 After clicking 'Play', please wait a few moments for the podcast to load. You can also listen on Spotify, Apple, Google and other platforms. Listen to other Forecasts here. Pastor, poet and winemaker Ryan Keating reads and describes two original poems about wine and communion soon to be published on Foreshadow. Then he describes how he has, in retrospect, understood his exilic journey to Cyprus as a pilgrimage, one in which he has discovered deep wells of healing. Finally, he shares how ancient Christian prayers and cooking with his family have provided nourishment. Links to Ryan's poems: And Lift Them (for victims of the recent earthquakes in Turkey; Agape Review) Overshadow Me (Agape Review) Facebook group: Where to Put Your Poems Art: Ascent of the Lower Ranges of Mount Sinai by David Roberts, public domain Ryan Keating is a writer, pastor, and winemaker on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. His work can be found in publications such as Saint Katherine Review, Ekstasis Magazine, Amethyst Review, Macrina Magazine, Fathom, Dreich, Vocivia and Miras Dergi, where he is a regular contributor in English and Turkish.
Ryan's other work on Foreshadow: Jonah Moves (Poetry, September 2022) Josh Seligman is the founding editor of Foreshadow and a co-host of its podcast, Forecast.
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Bryant Burroughs imagines a prayer from the Widow of Nain (Gospel of Luke) How long, how long must we kneel and cry to you, until our appeal is heard and you are stirred? Do the ears of God hear no sound? Are the hands of God bound? Are the eyes of God blurred? I had heard that you are Heaven’s Breath blowing into us a life that stops death. Yet here am I, bereft of all save sorrow. You, son of a widow and the Spy of God, you didn’t even try. Does your mother have another son I may borrow? God’s only Son, why is my only son here on this dreadful God-forsaken bier -- This son of unquenchable tears? But for no good have I wailed, and I wonder: who else have you failed? I’m left with sorrow to fill my years. Bryant Burroughs is a writer and lives with his wife Ruth in Upstate South Carolina with their three cats. His work has appeared in online literary sites such as Agape Review, Clayjar Review, Pure in Heart Stories and Faith, Hope & Fiction.
Related work on Foreshadow: The Widow Whose Son Lived by Bryant Burroughs (fiction, July 2022) Bryant's other work on Foreshadow: The Youngest Day (Poetry, November 2022) By Linda McCullough Moore It will be five years Friday, Sarah said, since my sister died. Yes, I think, five years, and thirty years since my father died, and a million different days since we were daughters, sisters. But shall we count that way? Will eternity be Measured? Does not memory say it won’t be marked by years, and does not love refuse accounting? Linda McCullough Moore is the author of two story collections, a novel, an essay collection and more than 350 shorter published works. She is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, as well as winner and finalist for numerous national awards. Her first story collection was endorsed by Alice Munro, and equally as joyous, she frequently hears from readers who write to say her work makes a difference in their lives. For many years, she has mentored award-winning writers of fiction, poetry and memoir. She is currently completing a novel, Time Out of Mind, and a collection of her poetry. www.lindamcculloughmoore.com
Linda's other work on Foreshadow: Untitled (Poetry, October 2022) A Little Thing I Wrote (Poetry, October 2022) Wait It Out (Poetry, October 2022) By Jessica Walters On Sundays after church while the adults had coffee and pie we played in the barn, the cornfield, the forest. We played kick the can, capture the flag, we played pretend, imagining the most elicit thing we could think of—that we were orphans. It changed slowly the way things do. Friends left home, moved away, had marriages their families disapproved of, had kids outside marriage, chose the wrong job, started asking questions. It was the questions, in the end, that led us away. But we didn’t foresee how they would unspool us and the old life. We asked questions as if those Sundays would house us when we returned-- Jessica Walters' work has been published in The Ormsby Review, [spaces] literary journal, Still, Agape Review, Scintilla and Solum, and her short story 'Glass Jars' was shortlisted for the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Writing. Holding an MFA in Creative Writing, she teaches creative and academic writing in Langley, British Columbia.
By Roger Belbin Now we don’t need to go out on Sunday. We can stay at home and view the screen. Our morning service is ready to play. We dress as we like, as we’re not seen. We can of course just sit at our ease, But we wonder if we should be standing Or sometimes should be down on our knees. Perhaps it’s all just too demanding. We miss the chance we used to take To greet our friends as we could then do, To celebrate peace with a handshake. But now we are learning something new. Yet, if you started late, don’t worry. You can skip a bit, if you’re in a hurry. Roger Belbin lives and writes in Cumbria, England.
