FOUND ON CHRISTMAS MORNING
Dan Wilt

Delivered at the St. Stephen’s University Christmas Banquet, December 2007

I’ve been asked to give a brief devotional tonight, particularly related to Christmas, and even more specifically to your time away over the holidays.

I recalled a Christmas memory that serves as the foundation for what I’ll share in the next few minutes. The memory pertains to a particular Christmas day that stands out among the 42 Christmases I’ve experienced thus far.

Santa, We Have A Problem
I was about seven years old, as I recall, and at a typical, early December dinnertime, my parents announced to us our Christmas holiday would be spent with my grandparents in northern Pennsylvania. Now, to both adults and children, a Christmas trip, especially with grandparents involved, can mean some very rich experiences - experiences with food, relationships and gifts.

Wait. Gifts. Trip. Santa.

Dear Santa, we have a problem.

Allow me to explain my distress. Ever since I was old enough to wonder, my parents told me that Santa was real, and Santa was the one who brought the Christmas presents. I did find Santa to be a rather quirky benefactor, in that the cookies we left out on Christmas eve for him were often only partially-eaten and the glass of milk only half-emptied. I used to think, “Any right-minded adult or kid would wolf down the full feast of confections available to him in the middle of a long night of gift delivery.” Something about Santa, I decided, must not be quite right.

Santa would also occasionally leave a note of thanks for our thoughtfulness at leaving him the sugary comestibles. Even though I myself was just learning to write, I remember noticing that Santa’s scribbles looked very similar to my male parent’s handwriting. In fact, I often imagined that the smiling eyes of Santa must have looked very similar to my father’s, especially when he was playing an impish trick of some sort on his children.

Santa Knows My Address
Suffice it to say that I had learned to trust Santa. I knew sure-as-shootin’ that come Christmas morning, cookies or no cookies, our tree would have under it at least a few packages that had my name written on them (often in that same, father-esque script).

You see, Santa knew our address. I had sent it to him every year as the return address on the letter. Santa knew where we lived. Santa would be there for me, because he knew me, and I somehow knew him. We had an understanding. I write him letters, I act civil to my siblings, and he shows up in my living room with toys. As long as I lived at 242 Oak Hill Drive, Middletown, Pennsylvania, USA 17057, Santa would show, sure as snow.

But this thought began to grow over the course of our dinner in my now troubled little mind. What if Santa came to our house as usual, and we weren’t home? How would he know where we were? He didn’t visit old people, I was sure of it, and my grandparents were the very definition of the word old. I loved my grandparents, that’s for sure, but at some stage I was sure that Santa had checked his list of old people, and there they were, left out of the Christmas delivery route forever. If we were at my grandparents house, Santa would never find us.

I piped up. “Okay, Dad,” I said, “you and Mom have a way to tell Santa where we are this Christmas, right? What’s your plan? Are you going to leave a map? What are you going to do?”

The Last Christmas Ever
My father was very comforting: “Oh, he’ll know where we are, Danny. Santa always knows.” (To this day, my family still affectionately calls me Danny, even if they try to honor the fact that I’ve grown up into a Dan. When they try to say “Dan,” it feels funny on their lips and comes out “Dan…ny.”)

“How will he know?” I asked, utterly dissatisfied with the paternal answer. The word paternal, and the word patronizing, have a similar root. “He’ll know,” he said again with those flickering, smiling eyes - this time with a firmness that seemed to say “Just trust me.”

How could I trust him? Too much was at stake. What if he was wrong? What if Santa came, found an empty house, and high-tailed it out of there for good, forever, leaving nothing? If I was jilted like that, I’d never come again to that house. That would be the end.

Then it hit me. This could be the last Christmas ever! No, wait. Last Christmas would be the last Christmas. This would the Christmas after the last Christmas ever. This would a Nothing! An absolute, nada, noway, nohow Nothing! On the Best-Memories-Of-Childhood scale, it would be a zero, a zilch, an empty wasteland of unfulfilled Christmas dreams strewn across a barren, muddy tundra.

The Long Journey To Nowhere In Particular
A few weeks later, distraught, I crawled into the car for our 4,296 hour ride (this is only 2 hours in adult-time), and began our journey to No-Christmas Land. “There are barely any homes here, no real addresses,” I remember thinking as our old chevy wagon buzzed along the highway.

My grandparents lived in a humble borough called Gowen City, near the larger city of Shamokin. That area of the state is known as the “coal regions” to most Pennsylvanians, and to a distressed Christmas child is the remote, nether region of the world. While the area is quite populated, and life carries on as usual in a small American town, I could only see a landscape riddled with rundown, abandoned homes and large looming coal hills.

I remember staring out the window at the wintry hills along the trip north, nothing in front of us but a little highway rolling like a zipper over the forested inclines ahead. “Nobody lives here,” I mumbled. My only solace was the hope of seeing one of my favorite cousins, and playing with his Christmas presents. And cookies. There were always the cookies.

On Christmas Eve, we finished the night with a warm cup of hot cocoa and a few of Grandma’s hockey pucks. (Editor’s Note: The cookies were actually called Angel Cookies, and rate a whopping 10 on the “how long they have to be soaked in hot liquid before they begin to be soft” scale. My brother, sister and I swear you could’ve used them for an NHL game in a pinch. Their sister cookie, another of Grandma’s specialties, were called Michigan Rocks. You get the point.) After shuffling upstairs, I snuggled under three thick comforters with my older brother and sister in the chilly front bedroom.

