It seems tonight that the midnight (post-midnight, my friends?) sky is my personal sky. That the stars, like gemstones on a fortune teller's cloth, only pretend to be randomly scattered but in truth are arranged very deliberately to tell me the events to come and the secrets in my heart.
I remember the stories as a child remembers – in bright snaps of emotion or image, never the more perfect memory of adulthood but always sharper, more alive with wonder. My grandmother and my mother and my father. All were story-tellers but each was so different in style and approach. The same mythology (personal mythology, family mythology... which was history and fact and faith and miracle all in one) could be woven for me by each of them until, at last, I would have every dimension of every event. They made it possible for me to step into stories fifty years old and older. To shrug into them like a favorite jacket, to recite and reenact them as if they had been my own life. Which, genetically, of course, they were.
...the pass in the mountains, bitter cold and ragged with craggy rocks. The regiment cut down by snipers – half dead, then half again. The final climb by the moon's sliver of light. The narrow cave. The explosives. Trapped in darkness devoid of breath...
I was raised with truths that were quiet and steady. That were woven into everyone around me. My grandmother was so mortified when a career counselor at my school ran down my financial prospects. “She will do the Lord's work,” grandmother snarled, her hair, even decades later and an ocean away, still shorn military short. And she drew me away.
It didn't surprise me when she fought with my parents, and then called in favors and opened a dozen doors so that I'd be trained as a painter. She wanted my hands busy with art so that my heart would be filled with prayer. “Our family are artists or soldiers, Eliza Jean, and there are no good wars to be fought.” It was the '80s and she always made it very clear, “Either way, you will be a missionary. You were born to Speak.”
...the hours of the night extend. Consciousness is lost or fading for all the soldiers who are left. The highest in rank, she struggles to rouse them but she knows that hope is thin. When day breaks, the enemy will either dig them out and shoot them or set further explosives and crush them where they are. The air is thin. It cannot sustain them. She slumps against the floor, her cheek to the cold stone...
I am neither speaker nor writer (in our tradition, “Speak” could just as well mean “Write”). I have said it here before and I'm sure I will again. What I mean, of course, is that I do not write every day. I do not feel the need, in my soul, in my heart, to express myself in words on paper or screen. I cannot sit down with an assignment and a deadline and create. Though “I need inspiration,” seems, even to me, like a cop-out. For more than a year I certainly had just that (inspiration) and was able to post my Sunday sermon on time every Sunday without fail. Am I less touched now? Am I less worthy? Have I (*gasp*) wandered from that path that my grandmother saw so clearly for me? That she paved with her own blood and bones? After all, my weekly blogs are no longer posted right on time.
...and in that state, that state neither living nor dying, the stone beneath her cheek hummed, vibrated. A stone river, at once solid and liquid. She opened her eyes. There, running the current, were skeleton fish, swimming across the floor and out of the cave, out a crevice in the wall and into the mountain. Did they disappear there? Did the crevice open up and then end abruptly miles beneath the earth? Was it worse to die here, at the hands of the enemy, than to die in a space so small a soldier would have to crawl on his belly, face turned to the stone? But then she heard a voice...
I am no less interested, inspired, impassioned or enthralled. I do not crave the drama, the newness, the sparkle, glitter and gloss. I am simply more introspective. More realistic. More willing to take deeper risks. More able to Speak.
I have more to say now that I am no longer distracted. I have learned that all that glitters is not gold.
...and the voice, of course, was His voice and He said, “And these loaves and fish will be enough.” And she woke. And she roused her comrades. She commanded them to eat what little they had left. Then she lit the last fire kit and showed them all the fossilized fish in the floor of the cave. They followed the trail of bones to the crevice, all but hidden in the far corner. Following her with faith, each solider squeezed into the gap...
Sometimes the leap of faith one must take into the darkness is more literal than figurative. Sometimes we must walk a dark path because the street that leads home is not lined with street lights. Sometimes we have to plunge ahead because otherwise we are simply standing in the darkness screaming. What awaits outside and beyond that blackness may be something far more horrendous than staying, standing there in the dark, but it is *something* and Christ tells us again and again that doing *something* is forever better than doing *nothing.* Failure will occur sometimes... but the attempt itself will always be a successful try.
...the passage was almost impossibly low and tight and blacker than any hell and she sang to them and recited scripture to ease their moaning terror. Dawn came and went without them knowing. Day came and went. Onward they crawled. The next night was almost spent when fresh air and starry sky appeared above them and they clawed their way to the surface... so far from their enemies that together they could stand and embrace each other and weep and shout in praise to the Lord.
I am not interested in anything but the truth:
Christ exists. He is a force in our personal lives. He is brilliant and joyous and always asks us to do the right thing which is never the easy thing.
Christ is not man. The rules and interpretations and exploitations of Christ's Word by man's church is sin. It is sin because it is giving in to fear. This only green world, with its fractal perfection, is the only true church.
Now then forever, Christ walks with us, died for us, rose for us, created us, speaks to us, and shows us both the tiny spark that is our lives and our personal path, and the cosmic bang which is the grandest big picture. We are part of everything around us, all things connected, because Christ's hand guides it all.
And Christ is the Alpha and the Omega. There came and has come and will come no other.
Great big statements. Tiny, personal truths.
It is very hard to despair when all filled up with Christ.
EJ
