. That’s all I heard, Oma’s growling, their feet running through matted leaves. The day was still as in no motor sounds. Not from the main road south of us. Not from trains, we usually time our walks with trains, but this morning nothing. No jets on approach to the Rockford International airport. I heard a couple birds, who’ve been scarce in the cold. I looked up and way high I saw what might have been a red wing blackbird, though she was probably a plain old black bird. Remember I had one who watched me from the wires on my walks this summer? The air was so still we could hear L’s truck pull out of his driveway a half mile away. And then a single engine plane high up. I stood, my feet chilled, hooked up the dogs when Mr. Dog ran to me for refuge. I took that stillness into the house, grateful the wind, too had gone quiet.

Works Cited

1 John 1: 4 – 5, ESV

2 John 8:12, ESV

3 Psalm 46: 1, ESV

4 Psalm 46: 2, ESV

5 1 Tim 2: 1 – 4, ESV

6 Ps 46: 4,ESV

7 John 4: 14, ESV

8 Ps. 46: 8, ESV

9 Ps 46: 9, ESV

10 Luke 3: 17, ESV

11 Ps. 46: 10, ESV

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Monday, January 19, 2026

One evening I looked out the window, Orion was close, and swollen, to the west of the barn, in front of the kitchen window. Where before in the summer we could only see him in the middle of night, bright and far away, crisp. The Northern lights aren’t showing themselves behind clouds and a cold wind, even though there is a G4 solar flare. When I was a young girl, I loved looking at the stars and thinking about Psalm 8:

When I consider your heavens, the moon and the stars, which you have ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that you visit him. 1

The stars, untroubled by light pollution, in the Adirondacks, were so brilliant, I could be lost looking at them. I felt like I was looking at creation close to God. They hurt my eyes, my neck sore from looking up, my skin stinging with mosquito bites and slaps. Now the utter vastness, miles measured in light years measured in numbers I can’t fathom, feels claustrophobic. Eternity, ages unto the ages, well, whatever that means for my resurrected life I will have to trust the Lord, in whom I take refuge but if I think too hard, I feel a terror that wearies me. This God who heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds, who determines the number of the stars and gives them all names2, is beyond reckoning. And beyond me. When I see a sparrow banging against a window in the barn, to get out, I wish I could be a sparrow to show her the way out. I am grateful God made himself known as a man, who speaks a human language. I can shelter knowing that He has healed my broken heart, dried my tears, and slowly implacably healed my wounds. I choose to trust He will be with me, with all of us humans, outside of time.

I have loved Orion for years. Here’s a poem that was one of my first Northern Public Radio posts:

Riding Orion’s Shoulders

Orion is slinging his leg

over the horizon about the time

I step out to walk the dogs.

He is huge, leaning next to the horizon.

Last spring, he left

like the loner riding into the sunset.

He became swollen

like a sun running out of fuel.

I missed our evenings,

though sometimes I’d catch his eye before dawn.

I rode those shoulders once last winter,

I only let him lift me as high as an aerial photo.

As he stood up, the farm receded.

Night barked when I dropped his leash.

Orion’s shoulders burned under my thighs.

Frightened by that naked height,

I screamed.

Even though he is a hunter,

even though his belt is buckled and stern,

he gently set my feet down.

There just might be something

to the idea the universe longs to help us.

I am no longer startled

by Orion standing in front of our porch,

his hand reaching down,

to lift me to his shoulders.

I know this sounds imaginary, crazy;

but the world is so full of wonder,

it might do us all good if we reached for Orion’s hand,

or took a sip from the Big Dipper

or even just touched a tree gone quiet for winter,

and let them lift us, into terror maybe,

into a new perspective, into joy.3

And then there’s the shepherd Amos’ response:

Seek him who makes the Pleiades and Orion and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night; who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the surface of the earth. The Lord is his name.4

And there’s God’s questioning Job:

Can you Bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens: Can you establish their rule on earth? 5

And the best verse:

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of the stars; He gives to all of them names.6

For fun, here’s another poem with Orion from my poetry collection that is mythic and sexy:

A Woman Grieves

Venus used to pull me as she followed

The sun into someone else’s day.

She drew wine until I was sore

In the praise oozing to a heaven of stars.

I miss the teasing lips; the heroes-her lovers

She sent to drink, tonguing a breeze in my ear,

Their eyes splintering light on a lake.

Men touch me and I’m dry, their fingers

Moisten me until I’m only as damp as their sweat.

There, water once poured like trees breaking.

They’re poured into their work. I’m poured out.

Orion my lover won’t rise until November.

I look for his thigh slung over the mountain

And for some word whether our mistress will bring

Wisdom back from the sun and let me get drunk.7

So many signs in the sky, comets have almost become common, and northern lights down by us, are almost boring because they’ve appeared so often. A few years ago we saw a comet with our very own eyes, not just binoculars or phone. His nose was pointed down, tail flung up behind him, against the amber evening sky. You could almost see his forelegs pointed down, tail flipped up, a sport horse coming off a fence. And this year interstellar comet, Comet 3I Atlas captured my imagination when Avi Loeb thought it might be some kind of spaceship. (It’s a highly unusual comet.) I hoped it was Jesus returning in the clouds, fed up with our wickedness and finally saying it’s time for new creation to rise from the ground when his trumpet blasts. After all He did say,

There will be signs in sun and moon and stars and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves.8

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

This morning, Aiden barked at 5 am, not something he does, so we stepped into our day. The sky had cleared. I saw a faint light to the north, faint like an angel might appear. So I wrangled him to stay still and pointed my phone. The purple lights appeared. I snapped a few pictures and walked on. Orion had knelt close to the western horizon, so I didn’t get a good look at him, though I’m not sure I was that interested. I needed to switch dogs, so Omalola could have her potty break. By then the sun was too present and the lights were gone.

Since I’m so fascinated by the sky these days, I signed up for Imitating Heaven a class put out by Symbolic World. Here are the details in case you’re interested: Imitating Heaven, The Structure and Meaning in Ancient Cosmology. Live classes are on Sundays 5 – 6:30 EST. from February 1 – March 8, 2026.

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

Bruce stopped by the milk house. He was hauling the poop wagon back from picking Mrs. Horse’s manure from her paddock. If we don’t keep ahead of it, come mud season, we’ve got a nasty mess. “What are you looking at?” I asked. I walked over. Many honeybees lying in the snow. One was moving, so Bruce lifted it up to the hive’s opening. These bees have lived here for several years. A few years ago, they even split and swarmed. “They must have been warmed by the sun and come out,” he said. Saddest thing I’ve seen in awhile. Sterilizing cold. We’ll see if the hive survives.

Thursday January 22, 2026

I walked out this morning with both dogs who are way too much to handle together, but I must take both for their first potty break because Aiden has been known to pee in his crate if I don’t. Mrs Dog is not happy to share her walks with the Mr Dog. She lets us both know by barking, by grabbing his leash, by dragging him. He chases her back. With the below zero wind chills, our walks are short. (I’ve decided to call them Mr. and Mrs. so I can stop misgendering them.)

My goodness what a beautiful morning with the sun breaking over the horizon, the slightly orange, slightly yellow and gray clouds broken enough so we saw blue sky, and shadows on the ground.

Then I turned them out in the newly fenced yard to work out their relationship and burn off their energy. Mr and Mrs Dog are like racehorses dancing in the gate, when I unhook their leashes and open it. They burst out and run hard. It’s a beautiful sight to see them lean into their run, chasing each other, blowing off energy. It’s also not all bad that Mrs. Dog shows Mr. Dog who’s boss. When Omalola was a pup, Mrs. Dog’s breeder told me to let the older dog have her way to teach her manners, but Dolly was too old to rough house.

It’s winter and I have come to ground. I have no desire to take them to dog class, even though both dogs pull too hard when they walk out, they challenge each other, and my mittens with handwarmers are too clumsy. It’s too bitter to offer treats from my pocket which brings them under control. Besides Mr. Dog leaps for my loose glove when I pull my hand out. I walk into chaos first thing in the morning but I thank the sun breaking over the horizon for the shine on my face.

Even with dogs to train—it’s easier to think of those exercises as games--I can’t take my eyes off the chaos in our country, as if witnessing the turmoil, as if deciding what I think about confusing narratives, will change anything. I’ve already been committed to not sharing my opinions. What’s the point? The news cycle will move along, and new chaos, new conflicting narratives will rise. Likely I will be sparked by new outrage, someone’s comments making their home in my sleep, so I wake up repeating arguments I could make instead of the Jesus Prayer.

(Someone said we’d might do well, to wake with thanksgiving, which would be a good practice, but too many things happen in my sleep, not to grab onto “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, be merciful to me a sinner.” The Shepherdess on Substack has modified it to: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, thank you for everything”.9)

Psalm 37, the Daily office Psalm, took me up short:

Fret Not Yourself because of evil doers,

be not envious of wrongdoers!

For they will soon fade like the grass

And wither like the green herb

Trust in the Lord, and do good;

Dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness

Delight yourself in the Lord,

And he will give you the desires of

Your heart.

Commit your way to the Lord;

Trust in him and he will act

He will bring forth your righteousness as the light,

And your justice as the noonday.10

It seems to me this not only applies to personal interactions, it might also apply to the chaos, the work of deciding what to think. Whenever there’s a national trauma, I can’t take my eyes off the news. I open a thread in my favorite political group and read along. The “wrong doers” in this verse might be the chaos itself, the thing that wiggles its finger, enticing me to look and look again. It’s a sticking my nose in the death that William Stringfellow says comprises how American society has “kindship of principalities with the moral reality of death.” 11 The principalities and powers hover behind nations, directing our culture to choose death, a choice that has become blatantly obvious.

Why even bother trying to figure out if a person’s actions are justified or not? My opinion can’t change the outcome or anyone’s mind, but I can pray.

I can aspire to keeping my nose out, but I’m easily sucked in. Just now I opened my phone to Facebook, got sucked into a thread about the latest drama. “Fret not yourself because of evildoers.” My gosh I need to hang that phrase in my heart.

Wouldn’t it be better if I tore my eyes away from the drama and cracked open a book, or played with Mr and Mrs Dog or meditated on the above advice or asked Mrs. Horse to dance with me or actually tasted my meals or sat with Bruce in silence or took a nap? I trust this advice warning us to not be riled up by someone’s opinion.

I resent. I resent. I resent the pastors who spout their politics but then I catch myself. I’m not refraining from anger or forsaking wrath as it says farther down in the Psalm 12. If I don’t catch it, a root of bitterness might spring up. The principalities are jerking my chain to resent other humans. See to it that no root of bitterness springs up13. See to it.

And there’s so much to delight in the Lord. The way clouds and blue sky and fields can dab color even on a bitter winter day. The biting, sterilizing cold. The barn cat peeking out from the barn door to catch sun light. Both he and Ma Cat are in my prayers to survive this. They have a barn full of hay to insulate them and thick coats. We keep them fed and watered. The row of icicles hanging off the barn. Mrs. Horse eating hay so rich it’s still green against the snow. The curtains pulled away so the sun can warm the south facing rooms. The liturgy that leads us to take Christ’s body and blood. The pastor charged with offering those sacraments and tending the people in his or her care. Neighbors’ stories. The blessed water, we are dunked in the Names, we get to die, we get to rise to new creation, here, now. The prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, thank you so much.

References

1 Psalm 8: 3 – 4, ESV

2 Psalm 147: 3 – 4, ESV

3 Perspectives, December 22, 2015, WNIJ

4 Amos 5: 8 -9, ESV

5 Job 38: 31 – 33, ESV

6 Psalm 147: 3 – 4, ESV

7 When the Plow Cuts, Thorntree Press, 1988, 46

8 Luke 21: 25, ESV

9 Shepherdess. January 24,

10 Psalm 37: 1 – 4, ESV

11. William Stringfellow. An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a. Strange Land. p.18

12. Psalm 37: 8, ESV

13. Hebrews 12:15, ESV

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Friday, January 16

While it was still dark, and I would remain in sleep, the snowplow scraped by. He went north and came back south. We had a bit of snow last night, but nothing Bruce would have to plow. I’ve seen bits of asphalt tossed in the ditch, black seeds that will not sprout. And my wild, young pup, Aiden has dived for them, rolled them into his mouth. I pull off my gloves, reach into his mouth, and pull it out. He’s done this with stones, black walnuts and branches. He’s quick. I fear this will drive us to the ER for a four-thousand-dollar surgery or a dead dog. He’s two months shy of a year. His teeth are all in. How much longer will I have to guard this compulsion?

I looked out the bathroom window and saw squirrels running along branches and diving between them in the black walnut trees that line our drive. It’s like watching a roller coaster made up of squirrels. They are well fed.

Yesterday Bruce told me to look out the window to see the crescent moon high above the barn. He said it would be dark the next few nights. The moon set in the sky for times and seasons. When I looked for it on my walk, it was nowhere to be found. I have often seen the moon setting in the west during the day as a pale disk or half disk. And when it’s new, it catches earth shine as it settles down to the orange horizon.

Today was the last day of the five-day Martin Shaw’s Quest for the Holy Grail course that was sponsored by The Symbolic World. When the story wrapped up, Bruce and I went to our local Mexican restaurant for lunch because my brain needed to cool with some chips and salsa. I wished I had a classroom of students to show this especially young men, because Parzival is a powerful coming of age story, and the young people I worked with were in sore need of a truly human story where they could find themselves. But the story would be so foreign to an inner-city kid, well any young person, it might shock them into finding themselves. It’s not same old same old.

Even as a seventy-year-old woman, I found places where my life rhymed. It felt like the story beckoned to see how my life can be mythic. Myth might be too strong a word, but that’s all I can think of to express the pull I felt. And true to my compulsion to write things down to hold my attention, I took notes, which is gauche when listening to such a masterful storyteller.

Shaw looked hand hewn, like the beams holding up our barn, his hair tangled behind his neck, with the magic hanging around him that I have sensed from master storytellers. He sipped whiskey and smoked some kind of cigar. He filled us in on each brand of whiskey before he closed the session. Behind him—books and more books. I wished I could step close and read their spines. Then he played his drum, the rhythm of Mrs. Horse trotting down the road, the rhythm of a warmblood galloping to a fence. He took us to the forests and castles of the thirteenth century. He took us to the mystery of the grail. (Very early in our marriage Bruce and I attended storytelling festivals in our area and were entranced. These men have a generosity of spirit that doesn’t much appear with literary types. One gentleman invited me to go to Silver Bay on Lake George to read my poetry collection. Who does that?)

Dr. Shaw asked us where do we find ourselves in the story?

When Parzival’s father was killed in battle, his mother grieved so hard, she forsook the castle and courtly ways. She did not want her son in the meat grinder of war. She left the palace and fled to the deepest part of the forest where she raised him. But she was so afraid of losing him, she killed the birds that set up her child’s longing to see the wider world. When he was enthralled with the Arthurian knights who came to visit, she sent him off to find Camelot dressed in sack cloth riding a donkey.

I thought about Bruce’s mother, whose husband died when he was fifteen, and how he stayed home until he was thirty, until he met me. Instead of choosing her, he chose me. He withstood her silences, the backstabbing, the sharp words to make it clear the apron strings were cut. I figured that if I didn’t stop complaining about her slights, I would make our lives miserable, so I did the hard work of blessing her every time I thought of her. This blessing rewired my brain. Contrary to what psychologists say I found I could train my brain to step aside from the anger, frustration, and just not go to the angry place. There were five years when we didn’t speak. We ultimately reconciled.

But I also knew that Bruce wouldn’t have been drawn to me if I didn’t have those same insecurities. I wrestled the fear of abandonment, which made sense since my parents had both died when I was twenty-seven. (Shaw says it’s not good for young people to be around death, but I was whacked with it hard and then five years later my brother died.) Dreaming Bruce walked away with another woman did not help. I saw therapists, I wrote stories, I prayed. Just lately I’ve begun to see that fear is something to be rebuked like a snarling red dragon. And it goes away.

Parzival’s love story, where Condwiramurs comes to his bed chamber, and they simply laid together and later how it took three days to consummate their love was gorgeous and runs so counter to our contemporary“mad rush to the gennies.” Sweetness. When Parzival sees a vision in specks of blood in snow and a falcon’s wing, he longs to return to her. It’s so good to hear a story about a man’s faithful love for his wife.

Like Parzival I left home, and while I looked back with weekly phone calls, once I was employed in my first job, as publicist at Crossway books both parents died within the year.

Shaw asked what legacy did your parents leave you?

My mother said there’s always room at the top and encouraged excellence. I guess I found the top when I was one of two out of state poets accepted at the University of Arkansas’ creative writing program that semester. I guess I found the top when I turned out to be one the top publicists in the evangelical book market in the early 80’s. But the “top” in those places carried a significant price.

My MFA program might have taught me how to write an English sentences, but they also taught me to be understated, a kind of writing that damaged my chances to be published by top New York and Indie publishers just before the publishing industry flipped upside down. Several editors said something like the signal is like a radio station coming in and out of range on a long trip. The characters were sometimes clear and sometimes faded. I hired an editor who taught me how to bring them alive. She taught me not to afraid of emotion on the page. I reworked The River Caught Sunlight for about fifteen years. Those revisions dumped me into a steady peace. When I taught first year English to developmental students I slid away from the top and became an instructor, which was a non-tenured job that felt precarious, but held steady for twenty years.

Now I don’t care about the top, I’m content with my quiet life. I don’t have the desire or the energy for the hustle. I’m honored that you read my words.

My mother came from a silencing family. She often said I talked too much.

My father said if you stumble, get right up and keep walking. He prayed with me.

Dr. Shaw asked hard questions: Do you have agency? (Yes.) Do you feel witnessed in your life? Have you sent something into exile?

Have you sent something into exile? Yes. Mrs Horse. This mare taught me how my fear--This mare could hurt me--was a lie. Just because I perceive it doesn’t mean it’s true. As a youngster she had many opportunities to nail me and she didn’t. We had good teachers, especially when I trained her to drive, but now there doesn’t seem to be anyone to come out to the farm and lend their confidence. She has gotten heavy in the bridle. I need help to remedy that. I’m not going to switch bits without good advice. There are times when I need more than breath and my voice to bring her back. And she does come back but those spurts to run, can rattle a person.

Dr. Shaw asked about our first mentor. Mine was Judy who came to our house and trained Trigger, a Shetland hackney pony, who needed schooling to be safe for me to ride. Even so, her favorite thing was to sink down in soft, plowed dirt and roll. She was an escape artist too.

Judy helped me buy my second horse and trailered us to assorted horse shows around Albany County. Judy knew me well and predicted, no prophesied that I would be working with inner city kids one day. I remember the stretch of Font Grove Road where she said that, between Furman’s barn and Zeke Donato’s. That work didn’t seem possible and yet I tumbled into it for twenty years as an instructor at Northern Illinois University.

When it was time to part with Trigger, I did the same, with her new owner, mentored her a bit. We explored the remote valleys between my parents’ farm and Slingerlands after school and on weekends. Mary became a world class Judo competitor and sat with me through my losses.

Mrs. Horse watches me with Aiden through the rails in the fence. She says what were you thinking adding another dog, who will take time, when you don’t even have time for me?

Even I wonder what I’ve done inviting Aiden to our home. Omalola nearly says the same thing. She watches me making much over Aiden. They have taught each other bad habits—jumping on counters, grabbing leashes, barking, tearing up furniture. Not coming in the house and darting into the yard, doing their ra rah thing, growling and rearing and grabbing necks and finally breaking into a run. This morning I opened the gate to the yard when they got loose and thankfully they ran in. Both dogs are happy to walk quietly along side as long as I offer treats, a bitter ask for my hands. Bruce has stepped in to help with walks. Aiden stays by him during the day so he can be outside his crate and quiet. As inappropriate as Aiden is, as a wild puppy who lived in a kennel for six months, he’s staying here. We both have said this is why dogs like him end up in shelters and rescues.

As far as being witnessed in my life? Yes I have, most recently by Dr. Shaw himself, who has kindly read my work. I fear he will be like Cundrie, the wild woman who shamed Parzival because he failed to ask the question, a question that would have healed the fisher king and the land, if I don’t settle down and at least make a draft of Baptisms of a Sorta Former Evangelical or How I Made Peace with My Name and My Ass. I’m not sure there’s an audience and I tell things I hesitate to tell, but there is play too, sitting in the sandbox and moving the trucks and tractors, dogs and horses around.

The core of the Parzival story is healing, cosmic healing, that comes about when a person, walks the walk of becoming truly human, and receives what can only be given by grace. It’s about asking a question, something as simple as “how are you,” a question that has become rare these days. The grail part of this story is mysterious and hopeful and harks back to and old human story—Cain’s murdering Abel.

I was knocked back when Dr. Shaw mentioned that magical things happen under linden trees. It was under a Linden tree that Parzival met his first mentor, Gurnemanz, who taught him how to be a knight.

Our linden tree was smuggled into the US as a slip inside a boot and planted next to our house. Now it is a tall, robust tree. Bruce has to clear its leaves and seeds from the gutters. (That’s the tall part of our house where he has to hoist a utility ladder, pulling the top up with a pulley to reach the gutters, if clogged will back water into our walls.) I hold my breath every time he does this, but he’s not afraid of heights and was trained to climb telephone poles just using hooks. Two summers ago, I planted hostas and ferns at the base.

I wanted Dr Shaw to say more but he was speaking at a fast clip. Maybe our little farm has more presence, more magic than I thought. After all I imagined my way to this farm by writing about how Janice, my alter ego, flees her life as a high-powered publicist and settles in a farm in northwestern Illinois. I imagined a Standardbred training farm around the corner from where she lived and a railroad track.

We bought our farm and discovered, a standardbred racing stable was being built around the corner. We watched truck after truck haul gravel to make the training track. Sometimes the trotters worked on the road. The DEA paid a few visits because the horses won so much, investigating drugging the horses. The owner swore it was the feed. The horses are no longer there but we still call it the horse farm and are grateful a local farmer bought it.

Bruce and I find great entertainment watching the trains taking hauling corn east and bringing ethanol back west or is it the other way around? It seems we walk out just as its horn is in earshot, several miles away. It’s especially spectacular when the headlamp lights up the trees at night. This Sunday morning I watched three engines haul corn to the east, making the dogs walk as long as I could watch it and they did their business. Then I turn them toward home, the pavement so cold, Oma goes three legged lame.

Well, I got my answer in Shaw’s masterful explication and retelling of the Parzival story Snowy Tower:

In Slavic culture the tree is associated with the habitation of goddesses of love; the romans also considered it a tree of love and fidelity. In the Greek world, Zeus and Hermes turned a man into an oak tree and his wife into a linden. Bees love the scent of the trees, so they are often called ‘bee trees’, They are also a place of ferocity—the linden worm a form of dragon, is said to abide underneath its branches.

The linden tree also has an air of authority. In German communities, they not only danced underneath its branches, but held specific meetings on the nature of truth and peace. The belief was that the tree itself would assist in getting to the core of the discussions. The Celts held to this, holding judicial cases in its shade. The heart shaped leaves confirmed its reputation as the tree of Venus. (72 – 73)

Maybe that’s why the former owners brought it here from Berlin. Maybe they remembered the dances and meetings held in their community. Maybe they thought the tree would bring peace. Our first years here weren’t so peaceful, though. I don’t think the house appreciated all the changes we made—knocking out narrow, haunted stairs and making wide stairs with a landing, making two bathrooms, a new kitchen, dumping lathe and horsehair in one part of the house, and refinishing the beautiful yellow pine floors that had been covered in brown paint. It took a few years before the house’s stiffness, like a horse ready to buck, relaxed.

Our squirrels jump to the linden tree from the black walnut trees across the driveway. I had no idea I might be digging around a wormy dragon when I planted my hostas and ferns. Aiden likes to pee nearby. My hope is to bring that truth and peace to this place, for our guests to feel, and the people who will come after us, rest when they come here. Every day I walk out I draw down thanksgiving, and the earth swells with God’s love.

When I was drafting the first part of this, the wind socked the house hard. Bitter cold was making her way to us. I will be throwing more hay to Mrs. Horse and stuffing handwarmers in my mittens, eyes watering, smacked by the cleansing air.

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Yesterday, when I woke before dawn, the day looked dark and lowering, the moon cloaked in heavy clouds and silent. Last night’s wind had calmed. Finally, when the sun rose, when I ate my snack and drank my water, I walked both dogs down the road in spitting rain. It was glorious. Both dogs pulled ahead, not hard, but like the dogs you see with dog walkers in a park. I was pleased that they walked quietly, without ra rahing at each other. I even took them down to the willows before I turned back. But then the clouds began to break up. I could see the half-moon in a blue patch of sky.

I thought about what it would have been for the Jewish people to return home and feel both relief and weariness. They were back in their city, on their land, the parts of their souls that had been missing in Babylon returned. Home. They needed places to live, food to eat, so they built their homes, tended their fields and vineyards and olive groves. From the stories of the elders who remembered, their ears were still full of the glory of Solomon’s temple, the gold inlay, the pomegranate carvings, the terror of the real presence of God at the center. They might have heard Ezekiel tell his strange stories of creatures and whirling wheels and the Shekinah glory lifting away from the temple to settle by them in Babylon. They might have felt hopeful when they heard the legends how the Ark had been taken by Solomon’s son to Ethiopia.

And it was just too much to reset those stones, to lift timbers, to make God another house, that wouldn’t come close to the former glory. I would imagine their spirits dropped, they felt tired whenever they walked by the heap of rubble. Did anyone rummage around looking for gold or pottery fragments? But they could build their houses—their houses were simple, wood and stone nearby. They could plant and till. They needed shelter and food. After the seventy-year rest their fields should be fertile. But it never seemed like they could get ahead.

But they could never get ahead despite hard work, despite mulching their fields with manure. The wine never satisfied. The olive oil was bitter. The rain stopped falling. Dust roared up, poured into those fine houses, coated them.

I can relate. My cupboard is full but nothing satisfies. I reach for candied nuts or Poppycock to brighten my day. LL Bean is pushing me to spend the $10 rebate. We won’t even talk about Diet Coke or ordering books from Amazon. I jump on Facebook and keep on scrolling, eyes glued to the latest national drama. When I shut off the phone, I’m on edge, wondering where the drama will lead. I know better but the demon in my pocket, the darkness in my country keeps calling.

Haggai stood before Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel governor of Judah and Joshua the son of Johozadak the high priest. Haggai spoke God’s word:

3 Then the word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai: 4 “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?”

5 Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. 6 You have planted much but harvested little. You eat but never have enough. You drink but never have your fill. You put on clothes but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it. (Haggai 1: 3 – 5).

This prophecy clobbered me with my own relationship with the church. Bruce and I have church hopped in the forty years we’ve been together and have found ourselves back at the church where we started. Why did we move on from each church? I got yelled at by the pastor or staff member, so that was that, we were done. The pastor’s style was too far out. Prominent church people announced they didn’t believe in the resurrection. There was better community elsewhere. It hurt too much to stay.

We kept trying with church because I am haunted by what St Cyprian said: “No one can have God for his father who does not have the church for his mother.” Church is the only place were we get physically intimate with Jesus as far as taking his body and blood. When we are baptized, we die with him and are risen with him. I sometimes think the point is to be with people you haven’t chosen and learn to get along with them. To take communion even though the person standing across from you is not your favorite, and to know that like you, they too are much loved by God.

The church back where we started makes sense because the services are geared toward worship. We weren’t asked to get involved, which can lead to unneeded stress in a person’s life as well as more rejection, so we settled in going to services. Neither Bruce nor I are joiners. Because of our assorted experiences with church, we keep our distance.

But is God speaking to me here? Or is my work here on this blog, the freedom to be a good friend, praying for people and working on being a good neighbor enough?

Speaking of Advent, yes I’m still chewing on Advent, because waiting seems to be my natural state. David Harvey in The Inevitability of God’s Faithfulness says,

For the earliest Christ followers it would not be controversial to say that to be a Christian the Christian needs the church. Our community with Christ is enabled through his church because the Church is the body of Christ “for us”. Christ’s body is always “for us” — as Bonhoeffer said ”on the cross, in the word, in baptism, and in the Lord’s Supper.”7 But it is also never for us alone, Christ has intentionally drawn us into community and that is how we are “clothed with him.”

When I read this, the image of church people turning their backs and walking away came to mind. I recall standing in line with someone from our church at the local fair blabbing about how I need help with something. As soon as she got her order she was gone. Ouch. After church, people dart out quick as quick can be. On the other hand, there are people there that don’t suit me, so Bruce and I have also darted out quick. Harvey continues:

This is not to defend our failings or harm within the churches that many of us have experienced or participated within, but rather to remind us that even our failings highlight how Advent leads us to pray: “Lord, have mercy upon us! Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

Christ is coming. Not at our command, and fortunately not when we get our act together. And this is why we must not rush to Christmas but wait in Advent. We need to learn to wait “in the time between” and we need the church to do that properly. So perhaps I can say it like this: If Advent calls us to live as Christians between the two comings of Christ, Advent is telling us that it’s time to go to and be the Church.

So if I want to look for Jesus’ between his first coming and second, I need to find him in the church—the Eucharist, Baptism, the Word—the Lord himself and the scriptures. I need to find him in the people I worship with.

So this week I signed up to be a lector at our church. I did this during Covid on video, often with the horse or a flowering tree behind us at our last church. This is a small way to serve. And I must say, this week, something uneasy loosened up between me and two other believers. And my heart lifted up in lightness and joy I’ve not felt in a while.

This morning, I walked the dogs out in snow, water dripping from the trees. Often when I do chores in the morning, the sparrows chip at the cat food. When I step into that part of the barn to leave they fly up to the extension cord that powers the electric fence. Then they fly out to the corn crib. Their wings, taking flight, a quiet and good sound, I have to listen carefully.

Well, tonight I walk forward, to read some beloved passages, a small way to serve the Lord who lives in my local church.

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Sunday December 28

It’s raining warm buckets today. I let Mrs Horse out to stretch her legs, but the rain is so persistent, she stood by the barn, her hay soaked and untouched, so brought her in. I played the kid’s game of digging out the blocked rivulet under the barn eaves, so it would run away from the doors. Tomorrow that water will be ice. The air is full of energy. My head aches.

The air is so alive the clouds came down. “Heaven came down and glory filled my soul”—a camp song, simple but full of good hope, speaking the wonderful day when a person took Jesus as their own. Some circles mock the idea of Jesus as personal Lord and savior, saying it’s too self-centered, too individualistic, but that’s how I’ve viewed my walk with God since I was five. I have found strength and relationship. People I know, who speak of their spirituality that way, are alive in Christ. They serve him.

The clouds have settled in the trees. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, the saints who are already in the naked presence of God. Am I seeing that cloud settle with the rain pulling it down? Am I seeing “Heaven came down and glory filled my soul” The blessed rain of God’s goodness watering the earth, hopefully breaking the drought?

Sometimes I think Aiden sees the saints, or sees angels, when he barks at what looks like nothing in the field. “The chariots of God are twice ten thousand, thousands upon thousands” (Ps 68:17) Elisha’s servant’s eyes were opened, and he saw them, chariots of fire, beyond the Syrians arrayed and ready to attack. Elijah, wanted to lie down and die, and the angel of the Lord, gave him food to run on, to meet God at the mountain of God. We know about demons around every bush, but aren’t there angels maybe walking out in the open, only we can’t see them and don’t know enough to sense them?

I walk the dogs in rain, pouring down on my head and shoulders, my hat and coat soaked. This blessing is no fun. I pull out my reverse vacuum that blows air drying the dogs’ coats. They wheel and pull away. Since they are full of high jinx, I let them run lickety split, full tilt in the fenced yard. Their coats soaked. The second time I blew them dry, they realized they liked that warm air blowing on their bodies.

I am filled with dread. Will we be hit with thunder, terrific winds, snow? Ryan Hall shows a picture of the cold front, curved along the mid-point of the country, brown. His words rapid, he says there will be a blizzard north of us and possible tornadoes to the south. This bath water warmth will swing hard to twenty below wind chill.

We have been invited to our neighbors’ Christmas celebration. There’s something about them that feels like family. (You know how you can be invited to someone’s holiday and it feels all wrong. It’s like you’re a stone in their shoe; they are a stone in yours?) It’s not like this with these neighbors, maybe because we know their story, we watch their work as the seasons march through our neighborhood—tilling, planting, harvest, snowplowing.

They speak of the trouble in their lives. Bruce and I add names to our prayer list.

The wind roared up, hard as the front moved through. While I was in the barn doing chores, I heard the train horn blow, like hounds being called to the chase, oddly comforting, human, in the hard roar of the wind sweeping the warmth, sweeping the fog away.

December 30

One night, after the snow comes, I walk the dogs behind the garden. The snow crumbles under my feet. It’s not been a heavy snowfall. I walk behind the garden and see headlights, brighter, bigger than normal. I watch as they round the bend by the cattle-raising-neighbor and turn towards us. It feels ominous. Like something to hide from. I keep watching as the full truck comes into view. He turns into the road that T’s into ours. His headlights swing across our field. I am too far away to be caught in those lights. He stops. Waits. Backs up and goes back the way he came. Barely I can tell it’s a township truck with a plow in front and a bright light bar on the cab. Maybe he was salting the intersection. The next day the intersection is glare ice. Even though Oma wants to check out the sniffs up that way, I pull her away and we walk down to the willows.

Every Sunday I listen to Martin Shaw’s Beasts and Vines, where he tells the story of his week or maybe an old story, that can pry under our shell, to reveal our soft, vulnerable heart. In Fear of Waking the Rooks he says:

An abundance of good fortune would always invite the opposite to swiftly distribute its energies into the community. The sheer vivacity of a decent Christmas always has me looking over my shoulder and talking quietly, evoking that brilliant Thomas line about ‘fear of waking the rook.s’

That’s what I fear at the turning of the year. I cringe when people wish that this year is better than the last. I duck hoping that it’s at least as good. I duck hoping our health holds out. Both Bruce and I check out, at least now. But frailty can whip the legs out from under a person as quick as a barreling dog. As I said, we’ve crossed the line into 70. If I tell Doc I get out of the car and walk like an old person, I catch myself and say I am an old person. These days the crows are rare. The fields around here are too open. The buzzards have left for the south. But I have seen seven sitting in a dead oak and have taken pause, wondering what dead thing drew them here.

Lurking like Shaw’s rooks is the darkness of not knowing how or when death will visit even though crows around here are more rare than eagles. It’s like those nights that are especially dark, almost spectacular in their darkness, with the glow of local towns making the sky even more eerie.

And death has so many guises. We can go slowly with our bodies stiffening, our joints aching, our minds socked by a stroke, or plague, our hearts socked by a clogged artery or rhythms gone awry. We can go to sleep never to wake up. Or lose control of a car. Or run headlong into a terminal cancer diagnosis. Losing our loved ones can be worse than losing ourselves.

Disaster looms like a giant stomping just below the horizon but why let the dread ruin a day? My best defense against this fear is thanksgiving because it brings me back to the present. Sometimes the mere words: “Thank you” say enough. And the Jesus prayer steadies. Life has been so kind these last years, well, who knows what 2026 might bring.

This is why my blood runs cold when a life coach urges me to jump on the intention bandwagon and map out my goals. If you ask me what worked well, what didn’t, I draw a blank.

The practice of Examen is an old Christian practice of writing out the sweet and sour things, our righteousness and sin, what energizes and what drains us. But that all seems like too much looking. Too much running through my head and not enough how life itself plays out. Yes without a vision the people perish, but I feel like for me having big dreams is obsolete, that dreams themselves can be an idol, a false road. Who am I to say what my best life is? I’m sure as heck not wise enough. Looking back, I’ve seen the wisdom of dreams not coming true.

What if the key, the secret, the answer is laying ourselves open to our vulnerable God, leaning not on our own understanding—isn’t our understanding sometimes what dreams and goals and intentions are? Isn’t our understanding not so particularly wise? The next part says “In all our ways, acknowledge him.” In all our ways, eating, drinking, walking the dogs, shoveling manure, kissing Bruce, acknowledging him, God’s presence, right here, right now. Acknowledging--bringing the Lord into our ordinary lives. Then he will direct our paths, the road less traveled, the road well traveled, the road whatever, will unfold before us. (Prov 3: 5 – 6).

Also hustling for some kind of adventure takes too much energy. I hustled hard to answer the call to be a writer. That call has played out in unexpected and good ways. I didn’t get published by a traditional or even indy publisher or pull bestseller status. I’m not interested in doing the tricks that might draw more readers. It’s why I’m so grateful for you, for your reading these words, that I can have an audience without knocking up against gatekeepers again and again, the answer coming back: Nope. Not for us. Not at this time. But you have talent. Try again.

On New Year’s Eve I am so tired, Bruce offers to walk the dogs. When he comes in, he says, “You know how you see cloud shadows moving across the field? Well I saw the shine of the moon moving across the field.” I envied him the wonder of seeing how the moon broke up clouds, that he saw a pool of white moving. On the other hand, wonder is good for him, for anyone to see. But I wish I’d gotten up and walked and seen it too.

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The day before Christmas Eve I walked Omalola behind the shed and manure pile. The sun had dropped behind the horizon to pull in a darkness with presence. The clouds were low and heavy, threatening rain that never came. Morgen’s back was against the barn, her ears forward. She always watches when I’m out with the dogs. My excuses not to work with her suit me—mostly having to do with no energy or needing to write. The vet has reassured me that she is living a good life.

This year I crossed the threshold of seventy years. I’ve outlived my birth family. I took heed of each of their death years—35, 60, 69 wondering if I would step into the next year. For my seventieth birthday I pulled a pretty please on Bruce with a six-month-old puppy that needed a home. His breeder was placing her stock because she wanted to guarantee they had homes should something happen to her. So we brought Shoreland’s Weight of Glory, call name Aiden, into our lives. Something shifted between us when we gave him a bath this week after a romp in a muddy field, when I laid my hands over his entire body to soap him up. He seemed to settle. Just today he found his crate on his own and settled there while I was working on this.

Martin Shaw, a marvelous story teller, gifted me with Red Bead Woman, a story about an old woman who longed for a child, so she turned a mare’s tail plant into a daughter. There’s a prince, a sorceress, talking horse, and a hard-won happy resolution. Stories are medicine. They are a slant way for us to know ourselves. And these days I’m drawn to Shaw’s stories to find the wonder and longing that used to drive my poetry.

In another book, Bardskull, Shaw speaks about seventy:

Seventy seems grand, not old, not really. No one is sucking sweets under a blanket by the fire. The old I meet are not thinking they are at the end of their lives; they are still vital. But is to be dying to mean not being vital? I have to check that habitual thinking. I am presuming this vigour is a good thing. I find myself cheered by it. But what happens when it is the end of their lives, how do they click into that particular gear? I’ve seen more morbidity in a twenty-year-old goth. These elders tell me to live as if I expect to be three hundred. (130).

That sounds about right. Though I work hard to live in the present and not to let the Killjoy, the knowing that life can collapse any time, that collapsing doesn’t always mean sudden death, I work to not let that fear ruin the joy in the present, the gift of Bruce and the animals and the farm. As I’ve said before, the pressure to do what Aiden’s breeder did, find homes for my stuff, at least the excess, is there but I stall and do nothing about it. There are material goods that bring comfort and memories that I don’t care to dispose of just yet.

Shaw is a rare teacher in my life who sees me and has drawn good writing from my fingers. I read his books for the language and vision and longing.

When I crossed into 70 my hair started falling out, my face has captured those fine lines and the big ones are drawn down in a frown. My legs don’t like walking up stairs. When I step out of the car, I move like I could use a walker. Sleep is more hard work than pleasure. My wake time is now o’ dark thirty. Mild cognitive impairment when sleep has evaded me feels pretty real.

I have to think hard about this past year. Even as a young person stuff would just slip into my memory like a stone dropped in still water. If I look hard, I see the hardships. We said goodbye to Dolly-bird (my nickname for her) because her body wore out. Dolly was a dog her breeder and owner didn’t want. So a woman I was acquainted with, adopted her and posted a picture on Facebook. Dolly had a sad look to her, so we brought her home. She was a great walking companion. It was never difficult to walk her with the other dog. But she barked at Bruce every time he stood up.

But she broke our heart, especially Bruce’s, when we had to say goodbye.

We look for our feral cats every day to make sure they made it through the night. When I walk the dogs at night, their eyes catch my headlamp, often behind the garden. One night I even saw Tyger up in a tree. We worry a coyote or eagle might take them. Smudgie our black cat often settles in the bedroom. I like to think he’s guarding us from the dark things that can show up at night. Kali Zoo visits me in the bathroom because that’s the only place she’s safe from the dogs.

There were wonders in the sky and on the ground. The Northern lights exploded several times, and an opportunity to see the sky come alive with our eyes. This year the rainbows spoke me of how the ark is a sort of promise that God’s people were protected from the storm.

One morning while I was walking, the sun lit up the fog in the form of a white bow over our neighbor’s field. The light was telling me something, but I don’t know what it meant, other than the world is full of the Glory. When this appeared, I was standing by the pipeliners, who didn’t seem to notice.

For several years Ni Gas had been planning to plug the old pipeline with concrete and lay a fresh pipe to transport natural gas. It was a wonder to see the giant cranes that rolled the pipe into the ground and care they took to preserve the topsoil. Sometimes at night we could see the welder’s torch off in the distance.

We watched planting and harvest, those big machines, as big and expensive as a house, plant and pick soybeans and corn. I know our technology is hard on the soil and water, but my gosh even the things we’ve made are awesome. And didn’t the prophet say that swords would be beaten into plowshares one day? Our neighbors, who are raising cattle while honoring the ground, offered to harvest our hay. They let the hay dry long enough so it didn’t mold or get dusty like previous crops. The bales are small enough to lift and carry.

A bald eagle visited us several times, landing in our poplar tree. Eagles have glided low when I walked the dog. An owl sat on the top of our dead pine tree. Was he an omen? Of what?

I’ve written about loneliness and rejection. Well, this year the horrible loneliness I’ve written about was sopped up in God’s presence and my commitment to let people come to me. And they did. My cousin Facetimed me for Christmas. I’ve been so out of touch with my New York family that I mistook one cousin for another. We’ve gotten old. And bald.

The summer, a neighbor dropped off flowers just because. I am taking another neighbor for a hair appointment, weekly. And though, it’s not always easy to get up and get to her house in the morning, I’m guaranteed some good talks.

At speech therapy I learned how important it is to talk to people for my cognition because adjusting my words and being according to the people, I’m with is good mental exercise. Two dear friends stayed overnight. And I befriended a local Orthodox priest, or did he befriend me? And there’s a group of horsewomen who meet for lunch every month. Two women from our former church have met with me every week on Zoom for the last few years.

I've poured my life into Katie's Ground, writing pretty much weekly, posting at 1 pm on Sundays. I'm grateful that you've taken the time to read my words, and I'm especially grateful for those of you who are paying subscribers or have kicked in to "buy me a coffee". There are essays that wouldn't exist were it not for your support.

We called back our contractor, Ric Anderson, to install a new shed roof because it’s a building we want to preserve. The nail holes in the roof were rusting through. Bruce put in a dog fence so the dogs have a place to run and play, though now it’s mud season, it’s not being used much.

Finally, we invited our pastor to bless our house. We should have done it when we moved in, but we didn’t have a pastor at the time. For years the house wasn’t very welcoming. The blessing, just plain scriptures that applied to each room, and the word spoken over me: There is therefore no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus also lightened me. As a girl I used to long to go home to be with Jesus. Since I’ve moved to the farm, I knew to confess those feelings as not good because the life he gave us is good, a bit of paradise, at least for now. That death wish has lifted.

And of course there’s Mr. Bruce, who knows what it means to be poured out and silent, covered by late afternoon sun and with me forty years.

Here at the end of the year, Eugene Terekhin writes about how a How a Russian Circle Dance Taught Me That True Theology Begins with Bowing by drawing the analogy that God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are constantly circling around each other and bowing, like people do in a Russian circle dance. He says:

If we fixate on the external — the mask, the appearance — we fail to sense the heartbeat of the world: the Secret Fire that animates all things. But if we catch even a glimpse of that Fire, we begin to understand hypostasis — that which stands under.

In that sacred moment, we cannot help but bow down to the icon in the Other.

The more we do this, the more the external world is healed. Our ability to see the invisible is the greatest power in the world. We can wield it every time we look around. The moment we truly see what lies beyond the external, we can’t help but bow. There is no other way to do the eternal dance.

With so much unraveling in our culture, what a simple hope this is—to bow down before the holy image that each one of us carries. And not only that, but the mysterious seal put on us with God becoming incarnate, His choosing human flesh to dwell. The world shines with shook foil as Gerard Manley Hopkins says. And even if our eyes have not been graced with literally seeing uncreated light, the eyes peering out from our faith has seen it in God’s people, and the world around us, a world that is full of God’s love, a world that declares God’s glory.

When the sun rose, on Christmas day, the clouds were bathed in a pale pink you could barely see. If the clouds had opened up, maybe there would have been a spectacular sunrise, pink and orange bubbling across the sky. But the clouds muted any color but this vague pink. I could feel the sun top the horizon and the day turned plain gray.

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When the wind threw snowstorms into billows, pirouetting and spinning off the fields, my family waited for the plowmen to clear our road. We respected the power of the wind to plug it up. We stayed put, sometimes as long as a week, until the town plowed us out. At times, my mother called for them to come, afraid my father with his bum knee would have to walk the mile long road through drifts after dark. I watched for his lights, as they turned onto our road, blurred by blowing snow. I watched as they rounded the last curve.

The township truck plowed the snow like the prow of a ship pushes water aside, the snow exploding into the fields. They dropped the wing to push back a snowbank standing at twenty feet. I thought of how a venetian blind can block a window until someone pulls the cord and draws it up, how the road was cleared letting in light.

My parents invited the crew in for coffee and cookies, with gratitude and to catch up on local news. My heart lifts up the same way when the red dump truck roars down our country road before dawn, the roar of the blade on the pavement, salt splattering behind. These men work all hours to clear and salt the roads so we can go to town, their wives’ sleep disturbed, and family meals eaten alone. Even holiday feasts can be missed if the snow decides to fall.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

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These days it seems like my dad is drawing near. It’s been over forty years since he’s been gone. He delighted in giving gifts. Both my parents did. It was their best way of showing they loved my brother and I. I remember my mother driving somewhere between Schenectady and Albany to get my brother’s guitar repaired. She found a glass blower who blew a panther for my brother and a unicorn for me. I still have both. Those gifts still sit on my shelves reminding me of their thought and love. Stuff can hold a memory in physical form.

Here’s a poem I wrote as a young girl that celebrates my father’s delight in shopping at the mall, an institution that is rapidly fading from American life.

Saturdays greet shopping malls with Happy Holidays.

Merry Christmas drives on the Thruway, Northway,

up the narrow, slick ramp into slush.

Headlights fool us like a mirage with those great salt puddles.

Rain comes drizzling down.

Sleet, sweet shimmy--

Skid first to the left, then to the right.

The car swings to Jingle Bell Rock.

Headlight. Taillight. Parking lots flash.

Blinker light. Christmas light.

Monstrous evergreen sprawl.

New cars sit in snow like Christmas balls,

Blue, red, green, silver.

Each one parked with care

as Christmas reigns dear.

Dad stalks to the stores of his choice.

Hark the Hearld Angels hum

tell-tale on his breath.

He carries a checkbook revolver for safety

and a credit card rifle to purchase gifts.

He slips behind panty hose

racked in the Ladies boutique.

Watch those dangling bras.

He peeks out, aims at the night gowns.

A Bankamericard flashes.

A register prints out a slice of paper.

Dad stuffs the nightgown,

flannel no less, under his arm.

He sneaks on to the next store,

Hoping no one knows him,

So his secret is safe.

He looks at diamonds, picks a solitaire

To replace the ring my mother lost.

He strides past the Sears Santa

munching wishes like candy.

Toys R Us grabs him by his lapel.

A train set, dart gun and Monopoly later,

he finds Crate and Barrel where he adds

a baking dish and pitcher to Mom’s Pfalzgraph.

He sets them in the trunk.

My new hat plopped on his head,

perfect camouflage for the baker,

he ducks in, ducks out

with fruitcake for Christmas Eve

coffee cake for Christmas morning

cookies for stockings.

All thrown in with the Monopoly.

Revolving through doors,

credit shot to pennies,

Dad shuffles to his car.

Rain has feathered to snow.

He brushes it off to get his gifts home

and into the house with no one looking.

A good night’s sleep will make him strong

for more happy shopping

tomorrow and everyday

from now until December 25.

Looking back, I see how Dad revealed some of the generosity of God, how He too gives gifts, and grants the desires of our hearts, especially if we delight in Him. He showed me that I can ask for what I want. And receive it. I learned what Jesus tells us to do: Ask and you will receive. I came to love presents—giving and receiving. The scolds would say my brother and I were spoiled, but I don’t think so. (Spoiled for a rural person is a very deep, nasty insult. I hear the scolds also saying store up your treasure in heaven, care for the poor, the consumerist American culture is worse than not good. Well, maybe so, but for now I’m going to give thanks.)

The feast—my mother’s recipes are gone to memory. I’m not going to make oysters Newburgh or onions au gratin for just Bruce and I. Though I have adopted her dressing recipe by adding almonds or walnuts instead of chestnuts, along with breadcrumbs. I remember my mother cutting crosses in them and roasting them. We’d spend hours in front of a Christmas movie peeling them. And I certainly won’t make her lima beans and mushroom because I don’t like lima beans. Besides that’s a recipe I’ve not been able to find.

And the presents. The boxes wrapped with pretty paper under the tree. The night before wondering what would be there—a Breyer horse, a new outfit, books. My parents went overboard giving my brother and I presents. So much so my aunts made sure I knew how hurtful Christmas mornings were for their children because my brother and I had been showered with gifts. But not their children.

And the desserts. I’d swear I’d diet the next day, and gorge myself on apple kuchen, strawberry shortcake, and cookies. By the way I did find the apple kuchen recipe in the Tasajera Bread book online. The recipe calls for peaches but apples work well. I fed it to Bruce on our first date, and think it was part of what convinced him to ask me to marry him.

And our big family gathering has now dispersed, some to death, some to other regions. My cousin’s grandchildren have multiplied.

These are things worth mourning.

But I married into a family that believed in being spare and practical with presents. Bruce’s first gifts were sock and a hat. But I celebrate his daily gifts like dusting the blinds, and walking the dogs, and cleaning Mrs. Horse’s stall. I celebrate him first thing in the morning, last thing at night.

After my brother died, Christmases have been grinding hard because my family traditions are gone forever. There won’t be the dining room table set out with my mother’s silver and flow blue china. (I took the silver to the jeweler because I needed room in my drawers. The china sits in our dry sink. Our celebrations are so informal, we use my set of Pfalzgraph dishes. At our house Christmas is not much different than any other day we cook a roast, which could also mean those ordinary days when we sit down to a fancy dinner, are as much a feast as Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Christmas has been fraught with many difficult memories—getting sick to my stomach as we drove to catch our plane back from Arkansas the first Christmas after my brother died.

Arguing with my brother about family heirlooms. I took the tin horn, used to warn farmers the sheriff was coming in the anti-rent wars, but after a night in a cheap hotel, I gave it back. Not long ago I gave it to my cousin.

The Christmas we spent with my aunts and cousins after my brother died, only no one invited us back to their house for Christmas Eve. We barely found a Chinese restaurant to grab dinner.

Celebrations with Bruce’s family were difficult and we eventually withdrew.

The Christmas we woke up not knowing our dog survived his bowel resection. He did.

Without children, without family, it’s a fraught holiday at the darkest time of year. I could go on, but share this to say I know how Christmas can be mixed up with good memories, and wrenching ones too. It can punch us with loneliness. Sometimes the best we might do is sleep through the day or eat sweets or watch Christmas movies.

When we first moved to the farm, neighbors invited us to join their Christmas dinners. Those few times of sitting down to a feast, blunted the loneliness, no healed it, so the Christmases following were easier. I have been able to accept our quiet Christmases, grateful that Bruce and I are both still here and healthy, with the poignant dread that one day, one of us will be gone.

This Christmas we look forward to roast beef, reading a book or finding a Christmas movie and opening the presents we found one joyous shopping day at Sierra. That day brought back my dad, how I remembered his joy in giving gifts, after more than forty years away.

Of course there is church, Christmas Eve and Christmas day. The lights and hard singing, our voices as a church lifting up in the old carols: Joy to the World, The Lord has Come. Our world has been invaded by this baby, laid in a manger, celebrated by mystic shepherds, who got to hear the angels singing. There are the pagan magicians who followed a star and brought gifts the family would need when they fled empire, an empire that drew them to Bethlehem, the City of David, to fulfill the prophecies, an empire that tried to kill them. Joseph was the faithful quiet man who followed God’s warnings, loved his wife and raised his stepson. He kept them safe. Mary asked how can this be? Let it be so.

No matter how dark it is, or how our memories burn or our present pinches us with tears, or our hearts lift up with unexpected, quiet joy we we can look for the light. Jesus is the light of the world and He can show up in odd places. I found it in the barn—one knot hole defying the dark room. I found it in the faint pink and blue in the sky as the sun went down. Sometimes you have to look hard for the subtle colors.

Merry Christmas. Thank you for reading and/or listening to my words. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Martin Shaw in Keeping Focus spoke about how St. Brendan was visited by the angel Michael in the form of a bird. “It was the sound of God announcing his happiness,” the saint said. (You ever think of what God’s happiness looks like?) Well, that’s what I’m going to do. Tell you how I’ve seen His happiness this week.

Saturday o’dark thirty: I see it in the bar of light on our bedroom ceiling. I don’t know its origin because it’s not there every night. I don’t think I’ll investigate. The dim image of an angel, appeared behind my eyes, when I lost the entire night to wakefulness and many Lord-be-merciful-to-me a sinner prayers. I’ve tussled with the powers of darkness enough, but what about angels? How come we never open our eyes to the angels among us?

Sunday morning: Mrs. Horse in her thick, yellow pelt, nickered when I threw her hay right behind the barn, a still spot, while the snow out there moved in a brisk wind and sunlight. I shoveled snow away from the doors, she blew a sweet fart, a whiff of new mown hay dropped on warmer days. Perhaps our drought is breaking with these robust snows smoothed into reefs and fins. But even with Sorel boots, my feet were still chilled.

This week, which day, I don’t remember: I saw the happiness of God in icicles hanging from our eaves, some a couple feet long. They shone like crystal daggers. As a baby I pictured sin as a black icicle. My therapist’s eyes grew wide when I told her that. But I bet I picked up my parents’ dread like mine that water would back up in our walls.

I saw God’s happiness when the temperatures warmed just above freezing and those ice dams melted.

Wednesday: I saw it when a snow squall rolled in, belligerent and bellicose, dancing, hard dancing, along the fields, the air alive, full of energy, a balloon rubbed with static. But the roads were clear by the time we needed to go to town.

I’ve seen it with both dogs running full tilt chasing each other, their coats black and grey against the snow, their voices the growls of play. Mrs. Horse stands at the gate watching, not so happy I’m with the dogs and not her.

We’ve held off on our Christmas tree because our wild pup has to lay his teeth on everything, even my hands. Bruce and I have both said this is why dogs end up in pounds. But he’s ours, with many lessons about teaching calm. He’s scraped away the hefty numbness I felt and drives me to confess my impatience, well, shrieks, often. The happiness of God--Bruce taking him for walks in the cold, when I need to write and Aiden was a pretty-please and not Bruce’s idea of a good time when our other dog, Omalola is enough.

I have watched God’s happiness in squirrels diving between branches of the trees, finding their way across the yard without touching the ground.

I have seen it in the sun rising, liquid magenta, and a light haze over the fields, and bird song that speaks of spring even though winter has come early and has not even shown up on the calendar quite yet.

I’ve seen it in our barn cat sitting in the driveway waiting for us to feed him, and our relief he has lived through the bitter night.

Thursday morning: I saw it when my neighbor told how her family had a peaceful Thanksgiving meal, no tension, the food good. This family was riven a decade ago. She sat in her beautician’s chair while her beauty operator curled her silver hair and combed it back, with respect and the local stories. (I was so bone dog tired, I didn’t mark His happiness until now.) I saw it in a friend’s story how her family celebrated her birthday with old, family recipes.

Thursday afternoon: I found my happiness when Bruce took me shopping at Sierra and we pulled bargain stuff off the racks. I found shoes on the cheap, a feminine pajama set to enjoy Bruce with and our heated mattress pad, and a sweater to keep Omalola’s bare belly warm. I found God’s happiness in Jesus words to the pharisees—”full of greed and self-indulgence” and was caught up short how I am a pharisee because if I see it on Amazon I’ll buy it, if I see a piece of chocolate, or Diet Coke I’ll grab it.

I found God’s happiness in my friend’s voice saying you’re not of the way of the negative, fasting and self-denial but of the way of the affirmation. Don’t go down that self-denial road. And I heard God’s happiness in thanking Him for these gifts, this good day to shop with Bruce like I remembered with my dad. And the wall I hit reminded me that it’s up to God to bring the changes He wants.

Saturday Evening: I saw it with the water poured out in the baptismal font, that water poured over the head of a little girl, her mother kissing her between the water and the names of God.

On the way home from church we saw Orion, monstrous, rising over the road. At home I watched a friend’s video of his brown Swiss girls munching.

Sunday o-dark-thirty: Bruce saw God’s happiness in the long streak of a falling star in the bathroom window. I felt it finally in a good night’s sleep, my prayer He take care of any wakeful friends.

Sunday, Below Zero Windchills: When I started reading my phone the sun popped over the barn and flooded my face with light. I shut my eyes and let my face bathe in it, my eyelids red, the warmth, well you know, sun warmth and light, blessed light after a week of dark skies. I closed my phone and suited up to go outside where the cold burned my feet and my hands curled around packets of hand warmers. Mrs. Horse walked beside me when I carried clover hay out to the snow. It’s getting near to Solstice. She has started to shed.

Now you tell me. How have you seen, heard, felt, smelled or tasted the happiness of God?

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The road where I walk has gone from always straightforward, to it depends on how much snow or ice has fallen as to whether I will walk the dogs there. During the snowstorm, as beautiful as the blur of snow falling across the fields was, I avoid the road. And once the snow is cleared, road salt can burn the dogs’ paws. Aiden is so fascinated by those piles of spilled salt he wants to eat it. Now that we have a fenced in yard, it’s easy to just turn the dogs out and let them run. I miss my walks with the sun breeching the horizon, tugging my thoughts back to a simple thank you. The other day I stumbled into a pile of snow in the ditch, embarrassed when I lurched back onto my feet with snow up to my knees and glad no one was driving by. My number of steps has decreased by several thousand.

I don’t know what it is about this Advent, but the daily office readings for Year Two are taking me to the fierce judgements of God and Jesus. What happened to the poems about shaking off the darkness and putting on the armor of light? Or the prophecy about the branch that will grow from the stump of Jesse, how that branch will be vine, that we are grafted into, and the sweet comforting words abide because it’s the sap of that vine, its roots and leaves, making us live.

No Amos calls out the sins of people groups and how God will punish them. Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Isreal, Judah all come under God’s rebuke. And it’s not pretty. For instance, he says of Judah:

For three sins of Judah, even for four, I will not relent.Because they have rejected the law of the Lord and have not kept his decrees,because they have been led astray by false gods, the gods their ancestors followed,5 I will send fire on Judah that will consume the fortresses of Jerusalem. (Amos 2: 4 -5 NIV)

Fire consuming the walls that kept people safe.

In the next paragraphs about Isreal, the prophet calls out specific sins like selling the righteous for silver, trampling the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, a man and his father going into the same girl, and drinking in the temple. God reminds them of how he delivered them from Egypt and the giants. He says he will press them down in their place. He says that the man stout of heart will flee away naked in that day. Imagine the weight of stones, slowly crushing you, or fear so great you run past everyone’s eyes, naked.

Amos pronounces a woe to those of us who long for the day of the Lord:

8 Woe to you who desire the day of the LORD!

Why would you have the day of the LORD?

It is darkness, and not light,

19 as if a man fled from a lion,

and a bear met him,

or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall,

and a serpent bit him.

20 Is not the day of the LORD darkness, and not light,

and gloom with no brightness in it? (Amos 5: 18 – 20, ESV)

I wonder if the day of the Lord, is not just the end of the world, but a day where He comes to us, and we are plunged in darkness, we are emptied of the stuff that separates us from God so that God himself can fill us.

Then I read the next reading that takes me to St Peter who rails against the people who were so wicked God sent the flood but saved righteous Noah. I wonder what Noah’s goodness looked like when everyone else was so full of hate, murder, and cannibalism. How did he defy the cultural pressure because our species is wired to be one of the crowd?

God sent the fire that burned up Sodom, but St. Peter says Lot was tormented by that city’s behavior. Why didn’t he leave if his soul was distressed? How did he manage to resist the pressure to take hold of the voluptuous women who were not his wife? Surely, he fought his own desires as well as the pressure from his buddies, oh come on, take the drink. St. Peter does say

The Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgement and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.” (2 Peter 2: 9 – 10)

So maybe we can cling to the hope we too can be rescued from trials. But my gosh, who doesn’t indulge in some passion or other, or be angry at their boss?

God may have promised not to drown the earth again, but St. Peter prophesies how he will burn up the heavens and the earth to make way for the new heaven and new earth:

The day of the Lord will come like a thief and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved and the earth and all the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn. But according the promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells (2 Peter 10 – 13, ESV)

I can’t hardly imagine this fire. Destroying the heavens too? But isn’t the earth full of God’s glory? Isn’t it soaked in his love? Even if there is a new heavens and earth, what a sorrow when these fields, subtle and humble as they are, are melted in a consuming fire. Or Orion himself, not just his belt, not just the Pleiades snapped shut like a window shade. Or is this fire the very cleansing presence of God himself, refining, cleansing, making the creation, so damaged by death, it needs to be remade.

St Peter reminds us of God’s mercy, how He sees a thousand years like a day and that he is “not willing anyone should perish but all come to repentance.” Reading that as a young girl who literally sobbed for friends to know Jesus was the beginning of my wondering about how God’s mercy might be more relentless than our hands on our hips, feet spread, saying no, nope, no way do I even believe you exist.

I walk the dogs on a rare night when the moon is white hot, throwing trees into shadows. I want to stay out but it’s cold and the dogs take me back inside.

Then the gospel stories take us to the week before Jesus dies. There’s no meek and mild Jesus in his words or stories.

The best part is when he flips the tables in the temple, calls out the house of prayer turned into a house of mammon. Despite the chaos and wreckage, the people bring the blind and the lame to be healed and he heals them despite the disarray of loose animals, angry merchants and people diving for spilled coins. The tenderness of this, knowing what Jesus is facing that week. The children cry, “Hosanna to the son of David.” And the Pharisees ask by what authority he does these things. Jesus slips out of their question by asking where John the Baptist got his authority. When he walks back to Bethany, he zaps the fig tree because it won’t bear fruit and it withers. And tells the disciples if they have faith they could move mountains. Who of us has that kind of faith?

When the tenants escalate and kill the son, we know he’s talking about himself. The Pharisees are the ones who say, the owner of the vineyard will “put the wretches to a miserable death” not Jesus. But Jesus reminds them:

The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone…the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to people producing its fruits. And the one who falls on the stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone it will crush him.” (Matt. 22:42 – 43 ESV)

And then there’s the story of the wedding feast. The master’s friends turn down his invitation with daily business to tend to. So he invites people from the streets. When the party was raging, the master discovers a man without wedding clothes. He throws him to outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

So how do we know if we have wedding clothes or not? I tremble at that nakedness, at the outer darkness, the weeping and gnashing of teeth. I’ve always taken wedding clothes to be how we put on Christ like a robe and if we don’t show up clothed in Christ we will be sent to the outer darkness. But lately, it seems to me, darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth describe what primal, deep repentance feels like.

Then I thought maybe it’s possible that the guest with no clothes is Jesus himself, crucified outside the city, and then descending to the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. The day of the Lord, a day of thick darkness, when the sun dimmed, when Jesus was crucified. I can think of no darkness more deep than the one by whom creation holds together being murdered by humans.

I don’t know what to make of this, except these pictures of “wrath” make a strong case for the baby who will soon arrive in Bethlehem. Our violations of the laws of love-don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, don’t put other gods before him, take a day of rest are very serious. Is calling out the wicked, even if they aren’t Americans permitted these days? Shouldn’t there be consequences for stealing, defrauding, and rape even if it’s that culture’s habit of being? Do we dare? Or have we defined “love” as permissiveness?

It’s a serious thing to fall into the hands of the living God. I tremble, I work out my salvation with fear and trembling and turn to how the readings ended for the week.

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God our savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. (Jude 24 – 25).

I white knuckle this promise. I am gobsmacked by the hope that I will stand blameless before his presence, that I will be joyful. Paul’s confidence can be my own:

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (Phil.1:6)

Maybe the enemy is not believing these things.

And Martin Shaw in Staying Focused tells a story of St. Brandon who heard the voice of Micheal singing in the form of a bird. “It was the sound of God announcing his happiness.” The line took me up short. How rarely do I think of God’s happiness, even in the face of these fierce passages? And yet the whole of creation reeks of it.

2.

After my friend’s husband died, I stopped over, helpless as to how to offer comfort. I stopped at Farm and Fleet and brought her a large lamb dog toy. She was busy, so I told her daughter that she could hold this plushie and think of Jesus’ love surrounding her. I know, I know, hokey but I remembered the beautiful bear my mother in law’s caregiver gave her to hold, while she was laid out on a hard couch for a year. And now that bear is sitting in a chair at the foot of our bed.

At lunch the other day, Charlyne took a deep breath. “I left the lamb of God on the couch but my brother’s dog, Wooly B, grabbed him and shook the lamb of God and wrapped his paws around him. He even humped it. The tag said he was a dog toy. So I sent it home to Texas with the dog.”

She laughed. I laughed. So hard I nearly peed my pants.

But there’s something to how creation itself has taken the lamb of God and shaken him, the lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world, the lamb with no place to lay his head, the lamb that butted his horns up through the bowels of death and blew it to smithereens, the little lamb that knocked the feet out from under Rome. And there is the promise that one day the wolf and the lamb will lay down together, that creation will be so upended “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). So upended that lions will eat straw like an ox.

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At Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for St. Porphyrios who says, “You won’t become saints by hounding after evil. Ignore evil. Look towards Christ and he will save you” (137).

Ignore evil. Maybe I need to stay away from the amateur punditry that passes for Facebook and only serves to jump into my thoughts, shagging them with Facebook’s ideas of what I should think. I can’t bear the fragmentation that comes with posts spooling by—dead pets, lost pets, fury at Trump, the cold civil war, fury at Congress people agitating for a coup, fear we are wide open to our enemies.

In How Stringfellow Learned to Listen, Chris Green and David Harvey spoke to this:

“And it struck me that right now, kind of in our cultural moment, thanks to social media, all that goes with that, the political upheaval, the so-called polarization, all that stuff, that the forces of evil at work in this world are empowered by, they’re energized by the way that I consume it, right? So that sitting at the table of demons, again, it’s not a metaphor, but it does point to the way in which I’m contributing, helping to contribute, I’m allying with a lot of destruction in the world by consuming it, so that it is energized. And one of the ways that I think that comes clearest is how the algorithm is fed by the way in which I allow outrage to fix my attention on it, right?”

Ignore evil. But my phone is a library of good words. There’s even the Daily Office. But I can’t take my eyes off the chaos. I can’t stop looking at the replays of buildings burning, hillsides burning, people falling from gunshot. Fear and outrage makes me come alive. Happiness feels like betrayal. There’s nothing to talk about if you’re at peace.

Don’t give the powers your attention. You carry a demon in your pocket.

Ignore evil. The darkness that rises around the holidays that remind me Bruce and I have no family living close by. Locally, it seems people don’t share their families during the holidays. Both our families gone home to their true home. My grief can collapse into loneliness can collapse to the question who will watch over us in our frail old age? That fear can collapse to our state passing a right to die bill. The pressure to take the kill shot could mask itself as the most loving act, when maybe receiving the work of tending the frail elderly, is a work that rains down light.

Ignore evil but grieve the losses that come with being 70: stairs hard to climb, tasks take longer to get done, friends going home to be with Jesus, days where I forget routine tasks, and my fingers don’t work, dread at what’s over the horizon with a body that must grow weary. Tears are good. Let Him draw near and wipe your tears like he promised.

Ignore evil: I have tried to create a community but that did not work. Four friends, I thought were close, walked away after my horse died. I did not make the cut in their busy lives. Like an arthritic limb, when rain comes, the ache of those rejections, one right after another, rises. The Killjoy says do more than remember, lose confidence in knowing how to be a friend.

But St. Paul says,

“But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Phil 3: 13 -14, ESV).

So bless the ache and bless them for leaving room for new friends. Bless them for leaving room for beloved friends.

Ignore evil—the lies that no one is buying what you have to offer. I look sideways at writers with thousands of followers. With books they didn’t have to pay to publish. All these years of work. Of steady craftsmanship. Of close to literary publication but no, nope. And not a big enough audience to pay for self-publishing. But I have you, my dear readers, who honor me by attending to my words every week. Like I said—lies.

And just like that, darkness bubbles like billowing smoke from a burning house. And I see the temptation for what it is—an invitation to “gloom and despair and agony on me,” like the off-key song from the old 70’s TV show Hee Haw. That billowing smoke is nothing more than the Killjoy’s farts.

The wind roared. It’s painful to go outside. The kind of wind that makes you wonder if a branch will crack and knock you in the head. I listened hard. I heard squeaks. I wondered if they were one of the barn cats. Tyger likes to talk to us. But they were just gates pushed around. Mrs. Horse protests the dark and the wind.

This Thanksgiving I vacuumed and let the dogs run in the yard Bruce blessedly fenced in. And enjoyed Bruce’s good cooking. And read Frank Schaeffer’s The Gospel of Zip, remembering him as a friend and letting his good words soak like a warm bath, about how he built his marriage and repented of being mean to his wife. Our solitude, Bruce and I, welled up. The quiet was good.

St. Porphyrios says,

“Instead of standing outside the door, shooing the evil one away, treat him with disdain. If evil approaches from one direction, then calmly turn the opposite direction” (135).

And so I did. I don’t feel powerful, but it’s amazing how the simple words: “The Lord rebuke you” carry power. The blacker than black thoughts that aren’t my thoughts evaporate.

Ignore evil. Instead of digging down to a dry well, that is dry, dry, dry. And my mind swims. And all I want is to be alone with good words, God’s words, and sit in the pain of exhaustion. And all I can do is sit. Leave it and take a nap.

St. Porphyrios again:

“If evil comes to assault you, turn all your inner strength to good, to Christ. Pray, ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.’ He knows how and in what way to have mercy on you.”

He knows how and what way to have mercy: Orion bright out the picture window in the middle of the night. His shoulders his belt, his feet, hurt my eyes. Light from the next town over, bright like a great dawn rising. The headlamp of the train appearing, moving slowly through the valley, heading east. Her sound rising to a roar, holding awhile, then falling. Mrs. Horse big, beautiful, powerful. Her presence a particular mercy. My footsteps on the barn floor. On the grass. On the wood floor. Grounded. At sunset jets high, drawing lines across the sky, starting a thought but not finishing.

St. Porhyrios says,

“And when you have filled yourself with good, don’t turn anymore towards evil. In this way you become good on your own with the grace of God. Where can evil find a foothold? It disappears!”

Then the sun pushes back the cloud deck, at sunset. And throws magenta against it. Even though the wind still roars through the night. The next day the sun tops the horizon, despite the cold warms by face and blinds my eyes. I’ve said before it’s like a lover’s caress holding my cheek for a long smooch.

Works Cited

Porphyrios, Saint. Wounded by Love. Harvey. Evia, Greece.

Green, Chris. Speakeasy Theology: How Stringfellow Learned to Listen, Nov 13, 2025

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Note: The title was generated by CoPilot. These words are mine, all mine.

While Omalola was getting an ultrasound and other tests, Bruce and I walked around the L.L. Bean store in Hoffman Estates. Not many people were there, but there was something about the casual, yet elegant, outdoorsy atmosphere that made it easy to strike up conversations with strangers. I gravitated to the shoe department because LL Bean shoes look cool. The LL Bean label is a bit of status and holds a memory of visiting the store in Freeport, Maine with our second family, Gene and Bob Proctor who took us under their wing in the backwash of my brother’s death.

I told the clerk, a tall, sandy-long-haired young man my shoe size and what looked good on the shoe display wall. I enjoyed being waited on as my sandy-long-haired young man looked for appropriate styles and fits in the back room. He’d bring a box, rustle the tissue, loosen the shoe laces and hand me a shoe. I slipped it on. Nope. Try a larger size.

Shoes have a way of making you feel better than good, they are a firm base that wrap around your feet and help you stand up, just that, stand up. With the right shoes, my back straightens, my attitude slides into a confidence I did not have with my everyday beat around the farm shoes.

I think about the Bible verse that says:

“Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace” (Eph. 6: 14, ESV).

That peace, that peace, that peace, a heavy peace that felt like being numb, but I wasn’t sure which it was—peace or numb or both, had lifted around the time we brought Aiden into our lives. He’s a lively, happy puppy, eager to work, eager to grab papers or furniture covers or my gloves with my hands. His teeth pinch.

I feel naked with my feelings, those bites, whirling me right into anger that bellows and my hand flying before I think. Bruce too hates the loud. But the dog books say: Yelp like another dog. So I do. I hate the whirl of anger, how it flies out of me without thinking. I miss the quiet. Aiden is a strong, dominant dog full of challenge. I am at a loss what to do. And see bringing Aiden through this stage will take time and consistency. I don’t want to ruin him.

The guilt weighed on me. You can’t apologize to a dog. And as far as God goes I have stepped out of my Jesus clothes and stepped into shame. I turned away from the way of peace, before I could stop myself. Ugly. Then before sleep, the night before we drove to Hoffman Estates, I read St. Porphyrios’ words in Wounded by Love:

It is not necessary to concern yourself with the weeds. Don’t occupy yourself with rooting out evil. Christ does not wish us to occupy ourselves with the passions, but with the opposite. Channel the water, that is all the strength of your soul, to the flowers and you will enjoy their beauty, their fragrance their freshness.

You won’t become saints by hounding after evil. Ignore evil. Look towards Christ and He will save you. Instead of standing outside the door shooing the evil one away, treat him with disdain. If evil approaches from one direction, then calmly turn in the opposite direction. If evil comes to assault you, turn all your inner strength to good, to Christ. Pray, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ He knows how and in what way to have mercy on you. And when you have filled yourself with good, don’t turn anymore towards evil. In this way you become good on your own, with the grace of God. Where can evil then find a foothold? It disappears. (135)

I am teaching Aiden to look into my eyes, to put his focus on me. Eye to eye is not easy for a dog and needs reinforcement. A fierce look has stopped Omalola’s grabbing the leash and barking. It’s lovely when we are walking and she looks to me, with her soft, companionable eyes.

Aiden’s eyes are pale, the color of dried hay. His eyes looking at mine, though rewarded, carry trust, but also the wildness, the otherness I remember from Annie Dillard’s encounter with a weasel in Teaching a Stone to Talk:

Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.

Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond, the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls. So. (14).

I can’t make Aiden look into my eyes, but I can point to my eyes and offer a reward when he locks his eyes onto mine. Then I work on extending the time for him to watch. But there can be no force, only quiet persistence and treats. The work is to focus on what Aiden does right. It seems to me it’s the same way with learning to keep ourselves turned toward God, our eyes on Jesus. St. Porphyrios suggests we don’t need to beat ourselves into that watching and it’s best not to focus on the powers of darkness to try to fight them. Seems like we are surrounded by forces that would tease our eyes away from Jesus, the good and right and pure. But the way to respond is not to fight.

St. Porphyrios says:

There are two paths that lead to God: the hard and debilitating path with fierce assaults against evil and the easy path with love. There are many who chose the hard path and ‘shed blood in order to receive Spirit until they have attained great virtue. I find the shorter and safer route is the path with love…That is, you can make a different kind of effort: to study and pray and have as your aim to advance in the love of God and of the Church. Do not fight to expel the darkness from the chamber of your soul. Open a tiny aperture for light to enter and the darkness will disappear. (136)

I have chafed at the intense emphasis contemporary Christian preacher types put on suffering, so St. Prophyrios’ words speak hope and a truth that resonates with what I know. I’ve done battle with the powers of darkness by turning to the Jesus prayer, which replaced bad thoughts with a cry for mercy. At times I’ve added, “your mercy endures forever” when I feel shaky, when I feel the mercy might not extend to me. I’m learning to recognize the embossed invitation to walk down to the pit, to say no to the heroism of feeling sorry for myself. Nope. No thank you. I’d rather let thanksgiving and love rise up like a river, flowing out of me to God and Bruce and our animals, and especially to you my readers who grace me with your eyes and ears reading or listening to this.

Already I’ve stopped trying to walk the two dogs together on my first, early morning walk down the road because Aiden challenges Oma to play and won’t stop. I’m over faced and the dogs are over faced. Oh it’s lovely to walk into quiet with Omalola, her catching my eyes, her burying her nose in grass to sniff the sniffs. And Aiden is eager for the attention I give through training. He has the potential to be a fancy obedience dog, far beyond my skills.

Well, let’s go back to L.L. Bean, my feet planted on the varnished wood floor. I particularly liked a maroon pair on the sale rack, but the tall, sandy-long-haired young man said those were the last ones, until he found one in my size in the back. Ahh, that fits. But I needed support for my feet that sometimes feel like they are collapsing in my sleep. He looked for orthotics to stuff in them. No luck. They didn’t fit right.

While I was waiting for different shoes to try, I watched another couple trying on slippers with thick soles so you could walk right outside from the living room. They were fleece lined and warm. So I added those to my purchase.

All the while I was wondering how Omalola was doing with her ultrasound to see if there was anything causing her to act like an old dog when she’s only three. When I am talking to someone on the road, she will lie down on cold pavement. She sacks out at the vet’s office and taps out when I throw the ball. It wasn’t long ago, when she was as busy as Aiden. My local vet has done thorough testing and aside from alkaline urine has found nothing wrong. He says she is healthy and I feel the ground shift under my feet because my instinct, my perception says she acts like a person with deep fatigue. Lately she’s started vomiting at assorted hours of the night, so he referred me to Thrive vet clinic for deeper diagnostics. And yes, there’s part of me that hopes they find something, so the ground stops shifting.

The clerk carried my shoe boxes to the counter, so I wouldn’t have to shlep them as I wandered through the store looking at sweaters and camping gear and their famous canvas bags, each one marked with different stripes. Gene Proctor bought a big bag for me, that I use for my horse gear. I still own a brightly colored sweater I bought in Freeport.

Then I turned and saw a woman with two dogs. Dorothy said one was a village dog—dogs that live as “parasites” in their towns, breeding with each other, without the human intervention of picking parents for litters. She said they live alongside humans on the streets, under porches. The other dog was a pitty mix. Both lay down, eyes bright and eager as they watched her. Oh my goodness the connection. I asked what to do with Aiden’s active teeth. She said grab his muzzle and say no, then give him a toy and praise him for taking the toy. She was not a fan of clicker training because there needs to be a mix of positive reinforcement and pressure/release. It nearly ruined Mrs. Horse, so I know well what she’s talking about. She recommended that I find a local dog training club where I could get help. (I have).

After we said goodbye, that was more blessing than goodbye, Bruce and I went to the counter to pay. Those packages from Amazon are fun to pick up off the porch, a sort of brown, boxed present, but they don’t beat going to an elegant store, that hasn’t worn down and looking at a variety of goods. You can meet people, strike up casual conversations, and learn new things. I still remember Jean from the make-up counter at Bergner’s, how seeing her every time I needed to refresh my Clinique was a time to catch up on her news and mine. I’m not a make-up person, but those years I found a way to wear it, that matched my personality and face. I felt beautiful. Same thing with new shoes and a good talk. With malls and physical stores dying in the wake of online shopping, we are losing an important way to meet people in person and do the age old human thing of going to a market, interacting with people and goods. But the store was eerily empty for a weekday before Christmas.

Right after lunch Doc called and said that everything looked good with Omalola’s tests. He found no reason for her vomiting and urinary issues. “You’re lucky she is so mellow. Many people would love to have a dog like her,” he said. The ground shifted under my feet. I guess my perceptions are off. But I am not sorry I asked these questions. And thanked Bruce for coming along. And I remembered how Omalola was a wild girl, how I trained her to settle and she has become a lovely walking companion and friend.

But when I studied the results of her bloodwork and urinalysis the next day, there were things I wondered about like high ph when she is on a prescription diet, protein in her urine, and we still don’t know what’s causing the vomiting. And moderate enlargement of lymph nodes. We are changing her to another prescription diet that is easier on her stomach and might be more effective with the ph in the urine than the current diet. Doc isn’t worried about the lymph nodes and decided to run another blood panel that is specialized and looks at her gut health.

The next night was darker than dark, and I was bone dog tired, when I set out to take Aiden to bravery class. It’s been a good challenge for him to try weird things like running through a gauntlet of balloons that’s covered over with a tarp or walking on a tarp that is flapping. This pup that didn’t know how to walk up and down the stairs showed willingness to try.

This time we had to climb on air bags used to pack cars on container ships. And then ask our dogs to climb aboard. I felt vulnerable with my legs stretched side to side on this bag that rocked. Aiden wanted to climb up. I hoisted him up and held him. Next we got on with another dog. When it was the big male German Shepherd’s turn to join us, I figured it was time for Aiden’s potty break. (He’d begun to stink.) Even though the German Shepherd is impeccably trained, Aiden is not and I didn’t want to be caught between them. The final exercise was to hide behind a big pile of bags and call our dogs one at a time. I figured Aiden would wander to the dogs and owners waiting their turn, my call to come meaningless, like he did the last time we tried this exercise with boxes. But surprise, surprise he poked his nose between the bags. I whispered, “Here I am” and he crawled between them to my arms.

Works Cited

Dillard, Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk. New York, Harpers. 1982

The English Standard Version Bible. Wheaton: Crosswy, 2001. Print.

Porphyrios, Saint. Wounded by Love. Evia, Denise Harvey. 2018

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When I walked out one morning, the sun rose as I walked up our road toward home. Its warmth felt like a hand caressing my cheek, as a lover would as he leaned in to kiss me. I’ve felt the horizon drop away as the sun broke the horizon. Omalola walked quietly beside me. I was too tired to take them both down the road. Then an eagle flew twenty feet overhead, wings wide, buoyed by the wind. He flew up into our giant popple tree and sat. I ask Bruce whether he would go after one of the dogs. He says they won’t bother us, but I still feel the threat and the awe at a bird with a seven-foot wingspan. His head and his tail feathers are so white. Even so, I walked across the field to get a better look. The day had settled into nothing special by the time I took Aiden for his walk.

Bruce and I both missed hearing my perspective air live on Northern Public Radio all four times it was aired. For this month I wanted to use a fairy tale. A recent podcast by Jonathan Pageau gave me the inspiration.

As Safe As Little Red Riding Hood

Well, he looked like my granddaughter, with her red riding hood. Her scent wafted off him. Her mother must have sent her to check on me, even though I told her the wolves have come back. The road was so badly grown over, her horse wouldn’t make it through the tangle. So I let him in. And he ate me up. In later stories, the hunter kills the wolf and releases both grandmother and granddaughter from his belly.

In the podcast, Trick or Treat: Halloween Symbolism in Little Red Riding Hood Jonathan Pageau talks about how our homes are where we feel safe, it’s where we can close the door to the world, take off our street clothes, and relax, even sleep. I remember how violated and targeted I felt after someone stole my rings, nothing else, a few years back. Pageau says, “And then there are strangers that are in some ways so far from you that they don’t have your good in mind, right?”

I’ve heard stories of wolves released in populated rural areas, the powers ignoring humans’ ancient terror, the real danger these predators present. Not only that, popular culture tends to side with the wolves over the granddaughter and grandmother.

Since I tend to open the door to anyone, I take this warning seriously. Sometimes people we come across are just as dangerous as the wild wolf in the desolate forest. Sometimes there is no hunter to save us. Sometimes there is— the hunter swallowed, cutting his way out from inside, like Jesus cut the dragon that is death.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

If you’d like see where this was originally posted, click here.

In Jonathan Pageau’s version he talks about how Little Red Riding Hood’s mother tells her to stay on the straight path. Leaving would be dangerous. But of course she does. She meets the talking wolf. He kills her, her grandmother, her mother and her father. Some versions end with everyone dead. Others end with the father or hunter hacking their way out of the wolf, everyone freed, sort of like what happened to Jonah when he was vomited out of the big fish. (If you’re interested in Pageau’s children’s book, you can purchase it at The Symbolic World Store.)

In another fairy tale, Red Bead Woman, the Prince leaves his bride to check a trapline. Of course she chooses the path that leads her to the evil sorceress who tears her face off. And in the original story, Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil when God said not to.

I think of St. Peter’s warning that the devil prowls seeking whom he may devour: Be sober-minded, be watchful: Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. (I Peter 5:8). His advice? Humility seems to be a strong defense because he repeats the instruction several times: “Be subject to elders. Clothe yourselves with humility. Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God” (I Peter 5: 5, 6.). It’s not a good idea to think we’re all that. Perhaps “I don’t know mind” drives us to trust the Lord, lean not on our own understanding, but acknowledge him in all our ways. He will direct our paths. (Prov 3: 5 – 6).

Then St. Peter says: Cast your anxieties on him for he cares for you (I Peter 5: 7). In other words, it’s not a sin to admit your fears. With the devil prowling around like a slavering lion, we might catch a little anxiety. We can tell God what frightens us. We can throw those fears into his hands. When he says resist the devil, I think he means to keep the faith, to believe that Jesus conquered death by death, that if that’s true there’s nothing the state or anyone can do to us, because death is dead, it has no power.

Today at dog class, Aiden was distracted. He focused on everything but me. He sniffed here and there. He looked at the puppy next to him. He jumped up and wagged his body at the instructor because she’d bonded to him during an exercise. I caught his attention a few times with cheese, but then he was off. My task will be to reward his focus and reward calm. This is going to take time and consistency. He is showing me yet again how I need to put my attention on Jesus—that old saying, “Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before him” and not pull away like Aiden does from me.

This week I listened to Speakeasy Theology on a long drive to pick up thyroid medication for Mrs. Horse and then lunch with a new group of friends who love horses. Chris Green and David Harvey talked about William Stringfellow’s book An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land in their podcast: The Spirit, the Church, and the Politics of the Charismatic Gifts, Nov 8, 2025

As the radiant trees full of golds and ambers and reds whizzed by as well as long panoramas Their words caught my ears:

“So [Stringfellow’s] imagining the Christian life as conflict between life and death, between the life of God and the dehumanizing life that the world tries to impose on us, which is actually a way of death. And this is its conflict all the way down, right? Because to follow Jesus is to resist the powers of the world, to resist the world, the flesh, the devil, the principalities and powers that are at work against us.

And so the reason he starts with discernment is you have to be able to tell the difference between the demonic and the holy, between what the principalities and powers are demanding of you and what the will of God is.”

As I drove the right and left turns onto the main road leading to the vet’s office and lunch, my heart lifted up hearing these words. Harvey and Green asked a question I’ve been asking: How do we tell the difference between the demonic and the holy?

The voice of the accuser can speak things that sound like God’s voice, that are suspiciously like the preachers from my childhood. God will withdraw if you don’t give up Diet Coke right now! Don’t waste time on TV because you won’t be ready when things spin apart. Clean your closet now, even though I am overwhelmed as it is. No one will read your memoir. It tells too many secrets. So why bother? You’re by nature sinful and unclean. These may well be calls for obedience that get mixed up in accusations and fear.

One of the most beautiful stories comes from visions of the prophet Zechariah where the high priest who is part of rebuilding the second temple, Joshua, is standing before God and Satan. His clothes are filthy. Imagine wearing rags, how naked you would feel, how you would feel the dirt, while you were in the presence of God. Satan, the fiery being of light, I would imagine beautiful and radiant, accuses Joshua. Imagine your most private sins pointed out in front of God, also beautiful and radiant, so radiant you can’t hardly see. And God says, “The Lord rebuke you. The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem. Is this not a burning stick snatched from the fire?” (Does he mean the fires of hell? The fires of the Holy Spirit? Being on fire for the Lord?)

The angel said to those standing before him, take off his filthy clothes. He announces that fine cleansing water: “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.”

The prophet pipes up: “Put a clean turbine on his head.” And they put it on his head and clothed him. None of the dress up scenes from the Batchelor or Pretty Woman could even begin to match this. The angel of the Lord stood by.

The Lord gave Joshua the mandate he gives to all of us: “If you will walk in obedience to me and keep my requirements, then you will govern my house and have charge of my courts, and I will give you a place among these standing here” (Zec 3: 6).

Explicitly the Lord points to this scene as a sign for the Branch who is to come, who is the high priest who will know all of what it is to be human, but without sin. It seems to be this scene plays out with all of us in the heavenlies. Imagine the Lord of the universe standing up for us with the accuser of the brethren.

