One Thousand Words

Horse-sense and the Meaning of the World by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/OTW_S6_E3_Horse-sense-and-the-meaning-of-the-world.mp3 Follow Follow Follow Follow Sign up for the Newsletter Thanks for signing up! First Name Last Name Email Subscribe Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference! Click Here There’s an anecdote attributed to Beethoven, at least as I heard it somewhere, that I love. The story goes that after playing a certain piece of music, someone asked him, “Maestro, what does this piece of music mean?” “Ah!” he said, “good question,” and immediately he sat down at the piano and played the whole piece again from start to finish. You get the idea. The meaning of a piece of art can’t be separated from the art itself, as if, in the case of a story, for instance,  a so-called moral could be extracted from it, such that the story could be discarded. The meaning of the music, or the story, or the poem is not separate from its medium, but bound up with it. Can you imagine a smile meaning something without a face? No, the meaning of the smile can’t be separated from the medium through which the smile is made available, the peculiarities of a loved one’s bodied expression. Often it is the medium or mode of the communication that shapes us as much or more than the message itself. It was philosopher Marshall McLuhan who said, “The medium is the message.” What does that mean? Neil Postman, in his book “Amusing ourselves to death,” applies McLuhan’s phrase to television, specifically Sesame Street. Now, I grew up loving Sesame Street, but Postman argues that, for all its merits, even a wonderful show like Sesame Street, can’t help but teach us to love its medium, which is television. He explains that if we love a TV show, at least one thing that’s happening is we’re being trained to love television, which is the show’s medium.  Nowadays, even if this (hopefully beneficial) podcast is what you go to your smartphone for, you’re still being trained to love the medium, which, in part at least, is the device itself. It’s just a pattern of reality, not itself bad. For instance, like we mentioned above, if the message is love through a hug, smile, or loving words from a friend, the medium is that person, and you’re being trained to trust and attach to the medium. The medium and the message are inextricable. That’s why what is said and how it is said go together. Like music and its meaning, like language and the people who speak it, like a smile and a face.   I love to read outloud. One reason is because words don’t come from thin air, they come from people. People with bodies, body language, voices, gestures, and expressions. They have a way about them. The best writers make their characters real as you read—you can see how they move, you can just hear how they would say such and such.  I’ll give you an example from a song I wrote called “Looking for you.” Here’s the first line of the song, it goes, “what if you found out someone had been looking for you the whole time?” It depends as much on how it is said, as much or more than what is said. You can imagine other ways of saying that line, can’t you? Let me try it out with two different ways of saying it:  What if you found out someone had been looking for you the whole time. (with a threatening tone)  or What if you found out someone had been looking for you the whole time. (with a comforting tone)  That lyric could get creepy real fast, right? The non-verbal music or tone of the phrase matters to its meaning. I’ve heard it suggested that something like 85% of communication is non-verbal, implicit, and intuitive. That non-verbal 85% is one of art’s sweet spots, and it’s reflected in God’s artwork, the Creation.   So, let’s look at an example from nature… Like Beethoven’s music, you can dissect a frog and catalog all the parts, but what you’ll miss entirely is what a frog actually means. You might analyze what it is, but not why it is. George MacDonald, who wrote a whole essay about how the images in nature are meant to supply our imaginations with ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves and God, puts it this way:  In what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things; we see in them, as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of them. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it—just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology. So Nature exists primarily for her look, her appeals to the heart and the imagination, her simple service to human need, and not for the secrets to be discovered in her and turned to man’s further use. Isn’t that interesting? Nature doesn’t primarily exist to be analytically autopsied, as if the message could be extracted from the medium, without destroying both. Gandalf’s comment about Saruman fits well here, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.”  John Ciardi says the same of poetry, citing Charles Dickens  …the language of experience is not the language of  classification. A boy burning with ambition to become a jockey does not study a text on zoology.  He watches horses, he listens to what is said by those who have spent their lives around horses, he rides them, trains them, feeds them, curries them, pets them.  He lives with intense feelings toward them. He may never learn how many incisors a horse has, nor how many yards of intestines.  What does it matter?  He is concerned with a feel, a response-to, a sense of the character and reaction of  the living animal. And zoology cannot give him that. Not all the anatomizing of all the world’s horses could teach a man horse-sense… So for poetry.   So meaning is not about mere information. It’s not about extracting the message. That means art has something to say about the inseparability of orthodoxy (correct belief)  and orthopraxy (correct living), for instance, since art-making emphasizes that meaning (or truth) only arrives when what is said and how it is said—the verbal and the non-verbal communication—harmonize. Christ says to obey (orthopraxy) is to love, which may suggest that the non-verbal how of our lives—the part that art tends to specialize in—is actually primary. Which is another way of saying I’ll know what you believe by how you live, not by what you say you believe. I’ll know what a frog is by watching how it frogs, not by reading the autopsy report. Or, in the case of Ciardi’s jockey, I’ll gain some horse-sense by being around horses, not by listening to a lecture about their characteristics.  Am I saying that truth-claims are secondary and not important? No. I’m saying the natural order of things is that truth claims are literally second, in the sense that, in real life, they don’t happen first. First the stranger smiles at you, then you meet them and learn their name. The relational experience of the person precedes the propositional conclusions we arrive at. I smell the flower before I set down my doctrine stating how pleasant it smells.   Recently I heard someone describe the moment they began to take Christianity seriously. They said they were tasked at their job to interview an old man, a believer in his late 90s. As the old man began to tell stories of God’s work in his life from over fifty years before, tears ran down his wrinkled cheeks and praise tumbled from his quivering lips. The young man realized he was in the presence of someone not just conveying information, but bearing witness to a relational reality. This old man really had met and come to love a living Jesus.   It’s interesting that Jesus invites his disciples to follow him long before he asks them “who do you say that I am?” In some sense, the experience of discipleship precedes conversion. You get to know someone before you make truth-claims about them. And the truth-claims of the church are the result of the cumulative witness of many who’ve heard the deep, throbbing music of God’s lovingkindness, steeped themselves in the poetry of the holy heartbreak of covenant history, experienced the forgiveness, kindness, and beauty of God’s healing work, and they’ve come to know its meaning. They’ve come to put a name and a face to it all. “The meaning of the world?” they say, “It is Jesus.”  Having said that, can you detect the idea we began with—that the medium is the message? The main mediums God uses to communicate himself are the beauty and intelligibility of Creation, humans who embody his ways, and art that narrates his relationship with the world, by which I mean, firstly, the Bible, and secondly, the things that people make, whether books, music, poetry, etc. If television shows are really forming in us an attachment to television, for instance, and instagram is really training us to love our phones, then how might God choose to be deliberate in the mediums he uses to form and teach us to love and attach to himself. He needs to be deliberate, right? Since the medium needs to correspond rightly to the nature of the message, which is personal connection with himself.  The loving faces and touch of God’s people are the medium that teach us to love, not TVs and phone screens, but faces and hands. Jesus has a face and hands that heal. The medium is the message. The excellent artwork people make, can shape a “horse-sense” of reality in our very bodies that directs hearts toward what is ultimately real, and even how God relates to what he has lovingly made. That’s one of art’s sweet spots. The Scriptures involve us in the history of how God has gone about involving himself in history, how he has painstakingly crafted a beautiful story for God and humanity to inhabit together.    This principle is also the problem with idolatry, because if the medium conveys a message that doesn’t correspond to what is actually real, the sense of reality taking shape in us will be rooted in a lie. We’re all beginning to notice, aren’t we?  That whatever our devices, as a particular medium, shape in us, it isn’t really true. Our devices aren’t making us more human, the medium of a screen can’t satisfy the deepest needs of our personhood for the presence of another living face and body with us. No machine ever could, because we’re not machines. Because the medium is wrong, so is the message.  Screens don’t prepare us for deeper relationships with people, but for deeper dependence on screens. On the other hand—and let this be an encouragement—protected time with actual humans in real life practicing God’s love, slow contact with the beauty of the Creation, and meditation in the presence of Scripture and good art—these all offer us points of contact with what God, and therefore life, is actually like.  May we, with all the saints across the millenia, when asked, “What is the meaning of the world?” answer, “It is Jesus.”    All the music that has ever moved you,  All the light that’s reached your eyes,  every touch of love consoling,  every scent to wake delight,  The tastes that stirred the longing, The sleep that bathes our weary limbs,  Each embrace that held the crumbling heart together  Borrows life from the God who is   Its meaning and its essence,  Who is the light that makes light shine,  Who is the face the world is hiding  In every good and lovely sign.  The post S6:E3 – Horse-sense and the Meaning of the World appeared first on Matthew Clark.

