"...may you bear witness for Christ in His glory, showing all who cross your path how the wonder of Him lives in all things, more than any man can comprehend, and with a plan that only He discerns. If His desire was for all of us to be the same, He would not have formed us so differently."
And so it came to pass that she found herself alone on the path and with child and she was not certain how it was that she came to walk upon this way and she was not certain how it was that she was without companion or champion, but she was quite certain why it was that she was unafraid. She was unafraid because with every step she was bearing witness for Christ.
It is nothing short of miracle, I think, that critics and market analysts place "Juno" and "The Passion of the Christ" in the same category. They both, it seems, spoke to the Christian population who responded by putting their money on the counter at cineplexes coast to coast. The brutal, perhaps over-dramatized life of Christ and the young, hip, abortion-isn't-right-for-me teen grrl, spoke to the modern Christian... as did the controversy that surrounded (to different extents) both films. The "Christian Dollar" is an elusive one, and the Church (as all denominations are called by the industry) is not easily courted. Which makes sense. I would suppose that Father isn't keen on dating studios (all of which are from the other side of the tracks).
We (as Christians) seem to like movies where we see our ethics come out on top. "See, Juno? Pre-martial sex was a complicated no-no, huh?" We like to see mirrors held up that we can see bits of ourselves reflected in and so justified. "See what my Christ went through? How can you not believe?!" But I find it endlessly fascinating that we tend to flock (pun intended) to the extremes. We want "Left Behind" and images of pious, pure and perfect Christians. You know... the kind that don't really exist.
There is an on-going movement by Dove (and others) to show little grrls that even rare and fabulously beautiful models and actors require an enormous amount of air-brushing. I think someone... um, maybe me, maybe you... should launch a campaign to show people, to show even other Christians, what *real* Christians look like.
Because being a Christian is being a believer in the teachings and the heart of Jesus Christ. It is being gentle. It is knowing forgiveness -- given and received. It is righteous anger. It is riotous laughter. It is freedom and confidence in our hearts. It is pushing ourselves to our full possible potential because anything less would be to fall short of what God hard-wired into our genome. Being a Christian is celebrating the temples of our body, granted by Christ, His gift to us. Elevation of music. Redemption in kisses. Hallelujah in every whispered I love you. Prayer in every moment.
The on-going conversation with Christ that includes the price of gas, the taste of bubblegum, the sound of children on the playground, the scent of new dawn, the realization when we meet the gaze of a friend that more awaits us in those quiet depths than we ever saw before.
Bear witness. Stand up for your Christ as He stood up, lay down, and rose again for you. Come out of the closet. Tell one person who didn't know that you are a Christian. But don't invite them to church. Don't spout man's scripture to them. Do it like this:
I am a raver, a biker chick, a gamer grrl, and a Christian. So yeah, that new movie does appeal to me on all sorts of levels.
...or...
That last time I had a solid KO in MMA was when this great big guy started giving me trouble because I wear a cross, cuz I'm a Christian, you know? But I've got short hair, and a grrlfriend, and I'm a chick... and he thought that didn't mesh. Like he's all into my business. That's between me and Christ.
...or...
I am not pro-choice because I believe that there are lots of choices but killing a living baby isn't one of them. However, I don't believe that candidates should be decided on one issue. I will place my vote for the person who will best guide this entire country, not just the Christian part. I am a Christian but I will not allow the pulpit to cast my vote. God gave me a brain of my own.
...or, simply...
I am a Christian. I am not a stereotype.
Real life is not about evangelic speeches. Real life is about showing, not telling. Make it real. Make it your own. Bear witness for Christ as you. Because whatever and whoever you are, if He walks with you, than you are a Christian.
EJ
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Sunday, May 03, 2009
And Suddenly, I Knew...
"How do you manage?"
"I just do."
"How do you do it?"
"You might as well ask me how I breathe."
I was raised to fight this hard.
I do not believe in raised Christians. Meaning, I do not believe that someone can be raised a Christian. They can be raised in a Christian household... but standing in a garage doesn't make you a car. I believe that Christians are grown. They evolve naturally, the way a plant is first a bloom, and then a seed, and finally a living thing.
I think we all, as human beings, grow and change over the course of our lives. We are influenced by how much sun and how much rain and how many rocks and how many weeds but most of us do manage to transform from one thing to another and another all through our years. And I think that more of us grow to be Christians than know it.
You are sitting on the rooftop at my side and you are renaming constellations, making up new mythology for them. All of your myths involve young heroes forced again and again to prove themselves to the even the people who love them. Most of your heroes are plain-looking, by your descriptions "unremarkable" or even "odd." All of your heroes are men.
As I sit silently and listen to you, just talking softly while I type with the FlipStart on my knees, I think to myself that you are a Christian and you don't even know it. This voice of guidance and solace that whispers to you in the night and in your dreams and when you lean in pointedly, is so obviously the voice of Christ. But you insist you believe nothing. When our soul leaves our body (and you do admit that the soul is part of our anatomy) it simply does something, goes somewhere but this life is all there is.
You think that makes you not a Christian.
I think that makes you content. You are unafraid to spend your days -- two or twenty thousand -- living fully in your body.
A friend says to me:
"If her touch is the height of sensation I will ever feel... if the most divine moments of my existence are beneath her hands, her mouth... than I walk willingly into any den of lions, into any fire. Christ has placed her in my life and I rejoice with every fiber of my being. I know eternity in her arms."
This is what Terrapyres are. Those children of Fallen Angels and man who are half of the Mardi Gras 3000 brand. They are my messengers. They present a type of Christianity that is alive and untamed, untethered to church or pulpit. They crackle with passion, with seize the moment, with joy. They tumble into oceans of emotion, of possibilities, of experiences and emerge, surface, better people. They cast aside the question of cultural, popular ethics and ethos and embrace transcendent living that is painful, that is brilliant, that is everything beating in their racing hearts.
I think a Christian has to be that alive. There is no such thing as an "arm chair believer."
It seems simple, but I will say it again and again:
I love your loud laughter. I love your bawdy humor. I love your harsh critique and your selfless nature. You are a small woman who takes big risks. You are a fighter, a lover, a charmer, a mother... a Christian. With leather jacket and right wristlet, in dancing, beaded braids and burning eyes, you are everything Christ demanded of us.
We need more warriors to wake up and realize that they have been Christians all along. We need more gamers to wake up and realize that they can change the world because they form their own mythos. We need to wake up and see dawn and accept it as the miracle it is.
My friend writes to me:
"Like the rain when it isn't falling across my face, like the sun on snowy nights, like the sight of the sea beyond the porch, and the crash of the waves throughout the night... I miss you. I think of you. I am not alone but I feel something is missing and it lies in the miles between us. That something is you. Sister. Soldier. Please know I am with you."
And every day when I wake, I realize I am more Awake than ever before. I am not interested in spending my days simply existing, but rather I want to be fully alive. Seize the day is too simple. I want to seize my own potential. Not do everything I want, but to do everything I do to the best of my ability -- beyond my best.
I want the rain on my face. I want the sun. I want the snowy nights. The sea. Your kiss. Your hands in my hair. The heat of our bodies. The cold of the starlight. The speed of my bike, the beat of the music. If I miss you (and I do) than I want to feel it, a tangible ache in my chest. I would rather yearn for you, my sister, my soldier, my friend, than feel nothing.
I don't think a real Christian can feel nothing.
And I have never felt more real.
EJ
"I just do."
"How do you do it?"
"You might as well ask me how I breathe."
I was raised to fight this hard.
I do not believe in raised Christians. Meaning, I do not believe that someone can be raised a Christian. They can be raised in a Christian household... but standing in a garage doesn't make you a car. I believe that Christians are grown. They evolve naturally, the way a plant is first a bloom, and then a seed, and finally a living thing.
I think we all, as human beings, grow and change over the course of our lives. We are influenced by how much sun and how much rain and how many rocks and how many weeds but most of us do manage to transform from one thing to another and another all through our years. And I think that more of us grow to be Christians than know it.
You are sitting on the rooftop at my side and you are renaming constellations, making up new mythology for them. All of your myths involve young heroes forced again and again to prove themselves to the even the people who love them. Most of your heroes are plain-looking, by your descriptions "unremarkable" or even "odd." All of your heroes are men.
As I sit silently and listen to you, just talking softly while I type with the FlipStart on my knees, I think to myself that you are a Christian and you don't even know it. This voice of guidance and solace that whispers to you in the night and in your dreams and when you lean in pointedly, is so obviously the voice of Christ. But you insist you believe nothing. When our soul leaves our body (and you do admit that the soul is part of our anatomy) it simply does something, goes somewhere but this life is all there is.
You think that makes you not a Christian.
I think that makes you content. You are unafraid to spend your days -- two or twenty thousand -- living fully in your body.
A friend says to me:
"If her touch is the height of sensation I will ever feel... if the most divine moments of my existence are beneath her hands, her mouth... than I walk willingly into any den of lions, into any fire. Christ has placed her in my life and I rejoice with every fiber of my being. I know eternity in her arms."
This is what Terrapyres are. Those children of Fallen Angels and man who are half of the Mardi Gras 3000 brand. They are my messengers. They present a type of Christianity that is alive and untamed, untethered to church or pulpit. They crackle with passion, with seize the moment, with joy. They tumble into oceans of emotion, of possibilities, of experiences and emerge, surface, better people. They cast aside the question of cultural, popular ethics and ethos and embrace transcendent living that is painful, that is brilliant, that is everything beating in their racing hearts.
I think a Christian has to be that alive. There is no such thing as an "arm chair believer."
It seems simple, but I will say it again and again:
I love your loud laughter. I love your bawdy humor. I love your harsh critique and your selfless nature. You are a small woman who takes big risks. You are a fighter, a lover, a charmer, a mother... a Christian. With leather jacket and right wristlet, in dancing, beaded braids and burning eyes, you are everything Christ demanded of us.
We need more warriors to wake up and realize that they have been Christians all along. We need more gamers to wake up and realize that they can change the world because they form their own mythos. We need to wake up and see dawn and accept it as the miracle it is.
My friend writes to me:
"Like the rain when it isn't falling across my face, like the sun on snowy nights, like the sight of the sea beyond the porch, and the crash of the waves throughout the night... I miss you. I think of you. I am not alone but I feel something is missing and it lies in the miles between us. That something is you. Sister. Soldier. Please know I am with you."
And every day when I wake, I realize I am more Awake than ever before. I am not interested in spending my days simply existing, but rather I want to be fully alive. Seize the day is too simple. I want to seize my own potential. Not do everything I want, but to do everything I do to the best of my ability -- beyond my best.
I want the rain on my face. I want the sun. I want the snowy nights. The sea. Your kiss. Your hands in my hair. The heat of our bodies. The cold of the starlight. The speed of my bike, the beat of the music. If I miss you (and I do) than I want to feel it, a tangible ache in my chest. I would rather yearn for you, my sister, my soldier, my friend, than feel nothing.
I don't think a real Christian can feel nothing.
And I have never felt more real.
EJ
Sunday, April 26, 2009
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
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
Sunday, April 19, 2009
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
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
Sunday, April 12, 2009
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
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
Sunday, April 05, 2009
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
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
Sunday, March 29, 2009
How Will They Know?
"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak up."
Pastor Martin Niemoller inspired these words with his speeches in 1946. My grandmother sat across the table from me in 1991 and spoke with quiet force, her eyes on me but her words in response to a conversation between my parents who sat with us:
“They came first for the Christians, and I did nothing because I am not a Christian. Then they came for the Blacks, and I did nothing because I am not a Black. Then they came for the women, and I did nothing because I am not a woman. When they finally came for me, there was no one left to do anything.”
I was eleven. My cheeks burned. I shook so hard I spilled my glass. I couldn't take my eyes off my grandmother. Of course, she was a Christian, and brown-skinned, and a woman. But that was not the point. The point was it means one thing to fight for someone just like us. Someone easy to love. And it means something completely different to fight for someone nothing like us at all.
Would you die for the person you despise the most?
Would you defend the person who makes your life the hardest?
It is so easy... so very easy... to bolster ourselves and attack those we hate and those who make our life harder. It is simple to hate the enemy. It is easier to rescue a friend than it is to rescue an enemy. It is simple to garner pity. It is easy to rally forces against someone who is Other Than you. We all do it. Complain about the boss with family. Nitpick a husband with friends. Gripe about the world and laws and conventions of culture at an anonymous forum. We are never at fault. We are often comforted and supported and "justified."
But it is not Christian. Nor is it excusable.
