Our Place

February 14, 2012

2012-02-14T10:41:00.004-06:00

Don't know how to read
the symphony expressed
in all these tadpole notes.

Turn the page to yesterday,
and pray through a watercolor wash
of emotion, bright around the edge

of remembrance. How do we number our days?
1-2-3, 1-2-3, waltz 3/4
through so many doors

and no going back
to paint in the empty rests,
where something else ought to have been.

"Draw in pen" it said,
"so you can't erase, and must make
something better of mistakes."

But I'll leave
such creativity to God:
the eraser and the pen,

the tadpoles caught by their tails,
the whole note rests
(black hats heavy as death),

and the watercolor remaking
of every day, sweet clamor calling
"Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!"

Elly

2012-02-11T14:02:00.004-06:00

Our beagle-terrier mix died this past week, old and full of years--17 to be exact. She was a good dog, though temperamental and stubborn. As a youngster, she astounded us all when she rewarded my attempts at training (coached faithfully by my mother) by winning reserve champion at the 4-H dog obedience show. She continued to [usually] sit on command, but everything else pretty much fell by the wayside.

She delighted a little girl who longed for a puppy, joyously accompanied long and pleasant traipsings through my grandpa's woods, and was the most vocally conversational dog I have ever met--sporting quite a vocabulary of groaning commentary during belly rubs and ear scratchings. These vocalizations pretty much ceased as she grew deaf, so they must have been in response to our voices not our hands.

Her old years seemed to me a commentary on creatureliness--on the limits and needs that bind all created things in a fallen world, and even on the necessity for a better master than I.

the Hurting and Church

2012-02-04T16:44:00.003-06:00

Before publishing this, I would like to affirm that my Lord loves the church, and because of that I don't want to undermine the precious thing she is. My participation in local congregations of believers profoundly blesses me. However, one particular aspect of church bothers me, as I will attempt to express here. These ideas are yet embryonic, a few short steps in what I hope will become a long and fruitful road. I am no expert, but I've been thinking, and I'd love for you, reader, to help me by sharing your own observations and thoughts.

"Church" is too often a difficult experience for those undergoing sustained difficulties. American evangelical Christians as a whole have inadequate training in how to truly be present with those who are suffering. Often we know the intellectual and theological answers to the problem of evil. In the shadowy land where personal life defies equations, however, we stumble. In my own life, I have found the best answer in that place is simply and incomprehensibly God's presence. But suffering often feels like the absence or wrath of God. In such a situation the presence of God's people brings potential for unique solace.

How beautiful if our corporate expressions of worship could themselves include vehicles to help congregants bring their sorrows before the Lord! What might happen if--instead of "leaving our burdens" at the sanctuary door--we sang them to Him as Moses and David did? If we did that, wouldn't those who enter church feeling alone in their pain see that they, too, have a place among us? God's word addresses the whole range of human experience. He created the human heart with its capacity for a thousand hues of emotion and thought. He is the one who calls us to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. Our corporate worship ought to reflect this.

When I ask the question "how can the hurting be shown they have a place in church?" most often I am answered "through relationships between individuals." I agree this is essential. But a corporate expression of struggles before God and public remembrance of His presence in the midst of us might give congregants the courage to make their own troubles known. Also, when congregants see leaders responding to sorrow without judging or "fixing" it, they learn that exhortation and explanation are not the only Biblical responses suffering. It seems so godly to remind agonized and questioning souls of God's sovereignty, but perhaps in that moment, what they most need to know is how profoundly and presently He cares.

I don't advocate worship services dominated by expressions of sorrow, but I think it should have a place there--along with victory and rejoicing. I don't think this is unattainable, and I believe God's word contains guidelines on how to accomplish this.

Suggested resources:

A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching Out to God in the Lost Language of Lament by Michael Card. see
http://store.michaelcard.com/asacredsorrow-book.aspx

"Childhood Sexual Abuse." Radio broadcast by Moody Radio's program Midday Connect. Discussion of the need and opportunity for the church to minister to those who have been sexually abused, and a description of the healing role of liturgy and music. see

http://www.moodyradio.org/brd_ProgramDetail.aspx?id=81496

dollar primrose

2012-02-02T13:10:00.001-06:00

2012-01-21T16:02:00.004-06:00

To what shall I liken life?
Fish on a line, flipping and playing against the inevitable?
Music box chime of metal bars and bumps?
Long keyboard navigations of meaning?
Scales winging higher and higher into the sky?

Trust is not a doorway, but a corridor
riddled with a thousand temptations to escape
the long, narrow line to the ineffable Unseen.
It seems (dare I say) mean that once is not enough.
Tear through the threshold, stumble and rise
to fight again the pull of stubborn siren melodies
on every side. Give up. Give up. Give up?
To whom? Myself, or You?
You, You, You . . . doorways snag and slide
but I guess a rhythm through the floor.
Is that Your heart, Father, beating at the end?
If so--if this is how You catch me--
catch and catch and pull me in.

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

2012-01-19T10:15:00.003-06:00

O Love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O light that foll’west all my way,
I yield my flick’ring torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

~ "O Love That WilL Not Let Me Go" by George Mattheson.

Farrowing House Ruin

2012-01-16T10:55:00.001-06:00

Farrowing House Ruin

Our rubber toes set well back from the rim
(from horror more than from self-discipline),
we scanned a black horizon in the ground
where concrete met thick water part-way down

the Pit. A tragedy of burnt up pigs,
a fascination, warning for us kids,
the times we stole a look at it alone,
it pushed us back and penetrated bone.

The mysteries that somehow we all share
will be covered over or laid bare.
All grass now, grace has dug the Pit a grave.
From secrets, too, we can be saved.

When Your Friend Is Grieving

2012-01-15T12:15:00.005-06:00

No two people experience the grief of a loved one's death in the same way. Each relationship is different. And for most of us, it's hard to know how to help those we love during their own dark hours. While I experienced the death of my dad when I was nineteen, I still struggle with "being there" for those I love when tragedy strikes. So please understand, the following list is offered from my own limited perspective. Maybe, at least, it will help you understand a bit more how your friend may feel.

When your friend is grieving--

Don't

try to fix it. Your friend needs you to be her friend, not her councelor.

Don't

give up if your friend reacts poorly to your attempts to reach out. Physical wounds are unusually sensitive to touch. Emotional ones are, too. Give your friend, and yourself, grace.

Don't

assume that "precious memories" are the silver lining of the situation. Memories are a poor substitute for actual presence. When the loss is raw, memories can seem like those scented candles that make you think cookies are in the oven and all the time it was only hot wax. This doesn't mean your friend won't want to explore memories--just that they aren't "the answer."

Don't

expect your friend to grieve the way you do. Some people feel a lot of emotion. Others don't.

Do

share your own memories of the deceased. Your friend cherishes the confirmation that his loved one was a blessing and continues to be remembered.

Do

be all right with being uncomfortable. People weren't designed for death. Tears, heartache, confusion, anger--are part of the territory.

Do

reassure your friend that you don't mind when she expresses uncomfortable emotions or heartfelt thoughts. She may feel exposed afterwards. She needs to know she is still okay.

Do

stay. Grief can be a long journey, and the funeral is only the beginning.

legacies

2012-01-14T22:40:00.004-06:00

Who can say the trail
our lives will leave behind--
silver-white, spreading like
a speed boat wake, circling away
like jet plane ribbons?

I'd like mine to be
an early summer breeze,
a kind and quiet lifting
toward enduring good.

Now, it bids more like
autumn's armful of curling leaves.
Caught in God's wind,
even that will do.

To A Favorite Sunday School Teacher In His Absence

2012-01-12T14:15:00.000-06:00

Though we'd developed the habit of sitting like lumps in cold folding chairs amid an ever growing silence (even though we all knew the answers)--you somehow managed to beckon us toward the marvels of God's work in our world. We were a pack of disparate teens enduring the motions of Sunday school, but you showed us something more and for a bit each Sunday morning, we walked the road together.

Perhaps it was your kindness that eased us--reassured us enough to reject our careful squints and grow wide-eyed again. Your kindness was always there--on trips home from college, and even afterwords when I visited the country church again. You showed me you really did care after my own dad was called home. And now that you are gone, I ache for your family--and yes, even for myself. You are missed, and you always will be missed, until we join you in the place where all kinds of divisions are no more.

"'Till we meet, 'till we meet, 'till we meet at Jesus' feet/ 'Till we meet, 'till we meet, God be with you 'till we meet again."

When I Can't Make Sense

2012-01-10T19:27:00.003-06:00

I used to be (yesterday, or the day before) convinced that we write to make sense of the world--even if that means expressing one's view that it's all senseless. Today, I wonder.Very little makes sense to me right now--and still, I write! I want to, and I feel I must. Perhaps, this, too, is one facet of life: the doing of the next right little thing--because it matters--even if I really couldn't say just how or where.

