Perhaps you’ve heard the anecdote of the child who cried out for comfort in the night. When the parent arrived, the child was assured, “Don’t be afraid. God is right here with you.” The child responded, “I know, but I need somebody with skin on.”

Comfort with skin on. This is not an unusual human yearning.

A friend recently prompted me to dig out a book from my home library, a book I cherished as a child, and recently recovered by purchasing a copy through a reseller. It is The Golden Bible, illustrated by Feodor Rojankovsky, published in 1946, the year I was born. In it are more than fifty stories from the part of the Hebrew scriptures that I’ve always known as the Old Testament. The entire book is filled with colorful and evocative illustrations that made the drama of the Bible come alive to me.

On the cover, “God” of the Creation Story is pictured as an old man with a white beard, aloft on a cloud of cherubs. Just above this central figure, “God” is also pictured as a figure shrouded in something like a sheet emerging from behind dark clouds. Presumably this is the “Holy Ghost.”

I don’t remember how or when I determined that God is NOT an old man with a white beard looking down from a cloud. In any event, my theology never got stuck in those literal and pictorial depictions I so loved as a child.

Now, as I hope you can discern from other writings on this blog, I trust in God who is both a mystery beyond comprehension and a presence nearer than breathing. The Christian story of incarnation, redemption, and eternal love brings me the revelation of God with skin on. And that skin, with respect to the care of other human beings, is mine.
 
 

 
LOVE SONG
 

You are the butterfly whose wings
  stir up a rainfall in Peru.
The tropic fern unfurled that brings
  an earthquake in Tibet is you.
 
The cry bursting from blackbirds’ throats
  that turns the tide on Iceland’s shore
is you, and Sahara’s dusty motes
  rosing the sunset in Lahore.
 
Who is the breath of an infant’s sigh
  that sparks the heart of a unicorn?
The rock streaking the moonless sky
  that wafts a feather around Cape Horn?
 
You, the invisible silver thread
  between Zanzibar and Amsterdam.
Even by thought unlimited,
  whatever the you may be, I am.
 
 

Barbara Loots
 

I don’t believe in “just deserts.” Or just desserts, either. The image that comes to mind is the movie scene that’s known as “the greatest pie fight ever.” You can watch it on YouTube Here. The movie is The Great Race made in 1965, with Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, and others performing slapstick at its messiest.

In the pie fight scene, Tony Curtis, in a white suit, walks unscathed (mostly) through a bakery where pastry missiles are flying in all directions, landing indiscriminately, creating a chaos of destruction. A metaphor for life, surely.

Certain people, it seems to me, get clobbered time after time with every messiness life can bring, while others–like me–don’t. It has nothing to do with justice either way. In fact, I have to think there really is such a thing as bad luck. And good luck, too.

Some will quote the saying, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” But that’s so not true for many, many hard-working people. Lucky is random. Lucky is impartial. Lucky is a terrible judge of character.

There’s an old joke about the person who prayed fervently, “Lord, please let me win the lottery!” Day after day, the same prayer. Finally, one day, a voice thunders from on high: “Help me out. Buy a ticket.”

Maybe some machinery of creation bought me a really good ticket. I’m extremely grateful, and I feel obliged to distribute the proceeds of my life to the best of my ability.

Hallmark published this verse of mine a while back, and probably holds a copyright. But here it is anyway, because it might be the definitive statement of my personal philosophy, and I’d hate for it to disappear forever into some corporate archive.

To have a grateful attitude

is always to believe

That everything in life

is but a gift that we receive.

So if the day brings laughter,

dark clouds, or hills to climb,

The heart can still be thankful

for hope and strength and time.

And gratitude remembers

throughout the longest night

That hands were made for holding,

that morning brings the light.

 
 

Barbara Loots

©HMK Inc.

Today I went six for six in Hardboiled Egg. You know what I’m talking about. Six eggs perfectly hard boiled, and peeled without demolishing any of the whites. Anyone who tells you they have a foolproof method for making perfectly boiled and peeled eggs every time is lying. You are not a fool. Eggs are very independent. (If Julia Child didn’t say that, she should have.)

Perhaps you’ve heard the disclaimer: “Cook?? I can’t even boil an egg!” Well, I’m here to assure you that boiling eggs–or anything else you do with an egg–is a culinary art not to be sneezed at. So just pick a method that seems to work for you, and stick with it.

Neighbors of ours in what is known as the urban core installed a chicken coop in their backyard. City ordinance permits chickens but no roosters. For a while, we enjoyed regular deliveries of eggs straight out of the chicken.

