Apocalypse Now! Or, not...

Of late I am reading much apocalyptic literature. Not a subject in which I have much interest. So why am I reading it? The same reason I got trapped into reading Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth in the 1970s.
Ah, the hazards of joining a book club!

There is much buzz about the major motion picture coming in October starring Nicolas Cage based on the Left Behind books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. SEASONS, the women reading theology group at my church, is reading the first book of the series and plans to see the movie. They hope to be well prepared to discuss it with others.  I gave this book the librarian's look when it first appeared in bookstores in 1995. I looked at a couple of copies being read by family and friends. I read the Kindle sample. These books are badly, badly written and fraught with even worse theology. One reviewer called "eschatological porn." I refuse to read it!
I am reading End Times Fiction by Gary DeMar with an introduction by R. C. Sproul which addresses the theological errors in such books. I downloaded it as an e-book from Better World Books and, for those who have fascination with "the rapture" or "the Second Coming" or "the end of the world," I recommend DeMar's book.
Even better, read this sermon "Apocalyptic and the Beauty of God" by my favorite New Testament theologian, N. T. Wright.
Wright's book The Millennium Myth is also worthy exploring.

Reading--even reading about something in which I have so little interest--is never wasted time.  When I was asked to teach my Sunday School class on the last Sunday of August, I had ample background materials to apply to The Apocalyptic Discourse of Jesus from Luke 21:4-36.

A close reading of this brief text from the words of Jesus as offered in Luke's gospel will perhaps lead to a better understanding of biblical apocalypse and allow us to leave behind the noise and distraction offered by LaHaye's fiction.

By definition, biblical apocalyptic literature reveals the transcendent reality beyond the world of historical events; it joins historical events with what is happening beyond history. Biblical apocalypse mediates the eschatological events of the end times and the new beginning which follows. Biblical apocalypse reveals the redemption of Israel and the "coming of the Son of Man with power and glory". It is always a call to expectation and righteous living and its intent is hopeful reassurance.

The other synoptic gospels treat similar material in Matthew 24:1-3 and Mark 13:1-4. In both of these accounts, Jesus speaks from the Mount of Olives to his disciples in Matthew and to four named disciples in Mark. In Luke's gospel Jesus is spending his nights at the Mount of Olives and teaching every day in the Temple. His audience includes not only his disciples but the surrounding crowd of people as well as Pharisees, Sadducees, leaders, scribes, and Herodians.

Our text begins with a prophetic oracle ("the day will come")  in verses 5-6 as Jesus looks at the Temple stones and "devoted things" (the later perhaps resonates with the "render unto Caesar" passage in the previous chapter) and says that they will be thrown down. The destruction of the Temple is a recurring topic in Luke's gospel. See also Luke 13:31-35, 19:28-44, and 23:26-31.
Jesus' apocalyptic discourse is a response to a pair of questions about when the Temple will be destroyed and what sign will mark the coming of the day. This historical event happened ten to twenty years before Luke took up his pen.
When the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in approximately 66-70 CE, Christians had heeded the words of Jesus and fled the city. Reading biblical text requires that one consider not only the time frame of the story--Jesus teaching at the Temple--but also the time frame of the text's original readers. The first readers of Luke's gospel, having survived the destruction of the Temple, an apocalypse of a sort,  are several decades later living in a time of persecution marked by rejection and ejection from their Jewish community and imprisonment and death at the hands of Roman governmental authority. In his telling of the story, Luke places Jesus and his followers in the midst of a crowd, a crowd that will soon demand a crucifixion, a crowd not unlike that surrounding the persecuted church.  What is Luke's primary message to his readers?

One way to read this text is to look closely at its structure.
My structure differs a bit from that offered by Charles H. Talbert: Reading Luke: a literary and theological commentary on the third gospel. (2002) I agree with Talbert's basic structure (ABCDB'C'A') but I preferred  to expand the central point (ABCDED'E'B'C'A') because the repetition makes clear the repetitive nature of history. The structure also supports my contention that the point of this discourse is not the political upheaval and the cosmic disturbances that mark the Apocalypse although LaHaye and other popular rapture writers focus on those things. Luke in this structure makes clear the cycle of history which continues indefinitely. Jesus was asked "when" and Jesus in Luke says "not yet."  In the writings of Luke, Jesus' Eschaton is the final event of earthly history and his readers are not to be misled about its timing. Rather, these readers live in a time of waiting, of readiness, of persecution, of betrayal, of testimony, and of witness.