Cosmos and Chaos

2012-01-08T21:06:00.006-06:00

I remember sitting in upper level English comp. classes at the Christian college I attended. We explored the purpose of art and of writing, learning about the call of God's children in a broken world. The world seems like chaos--hopeless chaos if we discount the redemptive work of Christ and the vestiges of His perfect creation still lingering among us. As Christians, we are called to look truthfully into the darkness and disorder without minimizing or dismissing it. And always, always, we are to shed God's light there.

But just now, I feel my perspective has taken a dizzying turn. Instead of gazing out into a wild universe and tracing God's redemption woven through it, I find myself looking inward and finding bewildering confusion. The chaos isn't just out there. It seems to be inside me, too. And yet, somehow, God reaches into this tangle and draws out a long, straight line of everyday grace. I do not understand it, but I think it's beautiful, and I'm awfully glad He does it.

Earth Bound

2012-01-07T18:12:00.005-06:00

The grounded bird doesn't understand
why the air suddenly betrayed his wings,
how the wind changed to splinters and arrows,
and his smiling world, once so wide and neat,
condensed into a tangle of dead leaves.

It bothers me so terribly
when I cannot understand:
I am always half-expecting
the world to break, and I lose faith
that it will ever truly mend.

Do I think my comprehension
can stall the unthinkable--
as if I am whole and only the world
is broken?

Are You Ready For A Journey?

2012-01-05T21:42:00.015-06:00

Light Studies

2012-01-05T21:23:00.013-06:00

2011-12-29T08:53:00.004-06:00

O Lord,

You resurrect the world,
melt the snow sands,
draw to tender life
last year's small, hard secrets.

You stipple the timberland
with the faintest red-purple
brush touch and inspire
even frogs to song.

I'll cast my lot with You,
but not from spring-sweetness only.
You are winter-inscrutable and summer-kind,
victory's red wing stroke through dying fall--

Surest of Mysteries--
Baby in manger, Man snapped midlife,
never ending, never began,
Perfect Power with holes in Your hands.

2011-12-21T21:45:00.007-06:00

I would like someday
to photograph them,
when I learn (or can afford)
the subtleties of shutter speed
and flash.

Hands on instruments enjoy
the intimacy of old friends
or the high strung tension
of hoping
for one.

The fingers rest
or move--always sensing
in some tiny, unknown way
the lay of melodic land
beneath their tips.

Resonances hushed beneath the skin,
leap to life--collaborated
by strings and sinew
into silhouettes
of soul.

Just A Reminder

2011-12-16T10:47:00.005-06:00

"You are more than what is hurting you tonight," these lyrics from MERCYME's song "Beautiful" touch a tender spot within my soul. Perhaps we are always trying to establish our identity, to find out what this creature that is us is, and where it orbits in the universe of human and divine relations. Will we one day grow beyond this? Or do we grow deeper and deeper into it? I am told that those who are dying often turn inward, compelled to process their own particular life and its meaning. I have sat beside recliners, listening as elderly friends turn over and over the gems of their lives, the singular moments and facts that bring order to the past.

At any rate, what defines us in our own minds--what we think holds us together, makes us worthwhile, or at least makes us different from the mass of everyone else--is important. We clutch those things, and they bind us. And so, I must remind myself of who I am and who I am not.

I am not
what I can't do well or
what I cannot do at all;
I am neither my failures nor
my successes.

I am not
what others think of me or
what I think they think of me.

I am not
my past.
I am not
my habits.
I am not
my sins.
I am not

stuck.

I am not
my hurts.
I am not
my hope.

I am His
and still finding out what that means.

Symbols and Celebration

2011-12-13T22:21:00.000-06:00

2011-12-08T13:37:00.005-06:00

Father, I feel so faulty today--
Weariness fogs behind my eyes,
and something (is it anger or sadness or worse?),
threatens to shake off my meager regulation.

I'm sorry for running and running
in the same circles, to get away from--
what?
When all along I always knew
It was to You I should have run.

Please, I don't want to escape
the stable. I want to feel
the ground quake beneath Your cross,
and to wait in the cold garden
for the first rays of Your rising sun--

Yes, I want to stay, even if that means confronting
whatever what is.

For The Ones Who Don't Know They Do

2011-12-05T23:15:00.005-06:00

I look at you and see God's work
in the hewing of your heart
and wending of your desires
into channels crafted to carry
living water.

But you see
how your experience fails
to shine like others.
You do not cry or laugh
or stretch your arms in ecstasy.
You do not effervesce--
and if you did,
we'd all be shocked.

Yours is not the quaking,
catastrophic kind of change,
but the slow turning of a pebble
in a current much greater
than yourself.

Messages in Winter

2011-11-17T10:48:00.004-06:00

The wind in the nose
scents of winter--
first time this year.

Remembering years before,
city traffic becomes
wind calling between

wings of tin and dusty rafters,
blowing enormous secrets
around stems of hollow weeds.

In winter, wind creates
a kind of silence
in and through and over our hurry.

Though unheeded,
still it pierces the core
like a choir communing in sign.

Seperation Anxiety

2011-10-11T12:52:00.004-05:00

Sometimes we wait
with our faces turned up
to fall's keen stars,
our chill focus willing
headlights over the farthest hill.

More often we fling
half-thought cries
toward a Being
we only dimly picture:
Please . . . please.
Oh, please. Come.

You manifest Yourself
in a million ways.
But our senses, hungering,
wonder at a void,
wanting nothing so much
as a father's jacket
under our spread fingers,
and the scent of his neck
as he pulls us close.

Parable from My Life

2011-09-19T11:05:00.003-05:00

There was a box the girl feared. Everything she was afraid or ashamed of she put inside the box, hoping no one would see. She kept the box under her bed where no one went because of the dust.

She knew a man who hated the box. And she loved that man. So she scrubbed and scrubbed the box--and let him look inside. Then she began to stick it back under the bed. (She'd be sure to need it again.) The man stopped her. "Beloved," he said, "Give me that box."

Things Falling

2011-09-11T14:34:00.000-05:00

Tears link, somehow,
the nation's tragedy
with my own.
My father was not
a man to cry in public,
so when he did, it counted--
like when the towers fell,
or when he wished he'd live
to see how I turned out.
Those were the two times
I saw him cry.
It's good to keep a place for tears--
a bottle, David said.
Something broken in our hearts
is always crying
for the touch of God.

Secure

2011-08-28T20:40:00.003-05:00

Lord,

It is so easy, when I feel You near, to trust Your goodness and love. I'm chilly now in my own shadow, worries buzzing round my head. My heart, once settled kitchen cozy, now seems taunt--half-alien around the sound of a door latch rattling. Oh, well. It is well, isn't it? This is Your place, and You, Yourself, have shot the bolt home.

Don't Leave It At The Door

2011-08-15T20:03:00.004-05:00

I want you to understand something. Because you may not have heard it. Or you may have forgotten. You may be stuck, fiercely pretending that you can get yourself in hand long enough to approach God. Sometimes leaders tell you to leave your distractions outside the sanctuary in order to focus on God. A praise chorus we sing at my church says to "just forget about your worries" and "get up and on your feet and get to dancing,praising." Sometimes, with some troubles, we can do this. But sometimes we can't.

When the trouble wraps around our souls, we may feel left with only two options. We may pretend, desperately trying to buy into an emotional release we don't really feel. In the end, we lie to ourselves, to others, and to God. The weight of trying to live a different reality than our own threatens to turn us into a kind of hologram that no one can really touch. When I think that Christian culture sometimes encourages this charade, I feel angry. In an effort to be acceptable in such an environment, Christians may pretend healing--thus making a pale mockery seem like all there is to true redemption. The relationship God offers you with Himself is so much greater than that! It has depth and breadth enough to flood every nuance and shadow of your existence. The second alternative for those unable to disentangle themselves from "their worries" may seem to be withdrawal and isolation. If it's too difficult to march with the victorious throng, then find some convenient doorway and drop out of step. And then you are left alone. Though that may feel like a relief at first, it's not good in the end.

Do you know? Have you forgotten? When you belong to God, He is with you. He is near the broken hearted. He knows, as no one else ever will, every bruise and bug bite on your soul. Bring those troubles! Bring them right in and unwrap them. Let Him see. Listen for what He might say. Run, run, no matter what, to Him. Bring it all with you. You can't really deal with it on your own, anyway, you know.

You don't have to pretend. Because He is here and He knows and He loves you.

Interactions with the Almighty

2011-08-10T13:31:00.005-05:00

There are times when we are Jacob wrestling and wrestling for a painful victory. There are times when we are Ruth, our bold request answered by protective kindness. And sometimes we are Hagar in the desert, finding ourselves suddenly and unexpectedly known.

to Someone I love

2011-08-09T18:56:00.004-05:00

"Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls." ~ 1 Peter 1:8-9

"Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is." ~ 1 John 3:2

"For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." ~ 1 Corinthians 13:12

Can't wait to see You.