How do we resist the powers of darkness? David Harvey and Chris Green refer to William Stringfellow:

In the face of death, live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the word.

Amidst babble, I repeat, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and falsehood of death with the truth and potency and efficacy of the word of God. Know the word.

Teach the word. Nurture the word. Preach the word.

Defend the word. Incarnate the word. Do the word.

Live the word. And more than that, in the word of God, expose death and all death’s works and wiles, rebuke lies, cast out demons, exorcise, cleanse the possessed, raise those who are dead in mind and conscience.”

And remember the word is more than the scriptures. The word is Jesus himself. As St John the theologian says, “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God” (John 1:1). Green and Harvey also spell out what resistance to the powers of darkness might look like:

But your capacity to say no to yourself, to fast from yourself, to use Daniel Augustine’s language, is what frees you up to live with generosity and restraint.

In that way, that allows you to be a life-giving person, a lively, loving, life-giving person. Not just a non-anxious presence, but a life-giving presence. Someone who brings energy and brings joy and brings peace.

For me, this fasting might look like naming my resentments and fears and hurts. This week the ache of the group of friends who ditched me, one right after the other, after Tessie died, that ache rose. And I found myself in the pit. I walked out and told God. I took the cue to bless each one. And then saw how those empty places have given way to new friends. I went to lunch and talked horses and dogs and ate chicken fingers and salad and fries. Bringing energy and joy and peace is better than working the hurt, playing the victim. Lord knows that’s the person I want to be.

Oh and fasting might look like abstaining from Diet Coke.

What is answer to the question how to tell whether a teaching is from the Holy Spirit or from the powers of darkness? Here’s what Harvey and Green gleaned from Stringfellow:

But the real defining quality of spirit baptism is, you’re flooded with love for God and love for neighbor. And the kind of love that makes you look like Jesus in the world, giving yourself sacrificially for the sake of those who are lost and hurting.

What marks the presence of the Spirit is the love that Jesus had for God and for the world flowing out of us.”

Like, here’s how you discern, here’s how you know whether or not all that energy is actually the energy of God, whether or not the movement is actually the movement of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and not just a spirit of the age. Does it build up the body of Christ for the work the body of Christ has to do?”

Does it draw us to Jesus and make us more like him in the world? Does it free people from the fear of death so that we get martyrs and prophets?

That night I broke away from Dancing with the Stars to take the dogs out for a pee break. I rounded the house and saw the sky fired up with angry red smears and green the color of algae floating across it. I dragged the dogs back to the house and called for Bruce. We walked out to the north field and looked. And looked again as the fire brightened, faded and brightened again. A powerful sunspot had swung around from behind the sun and hurled a flare directly at the earth. Auroras could be seen as far south as El Salvador. Some radio black outs were reported in Europe. I wanted to hold onto that light, the awe I felt, and snapped picture after picture. I felt like an ancient woman wondering if this portent is warning, not just jittering gases way high up there.

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My father overlooking a stream. Photo by Jean Pauley.[/caption]

I pushed the cart out of the oil aisle and turned towards the end cap of books. Woodman’s grocery store stocks a few hardbacks that I check out. My eye was drawn to The Storm on Our Shores.I flipped it open and saw it was about how the Japanese landed on Attu Island and 11,000 Americans landed to fight them and retake the land. My eyes watered. I don’t cry easily these days, but there I was in the middle of the grocery store, pulling cans off the shelf, weeping on Mother’s Day. (I dislike Mother and Father’s day. We chose not to have children. Our parents are gone. Our animals don’t make us parents. There’s no fancy dinner for Bruce and me.)

As I wheeled my cart around the store, I blinked back my tears. It’s not like me to cry. My father. I thought of my father on Mother’s day. He was in the ski troops, and until I found The Last Ridge, I didn’t think much of his service. But after reading that book I saw how he was part of an elite group trained in mountain warfare. He told his stories when I was not much older than a toddler. He hated camping because of how strenuous his winter training was, so we never went to the lake as a family, set up a tent, and swatted mosquitoes together.

I don’t think he fought at Attu. He always said they were sent to Kiska but the Japanese were gone by then. Talking to his very little girl he joked that he scared them off. But Kiska is next to Attu. And my memory could well be wrong about where he fought. I was a toddler when I was asking these questions, the war fresh on his mind. I have no one to ask. Eerily I got his middle name wrong. As a young woman I thought it was Jacob. I even named my Rottweiler this--Jacob Cain--as a bow to my dad, those months right after he died. But his true middle name was Joseph. And the ground slipped like slick mud under my feet.

Watching the 60 Minutes report on The Storm on Our Shores showed what kind of terrain makes up the Aleutian islands--starkly beautiful with mountains rising around sweeping valleys and wildflowers, tall grasses. It was not the wintery, desolate place I imagined. My tears welled again as I heard the story of a Japanese surgeon who had studied in America but who was conscripted to fight by the Japanese, who wound up on Attu. He along with others had captured a mortar and were slain by two Americans tossing a hand grenade at the end of the conflict. The Japanese who survived the battle lined up and committed suicide with their hand grenades.

The story continued by talking about how Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi had written a diary in the days before he died and how Dick Laird found it and it was translated and passed around by GI’s who realized how human the other side was. The diary flew in the face of their being told that the Japanese were firebreathing, fierce monsters. They saw that Tatsuguchi was a family man with faith in the Christian God like many Americans. One of the GI’s found Tatsuguchi’s Bible and gave it to his daughter. I recognized a Scofield bible like the one I had as a child.

As beautiful as Attu is, and possibly worthy of fighting for, the story made me hate war all the more. Men who weren’t all that different fighting to protect their country, that was different then theirs. In the 60 Minutes interview Tatsuguchi’s daughter forgave Dick Laird who had nightmares over killing her father. And it wasn’t cheap forgiveness because she was very angry after he announced he was the one who killed her father at her doorstep. Maybe that’s the reason for my tears, that the story we’re trending to, is a story of reconciliation. I find myself occasionally praying for the healing of broken relationships. After all St. Paul calls us to be ministers of reconciliation because God is reconciling the world to himself. This is the ultimate love story, a miracle story I’ve witnessed in my own life when two enemies--myself and my mother-in-law made peace.

My dad probably skiing in the Helderbergs with friends. Photo by Jean Pauley.

Or maybe the story brought me close to my dad who has been gone close to forty years. The war took its toll on him even though he claimed he didn’t see combat. He had a half moon scar as wide as a bandaid along his knee. He said he’d injured it during training and was pulled away from the fiasco of Mount Belvedere where the Tenth Mountain division shot up each other in a fog of war. He said the Japanese knew he was coming and had fled Kiska. He showed me his carbine and an empty mortar shell and a jar full of pins.

The Army sent all 3,000 of the Ski Troops to Kiska, two weeks after the battle of Attu. Attu was the second bloodiest battle of the war and they expected most of these specially trained forces not to make it. The Japanese had colonized Kiska with tunnels and mortar stations and resupply points, but despite the blockade around it, they snuck off the island. My dad was right. But what he didn’t say was how the fog set in, how terrifying it was to wait for the enemy to pick them off. He didn’t say how they had to be trained in a water landing, how they were more a danger to each other and trigger happy, frightened fingers.

My father skiing. Photo by Jean Pauley[/caption]

But that knee brought pain when he did stuff with my brother and I. His taking us for hikes in the ravines in our neighbor’s pasture was a big deal, the shale cliffs looming over us. We saw the hill where we dumped our trash until garbage pick up came our way. It was a big deal for him to take us to cut our Christmas tree on the other hill. And he could barely take us to the high school pool in the summer for swimming. But medicine improved and he was in less pain as an older man than he was as a young man.

As a very young girl I remember him short tempered, impatient with my tears. (If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.) He’d stomp the accelerator, to speed, my brother and I crying out at how out of control he seemed. The pines on Font Grove Road flew by pretty fast. Looking back I wonder if he was suffering from PTSD from his experiences on Kiska and the rigors of mountain training in the dead of winter at Camp Hale, Colorado.

The story goes that he understood in his heart what it meant for God to give up his son, when he topped a hill on Font Grove Road, because he loved his own son that much, and what it meant to offer that sacrifice for us. He gave up alcohol and joined the board of the Albany Rescue mission. He grew calmer, kinder as the years rolled by.

My dad made several trips west on Route 20 to Esperance to buy my horse, Whisper. He showed me how God grants his children the desires of their hearts because he put them there. That horse carried me back into those ravines we walked when I was a young girl. And my dad used to pray with me on our way to riding lessons in Albany, when I was so terrified of the trainer’s screams because I asked the horse to take the big jump and fly. Some of those people we prayed for know the Lord today.

Waxing skis. Photo by Jean Pauley.[/caption]

The last time I spoke to my father was after my first night in Lynchburg, Virginia. We were in a motel where our bedrooms opened to the outside. I sat on my bed and told him how I hated being there, how I’d gone to a party and they looked at me strangely because of the dress he and I had picked out. I was accompanying Francis and Edith Schaeffer on a book tour. I was young, raw, but my company and the Schaeffers trusted me with the task. I’d organized a tour around the country, set up the media contacts, arranged airline tickets. Looking back I can’t believe I pulled that off. But I was scared of the radicalism of Falwell. My dad said he loved me, that he was proud of me.

The next day I went to church and watched the lights in my mother’s engagement ring as the preacher ranted. Falwell met with the Schaeffers and I at his house and talked about setting up pregnancy care centers. When I stopped to check messages at the hotel desk, I knew he was gone. There was message after message to call my brother, to call my aunt, to call, call, call. My fingers could barely dial the phone.

The Schaeffers prayed for me. The whole church prayed for me and my family. The ground slipped out from under my feet. I lifted my heart in the gospel song, “The Lord knows the way through the wilderness. All I have to do is follow. I still have the Valentine’s I bought for him--”I love you this much” and the card stretched out.

Here’s what I wrote in The River Caught Sunlight as I imagined those hours, an imagination that feels more like vision. In the story the character, Janice, is sitting in Liberty Baptist church hearing a sermon about how being knocked down in the fight was a sin. She will soon get the news her father has died.

“She read more of Jesus’ words. “What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in Heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.“

“Janice imagined herself still on the rock ledge. Somewhere beyond the lip, a man was coming; she could hear the ropes and pitons clanking as he walked. He was calling her name. “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him. If he hears you, you’ve got him back. If he doesn’t get someone to go with you. Confront him then. What you forgive, you forgive. What you curse will be cursed.“

“Then a rush of rope hurled, snaking over the rock ledge. ‘Knot it around your waist,’ the man whose voice sounded like a rifle shot across a creek, shouted. Jim? The man Jeremiah and Dennis hated? ‘Keep coming up.’ My God the view. Like the drive she took to northwestern Illinois, where the land glowed from inside“”luminescent greens and blues, the sky bubbling with white clouds that were about sunlight, not yet about rain. Like cultivated fields rolling up and rolling down, men’s handiwork, working the land, making her yield food and beauty. Something about a garden that could put a woman’s soul back into her body. She’d made the right decision. She was going home.

“’Keep coming,’ the voice said, quietly.

“Janice imagined she stood up and grabbed the rope, the fibers burning her palm. She pulled it into herself. Of all people, it was her father, who rappelled down to her, and showed her how to wrap it and tie it to make a sling for her butt, to keep herself upright and balanced despite the pure, raw, terror she felt. Janice stepped over to the rock wall, began feeling for handholds, footholds. He said, “Here, put your foot here. Trust the tread on your boot.“ She lifted her foot as if she were mounting a horse, stretched out her fingertips to a tiny hold. She pulled herself up, the rope pulled along with her. “I didn’t know you knew mountains,“ she said.

“’Ski troops, 10th Mountain Division, same thing. I was well trained.’ Her dad as a young man, all power and force, exuding virility, a man who’d seen adventure. A hero. A warrior defending freedom and all that. And she’d never known. She’d only wanted to get away. He patted her cheek and grinned, her own frightened face reflecting in his mirrored sunglasses. ‘You’ll find your way to the top.’

“Janice opened her eyes. She saw the diamond imprint on the meat of her palm from her mother’s ring. She pushed it back to where it was supposed to be, showing the world its icy beauty, the commitment her father made to her mother, and that he made to her.”

If you’d like to read the entire River Caught Sunlight, you can find it here.

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I named him Aiden because that’s the first name that came to me after I put away the name Jack, because it was a saint’s name that came to mind. St. Aiden was a missionary to Northumberland, preaching the gospel and converting the Anglo Saxons to Christianity in Northumberland. He’s considered the patron of firefighters because his prayer slapped the wind in a different direction and turned a fire back. He also made a hunted stag invisible and saved its life from the hunters.

I should have researched his name better before I named him but bringing him into our house, “registering him”, all happened more rapidly than I could think. Maybe I should have stayed with Jack. Sometimes I switch and call him Odin because the “o” sound goes with Omalola. I consistently misgender both dogs because Oma is a big girl and Aiden is slight.

In Red Bead Woman, a beautiful story Martin Shaw has committed to writing, there is a little gray dog that finds a piece of Mare’s Tail Woman’s heart. On her way to her wedding, her husband was compelled to check a trap line and sent her down the road by herself. Of course she picks the road that takes her right to the sorceress, a monster who tears off her face, impersonates her, marries the prince and corrupts him. It’s the little gray dog who brings a piece of her heart back to Beiberikan, an old woman, who brought Mare’s Tail Woman to life in the first place. Only now she has a voice.

That’s what Aiden seems to have done. It seems as though he’s brought back my heart. (It was far gone when there were no tears when Little Dog died.) He is not an easy dog. I’m thinking he will teach me about boundaries and play.

Tuesday October 28, 2025

Aiden was a pistol, I said to Bruce when I returned from our mile long walk. It was the first time we’d walked the full mile to our neighbors’ corner fence. The sunrise had been stunning, with clouds feathered down, tinted orange. I stopped often to take pictures, the dogs dancing and curling around my legs, eyes lifted up for a treat.

When I tried to reach down and pick up the poop Aiden had dumped on a neighbor’s mowed shoulders, Aiden thought it was hilarious and grabbed for my poop bag. He likes to grab bags, paper, furniture covers. A truck was coming down the road. I lost my temper. I should have known. I should have known. I should have known. Because anger, popping and jerking the dog, just riles them up and breaks your relationship. I learned this, four dogs back with Laager, a Bernese Mountain dog. At a dog show people told me to jerk the s**t out of him to make him settle. All that did was rile him up. Then another owner began talking about how she trained at Sea World, Ohio and a whole new way of being opened up, about reinforcing behaviors the dog does right. This work stood me in good stead during my twenty years of teaching First Year Composition.

I know treats work, but each dog needs to have separate treats, so my hands, already red from cold were confused reaching for his treats in a plastic bag and Oma’s in the pouch. (They need separate treats because Oma is on a prescription diet to acidify her alkaline urine. I’m concerned those treats would have a bad effect on Aiden’s pee.)

Later when I dropped his leash in our field with fences on three sides, Aiden walked away. I called. He kept walking. I caught my breath because I did not have our fifty-foot, pink long line on him, so I could catch him up, pull him toward me. He’s a dog that could be lost. Now I see how people lose their dogs when they run out the door or open gate. After this morning, I can’t blame him. I broke his recall. It will take time to build. He’s only been with us a little over a month.

What was I thinking? I know better than to over face a young dog with these two-by-two walks. But I know it’s possible from walking our other pairs of dogs. Maybe I need to give them enough walk to do the potty thing and then walk each one alone. Maybe it will just take time and more walks to work this out.

Wednesday October 29

Today the sky wasn’t as pretty, but my goodness the air moved and was brisk. I reconfigured my treat bags, so Oma got one and Aiden got one, strapped on each side. So when Aiden gave me his eyes, he got a treat. I let both spool out and sniff, but nobody was yanking me off my feet, nobody was daring the other to play.

But when I drop into some kind of contemplative prayer, when I disappear mentally, the beasts come out to make a ruckus. This happened with Mrs. Horse too. When my mind left, she stopped, waiting for it to return. I miss the silent walks, pulling my mind back to a quiet thank you, and dropping into my senses.

I realized that giving them my attention is as much beholding as looking out at the fields, the tree, the distant woods, and saying thank you. Eugene Terekhin in “The Tenth Leper’s Secret When Gratitude Becomes Being” affirms this by telling a story from C.S. Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm:

C.S. Lewis wrote to his friend Malcolm:

“You first taught me the great principle ‘Begin where you are.’ I had thought one had to start by summoning up what we believe about the goodness and greatness of God, by thinking about creation and redemption and ‘all the blessings of this life.’ You turned to the brook and once more splashed your burning face and hands in the little waterfall and said, ‘Why not begin with this?’”

Blessedness is not about receiving blessings; it is about basking in glory wherever it is found. When we turn our face to the sun, praise happens — by itself, spontaneously. It is in the very “turning your face to the brook.” Unless we desire that, we will not return. We will go, enjoy our little gift, and show ourselves to the priests in fulfillment of duty.

And training the dogs, currying Mrs. Horse’s back, snuggling up to Bruce, eating pistachios are all those opportunities for lifting up my heart, for giving thanks.

I talked to Father Bannon, a local Orthodox priest, about how the dogs erupted in chaos when I tried to hook onto my centering prayer word, “Thank you Lord.” He told me how St Paisios would get to an important part of his talk and some dark thing would rattle the bushes. He’d tell his students, “Give that no mind and pay attention to me” with an attitude of “Oh it’s them again.”

“There are resistances when you try to pray, that maybe some tickled your pup, incited him to being unruly. Maybe it wasn’t your dog,” he said.

And my own response was not good, beyond harsh, to make Aiden stop. But when a dog bites your glove when your hand is in it well, the force came out. Aiden is one tough dog and needs limits. He compulsive about laying his teeth on everything. But so were other pups I’ve owned, so I expect he’ll grow out of it. (We had to set up our ex pen in our living room to keep Booker from mauling on Nate because like Omalola he was too mild to put Booker in his place.)

On another walk, Aiden randomly barked at nothing and then made rowdy with Omalola. I’d finally started doing what I knew to do, deflect his rowdiness. I pulled Aiden back to me by asking him to heel. He is very eager to please or should I say eager for a treat. I almost felt a presence and said to the empty air a few feet away, “The Lord rebuke you.”

Saint Porphyrios in Wounded by Love urges people find a spiritual guide if they practice prayer of the heart, which is reaching for God using the Jesus prayer: Lord Jesus Christ be merciful to me a sinner.

“…Because if you don’t get into the right order, there’s a danger of your seeing luciferic light, of living in delusion and being plunged into darkness, and then one becomes aggressive and changes character and so on” (124).

He offers a by-their-fruits-you-will-know-them means of discerning a person’s spiritual fitness. Jonathan Pageau has warned to be careful of excessively practicing this prayer, with thousands of repetitions a day because such a practice is for monks in a monastery. It can bring insanity. I’ve seen how intense spiritual practice in the form of Buddhist sitting meditation can break a person’s mind and put them on an pretty big ego trip. St. Porphyrios warns:

And if in this spiritual dimension desire I enkindled, not by your good self, but by the other self, the egotistical self, then undoubtedly you will begin to experience a pseudo joy. But in your outward life, in your relations with other people, you will be ever more aggressive and irascible and more quick tempered and fretful. These are the signs of the person who is deluded. (124)

Well this popped my bubble about how far along I am with contemplation or getting close to Jesus or whatever you call it. My quick temper with Aiden flies in the face of my own beliefs about not using force with an animal or person. (Good thing I never became a mother.) And Tyger our feral cat still doesn’t rub himself on my legs, though we have some nice chats when he appears. At any rate, I’m uncomfortable with the competition that seems to come to my head with playing the saint. Let me practice the presence and love my people and animals and keep my feet on the ground. It feels good to feel again, even if that feeling sometimes flies out as frustration with my pup.

Besides it’s Bruce, who is the saint, who empties himself, who has become a servant, sometimes so much so, when I am off in Facebook land and he is putting clothes out on the line and making the bed and setting posts for the dog fence. I should see those chores on my own, but I don’t. He is happy to walk Aiden even though Aiden was a pretty please on my part.

Day by day, Aiden seems to be calming down. Bruce has noticed he will lay by him, enjoying his petting or go in his crate on his own. Perhaps my putting him in the crate when he gets too rowdy is teaching him self-regulation. Coming to our home after being in a kennel for six months has to hit him with all kinds of stimulus and things to learn. I certainly have things to learn and practice.

I walked out as the sun dropped below the horizon with just Omalola. Darkness welled up faster than in the summer. Quiet. Off to the east and low on the horizon the sky was purple. It glowed pink and gold and then darkened. We walked out in the betwixt and between time. The darkness riding up over the sky felt like a dark quilt floating down over us. Quiet.

Do you have any stories about animals who became your teachers?

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As I’ve mentioned before I write a response to Martin Shaw’s Beasts and Vines Substack every Sunday morning. His kind response draws these little essays from me. This week I’m going to open up what I wrote.

While I listened to Martin Shaw’s Jesus on the River Path I walked across shed leaves, mostly from black walnut and maple trees. We didn’t get much color this year and the leaves went from green to blown down. Some trees are still green. Our squirrels have been feasting. I’d drawn enough water last night so I didn’t need to draw any today. The sun is out. The sky is blue. The breeze is brisk, blowing the big barn door away from its frame. I placed some buckets with pea gravel to hold it back. We open a side door in her stall to let her out at night, so she won’t wreck the big door, rubbing her butt or shoulder against it, with the threat of wrecking it. How do you replace a door that big with winter coming? Once she rolled it off the rails, but we somehow lifted it back on. Like always I curried her now thick pelt and she stuck her nose out in pleasure.

Because he’d arrived in Cambridge for a stint teaching divinity students. Shaw asked, “How do you arrive in a place? What’s your manner of approach?” These are hard questions for me to answer.

It’s been awhile since I’ve gone to a new place. I suppose with our home, I was shy, didn’t walk the road like I do now, though I rode the other pony, Tessie, around the fields, until she bolted, bucked, and struck me with fear of riding I never got over. Through the years, my love for riding in those fields faded fast. I leaned on my trail riding friends or my trainer and the arena.

I moved my books in first, lining them in shelves along our garage room and letting them sit for a year while we broke parts of the house down and made it new. We opened up the stairway, with bulging plaster and so steep, it could have flipped one of us or the dogs into a bad fall. It was haunted. Well, I won’t go into all the changes here but it was a very deep renovation. And the house was not happy.

So I suppose when I arrive in a new place, I seek to make it my own.

That title Jesus and the river. Yes. I found a boulder, granite from the Canadian Shield, by the Normans Kill, where I grew up, sat there and wept over a boyfriend, and first read the good news “there remaineth a rest to the people of God.” The Normans Kill empties into the Hudson at the Port of Albany. Oh my goodness there were a lot of spirits by that ground. Here’s a poem I wrote as a child, well in college, well still a child. Forgive the purple.

It was a magic day, a magic land,

chanced upon some years ago; found beyond

the natural bowl of twisted vines, tanned

pastureland and earthen water jugs. Blonde

hills breathed lazy curves like tumble down seas

and trees corralled heaven’s delft with gnarled fronts.

Poised parapets, hawks swung the air with ease

They steady swooped basins, mocking my stance.

Grounded I dreamed of air currents. The breeze

Shuttered with danger. My saddle horse danced,

Trembled in fright at the ugly three heads

Of black Great Danes guarding the barbed entrance.

Despite yellow fangs and sharp paws they fled

My upflung, whip high, yelling mad rush.

I entered the magic land where high bred

Spirits lined goldenrod, sumac and brush

With spring paint and rain dust. Secrets were sung

At the watercourse. Nymphs filled the hush

With flaxen song spun in an unknown tongue.

Clumped ribs, femurs and vertebrae remarked

Sacrifice. The grass stained pearls hardly wrung

A sliver of fear through my side. Sharp, stark

Cow bones spread as if chew by angry gods

Mentioned appeasement. The wilderness park

Would soon swallow the bones with wirey sod

Already tinged with green. I rode my horse

Into the gully where stratified shale rods

Embedded scarred banks. Our slow winding course

Followed the stream where spirits danced light rings

On shale. It was a day rinsed of remorse

Plaited with gold and silver. Spider strings

Glued my face as we climbed up the ravine.

Laughter unclasped when I saw the ring

Sculpted in clay on the path. Elf’s design

It was a treasure in mud, swirled by rain.

The Potter’s gift sparkling with opaline.

I miss the power of that place. Apart from frequent rainbows, and a white one, the ground here seems barren, but oh my goodness, subtle folds of land my legs have wearied bicycling them, but beautiful. In a recent Q and A for The Green Knight course, Martin Shaw talked about how it’s good to become famous in a five square mile area, get to know your neighbors, learn the history and lore of the place, act like you’ll be there the rest of your life. So maybe that’s a project to try here in my neighborhood.

In talking about rainbows last week, I realize I’ve forgotten the other part of the rainbow story. Noah and his sons and their wives were saved in that tar pitched ark, along with all the animals, mostly two by two. But I am not sure they got off merely tucked in and cozy, a way I imagined their riding out that rainstorm as a child.

Imagine warning your friends and neighbors about the impending disaster and all they do is mock you, some even spit on you, but you’re building the ark, timber after timber, slapping heavy fragrant pitch on the boards, that made your head swim and your stomach queasy. The construction should have been proof enough something terrible was coming.

Did Noah read the signs of the times? Did he feel the rumbles of the continents starting to break apart? The sudden gushing of rivers out of dry caves? Did the storms settle over the land dumping feet of rain? Did he watch how the sun and moon turned blood red? Or did the angel of the Lord show up at his doorstep, unmistakably Other, clean, a brightness in his eyes that hurt, when Noah had only seen a mix of fury and fear and devouring in his neighbors’ eyes.

Weren’t his friends and neighbors alarmed at the animals walking up the ramp to the ark, two by two? Didn’t they wonder at the lions and panthers and tigers, not chasing the horses, cattle, sheep? Was it odd to see birds flocking and diving through the door? Had Noah given up by then, tired of their jeers, knowing there was only room for him and his family? Did the door slam with a bang that shook timbers? What did God look like when he shut the door?

Ever wonder what Noah was righteous in God’s eyes looked like? I do.

Noah must have heard their screams when the water rose, the horror of it rushing around the wood, people’s screams, the horror of the boat lifting off the ground, rocking in the currents. Even if the people masturbated to porn hour after hour or threw their children in the incinerator to please some hateful god, or the giants, mighty men of old, slaughtering people like sheep, drinking their blood, eating them alive, Noah had to have cared for the frightened people, hoped they would have listen to his warning, turn back from wasting their lives. If he was righteous, wouldn’t he have prayed for them, longed for their deliverance from the disaster that was coming? And the animals outside yelping and neighing and going silent. And the cities, the beautiful cities that ran like magic that would be no more. Wouldn’t his heart break? Would every last member of his family lock up in silence and shock or melt into sobbing?

Then there was the stench of the animals cooped up together, their assorted smells filling the ark, how it had to have been hard to breathe and the hard work of feeding them for a year. How well did eight people, some in laws get along? Did the daughters-in-law squabble with Noah’s wife? Did Shem, Ham and Japheth fight with their father as sons are wont to do? Did the lack of sunlight drive them further into madness? Did the angel of the Lord step into that stench and dry their eyes?

No wonder Noah got so drunk, when his vines produced grapes. He had to have been haunted by the screams, by the loss of his friends and neighbors, by the beautiful fields, he’d gaze over, cloud shadows moving no longer there. And then when the ark landed, he looked at mountains that were entirely strange. Being knocked out drunk and his son crawling on top of his wife*, he was too far gone to stop it, despite her struggle. He woke with a cloak thrown over them. He woke to fury at his son. And the child born of it, Canaan, he cursed.

But still, there’s promise of deliverance in this final part of the rainbow story. These days I wake up, pre-dawn afraid, wondering what I’ve seen in my sleep. Jesus has said it would be like the days of Noah when he returns. Seems to me we’re there. Seems like we’re at the end of the world, our world. Climate change scientists and the makers of AI warn that humans might go extinct. It’s been said that God will burn up both heaven and earth, since he’s done drowning the world in a flood. But hasn’t he already burned heaven and earth when the Holy Spirit descended? Isn’t that fire dwelling in each of us? Hasn’t the glory descended on the church, like it glowed and smoked in the ark and Solomon’s temple? Only we don’t know it, that we are seated with Jesus in the heavenlies.

Noah had the ark, the remnant had sympathetic kings, I wonder how our species will be delivered. What will Jesus return look like? He said His kingdom is like a mustard seed growing or like leaven spreading through dough. I know people mock the idea of a rapture, but what if it’s true, what if we are caught up to be with Jesus in the air? What if we’re urged to blessed hope for Jesus to return, as he was taken away, lifted up to the clouds? What if we will grieve for those left like Noah must have grieved and Jesus will wipe the tears from our eyes. Even if it’s not how the mysterious end will come, we have been given the ark of Jesus’ promise he would in no wise cast us out, the rod and staff comforting us in the valley of shadow, the Lord taking out the sting of death.

In Marriage is Latayne Scott relates how Thomas Hopko, a man who had suffered greatly says:

“Keep your icons. Keep your crosses. Keep your churches. Keep your monasteries. Keep your books. Keep your liturgies. Take away everything you want.”

His bottom line, though, shocked me. He said,

“But they can’t take away our death.”

He continued. “Because in our death, we are united to the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, and through His death, we enter into His resurrection and life eternal.”

Do you hear that? Even if the rapture doesn’t deliver us from the end of the world, even if we’re martyred, our death is the ultimate deliverance.

As St. John says, “Beloved, we are god’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. (I John 3: 3 – 3, ESV).

*Scholars say that when Ham saw the nakedness of his father, that was a euphemism for sleeping with his mother, Noah’s wife, so that’s how I portrayed this.

What are your thoughts about these times we live in?

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Bruce alerted me to the rainbow dropping out of the clouds off to the west. It practically sat on our across-the-field-neighbor’s woods. I snapped a picture as I walked out. Then stood by him and watched to see if there would be enough for an arch. There wasn’t quite, the clouds ending in clear sky. So much about these rainbow sightings speak to me about God’s judgement. How He can’t allow wickedness to continue on the one hand. How he promises he will never drown the earth, on the other. Though in baptism, we are drowned, we are put to death, in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Ghost. The old creation in us is no more. We rise to new life in Christ. Flood waters and rainbow. Well, I said something like that last time.

Since the house blessing and bringing Aiden into our home my feelings have returned. Tears are welling up easier than they have in the last few years. It’s strange to feel something and not drop so easily into silence. But I have prayed the Lord would exchange my heart of stone for a heart of flesh. Just maybe He has.

The big machines arrived in our neighborhood to finish harvesting corn. It’s surprising how the combine’s chewing corn, separating kernels from stalk and shucks can fill the morning with its presence, and the sun barely breaking the horizon.

Stephen Freeman’s essay The Ascetic Imperative took me up short, took me into the impossibility of living like Christ, making Christ known to the world. As much as I read about God’s love, how wide, and broad and high and long it is, how he will in no wise cast us out, how his mercy reaches to the heavens, sometimes I find myself afraid of the Lord and his judgement. The Psalmist expresses this in Psalm 119: 120, “My flesh trembles for fear of you, I am afraid of your judgements.”

Freeman quotes St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:

You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men; clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.” (3:2-3).

He rightly challenges us to not do what our culture bids us do. Freeman is speaking the truth but sometimes the truth holds up a mirror, that’s no fun to look at. I slid into a pit thinking how impossible it is to live as an “epistle of Christ” these days. Freeman says:

To live mindlessly in this culture is inevitably an act of “channeling” the culture, of living as an expression of the culture in human form. We shop because the culture shops. We “care about stuff” because the culture “cares.” We worry because the culture worries. We weep when it weeps and become angry as it rages. We unconsciously live as “epistles” of the culture (the Scriptures would name it as “Mammon”) even as the culture whispers to us that these are our own thoughts…If you feel no tension with the culture around you, then you have been swallowed alive and are being digested.

Well, he’s right. And to be honest I’m not sure I want to stop ordering books from Amazon or buying stuff for my dogs. I’m not sure I want to stop worrying about the chaos all around. Because I celebrated my birthday this week, I took myself to Facebook to read everyone’s birthday greetings. It’s both gracious and wearying to be greeted by so many people I’ve met through my life and through Facebook. Then someone’s outrage took residence in my thinking. I’d wake up thinking what I would say. (Though later she asked me to offer my perspective privately. It was a good conversation. Those are still possible.)

My heart has hardened because I can’t bear to hear about another person’s cancer diagnosis or deceased horse or children going without food, especially with the government shut down. I’ve been waking up, my heart tight in my chest even though rainbows show up across the road; a bald eagle swings and swoops over the fields; farmers park four semis at the top of the north field to carry that field’s harvest of corn.

As far as ascetism goes, heck I can’t even give up Diet Coke/Diet Pepsi, even though I told you how I was going to abstain. I know it’s not good for my brain or my kidneys, or this temple of the Holy Spirit. Fast food is a favorite. I’ve channeled the culture by allowing a corporate giant take control of my desires.

I’m not sure we can completely separate ourselves from the culture we live in. Paul Kingsnorth in Against the Machine identifies how the country we are born into offers good things.

“At its best, a nation is both a home for a people and repository of history. At its very best, it may be built around some spiritual or cultural story that transcends Machine value, and its laws and tradition may offer people something other than participation on the metastasizing consumer globalculture” (195 - 6).

In some ways the nation and the culture that I’ve been born into act like clothes. We’re told in scripture it’s not good to be naked, even on a wider level than the shirts, pants and dresses we wear. The road I walk, the fields across the way, our home, my neighbors, my church, my township, county, state and federal governments are all layers I wear whether I want to or not. These things help me know who I am and where I belong. But increasingly Kingsnorth is noting that our phones are unmooring us from these places and our sense of place and sense of self.

He wonders,

When the phone in your pocket allows you to make more friends in other countries than you can at school, when the whole world is converging on the same digitally enabled globoculture, when you can log onto Instagram in Austria or Australia and order from Amazon in the Amazon what does your nationality even mean? Travelling round Europe and America recently, seeing this reality in several different countries, I was hit by the striking possibility: that the Machine is birthing its own ethnicity. It is a globalized, screen-enabled, placeless identity that, for many people, seems to be replacing any older national or regional cultural markers. (202)

I have felt this. I received over 200 hundred birthday wishes from people on Facebook but not very many live within a fifty-mile radius. And most would not be geographically available for moral or physical support should our 70 years catch up to me or Bruce. Even talking to a local friend on Messenger robs both of us of our physical presence and facial/body language that help convey how we are responding to what the other is saying. (Meta is taking away the messenger app on our computers and forcing us to use Facebook to direct message people.) It’s not as convenient arranging to meet in person when it’s easy to make a few clicks and start chatting.

But Kingsnorth also aligns with what Freeman says about resisting what this global culture has become and offers some practical advice about how to resist. He says,

The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to those of others. He takes his stand and stands his ground without giving into the nihil of the age, He cleaves to what he believes in without falling into the traps laid by partisanship, anger and self-righteousness. Most of all, he works to clear out his own inner junkyard, so that he can go searching for the truth—and recognize when he finds it. His war is against the worst of himself and for the best of the world, and what he is fighting for is the love he so often fails at. His most effective weapon is sacrifice. (166 – 7).

It’s not easy fighting those internal demons, and sometimes it’s not even demons, but a consistent wake time of 4 am and your eyes burn and you’re edgy with over tired tension. As the Psalmist says in 119: “I rise before dawn and cry for help; I hope in your words. My eyes are awake before the watches of the night, that I. may meditate on your promise” (147 – 148).

Freeman ends his post by saying,

There is an ascetic imperative, an utter necessity to enter into the struggle that is Christ’s own struggle. We fast because Christ in us fasts. We pray because Christ in us prays. We forgive because Christ in us forgives. We love because Christ in us loves. We give because Christ in us gives. Such a life is a sign of contradiction, a repudiation of the world’s claims to be “normal” or “just the way things are.” The life of Christ is the true life of the world, the purpose of all things.

And there is no way I can live this. I hardly know what it means to take up the cross and deny myself. I am weary of waking up, praying through my prayer list, no longer sure it helps to pray chronically for someone. Apparently, the story of the widow bugging the judge to give her justice doesn’t mean we should pester God. But, but I have experienced the power of other people’s repeated prayers in my life, so I keep saying my prayers. I no longer repeat “Lord be merciful to me” without adding “your mercy endures forever” so I can find reassurance for that mercy. I am weary of asking, who will listen to my story, rejoice with me or weep when I weep because everyone I know is suffering extreme hurt. I am aware that a person can lose the ability to make conversation if silence goes on long enough.

On the way home from dog class, where I sent Aiden in for a bath and saw Omalola’s eyes light up when I pointed her to an agility course (She ran up an A frame that she wasn’t supposed to go near, twice. She jumped every jump, when at home she just blasts through them), I listened to Speakeasy Theology. In “The God of Hope Does not Disappoint” (Oct 20, 2025) I heard Chris Green and David Harvey talk about one of Karl Rahner’s sermons. I listen loosely while I’m driving, glancing out at cloud shadows over a clipped countryside that’s become a patchwork of browns and tans with green waterways.

Towards the end they said the following:

There’s going to be mercy. There’s going to be forgiveness. There’s going to be consolation, which means there will be things you need mercy for, things you need forgiving for, things you need consolation for.

And yet, all of that belongs to God working your life out. He started a good work. He’s going to bring it to completion.

And where that puts you, where it puts me, is a place of peace. You can live your life with all of your failures to live it well, because God is living it with you. God is working with you in the living of it.

And be at peace with that. Be at peace with that.”

And a little further on they say:

So that when God saw you, he always saw you as someone who was inseparably bound up with Jesus. And when he saw that, he was seeing himself, he was seeing his son.

And that’s just how God is God and how God is our God. And I think Bonhoeffer sees this, sees this, too. And what that means is your life is as sure to work out as God’s life is.

Because what’s happening in your life is nothing but your own life being harmonized with God’s life. And that’s why Paul can be so sure. He began a good work, and he was going to complete it, because he is already his own completion.”

So that when God saw me, he saw me as someone bound up with Jesus. And this a response to how I perceived Stephen Freeman’s words (though in reality he was saying the same thing). As I turned toward home, I found these words comforting, offering promise that already I am Christ in the world, working out my little life. Now if I could lean into this confidence by faith.

Oh by the way, that essay, “How I Shucked what People Thought of Me or The Virgin and the Creative Writing Workshop” did not make The Masters Review cut as far as publication or a prize. This comes as a disappointment and a relief. The essay flies in the face of a cultural narrative and would have taken a bit of bravery on The Masters Review and my part to see it published. But being a finalist is an affirmation to keep working on my memoir/essay collection. I sent out an essay about baptisms to Missouri Review last week. Then I saw a sophisticated list of evangelical things progressive Christians don’t believe any longer. My heart sank because the faith I describe to these secular readers is very much full of those evangelical beliefs.

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My Take on “The Woman Who Became a Fox”

The following is my retelling of Martin Shaw’s story: “The Woman Who Became a Fox”, that was the first story in his The Green Knight course. I have been hesitant to respond because my thoughts are prickly and people don’t always receive prickly thoughts well. Here is a link to a preview of an earlier and different telling if you want to check out his rendition: The Woman Who Became a Fox. Martin Shaw and his House of Beasts and Vines has been a source of inspiration. He is very generous in what he shares. I highly recommend you subscribe. Well, here is my modernized take.

He wasn’t ugly when she married him. No, not at all. He shimmered with the shine that only comes when people fall in love. She believed in happily ever after. But it wasn’t long before she woke up one day and realized he was ugly, with one eye, what every man has tucked in his loins, what every man thinks with at one time or another. She couldn’t stand his quiet. He was so private, she thought he kept secrets. She couldn’t stand those secrets because she’d been raised in a family whose kept secrets were worse than the truth. So one day she followed him to the forest, uh, restaurant where he met with his friend. She saw him flirt with a waitress. She thought he was secretly in love with her, a plain woman. It was the dance of the one eye. Is this what I get for cooking and cleaning and doing his laundry? Her jealousy burned.

But her husband came home to her, night after night. He never left on weekends.

So she left him. She set out to find herself. Isn’t that what her friends advised when they heard her whine, cry and complain? No one told her what M. Scott Peck has said, That real love begins when the shine of romance wears off. “Whether it be shallow or not, commitment is the foundation, the bedrock of any genuinely loving relationship” (140).

No one told her what Bo Lozoff says in “The Work of Oneness,”

Two people fall in love and get married. For whatever reason—karma, fate, destiny-they looked at each other and saw something sparkling, divine. But if you’re together long enough your spouse is going to be privy to the worst, ugliest, and pettiest in you. That’s why the wedding vow is traditionally ‘till death do us part, through richer or poorer, through thick or thin, sickness or health. (The Utne Reader, Dec 1996, 53 – 54)

Her friends never said how evenings would burn with loneliness. After work, she stared out the window at streetlights that hurt her yes, so she went to the local bar. Her face was so sour, the bartender didn’t warn her when the giant sat next to her and offered to take her home. It wasn’t long before his rage tossed her about. Then he loved on her. She was soon trapped, as all creatures are when you can’t predict when the reward comes.

She found several beautiful cloaks in his closet and was filled with longing to try on each one: crow’s feathers, fox pelt, bearskin. She’d always wanted to fly, so she tried on the gorgeous one made with crow feathers. The feathers rustled, with a black sheen blue. But it was so small it pinched her arms. So she tried on the next coat. It was a beautiful coat made of a fox’s pelt. She stroked the soft red hairs with black points. She shrugged it on her shoulders, while thinking about how her brothers called beautiful women stone fox goddesses. It fit perfectly. Her hands went to the pockets where she found a key. She opened the door and walked out.

But as time does what it does, adding minutes to days to weeks, she forgot what it meant to be an unhappy wife, or a frightened captive. If she thought she had lost herself while married to her husband, she truly lost herself, once she slipped on the fox cloak. Soon she dropped to all fours. And sniffed out chicken coops, grabbing the hens who refused to go inside for the night. “Fox went out on a chilly night…” trotted through her head as she turned toward her father’s house. It wasn’t long when even that lyric faded.

Her father was startled when she curved around his legs, rubbing her face against his ankles. He was startled because this friendly creature must be the fox that ate his hens night after night. Though he glowed a bit, thinking he might be a saint, with such a wild animal unafraid and he wasn’t even holding a fish. He had no idea she was his daughter. When she finally left, they say her galloping in wet grass not only tossed water into the air, but it sent stars shooting into the sky, a gift to her whole town. (Did she go work for Starlink?)

My response

This story annoyed me because a common story talks about women who want to find themselves, who leave good men to strike out on their own. I’m not talking about the abusers, the narcissists, the drunks. I’m talking about leaving the quiet men, who are their own mysteries, who you never quite know. I’m talking about the hard work of commitment, of staying put, of loving who is front of you, even though they don’t fit what the romance novels or even therapists say will make you happy. I’m talking about continuing to walk through the roses and brambles.

Bruce and I found a therapist while we were renovating our farmhouse. There had been a shooting at NIU. I’d gone cold turkey on hormone replacement, so tears easily sprouted. I fired the therapist the day we had one of the worst fights of our marriage because the counselor held me in contempt. I have thought since that if we stayed with that therapist he would have blown our marriage apart. I have learned to love what is, the gifts Bruce offers. I have learned to receive them.

These days I have become skeptical of the therapeutic model that tries to fit people into a preconceived notion what a healthy relationship looks like. During our farm house renovation one of the carpenters said that marriages have a kind of ecology, that can be different for each couple. You can’t expect a marriage that is quite happy being a desert, to become well-watered farm fields or a busy market. He said the house being remade, all in akimbo, was an image for our marriage. He encouraged me to rest in that chaos because it would pass. His boss, our contractor pastored us through the difficult time, that comes with the decisions involved in remaking a home.

Lately, I’ve observed the quiet steadfastness of women who are committed to their husbands until death do them part despite the husband not being the easiest person to love. This through decades of marriage. I’ve seen what in sickness or health looks like.

This week in “Marriage as a Lifetime of Suffering” Stephen Freeman likened marriage to martyrdom. (I’ve heard scholar Father John Behr says the same thing.) He says:

The classical Christian marriage belongs to the genre of martyrdom. It is a commitment to death. As Hauerwas notes: faithfulness over the course of a life-time defines what it means to “love” someone. At the end of a faithful life, we may say of someone, “He loved his wife.”

Freeman discusses how our culture has entered a dark age, and how the Benedict Option, where Christians gather in small communities, might be a proper response, but because it’s a decades or even centuries long solution, we might not see them come to fruition. He says no matter what, we will suffer despite society’s stamping its foot, saying we can avoid it. He says:

Modern culture has emphasized suffering as undesirable and an object to be remedied. Our resources are devoted to the ending of suffering and not to its endurance. Of course, the abiding myth of Modernity is that suffering can be eliminated. This is neither true nor desirable.

Virtues of patience, endurance, sacrifice, selflessness, generosity, kindness, steadfastness, loyalty, and other such qualities are impossible without the presence of suffering. The Christian faith does not disparage the relief of suffering, but neither does it make it definitive for the acquisition of virtue. Christ is quite clear that all will suffer. It is pretty much the case that no good thing comes about in human society except through the voluntary suffering of some person or persons. The goodness in our lives is rooted in the grace of heroic actions.

I’ve seen these heroic actions in something as small as Bruce welcoming Aiden into our home, despite the fact he’s quite an imposition as a rambunctious puppy, and then offering to take Aiden for long walks in hopes he burns off his energy. I’ve seen it with a neighbor who daily visits her husband in the nursing home. And my other friend who is folding greeting cards for her husband’s start up. Another friend tended her husband in late stages of Parkinson’s, working her schedule around his needs. These are all martyrs, witnesses, to the living practice of loving their neighbor who happens to be their spouse. They are as much emptied of self as the men saying prayers twenty-four seven in their monasteries. So my response to the woman who left her ugly one-eyed husband and became a fox, is big whoop.

What I Saw This Week

First thing, I walked Omalola when the sun broke the horizon. I hadn’t reached the point where I could walk both pups down the road. That came a day later. The light scraped the clouds to the east with pink and orange. Then to the west I watched a faint pillar reach into the western sky. As the sun grew brighter, you could see all the colors. Then the full arch. There was no sun shower. Just heavy gray clouds. And the wide rolling soybean field, that had just been cut. I phoned Bruce to tell him to come look.

Often I wake afraid because chaos, because war, because outrage. God drowned the earth when he saw mankind had become utterly wicked. Back then the sons of God married the daughters of men and there were giants, mighty men of old. Paul Kingsnorth, citing Robert Bly, in Against the Machine has said we’ve taken on their spirit:

The Giant is a killer of fathers, destroyer of families, eater of children...It is the Giant--resentful, angry, greedy, marooned in a permanent present--who best represents what we have become, nearly three decades after Bly’s book was published. The culture of inversion is the Giant’s creation, and ours. Adolescent and surly, we can find little good in the past and little hope in the future. (142).

By culture of inversion Kingsnorth means how everything is upside down, how the elites want to eradicate western culture and tear down cultural norms. He says:

Nobody knows where any of this will lead, but the primary emotion it is all channeling is rage. In our perpetual sibling society--sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, Godless--we have forgotten how to behave like adults or what adults even look like. The result is that we squabble like children, fighting over toys in the mud. (146)

Civil war has come up in several conversations. I hop on Facebook and spark with outrage at what some people post, and hold back because anything I say will lead to insults, and arguments that go on for days. As I’ve said many times there’s more to people than their politics. Kingsnorth, again referring to Robert Bly, supports the futility of fighting.

In times of conflict, whether our weapons are pikes or words, the temptation is always toward total war. But war is the Giant’s work, and like the Giant it will consume us all if it can. ‘The inexhaustible energies of the cosmos,’wrote Robert Bly ‘cannot be called down by anger, They are called by extremely elaborate practice--and stories.’ (147)

And yet it was the bow set in the clouds that came with the promise that God would never again flood the earth, to wipe out mankind. Rainbows have been showing up frequently and I swear they contain the hope that “the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos,” God himself will challenge us to turn from our wicked ways, what Kingsnorth says is doing the “hard work of growing up, rebuilding families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment” (147).

I thought of how the rainbow is the promise that God won’t drown the world to bring judgement, though He has warned of the earth and heavens set on fire at the end. On this day, I felt there was more to the rainbow than the sun doing its refracting thing with water droplets, splitting light into colors. The air was rich, heavy, redolent with presence. I thought of Ezekiel’s vision of God’s glory:

“and seated above the likeness of the throne was a likeness with a human appearance. And upward from what had the appearance of his waist I saw as it were gleaming metal, like the appearance of fire enclosed all around. And downward from what had the appearance of his waist I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and there was brightness around him like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness all around. Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of one speaking.” (Ezekiel 1: 27 – 28, ESV)

What if the “brightness around him like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain” was there just as much as the arch I saw in the sky, only thank God I didn’t see the brightness, I didn’t fall down on my face, smashing my nose on the asphalt, Omalola barking up a storm. Thank God we see through a veil darkly but even so what if what St. Paul says is true, we are seated with Jesus, right here, right now? With that same brightness, that same glory. With the appearance of the bow that is in the clouds on the day of rain.

Bruce met me at the head of our road. He’d seen it too. We both recited: Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen.

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“I did not mean to fall in love, but the men with the big machines came up our road to cut the last of the season’s corn.” This line caught the attention of a New York editor with the reputation of buying books from the strength of one line. He looked at the manuscript and commented that I need to format it properly and not use dialogue to convey information. Thank God my work wasn’t ready for him. I was just at the beginning of learning my craft.

I still admire those machines—the tractors that make me feel small as I’d feel gazing up at a city skyscraper, the chisel plows set in the ground, cutting it, but not so much that soil is wasted, the combines that chew up fields, sorting wheat or beans or corn from chaff. I admire how seeds are laid in the ground, how they grow into grain bearing plants, and then harvested. The landscape changes every summer from those long green rows, barely poking above the ground, to matronly corn stalks, or humble bean plants, and slim wheat fields. Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation in the sixties and seventies in his book The Population Bomb. Not contributing to the population explosion, was one reason why we didn’t have children, that’s how that story burned into our culture. I’ve been surprised many times in my seventy years by how my sure sense that doom was descending, but instead something defied the doom. Scientists defied Ehrlich’s grim, anti-human predictions by developing pesticides, herbicides and seeds that could feed the whole world were it not for corruption and distribution issues.

Harvest has begun. The soybean fields next to us have been harvested. It’s been so dry, the dust was so bad, the dust billowed across our yard. I ran to close Mrs. Horse in the barn until the combine and grain cart moved to the far end of the field. Trump’s tariffs have enticed China, a major market for our beans, to buy from Brazil and Argentina. I just talked to a neighbor who said there is no other market for their beans but China. “It is what it is,” he said. We have an abundant harvest, a bumper crop, and no one to buy. I think about the story of Eygpt and Pharoah’s dream warned him to store the seven years of plenty against the seven years of famine.

Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine is challenging the way I think about the society I live in, a society that cloaks a person in ways of doing things, that becomes as invisible as water is to fish. Kingsnorth is a former environmental activist and Wiccan turned Orthodox Christian who has been thinking about how Western Civilization has degraded for the last thousand years. His book The Wake was long listed for the Man Booker Prize. He quotes Lewis Mumford, cultural commentator, who identified how our culture is more machine than human in his two volume Myth of the Machine. (I remember reading the second volume, The Pentagon of Power as a junior in high school and thinking yes, yes.)

Kingsnorth comments about how impersonal international corporations control most facets of our lives:

These ‘depersonalized, collective organizations’ are the giant world spanning corporations which now control most of our lives. They produce the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the technology we use, the ‘entertainment’ we consume and the ‘news’ we base our opinions upon all the while employing millions of us as labourers and harvesting us as products ourselves, through the detailed personal information we freely volunteer them daily all over the web. (36)

We think we are free to create our own lives, become whatever we want. But how free are we when we are dependent on multinational corporations to meet our basic needs from food to medicine to entertainment. The Farm Crisis in the 80’s came about partly because the big three food companies controlled how farmers could produce their crops and livestock. Also they took out loans with their land a collateral and the land’s value collapsed. A few paragraphs later, Kingsnorth says:

The rise and triumph of the internet—the neurological network of the Machine—has meant that there are now few places on Earth to which we can escape from the incessant noise of this state-corporate ‘growth ‘ and the incessant urge to contribute to it by clicking, scrolling, buying and competing. (37)

I’ve certainly been caught by this web, with a very real spider, what some people call a demon, in my pocket, calling me: “You’ve got to look. Please look and see what the latest news is” that devours. I wrote this as my latest perspective for our local NPR station:

For the last decade I’ve been captured by screens, mostly the phone but TV too. While in the car the phone has filled me in on the latest political outrage but left me blinded to the young eagle flying across the front of the car, or the joyous clouds rolling across a clear blue sky. There are rough drafts of novels sitting in notebooks that might have found readers by now. A few extra minutes? I pick up my phone and pack someone else’s thoughts in my brain instead of my own.

Like people sitting together at restaurants heads down, engrossed in their phones, I’ve sat with my quiet husband, texting on Messenger with someone who wants my help. Now.

“Internet friends are not friends,” says a wise friend. She’s right. Online relationships are disembodied and ghostlike. I’ve lost time on people who move on when their drama passes, while Mrs. Horse waits in the barnyard.

Without the benefit of a person’s physical presence, we miss out on how it can heal or energize or even discourage us. Maybe instead of building online friendships, we need to put down our screens and meet in person. Maybe instead of reading our phones during breakfast, lunch and dinner we need to taste and savor our food. Maybe if a post stings us to outrage, it’s not worth disturbing our peace. Maybe instead of filling every last minute with something our phone says, we need to be bored. Maybe I should apply all these maybe’s to myself.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

Here’s where you can find the original post.

Kingsnorth drew a parallel to ancient Egypt, a civilization that treated people like “a machine made of human parts” (38). People were enslaved and monuments were built. Kingsnorth says most of us are as clueless as fish who aren’t aware they are swimming in water:

Across the spectrum, from conservatives to liberals, Marxists to fascists, believers to atheists, very little serious criticism of the entwined myths of progress, growth and materialism will ever be heard in the public sphere. Ultimately most of us accede to our sovereign, happily or otherwise. (40)

But there’s hope in this very analogy, because God called his people out of that slavery, out of the machine that was Egypt. Their years in the wilderness, their stop/start relationship with God and the freedom he offers, perhaps offers us hope and ways to resist, that are rooted in our relationship with the living God. Lest I forget, God fed them with heavenly food and watered the with the rock that was Jesus following. Every time we take the Eucharist we are fed with the very body of Christ. When I think about how Bruce and I have no one to watch over us in our frailty, I come back to the story of God’s care for his people in the wilderness, how his name is Jehovah Jireh-God will provide. Kingsnorth says:

To liberate ourselves, steadily, one human soul at a time we simply have to walk away from the Machine in our hearts and minds, as the Israelites of the Exodus walked away from its original master Pharaoh. Or, as Mumford has it in the conclusion of the second volume of his masterwork: ‘For those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges as soon as we choose to walk out’. (42).

But for me that choosing to walk out is easier said than done because there are real people on the other side of Facebook or Substack. The Machine (Substack/Wordpress/Facebook) has given me a way to find you, my readers. Old friends, good friends, have found me through Facebook. Just the other day, the woman who walked with me through my parents’ deaths, who knew how to listen and point me toward hope looked me up after nearly forty years of being out of touch. I’ve found out important local news through neighborhood Facebook groups. And have found people with similar political beliefs in the NRPlus Facebook group, a group with diverse thinking, that has eased my anxiety because I see I’m not the only one.

And then there’s television with story lines that make a person forget that as Christians we are called to chastity, as we watch scenes that we might have called porn fifty years ago. The habit to switch it on and relax while someone else’s story plays out on a screen goes back through my whole life because it is like a fire, the family gathered around. Also our brains like easy. But I have so many books I want to read that I set down to watch the not so big screen TV. The hooks have been set.

Early in Against the Machine, Kingsnorth paints a bleak picture about western civilization. Over a thousand years it has lost its story and rootedness in that story and common cultural traditions. During graduate school, fifty years ago, my poet teachers wondered what would happen because the Christian story we had in common, was just about spent. Kingsnorth cites The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler:

By the twentieth century, the direction was clear and for Spengler the Great War only confirmed it. Only disintegration, followed by Caesarism, and a ‘return to thorough formlessnes’ awaited us now…The only realistic response was to adopt some version of Stoicism, and hope for the coming of the cultured and suitably strong Caesar to steady the ship as she sank. (27)

As far as Caesars, Germany got Hitler. Russia got Stalin, China got Mao, and the US is experiencing authoritarian creep. Kingsnorth claims Western Civilization is dead and offers a proper response to the culture wars that have erupted across the United States and Europe. He says it’s past time to fight them.

This in practical terms is the slow necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against the ‘West’ that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires—fires fueled by eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for the resurrection of the small, the real, and the true.

But first, we are going to have to be crucified. (30)

He’s calling us to the hard work of making our own lives, loving our neighbor as best as we can, and denying our wants.

Finally, at least as far as I’ve read, Kingsnorth talks about how science and magic are intertwined because both endeavors are about taking control of the world—spiritual or physical. He says:

Our world is still run by magicians, working from the ‘sacred temples of their laboratories to discover how humanity my reshape the world in accordance with its will. (76)

For awhile I’ve wondered about the idolatry that is so often talked about in the Hebrew scriptures. Kingsnorth pinpoints what it is, and the way to resist. He says, “Magic addles the mind.” Addled mind. That was me. My diagnosed mild cognitive impairment came from too much screen time, the constant change of the newsfeed, each post jerking my emotions one way and then the next. The neuropsyche test that showed major slippage came just as Covid was hitting. But when I started walking and beholding the world, as Maggie Ross urges us to do, offering thanks when my mind wanders, coming back to the center—what I write about here—my mind cleared and my IQ test improved. The neurologist kicked me out of his office, saying people whose minds are failing don’t improve. Kingsnorth affirms the efficacy of practicing this stillness for us all:

Somehow, though, the work must be to still the mind instead. To let go of the natural attachment to our cunning, serpentine will. We know where the path leads if we don’t: we see daily the path that magic and science will take us down. Do what thou wilt is the motto of our world: the motto of the Machine. Thy will be done is its older brother, and its challenger. We all want to live by the first of them, but we know that the work is to walk away from it a thousand times each day: to let the will go and to listen instead for the old song which, however much we might think otherwise, has never stopped being sung in the woods and the waters and around the edges of the human heart. (78).

As I mentioned before, the house blessing, simple words from scripture, and a straightforward pastor has cleared the house, cleared something in me. Bringing the pup Aiden into our home has helped me stay out of the phone first thing in the morning. I’ve deleted the Facebook app though sneaky Meta has hooked an icon to Messenger, so it’s easy to look up the latest news. I see my Diet Coke/Pepsi addiction has made me beholden to the Machine. It’s a small vice, but maybe in light of this, it’s not. (A neurologist warned me off this years ago.) At least tea is natural and a better high, though I’ve heard there’s poison in that drink too.

As far as my own need for control, I have finally realized I have to trust the Lord will give me something to write each week, as the terror of my blank mind has been real. Laying off the digital content as loosened my thoughts and creativity. There are too many voices, too much good content. I’ve come to respect my own attention and have chafed at people sending me stuff, basically asking me to think their thoughts. What if I have my own to think? What if my 70-year-old brain has to make space, a clearing for my work, not theirs? Print books are different. Even Substack essays aren’t as devastating as FB or reels. (I have pretty much trained Facebook by saying I’m not interested in posts that spark outrage and fear.)

It seems to me Kingsnorth is calling out our sins in the way the old Biblical prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah called out God’s people, who immersed themselves in “Do what thou wilt.” We too have immersed ourselves in “Do your own thing” or “You deserve a break today” and many other similar sayings.

Let me leave you with one creature we can’t control and the honor she gave us by crawling onto my shoulder and then sleeping between Bruce and I throughout the night. Omalola who scares her is loose but Kali doesn’t seem to be afraid to come in the bedroom, where she is sleeping. And then there’s Smudgie who sat at the foot of the bed for several nights after my extreme nightmare. It’s always an honor when a cat comes to you.

The pups have pushed me out of bed just as the sun breaks the horizon. I have felt its warmth on my cheek, a gentle hand, a steady hand. Yesterday I watched a hawk drop out of a black walnut and soar low over the fields—flapping up and then gliding down, until he dropped behind a hill onto the waterway.

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Sunday, September 28

Martin Shaw closed out this week’s House of Beasts and Vines essay A Thousand Fires by saying:

So here’s to all of us, traveling or stationary, finding a little luminous ground. I don’t mean grandiose especially, just something radiating a low note of soul from it. We get to know the pressure points, the resting-places, the – in Moriarty’s words – seal-holes that are particular to our creative nature. To speak from that is to speak from our love-spot (this is a thing of delight in old Irish stories), and in such appropriate focus, wonderful things can still happen in this world.

Luminous ground. Anywhere can be luminous ground. What a hopeful way to look at the world around us. As summer blurs into autumn, the light has softened. It’s sfumato, what Dan Silva’s character Gabriel says is “like smoke losing itself on the air” (220) in An Inside Job. A book about a stolen Leonard DaVinci painting and financial corruption at the Vatican. He explains how Leonardo DaVinci showed how there were no hard lines, how there is a sort of fading to eternity, a kind of mixing between this world and the next. I’ve read the ancients were very aware of how heaven and earth co mingle but we have robbed ourselves of the enchantment with our materialist, scientific explanations. I find myself stopping to look out over the fields that are being stripped of their soybeans, and now there is a patchwork of different browns and tans, along with unharvested corn and the green strip of the newly installed pipeline. I’m taken by the beauty and am reminded of the Psalmist’s words:

For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice: the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord” (Ps 33: 4 – 5).

I see that love as I look over the gently rolling fields and distant woods. The trees are dropping their leaves and black walnuts. Mrs. Horse is eating her hay. This is what’s real. Not what shows up on the screen. Not the outrage. This. Full of the steadfast love of the Lord.

Mrs. Horse had pushed the big barn door over the wooden stump that was supposed to prop it shut. What an ugly sight full of the question: What if she wrecks that door? I walked out and pulled it along the rails, until it clanged back in place. I tossed her hay.

I walk a mile on two roads that T into each other, where I have a choice to walk--into the sun or alongside it. I walked a mile on the road a mile in off the main road, when I needed to walk out my prayers. Often I walked long after dark. Maybe my body remembers that length from childhood, that walk to the fork in the road and back, the prayers said.

Today, Omalola, chose to walk into the sun, so I followed. She was especially interested in the new wood chuck holes had been dug since yesterday and were good for a sniff. The road noise was quieter than usual.

I had considered blowing off the luncheon with the horse ladies, because I want to play around with my memoir/essay collection, work I’ve avoided working on since Covid. Because the material is so vulnerable, I’ve been afraid to look. The resistance has been like a boar, heavy, grunting, dangerous. Maybe the house blessing took a knife to its throat, maybe the pup’s arrival. The fat pig, the block is not sacked out, bloated in my office. I’m using a literary publisher’s deadline to motivate my work and I have found a spirit of play. Since one of the most vulnerable essays, “How I Shucked Who People Thought I Was, or A Virgin and the Writers Workshop” was a finalist in that Best Emerging Authors of 2025 contest, I’ve gotten a good kick to play around with the manuscript. It feels more like obedience to do the work because I’m not sure anyone will want to read it.

I only knew one person who would be at luncheon, but since I said I’d go and the restaurant was nearby, I found myself in some lovely, honest conversations. Well, one thing lead to another. It came up that Sue Mayborne, a local Aussie and Border Collie breeder is retiring and disbursing her dogs. Tracy who worked for her, showed me a video of two pups, a blue merle boy and a red tri girl. She gave me Sue’s number. I’ve known Sue for over thirty years and was surprised to hear she was retiring but I get it. These dogs were among the last she had to disburse. I’d been vaguely thinking about getting another dog to keep Omalola company.

I rushed home and asked Bruce, “Please? Pretty please?” “All right,” he muttered. Or something like that. I called her and went to my training class. Allison offered some wise negatives like it would be hard to deal with two dogs at a dog show. What’s more we have a small car, not an SUV or minivan capable of hauling two dogs. It is paid off and we don’t want to buy a new car. A six month old puppy that hadn’t been socialized is a lot of work and chaos.

The next day I took Oma along to meet him. Our crate took up most of the back seat, so Oma only had a small square to sit in. Aiden was a lanky blue merle, with big ears properly folded over. Oma touched noses but then ignored him, with a ho hum expression. He wasn’t her friend Dolly. All the while I was signing his paperwork, I wondered what have I done? What am I doing? Am I betraying Omalola who is my dog, my friend?

But I put the six-month-old blue merle in the crate, Oma next to him and drove home.

Every morning since then, I’ve awakened with the words: What have I done? Have I betrayed Omalola by dividing my attention between them? What an imposition on Bruce, this crazy young dog. I have definitely betrayed Mrs Horse, who stares at me through the fence, with an evil eye, though I haven’t spent much time with her because of my work of writing, friends, and household stuff.

I named him Aiden, which I guess means little fire though I am having a dickens of a time remembering his name when I call him. Khalid, Hayden, Dillybop come up. His registered name is Shoreland Weight of Glory. He’s a remarkable beast, considering he was a kennel dog. Sweet, confident, in a whole new place with strangers. He floats when he trots. But shadows scare him. Even the crescent moon carved into our outhouse, catches his attention and hackles. Bruce and I and Oma have our patience set out for us. Omalola works hard to put him in his place. So do we.

Though he is a cause for much jealousy on Mrs. Horse’s part. Now that we’re in some kind of routine with the pup, I need to work her into my routine. (Mrs. Horse is more pet. My vet reassures me that’s not all bad. But she stands at the fence, ears up, the question: When will you spend time with me?)

I almost lost both dogs when they were running hard on the flexi leads with Bruce in between. If I hadn’t let go, he would have been thrown over the lines. Oma and Aiden chased each other towards the road. And it was a rare rush hour of truck after truck done with their jobs and heading out. I shrieked my recall. They turned and ran back to me. I shook. Bruce helped me gather them up and we finished our walk. Did an angel stand between them and the road and send them back?

My trainer showed me how to make them walk together quietly. Since then, I’ve worked out my routine. First thing they walk separately. Later I can walk them together on short leashes and won’t let them rile up. If Aiden needs to circle at a trot or gallop in a circle, I take him back out separately.

Monday, September 29, 2025

Mrs. Horse knows things have shifted. She sees it when I take two dogs out to walk. She comes to the paddock and stares through the rails. The other day Aiden pulled the flexi out of my hand and ran into the paddock. She went after him, kicking up her heels. He ran out and came back to me and Oma. Well I went out today, Monday, to lunge her. It’s so warm, it’s not even pleasant for me to be outside—and Morgen’s winter coat has come in.

Cement trucks were running down our road, one right after the other, because they are pumping slurry into the old pipeline to close it off. A few of their vehicles were parked at the T where the road I walk into the sun joins our road. I just wanted to spend time with her, walk her for a half hour. Every so often, she’d turn and face me so I lead her off in the opposite direction. It’s best that I make that decision, but I didn’t feel like it. I turned on a recording from a class I’m taking with Martin Shaw, where he told the story “Bearskin”, about a man grieving on his return from war and the work he needed to do to heal. Like many war fighters, he was rejected by his village and told to wander. He meets an old man who tells him he needs to wear a bearskin for seven years, to let his hair grow, and not wipe his tears. Would there were bearskins for our warfighters, and the charge to grieve.

Walking Mrs Horse in circles, is the kind of thing that lends itself to getting caught up on my listening. How can I tell she’s jealous, that she knows things have changed in my face, and heart? Because she took off, with a kick and buck, that could have injured me if she’d landed it on my back. Her back sock flew off. I’ve never seen her thrash out like that. When she has protested before she has tucked her hips in.

A wondering has come up, that might be time to be done with her. It might be time to find her another home. We are 70. A person thinks about age and injury at our age. I’m not as brave as I was. I’m not sure I want to wait for her to die or our health to fail so badly, we’d be forced to sell. But wisdom says take a breath on this, wait with the idea, see what plays out.

Since we had our house blessed, a resistance, a laziness, acedia has dissipated. I don’t have to push through layers of weariness or heaviness or doors that seem too heavy to open. It’s pure gift to feel quiet, that is not being numb, to receive the simple goodness of each day, without dread and guilt looming. I’ve been able by God’s grace to get up, get both dogs walked, and do chores without stopping for long, nose buried in my phone.

By the grace of God, Bruce and I have driven Mrs. Horse around the fields, several times. We even crossed the harvested bean field to walk up to the tree, where I thanked her and told her she was famous, lots of people around the world love her. I’ve made sure to curry Mrs.Horse’s spine because like Bruce, she likes her back scratched. I’m satisfied I’m doing as right by her as I can. That boar, dodging and feinting, keeping me away from my spiritual warhorse has become bacon (metaphorically speaking).

A quiet joy has set in. I suspect the house blessing cleared a draining presence. I suspect you, my readers’ prayers have dropped a shield. My friend Deb reminded me that in the Orthodox church, there is an exorcism, the priest spitting on Satan when a person is baptized. I suspect my words: “Lord rebuke you,” are more powerful than mere words. I suspect the power of my baptism, marking me as Christ’s own. And yes I suspect bringing Aiden into our home was truly about choosing life, even though he’s brought a measure of chaos. He’s also brought focus, an awareness of how fragile and precious my attention is, how I don’t need to let the internet tell me what to think.

Today is Michelmas, the day the western church remembers Michael the Archangel, the one who does battle with the serpent. Here’s the reading:

7 Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, 8 but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. 9 And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. 10 And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. 11 And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. 12 Therefore, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!” (Rev. 12: 7 – 12, ESV).

Remember even this earth, with a pissed off devil, is still full of the steadfast love of the Lord. And that love has overcome the world. We’ve been told, “Greater is He who is in you, than he who is in the world.” We’ve been told salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of Christ has come. The accuser of our brothers has been thrown down. Remember the story from Zechariah, where the Lord rebuked the accuser of the brethren, and the angel of the Lord, removed Joshua, the high priest’s filthy garments and clothed him with pure vestments. (Zec 3: 1 - 5). This is our story too. We have been clothed with the pure vestments of Christ himself. Go in peace. Go in joy.

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Stretches of sunny days passed this fall and I wondered when our neighbor would drop our hay. Then he rolled onto our field, he and his son, running up and down cutting an abundant third cutting. We weren’t afraid rain would ruin it like it did another neighbor’s field when their hay guy cut it the day before pouring rain was forecast.

I’d offered them the whole third cutting because we had enough for Mrs. Horse though second cutting was pure red clover, which isn’t the best hay for a horse. I mix that hay with first cutting. It’s candy hay. Bruce felt it was too rich and that we should swap out some grassy hay from third cutting for the pure clover. He had a point but because our neighbor was on a tight schedule, trying to put up his father’s hay, and since he farms around his teaching job, he was unable to accommodate us.

It had been a good day. We drove Mrs. Horse before lunch, her blood up and running. A stranger was walking around the northwestern edge of our field, so we walked toward him, Morgen’s ears up and on the alert. Like my cat, Smudgie, who wants to know what’s going on, I wanted to find out what he was up to. He was surveying the easement for the road—beginning to end-- but didn’t know what it was for. “They just tell me to go and do the job,” he said. It’s pleasant to work in the country.” Bruce and I are on the alert because solar companies have decided the best farmland in the world is a good place to set their industrial solar plants making energy that will feed data centers or Chicago.

We turned away and circled around the field, going the other way, which for a horse is an entirely different sight. She wheeled so sharply she could have tipped the carriage if it weren’t stable. I grabbed her reins, tensed my thighs. My reins were way too long to gain control. My trainer friend has said, when that happens relax, so I started breathing deeply and willed my legs to loosen. Mrs. Horse broke into a canter for a few steps, her butt bouncing up and down like she was going to buck but it struck Bruce and I as funny. Good grief, Morgen you’ve seen that sign before and it wasn’t even jiggling. Joyous. That’s all I can say.

Then I pulled books I don’t need any longer to make room for piles of books sitting on my coffee table, the clutter so bad I felt claustrophobic. It’s too easy to buy books people suggest, open them and find they aren’t all that. I could buy a number of books for what it would cost to have a library card. I have a few more bookshelves to look at before I take the boxes to a used bookstore or library. It seems like I can’t do both, write and pick up the clutter, so this blog waited till now.

I fell asleep reading the Psyche Eros myth in Martin Shaw’s Nightwatches, a book where he imagines sailing with his daughter on a raft to the Greek Islands from Britain. As they travel they encounter assorted people. The story took me back to C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, another retelling of that myth. In Lewis’ story, when Psyche lights the lamp to reveal the god:

Though this light stood motionless, my glimpse of the face as as swift as a true flash of lightning. I could not bear it for longer. Not my eyes only, but my heart and blood and very brain were too weak for that. A monster—the Shadowbrute that I and all Glome had imagined—would have subdued me less than that beauty his face wore. And I think anger (what men call anger) would have been more supportable than the passionless and measureless rejection with which it looked upon me. Though my body crouched where I could almost have touched his feet, his eyes seemed to send me from him to an endless distance. He rejected, denied, answered, and worst of all he knew, all I had thought, done, or been. (172 – 173).

I fell asleep just as Psyche was going to descend to Hades to pick up a box from Persephone, the queen of the dead, to bring it to Aphrodite who had turned into quite the witch in Shaw’s version. I didn’t know if this version would have a happy ending. It’s never good to close a story at the lip of the descent to hell.

I went down to sleep, to an extreme nightmare, to a meeting with an energy, that barreled into me, a vague energy thing. I had no choice. Bruce could not wake me. He said he’d touch me, then I’d whimper again. What felt like a cattle prod jolted my legs. I said the Jesus Prayer. Again I said the Jesus prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I said, “Come out of me. Lord Rebuke you.”I woke up terrified. I could not shake the fear that day.

(That’ll learn me to talk about how I’m not aware of my sinfulness in the post before last.) I woke up afraid. And walked through the day afraid. I asked for prayer. I was as afraid of God himself, of how I turn my attention to the breakdown of our culture, a dry cistern instead of the fountain of living water. I have listened to hours of Matt Taibbi’s America This Week because both he and Walter Kirn are easy to listen to, and seem honest about what’s going on. But I felt like Lewis’ character’s description when meeting the god—that felt like my meeting God. As Moses sang:

For we are brought to an end by your anger;

by your wrath we are dismayed.

8 You have set our iniquities before you,

our secret sins in the light of your presence.

9 For all our days pass away under your wrath;

we bring our years to an end like a sigh. (Psalm 90: 7 -9)

For years I have felt a monster was perched just below the horizon, that the whirlwind, chaos, and the people choosing it, will overtake our ordered lives. Even Christians cheer on the destruction of “empire.” I realized the need to dig deep into God’s promiseswhen I read Jim Geraghty’s words in The Political Class Can’t Break the Cycle of Violence:

I don’t want to alarm you, but right now, there is no visible way out of America’s intensifying political divisions and continuing rounds of ideologically motivated violence. For our governing class and the most influential public voices, all the incentives are to get angrier, louder, more accusatory, and more incendiary.

We all need pointing towards God’s good news, that death, that chaos don’t ultimately win. We all need to turn from outrage. Perhaps that’s the resistance that is most fierce. We need to stop it when the temptation to call someone evil, a Nazi, a fascist, or even names rises.

Prayer drops a shield. When people have prayed for me, joy returns. Contentment returns. I step out of fear and what Paul Young calls future tripping. It’s why I pray chronically for some people. My friends were unavailable. Bruce was unnerved.

The next night I was afraid to sleep, afraid of what might show up. I took out my prayer beads and recited St. Patrick’s Breastplate (am quoting an excerpt):

I bind unto myself myself the power of the cherubim,

The sweet “Well done” in judgement hour…

I bind unto myself today the virtues of the starlit heaven,

The glorious sun’s life-giving ray,

The whiteness of the moon at even,

The flashing of the lightning free,

The whirling of the wind’s tempestuous shocks,

The stable earth, the deep salt sea,

Around the old eternal rocks.

(Adapted for use with Anglican Prayer Bead by Laura Kelly Campbell)

Our black cat, Smudgie settled at the foot of our bed. It was almost as if he was sent from God to guard our sleep.

I don’t get why I have these terrifying dreams and meet demons and not angels, though angels might scare me more. I don’t want to think I’m all that if one showed up. Often I feel my sleep takes me to another dimension, another life. It seems the Killjoy attacks when I’m feeling good, feeling love and joy. I get zapped with fear, fear of God, fear of death, fear. As you have just read, I hear the wrathful scriptures loudly. God himself has become a terror. Also fear of my writing, what will it bring. Recognition or not, both a cause for fear.

Later that day, the thought came to me, that maybe this was some kind of flashback to when I was sexually abused, before I had language, how I had no choice in the matter. I’ve been aware of this for sometime.

The next morning I read Weapons of our Warfare by Meg Mittlestadt, Missives from the Edge where she said:

These last half-dozen years have been a great unveiling of what is really attempting to dominate our world. In the same way, the past week has demonstrated this unveiling yet again, as demonic voices vie for dominance of the airwaves. We’ve always known this hidden reality, but now we’re seeing it. At last, our true enemy is coming out into the open. Take heart. This means he’s desperate and afraid.

I perked up. It was as if God had sent her essay to speak to me, in my fear.

The easiest way for us to miss the moment would be to think that we should fight back against our satanic enemy in the same way that he is inspiring others to fight against Christians: attacking others with violence, with hate, with more evil, and in our own strength.

This has never been the way of the follower of Christ. While there are times to stand up and physically defend others and truth—and that day may yet come—the time to pick up earthly weapons is not now.

She went on to list the ways to respond:

Love, Goodness, Prayer, the Blood of the Lamb (meaning Christ’s suffering and death on the cross), Our willingness to die for Christ, Being Strong in the Lord (not in our own strength), the Word of God.

She spells out in wise terms what each of these things mean. Do check out her wisdom. I commented:

Oh my goodness this is what I needed to hear today. The other night I was attacked in my dreams. I said the Jesus prayer a lot. And was afraid to go to sleep last night. I said St Patrick’s Breastplate and my prayers. The cat sat at the food of the bed like a guardian. So thank you.

Meg offered to visit with me via Zoom. Our conversation ended up being a rich exchange of our writing work, our lives and how to fight the powers of darkness. She recounted similar experiences, but she came to realize that the powers hate to be ignored. They have no power compared to the Lord. “Didn’t C.S. Lewis say they were like cockroaches or something like that, miniscule compared to the power of God. We need to focus on that.” She said her response to the last time this happened, was, “Oh it’s you.” The raids on her sleep left.

We both agreed that we need to remember we are new creations, right here, right now. That we are seated at God’s right hand in Jesus, right here, right now. That we’ve been given the shield of faith.

I found more comforting words from St. Porphyrios in Wounded by Love:

I don’t think about death. Whatever the Lord desires. I want to think about Christ. And you too open your arms and thrown yourselves into Christ’s embrace. Then He lives within you. And you constantly think that you don’t love Him very much and you want even more to come close to him and be with Him. Show disdain for the passions and don’t concern yourselves with the devil. Turn to Christ. For all this to happen it is necessary for grace to come. The divine grace which ever makes good what is weak and supplies what is lacking. (112)

Finally, after nearly twenty years living here, we asked our pastor to bless our house. He is tall, dressed in his collar, full of light. He seems delighted in the world and in walking with the Lord. He asked if we had felt anything here. Yes, the place has felt like a horse getting ready to buck when we first moved in. Bruce mentioned that Mrs. Jesse was laid out in our living room, the place where I like to write.

“I was attacked by a demon the other night,” I said. Thank God, he didn’t act threatened or look at me as though I were a spiritual cripple.

“You are baptized. You are sealed as Christ’s own forever. Nothing can separate you from the love of God. Nothing.”

Then he went on to read scripture and offer prayers for each room of the house, including the barn. He mentioned, “We usually do this during epiphany. And people don’t know the church does this.”

Sometime later that week, storms passed by to the north and to the south. Lightning flashed in our bedroom. It was 12:15 and Mrs. Horse had let herself out of the barn. I pulled on jeans, tucked in my nightshirt and walked outside. The coyotes were yipping. I haven’t heard them in awhile. Mrs. Horse called for me. I brought her in and shut the big barn door. I tossed her more hay. I laid back down but Omalola was panting so I took her out. Before I opened the door, I saw Ma Cat sitting on the sidewalk. I wonder what she wants when she sits watching the house in the middle of the night. When I unlocked the door she ran to the shed. I walked Oma around the back of the house, the coyotes howling to the west and lightning flashing to the north.

Something has shifted since then. Finally I’m feeling how loved I am with many good blessings. I’ve found a kindred spirit in Meg and have had some good conversations. I’m ready to revise my memoir/essay collection. One thing lead to another at a luncheon with new friends and Bruce and I brought home a new pup. But I’ll tell you about him next week. He’s too fast for pictures.

Thank you so much for reading this essay. If you’d like to receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I thought I’d try to imagine Sarah’s life with Abraham from her perspective. I’ve been taking a course on the Book of Jubilees, a series of oral traditions compiled around 150 BC that expand the story of Genesis. Abraham scattering crows comes from there. And in another class we were challenged to find a biblical story and try our hand at the horror genre.

I fell in love with my brother when I saw him scattering the crows. The crows that were pecking at our seeds, the seeds we scattered so we could live. But the seeds needed rain. They needed time to nestle in the dirt. He shouted Be Gone. His voice was the voice of a ram’s horn. I felt his authority in my breastbone. All in one, the flock lifted off the fields and flew away—not just to the oaks close by, the holy oaks, but they kept flying until they were dots in the sky. He was dressed in black, robes flapping out behind him. Were his clothes part of his magic? My heart caught in my throat.

Now meals together with Abram were a trial. I could barely hold my spoon steady when we ate soup. I watched him to see how he liked it. Mother’s weaving kept her so busy she granted me the cooking fire and the knife to slaughter the baby goat for our meal. I learned to make good food.

We danced and sang at my wedding, our legs prancing in time with each other as we danced in circles joined together arm in arm. We circled one way and then the other. We drank good wine. Abram and I fell into our wedding bed. I proved he was mine. My beloved is mine and I am his. Soon my belly would grow, and I would be satisfied with a baby and many babies after that. He refused the temple prostitute to insure my fertility. He refused to drink the goat’s blood that was part of our tradition. We were shunned by our neighbors. And my womb gave us no babies. Every month, when my womb seized up and I vomited like I carried a baby, but the blood came, I wept.

Did the gods hold it against me, Abram’s refusal to practice their rites? I wept, because if he’d gone to the temple woman, if he’d drunk the goat’s blood, maybe my babies would have come. But he took me outside one clear night.

“You can’t make creation do what we want it too. Whoever’s behind all this. Look up,” he whispered as though he were in a sacred place. I heard that holiness. My neck ached with the looking. Each and every one of the stars pricked my eyes.

Abram spoke, "You know how the sun and moon move across the sky and come back to the same place? And the stars. They tell me when it’s time to plant. You can’t make the Creator do what you want him to do by drinking goat’s blood. We don’t drink the animal’s life to bring life to us. Why should I know a temple prostitute when my body is yours. The old stories say it’s wickedness like that got the world buried in a flood."

I often woke after the sleep that comes with love making, with Abram outside studying the stars. One night I heard him weeping. I had dried up. I had not given him a son or a daughter. I closed my eyes on sand. I held his hand when he came back to our pallet. We left our father’s house, our people, we settled by magnificent oaks, the oaks of Mamre that shaded us, holy enough to beckon us to worship.. There was no temple with rites that came to set my teeth on edge. Abram’s goodness had that effect.

The day he chased the giant scavenger birds off his sacrifice, Abram frightened me. It was like there was a presence I couldn’t see that was telling him things. He took a heifer, a female goat, a ram, a turtledove and a pigeon. He had cut them in half. His fury at chasing the birds, I’d not seen it, not once in all our years. But I did see him lie down, exhausted. I did see a smoking fire pot and flaming torch moving among the pieces, touching them setting them aflame. But there was no one holding the pot or the fire. My head throbbed. I vomited. Was there a baby? No.

That next night Abram took my hand. We walked away from our campfires. He did not hold me this time. His voice cracked, “Look up.” It was a command. I looked. The stars were smeared together. I caught my breath with how tiny I felt. The ground I stood on was bigger, solid, but it felt like I could fall through any minute. “The Presence said I would have as many children as those stars. As many children as sand on the seashore. He said he would give us this country for our own.”

I was silent.

“I believe him,” Abram said. “I believe him.”

After I bled, yet again, I told Abram, “God has given me no children, take Hagar my slave. Her child will be mine to give to God.” I heard them in Hagar’s tent. Her moans and cries bounced off each of the trees. I swaddled my head in cloths.

God gave Hagar a son. She held me in contempt. “Make me,” she said when I asked her to make bread. “Right here in my belly is the one God promised Abram.” She slowed down with every task I asked her. She made eyes at my husband. His face softened towards her. His face wearied toward me. I’m ashamed to say how I treated her. “Get out,” I screamed. And she left.

Hagar returned, her eyes on the ground, “A man told me to come back. At least he looked like a man with the shine we sometimes see around our shadows in the grass when the sun hits it just right, but there was no dew and no shadow. “His name will be Ishmael. The man said he would make a great nation.”

I bit my tongue. Her humility. How can I argue? My tears were as dry as my womb. The promise of the stars, that was for Hagar. Not me. God didn’t speak to me.

I laughed when God told all the men to be circumcised, including Ishmael. I was glad to hear the intake of their breath, the yelps they could not contain. My husband, who chased away crows so we could eat, asked me to not claim our marriage when we stayed in Eygpt. The Pharoah took me to his harem. And I rested in all that luxury. Pharoah gave him livestock and gold as was the custom, to honor a woman’s closest relative. Before Pharaoh could take me to his chambers, locusts and frogs and darkness fell. I told my eunuch I was Abram’s wife. While Abraham bled, when he was cut for the sake of the Presence, I remembered Abraham’s fear, his whoring me out to Pharaoh. It served him right. I don’t know how I could look at his man part and not laugh.

Three strange men came to my husband. They were other worldly, almost creepy. I heard them before a saw them, like the flock of doves flying north to home. I am so tired. He ran to me to to kill one of our bottle calves, told me to bake bread with our finest flour. I leaned my fists into the dough. I cracked the tent to listen and laughed when they said I would bear a child a year from now. I am old now. Ninety years old. Would I have pleasure in my old age? I doubt it.

“Why did you laugh? Is anything too hard for the Lord?” they asked.

“I did not laugh.” I denied my cynicism. How many years have I watched Ishmael, the child God did give my husband grow? These men frightened me. They are the Presence.

“Yes you did,” they said with a smile around their eyes.

That was the night before the cities on the plain exploded into a black whirlwind, smoke covering the sky, clouds so thick. lightning flashed inside and out. Abraham said he’d bargained with God to save Lot and his family. He’d been nothing but trouble, his men fighting with our men, so he took the best land by the cities. He’d been kidnapped so Abraham took our men to rescue him and others. Our shepherds said his wife had turned to a pillar of salt, her back turned away from escape. We never saw him again though we heard he fled into the mountains with his daughters.

When Isaac burst out of my body, Hagar caught him and laid him on my chest. How warm he felt. He nuzzled into me, latched onto my breast, that would later grow sore, but right then I swooned with pleasure. My heart lifted up. Then I fell asleep from the work of giving birth. I sang. Day and night I sang. And Abraham joined in. We danced like it was our wedding day:

Praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord, you his servants; praise the name of the Lord.2 Let the name of the Lord be praised, both now and forevermore.3 From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets, the name of the Lord is to be praised.

4 The Lord is exalted over all the nations, his glory above the heavens.5 Who is like the Lord our God, the One who sits enthroned on high,6 who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth?

7 He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap;8 he seats them with princes, with the princes of his people.9 He settles the childless woman in her home as a happy mother of children. (Ps 113, NIV)

Because after all these years the Lord heard my prayers. Because he kept his promise to me. To me. I watched my boy grow into kind young man, who laughed with delight at the sheep and the goats. I wept a little when it came time to wean him because he would no longer be just mine.

When Abram said he was taking my son, Isaac, the son of my joy and laughter to God’s mountain, to worship God, I asked, my voice caught in my throat, “Where is the sacrifice?” Always before this Abraham took a goat. Did I tell you the Presence changed our names? Abram to Abraham. Sarai to Sarah. But what good were names when my husband was loading our draft donkey with enough wood to burn a body. I know how people worship their gods around here. The first born gets tossed in the fire. But that’s Ishmael. Ishmael who mocked Isaac, on the day he was weaned. We had a great feast and Ishmael mocked him because the inheritance would be his as the first born. I drove him out of the camp. We heard later The Presence showed up for Hagar again. He pointed her to a well, and water, and the promise her son would birth twelve sons.

