Revisiting the Impassioned Path

Of course, we never left it. But let’s return our focus to that way we walk. Not our passionate path but our impassioned one. That one laid by a divine hand for our feet alone... and, sometimes, blessedly, for our feet together with another’s. Walk with me a ways?

Years ago I did a blind audition for an internship up in Washington State with a small independent publishing house run by a woman just a few years older than me. I’d known her as an author before – a nationally bestselling one – but I had come to know her, through rumors and reviews, as a fearless, no-holds-barred business woman. I wanted to get with that. I wanted to explore that kind of guerilla publishing in the book and gaming world. I won the internship. That summer changed my life.

I was raised a New Testament Christian. As I’ve written before, that means something to some people and other things I others. It does *not* mean that I am a close-minded, bigoted, anti-gay, Republican who owns a gun, a big dog and a strange map of all the Planned Parenthood clinics (actually... I am *one* of these things... but I’ve also been called a “swing voter,” so go figure). I believe that going to church makes you a Christian just as much as standing in a garage makes you a car. I don’t believe in denominations (man’s law) and I do believe that what exists in nature is meant to be mirrored by man. All of this is set up for:

I’ve known what to look for my entire life. Before I was old enough to fully comprehend what “impassioned path” meant, I knew I had to find mine. I was never drifting or lost. But I never worked so hard – at such a thankless... and such a clearly *important* task – as that summer at that independent publishing house.

My goal in high school in Boston was to prove that wearing a leather jacket didn’t preclude getting straight A’s in AP math and science. I graduated a year early and auditioned (life is full of them, isn’t it?) at a performing arts school in New York City. Once on the inside I realized that I might very well be able to make a career out of that crazy acting thing but I was drawn to the “throw away” extracurricular course in acrylics. By the end of my time in the Big Apple, I had fallen in love with the 5’ x 5’ canvas and was painting, on average, six commissions a year.

I fell into painting. I fell into it so completely that my models were known to fall asleep and I wouldn’t notice. I fell into painting like a swimmer or a runner. I dropped pounds when I painted. I dropped time. I dropped my sense of self and place and mortality.

But painting wasn’t my impassioned path. And I knew it. I kept searching.

I thought sometimes about an older grrl I’d met when I was a preteen. She was an author on tour. I begged my mom to take me to see her. We waited in the long line. She signed my book. Her blue eyes were wise and sad and all those things that they talk about in high literature but that you never believe you’ll see in real life. I remember saying to my mother on the way home, “That’s not her path, is it, Mom?” She didn’t answer. Maybe she thought I was being melodramatic.

Turns out, years later, sometime before that grrl had designed a mathematically gorgeous trading card game operating system for my faith-and-science open world “Mardi Gras 3000,” she discovered that her path was being a mother to two brilliant, but special needs children, and being the most honest, demanding and innovative publisher that the independent world has ever seen.

That is her impassioned path. I like to think that it parallels mine. That sometimes, just sometimes, our paths even cross and we stand for a moment and wonder at it all.

I don’t find my path easy. But I have stayed up all night wondering if anyone ever finds their path easy. If any impassioned path *can* be easy. But, as I was raised, I look at the world around me and count my blessings.

“I want to create a place where authors won’t be treated as I was. Where authors have a voice,” Grrl told me. I knew, by then, the hell she had walked through on her national book tours with huge presses. Edits that changed the race of the characters. Covers that made no sense. Marketing that positioned her as meat, as a sex object, as a minor in big grrl clothes. Her path seemed so right...

...so why is her house teetering toward foreclosure? Why does she struggle to raise her family? Is she *too* generous to the authors? Is she too nice, the way she lets bookstores develop payment plans when they can’t pay? The way she let’s authors blame her when chains won’t pay on time? Why does a *good person* struggle?

Dear God, is it truly because the impassioned path is never easy?

My quickening to life arrived when I found my path. When I realized how much it terrified me. How much outside my “comfort zone” it was. How much I’d be required to give and let go of. How much time, money, effort, sacrifice... I knew it was impassioned because it would minister to the heart. I knew (oh, forgive me, friend!) that it was impassioned because it was going to be *hard.*

A different friend (though, God help her, one in this same circle) wrote to me recently:

“I feel like I really am waking up right now. Finding who I really am. I’ve been praying to find out who I'm supposed to be. I feel everyone is here for a reason. Everyone has a mission. Many people don't search hard enough for their mission and they miss it. My whole life I've been adamant that I won't miss that path, and my prayer for years has been that God would reveal to me what I have to do to find and follow that path. Right now, that is a lot of the revelation I've been receiving. How to become the person I need to be, to be an effective servant for Him in the mission He has placed me on.”