Then tragedy struck. A raccoon broke in. Bye-bye chickens. The flock is being restored with better security, and I’m looking forward to eating more of those beautiful and delicious eggs. The shells can be pale green or brown or peach colored. The yolks are sunrise orange. I believe these eggs are significantly superior to grocery store eggs, and I am delighted to support the enterprise.

Oh, and just in case you wondered, here’s how I cook hardboiled eggs:

Put the eggs in a deep saucepan and cover completely with cold water.
Bring the water to a rolling boil.
Turn off the heat and let the eggs sit for 15 minutes. (This is the part where you might have to experiment a bit)
Select one egg for your “tester.” (It’s best to plan for a sacrificial egg when you’re counting on a certain batch for, say, deviled eggs.)
Run your test egg under cold water. Tap the shell to crack it all over.
Gently try to slip off the shell all in one piece (rarely happens).
Cut the test egg in half to check the texture of the yolk and the white.
If you like it, you’re good to go.  If not, let the remaining eggs sit in the hot water for a while longer. (I warned you it’s not foolproof!)
Pour out the hot water and run cold water over the remaining eggs (with ice!)
When the eggs are cool, tap to crack the shells and peel away.

Wrecked eggs become egg salad or salad garnish. Nothing is ever lost.

Although I’ve read that Mother Teresa could be rather testy sometimes in mustering obedience in God’s service, she ultimately did a bit of good, don’t you think? In honor of her canonization, here’s one of those “I was Beethoven’s roommate” stories–a second-hand or third-hand or even more remote encounter with grace and glory.

A friend of a friend tells the story of a friend of hers who got on an airplane and settled into his seat. In due time, a fellow passenger made her way down the aisle and sat in the seat beside him. He was speechless. It was Mother Teresa.

As the plane began its take-off, Mother Teresa drew out her rosary and began to pray aloud. The man, lapsed Catholic that he was, nevertheless began praying along with her. Mother Teresa then asked him, “Do you pray the rosary often?” He replied, ‘Uh, no.” (Who can lie to Mother Teresa??) Mother Teresa took his hand and placed her rosary into his palm. “You will now,” she said.

As the man told and retold this story, it became known around the community. One day, a woman approached him. “Such-and-such a person is seriously ill. May I borrow Mother Teresa’s rosary for prayer together?” Of course, said the man. Subsequently, the patient made a full recovery. After that, the rosary began its own holy road trip of prayer. Unfortunately, at some point, the rosary was lost. So, all that my friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend has left is the wonderful story.

The wonderful story. Sometimes that’s all you need for sustaining miracles.
 
 

THE OLD SOLDIER SPEAKS
 

They took a large sum of money and gave it
to the soldiers, bribing them to say, “His disciples
came in the night and stole the body while we
were sleeping.” from Matthew 28
 
I took the money. But with my last breath,
I tell you, I am not afraid of death
because of what came over me that day.
An earthquake rocked that blasted stone away
and lightning struck us blind.
  The corpse was gone.
Some women came and found us, close to dawn,
two simple soldiers up against the wall,
about to cut our throats and end it all
before the charge of dereliction fell.
So what would you have done?
  We ran like hell.
Of course, they found us, then cooked up a lie
to spread around, and bought our alibi.
 
Years later, I still dream about that night—
the heaving ground, the terrifying light.
But from the start, no matter what I said,
  I knew that Galilean wasn’t dead.
 
 
Barbara Loots

My birthday’s coming up.

Once upon a time, charmed by Yeats’s “When you are old and gray and full of sleep….” I wrote a poem imitating his form called “A Note to My Old Age.” So…am I there yet? Checking the description in my poem, I’d say no. Emphatically no. My note to myself will have to wait.

On the other hand, my poem “Advice to a Younger Woman” still holds up. Published in the Helicon Nine Reader, and also in a couple of my personal collections, it’s about the possibility of starting over. Clean slate. New life. Thirty or forty years after the events that figured in that poem, I’m sure that starting over can happen–over and over again.

Perhaps the capacity to start over was programmed into my personality when I was a child, a military dependent. We moved a lot. My early life was always about anticipating the next thing and letting go of the last. I know other people cherish the memory of growing up in one place and the lifelong ties that sustain them. For me, it’s the energy of change, a continual motion forward in time. Which is better? How could anyone know? You got what you got.

However, if you’re lucky, if you’re listening, if you’re me, sometimes you can move into someone else’s memories, and feel embraced by good old days you never had.
 