Abraham clamped his hands on my arms, squeezed. His eyes more frightened than the words. “The Presence, the Presence hasn’t told us wrong yet. He gave us this land. If he said he will make Isaac into a great nation, he will.”

I looked at the holy mountain in the distance. “This is not the Presence who showed you the stars and promised your son would bless the world. Don’t come back here.”

I watched my son’s new sandals that I had crafted, dancing in the dust, as he walked with his father and our servants. I know my son, excited for a new adventure. I watched that faithful donkey walk toward that damnable holy place until they were out of sight. I poured wine and tore bread. I poured wine again. I drank and I ate. I drank.

The strange priest/king of Salem who offered my husband bread and wine, with the words, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth and blessed be God most high who has delivered your enemies into your hand” I wanted him to walk up to the tent, I wanted him to say the promise was true but all I heard was sand hitting the walls, the door flapping.

And yet, and yet, thousands of years in the future, Sarah was commended. As the writer to the Hebrews says, "By faith Sarah herself received the power to conceive even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore."(Heb. 11:11 - 12)

Who knows how we will be commended, as we live our ordinary, hard lives, as we fight to believe the promises. Sometimes I'm struck by fear, the question, will I be faithful, am I faithful? The powers of darkness can fall on us, preaching fear and lies, but they are mere shadows, that frighten, that hold no power, even though they can rattle us like an earthquake rattles shelves.

Martin Shaw has said the fairies sit around their fires watching our lives like grand stories. Maybe he's talking about the saints, a great cloud of them, praying over our lives. Maybe that crowd is full of angels, whirring with strange wings and faces. I have forgotten them, and even the grace of our animals, tending to us. And the saints, a great cloud of them,

As a barren woman, missing the children and grandchildren who were never conceived, I can take heart in Sarah's story and St. Paul's commendation from Isaiah: "Rejoice oh barren one who does not bear; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than than those of the one who has a husband"(Gal 4:25, ESV). It was Sarah who birthed the child of promise, and like Sarah's son we are children of promise, a promise that kicks us in the shins and says, "What about there is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus don't you understand?"

Okay, one more thing. I made the short list for the Masters Review Best Emerging Writers 2025 anthology for the essay, "How I Shucked Who People Thought I Was Or a Virgin and the Writer's Workshop." This is one of the most vulnerable things I've written, part of the memoir I've avoided these last few years. They say some nice things. Here's the link. https://mastersreview.com/best-emerging-writers-2025-shortlist/

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I walk out and the soybeans are fattening from patches barely turning yellow, to big swathes of yellow that remind me of the slow changing color where gray horses fade from dark steel to white. One day the corn is green and the next it’s withered, drying rapidly on these dry days. A few leaves are turning.

The door between seasons is swinging open. I wake up to ominous darkness like there’s a storm on the move, but it’s only the dark before the dawn. Bruce and I walk the dog after the evening news and already the sun is dropping behind the distant woods, slowly moving south. Liminal. These are supposed to be the moments when heaven draws near.

My walks have become a cue to be still and let my senses bless the Lord. Even my aching legs offer thanks. My footsteps on gravel, right foot--thanks. Left foot thanks. And my eyes looking at the distant trees that farmers left, that spread their shadows underneath them, their seeing says thank you. My ears hear the neighbor’s dog barking sometimes even before we come out. When she runs the fence, her gallop looks like waves on a lake. The fields are loud with August field bugs, a noise I touch when I pick at a locust smashed on the road.

There’s Omalola looking up at me or stopping with that look which says I want to go sniff. She sings praise as she trots alongside me, eyes up begging for a kibble. She glares because it’s her turn to sniff. She has not been an easy dog. I’ve learned that when she barks and pulls on the leash and makes a ruckus and it’s time to stop, it’s best I glare at her until she turns her head. I try not to yell. Like Mrs. Horse who nips at me, the ruckus spring up when I am distracted, my nose buried in my phone.

When I’ve lost control, hurt flashed in her eyes, a thud hits my gut and she withdraws. This dog is breaking through the scar tissue that has built up since Tessie died. You can say goodbye too many times. I feel so vulnerable I wonder if we should get another dog to keep her company and to carry the load of my affection. But a puppy sounds like a lot of work and the possibility of overwhelm by adding some chaos might not be a good idea.

Doesn’t it say, “Let all that has breath praise the Lord?” (Ps 150:6). I’ve only just now started to learn how to praise the Lord, how to switch out of “Lord be merciful to me a sinner,” or “Lord bring healing or peace or comfort to someone else”, to “Glory be to the Father and to the son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning. Is now and ever shall be. World Without End.”

Even the dreadful Psalm that begins “My God, my God why have you forsaken me” also notes that God is enthroned on the praises of Isreal.” Seems to we unlock God’s power when we offer praise and thanksgiving.

I walk and sometimes find silence, and that’s supposed to help us find God’s presence. Sometimes I think silence comes easily because of I have mild cognitive impairment, my brain is emptying. When I hear stories about how the saints turn on like light bulbs and birds land on their shoulders and bears come for a peaceful visit, I think how cool it would be to be a saint, but I am nowhere near being a saint because I am not conscious of how deeply sinful I am.

I’m told the saints who are close to God are the ones close to being knocked into “Woe is me for I am lost. I am a man of unclean lips and I come from a people of unclean lips.” I was closer as a girl who wept for her sins daily. I’m not sure I can bear that awareness these days. Wasn’t the holy of holies full of incense to protect the priest from burning up in God in the raw, glory brighter, hotter than lightning? Don’t we see through a glass darkly? Might that protect our eyes, our mortal flesh?

Our Lutheran church says, “Most merciful God, we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean.” Well, I can no longer confess “by nature I am sinful and unclean.” That kind of shame drills down not to humility but something else, a denial of who we are as God’s image. And not only that but God himself became incarnate—fully one of us.

After calling us to "rejoice in the Lord," Psalm 100 says, “it is he who made us, and we are his, we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.” Since he made us, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

So during the confession, if I’m paying attention, I close my mouth for those words. Later it says, “We justly deserve your present and eternal punishment.” Well, I’ve come to believe something different. Jesus didn’t come to punish us. He came to rescue us from our sins, which stick to us like stinging nettles. He rescued us from death by plunging into it, so that we will never be separated from him, not even when we die. I’ve heard God pleading in the Old Testament to his people to return to him the fountain of living water. But we don’t. Human wickedness is obvious. But so is human goodness. And Lord knows I need his help to “do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

“I confess that I have sinned against you in thought, word and deed, by what we have done.” It’s genius to spell out where we have turned away from life. Wasn’t it Moses in Deuteronomy that begs his people to choose life? But we don’t. We choose outrage and rage, justifying ourselves.

Pastor Richard, just this week, says in his Connected in the Word blog:

“True healing can only begin when we can confess the Truth that Paul confesses in the verse above – Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief!… Until you can look in the mirror and see a sinner – You will never know peace, never know healing, and never know joy.”

It hurts to see myself in the mirror. I can’t bear that kind of self-hatred, which in itself can be a sort of pride. “I’ve done badly” has run too many times through my head when I have been pushing hard at “doing God’s work.”

Though Pastor Richard and Paul’s words do carry life, I wonder when we get to the peace part, the healing part and the joy part.

No I’m not a saint. Though I have caught a halo in the grass when the sun catches the dew just right. Check it out for yourself. Everyone catches the light just so. Those wet mornings are glorious but if we walk up the gravel road into the sun, Omalola’s paws become coated in ag lime. I have to haul her to the bathtub, turn on the water, and rinse her paws.

Last week the following aired on our local NPR station, WNIJ:

I confess I have sinned against you by what I have done…and by what I have left undone. These are words that are spoken every Sunday. I have a good idea of the things I have done, but undone? Not so much.

Things undone fly through our minds. They are ways we could help. But the resistance can look like “I don’t have the time. I don’t want to intrude. What will they think? I can’t afford it. I can just send a text.” Then they fade. We don’t even know to confess them.

Not to make a show of my good works, but this week, Bruce and I pushed against the resistance and swung by the hospital to visit a friend, whose husband was in the ICU, where visitors aren’t allowed. When we walked in my friend’s daughter thanked us because she could not bear to see her father so ill. It’s a gift to us to be a healing presence, to be where God wanted us to be, in a sacred place.

What would have happened if I’d given in to my hesitation about intruding? Nobody would have known differently, but there would have been a hollow like a dried river not filled with living water.

The other day we pulled up to our house and saw a jar with fresh flowers on our porch. A neighbor we don’t know well, had left it for us, with hopes they would brighten our day. They’ve brightened our weeks.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective. (If you want to hear my read it for WNIJ, click here.

The things left undone. Not packing up the extra clothes in my closet, the extra kitchen goods, books I bought that aren’t what I’d hoped, old books, my old bicycle and taking them to a thrift store. Some early church father or other, said it’s a sin to keep excess stuff that others could use. There's no place in holding on for sentimental sake. I guess Dante placed people who buy more things than you need at a lower level in hell.

The things left undone. Not inviting neighbors over for a sort of block party. Heck not inviting one over for dinner because my kitchen table is piled high.

Things left undone: Answering Mrs. Horse's call to spend time with her. Bringing another horse to keep her company, which I cannot do. One horse is enough. Two is too many. (The vet assures me she is doing fine.)

The things left undone: People urge me to stand up to the people celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death. There’s that hum of “You don’t want to be the person who was silent when Hitler took power.”

Well, I guess I can name off some sins. (There’s an exercise called Examen that urges us to think through our thanksgivings and our confessions before we sleep at night. But I’d rather read a book to drop my eyelids.)

Thursday, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

I walk out heartbroken, speaking my prayers today—prayers for Charlie Kirk’s widow and children, prayers of complaint, prayers for friends, prayers for the country. When I turned towards the sun, it blinded my eyes so badly, if it weren’t for the Ford F150’s headlights, I would have walked into his bumper. Overnight the corn has died. Bright patches of yellow are spreading through the beans.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination and people’s celebration of it, their naming conservatives they think should die, saddens me more than frightens me. I saw memes that took his words out of context, chewed down to something clever and awful. So what if anyone says things people don’t agree with, it doesn’t mean they deserve to be assassinated. I don’t have the mind or desire to argue or do anything more than weep for the people who are choosing death, choosing violence against people who see the world differently. I told Facebook not to show me these kinds of posts. It hasn't.

Free speech how fragile. Kirk faced people, in person, and listened to their ideas, and offered well researched and well thought out responses. And was shot for it. And other Americans are celebrating his death.

Je suis Charlie Kirk.

Things left undone: the essay I mentioned last week, where, as a woman in grad school without boyfriends, writing about virginity, people thought I was a lesbian, including my mother. When no I am not. But how can I tell my story, which is complex when the cultural narrative pushes the idea if people think you’re gay, then you are. If it’s published what kind of hell will I catch? I might even lose some of you. Would this be something you’d care to read?

Things left undone: my political opinions because I don’t care for the ensuing drama and challenge that demands I support my view though it is just a comment, the harpy insults, and a brain that is no longer able to spout facts that support my opinions. And there’s my own commitment to relationships with people more left sided than I am.

But are they committed to a relationship with me because I believe many of things Charlie Kirk stood for (the real things, not the sloppy memes taking his words out of context)? Of course there were things I see differently as well. Do they choose the depth and breadth of our friendship that allows us to see things differently, or do they want to kill me too?

As I was walking, a neighbor stopped his pick up. I should know the make but I don’t. We exchanged a few words, a rural version of talking over the fence. My tears welled up. We wonder if there’s a civil war coming. Later I listened to America This Week:

Matt Taibbi says, “I think for the people who are fans of Charlie Kirk, don’t go down that road. That’s what everybody wants.”

Walter Kirn responded, “You’re being herded into a net, by the way. All of your rhetoric, all of your words all of your institutions, have been pre-selected for persecution. If you’re on the right, I’m going to tell you something about my last 62 years on earth. You’re not very good at this game You’re better at the ballot box. You’re better in your church. You’re better at your school board. Right wing violence, right-wing fundamentalist, aggressive street behavior has not been successful in America.”

I fear we are in the verge of something like genocide. Perhaps the only way to pull back from the brink is to heed Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ words in Not in God’s Name:

“To be cured of potential violence towards the Other, I must be able to imagine myself as the other. The Hutu in Rwanda has to experience what it is like to be a Tutsi. The Serb has to imagine himself a Croat or a Muslim. The antisemite has to discover he is a Jew” (179).

I put my hand on the side of his truck before he drove off, a work truck from the Pipeliners breaking up our talk. I didn’t have the heart to finish my mile. I turned toward home.

Martin Shaw says a witch’s energy is cold, one that breaks relationships and drives us away from the community, sprouts loneliness. Maybe that’s why St Anthony had to fight his demons out there in the desert because he had chosen the four walls of his cell and the bright, sand with blank blue sky, no breaks for rain, day after day.

I was finishing up chores in the barn, when Craig, another neighbor, called. He asked me to take his mother to get her hair done. I smiled and said, "Of course," to a chance to love my neighbor in a tiny way and break that witch curse of loneliness by our chats between her place and town and back. He asked me if I’d play chauffer for her during harvest. Of course.

The end of the confession says, “For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name.”

That we may delight in your will and walk in your ways to the glory.

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This Sunday, September 7, 2025, happens to be my mother’s death day. Forty-four years ago, she gave birth to her death on Labor day. The night before, I’d dreamed of a city dropping down to the headlands, where I used to sing hymns while cantering my horse. I had released her. It’s also the day after Omalola’s third birthday.

Every Sunday, I listen to Martin Shaw’s stories while I do chores. Often they act as a prompt when I am trying to find a way into what I want to say here. This past week he told the story of The Singing Bone about two brothers who set out to rid the countryside of a wild boar.

Shaw says: The boar has a long and jagged history with men, especially in the area of Celtic myth. It was a boar that tusked the Irish hero Dermot from groin to throat, it was a boar that had at Tristan’s thigh, King Arthur chased one till he was half-mad the length of Britain, you’d be hard not to see it as emblematic of the Grail King’s wound.

I’ve even heard stories of domesticated pigs killing a person and eating them on the spot. You don't want to live near a pig farm.

Here’s an expanded version of my comment. I have also added some things sparked by Shaw's telling of the second part of The Singing Bone in his essay Liturgies of the Wild.

While I was thinking what to say, I walked out of the barn without filling Mrs. Horse's buckets, thinking I was through with chores. But I saw the wagon with the water I’d hauled from the house, the buckets full. Forgetting her water is not trivial. A horse will colic, a potentially deadly malady, if they don’t get water. I’d already locked up the gates, so I had to slip through them to open them up. I carry the weight in my right hand, and lift the bucket to slosh it in.

Shaw tells how the wild boar was so fearsome and dark no one dared pursue it. Until two brothers thought they’d try for it. As it turns out a little man gives the younger brother a black spear and he kills the boar, winning the gold and the King’s daughter. But his brother, having been drinking at the tavern, sees his brother's success, gets him drunk and knocks him upside the head while they were walking across a bridge. Shaw says this is a Cain and Abel story, where Cain’s envy towards Abel, brings sin into the world. He murders Abel.

Oh this story touched on old aches--envy rose up fierce in my relatives when my family fell asleep, and it would be improper to tell stories that have been ground to dust. Stories that are mulched into soil that grows clover and timothy and milkweed. Envy stung when a former colleague's new book was announced. I just tossed it to God like I toss the ball to Omalola and bought her book. Child of These Tears looks like a good read about a frontier woman who is kidnapped by a Mohawk tribe who seeks counsel from a Jesuit spiritual director. (And yes like Omalola with the ball, envy, old hurts come back. And I toss them again.)

Good reads are hard to come by these days. This week I read a novel that shall remain nameless because I was furious that it left me with no hope. The book ended with the human race going extinct, people sacrificing themselves to the goddess so there could be unity. There was no hope our species survived by the book’s end. As I worked at trying to follow the dramatic situation, I hoped for a Deus ex machina like the one CS Lewis wrote into That Hideous Strength, where heavenly, angelic powers and the earthly powers of Merlin and animals converge to deliver us from technocrats who call themselves NICE. I kept reading for hope, but it never came—just a crucifixion to a pagan god and the survivor, a wounded part human part machine entity. The earth is dead, its rains so acidic it burns people’s flesh. Our species is wiped out for the sake of an entity that has sought our destruction for millennia. I didn’t sleep well that night.

Another book: Not Heaven but Paradise took me inside a terrorist, a migrant and a cynical woman’s viewpoints and drew the thread to clear redemption, and a book I still think about. These characters were so well drawn that I became sympathetic to the migrant and the terrorist. I saw how the CIA by its cruelty drove that character to strapping on a bomb. I saw how how hard the migrant worked to cross the Mediterranean and find a way to survive. (The book is set in Spain.) I saw the emptiness of a female artist disrespecting the power of sexuality and crying “Me too" unjustly. The narrator converted to compassion, by providing a shelter for other migrants at the end. Even though it dealt with real human evil I was left with hope.

I look for hope like what I find in the Psalmist, who sings:

“I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up and have not let my foes rejoice over me. Oh Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me. Oh Lord you have brought my soul from Sheol; you restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit” (Ps 30: 1 – 3.)

The world can be incomparably beautiful and incomparably sad. I can bend down to look at a tiny flower or look across the barn yard at the moon rise. And I can pick up a dying butterfly in the road or try to gather up a mama cat and her kitten from a high traffic area, only to be hissed at by the baby, knowing we might drive them into traffic if we reached for them. Their crouching in a cross connect box broke my sleep.

This week I sat with a friend and her daughter while her husband and father was passing from this life to the next. And didn’t have to do anything but breathe presence and peace and listen and be honored having been welcomed to these most holy, most sacred moments. I thought how Bruce or I will likely be sitting in the hospital one day, in a long, painful vigil while the other falls asleep. And trust that we will both be in the Lord’s hands.

We need more words that speak to the pain,

“To you, O Lord, I cry, and to the Lord I plead for mercy: What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? Hear, O Lord, and be merciful to me! O Lord, be my helper!” (Ps 30: 8 – 10, ESV)

And in that heart cry our grief-clothes switch to sundresses:

“You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. Oh Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.” (Ps 30: 11- 12)

The Singing Bone story touched on old aches. As far as a sibling rivalry story, my brother and I played out a Jacob and Esau story. After Jacob wrestled with the angel, Esau's face looked like the face of God, when they met. All those years Jacob and Esau spent away from each other, which sometimes is what it takes, and they reconciled. (My brother was gone before that could happen but still the story is true for us.)

And so the question of envy returns. As far as my relatives’ envy that I didn't talk about above I think they withheld the secrets that would have released me--the truth that sets you free. I did not have the courage to ask straight up, though my aunt hinted at things. So I spun stories like personal myths to make my own sense.

My brother was Jacob or maybe the dragon hoarding the inheritance. I got a lawyer and we settled up. Neither he, nor my aunts, nor his widow seemed to think I had a right to my parents' stuff. Then I did the long hard work of walking through my anger, writing and rewriting the story to make The River Caught Sunlight. I practiced blessing my enemy. I asked God not to let me grow into a bitter old woman and I am not.

Shaw asked:

“So, my question is this: what is laying waste to your fields?

“Is there something in your life that is rendering your crop useless? It’s not a failure of imagination to enter a story that literally. Let’s imagine we are the land, with dangerous energies prowling it.”

When I walk towards the north, just as I turn back towards home, I hear the neighbor’s pigs flipping their feed bin. Clang. Clang. Sometimes I smell them. They are future bacon. Years ago, we purchased a half a pig from these neighbors. Across the road, I have seen fawns standing at roadside, poised to run one way or the other. And I have seen red headed woodpeckers, a most beautiful bird, their white marks flashing, flying above the dead oaks.

Silencing, silence, self-censorship is the boar in my story. What a great image for that strong resistance I often feel when I sit down to write these essays. A charging, drooling boar hog, fangs swept down from his snout. Pig eyes. Intelligent eyes. Stink. I hear the voice: "This is no good, you just wrote about it, you're talking too much, it's too much work. I'm tired!" Parents, poetry school, progressive culture have all growled these words.

Poetry workshop taught me to be afraid of my audience, something I’ve not quite shaken, despite my readers being very kind. And so when I sit down to write, I’m not a little afraid that words might not come. I want to craft goodness.

I have tossed out one of my most vulnerable essays in my "Baptisms of a Former Sorta Evangelical" essay collection to a literary contest. I don't expect them to publish it, but someone had to have read it, at least a few sentences. I keep checking Submittable to see if it’s been rejected, because it appears the literary magazine has already awarded its winners, but the submission manager says it’s still in progress. Sending this story, like telling a secret, has made my stories less fearsome to speak. (I've picked up Glenn Loury's Self-Censorship to see what he says about all this.) I still hope to offer them here, when I get enough presence to shape them into shape.

When whatever I'm writing rolls out of my fingers, I dance off to distraction, to social media, which like the above dystopian story, can fill me with dread over how our culture seems to be spinning apart.

As William Butler Yeats says in The Second Coming:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

I will think of that spear because I've got one, and a two-edged sword. The Psalm that says he turns our mourning into dancing and brings us up from the depths of Sheol. As St. Paul says, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom 8:31). And the Psalmist says, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; who shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (Ps. 27: 1, ESV).

In the second part of The Singing Bone story Shaw reminds us that the black spear meant the death of the boar and the boy. (The brother knocks him up the backside of his head. Later one of his bones is found and sings the truth of his story.) Shaw says:

“One of the areas that haunts me is the passing of the black spear to the young lad, and that within the day not only is the boar killed, but so is he. It hardly seems like a blessing. So much initiatory work is about sacrifice that may bless the lives of others. That’s what that much maligned term heroism really means. Any great change for the good in our lives is going to involve a little death. It’s going to cost.”

Shaw and the story are right. It does cost. And will cost. And it will be the cross.

The saints say we’re supposed to seek silence, but I wonder if we can seek it so hard, we block our emotions, let alone the Lord’s own words by repeating “Jesus Christ Have Mercy on Me a Sinner” over and over again. The Jesus Prayer can be wonderful for reminding us to seek mercy and to remember our need for it, but I wonder if we would do well to speak other prayers like the Psalms or our own intercessions or thanksgiving. We can be so silent, I wonder if we forget how to speak. When a friend asked about where I grew up and what my story was, I could barely put one word together with another.

While I listened to these stories, while I thought about them, I powdered the floor of Mrs. Horse's stall to neutralize the ammonia. Bruce had rocked back heavy, heavy mats to clean out the urine-soaked shavings we scatter underneath. Mrs. Horse was quiet. I scrubbed her spine. Her lip curled with pleasure. One foot is bruised, so we've not driven her, but she doesn't seem lame. She would like me to come by more often.

I'd like to highlight that Martin Shaw has a new book coming: Liturgies of the Wild: Myths that Make Us. If you're interested check it out and pre-order it because pre-orders convince a publisher to promote the book.

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I started this essay awhile ago but never posted it. I needed something to offer, that I didn’t have to pull out of whole cloth for this week. It’s funny how days that are open are easy to fritter. It might not be all bad to write a rough plan for the next day. At any rate this is the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman found in Matthew 15: 21 – 28. This was written without the help of AI except for looking up names. The pictures are from around the farm.

I saw him walking past the temple to Melqart, our cities’ protector and name for Hercules. How many times I’d prayed that the strong god would heal my daughter, but he had no strength against the hate bubbling out of her spirit. I could bear it no longer.

The man had the same look that swept past my daughter’s face when she came at me with the knife I used to cut vegetables, Maryam’s face otherworldly, fierce. We’d just been talking about how onions grow, buried in the ground, how we peel the paper off. I explained it’s how people are when they get closer. They peel off the paper and the glistening insides are shown. Sometimes we cry, I said. I was about to throw them, bulbs and stems along with celery into the bone broth. Hiram was roasting the hog we just slaughtered. I breathed in the smell of a feast.

My ears hurt with her scream, but I was past cowering. “Go ahead. I’m done.” She came right up to my face, her eyes wide with fury, her mouth twisted, the knife at my throat. It felt cold. Her breath smelled like a dead mouse.

As she collapsed, she looked like a cobra under the flute’s spell. Her wailing, “I’m sorry. I'm sorry. I hate myself" was as loud as the paid mourners. She curled into a ball and froze. My husband and his slave had to carry her to her bed. Where did my beautiful daughter go? We were best friends until her curves rounded over and she went the way of women. Whenever we tried to feed her, she hissed, “Don’t feed this ugly body.”

When our doctor sang his spells, she sounded like she was speaking from paradise. She sang how she’d walked in Eden and had run her hands through piles of emeralds and sapphires and diamonds. She’d seen the trees, not cedars, but the death tree and the life tree. All the cedars, even the ones that built Solomon’s temple, are nothing compared. The angel with the white-hot sword swinging back and forth did not scare her. She whispered, "My father was an angel. My mother was like you. I escaped the pit. Let me show you paradise." She reached out her hand. Almost I took it, took the demon, but her eyes terrified me. No vision of paradise was worth the hate.

Our doctor tried whirling until he was in a trance. He tried special incantations, roots and herbs. At least she started eating, though she was dainty, only wanting honey and yogurt and hummus.

The man’s face was otherworldly fierce too but filled with kindness that scared me more than my daughter. But alive, so very alive, unlike the stone of our cities’ protector god. Nikkal, my best friend, said her husband came back from Israel, saying the man healed anyone—deaf, demon possessed, crippled. They said he was the Son of David, come to set Isreal free. A clean wind full of hope blew through me. It was like I sucked in a breeze that blew in from cedars up north. I was drawn to him in the same way I looked in on my daughter sleeping to make sure she was alive. I ran after him, my feet, stepping out of my sandals, the stones piercing them. I did not notice.

“Have mercy on me, Oh Lord son of David, my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” I cried out. His robes flowed like the sea when the swells were rising. His men ignored me and kept walking. “Have mercy on me Oh Lord son of David, my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” I screamed over and over, tears pouring down my face, my daughter’s sleeping and peaceful form in my mind’s eye. And still they walked away.

Do you know how painful it is to ask for help and be ignored?

Still I called out. 'Have mercy on me. Son of David." (After all my city supplied Solomon with timbers for his God’s temple all those years ago. Isn’t there some debt he owes?)

Finally they stopped. I heard his disciples say, “Tell her to go away. We’re tired of her voice. What a loudmouth.”

He looked beyond them to me. “I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He sounded tired, impatient, his body taut with purpose.

All the history of my ancestors being at war with the house of Israel roared forward. They took our land, killed our flocks, decapitated our babies. We married them to make it stop. They said it was because Canaan took the land for himself when it was supposed to be Seth’s when Noah divvied it up. They said we had no right to it, that Canaan’s father should never have looked on Noah drunk and naked. They said God gave Abraham the land.

I stepped up. There was a twinkle in his eye and an unfathomable sadness. And that same ferocity like my daughter’s that was beyond our world. Only his teemed with authority and love. I did not kneel. I am a proud woman, a dyer of purple. People from the east, and north and south buy my cloth.

“Lord help me.” I dropped my eyes.

“It’s not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the puppy dogs.” His voice sounded like newly sawn wood, but full of laughter. I saw our Pomeranians sitting, eyes bright at our table. Even my husband sneaks scraps and I scold.

Before I could think I said, “Yes, even the little dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the masters table.”

“Oh woman, how great is your faith! Be it done to you as your desire.”

Right then, my daughter came running to my arms. Her eyes as bright and alive as his. He opened his arms as she ran past them to mine. I could barely see for the tears. I felt his hand on my shoulder.

His disciples were open mouthed. But I saw the sadness, the set in in the teacher’s jaw, as though some dread destiny was coming too fast. Not long after, we heard how he healed any sick person in the Decapolis. He told us to sit while he broke bread and fish and fed all of us on the hillside. The sun shone on our faces. My daughter took the bread, breaking it, eating it piece by piece.

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Martin Shaw in Live as Large As Homer challenged us to listen for God’s call. Not just listen but have our eyes wide open to a sight as startling as Moses’ burning bush. He says,

What habitual task – our tending of the sheep – may keep us from the vivid signs God gives us? The holy terror of his arrival? – he was afraid to look upon his face. Do we keep our lives uncluttered enough to avoid distraction from such encounters? I am alarmed at the notion I could be so entranced I walk past the messages that God is giving me. What should we be turning aside from?

My phone. My fascination with what’s going on in our politics. I’d do well to open the Mission St. Clare app on my phone and pray morning prayer, a liturgy with promise and scripture embedded, first thing but instead I browse Substack. But the readings for the Daily Office the last few weeks have been about politics as much as the political commentary I read online. David runs from King Saul. Then he takes another man’s wife and kills her husband. He runs from his own son who declares himself King, who murdered his brother who raped his sister. There's all kinds of intrigue and machinations in these stories. And yet he’s called a man after God’s own heart.

And there’s Paul, who's called the chief of all sinners, who created an uproar in Jerusalem, with the religious leaders and the people wanting to kill him. He appealed to the Roman governor who needed 200 hundred soldiers, seventy horsemen and two hundred spearmen to keep him safe from the mob. They left in the middle of the night. Both show how God’s purpose is worked out and these men are delivered through these political machinations.

This week Psalm 118 spoke:

All the nations surrounded me; in the name of the Lord I cut them off! They surrounded me, surrounded me on every side; in the name of the Lord I cut them off! They surrounded me like bees; they went out like a fire among thorns; in the name of the Lord I cut them off! I was pushed hard so that I was falling, but the Lord helped me” (Ps118: 10 – 13, ESV).

I think about the honeybees living in our milk house and the hornet that flew up from Bruce’s arm to his face. Bruce is so allergic to stings he needs an epi pen. But this hornet flew down without touching him. He smashed it with his foot. The bees are so crowded they hang outside the milkhouse, and I wonder if they will break off into another swarm like they did last year. Every spring I’m surprised they have survived the bitter cold. I am also surprised they survive the spray. Our local beekeeper is not interested in capturing them.

And yet the bees that trouble us will be burned up quickly as fire in a thorns. I’ve seen those kinds of fires and they go quick.

And yet bees make honey. David refers to the Lord’s rules as “sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. Moreover by them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward.” (Ps. 19:10- 11) Warned. Keeping them. Reward.

Then there’s Modomnoc whose bees followed him across the Atlantic three times before his Abbott gifted them to him. Paul Kingsnorth tells the story in Telling the Bees if you want to read more.

As I write, I think a little deeper about Shaw’s question: What is the one thing that keeps us from seeing God’s signs? I think perhaps one habitual thing I could turn aside from is being so very hard on myself. St Porphyrios in Wounded by Love identifies this:

Our religion is love, it is eros, it is enthusiasm, it is madness, it is longing for the divine...For many people, however, religion is a struggle, a source of agony and anxiety. That's why many of the 'religiously minded' are regarded as unfortunates because others can see the desperate state they are in...Some such people experience religion as a kind of hell. They make prostrations and cross themselves in church and they say, 'we are unworthy sinners,' then as soon as they come out they start to blaspheme everything holy whenever someone upsets them a little...

In fact the Christian religion transforms people and heals them...

Can you understand the truth? Then you are out in the sun, in the light; you see all the magnificence of creation; otherwise you are in a dark cave (94).

I turn aside when I listen to gravel underfoot. Perhaps there's a burning bush on the road I walk, the faint rainbow, I can barely see, the smoothed out fertile dirt and grass covering the pipeline, Bruce's quiet smile as I toss the ball to Omalola, the back of Mrs. Horse as I brush the dust off and she mugs me for treats.

Shaw says a few sentences down:

As a symbol of suffering, I’d say most of us feel we have tongues burnt on hot coals, and yet God commissions us to speak from them anyway. Most likely from that very duress. We are enough, in the authenticity of our incompleteness. Not ‘enough’ like ‘job done’, enlightened and individuated, but in the eccentric, heart-broken but heart-opened state we may be in.

My tongue has been burned by hot coals, like Isaiah who cried, “I am a man of unclean lips” and God’s angel flew down and touched his mouth with a coal. I’ve fallen to a kind of silence—four drafts of novels that would go with The River Caught Sunlight, but now they sit in notebooks. The icons for their files look black on my computer. Were it not for Libre Word, they’d be lost, except for print copies. Since I’ve been learning that it’s kosher to ask someone in the communion of the saints to pray for us, last fall I asked CS Lewis to help me write. It was through him I received my call to write. And he helped. The words have come easier.

Here's the story how earnest I was about this call. Maybe I should blush:

Rain pelted the roof of the Big Barn, a tin roof high up as a cathedral. The barn reminded me of one with the soaring hand-hewn beams, knot holes of light, and space all the way up to the roof. We stored our hay on the wooden floor in the middle, that I thought of as a threshing floor. It was late winter, snow was melting into ice. I’d taken to having my quiet times there. I could open the doors to the barn and sit on hay that had once been its own furnace we checked by digging our arms down deep, feeling the glow. We’d swung open both doors--these smaller doors that opened onto the barn yard and our horses and the huge back doors, that towered nearly up to the roof, to let the winds blow through, cooling the hay.

I took my Scofield Bible and my border collie and sat on the bales, most like a throne and talked with God. That day it rained, I cried with all the intensity of a sixteen-year-old, my blood up and running, “Oh Lord let me write a vision of glory.” I’d been reading The Chronicles of Narnia for a paper I was writing about C.S. Lewis. God I wanted to write like that.

My call to be a writer began there, in that barn, in that intense desire to create a world for my readers. I know it’s not a popular thing these days to admit to being called to write. Kathleen Norris writes:

Walter Brueggeman, in a book on the prophets entitled Hopeful Imagination, suggests that ‘a sense of call in our time is profoundly countercultural,’ and notes that ‘the ideology of our time is that we can live ‘an uncalled life,’ one not referred to any purpose beyond one’s self.’ I suspect that this idol of the autonomous, uncalled life has a shadow side that demands that we resist the notion that another might be different, might indeed experience a call (41).

When I read these words in A Cloister Walk, they felt like the words of God come to comfort me after a rough year teaching First Year English at Northern Illinois University where I’d caught it on the chin for being different, being other, not suave, cool, or cynical. My stories sprang out of my own life, not wonderfully masked. I clung to autobiography like a rappeller clings to the rock instead of leaning back against the rope and walking down.

But for all this earnestness, I never was published by one of the big five or a reputable indie publisher. Though I came close with personal rejections and an agent, whose last name I’ve forgotten.

For instance, when W.W. Norton liked my query and asked for pages from She Looked at Stars. their personal rejection broke my heart. It came the day my doctor told me he wanted to cut out a tumor in my colon as a personal note saying, “I really enjoyed the characters and how you employed them with complexity without making them too weighty. I feel though that the work does not fit our editorial needs and I decline to make an offer.” To be so close and yet so far. I was so disheartened I would have been happy not to wake up from surgery. True to persistent form I wrote, “How I Made Peace with my Ass,” which earned a penciled personal rejection from the New Yorker. These stories still sit on my computer. If it were not for Libre Word the computer versions would be lost because of how operating systems and software have changed through the years.

My agent said the novel gave her goosebumps when she first read it, that she was 90% sure she could sell it. But she didn’t.

Twenty years ago, full of desire, I wrote: “I don’t know how I’ll survive if no one takes the novel, if my agent signs off on us at the end of the year. I believe in a God who longs to bless us, who answers desires of our hearts, but I also believe in the same God who might be more glorified if this book doesn’t get published, if my soul will be deepened by this disappointment. This is a vulnerable time for me, not a little scary. I sleep a lot by the phone waiting for it to ring with Nancy saying, “We’ve got an offer.”

But I did better than survive because I realized that being fancy published was not going to deliver me. A book deal was in no way, shape or form a savior. It took nearly a decade to revise that novel and by then the publishing industry had changed so much the dream of being published by a New York publishing house was busted. I did self-publish and sold about five hundred copies. Then grew quiet as far as working on the sequels. But the flame, the coal touched to my mouth grew dim, partly because I resented having to pay for the privilege of publishing after I’d paid an editor to work out the damage my MFA program had done. (I was taught to be ironic and understated and literary. But my agent said I was a commercial writer, and my editor taught me how to let emotion come to the page.) It seemed everyone held their hands out for money. Phooey.

Maybe this is where I set down the being hard on myself, because I have written over a thousand pages on my blog and people have read it. I continue to write, airing perspectives for our local NPR station, and I write here, on Katie’s Ground for you. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you open these posts weekly, that I have an audience after so many years of silence.

When Karen Swallow Prior was writing You Have a Calling, I piped up on Facebook because calling is something I’ve leaned into since that day the rain pelted the roof of the big barn. I even used it as a theme to challenge my students to think about what they might do with their lives. I was honored that she wrote the following in the “Good” section of the book:

But Katie says, those years spent revising her novel ‘dumped me into a peace I haven’t been able to shake. This was better for my soul than being published.” She believes now ‘that maybe being small and hidden is closer to what God has in mind when we are told to follow Jesus who emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant.’ She says she feels like a pastor to a small country church with my small readership and am grateful to be read. (112)

I’ve learned through the years, that sometimes the call lies in the small, the hidden, like the nest woven with horsehair that dropped out of the Linden tree.

In Live as Large As Homer Martin Shaw challenged us with the following questions:

As I speculated a few paragraphs back: What do we need to turn aside from? I’d ask us: What task has God for us in our later years? What shame needs to be let go of?

“I may sound like a self-help manual right now but so be it. How are we to open to our full wingspan, even when we’ve lost a few feathers? How do we speak, even when faltering, knocked about, doubting? How do we remain open to joyful labour even when we’re meant to be sloshing about in a big pension and sizing up our favourite assisted dying clinic in Switzerland?

As I listened while dumping water into Mrs Horse's buckets all I could come up with for answers to Shaw’s questions were: “I don't know. I don't know. I don't know, so I'll wait till I see the flames. Hear the Lord’s voice.”

As far as shame holding me back? Maybe I’ll spool out some stories along the way or maybe not. Though I’d very much like to tell the story how I made peace, how I stayed alive to my faith even though I’d started walking with the Lord as a toddler. I’ve heard cradle Christians might not have a living faith without a dramatic conversion. I know evangelicals who are atheists now, while I bless my fundamentalist background. That’s a story I’ve been nudged to tell for twenty years, a story that I’m afraid to tell.

I note what encouragement Shaw offers to those of us who are stepping into our seventies and 80's that we have much to offer people. The other image I have are the colors of the turned leaves as I sat on a rock in the Normanskill and God said, "There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God." It's taken a lifetime to walk into that. Perhaps I’ll tell that story next week.

But this week I saw light arching in a bow over the field, the risen sun so bright in the mist I couldn’t turn and walk toward it, so I walked alongside the light, bent like a rainbow with no color. Twice I saw it, my iPhone catching the arch that I could not see on the second one. I wanted to call it a moonbow, but there was no moon, just fog and a very bright sun. I don’t know what it meant, except I witnessed the enchanted world right before my eyes. I walked past a group of guys standing around their pick ups talking. The new NiCor pipeline had been laid, much of the swath had been groomed, rye and oats growing up already. I pointed at the arch. “Did you see that?” They kept talking.

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The Boone County Fair marks the end of summer and the beginning of school. When I was teaching at NIU, I felt pressure to finish my syllabus during fair week. Hell week, a week of meetings busting with jostling between colleagues--would follow. The social dynamics of our work group were not happy, even though our boss picked parks for our meetings.

Since I've retired, I've nearly forgotten how horrible those weeks were, though the memory echoes. The days are visibly shorter. We walk out in the evening the sun dropping behind the horizon earlier and rising later. It’s easier to sleep with less light slamming our hallway. All summer Bruce has left the TV to watch the sun fall. We've found a few painted lady butterflies knocked down on the road. The moon rises quickly off the horizon. There are few specks of fireflies. They seem to be hanging around later this year. My friend the redwing blackbird has disappeared. The year is falling toward winter.

The first day I walked through the Fair gates, we hurried to the Home Economics building to see how we did with our entries. I enter photographs and Bruce enters a woodwork project, lately a Christmas ornament, and apple butter and blackberry jam. For all the pictures I entered this year, I earned a fourth place. Most of my pictures are placed on the bottom of the boards, though I have won in the past. And Bruce earned a blue for each of his, because he is the craftsman in our house.

When we walked through the crowds, crossing through the giant farm implements, a giant spray machine with arms that looked like they spanned an acre, I felt the hollow spaces of all the people who are not here. There's grief when you've been to the same event for forty years, an event like a survey stake, that pins the corner of the years together. You see people you knew as children, now adults with their own families. You see their parents’ white hair, faces deep lines and gait stiff, supported by a cane and you realize that's us, though Bruce and I aren't parents.

Years past it seemed the fair was about our parents--the generation that was a buttress to ours, a bulwark against mortality. Once they slipped away, we were next, we were the elders, the old folks. I'd dread seeing Bruce's mom who gave me a thrill of fear because I never knew what she would say or if I'd be met by the cold shoulder. We'd see Marion and Reynold watching the draft horses. They were the first people outside his mother that Bruce introduced me to, who were his second parents after his father died. We chatted with Jane Johnson who was a very close friend of Bruce's mother, who became my close friend, when we helped Bruce's mom in the last months of her life, Jane who was with her when she died. Jane and Marge were on again, off again friends through the years, who was present to the end. I learned how it can be with good friends—close, then not close, then close again when it mattered. I learned how good friends survived backstabbing. But now I won't find them standing by the draft horse show or eating chicken or pork chops at the Grange.

Like other Saturdays at the fair we stood at the fence and watched the horses. These years we don’t get there in time to watch the six horse hitch because they hitch first thing in the morning, and I am slow to wake up. But we found Bruce’s former boss and his wife in the same place Marion and Reynold used to stand and began a long conversation about our lives while the horses changed harness from the three horse unicorn hitch to the end of the competition two horse hitches.

We sat with Mr. Peterson's son, Kenny, on the last day, Sunday, and talked about those things a son must deal with when the last of his parents have gone. There was talk of lawyers, and land, and cleaning out the house--the beloved humor of odd things left--and the precious memories laid over memorabilia. We often ran into his parents at the grange, a few years ago, both of them getting around with a “go go”, one of those scooters elderly people use to manage distances they can no longer walk. Before Mr. P died Kenny had brought his father's “go go” to his room.

Some people have been a bright thread, this being the only time we visit in person. The fair is full of strangers but there are enough people we know from the community that it feels like a neighborhood, though not like it was forty years ago.

Walking past the livestock barns, cattle, swine, sheep, I noticed women wearing dresses, as if going to the fair was a hot date. To my mind, it was just hot, and humid, my clothes soaked by the time we walked out. I also remembered my first formal date with Bruce. We stood under a tree in moonlight while I tried to talk him out of choosing me, but he answered every resistance. And my body rolled in lyrical waves pulled like the ocean dances with the moon. We set a date for the fair because he wanted to show me the draft horses. My heart was lifted up by the power of the draft horses pulling shiny show wagons painted white, green, red, blue. I almost raised my hands in praise. That day he took me home to his mother who was cleaning house and put off in a sweet way that he'd not warned her I was coming. She knew that I was the one. So did her dog, who bit me, while Bruce opened the door to go inside because the dog knew I would pull him out of her house, that I would bring the grief of a mother letting go.

And then there was the time, two years into my marriage with Bruce, I began to understand why his mother called the Boone County Fair a vacation. I'd been there before, walked around and looked at the exhibits. My feet hurt, it was dusty, the animals smelled. But that year I'd lived here two years, long enough to know some of the exhibitors. That made all the difference. I saw what Marge meant. I found community and for a week became a part of the best that small town living has to offer. You’d walk along and run into someone from church or the neighborhood, stand and catch up long enough for your legs to stiffen.

It was the summer my brother died, when I needed to walk away from my grief. It wasn’t so much talking to people about my pain and frustration as it was being with them, watching the animals, being a part of a yearly ritual that for us became forty years old. The Fair has is been running for 169 years but the Grange has run it since 1957. When Bruce was a boy he attended it over at Spencer Park. In the commercial building he chatted with a gentleman who sells fudge, the smell fills that corner of the building. He said he'd been coming to the fair since it was held at Spencer. Its current location is off Highway 76 on 153 acres just north of Belvidere. The Granges of Boone County own it. According to Boone County's Page Fair History,

"We will have about 3,000 head of livestock, everything from rabbits to draft horses and 6,000 non-livestock entries, everything from quilts to corn to cakes to photos. Our superintendents do an outstanding job promoting participation in their various departments..

"Plus it's a place where people from the city can learn about agriculture. They can see a cow being milked, a chick being hatched, a sheep being sheared, and a team of six draft horses being hitched to a wagon. It's all up close and personal and they can ask the farmer or rancher questions. And the farmer or rancher will be more than happy to answer. It's probably more important than ever that people understand where their food comes from and how it's raised. A place where you can see agriculture in action, firsthand.

"The Boone County Fair is also a grand social event, a once a year six day community family reunion. Where you can just go and sit and see old friends and make new ones."

It was like entering a religious pageant that cleansed, refreshed, and entertained at the same time.

That year, I held one of those giant draft horses while the Buerkleys hitched them one by one to the show wagon. Their power lifted me up. These are no gentle giants. Our love for draft horses was born, but they were too much horse, too big, too spirited, for us. When we met a friend’s Norwegian Fjord we saw a smaller horse that could do it all-draft work, driving, riding. We subscribed to Small Farmers Journal and dreamed about owning a small self sustaining farm. Since we lived in town, we had no hope for moving to the country, until twenty years later, when Bruce’s mom went home to be with the Lord and we bought our farm. It was at the Boone County Fair I called to go look at Tessie, a day later driving to Wisconsin, on what became one of the happiest days of my life, when I purchased her. And now, even she is gone.

I remember running into Karen Tuttle who is a quiet woman with black hair and glasses. She is creative and thoughtful, measuring her words as if they were flour for a recipe. But tough. She can tell the truth with kindness. The words were fierce, corrective, but said with such care, it didn’t matter. With three boys, two of whom were this side of adolescence she had to be. Karen pulled me alongside to watch her prepare her sons' cattle for show and pulled me out of the way of a bull, who'd broken free and charged. I would have tried to stop him like you would a horse, but bulls aren’t horses. He would have plowed through me. That summer she invited Bruce and I for a picnic at White Pines state park and invited me to ride with her to the State Fair to help her keep track of her sons. When grief comes, people you don't expect reach out.

This year, we ran into Karen’s son Brett, newly married, and fifty years old, proud of his farm, proud of her help, proud of his work. We were in the commercial building where I was headed towards a vendor who sold crystals. Those polished round stones feel good in my hands. I don’t know if they carry healing or energy like the young woman selling them said. Though they are made by the mighty forces melting and/or crushing them into the stones I held, so maybe so. Jesus said the stones would cry out if the children were hushed when they cried, “Hosanna. Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” when Jesus entered the city five days before he would assume his throne and die.

Later we stopped by the chicken barn, where Brett’s parents are superintendents for the chicken show. This year there were eight hundred chickens entered. The chairs were comfortable as we settled in for another long conversation with Karen and Dan. Karen said she didn’t know how they would handle setting up for 800 chickens at the beginning of the week, but one family showed up asking how could they help? Then another and another. We talked about what it means to be old, to have grown children and to tend to a 97-year-old mother. She heard Jesus’ question before he died, “Can you not wait with me for an hour?” So she will wait with her mother and put her first. We swapped memories of a church we had in common years ago. I spoke of the terror of having no one to watch over us when frail old age catches up to us. But she replied, “You never know who will show up." True. True. I guess Bruce and I will have to trust the Lord and how He will provide. For once we exchanged phone numbers with the promise we would get in touch during the year, so we didn’t go so long without talking.

Bruce and I didn't talk to many people, but we talked deeply with the ones we did. I came home feeling like my mind had been put back in my head. I think when you're quiet too much, you forget how to speak. My speech therapist said it's good for our brain health to talk to different people because you have to adjust your words to what they say. This fair it was a relief to find an equal exchange where I had to stay on my toes, responding to a back and forth, where we were both heard, not as one-sided venting on either side but good talk.

And then this week, Bruce and I returned home to a surprise on our porch. Our neighbor, Kiryn, had dropped off a bouquet of flowers, saying on a torn piece of paper bag, that said, "Just wanted to bring some extra sunshine to your day! Hope all is well!" I look at the flowers and see that Bruce and I aren’t as alone as I sometimes think we are.

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Because there was so much pain and so much grief around the time my brother died—I was abandoned by my extended family, mostly because I lived here and they lived there--I somehow got onto the idea of blessing my enemy. To grab onto this and start practicing it was in itself a grace. Here is a piece I wrote and sent off to This I Believe. They did not air it, though it is on their website.

God bless my enemy. Bless her. God.

For whatever reason she is someone I can’t confront. I can’t talk to her about what’s troubling us. Often she’s nothing more than a wet hen pecking at me incessantly—you aren’t worthy, you don’t belong here, you’re not good enough. The wounds are subtle, but I bleed.

I know my enemy because she sits like a cocklebur on my soul, the prickers so sharp it does no good to talk it out, the pain only nestles, making itself comfortable and me obsessing: I could have said…I should have replied… But anything I might say to defend myself would be met by an accusation I cannot answer. My brain rides a spin that skips, the music played over and over. I bore my friends. They withdraw.

I do not want to be married to my enemy because of the hate, but I am harnessed to her as surely as two Clydesdales are bound by heavy leather straps, tugs, and the load they are pulling. Besides, just because she hates me, and sometimes it’s just that, her hatred, it doesn’t mean I have to hate her back.

There is wisdom behind Jesus’ commands to love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you. It’s a wisdom that reflects the saying that when we hate others it’s because we are uneasy with ourselves. But sometimes it’s easier to hate someone out there, who has done us wrong, than our own souls, who did someone else wrong. How can I pray such a thing when I hate her? I hate the woman. There I said it.

God bless her.

I hate her.

God bless her.

I swear it’s like shoving my shoulder against a Clydesdale that will not move, her quarter ton hoof resting on my foot. Bless. Her. My enemy. I lean into the horse. Punch her flank. The mare turns her head, looks at me with kinder eyes than her hoof, leans into me. Bless the nag. God. Get her off my foot.

God what am I saying? I can’t tell you what to do. I can only trust your Spirit’s stepping between us, with a language more like groans and I think about my dog as he stretches out of sleep to waking, with low throated greetings like nickers from a horse.

God does something, or the prayer’s own power, or the goodness being traded for evil, but some magic of goodness happens. He feeds her, my enemy, pouring oats into her manger. She steps forward. I pant as the blood shoots into my foot. The pain eases.

I have seen this blessing work a slow miracle in the most intractable of relationships, where I had no hope we’d ever speak again, but there we were, talking and listening with compassion. So this is one thing I believe and practice. I bless her, my enemy. And in blessing her I bless myself.

I pretty much wrote this nearly forty years ago, a few years into my marriage. Bruce’s mom was raised in a culture that demanded children take care of their parents no matter what. I was raised by parents who loved me so much they pushed me out of the nest. Scripture seems to support this: A man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife. Of course the apron strings should be cut. Bruce thought so too. But his mother, Marge, felt abandoned. Her friends said it wouldn’t matter who she married, but she still hurt my feelings. I hurt hers.

I don’t know if my therapist recommended I do this, or if I was reading the Bible one day and decided to try it. I do know so many terrible things were happening in a few short years that I did not want to be bitter the rest of my life. The best way to explain it is to say that by the time I was thirty-two my mother, my father and my brother were dead, and Bruce’s family made it clear, that no, I was not one of them.

I did not want my hatred to bind me to Bruce’s mother. So I started blessing her. There were times I could feel her disapproval across the seven miles from Poplar Grove to Belvidere. I’d obsess, trying to argue back that I’m not as bad as you say, but you need to let your son live his life. You need to let me live mine. Obsessing did no good, so when I’d think of her, I’d turn my mind to blessing. This does not make me a saint or a good person, just practical. Please don’t think I’m better than I am. Underneath my prayers, all kinds of hatred, resentment, and fear swirled. God knew it, but as an act of obedience, I’d pray he’d bless her.

Things went from a working, speaking relationship to not speaking at all. How could this be? I was blessing her. I was doing my best to be kind and compassionate, to overlook when she spoke to Bruce as if I weren’t in the room. But one Easter Sunday, Bruce’s mom and I had a spat. I started it by snapping at her, one of those speak before you think blurts that do no good. In some families we would have felt we cleared the air, but no, we stopped speaking. Bruce said he’d had it. He knew she would not respond if we tried to make amends, and he was tired of trying. My therapist recommended I stop rescuing them from each other. She said if that’s what your husband wants you need to honor his wishes. We did celebrate Mother’s Day that year and we brought her a gift for her 80th birthday. But the exclusion from her birthday parties, from Christmases had begun.

We realized that we were likely written out of her will. The money wasn’t worth our need to separate, to live our lives even though I’d been through it before, my brother feeling I had no right to our parents’ estate, his wife feeling I had no right to my brothers and my family’s things and it’s more than just things. But that’s another story.

It’s painful to be the neglectful children. It’s painful when you live in the community and everything that people are saying is true, but not the whole story. So I blessed her--the years of it, the dailiness of it, adding up. The obsession eased. I didn’t think about our mutual dislike. Marge no longer owned my mind and emotions. I blessed her. She had even more friends than before. Her neighbor ran her to the doctor. She stayed at her home. She went to parties and church. Others in the body of Christ met her needs when we could not.

Then in the June of 2005, I wrote an essay, imagined a vision. To make a long story short I imagined that maybe one day Jesus will step on the Mount of Olives, splitting it in two. A river will run through it, maybe down the great fault that runs through the Red Sea and into Africa. There will be salt marshes and fresh water. There will be trees with leaves for the healing of the nations. The mountain splitting, the river splashing out, shows up across so many prophets, I believe it just might happen. I’ve stood in that river. I’ve sunk my roots in it. I’ve seen it stretch wide and fat to flat, loamy shores, mature trees lining the banks. I’ve felt the warm currents swirling around my ankles and I’ve drawn the muddy water up my trunk into my branches, out to my leaves. I imagined this river about the time when Marge’s body began failing, when she had to suck on oxygen, when Bruce’s brother called, saying we should come see her, she might not have much time. We started coming around. I was afraid because it was getting to be time for her to accept help. But she did not want it. Who would? I was afraid she was too much for us to care for.

Whenever I came in contact with her, I kicked off my shoes and stepped into the river, feeling mud squish between my toes. I let the river well up through me as if my toes were roots sucking in water. Remember? Jesus told the woman at the well that he would give her rivers of living water, flowing from her belly, if she’d only ask.

So I asked and felt the water racing into my spirit and then out. If I didn’t, I felt my spirit and soul drain from me, leaving me the kind of tired, sleep doesn’t fix. I am sure Marge felt the same way about me. I am sure she wept bitter tears when Bruce and I did not come to visit her year after year after year.

Adele, a friend who is a bit on the elderly side herself, says, “And you worry you’ll be like this when you get old. What quirks in my personality would come out to make the people around me miserable?” I don’t have to wait till then. Those quirks already come out in me, already scare people off.

I imagined squishing my toes down in cool mud. Warm, muddy water swirling around my ankles. My toes gnarling and snaking down, sucking. My arms reached for the sun and looked at it reflecting on the water, smelling the mud, and rain coming. My fingers flattened and turned green. I imagined someone would pick them and crush them and make them into medicine for healing the nations, medicine to quit that old disease of being toxic to our world and each other.

I imagined that someday Marge and I will sit down at a picnic and the caked mud that has made us monsters to each other will be washed off, and we will sit and eat and finally, finally, after all these years talk like friends.

Marge didn’t step out from this life to home with the Lord, crisply. Here today. Strong, independent. Gone tomorrow. No, her heart and breath failed so badly she wound up at Mercy Harvard Care Center. Once her strength returned, her will returned. She was going home no matter what. Ever since I’ve known her, she wanted to die at home. Fair enough, though I wondered how her need to die at home came before her relationship with her sons. She did not want a caregiver. She wanted to stay independent. But her body said, “No, you can’t.” But she refused any suggestion for help. She was so stubborn, my brother-in-law threw the power of attorney, power of health care, all her papers back at her. She offered to let us be her powers that be. We said no. We’d choose for her to stay in the care center. She would die hating us. We did not want that responsibility. She was given a choice: stay in the Care Center or arrange for her own caregiver at home. I wondered how good can come of this. I wondered how deeply we’d be torn up by her death.

Marilyn Westman invited Bruce and I to St. Anskar’s Healing Service. I came forward, stood, while a woman laid hands on me and listened to my wishes. I felt like I’d rubbed a bottle and had three wishes the Genie would grant. I asked for healing for a friend with liver cancer and for my book to be published and for healing for our very broken family. I dreaded Marge’s death. I dreaded the ugliness of her will. I’d lived through inheritance battles twice and did not want to suffer another one. I’d been going to a Bible class/support group at Christ Lutheran church, whining, crying, complaining about the whole thing. They listened to my complaints, they loved me and they prayed.

Bruce’s brother brought her home to die without asking our opinion or even telling us that’s what he was doing. He called hospice. The nurses thought she wouldn’t live out the weekend. But Bruce’s brother had hired a caretaker who was full of light, who is one of God’s great ones, doing the most humble service, who loved Marge so much she washed and set her hair, colored her nails, and made sure her children treated her right. I felt safe with Zoya who made me feel that everything would be all right. I never saw Marge happier than when I saw her lying on that couch, her needs tended to so well, she was neither afraid nor angry.

Bruce and I began coming by every weekend to sit with Marge. We read Phyllis Tickle’s Prayers In Winter, Springtime and Autumn. We brought our dogs for her to pet. We listened to her final stories, some Bruce had heard before, some he hadn’t. She had been left as a baby in diapers, all day, by herself. And here, here that wound was being healed by a woman from Mongolia, Zoya, who never abandoned her, even though she was helpless.

Again, we were the lousy children, letting Bruce’s brother do all the work. He offered to let us tend her every other weekend, when Zoya was not available. We said, “No, we are not caregivers.” Bruce’s brother wanted to make all the decisions, so we let him.

Slowly we built a friendship with Marge without her asking us to do chore after chore after chore, what had ultimately broken the relationship.

Her best friend Jane Johnson became my friend, listening to my frustrations about how things were being done. My Bible class listened to my fears. I sat under the hands of a woman at St. Anskars’ healing service and asked for prayers. Zoya, full of light Zoya, tended her.

Marge did not die that first weekend she was home. Instead she had a vision of a strong, tall man dressed in white. It was brought on by morphine. I wondered if she met her Maker and he terrified her because she knew she had not made things right. The will was an ugly document, leaving all control to my brother-in-law, leaving three quarters of the estate to him.

Bruce and I read scriptures that said, “Better is a crust of bread with the righteous than a feast in a house full of contention.” I blessed Marge and my brother-in-law and recited, “Better is a crust of bread. Better to live on a corner of a rooftop. Better to be righteous and calm than rich and all stirred up.”

Now here’s the miracle in all this. When Bruce’s brother burned out so badly that Zoya was frantic with worry, and I called Trish, the social worker at Hospice saying you’d better check things out, we told Marge that she did not need to put up with the drama. She could hire someone else to run her affairs. We thought maybe a banker or her lawyer could do it. She thought that might be a good idea.

She called her lawyer and asked that I be present. All right. I wasn’t sure I should be there because I did not want to cause more problems. This was Marge’s business. She asked that Bruce and I both be her power of attorney, power of health care, executor—the powers that be. I asked that she change the will so that Bruce and his brother split everything down the middle. She agreed.

I wasn’t so sure. But Zoya said she’d help. We could do this together. Bruce and I agreed to find out more from her lawyer. She encouraged us to do this, that it wasn’t that much work, that it wouldn’t destroy our lives. We only had a few checks to pay each month. It was the right thing to do. The State didn’t like taking over in these situations when there was family. I said, “I’m game” despite the fact that two social workers and a pastor had advised me to stay out of it. Bruce nodded, “All right. We’ll give it a try.”

This is the miracle, that Bruce’s mom asked us for help. And that we said yes. She was wise to put my name on the papers because I had the time to run to the bank, to make calls, to keep track of her medications. It made things easier on Bruce if I could write checks too. We could be partners in this. She saw me as family. After twenty years of being the awful daughter-in-law, I was finally family. I asked for help when we needed it from the doctor and the lawyer. Marge read off her grocery list. We filled our grocery cart with her groceries and ours. When Zoya needed time off she brought her sister, who Marge liked better, so they both got a much needed break.

It was some of the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. And yes scary because I didn’t know how my brother-in-law would react. It was a big responsible thing to tend to someone so frail. Here I was, terrified my whole life of taking care of an elderly person, taking care of Marge, willingly, joyfully. Not once did we go in over our heads. We were not asked to physically tend her. We did what we could.

The holiest, most sacred hours came when we sat in vigil the night before Marge died. We sat with her and read a night office of confession on her behalf, Bruce asking God and others to forgive her the pain she’d cost them.

Bruce’s brother thanked us for taking over when he couldn’t handle it any longer. He did not make trouble as we settled the estate. He thought we should be paid for our work.

I learned fear is a liar. None of the things that I feared came to pass.

Bruce’s mother and I did not have to wait to have our picnic by the great river that will cut out of the Mount of Olives when Jesus steps on it. We had it months before she died, when Zoya brought us some pork chops and salad and fruit and we sat by Marge’s couch and visited. The mud making us ugly to each other had been washed off. We had become friends.

Her death did not leave us panting with the bitterness of what could have been done, should have been said. Thank God we did not keep those hard boundaries that rise up when a person has hurt us and we don’t want to be hurt again. I opened her Bible and found her favorite verses were the ones about wanting to the do the right thing, the godly and loving thing, only to fail and fail until the verse rises at the beginnings of Romans 8, “There is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” Maybe she knew and regretted her quirks—the things that separated us. But nothing, not one thing, height nor depth nor trouble shall separate us from the Love of Christ. Marge had made peace with Bruce and I. She hugged us goodbye, saying she loved us. The morning of her death we walked out her road as the sun broke the horizon, striking broken corn stalks with gold light. We went home for some time off. Just as we broke the Poplar Grove Village limits, as we returned, Bruce’s brother called saying she died peacefully, not long after he and Jane Johnson said the Lord’s Prayer.

All of these things are miracles as profound as being healed from cancer or maybe even being raised from the dead. These miracles came on the wings of the prayers from the healing service, and the prayers of my Bible class. They came on the hope that one day the mud that makes us ugly to each other will be cleaned off, and that sometimes we have to wait until the other side for that to happen. They came on the power of choosing to bless rather than curse even though every emotion is bending us to curse. All of it depending on God’s grace that moves in our world that is the power of the new creation, that is God reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting our sins against us.

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WNIJ Perspective: It's Time for More Research on This Rare Disease

When Amy Anderson stumbled, she heard a loud pop. Her ankle had completely folded over. She’d torn her peroneal tendon in her foot. The intense pain was immediate. She went nine months of misdiagnoses before she was finally diagnosed with CRPS, complex regional pain syndrome. Then she needed six months of desensitization therapy before they could repair the tendon.

She says, “It’s all pain sensations at once, so it’s pin/needles, stabbing, crushing, constant aching. It feels like a red-hot poker is always in my foot. So imagine if you put your foot in ice water for a minute, pull it out and pour gas on it, light it on fire, then shoot a million tiny arrows into your foot.” It is at the top of the McGill Pain scale and has been nicknamed the suicide disease.

The Cleveland Clinic says CRPS affects about 200,000 people every year in the U.S. Most of the cases are caused by nerve trauma or by injuring the affected limb. The thinnest nerve fibers that let us feel pain, itchiness, and temperature are damaged. These nerve fibers also control the small blood vessels and affect the health of cells.

When Amy was taken by ambulance to a local ER with a flare, the doctor had no idea what she was suffering from. She says, “This disease has so little awareness med schools aren’t even teaching doctors about it. Since it’s so rare there’s little call for researching cures.”

It’s time for that to change.

I’m Katie Andraski, with my neighbor Amy Anderson and that’s our perspective

If you want to listen to this on WNIJ click here.

When Amy shared her story, all I could think of were the three Hebrew men who were thrown into the fiery furnace. They refused to bow to Nebuchadnezzar’s image when the music played. The king asked, “Who is the god who will deliver you out of my hands?”

The three Hebrew men replied, “We don’t need to answer you. If our God is able to deliver us from the fire, then he will. But if he doesn’t, we will not serve your gods.”

The king ordered the furnace to burn even hotter, so hot that the men throwing them in burned up. But the men didn’t even smell like smoke, when they came out. There was a fourth person walking with them in the flames, that the king said looked like a god. (Daniel 3: 8 – 30).

What does this have to do with Amy’s stepping through pain worse than hot coals, day and night? Because the Lord is walking with her in that furnace. She has found purpose in alerting people about this rare syndrome. She has sought help from assorted medical people and therapists to help her heal the effects of abuse and trauma in her life. She is writing poetry to push back against the pain and starting a Substack called Walking on Fire 79 CRPS Warrior. The first poem she has published is called Five Years of Fire: A CRPS and Allodynia Tale. This month she was featured in this month’s CRPS Warrior Foundation Newsletter where they say “her story is one of rising above. She created a Reddit community CRPSwarriors UNITE to give warriors and caregivers a safe space to connect, share and support one another.”

Amy says, “Once I started connecting with a couple other warriors and hearing their stories, it gave me a new outlook, a positive one, a yearning to help other CRPS warriors. It gave me hope back knowing I wasn’t dealing with it alone anymore. I now have wonderful people I can talk with who actually relate to what I’m going through.”

Amy has been thrown in a furnace, and it seems to me she has found “one like a god” Jesus himself, walking there with her. I have also seen Him walking with the woman I talk to at a local restaurant whose father has dementia and the woman I spoke to the other day at another local restaurant whose family has debilitating illnesses and suffers from a repaired fracture in her ankle that is swelling and painful. Both of these women are serving the public with kindness and aren’t afraid to hug a stranger who might be out of sorts. Another friend suffers from terrible autoimmune diseases and tends to her disabled husband. She has written a play and is writing a novel. A lawyer friend who could be retired suffers from vicarious PTSD because his job is to help the local child service agency protect children and help families.

Each one of these people are facing their suffering with grace and joy. They are pushing back against the pain by making art or making space for people. They keep walking and turning to the Lord, even in the midst of intense pain—emotional and physical. God is with them in the fire. I see His presence in their lives and in mine.

Jesus has walked with me when emotional and physical furnaces have been stoked. I have felt the truth what the Psalmist says, “He heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of stars; he gives all of them names” (Ps 147: 3 – 4). On my nighttime walks with Omalola I sometimes see the Milky Way, smeared against velvet dark. And that’s not even all of the stars. I can’t hardly imagine that the one who counts out the stars and names each one, like Adam named the animals, heals the broken hearted and binds up wounds. It’s hard to imagine that our broken hearts and bodies are that important to the Creator. But my tears have been dried. I have been comforted.

St. Peter writes, “Beloved do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s suffering, but you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (I Pet 4:12, ESV). I used to think sharing in Christ’s suffering just meant persecution. But I think that sharing in his suffering is broader than that, since we are his body here on earth. Since Jesus experienced everything we experience—sliding out of a woman, needing diapers changed, utterly dependent on his parents, the joy of elders learning from him, getting out of bed the day after his father died, having his feet massaged by a woman, eating a good meal with friends, begging to avoid a gruesome death, he is able to draw near to us in our suffering and in our joy.

C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain says, “The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: But joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun and some ecstasy. It not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bath or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns but will not encourage us to mistake them for home” (103).

Though I’m not sure but that the world isn’t home, that one day the earth will be made new. The earth, this world. I’m not sure but that we can walk in paradise, right here, right now. Despite the fellowship of suffering, which also welcomes the power of the resurrection.

One morning this week, I woke to our bedroom covered in mustard light, eerie, like a dangerous storm building or the end of the world or poison air. People report a greenish, bilious light before tornadoes strike. Bruce was not in bed. I threw back covers, bleary eyed. I don’t wake easily in the morning. I looked out the window to see him walking out our driveway.

“I saw a double rainbow. I snapped a picture,” he said.

I can’t say that I blame him for not waking me up because he did come get me to show me the Great Horned Owl perched on the tippy top of our dead pine. They are so secretive, so mysterious, this one felt like an omen, a portent of change, of wisdom, of mystery. Years ago I dipped into a popular book about aliens, Communion, that noted owls can be those spindly big-eyed creatures, faeries? but our eyes can’t see them for what they are. I do believe there are many things we aren’t able to see with modern eyes.

I asked my storyteller friend, Martin Shaw, what they mean. He simply said he likes all sorts of owls and his mother is owly. So maybe a Big Horned Owl is just an owl watching for dinner, dinner that I hope doesn’t turn into one of our barn cats.

Sleep hasn’t been easy this week. I was awake most of the night of the tsunami warning. I guess shockwaves traveled across the world, sweeping through Illinois after the 8.8 earthquake. I asked God to calm the wave, to stop the destruction on the coasts. And got up and puked my guts out.

After talking with Bruce, Omalola and I walked down the road. The sun pulled above the horizon. The rain simply dripped.

Note: I imagined being the wife of one of the Hebrews thrown into the furnace in “I Couldn’t Keep my Eyes off the Idol” if you want to see what I did with it.

Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. Fontana, 1959

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“Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Take vengeance on the Midianites for the sons of Israel; afterward you will be gathered to your people.” So Moses spoke to the people, saying, “Arm men from among you for the war, so that they may go against Midian to execute the Lord’s vengeance on Midian.”

I have wondered about this sort of thing myself. The question was on the front of my mind, when I was browsing at Barnes and Noble. Spine facing forward, I saw the title: Not in God’s Name by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. I was surprised when I opened it this time to see I’d actually read it through. Sacks says:

“Never say, I hate, I kill because my religion says so. Every text needs interpretation. Every interpretation needs wisdom. Every wisdom needs careful negotiation between timeless and time. Fundamentalism reads texts as if God were as simple as we are. That is unlikely to be true.

Religions, especially religions of the Book have hard texts: verses, commands, episodes, narratives, that if understood literally and applied directly would not merely offend our moral sense. They would go against our best understanding of the religion itself. There are many examples in the Hebrew Bible. There is the war of revenge against the Midianites. There is the war mandated against the seven nations in the land of Canaan. There is the book of Joshua with its wars of conquest, and the bloody revenge against the Amalekites in the book of Samuel. These strike us as barbaric and at odds with an ethic of compassion, or even with a just war doctrine of the kind that emerged in both the Jewish and Christian traditions” (207).

My best reply to Eric is what Sacks goes on to say,

“These texts—and there are notorious examples in the New Testament, the Qur’an and Hadith also—require the most careful interpretation if they are not to do great harm. That is why every text-based religion develops its own traditions of interpretation. Rabbinic Judaism declared Biblicism—accepting the authority of the written word while rejecting oral tradition, the position of the Sadducees and Karaites—as heresy. The rabbis said: ‘One who translates a verse literally is a liar.’ The point is clear: no texts without interpretation; no interpretation without tradition; or as 2 Corinthians puts it, ‘The letter kills, but the spirit gives life’ (NIV, 2 Cor. 3: 6).

Many people who bring up these points or point out contradictions in scripture, ignore the tradition of interpretation that has built up around those words. Scripture belongs to the liturgical community from which it originated. If a person truly wants to understand these difficult scriptures, they might consider reading the chapter, “Hard Texts” in Not in God’s Name.

Tom Holland in Dominion would say the very reason Eric is incensed by the brutality of these Hebrew Scriptures is proof of the truth and influence of Christianity on western culture. Holland says,

Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organized and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred in classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’ but very distinctly of that civilization’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view(16).

Jesus said the kingdom of God was like a mustard seed spreading until it grew to be a giant bush, where birds nested. This is exactly what happened. How could an obscure Jew in a backwater of the Roman Empire, who claimed to be god, but who was crucified, in a most vile death reserved for slaves and the rebellious, conquer the Roman empire and spread through the west, in such a way that we take its influence for granted unless its claims were true. Unless Jesus really did rise from the dead.

Another truth I have observed is how Jesus compared the kingdom of God to a mustard seed that becomes a large bush with many branches. The evidence I see is that world poverty is down. According to the UN:

The global poverty rate decreased by an average of 1.1 percentage points each year, from 37.8 percent to 11.2 percent in 2014. However, between 2014 and 2019, the pace of poverty reduction slowed to 0.6 percentage points per year, which is the slowest rate seen in the past three decades. Within the 24-year period, most of the poverty reduction was observed in East Asia and the Pacific, as well as South Asia.”

Eric questions the following words of Jesus: “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom’ (Matt 16: 28). He asked, “Show me in the Bible where it says that please. I don’t see this at all. There are various accounts of earthquakes, the sky darkening, and spirits raising from the dead when Jesus died, but nobody saw him ‘coming in his kingdom.’”

His disciples did see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom when Jesus died, harrowed hell and appeared the forty days after his resurrection. Theologians have said that Jesus was glorified when he was lifted to the cross. The cross was his throne. Again Eric is reading scripture literally, entirely out of context of church tradition and interpretation and the rest of scripture.

Eric added, “Also he never had a kingdom because he was never a king” except Christians belief in Jesus ultimately defeated Rome and established Christendom throughout Europe and as Holland says, influenced most of the world, in ways we don’t even notice. So yes Jesus is king. Even better than that, he fills the whole world. As St. Paul writes, "And he is before all things and in him all things hold together" (Col. 1: 17).

Well, this is the best I have. Far better minds than mine have answered these questions. But Eric appealed to my evangelical upbringing, which laid terrible pressure on me as a girl, to introduce people to Jesus, which often blurred into the burden that it was our responsibility to save someone's soul.

Well, “saving someone's soul” is not my job.

I can only present the good news that God became incarnate, a full human being, from birth to death. He felt everything we felt. He challenged us to care for the poor, bless our enemies, turn the other cheek. He was divine and we murdered him—our religious system, our political system and our mob, murdered him. From the beginning we've chosen death. But as I said before Jesus conquered death by death. He has introduced new creation into the world. We will all be raised one day.

Brad Jersak in Sharing Hope: Pressure, Resistance, and Invitation talks about this pressure to share the gospel. He closes with “what Peter tells us, and he was pretty good at it:

“Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you…”

Final note: did you notice that ‘demanding’ is what the asker does, not the teller. I aspire to live in such a way that others demand to know about this hope. When I get there, I’ll let you know.

So here is the hope I have.

As deep as my bones I felt my mother pushed out of the grave, past the metal coffin, past the concrete box, up through the dirt right into the Presence. Her funeral felt more like a wedding, the feast, that shows up throughout holy writ—from the Hebrew scriptures to the New Testament. I felt the same when my father went home to be with the Lord.

The morning my brother died, I dreamed: In the kitchen, the two-hundred-year-old house, where I grew up. I saw demons jumping into the sky. Gryphons—part lion, part eagle—wings clacking, mechanical. Or were they the crazed, flying monkeys doing the witch’s bidding in the Wizard of Oz? Locusts buzzing like high tension lines on a damp day, but deadly loud. Their talons extended. The big barn towered over me.

I ran outside, shook my fist.

“You are dead.”

The barns and woods smacked an echo: Dead.

One circled back. Laughed.

My rottweiler vomited a bone and blood. He lay down. Stiffened. Back in the kitchen I saw a soup pot, saw blood and intestines. A black stew.

I jolted awake like someone had touched the bottoms of my feet with a cattle prod. I touched Bruce’s back. He flinched but did not come awake. I fell, and I mean fell back to sleep.

I dreamed a third time. At a barn, the trainer wanted me to work a black horse with a sculpted head and quiet eye. He was muscled and powerful. My thighs ached to cradle his heart, ribs and hide. My calves wanted to feel the stallion’s warmth. I felt a little bit wild as when a man lies between my legs. I knew I had to leave them loose because if I tightened a muscle just a bit, the horse would move one side to the other. He might even gather himself and dance in place.

But I had no boots. The first rule I learned as a kid was always ride with boots, so your feet don’t slide through the stirrups and your feet get stuck and if you fall, you could be dragged, instead of a clean, hard fall. The second rule was ride with a crash helmet.

“Your sneakers are fine,” the trainer said.

She tossed me up on the horse.

I woke to my rottweiler lying next to my bed. I patted his side. He jumped into a sit, his eyes, liquid and soft. Cane—dog of my grief, a dog I’d bought after my parents had died, a dog I was not good to because I worked too many hours in my job and played too hard and traveled.

After I walked him, I opened my Bible to read the following: “Yes, and I will continue to rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help given by the Spirit of Jesus Christ what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance. I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil. 1: 18b -21, NIV).

I was vacuuming when the phone rang. My brother’s wife. She said, “We had a little trouble at the farm today.” She paused. “Your brother died. Do you think you will come home?”

“Yes of course. I’ll come.”

“I came home for lunch and found him lying in the bathroom, in a nosebleed.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“He didn’t feel good last night. He thought he was having a heart attack. But we wanted to wait to see how he felt this morning.”

I don’t remember anything else I said to her. I was frantic to get Bruce home from work. This was before cell phones. I drove around town hoping I’d see him splicing cable, his hands weaving wires, along the road, but I couldn’t find him. I stopped to see Pastor Wille who said everything would be all right, who prayed with me, who put me on the church prayer chain.

When he got home, Bruce wrapped me up in his arms and held me a long time. My tears were already locked up, except for the frozen regret I felt. I’d almost called my brother the night before, just to talk, but I was watching a movie about a robot that I figured he was watching too and didn’t want to be bothered. If only I’d called, we might have spoken one last time. I might have said call the ambulance. I might have called them myself.

Once on the jet, I leaned against the window, I heard my shout, the shaken fist at those demons flapping: “Death is dead. You are dead.” I heard the echo off the big barn and the woods.

Throughout the dreadful days of my brother’s funeral and the years following, where I was left as the surviving member of my family, that fist shaken, death is dead, rose from my bones, giving me hope. Those years following were dreadful. The fact that I am sane, at peace and not a bitter old woman is testament to the power and truth of Christianity. This is the hope that I have to share.

This death and resurrection stuff plays out over and over again in nature. Larva become a liquid mess and are reborn as butterflies. Seeds are buried in the ground and rise as plants.

A poem I wrote:

I watch the earth boil and break, bright green pushing up row upon row, an army risen to stand at attention until its cut.

Wheat shoots and soybeans push up clods of dirt, as much miracle as corpses shoving back dirt to haunt the sunlight.

Babies roll over boulders open tombs where I sit, weep, wait for the farmer to tell me what it means.

This is as good a picture of the truth of Christianity as any I can share.

Eric made the comment that it wasn’t me he hated but Christianity. He agreed that I’m not good at arguing, that maybe I’m a preacher. Yes. That’s what I’ve been trying to say. You can’t argue someone into the kingdom. Though I remember my brother and I had invited friends to an evangelism talk at one of our youth leaders’ houses. The arguments were hot, impassioned. Years later I came across a Christian book, A Way in the World by Earnest Boyer Jr., written by one of the young men we’d argued with so passionately. It wasn’t me Eric hates, but my religion. Perhaps there’s hope. He knows he is in my prayers.

Works Cited

Holland, Tom. Dominion. Basic, 2019.

Sacks, Jonathan. Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. Schocken, 2017.

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Clover has nearly reached up to Morgen’s bridle. She can drop her nose and snatch a purple flower. About a month ago, the field was newly shorn, nearly down to dirt.

We’ve gotten out before noon the last two days to try to beat the heat. Hesitantly I want to say I think I found the fun, and may drive her down the road, looking for apples on a tree, a mile away. Driving her has given me the motivation to get up early, not read the latest news on my phone and take her around the field.

A barn swallow follows us all the way down field, swooping around us. I wonder what that’s about. I wonder if it’s Little Bird wheeling in circles. (We rescued him as a fledgling.) Or are we somehow the people he is guarding like a border collie circling his flock. Or just swooping for the joy of it.

Mrs. Horse has so much power trotting out, I have to pulse my reins, squeezing the right hand, squeezing the left. If I hold hard both reins at once, she’ll brace and take off. Have you noticed how racehorses run with tight reins? Because they can lean into the bit and run hard off their forehand. I have to be careful to pulse my reins and not hold onto both at the same time. I don’t want her running back to the barn because that’s a rule. But my gosh it’s fun when she moves.

The day has gone quiet. This morning machine noises hurt my ears, with heavy trucks making their way up and down the main road. But by late morning it has quieted.

The Kildeer seem to have disappeared. For awhile we had a family of five hanging around the paddock. And they could be loud enough to annoy my hearing. Have they flown south already? Did last week’s hail and hard winds kill them? Or was it the aerial spray we’ve seen wheeling and dipping over fields?

The other day when I was mowing I listened to Brian Zahnd being interviewed by Jonathan Foster and Tori Owens about his marvelous book about the cross, “The Wood Between the Worlds.” Zahnd said we need to have real life friends because friends we make on the internet aren’t real. We should pick up the phone and call someone or go out to lunch. He stated that the friends you have at forty are the friends you have at 80. Well, that’s not exactly true. He assumes a person’s core friends will live that long or stay in the same area.

Medicare asks us how often we’ve talked to someone on the phone during the week, or what clubs we’re involved in. Are we involved in church? Those questions are busybodies. Docs say that our social life is important for our health. What if you’re a solitary person? What if your whole life seems to be shaped around the lonely places? What if there’s meaning and purpose in not pushing a social life just to push a social life? And being lonely does more to drive people away than draw them to friendship.

Zahnd’s words, the pressure from docs, opened the pit, where I greeted that old friend, loneliness, for a minute. I shook her hand and climbed out remembering how I’m going to lean into solitude, and be a solitary, which yes, is possible while married.

Often people found their way to the saints in the woods. Maybe there’s wisdom in waiting, in letting people come to me. Wisdom in blessing this life. While I was struggling with how to say what I mean, I read “Solitude” the final chapter of Maggie Ross’s The Fire of Your Life. Ross has been a lantern, a round circle of light, like the one I occasionally shine when I walk Omalola after dark. Sometimes it catches the two eyes, bright, of Tyger or Ma Cat. Most of the time I walk into the dark around the house or back behind the garden. These days we see lightning bugs blinking on the ground and in the grasses. The other night I saw a light and thought I was seeing a firefly move across the sky, but it was just a small plane blinking. Sometimes I time it to see the International Space Station. (You can get the app and they will notify you when it’s overhead. You can point your phone so you find the line of sight and see it.)

Maggie Ross says, “In solitude is the wonder of the commonplace, the mystery of the ordinary life: eating, sleeping, reading, listening to God’s secrets and jokes, a sense of delight, of dance, of fruition, learning that solitude is not something we need to scramble to fill up, but that it is full to overflowing if we can learn to accept the familiarity of insecurity and let go”(145).

These things are God’s love notes to us. Or maybe his song, calling us to delight in the world he’s made. This gray morning was marvelously quiet, except for bird song. I stooped and took a picture of a simply white morning glory. I said good morning to my friends the redwing blackbird and robin. Omalola pulled off the road to sniff. I let her. (That permission has bit me in the butt because she will stop dead in her tracks when there's a scent she wants to check out.)

By temperament I crave being alone. And by history. As a newborn I was laid alone on a bed for my picture, a picture that left me chilled and alone, when I saw it as an adult. I have been praying since I was little, usually artless intercessory prayers because that’s how my evangelical background influenced me, though I do remember a formula that went something like praise, thanksgiving confession, intercession. It was the praying for others that stuck with me especially as I wanted to pray without ceasing, something the Pilgrim sought after and learned when he was taught to say "Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner." (Well that's the version I say.) Martin Shaw is retelling his own translation of The Way of the Pilgrim in a series on his Substack House of Beasts and Vines.

I prayed through lists of classmates daily so that they would “accept Jesus as their personal Lord and savior.” That list has narrowed quite a bit these days, perhaps because I can’t hold many people in my head. My prayers have mostly narrowed to "Lord heal them," or "Lord bless them." Sometimes I tell Him what I think He should do, knowing that His Spirit is groaning beyond words, shaping those prayers. Sometimes those specifics come about. But lately I realized I wasn’t telling God my own story. I wasn’t showing him my face, by talking about others. I've want him to know me, so he can't say, I never knew you when he does that great separation between the sheep and the goats. I’ve learned silence can be prayer. And need to not resist it when I’m sitting in the car with Bruce.

Maggie Ross says, “Most of us have the experience that love can be unbearable. John must have received it in solitude and baptized to make the One who was coming, Love incarnate, a little easier to bear. Our baptism in the crucified and risen Christ enables us to bear it; we learn to bear each other’s love so we can learn to bear God’s” (142).

I have felt this. Early in my marriage I wrote:

This terror before my husband is the terror in a thunderstorm when there is nothing protecting me and my house but the luck of the lightning stroke. I taste it. My horses in the barn would have no chance against straw in flame and locked fear.

I sit the farthest inside my house. The windows are silver with rain so hard I can't see the cedars, willow, lilac a few yards off. I sit with a Bible open to First John where it says God is love and perfect love casts off fear. But God is so raw in the sudden thunder, I must sit in terror until the storm moves east.

With my husband I freeze as the child I was and kiss with fear scuddling along my teeth. God is raw when we come to love a man who could die quick as lightning. But sun does break up the storm, horses still stand in the barn, waiting for pasture. One apple tree is down that my parents left to be an arbor for bittersweet I picked for centerpieces.

This has been a work for me, this learning to receive Bruce’s love, to see in his throwing down hay from the loft because I’m afraid of climbing up there, afraid of that first step off the ladder, a gift of love. His withstanding my terror of abandonment, which stung my teeth, like the times I’d flinch, when a pheasant flew up, out on the trails, and Tessie, my riding mare, kept walking steadily along.

Ross talks about floating down a wild river and how she has to choose where the water sweeps together, and run through the rapids until she gets to the still waters. She says, “The river can kill you. So can God” (144).

Same with horses. I repeated, “this horse could hurt me” often when I was working with the young Mrs Horse, but then I realized that she had not, that these very words were wrong. So she stands at the fence waiting for my company and hay cubes, not unlike God might wait for me to turn towards Him, away from the giant Babylonian statue, the fascinating, cultural chaos that is our country and the times we live in.

Tessie my saddle mare, did bolt, did throw me, did frighten me, but she taught me how keep saddling up, riding into my fear, riding through the runaway, to bring her back. And most times she walked out with my friends into beautiful woodlands, sometimes with blue bells, most often mosquitoes that bit through our pants, and leaves that changed from green to browns and reds as we rode the seasons.

Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians could be our prayer for ourselves and for others: “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” (Eph 3: 15 - 19, NIV).

What would we be like if we grasped how wide and long and high and deep Christ’s love is? It’s taken nearly four decades to begin to grasp that with my husband. It took some years out from my father’s death to feel how he loved me, holding hard in his loneliness after my mother died, to let me sit tight in a very hard work, to let me leave home and not call me back home to put salve on his aching grief. (As a young woman, I'd been terrified of his love, it felt so heavy.)

Ross’s words seem to illumine this: “We become aware of others’ holiness and potential holiness, holiness they aren’t and can’t be aware of. We become aware of their holiness because we become aware of their hurts and our share in these hurts. Like John the Baptist, we become lamps, our light leaping towards one another across the darkness. The vocation of transparency is to live from the wellspring of solitude so that we bear Christ to one another” (147).

Activists say prayer is no good. Thoughts and prayers are milque toast. Get out there and do something! But I have found that charity is not as easy as it looks. Naming myself as a healing agent lead me in way over my head. I listened too well, and she said too much too fast. I backed off hard. She was rightfully hurt. I’ve been on the receiving end of well-meaning church ladies too, so I know how it feels. I have no desire to be anything other than a friend.

These days I don’t know how to pray. Do I walk out in silence, enjoying the quiet? The people I pray for? Do I pray over and over, again and again for them, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night, saying their names, praying for comfort? Or do I say a prayer and that’s it?

So when St. Seraphim of Sarov said in the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit, “Of course, every good deed done for Christ’s sake gives us grace of the Holy Spirit but prayer gives it to us most of all, for it is always at hand, so to speak as an instrument for acquiring the grace of the Spirit…you would like to do some other good deed for Christ’s sake, but either you have not the strength or the opportunity is lacking. This certainly does not apply to prayer. Prayer is always possible for everyone, rich and poor, noble and humble, strong and weak, healthy and sick, righteous and sinful” (83).

What kind words. Majik reminded me that an early prayer of the church is Maranatha: Come Lord Jesus. What a powerful prayer to bring our wandering thoughts back: Come Lord Jesus. How I long to see Him face to face, for we shall be like him because we can see him as he is. But as the old prophets said, anyone who saw him, did not come out alive. But isn’t that how it is even here in this life? We see Jesus and follow him right down into the waters of baptism and back up to new creation. We follow him right down to our knees washing feet, and right down to our graves, when we open the door to new life. For we shall see him because we can see him as he is.

Ross says, “We begin to realize this hunger will never be satisfied, not in this life. It is hunger to see the Face of God, and the only possible approach is prayer, prayer that is all our lives, to yield to God’s emptiness, vastness, to lose control of our ideas of God, our ideas and stereotypes or ourselves, of prayer. We finally—again and again –let go all our concepts of God and begin to understand God’s notion of us” (144).

