On our impassioned path: Are we walking alone? Are we walking peacefully, contentedly? Are we equipped? What are the things we carry?
These are the questions that came to me this week in my quiet moments. They came by email and PM and conversations online and off. They did not come by dove. My path turned this last week and it has taken me away from those Christ-eyed messengers. When anyone whispers that the impassioned path is not a path laid down with pain and hard choices, I will remember the moment when I turned my back on them for the last time and felt like I was cast from heaven.
Are we meant to hurt like this on our impassioned path? Are we meant to bleed? Are we meant to sing hallelujahs? Whisper amens? Are we meant to shout, to rail against the world and beat it into salvation? Are we meant to be content? Isn't contentment another word for death?
I do not know the answers to all the questions. Just a digital pastor here; at least that's what they call me. Not Christ by far. He has all the answers. I have answers that are only questions. Pickover writes (as a friend reminds me) that until we ask the questions that are outside our comfort zone, almost outside our capacity of comprehension, we will not begin to understand the face of God. For He is and was and will be so far more than us that to even begin to glimpse Him, we must go to that unexplored place within and without ourselves. That place that is terrifying and joyous, like the birth of a child.
I know:
That anger is a tool, not a right. My father always said, "Only those who walk an impassioned path have the right to use anger." My father was never angry.
I was raised that life can be hard, alone and cold, and it can also bring us support, comfort and warmth. But on the impassioned path, comfort is granted but by the grace of God. No light is cast that does not originate from Christ. The traveler on the impassioned path does not rejoice unless the joy is heaven sent.
"You don't have to do this alone," my beloved often whispers. But all my life and in my heart, I know I do, I am, I always will be. Even Christ had a beloved, after all, but I do not see that man who prayed and wept in the garden as feeling not alone. He walked only with God. I walk only with Christ.
De Vries writes, "It is the power of God that He need not exist to be our salvation." Guided by Christ and the principles laid down by His words, His deeds, we walk on those cobblestones that line the impassioned path. We affect the fabric of what we see and what we know as our world. We are rain on water. We are changer and changed; His hands as we carry on.
And sometimes we carry gear with us. We are equipped for battle. We sally forth with talisman and tools. We link ourselves to the water and to the rain and to each other and to our Christ.
"Living metaphor like our Living Word. What is this thing? This powerful desire that resides in my chest, that burns through me like my passion for you? This need to give you that vow, that grant and bond? We are kissing and my fingers trace the lines of your hand, circle your ring finger. I linger and my blood turns golden in my veins. I know what I want to do.
"These meanings we weave into the trinkets and treasures that pepper our days and years. These tokens of time and memory and magic. Each item like a prayer. Like a promise. Like a thread in the tapestry of who we are. I wear my symbols with joy and pain and everything else that memory entails."
This is armor on our path. Even when we bind each other with that most sacred exchange, the exchange of bands, two never-ending circles, we are still alone. We are only concentric with Christ.
A friend asks me, "What does it mean to be baptized by the blood?" She has asked this question of others and of Google, crossing denominations and pop culture. The answers have been unsatisfactory. I smile. I feel my smile. It is movement across my face, yes, but also an emotion that spreads like that first sip of hot coffee on a winter morning -- warming and stimulating and addictive as soft kisses. I answer:
"Do you know in your head that He died for you? Or do you accept on your shoulders, carry the cross, see the blood on your hands, your head? Do you walk your path armed with His death for you, His rebirth for you, His pain, His humiliation, His sacrifice? Do you think about how He asked if there were *any* other way for us to know salvation... if there were *anything* else that He could do or that could be done... if God could please, *please* just lift this fate from Him? Do you ever think about how young He was? Do you ever think about how *mortal* He was?
"Have you decided to be His missionary and soldier (same thing)? Do you comprehend what He did for you? Do you recognize and contemplate that no other prophet, pope or preacher has ever or will ever do the same? Would you walk and fight and die just to give others the *option* of salvation? Would you live even when you felt like dying?
"If yes, than you are baptized in the blood of Christ. Full immersion? Baby, you know it."
And He said, "If any man should want to come with me, to walk his path, than he must lose his life and carry his cross." To be baptized in blood is to come through your own trail by fire, to be burned, to be reduced to ashes, and only then be reborn.
"And there was blood on the floor, on the sheets, on the window and wall... all summer long. But I survived."
Christ's blood washes over us and becomes our own blood. This man, born mortal to understand us. This man, reborn our savior. The only man to speak with the voice of God is Christ. Christ is the voice we hear in our hearts. Christ is the Living Word. Christ and Christ alone. We are saved not by His tears or His gentleness or even His guidance. We are saved by His blood. Christ's mortal death becomes our own impassioned life. Now... how will we spend it?
This is the true question, perhaps, behind all those others I began with. How do we walk our impassioned path? How do we spend our days? They are not unending. They are expensive and rare and precious. The eternity that awaits us will not be like this. Only this, here and now, is this mortal coil. Throw it away and you have thrown away something beautiful and wondrous that even Christ relished.
Scattered among the cobblestones on my impassioned path there are garnets like drops of blood and sapphires like deep blue raindrops. Sometimes I dream they are d6s or d20s and I wake laughing but mostly that are teardrops of blood and rain. Each one holds a memory or a promise or a prayer. There are so many of them that I treasure this way, that I scatter like seeds on my path, that at times I cannot see the scripture-poetry that is engraved into the cobblestones except by gazing through a kaleidescope lens of red and blue.
How will I spend my days? I will celebrate my Lord, my Christ. In dance and prayer and making love. In song and gasp and new dawn in your eyes. In change and challenge and defeat. In choices and exclamations and claiming my identity. In back-beat and stomp and speed at midnight. In sky and stone and child's touch. In everything and everywhere. In pixels, in steel, in oil and rain. In you and me and honesty.
But most of all, I will spend my days in awe of this life my Christ has granted me.
