Author: kenwoodley3

“Bombers Take Off From Golgotha”

The last shade of something

stalks the rim of night,

barely touching the tops of things,

sniffing the moonlight for food.

The stars are surrounded by burnt tea

and there is drinking.

Darkness stalks past the ruins,

spreading like damson

toward the crusty edge.

One by one the constellations are unborn

and the Milky Way becomes a beautiful scar.

From the jungle comes the sound of drumming

and the moon is swallowed by clouds

that look like an exploded letter bomb to God.

There are subtle chantings

that seem to be, or not.

People rub their ears

and graze further toward the edge of something.

Some prey is taken

and the night moves on.

—By Ken Woodley

There was nothing else left after the sun set on Good Friday.

The sky had become the roof of a cave.

The sky sometimes does.

Or appears to.

When bombers take off from Golgotha in our own lives we are desperately challenged. Two choices await our decision. We can sit down and give up, believing there is nothing beyond the cave. Or we can stand up, gather our crayons, and color stars and a moon on the cold hard stone, believing the sun will surely rise.

As it will.

In our hearts first.

And then the sky.

From blindness to sight. In a flash of light.

Blind from birth, your world of darkness dissolves into amazing colors.

Previously, the entire world had been in your imagination—the way everything looked—fed only by what your sense of touch told you about how they might appear if you could only see them.

We can close our eyes and touch a lamp or a chair or another human being and understand their appearance—but only because we have the memory of them in our minds. Someone blind from birth would have nothing at all to go on.

So imagine how the man felt in the Gospel of John after receiving his sight from Jesus. My imagination can’t come close to appreciating the man’s astonishing experience.

Jesus had been walking down a road when he saw the man and declared “I am the light of the world.” Then Jesus spat on the ground and made mud with his saliva. He spread the mud on the man’s unseeing eyes and told him to go wash in the pool of Siloam.

Ironically, this man is able to see but many of those around him suddenly suffer from a kind of blindness. The man who was once blind can see them but they cannot see him.

“The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’” the Gospel of John tells us. “Some were saying, ‘It is he.’ Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone like him.’”

The once-blind man insists, “I am the man” but some people simply refuse to believe him.

There is an old saying that applies to these doubters: No one is as a blind as those who refuse to see.

Jesus has worked a miracle but some people simply refuse to see it.

That got me thinking about life and my own experiences in this world. It struck me with sudden forcefulness that we, too, are sometimes blind to a miracle that Jesus or God has worked in our own lives.

And what struck me most forcefully was the realization that this blindness doesn’t always come from disbelief. Most of the time, in fact, this form of blindness comes from the fact that we have become too familiar with a miracle. We have lived with it for so long that it no longer strikes us as miraculous. We take it for granted. Like our spouse, for example. Choosing to live with someone, for better or worse, for a lifetime—and then following through with it—is not un-miraculous.

I imagine that within a handful of years, the man in the Gospel of John also came to take his sight for granted. Not intentionally. He wasn’t ungrateful for the miracle that Jesus had worked in his life. Through the years, every day he woke up and saw he sun rise made that new dawn seem gradually less and less miraculous. Every color emerging from the darkness of night was so familiar to him.

The same thing can happen when Jesus leads us through and out of one of life’s deep, wounding pains. It seems miraculous at first but in time we take the gentle scar for granted. Or, worse, we grump about the scar, forgetting how the wound, itself, felt.

Every now and then it’s a good idea to close our eyes and remind ourselves of a miracle worked in our own lives. Then, keeping our eyes shut, give thoughtful, meditative thanks for that miracle. We might imagine Jesus by our side. We might hear him spit on the ground, and then sense him kneeling beside us, making mud with his saliva.

We might feel his touch upon our closed eyes, the mud warmed by his caring hands.

Then, when we next open our eyes—with Jesus as the light of our world—we might see the miracles in our life more clearly.

That includes the reflection in your mirror.

My first story at the outset of a 36-year career at The Farmville Herald wasn’t the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein. Nothing that would lead to the resignation of a disgraced president of the United States. As scoops go, mine was pure vanilla. I was entrusted with a story reminding readers that the summer equinox was imminent. The day of longest light.