“Do you think he’ll come?” my sister whispered. “No,” I said. “He’ll never find us.” My older brother chimed in with a torturous grin: “You’re right. He won’t find us… because he doesn’t exist.” I punched him, and rolled over to bury my face in the pillow.

Found On Christmas Morning
The next morning at about 5 am, with low expectations and the faintest shred of hope, I jumped out of bed and gingerly tiptoed down the hard wooden stairs of my grandparent’s home. A sharp u-turn at the bottom of the stairs would reveal either my worst nightmare, or my moment of salvation. As I spun around the corner, tethered to the banister pole at the bottom of the stairs, I saw the tree. Beneath it, presents glistened in the flashing colored lights.

“I don’t believe it,” I thought. “Santa found us. Santa knows where old people live. He knows where my grandparents live. And, he knew we’d be here. Santa looked for me, and Santa found me. Santa looks for people, and Santa finds people.” The cookies, half-gone once again, made me feel as though I had at least offered a small token of thanks to my chubby, fur-faced friend. My father later assured me, “Santa is no dummy, Danny. Santa knows where you are. Santa always knows where you are.”

The Faith Of The Pursued
Christmas is either the celebration of the most definitive event of human history, or it is nothing. Christmas cannot simply be a part of the Christian story. It simply will not bear such limitation. It is either the celebration of the redemptive incarnation of God, the pivotal event of all human history, or a it is a horrible sham.

Christmas is a declaration in a bustling world of religion, irreligion and feigned religion, that it is not primarily people who look for God, but rather it is God who looks for, and finds, people. It defies the stance of the religious pursuit. It is the faith not primarily of the seeker, but of the sought. It is the story not primarily of the finder, but of the found.

Our faith is not one in which the human being pursues God, and ascends to him when we’ve unlocked the secret worship code that opens the relationship. Your faith and mine rests on a God who descends into our reality. This is a God who pursues us and finds us - no matter where we live, no matter where we go.

This Christmas, you and I are not dealing with a God who, like an old relative, hopes you have a nice time with family or friends between terms, and that you attend a church service in the middle in order to either recall important moral ideals or nostalgically recover your childhood. We’re dealing with a God who has pursued the human race since the beginning of time, and who finds you and I no matter where go, or how far from home we stray. Jesus is God’s declaration that God pursues, and we respond.

God is seeking you, even now. Are you willing to be found, and to embrace all the encounter will mean?

Raise Your Christmas Expectations
This Christmas, expect to be pursued, and found by God. Make yourself available to the unique encounter that is waiting for you. The reality of Emmanuel, God with us, will come crashing into your soul if you’ll make space for reflection.

Reflection on what? The unique story, in all of historic human experience, that God descends into flesh and blood, pursues us, and finds us - all of us - right where we are.

Colossians 1:15-20 “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”

The following is a series of brief thoughts on the arts that I’ll be sharing to kick off St. Stephen’s University’s Arts Week tomorrow in chapel.

The thoughts are by no means exhaustive, but are intended to give some framework for the role of creative expression in the world in which we live, and to instill a sense of purpose in the creative Christian voice.

VOICES FROM THE HINTERLAND: Reflections On Creativity And The Christian

Introduction

I’d like to begin these reflection on creativity with a poem that I wrote a few years ago. It’s a poem that gives some sense of meaning and context to my own creative activity, and to the act of creativity in general.

a new star

it lodged in space and time unknown,
held aloft by sheer delight;
my love now so brightly burning,
the newest star now born.

The Gifts Of Memory, Mystery And Movement

The creative act, it seems to me, is like the birthing of a new star. They say the Orion nebula is like a star factory, pumping out thousands of new, sizzling suns every year. Just like every act of art, the light that hits our eyes on every starlit night carries with it the gifts of memory, mystery and movement.

Memory is there. Something about the upward tilt of our head before the blackened canvas causes us to remember that our universe is very large, and such revelation typically brings us more of a sense of delight in such grandeur than it does a sense of our own, dwarfed position. We remember that we’re as big and as grand as the cosmos; that the universe within us is equally laden with meaning and dignity.

Mystery seems to be present as well, as our minds tingle with formless questions as to which celestial sparks are the farthest, which galaxies the strangest, and what kind of mind could be so fertile as to spawn such rambunctious glory.

Then, there is Movement. The soul seems to move as the light moves; the soul flickers as the light flickers. When ancient starbeams hit our atmosphere, we see the effect of air and light that we call a “shimmer.” If we squint at the stars and cause our head to just slightly quiver (as I used to do endlessly on a hill nearby my childhood home), it can almost seem as if the stars are dancing, moving abruptly and fiercely, like us, rather than quietly sitting in a static, stark field.

On The Voice Of Art

My task is, in the next few minutes, to lay out a reflection on the vital nature of the arts for the human being, and then to specifically engage those ideas with what it means to be follower of Jesus, the Christ. I perceive myself to be an artist, loving the pulse of words and rhythms most in my own forays into the fine arts, but also as one equally enamored with the arts of friendship and laughter, disciplined study and romantic love. I’m neither an art scholar nor an academic in the truest sense of the word. But I do count myself an aesthete, or a “lover of beauty,” with the best of them.

