There are certain words that get overused (actually, there are a *lot* of words that get overused -- like "lite" and "free" and “forever”) and used incorrectly and so they begin to lose their meaning, lose their power, and this worries me.
No. Wait. It doesn't worry me. It infuriates me.
Let's talk about these words. Let's actually talk about them as they were conceived, not as they have been conveniently co-opted by lazy thinkers who have nothing better than to approach life as gluttons for momentary pleasure, living so much in the hererightnow that their lack of reflection on what might come after (if anything) doesn’t bother them in the least because, not unlike trans fat, if heaven and hell exist, if reward and consequence are real, than we’ll only know for sure when it’s too late.
What? You'd like to know what these words are, specifically, before investing in the time to scroll down, read (skim), engage (or not) on this topic with a grrl you've likely never met or will meet but who seems to think that actions don't always speak louder than blogs? (Because why else would I? Blog, that is.) Of course, that is another conversation and not the one for today, so I’ll give in and give it up... but just this once, and just because you’re special.
Addiction. Empowerment. Sin.
Still with me? Most of you, I think no. Right about “addiction” is when the zoning out began and right about “empower” is when tiny minds who think I mean men when I say man are rolling their eyes skyward in chagrin in the face of the touchy-feely wonder of it all. Then we hit “sin” and I peak a little interest in the apparent paradox offer, the contrast/compare of gamer and grrl, but quash a bunch more interest because, heck, hererightnow who needs to worry about sin and since when did I start believing in sin anyhow? Like everyone in the whole wide English speaking world knowing the name Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein but only half those knowing who they are and only a tenth of those having ever actually read anything written or composed by either of them.
Now that there are only four or six of us left reading, let’s jump in. Because if I can’t live an examined life, than I’m just wallowing in slop and the last time I looked in the mirrored wall of my favorite dance club I was a taut and sexy thang, not no swine, baby. So let’s go play with pearls.
Addiction is a buzz word. It is hollow cheeks and dark circles and blood shot eyes. It is ultra skinny nothing but bones, covered in bruises, dirty and raw. It is destructive. It is illogical. It is not what anyone wants. It is a call, a pull, an inanimate thing that gets what *it* wants, without thought to host, to effect, to consequence.
I’m sure you can imagine the posters now. The faces. The taglines. The stark colors. You know the substances. The behaviors. The guilt, pain, sorrow, disappointment.
But what if I want to look deeper. What if I want to say: Addiction is an ache that cannot be filled until fed its desire. A constant yearning. A distraction. Elation beyond reason when satisfied. Defying logic to rejoice in consummation.
What if I defined addiction as: That which drives us beyond reason, to the edge sanity and logic, to the utter destruction of everything we were before and everything we could be with it. To yearn, to weep, to ache, to reach. To desire more than breath. To be willing to pay any price, any time, over and over again.
The pearl of great price. The wisdom of His stand: Do not as you have done. Change everything. Change everyone. Change yourself.
His words were more radical than email to carrier pigeon. His actions were more radical than covered wagon to space shuttle. I can code prayers in binary into the backgrounds of the newsletter I publish and that’s still tame compared to turn the other cheek, judge not your fellow man, and ask me for forgiveness... for anything, for everything... and it is yours.
Speak to me, from your lips to my ears, and I will hear even the unspoken that hides in the shadows and folds of your heart.
I will hear you. And what is more... I will understand.
“I fall to my knees
when I hear my angel’s voice.
Oh night divine, this night
when this love was born.”
It is addiction if it hurts someone else. Whether it’s drug-use, hatred, anger, compulsion, sex. It is impassioned if it drives us closer to God... when as it drives us mad.
Empowerment is a raised fist, a rousing speech, a grant, a trust, a parade, a law. Empowerment is pride in the lift of a chin, the direct line of a gaze. It is hoping and dreaming and building pillars beneath every castle in the air.
Empowerment is so close to enabling that the line is draw in dry sand. The winds of popular opinion shift and suddenly the division is gone and so are our good intentions.
I sit in a basement room with checkerboard lino and a cool comfort that encourages talk and chipped, second-hand mugs of hot cocoa and cheap tea, drip coffee that somehow emerges from the keg-shaped tank at the end of a green folding table. The bargain table cookies are gone and the crumbled napkins and crumbs are abandoned and forgotten. It will be my job to clean up the mess.
For a generation, this new generation, after Gen X, sometimes called Gen Y, the words have been shouted: Be proud! Stand up! Stand Out! FTW! (Forget the World.) Embrace the moment. And the statistics that had fallen are rising again. The rousing cry of, “Don’t let them beat you down!” became a growl of, “Nothing can take me down!” and there is no truth in that that isn’t misguided and twisted.
And every time you take him back in, you enable him to keep drinking and smoking pot.
And every time she weeps sorry and you murmur itsallright, you enable her to keep killing you.
And every time you let him fight alone, you enable him to be a rock, an island, an untouchable thing.
Every time you offer best wishes instead of time, every time you let confessions of hurt hang in the air, every time you flood her inbox and her ears with hypocrisy, you are enabling the very behaviors you pray would cease.
We empower because there is a darkness that must be risen above. But all that black still exists, swirling in eddies, maelstroms. We need to educate, not empower. We need to illuminate and examine, not empower.
We need to face the midnight storms, stand within the event horizons, and shatter them, disperse them, destroy them. It is easy to lift up. It is harder to dig down. But solid foundations are always stronger than pillars.
It really seems a sin to ignore the problem and throw bouquets of empowerment. Whether or not the soldiers are empowered, the darkness will still eventually kill them.
Sin is everything you have been taught it to be. Some of us have been taught the same actions, thoughts, behaviors. Others have never even heard of them. It floored me to hear that one doctrine claims masturbation will keep you out of heaven but resisting could eventually make you deity, when just down the street and around the corner, another congregation was teaching humility and out-right martyrdom to its youth, with masturbation as a way to rid yourself of sexual urges and desires and keep your body pure toward others.
Perhaps “sin” cannot be so easily defined? Unless “sin” is a convention of man (by which I mean humans, mankind, not everyone with a penis) and so is concocted by the ruling class, the rule-making, the money-holders, the power players. Is it a sin to step on an ant on accident? How about on purpose? Is it a sin to let a child cry unattended? How about to slap your wife? How about to cheat on your husband? What if you just *think* about slapping your wife when she accidentally looks at another man’s butt? Oh, how tangled a definition of sin we weave when we practice to deceive.
Who is drafting the definition of sin? Certainly not God. Deception is not in the genetic makeup of our Lord or when they told Him, “Dude, just *say* you’re not the son of God, and we’ll get you out of here, ‘kay?” and yet there He stayed. Bleeding. Dying.
But man and deception goes all the way back to Eden:
“Did you eat the fruit?”
“Oh no, no, no!”
“Than why are you buck naked?”
“Cuz we got shy!”
“Who told you to be shy?”
“The armadillos!”
The art of war and survival (not to mention those holy scripts) tells us we need to be fruitful. Just makes sense that anything that doesn’t make babies should be a sin. Common sense! (Oops! Guess none of the prophets foresaw gross overpopulation! Dang it!) The very same arts -- war and survival -- say safety in numbers, safety in homogeny. So suddenly conversion makes sense... holy wars... terror and bombs and ourgodistheoneandonly mantras that are justified even as we vilify each other.
Who decides what is sin?
God decides.
But the masses cry, “What about *until* God intervenes?! What about *before* we slip our mortal coils? What about others who sin and them needing to be punished? What about a prophet or helper or preacher or someone to facilitate the recognition and ramifications of sin and sinners *now*?”
You know what I say to all that? I say, “What a bunch of impatient, self-important, greedy, voyeuristic frakkers.” That’s what I say.
Sin is when Christ whispers into your heart and you pretend not to hear Him.
Sin is when He lights your path but you find it too rocky to walk.
Sin is when you damage or destroy that which is precious to Him.
Sin is hubris, jealousy, hatred, possession. Destruction, disregard, disrespect.
Sin is not dictated from the pulpit. It is a knowledge in ourselves, placed there by His hand, and it is as unique as our finger prints, sewn to fit our soul alone. Where cowardice may be the sin of one man, fury might be the sin of another. Only Christ and our hearts know the truth.
And that is why no man can judge another.
There is power in words. Great hurts can be healed or hidden by simple phrases. So when I see t-shirts with slogans (therein lies a delight) that shout for action instead of words, I pause and muse on longevity and remembrance, on meaning and definition. I think about all the actions -- of addiction, of empowerment, of sin -- that make us all who we are, that make our world what it is, ad I can’t help but wish that a few of us (a few hundred thousand of us) would sit down and stop taking action for a moment.
Just sit down, reflect, shut up... and blog.
EJ
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Suspicion
"You start walking your way
and I'll start walking mine.
We'll meet in the middle..."
"Too right for left, too left for right.
You can't get me, I can't get you.
From my spot on the fence
what a wonderful view."
I do this sometimes. Well, I do a lot of things sometimes. Not a very stable grrl, I suppose. But I can't remember ever reading about an artist who was stable. Most of them are down-right nuts and nuggets, as a matter of fact *shrug* I suppose I'm doing all right.
"Walk on down to the corner grocery store.
Bought myself some groceries and a little bit more.
Now I'm flying, flying higher than a kite.
And I'm doing all right, doing all right."
There is a stranger and you all know how I never learned not to talk to strangers. I figure that ever stranger is just an experience I haven't had yet. And as a gamer grrl I gotta get that EXP or I'll never level up, baby. I mean, What's your story? Right? This is Hollywood. Land of Dreams. Everybody gots a story.
So I'm slumming it because I've been working for twenty-three days straight and they've been those killer ten and twelve hour days and it's just shy of midnight and I look like slop. I'm in jeans all torn up and combat boots I bought off the back of a truck that have claw marks from some cat (I hope) along one side and a new-to-me ratty-ole brown leather jacket with Airforce patches and... oh yeah... that's about it.
'Cept, you know, my cross.
Now sometimes I don't wear one. I mean, I have ink. My shoulder. So I'm always wearing one. But sometimes I do stumble on my own belly button lint and I start to spinning about that whole concentric circle game of we're-gonna-be-different-because-we've-so-enlightened, "Why the cross?! What an icky symbol! Why celebrate His death?" And so I wear my Ichthys. You know. The little Christian fish symbol. But tonight I just so happen to be wearing my cross.
And my lefthand thumb ring.
And my left back-pocket purple bandanna.
And my attitude. And your cologne. (Not that I put it on... per say.)
So when I smile (way) up at the stranger in line before me at the corner store -- me a great big cornucopia of patches and symbols and code words and statements -- I'm not really surprised when he starts in. I was only surprised that he wasted no time.
"How do you know who you are?" He motions me up and down (mostly down because dude is like a big brickhouse and I'm his pool boy... or the tool shed).
I tilt my head and shrug a bit. "Cuz my Bible tells me so?"
He smiles, showing perfect LA teeth. I wonder, Do I know him? He says, "Society tells you who you are. The media."
My grin deepens. "I am the media, baby."
He laughs and he has a nice laugh and I look down and he steps outta line and I follow him. he leans against a concrete pillar next to the ice cream freezer and I notice he wears a wedding ring and the numbers tattooed across his knuckles might be scripture or they might be California penal code. Hard to tell. His skin is a two shades darker than mine, as chocolate as mine is cinnamon.
"You aren't suspicious?" He's looking down my half-zipped jacket. Not much to write home about ('cept the wearing no shirt part) but I know he's looking at my cross. "You're all covered in tags."
Oh, hon. If you only knew.
"It takes too much energy to be suspicious," I answer and my sincerity is so obvious in my voice it startles me a little. I guess... you know... I have something to say about suspicions. "I gotta look at it like this: If I work my skinny butt off to prove all my suspicions, I'll do it. Every one. I'll find liars and cheats and people who hate me who I thought were my friends. I'll find money exchanging hands in the parking lot of every church and blood in the confessionals and bribes on the offering plate. I'll find good people where I don't want to find them and bad people holding me tight when I cry. I think I'd rather spend my energy doing something else. Doing something... for Him. Not for me."
The stranger looks at me. The clock on the wall behind him says that, according to man's time, it's the Sabbath. Saturday and turned to Sunday by the power of man's great big black-on-white numbers. The power of the tick tock. It doesn't feel like the Sabbath to me until the horizon is painted with color. Or... does it?
"Do I make you suspicious?" What on Earth made me blurt that I don't know. Maybe not on Earth at all but rather in Heaven.
He smiles at me, the glib response ready to tumble on my deserving head but then he stops. He holds out his hand. We shake, just one pump, then hold, nothing wrong, mutual understanding. His hand is the length of my forearm.
"If I asked you, what should I do today, what would you say?" He means Sunday morning. What should he do Sunday morning.
"Ask me."
His smile widens. He even shakes his head in amusement. I don't wait for him to ask again.
"Stay home," I tell him as I realize our eyes are almost exactly the same color. "Stay home and make love with your lady and laugh with your kids. Go walking alone. Go walking with them. Plant something. Pray aloud together. Pray aloud alone. Realize that every congregation you need already hold dominion in your heart, in your home. You. Your family. God. The rest..." I look away. I shake my own head. I drop his hand and smile back at him. "The rest, man, is all suspicious."
And I turn and get back in line to pay for my gum, my Coke, and a pack of Beef Jerky.
I'll take my communion without the smoke, without the mirrors, without the closed curtains, pre-determined ballots, political pay-offs, and absolutely without the media.
The church of my heart is like my favorite dance clubs. Media Free.
EJ
403. Every person who, without authority of law, willfully disturbs or breaks up any assembly or meeting that is not unlawful in its character (only in its spirit), other than an assembly or meeting is guilty of a misdemeanor.
404. Any use of force, disturbing the public peace, or any threat to use force, if accompanied by immediate power of execution, by two or more persons acting together, and without authority of law, is a riot.
405. (a) Every person who with the intent to cause a riot does an act or engages in conduct that urges a riot, or urges others to commit acts of force and power, or the burning or destroying of lies, and at a time and place and under circumstances that produce a clear and present and immediate danger of acts of force, is guilty of incitement to riot.... (b) The existence of any fact that would bring a person under this definition of subversion shall be alleged in the complaint, information, or indictment and either admitted by the defendant in open court, or found to be true by the jury trying the issue of guilt, by the court where guilt is established by a plea of guilty or nolo contendere, or by trial by the court sitting without a jury.
406. Every person who participates in any riot is punishable by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by both such fine and imprisonment.
407. The taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer or lawful institution which confines any person is considered a lynching.
408. Every person who participates in any lynching is punishable by imprisonment in the state prison for two, three or four years.
409. Whenever two or more persons, assembled and acting together, make any attempt or advance toward the commission of an act which would be a riot if actually committed, such assembly is a rout.
410. Whenever two or more persons assemble together to do an unlawful act, or do a lawful act in a forceful, boisterous, or tumultuous manner, such assembly is an unlawful assembly.
Yeah... well... nolo contendere, baby. Nolo contendere.
and I'll start walking mine.
We'll meet in the middle..."
"Too right for left, too left for right.
You can't get me, I can't get you.
From my spot on the fence
what a wonderful view."
I do this sometimes. Well, I do a lot of things sometimes. Not a very stable grrl, I suppose. But I can't remember ever reading about an artist who was stable. Most of them are down-right nuts and nuggets, as a matter of fact *shrug* I suppose I'm doing all right.
"Walk on down to the corner grocery store.
Bought myself some groceries and a little bit more.
Now I'm flying, flying higher than a kite.
And I'm doing all right, doing all right."
There is a stranger and you all know how I never learned not to talk to strangers. I figure that ever stranger is just an experience I haven't had yet. And as a gamer grrl I gotta get that EXP or I'll never level up, baby. I mean, What's your story? Right? This is Hollywood. Land of Dreams. Everybody gots a story.
So I'm slumming it because I've been working for twenty-three days straight and they've been those killer ten and twelve hour days and it's just shy of midnight and I look like slop. I'm in jeans all torn up and combat boots I bought off the back of a truck that have claw marks from some cat (I hope) along one side and a new-to-me ratty-ole brown leather jacket with Airforce patches and... oh yeah... that's about it.
'Cept, you know, my cross.
Now sometimes I don't wear one. I mean, I have ink. My shoulder. So I'm always wearing one. But sometimes I do stumble on my own belly button lint and I start to spinning about that whole concentric circle game of we're-gonna-be-different-because-we've-so-enlightened, "Why the cross?! What an icky symbol! Why celebrate His death?" And so I wear my Ichthys. You know. The little Christian fish symbol. But tonight I just so happen to be wearing my cross.