The sociological phrase is political apathy. When we only take up arms to defend those like us. The homogenized culture that will we never have in America. And PTL for that, baby, or this brown grrl wouldn't be here. Political apathy is the refusal to see community outside likeness and commonality. It is also the inability to claim identity. It is a seed for spiritual apathy.
I am...
I am...
I am not...
Socio-political labels exist so that we understand on what foundation we stand. They are not necessarily who we are. Five days after my grandmother ended that argument at the dinner table both of my parents marched in the Boston Gay Pride Parade. They were happily married all my father's life. I do not believe either of them ever thought of themselves personally as gay or lesbian. But they did consider themselves members of the GLBT community and the numerous organizations and helplines and centers they gave time and money to would certainty agree with that membership.
When we are feeling alone in the world we turn, most often, to those who are like us. Maybe they have the same skin color. Maybe the same economic status. Maybe gender, sexuality, religion. Whatever. But when we are feeling the most lost, we rarely turn to those truly alien and different. We don't want to learn and take risks. We want to be coddled and stroked. We do not turn to those who are the briers or wolves that hinder and hunt us.
But who did Christ turn to?
In the desert, in His life, in the years He walked and taught and fought on this, His own green world, did He turn again and again to those loyal and true to Him? Did He find Himself enriched by constant isolation with His inner circle of common men? Or did He turn to the thieves, the prostitutes, the lost men?
You are lost. You tear through briers to ask the wolf, “Do you know where we are?” Do you truly think the wolf would eat you when you have asked him a question?
I have not been afraid of wolves since that dinnertime with my grandmother. And though I have found that sometimes when I speak to the wolf, he still bites me, he has never taken me down. Maybe this is because I know so very strongly who I am that I am not shaken by anything anyone else might say. The bricks that make up my foundation have nice, clear, strong labels engraved on them. They are society's labels but not what society thinks they are (Christian. Grrl. Raver.). Rather they are words with my own definitions (Lover. Woman. Fighter.) that do not waiver in the quakes that life rocks me with.
Often the wolf sheds his skin to become my closest ally.
He rarely looks like me -- in or out of his hide.
I said to a friend recently, “Does your lover mind that you blog so explicitly about him?” It is beautiful, sexy, powerful, earth-shaking writing, but despite the fact that the names and places are striped away, it is *very* explicit. Hauntingly so.
My friend takes a long time to answer me. Finally he says, “The poet Minnie Bruce Pratt once asked her partner, transgendered writer and activist Leslie Feinberg, if it was alright with Leslie that Minnie wrote about them explicitly. Leslie answered, 'If you do not write of us, how will anyone know we existed?'”
We lived and loved and existed on this only green world. But we said nothing. We wrote nothing. We did nothing.
And then... none of us were left to tell our story.
I am writing on the digital cave walls.
For me. For you. For them.
Now then forever.
EJ
Pastor Martin Niemoller inspired these words with his speeches in 1946. My grandmother sat across the table from me in 1991 and spoke with quiet force, her eyes on me but her words in response to a conversation between my parents who sat with us:
“They came first for the Christians, and I did nothing because I am not a Christian. Then they came for the Blacks, and I did nothing because I am not a Black. Then they came for the women, and I did nothing because I am not a woman. When they finally came for me, there was no one left to do anything.”
I was eleven. My cheeks burned. I shook so hard I spilled my glass. I couldn't take my eyes off my grandmother. Of course, she was a Christian, and brown-skinned, and a woman. But that was not the point. The point was it means one thing to fight for someone just like us. Someone easy to love. And it means something completely different to fight for someone nothing like us at all.
Would you die for the person you despise the most?
Would you defend the person who makes your life the hardest?
It is so easy... so very easy... to bolster ourselves and attack those we hate and those who make our life harder. It is simple to hate the enemy. It is easier to rescue a friend than it is to rescue an enemy. It is simple to garner pity. It is easy to rally forces against someone who is Other Than you. We all do it. Complain about the boss with family. Nitpick a husband with friends. Gripe about the world and laws and conventions of culture at an anonymous forum. We are never at fault. We are often comforted and supported and "justified."
But it is not Christian. Nor is it excusable.
The sociological phrase is political apathy. When we only take up arms to defend those like us. The homogenized culture that will we never have in America. And PTL for that, baby, or this brown grrl wouldn't be here. Political apathy is the refusal to see community outside likeness and commonality. It is also the inability to claim identity. It is a seed for spiritual apathy.
I am...
I am...
I am not...
Socio-political labels exist so that we understand on what foundation we stand. They are not necessarily who we are. Five days after my grandmother ended that argument at the dinner table both of my parents marched in the Boston Gay Pride Parade. They were happily married all my father's life. I do not believe either of them ever thought of themselves personally as gay or lesbian. But they did consider themselves members of the GLBT community and the numerous organizations and helplines and centers they gave time and money to would certainty agree with that membership.
When we are feeling alone in the world we turn, most often, to those who are like us. Maybe they have the same skin color. Maybe the same economic status. Maybe gender, sexuality, religion. Whatever. But when we are feeling the most lost, we rarely turn to those truly alien and different. We don't want to learn and take risks. We want to be coddled and stroked. We do not turn to those who are the briers or wolves that hinder and hunt us.
But who did Christ turn to?
In the desert, in His life, in the years He walked and taught and fought on this, His own green world, did He turn again and again to those loyal and true to Him? Did He find Himself enriched by constant isolation with His inner circle of common men? Or did He turn to the thieves, the prostitutes, the lost men?
You are lost. You tear through briers to ask the wolf, “Do you know where we are?” Do you truly think the wolf would eat you when you have asked him a question?
I have not been afraid of wolves since that dinnertime with my grandmother. And though I have found that sometimes when I speak to the wolf, he still bites me, he has never taken me down. Maybe this is because I know so very strongly who I am that I am not shaken by anything anyone else might say. The bricks that make up my foundation have nice, clear, strong labels engraved on them. They are society's labels but not what society thinks they are (Christian. Grrl. Raver.). Rather they are words with my own definitions (Lover. Woman. Fighter.) that do not waiver in the quakes that life rocks me with.
Often the wolf sheds his skin to become my closest ally.
He rarely looks like me -- in or out of his hide.
I said to a friend recently, “Does your lover mind that you blog so explicitly about him?” It is beautiful, sexy, powerful, earth-shaking writing, but despite the fact that the names and places are striped away, it is *very* explicit. Hauntingly so.
My friend takes a long time to answer me. Finally he says, “The poet Minnie Bruce Pratt once asked her partner, transgendered writer and activist Leslie Feinberg, if it was alright with Leslie that Minnie wrote about them explicitly. Leslie answered, 'If you do not write of us, how will anyone know we existed?'”
We lived and loved and existed on this only green world. But we said nothing. We wrote nothing. We did nothing.
And then... none of us were left to tell our story.
I am writing on the digital cave walls.
For me. For you. For them.
Now then forever.
EJ
Sunday, March 22, 2009
You Will Hear From Me Today
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
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
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Someone Else's Touchstone
“I'm standing here until you make me move.”
I'm waiting. I'm waiting for your words. You don't know. You have no idea how much I crave the bread crumbs you sprinkle. I know they are actually stardust. You have not hidden your divinity from me. You can't. The first time I saw you cry, your tears washed away the mask. The first time I heard you scream, your anger burned down the facade. I used to pray you'd write for me. I never thought it would be like this.
I am waiting. Word of God speak.
...the music explodes in my headphones. The day seems like it took months to end. Oh dear God, I want only to hold you. Why did this Sabbath feel like so much work? The music is so loud that everyone is speaking like soundless mimes. I cannot take my eyes off you. I want to know baptism again. I choose it of my own free will, baby, as I chose it the first time...
“I'm closer to where I started
chasing after you.”
...can you read my thoughts as you read my heart? Can you recast this day for me in the eight hours before dawn? Can your touch reshape me into someone alive with joy, with passion, with strength? Will you open my eyes when you close my eyes? Will you read my desire across the scripture of my body...
“I'm falling even more in love with you.
Letting go of all I've held onto.
I'm standing here until you make me move.”
...I want to walk in the forest of your gaze. Bronze and emerald, you are tempered wild, fine sculpture in untamed domain. Sprinkle kisses along the path, little one. I will follow your lead. I will call-and-response to your gasp, your sigh, your breathless song...
“There's nothing else to lose.
There's nothing else to find.
There's nothing in the world
that can change my mind.”
And suddenly I know where I am. South by southwest, I have my North Star and she shines so blue, so cold, so sharp. I have seen the Southern Cross for the first time and since that night, tide rising, wind slicing, I have known why I came this way.
“I'm living for the only thing I know.”
There is a stone in my pocket. There has been a stone in my pocket since I was four years old. Not this stone. But a stone. Touchstone. Charged stone. Old world Christianity. “When the world gives us more than we can bare, love, we place it here,” and Grandmother tapped the small, river-rounded stone in my hand. She wiped my tears. She looked at the sky. She reached into her own pocket. She held up a single black stone. It was worn down in the middle. Like the power of rain drops, she had worn away the stone with her soft tapping, persistent touch. “Let go,” she told me and she turned and left me there. I was alone. I stared at the white stone. I tapped out my trouble like divine Morris Code. And I let go as I dropped it into my pocket.
Are we elevated from animals? Are we rulers and not ruled simply because scripture paints us that way? Or are we actually slaves to the power of the viral colony that awaits us around every unwashed public door handle? I think our lives are exactly as we make them. I think we are rulers of nothing but ourselves and guardians of everything else.
Action, reaction, chain-reaction. I am only the sum of what I hold. I am only the interwoven fingers of the hand I'm holding.
“What are you writing?”
“My Sunday sermon.”
“Do you have something to say?”
“I always have something to say, Summer.”
And the windows are open. The doves are making sounds. It is raining. There is rain on the tile floor. There is rain on my skin. Still hot from the shower. All the windows stand open. All the windows... there is no difference. Inside or outside. Night sky, skylights. I am just standing here, as seen and as hidden as anywhere else.
“Do you have anything to say?”
“I always have something to say, Lord.”
And we walked at dawn. The street was ugly. The concrete cracked from a long winter and a bad thaw. You handed me a stone from your pocket. The tears on your face were the silent kind I used to watch my father cry. You didn't need to tell me it was a touchstone. I took it and a shock ran up my arm and down my spine. “I can't carry it any longer,” you thought but I heard the words as clearly as I saw the fast moving clouds, white strands of eternity, across that pale morning sky. I slipped the stone into my pocket. It was heavy. It was beautiful. It was horrible. It now was mine.
We must surround ourselves with companions willing to recast our day for us over and over again. To reset the line of truth. To recharge the heart. We must do the same for them.
“What's new?”
“I hate the word 'actually.'”
“Hm.”
I am confident enough to be silent. I am sure enough to enjoy listening to another person talk. I do not have to weigh in. I like watching the way a mouth moves to form words only a moment after the brain has formed them. I have no desire to correct someone. I open my mouth when I am able to say, “Oh! That is something new. Thank you.” I have no interest in using my voice to prove to the world how great I am.
Whose life are you recasting? Who do you sprinkle stardust for?
“She has a lock of hair in her pocket
and a cross around her neck.
The hair is from a little boy
and the cross from someone she hasn't met yet.
She says she talks to angels
and they call her by her name.”
Christ, sometimes I cannot carry it all. Sometimes I cannot see my personal sky. Sometimes I am afraid to ask you because I am scared of what you will tell me. I am not ashamed not to have all the answers... I would be ashamed if I didn't fight and bleed to find them.
*whispering* Lord? Here I am...
Sometimes it is so much better to shut my mouth, open my ears and nod my head. Sometimes it is so much easier to carry the stone for someone else. I grow more when I listen than when I talk. I make a difference when I accomplish the impossible and tell no one but my God.
*whispering* ...covered in your rain...
Take a step. Keep stepping until it is no longer easy. Draw your own map and then make it real. Take a hand. Keep holding until it is no longer easy. Draw another's heart and then recharge it.
*whispering* ...it feels so right to remake my world.
When we reach out to the person least likely... when we see with another person's eyes... when we truly come to know our opposition... we finally see through the mirror clearly. We become full. We grasp the touchstone and shock runs through our body. We see for the first time.
We grow up.
When life becomes difficult, we become Christian.
EJ
Grandmother? I would have carried your stone. I wish, so often, that you had burdened me.
I'm waiting. I'm waiting for your words. You don't know. You have no idea how much I crave the bread crumbs you sprinkle. I know they are actually stardust. You have not hidden your divinity from me. You can't. The first time I saw you cry, your tears washed away the mask. The first time I heard you scream, your anger burned down the facade. I used to pray you'd write for me. I never thought it would be like this.
