The Wood Stove (Need Draws Us)

Our need for warmth draws us and keeps us together, sprawled where the seating is too limited for six, the noise levels too much.  The dog, also, is there, taking up more than her fair share of the love seat.

In the corner, the wood stove ticks as the cast iron absorbs a slowly growing fire’s flames.  On the coldest mornings, the twins stand directly in front of the stove, blocking its window’s orange glow.  The older children stand within a foot, one on either side, squeezed between the wall and stove.  The smell of drying laundry fills the room as their clothes absorb the pulsing heat.  They stand until their pants are so hot they can barely walk and sitting down, forcing the hot cloth against chilled skin, ceases to be an option.

This is how we start and end each of winter’s darkening days, as the sun slips its way to and from arctic nights.  During the day, our circumference expands.  With time, heat grows, and the kitchen, the laundry, the sun-warmed front room, all become habitable and we spread, easing into the furthest reaches. 

But, when the sun sinks, we return.  Our need for heat draws us into the heart of the house, into the space of one another, into the stove’s orbit again where we hover until need is met.

These winter days, I find myself grateful for the warmth and the need that gathers us around our own glowing sun.  Need is also a gift and, often, the clearest path to communion with others and with God, who draws us also; God, like a great pulsing heart, a glowing sun, a wood burning stove, drawing us all close and closer yet.       

    

To See the Naked Trees (Advent Week 1)

Photo Credit

(Each week in December I hope to write at least one post reflecting on the lectionary texts from the Sunday before.  This week's readings include Jeremiah 33:14-16 and Luke 21:25-36.)

We flew along back roads surrounded by fields and forests on a gray day in late fall. 

“The trees are naked!” cried a little voice from the back of the van. 

“Yes,” I said, “they are.”

Naked is a big and delight-filled word for a four-year-old boy. 

To notice and accurately apply that word, I imagine, gave him nearly as much pleasure as running around naked does.

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This week’s advent texts, in both Jeremiah and Luke, carry images of trees - a righteous branch, a fig tree in spring.  Scholars note how the bible itself begins and ends in a garden with trees.  In this week's readings Jeremiah and later Jesus use trees to tell their own separate but similar stories of waiting and noticing, of promises and their fulfillment.

Advent – the four weeks leading up to Christmas – marks the beginning of the church calendar and I can’t help but notice again that we begin, not with action, but with waiting.  Active waiting accompanied by a good many urgent appeals for us to Pay Attention! and Stay Awake! 

So frequent are the biblical reminders for us to “pay attention,” you would think the human condition is just one big post-Thanksgiving-meal fog.  It’s as though the bible recognizes our tendency to hit the snooze button, to slumber while driving along familiar roads. 

It may seem simple, but it takes a certain kind of attention to notice the state of the world around us, something like the ability of a four-year-old to see and name the nakedness of the trees. 

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This week I hope to decorate an evergreen in our yard – a perfectly plump fir we affectionately refer to as “the Christmas tree.”  Last year we could neither afford nor did we have the energy to hang lights outside, but this year we’ve taken the plunge and crumpled icicle lights hang already around the front porch roof and the roof of the well house. 

Soon the kids will climb the Christmas tree with lights in tow and we’ll call out directions from the ground.  It will probably involve some yelling and end in a big tangled mess, but the tree, dressed in its winter greens, will have lights.  I don’t know whether the other trees in the yard – the naked ones – will look on with envy or relief. 

Later this month we’ll cut an overpriced evergreen and drag it into the house where it will become a hiding place for the kids and jungle-gym for the cats.  We’ll string it too with lights and tempers will probably flare between my husband and I and the kids who swarm in excited anticipation as the memory-making debacle unfolds.  

It’s tempting to think of all of those trees and lights as just another distraction.  Sometimes they are.  But I look forward to plugging them in at the end of the day, to watching the kids run off the bus in the early evening dusk toward a house wrapped round with light. 

We may not all have the attentiveness required to notice the “naked trees,” but surely we can learn to notice light.  

May the many lights of Christmas and the trees that bear them remind us of our tendency to snooze.  May they help us Stay Awake as we wait for the coming of the Light.   

  

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Welcome to the #SmallWonder link-up.

What if we chose to deliberately look for the small moments of wonder, the small sparks of presence, of delight or sorrow, of true humanity in which we meet God? 

That's my proposal - that we gather here each week to share one moment of Wonder from each of our days.  

You're invited to link-up a brief post about a small moment of wonder.  Don't worry if your post is too long, too short, or not just right - you're welcome to come as you are.  

While you're here, please do take a look around and encourage at least one other blogger with a comment.  

A Prayer for Wonder

We stayed out later than normal and as I carried forty pounds of three year old through the cold, dark night toward the waiting van, he happened to look up. 

“The moon is so little!” he cried. 

I tipped my chin toward heaven and saw stars winking their diamond light, but no moon in sight.

“Does the moon get that little every night?” he marveled.

“No, Levi,” I said, “those are stars.”

He’s seen the moon large, flat and silver hanging low and shining through his bedroom window at night, but you have to be outside to see the stars.  I tried to imagine what it must seem like to him, as though a giant hammer shattered the moon and sent it flying across a canvas of black, a million shimmering slivers of light. 

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“Go outside and look at the stars,” God told Abraham.  “Try to count them if you can.”

“Where is the king?” the wise men asked, “We have seen his star and have come to worship him.”

“You will shine like stars,” Paul tells the people of Phillipi. 

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How often do I fail to look up, to set my eyes toward the wonder of all that shines in heaven and on earth?

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Last winter we stood in a freezing field of evergreens as darkness descended, determined to cut our own tree despite the inconvenience.  Mittened and booted, the kids and I huddled around the van while my husband worked the hand saw back and forth against the still living tree. 

Standing in the field, out far beyond his bedtime, my one son was overwhelmed by the dark.  Tucking his mittened hand into my own he turned his chubby face up and it shone, round and full like the moon.   “Santa up there,” he said in a voice filled with a mixture of utter certainty and awe. 

I was surprised, we don’t really do much with Santa at our house and although he missed the mark theologically, in that wide darkness my little boy knew something holy and wonderful was afoot.  His very being embodied wonder as he gazed upward.  In that moment he was not so different from the wise men who couldn’t fully grasp the meaning of the star, but knew wonder, knew light, when they saw it.    

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Tied to the roof of the van, the tree followed us home to a dark little apartment where we strung it with lights, bringing a faint echo of the glimmering starlight inside with us for a season.  Those lights hung between needles of green lit the room gently in the evenings - quieting us, calling our hearts, our minds, to wonder, as though God might whisper in the darkness, “Look at the lights, try to count them if you can.”

//

Where are you looking these days?  

The world we live in holds enough darkness to overwhelm us all, darkness both deep and wide.  The good news of John’s gospel, though, begins with a simple affirmation - “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” 

There is a Light that shines among us and we are called not to deny the darkness, but to look for the Light in the very midst of it.

God of heaven and earth, teach us to look up, 
to look out beyond our small selves, our small ideas.   

Cultivate in us the eyes of a child – 
eyes of wonder, awe and belief.  

Let us stand unafraid in the dark, our faces lifted in wonder, 
seeking the light that’s both already and yet to come.   

Then we, with faces round and full like the moon, 
will shine like stars, like light scattered far and wide against the night.