In His Time

My friends like to tease me when I post my Sunday blog past midnight on Sunday. I am running on "God's Time" instead of "man's time" because I see a day from dawn to dawn, slipping from one to the next according to the cycle of the Earth in His own cosmos. This has always seemed right to me, natural and real, whereas clocks and other timepieces (though, I admit, they hold a fascination and a beauty for me) seem pretense and even hubris. *Man* can understand Time? *snort* How ludicrous.

Of course... what man can understand is his own time, not Time but time, because he invented time. His time is simply a mathematical equation for mortality. It is a way to seem important in a universe that exists so much longer than us that we seem each a single matchstick burning before the light of a sun or super nova. We are small and short-lived. But man's time assigns us numbers -- seconds, minutes, hours, days, years -- and we seem somehow more substantial.

But then... by the grace of divinity, we disprove our invention...

I lay at your side. We are saying good-bye without words. The watch, abandoned on the bedside table, tells me that four minutes pass. But those minutes take longer than any years of my life combined. Those minutes make more of an impression on me, than any decades that have passed, filled with minutes. Those. Four. Short. Minutes. Then you were gone.

You stand before me. You hold up your hands and I lift you into my arms. You whisper, inexplicably, strangely calm, "I will miss you when you're gone." But I have just arrived. You are testing the definition of mortality because your pet frog has died this morning and the sadness of the truth of man's time -- that it is far from eternal -- is a burden too heavy for shoulders so small.

I am standing at a make-shift easel. The room is all glass but your eyes are the picture windows that show me more. I have always known how you feel but never have you showed me this gaze, this face, open desire painted on your features without attitude or aggression. It is a raw emotion both tender and wild. The Georgia sun is painting us with setting colors and as I lose the natural light I find that every movement of the second hand on the clock in this rented cottage is taking... forever.

Man's time is a construct. It is a schedule. A honey-do list. A way to keep us all in sync. Could it be I have found, after passing that quarter century mark which meant absolutely nothing to me, that I am, at my heart, a Christian anarchist? That I yearn so deeply for God's Time, freeform and beating, pulsing like the living thing it is, that there are moments... days... weeks... that I slip out of sync completely?

But I have also found that the more I let go of my honey-do list, the more I realize what honey needs to do. And off my schedule, outside my planner, I am actually able to get everything done.

No longer the child in the garden, I partake of the apple... but this apple is not one that God warns me against. It is simply fruit from His table.

Let go. Let God.

In His Time.

EJ

Tangible Dreaming

...and I realize when I touch your wings and they don't disappear that I must be dreaming.

The feathers are borrowed from autumn's palette: gold, bronze, ivory. My fingertips brush as gently as I can when you are trembling like this beneath my touch. I know very well that divine messengers are not the stereotype found in cathedral paintings and man's scripture. Rarely do you want me gentle, my muse, my inspiration, my angel.

I turn my wrist, slide the pads of my fingers over the variegated tips of you. Silken strands, stiff with desire, fan against my skin; sensation begins there, where our bodies meet, and travels through nerves and blood and bone to pool in my palms like hot stones. I find I cannot breathe. When I manage a gasp, the air drawn between my parted lips, that floods over my tongue, is the scent of you, richer than any holy wine, complex like autumn itself, your theme, your element, your midnight gaze that speaks volumes in the silence.

I reach down and take your hand. Hold it up, palm to palm against my own. We are so different. We are so the same. I bow my head, turn your hand to my cheek. Turn my head to kiss the lines of your fingers and thumb. I cannot stop myself. My tongue passes, soft, light, the barest taste of you stolen in this moment, our moment.

And I receive my communion.

Divine inspiration...

Emotions. Chicks love to talk about them. Guys love to roll their eyes and claim they don't have them. Words like “deconstruction” and “processing” leave the domain of engineers and ballet dance their way across a much more touchy-feely stage. You may love them, dread them, wallow in them, rejoice with them, but no matter our attitude (or Attitude) we all live with them – ours and others. To me, emotions are the double fudge icing on the creamy but vanilla cupcake.