And my lefthand thumb ring.
And my left back-pocket purple bandanna.
And my attitude. And your cologne. (Not that I put it on... per say.)
So when I smile (way) up at the stranger in line before me at the corner store -- me a great big cornucopia of patches and symbols and code words and statements -- I'm not really surprised when he starts in. I was only surprised that he wasted no time.
"How do you know who you are?" He motions me up and down (mostly down because dude is like a big brickhouse and I'm his pool boy... or the tool shed).
I tilt my head and shrug a bit. "Cuz my Bible tells me so?"
He smiles, showing perfect LA teeth. I wonder, Do I know him? He says, "Society tells you who you are. The media."
My grin deepens. "I am the media, baby."
He laughs and he has a nice laugh and I look down and he steps outta line and I follow him. he leans against a concrete pillar next to the ice cream freezer and I notice he wears a wedding ring and the numbers tattooed across his knuckles might be scripture or they might be California penal code. Hard to tell. His skin is a two shades darker than mine, as chocolate as mine is cinnamon.
"You aren't suspicious?" He's looking down my half-zipped jacket. Not much to write home about ('cept the wearing no shirt part) but I know he's looking at my cross. "You're all covered in tags."
Oh, hon. If you only knew.
"It takes too much energy to be suspicious," I answer and my sincerity is so obvious in my voice it startles me a little. I guess... you know... I have something to say about suspicions. "I gotta look at it like this: If I work my skinny butt off to prove all my suspicions, I'll do it. Every one. I'll find liars and cheats and people who hate me who I thought were my friends. I'll find money exchanging hands in the parking lot of every church and blood in the confessionals and bribes on the offering plate. I'll find good people where I don't want to find them and bad people holding me tight when I cry. I think I'd rather spend my energy doing something else. Doing something... for Him. Not for me."
The stranger looks at me. The clock on the wall behind him says that, according to man's time, it's the Sabbath. Saturday and turned to Sunday by the power of man's great big black-on-white numbers. The power of the tick tock. It doesn't feel like the Sabbath to me until the horizon is painted with color. Or... does it?
"Do I make you suspicious?" What on Earth made me blurt that I don't know. Maybe not on Earth at all but rather in Heaven.
He smiles at me, the glib response ready to tumble on my deserving head but then he stops. He holds out his hand. We shake, just one pump, then hold, nothing wrong, mutual understanding. His hand is the length of my forearm.
"If I asked you, what should I do today, what would you say?" He means Sunday morning. What should he do Sunday morning.
"Ask me."
His smile widens. He even shakes his head in amusement. I don't wait for him to ask again.
"Stay home," I tell him as I realize our eyes are almost exactly the same color. "Stay home and make love with your lady and laugh with your kids. Go walking alone. Go walking with them. Plant something. Pray aloud together. Pray aloud alone. Realize that every congregation you need already hold dominion in your heart, in your home. You. Your family. God. The rest..." I look away. I shake my own head. I drop his hand and smile back at him. "The rest, man, is all suspicious."
And I turn and get back in line to pay for my gum, my Coke, and a pack of Beef Jerky.
I'll take my communion without the smoke, without the mirrors, without the closed curtains, pre-determined ballots, political pay-offs, and absolutely without the media.
The church of my heart is like my favorite dance clubs. Media Free.
EJ
403. Every person who, without authority of law, willfully disturbs or breaks up any assembly or meeting that is not unlawful in its character (only in its spirit), other than an assembly or meeting is guilty of a misdemeanor.
404. Any use of force, disturbing the public peace, or any threat to use force, if accompanied by immediate power of execution, by two or more persons acting together, and without authority of law, is a riot.
405. (a) Every person who with the intent to cause a riot does an act or engages in conduct that urges a riot, or urges others to commit acts of force and power, or the burning or destroying of lies, and at a time and place and under circumstances that produce a clear and present and immediate danger of acts of force, is guilty of incitement to riot.... (b) The existence of any fact that would bring a person under this definition of subversion shall be alleged in the complaint, information, or indictment and either admitted by the defendant in open court, or found to be true by the jury trying the issue of guilt, by the court where guilt is established by a plea of guilty or nolo contendere, or by trial by the court sitting without a jury.
406. Every person who participates in any riot is punishable by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by both such fine and imprisonment.
407. The taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer or lawful institution which confines any person is considered a lynching.
408. Every person who participates in any lynching is punishable by imprisonment in the state prison for two, three or four years.
409. Whenever two or more persons, assembled and acting together, make any attempt or advance toward the commission of an act which would be a riot if actually committed, such assembly is a rout.
410. Whenever two or more persons assemble together to do an unlawful act, or do a lawful act in a forceful, boisterous, or tumultuous manner, such assembly is an unlawful assembly.
Yeah... well... nolo contendere, baby. Nolo contendere.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Relevance
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[I am sitting in the sunshine, pale and sweet with autumn, in the public park in town. I am reading from my Bible and lost in thoughts private between me and my God. A woman comes suddenly to stand so close I see her feet first... and then the feet of her little children. "And if you bigots won't let me marry my partner, their other mother, the only family they have or know, what will happen to my children when I die?!" And she does not wait for a response. She is so angry. There is no time. There is no time because the effects of chemotherapy are obvious and universal. You come up behind me and only then do I realize I am standing. You saw and heard it all. You wrap your arms around me from behind. You whisper, "She doesn't know. She didn't see." But I look down at my Bible and I respond, "She saw enough." And I start to cry.]
I find the people I want around me are the ones who write a good press release. Better yet, the ones who can take a book, song, product, movie and boil it down into two sentences of why and if it's relevant.
Relevant. That means it means something. To us. Now. That means it reaches us, touches us, finds and discover us. And the "it" doesn't have to be inanimate. It can be he, she, them, even us.
Are we relevant?
I felt lost and alone. Oh, look. I'm unstable. I asked, "When you are struggling, when you're ill and hurting, is this... all of this... even relevant?"
You were silent for a long time. The distance between us clicked and hummed on the phone lines. I imagined I could count the beat of your pulse. "I'm sorry," you said, your voice low and smooth. "When did salvation become irrelevant?"
The partner you always wanted is right there.
And there. And there.
Have you ever done something, dreamed some dream (you know, a Dream), and thought it was big, it was wide, it would teach and preach and reach and touch, find and discover and no one, no one at all, would ever resistant it, ever close their hearts to it, because it was right (you know, Right)? Have you ever felt that feeling? Maybe even seen the proof in the pudding and in the reality of the reason for believing.
But you can't change a heart. You can cause a heart to open or close. You can coax or condemn a heart. But what it is, who it is, at its core, it will remain, now then forever. The scripture of the heart, wisemen like to say, is written in blood and muscle long before we are grown men. The scripture of the heart is what we have come to believe -- not the words we have memorized or the parts we have played -- but the truth behind it all. Arrogant, self-important, doomed, dreamer, useless, soldier -- the core truth is there, imprinted if not by the hand of God, than by the acts and reactions of our parents, our peers, our reality, our nonreality. The truth remains, lingering, whispering, carrying on into immortality, even after our bones (and heart) are less than dust.
I have witnessed and known -- blessed to know -- fighters who have risen from darkness and struggle and hopelessness. They are bright and they blaze trails for others to follow (or fall behind if they can't keep up). But even there, deep inside these burning hearts, there are whispers from the seed they grew from.
No. I am not saying "once poor, always poor." No. I am not saying we cannot change our station or that our lives are pre-written and we can't break away from cycles of abusive, of nature, of nurture. I am saying simply: The whispers will always be there.
So... I'll surround myself -- arm myself! -- with seeds who are:
Humble in speech
Proud by right
Relentless in desire
Driven by faith
Strong in community
Brazen in spirit
Unshaken by adversity
Deserving of respect
"No one *deserves* my respect," she told the group of teens. "They earn my respect." She looked at them each, slowly. It took time. Everyone waited their turn. "My parents. My teachers. My peers. Any and every authority. All of you. My loyalty is legendary. If you earn my respect." (Gee... think she grew up on the streets? What does her heart seed whisper?)
Earning respect. I would think, to do so, you'd have to be pretty dang relevant. You'd have to be active and push. Not passive and pull. You'd have to be a fighter. You have to read the signs.
"Push Communication is where the offer of information is initiated by the speaker. It is contrasted with Pull Communication, where the request of information is initiated by the listener."
They cannot read the signs. Because the trappings of comfortable religion (which have never fit the amorphous, limitless possibilities of faith) are just that, traps. The lightning is not Zeus. The rain is not tears. But neither is science the devil. Neither is desire the enemy.
They are lonely and lost. They are arrogant and meek. They stumble and ask questions that those who have trampled before us cannot answer. They are seeing in nature what is killed inside their churches. They are looking for truth before the faith in them dies.
"There is tranquility in ignorance, but servitude is its partner."
The New Hampshire license plate once read (still does?): Live Free or Die
Who am I serving? Who are you serving?
"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." --Abraham Lincoln
The whispers in my heart are wild, untamed. They turn tables. They do not waver. If I drift from the path, they call me back. If I look to the sky, they bring me dawn.
"Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free..." The ones you don't want anymore, the one who are beginning to want something and it isn't you, we will take them in. And we won't all get along. And we won't all look alike. And we won't all agree. But welcome is what happens when people listen. Welcome is what happens when people speak. Community is what happens when you earn each other's respect. Christ is just a natural consequence of all that truth.
Mark Twain said once, "Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed." Especially when the diet is hollow but convincing. Tasty and neat. No clean up afterwards. Drop your tithe in the plate and continue on. The country songs croon, "Here's a twenty for last night, and another for what I'll do tonight." Now ain't that American?
Rally forces and step in time. One person made a difference, you know His name, but now He asks us to repeat His cycle. He turned the tables, turned everything upside down. No more original sin. No more sacrifices. No more anything but a direct line to Him. Times have changed. They had changed then. The old ways fall away. They were crumbling then. To be a real Christian is not to hate. It is not to oppress. It is not to deny certain inalienable rights.
It is to bring change. It is to rise up and embrace thy neighbor.
Those of us who have broken free of denomination's pasture to find the Shepherd have one journey and one alone:
To keep Christianity relevant.
EJ
[I am sitting in the sunshine, pale and sweet with autumn, in the public park in town. I am reading from my Bible and lost in thoughts private between me and my God. A woman comes suddenly to stand so close I see her feet first... and then the feet of her little children. "And if you bigots won't let me marry my partner, their other mother, the only family they have or know, what will happen to my children when I die?!" And she does not wait for a response. She is so angry. There is no time. There is no time because the effects of chemotherapy are obvious and universal. You come up behind me and only then do I realize I am standing. You saw and heard it all. You wrap your arms around me from behind. You whisper, "She doesn't know. She didn't see." But I look down at my Bible and I respond, "She saw enough." And I start to cry.]
I find the people I want around me are the ones who write a good press release. Better yet, the ones who can take a book, song, product, movie and boil it down into two sentences of why and if it's relevant.
Relevant. That means it means something. To us. Now. That means it reaches us, touches us, finds and discover us. And the "it" doesn't have to be inanimate. It can be he, she, them, even us.
Are we relevant?
I felt lost and alone. Oh, look. I'm unstable. I asked, "When you are struggling, when you're ill and hurting, is this... all of this... even relevant?"
You were silent for a long time. The distance between us clicked and hummed on the phone lines. I imagined I could count the beat of your pulse. "I'm sorry," you said, your voice low and smooth. "When did salvation become irrelevant?"
The partner you always wanted is right there.
And there. And there.
Have you ever done something, dreamed some dream (you know, a Dream), and thought it was big, it was wide, it would teach and preach and reach and touch, find and discover and no one, no one at all, would ever resistant it, ever close their hearts to it, because it was right (you know, Right)? Have you ever felt that feeling? Maybe even seen the proof in the pudding and in the reality of the reason for believing.
But you can't change a heart. You can cause a heart to open or close. You can coax or condemn a heart. But what it is, who it is, at its core, it will remain, now then forever. The scripture of the heart, wisemen like to say, is written in blood and muscle long before we are grown men. The scripture of the heart is what we have come to believe -- not the words we have memorized or the parts we have played -- but the truth behind it all. Arrogant, self-important, doomed, dreamer, useless, soldier -- the core truth is there, imprinted if not by the hand of God, than by the acts and reactions of our parents, our peers, our reality, our nonreality. The truth remains, lingering, whispering, carrying on into immortality, even after our bones (and heart) are less than dust.
I have witnessed and known -- blessed to know -- fighters who have risen from darkness and struggle and hopelessness. They are bright and they blaze trails for others to follow (or fall behind if they can't keep up). But even there, deep inside these burning hearts, there are whispers from the seed they grew from.
No. I am not saying "once poor, always poor." No. I am not saying we cannot change our station or that our lives are pre-written and we can't break away from cycles of abusive, of nature, of nurture. I am saying simply: The whispers will always be there.
So... I'll surround myself -- arm myself! -- with seeds who are:
Humble in speech
Proud by right
Relentless in desire
Driven by faith
Strong in community
Brazen in spirit
Unshaken by adversity
Deserving of respect
"No one *deserves* my respect," she told the group of teens. "They earn my respect." She looked at them each, slowly. It took time. Everyone waited their turn. "My parents. My teachers. My peers. Any and every authority. All of you. My loyalty is legendary. If you earn my respect." (Gee... think she grew up on the streets? What does her heart seed whisper?)
Earning respect. I would think, to do so, you'd have to be pretty dang relevant. You'd have to be active and push. Not passive and pull. You'd have to be a fighter. You have to read the signs.
"Push Communication is where the offer of information is initiated by the speaker. It is contrasted with Pull Communication, where the request of information is initiated by the listener."
They cannot read the signs. Because the trappings of comfortable religion (which have never fit the amorphous, limitless possibilities of faith) are just that, traps. The lightning is not Zeus. The rain is not tears. But neither is science the devil. Neither is desire the enemy.
They are lonely and lost. They are arrogant and meek. They stumble and ask questions that those who have trampled before us cannot answer. They are seeing in nature what is killed inside their churches. They are looking for truth before the faith in them dies.
"There is tranquility in ignorance, but servitude is its partner."
The New Hampshire license plate once read (still does?): Live Free or Die
Who am I serving? Who are you serving?
"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." --Abraham Lincoln
The whispers in my heart are wild, untamed. They turn tables. They do not waver. If I drift from the path, they call me back. If I look to the sky, they bring me dawn.
"Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free..." The ones you don't want anymore, the one who are beginning to want something and it isn't you, we will take them in. And we won't all get along. And we won't all look alike. And we won't all agree. But welcome is what happens when people listen. Welcome is what happens when people speak. Community is what happens when you earn each other's respect. Christ is just a natural consequence of all that truth.
Mark Twain said once, "Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed." Especially when the diet is hollow but convincing. Tasty and neat. No clean up afterwards. Drop your tithe in the plate and continue on. The country songs croon, "Here's a twenty for last night, and another for what I'll do tonight." Now ain't that American?
Rally forces and step in time. One person made a difference, you know His name, but now He asks us to repeat His cycle. He turned the tables, turned everything upside down. No more original sin. No more sacrifices. No more anything but a direct line to Him. Times have changed. They had changed then. The old ways fall away. They were crumbling then. To be a real Christian is not to hate. It is not to oppress. It is not to deny certain inalienable rights.
It is to bring change. It is to rise up and embrace thy neighbor.
Those of us who have broken free of denomination's pasture to find the Shepherd have one journey and one alone:
To keep Christianity relevant.
EJ
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Surfacing
No matter what you say about life
I learn every time I bleed.
That truth is not a stranger to me.
I admit that I'm wrong
and then I change my mind.
I realize nothing is broken.
No need to worry about everything I've done.
Live every second like it was my last one.
This is my path and I walk it.
You tell me, it's not you, it's me.
And, baby, I would have to agree.
The radio is playing, running off batteries the way my bossman ran off at the mouth today, keeping us four hours long on no extra pay to give us notes (you know, Notes) on performances phoned-in by walk-ons who weren't even there. I'm told I'm supposed to be joyful that I have work at all. And I do have it. Work. Lots of it. Work. But not sure where the money goes after rent and food and utilities. Seems like there's never enough left for anything more. Not gas, not 'net, not a movie out. Seems like we're drowning in all this work... with nothing floating on the surface.
But I take a deep breath of the cold city air and I am thankful. God bless America, I am more thankful than I can find words to express as I exhale a free woman with access to free press and a heart that loves who she pleases and how. I am aware and awake to the truth that what I take from my job is less stress than the world hands some of my friends -- where rent or food or utilities are not paid. Where kind words cease to be helpful at all if they aren't accompanied with cold, hard cash to buy shoes and winter jackets at Goodwill.