Sitting very still, very cold, for a very long time by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/OTW_S6_E2_Sitting-very-still.mp3 Follow Follow Follow Follow Sign up for the Newsletter Thanks for signing up! First Name Last Name Email Subscribe Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference! Click Here The last few weeks I’ve spent the better part of my days out at the family farm near where my parents live. It’s deer season until the end of January, and I grew up hunting with my Dad, so that’s what’s on my mind lately. Honestly, I didn’t exactly relish deer hunting as a kid. I wanted to be with my Dad, but as a wriggling eight-year-old boy, I didn’t get particularly excited about being set in the woods and expected to sit there alone and perfectly still for, on average, three hours. Also, my Dad was pretty gung-ho about hunting back then, and so we were usually up and in the woods well before sunrise. And it was usually very cold. I could never get warm enough. Now, as you can imagine, that made sitting still that much harder. Shivering and wiggling were means of survival in the midst of a long, chilly morning, I reasoned. Being just a young’un, I didn’t yet partake of a morning cup of coffee, so I’d also get really sleepy on the deer stand a lot of mornings.   One of the only times growing up that I actually saw a buck of any size, was when it woke me up from a nap. I had climbed down from the twelve foot high ladder stand to sleep a while on the ground. Better to interrupt a hunt with a nap, than snooze your way off the side of a high platform and wake up dead. At any rate, I woke up on the ground eventually, with a big eight-point buck just a few feet away inspecting the strange creature he’d discovered laid out at the base of a tree. I gasped upon waking and startled the big fella, and we both froze for a moment. I don’t know what he was thinking. I was thinking, “can I get to my gun?” But it was a few feet away leaned against a tree. No chance. As soon as I moved, the buck darted away. I don’t remember if I told anybody about that until much later. I’d fallen asleep on the job, and, almost to rub it in, a prize buck had stopped by to make sure I knew it.     You may think, if you’ve played any deer-themed video games or watched a hunting show, that deer hunting is action-packed. You may be under the impression that the woods are positively crammed with the critters. The truth of deer-hunting is that it is wonderfully boring. It mostly consists of sitting incredibly still, totally silent, for a very long time, while nothing much happens. You begin to memorize the trees. Your eyes catalogue every twig that looked like a deer for a few seconds, but wasn’t. Your mind marks every twitch of a leaf that wasn’t, in fact, a deer’s ear or tail, and learns, over time, to disregard the sound of all two-hundred deer footsteps that wound up just being squirrels dashing through leaves or birds hopping across the forest floor. It takes a long time to learn that you almost never hear a deer coming. In fact, you almost never see the coming either. Deer don’t walk up, they materialize. They are silent forest shadows creeping warily across tree trunks, just darkening the world around them enough to graze the eye.   I hunted for six-and-a-half hours in one day. I saw one bobcat. I memorized a lot of trees. But every hunter knows that most deer encounters last a few seconds. It’s like waiting hours in line for the rollercoaster, and, when those few seconds finally arrive, I’m not exaggerating when I say that the feeling is the same. I cannot explain why the human heart beats like it does when shadow-buck materializes out of nowhere in the woods, like this creature slipped through some fairy-portal that happened at that moment to criss-cross our dimension. I can’t explain how impossible it is to slow your breathing, keep your hands from shaking (even twenty minutes after the deer has vanished again). I also can’t quite explain why you want to kill something so clearly majestic and gentle. But, for whatever reason, you do. You feel like, if I could just stop that thing in its tracks, I could get at that beautiful magic—hold onto it somehow.   They call it buck-fever. It’s enough of a rush to keep you coming back to sit painfully still for ridiculously long amounts of time, in extreme discomfort. You go hunting for that. You go hunting for the pulse-pound so loud only the crash of a gun can out-boom it.   But, truth is, you also go for the stillness and the quiet, which is 99.9% of what hunting is. For instance, I’ve hunted entire seasons and not killed anything. In fact, seen almost nothing. And, I have grown to love the very things that, as a child, frustrated me. Sometimes I actually enjoy getting up that early and climbing a tree stand before the sun is even up. It can be kind of game to slip through the woods as quietly as you can. And I have developed a taste for sitting as still as I can and memorizing trees for three hours at a time. I never would have thought that could be the case.    It’s only been in the last year or two that I decided to buy a few trail cameras to leave out at the farm. They’ve got fancy ones that’ll send instant videos to your cell phone anytime a deer passes by, but I bought a couple of the cheapest, simplest ones I could find. Now, it’s part of my schedule to go switch out the SD cards on the trail cams, come home, and check for deer videos. It’s like Christmas morning, y’all. You never know what may have walked past in the last week or two! A pair of racoons waddling by? A coyote startled by the infrared lights? A big buck? A brand new fawn barely getting his legs under him? There is a whole world going on that would otherwise go unseen, but there’s a tiny portion of the forest where the goings-on of that secret world are whispered.  Your whole life your own two eyes may only be able to see a tiny portion of the good that’s going on in this world. Buechner famously said that, “what’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”     From the deer stand I can hear the jets overhead and some big motor rumble down the gravel road not far off. There are horrible things going on in the world. Things that keep me from sleeping some nights. But they won’t amount to anything in the end. I am hunting for the things that will. I am out in the long stillness picking out the slender trail of the quiet, enduring things. Up before daylight, keeping watch in the cold for the dawn that may bring a longed-for glimpse of the Forest King with his spreading crown, as he steps from another world into this one.  The post S6:E2 – Sitting very still, very cold, for a very long time appeared first on Matthew Clark.

