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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.
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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) By Joshua Seligman  Lindisfarne Castle, Holy Island, by Derek Voller, CC BY-SA 2.0 Heaven on earth, we need it now I'm sick of all of this hanging around I'm sick of sorrow, I'm sick of the pain I'm sick of hearing again and again That there's (never) gonna be peace on earth These lyrics come from U2's song 'Peace on Earth', which came out in 2000.* The world was a different place twenty-three years ago, but the lyrics remain timely, expressing a longing for God's peace to come in the face of personal and global evils. Millennia earlier, the Psalmist described a similar longing in different words: O Lord, deliver my soul from unjust lips And from a deceitful tongue.... Woe is me! My sojourning was prolonged; I dwelt with the tents of Kedar. My soul sojourned a long time as a resident alien. With those who hate peace, I was peaceful; When I spoke to them, they made war against me without cause. Psalm 120:2, 5–7 As pastor Eugene Peterson writes about this psalm, 'Such dissatisfaction with the world as it is is preparation for travelling in the way of Christian discipleship. The dissatisfaction, coupled with a longing for peace and truth, can set us on a pilgrim path of wholeness in God.' Such a quest for wholeness in God has motivated pilgrims -- travellers with a spiritual purpose -- for generations. A few hundred years after Christ, the desert fathers and mothers left their possessions and status in single-minded pursuit of God. Their journeys led them into the wilderness to pray and wrestle against evil: in Egypt, they moved to the desert, while in the British Isles, where I live, many of these monks and nuns settled down on wind-swept, desolate islands off the Irish and Scottish coasts. Modern pilgrims still visit these sites today, which in the Celtic Christian tradition are called 'thin places', as visitors often sense there a seemingly thin veil between heaven and earth. One such thin place is Holy Island, Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast of England, where St Aidan established a monastic presence that transformed the region, the effects of which endure to this day. I had the opportunity to visit Holy Island one sunny day last autumn. I was struck by the overwhelming sense of peace that filled me during those few hours of walking on the island and that remained with me long afterwards. But many would say we don't need to travel vast distances to encounter heaven on earth, as powerful as such physical journeys can be. Some Christian traditions say that we can find thin places every week when the church gathers to break bread and worship God. The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, used by the Orthodox Church, begins with the words 'Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit'. The priest thus announces at the start of the service that the worshipping community is about to embark on a spiritual journey into the heavenly kingdom, joining the worship that is already happening there. 'The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession', writes theologian Alexander Schmemann. 'It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom....It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world.' In other words, worship is an ascent into the presence of God, and this experience transforms our ongoing relationship with the world around and within us. Perhaps the point of visiting a thin place, whether a holy island or a church service, is to absorb its qualities so that we can help make our homes and work places and communities little thin places of their own. Such journeys can also help us identify God's presence wherever we are and wherever we go. To a smaller degree, do we not also make such ascents whenever we step outside ourselves to honour the image of God in the people before us and whenever we open our ears to listen for God's still, small voice? Conversely, if we fail to recognise Christ in others, we fail to make the heavenly ascent. As St John Chrysostom warns, 'If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, you will not find Him in the chalice.' The ancient Hebrews also understood worship as an ascent. Their primary thin place, the temple in Jerusalem, was on a mountain, so their travels there for annual feast and holy days involved a literal climb. On their ascents, they would sing songs to accompany them. We call these the Songs of Ascents, and they can be found in the Book of Psalms. These fifteen psalms (120 to 134) cover a range of topics, from issues of the human heart to family life to socio-political concerns to blessings for the road. It's as if the songs enabled the pilgrims to bring the entirety of their lives before God in prayer, communally and individually, as they approached the temple, as they prepared for worship. At the same time, I imagine the songs gave them spiritual fuel for the hike. The Songs of Ascents and the pilgrimages for which they have been sung are the focus of Foreshadow this year. The editors and co-hosts look forward to sharing creative writing, podcast conversations and other works that offer personal stories and reflections on the journeys we take, spiritual and physical, in search of heaven on earth and wholeness in God. We hope these works provide courage, insight and inspiration for the path ahead. -- * Although in the original song, the line is 'There's gonna be peace on earth', in a live version, the line is 'There's never gonna be peace on earth'. Joshua Seligman is the founding editor of Foreshadow and a co-host of its podcast, Forecast.