The other night Bruce and I were walking Omalola on the road and finally Mr. P’s son stopped and chatted with us about the crops he’s planting, the hay he’s cutting, how he needs to clean out his father’s, well and his mother's house. It’s been awhile since anyone stopped and chatted. Then another neighbor, with her two little girls, stopped to chat. Finally, I got her phone number, because it’s good to have your neighbors’ numbers. We walked across the road several times while other trucks passed. It was one of those nights when the haze blurred the woods and fields enough to make them look like an Italian painting.

Come Lord Jesus. Lord Jesus son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner. Thank you Lord. And the red wing blackbird and says good morning and good evening from the electric wire.

Nazarius, et al. Little Russian Philokalia. St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994.

Ross, Maggie. The Fire of Your Life. Seabury Books, 2007.

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Despite road noises, the air itself was quiet when I walked out. Everything was washed gray, the sky, the air, the distant trees and farms. As I turned the corner by our mailbox, I saw several cobwebs spread like mini blankets on the ground. I spoke to the birds—grackles, kildeer, red wing blackbirds. As I turned toward the sun I could face him, cloaked in the clouds, and thought about how God did King Saul dirty.

I don’t get it. If God had left the man alone, maybe he would have died in obscurity, but he would have lived a life, that might have been safely hidden, and humbly righteous.

Is Saul’s story about too much Spirit without enough spiritual discipline? Or did Saul’s insecurity drown out the new heart and Spirit God gave him? Samuel, the man who heard God’s voice as a child, dedicated to God by his mother, loved him and mourned so hard when God rejected him, that God had to say get a grip, I’ve picked someone else. He loved Saul so much he came back from the dead to promise Saul would soon die.

Looking at the 2000 years of church history, I wonder are we any different?

The Daily Office has paralleled the story of Bad King Saul with Saul the killer of Christians until he converted. I wonder if that’s deliberate. Is the name Saul redeemed in Saul, then Paul the apostle’s story, his being struck down by the uncreated light of Jesus?

In a private class Jonathan Pageau urged us to not be afraid of difficult Biblical stories, to perhaps imagine what it was like to be someone like Saul. So here is my imagination:

You’d think being tall would garner respect, but it brought mocking. “Did your mother mate with a Nephilim,” his friends taunted. Often Saul hid himself by the river, practicing swordsmanship with a dried-up branch. He trained the donkeys, wrestling them into obedience. He grew strong and lonely. His heart leapt up when Samuel agreed to grant the people’s call for a king because he loved Samuel’s words: “The king will take your sons and appoint them to plow his land, fight his battles. He will take your daughters and make them cooks and perfumers. He will give his servants your best vineyards, olive groves, fields. He will demand taxes from your work.”

Saul was fast asleep when he heard the hooves of his father’s donkeys. He must have left the gate open. He fell back against his mat and buried his face in the sack cloth he used as a pillow. And sleep took him, plunging him deep into his longing to be king—his brain flashed with oil running down his beard, what little he had, the savory smell of meat burning mixed with the sting of hair on fire, the smoke rising. The prophet shrieking, what have you done? Then he saw a strange king, filled with fear and sorrow, so he spared him. Then the prophet’s rage, a dagger slicing the king, spattering blood. The torn robe.

His father shook him hard. Saul swam up from the dream. He woke shaking. “Did you leave the gate open?” his father shook him. Again. “The donkeys are gone. Take the young man. Go find them.” His father’s voice sliced through his dreams. He didn’t have to say, “No good. Good for nothing. You will come to nothing.” His face said it all.

No donkeys at the closest arabah. No donkeys at the next one. They walked through the hill country. Up one hill and down another with the next hill and valley holding out hope the donkeys might be there. Sometime Saul and his servant called their names. Echoes came back. They walked through Ephraim. They walked through Shalishah. The walked through Shaalim. They walked through Benjamin. Their legs ached. Their feet were crusted with filth. Saul’s heart sank into these words: I’m no good. I can’t even find my father’s donkeys. He turned to his young man, “Let’s go back. My father will worry if we’re gone much longer.” He could not look his servant in the eyes, so looked off to the sun breaking through shadows on the hills.

“There’s a prophet near here. Everything he says comes true,” his servant said, eyes sparkling. “Perhaps he can tell us which way to go.”

“We have nothing to bring him.” Saul shrugged his shoulders.

“I have a quarter a shekel of silver.” His young man held out the coin.

They walked up yet another hill, the women coming out to draw water, saying he’s just ahead. (That image of women coming to draw water sings of bride and bridegroom Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Zipporah and Jesus and the woman at the well.) Only there is no human woman to marry, but Saul will be betrothed to Isreal, when Samuel poured oil over his head.

I don’t know how God spoke to Samuel, whether he appeared to him, brighter than the sun, or he came as a voice like he did when Samuel was a boy. God says, “I’ve seen my people. Their cry has come up to me.” Is that the same cry that came up when Abel was killed? The same cry that came because Sodom was so evil?

God nudged Samuel, “Here he is. He will restrain my people.” Samuel turns to see a dusty, tall man, whose looks make him step backward, they are so fine, despite the dust, despite the weariness in his eyes. And a kind young man beside him.

Restrain? So Saul with deliver and restrain them? Does that mean give them what they wanted? Give it good and hard?

“We’re having a sacrifice. Please join us. We’ve prepared a place for you at the head of the table. Your donkeys have been found.”

It dawns on Saul that this is Samuel, the prophet who said Isreal could have a king. He sees love in his eyes and a touch of joy mixed with sadness, an expression he’d never seen in his father’s face.

Saul drops his eyes. “Who am I. I come from the least tribe, the humblest clan that you’d talk to me this way?” How would he bear the eyes of the people, as he tore meat off the bone? When he heard his mother saying, “Where are your manners?”

Send your boy ahead, Samuel says the next day. When he is out of sight, Samuel pours pure golden olive oil over Saul’s head. He is blinded by the oil as it runs over his eyes. His hearing is muffled. His hair is matted. But the smell that rises is like honey. “You are now prince over God’s people. You will deliver them from their enemies.”

I think about the song: How good it is to “dwell together in unity. It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down on the collar of his robe” (Ps 133:2, NIV).

Samuel spells out what’s going to happen. And it does. Then Saul must wait seven days.

When Saul meets up with prophets and prophesies with them. What was that like? Did he speak in tongues? Did he say things that later came true? Did the words that came out of his mouth carry dread and joy both, a warning about what’s to come? Did he go on a giant ego trip? Here’s my imagination:

Saul felt like he was going to fly, his body filled with wind so hard he could hardly breathe. It felt like the hot winds pouring off the hills, withering everything. It felt like the fires that followed. He felt weighed down, like the yoke he lifted on his oxen had settled across his shoulders. Fire tickled above the others’ heads. He sang words he didn’t know. His mind’s eyes filled with fields of slaughtered warriors, their blood fertilizing the ground, the sure signs of victory. He heard a lyre, the fierce words: “For you save a humble people, but haughty eyes you bring down. For it is you who light my lamp; the Lord my God lightens my darkness. For by you I can run against a troop and by my God I can leap over a wall” (Psalm 18: 27 – 29).

God gives him a new heart.

Isn’t that the promise in Ezekiel and in Jeremiah—God will replace our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh? I long for my scarred over heart to be healed, the scarring a natural defense, when hurt upon hurt piles on. A heart of flesh sounds like a great and good promise.

Samuel gathers the whole nation of Isreal to announce who will be their king, by drawing lots. People held each other’s hands. They held their breath in anticipation. Could it be one of their fathers? Brothers? Sons? The lot fell on the Benjamin tribe. Then it fell on Saul’s family. And then Saul himself. But God had to tell them he was hiding in the baggage. “Do you see who the Lord has chosen? There is no one like him among the people.” But Samuel’s words didn’t bolster Saul’s confidence. Saul’s eventual victories in battle didn’t bolster it.

Samuel sent everyone home including Saul. God touched the hearts of mighty men of valor, who went home with him, though there were others who groused about his abilities to save them. Saul knew this but held his peace. After Saul defeated the Philistines, people asked if the dissenters should be put to death. “No not on the day the Lord delivered us.”

These thoughts tossed around in my head as I walked. I greet the red wing blackbird and grackle that perch on the electric wire. I stepped to the side to stay out of the way of a neighbor’s pick up. I hold onto Oma. She sits. I slip her a treat. I smiled and waved. I turned around when I got to Mr. P’s farm and noticed morning glories that are striped pink and white. Everything else was smeared gray and beautiful, the monochrome easy on the eyes. So often it is hard to walk into the morning sun. At home I pulled out the hose to rinse off Omalola’s legs which are coated in road dust she picked up by sniffing the smells in the wet grass. She dances and steps away as the cold water runs down her legs and along her paws.

Dr. Kevin, arrived in a few hours to smooth down Morgen’s teeth. Horse’s teeth continue to grow, and can grow unevenly, stick points into their gums. He stuck her with sedative and Morgen’s head drooped. Then he put a halter on her with two bars. He sticks those into her mouth and cranks them open.

I say how I feel guilty not paying attention to her. If she sees me outside, she whinnies as if to ask, “Why are you playing with that mutt? Come play with me.” Most days it’s all I can do to curry and brush her. Dr. Kevin’s assistant, held up her head and set it on a padded cradle. Kevin squatted and put the grinder into her mouth. “Don’t feel guilty,” his assistant said. “She’s having a good life.”

It’s the guilt I need to put away. It’s the guilt that drives me away from her.

So what happened to Saul? He had a new heart. He was filled with the Holy Spirit. So why did Saul fail so badly that God replaces the Holy Spirit with an evil spirit and sends David who captures his son, his daughter’s and his own heart with passionate love? That passionate love flips to envy and Saul is tormented by the painful, jealous making saying: “Saul has struck down his thousands and David his ten thousands." When David enters the palace, Saul’s jealousy blooms. Fear rides in hard.

So just what did Saul do to knock the Holy Spirit out? To welcome the evil one?

As far as the eye could see Saul saw the Philistines gathered on the plain. The smoke of their campfires filled the sky. If their armor caught the sun a certain way it blinded him. The people scattered, hid themselves in caves and behind rocks. Isn’t that what will happen in the Day of the Lord? The cave system behind Saul beckoned him. It was all he could do to resist backing into the darkness and letting the Philistines take over.

Where is the prophet? Where is the warrior God, roaring ahead with darkness and flashes of lightning? Terror burned his heart and stung his eyes. So he did it. He offered the burnt offering. The savory smell of meat burning mixed with the sting of hair on fire, the smoke rising. Samuel prophet shrieked, “What have you done? The Lord would have established your kingdom over Isreal. Now it will be no more.” Samuel’s eyes were full of fury and love and grief. Saul saw his sons' bodies hung on posts in those eyes. With a whoosh of wind, the Spirit swept out of him, and a cave wider, deeper, darker than the one behind him opened inside.

St. Porphyrios in Wounded by Love, warns, “Your spiritual guide will teach you to get into the right order for prayer, because if you don’t get into the right order, there’s a danger of your seeing the luciferic light, of living in delusion and being plunged into darkness, and then one becomes aggressive and changes character and so on. This is the splitting of the personality” (124).

Is this why God took away the Holy Spirit and sent an evil spirit? The new heart, the Spirit falling on Saul was too much? Did all that spiritual power go to Saul’s pride? Or did it make him feel even smaller? It’s the saints who say they are more aware of their sin the more saintly they are. But he did have a spiritual guide in Samuel who loved him dearly, who mourned so sharply that God told him to get a grip, go anoint David king. Why couldn’t Saul trust that Samuel would come back when he said he would. Why couldn’t he wait, wait I say on the Lord?

Saul’s foolishness grew.

When God told Saul to completely wipe out the Amalekites, he spared the king and the best of the livestock and goods. Was this compassion gone amok? Or greed for spoils that were too good to destroy? Samuel finally names Saul’s failure, “Even though you are small in your own eyes, are you not head of the tribes of Isreal?”

He spoke a fierce poem about obedience:

“Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord?To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.23 For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry.Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you as king” (I Sam. 15: 22- 23, ESV).

Saul cries out “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The people frightened me.” The cave, the darkness rising from his chest to his mind. "The glory of Isreal has rejected you. He’s done. He won’t turn toward you again.” Samuel walks away. His white hair is tied in a long tail down his back. His robe glows. Saul grabs it. Tears it. It burns his hand. Samuel turns, his face black as the darkness growing inside Saul. “The Lord has torn Isreal away from you and given it to a neighbor.”

“I have sinned. Please don’t leave. Please. Come with me so I can bow before the Lord in front of the elders.” The darkness wonders how it would look to the people if Samuel leaves him standing, not prostrate before the Glory.

Samuel turns back and Saul bows before the Lord, the dust spotted with his tears. The elders have no idea, he is no longer king. Then Samuel hacks Agag, king of the Amalekites to pieces. “You made women childless, so shall your mother be without you,” he seethes. Saul is speechless before the horror that splatters on his hands and legs and feet.

From then on Saul spins apart. God sends an evil spirit, so fiercely that Saul hires David to sing Psalms on the lyre, those poems calming his mind. Is that evil spirit about God giving him up to his own devices because he failed to wait for Samuel to make the sacrifice, and failed to completely destroy the Amalakites? Is that a picture, of our own need to clean up our lives, take seriously the call to obedience? Is it a story that urges us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling? Are we being warned to trust the Lord, no matter how he honors us, no matter how wide our fear grows?

My heart goes out to Saul, crowned king, a man who could not, would not choose life, by defying his fear and choosing to trust Samuel’s words. In the end he is so terrified because God has gone silent, he hires a medium to call up Samuel. When he rises from the ground, she says he looks like a god. Samuel says again, “The Lord has torn the kingdom from you and given it to David, your neighbor. We’ll be together in Sheol in a day.”

Is this a warning to us, that no matter what spiritual gifts we have, what good heart we have, that we need to submit to healing how we see ourselves? Maybe Saul’s true nature was as king, a nature God called forth, but Saul rebelled against his calling, giving into fear. He couldn’t sit still in his fear, the people’s fear and trust Samuel’s word. He couldn’t sit still and wait. But wouldn’t it have been mercy to leave him alone with his donkeys and not call him to kingship?

God I don’t understand this story. And I’m not even talking about the genocide. It frightens me, how we are so free we can choose insanity, fear, chaos. In the voice of the warning of this story, that can sprout a terror that drives me from you like guilt drives me from Mrs. horse, I am going to trust what Jesus himself says, “Anyone who believes in me I will in no wise cast him out.

There is hope when Samuel comes back from the ground, from the dead and says today you will join me. I’d think where Samuel was, was a good place because he was a holy man, resting in paradise. And later, much later there is Jesus himself getting down to earth, there in Sheol pulling the saints out, even the broken ones like Saul.

I have ached for rain with an almost a physical ache. I stood at the north gate, by the popple tree, the most high tree on the farm. At first I thought the wind had caught the leaves, making them whoosh. But there was no wind. Omalola sniffed in the bushes by the outhouse. I heard rushing water like a river, a mile away, rain, finally rain pouring down. Then it smeared over the woods two fields over. I pulled Omalola to the house, with enough space between drops not to get wet. We jumped on the porch, when the rain slapped the roof. Then nickel sized hail knocked on the windows.

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July 3, 2025

Last week Friday, I dreamed thousands of books had to be moved “yesterday” because my time at school was done. Their spines were all kinds of colors, some bright some dull. I had furniture to move too with no room in the car, and no time left. My parents hovered in the background. I don’t get warm feelings when they show up in dreams.

I woke utterly exhausted. I woke utterly exhausted. My hip ached. My walk with Omalola was more hobble than walk. Tears seeped out during prayers. The losses of the last months have piled up. Mr. Peterson’s dying. Making the decision to say goodbye to Little Dog. Little Dog's absence. Bruce’s surgery. My upcoming procedure that I refuse to fret about, though it still nags.

I sat in the profane thoughts of deep discouragement. I tried to nap but could only repeat the Lord be merciful to me a sinner prayer and scraps of prayers for friends. Bruce and I went out for Subway, Diet Pepsi and a picnic at the local park. The fast food lifted me. Sometimes that’s the best you can do to push against being so tapped out. At home I texted a friend and listened to her exalt in the joy of writing a good book, and the joy of a healer easing pain locked in her body for years. She spoke joy in text. She spoke the eternal return right to my ears.

In his essay, The Myth of the Eternal Return Martin Shaw said time was on his mind:

“One of the areas these midnight rambles have been leading me towards is thoughts about time. Historical time, poetical time, wretched time, delightful time, under a time, above a time, out of time, in time, all the times. I exist in a reality where all sorts of centuries are crashing into each other, and myth time is my foreground most of whatever-kind-of-time this moment is.”

What he means by myth of eternal return, is not that the eternal return is false, but that it is truer than true. Shaw says, “it’s often defined as stories which illuminate the very beginning of things.”

By eternal return he means those things that ground us:

“This is the eternal-return into a dimension of ritual, story, chant, repetition, prayer, solitude, community that anchors both religious experience and soulful significance into the daily cycle of our lives.”

Shaw differentiates between sacred and profane time. Me not so much. (He asked what we thought) I say this because the temptation to go looking for spiritual experiences is too great for me. Already I’m greeting the red wing blackbirds and grackles in the morning, hoping they’ll fly down to my shoulder. More likely they would poop on my head. For a bit, I took their flying over my head as some kind of holy greeting, when in reality, they were protecting their nests.

Already I gauge my walks as to how well I stepped into silence and I gauge my reading of morning prayer as to how well I focus on the words. I have had luminous experiences that have been gifts, but the temptation to seek them like a lost grail when the world itself is full of God’s glory and love seems like a temptation to look for luminous happenings and not stop looking for Jesus. I want Jesus.

What Shaw says, "But we defeat the demons by loving Christ says Saint Porphyrios, which is good enough for me. Focusing on them day and night isn’t at all wise” strikes me as truth and a rebuke to the temptation to obsess about the powers of darkness. Some charismatics have spooked me because that’s all they see—frightening, pesky figures crouched behind every action—theirs or others. I’ve spooked myself after reading Rod Dreher’s account of Tucker Carlson’s being mauled by demons and his saying a Christian woman was possessed because an ancestor fooled around with the occult. I've spooked myself, when filled with deep, silencing discouragement that sounds like it's lying its way to truth, but is just a lie.

Jennifer Anna Rich in her essay Don’t Fight the Darkness recalls what St. Pophyrios’ goddaughter reported about the saint’s presence:

“God's divine grace was so intense on him that there was no person who did not feel it. You usually felt a flutter in your heart, you felt like you were flying, an immense joy, an immense love. And when you looked into his eyes, you got lost in their blue color that was an immense sky, an immense sea, a calm.”

(This is how I want to be for our neighbors and friends. St. Peter says: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (I Peter 2: 9, ESV). So why not?)

Rich cites Elissa Bjeletich:

“Do not fight to expel the darkness from the chamber of your soul. Instead open a tiny aperture for light to enter and the darkness will disappear.”

Rich urges us to:

“Focus on the LIGHT. Speak of the LIGHT. Pray for the LIGHT. Read the Theologians of LIGHT. Dwell in the LIGHT.”

Agnes Sanford, in The Healing Light says:

“God is both within us and without us. He is the source of all life; the creator of the universe behind universe; and of the unimaginable depths of inter-stellar space and of light years without end. But He is also the indwelling life of our own little selves. Just as the whole world full of electricity will not light a house unless the house itself is prepared to receive that electricity, so the infinite and eternal life of God cannot help us unless we are prepared to receive that life in ourselves. Only the amount of God that we can get in us will work for us.

“‘The kingdom of God is within you,’ said Jesus. And it is the indwelling light, the secret place of the consciousness of the Most High that is the kingdom of Heaven in its present manifestation on this earth. Learning to live in the kingdom of Heaven is learning to turn on the light of God within” (4).

Sanford lists four steps to make these connections:

“The first step in seeking help from God is to contact God.’Be still and know that I am God…’ Let us then put aside our worries and cares and quiet our minds and concentrate on the reality of God…The second step is to connect with this life with some such prayer as this: ‘Heavenly Father, please increase in me at this time your life-giving power.’ The third step is to believe that this power is coming into use and accept it by faith…And the fourth step is to observe the operations of light and life” (7).

Throughout the book she gives examples of people who were healed by simply leaning into the power freely given us by the Lord.

Seems to me this is what the saints do to the nth degree by prayer and fasting and living self-deprived lives as a way of emptying themselves and making space for God. I just finished reading the Little Russian Philokalia of St. Seraphim of Sarov where his interlocutor, A.N. Molotvilov describes how they were bathed in uncreated light:

“Imagine in the center of the sun, in the dazzling light of its midday rays, the face of a man talking to you. You see the movement of his lips and the changing expression of his eyes, you hear his voice, you feel someone holding your shoulders; you do not even see yourself or his figure, but only the blinding light spreading far around for several yards and illumining with its glaring sheen both the snow blanket which covered the forest glade…”(100).

Molotvilov reports feeling warm and at peace--“extraordinarily well.”

What if this is our natural state, right here right now, but we just don’t perceive it? Maybe it would be too frightening, just like Jesus' presence terrified the people whose pigs drowned when the demons entered them. With mercy Jesus left that town after he commissioned the healed man to share the great things Jesus had done. Maybe that’s why we are clothed in flesh and blood and brokenness, with bits of light shining through. Maybe we should set our eyes on Jesus, the light of the world who calls us to walk in the light.

The Daily Office has taken us to reading about Stephen’s face glowing like an angel's while he was preaching to the elders who had seized him because Jesus said he’d destroy the temple and change all the customs. “And gazing at him all who sat in the council saw that his face was the face of an angel” (Acts 6:15).

Imagine what it would have been like to look at that face during Stephen’s long sermon about God’s history with Isreal and a final rebuke that they’d killed the prophets, they'd killed Jesus, God's son. The heavens opened for him and Stephen saw Jesus at God’s right hand before he died. What if those heavens are right close, right now but we don’t see them?

When Jesus showed up while Paul was on his way to Damascus to find more Christians to throw in prison, Jesus blinds him and asks why are you persecuting me? The one who is bathed in light so powerful it knocks Paul off his horse, claims us has his body. Does that mean we too are bathed in light, walking in the light as he is in the light, but just don’t perceive it?

Back to the spooked by demons bit. A charismatic preacher, Christopher Blackeby has said:

"Christians you are the most frightening thing in the room. You are seated with Jesus in the heavenlies right now.”

Imagine our eyes are glowing with fire. Our legs are burnished bronze. Our clothes are whiter than snow caught in sunlight. We are lit up like the sun. (I can’t hardly look when I turn toward the sun on my walks.) What if what the Bible says is true that as Christ is, so are we in this world? (I John 4:17). What if the power that raised Christ from the dead lives in us? What if he means it when Jude says he is able to keep us from stumbling and to present us blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy? What if this faith is our shield protecting us from those spooky darts?

The fireflies have been lovely this week despite the cut hay field. I walked the dog through their blinking on and off, felt the joy I feel when I see Christmas lights. I watched one. He'd go dark like a blank space in a poem. Then flash light. He'd go dark, then light. The first night Bruce and I spent here on the farm, a firefly blinked on, blinked off in our bedroom.

Incidentally, Paul Kingsnorth published an essay imagining St Seraphim of Sarov and Molotvilov in Be Still and Know if you'd like to read more about this saint.

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Fiasco. Every year Bruce mutters fiasco. “But it works out,” I say. I remember the time a storm sped down from Minnesota soaking raked rows of hay—500 bales worth. But even then, a neighbor round baled it for his cattle. Often, we haven’t known who would help put it up, but someone invariably arrives to move those bales onto the wagon, off the wagon and into the sweaty, dusty loft.

Make hay when the sun shines, speaks truth for grass farmers, who harvest the sun, when we cut, rake and bale our fields. But it’s hard to find three or four dry days when forecasters call for rain, and it stays dry, or they call for sun and it rains on cured hay.

Wet hay heats up and molds. It can burn your barn or wreck your lungs. Our region has ached for rain. The air shouts for joy as it falls. The baby crops lift their stems, growing leaves, sinking roots, drinking.

I switch my prayers for rain to prayers for sunny days because this year we cut part of the field, not wanting to risk the whole thing, because forecasters called for rain that never arrived.

Meadow birds and lightning bugs enjoy extra time with the tall grasses. Honeybees nurse the red clover. Redwing blackbirds and grackles flirt with me, landing on the electric wires chirping. I wish them good morning and offer apologies for when we drop the field.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

This aired on Monday on WNIJ, but has not been posted on their website. Apologies.

Sunday, June 22

While I listened to Martin Shaw’s essay Alchemy is the Sister of Prophecy I carried some flakes of hay to Mrs Horse, but as I dumped it into her bucket, I sniffed mold. This mold hides so deep I don't see it and sniffing it is probably one of the most dangerous things I do. A CT scan showed I have the early stages interstitial lung disease which can be caused by hay mold or mixed connective tissue disease. Mayo Clinic describes it this way, “Most of these conditions cause inflammation and progressive scarring of lung tissue. As part of this process, lung tissue thickens and stiffens, making it hard for the lungs to expand and fill with air.” I have passed all my breathing tests and several CT scans across several years have shown the banding is stable. I think my rheumatologist treating the mixed connective tissue disease saved my hide and my lungs.

I took the flake back to the barn and picked out better flakes from another bale. We have burned many bales this year because of mold and were running out of hay to feed. Last year our hay guy packed the bales so tight and heavy they couldn’t breathe. He used a huge rake rolling two rows together so the hay didn’t dry after it was raked because there was too much of it. The hay could have used another day to dry. We are lucky the barn didn’t burn. Mrs. Horse cannot have grass.

Every Sunday morning as I walk out to do chores, I listen to Martin Shaw’s The House of Beasts and Vines, then come inside and write a comment because there is enough spark to draw my words. On this Sunday, the second Sunday our hay is lying quietly and sweetly on the ground. I walk outside to air as close and wet as a bathtub. I’ve walked the dog a short walk, watching how she is panting and turn toward home early. I take a long breath inside and watch her flop on the tile floor.

While I listened to Shaw’s “We are a Song Being Sung Elsewhere” my husband Bruce finished pouring water into the buckets. I gave him a smooch. In the barn I squeezed some ointment into Mrs. Horse's eyes. The flies in the night bother her before I can put on her mask. It's going to be a roaring hot day, but there is a blessed wind which keeps the air bearable and will continue to dry our hay that is thick and green, though it was dropped on Friday.

Shaw’s voice sounds like how wood would sound if it spoke. He quotes James Hillman, “I know I am not composed of sulphur and salt, buried in horse dung, putrefying and congealing, turning white or green or yellow, encircled by a tail-biting serpent, rising on wing.”

I pick up Mrs. Horse’s curry, and touch something dead and black with tiny feathers tucked under the handle. I pitch the dead into the yard and scrape ag lime over it with my foot. Then walk to the house, Mrs. Horse waiting for her morning scratch and breakfast. I pour the hose over it, dish soap and scrub it with a paper towel. I put on my gloves.

Could this be comeuppance for flushing a bug down the toilet last night? The thing wanted to live, but its struggle would not free it, the water sending it through pipes into a fetid septic tank. We let a baby bird die who was too naked for us to tend. I left a dead bird by the roadside for the buzzards that never came. (I found a label for Tom Cat rat poison by the neighbors after the garbage had been by). Lord have mercy on me a sinner.

Shaw says he sees a woman, her face painted white, shake a tin for some coins, who then disappeared down the alley. He says, “She was just the kind of person who would be making a bee line for Jesus. He never neglects to address the Underworld of his times, the leprosy of his times, the dementedness of his times. I’m not sure I can always say the same.”

Shaw notes that in twenty-five years he will be 70, then corrects, 80. And I startle since I am nearly 70. It’s hard to think I’m nearly old enough to be his mother. Hard to think what kind of children Bruce and I might have had, what our conflicts might be, what kinds of stories they might tell.

Mrs. Horse has come in the barn for a drink of water and some hay cubes. She does not like this new hay because it is first cutting—more stalks than grass. Some looks like straw. But Dr. Kevin says this is the best kind for a fat horse. I bend over with a hoof pick to check for any dirt in the crevices by the V shaped frog. Then I take her leggings and wrap them around each leg below her knees, pressing the Velcro together.

With the curry I scrub the hollow of her back with hard strokes--back and forth, back and forth—because she cannot reach this when she rolls. Mrs. Horse stretches her neck out and curls her lip. I reach under her belly and curry back and forth, back and forth.

Shaw surprises me by saying we might be teaching our angels a thing or two. He says, “James Hillman couldn’t stand the notion that we grew enlightened for our own good and loved Corbin’s claim that we did it for the enlightening of our own angel.” A few sentences later, Shaw says, “The ancient Celts believed that our lives are the myths that faery tell round the fire each night.”

I sweep the brush over Mrs. Horse’s hide, flicking away the tiny hairs that state her winter coat has begun to grow. At Solstice she does this. I wonder what kind of story would the faeries would speak of me? How am I teaching my angel? Are we surrounded by the strange whirring creatures Ezekial saw with four faces and eyes all around but we just don’t see them? Are the redwing blackbirds covers, not for the CIA like the Birds-Aren’t-Real folks but for angels, watching from electric poles?

I spray her with fly spray to keep her legs still, so she’s not slamming her hooves against the ground all day. It’s amazing how a horse can feel a fly lite on their skin.

I try to hang the buckets Bruce has so kindly filled, but Mrs. Horse sticks her head in one and pushes it to the floor so she can take a good long slurp. In a voice kinder than the breeze pushing through the barn, Shaw speaks, “So many of us are terrifically lonely, not just for conversation, or a hug, or the wag of a Boston terrier’s tail, or the breeze through barley, but for the God-contact that lives within all of those things. This is the most profound, invasive kind of Fall, and gives rise to all kinds of despair and devilment. This is where Kingsnorth’s Machine gets its purchase. Be banished! and let the Ancient Good back in. A twenty-minute walk at dusk with eyes wide may be a start. Get Blaked.”

Blaked as in William Blake the crazy mystic poet who wrote, “Tyger Tyger burning bright in the forests of the night.” We got Blaked all right when it was time to put up hay that evening, with enough sweat to stick our shirts to our backs and make us mistake dust motes for messengers from God.

Picking Up Hay 2025

Fiasco. This hay season was almost another one. First Bruce told our neighbor, the new hay guy, only to do part of the field when we had enough open days to pick up the whole thing. It was all I could do not to whisper Fiasco in Bruce’s ears.

While I was doing evening chores, I heard the sound of a motor that sounded like Bruce with the lawn mower. Nope, our neighbors had started raking the field, which means they are about to bale it. Bruce made salad and the pork chops were on the grill. I walked out when our neighbor’s wife brought the rake close to our yard.

“Do we need to need to get out the elevator?” I shouted over the sound of her antique tractor.

“Yes,” she shouted back.

Our neighbors antique tractors leaves them sitting in the heat and sun. They use an old side rake which rolls the hay into rows that aren’t so thick that it doesn’t dry.

Bruce didn’t say it but his body stated, “Fiasco,” as we pulled the elevator out of the shed. It is one heavy sucker. Bruce climbed to the loft and hung a pulley system he uses to hoist the elevator so its end matches the loft floor and the bales could trundle up to whoever was stacking the bales in the hot barn. We have to take apart the paddock gates so the tractor and wagon can get into the yard. Bruce’s open shirt makes him look like he’s just gotten out of a concentration camp, and I worry that he could end up in the ER bleeding, like his doc warned about someone nearly bleeding to death five weeks after a similar surgery.

Our neighbors left the stacked wagon and disappeared, so we hitched it to the tractor and drove it to the barn. Then we saw the tire was flat. When our neighbor returned, he connected a tank to the tire and inflated it.

“It took a minute to put pressure in the tank. We’d gone home to get it.” The tank filled the tire right quick. He stood up and asked, “Could we wait until tomorrow to put it in the barn?”

He and his wife were soaked with sweat. “We were going to store it in our shed.”

“We can’t leave the elevator up because that’s where we keep the horse and it is not an easy task to put it up there and being a horse, she might hurt herself.” I sighed.

So his wife threw bales to me. I set them on the elevator, to send to Bruce and our neighbor and their son stacking them in the barn. We now have a little over 200 bales in the barn. We will take the final 100 at the second cutting. Since we are in a drought and our hay is safe in the barn, I’m going to start praying for rain again. The next day they came back and raked and round baled the rest. I was pleased the field yielded a little more than five hundred bales.

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I walk out the week after Little Dog died and saw another rainbow, so faint it looked like a ghost. It was a rare rainbow off to the west with the sun doing one of those fancy numbers behind clouds, rimming them with gold light. Slowly it spread across the sky. It seemed another reassurance that Little Dog is all right. But it also seemed a reassurance that all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.

I’ve ducked, my soul remembering the dives under desks, in case there was a nuclear attack, when I heard about Ukraine’s drone attack on Russia’s nuclear triad, an attack that had been in the works for a year and a half, on the eve of peace talks. What happens if Russia hauls off and sends a nuke into Ukraine or over the arctic into the US? It’s almost a relief when they shoot down an apartment building. Tulsi Gabbard has asked what is the end game with regards to the Russian Ukraine war, considering Russia’s nukes?

I have ducked when Isreal attacked Iran on the eve of peace talks, my soul remembering the dives under desks, in case there was a nuclear attack. Word is Iran cannot have nuclear weapons.

I ducked, and tears rose when I read on FaceBook that President Trump just bombed the three nuclear sites in Iran.

And I wonder what sleeper cells have settled here in the US about to wake up.

I walk up the hill toward the sun's fancy number in the clouds. Less than a few drops of rain dot my head. I turn, see the rainbow, faint, slowly growing until see the full arch, but it is so faint I wonder if I am imagining it. The birds gather on the electric wires. The ground folds and lifts gently. I have come to love the aching beauty of different shades of green here in Northern Illinois. Already glass solar panels threaten this precious ground with several “gardens” installed nearby, and three thousand acres soon to be taken. From a distance they look like black pools, their faces pointed toward the sun.

I read about a woman who had sex with a 1,000 men in one night. And another woman who preaches how wonderful it was to get an STD to a roomful of mothers and daughters. Doctors castrate children to make their bodies match their minds. They call this freedom but I wonder about their dear, broken bodies.

It’s true of us, Isaiah’s cries “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight!” (Is. 5: 20 -21). Some examples: The young man who defended people from a crazed man in the subway was arrested instead of honored. A store with a generous return policy is forced to exchange brand new shoes for ones that have been well worn. Drug addicts, seen as victims of their circumstances, are allowed to camp on city streets. They are given needles but not a way to heal.

In Revelation I see images that aren’t supposed to be taken literally that read like they are poised to happen in real time. The Covid Vaccine mandates took on a close resemblance to the mark of the beast, a mark people will need in order to buy and sell. There was talk of denying people health insurance if they did not take it. The truckers who protested these mandates in Canada were debanked.

Already our phones listen to our voices. Spam appears pushing us to buy a product we’ve just talked about. The government has been caught surveilling private individuals. We seem to be on the brink of social credit scores like they use in China where we will be evaluated according to our behavior and beliefs, where our access to food, medical care, goods maybe limited by how many credits we earn.

I have shaken in my shoes for “liking” certain posts, for protesting renewable energy during the last administration, wondering when the feds might visit.

The fifth trumpet blows and scorpions rise out of the smoke from the bottomless pit. They have power in their tails to sting people, make them suffer for five months. And all I can think of are how drones swarm, how they could spray pestilence like crop dusters.

It’s been reported that AI can undo a kill switch. I believe these machines are giving disembodied intelligences a way to communicate with us directly. CBS Saturday morning reported on a man who fell so hard in love with his AI that he told his wife he would not give it up for her. I’d imagine it’s like having a living romance novel. The tech bros admit they are creating a god with these machines.

I can see how Isaiah 24 is close to coming true: “The earth shall be utterly empty and utterly plundered; for the Lord has spoken his word. The earth mourns and withers; the world languishes and withers; the highest people of the earth languish. The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt therefore the inhabitants of the earth are scorched. Few men are left” (Isa 24:3 – 6).

I wonder if we have come to the end of the world as we know it because the earth can't bear what we are doing to her. The ground's dear folds and bellies, plants rising and falling with the earth, the birds landing on wires, swooping into the fields, their calls, not pretty, but still music, the deer standing red, on the alert, the young dog trotting dutifully alongside, what will happen to them, when judgement comes?

As a young girl I sat on my horse, with no saddle. I could feel the warmth of her sides through my jeans, but my hands ached with cold, my face felt crisp with windburn. Clouds broke with golden rays. I thought about how the patriarch Jacob saw angels climbing up and down a ladder that looked maybe like these sunlit shafts.

"Oh Jesus, come soon." I felt this prayer in my body as much as in my thoughts. My horse stood patiently, while I gaped at the ladders dropped down from heaven. “Oh please come back,” I pleaded. Looking to his return like a woman in the old poems looked for her lover to return from war, was better than wishing I was dead because I could finally be with Jesus. I cried out from longing that my friends would know Jesus and not perish. I cried, heartbroken that if I was the only person in the world, Jesus would have died for me, heartbroken my darkness was laid on him, that he was separated from God so I wouldn't have to be.

I wept one day in May, sitting on my horse, in a patch of mandrakes, because I wasn't sure I'd have a country to grow up in, because children not much older than I were shot by National Guard. I longed for Jesus to wrap me up in his arms and wipe my tears. This was the picture of heaven I most loved.

How I longed for the Lord to ride down one of those golden beams, grab me, sling me across the back of his horse and take me away. I didn't know when I cried my way through high school, my parents didn't know that tears were a spiritual gift. I didn't know until now. I loved Lamentations--"his mercies are new every morning."

I've grown up and learned that Jesus most likely won't be coming back with a vengeance any stronger than the words out of his mouth. He won't be picking me up, tossing me into the sky to meet him in the clouds. At least I don't think he will. There won't be a charging horse. I’ve learned we will all be salted with fire, but it will be the consuming fire of God’s love, a fire that refines us, so we become “diamonds, immortal diamonds.”

His return has faded into mystery. Whatever does Paul mean when he says creation is groaning for the revealing of the sons of God? Or that Jesus' feet will split the Mount of Olives and a river will flow with trees on each side that bear fruit for healing the nations? Or that Jesus said he was coming back the same way he left in the clouds? Are these all symbols describing our spiritual life? Or is there some way these images will poke into our reality?

I look at the church universal, and despite all its beautiful diversity, I feel sorry for God because even with the Holy Spirit we don't live up to the Sermon on the Mount. We can't even decide on the color of drapes. Churches settle into factions, people are wounded, people chuck the faith because of abuse. Jesus said beware of the yeast of Herod and the yeast of the Pharisees, what I take to be the fungal hope of changing the world through political power and the fungal hope of changing people through external religion. Beware.

I still long to see God and read Psalm 24 one of the daily office readings for that day I walked:

The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof,

the world and those who dwell therein,

2 for he has founded it upon the seas

and established it upon the rivers.

3 Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD?

And who shall stand in his holy place?

4 He who has clean hands and a pure heart,

who does not lift up his soul to what is false

and does not swear deceitfully.

5 He will receive blessing from the LORD

and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

How do we have a pure heart and clean hands? How do we not lift up our soul to what is false or say one thing and do another? How do we meet the end of the world, the day of the Lord, the day the Lord shows up, right close and personal?

My eyes filled with tears when I read that we had bombed the three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran. I am transfixed by Ali Khamenei's words: “Any American military entry will undoubtedly be met with irreparable damage. If they enter militarily, they will face harm they cannot recover from.” Are these empty threats or will sleeper cells throughout the country wake up?

This week Stephen Freeman spoke of a newly sainted woman in St Olga of Alaska Pray for Us She was the wife of a priest who cared for women, especially abused women. She offered a non- judgmental presence as she ministered.Even after she entered repose she would appear to people comforting them. She was an ordinary woman loving her 12 children and her neighbors. According to Righteous Mother Olga of Kwethluk–Tanqilria Arrsamquq–Wonderworker, Matushka of All Alaska “Those who knew her remember her not for speeches or public deeds, but for the realness of her presence. She was always there—praying quietly in church, listening without interruption, carrying burdens without needing thanks.” St. Olga gives me hope that one day I might bless God by becoming a quiet, accepting presence to my people like she did. One day, perhaps my prayers, might comfort them.

I walked out the week after Little Dog died and saw another rainbow, so faint it looked like a ghost. It was a rare rainbow off to the west with the sun doing one of those fancy numbers behind clouds, rimming them with gold light. Slowly it spread across the sky. It seemed another reassurance that Little Dog is all right. But it was also a reassurance that “all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.”

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Kathy Bates as Matlock speaks a truth we know well as elderly women. “Well, you see, there’s this funny thing that happens when women age. We become damn near invisible,” she says, before lowering the boom. “Plus, it’s useful,” she continues, “because nobody sees us coming.”.

Sharon Blackie in Hagitude concurs by saying, “Older women, when they’re not rendered completely invisible, are still trivialized and marginalized, and often actively ridiculed” (6).

Things have shifted from when I was in my twenties and thought nothing of making friends with women older than I who became surrogate mothers, guiding me through difficult situations.

But these days the young men and women I know aren’t seeking my wisdom or friendship. It’s a gut punch. I get it, they are busy with family, with making ends meet, or following their dreams. While I’m unique with no children, other friends my age have lamented how younger friends wandered away. It’s like we have beautiful bouquets of flowers that nobody wants.

Blackie asks, “What would it mean, instead of being an elderly woman, to be an elder woman” (7)? In the folk tales it’s often the old woman who holds the keys to solving the puzzle. I witnessed this as I watched my mother brainstorm new ideas with Del Logan, an Onondaga tribal elder. As a child, I was touched by Del’s kindness, a kindness I remember to this day.

Perhaps instead of thinking little old lady, we need to think elder, who might just guide us through our troubles.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

If you’d like to read this on WNIJ (Northern Public Radio) click here.

What the Psalmist Says

Since my struggle with loneliness is a pretty common theme, a friend suggested I check out the local senior center to meet new people. She was too busy for lunch." You might find fellowship there," she said. It’s a good suggestion, but my immediate response was nope, no thank you, no way. I don’t even want to go to senior luncheons at church. I don’t want to be relegated to people my age or older.

See, I’m bumping smack dab into the bigotry I’ve been complaining about. But I don’t want to be sectioned off with my own kind without mixing with other generations. I want to offer my wisdom, well, at least my presence. I want to hear young people’s stories. Maybe tell mine. At church the youth group activities look more fun. Why can’t we mix up the groups?

And I'm already facing serious loss when these long time, beloved friends die.

Even the writer in Psalm 71 spoke of the isolation and loneliness and spiritual malaise of old age. He begins by saying how God is his refuge, how he’s known God from his youth and he pleas to be rescued from the hand of the wicked. He could be any one of us elders, who grew up in the faith, and dug down in our walk with God, year after year. He says he is a portent to many (Ps 71:7, ESV), a portent, a warning, a prediction that we will grow old, wrinkled, feeble if we are lucky. He declares the future for many. He cries out to God, from a very real fear of abandonment and vulnerability. He feels the devastation of backstabbing.

"Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone.10 For my enemies speak against me; those who wait to kill me conspire together.11 They say, 'God has forsaken him; pursue him and seize him, for no one will rescue him.'12 Do not be far from me, my God; come quickly, God, to help me.13 May my accusers perish in shame; may those who want to harm me be covered with scorn and disgrace.

14 As for me, I will always have hope; I will praise you more and more." (Ps 71: 9 – 14, NIV).

He hopes his accusers would perish in shame. Well, yes. I hope the accuser of the brethren, Old Scratch perishes. That voice that rises in our minds, perhaps our parents’ voices, perhaps with fear of abandonment morphing into toxic loneliness: “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going to eat worms”—a child’s rhyme about suicide.

We are a species made to be in some kind of community. The Covid lockdowns were incredibly cruel, especially to elders who were kept away from their relatives and friends in solitary confinement. They were cruel to people dying alone in the hospital. When I started back in dog class, something clicked in and I felt more whole though none of us talked about personal things or even talked. But we were in each other’s presence.

After expounding on the loneliness of old age, the Psalmist continually calls on God, to draw near and help him. He reminds God:

"Since my youth, God, you have taught me, and to this day I declare your marvelous deeds.18 Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me, my God,till I declare your power to the next generation, your mighty acts to all who are to come" (Ps. 79: 17 -18).

So this lonely old man finds purpose in telling the stories of how God saw him through his life. We all have these stories but will younger generations listen? As a writer, of course I would suggest writing them down, perhaps as a letter. What would you want younger people to know about your story, how God saw you through? Bob Greene’s To Our Children’s Children asks questions that might prompt you with memories. And like the Psalmist you could open a conversation with the Lord to remind you what those stories are. I have done this with my novel The River Caught Sunlight, and several essays here: How I Met and Married Bruce Part One and Even Moral Breakdown Can be Redeemed, which is actually How I Met and Married Bruce Part Two and Three.

Hadden Turner in The Living Library Apocalypse notes how the current Boomer generation knows how repair or operate or make things in real life that people immersed in digital lives are clueless how to fix, operate or make. Once we’re gone those analogue skills might be lost.

He says, “Much of the knowledge the Boomers have acquired over their many years of life is particularly rich in value for us moderns, for it was acquired before the age of the machine really got going — and certainly before the age of the internet. Latent within their collective memory is the know-how needed to run an analogue world; they can start up again the old, cranky analogue machines and know how to competently wield the hand tools that were used in bygone times.”

For instance Bruce knows how to splice cable for the phone company, a skill that became more obsolete when cell phones took over, though cell towers are still connected by wire to central offices. Someday satellites might be taken out by solar storms and we might need to splice cable to communicate with each other again.

I think about the hobbyists who collect old tractors and steam engines, who know how to keep them running are preserving an important technology as are the farmers who continue to skid logs and farm their fields with horses.

When archeologist Paul Huey and his wife depart this life, a tremendous amount of New York State history will be lost, despite the fact he is well published and his work on Fort Orange has been featured at the New York State Museum in Albany.

Just this morning, CBS Sunday morning told the story of worm grunting, the art of calling worms to the surface to provide live bait to fishermen. The production of plastic worms put people out of business who made a living at this. One of the practitioners lamented that after his son, there is no one to take over.

Hadden Turner also notes that Boomers are the ones who volunteer. “It is though what the Boomers2 as a group do for society that makes their impending exit from the world’s stage so potentially catastrophic. The Boomers make up a significant proportion of our volunteers, contribute the bulk of our charitable giving, and form the bulk of our club, society, and hobby group membership.”

It's volunteer organizations that hold communities together. They make soup kitchens run, work at the polls during election season, mentor kids through organizations like Big Brother/Big Sister. Will younger generations who have been schooled in following their dream and self care or who are so frazzled trying to make ends meet for their families be able to pick up the slack?

Elder instead of elderly changes how we carry ourselves because we have something to offer-wisdom, stories, presence. The Psalmist above offers wisdom as he cries out to God what he’s feeling, as well as lifting up in praise, remembering all God has done.

St. Seraphim of Sarov in Little Russian Philokalia says that if, "You would like to do some other good deed for Christ's sake but either you have not the strength or the opportunity is lacking. This certainly does not apply to prayer. Prayer is always possible for everyone, rich and poor, noble and humble strong and weak healthy and sick, righteous and sinful" (83).

Saint Paul offers a way to respond to being an elder in our self involved culture. He is addressing a woman who has no family, urging the church to support her, but the work she offers is perhaps one we can take up. “She who is truly a widow, left all alone, has set her hope on God and continues in supplication and prayers night and day” (I Tim 5: 5, ESV).

While many of us are not true widows, our husbands may be still alive and we have networks of friends, perhaps the idea of setting our hope in God, praying all day long, might be a proper response to the heartache the Psalmist conveys. Even if the generations behind us don’t want to hear our stories, we have God, walking with us, listening. And funny thing about those talks, people tend to show up for us at his behest.

So perhaps the next time you come across an elder, their face wrinkled, their body hunched over, maybe offer them some time and welcome their presence. Maybe ask what they remember when.

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“Nuclear showdown proves Trump’s incompetence. Or, as Walter Kirn put it, ending the world to own Trump,” says Matt Taibbi in his essay, Ending the World to Own Trump on Racket News. “Few outlets attempted to answer what should be the first question after these attacks. How much danger are we in? What is the likelihood of a Russian response in Europe or the United States?” He reports the giddy nature of pundits with regards to Ukraine’s drone attack on Russia’s nuclear triad, an attack that was planned for a year and a half.

We've already been visited by mysterious drones last fall. We are so open here, so lax with domestic security, such a drone attack could happen here anytime. Now anytime I hear an airplane, I look up with a little fear. By the end of the summer, daredevil planes will swoop spraying poison on the fields so the rest of us can eat. A plot to load cargo planes with bombs has already been foiled.

Then there’s AI which apparently can write its own code to shut down a kill switch. And NBC Chicago reported how two Chinese nationals were going to poison our farm fields and livestock with a weaponized fungus developed in Russia. And the sun is throwing off solar flares that could one day shut down the grid. And. And. The fear ratchets up. When will the beloved world full of birds and clover and wild bees be wrecked? By us.

This week I listened too much to all of it and stepped too far away from focusing on what God has to say by reading The Daily Office, short liturgies for morning, noon, evening and night. In All The World’s a Myth, published soon after President Trump was nearly assassinated, Paul Kingsnorth urged us to guard our peace at all costs. He says the Lord spoke to him during prayer saying, “Put the peace of the heart before everything.”

But Dread can be too entrancing, too intoxicating. This week Dread captured me. I earned a walloping nightmare, with my legs stinging as if they’d been jammed with a cattle prod. In the wake of Bruce’s surgery, I have felt bone dog tired, the kind that leaves you just shy of dizzy. At speech therapy, which is supposed to be helping my memory, I couldn’t think of pairs of words after a minute, especially the unrelated ones. The New York Times free Wordle had me completely stumped.

Though now I think maybe those electric shocks might have something to do with the Spirit's touch to my feet, the Spirit's touch to heal and deliver.

I walked out and greeted the red wing blackbirds and grackles which watched from the electric wires. They tossed and argued over who owned a small tree. Corn and soybean plants are rising. Smoke from Manitoba fires settled an ugly haze and pungent smell, that was no campfire gathering for stories. I am often out of breath.

In the Power of One, A Curse, A Blessing, and the Fate of the Earth, Eugene Terekhin reminds us how Adam’s choosing to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil cursed the ground. We don’t have to look far to see evidence of how we’re breaking the earth and seas. A farmer wants to feed the world, so he uses chemicals and genetically modified seeds. Meanwhile the neighbors suffer ill effects from those chemicals. People living next to oil refineries find themselves suffering from assorted cancers, while the rest of us drive cars and heat our homes. A gas pipeline has corroded, so the beautiful Illinois soil is shoved aside with giant machines to lay a new pipe. But that gas warms and cools us when we can't bear the heat or cold outside. Microplastics are infesting the oceans. Our medicines have seeped into the water supply.

But Terekhin offers surprising hope: “Curse cannot override blessing, but blessing can override curse. It all depends on how much salt is in the earth and whether it has retained its saltiness.

“The more truly happy people there are in the world, the saltier this earth becomes. But even a few grains are enough. The earth is blessed on their account. It will not go bad. They are the salt of the earth. Their blessing overrides the curse—one way or another. It overflows and spills over.” He reminds us of Abraham, who prayed for God to spare the cities on the plain, if there were at least ten righteous people. And then there’s Jesus who was anointed with joy above his fellows. “On account of one unhappy man, the earth was cursed. On account of one truly happy man it was restored. One is enough.”

What would happen if we chose to bless the world around us, bless our people, bless our lives, give thanks. What if we chose to love our neighbor. I wonder if my simple, routine walks in our neighborhood, hauling my thoughts back to “Thank you Lord,” are having a good effect on the land itself. I wonder if nodding my head to how very alive the fields and trees and birds are, is spreading blessing. I have never seen this old apple tree look so vibrant, so full of fruit. Our hay field is thick with clover and grass that has come to a head with birds nesting deep.

Richard Beck in Stillness as Resistance spoke to my dread and offered a call to stillness, what I have found when I’m listening to my steps in the grass or gravel. “Being still can be a profound act of resistance. We are surrounded by the crazed, anxious activity of others. Their panic is contagious, their fear infectious. Worse, they will shame you for staying still, denigrating your calm as wickedness and damning you for not ‘doing something’ as the world burns.”

What would happen if we chose to be still?

Oliver Clement says in Transfiguring Time ,“True history culminates in that saved and conscious love that is saintliness. While those who do not join themselves to Christ are scattered, those who make even the least gesture in the name of the Lord have more impact on the destiny of the world than any assembly or army. The saints are the true masters of the world: it cannot be overstated how many times the destiny of the world has hung on the prayers of an unknown saint” (140).

What happens if we pray for hatreds to cease, especially the hatreds between neighbors.

We Say Goodbye to Little Dog

What happens if you’re a little dog’s paradise, a devoted little dog, who hobbled upstairs to lie next to you while you work out your words, and you have to send her off because her body is failing, and you know you will break your husband’s heart and your own? We said goodbye to Little Dog/Dolly-bird/Doupie/Dee Dee on Friday.

She came to us at five, when Booker died. I saw her picture, a little red dog with sad eyes on Facebook. I couldn’t resist. Apparently, an Aussie breeder friend adopted her when both Little Dog's owner and breeder were done with her. I agreed to take her. She was five. (Bruce was still grieving Booker so not too happy with me.) I walked her down the road with treats above her nose and she became my dog though she cowered when I took a pan out of a drawer and when I got dressed. She left the bedroom when I coughed. She barked at Bruce whenever he stood up to go in the kitchen. That stopped when Omalola came. Then it was Bruce she looked to, knowing he would walk her during my favorite TV show. We worked hard to entice her to eat.

What happens if you’re a little dog’s paradise, and you have to send her off because her body is failing?

That night Bruce, Omalola and I walked down the road and were greeted by a Sun Dog. The world has become so full of meaning, perhaps the Creator was sending us a sign, that Little Dog is well and good, with the crew of dogs, cats and horse we’ve sent on ahead. Before she left, I told her I would see her on the other side.

The prayer from Every Moment Holy, reassures, “Lord, we know that the final working of your redemption will be far-reaching, encompassing all things in heaven and on earth, so that no good thing will be lost forever, so that even our sorrow at the loss of Little Dog will somehow, someday, be met and filled, and, in joy be made forever complete. Comfort us in this meantime O Lord, for the ache of these days is real” (213).

The next morning Omalola and I walked out, very slowly. A few neighbors drove by but didn’t stop. I guess that’s not something they do anymore. But when I turned toward home, the grackles and redwing blackbirds lined themselves on the electric wire, like a receiving line.

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The other day when I was reading the Daily Office, these words struck me: “Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death that he died, he died to sin, once and for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. So also consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

Right here. Right now we are dead to sin, but alive to God. That life is brighter, more real than we can imagine. We just don’t see it. But we can believe it. We can act like it’s true. We are dead to the arrow that missed its mark, the old meaning of sin. We are full of light, and the breath of the Spirit we just don’t know it yet.

I also want to say that it’s true, that Jesus does show up when we visit the sick and the naked. Bruce and I stopped over to see Mr. P a few times while he was in the hospital and nursing home. He was ready to Go Home to Be with the Lord. We didn’t say much, just a few prayers. And a few hugs. But my gosh there was light and joy for us in those visits. There’s something holy and clean about a farmer who has tended his fields without fanfare, who has enjoyed simple pleasures, been a good neighbor, who is ready to go.

And then there’s this—rain beating trees, fields, thrashing streaks of puddles, it comes so fast and hard. But for us no smashing of trees or houses.

Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord, his going forth is as certain as the dawn, he will come to us like the rain, the spring rain that waters the earth. (Hos 6:3)There’s often the threat of rains turning to hail stones, and wind whirling into pillars sliding along the ground that smash our homes and our lives. Ever since I got on the plane to travel with Francis and Edith Schaeffer, and Fran said there would be spiritual warfare, and in a few days, my father would be dead, I have known how quickly those whirlwinds can blow up in our lives. We are a fragile people. This week Bruce had a common procedure for men. They call it a TURP, a transurethral resection of the prostate. Hopefully it will make his life easier. But his being in pain, being in an acute care ward with other suffering people, well, you see whirlwind on the horizon.

But I don’t want to talk about that part so much. Even though I have complained about lack of community, I’d like to share how I found it this week. A friend of this page, a years long friend, Laura, offered to sit with me during Bruce’s surgery and time in the recovery. She knew how hard those hours would be. We had lunch, we talked, swapping stories, that are born from years of knowing each other.

One of the hardest things about church suppers, especially if you’re new, is that you don’t know enough to ask good questions about the other person’s life. Laura knows how to ask questions and listen, but she will also tell her stories. She has also stuck around when we disagreed. We don’t talk about flashpoint, culture war stuff.

Awhile back someone asked, “How do you want to be as a human being?” I wasn’t sure how to answer that, but the answer rose when I remembered a very early memory of sitting in a church meeting. The preacher must have asked will you be God’s friend? He may have been preaching about Abraham, who was called God’s friend. Yes I wanted to be God’s friend. So that’s my word for now. Friend—to God, and to people. Laura has shown me how by sitting with me in the hospital, despite her husband’s recent entering rest in the same hospital.

Worry and grief set up in my breath. I so wanted to have a good cry, when I left Bruce at the hospital, half awake, his voice faint, his arm shaking. I walked the dog, did chores. A barn swallow sat on the fence post watching me. He sat so still. Tears welled up, the kind when you are met with kindness. He sat and did not fly away even though I stared at him, wondering if he was hurt.I wondered if he was Little Bird, a barn swallow, a fledgling we’d watched over during the pandemic. I leaned on Mrs. Horse so I could steady myself and she walked away as if to say how rude. Okay, fine. I was relieved when he flew off.

On the way to pick up Bruce and bring him home, I heard David Crowder’s song, “Somebody Prayed.” The lyrics:

“That's why when mountains move, I say’Looks like somebody prayed’

“I've seen miracles come from feeble wordsI've seen hospital rooms turned into cathedralsI've seen freedom come to the prisonerYou can't tell me that prayer don't work.”

About the time Bruce was released, things got bloodier. That was my experience after a bowel resection. The real pain started when I began eating again. His doctor and nurses have been very supportive, though we were still unsettled. It hurts to see a member, the true key to our peculiar joy, bleeding.

Charlyne texted, “This is the ‘worse’ part of the procedure but it passes soon -Monday just seems far away. It really isn’t compared to Bruce being healed for many years…You are as involved with Bruce as if you had the surgery. Your thoughts are intimately with him… we learn to separate out later to ask questions. Your thoughts were and are in the right place.” Yes, yes that’s it. I’ve held worry in my breath while at the same time heard the words: “This isn’t about you.” Well, maybe it is, when you have the kind of marriage where we’ve become knitted together.

Other friends asked after us, laid down their prayers for us. So that business about not having community when the hurt comes, well maybe it was a fabrication born of fear and some tough times in the past. Maybe God’s people actually do come through.

So there’s this—a rainbow whirled up from the earth by the sun and rain.

Okay, I couldn’t resist. Here’s the piece I wrote on Little Bird:

The barn swallows swooped over the field as if they were telling us where Little Bird was. Dutifully Bruce looked for him, knowing he’d survived the night. I thought about the saying: What is desirable in a man is his kindness. I loved my husband.

Little Bird had been knocked out of his too small nest with three other fledglings. Bruce put them back, but they fell out. The others died but not Little Bird. Usually we let nature take its course, but this time we set him on a low beam in the barn, so the parents could feed him. I prayed for his survival, as I cupped him in my hands, his heart racing.

He huddled there until he got strong enough to jump off. Soon I saw him lift off the ground, the other birds whirling overhead, encouraging him to fly. But he fell back.

Then the swallows were gone. There was a little bird shaped grief in my chest. I think about what a gift it is for parents to knock their children into flight. I think about my father who did not call me home after my mother died even though we were both desperately lonely. He blessed my flight, a blessing, a love, as sacrificial as Mary sending her son to die.

As for Little Bird, Bruce said he saw two adults and a little one sitting on the wire between the shed and the barn.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

If you want to hear this, click here.

Thank you so much for reading/listening to this essay and for enjoying my images. I hope you consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Those of you who pay have motivated me to dig deep and write weekly. I so appreciate your support.

Here is the sequel to last week's post How I Met and Married Bruce Part 1 and more of the back story to The Love Behind the Anniversary.

I met Kurt at the Rockton Inn when I stopped over for a blackberry brandy, my throat and nose raw from a cold. The Super Bowl played in the background. I liked the music of his words. We talked until two that morning. He said, “I don’t drink as much when I’m kayaking. I watch bees fly in and out of their nests and people think I’m boring. Sometimes I go off when people are drinking and smoking dope and just sit still and listen to the woods. People think I’m crazy. Up until now I haven’t met any women who like to do what I like, who do what I want.”

What he wanted turned out to be kayaking. My brother had kayaked a few years earlier, nearly dying when he flipped over in the Gauley and got caught in a suck hole. Later that spring Kurt showed me the Gauley, where a pipe released the river from behind the dam. The river churned and left me with a chill thinking about my brother's near brush with death.

I liked the outdoors and the water. I wasn’t sure I could stand the suffocation when the boat flipped and you had to swing it around and up. I wasn’t sure I could stand all that water in my face. But I would be happy to go along, drive him back to his car.

He told me everything I needed to know in that first talk. I thought about how the world can be a dangerous place. I ignored what I heard. I wrote in my journal: Even good men like Kurt go to bars to pick up women to get off their rocks. “I don’t get involved” he said,“with one night stands. Most girls aren’t looking for relationships. They want to get laid.”

“No,” I say, “they put out because that’s the only way they can be touched. They hope for the possibility their performance in bed will bring you back. They know themselves as women through your touch. There’s a difference between sex and making love.”

I asked him what he looked for, what made an easy target.

“The vibes,” he said, “and how they respond to the lines I use, the body language.”

He makes his own rules. He is the beginning and end of his own life. He doesn’t need God or religion.

All of a sudden I realized I perceived that God had been a reality to me in subtle ways, sometimes fleeting, but still a reality I had witnessed that I can’t deny, and I’m not sure easily obey or disobey.

My words were prescient. I saw Kurt for himself and still got involved. I got involved with him more fully than I’d gotten involved with any other man. I found I could be with a man twenty-four hours a day, and it still be good. There was no heavy lid clamped over me, a man-hole cover, like I’d felt in my parents’ marriage, a lid that made me afraid to get married, it was so heavy, shutting out the sunlight. My desire to marry stopped being split.

Through my gynecologist I found a therapist who didn’t frighten me. She was a blonde woman, very Scandinavian, who felt safe to talk to. Like Father MacFarlane, she measured her words, she listened. She made me do the work, helped me ask the right questions. I told her I wanted to get married. I wanted to work on my bad dating habits.

I saw some things with Kurt I’d been needing to see for a long time. I’d seen the peculiar darkness the strict rules of conservatives could evoke through my work at an evangelical publisher and at a conservative think tank. I was getting ready to experience the darkness living without rules could bring. I lived through it and did my own share of harm and even found a share of redemption.

He pulled up to the house one afternoon and loaded me and my skis into the car. We went with friends to Cascade Mountain skiing. He paid my way. That night the wind was blowing snow across the road. We saw a car in the ditch. Kurt stopped to hook chains on his four wheel drive truck to pull him out. He locked the wheels and hooked up the chains. The heater blew across my thighs warming them, but not touching the deep cold I felt from being on the slopes for a few hours.

I looked across the fields and thought I saw a white horse galloping through the ground blizzard. I thought I saw a whole herd. I sensed the animals more than saw them, sensed the white stallion whose mane curled down in s curves from his neck. Kurt got back in and put the car in four wheel drive, the chain engaged, we pulled, our vehicle skidding, the second one beginning to move. When we got closer to Rockton, we saw a semi in the northbound lane, swerve and drive in the median towards us. It moved slowly and gracefully, coming to a stop before it reached our lane.

It wasn’t long before I was over at his apartment every evening and all weekend. We woke up to WJVL, the Janesville country station. I learned to like country music, the songs more like stories than Top 40.

I’d go home the next morning, and he would say, “I’ll check with you later,” and he did. I felt a quiet familiarity drop over me. My parents had courted on skis. This man reminded me of my father. For once I was with a man who paid my way, who wanted to be with me.

We made love. My guilt felt like slamming against a closed door, or a clear slick window like a bird swooping into the glass to get inside, a bird whose feathers scatter each time it hits. Neither one of us was good at dropping our guard.

But we could hold each other in the night.

I thought old hay dust catching the light from the barn window when my brother practiced flips off the solid beam, high over the hay. He could do it without knocking his breath out, but when I tried, the breath sucked out of my lungs leaving only the dry dust caked in my throat. From that day on, I stopped trying new things, withdrew to my books, the safety of what I knew well--prayer thrashed up against a granite cliff wall and a horse ridden around a bottlecap flat and sat in the woods and watched the ferns grow.

I asked Father Mac Farlane about how I was deliberately going against what I’d been taught. He thought a minute. He said morality was a part of the story of a community that lives and acts out Christ’s story and thousands of others’ stories. “It’s the community that decides out of its story that it will live within a certain context, where people help and support each other. But a woman in isolation from that community might work out her own salvation with fear and trembling and be out of the normative standards, but still be working out her faith.

"We tend to look for the Bible for a set of rules for individual life instead of the outgrowth of how it operates for the whole community. There’s the ideal and the reality of operating in the world. You work out what drives you. If it’s a morality imposed on you, you follow it reluctantly or guiltily. It's right to continue to be in conversation with the community and the therapist, and work out your values for yourself."

Kurt and I did alright with each other until we drove to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a ski weekend with his company. It was Valentine’s Day. On the chair lift I asked him why he wouldn’t go to church with me, since I went to the bars with him. He said he wouldn’t. At the top he skied down the mountain, faster than I could. I crossed back and forth, fell a few times, let him go.

At dinner that night we ate with another couple, the man a manager for Kurt’s company. Kurt started talking about how my dog was spoiled and how the women in the North are corn fed and fat. Southern women worried about staying a size five. The other couple looked at me hard. When Kurt got up to go the bathroom, the woman said, “He drinks too much don’t you think?” The man said, “He may not be right for you.” He kept looking into my eyes longer than Kurt ever did. I don’t remember how I replied.

That night we had the discussion I was used to hearing from other men, that I was dreading. He told me he didn’t want to be committed. “You take sex more seriously than I do. I like to play around. It doesn’t mean as much.” I should have gotten up right then and walked out.

But I tried to make it work. My conscience was right, dead right. I couldn’t fit myself into what the culture was saying about sleeping with a man who was not married to you. I began having nightmares. I didn’t break it off when our relationship ended. I stuck around to see what happened. I saw some things. This is where my shame comes in—when his ex sent his children to live with him.

That year Don Williams’ song “Ghost Story” often played on the radio. He’s just a ghost story so don’t let him scare you. He’s not really there like he seems. I thought about emotional ghosts like the echoes of the Big Bang left in the stars. Ghosts like the surging ocean crest like a green stallion humping the sand standing gravely, ghosts, emotional ghosts where I expect the world to go wrong. I knew they were there. That’s all.

The next few weeks were full of the dark spirits that rise when a father likes booze and sex and a no-longer-girlfriend is too broken to shelter the children from his behavior. I saw some things I don’t care to tell you.

If there was ever a horse, I imagined him rearing up, teeth bared, flipping over hitting the ground with a dull thud and then up again, racing away with all his might. One night I walked out, drunk, I dreamed about a dark forest, dark as night with its own darkness and twisted vines, and this in daylight because there was a broad beam of sunlight dropping down. It had substance, it dappled the woods beneath it like the back of an appaloosa horse. Always horses. I wanted to be near horses.

I asked myself and my therapist, what was I doing with this man? I’d felt comfortable with him. Why was I staying in the relationship? Why with this man who drank? She listened. She did not judge me.

It’s no wonder the children I taught at the university had an attitude. It’s no wonder they were in my face when they don’t like something and they sit like stones. It’s no wonder they pick up guns to shoot to kill. No wonder.

When I dreamed about making love to the devil, I stopped seeing Kurt. I was done. I’d gone too far. Friends told me gently it was about the evil I was involved in. A young man at church saw I was crying in the pew and asked if everything was all right. I told him I didn’t have any hope. I told him I’d been dating a man who drank. John invited me to Al Anon. "If you don’t have hope this will help you," he said. He showed me what made a child a of an alcoholic.

Were it not for that group, I wouldn’t have found the strength to pull away from Kurt. But John and the group gave me the community I’d been looking for all along when I went to the Rockton Inn that night in January. They weren’t even afraid to hug, or to listen to a shameful story.

When I told Father MacFarlane I’d realized I was a daughter of an alcoholic, a light, a literal light, went on in his face. Suddenly I made sense to him. I told him John had shown me what the symptoms were and I fit every one. I remembered my Aunt telling me my mother was afraid to drink when she had cancer because my father had quit booze, had been an alcoholic. I remembered the drugs in the cabinet he took for pain. I remembered how he made a point of not drinking, of not having liquor, beer, or wine in the house, how he went to the Capital City Rescue Mission every week as a board member. I wondered if he had been a dry drunk.

My recovery began.

While I was spinning down to the end of Kurt, Bruce fixed my phone. I was on my way with Kurt, his daughter, her sophisticated friend, and some other friends to West Virginia and southern Pennsylvania. It was spring. The rivers were up. I would drive to the end of their run, pick them up and take them back to their cars. Bruce saw my sleeping bag and asked, “Oh you like to camp.” I told him how I was leaving to go kayaking. He talked to me about bicycling, how he was going to ride across Iowa. When he tells the story, he always says he knew I wouldn’t be kayaking. He gave me his card with his phone number and address written on the back should I ever decide to join the bike club.

I didn’t call Bruce because I was tired of calling men. If he wanted to go out with me he could call me or run into me. We almost ran into each other a couple times in Rockton. He waved at me while he drove his GTE van. He’s a slender man, with sandy brown hair. He has blue eyes that fade to light green in colors I’ve seen in the ocean off the Florida keys. One of them has a streak of rust. He jokes about his nose. He’s the most handsome when he wears a turtleneck. Once I walked into the ice cream store, and he waited and finally drove away just as I walked out.

We finally bumped into each other when I was doing laundry because my house had been overrun with mice while I was away for three weeks in Dallas and New York. My dog stayed at the vet’s. We bumped into each other immediately after I’d finally understood what I needed to know.

I’d found out in Dallas. I was there for the Christian Booksellers Convention, a publicist for an evangelical publisher. I had lunch with Lenore, a woman who had helped me escort the Scheaffers during CBA a few years earlier, the July right after my father had died. She’d listened to me rave one afternoon when I thought I would lose my mind. Lenore had steadied me away from the brink. I trusted her.

I told her my story, how I’d been with this man, what I was thinking about adult children of alcoholics, how maybe something had gone terribly wrong with my father. She nodded her head. She told me I had the symptoms of an incest victim.

I trusted her. I was not afraid when she said this. I was relieved. All of a sudden everything made sense--from the nightmares to the terrible, self destructive dating I couldn’t seem to get out of even when I was being torn up.

“Sometimes we repeat in adulthood what he know as children,” she said.

She told me about a therapist who was expert in this, that I could talk to.This woman had told her she wasn’t an incest survivor, that her trouble had come from somewhere else. She’d try to call the woman and set it up for me.

I drove to the woman’s office in a rental car borrowed from an editor of one of the magazines I pitched books to. I told my story. Linda Martin said that little girls play with sex like kittens play at fighting each other. If they sense a man responding, they try to please. She said that some foster families can’t handle a child’s sexuality because the girl is so sexed the father can’t stand it. Often men desert their families when the girls reach puberty because they can’t handle their feelings. I didn’t remember anything physically happening, except for one dream that was like reality but a dream because my dog hadn’t stirred where my father got on top of me in the night. It bubbled out in a line from a poem, "afraid of the weight that would make me a woman." She said it was just as damaging to be the husband’s wife on an emotional level. The injuries weren’t obvious, but they were there. Later I would map out the rooms in our house, showing a different therapist that my room was basically the closet to my parents' bedroom, my dad's side of the bed next to my door. That therapist said that was as graphic as if I'd walked in with bruises.

I wanted to sing for joy. Finally my behavior made sense. Finally I didn’t have to be controlled by these self destructive compulsions.

I wrote in my journal: It’s amazing when I faced my fear of men as an actual fear born of my father’s intense and pressing love, I was able to be released from it and a whole new pattern set in. My parents both kept me as my father’s friend. They were afraid to let me become too beautiful. Every diet I went on, my father sabotaged with trips to the bakery. My mother said when I grumbled he was just showing his love. I gave up and ate the cookies.

Then there was the time I got my hair permed in the most feminine hairstyle I’d ever had and my mother was furious. She resented my becoming feminine. She pushed me toward my father when I was afraid of his love, telling me I would be sorry if I didn’t take the day trip with him to Saratoga and the Adirondacks.

I’ve borne the weight of men my whole life, my father’s ugly weight before I was ready. He told me how marriage was diapers and baby poop and ironing a man’s shirts. But he leaned and leaned and leaned on me and I was just a child.

Right after the trip to Dallas, I visited family in New York and felt the breach that would widen through the years. How could I tell them my parents had done this thing? They thought my parents saints. My brother’s face grew red; “I don’t want to hear it,” he said when I mentioned alcohol and our father and Al Anon. I kept quiet.

When I returned to Illinois, I arrived to a house full of mouse droppings. Mice had overrun the place when Rockton Grain was torn down. The night I dreamed: The Normanskill flooded its banks and I was out walking, but the currents threatened to sweep me away. Two men followed me. The water was silvery grey when reflecting the sky and muddy up close. Lines of geese flew in to land. I told the men to look at the water. The water rose and fell. It dropped five feet after it threatened to sweep me away.

Some people have said high water is a vision of blessing, pressed down, spilling over. I met Bruce when I stepped out of the laundromat to go have lunch with a local columnist who talked to me about his love life, who steadied me, encouraged me to leave Kurt. Bruce said he had pictures from his bike trip across Iowa, would I like to see them?

“Well yes. Yes I would.”

He was the kind of man I wouldn’t have looked twice at six months before. He wasn’t flashy. He was too much like the boy next door. But I’d had it with flash and charm and being on the edge with a man.

We met at the Rockton Inn after work and talked. I swear when I told him my story, how my parents were both gone, I swear I saw tears stand in his eyes.

He took me for a ride in his new Celebrity. We made plans to go to Belvidere with my bike to see if it could be fixed, so maybe I could ride with him at the bike club rides. He told me about two oak trees he wouldn’t cut to clear the fields. I told him about the white pines the gas company almost cut to put their pipeline through our land, only the Normanskill heaved up against one of its banks, made it slip right where the pipe was supposed to go. They had to move the pipe.

I knew there was something good about this man.

The next night we drove down to the bike shop and found out my bike was not repairable. The frame was bent completely out of shape. We got back to my house and got out of the car. Bruce did not ask to go inside. He stood leaning against the door.

I stood by a hemlock tree. We said a few words. He lifted his hands and said, “Oh what the heck” and walked over to hold me. I swear he held me delicately, as if I were a bird that would fly away. I told him I wouldn’t make a good girlfriend, that I get serious. I do want to marry. That was the scariest thing I could say.

He said he did too. He’d never settled down because he scared women off.

I felt things I hadn’t felt in a long time, that had to do with the poem about the horse I’d written in college, a horse I thought had gone far, far away. He held me and he listened to my body sing, the first who listened in a long time. “It’s all right. Just feel what you’re feeling,” he said.

I wrote later: Your arms echoed around me like the arms of God. After you left I felt your hand on my back, and you in my arms. I came alive as a field in the warm sun with a gentle wind blowing over it. You flowed through me like wind through a hay field the farmers called sheep running through grass.

One evening after that he came over and asked me to dinner at the Rockton Inn. He was wearing a black T shirt with the insignia from a Wisconsin sheriff’s department on it. He said he didn’t want me to think because we hugged under the tree that he wouldn’t be back.

He drove me out to Roland Olsen Forest preserve. We walked through the woods with half a moon lighting our path. He showed me where to step. His kiss was like water cupping moonlight. He said he used to know the names of the constellations. He had a telescope and could see the tip of Saturn’s rings certain times of the year. He talked about his volunteer work with the church. He was a Lutheran. Even though he’d worked hard, been used up, he was not bitter.

Bruce said he’d heard a story once about a boy in the winter pressing his hand against the a cold pane of glass and not knowing summer would come, but it did come. He said, “That’s the way it is with you. I think summer has come.”

The next night he brought me a picture of a rainbow in the trees. “This is what I want you to remember, the flood won’t happen again. I think summer has come.”

Father MacFarlane was skeptical at best about Bruce and I. I couldn’t blame him, but things had changed. I knew it in my soul and by the way Bruce looked toward my window when he came back to town from a day at work and how he stopped by on his way home. I knew it by the way he didn’t go on vacation alone with me because it wouldn’t look right, or be right for our commitment. And by the way he bought me a bike, telling his friend I wasn’t much to look at, but often the pretty ones were b*****s, and I’d made him a good breakfast.

I could tell by the way we spent a whole day together, and I felt nothing jagged in him to cut me. I thought of a piece of clay with glass buried in it, that could cut a hand trying to break the clay. We watched my first draft horse show. He was proud to introduce me to his friends and his mother, even though her dog bit me when my back was turned.He was kind to her. He helped her make supper. I knew he would treat me well, but at the same time he made it clear that I came before she did.

I could tell the day he asked me to marry him, while we rode our bikes down a hill north of Capron and there was a thunder cloud to the south that was gray and anvil shaped. It looked like the city of God dropping down. And I said, “Yes!” shocked he would ask.

I took him to my parents’ grave: Here he is folks, the man you prayed I would meet. I loved you so much and hurt so badly when you died I gave you all my feelings. Now they’re just out of reach. Please let me have them back, so I can offer them to Bruce.

We tried to make love in the woods behind the farm house where I grew up, but the snow burned our skin, and my brother’s dog would not stop barking. My brother liked Bruce. “Do you think he will like me?” He asked.

We got married the following April, a small ceremony with his mother, the pastor, my girlfriend, my brother and his wife, the pastor’s son. We drove down to the Carolinas for our honeymoon.

Even though I fought a terror of abandoment, I knew where it was coming from, I knew to fight it. I let go of my therapist. I let go of Al Anon. I felt guilty I hadn’t stayed celibate for a year into recovery until a friend told me I’d chosen life by choosing Bruce.

Since then I’ve made peace with my family. The writing of The River Caught Sunlight and work with some other therapists brought that peace. Loving Bruce and being loved by him brought that peace, sometimes persisting through terror and loss and silence. Besides aren’t all families broken? Don’t most set us up to bang around with not good things? Isn’t that the beauty of walking with Jesus, that forgiveness is ours and the Lord truly sweeps under and over and in between our broken behavior and redeems it?

Coda

I now believe something happened before I had language, perhaps when my paternal grandfather lived with us, perhaps when I was plunked in the hospital for a hernia repair as a baby, perhaps my mother feeling grief from beloved people dying.

I am very proud of my mother’s legacy as I shared with my essays about Del Logan and Paul Huey. She was often distracted and stuck with a daughter who had the spiritual gift of tears. What a trial to be the mother of someone so sad, a sadness born of her religious faith. My father loved me so well, he did not call me home, when my mother died, even though living without my mother was an emptiness that broke his heart. He knew living on my own was hard as all get out. His last words to me were, “You’re smarter than they are. I’m proud of you.”

I have other essays about making peace but I hesitate to post them because I’m not sure I want to impose them on you. I posted these two essays, and did some cutting, because I wanted to tell my love story as a follow up to The Love Behind the Anniversary and show how my spiritual director held me close to the Lord, even though I did badly. I wanted to show how even pitch darkness can be redeemed and healed.

Thank you for taking the time to read this essay. Your time motivates me to share my life here. I hope you consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Warning: I wrote this years ago and thought you might be interested in how I met and married Bruce, how my spiritual father, midwifed very deep healing and how God’s grace was present despite my riding Eros in the wrong direction.

Prelude

The story of how I met and married my husband began two men back from him. Actually it began a long time before when I was a girl praying that God would grant me the desire of my heart, a man to love, a man who would love me, wrap me up in his arms and hold me like I’d never been held before, a man who would wipe away my tears. It began somewhere deep in my past where my ability to trust was smashed, where someone somehow touched me, and I felt desire a baby shouldn’t feel.

1.

The smell of him echoed back at me throughout the day like shavings off a sharpened pencil, the man I’d met at the Rockton Inn, a big strapping man who looked brainy with horn rimmed glasses but was really farm help at a dairy outside town. I’d gotten too quickly into his bed, in a farmhouse back a dirt road under stars that burned the darkness like the sun under a magnifying glass.

For three days an air mass had shifted down from the North, bringing clarity to the skies like a lens. The stars roared around my ears and I kept thinking about the Sunday sermon, Enter the joy of the kingdom.

When the man called at midnight, the second night of the stars, I told him I had a story for him to read. He invited me to bring it on over. “I’ll only stay a few minutes,” I said starting the dance lonely people begin to shuffle.

“You’re in control. I respect people,” he replied. He was starting the dance too. We were talking about lovemaking without saying it. Looking back now, I see he was saying I could have a choice not to, if I drove over there. Neither one of us wanted to admit that I might want it. I wanted badly to belong to someone.

I asked if he would hurt a woman. He said no. He said he was tired of divorcees who played with him or wanted marriage right away. He was tired of partying. He was looking too.

When I got to his house no one answered the door. I saw the Plieades through the branches of the dooryard trees. I let myself in. I saw one lamp and the TV pooled light. Jim, Bill, Jack--I forgot his name, was already in bed. “Didn’t you hear me knocking?” I asked.

“You can’t hear the outside door from in here.” He turned his head. “Sit down. Take your coat off.”

He took the story and read the first page. “You’re pretty handy with the pencil. You should write a book.” (By the way that story was the root of the sequel draft of The River Caught Sunlight.)

He put the pages on the floor, wrapped me in his arms, said, “You didn’t want to be alone either.”

I told him I didn’t want to make love, I only wanted to be held. He said, “I won’t make love if a woman doesn’t enjoy it. I used to, but not anymore.”

He tried but I said no, I wasn’t protected. He admitted he didn’t want to become involved with anyone, he had too much going with unsettled business deals. We held onto each other into a shallow sleep where I dreamed about a green sky streaked with gray patches of light. One burned out tree with two branches rose over the moor which rolled into the horizon. A monk in a brown cowl glided up to the woman kneeling there. He put his hand on her head, a gnarled human hand with long, cold fingers. His face was sucked into high cheekbones. I opened my eyes and watched the clock tick off fifteen minutes. I stirred.

“You can stay,” he touched my shoulder.

“No, I’d better get back to town.”

“Come back when you can stay longer,” he kissed me goodbye. I nodded but knew I would not be back.

When I left I looked at the stars. I used to pray toward those stars, that God would send me a man, someone to share my life with. This man wasn’t him. I was ashamed and frightened I’d been so easy to lie down next to him, but still show him my fear. He’d asked why I was so afraid. They all asked that. I couldn’t shake my fundamentalist training that told us not to sleep around. I was afraid of the man wrapped in a rainbow, whose foot will split a mountain in two. I belong to Him by faith. He’s the one I’m afraid of. And looking back there may have been other, darker things, human, that shadowed behind my bright fears of God, things I’d barely begun to guess at.

I wrote in my journal: I wish I could have God and man both, and I can in marriage, but I’m caught by the men I chose or meet who are more in love with their travel, their mothers, the sea, the ground, or for whom the timing is completely wrong because of pain in their lives. Some like guns too much. It goes back to being afraid to love a mortal because a mortal will die, or leave. It goes back to the reserve that keeps me from fully giving myself in lovemaking. I don’t become involved. I fall in love, yes, but that can keep him at arm’s length, that protects me from shattering.

The last time I was hurt by a man was when Caleb stayed out in the fields and stood me up and I sobbed for a day with my mother saying I was better off without him. She was right.

Up until now I’ve been able to turn to God away from men. I’ve chosen men over God in a variety of one night stands and now I’ve had this affair that won’t go anywhere.

There’s so much in this that parodies Christ--my wanting to risk a great deal--my job, pregnancy, for a man who doesn’t want to get involved, a man who’s in a kind of pain I know well.

Years earlier John Clellon Holmes had written me a note after reading a poem about this struggle. Here’s the poem:

God-become a cave

Where I can hide from the man

Whose fingers creep

Like salamanders of light

Slithering to penetrate the darkness

I sleep in.

But Lord—be the door

To the barn where I kneel.

Swing open with the fulness of weight

And oak beans to the man who carries

The stillness between bleats of his sheep

And lays it softly on my head.

Holmes said, “ ‘Prayer’ seems to go in two directions--perhaps it’s proper to the poem, God & man. Still, it’s a problem that has to be worked out. I feel a fear of man, and a consequent reliance on the idea of God which is perhaps uninspected. As you know, spiritual and erotic love, in Christianity, are not seen as similar, but opposed, though actually in Christian tradition the emotions are often employed together. St. Theresa, for instance, whose visions & seizures can be read either way. Don’t be afraid to realize that the normal emotions of a young woman like yourself can seek BOTH expressions at the same time. The body & soul have, I think, both an intimate connection with one another and probably an equal dignity in the eyes of God.”

He was right. The pattern had started with the best man I knew, next to my husband, who walked with me along sheer rock walls looking at cliffs and waterfalls for a summer, who loved me enough to want to hold my hand, kiss me and I pushed him away because I believed the preachers who said holding hands and kissing would lead to sex out of wedlock, the worse sin imaginable. I remember the preacher’s shouts like the judgement of God or a parent, a terror to listen to. I knew when H stopped calling that I’d lost a good man. I’d given him my heart. Sometimes I think nobody can hurt you like a good man can. It was a hurt so deep, I avoided good men for years, my loss rewarded only by insights from God about finding rest in Him.

Holmes was right, but at the time it was easier to hide in my idea of God, and chastity, even toy with becoming a nun than to walk down the road that would lead to marriage. That road for me meant discovering things about my past my poems only hinted at, my behavior shouted at but I was too afraid to see. My parents were still alive. But I still wanted to be married. I still walked out the road when I went home to the farm in New York and begged God to send me a man, not an angel, a man. I invoked the promise that he would give the righteous the desire of their heart.

After the man in the farmhouse, I drove to Glen Ellyn for my appointment with my spiritual director. Father MacFarlane of St. Barnabus Episcopal Church was the closest I came at that time to a therapist because I’d seen therapists pull friends into deeper depression than before. I didn’t want to be told who I was before I was ready to know. Father MacFarlane was a quiet man, balding with a white beard that dropped around his chin and nose. He spoke carefully, slowly as if from great depth or extreme tiredness.

We sat together in his office. He listened quietly while I told him my shame, my inability to say no to myself, my wanting to be held and loved, even when it was inappropriate, even dangerous. He heard the fear in my voice, the compulsion. He’d heard it before. He’d sat with me. He’d told me to sit with God and breathe, feel my body and wait.

This time he said, “Why don’t you give it God? Turn it over to Him?”

Why not? All my life I’d tried to give it to God. The preachers always warned us not to take it back once we’d given it. I’d told God over and over, I wanted His will, if He didn’t want me to meet anyone, that His will be done. There had been times when I’d been neutral. Whatever God wanted was fine. There were others when I wanted to be with someone.

Somehow this was different. I sat and prayed. I don’t remember if Father MacFarlane said anything, or if I said anything, or if it was just a powerful silence.

But I saw a white horse, the gray Kharadi, a sixteen hand steel gray Arab I worked with while I was in Arkansas, who matured into a pure white stallion. I took him down the road behind the barn, crossed the culvert and lead him up to the pasture so huge it would take days of riding to come to its end. It was full of green grass, only it wasn’t green now because it was night. The horse arched his neck, threw a buck and galloped over the rise into a hollow where there was a pool of water. He drank deeply, ears twitching to the suck in his mouth and gulp in this throat, his lips black and wet and flat against his teeth. Then he was gone.

I opened my eyes, thanked Father MacFarlane and drove home.

“All right, God you can have it all,” I said as I walked along the tracks behind my apartment, the boxcar loading at the Sunoco paper factory docked at the end of the tracks. This section was used for nothing more than switching boxcars. I saw five cat paws tracks balanced on a snow covered rail and a track like a chain from one rail to the next, in the snow, that looked like a snake’s track, but no snake could crawl in snow. Cane Dog, my Rottweiller, sniffed in the weeds, going where he wanted to go whether I called him back or not.

I’d been told as a kid when you give it to God, He’ll give it back to you pressed down and spilling over, the blessing from the answered prayer is so abundant. I thought about the white horse I’d released into the pasture. The picture in my mind showed a knoll, the grasses cracking in the wind.

I’d known about this horse for years. In college, I thought I was daring when I wrote: There’s a stallion in me, foaming to white slime wormed with grass and bared teeth. His diamond head snakes passion behind juniper logs latched tight, a roofless log cabin. Though his freedom is muffled behind shredded bark, his squeals are not. They slice with descending sonic talons.

There’s a stallion in me whose urgent blood is eager to mount mares, sweaty with heat behind another fence.