Reclamation: Fixing up a Four Wheeler by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/OTW_S6_E1_fixing-a-four-wheeler.mp3 Follow Follow Follow Follow Sign up for the Newsletter Thanks for signing up! First Name Last Name Email Subscribe Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference! Click Here I’ve been trying to get the grease out from under my fingernails for a few days. There have been hours spent researching to find just the right parts, scouring youtube for videos on how to fix this or that axle carrier, install a new carburetor, or what size spark plug socket to use on this 1986 Honda four-wheeler. It surprises me sometimes, but I can get delightfully lost in these details. My brother called it detective work. Restoring an old machine takes some sleuthing to see if you can puzzle out all the components to bring a rusty old farm implement back to life after years and years of neglect.  I was telling my sister, Angela, a few days ago that I have a very specific memory of clinging to her as she drove this four wheeler around a pasture when my Dad and Uncle first purchased it. I wanted to drive it so badly, but I wasn’t allowed. I was only six. However, my older sister was eleven and I could ride behind her as long as my Dad could see us. This past week, as I’ve been working on the old rust-bucket, I can see that field where Angela and I rode the gleaming new vehicle back then, except, it’s not a field at all. No, not anymore. It’s a stand of pine trees, nearly fully grown now. I can see the tall, golden grasses waving in my memory, where now pines stand straight and tall. Back then, I dreamed of the day when I’d finally be old enough to ride this thing all by myself.    About this time last year, I saw the old four wheeler languishing in the pole barn out at the farm. I’m not sure when it had last been cranked. The airless tires drooped like melted wax, mud and rust mingled to cover the frame, and the seat cracked and peeled like gray paint curling on an abandoned shack. The red plastic body had faded to dullness over the years. I felt sorry for it. But more than that, I felt like it was some piece of my childhood, some old joy and combustion that no one had tended to for such a long time that it was slowly decaying into nothing. If something weren’t done about it, it would be irretrievable before much longer. The question arose in my mind, was it already too late?   That set me to researching. I discovered that this particular model of fourwheeler (A 1986 Honda Fourtrax 250) had, in its day, been a fine machine. I was surprised to find more than a few folks on youtube excited to get their hands on one in order to fix it up. Could it be that this old thing was somewhat prized? I hadn’t expected that. So far so good. I had a good machine — good material to work with, it seemed. I guess that, because of that, I was able to find a good bit of information on it, and, what’s better, it wouldn’t be too difficult to find parts for the repairs.  But then, I got busy with other projects. The last book of the Well Trilogy was wrapping up, and the launch process needed attention. I put a bookmark in the story of reclaiming the old fourwheeler, and set it aside, where a stack of other books inevitably piled on top of it. On went the year, I was away from home for most of the second half, gone all of July overseas, home for three weeks in August, before spending the rest of the Fall on the road touring with the songs and stories of The Well Trilogy. When this December rolled around, I was out at the farm again, and there it was: the lifeless old thing—tired and forgotten.  It would feel so good to hear that thing crank up again after all these years. How fun would it be to ride the old paths through these woods again? The ones that I haven’t even ventured upon since this thing broke down? To crash through some mud-puddle like a rain-tromping toddler, to weave through the acres, get to know this place better. It was just a week ago as I was pulling the old, gummed-up carburetor from the heart of the machine to transplant a new one, that the word reclamation popped into my mind. Entropy is always groping at our hearts. The long lazy slump of decay, disregard, and carelessness seems to never tire of letting the air seep slowly from the tires. Here’s this old thing that used to boom with ignition, spin out on the turf with a kind of eager combustion, like a horse eager to run the race.     Is it too late to pay attention to that old liveliness? To see where the rust has crept into the bones, and to fight back with a little axle grease, and TLC? For me, working on this fourwheeler feels like a way of practicing another kind of regard, another kind of healing maintenance. It’s a work of hands-on reclamation. A choice to be a present, deliberate participant in not giving up to the easy deflation of life through the pin-holes evil quietly pokes through the tires. To keep caring. To keep believing that life, hope, joy, and love are ultimate and indestructible realities. However, they are not automatic or passive realities. They are living, relational realities that depend on patience, trust, and persevering in the ongoing and vulnerable work of repair and maintenance.    Ultimately though, it is God’s regard, his hands-on care that will accomplish the grand work of reclamation in us and in this world. He has not forgotten us like old farm implements crumbling in the corner of some derelict barn. He has big plans for this little plot of earth, and there is a plot to earth—a story, a frame, under all this rust and decay.     When the long-exiled Israelites returned to their homeland under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, the whole place was a hopeless ruin, and the state of the land mirrored the people’s broken down hearts. I’ve always thought it was interesting that the way to reclaim the people was to fix up the place. They got to work, stacked the stones, patched up the walls, put a fresh coat of paint here and there. For me, it’s been changing the oil, putting fresh tires on, a new carburetor, greasing the joints. It’s messy work, but, strange as it may sound, it sparks something deep in me to work at it. And, it’s hard to explain how good it felt, after years and years of absence, to hear the raucous old joy of the engine’s rumble when it finally cranked again a few days ago. I was a little boy out on his daddy’s farm, eager to hit the trail.  The post S6:E1 – Reclamation: Fixing up a Four-Wheeler appeared first on Matthew Clark.

A Tale of Two Trees - Jonathan Koefoed “Moonlight in the Desert: Singing the Sojourner’s Song” by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/OTW_S5-E17-Koefoed-Essay.mp3 Jonathan Koefoed is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Belhaven University, where he teaches courses in American history and the history of thought. He is particularly interested in the dynamic relationship between ideas, their historical context, and the way that any historical idea or author can illuminate the ubiquitous human quest for a good life. His previous intellectual journey involved postdoctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin, a PhD in History from Boston University, an MA in Historical Theology from Saint Louis University, and a BA in Philosophy and History from Arizona State University. His scholarly research focuses on transatlantic intellectual history, particularly the romantic movement and its influence on US thought and culture. His articles have appeared in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations and Religions, and his reviews have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Transatlantic Studies and American Nineteenth Century History. By The Rivers of Babylon by Matthew Clark   The endless voices whisper, all our hopes are only dreams No Deliverer is coming, that we are blind in our belief  but in the land where we all sojourn, with its beauty and its ash I will sing still for the Kingdom and a King who’s coming back    CHORUS by the rivers of Babylon  we will sing a gospel song in a foreign land   While the nations all are raging, hear the Lord in heaven laugh  we will stand upon his promise, the ways of men will never last,  and like a seed is to a tree, in the twinkling of an eye  we will see the heavens open, we will meet him in the sky   CHORUS   BRIDGE there will be no word for lonely In the Kingdom Jesus brings Every fear shall be forgotten  and all will be made clean   all the merciful will know him  The pure will touch his face See the children bear his banner  and the slandered share his name   Soon the river of our exile  Will become a holy spring  While the bent tree with its bitter fruit  It will never grow again    Now, the face that showed us kindness  Met our thirst by Jacob’s well  He will clothe us in his garments  He will marry us himself ©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP) The post S5:E17 – A Tale of Two Trees: Jonathan Koefoed, “Moonlight in the Desert: Singing the Sojourner’s Song” appeared first on Matthew Clark.

A Tale of Two Trees - Susan Cowger, "Time Between the Times" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/OTW_S5-E16-Cowger-Essay.mp3 Susan Cowger is the author of a poetry collection, Slender Warble (Wipf & Stock/Cascade, 2020), and a chapbook, Scarab Hiding (Finishing Line Press, year 2006). Founder and editor emeritus of Rock & Sling, her most recent publications include Ekphrastic Review, Windhover, Perspectives, Crux, McGuffin, Presence, and In A Strange Land: Introducing Ten Kingdom Poets (2019). She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and her BA in Art with teaching credentials from Montana State University. Married to Dana for forty-seven years, she has four children and twenty-two grandchildren. (I know, she finds this rather shocking too.) Contact her on Facebook and at susancowger.com. In the Waters by Matthew Clark   I was scared for my life  Saw the ship was capsizing  And the Lord lay asleep while the storm raged  I was losing my mind  All the darkness was blinding  Till the Lord with a word stilled the chaos  In the waters, in the waters    I’ve seen life go so wrong  Seen the best sink in sadness  Till the dark seemed their only companion But I’ve seen Jesus come save Walking out upon the waves  With his feet planted firm in the madness   In the waters, in the waters    Interlude    And some days nothing makes sense   Lord, the still place is spinning  And the center can’t hold for much longer  So won’t you bring us your song  As the howling grows stronger    Your voice is an anchor, Your voice is an anchor, Your voice is an anchor to me In the waters, in the waters    BRIDGE I can hear it, I can hear it, I can hear it coming through    Through the storm, through the darkness (I can hear it coming through) In the places I was sure your love had left me  Every night I was sleepless  But the beauty of the moonlight was you singing  When the flames tore the house down There were friends who became my home and family  So I know you will not fail  That your love, my God, endures forever    ©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP) The post S5:E16 – A Tale of Two Trees: Susan Cowger, “Time Between the Times” appeared first on Matthew Clark.

