weariness – BONNIE J. McKERNAN

Your Labor is not in Vain

April 7, 2021 No Comments

If there’s anything these six Virginian acres have taught me, it’s that nature is not tamed overnight. The work of attempting to order the disordered so often feels like a battle I’m ever fighting and ever losing.

The growth and life that spring awakens is both exciting and exhausting. We live in a culture (myself included) that values results, production, and finished products, but rarely pauses to consider the mere act of tending and keeping and maintaining as work that is not only essential, but good and worthy.

I want a garden, flower beds, chicken coops, and patios, yet here I am still pulling endless weeds, chipping away at acres of brambles, and attempting to subdue this overgrown and unruly land into something that can support growth and use and beauty.

Staked tomatoes, arbored blooms, and manicured hedges are rightly glorified, but I’m working on seeing the glory in the slow and simple work of sometimes just holding back disorder. Continually fighting my yardful of invasive flora, stabilizing eroding hills and banks, adding things to my soil that leave it healthier than how I found it, and caring about those downstream of our creek that meanders well beyond my own land.

And here’s the thing, I need to see the value of this work even if we sold this place tomorrow. Even if it takes generations beyond my own before someone finally gets to lounge on a patio out back. Even if I never get my garden and taste the fruits of my labor.

This past season of Lent was a good reminder that pulling weeds makes room for flourishing and fruit. It’s simultaneously fighting against disorder and paving the way for order. With the knowledge that the exercise of dominion has always been meant as a vehicle of salvation, wholeness, and healing. Dominion exercised for other purposes is a travesty and a perversion of itself. It will not produce fruit that lasts or nourishes.

All things will be made new. Until then, we’re called to faithfully and tirelessly labor alongside the One who will carry it to completion, knowing that when we do, we are offered sustenance, beauty, and rest along the way

[On Faith], [On Family]

The Climax of Easter Night

April 4, 2021 No Comments

Thankful for the day and these people, and for this night that is “lighter than day.”⠀
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“The only real thing, especially in the child’s world, which the child accepts easily, is precisely joy. We have made our Christianity so adult, so serious, so sad, so solemn that we have almost emptied it of that joy. Yet Christ Himself said, ‘Unless you become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of God.’ To become as a child in Christ’s terms means to be capable of that spiritual joy of which an adult is almost completely incapable. To enter into that communion with things, with nature, with other people without suspicion of fear or frustration. ⠀
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We often use the term ‘grace.’ But what is grace? Charisma in Greek means not only grace but also joy. ‘And I will give you the joy that no one will take away from you…’ If I stress this point so much, it is because I am sure that, if we have a message to our own people, it is that message of Easter joy which finds its climax on Easter night. ⠀
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When we stand at the door of the church and the priest has said, ‘Christ Is Risen,’ then the night becomes in the terms of St. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘lighter than the day.’ This is the secret strength, the real root of Christian experience. Only within the framework of this joy can we understand everything else.”⠀
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-Alexander Schmemann, from “Sanctification of Life” (1963)⠀

[On Faith]

The Voice of Silence

January 18, 2021 1 Comment

Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark

January has been a bit wearying for me in many ways. And if I’m honest, I’ve felt God’s voice in my soul to be rather quiet lately. But I was telling my kids the other day, that one of the biggest personal evidences I have of not only God’s existence but his nearness, has been the times when he doesn’t feel so close. Those moments are so utterly and unmistakably different from when he does.
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It’s hard to deeply miss someone we’ve never deeply met or experienced. ⠀
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It’s those quiet, solitary moments that remind my soul to head back home.

[On Faith]

A Hymn for 2020

December 17, 2020 No Comments

I realize no one has made me in charge of such things, but I’m just gonna go ahead and re-name this: “The Hymn for 2020.”