The structure of Luke 21:8 - 28

• A  21:8-9  Time, "Don't be led astray"
• B  21:10       Political upheaval "wars and rumors of war" "Be not terrified"
• C  21:11          Cosmic disturbance "fearful things..."
• D  21:12              Persecution "for my name's sake"
• E  21:13-15            Testimony "Settle in your hearts..."
• D' 21:16-17         Persecution (betrayal) and death "because of my name..."
• E' 21:18-19             Witness "in your patience, possess your souls..."
• B' 21:20-24   Political upheaval "Jerusalem trodden down by the nations..."
• C'  21:25-26      Cosmic disturbance
• A'21:27-28   At that time, see "your redemption is near" "the kingdom of God is near"

Talbert concludes that this passage is all about persecution and perseverance.

In 21:29-36, Jesus concluded his discourse with a parable (a fig tree) which marks the passing of seasons. In all seasons, through Jesus' words, Luke urges his Christian readers to "Take heed to yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down..."

Note: "Generation" in 21:32 has at least two meanings:

1. a period of time of approximately 30 years. In this sense "generation" is tied to earthly history and is related to a fleshly life and human power
2. an indefinite number of years characterized by a particular quality.

In the Apocalyptic Discourse of Jesus, "generation" carries the second meaning; it is a period of time characterized by suffering and persecution,  testimony/witnessing, and expectant waiting. In this text, Luke has located his audience between the time of Jerusalem's destruction and "the day" when God judges the nations and redeems Israel in the "coming of the Son of Man". The counsel Jesus and Luke offer to their hearers applies equally to Christians today:

• Don't be lead astray
• Do not be terrified
• Settle your hearts
• In your patience possess your souls
• Lift up your heads because your redemption comes near
• Take heed to yourselves lest you lose heart with surfeiting and drunkenness and anxieties of life
• Watch
• Pray
• Be worthy to stand before the Son of Man 

Nota Bene: Hopkins

Reading a so-so book is suddenly worthwhile when one learns something new about one's favorite poet.

Kenny, Anthony: God and Two Poets. Arthur Hugh Clough and Gerard Manley Hopkins. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988. p. 93

"This poem {Barnfloor and Winepress} was one of the last written by Hopkins as an Anglican. The richness of its allusive use of the Authorized Version caused him some problems when he became a Roman Catholic, because of the Catholic prohibition on using vernacular versions of the Bible which had not been made from the Latin Vulgate. In January 1867 he promised to send a copy of the poem to his friend E.W. Urquhart. By 15 August he had still not sent it, and he explained in a letter:

"Such an absurd little hindrance prevents my sending you... there are quotations or quasi-quotations from the Bible and I must check them by the Douay before I can reproduce the verses, but a Douay I have not got." (L, III:41)

The result was that he thoroughly recast the poem, though he admitted in a later letter that as a version of the Bible the Douay was inferior to the Authorized Version.
The embarrassment of feeling obliged by ecclesiastical law to make use of an English version which he knew to be inferior may be one reason why, in Hopkins's Catholic poetry, allusions to the Bible are rarer, and less explicit, than they were in his Anglican poetry. Another reason... is that sacramental symbolism and liturgical language became for his, as vehicles for the expression of religious emotion, more important than the language of either the Old or the New Testaments."

This "later letter" is dated 21 August 1867 and appears on p. 28 of my copy of Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins... edited with notes and introduction by Claude Colleer Abbott. Oxford U. Press, 1938.

"About Barnfloor and W.--the Douay is of course an inferior version but the differences we. mostly likely be unimportant and I shd. like the thing to be correct. However I will bring it: I have thoroughly recast it."

I am, perhaps, too emotionally involved with GMH. It breaks my heart that he never got to read The Jerusalem Bible which is one of my favorite versions, especially for the Psalms and other poetic passages.

I am also well aware of the frustrations of working with a church who prefers what I consider and "inferior version." I really, really hate the NIV.

How do I mourn? I garden and read...

My newly planted roses and gardenias which are thriving.

