February 18: "Night Sky," Star Watcher, Wonder and Beauty

Billy Collins stargazes . . .

Night Sky

by:  Billy Collins

Lying on the beach

after so much wine and talk--

dippers everywhere.

I've been a star watcher most of my life.  From a very young age, I had a subscription to Astronomy magazine, each month losing my mind over all of the beautiful images of stars and planets and galaxies in its pages (although, compared to the images now available from the Webb Telescope, those pictures now seem like petroglyphs on cave walls).  Many a night I spent with my eyes pointed heavenward.

I sometimes thought I would become an astronomer or physicist.  That's how much I loved gazing through my telescope.  Of course, I didn't turn out to be the next Carl Sagan.  Many of my friends and family would say that my head is still in the clouds, but I'm chasing poems instead of comets now.

Not many stars are visible tonight.  For the past week, it's been pretty gray and snowy.  My daughter came over for dinner a couple nights ago, and we watched a couple episodes of The Crown together.  I remember summer nights with her when she was younger, watching for passing satellites and Perseid showers and lunar eclipses in our backyard.  When Neowise showed up a few years ago, she climbed Sugarloaf Mountain with me in the dark to see the comet from the summit.   

I don't think I'll ever outgrow my childhood fascination with astronomy.  Looking into the heavens is like time traveling:  all the light we see is between 4,000 and 70,000 years old.  Truly a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.  (Yes, astronomy also fostered my love of science fiction, as well.)  That means that, when you see some stars in the night sky, what you are seeing is light that originated at a time when Earth was going through an Ice Age due to the super eruption of the Toba Volcano.  That extinction event left only about 5000 human ancestors alive on the entire planet.  Everyone living now is descended from those 5000.  That blows my mind.

My knowledge of astronomy is rudimentary, at best.  I can't identify all the constellations spinning above me.  However, I can name all the planets.  I know that we are part of the Milky Way.  I also know that Earth is about 93 million miles away from the Sun.  Like I said, rudimentary knowledge.

But Saint Marty is all about chasing wonder and beauty each and every day.  

April 6: "Swan," Struck Mute, Wonder and Beauty

Mary Oliver on beauty . . . 

Swan

by:  Mary Oliver

Did you too see it, drifting, all night on the black river?

Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air,

an armful of white blossoms,

a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned

into the bondage of its wings:  a snowbank, a bank of lilies,

biting the air with its black beak?

Did you hear it, fluting and whistling

a shrill dark music, like the rain pelting the trees,

     like a waterfall

knifing down the black ledge?

And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds--

a white cross streaming across the sky, its feet

like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light

     of the river?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?

This poem is all about being struck mute because of beauty.  For Mary Oliver, it's a swan gliding in a river or lake, taking wing into morning light, its body a rising cross in the silvery sky.  That's what stops Oliver in her tracks, makes her reflect on the meaning of beauty.

Holy Thursday today.  The beginning of the Easter Triduum.  For most of this weekend, I will be a Lutheran celebrating Easter.  I will be playing tomorrow evening for my home parish--a Catholic celebration of Good Friday.  Then two Easter Sunday morning Lutheran services.  

I've always struggled during Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday.  I think it's the retelling, again and again, of the narrative of Christ's Passion.  I get swept up (or along) in the pathos of the whole story--the extreme humanity of the main actors.  Judas.  Peter.  Mary.  Pontius Pilate.  Jesus.  There's something quite beautiful (and heartbreaking) in all of the brokenness.

When you reach my age, you've experienced betrayal.  You've probably betrayed someone, as well.  And denied someone.  Lost someone.  Grieved for someone.  It's all there.  For me, this week is all about the beauty of being human.  In the gospel narratives of the Passion, humankind at its very worst and very best is on full display.  

My favorite moments in the gospels are when Jesus is at his most human.  When he gets pissed or sad, feels bereft or frightened.  That's the Jesus that interests me.  Because I understand that Jesus.  Yes, I get the whole Son of God part of Christ's DNA, but there's the whole Mary (Oliver) side that watched sunrises, picked flowers, admired swans, fell in love, wept for dead friends.

Maybe Jesus was a poet.  I mean, he's a descendant of King David, author of the psalms.  That means that poetry was in his blood.  It also means that Jesus was stopped dead in his tracks every once in a while by the beauty of the world.  

I think, in a lot of ways, seeing the universe through the eyes of a poet is sort of like having a divine point of view.  I'm not saying poets are gods.  I'm saying that poets recognize the importance of the small, insignificant, gorgeous things that stitch together this life.  Now, what does a person do with that recognition?

I do what Mary Oliver did:  I write poems.  That's how I change my life, sentence by sentence, word by word.

When I got home tonight after church, I led a poetry workshop.  It was a perfect way to end Maunday Thursday--with wonder and beauty.

Saint Marty wrote this:

I Came Home this Afternoon

by:  Martin Achatz

after Diane Seuss

I came home this afternoon to an extra garbage

can blown into my yard by a spring wind

so strong it brought down pine branches,

dug up Taco Bell bags, rolled an empty can

of Miller Lite down the street as if it was

late for a party, the snow banks dwindled

into piles of striated sand, an archeology

of the entire winter of storms and melts,

blizzards and reprieves  It is Holy

Thursday, when the church is stripped,

reds and purples paraded out by serious

parishioners intent on plucking the place

bare, until the world is just a knuckle, raw

and bleeding from hitting the wall too many times.