|
I’m not good with plants
But I found this seed, if you can help. There are some cracks, Exposure has caused it to suffer. The soil doesn’t look good: Dry and inhospitable. Are you surrounding it with manure? Is that the right thing to do? The plant looks sick. Ashen leaves with brittle branches. Do we need to resoil? Replant? Will fresh water be enough to save it? Can you take this seed, this dream, in my heart – That time and heartache have beaten down, And make it something more? Will you breathe new life into this and cause something to grow? -- Kris Green lives in Florida with his beautiful wife and two savage children. He’s been published over 60 times in the last few years by the wonderful people at Nifty Lit, The Haberdasher: Peddlers of Literary Art, In Parentheses Magazine, Route 7 Review, BarBar Magazine and many more. He won the 2023 Barbe Best Short Story and Reader’s Choice Award for his short story, 'Redemption'. Currently, he has regular nonfiction articles being published by Solid Food Press on fatherhood entitled 'On Raising Savages'.
0 Comments
‘We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…’ (Hebrews 12:1)
I walk into the small church, and the first thing I notice is that the walls to my left are covered with icons – of Christ, angels, saints. Hardly an inch of brick shows between each frame. The faces watch me through the dark fog of incense and candlelight as I sit in a chair near the back. I have heard of icons being described as windows into heaven, mirrors reflecting holy light. Is this why they strangely make me feel at home here, even though I have never to my memory encountered anything like this place? It is like a footpath lined with tall, leafy deciduous trees quietly breathing, exuding life, oxygen into the atmosphere. I am surrounded by icons. The priest in bright robes slowly walks out of one of the doors screening the altar area. He is clasping a censer, which looks like a lantern dangling from golden chains, but instead of light, it gives off clouds of smoke every time he shakes it before each person as he drifts to the back of the church. The clanking chains sound like sea waves crashing, and waves of people bow in response, some making the sign of the cross. Now he is curving round back towards the altar. He looks at me and shakes the censer towards me. I feel this is a greeting of some kind, perhaps a blessing. I bow in gratitude. I later learn that Orthodox priests cense both icons and people in this manner to show honour to God. As St. Basil says, ‘The honour paid to the image passes to the prototype.’ Just as when one kisses a photograph of a loved one, they are honouring not the photo but the beloved, so when the priest censes an icon, honour passes through the wood and paint to the saint it depicts. And when the priest censes a person, honour even passes through that person to Christ, the prototype of us all. I am surrounded by icons. Behind my desk in my classroom where I teach, on a cable box running along the wall, sits an icon of various people serving the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the sick and the prisoner – each one Christ in disguise (see Matt. 25). Every morning, I look at the icon to remind myself that in a mysterious way, each of the students I will teach this day is Christ. In other words, when I teach, I am standing before twenty to thirty living icons. (How I sometimes wish my students were as calm as icons!) Beyond the classroom, whenever I meet someone, I am meeting a living icon, since every person is made in God’s image. (The word ‘icon’ comes from the Greek word eikon, which means ‘image’). My wife, children and wider family. My colleagues, my neighbours, people at church. The commuters I pass on my drive to work. The strangers I meet once whom I may never meet again, at least not in this life. Even my enemies. I don’t usually think of them as living icons. Sometimes I get stuck on someone’s behaviour at a certain moment or their reputation or my prejudices against them. Sometimes I’m preoccupied with my musings that I fail to recognise that before me is a reflection of God that I am called to honour, just as the priest censed me on my first visit to an Orthodox liturgy. As Joe Bisicchia writes, ‘Perhaps we suffer / too much self-admiration to notice… / how bread breaks / in every face’. But such poets help me to notice and remember. KPB Stevens describes how Christ’s light deepens his vision of the people he loves so that their often clunky forms are ‘almost lost’, and ‘they hide within the radiance’. I would push this image even further: perhaps their forms are not lost in the radiance as much as found in it. An iconographer would tell you that each depiction of a holy person uniquely captures their personality through such distinctions. The bald head of St. Paul, for example, or the dismembered and restored hand of St. John of Damascus. Some icons include key objects from a saint’s life, such as, in the case of St. Melangell, a hare. Despite the common features that icons share, such as halos or gold, each one is simultaneously unique and identifiable. The saints’ distinctions are not lost in their holiness but transfigured. In other words, perhaps we are called not to be illusions (meaningless fantasies) or elusions (in which our identities are forever hidden) but allusions, in which we mature distinctly while finding our home in Christ, the fullness of the image of God. So if we are living icons – masterpieces, saints in the making – then how do our lives, including their peculiarities and particularities, offer glimpses into God’s presence? Do I step out of the way enough to let God’s light shine and to notice his image in others? I'd like to think that reading wholesome literature, such as we strive to share on Foreshadow, can help us here, can remind us of who we are called to become, can teach us to honour God’s image in each person. Like a wall of icons, many of the works we have shared this past season have reflected truth and beauty, sometimes in unexpected places, such as in ‘Herald Across the Divide’, ‘Burning Bush’, ‘Pharasaic’, ‘Dust’, ‘Carpet’, ‘St. Luke