D. Thomas

“The Lord for his True Love…”

I have been walking these winter twilights, carefully avoiding solid ice, crunching in the snow beside the streets: I love the glow of the evening dark and the white upon the ground; moonlight, streams, and trees are possibly my favorite things. Some of my favorite things. I look for the deer tracks, and the deer. This is middle Pennsylvania, and I live where I can walk on safe streets beside lively little streams from underground springs which duck underground again and run beneath the school yard and streets to the Susquehanna River. I have seen two or four or fifteen deer on our passages back and forth almost every time I have taken a walk these ten months, and I always sing to them– I figure they’ll know it’s just me and be unbothered.

I think, or I like to think, that the deer spirits, the Ancient Ones and old gods of these hills and woods, disguise themselves during the day as fallen branches, tree stumps and roots, and that at night or their own Times, they stand and shake themselves and snort, and walk. Why not? Places, like groups, have spirits. In this place, there are still, I hope, guardians.

I sing “Amazing Grace” to the deer.

I sang that first one summer to chipmunks at the house, and within weeks had them eating out of my hand, and one jumped up into my lap and let me pet her while she filled her cheeks with peanuts. Ever since, when I have gone outside and sung “Amazing Grace” in their summer season, I’ve seen chipmunk heads pop up; I throw peanuts and imagine them saying “It’s true! It’s true! She’s real!”

Walking, I rejoice and praise, and offer thanks for this place where school children and seniors and wildlife can co-exist, and thanks that I am here to love this place and to run errands and keep house for my father, especially in this COVID year (“year”).

–My sister interrupted my rough draft with a text about Leptons and Hadrons and Higgs bosons… well, no; she was responding to a text of mine. I thought the headline about black holes being portals to other universes was just funny. Although I don’t understand the language of equations, variables and the signs of functions that are like Chinese characters, Cyrillic or Greek alphabets which I cannot decipher, I like to read the English language explanations of quantum and cosmological things. Particles and waves, of course, electrons and neutrons, gluons, muons, neutrinos, quarks and anti-quarks and miniscule bits that exist for slivers of split seconds and turn into other things, things that change color and flavor and sometimes their quantum spin, subatomic births and deaths as galaxies expand, stars burn and burn out over countless billions of generations… Nothing is still, nothing is really solid. Equations that predict and postulate seem like alchemical treatises to me, using different signs and symbols for squaring circles, the sacred marriages or conjunctios, and a little like the Book of Revelation.

We try to explain what we see and have no words for. We cannot translate the Infinite into human languages yet. We do not know how things happen to be, how this began or how or when or if it will end. We can only approximate, use analogies, metaphors, signs and symbols.

“The Lord for his True Love

Consented to birth..”

Conjunctions. The Winter Solstice fell, this winter, on the night of the great planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, and media was saying it would appear like the Christmas Star. I thought that that was a nice idea, but that the wise Magi who were following the skies and prophecies would have been watching those same planets over years, and would have seen their approaching alignment; constellations were charted by then, the ancients knew the stars, knew the circumference of the earth, postulated atoms… 3 A.D. was fairly modern– there were written languages and translations of texts, advanced mathematics, and was more like 1820 than 1820 was like to now.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and two days from now is Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, which I bring up because, in other years, that is the big blow-out last party day of Carnaval; revelers and maskers hide their faces and can dance in the streets, eat and drink and act out fantasies and wishes and self-indulgences, unconscious Shadow-selves get the wild out of their systems before the long fasting season of Lent, which culminates in Good Friday, which had to happen for there to be Easter, which I will write about another time. The Carnaval season is the time between Epiphany and Lent. Epiphany is when Christians celebrate the coming of those sky-reading Magi to see the baby Jesus, when they saw that He was the Christ and worshipped, or Christ was first manifested to the Gentiles. It is the 12th Day of Christmas.

It is January 6.

This year, on January 6, a horde of people carrying Confederate and Nazi and American and trump flags, and crosses, stormed the U.S. Capitol building to interfere with a most “sacred” office of the American democratic system, certifying the votes in the free election, the peaceful transition of power. They, face-painted, horn-helmeted, noose-bearing, were acting out the Shadow- self of this nation. And blapheming.

Surely spewing hate, erecting a hangman’s gallows, identifying as Neo-Nazi or Klan, and carrying a cross, calling one’s self Christian, is using the LORD’s Name in vain.

My Confession: I believe in a Creator, Sustainer, and Maker of “heaven and earth”, of every force and every particle, generator of all energies, natural laws, and things that are in this and any ever universe, and in the Holy Spirit, the Living God which creates and moves and works to this day, and in Jesus Christ through whom all things that are made are made– maybe like a Higg’s field, I don’t know and no one knows how– which was born into a human body and walked, talked, ate, shat, thirsted, slept, among us and died and rose and, I really don’t know why, but loves us and saves us, not from pain, sickness, death, not from all evil and trouble in this life, but–some inexplcable salvation– Grace, Presence, Joy. When I read the descriptions of the subatomic realm or the grand cosmos I want to burst into song and Psalms of praise– which further entries of this blog will “argue” and explore…

For now, though, this being Valentine’s Day, I offer to Jesus Christ this Valentine:

The LORD for his True Love

Consented to birth

To a body of clay

And to life on the earth.

He came to meet Satan

On that devil’s ground

To overcome evil and death

Where it’s found,

To heal the sick flesh,

Deaf ears and blind eyes,

Revealing the truth

To correct Satan’s lies.