Beautiful Places

2011-08-09T14:39:00.006-05:00

Places we visited on summer vacation:
Illinois River
Starved Rock State Park
Lake Michigan

Death of Perfectionist

2011-08-06T09:33:00.004-05:00

I knew how
to measure up,
knew the only difference
between a red ribbon
and a blue
lay nestled
in the fine print--
a demon of detail,
a level universe
of perfectly spun plates.

You may stare, if you like,
at all these ceramic shatters.
I've grown lazy
and tired,
and fascinated by jagged, crazy,
angled edges.
Put simply--
I no longer care
to try.

Considering my rent unpaid,
I find a busy corner
on which to stake my sign:
"Will-Work-For-A-Place-In-The-Universe."
This, of course,
means I want
a handout.

The odd thing is--
I've already got one.
I exist, take up space,
breath in, breath out.

I am placed.

Could it be
that all along
the secret was not
deserving to live--
was, instead, accepting
the gift of life?

Summer Evening

2011-07-24T20:25:00.002-05:00

Wonderful, isn't it, how God fills the air with beauty and action? It could have been enough to make earthbound creatures and leave overhead only perfect, ever changing blue. But it wasn't enough. Instead, action and beauty wing across the skies. A small hawk tumbles and cuts away from swifts as the little birds ply wings like whirring paddles in pursuit. High up, a few seagulls stroke clean lines through the sky, like great sail-ships in an inverted ocean. And close down, the fantastic body of a dragon fly darts on translucent wings.

Afraid

2011-07-21T09:37:00.002-05:00

Sure, I'm afraid of being consumed.
But if You're doing it--
it's okay. Do what You must.
I trust You. You and I
have gone a ways together.

What I'm really leery of
is being used up
by people claiming
to speak in Your name.

Problem Paper

2011-07-16T18:39:00.005-05:00

Among first and second graders it is not unusual. The slipped marker and consequent dismay: "I ruined it!" Loathing the stray mark or misshaped creature on their former masterpiece, their eyes fill with angry tears and their faces crease with frustration. I've tried to hearten them: "Don't give up! Maybe you can turn it into something else. Sometimes mistakes can be turned into something that makes the picture even better!" But they don't buy it,and I'm not quite sure I do either. Inevitably the paper ends up discarded. Sometimes the artists are too discouraged to try again that day. From my adult perspective, I crease my brow and smile a little because no one but a first or second grader expects that first or second grader to be perfect. For the rest of us, the rabbit with round ears is endearing though difficult to identify.

One thing I notice over and over as I work with children is that the problems of adult humanity appear in their infant forms in communities of children. The thing I shake my head over is a less sophisticated form of the same thing I do. I, too, rue the blot and forget everything good still in the picture. I want to give up and throw it away. I want a clean paper. But that is not what we get. Thankfully, the Master Artist knows how to turn blemishes into something better. Under His hand, we cannot give up.

2011-06-26T17:41:00.003-05:00

I don't have words yet, for this new confidence: this smiling despite flaws, this shy reversal of a soul's infolding, these straightened shoulders, this bolder voice. Who can explain a heart's choice to trust God's plot line? Here I am, in permanent ink. Would I allege a tremor in God's hand? Who am I to say, "I am a mistake"?

Our Enemy Despair

2011-06-23T23:57:00.006-05:00

I was always irritated by one particular exchange in the film Anne of Green Gables. After hungering desperately for a home, Anne finds out the one she has been promised doesn't want her after all. She says she is "in the depths of despair." Wanting Mirilla to understand, she asks, "Can't you at least imagine you are in the depths of despair?" "No," Mirilla replies, "I cannot. To despair is to turn your back on God." The woman's reply always seemed a little heartless to me.

But in my own life, I begin to see a grain of truth in her words.

Despair is a nightmarish figure. In Pilgrim's Progress he shows up as a terrible giant. In The Faerie Queen, he is an old man living among "a ghastly windfall" of corpses--bodies fallen from trees upon which they had hung themselves after heeding his arguments. Despair lies and speaks from both sides of his mouth. He manipulates guilt and coaxes forth hopelessness. He is, indeed, a formidable enemy, not least because he often presents himself inside his intended victim's mind, speaking with the sound of his victim's voice.

"Things are so bad," he says, "they can never be set right. What mends today will only break again tomorrow. Why bother with life? It is a dreary business which you will certainly botch."

But to listen to him is to not listen to God. While physiological imbalances often play a key role in wrong thinking, a willful choice to despair is a faithless choice. For to despair--to absolutely despair--is to act as though God's goodness does not exist and Despair's black lies are the ultimate reality. "Curse God and die," said Job's wife. But he didn't. And we hear his impossible assertion: "I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes--I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me" (Job 19:25-27 NIV).

There is often a kind of fierceness when we choose to defy our enemy Despair. It is like standing blindly in an empty room and screaming. He makes us think that he is only our own voice speaking, not an enemy trying to devour our bodies if not our souls. Yet we speak into that empty room, saying in the face of what feels like flawless logic: "No. God does have a good point for my life--one that isn't simply to use me as a warning for others. I am His child and His poem. He has planned good works for me to do. Not only that, He has born my griefs, carried my diseases,and wants me to cast my cares upon Him, too! Is anything in this shattered world so ruined that He cannot fix it, He who has been broken Himself?"

So off with you--you pit, you giant, you gaunt old man! I have better company tonight. "How precious to [or concerning] me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you" (Psalm 139:17-18 NIV).

summer verse

2011-06-16T11:40:00.002-05:00

Summertime,
when light lingers longest,
and life, unquenched, stays up
twirling stories
through warm and welcoming nights.

Suspend

2011-06-14T12:32:00.009-05:00

You, Who blows beneath the hummer's wings,
Who suspends him, mouse-soft bodied, eggshell boned, in thin air--
You, Who holds together such distilled vibrations of living,
not letting them scatter into a thousand meaningless glitters
lost across an abandoned world--
my mind knows, but my heart cannot comprehend, why

You let the sparrows fall.

Holding this tiny corpse of air-dust, my palm its bier,
I catch all I can of answer--
a whisper of all You gathered up into Yourself,
impaled on a tree.

Strange (or is it?)
that the answer is always,
always You.

Butterfly Parchments

2011-06-08T23:10:00.003-05:00

Guitar pick wings
on gravel paths
remind of things
that cannot last,
a litany
of all we've lost
twixt Eden's apple
and the cross.

* * *

Confession

2011-06-01T22:28:00.002-05:00

You knew? I asked.
Oh yes. I wondered how long
you would not tell me, and if
you would ever let me say
"I forgive you."

Ethan

2011-06-01T22:15:00.003-05:00

After the warning
and half-glimpsed needle
and broken washers,
I settled across the way
to wait for laundry
and try to write.
It was a relief, I confess,
to glimpse your pleasant face
in that unfamiliar
and vaguely alarming location.
Authors are blessed
to retain imaginary friends
even in adulthood.

City Night

2011-05-30T22:49:00.007-05:00

The stars still burn fire
through rusty velvet skies,
and the wind sighs ahhh . . .
a breath--a great wave
over us, so tiny and beloved.

* * *

On Trying to Gather Up Things Let Go

2011-05-30T09:47:00.007-05:00

Today, I will look for things:
papers pushed between books,
paychecks waiting for the bank,
bills perhaps fallen through cracks
where cheap shelves don't quite meet the frame--
a conglomerate of procrastination.

Maybe also I will find
whatever it is I've lost.
But this, I feel,is unlikely,
unless it is the crumbled remains
of faithfulness.

Forsake Me Not

2011-05-26T14:21:00.005-05:00

God, please don't leave me. Please don't leave me. The familiar thought met me as I pressed my face into the pillow, praying my way into the day. Or maybe I was just seeking to sanctify my procrastination against the demands awaiting me, the stock of everyday tasks and terrors piled in the semi-darkness of predawn.

Some things heartened me in those groggy moments after sleep. I liked wakening to a praise song stuck in my head. Since the day my dad prayed that I would wake up with a song in my heart, those unbidden melodies have seemed like direct and explicit kindness from my heavenly Father. But the words of my waking prayer--and the mode of their coming--bothered me in my saner moments. Did I really think God would abandon me? Did I carry that fear so intently that it verbalized as the first offerings of consciousness?

I suspect, now, that the fear of doing something to ruin relationship with others is my persistent companion. There is, perhaps, nothing quite as awful to me, and the days when I have felt I would eventually, inevitably cause more harm than good have been days threatened by despair. The death of my relationship with God would be the most horrible manifestation of this fear. And yet, especially of late, I feel a stronger confidence in God's ability to take pity on me and lovingly shield me even from my own capacity to self-destruct. Maybe the alternative is just too awful to contemplate. But I think there is more to it than that. John says in his first letter, "And so we know and rely on the love God has for us" (1 John 4:16 NIV). God's love is reliable, and sometimes we are given the grace to sense this is so.

These have been my thoughts concerning the why of my early morning prayer. But regardless of these speculations, I find comfort in finding an expression of my own plea in the Bible--and an answer to it. In Psalm 27, David cries out to God, "Hide not your face from me. Turn not your servant away in anger, O you who have been my help. Cast me not off; forsake me not, O God of my salvation!" And then he answers himself: "For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me in" (v.9-10 ESV). Here the heart cry, the human brokenness, the reassurance, and the welcome.