By Michael Lyle  Art: Ludvig Christian Møgelgaard, Public domain The Carvers were a trial. There was a Carver on the rescue squad, a Carver in the church choir and every Sunday school class in the church, a Carver in the high school band, a Carver in the middle school, a Carver in the elementary school, a Carver on the church softball and volleyball teams, a Carver on community t-ball and soccer teams, a Carver at every picnic, meeting, or prayer group, a Carver in every parade. Every manifestation of church or community included at least one Carver. Hank Carver, sometimes-employed husband, father (five times over), and generally good fellow, attended worship regularly, worked faithfully with the rescue squad and Ruritan, and did whatever good he could whenever he could. His wife Amelia (who on the occasion of her fifth delivery insisted that the doctor remove all possibility of a sixth) taught Sunday School, sang in the church choir (along with her eldest, a son and exceptional soprano), attended every PTA meeting, volunteered every time the pastor asked for help, and did whatever good she could whenever she could. The lesser Carvers (son Jamie, daughter Edith, daughter Grace, daughter Candy, and son Joey), were, quite literally, everywhere else. It was not unusual to find several Carvers at the same place, and/or at multiple and widely diverse places, at the same time. The Carvers, like Moby Dick, were believed by many to be ubiquitous. The Carvers also possessed other universally attested traits in addition to their great, good hearts, outgoing personalities, and omnipresence. Their cars were frequently under repair, their bills were usually overdue, the children perennially lacked transportation, among other things, and they were often caught in the grips of some extenuating circumstance or other. Hank was perpetually on the brink of a new job, or just one seventy-five dollar part away from getting his truck back on the road. Amelia’s worn-out sedan was frequently one tank of gas, or one inflated tire, short of a trip to the doctor’s office, the pharmacy, the school (to drop off or pick up one of the kids, or to meet with one of their teachers), the church, or the supermarket. The kids usually lacked the instrument necessary for them to play in the band, funds for a week at summer camp, the deposit for the school trip, breakfast, funds for the youth ski trip, new shoes, hats, coats, umbrellas, lunches, belts, matching socks, dinners, pairs of glasses, or prescriptions filled. They lacked these things until someone in the community heard about it and came to the rescue. If it takes a village to raise a child, it took an entire town to keep the Carvers going. The Carvers were at the heart of the community, and the community’s heart never had an opportunity to stray very far from the Carvers. It was a textbook symbiotic relationship, except the community sometimes felt inadequate and occasionally resentful of its role. The Carver kids were legendary for emptying any and every candy dish a household had to offer in one quick pass. It was nothing to see them flying out the door, mouths and pockets at maximum capacity. If no treats were clearly visible, one of the little ones would usually ask about availability. Certain families stopped answering the phone on the days Candy would likely need a ride to (and of course from) soccer practice. In those days, before the Internet and smartphones, many acquired caller ID primarily to identify the Carvers. Everyone knew that once they agreed to give Candy a ride to the soccer game, or pick Edith up from band practice, or get Joey from preschool, they could be saddled with the child for hours, and sometimes through at least one meal. And because folks were uncomfortable dropping a nine-year-old off at home when they knew no one else was there, everyone opened their minivan doors, their refrigerators, and their hearts over and again despite promises recently and vehemently made to themselves to the contrary. Eventually, the Carvers found their way into the very language of the community. If one had provided money, transportation, clothes, food, or any other means of support, or, as happened on occasion, all of the above, they considered themselves “Carvered.” Giving a lot of money, keeping a child overnight, or paying a utility bill was considered to be a “Major Carvering.” Dropping a Carver child off at home, inviting one to a family meal, or swinging by the Carver home to take a late-sleeping Carver to school, was considered to be a “Minor Carvering.” To the extent that pretty much everybody in the community had been “Carvered” at one time or another, it was doubly true of the church. Mom Amelia often latched on to one person or family in the church at a time. About every two months, I got a call from a different upset and confused parishioner with the familiar story. Amelia had “been sharing with them,” and they had “started helping out.” Then Amelia had started asking for additional help. Then Amelia had asked for increasingly larger forms of help. Then the person began feeling used and confused and decided to call the pastor. Those within the congregation who had been “Carvered” grew at an alarming rate. The Carvers were a trial, and a peculiar kind of godsend. The Carvers generated more theological discussion and more visceral wrangling with Christian ethics than any sermon, class, lecture, presentation, or activity I’ve experienced. They provoked ongoing wrangling with servanthood, forgiveness, honesty, patience, love, stewardship, and