Post #31.12, Thursday, April 28, 2022

Historical setting: 589 C.E. In the Vosges Mountains

         There, breaking through the brush at the trail, in the spring breeze is all the lightness of sunshine — it is Ana.

         “The servant told me of your thoughts. I ran ahead of him to see you and to say I’m grateful, I’m so happy…”

         I lay down the saw in the heaps of brush and go closer to her for the perfect silence – a gaze with no word spoken.

We stand here just … just looking, until the servant catches up, and he is here with us too.

         “I see you’ve already told him, Ana.”

         “Told me?” I ask.

         “I was hoping you’d come back.” She said. “I didn’t know there was a rule. And you aren’t even a monk, how could there be a rule?”

         “It is as you said, the rule made by men for woman can too easily be oblivious to the nature of women. No wonder we get into tangles.”

          I happen to have a twig in my hand. I just notice I am still grasping onto it. It was with the brush I gathered to thatch the nesting boxes. I laid the tools aside, but I still have the twig. Now Ana is looking down at the twig in my hand so I hand it to her. “It is the way of birds, you know.”

         She takes it from me laughing with her creek-sparkling blue eyes. We both glance at the servant. She explains, “It’s probably not a bird thing for cages, but the wild wrens and the doves know well what it is.” She brandishes the twig. She looks the twig over very carefully then tells me, “It is a very lovely twig.  It is by far the best twig ever offered to me, so let us now just fill the house all up with twigs and sticks and call it a nest!”

         “Thank you God, for simple gifts.”

         Says the servant brother.  “I’ll just walk back alone now and I will let the father know the rule of Ana has been breeched and also we may soon be able to send all of our messages off to Ana on bird’s legs. I will bring you a pair of squabs that will always come home to your house when they are of an age to fly.”

         Brother servant goes on his way, and Ana and I drag the thatch and sticks all the way up the hill to the house with no roof – yet.

(Continues Tuesday, May 3)

Post #31.11, Weds., April 27, 2022

Historical setting: 589 C.E. In the Vosges Mountains

         “Brother Servant I know the rule of Ana is to not even know of her, so I will say nothing at all of her, but I will silently follow you on the path, and when we reach the creek I will stop and cut thatch while you go on ahead.  She won’t even know I’m there.”

         “Somehow, Ezra, I can clearly see you are inching ever closer to breaking the rule.  And what if she doesn’t want birds living there?”

         “Then I will just repair nesting boxes here or if she changes her mind, then maybe there — wherever they are needed. I’ll gather the supplies at the creek.”

          Brother Servant notices, “Inching ever closer… But I figure, since all your construction skills are human, and you don’t seem to have the gifts known by birds with beaks for weaving grasses I will have to supply you with a saw and a blade. You may walk with me as far as the creek. Then I will continue on up while you go about gathering brush and sticks.”

         He’s right. I guess I’m inching my way ever closer to breaking the rule. But in fact, I’m really not bound by any rule here and I could just go up there as I please, but then Ana might feel I’m forcing myself onto her and she wouldn’t want me there, even if all I did was build a roof for her house. And by breaking the rule they have here I would not only close myself from her, I wouldn’t have this place to return to. Cages and rules constrict both bird and man but they may serve a worthy purpose.

         Dear God, let me find the limits to my own freedoms in the many ways of love. Amen.

         We set out on this new morning, I with a saw and a blade, and brother servant with a bird in a cage.

         Now here on the banks of the creek as Brother Servant walks on I find all the materials anyone would need for cages and roofs, broom hedge for thatching and pine poles and hazel branches for building. He’s gone on ahead up the hill with the bird in the cage. The sun is rising higher, and already I’ve pruned a new hole in the brush for sunshine to pour through, and it makes blue sparkles of sky on the water, once dark.  I have a heap of thatching cut here already.

         Now I hear someone romping through the thickets on the path.

(Continues tomorrow)

Post #31.10 Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Historical setting: 589 C.E. In the Vosges Mountains

         Brother Servant took my request to the father for Ana to have birds.

