The Wine of Happy Vineyards

The Wine of Happy Vineyards

(“O Lord, our Lord, your greatness is seen in all the world! Your praise reaches up to the heavens.” Psalm 8:1)

The songs fall from the heavens like petals from a rose;
the scent is like rain after the sun goes down.
Day to day the sunsets sing with lyrics reconfirmed
by the moon and stars.

We are so dry here after years of drought; the fields
barely yield the fruit we were once accustomed to.
Slow to grow and barely to flourish, we have waited
for the minds of the miscreants to change.

We are looking for the Spring and rain;
we are waiting for the winds to repent their
arid canopies of sundried mornings. We are looking
for the grand rearrangement, for something recent
to replace our handheld testaments of disillusionment.

We have dreamed it; we have been undone.
We have cast our windows fully open and our
doors
ajar to welcome the habits of heaven.
I’d invite you in to await the choruses complete
from the hills and across the river and up the banks
of hope. We will know the melody the moment we
hear it.

Have we drunk the wine of the happy vineyards;
have we possessed the bread of a thousand possibilities?
Has the light finally reached us from the furthest stars
that started a million years ago to traverse the universe?

We have heard the refrain pushed forward like whitecaps
driven by the wind. We have not stopped listening.
We see the masterstroke of genius in the setting sun
and realize there is more to this all than we can fit
into a few lines of a poem.

Another Happy Heretic

 Another Happy Heretic

(“Go and learn what this saying means: ‘It’s mercy I want, not sacrifice.'” Matthew 9:13a)

She was shunned because she
loved people
more than she
loved their god.

Imagine that. A rat in the church
for all that time who refused to
be crammed into their rigid frame
and hung on the wall.

She wore her hair long. The men did not.
She wore her dresses long so the men would not
be guilty of lust. Every time she complained,
they said,
“it’s bad company you’ve been keeping. Now,
go seek the Lord and learn to fit in.”

She could not shake her love for people,
and the god they applauded was always throwing darts
at the unsuspecting. The music was nice: some-times.
often: not.
It could have been her blood shed; that’s what she heard.
It should have been her death, till she looked her
neighbor in the eye and
realized how absurd was the thought that kept everyone
in strict mean time and away from the devil’s chords.

So she, shaking, scathed, praying that god was not
the tyrant she had been taught,
slipped away, cut her hair, posed at the camera,
took a selfie. And smiled.

Then she took her neighbor a piece of pie,
and gave the server at lunch a tip, a grin.
A chance to begin again to be
simply human. Though her stomach was twisted,
her heart churning like a dragster on the quarter-mile,
she knew she could wander in the wilds safely
and love people

More than she had loved their god.

God Made This Day

God Made This Day

“When times are good, be happy: but when times are bad, consider this: God has made the one as well as the other. Therefore, no one can discover anything about their future.” Ecclesiastes 7:14

Imagine yourself on a boat or small ship. You have sailed solo quite a distance and now are out of view of any land. All around is only water and a clear sky and the spring sun warmly shining down. The weather is perfect. The temperature is just warm enough, perhaps in the low 70s, and the water is still. From time to time small ripples wrinkle the water’s surface, but mostly it is smooth and unruffled.

You stare at the sky that surrounds you. Every way you turn, the color is the same. The sky is washed with the bright pastel blue of a cloudless day. You sit back to take it all in breathing the air. There is nothing of earth about it; no mud, no sand, no engine emissions. It smells like water, but more. You think that if bread could be baked of simply H2O it would have this aroma. It is so fresh you take one deep breath after another, which puzzles you. Rarely, if ever do you pay attention to your breathing. But in this beautiful moment you do.

You scan the sky again, starting at the zenith above you and begin to follow the palette of blue down to the horizon. The sky, a deep brushwork blue overhead, turns lighter as it meets the horizon in a whitewash of cerulean.

The water transforms the sky from its pale monochrome to a silvery mix of blue and green. Even with very little wind, the surface of the water shimmers. With the slightest breeze, tiny diamonds seem to burst and shine above the water. Your sense of awe expands.