“A Hymn: A Prayer for Forgiveness and Deliverance⠀
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O God of earth and altar,⠀
bow down and hear our cry,⠀
our earthly rulers falter,⠀
our people drift and die;⠀
the walls of gold entomb us,⠀
the swords of scorn divide,⠀
take not thy thunder from us,⠀
but take away our pride.⠀
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From all that terror teaches,⠀
from lies of tongue and pen,⠀
from all the easy speeches⠀
that comfort cruel men,⠀
from sale and profanation⠀
of honor, and the sword,⠀
from sleep and from damnation,⠀
deliver us, good Lord!⠀
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Tie in a living tether⠀
the prince and priest and thrall,⠀
bind all our lives together,⠀
smite us and save us all;⠀
in ire and exultation⠀
aflame with faith, and free,⠀
lift up a living nation, ⠀
a single sword to thee.”
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-G.K. Chesterton, 1906⠀
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My husband stumbled on it earlier this year in my Chesterton book of poems (because #readapoemaday) and I haven’t quite shaken it off.
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**Vintage artwork shown was done by Chesterton’s pal Tolkien. One of many original illustrations that accompanied The Hobbit manuscript when he submitted it to his publisher in 1936. Check out this amazing book for more of them.

[On Faith]

What is Truth?

November 10, 2020 No Comments

Truth. That word getting thrown around like wildfire lately. Twisted on all sides, for all purposes.

Let’s clear the smoke a bit, wipe away the mire, breath deeply, and be refreshed — because Truth is a balm, not a bomb.

Disordered and weaponized it becomes something no longer itself, spreading and infecting all it touches (1 Cor. 5:6-8), but sought after like the costly pearl and the oft-forgotten treasure it is, kept intact, not an atom in the cosmos is immune to its ability to enliven and heal (Matt. 13:31-33).

Truth is not facts, something to be voted on, a thing one can censor or own (John 14:6).
Truth is walked in, not won; clung to, not fought for. It is freely offered, freely given, and then lived. It’ll look more like worship than war (John 4:23-24; 2 John 1:4).
Truth is not something we speak so others will listen to us, it’s something we “become of” so we may hear the voice of Christ (John 18:37).⠀
Truth is not something to win arguments or prove points with, it’s something that gives life and sets people free (John 8:32).⠀
Truth overflows from its source, reflects its source, glorifies its source, leads back to its source (John 16:13).⠀
Truth is for every class, color, creed, and party (Acts 10:35).⠀
Truth is something Love rejoices in, not something Anger throws (1 Cor. 13:6; Eph. 4:15).
Truth is something we “belong to.” A belonging that can be identified in ourselves and others because it’s woven with right actions and hearts at rest in their Maker’s presence (1 John 3:18-19). Anyone can say something that is true, but severed from its roots, it will wither, die.⠀
Truth inaccurately handled or wrongly offered (“the wrangling of words”) is birthed of this world. It becomes useless babble, leading its hearers to ruin rather than life, spreading like cancer. To present truth rightly is a solemn charge, to do so rightly is a holy and pleasing offering to God (2 Tim. 2:15).
Truth is not a political platform or the possession of any man-made institution or denomination, it’s the living God. The foundation of his Church who is commissioned to carry his unity, truth, goodness, and beauty to every inch of our world (1 Tim. 3:15).⠀
Jesus flipped tables only because he embodied Truth. He flipped what was hindering people from that Truth, then stuck around to heal, feed, and lead them there (Mark 11).

The world, like Pilate, is asking: “What is truth?” (John 18:38). They are fearful, weary, angry, and hopeless. But we’ve been handed the reason we need never fear. We’ve been offered unmitigated rest and given the Spirit of peace. We have lasting hope because we know Truth, and only by embodying that truth, through the work of the Spirit, will we be offering anyone anything worth taking—something that can feed, heal, change, and last.⠀
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So while the world argues about current events, let us be people who walk and live the narrow, yet beautiful way of Truth.

[On Family]

On Homeschooling, Dyslexia, IEPs, & my 9 yo Poet/Astrophysicist

August 9, 2020 No Comments

My 9-year-old confessed to me the other day: “You know what, Mom? I feel so much smarter here than I did at school” [my Mom heart sank a bit and my eyes froze on her expressive face with her little dyslexic mind deep in thought].

“…At school it seemed like I spent all of my time just not being able to read while everyone else could, but here at home I learn about black holes and supernovas and invent stuff and write poetry. And I’m really good at those things [Exhale. There’s the confident mini-woman I know and love].

