In her book The Artist’s Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom, author Christine Valters Painter invites her readers to the traditional monastic practice of praying the hours and offers the suggestion of writing personal liturgies for these prayer times in haiku form. I felt inspired by her prompt and created short pieces for each of the prayer times. Then I put the handwritten pages in a drawer and forgot about them for several years.
Last week, I was cleaning out some items and came across these prayers. I was unexpectedly moved. Obviously these poems meant something to me when I wrote them, but they have retained–and even strengthened–their significance. So I felt inspired to pull them out, edit them, share them, and find a way to incorporate them into my own daily liturgy. The last item on that list is still in progress, but I’m starting by sharing them now. Perhaps you, too, want to compose some haiku liturgies of the hours to accompany you into the new year.
Vigils
(middle of the night)
Three a.m. again:
Night unfolded and soft,
Dream time, untethered.
All this open time,
Cradled in the Spirit’s hands,
Needs no other bounds.
Lauds
(dawn)
Praise for the first sound
that tells me I’ve awakened.
Praise for the new breath.
Praise for the dawn light,
whatever its quality.
Praise the resting dark.
Terce
(mid-morning)
Weary already
And dappled, too, with delight.
Joy comes with the morning
and must be received.
I place my hand on my heart.
Here I make a home.
Sext
(noon)
Productivity
can never equal my worth.
Slow down and savor.
I move my body
to the dance of God’s great love
that draws me onward.
None
(mid-afternoon)
Heavy the eyelids—
Grace doesn’t need my focus
to lighten my sight
No matter the length
of shadows or things undone,
Grace refills the cup
Vespers
(dusk)
Everything can slow:
the heartbeat, the pace of talk
the ring of laughter.
Gather it all in
and let it settle in peace:
Like dew on dry ground.
Compline
(bedtime)
Where was love present—
especially, tangibly—
in this time and place?
What do I long for—
especially, tangibly—
in this time and place?
Three years since my congregation (and many like it) has held in-person services during Holy Week.
I remember Lent of 2020. I remember people saying things like it was the Lentiest Lent they had ever Lented. And then, it just kept Lenting, kept moving through a season of deprivation and confusion and struggle. Winter came around again, and I never felt properly Eastered or summered or called again into life. We just slogged through.
Last spring, I half-joked that I had given up work for Lent: after several months of illness, I was on a medical leave of absence from my job, and my time off overlapped with Lent. I spent the weeks resting and seeking healing and clarity, and this, too, was a deep observation of Lent.
Easter was still an online celebration that year. Earlier this week I watched a video made by my congregation for last year’s Easter Sunday. Households and members had filmed themselves dancing to one of our Easter songs, and these separate videos were compiled into one, complete music video. It was done well, but watching it left me feeling profoundly sad. We were all so disconnected then – and had been for such a long time. I myself had felt unready to return to my job and the overwhelming stress that was making me ill. When Easter arrived that year, the celebration was muted.
The pandemic isn’t gone, of course, but this year is different. My community is highly vaccinated and knows how to mitigate risk. We’ve been gathering to worship in person for months. We marked Ash Wednesday and each Lenten Sunday together in the meeting house. We practiced our Good Friday music and Easter songs this week, singing them together for the first time in three long years.
My own life is as changed as our corporate one. I’ve started a new job working with local, organic food, and I’ve been writing (joyfully) all the time. My wellness has increased. My stress is manageable. Last year feels as faint as last night’s bizarre dreams.
And Lent – it hasn’t felt very Lenty to me at all.
I’ve felt more Advent-y, honestly. Waiting and wondering and living with anticipation.
I was feeling down about this as Holy Week began, disappointed that my inner life had not lined up with the church calendar, that I had not been able to engage the practice of Lent as deeply as I would have liked. Easter was hurtling close impossibly fast. I thought of the game of hide-and-seek I’d played recently with a three-year-old friend: ready or not, here I come! Holy Week had arrived, and I didn’t feel the least bit ready.
But then I remembered Lent in 2020, Lent in 2021, the long fasting from normalcy that stretched between those Lents, the wrestling with global and personal crisis that had wrung me out. I’d been Lenting, I realized, for a very long time.
