[God in the Yard] “how grace used to drift in with the night”

L.L. Barkat begins chapter three of God in the Yard with a discussion of contemplation, including a quote from Da Vinci: “Do not despise my opinion when I remind you that it should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes or a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places, in which, if you consider them well, you may find really marvelous ideas…. By indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.”

God often reveals Himself in the “indistinct things” – Baalam’s donkey, Gideon’s fleece, Jonah’s worm, a little girl, a carpenter from Nazareth.

I think L.L. approaches contemplation almost as “meditation,” the kind that Isaac did, or the kind that the Psalmist promises. She doesn’t pretend to know what God will reveal of Himself while she sits in the yard, studying the indistinct; she doesn’t go with an idea of what He must reveal to her. She looks and listens for His heart, right where she is, finding Him wheels within wheels in a pine tree, finding grace at the end of a hard day as she considers a bush stooped like an old grandmother who has lived days like this before her.

“Matriarch”

Children off to bed, chatter secrets,
I descend red oak stairs, reach for downy coat,
walk out beneath the moon.

Sled in hand, I pick my way to secret place,
settle plastic red, breathe deep to unwind tight-sprung
day, lie down and look towards the pine.

Branched arms are softness, feathered cradle
calling. Trunk is hips, come to say, sit;
gone is the needle-sharp talk of day.

Nearby, grandmother-curved bush looks
to lap in silence, remembers how it was with young ones,
remembers how grace used to drift in with the night.

- L.L. Barkat, God in the Yard, p. 25-26

She says of the poem, “I’ve come to this outdoor place feeling emotionally dark…. If the word contemplative also means ‘putting together,’ which it does, then it may be needful to search the darkness, the broken pieces of life, with an openness that these are somehow important parts of communion with God.”

This, I know, is true, that walking humbly with God who is Light means to open our darkness to that light, to bring broken humanness into His God-presence – tangling the real grit of our lives up in the real glory of His Life, and finding ourselves changed for the beholding of Him.

Nearly every afternoon, as the sun sinks low to the west, it cuts through the trees in our back yard and passes through our bedroom, splaying a swath of blue light across white. I don’t know why it’s blue, but it is, and it’s clean and it’s hopeful.

I don’t usually have time to do more than walk past the room, see it creating its own space on our very soft bed, inviting me in – but it always makes me smile. It is as if the heat of the day sighs soft into night, releasing its hold on the day, realizing the possibility of rest.

When I fall into bed at night, after the kids are asleep and Pete is asleep and the only sounds are the outdoor sounds and the creak of the settling house, I sit quiet, waiting for my brain to shut down. I replay the day, try to organize my regrets. It takes me a while to take the rest that waits for me.

But there on the wall in the late afternoon is His invitation to it, the indistinct play of light and shadows on bed and bedroom wall. I know He remembers my dust and knows the regrets that come with earth-time that passes too swiftly for souls made for eternity. He knows intimate how my humanness craves rest when I can’t get it, knows that I need light to walk in the dark.

When I remember You on my bed,
I meditate on You in the night watches.
Because You have been my help,
Therefore in the shadow of Your wings I will rejoice.
My soul follows close behind You;
Your right hand upholds me.

- Ps. 63:6-8

When I notice the indistinct, the tiniest gifts of light and color and wind and birdsong – when I contemplate God who brought it to my attention – this is when my soul follows close behind Him who created it and enjoyed it Himself as God-in-the-Flesh. Knowing He knows me and knows just how to catch my eye, I fall human into Him with Jesus the hope beyond my daily regrets – and grace drifts in with the the night.

related:
“find / the moon”
“playing toward God”
quiet spaces