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A Tale of Two Trees: Lancia Smith, "Reaching for the Unseen" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/OTW_S5-E13-Lancia-Smith.mp3 Lancia E. Smith is an author, photographer, teacher, and business owner. She’s the Founder and Executive Director of Cultivating Magazine and its discipleship and creative team, The Cultivating Project. She has served in executive management, church leadership, school boards, and art and faith organizations for over thirty years. A recovering addict herself with more than forty years of sobriety, Lancia has done extensive support counseling. Her defining life focus is discipleship, expressed through mentoring, nurturing, and teaching. Lancia and her husband Peter make their home in the Black Forest of Colorado Springs.  Let your roots go deep Sit with me and talk awhile, Here while there’s a quiet hour  We’ll whisper with these witnesses, These steady stars  Who shine out in the universe, Marking out this path of ours  That only faith has eyes to see, That ends in joy   CHORUS  Oh, let your roots grow deep Is the word of truth you heard beginning to grow faint?  Let your roots grow deep, Let your roots grow deep  Don’t give up the fight just yet, Fix your eyes on Christ and  Let your roots grow deep, Let your roots grow deep     Drink deep from the Holy Fount, Whom angels praise and heaven crowns He washes weary pilgrim feet with Riversong  And even though this riverbed does not bear a river yet  These trees that grow know underground, Deep waters wait    CHORUS    The Kingdom that we see ahead, t he joy of our inheritance  Is built upon a Cornerstone the world rejects So, if today you hear his voice, Still and small amidst the noise  Don’t miss the call to fall into, His open arms   BRIDGE  Oh, let your roots go deep ©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP) The post S5:E13 – A Tale of Two Trees: Lancia E. Smith, “Reaching for the Unseen” appeared first on Matthew Clark.

A Tale of Two Trees: John Barnts, "Downside Up" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/OTW_S5-E12-Barntss-Essay.mp3 The post S5:E12 – A Tale of Two Trees: John Barnts, “Downside Up” appeared first on Matthew Clark.

A Tale of Two Trees: Jason Smith, "The Pit and the Power" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/OTW_S5-E11-Jason-Smiths-essay.mp3 Jason Smith serves on the board of An Unexpected Journal, as a strategist for the C. S. Lewis Foundation, and as the senior editor for acquisitions and development at Wootton Major Publishing. In his spare time, he works a day job as a marketing director for a medical device engineering firm, where he writes about fun things like FDA regulations and embedded cybersecurity. As J. Aleksandr Wootton, he is the pseudonymous author of the much-loved young adult fantasy series Fayborn and reviews every book he reads at www.goodreads.com/mrwootton. When I Cried Out (Psalm 40) by Matthew Clark   When I cried out from the pit that I had dug His song burst past the dead end grave Isaiah’s burning ember came and kissed me on the mouth And I knew there was still music to be made   CHORUS After all that I’ve seen, I cannot seal my lips Even when my heart fails within me,  For the Lord did not hide, no, he listened in his mercy And his song of lovingkindness still persists  Though I do not understand it, I am standing on this    All my troubles when they swelled into a crowd  The shame of failures too many to count  Then I whispered through the tangle, and you looked me in the eyes I found quiet that sang louder than those lies    CHORUS BRIDGE I thought I had to climb that holy hill to twist your arm  But when you bent to wash my feet,  I knew that I’d been wrong    CHORUS  © 2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP) The post S5:E11 – A Tale of Two Trees: Jason Smith, “The Power and the Pit” appeared first on Matthew Clark.

A Tale of Two Trees: Steven Elmore, "Sustained by Joy" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/OTW_S5-E10-SElmores-essay.mp3 Steven Elmore is the President of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. He has over 20 years of experience working at nonprofit organizations and educational institutions, including serving as a community college adjunct professor (English composition), software instructor (basic to advanced MS Office), GED instructor (science, history), test preparation tutor, and in a wide range of office management and administration roles. His specific skill sets include event management, teaching/training, team leadership, program management, writing, communications strategy, strategic planning, and computer technology. He is also a writer for Cultivating Magazine.   Like A Lamb by Matthew Clark Fear and pride are just two sides, friend  Of Caesar’s tarnished penny  Quietness and rest belong to God  But who hasn’t studied warfare  On the battlefield of life here  Perfecting self-defense just to survive?    You know how good it feels, love  To scratch the itch of anger  But complaining only chains us up inside Feels like safety and power  In a world so full of danger  It feels like danger to be grateful, small, and quiet    CHORUS But Oh, I see the Mighty Word of God Go silent to the slaughter like a Lamb Oh, I hear the voices of the crowd  Grow louder as the buried kernel’s roots descend     Cause the roots beneath the surface  Search and listen for a music  That is and was and will be evermore  Like an acorn to an oak tree  Who would ever think it could be  That those little lambs might ever rule the world    But the meek will spread their branches  Above the clamour of the nations  The sons of God will rest beneath their shade  And the politics of power   That seemed so strong until that hour  Will fall into the traps their power laid     CHORUS    BRIDGE Nobody’s free from hardship  And the briers in the garden  Can push their way so deeply down inside  Till what started out so tender  Is choked out by the winter  And gentleness don’t have a chance to flower    But don’t let your love grow cold, dear  or buy the lies they’ve sold here  For the fools of God will fiddle on the roof  All their lives they were the punchline  Now their laughing faces outshine  Every image Caesar thought would get him through  ©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP) The post S5:E10 – A Tale of Two Trees: Steven Elmore, “Sustained by Joy” appeared first on Matthew Clark.

A Tale of Two Trees - Benjamin Holsteen, "Sing an Exile's Love Song" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/OTW_S5-E9-ToTT_Bens-Essay.mp3 Benjamin Holsteen believes that a life spent in pursuit of awe, wonder, and gratitude in the midst of the everyday is the best preparation for an eternity spent in the presence of their ultimate Source. He spends his days thinking, writing, talking, and living out of this conviction, currently as a PhD candidate in Art and Theology at the University of St Andrews. He lives on the edge of the North Sea with his wife and two children. You can find him online from benjamin.omg.lol and subscribe to *Transcendent Mixtapes*—his forthcoming newsletter reflecting in writing on religious life in the 21st century, filtered through a lifetime of obsessive pop music listening—at transcendentmixtapes.substack.com. How can we sing?  by Matthew Clark   Our captors cracked their whips and grinned  Down by the rivers of Babylon They laughed and mocking bid us sing  Down by the rivers of Babylon   So we hung our harps upon a withered tree  Down by the rivers of Babylon And we gave up songs about being free  Down by the rivers of Babylon   Pre-Chorus Oh don’t let our love grow cold   CHORUS But how can we sing the Lord’s song  How can we sing about home?  How can we sing the Lord’s song  By the rivers of babylon?   We wake up strangers in a foreign land  Down by the rivers of Babylon Lord, dry as sand slipping through your hand  Down by the rivers of Babylon   Pre-Chorus  CHORUS   BRIDGE Oh, his love endures forever  (Lord, don’t hide your face forever)   ©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP)   The post S5:E9 – A Tale of Two Trees – Benjamin Holsteen, “Sing an Exile’s Love Song” appeared first on Matthew Clark.

A Tale of Two Trees: Heidi White, "Two Trees, One Cross" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/OTW_S5-E8-ToTT-essays_HeidiWhite.mp3 Heidi White, M.A., is a teacher, editor, podcaster, and author. She teaches Humanities at St. Hild School in Colorado Springs. She is the Managing Editor of FORMA Journal and a contributing author, speaker, and consultant at the CiRCE Institute. She is a weekly contributor on fiction, poetry, and Shakespeare on the Close Reads Podcast Network and the CiRCE Institute Podcast Network. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Anselm Society and sits on the Academic Advisory Board for the Classical Learning Test. She writes fiction, poetry, and essays, and she speaks and writes about literature, education, and the Christian imagination. She lives in Black Forest, Colorado with her husband and children. She also hosts The Daily Poem Podcast  A Tale of Two Trees by Matthew Clark   I dreamed I saw two family trees  They grew from very different seeds  One stood tall with flowered crowns And one was bent and bitter    The bitter tree bore sour fruit  That made the people eating do  Wickedness upon the earth  Until they grew to love it    The flowered tree put out its leaves  Which perfumed faintly that bitter breeze  The bent tree’s branches shook like snakes  And did their best to kill it    But up the sweetness rose again  Like children rise from water cleansed and  Though the thorns tore at their flesh  They would not stop their singing Well ages came and ages went  And it seemed the good tree’s strength was spent  While the bitter tree kept sprouting strong  And choking out its fragrance   Till one day evil’s wicked limbs  Entangled all the hopes of men  And struck that holy heartwood down  And felled the mighty timber    The crooked fingers of that tree  Took hold of earth and made it bleed  And most forgot what goodness was  Or where to go to find it    And holiness decayed to dust  The spinning world gave way to lust  And justice cracked like splintered wood  The world lay in confusion    BRIDGE A tree is known by the fruit it bears  And every day we plant ourselves In one of two families  In one of these two family trees   But no one saw the twist to come  The prophets of the stump of God  Were killed like fools and all ignored  But underneath the soil    A tender Word beneath the roots  Uncurled until a little shoot Unfurled into the poisoned air  To raise the ancient family    To stir the dormant seed of faith  And water withered hearts awake  To die upon that bitter tree  And uproot it forever    And one day soon we’ll see his face David’s branch will clear away  The stubble where the wicked grew  And Jesus will make all things new ©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP) The post S5:E8 – A Tale of Two Trees: Heidi White, “Two Trees, One Cross” appeared first on Matthew Clark.

