To The Morning

Such a peaceful, bucolic morning here. 

As I stood with my coffee on the back balcony, overlooking the marsh that, in the early misty light, hosted a statuesque Blue Heron and a muskrat gnawing grass stems at the age of the waterline, I took in this glorious beginning of a day, and my thoughts traveled back to the sixteenth summer of my youth spent at a conservation camp.

It was there, still in deep slumber in our bunks in rustic cabins, recovering from our physical endeavors of the previous day of trimming trees, cleaning state park restrooms and beaches, and clearing clogged streams of debris, that each morning we would wake to Dan Fogelberg's "To the Morning." As the notes rose softly from the camp loudspeakers, along with the sun, both gently crescendoed into an invitation to all that the fresh day had in store.

This is my recollection of those waking hours:

To the Morning

There’s a song, called To the Morning by Dan Fogelberg, which I became acquainted with during my sixteenth summer while working and living at a Wisconsin Youth Conservation Camp. 

Each morning, as we campers snoozed in cozy bunks in rustic lumberjack-era cabins shrouded in pre-dawn mist, we would perceive, from the corners of dreams, the ever so slight inklings of piano music emanating from the camp loudspeaker. 

The song tiptoed at first into our heavy-lidded slow-to-come-to-life consciousness:

“Watching the sun

 Watching it come

Watching it come up over the rooftops”

Then, in slow but sure crescendo, it spread out across the camp, eliciting the first no-going-back-to-sleep stirrings among the slumbering workers.

“And maybe there are seasons

And maybe they change

And maybe to love is not so strange”

Every morning, in rumbling thunder or windy restlessness, that song woke us to the day that lay before us.

Not a morning person at that time in my life (show me a teenager who is), I loved waking to that song. It modeled for me how to rise and meet the day in the possibility of romance with life itself.

Years later, I used to occasionally play this song to rouse my boys before school, and have returned to listening to it, once again, in the last year.

It reminds me of that summer—of that soft dawn light carried on a breeze of fresh pine through screened cabin windows—of when the song did justice to a time of day I had previously loathed. That summer, I learned what morning is—the very best time of day.

Back then, physical sweaty work in the bright, harsh afternoon sun or bug-buzzing forests followed this fleeting moment of ante meridian joy--flushing pheasants from pre-mown fields of chest-high grass under a cloudless, one-dimensional sky, and trimming sap-stained branches of tall pines, our necks sore from hours spent looking up. 

Other days, the aroma of bleach and pit toilets painted the walls of our nostrils after a week of State Park Campground clean-up duty.

Sentimental-tinged realities swirled in my adolescent head as each day of camp wore on. I missed my best friend back home, and yet at the same time, dreaded the ever-approaching end of summer when I would leave this brief, but thoroughly established and adapted-to camp/work existence, never to return to it again.

But when I play To the Morning now, after these many years, this time, of course, on Spotify (which certainly can never quite measure up to a rusty loud speaker as conduit for a tune spinning on a record player in a northern conservation camp office), it all comes back and I remember--that when I meet the day in this way, and watch the eggy orb reveal it’s cherub face, be it above a stark frozen landscape in January or one teeming with the early June croaks and bleeps of frogs and trillings of Red Wing Blackbirds in the marsh outside my door, that morning is when we establish how it will go—this day. 

And so I toast the morning in determined commitment, in a non-negotiable and oddly confident way, that, in the words of Fogelberg's song, 

“Yes! it is going to be a day where there really is nothing left to say but ‘come on morning.’”

Copyright Barb Harwood

To the Morning by Dan Fogelberg

Watching the sun

Watching it come

Watching it come up over the rooftops

Cloudy and warm

Maybe a storm

You can never quite tell 

From the morning

And it’s going to be a day

There is really no way to say no 

To the morning

Yes it’s going to be a day

There is really nothing left to

Say but

Come on morning

Waiting for mail

Maybe a tail

From an old friend

Or even a lover

Sometimes there’s none

But we have fun

Thinking of all who might

Have written.

And maybe there are seasons

And maybe they change

And maybe to love is not so strange

The sounds of the day

They hurry away

Now they are gone until tomorrow

When day will break

And you will wake

And you will rake your hands

Across your eyes

And realize

That it’s going to be a day

There is really no way to say no

To the morning

Yes it’s going to be a day

There is really nothing left to say but

Come on morning

Written and sung by Dan Fogelberg

Get Some Rest, World

 

This today from Reuters: 

“Pope Francis made his first public appearance since returning to the Vatican mid-week after an 11-day hospital stay, telling well wishers they should take a break and switch off from the stresses of modern life.

‘Let us put a halt to the frantic running around dictated by our agendas. Let us learn how to take a break, to turn off the mobile phone,’ Pope Francis said in his weekly address from a window overlooking St. Peter's Square.”

A similar sentiment has been playing in my head since I recently read a feature story in a major newspaper about a positive, non-political topic (the history of a local record company) that was tarnished by the interjection of totally irrelevant negative political and COVID comments.

What I want to tell that Chicago reporter is the same thing Jason Bourne told CIA agent Pam Landy, surprising her, as Bourne watched her through a window of an adjacent skyscraper:

“Get some rest, Pam, you look tired.”

A professor of mine at Moody Theological Seminary once advised something similar. Perceiving that I was approaching my studies with perhaps a bit too much gusto, he said,

“Relax. Go watch some TV.”

Maybe we can all take the first step to gaining some much needed reprieve by watching, or re-watching, The Bourne Identity series. 

We need to get some rest, world. We look tired.  

Copyright Barb Harwood

"Church:" Not Just for Sunday Any More

 

Billy Graham, in The Journey, writes, 

“Nowhere in the New Testament does 'church' refer to a church building, since there were none in the first century (Christians mostly met in homes).”  

He goes on to point out that, in the Bible, 

“Church” meant “a local group of Christians, or all the Christians in a particular city or area.” The word “church” in the Bible “refers to the company of all believers, who are spiritually united by their relationship with Christ. The church isn’t just a local congregation, it includes all believers everywhere...” 

So this begs the question: how did we get to where we are today where that one hour on Sunday morning (or three times a week) has come to define us as believers and take precedence in our walk? 

What would happen if people were to stand back and stop looking at church as having an address and a program and saw it as all believers? 

What would happen if  "church" was understood as a body of individuals who work, eat, play, pray, travel and go to school every day of the week, and with whom we interact on a daily basis (maybe not even knowing they, too, are people of faith?) 

Would we act in our daily behavior with the reverence, chivalry and good will that we do on Sunday mornings? Would we live as though we are in church all of the time? Because, as a body of believers called the church, that is exactly where we are all of the time?

Our limited contemporary definition of church has constrained us and at the same time let us off the hook. 

It constrains us by keeping us from interacting with others who “don’t attend my church,” and it lets us off the hook by leading us into the false assumption that “church”—the building and Sunday morning congregation—is where we live our faith. 

So, the thinking goes, if we can pull off living our faith for one hour (or three times a week), then we can go home with our families, and to work and school on Monday, and never have to think about living our faith again until we head, once more, into the church building. 

Year, after year, after year, after year, that is often how it goes. 

But if that’s the case, we’ve got church all wrong.

Copyright Barb Harwood