For the past couple of months before the weather heated up and forced me indoors, I have been focused on my backyard, designing a landscape plan, digging in the dirt, planting,  remembering my farmer Daddy and thinking of the quote my friend and spiritual mentor sent me while I sat at his bedside and which we used at his funeral: "...never let us forget how soul-filling the feel of warm earth trickling through our fingers can be--how sacred it is to be a child of the land."  I have been filling my hands with dirt to fill an empty place, knowing all the time that the work was less about "planting potatoes" and more trying about spinning "a thread... strong enough to hang a bridge on"  as Marge Piercy describes in a poem sent to me by another friend. http://www.tear.com/poems/piercy/bridging.html
Another friend sends me his sermon on comfort, the Hebrew word nechamah  נֶחָמַת, and the older meanings of the English word "comfort" to cheer and strengthen me.

Poetry, words, reading are now, as they always have been, a comfort and strength to me.

I came across a second copy of this book going through books that David's mother was discarding. Rereading several sections were a great comfort to me. I passed the second copy to my sister, grateful for her presence through this journey.  Kathleen Fischer: Autumn Gospel. Women in the Second Half of Life.  Paulist Press, 1995. I read this book several years ago, probably a decade or more ago, when I could still claim to be middle aged. Fischer associates the "spirituality" of the aging woman with  "a renewed sense of the power of the imagination, a focus on community and connectedness, increased awareness of our embeddedness in the rest of natural world, the recovery of female symbols for the sacred, and of biblical and traditional stories of women." Many highlights and annotations remind me that this book was important to me in my midlife transition--I think I was approx. 49 years old when I first read it; I'm 65 now.
I often plan to reread a book but this rereading was coincidental--it happened that my mother-in-law was discarding a pristine copy--and I checked my library to see if I had one on my shelves. I did! I noted several highlights which seemed to be relevant to this current season of grief: "Gardening is a contemplative path through which we enter into the rhythms of death and rebirth..." page 92 explains the focus and energy I have expended in my landscaping. So I brewed a cup of tea and started to read and was comforted:
"When we have done all that we can to resist such suffering, when we find that the disease is incurable, the situation hopeless, practical efforts useless, then we can still do all in our power to prevent the circumstances from destroying or degrading our humanity and that of others. We do this by offering all the comfort, all the empowerment, and support possible in the given circumstances. This is the meaning of incarnation.
"It is incarnation that sustains us, the sacrament of God's loved found in the love and support of others....
"One source of comfort is the knowledge that a compassionate God is with us in the suffering, that God does not send it to us, but struggles with us against it and works with us to bring all possible good out of tragedy."
"Faith is a deep wellspring... deeper than the darkness of evil there is a vision of the compassion of God... Finally, we leave to God all that we can do nothing about." p. 112 - 113
I think the first reading was the source of part of the wisdom that has led me through a decade or more of difficult decisions as my parents' age and now Daddy's death. I know the second reading offered solace.

Recently, I have read Madeleine L'Engle's Two-Part Invention. The Story of a Marriage. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1988. This book is currently in print as book 4 of The Crosswicks Journals.  L'Engle would make the short list of my favorite authors and would also make the short list of my favorite theologians. I ordered a couple of her books from Better World Books. Good prices on wonderful books with profits going to a good cause, literacy, and thus my new library bookshelves are already starting to overflow. A few quotations: "...living far too much in an interior dream world. But that interior dream world has stood me in good stead many times when the exterior world seemed to be collapsing around me." p.5 "I had neither the money nor the inclination to meet friends at nightclubs or bars, and spend hours in what seemed a terrible waste of time." p. 31  "...life is a mixture of mutually contradictory feelings." p. 37 " Bach is for me the composer of my heart. The structure of a fugue is far more nourishing to me than the emotionalism of the romantics, but Tchaikovsky..." p.49 "I do not want to be indifferent to the joys and beauties of this life. For through these, as through pain, we are enabled to see purpose in randomness, pattern in chaos. We do not have to understand in order to believe that behind the mystery and the fascination there is love. In the midst of what we are going through this summer I have to hold on to this, to return to the eternal questions without demanding an answer. The questions worth asking are not answerable." p. 125 "I have slowly learned a lot about grief, and the right and proper expression of it. Wearing mourning in the old days was not such a bad idea, because it took into visible account the fact of death, which we now try to hide, so that it won't embarrass others.... We pull ourselves together when we need to. We do the things that have to be done. But we need to give ourselves times and places in which to mourn. This is strength, not weakness." p. 184  "...my own rootedness must be expressed in and through symbol and sacrament or it is not rootedness at all." p. 203