By Sara Kyoungah White My visit to South Africa begins with darkness. Disheveled from the twenty-hour flight, I step into the room at the bed and breakfast and find the light switches will not work. The last time I had sat in total darkness was several months before, out at the family ranch, where the Milky Way evanesced out of the night sky and my husband snored beside me. But my first night alone in South Africa, I have only the flashlight on my phone. Strangers in a foreign land need blind courage; exhaustion saps me of any of that. I find the bed and lean back. At home, my children are watching the clock in the classroom, willing the minute-hand to click toward the dismissal bell. Here in the dark, on the other side of the world, the white sheet is over my head to keep the mosquitos from whining in my ears, and the temperature is unexpectedly cool. I am like a corpse in a morgue. Lying in the darkness, I begin to hear the sound that punctuates my sleepless nights in Johannesburg and, later, at the lodge in Pilanesberg National Park. Piet-my-Vrou. Piet-my-Vrou. The red-chested cuckoo emits this distinctive three-toned call for which it receives its Afrikaans name, Piet-my-Vrou. Its call fills my days and nights. Later, I learn that female cuckoos sneak into other bird species’ nests to lay a single egg, which it then abandons. The egg incubates quicker than those of the host, and when it hatches, the orphaned cuckoo chick’s first instinct is to kick the other eggs out. The unsuspecting host then raises the chick as its own. Records show female Piet-my-Vrous laying up to 20 eggs in one season, leaving in its wake entire broods of unborn chats, thrushes, and flycatchers smashed on the ground. There’s something familiar about it. In the daylight, the call of the Piet-my-Vrou is lost in a gaggling audioscape of insect and bird calls I do not recognize, cackling and rattling and whooping like a thousand unseen hosts. I look for eggshells on the path between my lodge and the viewing deck, where there is an artificial water hole, a perfectly round circle of greenish blue. * 1,200 million years ago during the Mesoproterozoic Era, when the supercontinent of Columbia was breaking apart and sexual reproduction was first evolving among eukaryotes, a volcano erupted in what is known today as Pilanesberg National Park. The park is molded from the fiery bowels of the earth, a millennia-long imprint of a colossal eruption that hurled boulders and masses of land as if they were handfuls of dust. Three concentric rings of hills, known as an alkaline ring complex, provide a uniquely transitional habitat between dry Kalahari desert and the moister Lowveld vegetation, which we witness with each turn of the safari truck—grass and sand on one side, low-lying trees and hills on the other. The rising or setting sun tinctures everything with a ruby gold light. Dawn and dusk are when the shadow of the ancient red fire passes over the land, glowing still, calling out life like a dare. Life answers. The animals are out, grazing, walking, mating, hunting. I catch a glimpse of the silhouette of a giraffe against the green hills, towering above the trees, and I can imagine a time when there were dinosaurs here. It is late November. Winter is at the threshold at home, knocking furiously on the door and shaking snowflakes to the ground in thick, rolling blankets. But in the southern hemisphere where I am, the rainy season of summer is beginning. Only the sun shows its quiet fury, and the red-chested cuckoo is calling, as if I have dropped through a portal into another world. * When I was a college student, I lived at a children’s home in the South Korean countryside for a year, teaching English. My home that year was a small two-room annex off the office building, facing the houses where the elementary-aged kids lived—the Joseph House for the boys, the Esther House for the girls. Most of the children who lived there were either abandoned or unwanted by their families. I was a mediocre teacher, and the classroom left me feeling flustered. It was my first time so far from home, and I began to feel like an orphan myself. In my off-hours I would find refuge in the nursery, where there was a single baby girl and her caretaker, a quiet elderly woman whose wrinkle lines had settled into a perpetual good-natured grin. The baby girl’s name was Soo-yeon. They had found her in a trash can. Something about being alone with a baby makes you completely un-self-conscious. I sang to Soo-yeon, something I would never do in front of anyone else. I held her little hands as she slept in my arms and made silly noises to make her smile when she awoke. I watched her grow from a tiny infant who mostly slept into a baby who could follow me with her eyes; from a baby who could sit without being held up, into an almost-toddler who could take wobbling steps. Years later, when I would have a baby girl of my own, I would think of her often. One day I came to the nursery, and Soo-yeon wasn’t there. The caretaker told me she had been adopted. * Our field guide at Pilanesberg is a long-legged, cheerful Afrikaans woman with a small face and broad shoulders. Her name is Lara, but everyone unwittingly keeps calling her Laura. Someone asks her, “What is the latest you’ve ever been out at night by yourself on the reserve?” She replies with only a few second’s hesitation, “Midnight.” She heard the call of a leopard one night, like a handsaw ripping through tree trunk, and leaped out of bed to find it. She has seen a thousand elephants in her lifetime, but she never