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Slow me down to the dawdling of a child,
popping jewelweed pods in the lane.
Hold me back to catch the straggling western light,
the last low glint on her freckled cheek.
Hush me quiet to the black hen’s roosting,
the ruffle of chicks tucking in under wing.
Dream me small into moments of gravity,
the pure sight of the waking heart.
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Lindsey Gallant
S. D. G.
I need to go and sit beside a sweet pea seedling.
To touch its tendrils reaching for something to grab hold of, the ballast for the way ahead, the ladder to heaven. The biggest seedling has done it – reached for and wrapped itself around a chive stalk, curled its thin tendril in a custom knot around the chive. An anchor. A foothold. A touchpoint for security.
It’s working on its fifth set of leaves, all opposite pairs, two smooth-tipped ovals facing each other on a tiny branch, like palms open to the sun. One tendril growing out past them. Reaching.
Is it wrong for it to grow so? To desire the sun and the heights it can see above? Is it wrong to want to stretch beyond the soil, beyond the planter even, and out into the big, wild world?
The urge for growth is inherent in its nature. The moment the seed came to life beneath the soil—do not fear the darkness, little one!— its desire manifested in expansion. Roots spreading down, stem straining up, each stretching to source material.
The new plant must keep sprouting leaves, leaves that will catch the sun’s energy in a green web and turn it into sugar, food for more leaves, more growth, more height, till finally the plant will bear the weight of the glory it is unfurling toward – the flower.
Don’t stop now, sweet pea seedling. You know the way. Find it. Fight gravity. Grapple and grasp. Reach for those footholds. Make yourself lovely and large.
I’m waiting for the flower. The rush and flash of colour, the heady breath of nectar, the laugh-out-loud splendour of a humble sweet pea blossom that will catch a bee and empty its hidden cup till it is brushed with the holy yellow dust of another, and swell with fruit, and begin again the work of the sacred seed.
Whisper your joy to me, little green one. I am listening. Show me the way, your simple, sweet apocalypse.
I am reaching, too.
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~ Lindsey Gallant
Here’s something I believe with all my heart: God is a speaking God.
This morning a sparrow let me come near and look at it perched in the rushes. It didn’t move as I stepped closer, pushing the dewy grasses aside till I could see the sun glinting off its feathers. I stood in the mud of the little marsh and looked it in the eye. It held my gaze, never flinching, till its partner darted close and the two of them dove into the chokecherry bushes on the bank.
The exchange took less than a minute. But it filled me with a sense of beauty and connection. I had been seen. I been noticed.
It may sound odd to say, but God is in the sparrow’s eye. Not in some generalized filling of nature, blurring the lines between Creator and created, but particularly present and available to be noticed—to be acknowledged as the Giver behind all good things.
George MacDonald said it well:
For the real good of every gift is essential first, that the giver be in the gift—as God always is, for He is love—and next, that the receiver know and receive the giver in the gift. Every gift of God is but a harbinger of His greatest and only sufficing gift—that of Himself. No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things.
from George MacDonald: An Anthology by C. S. Lewis
The pause before a bird lifts.
The smell of wild roses on the morning breeze.
The kitchen window spider masterfully crafting its web.
Gifts of creation, yes. Gifts from the Creator—here is the deeper joy. Recognizing the Giver’s wink re-enchants the world for me.
Too often I feel disconnected from God and his mystery. But I’ve found that one of the first steps back to connection is to remember this truth: the whole world is made to vibrate with his voice.
The voice of God is not limited to the places and spaces we have deemed “spiritual,” cordoned off with scarlet ropes for Sundays or “reserved seating” for the professionally religious.
Here’s the beautiful freedom: there is no separation. God is giving, speaking, loving, noticing, and generally flinging grace on any random Tuesday morning. This morning I caught it. I saw it, behind the sparrow’s eye, and it drew me in, like spider silk. The Giver in the gift.
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~ Lindsey Gallant
This poem was inspired by my visit to the church and monastery at Orheiul Vechi in Moldova. I was captivated by the beauty of the place and the prayers left in the side of the cliffs. My talented young friend Andreea Onu painted the above picture in response to my words – thank you, Andreea.
The Caves at Orheiul Vechi
I saw your prayer
folded quick and pressed into the
cleft of rock, our last meeting place.
I spread the ink
in the sun to dry, but not before
your name smudged blue on my thumb.
Tell me why
you have such faith in limestone pores
and the raw edge of these monks’ murmurs.