I am waiting. Word of God speak.
...the music explodes in my headphones. The day seems like it took months to end. Oh dear God, I want only to hold you. Why did this Sabbath feel like so much work? The music is so loud that everyone is speaking like soundless mimes. I cannot take my eyes off you. I want to know baptism again. I choose it of my own free will, baby, as I chose it the first time...
“I'm closer to where I started
chasing after you.”
...can you read my thoughts as you read my heart? Can you recast this day for me in the eight hours before dawn? Can your touch reshape me into someone alive with joy, with passion, with strength? Will you open my eyes when you close my eyes? Will you read my desire across the scripture of my body...
“I'm falling even more in love with you.
Letting go of all I've held onto.
I'm standing here until you make me move.”
...I want to walk in the forest of your gaze. Bronze and emerald, you are tempered wild, fine sculpture in untamed domain. Sprinkle kisses along the path, little one. I will follow your lead. I will call-and-response to your gasp, your sigh, your breathless song...
“There's nothing else to lose.
There's nothing else to find.
There's nothing in the world
that can change my mind.”
And suddenly I know where I am. South by southwest, I have my North Star and she shines so blue, so cold, so sharp. I have seen the Southern Cross for the first time and since that night, tide rising, wind slicing, I have known why I came this way.
“I'm living for the only thing I know.”
There is a stone in my pocket. There has been a stone in my pocket since I was four years old. Not this stone. But a stone. Touchstone. Charged stone. Old world Christianity. “When the world gives us more than we can bare, love, we place it here,” and Grandmother tapped the small, river-rounded stone in my hand. She wiped my tears. She looked at the sky. She reached into her own pocket. She held up a single black stone. It was worn down in the middle. Like the power of rain drops, she had worn away the stone with her soft tapping, persistent touch. “Let go,” she told me and she turned and left me there. I was alone. I stared at the white stone. I tapped out my trouble like divine Morris Code. And I let go as I dropped it into my pocket.
Are we elevated from animals? Are we rulers and not ruled simply because scripture paints us that way? Or are we actually slaves to the power of the viral colony that awaits us around every unwashed public door handle? I think our lives are exactly as we make them. I think we are rulers of nothing but ourselves and guardians of everything else.
Action, reaction, chain-reaction. I am only the sum of what I hold. I am only the interwoven fingers of the hand I'm holding.
“What are you writing?”
“My Sunday sermon.”
“Do you have something to say?”
“I always have something to say, Summer.”
And the windows are open. The doves are making sounds. It is raining. There is rain on the tile floor. There is rain on my skin. Still hot from the shower. All the windows stand open. All the windows... there is no difference. Inside or outside. Night sky, skylights. I am just standing here, as seen and as hidden as anywhere else.
“Do you have anything to say?”
“I always have something to say, Lord.”
And we walked at dawn. The street was ugly. The concrete cracked from a long winter and a bad thaw. You handed me a stone from your pocket. The tears on your face were the silent kind I used to watch my father cry. You didn't need to tell me it was a touchstone. I took it and a shock ran up my arm and down my spine. “I can't carry it any longer,” you thought but I heard the words as clearly as I saw the fast moving clouds, white strands of eternity, across that pale morning sky. I slipped the stone into my pocket. It was heavy. It was beautiful. It was horrible. It now was mine.
We must surround ourselves with companions willing to recast our day for us over and over again. To reset the line of truth. To recharge the heart. We must do the same for them.
“What's new?”
“I hate the word 'actually.'”
“Hm.”
I am confident enough to be silent. I am sure enough to enjoy listening to another person talk. I do not have to weigh in. I like watching the way a mouth moves to form words only a moment after the brain has formed them. I have no desire to correct someone. I open my mouth when I am able to say, “Oh! That is something new. Thank you.” I have no interest in using my voice to prove to the world how great I am.
Whose life are you recasting? Who do you sprinkle stardust for?
“She has a lock of hair in her pocket
and a cross around her neck.
The hair is from a little boy
and the cross from someone she hasn't met yet.
She says she talks to angels
and they call her by her name.”
Christ, sometimes I cannot carry it all. Sometimes I cannot see my personal sky. Sometimes I am afraid to ask you because I am scared of what you will tell me. I am not ashamed not to have all the answers... I would be ashamed if I didn't fight and bleed to find them.
*whispering* Lord? Here I am...
Sometimes it is so much better to shut my mouth, open my ears and nod my head. Sometimes it is so much easier to carry the stone for someone else. I grow more when I listen than when I talk. I make a difference when I accomplish the impossible and tell no one but my God.
*whispering* ...covered in your rain...
Take a step. Keep stepping until it is no longer easy. Draw your own map and then make it real. Take a hand. Keep holding until it is no longer easy. Draw another's heart and then recharge it.
*whispering* ...it feels so right to remake my world.
When we reach out to the person least likely... when we see with another person's eyes... when we truly come to know our opposition... we finally see through the mirror clearly. We become full. We grasp the touchstone and shock runs through our body. We see for the first time.
We grow up.
When life becomes difficult, we become Christian.
EJ
Grandmother? I would have carried your stone. I wish, so often, that you had burdened me.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Making a Difference
Like with love, it begins with yourself.
And the music carries me. Cresting, crashing, falling down. Your hands are in my back pockets. Our belt buckles click together. Yours is a wolf. Mine is a star. You murmur, not a whisper, something more certain, like the confidence in your eyes: “I know where we can go.”
The hall is long and dark and narrow. Rebirth. Reborn as someone else. Someone no one here knows. An eight hour flight was never so worth it. You turn and smooth down my Silence = Death t-shirt. “It suits you,” you say somewhere left of my ear. You push my hair over my shoulder. I just look at you. You know my answer.
We turn onto the dance floor. Blackness in the middle of the Sabbath day. Shot in time with the beat with red, blue, green, gold. So many have come to worship this way. Someone... several someones are shouting call and response to the live DJ. I count a few rosaries but mostly the accessories of the faith glow neon or glint gold. Hm. Grrl... you sure know how to find a club. And you know it. You walk backwards, away from me, melting into the crowd, disappearing. You mouth, “Told ya... *Angel*....” Your dark hair braided into three dozen braids on the flight here falls forward, hiding eyes that burn.
We are not here together.
I am alone. I am perfect. I am with my Lord. I move into the crowd, arms up, boots stomping, already dancing.
Tokyo. Not today. Not NYC like now. It was Tokyo and I was running away from myself. Oh, dear Lord. *So* not like now. I just wanted to get away from LA. From the looks I found myself getting and receiving. From the words that all my “friends” were squinting and shaking their heads at me about. It was the first and last time I joined a Bible study group. Oh Christ... I had no idea how much damage it would do, it did, until years after the fact. Those tiny minds undid years of truths. Just reached into my heart....
Tokyo. It was cold. The club was hot. The cover was high. The floor was packed. The music was hard techno pop, raging beat, shotgun lyrics. I was there fifteen minutes when a dancer (boy? grrl?) offered me a tab and I considered it for the first time in my life. I was running so hard, so far, so fast. I wanted to lose myself... this waking up self. I said no. Thank you, God.
I danced. I danced and cried and prayed. At some point there was a pair of deep brown eyes, short spiked black hair frosted neon blue. There were hands unbuttoning my crisp white button up. The white tails fluttered at my hips, spun out behind me, brushing black leather pants. Angel wings. “Angel...” a whisper. I danced.
Lord...
I didn't ask for this.
I didn't look for this.
Slumbering in my chest.
It kills me to deny it.
It closes me down.
It spins me inward.
I want to open my arms.
Give me the courage.
Open my eyes.
Touch me.
I am alone.
Just you.
Just me.
Touch me.
Take me.
“You talk about Christ like a lover.”
“He is.”
“You talk about making love like prayer.”
“It is.”
“You see Him differently than I do.”
“Absolutely... PTL.”
Freezing Rain. Cherry Blossoms. On the Speedway. Move. Blast My Desire. Around the World. World's End. My Sweetest Nightmare. Dogfight. Hard dance songs. Techno crash. I imagine on a global stage, Terrapyres dance to music like this. Maybe they had their origins that night. That idea of angels finding Christ on the dance floor, or swimming in beat and bass line and searing vocals. Music is my blood and baptism. I find Christ beneath, behind, inside the music far more often than I find Him in the hollow words of any man. Here is primal and my Christ is primal.
Tokyo. I cried, “Show me!” Take me. Touch me. I will do the work. I will do the work. I. Will. Do. The. Work.
And He did. He reached down and touched me. Took my heart, that sheltered little grrl who was welding steel around herself, and with the strength of only my Lord, He shattered the armor and opened my heart to myself. I was alone. On that dance floor, in the world, I was alone. Just Him. Just me.
I don't need anyone else to know who I am.
And I did the work. First the body and then the mind. I gained fifteen pounds of muscle (which I needed). I gained an inch of height (by standing up straight). I walked five miles five times a week. I planted a garden, my hands in rich soil like life. I boxed three times a week, forty-five minutes hard.
I changed me. I celebrated Christ in me. I would not waste this gift, not this body, not one heartbeat, not one day. No motivator but my faith. I need no guide other than my Lord in my heart, in my ear, walking at my side.
And I did the work. Second the mind. I read a new book every week. Nonfiction. Theory. Fiction. Raw. Real. I opened my eyes to my world, to my politics, to my reality. I broke open everything I thought I knew. I wrote. Journaling first because that's what chicks do, and then blogging, cuz that's what everyone does, and then I pushed and Christ pushed back and I was writing to touch hearts and save souls. And Mardi Gras 3000 crested like a dream.
The music is in my bones now. Nothing quite like NYC clubs on the Sabbath. I am sure of myself when I walk out of man's world and into God's world. I could have gone mountain climbing. I could have scaled a rock. I could have chartered a boat and gone diving. I could have walked into any bar and picked a fight LOL! But the view here is so much nicer.
It was Tokyo and the rain was cold. It was Tokyo and I had certainly gone to the ends of the Earth to escape something that I carried within me. I felt branded...
...and now I feel branded. Marked forever. Touched by the flame of God. This brand is His mark. I accept my nature. I embrace who I am and what that means and what I must do. Word of God has spoken. And this angel dances. Sweet Christ, I'm dancing.
Remind me, Lord.
Of who I am.
Don't allow me
to run to hide
to waste the breath
you have given me.
Knock me down
so that I remember
how to stand back up.
I found myself
so as not to be lost.
You are my shepherd.
No one else.
I am
standing
dancing.
Warrior, heal thy self.
Less than 21,000 genomes make up every single living creature on this only green world. The same 21,000 genomes. Human beings do not have a single unique genome. Period. As in nature so in man. As in nature so in God. Stop just reading it, over and over again, and start believing it. Start feeling it. Start breathing it.
Start preaching it.
We are all the same 21,000 words written into just less than seven billion books. We are all the same words... each telling a different story.
Are you sharing your story?
EJ
And the music carries me. Cresting, crashing, falling down. Your hands are in my back pockets. Our belt buckles click together. Yours is a wolf. Mine is a star. You murmur, not a whisper, something more certain, like the confidence in your eyes: “I know where we can go.”
The hall is long and dark and narrow. Rebirth. Reborn as someone else. Someone no one here knows. An eight hour flight was never so worth it. You turn and smooth down my Silence = Death t-shirt. “It suits you,” you say somewhere left of my ear. You push my hair over my shoulder. I just look at you. You know my answer.
We turn onto the dance floor. Blackness in the middle of the Sabbath day. Shot in time with the beat with red, blue, green, gold. So many have come to worship this way. Someone... several someones are shouting call and response to the live DJ. I count a few rosaries but mostly the accessories of the faith glow neon or glint gold. Hm. Grrl... you sure know how to find a club. And you know it. You walk backwards, away from me, melting into the crowd, disappearing. You mouth, “Told ya... *Angel*....” Your dark hair braided into three dozen braids on the flight here falls forward, hiding eyes that burn.
We are not here together.
I am alone. I am perfect. I am with my Lord. I move into the crowd, arms up, boots stomping, already dancing.
Tokyo. Not today. Not NYC like now. It was Tokyo and I was running away from myself. Oh, dear Lord. *So* not like now. I just wanted to get away from LA. From the looks I found myself getting and receiving. From the words that all my “friends” were squinting and shaking their heads at me about. It was the first and last time I joined a Bible study group. Oh Christ... I had no idea how much damage it would do, it did, until years after the fact. Those tiny minds undid years of truths. Just reached into my heart....