My gardenias have begun the scattered rebloom and will breathe fragrance into the fall. My roses are setting their third set of blossoms. The magnolia tree is growing and claiming her position as queen of the back yard. Figs will ripen in a few weeks.  The hollies are setting the berries that will feed the birds that winter in my garden.  I try to "leave comfort root- room."  (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Still, I find my "reality... takes leave" and  "my soul... dependent upon [his] nurture now shrink[s]... reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves."

Gardening, reading, and hoping
".... after a period peace blooms, slowly and always  irregularly."  Maya Angelou from her poem When Great Trees Die.

Teaching Luke: "Do not be afraid, little flock..."

Last Sunday I filled in as leader for the Discussion Class (Luke Part 2) at Southwest Central Church, Houston, since Michael and Brent were both out of town. Yes, me! At church and teaching on Mother's Day and only a little bit weepy. How I rejoice in this evidence of healing and spiritual growth!  I don't think I was ever privileged to teach a class that was a better fit with the morning's worship service. Our passage from Luke melded perfectly with the reading from Acts 2 from our "Peter Speaks to You" series which informed our worship last Sunday.

In its detailed discussion of Luke, the class had reached Chapter 12 but I began with a reminder of the last verses of Chapter 11:
⁵³ When he went out from there, the experts in the law and the Pharisees began to oppose him bitterly, and to ask him hostile questions about many things, ⁵⁴ plotting against him, to catch him in something he might say.
Everything in the next section (Luke 12:1 - Luke 13:21) happens in this context of opposition, hostile questions, and plotting "to catch" Jesus which gives an urgency to his words. When Jesus heals on the Sabbath, the experts in the law say, "Gotcha!" but the section concludes:
 ^13:7 When he said this all his adversaries were humiliated, but the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things he was doing.

The setting is one that Luke has used before, most notably in Luke 6, Jesus' Sermon on the Plain--Jesus teaching his disciples in the midst of a crowd. And, oh! what a crowd, "so many that they trampled on each other." This emphasis on the size of the crowd introduces one of the major Lukan themes: "the world turned upside down." What seems big or valuable is really of no value; what seems small and of little value is really a great treasure.
Jesus and his disciples are surrounded by hostility, a hostility that is moving toward Jerusalem and a cross, just as the original readers of Luke's gospel, the early Christian church, are faced with persecution and the very real possibility of martyrdom. As Craddock writes,  "...these words are more fitted to the church after Jesus' resurrection than to his immediate disciples, because these sayings both imply and openly state the gift of the Holy Spirit." In the face of this hostility, Jesus repeatedly assures his disciples that God cares, that God provides, that the unfruitful fig tree will be cut down, that the faithful servant will be rewarded, and that the Kingdom of God will grow from the small mustard seed which he is sowing into a "tree" where birds may nest in safety and provision.

(Note: in both Jewish and Buddhist traditions and early writings, the mustard seed is an image of creation, an expanding universe, eternity. Its appearance here--particularly with the mention of "garden"--may be evocative of similar ideas.)

The section, Luke 11:53 - Luke 13: 22, is marked by

1. movement ⁵³ "Then he went out from there" and ²² "Then Jesus traveled"
2. and the use of "leaven" and birds

Although none of the commentaries I looked at mentioned it, in my reading I noted a chiastic structure:

A     LEAVEN of the Pharisees,  that is hypocrisy
B           Birds e.g. sparrows for whom God cares.
             NO FEAR you are worth more than sparrows     
C             A Question from the crowd re. inheritance
                 Jesus answers with a question:
                 "Who made me the judge?" DIVISION of property
D                   A parable: rich man building barns ("eat, drink, be merry")
                     Not ready for his death and headed to "Gehenna"
E                     DO NOT WORRY
                        Birds e.g. Ravens do not build barns, God provides
                        Lilies, grass withers and is burnt, God provides
                        ³² “DO NOT BE AFRAID, little flock,
                              for your Father is well pleased to give you
                              the kingdom.
                                ³³ Sell your possessions and give to the poor.
                            Provide yourselves purses that do not wear out—
                            a treasure in heaven that never decreases,
                           where no thief approaches and no moth destroys.
                      ³⁴ For where your treasure is,
                         there your heart will be also."
  D'                  A Parable: servants waiting for their masters' return
                       Ready with loins already girded and lamps continually burning
 C'              A Question from the Disciples (Peter)
                  Jesus answers with a question:
                 "Who is the trustworthy steward?" DIVISION of households
                 "You hypocrites!"
                 "Judge for yourself what is right!"
B'        Wild birds that nest in the mustard tree
A'    LEAVEN of the Kingdom of God

