Here, there are blueberries.

a re-introduction to Making All Things New

Near the end of Incarnadine,¹ Mary Szybist’s collection of poems refracting our vision of Mary the mother of God, she riffs on the Psalms (particularly Psalms 8 and 27) in “Here, There Are Blueberries”:

When I see the bright clouds, a sky empty of moon and stars,
I wonder what I am, that anyone should note me.

Here there are blueberries, what should I fear?
Here there is bread in thick slices, of whom should I be afraid?

When the Psalmist considers the heavens, he too wonders aloud to God “What is man, that you are mindful of him?” He goes on to marvel that God made humans a little lower than angels, and that humans rule over the rest of creation.

Szybist marvels differently. She does not find herself ruling over the world, but luxuriating in it.² All the gifts of creation are hers,

Swelling at the edges of the meadow. 
And for this, I did nothing, not even wonder.

You must live for something, they say.
People don’t live just to keep on living.

But here is the quince tree, a sky bright and empty.
Here there are blueberries, there is no need to note me.

This turn away from achievement and towards restful appreciation is one Szybist makes at several points in the book. In “Update on Mary”:

“Some afternoons Mary pretends to read a book, but mostly she watches the patterns of sunlight through the curtains…

Mary likes to go out and sit in the yard. If she let herself, she’d stare at the sky all day.

The most interesting things to her are clouds. See, she watches them even by moonlight. Tonight, until bedtime, we can let her have those.”

What is she looking for, in this bright and empty sky, as the clouds pass? And will He ever return? Hope remains. And, as a sign and gift, here there are blueberries.

***

This newsletter, which I started in 2016 (an absolutely wild time to be working at an evangelical institution, as I was then!)  has been dormant for the past few years. Not because I’ve been staring at the clouds – my family has moved twice, I’ve completed yet another graduate degree, and I’ve begun to embrace a new vocation as a priest in the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement.

And now that the pieces of my life are starting to come back together in some kind of discernable pattern, this newsletter has been poking at me, trying to get my attention. Remember the early days on the internet, she’s saying, when writing led us to kindred spirits we never would have found otherwise, and the community was nothing more than it was nourishing? I find myself wondering how writing, and how this newsletter, can fit into my vocation now.

The way I understand what it means to be a priest is that the church has recognized me as a person who can be a steward and interpreter of the tradition and mysteries of the gospel. The life of the church exists in the space Christ opened “where human beings have only to be open to what is offered and where God demands nothing and imposes nothing but simply abides in unceasing love.”³ My role is simply to be a caretaker of that space, to keep holding open the garden gate Christ opened, and to invite others in. It’s a garden for everyone, but somebody has to be trained and appointed to spread the compost and clear the weeds and call people to come taste the blueberries. I'm delighted to be one of those people.

So in this relaunched version of Making All Things New, that’s what I’m going to try do: to cultivate a small space in your inbox that attends to the gifts of the earth, and that opens us to the love of God that sustains us.⁴

Every Tuesday I’ll send a brief reflection (briefer than this one has been!) along with three things I’ve loved that week.

I hope you’ll stay with me.

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Three Things:

• Alison Roman’s Sambal Chicken Skewers is probably the recipe I get asked to share the most! I love them for an early summer dinner party, along with an Asian cucumber salad like this (topped with peanuts for crunch!); rice; and watermelon slushies (blend: 6 cups frozen watermelon chunks, juice of ½ lemon, and a couple tablespoons simple syrup. And vodka, depending on the party.)

• This essay, by my friend Jessica, about the difficulty of knowing when to leave: 

“And because seventy years ago, on my father’s side, my great-grandmother, grief-stricken, left Vilna, fleeing all she knew; because fifty years ago, on my mother’s side, my great-grandmother kissed her sister goodbye and boarded a ship away from Eishyshok; because my grandfather is a man attuned to wonder, and knows his presence here is miraculous; because I am the first grandchild in a bloodline that by all rights should have ended in a Polish cemetery or in a Polish forest; this is how nearly every day of my first year begins. With my head cradled in the crook of his elbow, with my body resting along the length of his forearm, with the greatest care and attention, my grandfather lowers me into warm water and gives me my morning bath.”

• The song most likely to crack your heart a little.

Let me know what you’ve been loving! Or what you’d like to hear about in this newsletter in the coming months.

Amy

1. I’m using Bookshop affiliate links, so if you buy the books through these links you’ll be supporting independent bookstores and also contributing to my own book buying fund. But no judgment if you opt for the faster, cheaper amazon option: I often do too.

2. It’s worth noting that plenty of Psalms make this same move, to gratitude and adoration rather than dominion. For instance, while “Psalm 8 presents a thoroughly anthropocentric view of creation, [Psalm 104] moves toward an ecocentric profile…[in which] human beings are considered at most coinhabitants with the onagers and the coneys” (William P Brown, Seeing the Psalms).

3. In the epilogue to a collection called Praying for England, Williams writes that Christ our high priest opened once and for all a space “where human beings have only to be open to what is offered and where God demands nothing and imposes nothing but simply abides in unceasing love, a love that can only be imagined in the human world and human language in terms of vulnerability. It is thus a place where human competition means nothing; a place where the desperate anxiety to please God means nothing; a place where the admission of failure is not the end but the beginning; a place from which no one is excluded in advance.”

4. Not just attention; “Attention without feeling is only a report,” Mary Oliver says. I aim for attention, with feeling, to what is good. “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.” Simone Weil