the nature of Christian community. The Carvers gave liberally of what they had: love, honesty, strong bodies willing to work long and hard, musical talent, faith, and their unique selves. The Carvers loved and served well, and they were well-loved and served in return, as well as fed, transported, tolerated, subsidized, clothed, forgiven, gossiped about, complained about, embraced, prayed about, prayed over, prayed for, and avoided. No one ever figured out what to do, what not to do, or when and how to do it, or not. Everyone occasionally wished the earth would open up and swallow the Carvers and their needs whole, and everyone simultaneously wondered how to love them better and how we would get by without them. The Carvers were a trial. Every family and every person was ultimately left to make her or his own peace with the Carvers and how they should be handled. My moment came one Christmas Eve. I grew up hearing about how Santa was always so worn out from his work on Christmas Eve that he slept for a week, carefully ministered to by Mrs. Claus and the tireless, subhuman elves. It didn’t take many Advents and Christmases as a minister for me to completely understand such fatigue. I’ve done manual labor, worked in a department store during the holidays, and worked in other high-stress jobs, but the weariness I feel on Christmas Eve as the pastor of a local church surpasses anything the secular world has thrown at me. And it’s not the multiple services, the secular expectations, the inexhaustible details, the parties, receptions, celebrations, or engagement with rampant consumerism that does it. It’s the illusory holiness that can’t quite be grasped that really takes it out of me. My family had given up on me years before. I had surrendered being “normal” during Advent and Christmas, and they had given up trying to interact normally with me. Everyone had learned to maintain a certain distance. Sometimes I would catch them whispering about how I seemed to be doing when they thought I was out of earshot. They would give me looks of genuine compassion and periodically inquired as to how I was “making it,” or would simply place a loving hand on my shoulder. But by the time Christmas Eve arrived, the parsonage decorations were up, gifts wrapped, and my wonderful wife, daughters, and sons-in-law safely gathered in, I was pretty much beyond reach, and everybody knew it. They loved me anyway and waited patiently for my eventual, gradual return. The Christmas of my “Carvering” was as idyllic as it could possibly be under the circumstances. Our lovely, historic town was decorated to a standard sufficient for any Christmas story set in any English village or Currier & Ives lithograph. The beautiful, old church was glorious in its Yuletide finery. It was appropriately cold, and flurries had swirled all afternoon. The town always celebrated a 7:30 P.M. ecumenical service at which one of the town clergy preached and all the others participated in the service. These community services were much anticipated, and the preacher usually started on her or his sermon in October. (I still recall the sermons I preached on those occasions as well as the ones I heard. If we all had put that kind of time and energy into our weekly efforts, there wouldn’t have been an empty pew for miles.) These were occasions at which the host church, host pastor, guest preacher, and everyone present displayed their very best. Grown children of local families knew that if they were coming home for Christmas at all, they’d better have themselves present and presentable by 7:30 P.M. Christmas Eve. College students home for the holidays sat with their families and acted like their faith was more important to them than ever. These were much-anticipated, special gatherings of a close-knit community in which all cared about the others and knew more about one another than was healthy or necessary. By 10:00 P.M., however, everyone had resorted to home and hearth. A few still visited from house to house, delivering home-baked goodies and spreading Christmas cheer, but most were done and gathered in. The town lay quiet, as only we Methodists ventured back out for 11:00 communion. So picturesque was this particular Christmas Eve in the Blue Ridge Mountains that I had begun to believe this might just be the year that I arrived home from the 11:00 P.M. candlelight service ready to relax and celebrate. In spite of myself and the vagaries of the season, I mostly looked forward to those late services on Christmas Eve. They had become the essence of Christmas for me and for a goodly number of others, and they attracted a diverse crowd. People who didn’t even attend worship on Easter ventured out in the late-December cold each Christmas Eve to hear the story again, sing the familiar carols, and light their little candles. Those services, of the many in my life, remain the most beautiful and peaceful of my experience. That particular evening, a mystical holiness hung palpably in the air. The service flowed seamlessly, the worshipers departed in joy tinged with awe, and scattered snowflakes fell as I wished the departing congregation “Merry Christmas” on the church steps. My family waited patiently with me as I made sure all the candles were well out and began switching off lights. Finally, I told them to go along home, that I would be there in a few minutes. The parsonage was a short walk up the street, just on the edge of the town. I simply wanted to spend a few minutes alone in the quiet sanctuary. Tears