Faith, Family, & Focaccia

A faith and culture Mommy blog, because real life gets all mixed together like that.

Tag Archives: Poetry


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A Psalm for a Rainy Day

I had no intention of writing poetry today. I had far too much to do. Today marks exactly 4 weeks to zero hour for our anticipated/dreaded move to New Jersey and departure from Milan. I have Italian contracts to cancel, and insurance inventories to complete, and preschool programs to research. I don’t have time or emotional energy to even read any poetry, much less to write any.

But, today seemed determined to draw from my soul a psalm of lament. To begin with, it began far too early, after the twelfth or twentieth night cut short by the demands of life. And as I opened the shutters to let in the daylight, there was precious little light to see. After a few blessed days of daylight savings sunshine, the grey Milano overcoat of approaching winter had descended again to cloak the city in melancholy.

Then, at pre-school drop-off, the Gigglemonster staged an unexpected and unexplained anxiety episode. He didn’t want to go into the classroom; he didn’t want to play with his friends; he just wanted to go home with me. I really don’t know what was underlying his sudden clinging (his teacher promises he was fine all day), but regardless of the depth of his emotional display he certainly knows how to push all my buttons. The peace I have felt about how we’ve dealt with some recent bullying episodes evaporated. Was he trying to tell me he didn’t feel safe? Was there some trauma he hadn’t yet told us about? Should I even make him stay at school? Eventually his lovely teacher distracted him with a helping task, and he let me leave with a smile, but I could still feel his little arms wrapped tightly around my neck.

Then my morning women’s Bible study exposed more raw emotions. Most of the two hours of talk was good, but very heavy. And then there were a few comments with which I strongly disagreed but which I didn’t have the emotional energy to fight, including an assessment of the recent tragedy in the Philippines. I can cognitively understand the position that all pain in the world is just judgment on a fallen world, but I cannot believe that is the full story. Not from a God who hung on a cross to take judgment that would otherwise have fallen on us.

A little light Facebook scrolling was not the palliative I was hoping for. So much vitriol and hatred and political wrangling! Is this the culture to which I am returning? Remarks that three years ago would have elicited passionate, rhetorical response from my socially engaged conscience now push me toward hopeless tears. This was not the balm I needed.

So, finally I turned to scripture. I thought about the psalms, but my fingers paged a bit farther to a book I’ve only read before in snatches. Lamentations. This might not be the obvious choice to dispel heaviness from my heart, but for some reason I began to read and I couldn’t stop until I had read the last verse, out loud, in the solitude of my living room. It’s not that it was comforting exactly, although it certainly put my first-world, white-girl, lady-of-leisure problems into perspective. It is nearly five chapters of utter devastation, interspersed with confessions that this fate is deserved. And yet there is one interlude that placed a value on the weight in my heart.

“Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.’ The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” (Lamentations 3: 22-26, NIV)

OK. So maybe I could wait quietly with this heaviness of heart. Maybe there was something to be gained, something to be learned about faithfulness from letting the pain stand. And as I stopped resisting it, stopped trying to push it away, instead it poured out, overflowing in a poem. Just as the clouds began to release their heavy weight of rain, so my heart released the weight of words that couldn’t heal my vague, painful aching until they were expressed.

To feel that cleansing wash would have been gift enough. Then, miraculously, I found that a poem was exactly what I needed when Princess Imagination dissolved into tears tonight just after her bath, sobbing on my shoulder about her sorrow in leaving friends for a home she longs for, but only dimly remembers. Instead of my usual mommy-talk of encouragement, I shared with her my own pain and the revelations it has brought to me. I shared, and she smiled. Sometime words that speak in images are easier to understand.

So now I share those words with you. May they bring some light if there is rain in your day today.

The clouds are full of rain today, they can’t but overflow.

The grey sky droops above my head, grown tired before I left my bed.

Clouds steal the color from the world, and chill my heart, cause it to furl.

The clouds are full of rain today, they can’t but overflow.

*

The clouds are full of rain today, they can’t but overflow.

Yet, thoughtlessly, I’m unprepared. I have no shield, my head is bared.

I should have known the days of sun could not survive the year near done.

The clouds are full of rain today, they can’t but overflow.

*

The clouds are full of rain today, they can’t but overflow.

A drizzling patter is first to fall, a soft, slow moan to my heart calls.

Then, growing stronger, beating down rain wets my face and paints my frown.

The clouds are full of rain today, they can’t but overflow.

*

My heart is full of pain today, it can’t but overflow.

My sighing soul, weighed down by grief, for coming loss but not in chief.

More heavy is the grief of world torn up by storm, and hate, and words.

My heart is full of pain today, it can’t but overflow.

*

My heart is full of pain today, it can’t but overflow.

I read lament and misery. I reel from wrath, so stark to see.

I can’t embrace the angry claim, and yet I know the truth of shame.

My heart is full of pain today, it can’t but overflow.

*

My heart is full of pain today, it can’t but overflow.

How can my God of love require a pain that makes all hope expire?