Tokyo. It was cold. The club was hot. The cover was high. The floor was packed. The music was hard techno pop, raging beat, shotgun lyrics. I was there fifteen minutes when a dancer (boy? grrl?) offered me a tab and I considered it for the first time in my life. I was running so hard, so far, so fast. I wanted to lose myself... this waking up self. I said no. Thank you, God.
I danced. I danced and cried and prayed. At some point there was a pair of deep brown eyes, short spiked black hair frosted neon blue. There were hands unbuttoning my crisp white button up. The white tails fluttered at my hips, spun out behind me, brushing black leather pants. Angel wings. “Angel...” a whisper. I danced.
Lord...
I didn't ask for this.
I didn't look for this.
Slumbering in my chest.
It kills me to deny it.
It closes me down.
It spins me inward.
I want to open my arms.
Give me the courage.
Open my eyes.
Touch me.
I am alone.
Just you.
Just me.
Touch me.
Take me.
“You talk about Christ like a lover.”
“He is.”
“You talk about making love like prayer.”
“It is.”
“You see Him differently than I do.”
“Absolutely... PTL.”
Freezing Rain. Cherry Blossoms. On the Speedway. Move. Blast My Desire. Around the World. World's End. My Sweetest Nightmare. Dogfight. Hard dance songs. Techno crash. I imagine on a global stage, Terrapyres dance to music like this. Maybe they had their origins that night. That idea of angels finding Christ on the dance floor, or swimming in beat and bass line and searing vocals. Music is my blood and baptism. I find Christ beneath, behind, inside the music far more often than I find Him in the hollow words of any man. Here is primal and my Christ is primal.
Tokyo. I cried, “Show me!” Take me. Touch me. I will do the work. I will do the work. I. Will. Do. The. Work.
And He did. He reached down and touched me. Took my heart, that sheltered little grrl who was welding steel around herself, and with the strength of only my Lord, He shattered the armor and opened my heart to myself. I was alone. On that dance floor, in the world, I was alone. Just Him. Just me.
I don't need anyone else to know who I am.
And I did the work. First the body and then the mind. I gained fifteen pounds of muscle (which I needed). I gained an inch of height (by standing up straight). I walked five miles five times a week. I planted a garden, my hands in rich soil like life. I boxed three times a week, forty-five minutes hard.
I changed me. I celebrated Christ in me. I would not waste this gift, not this body, not one heartbeat, not one day. No motivator but my faith. I need no guide other than my Lord in my heart, in my ear, walking at my side.
And I did the work. Second the mind. I read a new book every week. Nonfiction. Theory. Fiction. Raw. Real. I opened my eyes to my world, to my politics, to my reality. I broke open everything I thought I knew. I wrote. Journaling first because that's what chicks do, and then blogging, cuz that's what everyone does, and then I pushed and Christ pushed back and I was writing to touch hearts and save souls. And Mardi Gras 3000 crested like a dream.
The music is in my bones now. Nothing quite like NYC clubs on the Sabbath. I am sure of myself when I walk out of man's world and into God's world. I could have gone mountain climbing. I could have scaled a rock. I could have chartered a boat and gone diving. I could have walked into any bar and picked a fight LOL! But the view here is so much nicer.
It was Tokyo and the rain was cold. It was Tokyo and I had certainly gone to the ends of the Earth to escape something that I carried within me. I felt branded...
...and now I feel branded. Marked forever. Touched by the flame of God. This brand is His mark. I accept my nature. I embrace who I am and what that means and what I must do. Word of God has spoken. And this angel dances. Sweet Christ, I'm dancing.
Remind me, Lord.
Of who I am.
Don't allow me
to run to hide
to waste the breath
you have given me.
Knock me down
so that I remember
how to stand back up.
I found myself
so as not to be lost.
You are my shepherd.
No one else.
I am
standing
dancing.
Warrior, heal thy self.
Less than 21,000 genomes make up every single living creature on this only green world. The same 21,000 genomes. Human beings do not have a single unique genome. Period. As in nature so in man. As in nature so in God. Stop just reading it, over and over again, and start believing it. Start feeling it. Start breathing it.
Start preaching it.
We are all the same 21,000 words written into just less than seven billion books. We are all the same words... each telling a different story.
Are you sharing your story?
EJ
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Black Sky, Red Silk
You think, in the cold and the dark, the wind that bites -- winter fighting back -- the clouds that spin, that I perhaps do not think of you. That I am lost to the concrete forest. My love, my friend, my angel, guardian, lady. You drift, ebbing with the tides, and when others deconstruct and turn their lives upside down and inside out to change like origami birds, to take flight, to soar, you ride the swells and gaze at the sky.
Or perhaps, beloved, you do not gaze at the sky enough. For if you did, if you were, if your eyes were on the sky as much as mine are than you would know:
I love you like sunlight on the sea. Like swift white clouds, thin and spread like feathers. I love you like the wet stones of the shore at Second Beach, cast there to tell my fortune.
I want you like candle flame, the heavy egg-shaped votive burning in my palm. I want you to tell me yes as you have never before. I am done writing stories; I want you on fire for me as I am for you. Want to dance these flames together. Amen.
I miss you as if I am dead. I am controlled and working hard, throwing myself into everything like there is nothing else. Showing half-a-hundred strangers around me that I can meet every demand. I miss you because I miss us and so I miss myself. I walk unknown here -- for my passion for you is not a label for me. It is part of who I am. The heart of me.
Will you recognize me in this new-found militance?
I read between the lines when you write for me. I buy a red silk scarf and tie it snug, a right wristband, caressed for hours beneath my fingertips. I think perhaps we match now, yes? No, not a scarf there, I know... but something else, something more fitting... but this love, this passion, this heart... it is the same.
Look up, my lady. Look up.
Do you see how much you are loved?
Or perhaps, beloved, you do not gaze at the sky enough. For if you did, if you were, if your eyes were on the sky as much as mine are than you would know:
I love you like sunlight on the sea. Like swift white clouds, thin and spread like feathers. I love you like the wet stones of the shore at Second Beach, cast there to tell my fortune.
I want you like candle flame, the heavy egg-shaped votive burning in my palm. I want you to tell me yes as you have never before. I am done writing stories; I want you on fire for me as I am for you. Want to dance these flames together. Amen.
I miss you as if I am dead. I am controlled and working hard, throwing myself into everything like there is nothing else. Showing half-a-hundred strangers around me that I can meet every demand. I miss you because I miss us and so I miss myself. I walk unknown here -- for my passion for you is not a label for me. It is part of who I am. The heart of me.
Will you recognize me in this new-found militance?
I read between the lines when you write for me. I buy a red silk scarf and tie it snug, a right wristband, caressed for hours beneath my fingertips. I think perhaps we match now, yes? No, not a scarf there, I know... but something else, something more fitting... but this love, this passion, this heart... it is the same.
Look up, my lady. Look up.
Do you see how much you are loved?
Sunday, March 01, 2009
If You Aren't Rejoicing...
...you don't know what's going on.
Shh. Quiet now. Let me bring you there.
I once promised you that I wouldn't publish poetry on Sunday. This was a day to sermonize. To guide and council. This was my day to be an angel.
But I am not interested in Puritanical angels. They bore me and rarely leave evidence of their passing. Plus, if the stain glass windows are right, they're all very, very white, and baby, last time I checked, I was more cinnamon than driven snow.
Tonight, stars spinning above me, clouds fast across this open desert so bracing cold... tonight, surrounded by brush and cactus and night time creatures that can find me so much easier than my human handlers... tonight, with my player shuffling the same five songs... tonight, I am caught, captured and held by you. I am alone with my Christ and whispers of divinity, falling like stardust.
The roaring riffs
of sweet salvation
in cascading
tumble-tight lyrics
that carry me to
another place and
wash over me like
baptism, like
rain showers like
storms in the air
around me
inside me
lifting me up
taking me down
... oh dear God
I just described
how I feel
when you touch me.
Christ Almighty, you placed us here. You laid us here in the double helix of who we are and what we can be to each other. What cell holds gentleness? They have mapped the one that holds song. Where in my muscles does this desire for you slumber then jump, alert, alive, aching when I look into your eyes? Sweet Christ, this is how you have made us. This is how you have spun still matter into flesh, bone and thought all wrapped around twenty-one grams of soul. You have made us able to write words erotic, romantic, touching, inciting. You have made us able to touch so softly we trace fingerprints, or to possess so fully we are shaken and left shaking.
In my celebration of you, I celebrate this body. In my honoring of you, I honor this body. To deny my heart is to deny you and I will never deny you. Lord? I am shouting from mountain tops. I rejoice to find you... find myself... find us together.
You are born
of sound, my
music made flesh
of beat and bass
the bright
sharp brilliant
edge of you
beneath my
praying tongue.
You are born
of the ocean
the cresting
waves calling
whispering
shouting my
name throughout
the cold night
meeting
the cool dawn
burning in
your arms.
I promised you only poetry on Thursdays. Sermons on Sunday. But there are some messages that can only be given in verse. There are some promises that can only be exchanged in touch. Sometimes we must embrace the truth that there is a time and a medium and a reason for everything. It is written into our genetic scripture. It is coded and expressed, activated and mutated just for me, just for you, just for this love that beats between us, Christ. There are times when the educated sentence fails us. It only confines. Free form, freefall, is the only way.
Christ coded our genome. Christ coded this universe. If you think you know, you don't. If you think you're right, you're wrong. It is all a mystery. It is all a hundred times more than our wildest discovery.
There are at least ten thousand ways to love somebody.
And I
have never
loved you more.
For your strength
for your fire
for your constance.
And I
sometimes
know so very
little, but only
that I love you.
That I would do
anything for you.
That I could be
that I will be
that I am
anything that
you need.
EJ
Shh. Quiet now. Let me bring you there.
I once promised you that I wouldn't publish poetry on Sunday. This was a day to sermonize. To guide and council. This was my day to be an angel.
But I am not interested in Puritanical angels. They bore me and rarely leave evidence of their passing. Plus, if the stain glass windows are right, they're all very, very white, and baby, last time I checked, I was more cinnamon than driven snow.
Tonight, stars spinning above me, clouds fast across this open desert so bracing cold... tonight, surrounded by brush and cactus and night time creatures that can find me so much easier than my human handlers... tonight, with my player shuffling the same five songs... tonight, I am caught, captured and held by you. I am alone with my Christ and whispers of divinity, falling like stardust.
The roaring riffs
of sweet salvation
in cascading
tumble-tight lyrics
that carry me to
another place and
wash over me like
baptism, like
rain showers like
storms in the air
around me
inside me
lifting me up
taking me down
... oh dear God
I just described
how I feel
when you touch me.
Christ Almighty, you placed us here. You laid us here in the double helix of who we are and what we can be to each other. What cell holds gentleness? They have mapped the one that holds song. Where in my muscles does this desire for you slumber then jump, alert, alive, aching when I look into your eyes? Sweet Christ, this is how you have made us. This is how you have spun still matter into flesh, bone and thought all wrapped around twenty-one grams of soul. You have made us able to write words erotic, romantic, touching, inciting. You have made us able to touch so softly we trace fingerprints, or to possess so fully we are shaken and left shaking.
In my celebration of you, I celebrate this body. In my honoring of you, I honor this body. To deny my heart is to deny you and I will never deny you. Lord? I am shouting from mountain tops. I rejoice to find you... find myself... find us together.
You are born
of sound, my
music made flesh
of beat and bass
the bright
sharp brilliant
edge of you
beneath my
praying tongue.
You are born
of the ocean
the cresting
waves calling
whispering
shouting my
name throughout
the cold night
meeting
the cool dawn
burning in
your arms.
I promised you only poetry on Thursdays. Sermons on Sunday. But there are some messages that can only be given in verse. There are some promises that can only be exchanged in touch. Sometimes we must embrace the truth that there is a time and a medium and a reason for everything. It is written into our genetic scripture. It is coded and expressed, activated and mutated just for me, just for you, just for this love that beats between us, Christ. There are times when the educated sentence fails us. It only confines. Free form, freefall, is the only way.
Christ coded our genome. Christ coded this universe. If you think you know, you don't. If you think you're right, you're wrong. It is all a mystery. It is all a hundred times more than our wildest discovery.
There are at least ten thousand ways to love somebody.
And I
have never
loved you more.
For your strength
for your fire
for your constance.
And I
sometimes
know so very
little, but only
that I love you.
That I would do
anything for you.
That I could be
that I will be
that I am
anything that
you need.