A Tale of Two Trees: Emily Verdoorn, "Rain" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/OTW_S5_E7-essay_Emily-Verdoorn_Rain.mp3 Emily Verdoorn is a mixed-media artist from Des Moines, Iowa.  For as long as she can remember, Emily has loved drawing and making things.  What was unselfconscious play as a child grew into a way of paying attention: to more deeply press into the life of the world around her, to grow in affection, to be awake to the world charged with the presence of Christ.  After receiving her BFA at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi, Emily spent some time participating in various intentional communities and ministries such as L’Abri, Brazos Fellows, and Summit Ministries which have also informed her work.  You can find Emily’s work and process online at emilyverdoornstudio.com and on instagram @emilyverdoornstudio. You Belong  by Matthew Clark   Wait, wait, before you give up Breath, breath remember what’s true  When feel like you’re a stranger And you can’t find a friend    CHORUS You belong to someone who loves you  You belong to someone who loves you  You belong, you belong  You were made to belong… to someone who loves you    Somedays the clouds will not part  Most days there’s a fog on your heart  But you’ve been around enough  To know the daylight will come    BRIDGE Someone who’s written your name of his hands  Someone who laid down his life  Someone who waited with tears in his eyes And kept watch down the road for his runaway child    I know with the world like it is  Hope tends to slip through your fists  But the truth is the truth  Though the whole world tell lies The post S5:E7 – A Tale of Two Trees: Emily Verdoorn, “Rain” appeared first on Matthew Clark.

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The (understandable) lie of cynicism, and the reality of hope by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/OTW_S5_E5-The-understandable-lie-of-cynicism.mp3 Pre-Save "You Belong" on SpotifyPart 2 of the The Well Trilogy, “A Tale of Two Trees” releases June 2nd! And the first single off that album releases Friday, May 5th. Pre-save it on Spotify today. Just click below and follow the instructions…  Click Here To Pre-save "You Belong" on Spotify “In those latter days, because of the increase of wickedness, the love of many will grow cold.”    Chesterton said that taking in the news was the very worst way to gauge reality, because the whole point of journalism is to report on abnormalities. There are millions of people who enjoyed their bowl of cereal this morning, but the news reports the two people who choked on their cornflakes. The idea is that, if you watch enough news, you’ll start normalizing the abnormal. You’ll begin to believe that most people choke on their cereal in the morning, when, of course, the opposite is true. Most people don’t.     Cynicism works in a similar way.     Jesus says, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart I have overcome the world.” That’s a realistic statement from the most realistic person to ever live. No one is more aware of how bad things really are than Jesus. He is the most realistic person when it comes to wickedness and trouble in the world, and what’s wild is that in the very next breath he’s the most hopeful and encouraging person. It would be easy to read that verse sarcastically, wouldn’t it? Cynicism would tempt us to use a sarcastic intonation, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, I mean whatever, if you’re still naive enough to believe in anything genuinely good.”    How can Jesus be both? How can he be absolutely clear-eyed and realistic about the wickedness of the world, and unironically hopeful and encouraging? By no means is Jesus naive, and yet he manages to escape the trap of cynicism. How? Because he sees the whole of reality in a way we don’t. He’s come from the presence of God to bring a better journalistic word about what is actually normative, and what’s normative is goodness, beauty, holiness, kindness, love, gentleness. From our vantage point these noble things break our hearts because we have become so worn down and wearied by evil; we see them as carrots dangled before our eyes, carrots we can never actually have. At best we talk about them with a heartsick longing, and at worst we scoff condescendingly at them, mocking them because we no longer believe in them anyway. We know better. Life has taught us to know better, hasn’t it?     But that is a trap. It’s the result of having our vision warped and skewed and overtaken by shadow. In this world you will have trouble, says Jesus realistically. But trouble is not the end of the world. There is some secret Jesus knows. He knows what’s actually normal. The Lord in heaven laughs, because he sees how puny the reign of evil really is, how temporary, how a single breath will blow it all away. There’s simply no contest. The eastern idea of equal opposites barely eeking out a balance between good and evil is ridiculous. When the moment comes and the Lord steps onto the field of war, the war will be over.     The crucifixion looked and felt so final, so absolute. Jesus’s death would have been cause for cynicism to claim primacy. But the resurrection of Christ makes a greater claim, saying that, no matter how convincing death and sorrow appear, don’t believe them, this vision of God’s light, life, and love triumphing in such a concrete way within the walls of our sorrowing world is what is most real. The word this beautiful resurrection speaks is the truest thing about reality.    Cynicism and despair are strong temptations in such a broken world. Hope and gratitude are sometimes easy, but very often they are acts of obedience and faith. Hope is often a decision we must make to actually believe what Jesus has said about life, that it is and shall be “very good”. But who hopes for what they already have? We’re told that love hopes all things, believes all things, bears all things, endures all things. Cynicism is a resignation to all the obvious evil in the world, as if it were the main thing, the primary reality. Hope calls us to bravely believe that evil is ultimately untrue. That evil is making an arrogant claim about its own primacy that is false. Jesus bears witness to that lie by being both absolutely realistic about evil, and at the same time keeping his heart open, vulnerable, and hopeful. He can stand with us in clear sight of all the the inevitable trouble of the world, and say, without a hint of irony or sarcasm, take heart, be of good cheer, don’t let your love grow cold, keep going, life is beautiful and good, rejoice always, lift up your hearts, keep thinking about whatever is noble and good, your labor is not in vain, nothing can separate you from the love of God, joy comes in the morning, I’m with you in the valley of the shadow of death, a bruised reed I will not break, I will bind up the brokenhearted, behold I am making all things new, come to me if you’re weary, I will give you rest. Rest from all that has beaten you down to the point that you can’t even believe in goodness anymore.    The rest Jesus offers is for those of us who, in order to understandably protect ourselves from more heartache, have taken up the cynic’s mantra. What is the cynic’s mantra? It’s this: “If you lower your expectations, you’ll never be disappointed.” Can you hear the hopelessness, the resignation, the despair and overwhelming sadness in it? What does it take to get us to that place? How much love must be withheld from us? How much harm must be done to us? I don’t think we’re born into this world expecting to be dropped, but at some point, if our cries go unheard long enough, we give up on expecting that the hunger and thirst to be held, celebrated, and meaningfully incorporated into a loving fabric of belonging is even worth the trouble of hoping for. Hope, if we’ve come to that sad conclusion, is just a reminder of what we’ve come to believe we can never have. Another dangling carrot, a trap door like all the others, ready to fall out from under us.    Perhaps the most frightening thing about cynicism is that, like many of our unhealed wounds, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a habit that tends to create a vicious cycle of self-sabotage. Someone told me once that what isn’t redeemed repeats. Wounds that don’t get the love and care they deserve, don’t remain neutral or benign. They continue to cry out for help, because the loss or the deprivation was real, which means the need for protection and love was real – and it still is. But if we’ve lost hope, we’ll spend a lot of energy protecting ourselves against it, typically by minimizing the good things we actually long for, that we actually do need. We may long to be enjoyed for our playfulness, but if we were punished for it by over-serious parents, we may repeat that punishment within ourselves and towards others. We lose our ability to enjoy the things we desire, because we can’t bear the pain of endlessly deferred hope, so we sabotage those good things in order to keep our expectations low, so we won’t be disappointed.    To lay more guilt and shame on the shoulders of friends around us who’ve lost hope is not my point. Lack of love is what has made it so hard to hope. How does Jesus respond to those of us caught in this cynical trap? There’s a moment in Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well that struck me just this week that I think has something to say about this.    Once Jesus has told her something that there’s no way he could have known (about her five husbands and the sixth she’s living with) she realizes he’s some kind of holy man. I think at this point she’s concluding that she’s being set up. A Jewish holy man has come to Samaria to dangle a carrot, then snatch it away. So she decides to go ahead and get it over with. She thinks she knows what’s coming. So she says, in essence, “Okay, holy man, where’s the right place to worship? Our mountain or yours?” She knows the answer. He’s a Jewish holy man, the only thing he can say is “at the temple in Jerusalem.” And she knows that’s impossible for her, a Samaritan woman with her track record. She’s trying to sabotage the situation, because her expectations have been shaped by the cynicism that, thus far in her life, has been necessary to survive all the disappointment she’s experienced. She’s saying, “Don’t waste your time or mine, holy man, yank the carrot, let’s get this over with. Don’t toy with me as if things could actually change, as if I could ever have access to God’s love. I know better than that.”    But Jesus, as usual, brings a whole new possibility to the table. He says God isn’t all that interested in a particular mountain, here or there. Something different is happening, and rather than people having to go to some certain place to meet him, he’s come to meet them wherever they are. Like, at a well at noon in Samaria, for instance. This carrot isn’t being dangled, it really is being offered. This is not a trap door. You can put your weight on this, all of your weight, and it will hold you.    We’ve all gotten used to being dropped. We’ve come to expect it. Can’t you hear the cynicism in her response? Her words are dripping with sarcasm when she says, “Oh, I’m sure that’ll all get sorted out and everything will be hunky-dory, once the Messiah shows up. Like that’s ever going to happen, or even if it does, like it’ll make any difference for someone like me.”     I can imagine that even as his heart was breaking for this woman, maybe with tears in his eyes, Jesus also couldn’t help but smile, knowing as he did all the goodness that was right there within reach for her. Did she see him smiling and feel puzzled? Was there some joke she wasn’t in on? Some punchline she missed? I think there was. That woman had no idea, just like most of us have no idea, how much love, forgiveness, goodness, beauty, and relief is sitting so very close to us. That’s the joke God is playing on evil, whatever bitterness Jesus touches is made sweet. Whatever soured well we’re drawing from, if we’ll sit there with Jesus, he can overcome it, and meet our disappointed thirst with the sweetness of living water. Of course you’ll have trouble in this world, he says, but don’t give in to it – don’t believe the claim it makes on you, keep up your courage, because I have overcome the world. A Closing Prayer Against Cynicism Oh Lord, we have been so hurt in so many ways. We have been dropped again and again, so that it is very hard to believe that we could be held, or that any good thing could be relied upon. Cynicism tempts us to resignation and hopelessness. Having experienced so much sorrow, cynicism feels most reasonable and safe. But, I feel my heart slipping away from me into a cold, paralyzing darkness. Lowered down into a pit of low expectations, where it is safe from the threat of more heartbreaking deferred hope. Safe, Lord, but cut off from the warmth of love and the joy of light. Come, Lord Jesus, and meet us in these low, cold, hurting places, like you met the woman by the well, and smile upon us here. Tell us again, for our sorrow makes us forget, the good news about how small evil and sorrow really are set next to your love for us — set next to your power to bring new life where death has made such arrogant, enormous claims. We are putting ourselves in your hands, Lord, do not drop us. We are asking to be held, do not let go of us. As we experience your reliable love, draw us out of cynicism into the solid reality of your inexhaustible goodness and care.  Through your resurrected Son Jesus Christ, Amen.   The post S5:E5 – The (understandable) lie of cynicism, and the reality of hope appeared first on Matthew Clark.

