Ash Wilderness

No ashes smudged my brow,
no fellow pilgrims gathered 'round,
no bread was pressed into my hand,

there was no wine for parchéd tongue

no taste of Christ's body or His blood

Instead, white flakes upon my crown

Ash-like, they blanketed the ground,

My empty home was filled

with candle glow and a beating heart

a chamber of blood for the body of Christ

Empty space became hallowed

my knees pressed in, head bowed;

Desolate darkness filled with little flames,

the silent void invaded by a chant

breaking forth from the Body of Christ

In this season of sadness bright

the valleys become hollows to catch light,

the negatives show up outlined clear—

Our Lent has been a year-long affair

sustained with only the Body of Christ

We who see the edges of dark

find the contrast stark 

between Advent's rising Sun and its setting,

where we befriend lament and night,

swallowing deep the body of Christ

'No ashes' leaves an empty space

where I learn to receive a crown of grace

for expectations unmet and things lost—

And a single heart is not alone

when it is part of the Body of Christ

Hollowed hands are a channel of

opportunity to be offered in love,

to be raised in repentance, 

and lifted in worship, open to be

the physical signs of Christ's body. . .

From the places you've been torn. . .

"There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve—even in pain—the authentic relationship. 

Furthermore, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.”

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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Emptiness. I have felt its greed in my heart and in my body. There is a permanent hole in my heart while I walk on this side of the Kingdom coming, and God Himself does not fill that emptiness. He is leaving that slow-bleeding hollow right where it is. It is that absence that somehow makes me feel your presence more sharply, Aaron. 

For years there was an Aaron-shaped empty-space where you should have been in my life. You didn't just drift away, as so many friends do when life carries us along. You were sharply cut away from me one winter's day in Alaska. You became a stranger to me over the course of time, and in a particular instant you saw me as a stranger to you from then on. No one understood the ache I carried inside of me from that encounter. I didn't even understand it really. I didn't know how deep the wound went until that parting shaft was ripped out one September day, the barb leaving a gaping hole in its reverse exit. 

No words could fill that hole. No friendship on earth could patch up that wound. But when I read Bonhoeffer's above quotation, it resonated all the way down the path of that still-bleeding laceration. "It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness." He leaves the torn up place to allow us in that empty, painful ache to connect with the one we've lost: "For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled, one remains connected to the other person through it."

How strange. In those five years where even my closest Semester friendships began to wane, I felt a deep connection with you—the friend who had abandoned me. When you ended your precious life, the pain was unbearable precisely because you had already left an empty place, unfilled all those years, where my connection to you was strong. It remains strong. That emptiness makes me curl up in a ball and ache sometimes, because absolutely nothing can fill it except you. And nothing I can do will get me to you. Only God can do that, and this isn't the right time yet. 

"Furthermore, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation." I have forgotten so many details, moments, jokes, and sayings of our time together at Semester... Certainly I have forgotten more than the ones I can and do remember. But I treasure what I remember. I treasure your letters. You taught me things while we corresponded, but you have taught me much more through those same words years and years later. And the more I understand what you were saying, the more deeply I value your mind and heart, your self. Thus, the more difficult the separation. The assuaging answer isn't to forget or to stop reading your letters. Though there is intense pain in the separation, there is profound healing in remembering, especially in remembering together with your family or our friends.

For years I have felt that all I had to offer God was emptiness. Empty hands. An empty heart. Empty desires. Empty relationships. Empty arms. An empty shell. The times I've been the wisest (though they felt the most foolish) were the ones where all I had was emptiness to offer on the altar to God. Now I begin to learn that the very empty places are the ones where I find connection to the person or dream or thing that is missing. It's not the connection I would choose. The ache can be debilitating sometimes. I would give much to reach out and wrap you in a hug once again, my arms full rather than empty.