         He tells me, “The father wants to know if Ana would like birds so I will have to ask her.”

         I need to find a distraction while I wait. I offer, “In my youth I apprenticed with a carpenter. Possibly I could make new nesting boxes here?”

         “Really Ezra, we have higher priorities for repairs.”

         I can’t think of anything else just now. “Maybe I could repair this dilapidated aviary here. Apparently the only thing that keeps the pigeons here is their domestication. I ask.  “With only a few tools, a saw and a blade, I can easily build a new aviary. I’ll use the scrub along the creek – the broom and willow, hazel wood and pine — and the birds will have fine nests of thatch and sticks and it won’t take the supplies we need for the important repairs.”

         Brother Servant isn’t impressed. “Birds already do that task quite well and they never borrow a saw or a blade from us. Ezra I know you are making plans to take birds to Ana. That seems to be all you think about. Just give me a chance to go and ask her.”

         “Yes, of course.  But maybe if you have some chores I could help with, you could go up there sooner?”

          “Alright, you may walk with me to the creek and start gathering these supplies while I go ahead and ask her.”

         “Oh thank you!” 

         Maybe I could make a note of the joy I feel just now.  It would fit on a bird’s leg and it would have a tune she could play on her flute, “Praise God!”

         Here in the midst of these chanting brothers only verses of moaning laments lap gently one onto the next like wavelets turning over on an evening shore. They are a whole dark sea, and here I am a loud splash joy just waiting to be shouted. Thank you God!

         “Thank you Brother! I really think birds could give Ana a chance to know she is beloved without her having to navigate the treachery of men’s lust.”

         “You’ve thought of that, have you?”

         “She told me she has fears.”

         “Please don’t forget, Ezra, here we may only speak of an unnamed angel of the wilderness. It is our sacred duty to forget whatever lustful thoughts we may have.”

         “Of course.”        

(Continues tomorrow)

Post #31.9, Thursday, April 21, 2022

Historical setting: 589 C.E. Annegray in the Vosges Mountains

         I’m waiting to hear if Father Columbanus would consider having pigeons trained to return always to Ana so we could send notes to her and she wouldn’t feel so alone. When words to Ana have to be like words to an angel all she hears are our woes and petitions. It hardly seems kind to speak to a person as we would an angel. She should also know people care for her.  And maybe even the angels want to hear that.

         Made as we all are in the image of God maybe even prayers to God should be our kindest thoughts and gratitude. In fact, maybe I should make my prayers as love notes. Here is my love note with gratitude for “Green.” 

         Dear God, Creator of all that is and was, thank you for embracing earth in green. Thank you for this season of new life, winter grasses, green now in earth color, standing on frail stems as messengers of new life after the colorless withers. Green earth gulping first sunshine, exhale of plant breath to life-breath for us who live among the critters and beasts. Breath as spirit, metaphor for life and life again, crossing the mystical line between heaven and earth green is the tangible reality of the invisible infinity of blue.

         Thank you God for your love poured out that surprises even tough-knuckled humans with little joyful finds of mushrooms popping through the forest floor to breech our longing fast of winter. Thank you for an earth that lets us know of your love as it is in heaven. And may our human choices be generous also, to care for even the birds and maybe the frogs and snails as well. I love you too, Amen.

         Brother Servant has returned.

         “Ezra, I’ve taken your request to Father Columbanus to consider. I thought he would ponder over it and wait to answer. He has so many other concerns to deal with. But no. He told me right away even as I was standing there. He asked me if it would be a burden for me to set up the new cages and roosts. I told him it could be done.  Then he asked me what messages you were suggesting. I told him that you thought anyone could send little psalms or notes of encouragement, and that you suggested Psalm 118:24.  He smiled so brightly his eyebrows went up and his forehead wrinkled. ‘But first,’ he asked…”

(Continues Tuesday, April 26)

Post #31.8, Weds., April 20, 2022

Historical setting: 589 C.E. Annegray in the Vosges Mountains

           Again when we stand for the chanting of the psalms and I look down the row passed the elder monks and to see Brother Crathius, he once more leans forward and makes eye contact with me. This time he is prepared with a nod of recognition rather than shock. We share in knowing that the stiff joints of the elders he is attending, and my strange circumstance of life and life again are both ways of restoring usefulness after suffering. This is all about the hard flexes of healing. Creator love is the constancy of new life and healing – hallelujah anyway.

