Ordinary Wednesday: Not in the fire, not in the quake

One of my favourite moments in the Bible is the little, anticlimactic story after one of the big show-stopping stories. It comes in 1 Kings 19, immediately after Elijah has triumphed over all the false prophets of Baal and the land-grabbing wicked King Ahab. God has shown up in an undeniable way to give Elijah the victory that day. It should be anyone’s career highlight. Yet Elijah, hearing that the king’s wife is still out to get him, sets out on an endurance sprint to escape and at the end of it all collapses in despair in the desert.

What do I love about this story? First, I love its humanity. It’s why I love the book of Jonah too. I recognise myself so easily in these pages. I, like Elijah, am a massive idealist. Like Elijah, I push myself to my limit. And a two-decade battle with depression has also meant that, like Elijah, I am easily defeated, prone to despair.

But more than this I love what comes next. God shows up, first as an angel that tells Elijah to eat, drink and sleep. He does this twice. Then He sends a series of dramatic natural events: a violent wind, an earthquake, a fire, and yet in all of these events we are told that God, though sending them, was not “in them”. They were not Him speaking. When He does speak, it’s in “the sound of a low whisper”. Some translations call it the “still small voice”. And then, in that low whisper, God gets Elijah’s attention and shows him the way forward.

I am drawn back to that story today for a few reasons. The obvious one most Australians will recognise. This morning my city experienced the shock of an earthquake registering 6 points on the Richter scale, with its epicentre in the mountains north-east of me. It was dramatic but relatively minor, nothing of the scale that many places around the world have to deal with often, simply unusual for Australia which lies safely within its own continental plate. But yes, an earthquake got me thinking. Specifically it made me think, How does God get my attention? It struck me quite quickly how many in my city, stuck in the morass of our sixth lockdown and the growing reality of what this delta strain of Covid means for us, welcomed the earthquake as a diversion. I certainly did. But others, understandably, were frightened. Others wondered, what next?

Which brings me to my second reason why I’m telling this story today. Because, while the earthquake itself did not make me feel like this, I know well that feeling of “what next?” and am often there when I feel that I’ve had one too many things go wrong. Today it wasn’t the earthquake that made me feel like this but some complaints about work I had given much effort to that tipped me quickly into a place of feeling that I couldn’t do any more. It was so easy to slip into that place, so easy to feel that I had no choice but despair.

And yet there was a moment in the day when I felt that God spoke quietly yet clearly and I want to return to that moment. I was walking my boys to the park at the end of the afternoon and, as often happens, they grew tired and distracted, occupied with digging in the dirt and finding treasures of sticks and leaves. So I gave in and decided that some nature play was more important than getting to the park. I pulled the pram off to the side of the path and I let the boys crawl and discover instead. And as I stood there, I looked around me, listened to leaves and wattle-birds, briefly lowered my mask so I could breathe in wattle and eucalypt, and God was so clearly present, the author and perfecter of this scene, the one who carved each groove in the trees’ skin, the one who taught wattle-birds to dance and sing, that I heard my spirit say, “How much more will He care for you?”

It was simple. The ground did not shake. I still grew deflated by evening. My mind played suddenly and unexpectedly in the darkness. But then I sat with Elijah, and told you his story, and I can now repeat what my spirit heard this afternoon. I ask it to myself. I ask it to you. If He so clothes the wattle-birds and the eucalypts, how much more will He care for you?

Ordinary Wednesday: Daily Bread

During the first Melbourne lockdown around Easter 2020 I began baking bread. One of the first items to start disappearing from supermarket shelves was bread (after toilet paper…) and with shops overwhelmed by panic-buyers rushing in to get everything they needed for the apocalypse it was generally easier to make do with what we had at home instead daring the crowds. So I started baking.

Soon it became a regular part of my week. My boys devoured bread and it saved us money to make it ourselves instead of buying it. I also enjoyed the challenge, and for me bread-making became a kind of lockdown therapy. This year, I expanded my repertoire to include sourdough – something of a COVID-era cliché, but I’m okay with that. The whole process of making sourdough is a delight and a fascination, and the bread I can make now is far better than any that I ever made with regular yeast. It also gives scope for so much spiritual reflection: the slow process that we simply need to trust; it happens, with remarkably little interference from us. Even the making of the starter culture is simply a matter of patience and perseverance: knowing what to do, keeping on doing it each day, and trusting that one day it will work.