...and there is moonlight. Pale like the word “cool” and glancing over everything including your bare skin which is cream and roses and imperfect and so I know you are real and not mythology. My eyes drink. My hands sing. My heart pounds so loud in my ears I cannot hear the prayer that tumbles from my lips as I sink to my knees before you, tears streaming down my cheeks...

If I stand in the snow at the top of a long mountain trail, I will feel cold. If I open my arms and turn my face upwards beneath the hot summer sun, I will feel the warmth burn welcome across me. If I take speed, wrap her around me as I wrap myself around my bike, and blaze trails like so many pioneers before me, I will feel the wind, the bite, the slice of molecules and distance; I will feel free.

Ah, but that last is not a physical sensation. That last is emotion. Physical sensation is mundane, hard-wired into our genome. Not boring, not unwelcome, certainly not to be ignored but most often expected. The body is made to feel (touch and be touched) but also to *feel.* I have experienced physical sensation that was transcendent, literally lifting my sense of self out of my body only to linger in that space just beyond it... but I have felt this divinity more often in response to that mysterious other location, my own State of Emotion.

...there is the feeling of your hips in my hands. There is the feeling of my cheek against your thigh. There is the perfection in the knowledge that since the beginning of poets and writers there have been lover muses. The Greeks and Romans did not corner the market, nor close the market, on other-worldly creatures guiding prose, guiding soldiers, guiding light in an otherwise darkened and darkening world. Stars spin overhead, twilight sky like its own cosmos, and I cease to know where you begin and I end. I ended the moment we became this touch...

This is how we hear our Christ. My friend asks me often, “How do I hear Him?” Then she teases, “I don't hear Him as clearly as you do. You have a direct line or something.” She makes me smile. Makes me laugh. But I don't have a direct line; not unless we all do. I am no special anything; I just have a secret.

Christ is not a physical sensation any more than making love is purely a physical sensation, and there is more a connection between Christ and love making than any of man's denominations want us to recognize. Christ, like the best lover, makes His appeals to our emotional state. He writes His messages on our emotional slate. He is that first time we look across the room at the person we will love forever and something... wonderment, discovery... blooms in our chests, spills down our limbs. Emotion becomes physical, tangible, real. Christ walks with us, talks to us, becomes physical, tangible, real.

...and I am holding you. The wind is strong and cold but neither of us feel it. Your wings enfold me, protect me. The clouds roll in low with menace in the night. They open suddenly, violently. Rainfall. Rainstorm. You whisper words into my hair and the rain becomes warm, baptism, rebirth in your arms.

The dawn is coming. I know you will leave. You have given me your gift and I accepted on my knees. Offerings have been exchanged. Inspiration sweet on my lips. But I cannot let go. I whisper, “Stay.”

You look at me. Your eyes are ten thousand colors of autumn and sea and sky and heaven. You tilt your head to one side. You say without speaking, “No one has ever asked me to stay.”

I look at you openly. I hand you my everything. I bare my heart. “Than let me be the first.”

And the emotion between us is real, is physical, is Christ.

EJ

And in the Garden

There is no brighter day than this, silver morning shot with clouds white and thin, brilliant birth, His, mine and ours. I close my eyes and see the curves of you by moonlight, the hollows of mysteries, the definition of muscles. I open my eyes and see your eyes across the cafe from me, worn by a stranger. They are, as always, cold bright sharp and I know forever that I will always find blue eyes as Woman, green eyes as Friend, and every brown eye as Savior. My world is untamed wilds with a single path paved with these crystal absolutes.

Thank you, Christ, for opening my eyes. You're right. She is beautiful. This only green world.

“I will walk along these hillsides
in the summer, 'neath the sunshine.
I am feathered by the moonlight,
falling down on me, I said...”

And yes, the lyrics tumble and roll into each other and I do like that. I had forgotten how much I love that feeling of unending music. I think of the waves, of course, the shore, the horizon endless, stretching to infinity, and I think of deep, dark trails into ageless forests bent and bowed by wind over those self same waves, and I look all the way through existence to the face of my Lord and I know He understands intimately the complexity of this life, this heart, this gamer grrl who rarely seems to be given anything in small doses.