         A pigeon flies over, and lands on the wall top.

         On this new day, Father Columbanus is back at Annegray and the servant monk has returned with him. I tell the Brother Servant about my idea to take some baby birds to Ana so she will have a roost there, then we can send her messages.

         He asks, “What messages would anyone send to her?”

         “Today I would like to send her ‘This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!’ [excerpt from Ps. 118:24]  But I, or any of us could send her little words of encouragement, maybe just a kind word or maybe any phrase like that from a Psalm; She could know people are thinking of her. She would hear that others of us aren’t just thinking of our own benefit of her gifts, but we also value her as a child of God. I think that matters to her.”

         “You know, Ezra, you are not supposed to imagine her as a woman. And this sounds to me like a ploy to break that rule.”

         “Really I’m just thinking of her nature as human being. I think she would appreciate nurturing the little birds in her home. It would be helpful for her in many ways. But of course, I do realize you would be carrying birdcages in both directions up and down those hills. It would be an extra task for you. I can understand that.”

         He offers, “I will take your idea to Father Columbanus.”

(Continues tomorrow)

Post #31.7, Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Historical setting: 589 C.E. Annegray in the Vosges Mountains

            Now we are in the halleluiah season after Easter. The prayers of resurrection seem awkward for pilgrims among us who have come only with the heavy chains of Lenten suffering. The Irish monks celebrate Easter using a different calculation than the Roman pilgrims so the rhythm of the days is already disturbing for the monks from other abbeys. Now on this day the brothers of the Annegray choir call, “Christ has risen” and the response from the pilgrims is a nearly sorrowful, no I mean actually a tearful response, “Risen indeed.”

         The Jesus teachings of love for neighbors and enemies alike, the notion of God as full spirit of universal love, the wisdom of a Creator of all beauty, life and light, seem as though the halleluiahs would be a rightful norm not just some irrelevant afterthought to the constancy of suffering.

         I glance down the line of pilgrims, and there is Brother Crathius with the elder monks from his community. We are standing very near together here and I see him as leans forward also and takes notice of me, then pales with the shock of it. For a moment I wonder if it is my dress as that of a commoner in the midst of monks. But with all the halleluiah’s from the risen Christ I realize he had not anticipated my healing to go so well, and now he sees me as a physical face of resurrection. Maybe I am that as a physical sign like a dandelion seed I wander always into tangible life to be a metaphor for the spiritual forever.

         Shall I pass a message down the row to tell him of my strange circumstance, that I am simply a metaphor for the unseen nature of spiritual continuance? A physical resurrection is simply magnificent healing.  Doesn’t everyone know healing?  The spiritual truth for which I am a sign is the resurrection of the Christ, the universal Spirit and we all share in the Resurrection we celebrate today. Having no ink or parchment at this moment, and with such a long and complicated note I would have to make explaining it, I choose not to pass a note down the row to say in so many words as this whole story tells, that I am yet a living and healed man.

(Continues tomorrow)

Post #31.6, Thurs., April 14, 2022

Historical setting: 589 C.E. In the Vosges Mountains

         My thoughts seem always on Ana. Confessing the sinful distraction would give me another chance to say her name aloud. And by this time my tonsure is hidden in the curls of a layman and my thoughts of Ana are simply part of my gratitude. Thank you God for Ana. May the seeds of spirit floating free fill her garden. Now I’m thinking of Ana gathering dandelion leaves.

         Last I saw her she was bedazzled by the rich spring greens just appearing up from the earth planted only by God without any human farmer intervening. The bitters of springtime seasoned her porridge and gave us new strength to till a garden patch where none has ever been. And in this time of year even long established gardens have yet to grow, so anything stored over from another year’s gleanings are long gone. Without the wild plants this would be a hungry season.  Yet she found them and she was amazed. The more you pull them out, the more will grow. It’s the pattern of abundance.