EJ
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
I like to turn all the lights off and wait to see what happens. The cold dread, the spectral fingers on the back of my neck, the sense of a presence in the room -- these things have not happened since I was nine years old. Like the wonder and mystery of deja vu being shattered by the simple truth that it is a chemical loop in the brain, I sometimes miss those very early nights when I was certain that something dangerous lurked in waiting for me.
It should surprise no one (certainly not my parents) that I grew up to be a danger addict with more bones broken than years lived and a complete willingness to do any physical feat that excites me as long as it doesn't put another person at risk. And as for what excites me? Hm. That would make this blog very, very long... and require me to climb down from this roof top, jump over to the next one, shimmy off the side and slink back around to my new bike for jelly beans. Cuz, baby? I'm gonna need a snack if I'm gonna be here that long.
The darkness of a room or the night doesn't scare me any more. The idea of being stabbed or raped or robbed on a city street doesn't amuse me much but I'm not talking about that darkness. I'm talking about the darkness of a room or our homes where we know very well we are safe and sound, the door locked and the windows too. I'm talking about the darkness of a bedroom, quilt over our heads, nervous to turn off the reading light and make every draped shirt a creature reaching through the shadows.
Memory of You... I come downstairs. My bare feet soundless. I am listening to you wash dishes in the light of a full moon. You leave every light off. The whole house is silent except for the water running and the sound of my heartbeat in my ears. I turn into the kitchen. I stand in the doorway. I watch you from behind and I wonder how many women have stood and watched you across a room in the dark. I feel something just shy of predatory...
Are we afraid of those monsters and unknowns because we know *something* must exist other than we? Something must exist, surely, beyond this reality of work and money and petty tones of voice. Something... oh... anything, please! Or are we afraid that *nothing* else is there? Nothing at all. This is it. Seize it. You didn't? Too bad. That was it. Right... there. Gone.
We rush from darken rooms. We turn on lights at night. We carry flashlights. We stumble up stairs wondering what is behind us. We cling to beliefs that grant us epic fantasies and call them religion. We pray to an entity we call God as if He is corporeal and we are able to comprehend Him. But the truth is so much more complicated. The truth is not fairytales for children to soothe them into sweet dreams.
When will we wake up from childhood? When are we ready for the truth?
Memory of Me... I am thirsty. Not like I have ever felt before. I dreamt of music. I dreamt of lights. I am nine years old. My white and red pjs were soaked with sweat and I strip them off in the darkness. My night light has burned out. The moon is black and new. I am so thirsty. I don't want water. But it will have to do because I do not know the name of what I desire. I am a child. No one has told me the words yet. I walk out of my room and into the silent house...
What if the twenty-one grams we lose at death are just returning to whence they came? What if we are all possessed with twenty-one grams of electrical, biological, sentient life and, when this clay dies, we snap back to being with God... to being that force that supports and enables God... to dancing with bosons and demi quarks... stretching thin together like solar sails to glide across this fine cosmos. What if...?
I don't believe in heaven. Nor do I believe in hell. I have never believed that Thor makes lightning or that Athena lept, fully formed, from the head of her father. I do believe that Christ changed the world. I do believe that He hears my prayers. That He answers. That He speaks. I know that the human race did not begin with Adam and Eve. That Mary had never lain with a man in order to be with child. I know that my Christ died a mortal death, bloody and in tears on a cross and that He rose again, unable or unwilling to let go of His twenty-one grams until He finished the circle on the greatest story to ever be told.
Memory of You... You turn off the water. You are pulling off rubber gloves. Looking into the steel basin, now empty. I step into the room. The wood floor is cold. I don't blink. I come close enough to take in musky, rich scent of your hair. The sound of your breathing. My lips part to say your name and you look up. My intent to speak has alerted you to my presence. You meet the gaze of my reflection in the window in front of you. You do not turn to face me. Instead of your name I say, "Did I startle you?" You are silent. There is a long passage of time. You turn. The hem of your sweater jacket brushes my arm. Your eyes, blue-black... undo me. You turn your hands palm up at your hips. You tilt your head to the side in slow motion. You set your jaw, say, "Did I startle you?"
Tucked into easy categories and wrapped in careful mythologies, we want to sing hymns and know that this isn't everything. We want to live right and be rewarded. And just like some little children are happy with a hug and others want candy and still another demands expensive electronics, each of us look for the reward that fits our temperament. Even those of us who walk away from or pretend not to seek religion still search for the reward of living. Look up which religions are the fastest growing. One is even so fast that its founder said he rivaled even Christ. How's that for diverse choices?
In the darkness, what are we afraid waits for us? The truth?
"…For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect, and anticipate their great shame, and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support. We’ve got to have equal rights for everyone." (Sean Penn, accepting the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of equal rights activist Harvey Milk.)
In the darkness, where our hands become our eyes, where my touch across your skin is sacred and burns sweet as rebirth, what are we afraid of? That with hands, fingertips, mouth and tongue we will discover the lies in the doctrine? That we will find the cracks in the logic of these human mythologies? If you come for me, like God's own shooting star, like comets that cycle and return, do you think you will wake up somewhere else completely without a road map... or perhaps without a torch to show your way? Is this love not truth enough?
"When I was thirteen years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas, to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life; it gave me the hope that one day I could live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married… Most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us thirty years ago, I think he’d want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by their churches, or by the government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value. And that no matter what everyone tells you, God does love you, and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours." (Dustin Lance Black, accepting the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for "Milk")
Memory of Me... The house was full of shadows. Was I sleeping still? Was I walking through the cold house nude and skinny and afraid? Every corner, every plant and picture and side table I had known all my life was a creature or presence waiting to touch me with unworldly hands. I was alone on the planet. I was driven to keep moving but only because it was so essential to drink. I knew I would surely die if I could not drink. Through the living room, the carpet beneath my feet... the big windows, tall and showing only night... He stood right there. Between me and the kitchen. Just... stood. He could have been a friend of my parents, dark skin, dark eyes, crisp hair. He could have been my brother. Deja vu. I stood and looked up at Him. Deja vu. I stood. He was so normal. So natural. He just... stood.
And I got it.
And I wasn't afraid any more.
Now, turn off the lights.
EJ
If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.
Christ didn't turn tables in the temple because He wasn't a proponent of activism.
"There are a multitude of reasons why marriage equality lost in November. The one I keep coming back to is a failure to cast the role of the villain in the battle against Prop 8. Unlike Prop 6 in 1978, there was no John Briggs to debate, and no Anita Bryant to galvanize our base. Instead in 2008 we had the Catholic and Mormon church, two amorphous beasts that were nearly impossible to vilify in the minds of the public." (www.inlookout.com)
It should surprise no one (certainly not my parents) that I grew up to be a danger addict with more bones broken than years lived and a complete willingness to do any physical feat that excites me as long as it doesn't put another person at risk. And as for what excites me? Hm. That would make this blog very, very long... and require me to climb down from this roof top, jump over to the next one, shimmy off the side and slink back around to my new bike for jelly beans. Cuz, baby? I'm gonna need a snack if I'm gonna be here that long.
The darkness of a room or the night doesn't scare me any more. The idea of being stabbed or raped or robbed on a city street doesn't amuse me much but I'm not talking about that darkness. I'm talking about the darkness of a room or our homes where we know very well we are safe and sound, the door locked and the windows too. I'm talking about the darkness of a bedroom, quilt over our heads, nervous to turn off the reading light and make every draped shirt a creature reaching through the shadows.
Memory of You... I come downstairs. My bare feet soundless. I am listening to you wash dishes in the light of a full moon. You leave every light off. The whole house is silent except for the water running and the sound of my heartbeat in my ears. I turn into the kitchen. I stand in the doorway. I watch you from behind and I wonder how many women have stood and watched you across a room in the dark. I feel something just shy of predatory...
Are we afraid of those monsters and unknowns because we know *something* must exist other than we? Something must exist, surely, beyond this reality of work and money and petty tones of voice. Something... oh... anything, please! Or are we afraid that *nothing* else is there? Nothing at all. This is it. Seize it. You didn't? Too bad. That was it. Right... there. Gone.
We rush from darken rooms. We turn on lights at night. We carry flashlights. We stumble up stairs wondering what is behind us. We cling to beliefs that grant us epic fantasies and call them religion. We pray to an entity we call God as if He is corporeal and we are able to comprehend Him. But the truth is so much more complicated. The truth is not fairytales for children to soothe them into sweet dreams.
When will we wake up from childhood? When are we ready for the truth?
Memory of Me... I am thirsty. Not like I have ever felt before. I dreamt of music. I dreamt of lights. I am nine years old. My white and red pjs were soaked with sweat and I strip them off in the darkness. My night light has burned out. The moon is black and new. I am so thirsty. I don't want water. But it will have to do because I do not know the name of what I desire. I am a child. No one has told me the words yet. I walk out of my room and into the silent house...
What if the twenty-one grams we lose at death are just returning to whence they came? What if we are all possessed with twenty-one grams of electrical, biological, sentient life and, when this clay dies, we snap back to being with God... to being that force that supports and enables God... to dancing with bosons and demi quarks... stretching thin together like solar sails to glide across this fine cosmos. What if...?
I don't believe in heaven. Nor do I believe in hell. I have never believed that Thor makes lightning or that Athena lept, fully formed, from the head of her father. I do believe that Christ changed the world. I do believe that He hears my prayers. That He answers. That He speaks. I know that the human race did not begin with Adam and Eve. That Mary had never lain with a man in order to be with child. I know that my Christ died a mortal death, bloody and in tears on a cross and that He rose again, unable or unwilling to let go of His twenty-one grams until He finished the circle on the greatest story to ever be told.
Memory of You... You turn off the water. You are pulling off rubber gloves. Looking into the steel basin, now empty. I step into the room. The wood floor is cold. I don't blink. I come close enough to take in musky, rich scent of your hair. The sound of your breathing. My lips part to say your name and you look up. My intent to speak has alerted you to my presence. You meet the gaze of my reflection in the window in front of you. You do not turn to face me. Instead of your name I say, "Did I startle you?" You are silent. There is a long passage of time. You turn. The hem of your sweater jacket brushes my arm. Your eyes, blue-black... undo me. You turn your hands palm up at your hips. You tilt your head to the side in slow motion. You set your jaw, say, "Did I startle you?"
Tucked into easy categories and wrapped in careful mythologies, we want to sing hymns and know that this isn't everything. We want to live right and be rewarded. And just like some little children are happy with a hug and others want candy and still another demands expensive electronics, each of us look for the reward that fits our temperament. Even those of us who walk away from or pretend not to seek religion still search for the reward of living. Look up which religions are the fastest growing. One is even so fast that its founder said he rivaled even Christ. How's that for diverse choices?
In the darkness, what are we afraid waits for us? The truth?
"…For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect, and anticipate their great shame, and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support. We’ve got to have equal rights for everyone." (Sean Penn, accepting the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of equal rights activist Harvey Milk.)
In the darkness, where our hands become our eyes, where my touch across your skin is sacred and burns sweet as rebirth, what are we afraid of? That with hands, fingertips, mouth and tongue we will discover the lies in the doctrine? That we will find the cracks in the logic of these human mythologies? If you come for me, like God's own shooting star, like comets that cycle and return, do you think you will wake up somewhere else completely without a road map... or perhaps without a torch to show your way? Is this love not truth enough?
"When I was thirteen years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas, to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life; it gave me the hope that one day I could live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married… Most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us thirty years ago, I think he’d want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by their churches, or by the government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value. And that no matter what everyone tells you, God does love you, and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours." (Dustin Lance Black, accepting the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for "Milk")
Memory of Me... The house was full of shadows. Was I sleeping still? Was I walking through the cold house nude and skinny and afraid? Every corner, every plant and picture and side table I had known all my life was a creature or presence waiting to touch me with unworldly hands. I was alone on the planet. I was driven to keep moving but only because it was so essential to drink. I knew I would surely die if I could not drink. Through the living room, the carpet beneath my feet... the big windows, tall and showing only night... He stood right there. Between me and the kitchen. Just... stood. He could have been a friend of my parents, dark skin, dark eyes, crisp hair. He could have been my brother. Deja vu. I stood and looked up at Him. Deja vu. I stood. He was so normal. So natural. He just... stood.
And I got it.
And I wasn't afraid any more.
Now, turn off the lights.
EJ
If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.
Christ didn't turn tables in the temple because He wasn't a proponent of activism.
