Lord? Walk me away from everything. Walk me closer to you.
I drive for twenty-three hours to find Christ. I could have found Him in three minutes on my roof top, or in no time at all just by closing my eyes. But I wanted to be here. This place untouched and almost unreal.
I stop for hot coffee before the final five miles to the trail head where I'll stash my bike in the brush and hope I can still find my way. The cook/owner/waiter asks me where I'm headed then cocks his head and an eyebrow. "The McAllen place. Waves rose up and took them both. Washed everything but the house out to sea."
I pay for coffee and tip. I buy two bottles of water. The door chime shows me out and, "It was two nights after Eve McAllen died. So heartbroken, Georg called up the sea."
And thirty minutes past the trail head, thunder rolls low and tumbling with danger and I think about the first time we made love.
The forest is close and unkempt. I think of my Lord in the wilderness. I remember His voice when I have been afraid or have felt lost; He has always said the same thing. "You will hear from me tonight." And I wait. And I always do.
I wonder over the nature of temptation and I write this sermon in my head, all in time, poetry, prose, beat, fall, beat with the cadence of my boots on the path more impassioned and far less traveled. I think about slam poetry and open mics and why I insist the sky is best silver, blue, black, orange, and not green on green on green like it is right now, here in the depths of wood. It is not long before darkness takes my way out from under my feet and washes color from this only green world. But it is then that I realize that I know my journey even blind. I am not afraid. I am not alone.
This knowledge in the world is more important to me than breathing.
I woke Saturday morning to another body in my bed, warm and bare and without pretense or complication. Still half in dreams, I murmur a name that is familiar to neither this audience nor this room. I blink. I stand. I realize I need to drive. This was, almost, too easy because it was an effortless fit.
"Do you think Christ put us on this Earth to have it easy?"
"I have fought so hard for so long... I want to lay it down."
"Go ahead. Lay it down."
"Yeah?"
"When you die."
The thousand plus miles between us shrink. I am racing toward the speed of sound. The sadness, secrets, sleepless notes of a hidden struggle. We must push away to push up, to grow... closer to God... to grow... stronger on our own. Christ gave us these bodies to discover range of emotion. Not repetitious but naturally cyclical, ever widening concentric circles. You channel it into music that no one else will ever truly hear. Your prayers whispered between strums of steel and brass and copper, wrapped within the reverb in some ancient tongue. Do you really think anyone understands? If they are fully alive they come close. You will know them when they look away, when they cannot meet your eyes for the tears that well there, in happiness or in sorrow. To anyone else, it is only noise. From your hands to Christ's ear.
Then one day, drifting, echoing past so many deaf ears, one single note will plant itself in the loamy, rich, fertile soil and by Christ's hand you will wake that dawn to a wild rose, blooming riotous blood red. And when you hold that blossom in your hand, you will know who hears you. Go to her.
By the time I hear the waves on rock and sand and shore, I am ensconced in thoughts of ageless prophesy and the eternal nature of art and the art of eternity. I consider stars, peeking through tree tops, as fires, as creatures, as living things with souls and dreams and every fine masquerade of life. I consider the way your words, your voice, your hands, move across me like Christ's own wind pushing, pulling and caressing the tide. I break from the forest and onto the coast, open and bare to this wind, to the world, to the waves and I wonder what difference is it that instead of standing here with me, you are found instead in the written verse tucked in my pocket. I believe I have found the truth, beside this sea, beneath this sky... tonight.
My memories and my desires mix and meld effortlessly into one existence and time slipstreams:
The moment I understood what "Come here..." meant. Tomorrow night, our hips (not our hips), locked into hard beat on the dance floor. The morning I realized that your "no" meant you didn't trust me. Strobes, raver glow, your eyes closed, your head cocked, you keep rhythm at the base of your spine, 2-2-3 when everyone else pounds 1-1-2. I want to stand in the open rain...
I didn't know this would all be so hard. No one told me this would be so damn hard.
And the thunder keeps her promise and shares her release, torrents of rain, fresh water passion throwing back salt water desire. Reciprocity, indeed, I scream. I throw my head back -- I see like in a photograph, like in a memory, like in the here-and-now, your wrist tucked against the small of your back, your other hand skyward, hallelujah -- and I scream.
The ocean, the thunder, the rain is louder. The whole world is louder than I am. But still Christ hears me. I play my notes, my voice bouncing off cresting waves and standing stones, and lone house filled with ghosts, and Christ hears them all. Who knows what other ears will hear. Right now, I need only for His.
As the storm realigns me, I know that this is Him. I knew I'd hear from Him even as He hears me. How can this compare to the feel-good bubble cast by mortal man's pulpit? I am aware, alive and on fire with His word, His voice. How can I be sustained, reset, lifted up by pews and politics and platitudes? I cannot. I need Him raw, real and eternal. I need Him to grab me, shake me, open my eyes. Christ is feast in famine, vaccine in plague, salvation in hell, this hell -- the only one that exists. He said, "Change it. Do it. Feel it."
Who am I not to listen?
EJ