Keeping On

2011-05-18T11:29:00.005-05:00

I keep coming back to that memory--
the neutral walls, the white desks,
the chairs filled with intermittently buzzing students
just waiting for class to begin,
and then,
you coming, your books slipping,
you muttering something
as you slapped them back on the table
and the covert, nervous, almost pleased thrill
running through the ranks--ohhh.
We watched, but in the span of a breath, it was over.
Class began with a smile and followed
the established rhythms of exploration and hope.
Do the next thing. Do the next thing. Do the next thing.
But I still wonder how you did it.

Isaiah 26:3

2011-05-16T22:05:00.000-05:00

Severances

2011-05-16T21:16:00.004-05:00

If I could turn tears to words,
if I could figure--at least outline--
the shadow of Eden flung over our hearts,
and all the hopeless hopings entertained after her fall,
and all the thousand smaller fallings
in that one long drop . . .
then I could explain how much I long for you,
and how much I don't.

On Giving up the Violin (or maybe, taking it up again)

2011-05-16T09:42:00.003-05:00

Father,
I am growing repulsed by the sound of my own voice.
Teach me how to raise it up to You,
thinking only of the beauty of the One it praises--
or maybe, too, seeing in it a sliver of Your creation,
and so, a thing not to be despised.

Fear Is

2011-05-15T21:03:00.003-05:00

not always the stiff, dry tongue
or the vaguely ill stomach;
not always the singing nerves
or the short breaths
or the sharp, split-second readiness
for whatever must be done.

Sometimes, it is only
the shadow you always
half expect.

Ask the Old Man

2011-05-11T23:13:00.001-05:00

Dear Old Man Weather,

What happened to spring?
You know, that place between the hot and the cold.

Sincerely,
Sarcastic in Chicago

Gentleness

2011-05-09T13:41:00.005-05:00

". . . a bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not quench . . . ." Matthew 12:20

I am a match in the wind,
kept aflame only
by certain, sheltering hands.

* * *

Home Land

2011-05-06T12:04:00.006-05:00

Good Friday

2011-04-22T23:35:00.000-05:00

"It is finished."

Gray Day Prayer

2011-04-20T12:00:00.004-05:00

Definitely overcast today. And cold. I miss home, and I hurt over messed up relationships. You must have, too, four days before Easter. Thanks for coming.

Late Arrival

2011-04-16T09:52:00.003-05:00

It is cold and rainy today, as it was yesterday. Still, irrepressible signs of spring spread themselves through my neighborhood: some mysterious vibrance floods lawns with green, leaflets like gauzy scarves adorn many tree limbs, and the first tulips hale this Dutch community. Spring may be late, but it is relentlessly advancing--and I am later still. I find myself running behind this unfolding riot of life and color, crying, "Wait! Slow down! I'm not ready yet!" It's like tumbling into a holiday with work still on my conscience. The austere spring of two weeks ago perfectly suited my internal landscape--square farm buildings monumented against faded sky,clear miles lined with last year's stubble, everything bleached down to clean bones atop earth enceinte with resurrection.

Remembering

2011-04-14T09:28:00.005-05:00

I give you grace--
that thing we both gasped for
like drowning men who wrench
their necks to break the water line.

It's hard to understand
someone so high up,
a man whose knees hurt
so he couldn't get down
to play on the floor very often.

But you did give me grace.
You must have known that ground
where my soul stared like a frightened rabbit
and fought fantastic shadows.
At least, you walked there with me,
beaming the flashlight again and again and again.

Now, even as I analyze this sad emptiness
over the floor boards, I give something back--
if only to memory's echos:
I give you grace.

If I Could

2011-04-12T09:55:00.003-05:00

I'd find you somewhere--
I'd know you, even if your back was turned,
by the set of your shoulders
and the rhythm of your walk.

How can souls footstep into sky
and leave behind so much half-sprung,
half-buried yet in earth?
We weren't done yet, you know.

To me, hoe in hand in this abandoned garden,
It doesn't seem fair.

Wanted

2011-04-06T13:59:00.008-05:00

Took my life to the
white elephant sale.
Laid it out on the
folding table.
Set it next to an
old red pail
and a sword for
opening mail.

Waited to see what
it might fetch,
slouching, hang dog,
quite the wretch,
a good home--huh,
what a stretch!
Never guessed what
happened next.

He took my life from
the reject pile,
washed away what
made it vile,
spent the blood of
His own exile--
the veiling of His
Daddy's smile.

Warmth and safety,
place and home--
got no reason
now to roam,
but if He called then
I would come
to the center
of the sun.

Goodbye, Good Girl

2011-04-06T12:00:00.004-05:00

She's been trailing off in pieces ever since my preteen self took inner inventory and concluded she was pretty well achieved. Now (I fervently hope) she is going en mass. She looks kind of funny, doesn't she--not quite right, somehow? That's because Good Girl is two dimensional. I designed her as a flat surface to hide behind--an Elsie Dinsmore-esque figure whose gravest sins would cause others to laugh at their mildness. She displayed simplicity and wholesomeness like Luisa May Alcott's Old Fashioned Girl. She followed rules to the letter, she went above and beyond, she was sweet and untroublesome, never had a traffic ticket, said yes--to even the hinted expectations of authority figures. No honest criticism could apply to her, although each instance of it would plunge her into an agony of self-examination (because she was so humble, you understand).

I read somewhere to beware of condemning others in my heart, because the behaviour I roll my eyes and shake my head over may well become my own stumbling block. The advice is worthy of note--I have heard my own condemning voice echo back in my direction. I don't mean that it's wrong to confront sinful behavior, but condemnation is another thing entirely. Condemnation weakens the hope of redemption and change; it paralyzes and consigns the defendant to remain just where she deserves.

Sunday I plan to sit at the back of church instead of the front. I intend to come just as I am. Sunday, I will seek and listen but not perform. My smile, when it comes, will be real. I will begin the terrifying process of not hiding. No--that's not it. My life is hidden, but not behind Good Girl. After all, there is only One Who is truly good. And He invites me to share His yoke, wear His righteousness, and abide in His love. My life is hidden in Christ. Lately, I've felt my life to be a white elephant--but Jesus really does want it. My hope is in Him. He is my life. And I hope that the security of His love for me will help me to risk rejection from others--and even, at times, from myself. After all, I won't have recourse to Good Girl anymore.

Stab at Description

2011-03-29T14:59:00.003-05:00

The fox was like
a feather falling,
quiet, fluid, fast.

The fox was like
A lady's cloak,
elegance not quite past.

The fox was like
a dash of sun
on red desert rocks

The fox was like
a paper slip
in a shadow box.

Riches

2011-03-29T14:44:00.003-05:00

Thanks
for familiar handwriting on happy notes,
for warm food on bright plastic plates,
for kindred company and coffee shops
and Earl Gray tea with lots of cream.
Thanks for poetry--
especially the unexpected volume I bought
for a dollar sixty-nine.

Considering Gustavo C. Garcia

2011-03-22T13:25:00.007-05:00

Stand in the wind. Close your eyes, spread your fingers, and you may feel, flowing between them, the current of old stories and new stories--then and now eddying around you. The stories are something quite beyond you. The most you can do is dip in your finger, and for a moment, sense the current of their passing.

I heard today of a green-eyed lawyer who spoke for his people and won--won--and the liquor washed off by cold water and hot coffee just that most important morning. He was brilliant, I heard, and I do believe he cared: cared that when they said "Mexican-Americans," one justice asked, "What's that?" and another said, "Don't they call them Greasers down there?"

The justice gave him 16 extra minutes in that Supreme Court--to weave his story and tell just who they were. "You are," someone said, "What you have to defend." And they won, his people. But not him. He died on a bench, his liver ruined and his mind. Looking at his picture--his smile, his eyes light and maybe vulnerable (even in black and white)--I feel the tug against my fingers.

He won that most important day. Even after what came first--despite the hints of what came after. I am accustomed to the theory of "work like it depends on you, and pray like it depends on God." But the night before, this man didn't. Was it grace for the many he stood to defend? Was it grace for the grandmas and children who gave their mites for his great cause? Or was it, maybe, grace for him?

As this man's story runs away between my fingers, I find hope that even this bruised reed may be of some profound use.

Jiggery Iddle

2011-03-16T21:57:00.005-05:00

There lived a ladybug named Iddle. Upon this time he lived under a crunchy brown leaf beneath the tallest tree on the High Blue Hill. His first name, for those of you who are nosy, was Jiggery. Iddle was a very serious beetle--seriouser, even, than the great Thertoe himself. And Thertoe was so serious he ran off to the Big City to live deliberately in the highest corner of the tallest skyscraper the giants had managed to invent.