But recently it prompted a new reflection. I joined a Facebook community of amateur sourdough bakers called “Daily Bread” and this made me think, of course, of the line from the Lord’s Prayer, “give us today our daily bread”. This is particularly pertinent for me at the moment, because my three boys are growing in body and appetite and so I really am baking a loaf of bread every night for the day ahead. What, I found myself wondering, does this mean for the prayer for my “daily bread”? I am making it myself, after all. So what does it mean to pray for it nonetheless?

Well, obviously I know that Jesus was not only talking about bread. “Daily bread” means the things we need to sustain us through the day, and it must also make us think of the verse in Deuteronomy 8:3 that Jesus quotes back to the devil in Matthew 4:4 – “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” But there is also a very real sense in which He was talking about bread. Bread, after all, was a staple food in the ancient middle eastern world, much as it is today in many cultures, and to pray for your daily bread meant a recognition both that your bread came from the hand of God and that you were to rely on Him for the day’s provisions and not fret about the days beyond.

So, when I pray for my daily bread, I am not denying that I have a responsibility to procure that bread. If I can work, then I should do so, and then I must either buy or make the bread. The process of making it myself does not place me in a position of lesser reliance on God; it simply makes me a co-worker with Him. He gives me what I need to make the bread, and He could take it away any time He chose. I am dependent on Him each day for the very basics of my survival.

Yet it struck me, as I thought about my own bread-making, that Jesus originally spoke these words to a people who would always have made their own bread. There would have been no Baker’s Delight in the ancient world – no news-flash in itself, but not something I had ever given careful thought to. If you lived in their day, your daily bread would always have come from your own oven, your own fire, your own hands doing the kneading and cultivating the yeast. Every step, perhaps even the growing and grinding of the grain, would have been your own work. And yet Jesus taught: ask God for the day’s bread.

In modern Western culture we are undoubtedly cut off from the processes of food production. We go to the grocery store and buy bread that someone else has baked, from flour that someone else has milled, from wheat that someone else has grown. In baking my own bread, making my own sourdough culture, I am more aware of that process. Yet I am no more in control of it. The time that I accidentally left the culture fermenting in the oven after I turned it on to bake bread, turning it into a burnt-out jar and a strangely shaped crust at the bottom of the oven, reminded me of how easily the work of my own hands can be destroyed. When my children throw their bread on the ground outside, I am reminded again. I make the bread, but I am not in control.

So when I mix up the flour, salt, water and culture each night, I can remember: God has given me everything that my hands are mixing. When I place it in the oven in the morning, I can remember: God has given me this new day, and the opportunities that it presents; He has given me the family to feed; He has given water to the crops that have given me the flour. All things are from His hands to mine.

But I can also remember: God has called me to use my hands to participate in His work. When I ask for my daily bread, God provides, and then He calls. He gives me the opportunity to be part of the process, to feel His creation at work, and to participate in this symbol of the kingdom of God slowly at work, like a tiny bit of leaven working its way imperceptibly through the dough…

The Lisping God

God, Calvin said, speaks
like a nursing mother lisping to her child,
making room for "our feebleness", 
as though
cuddling us with words.

And so I turn
to the comfort of Psalms
where the wounded Christ opens
His arms to make
room for my wounds,

to the God who calms a lamb
sleeping by a stream,
or exhausted Elijah:
God's angel enfolding him
in the comfort of sleep.
Pablo Picasso, “Mother and Child” (1902)
http://www.pablopicasso.org

Ordinary Wednesday: In Between Poems

Heaven’s chimes are slow, but sure to strike at last;

Earth’s sands are slow, but surely dropping thro’:

And much we have to suffer, much to do,

Before the time be past.

Christina Rossetti, “Heaven’s chimes are slow”

One of my favourite stories is a little-known work by J.R.R. Tolkien called “Leaf By Niggle”. It is the story of an artist called Niggle who is brilliant at painting leaves. One “leaf by Niggle”, they say, is worth many other artists’ trees. But Niggle wants to one day paint a whole tree, and aims to do so, but is continually interrupted by his neighbour whose petty complaints Niggle still feels obliged to help with. Niggle also knows that he has a big journey that he must undertake one day soon, and he keeps putting off preparing for it. Niggle’s story is so familiar to me: the story of someone whose head is full of creative goals yet they are never realised because life keeps interrupting.

But that – spoiler alert – is not the end of Niggle’s story. If you read to the end, what you find is that all of life’s interruptions have become part of Niggle’s artwork. In the end, instead of having painted a tree, he finds that he has created a garden, and he and his pesky neighbour are now co-workers in the one beautiful garden. Everything that seemed to interrupt Niggle from his artwork was in fact the art in the making.

