Spring in Grasmere

The land is mirrored by His hand



The lake is colored by His land


Eyes closed to Love less beauty see


And live less joy to get self free.


Yet in His yoke, the Shepherd King,


Can this lamb jump and join the Spring.

 

"A loveless world," said Jesus, "is a sightless world.  If anyone loves me, he will carefully keep my word and my Father will love him--we'll move right into the neighborhood!" John 14:23

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



The resurrected I-phone

Yesterday God resurrected and morphed my I-phone into his God-Phone. I’d dropped it by mistake into a creek during a rainy ramble a few days ago. After I let out a shout (lacking in praise), I fished it out and blew it out best I could, but to no avail. Dead duck in the water. I brought it home, plugged it into a charger, put it in front of a hair dryer, etc. Only then did I google, “what do you do with a water damaged phone?” I found I’d done all the wrong things. I didn’t take out the sim card, didn’t take out the battery, didn’t leave it unplugged, didn’t do this and that and the next thing. Only thing I did right, at that point, was to put it in a bag of rice and let it sit. It sat in the bowels of the earth 3 days and 3 nights.




And then, low and behold, after much prayer on my wife’s part (because I was an unbeliever), it resurrected! God saw Bethyl’s faith and healed something in me. Thank you, Spirit of God, thank you, faithful wife. So from now on when I look at this extension of my right hand, I’ll praise God and be thankful for my praying and believing wife.  When she's not busy looking at ewe's lambing, she's praying for you and for me. (And, by the way, lambing season is upon us, with white fluff on pogo sticks bouncing around emerald pastures.)

I too have a mustard seed of faith, but this iphone business felt too selfish to pray for with confidence. Pray for others, God’s kingdom work to advance, healing for sin—but an iphone?

He gets the glory for his grace to us all, in spite of our casual contempt for His sovereignty with grumbling worry & disbelief.

Weaving Attachment

I’m reading about attachment and attunement. The Anatomy of the Soul, Curt Thompson, MD, is a great read.   Our connection to Jesus and others all mirror how we were able or not able to attach to mom and dad as kids. This mirror can be fixed if it is broken, and most attachment mirrors are truly busted.

The mirrored Stickyl Tarn pictured above is almost perfect. My own attachment has been a mix of avoidant, anxious, or disorganized feelings. God is gradually messing with that.  He's securing my hold on Him in a way that mirrors more closely His hold on me. The goal is to weave together a loving chosen family that mirrors Jesus together back to Him and each other.

When you feel me feeling your feelings with you, now we're talking!   That's the guts of attachment in the making.   When that empathy is missing, what's left are talking heads with mouths and no ears.


St Augustine was ahead of the game when he said, “So great is the process of a sympathetic mind that our students are affected by us as we teach and we by them as they learn. Thus we come to dwell in each other; they speak within us what they hear, while we learn in them what we teach.” From Instruction of Beginners, XII, 17.

This picture above & below is of Mary attaching to her Child within and the world around her.   She's feeling the pain of the coming birth and death of her child swirling within her like a galaxy forming.  Her pain and process is etched in glass and suspended from the wall of a cathedral in Kansas City, Missouri.   It's an amazing sculpture.   Attachments costs.  But the salvation of your world depends on it.  

In praise of praise

Yesterday we spent some time in William Wordsworth's neighborhood; sat among his daffodils.   Later in the day we led a home share group on praise and worship. It’s a group of several young twenty-somethings in college; several 80-somethings in active re-firement volunteer careers; and a scattering of us inbetween. Bethyl and I were trying to say something meaningful about what praise was, and wasn’t. Praise isn’t giving in to an incurably self centered Deity who can’t get enough compliments. It isn’t like eating your spinach because you know it’s good for you. Instead, CS Lewis has a seminal thought that had escaped me:


“But the most obvious fact about praise---whether of God or anything—strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honour. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise-lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game—praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least. The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works; the bad ones continually narrowed the list of books we might be allowed to read. The healthy and unaffected man, even if luxuriously brought up and widely experienced in good cookery, could praise a very modest meal: the dyspeptic and the snob found fault with all. Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible.” C.S. Lewis Reflections on the Psalms pg. 79-80.