RETURNING TO THE ISLAND
 

These are the trees we hang the hammock on.
There is the spot where Billy caught a pike.
The hearth that our father fitted stone by stone.
The smoky old lamp our mother used to like.
 

Here are the chairs, no two of any kind.
The model boat with its musty sail half-mast.
There are the tools and nails we left behind
to fix the neglect from summer seasons past.
 

Somewhere we’ll find the coffee, matches, keys.
Everywhere, mice will show us where they’ve been.
Under no nearer, wiser stars than these,
everything dies, and something grows again.
  
Barbara Loots
Mezzo Cammin 2011

Kids and cats famously love cardboard boxes. Give a kid a gift that comes in a big box, and the box itself may become the best gift ever. At this moment, Bob the Cat is curled up in a cardboard box that contained some documents I brought from the printer. It’s a shallow box, perhaps 12 by 18 inches. She claimed it before it was empty, and for several days, she has sat, snoozed, and snuffled around in the box beside my desk.

There’s a sense of security in boxes. For me as a writer, a box of one kind or another provides the boundary that guides my imaginative and spiritual journey. It is the restriction that paradoxically enables freedom.

One of my boxes is the discipline of rhyme and meter. Ideally, when a poem starts, I don’t know where it’s going. The exploration of language through rhyme and meter actually shapes the thought, not the other way around. The English language offers a vast range of choices. How fortunate I was to be born into it. Then again, if you were born into Urdu or Spanish or Chinese, you could be feeling exactly the same way. But you probably wouldn’t be thinking in exactly the same way.

Another of my boxes is Christianity. It would be impossible to explore every possibility of God (or not-God, for that matter) without a framing of story, ritual, and community. I have accepted my box of faith as a way of finding both security and freedom. For the limited time I have to figure out this life, choosing to think inside the box helps a lot.

Thank you, Bob the Cat.

My friend Bill Tammeus (locate his excellent blog on the list to the right) recently published his latest book, The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers, Build Faith. One chapter is titled “Does it help to compare religions?” He presents several possible views, including the oft-heard opinion that goes something like this: “All religions boil down to the Golden Rule.” Check out the rest of Bill’s discussion when you purchase his book Here.

My mind leaps immediately to the personal. Am I a Christian because I carefully researched a number of pretty good religions and picked the one I thought was the best? I’ve probably had more opportunity than most people to do just that.

As the daughter of a preacher’s kid, I was literally grandfathered into the Christian faith right from the cradle. Growing up in a military family, I lived in cultures as diverse as Japan, Libya, Spain, and Long Island. We worshiped in a number of churches of the Protestant persuasion, including Dutch Reformed, Methodist, non-denominational, and Presbyterian. We rubbed shoulders with Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, and Pentecostals. I didn’t know many Jewish people until I became an adult, but I made up for lost time by falling in love with a Jewish man. I scrambled to learn how I could embrace both his Jewishness and his professed atheism. I couldn’t. And that ended that. However, the excursion into atheism was possibly the richest religious learning experience of all. But that’s another story. For more than fifty years, I have worshiped, studied, served, and doubted as a Presbyterian.

As a docent at the art museum, I’ve added Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Islam to the list of religions or traditions about which I know a little. I respect and value the practice of religion as a path to beauty, meaning, and goodness.

With so many possibilities, it would take more than one lifetime to dabble around in religions until you settled on the best one. So I have arrived at this opinion: You don’t pick your religion. Your religion picks you. Or not.

When your religion, your true faith, comes along, it grabs you and doesn’t let you go. It’s irresistible. Maybe it’s like falling in love. You make a commitment and live ever after with the surprises that follow–doubt, disappointment, ecstasy, enlightenment all rolling along together.

Some people don’t find love. Some people don’t find religion. I don’t know why. What you expect, what you seek, what you yearn for–these things matter. What you got born into probably has something to do with it, too.

Here’s a hymn that says it all for me.
 

O LOVE THAT WILT NOT LET ME GO
 
O Love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
that in thine ocean depths its flow
may richer, fuller be.
 
O Light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
my heart restores its borrowed ray,
that in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
may brighter, fairer be.
 
O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow thru the rain,
and feel the promise is not vain
that morn shall tearless be.
 
O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
and from the ground there blossoms red
life that shall endless be.
 
 
George Matheson, 1842-1906
 

In the Sunday newspaper, I saw a photo of a woman standing next to a long staircase in her home adorned with a needlepoint runner. Needlepoint! She had spent seven years making a work of art for people to walk on! I call that devotion. And joy.