This kid. She braved through one year of IEPs the year before last like a champ, and while unlike her it often left me in tears (and few things do), the contrast of it all helped us both realize how much she loves learning. In ways a system (as supportive as it truly was), could never have brought forth.

At school, her remedial reading handed her nothing to wonder and dwell on, while at home she can ask me to read her cosmology, theology, and Longfellow to her heart’s content.

…I was hanging up some clothes in her closet and discovered her sweet impromptu solar system☝️

She informed me that she’s decided to be an astrophysicist. Because: “I think it would probably be a more stable job than a poet”😆

It’s a fascinating thing to go about our days together as I slowly figure out how her mind and soul work and what they were made for.

She will eventually learn how to properly read all the words and ideas she’s grown to love, she will eventually learn how to properly spell all the poetry and stories that pour out of her, and I will eventually learn how to properly channel the beautiful, quirky intensity of this kid I was given. …The one who can’t decide if she’s gonna be an Einstein or an Anne of Green Gables, but I have a feeling she’s going to figure it out.

(I share this because I know many are having homeschooling thrust upon them in ways none of us envisioned. But I can say with confidence that along with its high and lows, which there are, there’s an unmatched freedom to it that allows some minds and souls to become far more themself than they ever could have otherwise).

Her first tourtière🏆 (everything tastes better when cooked in an apron and snakeskin boots)

“Doing Modern Art” when she was supposed to be doing math🙄

Black Holes and distant galaxies🌌

Fiddling in the meadow💕

[On Faith], [On Family]

“I am, I Can, I Ought, I Will”

December 3, 2019 No Comments

[Trying to get this kid to come start school this morning/afternoon for the umpteenth time]:

N: “…but Mom, I just really can’t. I’m working on something SO important right now. I’M RE-DOING MODERN ART.”

It was a really tough day with this one in particular, who was fighting against Monday with all her might after a busy holiday week of traveling. But as I lay here now and think back on the day, I realized she was at her best when she was making.

…Mounds of construction paper snowflakes before I was even out of bed. Intricate train track towns slowly filling the room as I worked with the other kids. Pages of Mondrian-style artistic creations because a right-angled ruler and a tin of colored pencils caught her eye on her way to start math. Slowly and attentively tackling “Good King Wenceslas,” for the first time with her violin teacher, because even though she grumbled all the way to practice, she simply couldn’t stifle her desire to make music.

“I am, I can, I ought, I will,” is the Charlotte Mason student motto so often before me, and I’m struck by how even on days where our children get nowhere close to the end of that motto, the “I am” part of it never changes. It’s always there. And I’m convinced the only way they will ever truly make it to the whole “I will” part — at least in the way they ought — is by knowing who they are, whose they are, who they were created to be, and what they were created to do.

Even at her worst, my dear tired little girl, just couldn’t keep herself from making and creating.

Yes, we must do math. Yes, we must figure out how to teach her dyslexic little mind to decipher all the words she so loves to hear and speak. Yes, we must (all) learn to actually do what we ought because it’s how we do right by others and ourselves. …BUT every so often, if we have to spend an entire Monday just camping out on that tiny little, but eternally significant “I am,” and go to bed praying that grace will get us closer to the “I will” tomorrow, well gosh darn it, that’s just what we’re gonna do😂

#iwillbecauseiam

[On Faith], [On Family], [On Schooling]

In the Image of their Maker

November 18, 2019 No Comments

”In our society, at the age of five, 90 percent of the population measures ‘high creativity.’ By the age of seven, the figure has dropped to 10 percent. The percentage of adults with high creativity is only two percent! …We are diminished, and we forget that we are more than we know. The child is aware of unlimited potential, and this munificence is one of the joys of creativity. Those of use who struggle in our own ways, small or great, trickles or rivers, to create, are constantly having to unlearn what the world would teach us” (Madeleine L’Engle, ‘Walking on Water‘).

I’m not a craft mom. My utilitarian bent drags me down & my creativity tends to manifest itself in necessary things… learning how to lay hardwood flooring because we need a floor, cooking a meal because we need to eat dinner, sewing because my kid has a hole in his pants. But crafts are messy and superfluous, and what do I do with it when it’s done??