Looking back across four decades, it makes me smile to remember how excited I was to write that story. I’m glad for that joy, and how fitting its source was a day when the sun seems unlikely to ever set. In retrospect, that small mustard seed of a story foreshadowed my driving passion as a journalist—particularly during my 25 years of editorial writing. Reporting on crime and fatal accidents was never something I wanted to do.Wherever and whenever possible, my deepest satisfaction came in furthering the cause of “light.” Especially on behalf of Prince Edward County’s journey of racial healing and reconciliation.

Sunday’s return of Daylight Saving Time (Spring Tour 2017), reminded me of those first few paragraphs that I had composed shortly after joining the newspaper in June of 1979. My gratitude for the blessing of so many years in one community’s newspaper “pulpit” will never cease to flow over the brim. I could never thirst for more out of life.

My years at The Farmville Herald remind me of the time Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph, as the Gospel of John reports. Jesus, tired and thirsty, was sitting by Jacob’s well in the noon sun. He asks a Samaritan woman for a drink from the well. She is amazed that Jesus is speaking to a woman and a Samaritan. But Jesus was always breaking through barriers of segregation—social and spiritual.

Jesus then tells the woman about the living water he can provide. “Those that drink from the water that I will give them will never be thirsty,” Jesus tells her. “The water that I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” he adds. This “living water” is still on offer. Anyone who accepts the cup is able to drink from it.

What Jesus offers comes in many forms. One of them, I believe, is when we answer our life’s true “call. Whatever and wherever that may be. Every occupation offers a chance to serve the greater good. Without exception. All we must do is look for those ways that we can further the cause of “light.” The ways that each of us can represent, both figuratively and literally, the return of Daylight Saving Time in someone’s life. The ways that we can bring a day of longest light into their lives and become, in effect, a one-person summer equinox. Even if for just one day.

When we do that, we are able to feel—as Jesus promised—a spring of water gushing up within us, a water that forever quenches our thirst. My years at The Farmville Herald will forever bless me in that way.

But there is something else that proves, for me, the truth of Jesus’ words: the abundance of “light” that others have shone into my own life. The summer equinox that their companionship and love kindled within me.

Any light that I have been blessed to shine through the years has been, and forever shall be, filled with their luminescence. Their “bylines” are all over me.

What would happen if we turned our life upside down because God told us to?

Suppose God said: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you….”

That’s exactly what God did tell Abraham in Genesis.

Abraham’s country, kindred and father’s house were everything to him. His known universe. His life orbited constantly among his kindred, in and out of his father’s house, forever in his own country. His place of comfort, safety and love.

But God told him to leave all of that behind.

Every day of his life, Abraham had awoken in his own country, among his kindred and his father’s house. He worked there. Laughed and cried there. He planted roots so deep that one can hardly imagine the effort required to pull them up and plant them somewhere else. Or, if the roots stayed put, the courage necessary to turn and leave them all behind.

But that is exactly what Abraham did.

Few of us will ever have to endure the total uprooting experienced by Abraham but there are times in our lives when it might have felt as if we’d left what had become our known universe behind. When we move to another community, or another state, when we change jobs, when we marry, when we become mothers and fathers for the first time—and so many other life experiences that are leaps of faith—we are leaving our known universe and journeying to a totally new way of life. In effect, a new country.

Leaps of faith aren’t straightforward journeys because they don’t come with roadmaps. We can’t Google or ask Siri for directions. We leap into the unknown.

Fortunately, however, we are hardly ever asked to make such leaps alone. Lot journeyed with Abraham. I have made most of my life journeys into the unknown with my wife, Kim, just as I have journeyed by her side.

But she has not been my only companion, nor I hers.

As all of us journey from one known universe to another, there may come a time when we question our ability to persevere. There surely must have been occasions when Abraham thought to himself—or spoke aloud—“Okay, God, you told me to leave everything behind: my country, my kindred and my father’s house. I obeyed but now I feel lost. Where are you?”

Asking that question is no sin, nor is it a lack of faith. Asking a question allows God to answer. Asking a question demonstrates faith that God will answer.

The key to everything that happens next on the journey is the direction taken by our eyes after we ask for help. Where do we look? If we look down all that we see is the mud and the rocky ground. But if, as described in Psalm 121, we raise them to the hills—that is, if we incline our heart and soul to a new horizon—then we more clearly feel the presence of God by our side.

When we look with hope through the eyes of God’s promise, dominoes of light spread out into the darkness. We notice something we didn’t sense before: God has been there the whole time.