The day, my day, falls away to the pavement and I walk the last two blocks home. I stood on that street corner for half an hour coming to terms with the fact that I was so far from drowning I was laying in the sun, on the sand, drink in hand, compared to some of those I love.
No sooner do I arrive home that you take off. Take your jacket. Take your keys. You're gone. I sink down on the couch, tug at yesterday's paper. I watch you leave. I hear the lock snap. Your face, just a glimpse, was tight, angry, your teeth bared while you breathed through parted lips. I close my eyes. I think it was only for a moment.
When I open then again, you are standing in the threshold. The only light is behind you, indirect and diffuse. You are cast in shadows heavier than night. You are holding a rose, deep red, long-stemmed. You stand there forever.
A drowning man doesn't worry about pride. A drowning man will fling out a hand to any soul, friend or enemy. A drowning man who believes... who Believes in himself, in his own worth, in his own place, in his own value on the face of a world of billions, will fight fiercely until no breath remains, until oblivion swallows him whole.
He does not fight only when it is easy. He does not fight just until it gets hard. He does not fight only when there is a chance. He fights even in the maw of the lions. He fights when there is no reason or logic or peace from fighting.
Christ did not suffer... for hours... pain and humiliation, degeneration and betrayal... just so we can give up on His ticket. Just so we can step off His watch. Lay it down. Hand it over. "Let go, let God." doesn't mean give up. It means: Open up! He doesn't have a queue. He's not backed up, baby. You scream, when you bob to the surface, "Lord! Lift me up! Lord! Fill me with your fight!" And He does. He just... does.
Because that's what a Christian is. A live wire. An open conduit for Christ.
I am not understanding the reason why the Far Right pounded their chests whenever liberals (dear Lord, what does that even mean any more?!) "disrespected" the president. And yet... every right-bent blog I visit, opens with, "Hey, *I* didn't vote for him..." or "I'm conservative. That means I didn't vote for Obama." Oh. Okay. Hi! *waving* Hi there, *minority.* Hi there, loser! Hi there, person calling attention to the fact that you don't agree with most of your own country. United we stand, people. Before you blog, "Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing." How about you try typing, "Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize for proving to a world of 6,485,614,626 non-Americans that if they just wait four years, the heavy-handed, bigoted, Republican, double-dealing, intolerant white men will, by and large, be cast aside by the free thinkers who understand what the words 'freedom of religion' and 'division of church and state' mean and elect a new president... one that might *finally* be a decent man... instead of a creature owned by the institution of lies that is Man's Church." (MLA or APA Citations for these statements have been removed to encourage readers to GO READ history themselves... and perhaps the Bible, too.)
I am surfacing. I rise from the couch.
The drowning man does not have time for oratory. The drowning man does not have time for clever twists of words, barbed and stinging. The dying *man* does not strike out in his last, but rather fights on with it. It is only the dying *beast* (so close, sadly, to some men that one is the same and indistinguishable) that strikes out even as it falls. Where is the victory in pity, in pain, in energy and heartbeats spent toward two defeats?
I was nine. I was angry. In the way that only children can get angry. My mother tired to reason with me. I mother never reasoned well. She called, throwing up her hands, to my father. He lowered his paper slowly. He tipped his head and looked at me.
"You think this is righteous anger, Eliza?"
"I do, Papa."
"You think it brings glory to God?"
I am silent. He is not:
"You are the scorpion in the desert drowning in quick sand. With your last strength you strike and kill the owl. If instead you had wrapped your tail around his foot, he would have lifted you from the sand."
The thing that haunted me, stayed with me, for years afterwards, is that my father, gentle, conservative, traditional, joyful, open-minded, intellectual, had given me the blue prints for life. With that one fable -- a flash fable, like flash fiction -- he had left enough unsaid that I could carry on as pacifist or fighter. I could move forward in silence or with shrewd retort.
I learned:
To let a bigot talk himself out... and then use his own grandiose flight against him.
To find my footing, and then strike.
To call for help, and value help, but still know forever who my enemies are.
To struggle. Always. Until I get it right.
To see my attackers for what they are: A chance to stretch, to reach, to grow.
To trust that God will always send the owl.
And that the owl will try to eat me.
And that sometimes I will have to sting the owl when we are still in flight.
But falling through a sky of Christ's own stars is the best kind of drowning I can imagine.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
It is not morbid or emo to admit, to announce, to confess and to confer that we are all drowning men. In sadness, in regret, in anger, in inaction. We are all drowning in some small or large way because we are not perfect, we are not divine, we are men, we are human, we are mortal. We can wash ourselves with thankfulness that we are not another man, who no longer can break the glassy surface of the stormy sea, but thankfulness alone doesn't buoy us for long. We can stop the weeds of wallowing self-pity from tugging us down, but eventually, even thankfulness will fail if we are surrounded by other drowning men.
But what happens if instead of dying together, we cross the fathoms and give to each other everything we have? Do we drown faster? If we are all struggling together, if we all unify to struggle toward one goal -- to host an art show, to hold an open mic, to launch a book... a shuttle... a dream -- aren't our chances for survival a thousand times magnified? Aren't we stronger in numbers, as a community, as a people?
Abraham Lincoln, before his election, said to a prominent preacher, a man who could bring about or bring down Lincoln's nomination to the party, "I will join a church when they ask me to subscribe not to man's word, but to the words of Christ: To love one's neighbor as oneself. To see all men as equal in the eyes of the Lord."
Standing before you, the scent of roses from one rose, the ceiling disappears and I am beneath a billion stars. I could stand here forever, tracing angel constellations, wishing that someone would defend me.
But I would rather stand here and shout, sing, pray. And defend someone else.
Just think if we all saved a drowning man today, how clear the sea would look tomorrow.
EJ
I learn every time I bleed.
That truth is not a stranger to me.
I admit that I'm wrong
and then I change my mind.
I realize nothing is broken.
No need to worry about everything I've done.
Live every second like it was my last one.
This is my path and I walk it.
You tell me, it's not you, it's me.
And, baby, I would have to agree.
The radio is playing, running off batteries the way my bossman ran off at the mouth today, keeping us four hours long on no extra pay to give us notes (you know, Notes) on performances phoned-in by walk-ons who weren't even there. I'm told I'm supposed to be joyful that I have work at all. And I do have it. Work. Lots of it. Work. But not sure where the money goes after rent and food and utilities. Seems like there's never enough left for anything more. Not gas, not 'net, not a movie out. Seems like we're drowning in all this work... with nothing floating on the surface.
But I take a deep breath of the cold city air and I am thankful. God bless America, I am more thankful than I can find words to express as I exhale a free woman with access to free press and a heart that loves who she pleases and how. I am aware and awake to the truth that what I take from my job is less stress than the world hands some of my friends -- where rent or food or utilities are not paid. Where kind words cease to be helpful at all if they aren't accompanied with cold, hard cash to buy shoes and winter jackets at Goodwill.
The day, my day, falls away to the pavement and I walk the last two blocks home. I stood on that street corner for half an hour coming to terms with the fact that I was so far from drowning I was laying in the sun, on the sand, drink in hand, compared to some of those I love.
No sooner do I arrive home that you take off. Take your jacket. Take your keys. You're gone. I sink down on the couch, tug at yesterday's paper. I watch you leave. I hear the lock snap. Your face, just a glimpse, was tight, angry, your teeth bared while you breathed through parted lips. I close my eyes. I think it was only for a moment.
When I open then again, you are standing in the threshold. The only light is behind you, indirect and diffuse. You are cast in shadows heavier than night. You are holding a rose, deep red, long-stemmed. You stand there forever.
A drowning man doesn't worry about pride. A drowning man will fling out a hand to any soul, friend or enemy. A drowning man who believes... who Believes in himself, in his own worth, in his own place, in his own value on the face of a world of billions, will fight fiercely until no breath remains, until oblivion swallows him whole.
He does not fight only when it is easy. He does not fight just until it gets hard. He does not fight only when there is a chance. He fights even in the maw of the lions. He fights when there is no reason or logic or peace from fighting.
Christ did not suffer... for hours... pain and humiliation, degeneration and betrayal... just so we can give up on His ticket. Just so we can step off His watch. Lay it down. Hand it over. "Let go, let God." doesn't mean give up. It means: Open up! He doesn't have a queue. He's not backed up, baby. You scream, when you bob to the surface, "Lord! Lift me up! Lord! Fill me with your fight!" And He does. He just... does.
Because that's what a Christian is. A live wire. An open conduit for Christ.
I am not understanding the reason why the Far Right pounded their chests whenever liberals (dear Lord, what does that even mean any more?!) "disrespected" the president. And yet... every right-bent blog I visit, opens with, "Hey, *I* didn't vote for him..." or "I'm conservative. That means I didn't vote for Obama." Oh. Okay. Hi! *waving* Hi there, *minority.* Hi there, loser! Hi there, person calling attention to the fact that you don't agree with most of your own country. United we stand, people. Before you blog, "Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing." How about you try typing, "Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize for proving to a world of 6,485,614,626 non-Americans that if they just wait four years, the heavy-handed, bigoted, Republican, double-dealing, intolerant white men will, by and large, be cast aside by the free thinkers who understand what the words 'freedom of religion' and 'division of church and state' mean and elect a new president... one that might *finally* be a decent man... instead of a creature owned by the institution of lies that is Man's Church." (MLA or APA Citations for these statements have been removed to encourage readers to GO READ history themselves... and perhaps the Bible, too.)
I am surfacing. I rise from the couch.
The drowning man does not have time for oratory. The drowning man does not have time for clever twists of words, barbed and stinging. The dying *man* does not strike out in his last, but rather fights on with it. It is only the dying *beast* (so close, sadly, to some men that one is the same and indistinguishable) that strikes out even as it falls. Where is the victory in pity, in pain, in energy and heartbeats spent toward two defeats?
I was nine. I was angry. In the way that only children can get angry. My mother tired to reason with me. I mother never reasoned well. She called, throwing up her hands, to my father. He lowered his paper slowly. He tipped his head and looked at me.
"You think this is righteous anger, Eliza?"
"I do, Papa."
"You think it brings glory to God?"
I am silent. He is not:
"You are the scorpion in the desert drowning in quick sand. With your last strength you strike and kill the owl. If instead you had wrapped your tail around his foot, he would have lifted you from the sand."
The thing that haunted me, stayed with me, for years afterwards, is that my father, gentle, conservative, traditional, joyful, open-minded, intellectual, had given me the blue prints for life. With that one fable -- a flash fable, like flash fiction -- he had left enough unsaid that I could carry on as pacifist or fighter. I could move forward in silence or with shrewd retort.
I learned:
To let a bigot talk himself out... and then use his own grandiose flight against him.
To find my footing, and then strike.
To call for help, and value help, but still know forever who my enemies are.
To struggle. Always. Until I get it right.
To see my attackers for what they are: A chance to stretch, to reach, to grow.
To trust that God will always send the owl.
And that the owl will try to eat me.
And that sometimes I will have to sting the owl when we are still in flight.
But falling through a sky of Christ's own stars is the best kind of drowning I can imagine.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
It is not morbid or emo to admit, to announce, to confess and to confer that we are all drowning men. In sadness, in regret, in anger, in inaction. We are all drowning in some small or large way because we are not perfect, we are not divine, we are men, we are human, we are mortal. We can wash ourselves with thankfulness that we are not another man, who no longer can break the glassy surface of the stormy sea, but thankfulness alone doesn't buoy us for long. We can stop the weeds of wallowing self-pity from tugging us down, but eventually, even thankfulness will fail if we are surrounded by other drowning men.
But what happens if instead of dying together, we cross the fathoms and give to each other everything we have? Do we drown faster? If we are all struggling together, if we all unify to struggle toward one goal -- to host an art show, to hold an open mic, to launch a book... a shuttle... a dream -- aren't our chances for survival a thousand times magnified? Aren't we stronger in numbers, as a community, as a people?
Abraham Lincoln, before his election, said to a prominent preacher, a man who could bring about or bring down Lincoln's nomination to the party, "I will join a church when they ask me to subscribe not to man's word, but to the words of Christ: To love one's neighbor as oneself. To see all men as equal in the eyes of the Lord."
Standing before you, the scent of roses from one rose, the ceiling disappears and I am beneath a billion stars. I could stand here forever, tracing angel constellations, wishing that someone would defend me.
But I would rather stand here and shout, sing, pray. And defend someone else.
Just think if we all saved a drowning man today, how clear the sea would look tomorrow.
EJ
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Think It Through
The simplest solution is often the best solution. Think of the almost incomprehensible number of creatures and objects and rules of physics that God had to craft with creation. Try to grasp that and you’ll see quickly what logical sense it made that He wove everything – everything! – from fractals that repeat and flip and turn and slide into place. Genesis made simple... only for God, of course, but you get my idea.
In teen out-reach (“RL Bible Study”) tonight one teen asked me point blank, “Why did God make sex feel good?”
An older grrl across the circle muttered, “It does?”
But I gave in. I played along. “You’re really asking, why did God make sex feel good if we have to wait until we’re married... or until we’re trying to conceive?”
The teen flipped her hair and shook her head, popping her gum and adjusting the belt on her jeans. “No. Not *that* kind of sex. The other kind.”
And my sharp retort of pleased/amused laughter rang off the church basement floor. I looked up at my co-teacher with great big eyes full up of joyful opportunity. He looked back at me with klaxons of alarm sounding. Oh... I looked away. Right. As Christians... we’re not supposed to *like* our bodies.
*shrug*
Too bad. I do.
And so I said:
I stood on the beach with the waves around my bare feet and cresting around my calves and she was running, laughing, her hair wet with the spray, leaving a trail of clothes behind her until she threw herself into my arms, tackling me into the waves and locking our mouths, our hips, our hearts... and it all felt so good. Why? Because I was alive. And she was alive. And we had the entire ocean to discover and each other.
And it was all a gift from God.
I danced hard in the darkness and the strobes were blue green red. The beat was heavy, unrelenting, power and sex (same thing), pleasure and passion (ditto) shaking me down and turning my marrow molten bronze and my skin into rose petals. I felt free from every care, every worry, every Suit telling me what to do, how to walk, who to kiss, how to live. I was me: Endurance. Beat. Strength. Firm, slick with sweat, wild with the night. And nobody was taking me home but me. I belonged to only me.
And it was all a gift from God.
The desert was like nothing I had ever seen. And we made love in the cool blue shade of ancient stones. His tongue traced the lines of my tats and the warm metal of every piercing and I felt my body like scripture, telling truths and stories unfiltered by politics or fear. All the fighting, all the sacrifice, all the compromise and standing ground was all right there to be tasted, to be read like Braille. My hands on his shoulders then tangled in his hair, I shouted at the endless sky.
And it was all a gift from God.
Holding you while you cried hard because he could no longer meet your eyes....
Holding my father while he passed from this world....
Holding my breath the first time you looked at me....
Holding on even when the world tells me to let go.
The only letting go I ever do is to let go, let God.
And that, too, is a gift.
“I hope that answers your question,” I say with a steady gaze and a gentle smile.
She squints her eyes at me than swivels in her plastic chair and fixes her youth pastor with an incredulous stare. “Where'd you find this chick?!”
There is laughter. Mine included. And I meet your eyes across the room.
When we are given a gift, we are thankful. We are gracious. We are respectful. When we are given a gift, a gift grant to us by our Lord and woven into our bodies in a hundred million fractal parts, we should not be ashamed. We should not second guess.
We must celebrate.
EJ
In teen out-reach (“RL Bible Study”) tonight one teen asked me point blank, “Why did God make sex feel good?”
An older grrl across the circle muttered, “It does?”
But I gave in. I played along. “You’re really asking, why did God make sex feel good if we have to wait until we’re married... or until we’re trying to conceive?”
The teen flipped her hair and shook her head, popping her gum and adjusting the belt on her jeans. “No. Not *that* kind of sex. The other kind.”
And my sharp retort of pleased/amused laughter rang off the church basement floor. I looked up at my co-teacher with great big eyes full up of joyful opportunity. He looked back at me with klaxons of alarm sounding. Oh... I looked away. Right. As Christians... we’re not supposed to *like* our bodies.
*shrug*
Too bad. I do.
And so I said:
I stood on the beach with the waves around my bare feet and cresting around my calves and she was running, laughing, her hair wet with the spray, leaving a trail of clothes behind her until she threw herself into my arms, tackling me into the waves and locking our mouths, our hips, our hearts... and it all felt so good. Why? Because I was alive. And she was alive. And we had the entire ocean to discover and each other.