Not so, Iddle. Iddle composed himself under his crunchy leaf to ponder the passing of time by the shifting flecks of light that pierced his frail dwelling. When his friend ant stopped by to visit, Iddle stared him solemnly out of countenance. When grasshopper popped in to fiddle a bit, Iddle danced such an awful, serious jig that grasshopper stumbled away with his head full of spinning second hands. The grasshopper flung himself into the sky to try to recapture his merry way, but he felt so like the coo-coo in its clock that he gave up the effort and sat morosely chewing tobacco until he forgot to remember. Finally the spittle bug skittered across Jiggery Iddle's somber stoop. (If you are wondering why so many folk stopped by such fellow's place, then you need only think of staring contests. Or smiling contests. And how everyone who loses tries to make the others crack up.) Anyhow, the spittle bug blew a great mound of bubbles around his delicate green self and stared at Jiggery through them. "You are all over rainbows," said the spittle bug, in a delicate green voice. "Have the goodness," said Jiggery, "to remove your trite reflections from my flecks of sunlight. I am thinking." The spittle bug, being a sensitive creature, blubbered a bit on his way out.

And so, for a while, Iddle enjoyed the little dimness and little sun flecks under his low, wrinkled ceiling. And then the wind blew. It billowed down from the tree tops and slurped through dusty old roots and tangled brambles. It sucked up Jiggery Iddle and his leaf and flung them upwards--and as the air shivered over his bright shell, Jiggery announced, "This is exactly what I have been expecting all along." Only nobody was around to hear him. The leaf did many amazing gymnastics in the air, which I do not think Jiggery could have entirely expected, and finally ended up, somehow, in the very top of the tree. Jiggery clawed himself out, toe by toe, from his crinkled leaf, and announced again, "Just what I thought." Only it wasn't. It was big and blue and went on and on, up and up--and beneath it was green after green, down to the bare brown earth--and beyond it kept going far, far out, the blue and the green and the invisible wind. And the beetle began to think--slowly, in his little brain beneath his hard shell--that perhaps crunchy leaves and sun specks and even the passing of time were not the most serious things, after all.

If you ask me, I cannot tell you for sure where Iddle is now--perhaps trying to see through the spittle bug's bubbles, or encouraging grasshopper to make a wind song, or cheering on ant in his hurry work. Or maybe (but I hope not)crawling up my wall to find his own corner.

In Glasses, Darkly

2011-03-10T20:28:00.006-06:00

Glasses are like a sheen over the soul,
like looking at everything from behind a window--
like the neonatal observation glass
between the babies in their plastic holders
and the hardier folk pondering from the other side.

Sometimes my glasses get smeared,
and I peer and peer for a clear spot
in a mist-thick world, knowing the blear is only
just in front of my eyes. And always
there's the scratch--the familiar place
I learn not to see.

And then, sometimes, particularly before bed,
I take my glasses off altogether,
and the world becomes suddenly
as broad and soft as an impressionist painting,
but then I can't find the details.

Am I learning to prefer contacts?

Thoughts on Growing Up

2011-03-01T12:19:00.005-06:00

The following are a couple of quotes from Harold Best's letter to young artists (written for inclusion in Michael Card's book Scribbling in the Sand: Christ and Creativity).

"Your authenticity does not depend on proving to people or to God--with pitches, paints, or pen--that you really are quite a piece of work. Rather, I pray that you are discovering that your authenticity lies in who you are constantly becoming in Christ [. . . .] The only reason for doing our very best, despite any cost, is the infinite worth of Jesus, for making art this way is where authenticity lies."

"Be simple and straightforward about your art. Don't mysticize it; don't mysticize your relation to it. Love it, yes, just as God loves a zebra. But don't outstep him by saying that you are your art when he can't say that he is a zebra."

I doubt I can truly call myself an artist (though, honestly, I'd love to). Creativity is, however, woven into the fiber of who I am. I've made the mistake that Best warns against--the mistake of binding my creative endeavors too tightly to my being. In fact, I've bound all my endeavors (especially the ones I fail at or fail to attempt) too closely to my identity.

This past birthday I tipped over the line between twenty and thirty (no, I didn't turn thirty, I'm just closer to it than twenty, now), and I am only just realizing how flawed my thinking about adulthood has been. I thought I was failing at it. I thought I was morally devoid of the "oomph" necessary to achieve a respectable place within this new world. See, in childhood, others are charged with helping you develop into something. When you grow up, the props are removed and you see if the glue has hardened enough for you to be a freestanding structure. I suppose this is exhilarating if you feel like a granite arch or something. It is another matter entirely if you feel like a kindergartner's gooey graham cracker house.

The thing is, though, that we don't make our own place, not really. We may set up an apartment, eventually buy a little residence--but as Christians, there is a part of us that is never really home here. We taste home now and then, like licking off birthday cake beaters, but the real thing is still coming. God, watching me set off on my own, was not standing back with folded arms saying, "She's grown now. Let's see if she sinks or swims." I suspect the change in self-reliance didn't seem momentous at all to Him. The Bible says that He has compassion on us like a dad does because He knows our frailty.

I suspect that growing up is not an abandonment of dependence, but a change from second-degree dependence to first-degree dependence. As little ones, we rely on our parents who rely on God. Growing up, we learn to rely more and more directly on God. Adulthood is a chance to see--not if I am enough--but if God is.

Prayer

2011-02-27T20:05:00.003-06:00

Beloved Lord,

My life is not worth living for me,
but it is worth living for You.

Help, Lord,
for there is no way
I can live Your life in me.

On Closing The Back Door

2011-02-24T21:57:00.004-06:00

Master,
I yield to You
the back door--
again.
I am tired
of the lurking possibility
of escape,
and even more tired
of having to give it up.
I catch the vista,
now and then,
of this room You've given me
versus the nothing
behind the door, but

sometimes . . .

Can't You do something about it?
Brick it up? Mortar it over?
Undo it?
Because I never want
to escape from
You.

Working Girls (February 14th)

2011-02-13T20:06:00.009-06:00

In drab, short dayfalls, we would like to know
that there is more to life than schedules
and checklists noting failure, triumph, growth.
Instead of counting how we keep the rules

(or break, bend, make them), we would like to think
we are more than the sum of what we do.
Our chains are not St. Valentine's--are linked
by neither steel nor love, are more obtuse.

Are we the jailer's daughter, or the man
himself? Unloved and lovely? Unloved,
unlovable? Detained by kinks of mind
and fractured hearts, we guard against rebuff.

Oh, why mistrust the One who gave his life?
We have our valentine. We need our sight.

Chicago Blizzard of 2011

2011-02-02T14:28:00.003-06:00

The following are various impressions of our snowstorm. While it scarcely rivaled the fierce events chronicled by Laura Ingals Wilder, it was still large and wild.

Blizzard

The wind
is an artist
making
or destroying
a thousand
pure white masterpieces
in one long
night.

* * *

A blizzard is
a long white wind,
a snow-serpent's yawn,
an ascetic's passion,
the arctic licking
our tame backyards.

* * *

Snow and wind in city lights
night
turned white

* * *

January 27, 2011 Addendum

2011-01-27T11:43:00.002-06:00

The sky has relented now and is lavishing us with large flakes. They are streak lines when the wind gusts, and meandering spots when the wind slows. Sometimes they seem to linger at the window, as if they wanted to glance in on their way to earth. I have made banana bread.

January 27, 2011

2011-01-27T09:17:00.002-06:00

A vista-less day of blank cloud cover and spits of snow. Yesterday's thaw crackles underfoot. The houses, though dim and boxlike, seem havens from the larger, emptier box of earth in its chill and echoing warehouse. Today is a dormouse day, a time for going down and in, when we find comfort in little, deep things.

Apple Scented Candle

2011-01-26T20:45:00.003-06:00

Apple Scented Candle

Glowing in the twilight
of a half-lit room,
touching pale white
of a spent carnation bloom,
bouncing in a draft
like an overtired tot,
you are
a searing spot, a small fire,
a whiff
of some sure love.

disciple to The Master

2011-01-24T23:19:00.001-06:00

I have followed you, Lord, at a distance--trudging at the straggle ends of the crowd where your words are faint and you seem, somehow, small and flat. Was it to make you manageable? Or was it because, at that distance, you seemed less likely to notice me and shake your head and send me packing back to the foot of the table? I could not see well enough, from there, to note a flicker of disgust in your eye or to run hard against a challenge.

But there is something about you eminently irresistible. And I find myself nudging through a press of doubts, little by little, the churned dust thinning now and then to show your back ever larger and nearer. If I imagine, I can almost feel your words stroking through my heart, the heart you have promised to make tender. Nearer and nearer I come now, until I poke up beside you, sweaty and dust covered, and crane my neck for a glimpse of your face. Funny how faith means, at this moment, believing you will do the opposite of turning me away.