“Do you still wear it?”
"Every day.”
“If you never saw me again?”
“Still.”
“If I never...”
“Still.”
“Because?”
“Of what we had.”
“That night?”
“...”
“Not that night then.”
“Creation. Birth."
“Rebirth.”
“That truth is always there.”

And His mortal body hung on that cross. It was a symbol like we no longer have universally. A sign of death most cruel and base. Painful and tearing. The woman who loved Him more than any other catching His tears and His blood in a chalice that would inspire and romanticize these horrors. It may not have even existed. But her pain, as helpless witness to His pain, was... is... most certainly undeniable. Mother of my Lord, on her knees, *not* begging Him to lie and deny the truth of His divinity. Her tears like the tears of no other.

Because she carried Him.

“Through this womb cometh the Lord, our Christ. My Beginning and my End. Transforming me forever from woman to Mother. Transforming this world, now then forever, from empty to overflowing. He will walk this only green world, be loved and hated, laugh and cry, exist among us, touch our hands, our eyes, our hearts, and we will know the truth and see it everywhere.”

The children selling street jewelry outside the Catholic church look no different today. I could lift these children from this place and place them in almost every city I have ever visited. They could be on any continent. They could be any color or age or speaking any language. I have been walking for six miles. I have passed fifteen churches. I have passed eighteen children. Three sold oranges. Five sold jewelry. Some of the others sold wares they knew I would not buy. But for all of them I push back my headphones and meet their eyes. Blue... green... brown. Some of them were minors, most of them were not. Some of them wore crosses, most of them did not.

“I am not worthy of this, my Lord.”
“You are.”
“You do not need to be washed in the water, Lord.”
“Wash me then in the blood.”

And the dove appeared.

And the Lord spoke.

And the stone was rolled away.

And the women knew that He was risen.

“Go tell it on the mountain,
over the hills and everywhere.
Go tell it on the mountain,
that Jesus Christ is born.”

“I wanted to bring them something. It is traditional, yes. But more. I wanted to leave a talisman there with you. Oh, how it grows harder to have you away from my embrace, from within the reach of my fingertips...

“An Easter Lily. The trumpet of it heralds birth and triumph. They could not fell Him. They brutally killed Him but He neither bent nor broke. He did not crumble to the will of man. He did not step into their denomination. He did not shape Himself to their desire. He was, is, will always be desire.

“The white petals are firm, thick, textured and fine. Life, purity, hope, spirit. First brought to America by a World War I soldier from their native Ryukyu Islands. Only available commercially for two weeks. The fourth largest potted crop. They are the traditional flower of Easter. I would have settled... I could have settled... so many times... but I didn't. I wouldn't. I waited. For you. Should I have worn a Promise Ring all these years?”

After they stopped the mortal heart in His chest, but before He rose again as savior and End Time soldier, there came to be found, in the Garden of Gethsemane, lilies as white and pure as moonlit snow. They were glorious in the morning sun. They were blinding beneath starlight. Some remembered then Christ's Sermon on the Mount, "Consider the lilies of the field...”

“Consider what I have left for you. Not the verse man will write upon dying parchment. But rather this undying world that evolves and transforms for you, revealing every mystery that I ever shall need of you to know.”

And those men who followed Him, who would later write His (and their) words and stamp them divine, did not believe that He stood before them. They were, they thought, the perfect examples of mankind. Doubting. Unable to believe without proof.

Some of us do not need the words.

We have here *tapping my heart* the Word.

“Easter lilies are called, sometimes, the White-Robed Apostles of Hope. Mercy, compassion, kindness and unconditional love. Beloved? I do not have a 'hope' for this, our love. I have a *knowing.* And though it is an unconditional love, and love laid with kindness, and love gentle with compassion, even when I ask for it, you rarely show me mercy. You meet my gaze and every pretense falls away. I am stripped bare before our Christ. The growl that rises in my throat, the muscles that jump across shoulders and neck and arms and belly, have nothing to do with mercy. This is a primal divinity. Christianity untamed and burning. I worship on my knees.”