And it was all a gift from God.
I danced hard in the darkness and the strobes were blue green red. The beat was heavy, unrelenting, power and sex (same thing), pleasure and passion (ditto) shaking me down and turning my marrow molten bronze and my skin into rose petals. I felt free from every care, every worry, every Suit telling me what to do, how to walk, who to kiss, how to live. I was me: Endurance. Beat. Strength. Firm, slick with sweat, wild with the night. And nobody was taking me home but me. I belonged to only me.
And it was all a gift from God.
The desert was like nothing I had ever seen. And we made love in the cool blue shade of ancient stones. His tongue traced the lines of my tats and the warm metal of every piercing and I felt my body like scripture, telling truths and stories unfiltered by politics or fear. All the fighting, all the sacrifice, all the compromise and standing ground was all right there to be tasted, to be read like Braille. My hands on his shoulders then tangled in his hair, I shouted at the endless sky.
And it was all a gift from God.
Holding you while you cried hard because he could no longer meet your eyes....
Holding my father while he passed from this world....
Holding my breath the first time you looked at me....
Holding on even when the world tells me to let go.
The only letting go I ever do is to let go, let God.
And that, too, is a gift.
“I hope that answers your question,” I say with a steady gaze and a gentle smile.
She squints her eyes at me than swivels in her plastic chair and fixes her youth pastor with an incredulous stare. “Where'd you find this chick?!”
There is laughter. Mine included. And I meet your eyes across the room.
When we are given a gift, we are thankful. We are gracious. We are respectful. When we are given a gift, a gift grant to us by our Lord and woven into our bodies in a hundred million fractal parts, we should not be ashamed. We should not second guess.
We must celebrate.
EJ
Sunday, August 09, 2009
God Whispers: Down. Stay. Good Grrl.
...or The Importance of Inaction
I am sitting alone with you (is that an oxymoron?) above the sea. I used to ride out here, the speed easing me half way to the healing that the sea would complete, and then sit on the bluff at the side of the road. But that isn't how you roll. You have a little... a lot... more class than I do. You are elegant and refined, cultured and measured. I think this is why you have had so many lovers. I don't think many creatures like you exist any more. Especially not in GenX.
You whisper: I don't want my angel on the side of the road.
I like it when you call me your angel.
"No playing games.
You're watching me.
All those simple things you do.
They draw me in."
And so I am alone (with you) perched on the balcony railing of a five star hotel, the sea crashing three storeys below me. My bare feet dangling to the drop, my back to your chest, your hands slipping forward to open eight buttons. I find myself counting them come undone... as I come undone... all in time with the waves cresting, crashing, cascading, creating a new shoreline with every slip, slide, seduction of you. Your fingertips brush my hem, open cloth like you open by heart. Thumbs stroke down abs recently tightened for work. I shudder. They continue down then alight, with no other fingers, on my heavy Kawasaki belt buckle.
You whisper: I'm listening.
I like it when you're listening.
"The places you touch
you mark with a kiss.
No one knows your secret
but sometimes you let me in."
I try to open my mouth but my lungs fill with sea spray and salt. Suddenly I want the sand at my back, you above me, those freezing cold curtains of mist and wave washing up and away around us. I want you inside me, filling me up in a way that only the Holy Spirit can. I want to *do.* Not talk about doing. I want *action.* Not planning. I want to shut up and take you against me. I want to scream your name like the time the neighbors came knocking to make sure we were okay. I don't want to talk. I want to do. You open my belt. I'm waiting, you tell me, without words. I push against you but you won't be persuaded. I stare at the sea and imagine drowning sweet and wild in you. Come on, grrl, you're coaxing, tracing the lines of my muscles and bones. Then, roughly, without pretense, you turn me into your arms. Kiss me hard. I feel my hands let go of the railing and I'm flailing, trying to find a purchase in your clothes, your hair, your... but you are holding me so tightly that I do not need to hold on. And anyway, I've already fallen. Oh God, you know how hard I've fallen for you.
You whisper: You will talk to me.
I like it when you insist.
"I can't wait to begin.
I can't breathe while I wait."
I tell you everything. Everything. Everything that no one else knows. Everything that I never admitted to even myself. The fears, the dreams, the hopes, the broken heart. I tell you everything. I even tell you the truth. My own quiet truth, soft and tender. And so much of what I say starts and ends with, "They said..." and "...they say." So much of my reality shaped by how other people see me -- and the labels of culture, tradition, society, religion and politics that they glue all over me. Five times... I see your eyes counting... ten times... I watch your smile keeping track... twelve times is the charm and you stop me. Your finger tips against my lips is like an electric shock crackling through my body. You are fire and ice and I want you so much it's almost unbearable. I moan. You step away, leaving me in the plush hotel room chair.
You step back... but not too far. I can still smell your perfume. You unzip your bomber jacket and it falls over your shoulders as you shrug it back. It slides down your arms and back and pools, chocolate-and-nutmeg brown, at your boots. You hold my gaze. You tilt your chin. Your hands travel your body. You shudder. I lean forward in my chair, tensing. You hold up one hand, one finger poised. You shake your head with a faint smile. I lean back. I will stay. I will do anything you command.
You whisper: Are you watching?
I like watching you.
"Every time that I look
you're more inviting."
Shirt... button by button. Skirt... button and zipper. Boots... the arch of your back, the rise of your ass, as you bend over, the swell of each breast threatening to do exactly what you do for them a moment later. You are standing in nothing but a tasteful swatch of black silk and purple lace. Now you raise your hand again. But this time, you beckon me forward. I come obediently, willingly. You have never before allowed me... you have never beckoned me to you with this look on your face, so open, so honest, so obvious what you are saying. But then, you say it.
You whisper: Touch me.
I like...
Words and music fail me. I never thought you would say those two words. Never. I do as told. Gently, shuddering myself now. Slowly, unwilling to rush this moment so rare and precious. I explore and discover your hidden places, your secrets tucked beneath your waves of hair, aside the curve of your ribs, the taut rise of your shoulder blade. I take my time because in dreams (which surely this is) you can take all the time in the world. I am certain there are more than twenty-four hours in this day to touch you. We are the same height exactly so when I run my hands down your sides, cradle your hips and lean into your nape, your lips nestle against my ear.
You whisper: ...
And my eyes fly wide with surprise and pleasure. I cannot stop the gasp that escapes me. I cannot breathe, think, speak. I simply hear your two-word command and sink to my knees.
The sun sets. The balcony doors have remained open and I hear the waves even as I taste your heartbeat and feel my own pounding in my blush. Your hands tight in my hair, some minutes... hours? ...later, and then you ask the question: *They* say what you had wasn't real. *They* say it wasn't valid with only words. You have lived with me for months. I have taken your body countless times. And now you have taken mine. So, tell me, little angel: Which one of us do you know better, him or me?
I blink. I blink again.
You know who I know best.
Sometimes the truth can only be found in inaction. Sometimes action does nothing to show us the way. Sometimes it changes nothing. Sometimes all we need is the ability to be still and listen.
EJ
I am sitting alone with you (is that an oxymoron?) above the sea. I used to ride out here, the speed easing me half way to the healing that the sea would complete, and then sit on the bluff at the side of the road. But that isn't how you roll. You have a little... a lot... more class than I do. You are elegant and refined, cultured and measured. I think this is why you have had so many lovers. I don't think many creatures like you exist any more. Especially not in GenX.
You whisper: I don't want my angel on the side of the road.
I like it when you call me your angel.
"No playing games.
You're watching me.
All those simple things you do.
They draw me in."
And so I am alone (with you) perched on the balcony railing of a five star hotel, the sea crashing three storeys below me. My bare feet dangling to the drop, my back to your chest, your hands slipping forward to open eight buttons. I find myself counting them come undone... as I come undone... all in time with the waves cresting, crashing, cascading, creating a new shoreline with every slip, slide, seduction of you. Your fingertips brush my hem, open cloth like you open by heart. Thumbs stroke down abs recently tightened for work. I shudder. They continue down then alight, with no other fingers, on my heavy Kawasaki belt buckle.
You whisper: I'm listening.
I like it when you're listening.
"The places you touch
you mark with a kiss.
No one knows your secret
but sometimes you let me in."
I try to open my mouth but my lungs fill with sea spray and salt. Suddenly I want the sand at my back, you above me, those freezing cold curtains of mist and wave washing up and away around us. I want you inside me, filling me up in a way that only the Holy Spirit can. I want to *do.* Not talk about doing. I want *action.* Not planning. I want to shut up and take you against me. I want to scream your name like the time the neighbors came knocking to make sure we were okay. I don't want to talk. I want to do. You open my belt. I'm waiting, you tell me, without words. I push against you but you won't be persuaded. I stare at the sea and imagine drowning sweet and wild in you. Come on, grrl, you're coaxing, tracing the lines of my muscles and bones. Then, roughly, without pretense, you turn me into your arms. Kiss me hard. I feel my hands let go of the railing and I'm flailing, trying to find a purchase in your clothes, your hair, your... but you are holding me so tightly that I do not need to hold on. And anyway, I've already fallen. Oh God, you know how hard I've fallen for you.
You whisper: You will talk to me.
I like it when you insist.
"I can't wait to begin.
I can't breathe while I wait."
I tell you everything. Everything. Everything that no one else knows. Everything that I never admitted to even myself. The fears, the dreams, the hopes, the broken heart. I tell you everything. I even tell you the truth. My own quiet truth, soft and tender. And so much of what I say starts and ends with, "They said..." and "...they say." So much of my reality shaped by how other people see me -- and the labels of culture, tradition, society, religion and politics that they glue all over me. Five times... I see your eyes counting... ten times... I watch your smile keeping track... twelve times is the charm and you stop me. Your finger tips against my lips is like an electric shock crackling through my body. You are fire and ice and I want you so much it's almost unbearable. I moan. You step away, leaving me in the plush hotel room chair.
You step back... but not too far. I can still smell your perfume. You unzip your bomber jacket and it falls over your shoulders as you shrug it back. It slides down your arms and back and pools, chocolate-and-nutmeg brown, at your boots. You hold my gaze. You tilt your chin. Your hands travel your body. You shudder. I lean forward in my chair, tensing. You hold up one hand, one finger poised. You shake your head with a faint smile. I lean back. I will stay. I will do anything you command.
You whisper: Are you watching?
I like watching you.
"Every time that I look
you're more inviting."
Shirt... button by button. Skirt... button and zipper. Boots... the arch of your back, the rise of your ass, as you bend over, the swell of each breast threatening to do exactly what you do for them a moment later. You are standing in nothing but a tasteful swatch of black silk and purple lace. Now you raise your hand again. But this time, you beckon me forward. I come obediently, willingly. You have never before allowed me... you have never beckoned me to you with this look on your face, so open, so honest, so obvious what you are saying. But then, you say it.
You whisper: Touch me.
I like...
Words and music fail me. I never thought you would say those two words. Never. I do as told. Gently, shuddering myself now. Slowly, unwilling to rush this moment so rare and precious. I explore and discover your hidden places, your secrets tucked beneath your waves of hair, aside the curve of your ribs, the taut rise of your shoulder blade. I take my time because in dreams (which surely this is) you can take all the time in the world. I am certain there are more than twenty-four hours in this day to touch you. We are the same height exactly so when I run my hands down your sides, cradle your hips and lean into your nape, your lips nestle against my ear.
You whisper: ...
And my eyes fly wide with surprise and pleasure. I cannot stop the gasp that escapes me. I cannot breathe, think, speak. I simply hear your two-word command and sink to my knees.
The sun sets. The balcony doors have remained open and I hear the waves even as I taste your heartbeat and feel my own pounding in my blush. Your hands tight in my hair, some minutes... hours? ...later, and then you ask the question: *They* say what you had wasn't real. *They* say it wasn't valid with only words. You have lived with me for months. I have taken your body countless times. And now you have taken mine. So, tell me, little angel: Which one of us do you know better, him or me?
I blink. I blink again.
You know who I know best.
Sometimes the truth can only be found in inaction. Sometimes action does nothing to show us the way. Sometimes it changes nothing. Sometimes all we need is the ability to be still and listen.
EJ
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Give Me Five (Days)
If I whisper it, if I gasp it, if I murmur and coax with words and touch, will you walk with me and me alone, not now then forever, but more than just this night, will you stand at my side, will you be my beloved, for just five days. Will you give me all of you, will you trust and support me, will you try me on for size, will you hear my yes and hand me yours, will you guide my heart, my body and my life... for just five days?
A friend of mine said powerfully once, "I do not believe what the pulpit tells me. The pulpit is made of wood. If my church ceased to preach what I believe inside myself than I would cease to be a Baptist." She refused to be a label. She was stating, simply, that should her church change their mind tomorrow -- receive divinity retold -- she would walk away to worship one-on-one, just her, just Christ, just the truth. A new holy trinity.
Denomination is broken. Oh? Are you clicking away, closing the browser, muttering to yourself, "Here she goes again!" But here I go again is exactly where I'm going:
Mob mentality. If enough people, or the "right" people say it, repeat it, phrase it or shape it, we believe it. Not our logical mind. Not our heart. Not the voice of God in our own ears. We are egotistical, I suppose, if we have the strength, the confidence to say: I understand that you believe that, mother (father, pastor), but that is not what I believe."
Because in order to say that -- loudly, proudly -- we must know what we believe and know who we are. We must be, if not doubt free (though the strongest people I know are) than on the path to that shining destination.
How can you know that I am not the one who will love and cherish you, fight for you and hold you? How can you know when you will not look at me, look in the mirror, look into the surface of the baptismal pool and see our faces, side by side, every Sunday? You have seen me awash with desire for you. You have seen me fight with words and fists for you. But you resist, you insist, you desist any activity that might allow you to glimpse me as more than just a creature passing through your life when you need it. To you I am first a miracle and second transitory, short-lived. You leave me notes that thank me for reports and charts and chocolate chip cookies and unspoken, unexplained evenings of passion, and you compare me to falling stars, comets, bright, brilliant, burning away.
And Christ says just the same. Why are you mine only on Sundays? Why am I yours only when ministry fills your ears? Why won't you carry me with you always? Why don't you hear me when I urge you, "Kiss him..." Why do you allow secular doubt to fill the sacred, holy places I made hollow only so you could fill yourself with me?
Does doubt help you? Decide. Move. Looking back doesn't teach any lesson. If you must look back for the lesson, it wasn't yours to learn.
Does fret buoy you? Or does it sink you into mire and muck and shadowlands of twisted paths cobbled with more of the above (doubt)? Throw out fret because it kills you and kills your light, and reach out for faith.
Does that sound overly simple? Do you crease your brow and cry, "How?"
Just try it. Replace every single act or thought of doubt or fret with action. With decision and with faith. That means doing the work. Going the extra step. Do it for five minutes. Than five hours. Then, finally, five days. When you doubt, decide. Sometimes you will be wrong. But do it anyway. When you fret, turn to faith. Turn to the light, to the sky, to a child's embrace, to a friend's laughter, to a favorite verse in poetry, in song, in scripture. Instead of leaving your place of worry filled with dread and inaction, go forward from your place of light. Open yourself up to inspiration... and then leap.
Leap right in.
Five days. Be mine. Look at me and see that I will love you forever. That my promises are absolute. That my mind is my own, but my heart is already yours. For five days look at me... and see yourself in my eyes. You will know everything inside me if you only take the time to see. Just five days. In the eyes of our Lord. Just five days.
It will change your life.
EJ
A friend of mine said powerfully once, "I do not believe what the pulpit tells me. The pulpit is made of wood. If my church ceased to preach what I believe inside myself than I would cease to be a Baptist." She refused to be a label. She was stating, simply, that should her church change their mind tomorrow -- receive divinity retold -- she would walk away to worship one-on-one, just her, just Christ, just the truth. A new holy trinity.
Denomination is broken. Oh? Are you clicking away, closing the browser, muttering to yourself, "Here she goes again!" But here I go again is exactly where I'm going:
Mob mentality. If enough people, or the "right" people say it, repeat it, phrase it or shape it, we believe it. Not our logical mind. Not our heart. Not the voice of God in our own ears. We are egotistical, I suppose, if we have the strength, the confidence to say: I understand that you believe that, mother (father, pastor), but that is not what I believe."
Because in order to say that -- loudly, proudly -- we must know what we believe and know who we are. We must be, if not doubt free (though the strongest people I know are) than on the path to that shining destination.
