Seeing with Eyes of the Heart

Seeing with Eyes of the Heart

Sometimes life delivers a reminder of the Glory it holds, like this week while I meandered through a small park running along the west bank of the Scioto River. The park was empty except for a few walkers and two knots of birders gazing up into the trees. They carried a variety of cameras and binoculars, some with lenses long and heavy enough to require extra support. It was migration season. Non-resident birds and ducks were traveling through. I’m a casual bird watcher with a life-list begun decades ago where, if I remember, I check off a bird when I see it for the first time. My list is a record of what I’ve been graced to see, not a guide for what I have left to find.

“Hi. What are you looking at?” I asked good-naturedly, observing six feet of social distance.

“Nothing!” an irritated woman spat out. “Nothing! There is nothing to see here.”

I looked around at the surroundings, brimming with spring flowers and trees in various stages of leafing out. The river reflected the sun, and an occasional heron sailed by the white clouds.

“Really? Nothing? My sister and her husband saw a black -billed and a yellow-billed cuckoo here yesterday,” I said, trying to sound like I knew a little about the hobby. I was thinking “you just never know what will show up,” and thought I delivered the comment in a hopeful kind of way.

“Yesterday. Figures. The thing is, they were here yesterday. I wasn’t!”

No, she wasn’t. The problem, as I saw it, was that likely she wasn’t present in the morning’s moment either. Not really. Her experience was constricted by an agenda, and the park wasn’t delivering. I continued my walk, and despite the disgruntled woman’s claim that there was nothing worth seeing, I found plenty. Actually, her outburst, uncharacteristic of birders in general, heightened my openness to the surroundings.

First to catch my eye were dandelions, some sunny yellow and others holding delicate silver globes of parachuted seeds, waiting for a breeze to send them flying. They mingled with fuzzy, thick- stemmed plants sending up shoots topped with a clenched cluster of buds. I leaned in for a closer look. The spotted early earth-hugging leaves gave it way: waterleaf.

The scene reminded me of a pastel drawing at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston: “Dandelions,” by Jean-François Millet. His detailed drawings highlighted the flowers’ beauty and caught my attention immediately upon my entering the exhibit. “A kindred spirit,” I’d thought. I’m not an accomplished artist, but when I draw, I work small and focus on common treasures.

"Dandelions" a pastel on tan wove paper byJean-François Millet, French artist. Drawing of dandelions, yellow as well as gone to seed,
Dandelions, 1867-68
Pastel on tan wove paper
Jean-François Millet
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

There were lots of other things to see in the park. Oak, sycamore, maple, locust, and hickory trees. White honeysuckle blooms wet with nectar. The small stream, last week singing with water splashing over its rocky bed, diminished by hot, dry days.

I followed the lichen covered stone wall reminiscent of those crisscrossing fields in New England and the Robert Frost poem that made them famous. In a patch of wildflowers and grasses left to grow wild, bluebells were fading and ground-hugging violets stole the show.

The path stopped at the river. Mallards were gliding past, and farther out, a ruddy duck disappeared under the water again and again. I stood a while, soaking in the scene and then turned to walk back to my car.

The birdwatchers were still gathered in the same place, but this time cameras were clicking.

“What’d you find?” I asked.

“A Blackburnian warbler,” a gentleman replied and guided my eyes upward to a small silhouette perched on slender tree-top branches. Lifting my binoculars, I found the bird, stunning with black, white, and orange markings. Closer to my car, a Baltimore oriole flamed bright on a tree branch. An embarrassment of riches.

I was reminded of my morning walk a few days later while reflecting on the feast of Pentecost by reading poetry of Jessica Powers (1905-1998) an American Carmelite nun. In “Ruah-Elohim,” she writes that “Spirit” in Hebrew is feminine and that the Holy Spirt is tender Love, come to mother us. In “To Live with the Spirit'” she reminds us that the one who walks as the Spirit-wind blows “turns like a wandering weather-vane toward love.”

But it was her description of the Apostles in “The First Pentecost” that caught my breath. They looked at one another. “…words curled in fire through the returning gloom. / Something had changed and colored all the room. / The beauty of the Galilean mother/ took the breath from them for a little space. / Even a cup, a chair or a brown dress/ could draw their tears with the great loveliness/ that wrote tremendous secrets every place….”