filled my eyes as I knelt at the communion rail in the stillness of the darkened church. Like a shipwreck survivor fresh from a perilous, crowded raft, safely ashore at last, wrapped in a blanket and cupping a mug of soup, I blubbered heartfelt thanks for deliverance and my life’s innumerable blessings. Spent and calm at last, as I rose to gather my things and enter ever more fully into the childlike joy of Christmas, I was startled by Candy Carver’s silhouette, illuminated by the light coming through the doorway leading to the rooms behind the sanctuary. “I need a ride home,” she said. How long had she been standing there? Had she watched me kneel and cry like a sentimental child? Where had she been as everyone else was departing? How had she gotten there? Where was her family, and on Christmas Eve for God’s sake? My cozy Christmas Eve was suddenly adrift in a fog of resentment, covering me like a pall of lead. Here I was again on Christmas Eve, spent yet again, my expressions of relief and release answered by a punch in the gut. “Where’s your family?” I asked. “Isn’t someone coming for you?” I thought of my family waiting for me up the street, anxious to open our one Christmas Eve gift each before turning in, and ready to finally get “Christmas” underway. I thought of how they were probably expecting more of me than usual because of the good place in which they had left me just moments before. “Mom said I should get a ride with somebody.” Except we were all out of somebodies. At that moment it felt as if every other somebody in the world was sitting around the tree with their family sipping eggnog while I stood there wishing all the Carvers lived on Mars. Of all the somebodies in the whole world, I was the one being “Carvered” on Christmas Eve. “Can’t we call your house and have somebody come pick you up?” “Our phone’s not working right now.” “Get your coat. Let’s go.” I fumed all the way to the car, all the way through town, and halfway out to the Carvers. Finally, I came out of myself and looked over at Candy. There, all in a heap, bundled up in a worn-out coat two sizes too big, sat the entire Carver story embodied in that one child: all the embarrassing situations, the awkward requests for assistance, the hand-me-down clothes, unpaid bills, unappreciated duties grudgingly performed by over-used friends, neighbors, and church people. It all draped from that child like the acolyte’s robe she had but recently hung in the sacristy. Only this time it was her pastor whose irritation shone through. “What do you want for Christmas, Candy?” I heard a kindness in my voice that hadn’t been there since I’d bidden my family to go ahead home. After a silence, Candy named a couple of things popular with her age group that year. Both were expensive, and I knew she wouldn’t be getting either. “Anything else?” She named a couple more little things, and then we were at her house. “Thank you for bringing me home,” she said. “You’re welcome, Candy. Merry Christmas! I hope Santa is good to you. You deserve it. And thank you for being our acolyte tonight.” She smiled and closed the door. She let herself in the house. The light was on, but nobody greeted her except the two scroungy dogs that lived under the house and had come barking and snapping at my tires as we pulled up. Candy alone, of all her family, had come to the late service that night to acolyte for me, for all of us, and I was so caught up in myself that I hadn’t even noticed. Too embarrassed to impose on anybody else, she had waited around to ask her pastor for a ride home. She had waited for the safest person to impose upon, and yet had experienced the same old resentment yet again. Had I undone everything the service might have offered Candy? Had we really offered her much of anything in the first place? The wonderful feelings of my personal Christmas experience certainly weren’t hers. She was a Carver. Carvers were a trial. It was deathly quiet as I drove through town, passing the churches, houses, and small businesses of people I knew. As I passed my own now-dark church and headed up the street to the parsonage, I knew Candy would forgive me, probably already had if she was thinking of me at all, and that the seasonal, popular Christmas spirit had been replaced by something altogether more profound. Michael Lyle is the author of the poetry chapbook The Everywhere of Light (Plan B Press), and his poems have appeared widely, including Atlanta Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Crannóg, The Hollins Critic, Mudfish and Poetry East. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
Michael's other work on Foreshadow: Wick of the Soul (Poetry, October 2022) Tennis Players (Poetry, October 2022) Yahweh (Poetry, October 2022) Family of God (Poetry, October 2022) By Carl Winderl on that starry starry silent night in His stone cold manger pondering just what Is It God hath wrought in that slightly more than a pound of flesh, or so about to be some day, soon in a couple weeks or so to feel the knife’s slice . . . as if some sacrificial lamb He will sometime be. but til then, on this bleak midwinter night in the silence of His Mother’s smile I see Him there enwrapped as if some Handful of clay created “how” . . . but for now, cradled in a swaddling of Flesh. . . . Carl Winderl holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from New York University and maintains a home in San Diego, California. He is the author of the poetry book, The Gospel According. . . to Mary (Finishing Line Press, 2021).