For me, it’s a beautiful picture of heaven – and I suspect Tolkien meant it that way. It’s also one of the best reflections of creativity and its eternal significance that I have encountered. I have been comforted by it many times when I feel that I am not accomplishing all that I hope to accomplish. I like to think – and I shared a poem of mine here yesterday to that effect – that even all the poems I have never managed to write have become a kind of humus making the nutritious soil for everything else that I have written or done.

I wonder what we will one day make of all the spaces in between things in our lives – those times of waiting or interruption or stasis, those times when we felt we weren’t where we should be, doing what we wanted to be doing. Neurological research even indicates that times of seeming stasis are actually often times when our brains do the work most necessary for being creative. I love the life and poetry of Christina Rossetti for this reason, because in her work I see so much of that fruit of in-between times. One of her most beautiful and powerful works is the three-part poem “Three Stages”. Two of the three stages were originally published as stand-alone poems, and one was reimagined as another poem “Heaven’s chimes are slow”, and there are many years in between each stage. We can see, as Rossetti keeps returning to the theme – seemingly the story of giving up a love that went against the persona’s conscience – the way that time works away at our wounds and struggles. We see the vacillations in a soul that is seeking to do what it knows to be right yet feels the tensions of this decision. And we see some wonderful reflections on the passing of time itself, something that only time can teach us, as in this passage from the final part:

I thought to deal the death-stroke at a blow,
To give all, once for all, but nevermore; –
Then sit to hear the low waves fret the shore,
Or watch the silent snow.

“Oh rest,” I thought, “in silence and the dark;
Oh rest, if nothing else, from head to feet:
Thought I may see no more poppied wheat,
Or sunny soaring lark.

“These chimes are slow, but surely strike at last;
This sand is slow, but surely droppeth thro’;
And much there is to suffer, much to do,
Before the time be past.“

That last stanza always arrests me. They speak of a soul that has struggled, known that struggles do not end easily, and yet has chosen to persevere all the same. “These chimes are slow, but surely strike at last”: there’s something of Biblical power in these words, in the way that they recall moments in scripture like Habakkuk, in the version that Rossetti would have read it: “For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry” (Habakkuk 2:3 KJV). Rossetti goes on also to use images from Ecclesiastes, with its deeply realistic sense of the labours of the soul longing for eternity. It is a poem filled with the aching of our in-betweens.

“These chimes are slow, but surely strike at last.” “Though it tarry, wait for it.” There’s always been a tension for me in the statement that God’s promises “will surely come” and “will not tarry”, even “though it tarry”. How is this true? There’s an ambiguity in how the KJV renders it. The ESV makes the distinction clearer, though no less of a paradox: “If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.” How can it seem slow yet not delay? Because God is not failing to act, any more than Jesus neglected to stop Lazarus from dying. God is acting, even in the in-betweens. He is working in the stillness and the silence as much as in the earthquake and the body rising from the dead. Nothing is truly an in-between moment in God’s timeframe.

And so we wait, and seek, with Rossetti, to “rest in silence and the dark”. God, thank heavens, is with us, sustaining us in both, and we may even produce some beautiful poems or gardens in the wait.

For all your unwritten poems

This one has a stone wall that you saw
driving north at sunrise on your last day at work.
You thought, “I’ll write a poem about that”, but by sunset
it was lockdown again 
and you went home to stay home. No poem.

This one has a glimpse
you caught of your face reflected in a sunlit window
and your freckles surprised even you, as though
the last time you’d seen yourself you were pale
and now time and slowness had put their pigment on you.
You began – a sonnet, if I recall correct – but never
finished, the iambs too regular, life
in too much quiet disarray.

This one has ivy winding around it,
and this one got lost taking out the compost.
These ones were bundled together in your bed
when you fell asleep, and this one lies tangled
in your youngest son’s cot.
Over there’s an epic that was never thought
and under the garden path is a song.
“Remember us?” they cry, as you hang laundry to dry
and somewhere, yes somewhere, you’re sure that you do.

When it works,
when the sounds and pictures and words combine
to take shape on a page, on a screen, on a tongue,
you will look up, and find
the stone wall has become a city,
the compost heap an orchard, vast,
your children resting beneath the boughs.
You will stand 
on the bedrock of your unwritten thoughts,
teeming with miles of living humus beneath you,
everything being written, all the while.