Skirting Sinai

2011-01-24T23:08:00.003-06:00

God, I feel like pressing up against every place You have been--like lying spread-eagled in the middle of miles of empty earth, feeling the echoes of Your act of creation wave through ages to buzz faintly against my ribs. I want to see a flash of your delight in the iridescent fidgeting of little birds, and to trace the ridges of Your fingerprints in the bark of a living tree. I want to follow along behind You, soaking in the particles of wonder that trail in Your wake. I fear coming closer; for even from here, at times I catch a whiff of something burning. I fear the awful boundary line, and the smoke, and the Voice that sets the mountain trembling.

Thinking of a Frost

2011-01-10T21:26:00.002-06:00

I only saw it in the dark. As I clumped down the steps, accompanying our dog on one of her many nightly business trips, I noticed a coating of crystals on the trees and brambles of the yard. Unlike the sharp gleam of ice, this garment of scale-like crystals bristled around branches and winter-dead leaves to create a soft reverse-exposure silhouette--pale (not exactly white, almost tinted with rose or brown) against a black satin sky. I called for my brother to join me, and together we stood beneath a tree and looked up through its transformed branches at stars, sharp and clear in a patch of the wide night. By the time I woke and went outside the next morning, little remained of the last night's masterpiece--only a fancied gleam over the snow, like many flat crystals sifted to earth.

Sometimes I fear the renewed hope which stirred in my heart that New Year's week will prove as ephemeral as the fragile transformation lent to the trees that night. It stands a poor chance if its maintenance is all up to me. But I think it isn't.

Mortal Musing

2011-01-10T12:31:00.003-06:00

It was Wednesday night at the baptist church and the heater was working properly. I sat near the back listening to one of the pastors lead the Bible lesson--a challenging one, for me, about the abundant power God gives His church because His Spirit dwells within us. At one point the pastor described how, no matter what happened to him physically, his soul--the real him--had everything he needed through Christ. The point, though true and praiseworthy, left me uneasy.

You see, I find a poignant comfort in the truth that God takes our human frailties into account--caring for the needs and limitations of our bodies as well as our souls. Psalm 103:13-14 tells us, "As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust" (ESV). I admire the humility of Agur, who asks God to "feed me with the food that is needful for me [. . .] lest I be poor and steal
and profane the name of my God" (Prov. 30:8-9, ESV).

I am a daughter of the oft maligned Puritans (though not a scholar of them), a direct descendant of a man who served under John Winthrop as the first lieutenant governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. My sister and I less than half jokingly attribute our family's introspective tendencies and sometimes hyperactive consciences to this fact. Perhaps unfairly, I wonder if the protestant traditions I am steeped in lean toward a restless striving to transcend our humanity, instead of recognizing the interconnectedness of body and soul, and the weird and wonderful reality that God is here with us, as we are now.

One of my favorite detectives is G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, the dumpy little catholic priest with a delightfully holistic approach toward the crimes and criminals he runs up against. Once, when trying to dissuade a criminal from stealing valuable fish-shaped silverware, Father Brown finds the criminal trying to intimidate him.

"Stand still," warns the criminal, "I don't want to threaten you but--"

"'I do want to threaten you' [says] Father Brown, in a voice like a rolling drum, 'I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched.'"

Describing the encounter later, Father Brown says of the criminal, "I don't know his real name, but I do know something of his fighting weight, and a great deal about his spiritual difficulties. I formed the physical estimate when he was trying to throttle me, and the moral estimate when he repented."

I love the way the physical and the spiritual run together in these stories. For we are both; we are meant to be both.

As Christians, our minds, our hearts, and our treasures ought to be firmly placed in the kingdom of heaven. Faith, "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," is a most precious gift. Yet, God has given us more than ethereal knowledge and assurances. After all, "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." People experienced Christ with their physical senses. And now, in a different kind of way, people can do the same. Aren't we who believe in Him the body of Christ? Gerard Manley Hopkins expresses this idea: "For Christ plays in ten thousand places / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / to the Father through the features of men's faces." Our bodies and spirits acting together to offer physical acts of service in Christ name--the cup of cold water, the prison visit, the handmade garment--bless Christ personally and demonstrate a bit of His character to a world that needs to know that He is here.

Troubled by my own frailty, I am encouraged that Jesus taught us a prayer that touches on the need of dust and spirit: to be fed and forgiven and not led into temptation.

An Additional Blog

2011-01-09T19:48:00.002-06:00

My friends, I have embarked on the adventure of an additional blog. What business have I beginning another when my postings here tend to be few and far between? Very little. But I am anyway. Lately, I have found myself fascinated by the heritage passed down to me by the family God has placed me in. I'd like to explore this subject more through photos, scraps of memories, and old writings and records. If you enjoy old reminisces, or if you belong to my family and want to remember with me and add your own memories, please drop by and visit!

http://snapshotsandvistas.blogspot.com/2011/01/blog-post.html

Bloggers

2011-01-05T12:48:00.003-06:00

Why do we do this?
Is it for truths posted, like Luther's,
in a public (though little read) space?
Is it the chronicling of one's voyage,
maybe an indulgence of introspection?
Or is it a blind reach for hands we cannot see,
the sticking of an arm through a hole in the wall
to wave dumbly until someone catches on?

Do beings brush against each other in cyberspace
just as they do on solid earth?
You notice it most on country roads, at night--
the single pair of lights gliding toward you,
dipping, resurrecting,
nearer, nearer, until
you squint through headlamp sword thrusts
and then, something sweeps past with a spit of gravel,
and you are sequestered again in the quiet dark.

Perhaps this world of invisible connections
may serve, at least, as a statement of faith
that souls exists.

Dear friends, questions like these have been chafing at me. I'd love your input. Why do you blog? And why do you read other people's blogs?

Fragment

2010-12-27T15:10:00.003-06:00

Standing on the sidewalk by the house, it is quiet. Each sound becomes significant--
the drip, slow and singular, of ice melting from the eaves, and the rumble of my brother's conversation seeping through the droughty kitchen window frames. Miles all around fade into a snowy white mist. I cannot make out the field's end. Near at hand, the yellow rose brier is encased in a fragile silver spell which I hardly see, watching, instead, the large black dog as he roots something nasty from the snow and crunches it.

City Snow

2010-12-21T13:30:00.003-06:00

When we lived in town, my mother didn't care much for snow. I remember driving past embankments grass covered in summer but besmirched in winter with tire-flung slush. The traffic churned white powder into deep gray gunk, and the atmosphere assumed the unhealthy dankness of a cold in the head. When I turned thirteen, we moved to a village of 300 tucked in amongst miles of fields and timber. Suddenly, winter became a thing of peculiar glory--treacherous at times, and sharply beautiful. The sun flamed colored glitterings from individual crystals under the maple in front of our house, and the road beyond it retained a postcard purity even into the afternoon. Fields behind the house offered their own arctic wasteland, a chance for first footsteps onto the moon,an opportunity to tread where no one else had ever pressed his foot. Blue shadows rested beside drifts along the fence line, and the ditches sported wind sculptures like cake frosting or snow white peaks of meringue. On especially cold days, wraith veils of snow snaked across the road like the angel of death in the old Ten Commandments movie. An austere joy thrived in the miles and miles of relentless white.

I live in the city again. This morning, trudging to the post office through uncleared sidewalks next to four lanes of traffic, I noted gray spatters flung far across last night's snow and grimaced as droplets misted my face. My perennial struggle here is identifying myself with my brothers who live packed among human-induced problems in this over crowded part of earth. Never mind my own sins and struggles--I'd rather consider their problems as something alien imposed upon my quiet little country self. But if ankle-deep, sludgy snow is not my native turf, and if this is Christmas time, isn't this sort of walking a kind of privilege? Just think, our God chose to identify himself so completely with us that He became one of us, walking our roads as if they were natural for Him! A reminder of God's chosen closeness to us is worth dirty snow in my shoes.

"Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness" (Philippians 2:5-7, NIV).

Ode to an Old Car

2010-12-19T16:18:00.003-06:00

How do I write a tribute to a car without being sappy?
Probably, I can't. But you were, after all, my first, and that must count for something. Also, the way you carried my soul around--that counts for something too: the hours and hours several times a semester gliding from Tennessee to Illinois and back again, and those last bittersweet voyages to Arkansas to say goodbye to a woman with a thousand wrinkle lines and the man who loved her, and the sweetly strange moment on the way back when it seemed God showed me what to do with all the love I had just seen. I glimpsed pink sunrises and red sunsets and mile after mile clocked while the heart recalibrated from one scene to another. I talked to God and I thought while your great metal capsule shuttled me through landscapes beyond the merely physical.

I brushed the caked snow off your rear windshield when I said goodbye, so that I could rub the raised outline of the duck head sticker pasted there by an elderly man I respected and loved--your first owner, the man who agreed with his family to give you to mine. I liked that sticker--liked the fact that my car didn't scream "vulnerable single woman" in this city world. I liked the way a Buick '92 was actually cool here. The tow guy was disappointed when he saw you. There wasn't much to salvage, so we renegotiated your price. But that's all right. You were worth a lot--just not that kind of currency.

Thanks.