Until the Kingdom comes in its fullness and we run to the Supper of the Lamb together, I will try to remember that God isn't filling the hole, He isn't fixing the ache, and He isn't covering over the emptiness...so that I am still able to feel connected to you. Not in an idealised or idolised way, but in a  way that beckons me "Further up and further in! "

Love always,
Johanna

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Title: 

This is the hole

Where most of your soul

Comes ripping out

From the places you've been torn

(From"Always" by Switchfoot)

Messy Christmas

The branches have traded

Their leaves for white sleeves

All warm-blooded creatures make ghosts as they breathe

Scarves are wrapped tightly like gifts under trees

Christmas lights tangle in knots annually

While many people are wrapping up their Christmas lights rather than untangling them from last year, some more traditional churches are just entering into the celebration of the Christmas season. For them, Christmas begins on the evening of December twenty-fourth (since the Creation, days begin the evening before—think of Genesis 1:5: "...and there was evening and there was morning, the first day" etc.), going through to Epiphany on the sixth of January. 

This year, snow fell like shimmering garments on tree arms a week before Christmas. Yet for many of us, by the time the day itself rolled around, the sun had melted the tree robes and we were down to shirt-sleeves and thin sweaters. I love snow, but who decided that it is “necessary” at Christmas? 

Our families huddle closely

Betting warmth against the cold,

Our bruises seem to surface

Like mud beneath the snow

Some kinds of "snow" feel necessary... We want the blanket of "nice feelings" at Christmas to mask the cracks in our families of origin or in our marriages, in our loneliness and in our broken spots. But holidays have a way of hitting our bruised places. An argument in the car on the way to a Christmas gathering reminds us of the scores of fights we've had all year. The question, "So, are you seeing anyone?" (and you know they want to add "yet" at the end of that query) rankles when you're tired of being alone, or you've recently broken up with someone, or you feel somehow lesser because you in fact don't have someone. Sometimes the bruise is cruel and bone-deep: someone is missing in the pew at midnight mass with you; there is only the memory or shadow of someone you dearly love hovering at every crowded table, making it feel incomplete. 

It is a muddy, messy time, this Christmas. Messy Christmas. That is the phrase my phone auto-corrects to instead of "merry" Christmas. I laughed the first time happened. It struck my cynical side as humorous and morosely accurate. The mud of the Fall still lurks beneath the snow of the now-but-not-perfected redemption. But clean slates are coming. . .

So we sing carols softly

As sweet as we know

A prayer that our burdens will lift as we go

Like young love still waiting under mistletoe

We'll welcome December with tireless hope

Hope. Christmas is replete with Hope. God joining to flesh in a miraculous marriage. The Redeemer was born. Happy, sentimental sigh. 

But the crushing reality is that the Redeemer wasn't born as an adult. Things didn't change when He came. Yes, there was the flash of Heaven, opened to the shepherds. There was a great sign in the heavens, leading the wise men. Then, just like the previous four hundred years, there was a lull. Silence. Hope was born...but He wouldn't be revealed for another thirty years. 

I wonder if the shepherds were like fourteen-year-old me: not subtle, hanging around wherever I could—whenever I could—to be around the guy I was crushing on. Or did they cease hoping? Certainly, unflagging hope is hard to cultivate, especially when your hope is placed in the wrong thing, the wrong outcome, or the wrong person. Those shepherds waited for thirty years. Did they continue to hope? Did they connect that awe-filled night years ago with the peripatetic rabbi stirring up the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Jewish people, and the Romans?

Hope can be hard to cling to in the darkness, but that is precisely where we need it the most. Where we need Him the most. Thirty years before the Rabbi began calling fishermen, the ancient, long-awaited seed of promise was sown, becoming a tender shoot in Egyptian and Galilean soil.

"...For you [John] will go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways,

To give knowledge of salvation to His people

By the remission of their sins,

Through the tender mercy of our God,

With which the Dayspring from on high has visited us;

To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,

To guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1:76b-79)

Hope. It comes in through those very cracks we long to cover. He enters into our broken places. He is gentle with our bruises.