We do not observe Lent and celebrate Easter in order to feel particular things at particular times. After all, we celebrated Easter the past two years in the midst of grief and challenge; those feelings didn’t stop it from being Easter. My Advent-like feelings of anticipation haven’t stopped the past six weeks from being Lent. These cycles of observance are not in place to manipulate or dictate our experiences but rather to affirm them, to demonstrate how God and God’s story of love is present in every kind of season. We practice Lent, practice Easter, practice Advent, moving through these parts of the story again and again until they become second nature. We wander Lenten wilderness – God is there. We wait in the pregnant dark of Advent – God is there. We wonder at the cacophonous mystery of Pentecost, soak in the quiet gratitude of Epiphany, mark the days of Ordinary Time – God is there. As we cycle through the story again and again, we learn to trust that birth attends preparation, revelation grows from seeking, and resurrection is not far from loss, because this is who God has promised to be. God’s generative presence does not rely on a careful liturgical performance or a specific alignment of our emotions. Easter comes – ready or not – because the God of life cannot be contained.
Maybe this has been yet another overwhelming Lent for you. There are plenty of reasons for it to be, plenty of suffering and despair, plenty of desert journeys and weapons of empire and sealed-up tombs. Or maybe Lent barely registered, a blip on the map of your year, and Easter seems impossible to contemplate. Whether Lent feels never-ending or far away, Holy Week comes. And we move through the rhythms of fierce and liberating love offered to us in every place, every time, every season we inhabit. Jesus says, “Here I come,” and we are found.
The tornado siren rang out just as I was about to turn off my light and go to sleep. My housemates were already in bed, but we made the bleary-eyed journey to the basement to wait out the storm. The lightening cracked ominously close; the rain pounded. I thought of my fears of tornadoes as a child and how I sometimes had dreams of portentous green clouds.
This morning, feeling the interrupted sleep in my bones, I remembered this simple prayer I’d written several years ago. When we feel fear, no matter our age, seeking calm for our nervous system can bring us back into a state of equilibrium–and, ultimately, to sleep.
Prayer before bed or over a nightmare
If said with a child, have the child repeat each line.
I’ve been trying to find words for over a week now. But sometimes injustice requires imperfect words. There is great harm being done in Palestine, and we perpetuate the harm when we are silent.
There are those who have written expertly on the violence in Israel and Palestine. You can find some of those writings and videos here: a Christian perspective, an introduction from the group Jewish Voice for Peace, and an editorial overview by a Doctor’s Without Border’s member.
(There’s also this video via John Green that gives a historical explanation. I don’t necessarily agree with all his conclusions [and I don’t know why all the people profiles are so visually odd looking], but it was a helpful overview for me.)
I am not an expert. I do not have personal connections to the area. But I do have a profound connection to the situation (perhaps you do, too) because I am a member of a colonial/settler people group. And that means my engagement with the current issue of occupied Palestine must also include a willingness to confront my violent ancestral history.
Some of my ancestors were recent settlers, coming over to the United States to claim the promises of cheap land and new beginnings. But a solid majority of my ancestors were colonizers, arriving four-hundred years ago in what was occupied, conquered, and stolen territory and carving their new lives out of the land and livelihoods of the indigenous people. This is a hard history to face.
Humans have been moving around the planet since we could walk, but migration and colonialism are not the same thing. A colonial project requires an exploitive empire, an assumption of superiority, and a justification for consistent violation of indigenous peoples’ rights (if the indigenous people are acknowledged at all). The place I live has been marked by this oppression and violence, and I live with that inheritance. This is a hard history to claim.
Growing up, I felt such a deep connection to the land I lived on. I felt held by the hills and trees and my time was marked by the way the seasons shifted around me. I experienced a deep sense of belonging, of knowing and being known. The first cracks in this image came with the realization that the fragrant white honeysuckle I was accustomed to enjoying along the edges of a May-blossoming treeline were actually an invasive species. These white honeysuckle had crowded out the native and now hard-to-find pink and red honeysuckle. My sense of feeling at home began to slip. And then other truths about the land emerged: chicory isn’t native, clover isn’t native, I’ve never seen the once-ubiquitous sweetgrass in the wild. I realized that my ancestors came not only as impoverished people fleeing to something new, but they also came as conquerors, inflicting the oppression they had received on the natives they refused to recognize as equals. I had to face my own invasive-ness as well as the realization that I wasn’t sure I knew my native land at all. This is a hard past to internalize.