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The Joyous Grace of Creative Incompetence by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/OTW_S5-E3-The-joyous-grace-of-creative-incompetence.mp3 My brother Sam and I are both artists. He works in ceramics and, though he’s proficient on the potter’s wheel, he has a special capacity for capturing personality and expression in humorous figural sculptures of dragons, trolls, and other wild creatures. Our house is full of these hilarious critters peeping out from nearly every corner. Even the urn that holds our coffee grounds is a grinning, fat troll wearing a yellow tie whose head is the lid.   The last few years Sam and I have both worked from home. The two-car garage is his ceramic studio where he sculpts during the day and teaches classes occasionally. My little recording studio is set up in the extra bedroom. We’re both coffee drinkers, and our routine is to spend the first hour or so of each day at the breakfast table chatting over hot mugs of coffee as we gear up for whatever we’re working on that day.  As you can imagine, one of the recurring topics of conversion is the creative process. We’re always comparing notes on art-making itself – the processes and materials and inspiration, the travails of trying to get some meandering idea worked out concretely in our respective materials, and the further travails of trying to make a living at it. On top of all that, we tend to land in a place of gratitude sensing that, as we subcreate (to use Tolkien’s term), we are entering into a great and abundant mystery of making that is ultimately sustained and overseen by God himself, and not our own powers or achievement.   The invitation to make stuff is fundamentally an invitation constituted by God’s grace. Now, that may just come across as a Christian-y thing to say, so let me push into it a little more. By “grace” I mean a few things. One is that the invitation is a form of hospitality – God is calling us to collaborate – to take up whatever raw materials we gravitate towards, whether clay, music, words, food, wood, fabric, decor, space, ad infinitum, and develop those given things into something new that honors their inherent nature and qualities, but that realizes in new ways their internal potentialities. God could do all of that himself, but he chooses not to. Instead, he has chosen to graciously, hospitably invite us in to share in the fun. God says, “Look at this stuff, I call it clay. Do you like it? Take some home with you, see what you can make out of it. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!” So that’s one thing I mean when I say the invitation to make stuff is constituted by God’s grace.   Another thing is that grace, by its very nature, is unnecessary. Grace is, you could say, “extra”. My friends from Louisiana would say lagniappe. Lagniappe means some extra unexpected goodness that comes after something that was already good. It’s overflow, more than what’s required. The fact that we are invited to work and make and love and sing and dance and cook – all that’s extra. As if creating the galaxies, gooses, and grackles wasn’t enough, how about topping it all off with people. And while you’re at it, Lord, how about topping that off with marrying those people, through Christ, into the life of the Holy Trinity? And, then how about topping that off with a new heavens and a new earth… and who knows what the Lord will top that off with? Our God is a most persistent topper-offer! He seems to get so caught up in the joyous overflow of making that he’s always doing more than is required, always pouring out grace upon grace upon grace.  That being the case, the invitation to live our lives contextualized by that overflow and to creatively collaborate with God through the materials at hand in this world is characterized by grace. In other words, because there’s goodness aplenty, you don’t have to be all that good at it to participate. Grace means we can take creative risks. It means we can get started before we have any idea how to do it well. We can jump in and learn as we go, because our identity and the cosmos, in general, are not dependent on our proficiency. Those have already been taken care of, so we’re free to be no good at it, but do it anyway. We’ll get good at it eventually, unless we never get started.   I remember something a friend said years ago when he was a new dad. He said that as he learned to enjoy his children, he was learning to be enjoyed by God. I can still hear him say, “Children are completely incompetent. They’re not good at anything.” One thing about little children though, they aren’t afraid to get started. They don’t mind getting born, even though they have no idea how to do anything. Be like a little child, get comfortable with your incompetence and go head and get started. The world is not at all depending on you, and it’s absolutely fantastic that you are in the world.  It’s worth emphasizing: if you are in the world, then it’s because the Lord, the Giver of Life, enabled your existence. Existence itself, because it is a gift from God, is valuable in and of itself, without any further qualifications. Now that you are here, the work of being a living person is only secondarily to be proficient or good at stuff. Competency isn’t where you start. It may not even really be the goal. I mean who will ever be as good at anything as God? The main work of being a living person is responsiveness. Your very existence is grace, which means the supply of goodness and love is a question that’s already been abundantly addressed. God has already proclaimed an endless chain of “amens” to your presence here, that’s what you’re made out of. Even if a person only made it a few days, weeks, or years in this world, that chain of amens will go on.  But for those of us here, now what? What happens next? Next, we open our eyes and ears, stick out our tongues, feel with our fingertips, sniff with our sniffers. We go exploring. We go on a life-long scavenger hunt, looking in every neglected field for treasures. And when we find them, we get very still. We do a special kind of work called beholding. Beholding means to sustain a loving relationship of true knowing, true perception. Beholding is what allows us to understand the nature of a given thing within the context of it’s preciousness to its Creator. Beholding is the patient practice of entering into and honoring the life of a thing and learning its true name. In other words, beholding places us in a position of humble wonder as we look for Jesus’s intention within the things that he has made and that he continues to bless and sustain.  Just like the first job of the apprentice is to do nothing but watch the master work, beholding is not about getting anything accomplished, it’s just about paying attention. It’s about reverence. Once reverence has taken root, it blossoms into response. Now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen, I start making attempts to respond. I love because I was loved first. That is where art-making best begins – as a response to having beheld goodness.  And different materials, different mediums, call for different responses, according to what we’ve perceived of their nature, through the practice of beholding. Clay calls for a certain response, because it has its own kind of given life. Paint calls for a different response that corresponds to its particular qualities, which are the things it “loves” to do. A good cook has reverently beheld the nature of ingredients and therefore knows how to respond rightly and creatively to their inherent qualities. In other words, how to work with them to realize and develop their potential, rather than work against or in spite of them. A true artist is a humble collaborator, who takes joy in lovingly listening to her materials as she nudges and nurtures them onward to unfold their potential in new ways. She sees how an alphabet can become a sentence, and a sentence might grow into a sonnet. He sees how a block of mute wood might carry silent songs, and he responds by crafting a singing instrument like a guitar or cello. In Lord of the Rings, the Elves taught the trees to talk and they became Ents, but even in this world, ordinary men and women teach trees to sing. To sing perhaps a song they knew but could never hope to sing without our involvement.  Art-making then, like life itself, is a call to mutual reverence and responsiveness. It is a call to love, and in loving to waken and raise up all that God has graciously given us to steward. The perfectionism that paralyzes us from getting started is a trap laid by our Enemy, who loves to block our participation in God’s life. Don’t beat yourself up about it, but recognize it’s based on a lie about the way things are. It’s based on the lie that we have something to prove, something to earn, that competency is what justifies our existence. But the invitation is especially extended to the bumbling and incompetent. Jesus was always telling adults to be more like children, not the other way around. To our heavenly Father, we are all little incompetent children anyway, and we meet the Most High God not by being really good at mountain climbing, but simply by our infantile reaching. Fellow children, in Christ, we have already seen him bend down to us, take us in his arms, and raise us up to his shining face. I love how David Taylor writes this psalm in such a way that God as Creator, Christ as Redeemer, humans as sub-creators, and the Creation itself are all brought together so beautifully. Amazing. A Collect Prayer for Creation  By W. David O. Taylor, from his book “Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life”   Maker of heaven and earth, all your creatures, animate and inanimate, stand before you. In Christ, who stands at the center of creation, we see how mysteriously well-pleasing it is to you. In Christ, the mediator of the whole world, we see how broken it is. In Christ, the firstborn of creation, we discover its final destiny: new creation!   May we take pleasure in your creation as you take good pleasure in it. May we care for the earth as you lovingly care for it. And may we offer up all the creative work of our hands in praise of you, in service of our neighbor, and in anticipation of that day when the cosmos shall be made forever alive.   In the Triune Name.   Amen. The post S5:E3 – The Joyous Grace of Creative Incompetence appeared first on Matthew Clark.

