Clover has nearly reached up to Morgen’s bridle. She can drop her nose and snatch a purple flower. About a month ago, the field was newly shorn, nearly down to dirt.
We’ve gotten out before noon the last two days to try to beat the heat. Hesitantly I want to say I think I found the fun, and may drive her down the road, looking for apples on a tree, a mile away. Driving her has given me the motivation to get up early, not read the latest news on my phone and take her around the field.
A barn swallow follows us all the way down field, swooping around us. I wonder what that’s about. I wonder if it’s Little Bird wheeling in circles. (We rescued him as a fledgling.) Or are we somehow the people he is guarding like a border collie circling his flock. Or just swooping for the joy of it.
Mrs. Horse has so much power trotting out, I have to pulse my reins, squeezing the right hand, squeezing the left. If I hold hard both reins at once, she’ll brace and take off. Have you noticed how racehorses run with tight reins? Because they can lean into the bit and run hard off their forehand. I have to be careful to pulse my reins and not hold onto both at the same time. I don’t want her running back to the barn because that’s a rule. But my gosh it’s fun when she moves.
The day has gone quiet. This morning machine noises hurt my ears, with heavy trucks making their way up and down the main road. But by late morning it has quieted.
The Kildeer seem to have disappeared. For awhile we had a family of five hanging around the paddock. And they could be loud enough to annoy my hearing. Have they flown south already? Did last week’s hail and hard winds kill them? Or was it the aerial spray we’ve seen wheeling and dipping over fields?
The other day when I was mowing I listened to Brian Zahnd being interviewed by Jonathan Foster and Tori Owens about his marvelous book about the cross, “The Wood Between the Worlds.“ Zahnd said we need to have real life friends because friends we make on the internet aren’t real. We should pick up the phone and call someone or go out to lunch. He stated that the friends you have at forty are the friends you have at 80. Well, that’s not exactly true. He assumes a person’s core friends will live that long or stay in the same area.
Medicare asks us how often we’ve talked to someone on the phone during the week, or what clubs we’re involved in. Are we involved in church? Those questions are busybodies. Docs say that our social life is important for our health. What if you’re a solitary person? What if your whole life seems to be shaped around the lonely places? What if there’s meaning and purpose in not pushing a social life just to push a social life? And being lonely does more to drive people away than draw them to friendship.
Zahnd’s words, the pressure from docs, opened the pit, where I greeted that old friend, loneliness, for a minute. I shook her hand and climbed out remembering how I’m going to lean into solitude, and be a solitary, which yes, is possible while married.
Often people found their way to the saints in the woods. Maybe there’s wisdom in waiting, in letting people come to me. Wisdom in blessing this life. While I was struggling with how to say what I mean, I read “Solitude“ the final chapter of Maggie Ross’s The Fire of Your Life. Ross has been a lantern, a round circle of light, like the one I occasionally shine when I walk Omalola after dark. Sometimes it catches the two eyes, bright, of Tyger or Ma Cat. Most of the time I walk into the dark around the house or back behind the garden. These days we see lightning bugs blinking on the ground and in the grasses. The other night I saw a light and thought I was seeing a firefly move across the sky, but it was just a small plane blinking. Sometimes I time it to see the International Space Station. (You can get the app and they will notify you when it’s overhead. You can point your phone so you find the line of sight and see it.)
Maggie Ross says, “In solitude is the wonder of the commonplace, the mystery of the ordinary life: eating, sleeping, reading, listening to God’s secrets and jokes, a sense of delight, of dance, of fruition, learning that solitude is not something we need to scramble to fill up, but that it is full to overflowing if we can learn to accept the familiarity of insecurity and let go“(145).
These things are God’s love notes to us. Or maybe his song, calling us to delight in the world he’s made. This gray morning was marvelously quiet, except for bird song. I stooped and took a picture of a simply white morning glory. I said good morning to my friends the redwing blackbird and robin. Omalola pulled off the road to sniff. I let her. (That permission has bit me in the butt because she will stop dead in her tracks when there’s a scent she wants to check out.)
By temperament I crave being alone. And by history. As a newborn I was laid alone on a bed for my picture, a picture that left me chilled and alone, when I saw it as an adult. I have been praying since I was little, usually artless intercessory prayers because that’s how my evangelical background influenced me, though I do remember a formula that went something like praise, thanksgiving confession, intercession. It was the praying for others that stuck with me especially as I wanted to pray without ceasing, something the Pilgrim sought after and learned when he was taught to say “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.” (Well that’s the version I say.) Martin Shaw is retelling his own translation of The Way of the Pilgrim in a series on his Substack House of Beasts and Vines.
I prayed through lists of classmates daily so that they would “accept Jesus as their personal Lord and savior.“ That list has narrowed quite a bit these days, perhaps because I can’t hold many people in my head. My prayers have mostly narrowed to “Lord heal them,” or “Lord bless them.” Sometimes I tell Him what I think He should do, knowing that His Spirit is groaning beyond words, shaping those prayers. Sometimes those specifics come about. But lately I realized I wasn’t telling God my own story. I wasn’t showing him my face, by talking about others. I’ve want him to know me, so he can’t say, I never knew you when he does that great separation between the sheep and the goats. I’ve learned silence can be prayer. And need to not resist it when I’m sitting in the car with Bruce.
Maggie Ross says, “Most of us have the experience that love can be unbearable. John must have received it in solitude and baptized to make the One who was coming, Love incarnate, a little easier to bear. Our baptism in the crucified and risen Christ enables us to bear it; we learn to bear each other’s love so we can learn to bear God’s“ (142).