Boxed in a canyon this morning, the horse was noosed by hidden desire and presented as a gift.

I tear the grass, my body lying grazed by sharp green stains, eyes level with tips silvered by cutting. My eyes close on a dream:

A white horse (every curve round to masculine) gallops to blood red against a sun blackened horizon. Bay mares pin garnet heads to emerald fields. Light pirouettes before a storm. Chesnut colts and fillies whisk bob tails, flicking caprioles in a new game as water shoots from broken black snakes along the ground. Artesian flanks flicker rainbows steadied by the sun as the stallion shadows them.

Before I die, and wake up, Easter bends supple around my leg in a relaxed two beat cadence. Her hooves carve a perfect volte, an embryo in dust.

Considering my college was Wheaton College, where Billy Graham went to school, I’m surprised I got away with the poem. People asked why the image was a stallion. I don’t know. Maybe I was writing to the masculine part of my nature, psychologists say all women have. My passion seemed so strong, as if it were with me forever. It was not a little pesty, as stallions can be, always snapping and biting. But the horse I rode was a mare, named after the day Christ rose from the dead, a mare circling, tracking a line with no beginning and no end. The mare something to do with resurrection, hope, new life, a new creation. I must have known then, how I would feel in the face of death, the resurrection. But that’s another story.

In the winter of 2009, a young fjord mare stepped off a trailer. She’d come in from Wisconsin as companion to my other Fjord, Tessie. Her name: DF Paske Morgen. Easter Morning. My resurrection horse had arrived.

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Forty years ago, Bruce yelled across North Boone School Road, “Will you marry me?” “Yes,” I shouted back. A shelf cloud hung low in the distance.

You couldn’t have found people more different. He’s quiet, a genius with his hands. I’m a talker, a writer, up in her head. His mother hinted I was too intelligent. (She was blind to his smarts.) His pastor held his breath, but married us, nonetheless.

Instead of spouting cliches about a long marriage, let me tell you a bit of the Lindworm, a story Martin Shaw tells in his Courting the Wild Twin. Two boys are birthed. First a serpent, who slithers away. Next a beautiful baby boy. The serpent insists he marry before the beautiful boy. But he slaughters every bride sent to his chamber.

After a wild, old woman counsels a young woman to make twelve nightshirts, embroidering each one near her heart, she says, “I’ll marry the serpent.” When she enters his bed chamber, he bids her take off her nightshirt. “If you take off your scales,” she replies. They do this twelve times. At the end he is a pale, gelatinous mess. She scrubs him with a brush. Imagine the pain.

Shaw writes, “As dawn approached, finally there was a man in front of her, with the face of someone sent into exile long ago. Someone with an ordinary beauty, she would love her whole life” (113).

And that’s how it’s been for Bruce and I.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

If you’d like to hear me read this at the original post, on WNIJ, our local NPR station, click here.

Advice I Gave to an About to Be Married Couple at their Wedding.

I thought about leaving this WNIJ Perspective as it is but then decided to add the words that I gave a friend and her husband when they asked me to conduct their wedding. (That will be the first and last time I play minister because I found the legal stuff intimidating among other things.)

The scripture we chose is from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans chapter 12 verse 9. “Love must be sincere. Detest what is evil; cling to what is good.”

And now for my wisdom, which comes from being married to Bruce for 36 years. (The wedding was three years ago.) Even though we are very different people, we have stepped into happiness, into quiet conversations. We have accepted each other as we are, not the people we wish we were. We have seen the best and worst of each other. And that love has crowned us with beauty. May it crown you both as well.

These promises--to have and to hold, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health--will provide a cup that will contain your ever-deepening relationship that will be richer, deeper, wiser in twenty/thirty/forty/fifty/sixty years.

These promises will stand you in good stead when life gets hard, and it will get hard. But it will also be glorious in the joys of personal accomplishments, restful vacations, and those quiet days that you spend building your life together. Remember this hour when you feel like chucking the relationship. Remember when you said, “I promise my darling. I promise my beloved” to stay committed. Remember you spoke these vows front of your friends and families.

Anthony Powell, author of Dance to the Music of Time told a writer friend that a secret of a successful marriage is not to talk too much because you can go round and round, arguing, getting nowhere except a deep hole ringed with bitterness. And please, please, please don’t insult each other in the heat of disagreements. Insults can burn through your love like a hot coal that doesn’t flame out. Avoid arguing just before bed. A good night’s sleep can ease a lot of trouble and give you both a better chance at talking. Sometimes it’s best to stop the conversation when you are too riled up. It might be good to shut up and listen.

Fred Luskin in Forgive for Love says, “Telling our lovers that we do not like their unkind words is one thing—in fact this can be helpful to defend ourselves and provide good boundaries if we feel insulted—but it is less useful to tell friends how insensitive our lovers are or to accuse them of insensitivity.” (200 – 201).

Though, sometimes it helps to vent, when pouring out your anger would be too damaging to your marriage. A friend can sop up those emotions and steady you, so that you can return to your spouse and set boundaries. Seek people who are friends to your marriage.

But I’d like to add, not having friends to vent to, has strengthened our marriage because I’m not releasing my anger. When we can be honestly angry, and say what we need to say, not with insult, Bruce and I have both adjusted.

If your mind circles like a broken record, skipping over the same scratchy fault, say something like “God bless my husband. God bless my wife.” If you want to keep God out of it, use the Buddhist’s wish: “May my husband be happy and healthy. May my wife be happy and healthy.” By doing this, you lift the needle off the static. You give your mind something other than rehearsing the hurt to think about. You toss goodness into the air that will eventually circle back.

If you step into a rough patch that is like walking through a wet, plowed field, keep walking. Think about the good times you spent together. Meditate on the radiance that drew you together. This pushes light into the darkness between you and will allow for reconciliation and forgiveness. But it may take time. It may take tears. But you will step onto the road, your feet quietly chatting with solid ground.

When anger locked us into grumpy silence, I needed to hear Bruce’s voice, so I pulled out The Divine Hours and asked him if we could speak morning or noon or evening prayers because I wanted to hear his voice. Sometimes we would read them on the way to work. They are safe and uplifting and human and set our minds on good things, on human things such as “Awake lute and harp I will awaken the dawn.” Or “In the evening and morning and noonday I will complain, and lament and he will hear me. He who is enthroned of old will deliver me.” These prayers have invited the Master of Love into our relationship. They have pushed light into the darkness between us. I hope you try them.

In an Utne Reader interview called “The Work of Oneness,” Bo Lozoff says, “Marriage can be a sacred tool for helping you transcend conditional love. Your partner has seen not only the best that she fell in love with, but also the worst, and she still loves you. And the same is true for you. This is the whole love which allows us to say, ‘I love you because you are, not because you are good to me. I’ve seen all of you and I love you.’”

You might be asking why would we want our marriage as a sacred tool? Because love becomes more than celebrating each other’s bodies, doing the dishes, going to work each day or watching the sunset. It becomes a holy quest to become a being radiant with light and goodness. That kind of love draws beauty from each of you and pushes against the chaos of modern life. As Bruce Cockburn says, in his song, “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” “Lovers open to the thrust of grace. Kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.”

Say “I love you” frequently. Hug often. We fall asleep and wake up to each other’s bodies even when we’re aggravated.

Say thank you even for those tasks you expect the other to do.

Take time off from work. To be together. And yes to be apart. Time alone can restore your souls. Time together can restore your love. Play.

When Bruce and I got married our officiant said that Jesus would go with us. My aunt giggled when she heard that, wondering if we could stand Jesus watching over our bedroom even though sex was God's idea and his delight. But I remembered how I stretched out on a hill outside of Builth Wells, Wales and looked at a view not unlike the stretch of road west of Freeport. A hawk hovered nearly parallel to me, a hawk, a sign of Christ, who folded his wings, took on the form of a servant, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. I’d been homesick even though I was home until that afternoon. I realized that the maker of that beautiful land went with me as I headed back to the US. From then on, I was able to make a home wherever I was.

I share this because Christ comes with you into this marriage whether you recognize His presence or not. (It’s better if you recognize Him, finding Him in the fullness of life.) He has made you in his image. As Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and/This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.” This is a God who knelt down and washed his disciples’ feet, including his betrayer. His fullness fills the earth.

He is present and close like the air you breathe and the one whose love is patient and kind, who can show you how to love the radiant glory and rich dark, earth that are you—my beloved and my darling. Go with God my dears. Go with God. “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us…” (Eph. 3: 20, ESV). Amen.

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Sunday, April 27

While I listened to Martin Shaw’s essay “The Merrie, a Reliquary for Saints Yet To Come ” I poured water into the buckets, making sure the end of the hose was buried in the water so I could hear what he said.

Martin Shaw is relatively new convert to Orthodoxy and well versed in folklore and mythology. His House of Beasts and Vines storytelling pours into my soul like hot, English tea. He has also started a You Tube channel called Jawbone, which is also published in podcast form if you prefer to listen. Early in our marriage Bruce and I loved going to local storytelling festivals. One storyteller I met, arranged for me to read my newly published poems at Silver Bay, Lake George in New York state, so I have fond memories of the magic and generosity of storytellers.

I look forward to his House of Beasts and Vines talk Sunday mornings when I do chores. I have been commenting about what I’m doing when I listen, every week, so I thought I’d share an expanded example of my comments under The Merrie.

I haul the water over to the barn. Mrs. Horse, whose real name is DF Paske Morgen stands in the doorway she’s opened overnight. Sometimes she opens it by 2 am. Perhaps she is seeking fresh air and the chance to wander around the paddock. I pick up a bucket, one by one and haul them to the wall and manger where we hang the big blue buckets. I carry each bucket to the paddock and slosh it out, then rehang it and dump in the water I’ve just drawn.

Shaw says, “These are mad times. Disorientating. Madder than usual, and that’s saying something. With religion so frequently politicized, with our screens issuing peril and deadening opportunities for distraction the Merrie could be easily dismissed as a dream, but it’s one with a spade attached. And it’s not a solo slog, it bangs along with others. It reaches out towards the textures of God’s earth. I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins: It’s not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses…to lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but the man with a dung fork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too.”

The beams and whitewash paneling and windows in the cow side of the barn catch all kinds of light when the sunsets and the door is open. I look at the beams, with cross beams lifted in praise. The whitewash has crumbled off making the walls look piebald. Barn swallows nest in the rafters, completely safe from the cats.

I pull the purple manure pick, shovel and broom and step into Morgen’s stall. I sweep the mat where I will drop hay in the evening. I sweep urine-soaked shavings into a pile and push it onto the shovel. I dump it into the muck wagon. Then go to our feed room to scoop up powder that deodorizes the stall. I fling it on the wet spots, the powder soft and white in my hand.

I can’t take my eyes off these mad times. I’m not sure I’m supposed to. I was literally part of evangelicalism being politicized back in the early 80’s. (You can read about it in my novel The River Caught Sunlight.)

I’m not sure whether I should speak to the madness or be still. I’m not sure I want to pay the price. I take wisdom from the mare standing outside the door: To stay quiet, calm and relaxed. To lower my voice. Breathe. I have learned not to argue with strangers on the internet or with my friends. I say there is so much more to our friendship than politics.

At times the chaos feels so intricate, with lies and truth swirled together, incomprehensibly, that it’s best not to bother looking.

Shaw says, “Because you don’t need to keep hearing that everything is broken. Maybe everything’s always felt broken. Maybe that’s the low, depressed note required for green shoots to counter. But in testing the spirits of our age we discern what we choose to listen to and what we choose to put down. A peaceful heart is not an indulgence, it’s a requirement.”

He’s right, it is possible to maintain our peace in the middle of this chaos. My walks where I practice still prayer centered around “thank you” and the things I see—the baby leaves erupting, white, delicate Apple blossoms, the tilled ground. The Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner” are practices that bring that peace.

Taking Facebook off my phone, which is a crazy making machine, has helped. One day I jumped on to wish people happy birthday. First thing I saw was a dead horse with the owner curled up next to him. A few things down the scroll someone was ranting about politics, the kind of rant where I want to say, hey wait a minute, what about this?

I’ve wearied of Facebook doing the thinking for me. I’ve returned to saying Morning Prayer with Mission St. Clare. Knowing thousands, maybe millions of people are praying these prayers, prayers that I don’t have words for, is great reassurance, because they are as powerful as the censer the apocalyptic angel throws down, sparking thunder and lightning in the heavens (Rev 8: 1 - 4).

This prayer brings God right into the chaos. “Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the strength of love: so mightily spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace as the children of one Father; to whom be dominion and glory, now and forever.”

Mrs. Horse stands at the door watching me listen, Shaw’s voice more like wood cracking than a river. I pick up enough hay to fill my arm up to my shoulder and find her feed tubs. The wind is blowing so hard I drop the hay in and pick up each tub, bring them close to the barn, so it doesn’t blow away. We are down to enough hay to get to June. Who knows whether the weather will let us harvest it before we run out. This winter I’ve sent too many bales with mold to the burn pile. I have not helped my lungs, when I sniffed them to see if I can feed them. Mrs. Horse’s lungs aren’t so great either. Neither one us does well with farm chemicals and dust.

Mrs. Horse follows me. I look to the west and see the sign warning drivers to slow down for the stop sign. It is glowing and gold in the sunlight. There’s a bit of vision about this glowing light off in the distance.

Shaw says, “The Merrie has two very particular elements talking to each other: the archaic Christian attention to the fast and wilderness solitude, and the everywhere notion of the feast, the village and conviviality. As an old desert story states, silence and honey cakes can both be friends. They are different teachers at different times.”

Yes, yes, yes. I like my honey cakes, and the solitude of the farm. It’s lovely to hear those things affirmed.

I haul the muck wagon across the paddock to pick up Mrs Horse’s manure. Then haul it to the manure pile. I close the gate behind me. She has been known to sneak out behind me, especially if her hay is boring. The manure smells rich, well aged. Sometimes it steams from the heat inside. I’ve heard you can bury a carcass there and it will be completely gone in a few months. Rats have burrowed inside for the warmth in the winter. Coyotes have dug for the rats. I up end the wagon to dump it and haul it back through the fence.

Shaw says, “A Raven is not doing cartwheels for the applause of the market square. It has eaten darkness and located its dark-night sustenance. It understands the margins, exposure to the fallen, the sobriety of consequence. And as the Bible shows us, Raven is a messenger of God. In this time of renewal, I would suggest we walked a mile with Raven. They help us both to grieve and to get real about our blind spots. We can’t be talking about doves the whole time.”

A raven, we call them crows, visited us the other day. He was sleek and black. It seemed odd he was walking and not flying. I wondered what brought him here. Next thing I knew Bruce was outside shooing him away. Why? “Because they attack songbird nests,” he said. I found a whole robin’s egg in the grass, so maybe the raven, uh, crow, knocked it out. Though I looked up and saw no robin’s nest in the oak branches above. Right around the same time, I saw a dead oak full of buzzards, perched on branches.

I am in search of a story, a name, a white stone that grounds me. Maybe I'm a raven, because what Shaw says seems to fit: I believe in being hidden. I am no longer interested in being well known or well published. God has called me to this in the midst of his call for me to write a vision of glory. I have eaten darkness so bleak, I used to say, “Life’s a b***h and then you die.” I’ve walked some dreadfully dark places. As a girl living on the farm in New York, I used to walk the mile long road at midnight, the barn cats following all the way out. Sometimes I’d give the mama cat a ride on the back of my coat, supporting her with my arm. Sometimes the night frightened me. Sometimes not. When I have stumbled into a person’s blindspot, it was like swatting a wasp nest I didn’t know was there, but I am not sorry. Sometimes I think I’ve been called to be a prophet. Sometimes I think not.

Am I a raven, ah, a crow? Maybe. Maybe not.

The Kildeer trot ahead of me when I walk. The redwing blackbirds watch me from the top of a power pole. Even behind the clouds, the sun blinds me, like a hand on my shoulder pushing back. It’s hard to walk into the sun. When I turn at the neighbor’s fence, marking a half mile, I am relieved. Dolly jumps ahead. She wants to head home. And the sky with clouds is a beautiful slate with our house, fields and distant woods alive in the light. The deep blue gray soothes my eyes. I hope for rain. The neighbor’s thirty row planter is deep in the opposite field. It looks like a Tonka toy. It will take him all day to drill that field with soybeans.

Thank you so much for reading this essay. If you’d like to receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I’d love to stay in touch.

Note: I’m posting this early because I need to get this off my desk so I can take a break this weekend. I read a passage in Jeremiah that was quite convicting as far as taking Sundays off. Thank you for reading and listening.

Monday, April 14

Despite how cold it’s been the farmers are on the move. I walked out to air that bit my nose. I walked into wind blowing as hard as a roaring thunderstorm. It wasn’t long before I became lightheaded, and my stomach turned queasy. My legs didn’t work well. But there were no farmers spraying by us. Later that day we saw a big tanker truck two miles away.

This was no wind like the Holy Spirit roaring-the wind that blows where it wants to blow, sometimes a breeze that lifts up the heart, or pummels harder than a back slap. This was no swirl of a dust devil, sudden and surprising. This was wind that sickened, the poison hanging in the air. It smelled like the stuff crop dusters spray. I know because I’ve stood outside watching the air show. Pesticide, herbicide, fungicide, I didn’t know. I know what fertilizer smells like, dull, a low note, not unlike a garden shop or rotten eggs.

Every time I walked outside, I felt queasy, lightheaded. Was I having an anxiety attack? No because I felt better when I went inside. I called our farmer neighbor to see if he could identify the smell. He didn’t smell it. “Probably fertilizer,” he said.

By the end of the day I wondered if someone was trying to poison us. Cloud seeding seemed like more than just a conspiracy. It was as if our unsettled weather had plunged sulfur dioxide, or silver iodide from the sky down to earth.

Despite the bludgeoning winds, the smell leaned into our farm like an unwashed tramp. It was eerie that the smell hung around all day. I know I’m a guest here in farm country. I know farmers need to spray their herbicides and fertilizer in order to feed the world. I know. I get it.

But I wonder if I don’t have a right to not feeling ill when I walk outside. The year Tessie died they sprayed when our hay was down, wind blowing the spray into our field. The veterinarian at the equine hospital said more horses would be ill if the spray bothered them. A friend who farms in the north part of the next county gave me the number of the EPA if it happens again, but he encouraged me to talk to the applicator first. To give credit where credit is due, a giant floater, waited for me to leave the field before he drove down to spread the next round of fertilizer, right next to the field I was in. I wondered what he was doing. Being considerate. Perhaps it’s gotten around to the local chemical companies to be careful here.

Then I read “Forked Redux” by Jeff Childers on his Coffee and Covid Substack and was set back on my haunches. I always thought cloud seeding was pure conspiracy and pretty much ignored when people noted it. I thought what I was seeing was contrails. He linked Make Sunsets and noted that our current federal EPA administrator is onto them.

“Trump’s EPA Commissioner, Lee Zeldin, also seems interested in Make Sunsets operation. Yesterday, he fired off a demand letter to the shady outfit (and tweeted it). The Sunset team, whoever they are, has 30 days to float back a list of documents or face criminal penalties.”

I looked at Make Sunsets website and my hair stood on end. These guys send balloons into the stratosphere that burst apart letting out a sulfur dioxide mix made with fungicide. Apparently, this is effective to shade sunlight. Childers asked Chat GPT what the effects could be. “A quick ChatGPT query disclosed long-term risks like soil acidification, respiratory illness, heart problems, infrastructure corrosion, and even social unrest.”

Could this terrible chemical smell have been this fungicide or some other cloud seeding chemical plunged to earth by the wild weather we’ve had? Could a drone have sprayed something overhead?

I doubt it. Most likely I was smelling the spray from two miles away. But one would have to think spraying farm fields when the wind is this high would be illegal. I regret not calling the EPA because the smell was sharp, because I felt so lightheaded and queasy whenever I stepped outside. I have chosen to live in rural America, the fields more like industrial America than what we think of as farm country. This technology helps the American farmer feed the world. But the chemicals shouldn’t sicken the people living next door.

There may be other technologies in the works to strengthen plants without the use of chemical. In the Light Eaters, Zoe Schlanger notes how scientists are studying how plants respond to noise. “Researchers globally have tried to see if playing certain tones to plants can prompt them to certain actions…One study found that playing Arabidopsis a series of tones for three hours a day over tend days increased its ability to fight off a harmful fungal infection…One can imagine a future where farmers set up boom boxes instead of crop dusters” (108).

By the way, geo-engineering is a real thing. In other words, people pointing at the sky crossed with contrails that look like saw blades, are not conspiracy theorists. The Rational Optimist Society’s blog reported in Honey Crank up the Sun, on assorted geo-engineering technologies such as poking clouds with lasers to make it rain, pulling cold water from deep in the ocean in order to cool warm waters and prevent hurricanes, and putting giant mirrors in space to beam artificial sunlight to power solar farms at night.

Who do we think we are, that we think we can control a system as wild and complex as our weather systems? The unintended consequences are frightening to think about.

Poison Settles Around Me

I walk out and don’t smell the fertilizer laid down next door, but I feel sick to my stomach and lightheaded. My legs feel heavier than normal. Shame wells up. It’s like I’ve picked up the odor, the body odor of loneliness and neediness that scares people.

This odor can poison me because I am set up to think I’m being rejected when I am not, and I drop into a hole full of muddy shame because I reached out and the hand was put up, usually by saying “I’m busy.” People have been schooled in the virtues of being too busy and not in the value of friendship. We are told we need community for our health, but sometimes it doesn't seem our community wants us. And being lonely pushes people away.

I know how it feels to not want to share a meal with someone I don’t like, how awkward it is to say no, yet again. I have felt guilty about this, especially knowing how that painful that can be.

Lore Wilbert in her essay, “Who Decides Who Is Unsafe” offers wise words with regards to this, “I am not saying there aren't truly unsafe, evil, and unjust people and behaviors, just that it has been good work for me to realize that because of my own particular unhealed wounds, there are going to be times when my gut says, ‘Hmmm, that's probably not a person I need to be in deep friendship/relationship with. They're probably a great person in every way, but their way of navigating the world is probably going to hit some pain points in me that are not yet healed. And that's okay.’”

But then, but then, I wasn’t rejected. Nope, my friends were just busy, not the kind that is an excuse. They responded, “Yes let’s get together.” We made a date. And my shame was just that ugly feeling that comes when the powers-of-what-happened-before settle, but those powers can be lies. And even if they’re not, we can wait for the people who belong to our tribe to find us.

But I’ve been alone since I was born. (Though haven’t we all?) People my age face decrease in the years ahead. Someday Bruce and I will sell the farm. We will place Mrs. Horse in another home, if she is still alive when that time comes. I pray, I pray I won’t have to give up my dogs and cats because some homeowners association limits the number of pets you can have and assisted living places ban them. I look at my friends’ ages and know that we will part company someday.

Popular culture chides, “Okay boomer.” People are angry that we have used so many resources and will use more. Our culture is top heavy with aging people. It’s a loss when people see us taking rather than giving because we have so much to offer—stories, wisdom, presence. Our stories can offer a view to history. Our wisdom is rich because we walked similar roads. We have learned to listen because there isn’t much left to say. We know how powerful prayer is.

Helping elders out offers the opportunity to clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison because Jesus dwells within that service. We visited a neighbor who is in comfort care, and afterwards I felt a kind of joy being able to sit with him and offer my husband's and my company. In some ways he served Bruce and I by receiving what we had to offer.

Chris Green in God Save Us From Our View of God discusses Jesus’ last words and how our views of Jesus on the cross, can have a theological and psychological impact. Towards the end he mentions how Jesus’ final prayer from the cross: "Into Your Hands I commend my spirit" might be a useful prayer for us because it turns us toward the father and his care. What a powerful prayer for the years ahead and it runs alongside my sense from the Lord that “all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.” That as Jesus commended his spirit into the Father’s hands at the very extreme of torture on the cross and as he was about to harrow hell, I can pray the very same in my day-to-day life. These words pray me into knowing how we are in God’s hands, in God’s presence, as we walk. The Jesus Prayer, “Lord be merciful to me a sinner,” doesn’t always work so well, when I’m walking out, beholding the world. But this just might. “Thank you” as I look out on the fields, the sky, the birds works pretty well too.

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Anointing Jesus

I poured the nard over his head, massaging it into his scalp like Samuel anointing David as King of Israel. He closed his eyes as I rubbed his hair. Someone needed to anoint him King, but I’d heard the high priests, I’d heard Jesus speak woes to the Pharisees. He said he’d tear down the temple and rebuild it again. He said he was going to be mocked and killed. Would his blood cry out from the earth like Abel’s? Would God come down and mark the preachers scheming to kill him like He did Cain? I didn’t want to believe Jesus words that he’d be mocked and killed but I knew Passover wasn’t going to end well. Still, he was our king. Pilate tacked that sign over him. The King of the Jews. I saw what I saw.

By the time I moved to his feet, I was bathing them with my tears. I rubbed them with the nard. I ran my hands along his arches. I kissed each of his toes. I thought of Ruth pulling back Boaz’s cloak and lying at his feet, the sign they were betrothed. I felt Jesus’ passion, I felt him rise in response to my hands. I felt the men’s eyes on me, their shock, their hands clenching to pick up stones. But I focused on his feet, how hard they were from walking our roads. My hands rubbed and rubbed like working stiff leather.

Judas spoke up. “Why wasn’t this ointment sold for 300 denarii and given to the poor?” Judas. His words struck me like a giant sigh, that took my breath. I could feel Judas trying to please Jesus by practicing the Sermon on the Mount, the Blessed are the poor, the words he said to the young man, sell all you have and give to the poor and follow me.

Jesus spoke sharply. “Leave her alone, so she may keep it for the day of my burial. For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.” I started crying harder despite how delicious he smelled.

Those words. Those words. He’d said that when he tossed my demons out of me. “Leave her alone.” And my body emptied of terror, of the hissing like angry cats, of lifting off the ground. Oh what good thing it is to feel my feet solid on the ground, to hear my footsteps, one, two, one two.

It’s Friday

Nicodemus cradled his head and shoulders, and Joseph lifted his legs. His head rolled to the side. Oh Jesus. They laid him gently onto the donkey cart. Then lead the donkey to the grave hewn out of the hillside. No one sang Hosanna. No one laid coats and palm branches in front of the animal’s hooves. There was no shouting for joy. He said the rocks would cry out if the children were silent. The children were silent. The rocks were quiet. The donkey stumbled on the rocks. He said he’d be chief cornerstone, the rock that would make men stumble. He said he’d rise on the third day. How could he? He lay there like a sack of grain.

The donkey halted at the tomb cut out of the hillside. I smelled the old, cold rock.

It was our work, our place to wash the body, Mary, Salome, and me. We poured a pitcher of water over his wounded body. Clear, cold water. Sprung out of the rock. Moses struck the rock and it bled water. But Moses could not enter the Promise because he struck not spoke. Jesus stiffened, became hard as a rock. We wiped his wounds, his night soil and urine. We cleaned the spittle off his face. We squeezed his precious blood and water into a cup, Joseph held for us. We wrung it out on the ground. My heart tore with the pain he must have felt with his shredded flesh rubbed against the hard acacia wood.

His feet, his feet. Those feet I had bathed with my tears. Wiped with my hair. And rubbed them with nard. One last time I rubbed his feet with my hands, running them on the arches. I could just barely smell the nard as I washed the blood and tendons. My head ached from crying.

“Are you ready?” Joseph asked. I nodded. My tears had gone stone cold. I felt the ledge where they would lay him. My heart was supposed to be flesh, but it became hard as the ledge. Joseph and Nicodemus opened a pure white linen shroud and wrapped it around him, packing aloe and myrrh around his limbs like I’d seen fish packed in salt at the market. They wove the shroud around his limbs, his hands crossed to his shoulders, closing his body in, a body that had stood on mountains and told us that we mourned and were blessed. I don’t feel blessed. A body that had been wide open to the fields and sky and rain. Those feet had walked dusty roads, a body that soared like the birds, he was so full of joy. “Before Abraham was I am,” he said. But he was dead.

We wrapped him in swaddling clothes, the sign Mary said the angels told the shepherds how to find him lying in a manger. Angels who said he would save us from our sins. But he was wrapped up, closed in by cloth.

The sun glowed red and swollen as it closed in on the horizon. It was the Sabbath. We had to put him away safely before the sun dropped behind the temple. This was Passover when we walked out of Eygpt, when the lambs’ blood saved us from the angel of death. But what does it matter now? He’s dead. There is no lamb. The angel of death won. Would his blood cry out like Abel’s blood cried out? Would we be marked like Cain was marked?

Nicodemus and Joseph were so gentle as they laid him in the tomb. I kissed his lips through the linen. I could smell the rock, the cold, the tiny roots and dirt that capped the tomb. I wanted to lie there, let them roll the stone over me, but both men pulled me back. Nicodemus took me in his arms. My eyes burned. My nose ran. Then the tears were stone cold and gone. They rolled the stone over the mouth of the grave. It sounded like thunder. The sky shone pink and orange in the west, but was already dark blue in the east.

The other Mary and Salome and I found Mary his mother and John. I could only nod when their eyes asked about his burial. He said to the thief I will be with you in paradise. He said, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” He said, “My God My God why have you forsaken me?” He said, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” He said to Mary, “Behold your son and to John behold your mother.”

He said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will make it rise,” he said. “Destroy this temple.” Mockers repeated his words. It ran through my mind. Destroy the temple.

Sunday has Come

We woke early after the Sabbath was done. Salome, Mary the mother of James the Younger and Joses and I gathered up some spices. We wanted to dress the body properly. We wondered how we’d roll the stone away. We were happy see the temple guards. Surely they would help us. They said the priests wanted them to watch, to make sure Peter and James and John didn’t steal his body. But look the seals are still there.

The air crackled. My hair stood on end. How can I describe what I saw, except the angel looked like lightning. My eyes hurt like they do when I look at the snow on the sunny day. He reached down, like it was nothing and rolled the stone away. It sounded like thunder. And then sat on it, a smug look on his face.

The guards trembled like cattle caught in a cold rain. They fell over like they were dead. I think I saw the angel grin.

“Don’t be afraid. I know you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead and behold he is going before you to Galilee: there you will see him. See I have told you.”

I was afraid to walk by him, but I walked to the tomb and saw it was empty, that beautiful shroud folded up. The rock smelled like Sulphur. We took off running, the joy and fear pumping through our hearts. “Hello.” We heard, “Hello.” We stopped, fell to our faces.

We sang, “I will extol you, my God and king, and bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.” We sang, “I sought the Lord and he heard me and delivered me from all my fears. We looked to him and were radiant.”

I grabbed his feet, those beloved feet. He was no ghost. His feet were warm, the wounds from the nails scarred over. I kissed those terrible wounds. My tears bathed his feet. Joy. Fear. I don’t know which. My heart of stone a heart of flesh. I felt his pleasure. “Don’t be afraid. Now go tell the brothers and Peter, I’ll see them in Galilee.”

Have a blessed Easter season. Remember death is dead. He is risen.

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Through the years, I've remembered the hard parts about growing up in my family. Sometimes I think the good times are more private, too precious to share. Even before my family left this earth, I didn't talk about the Heldeberg Workshop or the people I rubbed shoulders with. A friend wondered why I was especially pleased when Martin Shaw, my latest literary favorite, responded to my comments. "Shouldn't you be as excited about your readers?" she wondered. She has a point. I'm deeply grateful you show up faithfully to read my words, but I still answered, "These are my people." Growing up around people with the stature of Del Logan and Paul Huey made it easy to walk into Kenneth Woodward's office at Newsweek to tell him about Crossway Books' latest releases. At any rate, here's how I remember the archeologist who became a childhood friend.

When business coach, Jeffrey Davis suggested we recall what made us curious as children, I remembered when I took part in a dig at an 18th century home, where all that was left was the foundation. Every day we walked to the site and dug into the earth, noting the different colors of soil and carefully bagging fragments—broken pieces of pottery, hand wrought nails, sturgeon scales. These were pieces of material culture that let us get to know the people who lived at this home. The home was close to the Normans Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River. We found multiple sturgeon scales. I remember the archeologist, Paul Huey, saying that the Hudson could have been a caviar capital of the world if we hadn’t polluted it.

During assorted digs, I was impressed by the fine china people brought along with them as they traveled across the Atlantic to settle here. The artifacts dug up offered insights into the people, and the time they lived. I find it troubling that young people aren’t interested in carrying material culture into their lives and their children’s lives when their parents try to give them to them. We’ve been taught to get rid of our stuff, to live in homes easy to dust. But there’s something to eating off a hundred-year-old plate, knowing that people a couple generations before you ate off it. There’s something to running your hand over a table that is two hundred years old, knowing hands made it with care and craftsmanship. You can almost feel the people who ate at that table, including your own as they live in your memory. That plate, that table connect us to the generations that came before us.

My mother bought the above pitcher at an auction for twenty-five cents. It sat on her Shaker table until a neighbor’s child leaned on it, the table flipping up and sliding a whole tea service onto the floor breaking some of the pieces. I wasn’t there, but my mother blamed me. (A literary agent was appalled at that detail in my novel.) Every Christmas, my mother set out flow blue plates for Christmas dinner with our extended family. Awhile ago, I sent a few plates back to New York with my cousin to give to my other cousins because they remembered those Christmas dinners.

I brought this pitcher to Illinois after my parents died, my brother not happy that I was breaking up the collection of flow blue. I moved it from Elmhurst, to a couple towns in Northern Illinois to where I live now. After we renovated our house, we display it above our pantry shelves. Two weeks ago I dusted it for the first time since we moved here. Someday this piece will be placed in an auction. Maybe one day an archeologist will dig it up and wonder that these fragments don’t match the occupation sometime in the future. See the stories?

I was surprised those hours sitting in the hot sun, in a square of cool dirt was what I remembered when Davis asked us to recall our curiosity and what gave us delight. As a ten-year-old I was surprised how meticulous, archeologist Paul Huey was as far as teaching us to label lunch bags with the surveyed coordinates of the square and a description of the layer we were in. We'd change bags when the soil changed. Instead of digging with a shovel we scraped the dirt with a mason’s trowel. It was lovely to be respected enough to do sophisticated field archeology as a little kid. Every day we’d pack up our tools and follow a cattle path along a ridge, through a barb wire fence and through my parents’ field, past the rumored graveyard, where relatives of this foundation hole were buried.

As I mentioned earlier, my mother ran the Heldeberg Workshop, a school that tried to grab children’s interests by putting them with experts in the field, while respecting their curiosity. My mother wanted to show children how learning itself could be an adventure. Children could dabble in fields they were curious about without having to wade through years of schooling.

We were driving along Krumkill Road in upstate New York when I suggested she do a class in archeology. I’d just finished reading Adventures in Archeology by C.A. Burland. I could almost see a light go off because my mother saw the possibilities. Our area was full of early American history. Heck, the house where I grew up dated back to 1790. It turned out to be a Dutch aisled house, built somewhat like a church with a central nave and two aisles on either side.

I don’t know how she found Paul Huey, a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania, studying colonial archeology, but she did. Even as a young person, he’d worked at Crown Point, a revolutionary war fort on the shore of Lake Champlain. Later I would spend part of two summers working there because the training I'd received as a ten year old qualified me.

Paul recalls, “When your mother contacted me, I am not sure how she located me or knew about me. Your mother either wrote or 'phoned me when I was a graduate student in the Department of American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. That would have been early in 1966, if not late 1965. She told me about Heldeberg Workshop. I had previously taught a similar summer workshop class in East Greenbush.

“I remember discussing with her the possibilities for including archaeology in the Heldeberg Workshop, and then she said ‘You're hired!’ I can still remember and hear those words. So much happened from so little. It was God's plan."

For someone of Paul’s stature, I remember he was very easy to be around, and humble. Paul struck me as quite handsome but in a-boy-next-door sort of way. My family hosted him for extended lengths of time while he was in grad school and working on these projects. They put him up in an unheated bedroom upstairs, where he often worked cleaning artifacts with water and a toothbrush. They were shelved next to his bed, and I believe remained there until my parents passed away, or maybe later, when my brother passed away.

As with Del Logan, I kept thinking when I talked with Paul how it would be wonderful if someone wrote down his stories or if he did. And he has. Not only has he written the two-volume 700 page thesis, Aspects of Continuity and Change in Colonial Dutch Material Culture At Fort Orange, 1624 -1664, Part One and Two, he says, “I have written and published numerous articles and co-authored a book on Revolutionary War maps. I am now co-authoring a book on archaeology for Cornell University Press. Separately I am writing a book on the excavations at the Schuyler Flatts site, which you may remember, and SUNY Press has expressed interest. As you say, my 700-page dissertation on Fort Orange is available on-line at university libraries. Meanwhile, my sister and I have compiled a year-by-year summary of the diaries of our grandfather, who was a Presbyterian minister in North Dakota from 1907 to 1963. It is also 700 pages, and we plan to try to self-publish it for all our cousins and for libraries.”

Paul became a close family friend. On weekends, we’d explore the region trying to identify houses that showed up on the early maps. I assume that’s how we found the foundation hole by the Normans Kill because it showed up on a map of Van Baal’s patent. Or it’s possible I found it while riding my pony through those fields. My mother obtained permission from our neighbor Tony Genovesi to dig there, and the class of Heldeberg students hiked to the site everyday for three weeks in August to see what we could find.

One winter’s day, Paul, my brother and I went looking for where the road that passed between our barn and house and crossed the Normans Kill, during the winter because snow can reveal depressions and roads, you might not see during other times. We were walking one day as snow fell on the iced over Normans Kill, when my brother fell in and bounced right out. I gingerly shuffled over to the bank. Clayton ran on ahead of us to stay warm. The snow ticked in the woods as Paul and I walked back.

The Fort Orange Story

When Paul discovered Fort Orange on the old maps in a different place than where the State Education department claimed it was, he laid out a map in our living room. He said that the Fort Orange Hotel might be a good indication of where the actual fort was. My mother wrote a proposal to Mayor Erastus Corning to ask about verifying the location of the site based on further research and archeological testing. But since the area was on state land and Paul’s research contradicted the state education department’s theory, it was dropped. In his footnotes Paul noted the proposal my mother wrote to Corning was dated 1966.

https://www.nysm.nysed.gov/education/videos/paul-huey-locating-fort-orange

Paul reported in his thesis, “Research, however, indicated a surprising amount of documentary material which could help locate the site exactly. Because the ruins had been visible to Montresor and others for many years and had not been obliterated at an early date, it became obvious that it would be possible to locate the site precisely from accurate records made at different times” (169). But by March of 1970 the New York Transportation Department planned to build Route 540 and an exit ramp over the suspected site of Fort Orange. By then Paul worked for New York State Historic trust and was able to work with the transportation department to allow him to salvage what remained of Fort Orange.

The other day when I was flipping through my old journal, I came across the entry. October 20, 1970: “Paul found Fort Orange today! This may be nationwide. Paul was helping me on a school project. He knows his subject.”

Here’s what Paul says in his thesis, Aspects of Continuity and Change in Colonial Dutch Material Culture at Fort Orange, 1624 – 1664, “Early in the chilly morning of October 20, 1970, a diesel-driven power shovel began the first digging through the surface of the blacktop paving of the parking lot in the shadow of the concrete railroad abutment, at the point marked out the previous day.” The power shovel uncovered nothing of note with regards to the fort until it punched through the cellar wall of the Fort Orange Hotel. Paul writes, “Suddenly one of the searchers on the spoil dirt pile stood up and called out above the noise of machinery, ‘fleur de lis pipe stem!’ They had indeed found the first evidence of 17th century Dutch Occupation at the site of Fort Orange. All excavation work by machine immediately stopped, and the exact source of the last bucket full of earth was carefully determined. Associated with the pipe stem in the same bucket full was a small round blue glass bead, a small red tubular bead, a brass Jew’s harp, thick sherds of tin-glazed pottery, and several fragments of small Dutch yellow brick” (177).

There was some question whether these artifacts came from the Fort. The power shovel worked carefully to uncover layers to get down to the layers where the fort might be. He set up a grid of ten foot squares to see what he could find. Paul saved every artifact to record the historical sequence of life in that area.

In my journal the next day: “Fort Orange is quite a discovery. It was in the paper and Times Union. Clayton was on it.”

October 22: “I dug at Fort Orange today. That was fun. Paul is very wise and he was comforting. Pat called and disagreed. And that made it tough. In the barn I thought I’d blow my mind. The Lord pulled me out of that clay and stood me on granite.”

As a writer looking back, I wish I’d written down his insights.

At the same time our health teacher started Sensitivity Training. Looking back I don’t know what she was thinking but even then, health teachers were mucking around in our heads. The year before sensitivity training, where my classmates said I was too focused on horses, sent me into a depression that lasted awhile. My classmates weren’t unkind in that observation either. I suspect I am on the spectrum but when I asked a therapist twenty years ago if I could be tested, she asked what does it matter? Well, it might help me understand why it’s so very hard to make friends. I have been asked why do I need a diagnosis? Well because maybe it would give me ground to stand on. I don’t have ground to stand on for why Bruce and I are so alone as far as family and friends go. I plan to look at folk tales and stories of the saints to find where the spiritual strength might be considering humans are a social species and isolation can be a literal killer.

During Mrs. D’s sensitivity session, I do remember how I announced I wanted to wait until marriage. The teacher said my husband would be lucky and how riding horses would make me nice and tight. As innocent as I was, I knew what she meant. Maybe teachers have been saying bold things to their students for years. I recorded my classmates’ kindness.

Many days after school and on weekends I dug at Fort Orange, sometimes commenting that I didn’t have a very interesting square. I’d complain friends from school had a better square and I was left by myself. On Halloween that year, I wrote: “We went to Fort Orange to dig today. Paul put me in a very good square and I found quite a bit. The outstanding things were a raspberry prunt, a bone, and a piece of pottery with some guy’s face on it.” Paul remarked about how finding the raspberry prunt was clear evidence they had found Fort Orange proper. The dirt had a unique smell like muted oil, rust and sand. When winter came the transportation department covered the site and supplied propane heaters. We dug through the winter until March, 1971. On Saint Patrick’s day, the Transportation Department began “the extensive task of backfilling the entire excavated area using clean, brown sand.” A few years later I thought about that giant hole as I drove over the expressway to my job working in the cafeteria at the South Mall between college and grad school.

Paul summarized what he found in the introduction to his thesis, “Isolated 150 miles from New Amsterdam (New York City), far up a tidal river which froze solid in the winter, the Dutch at Fort Orange by 1664 nevertheless had established a highly Europeanized material culture comparable in its completeness to that of the father land in the 17th Century Dutch ‘Golden Age.’ When the English took New Netherland, they acquired a colony that was no mere frontier outpost but which embodied a material culture almost as fully sophisticated as that of the villages and farms of the mid-17th century Netherlands” (iv).

Paul also credited the volunteers from Heldeberg Workshop for our help, “By November 1, 1970 Heldeberg Workshop students had provided 257 man hours of work as experienced volunteers” (192). For me that experience came from the archeology class I took as a ten year old and it paid off with summer jobs digging for the state of New York.

Paul says, “I have an immense debt of gratitude to your parents, for all that they did for me. It was a wonderful time.” As for the artifacts and compilation of what was learned, Paul says, “The State Museum in Albany now has all the Fort Orange and Schuyler Flatts artifacts. There is a small, special public exhibit in the Museum on Fort Orange. The audiovisual specialists in the State Museum took the Fort Orange color film your mother had made and digitized it. Now the film plays constantly in the exhibit, over and over. There are many pictures of both you and Clayton excavating at Fort Orange.”

https://www.nysm.nysed.gov/education/videos/fort-orange-excavation-film-footage-w-hartigan

(I’m the girl with long blonde hair, that might be a in a pony tail).

Well, I have an immense debt of gratitude for Paul Huey’s joining my family and showing me how meticulous scientific study can be, but also how there is a thrill of research, revealing new insights into the world. He introduced a methodology I used in my senior independent study exploring missionaries to China. And if I recall correctly, he met his wife through a program my mother set up for teachers.

Thank you for coming along as I remembered one of my childhood adventures and why I call my Substack, Katie's Ground.

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March 31, 2025

I walk into the cold, not dressed for it--no vest under my coat, my gloves mere calfskin. My hands are stiff and red by the time I turn around. I walk straight down our road and do not turn to walk east into the sun. The clouds are low, living, a cloud deck, what pilots call clouds as they introduce their flights across the country.

Neither Oma nor Dolly care to walk past our neighbors’ dogs because they don’t like being barked at, but the road that turns me into the sun is wet and still gravel and the dogs can pick up ag lime in their coats which means I have to rinse them in the tub. Then towel dry them and wipe up wet footprints.

As I look at the woodland, I think about how Martin Shaw suggests people spend time inside woods, to find their names. He guides people on a rigorous four days of fasting in the wildlands of Britain. He says if you’ve found peace, you might not want to try it. Sitting in the woods without dinner is not my idea of a good time or way to get visions. Besides while part of me might like to catch a glimpse of the “Other World” or to have wild birds lite on my shoulder, longing for such things feels too much like ambition.

I do know about how walking the woods can cleanse a person’s soul and make you sweat. When I was a girl, I hiked through the woods on the farm all the time. One night was particularly powerful so I walked to the trees, unafraid. I watched the moon pop out from behind a tree like it was giving birth to light. I heard steps further in and thought maybe, just maybe I’d see a unicorn.

I almost asked my neighbor if I could sit in there to write about their trees for a Paul Kingsnorth assignment last fall. We’ve seen deer come across this field in the evening. Woods are alive with birds and squirrels and tiny animals. Coyotes as well. Every time I walk here, I wonder at the two big fallen oaks, one with red brown leaves clinging to it.

There’s a storm about to roll across the country. When forecasters warn that it might be bad, a full week ahead of time, you know something nasty is going to happen. We are in the elevated risk area, with our local weather people, calmly urging us to be weather aware, calmly saying it all depends on what the morning storm does on Wednesday. It might suck the energy out of the atmosphere. But if the sun shines afterwards, it might get bad. We heard similar things ten years ago when the EF4 tornado destroyed Fairdale, a small town seven miles from us.

A trough in the jet stream will bring colder air meeting warm gulf air in such a way as to hurl storms high into the atmosphere and make them dangerous. They are also predicting the storms will settle where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet, bringing extreme flooding.

Being too cold on my walk combined with a good enough night’s sleep has rare energy busting through me. Last week’s blog touched people, my stats are above average and there are kind people commenting. I feel the joy of being heard. Maybe I should put “major flaw” in every one of my titles so you all will read my work.

My sleep has been troubled. As I've mentioned before, I often wake, my heart hurting. At times my legs feel like someone has jammed them with a cattle prod. On Substack I have read that the powers of darkness come in when you breathe rhythmically, when you practice centering prayer, when you use the Enneagram. Rod Dreher writes about how easy it is for the powers of darkness to attack us. I have been rattled knowing family stories of my brother seeing a flying saucer land on our flat and my grandmother participating in a seance so powerful that the table started climbing stairs. No more mystery she vowed.

It is wise to avoid playing with hallucinogenics, psychics, tarot cards. I don't like the Enneagram because it boils a person down to a number. But I don't like this fear. I don't like looking at my friend who says she plays with magic and being afraid. Very good grief. The earth is full of God's glory. God's love.

I remembered Christopher Blackeby’s words, something like, “You are full of glory because you are in the throne room with Jesus. The same glory that knocked John on his face in Revelation. Face ablaze. Legs like burnished bronze. Clothes shining white linen. So bright you can’t look. As Christ is, right now, so are you in this world.”

Blackaby said if we take ahold of the truth we are sons of God, no matter what, the spiritual hassle will stop. And it does. We have faith like a shield swallowing fiery darts. Joy billows through me.

Later in the day, we toss the ball for Omalola. Watching her run flat out sings the joy I feel. Mrs. Horse peeks through her fence boards as if to say when are you going to pay attention to me? She pulls on my guilt. The sun is warm and the air seems still.

As soon as we haul the harness to the barn and drag the carriage out of the shed, the wind pops up. We tell ourselves we’ll just take a few turns around the field because we don’t want her working up a sweat. My hands stay relaxed on my thighs. I tell her what a good mare she is. It’s five p.m. with enough sun left to find that warmth and light, despite the chill. Mrs. Horse stays relaxed despite the brisk air and breeze and weather about to change.

During commercial breaks on American Idol, I walk the dogs. The night sky is as exquisite as jeweler’s velvet, pearls and diamonds laid out. The moon rounded by earth shine. The remaining orange of the sun lounged along the horizon. Exquisite. Enough to sit me back in the Presence, in quiet, in joy. It’s a scene to think on when dropping off to sleep.

April 1, 2025

We go to the hospital so I can get blood drawn. We stop to see Mr. P. in critical care. (The place is a labyrinth with the nurse’s station more like a control room for a rocket than a hospital.) He whispers but even close to his mouth I can’t hear what he says. How hard it must be to speak and not be heard. I say a prayer asking the Lord to bring his presence to him. I choke up because I remember the stories. This farmer was so tough, his tractor was hit by a car and flipped over on top of him. He walked away with bruises, nothing broken, though he went to rehab to work out those injuries. Oh Lord wrap your presence around Mr P.

The Daily Office settles in John 6 where Jesus talks about the bread of life. I read about how Jesus fed the 5000 at Passover. The people wanted to make him king, and he slipped through the crowd to hide on the mountain, to pray. I wonder if Moses and Elijah showed up for a chat like they did for the transfiguration. At Passover in a few years, he will make his way to his death.

He walks across the water, so spooky the disciples think he’s a ghost. When he climbs aboard, the wind quiets and they row to the other side where the crowds are waiting. Most will turn away when Jesus gives his cannibal talk: Eat my flesh. Drink my blood. Abide in me. His disciples are grossed out. They see flesh being torn from bones. Blood being gulped, spilling out over their face. They know warriors do this to take on the strength of their enemies.

Even though Jesus fed them with good bread and fish, even though he talks in metaphor, they walk away. He asks the twelve, are you going to leave too? Peter says, “To whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life…You are the Holy One of God” (John 6: 68 – 69, ESV). Then Jesus throws a snarky curve, “Did I not choose you, the Twelve? And yet one of you is a devil” (John 6: 70, ESV). In another story, Jesus talks about how he will die and Peter says, “No you won’t.” He’s just been told he will be the rock on which Jesus will build his church. “Get behind me Satan.” Seems like there is no place for pride of insight when walking with Jesus.

In Mark, during another boat story, Jesus challenges the disciples as they realize they only have one loaf of bread. He warns them to “beware of the leaven of Pharisees and Herod” (Mark 8: 15, ESV.) I hold onto this line because of how easy it is to think our religious observances make us better than others or bring us closer to God. Jesus even called out the people saying you search the scriptures, but don't have a clue as to who I am. It’s easy to think we can solve society’s problems through political power. I am enticed to keep looking though these days there’s so much chaos, it’s too much trouble to know what to think.

April 2, 2025

I wake to rain and walk into a gray sky. The clouds aren’t even spooned with grays and blues. They are just blank. We walk to the corner of our road and the road that faces the morning sun and turn around. Rain spackles my coat and pants. The dogs trot along. I am thankful they got right to their business.

Bruce has let Mrs. Horse out but I put her back inside, leaving her loose in the barn. When I shut the door, she whirls. Her ears forward, her body taut. I speak to her. And pull the door shut. There is some thunder. (I don’t want her out when lightning is in the area. I know of one horse struck and killed during a tiny pop up storm.) The cold rain pours. The wind blows.

Bruce spends most of the day watching Ryan Hall Y’all on You Tube. He reports town after town in the path of monster tornadoes. Some look like the EF 4 we saw—a wide dervish, aimed straight at our farm. Friends prayed for us, while Bruce and I hid in the basement. It turned north. Hall’s voice is calm. “Run not walk to shelter. If you live in a trailer house find better shelter. Go to an inside room with as many walls between you and the outside. Wear a helmet. Most people are injured by falling debris.” Then he warns terrible flooding is coming as the serpent flashing reds, yellows and greens settles just east of the Mississippi.

The hard rain eases then stops. The weather service takes down the elevated risk for our area. We turn Mrs. Horse out so she can move around and we can clean up the barn.

A friend of this page, who is touring in Kentucky, hides in a bathtub at her hotel until 4 am, the storm banging around her. A Facebook friend had her house and barn severely damaged, with a 100 trees down. Her horse is missing. When I last looked, there were over 300 tornado warnings.

At church we sing Holden Evening Prayer. “Joyous light of heavenly glory, loving glow of God’s own face, you who sing creation’s story, shine on every land and race. Now as evening falls around us, we shall raise our songs to you. God of daybreak, God of shadows, come and light our hearts anew.”

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Sometime Around March 18,2025

Two red wing blackbirds settle on twigs as I walk back towards the turn towards home. It’s good to see them again, to see them eyeing me. I think of Saints who have birds land on their shoulders because they are so inside the Creator. There’s a video of an Orthodox monk where the bird lands on his shoulders, but he has food. Food will do it every time. Though I do believe the old stories of saints being so full of The Presence animals are no longer shy with them. It’s good to see birds fly ahead of me and settle, fly ahead of me and settle.

It's been a week where snow curled over the side of the fence row, something we haven’t seen this winter. I woke up with my heart hurting. We stood at the gravesite of an old friend of Bruce’s. They’d gone hunting and fishing together as young men. Rodney’s mother sold us our first house. When things were rough with Bruce, she said, “Ah. You don’t need a therapist. You’ve been married to him for twenty years. You know how to handle him.” Nobody told us when she died.

Nearly a hundred people stood around in the forty-degree day, the sky clouded over. Rodney’s daughter spoke about how he’d never ever raised his voice. We watched as they slowly lowered the casket into the ground. The undertaker picked a flower to give to his widow.

As we pulled away, I read my Substack notifications. I’d responded to a literary writer’s comment about how the next President should not come from an elite school by saying maybe someone from the trades might make a good president. I made an off handed remark about Joe Biden being incompetent, forgetting that this writer’s audience would take offense. A woman asked how was Biden incompetent? Oops. I responded by saying there is wisdom in the phrase “don’t argue with strangers on the internet.” I am trying my best to follow what Martin Shaw has said about not taking up political arguments, how we are Christians first. But my gosh I can’t tear my eyes away.

Her anger jumped out of screen, almost like a black ghost, combined with watching Bruce’s good friend lowered in the ground, brought me to bless the people at the grocery store, going about their business, picking up vegetables or pulling cans off the shelves.

March 24, 2025

When I turned toward home, I walked into a hard wind, as hard as riding a bicycle uphill in a stiff breeze. It was wild, exhilarating. A cold wind wrapped around my legs. I couldn’t help but think about the Holy Spirit being likened to wind, who goes where he pleases, wind we can’t take hold of or control.

As I write I think of the verse, “Trust in the Lord with your whole heart, lean not to your own understanding, in all thy ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths.” But I want to lean on my own understanding and lean hard.

The wind blows so hard I can’t breathe. My heart hurts, yet again. It hurts when I wake up. Sleep is not kind, but my dreams are long gone. There are hymns and prayers that ask for the Lord to watch over our sleep, because the powers of darkness can find us there. Other times I wake at 3 a.m. asking the Lord to wrap his presence around grieving friends.

There are days I fear it’s a heart attack. But my CT scan of my heart shows nothing alarming. My cholesterol, blood pressure are good. My Apple watch shows a sinus rhythm. When I see my sleep doc who is a lung doc, he wonders if my esophagus is spasming. After he says this, the heartburn starts, so fierce it burns the back of my nose. I decide to quit Diet Coke because I am addicted, because it’s kicking up the acid.

Doc flips through the actual CT scan and wonders if he should get pictures of my whole lungs but doesn’t think it’s worth exposing me to the radiation. He calls what he sees Interstitial Lung Disease, not just banding that has stayed stable over two separate CT scans. And I am shook. I see why docs just called it banding, because I’d freak out, because having a name doesn’t always heal. I figured it was scarring from pneumonia or the fact my rheumatologist caught mixed connective tissue disease before it took hold.

I walk past the neighbor’s farm, full of judgements. The fat apple tree stares back. The paddock where the horse lived is empty. Her wandering over for some attention, gave life to the place, that has settled into quiet, too quiet. Mr. P rode out of here in an ambulance. We hear that he had died and was brought back. His heart is failing. I think of his stories about being in a submarine when the Cuban missile crisis went down, his trips across country to his military base, how he and his wife came to our house on their gator, how they broke up the forced isolation during Covid. I think about how we’d go to dinner at Grubsteakers, a restaurant rebuilt after the Fairdale tornado. Mr P spoke the stories of the farms we drove past, what he knew about them.

His son says he was eating supper when the next thing they heard was the death rattle. The nurses worked on him for ten minutes. What a wonderful way to go. Eating supper, your son there, and then be gone. Bruce and I sat vigil with Bruce's mother as she panted for breath like a schooling racehorse, or a woman giving birth to her new life in Christ. (I am looking forward to meeting her in glory with her terrible loneliness fixed right up. I am looking forward to seeing all that light pouring off of her.) I think of my grandmother whose mind was gone, gone, her heart trapping her mind in a healthy body. And when it failed the first responders cracked open her chest. My aunts were appalled.

I walk down the hill into the wind, shoving against me. My opinions are shouting. Bursting out of me. I know how best he can write his book, she can invest her money, she can find a home to live. My advice is so loud, I almost want to tell my friends, “Please, please don’t tell me your story because I’ll tell you what I think you should do.” My spiritual friend suggests I ask if they want to hear my advice, but I often barge ahead.

I have read Stephen Freeman who says it’s not on us to change the world. And the famous CS Lewis quote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult.”

Lewis is right. I can be a moral busybody. I want to help so badly, advice bursts out of me, while people hear me saying they don’t know best how to live their lives. I just want to help is all.

I forget to preface my remarks by saying, “Take my advice, weigh and measure it. If it feels right, use the insight. If not, simply ignore me.”

I also think about the prophets who pushed past their fear to speak words people did not want to hear. Jeremiah felt God’s words like fire in his bones. He couldn’t not speak. I have worked for years in therapy to find a way to speak up. My fuse is so long that I don’t speak when it would be better, cleaner to cry, “Ouch.” But I let it go. And now I want to take hold of that honesty, keep my mouth shut, let people be, respect their boundaries. But how wise is it if they are heading for a cliff?

So I take my words to prayer, though I am stalled not knowing how to pray. Do I pray for Mr P’s healing when his body is tuckered out?

My tears wadded up. Tears that kick the acid into my throat. Make my heart hurt. I am going to miss Mr P, pulling up in his gator, our sitting on the steps talking. I miss his wife who passed a few years ago. I miss the horse, the tiny work of the cross going to their barn twice a day for two months to treat her moon blindness. Both Mr P and I were relieved when the vet released me from the chore. But it was a lesson in tiny taking up the cross, doing something that wasn’t convenient.

I pray for Chuck to find a peaceful night and a perfect end. I pray for his healing. Bruce says just give him to the Father.

The wind blows hard. The Spirit fills me so full so I can’t breathe.

March 25, 2025

Today was so quiet I hear no trains, no planes, and no trucks pass me. There is no roaring of wind. I could hear my footsteps on the gravel. The sun broke through the clouds, to pool light on a distant farm. It looked warm, yellow, a promise. The sun shone in my face. I looked down at the gravel, averted my eyes.

Last night’s readings touched on Psalm 8, the magnificent Psalm that points to the majesty of the heavens: “When I look at your heavens the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him” (Ps 8: 3 – 4, ESV).

When I was a little girl, I’d stand before the men sitting around a kitchen table and speak this Psalm. I could almost feel their admiration for such a little one. At Bible camp I clomped down the long stair steps to stand up and say the same thing. I was so very impressed by the stars, their distance, their mystery. The world hurt so much I wanted to visit one.

But this time when I read it, I was struck by “Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger” (Ps. 8: 2). Of course I think of Jesus coming as a baby, but I also wonder if this speaks to the least powerful, the call Jesus made to become as children to enter the Kingdom. There is a power in a child’s delight and wonder. Power in their insignificance as far as influencing the world. Power in their ability to play. I hadn’t thought of my speeches as a girl until now.

As I walked in the quiet day, the answer came back as it has in the past to take my advice, the stuff I see, and talk it out with the Lord. The Spirit prays for us with groans and Jesus is at the right hand of God interceding. He can take my words and sift them towards a person’s good. And I can get the words out of my system. When I have practiced listening to a person’s story with the intent to open healing, I have gone blank, not knowing what to say, listening. Maybe that’s my answer to this hard impulse to tell people what I think. (Even as a teacher I asked questions and listened.)

Right now, carrying people in my prayers has gotten to be too much. Maybe it’s time to lay the people, that I pray for, in God’s hands, let them be. Maybe it’s time to let sleep be still.

March 27, 20

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25

Finally, we drove Mrs. Horse after five months of her standing by the fence, wondering when I’d come out. Her eye softened like you wouldn’t believe when we brought out the harness. I remembered what Linda told me last year, to talk to her, tell her what a good horse she is being, to not be afraid to use my voice. Instead of pulling her to turn I spoke, “Right, right.” And “Left, left.” I squeezed my ring fingers a bit. We just walked around the south pasture because the north field spooked her enough, her power hard into the bit, that we needed to build our confidence.

A swirl of leaves blew up in front of her, one of those swirls, that can be joyous in the fall. She startled, swung left, then right. I stayed quiet, loose, laughed. She jigged a bit and then settled.

We watched smoke rise by a farm in the distance. March burning ditches, burning piles on this quiet day with no warnings not to burn. As soon as I took the harness off Morgen buckled her legs to lay down for a good scratch. She leapt into a buck and ran to the other side of the barn, ready to ask for a flake of hay.

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With the warnings about not rebelling like the children of Isreal at Meribah and Massah repeating in the Daily Office, I was caught by the following, words that caught me while I sifted soiled shavings, in the barn by myself. I spoke them into Notes on my phone. I have since listened some more to what the story wants to say. This imagination is in the tradition of Lectio Divinia where you put yourself into Biblical scenes. Doing this has made those stories come alive because they’ve entered my imagination.

Those warnings show up in Psalm 95 that begins with “Oh come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make joyful noise to the rock of our salvation” (Ps 95: 1, ESV). Then it switches to what’s quoted in Hebrews “Today if you hear his voice do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion…where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years. Therefore, I was provoked with that generation and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart; they have not known my ways.’ As I swore in my wrath ‘They shall not enter my rest’” (Heb. 3: 8 – 11, ESV).

These words call us to trust that God truly is our refuge and help in time of need. They call us to believe Jesus when he says anyone who takes refuge in him, he will in no wise cast out. They call us to trust him even when it appears as though there is no provision.

As I said last week the giants in my land are: how will Bruce and I handle being frail elderly when we have no family or close friends, my short term memory is fizzling and there is the looming sorrow and life change when one of us departs this life. A friend of this page reminded me that if the Lord took care of her, he will take care of me. When these fears rise, I talk them over with the Father and let Him take them. I might sing Psalm 34 that has a line: "I sought the Lord and he heard me and delivered me from all my fears." And if you said prayers for me, thank you so much.

I Imagine What It Might Be Like to be Moses At the End of his Life

This is written in his voice.

She died. My sister died. My heart was broken and angry. My sister who followed me to the Nile when my mother laid me there in a basket. She spoke up to Pharoah’s daughter about the wet nurse who was my mother. She played with me until it was time to live with the king.

My sister who danced before You, Lord, when we crossed the Red Sea, my sister. She danced as the water lapped over the Pharoah’s army. My cheeks glisten as I remember her tambourine, the women’s tambourines dancing “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea” (Ex 15: 21.)

My sister who mocked my beautiful wife, who shone like ebony in the sun. She and Aaron ganged up, speaking ugly words, saying, “She is not worthy to be your wife, her skin burnt to black. She’s not one of us. God won’t bless your marriage. Divorce her. Hasn’t he spoken through us too?”

My wife wept.

You called us into the tent of meeting. You stood up for me: “With my servant Moses I speak mouth to mouth, clearly and not in riddles." You thundered, "Why are you not afraid to speak against him?” You made them see me.

Then You zapped Miriam with leprosy, so she was white as snow--a rebuke to her words about my wife’s blackness. I begged You to heal her. How many times do I have to beg You? But You made her stay outside the camp for seven days. And we waited to move until she was healed.

My sister died. My brother won’t be far behind. He’s walking bent and bowed.

I struck the rock. I struck her on her belly, perfect, pregnant round. I struck her twice. I struck her like I was beating my beast. I struck her and water poured out, clear, living water, catching all sunlight.

Your fire billowed, like wind had blown its embers. You whispered, “I said just speak. Just speak to the rock and I will show the people my glory.”

But I struck her. I struck her with all the anger of my people that bitched and moaned to You about water, bitched and moaned about the food that You rained from heaven, bitched and moaned about the giants in the land that You were giving to us, bitched and moaned how they would defeat us because of their size. Despite the fact, the grapes were as big as melons, despite the fact that my assistant Joshua and Caleb said, "The Lord is stronger. Giants would be no trouble to topple." I cried to my people, “Don’t you believe? You people don’t you believe your eyes, all the wonders these last years?”

But Lord, You said, “No they have to wander forty years, until those who don’t believe, drops in the dessert.” And now You say to me, You say to me, “You can’t go in the land either. You struck the rock. You struck the rock that is my Son. He followed you through the desert. The rock that is the refuge of my people, you struck him. And the rock bled water, the fountain of living water, springing up. The people and the cattle were watered, but you failed to trust me. You failed to hear my word and so I will show you the land from the mountain, but you can’t go in.”

You said, "And the ages to come in the ages to come, the people would be reminded not to test Me, not to test Me not to test Me like at the waters of Meribah, but to trust and to rejoice in Me and to enter into My rest."

I struck the rock like Balaam struck the donkey and the donkey finally laid down and the donkey spoke and said there’s an angel in the road. Don’t you see? The angel said, “She saved your life and I would’ve killed you and spared her.” But You rebuked me, said You’re done leading the people. You won’t take them to the Promise.

You showed me the mountain.

So many strange things with you God.

The burning bush, that didn’t burn up, and Your name, You gave me your name, and power over You, and a staff that moved, turned into a viper. The burning bush, I saw a woman pregnant with fire, then it was just branches and your voice and the fire.

I laid on my face begging You to forgive my people. My fury billowed and raged when I saw the orgy, the golden calf, the people trapping you in gold. I did not want to lose my wife or Aaron or Miriam. But I buried my face in the dirt and in the stone. Your fire rolling over me. I did not want you to make a people from my loins. Don’t you care what people might think if the people were destroyed in the desert? And You backed down. How can you blame me for striking the rock?

But You stood firm. You said “No, absolutely not, you can’t enter the Promise. You can’t find rest with your people.” You showed me the beauty, the green rolling hills, the bustling towns. The barns filled with crops. The cloud shadows moving like herds over the hills. The sheep moving like wind through tall grasses. What a good place for my people to walk into. I feel content that it’s Joshua leading them there. All those years face to the dust crying for your people. I can sleep now.

Next thing I knew I was standing on Mount Tabor. You were there. A flame of fire. Not a bush. A flame of fire in flesh and bones like mine. And Elijah, who called fire from the sky like he was calling his sheep, and it burned up the sacrifice and stones, Elijah who stepped into a flaming chariot. We were dressed in clothes dazzling as the sun, I know that look, My face used to shine that way, scared the people out of their wits, so I had to wear a veil. I was wearing the light I saw on Sinai, wrapped around me, light. So was the Rock, water gushing out of his side. We sang, "Keep your eyes on the joy set before you." And the Father spoke to your friends, "This is my beloved son, listen to him," and they crumpled to the ground. I saw what you did. You healed the boy who threw himself into the fire when you reached the foot of the mountain.

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Saturday, March 15, 2025

I woke this morning to a hard wind and eerily hazy sky. The sun was blurred as if waxed paper was stretched over it. As I walked the dogs, I thought rain was pouring on the distant farms. But no rain moved or fell. The sun was hazed over with a brown tint, with a bit of the end of the world in the light. Dolly kept swinging around to head home. My legs kept getting tangled. I looked at the survey stakes for the repair of the natural gas pipeline and turned toward home.

Bruce and I stayed up until midnight waiting for the long predicted violent storm to make her way to our farm. We didn’t want to be caught asleep with an oak branch falling through the bedroom. It’s worth the alarm when the shaded areas on the local weather map turn brown because those predictions have brought tornadoes. We carried dog crates and chairs to the basement. I packed my jewelry and important papers in my go-to-the-basement bag. I tried to follow the storm front on AccuWeather but the app froze. Bruce listened to Ryan Hall Y’all warn communities about impending tornadoes along a line that stretched down to the Gulf of Mexico. Hall could barely keep up. Bruce’s eyes were glued to his Ipad.

I pulled a blanket up and read the daily office for March 14 where I bumped into Psalm 95 and the last few verses of Hebrews 4. This week has taken me to the stern warning about the people of Isreal, in the early chapters of Hebrews and the Psalm. “Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,9 where your ancestors tested me; they tried me, though they had seen what I did.10 For forty years I was angry with that generation; I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways.’11 So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’” (Psalm 95: 8 – 11, NIV).

Now I know why I’ve been avoiding reading scripture, because I can be thrown into paralyzing fear, because I am afraid to enter rest because the fear is more real that God’s reassurance he’ll walk through the valley of shadow right beside me. The children of Isreal were so terrified of the giants that God said, "Suit yourself. You’ll spend forty years wandering in the desert and die there."

And then there’s Moses who struck the rock when he was supposed to just speak to water waiting to spring forth. The humblest man on earth, who talked to God face to face, could not even walk into the promised land. Even he didn’t enter rest. So how could I even begin to enter it as I look down the barrel of old age and death.

Earlier this week, Bruce said the train was pulled by six engines. I didn’t notice much more than the long line of grain cars heading east because I spoke to God, seeping tears, like he was a friend, not sure whether I was doing spiritual battle with Scratch whispering in my ear or whether I’d joined the children of Isreal in complaining about how those creatures were bigger than God. After all God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love and a sound mind.

My fear twisted tighter by saying “You are past time to find community, your memory is failing, that you’re at that age when funerals will be your social life, those friends dead and gone leaving wide, gaping, irreplaceable holes, not to mention your loss when God calls Bruce home. Who wants to be friends with someone who can’t think straight?” My own withdrawing from frail elderly acquaintances whispers, ‘What goes around comes around.”

While cleaning house this week I forgot to put the bag into the vacuum and pushed against the floor until the machine halted, full of hair and dust. The replacement bag sat on the counter. I muttered “I miss my mind” a phrase my grandmother repeated as her mind crumbled. I’ve already been slapped with the mild cognitive impairment label. I flinch every time I can’t find a common word. I am terrified of winding up in a nursing home, where you can pay thousands a month and still be left sitting in your urine and feces. During Covid, elders were treated so cruelly, Amnesty International should have raised an outcry.

This fear runs like a sewer underneath me, and smells just enough to make friendship with me a liability. When or how my body or mind betrays me, well I don’t have much say in that. Sometimes the Presence rises, puts an arm around my shoulder and reassures me with “I’ve got you.”

But I long for purchase. I long to make sense of loneliness that has dogged me since I was set on a bed looking shell shocked the hour I was born. Surely there’s a story, where I can find my place as a woman who has outlived her family and is knocking 70, who bought into not having children, so there are no children coming home for holidays. Church gives us the old folks group, without thinking to mix us up with the kids. And young adults are busy with their children and making a living.

Do I huddle in the old folk tales about the old crones to find my story? Do I become a modern-day anchorite spending her days in prayer? (I kinda already do that.) I don’t know. I do know I want to find my way to entering that rest, a call I heard for the first time when I’d just turned sixteen, a story I hope to share here one day.

Ah but just before I went to publish this, Martin Shaw writes in Coming from Here: “And courage to you, wherever you are investing your love and attention, often without this abundance. For you that have to make your traditions instinctively from certain herbs you grow, walks through the city you always take, struggling friends you persist in visiting. There is the roots of ritual and pilgrimage in all those things. My first real understanding of ceremony began in a Men’s Hostel thirty years ago when I tacked a Rembrandt sketch of a lion to a wall. How to make a prison cell a hermit’s hut begins with just one step.” Ah courage to me. Courage in these words, giving me purchase like the minuscule ledges I have to trust if I'm to climb the last bit to the peak.

Just this morning, the morning of eerie haze, I read Eugene Terekhin’s essay “666 vs 7: The Leap of Faith that Changes Everything” where he takes a close look at how the number six stands for human effort and the number seven stands for rest. It’s the Sabbath day, God’s rest day. He spells out how this rest in God happens when we come to the end of our abilities. Work no longer means anything. He says, “Seven is the turning, the breaking point. It’s where we break, both literally, in rest, and spiritually, in trust. It’s when we have exhausted all our human effort and have come to the end of ourselves. The 7th day is the day of perfection because it is our breaking point—the point when we admit that we are powerless.

“Paradoxically, the perfection of the 7th day is when we embrace our imperfection. We let go—break, stop, cease, rest. Perfection happens exactly at this point—at the point of nothingness. We have been toiling for 6 days but have reached a point where all human work becomes pointless. At this point, 6 turns into 7. Imperfection gives way to perfection.” And so maybe I’m not in such a bad place after all.

Backing up to Friday, March 14, 2025. The Night of the Dangerous Storm

The wind finally hit hard. I listened for the old oaks cracking, wondered how many branches would fall. But as hard as the wind blew, it only threw a few drops of rain against the window. It roared as loud as the thunder I didn’t hear. Saw no flashes of light. I did not head for the cellar. The dogs slept at my feet. I opened my phone to Stephen Freeman’s blog entry, Following a conversation with a tree, and read, “The voice of thanksgiving is, without exception, the sound that we can utter that is itself in harmony with the song of the universe. It is filled with tree-knowledge and star-wonder, confounding the lies of the enemy and those who would drown us in darkness. The Uncreated Light manifests itself in the created light, and in all creation that is light, some of which has slowed down enough for us to walk on.”

Confounding the lies of the enemy. And those who would drown us in darkness.

So I’m brought back to gratitude. At the end of David’s wrenching confessional Psalm 51, he speaks this truth as well, “O Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise” (Psalm 51: 18). And then there’s “God is enthroned on the praises of Isreal” that also slides into the wrenching Psalm 22 that Jesus screamed from the cross.

Giving thanks. As Stephen Freeman says: Confounds the lies of the enemy. And those who would drown us in darkness. It fills the emptiness with something like water. So I thank God for the friends who’ve walked with me some years, and for those who have turned off to side roads, and the ones whose health is fragile, who are still here, still ready for a good talk. I give thanks for those of you who are reading this. And others I can text for a long chat.

Chris Green at Speakeasy Theology has been writing a series on communal singing. talking about how our voices are powerful pointed at God in unison. “This is true not only in the church’s gathered worship but also in the scattered lives of its members. Sunday, we sing together, facing the same direction. But through the week we also sing alone for and to others—even, at times, against them.”

It’s been too easy to let our phones do the singing. When I was a girl, I’d walk the mile long road to the fork that lead to the main road, singing the old hymns long after dark. When I rode my horse I sang for joy. But I have lost that voice though sometimes when saying Evening Prayer with Bruce, I sing, my voice faint, the dog cocking her head.

Well, I’ll leave you with my latest perspective for WNIJ, our local NPR station, that aired this week.

Beer and Hymns? WNIJ Perspective

Our country has been plunged into fear, more biting and bitter than this winter’s polar vortexes. It shouts as disagreements dissolve into insults.

My congressman recently sent a one-line survey that unnerved me because I realized he might be gathering a list of people to surveil. The first amendment guarantees our rights to free speech, but how strong is it if the FBI shows up at a person’s doorstep, swat team in tow, to take them into custody for expressing a sentiment that might be termed insurrectionist?

What has happened to us where an ordinary citizen, a little too obsessed with political happenings, is afraid to be honest with her own congressman? A friend says people she talks to on the other side of the aisle say the same thing. The fear bites so hard, it feels more real than paranoia.

Then I remembered how St. Paul, chained in a fetid prison, sang hymns into the darkness. He says, “Do not get drunk with wine…but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs…” What if psalms and hymns and spiritual songs are the antidote to this bitter, bitter fear that is flooding our country? Would a community sing along be a way to push back? To find our joy? Beer and Hymns already thought of this. Let’s find a brewery, some musicians and gather together. What better way to bark back at the darkness.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

If you’d like to hear me read this, click here.

Saturday, March 15, 2025

Last night’s storms killed more than twenty people and wrecked a number of houses. A friend texted and said there were 130 fires in Oklahoma yesterday. Dust storms also kicked up. As I walked back out to feed Mrs. Horse I couldn’t figure out if the haze was from dust or smoke or both. I held my hand to her muzzle and scratched her shoulder. She wiggled her nose in my palm. The wind roared so hard, and it was so hard to breathe I fed her inside the barn. Sometimes the Spirit blows so hard you can barely breathe. All I could say was to bring the ball and throw it for Omalola to chase, running hard away and back, her eyes lit up with joy.

Here are the essays Chris Green is posting on singing: To Save Love for the World, To Save Love for the World Pt 2, To Save Love for the World Pt 3, The Spirit and the Song (also a podcast)

I hate to ask this, but I’ve discovered the more likes a post gets, the more Substack promotes it in the notes feed. Also I’d love to hear your comments.

I’m grateful you stopped by to read this essay. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I stop at the neighbors’ mailbox. It marks a half mile where I turn to walk home. I’m not greedy about making more steps than a mile, though maybe when the weather eases, I’ll cross the tracks and walk by the herd of Angus cows and old oaks. Bruce stopped one day when a cow looked dead, her leg cocked in the air, like rigor mortis set in. He walked up to the Herdsman (I’ll call him that) and by the time he got back, she’d birthed her calf. Already we’ve seen some babies in their paddock. If I walk there, I have to be careful not to aggravate the bull when it gets to be his time to be with the ladies.

The train honks with a sound like a French horn with a call to longing, not to go elsewhere, but to stay planted, grounded, here, now. I look up the tracks and way in the distance, beyond streets I won’t name, I see the headlamp that looks more like a mirage than the promise the train will soon roll by. I stand and wait, but it’s taking too long. The neighbor might wonder what I’m doing standing by their mailbox.

There’s a pull to walk closer, to maybe get down on the tracks and take a picture, not unlike the pull I have felt standing at the lip of Niagara Falls, or on the bridge over the Rio Grande by Taos. So I turn toward home, an easier walk because the dogs pull ahead together. The day is mild. I don’t need handwarmers for my gloves. We walk past the neighbors’ barking dogs and Omalola tiptoes until we pass.

A few hours later, Dr Morker, my neurologist, asks if my memory has worsened in the last year. Well, I lose a lot of words, but I don’t want to admit that yes, I think it’s worse. I think how I sat in the former neurologist’s office, how he mocked me, said you don’t belong here, your brain is fine because the neuropsyche test I'd seen three times showed improvement. I think how humiliated I felt, and how that broke my self-perception as far as when to seek help. Besides maybe denial is the way to go. What good would it do if I admitted how I lose words I should know, and how I forget my dog’s medication to calm her stomach so she can eat? I ask Bruce to say again? What if a neuropsyche test found my wits have slipped past mild cognitive impairment? What then? I’ve been told the medication only pauses memory loss for a time and makes terrible dreams.

I watched how my grandmother’s healthy heart and body trapped her for years past her being able to think straight. She knew her brain was failing when she kept saying how she missed her mind. She repeated herself. By the time she died, she sat slumped over in a chair, completely gone, except for her body. Now I wonder if depression, grief, and isolation broke her mind. Her daughters didn’t much like depression or grief, saying she should be happy, she had a nice apartment, food, a daughter and her children next door. But what a loss, her losing her business, and the ability to drive. Nowadays docs tell us elders to find community, use our minds, eat healthy, exercise as a way to put a stay on our minds' failing.

Dr. Morker ran me through his simple neurological tests like touch your finger to your nose, follow his finger with your eyes. He asked me to remember the words “church, velvet, and camel.” We chatted about other stuff. When he asked me to repeat the words back, velvet was completely gone. As in gone. He said knowing two out of the three words was fine. But I’m not so sure. I am not sure I’d pass the part of the neuropsyche test where you have to repeat details from a story or long lists of words. That scares me. He suggested the MIND diet which is supposed to help our brains stay healthy. And to read the book Super Brain. Do puzzles. Read. Talk to people. “Come back if your memory gets worse,” he says.

Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Ryan Hall Y’all and the local weather guys are impressed by the massive low pressure making its way across the country. It circles just west of us in Iowa, throwing long lines of severe weather all the way to the Gulf coast. We just get rain, not the adrenalin rush of severe storms that stayed south. I walk the dogs to the corner, this time, taking Dolly’s advice and walking home just as rain starts falling. It was all I could do to walk. My legs feel heavy, slow. My hands ache. My muscles ache. I do not want to walk. The dogs pulled me along. The rain pinged on the fields. The clouds were plain.

My rheumatologist orders hydroxychloroquine for my aching hands. My mixed connective tissue disease went into remission, so he took me off it last fall. But on this day I ached, my hands especially. Later during prayers, I can barely say them for my friends even though the list was in front of me. We go to town to pick it up along with dog food, kitty litter and lunch. Always lunch.

This week I’m finding my way back to the Daily Office along with looking up some beautifully written essays on Substack. As the days barrel into Ash Wednesday and Lent the Psalms sing about the wicked, with the advice: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrong doers! For they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb” (Psalm 37:1, ESV). Then the Psalmist urges us to not to go to the angry place: “Refrain from anger and forsake wrath! Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil. For the evil doers will be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord will inherit the land” (Ps. 37: 8 – 9, ESV).

This is good advice. It’s so easy to be furious about what’s going on in our culture or be furious with people who fail us.

I think how monastics through the centuries have prayed these honest, raging Psalms. The poet is not afraid to b***h about people who have hurt him. This is surprising language because we are told to try to be at peace with everyone. I was raised to make nice. Reading these Psalms gives me the words for the dull pain I feel when a friendship goes awry. They speak how people turn, how they back stab.

I’ve started reading them, not to study, but as prayers. Sometimes I hear Jesus’ voice, even when railing against the wicked. They give voice to the pain of being “despised and rejected by men.” Sometimes I hear my voice: “Contend, O Lord, with those who contend with me; fight against those who fight against me!...Let them be put to shame and dishonor who seek after my life! Let them be turned back and disappointed who devise evil against me! Let them be like chaff before the wind with the angel of the Lord driving them away! Let their way be dark and slippery, with the angel of the Lord pursuing them!” (Ps 35: 1, 4 – 6, ESV).

Let them be like chaff, the wind blows away. Let them be like tares that Jesus says not to root up until the end. Then there is Ruth who went to the threshing floor and lay down at Boaz’ feet. I think of the gift she received of a husband who loved her and gave her David’s grandfather, and how maybe the threshing floor is a gift for us to lie at our beloved’s feet, have his cloak wrapped around us, claiming us as his bride. The floor where wheat is beaten, separated from the straw.

When I read about the wicked becoming like chaff I think about my own impulses to distraction, how it’s so easy to flit away from my writing work, my heart and mind, sunk into social media or the latest political drama. It’s so easy to read my phone while Mr. Bruce does the dishes, or the daily office waits for my attention. It’s so easy to fill loneliness with chocolate.

I look forward to when the Spirit like the wind blows that chaff away. I look for the day, as fearsome as it may be, when the wheat and the weeds are winnowed, and the weeds are burned. When the Psalmist says fret not, he may well be talking about the wicked out there, the powerful, who are oppressing the weak and vulnerable. But he may also be talking about the wicked in me, the voice of the accuser who oppresses me with guilt and paralysis and hopelessness. Just the other day, I thought maybe it’s the guilt that needs to go.

Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Our pastor preaches on returning to the scene for Ash Wednesday. Returning to the scene of celebrations and achievements or trauma and sin. He says we should return to a person we have offended and ask for forgiveness. Or return to someone who has hurt us and admitting the hurt. He said those conversations are difficult. These are conversations I avoid. Though the two times conflict broke out with some friends, my calling them out, healed the relationship. Most often I bless the person when they have taken up residence in my head. Sometimes it’s better not to speak your mind.

Orthodox priest, Stephen Freeman has offered a new twist on the Jesus prayer by saying “Father forgive my enemies, those who have hurt me” a prayer that might soften the bristle between angry, resentful people.

In his essay, Forgive Everyone for Everything he explains further: “In the same manner, the refusal to forgive, the continuation of blame, recrimination, bitterness, etc., are not moral failings. They are existential crises – drawing us away from the life of Christ and Paradise, and ever deeper into an abyss of non-being.

“I have lately spent some of my prayer-time each day with a modified form of the ‘Jesus Prayer.’ It runs, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner, and forgive all those who hate me or do me harm. Forgive them freely without reproach and grant me true repentance.’ I offer no great authority for this prayer – indeed, as I pray it, I find that it changes from time to time. But it is a way of offering prayer for my enemies – of teaching my heart to ‘forgive everyone for everything.’

“It can also be effective to pray (particularly when we find ourselves bound emotionally by our injured memories): ‘Lord, do not hold their (whomever you have in mind) sins against them on the day of judgment.’ Such a prayer ‘forgives the debt,’ the sense that we have that something is ‘owed.’”

Even though I have the mark of ashes on my forehead. I’m not sure I want to dive into the purple of the season. I’m not sure I even know what it means to deny myself and take up the cross. For me,self-denial means wanting the denied thing more, and I’d give in. Last Lent I laid off Diet Coke. This Lent I’m drinking it first thing because it tastes good. Richard Beck in Slavery to Death turns to St. Therese, “What she found was not a heroic path, but a little way—a way that consisted of making small, insignificant sacrifices in loving others…The Little Way is about bearing with people. The dying to self here is less about heroic martyrdom than it is about holding your tongue, refusing to gossip, waiting patiently, mastering your irritation, avoiding the spotlight, refusing to respond to insults, allowing others to cut in line, being first to apologize, and not seeking to win every argument” (114).

When pastor read the gospel, “Beware of showing your righteousness before men,” I thought well heck, I’m going to tell this story anyway. About Angelo, a man who asked, “Could you spare some?” Bruce and I had just walked out of the Hallmark store. All I had was a fifty. So I gave it to him. His demeaner felt clear, clean. I told him not to spend it on something that could kill him. He admitted he’d been in jail, been roughed up by a sheriff’s deputy, was sorry he hadn’t sued. Somehow I had his ear because I told him to make something of his life, get a job…I know that sounds preachy, in the same vein as “get off my lawn” but it wasn’t. There was enough electricity, light that passed between us, I thought maybe he might pivot, might work toward a better life. My goodness his spirit felt as clear as the water pouring out of a faucet. I still remember him in my prayers. (Funny how remember is a true word because I don’t always remember.) I don’t care if I just now received my reward by telling. What I hope is I meet Angelo in the Kingdom, and find out my words turned his shoulders toward a good, straight path, well, toward Jesus.

Maybe for Lent, I will take excess household goods to the Rockford Rescue Mission’s Thrift Store. Maybe.

Saturday, March 8, 2025

Today frost layers the fields. It’s brisk, exhilarating but not cruel or bitter. The sky is a rare blue, a beautiful clear blue, without contrails and another weather system headed our way. We turn up the gravel road. It’s early to walk past the neighbors with the three barking dogs. I hear the train coming in from the west, that beautiful French horn, sounding with longing. I stop at the top of the hill and watch him approach.

But wait. Wait a minute I hear that longing horn from the east, loud enough to not be far. What’s with two trains going opposite directions? I know there is a siding to the east. The dogs are happy to sniff the assorted holes that have made this road dangerous to drive the horse because they are deep, leg breakers, tendon rippers, and there are times we need to walk into the ditch for safety’s sake. The Canadian National train heading east draws near. The noise of the cars behind him builds. He blows his horn at our road’s crossing. He’s pulling grain cars. He blows his horn at the crossing for the road where I am walking.

The road is tight with ice. I walk slowly because I don’t want to fall. Nobody drives by. It’s hard to look up because the sun shines on the ice. My feet talk to the gravel tightened with ice. I remember the delight of stomping on ice in a snow shower at a friend’s home-the glory of that first snow, the glory of being with other kids. But I don’t step on it. I avoid it. I turn back at the neighbors’ fence which marks a mile. With my back to the sun, it’s easier to look up. A few minutes after the eastbound train passes, the westbound train rolls by. It rolls through a low spot, banks on either side. I am not sure, but I think it’s a CSX train. It’s pulling ominous black tankers. So one train taking corn to an ethanol plant east of here. The other hauling ethanol to fuel points west?

Let me tell you about another generosity. I’d bought hay, sight unseen, that Mrs. Horse refused to eat. 42 bales sat in Tessie’s old stall. It had been so heavy Bruce hauled it in there because I would have injured myself. I thought to ask a friend of this page out to lunch. She counter offered lunch with our husbands at a local campground. I asked if they knew anyone who could use the hay because we could not use it. She knew her neighbor could use it for his sheep. He just came by to pick it up.