Curiously though, I love art and music and poetry and so many beautiful things I no longer can find the time to do or learn or cultivate.

My kids though, they CREATE. With no clause of necessity attached. They do it because it brings them joy, and I’m struck by how beautifully that reflects their Creator

One of my sons interrupted me the other night, well past his bedtime, excitedly wanting to show me this ship he was stitching. I was frustrated then, but saw it sitting in the corner today, and it touched me. This is my kid who gravitates to all things facts and reason. He lives and breathes sports and history and facts. He’s not my imaginative or creative one, but he loves making and building and executing. No pattern or instruction from me, he just bummed some supplies off his Great-Grandma and ran with it.

And I realized the importance of this. Here is my child who happens to be struggling with the abstractness of faith, yet something in him still loves the abstract beauty of creating. Because whether we see it or grasp it, we were made in the image of our maker and the “creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught” (L’Engle).

There’s a flame there apart from me, that I could never ignite, but I can kill or kindle. Lord, help me kindle!

[On Faith]

The Regression of Progress

November 8, 2018 1 Comment

“Now we are no longer primitive. Now the whole world seems not holy… We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism… It is difficult to undo our own damage and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it. We are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.

Did the wind used to cry and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of the earth, and living things say very little to very few.

And yet it could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water, and wherever there is stillness there is a small, still voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song and dance, the show we drove from town…

What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us?” (Annie Dillard, “Teaching a Stone to Talk).

I’ve been pondering lately, these reasonable and rational times we find ourselves in. On one hand we have learned much. So many great advancements in science and medicine and philosophy, a plethora of neat little theological boxes to choose from… I can’t help but feel at times though, that the more we think we know about this world, the smaller we make it.

I have no desire to harken back the Dark Ages, yet there are moments when all this knowledge feels anything but illuminating.

What are we losing in our race to prove and rationalize and exegete? What are we quenching in our striving to explain and define it all?

In the words of C.S. Lewis, “They err who say ‘the world is turning pagan again.’ Would that it were! The truth is that we are falling into a much worse state. ‘Post-Christian man’ is not the same as ‘pre-Christian man.’ He is as far removed as virgin is from widow.” And that was 1953.

The pagan world had the mystery and wonder and excitement that preceded the Incarnation. The modern, post-Christian world is bleak and dark in comparison. I rejoice the truth that can be attained, though I can’t help but lament the wonder that was lost.

I didn’t used to care about wonder, but the days have felt colder and shorter and louder lately. Life can be hard and tiring, and while I often collapse into bed with a mind full of facts and reality, I can’t help but pray that I awake to a morning of hope that defies reason and miracles rather than answers.

I want to be proven wrong.

I want my lens of rationality to stop blinding me from the inexplicable works and beauty of God.

I’ve been handed truth undeserved, for which I am eternally grateful, but the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. The more I know God, the more I realize how incomprehensible he is. And the more I long for my deafened ears to hear him in the wind and my skeptical eyes to see the mountains praise him.

“He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth upon nothing. He wraps up the waters in His clouds, yet the clouds do not burst under their own weight. He covers the face of the full moon, spreading His cloud over it. He has inscribed a horizon on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness. The foundations of heaven quake, astounded at His rebuke. By His power He stilled the sea, and by His understanding He shattered Rahab. By His breath the skies were cleared; His hand pierced the fleeing serpent. Indeed, these are but the fringes of His ways; how faint is the whisper we hear of Him!

Who then can understand the thunder of His power?” (Job 26:7-14).

[On Faith]

Fighting Anxiety …Like A Child

August 13, 2018 No Comments

[Originally published HERE at Servants of Grace]

I sunk into bed during one of those awful, pre-dawn hours of the night after a day where my required tasks had far outnumbered the minutes allotted to me. One of those “Come again, Lord Jesus” moments when you decide you’re utterly unable to wake up and take all the breaths and steps required to get you from one end of the day to the other. The mere thought of the sun coming up — brutishly forcing me to open my eyes and behold the whirlwind of problems and duties that would be there to greet me (in a far too short amount of time) — seemed to feed on my exhaustion and tension, convincing my sleepless-self that I hated the sun and its horrible inevitability and I had no desire to ever see it again.

