The air is filthy. I watch it shimmer on the horizon. I see text messages scroll across the distant haze. “You might be a thirteen year old boy” ...blending into... “Cut! @!#$%, E.J., what's wrong with you today? Can’t you even *look* aroused? You’re supposed to *want* him!” ...turning inside out... “I want you; I don’t know what that means.” ...the LED display blinks across God’s own sky. Christ is bouncing messages off satellites. I need an intervention. Direct revelation. Baby... lift me up, life my spirits. Take me down in your arms. Make me forget those golden gates at work that are nothing like heaven and everything about check-point, take my badge, you’re ours now, lock and key. Oh, what did I sign? Where was the dotted line that pointed my way to hell?
Every day, speed delivers me the way only three words from you can.
“How can you see into my eyes like open doors
leading you down into my core.
My spirit sleeping somewhere cold
until you find it there and lead it back home.”
The music rips through my skull loud enough to hear outside my helmet. The Cali dude next to me at the last red light before the ocean is all pose and bravado in his swank convertible. He is looking at me. I’m looking (not quite) straight ahead. A blue Honda Civic and a white Impala collide in the intersection. No one is hurt but there is glass everywhere. It shines in the pale, dirty light. We turn off our engines. I take off my helmet. Dude smiles at me. My eyes are on the wreck. My boots crunch. Everyone is okay.
I am not okay.
“Wake me up inside.
Call my name and save me from the dark.
Bid my blood to run
before I come undone...”
Two hours spent in the middle of the street. Strangers who stare at my riding chaps and my street jewelry cross and one, Jimmy, who finally asks if I’m a Unitarian minister. Asks me to pray for him... he has no money for repairs. He’s going to lose his job for being late. The world is crashing down around him. He sinks down before me. There is shame and failure on his face and he is crying loudly, unable to stop it, wanting on so many levels to be heard. There is a buzz in my ears. There is a low, roiling anger in my chest. There is this need everywhere I go.
Above us the sky is darkening with flash-rain clouds. I want it so bad. That rain. I want it to drench me. Christ’s natural baptism. Bring the second Great Flood, Lord. Wash this away. Remake this world in your image, Lord. ... I want to feel you in my arms. I want the quiet night around us. I want you standing beside me right now. Seeing the difference we can make. Feeling that difference. Because it is a *difference.* Other people don’t find themselves here so often. It is different, not traditional, not rote and mundane. I want to see the moment in your eyes when you arrive with me, when you stand in this place that I stand and feel the way I feel for you. I want us as one person, one path, one passion, God take the rest of it!
Mr. Convertible is staring at me as I sink to my knees in the glass with the boy who can’t be much out of his teens. And I’m taking his hands which are cold and stiff, rough like his work jeans covered in plaster. And you know what I say:
“I don’t need to pray for you, Jimmy. He’s waiting to hear from *you.*”
And he breaks. He breaks to be found. The shell that this world casts around its young men, shaping them into hard things that can’t tremble in the new rain. And I’m holding him without thinking about it and he cries something about his sister or a lover or a mom. I’m not sure exactly because I realize that my headphones are still in.
“Now that I know what I’m without
you can't just leave me.
Breathe into me and make me real.
Bring me to life...”
My heart is a wreck in the middle of the road. Strangers are crying in my inbox. Bobbing on tears I am buoyed back to you time and time again. Washed up on your shore, exhausted and wanting. I am the child gazing up at you with eyes of hope and trust, and you are the manifestation of that love that Christ promised me when I wanted nothing else but to die. Do you wonder how I can survive a thousand miles away? Watch how patient I can be with this miracle. It has been eternity (and back again) that I’ve waited for you.
“Frozen inside without your love, darling.
Only you are the life among the dead.
...Bring me to life.”
There is a rumbling of the coming tow trucks. There is a rumbling across the muddied sky. There is a rumbling in my chest, a thrumming realization that the struggle has just begun. I crush the lanky boy and glare at the officer who suggests we get out of the road.
“He can’t move right now,” I snarl. “Make them go around.”
Make them all go around! Make the twisted filter of man’s own doctrine – the church, the corporate line, the politicos and saints – make it change for us, for once. For twice. For now on! I am so angry! And the anger is pure and clean and lifts me up above the smog and into the clear stratosphere. Shine on me, celestial light. Remind me of divinity the way you whispering my name reminds me, transports me. There. Christ is standing right there.
5:42: What is he telling you, EJ?
5:43: *He
5:44: That God gave us these bodies as vessels of celebration. As sacred things that we share only with the one person who completes us. So take your time. And choose carefully. Because forever means forever.
He is saying: Why are you wasting your precious mortal time, the second greatest gift I have given you, not laughing? Not shouting for joy? Why are you – alone and together -- buying into man’s filter that I have given you the intelligence and the strength and the *courage* to see through? Rip away the veil! There is no veil in living Christianity.
“All this time I can't believe I couldn't see.
Kept in the dark but you were there in front of me.
I’ve been sleeping a thousand years it seems.
Got to open my eyes to everything.”
And finally the rain stops and the cars are dragging away the sounds of metal and ruin. Mr. Convertible got bored and left. He has his story to tell the guys. The story to take home to his girl. He will be the hero in his retelling even though all he did was cruise my skinny ***. Jimmy is standing on the street corner, looking up at the sky, then looking at me. He squints his eyes and raises his chin. There are tears and rain on his face. He looks all of sixteen. He is probably twenty-one. “You look familiar to me. Do I know you?”
I smile at him. The song continues on repeat. The sky has cleared. My anger has washed off my leather jacket and run down the gutter to swirl away. My faith remains as does my desire for you.
“Yeah,” I tell him, my eyes drifting to some point in the distance, around the corner of the buildings and the palm trees. “You know us Christian biker chicks. We all look the same.”
And I get on my bike and I turn her around. I return to the city and away from the ocean. No need to travel to that rocky shore today. Christ met me half way.
At home, I reach into my pocket and take out the fist full of broken glass. I let it fall through my fingers, scattering like frozen rain in the blue glass candy dish on the table. Usually I bring home a pocket full of sand and pebbles. Today is so much more apropos.
Break it open, baby. We will make our own way.
E.J.