seems bored. She and the other field guides spend hours each day driving gaping tourists and their cameras all over the reserve, scanning from left to right, right to left, to spot a rhinoceros or a hippo, hoping for the rare glimpse of a caracal. They speak sightings of animals into their radio with a holy pronouncement. On their days off, they go out together just to watch the dung beetles roll their perfectly-shaped balls. “I could watch them all day,” she says, and she has. Her eyes can spot the curves and shadows of creatures from miles away, like how one might guess the silhouette of a loved one by their limps and proportions. Each time she stops the truck to point into the distance, it takes us a moment before the transformation happens: what we took for inconspicuous rocks morph into a herd of kudu on the hills or a white rhinoceros lumbering. When night falls, Lara whips out a giant searchlight from the seat beside her as if conjuring it out of the darkness. One hand on the steering wheel and the other gripping the lamp, we bump along as she scans every tree and bush, sweeping the light from left to right, right to left, up and down trees, under bushes. “I’m looking for the shine of eyes!” she shouts back at us over the roar of the engine. She doesn’t put the light down until she’s turned the engine off back at the lodge. She is still hoping to spot the leopard. What is it that drives her? She and the other field guides do this day after day, and yet her wonder rivals ours, her depth of knowledge coloring our vision brighter. Her whole vocation seems to me a search and a prayer. She is like the woman who turns over the house to find her lost coin, or Samuel calling into the night. We once lost our three-year-old daughter on a Sunday at church. My husband and I ran up and down the street, shouting her name, ran into rooms and out of rooms, asked every passerby if they had seen her. It was like being trapped inside an hourglass, the dread burying us deeper with each passing second, until the glass shattered and we found her. She was sitting in the back of the sanctuary, laughing, attended by a host of adoring college girls who were feeding her marshmallows. * We learn that what appears to be unspoiled, virginal terrain is carefully restored farm and mining land, wrought at great cost. I wonder to myself if anything is compromised by knowing that Pilanesberg is more curated Jurassic Park than wild jungle. In the early 1980s, entire buildings and villages were dismantled and hauled away from Pilanesberg, every person and non-native species transplanted. In one of the most ambitious relocation projects ever, nearly 6,000 animals were then moved to the reserve from other parts of the continent. A buffalo grazing in a field would suddenly black out and wake up blinking in the light of a completely unfamiliar place. Project Genesis, they called it. One article in the Los Angeles Times describes it as “rivaling Noah’s efforts with his ark.” The park spent nearly as much on the game fence surrounding the park as it did on the game itself. We come across a lone elephant bull in the road, and Lara tenses. She checks all the signs carefully to make sure he is not in musth, an annual time of heightened testosterone levels that makes adult male elephants unpredictable and aggressive. He’s not, so we drive toward him, and he rewards us with a glorious saunter across the road, bathed in the orange filtered light of dusk, his tiny wrinkled eye never looking directly at us. I later find out that when elephants were first brought to the reserve under Project Genesis, young orphaned bulls reached sexual maturity ten years earlier than they should have and went on wild rampages, resulting in the deaths of 17 rhinoceroses and several people. The issue was resolved when older adult bulls were brought in, and the young culprits were culled. For how large he is, the bull elephant in front of us treads impossibly softly. He passes within arm’s reach, and his footfalls are all rustle rather than thunder. There is hardly a puff where his massive feet touch the earth. He is a dust-covered cloud, an apparition of the gloaming whose bearing is edged with mournfulness. That night when I lie in bed, listening to the Piet-my-Vrou call ceaselessly through the hours, I begin to think in my delirium that it wants me to hear something. It dares to repeat, over and over again, something I have forgotten. * When kids who grow up in children’s homes turn 18 in South Korea, the government hands them a check for a few thousand dollars, and they are left to fend for themselves. Many turn to gangs, drugs, and prostitution and have kids of their own they cannot care for, continuing the cycle of abandonment. One night while I was living at the children’s home, I was almost asleep when there was a terrific rattling of my front door, as if someone were trying to break in. The next morning, I learned that one of the aged-out kids had returned. The annex room in which I’d taken up residence was also where he would often spend the night. I did not interact much with the older kids; they were sullen and cold to outsiders like me, unwilling to extend the possibility of being hurt. They had been hurt too often. But the children I taught were friendlier, maybe because of their age. They were boisterous, quick to laugh, whip smart, unpredictable second to fifth graders. One darling girl with sass would be happily reciting the Lord’s Prayer with the class one moment and then hurtling chairs across the room the next. I grew close to the young boys of