“… The Lord himself watches over you;” Psalm 121 assures us.
the Lord is your shade at your right hand,
So that the sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night….
The Lord shall watch over your coming out and your coming in,
from this time forth for evermore.”

When we keep faith with God, God is able to keep faith with us. God is able to bless us and, crucially, make us a blessing to others. That was God’s promise to Abraham. That is God’s promise to us. When we make a leap of a faith in response to God’s call, a faithful landing awaits.

Don’t let the ashes deceive you. They are not a sign of death. On the contrary, they are evidence—absolute proof—of life.

So let the ashes remind us of the flame.

Just as the empty tree limbs of winter somehow testify to the budding leaves of spring. Ashes are evidence of life in the same way that the moon reflects the light of a sun we cannot see. The way starlight travels billions of miles to reach our eyes even though the star itself ceased to exist so long ago that our mind cannot grasp the timeline of its demise. The star is gone but its light remains, moving toward whomever might be standing in the darkness looking skyward to see what parable the night might whisper in their ears.

So let the ashes remind us of the flame.

Ashes are signs of life in the same way that rain is able to tattoo sidewalks with the perfect outline of leaves that once lay there but have been blown away by the wind.

The way ripples sweep out across the surface of a pond when the small child skips the smooth pebble across the water after his grandfather shows him how.

A final splash and the stone is gone, but its ripples go on and on.

The same way the ripples of those we love and who have loved us continue widening out to every corner of our heart and soul after they have gone from this world.

They are gone, like Jesus is gone. But they remain, like Jesus remains.

So let the ashes remind us of the flame.

In the course of our lifetime we will be like that sidewalk, with only the rain-soaked imprint of someone we dearly miss left behind. We will be like the moon, reflecting the light of a loved one we can no longer see. We will be like the water’s surface, someone’s voice and smile still skipping and rippling through our lives even though they are gone.

But, in time, we will also become the image of a leaf the wind has swept away, the reflection of a light no longer seen and the stone that has disappeared beneath the surface.

We will become that trail of smoke in the sky that others will believe they cannot follow. A trail of smoke that leaves them standing alone, just as we have been left standing alone. But they, too, will follow that trail one day. A trail through the sky that Jesus blazed for us, marking the way with his life. Marking the way with his death. Marking the way with his resurrection.

Footsteps in the sand are washed away by the tides. Footprints in the snow melt in the sun. Indentations of bare feet in green grass are seen but for a short while. Nevertheless, they tell the truth. Like ashes, they are signs of life. Signs of soul marks no tide can wash away, no sun can melt and no wind can sweep out of sight.

Life’s rain will fall, its winds will blow. But that is all they can do.

Let us go out into the world with the proof of everlasting life marked upon our forehead.

Let the ashes remind us of the flame.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve thought a squirrel scampering through dry leaves in the woods was a bear, my pockets would sound like a tambourine.

The leaves of long gone autumns amplify the sound of a squirrel until it takes on Jurassic Park-like qualities. Especially if you’re deep in the woods, alone with your thoughts and the sound of birds tuning their violins and violas. The sudden “eruption” of a happy squirrel hoping to hide a nut from its friends can cause whiplash.

Eventually, however, one learns to smile, or perhaps even chortle. Nope, not falling for the old squirrel-in-the-leaves again. That’s no bear. Hahahaha.

Until, one day, it is.

That happened to me last summer. There I was, coming to the end of a hike. There was the highly-traveled two-lane highway going past Appomattox Courthouse National Historical Park. I could see it through the trees. There was the parking lot. I could see it through the trees. There was my car in the parking lot. I could see it through the trees. And there was the bear. I could see it, skidded to a halt 40 feet away from me, through the trees.

We stood staring at each other. I’m not sure which one of us was more surprised.

I’d read in a newspaper once that if you don’t project fear and panic and, instead, make yourself loud and large, a bear will leave you alone.

Loud and large? My fear was loud and large. Don’t project panic? I was almost projectile vomiting panic.

There was only one thing to do and I admit, on the purely musical level, it wasn’t the best choice: I began singing “Jimmy Crack Corn And I Don’t Care” and waving my hiking stick in the air as I walked away. (To this day, I have no idea why that song came into my head).

As I emerged from the trees, two people were just getting out of a car. They must have thought me insane. There I was almost screaming “Jimmy Crack Corn And I Don’t Care” and waving a large stick around as if I was being attacked by bees. Or was John the Baptist on a particularly “Oh-you-brood-of-vipers” day.

