Easter Darkness

I sat on the porch with Barney and Rufus this morning watching the full moon, wreathed in mist, set over the far mountains. As the moon set, the sun was beginning to rise across another ridge in the east. A moment of mystery and grace, unseen most days of my life, the rising and setting of our two beautiful sources of light in this world, gave my soul joy this morning. Full moon nights keep Barney busy barking and one of us yelling “Barney, dammit” at least once from the bedroom window. But in the quiet hush of night light setting and day light rising, there was only gratitude and joy in the company of Rufus and Barney. They sat on either side, gazing into the mysterious grey half light darkness seeing and hearing what is invisible to me... the stirrings of life in the darkness.
Lent has lingered overlong this year. In the midst of the journey towards the cross, there have been reminders of life’s limits all around. Friends with cancer, friends with old age illness and approaching death, the spreading of a beloved child’s ashes, parents of friends dying, recognition of changes in my own body that signal a new era, all stirrings in the darkness that encompasses the light of life. As I sit on my soul’s front porch, I ponder the workings of God in all darkness and light.
There are days when I wonder how God could be present in a world filled with suffering and loss. Genocide, children starving, wars and rumors of wars, pirates and terrorists fill me with fear and loathing leaving no room for gratitude or grace. Then, I remember an ad I heard with a little girl’s voice saying “Pray your worries.” Instead of lying awake listing all that is wrong or hurtful, pray your worries. So I resolve to give the gifts I have been given and leave the care of the world in God’s hands. I am not God. In spite of all that is wrong, I do believe God is at work in our world today just as God was working in the world through Jesus two thousand years ago.
As I pray my worries, I remember to give thanks for all I have been given and to do so without smearing false guilt over my thank you’s like jelly on bread. When I have given someone a gift, I despise hearing the words “You shouldn’t have...” as if protesting the intentions of the giver make the gift more acceptable. Somehow I think God would prefer songs of thanksgiving instead of a Judas song that says we are wasteful and others have more need than us. I have been given much, all that I need and most of what I want. I am grateful. Stirrings in the darkness...
Easter comes as a liturgical explosion of light, new life, and new beginnings during the season of spring, itself an explosion of color and new life. Like the little sparrow who has built a nest in my grapevine wreath on the porch, I flutter my wings and fuss, not at people who pass by, but at the darkness. I know there is life beyond the light I can see and I want the meanings of the darkness revealed. The mystery remains, though, and I must live with Easter darkness by faith, gazing with the eyes of faith into the night that remains. So I pray for those who suffer, for those who have died or are dying, for those who walk this world without the gifts I have been given. And I give thanks daily for my life and my place here in the midst of plenty... plenty of food, plenty of beauty, plenty of love, plenty of home and plenty of God. Easter darkness, Easter light...