"There are a multitude of reasons why marriage equality lost in November. The one I keep coming back to is a failure to cast the role of the villain in the battle against Prop 8. Unlike Prop 6 in 1978, there was no John Briggs to debate, and no Anita Bryant to galvanize our base. Instead in 2008 we had the Catholic and Mormon church, two amorphous beasts that were nearly impossible to vilify in the minds of the public." (www.inlookout.com)
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Personal Mythology: Light and Dark
“Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.” --Camille Paglia
“The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. And the world's full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.” --Joseph Campbell
Light, dawn light, creeps across my sky, and I think about great thinkers. To listen to the lectures or read the books of Joseph Campbell is to remember that before modern man there was still man. Our rich existence as a species did not begin with the qwerty keyboard nor was it spiritually enriched by the invention of the itty bitty cell phone. Modern playthings are just our current accessories, replacing the beads and bones that once adorned our hair and clothes, replacing runes and smoke signals. Our lives are neither richer nor poorer because of these changes; Our lives have simply continued.
The ebb and flow of time seems to disappear when you listen to Campbell discuss the inherent differences between men and women. Their different needs and responses, their psychological and psychosexual baselines. I do believe in equal pay (for equal work) but I do not agree in different standards for the same task. If a man can do the job better because of muscle mass, aggressive approach or what have you, than a man should be given the job, quotas or not. God did not make men and women the same. He made them equal – just as He made every male and female in every other species equally important – but not the same. To ignore these differences – to not celebrate them – is a crime not just against each other but against the beauty of God.
To grossly simplify Camille Paglia: I want my women passionate, sexy and straight, and I want my men possessive, aggressive and erect. Disgustingly blunt? Not entirely correct? Of course to both. Because in God's natural order for man, as mirrored in nature, His divine map laid here for us, there is room for gentle, quiet, sensitive men, and there is room for protective, assertive, viciously brilliant women. The point is, there is room for all kinds of vibrant differences.
“I do not believe that Christ, our Lord, our Lion and Lamb, placed us on this world alone and without guidance. And you will know your guides because they will refuse to call themselves divine and may not even call themselves Christian. They will be humble. They will hide nothing, for Christ hid nothing. And not everyone will follow them but all will hear them and agree with what they say. Because the truth can be ignored but it cannot be denied.”
I want to paint. Instead I am sitting outside on the closed dome of the private observatory of a friend. I have realized, strangely, that I like to look at the stars with my naked eyes more than I like to view them through the telescope. I do not want to see them so explained and scientific. I want to view them through the lens of my personal mythology. I want to connect their points to form my own constellations. I want to remember them attached to my own memories and the histories of my family. I don't want to *know* what I see. I want to believe what I see.
“Religion is a construct of man. Even if you subscribe to a denomination, you know this as truth. It is a construct of man which stands *between* man and God. It is meant to better facilitate the understanding of God by man. But religion must be transparent. It must be open like air and sky. If it is not transparent, than God cannot be seen through it.”
Why do so many of us flock like sheep to the constructs of man? Why does denomination soothe and call to us? Because it is comfort, ritual, structure and pattern. Because it is tangible belonging. I met once a man who said to me that his faith was strong as steel, that it was everything to him, his life and breath and thought and reality. Walk away from your church then, I answered. Walk away for one year and walk your path, just you and your God. And it was obvious from the blanch of his face and the panic in his eyes that he was sincere when he responded, I would lose my center if I lost my church.
The loss of mythology is indeed the loss of our center. Without mythology we lose the knowledge of who we were and lose touch with the primal forces that still exist within us, sometimes slumbering, other times roiling. Mythology is the key code or directions on our road map to a life lived not in fear but in rejoicing. A life lived fulfilled and rich, a depth of experience that nourishes and sustains us.
Of course, how we build that mythology, where we turn to for that mythology, is entirely our decision and there are as many personal mythologies as there are people on this only green world. Of course, my answer was: Fill that center with Christ.
“The power of Jesus Christ is that He does not need to have been a god to have changed everything.”
“I live my life as if there is no heaven that awaits me, but that Christ was still the son of God. Now then forever, He is my teacher, guide and maker. There is no incentive. There is no after life. There is only what my Lord has commanded of me, and that is enough.”
Society crumbles when one of two things happen. When we either destroy our mythology or our mythology destroys us. Both are equally possible and equally horrible.
“Babylon Syndrome is man as God. Man proposes now or in a far future to be as God. God is not now and was never a mortal man. We are and will be until we return to that which we came from. We are not now nor will we ever be gods. To strive for this – to strive to be as our Lord – is not just blasphemous but a disease that infests through the wound of hubris and spreads like the most virulent of contagions. These are mythologies for small, fearful minds and they are addictive.”
“When we topple our gods, we topple our survival as a unified people. God surrounds us and classifies us as natural unto Him, as He planned for us. We are embraced by Him. Once we fell God, once we lift ourselves out of His natural center and place ourselves outside with Him, we are no longer a people of one heart, one mind, one path. We are no longer concentric circles, but rather opposed and opposer. Elevated and descended. More than and lessor than. Right and wrong. The table, my friends, is no longer round.”
I am witness to a small group of brave young people choking on tradition and struggling against real odds to find themselves in a heritage that has no room for them. I think of the human rights activist Harvey Milk talking about there being no time or luxury for hiding. If everyone was aware that they knew a gay person, he argued, they would see us as human. Not abnormalities or even just the extremes they may glimpse in public. They would see us as part of the pattern. One of the concentric circles of human life.
But instead many people see the world, and raise their children, entrenched in personal mythologies that are outdated, outmoded or simply wrong, founded in hubris or otherwise out of control. It is terrifying how recently many major religions still proclaimed racial segregation a holy mandate and equally disgusting how many denominations do the same today for orientation. Both diverse attributes are positively displayed in abundance in nature and seem to make only logical sense – vivid difference in species allows for the adaption to multiple environments; homosexuality allows for birth control on a planet with limited capacity (gay couples, if they have children at all, have far fewer, on average).
By propagating mythologies that are contrary to our natural truth, we are allowing discord. We are moving against the grain that is God's plan. His map for us is so very beautiful and we are ignoring it when we try to build religions out of smoke and mirrors, denominations that do not stand up under close scrutiny and that fight for traditions that only benefit the further spread of ignorance. The blind are so more easily led. The collection of souls at the thrones of men naming lightning in the dark.
EJ
“The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. And the world's full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.” --Joseph Campbell
Light, dawn light, creeps across my sky, and I think about great thinkers. To listen to the lectures or read the books of Joseph Campbell is to remember that before modern man there was still man. Our rich existence as a species did not begin with the qwerty keyboard nor was it spiritually enriched by the invention of the itty bitty cell phone. Modern playthings are just our current accessories, replacing the beads and bones that once adorned our hair and clothes, replacing runes and smoke signals. Our lives are neither richer nor poorer because of these changes; Our lives have simply continued.
The ebb and flow of time seems to disappear when you listen to Campbell discuss the inherent differences between men and women. Their different needs and responses, their psychological and psychosexual baselines. I do believe in equal pay (for equal work) but I do not agree in different standards for the same task. If a man can do the job better because of muscle mass, aggressive approach or what have you, than a man should be given the job, quotas or not. God did not make men and women the same. He made them equal – just as He made every male and female in every other species equally important – but not the same. To ignore these differences – to not celebrate them – is a crime not just against each other but against the beauty of God.
To grossly simplify Camille Paglia: I want my women passionate, sexy and straight, and I want my men possessive, aggressive and erect. Disgustingly blunt? Not entirely correct? Of course to both. Because in God's natural order for man, as mirrored in nature, His divine map laid here for us, there is room for gentle, quiet, sensitive men, and there is room for protective, assertive, viciously brilliant women. The point is, there is room for all kinds of vibrant differences.
“I do not believe that Christ, our Lord, our Lion and Lamb, placed us on this world alone and without guidance. And you will know your guides because they will refuse to call themselves divine and may not even call themselves Christian. They will be humble. They will hide nothing, for Christ hid nothing. And not everyone will follow them but all will hear them and agree with what they say. Because the truth can be ignored but it cannot be denied.”
I want to paint. Instead I am sitting outside on the closed dome of the private observatory of a friend. I have realized, strangely, that I like to look at the stars with my naked eyes more than I like to view them through the telescope. I do not want to see them so explained and scientific. I want to view them through the lens of my personal mythology. I want to connect their points to form my own constellations. I want to remember them attached to my own memories and the histories of my family. I don't want to *know* what I see. I want to believe what I see.
“Religion is a construct of man. Even if you subscribe to a denomination, you know this as truth. It is a construct of man which stands *between* man and God. It is meant to better facilitate the understanding of God by man. But religion must be transparent. It must be open like air and sky. If it is not transparent, than God cannot be seen through it.”
Why do so many of us flock like sheep to the constructs of man? Why does denomination soothe and call to us? Because it is comfort, ritual, structure and pattern. Because it is tangible belonging. I met once a man who said to me that his faith was strong as steel, that it was everything to him, his life and breath and thought and reality. Walk away from your church then, I answered. Walk away for one year and walk your path, just you and your God. And it was obvious from the blanch of his face and the panic in his eyes that he was sincere when he responded, I would lose my center if I lost my church.
The loss of mythology is indeed the loss of our center. Without mythology we lose the knowledge of who we were and lose touch with the primal forces that still exist within us, sometimes slumbering, other times roiling. Mythology is the key code or directions on our road map to a life lived not in fear but in rejoicing. A life lived fulfilled and rich, a depth of experience that nourishes and sustains us.
Of course, how we build that mythology, where we turn to for that mythology, is entirely our decision and there are as many personal mythologies as there are people on this only green world. Of course, my answer was: Fill that center with Christ.
“The power of Jesus Christ is that He does not need to have been a god to have changed everything.”
“I live my life as if there is no heaven that awaits me, but that Christ was still the son of God. Now then forever, He is my teacher, guide and maker. There is no incentive. There is no after life. There is only what my Lord has commanded of me, and that is enough.”
Society crumbles when one of two things happen. When we either destroy our mythology or our mythology destroys us. Both are equally possible and equally horrible.
“Babylon Syndrome is man as God. Man proposes now or in a far future to be as God. God is not now and was never a mortal man. We are and will be until we return to that which we came from. We are not now nor will we ever be gods. To strive for this – to strive to be as our Lord – is not just blasphemous but a disease that infests through the wound of hubris and spreads like the most virulent of contagions. These are mythologies for small, fearful minds and they are addictive.”
“When we topple our gods, we topple our survival as a unified people. God surrounds us and classifies us as natural unto Him, as He planned for us. We are embraced by Him. Once we fell God, once we lift ourselves out of His natural center and place ourselves outside with Him, we are no longer a people of one heart, one mind, one path. We are no longer concentric circles, but rather opposed and opposer. Elevated and descended. More than and lessor than. Right and wrong. The table, my friends, is no longer round.”
I am witness to a small group of brave young people choking on tradition and struggling against real odds to find themselves in a heritage that has no room for them. I think of the human rights activist Harvey Milk talking about there being no time or luxury for hiding. If everyone was aware that they knew a gay person, he argued, they would see us as human. Not abnormalities or even just the extremes they may glimpse in public. They would see us as part of the pattern. One of the concentric circles of human life.
But instead many people see the world, and raise their children, entrenched in personal mythologies that are outdated, outmoded or simply wrong, founded in hubris or otherwise out of control. It is terrifying how recently many major religions still proclaimed racial segregation a holy mandate and equally disgusting how many denominations do the same today for orientation. Both diverse attributes are positively displayed in abundance in nature and seem to make only logical sense – vivid difference in species allows for the adaption to multiple environments; homosexuality allows for birth control on a planet with limited capacity (gay couples, if they have children at all, have far fewer, on average).
By propagating mythologies that are contrary to our natural truth, we are allowing discord. We are moving against the grain that is God's plan. His map for us is so very beautiful and we are ignoring it when we try to build religions out of smoke and mirrors, denominations that do not stand up under close scrutiny and that fight for traditions that only benefit the further spread of ignorance. The blind are so more easily led. The collection of souls at the thrones of men naming lightning in the dark.
EJ
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Are Angels Dancing? G2G
"And so, on the Sabbath, do His work."
The question becomes, now (in our post-modern times), then (when He walked a mortal man) and forever (into our future as a species): What is worthy?
I have a friend who never emails me more than twelve words at a time. She never asks a question without providing multiple choice answers and she rarely expects a response. Lately, her subject headings have all been: Mustard Seed
Christ said all we need... the only thing... is faith as large as a mustard seed. Barely twice the head of a pin. It may seem absurd until you remember how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Perhaps those of us with even just that faintest whisper of faith have enough space to have angels dancing "Swan Lake" in five dimensions.
