I stood outside the library waiting for Judy this morning, and wondered whether there would be any moments of light today. I hadn’t bothered to bring the camera. It was a rainy morning and we were squeezing our walk in between rain storms. I stood there, under gray skies and dripping trees, with no sunshine in sight. But slowly I became aware that there was a lot of light around me. The sky, though gray, was light. Bright headlights kept passing out on SR 15, and the windows in Umble Center caught the reflection of headlights waiting at the stoplight, multiplying them till it looked like a wild party was going on inside. The campus lights burned a warm yellow. And the wet sidewalks reflected the campus lights with puddles of gold, and they reflected the gray skies with puddles of silver. Silver and gold, at my feet. More subtle than diamonds in the dewdrops on grass on sunny days, but a spirit-lifting light when I allowed it to seep into my awareness. And rainy fall days like this tend to trigger a memory from my childhood days. I see the turn into Carter Rd, with wet leaves on the wet road. This is 10th St from this afternoon, outside our current home, so it's missing the curve, but this is close to what I picture. And then I’m in our warm home. I can smell beef stew simmering on the stove, and bread baking, or maybe an apple pie. And Judy and I are at the piano, singing, “Joyful, joyful we adore thee, God of glory, Lord of love,” and working together on the music, one of us playing the right hand part and the other the left hand. All thy works with joy surround thee, earth and heav’n reflect thy rays, stars and angels sing around thee, center of unbroken praise. Field and forest, vale and mountain, blooming meadow, flashing sea, chanting bird and flowing fountain, call us to rejoice in thee. HWB 71, v 2, Henry van Dyke I must have absorbed these words at a deep level, because in some way, this is what I’m watching for and what I'm finding as I watch for those sparks of light – the invitation to praise and wonder, wrapped up in light and shadow and leaves and candles and grasses and puddles and clouds. (this is Judy and me at the piano, from about the right time period, but given the position of our hands and the trolls above the keyboard, I suspect we are playing a duet version of The Hall of the Mountain King)
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I was trying to take a photo of the cloudy, lavender, just-before-sunrise sky, and suddenly Sunrise! Later, I lit a candle for a direction session this afternoon, with these words from the opening prayer in Philip Newell's Celtic Treasure: We light a light in the name of the God who creates life, in the name of the Saviour who loves life, in the name of the Spirit who is the fire of life. We ended the session with a small ritual from Children and Worship – snuffing the flame of the Christ candle and then lifting the candle snuffer so that the smoke swirls through the room, with the words: The Light that was in one time and one place is now in all places, in all times. Light that has changed, Light that is absent and yet still present. When I left for my walk this morning, the sky was just beginning to lighten in the east. A half moon floated overhead and the morning star shone in the west. Fifteen minutes later, the sun was nearly up and the sky was cloud-free and incredibly luminescent. And a half hour later, the sunlight was reaching the tops of trees and buildings. I was intrigued by this high-level repair work. And back at home, the sun was just gilding the tops of our locust tree and the neighbor’s tulip poplar, with the moon overhead. Sunday -- a gloomy, wet morning, and a grieving community, yet there is light in the darkness. During second hour, one option was a Taize-style worship service, with prayers around the cross. We sang of light in the darkness and at the end, we left our candles burning with our prayers. And at the front table, the peace lamp burned: “The light shines in the darkness. “ Later in the afternoon, John and I went to the visiting hours for Professor Jim Miller. While we didn’t know Jim well, we have several connections with family members.