When leaving Eden, Eve cried repentant tears and those tears became lilies. Her repentance was true and pure, and lilies have since been always associated with women.

“Why do you weep?”
“They have taken the body of our Lord.”
“He is not here.”
“He has risen!”

There is one child selling lilies. I see the cardboard sign before I see his small, single-bloom plants with roots wrapped in Dollar Store tissue paper. I turn the corner to him. I stop. These are far from Easter Lilies. There is no white-washing here. And brown boy meets eyes with brown grrl and I realize we are probably the same age. And not so very different.

“But then I see them. The brilliant burning orange. The dusting of chocolate brown. The petals open like palms, the stems deep and strong. These are the flowers of my Christ. Not white-robed and scrubbed clean. These are the fire of passion, the untamed wild, the survivors after brutal winters, the lovers tussling together among lush green leaves. These tiger lilies draw my gaze and my touch and my devotion. Here is our love. Here is true Easter.”

I wear a cross not because I worship death. I wear a cross (from my neck and inked on my body) because even this could not bring down my Lord. Even this could not tame His wild. No weapon of man could silence His voice.

And today? On this fine silver-skied Easter, rain falling like baptism, I sit in a room surrounded by thirty tiger lilies, their roots wrapped in Dollar Store tissue paper. And today, I hear His voice clearer than ever.

EJ

My Prayer

Sometimes things seem so clear. The voice in my mind that murmurs thoughts centered by myself, is my own voice. No matter how righteous it seems, it is only my own counsel. The voice in my heart that whispers of path, and world, and right and wrong, is the voice of Christ. I do not think He has ever whispered to me of me, not directly, not specifically. It is always other, always outside, always bigger than the smallness of “me.”

I am no one and nothing. I am anonymous and honored to be so. I am atoms, cumbersome, compared to the elegance and grace of demiquark and boson. Just when I think I understand, just when I think I can claim a knowing, there appears something, some untheorized particulate that challenges everything – physically -- that I know -- my own personal Y(4140). Only my faith remains unscorched. Only my heart in the hands of my Christ stays the same, now then forever.

It is like this:

I stand in the knowledge that human beings have the capacity to twist the truth and deny logic. They bend reality to suit their personal desires. They justify their behavior by pointing fingers at anyone but themselves. I have, perhaps, known only two people who do not use this self-comfort/self-defense mechanism – my grandmother, Rae'sol, and my friend and publisher, Jennifer. They are (or were, in my grandmother's case) brutal with themselves and with everyone around them. They slice through pretense with truth like Christ's own sword. When someone else might say, “You can't get blood from a stone.” They say, “This stone has bled enough.”

My grandmother lived and fought during an ethic/religious cleansing that tried to eradicate her. My friend exists in a world that hates businesswomen and finds it easy to blame them for everyone else's creative and economic failures. Both of them have been obsessively loved. Both of them have been vehemently hated – even by those who once professed to love them.

The truth, the brutal, unyielding truth, is only valued when it tells us what we want to hear. After that it becomes the enemy and the messenger must be destroyed.

I think of these two women now and I think of one other person. My father. He often twisted reality to deny truth. His glass was always full no matter whether it stood before him or lay shattered across the table. His eyes always turned to the light. He turned his back to any shadows. The world was not black and white. It was blinding gold. It was forever the divine reflected in a hundred thousand drops of dawn dew. There was no silver-lined cloud. There was no cloud. There was only gold.

What kind of soldier do I want to be? What kind of Christian? Can I function – no... can I rejoice and fight and dance and laugh and march forward, ever forward – if I am always faced with the truth? If I always must carry the truth? The truth weighs so much. So much more than the mist of lies or the thin veils of justifications. Passing the buck, after all, means you don't carry it any more.

I speak calmly. The two people before me – live, not in email or on the phone – are littering me, tag-team style, with profanities like I have never heard. They are tearing apart everything I hold sacred. They are as certain of their truths as I am of mine. So... are they right? Have they found cracks in me and mine? Do they actually know when I do not? Should I question everything because they are so... damned... *loud*?