The simplest answer, of course, and the one that begins to answer that now then forever question is: We are all worthy.
Now, stepping forward, none of us left behind, the next part of the question: *What* is worthy? *What* are we supposed to do on the Sabbath?
My friend Gille does not really believe in God. But she cannot explain to her satisfaction why incredible people like Gandhi and Gurumayi Chidvilasananda and Mother Teresa and Jesus Christ have come to walk on this only green world if there isn't a God. She feels that people like these would never be born if mankind were left here to our own devices alone. Gille believes that goodness -- change -- as ministered by these individuals can simply not be produced from the human animal without divine intervention.
I went to spend the day with Gille today. She is expecting her third child joyfully. She and her partner and their toddler son live together in a classic alpine cabin slash seaside cottage hybrid that is, in fact, sitting on the seashore. It was the first time I'd had Internet in three days. I was most def shaking with cyber withdrawal when I arrived. But the moment I walked in, my busted laptop under my arm, I knew the last thing I would be spending my Sabbath doing was answering email and surfing the web. Every horizontal surface in Gille's house was covered with beta cards of Mardi Gras 3000.
"I'm not sure what I believe, Angel," Gille told me. "But I know that what you're doing with MG3K speaks to people. It lifts them up. And when they look closer, they find God in the details."
And so Gille spends every Sabbath immersed in the brand. I do not have words for what that meant and means to me.
What does God intend for us to do on the Sabbath? His work.
I remember being in elementary school and arguing passionately with a student a few years older than me. Funny how when I look back on "conversations" like these they never seem childish. My religion was far more a point of ridicule than my skin color or (early on) my accent. I don't remember what denomination the seventh grader was but I remember the constant use of, "My teacher told me..." with the teacher in question being a Sunday School teacher. The idea was: The Sabbath is for rest and I was a sinner because I'd spent my Sabbath with my parents on a Habitat for Humanity homesite. It seems building a home for a family in need was a grievous evil.
Less dramatically, I've heard it argued that if something makes you money, it should not be done on Sunday. (For this very reason, I waived all royalties to the MG3K brand and even this blog book -- the printed and bound edition -- will be given away free and sold at cost.) I have no problem with this definition though I do not find an issue with parents who choose to work on the Sabbath in order to support their families. I only hope that they give another day to God. Not for God. He doesn't require our worship to survive nor to love us (it isn't a trade). But in order for us to thrive, we must throw ourselves into *worthy* work at least one day a week.
The celebration of family is a celebration of God. I have always followed that as a good guideline for what should or shouldn't be engaged in on God's Day. Family being defined as partner, spouse, child, sibling, heart-friend. Those that by blood, oath or love are our family in the eyes of our Lord. Sometimes this means making love. Sometimes it means playing tag. Often it manifests as hard work -- working together in the home or yard.
The Sabbath is not a day of rest. God rested on the seventh day after He created the universe. I didn't create the universe this week, did you? The Sabbath is our day to show how grateful we are that He worked so hard to give us what we all take for granted just by not spending our lives on our knees kissing every flower petal, blade of grass or bumblebee. Every breath, every dawn, every windstorm, every kiss, every heartbeat we stand beneath His blue sky or beside His blue-green sea, we have reason to do His work, and do it to the best of our abilities until we are ready to drop into deep dreams, every single Sabbath.
Through the crimbly speaker on the old wireless phone, I hear a mutual friend talking to Gille:
"I just wanted to work today. To lose myself in good work. But I knew they needed something. It was the last cash I had from selling that furniture on Craig's List. I just wanted to show them that even when we have nothing, there is something if we think first of each other, and not of ourselves. Not my money. Our money. We'll do fine if we stay together, if we're grateful, if we stay on the path. I can do the work tonight when they're all asleep. God made me able to push myself. It would be wrong not to. And I saw their smiles... they all knew this was the very best I could do and it was barely anything. But... oh Gille... they were so thankful. It was worth doing."
What is worth doing?
1) Does it change you for the better?
2) Does it change someone else?
3) Does it share the word of God and celebrate Christ?
4) Does it open up your world?
5) Does it fill your heart with light?
6) Does it hold up your impassioned sky?
7) Is it living prayer?
If it is effortless... if it requires no thought... if it doesn't energize and lift you up... if it isn't good, hard work... than it is not intended for the Sabbath.
Christ? Today felt right because I gave myself to you. You rested on the seventh day. I create in your honor on my seventh. Today. Forever.
EJ
This blog entry is dedicated to Ginny and Jennifer in honor of their joint venture, "G2G," a graphic novel/anthology of stories by grrls, for grrls, that center around the theme of bringing glory to God. My pledge is my first paycheck from my "day job." I couldn't be prouder.
The question becomes, now (in our post-modern times), then (when He walked a mortal man) and forever (into our future as a species): What is worthy?
I have a friend who never emails me more than twelve words at a time. She never asks a question without providing multiple choice answers and she rarely expects a response. Lately, her subject headings have all been: Mustard Seed
Christ said all we need... the only thing... is faith as large as a mustard seed. Barely twice the head of a pin. It may seem absurd until you remember how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Perhaps those of us with even just that faintest whisper of faith have enough space to have angels dancing "Swan Lake" in five dimensions.
The simplest answer, of course, and the one that begins to answer that now then forever question is: We are all worthy.
Now, stepping forward, none of us left behind, the next part of the question: *What* is worthy? *What* are we supposed to do on the Sabbath?
My friend Gille does not really believe in God. But she cannot explain to her satisfaction why incredible people like Gandhi and Gurumayi Chidvilasananda and Mother Teresa and Jesus Christ have come to walk on this only green world if there isn't a God. She feels that people like these would never be born if mankind were left here to our own devices alone. Gille believes that goodness -- change -- as ministered by these individuals can simply not be produced from the human animal without divine intervention.
I went to spend the day with Gille today. She is expecting her third child joyfully. She and her partner and their toddler son live together in a classic alpine cabin slash seaside cottage hybrid that is, in fact, sitting on the seashore. It was the first time I'd had Internet in three days. I was most def shaking with cyber withdrawal when I arrived. But the moment I walked in, my busted laptop under my arm, I knew the last thing I would be spending my Sabbath doing was answering email and surfing the web. Every horizontal surface in Gille's house was covered with beta cards of Mardi Gras 3000.
"I'm not sure what I believe, Angel," Gille told me. "But I know that what you're doing with MG3K speaks to people. It lifts them up. And when they look closer, they find God in the details."
And so Gille spends every Sabbath immersed in the brand. I do not have words for what that meant and means to me.
What does God intend for us to do on the Sabbath? His work.
I remember being in elementary school and arguing passionately with a student a few years older than me. Funny how when I look back on "conversations" like these they never seem childish. My religion was far more a point of ridicule than my skin color or (early on) my accent. I don't remember what denomination the seventh grader was but I remember the constant use of, "My teacher told me..." with the teacher in question being a Sunday School teacher. The idea was: The Sabbath is for rest and I was a sinner because I'd spent my Sabbath with my parents on a Habitat for Humanity homesite. It seems building a home for a family in need was a grievous evil.
Less dramatically, I've heard it argued that if something makes you money, it should not be done on Sunday. (For this very reason, I waived all royalties to the MG3K brand and even this blog book -- the printed and bound edition -- will be given away free and sold at cost.) I have no problem with this definition though I do not find an issue with parents who choose to work on the Sabbath in order to support their families. I only hope that they give another day to God. Not for God. He doesn't require our worship to survive nor to love us (it isn't a trade). But in order for us to thrive, we must throw ourselves into *worthy* work at least one day a week.
The celebration of family is a celebration of God. I have always followed that as a good guideline for what should or shouldn't be engaged in on God's Day. Family being defined as partner, spouse, child, sibling, heart-friend. Those that by blood, oath or love are our family in the eyes of our Lord. Sometimes this means making love. Sometimes it means playing tag. Often it manifests as hard work -- working together in the home or yard.
The Sabbath is not a day of rest. God rested on the seventh day after He created the universe. I didn't create the universe this week, did you? The Sabbath is our day to show how grateful we are that He worked so hard to give us what we all take for granted just by not spending our lives on our knees kissing every flower petal, blade of grass or bumblebee. Every breath, every dawn, every windstorm, every kiss, every heartbeat we stand beneath His blue sky or beside His blue-green sea, we have reason to do His work, and do it to the best of our abilities until we are ready to drop into deep dreams, every single Sabbath.
Through the crimbly speaker on the old wireless phone, I hear a mutual friend talking to Gille:
"I just wanted to work today. To lose myself in good work. But I knew they needed something. It was the last cash I had from selling that furniture on Craig's List. I just wanted to show them that even when we have nothing, there is something if we think first of each other, and not of ourselves. Not my money. Our money. We'll do fine if we stay together, if we're grateful, if we stay on the path. I can do the work tonight when they're all asleep. God made me able to push myself. It would be wrong not to. And I saw their smiles... they all knew this was the very best I could do and it was barely anything. But... oh Gille... they were so thankful. It was worth doing."
What is worth doing?
1) Does it change you for the better?
2) Does it change someone else?
3) Does it share the word of God and celebrate Christ?
4) Does it open up your world?
5) Does it fill your heart with light?
6) Does it hold up your impassioned sky?
7) Is it living prayer?
If it is effortless... if it requires no thought... if it doesn't energize and lift you up... if it isn't good, hard work... than it is not intended for the Sabbath.
Christ? Today felt right because I gave myself to you. You rested on the seventh day. I create in your honor on my seventh. Today. Forever.
EJ
This blog entry is dedicated to Ginny and Jennifer in honor of their joint venture, "G2G," a graphic novel/anthology of stories by grrls, for grrls, that center around the theme of bringing glory to God. My pledge is my first paycheck from my "day job." I couldn't be prouder.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Leave Me Breathless
“Because it seemed like a good idea at the time...”
[...was achieved, 26% of study participants reported one, or various combinations, of the following involuntary responses: brief loss of sight; a sensation of falling; loss of fine motor skills; trembling in extremities, and/or involuntary vocalizations. If... was achieved by a combination of... instance of involuntary responses as listed above rose to 92% with a high occurrence (more than 72%) of an inability to breathe...]
I decide to turn over a new leaf and so I say yes (for once) and go to Mass with Lillian. After all, these are dark times and all that yadda and maybe my heart needs a little stain glass light stations of the cross contemplation down on my knees God be with you and also with you inspiration.
I wake with little grrl eyes when Lillian turns off my alarm and strokes my hair. Over her arm is an eggshell white dress in layers of silk and soft lace. I blink up at her. She lays the dress down and moves soundlessly from my room. The smells of dark coffee and fresh sourdough with clover honey fill the space around me. I lay there on my back, staring at the ceiling, my fingers moving over the line between silk and lace.
“...like silk to brushed lace, satin to fine corduroy, you changed under my fingertips in a tangible expression of desire. You whispered something to me. But I found I was breathless and could not respond...”
I think to myself, “In for a dime, in for a dollar.” and I pull myself out of bed as well as out of my d6 boxers. I know I have grrl's underwear somewhere... and I think it's in my size.
Lillian French braids my dark hair with white ribbons. She smiles down at my grandmother's prayer beads, double looped dark olive wood spilled over the high-necked opaque front of the dress. It is surprising comfortable... I feel sheathed in... hm. I draw my mind back to the kitchen. I have not been able to speak to Lillian yet. There is something more perfect in this unspoken time.
She tips my head up with two fingers under my chin. She contemplates my unadorned face. I am three shades darker than the headshot attached to my resume. After an indeterminable moment, dawn's clean light slipping across the tile counters and floor, slipping into my empty coffee mug, across the honey toast crumbs, Lillian nods once and gives me a hint of a smile. Her perfume is exotic. Her suit is Italian. She nods once more and I rise as if commanded in my heels and stockinged legs. I follow her from the house; I am a different woman with very little effort... but with a universe of awareness.
“...were going to be late, the evening almost certainly ruined, and she made a small sound. It may have been a sound of apology had she glimpsed my angry glance at the grandfather clock in the foyer. I looked up. At the top of the stairs she was poured into low waisted black leather pants and a white silk shirt cast with ruffles, waves of softness, across her small breasts. I drew sharp breath. My heart pounded. I felt faint. I had to look away.”
