April 3, 2026: “The Willows,” Triduum, “Good Friday”

I only get to write this once a year—happy Good Friday!

Yes, Lent is over., and were are in the middle of the Triduum of the Christian calendar.  Yesterday was Maundy Thursday.  (Pretty much all services—aside from the Catholic ones—were canceled yesterday due to a snow and ice storm.)  I did not go to church yesterday.  Today, however, I played two Good Friday commemorations, one Catholic and one Lutheran.

I have to be honest.  Lenten and Easter music just don’t excite me.  I’ve been a church musician for close to 40 years now (started playing pipe organ when I was 17 years old), and I still dread Ash Wednesday with all its minor keys and dirges.  I know Lent is supposed to be a time of preparation and sacrifice, headed toward the loudness and light of Easter morning, but I won’t cry if I never have to play “O Sacred Head Surrounded” or “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” again.  (Let me stress:  I’m against the crappy hymns and music of Lent and Easter, NOT the seasons themselves.)  You would think that, after 21 centuries, churches might have come up with a few good pieces of liturgical Eastertide music.

Now, before I start getting comments from angry churchgoers listing favorite Lent and Easter tunes, I will say that, given the choice between the funereal ditties of Lent and the overwrought anthems of Easter, I will choose the overwrought.  I can get into a rousing chorus of “Up From the Grave He Arose” as much as the next Christian, but it’s just so . . . ostentatious is the word I’m looking for, I guess.  I prefer subtlety.  What can I say?  I’m a poet.

Marie Howe gives us a subtle poem today . . . 

The Willows

by: Marie Howe

As we are made by what moves us,

willows pull the water up into their farthest reach

which curves again down

divining where their life begins.

So, under travels up, and down and up again,

and the wind makes music of what water was.

A beautiful little poem that packs a lot of joy.  It’s a celebration of “what moves us.”  Water—the one thing we (trees, plants, birds, insects, human beings) all depend upon.  We can go for days without food.  Water, on the other hand, is necessary for survival.  

Howe’s words more to me about Lent and Easter than “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” ever has.  Because it’s about the force that sustains and uplifts us.  Even the wind sings a water hymn in the last line.  That’s what this season is about—walking across a desert and finding a cool, fresh running river at the end.  Whether you’re a Christian or not, we can all understand the relief of a glass of icy water on a hot summer day.  

You see what I’m getting at, I hope.  For me, Lent and Easter aren’t about the ashes and bells and incense and chants.  This season is about being offered a hose to slurp from after sweating in the fields all day long (metaphorically speaking).  

There’s another ice storm blowing in tonight.  I’m sure the grocery stores in the area were jammed with people trying to get their last-minute Easter shopping done prior to the freezing rain.  Think Black Friday, but everyone is fighting over hams and baskets and Cadbury Creme Eggs.  My wife and I did our final shopping last weekend.  We’re not planning on going out a whole lot tomorrow.  (I may hit the laundromat, but that’s about it.)

Saint Marty wrote a poem during one of his Good Friday services today . . . 

Good Friday

by: Martin Achatz

I sit,

listen

to this

familiar

story of betrayal, love, forgiveness, redemption,

think how my mom, with knees calcified by

arthritis,

knelt in

church every

Good Friday,

knobbed 

knuckles

folded, 

accepted 

her pain

like a kiss 

from her 

dead mother.

August 5: "Seven White Butterflies," Happiness, Anthology

Mary Oliver chases . . . 

Seven White Butterflies

by:  Mary Oliver

Seven white butterflies

delicate in a hurry look

how they bang the pages

     of their wings as they fly

to the fields of mustard yellow

and orange and plain

gold all eternity

     is in the moment this is what

Blake said Whitman said such

wisdom in the agitated

motions of the mind seven

     dancers floating

even as worms toward

paradise see how they banter

and riot and rise

     to the trees flutter

lob their white bodies into

the invisible wind weightless

lacy willing

     to deliver themselves unto

the universe now each settles

down on a yellow thumb on a

brassy stem now

     all seven are rapidly sipping

from the golden towers who

would have thought it could be so easy?

