“Made from earth I am
and in love with the ground,
but this urging persists,
an aching where you etched
onto tendons muscles bone nerve
a longing for leaping
a yearning to soar.”
~ Jan L. Richardson
This afternoon has been spent rifling through books looking for poetry and readings for several upcoming worship services. Anyone walking by my office must have been reminded of Bob Cratchitt bent over his desk, focused on the stacks of coins he counted for Ebeneezer Scrooge. Instead of coins, I was surrounded by books tipped open and laying askew. I think my hair may have even been a little wild where I had run my hands through it in a desperate search for the perfect expression of an Advent Sunday or Christmas Eve or Day, which happens to fall on a Sunday this year. It will be a busy 24 hours!
I was looking for phrases that expressed ‘dreaming’ to illuminate our church theme of “We Are Those Who Dream”. In my page flipping, my eyes fell on the poem above. While it did not really fit the theme, it caught my attention and I read it aloud to no one in particular but myself. It seemed to suit my mood, my frame of mind.
It snowed overnight, you see, and that always stirs something of the creative spirit within me. I know that to many people this seems odd. Creativity is for warm weather, for lazy summer days when you can loll about allowing fresh ideas to spring up like blooming flowers popping up all around. Creativity is for September, when that school-gene gets resurrected, as the possibilities of a new year of learning are underway. Creativity is not for cold, dark, snowy days when morning comes too late and evening too soon.
But the creative spirit almost always creeps into my life in the first days of cold and snow. For me, there is something about rising early and seeing the palette of deep, blue sky punctuated with tiny, glittering stars. Yesterday, as I fetched the morning newspaper from the stoop, I stood outside in my pajamas staring up at the morning’s arrival. A plane moved quickly across the middle distance, its light competing with the stationary, shining stars. A satellite moved slowly in a meditative pattern between the silver-light of distant stars. I breathed in the cold air, allowing my lungs to fill with its freshness, and exhaled my visible presence back into the day, signing on for being alive yet again.
Perhaps it is this kind of recognition that overcomes me and keeps me ‘in love with the ground’, that makes me incredibly thankful for being made of earth. Perhaps it is this loving that also nudges at the urging, the aching to leap with the joy of the gift of life and a yearning to make the most of this blessed miracle of walking in the world. Perhaps it is this Advent season that keeps me always on watch for how the Holy is filling the empty spaces or the overstuffed moments of my day. That habit God has of taking something plain and ordinary and filling it with More.
Whatever it is, I am grateful for it. For this persistent Creator that breathed me into being and holds me with a love that will not let me go. Not in summer. Not in spring or autumn. And certainly not in the early days of winter when the cold calls like a siren from the lakes that are icing over all around.
And what about you? What is yearning to soar within you these Advent days? How is the One who is ‘etched onto your tendon muscle bone nerve’ moving in your life?
May blessings abound from darkness of morning till darkness of night.