Category Archives: my own work

“working the curse”

We’re all navigating amongst cursings. They fly around now-adays into our ears or on our screens like angry gnats. Any curse from any source is a pronouncement toward harm. The first record in ancient documents of the word “curse” however was from God’s mouth, not man’s. And the consequence of that should be a heads-up over any puny castings from mortals.

What is startling about this cursing from God, described in Genesis 3, is that it comes in response to man and woman’s disobedience. God approaches and then has specific words to them; but the immediate cursing that God voices is directed onto Satan and then secondarily God places a curse on the ground like a lightning bolt which bypasses the humans.

The ancient Hebrew word, arar, means “to hem in with obstacles” “to bind” and that consequence is what sticks presently on Satan and also on our earthly ground. We live in a cursed reality, with a cursed supernatural enemy, though we ourselves are not cursed! Lesser beings may aim to curse you, but God has not yet made pronouncement on you. The time He gives each therefore is potentially restitutional. Only God has the moral purity, perfect vision and the cosmic authority to make any claim over one’s soul. But God waits. His self-description is that He is “slow to anger”, but then He has “eyes like fire“.

So, this is important to know going forward for any who might be wrestling with a God-sized heaviness. He waits in mercy. He waits on us. But the prophets were clear with one unified voice that one day God will deal. The wise ask then, how does anyone operate meaningfully in such a damaged reality now? Blaming Satan, blaming the earth, blaming others is not our business and only a wasteful distraction. A Psalm writer makes a counter exclamation before God in this tension of wonder: “what is man that You, God, are mindful of Him?”

Here’s a visual example of taking a quiet and responsive stand midst broken territory. I made this mixed media piece some years ago. It now belongs in a private collection in Nashville. The layered-in pages of text form a silent arc over the head of a lone figure, which I collaged onto the panel, and then painted over into a ground. Field rows are a symbol to me of the work we have yet to finish; and the recession of fields toward a far horizon has long fascinated me as a symbol of time, a coming destination and perspective until that day of completion.

This figure pauses midst the work of cultivating. Is he anticipating? Is he weary? What is he looking at if not the work itself? There is some kind of work going on inside him; and that is his business. Thorns and tangles are represented here, but they are only context. The thorns are not the point. The silent pregnant gaze of the un-cursed farmer is the point.

the times require

(Not prose, but urgent poems -mine and His- with an image from my icons “Among the Lampstands”)

Among the lampstands walks a man with fire in His face

And seven starry messengers are held up by His grace.

He involves us in this vision. He gave us words to SEE:

The things that are, the things that were, the things still yet to be.

He walks among the lampstands. He wants my heart to know.

He’s not seated casually – so far from all below.

He once walked in a garden (one walks when not at rest)

He’s up and looking, searching. His heart is on the quest.

Genesis 3: 8, Revelation 1:20, and 2:1

These are piercing eyes that see the show of every deed I know.

And those undone and those dismissed which stained my vaunted soul.

He says “wake up” He softly calls. Then runs off from my door!

“There are things yet uncompleted! Take my blood-soaked cloak as cover

And run with me my love.”

“Don’t slumber now, ‘stead heed my promise and I will give you more.”
“Have you forgotten, you who stand there pondering the storm?”
“I’ve loved you long before. I have more for us together! Oh, turn and let’s explore.”

Song of Solomon 2:8-14, Revelation 22:2

His were first words ever spoken. His will be the last.

And though He knows we “now have sorrows” -Time will make this past.

He assures me with His middle words He sealed them sure and fast

And so my present tense is traveling, held by Jacob’s mast.

Genesis 28:12-13, John 16:22-27 and Revelation 1:5 and 8

“After these things I looked and behold…” There’s a linear time jump to future we’re told.

Quantum cycles repeated ‘til the story was old.

But then lifted out come we, no longer on hold.

I’m so caught by wonder, I drink from again.

“To Him who’s released me” My soul on the mend!

Revelation 1:5b and 4:1

There is a city coming. Beyond this hour of trials,

Established by the builder, who says “a little while”

A new name and an old name Gives the One traversing time.