Another friend is riding in the car with his mother when she breaks down, she says, “I just don’t want you to take the hardest path. I want life to be easy for you. Not full of persecution and bigotry and hatred. I want you to be happy.”

And he looks at her. His silence acknowledges that life will be hard ahead of him. And he answers carefully, “What makes you think I’m not happy?”

I can be happy... even when life is a trial in darkness.

I can be happy... even when I don’t see the point in the pain.

I can be happy, not because I am a simple-minded, flowers-and-bird-song, cliché-brained idiot, but because I know inside me, at my core, that I am where I am meant to be.

Those of us who choose to live by what man cannot take away, we spend our early lives searching, actively questing for our path. We are not driven by money or even comfort. We believe that not finding that impassioned path... or worse, finding it and choosing, knowingly, not to walk it... is the only unforgivable sin.

We know that one gift that will be given to us when we walk with Him, is that we will come to see ourselves through the eyes of God -- perfect as we are even with our imperfections. Not to be judged my man or even our own insincerities. We are perfect to be where we are. Doing our work which is His work which is hard.

“Do you fear this time?” I asked Grrl (perhaps she is that mythological “One Grrl in Every Generation”).

Her voice held that smile of hers that I miss so badly since I’ve moved away. “As long as I am doing everything I can, to the best of my ability, in every moment of every day, than I am doing everything He asks of me. And no, I am not afraid.”

And what He asks is never easy but it is always impassioned.

E.J.

And Then, Came the Dawn

It only happens when everything is striped away. It only occurs when I am desolate, abandoned to my exile, standing past the event horizon of my existential void. It comes to pass that the stone is rolled away.

The night slips from the sky, fading, but I imagine it sliding down the arc of your Earth, easing around the curve of your heavens to find another home. Dawn arrives pale and new, and the rain is falling, always falling it seems when I need it most, when your renewal, your baptism is the only solace that will satisfy me. When this young Atlas cannot convince herself to shrug, then it is only your tears that rescue me, that flood my world, allow me to sink joyously, to watch my burdens bob away on the currents of your eternity.

It is always darkest before the dawn.

“Why are you hiding?”

I am crying in your arms. I am sobbing, that kind of sorrow that wracks the body and numbs the mind. That kind of pounding, screaming anger that is only expressed in a woman’s tears or a warrior’s cry. I want to take hold of the darkness like a cloak and rip it away from you. I want you and your family to be bathed in the light. I want nothing but love to surround you. But the stone stays there. The stone stays. I want to make it all better. But I can’t. And it gets worse. And the stone stays.

That which killed Him only made us stronger.

“I want to believe, Lord.”

I think of how many times
I have fallen
through the heavens
Lord, to your embrace.
I think I know
only your love.
I think I know only
your love endures.
I think I know
you.

Standing in the rain in Mazatlan on Easter morning, I close my eyes and it is hard for me to imagine what it must have been like for that cluster of apostles, hiding and afraid, having watched the body of Christ perish on the cross. Knowing the stone that was rolled into place, sealing Him away from them. It is hard for me to understand them. Hard to imagine not rising up, fighting back, shouting out...

When I see the Southern Cross
for the first time, for this time
I understand why I came this way.
And the truth I'm running from
is so small. And your promise is
as big as the coming day.

Sweet Lord, my Christ, harbor, companion, confidant, and co-conspirator. My friend. You are everywhere. You are with me and everyone I love. You fill a space made just for you inside my heart and silence my tongue with a smile when stupidity surrounds me. My judge. My God. My first dawn light.

I can imagine you, so easily, too easily, as that man, that man of flesh and blood, and barely past thirty years... that human being cast into bone and muscle and knowing your path even as it unfolds before you.

“Lift this from me, if you can.”

I am crying against your shoulder. Strong as my father’s was, though your hair is shorter, your voice deeper. Not strong enough to carry the burdens despite what you whisper to me. You are so brave. And then you stop. You push me away two inches, you look in my eyes. You touch your chest. “I don’t need the light upon me, E.J., I have the light inside me.” And in that blackness before your dawn... your dawn that seems years away... you are rising up, fighting back, shouting out....