2010-12-14T11:08:00.006-06:00

I am haunted by the ice-edge of idyllic winter, the slip and shine of it, the beauty that can't be kept, the brilliance that is itself a splintering of light. What thin membranes hold life as we know it in place! How elusive the boundaries between the mundane and the profound--the Infant and stable and sword inextricably linked. There is much we cannot hold, and much--thank God!--we cannot hinder.

Thanksgiving Scene

2010-11-23T11:36:00.003-06:00

In the absence of well-developed visual art skills, I am reduced to words:

Light from the double windows of an old house captures our vision. We see in the glow behind the glass a happy chaos of warm colors: sweaters,faces flushed with laughter and bustle,a half-devoured feast lingering on the bright cloth. Close against the window, two children press noses and palms to the glass, peering out into the night. Their breathing makes cloudy rings around the spot where their mouths should be. Perhaps they are watching two figures walk along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street--a man and a woman, their arms linked. Their backs are to us, but the woman's head is turned toward the man and we see her face, a pale oval above her black winter coat. She is smiling. By the light of a street lamp at the end of the block, we see a man mid-stride across the intersection--a distant, solitary figure in perfect silhouette.

Divine Simplicity

2010-11-09T21:16:00.004-06:00

I'm not sure what divine simplicity is--I'm like a pedestrian shuffling along the sidewalk who suddenly catches an intriguing whiff of something. Will I search it out? Will I shrug and go on? Will I hesitate until I get used to the new scent and can no longer detect it or follow it to its source?

This past weekend, my sister and I watched Karate Kid. One scene stands out in my mind. The protagonist, Dre, seeks out his kung fu teacher after a difficult afternoon and finds the typically calm, trustworthy Mr. Han smashing a car with a sledge hammer. When the teacher shares his story, Drew learns that this evening marks the anniversary of the car accident which claimed the lives of the Mr. Han's wife and son. As the teacher weeps behind the steering wheel, Dre draws him outside. In the peaceful courtyard, accompanied by cricket song, the two begin training again. The camera captures the silhouettes of the small African-American boy and the Chinese repairman moving in perfect balance--clean, living lines in the blue radiance of the smashed car's single headlight. Later, as the film nears its climax, Drew suffers an injury during the semifinals of a kung fu tournament. Mr. Han is reluctant to let him continue, but Drew protests against the idea of giving up. "That's not balance," he says indignantly. "That's not real kung fu."

While I reject the religious elements of kung fu present in the movie, the distilled focus, the discipline, the lines--razor sharp and gracious--intrigue me. They relate to a thing I usually feel missing in my life. Of many habits I could cry, "That's not balance. That's not real--" Real what? Kingdom living, I think. See, God does outline a simplicity, a razor focus, for his people. Life can seem snarled and hopelessly involved. That odd thing, balance, is terribly hard to delineate, let alone achieve. But Jesus tells a frustrated Martha, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her" (Luke 10:41-42 ESV).

One thing. One thing is necessary.

Harvest Time

2010-11-04T21:48:00.008-05:00

Come, ye thankful people come;
Raise the song of harvest home;
All is safely gathered in;
Ere the winter storms begin.
God, our Maker doth provide
For our wants to be supplied.
Come to God's own temple, come;
Raise the song of harvest home.

"Come, Ye Thankful People, Come" by Henry Alford

An Interesting Exercise

2010-10-29T22:02:00.004-05:00

For the following exercise, I asked my sister to give me a few words, a rhythm, and a rhyme scheme to play around with--not wanting to exert myself and generate my own material. The verses below are the product of these, not of some profound rumination on the nature of the soul.

* * *

What is the substance of a soul unsheathed?
Fuzzed dandelions spread like sun-spots on
the grass? Or Grand Canyon bombasts of dumb
high depths? Or sycophant bad-breath all wreathed
in sweets? Or helium inspired chiffon?
or just a stem of red geranium?

* * *

2010-10-26T11:03:00.004-05:00

In the middle of a busy life, at times the wind dies down. You look at the blue gray clouds at the world's rim, and you hear, in the sudden lull, a faint rending sound, like when you strain a too old, too tight shirt. It is the sound of the universe ripping.

The ripping happens all the time. The cemeteries are full of its testimonials. The hospitals brim and tip with it. It hangs, listless, on all the missing faces tacked up in Walmart. It trickles, stinging, through all our everyday abrasions, and echoes down the phone line in a strained voice, desperately matter-of-fact.

And we chant stories to sooth ourselves in this alarm; we rattle about, making noise and forgetting. We say at least we have memories, at least we still have someone, at least lives leave legacies, at least there remains honor and bravery, at least, at least . . . .

But it doesn't matter--none of it matters. Unless, unless, God is.

God is. God is.

See us here, God? Our cracked hearts, our crumbling heavens? Wake us to the reverberations of that other rending: the holiest place brought near through a broken cloth, a broken body. Remind us about birth pangs.

Faith, Timeless and Contemporary

2010-10-15T13:04:00.004-05:00

The Roman official had
astonishing faith,
common sense, really.
He believed You were Yourself.
Really believed,
believed enough
to be reasonable.
If you told his servant to be healed,
he would be.
Duh.

Your kingdom, Lord,
abounds with common sense,
horribly counter-intuitive
to those of us used
to making do
in the U.S.
We are
a bit confused,
having devised you a flag,
which belongs,
apparently,
right below our stars and stripes.

We inject
Your promises
into our own pursuits
so they will succeed—
and when they don’t
we are disappointed
and leery
of believing.
Next time,
we’ll know worse,
not realizing,
that sometimes,
Your kindest gift
is to let our servants
stay sick.

* * *

Unmerited Favor

2010-09-17T13:51:00.005-05:00

When you are dying
people hope you will be profound.
“What would you do differently?” they ask.
and you, no longer able to swallow solid food, say,
“Eat more steak.”

Of course, that's not all—
but you don’t just go around saying it.

You’ve still got happenings and annoyances—
gigantified, perhaps.
Stuff still hurts—just extra,
and you’ve got an awful lot on your mind,
and it’s one long goodbye,
(when even short ones are wearing), so
you don’t feel like being profound.
Besides, you wouldn’t have died of a heart attack, after all,
If you’d eaten more steak.

Really, what do you have,
What do any of us have,
in the end,except
gigantic grace?
The same grace that helps us
to say “I love you,”
and to surmount another lay-off,
And to pray against nightmares,
And sometimes,
To eat steak.

***

Salt Spots

2010-08-31T10:21:00.001-05:00

Salt Spots

It’s not funny that people wipe their glasses,
like their eyes, when they cry.
Flickings from triangled lashes dry,
otherwise, like shrunk away seas
or doggy boogers above window sills
or salt slush when the wiper fluid’s out.
Personally, I anticipate glorious results
when God polishes my soul.

* * *

Cliff Jumping

2010-08-20T15:55:00.004-05:00

I have had a picture in mind these past weeks--a picture of a young woman in mid-fling from the top of a cliff. Her arms and fingers are outspread, her legs still bent behind her from the hammering steps of her spring into open space. I'm not sure about her eyes--are their lids flung wide open, the air rushing past as she stares for what is coming? Or are they screwed nearly shut against the fears she has chosen to disregard? But her face, I know, is creased with the vibrations of mingled terror and sharp joy. She will never make it across the chasm. That is not her job.

I love pictures and picture making. In some of my earliest memories, I entered my own place through creativity--a state of immense satisfaction where I moved freely about crafting wonderful things--first swirled crayon bird nests of color, later a paper tree with a hole in the trunk. I fashioned a squirrel on a tab which could be slipped behind this hole so the squirrel could peek outside. Literary endeavors began around this time, as well. My keepsake box at home houses the dictated construction paper manuscript of an odd story about rabbits and foxes, funny in retrospect, but quite serious at the time.

As my creative efforts grew with me, I became increasingly aware of the gaps entangled with this delightful activity: the gap between what I saw on the paper and what others saw, the gap between my efforts and the achievements of real artists and writers, and the dispiriting gap between the story or picture in my head and story or picture on the paper in front of me. How was it that things so alive and meaningful in concept could fall so flat in the physical world?

The last two gaps have bothered me most in my recent life "on my own." Cut free from the nurturing connections of childhood, I find myself weighted down by a need to justify my own existence. I think if only I get a book published, if only my writing begins to touch others' lives, if only I leave an indelible mark for good on the world, then I would have been worthwhile. Funny thing is, though, when justification for existence depends on accomplishing something, that particular thing becomes too terrifying to attempt! Better to be forever getting around to it, than to be confronted, finally, with sharp rocks at the bottom of a long drop.

I've been painting a bit, again. Not the tiny, light, careful details of my earlier attempts--but quicker, freer renderings in water color. The activity now, I hope, is closer to an act of faith than to an act of achievement. I begin to suspect that life is not so much a toiling up one great mountain, as a hiking over a chasm-pocked land. We are confronted, over and over, with gaps and spaces hopelessly beyond our negotiation. But Someone calls us, and we fling out, the wind tearing at our ears, our brain and stomach rebelling at the senseless drop below. We fling out, trusting the One who has made His business bridging the impossible distance.