But it rose anyways.

And after its arrival, one of those inevitable duties toddled into my room to greet me. While the rest of my children have developed varying degrees of self-sufficiency and self-awareness, this freshly-turned-three-year-old grasped my hand, pulled herself up, pressed my tired face between her palms, and candidly informed me of her wants and her needs for the moment. She wasn’t hesitant, or even demanding — but expectant. Because she knew she was incapable of getting through the morning and meeting her needs by herself. Yet she wasn’t troubled by it because she knew I was there, and I could. And my heart ached, because as I watched my sweet child I realized that though I know my God is there and is able, I can’t seem to figure out for the life of me, how to talk my heart into resting in this truth and my feet into walking that path of child-like reliance.

The Calmed and Quieted Soul

I longed to be able to proclaim Psalm 131:

“O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.”

Instead of a self-propelled soul that instinctively presses on, desperately trying not to forget those “oh yeah,” mental sticky notes to remember to seek the Spirit, I yearn for a childlike-soul that doesn’t even know how to take a step apart from him. Not out of fear, but out of a confidence so strong — in his strength, and goodness, and love — that I couldn’t even imagine trying to find my way through the day without clinging to him. O LORD, wean me of myself!

The Weaning Soul

I’ve raised enough babies to understand the difference between a weaned child and a weaning child. That one syllable is the difference between peace and anxiety, contentment and worry, rest and struggle, surrender and striving. …A weaning soul is a weary soul. One that needs to be stilled and soothed as it’s weaned from its desires and thoughts and ways, because something far better is being offered.

We need to follow the path of the psalmist as he seemingly describes his weaning of self, venturing from inward to outward — from heart, to eyes, to actions: “my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me…”(Psalm 131:2).

Until my heart is able to say that it trusts in Christ above all else, I will continue to be broken and betrayed.

Until my eyes can look to nothing above God to satiate my desires, I will continue to taste disappointment.

Until my actions are spurred by the Spirit and his strength alone, I will continue to trip and fall.

The road to that place can be long and trying, but rather than allow our anxiety to falsely prophesy hopelessness, let’s instead rightly proclaim the hope we have because we know who is leading us, and we know to whom we are being led.

“After a period of prolonged and painful struggle to have its longings answered, the little one gives over striving any more, and is at peace. …Like a weaned child, its tears over, its cries hushed, reposing upon the very bosom that a little ago excited its most tumultuous desires, his soul that once passionately strove to wring from God an answer to its eager questionings, now wearied, resigned, and submissive, just lays itself to rest in simple faith on that goodness of God… It is a picture of infinite repose and of touching beauty—the little one nestling close in the mother’s arms, its head reclining trustfully on her shoulder, the tears dried from its now quiet face, and the restful eyes, with just a lingering shadow of bygone sorrow in them still, peering out with a look of utter peace, contentment, and security. It is the peace of accepted pain, the victory of self-surrender” (Rev. James Vaughan, 1876).

The Sun Also Rises

Stressful days will come and go, and I doubt my nights will be forever absent of restlessly watching the clock advance as my brain mentally counts all the seconds I’m not sleeping and all the things I’m not doing. But every night when the darkness comes, I can remember that my sins and anxieties can die with it. And every morning as the sun faithfully rises, I can remember whose mercies for me are new—regardless of what the day brings — because death (and everything in between) was forever conquered.

Dear Lord,

Help me open my eyes in the morning and immediately seek you rather than the world and its worthless things. Make my weaknesses clear and your strength blindingly clearer. Help me rest in your hope rather than wallow in my fear. Thwart my feeble yet habitual attempts to rely on my own abilities. Burden my heart with what distresses you rather than what stresses me. Help me seek you more than answers, pray more than worry, and worship more than grumble. Be my peace in the chaos and my rest after sleepless nights. Help my mind wander to you when I’m weary and anxious. May I hope in the LORD, from this time forth and forevermore.

Amen.

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