And you who hold fast what you have. Will not be left behind.

Isaiah 26:20, Mark 6:31, John 16:16-22, Hebrews 11:8-10 and Revelation 3:12, and 6:11

what’s in motion?

“While the earth remains…” assured its founder, “I will never again curse the ground on account of man…” Instead, according to Creator’s worded promise “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter and day and night shall not cease.” We’ve all taken this for granted, this gentle cycling of life on earth. Like children in comfortable homes, we think it is our due that things should stay as nice as they are. We’ve even assumed we had something to do with all this. It’s ours. Men and women of every nation and time have regularly assumed too much.

Long ago rhythms were set in place and we live within them. Light itself has a pulsing rhythm of particles inside waves. Sound has vibration cycles. Waters have rising and falling tides, responding to a moon which waxes and wanes. Nations rise and fall throughout time. And even our individual beating hearts carry a charted rhythm throughout our waking and sleeping. We can track, even influence modulations in pulse, but none of us constructed nor originated our heart function. When this pattern goes flatlined, we are already gone. Rhythms are embedded, they are a given, a sustaining gift for a time. I consider them all a marker of big-picture reality, and if the Creator’s words are heeded, a sign of hope.

Here is a detail of what I am talking about placed in a collage entitled “In Entropy” which currently hangs in a Gallery show titled “Post Urban”. I don’t know what attracted the jurors to include my pieces. But I know what I intended with inset patterns into a piece which otherwise looks entirely chaotic. There are rhythms, varying cyclings. It is a given thing in both the microcosm and the macrocosm.

As I type today, troops and ships and missiles are moving in positions. For a number of years now I have sensed the waning in my own proud nation. I even felt the earth shake subtly one afternoon, and when I saw the hummingbird feeder moving like a metronome, I knew we were entering the beginning of birthing pangs. Now, many are bewildered at the rapid increases of change, “what’s happening?!” is their wide-eyed cry. The word “unprecedented” is used so often now by talking heads that it (and they) are loosing any meaning.

The painting I highlight at the top of my post this month is in my icons collection on this website. This image is a simple small thing, made of alcohol inks on coated paper. Obviously a landscape, but for me the undulating hills are a symbol of the rising and the falling that happens in all things. All around on the ground, where any one of us stands, are bigger things working, way bigger and especially above. And to give anyone a greater sense of it, Jesus said to his pretty clueless followers basically to “look up”.

It would be valuable to see the whole chapter of warnings He said this in. He didn’t give them a candy-coated pep talk, but rather a gentle pointed wake-up call, and then finally: “He told them a story. ‘Look at a fig tree. Any tree for that matter. When the leaves begin to show, one look tells you that summer is right around the corner. The same here—when you see these things happen, you know God’s kingdom is about here. Don’t brush this off: I’m not just saying this for some future generation, but for this one, too—these things will happen. Sky and earth will wear out; my words won’t wear out.’ “

Luke 21 in the Message Translation

Thickets Repeat

There’s something deeply set in the fabric of all material things, though every generation resists it. But it’s real, it’s frustrating, and we live with it every day. This was predicted in fact: that out of the broken ground we til, that thorns and thistles would accompany the healthy produce we each need for sustenance. More than that, this ground, which blooms both good and ill, will also receive us back. Like gravity: it’s a baked in thing and no workaround can cancel it. “All the days of your life” there will be a confounding coming up of thorns. And with both downward gravitation, as well as with upward tangles, we only hurt ourselves when we don’t navigate with some creative measure of humility about things that complicate our ambition. Elon Musk (ambitious himself) said: “I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.”

To bear in your mind something true is half the battle.

For me early on, a wake-up call about what I could transcend and what I could not, refitted my idealism. So, it stuns me when there is so much hubris being thrust forward as if all natural laws are changeable, and that this present generation is finally going to rule and reign into super humans. Proud pronouncements from posers of any stripe make me wince. For thickets repeat. They multiply even. C.S. Lewis called every single generation’s ahistorical cockiness as simply “chronological snobbery”.