How can you know that I am not the one who will love and cherish you, fight for you and hold you? How can you know when you will not look at me, look in the mirror, look into the surface of the baptismal pool and see our faces, side by side, every Sunday? You have seen me awash with desire for you. You have seen me fight with words and fists for you. But you resist, you insist, you desist any activity that might allow you to glimpse me as more than just a creature passing through your life when you need it. To you I am first a miracle and second transitory, short-lived. You leave me notes that thank me for reports and charts and chocolate chip cookies and unspoken, unexplained evenings of passion, and you compare me to falling stars, comets, bright, brilliant, burning away.
And Christ says just the same. Why are you mine only on Sundays? Why am I yours only when ministry fills your ears? Why won't you carry me with you always? Why don't you hear me when I urge you, "Kiss him..." Why do you allow secular doubt to fill the sacred, holy places I made hollow only so you could fill yourself with me?
Does doubt help you? Decide. Move. Looking back doesn't teach any lesson. If you must look back for the lesson, it wasn't yours to learn.
Does fret buoy you? Or does it sink you into mire and muck and shadowlands of twisted paths cobbled with more of the above (doubt)? Throw out fret because it kills you and kills your light, and reach out for faith.
Does that sound overly simple? Do you crease your brow and cry, "How?"
Just try it. Replace every single act or thought of doubt or fret with action. With decision and with faith. That means doing the work. Going the extra step. Do it for five minutes. Than five hours. Then, finally, five days. When you doubt, decide. Sometimes you will be wrong. But do it anyway. When you fret, turn to faith. Turn to the light, to the sky, to a child's embrace, to a friend's laughter, to a favorite verse in poetry, in song, in scripture. Instead of leaving your place of worry filled with dread and inaction, go forward from your place of light. Open yourself up to inspiration... and then leap.
Leap right in.
Five days. Be mine. Look at me and see that I will love you forever. That my promises are absolute. That my mind is my own, but my heart is already yours. For five days look at me... and see yourself in my eyes. You will know everything inside me if you only take the time to see. Just five days. In the eyes of our Lord. Just five days.
It will change your life.
EJ
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Difference of Opinion
There is so much about you that means so much to me. The song says it, doesn't it? There isn't anything about you that doesn't do something for me. I'm not interested in fifteen minutes of fame, but you were my closest brush with divinity... and that's saying something. I have witnessed divinity standing in my kitchen. I have heard divinity in rain song. I have read divinity in ancient texts all but lost, all but censored and burned. But you were divinity in sensation, in heartbeat, in fingerprints left on my skin that I can never forget. Of all that we have shared, all the moments, all the crossroads and catalysts, fears and flashpoints, all the inspiration, discovery, and victory, everything we have held between us, sacred and alive, the hours I hold most reverent are the hours when there was nothing between us at all.
But you do not agree.
The hours you hold most holy is the long evening into night, twelve hours, maybe fourteen, when there was a polished cherry wood table, twenty d6, four number two pencils, a hole-punch and one graph paper notebook between us.
That difference in opinion has only stopped bothering me in the last two hundred and fifty-six days. But it was today, at first light, when I realized that acceptance was wrapped in a golden hallelujah.
“I look into your eyes
as you are saying goodbye
and I see for the first time
what I see for the last time
all the scars that I laid
all the price that you paid
but I swear I never saw it
until now...”
The sunlight is oppressive outside the arboretum greenhouse. Somewhere above and outside the thirty foot ceiling, the sharp blue sky is cloudless with summer heat. Perched forbidden in the tropical crook of a hardy, split trunk palm, I feel my spine and the tree become one thing, two separate entities blending seamlessly into one, and I close my eyes and muse on the vast variety of human experience... the myriad of ways the exact same event can be seen, felt, lived by a myriad of people.
I remember...
You undress slowly, by candlelight. You have dressed carefully, in perfect layers of emotion, only hours before, before we went to dinner. You stay just out of arm's reach. You will not allow my touch only my gaze and it will stay that way all night. My mind is drifting. That happens sometimes. You say it fascinates you that I'm always thinking something. I finally murmur to you as you lift silk over your head, “How do you feel right now? Be honest.” You smile at me. Honest is the only way you know how to be. “Powerful. In control. Pleased with myself,” you tell me, impressing me once again with your pure sense of self. “How do you feel?” you ask, not surprisingly. I smile back at you. “Powerless. Without control...” my smile changes. “Pleased with you.”
The smells of the flowers – sweet, elusive -- and the green, rare growing things – spicy, lingering, thick -- that fill this glass palace wash over me not unlike the sea spray at the oceanside. I hear children laughing and the low, comfortable voices of a man and woman. They are discussing the behavior of an older child, a teenager, who is not with them but is clearly their own. The way she's dressing is the topic of conversation. Mother says, “It's empowering.” Father says, “She looks like a whore.”
I remember...
Making a checklist of attributes my perfect partner would be required to have. It was an exercise more for myself than for anyone else (so said Cosmo) so that my mind was clear. You met my every desire – physical as well as behavioral – except for one. It seemed small. Maybe even something that could have changed, and I was so willing to overlook it. Not be too picky. Because you had a child. I would be walking into a ready-made family. A little family that needed my support – financially and spiritually and emotionally. It was like walking into a dream come true. And I was a dream-walker, deliriously happy even when I was huddled, crying, shaking, afraid, humiliated... telling myself over and over again that this was everything I wanted. The first and last time we had a friend over for dinner, she threw back her chair when you ridiculed my attempt to pray in your home, and she snarled with bared teeth, “I have never witnessed such abject cruelty.” But I had been so sure I was happy... so happy... perfectly happy.
Here I am. Sitting here now. There was perhaps twenty people in the massive greenhouse. Some walk the paths alone. Others are together. But either way, they each experience this place in their own way, on their own terms.
We want so badly to not be alone, to connect, to find those bonds that bind. And we believe so deeply, so fundamentally that to fit together we must have more common denominators than uncommon ones. We must share opinions, politics, skin color, religion, and more and more.
But what is interesting (what is *fascinating*) than if another is exactly as you are? Where is the wonder and discovery and spark of new possibilities and broader horizons then?
No where. If we surround ourselves with what is easy to get along with, with those who are so like us they almost cease to be individuals outside us, than there are only the possibilities that exist when we are alone. Our view of the horizon (of everything) is narrow.
Humanity can survive with an insular, isolationist approach, but it cannot grow. It cannot evolve and transform. Do we really want to stay *here*? Is this really as high as we think we can reach? God did not place us here, on this only green world, to wallow in petty, base animal instincts – eat, sleep, screw, fight. We are animals, yes, of course. We mirror nature just as our world mythologies mirror themselves and ourselves crossing all political borders. But we are the animal that God named steward of all others and the Earth itself. Connecting with one another beyond the primal needs for food, shelter and reproduction and is what God expects, demands and requires of us.
I tucked my hands behind my head. I imagine that no one will find me here ever. That I can exist indefinitely perched here in this cultivated garden of Eden. I imagine the faces of my comrades. Those men and women who are walking with me on a path I once walked alone. They are all... so different. Even those who, on the surface (their armor perhaps) appear so like me, experience life so very, very differently. Intrinsically different. We are not one race, religion, orientation, generation, political party. We do not all call each friends, call each other reliable, call each other at all. But we are together. We are, as a team, standing, fighting, working, all to create something beautiful, something with depth and breath and beating heart. Our differing experiences, even with the same event, the same facts, the same words and moments, combine and spill into our ideas forming a singular experience that becomes greater than any of us could create alone.
I am talking, of course, about Mardi Gras 3000.
This blog has become a place for me to bare my heart and talk to my friends, strangers searching, other fighters hoping. But I have to stop and remind myself that this blog would not be here if it weren't for MG3K. If it weren't for the encouragement, the focus, the support, I have found in that community. That community of dynamically different people.
There are people in my life – forces in my life – outside that network of comrades, who are trying their hardest to tear me down. Some say they love me. Some say they hate me. Some just insist I need them. They say: Look to your own. Look to those like you. Look to us. But they don't understand or know me. They herald the end times (little end times) because their own experience is failure. Their shared experiences are focused on their own losses and so that is all they have to project, to offer. They are little minds that surround themselves with little minds and they cannot understand that we celebrate that we are each different, with and without blame in every situation, above and beyond and beneath the work we must do, choose to do, avoid doing. We are realists and we dance in the face of our own imperfections.
“There is no way you'll make it. And when you fail, when you flame out in false glory, you'll come back to me because I know how to treat you.”
No, I won't.
And no, you don't.
But don't take my world on it. Because that's only my experience.
Just keep watching us reach.
EJ
But you do not agree.
The hours you hold most holy is the long evening into night, twelve hours, maybe fourteen, when there was a polished cherry wood table, twenty d6, four number two pencils, a hole-punch and one graph paper notebook between us.
That difference in opinion has only stopped bothering me in the last two hundred and fifty-six days. But it was today, at first light, when I realized that acceptance was wrapped in a golden hallelujah.
“I look into your eyes
as you are saying goodbye
and I see for the first time
what I see for the last time
all the scars that I laid
all the price that you paid
but I swear I never saw it
until now...”
The sunlight is oppressive outside the arboretum greenhouse. Somewhere above and outside the thirty foot ceiling, the sharp blue sky is cloudless with summer heat. Perched forbidden in the tropical crook of a hardy, split trunk palm, I feel my spine and the tree become one thing, two separate entities blending seamlessly into one, and I close my eyes and muse on the vast variety of human experience... the myriad of ways the exact same event can be seen, felt, lived by a myriad of people.
I remember...
You undress slowly, by candlelight. You have dressed carefully, in perfect layers of emotion, only hours before, before we went to dinner. You stay just out of arm's reach. You will not allow my touch only my gaze and it will stay that way all night. My mind is drifting. That happens sometimes. You say it fascinates you that I'm always thinking something. I finally murmur to you as you lift silk over your head, “How do you feel right now? Be honest.” You smile at me. Honest is the only way you know how to be. “Powerful. In control. Pleased with myself,” you tell me, impressing me once again with your pure sense of self. “How do you feel?” you ask, not surprisingly. I smile back at you. “Powerless. Without control...” my smile changes. “Pleased with you.”
The smells of the flowers – sweet, elusive -- and the green, rare growing things – spicy, lingering, thick -- that fill this glass palace wash over me not unlike the sea spray at the oceanside. I hear children laughing and the low, comfortable voices of a man and woman. They are discussing the behavior of an older child, a teenager, who is not with them but is clearly their own. The way she's dressing is the topic of conversation. Mother says, “It's empowering.” Father says, “She looks like a whore.”
I remember...
Making a checklist of attributes my perfect partner would be required to have. It was an exercise more for myself than for anyone else (so said Cosmo) so that my mind was clear. You met my every desire – physical as well as behavioral – except for one. It seemed small. Maybe even something that could have changed, and I was so willing to overlook it. Not be too picky. Because you had a child. I would be walking into a ready-made family. A little family that needed my support – financially and spiritually and emotionally. It was like walking into a dream come true. And I was a dream-walker, deliriously happy even when I was huddled, crying, shaking, afraid, humiliated... telling myself over and over again that this was everything I wanted. The first and last time we had a friend over for dinner, she threw back her chair when you ridiculed my attempt to pray in your home, and she snarled with bared teeth, “I have never witnessed such abject cruelty.” But I had been so sure I was happy... so happy... perfectly happy.
Here I am. Sitting here now. There was perhaps twenty people in the massive greenhouse. Some walk the paths alone. Others are together. But either way, they each experience this place in their own way, on their own terms.
We want so badly to not be alone, to connect, to find those bonds that bind. And we believe so deeply, so fundamentally that to fit together we must have more common denominators than uncommon ones. We must share opinions, politics, skin color, religion, and more and more.
But what is interesting (what is *fascinating*) than if another is exactly as you are? Where is the wonder and discovery and spark of new possibilities and broader horizons then?
No where. If we surround ourselves with what is easy to get along with, with those who are so like us they almost cease to be individuals outside us, than there are only the possibilities that exist when we are alone. Our view of the horizon (of everything) is narrow.
Humanity can survive with an insular, isolationist approach, but it cannot grow. It cannot evolve and transform. Do we really want to stay *here*? Is this really as high as we think we can reach? God did not place us here, on this only green world, to wallow in petty, base animal instincts – eat, sleep, screw, fight. We are animals, yes, of course. We mirror nature just as our world mythologies mirror themselves and ourselves crossing all political borders. But we are the animal that God named steward of all others and the Earth itself. Connecting with one another beyond the primal needs for food, shelter and reproduction and is what God expects, demands and requires of us.
I tucked my hands behind my head. I imagine that no one will find me here ever. That I can exist indefinitely perched here in this cultivated garden of Eden. I imagine the faces of my comrades. Those men and women who are walking with me on a path I once walked alone. They are all... so different. Even those who, on the surface (their armor perhaps) appear so like me, experience life so very, very differently. Intrinsically different. We are not one race, religion, orientation, generation, political party. We do not all call each friends, call each other reliable, call each other at all. But we are together. We are, as a team, standing, fighting, working, all to create something beautiful, something with depth and breath and beating heart. Our differing experiences, even with the same event, the same facts, the same words and moments, combine and spill into our ideas forming a singular experience that becomes greater than any of us could create alone.
I am talking, of course, about Mardi Gras 3000.
This blog has become a place for me to bare my heart and talk to my friends, strangers searching, other fighters hoping. But I have to stop and remind myself that this blog would not be here if it weren't for MG3K. If it weren't for the encouragement, the focus, the support, I have found in that community. That community of dynamically different people.
There are people in my life – forces in my life – outside that network of comrades, who are trying their hardest to tear me down. Some say they love me. Some say they hate me. Some just insist I need them. They say: Look to your own. Look to those like you. Look to us. But they don't understand or know me. They herald the end times (little end times) because their own experience is failure. Their shared experiences are focused on their own losses and so that is all they have to project, to offer. They are little minds that surround themselves with little minds and they cannot understand that we celebrate that we are each different, with and without blame in every situation, above and beyond and beneath the work we must do, choose to do, avoid doing. We are realists and we dance in the face of our own imperfections.
“There is no way you'll make it. And when you fail, when you flame out in false glory, you'll come back to me because I know how to treat you.”
No, I won't.
And no, you don't.
But don't take my world on it. Because that's only my experience.
Just keep watching us reach.
EJ
Sunday, July 19, 2009
So Sayth the Lord
Mass is over but I do not rise to leave. I sit for long moments while the crowded pews empty leaving me, eyes closed, in contemplation. This is not my denomination. I am not a joiner, a team-player, a follower... except of Christ... but we made a deal: You would go if it was alien to me, too.
The sounds of Sunday catch up and gossip and small talk take a long time to melt away until finally there is just this:
The sound of a place made holy by human faith.
The sound of stillness.
The beating of my heart.
The beating of your own.
If stain glass windows and rose oil on wood and impossibly high and arched ceilings had a sound, there would be that sound as well but I will have to settle for the sound of candles flickering at the stations of the cross. The whispers of saints and shuffle of prayers floating among the rafters.
You speak into my quiet space:
"Once, when I was younger, I had every hope and every faith in everyone and everything and every where I saw God. I knew with certainty that if I prayed and married and lived my life as He commands, that I would arrive at my Destination which shares the same root as Destiny. Not heaven. Something before heaven. A place I could touch and taste while still my body was flesh and my tongue hungered. This place was called Happiness."
I open my eyes. They, my eyes, are brown and black and gold. They are the same hues as the worn wood of the pew, the leather of the hymnal, the gold of my father's wedding ring that I have come to wear. I stare at one of my hands, gripping the edge of the pew. My brown knuckles are white but still the pew seems insubstantial. I am falling through space... or maybe rising. It is impossible to tell until... unless... I arrive.
You continue:
"It did not happen gradually. It happened all at once. Not at dawn as revelation is rumored to come, but at the soft fall of darkling. I was not alone -- the city street was crowded -- nor was I introspective. But I may as well have been on a mountain top deep in faithful meditation. The truth was like sharp, cold rain, pure and undeniable: All my life had been shaped by other hands. Not God's hands but man's. Culture and society and expectation. I had never once struck out on my own for wilds unknown with myself and my God alone to guide and comfort me. Never had I allowed Him to be my only companion so that He could show me, in running river and still pond, in morning dew and misty sky, a reflection that showed me myself as He sees me. Not once had I come near that place called Happiness... because that place is not a destination but rather the journey to heaven itself and it is the journey that is the location. It is the journey that is Happiness."
