Driving west on Interstate 70 from Topeka, Kansas around ten in the morning, I plunged into that green swath of oceanic beauty called the Flint Hills. Named by explorer Zebulon Pike in 1806, the majestic sweep of bluestem prairie extends north to Nebraska and south all the way to Oklahoma.
Formed 250 million years ago when Kansas and Oklahoma were covered with shallow seas, the land is compared to the undulating roll of a great body of water. The shallow soil rests on seabed layers of flint, shale, and the fossilized remains of sea animals.
Reveling in the beauty, I was sailing down the road, when I came abruptly upon a sight that brought my heart to my throat and sent a chill down my spine. A huge shimmering whiteness moved off to the north along the road. Bigger than the side of a barn, it lifted and fell back to the ground. It seemed alive somehow, but no animal could be that large.
I slowed, curious and wary. The highway was deserted. Was this a UFO? Maybe I should look for an exit and turn back. I drove a bit further, then coasted onto the shoulder, and stopped about 100 yards away, watching that white thing waving.
It looked like huge wings. One wing spread up the side of a hill, the other lay nearer to the road in the valley. A few iridescent feathers lifted in the wind and reflected the blue sky like mirrors. The wings were rising and falling slightly in a convulsive shudder.
It’s hurt. It needs help. But it’s huge. Would I scare it? Would it attack me? And what is it?
I looked up and down the road. Still no traffic. I opened the car door and slid out. A sudden rush of wind whipped past and slammed the door shut. The air was cool and smelled of grass. The only sound was the soft swish of shuddering feathers. Standing by the side of the road between earth and heaven, I pressed my hands over my mouth and stepped forward. I had taken a few more steps when, suddenly, the thing, the bird hiccupped. It convulsed and heaved in a ragged sob.
I nearly jumped out of my skin, but I saw that it was crying. The beautiful bird had spread herself over the sea of grass to weep. Don’t ask me how, I just seemed to know the bird was a she.
I moved a little closer, wondering if I could be of comfort. May I help you? But before I could finish the thought, a river of grief and anguish engulfed me and I tumbled over and over, gasping for air, drowning in sorrow. A deafening roar of cries and sorrow filled my senses. Then a battering wind and hellish screams pulverized me into tiny pieces, flinging me into darkness. After that, nothing.
When I came back together as myself, I was there in the quiet August morning with the hills, the sky, the empty highway, and the still bird. She seemed calmer now. The shuddering had stopped.
Are you all right? I asked. Are you able to fly? And again, instantly, I was drawn out of myself in a sickening swoop over mountains. We dove into the depths of the sea, peered into the eye of a whale, and crawled with a crab on a shore. I saw the molecules of a heart valve, and plummeted into the shrunken belly of a child in Sudan. We whooshed through glittering palaces of power and stood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. She laid those wings over a pile of bodies in Pakistan and sat on the shoulder of a man holding an AK47 rifle. We splashed in a child’s swimming pool with a little girl in a pink and green striped bathing suit. She whispered to an artist bent over a painting, and coursed up the stem of a tomato vine in Fremont, Nebraska.
This time, reeling and breathless, I didn’t want to ask any more questions, or bear the answers. I gazed upon her wings spread over the prairie grass and the reflection of the blue sky, the puffy white clouds, and the tall grass waving. In the play of light and color I caught of glimpse of a woman peering back at me and realized with a start that the woman was myself.
Then she lifted one wing. She drew her head out from under it and turned her eyes on me. A bolt of love and compassion seared through me with the crackle and snap of flames rising from dry wood.
I sank down beside the bird. What do you want of me?
Tell them.
To stop.
Hurting me.
I cringed, shaking my head. I can’t. I am complicit. I have blood on my hands, too.
She waited for me. The wind ruffled her feathers. The puffy clouds moved across the sky. Somewhere a meadowlark called.
Okay. How?
Be brave.
Be brave, she told me.