The oil painting I am highlighting this month is not just about that downside. There’s more in the human story; and it is hinted, whispering through the chaos of any mounting morass. I sold this to some friends and they have this painting hanging in their living room where they can talk about the broader hope and even the peeks of beauty which are embedded in life on our ground, as symbolized here. One has to look however. Hungering to see something beyond your own mess is not a weakness of the wretched, but actually their first step through.

The texture and the scratching-in here is pervasive. It’s as if I am digging with a trowel. There’s lots of natural broken line, but colors got revealed along this way. It’s a quiet persistence, a determined expectation based on things which are truer than assumptions. We all live on roads where thistles are. We can curse them and stay stuck in them. We can deny them and get cornered by them. But the real subject of this painting is the light, dancing through the bits, and without that light we can’t see at all.

You can live on any ground where thickets are if you will just start studying that light.

“El Olam”

The title of this work is a little-known Hebrew name of God I discovered when reading through Abraham’s journey in the book of Genesis. In 50 years of my own journeying, I have never heard anyone talk on this, but it is rather simple, and it hit me between my eyes one day as I was (then and continue to be) impressed with how Abraham learned more and more about the character of this unseen God he aimed to follow — step after dusty step. It takes time to learn important things.

You can see for yourself how Abraham identifies this new description of God in Genesis chapter 21 right after he’s made an agreement with a man who could have been an enemy (the back story is recorded there, starting in ch. 20). Abraham messes up. God protects and leads, then God even blesses him (kind of a main theme in the Bible). And the philistine takes notice and comes forward. Both this foreign leader and Abraham have something they need to settle out. And so, they make a treaty, a solemn covenant. That’s the short of it.

But the long of it, is that Abraham already knew about the value of covenant by the time he gets to ch.21. And he already knows some things about the character of the God who’d solemnly promised (alone and uninitiated) by making a covenant with this father of the Jews. (see further back story in Genesis 15). So that once things settle out so wonderfully with Abraham’s on-the-ground issue, he is given to see so much more deeply how God has been everlastingly in charge of the entire journey. El Olam can be translated as “continually eternal” “without end” or even literally “the vanishing point”. Abraham voices this realization on his own, and in worship after the philistine has left the scene satisfied. Abraham sees where and how and with whom this is ALL going to settle out. Abraham’s El Olam can be trusted.

The idea of a vanishing point made me curious even as a young one looking at how the parallel corn rows seemed to squish together further out in the field. This was visually mysterious to me, for I knew that walking down any row would never lead me to that point. But then in college I gained some skill at understanding how to translate depth onto a 2 D surface in a perspective drawing class. This old sketch is from that class. There’s a hidden vanishing point in pencil on the back horizon which is the key to getting everything else correctly in place. If you look closely, you’ll see how I messed up too. But the joining point is there.

Later when I saw that this abstract idea was voiced by Abraham as another name for God I was ‘blown away’, or maybe blown further into the mystery: to the point of that recognition.

I made the complex landscape highlighted at the top of this post in 2006. It was inked up and pulled onto paper through an etching press, then I collaged graph paper onto the image and finally a layer of encaustic wax was floated over the center to give it some translucence. This result is one of my favorites for the conceptual reasons above. I have submitted it to a juried committee for a possible showing in Cincinnati in 2022. If it makes it in, I will note that on my news and reviews page. But for now, I am just content to rest this year, and to rest all of my years in the able hands of El Olam.

What goes down (goes up)

It is simple and yes, it is scary; but only if you will be honest about what you cannot escape. Your only alternative is to dismiss or pretend for a while — in arrogant assumptions: “there is no God!” “no one sees” “I’m in charge here” “you’re an idiot” “there’s no dialogue” “we’ll enforce this, for the power is ours and we’re on the right side of history”… You may be comfortable for some time this way, but in the end, a higher reality will overcome you. What will you say then?

You have no explanation for why every single human, in all human history goes down, one same direction: down, back into dirt. In this we are all the same. Your body has a shelf-life which betrays every ultimate supposition. The wise grapple with this; for raw honesty is the only way that leads to a scrap of hope.