I raise my bowed head. I look to my right. You are there, composed and proud. Today you attended service in a black knee length skirt with a gold link belt and a purple silk blouse. Your buckle-up boots are intact with their angel charm dangling. You blink once, slowly. You are looking past me. You have not spoken since before Mass.
I turn almost against my will. I look to my left. The woman who sits beside me was not there during the service. She is not looking at me. Her profile is austere, regal, dignified. She turns to me so suddenly that I jump.
"Do not stray from your location."
And she is gone. Moving soundlessly away through the aisle. Moving gracefully out of the church and into the day.
I stare after her.
You lay a hand on mine. I do not look at you. You ask, "Who was that?"
I answer with the truth, "My mother."
EJ
The sounds of Sunday catch up and gossip and small talk take a long time to melt away until finally there is just this:
The sound of a place made holy by human faith.
The sound of stillness.
The beating of my heart.
The beating of your own.
If stain glass windows and rose oil on wood and impossibly high and arched ceilings had a sound, there would be that sound as well but I will have to settle for the sound of candles flickering at the stations of the cross. The whispers of saints and shuffle of prayers floating among the rafters.
You speak into my quiet space:
"Once, when I was younger, I had every hope and every faith in everyone and everything and every where I saw God. I knew with certainty that if I prayed and married and lived my life as He commands, that I would arrive at my Destination which shares the same root as Destiny. Not heaven. Something before heaven. A place I could touch and taste while still my body was flesh and my tongue hungered. This place was called Happiness."
I open my eyes. They, my eyes, are brown and black and gold. They are the same hues as the worn wood of the pew, the leather of the hymnal, the gold of my father's wedding ring that I have come to wear. I stare at one of my hands, gripping the edge of the pew. My brown knuckles are white but still the pew seems insubstantial. I am falling through space... or maybe rising. It is impossible to tell until... unless... I arrive.
You continue:
"It did not happen gradually. It happened all at once. Not at dawn as revelation is rumored to come, but at the soft fall of darkling. I was not alone -- the city street was crowded -- nor was I introspective. But I may as well have been on a mountain top deep in faithful meditation. The truth was like sharp, cold rain, pure and undeniable: All my life had been shaped by other hands. Not God's hands but man's. Culture and society and expectation. I had never once struck out on my own for wilds unknown with myself and my God alone to guide and comfort me. Never had I allowed Him to be my only companion so that He could show me, in running river and still pond, in morning dew and misty sky, a reflection that showed me myself as He sees me. Not once had I come near that place called Happiness... because that place is not a destination but rather the journey to heaven itself and it is the journey that is the location. It is the journey that is Happiness."
I raise my bowed head. I look to my right. You are there, composed and proud. Today you attended service in a black knee length skirt with a gold link belt and a purple silk blouse. Your buckle-up boots are intact with their angel charm dangling. You blink once, slowly. You are looking past me. You have not spoken since before Mass.
I turn almost against my will. I look to my left. The woman who sits beside me was not there during the service. She is not looking at me. Her profile is austere, regal, dignified. She turns to me so suddenly that I jump.
"Do not stray from your location."
And she is gone. Moving soundlessly away through the aisle. Moving gracefully out of the church and into the day.
I stare after her.
You lay a hand on mine. I do not look at you. You ask, "Who was that?"
I answer with the truth, "My mother."
EJ
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Clockwork Letters
I close my eyes and my truest desire shapes and reshapes my reality. You are standing beside me. There is nothing but the rain. It is warm and the night is springtime on your tongue as you whisper my favorite prayer that begins and ends with yes.
Lately, I find myself remembering the night we made love. The connection afterward that was almost without words, quiet and still but tangible. I thought I would never have that again but I have found it just as strong in conversation, over coffee, over email, and even over time. I once thought I could only find that spark of connection -- blue fire in the night -- during love making or prayer but I realize now that I just wasn't looking hard enough.
The clock in the hallway has stopped working. The key lays on the antique table beside the sixty year old grandfather clock. I cross the wood floor in silence, without any sound at all, and I caress the lines of the key. I think of my friend Abbie spending time, joyous, as she selects just the right Tupperware organizers for her kitchen. I trace the hallows of the key and think about my friend Cris, joyous, cutting lawn greens for her herd of livestock rabbits. I pick up the key and let it slide down my fingers into my palm, the weight of it solid and real, as no time really is. I stare down at it... and then up at the still face of the clock.
I know that even if I allow it to remain asleep, the time it tracks will still pass. The cat is just as much alive as it is dead, and the possibilities of what may happen between this dawn and Christ's next are as endless as the concentric curls of the key pressed into my hand.
I hear the cab rumble to the curb. You are always standing outside waiting for it. You can't abide being late and obsess about missing your ride. In my half awake, half sleeping state, it seems we have made love every night for several weeks, but I know that can't be true. An expanse of time like that hasn't existed for either of us for years. I hear a child singing. You have left a CD of choir hymns in the stereo. A young boy's heart is poured into "The Little Drummer Boy" and I do not try to stop the tears that roll down my face.
I sink down against the wall. My eyes are still on the clock. My hand still grips the key.
I dream about harnessing the Grail in a Cathedral.
I dream that the face of the clock peals open like a Christmas orange and the clockworks, the gears and springs and tiny wires and weights, spill out slowly, slipping like something liquid, like blood or tears, down the front of the elegant case and pooling, spreading out over the floor, drowning my bare feet with time.
I didn't really understand anything then. Past present and to be tumbling into one another the way we tumble into each other's arms. No reason except truth. That one is the other and we are, like they are, much the same. I hadn't really been listening. I heard you, though. You spoke to me from the darkness of the road that night. You reached me and made me see how important it all was. How real. But I was frustrated and afraid about so many things. Afraid of failing. Afraid of success.
Time washed all that away.
Just not man's time.
At the ocean, I feel you beside me. In the cold evening waiting for dusk. In the heady breeze off the water, in the salt spray and the movement of the waves against the sand. I came home wanting to let go. To stop trying to hold on so tightly. I am tired of holding on. I'm not afraid of failing any more. Or of success. Either way, what will come, will come.
It doesn't matter if we fail or if we succeed. It doesn't matter if the journey is the entire destination. It is this fight that is my path. Not what might come of it.
As long as we stand together, what are we afraid of really? What can we lose that we truly love? No object, no place. Those things cannot command love as the feeling of your hand in mine, the whisper of your heart, audible or digital, the perfection of every small victory.
It has already been enough.
We have already changed the world.
Let the clock stay still. The Lord's time is now then forever. And everything in His time is as it should be, when it should be, and why. Dawn will come. Dusk will come. Day and night and joy and sorrow. I cannot effect these forces nor stop the earth from turning. I think I should stop trying.
After all, I need all my energy for better things.
EJ
Lately, I find myself remembering the night we made love. The connection afterward that was almost without words, quiet and still but tangible. I thought I would never have that again but I have found it just as strong in conversation, over coffee, over email, and even over time. I once thought I could only find that spark of connection -- blue fire in the night -- during love making or prayer but I realize now that I just wasn't looking hard enough.
The clock in the hallway has stopped working. The key lays on the antique table beside the sixty year old grandfather clock. I cross the wood floor in silence, without any sound at all, and I caress the lines of the key. I think of my friend Abbie spending time, joyous, as she selects just the right Tupperware organizers for her kitchen. I trace the hallows of the key and think about my friend Cris, joyous, cutting lawn greens for her herd of livestock rabbits. I pick up the key and let it slide down my fingers into my palm, the weight of it solid and real, as no time really is. I stare down at it... and then up at the still face of the clock.
I know that even if I allow it to remain asleep, the time it tracks will still pass. The cat is just as much alive as it is dead, and the possibilities of what may happen between this dawn and Christ's next are as endless as the concentric curls of the key pressed into my hand.
I hear the cab rumble to the curb. You are always standing outside waiting for it. You can't abide being late and obsess about missing your ride. In my half awake, half sleeping state, it seems we have made love every night for several weeks, but I know that can't be true. An expanse of time like that hasn't existed for either of us for years. I hear a child singing. You have left a CD of choir hymns in the stereo. A young boy's heart is poured into "The Little Drummer Boy" and I do not try to stop the tears that roll down my face.
I sink down against the wall. My eyes are still on the clock. My hand still grips the key.
I dream about harnessing the Grail in a Cathedral.
I dream that the face of the clock peals open like a Christmas orange and the clockworks, the gears and springs and tiny wires and weights, spill out slowly, slipping like something liquid, like blood or tears, down the front of the elegant case and pooling, spreading out over the floor, drowning my bare feet with time.
I didn't really understand anything then. Past present and to be tumbling into one another the way we tumble into each other's arms. No reason except truth. That one is the other and we are, like they are, much the same. I hadn't really been listening. I heard you, though. You spoke to me from the darkness of the road that night. You reached me and made me see how important it all was. How real. But I was frustrated and afraid about so many things. Afraid of failing. Afraid of success.
Time washed all that away.
Just not man's time.
At the ocean, I feel you beside me. In the cold evening waiting for dusk. In the heady breeze off the water, in the salt spray and the movement of the waves against the sand. I came home wanting to let go. To stop trying to hold on so tightly. I am tired of holding on. I'm not afraid of failing any more. Or of success. Either way, what will come, will come.
It doesn't matter if we fail or if we succeed. It doesn't matter if the journey is the entire destination. It is this fight that is my path. Not what might come of it.
As long as we stand together, what are we afraid of really? What can we lose that we truly love? No object, no place. Those things cannot command love as the feeling of your hand in mine, the whisper of your heart, audible or digital, the perfection of every small victory.
It has already been enough.
We have already changed the world.
Let the clock stay still. The Lord's time is now then forever. And everything in His time is as it should be, when it should be, and why. Dawn will come. Dusk will come. Day and night and joy and sorrow. I cannot effect these forces nor stop the earth from turning. I think I should stop trying.
After all, I need all my energy for better things.
EJ
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Pride Day Sabbath
Won a tiny little radio bud as a door prize at my favorite club. I think it was rigged but I didn't complain. In the accompanying tiny headphones, Jack FM plays it so well. The song reaches me and becomes the soundtrack as you walk across the lot. Your Raybans. Your classic LBD paired with six-buckle combat boots. Your hair wild and laced with peak-a-boo braids strung up with blood red ribbons. I can already smell your spicy perfume. Already taste your chapstick on my fingertips.
The song plays. It seems, impossibly, like you hear it too because you're stepping in time with the simple back beat, bobbing your head almost imperceptibly.
"I don't mind you coming here
and wasting all my time.
'Cause when you're standing oh so near
I kinda lose my mind.
It's not the perfume that you wear.
It's not the ribbons in your hair..."
They've given us permission to use an empty studio. The billowing whites and bright, bright lights cast you in perfect tones. I stand behind the camera (what a new change) and forget to take the lens cap off. I am watching you watch me. Forget the fan, the window is open. God's wind fills the room, creating ripples in the backdrop and sending your hair flying like a mane. We took the stairs up four floors to get here. You told me to stop staring at my feet, to take my hands out of my pockets. I wasn't staring at my feet. My eyes were closed. My hands stayed in my pockets. This grrl knows the limits of her self-control.
"I don't mind you hanging out
and talking in your sleep.
It doesn't matter where you've been
As long as it was deep, yeah.
You always knew to wear it well and
you look so fancy I can tell..."
You turn your back to me and lift your hair. You look over your shoulder at me. You know what you need, you ask me. I think the question is rhetorical or maybe not a question at all. You don't expect an answer but you neither do you look away. Bottomless eyes all full up with confident experience (Lord, where have I seen *that before? Heaven help me LOL!) give me all the answer I could ever muster. I can almost read the words, your careful cursive script. Then you say, You need a fighter. And you undress.
I wonder how in the world you hid your wings beneath such a tiny dress... and then I set the timer on the camera and step to your side.
"I guess you're just what I needed.
I needed someone who's free.
I guess you're just what I needed.
I needed someone willing to bleed."
* * *
My stomach tumbles
in anticipation
I fidget, shift my weight
shrug deeper into my leather jacket
straighten my cotton shirt
and feel my breath fast over parted lips
and I wonder what your name is
tonight.
There is a crackling between us
that lights the lantern in my chest
guides me, illuminates me
fills my hollow places
with a molten bronze and copper
glow of darkling dusk dawn
when you whisper to me
Christ be with you
and I answer
He certainly is
tonight.
Somewhere someone is playing
music like harp or violin and
I realize that my tie is crooked
as is your grin but it somehow
suits you when you wear the
little black dress
with the rich embroidered collar
that you're wearing
tonight.
You tuck your legs up under you
and the six buckles on your calf-high boots
are pressed against my thigh
through my pressed slacks and
I glimpse
(because I'm staring)
a tiny angel charm dangling
from one buckle is
laying still and serene on the pew
between us at Mass
tonight.
The pastor's voice is filled with hope
and his own faith to call to arms
all of us drawn here tonight
to hear the words of men like him
and women like him too
who have stepped outside the pens
of their shallow denominations
to offer their prayers and thoughts and
anger and all their pulpit votes
to show that we
(the we that includes you and me)
are actually, in truth, in the end
(like these end times most certainly are)
human beings
with rights
(imagine that)
and that we have a place
in their churches
in their cities
in their heaven
not just tonight
not just today
not just tomorrow
but now
then
forever.
EJ
The song plays. It seems, impossibly, like you hear it too because you're stepping in time with the simple back beat, bobbing your head almost imperceptibly.
"I don't mind you coming here
and wasting all my time.
'Cause when you're standing oh so near
I kinda lose my mind.
It's not the perfume that you wear.
It's not the ribbons in your hair..."
They've given us permission to use an empty studio. The billowing whites and bright, bright lights cast you in perfect tones. I stand behind the camera (what a new change) and forget to take the lens cap off. I am watching you watch me. Forget the fan, the window is open. God's wind fills the room, creating ripples in the backdrop and sending your hair flying like a mane. We took the stairs up four floors to get here. You told me to stop staring at my feet, to take my hands out of my pockets. I wasn't staring at my feet. My eyes were closed. My hands stayed in my pockets. This grrl knows the limits of her self-control.
"I don't mind you hanging out
and talking in your sleep.
It doesn't matter where you've been
As long as it was deep, yeah.
You always knew to wear it well and
you look so fancy I can tell..."
You turn your back to me and lift your hair. You look over your shoulder at me. You know what you need, you ask me. I think the question is rhetorical or maybe not a question at all. You don't expect an answer but you neither do you look away. Bottomless eyes all full up with confident experience (Lord, where have I seen *that before? Heaven help me LOL!) give me all the answer I could ever muster. I can almost read the words, your careful cursive script. Then you say, You need a fighter. And you undress.
I wonder how in the world you hid your wings beneath such a tiny dress... and then I set the timer on the camera and step to your side.
"I guess you're just what I needed.
I needed someone who's free.
I guess you're just what I needed.
I needed someone willing to bleed."
* * *
My stomach tumbles
in anticipation
I fidget, shift my weight
shrug deeper into my leather jacket
straighten my cotton shirt
and feel my breath fast over parted lips
and I wonder what your name is
tonight.
There is a crackling between us
that lights the lantern in my chest
guides me, illuminates me
fills my hollow places
with a molten bronze and copper
glow of darkling dusk dawn
when you whisper to me
Christ be with you
and I answer
He certainly is
tonight.
Somewhere someone is playing
music like harp or violin and
I realize that my tie is crooked
as is your grin but it somehow
suits you when you wear the
little black dress
with the rich embroidered collar
that you're wearing
tonight.
You tuck your legs up under you
and the six buckles on your calf-high boots
are pressed against my thigh
through my pressed slacks and
I glimpse
(because I'm staring)
a tiny angel charm dangling
from one buckle is
laying still and serene on the pew
between us at Mass
tonight.
The pastor's voice is filled with hope
and his own faith to call to arms
all of us drawn here tonight
to hear the words of men like him
and women like him too
who have stepped outside the pens
of their shallow denominations
to offer their prayers and thoughts and
anger and all their pulpit votes
to show that we
(the we that includes you and me)
are actually, in truth, in the end
(like these end times most certainly are)
human beings
with rights
(imagine that)
and that we have a place
in their churches
in their cities
in their heaven
not just tonight
not just today
not just tomorrow
but now
then
forever.
EJ
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Personal Revolution
Dawn arrives. We have been talking for so many hours I am startled by the transition into the Sabbath. It seems to manifest, to take shape around me like a living presence. Something told you to look at my recent photo and you didn't like what you saw. I could never fool you. Why would I want to? Dawn washes over the roof top and the world is white light reflected between white adobe and white clouds. I blink for a moment, transfixed by beginning again.
