“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”
~Vincent Van Gogh

This past weekend I listened to an interview with Krista Tippett and author Kate DeCamillo. It was a charming and inspiring conversation between two people that seem to truly admire and appreciate one another. During the interview in response to a question, Kate DiCamillo said:“Life is chaos. Art is pattern.” These words pierced both my heart and my imagination. And they hit home to the world as I know it these days. Her statement also sent me to the dictionary to refresh my memory about the actual definition of chaos. “Complete disorder and confusion. Behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions.” And of course, there was also the definition that exists in the beginning of the sacred texts many of us hold dear…“the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.”

It seems that over the last two and half years chaos has been the food of the every day. Some days I find myself overwhelmed by it all. Am I alone in this? Yet in those feelings I have found myself drawn more and more to art. And not just art we might find in museums or on stages and between the pages of books though that has been particularly helpful in counteracting the experience of disorder and confusion. The every day arts of cooking a meal or arranging flowers in a vase have lifted me out of what seems the randomness of it all. Taking time to pay attention to how I wipe the kitchen counters or arrange books on a shelf also has done the trick. And in just a few weeks (please, God!) spring will be here and the art that is the garden will begin to take shape.

“Art is pattern.” I had really never thought about it in that way before. But the patterns of the buildings we know to be great gifts of architecture can bring a grounding to our world. Noticing how a chair we have housed for years is put together with form and purpose speaks to the patterns of bringing wood and design together. The coat we have worn all winter and are desperately tired of was fashioned from patterns of what fits on our needy, welcoming body. That favorite recipe takes random ingredients and through the process of weaving them together feeds us, even delights us. 

No matter your faith tradition the stories shared round fires and passed down from generation to generation all begin with some kind of disorder that moves through the acts of creativity to birth patterns that bring order, calm, purpose and even beauty. “The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface”…and then light was called forth and the patterns of Creation began to build.

So why did those six words spoken by the great teller of stories for children capture me so? Perhaps it was a challenge. A challenge to take what often feels like the chaos of thought and experience and find a pattern that will make something more of it, perhaps even art. If we take seriously these traditional stories that ground us in who we are as humans, it seems a central message is to create. So on these days that seem to want to hang on for dear life to the grayness of winter and in the face of those voices who want to stir up evermore chaos, there might be the challenge to begin to see, to create the patterns that can make artists of us all. 

It’s worth a try.

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning 
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows, of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light-
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start my day
in happiness, in kindness.

This beautiful poem by the beloved Mary Oliver, is a piercing reminder of the fullness of the nest in which we find ourselves. This thing called life holds the macro experience of being alive in the vastness of the whole universe…the Sun which opens to us every morning, the darkness that can threaten to overwhelm us. It also contains the micro…the faces of tulips, the surprise of opening morning glories. Each day we walk the balance beam of both the enormous and the minuscule.

At this time of year, I try to have tulips in my house at all times. They are one of the first signals that the season is turning and their color keeps on telling me to calm down, all shall be well. The truth is they were the first flowers my husband ever gave me and so have always held a special place in my heart. Right now there are orange and yellow ones in the living room and red ones in the kitchen. Their minute petals hold a whole world within if you have the time to look at them. A sunrise in the center of their unfolding.

Lately I have been thinking of this macro/micro world we inhabit. My ability to hold the pain and suffering across the world has limits. Watching as families flee the horrific devastation in Ukraine is too heart breaking for words. The anger and despair that accompanies those feelings could undo any ability to move in any ordinary day. And the privilege with which I say this, not being in their shoes, observing from such a distance is not lost on me.

And yet…and yet…I walk by those tulips and I am drawn to their beauty and their grounding. I try, if only for a few minutes, to stand with what they have to offer in one hand and my feelings for those so far away moving across uncertain paths in the other. Those two outstretched hands form a prayer that is filled with both gratitude and lament. To be human is to live in both worlds, macro and micro. We hold out our hands and our hearts to the beauty and the terror and pray that somehow our intention makes some measure of difference. 

As the poet says…’Good morning, good morning, good morning.Watch, now, how I start my day in happiness, in kindness.’ Here we are, all of us, held ‘in the great hands of light.’ Again. And again.

“You recall those times,I know you do, when the sun
lifted its weight over a small rise to warm your face,
when a parched day finally broke open, real rain
sluicing down the sidewalk, rattling city maples
and you so sure the end was here, life a house of cards
tipped over, falling, hope’s last breath extinguished
in a bitter wind. Oh, friend, search your memory again-
beauty and relief are still there, only sleeping.
~Molly Fisk

For those of us who make our home in the Christian household, the season of Lent paid another visit beginning last Wednesday. It is a season that is not always a welcome guest. Depending on the brand or branch of this tradition in which you were raised or find yourself, it can be forty days of deprivation, penance, furrowed brows, resignation, or all manner of soul dampening things. We so often forget that these days we have infused with often misplaced theology really gets its beginnings in the word ‘lecten’, an Old English word meaning ‘lenghten’ and referred to the season of spring. And when spring arrives, and the days lengthen, we experience that amazing gift of…light, more light. 

And aren’t we all hungering for that? Because the fact is this Lent could be shaping up to be the lentiest Lent. I don’t know if that is a word, in fact I am sure it is not, but it is the thought that keeps coming to me. I may have thought something similar last year when the isolation, deaths, and illnesses that surrounded us had no end in sight. While some of that reality is still with us, now we are confronted with a war that is evil and unjust and has most thinking people wondering what can possibility happen next. 

All this may just be why a season like Lent has continued and stood the test of all these years. Marking Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness and the temptations endured on the journey toward Easter are meant to help us mark our own forty days in our own lives. Our own hope of having the light lengthen into something brighter and more hopeful than where we are right now is important work and life-giving work. Spending some time with this notion of ‘lengthening light’ has had me watching for ways in which the sheer goodness of light emerges and is helping me see what this Lent may have to teach. 

Light comes in so many forms. There is, of course, the pinnacle of Light, the Sun. And there are those actual rays of light that have begun to melt some of the ice and snow that is stacked in our yards and have encrusted our spirit. And there is the light that bursts forth in our hearts when we hear good music or read a turn of phrase that seems filled with a light of knowing coming from another world. There is also the light that happens when friends family speak with laughter and understanding. There is even the light of silence that can hold us when the words of the evening news threatens to darken our tender, fragile souls. 

The poet says: “You recall those times,I know you do, when the sun lifted its weight over a small rise to warm your face, when a parched day finally broke open…Oh, friend, search your memory again-beauty and relief are still there, only sleeping.” In these days, these lentiest of days, life does seem “a house of cards tipped over, falling, hope’s last breath extinguished in a bitter wind.” 

But as those who have the ability to recall, may we find the courage to embrace the beauty and strength of the sunflower, the national flower of Ukraine, lifting our faces toward the light, standing tall in resistance and power. May we mirror the resilience we see on the faces of those who flee and have been forced to fight.  Lent…lecten…lengthen…light. May we awaken what is only sleeping and have the grace to find our way toward a brighter time.