I am compelled to put these morbid words down. For kidnappings in Nigeria, assassination in Haiti, beheadings in Indonesia, torture in Afghanistan and every hidden thing done in certain American clinics, and in certain Chinese wards has me sorely vexed. I cannot just shrug off what’s going down. I am one voice, from one soul in the same time period as you are. But I am calling it out with real concern.

This is what holds me: God sees it, He sees it all. God hears it. And God hears me. My blood and your blood has something in it that answers back to Him, even if the embodied owner of each DNA code could or never would talk to his Creator. The blood cries up. It did at the very first spilling of just one body ripped open. It is generations of sound waves now. This will not end well for those who won’t address Him while they yet have time to do so here.

“But they will be held guilty, they whose strength is their god… and though it (the Lord’s answer) tarries, wait for it…” Habakkuk 1:11 and 2:3

In contrast to this waiting, I saw a large banner in an upscale American town which proclaimed, “Rage against Hate”. This makes shortsighted sense to some. Human rage always has its reasons, but it is blind to the multiplied effect; and all the collateral damage is worse than any deadly virus. I heard a young woman proudly say recently “burn it all down” and she sincerely thinks that somehow what will arise from the ashes will be productive for the powerless. Tit for tat only ever expands the sorrows.

So, one prophet, instead of raging with men, actually took up his case by raging with the God of justice (worth reading the whole account). He later recorded this and I echo it often:

“Lord, I have heard the report about Thee and I fear. Oh Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make it known; in wrath remember mercy… I heard, and my inward parts trembled. At the sound my lips quivered. Decay enters my bones, and in my place I tremble. Because I must wait quietly for the day of distress… Yet I will exult in the Lord.” (Habakkuk 3:2, 16,18) The prophet does not get there easily, but he got there.

Here’s what I say to myself and encourage as prescription for anyone. In your recognized vulnerability, take your case up. Life cries to LIFE, better sooner than later. All blood cries up for an account anyway. What’s in your blood is consequential metabolically but also spiritually, regardless of what you have assumed about God or yourself. Blood travels upward though it is heavy, even buried in the ground. That’s what this image is about.

For what goes down does go up.

when the glass was shattered

This icon hangs prominently in my studio space. It’s an important personal memory, but also a much broader symbol for any other pilgrim. It’s like a “memento mori” which was a visual signal in medieval art, often a skull placed in the picture as a reminder of the reality of everyone’s end. My subject here is more than that certainty, but rather a still shot reminder of the lingering time I have until I also drop. I titled this “Lingering Moments”. This is a monotype, a one-off impression made on paper with an etching press. I printed this in 2006.

The impetus for my imagery here was the sight/memory from my television screen, five years earlier, of papers flying out of many broken windows in the twin towers in New York on 9/11. The horror on the ground, and behind those windows could not be seen nor heard on the tv. That was a mercy, a veil at least for us glued to our screens trying to grasp what was really happening there. But I was fixated on these floating bits, as if they were what the Japanese call ukiyo-e = “pictures from a floating world”. That day, what was actually floating were fragments from meeting agendas, spreadsheets, architect elevations, love notes, hand scrawled grocery lists…whatever had been in minds just earlier for thousands of people…and now an ephemeral randomized conglomeration cast into the air.

There was a strange lightness that masked the horror. Five years after that my heart was still etched with the memory. When talking about this with a friend, how to adequately illustrate the import of that day, he said more time would be needed before any sensitively viable imagery could be accomplished… 20 years out my heart-etch remains, and so today, I make an attempt with words.

The flying papers were stand-ins for the gravity of it all. The papers represented particular individuals, doing common work, with unique histories now all jumbled into a common national tragedy. And there was time in the falling of these fragments. That was what struck me: the slow articulation full of weight, like last rites prayers, moments for reckonings on one September day no one ever anticipated.

The papers all fell and turned to dust, but while they wafted in the air there was some time, precious little, yes, but moments just the same between impact and finality.