I care about beauty as a window to God, as a healing balm, as a catalytic agent of justice and freedom and renewal, and as a satisfying drink of cold water to a desert’s thirst. From this posture of awed appreciation, I speak. I also care about beauty as an indication that God is alive and that I am alive as well – that we are made for this rippling creation, and that this artful world all around us holds keys to our own redemption, both inward and outward. In short, I deeply believe in art; not only that it exists, but that it should exist and has powerful purpose for existing. I believe that art speaks, art tells, art beckons, art sings, art calls; art has a voice. I believe that art is from God, and mimics if not embodies His voice, in both riveting whispers and gravelly growls.

I also believe that most art in our world is broken, to some greater or lesser degree. Art reflects the artist, and we are a broken race. Just as anything can be twisted and corrupted by our own blemished voices, so too art can reflect our most base natures. Yet I am unwilling to give up the baby for its murky bathwater. Art finds its origins in God, and in the first sentences of Genesis. You and I are destined to create, and out of that act of throwing stars into space, to participate with God in healing, deliverance and transformation - not the least of which is our own.

The Hinterlands

I come from a small town in Pennsylvania called “Middletown.” Middletown. I don’t believe a hamlet’s name could be more generic. A meeting was held on that little plot of land a few centuries ago. I can just hear the most influential voice in that gathering suggest, “I think we should name our town according to its geographical position in relation to more interesting places on either side.” Middletown. The name feels more like a gesture than it does a monument; just like the town, it feels like it could come or go at any minute.

For all of my joking about it’s name, Middletown is where I am from. It’s my home. It’s always been, and as far back as I can remember, when I say the word “home” I still have part of me that thinks of that quirky little village. I’ve often quipped that my life is that of an advocate of middle grounds, always suggesting that extremes have their flaws and advocating the wisdom of mutual understanding and radical centers. And yet, I’m appreciating as I get older that sometimes one voice must be viciously loud, and another strikingly soft, for a point to find its way through the din of babel that fills the airwaves, and lifewaves, of our age.

Middletown is a bit of what one might call a “hinterland.” According to most dictionaries, a hinterland is a place “in between.” It’s a middle-land if you will. It’s not a large urban center, nor is it the coast. It’s not the land into which a dominion plows its money and energies. It’s not the land that is necessarily waste, either. A hinterland is a “place in between.” It’s a place inland from the free and inspiring vistas of the coasts, and it’s a place outland from the stabilities and governments of the big city. It’s neither here, nor there.

It’s the back country, the hidden bush, the small town, where forces both dark and light are at work, where questions can be asked without immediate suggestions of recalcitrance or rebellion. It is the land where poetry can simply suggest, or query, or lift, or bend, or stumble over itself in an endless quest for finer and finer nuances of meaning. On the borders, on the edges, pioneering and protecting decisions must be made. In the cities, in the centers, those decisions are reinforced and resourced for the good of all. In the hinterlands, however, in the middle-grounds, we can often more freely search for meaning in a meaning-filled world.

Voices From The Hinterland

In the beginning of time, a sacred world took the stage. God created, it says in the first verse, of the first book of the First Book. All beauty came from God, brimming with truth and vibrant with the full spectrums of life and light and sound and scape. There, something broke, someone fell, burning deep shadows onto the lands of light. Now, neither in the center, nor on the fringe, but rather in a no-man’s land, we wander. The hinterland it seems, is our home. To those living on the edges, making the adventurous look tame and screaming for wilder ways, we lift our voice. To those living in the center, deciding on decisions, protecting trustess of the sacral rules, we lift our voice.

To express oneself in art is to incarnate our hinterland questions, perceptions, ideas and feelings. It is also to incarnate truth from less obvious places in our souls. Author Madeleine L’Engle said in her book Walking On Water, “To paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity. The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birth-giver. In a very real sense the artist should be like Mary, who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius or something very small, comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.’” From the back country of our hearts and lives, we speak the inutterable; we tempt the fairies to come forward and to tell the world they exist. We give voice to profound realities that lead us to God and to ourselves, and then, often, back again.

The Aesthetic Voice
As creators, we speak in many voices. Art is often spoken of in the term “aesthetics.” We know the definition of this word by its opposite - anaesthetic. Anaesthetics are those things which numb, and dim both pain and pleasure impulses. Aesthetics, by contrast, are those things which sensitize, revitalize and make one simply more aware. The artist lifts his or her voice, from the hinterlands of our questions, hopes, dreams and senses, and “makes aware” those who have been numbed by either the shouts of the revolutionary edge or the silence of the mundane and repetitive center.

The artist who follows Jesus raises his or her aesthetic voice, in paint or poem or song or sketch, to uncover the wound, to suggest its healing or its actual state, and to somehow aid its healing by directing attention (sometimes by invoking more pain) to the wounds we bear.