Horse Poop, Easter Egg Hunts and Lent

The farm is ringed round with dark clouds in the distance telling the tale of snow coming soon. The wind makes the tops of the tall oak trees bend and sway, limbs bumping into each other as the winter front roars its way towards us. I walked down to the stables this morning leaning into the wind, enjoying the warmth that remains as the gray clouds begin to cover our skies. As I shoveled out horse poop from the stalls, I began to reflect on yesterday’s Easter Egg Hunt and Lent. Strange combination, perhaps but my mind goes bumpty bump when I am doing physical labor.
Everyday, without fail, I must rake out the old used up sawdust and poop so that fresh bedding is available for Junie B and Dixie Chick. If the dirty sawdust is left in the stalls, it turns rancid and acidic. It hurts the horses hooves and the smell will make them sick. They must be stalled at night in spring time to prevent their overeating the tender spring grass that is so high in sugar. Junie B will eat herself into oblivion if she is not kept in her stall. Too much weight and she will founder, be lame and unable to be ridden. So I shovel poop and think.
I do these same tasks...shovel poop in the stalls, rake and clean the paddock, put out hay, check the water, give the donkeys and horses feed, brush and groom them for a little while each day. If it is morning, I am in the stable tending to the horses and donkeys. In the evening I put them up and give them hay and water for the night. It is a labor of love... love for them and for who I am when I am with them. Why, I wonder, is it so hard for me to do the same for God... to walk down to the place where God lives in my heart, rake out the garbage, tend to my surroundings and feed my soul?
Lent, the liturgical equivalent of stall cleaning, gives me a push to establish (again) a pattern of paying attention to God, feeding and tending my relationship with the One who loves me just because I am, not because of what I do. And yet, what I do matters. So yesterday, the Egg Hunt day, was an opportunity to do something old in a new way. Old patterns are gone. The routine had changed and something new was hatched at Sabbath Rest Farm on this Palm Sunday.
Families came from Cara’s first grade class, children in tow. It didn’t take long for the kids to begin running the length and breadth of the green hills, tumbling like young puppies at play. I met a young father recovering from back surgery, a builder and lover of wood. He grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York. I loved hearing his stories of farm life.
Ganadhi and Natalyia, their three children and Celeste came. Celeste was wearing her daffodil hat and Natalyia brought Moldovan food... wonderful cucumber cabbage dill slaw and stuffed grape leaves and chocolate cookies to die for. Did you know there is a Russian grocery on Patton Avenue? Ganadhi told me how to tell the difference between rooster chicks and hen chicks. Who knew hen feet flop down and rooster feet turn up? At the end of the afternoon, Ganadhi received a phone call telling him of his father’s approaching death far away. He will suffer this great loss far away from his family, unable to return to his birth country of Moldova. Four pre-teens flopped in the hammock, dragging the ground as they tried to swing. The hay ride filled with children and parents squealing and laughing. Neighbors came, some with their grandchildren. Junie B stood patiently as little children climbed on her back only to say, “It’s so high up!” Three of our grandchildren, dressed in look-a-like shirts, carrying their Easter baskets, looking for eggs, mouths smeared with chocolate, fell asleep in the car on their way home to Lewisville, tuckered out from all the excitement.
Michael estimated seventy five or eighty people came and many of them for the first time. What a gift of grace for me yesterday. How could I have not seen the possibilities for relationship with my larger community before? So many from so many different places... so much good food and so much laughter... so much celebration of new life at the end of a hard winter. I am pondering how to continue this new tradition... how to find those who would love to take a Kawasaki mule ride roller coastering up and down hills, sit in warm sun and cloud gaze, go for a creek walk and look for pretty rocks, pet the horses and laugh at the donkeys. Sabbath Rest hospitality for new friends, my hometown, my Easter gift one week early... Thanks be to God. And thanks for those kitchen friends who stayed to help clean up. It looked better after than before!

Spring is springing...

I wakened to the melody of rain on our tin roof and the call of the mourning dove...two of my favorite songs. It is spring in the mountains. One day is warm and sunny, the next cold and rainy. The weather, like life, is never static. Daffodils have been in bloom for a month by our stone walkway and the hyacinths and tulips are joining in. The fertilizer and lime have turned the hayfields an Ireland emerald green. Everywhere there is evidence of new life bursting up through the mud and debris of the seasons past.
New baby chicks live in the basement under the bright warmth of spotlights. Turkeys talk softly down the hill below our bedroom windows. Rabbits are hopping out of the brush and over the lawn to the woods. Sparrows are nesting in the Spanish moss in my grapevine wreath while bluebirds make their nests in the boxes on the fence posts. A group of four young deer are spending the nights on the hill below Tim and Jeannie’s house. And the groundhog, newly emerged from a long winter’s sleep, has eaten Mama’s rhododendron down to the ground as a spring snack. The earth’s inhabitants are hungry for light and warmth and food. I include myself among the deer, the chicks and turkeys, the rabbits, the birds, and even the groundhog. I, too, long for new life and light.
As I watch the miracles of spring in this my sixty third year, I am as filled with wonder as a young child. Old people, if they pay attention, and little children are able to see the miracles that surround them everyday without the filter of being a grown-up. They know what an absolute miracle it is that peeper frogs come back to sing their song at the same time and place every year. They take delight in the feel of fluffy baby chicks newly hatched, peeping and pecking the hands that feed them. The choosing and picking of spring flowers for a bouquet is an occasion for jubilation. The gift of the world we live in is still a gift unmarred by fears of pollution and global warming.
Just for today I will live with thanksgiving in my heart as I celebrate the wonders of this gracious old world we share with all of God’s creations. I will watch the horses and donkeys run down the hill to meet me, tails and manes flying in the wind, and sing a song of thanksgiving for their fleet feet. I pray my soul’s feet will be as swift as theirs when I run to meet my Creator. Like the Psalmist I yearn to “have wings like a dove to fly away and be at rest... to find a shelter from the raging wind and the tempest.” I am sheltered now in this time of new life. This blessed season in body and soul is a gift beyond measure. I rest in the unchanging Goodness that has created me and all that is within and without... the world of springtime is blooming in my soul today. Thanks be to God.

