Mercy, Now

I’m sure I haven’t seen a video of Boy George performing, or a news clip or even a picture of him, in many years. But there he was on the second day of Lent when I clicked the link at the end of an online Lenten devotional from the Northumbria community that I’ve been reading most mornings since Ash Wednesday. He wore a flashy red hat, a black shirt, and generous swipes of gray eyeshadow and black eyeliner. Welcome to my morning, Boy George. Sing me a song.

“Mercy, Now” is the song he sang. I’d never heard the song before. The first stanza is about a father who is having a hard time. He’s lived his life and death is near. “I love my father, and he could use some mercy now.” In the second stanza, a brother is struggling and in pain. Mercy, now. The song turns its attention to church and country, to every living thing, to each of us, all of us. “Every single one of us could use some mercy now.”

The song kept playing in my head, along with the image of Boy George, singing and smiling and dancing on stage. A couple weeks later, on day 16 of Lent, another entry in a second Lenten series I’ve been reading, this one by Tamara Hill Murphy, again included a link to another version of “Mercy, Now.” This time it opened to the song sung by Mary Gauthier and in a slower, more somber style. I later read that Gauthier wrote the song, both the words and music. In her book, Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting, Gauthier wrote of visiting her father as he was dying and in the days that followed she wrote the song. She has sung it at every concert since. (Here’s a link to the lyrics.)

“People sometimes cry when they hear it, but if tears come, I think they are tears of resonance; the words provide listeners a witness to their struggle. ‘Mercy Now’ started out as a personal song, then it deepened. It became universal.”

Then the next day, Lent day 17, the Northumbria series presented yet another link to “Mercy, Now,” this version by Alana Levandoski from her album, Hymns From the Icons.

“Mercy, Now,” three times in my inbox. I’m grateful.

~~~

[Photo: These aren’t the palms from a Palm Sunday morning but from a trip to Florida several years ago. How lovely today, after getting 14 inches of snow Friday night, is the remembrance of them, reflected in the pool.]

Standing in Line for Ashes

This coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. Maybe for you this day will be like any other. Or maybe you will go about your day but imagine a swipe of ash across your forehead. Or maybe, like me, you will go to a service, stand in line with others—likely some who are stripped bare or who carry a quiet grief or any number of everyday anxieties—and a minister or priest will make the sign of a cross on your forehead using ash from palms burned from last year’s Palm Sunday.

My friend Daniel Thomas has just released a new collection of his poetry, Leaving the Base Camp at Dawn. The poems explore how a long relationship of love is like a spiritual practice, and this exploration often comes disguised as narrative about forging streams and climbing mountains. A couple weeks ago I started reading his book and came upon the poem “Ash Wednesday.” I read it. Then read it again. And again. I closed the book and opened it and read it yet again. Please read it now yourself.

Go to this link. Read.

Then scroll to the bottom of the page and listen to Dan reading the poem. Reading and listening are two different things.

Carry the words with you and the way they made you feel into the beginning of Lent. Read and listen in imagination or anticipation of ash on your forehead, of standing in a “ragged line,” of carrying or observing “grief concealed.” 

~~~

[Photo: a field in February.]

"After Work" by Jane Hirshfield

Recently, I read the first poem in a book that's been sitting on my shelf, unopened, for a long time. "After Work" by Jane Hirshfield in her book Of Gravity and Angels. Of course the title intrigued me. “After Work.” Work isn’t a common word in the titles of poems.

I invite you to pause now and read the poem for yourself. Here’s a link to where the poem is printed. Please do click the link and read it. But don’t forget to come back. Or, if you’d prefer, click the link below and listen to me read the poem (with Over the Rhine, "May God Love You" in the background).

This poem is anchored in the the after-work space. Work is over, and it has likely consumed the mind and the physical energy of the poem's narrator. She has sat at a desk or stood at a work station or bounced here and there around other people's needs all day. Consumers, patients, customers, colleagues. Probably inside 4 walls, probably in indirect lighting, probably following a script of some sort, probably channeling from her experience and education only what is applicable to the task at hand. Eight hours later, more or less, and the work is done. Punch the time card, close down the machines, hang up the white coat, the apron, the lanyard with her name tag.

And the narrator enters the space of the rest of her life.

She enters full and whole and living space. Beauty is present. She calls to an animal, a horse, obviously known and loved. She offers a treat, corncobs. They look at each other eye-to-eye. And the universe is reflected in the horses’ eyes.
 

and in the night, their mares' eyes shine, reflecting stars,
the entire, outer light of the world here.

When I first read those last lines I nearly gasped.

During work, however you define work, our efforts are one teeny tiny piece of the whole, and here now, when work is done, is the remembrance of the whole. Here now is the need to reorient. The need to shake ourselves and remember, with each leaving of work, the immensity of the universe of which the work was a part. Shake yourself and expand. Relax your eyes and reorient to more than what you see at your desk, your work station, your register, your waiting room, your conference table. See the whole.