I suspect that one reason we American are often silent on oppression in Palestine is because we see the resonances with our own history. Truly seeing is painful. It dredges up feelings of confusion and guilt. It requires an admission of wrong. But if I am willing to stay with my own colonial narrative long enough, a new possibility emerges.
I can’t change the past. I can’t undo every action my ancestors took to trick, coerce, and kill the people already present on this land. I can’t retract the harmful British colonial policies that created the current situation in Israel and Palestine. But I can choose to encounter the past with integrity. I have the power to own my place in a lineage of destruction that I did not create but still benefit from. I am free to name the recurrent themes of settler colonialism around the world – and still present in my own country – and to amplify the voices of those seeking liberation. And, with enough work, I can choose to transform the trauma my people endured and then inflicted into solidarity with the oppressed.
This inner liberation must go hand-in-hand with the outer work of seeking justice and peace in places like Palestine. If we choose to look together into the harmful narratives we have inherited, we can take the first steps to writing a new story of freedom.
I don’t remember why, but I was reading the story of Samuel and his mother Hannah in the book of 1st Samuel, and I was struck by a phrase that recurred several times: “the word of the Lord was rare in those days.” So I decided to write some song lyrics inspired by my meditation on the story.
1.
The word of God was quiet then,
and visions weren’t so widely known.
Prayers were made by violent men,
who claimed the Holy as their own,
When Hannah came to Shiloh’s heights
and fell upon its sacred ground.
She poured her offering of tears,
mouthing words without a sound.
“Don’t forget me, Holy One,
don’t ignore my desperate cry.
If we can’t hear you, are you listening?
Do you hear each anguished ‘why’?”
2.
The word of God was quiet then,
and visions weren’t so widely known,
so Hannah left and looked for hope
all along the journey home.
An answer swelled within her womb,
a promise grew into her son.
When he was weaned, she brought him back
in thanks for all the Lord had done.
“I remember, Holy One,
how you listened to my cry.”
Hannah turned her prayer to song
and lifted praise to Adonai:
3.
(The word of God was quiet then,
and visions weren’t so widely known.)
“My heart rejoices in the Lord.”
She sang, “My strength’s in God alone.”
“The mighty warrior’s bow has snapped;
the stumbling ones are clothed in pow’r.
The barren woman rocks her child;
the hungry feast on manna shower.
“You remember, Holy One,
and you listen to our cry.
Before I questioned, you were listening,
Before I asked, you gave reply.”
4.
The word of God was quiet then,
and visions weren’t so widely known,
but Hannah sang with joyful faith
and nurtured seeds of hope she’d sown.
Did her son, the prophet Samuel,
learn from her what listening means?
Were the words of God so silent?
Whose holy visions were unseen?
We remember, Holy One:
We must learn to hear your cry,
not in those who grasp at power,
but in the outcast asking why.
While it was still dark
we grabbed our cups of warm beverages
and set off down the nearly-empty street,
the watchful eye of the half-moon
looking out from the sky growing bluer every moment.
Everyone on the beach is a silhouette,
recognition made harder by the masks we wear.
But somehow we know each other by the choice to be present
here
in the cold dawn on the colder sand.
The singing starts.
It’s more muffled this year,
but not even thirteen months of pandemic
will silence us altogether.
We watch the horizon
where a band of cloud
meets the placid water,
and I wonder
what we’ll actually be able to see this year.
We sing the sky to brightness,
and the first streaks of color break through:
jagged lines,
like stretch marks
where the whole world has been waiting to give birth
to this particular morning
in this particular place
with these particular people shouting
“Alleluia!”
And indeed the sun does crown the cloudy horizon.
And a child marvels at just how big it is.
And the lake reflects the glowing red
into a path of light,
a pillar of fire guiding the way
into liberation.