I'm walking toward tomorrow
with my feet firmly in today.
And your love is my anchor
tied with a silver chain.
I have this temple
with stained glass windows shining.
This body is all I can offer
but she finds music in your name.

Our Atlas and savior. The roaring lamb and final sacrifice. The light you cast by walking your path still shines within us. We struggle through the darkness toward that unknown dawn but with you within us we find your bravery -- warrior and wiseman – and today we celebrate your life, everlasting, which allows us to live.

E.J.

Travel Blanket

So much can change in a week. So much can change in 42 hours. So much stays exactly the same. One moment I’m writing a PM on my fire escape, the light of dawn pale and clean with promise. The next, it seems, I’m half a world away, having touched down in five different time zones, gained a day and traded twelve thousand dollars to say, “Happy birthday.”

I’ve spent the last week seventy years back in time and forty years in the future, every time I turned around, or west, or blinked my eyes, it changed. This wasn’t culture shock. It was generational flux. I’ve heard stories both fact and fiction and both were stranger and more compelling than my “real life” of beta testing, scripts, pilots and ratios. For one week I was embraced and shattered, cocooned in living myth and exposed by it. I played the role of angel, rebel, mother, sister, daughter, lover, friend. I drew water from a well and used a GPS. I prayed holding hands and I saw my mother blush for the first time. I beat my chest with indignation to prove my heart was beating.

I remembered what it was like to be among people like me. The undeniable truth that a racially diverse but religiously homonogized community can provide. Never complain, never explain. The knowing is there in every gaze. There is no argument. There is no unspoken heart. The knowledge that I am understood, not tolerated; loved, not accepted despite; respected without conditions and modifiers. I remembered the solace and strength that “congregation” provides... and why so many of my brothers and sisters in faith are so strong and steely. Because we *don’t* prescribe to this path and, by golly, life is a lot harder without a mob of one’s own.

Take your council not from man but from God. Walk with Christ.

This week, I’ve traveled more than ten thousand miles, Erik. And in all that travelling I came to many conclusions about man and God and the nature of tattoos. I’m falling asleep as I type these words, stretched belly down on my bed, literally waking up when my forehead hits the space bar. I *want* to do a million things – eat apples, drink coffee, talk to a lady friend, call another, even paint or draw – but as I know I’ll sleep most of Sunday away, there is only one thing I *must* do. I must write to you.

The quiltwork of our lives is a mystery to everyone but ourselves. If a friend says he knows you, he really is saying only that he recognizes some of the panels in that quilt. Some of the textures and images and bit of cloth are shared in his own life’s patchwork and so he understands.

Our parents are the same way. They wrap us in soft colors and carry us – much longer than any of us like to admit – into the world until our quilt is warm enough, complex enough, big enough to keep us well. They know some of the patches, they helped stitch them there, but others are alien to them, unknown and secretive. Those parts of us that are understood by only two – us and God.

A man at a pulpit (or a woman or a chorus) says to you, Erik, that “We all are together and feel the same.” This is comfort food like saying, “Thor is angry... look at that lightning!” This is words to name the unknowable. You wrote me while I was away and said, “I feel angry at him. He doesn’t know me. He stands and includes me but I am not included.”

Because why? Because he doesn’t understand your parents? (No, not mine either, most likely, my friend.) Because he doesn’t understand the fury in your heart? (I don’t understand it either, Erik, but I love you for it and I would carry it too.) Because you are not easily pigeon-holed. You are the intelligent, gentle, spiritual man that European countries seem to produce in joyous poetics but that America like to label as deviant. You are looking for a faith that may only be found in your own heart, in the eyes of your mother when you look at her, in the good morning call of your little herd that have come to rely on you and find comfort in your presence.

One of the first things I learned, and that came to me again and again this week, is that my feelings – about anything – belong to me. They are valid and part of me because they are my own. I claim how I feel about everything – the life examined can also be lived. I can deconstruct, remodel and rebuild how I feel about politics, art, or love. My feelings do not depend upon someone or something else. My heart is not dictated by the pulpit, the White House, or my time zone.

Christ passes His hand over the quiltwork of my life. He knows every patch – sorrow, humiliation, rapture, passion, inspiration – even some patches that I do not remember myself. He knows. He whispers: This is all part of you, E.J.. And I walk with all of you.