"Sometimes I find that I don't need to sleep." I think this is odd for you to say because you have Chronic Fatigue and you aren't supposed to be able to go two or three days with out sleep.
"Sometimes I find that I don't want to wake." I regret the words the moment I say them but equally so I know that lately they are the truth.
You let me get away with nothing.
"You're either awake or you're dead, grrl. Make up your mind."
Tough love mama pushes me off the roof.
Which is exactly what I needed.
Message subject: Re: ...
From: Angel
Sent: Fri Jun 26, 2009 1:15 pm
To: Wings
I feel disjointed, disconnected. The world around me is raging, moving. I march with my cause but I do not hear the drums. My heart beats; The sound is hollow even to me. Reach me?
Opening my eyes (as I fall from the roof) I reach out my hand. A dove alights in my palm like a slow, warm kiss. She spills silk ribbon between my fingers embroidered with your message.
Message subject: Re: ...
From: Wings
Sent: Sat Jun 27, 2009 2:53 am
To: Angel
I remake my reality. I reshape my world. I place you in it.
We're walking down the beach. The clouds are overcast, the wind seems to come from every direction. I am listening to 'Diamond in the Rough.' I have one earphone. You have the other. We walk along the solid, wet sand and rocks, towards the cliff. We don't speak. We don't need to.
We reach the edge of the beach and the tide is still out enough for us to sit on the smooth four and a half foot rock past the driftwood. My mp3 player changes. 'Cobblestone Walking' begins, the original harp music by our mutual friend. The perfect mix of harp and wave combines to form something closer to divinity and forever and heaven, far away from the finite and momentary.
Here is where we find our peace.
Minutes pass. They are counted by the changing of songs if nothing else. Softly I begin to tell you of the ideas I have for a novel we will share. It is complex and complicated and I know it will speak to you because I was inspired by one of your favorite authors who I am reading for the first time. I am discovering fine literature and am startled that I spent twenty years without it.
To the right, the sun is beginning to set. The sky is, however, still lit by the day that remains. I find myself silent. I am anxious to return to the cabin. I am anxious to stay here with you.
You see my face and you calm my worries with only a few words that somehow always say so much. You help me find driftwood for our friend to create harps. You walk back with me to the cabin, your hand in mine. You settle my fears with your presence.
If you were not there in body, you were there in mind, in spirit.
I think they are one in the same.
And I think, just perhaps, you had no idea how much I needed all of your words but more than anything that one last sentence. For to me, to any true Christian, the word is the Word, and word and deed are one and the same. Word and touch. Word and song. Word and oath, benediction, passion, struggle. I watched a tv show recently where a young man wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, "Actions speak louder than blogs." I would have to agree which is why I do march, whether or not I hear the drum, and especially in June. However, I am also very aware that blogging is an action.
Message subject: Re: ...
From: Angel
Sent: Sat Jun 27, 2009 5:18 am
To: Wings
On the other side of the world, in Iran, more than a million young people are fighting, dying, disappearing, standing up for the first time... it is a revolution that the world is watching.
And right here, crying, tears running between the keyboards keys, I read your words and I recognize that right here, with no one watching, there is a revolution. You are waking up. You are standing up. It is just as powerful because, in the eyes of Christ, one and many are the same.
It is easier to stand behind a national or global cause then to change the personal corruption in our own private, intimate lives. I have grown weary of talking about green politics with people who blame genetics for their drug addiction. I am tired of arguing morals with men who have made the mythology of denomination out of God's word.
Heal thyself. Revolution begins at home.
Actually... it begins in the heart.
Every Iranian fighting for a voice understands what I'm saying. Their movement is (globally) millions strong in support but every single person marching began the revolution alone, in their hearts, in the blood pounding through their own individual bodies.
No matter whether we sleep or wake, whether we are walking in friendship or struggling in conflict, we have the power within ourselves to overthrow the corruption that threatens us. We know what it is. We know the truth of what it is doing. No one knows ourselves as well as we do... with the exception of the Lord.
Perhaps it would be just a correct to say: Every personal revolution begins with Christ.
After all, He did away with the idea of being born with original sin, away with spare the rod spoil the child, away with women as dirty objects. He turned the tables and turned over the tables. No more blood sacrifices. No more mediation. Now then forever, He rose up made His revolution of salvation. Our revolution began in His heart and is carried in each of ours now.
Christ as brother, father, lover. Christ as revolutionist.
"Sometimes I find that I don't need to sleep." I think this is odd for you to say because you have Chronic Fatigue and you aren't supposed to be able to go two or three days with out sleep.
"Sometimes I find that I don't want to wake." I regret the words the moment I say them but equally so I know that lately they are the truth.
You let me get away with nothing.
"You're either awake or you're dead, grrl. Make up your mind."
Tough love mama pushes me off the roof.
Which is exactly what I needed.
Message subject: Re: ...
From: Angel
Sent: Fri Jun 26, 2009 1:15 pm
To: Wings
I feel disjointed, disconnected. The world around me is raging, moving. I march with my cause but I do not hear the drums. My heart beats; The sound is hollow even to me. Reach me?
Opening my eyes (as I fall from the roof) I reach out my hand. A dove alights in my palm like a slow, warm kiss. She spills silk ribbon between my fingers embroidered with your message.
Message subject: Re: ...
From: Wings
Sent: Sat Jun 27, 2009 2:53 am
To: Angel
I remake my reality. I reshape my world. I place you in it.
We're walking down the beach. The clouds are overcast, the wind seems to come from every direction. I am listening to 'Diamond in the Rough.' I have one earphone. You have the other. We walk along the solid, wet sand and rocks, towards the cliff. We don't speak. We don't need to.
We reach the edge of the beach and the tide is still out enough for us to sit on the smooth four and a half foot rock past the driftwood. My mp3 player changes. 'Cobblestone Walking' begins, the original harp music by our mutual friend. The perfect mix of harp and wave combines to form something closer to divinity and forever and heaven, far away from the finite and momentary.
Here is where we find our peace.
Minutes pass. They are counted by the changing of songs if nothing else. Softly I begin to tell you of the ideas I have for a novel we will share. It is complex and complicated and I know it will speak to you because I was inspired by one of your favorite authors who I am reading for the first time. I am discovering fine literature and am startled that I spent twenty years without it.
To the right, the sun is beginning to set. The sky is, however, still lit by the day that remains. I find myself silent. I am anxious to return to the cabin. I am anxious to stay here with you.
You see my face and you calm my worries with only a few words that somehow always say so much. You help me find driftwood for our friend to create harps. You walk back with me to the cabin, your hand in mine. You settle my fears with your presence.
If you were not there in body, you were there in mind, in spirit.
I think they are one in the same.
And I think, just perhaps, you had no idea how much I needed all of your words but more than anything that one last sentence. For to me, to any true Christian, the word is the Word, and word and deed are one and the same. Word and touch. Word and song. Word and oath, benediction, passion, struggle. I watched a tv show recently where a young man wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, "Actions speak louder than blogs." I would have to agree which is why I do march, whether or not I hear the drum, and especially in June. However, I am also very aware that blogging is an action.
Message subject: Re: ...
From: Angel
Sent: Sat Jun 27, 2009 5:18 am
To: Wings
On the other side of the world, in Iran, more than a million young people are fighting, dying, disappearing, standing up for the first time... it is a revolution that the world is watching.
And right here, crying, tears running between the keyboards keys, I read your words and I recognize that right here, with no one watching, there is a revolution. You are waking up. You are standing up. It is just as powerful because, in the eyes of Christ, one and many are the same.
It is easier to stand behind a national or global cause then to change the personal corruption in our own private, intimate lives. I have grown weary of talking about green politics with people who blame genetics for their drug addiction. I am tired of arguing morals with men who have made the mythology of denomination out of God's word.
Heal thyself. Revolution begins at home.
Actually... it begins in the heart.
Every Iranian fighting for a voice understands what I'm saying. Their movement is (globally) millions strong in support but every single person marching began the revolution alone, in their hearts, in the blood pounding through their own individual bodies.
No matter whether we sleep or wake, whether we are walking in friendship or struggling in conflict, we have the power within ourselves to overthrow the corruption that threatens us. We know what it is. We know the truth of what it is doing. No one knows ourselves as well as we do... with the exception of the Lord.
Perhaps it would be just a correct to say: Every personal revolution begins with Christ.
After all, He did away with the idea of being born with original sin, away with spare the rod spoil the child, away with women as dirty objects. He turned the tables and turned over the tables. No more blood sacrifices. No more mediation. Now then forever, He rose up made His revolution of salvation. Our revolution began in His heart and is carried in each of ours now.
Christ as brother, father, lover. Christ as revolutionist.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Air Running
“Eliza Jean,
You do not sound like yourself. Your message to our mutual friend is alive with humor and healing. But to me you write brief and sad lines that linger with the cadences a young woman who has Christ but nothing else. And so, with the post-midnight sky my quiet state of mind, I'm writing you back with this message:
The trees are shadows
holding up my personal sky
asleep with low clouds
velvet black on black.
Stars are memories
like flowers and sunshine
and white clouds on
blue sky canvas.
Tonight
night is night.
And in this peace
in this place that is
my own and home
the children are running.
They call it air walking.
With no city lights
to show the way
they find their own
by running into the darkness
at full speed laughing
arms wide like flying
marveled by the truth
that this night is
their night
their world
their everything.
Somewhere, in this reality that embraces and lifts them, there is my love for them, there is Christ, and there is you. The influence you have on their lives is mysterious. They know your words, your creations, your bravery. They will grow up knowing their impassioned path because even now, in the absolute blackness, they are walking, running, flying on it.”
And I wake up to your words. I wake up.
Leap. You know what you do well. Now leap. Take your gift to the next level, to the next place. Don't look. Leap.
I am so tired of everyone doing the bare minimum. If there is a word count, it is met with none to spare. If there is a deadline, there is the hustle at the eleventh hour. I am interested in air runners.
There is a extreme nature to this path of mine. It attracts an interesting following. But everyone who *fantasizes* about being an immortal or a missionary (or a big rock star) doesn't necessarily want to *be* any of those. And even more so, very, very few of them want to *work* to become anything.
The whole idea of bleeding for your path is argued as anti-Christian.
Denominations preaching permission to be lazy: If it's hard, it's not from God. Unless it makes you happy happy joy joy all the freaking time, it's not from God. If you have to fight for it, work for it, bleed, cry and reach for it.. leap into the blackness with your arms outstretched for it... be crucified....
I pick up the newspaper. You subscribe. You believe that labels and politics are part of why we're on this planet. You have a t-shirt that reads: If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention. I am tired of, “What good does it do me to get angry.” I am tired of, “Well, I see their point of view.” Only an idiot couldn't see their point of view! That's not the point! A lot of life-changing, world-changing ideas have come from being angry. And trust me, baby, ideas from anger are far better than the ideas that come from fear.
Get angry now and you won't have to be afraid later on.
You have circled a personal ad in cherry chapstick. The scent of it lingers and the sheen still catches the pale dawn light. The ad reads:
Saw U dancing @ The Jinx. RU Angel?
The ad below it reads:
Me, you, zipties, daddy's car. Text me.
You slap a carton of orange juice down on the table, prop your elbow on your bare knee and don't bother to straighten down your (my!) black and white boxers. “They know you've arrived, Angel.”
And I stand up. And I go to the window of this new home and throw it open wide. I walk out onto the patio and breathe deep and slow in the brightening light.
Yeah, it's time. Time for them to know I...
Time for the world to know that we have arrived.
EJ
You do not sound like yourself. Your message to our mutual friend is alive with humor and healing. But to me you write brief and sad lines that linger with the cadences a young woman who has Christ but nothing else. And so, with the post-midnight sky my quiet state of mind, I'm writing you back with this message:
The trees are shadows
holding up my personal sky
asleep with low clouds
velvet black on black.
Stars are memories
like flowers and sunshine
and white clouds on
blue sky canvas.
Tonight
night is night.
And in this peace
in this place that is
my own and home
the children are running.
They call it air walking.
With no city lights
to show the way
they find their own
by running into the darkness
at full speed laughing
arms wide like flying
marveled by the truth
that this night is
their night
their world
their everything.
Somewhere, in this reality that embraces and lifts them, there is my love for them, there is Christ, and there is you. The influence you have on their lives is mysterious. They know your words, your creations, your bravery. They will grow up knowing their impassioned path because even now, in the absolute blackness, they are walking, running, flying on it.”
And I wake up to your words. I wake up.
Leap. You know what you do well. Now leap. Take your gift to the next level, to the next place. Don't look. Leap.
I am so tired of everyone doing the bare minimum. If there is a word count, it is met with none to spare. If there is a deadline, there is the hustle at the eleventh hour. I am interested in air runners.
There is a extreme nature to this path of mine. It attracts an interesting following. But everyone who *fantasizes* about being an immortal or a missionary (or a big rock star) doesn't necessarily want to *be* any of those. And even more so, very, very few of them want to *work* to become anything.
The whole idea of bleeding for your path is argued as anti-Christian.
Denominations preaching permission to be lazy: If it's hard, it's not from God. Unless it makes you happy happy joy joy all the freaking time, it's not from God. If you have to fight for it, work for it, bleed, cry and reach for it.. leap into the blackness with your arms outstretched for it... be crucified....
I pick up the newspaper. You subscribe. You believe that labels and politics are part of why we're on this planet. You have a t-shirt that reads: If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention. I am tired of, “What good does it do me to get angry.” I am tired of, “Well, I see their point of view.” Only an idiot couldn't see their point of view! That's not the point! A lot of life-changing, world-changing ideas have come from being angry. And trust me, baby, ideas from anger are far better than the ideas that come from fear.
Get angry now and you won't have to be afraid later on.
You have circled a personal ad in cherry chapstick. The scent of it lingers and the sheen still catches the pale dawn light. The ad reads:
Saw U dancing @ The Jinx. RU Angel?
The ad below it reads:
Me, you, zipties, daddy's car. Text me.
You slap a carton of orange juice down on the table, prop your elbow on your bare knee and don't bother to straighten down your (my!) black and white boxers. “They know you've arrived, Angel.”
And I stand up. And I go to the window of this new home and throw it open wide. I walk out onto the patio and breathe deep and slow in the brightening light.
Yeah, it's time. Time for them to know I...
Time for the world to know that we have arrived.
EJ
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Listening
Here we are. The very same table. The checkered floor. The quiet music playing. The standard cafe din. You are not the same person who sat across from me all those months ago and told me it wasn't love but you are here because, in your own life, it wasn't.
It should be raining.
Beneath the table, my hand slips to the floor to ceiling glass. It is still cool beneath my fingertips which rest as soft as whispers, barely touching, hesitant and shy. It should be raining, I think again. My thoughts, it seems, are wandering.
"I miss her and she knows it. She's outed me at church, on the boards, at work. She says she just wanted to see me, hold me a moment... but she wrecks havoc every time she touches me. She holds him -- they'll be married in two months, the date is set -- too tightly and stares at me over his shoulder."
I watch you, my eyes still and intent. You are drinking decaf chai because you're trying to prove some point to her. She ceased to be a human being some weeks ago. Now she is a force in your life, a symbol. You think she is your test. You think this will make you stronger. The thick, hot steam from my tall double hides my sleepless eyes. Make up (for the first time outside of work) disguises the rest.
If that which does not kill us makes us stronger... why am I not invincible yet?
"I'm praying so hard. I know I can reach her. She wants me to reach her. She's destroying me but I can't give in, give up. She wants me to show her, save her."
I hear every single word you say. I could even repeat them (or write them verbatim in this blog). But I will not lie to you, friend, I am not listening. I am *hearing* but that is simply not the same. Listening happens with more than just the ears.
We are a hundred miles from the ocean and four hours away from that beach, but suddenly I hear the waves. My heart is pounding, racing... my blood is roaring thunder in my ears. But then the stranger at the counter turns around, tossing full, wild curls, and I do not know her. Our gazes meet. Her eyes are green. I look back at you.
"Why would God have brought me here to this place, to this church, if not for her? How can I walk away from something He so clearly is asking of me? It would be so easier to hate her. To forget her... fine, not forget her, but still, walk away. But every Sunday comes and I find myself there again... and again and again."
The sky was deepest black and so crisp and cold and full of milky way stars like cream and diamonds. I dreamt of children running and playing and laughing. I dreamt of waking every morning alive with passion and rejoicing impassioned. I poured your coffee and couldn't meet your eyes. I don't think I ever met your eyes again.