I’ve had my little bouts with needlepoint. And knitting. And macramé. (Macramé?? Yes, I am that old.) In none of these activities did I discover devotion and joy. Impatience and frustration, yes. Anger and inadequacy, yes. How many little work-kits of unfinished projects have come and gone in my life??

I’m in awe of people who have the patience to pursue a work of beauty to the finish–whether a handcrafted home accessory or a painting on the wall at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I’ve come to believe that 99.99% of creativity is just sticking with the work. I have no research to back this up. But maybe you’ve had the same thought from time to time.

I’m a writer. I play with words. Sometimes I finish a poem. They are often short. In the lit’ry biz, they are called “lyric poems” because historically they originated as song. As a writer for Hallmark Cards, I knew that about sixteen lines was the limit for verse, and I fell into the habit. Or perhaps I just took seriously my old English professor, Dr. Eells, who leaned back, tented his fingers, and intoned: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” (Quoting Polonius in Hamlet–and there’s more to say about that….)

I usually write about things I’m actually looking at, or about factual events I know of. To me, the writing of, say, a novel that involves an unimaginable number of words and hours, with characters and stories that never actually existed–well, that’s what I call creative!

People I meet sometimes drop their eyes and demure: “I wish I were creative.” Trust me. When I see an achievement like that needlepoint staircase runner, or a painting like Richard Estes’ Central Savings in the Nelson (to name just one of 69,000 works in the collection), I tend to think, “Wow. I wish I were creative.”

Creativity is the nature of Nature. YOU are IT. Just live your life.
 

CREATIVITY
 
 
Repetitious nature
  began creating things:
Replicating butterflies
  with lavish velvet wings;
 

Multiplying maple trees
  with many-handed boughs;
Sailing fleets of common geese
  with quick and curious prows;
 
Lining up the little grass
  and teaching it to sway
To and fro in unison
  on a windy day.
 
Then capricious Nature
  chose another game:
Tried her hand at snowflakes,
  made not two the same.
 
 

Barbara Loots
The Lyric

Some years ago, at my church, I helped lead a series of classes for people engaged in what we called “caring ministries.” The primary skill for helpful care of others is this: Listening.

And you know what? We’re not very good at it.

For the class, we did many practice sessions, if only to get across the realization that listening is difficult. You can click around the web to find lots of information about listening vs. hearing. In brief, the human mind is capable of processing words at a rate of upwards of 400 words per minute. Normal talk takes place at about 125 words per minute. That leaves a lot of brain cells waiting for the next word. And our brains make up the difference with plenty of clutter. Attention drifts. We quickly stop listening. Even worse, because we like to talk back, give answers, and provide solutions, we are usually thinking of the next thing we want to say. We are pretty hopeless at listening.

When I take myself to the vast silence of a natural place like the Island, I practice listening. Feel free to laugh here–because clearly the result of what I call listening is the outpouring of an avalanche of words! Nevertheless, listening has been a theme of mine from way back. I’m always trying to get better at it.
 

IT IS THE TIME TO LISTEN
 
It is the time to listen. Things
have begun to speak again
more wonderful than music, more
articulate than men:
the animals who question
and stones that mourn.
Oh, who will translate for us these
green tongues of corn?
 
 
Barbara Loots
The Lyric

One of my favorite novels is Contact by Carl Sagan. I like the movie, too, starring Jodie Foster as a young scientist who listens patiently and stubbornly to sounds from space, and discovers a signal transmitted from beings in a star system far beyond our galaxy. In the movie, the young astronomer asks her father if there’s other life in the universe. His response went something like this: “If there isn’t it’s a terrible waste of space.”

At Dickinson Island, you can actually see the Milky Way, the constellations, and all the bright named stars. I picked out Vega, the star of the Sagan story. Looking out into the starscape, along with reading books on current theories of how the universe came to be, I can’t imagine that a God worthy of our devotion wouldn’t have come up with way more ideas than…well, just US.

A poem I go back to again and again was written around the turn of the 20th century by Alice Meynell, a well-known writer in her day. She reminds me that while it is very important to cherish and live out our own stories, we really have no idea of all there is.

Couldn’t we begin to explore the universe simply by listening very carefully to each other?
 
 

CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE
 
 
  With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.
 
 But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How He administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.
 
 Of His earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.
 
 No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.
 
 Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way,
Or His bestowals there be manifest.
 
 But, in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.
 
 O be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

 
Alice Meynell   (1847-1922)