Broken Birthday Pots

Living Psalm 23

I’m sitting here in our cottage, in the bay window seat, overlooking Psalm 23. Sheep lying down in green pastures. The green pastures leading to the still waters of Grasmere Lake beyond, and all that framed by the fells that lift my eyes up. Madam Day lectures when the sun shines; Professor night does his swing shift.   Here's a picture, below, out our back window.   The one above is on a nearby walk.  

I just returned from a walk high up along a ridge.  It was softly raining as I left The Barn and that changed to bright sunshine for awhile. Then the rain came again and turned white into pelting hail and snow coming down sideways. I pulled up my hood, strapped the chin Velcro tight, gloved up, and otherwise mentally battened down the hatches. The sheep didn’t seem to either notice or mind. As they grew longish ice beards mouths moved, green disappeared, and hoofs shuffled forward in a slow grass mowing operation.   Once I came down, the walk around Grasmere lake yielded this photo.

Three nights ago was interesting. The vicar of Chapel Stiles, George, picked us up and off we went into the dark hailing night thru windy narrow lanes some 20 miles. We pulled out of the dark into a puddle of light around a tiny community hall. When we entered the community hall there were about 30 folks drinking BYOB whatevers and others, tea, coffee. Two folk singers on guitars, viola, and wind pipes of various sorts. For seven quid a head it was a great evening’s entertainment. We clapped and sang thru ballads, toe-tapping Scottish reels, tear jerking stories of love longed for and lost. It was a great introduction into micro-community.

I’m reading a great book, Flickering Pixels: how technology shapes your faith, by Shane Hipps. He was an ad exec and converted to pastor. Here’s a sentence from the beginning chapter: “my task was to hijack your imagination, brand your brain with our logo, and then feed you opinions you thought were your own. You’re welcome…. My job was to save people from feeling impotent, unattractive, or powerless by offering them a Porsche, which promised to fix those problems…. Before you start judging, you should know I never offered cheap grace—the gospel according to Porsche will set you back between $80,000 and $150,000 depending on how much salvation you need.”   Personally I'm glad I need both much more and much less than that, depending on what's being saved.

Scripture memory is moving along slowly. I memorize as I fell walk most generally. But I do find it re-shaping my synapses and perseverance. It’s like slowing a race car down into a plow share. You don’t see as much but you leave deeper tracks, within you primarily.  I hold onto the verse “I am the Vine. When you are joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant…” John 14-17 is my current project; half way home there; entering the first few verses of chapter 16.

Welcome to our new home.   Here we are smiling at you over dinner, our first week in the Barn.   We love, love, love having a fire in the fireplace once again.   When we're not looking out the windows we spend a lot of time reading and gazing into the fire, resting.   We're so grateful to God for this sabbatical.  

A couple of days ago I climbed to the top of a volcano here on La Palma, one of several. Some predictions are that one of these suckers will blow and crack off a chunk of this island, sending a tsumanmi that’ll swamp NY City a few thousand miles away across the Atlantic. Cheerful thot. The forest was peaceful as I climbed, just me and God for the most part. The view at the top included a cross.   This cross, but in a different season, from a different camera; just thot this was a cool picture.  The Sacrifice stands up to all kinds of weather.


          I spent my time reviewing the sermon on the mount. Keyed in on the first few verses of chapter 7, about not focusing on the smudge on your neighbor’s face when your own face is distorted with contempt. As I came round a corner, close to the one below, heading down from the top, on the steepish path, four portly Germans were struggling their way up the path. They asked for directions. I found myself thinking, “they’re helping themselves to too much of that good German beer and been packing away the groceries.” As I gave directions and shoved off down the path, I tripped and slid into a hole, about 3 feet deep. Laughed at myself as they helped me up. Later I thot, just how much of a sense of humor does the Lord have, anyway?