Ordinary Wednesday: Spring Hesitation

Poets have never fully trusted spring. e.e. cummings likened it to a “perhaps hand”, hesitant and uncertain. T.S. Eliot called April “the cruellest month” (a class I taught once decided it was because he had bad hayfever). John Mark McMillan recently sang that “Spring without permission rages on again”. And Christina Rossetti had this to say:

Spring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust

March with its peck of dust,

Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,

Nor even May, whose flowers

One frost may wither thro’ the sunless hours.

(“Winter: My Secret”)

I began writing poetry at the start of spring in my last year of University, when life felt that it was opening up for me after a number of challenges, yet I felt the uncertainty and fear that it might all shrivel up again. The uncertainty drove me to poetry, and I haven’t looked back.

Today the southern hemisphere welcomed Spring, and my city, notorious for turning on dreadful weather in the first week of September, surprised us all with a glorious display of blossoms and sunshine. My family ate a picnic lunch in the garden and celebrated with a colourful blueberry “Spring” cake. Meanwhile our government announced another three weeks of lockdown, followed by a slow removal of restrictions. We’ve been here so, so many times before.

I don’t want to get into the politics of things here. I am largely in support of lockdowns, not because I like them or am blind to their (significant) negative consequences, but because I believe them to be mostly necessary. Despite that, I realised by the end of the day that I felt crushed. For me it’s the experience of seeing yet another year 12 class finish their schooling over Microsoft Teams, where bad internet connections, discouragement and the challenges of writing from home can so easily make everything much harder than it already is. And it already is so, so hard. I do not want to fail my students. I do not want them to lose heart. I do not want to see this happen again and again and again.

I do not have an answer to all of this. I thank God that I do not have to make the decisions that our governments have to make. But I do know that no spring, no end to lockdown, no return to “normal” will ever be everything we hope for, not in this life. As a believer in Jesus, I know that it isn’t only lockdowns, hayfever or aphids that stand to ruin our hopes for spring. In this life, spring is only ever a promise, not the fulfillment.

So when hayfever hits, or Melbourne delivers with its early-spring winter revival efforts, or lockdowns are extended, I am going to try something: turning to God, and thanking Him that this is not all there ever will be. Because our final spring is not here yet, and when it comes it will never be destroyed.

Keeping It Reel: Thoughts on authenticity and social media

I was filming my sons engaging in a science experiment they had learnt about on Play School – mixing bicarb soda and hair conditioner to make snow – when I realised very quickly that this was not something I would be sharing on social media. The twins shovelling handfuls of bicarb-conditioner-mess into their mouths while my eldest complained about the mess it made on his hands and tried to remember if the recipe also needed four cups of water…it all ended with me hurriedly cleaning up the mess and diverting them into other outdoor activities while I hung up the washing. I then caught a glimpse of some recently opened peach blossoms and paused to try capturing it on my phone, while one of the twins clung to my legs, demanding cuddles, and the eldest started rummaging in the garden bed. I could share the peach blossoms online, but what picture would this give of my life, compared with the reality?

I am torn sometimes by the question of what to share and what not to share. At any given moment most of my country is in some form of lockdown, with its two biggest cities, including my own, being stuck in strict, extended lockdowns that seem not to be ending any time soon. Sharing moments of beauty and reprieve seems to be often important to do, both for ourselves and for others. Yet there are also those who need to hear the real life stories – the kids screaming, the flatness, the struggle to be motivated, to parent well, to work. These also need sharing. And sometimes we also just need to let off steam, and that can be okay too.

But does the world need to hear me let off steam? Not really. I have friends and a wife who will graciously listen, and a God I can always turn to in prayer. I do not need to make others hear my frustrations, not for my sake alone. Nor are my meltdowns more real than my rejoicing. I was genuinely in awe of the peach blossoms this afternoon, and genuinely exploding in my eyes and nose for the rest of the evening with allergies from all the pollens and the dust mites that we unsettled with cleaning. As Taylor Swift would say, “Both of these things can be true.” It is difficult to know which side of reality most needs sharing at the time.

Here’s a question I am trying to ask myself, not always successfully: which is the most loving thing to share right now? Sometimes sharing a cute picture of the kids is loving, sometimes it is loving to share a struggle, sometimes to share both. Sometimes it helps others feel more normal to know that I struggle. Sometimes people just want to see something beautiful, and that’s okay too. Sometimes people need their eyes lifted beyond their struggles, sometimes they need to see where God is working in the midst of it. Sometimes they need distraction, sometimes a cry. But the key is that I should seek to be loving. If I am sharing something beyond my close friends or family, it needs to be about more than just me. The world doesn’t need more of me, but it certainly needs more of God, and it certainly needs more beauty and love.