The Authentic Voice
Art, if it is anything, is authentic to its creator. It is real. It doesn’t come primarily from the outside in, as if some objective fact could burst on the scene and demand that you paint it, or say it or sing it. Art comes from the inside; from our gut response to the world, or an experience, or a thought so primal it threatens the life of its thinker. The art bears our personality along with it, like a ship carried by a raging river. The creation reflects its creator. The artist lifts his or her voice, from the hinterlands of our perceptions, impulses and faith, and demands that shrouds be lifted and masks be removed before the party continues.

The artist who follows Jesus raises his or her authentic voice, in melody or movement or rhythm or rhyme, to unmask the imposter, to reveal our strong or weak estate, and to somehow draw honesty like water from the rock hard personas we create to hide ourselves.

The Artistic Voice
Art is endemic to the human race. Creativity is a must. We were made to create, whether through forms of right-brained creativity or left-brained creativity. Creativity is the surest sign that there is no such thing as a secular world - a place or time where God is not welcome or is ever completely shut out. Even the most adamant atheist creates, and expresses, and revels in the curve of a line, the turn of a phrase or the sound of a symphony. The artist lifts his or her voice, from the hinterlands of our belief systems, trust and delights, and offers a new way of saying something timeless, often eternal, to the weary ears of the listener.

The artist who follows Jesus raises his or her artistic voice, in story or sound or prose or print, to declare that God is alive, that we are alive, and that there is no place where the possibility of shared, divine-human relationship is not. Art prophesies to the world that there is a God not only in heaven, but also on earth, who is not divorced from His creation, but rather has drawn near.

Conclusion

I’m from Middletown, and in some ways, so are you. We are from a small place between two bigger places; a hinterland, really, in the grand scheme of things. Today, I’ll do that for which I was created. I will create, from this strange, non-descript, in-between land. I will feel part of the pain that’s been, and part of the glory to come. I’ll do so as I live from the vibrant joy that comes from believing in the Incarnation, the reality that God knows humankind intimately, and that humankind may now know Him back just as intimately.

To be a Christian, it seems, is to create from the living center of hope, and to aesthetically, authentically and artistically raise our voices to declare that love has come, and redemption has entered this good, yet fallen creation. Our voice may sing questions, or it may suggest answers; the hinterland will never leave us. And yet, you and I must raise our voice from this place, for God, for ourselves and for others who will hear glory and reality in our trembling words.

In a thousand ways, lift your voice to speak from the hinterland you call your own. Among the screams of the wilder borders, and the soliloquies of sedated centers, your voice will eventually be heard.

To think that I could die
With this fire inside;

Half out, and warming,
Half in, and burning.

forward
on points of no return

I walk the bridge beneath my feet,
That bears my soul from height’s despair;
And forward in this trepid quest,
Toward the far, new edge I dare.

Return no more to ways I knew,
Nor fright me with this dang’rous goal;
All time should well be spent on this
Ascent, descent, of foot and soul.

dan wilt
st. stephen, 2007

Christianity.ca just posted a short story I wrote a few years ago, called Quest For The Perfect Christmas Tree on their site.

Quest for the Perfect Christmas Tree - Christianity.ca

After this year’s Quest experience, I may be adding another paragraph soon:

The Judgement-Of-The-Trees-Ceremony – a dark and foreboding ritual when the hopeful trees must succumb to the spoken criticisms of the True Believer, while the Compliant Spouse and Unwitting Hordes follow behind, seeking to counsel the “un-chosen trees” through their experience of unqualified rejection. The seven-year old says, “You’re a nice tree. You’re a good tree. Someone will cut you down. Someone will cut you down today.”

This is a poem I wrote for one of my Master’s papers on the nature of humanity. I find that when I am writing raw poetry, I am able to say so much more with less words than when I am writing prose. In the film Contact, Jodie Foster’s character, seeing the beauties of the cosmic wonderland she touches, says “Poetry. They should have sent a poet.”

BLEND OF FIRES
On Human Nature

Blend of fires, earth and heav’n,
Beat within the mortal breast;
Transcendent love to hellish hate,
Vie in human souls on quest

As nature starts, so it can end,
Though embattled is this coil;
For shattered images can mend,
When Love’s applied as healing oil.

Dan Wilt, May ‘06

saffron (or the spice of the prophet)

saffron burns like a spice not meant for human forebearance
lilting down the pipe of open dreams
dreams meant for listeners and not for speakers

it lofts through the streams of blood like a boat on a swollen river
kept aloft by its nature
nature meant for speakers and not for dreamers

it burdens the stomach like so much powder
an incense for food
food meant for dreamers and not for whistlers

it keeps its fancies within the frame until it can no longer
pent up no more by my design
design meant for whistlers and not for givers

an assignment for givers and not for takers.

d. wilt

I was reminded this morning that back in May of 2004, I was asked to address the student body of Heritage Seminary in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada.

I was the opening speaker for their Arts & Creativity week, and chose to involve the elemental themes of earth, wind, fire and water in addressing the creative impulse.

Here is a .pdf of my talk: Quest For Eden

In recent years I’ve been encouraged (literally by a hundred friends or so) to post my writing. So today, I post it here on my blog.

In classic artist form, I’ve felt very vulnerable when it comes to the writing I do that is not “what I am known by.” Most people think of me as a Church leader/influencer/trainer/worship leader.

While I’ve professionally written primarily Church directed pieces for magazines, CD/DVD covers and other print media, this area feels far more vulnerable for me.

