Saturday, March 15, 2025
I woke this morning to a hard wind and eerily hazy sky. The sun was blurred as if waxed paper was stretched over it. As I walked the dogs, I thought rain was pouring on the distant farms. But no rain moved or fell. The sun was hazed over with a brown tint, with a bit of the end of the world in the light. Dolly kept swinging around to head home. My legs kept getting tangled. I looked at the survey stakes for the repair of the natural gas pipeline and turned toward home.
Bruce and I stayed up until midnight waiting for the long predicted violent storm to make her way to our farm. We didn’t want to be caught asleep with an oak branch falling through the bedroom. It’s worth the alarm when the shaded areas on the local weather map turn brown because those predictions have brought tornadoes. We carried dog crates and chairs to the basement. I packed my jewelry and important papers in my go-to-the-basement bag. I tried to follow the storm front on AccuWeather but the app froze. Bruce listened to Ryan Hall Y’all warn communities about impending tornadoes along a line that stretched down to the Gulf of Mexico. Hall could barely keep up. Bruce’s eyes were glued to his Ipad.
I pulled a blanket up and read the daily office for March 14 where I bumped into Psalm 95 and the last few verses of Hebrews 4. This week has taken me to the stern warning about the people of Isreal, in the early chapters of Hebrews and the Psalm. “Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah
as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 where your ancestors tested me;
they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
10 For forty years I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
11 So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’” (Psalm 95: 8 – 11, NIV).
Now I know why I’ve been avoiding reading scripture, because I can be thrown into paralyzing fear, because I am afraid to enter rest because the fear is more real that God’s reassurance he’ll walk through the valley of shadow right beside me. The children of Isreal were so terrified of the giants that God said, “Suit yourself. You’ll spend forty years wandering in the desert and die there.”
And then there’s Moses who struck the rock when he was supposed to just speak to water waiting to spring forth. The humblest man on earth, who talked to God face to face, could not even walk into the promised land. Even he didn’t enter rest. So how could I even begin to enter it as I look down the barrel of old age and death.
Earlier this week, Bruce said the train was pulled by six engines. I didn’t notice much more than the long line of grain cars heading east because I spoke to God, seeping tears, like he was a friend, not sure whether I was doing spiritual battle with Scratch whispering in my ear or whether I’d joined the children of Isreal in complaining about how those creatures were bigger than God. After all God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love and a sound mind.
My fear twisted tighter by saying “You are past time to find community, your memory is failing, that you’re at that age when funerals will be your social life, those friends dead and gone leaving wide, gaping, irreplaceable holes, not to mention your loss when God calls Bruce home. Who wants to be friends with someone who can’t think straight?” My own withdrawing from frail elderly acquaintances whispers, ‘What goes around comes around.”
While cleaning house this week I forgot to put the bag into the vacuum and pushed against the floor until the machine halted, full of hair and dust. The replacement bag sat on the counter. I muttered “I miss my mind” a phrase my grandmother repeated as her mind crumbled. I’ve already been slapped with the mild cognitive impairment label. I flinch every time I can’t find a common word. I am terrified of winding up in a nursing home, where you can pay thousands a month and still be left sitting in your urine and feces. During Covid, elders were treated so cruelly, Amnesty International should have raised an outcry.
This fear runs like a sewer underneath me, and smells just enough to make friendship with me a liability. When or how my body or mind betrays me, well I don’t have much say in that. Sometimes the Presence rises, puts an arm around my shoulder and reassures me with “I’ve got you.”
But I long for purchase. I long to make sense of loneliness that has dogged me since I was set on a bed looking shell shocked the hour I was born. Surely there’s a story, where I can find my place as a woman who has outlived her family and is knocking 70, who bought into not having children, so there are no children coming home for holidays. Church gives us the old folks group, without thinking to mix us up with the kids. And young adults are busy with their children and making a living.
Do I huddle in the old folk tales about the old crones to find my story? Do I become a modern-day anchorite spending her days in prayer? (I kinda already do that.) I don’t know. I do know I want to find my way to entering that rest, a call I heard for the first time when I’d just turned sixteen, a story I hope to share here one day.
Ah but just before I went to publish this, Martin Shaw writes in Coming from Here: “And courage to you, wherever you are investing your love and attention, often without this abundance. For you that have to make your traditions instinctively from certain herbs you grow, walks through the city you always take, struggling friends you persist in visiting. There is the roots of ritual and pilgrimage in all those things. My first real understanding of ceremony began in a Men’s Hostel thirty years ago when I tacked a Rembrandt sketch of a lion to a wall. How to make a prison cell a hermit’s hut begins with just one step.” Ah courage to me. Courage in these words, giving me purchase like the minuscule ledges I have to trust if I’m to climb the last bit to the peak.