I ache to see with such Spirit-opened eyes, our world and one another. Could wars and hatred, violence and earth-abuse continue among human beings with eyes so wide and seeing? Would eyes of the heart see past the false constructs of “them” and “us” to the “we” that shared Spirit makes us? Ah, for such eyes!

Along with this tired planet, with the weary, war-torn beings that live on it, I join my voice to the urgent prayer:

Come, Spirit come! We need the sight you bring.

© 2021 Mary van Balen

Advent in a World of Turmoil

Advent in a World of Turmoil

Starry night sky over pines

PHOTO: Jennifer Stephens

Originally published in The Catholic Times, December 13, 2015

 

“What does keeping Advent mean for us now, today?” I asked myself after reading a couple newspaper articles about mass shootings and escalating fear and anger at terrorist attacks. I was still pondering while making a quick stop at a mall. Lights and hype along with an unending string of Christmas music bombarded the senses, and on the drive home, Pope Francis’s reference to this year’s Christmas trappings being a charade came to mind.

Checking the text, I discovered that he opened his homily with “Jesus wept,” adding later “…because Jerusalem did not know the way of peace and chose the hostility of hatred, of war.” With Christmas coming, the pope said “…there will be lights, there will be celebrations, trees lit up, even nativity scenes…all decorated: the world continues to wage war…The world has not comprehended the way of peace.” The entire world is at war, piecemeal, and the cost is great—A somber message for the coming season of joy and hope.

While terrorism and wars are in the news around the world, they are not the only form of violence. There’s also violence against the poor and marginalized when funding for safety-net programs are cut. Civil rights for all are a continuing issue, as is adequate care for those suffering from mental illness. (Many mass shooters suffer from it.)

The earth itself suffers at the hands of human beings, yet some choose to dismiss the issue of global warming and the investment in new technologies needed to address it. (Did you see the pope’s shoes, sitting along with 20,000 others in a public square in Paris during the climate talks there—A quiet “march” to support those working to find ways for governments to respond to this threat?)

The pope is right: The world has not embraced the way of peace. How do we do that? How do we find hope in a dark world?

A friend sent a poem she has been using for Advent reflection: “Annunciation” by Denise Levertov. “Aren’t there annunciations/of one sort or another/in most lives?” the poet asks before pondering how we do or do not accept the annunciations that come to us. She writes of Mary, a young girl like other young girls, but called to a “destiny more momentous that any in all of Time;” she didn’t hesitate to embrace it.

Levertov concludes that whatever we have to offer is enough. “The blessing is not in the treasure/But in the letting go.” We are called to give what we have, not to hold it close, but to generously pour onto the world. We are called to lavish Love on the marginalized who need our care and nurture, much as Jesus needed protection within the womb as he grew.

Levertov’s poem reminds me of the loaves and fishes story. The young boy freely gave what he had, and Jesus made it enough.

Maybe that’s what’s Advent’s quiet and waiting is about. Avoiding the distractions of orchestrating a “perfect Christmas” and instead giving ourselves time to pay attention to what Grace has been placed in our hearts, not turning from the challenges of sharing it in a dark and often hostile world. Like Mary, we’re called to say, “Yes, I’ll give all that I am.”

A poem by Jessica Powers, considers the Incarnation. “In Too Much Light,” she sees the Magi following one star and laments her difficulty finding one to follow. Her revelation?

Faith cries out ‘til her voice fails, proclaiming that in every spot and time, “…there is not any place/ when the sought Word is not.”

That’s where our hope lies this Advent, when even our pope laments the darkness and choices for war over peace.

It is within, given when the Holiest of Mysteries became one of us, sharing Love and trusting us to share it in our times and places. The hope is discovering that light, not outside us, but in our deepest center. Being selfless with it, giving it away, is embracing the way of peace.

When we discover the divine light within ourselves and within all others in this world, the wounded, the suffering, the marinalized, the fearful, the violent, then we’ll have found the God we prepare to celebrate during Advent.

Jessica again: “Behold, all places which have light in them/truly are Bethlehem.”

 

© 2015 Mary van Balen