It’s closer to home, and what really is going on behind my eyes.

Here is my draft form poetry collection (approx. 300 poems to date). They are quite varied in form, and all need editing/review. Here is as good a place as any to let them rise to the surface for a season.

Word Doc Download: the color of eden

“Learn too to contemplate the beauty and holiness of the city where God resides and wherever he has placed you. There, at the heart of the city, raise your arms in praise and intercession.”
The Jerusalem Community Rule of Life

Gutteral, primal melodies, resonant tones and jagged motion captured the viewers in a kind of trance. Our hosts and joyful entertainers were the Zulu’s, an ancient tribe from this corner of an amazing world.

For tonight, the Zulu men would rumble in sacred voice, and the Zulu women would screech in tongued percussion – not for traditional reasons, but for us and our pleasure. It started as an impromptu show of sorts, but somehow became a deeper pleasure to the actors than to the hypnotized spectators.

As the dancing began, my soul was swept away. The pulse of the music, mingled with jutting arms and hiking legs, put the audience to laughter. Though I laughed as well, I was also put to a robust and thrilling prayer. Then the voices left the stark motions behind as unison throats began echoing unison passions - the same sounds that must have been nightly heard on slave-thirsty plantations in the southern states of a darker age. I began to softly weep.

The ancients spoke of the perichoresis, the divine dance between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, expressing the interwoven mystery of Trinitarian unity. When I think of that Dance, the one the image bearers of creation were invited to join in the incarnation, I don’t see measured steps and laced attire. I don’t heart string quartets, or see pallid faces in pillared rooms.

Instead, I see dark skin, sweat and bonfire and tears of passion. I see arcs made by hands and feet slicing bright through smoky air, and thumping hard into dusty ground. I see light interplaying with darkness, shadows cast by creation’s fire across seamless, newborn starfields. I see creation born not out of a linear duty, but out of a communal fire-dance of joy.

The swirl of Zulu voices and dance now became an accompaniment – an accompaniment to a prayer that rose from my heart in deep impressions and sensations. Impressions of a people so beautiful that the God must weep with joy at His image so robustly displayed within them.

Sensations, of smell and sound and touch that must have surrounded this people here for generations, nursed in the wild beauty of the rugged African terrain, touch my inner senses.

My heart groaned, not in a painful expedition of saving prayer, but rather in a wailing song reminiscent of slaves rapt in worship, crooning nightly on the haystacks of unreasonable masters.

Such wildness, such freedom, such passion – and to think a day came and went when such indelible tempraments from their common continent were chained and whipped.

The prayers of the heart can be as wild and as passionate as the human condition. Love and loss, fight and fury all mark a life left in the hands of God. Our prayers are meant to rise and writhe with the same holy fire, bursting forth from us in myriad vocabularies of the soul.

For the Zulu, tonight, their song and dance I understood to be their prayers. So much life, captured in melody, motion and mirth. For me, tonight, I understand a new way to pray. With my hands, with my feet, with sounds deep and firm, or wild and free.

God understands such language, and I feel as if I have just prayed with the Zulu.

God created human beings; he created them godlike, reflecting God’s nature. He created them male and female.”

From Genesis 1 in The Message

“Devout souls ascend to God more frequently, promptly, and with lofty heights.”
Francis de Sales, from The Devout Life

My mother was raised in the coal regions of Northern Pennsylvania. A true “coal-miner’s daughter,” my childhood was laced with stories of coal hills, mine collapses, local heroes, shanty towns, powerful unions and the company store. Some of my relatives even participated in the Molly Maguires, a secret Irish terrorist sect committed to evening the score with the corrupt anthracite mine owners of the late 1800’s. To my family, the old refrain “You load sixteen tons, and what do you get; another day older and deeper in debt…” was no folk anthem – it was their harsh reality.

I think I learned to draw near to God riding with my grandfather around the steep, deadly bends that encircled Big Mountain. He was a soft-spoken man with laughing eyes, a wizened face and rough hands that spoke of decades of hard labor. Every time we would near an edge in that old rusty truck, I found my infantile spiritual life awakened, as I cried out to God as I understood Him to be; my Rescuer from Grandpa’s erratic driving. Grandpa’s hand on mine made my divine connection seem more real, I think, even though I knew deep down that both of his hands should have been on the wheel.

My mother recounts how she and her siblings, along with the families of the other coal miners, would come to the worksite every day to wait for the horn to blow, signaling a long day’s end. The men (and boys) would ascend from the shadowy depths, pouring out like a wave of velvet, blackened water from the rocky hole, and the children would eagerly wait for each face to softly contrast with the lightless, gaping door of the mine.

As their game, the miner’s children would guess which black-sooted figure was the frame of their father. Covered from head to toe in the dust of the coal they spent their days seeking, these men were all but unrecognizable from the residue of their search.

I find prayer to be like what I imagine was their daily labor experience. I readily descend into the mine of God’s heart, and it seems that nothing comes easily to me. I must choose to whistle every song, wrestle for every revelation, dig through emotional rock and clay, blood on my hands and trembling weakness in my heart. Some times, rare times, I leave with a whole barrow full of precious encounter. Some times, most times, I come out with nothing in my hands but more blood and dirt to show for my venture.