So here is how I am trying to keep it real. Here is a photo of a peach blossom in my garden that would look so much more beautiful if you could come to visit my garden and see for yourself. It was beautiful, and the sun in the afternoon was glorious, and I sneezed and struggled to keep my children occupied and God is good, all the time.

Ordinary Wednesday: Natural Theology for Pre-Schoolers

This is a conversation I had with E, my nearly four-year-old, at breakfast yesterday, about why the porridge was not ready yet, even though he was yelling at it and telling it that he wanted it to be ready.

Me: It’s like in Basil and the Branch [a kids’ book that he loves about a branch on a grapevine]. Even though Basil squeezes and puffs, he can’t make his grapes grow yet.

E: Why can’t he make his grapes grow yet?

Me: Because it isn’t the season for grapes to grow.

E: Because grapes grow in summer!

Me: That’s right, grapes don’t grow until summer.

E: And we eat them in autumn! And winter, and spring!

Me: Yes, we can eat them in autumn, can’t we? Or it’s like our quince tree. That takes a long, long time to grow quinces, doesn’t it? Do you think the quince tree could make quinces now by squeezing and yelling?

E: No…

Me: And then the quinces start to grow in summer but they take a long, loooong time to ripen. They’re not ripe until autumn, are they?

E: [growing interested] What things can we make with quinces next autumn?

Me: What would you like to make with quinces next autumn?

E: Could we make quince paste?!

Me: Yes, we could make quince paste again. That takes a long time to make too, doesn’t it? Just like sourdough.

E: Or we could make quince jam!

Me: Yes, we could make quince jam too. That also takes a long time.

E: Is the porridge ready yet?

Me: Almost. I just need the berries to thaw.

E: I want water.

And slowly, slowly, the oats absorb the water, and the berries start to thaw. Slowly, slowly, buds lose their outer winter coating and tiny flowers peak through. Slowly my son is learning to be patient, even though the next morning he is sad once again that the porridge takes too long to be ready. Slowly I learn to be patient too, even though tonight my children climb in and out of my legs while I make pasta, and I knead sourdough while E is sad because his mother has not yet come inside from work. Slowly God teaches me that I too am as easily saddened, as little inclined to trust Him, as much in need of grace. Slowly, slowly, God works in winter-hardened hearts.

Ordinary Wednesday: The New Ordinary?

It’s a curious thing, keeping ordinary time these last two years. In some respects everything is very ordinary. We don’t leave our homes very much; each day feels much like the previous one; we see the same people, the same walls, the same garden beds. Yet in other ways nothing is ordinary. We long for a return to “normal”, and find ourselves frequently disoriented when life resumes normality for a time and then changes again. We book holidays only to cancel them, make birthday party plans only to send out the message to friends and family that the party cannot go ahead. I’ve coined the phrase “lockdown whiplash” (I’m sure others have used it too) to describe the startling, yanking dislocation that occurs when we keep snapping in and out of lockdown restrictions. Everything is ordinary; nothing is.

How do we find our bearings in this time? One of the comforts I have found is in watching the seasons change. Today I spied our first rose after the big winter prune, peeking like a sunset through the plum blossoms. The springstars are out sparkling softly all through the garden bed. Soon the peach, apple and quince will blossom too. Time is passing even if it feels that we are not moving.

But God’s time, I am reminded, is not our time. The slowness of ordinary time gives way to the expectation of Advent. And what happens year by year in the church calendar is happening cosmically in our hearts with ever growing truth. There were four hundred years between prophecies before Jesus came, yet creation was still preparing the way, the Roman Empire still waking up and readying itself to pave those roads that Jesus and Paul would walk.

What, I wonder, is this ordinary/extraordinary time growing in us? What is it growing in you? What is it growing in me? The signs may not be as clear as the rose I saw today, but they will be more certain, more secure, because the God doing this work never fails, and He always finishes what He starts.

From the ground

“Dada! Find wiggly-woo!” the twins cry,
exultant at the chance to dig fingers in earth
and find its inhabitants in their hands.

And so, on my lunch break, I fossick
in our newly dug garden bed,
each patch of earth yielding

a companion for these delighted fingers,
and I store the moment like compost
to ferment within, to wriggle me alive.