Time, if even just the minutes it took for the papers to lay down on the dirty street, has long seemed to me a mysterious grace. Whether it is 70 plus years assumed from first breath to last, or just 39.37 hours, or 3 minutes and seven seconds — the time any of us have individually is as if a slow-motion camera has been turned on. The moments we have provide a serious possibility for when clarity can pierce through. Let…a sober…wisdom…pierce, my friend. Time is an ephemeral resource toward that end, it’s a declining dash, a whisper of terminus for each of us. Attend to that whisper — with all your beating heart.

A Vehement East Wind

In my Images on this website, the category “Icons” pulls up a collection of meditative symbols that have moved my expression, and to me they still speak. Employing various media from collographs to monotype, from drawings to collage, are suggestions of themes which are universal as well as biblical. Each of these works, as a stand-alone visual, is an offering toward the pondering of ultimate things that matter. If the images intrigue, titles may suggest further. And in future posts I may elaborate on a couple more of these with some detail.

So this month, I want to highlight the predicament of one troubled sage. It’s a true story of how unbelievers were moved to trust the true God in contrast to the dismal character of His prophet.

Jonah’s story is found in the Hebrew Tanakh, in the last portion labeled “The Writings”. In the Christian grouping of the same writings. Jonah is called one of the “minor prophets”. He lived and labored in the 8^th c. BCE . Anyone can learn much through his struggle. Even the Quran takes lesson from the tale of this Hebrew. His is a short 4-chapter drama, worth your read.

The single image I drew from Jonah is the tension left unresolved at the end of his story. Jonah himself is long gone from earth, and what he did in response to God’s words and God’s obvious compassion is unknown to us. Yet his quandary — which mirrors so much of real life — can be a rich mine for so much more. Jonah leaves us as he broods, sitting under the meagre shade from a wilting gourd vine, having to decide what he’s going to do with what God has said to him. Herein lies the crux of the whole matter inside his own sulking heart.

Jonah’s problem is as current as today’s news. In fact, I read this week in The Times of Israel, writer David Horowitz’ description of their current situation: “I get the sense of time stopping, of a fateful moment — a balance that can swing either way, in the Old City and beyond”.

My work here, aims at that same pregnant tension. I titled it “A Vehement East Wind” taken from words in the 8^th verse of Jonah’s 4^th chapter.

An east wind is an unusual shift in the natural order. Normally winds and weather approach us from our West. The reason for this is that the earth we stand on has an axis, rotating rapidly from what we call east into west from any point on the globe. Like the trails that slide over the hood of a moving car, the atmosphere meets and moves contra the direction we’re traveling. But east winds are a strange and often violent reversal, almost like an ambush coming from behind. And biblically, east winds portend danger. Isaiah said “Thou dost contend with them…with His fierce wind He has expelled on the day of the east wind.” Job agrees “The east wind carries him away…for it whirls him away from his place.” Drought is indicated by Hosea’s east wind (13:15), and Ezekiel’s as well (17:10).

So when Jonah, late in the day of his return to God’s business, finds himself insulted by an east wind, we know this is not a gentle eastern breeze but rather a sign of significant trouble.

You might empathize with the man. He tried to ignore God but that proved mercifully impossible.

In all this, I was moved to tears, and moved again even as I re-read Jonah’s account today. For God cares more for pagans than we do; and He knows how to get their attention. And in the harder end, He speaks into our angry hearts, quietly awaiting our own response! There is beauty in the wilting gourd, if only Jonah could see it. The poet John Moriarty says of his own coming to clarity that it was like being “shattered into seeing”.

In my image, it’s like a still shot in this moving drama. What am I going to do with God’s words and with His heart?

This piece was selected and now hangs in my United States’ Congresswoman’s office.

in entropy

en·tro·py (ĕn-trə-pē) n.

1. Symbol S For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work.

2. A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.

3. A measure of the loss of information in a transmitted message.

4. The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.

5. The deterioration of a system or society, especially when it seems inevitable: city activists who fought entropy by organizing neighborhood groups.

[German Entropie : Greek en-, in; + Greek tropē, transformation; see trep- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.]

(cited from the American Heritage Dictionary: https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=entropy&submit.x=48&submit.y=13)

Entropy is an important concept to understand for it describes the very time in which we’re living. I offer not only basic definition here but also some explanation through my own work, for I think it informs our moment.