I have felt this. Early in my marriage I wrote:
This terror before my husband is the terror in a thunderstorm when there is nothing protecting me and my house but the luck of the lightning stroke. I taste it. My horses in the barn would have no chance against straw in flame and locked fear.
I sit the farthest inside my house. The windows are silver with rain so hard I can’t see the cedars, willow, lilac a few yards off. I sit with a Bible open to First John where it says God is love and perfect love casts off fear. But God is so raw in the sudden thunder, I must sit in terror until the storm moves east.
With my husband I freeze as the child I was and kiss with fear scuddling along my teeth. God is raw when we come to love a man who could die quick as lightning. But sun does break up the storm, horses still stand in the barn, waiting for pasture. One apple tree is down that my parents left to be an arbor for bittersweet I picked for centerpieces.
This has been a work for me, this learning to receive Bruce’s love, to see in his throwing down hay from the loft because I’m afraid of climbing up there, afraid of that first step off the ladder, a gift of love. His withstanding my terror of abandonment, which stung my teeth, like the times I’d flinch, when a pheasant flew up, out on the trails, and Tessie, my riding mare, kept walking steadily along.
Ross talks about floating down a wild river and how she has to choose where the water sweeps together, and run through the rapids until she gets to the still waters. She says, “The river can kill you. So can God“ (144).
Same with horses. I repeated, “this horse could hurt me“ often when I was working with the young Mrs Horse, but then I realized that she had not, that these very words were wrong. So she stands at the fence waiting for my company and hay cubes, not unlike God might wait for me to turn towards Him, away from the giant Babylonian statue, the fascinating, cultural chaos that is our country and the times we live in.
Tessie my saddle mare, did bolt, did throw me, did frighten me, but she taught me how keep saddling up, riding into my fear, riding through the runaway, to bring her back. And most times she walked out with my friends into beautiful woodlands, sometimes with blue bells, most often mosquitoes that bit through our pants, and leaves that changed from green to browns and reds as we rode the seasons.
Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians could be our prayer for ourselves and for others: “For this reason I kneel before the Father,from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being,so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,and to know this love that surpasses knowledge“”that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us“ (Eph 3: 15 – 19, NIV).
What would we be like if we grasped how wide and long and high and deep Christ’s love is? It’s taken nearly four decades to begin to grasp that with my husband. It took some years out from my father’s death to feel how he loved me, holding hard in his loneliness after my mother died, to let me sit tight in a very hard work, to let me leave home and not call me back home to put salve on his aching grief. (As a young woman, I’d been terrified of his love, it felt so heavy.)
Ross’s words seem to illumine this: “We become aware of others’ holiness and potential holiness, holiness they aren’t and can’t be aware of. We become aware of their holiness because we become aware of their hurts and our share in these hurts. Like John the Baptist, we become lamps, our light leaping towards one another across the darkness. The vocation of transparency is to live from the wellspring of solitude so that we bear Christ to one another“ (147).
Activists say prayer is no good. Thoughts and prayers are milque toast. Get out there and do something! But I have found that charity is not as easy as it looks. Naming myself as a healing agent lead me in way over my head. I listened too well, and she said too much too fast. I backed off hard. She was rightfully hurt. I’ve been on the receiving end of well-meaning church ladies too, so I know how it feels. I have no desire to be anything other than a friend.
These days I don’t know how to pray. Do I walk out in silence, enjoying the quiet? The people I pray for? Do I pray over and over, again and again for them, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night, saying their names, praying for comfort? Or do I say a prayer and that’s it?
So when St. Seraphim of Sarov said in the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit, “Of course, every good deed done for Christ’s sake gives us grace of the Holy Spirit but prayer gives it to us most of all, for it is always at hand, so to speak as an instrument for acquiring the grace of the Spirit“¦you would like to do some other good deed for Christ’s sake, but either you have not the strength or the opportunity is lacking. This certainly does not apply to prayer. Prayer is always possible for everyone, rich and poor, noble and humble, strong and weak, healthy and sick, righteous and sinful“ (83).
What kind words. Majik reminded me that an early prayer of the church is Maranatha: Come Lord Jesus. What a powerful prayer to bring our wandering thoughts back: Come Lord Jesus. How I long to see Him face to face, for we shall be like him because we can see him as he is. But as the old prophets said, anyone who saw him, did not come out alive. But isn’t that how it is even here in this life? We see Jesus and follow him right down into the waters of baptism and back up to new creation. We follow him right down to our knees washing feet, and right down to our graves, when we open the door to new life. For we shall see him because we can see him as he is.
Ross says, “We begin to realize this hunger will never be satisfied, not in this life. It is hunger to see the Face of God, and the only possible approach is prayer, prayer that is all our lives, to yield to God’s emptiness, vastness, to lose control of our ideas of God, our ideas and stereotypes or ourselves, of prayer. We finally“”again and again ““let go all our concepts of God and begin to understand God’s notion of us“ (144).
The other night Bruce and I were walking Omalola on the road and finally Mr. P’s son stopped and chatted with us about the crops he’s planting, the hay he’s cutting, how he needs to clean out his father’s, well and his mother’s house. It’s been awhile since anyone stopped and chatted. Then another neighbor, with her two little girls, stopped to chat. Finally, I got her phone number, because it’s good to have your neighbors’ numbers. We walked across the road several times while other trucks passed. It was one of those nights when the haze blurred the woods and fields enough to make them look like an Italian painting.
Come Lord Jesus. Lord Jesus son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner. Thank you Lord. And the red wing blackbird and says good morning and good evening from the electric wire.
Nazarius, et al.Little Russian Philokalia. St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994.
Ross, Maggie.The Fire of Your Life. Seabury Books, 2007.
