"...a bow of promise on the cloud..."

"Little darlin'
It's been a long, cold, lonely winter.
Little darlin'
It seems like years since it's been here.
Here comes the sun,
Here comes the sun,
and I say,
It's al right...."
- George Harrison

Since there is not (at least not one that I could find) a recorded version of my first choice song for this post, "Love," by Mary Baker Eddy,  I am going to lead with this hauntingly lovely James Taylor and Yo Yo Ma version of "Here comes the Sun," written by The Beatles' brilliant George Harrison.  But the story is still the same. 

It was almost twenty years ago, but I can still feel that sudden shift, a recalibration in the weight of my mental "air," whenever I think about that Sunday morning service in Valerie Lodge.  I'd been in my cabin all night wrestling with demons...and angels. I'd gotten a phone call, in the middle of the night, that threatened to take me so far down into a chasm of depression, that I wasn't sure I'd be able continue my work at camp that summer.  My heart was in shreds, and I could barely breathe.  I'd been caught in the middle of an emotional battleground all night.  One minute the angels of Love and peace were winning...and the next minute I'd become a ricocheting crossfire of anger, hurt, and regret. 

If you were to have painted a picture of my mental sky, it would have been as grey as slate, and as black as a battalion of thunderheads creeping over the western slopes of the Collegiate Peaks, on a late summer afternoon. 

I wasn't surprised the next morning, when I finally did leave my cabin, that it was actually overcast, and that heavy raindrops were beginning to splatter...darkening the pale, sun-bleached cedar decking that apron-ed Valerie Lodge.  I'd already missed breakfast, but I couldn't miss Sunday School. 

We gathered in the Lodge, while one of the campers played a prelude, and we moved chairs from the dining room, passed out hymnals, and got everyone settled.  The Sunday School superintendent announced that we'd be singing Mary Baker Eddy's poem, titled, "Love."  It barely registered on the landscape of my dark thoughts.  Then she read the poem, the pianist played through the melody, and then we stood to sing. 

I did not feel like singing.  I was not at peace.  I was in pain.  I hoped that I could get by with just listening to the rest of the congregation sing.  I thought that, perhaps, I could find some comfort in the sound of their voices.  And so,  while quietly wiping at my tears, and...hopefully...without notice, I stood in a cocoon of mixed sorrow and hope.  But, before long, I found myself singing along as if each word were the sacred building blocks of a prayer.   And, not surprisingly, I was finding comfort...and hope. 

But it wasn't the comfort I found in its words that shook me to my core, it was the promise, the hope that I found in this line:

'Twas Love whose finger traced aloud
a bow of promise on the cloud..."

Love wasn't going to paint a rainbow of promise on a clear, cloudless blue sky...but on a cloud.  Love was going to use my cloudy moments as a canvas for painting a promise...full of color, dimension, beauty.  I could count on it.  Without the cloud, love wouldn't have the droplets of water...my tears...to bounce and refract light off of.

My tears were going to color my life with beauty and texture.   I could count on it.

And, it wasn't just the words from the poem that gave me strength, but it was the poet herself.  Mary Baker Eddy had lived through so many days that were heavy with clouds of darkness and despair.  She had borne sorrow, rejection, disdain, and regret with grace.  She had suffered and survived, hoped and persevered, wept, worked, watched, and prayed.

If anyone knew how to navigate a personal storm, it was Mary Baker Eddy.  If anyone had the "street cred" necessary to inspire, encourage, and "call forth" the kind of inner resolve that, alone, could weather the seething sea of human crisis, it was Mary Baker Eddy. 

And I trusted her.  I trusted her honesty.  I knew that her poetry was wept with the purity of the Magdalene's tears, and written with meekness of the our Master's courage.

For almost two decades now, this simple statement:

'Twas Love whose finger traced aloud,
a bow of promise on the cloud..."

has given me a lens through which my darkest days have portended the greatest opportunity for Love's light to shine through my heart and become a multi-hued rainbow of promise. 

I did not leave camp early that summer.  Instead I discovered how beautiful life can be when love passes through the prism of our tears and paints the world with light, and color, and grace.

I hope that if you are feeling the lowering of clouds, you can find promise in Eddy's words.  Words she poured out in tears, to give each of us fresh hope.

with Love,
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

Here is the link, for those of  you who might prefer the more classic Beatles version of "Here Comes the Sun."