We moved slowly through the waiting line, past the display of family photos, and suddenly there was an echo of our peace lamp litany. One of the photos was of a table full of candles, burning brightly. Near it was a card with John 1:5: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Jim’s niece, a friend of our daughter’s, told us that it was a favorite verse of her grandmother’s and that they had a Christmas family tradition of having a candle hidden in each room of the house. They search for the candles and gather them all together in one spot, a festival of light in the darkness. We did much singing of light today, but the song that is echoing in my ears at the moment is the last one from the Taize service -- Within our darkest night. How appropriate that it came in the section entitled “Preparing to take the Light into the world.” May it be so. A day of many gatherings, which brought moments of light, but little time to write about them. Here are a few: The quality of light in my backyard, midmorning, was striking. Leaves and clouds blew by swiftly, so one moment the yard was dim, then the spotlight came on, and neighbor’s garage and maple tree blazed brightly, And then the garden was full of light and the maple tree faded into the background. Then, later in the day, the calligraphy of bare branches lit by sun at Oxbow And the lights and shadows of these oak leaves still on the tree Sparkles from the sun on the water in amongst the weeds and grasses and flowers in the roadside area near the Oxbow entrance And a moment of light (or perhaps “lite”) as seven former members of the Assembly group Fishslippers met for breakfast, after a gap of eight years, and remembered how we had come by our name. Back then, we had just begun meeting. We had come together around an interest in exploring how to live justly and joyfully in North America. We went around the circle, telling a little about ourselves and why we were interested in the group. Two couples had recently returned to the US after MCC terms, others had spent parts of their childhood in other countries. There was a lot of energy and grand ideas were flowing about ways of being countercultural. Then it was Andrea’s turn. She shook her head ruefully. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re all so serious and here I am, knitting fish slippers.” She waved her knitting at us – and indeed, it was a slipper designed to look like a fish. A bit like this, only in a solid blue-green, and adult size. “Perfect,” someone else said. “We’ve been talking about swimming upstream, against the cultural current.” “And we’re wanting to do it joyfully,” someone else chimed in, “ We could all use fish slippers.” One thing led to another, and Fishslippers we were from that day forth. I nearly didn’t go out for a walk this morning. I didn’t have a walking partner and it looked cold and gray. But I wanted the exercise, so I went. Just before I left the house, I saw a little blue in the sky, so I grabbed my camera. Good thing! The sky was amazing, full of fast moving clouds lit by the rising sun, and with fascinating shadows cast by other clouds. And always changing. It wasn’t the most aerobic walk I’ve ever had, because I kept stopping to take photos. The slide show below is in chronological order, over about a twenty minute period. If you are familiar with the Goshen College campus you may be able to tell when I'm facing east and when it's west. When you see the branch of maple leaves, you've been through the whole cycle. I'm repeating the image of the full moon I recorded yesterday morning. Any midwife will tell you that there is often an uptick in births around the time of a full moon. And so it was. Jodi Beyeler, one of Assembly’s elder group, and her husband, Ben, were beginning to wonder if their little one was ever going to make an appearance. The due date was October 4, and the days kept passing. Finally we got to that full harvest moon. Arthur Lester Hochstedler Beyeler was born about four hours after I took that picture, at 10:12 on 10-12-2011. No wonder he waited. A future in some mathematical field seems likely. And about four hours after that, in a different time zone, Timothy Michael Yoder arrived, son of Katie and Luke Yoder, and grandson of Mike and Mary Lehman Yoder from Assembly. It is good to celebrate new life in our midst. And since I don’t have photos of either of the new families, here’s one of another new life. Twenty-six years and two weeks ago, David Isaac Glick joined our family. It was a full moon then too. Here's David then. And David now, seen here with sister Beth, at her wedding this August. Sparks of light, the two of them -- and now Jesse too. Beth and Jesse, sparking My walk got delayed a bit this (yesterday) morning, because this friendly fellow was splayed on the screen door to our porch, and I had to take his photo. Something about his fresh green oddity, and that amazing leaf-look just makes me smile. I did a little internet sleuthing and found this link to the katydid's song. http://www.fcps.edu/islandcreekes/ecology/Insects/True%20Katydid/141sl1.wav Listening to it gave me a little aha! moment -- we've been hearing katydid's in the regular night chorus. The moon was nearing the trees to the west as I crossed campus -- and looked twice that big without the camera. A little way down the bike path, the morning glories were trumpeting a blue hallelujah to the dawn. And the darker purple morning glories are an embodiment of the Inner Light. I’d gotten that much written last night, but waited to post. Yesterday evening, Assembly’s worship space was available for people to gather in silent prayers around the cross. I knew it would be a time of light in darkness, and it was.