Just this morning, the morning of eerie haze, I read Eugene Terekhin’s essay “666 vs 7: The Leap of Faith that Changes Everything” where he takes a close look at how the number six stands for human effort and the number seven stands for rest. It’s the Sabbath day, God’s rest day. He spells out how this rest in God happens when we come to the end of our abilities. Work no longer means anything. He says, “Seven is the turning, the breaking point. It’s where we break, both literally, in rest, and spiritually, in trust. It’s when we have exhausted all our human effort and have come to the end of ourselves. The 7th day is the day of perfection because it is our breaking point—the point when we admit that we are powerless.
“Paradoxically, the perfection of the 7th day is when we embrace our imperfection. We let go—break, stop, cease, rest. Perfection happens exactly at this point—at the point of nothingness. We have been toiling for 6 days but have reached a point where all human work becomes pointless. At this point, 6 turns into 7. Imperfection gives way to perfection.” And so maybe I’m not in such a bad place after all.
Backing up to Friday, March 14, 2025. The Night of the Dangerous Storm
The wind finally hit hard. I listened for the old oaks cracking, wondered how many branches would fall. But as hard as the wind blew, it only threw a few drops of rain against the window. It roared as loud as the thunder I didn’t hear. Saw no flashes of light. I did not head for the cellar. The dogs slept at my feet. I opened my phone to Stephen Freeman’s blog entry, Following a conversation with a tree, and read, “The voice of thanksgiving is, without exception, the sound that we can utter that is itself in harmony with the song of the universe. It is filled with tree-knowledge and star-wonder, confounding the lies of the enemy and those who would drown us in darkness. The Uncreated Light manifests itself in the created light, and in all creation that is light, some of which has slowed down enough for us to walk on.”
Confounding the lies of the enemy. And those who would drown us in darkness.
So I’m brought back to gratitude. At the end of David’s wrenching confessional Psalm 51, he speaks this truth as well, “O Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise” (Psalm 51: 18). And then there’s “God is enthroned on the praises of Isreal” that also slides into the wrenching Psalm 22 that Jesus screamed from the cross.
Giving thanks. As Stephen Freeman says: Confounds the lies of the enemy. And those who would drown us in darkness. It fills the emptiness with something like water. So I thank God for the friends who’ve walked with me some years, and for those who have turned off to side roads, and the ones whose health is fragile, who are still here, still ready for a good talk. I give thanks for those of you who are reading this. And others I can text for a long chat.
Chris Green at Speakeasy Theology has been writing a series on communal singing. talking about how our voices are powerful pointed at God in unison. “This is true not only in the church’s gathered worship but also in the scattered lives of its members. Sunday, we sing together, facing the same direction. But through the week we also sing alone for and to others—even, at times, against them.”
It’s been too easy to let our phones do the singing. When I was a girl, I’d walk the mile long road to the fork that lead to the main road, singing the old hymns long after dark. When I rode my horse I sang for joy. But I have lost that voice though sometimes when saying Evening Prayer with Bruce, I sing, my voice faint, the dog cocking her head.
Well, I’ll leave you with my latest perspective for WNIJ, our local NPR station, that aired this week.
Beer and Hymns? WNIJ Perspective
Our country has been plunged into fear, more biting and bitter than this winter’s polar vortexes. It shouts as disagreements dissolve into insults.
My congressman recently sent a one-line survey that unnerved me because I realized he might be gathering a list of people to surveil. The first amendment guarantees our rights to free speech, but how strong is it if the FBI shows up at a person’s doorstep, swat team in tow, to take them into custody for expressing a sentiment that might be termed insurrectionist?
What has happened to us where an ordinary citizen, a little too obsessed with political happenings, is afraid to be honest with her own congressman? A friend says people she talks to on the other side of the aisle say the same thing. The fear bites so hard, it feels more real than paranoia.
Then I remembered how St. Paul, chained in a fetid prison, sang hymns into the darkness. He says, “Do not get drunk with wine…but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs…” What if psalms and hymns and spiritual songs are the antidote to this bitter, bitter fear that is flooding our country? Would a community sing along be a way to push back? To find our joy? Beer and Hymns already thought of this. Let’s find a brewery, some musicians and gather together. What better way to bark back at the darkness.
I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.
If you’d like to hear me read this, click here.
Saturday, March 15, 2025
Last night’s storms killed more than twenty people and wrecked a number of houses. A friend texted and said there were 130 fires in Oklahoma yesterday. Dust storms also kicked up. As I walked back out to feed Mrs. Horse I couldn’t figure out if the haze was from dust or smoke or both. I held my hand to her muzzle and scratched her shoulder. She wiggled her nose in my palm. The wind roared so hard, and it was so hard to breathe I fed her inside the barn. Sometimes the Spirit blows so hard you can barely breathe. All I could say was to bring the ball and throw it for Omalola to chase, running hard away and back, her eyes lit up with joy.
Here are the essays Chris Green is posting on singing: To Save Love for the World, To Save Love for the World Pt 2, To Save Love for the World Pt 3, The Spirit and the Song (also a podcast)
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