The Threat of Gratitude? by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/OTW_S5-E2-The-Threat-of-Gratitude.mp3 There is something frightening about gratitude. Does that seem like a strange statement? How could gratitude be a threat? How could it be frightening?  That’s the question that got lodged in my head today as I was out for a walk. Passing all the startling new green that is leafing out from every direction here in Mississippi as spring is kicking off,  posed a challenge to the tired, gray thoughts that cloud my mind from time to time. Every tip of every branch is celebrating the return of newly grown joy. An irrepressible springing joy, that arrives just when you’d gotten used to things being skeletal and bone-cold. Oftentimes, right at the point when the chill has worked its way down and settled with a seeming permanence in our marrow, some newborn wind breathes into the nostrils of this slumbering world and wakes it again to the truth of an indomitable life, to hope, goodness, and beauty.  This pattern is built into our world. It’s so common that it’s easy to write it off as a mere material happenstance, rather than a tale woven into things that endlessly bears witness to something ultimately true. A deeper magic, as Lewis says, that ever abides, untouchable, incorruptible, beyond the reach of decay.  There is so much to be grateful for. But I do think that gratitude poses a threat to us, if we have gotten too comfortable with despair’s sad ability to soothe us. In my own experience, I’ve found myself getting so used to believing that goodness was out of reach, that, in despair, I wound up settling into sad substitutes for things like friendship, affection, joy, creativity.  God has built into us strong and beautiful desires, desires for a life of deep abiding friendship, attachment, generative creativity, and joy. What happens when, for a thousand reasons, those things are torn from us and held out beyond our reach? Maybe someone wounded us deeply? A trespass that traumatized some good thing in us, so that we can no longer see or feel it as good at all, much less hope that the good God created it for could ever be restored. That’s positive wounding – meaning something terrible did happen to us. Then there is negative wounding – something good didn’t happen or was withheld. Maybe no one hugged us growing up, no one listened when you had a real need, or encouragement was withheld. Often sins of omission do as much damage as sins of commission. In other words, to be starved is just as deadly as being poisoned.  Whatever the case, a lack of love can wear us down until we give up. Love and goodness are someone else’s fairy tale. Someone else’s fantasy. Maybe we’re not aware of the degree to which we’ve joined our hearts to hopelessness and adopted cynicism as the most reasonable position. Because, if we’re honest, if we’re in a position of such woundedness, then according to the evidence offered by our experience, cynicism is the most reasonable thing in the world.  And here’s the kicker. Once we get to that point, and I’m speaking from my own heart, cynicism and despair actually do become soothing. They feel good. If you’ve lost hope in ever accessing real goodness, hope is no balm, it’s salt in the wound. Gratitude has to do with hope which has to do with holding on to a faith that says we’re not cut off from the goodness God dreams of for us. That’s why gratitude feels threatening, because it holds up to our sad eyes a picture of the good thing we no longer believe we can have. Cynicism says, “I know better than to believe that fantasy.” And that’s why cynicism is so soothing, so comforting. And why it’s so frighteningly easy to get very comfortable with. It protects us from gratitude, from hope.  Things like gratitude, hope, faith, desire – these invite us to keep trying. They seem to taunt us with the possibility of good things, good things we’ve long since given up on. The Good News of Jesus’s love could feel like a cruel joke to us, if we’ve gone so far as to make peace with despair. The numbness is the only relief we believe we can have any realistic hope of attaining, and the call of Jesus to rise and follow him just makes us feel more exhausted than ever. We pull the sheets back over our heads. Hopelessness is safer, more comfortable, soothingly familiar. It’s not good–of course we know that–but it kind of works, you know? Once you stop believing in steaks, you’ll settle for spam. It’s the best you can hope for, right?  It’s been a long, slow journey for me, as the Lord has patiently coaxed a wounded dove out of the crevices and crags. It’s still going on, of course. Learning to hope again is not pleasant at first. Faith, in the beginning, is nowhere near as soothing as cynicism, despair, and faithlessness. Trust and gratitude feel like they’ll kill us. The desires God himself planted in our hearts become so entangled with shame and starvation that we just wish they’d go away entirely. But those desires are what make us human, and it seems that to remove them would do more damage and be a greater sin than to leave them unfulfilled or even wrongly filled.  Jesus says that because of the increase of wickedness in the world, the love of many will grow cold. It’s an ongoing prayer of mine, that those places in my heart that have grown so cold would not shove away, in despair, the warmth Jesus is offering. That they would not freeze up. I pray that I would stop settling for the voice of a sad sarcasm that would offer to soothe a heart so easily resigned to loneliness and hurt. I pray that the temptation to a sleepy passive pseudo-rest would not pull the blanket over my eyes and keep me from seeing that face that smiles tenderly upon every one of us, inviting us to rise, pick up our mat and walk, knowing that the devastating power of our sins and sorrows has been fully embraced by Jesus. That we are carried in his arms, and where we’d believed ourselves hopelessly cursed, God himself persists in speaking blessing upon blessing, grace upon grace. A Closing Prayer Lord, whether it’s by something terrible done to us or by some good thing that was withheld from us, or even by our own failures, we’ve been hurt. Our hurts have gotten so loud and persistent that they crowd out your kindness. In fact, it feels scary to even give good things a chance, because they just remind us of what we’ve come to believe we can’t have. But you have made it very clear that you desire to be with us no matter where we are. You, Jesus, have pressed into every hurting place, bringing with you kindness and hope. You do not dismiss our hurt, you embrace it, even as you call us to bravely turn toward new goodness that you desire for us. Beautiful Lord, please keep up your gracious, persistent work in us; please continue to coax out from among the craggy crevices your frightened, wounded doves, mending the wings that we’ve learned to keep safely tucked away and flightless. Amen.  The post S5:E2 – The threat of gratitude? appeared first on Matthew Clark.