Easter Egg Hunt Heaven

He walked up the steps, hitching up his pants as he moved to meet the pastor sitting on a stool at stage right. A big, burly young man with a beard, wearing pressed jeans and a plaid shirt, with a soft Louisiana accent, he stood anxiously as his pastor began to interview him. We were attending the spring musical at our friend’s church and in the middle of the music, a time was set aside for testimonies. Testimonies are a public way of saying what you believe based not just on what you know, but also on what you have experienced... heart, mind and soul laid bare to those who sit listening to you. Giving your public testimony is enough to make the strong quake in their boots, or high heels.
The pastor began to ask questions designed to help the young man tell us what he knew and what his experiences had been. His life had been consumed by drugs and alcohol. He, his wife and child moved here from Louisiana to live. His wife began attending church and her faithfulness brought him to God. This past year was his first sober year since he was a teen. He lost his job and had decided after months of searching and barely hanging on, to go back to Louisiana to work on an oil rig. Then a man he had called twelve times looking for work, called him and hired him two days before he was to leave. A miracle for him, a reason to believe God was taking care of him.
The words that stuck in my craw, however, were the words he used to describe himself as a child. An abusive home, a holy terror of a child... “I was the child everyone felt sorry for and no one wanted their child to play with.” My heart cracked wide open hearing those words and I wept for the little boy he had been. He has transcended his beginnings and now is part of the Family of God at his church, accepted and loved for who he was and now is.
Our Easter Egg Hunt is on Palm Sunday. For twelve years, we used the egg hunt as a way for church members and their children to come play on the farm. This year, we are no longer members of that congregation but we are still having the egg hunt. When I heard that young father’s testimony, I began to look for children like him to invite to the farm. I called Carolyn and asked her to invite the family Cat Square Church helped at Christmas. I am going to invite our neighbors who have a special needs child. I have already invited our neighbor’s grandchildren, mountain children with strong tap roots in Cutshall Town. I am going to ask Celeste to invite the young family from Moldova. I called Cara to invite her first grade class, children whose families are new to our country and children whose families struggle financially. I am going to go looking in the byways for those who have not been asked to sit at the table of grace and plenty, those who are new to this country, those who are outside the circle, and we will learn each other’s names, take a hay ride together, pet baby chickens, watch the children ride Junie B, laugh at the donkeys, hide and hunt Easter eggs, share a meal and celebrate our connections, not our differences. A little preview of heaven...
I believe God will be there, too, watching the children and the parents, taking pleasure in their joy and laughter. And I believe God is watching over the life of that little abused boy now grown into a loving father and husband, taking delight in the hatching transformation that happens when Love comes to life through the loving care of others. We are all little children in your sight, I know, but sometimes we forget those who are least among us. Remind us in this season of Lent to look for those children who need the loving touch of God in the midst of their loneliness and suffering. If there is another little child, a holy terror in our group on Sunday, please God, could we be a reflection of your loving kindness for them? Thank you for Sabbath Rest Farm, for its daily gifts of laughter and love, and for the opportunity to share it with others.