Carl's other work on Foreshadow: kneeling at the Manger (Poetry, December 2022) at the anti-tower (Poetry, June 2022) At Judas' funeral (Poetry, March 2022) A Writer Is Always at Work (Part 1 of 2) (Interview, May 2021) Book review by Rachel Fulton Brown  Carl Winderl, The Gospel According...to Mary. Georgetown, Kentucky: Finishing Line Press, 2021. xiv+90 pp. I did not expect to enjoy this book. I tend not to like free verse—I much prefer iambic pentameter—nor do I enjoy most modern efforts to imagine what Jesus or Mary thought or said. The idiom is always off, not scriptural enough, too psychoanalytical or colloquial, making Jesus anything but divine and his mother either victim or “strong woman,” at once too ordinary to be hailed as “full of grace” and too powerful ever to have said “Let it be to me.” A book of poems written in Mary’s voice without meter or rhyme? At best, I expected to be irritated, if not downright annoyed. And yet, when Carl invited me to review his poems, I said yes, even as I questioned how it could be that I should find joy in them. What can I say? Mary has a way of nudging me when she wants me to look at something. The Song of Songs as sung at the feasts of her Assumption and Nativity, the psalms as sung in the Hours of the Virgin—these were the texts that medieval Christians turned to when they wanted to hear the voice of Mary speaking with her Son, about which I have previously written on other occasions at Mary’s behest. I say Mary’s behest, but more accurately, Wisdom’s, the voice of Our Lady conceived at the beginning of the world. I felt her nudge in Carl’s request. There is something here you need to learn. Do what he has asked you. Take, read. What would it be like to be the Mother of the Word when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us? To be filled with words, and yet silent, keeping them in your heart? One might catch a whisper here, a gesture there. The Spirit blows where it wills, overshadowing the letter. Sentences are reduced to fragments and promises, changes in font taken up from the Font. Each word becomes a riddle stretched out on the Cross of the page, crucified with the Son. There are glimpses of veils, shadows of types, the poverty of print made medium for the Light. “Do whatever he tells you.” Trust Him. Take it slowly. Have patience as you follow the lines down the page, collecting gemstones and drops of blood. It is cruel to ask a scholar to review a mosaic of Light, to render, dismember, shatter in prose. And yet who but a scholar—or lover—would catch every word? Hear the echoes of the tradition in the turn of half a phrase? The margins of the book fill with scribbled notes: I hate this effort to make heaven earthbound (on Mary sitting in the laundry, immaculately conceived). Like marginal labels in a medieval illuminated manuscript, glosses on images the poems assume (on Pilate’s wash water and the witnesses to His scourging). Mary knows the science of creation, quadrivium as well as trivium (on the chemical reaction of Good Friday’s leaded sky). Images leap out at you—tied to the creator of the world (“a lump of coal”). Sometimes it is difficult to tell who is speaking to Whom, when punctuation fails and no words are capitalized. Only the pronouns merit a capital letter, condemned: Him, His, He. Does the Son speak of the father or the Father of his son when Isaac lies stretched on the cross “trussed up, in trust”? Citations to Scripture are throughout unmarked, leaving marks in the margins, the imagery slipping from Old Testament to New and back again, shimmering, bloody, hidden in a life-time of prayer. Should I give my references? Tell you how I know that when Mary says (10) thus I now see and I know it’s not just a hypothesis, nor a theory it is Law that she is speaking the Reality of love, the transfigured Trinity made three-dimensional on the Cross buried in her womb, as medieval commentators like Richard of St. Laurent averred? Can I explain how I know, with Mary, that Christ was marked with tattoos—in Black and Blue Old English on his right bicep “Born to Raze Hell!”, a Serpent Green & Red on his left forearm, a Valentine’s Heart over His breast, broken in two, labelled M-O-T H-E-R (13)—because I wear tattoos of my own on my shoulders and back? Can I tell you how it makes sense to see the Transfigured Christ in the flying crosses of the airplanes, including the one flat, dull, shadow-less and life-less, on the ground in its hangar, awaiting its Passenger (20–21), because I have lived through the mechanical horror of air travel myself? Halfway through the book, the pain of understanding is almost (but not quite, because I am not Mary) too much to bear. Another marginal notation: Like eating the whole bar of chocolate in a single sitting, trying to read the whole book—“just one more.” And another: Difficult to read—force you to think—cannot glide over the words—not about “information.” We need instructions on how to read. Another living poet comes to mind. Anglican priest and singer–songwriter Malcolm Guite writes about poetry as necessary to theology, to the understanding of