As you take it all in over the early afternoon, you feel peaceful, calm and content. This is the life. This is what my soul needed. This is why I bring my boat out here. (Everyone knows you don’t really fish.) And in the sort of exclamation that only comes from a satisfied and solitary place, you exhale loudly, “I am so blessed!” And you are. And, even if you don’t believe in God, you still would probably use the phrase. It just seems right.

But in the moment of your reverie you feel the wind pick up a bit. Not much at first. You’ve been on the water enough times to know the calm moment was a rarity. You consider turning for shore, but you are not concerned quite yet. You want to embrace the day and inner peace you are experiencing.

You glance at the horizon again and now become concerned. The horizon has changed. Now, above the water heavy cumulus clouds are building. Rising high above the water with their flattened undercarriage, they are already dumping heavy rain and are moving toward you. No longer silver, both the sky and water are boiling into a deep and threatening gray.

The water is choppier as the waves increase. All waves have two attributes: frequency and amplitude. On the boat, you feel the frequency increase as the waves are swept along by the wind. Frequency is simply the rate at which a wave moves past a fixed location. It can also be expressed as the distance from one quest to another in a moving wave.

Amplitude refers to the height of the wave. It is measured from the trough, the lowest part of the wave, to its crest. So, a three-foot wave is one that is 36 inches from trough to crest. On the boat, not only are the waves coming more frequently, but their amplitude has increased. What once perhaps rocked your boat a bit now, with the greater force of higher waves, threatens to capsize your vessel. Your perfect day is becoming a perfect storm. A few minutes before you were saying, “I am so blessed!” Now, “Blessed” is the last word that comes to mind. (You can substitute your own.)

The Teacher in Ecclesiastes wants us to remember that life is just like that. We can go on for days with everything going right, no major disruptions, our kids obey us (or at least we think they do). We love our job, we have close friends we enjoy, our marriage is, well, a good marriage. (Which means, yes, you fight, but you work it out.) You haven’t received a speeding ticket in over a month, rush hour traffic has been unusually light, and you even have enough savings to take your kids on a vacation of a lifetime. You would say, “I am so blessed.”

The Teacher tells us to be happy during these times. Don’t feel bad when things are going well. Just like the man on the boat, drink in every good thing. Enjoy when life goes well, and the storms are afar off.

But then he asks us to consider something when things go poorly: “God has made one (day) as well as the other.” Uh oh! In other words, when things get stormy and everything you believed gets turned upside down, remember, God made that time (or season) as well. It was easy for the man in the boat when the water was still, and the sky was clear. It is easy for us when finances, family and friends, health, plans and direction all seem to work out the way we expected. It is easy to say, “I am so blessed!” Because we feel blessed. We feel blessed by positive things: quality relationships, finances in good order, etc. But we also feel blessed by negative things: no downsizing at work, very little friction in relationships, etc.

Let things go bad, though, and how well do we feel blessed now? Come on, it’s just me typing this and you reading it; you can be honest. No matter how often we are trained to say, “I’m too blessed to be stressed”, we get stressed. And often for good reason. Storms can rise on open water at any moment and from anywhere. And can they in life. You lose a job. You go through a divorce. You are diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. You have medical needs that have drained all your finances. Just imagine experiencing one of those life events and exclaiming, “I am so blessed!”

But that is not what the Teacher is advising. He is not asking us to evaluate if God is in the good raise we got as well as our struggle with alcohol. He is asking us to remember that God made both days. He did not necessarily make the circumstances happen, but whatever circumstances do happen: God is in that day.

I believe this will make a difference for a lot of people. In the mid-90s I was making over $60,000 per year; more than I had made in my life. For that time our family was able to enjoy many experiences we wouldn’t have otherwise. But, consider this. While my income increased, I had friends who were out of work for years. Was God with me and not with them? Of course not. We were both functioning on “the same day.” The same day I sold $50,000 of computer equipment to a hospital a friend of mine was searching for work to support his family. But we were both in that “same day”.