I learned the meaning of “entropy” in a physics class; it marked me immediately as a truth. Not “my truth” (oh, please don’t bore us!) but universally recognized reality.

Entropy is a thermodynamic law, the Second Law, in fact. This means it is intrinsically true for all and has been observably tested through time. You can’t get away from it anywhere on earth. Entropically all material things degenerate. Bouncing balls left alone return to lower and lower heights, metal corrodes, soil depletes, smiles fade. As a high-schooler I had seen enough to know that things weren’t right, that breakdown and disappointment of outcomes was plaguing each and every one. I am not a philosopher, but as a chronic melancholic, learning there was a stated “law“ for this was actually a huge relief! Someone had identified and spoken the Truth out loud. Admitting this, it seemed to me then, at least maybe we could get somewhere meaningfully even in the midst of such harsh goings on.

That recognition was before I even cared about spiritual things, but I do think it was an important beginning point. One has to admit the universally bad news before any transcendent good news is even relevant!

Just recently I was pulling older work out of my flat files and re-discovered this large mixed media piece: “In Entropy”. I have entered it into my Icons gallery here, for its timeless significance. I accomplished this in 2006, and it was included in my MFA (graduate work final) show. This is a large collage pasted together from science text snippets, a photograph I took in Asia, and some hand-inked brayings onto good printmaking paper. I then layered in encaustic wax overlays.

What moved me here, and still moves me, is that in the midst of all the deconstruction going on all around, there are sure hints of pattern observable in forms and waves, in repeats and cycles. Pattern reveals a plan and a planner for those who are hungry to look into the back story. Scratchy lines (seen in so much contemporary work) are a symbol, as are sine charts which suggests process in time. We are all heading somewhere even in the dim.

I made this visual as a statement: that ultimate plan is bigger than breakdown, that hope has reason outside our narrow system, that beauty is a sign even in the dissipation, and that the Maker, the ultimate Planner is not at all perturbed. The prophets all spoke of when and how He will intervene in the mounting chaos. The time is His. Listen to Habakkuk quoting God’s words in his second report (2:3) “For the vision is yet for the appointed time; it hastens toward the goal, and it will not fail. Though it tarries, wait for it; For it will certainly come, it will not delay.” Jeremiah a couple decades later describes his own crushing trauma in Lamentations, but then he also grapples with the only One who could intervene into his particular pit “and therefore I have hope…“

Slice through or tear apart what is and what will be any way you wish. But if you dare to care, you may notice hints of promise shining through the fragments of ruin, for what Creator started, He will certainly also bring to resolution.

And though I am weighted (each day now) by the gravity pulling us all, my hands and my heart exult (every day) in the One who is truly coming as He promised. What He made He cares about, He sees how things are being handled. He will set right what concerns Him. Wait for it.

“Sitting with Pretty”, or seeking the WHY before the HOW

I remember the day I painted this, sitting on a high rock perch with my oldest daughter. She (always pretty) owns this painting now, and every time I visit her home, I am reminded of those quiet moments in that magic place with her. The natural pink palisade wall below us overlooks the great midwestern American lake we love. That day and some way over on the edge of the cliff, my son and husband were fixing rope to rappel this wall. Preferring not to watch that episode, I chose this view, and got transported instead into the beauty of the long and the far of it all. As C.S. Lewis puts it, we went “higher up and further in.”

This is an early work, one of a few I show on my reorganized image page. It’s important not only sentimentally, but also aesthetically because of the pull landscape has long held for me. Before I knew how to work painting tools, and even as I was fumbling around through the years with them, it was always the big views into far away vistas which moved me into any effort to capture something onto a 2D surface. The result has never been enough but rather a reminder of the “something more” out there that gets me pursuing. I can feel that inner draw even as I type these words.

There are poignant moments when one senses that kind of pull, even without knowing its source. It’s a faint whisper that there is something really important, really heavy, really good “out there for the asking”. How do we even know these things? I do wonder with a kind of humble awe. I somehow grasped a bit of this early on and wanted to understand more long before I became interested in biblical specifics. The WHY draws one first, it seems to me at least, before the HOW has any pertinence. What about for you?