I would have come
without your coin and spread my rainbow
flame over the whole greening valley
And told you
how indelible these syllables are,
my kiss in every furrowed crease.
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~ Lindsey Gallant
S. D. G.
Mary is the first to wake in the gloom of morning, to realize that this is the third day without him. First to creep to the tomb before even the birds awake, clutching her offering of spices. It is a garden and it is dark and though there are no flaming swords she feels the place is abandoned, perhaps even cursed. The smell of Eden that was beginning to be on his clothes, all gone. Now there must be myrrh and aloes to disguise the stink of death.
And — lo! — she is first to see the shock of a gaping hole where her beloved’s body was meant to be. All is bewilderment. What could this mean? Not even left with the scraps so carefully bound?
She runs to find the others because she cannot find him — she cannot find God.
The men come, running, sleep dust in their eyes, to see what she has seen, but they do not understand either. There is nothing to see here, and so they go back home. Back to bed? Back to a house aching with hopes pierced? Back to breakfast pots and pans all out of tune because the melody of life, the song they had just caught on to, had suddenly dropped out of the score?
But Mary stays.
Oh Mary, she stays. Perhaps she is exhausted from the morning run. Perhaps there is something within her that will not let go. Perhaps she has been wrestling with an angel all night, and that is why she is not surprised to see two of them when she finally screws up her courage to look into the empty tomb.
“Why are you weeping?” they ask.
“They have taken him. I don’t know where he is!”
And here we find our own voice with Mary’s.
We are weeping because of everything that has been taken from us — the husband who did not wake up, the hair that fell out after the second round of chemo, the home that was blasted apart by enemy shelling, the hopes that have withered into burdens too heavy to hold.
“I don’t know where he is!”
God, where are you?
Once upon a time, at the very beginning, God came looking for us in a garden. And we hid. We hid because we had seen ourselves naked and realized the problem was us. We had listened to lies and could not bear the fallout of living without trust in the Maker’s way. And our own thorny way has choked us ever since.
Our race keeps choosing not-trust, not-love, not-peace, and the whole weary world is sick, sick, sick, and what if we are the worst cancer of all?
Is this the bitter end of our march out of Eden? That in our desperation we finally come looking for God but he is nowhere to be found? Could it be the last nail was the last straw, and he has washed his hands of the whole wretched lot of us? Are we left alone in our suffering at last?
Our tears blind us.
But into this tanglewood of grief a man steps.
And the first, fresh word off his lips? — “Woman.”
She turns toward the voice.
“Why are you crying?” he says.
She is crying for Eve and all of us.
“Whom are you seeking?” His voice is gentle, earthy.
Here is a woman seeking, not hiding. But she sees only a gardener, and for the third time this exhausting morning tells her tale of woe.
First, to the disciples.
Second, to the angels.
Third, to the early rising gardener.
How long, oh Lord, how long? How many times must the story of our griefs be told?
And then, into her suffering, the rasping voicing of it all, comes the revelation.
“Mary.”
Her name on his lips.
And then the turn, the volta that shifts her whole horizon.
“Teacher!” His name on her lips. Jesus.
Here is the daybreak revelation — finally, we can see him when we hear our own name spoken by him.
The name Mary, deep-rooted in the word for bitter — suddenly her name in his mouth changes her whole identity and begins to change the world right then and there. It becomes sweet. It becomes reborn. It becomes resurrected.
This is worthy of a pause. For all Mary did not yet know or understand, and with the tears still wet on her cheeks, dissolving wrinkles of salt — Jesus speaks her name and the thorny garden of her anguish begins to transform. The birds begin to sing again.
For those who keep seeking, even in their suffering, this treasure is to be found —
For those who keep knocking their calloused knuckles on the sides of stone graves —
For those who keep asking, “Where are you, God?” —
These are the first to see the risen Jesus. To touch the life that begins to strip death of its power and sickness of its lordship and war of its tyranny, to make everything sad untrue. It is only a beginning, but it is enough. A man and a woman in a garden.
We are not alone. We are not abandoned. Here in the freshness of morning Jesus speaks our name, perhaps the only word that can reach deep enough into our sorrow and begin our own resurrection. A name that turns to music in the mouth of God.
Oh Mary, she hears and she sees. Her name. Her God. And all the world is singing, singing, singing…
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Read Mary’s story in John 20:1-18
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~ Lindsey Gallant