I think this poem is about happiness, or the pursuit of it.  The butterflies banging the pages of their wings as they dance and float toward paradise where they sip greedily from golden towers.  Butterfly heaven.

Happiness can be that easy, as long as you're willing to accept and celebrate all the blessings available to you.  I drive a Subaru Impreza.  It's a good, reliable car.  I could spend my days lamenting the fact that I don't own a flashier, more expensive vehicle.  Say an Escalade or Mercedes.  Or I can just be happy that I have a mode of transportation sitting in my driveway that gets me where I need to go quickly and easily and efficiently (when it comes to miles per gallon).  I choose happiness.

I worked at the library all day.  After having yesterday off, I will admit that I wasn't exactly excited to be on the job on a Saturday for over seven hours.  Plus, the cloud of sadness that's been hanging over my head recently was still with me, fogging my vision.

I followed my normal routine when I arrived at my office.  I checked my email and phone messages.  Made a list of tasks to complete.  Then, I walked downstairs to check my mailbox.

When you're a writer/poet, there's a special thrill that I really can't describe.  It comes when you see something you've written in print.  Your name in the table of contents alongside other writers whom you know and admire.  Your words spilling down the page.  Nothing compares to this.

Granted, I publish blog posts every day.  Sometimes those posts contain poems I've written.  But blogging is not the same as holding a book or literary journal in your hands, knowing that someone liked your work enough to pay to have it printed.

In my library mailbox this morning was my copy of a new anthology of essays about water.  On page 77 of the anthology is my essay "The Language of Water."  When I had the book in my hands, flipped thought its thick, rich pages to my contribution, I actually felt that cloud of sadness lift a little.  I was happy.  Very happy.  And that happiness has stayed with me most of the day.

It was what other people might describe as a tiny joy.  A butterfly heaven.

For Saint Marty, it was a wide, blue blessing.

Lake Superior on a clear August morning.

November 10: Whiteness, Snowstorm, Spiritual Writing

. . . Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!

Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous- why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

A little section from Chapter 42 ("The Whiteness of the Whale") of Moby-Dick.  For those of you who were hoping not to hear anymore from Melville's book, I'm obligated to remind you that this is the year of Moby-Dick.  Ahab and company aren't going away until January 1, 2019.  So, for the next month-and-a-half, I will be cherry picking from sections of the novel to suit my needs.  Hence, the focus on white today.

The first big snow storm of the season hit the Upper Peninsula of Michigan last night.  When I went to bed, there was simply a dusting of snow on the ground.  This morning, when I went outside to start my car, there was a two-foot wall of white surrounding our cars.  It took about two hours to dig them out.  Winter is upon us.

Of course, as a Yooper (that's a term for a lifelong resident of the Upper Peninsula), I am allowed to complain about snow.  Thus, if you had been anywhere near my house this morning, you would have heard me saying colorful things like "Why do we live here?!: and "It's too goddamn early for this shit!"  My back is sore.  My socks are wet and cold.  And my life for the next six of seven months is going to be a series of snow storms punctuated with brief respites of subzero temperatures.  Over half-a-year of white.

Today, I have a writing project on which to work.  A little essay about water.  It's something that I was sort of commissioned to write by a friend of mine.  It's part of a series of spiritual essays about water published in a local monthly paper.  I've always sort of struggled with the concept of spiritual writing.  It's a very slippery term.  I can't really provide a clear definition of what a piece of spiritual writing is.  However, when I read something that is spiritual, I know it immediately.
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Those are my dilemmas today.  Whiteness.  Water.  Spiritual writing.  Somehow, they're all swimming together in my head, coalescing.  Perhaps they'll all related in some way.  I guess I'll find out.

Saint Marty is thankful this morning for muscles that work, whiteness that purifies, and writing that reaches toward something bigger.