         When the Brother Servant was sharing the meal at Ana’s house she mentioned her appreciation for dandelions just as we were eating them.  I called it abundance but Brother Servant called it grace. Grace is the pouring out of God’s wonderful gifts even when we don’t ask — unsolicited, unplanted by us, unpaid and free. The metaphors of nature speak to all of us who would take notice of so many things that grow wild and sweet with no farmer’s plan to make a harvest. Thank you God for these riches of this earth you have spread before us all, grasses for the beasts, and seeds and roots and bitter leaves for humankind.

         And this metaphor for grace holds another verse of God’s own poetry, to speak of resurrection.

         It was said “a flower which unlike other flowers that wither and fade as they die, mysteriously blooms again. As it dies, the dandelion blooms into a ‘beautiful white globe, like a full moon, luminous, airy and mystical… At the very moment of death, in a silky silent explosion, multitudes of white parachutes are released, each parachute carrying the sacred message: freedom is life.’ The dandelion, in its death sends itself into the world in freedom, spreads itself everywhere in ways no one has been able to control…” [Footnote]

[Footnote] This blogger’s personal note: my cousin, Rev. Dr. Carol Ann Munro shared this quote as a benediction at a memorial for another family member whose spirit we all knew continues, well-mingled in the creative froth of Universal Spirit. It was such a perfect metaphor of resurrection I asked her if I could offer it again here. She said it has a source: (Hays, Edward, Sundancer Foster of Peace books, 1982, and continuing.) Thank you Carol.

 (Continues, Tuesday, April 19)

Post #31.5, Weds., April 13, 2022

Historical setting: 589 C.E. In the Vosges Mountains

         I stand here among the pilgrims for the chanting of the psalms. I know that many who dedicate themselves to obedience in Christ assume grief and suffering are the virtues that make them holy. I’ve known some use suffering to nurture their own ability for empathy and for all human suffering, while others just seem to exacerbate their own personal pain as the ritual itself. Some of these suffering Christians seem stuck in the Lenten agonies, intent on some kind of unannounced race to out-do one another in suffering pain. Surely I am missing something here.

         Isaiah spoke of a “suffering servant.” [Is.52:13-53:12] Maybe it was a metaphor for the suffering of the nation of Israel. It was an unwinding of the Israelite history after the captivity by the Babylonians. Then Christians used the same verses to make Isaiah’s Suffering Servant seem a prophecy of Christ. [Romans 10:16; 15:21](Footnote)  And sure enough, Jesus suffered so that was the needed proof that one man was the holy savior of ancient prophecy.

         Whatever may be said through twists and contortions of holy relic in wood chips, somehow it’s become a notion that human pain can be a portal to a God who suffers. In these strange times the brutal showpiece of political execution has become a sacred symbol. How easily the message of the love of God, the whole of Jesus’ teachings, becomes no more than a decorative frill on the reliquary. So I wonder are Christians keeping the suffering and loosing the servant?

         Now here I am in my mystical belonging with my human friend Jesus, ‘the way and the truth and the life,’ as I knew him to be. And I am leftover, a physical sign for the spiritual gift of life forever. Self-sacrifice is something I could never attain, always buoyed back into health and life by the simple love and beauty of it all.

         Just now Brother Crathius hurries by with a long bench (oblivious to my presence here as a healed man). He’s discovered that the Rule of Columbanus has a nearly hidden detail that excuses the sick and elderly from standing long hours for the chanting of Psalms.  He can fulfill his assignment to care for the monks he was sent to look after by taking them a bench to sit down and ease their hurting feet and knees. No, maybe we aren’t missing the servant after all in the subtle gestures of caring for one another.

Footnote:  Brettler, Marc Zvi, and Levine, Amy-Jill “The Bible with and without Jesus,” How Jews and Christians read the same stories differently, (HarperCollins) 2020. Chapter 9.