In this text Jesus seeks to reassure his small group of followers in the midst of a much more numerous crowd that the Kingdom of God will grow, that God will provide everything his "little flock" needs just as he provides for birds.
Major teaching themes include:

• hypocrisy
• "my" possessions vs. God's provision
• "riches" vs. "treasure"
• being prepared for persecution, for death, for judgment

Of the repeated themes which this class has been noticing we see:

• angels,
• Holy Spirit
• the world turned upside down
• the poor
• the Kingdom
• clean/unclean (I'm not sure this item is on the list on the blackboard)
• and numerous pairs

We have a pair of fears: the one who can destroy the body vs. the one who can destroy the soul.
We have a pair of brothers--as we had a pair of sisters in Chapter 10:38-42--where one asks for judgment against the other.
We have not a pair but a triplet of birds: sparrows, ravens (an "unclean" bird), and wild birds. The appearance of the third reinforces the chiastic emphasis on E Luke 12:22-34 as the key section of this text.
We have a pair of questions; one from the crowd and one from the disciples represented by Peter.
We have a pair of parables both speaking to being prepared for judgment.
We have a pair of trees: an unfruitful fig tree and the tree that grows from the mustard seed.
We have a pair of "divisions" of an inheritance and of households.

Does Chapter 12 ^51 "Do you think I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! ⁵² For from now on there will be five in one household divided, three against two and two against three. ⁵³ They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
relate to Chapter 11 ¹⁶ Others, to test him, began asking for a sign from heaven. ¹⁷ But Jesus, realizing their thoughts, said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is destroyed, and a divided household falls. ¹⁸ So if Satan too is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?"

And, perhaps, there is a pairing of baptism and fire in 13:49-50 which looks forward to the second chapter of Acts, also written by Luke.
Part of that passage was the key text to our worship service on Sunday:

^{Acts 2:42} They were devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. ⁴³ Reverential awe came over everyone, and many wonders and miraculous signs came about by the apostles. ⁴⁴ All who believed were together and held everything in common, ⁴⁵ and they began selling their property and possessions and distributing the proceeds to everyone, as anyone had need. ⁴⁶ Every day they continued to gather together by common consent in the temple courts, breaking bread from house to house, sharing their food with glad and humble hearts, ⁴⁷ praising God and having the good will of all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number every day those who were being saved.

In Luke/Acts, as Talbert suggests, the purpose of wealth is to share with the poor, with one another. Much of our class discussion centered around the difficulty of putting this teaching into practice.

I read and made use of the discussion of this section in these books:

Craddok, Fred B.: Luke: Interpretation for Teaching and Preaching. 1990

Talbert, Charles H.: Reading Luke: A Literary and Theological Commentary. 1982

Brent and Michael gave me a third book with these which I read but from which I made no notes so I doubt that it contributed to my understanding of the passage.
Scripture quotations from the NET Bible via Biblegateway.

Memoir: Daddy on a summer morning...

I've been putting in a new yard. When I started removing grass to prepare a new bed, I noticed that my hoe was dull. I remembered the countless mornings from the time school turned out in May until School started in September--yes, we pretty much kept to those dates because in a rural farming community children are labor--that began with "iron sharpening iron" as Daddy filed our hoes and the rising sun colored the eastern sky and tinted the land rose gold.
I could not find my file so I asked DMP to pick one up on the way home. He did and when I opened the package in the morning light to begin a day's work, I finally got the joke.
Daddy had brought home a new file and laid it carefully on the edge of front stoop as he began using the old file on our hoes. Mother came out and sat on the stoop with her coffee cup watching him. Hiding his smile under the wide brim of his hat, he said, "Dot, hand me that S.O.B."
She shot him a look of both shock and anger.
His blue eyes sparkled and he looked directly at her and said, "That's what it is; read the label."
She did; they laughed. She blew him a kiss and tossed him the file and we got on with our day.
Even at the time, I knew they had shared a joke, a private joke, one of the countless little ways they affirmed their love day in and day out.
My new file is a Nicholson 10" Black Diamond Single Cut Bastard.
"Single Cut Bastard." What a wonderful phrase!
It would make a good line for a poem or a title for a novel.

