Part 6 - Offerings

The Canticle of Brother Sun
(Rephrased: St. Francis of Assisi)

To you alone, Most High, we raise
a never-ending song of praise!
And as you hear your children sing,
be blessed through all created things:

Through Brother Sun, who brings the day,
shining forth to light our way;
whose splendor is most like your own,
high on Heaven's blazing throne;

Through Sister Moon with haloed brow,
and the Stars which nightly glow
clear and precious up above,
silent witness of your love;

Through Brother Wind, the moving air,
the stormy weather and the fair
by which you nourish and sustain,
bring the clouds and send the rain;

Through Sister Water, pure and clear
like a silver-flowing mirror
in which we might see your face;
lowly, calm, and full of grace;

Through Brother Fire, bright of fame,
unto us a purging flame,
giving forth his warmth and light
in the darkness of our night;

Through Sister Earth whose bounty feeds
and fills every creature's needs;
whose ample bosom ever yields
fruit and flower of the field;

Through every man of goodly grace
who freely pardons for your sake,
enduring sickness, scorn, and trial;
whose faith has overcome the world;

Through Sister Death, who sets us free
from flesh and its infirmity;
for those who love the Lord Most High
in truth, can never truly die.

Nativity Prayer

I long to see
the beauty of your birth,
All of heaven's glory
drawing near to earth;
Hovering
so close all around,
Seeking
for a place to touch down,
A stable bare,
a heart to be his ground.

And as I sing
these carols unto you,
Songs of joy
both ancient and new,
My only prayer
is that I may be
A witness of your coming;
touch the earth through me!

An Offering

A native holy man once professed
that it is those who've gone before us,
the ancestors, grandfathers, grandmothers,
whose love enabled us to be here,
brought our very lives into being:
For they thought about us as they lived,
prayed and hoped and worked toward this end,
that there be a future. We live in that future,
the world which was prepared by them
through all their pains and loves and labors,
hopes and aspirations, prayers.

We must be born of all these things,
not only of flesh and blood and genes,
or what could we be but animals,
or even less than animals?
And I consider this and tremble…
--What of the child who wasn't thought of,,
born out of acts of thoughtlessness,
concieved but according to the flesh?
What is to be their inheritance?
Who will give them a soul, a dream,
an identity, a reason to be?

I pray that all these might find favor;
that they might have an inheritance,
a place at the living glorious banquet;
for the Father himself has dreamed them,
and their true lights are hidden in Him.
And I offer this to them:

See, I am childless still tonight,
and my thoughts are of you as I write.
I hold your faces in my mind's eye
and offer these dreams and meditations,
the whole inner landscape of my vision,
that you, too, may have a native land,
something real on which you can stand,
a holy sphere of your own to dwell in,
to live and dream and be and know in.
May by dream become your provision;
may your souls yet find a home.

--An act of faith; I know not the outcome…
Cast your bread upon the waters,
for after many days,
you will find it again.
-Eccles. 11:1

My Heart is an Egg

My heart is an egg, and I feel something breaking.
There first comes a wobble, a painful shooting tremor,
a tiny crack appears in the seam,
growing larger, longer, and scarier;
an eyehole is opened and some fluid seeps out
(call them tears if you like),
and a sharp little point pierces through the rift
like an arrow, like a chisel, pecking, pecking;
a wobble, a roll, a wider, louder cracking,
and there gushes at once a clear, viscous fluid.
The shell splits wider around the jagged gap,
and I think I must be dying
until a tiny yellow head pokes through,
matted and dripping, eyes still shut against the light,
and a frail little body stumbles out trembling,
trying to rise up on short, spindly stick-legs
amidst the clinging fragments of the shattered old shell.
I hear soft peepings; a new life is begun.

Throes

Can a man get pregnant? Can a male bear?
--Then why am I for so long in labor,
and with what?
Years and years of getting my guts kicked,
stretched, torn, pounded black and blue
by something that keeps growing and seeking release;
and there is no release. I am not delivered.
I pant and gasp and give birth to wind,
to words that sit in notebooks on a shelf.