at Nazareth’ and ‘Vesper Sparrow’. Others have portrayed choices and turns in the lives of ordinary people that reflect the archetypal victory of Christ, such as in ‘The Story of Prisoner 16670’, ‘That Poet’, ‘Like a Land of Dreams’, ‘Doubt’, ‘Waiting for the Word’, ‘Narration’ and ‘Poems to God, No. 139’. May we always be, and remember that we are, surrounded by icons. -- Josh Seligman is the founding editor of Foreshadow. Note: We are now accepting submissions in line with our next theme: ‘Offerings and Open Hands’. At its heart, the theme is about offering ourselves to God in trust that in so doing, he will bless and transform us for the life of the world. Also keep your eyes out for a new Foreshadow project called Anaphora, a resource hub for people reflecting on the relationships between teaching, faith and literature. On a rainy morning last May, my wife and I viewed acres of contemporary art housed in two Biennale campuses in the Castello district of Venice, Italy. We encountered varying degrees of talent and vision — paintings, sculpture, installations, video — carried off with varying degrees of success. After an hour, with so much artwork to take in, my sensorium, as usual, began to frazzle, and the impulse to keep moving kicked in — a drive-by treatment that left me with a lingering sense of regret.
In the afternoon, as the sun broke through to light the towers and cupolas and green canals of the beautiful, sinking city, I suggested we ditch the crowds and take the vaporetto for the quick trip to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and its eponymous Baroque church designed by Andrea Palladio (1508–1580). The Benedictine church’s white marble façade and iconic belltower beckoned across the blue water. “There’s supposed to be an art installation there,” I added. “A sort of satellite to the official Biennale.” We entered the basilica without great expectations: we’d ingested a full diet of art in the morning, and I’m no lover of the baroque. Once inside, though, as I looked around, my footsteps slowed. Here, in the marbled brightness of a sacred space, several figures made of wax — archangels, I would learn — stood tall, mysterious and challenging as standing stones in a forest clearing. The few other visitors, I noticed, communicated in hushed whispers. And the words I’d never forgotten from the pen of French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, philosopher and writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), words that penetrated me like a spear four decades earlier, returned: “the power of the Word Incarnate penetrates matter itself; it goes down into the deepest depths of the lower forces.” The artist, Berlinde De Bruyckere, was born in Ghent, Belgium in 1964. She grew up with a different angle on life: her father was a butcher. The title of her installation, “City of Refuge III,” is the third in a series based on the Nick Cave song of the same name, a song with roots reaching back through Blind Willie Johnson to folk and blues: You better run, you better run/You better run to the City of Refuge. The humanlike archangels stood on their own pedestals, messengers from God reflecting our uneasy souls, their faces concealed by wax cloths. They were unbalanced, as if preparing to rise. Maybe. The works of Teilhard reached me at a crisis point, professionally and personally, when my life resembled an intransitive verb in search of an object. I was in my mid-30s, that vulnerable age Dante wrote of when he became lost in a dark wood “half-way along the road we have to go.” I read Teilhard’s bracing prose with the enthusiasm of a parched wanderer lost in the desert encountering a fresh-water spring. In describing his own dilemma, the priest and scientist put his finger on the modern one: “he will give up any attempt to make sense of his situation; he will never belong wholly to God, nor ever wholly to things; incomplete in his own eyes, and insincere in the eyes of his fellows, he will gradually acquiesce in a double life. I am speaking, it should not be forgotten, from experience.” In his vision of the universe, Teilhard established Christ as the Omega point of cosmic evolution. Whatever we do, in a Christ-centered cosmos, he wrote, it is through the care we bring to the tasks by which we earn our daily bread and, as responsible citizens, care for the least of those among us, that we create and build, and are in turn further created. Such is the “divinization of our activities,” Teilhard observed. “Christ is the goad that urges creatures along the road of effort, of elevation, of development.” De Bruyckere’s archangels are not so explicit; they are poignant in their ambiguity. But their very presence confronts us with the eternal question: how shall we live? In the sacred space of San Giorgio Maggiore, a sanctuary and refuge through the centuries, in a wounded, post-Covid time, the artist has asked the question with pity and tenderness. In the sacristy, De Bruyckere placed wax tree trunks on metal welding tables — a post-apocalyptic vision that nevertheless suggested possibilities of regrowth and redemption. It was a grim, psychological landscape, the broken trees seemingly splayed at random, unless one catches, however fleetingly, an image of order in the universe, like the washed-up driftwood we sometimes come across on the beach arranged in interesting, complex patterns. The installation was juxtaposed with an altar painting by Giuseppe Porta (also known as Giuseppe Salviati) (1520–1575), which shows Mary and Joseph presenting their infant child at the temple in Jerusalem. Two angels hover above the scene, one holding a cross foreshadowing the crucifixion. And resurrection. Other installations appear in the corridors of the gallery halls — wounded body parts of wax, wax casts of animal skins piled, more or less neatly, on bronze pallets, and tree branches, but the heart of the exhibit, for me, was found in the figure of a recumbent archangel on a pedestal resembling a coffin made from old building materials. Do we behold a corpse, an angel guarding an unseen body, or a slow chrysalis-like