Be brave.
_____________________________
Don’t grieve God. Don’t break his heart. His Holy Spirit, moving and breathing in you, is the most intimate part of your life, making you fit for himself. Don’t take such a gift for granted. Ephesians 4: 29 (The Message)
Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. Ephesians 4: 29-32 (NASV)
Prairie Lamentation was first posted on August 31, 2010.
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Posted in Christianity, contemplation, faith, Holy Spirit, Spiritual Practices, spirituality
Tagged Bravery, Compassion, Ephesians 4: 29-32, Flint Hills, Grieving, Holy Spirit, Kansas, Pentecost, suffering, Topeka
Driving west on Interstate 70 from Topeka, Kansas around ten in the morning, I plunged into that green swath of oceanic beauty called the Flint Hills. Named by explorer Zebulon Pike in 1806, the majestic sweep of bluestem prairie extends north to Nebraska and south all the way to Oklahoma.
Formed 250 million years ago when Kansas and Oklahoma were covered with shallow seas, the land is compared to the undulating roll of a great body of water. The shallow soil rests on seabed layers of flint, shale, and the fossilized remains of sea animals.
Reveling in the beauty, I was sailing down the road, when I came abruptly upon a sight that brought my heart to my throat and sent a chill down my spine. A huge shimmering whiteness moved off to the north along the road. Bigger than the side of a barn, it lifted and fell back to the ground. It seemed alive somehow, but no animal could be that large.
I slowed, curious and wary. The highway was deserted. Was this a UFO? Maybe I should look for an exit and turn back. I drove a bit further, then coasted onto the shoulder, and stopped about 100 yards away, watching that white thing waving.
It looked like huge wings. One wing spread up the side of a hill, the other lay nearer to the road in the valley. A few iridescent feathers lifted in the wind and reflected the blue sky like mirrors. The wings were rising and falling slightly in a convulsive shudder.
It’s hurt. It needs help. But it’s huge. Would I scare it? Would it attack me? And what is it?
I looked up and down the road. Still no traffic. I opened the car door and slid out. A sudden rush of wind whipped past and slammed the door shut. The air was cool and smelled of grass. The only sound was the soft swish of shuddering feathers. Standing by the side of the road between earth and heaven, I pressed my hands over my mouth and stepped forward. I had taken a few more steps when, suddenly, the thing, the bird hiccupped. It convulsed and heaved in a ragged sob.
I nearly jumped out of my skin, but I saw that it was crying. The beautiful bird had spread herself over the sea of grass to weep. Don’t ask me how, I just seemed to know the bird was a she.
I moved a little closer, wondering if I could be of comfort. May I help you? But before I could finish the thought, a river of grief and anguish engulfed me and I tumbled over and over, gasping for air, drowning in sorrow. A deafening roar of cries and sorrow filled my senses. Then a battering wind and hellish screams pulverized me into tiny pieces, flinging me into darkness. After that, nothing.
When I came back together as myself, I was there in the quiet August morning with the hills, the sky, the empty highway, and the still bird. She seemed calmer now. The shuddering had stopped.
Are you all right? I asked. Are you able to fly? And again, instantly, I was drawn out of myself in a sickening swoop over mountains. We dove into the depths of the sea, peered into the eye of a whale, and crawled with a crab on a shore. I saw the molecules of a heart valve, and plummeted into the shrunken belly of a child in Sudan. We whooshed through glittering palaces of power and stood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. She laid those wings over a pile of bodies in Pakistan and sat on the shoulder of a man holding an AK47 rifle. We splashed in a child’s swimming pool with a little girl in a pink and green striped bathing suit. She whispered to an artist bent over a painting, and coursed up the stem of a tomato vine in Fremont, Nebraska.
This time, reeling and breathless, I didn’t want to ask any more questions, or bear the answers. I gazed upon her wings spread over the prairie grass and the reflection of the blue sky, the puffy white clouds, and the tall grass waving. In the play of light and color I caught of glimpse of a woman peering back at me and realized with a start that the woman was myself.
