Tag Archives: blessing

On My Neighbor’s Sleeper Sofa

(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)

Commentary

In case you didn’t read between the lines, we had a house fire. Our excellent neighbor Don put me and my son up for the night while Susan slept at her friend’s house. Jonathan slept in a guest room and I slept on a sleeper sofa in my neighbor’s den. I say “slept.” There was very little sleeping that night for any of us. As I lay there, I could look through Don’s kitchen window at the roof of our house. The background photo is one I took as I lay there, feeling compelled by my muse to memorialize the occasion in verse.

“Days That Lie Ahead”
As I write this commentary, it has been one week since the house fire. I’m learning some new lessons and relearning old ones:
1. Don’t worry…
2. There are people who love in practical ways…
3. God was providing for us to pay insurance premiums all those years….

One highlight was the way St. Bart’s Anglican Church snapped into action. The Associate Pastor over Worship and Pastoral Care, Jen Crider found us a luxurious home to stay in for several days while the owners were on vacation. Friends and family extended offers of help, although I didn’t know how to take them up on their offers at first. A special new friend (he’s a fellow poet!) and his wife washed clothes for us. Others donated cash. We feel loved. We’re experiencing some anxiety and plenty of confusion about the process. But we’re confident this will all turn out for God’s glory and our growth as His children.

Below is a poem I wrote on the second night after the fire. By then, we were comfortably ensconced in the home Jen Crider found for us (the Darnells bravely welcomed us three humans and our three cats into their home while they finished out their vacation).

Entertaining Possibilities

(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)

Commentary

THE PLACE OF HOSPITALITY IN CONVERSATION

Terrible and terrific conversations are both so notable to me that my mind stores them with a seemingly unimportant fact: precisely WHERE those conversations took place.*

I was standing over there when the young lady shut down brainstorming by proclaiming, “That is impossible!”**

I was sitting at my desk when the young man ended all exploration with his boast, “I have studied computers, so I can confidently say you are wrong.”***

The old professor and I were both sitting in recliners in his den when he allowed, “I hadn’t thought about that interpretation of the poem we’re discussing; let’s see what additional support we can find for your idea….”

What is it about PLACE that attaches to the memory of hospitable—and inhospitable—conversations?

_________

*I previously explored this in discussing my poem, “Outcropping of Hospitality”: https://www.bhepp.us/2021/07/outcropping-of-hospitality/

** I was speculating about if and when translation software will be able to do contemporaneous translation of sign language.

*** I was pondering whether fax sending numbers are inherently identified to the fax receiver; my default position was “Surely they are.”

Moving Maundy

(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)

Commentary

When you’re not an Anglican, but serving them in the soundbooth, and the priest comes up and says, “Just let the slides go black; come down and let me wash your feet.” Maybe next time I’ll be less duty-bound, and accept. It would have been a blessing, all around.

#john13 #maundythursday #anglicans #stbarts #footwashing #soulcleansing

(background image by BennoOosterom on Pixabay)

Prayer For Artists

(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)

Commentary

Slowly, slowly it dawns on me what artists, musicians, and dancers have been doing all along. Some of them speak a language I never learned. But I start to catch their drift.

I’ll try to expand on that…. King David wrote that

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Psalm 19:1 (NIV)

When we witness something beautiful or magnificent, it points us to God. I’m not enough of a philosopher or theologian to defend that statement. It’s just something I sense or intuit, and increasingly so. Somehow, I am becoming more appreciative of beauty. It’s subtle: I watch someone dancing, or view a painting, and something deep inside me responds with joy. Even though I myself don’t speak the language of dance or of painting, I begin to recognize its words.

(background image by Jacques Gaimard on Pixabay)

Wistful Grace

Commentary

A few years ago, when I went full-time with my web business and suddenly had plenty of time on my hands, I began taking walks around White Rock Lake. Sometimes it was from a parking lot (a 9 miles hike) and sometimes from home (a 12 miles hike). That was the beginning of one of the best periods in my life. Here’s why….

Paying Attention
On those long hikes, one of the things I did was pay close attention to how I was responding to people I encountered along the way: “The site of that elderly lady elicited warm feelings. Why? When I saw that young man, I felt disgust. Why? Why am I so ready to love some people, but not others?” Even after years of paying attention to my responses, it’s often still a mystery. But at least I’m a little more attuned to my emotional state now than I was before.

So I Asked Myself….
Yesterday, I walked by the bench in the background photo. Thanks to the habit of paying attention to my emotional state, I knew there was something I feel every time I pass by a person sitting on that bench. Could I put that feeling in words? Here’s what I initially wrote:

Often, when I’m walking at White Rock Lake and find someone sitting on this bench, I wish to sit with them, to share their experience. People taking in the beauty of a place like this are close to God, whether they realize it or not. But usually I just smile and walk on by.

Is it So?
What I want to do (sit with them) is something I can report with more confidence than why I want to do so. In the prose explanation and subsequent poem, I connect my desire to a sense that God is somehow involved in the experience. That’s still just a theory of what’s going on in my head and heart. This theory may get support from a book I started into last night: “The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community,” by Curt Thompson.

Why Wistful?
It makes me sad that I either cannot or do not always act on my good impulses. To sit and talk with a stranger? There’s nothing wrong with that impulse. But something usually stops me. What?

RELATED POST: “The Man From Valladolid” (based on meeting a fellow just yards from this bench).