Yet, when I ascend from the mine of prayer, I find that I am not the same as when I entered - others may be the only ones who see the difference. I am covered from head to toe in that which I sought in prayer. The residue of His glory is the treasure I leave with, and the reward for another moment, God-lived.

Over time, I believe the residue of such encounters builds, and a wiser pursuit of God reveals to me His love, found both in the heavy riches of His power, and in the light dust of His beauty. His presence, then, is not so much found in the nuggets I desperately intended to leave with, but rather in the lingering presence of His love; now covering my sweaty brow.

“So where does Wisdom come from? And where does Insight live? It can’t be found by looking, no matter how deep you dig, no matter how high you fly. If you search through the graveyard and question the dead, they say, ‘We’ve only heard rumors of it.’ God alone knows the way to Wisdom, he knows the exact place to find it.”

From Job 28 in The Message.

“Thank you Lord Jesus, that you will be our hiding place, whatever happens.”
Corrie ten Boom

“Sweet flower” is what her name means. Grandma also told us it was the name of an ancient Armenian princess. Grandma’s first name was Siranouche. My wife’s middle name is Siranouche. My daughter’s middle name is Siranouche. “Sweet flower.” So appropriate in each life it adorns.

As my children encircled her feet, Grandma would tell the old stories. On one occasion, I taped an hour of those stories, and the harder questions were asked. “Grandma,” queried my daughter, “How did your mommy and daddy die?” I interrupted, telling Grandma she didn’t need to answer that question if she didn’t want to. Her response was matter-of-fact. “They must know, honey. They must know such things.”

At 95 years old, Siranouche was one of the last living survivors of the Armenian death marches under the Ottoman Turks at the turn of the 20th century. A mass genocide that the world ignored, Adolph Hitler is infamous for a statement made to a German commander: “Who remembers the Armenians; who will remember the Jews?”

Siranouche and her family lived in a small Armenian village called Orphah. She recalls the beauty that was once her family’s estate. “I remember playing among the fruit trees in the orchard,” she says with a smile. At 14, young Siranouche and her family were awakened in the middle of the night by Turkish soldiers. She, her mother and siblings stood and watched as the fathers and husbands were huddled into their small Armenian churches – which were then burned to the ground. The screams still haunted her now aged mind.

She remembers the death marches through the Syrian Desert. How her mother would spread her skirt over her five children in the desert’s cool, night air to keep them warm as they slept. She remembers the Syrian women lining the march, hoping to help save some of the children by taking them as their own. Though the youngest died along the march, Siranouche’s mother (my wife’s great grandmother) gave away the rest of her children in one day – such a horrible joy for her – to know they might live, but that she would die soon, far away from her precious jewels.

Her new Syrian family treated her well, though she was a servant. One night, she had a dream. In her dream, Jesus came to her with outstretched arms. Using no words, she could see in his eyes that everything would be alright. From that point on, she knew she worshipped a different God than those around her, and she knew that someone was taking care of her.

My children are squirming, as children do, but still listening intently. One blessed day, she saw a boy she thought she recognized from her Armenian village across the street in her Syrian village. Though men and women were not to cross the street to each other by custom, she took her chances and ran across the road. Not only was the boy indeed who she thought he was, but he knew where two of her brothers were! A connection was made by this newfound messenger, and an escape plan devised. One brother would feign illness, and request that his sister come to take care of him for a time. When they left the home, they would run for freedom, elusive and ethereal as it was.

The boys made their way to Siranouche’s home via the train, trying to hide the fact that they were Armenian (though the war was over, Armenians were still quite fearful for their lives). The conductor’s wife, a fellow Armenian, evoked a confession from them with her kindness, and after exchanging a few words with her husband, informed them that the train would stop behind the village they would abduct their sister from, and would wait for them to return. Siranouche remembers the gratefulness she felt toward her Syrian family, yet more vividly remembers the wild rush of freedom that flooded her soul as they raced down the hill behind the village to their waiting chariot of steel.

Years passed, and Siranouche and her brothers, now in their twenties, received a letter and photo. “I’m your brother” the note said, “and I’m coming to you tomorrow.” Raised as a soldier in the Turkish army, their youngest surviving brother fell into their waiting arms and told them his story. In a strange twist of events, they realized that while Siranouche was staying at an orphanage in Istanbul, she had actually met her youngest brother from afar! A small, white dog would frequent the fence of the orphanage to play with the smiling young girl. The dog’s young, male owner would stand at a distance and watch. That boy, that “Turkish boy,” was her youngest brother.

The stories continued, and miracle after miracle marking her journey to our living room flowed seamlessly from her memory. My children grew sleepy, but struggled to drink in all the details of Grandma’s fascinating story. Finally, my eldest daughter asked a question she had been holding for far too long. “Do you forgive the Turks?” she exclaimed. The room was silent.

“Oh, honey, of course I do,” came Grandma’s answer. “We must forgive. Unforgiveness does not hurt them; it only hurts us.”

Siranouche. “Sweet flower.” The perfume that came from Grandma changes my prayers daily. No longer do I expect God to show His presence by rescuing me from all that comes my way. Rather, I expect His highest gift – to be with us in our struggles, to comfort us through them, and to give us a legacy of faith worth passing on for generations. My children are learning how to pray as well. And for them, Grandma’s story will shape the way they talk to God, and talk to the broken world He loves.