You say that when you spend your Sundays in a church building that you end your day feeling “confused, patronized, and simplified.” You have spent every other weekend trying a different denomination. But on those Sundays that you stay home, that you spend your day with your mother, your siblings, your herd and your friends... that you spend your hours (not just two hours or three) talking about God, talking about life, talking and laughing and adding silver threads to that quiltwork of you, that you end your day with a joyous heart filled with light, filled with what you are beginning to recognize as Christ.

What is He telling you?

I spent the week with people who told me I was divine... and I was foolish. That I was impassioned... and I was blind. But there were travelers in my journey who just smiled at me. Who say those patches in my quilt and embraced me, crushed me wonderfully, and murmured, “Of course. I see. I understand.”

You will find your fellow travelers, Erik. You may, my friend, have already found them. Don’t put your butt on a pew. Put your feet on the path. You know where it will lead you.

In love,
E.J.

Christ As Celebration

"Christ didn't dance, E.J."

"Hm. Bringin' salvation to the whole wide world? Yeah, He probably didn't have a lot of down time."

Oh baby, God didn't give us bodies not to feel this good.

There's something happening. Right now. Right here. In my chest. In yours. That thrumming. A beat. It's not just one heart, not just two. This passion between us. This blood music. She has become a precious thing with wings. A creature of lost scripture and found mythology. My angel. I'm thinking of you in front of eighty thousand eyes. Pilot light blinking: Live. So alive! I'm laughing. Throwing my head back in the rain. Lifting my hands to my face, to the skies, to Christ. Photo shoot. Interview. Public scrutiny doesn't bother me. Can't find me. Not the way you find me. Giving it up. Giving it over. Giving it all to you. Praise the Lord you take me.

"And I'd give up forever to touch you,
so I'm lucky that's not up for trade.
You're the closest to Heaven that I've ever been
and I don't want to fall home right now."

'Cause without you, I'm like the Fallen Angels we speculate over. Striving for redemption on a path alone. Dancing my way through dark clubs, brown eyes glinting, shaking my head "no" to the music, hands in the air, bass line body moving. Willingly lost to the world, condensed into binary and ions, hidden and veiled, cloaked in mysteries that only you and Christ decipher. I'm praying: Stand with me. Walk with me. Guide me. I won't stray because my path is mine. I won't close my eyes because I'm not afraid. Bring the darkness, bring the pain, bring hardship and hate. Bring it. I'm stronger every day. "You've Got Mail." I'm stronger every moment. "You Have 18 New Messages." I'm the woman you always asked me to be, Lord. I'm the person you need, baby. (And, apparently, I'm humble too.)

"And all I can taste is this moment
and all I can breathe is your love.
Yeah, sooner or later it's over
but I don't wanna miss you tonight."

Rejoice! For this is the new day that God has given us, and these, our hearts and bodies, were formed by His hand, and are made in celebration of His glory. What wonder is man. What wonder is God. Rejoice and celebrate! Heed not the words of man who leads his brothers into war and blindness. Heed carefully, intelligently, the written filter, bastardized and removed from the sanctity of context. Turn your face to the light. Listen to the Living Word, beating in your chest. Trust that you will not be led astray because you know you walk the impassioned path. Find it. Claim it. Shout it from mountain tops the way I shout how much I love you. Know evil and be strong enough to slay it, standing alone or standing beside me, donned in the armor of Christ. Know you are enough. Always enough. Just as you are. Perfection made by the hand of God, in celebration of His love for every single one of us. "Christ be with you." "And also with you."

"And I don't want the world to see me,
'cause I don't think that they'd understand.
Everything man-made can be broken,
and I want you to know who I am."

Revel in the new light of day. Step outside. Unsheltered, under the sky. Close you eyes. Then open them. There is your new light. Start from there. Ask Him something. Anything. Feel the truth wash over you like passion. Take you away and lift you up. It is sometimes hard. It is sometimes unfair. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes life burns. But none of it destroys us. None of it can rip us apart. Not if we stand in the new light. Not if we hand it over. Atlas shrugged, baby, and so can we. Christ is there. If He could carry the cross, He can carry our pain, our fear, our uncertainties. Hold my hand. Celebrate in knowing I hold your hand. Every morning, as the new light creeps to the sky, every moment after I open my eyes, I realize my heart is full. I have the time, the energy, the drive. I have every resource in Christ... and one of those resources to draw upon is my passion for you.

