When Faith Falters, Then What?

An Easter Message

“Simon Peter said unto them, I go fishing.” John 21:3

Easter opens the door for spring. It elevates our spirits in a renewal of the earth’s grandeur. For Christians it’s also a time of quiet reflection and a vicarious reliving of the events surrounding the final days of Jesus’ life.

For those in the Biblical account, the Feast of the Passover was a time of high religious enthusiasm. Perhaps a spectacle resembling a religious Mardi Gras. We can only speculate.

In re-reading the Biblical accounts, I’m struck by the cast of characters in the scene. What were they thinking? I wondered about their faith, its foundation. So, I de-constructed the scene to see what would appear.

The short list of the cast gives some clues:

The multitudes mingled
Jesus prayed
Disciples slept

Judas betrayed
Peter denied
Pilate plotted

The soldiers tortured
A thief repented
The disciples hid

Spectators mocked
Women wailed
Jesus crucified

Imagine if we had been there. What role would we have played?

Emotional fervor intensified during Passover. The multitudes expected miracles. Euphoria energized them. But wait, Jesus rides in on a donkey? What’s this, the Son of God, the Redeemer of Israel riding on a lowly animal? They’re perplexed, confused. Is this a hoax? Their faith falters.

Emotional faith lacks solid foundations. It’s based on the secretions of the adrenal gland. It’s centered in the limbic system of the brain, the central processing area for feelings, moods and emotions. Its zeal is a raindrop. It evaporates instantly in the desert dust. It’s a faith that leans on a weak reed. It has the hand-grip strength of a newborn baby.

We’re defined daily by our responses to life’s events:

When life kicks down the door
And assails us like a beast,
When its teeth rip raw our flesh
And tears drip down our cheeks,
When all of life seems hopeless,
Where do we go for faith?

Jesus found this life waiting for him in Jerusalem. Where did he go? To the Garden of Gethsemane. What did he do? He prayed.

When caught in the vortex of tragedies, our faith seems to abandon us. How do we endure the fallout from unmitigated disasters? How do we summons up something as ephemeral as faith? Much less trust or depend on it.

Oh, yes, our faith is strong when the storms of life hit other shores, when we’re healthy, prosperous, satisfied, trouble free. But let life’s crises claim us, then see where faith goes. It seems to flee, to leave us forsaken. We’re not alone. Scripture says all forsook Jesus and fled. Even on the cross Jesus cried out, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?)

The chain of events in the Easter story exposes us to:

The humiliation,
The torture,
The brutality of human cruelty.

Crucifixion is barbarism on display, revealing the wild innate nature of man. The world of mankind at its core drips with blood, tooth and nail. Can any faith withstand this?

We’re vicarious spectators when Jesus is betrayed, arrested, arraigned, condemned, beaten, crucified, dead and buried. We’re cowards along with the disciples, quavering behind closed doors. We’re with the women at the empty tomb. We meet the risen Christ. We’re on the road to Emmaus when Jesus walks with us. Like the others, we’re often confused, conflicted, perplexed. Where do we go from here? Where’s our faith now?

I can relate to Peter, who said, “I go fishing.” His faith faltered, even as ours does. Others joined him. They returned to what they knew, to the place where Jesus first found them. And Jesus found them again, just as before. I’m certain the subject of “fishers of men” came up.

Even though our fledgling faith is often fleeting, God will find us again, whispering His promise, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” That’s where real faith is found…in God’s promises.

Soon the Easter egg hunts will end, the Easter bunny will return to his burrow and the Easter lilies will wither. We will be left to ourselves again. Where will we go to renew our faith? Will God find us again? I ask myself these questions. What about you?

May our risen Savior find us again, revitalize our faith, strengthen us in all good works, and fill us with His Holy Spirit for greater service to Him and our neighbors.


Bud Hearn
March 29, 2018

Talking to Trees

Strange things can happen living along the coast of Georgia. One day I talked to an oak tree. Let me tell you about it.

Oak trees possess mystical spirits. Besides being great to climb as a kid, they are iconoclastic and do things backwards, sort of a stick-in-the-eye to protocol. Like shedding leaves in the spring, not the fall.

One March morning you look out and the trees are full of leaves. The next day a great migration takes place…the leaves let go. No sounds, no mourning, just a silent goodbye to the old. Each leaf an ending, and a beginning. Maybe one of the quietest sounds ever heard is the sound of letting go.

Silence scares people. It’s not loud enough to suit them. Our super-charged culture blasts its incessant cacophony of incoherent noise. It delights the serially addicted adherents of the modern-day ‘screen generation.’

It takes a while to get accustomed to living in a place surrounded by silence. It’s possible to vanish into silent moments while walking among the oaks, or strolling near the marshes. Its restorative value is incalculable.