What is this accomplishing?
What's my life been for?
So much struggle, so little to show!
"Surely I have labored for nothing,
and spent my strength in vain."
God may forgive me;
can I forgive myself?

I hope that it's his seed that's in me;
I hope that he's the Father.
"Be it done unto me according…"

God help me!
If I just had the words,
had the colors,
had the song!

I'm wearing, tearing, splitting, turning inside out;
passing as through a fiery furnace,
an erupting volcano, rivers of lava,
cinders and belching gases.
I'm melting. I'm melting.

This is impossible!
I'm being born!
(Am I my own mother?)

Boiling to the surface,
still-formless matter;
feelings flow like mercury.
Cool me, shape me, form me,
this still-formless son of void and chaos
so full of rich beauty-potential,
all trying to emerge and to happen,
and I haven't got the
love
to bring it forth,
nor the strength to shape it!
God help me!

Heartwood (Among the Giant Sequoias)

As I wander this path, I pause to consider
three giant sequoias fused close together,
three veteran comrades supporting each other,
combining their strength so that none of them topples
where fire has gutted out most of their heartwood.

I enter in and lay me down there,
gazing up through a blue skylight-window,
thinking on the truth I see imaged:
one tree of three, soaring into the heavens.
I gaze and am drawn into rapt contemplation
of the mystery-miracle-multiplication
which engenders Creation: fish, loaves, and people.
All born of a union of spirits together,
of the great triune Love here imaged above me,
and the echoing love between man and woman,
his Spirit between them, binding their lives
into one threefold cord not easily broken.

Yet, that was broken from which my life sprang;
the cord was undone, the ties all severed
before I was born. I feel this within me…

Creator, my Father, my Mother here imaged
and felt somehow in this life that surrounds me,
massive, embracing, rooting and reaching
to earth below and to heaven above me,
I pray you form me within depths of silence,
the core of the world, the womb of your Spirit;
--Form me as you are, made in your image,<
made to be like you, to know you, to love you,
my Father, my Mother; my own couldn't do this.
They couldn't birth me. They needed you too…

I come to this chapel carved from the heartwood
of these ancient trees ravaged by fire,
to gather their strength, to learn of their wisdom,
to hide in their bosom and yours, til I find it…

"For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
your eyes saw my unformed body."
--(Psalm 139)

So may your broken body heal me,
and as these roots and trunks draw the water
out of the ground to nourish the crowns,
so may your blood give life to my being,
spirit, soul, body, root, branch, and leaf.
You are to me
a life-giving Tree.

Unless a Seed

One man alone…
the world, overwhelming,
needs all around me,
even my own;
can't fill my own.

What can I do?
I see so much heartache,
feel so much sorrow;
and, where are you?
Do you feel it, too?

You broke the bread,
fed it to thousands;
some was left over.
What about hearts?
What about love?

Unless a seed
falls and splits open,
pours out its substance,
it stands alone;
no fruit can come.

God, take this seed,
all that is in me;
sow it more deeply,
and may it spring forth
green from the earth.

By a Thread

A tiny tender bud upon the tree of life,
a flickering flame of God scarcely kindled
in the dark of a womb now shaken with trauma.
An attack from above, a falling shadow,
and now my new sister lies for weeks
on the threshold of a miscarriage;
resting, hoping, praying, we with her,
that God and His angels may yet save
this little one whom we've never yet seen,
and whose true name we do not know;
He knows…

You embryonic world, portent, divine promise,
clinging to life by a slender silver thread,
what is it that binds you to this earth,
this body of earth, or to all of us,
the living? Is it a mere cord of flesh?
Then I think, by now, you would have been severed,
dead, cut off. -Or, is it not love
that calls you here to be among us?
And is it not by that sole saving Power
that the slender thread remains unsevered?
And is it not by faith that it gains
the strength of steel, although so fragile?
Is it not by these fervent prayers, and many
ascending before the Throne of Heaven,
and by the hands of unseen angels
that you are not simply swept away?