Or nearly so, until, undressed, I see it grows from faithfulness.

Not faith I make, but must receive and finally rest in full reprieve.

My heart is full of pain and hope, it can’t but overflow.

*

My faith will rise anew each day, a gift from Light who cannot fail

So I must look beyond the clouds, must trust in grace to tear the shroud;

The sun and Son now just concealed. The world, my heart, will both be healed.

My faith will rise anew each day, a gift from Light who cannot fail.


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Ocean Empiphany

401I have always loved the places where the ocean meets the land. I love the sound of waves; I love the tang of salt on the air; I love the perfect clarity of the horizon; I love the slow descent of my bare toes through shifting and embracing sand; I love both the warmth of radiating sun and the chill of enveloping fog. My senses rejoice and my soul relaxes when I sit on the beach and stare out at the water. There is something beyond the sensory experience that speaks to me. There is something about that point of connection that focuses me. Simultaneously my soul is stilled in response to the vast blueness, while the fact of solid land offers me safety and comfort. I can encounter my incredible smallness in the world in a way that doesn’t diminish me. In many ways, the beach is my holy place.

Not that holiness really describes much of the past three weeks of Mediterranean vacationing. Put aside all the topless sunbathing (I can mentally recognize that the practice actually desexualizes women’s bodies in my current host cultures, even if it still feels scandalous to me). I’m not offering any cultural commentary here. The lack of “holiness” in my vacation is more a reflection of busy schedules, and clashing priorities, and frequent obligations to redirect my children’s behavior or to intervene with sibling bickering. This time has been a wonderful time for our family, but with intense togetherness rough edges get exposed and the results can be wearying.

397And the days set aside for “relaxing” on the beach are not quite a blissful escape. There’s still sunscreen to apply (and re-apply), and arguments over whose turn it is with the water gun, and fruitless efforts to preserve a sand-free zone on the towels, and efforts to get progress with independent swimming, followed by motherly anxiety about keeping a vigilant eye on my suddenly flotation-free child, and generally not much time to just sit and absorb the crashing of the waves and the profundity of existence.

Thankfully, my wonderful husband is universally proclaimed to be the “fun” parent in contexts like playing on the beach, and therefore the kids generally prefer his company on the rare moments when they both want to swim at the same time. So, on Wednesday, I had a few minutes to relax on my beach chair and read my book.

The book that has captured my attention this vacation is one I mentioned a few entries back: Ben Patterson’s Deepening Your Conversation with God. I think perhaps it is not a coincidence that on Wednesday I was reading a section that describes what it means to address God as Father. Patterson’s point, intimately illustrated, is that God as Father is both a frighteningly powerful Other and a shockingly intimate source of tender care. It’s a theological point I have always assented to, but that day it was real to me in a new way.

484You see, as I was reading the words, I was also glancing up regularly to check on my two little children playing in the surf. It’s not that I don’t trust my husband who was officially on parent-watch, but much as I love the ocean I am also aware of its power. The Gigglemonster and Princess Imagination are still just so small. One unforeseen undertow when Tyler’s attention was focused on the other child, and one of them could go under forever. And so, every 30 seconds or so, I would just dart a glance to check that I could see them both and that neither was venturing too far away from Daddy’s strong, protecting reach.

In one of those glances, my vision focused with sudden clarity. I saw the huge, limitless expanse of blue water, and my two children’s tiny heads gleefully bobbing on its edge. I felt, in one instant, two truths. First: that the ocean, however huge, was small and powerless in reference to the one who made it. Second, that this same Creator is also a loving Father whose attention can never be distracted from my two precious little ones.

There really are no words for the stunned wonder and humbling gratitude I felt in that moment. It was almost too overwhelming in the moment to fully register, and so I have been processing it since. I will not pretend that, over the last two days, this epiphany has constantly invaded my mind, but the echo is there. It has reverberated in my soul whenever I have given a moment’s silence to listen for it, and those quiet echoes have produced a new expression of awe that I offer now. If you feel even a sliver of the wonder of my moment on the beach, you will be blessed.

Ocean Epiphany

Rolling blue that stretches out / numbs my mind through vast expanse.

Each azure drop is known to You / and each wave’s movement in advance.

The Word that spoke the water’s life / is echoed by the murmuring tide.

Infinity of sea and sand / is dwarfed by You, who will abide.

Enormity, You still my tongue. / How can I speak to such a God?

You are too big, too strong, too whole / to speak to you reveals my fall.

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And yet, each drop of sparkling blue / that eddies round my children’s feet

obeys your Word and leaves them safe / to dance in wonder less complete.

They cannot grasp the awesome truth: / Creator God, so very near.

Not do I, in most moments, know / as EL-ELYON that voice I hear.

For this one moment focus snaps / I see in intimate relief

How you are one, both far and near, / deep love from One beyond belief.

Then I must pray as ne’re before / I cannot stand and yet I yearn

You are my terror and my Lamb / and give me love I’ll never earn.