Let our bells keep on ringing

Making angels in the snow

And may the melody [of Hope] disarm us

When the cracks begin to show

Like the petals in our pockets

May we remember who we are

Unconditionally cared for

By those who share our broken hearts

_______

The table is set

And all glasses are full

The pieces go missing

May we still feel whole

We'll build new traditions in place of the old

Cause life without revision will silence our souls

Last year, table after table was set, glass after glass filled. But the gaping hole of grief gnawed at me like an insatiable, unwelcome guest. Every table felt incomplete. There was a strange distance between me and everyone I was around. Like I was in a glass bubble and could see them, but I could touch them, couldn't really hear them. Those layers show up in many ways at various times, but all last Christmas I felt it. I couldn't enter fully into anything, because I wasn't whole. I am still not whole. I will always carry in me a bleeding wound. And it will only grow as the number of empty chairs rivals the number of full ones. And one day, the perpetually bleeding bite from grief, from death will kill me. Then I can fully enter in to the Kingdom come, to the City of God and the Feast of the Lamb. Strange how a fatal wound precedes life. 

The missing pieces haven't gaped so glaringly this year, but the numbness is still floating around. My heart, mind, and body are all topsy-turvy this season. The missing pieces can never be filled—but sometimes there is a new friend waiting in a vacant church pew; there is an old friend who remembers the ache with you, and even carries it with you for a bit. 

So, let the bells keep on ringing, making angels in the snow. And may the melody surround us, when the cracks begin to show this messy Christmas.

"Snow" by Sleeping at Last (Ryan O'Neal)

My world is a lie that's come true

"The presence of [your] absence is everywhere." 

—Edna St Vincent Millay

Is it irony that the first big holiday without you is Thanksgiving? The season of gratitude feels hollow. After all, I can give thanks for things, but they will all disintegrate at some point. I can give thanks for other people...people that I know now because of you. But underneath the gratitude there is the painful knowledge that every person for whom I can and do give thanks will one day die. At some point, my heart will bleed like this again for someone else. And someone else. Your mom tried to tell me that it was like adding new rooms in my heart...and it is, but all I can see is that it will drain my heart dry of blood to lose these souls some day. Lord have mercy, may it not be soon!

This visit was far harder than I anticipated. I felt your absence so strongly, as if the emptiness were a sort of presence itself. Having never visited you in your home, on my first visit it didn't seem too odd not to have you in the house... Over Thanksgiving I kept feeling like you should walk around the corner, be sitting at the fourth side of the game table, playing the other colour in Settlers of Catan.

The worst moment came when I went ambling through the woods with your persevering parents. There was a stream with a rock and trees in a nook by the bank. I instinctively knew that it was a place that should have had memories made in it. Memories made by us in some other year. We would have packed biscuits and a thermos of tea, our favourite poetry books, and perhaps your walking stick. We would have tromped through the leaves to plant ourselves in golden autumn light, reading aloud to one another until we ran out of pages or daylight. We would have scampered home under the bare boughs sprinkled with stars. I felt the loss of this unmade memory so strongly that I was almost sick. It felt so like a place you would have visited that the unmade memory seemed more real than other memories I carry with me.

When I returned home a few days later, I discovered these lines that may as well have been written about that unmade—alas! never to be made—memory:

Where is the sun?

Feel like a ghost this time

Where have you gone?

I need your breath in my lungs tonight 

I'm holding on to You

My world is wrong

My world is a lie that's come true

And I fall in love with the ones that run me through

When all along, all I need is You

My world is wrong—because you aren't in it. My world is a lie that's come true. Lies whispered you away. The not-quite-six-feet of space you used to fill is achingly, noticeably empty. Those unmade memories will stay unmade. There is no hope that you will 'get better'—whatever I hoped that would mean. There's no going back to my twenty-three-ish-year-old self and urging her to go visit you. The ghosts of unmade memories haunted me along my every step at Fort Barton tower, among the trees by the river, and beside your woodstove. They taunted me as I looked through your bookshelves and saw your handwriting on the bathroom mirror. There was all the evidence of you, but no presence. Everything was all wrong and I could only think, Where have you gone? You should have been right there, right there with us—laughing, capering, drinking in the cold Beauty.