(Continues tomorrow)

Post #31.4, Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Historical setting: 589 C.E. Annegray in the Vosges

The keeper of the birds told me there is a “Rule of Ana.”

         “It is forbidden to speak any notion that this ‘Ana’ you have called by name as anything but an angel.”

         “I understand. I know this rule was made for her safety. May I be respectful.”

         “It is forbidden even to think of her as a woman.”

         “Of course.”

         I have a thought just now. I try to make a new topic of it. I ask the monk if they raise the birds here.

          “Yes. We may have more hatchlings soon.”

         Apparently I am allowed to ask about the birds.

         “Are they hard to care for?”

         “They are very much like chickens.”

         “I see no roosters.”

         “Yes you do. You just don’t know which are hens and which are cocks, they look alike to someone who doesn’t know.”

         “Of course. Do they all carry messages?”

         “What are you thinking? Whatever does this matter to you?”

         “I’m only thinking of angels now, you know, the wings and all that.”

         Try as I might, I can’t stop thinking of this idea I have. What if Brother Servant could take Ana some birds of her own to raise, and make their home at her house?  Then, she can receive messages from us, and she will have several birds that always come back to her in the same way the birds now fly away from her to come back here. She will have a community of birds and when one is carried here, it can fly a message to her from us.

         The monk reads my silence. “No more thoughts about that holy angel; fill your mind with the sacrifices of Lent, nothing more.”

         When someone says “don’t think of…” I always think of it, even if I wasn’t already thinking of it.  I can’t intentionally, not think about something. Dear God, please check on your holy angel Ana just now, while I try to forget her.

         But even when someone says the name Father Columbanus, I think of birds, because his name means these families of pigeons and doves. And when I think of birds, I think of this idea and then I think of Ana.

         I’ll speak to Brother Servant about this when he returns.  Perhaps Ana could have some fledglings.

         The keeper of the birds reads my silence once again.

         “I told you, don’t even think of her.”

(Continues tomorrow)

Post #31.3, Thurs., April 7, 2022

Historical setting: 589 C.E. In the Vosges Mountains

         Annegray is a ruin of a fortress.  Like Ana’s house it has very sturdy stone walls. But here pieces of a makeshift roof are only in the places most needed. With skins hoisted over here and striped tenting or woven waxed cloth over there it has something of the feel of a desert market place but where I would expect to see camels and displays of merchandise there are just solemn processions monks.

         I see another bird fly over like the birds in the boxes delivered by the servant monk to Ana and I wonder if she is sending a message to us here. Now I’ve seen how messages move here more quickly than even a horse could travel from wilderness places up and down the hills and back to this monastery. Maybe someone at a distance is in need.

         No matter if we value solitude or treasure companionship we are always bound to one another by need. Sometimes it’s our own need, and sometimes it’s our care for another. So the solitary wilderness times when Jesus set this example of the Lenten fast he was attended by angels Mark tells us. [Mark 1:12] Father Columbanus goes to his solitude attended by the Brother Servant. Maybe that is because of his legendary discovery of a bear in his cave, or maybe it was an awareness of responsibility for his community of monks, whatever his reason, the father takes the Brother Servant to always maintain the connection between solitude and community.

         When the fetters of responsibility for others are of our own choosing the name of that goodness is love. Neighbors, partners, obligations, enemies, companions, it doesn’t matter our assigned relationship, when belonging is empowered with empathy both beauty and grief hold us in love’s arms.

         But now I’m thinking of Ana, and maybe I’m always thinking of Ana. Were I a monk it would be a distraction from prayer and probably a sin. Maybe I am required to stay away from her because it is a worry that others don’t know me and certainly don’t trust me. But I’ve made no vow to stay here and I’m thinking Ana is all alone and isolated by the fears of … of what? And yet I stay here. As a child she welcomed opportunities to be with people, but here she is with her companions limited to the creatures of the wilderness. She must feel a terrible emptiness. And now I too am here, not there.

(Continues Tuesday, April 12)