progress through a dark passage toward the light? Teilhard again: “that the perceptible enters vitally into the most spiritual zones of our souls — then we must also recognize that in the whole process which from the first to last activates and directs the elements of the universe, everything forms a single whole. And we begin to see more distinctly the great sun of Christ…rising over our interior world.” De Bruyckere’s “City of Refuge III,” installed in a very old church on an island away from the madding crowds of Venice, confronted us with a series of blunt potentialities: torpor or emergence; life as a warren of cul-de-sacs or a collaborative work of creation; to tread water or plumb the deep-down labyrinths to arrive, once again, at the overwhelming question: how shall we live? “For staying is nowhere,” Rilke famously wrote in his First Elegy. -- Mike Dillon lives in a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. A former publisher of community newspapers, his poems and essays have been published in this country and internationally, including Dappled Things, Rain Taxi, Kyoto Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, Galway Review and many other venues. His new and selected poems, Nocturne, was published in October 2024. It is sometimes a radiant world,
this life in Christ. But only sometimes. Sometimes I am shy, afraid to name the body, to describe the strangers whom I love. The little nun who was never a nun, in her house of dusty corners, who worked in hospitals for years, with her smile and white curls, who studied and wrote songs and was never beautiful, but strangely weightless in a reappearing way, like sunlight, high and vaporous, within a winter day. Or the eternal neighbor who walks within herself, never selfish for news of others, yet always going to the doctor with some friend who’s lost his sight or is becoming distanced from his mind and slowly slipping away. She went to boarding schools and cleaned summer cabins, one arm withered by polio, although you’d never know it unless you chose to notice. She offers salvation in a neighborly way. Or the man with infants’ hands, so soft and unscarred that they might have just come from the womb, who talks, often, of cold moons and a creek-bordered farm where his ancestors labored and died, too soon. If I were to make a mosaic on the wall it would have to hold them all, each figure made of glass set in stone, each tesserae catching light and holding it, obscuring my perceptions and showing that they’re limited. When light shows brightly the forms are almost lost, the lines of colored glass embossed beyond simple distinctions, and I, and those I love, hide within the radiance. -- KPB Stevens is an Episcopal priest, poet and painter who lives in Columbus, Ohio. His work has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, Cardinal Sins, Squalorly, Inwood Indiana, Orion Headless and The Christian Century, as well as two EASE Gallery chapbooks, Wildernesses: Physical & Spiritual and Trespasses. His story 'My Beam of Light' was selected for The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2014. A year after she died
I stood in an oceanside church. The waves were echoed by chalice and stained glass. A year in which I never said “believe.” What is belief within the hollowness of grief? A year, a numbed highway, a blank staring at the day, a dissipation of memories. Then, adrift in stained light, we stood and said, “I believe,” I and these strangers who were holding my belief for me. I believe. God of wind and the ocean, and the woven pattern of the waves — of the birds, their wings wide, their bodies seed pods on the breeze -- God of the sky, the birds' cries, the whales breaching by the boat -- shadows move, sunlight strikes deep chasms in the sea — jellyfish slide by the boat's side — God of the world's eye — shadows deepen, shadows shatter into shapes that sing — gems of color along each wing — God of perception and perceived — God of everything. I believe. -- KPB Stevens is an Episcopal priest, poet and painter who lives in Columbus, Ohio. His work has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, Cardinal Sins, Squalorly, Inwood Indiana, Orion Headless and The Christian Century, as well as two EASE Gallery chapbooks, Wildernesses: Physical & Spiritual and Trespasses. His story 'My Beam of Light' was selected for The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2014. After the champagne toasts,
the fine bottles of red and white, the sugary dessert wine, the speeches in Spanish and English, the bride and groom were led across to the aero- service to ride a seaplane sweeping above forest and lakes, around the High Peak point after guests showered bird seed instead of typical confetti. We hurried to the bridge to watch a roaring take-off. The Best Man, a church bell ringer, arranged everyone heart-shaped on the beach sand to greet the pair returning, as we sang for the bride's birthday. And as we dropped our hands we felt how hard it was to let go. -- Royal Rhodes is a poet and retired teacher. His chief delight is hearing from many former students whose lives are helping to heal the world. Wrestle the written
And the Incarnate. Reverently adore the Holy hieroglyph, Diction and drafting, Laud and lexicon. Neither space nor time Nor anything created Can touch your soul, But Logos can. Existing before time For this-- Soul-shifting rebirth, Redirection of function. Power in minuscule Flecks and flexures: I am rewritten, My being restructured, Speaking and hearing, Worshipping the Word. -- Olivia Oster is a writer living on Lookout Mountain, Georgia, whose fiction and poetry explore the spiritual aspect of common everyday life as well as the elements of life with which she is most familiar: chronic pain, parenting, writing, the Bible and homemaking. Olivia’s poetry has been accepted in As Surely as the Sun, Spirit Fire Review and others. She has also published A New Grammary, a book of grammar formulas, and a poetry chapbook called Poetic Faith. Olivia is a teacher, wife, mother of five and student of the Word. Shachah I bow down prostrate on the ground.