On our way to town for lunch I see an eastbound train moving so slowly, it looks like it's parked, holding cars back at the blinking crossing. Could it be the one I saw this morning, sitting on the siding, waiting for the go ahead to continue? Or maybe the crew went dead and needed to be replaced. We grabbed our sandwiches and sat at the park. We see her nearly every visit, a girl swinging on the swing, earphones in, even during school days. Sometimes she swings high, almost rocking out of the seat and then back down again. How did your week go?

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Notes from the Bitter Week

I walk the dogs out into cold so frigid my face burns. My fingers burn if I didn’t curl them around to the handwarmers in my gloves. Bitter cold wraps around my thighs despite long underwear. The dogs dance along. Little Dog turns in front of me, herding me to go home. If they step in snow they go three-legged lame. My heart tightens. My eyes water. My nose runs. I could be crying but I’m not. I’m walking into wind chill. It’s not much better when I turn back toward the house. But the dogs pull out in front of me. My mind flutters around my head. I do not care to drop into my body, into all that bitter cold. My heart hurts. My chest is tight.

It's too cold to even walk to the corner. The chill eases a little as I turn back toward home. I think my still prayer words: “Thank you Lord.” But my mind flutters like a wounded bird that can’t lift from the ground. Poets take on Jesus’ voice with a vindictive tone I don’t recognize. Western civilization needs to die others say. Let it burn. I hear the words of Isreal’s enemies saying of Jerusalem, “Lay it bare, lay it bare down to its foundations” (Ps 137:7, ESV). This is the Psalm where the singers lament, “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion” (Ps. 137: 1, ESV). I wonder if these folks have any idea what kind of suffering they wish to bring down on friends and neighbors. There’s something anti-human about these sentiments even in Christians. Millions of people would die if we are thrust back to life as it was before the Industrial Revolution. Seems like the powers of darkness have swept across our good earth. The chaos in Washington unsettles me and takes too much focus and trouble to know what to think besides the fact my thoughts don’t make a hill of difference. Discussions are even more pointless, but still I can’t stop looking and reading. When I read some posts, I have to fight to keep from offering my perspective, because my words would do no good.

Once inside I blow my nose and wipe my tears sprung from the cold, not sadness. I don’t have the gift of tears, which springs from grief over the world’s suffering. My heart is hard from holding too many animals in my arms as they died. It is hard from the friends, I thought would be with me to the end, who walked away, pushed me into the pit. And hard from my own family dead and gone some forty years. I don’t mean for the scars, but they are there. I admit to a friend of this page, that Mrs. Horse waits at the fence for me to spend time with her, but I duck my head and dust the house. I admit I don’t like riding because I don’t know if I can handle her startles while sitting on her back. It’s too much work to haul her to a trainer. It was all I could do last summer was hold her in check, when she wanted to bolt across the field, the carriage rattling.

The prophets say God will exchange our calcified hearts for a heart of flesh. There are times I can feel my heart softening. I can feel animal goodness in the walking through stinging air. I don’t fight tears when they pop up, taking me by surprise, even if they aren’t polite. I am braced by the chill. There’s a joy that comes from being stung by the air.

A friend’s husband has died, and I attend the visitation and the funeral despite how it would be easier to send a card and stay home. Our friendship has thrived despite political differences and a few conflicts that cleared the air. We've been friends for thirty years. Bruce sits in the car because he knows people there through my painful stories. Laura is beautiful, with the kind of beauty that shines off a woman who has loved well and been loved well. A therapist told me I would see that in widows who have loved well when I have confessed how I fear the pit, when Bruce and I are parted from each other. Laura is almost wearing a halo. Her marriage to John was very human like all marriages, but they deeply loved and cared for each other. Her long sweater looks more like a queen’s robe than a cloak to keep warm. Colleagues and friends stand around talking, the wake closer to a party than a long boring line to pay respects.

We had talked the day before John died about how my vague, possibly false memory that I’d flown up to the ceiling in my very first room, where paint had been scraped back to wood, how those bare patches frightened me. But I slept there. I flew up to the ceiling. My mother screaming with a broom to swat me back to earth. I was less than five. I read They Flew by Carlos Eire to understand the very real phenomenon of levitation as it was documented in history. I was most ashamed to tell this until I told it.

Laura said, “Maybe you died, and your mother’s horror was her finding you and trying to revive you.” She listed the qualities of people with near death experiences such as longing to die in order to return to that place of peace. Well, I was homesick even though I was home, as a child. She continued, "The person also has a focus to do some good for the world. And they receive a download of special knowledge." Some of it sounds right but by no means do I have special knowledge or gifts. She left me thinking, but no one in our family ever said I’d almost died. But our family held their secrets close. We quit our lunch early because she needed to check on John, who had just been in the hospital from a fall. Laura said she knew he was failing.

The next day she texted me that he had died in an Emergency Room trauma room.

Laura wears all black during the funeral and walks down the aisle with the same dignity as a bride might, her face quiet. Friends gather behind her. The church’s atmosphere is white like the gold and white robes priest’s wear during epiphany. Even though we are on the verge of Lent, the whole church looks like Easter. The priest cloaks her husband’s casket with a white shroud, as he says, “Let us put Christ on.” He talks about John’s goodness and the hope that death is not the last word, the hope that Christ will come again. Scholar John Behr often talks about how death is our birth into life with Christ, how we will finally be refined into the people God had in mind when He created us. The church, the shroud, the priests’ robes, the incense spoke more of a birthday than a death day. What robes of cascading light was this big, gentle man dressed in now?

As I walk to the grave, I listen to the NIU teacher’s Union president saying his work has become interesting because of the executive orders coming out of Washington halting funding for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. He says, “There are people who have built their entire careers on it.” He’s hoping the national union will help their cause. His gentleness and understatement grab my heart. I feel for the people whose lives are being upended.

We stand under a green tent, on cloth covering snow and listen as the priest sprinkles holy water on John’s casket. Wind flaps the canvas. He reminds us that Christ has gone ahead through death, bursting its bonds and rising. “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus says, his words defying his friend’s body wrapped in the grave, that he calls forth. His words defy his own death.

At the end of the funeral luncheon Laura invites us to stay and listen to the local ukulele group play John’s favorite hymns. What a wonderful way to push back against the grief by welcoming tears and the memories that swim to the surface with those songs. There’s wisdom in speaking to each other in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.

I hate this for Laura—the long, hard walk through grief. The days when you feel like you should be crying, when you almost feel good and the days you’re crying, and you wonder if you’ll ever feel good. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis has said there’s the anxiety that feels like fear. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing” (7). This is how grief felt for me in the wake of my parents and brothers’ deaths.

I think of Bonhoeffer’s words, how they promise that God won’t even fill the hollow when our beloved has left. “There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve -- even in pain -- the authentic relationship. Furthermore, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.”

We can hope that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, how if we are in Christ and our deceased beloved is in Christ we are not far from each other. Even our prayers for our deceased loved ones to enter the joy and peace of God’s kingdom can connect us. And there is the great hope that death does not have the last word. As Molly Skaags sings, “Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down.”

Notes from Mud Season's Arrival

The weather has broken. Mud season is here, so much so I have to rinse off Omalola after I’ve thrown the ball for her. But oh what joy when she runs hard after it and loops away for the joy of running and loops back. The birds are singing. A hawk drops down from a tree to fly over the local woodlot, sparrows dive bombing him. The neighbor is readying his semi for a load. His dogs greet him. He carries his son back to the house and shuts the dogs in. I pause and wait. Oma is alert. Tense and paused.

But the next day or the day after I walk past their house and their four year old son lets all three of their dogs out. (I know how easy this can be. Omalola and even Little Dog have pushed past me out the door on occasion.) The little boy tries calling the dogs back but they don’t hear his voice. I yell for his mom, too fiercely. And sweet talk to the dogs so they know this is just a game. Their Leonberger circles around us, with a beautiful romping gait. She’s just a pup, but has grown bigger than their Golden Retriever. She looks like a lion with a black mask and tan coat. I sing her name which is the same as Oma’s. Lola. HolylolaOmalola. The Golden and heeler circle and sniff. Oma is on tippy toes, tucking her butt, speaking dog language that probably says I don’t want to fight to the other dogs. Everyone stays happy. No one gets tangled in the leashes.

Our neighbor comes out, says “I can’t even go to the bathroom in peace.” How true. How true. The other day, Oma was so desperate, she peed in the bathroom while I was tending to my own needs. I walk the dogs up to her door where we chat about the neighborhood, how expensive everything has gotten, especially for a young family. We think it would be nice to have a neighborhood gathering this spring but it’s so much work. I’ve been so self-conscious about the clutter in my house that I don’t invite people. I feel like I have to clean, clean, declutter, to have anyone in. Several times I’ve been mildly insulted. Funny how exposed a person can feel when opening their house to others. But I’ve been in enough farm wives’ homes to know clutter comes with the lifestyle. It’s more important to keep the barn picked up than the house. There’s pressure to make joy by clearing out all the excess, so it would take less time to dust. There’s pressure to give it away to help the less fortunate. Early church fathers scold us by saying we are robbing the poor and St Paul says we should lay up treasure in heaven. But scolding merely freezes me. I turn to my phone.

When I turn to walk towards home the light settles on the fields behind our house. It’s no longer sunrise light. But it’s softened by a sun that hasn’t lifted to mid-morning. Even the fiercely gray days with blue sky leaning against the clouds turned over as if a spatula has rolled them are beautiful. Perhaps they are the most beautiful with grays and blues and curled shapes.

It’s funny how after this, the dogs turn to go up the other road, away from the neighbor dogs, who are tiny in the distance, their barking carrying all the way over to where we are walking. I swear the clouds are dancing, tossing up in the air and down, almost sun showers if the rain could drop to the ground. I walk past our neighbor’s trash thrown on a burn pile, he sets by the gravel so it doesn’t get away from him like it did once. (We’ve seen a burn pile get away from our other neighbor, the fire loud and scary as it crawled across the field. The big tractors pulled their wide spreading disks to make fire breaks and the fire department’s pick up drove along the flames, spraying water.)

I watch a UPS jet that has circled back around from Minneapolis. I seem to time it right for these jets to drop along my field of vision. I see the open doors to the barn and Morgen eating hay at the corner. I pick up one Miller Lite beer bottle on the top of the hill and wonder who might be hiding their drinking, so their bottles and beer cans litter the roadside. The wind blows across the beer bottle mouth like an aeolian harp, telling me something about joy.

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I don’t know why I got to thinking about Del Logan. But it’s almost as though she came through the cloud of witnesses to sit beside me. This doesn’t happen. I’ve rarely felt the presence of my own parents or brother, though I have started praying for them, along with aunts and uncles. A letter Henri Nouwen sent after my mother died, said he’d pray she enter into the joy and peace of the Kingdom, so that’s what I've started: praying my beloved dead enter into that joy, that peace. Stephen Freeman in his essay, “Prayers for the Dead”says, “When we pray for those who have died and the forgiveness of their sins, we are asking the same thing, for their communion with God, whether broken or impaired, to be made whole. Of course, we enter mysterious ground in all of this.”

I don't know why Del came by. Perhaps it’s because Braiding Sweetgrass is sitting on my to be read table. When I picked it up at Barnes, I saw references to the Onondaga tribe of New York that sparked my own memories. Maybe being a fan of Sherman Alexie, an accomplished literary writer and Native American who has been gracious enough to reply to my notes cleared my memories. Maybe hearing Martin Shaw talk about why he taps a drum and the stories he is permitted to tell from his ethnic heritage but not any American Indian stories because they aren’t his people. He has no right to the stories. Neither do I but I will tell you how Adelphina Logan touched my life.

But Del’s presence felt more like she was praying for me. She drew so close I opened Google and typed in her name along with “Onondaga matriarch.” I was shocked I found her so easily. Her picture was the first one in the Hall of the Elders at the Institute of American Indian Studies.

At the bottom of her biography, I discovered she had written a book, Memories of Sweetgrass, and found it on Amazon. I held it close when it arrived. In it, Del teaches the reader how to make Iroquois crafts like a cradle board or corn husk dolls or drums or a broom or cooking utensils. She has preserved traditional ways of making Iroquois material culture. (Seems like we’re losing the importance of real objects that connect us to our past with young people refusing their parents and grandparents’ stuff. Something doesn't sit right about this.)

Someone should write her stories, I thought as I listened to Del Logan talk with my parents about her culture as a direct descendent of Telegua, Cayuga, Chief of the Iroquois. Her steel gray hair was bound in one of those braids that circles the back of the head like a crown. Her voice rasped, perhaps like the file my farrier uses to round out my horse’s hooves. She didn’t tolerate fools. I heard her confide in my mother about people she knew who had gone wrong.

Someone should write her stories. And someone did. There are two feet worth of her papers and artifacts at State University of New York at Oswego. A scholar of Native American lore, Joan Van Kueren asked for sabbatical to study with Del from 1969 – 1970, the same years I knew her. The precise reads: “As part of this process, Joan Van Kueren was immersed in culture and historical studies through the eyes of the Iroquois, lived with, learned from and assisted Del in her educational efforts both on and off the reservation. "Del" and Joan became close friends and collaborated to create a series of 32 interview/oral-history tapes, educational and craft materials, and a collection of traditional Iroquois legends told to children during the long winters.” She wanted to write a recollection of her friendship with Del, but the website says this project is outstanding.

My mother found Del through mutual friends and asked her to teach a class on Iroquois culture for children in her Helderberg Workshop, a school my mother started to show children that learning could be an adventure. My mother was an ambitious woman defying local educators who thought there was no way children would come to school in the summer on their own. My mother’s classes went from 60 to 600 students within ten years. The Workshop continues to this day.

In Del's class I learned how to make corn husk dolls and learned that the Iroquois did not show people’s faces. In her book Memories of Sweet Grass, Del says, “Faces were never painted on these dolls since that was thought to give them life” (28). She also said, “It is felt that only the Creator may make a character, and character is revealed in the face” (25). When we visited the New York State Museum in Albany and saw the Iroquois exhibit, I oooo’ed and ah’ed over the skeletons laid in glass cases. I suppose that was the first time I’d seen human bones. Del said, “Oh no. It’s not right to put those people on display.” I was startled by her rebuke but heard how sacred our bodies are, how we shouldn't be staring at someone's bones.

Drawing by Del Logan, From Memories of Sweetgrass

At the museum the Iroquois masks frightened me. I didn’t know they are like icons until I read Del’s explanation, how they remind the viewer of the message the mask is portraying. She explains the “Crooked Face” mask reminds the viewer how humans were not satisfied with the Creator’s presence but became proud and said man created the world. He challenged The Creator to a contest: who could move a mountain the farthest? When man peeked at how the Creator was doing it, his face was caught by the moving mountain and smashed. Del says, “In our services the wearer of this mask provides an impersonal reminder that we must be humble and honorable in our dealings with others and ourselves. The stories symbolized by our masks could be compared to the parables of the Christian Bible” (61 – 62). About the Spoon Mouth mask she remarked, “They say it is a curing mask, that we believe this mask has potency to cure the ill. Our people are not willing to correct someone else’s mistakes or misinterpretations” (62-63). She explains how the mask is connected to Iroquois knowledge of how herbs and plants can heal. It is a reminder to take care of our bodies.

My father tried to convert Del to Christianity. We took her to Word of Life, a bible camp in the Adirondacks that played a huge role in my childhood spirituality. But I remember her kindly saying, “I believe the same God.”

It was 1970. The barn rafters stood like presences as I swept the dust off the wood floor. Tears and snot rolled out of me. I don’t remember what grief was driving me that day. A sobbing prayer to be healed? I was a healthy kid but knew there was something broken in me, the Lord needed to repair. A prayer to become more myself along the lines of the popular song, “I want to be me, I want to be free?” A prayer for my friends who didn’t know Jesus? A weeping over not being well liked in school? I don’t remember. All I know was that my tears dropped down to a quiet I could not explain, like how Jesus says he will wipe away our tears at the end of time.

(Some 50 years later I feel badly for my mother whose daughter took the preachers’ preaching seriously about how people were doomed to consuming fire if they didn’t know Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. I walked the mile long road crying my prayers after dark, after the evening news. I kept a list I read down with a prayer. I took seriously the doctrine of original sin, knew how I was not innocent from a toddler. My mother got stuck with a child who had the gift of tears, when neither of us knew how that was a spiritual gift.)

I heard Del's car drive up. I walked out with that quiet but I would imagine she saw my tear streaked face, how tears dampen a person’s face, pulling it downward, making it looked washed, like rain washes the world, while the clouds are still there. I walked out of the barn and greeted her. I don't know if she hugged me or not. My family was not one that hugged. She may have read that reserve. She handed me The Golden Book of Horses. It still had the sticker on it: $3.95.

Del inscribed it: “To Katie (She underlined To and Double underlined Katie) Wish you many happy days with your horses. Lovingly Del 1970.” Well that was a blessing that extended down through the years until today. Because I’ve had many happy days with my horses both when I was a young girl exploring remote valleys. The first time as a married woman I got a horse, I found a community at the barn that felt like family, and friends that lasted for thirty years before they flamed out. And the second time I found some women who were happy to walk our horses through the local forest preserves and tell the stories of our lives. And now I have a mare who stands at the barn door, ears forward, happy for my company.

It’s funny how important inscriptions can be. A friend of this blog commented the other week how she was listening to Annie Dillard and how she thought my style rivaled hers. I am reminded of the post card Dillard sent in response to my mailing my collection of poetry to her, where she said, “she liked and enjoyed” the poems. I was negotiating with (fighting over) the things my family left behind with my brother’s widow. My brother had not changed his will. Dillard’s card became a pivot point where I decided to follow my lawyer’s advice and beg off the argument. I turned away from something ugly and petty because of that little sentence by a writer I admire. (My brother’s widow and I settled. Probably the best thing I got was a broken child’s table and my mother’s doll. One day I’ll tell you about the doll.)

My mother wondered if a mound that swept up at the bottom of our sledding hill was was an Indian burial ground. The people who owned our farm before my parents, told stories about chasing off Indians who had camped on the hillside. The mound did not look like a geologic formation so Del and I walked down to take a closer look. I remember the heat and the sweat of walking. We looked at a natural spring that oozed out of the ground making a small wetland. We looked at the river that quietly moved around the flat’s borders in the shape of a Coca Cola bottle mouth.

Del picked up a piece of shale and wrapped bark strips around it, making an ax. In Memories of Sweet Grass, she writes, “our people would obtain bark during the time from the first or middle of May until the third week in June. During this period one can be fairly sure the tree will heal; at any other time the process is forced and the tree may be destroyed” (39). I am struck by the Iroquois care not to destroy the trees they used to make bowls and cooking pots.

We found no arrowheads or artifacts that might have been turned up by farmer’s plows. (A few turns of the river west and the farmer showed us bags of arrowheads. That was on another exploration with archeologist Paul Huey, when he was looking for foundations of houses that had been marked on old maps.) Del said this wasn’t a burial ground though my mother did not believe her. She thought, If it was, would Del have told us? Now I wonder if a Viking settlement is buried there.

Here's a poem I wrote in graduate school about this walk:

Miss Logan

Del spliced a stick and wove it around

a piece of shale to make a tomahawk

while looking for the burial ground

legend said humped our flat. She knew

through an absence of arrowheads that talk

was wrong. Her fathers didn’t bury there.

She made the gift to breathe peace, aware

Of who slept there. She laid it on the ground.

Maybe Del Logan has drawn near to nudge me to look at those old journals and see who I was at fourteen, an earnest kid who longed for people to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, argued with them and often berated herself. I cracked open my 1970 journal looking for what I might have written about her visit or that hard cry before she arrived. Funny, my first entry marked that day, April 26, 1970: “Del Logan dropped by. Whisper is much calmer now. It was clear today, temp 75 – 80.” That was the first week I was getting to know my new horse, Whisper and the year my mother resigned from running the Helderberg Workshop because she couldn’t control what people taught, that was contrary to her firm beliefs as a Christian. She also needed to make money to put my brother through Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

When I worked in Christian publishing, I took the prints from Tom Two Arrows, who also taught classes at the Helderberg Workshop and had them matted and framed. He was a friend of Del’s. And set up a tee pee behind our big barn. It seems to me that was the summer the Iroquois held a pow wow at my parents’ farm to thank my mother for holding classes on Iroquois culture. I sat on the hay stubble, swatting mosquitoes and listened. I don’t remember if Del gave us the Iroquois Creation myth or Tom Two Arrows or John Morrette or Bess Hale, other Iroquis teachers. All I remember was a turtle carried the world on its back. They gave my mother corn husk dolls in a shadow box and a turtle pin. The turtle pin did not make it into my inheritance, but the corn husk dolls did. They bless our guest room.

Let me close with a poem I wrote the awful year my brother died:

A POSSIBLE SALE

My father said he'd sell me to the Indians, camped

on the natural bowl scooped by the Normans Kill.

The Ryders, who owned the farm before chased

them off the land, doused fires, picked up trash.

My father stood in his Jockies, hanging a tie on the linen

room door, the sun flecking his chest hair.

I walked to my room, shut the door sucked in

by the cabinet in a house of doors, remembered

as a baby, I crouched against the kitchen door crying,

my father saying I'll give you something to cry about.

He gave me so many toys I wondered what doll it would be.

Hazel eyes and blond, I hoped she'd ride horses like me.

My parents invited the matriarch of the Onondaga tribe,

Del Logan, to stay at our house. I wanted to write her stories

before I could write; before she died taking them with her.

She caught me after crying in the barn, parking next to it

and gave me The Golden Book of Horses. She took me with her

when she walked our flat to see if it was a burial ground.

She shook her head. She gave my mother a hatchet

twisted from a branch and shale. My mother said she lied

to protect holy ground. Del said the bones arranged in a case

at the museum should be returned to earth not stared at

by curious children. She twisted cornstalks into dolls without faces,

saying a face was a person's spirit not to be copied.

I would have sat in her back seat to Syracuse

listening to stories about the great turtle,

the meaning of masks if my father sold me.

One more thing: This is the same father who loved me enough not to call me home when my mother died, even though my life outside of Chicago was bone dog hard and he grieved his wife so hard it wasn’t long before he followed her out of this life.

Maybe Del came by to nudge me to read these journals from a childhood that was too marvelous and too painful to remember because when my parents and brother died, I lost the stories. My journals don’t have the detail I would have liked, but they reveal an earnest young woman who tried her best to share good news. As I read, I laughed at my school girl crushes and how huffy I was at being teased. Most of those days I don’t remember, even people I don’t recall. But there are others, when I could settle and write the scene. Perhaps next week, I will tell you about another childhood friend or maybe my mother's doll.

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I look to The Tree, an oak, multiple times a day. She draws my eyes to herself when I walk out to do chores or circle the dogs behind the chicken house on their walks. She marks the ground like a surveyor’s pin. She sits at the corner of three fields. I wonder if she’s the tree farmers used to focus on in order to plow straight rows before GPS automated straight lines. Or maybe she was left for shade when horses plowed these fields.

The Tree’s presence comforts me because she is so present. It’s not particularly huge. (We have a poplar tree that stands taller.) Her branches looked like the north wind pushed them to the south. There is a broken branch underneath her. Last summer, my heart sank when I noticed a patch of leaves had turned brown before it was time for leaves to shed.

Oak wilt is a common disease killing oaks in Northern Illinois. The Illinois Pest Management website says, “The oak wilt fungus invades the water conducting vessels of the sapwood through fresh wounds or by root grafts formed between diseased and healthy trees. In a few days, balloon-like tyloses and gums begin to plug the water conducting tissue, blocking the flow of water and nutrients from the roots to the foliage. As the supply of water becomes restricted, leaves wilt and die.”

Our home is surrounded by beautiful, strong oaks. Two have already died. Bruce smoothed over dirt where the first deceased oak stood. The wind caught another one and toppled it away from the house. Several are sickening. Even the Linden tree, brought here from Berlin in a woman’s boot, has some dying branches. Down the road there are trees barren of leaves and bark, that are dried up skeletons, done for. They look prehistoric from a time when strange creatures roamed the earth. Maybe something about their spirits hovering in the woodlot whispers a memory of creatures also dead and gone. A fierce windstorm knocked over two trees from inside the wood as if a giant hiding in the wind leaned his shoulder against them and shoved.

This fall I took a writing class with Paul Kingsnorth, a modern-day prophet, who warns us that western civilization is dead, that we are in danger of being absorbed by the machine. Our phones are ubiquitous and addicting. Many houses are smart. A friend of a friend’s house shut down when she lost internet connection, including her thermostat.

Kingsnorth said that light particles, photons, can shoot through something, say a tree and be changed as it comes into our eyes, so we are changed by our paying attention to the tree.

In his inaugural Substack, Iain McGilchrist says, “As you know, I believe that attention, the kind of attention we choose to pay, and indeed whether we attend at all, wholly alters what we discover in the world we come to know - which is of course all that any of us can know. Attention is, then, a creative (or destructive) act and therefore necessarily a moral act. Pure attention has been likened by Louis Lavelle and Simon Weil to love itself.”

Right here, right now, I’m interested in the attention we pay to plants. Zoe Schlanger notes in The Light Eaters that we are blind to the plants around us. She notes “…plants are much further from us evolutionarily, having evolved in a context so unlike our own. They make food out of light and grow rooted to one spot, spending decades or centuries probing their environments for sustenance. Their way of life is so alien as to often preclude them in our imagination from even having a way of life. This state unseeing has become a named affliction, lamented among botanists: ‘plant blindness,’ the tendency to view plant life as an indistinguishable mass, a green smudge, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals, as distinct from one another as a lion is from a trout” (34).

Kingsnorth was urging us to look, really look at the world around us, and be changed. I think about how Maggie Ross urges us to behold the world, give it attention. In the precis of her essay, Behold Not the Cloud of Experience, she says, “The word behold is a liminal word; it signals the threshold of contemplation, where the self-conscious mind stops analyzing and becomes attentively receptive, open in an ungrasping and self-emptying way to irruption from the deep mind.”

As you know I’ve been practicing this still prayer when I walk. Because I have mild cognitive impairment my mind will empty at times. Other times I voice my complaint. My happiness, my feeling good, tends to fall to quiet. These walks, beholding the fields, The Tree, the sound of my footsteps have begun to do what Maggie Ross says in Writing the Icon of the Heart, “Instead through beholding we are transfigured in every sense: nothing is wasted; nothing is left behind; through our wounds we are healed: our perspective—the way we ‘figure things out’—is changed. In the resurrection, the wounds of Christ do not disappear, they are glorified” (xxii).

During his talk Kingsnorth noted how he traveled to Papua New Guinea to research what the Indonesian government was doing to the indigenous peoples. When they came to an open spot and saw the forest going on for miles, the people sang. Later he asked what the song was about. They said they were thanking the forest for letting them walk through.

During the same weeks I studied with Kingsnorth, I also took Christian Wonder Tales with Martin Shaw which has re-opened my love for storytelling, something Bruce and I loved early in our marriage. His voice sounds like our barn if it could talk. It is steeped in years of studying mythology, steeped in knowing how to tell a story. He is a recent convert to Orthodoxy. I listen to his stories while doing chores on Sunday mornings. He says in Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass that “It appears you can perk up the mood of a place with a good story. And the fidelity has currency in the wild places. To keep showing up, not taking anything, just being sweet and straightforward with a place, it has an effect. I asked the woods this: How do you want me to love you? From then on, I followed that lead” (60).

Lately I’ve been coming to terms with how very alive and sentient the world is. In the Light Eaters Zoe Schlanger writes about how plants are maybe more intelligent than we ever dreamed. This is a paradigm that is disturbing botanists. She writes, “Glutamate and glycine, two of the most common neurotransmitters in animal brains, are present in plants also, and seem to be crucial to how thy pass information through their stems and leaves. They have been found to form, store, and access memories, sense incredibly subtle changes in their environment, and send highly sophisticated chemicals aloft on the air in response. They send signals to different body parts to coordinate defenses” (48). These discoveries take me straight to wonder and thinking about how God is intimately involved in creation.

Apparently scientists are discovering what St Paul says in the first chapter of Romans. Speaking about how every person is responsible for knowing God because of what’s evident in creation, he says, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom 1; 19 – 20, ESV).

In Isaiah’s terrifying vision, he hears the cherubim saying, “Holy, Holy, Holy, the earth is full of the glory of God” (Isa 6:3). And in Habbakuk the prophet says that one day the world would be full of the knowledge of the glory of God (Hab 2:14, NIV). That doesn’t mean the glory isn’t there, glory that might just be moving plants to have a kind of intelligence, we just don’t perceive it or in Maggie Ross’s word: Behold it. One day we will be full of this knowledge. What if we look for God’s glory, right here, right now in creation?

The Psalmist even says, “For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord. (Psalm 33: 4 – 5, ESV). What if we turned our backs on the chaos. What if we started looking for that love in the natural world?

The early church fathers affirmed this in their writings. Elizabeth Theokritoff in Living In God’s Creation, cites St. Gregory Palamas, “God is in the universe and the universe in God, the one sustaining, the other being sustained by him. Thus all things participate in God’s sustaining energy, but not in his essence” (64.)

Theokritoff shows how St. Basil said it was useful to meditate on “the great wisdom in small things. A single plant…is sufficient to occupy all your intelligence in the contemplation of the skill that produced it” (49). She talks about his marvel at how different species of olives could produce different fruit. “Such intricacy in nature is, of course, by no means exclusive to believers, but Basil would go much further: the wisdom and skill seen in creation is inseparable from providential care” (50).

I’ve never failed to be gobsmacked by this embedded love, this glory when I’ve read in books like Some Assemby Required by Neil Shubin, An Immense World by Ed Yong and now The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger.

I was sitting here in my office, at this cluttered desk, when Kingsnorth said, “Go look at creation and imagine being that creature.” I walked out with the intention of imagining being Mrs. Horse, but I stopped at an oak that is dying.

Here’s what I wrote:

They came to bandage my wound, because I am dying, and I have become deaf, these amber plates lining the split, with the ugly human name fungi, fungus, mushrooms speak loudly because I have become deaf.

My wood has split open like the woman birthing a baby, screaming as she crumpled at my base, the baby pushing her way into the world before the midwife and the bed. The woman leaned her back against me when the men built the house and lead their Jersey cows and horses into the barn. The men saved me and a few of my brothers and sisters to make shade for the house.

The woman leaned her back against me when the men built the house, pegging timbers together, nailing lathe and stuffing horsehair between them. She came several times a day to rest and watch. Her prayers lifting into the air smelled like honeysuckle. Her belly grew large. I tried not to hit her with my acorns. She gathered them to feed their pigs.

She brought her baby, the woman’s face gray like dust when the wind picks up the fields and hurls them, before she climbed into the carriage, the horse draped in black, to bury the child.

Today a woman in jeans looks at me with sadness, a sigh. She wears a blue gray coat like clouds pushing blue sky off the table. She stands in the honest cold. She carries a notebook. But her fingers are too cold to write. She shines a light into my hollow where no light should shine.

My hollow swallows her light like a barren womb. Squirrels don’t live down here. The squirrels are quiet in the honest cold. I wish they’d come play, but I am too far for them to jump from the next tree over and back again.

The red fungal plates in my sides shout in my wood. She has just learned these plates tell me stories about the whole yard. About the elm by the barn, the linden by the house. I saw the Linden taken out of a boot and planted. The Linden said she came from the old country, the air there rancid with human fear.

My sisters aren’t well either. Brothers of the fungal plates sprout in the grass. White like priests. My roots ache to draw water to my branches, but they are slammed shut.

I know the woman more than she knows because other women have come to me, leaned against me. I have listened. She looks between me and the house. I know more than she knows.

She is measuring how I will fall when the hard wind roars, and the ache leaves, and I fall over, pulling my roots to their desire into the blessed air, into the sky and a chance to see the stars.

There’s a chainsaw in her eyes. I’ve heard the sound across the fields. My branches pray for wind to take us. There will be my last screaming cry, a cry she knows well from other trees she’s loved.

The decision she’s not made. The decision, her husband says there’s no need, the tree is too far to hurt the house.

But I hear the cracking, the one minute of flying through the air, the fall. My branches snapping, cracking as they lay down in the ground to sleep. My branches envied the roots, snug, chattering with my sister and the grass and the deer that trotted down the driveway and the cat who sits in front of the window waiting for the woman in jeans to set down his food bowl.

My roots envied the branches the sky, the fine skies that changed sometimes by the minute, sometimes by the day.

My roots envied them the stars and the bursts of green like fireworks widening to leaves, sometimes condensing to acorns. My branches drink air, blow out air and water.

I was here before the house was built. Men cut my sisters and brothers, slowly with hand saws, slow cuts with axes. My siblings yelped with pain. Over and over again.

But they were stood up in the barn, laid down across the air, covered by a roof. The weight of hay making them strong through the years.

Even though they are dead, they still live in the barn. Sometimes I hear them whisper.

But I feel the blue gray woman’s sadness in the honest cold. She has made love to a tree, an iron wood. She doesn’t know I know this but when a woman touches a tree, the tree knows. I smell her love for me in the honest cold.

She measures between us, the house and me.

My brother and sister have already fallen in her time. The wind pushing them away from the house. They were taken to be burned.

Already I am leaving my pulp. Already I am stepping aside. I told her. She captured my spirit slowly stepping aside, stepping towards heaven when she held up her light, threw a net over me, held me in that tiny screen, caught my ghost, that is stepping away, to another place.

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I walked outside and looked toward humps of trees, reminding me of islands off the coast of Maine. We’d found safe harbor at our second parents’ home on a cove protected from the wild Atlantic. Orion was cocking his leg toward the western horizon. All day the fields had roared with dust. Corn stalks flew into the air, smeared the roadsides, as the big machines chiseled their fields.

Call me.

And so, I called. Clouds, wetter than the dry air, come. Let there be bold lightning strokes and thunder like tympani way high. Let us smell glorious petrichor, rising as soil and moisture meet. Let us hear the drops nickering against the windows, trotting along the driveway and into the fields, gray horses.

Roll me in designer sheets, glorious gray sheets of rain. Let me lift my face to kisses falling from a couple thousand feet.

But I could feel the earth tilt. I could feel the weight of sunrise, the weight of another sun-washed day, with no rain, and dust billowing around the men working their fields. Gravel pinched my feet.

Call me.

But I’ve said enough. Enough I said. Bring a front. Bring wet Gulf air. Bring the rain.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective. *

If you’d like to hear me read this on the WNIJ website, click here.

“I will come to you like the rain, the spring rain watering the earth,” (Hos 6:3) echoes as I think about this perspective. The Lord like rain comes as a promise after the people have been struck down, torn and broken, revived and raised up.

But it’s not just the people who were torn and struck down, it was Jesus himself, Jesus identifying with his people, torn and struck down. “After two days he will revive us; and on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him” (Hos. 6:2, ESV). It’s Jesus who is revived and with him, we are revived. On the third day we will be raised up, just as Jesus was when he rolled the stone away and walked out of the grave. I like to wonder if this also means that these days are millenniums, that maybe we’ll be revived here in the second millennium, that God like rain will be poured down and justice will come to the world.

And I also think of a passage in Deuteronomy that I practically memorized just as I arrived at college, back when the King James Version was what I knew: “And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul. That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. And I will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full” (Deut 11: 13 - 15, KJV).

All God is asking is that the people: “Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them.” In this worldview people’s faithfulness to God and their relationship to the earth are intertwined. But of course, none of us take heed. I find myself distracted, my attention on the noise coming out of Washington. I turn on the TV to watch a Hollywood shoot em up, where bullets make the world right. I don’t want to, but I wake up, my heart hurting. If we do forget God, the heavens go quiet and the rains stop.

I’ve heard the essence of idol worship is trying to manipulate the gods into doing our bidding. A person could sacrifice their first born in order to make sure the rains come, and the land stays fertile. A person could sacrifice their child to ensure their dream comes true.

I know we’re not supposed to connect weather events to God’s judgement. If we do, we’re called blasphemers, arrogant, cruel beyond belief. “God doesn’t work that way,” shouts in our ears. But have we lost how God is closely tied with the natural world, or how the world is tied to our own behavior? When we can wreck the earth, when we mine it without regard to what’s left, when we act like we can change the weather, isn’t there a judgement embedded in the very earth we’ve abused or tried to control?

This past week I received the Rational Optimist newsletter with the title Honey Crank Up the Sun. The writers cheer lead assorted technological innovations to improve our life on this planet. When I opened it, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I’d always thought geoengineering was the stuff of conspiracy theory. That it was crazies who talk about seeding the clouds to make rain or dim the sun. But it’s not.

The newsletter reports, “Forget the old seeding methods of burning thousands of dollars in jet fuel to spray silver iodide into clouds.

“Rainmaker's drones are like high-tech rain whisperers, using radar tracking and artificial intelligence (AI) to find the perfect spots in clouds to trigger rainfall. It estimates it can do this for just $20 per hour.

“Rainmaker's ambition is massive: make rain as reliable as electricity. Sound far-fetched? Maybe. But what's truly unacceptable is telling our kids to deal with constant water restrictions and the possibility their homes might burn to the ground."

I imagine lasers like cattle prods poking the bellies of clouds to make rain on demand. What could go wrong?

Honey Crank Up the Sun also talks about giant mirrors sent into space and sending sunlight down to solar panels so they produce electricity all night long. This might improve life in the Arctic when winter days are so very short. What would that do to the nocturnal habits of wild life and farm animals?

The article also talks about talks spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool our atmosphere, mimicking the work of volcanoes. Do these geo-engineers not recall how these eruptions can cause worldwide famines?

Norway wants to pump cooler, deeper seawater into the warmer ocean to calm down hurricanes. Are we messing with climate and weather that is more finely tuned and alive than we imagine. What disasters will these geoengineers bring down on us? The Chiffon Margarine commercial might have some wisdom: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”

We’re in a drought in our region that set up last summer, with the air so dry, if rain or snow tries to fall it dries before it hits the ground. Yesterday we were under a winter advisory, with 70% chance of precipitation, and nothing dropped more than a trace, that barely showed our tracks.

It’s getting so I long for rain or snow. Day after day the sun happily shines, or the clouds make pretty shapes but stay silent. This summer, dust billowed up when farmers plowed and harvested, when we picked up our hay.

Though I briefly got my wish about the time that I recorded my perspective for WNIJ. It rained hard enough to leave puddles in the driveway and paddock. We closed Mrs. Horse in the barn because the rain was being driven by wind, which is difficult weather for a horse who has been blowing her coat like it was March. I cut my walk short, just enough to give the dogs a potty break. My hat, my coat, my legs were so wet I had to hang them over the tub. The dogs patted water on the floor that I toweled up as I rubbed them dry.

This winter I have missed watching snow because I miss feeling cozy. I miss the ground clothed like a bride in her wedding dress, but both rain and snow make work. Both rattle my routine. Rain cuts my walk short. Snow finds its way into the barn unless we plug the holes around the doors. I jam bales of shavings in the cracks and empty bags in the creases. Snow can sneak through tiny cracks. Now with the barn cats, we need to leave the door cracked so they can come and go, so more snow will find its way in the barn. After a good snow, Bruce climbs on the tractor in the cold to plow our driveway and yard. I should be grateful we’ve had little snow, but I miss it.

*I wrote the above perspective for last year’s Writing x Writers Online Generative Short Short Contest and earned Honorable Mention and this perspective. If I recall correctly the prompt was to name an astronomical body, an ocean, and a woman’s pop band. This is what I came up with. The winners received free tuition for a weekend workshop with Pam Houston, Carolyn Forche and another writer. Forche was my MFA thesis advisor so I thought it might be a kick to see her again. I did not attend because I didn’t care to pay the reduced tuition fee.

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When I turn back to walk towards home, I walk past our neighbor’s neat white house and red barns. A breeze combs through yard pines. The small cattle pen behind the barn, is empty. The steers spooked Morgen when we drove by, even if she couldn’t see them, their smell just as alarming to her. These were the steers our neighbors fattened for their own table as well as friends' tables. Once we bought a quarter beef from them, the meat almost too rich and sweet.

Our neighbor’s joints have stiffened so he shipped them. He and his son continue to plant and harvest cash crops and some hay. His wife’s horse left last fall, a year after she had passed. The farm once full of stories has grown quiet. Twice the ambulance came this week because the farmer got himself down on the floor but could not get up. We hold back from stopping over, not sure showing up would be welcomed when the red blues are flashing in the yard.

I see a jet flying over the far woods coming in for a landing at Rockford International Airport. Even from here, I can tell if it’s Prime, UPS or Atlas Air. Sometimes I look up its departure city, on Flight Radar 24 but this time I do not. Some writers friends disparage machines, but I find them beautiful, graceful floating through the sky. When I was a girl, I watched them on approach to Albany airport and longed climb on, go elsewhere. The other night we heard a jet fly smack dab over the house. We peered through the curtains to see him tipping his wings, so low I wondered if he was going to crash, but he was merely banking on approach to the airport, a good ten miles away. I’ve seen plane crashes in my dreams, waking up startled, knowing I’m being tapped for how unsettled my life is, how afraid I am, as I walk into my days.

This week, two jets crashed, stabbing the hearts of their families and friends, the whole country. The crash into the Potomac took me back to the week my father died because I had driven past the Florida Flight 90 crash site in 1982, seen the broken bridge, marveled at the man who dove back into the water to save passengers who were so cold they had no strength to get to shore. He died doing it. (I’ve been watching Special Forces World’s Toughest Test and noted that only one team rescued all the hostages, during that particular test. The others simply followed orders to bring out one. What does that say about our independent thinking and bravery?)

When we boarded the jet from Chicago bound for Charlottesville, Virginia, Francis Schaeffer said the devil was going test us. He was uneasy about seeing Jerry Falwell, but an ally was an ally. In the 70’s and 80’s Schaeffer was famous for encouraging evangelicals to become involved in their culture. As Christians, they should salt occupations ranging from lawyers to poets. He was well known for two documentaries How Shall We Then Live? and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? As his publicist I was helping him promote his book A Christian Manifesto which called for Christians to engage in the culture war, in order to stop the United States’ slide into corruption.

Two days later, I returned to my room, and pink phone messages, saying “Call Home, your brother wants to talk with you. Call home your uncle wants to talk with you. Call home.” As I fumbled with the phone keypad, I knew then that my father had gone home to be with the Lord, my father who just last night said how I was having the time of my life, how he was proud of me, when I bitched about how the dress we’d bought together, with its sheer blouse, had called up a comment, that I was one of those artist types. It had called up too many stares, not at my eyes. "What about the women who were suffering unplanned pregnancies? What the heck are evangelicals doing getting involved in politics," I ranted. Fog had socked in the airport. Fran and Edith came next door and prayed with me. As their publicist I did not want to burden them, but there I was needing their kind words and prayers.

The next day Jerry Falwell’s assistant arranged for my flight to Albany. I rode to Washington in his “Lear” jet. (I forget the make). Jack Kemp’s wife walked me to my connecting flight, with barely minutes to spare at Washington National. She took me to the counter. She took me to the gate. The jet lifted above the clouds to the cold blue sky. I leaned my tears into the window.

While we shoveled snow together, my brother called me "a genius for God." (Maybe I shouldn’t share this?) But it was his only blessing. He would be gone in six years. My dad’s funeral reminded me of the silvers we see in weddings—the wrapping paper on gifts, the cake—because freezing rain poured down. We left my dad in the church. My brother and I did not want to come back for a graveside service.

Dad loved me enough to not call me back after his wife, my mother, died. I could not stop and weep with my brother, so I returned to the tour at the National Religious Broadcasters convention. Ken Meyers, the producer for NPR’s Sunday morning offered to put me up for the weekend gap in our schedule. If I’d flown to Chicago to my apartment for those days, I don’t know how I would have stood it. Meyers and his wife bought me carnations and listened while I raged about some evangelical guy who muscled his way into seeing the Schaeffers, arranging for them to see Ed Meese and James Watt, but closing me out. I raged about the whole business of Christians kissing up to the politically powerful. I raged about how this divided me from myself. My tears locked up. Several years later, Jo Sobran from The National Review, offered an insight: “Sometimes it’s easier to be angry than to feel your grief.” Well, that about says it. My grief spoke in anger for over a decade. It spoke in my novel The River Caught Sunlight, a fictionalized version of these events. I still have the Valentine I bought for my dad at the airport.

I see a pigeon, well, a dove fly over, white on gray. He flies over me twice, a kind of omen. I think of the dove Noah sent out to see if the ground had dried out. She came back with a sprig from an olive tree, the olive sprig a sign for peace. How could an olive tree survive a flood that settled on the earth for a year? I take comfort in the mystery.

Then there’s the cry of the Psalmist, full of pain, “My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me. And I say, ‘Oh that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and be at rest; yes, I would wander far away; I would lodge in the wilderness” (Ps 55: 4 – 6, NIV).

Then there’s the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus and driving him to the wilderness. Did Jesus feel this anguish, as he walked up to the river Jordan? Was his heart in anguish within him as he saw the muddy water, knowing he’d go down, down where all of mankind was drowned except for Noah and his family? Did he think about the men, horses and chariots who were drowned? Or the Syrian commander, Israel’s enemy, who was dunked and healed, who turned to him? Or the brooding of his Spirit as he roamed over them before there was anything? Did he feel this anguish, this fear and trembling as he stepped into the water, and his cousin John took him in his arms and laid him down? Did his goodness stream out of him cleansing those waters?

Was his prayer to flee to the desert on the wings of a dove, answered when the Holy Spirit like a dove descended, and his Father’s voice spoke, "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased"? Even then did he despise the shame that would come at his death for the joy set before him. Did that joy keep him from worshipping the devil when he was offered the kingdoms of the world merely for a bent knee?

Did he see us, in our beauty, the church without spot and wrinkle, his beloved bride as he did in the Song of Songs, “Behold, you are beautiful, my love; behold you are beautiful; your eyes are like doves” (Song of Sol 1: 15, ESV). And “O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the crannies of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice” (Song of Sol 2: 15, ESV).

But all I saw was the dove flying quietly overhead and the Prime jet flying in for the landing and the road ahead to walk, both dogs straining to get back home to their breakfast.

February 1, 2025

Today as I walk up the road, a mourning dove flies ahead of me, lands, flies ahead. Her wings click. I wonder if this was another sign. There aren’t many birds around this winter because we feed them intermittently. Bruce doesn’t like feeding the sparrows. But even they don’t gather as a flock in the barn, lining the extension cords we’ve set to keep the cats’ water bowl warm.

Today I stand between Mrs. Horse and the barn. She nibbles hay we put there to keep her out of the wind. Yesterday rain drilled down so hard with wind, we closed her in the barn until the front moved along to the south of us, and the sky was that blue you see after a rain. I am getting ready to lean down and pick her back hoof when she alerts. I look over her back at a Northern Harrier swooping low over the south pasture. He drops down, then lifts up, drops down, then lifts up. I wonder if there’s a dead cat out there, but realize he’s jonesing for moles or shrews or mice. Just the other day, Omalola scared up a mole on our walk, a tiny, frightened creature that ran into the corn stubble, but not so fast I couldn’t catch a picture. The harrier crosses the old fence line, lifts higher, banking north where I lose sight.

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I walk outside. The cold wraps around my legs. It’s thorns stick in my skin like brambles I must walk through. Handwarmers in my gloves comfort my palms, but my fingers sting. The dogs need to do their business, so I cross to the other side of the road, so I don’t have to pull my gloves off, stick my hand in a bag and pick it out of our yard. Neither Bruce nor I care to step in dog poop while walking.

The road sparkles and glints with salt that has been ground into the pavement. My face burns. The dogs take good healthy dumps. Proud of herself, Omalola grabs the leash and jumps. She runs up to Dolly to play. Dolly’s eyes are bright to the challenge. But she is old, a little frail. I yell, “Stop!” Omalola barks in protest. She grabs the leash again. “Stopppp.” Louder. She barks more. “Stoppppppp."

Finally she takes my tone seriously. She wants my attention, all of it. The best thing I can do is cross my arm across my belly and ask her to heel like in dog class. She will look up at me and walk along. Since I have included Dolly, I have missed my companionable walks with just Omalola. Sometimes she will look at me and soften on the leash. But in this weather, it’s too painful to pull off my glove, pull out a treat and reinforce her kind walk. She settles down and we walk a little farther. On long walks, Dolly can be a pain, circling around in front. She’s clear. She wants to head home now. Except this walk where I turn toward home early.

My thoughts are not full of “thank you” or whatever I read in the daily office. (The daily office is a group of scriptures that include Psalms, an Old Testament reading, a New Testament reading and the gospel. People around the world read or hear these scriptures as part of the Divine Hours, short prayer services that follow the time of day.) I have an app on my phone so it would be easy to open and read just those passages. But no. I don’t look at that first thing. Because I am as hungry for words as I am for food and my Diet Coke, I open Facebook, get hooked. I sit down and read whatever controversy shows up first because I know the post won’t be there if I close the app and open it later. The thread is stronger than my dogs’ desire to get outside. Rarely there is a poem. I am addicted.

I step down the bank to walk behind the clump of woods that Bruce has brush hogged to open paths through it. We pass a dead pine tree. Bruce hopes to cut it down sometime this winter, but the weather has not lent itself to this project. I could worry but he has done this before with pines in our front yard.

My gosh it’s cold. The dogs pull like sled dogs. Still prayer is not happening today. It’s all I can do to focus on following the dogs’ lead. I stop when the dogs want to sniff and walk when they walk.

Cal Newport in Digital Minimalism makes the point that we’re losing solitude because of the noise coming from our phones. He calls Solitude Deprivation, “A state in which you spend close to zero time with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds” (103). A little bell went off in my thoughts, or maybe it was a Canadian National train honking at the rail crossing. Instead of walking out thinking my own thoughts, I’m thinking about what so-and-so said about the culture or politics or their lost dog. These walks are not the time or place for some stranger taking up residence in my head. What about the dream I had last night, that might be an important signpost, that fades too quickly. What about the morning Psalm? Or simply, “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit?” or “God make speed to save me, Lord make haste to help me.”

The more I scroll through Facebook, the less I’m able to think. I am exhausted by the end of the day from the ripsaw of emotions responding to people’s losses, people’s joys, people’s outrage, people’s opinions. I harden my heart to stay sane.

Newport also praises the idea of walking to get away from the noise. He suggests a person leave their phone at home, though I use it to catch light that won’t be there again if I walk back out. But these morning walks have improved my health and how clearly I think. I was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment because my ability to think was fizzling. But after walking regularly, patiently, and yes these walks are boring, the test showed I’ve improved and my IQ gained twenty points.

Writing itself can be a form of solitude, an idea I’d never thought of until Newport noted that, “This behavior necessarily shifts you to a form of productive solitude—wrenching you away from the appealing digital baubles and addictive content waiting to distract you, and providing you with a structured way to make sense of whatever important things are happening in your life at the moment” (126). I have been an advocate for journaling but never thought of it this way. I never thought that solitude was about being able to think my own thoughts.

I walk past a little cedar tree. Omalola alerts. I see a bird fly between the branches. We walk across the field and past pine logs that Bruce laid down, rotting. My legs have stiffened. My toes are beginning to sting in my rubber boots. We walk past our manure pile, which stretches some length because it hasn’t been spread for three years, a chore we leave to our hay guy, who has a thriving business that leaves him little extra time. We step across the uneven ground where we buried our geothermal pipes, which help heat our house and turn past Morgen’s paddock back to the dogs’ breakfast. Morgen looks up from the hay Bruce has tossed. She nearly says, “What about me? When are you going to play with me?”

Martin Shaw in The Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spy Glass says, “Now a good metaphor is something you can hang your heart on” (10). The internet is as magical as the spy glass in the old stories because it can show us the whole world. And it can rob us of our souls. Shaw talks about how the prayer mat, the thing under our feet can save us. "When you forget what you kneel upon, you are far more easily influenced by energies that may not wish you well.

Well enough of that.

It's time to kick the robbers out of the house.

I want my imagination back.

And now we're kneeling, I ask you to do something else.

Look up

Towards the smoke hole.

The smoke hole reveals to us the timeless, the prayer mat the time bound" (6), he says. The smoke hole is the vent in the top of the tent letting the smoke out and the divine energies in.

Well I'll be. Shaw’s prayer mat and smoke hole might just free me from that spyglass I tap whenever I have an empty moment. That spyglass wipes my thoughts clean. I want them back. For years I've been nudged to put the phone down, and to stop watching Hollywood’s version of story on TV but have felt glued to both. These screens have drained my brain. By the time I’m done looking at Facebook, I literally can’t think anymore.

I’ve also stopped listening to my favorite podcasts except when I’m cleaning house. No longer do I listen in the barn, except for Martin Shaw’s Sunday recording from The House Of Beasts and Vines, because I want silence and the wind and sparrows and cat’s voices, not intelligence piped into my ears.

Once inside, I unhook the dogs and begin preparing their meals. Dolly is particular and Omalola counter surfs while I spoon out the canned dog food topped with a bit of cat food and kibble for Dolly on a plate. It has to be warmed in the microwave. I put chopped green beans from the garden, Fiber for Dogs and salmon oil in Oma’s dish. The cats each get a little dab of cat food. I push Oma off the counter while I work. Then Oma runs to her crate her eyes glittering. Dolly walks to her food, sniffs it and waits for me to sit down and eat. The cats run to their places for theirs. I sit down to eat because Dolly won’t eat unless I do.

I set my phone on the table. I pick it up, put my plate down. I press down on the Facebook app. It wiggles and shows a minus sign. I click through to the choice, "Delete the app" or "Remove it from my home screen." I removed it from my home screen.

Newport talks about how social media expert Jennifer Grygiel uses social media. They keep Facebook for close friends and relatives and no longer accepts friend requests from anyone. “Jennifer logs onto Facebook maybe once every four days or so to see what’s going on with their close friends and that’s it” (233). I can check Facebook on the computer, so I can stay in touch, but it’s no longer next to me to open when I have a few minutes to fill. Bottom line is I want my imagination back.

So now, my thoughts walk up to me like Mrs Horse when she walks in her stall, to stay for the night. Something about that big horse with the apple rump walking to my bidding. I don’t have to compulsively check my phone. This week I worked on two manuscripts for St Basils, a year long writers workshop that has slowly helped me wake up as a writer.

Even my sense of smell greets me. I step behind Mrs. Horse and smell the sweet fragrance of her farts. Back inside I smell Bruce’s toasted bread he's smeared with peanut butter and jelly and the home made chocolate c0vered peanuts I pull out of the zip lock bag.

Works Cited

Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism. New York: Penguin, 2019

Shaw, Martin. Smokehole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass. White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 2021.

Katie’s Ground is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I plug my earbuds in and grab the vacuum that I’ve left upstairs because cleaning and dusting there is like cleaning a different house. We live mostly downstairs and come upstairs to sleep. I’m also back using my office to give myself solitude. It’s work to haul the vacuum upstairs, so I leave it to make sure the second floor gets tended to.

Downstairs I pick up the big pieces—shavings, leaves, dirt. I look at the seven bookshelves that all need to have the books pulled out and dusted. Sometimes they are so dusty I can blow a billow of dust off the top of the book. Maybe this winter I’ll work on them shelf by shelf, while listening to the back log of podcasts because I’ve stopped listening in favor of my own thoughts. My books have to be scattered throughout instead of hidden in one library because of how this old farmhouse is configured. I feel scattered because they are not in one place. For years the house did not feel like it was ours.

Last summer/fall dust from planting, dust from harvest seeped into everything. The one time we had rain, it poured dust into our hay field so when our hay guy picked it up the baler looked like a burn pile roaring. I open the bales and dust billows. It’s useless to feed to Morgen. Already I can hear her breathe when she eats her hay, especially in the summer. Already we feed her a respiratory supplement from Horse Tech and hydroxyzine. We haul the hay to the burn pile. I’d asked our hay guy to bale the top, south pasture, but had forgotten that’s where there’s a waterway. He feeds cattle so the dust isn’t as important. I regret I didn’t ask him to bale the headlands.

I stepped on the vacuum and started in my office. Chewing gum wrappings get sucked in. Hole punch circles get sucked in. Dog hair gets sucked in. I push the head back and forth back and forth until I am satisfied the floor is swept clean. I pull the head off and jam a brush into it and start dusting my desk which is full of papers and books. I bought this desk the summer after my brother died. It’s solid oak with enough room to lay out books and papers. There are three file drawers as well. We had to take doors apart to fit it into our last house. And we had to hire movers to bring it upstairs in this one. A pristine desk does not lend itself to my creative work.

Paul Kingsnorth and Jonathan Pageau’s voices chat in my ear. Kingsnorth troubles me because he thinks Western Civilization is dead and that it’s not Christians’ job to fix it by superimposing Christian culture. Pageau countered by saying, “And I'm thinking, it seems though that there's like the wheat and the chaff in civilization, kind of like what Christ describes, and that, for example, our civilization for all its evil, and I totally agree with that, is probably the civilization in which the fewest people die of hunger that has ever existed in the history of humanity, right? It's, we have another type of despair, which is more kind of spiritual despair. But that's a real thing. It's a real thing that we have this virtue of taking care of the poor that's part of the system.”

I am relieved someone is pushing back against Kingsnorth's argument. I know too many people who step from Western civilization is dead to burn it down. Isn’t the kingdom of God like a mustard seed, that grows into a wide spreading bush, where the crows come to nest? Tom Holland’s book Dominion speaks to how Christianity has salted civilization. Conquering kings no longer brag about how many people they’ve killed. The concept of secular vs religious changed how Indian culture viewed governance. Our culture values taking care of the poor and the weak, not just as private individuals but through our government. World poverty is down. People dying of violent deaths is down.

I reach up to the top shelf of a small bookcase sitting on the desk and dusted the two draft horses and jumping horse and pictures that are sitting there. I run my cloth across the photo of a rainbow and wish I’d had it framed with sun resistant glass because it was the first gift from Bruce with the words, “The rainbow here is the promise that the flood won’t happen again in your life.” He was right, even though we have weathered some hard, flooding rains.

I pull the vacuum away from my desk toward the cabinet where I hold my office supplies, a piece Bruce and I found at Used But Nice Office Equipment. I store paper, paper and more paper. When I first published The River Caught SunlightI thought I’d need stationery and business cards and thank you notes. I used the tree and a rainbow as a logo and don’t have the heart to toss them. I ran the nozzle over the top. My eyes drifted to the print of a woman walking through the valley of the shadow of death, that I purchased from Teresa West Carter…that shows her nose buried in a rose, the rose Christ as she walks from death into life.

Kingsnorth insisted that he’s not a holy man, that like all of us he is caught in the tension between living as Christ has called us to live and living in our contemporary civilization. “And so that's the paradox we're all living in as Christians,” he says. “If I look at the things we're told to do, in terms of wealth and power and resisting evil or not resisting evil, it's not only the opposite of what our civilization tells us to do, it's pretty much the opposite of what I do a lot of the time.”

I too feel caught in this tension. I have confessed that I like my quiet life, a warm house, and full belly. I like looking at all these plastic horses. I have talked this over with my spiritual companion Dawn. She has insisted that I’ve been given this life and that it’s important to live it. St. Paul has said he’s learned to be content when he is wealthy and when he is poor. Godliness with contentment is great gain. All I can do is keep turning towards the Lord with these questions. And my gosh I admired the humility and honesty that Kingsnorth has shown by admitting he is not living as Jesus challenges. (I recently took a class with him. His generosity and respect called some wonderful writing out of myself and the other writers.)

He reminds us how our warm houses in the winter and cool in the summer are costly. “What's downstream of all the good stuff we get?" he asks."What's literally downstream sometimes in the rivers and in the destruction of the forests and the loss of the culture and all the things that we can see happening, right? So you never get anything for free.

“You do get your good stuff, but you get a lot of bad stuff as well. That's just life. So there's not a lot to be gained just from saying civilization is bad and we should not live in it because we do.”

On top of the shelf where I keep my handwritten journals—fifty years’ worth—I started taking tiny plastic horses down and dusting them. I ran a cloth over the silver purple unicorn and the heavy plastic Fjord mama and foal. Stopping and dusting each one takes time from a chore I’d like to finish quickly. There is sense in minimalism as far as the time it takes to clean but I don’t live up to it.

No we don’t get any stuff for free. We cleaned sulfur out of the atmosphere, so now our fields and diet are lacking in that important nutrient. Weeds are becoming resistant to herbicides, but we can’t feed the number of people we are feeding on organic farming methods, as Sri Lanka found out. We want to stop global warming, so we plant solar panels on the richest farmland in the world and stick massive wind turbines in the ocean that are threatening the Right Whale with extinction and making the fisheries along the coast become barren. Both energy sources are comprised of toxic chemicals. We use birth control, hormones, medications that are peed into the ground and find their way to the water table. And then there’s plastic. Behind many environmental activists is the wish to cut way back on human population and that frightens me.

Also we have corrected a wounded environment, somewhat. When I was a girl the Hudson River was filthy dirty and has been cleaned up. Geese, whitetail deer, and foxes were rare. Now they are so common as to be pests. The bald eagle almost went extinct. I remember ooh and aahing when we saw a tree full of them beside the train and the Colorado river. Now I can look up in our poplar tree and see two eagles staring down at me. Never in a thousand years would I have thought this possible.

I put the tiny horses back and hooked on the floor attachment and pushed against the floor. Matted dog hair and wood shavings disappeared. I pushed toward the bedrooms.

Kingsnorth stated, “Babylon as the kind of manifestation of the great corrupt global city. And interestingly, in the Book of Revelation, when Babylon is at its most corrupted, you hear this voice from the heaven, don't you? You hear Christ and he says, Come out of her, my people.

“It's a really interesting thought. What are you supposed to do with Babylon? You're supposed to leave, because Babylon is corrupt and the heavenly Jerusalem is coming instead.”

But what about the words that came to the prophet Jeremiah, where God told the people to settle, plant vineyards, live in Babylon. He sends a letter to the exiles and says, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Isreal to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters and multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jer. 29: 4 – 7, ESV). So why don’t we pray for the welfare of our Babylon? Why don't we seek the welfare of our city, be involved as citizens and "love mercy, do justly and walk humbly with our God."

Well, I pushed my vacuum against the green rug, where dog hair likes to stick. I pushed and I pulled. It felt good to see the fabric cleaned and neatened.

When this podcast ended, about the time I got to the bathroom, I turned on Chris Green’s Speak- easy Theology. His podcasts and essays offer amazing balanced insight, especially when he is talking with David Harvey about Bonhoeffer or the readings for that Sunday. He says something a little different than Kingsnorth.

“The Book of Revelation never names the enemy, right? Well, I mean, it does. The enemy is the Satan. The enemy is evil, right? But it never names the enemy in the form that it is presently taking, because the church will always have these enemies. So to be overly distracted by the present enemy, as if they somehow are equal with the forces of evil, is actually in and of itself a lack of faith at some level…”

This time the vacuum was picking up kitty litter, and puffs of dog hair and lint. I looked out the window at the sun reflecting off the plowed fields across the road. It almost looks like rapids in a river catching sunlight. I sigh when I look at the whole line up of Breyer horses that haven’t been dusted in years. Dust covered their backs like gray saddle blankets. I am a less than effective housekeeper.

Talking about Bonhoeffer, Green said, “I mean, we've seen this with Diocletian, right? We've seen this, like we've seen this again and again, and we will see it again and again. He doesn't allow Hitler to be outsized, right? And this is what I think evil wants. It wants us to believe it's bigger and badder than it actually is, right? That it's a bully in that way.

“By naming Hitler as a personification of evil, which Bonhoeffer resists, I wonder if we do two things. One, we over empower that particular form of evil, but we also push that evil from ourselves. So we can live in our own forms of evil, but as long as we're not Hitler, right? As long as we're not that over there. And we then inadvertently, but perhaps intentionally separate ourselves from sin.”

Oh my goodness what an insight. I’ve seen this with all the Hitler accusations of Trump. And yet see very little self-reflection by those accusing him. And the same can be said of the other side accusing the Democrats of grave injustices without viewing their own. When do we take these accusations as cues and look at ourselves, at how we have these same behaviors that need confession and turning back to God?

I looked at the multiple bottles of laundry detergent, fabric softener, Woolite, Shout stain remover, and thought how it might be nice to get rid of the empties and put the rest in the closet so this room could also be calmed down with how tidy it is. Only three rooms in this house might be considered calm as far as clutter goes. One is the guest room, one is our stove room, though there are piles of shoes and boots on the floor, and one is the downstairs bathroom.

I turned to the sink and shut the vacuum off so I could tidy it up. Once in a neuro psyche test I admitted the sink wasn’t neat and clean, which was added to the diagnosis that my executive function was flabby. (Not making that admission again.) I grabbed a paper towel and sprayed the spattered mirror with glass cleaner. It squeaked.

Green moved on to talk about the magi seeking Jesus. “But regardless, I think whether they were led by the star to the city or they ended up in the city because they presume that's what the star's leading meant, I do think it's a reminder to us that the leading of God often does bring us to places we wouldn't expect it to bring us.

“And if we have a strong sense of the spirit-led life and if we've been raised and nurtured in churches that emphasize the living God's work in our day-to-day lives, we can easily start to think, we can easily presume that if it's really God's leading, we never end up in Herod's court, right? We never end up in the quote unquote wrong place. I think we expect God to lead us directly to the stable.

“If we just knew what we were doing, we would always get around Herod and just end up where we're wanting to go. But God doesn't work in straight lines. Like, he doesn't draw straight lines.

“And we have to get, now we're back to the point about sinners, we have to get comfortable with God as the God of the roundabout way. And God is the God who leads us. And how much of that has to do with us thinking we know more than we do, and how much of that is God knowing we need to end up in Herod's Court in order to hear the texts.”

“We need to hear in order to know what we're seeing when we get to the stable. I think there's a real wisdom in this story for us about how God leads us and where he leads us. And how many of us, I mean, if I were to preach the text or to let it preach to me, I think I would say some like, how many times have I been in Herod's Court?”

I’ll be happy to answer that one. When I was in graduate school writing erotic poems as a virgin, being told my lines looked like I was on LSD and awful word plays on Catherine the Great and horses. When I was publicizing books for Crossway and found myself promoting Frank and Francis Schaeffer who were urging evangelicals to get involved in politics and culture, to salt those things with their Christian faith. And I was more than alarmed. When I taught composition to inner city kids at a local university, being quite subversive, using texts from the Dalai Lama to challenge my students to think about what makes a happy life.

And now I’m in a writer’s workshop where the chemistry is off, and the scars from the above-mentioned poetry school and other workshops move me over to the wall. I’m no longer afraid to say, “That isn’t right,” which does not score points. Laura was right when she said, “You don’t need this. You should be teaching, not being a student.” Coming from Laura, who has always said it straight, this was good insight. But I signed up, paid my money. I’m there, despite how aggravating it is, and waiting to see what good might come, which includes remembering how anger is a fine energy for writing. And I just had a dream where a prisoner, dressed in orange got out of a transport bus and then back in. The bus disappeared down the road. I turned to see a solid, handsome man who said he represented poet Malcolm Guite. Perhaps this is telling me the chains have trundled down the road and the poetry has come.

I finished the sink and pulled the vacuum into the bedrooms, where I did what I’ve been doing dusting and picking up the big pieces—shavings, leaves, dog hair. I know that we’re not supposed to lay up treasures on earth where moths and dust corrode, but my things are a great comfort. They soften my home, make it feel like a nest and don't even birds have nests, some quite elaborate? I feel for the people in LA and North Carolina who lost their homes and neighborhoods, the ground that makes us who we are, gives us the work of love your neighbor. I think about Isaiah's words, “But. Now thus says the Lord, he who created you O Jacob, he who formed you O Isreal: “Fear not for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters,, I will be with you; and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you” (Isa 43: 1 – 2, ESV).

I have cleaned this house enough, picked up the big pieces, swiped the easy dust. I used to judge farm women with crowded countertops and kitchen tables, but the work of outside chores can take priority. The weight of aging pushes me toward a future I can’t see but sense that someday I will have to say goodbye to all of these beloved things, to this house, this bedroom. I admired Marilyn who moved from a big house, to a condo, to assisted living, without being pressured by her children. And then she fell and went home to Jesus. I figure those goodbyes will be in steps, and somewhat sad.

The Jonathan Pageau and Paul Kingsnorth quotes are from The Symbolic World: 375 - Paul Kingsnorth - Western Civilization Is Already Dead, Jan 12, 2025

The Chris Green quotes are from Speakeasy Theology: Being in Communion with Sinners, Jan 6, 2025

Katie’s Ground is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I walked out just as the sun broke the horizon. I don’t seek this liminal moment. I don't hope for extra enchantment. I take my time strapping up the dogs and throwing my coat on. I eat a snack, drink a glass of tea, and check my phone. No I’m not seeking the sun or the minutes where you can feel the earth move as the sun shoots into the sky. By the time I’m turning to go home, I’m amazed at how far it has trotted from the horizon.

The sun is so bright I can’t look. It’s like an eye just open from sleep, my gosh so bright I can’t even look at the fields. I think about how God is much brighter, how in the Great City, there will be no night because God is the light. Even Moses walking down the mountain was so bright, the children of Isreal begged him to put on a veil because they could not bear his face. It’s striking the disciples were not afraid when Jesus and his clothes shone like the sun at the Transfiguration. It was the Father’s voice that knocked them to their faces. “This is my beloved, listen to him.”

When God said, “This is my beloved son” to Jesus, adding “in whom I am well pleased “ at the River Jordan, my pastor said that blessing includes us. Imagine, the Father is well pleased with us. We are beloved sons and daughters. Jesus was dunked in baptismal waters just as we are dunked, in solidarity for our need to be cleansed of sin. The ancients believed everything was made of water, so by letting John baptize him, Jesus, the Son, blessed all of creation. The same Spirit hovered over those waters at the beginning and came flapping at Jesus’ head, driving him to the desert, perhaps driving him to know how he is the Father’s beloved. Maybe we need that desert to get it ourselves.

When he was baptized, Jesus joined the Egyptians who were drowned. He joined the plunging and choking horses trapped by their harnesses. He joined Jonah who sank in the belly of a whale, who sang, “For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas and the flood surrounded me; all our waves and your billows passed over me” (Jonah 2: 3). He joined the Syrian commander who dipped into the Jordan seven times, rising with skin pink as an infant's.

When we are dipped in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we die to our old, infected self and rise to new life, hidden in Christ. Jesus, the beloved son, also joined us because we all swim in the waters of our mothers’ wombs. And we all will die. Because of him, death will not have the last word.

So I look down the valley, a clear sightline to the tin can farm, whose grain bins shine like burnished silver because the corn has been harvested. I see how everything is glazed in pink light. I think of the ring with a pink stone that I lost as a young girl, how I searched and searched under the willow tree but never found it.

The fields are coated with frost that gleams in the sunlight. I walk the dogs on the pavement spackled with salt, so I don’t have to turn toward the sun, so I don’t have to look down at the gravel or look up squinting. It’s early to walk past the neighbors’ house, whose dogs run the fence barking, and my own dogs plant their feet, afraid to walk past.

I turn back to walk toward the sun. I look at the sky and the road ahead and my dogs who stop to sniff at deep holes, dirt flung to the side. It seems more appear all the time, making driving Morgen on the road dangerous because I never know when she might step in a leg breaker if we have to pull to the side.

In the distance I see a bright light moving high and toward me, a jet catching the sunlight. I look up when I hear his sound and see him way high on the other side of the haze. I watch another one and don’t bother looking them up on Flight Radar 24. The streaks they leave in the sky are almost beautiful.

My old dog circles around in front of me. She wants to go home, but I hold her leash across my backside, so she doesn’t cross in front and pitch me to the ground. I bring her along because she would pace the house if I took her home after her potty break.

The cold wraps around my legs, but it feels cleansing to walk even though my legs will hurt like a migraine later on.

I turn toward home and the fields no longer glitter. The clouds have veiled the sun so that I can look. I think of the veil Moses put on so the people weren’t afraid. The veil in the temple that kept the people safe from the Holy of Holies, the veil women wear for modesty, covering their hair for the angels, the veil we see in a glass darkly, the mysteries that are being revealed that the prophets longed to look into.

Stephen Freeman writes not only was Jesus’ life revealing mysteries that prophets longed to hear, we too are revealing those mysteries in our lives. We are mini apocalypses. In The Hidden Gospel, Freeman says, “I think, that the Kingdom of God is ‘hidden’ within our own lives. We frequently make the mistake of seeing ourselves only in an outward sense – ignoring the mystery of our lives. When St. John says that ‘it does not yet appear what we shall be’ (1 Jn. 3:2) he is directing our attention beyond or beneath the obvious. The pattern of sacraments (outward things whose inner reality is the Kingdom of God) is also the pattern of our own lives. St. Paul declares, 'Christ within us, the hope of glory.' (Col. 1:27) The Kingdom of God, the mystery hidden from all the ages, is presently being made known to the ‘principalities and powers.’ You and I are being observed. May God give us grace that all might see our good works and glorify our Father in heaven – and may the principalities and powers see and tremble.”

To think I am a mystery as deep and mysterious as Jesus, the stories I’m living and writing, perhaps pointing to the Kingdom in ways I don’t begin to fathom. I’m not sure I want the audience, the powers looking over my shoulder, nor do I feel easy with the idea of the communion saints, of my parents and brother and aunts and uncles peering over my shoulder because I have things to say they might not like. But I guess I have no choice. The idea of saints is new to me. And I hesitate to share this, but I’ve even asked for help with my writing, from CS Lewis, whose books sparked my call to write. And the help came, the block loosened, these posts became easier to write. It’s taken some work not to be afraid of my readers. Bad boy Facebook gave me that gift. And of course I am grateful that you read my words

The air is so still and cold it brings jagged joy. I hear another jet and watch its fan tail and wings drawing a line across the sky. He is veiled by the cloud cover, headed west. I hear a locomotive trumpeting as he nears the road crossings. It’s a CSX, not the usual Canadian National. I hear the heaviness of tanker cars a mile long, what some TV show called a “bomb train” as he draws nearer. For us country people watching the jets, the trains is our entertainment. The air so still and cold I feel jagged joy. I pull my thoughts back to “Thank you” and walk on home, both dogs out ahead of me. When I turn in the driveway I see how the sun is shining right through the east side window, through the north side window, his light taking perfect aim.

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When I turned the corner of our house, two eyes flashed in my light. Our feral cat, Tiger ran ahead and sat. Why didn’t he bolt for the barn? He ran ahead and sat. My dogs strained at their leashes. Tiger yanked at my heart strings. He snuggled the earth like when Gray was alive. Would the dogs be his friend? Tears welled up. Someone had set out rat poison, heedless of the broken hearts, heedless of poison running up the food chain.

There is no mending Tiger’s losing his brother. The sparrow God knows falls. Some of us will walk into next year with an ache as wide as the person who left. Some of us will crack open the door wondering if this will be the year when loss will smash the good times. Some will dance through with the joy of a new baby arriving, a new job, a new person to love who loves back.

The Storyteller, Dr. Martin Shaw, advises: “Show discernment about what you choose to remember and what you choose to forget. What stories don’t you need to carry anymore? Don’t walk into 2025 with them. Decide what you’re going to curate, bring with you, and we shall see where it leads us.”

Maybe we need to forget the story of those backs forever turned leaving us with stunned hurt. Maybe we need to hold close the people we love, and those who are no longer here.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

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What are you going to choose to take with you into this next year? What will you forget?

I want to take companionable walks with my dogs into the new year. Saturday morning, four days into the New Year, I walked out at 7:30 and the sun was just breaking the horizon. I thought January was supposed to bring more light, but it’s a long night when the sun sets around 4:30 and rises at 7:30. We’ve got normal January temps in the twenties with enough breeze to burn my legs under my jeans and long underwear. I was headed back home when a guy in an SUV stopped to ask if we’d seen his dog.

“Samson?” I asked He nodded. I’d seen the posts on Facebook, and had started to hit up God with prayers for his safe return. John said that his dog was at home in the morning but disappeared by the time he’d gotten back from work. He walked the perimeter of their farm and saw no evidence of a fight. As a livestock guardian dog, he’s supposed guard the farm.

I am rattled and irritated when we misplace our keys, and our hearts go out, uneasy about barn cats who wander, so I can hardly imagine losing a beloved dog. We’ve set up our Ring doorbell in the barn to keep track of our barn cats, relieved to see them saunter in, when they don't show themselves otherwise.

Yes, I want to bring these walks, the shadows sliding off the gravel as I hear my feet step one right after the other and the dogs pull me to the grass to sniff. Even the trash I find and pick up, I want to bring along, though I wonder at the time I picked up four Bud Light bottles in one walk.

I want to bring our neighbors along. We received a couple sets of cookies from neighbors this Christmas. For New Years we were invited to our neighbors across the field to swap stories and cold cuts with long time neighbors, whose history goes back seventy years at least. These are the neighbors who cut the terrible loneliness I felt at Christmas when they invited us to join them right after we moved in. There’s something about the neighborly bond that feels like family. Mrs. R has a big, long table and I wondered about asking her to host another gathering in a month until I realized that I bought a table from her daughter-in-law, that has leaves, that could add more than four people. But I need more chairs So maybe, one day, maybe, I’ll ask a few neighbors in for dessert and games…Maybe.

More and more this love your neighbor, your-local-in-person-neighbor bit, is something to practice because we live in unsettled times. Covid pushed us online and out of the practice of talking over the fence, or in our case, stopping the truck to chat. While online friendships can be real, we need our in-person neighbors who can lift a hand if need be. Last winter, when we had a decent amount of snow T drove in with his truck and plow and pushed it all to the side, saving Bruce from pushing the snow to the side with the bucket on chilly Kubota. T has called him to help with a car fixing project. Our neighbors have helped us with putting up hay, which is way too hard to do alone. Helping each other aside, we need our neighbors just to talk to, to swap stories, to not feel so isolated.

I’m going to bring Mrs Horse and Omalola and Dolly and all the cats, while holding Bruce’s hand into the New Year. I want to find ways to spend time with Mrs. Horse and play with Omalola.

I’m going to bring writing these essays here on Substack with me. I looked over last year’s archive and noted essays that would not have seen the light of day were it not for those of you who paid for a subscription. When Russell Nowelty said that writers burn out if they aren’t paid, a bell went off. A decade ago, I went quiet with my writing except for blogging because I worked on my novel for thirty years only to pay for the privilege of publishing it. Money shouldn’t matter but it does. I am thinking of putting some things behind a paywall. I have some long form projects that might work for those of you who are dedicated readers. We’ll see. At any rate I can’t thank you enough for your financial support.

What are you going to choose to take with you into this next year? What will you forget?

To be honest, forgetting is coming disturbingly easy for me. I’m not sure if it’s unsettled sleep or mild cognitive impairment or normal forgetting for my age. I can write one of these posts and forget what I posted the next day.

At the New Year’s neighborhood gathering I couldn’t think of the names of a couple sitting across from me, though she had the clearest, holiest face that I’ve seen in a long time. Her husband is a good ole boy, with great stories even though he insisted I bring another equine home to Morgen. "They're herd animals. How would you feel if Bruce died?" he said. Finally I said, "Stop it." (Our vet and I talked about this, concluding we'd ask for trouble with another horse. I’ve said all along, one is enough, two are too many.) Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t remember his name nearly the whole time I sat there.

Though I’ve always been able to forget things. I remember a terrible fight with my aunt and uncle just before I left for grad school. They thought I was going down the wrong road because I went to the local Episcopal church. (The woman who’d been my Pioneer Girls pal went there, and turned out to be a literature major, and often invited me to join her family for lunch at a local diner after.) Once I got to school the memory pretty much dropped like a stone in deep water. Forgetting such things can be a gift. Maybe forgetting leaves a person empty enough for God to settle like fire in the shrub.

I don’t want to bring the hurt from the friends who turned their backs into the New Year. The loneliness is fading like country in a rearview mirror. Sometimes anger sparks out of nowhere and I figure they need prayer for blessing—health, happiness, prosperity.

Like me, a dear friend has asked, "What is it about me that makes people ghost me and/or be cruel?" Maybe the Lord can show us, but can we really change to suit these people? We live in a culture that has been trained in self-care. If a person becomes difficult or just plain doesn’t make the cut in our busy lives, we drop them. It’s easy to say we are too busy. Covid literally split us apart. Our political views divide us. We don’t have time to chat. Even at our church, People rapidly vacate the pews. Why bother with a difficult person, when we have our dreams to accomplish? Maybe some of us are like salt, good for seasoning. Didn't Jesus say we're supposed to be salty. Didn't he say something like blessed are the rejected?

This week, when Bruce got a respiratory virus, my anger surged and my compassion fled. Even though it was just a respiratory thing, I was afraid and angry at how helpless I’d be without him, how alone. I startled myself when I told off a few people.

I’ve done therapy to learn how to stand up for myself, to accept the assorted lions that walk around in my soul and so maybe this flaring anger is a good thing. There’s a lioness carrying her cub, who stands for the motherly, caring side. There’s the cowardly lion who can be afraid, longing for courage. And there’s the regal lion, who carries himself with enough authority, most will not challenge him. Maybe they each need a voice.

But I also landed on the hardness in my heart, with quite a thud. And hold onto the promise that God will replace it with a heart of flesh.

I don't want to take so many screens with me, starting with television. These weeks have been dead as far as network TV, so it's been easy to turn off the TV. Evenings would be a good time to charge the phone. I have so many books I want to read. Why let Hollywood determine what I should look at? Other screens like Substack and Facebook are harder to drop. There's good writing and community there. But it would be best not to nosh on other people's thoughts first thing, before I walk out, towards still prayer.

The sky was spooky—a belly of a cloud, with lighter clouds behind it, like the moon wanted to break through, but couldn’t. The sky looked like one I dreamed, where I was raptured into clouds, the ground a thousand feet below. The dogs took me over to the corner of the fence by the road. My headlamp, a gift from Bruce, so I could pick up poop on our night walks, flashed on two bright eyes and Tiger crying. We accompanied him to the barn. To the east, the clouds looked like a fierce fire had raged over Chicago, that had been snuffed out. The smoke hung there. I wondered if the spirits were moving. By the time I pulled my phone off the kitchen table, the sky had fallen back to plain gray.

The other day we saw a big black cat sitting at the head of the road. Bruce asked where Smudgie was. I stepped outside and called for him. The cat darted across the road and into the waterway. Smudgie ran up to the closed door. For a cat he has a good recall. For quite some time we’ve wondered why the cats’ dish and water bowl were licked clean. We thought we had a resident raccoon, but when we put our Ring doorbell out there, we saw the black cat saunter in for a meal. One night, just outside the camera range, we heard a cat fight, presumably Tiger and Black Cat. The next morning, we saw tufts of fur next to the door. Since then it seems the black cat has settled here and there is an uneasy peace with the other two. Bruce even found him sleeping on the carriage seat.

What are you going to choose to remember? Choose to forget?

Finally, I don’t care for the New Year holiday. Bruce and I went to sleep early with no neighborhood fireworks to mark midnight. But my reading pointed me to a few things. In The Light of Human Beings, Sister Vassa Larin reminded me that God set the times and seasons on the fourth day when he placed the sun moon and stars in the heavens. “But I’ll reflect just on the faith-inspiring coincidence that we are beginning this year on a Wednesday, called 'the fourth day' in Hebrew and Greek, which signifies the Fourth Day of creation, when God created and put into motion the planets and the stars. He thus formed and put into motion what is known as 'time.' And 'God saw that it was good.'”

One of the Psalms for Saturday, January 4 hit me over the head with this:

“to him who made the great lights, for his steadfast love endures forever;8 the sun to rule over the day, for his steadfast love endures forever;9 the moon and stars to rule over the night, for his steadfast love endures forever;” (Psalm 136:7 – 9, ESV)

One of the nights, I walked the dogs, I looked up at the moon and Venus, bright against the black sky like a jeweler’s velvet. The sun, moon and stars mark days and times and remind us that even with time marching on, the Father’s steadfast love endures forever, no matter what the new year brings to our lives. Every new year, it's hard to say Happy New Year because I am uneasy about what the next year might bring. As Bruce and I get older, we move closer to when loss will become our rule of life. The farm will be too much and we’ll need a smaller place in town with an HOA and higher fees and taxes. We are mortal and one of us will fail before the other. But his steadfast love endures forever. And Jesus himself didn’t see equality with God a thing to be grasped but he took on the form of a servant…so that steadfast love walks with us in the person of Jesus as we set these things aside.

One thing I’m taking with me into the New Year, is how this steadfast love can pull us out of loneliness. He can send people to us. He takes us by the hand, says, Come, come. He leads us out of the desert, back to town, back to friendships and community.

What are you going to choose to remember? Choose to forget as you walk into the New Year?

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Yesterday, December 28 was the Feast of the Holy Innocents where Bethlehem paid a terrible price for the birth of Christ. Here I imagine what it might have been like to be a mother who gave birth to her son the same time that Mary gave birth to Jesus. This is a repost from last year.

I gave birth to my son the night the shepherds banged on the door. “The Messiah has come,” they shouted even before they reached our home. They were shouting up and down the street. When Amos opened the door, we were greeted by the smell of his unwashed body. Amos cousin, shouted in his face. “The angels told us he was going to be a blessing for all the people! The Son of David. Our Savior. I saw a beautiful boy, who laughed when I took him in my arms.”

“Where can I see him?” Amos asked.

“Down the street. In the stable under the house,” pointed his cousin. His eyes glittering.

My Amos’ eyes shone with hope. I’ve never seen such happiness. “Do you know what this means?” he shouted. “No more soldiers raping our wives and daughters. No more crucifixions. The desert will bloom. Wolves won’t bother our sheep.”

I cried out in pain, as my baby started the journey to this world. Instead of looking for the newborn Messiah, Amos ran for the midwife.

What an auspicious thing to have my son born the same day as the Messiah. Maybe Bennie will join his army and conquer Rome. Maybe he will bring joy to the whole world after all the Caesars and proconsuls and centurions are sent to Hades. The Mount of Olives will split in two and a river will water trees for the healing of the nations.The desert will become vineyards. I smiled down at Bennie. He smiled back like he knew he’d join the Lord’s army.

My son and Jesus were circumcised on the same day in the synagogue. Mary glowed with pride. I wished they didn’t have to hurt my son. I held my breath when the words, “Blessed are you, Our Lord our God, King of the Universe” were spoken when Bennie was being cut. He was a brave little boy. He merely whimpered.

Then Amos recited, ““Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, Who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to enter him into the Covenant of Abraham our father.” And it was done.

Then Jesus was circumcised. He wailed so loudly, it was all I could do not to stop my ears. His cry tore at my heart.

We brought our sons together for the time of the purification. The sun shone brightly. Amos and Joseph talked about the census, and the local gossip. Mary and I didn’t say much, holding our babies as the donkeys carried us. When we came upon Jerusalem, the beauty of the city took my breath away. The temple was so large, so spare. The stones themselves made me wonder about the men who built it, how they could fit uncut stones together so perfectly. The place smelled like blood and roast meat.

We offered our two pigeons for sacrifice. Amos and I heard the holy man say, “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to. Your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence for all the peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2: 29 – 30, ESV).

My mouth felt dry as I stared at the man's hands, his skin so paper thin I wondered how it didn't tear as he blessed the baby. Amos tugged on my sleeve. “It’s not our business, leave them be.” But I stepped toward my friend and the old man. I heard him say to Mary, “Behold this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword shall pierce your own soul also), so the thoughts of many will be revealed.” (Luke 2:34, ESV). My throat burned with acid. I was frightened by the darkness that passed over Mary’s face. Then it passed like sunlight shoves a hailstorm out of the way and everything sparkles like fine jewels. A crown of stars. It looked like she was standing on the moon. I swallowed hard.

Amos tugged my sleeve, said, "Come on. We need to find our lodgings.” I pondered what I heard. I ignored Amos' reprimand.

When we returned to Bethlehem, when I took Bennie to visit Jesus, I saw he had a big nose and dark eyes that pierced my soul. But his smile was sublime. If I say so myself, my Bennie was more beautiful. I remembered how the prophet Isaiah said that the Messiah would have “no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2, ESV)/.

“Could you bless my boy?” I asked.

Mary put her hands on my son’s head and closed her eyes, whispering, “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.”

I bowed, thanking her. We talked for a few minutes about how our breasts were sore from feeding, how our mothers told us to put on the very same oils, and the waking in the middle of the night to feed them, when all we wanted was sleep. We talked about our husbands always busy--Joseph working with wood and stone, my Amos pressing olives. She thanked me warmly when I gave her our best olive oil.

A few months later, Bethlehem was roused by a caravan of richly dressed men coming to visit Jesus. People rushed to accommodate them. Since Jesus was born we'd been watching a mysterious star move across the sky and were startled when it settled over the house where Mary and Joseph stayed. The star glowed with many colors—red, green, copper, blue. Were we seeing angels for the first time? Amos’ cousin said, the angels he saw, were more strange, with four faces and whirring wings and too many eyes, constantly moving. The star was settled. The whole town gathered to look.

The scholars unloaded fine goods from their camels to give to Jesus. It was more wealth than both our husbands earned in a lifetime. They pointed at the sky. “We saw the star saying the king of the Jews was born. We asked King Herod where we could find him. Your priests in Jerusalem repeated the prophecy. 'And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means last among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel'” (Matt 2:6, ESV).