The worship space was dark, except for the lights on the banners and front table, where the flame of the peace lamp burned steadily. Closer to the entry, two semi-circles of chairs embraced an open space. In the center of that space, the rough wood cross that we use for Good Friday services lay on the floor, with two terracotta platters full of sand at its head and foot. A few small white candles stood in the platters already, bright flickers of light in the darkness. Others were held by people silently praying in the chairs, or kneeling at the cross. John and I lit our own small white candles at the Christ candle, and joined the silent prayer. It was a restful moment of light in the darkness. And in the middle of it, there came another spark of light. We had been there for awhile, in the midst of that prayer-filled place. There was quiet movement, as some left and others arrived, and I hardly noticed when Bethany, chair of our worship committee, got up and quietly opened a nearby closet. She brought out a small side table. She disappeared into the worship closet. While she was out of sight, one of the older members of the congregation got slowly to his feet, his cane in one hand and burning candle in the other. He moved forward to place his candle in the platter at the head of the cross. I wondered how he would manage to get down and back up again, but just then Bethany arrived with another sand-filled platter. In one graceful movement she set it on the small table and put the table near the cross. With a gentle smile, she helped Hilary set his candle in the sand. It struck me as such a lovely, attuned-to-the-moment gesture, a small act of kindness that captured the spirit of so many small acts of caring that are happening in this community, sparks of light as we struggle with the chaos of one act of violence. I’d end with that, but I want to add the quote that I saw repeated in several facebook entries and a few emails yesterday. Karl Shelly, one of Assembly’s pastors and Adjunct Professor of Peace, Justice & Conflict Studies at Goshen College, wondered what to say as his “Transforming Conflict & Violence” class gathered for the first time since Professor Miller's death. Here’s the quote. “Two things I know to be true: this world is filled with remarkable beauty and love. And this world is filled with unspeakable violence and pain. We live in between both; with glimpses of heaven and of hell; of darkness and of light. As one who seeks to transform conflict and violence, I will live by the proposition, and walk in the hope, that violence and pain never have the final word ...” Amen and amen. When I walked into my spiritual director’s study this afternoon, there were sparks of light dancing all over the room. My director was standing in a shaft of sunlight, holding a small bowl-shaped candleholder made up of many bits of glass soldered together. Each bit was at a slightly different angle and when she held it in the sun and moved, lights spangled the walls.
For most of the session, the bowl sat on a small table between us where it caught the light, spattering dabs of light around the room. Their wild dance was stilled to the nearly imperceptible rhythm of the sun’s crawl across the sky. Much of the time we were hardly aware of them, as we talked of illnesses and deaths, a prayer practice of looking for moments of light, and the interplay of darkness and light. Beside my director’s chair was a small table with a candle and some pictures. I looked at them without really seeing them until suddenly a small flame blossomed in a dark area of one of pictures, an Annunciation. The right half looks like an old Dutch painting, with Mary as a peasant woman standing by a table. The left is dark with a wild scribble of light for the angel. “My Neon Annunciation,” my director calls it. The flame – a reflection from the soldered glass candleholder – slowly bloomed at the edge of the table. A little later, it lit the angel. Light and darkness. I want to keep musing on the intersection of light and darkness in the days ahead. Looking for sparks of light is not an attempt to see life as all sunshine and roses. Life and death, darkness and light are more intertwined than that. My attention keeps getting caught by the interplay of light and shadow, joy and sorrow. Looking for sparks of light is a way to keep affirming that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness can not put it out. * I've learned that the picture is of a mixed media installation by Theodore Prescott. He sculpted Mary "as a Mennonite girl standing alone in a humble house, preparing to bake bread." The angel is a scribble of neon tubing. You can see a thumbprint at http://worship.calvin.edu/resources/resource-library/projected-images-in-worship-illustrate-or-illuminate/ Today’s sparks of light are of a different nature than recording the interaction of light waves on an object, three moments from this past weekend that made me smile. There’s the wonder in a child’s face as he ponders the mysteries of changing colors in striped light bulbs. (Thanks Jeff and Joah and Goshen’s First Friday festivities). Rebecca with her eye on the speeding soccer players out on the flat, Lily fascinated with Rebecca, and Caitlin with that careful mom's eye, making sure Lily stays gentle in her enthusiasm. (You can't tell from the photo, but Lily is enthusiastically shaking Rebecca's feet, and a moment later reached up to give her a big hug.) And a common scene from the weekend -- a display with photos of the 90 or so children now at Assembly Mennonite Church, and adults striving to put names to faces, so they can honor one of the Privileges of the Child at Assembly -- to be known by name. |
My approach to contemplative photography --
"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Mary Oliver in "Sometimes" Archives
August 2020
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