Emily Dickinson, a recluse and a poetic mystic often would use dashes — as if extending thoughts into the air — as part of her vocabulary. I suspect this is so because words themselves (like painting tools) could hardly frame what she was after in any attempt to communicate for others what she could sense in her spirt. Here are just two samples:

In many and reportless places

We feel a Joy –-

Reportless also, but sincere as Nature

Or Deity –-

It comes without a consternation –-

Dissolves — the same –-

But leaves a sumptuous Destitution –-

Without a Name –-

Profane it by a search –- we cannot

It has no home –-

Nor we who having once inhaled it –-

Thereafter roam.

(c. 1876, #1382 in T. Johnson’s Chronology)

____________

I groped for him before I knew

With solemn nameless need

All other bounty sudden chaff

For this foreshadowed Food

Which others taste and spurn and sneer –-

Though I within suppose

That consecrated it could be

The only Food that grows.

(c.1882, #1555)

Jesus called this food “rivers of living water” and invited the hungry and thirsty to dine with Him. I’ve become convinced that every longing that we experience here, is only a merciful foretaste of the truly more that is available to any, and that, as He said — just for the asking.

finishing the ascent

Since July of this CoVid year, I have been posting a reflection on each of the 15 psalms in a sub-collection out of the ancient Psalm book called the “Psalms of Ascent”. These Psalms: 120-134, have fascinated me for a long time as a pattern for spiritual progress. Like Jacob’s ladder, these ascend meaningfully. Like the Hebrew walk up to Jerusalem these get more complex in time and in history referencing that land. And like King Hezekiah’s answered prayer these are an emblem of 15 movements on steps arranged by the only One who controls time and who responds so mysteriously through our requests to Him.

We live in linear time. We start somewhere, we end somewhere; but time moves for us in only one direction. We also live under the limitations of life in all its complexities. Gravity, hardened ground, hardened hearts, decay, illnesses of many kinds, warring nations, suspicions and patterns of mistrust put us all on watch. It does not matter on which continent you live, what language you speak, or what century your life has passaged through, this has been true for you: life is hard, and time only goes forward. None of us can move back in time to our earlier days, we can only step some way ahead into days we’re not sure of. My best advice? Don’t go it alone. Go with the One who is over time and nations, and who has echoed through His whole book about a plan and a purpose for those who are hungry to know.

Abraham was shown the stars, given words about offspring (he didn’t have) a settled land (he couldn’t see) and a blessing beyond his ability to measure. Abraham simply believed the intervening voice of a God he was choosing to follow. What is evidenced in this last Psalm in the Ascent collection is a prophetic view of that coming blessing. It’s a short burst of praise; and like the last two responses in this final triplet it’s a corporate response. Many now are believing, beholding, praising and responding. But we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

I started this series after a lot of study, then some sketching of the patterns I thought I could see. I’ve mentioned often in earlier posts about the triplet pattern evident: every three Psalms in this set of 15 shows a rhythm that gets repeated through the whole. But there is also a pattern of fives that reflect the 3 promises earlier given to Abraham about the land he was walking toward, the seed which would come from him and the blessing God was not only promising but would guarantee (Gen.12, ratified in ch.15).

The Psalm writers were all descendants of Abraham. The prophets were also; and what they saw ahead was mysteriously sure and echoed often in both their own times but also pointing toward a final fuller FINISH. We’re almost there. I can hear the cheering in the stadium. I have motivation and great confidence, like Abraham did, because of the One who spoke these promises. I can trust (not what I see now but rather) these words because God not only spoke His promises again and again, but He also guaranteed that He would get it done some day in fullest human history.

A song of ascents.

134 Attention! Praise the Lord,
all you servants of the Lord,
who serve in the Lord’s temple during the night.
²Lift your hands toward the sanctuary
and praise the Lord.
³May the Lord, the Creator of heaven and earth,
bless you from Zion.

Mary Barton Nees

Conceptual Landscape