The reflection in these horses’s eyes is reminding the narrator and you and me to emerge from the tunnel of our days and newly re-imagine the universe in which we work and breathe and live.

~~~

[photo: early morning rabbit prints]

Among the birch trees

I recently went to The Museum of Russian Art, which if you’ve read my blog for a while you may remember some prior posts about this beautiful place (which has had a Ukrainian flag prominently painted on the front of the building for the last couple months). The first painting I saw on this visit landed my attention and my affection as well. I’ve been thinking about it for several weeks. It’s called “Among the Birch Trees” by Akhmed Kitaev in 1962. I hope you’ll click this link to see the painting before you read further.

The painting seemed at first to be a picture of a forest of birch trees. Beautiful cream, gray, and brown bark, bright green leaves, long lean trunks. But then I saw the woman. If you clicked the link above, do you see her now too? Peering out from behind one of the trees is a woman. Was she posing? Or did the artist capture her as she was walking through the forest and just emerging from behind a tree? It almost seems as if she was hiding behind the tree and just now emerged to say, “Here I am!” There’s something playful about her. See the tilt of her head. Look closely and find the bouquet in one hand and the single flower in her other hand. She wears a clear plastic rain coat and a clear plastic rain hat held under her neck with a pink plastic tie, and a black purse hangs over her wrist. Her rain gear all has a pinkish hue. She wears a watch and a dress, not pants. Her hair is dark and worn typical of the 1960s.

She looks like an ordinary middle-aged woman of her time and place who went out to do some shopping on a rainy day, but instead of walking down gray sidewalks on a gray street to a neighborhood store, she instead stepped into the forest and there takes a stroll gathering flowers and being flirtatious with the beauty of the birch. I like to think that she is playing hooky from her errand to the store. That she ditched the errand and strolled boldly into the forest. Maybe she enacted a stealth walk, veering only at the last minute away from the store and toward the forest lest anyone notice. Maybe she hid around corners of buildings, kept her head down, bent over more than necessary to tie her shoe or fix a stocking to escape the questioning gaze of a neighbor or coworker. When the coast was clear, she made a dash into the forest and hugged the birch. She breathed deeply. Lifted her face to the sky. Leaned back against a tree and rested.

Or maybe she was simply taking the long way to wherever she was going. Adding joy and rejuvenation to her day wherever and whenever she could. I much like that idea as well. I love this painting and hope you’ll look at it awhile. Maybe you’ll come up with your own story about the woman in the painting.

~~~

[Photo: A slice of the painting described in the post. Click through to enjoy it in full!]

Opening a Window

One weekend day in mid-January, a day when the temperature suddenly spiked to just above freezing after so many cold and subzero days, my husband and I went for a drive in celebration of the gift of the day. The sun sparkled in a way that seems to happen only in the winter. (Did you know that the earth is closer to the sun in early January than at any other time of the year?) The sky was brilliantly blue, with the snow reflecting all the light from the sun back into the sky.

I opened the sunroof window.

Oh the joy! We lifted our faces.

You should have seen our smiles. Our delight. The moment lasted only a short while before the car got too cold and I had to close the window. The temperature eventually dropped. Clouds eventually came. Snow. It was, after all, still winter. But that day’s invitation to open the window and turn my face to the light, to the sun's warmth, has stayed with me.

A short while later I opened a book of poetry that I’d bought a year earlier but never yet read, How to Love The World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, edited by James Crew. Here was a poem called “Promise” by Barbara Crooker, and this is how it began:

The day is an open road
stretching out before you.
Roll down the windows.

Ten more lines follow, and I’d include them all if not for wishing to respect the poet’s copyright, but these lines were what struck me. The third line in particular.

Roll down the windows.

There’s been so much heavy news the last couple years. So much heavy news the last couple weeks. Maybe you also need a prompting to open a window, literally or metaphorically, and turn your face to the sun. Let in the warmth, let in the light, the freshness; let what has gone missing return.

Opening a window in the middle of a very cold season is an act of joy, which means hope is present, because don’t we all hope for joy?

~

[Photo: at a local nature center, thaw circles emerging around plants that soon will be green again.]

~~~

This post was first published in my monthly newsletter, “Dear Reader.” Subscribe here.

Filling with light

The last couple months I've been reading through the Gospels using The Message paraphrase by Eugene Peterson. Reading through the eleventh chapter of Luke, here's what caught my attention: "Your eye is a lamp, lighting up your whole body. If you live wide-eyed in wonder and belief, your body fills with light."

Maybe as a child, like me, you learned and sang the song, "This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine," based on other translations of this verse. The light in me for others. Yes to this; a wonderful thing to be taught early in life. But I appreciate this additional twist that Peterson gives, this emphasis on opening outward, "living wide-eyed in wonder and belief," not in the sense of responsibility but in the joyful sense of becoming filled with light.

Benjamin Tucker: Don't Lose Hope

Benjamin Tucker, a musician here in the Twin Cities (and good friend), released a new album this past May, Such Is Love. One of the songs is titled, "Don't Lose Hope."

These three words are repeated again and again, leaving no doubt that whoever listens to and engages with the song should receive the message, clear and strong: Don't lose hope.

The lyrics extend beyond that trio of words but those are what you'll carry with you. Don't lose hope.

You can listen to "Don't Lose Hope" here and watch videos of that and all the other songs on the album here.