But somewhere in the intervening years—years that froze our friendship (in my memory) in its happier days—something changed. You changed. You became a living ghost; where had you gone, my friend? You became the living epitome of these lines:

All of my days are spent

Within this skin

Within this cage that I'm in 

Nowhere feels safe to me

Nowhere feels home

Even in crowds I'm alone

Tonight my eyes are red. Red from lack of sleep. Red from a profusion of salt-laced liquid streaming out.

What are you waiting for,

The day is gone?

I said I'm waiting for dawn

What are you aiming for

Out here alone?

I said I'm aiming for home

Home. In my vernacular that word applies to a little terracotta brick house in the Midwest and the people in it. It refers to the lodge in Pagosa, to the cloisters in Oxford, to the Mountain, to my cabin, to my friends. But now, more than ever, home means the Kingdom. The place I am longing for—and have been longing for all of my life; though I have never yet been there. You can long for home even if you've never been there. It is a remembering forward that I feel for the Kingdom. But did I say I had not been? No, but inhabiting the Kingdom is a well-loved part of home that I do remember—you. And so I long to go Home. I long for the perpetually bleeding wound to be healed. I long for the hopes that have died and died and died to resurrect into their true, redeemed, glorious selves.

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from—my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” 

― C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

________


—Switchfoot, Sing it Out

—Switchfoot, Red Eyes

Empty Hands

I want to hold my worth in my hands;
to trace my accomplishments
in gilded letters on spine and cover;
to smell them in ink and paper.

But my desire is a dream awakened,
and all I can trace are tears
of shame, that I have nothing
to hold out in offering but empty hands. . .

Empty hands—not clenched fists,
angry, or grasping at given gifts;
Empty hands, ready to hold another's,
to serve, to open and receive. . .

To receive trust—a hand placed
in mine by a friend or a child;
to receive that broken bread,
spoken over, speaking over me: "You belong."

To belong, to be welcomed,
is not something I can close my hand
around—my palm is empty
on this pilgrimage, ready to give.

I cannot hold my worth in my hand,
but I can hold His most precious Body;
hold the hand of one in His Body;
be a hand in His Body—empty. . .

What if the Season is Barren

They are like trees along a riverbank bearing luscious fruit each season without fail.

Their leaves shall never wither, and all they do shall prosper.

—Psalm 1:3, The Living Bible



What if the season is barren

rather than bearing?

How if the leaves have curled

and the river has curved

away—away from from this tree, empty?



“Empty? Why art thou empty?”

Asks the Spirit-wind,

rustling through parchèd leaves.

“Have you ceased to delight in

my Word—written, spoken, spilled down?"



In the stillness after the query

hangs an echo from ancient days:

“Who told you you were naked?

Why are you afraid? Have you disobeyed,

eaten what I forbade?”



“Yes, Lord,” I whisper in shame.

“I have known good, but evil is now

natural to my broken frame.

I have not delighted in Your Name,

to Your Word I refused to bow.”



“Yet all these days

I have guarded your ways—

return to me, delight in me.

My arm is not too short to save,

remember this and offer praise.”



Like a long-waited rain to a dry tree

were His entreaties to me.

I took delight as I meditated,

both day and night, upon

His Word—written, spoken, spilled down.



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Photo by Peter Oslanec on Unsplash

Unmerited

Kindness
flowing out
in wine and chocolate chip cookies,
in smiles and eyes, in words and hidden acts

Grace
flowing down
in water and wine and blood
over dark soul nights, to unworthy us

Love
flowing over
from hearts and hands, eyes and lips
in forgiveness again, and again—every time

Gifts
ever flowing
that we cannot earn, cannot repay,
we humbly receive with open, empty hands

Full
over flowing
hands and hearts, eyes and lives—
Lord teach us to receive with gladness and joy!