I am presentable. The little white purse and black hymnal work so well as accessories to my good grrl outfit. I keep my eyes on Lillian's face or on the ground. The incredible marble of the cathedral floor is peach and rose and white. My mind is bright and blank, as if willed that way so that my thoughts won't offend this structured holy place with its traditions and rituals of human comfort. I bob my head. Smile without showing my teeth. Avert my eyes. Fold my hands. Lillian introduces me as Angel.
I take in textures through osmosis. As the priest murmurs in a tone patterned to soothe, I absorb the cold of the marble floors and stone columns. The oak and velvet of the pews. The leatherette of the pad beneath my knees. The ricepaper thin pages of the mass-produced Bibles. I breathe slowly and deeply and draw the scents of this place into my body, allow them to become part of me.
“...I remember... I remember your perfume. Still so far away. In my parents' house. Your bandanna. Your perfume. Wild roses. I slept with it under my pillow. Buried my face in it. Closed my eyes. Wanted to breathe nothing else...”
“And I can still smell you on my fingers, and taste you on my breath...”
Half way through the service I think about the light coming in the highest stain glass panes and I look up to see the molten lead lines that stitch together angels... but my gaze never rises that far.
Her red hair braided modestly, her deep green blouse ripples down her narrow torso and tucked into pleated black slacks, is the Horseman of the Apocalypse I danced with not so long ago... when I was, of course, that other Angel. A totally different woman. My mouth opens. Did I think she went forth on her steel horse to seek the other riders and discover the seventh seal? I am about to blink and look away... when she looks up from prayer, and then back at me. Over a sea of bowed heads I am discovered.
“...Christ... there is what I want and what others want to give me. There is what I am content to receive and what others desire to grant. Allow me the wisdom to bring these two extremes into alignment. Guide my decisions and show me the way to the path I must walk and I will walk it. Lord... just point me in the right direction. I will discover the trail.”
The prayer continues and her eyes walk over my body like I have been gift wrapped and delivered to her doorstep. Which, in some ways, I can certainly see how my garb and this circumstance appears to fit that bill. I am unable to look away from the appraisal because I find myself thinking. I am so lost in thought, actually, that my surroundings fall away and my head tips a little to one side in realization.
Feeling helpless. When I was ill, you said to the friend who was caring for me, “I feel so helpless.” And when life, in general, takes us and spins us 'round, we feel out of control. But there is always something to do. There is no scripture or memory I have ever heard that speaks of Christ doing nothing. There is always something to do... it simply may not be what we desire to do. It is easy, for instance, when someone is ill, to be the one to wrap them in blankets and make them soup. Not so easy to pray for them hard and heart-felt at a great distance, to send them a story, a picture, a funny I-Can-Haz. To impress them with poetry or by cleaning their house. To care for their children (who are wild things) or paint their deck.
I think about how we all seem to like feeling breathless... but none of us like to feel helpless. But isn't it when we feel helpless that we are most likely to turn to Christ? Isn't it when we feel helpless that are are most likely to open up to a new friend and realize how much we are loved? When we are most likely to discover peace?
“'...someday you will leave because my life is complicated and entangled. Someday you will go, but until then I will love you.' And I looked at her and I shook my head. Soundlessly at first, but then, 'You're worth it. I'm not going to make a mistake and pass you up because you aren't simple.'”
When are we most likely to unlock strengths we never knew were there... even though they had been whispering to us all along? When our feet stand on bedrock, when we have reached that rock bottom, that is when Christ equips us with our wings. And I have always been partial to wings.
When we feel helpless, it is the perfect time to sit with Christ and make a list of all the things we could do. The grail is always full and there will never be enough hours in a mortal day to fulfill our every prayer. Helpless simply means, undecided. Undecided simply means you have the opportunity to make a decision. And every decision you make builds your emotional muscle. That vital system that allows you to claim your own faith. To carry your own armor. To see the truth in everything.
“Hello, Angel. I didn't know you were Catholic.”
“I'm not.”
“I see. Another faith then?”
“Yes. I'm a Christian.”
(laughter)
“No offense intended.”
“None taken.” (pause) “Would you like to...?”
“I'm sure I would.”
(smiling)
“But, I don't need to. So no thank you.”
And I leave St. Peter's with Lillian and we eat small sandwiches with brie and drink coffee with cinnamon under a heavy, silver sky. We talk briefly about the rise of the church in pagan England and the structure of redemption and the lack of faith in the self that it all represents. And as we walk back to her car and she stops suddenly and the color drains from her face even as I am watching her... as she grips her chest near her shoulder in two hands and crumbles into my arms even as I am reaching for her... as she calls me Pablo and I answer to his name... as I feel the *helplessness* welling in my chest and spilling from my eyes, down my cheeks, across my eggshell white dress... I know I have a hundred million decisions to make and I make them all. I know I will not lose her now. I decide that I will not lose her. And because of that decision, every other choice falls into place to support that first. I am everything she needs (fast, resourceful, him) and nothing that I want (to scream, to shout, to crumble to the sidewalk with her) and I am utterly *there.*
These are the moments that define us. The helpless ones.
Lord? I'm here.
Baptized in your words, I am breathless.
At my best, I am helpless.
These are our moments.
EJ
[...was achieved, 26% of study participants reported one, or various combinations, of the following involuntary responses: brief loss of sight; a sensation of falling; loss of fine motor skills; trembling in extremities, and/or involuntary vocalizations. If... was achieved by a combination of... instance of involuntary responses as listed above rose to 92% with a high occurrence (more than 72%) of an inability to breathe...]
I decide to turn over a new leaf and so I say yes (for once) and go to Mass with Lillian. After all, these are dark times and all that yadda and maybe my heart needs a little stain glass light stations of the cross contemplation down on my knees God be with you and also with you inspiration.
I wake with little grrl eyes when Lillian turns off my alarm and strokes my hair. Over her arm is an eggshell white dress in layers of silk and soft lace. I blink up at her. She lays the dress down and moves soundlessly from my room. The smells of dark coffee and fresh sourdough with clover honey fill the space around me. I lay there on my back, staring at the ceiling, my fingers moving over the line between silk and lace.
“...like silk to brushed lace, satin to fine corduroy, you changed under my fingertips in a tangible expression of desire. You whispered something to me. But I found I was breathless and could not respond...”
I think to myself, “In for a dime, in for a dollar.” and I pull myself out of bed as well as out of my d6 boxers. I know I have grrl's underwear somewhere... and I think it's in my size.
Lillian French braids my dark hair with white ribbons. She smiles down at my grandmother's prayer beads, double looped dark olive wood spilled over the high-necked opaque front of the dress. It is surprising comfortable... I feel sheathed in... hm. I draw my mind back to the kitchen. I have not been able to speak to Lillian yet. There is something more perfect in this unspoken time.
She tips my head up with two fingers under my chin. She contemplates my unadorned face. I am three shades darker than the headshot attached to my resume. After an indeterminable moment, dawn's clean light slipping across the tile counters and floor, slipping into my empty coffee mug, across the honey toast crumbs, Lillian nods once and gives me a hint of a smile. Her perfume is exotic. Her suit is Italian. She nods once more and I rise as if commanded in my heels and stockinged legs. I follow her from the house; I am a different woman with very little effort... but with a universe of awareness.
“...were going to be late, the evening almost certainly ruined, and she made a small sound. It may have been a sound of apology had she glimpsed my angry glance at the grandfather clock in the foyer. I looked up. At the top of the stairs she was poured into low waisted black leather pants and a white silk shirt cast with ruffles, waves of softness, across her small breasts. I drew sharp breath. My heart pounded. I felt faint. I had to look away.”
I am presentable. The little white purse and black hymnal work so well as accessories to my good grrl outfit. I keep my eyes on Lillian's face or on the ground. The incredible marble of the cathedral floor is peach and rose and white. My mind is bright and blank, as if willed that way so that my thoughts won't offend this structured holy place with its traditions and rituals of human comfort. I bob my head. Smile without showing my teeth. Avert my eyes. Fold my hands. Lillian introduces me as Angel.
I take in textures through osmosis. As the priest murmurs in a tone patterned to soothe, I absorb the cold of the marble floors and stone columns. The oak and velvet of the pews. The leatherette of the pad beneath my knees. The ricepaper thin pages of the mass-produced Bibles. I breathe slowly and deeply and draw the scents of this place into my body, allow them to become part of me.
“...I remember... I remember your perfume. Still so far away. In my parents' house. Your bandanna. Your perfume. Wild roses. I slept with it under my pillow. Buried my face in it. Closed my eyes. Wanted to breathe nothing else...”
“And I can still smell you on my fingers, and taste you on my breath...”
Half way through the service I think about the light coming in the highest stain glass panes and I look up to see the molten lead lines that stitch together angels... but my gaze never rises that far.
Her red hair braided modestly, her deep green blouse ripples down her narrow torso and tucked into pleated black slacks, is the Horseman of the Apocalypse I danced with not so long ago... when I was, of course, that other Angel. A totally different woman. My mouth opens. Did I think she went forth on her steel horse to seek the other riders and discover the seventh seal? I am about to blink and look away... when she looks up from prayer, and then back at me. Over a sea of bowed heads I am discovered.
“...Christ... there is what I want and what others want to give me. There is what I am content to receive and what others desire to grant. Allow me the wisdom to bring these two extremes into alignment. Guide my decisions and show me the way to the path I must walk and I will walk it. Lord... just point me in the right direction. I will discover the trail.”
The prayer continues and her eyes walk over my body like I have been gift wrapped and delivered to her doorstep. Which, in some ways, I can certainly see how my garb and this circumstance appears to fit that bill. I am unable to look away from the appraisal because I find myself thinking. I am so lost in thought, actually, that my surroundings fall away and my head tips a little to one side in realization.
Feeling helpless. When I was ill, you said to the friend who was caring for me, “I feel so helpless.” And when life, in general, takes us and spins us 'round, we feel out of control. But there is always something to do. There is no scripture or memory I have ever heard that speaks of Christ doing nothing. There is always something to do... it simply may not be what we desire to do. It is easy, for instance, when someone is ill, to be the one to wrap them in blankets and make them soup. Not so easy to pray for them hard and heart-felt at a great distance, to send them a story, a picture, a funny I-Can-Haz. To impress them with poetry or by cleaning their house. To care for their children (who are wild things) or paint their deck.
I think about how we all seem to like feeling breathless... but none of us like to feel helpless. But isn't it when we feel helpless that we are most likely to turn to Christ? Isn't it when we feel helpless that are are most likely to open up to a new friend and realize how much we are loved? When we are most likely to discover peace?
“'...someday you will leave because my life is complicated and entangled. Someday you will go, but until then I will love you.' And I looked at her and I shook my head. Soundlessly at first, but then, 'You're worth it. I'm not going to make a mistake and pass you up because you aren't simple.'”
When are we most likely to unlock strengths we never knew were there... even though they had been whispering to us all along? When our feet stand on bedrock, when we have reached that rock bottom, that is when Christ equips us with our wings. And I have always been partial to wings.
When we feel helpless, it is the perfect time to sit with Christ and make a list of all the things we could do. The grail is always full and there will never be enough hours in a mortal day to fulfill our every prayer. Helpless simply means, undecided. Undecided simply means you have the opportunity to make a decision. And every decision you make builds your emotional muscle. That vital system that allows you to claim your own faith. To carry your own armor. To see the truth in everything.
“Hello, Angel. I didn't know you were Catholic.”
“I'm not.”
“I see. Another faith then?”
“Yes. I'm a Christian.”
(laughter)
“No offense intended.”
“None taken.” (pause) “Would you like to...?”
“I'm sure I would.”
(smiling)
“But, I don't need to. So no thank you.”
And I leave St. Peter's with Lillian and we eat small sandwiches with brie and drink coffee with cinnamon under a heavy, silver sky. We talk briefly about the rise of the church in pagan England and the structure of redemption and the lack of faith in the self that it all represents. And as we walk back to her car and she stops suddenly and the color drains from her face even as I am watching her... as she grips her chest near her shoulder in two hands and crumbles into my arms even as I am reaching for her... as she calls me Pablo and I answer to his name... as I feel the *helplessness* welling in my chest and spilling from my eyes, down my cheeks, across my eggshell white dress... I know I have a hundred million decisions to make and I make them all. I know I will not lose her now. I decide that I will not lose her. And because of that decision, every other choice falls into place to support that first. I am everything she needs (fast, resourceful, him) and nothing that I want (to scream, to shout, to crumble to the sidewalk with her) and I am utterly *there.*
These are the moments that define us. The helpless ones.
Lord? I'm here.
Baptized in your words, I am breathless.
At my best, I am helpless.
These are our moments.
EJ
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