And for a rare performance by George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, and Phil Collins here is another version of "Here Comes the Sun." 

"A silver tear appearing..."

“Hope…comes through our tears, as the soft summer rain,
To beautify, bless, and make joyful again.”
- Mary Baker Eddy

Dear Maria, in a recent comment, you gently asked if I would post something on “tears”…  Hmmm…. I can’t think of a subject I feel more experienced in addressing. 

If James Taylor songs, like song "Carolina in My Mind," it have been the soundtrack of my life…tears have been the environmental constant.  I must thrive, spiritually, in salt-water.  I have become so accustomed to the feeling of tears filling my eyes, running down my cheeks, pooling in my ears, and falling on my shirt that I have long, long, long since abandoned wearing mascara, buying silk shirts that show tell-tale salt stains or thinking that I could fool anyone into thinking that it was “just something in my eye”.

That said, I have also had a very special journey in making peace with my tears.  When I was younger I thought that my tears were a sign of weakness.  I thought that they made me appear fragile, vulnerable or emotionally out of control.  I tried to staunch them with inner grit and with a spiritual resolve to “not let anything get to me”…but, to little or no avail.  I cried when I was happy, sad, moved, hurt…I cried at movies, family reunions, arguments, Hallmark commercials and angry words.  I cried when I felt overwhelmed by life and I cried when life was good.  I cried when I needed rest and just wanted to exhaust my thoughts from spinning out of control.  I cried whenever I thought about those things that made me humbly grateful for the abundance of divine mercy, grace, wisdom or inspiration I was experiencing.  But still my tears somehow made me feel weak and vulnerable.

That was until one morning when my eldest daughter was about eighteen months old.  She had been up all night with a raging fever that would abate briefly…I would feel some modicum of peace, fall into an exhausted sleep, only to awaken suddenly to her disoriented thrashing or a listless incoherence. 

By morning I was on the verge of mother-madness.  I felt helpless and powerless to bring any sense of deep inner poise to bear on the moment, and hopelessness was seeping in around the edges of my spiritual fortress. 

As I sat there on the edge of my daughter’s little bed with my Bible in my lap, my tears welled up and spilled onto the page I had been reading from.  I was desperately grasping for something that would ground my prayers.  At one point I wiped my eyes and looked back to the page that was open in front of me.  I was stunned to see that the print was, quite literally, magnified by a large teardrop that had fallen onto the page and was still pooled on the paper.  These words, from 1st John:

“There is no fear in love…”

were larger because of my tears.  The teardrop had acted as a magnifying glass to emphasize the power of this statement.  I was stopped in my tracks in more ways than one. .  I knew...I was sure...no, I was absolutely certain about how much I loved my daughter…in fact up until that very moment, I thought that I was afraid because I loved my daughter.  But what the Word (the Bible) was saying, from underneath that teardrop, was that because I loved my daughter I was not afraid.  These two things were mutually exclusive.  I could not have both.  I could not love and be afraid…anymore than I could have light and darkness at the same time. 

My tears were NOT tears of fear at all…they were tears of great love.  I could reclaim them for God and recast my feelings in the light of that love…that all powerful, divinely bestowed affection that I could never have created myself, even in my most inspired moment. 

I was certain of what was true…I loved her…therefore I had to be certain that I wasn’t afraid…I had just misread the feeling.  I could correctly claim that feeling as one of humble gratitude for God’s presence in my life revealing itself as tenderness, loyalty, affection, and joy….immediately.  And I did. 

Hannah’s healing, like many others throughout her childhood came without incidence when I realized that the feelings that I had misinterpreted as fear…were really love…deep, humbling, unsettling, knee-buckling, trusting, heart-expanding love…the presence of God in my life.

This was also the end of my disquiet about my tears…or anyone else’s for that matter. 

I love my tears. I love to be moved.  I love to weep, to cry, to let the tears of feeling flow through and around and over me.  Washing away the cobwebs of intellectualism, letting the salt left in their wake, dry up the undefined uncertainties of “what if”, and magnify the power of “the Word” in my life with the experiential certainty of not having just known, but actually felt God move my heart to surrender all that it had left to give, in order to wash His feet in gratitude.

“Saw ye my Savior ?
Heard  ye the glad sound?
Felt ye the power of the Word?”
-Mary Baker Eddy

Mary Baker Eddy has taught me to associate my tears with the presence of God, with the presence of hope and faith…the “triune” of love.

K (and J)