The island’s silence is a little unnerving at first. It takes time for the nervous system to adjust to the slow-pace flow of island life. The gravitational pull of busy, big city life hangs on tight. It took about three years for me to break the shackles of its insidious vortex.

The seductive presence of ancient and massive oak trees helped. Maybe that’s why I respect their wisdom. As Anne Beattie once remarked, “People forget years and remember moments.” Here’s mine.

It is a day in March, 2017. The sky is blue and vacuous with wispy jet trails. They streak like ephemeral memories across the sky of the mind. And like most days, I’m hungry. Hunger makes strange music in a man’s stomach, maybe even causing him to hear mystical voices. It gets the blame for a lot.

I break routine and ride over to Jekyll Island. A change of scenery is good food for the soul. In those days the Rah Bar occupied the end of the marina pier near the Jekyll Island Hotel. Sadly, it has now been displaced, ‘restored’ they say, a euphemism for destroying the charm of an island icon.

The Dangerous Dan’s Dawg ruled the menu. It was hard to beat, especially when enhanced by a cold can of the brew that made Milwaukee famous. Such combinations are memories in themselves.

It’s healthy to walk off the effects of King Kosher nitrates. I take a stroll among the oak trees. It feels comfortable to associate with these massive specimens of antiquity. There’s a sense of eternity among these gnarled, weather-beaten survivors of the caprices of nature.

They exude an energy that’s palatable. Strange, I know, but if they could talk, what would they say? What wisdom would they impart out of the silence of their voices? I think to open a dialogue with one. This is how I recall it going.

“Hi, can I ask you a question?" It answers in silence. In fact, it’s so quiet I can hear the temperature drop.

Undeterred, I ask, “Why do you shed your leaves in the spring, and not the fall?" A slight breeze rustles the leaves. More fall around me. Is it speaking, I wonder?

“What are you saying?” The tree shakes slightly. Branches above me rustle, the air is electric. The wind whispers, “Listen.”

More leaves fall. Curious, I grab a low branch, study it closely. At the tip of the leafless branch is a tiny hint of green, another leaf in the making. It seems to have shoved the former resident off, making room for itself. Such is the way of all growth.

Nature speaks in silence. A resurrection resides in every branch, new life in every stem. Who needs words to understand this?

Maybe that explains the mystery of how oaks have had better luck in converting Yankees to the Southern lifestyle than Wesley had in spreading spirituality to the natives.

A quiet calm descends upon the place. Conversation ends. The breeze moves on. So do I.

Did the tree speak? What did I hear? Maybe just the simple reminder that age is no impediment to new growth, but first the old has got to go. Life is perennial.

Imagine talking to trees, and have them talk back. What a place to live.


Bud Hearn
March 24, 2018

Early Morning Coffee

Life has its own intent…our part is to just show up.

**********

Life offers up to us certain simple moments of pleasure. Maybe not always big ones, like the thrill of love, or the terror of skydiving. They’re different for everyone. Early morning coffee is one of mine.

It’s difficult to describe the joy to be found in my dark kitchen at 6:00 AM with a hot cup of coffee. Quiet, only the whirring of the refrigerator’s nervous system and the plop, plop of ice cubes. Nothing moves, everybody’s asleep. No big thoughts, often no thoughts at all. Just myself, the dark and the solitude augmented by the slow rush of caffeine.

Ah, caffeine, my drug of choice, an addiction unbroken since the first taste in high school. The ‘slow rush’ of caffeine soothes my tenuous ticker. It can no longer tolerate the wind-‘em-up, shoot-‘em-out brain-bursts and eye-explosions of full bore caffeine. Now it’s the senior citizen’s formula: one-third regular, two thirds decaf.

Rush-rush mornings are a curse from hell. Rapid movement before 10:00 is inhumane. Yes I know, some folks scorn such a decadent wake-up routine with utter disgust, claiming what a waste of good energy. These adrenaline junkies fly out of bed, flood the house with light, flick on the TV and fry up breakfast. Pray for them.

Some prefer the moments of slow sunsets to distill the day’s closure. In fact, nothing beats a cold Miller Lite while watching a golden sunset. It seems to squeeze out the sponge of the day’s details. It’s just different. The difference seems to be that the morning’s hopes and dreams of the day lie ahead: new, unexplored, expansive, while the day’s end simply wraps up what the preceding hours dredged up.

Now this is no attempt to proselytize or convert anyone from their own morning proclivities. Habits are ruts, good ones and bad ones. Some redeem, others condemn. My father had his own peculiarity.

He’d sit at a small round table in the kitchen staring silently into the darkness outside. A tiny light from the small transistor radio reflected on his cup and saucer. He listened to the static whisper of the day’s fishing report on Lake Seminole and the weather forecast. That was about the extent of his wake-up.