A Shell Dishabited

The rumble of thunder reverberates off the foothills. Damp pine-scent laces the air. A trio of squirrels seek refuge in the spruce that touches the sky with its tip-top branches. This is the stillness of the very first Summer Saturday–my day of solitude and sleep, of caramel-filled chocolate and endless mugs of PG Tips. It is a fairy sort of daylight, ripe for reading Fantasties or Lord of the Rings. I can see sunlight slanting through the clouds, glancing off the whiskers of one of those squirrels. His dew-bright eyes are full of curiosity and mischief. 

O me! That I get to live in this world, to see with my two green iris-eyes the wonders of this day. To sniff up the fresh sweetness of the earthy pines. To hear the chirrup of birds, the clash between thunder and lightning, and the drip, drip, drop of the rain-song. I am given the gift of a cool breath of air, kissing my neck, swirling my honey-red hair. It is all balm for my soul after this labour-intensive week at work, after hard news. How can anything post-Fall still ring of Truth and Beauty? But it does. How can the creation still shout of God's glory when lives are sticky, shattered, crumpled messes? Yet it does!

My aching limbs are full of tired. My soul is searing-hot with pain of a different sort, for a loved one, and another, and still more. My prayers climb to the heavens, fly beyond the clouds to the ever-listening ears of the Father. No longer is weariness confined to muscles, it sinks its shaft far into my very being. Prayer presses deeper the helpless feeling, the weakness I walk daily. I feel emptier still... And then the rain comes. Splattering on the shingles, splashing on the glossy green leaves. The rain flows down to the thirsty earth, giving itself with joy. The droplets sink lower and lower still, into the dark red earth, into the deep fir roots. Those pines reach higher to brush the skies. The higher cannot stand without the lower,* whispers each drop. The higher cannot stand without the lower!,* sings the spicy fragrance of pine needles, wafting upward. The dark clouds empty themselves of rain, that the dusty earth might be refreshed again.

Is that it, Lord? my heart queries. Must You empty me of all of me so that I might be full of only You? And once I am full of You, will You pour Yourself out on others? Empty. Full. Cracked and broken to spill out the kindness of God, lavishly gifted to me. I cannot hold it in, like the rainclouds cannot hold the rain. I cannot keep it to myself, like a stagnant pool. God's loving-kindness is poured out on undeserving me. To keep it from stagnation, it must flow out from me to others. It is not earned, it is given with joy. It cannot be kept, it cascades down in delight.

A poem comes to mind about this emptying and filling. It reminds me that if I am replete with myself there is no room for God to fill me, no place for Him to overflow in my life: 

If thou could'st empty all thyself of self, 

Like to a shell dishabited, 

Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf, 

And say, 'This is not dead', And fill thee with Himself instead.
But thou art all replete with very thou

And hast such shrewd activity, 
That when He comes, He says, 'This is enow
Unto itself - 'twere better let it be,
It is so small and full, there is no room for me.' **

What if the thunder, full of itself, did not roar the echo of power from the Creator? What if birds decided to sing their own dissonant song and could not communicate with others of their kind? What if squirrels ceased being squirrelly? And what if the ground decided it was too full of tree roots and the firs came crashing down? If nature began to do as it pleased, rather than living by God-given instincts, chaos would ensue. So what do I expect to happen if I am replete with very me? Can God fill me with His loving-kindness if I am already full of self? Will I be able to shower others with His goodness if I cannot receive it? Certainly not! I must be empty so He can fill me. God pays me–pays all of His children–the great compliment of accomplishing His will and work through me–through us–if we will let Him. 

I want to be like the rain falling deep into earth's heart; to be a shell dishabited. Going low to make others tall. Overflowing. Empty. Ready to be filled, to let my life be the sweet aroma of Christ in me, the Hope of glory.***

~ Johanna

______________________

 * Thomas á Kempis, The Imitation of Christ: Being Thankful for God's Grace
** Sir Thomas Browne, If Thou Could'st Empty All Thyself of Self
*** Colossians 1:27 (NKJV)