Then she lifted one wing. She drew her head out from under it and turned her eyes on me. A bolt of love and compassion seared through me with the crackle and snap of flames rising from dry wood.
I sank down beside the bird. What do you want of me?
Tell them.
To stop.
Hurting me.
I cringed, shaking my head. I can’t. I am complicit. I have blood on my hands, too.
She waited for me. The wind ruffled her feathers. The puffy clouds moved across the sky. Somewhere a meadowlark called.
Okay. How?
Be brave.
Be brave, she told me.
Be brave.
_____________________________
Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. Ephesians 4: 29-32 (NASV)
Don’t grieve God. Don’t break his heart. His Holy Spirit, moving and breathing in you, is the most intimate part of your life, making you fit for himself. Don’t take such a gift for granted. Ephesians 4: 29 (The Message)
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Posted in Christianity, contemplation, faith, Holy Spirit, Spiritual Practices, spirituality
Tagged Bravery, Compassion, Ephesians 4: 29-32, Flint Hills, Grieving, Holy Spirit, Kansas, suffering, Topeka
A quick perusal of online comments, letters to the editor, talk shows, and news commentaries reveal that forbearance for the sins of others is in short supply. Politics and many businesses appear to have expunged mercy and generosity from their operations.
Theologian Miraslov Volf in his book, Free of Charge – Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, writes, “Mainly we’re set up to sell and buy, not to give and receive… To give is to lose.” We do not know how to receive our lives. We try to earn our worth, or demand it because we feel entitled to it. We see the other as either a potential rival or a target market. We are quick to blame, slow to forgive, and eager to sue. Getting and spending, beating and winning, we are oblivious to the ocean of care and delight in which we have been placed by the sheer goodness of God.
You guessed it. I have been watching television and reading newspapers too much. Our culture distracts us from the truth of the totally unearned, undeserved gift of our precious lives. In contrast to the world, faith teaches us that we are not here to achieve our own purposes, but rather to be instruments of God’s grace and peace.
Volf closes his book with a long series of questions:
So why do so many of us take the “sword” into our hands so readily? Why do we visit vengeance on our enemies, when we should, inspired by the cross, forgive?….Why have many of our Christian fathers and mothers throughout history, greedy and vengeful as they were, left so much suffering in their trail?… Why do we refuse the God-given bridge that would transport us from selfishness to self-giving, from vengeance to forgiveness? That’s a mystery that should make us tremble – tremble before the God who gives to the ungrateful and the God who forgives the ungodly.
These are huge questions, questions that need to be asked and considered. However I think the way out of the morass of human resistance to grace is probably not in looking at our tangled, twisted selves, but rather in lifting our eyes to the Transcendent Goodness in our midst. Gazing on love, mercy, and justice cleanses, refreshes, and re orders our priorities.
And here in Topeka, Kansas you may receive such a grace filled vision, actually free of charge. The Sunflower Music Festival is in town. For nine evenings you can listen to some of the world’s best musicians play Mozart, Beethoven, Ives, Gershwin, and others.
Little kids, youth, and the elderly, bussed in from care centers, will sit hushed in the packed concert hall each night. We watch the conductor lean over his orchestra, calling forth lilting melodies of heart breaking beauty and thundering power. We fall into the wonder of the pianist’s hands, the French horn’s smooth haunting call, and the sobbing sweep of violins.
We take part in the miracle of humans cooperating, denying themselves, as they lose their lives to create together something larger, finer, than any one of us could do alone. We surrender to the gift of grace among us that is manifested as we give and receive, bend and bow, rest, and watch the hand of the one who can weave out of our lives together on this earth something that thrills, frees, and heals.
The Miro Quartet
Where’s the grace? Why right in your own back yard. And here in Topeka at the Sunflower Festival, it won’t cost you a cent.
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