Joseph House, often helping them with homework and playing tag with them in the courtyard. Each of them came to trust me in their own way, and I grew fond of them, thinking of my own little brother at home. But there was a darkness in them that always caught me by surprise. One day I came into their house, and it was too silent. I found them all in the back room, crowded around a small figure. With a sinking heart I knew it was the one they always bullied. They had put a bag over his head, and his hands were tied, like something out of a torture scene, and he was sobbing. “I watched my father commit suicide,” tells me one boy who I grow particularly close to. He visits me often with his best friend, who wants to become the president of Korea one day. “He was drunk and cut his wrists with a broken glass bottle.” Another time, a boy asked to borrow my phone. He was in fifth grade, and I, being a foolish young girl, said yes. I learned too late that he had stolen into the office earlier and pilfered his mother’s phone number. I watched in horror as his hopeful face hardened slowly into a raw despair, his mother’s frantic, anguished tone seeping through the phone. “You cannot call me again,” I hear her say clearly. When he hangs up, he hands back the phone without saying a word, his eyes like shuttered windows. * When we come across a parked pickup on the shoulder of a road, Lara slows and gives it a grim look-over as she drives past. It’s empty, with disheveled cartons and boxes rammed into the backseat. She mumbles something indecipherable about poachers, says something in Afrikaans into her radio, and kicks the engine back into high gear. The rhino’s horn sells for more than gold or cocaine on the black market, says Lara. To make sure to get every last bit of it, a poacher will cut off the entire face, leaving behind a ghastly carcass. Poaching became a real problem during the pandemic, when the park was closed to visitors. The rangers and caretakers at Pilanesberg recently made the emotional decision to cut every rhinoceros horn in the park down to a stub, in a last-resort attempt to deter poaching. So much of human–nature interaction these days seems to be a matter of choosing the lesser of two grave evils. All the data show that cutting off a rhino’s horn has no ill effects on its quality of life. But Lara and the rangers have witnessed firsthand how the loss of a horn can impact the entire ecosystem. Take for example two young lion brothers, she says, who in a burst of immature bravado decided to go after a rhinoceros one day. They were underpowered and soon realized it. One lion went straight for the face of the rhino. It would have been gored to death had there been a horn. I lie in bed awake and listen to a distant leonine desperation sounding into the blackness of night. I wonder if it is the same lion that attacked the hornless rhinoceros, the same lion we saw that morning, pacing a game trail and pausing to stare at us, black lips slightly parted. I had never heard a lion roar before. I know they make many sounds. But the one I heard that morning was filled with such longing, I was unexpectedly moved by compassion, not fear. I thought of my dog when he dreams in his sleep, twitching his legs, whining and baying for something instinctual. I thought of how babies can be comforted by a sweater that smells like the mother, or how a plant will always, however painstakingly, turn its face toward the light. I thought of the Piet-my-Vrou calling. The lion we saw that morning scented a wildebeest before he saw it. From deep inside his chest came an anguished groan, like one who bore a curse, or one who knew what it meant to pray. I can never un-hear it. * When the people of southern Africa hear the call of the Piet-my-Vrou, they know the rains are coming and begin to plant their seeds. I had journeyed to the other side of the world without knowing that it was this call I had come to hear. Every psalm I read that year in Korea reminded me of the children I lived with. Every night as I journaled my prayers, I sowed many tears on their behalf, praying for a reaping of joy, a bending of destiny. In the nursery, I often sang a Korean song over Soo-yeon based on Psalm 121. In it are bound all my hopes for her. The Lord will guard you, He is your shade at your right hand. The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon at night. Lift your eyes to the hills--where does your help come from? Your help comes from the Lord, who made you and loves you. Prayer is like bird watching, says Rowan Williams. You sit for hours and wait for the burst of wings and color to flash before your eyes. Or prayer is like a game drive. Sometimes you go for hours without seeing a thing, and then you round a bend to find a serval in the road. Sometimes you stare off into the trees and feel the prick of eyes—a kudu with whimsically twisted horns is cautiously looking back. Day and night, you wait for the moment when the radio crackles to say there are lions in the east field; when you flash a beam of light into the night, and a pair of shining eyes answers in return. Day and night, you wait for the moment when you hear a call sounding. You wait for the moment when you call in return, and the answer is not rejection but love. I pray for them still. Sara Kyoungah White is a writer and editor living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her essays and poems have appeared in publications like Christianity Today and Ekstasis. She serves as a senior editor on staff with the Lausanne Movement, a Christian nonprofit.
