Nature all around me

Saturday, September 16, 2023

Memorial of Saints Cornelius, Pope, and Cyprian, Bishop, Martyrs

Nature all around me

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Last night at Randall’s Grocery a grasshopper flew , that buzzing little creature,  and landed with a swoop right on the side of my car. I said hello, went inside, and when I came out he was gone. Of course. He had promises to keep. Grasshopper promises, but promises nonetheless.

Here’s a little poem about a fly. I don’t know why. It was not written by a fly, but a man who was a very good observer, in no hurry, watching this particular fly and then putting down a few words.

               The fly

As I sat for morning prayers a fly lay still

upon the windowsill, a little buddha,

hands folded reverently on his chest,

 

not careening frantically in mindless loops

like the executive chasing his millions,

or the TV buzzing in our heads,

 

not swatted and dodging, the constant refugee,

living off the crumbs from the master’s table,

like the tattered man under the bridge—

 

no, completely, in his death, himself,

and cleansed of all success or failure,

unjudged, and uninterpreted, and still.

 

In our piety we may receive him as an icon

or dispose of him, without his least concern.

How lightly he rests, his labors ended,

 

beckoning us to the perfect place where

he has always lived, where no one asks,

“Who do you think you are?

This man is Steve Garnaas-Holmes, the poet. It sounds like he practices respect for the smallest creatures. At least sometimes, he notices them.

Another poet, feeling his age, writes about himself, gradually leaving “his” world and being absorbed into the world God settled him into in the first place. At last, like the fly, his consciousness of himself has dwindled and dipped, dwindled and dipped, until …

There will come a time when people will no longer say

“Those words from your mouth, let me write them down.”

A time when I will sit thoughtless, alone, I might be drooling and neglected,

It lies in my future.

There will come a time when I will have forgotten all my glory days and conquests,

a time when I am stripped of all those experiences

that I mistakenly thought defined me and measured my worth.

There will come a time when I become so vulnerable and pure of self

that I will be able to be fully received into God.

And then Jesus speaks without artifice about what he sees and hears, and what we see and hear. Jesus wants us to build houses on rock, and says so. But before this he tells his disciples:

A good tree does not bear rotten fruit,

nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit.

For every tree is known by its own fruit.

For people do not pick figs from thornbushes,

nor do they gather grapes from brambles.

A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good,

but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil;

for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.

For heaven’s sake, choose to be a small and lonely grape, clutching to the vine.

 

 

Why do you call me “Lord, Lord” but not do what I command?

Build your house upon the Rock.

 (1 Timothy 1, Psalm 113, John 14, Luke 6)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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