It is so easy to get angry at someone who is helpless to hurt you back. It must feel so good to throw punches when someone else's hands are tied. It must make someone feel so powerful and justified. Personally, I wouldn't know. Christ didn't raise me that way. Shame on you who know better. Wake up those of you who don't.

If you cannot get what you want, you'll take your payment in blood. I don't believe in hell... but still I think a special circle awaits people who play that way.

I am starting to hate that word. Justification. I would much rather dance. It seems a bit of a joke among my friends. “Where is Angel tonight? Dancing, of course.” They smile because they might as well be saying, “Where is Angel tonight? Praying, of course.”

It seems sometimes that this world is full of people who act in ways that stun me. I stand and blink my eyes in the flames of their disregard for each other. I am horrified by their inability to recognize a decent person. What hope can I have for the human race if they do not even know an angel (no, not me) in their midst? What hope?

Night falls and I am standing at the coastal bluff that I love. Am I unstable? Yes. I am rocked by this world. My eyes rest on the ocean. The water is on fire with sunset. The wind... she smells like salt and sea and everything wild and dangerous. I like it here. Alone with my Christ and my bike and my music in my ears. “Now that we're alone, can I make a request? Will you make me number one on your playlist?” Here, standing here, I can let go of everything that awaits me in my inbox and my mail and my day-job minutes.

Christ? Can you bring this – this peace, this sacred place – to everyone who hurts the people I love? Can you give them this moment in their tomorrow? Let them know this untamed love. Let them cry out in revelation. Let them see the face of you.

It is easier...

It is easier to hire a lawyer than it is to offer a helping hand.

It is easier to throw a rock... or a profanity... than it is to throw in the towel or accept responsibility.

It is easier to blame someone else, doubt someone else, hate someone else than it is to do almost anything else.

I do not know these things to be true from personal experience. But from what I witness in the world, they must be.

A Godless country? A country of people unable to create community with its lack of homogeneity? Are we? I hear this said so often. But this is too easy, as well. We are not Godless... how can we be? God is standing right here, and there, and everywhere. But I think sometimes we are so busy screaming, or shouting, or searching for blame, or searching for justification (there it is again), that we cannot hear anything or anyone divine. I have never known divinity to shout.

Christ? Shout for me.

There is a bass line and rough beat that rocks up through my boots and shakes my hips and spine and shoulders and throws my head back like a strike. I have never danced here. This club by the sea. It is the Sabbath and I am looking for my release, my fix, my Christ who lifts me, moves me, explains the world to me, just His own simple gamer grrl who wants to change the world but can barely understand it. He has given me comrades to march with me; I see their faces. My heart pounds as if lifting from chest. He has given me adversaries that are tangible and complex to challenge me. He has given me this beat. He has made me clear.

“Well, you know Eliza Jean... she's not the sharpest spoon in the drawer.” Laughter cut short by the sound of a crack – a fist meeting a face. I turn the corner. You are standing at his chair. He is holding his face. There is blood. You are fiery and alive. The muscles in your arms and neck stand out. I cry your name in anger. Your head snaps to look at me and your lips are drawn back from your teeth. You are beyond words.

Why was I mad at you? Because Christ says turn the other cheek and instead you turned his cheek? (Claude's, not Christ's.)

The cliche: “Geesh, does she need to get laid.” Meaning, a person is way too tense. But really what we mean to say is:

I wish for you, in this moment, when you are beating me, my loved ones, my everything into an unrecognizable mess... in this moment, while you tear me, and mine, apart and down, and to pieces... I pray that you will someday... will right now... find some peace in something, anything, other than making someone else bleed.

It is easier to pray for friends than for enemies. If every enemy is just ignorant to the truth you offer in your hands, it would be so simple to just educate them. Not so simple when they choose to be deaf and blind.

Before you strip me of my rights and steal everything holy from me and mine, would you like to stop and read 1500 words? There are several blogs here to choose from. Or perhaps just these four words?

I don't hate you.

...

But my Christ has never asked me to just lay down and take it.

EJ