As many Australians have come together over the past week to recognise the first Australians for NAIDOC week, I’ve been challenged to think more about how I walk with indigenous Australians day to day. This is a small beginning: a reflection of what it means in my own backyard.
But we venture on. Newness at least is in
the air, on Capitol Hill, in the fruit
jumping out of trees. We cannot slow this
if we wanted to. Shopping aisles charge on
towards Christmas, while my heart craves Advent.
I could use the dark, the waiting, to bend
soul's joints back into shape, could use the long
silence to learn again to wait, to wish.
We have not yet traced the evil to the root,
nor will we. But our hearts may learn to sing
a purer song if they remember this:
the days we could not sing or hug or kiss,
the days we passed at home craving our home
where we are not apart and not alone.
Order unravels quickly
from sleepy first breath to
outbreak of chaos.
I cannot control
the unfolding of the day, but God
of the singularity and
multiplicity teaches
single-heartedness if
I take this moment
to listen.
Everything breaks,
is broken, or
sticks underfoot like porridge.
Voice grows tired, and
heart turns wild
at the endless, savage
price of love.
Crushed underfoot,
I learn Eden and Golgotha
while I wipe the floor again.
Body breaks, is broken,
tomorrow is new.
The day had gone on long enough.
First the Pharisees and their questions,
then the intruding children,
then the camel and the needle's eye,
so that, when they cried out,
"Who then can be saved?" it was
as much from the weariness of the day's
debates as the thought that riches
could keep an earnest man from heaven.
And so, right when
all their careworn sandles seemed
not worth the effort, He looked
into eyes and said, "What's impossible
for man is possible for God."
What then? Could God lift
the labour-sick soul, and write
new possibility on its nature?
In the midst of the burden
and the striving, this truth:
Be small. Be like a child.
Be less so I may be more.
Learning the names of days, my son
asks each morning for the signs that distinguish
one from the next: is this
the day the rubbish truck comes?
Does Dad go to work?
Is it music class today?
And this day, one without
any special markers, leaves me
bereft of news to give him, only
the name - Wednesday - and the thought
that days like this are needed, when
we simply live, and get on with life,
while trees do their daily work
and cells respirate, we too
find grace in the normal,
and the chance to try
again what we left
undone as yesterday's sun went down.
All this I cannot say, only
that these ordinary days
bring their own small gifts.
On this day
I still wrestled my children
into their clothes,
still raced out the door
too late for comfort,
still pricked my finger with a rose thorn,
still feared that all my labour's in vain,
and found the evening slump
a little close to despair
yet
everything changed, while nothing changed
and mustard seeds of life were at work
whether we noticed
or not.
My twins' favourite game
is to grab a Bible each and run
delighted round the room shouting,
"Bible! Bible!" as though
treasure has been found.
Their Bibles are ragged and worn from rough handling;
binding broken, the Word opens up,
unbound, into the mess of life.
Man is what he is and he is everything that he is in the decision of faith
Karl Barth
And faith, or belief, is more
direction than assent
to a thought or a fact; it is
movement towards
the thing from which others turn,
and from which you may have turned,
will have turned,
for hole-hearted love is never whole-hearted,
and yet
you correct, in daily
micromovements, to turn
back, again, again, and dwell -
for faith also is dwelling,
an end-of-day settling,
body and soul, weary and fighting,
ending your fighting,
and drooping, falling
into infinite arms.