“I’ll run the course you lay out for me, if you’ll just show me how.”

From Psalm 119:32 in The Message

“There should always be more waiting than striving in a Christian’s prayer.”
Evelyn Underhill

I tried to seem interested. These “men’s men” were in deep and reverent conversation, and I was an unwitting participant. I learned long ago to both interpret, and semi-fluently speak, the mountain dialect of Henson Cove. However, this time the squinting of my eyes and twitching of my ears was due to the nature of the discussion these two strong men were having, not the drawl in which they spoke.

As far as I could understand this holy banter, apparently Troy-Built makes the best tractor, with John Deere running a close second (I note here that while there were no physical action as the words “John Deere” were spoken, I could feel the atmosphere significantly change, as when the angel entered Mary’s room, and I felt we should all remove our hats, had we any on our heads).

My wife’s uncles, two brothers and farm-boys whose roots stretch deep into these North Carolina mountains, were debating the higher issues of farming - or rather power gardening as it had become in their older age. At times in the conversation, the gulf of separation between their shared common knowledge and my agri-technical ignorance seemed infinite, as their impassioned words seemed to take on an enlightened, theological tone.

I smiled each time they would wink and nod at me, as I if knew a thing about the divinely bestowed machinery of which they spoke. Our rocking chairs beat out an accompanying rhythm, as they spent the next few hours poetically elocuting the step-by-step process of plowing a large garden, riddling their verbal music with synonyms for dirt (yes, there are more options than soil and sod), and punctuating sentences with hushed references to sacramental terms such as quality and horsepower. The air crackled as they spoke, my hair standing on end as I waited for lightning and thunder to confirm the veracity of their words. It was then I realized that I was unknowingly being invited into the Illuminati of Crop Farming – and no initiation rites were required of me.

I have often been in the context of conversations that I felt quite removed from, face against the glass, on the outside-looking-in at a world of hidden codes, knowing glances and assumed understandings.

Talking with God can seem the same to one not versed in the Bible, or ill-prepared to translate the “Christian-ese” many praying people speak in. Centuries of church regimen have convinced the common person that without magical incantations, liturgical passwords and pious persona, God is not very amenable to hearing the prayers of those less adept at the finer points of spiritual conversation.

Yet, the Scriptures themselves rail against such a violation of their essence. A gospel that is not accessible to the vocabularies of prostitute, pastor and president - is no gospel at all. God is not solely approached by those who have taken the time to memorize biblical phrases, but rather by those who have a heart to engage in the most important Conversation a human being can have. A heart to engage in the conversation – that’s what I had with the uncles in the room.

After some time, I began to feel as if I might understand why that new German tractor was giving Troy-Built a run for its money. Offering my contribution in a jumble of accent and swagger, I reached for metaphors that were familiar to express the unfamiliar. With smiling eyes pointed toward me, the two uncles noticeably lowered the standards of their philosophifications to include… me.

I choose to do the same for others who may want to enter the conversation I am having with God. Perhaps in simplifying my own language of prayer, I may not only invite another human being to enter in the Conversation, but I may also better understand what in the world God and I were talking about in the first place.

“And when you come before God, don’t turn that into a theatrical production either. All these people making a regular show out of their prayers, hoping for stardom! Do you think God sits in a box seat? Here’s what I want you to do: find a quiet, secluded place so you won’t be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can mange. The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense his grace.”

From Matthew 6 in The Message.

“The malice of sloth lies not merely in the neglect of duty (though that can be a symptom of it) but in the refusal of joy. It is allied to despair.”
Evelyn Waugh, from The Seven Deadly Sins

Pap, as we called him, was a soldier in World War II. As his grandson, most of my knowledge of his prime years came to me in the form of stories and banter shared between family members at reunions. Pap never seemed to feel it was necessary to tell me much about his life, so I never pried.

I’m told he was an important employee at our local military base, worked in a supply depot during the Great War, and never saw the front end of combat. I’m glad. I have some photos of him that he sent to my grandmother during the war, both shots taken while he poised himself on supply barrels. In one picture he is standing, and in another, sitting.

On the back of one image, the sitting one, Pap wrote a brief love note to my grandmother. I cried the first time I read it. He calls her his “star,” references the old tune “That’ll Be the Day,” and talks about reaching out to the sky to hold his celestial beauty in his arms again. Unlike so many of his war-time compatriots, he did hold his shimmering night jewel once again.

I used to sit with my grandfather on his front porch as he neared the end of his life on earth. Chained to an oxygen tank and a failing heart, he had burdens to carry my adolescent mind couldn’t appreciate. He occasionally held a cup of ice chips close – the only water allowed to touch his lips.

He had come to faith in Jesus later in his life, and he and I would spend long hours talking about the energies of prayer, the strangeness of church, the importance of oxygen and water (both of which were precious luxuries to him), our quirky small town and the mysterious topic of women. I’m glad we got in that last part.

I was with my grandfather on the morning he died. I sat by his bedside, holding his hand. He was trapped in a failing bio-system, crying out in a loud delirium to old army buddies, and more vigorously, to his mother. I cried at his bedside, unable to help him, unable to pray, and unable to emotionally grasp this transformation of a man of profound wisdom back into the semblance of a scared child.