The peculiar thing was he drank his steaming-hot coffee from a saucer, not a cup, a habit inherited from his mother. He called it ‘saucering.’ I have never heard of anyone else doing this until I read of it in Streets of Laredo by McMurtry.

Back in March, 2002, I ran across a poem, Comeback, by Tess Gallagher. It seemed to sum up my penchant for early morning coffee in a dark place. Here it is:

My father loved first light.
He would sit alone
at the yellow formica table
in the kitchen with his coffee cup
and sip and look out
over the strait. Now,
in what could be the end of my life, or worse,
the life of someone I love, I too
am addicted to slow sweet beginnings.
First bird call. Wings
in silhouette. How the steeples
of the evergreens make a selvage
for the gaunt emerging sky.

My three loves are far away
in other countries,
and one is even under
this dew-bright ground
where the little herds
of jittery quail peck
and scurry for their lives.

My father picks up his cup.
Light is sifting in
like a gloam of certainty
over the water. He knows
something there in the half light
he can’t know any other way.

And now I know it with him: so much
is joining us in the dawn
that no one can ever be parted.
It steals over us because we left
the warm beds of our dreams
to sit beside what rises.
I think he wants to stay there
forever, my captain, gazing but not
expecting, while the world
begins, and, in a stark silent calling,
won’t tell anyone what it’s for.

**********

Life offers up to us certain simple moments of pleasure. Early morning coffee is my rut. What’s yours?


Bud Hearn
March 15, 2018

Shed ‘em, it’s Barefoot Time Again

March blows in a special memory to me. So refreshing, in fact, even my bare feet remember it. Let me tell you about it.

**********

Growing up I never found much use for March, except for my birthday and going barefoot again. March is like some double-minded people I know: unstable in all their ways.

It’s hung up half on winter and half on spring; it’s hot, then cold, windy or calm. It can’t make up its mind. It possesses the true Piscean nature. But one thing it can’t deny: bare feet can smell spring coming.

Long before daylight savings time artificially elongated the days, the urge could be felt, an urge as primal as life itself, this urge to shed the shoes and let bare feet get reacquainted with Mother Nature. Every bonehead kid over eight with even a pea for a brain knew it. Especially boys.

There’s something ethereal about feeling soft dust or mud squish between your toes and the still-damp grass tickle the soles of your feet. Such were the backyard days of my youth. Maybe yours, too.

Kozan Ichikyo had these impulses:

“Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going--
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.”

Feet have about 200,000 nerve endings. Scorching sands and sharp stones tend to weed out all ‘tenderfoots.’ Every barefoot step is a new experience in feeling free. Until summer’s over. By then bare feet resemble black asphalt, are tough as nails and no longer fit into shoes.

Stepping barefoot outside on a mild March morning is like a naked experience. Pure Zen. Even on bare feet. But for most kids Zen sounds like a new brand of ice cream. The ‘Barefoot Philosophy of Life’ movement was still gestating in San Francisco.

My small town, Colquitt, Georgia, commands a majestic perch atop of what could be called a sand hill. Hills in Southwest Georgia are rare. You have to look hard to see one. The town’s topo slopes west down to the Spring Creek, a trickle that meanders among cypress knees and swamp grass. It provides cheap daycare for young boys and old fishermen.

It was early March. The day was cool. Ok, it was cold. It had rained. We were barefoot. But youth have no feelings in their feet, or their heads either. Cognitive functions were theoretical.

School was out. We were bored. Fishing occupied our minds. A freshly plowed red-clay field lay in front of us. It sparkled in the bright sunlight. Glints of sunlight refracted from tiny flint stones still wet. They seemed to wink like miniature eyes. It tempted us, like many of life’s sparking fields tend to do, but we didn’t know that then.

The field presented a dilemma: cross it as the shortcut, or take the long way around on the sidewalk. You know what we did. Shortcuts are not always the best route. We learned that later, too. So did you.

So off we go, the mire of cold wet clay oozing between our toes. We slipped, slid and laughed across that field. The splendor of that moment lives on.

Now another March is here and along with it comes the same urge to shed my shoes. Other urges are there, too, but some of them can only be observed from a distance. Time has converted them to memories.

Two weeks ago I’m standing ankle deep in new grass, waiting for our dog, Mac, to finish his affairs. Sadly, that was a few days before he said goodbye to us.

Whether on a whim or a momentary recurrence of the primal urge, I step out of my shoes. The grass is cool and damp. The earth is warm, firm and friendly. I feel strangely at home. While standing there barefoot, the intervening years slowly vanish and it all seems to make sense. Some things never die.

**********

Bare feet have magical powers. They can transport us back for a brief re-visit of childhood. Don’t miss the opportunity. Shed ‘em and you won’t.


Bud Hearn
March 9, 2018