the Incarnation: tasting the Words, hearing the Echoes and Counterpoints, delighting in the play of Images and Allusions, Ambiguity and Ambivalence, Perspective and Paradox: “Poetry may be especially fitted as a medium for helping us apprehend something of the mystery embodied in that phrase ‘the Word was made flesh’” (Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination [London, 2008], 2). In Carl’s poems, we are in the presence of the Word whom only the womb of His mother could contain. Rhymes and puns live in the gaps between sense and sound; Mary is the kenning of Christ. It is impossible to read enough in the tradition to catch all the references. All the references are in Scripture, breathed out over centuries in the liturgy. But the poems are incarnate, too. They depend on their layout on the page, on the line breaks and isolated words. Without meter or rhyme, they hold anticipation not in their sounds, but in their sense. They are incarnate, yet mute, handmaidens of spoken verse, structured in the pauses between words. This is a typographical Mary, the Mary hidden from the outside world, made visible on the page. Silent in her physicality, not to be quoted, as she remembers the day when her Son died. “X marks the spot” on the hill where the “decidedly veryUpperCase” “old Rugged Cross” stood, a marker for “latterday Pirates who / abbreviate their cache en vellum / with the selfsame Grecian phoneme” marked on the hands and feet of her Son and worn on ears, necks, breasts, and lapels, fashioned in silver and gold, “causing me to also reminisce ... / the day so long ago when Romans played / Pin the Cross on Jesus” (38). Those who have ears to hear, let them hear. The title of the book promises coverage--The Gospel According ... to Mary—and so we read the Gospel not in linear time, but in memory, Mary’s memory overlapping events from Good Friday to Christmas, the time of her memory enfolded in the time of the liturgy, the cycle of seasons turning, turning in her memory like the laundry in the washer and dryer in the opening poem. Once I surrendered to the brokenness of the lines, the soiled references to the modern world (expected, but not expected to resonate), I found myself in a mosaic of light, a medieval worshipper sitting in darkness, sunlight streaming through the glass stained by the colors of story, God’s Incarnation into Time Past, now Time Future made Time Present. Yet another marginal notation, at a place where the line break broke apart the words: “first planted His minis- / Tree in the Great / Temple Hall” (67): aslant—looking aslant through figures / glass / refractions. I cannot tell you what it was like for me to experience reading these poems, except in broken excerpts. Do we wonder to find Mary so silent in the Scriptures, she who contained in her womb the Word by which the heavens and earth were made? Take, read. You will find in these poems good wine. Rachel Fulton Brown is associate professor of History at the University of Chicago. She is author of From Judgement to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200, and Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought, both published by Columbia University Press. She has co-authored and edited two books of poetry with the Dragon Common Room, her online classroom for training poets in iambic pentameter. She blogs on the internet mosaic as Fencing Bear at Prayer.
The Gospel According...to Mary by Carl Winderl Carl's work on Foreshadow: kneeling at the Manger (Poetry, December 2022) at the anti-tower (Poetry, June 2022) At Judas' funeral (Poetry, March 2022) A Writer Is Always at Work (Part 1 of 2) (Interview, May 2021) A Writer Is Always at Work (Part 2 of 2) (Interview, June 2021) By Carl Winderl staffs at their sides, hushed mouths agape, reeking not of frankincense and myrrh, but of linseed oil, sulfur, pitch, and tar, these rough men stare, stunned by My Son’s birth, shocked in amazed gazing, at Him. Their faces though I recognize, they’re the providers of the Paschal lambs, at Passover for the Temple, they breed and they take from the ewes their firstborns to bleed and suffer, sacrificed to atone for Israel’s sin, but when their shepherd eyes meet mine I see on their adoring faces a glimpse of mute surprise, some wonder; in an eyebrow’s rise dis- belief, while something in their furtive sidelong glances causes me to further ponder more, for they have been trained to know a sacrificial lamb when they see One Carl Winderl holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from New York University and maintains a home in San Diego, California. He is the author of the poetry book, The Gospel According. . . to Mary (Finishing Line Press, 2021).
'kneeling at the Manger' first appeared in The Christian Century. It has been republished here with the author's permission. Carl's other work on Foreshadow: at the anti-tower (Poetry, June 2022) At Judas' funeral (Poetry, March 2022) A Writer Is Always at Work (Part 1 of 2) (Interview, May 2021) A Writer Is Always at Work (Part 2 of 2) (Interview, June 2021) |
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