Words that Make Quiet by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/OTW_S5-E1-Words-that-make-quiet.mp3   Today, I don’t want to write anything. Is it possible to make words that make quiet? I think of the sounds rain makes as it falls on the house, the ground, the field. I like to listen to that sound and the way it quiets the world by way of its audible presence. A continual hush saying nothing but listen to this hushing as it shushes everything it touches. All the better if you’ve got a barn to shelter in – one with a tin roof. That sort of rainfall, for me at least, is the loudest, most quieting that I know. Listen to the word “wash.” It is that rainfall. It is a word that makes quiet, isn’t it? A hushing word.  “Let me wash you,” Jesus told Peter. May we be quieted by that washing.     What are other sounds – other words that make quiet?    I think of kitchen sounds, cooking sounds. What do you hear? Not the clang or clamor of pots and pans. My Grandmother used to softly whistle while she cooked. It was a gentle, breathy, unconscious whistling. Never any particular tune, as far as I know. Just a wandering, carefree tunefulness, happy to be making its quiet way around the room as the cooking got underway. I find myself whistling like that sometimes in a quiet kitchen. I’m doing it for a while, before I even notice, and then I am glad to notice and then go back to not noticing.     A favorite kitchen sound is eggs frying. Eggs cook quickly and they make the best music if you don’t cook them too hot. Just above a medium on the stove at my house is best. That’s right at the point when they’re hot enough to fry. I don’t know the temperature. When eggs are frying just right in butter, oil, or bacon grease, they make a flopping, warbling, murmuring sound. A low gurgle and slap alongside a crispy fizzing sound as the whites whiten.    Cooking is a place I go in order to quiet. I like the sounds, the smells, colors and textures, even the movement and dance of it. I’m not even getting into all those things right now, but it’s a whole world of goodness. Like many things cooking has become so professionalized as to become scary to normal people. But it’s worth learning to enjoy, if pressure can be alleviated.   “Go to the upper room and prepare a meal for us there,” Jesus told his disciples. May we be quieted and nourished by good meals.    So far we’ve got rainfall, washing, whistling, eggs frying… where else might we find? Other sounds and words near at hand that make quiet?     When I was a child, as the day wound down towards sleep in the evening, my mom would often read to me out loud. Being read-to out loud is a sound that makes quiet. A good story read to us by a loved one, especially if we’re warmly nestled next to them, is like wind bending the grass of a field, or the steadying murmurations of a little stream, or a crackling fire. To read aloud alone is wonderful too, but to be read-to in the evening by a beloved voice is a precious thing.    “Today, these words are fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus told the crowd. May we be quieted and blanketed by good words read aloud.    Rainfall, washing, whistling, eggs frying, reading out loud… What else?    About a week ago a friend and I went stargazing. The temperature had dropped pretty severely a few days before and the night-creatures were all too cold to chatter. We only heard a single shivering frog and a few far-away owls. We’d gone to a rural spot to escape the light pollution and so there were no highways or cities nearby. It was a clear night, without even any wind to reverberate among the trees. We noticed the quiet even before our eyes had adjusted enough to attend to the stars. Have you ever been in a room when the washing machine or dryer that you’d forgotten was running finishes its cycle? The sudden quiet can startle you because you hadn’t realized there was so much noise. It was like that under those stars. Living in a city or near one, we hadn’t realized what kind of quiet was even possible. It was coming up for air.    On top of that, now that we were away from the light pollution (it’s own kind of noise), the clarity and brilliance of the stars was like a music made of quietness to our eyes. Someone said that music, if it is to be life-giving, must begin in silence. Stargazing makes for quiet.   “Look at the stars, can you count them?” God said to Abraham. May we be quieted beneath the silent music of starlight.    Rainfall, washing, whistling, eggs frying, reading out loud, stargazing… What else?    I think of birdsong. Occasionally, I don’t sleep very well. I go to sleep early, sleep a few hours, then I’m up from 2 or 3 am till 5 or 6am. I’ve been up a few times to hear the very first bird wake up and start singing. But even on the nights when I do sleep well, I don’t set an alarm clock. I typically wake up as the sun arrives, and I love to lie still for a long while and listen to the birds. Some birds, of course, are gravelly squawkers. But, in our yard, we have mostly little singers who pipe sweetly at the edge of dawn to welcome the light that is both new and ancient. Some mornings their music is a special calming, cooing mercy, if there’s been a nightmare or a grief to interrupt sleep. They bring with them the lilt and lift of lightness, of “ah! Bright wings” as Hopkins says.    “And the Holy Spirit descended upon him in the form of a dove,” say the Scriptures of Jesus at his baptism. May we be good perching places for the Holy Spirit’s blessing of quietness and rest.     Lastly, I remember a funny story when a buddy of mine stopped by to visit but we were both so tired that afternoon that the conversation drifted off slowly until he fell asleep on his couch and I fell asleep on mine. He said later, “now I know we are real friends.” That friendship required no entertainment, no performance, it didn’t even require being awake. One of the most wonderful things to me is to simply be quiet with someone and feel no need to fill the space with any distractions. That kind of quiet is itself a form of affection. It is a vulnerable, quiet trust in that other person’s love for us. It is a listening for a different kind of language, the quiet speech of simple, unadorned presence. The simple goodness of being with someone without any need to justify the worthwhileness of that presence.  “I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content,” says the Psalmist. May we be content in the affection of quiet.    Rainfall, washing, whistling, eggs frying, reading out loud, stargazing, birdsong, quietness together… What else?  The post S5:E1 – Words the Make Quiet appeared first on Matthew Clark.