On Stars and People

2010-07-19T13:21:00.006-05:00

Crouching between twin soybean rows, I glanced behind me at the many parallel lines pointing to a hedgerow and expanse of farm land beyond. In front of me, the stripes filled the field’s acres, ending at last behind the home place’s backyard. I relished being so alone in all that space of low green plants, feeling that peculiar joy of solitude which exists, I think, in not really being alone at all. I imagined God surrounding me like the infant soybeans in their orderly ranks. "You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it."*

I lay back and looked up into the wide twilit sky, squirming for a comfortable position against hunks of last year’s stubble which dug into me like lumps in a mattress. Two stars (or more likely planets) glowed in hazy blue-gray heights. As I watched, two more seemed to appear, fuzzy and very small. By craning my head back, I could see another patch of sky and find more stars to add to my flock’s number—now five, now eight, at last eleven. I felt rather fond and proprietorial toward the little things.

My idyllic vigil terminated when a mosquito pestered my right ear, driving me to sit up and view the dusky expanse which divided me from the yellow glow of home. I hurried back, spurred by alarming recollections of coyote choruses in the blackness behind the house.

The stars weren’t the only ones I took on. At times during my visit to the home-place, I harbored a low-grade anxiety about my loved-ones there. I tromped about, trying to manage our relationship, trying to give this one what I thought was needed and that one what seemed best, and finding with alarm that once in a while needs seemed to contradict each other!

It turns out that I am not all that. And it seems rather funny that I thought I could be responsible for so much--could claim wild, appalling, fiery heavenly bodies, numbering them and patronizing them because they seemed small and dim through the indistinction surrounding me.

Only One can lead forth the stars. Only One knows the name of each. And only One knows my loved ones thoroughly, from the number of hairs on their head to the number of days in their lives. It is He who made my life distinct from the inert earth beneath my feet in the field that night. And He is the one who has laid His hand upon me, and upon those I love.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.

*Psalm 139:5-6 ESV

Failure of spontaneity after a long day

2010-07-07T21:08:00.005-05:00

Hi, to any who may chance on this post! I feel like writing, but I'm not sure what to say. Or how to say it. And I want to post something new, so please forgive the slack craftsmanship. Sometimes a girl is just not quite sure what all is rattling around inside herself. At that point, she may decide to do some random mental shaking--like trying to dislodge coins from a piggy bank--and see what she ends up with . . .

. . . guilt--for taking up non-private space with undisciplined words. Oh, maybe I'll post again later :p Horrors! I'm resorting to emoticons! Okay, so, how 'bout I keep my prewriting to myself next time?

Someone's Story

2010-07-01T22:27:00.011-05:00

"Do I know you?" he asked.

I had hoped to virtually ignore the lawn mower's intrusion of my private photo shoot in the cemetery, but the driver had other ideas. There may not be many people in these parts, but they sure can be nosy, I thought. I turned and squinted through the dusk at a face rendered Mowgli-like by long brown hair. To my surprise, I did know him--barely. He was taller and thinner. And his eyes were sad, blatantly sad. Down at the bottom all the way to the top sad.

"I've picked up more bad habits," he informed me. And proved it before our chat ended by smoking a cigarette.

We listened to songs on his phone; they seemed a litany of sad, lovely melodies and rejection-laced lyrics. And he told me bits of this and that. He'd been out fishing. I could see the mud splashed on his jeans and skin, a bit of it caught in his long bangs. He told me smoking helped him with his life's pain and stress.

The pain and problems partially told were too much for my twenty-five years, let alone his eleven or so. Absence, poor choices, and death had trickled down from a few older people and eroded his life for far too long. It seemed to me that he was almost determined to allow their poison to shape his life.

We took a pictures of tomb stones and grass and sky, I with my camera, he with his phone. He finished his cigarette. Then we parted ways. It was nearly dark. A sense of hopelessness gripped me on behalf of my young friend. Where are you, God? I thought, as the boy's vehicle rumbled away. And then, Where are we, your people? Where are You in us?

My thoughts turned toward what I had thought was a calling for my life: Here am I writing pretty stories while little boys plunge toward hell. Next to the ugliness I had glimpsed, I wondered if my stories of something better had any real value. I looked toward the horizon. The first star shone bright above the last flames of sunset, evoking the hobbit Sam's words as he traveled in a dark and evil land: "Look, Mr. Frodo, there's light and beauty up there."

After the boy rumbled out of the cemetery and onto the road, I heard the mower's blades kick into motion. I walked in the freshly cut swatch at the edge of the unmown ditch, a lone strip of order cut by a small figure on his way home.

"His eyes were so sad," I told Mom when I got back to the warm glow of our kitchen.

"I've noticed it too," she replied. "He went for a walk and talked with me last week. A man from church said he's willing to meet with him."

Dad's songs

2010-06-21T12:35:00.004-05:00

On this Father’s Day, I find myself longing to honor my dad, to find fitting words with which to remember and cherish the gift of his presence in my life for nineteen years. A person is more than another’s memory, and I have always chafed at the platitude that loved ones somehow live on in the hearts or through the words of those who remain on earth. Dad exists without my help today. Just as if he were in Europe or China or anywhere else beyond my reach, his personhood is real and independent of my thoughts or feelings on the subject. And yet, words of remembrance do have value. Like the child’s scribbled page taped to the fridge, they catch an impression of the reality; like a shadow in the grass, they capture a shape of something more substantial.

The melody of Dad’s life wove through my childhood, and its resonances vibrate inside me even now. Dad wielded song as a way to store truth within the heart, as a part of the Good Fight, and as an opportunity to worship. The simple melodies and profound words he sang still point me to bedrock, especially when life seems complicated . . . “1,2,3, Jesus loves me / 4 and 5, he’s alive.” One song he taught me covers the saga of Creation, Fall, and Redemption:

In the beginning the Word of God came,
Creating everything by calling its name:
“Let there be light, and call it the day.
Let there be night. Oh hear and obey!”

Then the Lord, He made man as the crown of creation
But man, he fell into sin’s condemnation.
Then the Lord became man, in space and time,
Bringing salvation, to all mankind!*

This broad-shouldered working man wasn’t ashamed to hum “Jesus Loves Me” on a public bus to counteract another passenger’s open practice of Eastern Meditation. He graced a hospital elevator with the melody one day when he found himself sharing the space with a morgue-bound corpse. Because hearing was one of the last senses left to the dying, he hummed the song that almost everybody knew--just in case the soul hadn’t quite left for its eternal destination. I like knowing that the comfort of “Jesus Loves Me” doesn’t just apply to sweet children kneeling by downy bedsides. It belongs just as much to grownups standing next to death.

* Christmas, Charles. “King of Kings.” Songs of Praise. Vol. 1. Ann Arbor: Word of God, 1978.

2010-06-01T12:59:00.004-05:00

There is more to life than we can possibly understand, take in, or even be aware of. There is too much of horror or glorious goodness in it--the lightest brush overwhelms us, setting our small and watery selves all aquiver or making us blank and blase.

Life is big beyond our understanding. And that is all right. For we know enough of the One who knows all to leave mysteries at rest in His hands.

“The secret things belong to the Lord our God [. . . .]" (Deuteronomy 29:29 ESV).

In the library

2010-05-28T12:47:00.005-05:00

Sometimes a children's section can make you cry . . .
all the great, huge ideas in little words,
all the things said--or not said,
the kinds of questions answered--or not answered at all,
or not even asked, though a voice inside says,

"why?"

Its funny how gentle, little words win a grown-up heart,
or make it hurt because of all the things
so hard to say to a child.

Thoughts after a rain

2010-05-21T18:57:00.007-05:00

This evening I walked home from work in air warm and moist from a thunder shower. Lilacs lavished fragrance on the neighborhood and foggy gray clouds edged a clean blue sky. After the rain, the world felt like dawn or like being forgiven.

Whether I realize it or not, I live a life awash in mercy. Before work today, I tied my head in a purple kerchief and traipsed to the grocery store, patting myself on the back for treading so nonchalantly beside four busy lanes of traffic.On my way back, I took the steep, elbow-like stairs which lead pedestrians up an embankment. At the top, I met a surprisingly open vista. Railroad tracks cleared the landscape and led into a tree lined distance. A dirty patch of ground clumped by uncut grasses broadened the open space on my side of the tracks. The widened vision touched my soul. And coming toward me, clipping over the dirty path, came a little old lady with her hair protected by the clear plastic hood common to grandmas on rainy or windy days. A little band-aide covered a bit of her cheek and her eyes shone as she exclaimed to me, "You use this way, too!"

We congratulated each other for a moment on the fittingness of this route to the grocery store and parted cheerily.

Where I Come From

2010-05-16T22:09:00.003-05:00

From "Be Still My Soul"

2010-05-08T23:40:00.003-05:00

"Be still, my soul: thy Jesus can repay
From His own fullness all He takes away.
. . . .
Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past
All safe and blessed we shall meet at last."