Star-Throwers and Holstein Cows: A Note for the New Year

New Year's Eve Sunset

This very well might be the worst New Year’s post you read this year.  To begin with, I am a whopping twelve days late on the whole let’s-write-about-the-past/coming-year bandwagon.  Moreover, in the following paragraphs there is not a single New Year’s resolution to be found.  [I figure I am overly goal-oriented to begin with, so I try to stick with situationally-negotiable, adaptive plans].  Nor are there any elegant looking-back moments summarily capturing all that I’ve learned in the past year.  As fitting as that would be, life, I find, tends to resist all such tidying-up tasks with vigor.   All I can offer, it would seem, would be a word of thanks and of beauty (the latter borrowed from thinkers much wiser than myself).    

So, here we go: thank you, thank you, thank you to all who have walked with me so faithfully through the topsy-turvy, transition-jammed year that was 2013—from graduation in the spring, to a whirlwind of travel in the summer, and then to the disorienting leap from Senegal to seminary this fall, well, it’s been quite a year! Thank you, too, for so patiently wading through these posts and not deeming me too presumptuous for sharing my thoughts as I seek to grow into the craft of writing and the practice of advocacy. 

And now to share two of the breathtakingly striking passages that I stumbled across over break: The first is from Frederick Buechner’s Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, in which he defines praise as the following:

"[Praise] is about as measured as a volcanic eruption, and there is no implication that under any conceivable circumstances it could be anything other than what it is.  The whole of creation is in on the act— the sun and moon, the sea, fire and snow, Holstein cows and white-throated sparrows, old men in walkers and children who still haven't taken their first step.  Their praise is not chiefly a matter of saying anything because most of creation doesn't deal in words.  Instead the snow whirls, the fire roars, the Holstein bellows, the old man watches the moon rise.  Their praise is not something that at their most complimentary they say but something that at their truest they are." (85). 

What might it mean, I wonder, to live this coming year with deeper awareness of this truth at the forefront of our consciousness?  To tap into the implications of the radical notion that praise is what/ who we are designed to be?  How might such an understanding shape my interactions with my family, classmates, refugee clients, strangers, or, even/especially the people with whom I don’t naturally get along?? 

Second, in his book The Promise of Paradox, Parker Palmer relates Loren Eiseley’s story of the star thrower.  Eiseley recounts his experience of— in a town where so many of the inhabitants would daily comb the beaches to collect, kill, and sell starfish— coming across in the very early morning a man who would, against the odds, get to the beaches before the others in hopes of throwing back in and thereby rescuing as many starfish as he could.  Reflecting on the significance of Eiseley’s story, Palmer writes,

“It offers an image of a God who threw the stars and throws them still.  It speaks of how ordinary men and women can participate in God’s enveloping mercy.  And it suggests a vocation that each of us could undertake on our inward way of the cross: To recognize, to identify and lift up those moments, those acts, those people, those stories which contradict the ways in which the world says no to life” (47).

What might it look like in our own lives and communities to participate in this star-throwing mission, I wonder?  In what areas of our lives and the world is God continuing to throw stars?  Who are the human star-throwers around us that we’ve been passing by unseen, and how might we train ourselves to look for them, join them, and help sustain them in this work?

Everyone, I would wager, has their own seemingly small practices of throwing stars.  This year, I hope and hey, maybe even resolve, to live in such a way and at such a pace that these practices might become ever more visible to my eyes and graspable to my hands.