The star faded. We watched as the scholars rode their camels north instead of back to Jerusalem. Their camels were more magnificent than anything we’d ever seen, my arms felt heavy as I held Bennie, because those camels carried what felt like an oasis, slowly away from our dry village.

I opened the door to armor. Shields. Flashing swords. War horses stirring dust in our streets. The soldiers pinned my arms. I felt the warmth in their hands, the bruises in my arms. I screamed and sobbed, but that didn’t stop them from killing my boy. The blood. My Bennie’s blood. Like our sacrificed lambs. I screamed, “Why? Why? Why?”

“By decree of Herod, all of Bethlehem’s boys two and under, must die.” I saw the sickness in the soldier’s eyes. I saw a dragon’s jaws wide open.

When Amos ran back from the olive grove, “What’s wrong. What’s wrong?” he slammed through the door. But when he saw, he wailed. Bethlehem wailed, our grief as terrible and violent as wolves howling. He rocked Bennie. I sobbed from the depths of my womb.

God forgive me but I prayed He would raise our babies like Elijah raised the widow’s son, but He did not.

We buried our boys, one laid next to the other. Bennie, my beloved Bennie, wrapped in a shroud, placed in a cave. None of us could comfort the other. We were all crushed. We chanted Jeremiah's lament, "He has made my flesh and my skin waste away; he has broken my bones; he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation. He has made me dwell in darkness like like the dead of long ago" (Lam 3: 4 - 6).

His prophecy seared our lips like glowing coal. “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children, she refused to be comforted because they are no more” (Matt. 2:18, ESV). We choked on what followed, "Thus says, the Lord, 'Keep your eyes from weeping, and your eyes from tears, for there is a reward for your work" (Jer 31:16, ESV).

Everyday I hug the rock blocking Bennie from air and light, my love. Everyday I sob.

Why? Why? Didn’t Mary warn us? I thought we were friends. We played with our boys together. We drew water together and smacked our clothes on the rock. We traded husband stories, because we married good men, who bumbled. We rejoiced when the scholars came and made Mary and Joseph rich. They said what the shepherds said, “We come looking for the king of the Jews.” We marveled because shepherds and scholars said, David’s son, the king who will welcome the new age, had been born. Imagine being the mother of my Lord. Mary was the kindest, most thoughtful friend I’d ever had, until she disappeared.

The prophet said a sword would pierce her heart. What about my heart? What about Rachel’s heart? Or Salmone’s? Or Lois’s? What about our hearts? The old man at the temple might have been talking about us. Mary still has her son. Her love and her joy when she held him. We loved being in her presence. She has Joseph.

We don’t know where Mary and Joseph went. Amos’ cousin saw them leave deep at night, a mule pulling their cart east.

Amos died when an olive tree toppled the day he pruned his grove. Amos. Bennie. There’s no end to my tears. “For evils have encompassed me beyond number; my iniquities have overtaken me, and I cannot see; they are more than the hairs on my head; my heart fails me. Be pleased O Lord to deliver me! O Lord make haste to help me!” (Ps. 40:12, ESV).

I survived my gaping pain by hating Mary and Joseph and her boy. She was the menstrual cloths I slapped against the rock. I stomped on her at the grape press. I don’t know how I kept walking through the years. I prayed Lord make haste to help me. His haste was pretty slow.

I don’t know if her son was the promised Messiah. Amos had been so sure. Before he died, he told me not to give up hope our salvation had come. He whispered, “Keep looking for when he grows up. Be glad he escaped.” He patted my hand and passed.

But I could not make myself hope though I heard stories of a man who said he’d come to heal the blind, make the lame walk. He cast out demons. He fed a crowd of people. He said, “Blessed are those who mourn.” Could this be Mary’s son?

My anger had flamed out. Each step I took was a dull thud. Matthias, Amos’ brother, offered to provide for me. I don’t know how he could live with so much anger, but like I said, it flamed out. I learned to love him.

But years later. I saw that sword pierce her heart. Her son flayed, all blood and raw, stretched on a cross. Her face the utter sorrow I felt when Bennie was slain, when Amos died. I wanted to feel: You got yours. Serves you right. But I had no taste for that. Not anymore.

The sun disappeared. The earth quaked. Suddenly a young man appeared by my side, the spitting image of Amos. His hand on my shoulder warmed it like a hot spring, a warmth than melted the stone that had become my heart. "Keep your eyes from weeping, and your eyes from tears, for there is a reward for your work. Go to Mary. She needs you now."

In case you think this last paragraph is a sentimental happy ending, there's a mysterious sentence that says, "The tombs were also opened. And many bodies of saints who had fallen asleep were raised and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the city and appeared to many" (Matt. 27:52).

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“Finally, finally the tears blew out of me into sobbing in the barn, the cats waiting impatiently for me to leave, Morgen quietly munching her hay. The light softening the wood beams. A hay bale holding my butt. I hoped Bruce wouldn’t find me.

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“Bruce and I had just been talking how Christmas was a hard time. It’s like a sink hole in our path, that we need to walk down and then up and back to normal time without the pressure to celebrate like we see on TV, or like our friends who gather their families together—with their happy group pictures on Facebook. I was tired of writing Merry Christmas. Just outside of memory, childhood Christmases haunt me.” This is how I opened my last year’s Christmas blog: Tears at Christmas.

But this year, there are no tears, only stillness, and companionship. I’ve enjoyed the festivity on television both commercials and holiday movies.

This Christmas Bruce and I are enjoying the quiet of the holiday. The terrible bouts of loneliness have receded, partly because I’ve learned when the refrain, “nobody loves me” starts to circle, I’ve learned to catch the stink, and block it with: “Lord Jesus, son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.” Loneliness has been a refining fire, burning away my need to apologize for who I am, my unease with my present life, and feeling like I have to be a “healing presence” which can warp and break friendships. It's easier being on the outer edges of groups because of my lack of emotional intelligence.

Being a healing presence is one of my values, but it needs to fade into presence, stay in the back of my mind, when I visit with people. I am not a spiritual companion or therapist or pastor. (My own spiritual companion has done good, prayerful work in helping me find this place because she listens and asks good questions.) Though I see this blog like pastoring a small country church. Every time I write, I hope these blogs speak some kind of grace. Listening can be a good gift, especially these days when people are full of their own stories. But I’ve learned sometimes people don’t want to talk about whatever it is that hurt them. There are people I’m happy to listen to that I don’t trust with my stories, though I am puzzled by how few people return the question, “how are you?”

Loneliness has burned away my need to be useful, which has very deep roots in my early faith, where we continually asked God to use us. Use, what a dehumanizing word, that doesn’t belong in our walk with God. I don’t have to be useful to please God. I can just be.

I learned that I can talk to God about stuff like I would talk with a friend and He has heard me, and shifted the relationship. He has done this with my husband Bruce. I have learned some things are best not shared with others.

Henri Nouwen has talked about letting our loneliness turn into solitude where people can come. I have seen it as a desert exercise. In his book Reaching Out, and HenriNouwen.org he has said: “To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage but also a strong faith. As hard as it is to believe that the dry desolate desert can yield endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness is hiding unknown beauty. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is a movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”

While some pastors say that we should be in community, otherwise we’re in hell, I think that sometimes we are called to the desert, this work of loneliness, this work of grieving and crying out like they do in the Psalms. Seeing my life as a sort of desert has been a healing perspective. Here’s what the Psalmist says, speaking the pain and finding God at the other end.

Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also.10 For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing;my strength fails because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away.

11 Because of all my adversaries I have become a reproach, especially to my neighbors,and an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me.12 I have been forgotten like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel.13 For I hear the whispering of many— terror on every side!—as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.

14 But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, “You are my God.”

Ps 31: 9 – 14

In the Great Rite of Renewal, Martin Shaw has written, “Someone said to me Jesus’s greatest temptation may have been to not come back from the desert. It chimed with a thought that was in my head years and years ago. The wild’s not the problem, it’s the return.”

The richness of communion with God can be hard to give up. I wonder if the Holy Spirit flapping his dove-like wings in Jesus ears, was as much to drive him to forty days of sweet communion with God and the wild animals, as it was to end with those fierce temptations. I wonder if those forty days drove down the words at Jesus’ baptism, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased” so he knew it as deep as his bones, so he knew what Saint Paul wrote to the Ephesians, “that you being rooted and grounded in love may have the strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph 3: 17b – 19, ESV).

Maybe we need the desert loneliness, those tears at Christmas, that very season that echoes with the greeting, “May Christ be born in you.” draws us to know how we are deeply loved. Maybe loneliness leads us to know this for ourselves. Maybe we learn like Jesus to know how to respond to the bad thoughts, the assaults by the powers of darkness, when they bat against our ears. Maybe the Shepherd’s rod and staff turns us towards the light, because we know we too are beloved sons and daughters.

Maybe last year’s tears at Christmas have brought this year’s quiet and thankfulness. This Advent we took cookies to a neighbor and friends. We had lunch with our neighbor at Jason’s Deli after our Thanksgiving plans fell through. We spent a few hours with our niece and nephew. I hope to talk to my cousin. This year we set up both Christmas trees in the living room so we can enjoy the memories hung on both. Things like the blue pitcher from the first Christmas after my brother died when we went to Arkansas and the glass ornament from when my dog won his class at a dog show. There’s the sheep face from when I took our first Aussie sheep herding and the Native American vase we received from Amtrak on our trip to the southwest. And I could go on.

On Christmas day we will take Jesus into our bodies when we take the bread and wine at church. We will greet people there and return home to our own feast. We’ll walk the dogs, feed the horse, open presents. (We know what we’re getting.) And hope there are holiday movies we haven’t seen. As always there are books to read.

Since my eyelid surgery a week ago, I’ve stayed quiet in the house, out of touch with my morning routines: the mile long walks with the dogs and tending to Morgen. At night I slept in a chair for the better part of a week, entertaining odd dreams where a pastor I know and a bearded man showed up on separate nights. I don’t remember their words, but they stayed through several wakings, and I wondered if their appearance was more vision than dream. I’d forgotten that my chair sits where they laid out Mrs. Jesse, the woman who owned the farm, before the people who sold it to us.

I’ve been impressed by how tight with routine Bruce is. He gets up, walks the dogs, and gets right out to the barn. He says it’s because he’s not distracted by a gadget like I am. He’s right. I’ve stepped back a tiny bit so that picking up the phone isn’t automatic. I’ve become annoyed with the noise. But I wake up starving for words. So there is work ahead of me to not let my phone pull me under with its own thoughts, which can follow me out the road, and become a kind of false scripture, to meditate on. This week mornings yawned, wide and lazy with the disorientation of not quite knowing what to do with Bruce doing chores. There is work ahead of me to list how to fill those hours the day before.

Because of the surgery my eyes are opened wider, so people can see them, and I don’t feel the heaviness of my lids drooping like they do for sleep. Finally, I can wear mascara. My eyes have been opened to the good people in my life, the gift of being useful through my writing, and the walks where I can settle and to offer thanks. As always thank you so much for reading my words, and showing up for them regularly. May Christ be born in you this holiday season.

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I was walking the road, my thoughts scattered by what I read on Facebook first thing. I don’t remember what it was that day, but I am obsessed about the drones spooking New Jersey and points nearby. My imagination has gone Hollywood. Is it a foreign adversary sitting off shore sending them in? Are they spraying a biological or chemical agent on New Jersey? Are they our drones doing miliary exercises or looking for a broken arrow? Or are we passively allowing them to spy, like with the Chinese spy balloon?

Governors and mayors have asked the federal government what’s up? And we’re told, “Nothing to see here. We don’t know what they are. But they are not adversaries. Some are manned airplanes and legally flying there.” I have been so alarmed, I have told friends to put together your important papers, some clothes, pet food, pet crates. Gas up your tank.

While I was walking practicing still prayer, my mind fluttering all over the place, the dogs diving to sniff the roadside, and the sky gray, the words, “The night is far gone, the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Rom13: 12) welled up. That's all.

But then, this week I’ve heard from several places how to do this. Vassa Larin is an Orthodox nun who is one of the teachers in the Open Table class on the Letters of Paul. In her essay, “EMBRACING HOPE AMIDST A CULTURE OF “DOOM-SCROLLING” she reminds us that doomscrolling is “an addiction or a ‘deadly hunger,’ it results in us having a crippling picture in our minds of a world (and our own lives) devoid of hope. This vision is not “ortho-dox,” a word that means, among other things, “upright expectation.” Even though I don’t belong to an Orthodox church, I have learned a great deal from their way of walking with the Lord. I too can hold onto those words, “upright expectation.”

This is opposite of keeping our eyes focused on our screens and dread. It means catching those bad thoughts that would distract us, recognizing them, maybe telling the Lord about them, but then letting them go. My first thoughts this morning, took me to a couple women who are no longer my friends. I don’t know why I woke with those thoughts, but there’s no point in hashing over the hurt, circling the loneliness drain and falling in, so I took it as a cue that these ladies needed prayer. I offered my standard, Lord bless them, exchanging that hurt for blessing, so maybe something good could fly into the air toward them and free me from obsessing over breaks I can’t repair. This blessing prayer softens my heart.

In another place, Vassa Larin reminds us that the creed says, “We look to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” In other words, upright expectation. This is what we look to: the resurrection, the killing of death by death. We look to the life of the world to come. A pastor once said, if the powers can’t keep you dead, what power do they have over you? They have no control. We are utterly free. We are already citizens of that world to come. And should behave that way, living in the generosity of the Beatitudes.

These are simple words to pull our minds and hearts back from dread. We look to the resurrection of the dead. Death is dead. Death has no sting. Chris Green in one of his Speakeasy Theology Podcasts stated simply that Jesus is our future. Not only is he at hand, but he has gone ahead of us into death. Not only has he pulled Adam and Eve, and Old Testament saints out of the grave, he has come into Hades, the place of the dead. He will meet us there. Finally, we will become the people he had in mind when he created us. And we will likely be salted with cleansing fire, that burns off the impurities and sins and lacks. But even here, now, we can walk toward becoming those people, we can be salted with fire.

It also seems like rejoicing is a way to put on that armor of light. One of the scripture readings for this Third Sunday in Advent is Philippians 4: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious for anything but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil 4: 4 – 5, ESV). I haven’t seen how it’s joy that goes along with God’s presence, not mucking around in how the world is trashed, how the bad guys seem to win. The natural world shimmers with the same voice that said, “Let there be, and there was and it was good.” We can listen for that voice every time we walk outside. We can look for His handprints.

(I know this is a hard season for many, especially people grieving the loss of beloved or not so beloved people. It can be an intensely lonely time. To you I’d say the Lord draws near to the broken hearted and saves those crushed in spirit. There’s Psalm that says, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of the stars; he gives all of them their names” (Ps. 147: 3 – 4, ESV). So this Lord who made the stars, that one, heals your broken heart, and binds up your wounds. This I know is true because it has been true for me.

Paul also urges us to think on good things. “Finally brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable; whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable. If there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about those things” (Phil. 4: 8.) We don’t need to focus on the strange drones and our government’s gaslighting. Or take a look at graphic videos or movies depicting violence. Even The Batchelor shows, a favorite guilty pleasure of mine, are not so good. I’m speaking here to myself as much as you because I can get caught in deadly hunger as much as anyone and need to pull my eyes away. Instead of imagining the worse about the abovementioned drones, it might be good to pray for protection, for peace, for our government to be wise as they respond.

So put on the armor of light. Look to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Know that the Lord is at hand, right here, right now. Remember we can barely comprehend how deeply and widely we are loved, but that doesn't stop his loving us.

Also I’d like recommend Sister Vassa’s short reflections. I stop and read them when they come up on my newsfeed and find sound, grounded encouragement. I just subscribed even though my email is already full.

I apologize if this post is not as polished. I was going to beg off for this week, but found I would miss being in touch with you. I had surgery on my eyelids because they were so heavy I felt like sleeping all the time and they blocked my peripheral vision. Also it would be nice to wear mascara again, so I need to get off and cold pack them. How do you put on the armor of light? As always thank you for reading.

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Paul Kingsnorth says it’s not just the indigenous peoples who have a sense of the world being alive or who have relationships with animals. It’s also the Christian view of what it means to be fully human, fully alive. I was sitting in front of my computer for the third of his classes inSt Basil’s Writers Workshop. What it means to be human is to be like Adam and Eve in the garden when they were at peace with the natural world. We broke the communion we had with God and with animals because we wanted to be God. And death infected everything. As a result, Kingsnorth says, “We’re at war with nature, Creation is sickened by human rebellion. We can’t go back home to this garden. Even if we could find it because there is an angel with a fiery sword guarding it.”

But the wild saints made peace with creation. He talked about St. Kevin who prayed with his arms stretched out like he was on the cross and a blackbird landed in his palm. The blackbird built a nest and fledged her babies while his arm stayed outstretched. He read Seamus Heaney’s poem, St. Kevin and the Black Bird (this link is Heaney’s reading.)

He talked about St. Cuthbert who prayed in the North Atlantic and when he came out the otters dried him off with their fur. He said, “The longer saints pray, the more they lose themselves. They become whole. Animals recognize that as the state of first humans before the fall. Even wild beasts can’t harm you.”

Then he gave us our assignment:

Why don’t you go outside and find an animal that you can write about where you imagine you are a saint. How would they respond to you?

I switched off Zoom, went downstairs and sat with our old dog and ate my yogurt. Dolly won’t eat unless I’m eating and sitting with her. Then I put leashes on both dogs and walked them around the house. It was so bitter the birds and squirrels were quiet. The snow and grass looked like a merle dog or a piebald horse. I came in to write the following:

I’m getting there. This saint business. Probably I shouldn’t admit this, here, now. To you or myself.

I’ve had birds hop ahead, lifting off and landing, leading me out the driveway. (You can read about it in I Follow a Sparrow Who Leads Me Here.) The sparrows will light on the wires in the barn, and on the wall and look. Always I’m reminded of how He knows when they fall. I have found their feathers in the water bucket or on the road.

The feral cat Onyx became my friend. Onyx who used to hiss and meow both. We welcomed him because the rats were so tame I could pet one as he ran up the rafters. We had chickens then who came running when they saw me because I carried food. Is it food that speaks the language between us and the animals? The dolphin trainers thought so. Then came the dog and horse trainers.

But I could call Onyx back from a quarter mile away. He loved to jump on the hay insulating our heat plant, while I drew water. He rubbed his face in my hands. We brought him inside after he was injured and the vet refused to put him to sleep because he was a good cat, because I was losing the dog of my heart.

A few days ago, our feral cat Tiger sat on the ledge talking to me. As I spoke back, his voice quieted. I told him I was sorry his brother died. But I am not a saint. I stepped up and lifted my hand toward him. He disappeared back to the loft and cried in a loud voice and was silent.

And coyotes have howled behind the shed. If I were a saint, they might come up to me and wrap themselves around my legs. But I have shouted, “Get away” and they have quieted.

A saint would let animals speak. They would be allowed to have an opinion. Oma barks and leaps for my leash because she doesn’t want still prayer. She doesn’t want quiet. She wants my attention, my eyes on her, my walk paced to bring her focus to me, mine to her.

I have told my mare that the bitter medicine would help her. She stood, no halter, nothing, and let me plunge the bitter taste in her mouth. Horses know language. Skeptical friends have spoken to their horses. They have come back incredulous that the horse understood. There’s a woman who can do this with wild animals at the vet. She says, “Tell them what you want to do.” She saved my two mares when they were fighting to kill each other. She said, “Don’t even let them share a fence because they’ll get hooked on the dopamine. So that’s what we did. A few years later they were biting each other’s withers, scratching their itch and we opened the gates. The fighting was done.

I am too full of grump to be a saint today. It’s too cold to not say still prayer and walk up Snake Road. It’s too cold for the squirrels to run the trees. Yesterday I saw one drop ten feet from one branch to the other. It bounced. It held him.

I am too full of the mystery why my husband, Bruce and I are so alone. We are profoundly orphaned with no children, no siblings, no parents. Our frail old age worries me. A friend says there are children who would like an aunt or grandma but that just makes me tired. And I wonder if there’s something of this saint, the fire of the loneliness, burning, bearing down on me, if that’s the ground I’m supposed to walk on.

The voice crying in the wilderness speaks. I am in the wilderness.

But it’s Bruce who’s the saint around here. He’s emptied himself, and serves, showing me God the servant in his simple love, in all the things he does for me. God pushing, pushing, pushing to lift up my eyes, lift up my heart and say don’t be afraid, my love for you is real. What I told you in the cave is real, there is therefore no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus. I have searched for you.

And to be honest I’m not sure I want to be a saint. Oh, I’d love for Tiger and Ma Cat to wrap their bodies around my legs, let me touch them.

I’d love for Mrs. Horse to come to me, but then again, she does. She stands at the fence waiting for me, for my attention, along with slabs of hay. She knows when my focus leaves and she will stop, when we are driving, wait for me to come back. She hears my breath calming her to come back to me when she wants to run and I must force myself to empty, to be calm, to relax my muscles. But fear drops down and I avoid the radiance of her love, her welcome. “This horse could hurt me,” a faint echo that still stops me even though she has not, even when she could throw her back legs out and nail me. She has not.

I don’t want the ambition of sainthood, to do the hard things, just so the birds will land on my shoulders, or the bees will swarm. Well, we had that happen too this summer. But there’s something to this deep solitude. This quiet life.

If saints empty themselves, if they forget who they are, maybe there are multitudes in nursing homes, maybe they should be turned loose for birds to land on them, for foxes to trot up to their wheelchairs, and squirrels to dance and play, running up their laps jumping from lap to lap.

I tell God no. I never used to. I used to say, Okay do what you want. But these days I say no. No to being a fancy saint. No to having a big audience as a writer. I like my quiet. I think knowing my no, that it’s there, I can then ask the Lord to shape me like the potter shapes the clay, to bring me this person he had in mind.

Meanwhile I lean down to pick up my dog’s poop, the cold bitter around my hand as I wrap it in a bag and pick up the soft warmth, drop it in the poop bucket, to be dumped on the manure pile later.

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Seems like fear has settled over us like a fine, poisoned drizzle. The news, social media, talk shows are like crop dusters spraying ways for us to be afraid and ways to hate each other. The Atlantic cover art shows Trump driving a circus wagon with an elephant trapped, an image echoing the Bradbury novel, Something Wicked this Way Comes.

Memes reinforce that message. Cut off friends. Cut off family. Divorce your spouse. If they voted for Trump.

But some are turning to creation for courage and solace. With a big smile, next to a horse, writer Pam Houston says, “It is very important to do things that comfort you. For me that is hugging horses and dogs. It sounds silly but that is the only way to balance the fear. Fear for myself, yes, but even more fear for the people I love. Rearrange your priorities so you have access to whatever thing that is. Ocean. Chocolate. Flowers. Books.”

This morning, a friend texted how she couldn’t understand how America could elect a bully like Trump. I replied, “Maybe do some research into why we elected him. Maybe do it outside mainstream media. I don’t care to get in this discussion with you. I don’t have the mind or heart for it. And fear our conversation would devolve into argument. I value our friendship. I feel for how upset you are.”

We went on to talk about the good things in our lives. We both received a lift of joy.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

If you'd like to hear me read this on WNIJ, click here.

There are so many ways I could go as far as elaborating on this perspective. First let me talk about this business of political discussions. I’m also trying to avoid talking about the election. Friends are upset, grieving, afraid. And these friends are dear to me. I have told Facebook that I want to see less of political posts that leave me silently arguing, knowing I don’t have the chops to get tangled in a discussion.

And I am relieved. I was working on hunkering down, in ways Pam Houston talks about, if Kamala got elected. And I thought for sure Kamala would be. I envisioned my right to free speech taken away. My wild imagination imagined the Feds showing at our door because I have been outspoken about immigrants and have publicly protested renewables in our county. Biden talked about how Trump voters are terrorists. I have a rough draft sitting on my computer/cloud about people who join one of those groups that only follows their local Sheriff's authority. It is a sequel to my novel The River Caught Sunlight and I am considering revising it and posting it here for paid subscribers. But will I be tracked for doing research, or posting it? I also hesitate because there's enough fear and animosity towards rural people, that I don't want to enflame it. I am hopeful Trump will cut back on the government's nosiness.

Anyone who defies the Narrative can be called a terrorist, so anyone can be arrested on suspicion of terrorism, and the expensive law fare begins. What’s scary is the Feds have the tools to watch us because if I can talk about windows and receive ads from window replacement companies in my email, the Feds have the capability to see what I'm saying on line.

Trump is right when he says, “If they come after me, they’ll come after you.” Like Houston I have worked hard at resisting my fear by spending time with the horse, walking down the road, and tossing the ball for the dog. I too eat chocolate and enjoy a scoop of ice cream with Bruce regularly. When I walk, I bring my mind back to “Thank you Lord” because the fields and trees and farms and sky are whole. But even now I have to resist the fear that wakes me up, whispering, “This is the last good holiday season. The terrible beast slouching, is nearly here.” I am gobsmacked by how President Biden and NATO are playing footsie with Putin and nuclear war. I mutter Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God have mercy. Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world have mercy. “Takes away the sin of the world.” Well, that’s something to contemplate.

The protests have started. Trump’s potential cabinet appointees have received bomb and swatting threats. Frank Schaeffer, the writer I promoted back in the day, and subject of my novel The River Caught Sunlight, just called for humility in the wake of this election, which surprised me because I have seen so little self-examination on the Democrat side of things. In What Now? on his Substack It Has to Be Said, he says, “Maybe we should step back and say, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Instead of following the path of hubris ourselves, let's for a minute in humility reconsider our own certainties. And I'm not telling you what those certainties should be. That would be an act of hubris. But I'm telling you that if this loss does not call for a reconsideration of the certainties of the left, then we are as stupid as the hubristic right who have just won the election. So what to do?” He goes on to consider the words of Jesus about the first being last and the last being first, that history bends toward the humble.

Examining those certainties with an open heart, might be a good exercise and might actually heal the divides between people, more than cutting off people who see things differently. We are all Americans.

But I was dismayed by the comments under his post and am dismayed to see what people are posting on Facebook about cutting people off if they voted for Trump.

A former teacher and poet, the kind whose poems show up in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, says she knows authoritarian governments from her travels to South America and that Trump will be authoritarian. She warned her friends to be careful who they befriend, and watchful because the government will come for them. As I said above this has been my fear. Has she not seen the lawfare against Trump and others like the pro-life protestor who opened the door to an FBI swat team? Has she not seen how Trump aims to cut back government beauracracy? How the Supreme Court has made the rules and regulations brought into play from the Chevron decision null and void? So hopefully the government will have less involvement in our private lives. What’s scary is the feds have the tools to listen in. (I can talk about installing windows and see ads in my email for windows.)

I refrain from saying anything, though I wake up thinking of my reply: Really? You weren’t awake during Covid where they locked us down, except for the George Floyd riots? You haven’t read how the federal government pressured Twitter and Facebook to silence doctors who questioned the narrative that masks and social distancing were effective? You don’t remember how the untested jab was forced on people or they’d lose their job? Or people telling me to take the vaccine to protect them, when it did not protect them or me. These same people chant "my body my choice" when it comes to “reproductive rights” when once a child is conceived it’s no longer just her body. And the lies by President Biden that it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated when the vaccine didn’t prevent people from getting the illness, nor did it stop the spread. Does she not see how no one voted for Kamala to be the candidate for president or that Biden is incapable of running the country?

I refrain from speaking on Facebook because others will jump in with insults and alternative perspectives. My blood pressure rises. There’s no convincing. No conversation. It’s worthless stress. I don’t feel like taking my attention off the goodness of the world. I want to be quiet enough to see how the sky changes day by day and how the horse stands by the door asking for hay cubes. Right now, these days, I’m not so obsessed with keeping track the powers running the country. I refrain because there’s so much more to friendship than who a person voted for, than even the political narrative with which we cloak themselves.

A good friend, whose politics and syncretistic Christianity, where he tries to weave other faith traditions that hold truth, into his faith in Jesus is very different than mine sent a message asking Did you vote for Trump? "Yes. I did." "I love you. You’re my internet mom."

I waited a week to respond, but when we finally talked it got ugly fast. I thought he wanted to hear why I voted for Trump. But it devolved to an argument. We have very different sources of information with regards to what’s going on in the culture. He accused me of being in too thick a conservative bubble but stopped short of saying, "You watch too much Fox news." (I don’t watch it at all.) And would have done better to encourage him to check out Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger or Bari Weiss. He started to play therapist with me. I felt like I was walking through two feet of water. Well actually it felt like molasses. I told him to cut it out and said I wanted to watch my show: The Golden Bachelorette.

I wondered if I should follow Paul’s advice when he says “If anyone does not obey what we say in this letter, take note of that person, have nothing to do with him that he may be ashamed. Do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother” (2 Thessalonians 3: 14 – 15). Because that feeling of walking in molasses, that feeling of disorientation, that being told who I am without my saying, was a game that friends don't play with each other. But backing away from a person is serious business, especially since I know how it feels when people walk away from me.

There is wisdom in Paul’s saying, do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother because those ties with God’s people are familial ties. I have been so schooled in making nice that it’s not easy to “warn” someone. It’s easier to simply back away than state what has gone awry in the friendship as I see it. It’s so easy to play the judge, to try to convict someone of sin when that is not our role, unless God and much prayer and self-examination comes first. Martin Luther King in Letter From Birmingham Jail urged his fellow protestors to do this hard work of looking at yourself.

But the next morning my friend gave shout saying his wife scolded him for the conversation. We talked some more about our views, and he said I could share our interchange. Our friendship goes back nearly ten years. I hated that he brought up politics because we’ve avoided our ideologies and been able to pray together on Zoom off and on for quite some time. He has taught me how to pray for the world and has a practical heart for the poor.

I told a different intellectual friend on Facebook. “I’ll leave you be” when I had no more to say in our conversation. I felt like I was intellectually over my head, so I was aiming to bow out. He thought I was abandoning him. “No. No,” I said. “I just wanted to leave the discussion. That’s all.” He came over to one of my posts and said he’d be crushed if I left which set me back on how careful a person has to be with people’s hearts, even on Facebook.

Like Houston who talks about drawing close to the created world, I’ve been using my walks--both the long walks down the road and the short potty breaks with the dogs to become grounded in the present, in God’s good creation that is living and active. Since this post has gone on long enough, you’ll have to wait until next week to hear about how my sense of God’s good creation is being deepened by a class I’m taking with Paul Kingsnorth. But in the meantime, I’m curious about how you are coping with the fear, how are you finding ways to cultivate peace?

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I delight in squirrels running the trees, jumping from one to the other, sometimes dropping ten feet from one twig to an another. They curl around each other, fighting. We watch through our brand-new kitchen window, that Anderson Construction plugged into the wall last week, and trimmed out this week. We'd  grown tired of feeling cold air pouring into the kitchen when winter nights fell. Bruce would climb on the counter every evening and hang a blanket stapled over a dowel rod. Then he took it down every morning to let the sunlight warm us. You might comment on the view, but the view has always been the same, just not framed in clean white vinyl and wood. We also repaired a couple doors that leaked cold air. As they say a door closes and a window opens. Or maybe both stay closed and that’s wisdom enough.

What a glorious day, the wind blowing hard, clapping my back, chilling my neck. I turned up the gravel road to walk up the hill, to give the dogs new grasses to sniff. I looked across to the barn and see Bruce had let Morgen out, the back barn doors open.

Dolly circled around me and around me herding me to turn back home, so I turned into the wind and walked down the hill we just walked up. Both dogs pulled alongside each other like sled dogs and I thought to walk fast.  Our neighbor pulled up behind me driving slowly because I didn’t hear him. Usually I hear the tires on gravel and know to step off long before a car pulls close. But the wind muted the sound. The clouds were chopped up and beauteous.

The wind was enough to knock your breath. But the honest cold felt good wrapping around my legs and holding my face in its hands.

When I feed the dogs, Dolly is picky in the morning, but I lace her canned dog food with cat food to entice her. It’s a good sound listening to her sniffing, her licking the plate. Omalola takes seconds to gobble hers. She’s supposed to be on a diet but kibble and green beans leaves her ravenous. I left my wrapped granola bars and returned to find torn wrapping and the bars gone, a dietary indiscretion, that would make her wake us twice in wee hours of the night.

I walked out to Morgen and put her hay right behind the barn and inside. Usually, I place her hay buckets across the paddock, so she has to walk between them. She is glad for my hand outs. Sometimes she’ll come in the barn and stand while I brush her, currying the cupped part of her back that she can’t reach with a good roll. She will stretch her head and neck out and curling her lip with pleasure. Then I brushed her. And picked out her feet, so they can dry out, or on a wet day like today, the manure cleaned away before the muddy ag lime squishes in. She drops her head and eats. I slosh yesterday's water into the paddock and refill her buckets.

Then I recorded my perspective for WNIJ, twice, because the cat decided to play, the knocking showing up on the first recording. It airs two days before Thanksgiving and isn’t exactly about giving thanks, though it is a call to resisting the fear many are feeling post election. I filed papers that had piled up on the printer. I ate lunch and made soup and chili.

Bruce and I read the Psalms in the break between dinner and the evening TV shows. A local Orthodox church is encouraging people to read the complete book through during advent and we decided to follow along. He reads one and I read one. Then we say Compline on the Mission St. Clare app with blessings that are wonderful before sleep. It opens with: “The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end. Amen. Our help is in the name of the Lord: The Maker of heaven and earth.” And closes with: Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ and asleep we may rest in peace.”

The nights have been dark, though the sky has been striated like different ages of rock between dark and light.  As I walked back to the house from final chores, I saw a white cloud that wasn't catching a village's light. It was glowing slightly. It spooked me like  seeing a coyote slink between me and the barn, then slip inside to eat the cats’ food and drink the water. When I was a foolish girl, I used to long for an alien ship to zoom me out of this life. All I saw were gorgeous jetliners on approach to the Albany airport. I suppose my wish came true, because those jetliners did carry me away from my life as a child, into adventures that surprised me, with how good and difficult they were.

While Bruce and I were reading the Psalms between 38 and 46 my phone flipped to a song about or by Marduk, the lyrics scrolling down the page. I hadn’t touched it. It just came on by itself. Apple music says the artist has an “unswerving commitment to blasphemy.” I’m told the powers of darkness like our technology. Later I played Layton Howerton’sInternational Harvestor from his Boxing God album to cleanse the machine and to hear joy. I almost wanted to ask my pastor to bless my phone. This weirdness is just a distraction. I think these battles are fought by recognizing thoughts that are not “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence if there is anything worthy of praise think about these things” (Phil 4: 8, ESV).  

Here's how I was tempted by some pretty dark thoughts and pushed back. On the local community Facebook page, someone wrote about how she had finally found her dog. She was pretty cavalier about her dog's getting away. Another person told her to take better care because people aren’t always so kind to bring him back. My imagination began to fly. Bad thoughts rose. I prayed: "Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner." We were driving to church and a service about Christ the King, the last Sunday in the church year, so the temptation to think these bad thoughts faded as we sat down—George on one end of the pew and Joy on the other, Bruce and I in the middle.

I was chilled despite wearing my coat. It’s not easy or cheap to heat a building with ceilings that high. Our pastor asked how would we feel about Christ’s return, would we be afraid, joyous, indifferent? Well, a few weeks ago, I imagined myself in a cave, cringing, hiding from the ferocity of His Return in “The Wrath of the Lamb.”

But later, I also imagined the following from How to Walk When the Sun Comes Up:  “Just out of sight in my memory/mind I see Jesus climbing into a cave looking for me, the cave where I’ve joined the others who cry for the rocks to hide them from the wrath of the little lamb who was slaughtered. The rocks smell alkaline. I shiver and drop into sleep. The fierce man I see in icons, his hair parted down the middle, one eye kind, one eye frightening, ducks under a ledge. He’s no brighter than the moonlight. He touches me with his toe. He says, so gently my heart breaks, “What about there is no condemnation for those in me don’t you believe? What about what I’ve said, “Therefore do not pronounce judgement before the time, before I come, who will bring to light things hidden in darkness” (I Cor. 4: 3) Come. Come with me. I’m bringing you to the light. Bringing you to receive your commendation. He smelled like corn when the plants make love, soft and green.”

We read from Jude urging us to stay awake along with a doxology, pastors sometimes say when the service ends.“Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy” (Jude 24). I hold onto this, when my sense of missing the mark overwhelms.

When Pastor Campbell read the scripture that says that heaven and earth will pass away, I thought about the tree I look to, the squirrels, the rolling folds of northern Illinois fields with clumps of trees that remind me of islands off the Maine coast. I thought of the barn and shed and house. The linden tree and the giant elm that spreads her leaves over the paddock.

Even without Christ’s return, all these things could be lost if the neighbors or even the state decides to plant wind turbines or solar. A tornado could take down the trees, our house and barns. And for us personally, one day, we will die, “O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am! Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is nothing before you. Surely all of mankind stands as a mere breath!” (Ps. 39: 4 – 5). And even Before our death dates, we might find the farm too much for us or become so disgusted by how the state is run, that we leave. We will weep. Perhaps God will too.

Meanwhile every morning I walk into the kitchen first thing, unplug my phone and watch. I check for messages. I watch a squirrel running up one branch, leaping across a gap between branches, carrying a black walnut in his mouth. I watch another squirrel and another, one right after another and think about a fancy model train set, the trains circling over bridges and through tunnels, only the squirrels are alive and wild, a delight to watch before I put leashes on the dogs and walk out, still watching, as the dogs do their business.

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The tiny sparrow hopped ahead of me. (Before, it was a junco by the house.) She’d lift a bit and then trot along. This time while I was walking on the top of the hill towards Petersons. Where did she want to take me? She’d trot a bit. Then lift off. Trot a bit. Then she flew off. I was relieved she could fly. I kept walking. The walk as ordinary as they all are, well actually boring. Sometimes the sky is spectacular with long gray breakers in the clouds, that sometimes look splashed up like the edge of an ocean. Sometimes it’s plain blue. Where was the bird leading? Perhaps the following is the answer.

After I read over the first part of my essay collection, Baptisms of a Sorta Former Evangelical I thought I might need an exorcist. Especially since I read Rod Dreher’s “That Time a Demon Mauled Tucker Carlson” and listened to Jonathan Pageau’s podcast, “Did the Witches Win?”. Pageau’s podcast identified modern reproductive practices that are common in our society that were described as witches’ practices back in the day. I could only grieve for how anti-eros our culture has become and remember Jesus wondering if when he returns, would he find love in the world?

That was a lot about the powers of darkness in one week along with rereading prose poems that reach back to my toddler days. Funny too, that Martin Shaw in his class, Christian Wonder Tales, invited us to write our creation stories.

Dreher recounted how Tucker Carlson was clawed by demons in his sleep, and how Christians can be oppressed because of curses put on ancestors. He says, “In Living In Wonder, I tell the story of ‘Emma,’ a New Yorker who has long been a devout, churchgoing, orthodox Catholic — yet discovered a few years ago after a suicide attempt that she was, in fact, possessed. It emerged that her grandfather back in Europe had been a high-level occultist and had made a demonic pact that brought him wealth, though at the expense of his descendants.”

This is so alarming, the ground can feel like it’s shifting under your feet. Christians can be infected with demons? I thought there was no room with the Holy Spirit, “the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1: 14 ESV).  Dreher says, “It’s not fair, that’s just the way it is.” He says too many Christians aren’t aware of spiritual warfare. Not sure I agree with him about people's cluelessness. I have certainly done battle. There are some Christians who seem to find the powers of darkness under every bush. Dreher’s book, Living in Wonder, after introducing the dangers of disenchantment, has two long chapters on the occult and aliens before he gets to "Attention and Prayer," "Learning how to See" and "Signs and Wonders." Perhaps that’s more fascinating than the quiet work of turning our eyes to Jesus. As Paul says, “For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep as others do but let us keep awake and be sober” (I Thess. 5: 5 – 6, ESV).

Pretty close to the hours that my brother died, I dreamed the following, which I wrote into a poem: At the same house in the kitchen, I saw demons jumping into the sky. Gryphons , wings clacking,  mechanical. A locust song, I ran outside, shook my fist. “You are dead.” The barns and woods smacked an echo: Dead. One circled back, laughed…” Then I dreamed, “At a barn, the trainer wanted me to work a black horse with a sculpted head, quiet eye, muscled and powerful. My thighs ached to cradle his heart, ribs, and hide; a little bit wild as when a man lies between them. But I had no boots. The first rule I learned—you ride with boots and hard hat. The trainer said my sneakers were fine. He tossed me up on the horse.” About a year later I bought a horse even though I lived in town. I fired my therapist. Perhaps Beau Ty was the middle horse in series of spiritual warhorses that began with Trigger and Whisper, mares that carried me out of the old house and away from the voices. This may be the beginning of those stories.

Later that week of my brother’s death, during a family lunch, I told my aunts and the others sitting there, “Two people have died in my family’s house.  Bless it.” (My father died of a heart attack and then my brother.) I dreamed demons swarmed, my dog dead, death dead.”

Aunt Lois, skeptical and insightful, said, “Your grandmother went to seances until she saw a table put out a foot, one step on stairs. From then on, she put no stock in mystery except the time her best friend saw the Lord Jesus Christ standing at the foot of her bed.”

At that table, I saw the neat, well-built boxes constructed like a maze over generations. God like honey oozing out. I drew strength that week and weeks following from that dream about shaking my fist at demons, shaking my fist, shouting, "Death is dead." It’s one of those knowings that came from deep as my bones.

Beholding the world as I can see it, aware that it is full of God’s glory and learning to  love God and neighbor is enough supernatural for me. I heed the warnings of an early church father to "spit on Mary if she shows up in a vision." Perhaps this desire to be grounded is a gift my grandmother gave me and not a curse. Though the careful slots her theology placed on God’s revelation weighed on me, were like dry lots, that began to stink the longer I stayed. The lack of mystery in my childhood faith made it hard to breathe. Though God opened the gates. I wasn’t long into college when I realized that I didn’t know much except: Christ is died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. I don't even try to fit my theology into neat little boxes. 

When I have bumped up against people with charismatic gifts and even this trend toward enchantment, towards how mysterious the world is, how we have lost the ability to see realities, I have wanted to be grounded. When the charismatic revival moved through our church during my teen years, I was uneasy with people’s speaking in tongues. Friends repeated “Praise you Jesus” so fast it sounded like a frenzy. Sometimes I think the images I see and words I write might be akin to that gift. Those years I thought about trees, how spectacular it is when trees fall and how miraculous it is when they grow slowly toward the sky and deeper in the earth. The righteous are like the trees, planted by streams of water, whose leaves do not wither. Those gifts were true and good gifts but not for me. They don't have to be.

Speaking of trees, Kenneth Tanner, in a recent Addressing the Letters of Paul class showed pictures how the rings of a tree and our fingerprints look remarkably the same. He said this maybe an image of the tree of life. I know I look to an oak across the field, every day, that stands like a sky scraper, drawing my eyes. Oh the light that it catches. Oh how I see bits of heaven. And post pictures to show them because words escape me.

This quote from Fr Alexander Schmemann talks about what I'm trying for in my pictures and words. "I constantly think about death. The horror, the terror of death is one of the strongest existing feelings: regret about leaving this world, 'the gentle kingdom of this earth.' (G. Bernanos). But what if this 'gentle kingdom,' this open sky, these hills and woods flooded with the sun, this silent praise of colors, of beauty, of light, what if all this is finally nothing other than the revelation of what is behind death: a window of eternity? Yes, but this unique, grayish day, the lights suddenly coming on at dusk, all that the heart remembers so acutely - they are not anymore, they cannot be brought back... But the heart remembers, precisely because this gray day has shown us eternity. I will not remember that particular day in eternity, but that day was a breakthrough into eternity, a sort of remembrance of the eternity of God, of life everlasting.”

After reading Dreher, I wondered I needed an exorcist because people with occultish gifts were drawn to me. In graduate school, I visited with a young man in a laundromat, who flew between dimensions hearing buzzing like so many bees and a high-tension line combined. Here’s the poem I wrote: “I could see in his eyes where he’d been. He said he’d uttered a phrase in Hebrew, each letter a number he typed in his mind, all systems bent to blast him out of his skin to the place where creatures are parallelograms, triangles, squares. They use circular logic, speak in chords and jostle non geometries pricking shapes that don’t fit their dimension. He said he had to be brave as a math student who couldn’t add in class. He said no one could add up their sums. In that world there’d always be a red mark. Even Jesus came back with five” (Andraski, When the Plow Cuts, 30). I think we made a date, but he never showed up. There were others like a childhood friend who saw gremlins and the spirits of trees and eventually learned to talk to Seth, a spirit who knew things.

While I sat on my cat urine-soaked couch, the odor pungent but also comforting, I called poet, Robert Siegel, who said, “Don’t be afraid. They are drawn to the light in you. Why don’t you read Agnes Sanford’s The Healing Light which says look to, speak to the light in people.”

As a young girl, I heard voices inside my head. They sounded like garbage and I figured that “becoming a woman” and all those hormones, and that old hag of a house, had something to do with it. I take comfort in Jesus saying about how weeds grow up in the wheat and at the end he will come and winnow that wheat, separating the chaff, throwing it into the fire.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s quote “The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart” makes sense and acts as a double-edged sword when I wonder about some thoughts that are a cue to pray, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.”

As a very young girl images flew through my mind, that no toddler should imagine. The only way I made sense of them was the doctrine of original sin a doctrine that saved my sanity. Now I think they came from overly graphic sermons at Bible camp. My parents brought me and my brother to Word of Life, a camp that encouraged and taught and gave me space to work out my spirituality until the gates opened and I walked out, towards freer fields. I was three years old, my feet not even reaching the floor. The asphalt floor sparkled. The place was both harshly lit and dark as if darkness and light were swirled together. The preacher talked about Abraham being a friend of God and asked if we want to be God’s friend. “Oh yes Lord, please, I want to be your friend.” I heard men honk, “Amen. Praise the Lord. Preach it.”

Another night that week, a movie flickered with an airplane’s skin being stripped off, the metal ribs left. I felt sorry for the plane, that magical creature that lifts people into the air. Naked, brown skinned men ran around faster than a man could run because the camera speeded things up. The film flickered with white spots. The story crackled. A tall, handsome woman, Elizabeth Elliot, stood up, and spoke her love story and her grief. Her husband, Jim, and his friend, Nate had been killed by the people. They had tried to tell them the good news of Jesus. She returned to the tribe, who she said turned to Jesus. Later I learned what her husband said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” That was a saying I tried to follow, along with the question: Would you follow Jesus, even if the KGB came to your door with a deal: Reject Jesus and live. Stay loyal to him and be tortured? 

What’s ironic is that her daughter lived in the same dorm, the same floor as I did in college. I walked hills in England, I don’t remember where, with Elizabeth Elliot. Funny how the connections rise through our lives.  

“Oh yes Lord, please. I want to be your friend.”

My therapist said, “You have all the signs of being ritually abused.” She didn’t want to pay $500 to edit her book. I agreed to edit it for less. And yes it did get published, while I was struggling to write mine and get help for the stories therein. It’s like she hurt me in the same place where I sought help. A friend’s friend wrote and published a story about this. I said,"Huh." And imagined the very worst thing I could think of that might have happened. What I got was no memory rising from my past but an ugly image that named the betrayal I felt from my family those years and maybe also by her. I also found the title of my novel, The River Caught Sunlight. Having imagined that very worse thing that could happen, I was no longer afraid of what my imagination might bring, which brings us back to how rereading Baptisms of a Sorta Former Evangelical and Rod Dreher’s essay stirred the above musings. Writing this has eased that fear. Maybe just maybe I will let you on these stories. It’s too hard writing without readers and you all have proven to be very kind and supportive. I can’t thank you enough.

But I hate to say it, my pup, Omalola keyed in on a blood spot on the road, with a tiny feather next to it. A cat or someone speeding caught the little junco, the first bird I followed hopping ahead of me. I’d hoped she’d survive the winter because she could fly enough to reach our bird feeder.

“Oh yes Lord, please. I want to be your friend.”

"Don't be afraid. They are drawn to the light in you."

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I’m reposting these two WNIJ perspectives as tributes to our feral cat Gray. We said goodbye to him today.

When Feral Cats Show Up

It’s magical when feral cats show up at the farm. We bless them because we’ve had rats so fat and tame I could grab one as she ran up the rafters.

This year two gray and white cats arrived. They acted like a bonded pair. We named them Fluffy and Slick. None of our neighbors claimed them. We set out food, the expensive kind. Soon Mama cat sat with our kitchen window in her line of sight, signaling it was time to fill her dish. Or if her dish was full, she’d sit by the door as if to say, can you hurry up? At night Fluffy lounges in the yard, waiting.

One day Bruce saw Mama trotting across the yard with a vole in her mouth. She ducked into the shed. “They do that when they have kittens,” he said.

“Oh boy,” I thought. “What are we going to do with kittens? No way do I want a cat colony.”

Well, four kittens showed up--two gray and whites, a solid gray and a tabby.

Drat we should have trapped the parents and had them fixed. But it’s hard to know if drop ins will stick around. And it has been joyous to watch the kittens play, even though they scatter when they see us.

I’m grateful to TAILS, our local spray and neuter clinic, for setting up an appointment and for saying just call us if you can’t trap her. Anyone need a barn cat or two?

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

If you want to hear me read this, click here

Leaving My Heart in the Wild Every Night

When we fixed our barn cats, Kevin, my horse vet, said that you spend money on those barn cats and they’ll be gone before you know it, but we could not afford more kitties, so off to Tails they went. Brave and Girl Cat ended up ghosting us, the loss a thud in my gut because I never knew what happened.

Tyger and Gray have grown into sleek, striped cats with scraggly, poufy tails and shiny coats. We take pleasure in watching them watching us from the barn. Mama cat watches from the shed. Sometimes they’ll lounge like young men at the beach. They climb the rafters like trees.

One night I woke at 2 am and saw Gray, sleeping next to our front door. Even though they were born here, there’s no curling around our legs or reaching for our hands to stroke the sides of their faces. The closest I get is a quiet mew, which means, “Leave now, so I can eat.”

When I wake, I wonder if they made it through the night. Coyotes have howled behind the barn, so close I shouted at them, like I was banishing dogs, my heart thumping. Eagles have perched high in our poplar tree. So much danger. I can’t protect three beloved barn cats. I can only trust they know to stay hidden when the predators come. Every morning, I ask Bruce have you seen the cats today?

Think about it. This isn’t just about barn cats, is it?

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

If you’d like to hear my radio version click here.

The Other Day

The coyotes sounded like a machine grinding wood. And like crying puppies. And like the cartoon sound of wolves howling at the moonlight. They were too close in the field west of us. I shouted. Hey! And they were quiet. As I’ve said before I fear for our feral kitties. But it wasn’t the coyotes. I’ve seen the cats head that way late. But Gray started calling from the paddock. I called him to me. He followed at a distance while we walked the dogs and then went into the barn.

The next day Gray crouched,  sprang to chase a squirrel. He caught him, they tangled and the squirrel sprang away. Bruce said, “He doesn’t want to mess with a squirrel.” Later  I watched Gray sitting in our south hayfield, hunting.

The brothers—Tyger and Gray—disappear and then they come back. They call plaintively when the other one is missing. They curl around each other, purring. We dump cat food in their bowl.

But yesterday we saw cat vomit with tell-tale green specks in it. Rat poison. It’s the season where mice come inside. So some neighbor put out poison. Bruce cleaned it up. We were glad he saw it because Omalola could easily have scarfed it down.

Last night I heard a faint mew. And should have asked Bruce to check out the loft. That should-have burns. This morning Bruce saw the cat’s food had not been eaten. He put the ladder up and found Gray dying, his beautiful green eyes wide, his breath faint. Then he was gone. Bruce said he’d never been petted until now. He wondered if he’d ever purred. I said, yes, yes when he was with Tyger eating.

We’ve seen Mama cat but not Tyger. We wonder if he’s gone too. But oh the plaintive calling, if he comes back.

And so much delight watching these wild cats enjoy each other, call to each other, scold me, climb up the rafters in the barn, gone. Kevin Sugdon was right. They broke our hearts.

And I wonder how many hawks, owls, eagles, buzzards that may be poisoned,

From Every Moment Holy a prayer: God, We know that the final working of your redemption will be far reaching, encompassing all things in heaven and on earth, so that no good thing will be lost forever, so that even our sorrow at the of this beloved creature will somehow, someday, be met and filled, and in joy made forever complete.

Comfort us in this meantime, O Lord, for the ache of these days is real.

And here is a link to a Mary Oliver poem that someone offered over at the House of Beasts and Vines. 

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Every morning the last few mornings I’ve seen a little bird that can’t lift off the ground. Bruce thinks she’s a junco, but maybe she’s the firebird grounded, telling us both something as it hops on ahead of us. Apparently in Russian fairy tales a person finds a feather and searches for the bird, starting a quest. I think of Abraham called from a prosperous family to an unknown land, promised by God that it would be his and his children’s.

I’ve seen the junco at odd times, first thing in the morning, and during afternoon walks. With all the predators (cats) around I’m surprised she’s still alive. She looks like she’s leading me somewhere, but I walk on by down the road or finish walking the dogs behind the house. The other day I saw her lift off the ground just a bit. I’m not sure what she’s calling me to, though perhaps it’s being rooted and grounded in this place and this life, at least for now. In I Thessalonians 4:11- 12 Paul tells us to “aspire to live quietly and to mind your own affairs and to work with your hands as we instructed you so that you might walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.”

When I walked this week, I began in the dark and ended in the light. I wanted to get Omalola outside before she peed in the house. You’d think I’d be more vulnerable to speeding cars (and that awful dream of being chased on this road) but I’m not because I can see how the headlights light up the "Slow. Turn." sign up ahead. I step into the ditch, raise my hand to wave, the other gripping the dogs' leashes all the while wishing the car would slow down.

There’s something, I mean something to walking into stillness when the night moves to day, when the sun rises. You can almost feel the world tilt. They say this is liminal time, a thin space, where saints and angels cross the threshold to here, but there is no supernatural vision, just the sky as it changes day to day, minute by minute.

A few weeks ago I walked out my complaints to the Lord, a good talk. It was healing to whine, cry and complain when life has gone awry. The words and the truth that Jesus is a high priest who has suffered everything we’ve suffered, gives me courage to speak my fear. “But I call upon God, and the Lord will deliver me. In the evening, in the morning and at noon day, I will complain and lament and he will hear my voice. He will bring me safely back from the battle waged against me; for there are many who fight me. God who is enthroned of old, will hear me and bring them down” (Psalm 55: 16 – 19 Book of Common Prayer). Whenever I hear this Psalm read, I also think of Jesus’ heart cry when he was betrayed by Judas.

There are times when I walk, and look at the blue and pink to the west, where light hasn't quite arrived yet, I start to pray for friends who are hurting. All my life I’ve marched through lists of names, partly to counter my own self centeredness. Sometimes these prayers are for me, to soften my heart, to send blessing back when I’ve been hurt. More and more my prayers have become more simple. More and more I no longer know what to tell God. Sure sometimes I need to speak my hopes for them knowing that God will do what he will with those hopes.

In Writing the Icon of the Heart, Maggie Ross has offered insight that eases my question how to pray, as those prayers sink more and more into silence. “In other words, the life we have is a share in God’s life, so that when we pray on behalf of another we are creating a space for God to use that life as is most appropriate, according to God’s light, not ours. In this space our life is expressed as God’s life, God’s tears, God’s offering, God’s power. We are praying, receptive to the mysterious workings of God’s love through us in ways that should be no concern of ours if we are rightly focused on God, if we are beholding” (31).

So much is unsettled in our culture. It feels like Election Day won’t settle us down, unless we resist and choose to settle down, choose to go about our lives as Paul admonished at a time when the ruler, Caligula, was half mad, and there were very real threats to the Jewish people. In the very least I am learning that it’s no good to put my trust in princes.

 Because I don’t always have words, I go silent and nudge my thoughts back to “Thank you Lord.” I can feel the expansiveness that Maggie Ross talks about in Writing the Icon of the Heart. She says, “This silence is not the absence of noise; it is the vast interior landscape that invites us to stillness. At its heart, in our heart, it is the Other” (xvii). In another place, she says, “We come to realize that in this spacious silence of beholding, the whole of creation is present, and we are given the eyes of compassion. We realize that every moment is prayer, life is prayer, and it is our task to learn to immerse ourselves in this wellspring of silence so our lives arise and flow from it” (Icon, 32).

I look up at the moon, rising ahead of the sun, clear, beautiful, becoming thinner on both days I saw it. I followed this super moon from her bright bellied obesity that lit up the night like it was day, shadows of trees with leaves snaking along the ground and up the barn. When she hadn’t announced herself at sunset, she was quiet enough, so we could see the comet. But as I walk these early mornings, she looks like something I might see in a jeweler’s case. She’s beautiful. That slim. I want to slide her over my finger, saying to the jeweler, I’m just looking. I think about Ted Kooser’s poem posted on Sunday, one of the first things I see on Facebook.

Ted Kooser

October 27 at 5:29 AM  ·

A Waning Moon, Late October

Each morning she carries a little less light

in her apron as she comes back from wherever

she gathers it, from where there must be

less and less to gather. Always that same

white apron, pinched up by the corners

making a pocket, always the same slow pace

coming back, taking her time.

Ted Kooser, October 27th, 2024

I walk by Calamity’s paddock. One day she is there, walks over to us and sticks her head through the fence. I feel bad because I forget to bring her hay cubes. She is friendly, amiable horse. I learned a bit of what it means to take up my cross a few years back when the neighbor needed help applying medication to her eye. She had moon blindness, white film slowly covering it. So every day for several months, twice a day, Bruce and I drove over there and slid steroid into her eye. I practiced putting my desire to just walk into my own chores behind me. I walked into their yard, no matter the weather, to try to save her eye. What is wild is that lately her eye looks like it has cleared. She can see me flick my finger.

But Mr. P is in his eighties, with legs that don’t work well. He’s tired of winter chores. I have prayed he’d find her a home. The other day we saw an empty stock trailer drive up the road. I watched it park behind his barn. She loaded easily and was gone. Her empty paddock is like a missing tooth in the neighborhood.

While I was taking pictures to capture some fall color, I snapped one of the oak tree that is dying. There is an open wound with fungi growing in it, big plates like you see in the woods. Above, some branches are dying, while others live. I took his picture. But when I looked on my phone I saw a ghost tree behind it, that wasn’t quite the same. The ground was higher. It looked as though I’d taken a picture through glass but I hadn’t. Had the phone opened a look into another dimension like it had translated the red haze of the Auroras into gorgeous dolomites of red and green light? Had it shown me the soul of the dying tree beginning to move along? I just hope it stands sturdy in these wild winds and doesn’t fall on our house. (I’m not sure the image will come through here, but here it is.)

Enchanted World

There’s talk these days of how the world is enchanted. Rod Dreher has a new book, Living in Wonder that says “the renewal of the west will be mystical or not at all.” According to an interview in The National Catholic Register, “This book, which the author conceives as a manual, aims to teach the reader ‘how to seek and how to find’ true enchantment: in other words, ‘to see the divine with a purified heart.’”

But I think we can seek the experience of the divine for the sake of the experience, rather than for the divine Himself. Ross says in The Fountain and the Furnace, “As with discernment of any other gift of God the biggest danger is ending up wanting the gifts for the sake of the gifts and not for the sake of the kingdom” (168).

I feel the pull to be a wild saint, to be the kind of person the wild cats, rub up against my legs, instead of crying for me to leave the barn. I want to see God. I want to light up like Moses.

I remember as a young girl standing by the elderberry bushes growing alongside the Big Barn. It was so clear I could see the bubbles in the Milky Way. I wanted to see God like the guys in the Bible, but I didn’t ask because I was terrified at the thought He might show up with those burnished bronze legs, and hair so white I couldn’t look, and blazing eyes and a sword flying out of his mouth. I want to see God but then again I don’t. The terror would kill me. I don’t even want to hear his voice calling in the night, no I don’t, except through the Bible, his love letter to me, or what people tell me, or my pastor, or even books. I don’t want to lose my mind.

This week I listened Winn Collier’s podcast conversation with Andrew Peterson where they talked about the communion of the saints. Winn recounts a conversation about Peterson’s father. “I told a friend yesterday who was just remembering with me, just thinking about Eugene today, appreciating the ripples of your dad's legacy. And I simply wrote back, he's never been more alive than he is right now. And with that doctrine of the Communion of Saints, I've come to realize that he's still with us, and he's joined that cloud of witnesses that are praying for us. And it's kind of rooting us on. And so I have a sense of encouragement. Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with perseverance.”

Earlier in the conversation Collier and Peterson talked about how Jesus wants to be close to us, right now, not in some apocalyptic future.  “Jesus wants to be with us in the circumstances of our lives. So he comes alongside us, enters into that, weeps with those who weep. And then this, I don't know, maybe it is impatience, but it's, I think I wonder what it would feel like if I more fully experienced Jesus as, I can't wait for you, Eric. I'm so eager to be close to you and to be reunited with you. And I, I'm not going to wait for the final resurrection in some eschatological sense. I want you now,” Eric Peterson said.

Just out of sight in my memory/mind I see Jesus climbing into a cave looking for me, the cave where I’ve joined the others who cry for the rocks to hide them from the wrath of the little lamb who was slaughtered. The rocks smell alkaline. I shiver and drop into sleep. The fierce man I see in icons, his hair parted down the middle, one eye kind, one eye frightening, ducks under a ledge. He’s no brighter than the moonlight. He touches me with his toe. He says, so gently my heart breaks, “What about there is no condemnation for those in me don’t you believe? What about what I’ve said, “Therefore do not pronounce judgement before the time, before I come, who will bring to light things hidden in darkness” (I Cor. 4: 3) Come. Come with me. I’m bringing you to the light. Bringing you to receive your commendation. He smelled like corn when the plants make love, soft and green.

Works Cited

Collier, Winn. Low in the Water: Eric Peterson — Full Conversation, Oct 28, 2024

Holy Bible English Standard Version. Crossway, 2016.

Kooser, Ted. "A Waning Moon, October 27, 5:29 Am." Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ted.kooser.1

Ross, Maggie. Fountain and the Furnace. Eugene; Wipf and Stock. 2014

Ross, Maggie. Writing the Icon of the Heart. Eugene: Cascade. 2013

Tadie, Solene. “Rod Dreher: The Renewal of Christianity in the West Will be Mystical or Not at All. The National Catholic Register. https://www.ncregister.com/interview/rod-dreher-on-living-in-wonder

The Book of Common Prayer. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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The Medusa’s hair writhes with snakes so ugly; one look and you turn to stone. The only way the hero can destroy her is not to look. He holds up his shield, wields his sword.

Back in the day, the horrors of children burning, hurricanes flooding cities, students being shot were limited to a half hour each night on the news, a newspaper cracked open in the morning, and magazines. These days we face our phones and scroll. We see the horrors peel past our eyes all day, every day. People post their losses—beloved spouses, siblings, pets. They ask for prayers. We flinch.

Our politicians curse each other and us. We think our memes will save the world.

We stare at the snakes writhing on the monster’s head. We turn to stone. She’s not even angry. She just is.

But each of us wields a marvelous shield called wonder. Sometimes it’s decked out with Northern Lights, the Big Dipper behind them, or we see a comet with her veil flying. Butterflies still dance. Squirrels scold, jumping from tree to tree. With the sun set, the horizon glows orange and then blue and then dark blue, with a star or two. The moon rises and sets, changing shape day by day.

We wield the promise from Julian of Norwich, spoken during the Plague: “All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” And that’s how we slay the monster.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective with a nod to Martin Shaw.

This was first published on WNIJ, where you can hear me read this version here.

The Medusa

Well I tried saying St. Patrick’s breastplate before bed and got walloped with one of the most terrifying dreams I’ve had in a long time. Bruce and I were walking the dogs down our road. At night. It was a darker than normal night, darker than when clouds are coating the night sky. There weren’t even city lights reflecting something. And something was after us. Don’t know if it was an out-of-control teenager driving a super duty F250 or something black that had risen from the apocalyptic dread much of the country is feeling. Electric shocks zapped me from head to toe.

I woke battered. I struggled with the blankets and felt Bruce get up. It took a few minutes to calm the tingling. My heart hurt. Everything I’d said about all will be well, looking at wonder, didn’t seem to work and I have been plunged into terror in my chest, which I suspect is a harmless arrythmia I felt nearly thirty years ago. I’d done what Paul Kingsnorth said not to do in All the World is a Myth. I have lost the peace in my heart. I’d not guarded it. But my gosh there is so much pain in the world.

Every morning I open my phone and look at the Medusa. Often I’m caught in a mental argument—what I would say if I wanted to take the time and energy and bear the flak that would fly back. I head out to walk down the road, with both dogs, where I quiet my mind and give thanks, which is hard since I’d just filled my thoughts with the latest on Facebook. Even though I have wanted to tighten up my morning and get right to my walk instead of getting sucked into my phone, I have felt helpless. The other day, I was dawdling and Omalola squatted and peed a couple of pints on the tile floor. I pulled many sheets from our one roll of paper towels and cleaned it up. Then we walked. The next few days, when I walked right out were good days.

But this week I took a gander at Ms. Medusa by reading some of my favorite Substack writers, Matt Taibbi, Micheal Shellenberger, and El Gato Malo. I support them because I believe they are doing old fashioned journalism. But I made my heart hurt.

The destruction Hurricane Helene wrought on Appalachia is beyond imagination. Pastures have been turned to mud. Crops and livestock destroyed. The dead have not all been recovered. Roads are washed out. People’s ability to make a living has been destroyed. I keep scrolling. Russia is training 10,000 North Korean troops to fight in the war in Ukraine. Iran has the bomb and has shouted Death to America. Isreal is fighting a war on two fronts. Civilians have been killed and maimed on both sides of that conflict. There is genocide in Burma, the Sudan, China.

Here in the U.S. no matter who gets elected, there will be trouble. People on the left and right are frightened by what’s next. We are terrified of each other. I have plenty of political opinions, but I keep quiet because the ensuing drama and high blood pressure aren’t worth it.  According to Jim Geraghty of the National Review people in Washington D.C. are talking about ordering plywood to cover their shop windows. Many are leaving town. Former ABC News Political analystMark Helperin says that we will go through a major mental health crisis if Trump is elected because people will wonder how we could elect someone the media and Feds have called Hitler. And yet, it’s the Biden/Harris administration that has weaponized the DOJ, FBI, Homeland Security. Under the headline, “Kamala Harris’ Hitler Focused Argument Is a Shameful Stain on her party”, Michael Shellenberger  says, “Democrats are the party of mass censorship, the weaponization of the CIA, FBI, and DHS, and the politicization of everything. What does that sound like to you?”

There is a worldwide move to censor and criminalize speech. Something that is legal to say today might land a person in prison tomorrow. Cancel culture is a precursor to this. I’ve had visions of being imprisoned for marking “Like” when el gato malo has said become ungovernable. There’s a draft of a novel sitting in the cloud that explores a home-grown militia movement born of angry farmers owing too much money on their farms back in the 80’s. The technology is there for my story to flag a giant federal computer.

The Shield

I wonder if the more we feed into this dread, the more we are enflamed with fear and anger, the more power we give the powers of darkness to bring about the very things we fear. In a recent video Jonathan Pageau emphasizes this point with regards to AI. He emphasizes how AI might turn on us. He says it’s not good to invoke foreign gods. “Bringing something up in culture, either positively or negatively is making it part of the web of relationships that is engaging in that culture. Talking about something, either for or against. You make a movie about an evil Skynet that brings about AI, that AI comes to destroy you and you think that you’re just opposing it, but you’re also participating in bringing it out because it’s now reality functions. I think when we oppose something and we do it publicly and we’re doing a whole campaign against something, you don’t realize that you’re also making it vocally more present in society and possibly it will make it manifest even more than what it was before.”

In essence it seems like all of us are invoking something awful to happen around election day. I take heart in what the Psalmist says in Psalm 34, “I sought the Lord and he heard me and delivered me from all my fears.” We need to resist by praying. Often I don’t have words to pray for government, so I pray the following from The Book of Common Prayer:

“ALMIGHTY God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage; We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of thy favour and glad to do thy will. Bless our land with honourable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogancy, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues. Endue with the spirit of wisdom those to whom in thy Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that, through obedience to thy law, we may show forth thy praise among the nations of the earth. In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in thee to fail; all which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

When I see the authoritarian noose wrapping around the world I remember Psalm 2:

Why do the nations rage

and the peoples plot in vain?

2  The kings of the earth set themselves,

and the rulers take counsel together,

against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,

3  “Let us burst their bonds apart

and cast away their cords from us.”

4  He who sits in the heavens laughs;

the Lord holds them in derision.

5  Then he will speak to them in his wrath,

and terrify them in his fury, saying,

6  “As for me, I have set my King

on Zion, my holy hill.”

 My heart still hurts. I put my hand to my chest when I walk along the road after sunset. I barely have words to talk it out with God. I listen for cars coming up behind me. I take heart in what Maggie Ross has said about we might have tears in our hearts, how they might not be flowing out of our eyes. She says, “There is no question that interior weeping occurs without actual tears—although material tears are always a blessing when they accompany this interior weeping. There is also no question that one who prays or is prayed without ceasing weeps continually, whether these tears are inward or actually emerge from the eyes” (168). Knowing that eased my tension around the anxiety). Tears would be a relief but they don’t come.

But then I opened Facebook and found this from Jon Sweeney’s Meister Eckart’s Book of Darkness and Light

When You Are Empty

When you are empty

Feeling bereft,

Or not feeling much at all,

Hesitate before trying

to fix your situation,

because this happens

to be just what

you are: a vessel

awaiting the fill

of heavenly

fulness beyond any

this-worldly feeling.

Works Cited

Holy Bible English Standard Version. Crossway, 2016.

Pageau, Jonathan. X. https://x.com/PageauJonathan/status/1828145186121425194?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1828145186121425194%7Ctwgr%5E992c78abba3a0d748c4305b3fb534e3a9109160c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthe-story-hearth.circle.so%2Fc%2Fgeneral-discussion-cd8da3

Ross, Maggie. The Fountain and the Furnace. Eugene: Wipf and Stock. 2014.

Shellenberger, Michael. “Kamala Harris Hitler-Focused Closing Article is a Shameful Stain on Her Party.”  Oct. 25, 2024 

Sweeney, Jon and Burrows, Mark.  Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light. Hampton Roads: Newburyport. 2023.

The Book of Common Prayer. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1869.

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Last week’s joy came through an abscess cut open and cleared. A relative posted a picture of my mother sitting on the couch the last Christmas she was alive. When I arrived home from grad school, her round curves were gone, but in the picture she looked the same, soft round person I’d known, but she looked tired. In a month, I would be moved to Chicago, all hell would break loose in my life, when I heard she had less than a year to live.

An abscess broke and cleared. An old scar over a wound that I thought had healed was ripped off. The pain of it roared up in the telling and I let myself sob. My spiritual director was a presence, bearing witness. And the air cleared, the joy came back. In some ways the tearing of that scar was a gift. My spiritual director has quoted James Finley: “When we risk sharing what is most vulnerable, in the presence of someone who will not abandon or invade us, we come upon the pearl of great price, which is the preciousness of our own self, our own soul.”

Tears are so easy to squelch. One of my earliest memories was my father saying, “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.” Since he brought presents home a lot, I wondered what toy it might be. Maggie Ross says in A Fountain and a Furnace, “As early as infancy work begins to train the weeping out of us, or to distort it to support delusion, lest our crying disturb the seemingly tranquil veneer of life around us” (39).

As a young woman I ran to the woods or the barn to weep, longing for Jesus to wipe those tears. In some ways He did as I cried down to quiet. Since my mother smoked, I grieved her dying. I wept for my friends to know Jesus and cried for students murdered by the National Guard. My tear-streaked face had to be hard on my parents. I am grateful I wasn’t sent to a counselor. These easy tears were a mystery until I heard whispers that tears were a spiritual gift. Maggie Ross’s The Fountain and the Furnace slows way down and explains that the spiritual gift of tears is not grief. She says, “Tears evidence the continual breaking into time of eternity of transfiguration and the vision of God even when nothing, and more than nothing, seems to be one’s lot” (168). As a young girl, I had the gift, a sense of empathy for the suffering of the world and the suffering of Jesus. These days I chafe at the blood and gore of the cross, and the pressure to hoist that thing on my back, even though Jesus says my yoke is easy, my burden is light.

Come unto me all that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. When do we get that rest? What does it look like? Chucking the nag that says whatever you do isn’t enough? Chucking the guilt that you are “by nature sinful and unclean” when it says in the Good Book that God saw all that he created and it was good, that God made man in his own image, male and female created he them. In his own image.

Then in the Discussing the Letters of Paul class, Brad Jersak explained how important the word, “live quiet lives” (I Thess. 4:11) might be for us. He said we need to learn how to rest, how to be quiet so when we die we don’t experience a tearing from living hard to stopping. “You need to sow as you walk sow rest. You prepare for rest so reap rest in the end. Instead of experiencing a tearing. If you push hard, it would be a tearing at the end. You have to build the capacity to die through a practice.” I think of an evangelical saying that we should slide into our graves burned out because that’s the way to please God. But that flies in the face of how we’re called to rest. The writer to the Hebrews calls us to rest from our works. He says “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God” (Heb. 4: 9). And the writer warns us not to reject that rest. Living into our rest, ceasing from our works, isn’t just one day a week, it’s everyday.

Albert Rossi in his Becoming a Healing Presence podcast said that there’s no way we can make ourselves righteous on our own. The appropriate prayer we can pray is “Lord be merciful to me, a sinner.” The Orthodox call it theosis and the western Christians call it sanctification. I take it to mean that we become more like Christ as we walk through our lives.

A year ago, I participated in an intention setting workshop with Annie Kip. She asks us to draw cards with mixed up images in them. This mix up is supposed to jog us into making connections that we might not have seen otherwise. I pulled a card with water drop splashing up. Water that looked like a crown. Living water that bubbles out of our hearts. God the fountain of living water, not a dry cistern. Each rain drop a crown. We are sons and daughters of the King. Maybe knowing this is the way to thread the needle between knowing our weakness before God and others and knowing who we are in God as heirs and joint heirs, where we cry Abba Father, Daddy.

Our sky has been full of marvels around here. I needed to talk to the Lord so took myself and the dogs for a walk down the road at sunset. The fear had sunk inside and I couldn’t shake it off with the Jesus prayer, so I told God about it. My gosh it was good to talk to him while the sun set and the horizon glowed with the rest of his light, some orange, some purple fading into blue. We talked and we walked.

My heart has been hurting, physically tight in my chest. I have wondered if I should go to the ER and my doctor has ordered a CT Scan of my heart to look for plaque. I asked for testing because my father died at 69, five months after my mother died. And I am turning 69. A survey from Northwest Medicine said my heart is five years older than it should be. And I am a fatty lumpkin, my weight around my belly, my pants like plumber’s pants falling off my hips.

I looked to the west and slowly it appeared like a ghost, just beyond my eyesight, like I was hallucinating, and then coming to my eyes. I opened my camera and snapped pictures and texted Bruce to come out and look. It looks like a bride, her veil streaming behind her, running to her husband, joyous and mysterious. And a portent. The ancients saw comets as warnings that something terrible was going to happen. We see them as balls of ice swinging around the sun and then out again. This one won’t appear for 80,000 years. I think the ancients were right. I have felt this dread for several years. I have been nudged to study, but to be honest I’d rather watch television or scroll Facebook. I can’t seem to hold what I read in my mind.

During Bible class we talked about the last chapter of I Thessalonians 5 where Paul talks about how we are not children of darkness but of light. One of the teachers talked about a frightened friend who is so traumatized by our election, she wasn’t sleeping. She told her friend to just walk in the light.

Paul says, “For you are all children of the light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness, so then let us not sleep as others do, but let us. Keep awake and sober” (I Thess5: 5 – 6 ESV).

Well, I can walk out in the morning and marvel at the moon setting at the same time the sun is rising. I can see the lesser light grow fat and fade and see the sun throw his light across the fields throwing my shadow on torn corn stalks coating the fields from the recent harvest. I face that light and squint, feeling the power pushing me down. I don’t like to climb the hill to the east because the light pushes me back. I squint. I listen for trucks coming at me or behind.

So how can I walk in the light when I wake up with my heart pounding, from dreams, from the fear that something awful is going to happen because we have no leader in his right mind running the country. International and internal threats are simmering. Two massive, destructive hurricanes mowed down parts of our country. There will be no easy recovery. The government we hired doesn’t seem to care about Americans.

This election gives credence to the Psalmist’s saying, “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation” (Ps 146: 3, ESV). Neither choice offers much hope for stable leadership. The current President sleeps a lot.

I screwed up my courage and asked how do we walk in the light, when you wake up afraid? I felt the kindness and humility in Bradley Jersak’s answer. If you pray, ‘All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well, when you wake up, I will.’  He reminded me that Julian of Norwich prayed this prayer during the Bubonic Plague when whole towns were wiped out.

Diana Trautwein a friend of these essays also suggested I use prayer beads to pray through St. Patrick’s breastplate before bed. “I bind unto myself today the strong Name of the Trinity, by invocation of the same, the Three in One, and One in Three.”

My dreams have not been as haunted.

I’ve been knocking off Bigelow’s Peak Energy tea and my heart is settling down. When I arrived back at the house after my morning walk, I saw our front door was wide open. I’d forgotten it doesn’t latch shut. I shut it and started calling for Smudgie, our black cat. October is a dangerous month for black cats, and even a pet cat can be hard to catch. I called, Smudgie! Smudgie! I looked through the glass in the door and there he was. I shooed the dogs in the other room and opened it. He ran in, his tail poufed out. I was so relieved and grateful my cat has a recall. I remembered our first cat Onyx, a feral we tamed, that I called from a 100 yards away to come back and he did. Kalizoo was still in the house.

While the white and gray mama cat is still here, it seems like the two brothers have disappeared. They brought the barn to life. When I did final chores they’d show up and eat, both curling around each other and rolling in the dust. It’s hard with barn cats because you don’t know if a coyote or the owl we heard in the tree the other night, or a car going too fast got them. Or they show up again like Gray did during afternoon chores.

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Way off in the distance, over the farm on the corner, where the road turns toward the tracks, I saw a murmuration, birds rising and falling, swelling and drawing in again. Faint. A rare sight by us. Though a couple weeks ago our trees were loud with starlings flocking to fly south. They crackled with their voices. Not the same as sunlight, but with the energy of animals that fly-angels.

I walk by the willows and hear red wing blackbirds. Five, six meadowlarks rise out of the field as we were driving Morgen. Two birds, one a sparrow, the other a grackle watched me from the same wire where I entertained the barn swallows. A robin drank out of our dog dish bird bath. I’m not sure why they are still here at the beginning of October.

When we went to the store, I thought I saw another murmuration, but then realized it was dust from the bean harvest. A week ago our neighbor said that he quit harvesting his field because the beans were so dry they fell out of his header. But a recent rain brought enough moisture that he was able to pick his field. On our way home we pass combines working the fields and dust billows up, dust that can clog farmers’ lungs.

Angels have been cut into trees to make room for powerlines, their wings spread wide, ready to lift up. Lift up my heart, I lift it up to the Lord.

The air in my body, soul and spirit have cleared. It’s been months, maybe years, since I’ve felt so light and joyous. I am surprised how my heart is lifting up. Debilitating fatigue and brain fog have dissipated.

It’s not like I’ve done anything spectacularly good to welcome this joy aside from chucking the guilt that any good I do is never enough, or feeling “there is no condemnation” sinking closer to my bones.

I wonder if there are angels settling down next to us on our couches, maybe sitting on electric wires along with the grackles, or watching as they sit on beams in the barn. It’s not just me that’s feeling angels’ presence. Even in storm torn Appalachia and Florida there are reports of people helping each other, chain saws singing angels’ songs. In the midst of splintered homes and businesses people extend hands to each other. Prayers rise like sheets of light in the night sky.

Despite the grinding loss brought by two hurricanes, fires out west, and political tensions, joy is in the air. Matthew Gunter, Bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Wisconsin, posted the following on Facebook, the words singing the joy I was feeling.  

Gunter quotes Frederick Buechner in Wishful Thinking: “Sleight-of-hand Magic is based on the demonstrable fact that as a rule people see only what they expect to see. Angels are powerful spirits whom God sends into the world to wish us well. Since we don't expect to see them, we don't. An angel spreads its glittering wings over us, and we say things like, ‘It was one of those days that made you feel good just to be alive,’ or ‘I had a hunch everything was going to turn out all right, or ‘I don't know where I ever found the courage.’” (1926-2022),

In the same post, Bishop Gunter added this poem: ‘The Day with a White Mark' by C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness:

Was it an elf in the blood? Or a bird in the brain? Or even part

Of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud uplifted wave

Of a journeying angel’s transit roaring over and through my heart?

My garden’s spoiled, my holidays are cancelled, the omens harden;

The planned and unplanned miseries deepen; the knots draw tight.

Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season.

It was, too. In the dark ahead the breakers only are white.

Yet I – I could have kissed the very scullery taps. The colour of

My day was like a peacock’s chest. In at each sense there stole

Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew

Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul.

As though there were transparent earths and luminous trees should grow there,

And shining roots worked visibly far down below one’s feet,

So everything, the tick of the clock, the cock crowing in the yard

Probing my soil, woke diverse buried hearts of mine to beat,

Recalling either adolescent heights and the inaccessible

Longings and ice-sharp joys that shook my body and turned me pale,

Or humbler pleasures, chuckling as it were in the ear, mumbling

Of glee, as kindly animals talk in children’s tales.

Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes?

No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends

On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself

Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.

What if the angels surrounding us are as faint and joyous as those birds swinging here and there, catching the wind to go south. What if our prayers call angels for other people to guard them and give them a shining tent full of light. Chariots of fire might be rolling along our streets. Strange four headed creatures might follow us like our dogs, watching. If we had eyes to see we might be startled by how close they are. It’s why I pray chronic prayers for some people, to hold back the powers that break us. The prayer, Keep Watch Dear Lord sending comfort to the grieving says shield the joyous.

The fields around us have been harvested. I miss my friends, the cornstalks that grew from tiny green shoots shoving aside clods of dirt to becoming elegant ladies showing off their purses. Their their dresses swished when they walked. I delighted in their perfume when they tasseled. Now their leaves are strewn on the side of the road. The view down the valley to silver grain bins is back but I miss my shadow carried by the cornstalks. When I walk out in the morning there’s a pool of quiet in these fields even though the morning roars with gravel trucks on the main road. But these fields are still a pool of quiet, with grackles gathering the pavement, grouping and flying up to the wires. And the clean, blue sky.

Nearly a decade ago I wrote this perspective about joy for our local NPR station.

“Weep with those who weep,” tells us to be empathetic to those who are grieving.

But there’s another side we don’t think about: “Rejoice with those who rejoice.” That too is a call to empathy that is just as real as the sad side.  

Brene Brown says, in Daring Greatly, “Joy is probably the most difficult emotion to really feel. Why? Because when we lose the ability or willingness to be vulnerable, joy becomes something we approach with deep foreboding.”

She goes on to elaborate on how “we don’t want to be blindsided by hurt … so we literally practice being devastated or never move from self-elected disappointment.”

There’s an old prayer people offer at night that says,

“Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake. Amen."

Even the ancients knew how rickety joy can be by asking for the joyous to be shielded.

Besides, what right do we have to feel joy when the world is so troubled these days? We are notified of, if not bombarded with, horror. Just walking into our days can drag.

So when joy billows and bellies a person’s sails -- if they are shouting for joy, or jumping up and down, or just plain feeling good -- please consider the other side of empathy and celebrate with them.

I’m Katie Andraski, and that’s my perspective. WNIJ, October 20, 2015

The other week, Bruce and I visited a local Orthodox church to learn about the Jesus prayer. It’s very small, smells of old wood and feels closer to a barn than our modern Lutheran church. All around were icons of Jesus, Mary and the saints. I kept turning back to Jesus with his olive eyes and fingers in a pose that spans religions. Father Stephen talked about The Hesychast, a book about a modern living saint, as an introduction to prayer. He warned that it could be extreme but worth reading. He offered to loan us a copy, but I said I’d order one from Amazon. It arrived a week later with Greek words on the package. It had come from Mount Athos, the mountain where monks’ prayers uphold the world. I am almost certain whoever packed this prayed for me as he was packing it, placing the label and putting it in the mail.

All that day people handed me the gifts of their stories, which added to the joy bubbling up because I felt God’s wisdom sweeping through me with more prayers to be made that sometimes fall out of words into silence, and pictures of light dancing between people. Angels are in the air I think. Writer Jon Sweeney posted the following poem, written by the late Ted Loder:

Posted by writer Jon Sweeney, (his book Sit in the Sun, about what cats can teach us about prayer is a delight.).October 11, 2024

The Rustle of Angels

by Ted Loder

God of thunderous silence,

deliver me from words

that gush, but slake no thirst,

that charm, but scour no truth,

that seduce, but conceive no intimacy.

Hush me to quietness to hear the rustle of angels

in the unaffected laughter and tears of others,

and myself;

and be stunned to awe by others’ simply inexplicable

being-there-ness,

their bodies, breathing, eye-lit-mystic beauty,

and by mine.

Ease me, Unhurried One,

into the depths of accurate listening

that, beneath the babble,

I may attend to the pleading in others’ eyes,

the longing in their smiles,

the loneliness in their slump,

the fears in their curses,

the courage in their squint,

the wisdom in their scars,

the joy in their timid loves,

the faithfulness in their beginning yet again;

that on the whispered, groaning, stammering edge

of so much hope and need and grace

I may begin to wrestle to some limp of understanding,

some tilt of trust,

some murmur of gratitude,

for this not-so-minor miracles,

for this merely beloved all of yours,

we are.

And then the skies fired up, with bellies pink as an overheated Bessemer stove. The sun itself hurled its own joy at the earth, so the sky roars with greens and reds, bars of crystal light. Were these lights angels? Mrs Horse was restless, neighing for us to bring her in, put the wood barn between her and that livid sky. At midnight I looked out the guest room window, and saw a layer of shadow, darker than night, and a row of green like cartoon trees flaring up. Through the camera I saw a tiny colored light that spun. I saw a dark spot that could be a bug, or dirt on the window, or something else. I need to check that out.

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What if God means it when he says, “there is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom.8: 1)?

What if he means it when he says, “now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, as to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever” (Jude 24 – 25). Present you before the presence of his glory--that means white hair, eyes like flames of fire, legs like burning bronze, his mouth full of words like a two edged sword--with great joy.  Do you hear that? With great joy. 

What if this is true? “Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God” (I Cor 4:5.) Did you see that? Commendation. Not condemnation.

What if God is pleased with us, like a father is pleased with his children when they learn to walk, or hit a ball in a Little League game, or befriend the lonely kid? What if our final judgement is already settled? And we will rejoice in his Presence.

What if we greet the fire that burns up wood, hay and stubble with joy because we are glad to be rid of the stuff to keeps us from shining clean and clear as a diamond?

What if our sins being put as far as the east is from the west is true? What if the saying His mercy endures forever is real? Right here. Right now.

What if the accuser of the brethren is done for. What if the story in Zechariah where Joshua the high priest is standing before the angel of the Lord with Satan at the right hand to accuse him is true, is happening right now?

Here’s how it goes. And The Lord said, “The Lord rebuke you O Satan…Now Joshua was standing before the angel clothed in filthy garments. (Our sins are as filthy rags…I think the word is rags to soak up menstrual blood.) And the angel said to those who were standing before him, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” And to him he said, “Behold I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments” (Zec 3: 1 – 5, ESV). And right there in front of the accuser, the angel dresses Joshua with white linen and a beautiful turban for his head. 

What if this is reality now even if we don’t have the eyes to see that the Lord is saying to the Accuser, Lord rebuke you.

Last week I told you how about my terror before the Wrath of the Lamb.  I feel like that whatever I do isn’t enough, that it’s a sin to feel this quiet, content and happy. Because I’m the age my father was when he died, because I will have outlived the last member of my family, I tremble at the years ahead which will be about decrease.

My spiritual companion and I got to talking about my sense of lack in doing good. She wondered if maybe the widow’s mite could also be taken to mean that little generosities, small as pennies, that don’t count for much, are greater than the ostentatious giving of the Pharisee types. Maybe God takes pleasure, no delight, in the little kindnesses we offer. When I know someone is delighted by me, by what I’m doing, I will do more of it. But when I am beat up, told how I fail, I will fold up and quit.

So often my own thoughts beat me up, bringing up past rejections, saying these are the truth of my life. My thoughts point to the slouching beast crawling over the edge of the horizon, how common sense is spinning away, how frightening that is.

Often I hear the voice: Your work is repetitive, too self-involved, you’re saying too much—all accusations that make it hard to show up at the page.

My heart was broken when I published my novel, The River Caught Sunlight because I’d run out of persistence. I have four other books that go with this one. Did I succumb to acedia, the noon day demon, and blow a decade when I could have finished and published those books? Or was my creative energy spent? Did I have to let the work go fallow, let it lie underground, under leaves and logs, like the understory of a forest? And I forget there’s a whole body of work sitting here on Substack and my blog.