Death has lost its sting,
and God has arisen
in the swimming muskrat
and the calling seagulls
and the little boys gleefully kicking sand
as the round stone of the sun rolls higher into the sky,
as the pillar of fire grows too bright to look at
and sinks slowly into the water
where it becomes the promised land.
I wrote this hymn during the season of Advent this past year because I longed for new lyrics to the familiar carol “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” But this song also is appropriate for March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, the day we celebrate the angel’s visit to Mary and Mary’s perplexed but wholehearted ‘yes.’ I was inspired both by Mary’s own song and by St. Basil’s ancient words: “Annunciations are frequent; incarnations are rare.” What seeks to be made alive in you today?
The angel came to Mary with the message, “Do not fear!
You are the highly favored one, and God is with you here,
For you will bear the Son of God and bring God’s kingdom near!”
O, tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy! O, tidings of comfort and joy!
When Mary heard the angel’s words, she asked, “How can this be?”
The angel opened up to her the sacred mystery,
And even then her longing grew for all to be set free.
O, tidings of wonder and joy, wonder and joy! O, tidings of wonder and joy!
And Mary told the angel, “Here I am to serve the Lord.
I will receive God’s promises according to your word.”
And she prepared her heart to hold the Spirit then out-poured.
O, tidings of mercy and joy, mercy and joy! O, tidings of mercy and joy!
Then Mary raised her voice to God in hopeful, thankful song:
“God has begun the turning we have waited for so long:
Redemption comes to lift the weak and to reshape the strong!
O, tidings of justice and joy, justice and joy! O, tidings of justice and joy!”
The angel comes to each of us, invites us all to bear
God’s love made flesh within our lives. So let your hearts prepare!
Will Mary’s yes take root in us and grow until we share
God’s tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy? God’s tidings of comfort and joy!
I did some very serious pillow punching this morning, hoping that my daily ritual of anger expression would somehow cleanse me of my tangle of emotions.
It did not.
Anger is everywhere I look: in the images of the crowds storming the US capitol, in the Facebook post reactions, in my own frozen, frightened body. And though I want to understand its power as a tool, so often anger paralyzes me. Whether your anger feels like a controlling force or a numbing drug, it can be utterly overwhelming.
I’ve been told that anger is a gift – a propelling fire of righteous anger can fuel our movement toward justice. So I began wondering: how do I transform my anger into action? How do I let my fear and my indignation move through me and prepare me for the loving work that comes next in dismantling white supremacy?
Last night, as I considered the stress of this moment in our nation and of the whole past year in general, I shared with my sister something I’d learned about zebras in the wild. After a zebra has survived a predator’s attempt to chase, kill, and eat her, there is a mighty amount of residual adrenaline coursing through her body. So the zebra shakes – shakes and shakes and shakes every muscle until the trauma of the recent encounter has been digested by each cell. The zebra doesn’t shake off the stress – she shakes through it.
This afternoon, after a Zoom call with colleagues and students at the school where I work in which we processed yesterday’s events together, I went into my room and created this ritual space for myself:
I closed the door. I looked to my window. And I began to shake my whole body.
I shook my arms, my head, my legs – I tried to get every muscle involved.
As I did so, I opened myself up to the fear and the anger I’d been trying to hold inside, and I let it shake around in the pit of my stomach. I named that fear and that anger to myself again and again. It almost felt like too much.
Eventually, I was spent, out of breath. I sat down in my chair, breathing hard, still letting myself experience the fullness of my emotions.
Once I caught my breath, I began to repeat an affirmation to myself. “I am not alone,” is what came to mind. I repeated the phrase with each deep breath in and out.
As my breathing began to slow, I imagined threads connecting me to each person around me, to the earth beneath my feet, to my loved ones far away. The imagined shape began to resemble the mycelium networks that burrow through every inch of forest soil, connecting tree to tree. I let that image feel as real as possible. I considered if this is what the Holy Spirit is like.
I wondered if there is an affirmation for us, together, not just for me. “We are grounded,” I said to myself, considering this web I held in my mind’s eye. And I felt my heartbeat slow. “We are grounded.”