I grant, when life is tough, it is really hard to say, “I am so blessed”. Here’s a clue: Don’t say it. I have just ended an entire year without earning a penny. I took early retirement for medical reasons and have been attempting to qualify for Disability Insurance. Now living with relatives, not pastoring a church, across the country from friends and a place we called home, I have found it difficult to say, “I am blessed”.

Once I considered this passage, though, I found myself able to say, “God has made this day.” Dear one, no matter what you are going through, God is with you. You may not feel “blessed”, and that is okay. Don’t let anyone put you down for that. But, if you can find a way to say, “I may not feel blessed, but I know God is with me, because He made this day just like any other,” it may bring you to a place of hope. The day everything went right? God made it. The day when your soul felt like it was boiling over? God made that one too.

God has made this day.

Happy Holidays ya'll

“And I heard a great voice out of the throne saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his peoples, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.’” Revelation 21:3

We are at it again. It is November 6 and Christmas decorations are popping out everywhere. I haven’t even finished the bite-size leftover chocolates from Halloween. Don’t take me for a Grinch, I adore Christmas. There is so much magic, joy, music and family all compressed into a Holy Evening and Everybody Up Early Morning.

Like Treasure

Like Treasure

("The kingdom of heaven is like treasure that was hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again. He was very happy. So he went and sold everything he had. And he bought that field.” Matthew 13:44)

Never expecting a muddy day; sun across every field
burned the fog and left the dirt crusty above the tangle of roots below.
I wore my black loafers and navy dockers,
walking sidewalk straight, hearing the crazy blackbirds
pretend to threaten, the faint frogs attempting their songs,
and the wide river a slow bass legato run.

Across the field, one third of the way in, was a mound,
just an emergence of soil, not enough to cast a shadow,
not enough to catch my eye, except today.
For sounds and sights, time and place, this day,
without reason other than my meandered pace,
I noticed what I would not, what anyone would not,
notice any other day.

I kicked off the cracked mud opening from the top
that spidered down from middle to bottom, not suspecting
a find,
just a lump to kick the time away.

So as I scraped my second foot over the late-day clay,
a wink from the dark caught my eye. I had been fooled before,
a child of 7 or 10, when the same reflection revealed only
a broken neck of a dr. pepper bottle.

I reached inside the dark, careful not to slice my fingers on
someone’s busted drink, and blue! Or violet! Or jade or emerald!
Oh joy; the colors would not be defined! Within my hand it was
cold and warm to my eyes.

The sun stopped shining, the field disappeared, and the afternoon
once lively now existed no more! There was only a moment full of all,
a day pregnant with every, and a gem too heavy to have weight or any.

Within a week I sold all I could see, rented the rest and bought that field
in spite of myself. My slices of five out of seven flew beyond the dawn

And the price I paid, in spite of myself, never matched the radiance,
the laser, the fluorescent, the flame and the spray of the never-changing
gem, though it seems, the colors are clearer with the day. And lately

After decades of wander, full knowing my foolish transaction,
there is nothing more precious, even on days of hunger,
than the beauty I found caked with earth’s transitions.

Good Company

"Good Company"
(“Jesus clearly did not come to help angels, but he did come to help Abraham’s descendants.” Hebrews 2:16)

I’m no angel and I’ve got a lot of proof,
my robe and wings having been removed
each time I attempted simple perfection,
a soufflé-like servanthood that nearly always fell.

I am happy for Your company, can You tell?
I’m not sure how to express it (though others will tell
me without hesitation the proper posture and sell me
a cd with the instructions.)

I am lonesome without Your company, have You heard?
Perhaps I misaddressed the card once again, requesting service
from another loner like me; with limited time, limited resources
and limited availability.

You are the life of my party, You’re always invited.
Join in any conversation, I mean it, in spite of my tendency
to trap the words and expel them with nuggets of personal knowledge
to show I need You less than I’ve told.

You can bring the angels with you, I enjoy the way they smile
when they look at me (and the rest of my kind). I enjoy the way
they smile at how much help we’ve needed, how little they could do,
and how simply You saved us sinking--I’ll use the old-time word now--
in the mire.

It was Your tears before You faced the terror that make You such good

Company.