To watch him be a man, and a child at the same time, caused a strange dissonance in my young heart. Then, he startled me. With a firm grip on my hand and a jerk of my body toward his, Pap stared right through me – he had something important to say.

Eyes locked, his as wide as silver dollars and my own full of tears, Pap was as silent and sane as I had ever seen him. With a stare that held me tighter than a vise, he spoke firmly and with military command on his lips:

“Daniel, enjoy your life.
Jesus will take care of you.
I love you, I love you, I love you….”

His eyes fell to half-mast, and his gaze slowly wandered from me. He was still alive, but seemed to have sunk into a solitude having said his peace. My grandfather’s one moment of sanity in the middle of his last moments, and he decided to spend it leaving me a legacy. I just wept at his bedside.

A short time later, Pap died in the ambulance outside of his home on Vine Street. I thought the legacy had been passed on in completeness. I was changed forever. But God felt one more stroke of the pen was in order.

A friend, working on the ambulance crew of our small town, called me a few days after my grandfather’s death. It seems he was on day shift the morning Pap died. With trembling in his voice, he told me that within minutes of driving off with my grandfather in the ambulance, Pap opened his eyes wide, smiled, and lifted his hands to heaven. “I see you Jesus, I’m coming!” were the words filled the ambulance.

With that declaration, he passed from this life to the next. His legacy concluded in a worshiping prayer, a prayer of return home. One last, human phrase to be breathed, and his greatest gift to God fully offered.

I pray differently now. I pray that life would not be a burden for my wife and children, or for the people on my prayer list. I ask of God that joy would follow their steps. I ask Him that life would pivot from being a “have-to” to being a “get-to” – a life lived out in consecration, and not simply in obligation.

If I’m going to look for joy, listen for joy, live in joy and bring joy to the world, I’ll have to infuse my own life with a joyful approach to all things that I do. In Pap’s words, I will enjoy my life, help others to enjoy their own, and help us all to enjoy one another’s lives.

I now approach my prayerful days expecting to enjoy my life, instead of relinquishing my attitude to the endless duties and responsibilities that may mark the hours.

“Give your servant a happy life, I put myself in your hands!”

From Psalm 85 in The Message

“While visiting the University of Notre Dame, where I had been a teacher for a few years, I met an older, experienced professor who had spent most of his life there. As we strolled over the beautiful campus, he said with a certain melancholy in his voice, “You know, my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.”
Henri Nouwen

I ran into her while I was out on my prayer walk. Sometimes I find that mingling my need to talk to God with the steady pace of my feet pounding the cement brings out the silent conversation that’s been brewing in my heart. I was just beginning to focus, a rare experience for me, when a frantic wave and an oncoming, swerving car caught my attention.

She pulled over. “Hi, Dan!” she said as she wound down her window. “It’s so good to see you!” I was a bit less jubilant, shaken from my meditative stupor, but it was still pleasant to see her. She’s a single mother. One with a smile most every time I’ve seen her.

She has a few beautiful kids, one of whom is a sweet little princess with Down’s Syndrome. I have a tiny place in my heart reserved for that young charmer.

That little star stole my heart one Sunday after our morning service in the high school where our church met. She took off from her mother, and began to run into the stairwell of the massive, vacant building. I saw the incident and bolted after her, afraid she might quickly become lost in a lonely hallway of a labarynthine building, and not know what to do. A dear friend of mine, who also has a Down’s girl, told me the story of how when he first came to our church, his daughter was lost for an hour in the school, and they found her sitting in her urine in a classroom, silent in response to their beckoning.

The image went through my mind over a millisecond’s time, and I began to run faster up the stairs. I caught her as she rounded a corner, on the cusp of escaping my view. I gently lunged for her, and we stumbled to the cold, hard floor. We both began to spontaneously laugh. She out of sheer glee that I had joined her in a game of chase, and I out of sheer joy I caught her before possible hours of emotional tragedy.

This woman’s husband has been in jail for years, and she has persevered through losses right and left. At one point, she was beat up in her home, in front of her kids, by some rough women in her neighborhood. A friend petitioned the police for some form of justice, but received a deaf ear. So, a group from our church began to pray, appealing the a Judge beyond time and space, and within a few weeks the perpetrators came to her door to authentically apologize, moved by some unseen force. They then moved out of the neighborhood. God gives relief to the oppressed, sometimes this side of heaven.

I remember another time where she came into our church office, and she shyly asked if we could chat. It seems she had run out of food, and needed two more days worth until her social assistance check came. She died a thousand deaths that she had to ask me for help. Her sunken eyes made me grieve that I had to help her.

She was thrilled to tell me now, in this meeting by the curb, that she had a new job. She was working at a variety store, and her sense of confidence was coming back. Her husband, now out of jail and wanting to make a new life for he and his family, was back in Ireland buying a home for them. She was moving to be with him in a few weeks.

I was overwhelmed with her joy. She always seems to have that effect on people – a smile undaunted by her dark realities. And in the middle of my prayer walk I was stopped by a living example that God redeems, loves, and moves in this world; in her world and mine. When the interruption to my prayers is a memorial to the truth that prayers are answered, I welcome the invasion of my space.

“What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving.”

From Matthew 6:31-32 in The Message