 After clicking 'Play', please wait a few moments for the podcast to load. You can also listen on Spotify, Apple, Google and other platforms. Listen to other Forecasts here. To introduce the new season, co-hosts Jarel, Will and Josh each answer the two questions that they plan to ask their guests this year: 1) Can you describe a physical or spiritual journey (or both) that you have been on? and 2) What are the text(s) that strengthen and nourish your faith and life? These questions follow the theme for this year, 'Songs of Ascents: Pilgrimage and Worship', exploring the journeys we take in search of wholeness in God and the resources that fuel us.
Art: Ascent of the Lower Ranges of Mount Sinai by David Roberts, public domain By Alan Altany From my computer and desk in this white-walled home office with Grunewald’s “Crucifixion” and “Resurrection” on one wall, an icon of Christ, crucifix, and photos of my kids and dog on another, this is my place to launch voyages in the geography of time, space, and even eternity. This is the hinterland for my work in writing poems about God and ants, sloth and saints, melancholy & mysticism, wherever my mind and imagination take me through time and into the breach of eternity’s saturation of the finite; this is my satellite orbiting earth, my mountaintop monastery, my daily pilgrimage of going nowhere. From this solitary place come visions, for “your cell will teach you everything”; silence and strokes on the keyboard, soulfulness and simple love are here for creating a godly-driven experiment of emptying my petulant ego-drama, a place of gritty and painful grace under a spinning, overhead fan, as I leap & plow into mysteries where here and eternity are one. Alan Altany, Ph.D., is a septuagenarian college professor of religious studies. He’s been a factory worker, swineherd on a farm, hotel clerk, lawn maintenance worker, small magazine of poetry editor, director of religious education for churches, truck driver, novelist, etc. He published a book of poetry in 2022 entitled A Beautiful Absurdity: Christian Poetry of the Sacred. His website is at https://www.alanaltany.com/.
Alan's previous work on Foreshadow: The Seven Deadlies (Poetry, October 2022) Grunewald's Crucifixion (Poetry, September 2022) Habit of Being Wise (Poetry, October 2022) By Steven Searcy It is an ancient wound yet perpetually fresh, rubbed raw again and again-- to wake each day in a world where work never ceases and never fully succeeds, where whispers and glimpses of beauty keep us clinging to a hope that goodness could be real and lasting, yet the continual calamities, frustrations, and aches never allow a full certainty that anything will ever be all right in the end. How stuck in the middle we are, on this earth that we inhabit-- constantly drawn toward a bliss beyond what we now know, yet tethered to a hell that never seems to die, and we all stand, stumbling, unwieldy, straddling the chasm. Steven Searcy lives with his wife and three sons in Atlanta, Georgia, where he earns a living working as an engineer in fiber optic telecommunications. His poetry has been published in Ekstasis Magazine, Reformed Journal, Fathom Magazine and The Clayjar Review.
Steven's previous work on Foreshadow: Misjudged (Poetry, October 2022) Morning Prayer (Poetry, August 2022) Do What Cannot Be Left Undone (Poetry, September 2022) Being (Poetry, October 2022) |
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