Monthly Archives: August 2009

To Walk in Spaciousness

church, poetry, quotes, ,

On the Feast of the Transfiguration I was standing in church listening to the prayers a few minutes before the main service was to begin, when our rector handed me the Psalter and asked me to go outside and ring this bell. I was to ring it once by means of the foot pedal, read aloud a passage from the Psalter which was penciled off, push the pedal once more, read the next passage, and so on until another parishioner came to relieve me.

It was the first time I had ever rung that big bell. As I began chanting, I was praying the Psalm and at the same time reflecting on how I’d never known, when standing inside the church I heard those slow peals, that the bell-ringer’s voice was ringing out there along with the bell.

After a few stanzas, the words, “I walk in spaciousness, because I search Your commandments,” came out of my mouth and piqued my consciousness, as I did not remember reading that word spaciousness in the Bible before. Before I knew it, the skilled bell-ringer had come to my side and was gathering the ropes for all the other bells, getting ready to ring the full and celebratory announcement that accompanies the priest’s “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!” and I went back in. I hadn’t noticed which Psalm it was that I was reading, partly because the number was in Roman numerals, and those don’t register without my actively working them out as a puzzle, however speedily.

So it was days later that I found out it was Psalm 119 (or 118 in the Septuagint, which we use) and verse 45. Before that, I’d searched all the Bible translations and discovered that spaciousness is not in them. It is in the lectionary of the Orthodox Church in America. The other translations do use similar language, such as “I’ll stride freely through wide open spaces as I look for your truth and your wisdom.” (The Message) or “I will walk at liberty and at ease, for I have sought and inquired for [and desperately required] Your precepts.” (Amplified)

Just the week before, I’d been thinking about the negative and positive meanings of freedom and liberty. We can be free from something, or free for something. Even some of our positive freedom can be used to enslave, as T.S. Eliot put it: “Hell is where everyone must do what he wants.” That would be confinement, and not liberty.

This experience of true spaciousness can only be of God’s presence, or His energies, as the theologians explain it. And I like that Amplified phrasing, “I have sought and inquired for and desperately required Your precepts.” As Deuteronomy 4:29 explains, we find Him when we seek with our whole heart and soul.

Our whole heart and soul? I know that I have rarely felt that kind of wholeness. I am too scattered, distracted, agitated, muddled—even when I am not downright uninterested and double-minded. But occasionally I catch glimpses, of that spaciousness that is my Lord, the Holy Trinity in my heart. Breezes blow from those wide open spaces, and I know I am there for Now. And you can’t be in Now if you are wondering how long it will last.

This morning my dear friend at Bread on the Water sent me the whole of George MacDonald’s poem A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul, and I immediately looked, naturally, at the section titled “August,” which begins with this fitting stanza:

So shall abundant entrance me be given
Into the truth, my life’s inheritance.
Lo! as the sun shoots straight out his tomb,
God-floated, casting round a lordly glance
Into the corners of his endless room,
So through the rent which thou, O Christ, hast riven,
I enter liberty’s divine expanse.

Now, I expect we will have plenty of full-sunny days for another month, which will remind me to contemplate the divine expanse of His endless room, and strive to enter into His spaciousness.

Spot

animals, garden, home


I prefer to call “it” Spot, because Bengal Boy assumes too much. This gorgeous animal has been hanging out in our yard nearly every day, and tries to get Gus to play with him/her. It stole one cat toy already and nearly got away with a second.

What parents of such an expensive and exotic creature would let it roam the neighborhood? Is she really homeless? Is he just lonely? I’m halfway hoping our foster-parenting might lead to outright adoption. But for now, we just admire the beauty.

Things That Won’t Stay

church, history, poetry


The Night Will Never Stay

The night will never stay,
The night will still go by,
Though with a million stars
You pin it to the sky;
Though you bind it with the blowing wind
And buckle it with the moon,
The night will slip away
Like sorrow or a tune.

-Eleanor Farjeon

Maybe this poem popped into my head in the shower this morning because I was thinking about the passing of Summer. Some people are ambivalent about Summer or plain dislike it, as they love another season so much more. But it doesn’t last.

Even though we Christians are “children of the day,” night does not belong to evildoers. My friend Tim taught me to consider the darkness of Deep Heaven (C.S. Lewis’ preferred term for space) or the night sky not as empty, but rather, full of angels.

In the days before electric lights the night was long, especially in winter. It was common for people to spend many hours on their beds, but not sleeping all that time. In the middle of the night they would have the opposite of a nap, a period of being wide awake. During this time they would think or pray, during what the Psalmist refers to as the night watches.