Crying out loud, dirt in mouth, I’m finished, found out. Barak In reverence I submit, I bend. Oh my soul and all within, Bless, adore, bow to Him. Todah I yield thanks, lift up open hands Singing with harmonious bands Obeying His commands. Zamar Music wields like sword, life water, Strum and sing at the altar, Melodic praise I offer. Halal In foolishness I dance for You, Risk all for one reckless view Of Jehovah, hallelu! -- Olivia Oster is a writer living on Lookout Mountain, Georgia, whose fiction and poetry explore the spiritual aspect of common everyday life as well as the elements of life with which she is most familiar: chronic pain, parenting, writing, the Bible and homemaking. Olivia’s poetry has been accepted in As Surely as the Sun, Spirit Fire Review and others. She has also published A New Grammary, a book of grammar formulas, and a poetry chapbook called Poetic Faith. Olivia is a teacher, wife, mother of five and student of the Word. While it is still dark, he is disturbed
by a child, damp with darkness and want. He heats the water quietly, washes the child awake. Here he descends with an awkward gate and assumes a posture that a child might take. This is intentional discomfort, but with reaching hands. He breathes out the pressure in his chest, blowing a sigh across a crinkling page. The wet hair of the son seeks the warm shoulder of his father, but there is not enough time before sunrise. Everyone else must open their eyes and move quickly through these morning skies. He sings them through the routine -- fresh underwear, vitamins and a final blessing. Depositing the children and hoping for some interest, he finally turns to his plans for the day -- how can he do justice with the dreams of pioneers, the sins of inattention, the fear of the Samaritans? He eats a noon meal with an anxious eye on his inbox. He knows his afternoon will lack space for response. There is only a small ache in his back when the last bell sends him out on the lines of the tennis court. The lilting rhythm of the sport is like a psalmic chant, lulling him asleep. Shaking his racket and voice, he asks his team, Are we focusing on our feet? Oh, they should be beautiful if we are spreading enough good news. His toes feel heavy and plodding. He drives home to shower his sweaty body in a warm baptism, a new beginning. He sits quietly in the rain while his wife stirs a crock pot of curry. Grains of sticky rice freckle his palm, and he gently returns them to the bowl. He reads to his child, as many stories as he can hear, until his wife calls him downstairs to rub her feet. He loves this final hour. Only one person to please with a simple touch on repeat. Thumb across ankle, thumb against heel -- like breathing. When she is asleep, he turns off his lamp. -- Matthew Miller teaches social studies, swings tennis rackets and writes poetry -- all hoping to create home. He and his wife live beside a dilapidating orchard in Indiana, where he tries to shape dead trees into playhouses for his four boys. His poetry has been featured in Whale Road Review, River Mouth Review, EcoTheo Review and Ekstasis Magazine. God is burrowed tightly. I stalk
well worn paths, shifting past clefts in the rocks, trying to pillow myself in their stiff ridges. But roots wedge the limestone, splitting, spilling tendrils. Not there, not in moss and lichens. I would strike the stones but maybe this time there’s nothing in the water. It’s a time of exile, and mine is dry and lacks desire. Parched land no one wants to touch. Trenches with no rain, without music to sprinkle the garden. Maybe down there, in this thin, tindered straw, something is cradled. -- Matthew Miller teaches social studies, swings tennis rackets and writes poetry -- all hoping to create home. He and his wife live beside a dilapidating orchard in Indiana, where he tries to shape dead trees into playhouses for his four boys. His poetry has been featured in Whale Road Review, River Mouth Review, EcoTheo Review and Ekstasis Magazine. |
Categories
All
Archives
November 2025
|
RSS Feed