Make good. Today. Start now. Today. Rejoice in what you know, not what anyone else tells you. You know. He knows. Throw away fear like a child throws away broken things. Dance. Scream. Run in the rain with me. Pray for those who hurt you and the ones you love. It isn't as easy as it sounds. But you can do it. We can do it. And when I cup your face in my hands, when I gaze into eyes that hide everything and nothing, know that I see Christ in you. Know that the rain that falls over both of us is Heaven sent.

E.J.

Wooing Peacocks

I awoke with the sun shining in windows that will someday be yours. The pale, new dawn light crept through the dense green trees like God breaking over the land. Dawn has a sound. Dawn has a whisper, like a lover in the early hours before responsibilities and life begins. A voice that has always brought me from sleep better than any alarm clock.

Out in the orchard I hear Sparrows, Chickadees, Flickers. The breeze is silent, barely stirring the bare trees. When I hear them at first -- the soft, distant cooing -- I think they are doves. But then they warble-cry and I realize there are Peacocks in this enchanted forest. A year or two ago, an entire ranch (no, not joking) emptied in a single wind storm, dozens of Peacocks flooding the nearby Banner Forest to live free and wild. You'll glimpse them sometimes, standing in the brush. Majestic and fabulous. Regal and otherworldly. You blink and wonder if you imagined it. The large blue-green body of silken feathers. The alert, aware and Godly head.

Birds are God's own angels.

A young man contacted me this weekend. A subscriber to this blog. He asked me to define New Testament Christianity. He was dismayed that *everyone* seems to use this term like a badge of honor (like a catch all) but that few people seem to embrace the tenants that he himself grew up with as an Armenian American in a New Testament Christian family. He wanted something written down, something to show everyone else. Something that says: You are not what I am. This is what I am. Because assumptions are dangerous things.

I told him there were fifty times when I wished for just such a note. But that having it wouldn't be within the guidelines of our own denomination. For a New Testament Christian does not come from a place of hubris. Does not argue with other Christians. Does not convert cross denominations, cut down other Christians, or even point out things we may see as inaccuracies in other scriptures.

Instead I wrote him this:

Gerald, you are a New Testament Christian if the base of your religion is the words of Christ. If you believe that the new day begins at dawn, not midnight. If you live your life by the passage of the sun and not the clock. If you believe that men and women are equal in the eyes of the Lord and were made to support each other. If you treasure children and know that life begins at conception and that conception is way before zygote. If you study history. If the pulpit does not preach politics. If someone being gay, like it is in nature, is genetic. If God, not Big Bang, created the Earth and that every blade of grass is here by His hand. If Christ -- not the Old Testament, not what came after Ascension, and certainly not what man teaches man -- is your Lord. If the body is sacred. If the heart is a temple. If to say "I love you" means I accept you, I value you, I will always support you. If you would never raise a hand to your child or your mate. If you strive to never raise your voice. If you think it's okay for a man to cry and for a woman to shout in protest. If you believe that bigotry and racism and phobias are what happens when man's culture imposes assumptions over God's natural diversity. If you don't accept scare tactics and wear a cross only because He beat it. If you are a rabble rouser. If you leave hubris at the door. If you accept all through the gates of your heart... even when sometimes you will be faced with enemies in your courtyard. If prayer not just at meals but constantly, four, five, eight times a day. Not wishes half-formed in your mind. Conversations, alive, passionate and *never* one-sided. Conversations with a real Christ. Not a vision of a white man with blue eyes. Not a visage. A real man. Powerful, strong, rebellious, articulate, gentle, focused and fully, completely alive. Our Christ. The beginning and the end. Our salvation and our grace. The heart of all that we are.

Do you turn to Christ or to man? If you turn to Christ, Gerald, than you are a New Testament Christian. If you turn to Christ, truly turn to Christ in all things, than you know it.

Standing in the early-spring orchard, cold and alive, I know enough not to write my weekly blog from a place of fear, pride, anger, hurt, guilt or any man-made emotion. I can only allow these feelings to wash away from me. Lifted into the dawn air. I can only know in my own heart that Christ stands beside me. Not because I am great. Not because I am gifted or touched or divine. But solely because I am none of those things. He stands with me because I need Him.

And He stands with everyone who does.

E.J.