They backed away, dread showing in their eyes. The man reached for his wallet and I think the woman was about to dial 9-1-1. I tried explaining the whole bear situation. I am certain they did not believe me.

I share this story because we all encounter “bears” from time to time throughout our lives. And I am not speaking of the animals with four legs. Things happen to us that can provoke an initial reaction of fear, perhaps even panic—whether it’s a health issue, job related or a personal relationship. Have faith. Let your soul be loud and large—even if that means singing “Jimmy Crack Corn And I Don’t Care” at the top of your lungs. When we do, we realize that, whatever song we choose to help us journey through our fear, God is singing harmony.

And sometimes—not always, but occasionally—we discover that it was only a squirrel scampering through the leaves.

“The Distance”

The distance

is someone else’s

frontyard

where children

play with a dog and a ball

and their parents

sit on the front porch

gazing off into the distance

which is someone else’s

frontyard

where children

play with a dog and ball

and their parents

sit on the front porch

gazing off into the distance.
A husband and wife emerged from the SUV in the grocery store parking lot. They were deeply engaged in conversation. Not, however, with each other. Both were on the phone. I was hoping they’d at least called each other to have a chat, but they had not.

There may have been a very good reason both were talking to people who weren’t in the vehicle with them, heading into the store still speaking to someone who wasn’t there, rather than to each other. But the situation seemed emblematic, and symptomatic, of the age in which we live.

We are often connected via phone, text, email, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram—etc.—to everyone we cannot see and disconnected to those sharing life by our side.

The poem “The Distance” was written years ago, long before the digital age (yes, I am very thankful the internet allows us to share these words). One of the points the poem tries to make is that sometimes we are so distracted wishing for how things might be that we do not see the blessings within arm’s reach. And so we lose them. Forever.

But there is another side to disconnection. If we’re not careful, we can become detached from our deepest self. Life’s myriad distractions—or some deep life wound—can separate us from a soul connection to our child of God selves. We then run the risk of losing our way, getting tangled up in life’s weeds and thorns.

That can happen to anyone. None of us is immune. And we may not even recognize what’s going on. One minute we’re in the green pasture beside the still waters. The next second we’re walking through the valley of the shadow of death and there’s not a green pasture in sight. Only the distance.

But there is a way out. There is always a way out. However much we may distance ourselves from our Good Shepherd, intentionally or not, Jesus never distances himself from us.

Goodness and love will always follow, wherever life takes us, guiding us out from the weeds and thorns. Then, amazingly, we find ourselves back on the front porch—just like that—getting up from our chairs, joining our children, our spouse or a friend, as they—as we—play with a dog and a ball.

The distance is gone. If not forever then, at least and at last, for one moment in a day.

Here I stand, silently and still, watching a sunrise, seeing the night slowly and surely—head over heels, eventually—fall in love with the day.

Dawn goes beyond the sense of sight. A glorious sunrise is something one feels. We can wrap our souls around them. They are a wordless prayer in the sky—and its wordless answer.

Wintertime reveals them at their most transcendent. So much of the horizon is visible through the limbs of the leafless trees. The dark maple and oak silhouettes actually enhance the painting that is being brush-stroked before our eyes. The contrast makes the blossoming colors really “pop.”

The experience is very much like watching a painter produce a masterpiece. The rising sun and the breeze-blown clouds and jet trails provide constant movement. The colors continuously journey through the spectrum, an ebb and flow of blues, pinks, purples, violets, oranges and everything in between. Then, finally, that day’s painting is done.

Interestingly, no sunrise is ever finished until it is gone, which makes it a little bit like our own lives. A single day left in our life becomes, in effect, a lifetime and anything is still possible. Even a new thought or a deeper understanding of one’s life. No sunrise is without meaning.

Clouds are essential to any truly spectacular sunrise. They provide a canvas upon which the rising light can fully express itself. That also resembles our own lives. The “clouds” that cross our path may block out the “sunshine” entirely—for a time. If looked at philosophically, however, they make life’s sun and blue sky really “pop” when we see them next. We appreciate far more deeply the joys—the people and things—that illuminate our lives.

Sunsets offer transcendent moments, too. They are the perfect mate for sunrise. Later today I will stand, silently and still, watching the sunset tell the dawn, “Yeah, it was love at first sight for me, too.”