And then I asked if the Holy Spirit had a call or a summons for us in that moment. I felt the pull to root myself deeply in that connection I’d experienced. So I kept breathing into it.
Shake, feel, breathe, center, connect, listen – I plan to go through these steps as many times as needed in the days and weeks ahead. I am often so afraid of my anger becoming destructive that I never tap into the strength of its holy fire.
We will need a lot of holy fire as we continue the work of growing just communities. So I invite you zebra-shake with me, shake through your anger, and let yourself be grounded in the truth of our connection.
Due to the peculiar nature of layovers, my flight back to Chicago from Southern Oregon took me through Los Angeles. As we flew over the California coast, I saw billows of smoke rising into the air—evidence of the wildfires tearing their way across the dry ground. I was sad, even disturbed, by these fires; they poked at my desperate feelings about climate change and environmental preservation. But I was removed from them in every possible way, soaring miles above in a machine that only added fuel to the fire of the climate crisis.
Instead, my mind was on Oregon and the beautiful Rogue River Valley I’d left behind. I had been there for a storytelling training, once in March to begin and once in October to close out. The place had captivated me—three mountain ranges joined and merged at this valley, filling the horizon with sharp blue shadows. The terrain—the climate, even—varied depending on what side of the mountain you stood on, or how far up you were. I explored mossy creek gullies and snow-capped peaks, drove down winding roads through oak savannas and sat in quiet pine forests. I hiked up volcanic landscapes and watched the valley spread out beneath me. I loved the way the topography was open enough to be a like a map—I could see each landmark no matter where I was, miles and miles away, and hold the shape of the valley in my mind.
At night, I watched the mountain shadows fall over the pastures and vineyards, and I breathed in the smell of wood smoke. In the morning, I cut up pears grown nearby and saw the sun move over the Cascades. This place brought me such deep peace and gratitude.
Almost a year has passed since that trip, and we’ve circled back around to wildfire season again. I’ve watched with pity as the skies across Washington and California fill with smoke. I’ve wondered how long it will be before we finally take climate change and it’s exacerbating effects seriously. And then, this week, I saw the news on my facebook feed, echoed by the many friends I’d made in Oregon: the Rogue River Valley was burning. The fire was un-contained. The wind was whipping the flames past the farm I’d stayed at during both visits. A colleague’s house was burning down.
Pain filled my stomach. The images of towering flames caught my breath. I felt like I wanted to throw up. Helplessly, I listened to a live video as the firefighters named roads I knew and prepared to evacuate whole communities. In my mind’s eye, I could trace the path of the fire as it devoured that beautiful place. I cried. I railed. I was no longer in an airplane looking down at a distressed but unfamiliar landscape. I was all but choking on the ash made up from a place I loved.
We cannot save the world in the abstract. That’s not how we humans work. The word “courage” comes from the word “heart,” and we fight most fiercely for what we love. The magnitude of the ecological crisis we face—climate change, species loss, ocean acidification, melting glaciers, fiercer storms, degraded soil—it’s all too much. One brain cannot face the enormity of it all and still have the power to act.
So, instead, we must let little pieces of the miraculous world God so loves into our own unfathomable hearts. And it is then we witness how God’s own passion blazes within us, ready to travel through overwhelming grief and impossible odds to show us just how much we love the world, too. We feel our kinship with some small space on the planet, and we grow a determination to help that place flourish.
I can’t stop the fires scorching the beautiful Oregon valley that has captured my heart. Not a single one of us can clean up the whole ocean or reduce carbon emissions enough to make a difference. But because I have opened wide my heart to the love of God present in some small patch of God’s good creation, I will find the courage to love the earth well. To protect the places that bring me delight. To cultivate the imagination needed to envision new systems of energy and commerce. To re-align my rhythms with that of the place I call home. Even to let go of the possibility of ever visiting Oregon again, if that’s what it takes to protect what I love. If we are driven by fear, we will fail. When we are driven by love, that’s when miracles happen.
The change we seek won’t happen overnight, but, spurred by love and sought together, it will grow like fresh new plants after a forest fire—resilient and ready and bursting with hope.
cassidhe hart 