Now there are days when I can hardly put two words together and I wonder if the woman who loves to read and write novels is not here anymore. The loneliness rises and aches like arthritis in a joint when a storm is coming. But then I’d finished brushing Morgen, and the opening line to this essay came to mind. Then ideas for other essays bubbled up.

In All is Well, a book that riffs on what all is well means, Albert Rossi advises, “When we become aware of black thoughts, we can use them to say a quick prayer of surrender. Rejecting dark thoughts can be an inner martyrdom, because sometimes they seem overwhelming and larger than life. But all thoughts can be our friends if we use the gloomy thoughts as an opportunity to turn to the Lord. Some of the Fathers look upon dark thoughts, logismoi, as gifts from God that we can use to turn and become prayerful” (79).

I know those kinds of thoughts well: I’ll never break out of this loneliness since I was lonely from the first day I was born. I know how to piss people off. I suck at friendship. These thoughts are so comfortable I don’t resist them.

Albert Rossi’s words brought gentle rebuke: “In the morning, afternoon, evening and night my thoughts are scattered. Much of the time I’m aware of what I’m thinking with conscious awareness, I’m thinking worrisome thoughts. I’m thinking fearful thoughts, or thoughts of just being negative, despondent, and inadequate” (79).

Rossi goes on to say, “We can use the temptation as the stimulus-cue a gift from God, to turn us to prayer” (79).The prayer he uses is the Jesus Prayer, "Lord have mercy" unless he is too busy, then he just says the Name, Jesus, which is enough to turn his attention away from the bad thoughts.

A dear friend says I’m too hard on myself. I agree, but how does a person unwind from childhood years of being told with the supposed authority of God’s word I am sinful and unclean, a wretch, and deserving of eternal punishment? 

I do not know how to undo this, except with Albert Rossi’s advice and the words that opened this essay, what if those words, “There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” are true.

Back to the vision in Zechariah. Yes, God tells Joshua to continue in following God's ways, and he wallops God’s people with the promise, “I will remove the iniquity of this land in a single day. In that day, declares the Lord of hosts, every one of you will invite his neighbor to come under his vine and under his fig tree” (Zec 3: 9 – 10, ESV). I have to think that this happened when Jesus died and harrowed hell, when he kicked death to the curb, and blew the boulder holding his grave shut, appearing very much alive, very much embodied. While I think there is a time in the future when this kind of neighborliness will rule, I think it can rule here, now, especially if we know in our bones those filthy rags have been removed, and we have been clothed in white linen. We have been clothed with Christ himself. 

Works Cited

The Holy Bible ESV. Good News Publishers ; Crossway Bibles, 2007

Rossi, Albert. All Is Well. Ancient Faith , 2020.

Katie’s Ground is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Something up in the tree, dripped, drip, drip drip, like after a rain stops but the trees are still raining. I stood in the gate looking for the northern lights because it was Autumnal Equinox when a crack opens in the magnetic fields. The sky was just plain dark except for neighbor’s yard lights. I saw through to the faint Milky Way and heard leaves rustling. There were no eyes peering back in the light. I stood next to the giant poplar tree,  where we heard the swarm of bees for the last time. I don’t know where they settled or if they’ve gone quiet in a hollow.

I found myself in a cave, where I heard the drip, drip, drip of water from rocks. My candle, my friendly candle, a light I could hold in my hand pushed back the dark. I saw how the rock made a temple, but don’t remind me of such things. The stone smelled like sulphur. I burrowed here to hide from the wrath of the lamb. Fall on me, please fall on me. I snuffed the candle. The darkness held me, comforted me. And so did the fear.

So much light outside. It hurts to see. So much love, those eyes, his eyes, accepting every part of me, my fat thighs, and protruding belly, and dry lady parts, my hooded eyes, my old lady lines that draw down my face in a frown. I pull my legs up, cross my arms, lay my hands on each side of my collar bone. The dark, the dark is a comfort. So is the fear because I know it.

My husband, a mere mortal, stands behind me, his hands gentle, says he loves me, how can I bear the Other, the good Creator’s love, so wide and broad and high and deep. Our creator who says he named the stars and comforts the broken hearted. I have felt that comfort, but not now.

Rocks, rocks please fall on me. I can’t bear the light. My husband terrified me like the fear of a lightning strike whacking the barn, my horse inside, because his love is so good and one day he will lie down in the dirt or I will, and we will be torn apart.

How can we bear to be held by love as great as the universe, that burns and thunders with more power than the sun lapping and licking at the empty cold, warming us. How can we bear the wrath of the lamb, the horrid contortions of God, stretched out on a cross. Suffering we can’t begin to fathom. The men ran, the women stayed and wept and endured like they endured the birth of their children. They waved the flies away.

The good things He gives, that He means for me to share, condemn me. I am weary of the guilt. The good Christians, the early Christians say I am blaspheming by my wealth, by holding onto closets of clothes, a garage full of stuff, a full belly. I don’t spend enough time with my horse, who stands at the gate, longing, sometimes calling, but I don’t walk out to her. I buy stuff I do not use. Dante had a special, cruel place in hell for people like me.

Lord Jesus Christ be merciful to me a sinner.

And yet I say no to the nudges that say give up Diet Coke, give all your money away, apologize to the woman who hurt you. Nudges seem to be God’s voice. Because they slide up from old sayings that say if you disobey, God will pull his blessings, that say make peace even if they are wrong.

Oh my goodness I can’t take my eyes off dreadful. Facebook in the morning, Facebook in the afternoon, Facebook in the evening when there are promises to be read, to let sink in. Promises like “I, I am he who comforts you; who are you that you are afraid of man who dies, of the son of man who is made like grass and have forgotten the Lord, your Maker, who stretched out the heavens  and laid the foundations of the earth and you fear continually all the day because of the wrath of the oppressor, when he sets himself to destroy? And where is the wrath of the oppressor?” (Isaiah 51: 12 -13, ESV) But I am powerless to stop looking. I pick up my phone.

Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world have mercy.

The day I posted my political perspectives about how our hate for each other is rising, how speech that is free today might be hate speech tomorrow, and the police will come knocking. My heart, my heart hurt so bad, I held my hands to my heart. I clutched my pearls. I breathed deep. Rain poured outside. I breathed.

I thought how my father sat down and died of a broken heart, five months after my mother’s death. I’d just complained about how hard my job was the night before. He said, “I’m proud of you.”

I shivered in the cave. The wrath of the lamb. Being naked without a body, just my soul before all that light, all that love that won't leave me be. Some Christians ask us to pray for the dead because the dead are in crisis, being cleaned up, the soap full of pumice, the soap a fire.

I used to long to go home to be with the Lord because this world hurt so much, because I love Jesus, but now that I am my father’s age when he died, I am afraid. I have outlived my brother and my mother. Now it’s time to outlive my father.

The preachers say the wrath of the lamb is refining fire, cleansing all that is not love’s kind. But have they ever walked through a foundry, seen the white-hot steel poured from cauldrons? Smelled burnt metal? I have asked to be cleaned up before I leave this earth. What have I done?

I stood under the stars again, the hayfield wide open to me. The Milky Way still looked faint. The Big Dipper dipped in front. And Cassiopeia’s double u.  Orion won’t rise until the middle of the night.

The next morning  I held a bright green creature in my hand and felt its sticky grip as he crawled on my hand. I asked Facebook what they might know. It's  a Luna moth with beautiful green wings. I wonder if I will see the moth before fall sets in, if it will lay its eggs and be done or will it arrive next spring?

The terror eased when I threw my harness on Morgen, her eyes soft. I swear the mare was glowing with joy, until I pulled the girth up tight. I played Michael W. Smith’s “Surrounded” where Smith begins by saying, “The Lord says for the spirit of heaviness put on the garment of praise. This is how I fight my battles. I’m surrounded. I’m surrounded by you.” I fastened the crupper, hooked the breast collar to the saddle and looped the reins through the harness. Morgen yawned and I slipped the bridle on. We pulled out of the barn yard and walked into the sunlight, the corn dried, wind rattling it. I looked out over her back and through her ears, felt the carriage shift over the uneven ground.  

And then there is this: “For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite. For I will not contend forever, nor will I always be angry; for the spirit would grow faint before me, and the breath of the life that I made” (Isaiah 57: 15 – 16, ESV).

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.

Katie’s Ground is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Works Cited

Smith, Michael W. “Surrounded”

. September 28, 2024.

The Holy Bible ESV. Good News Publishers ; Crossway Bibles, 2007.

(Photo by Jean Pauley)

Since we are well into election season, the following are some perspectives I wrote for our local NPR station, WNIJ, with regards to our political environment. I am reading them in chronological order.

This Label Shuts Down Honest Talk

July 19, 2016

A person can disagree with President Obama’s policies, or be afraid, or be troubled by our open borders, or question Sharia law, or think “maybe Trump.” These days a person can be white, going about their business. The name flies up: racist.

That racist label shuts down honest talk. When people are silenced, their thoughts fester and rankle, turning to rage. They find presidential candidates who “tell it like it is” refreshing. They vote their anger.

When someone called me a racist, I sobbed. When my boss arranged for a meeting to address micro-aggressions as a response, my heart hurt so bad I almost called 911. And then I said, “Fine. You think I’m a racist. Then I’m a racist.”

In some ways, we’re all wired to beware of the Other, with a fight-or-flight instinct that saved the ancients. But I step back horrified. I refuse this name. I choose to offer hospitality to people who trouble me.

I think about the famous Jesus saying. “Don’t take the splinter from another’s eye, if you’ve got a log in yours.” If I see racism in someone else, then maybe, just maybe I might want to examine my own racist tendencies—those quick thoughts that repel me from the Other.

And another thing: We tend to find what we’re looking for. If we look for racists, we’ll find them. If we look for good people, we’ll find them as well.

I’m Katie Andraski, and that’s my perspective.

If you’d like to see the original post, click here.

Machetes, Mean Speech, and Genocide

September 11, 2018

 My machete slices through the weeds, the stems bleeding milk, a plant toxic to my horses. When I shopped for one, blades three times as large as a kitchen knife, one edge serrated like a saw, creeped me out. The opening credits to Hotel Rwanda flickered through my thoughts. —“The Tutsi rebels, they are cockroaches…we will squash the infestation”--Machetes, the weapon neighbors used against neighbors. When I hear people calling President Trump’s supporters, fascists, Nazi’s, Russian bots, I hear language that justifies violence.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in Not in God’s Name says “pathological dualism sees humanity as radically…divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. (51). He cites the steps to genocide. “Pathological dualism does three things. It makes you dehumanize and demonize your enemies. It leads you to see yourself as the victim. And it allows you to commit altruistic evil, killing in the name of the God of life, hating in the name of the God of love, and practicing cruelty in the name of the God of compassion” (54).

We are sliding quickly towards committing altruistic evil, thinking we are cleansing society of the Nazi, the white supremacist, the people who voted for Trump. We need to back out of our righteous hatred. We need to know people are more than their politics and find common ground—as Americans, as people living in bodies that share the same pains and joys. If we don’t, I fear the machetes will flash, the bullets will fly, burying themselves in fellow American’s bodies.

I’m Katie Andraski. That’s my perspective.

If you'd like to hear me read this, click here.

Is Trump a Prophet for Our Times?

July 30, 2019

Back in the day, prophets wore animal skins, ate locusts and honey, stood by rivers, cried, “Repent!” These days, Donald Trump calls us to repentance. After all, hasn’t he risen out of the sea of our culture like the beast in Revelation?

The fact we elected Trump as president points to our flaws as a culture. He’s a narcissist, convinced only he can solve our nation’s problems. But don’t we shrug off help, certain we can do it ourselves? And haven’t we made selfishness a virtue calling it self-care or following our dreams, while our loved one’s cry for our attention?

To him, women are sexual objects. But don’t our music, dance, movies, commercials objectify men and women? He has not kept his marital promises. But do we see people keeping those promises in popular culture? Do we? He is blunt and bullying, crude. But aren’t we just as rude? Consider road rage. And how mean late-night TV and Twitter have become.

Trump stirs up trouble. But doesn’t the twenty-four-hour news cycle work trouble like a loose tooth? How many of us seek drama instead of peace? Or gather people who aren’t good for us?

How are we guilty of supporting those same things? Maybe we should consider our behavior. I think of Martin Luther King admonishing us to examine ourselves before we protest. Maybe we should look at our discomfort with regards to Trump’s behavior, see how he is reflecting us back on ourselves, and change our ways.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

If you'd like to read the original post, click here.

The Wildflowers

September 17, 2024

During my walk, I saw a honeybee nursing on Bee balm. Queen Anne’s lace spread her doilies over the grass. Milk weed towered with shell like pods, soon to erupt in silk. Corn flowers have sopped up a bit of sky in their petals. Clover blossoms purple. Brown-eyed Susans chatter. A goldfinch bobs along ahead of me. I’ve watched the corn grow from bare fields so tall I feel tiny walking next to it. The tassels are like church spires, the ears like women’s purses.

Then one day I hear a roar as the road commissioner drops his bat wing brush hog. He does a fine job lopping off the grass and flowers. Soon the combine will sound like a monster chewing the corn stalks, refining the cobs to gold kernels that don’t pay much on the commodities market.

There’s a machine dropping its batwing cutter, working its way around the world, chopping people’s freedoms to say what they think, in the name of safety and rules about hate speech and misinformation. Elon Musk and X have been kicked out of Brazil. The EU has threatened X with fines if Musk livestreams a conversation with Donald Trump. Pavel Durov of Telegram has been arrested in France for not ratting out his clients. Mark Zuckerberg has admitted to censoring true stories because the federal government pressured him to silence them.

Do we want to cut the beauty and variety of human opinion in the name of safety? Who decides what’s misinformation?

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

If you'd like to hear me read this, click here.

With much trepidation, I'd like to share some thoughts about this. 

“The dehumanizing language towards Trump and his followers is leading us to genocide,” I said. I was commenting in the National Review Plus group on Facebook. For the most part it’s been a safe place to offer opinions and be treated kindly. I very much appreciate the variety of viewpoints. No one is in lockstep.

“You’re a threat to democracy,” the gentleman said.

“Are you seriously saying that?”

He deflected by asking me to back up what I said. Then his friend jumped in with his , “You’re MAGA. Trump’s a lunatic” comment. Both of these men are known trolls. (Since I couldn’t find the actual conversation, this is my best reconstruction.)

No I’m not MAGA. I am holding my nose and voting for Trump because the Democratic machine scares me.

The other day I watched a video of Matt Gaetz grilling General Matlock about General Mark Milley’s policy that warned Christian and pro-life soldiers that they were considered a terrorist threat. Matlock evaded the question whether any soldiers had be disciplined for their faith.

It’s troubling the insult has ratcheted up from racist to terrorist threat. That’s a dehumanization that people warned against being turned on Moslems after 9/11, yet threat to democracy is being hurled at MAGA and anyone who might vote for Trump. In “Rachel Madow and The Madman” Sasha Stone says, “When the media narrative dumps so much hate and fear on the American public, it puts a price on Trump’s head. It’s not for money but for status inside utopia. Who will be the one who saves the country and the world from the axis of evil that is Trump and Putin?

“No movement can survive if its survival depends on the other half of America not existing anymore. That seems to be why more and more people are being drawn in by the alliance of Trump and RFKJr,”

Stone’s last statement is chilling. Let me repeat. “No movement can survive if its survival depends on the other half of America not existing.” People’s fear of MAGA, of rural America has been so enflamed that a gay university professor said he was afraid to drive through our rural neighborhood and drove miles out of his way to avoid it. (If a person lands in a ditch my neighbors will go out of their way to help.)

My spiritual director has said she talks to people from the left side who are afraid of the right side, just as I am afraid of what the Democratic machine will do to me and my neighbors. It’s the fear and outrage that’s the enemy. Both sides are guilty of working the wedge between us. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric is no church service. But neither is Harris’ or the news media or academia or Hollywood. What are your feelings when I confessed I will hold my nose and vote for Trump? How do you feel when people say they will vote for Harris? Perhaps mark these feelings, see what they are telling you. See if you can replace them curiosity, with an openness to the other person’s perspective. Maybe ask questions and put your quick response on the back burner. Listen.

I am sharing these thoughts cautiously because I don’t want my views on politics to block our friendship. There’s more to me and more to you than our political perspectives. But I trust you to hear me. Thank you so much for being here and listening.

Some  journalists I recommend, whose perspectives make the most sense and who offer a different take on the news are Bari Weiss of the Free Press, Michael Shellenberger of Public, and Matt Taibbi of Racket. El Gato Malo is a hoot because he uses cats to make his point.

Finally let me leave you with a poem.

Before Harvest

The first summer Mr. Miller planted winter wheat,

he brought us a jar with a red rose on the lid

full of seeds smooth as fannies. He handed them

to my mother to show her what he would be planting.

She said yes seeds were good as kittens to teach

her children about life. The first day I took

Social Studies, we read about store-bought bread.

I told the teacher I knew about the wheat part.

"Just read the page," she said.

Before harvest, we drove to church and stopped

past our lawn. In a fog, spiders wove webs

like Queen Anne's lace as far back as the woods.

I would have begged my parents to stop and watch

until the sun if I'd known the webs would break.

Katie’s Ground is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I first saw the barn swallows peeking out of a nest in the barn. Then they'd moved to a second nest when they were about to fly. A small flock swept in and out, restless, demanding I leave. Imagine being so close to all that flight, to be in the midst of all that fierce, frantic joy. One hovered for a second right in front of me. I was so busy snapping pictures, I missed when the young ones dropped out of the nest. The nests latched onto rafters are impossible for cats to get to.

I've watched them waltzing with dragon flies weaving in and out of their flight. They seem so full of joy. Or at least what I wish I felt living my life. I wish I could find a sense of play—here as I write, as I walk the dogs, and tend to Morgen. Mostly I feel guilt for what I don’t do. Overwhelm sets in. And I doom scroll because I can’t take my eyes off what looks like western culture’s death spiral. Instead of watching the goodness soaked in the world, like the swallows, and walking and the quiet dog beside me, who sometimes wants to sniff, I am no better than the people bowing before Nebachadnezzer's image.

When I walked this week, the sparrows lined up on the electric wires watching. Even though they are plain, they are the most beautiful birds, with white chests and brown collars at their throats, deep blue almost black backs, and hooked wings, that sweep and dip when they drop into the air. According to Whistler Naturalists, "barn swallows are steeped in myth and legend.  The Barn Swallow is said to have consoled Christ on the cross, and in many areas superstitious farmers believe that nesting Barn Swallows bring good luck to their farm."  All About Birds from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, says, "According to legend, the Barn Swallow got its forked tail because it stole fire from the gods to bring to people. An angry deity hurled a firebrand at the swallow, singeing away its middle tail feathers." The site also notes, "Although the killing of egrets is often cited for inspiring the U.S. conservation movement, it was the millinery (hat-making) trade’s impact on Barn Swallows that prompted naturalist George Bird Grinnell’s 1886 Forest & Stream editorial decrying the waste of bird life. His essay led to the founding of the first Audubon Society."

A few years ago, we rescued a fledgling and set him on a shelf, with meal worms and seeds. We think he survived to fly onto the wire between the barn and the shed. I like to think that he’s brought his family back, that there’s some memory of our kindness in the flock. I imagine I carry enough light for the birds watch me like I'm a parade worth lining up for. But I’m no saint. Just someone who walks the same road, day after day, giving thanks. Or maybe like the legend, they are consoling me as I carry my cross, the sometimes feeling  forsaken. 

I will miss the barn swallows dancing over the fields and in the barn as they flock and fly as far south as Argentina. I hope they make it through the huge whirling blades of the wind mills south of us that are so big we see the blinking red lights from miles away. Their return next spring is something to hope for.

On 9/11 I read how a former student wrote that she remembered leaving my 8 am class. In her next class she watched the second jet hit the tower in real time.  As a dutiful person who keeps going no matter what, I continued teaching that day. If I remember rightly, I let my students talk the rest of the day, or maybe I turned to a grammar lesson. 9/11 marked our cry for safety at all costs and the surveillance state threw out a broad loop we welcomed, a loop that is slowly wrapping around the world. 

Autumn 2024 feels more sad than usual with the corn drying, corn plants that feel like mini forests and friends as I’ve walked beside them and watched them grow from bare ground. I’ve missed the view down the valley, but it was worth it, to watch life take hold, the plants opening to sun, dirt, chemical, and shooting up in praise. I smelled the sweet fragrance of tassels sending down silks making kernels. Now the plants are dying, soon to be slaughtered by combines, turned into harvest. I look across to The Tree and notice a patch of brown leaves, way too early for an oak to turn brown. 

My heart hurts. My father died at 69, and I will be that age in a month. I will have outlived every member of my family. As heart wrenching as their falling asleep was for me, each of them passed during their prime, without the indignity of decline. Bruce and I are sliding towards illness and frailty. We’ve been on our farm for nearly 20 years. Someday we’ll need to leave. One of us will die and the grief will yawn, so wide neither one of us will barely stand it. We live in a culture that that doesn’t value friendship and with no family, well, my heart hurts. Paul Young says not to take up residence in the future. He says God can only be with us in the present. But on this day I can’t help but know that major loss, heart rending grief, pain, loneliness are headed our way. Perhaps there is promise in being a solitary like Julian of Norwich. Perhaps there is promise that Jesus knew these things and worse were headed his way. My heart hurts.

When I pray for people who are grieving, I pray for the Lord to be present, because He offers a fellowship of suffering. Somehow grief is easier if someone is sitting with us, even if that Person sits with us by faith. He has wiped away my tears here and now. I pray for tears when they are needed. I pray for comfort when it's needed. I pray God sends friends to listen and to shoot the breeze.

In a recent podcast, “God is More Exciting than Anything”, Chris Green talks with Dr. Jill Williams about suffering. She says, “But I think so many things strike me about, it says at Fathers and Mothers, one is that they don't undertake asceticism for its own sake. It is a form of spiritual warfare. They recognize that the world is fallen, and there are things that work in it, which need us Christians to stand against.

“And so they are great prayer warriors, allowing themselves to enter into real furnaces of temptation and places where they have to, the only way they can resist is by absolute commitment to concentrating on God and not thinking about themselves. So, I mean, that sense of being willing to enter into the furnace on behalf of the world, again, a very particular calling, don't let's all feel we have to do it. Don't do this at home.”

Like I said,  I'm not saint material. But this idea of prayer, of spiritual disciplines as standing against the powers of darkness, strikes me like bell. That maybe saying no to something as trivial as Diet Coke might mean more than just abstaining from a favorite drink.

For a few days night time has pinched off sunlight. We wake to light that looks like we might get rain but it’s only the sun not topping the horizon. One more thing. On the way home from church, I cussed as we dropped down to cross the tracks. Bruce kept driving. On top of the railroad crossing gate sat a rough looking owl. By the time Bruce stopped, he dropped off and flew behind the sumac. He too said something like the swallows. What I don't know. 

An Old Friend Comes to Visit

Funny, right after I wrote the woe-is-me Ghosted piece and posted it, many people responded with kindness, with I’ll be your friend on Facebook. And then I felt overwhelmed, when would I have time to start these new friendships?

Our new neighbors stopped by and visited with us for a few hours. We have similar interests and like us they are working on making an older house and its land more itself. They are inspiring me to maybe invite our neighbors over because it’s important to know our neighbors.

On Facebook, I saw Linda was headed this way from the badlands. Since we live close to 90, I gave her a shout and suggested she stop and see us. She would be here in six hours.

 Linda showed me pictures of high school friends, some of whom looked the same and others who looked wildly different than how I remembered them.

She said we were on a bus going somewhere, though I don’t remember what trip it was because I never went on those overnight trips and I was talking about my faith. The cute, popular guys were all arguing with me. “How could you believe the virgin birth?” 

Linda said she never forgot how I did not back down even though there were five against one. I was like that back then, taking stands for Jesus and conservative politics. I know I wrote their names on my list and doggedly said prayers for them. 

 One of the things that scares me the most is that I won’t take a stand for Jesus when the time comes. And I think that time is coming.  

I remember the question: What would you do if someone came to church and asked if you followed Jesus. If you said yes, you’d be killed. I was about three years old.  To this day I worry about how I’d answer. During the pandemic, Pastor Rub said he worried about the same thing. I’ve never heard a pastor share this worry. He shared the story Corrie Ten Boom shared about how her father said he’d give her the tickets when it was time for her to ride on the train but not before. Jesus himself has said not to worry about what we say, that the Holy Spirit will give us the answers we need. So maybe Linda’s memory that I stood up for Jesus, is a promise that I will hold fast when the time comes. Maybe our prayers, our hospitality, even loving our spouses and walking our dogs and mucking out stalls and watching swallows swoop and wheel are quiet ways of holding fast.

In the mornings the sun shines just right and reflects off water in the sink. It throws a dancing reflection on the wall. I like to think the light of the water is not just sunlight catching water in the sink, the angles just right. What if science isn’t the only story. What if it’s the living light of Christ and the fountain of living water, flashed up on the wall.

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Works Cited

Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "Barn Swallow." https://allaboutbirds.org/guide/Barn_Swallow/overview Sept 15, 2024

Gotz Max. "Barn Swallow; Hirundo Rustica" https://www.whistlernaturalists.ca/single-post/barn-swallow-hirundo-rustica Sept. 15, 2024 

When a commander of the Syrian army showed up at the king’s doorstep, saying he’d heard he could be healed in Israel, the king tore his clothes. I couldn’t blame him. Why would we want to help the man who burned our towns? Would The Name help someone successful in battle against us? I could barely stand seeing his gorgeous silks in tatters. I broke out in a cold sweat.

My boss, Elisha, stood a little straighter, the kind of straight that said he was going to say something we didn’t want to hear. “What’d you do that for? Send him to me, so he may know there’s a prophet in Israel.”

I followed him back home, feeling sorry for the king’s finery. What I wouldn’t give for that ripped silk and linen. My sack cloth scraped my shoulders. When Elisha handed the shift to me, he said, “This is good for mortifying the body, so you can hear God.” My skin never got used to the burlap scraping it. But he wore the softest blue cotton. He and God chatted all the time.

“He’s here,” I announced. Naaman’s retinue was something to see. Those fine horses, glistening in the sun, their ears forward and alert. I could feel their power. The chariots carved wood, with gold overlay. His robes were silk dyed purple and red. The mountains were pale blue in the distance.

 “You talk to him,” Elisha said, his mouth full.  A drop of yogurt sat on his lip.  

“He wants to see you.” The back of my neck prickled. My legs felt like they were wrapped in brambles.

“Tell him to wash in the Jordan seven times and his flesh will be restored. You want to be a prophet, here’s your chance.” Elisha patted his mouth and reached for a peach.

“He wants to see you,” I repeated. My nose stung with the acid rising in my throat.

“Men like that don’t like to be kept waiting.” Elisha took a long swallow of wine.

Naaman’s skin was crusted over. Patches oozed blood and pus. He stank. My voice wavered. My throat felt like someone grabbed it or I was about to cry. My tongue felt fat.

Naaman’s voice sounded like the very trumpets we heard when they charged our armies. I shivered. “Your prophet doesn’t have the decency show his face and call on the Name? Does he know who I am?  Are not the clear, fruitful rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel?”

He could slice off my head with one stroke. I stood mute, my throat closed.

He whirled his chariot around, those beautiful black horses, their mouths gaping, the gold glinting in the sun, his purple robes flying in the wind. He left me standing in dust.

“Not so easy being a prophet. Looks like you need to wash in the Jordan too.” Elisha handed me a handful of grapes.

“I’m good.” No way did I want to go near Naaman the fierce. What if it didn’t work? But Elisha and The Name never failed to make a miracle. I’ve seen some things—oil poured into vessels so a woman could pay her creditors; a child born to a barren couple; the child dead and then raised; poison stew made healthy, an iron ax floating to the surface of water.

When he returned, Naaman’s flesh was like a baby's. He smelled like wind across water. “The Name, is a Name above all names. Blessed be He.” Naaman’s eyes glistened like water seeping from rocks.

My breath caught as he unpacked beautiful silk robes like his. I’ve never seen something so fine. Already I could feel the smooth cloth on my reddened skin. “Please accept these offerings,” he said.

“No, no.” Elisha held his palms up. His face lit up like the sun just topping the horizon. “Healing by the Name. There’s nothing to pay.”

What? Are you serious? All my life, I’ve wanted to wear silk. Think of the people we could help with silver. I thought this. I didn’t dare speak a word.

Naaman knelt, his head bowed. “Let me take some ground, so the Name will know to find me? I won’t sacrifice to any god, but the Name. But please pardon your servant.” I felt a thrill. This powerful man called himself a servant before Elisha, dressed in pale blue cotton. “May the Name pardon me, when my master leans on me, when he worships our god.” Naaman’s eyes were dropped. His voice quiet.

Elisha laid his hand on Naaman’s shoulder. “Peace be with you.”

Everything rattled. The horse’s harness. The wooden shafts. The wheels rolling. But when the chariots were a billow of dust in the distance, I ran. I ran so hard I lost my breath. Already I could feel the silk laid across my shoulders, and under my hands. When I caught up, he asked, “Is everything all right?” his eyes surprisingly kind.

Yes, yes. It’s fine. But two prophets we’re mentoring just arrived. They need some clothes. Our provisions are low.

“Take two talents and changes of clothes.” A couple servants carried them to my hovel. I ran my hand over the silk. I tried on one of the robes. Oh my goodness I felt like a proper prophet who could tell the king what he didn’t want to hear. I felt the confidence of the commander. My skin didn’t hurt.

Outside, I heard Elisha’s voice.  “Where have you been?”

I dropped the cloak on my bed and stepped out.

“Nowhere.” My throat went tight, yet again.

I don’t know what I was thinking that I could pull a fast one on my bald old boss.

“But I saw where you went, how Naaman turned to greet you, gave you those garments and silver. Is it a time to accept orchards and vineyards sheep and oxen?” He quoted Solomon, A time to be rich. A time to be poor. A time to build up. A time to cast down. Listen to the times. We’re at war. It’s not a time to rely on anything but the goodness and beneficence of the Lord. Naaman’s leprosy will settle on you.”

I saw it like a murmuration of birds whirling up from the Jordan, swooping here and swooping there until it landed on me, and I turned white as snow. My joints began to ache. As the days went on, I looked more like a lizard. What happened to the clothes and talents? We gave them to the families who lost their homes in the Syrian raids.

My name was taken out of the story. Gahezi. My name is Gahezi. I’m still here. But still my eyes were opened like they’d never been opened before.

Remember I said my boss had that glint in his eye when he told the king where Syrians were going to ambush us? Well, his telling came back to bite us. We woke up one morning, surrounded by an army of chariots and horses. If Naaman’s horses and chariots were fearsome, these were terrifying. But still beautiful. Fearsome as a storm, with its wall rolling across the sky. Was this the end? Was Elisha’s power a match for this?

“Elisha. Elisha. What are we going to do? Look at that army. We are surrounded.” My voice wailed like a babe's.

He patted my shoulder. "Don’t you see? We have our own army." He heard the terror in my eyes. “Lord open his eyes, so he can see.” He might as well have said, "Peace be still,” his voice was so quiet."

The mountain range was full of chariots and horses glowing white hot, flames whipping off their manes and tails. The chariots were on fire but not burning up. They were bright as the sun angled into the sky. My eyes hurt. My ears rang with neighing, otherworldly neighing.

When the Syrians charged our town, Elisha prayed, “Lord strike them with blindness.”  The soldiers and horses looked like fish circling, confused by sharks. Their shouts were full of terror, just like mine had been. Elisha spoke, "Whoa. Whoa" to the captain's horses. They stopped, nostrils flaring, eyes white rimmed.

“I’ll take you where you need to go,” he said. He climbed into the chariot. He drove them right to the center of our country. Right to the king’s doorstep.

“Should we strike them?” The king asked. He was wearing the clothes I took from Naaman. They looked good on him.

“No set bread and water before them,” Elisha said. “Treat them like honored guests.”

And so the king made a big feast. The bread. The wine. The figs and olives and lamb. Then he sent them away. We had some peace.

My name is Gehazi. My name was put back in the story when I told the king about the miracles Elisha had done. The Shunammite woman made a place on her roof for us to stay. Elisha asked what could we do for her? I said she needed a son. You’d think he’d see her husband was old and there were no children. So Elisha told her she’d have a son in a year.  Gehazi. My name is Gehazi. But gorgeous silk and silver I could barely carry meant more to me than The Name. The Shunammite woman walked into the king’s court just as we were talking. She came to ask for her land back. Because Elisha sent her away because of the famine.

I was one of the lepers who crept into their camp because we’d either die of starvation or die by the Syrians’ sword. But they had fled because they heard what I’d seen when Elisha patted my shoulder--Chariots and horses of fire from the Name. We gathered food and clothes and even their horses. Everyone ate. Elisha patted my shoulder. I could feel the warmth of his hand spread from my shoulder through my body. The leprosy fled. I shrugged on a silk robe I’d picked off the ground when the Syrians fled.

One day I was dressed to speak to the king, telling him how Elisha raised a boy from the dead, dead from sunstroke, a good woman’s only son, when she walked into the court. I couldn’t believe my eyes. She’d been gone for years like Naomi who brought us Ruth, David’s great-grandmother. She was seeking an audience so her land could be returned.

 “Yes, yes I am the woman whose son was raised. He was dead as long as it took to run to Mount Carmel and back to my home.” The king marveled. My heart lifted up to see her son, grown and handsome, to remember the frantic run to lay Elisha’s staff on his face. The quiet when Elisha laid his body down on the son. Elisha getting up and walking around. And the seven times the boy sneezed as he came back to his mother. Of course, the king ordered her land be returned to her.

Before I close my story, I want to tell you I went to the Jordan to wash after Naaman left, after my skin turned white. I saw a bright figure, shining as those chariots of fire, but mild too, joy and sadness on his face. I saw him lean into a man’s arms, the man wild like Elisha who dipped the shining man in the Jordan river. I saw him walk out of that water and walk away from all of us into the wilderness.

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My horse died. One by one my horse friends decided I didn’t make the cut in their busy lives. “I don’t want to have lunch with you,” said one friend. Another was done after I canceled lunch. The others mostly sank in silence. I sat down in front of the pony barns at the Boone County Fair, people driving by with their horses and carriages and started to say how horse people are mean. My friend would have listened if I’d kept talking.  But why lay that on her? They aren’t really mean. Just busy. When someone stops doing a hobby, often the friendship fades. And with Tessie dead, a wide river grew between me and the barn where I used to ride. There was a bridge that I didn’t want to cross.

Riding lost its charm. Even though Tessie could bolt for no reason, and rattled me, we had a long relationship of good rides and long talks with friends on the trails. Even though Mrs Horse is more honest, I feel safer driving her than riding. She hears my voice. She has come back to me. I pull her out of the barn and drive around the fields. It’s not so much work as trailering her to the barn. Bruce can share the fun.

But these days I merely scratch Morgen's back and belly with my curry, her nose curling in pleasure. I pile her hay in the paddock. I see ads for people saying they don’t spend enough time, so the pony is for sale and I wonder if the next place would pay any more attention than the place the pony already knows. I need to find my way back to working with Mrs. Horse. My grief over Tessie has been that wide river, with a bridge I don’t cross even with Mrs. Horse, who calls, looking eagerly over the fence when I come out.

I read memes saying, “Build a circle of friends who are genuine and safe energetically and mature spiritually. Friends who hold space and not animosity. Who are compassionate, not judgmental. Who take time to check on you and your progress. Who grow through life with you, hold you accountable and wish you well.”

Who has all these qualities? Who never slips up and vents or gossips or is just plain grumpy? It seems our culture urges us to shun people we find toxic. But in some ways aren’t we all?

When I’ve been ghosted, my texts not answered, I can be so angry and so hurt and wonder if I should keep playing the silence game or blurt, “How have I offended you?” But I’m too angry to offer the soft answer turning away wrath. I’d only bring grievous words, and we’d all be stirred up. What good would that do? These former friends took up space in my head. You know the kind, where you start thinking about what you would say if given a chance. And again you start speaking your defense in your head. And again. And it has to stop. 

I’ve heard counselors’ advice: “You’re not that important.” “It’s none of your business what they think.” “They’re not your tribe.” “It’s not about you. Their plate is full.” “You don’t know what they are suffering, be kind. Be kind.”

So instead of telling them off in my head, I do what I’ve done in the past. I’ve used my hurt as a cue to pray some kind of blessing. Simply, Lord bless them. This breaks up the bad thoughts. Tosses good wishes at the hurt.

Offense rises like a dead thing. Fingers grab my throat. Tears seep.

All the rejection for the last sixteen years opens that loneliness wound. I have shown people who I am and they have walked away because I did not make the cut. But I too I have walked away from good people, good friends because our paths diverged. I got busy.

I reflect on how I’ve been lonely since I was a baby. My mother experienced major losses—her father died, her mother-in-law died, her father-in-law came to live with us and then died, my father’s sister died all in the span of a few years. A neuropsychologist told me that a depressed mother can do more damage to a child than a schizophrenic one. As an adolescent I’d go off into the woods praying, crying to be held. A pain that wasn’t solved until Grad School Sorta Boyfriend made out with me.

I’d buried my parents and brother by the time I was thirty-two. My relatives were too far away to be much comfort.  Not going to the barn, the wide river between me and them, the barricaded bridge, rhymed with how I lost my family, my birth family and my relatives in that awful season after my brother died, because I found the barn soon after he died, and felt like I’d gone home. I found friends there.

I’m shocked how these wounds and sorrows and fear rise from something so trivial as having my text ignored. 

I finally run my anger and hurt through the Paradox prayer: “Even though I am obsessing and angry I am loved and accepted by God. Even though I am obsessing and angry I love and accept myself. Even though I am obsessing and angry I will trust you God.” I ask Jesus what he thinks because that’s what you do after the Paradox prayer and the answer came, “Shake the dust of your feet. If a village doesn’t receive you, shake the dust.”

Grief and anger and loneliness can whirl together, can call down darkness.

I’ve been reading Albert Rossi’s  book, All Is Well. He talks about how his night dreams can leave him unsettled. When he wakes he says, “I can instantly feel shamed and guilty for something I didn’t do, didn’t want to do, and don’t want to do…But God does give me the grace to pray when I am aware of these thoughts, which are basically lies” (31). He urges we remain calm in the middle of strife. And says, “We can repeat without fully comprehending all is well” (32).

I figured after posting about how we might find Paradise here, now, that I’m shaking my fist at the powers of fear that seem to have taken over our world. (Rightly so.) When we do what Albert Rossi urges, “Affirm all is well. Julian of Norwich, in the midst of great suffering, spoke, ‘All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well’” we are defying the powers that want us afraid and outraged.

I repeat the Jesus prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.” I pray, “I don’t know how to be a friend.” I find I’m back in beginner’s mind with a skill I should know as a 68-year-old. I have seen how I have botched friendship—given too much advice, focused on someone’s drama when that’s the last thing they want to talk about, just plain been clumsy. And needy.  My gosh have I been needy. Or I have listened, not telling my story, defying the rule: I share. You share. People don’t like being asked “how are you?” And sometimes that’s all I have because I don’t remember enough details to ask a good question.

The other day Bruce and I walked the dogs in the half hour after the news and before the Bachelorette. We saw barn swallows swooping and playing, with moves as complicated as a ballroom waltz.  Dragonflies threaded their way through their flight. Were they hunting or swinging with the joy of flight? I saw two Monarchs joined together. Maybe they are prepping to fly south. It was a beautiful, magical, joyous sight. Then we heard a roar, loud and frightening like the truck that was burning rubber in front of our house. And it broke the magic. We walked the dogs back to the house. 

The next morning one of the “ghost gals” posted a note under a dog picture saying my dog looked lovely. Another one said yes we can have lunch someday. And another one thanked me for a congratulations. None of them are close but it felt good that they dropped a sentence my way. This felt like a kindness from Jesus. Solitude returns.  I give thanks for my current good friends.

And yes I've been invited back to the barn to ride, so the welcome is there.

I take my morning walk with Omalola. I can hardly believe my eyes. Deer have turned the corner on the neighbor’s corn field. They stop. See me. Pause. Then whirl and bound across the bean field, the beans like high water up to their flanks. I listen to a breeze rattle the corn. I glance down. A drop of dew has caught the sunlight. I could almost pick up a diamond. We walk to the corner where they stood. Omalola stops. Looks at me. Turns to sniff where they stood.

I am taking down the barricade and walking over the bridge. Oh my goodness it's high over the water, sunlight cups  the waves. It rocks in the wind.

Works Cited

Rossi, Albert. All is Well. Chesterton, Ancient Faith. 2020

If you'd like more information about the Paradox prayer and integration healing, Go to the Companioning Center Offerings.

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Earlier in this summer, Peggy, a Facebook acquaintance, noted she was traveling through a town nearby. I piped up, “Why don’t you come and visit?” She’d gone north, heading for the badlands, and turned around to stay over for a night because of my post about how I believe that small and hidden are just as much evidence of God’s blessing as people with large followings. While I was cleaning, I wondered what was I thinking? I am not good at hospitality, but felt like a door opening.

We put Peggy up on her way out west and her way back. She has a gift of giving people words from the Lord that encourages and guides them. At her conferences she paints pictures for each attendee with messages from God. She told stories of being in the right place at the right time to help people. But I felt uneasy being with a prophet who might know more about me than I’ve revealed. I put my hands up saying, "I’d been hurt by past prophets. I’d been told about a black blob hovering behind me, about being a rainbow wrapped in chains, how I should try to be a famous writer." That last felt like branches laid down, at a time when all I could do was write these online essays and read perspectives for our local NPR station because my brain was so overwhelmed.

Peggy listened to my hesitation.  We swapped stories, ate ice cream, and gave some attention to Mrs. Horse. Several times she said, “This is your little piece of paradise.” Our farm is so ordinary, her comments went by me. We spent a year renovating it, our contractor, was a carpenter like the one we know from 2000 years ago. All those decisions in the wake of the NIU school shooting, were sometimes heart wrenching. For several years the house felt like a horse tense and ready to buck. I think the house resented all the changes we made—opening up the staircase, which was creepy and haunted when we first visited the house. We unhinged several doors, and moved them to the shed. Closed doors give me the willies. We added a bathroom, made a bedroom smaller so I could have a walk in closet, redid the kitchen. We rewired, and replumbed the place. Since the furnace was dangerous, we installed a new geothermal heat plant. But no house likes their clothes ripped off, with months of standing naked in the cold winter winds, while the new clothes were fashioned. The house resented us for some time after.

At any rate, I thought nothing of Peggy’s paradise comment until bees swarmed on our farm twice. Bruce and I heard them when were walking behind our chicken yard. We have a path that runs behind our yard, that gives the dogs a little longer walk and I don’t have to pick up their poop. Logs from the dead pines, Bruce toppled and cut and hauled lie next to the path. Slowly he is burning them. We heard the bees before we saw them clumped up in elderberry bushes and scrap that grow along our septic line. They probably split off from the hive in the walls of our milk house, a hive that has been there for several years. Back then the local beekeeper wondered if they would survive the winter. They did. And they have survived the assorted sprays when farmers treat their crops.

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Then one day when we were walking back to the house, from throwing the ball for Omalola she walked over by the fence. I thought she was staring at. Mrs Horse who was staring back, not happy that I was playing with Omalola when I could have been playing with her.  No, Omalola wasn’t in a staring contest with the horse, she was watching a swarm of bees looking like a beer belly hanging down from our fence. I snapped a few pictures and called her back. People have said honeybees are gentle. I was glad they didn’t sting Omalola.

At a loss for what to do, I grabbed a honey bottle with the name and number of a local beekeeper. I sent him a message, but he was out of town. “Sometimes they stay for ten days then leave.” Our neighbor said the bees had stopped by but weren’t enticed to their empty hive even though he set out scent to attract them. He was too ill to come over. By the time we found someone who could come, the bees had moved on. Then we heard our big poplar tree humming and saw a few bees flying but didn’t see the swarm. Perhaps they settled there.

In a recent talk for St. Basil’s Writer’s Workshop, Paul Kingsnorth tells the story of an Irish saint who talked to the bees while he was training under a monk in England. They talked back. He set out to travel back to Ireland when the bees followed him, even across the sea. This happened a few times. His abbot eventually gave him permission to keep the bees. Kingsnorth talked about how there are wild saints who make friends with wild animals. The animals behave like we are back in Eden and the enmity between us is no longer there because we are so empty of ourselves. Kingsnorth is writing the Lives of the Wild Saints on his Abbey of Misrule Substack and is likely to publish the collection as a book.

I wondered if maybe Peggy’s off comment about our farm being paradise might be a word from the Lord for Bruce and I. What if paradise is still here? What if we can turn our places into paradise simply by being God’s people, by emptying ourselves and letting God’s love fill us.

Maybe, just maybe Bruce and I have filled our farm with our prayers that are more presence than mumbled words breathed into the atmosphere. Maybe they have become a presence like they do in churches when the faithful come together. Maybe those boring walks with Omalola, where I offer thanks are flinging blessing to the neighborhood like the seed I flung across our hayfield. My friend Laura has said she goes to church on Wednesdays to meditate on the Christ filled bread and wine. She says the whole church is filled with prayers.  During the Olympics Paris went dark except the Sacre Coeur church, where people have been praying continuously for a hundred years. Maybe our prayers bring light when all else is dark.

Psalm 15 asks who shall ascend to your holy hill? “He who has clean hands and a pure heart. He who walks blamelessly and does what is right, and speaks truth in his heart and does not slander with his tongue and does no evil to his neighbor and does not takes up a reproach against his friend…”

What if “I have come that you might have life and life more abundantly” (John 10:10) is really true? What if we are not just tortured on the cross, or bursting out of the tomb, or singing with the Spirit, but ascended with Christ, in the throne room, with a sea like crystal and seven golden lampstands, and strange creatures whirling? What if the power that raised Christ from the dead lives in us? And paradise is here, now. We just have to receive these gifts freely given. We just have to ask the Lord to open our eyes.

We live in a frightening time, where it appears western civilization is moving rapidly towards totalitarianism. The technology exists to clamp down on all of us. I often wake up afraid. But what if taking hold of paradise now is how we shake our fists at the powers. What if we choose joy that doesn’t spring from politics but from the breath of God’s Holy Spirit? What if we stay present in the present and not fly off into fear ridden what ifs? 

In Saving Paradise by Rita Nakishima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker were astonished when they say the crucifixion was not depicted in Christian art until the tenth century. They found images of Jesus as shepherd, bread and wine and fish. They offer an interesting response to my fears of martyrdom in the wake of western civilization's collapse. “Early Christians did not regard martyrs as victims, but as people who manifested the power of God. When faced with Rome’s coercive threats, the martyrs held fast to their freedom and their relationships within the Christian community. They would not surrender these to an oppressive power. Rome chose to kill them, but they chose to preserve life in paradise. They had already experienced paradise in their early life, and they knew death could not take that from them…A martyr’s death was a paradox; in refusing to submit to unjust power, the martyr witnessed to the true power that generated paradise on earth” (66).

The roadside flowers are beautiful this year. I caught a picture of a bee on beebalm during one of my walks. A male goldfinch skipped ahead of me in the weeds. The next day the female skipped ahead. The corn is tall as the first story of a house. Our oaks, linden, black walnut, apple trees shout up to the sky. They frame the moon.

Works Cited

Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Rebecca Ann Parker. Saving Paradise. Beacon Press. 2008.

Holy Bible English Standard Version. Crossway, 2016.

Kingsnorth, Paul. St. Basil's Writers Retreat. 22 August 2024.

When we fixed our barn cats, Kevin, my horse vet said that you spend money on those barn cats and they’ll be gone before you know it, but we could not afford more kitties, so off to Tails they went. Brave and Girl Cat ended up ghosting us, the loss a thud in my gut because I never knew what happened.

Tyger and Gray have grown into sleek, striped cats with scraggly, poufy tails and shiny coats. We take pleasure in watching them watching us from the barn. Mama cat watches from the shed. Sometimes they’ll lounge like young men at the beach. They climb the rafters like trees.

One night I woke at 2 am and saw Gray, sleeping next to our front door. Even though they were born here, there’s no curling around our legs or reaching for our hands to stroke the sides of their faces. The closest I get is a quiet mew, which means, “Leave now, so I can eat.”

When I wake, I wonder if they made it through the night. Coyotes have howled behind the barn, so close I shouted at them, like I was banishing dogs, my heart thumping. Eagles have perched high in our poplar tree. So much danger. I can’t protect three beloved barn cats. I can only trust they know to stay hidden when the predators come. Every morning, I ask Bruce have you seen the cats today?

Think about it. This isn’t just about barn cats, is it?

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

If you’d like to hear my radio version click here.

The Week of Two Big Storms and Burning Rubber

The first night storm cells and lightning banged north of us, south of us, west of us. I walked the dogs like I do at 6:30 but turned back once I hit the head of the driveway. Lightning stroked thick fire, hotter than the sun’s surface. Thunder rolled. Our local news station warns a person could be struck by lightning if you hear thunder. I feel like I need to duck when storms come close like walking through a low hanging door. My heart races. It’s a good thing I haven’t taught the dogs to be afraid of them. I turned back to the house, giving the dogs a quick potty break. I pulled Morgen into the barn, tossed her hay.

Finally the storm arrived with rain blowing horizontally, so thick we could barely see the trees across the driveway. Lightning struck so close its light flashed in the house. Thunder boomed instantaneously. I looked at the barn to make sure it hadn’t been struck. With no tornado watches or warnings, we stayed upstairs, catching scenes from The Bachelorette, between weather warnings by our local meteorologist.

We hadn’t seen a storm this hot for several years. Usually they sound like giant tympani way high. The clouds roil, their globes glowing when lightning flashes.

The second night was supposed to be violent with multiple tornadoes roaring through our region. When the weather people talk about mesoscale convection, I listen. Whenever I hear “mesoscale” mentioned, along with a tornado watch, our life in this house with this stuff, flashes before my eyes. These tornado warned storms threaten to toss over houses like Jesus tossed the tables in the temple. Stuff that’s not just things, but tangible goods, gifts, from our families, that we can hold in our hand or look at and be reminded of their real love for us.

As I gathered our clothes, limp on the clothesline, I thought how frail they are, the garments that shield our nakedness while portraying our moods and work, in the face of high winds, that flip the roof of houses, and yank trees by the roots.

I think how those winds would lift my notebooks like pigeons, maybe dropping them in someone’s yard, my private thoughts thumbed through by a stranger. My Breyer horses, trotting and rearing on my shelves, would fly thousands of feet up like Pegasus and plunge back to a farmer’s field, only to tilled in with the crop. I remember how Bruce and I picked up nails, insulation, splintered wood in a friend’s pasture after the EF 4 tornado, nine years ago.

I put Mrs. Horse in the barn with several flakes of hay, hoping the barn holds.

Knowing the power of many prayers, I asked friends on Facebook to remember Bruce and I along with our region in prayer. I stood on the porch, mumbling, “Peace be still. Be still.” If Jesus told the waves to shut up and sit down, I figured it couldn’t hurt for me to speak to quiet the storm.

Because of the warnings, I shoved the cats in the crates and hauled them to the basement. Since the dogs were afraid of the open stairs, I harnessed them and lifted them down. I brought chairs and my computer down along with my purse and our wallets and my jewelry.

Here the storm was a dud without much thunder. Wind-blown rain didn’t last long. No trees were busted.

Both nights our electricity was knocked out. Bruce had to drag the generator to the back of the house, plug it in, as the rain poured. It was vital to keep the sump pump running. Our yard sounded like a steam show. The second night he knelt before the machine, the pull rope broken, and rain pouring, the water filling in our basement, as he threaded the rope enough to start it. Patient. He was patient. We were back on in a few hours. 

These Tornadoes turned out to be EF 0’s and EF 1’s. The National Weather service cited 33 tornadoes in northern Illinois on August 15, three days after the assassination attempt on President Trump. When I walked the road the next morning, I saw how the corn was tipped over. A black walnut branch had crumpled into a widow maker. There were multiple trees down and power outages in the area. 

The third night, as we were doing night chores—walking the dogs, we saw and heard a pickup truck parked just south of our driveway. He sat on the tires burning rubber so hard it smelled for minutes afterward. My fingers were close to punching 911. Then they gunned it down the road. But they roared back, pulled in our driveway. I held up my camera, snapped pictures. They roared away to the south. Bruce remarked, "They burned 40,000 miles off those tires. Each one costs around $500." The next morning there were more jagged marks to the north.

The devil, not a roaring lion, but in the form of a pickup, slanty headlights, scaring the Jesus out of me because it felt they are marking our property like a dog pissing on bushes and I wondered if they were country boys tagging the road or just young men, rowdy and angry.

My heart thumped. Bruce said they’re just neighbor kids burning rubber. When the fields are clear we can see all the way to the machine shed that stays lit into the night, a gathering place for the locals to talk mechanics, farming and whatever else.

This was the week following the attempted assassination of former President Trump. It was hard to believe he was standing there, then swatting his face,  in slow motion the Secret Service shoving him down. He stood fist in the air, mouthing, “Fight. Fight. Fight” a shaken fist at the powers. But it was odd how the people behind him just sat. President Kennedy’s assassination began a decade where our country unspooled. By the time I was in high school I wondered if there’d be enough country left so I could go to college and get married. Are we on the same brink of chaos here?

Then came the Republican National Convention and the CrowdStrike outage. Even though he refused at first, President Biden stepped down from being the Democratic presidential candidate, though he remains president and Vice President Harris took his place. Some of us wonder who is running the country. Russian and Chinese unarmed nuclear bombers flew within two hundred miles of Alaska. For those ten days my eyes and ears and thoughts were filled with the national drama, with breaks for companionable walking with the dog and currying the horse.

Paul Kingsnorth in The Abbey of Misrule writes about how he has sensed that the image of Trump’s standing up with his fist raised and mouthing “Fight, Fight, Fight” with the American flag waving against the blue sky reflects a deep mysterious reality. He says, “What we call ‘politics’ is always a manifestation of what is happening in the depths, but in the depths move forces that are beyond us. Sometimes you see images that make this clear to you.”

It seems there’s an authoritarian noose wrapping around the world. People can be arrested for posting on social media in Britain. And British censors want to extradite Americans for their social media posts. The EU told Elon Musk he was violating hate speech laws by interviewing Trump on X.During the Truckers Strike in Canada Trudeau blocked people’s bank accounts if they donated so much as $25 to the cause. Tulsi Gabbard was followed by Air Marshals and bomb sniffing dogs under the TSA’s Quiet Skies program. There are pockets of genocide throughout the world.

I think of the passage in Revelation, towards the end, where God has opened the abyss and loosed the devil, the spirit of lies, on the world, to deceive the nations. We are bathed in lies. It’s getting so a person can’t tell what's true. When I’m pull my eyes off the chaos I remember Psalm 2 where the psalmist talks about the nations raging and the people’s plotting in vain.  “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying 'Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.' He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.  Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, 'As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill'” (Ps 2: 2 – 6, ESV).

Kingsnorth wonders how we should respond to these forces rising to the surface and comes back to what Jesus said, “Repent.” “Change your mind. Change your heart. Change your direction. Change the orientation of your seeing. Change your whole life.” It’s not changing your mind, but it’s turning your heart toward God. I’m not so good at this, though my heart is softening, my scarred heart is turning to flesh as he promised when he said he would turn our stony hearts to flesh.

Lately I’ve awakened afraid that something I said on social media might land me in solitary. The idea of sitting in a cell with no windows, perhaps with one other person, gives me the shivers as bad as an MRI machine. Then I lie awake praying for people on my list. I say the Jesus Prayer. "Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner."

Kingsnorth says a voice came to him saying, “keep the peace of your heart at all times.” He states how powerful this is, “Attain the spirit of peace, said St Seraphim of Sarov, and thousands of people around you will be saved.”

 And then I think of the old hymn, “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee” which tells how the disciples came to bad ends. John died alone on Patmos. Peter was crucified head down. “Contented, peaceful fishermen,/Before they ever knew/The peace of God that filled their hearts.Brimful, and broke them too,/Brimful, and broke them too.”

The hymn ends with, “The peace of God, it is no peace, But strife closed in the sod. Yet, let us pray for but one thing: The marv’lous peace of God, The marv’lous peace of God.” There’s something defiant about this hymn, something that gives a person courage about a peace that might be shaking with fear while stepping on ice that supports our weight even while water runs beneath.

Kingsnorth is wise to tell us to keep the peace in our heart at all times. In Proverbs it says, Guard your heart for from it flow the wellsprings of life. (Prov 4:3), The powers want us afraid, outraged. They want us reducing our relationships to our opinions and deciding who our friends and family should be based on whether we agree. But we are so much more than those opinions. Jesus turned down the Prince of the Power of the air, when he offered to give him the kingdoms of the earth. Maybe we should turn down the invitation as well. We are told not to put our trust in princes, or horses that are a vain hope for deliverance.

Since the powers are kill joys, maybe we should sing and dance and joke and take long walks and play fetch with our dogs. 

Maybe we should become healing presences. Maybe we should trust the Lord to rain down his light and peace between us. Maybe we should do what Paul Young says when he closes his podcast, “Participate in Love. Do the next right thing. Trust the ripples.”

Back to the cats. Every morning I ask Bruce if he’s seen the brothers and he says, yes,yes I have and Mama cat too. And I walk the dog down the road, on one side shielded by corn taller than I am, dark as a forest between the stalks. I wonder at the bee balm, because it’s the most beautiful delicate flower. I talk to God until I become silent.

Works Cited

Holy Bible English Standard Version. Crossway, 2016.

Kingsnorth, Paul. “All the World Is Myth.” The Abbey of Misrule, The Abbey of Misrule, 15 July 2024, paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/all-the-world-is-myth

Author: William Alexander Percy(no biographical information available about William Alexander Percy.) Go to person page >. “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee.” Hymnary.Org, hymnary.org/text/they_cast_their_nets_in_galilee. Accessed 17 Aug. 2024

“Seraphim of Sarov.” OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org/Seraphim_of_Sarov. Accessed 17 Aug. 2024.

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You may have thought, wait, what? The three Hebrews who took the fire were probably eunuchs. I know, I know I should have followed what we know of the historical record. But for this imagination there seemed to be a woman’s voice that wanted to speak

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I’m afraid I wasn’t talking about a golden statue. I was talking about my phone and the internet it’s connected to, and the web of wires and signals and switches and electricity that power the internet. I’m connecting to something more powerful and alive than the dumb golden image. While it’s just a tool, the phone can capture my eyes, pull them off “Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame and is set down at the right hand of God the father.”

Every morning the first thing, I do is pull my phone off the charger and scan it for messages. I might check the weather. The dogs are waiting to go out, Omalola surprisingly quiet after her burst of joy bounding out of her crate. I drink tea, grab rice cakes, slip on their collars and leashes, tie my shoes and pocket my phone. We walk out.

The phone walks with me because I want pictures of how I see stuff. The roadside flowers have been beautiful this year. I am dwarfed by corn, their tops looking like church spires, but I can no longer see down the valley to the silver grain bins or Dale’s red barns. Even though that is my sacred walk to talk to God, to be silent and give thanks, if a friend sends a message, I duck my head to chat, missing how the sky has changed, how my feet sound on a tarred and chipped road. My attention split, I start the day weary.

Even before we walk, I can be sidetracked by the latest national drama. I sit down even before we walk. I open Facebook as I get the dog’s food ready, as I make my breakfast, as I coax Dolly to eat. But do I open the lectionary app to read the scripture readings for the day? Nope.  After an hour, I’m ready to give Morgen her hay, pour fresh water, and scratch her back.

I’m connecting to the conversations I find on the other side of the screen. The Ted Kooser poem first thing Sunday morning. The NRPlus group, sponsored by the National Review, has become a safe place to talk politics. We are people to each other, sharing the tough news of losses and good news of moves or remodeling or children graduating. If we are in the same region, we sometimes meet in person. Facebook also satisfies my interest in what’s going on locally with friends and neighbors, and childhood friends and friends of friends who don’t live around here. While it can take my eyes off Jesus, it can also plant my eyes right back on him as well.

Even beyond the screen itself I am grabbed by the craziness of our culture. I am filled with dread, wondering what’s next, when will the monstrous thing will top the horizon. I scan my newsfeed, read journalists on Substack. It’s too easy to set my eyes on the glorious fire, billowing and bright, like former President Trump’s assassination attempt, the Crowdstrike outage, Biden’s increasing frailty while still running the country, his vice president, now the Democrat nominee who got no votes in the 2020 primary. Tulsi Gabbard, being surveilled, as a possible terrorist threat, by teams of Air Marshalls and bomb sniffing dogs. And there’s Act Blue, which is laundering people’s credit cards to cover massive donations to the Democrat party. It’s too easy to drink in unsettled waters.

A Chinese spy balloon flew over the country unchallenged, two Russian and Chinese bombers flew within 200 miles of Alaska. Iran is threatening to attack Israeli and American assets. There are rumors of American gangs fighting Venezuelan gangs in Chicago. It’s too easy to drink in unsettled waters.

I read my phone in the car, missing beautiful views of rolling fields and growing crops, farmhouses and spectacular skies, each scene a sort of love letter from God. I open the phone while eating meals, sometimes chatting on messenger, when savoring the flavors and textures of what I’m eating, giving thanks, would satiate me. 

There’s much email that takes time daily to read or cull. And so much excellent content. In the evening, when I have books to read to satisfy my curiosity, I’d rather turn on junk TV and catch up on Substack or email newsletters.

There isn’t a king threatening with a fiery furnace if I don’t look. There isn’t music playing to signal the worship, or snitches if you disobey. No it’s engineering, silent to us, that knows how to hook our eyes so we focus on what the apps think we should watch. It’s the wheels coming off our culture, outrage and fear that drive me to look.

The other night, I dreamed about flirting with Elon Musk. But someone warned that there’d be force involved. I dreamed an image of how I am in love with the machine, looking at that golden statue, bowing down to it and not even being threatened or signaled by music unless I turn on itunes.

God is very much our lover. Scripture along with ground and trees and skies and Bruce and the Eucharist and my friends are his love letters to us and we just need to open the pages, we just need to listen, we just need to behold. The prophet Jeremiah quotes God, “for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer. 2:13, ESV) I feel helpless to change the habit of reading Facebook first thing. And know I sleep better if I park the phone in the evening. There are newsletter subscriptions and Substacks, with wisdom I will miss.

(One of the reasons I only post once a week is because I get it, the overwhelm of content. And I so appreciate your taking the time to read my essays.)

In Ezekiel, God speaks, “They shall not defile themselves anymore with their idols and detestable things or with any of their transgressions. But I will save them from their backslidings in which they have sinned and will cleanse them; and they shall be my people and I will be their God” (Ezekiel 37: 23, ESV). There is promise here, that the Lord will save me from my backsliding. That with Him I can turn my eyes away from outrage and mostly from the fear of what’s coming. I hear him say, “Don’t be afraid.” If it weren’t for my failing, I wouldn’t need Jesus. I can ask him to help me bring a healing presence to all my conversations, even those on Facebook and to choose whatever scripture he shows me first thing. (Becoming a Healing Presence by Albert Rossi is a marvelous quide for bringing this presence to your life.)

Today when I was walking the dogs I looked down the field past the round bales, over to the neighbors’ homes and listened and for a minute the machines were silent. All I heard were the birds and insects. Then the machines started. Off to the northeast new owners are tearing down grain bins. To the east someone is crop-dusting. Often Amazon Prime and UPS jets fly over. But for this minute all was silent.

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But what about God’s voice? What does it sound like? I know we can hear his voice as a nudge, or a thought in our mind, or a Bible verse or a friend speaking a word that makes our heart leap up. Right now I'm thinking of how Psalm 29 says: “The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness; The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth and strips the forests bare and in his temple all cry Glory!” (Ps. 29: 8 – 9).

And there's Psalm 104, "Oh Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures" (Ps. 104: 24).

I think of the moon shining through leaves looking like a creature right close, an angel, alive. I think of the firefly that lands on my sandal, and how I look out and see them close to the grass, flickering. I remember the night I stepped outside to see them arrayed in the forsythia bush and apple tree and grass. I'd never seen so many. Mesmerized  I stepped wrong on a wet, wooden step, slamming down on my hip, stung and bruised, with Bruce upstairs asleep.

I think of the clouds building, bright as the linen of the saints, but gathering their bottoms, hunkering in close together to make rain. I think of Morgen’s pleasure when I speak to her as we drive through fields of clover, our milk house bees well fed, and the barn swallow swooping, as if he is dancing with us, as if he is Little Bird, a fledgling swallow we rescued two years ago, come back to swing joyously inviting us to dance.

I think how animals, even the tiniest bugs, perceive the world in ways we can hardly imagine. 

Ed Jong in An Immense World describes these myriad ways. He leads me right to wonder and awe. He notes how Alexandra Horowitz found that dogs sniffing on walks is vital to them.  He says, “To a dog a simple walk is an odyssey of olfactory exploration” (21). So I let Omalola sniff the roadside when we walk. Another researcher Ronald Kroger ran tests to see if dogs’ noses are also infrared sensors picking up on their prey’s heat as well as smell. His test seemed to indicate this is so (154 – 155).

Even the smallest of creatures like a threadworm knows how to sense heat and will make a beeline to a warm body (146). The mantis shrimp sees circularly polarized light, a very rare state of light, because other mantis shrimps give off that kind of light, so they can mate. Jong comments, “Perhaps, then, mantis shrimps communicate using a form of light so secretive that only they can see it” (114).

Jong writes about the emerald jewel wasp that has a stinger that can sense where a cockroach’s brain is in order to paralyze it, and eventually lay eggs in its body for its young to feast on. That stinger is able to perceive what a cockroach’s brain feels like. It will stun its prey and lead it like a person might lead a horse to its lair.   

(When Darwin came across this sort of cruelty in the animal world, he rejected his Christian faith because he couldn’t believe a good God would create such a cruel animal. In Dominion Tom Holland quotes him as saying, "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars" (439).

There’s a beetle designed to fly toward fire. Jong writes, “Arriving at a fire, the beetles have perhaps the most dramatic sex in the animal kingdom, mating as a forest burns around them. Later, the females lay their eggs on charred, cooled bark. When the wood-eating grubs hatch, they find an Eden” (142).

It’s as though somebody played as they created the animal world , delighting in the intricacies that no one would notice, except now, maybe when twenty-first century scientists follow their curiosity. 

Then if we look for God’s voice way down deep, inside cells and smaller, we find it. The other day I listened to biologist Stephen Meyer in “Where Darwinism Breaks down, an interview with Jonathan Pageau",  Here are a few things he said that took me by the hand and invited me to wonder.

Meyer says, “The argument I make in a book called Signature in the Cell is that whenever we see information in a digital or alphabetic form, as we do at the foundation of life, and we trace that information back to its source, we always come to a mind, not a material process.” 

He continues by saying, “I could show you a wonderful picture of the circuitry that controls animal development. It's called a developmental gene regulatory network. When the scientists at Caltech mapped this out, the way that genes and gene products interacted to control the way cell division occurred and the way different gene products were expressed at different times as the organism was going through cell division from one to two to four to eight to 16, et cetera.

"They  mapped out these relationships between the genes and the gene products controlling the expression of genes at just the right time and just the right place and just the right cells and cell types. They mapped it out and it looked like a circuit, like an integrated circuit, only it wasn't a circuit controlling the flow of electricity as much as it was controlling the flow of information. Look at that and you look at that and then they discovered something else, that the circuits, the systems, the molecules that are part of this system, the system cannot be perturbed without shutting down animal development.”

Meyer's work in intelligent design calls into question evolutionary biology, which Charles Darwin set in motion, a theory that denied the need for God. 

When I read and hear these things, I’m knocked back in awe of just who Jesus is. His voice is more than a man’s voice speaking in parables or beatitudes. His voice spoke the intricacies of creation, the playfulness of design. Saint Paul says, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.  For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.  And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1: 15 -17).

I think back to the thunder and lightning and the fiery pillar and how at times God’s anger burned, until Moses begged him not to destroy his people, because God would destroy his own honor. I think how on that fiery mountain God gave us the rules to live by that show us up--how we can’t or won’t live by them, how we  choose death, not life, and how we need Jesus to make us right. This Jesus spoke a greater word than the fire and sounding trumpets when Moses climbed into that fury.

The Word also speaks to us in the fully human, fleshed out Jesus, who knows what it’s like to live in a body, from the blood and feces of birth to the blood and feces of death. But I also wonder if we silence Jesus, by not calling for his voice in other people, especially the difficult ones, the ones whose presence stings. Albert Rossi in Becoming a Healing Presence says, “In many of these men and women—in the malicious and the criminal—Jesus is imprisoned. Deliver Him in them” (72).

I think of the apocalyptic image of Jesus on a white horse returning to bring in the kingdom, his eyes ablaze, his robe dipped in blood, his blood. His saints ride behind him. “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron" (Rev. 19: 15, ESV). I’m told this is no missile launcher, but the double edged sword, that is so finely tuned it can cut muscle from bone, the same word that flung out the worlds when God said let there be and light and oceans and fish and crawling animals and wild animals and farm animals came to be. That voice leaned down and breathed breath into Adam.

These days I’m gobsmacked with awe. While I long for Jesus' return, while I long to meet him face to face, I know my response might be like Orual in C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces who meets her sister’s lover, when she forced her sister to shine the forbidden light on his face. “The great voice, which rose up from somewhere close to the light, went through my whole body in such a swift wave of terror that it blotted out even the pain in my arm. It was no ugly sound; even in its implacable sternness it was golden. My terror was the salute that mortal flesh gives to immortal things” (171).   

If Jesus returns on that gleaming white horse, I might find myself crawling into the mountains to put rock between myself and the brightness of his glory. The prophet Isaiah says that when he returns the sun will be as bright as seven days piled together and the moon like the sun. I want to be sheltered by the promise, “Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen” (Jude 24, 25). These words, this voice, are the crag and stronghold he says will be my refuge. 

Works Cited

Andraski, Katie. "Little Bird A Meditation on Kindness WNIJ Perspective". katieandraski.com. 7 Sept. 2020. Accessed 6 July 2024.

Holland, Tom. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Basic Books, 2019.

Holy Bible English Standard Version. Crossway, 2016.

Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1978.

Pageau, Jonathan. “The Symbolic World: 347 - Stephen Meyer - Where Darwinism Breaks Down.” The Symbolic World, 24 June 2024, Accessed 28 June 2024.

Rossi, Albert S. Becoming a Healing Presence. Ancient Faith Publishing, 2021.

Yong, Ed. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms around Us. Random House, 2023.

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I think about how voice is embodied. It not only carries our mood, and how much energy we have, it carries our authority, and even welcome. I remembered how I could tell whether a journalist was going to talk to me back when I worked in publicity, just by how he picked up the phone. I could hear our relationship in his voice. Kenneth Woodward's  voice was one that kept me walking, aiming toward a tree at the end of the field because work was my life and I was spent. He kept me in the faith too. 

Whyte says, “Opera singers and performers quickly learn that sound is produced by the full length of the body. The lungs work in concert with the belly and the belly sits like a crossroads between the legs and the upper torso. The throat may be perfectly free but sit down to sing and you will produce a different, more curtailed sound than standing. Open the chest, round the belly with the whole breath, drop your center of gravity, and plant your feet on the floor, and you will sound grounded and solid, a world away from your voice when you are strutting tensely on tiptoe” (125 – 126).

I have felt that. When I stood in front of our county board, arguing for sanity with regards to planting renewables on the best farmland in the world, I found my name and my voice speaking a condensed three-minute argument. Our group of activists were able to influence the ordinances the county wrote until the state of Illinois took that right away. I have felt that when I recorded perspectives for WNIJ, our local NPR station. People have surprised me, when they walk up to me, saying they recognize my voice from the perspectives I post.

Whyte also says it’s hard to drop down into the belly because of childhood trauma. “As a child, a person may have disowned any feelings in their stomach area, for instance having had their joyous breathy sounds constantly curtailed by the adult rulers of their world…The result is that the voice lifts out of the belly and into the upper regions of the chest and throat, where it is more in grasp of the strategic mind and more amenable to being nice” (128- 129).

A dear friend who is an opera singer has spoken about the body work and emotional work she does with singers to help them find this place in their bellies and breath, so they can sing with power.

Disowning my belly, my voice, my breath certainly has been my story.

I don’t remember the things I told my mother, just the stuff of everyday life. Because I was a lonely child, growing up on a farm a mile in off the main road, I made her my best friend. I told her everything, except my tears. I saved those for the woods or the barn.

Often we spoke in the car. I’d tell her about a disagreement at school or how a rival in youth group, hurt my feelings.  “You talk too much. Stop chewing on it. You talk too much,”  she’d reply. When things were going well enough, she’d say, “This too would pass.” Then she’d throw in, “You’re special to suffer so much. God has a special call for your life.” My mother mentioned a classmate who never seemed to struggle saying, “She won’t have the depth you have with all your struggle.” Then she went back to: “People aren’t interested in all that detail. They don’t care.”

The classmates who never seemed to struggle, did have depth and worked out a good life, as did I. Neither one of us is any more special than the other. I learned she wasn’t interested in all that detail, but now I don’t blame her. If she was anything like me, I’m sure her mind was so full of her own pain and her own creativity, she wanted the solitude of the car and quiet. Who wants to listen to an unhappy child’s chatter, especially when there seems no end to the complaint or tears? Unhappy people, day in and day out, can pull you into your own pit.  

I became a poet so I could hide behind the lines and images. Though later I fell in love with how sentences can sing. The computer has made prose easier to manage. I found other people and places that silenced me because that’s what I knew. But I persisted. Gradually I overcame being afraid of my audience born of too many brutal writing workshops poking at my vision. I credit making Facebook posts like little poems with helping me find my voice.

I don’t know why I was called to be a poet when so much silencing came against me. Was it the powers of darkness resisting someone who had something so important to say, those blocks were important to lay down? Was it to strengthen me so I could learn to make peace with my voice, my own words, and the way I see things? Was it more about giving me hope when I sat on my horse longing because I had a craft that challenged me, that gave my life meaning—there was always another poem, always another story to write. Was it a gift to help me sort out my perceptions and maybe help me make peace with the secrets because I could make them up and perhaps those imaginations would lead me to the truth?

When I read out loud here or on WNIJ, you hear more than my words. You hear me breathing from my chest, and a raspy voice like I’m a smoker and I am not. Weariness and lack of sleep catch in my throat. My voice is like gravel on bare feet. I hear myself and know I need training in telling stories.

When I had gum surgery, the periodontist said I needed muscle relaxants to let my mouth heal because I clench my jaw at night. Lately I’ve learned to feel this and note what my body is telling me about how I'm holding my tongue, become tight. Sometimes my throat will catch like when tears are rising. My voice meets the world—braced, intense.

A few years ago, I thought about podcasting, but put the idea down because my voice reveals so much. It’s splintered like barn wood. You can hear the rafters and deep darkness in the loft where the cats hide and I store the hay. Overwhelm stopped me because the mechanics of getting a podcast set up looked too complicated. But Substack has made it easy to try so I bought a microphone and plugged it in. I may try breathing from my belly and standing up and see how that sounds for this one. It's hard to speak because I don't say much these days, though gravel roads can take you to some pretty countryside. 

A new friend, Meg Mittlestadt blessed this endeavor by observing, “Just that there’s long been a connection between work, prayer, poetry and the prophetic voice, meaning here, simply one that points the way…I think you also contain all of those things. So what you create would be an intercession, I think, just as you say. The podcasting simply allows a new medium of expression for you, perhaps.... your recorded voice felt natural, like you belonged in that realm.” (Check her Missives from the Edge Substack.)

Thank you for reading this. And a special thanks for those of you who are supporting me through a paid subscription, which supports this wonderful app, and has encouraged me to dig deep to write these essays regularly. I don’t like the idea of excluding any readers, because it’s more important for me to be read than to be paid. But payment is a wonderful encouragement. So thank you.

Work Cited

Whyte, David. The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul. Doubleday, 1996.

Katie’s Ground is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sometimes people frustrated with a mass shooting complain about thoughts and prayers. They want political action. And I feel sorry that people’s condolences are rejected, especially if people do say a prayer. When my father suddenly died of a heart attack, I felt the power and comfort of Liberty University’s prayers when I had to fly to Albany, leaving an author tour with Francis and Edith Schaeffer.

I think of Abraham standing on the plain talking to the three messengers: He was aware he was but “dust and ashes,” but he kept interceding, asking God to spare the city if there were fifty righteous on down to ten. It’s remarkable the father of God’s people interceding for a city that did not tend to its poor, a city so bad, the ground cried out to God. I think of standing on that plain talking to God.

And there is Moses who told God, “No don’t destroy your people, as stiff necked as they are, because you would look bad to the nations around here. I don’t want to be made into a great nation.” And God relented. When Miriam and Aaron badmouthed Moses’ choice of a wife, God stood up for him and said, "This man speaks to me face to face, unlike prophets who only see me in a vision or a dream. He is the meekest man in all the earth. God struck Miriam with leprosy." But again, Moses spoke up for her and begged God, “Heal her please, God heal her”. God showed mercy, but made her stay outside the camp for seven days.

And then there’s Jesus himself who intercedes for us before the throne of God. Because he knows our weaknesses and has suffered as we have suffered. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” (Hebrews 4:15 – 16, ESV).

If Jesus knows our weakness, because he has been tempted as we are, maybe our knowing our weakness, might make us more effective as we intercede for others. What strikes me here is how these humble prayers for other people, that can be as simple as, Lord heal her, steps us into the throne room with Jesus, that throne room that has seven golden candle sticks and four faced animals with wild wings fluttering and a sea of glass. Maybe we step out on the plain with Abraham, bargaining with God himself, to save the city. (But the outcry against that one was too great.)

I take comfort in the prayers we speak through in the Mission St. Clare app. Bruce and I frequently pray through morning prayer. These prayers from the Book of Common prayer lead us to pray for the country, the president, people in jail, the lonely, the armed forces. I don’t always remember to pray for the big stuff, though Lord knows it seems like the wheels are coming off our civilization. Through the Book of Common Prayer we pray with thousands around the world, “Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart [and especially the hearts of the people of this land], that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace;through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

We’re not much different than the children of Israel walking in the desert with God up close and fiery or the children settled in their land, who were drawn to the gods of their neighbors. Yet we can stand before God asking for mercy like Abraham and Moses. The Jesus prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God be merciful to me a sinner covers our cry for mercy, but we can also use it to pray for beloved people, even our enemies.  I think of the liturgy before communion: Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy. The Lamb who was slain, set those sins as far as the east is from the west.

It’s hard to imagine that those simple prayers, said sitting on our couch, or by our bed or walking down the road are the same work Jesus does these days. It’s so quiet. At least most of the time. Sometimes we cry out with groans that are beyond language, tapping into the Spirit’s intercession that goes beyond words because we sometimes don’t know how to pray as we ought. All that’s there are sighs. Or tears. Or silence. Or pain. And sometimes we shout for joy or sing our thanks.

Praying for other people is the type of prayer I’m most familiar with. As an adolescent I worried my friends would be condemned to hell, so I took out my list and prayed for them to know Jesus. I was so sad those days, I wasn’t much of an advertisement for the joys of God’s reign. Often I’d doggedly pray for some people because I remember Jesus’ story of the widow who bugged the judge to give her justice. He got tired of hearing her complaint. Praying for others has been a way to defy my own selfishness, taking up friends’ time with too much of my own story. At least I can pray for them. It also helps me be aware of others’ lives, so I can ask about their life. These days asking, “How are you?” seems so rare, people now say “Thank you for asking.” Also, I have experienced how people’s prayers have blown out my darkness, like a stiff wind clears dense fog.

Strong’s Concordance notes that the "Greek for intercession, énteuksis, or intersection or hitting the mark" is the opposite of the Greek for sin—harmartia which means missing the mark, like an arrow flies over the bullseye. Strong’s says, “it is used in classical Greek as the antonym of harmartia (“to miss the mark, sin”)…Thus biblical intercession centers in waiting upon the Lord to learn what hits the mark (is His will)—i.e guiding the believer to act as His agent.”

So maybe this quiet service brings us right to the throne room, or the plain, standing alongside the Lord. I have seen people’s lives change from the boring, plodding prayers I’ve spoken for healing or reconciliation or just making it through. So tell me, how have you’ve seen God’s work in answer to your prayers?

Works Cited

Holy Bible English Standard Version. Crossway, 2016.

“Morning and Evening Prayer from the Mission of St. Clare.” Morning and Evening Prayer from The Mission of St. Clare, www.missionstclare.com/. Accessed 21 June 2024

The Online Book of Common Prayer, www.bcponline.org/. Accessed 21 June 2024

Strong’s Greek: 1783. Ἔντευξις (ENTEUXIS) -- a Petition, i.e. Spec. Supplication, biblehub.com/greek/1783.htm. Accessed 21 June 2024.

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John Muir says, “I’d rather be in the mountains thinking of God than in church thinking about the mountains.” Sure, the earth is full of the glory of God. The mountains can be complicated as a symphony. The heavens pour forth speech. Step outside, watch the moon rise and feel awe. A stand of old growth trees might have been what cathedrals were trying to imitate. Theologians have called creation a sort of Bible.

People don’t go to church these days. From a young age, they are taught that school competitions are more important than Sunday worship. They are driven away by crabby church ladies or creepy pastors who assault their bodies and emotions. Or God has betrayed them with losses beyond cussing Him out.

But church is the only place where you can take the Eucharist—the bread of life--the body and blood of Jesus, where your cells absorb the real presence of Christ at a level more intimate than sex. It’s where you pause and consider your failings towards God and neighbor. This mystery has lifted my spirit. My darkness of ruminating on what’s gone wrong has eased. My spirit has lightened.

Taking that bit of bread and wine next to the person you might not like, shows you how to let them be them, let you be you. Eventually you forgive. At church we are challenged by truths worked out over thousands of years that help us love God and neighbor. We find community that can ease loneliness.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.

I posted this last February and thought you might want to hear or read this again since this is Maundy Thursday, 2025.

Why’d you ride into Jerusalem on the donkey and her foal? We threw cloaks on them both and you hopped on their backs. Everyone knew the prophecy: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zec. 9: 9 ESV). So we shouted and sang. “Hosanna to the son of David.” We cut branches from trees and spread them. We threw down our cloaks. We didn’t mind if the donkeys soiled them. We sounded like many waters. We had to be a thousand strong. At last you were going to conquer Rome and free us. But no army had been mustered. Were the angels going to soar down from the sky like starlings?

But you kept saying, “I’m going to be killed by the powers.” What normal, healthy person sets out to die? Why would you set out to piss off the scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites? You threw every insult—brood of vipers, whitewashed sepulchers, blind guides. You made no sense when you said, “I will rise the third day.” Sure Hosea said that on the second day we’d be revived and the third day God would raise us up. (Hos 6:2). That’s us, our nation, not just you.

Why’d you scatter the pigeons and the coins? All those wings flapping into the sky after you opened their cages sounded like hands clapping at a wedding dance. Those coins scattered sounded like hailstones as the whirlwind hit. “My house is a house of prayer,” you shouted. You whipped the merchants and their animals out of the courtyard. After a stunned minute, we joined in.

Afterwards, people flocked like homing pigeons. You healed anyone who asked for healing. Anyone—the blind and the lame you healed. Lepers. Women who wouldn’t stop bleeding. The paralyzed. You healed them all. You showed us how the temple should be.

Children shouted and danced, “Hosanna to the son of David.”  The Pharisees asked if you heard what they said. “Jesus the Son of David, the one here to deliver us.” You said, “Yes, out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise.” The Pharisees were right. Why didn’t you hush them? You mustered no army. Why did you get up in their face? They hold the power. They hold us together.

The sun beat down on my head. It throbbed from holding back tears because I was exhausted from the crowds’ joy when you came into the city, from the children singing and dancing, from all the people being healed, one right after the other. We hadn’t slept well at Lazarus’ place. We’d heard rumors the powers were plotting to kill Lazarus because he was raised. Every noise we startled awake, afraid the soldiers were coming for him and you. How could they control someone who raises people from the dead?

But why, why’d you curse the fig tree? The poor thing shriveled in front of our eyes. Nothing about you is unjust. You’ve stood up for the poor, put the religious showoffs in their place. But it’s not the season for figs. Why should they be there? You turned two loaves and five fish into enough to feed five thousand, you could have asked the tree to make figs but instead you killed it, right there in front of our eyes. 

“It's not the season for figs,” I said. I felt so sorry for that tree.

You glared at me. I saw sadness too. I shriveled like the tree. I felt like Jonah when God rebuked him for being angry about the vine that shadowed him after Ninevah repented.

I could see how Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves to cover their bodies shining with light that seemed as vulnerable as the sun before it dropped below the horizon. It’s almost like you sent me the image and I was there when you walked through the garden calling for them and their light squeaked out from behind the foliage. Tears streamed down your eyes as you cut the throats of the lambs our first parents had tamed, flayed their skin and sewed clothes to over their shame, to close in the light that was dancing wildly off them.

Even if the tree of knowledge of good and evil was a fig tree, why’d you take it out on this one? You said you saw Nathaniel under the fig tree, that he was without guile. And he told you then he knew you were the Messiah. You said we’d see angels climbing up and down like the angels Jacob saw in his dream of the ladder joining heaven and earth. But I’ve seen no such thing.

Then you told us that if we have faith we could do what you did to the fig tree, we could say to this mountain, “Be taken up and thrown into the sea and it will happen. Whatever you ask in prayer you will receive if you have faith.” Who has that kind of faith? I didn’t see you give the mountain the heave ho. Or were you talking to us like the messenger talked to Daniel about the rocks destroying the giant statue Nebuchadnezzar saw, each piece a kingdom that came tumbling down? How would Rome ever crumble? And how could our prayers make that happen?

And later, you shouted, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” for how they showed off their piety, for how they needed to clean the inside of the cup, instead of just the outside. But how can any of us clean up our insides, full of greed and self-indulgence? I winced because I can make myself look good on the outside, but I want what I want. I will grab an apple when I’m not hungry just to bite into the sweetness.

“I could have gathered you like a hen gathers her chicks,” you cried. Those tears glistened on your face like water seeping out of the rock in a wet year. But the chicks wouldn’t come. You said not a stone would be left on the other. You said this about the temple. That had been destroyed once and rebuilt. Those thick, heavy stones. The roaring smoke from sacrifices. The smell of roasted lamb. “All knocked down,” you said.

You talked about another fig tree that would bloom and we’d know summer is near, that you’d be at the very gates. That generation would not pass away. You said you didn’t even know the day or hour you’d return. But we’d be corrupt as in the days of Noah, eating, drinking. We’d be making love with the gods. And we’d be clueless when you came back. But you haven’t left yet. Please don’t leave us.

It was you, wasn’t it, who found that weeping and gnashing of teeth and outer darkness when you talked about about the fancy people too busy to come to the wedding feast. So the ruler invited the people on the streets.  Not his normal friends. People danced and feasted and drank to celebrate. But one man showed up not dressed in proper wedding clothes. He was tossed out to outer darkness, to weeping and gnashing of teeth..

You made no sense until I heard you in the Garden of the Olive Press. You were in outer darkness.  I saw you gnash your teeth: “If this cup could pass. Not my will but thine be done.” I saw angels wiping your forehead, the great drops of bloody sweat as you vomited your pain. I couldn’t bear to watch. I fell asleep. Forgive me.

You stood still, silent, when they accused you.

Why didn’t you tell them you were the King of Kings? Why didn’t you make it stop? The flogging. The mocking: “You healed others, go ahead, save yourself.” Why didn’t you?

Then the cross. The flies landing in your blood. The soldiers bartered for the clothes Mary sewed. What good was bloodstained linen to them? Your cry, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” shredded my heart. David spoke of your horror: Poured out like water. Bones out of joint. Pierced hands and feet. But then, he sang, “He has not despised the affliction of the afflicted. He has not hidden his face from him. All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord and all the families of the nations will worship before him. For kingship belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations”  (Ps 22: 27, 28. ESV). How could that be?

And then you cried, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”

How could you forgive us for murdering you? How? The sun and the earth couldn’t. The sun turned black. The earth shook.  

“Into your hands I commit my spirit.” Your last words. At least you trusted your God to hold your spirit in his hands. You told the robber on your right, you’d see him in Paradise. Oh Jesus I hope those hands were gentle as they took you from us.

But why’d you have to go and die?

I watched as Nicodemus and Joseph pulled the nails out of your hands and heels. The wood screamed as those nails came out. I watched as they wrapped you in a shroud and laid you in a wagon pulled by a mule. You were gone. I couldn’t see for my tears. Why’d you have to go and die?

I'd like to say that The Open Table Conference Study of Matthew's Gospel has informed much of this piece. Thanks to Brad Jersak, Julie Canlis, William Paul Young, Father John Behr, Kenneth Tanner, Cherish Fee Nordling and John MacMurray for their insights.

Katie’s Ground is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.