The LORD Is Peace

Listen to me read this post:

Lake Tawakoni from the southern shore

A path through tall trees in Lake Tawakoni State Park

Treetops and sky, Lake Tawakoni State Park

Another view of Lake Tawakoni, from the southwestern shore on a clear day

The susurration of trees and lapping of waves

Whisper in antiphon:

YAHWEH Shalom,

YAHWEH Shalom,

The Lord is peace,

The Lord strengthens His people with peace.

The sunflowers lean forward,

In eager expectation awaiting in hope 

The Great Day of the rising

Of the Sun of Righteousness

With healing in His wings.

(Come soon, Lord Jesus.)

Osprey perched in bare tree branches

The osprey's plaintive cry

Laments the groaning bondage of creation now.

The buzzards dance attendance on the last enemy,

Mortally wounded, defanged,

Yet still destroying in death's death throes.

Black and white warbler foraging for insects

Painted bunting in tree branch

Wordlessly, buntings and warblers, cardinals and wrens

Intone their unabashed, unceasing melody of hope

In the not yet:

Prayers are heard,

Promises true,

Prince of Peace coming;

The kingdom of this world

Will become the kingdom of our Lord,

And He shall reign forever.

Weeping will pass.

Joy will come.

The rattling cicadas beat time with their wings,

Counting down the days till deliverance

From corruption to decay.

Giant swallowtail butterfly, ventral wings

Giant swallowtail, dorsal wing

The fluttering swallowtail sips nectar,

So delicately her blooming perch barely moves.

In her partaking of the cup the Lord has filled,

She moves on, scattering with fecund prodigality

Grace for future blooms.

Trees in deep shade with Lake Tawakoni in background

A spider perches upside down in its web, which looks iridescent in the morning light

A fawn looks straight at the camera from the shelter of green trees

The trees of the field lift holy hands to heaven,

Singing for joy before the Lord,

Before He comes

Before He comes

To judge the earth in righteousness.

The nations rage;

The peoples plot and scheme,

But the susurration of trees and lapping of waves,

Yet sing, "The LORD is peace."

A Learner's Prayer

 
Father of lights,
In whom there is no shadow of darkness:
Thank You for the gift of learning and education,

For Your outbreathed Word in my native tongue,

For literacy to read it,

For its adequacy to equip Your children to walk worthy of You,

For the wise, Spirit-instructed people

You have given the church over the millennia

To help us understand it,

For the abundant wealth of information about a vast myriad of curiosities,

From the deepest depths of the oceans

To the outer reaches of our galaxy and beyond;

From summits, sea creatures, sequoias, and stars,

To subatomic particles, viruses, and genomes;

From the fine arts to Fibonacci sequences;

From cabinet-making to computer science to combustion engines.

 
What a wonderful world You have made for us to explore!
We praise You for the marvelous mystery inviting enquiry,

For the order and structure awaiting discovery,

For all the sparks of curiosity kindling daydreams and imagination.

 
Thank You also for the limits of our comprehension,
For in our finitude we know not even where they are.
If I were the undefeated, undefeatable quiz-show champion,

Knowing one hundred percent of the answers

One hundred percent of the time,

If I knew and understood every book and parchment

In every library

In all of human history,

All my knowledge would be—

And this is generous—

One hydrogen atom

On one water molecule

In one droplet

In the ocean of Your infinite wisdom.

 
You are diamond,

And the sharpest mortal mind cannot scratch the surface

Of Your understanding.

Know-it-alls know nothing in light of You who know all.
 
In the final reckoning,
Eternal life or death rests not on facts we know
But on whom we trust.
Knowledge of You, O God,
Knowledge of Christ,

In whom all treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden,

Knowledge worked in Your children by the Spirit of truth—

Who knows the mind of a person

But the spirit who indwells him?—[i]

Personal knowledge of the Triune God is the only knowledge
That breathes life into dead hearts.
 
“This is eternal life:
That they may know You, the living God,
And Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”[ii]
 
To gaze upon Your glory,
To be transformed into Your likeness,
To bear the privilege of making You known—
This is the truest knowledge,
And to revere You is the beginning of wisdom.
 
So I thank You, Lord, for learning,

For books,

For the Book of books,

For education,

For reason and imagination and memory.

Make us faithful stewards of the gifts You have graciously entrusted to us;
Make us humble stewards, always conscious of how miniscule our understanding is
Before the inscrutable majesty of Your glory,
In Jesus’ name.
Amen.

 

---

[i] 1 Corinthians 2:11

[ii] John 17:3

Creation's Song (a poem)

Creation sings God's praise

Day and night, though cities quake, 

Though the strongest fall. 

Breathe in His beauty;

Lean on His steadfast mercies.

Cry to God. He hears.

He shares our sorrow. 

He shelters beneath His wings. 

He fails not His own. 

Grace and faithfulness

Turn mourning into dancing;

Our Lord holds out hope.

Shine {A Poem}

Induct me, Lord, into the fellowship of shining faces,

The kinship of the radiant, kintsugi saints

With your gold gleaming through the fractures of

Their souls. Shine Your bright righteousness on me.

Count me among the meek who gaze so long 

And earnestly at Jesus' glorious face

In ink and paper, pixels, glass, and light,

Who speak and listen to Your voice along

The steep and cobbled winding path of life

To such extent, Your Spirit kindles inner flame

Your light, not ours,

Absorbed, reflected back

From unveiled hearts, shines forth to watching world.

But first, we need to see. Open blind eyes.

Transfix us and transform us with Your grace.

In Jesus' name we seek Your face. Amen.

 

~crlm, 1/14/21

Sehnsucht Season

Sehnsucht: noun (German), yearning, longing, pining

The weary, watching world,

An empty womb,

Awaits with longing the Coming One

We love yet have not seen.

We long for the Yule-less winter

To break into carillon peals

And joyful carols:

“Behold! Our beloved Bridegroom comes!”

 

The yearning overtakes us with lengthening darkness,

A sweet, painful wistfulness

That stings as we inhale the fragrance of a rose--

When we gaze at clouds like angel’s wings

With rainbow-fragment nimbus--

Or hear the clarinet melody that feels

Like homesickness for a home

I’ve never inhabited--

Or feel the hint of Great Lion’s mane

Brushing against my arm

In some obedience of love--

Or hear the faint tinkle of our High Priest’s

Bells between the pomegranates

At the hem of His robe

As He continually intercedes for us--

Or catch the merest hint of athelas on the wind.

The numinous encroaches on the fringes of our thoughts,

Alluring our hearts on pilgrimage

To a better country,

And a heavenly one.

 

Abiding in this emptiness,

Dwelling in the lamentful longing,

Feeling the exquisite ache

Without rushing to fill the hollow

Of sehnsucht

With earthly anodynes:

This is our Advent prayer.

C. S. Lewis on Longing for the Far-Off Country

"These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. [14] For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. [15] If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. [16] But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city" (Hebrews 11:13–16, ESV).

 "In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedience is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever."

~C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory," The Weight of Glory, pp. 31-32, emphasis mine