There is no better way to begin or end a day. In both the rising and the setting of the sun we can sense the presence of a loving God. An all-embracing love that is given without conditions or limits. A love that neither rises nor sets. A love that is simply always here for us. Right now.

If the Trump administration really seeks to protect this nation from terrorists, the executive order should include me, too.

I am not proud to admit it but these are just a few of the countless things I have done to terrorize millions:

I burned people at the stake.

I devised and used instruments of torture.

I engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

I bought and sold human beings into slavery—sold husbands into slavery away from their wives, wives into slavery away from their husbands and children into slavery away from their parents.

I persecuted the Jews for centuries and then carried out the Holocaust.

I dropped the Atomic Bomb and annihilated two cities filled with innocent men, women and children. Yes, it was war but….

I lynched African Americans and bombed their churches. I closed their schools rather than let my children go to class with them.

The electoral system that made Mr. Trump president—despite his 2.5-million-plus loss in the popular vote—continues to be based on a formula that declares African Americans to be three-fifths of a person.

So, I lied when I signed on to the words “all men are created equal.” I don’t believe that at all.

I persistently refuse to support equal rights, justice and the pursuit of happiness for anyone who doesn’t look, believe, speak, worship, and make love the same way I do.

I call myself “pro-life” but once a child is born I banish their needs—and that of their parents—from my mind. Entirely. I am, in reality, pro-birth; after the first breath, I don’t care whether they keep breathing or not.

And I call myself a Christian.

Clearly, no Muslim nation would want me within a thousand miles of its borders. I don’t blame them (and I haven’t even mentioned the Crusades).

No, I have never personally done any of those things—I abhor them all—but the crucifix around my neck condemns me because….

….Every Christian is a terrorist.

Right?

I couldn’t resist. The tennis “gods” had worked a miracle down under. The men’s final of the Australian Open would feature Rafa Nadal against Roger Federer. Out of nowhere. Perhaps the two greatest male tennis champions of all time, both had been recovering from injuries and, furthermore, hadn’t faced each other in a major final in six years. Those glory days, the tennis world supposed, were long past.

So, I just had to watch. The problem was, however, I would have to miss church to tune in. That nagged at me. I felt a literal hunger for communion. As each hour ticked away on Saturday the call became stronger and stronger. The Holy Spirit was tugging my spiritual sleeve, tapping me on the shoulder: “You need to follow me. You really do.”

I followed, driving to church in the afternoon to observe an improvised communion by myself. I chose a pew and sat down. Darn! I’d left my reading glasses in the car. But something told me not to go get them, that I would see all that I needed to see without them. I stayed put, squinting to read an Order of Worship for the Evening in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer—my favorite service.

The words “Light and peace, in Jesus Christ” always still my troubled waters. I let my soul steep in them for a few moments. Then communion began. Or, more accurately, continued. I’d been in “communion” since I followed the nudging call. After eating the bread, I began to raise the small styrofoam cup into which I had poured a communion swallow’s worth of wine.

The church’s sanctuary was unlit and my eyes were closed. So the sudden, brilliant light seemed to come from nowhere. As my lips touched the cup it was as if I’d suddenly become surrounded by incandescence. It seemed then, and still does, like a miracle.

There was, I quickly realized, a perfectly simple explanation. I had been sitting at just the right spot at just the right moment of the afternoon, drinking from just the right kind of cup. In that instant, the white styrofoam literally “cupped” the late afternoon sun—which had just peeked through the upper corner of one of the windows at the back of the church—reflecting and pouring it directly into my eyes. And my soul.

My cup had overflowed with light. A communion of light. It was the most moving observance of Holy Communion that I’d ever had. Or, I suspect, I ever shall.

The experience reminded me of this truth: There are miracles all around us. Big ones and little ones. But none of them are small. Even if they are made of styrofoam. They are waiting there for all of us. God’s Holy Spirit is tugging everyone by the sleeve, tapping us on the shoulder, saying, “Come, follow me.”

Answering, “I will” is never a response we’ll regret.

The Nadal-Federer match was, of course, a classic. Five sets. Every game began with the score love-all, but amazing points then flew all over the court. Love-all became 15-all, 30-all, 40-all, or deuce.

But sitting in a pew alone the day before had shown me—yet again—with God, the final score is always love all.