Of course there is much physical beauty in the stars and moon, the smells and sounds of the night. There is nothing like sleeping outside on high mountains–especially if you can have your night and summer at the same time–and contemplating the glory of God in those uncountable stars. It’s hard not to pray then.

What Am I About?

crafts, food and cooking, garden, home, housework, my garden, quotes, ,



When a man is in earnest and knows what he is about, his work is half done.   –Mirabeau

My trouble is, I don’t know what I am about. Or as we moderns would say, I lack focus. Some days the thousand details to be seen to, the hundred or so projects unfinished, don’t bother me. But today is another matter.

Maybe I am in transition from a heavy thinking period into a time when I need to attend more to housework and at least a couple of those tangible projects. The philosophical questions, and the writing projects–I assure you, just cranking out a few good paragraphs for this blog is a Project– can wait. It occurred to me that I should shut just down the computer for a spell, but then I remembered that if I write even a few words on the subject, it will help me come to grips with my “problem.” And in the process, I’ll share a few things from my week, somewhat haphazardly.

I recently started a new project, just to make things more difficult. A baby quilt for which there is a deadline, of course. Deadlines are just a facet of time, and time is not a bad thing. Christ sanctified time, if that were needed–and I don’t want to start thinking too much here!–when He entered it. So time, and deadlines, are all part of being human, and I mean that in a good way, as Christ was The Human. He had a deadline, the cross, but He never hurried or fretted.

This photo is one of two baby quilts I’ve made, both more than twenty years ago! I don’t want to show you the fabric for the current one yet, because I want it to be at least partly a surprise.

The photo of melon and blueberries is a beautiful image, yes? Those two just seemed to belong together. But it was an idea based solely on the visual sense, and failed completely when tested by the tongue. The honeydew was SO yummy by itself, and the blueberries were perfectly sweet and distinctive in that flavor that blueberries have. But together they clashed, or rather, the honeydew completely ruined the blueberries, and you wouldn’t know by that bowlful of color that blueberries were anything but flat and sour at the same time.

The fruit bowl surprise ties in to another somewhat philosophical point–about our western emphasis of the visual– that will have to wait. If I ever get back to that part of what I am about I’ll post the picture again. It’s pretty enough for a repeat.

There are two types of basil here. The green one is growing in my garden, and the purple-tinged bunch was given to me by K.

I washed it and spun it dry and did make pesto, though she wasn’t sure the flavor would be right. “Everyone” has a pesto recipe so I am not going to post mine. I got it about 30 years ago from a weekly very small-town newspaper, a recipe from a local woman who used sunflower seeds instead of nuts. Since then I have adapted and changed the recipe and switched to walnuts and then pine nuts and back again.

Pesto is infinitely variable. Depending on what you are going to do with it you might want to use more olive oil–or butter, as an Italian lady I knew used to do–to make it more runny. You might like to add some parsley or use toasted almonds as the last recipe I looked at did.

This time I was putting it on toast. We thought the flavor was outstanding. And just for good measure, I’ll show you the pan of zucchini I served that night.

I’ve lately noticed a phenomenon repeated from the past: one spends so much time cultivating the vegetables that it’s hard to get back in the house to cook them into the dinner. B. used to come out in the garden looking for me, asking if there was a plan for dinner that night?

Today I knew what I was about when I did my gardening in the morning! Tonight I will be ready.

I watered the vegetables and made a second picking of Blue Lake beans–wait! Do those look like Blue Lakes? You’re right, most of them certainly do not. A few, from last year’s seeds, are true to type, but my packet was mislabeled. The beans I am getting are mostly sticky, coarse and with a flat profile. They will probably have a bean-y taste, if they resemble Romanos across the board.

Hmm…another surprise in life. If you can’t get what you like, you have to like what you get. I’ll just slather them with pesto and everyone will love them.

Anyway, the green bean tower-tepee looks pretty, especially with that Celtic cross my friend H. gave me in the background.

This last picture is of my favorite flowers this summer, some nasturtiums and lobelia in a big pot that was a bargain at Food Maxx of all places. Year after year I try to get new varieties of nasturtiums to grown from seeds or plants in many places all over the garden, but they never take. Instead, the standard variety keeps growing in the cracks in the concrete around the pool pump where no one sees it.

nasturtiums+ 09

So this year I put two healthy starts in a pot, and with more TLC they are thriving. I’m wondering if I should place the pot over against the fence and encourage some seeds to self-sow in the ground…

Now for a closing thought, before I leave you to attend to the other kind of work–or toil:

Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.  —Herman Melville