Chiaroscuro: Playing with light and shadow

I've had a week of experiencing light and shadows.
Making the most of Houston's last cool weather before the summer blast, I spent lots of time working in my yard. While working in the hot afternoons, I often longed for some rest in a patch of shade. The patio table umbrella was nice; the natural shade from my neighbor's trees was nicer. For me, those shadows became a place of shelter, a resting place.

Gregory Gibbs, 2014, used by permission.

One day last week a young friend posted a "selfie" that I found quite intriguing. I lingered over the photo and returned to it several times in the week. Something in the photograph reminded me of a Rembrandt painting that had first fascinated me in childhood when I found  it in the World Book Encyclopedia. Rembrandt's single candle lighting is called chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro was not original to Rembrandt. Several of my other favorite 17th and 18th Century painters--Leonardo Da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Caravaggio--made use of the technique. Chiaroscuro lends a painting "dramatic intensity, rhythmic visual harmony, and psychological depth." {I would very much like to properly cite this phrase but am not certain where it originates. Two sources that I found interesting are:  Jeffrey A. Netto's 1999 article for his English course: Writing in the World of Painting   and a really fun power point from teacher web "Outside the Lines." }

All this to say that I had already been thinking some about light and shadow when I arrived at The Cenacle Retreat House on Saturday morning for the "spiritual spa day." 



My friends, Amy, Chelsie, Brandy, Michal, Luci, Elana, and me
on the patio of the Cenacle in light and shadow.

I was very much looking forward to a massage to  ease the aches and pains of the week's hard labor in the yard, to being indulged with some delicious lunch and a high tea, and to spending some quality time with friends. It was a truly wonderful day. Walking the beautiful gardens and woodlands allowed me to experience more light and shadow.
One of the two sessions I attended was Connie Longsworth's Musica Divina, a meditation technique similar to Lectio Divina using music rather than text. Connie suggested that we could use this technique not only intentionally but any time when we were trapped listening to music in a car, on hold, shopping. We could use it for any genre of music, as a way of encountering God in everything.

I did not care for either of Connie's selections: Captivate Us by Watermark and Cyndi Lauper's True Colors. I found the music uninteresting; I found the poetry, particularly True Colors, dreadful. Nonetheless, as I reflected on the words and the relationship of those two pieces to each other, I noted that both songs were very sensory, extremely visual, and that both relied on motifs of light and shadow.

"like the stars..." "radiant bright... in your breath and shadow..." "let everything be lost in the shadows of the light of your face..." from Captivate Us

"You can lose sight of it all and the darkness inside you..." "I see your true colors shining through..." "Like a rainbow..."

from True Colors

My journal notes:

Chiaroscuro

by K Cummings Pipes 2 May 2014

Light by its very nature creates shadow.
Shadows are not the same as darkness.
Darkness is an absence of light.
Shadows are the result of light's presence;
they are part of the light's revelation.
For example:
I do not, I cannot doubt unless I first have faith.
Indeed, doubt is not the absence of faith;
doubt is a shadowed faith.
The presence of the Light reveals shadows.
Shadows change with the movement of light
or with the movement of the object that casts the shadow.
Remove the object and the shadow is gone.
Such removal may be necessary
when the shadow is the result of some hindrance or sin in my life.
Not all objects can be moved;
they are not sin but circumstance.
These objects are to be walked around, not stumbled over.
Sometimes a shadow object can become a candlestick,
lifting the light higher and increasing illumination.
Looking at a shadow from different angles,
seeing how the shadow changes in time and space,
may create a fresh perspective or open a new path.
If there are no shadows, there is no Light.
The play of the Light and shadows bring
"dramatic intensity, rhythmic...  harmony,
and psychological depth" to my life
and are indeed a shelter and a resting place.