--Well I would have been, and would be today,
this very hour, if not for the same;
and so would we all, if the truth were told.
What keeps us tethered amidst the fury
of the storm? What binds us together
heart to heart as sister and brother?
Can love ever fail? His purpose be thwarted?
Or only delayed? Obscured? Covered over?

Windblown, uprooted, I bend to kneel
upon my bedroll, huddled, clinging
to whatever light I can find in the darkness
of a cold, rainy night here on the church porch,
fumbling, groping for my own promise,
searching for that small silver thread
which somehow binds me to the living,
to hearth and home; even here, alone;
searching the heart for some image of wholeness,
a Mother, a Child, a radiant glow
within a manger, born for us…

My heart is a glacier, thawing, cracking,
shattered to fragments. Rivulets
of water come streaming down my face
in silver ribbons without end,
hot from my eyes, warm on my cheeks.
I call to the Giver of life and the promise
and offer these tears to warm and nourish
the seed of life that clings to the rock face,
the roots that connect with the womb and soil,
the silver thread which somehow binds us;
and pray that the child may live and flourish.

There is a brightness; I just glimpse
a little girl being pushed on a swingset
there in the park just down the street.
One day soon, I am sure we'll meet…

I Heard You Crying

I heard you crying as we gathered for prayer;
the same cry I've heard in your voice when you sing,
when you lead us in worship Sunday morning,
taking and offering up our hearts' cries:
Some of "Abba!" and some of longing,
the cry of the child who's lost and abandoned.
"Father, close the gap", was your prayer
tonight; "and take away the nothing."

I know the "nothing", how its dark burden
can crush your spirit and blanket your vision.
"Nothing" is powerful, not a mere absence;
"nothing" can drain the very life from you.
But, I wouldn't have known when I first met you;
you had such a presence, a calm, quiet strength
in those deep brown eyes and sturdy frame,
in that powerful voice, the deep wells of passion
which flowed from within, mounting, cresting
waves which carried us into his presence.
I didn't sense the emptiness, longing;
that there in those depths could dwell such a "nothing;
that such passion could well up from desperation,
longing to feel; to be held by Daddy.

But some depth of tenderness in that longing
tells me he lives there deep within you;
that your heart's cry has already been answered,
despite the shroud that hides this from feeling,
wedging a gap between spirit and sensing;
the dark, choking cloud of invisible "nothing".

--It is not nothing, my sister, but something:
elusive yet tangible, casting cold shadows
like spooks in the closets of childhood nightmares,
terrors of being abandoned, rejected;
the dark, tarry ink of intolerable shame,
the creeping ice which numbs all feeling,
yet cannot extinguish the fire of longing;
his witness within the pain of thawing.

Last night you spoke of how your dad left you;
what it's like to have grown up without a father;
to have nothing modeled, no image to go on
by which to know God or who you yourself are.
"You're always looking inside for the rest…!"

And wasn't it you who told me once
that our God does his very best work
in a vacuum, creating in empty spaces?
(The empty tomb where death is defeated;
where the Incarnate overcomes "nothing".)
Painting his image on empty canvas…

I have also created in empty spaces;
were you the one that I saw in the drawing
of one in shadow, slowly emerging?
Were you the one in the barren desert,
hand raised, squinting toward the horizon,
seeking for sign of life or a vision,
scanning the land and finding…..nothing?
Or was it me? Or is there a difference?

We war against darkness, we push back the nothing
in prayer and worship, laughter and sharing,
entering in both alone and together,
opening doors for each others' passage;
the singing high priestess, the warrior-poet,
lifting each other up to the Father,
leading each other into his presence,
entering into the Holy of Holies
through a covenant sealed by the blood of our Brother
in whom we are brothers and sisters forever.

And there in your eyes I see the love shining,
the light of his Spirit, sign of his presence;
as you see in mine. We reveal him together,
we become him together, we are him together.
He is our life, we are his body,
we are his ways of touching, healing;
Immanuel, God with us, the Father revealing.