"I write to her every single night before I sleep. Even when we work killer twenty-hour days. I just want her to know everything in my heart. She never writes back but she always returns the read receipt. That's enough for me. It... it has to be enough."
A conversation returns to me:
What are you writing?
A treatise.
A what?
Words.
About?
No idea. And you?
Painting the sky.
With?
Clouds.
Which kind?
That kind.
Nice.
They remind me of you.
I don't see the resemblance.
They're cool.
Cold?
No.
Out of reach?
They're right here.
On your canvas.
Right here.
...and I kissed you.
"She doesn't understand. I never explained enough. Discretion, respect, boundaries. Where I've been, what I've felt, why I came to her with my everything. I never explained enough. She didn't know. She can't know how I feel."
And I am staring at you. Unblinking. I am disconnected from this place, this (one-sided) conversation. I don't think I was ready. I thought I was. I thought we were variations on the same theme, you and I. Like Sister Light, Sister Dark experiencing like events. When I find my voice suddenly I think I cut you off because all at once the only thing I was hearing... the only thing I was listening to... was my own voice:
"She may have heard you but she wasn't listening. We hear with our ears but we listen with our hearts. We hear for ourselves and what we need. We listen for someone else. We learn when we hear. We love when we listen. Real listening is like touching your lover with no thought of her touching you. You are there entirely for that other person.
"This is how we know whether or not we are hearing Christ or listening to Christ. If what we hear is about us than we are hearing. If we are listening than we receiving Christ. We are receiving Him. He speaks truth, we listen. Later, we apply those truths to our lives.
"Even when we ask questions of Him, we can choose to either hear the response or listen for the response. Hearing it is like picking an option off a multiple choice list. We always knew the possible outcomes. But listening for the answer will always be unexpected. Because man cannot know the heart of God. We can't know His depth, His complexity, His possibilities.
"When we listen, we are open to anything... to everything... to all discoveries, rediscoveries, and salvations."
And you stare at me. A hundred million events flood my senses. My (unexpected) tears fall over my jaw and splash like the rain I wished for on my one clenched fist. I realize that if I had listened to the sound of the waves and the stars and your eyes, I would have understood so much more about myself. But I wasn't listening; I was only hearing.
"I'm leaving," you tell me. But you don't get up. I know you aren't talking about the cafe. "I'm letting go."
And I think, in the silence that follows, I am listening to the voice of Christ.
EJ
It should be raining.
Beneath the table, my hand slips to the floor to ceiling glass. It is still cool beneath my fingertips which rest as soft as whispers, barely touching, hesitant and shy. It should be raining, I think again. My thoughts, it seems, are wandering.
"I miss her and she knows it. She's outed me at church, on the boards, at work. She says she just wanted to see me, hold me a moment... but she wrecks havoc every time she touches me. She holds him -- they'll be married in two months, the date is set -- too tightly and stares at me over his shoulder."
I watch you, my eyes still and intent. You are drinking decaf chai because you're trying to prove some point to her. She ceased to be a human being some weeks ago. Now she is a force in your life, a symbol. You think she is your test. You think this will make you stronger. The thick, hot steam from my tall double hides my sleepless eyes. Make up (for the first time outside of work) disguises the rest.
If that which does not kill us makes us stronger... why am I not invincible yet?
"I'm praying so hard. I know I can reach her. She wants me to reach her. She's destroying me but I can't give in, give up. She wants me to show her, save her."
I hear every single word you say. I could even repeat them (or write them verbatim in this blog). But I will not lie to you, friend, I am not listening. I am *hearing* but that is simply not the same. Listening happens with more than just the ears.
We are a hundred miles from the ocean and four hours away from that beach, but suddenly I hear the waves. My heart is pounding, racing... my blood is roaring thunder in my ears. But then the stranger at the counter turns around, tossing full, wild curls, and I do not know her. Our gazes meet. Her eyes are green. I look back at you.
"Why would God have brought me here to this place, to this church, if not for her? How can I walk away from something He so clearly is asking of me? It would be so easier to hate her. To forget her... fine, not forget her, but still, walk away. But every Sunday comes and I find myself there again... and again and again."
The sky was deepest black and so crisp and cold and full of milky way stars like cream and diamonds. I dreamt of children running and playing and laughing. I dreamt of waking every morning alive with passion and rejoicing impassioned. I poured your coffee and couldn't meet your eyes. I don't think I ever met your eyes again.
"I write to her every single night before I sleep. Even when we work killer twenty-hour days. I just want her to know everything in my heart. She never writes back but she always returns the read receipt. That's enough for me. It... it has to be enough."
A conversation returns to me:
What are you writing?
A treatise.
A what?
Words.
About?
No idea. And you?
Painting the sky.
With?
Clouds.
Which kind?
That kind.
Nice.
They remind me of you.
I don't see the resemblance.
They're cool.
Cold?
No.
Out of reach?
They're right here.
On your canvas.
Right here.
...and I kissed you.
"She doesn't understand. I never explained enough. Discretion, respect, boundaries. Where I've been, what I've felt, why I came to her with my everything. I never explained enough. She didn't know. She can't know how I feel."
And I am staring at you. Unblinking. I am disconnected from this place, this (one-sided) conversation. I don't think I was ready. I thought I was. I thought we were variations on the same theme, you and I. Like Sister Light, Sister Dark experiencing like events. When I find my voice suddenly I think I cut you off because all at once the only thing I was hearing... the only thing I was listening to... was my own voice:
"She may have heard you but she wasn't listening. We hear with our ears but we listen with our hearts. We hear for ourselves and what we need. We listen for someone else. We learn when we hear. We love when we listen. Real listening is like touching your lover with no thought of her touching you. You are there entirely for that other person.
"This is how we know whether or not we are hearing Christ or listening to Christ. If what we hear is about us than we are hearing. If we are listening than we receiving Christ. We are receiving Him. He speaks truth, we listen. Later, we apply those truths to our lives.
"Even when we ask questions of Him, we can choose to either hear the response or listen for the response. Hearing it is like picking an option off a multiple choice list. We always knew the possible outcomes. But listening for the answer will always be unexpected. Because man cannot know the heart of God. We can't know His depth, His complexity, His possibilities.
"When we listen, we are open to anything... to everything... to all discoveries, rediscoveries, and salvations."
And you stare at me. A hundred million events flood my senses. My (unexpected) tears fall over my jaw and splash like the rain I wished for on my one clenched fist. I realize that if I had listened to the sound of the waves and the stars and your eyes, I would have understood so much more about myself. But I wasn't listening; I was only hearing.
"I'm leaving," you tell me. But you don't get up. I know you aren't talking about the cafe. "I'm letting go."
And I think, in the silence that follows, I am listening to the voice of Christ.
EJ
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Faith Under This Sky
It seems tonight that the midnight (post-midnight, my friends?) sky is my personal sky. That the stars, like gemstones on a fortune teller's cloth, only pretend to be randomly scattered but in truth are arranged very deliberately to tell me the events to come and the secrets in my heart.
I remember the stories as a child remembers – in bright snaps of emotion or image, never the more perfect memory of adulthood but always sharper, more alive with wonder. My grandmother and my mother and my father. All were story-tellers but each was so different in style and approach. The same mythology (personal mythology, family mythology... which was history and fact and faith and miracle all in one) could be woven for me by each of them until, at last, I would have every dimension of every event. They made it possible for me to step into stories fifty years old and older. To shrug into them like a favorite jacket, to recite and reenact them as if they had been my own life. Which, genetically, of course, they were.
...the pass in the mountains, bitter cold and ragged with craggy rocks. The regiment cut down by snipers – half dead, then half again. The final climb by the moon's sliver of light. The narrow cave. The explosives. Trapped in darkness devoid of breath...
I was raised with truths that were quiet and steady. That were woven into everyone around me. My grandmother was so mortified when a career counselor at my school ran down my financial prospects. “She will do the Lord's work,” grandmother snarled, her hair, even decades later and an ocean away, still shorn military short. And she drew me away.
It didn't surprise me when she fought with my parents, and then called in favors and opened a dozen doors so that I'd be trained as a painter. She wanted my hands busy with art so that my heart would be filled with prayer. “Our family are artists or soldiers, Eliza Jean, and there are no good wars to be fought.” It was the '80s and she always made it very clear, “Either way, you will be a missionary. You were born to Speak.”
...the hours of the night extend. Consciousness is lost or fading for all the soldiers who are left. The highest in rank, she struggles to rouse them but she knows that hope is thin. When day breaks, the enemy will either dig them out and shoot them or set further explosives and crush them where they are. The air is thin. It cannot sustain them. She slumps against the floor, her cheek to the cold stone...
I am neither speaker nor writer (in our tradition, “Speak” could just as well mean “Write”). I have said it here before and I'm sure I will again. What I mean, of course, is that I do not write every day. I do not feel the need, in my soul, in my heart, to express myself in words on paper or screen. I cannot sit down with an assignment and a deadline and create. Though “I need inspiration,” seems, even to me, like a cop-out. For more than a year I certainly had just that (inspiration) and was able to post my Sunday sermon on time every Sunday without fail. Am I less touched now? Am I less worthy? Have I (*gasp*) wandered from that path that my grandmother saw so clearly for me? That she paved with her own blood and bones? After all, my weekly blogs are no longer posted right on time.
...and in that state, that state neither living nor dying, the stone beneath her cheek hummed, vibrated. A stone river, at once solid and liquid. She opened her eyes. There, running the current, were skeleton fish, swimming across the floor and out of the cave, out a crevice in the wall and into the mountain. Did they disappear there? Did the crevice open up and then end abruptly miles beneath the earth? Was it worse to die here, at the hands of the enemy, than to die in a space so small a soldier would have to crawl on his belly, face turned to the stone? But then she heard a voice...
I am no less interested, inspired, impassioned or enthralled. I do not crave the drama, the newness, the sparkle, glitter and gloss. I am simply more introspective. More realistic. More willing to take deeper risks. More able to Speak.
I have more to say now that I am no longer distracted. I have learned that all that glitters is not gold.
...and the voice, of course, was His voice and He said, “And these loaves and fish will be enough.” And she woke. And she roused her comrades. She commanded them to eat what little they had left. Then she lit the last fire kit and showed them all the fossilized fish in the floor of the cave. They followed the trail of bones to the crevice, all but hidden in the far corner. Following her with faith, each solider squeezed into the gap...
Sometimes the leap of faith one must take into the darkness is more literal than figurative. Sometimes we must walk a dark path because the street that leads home is not lined with street lights. Sometimes we have to plunge ahead because otherwise we are simply standing in the darkness screaming. What awaits outside and beyond that blackness may be something far more horrendous than staying, standing there in the dark, but it is *something* and Christ tells us again and again that doing *something* is forever better than doing *nothing.* Failure will occur sometimes... but the attempt itself will always be a successful try.
...the passage was almost impossibly low and tight and blacker than any hell and she sang to them and recited scripture to ease their moaning terror. Dawn came and went without them knowing. Day came and went. Onward they crawled. The next night was almost spent when fresh air and starry sky appeared above them and they clawed their way to the surface... so far from their enemies that together they could stand and embrace each other and weep and shout in praise to the Lord.
I am not interested in anything but the truth:
Christ exists. He is a force in our personal lives. He is brilliant and joyous and always asks us to do the right thing which is never the easy thing.
Christ is not man. The rules and interpretations and exploitations of Christ's Word by man's church is sin. It is sin because it is giving in to fear. This only green world, with its fractal perfection, is the only true church.
Now then forever, Christ walks with us, died for us, rose for us, created us, speaks to us, and shows us both the tiny spark that is our lives and our personal path, and the cosmic bang which is the grandest big picture. We are part of everything around us, all things connected, because Christ's hand guides it all.
And Christ is the Alpha and the Omega. There came and has come and will come no other.
Great big statements. Tiny, personal truths.
It is very hard to despair when all filled up with Christ.
EJ
I remember the stories as a child remembers – in bright snaps of emotion or image, never the more perfect memory of adulthood but always sharper, more alive with wonder. My grandmother and my mother and my father. All were story-tellers but each was so different in style and approach. The same mythology (personal mythology, family mythology... which was history and fact and faith and miracle all in one) could be woven for me by each of them until, at last, I would have every dimension of every event. They made it possible for me to step into stories fifty years old and older. To shrug into them like a favorite jacket, to recite and reenact them as if they had been my own life. Which, genetically, of course, they were.
...the pass in the mountains, bitter cold and ragged with craggy rocks. The regiment cut down by snipers – half dead, then half again. The final climb by the moon's sliver of light. The narrow cave. The explosives. Trapped in darkness devoid of breath...
I was raised with truths that were quiet and steady. That were woven into everyone around me. My grandmother was so mortified when a career counselor at my school ran down my financial prospects. “She will do the Lord's work,” grandmother snarled, her hair, even decades later and an ocean away, still shorn military short. And she drew me away.
It didn't surprise me when she fought with my parents, and then called in favors and opened a dozen doors so that I'd be trained as a painter. She wanted my hands busy with art so that my heart would be filled with prayer. “Our family are artists or soldiers, Eliza Jean, and there are no good wars to be fought.” It was the '80s and she always made it very clear, “Either way, you will be a missionary. You were born to Speak.”
...the hours of the night extend. Consciousness is lost or fading for all the soldiers who are left. The highest in rank, she struggles to rouse them but she knows that hope is thin. When day breaks, the enemy will either dig them out and shoot them or set further explosives and crush them where they are. The air is thin. It cannot sustain them. She slumps against the floor, her cheek to the cold stone...
I am neither speaker nor writer (in our tradition, “Speak” could just as well mean “Write”). I have said it here before and I'm sure I will again. What I mean, of course, is that I do not write every day. I do not feel the need, in my soul, in my heart, to express myself in words on paper or screen. I cannot sit down with an assignment and a deadline and create. Though “I need inspiration,” seems, even to me, like a cop-out. For more than a year I certainly had just that (inspiration) and was able to post my Sunday sermon on time every Sunday without fail. Am I less touched now? Am I less worthy? Have I (*gasp*) wandered from that path that my grandmother saw so clearly for me? That she paved with her own blood and bones? After all, my weekly blogs are no longer posted right on time.
...and in that state, that state neither living nor dying, the stone beneath her cheek hummed, vibrated. A stone river, at once solid and liquid. She opened her eyes. There, running the current, were skeleton fish, swimming across the floor and out of the cave, out a crevice in the wall and into the mountain. Did they disappear there? Did the crevice open up and then end abruptly miles beneath the earth? Was it worse to die here, at the hands of the enemy, than to die in a space so small a soldier would have to crawl on his belly, face turned to the stone? But then she heard a voice...
I am no less interested, inspired, impassioned or enthralled. I do not crave the drama, the newness, the sparkle, glitter and gloss. I am simply more introspective. More realistic. More willing to take deeper risks. More able to Speak.
I have more to say now that I am no longer distracted. I have learned that all that glitters is not gold.
...and the voice, of course, was His voice and He said, “And these loaves and fish will be enough.” And she woke. And she roused her comrades. She commanded them to eat what little they had left. Then she lit the last fire kit and showed them all the fossilized fish in the floor of the cave. They followed the trail of bones to the crevice, all but hidden in the far corner. Following her with faith, each solider squeezed into the gap...
Sometimes the leap of faith one must take into the darkness is more literal than figurative. Sometimes we must walk a dark path because the street that leads home is not lined with street lights. Sometimes we have to plunge ahead because otherwise we are simply standing in the darkness screaming. What awaits outside and beyond that blackness may be something far more horrendous than staying, standing there in the dark, but it is *something* and Christ tells us again and again that doing *something* is forever better than doing *nothing.* Failure will occur sometimes... but the attempt itself will always be a successful try.
...the passage was almost impossibly low and tight and blacker than any hell and she sang to them and recited scripture to ease their moaning terror. Dawn came and went without them knowing. Day came and went. Onward they crawled. The next night was almost spent when fresh air and starry sky appeared above them and they clawed their way to the surface... so far from their enemies that together they could stand and embrace each other and weep and shout in praise to the Lord.
I am not interested in anything but the truth:
Christ exists. He is a force in our personal lives. He is brilliant and joyous and always asks us to do the right thing which is never the easy thing.
Christ is not man. The rules and interpretations and exploitations of Christ's Word by man's church is sin. It is sin because it is giving in to fear. This only green world, with its fractal perfection, is the only true church.
Now then forever, Christ walks with us, died for us, rose for us, created us, speaks to us, and shows us both the tiny spark that is our lives and our personal path, and the cosmic bang which is the grandest big picture. We are part of everything around us, all things connected, because Christ's hand guides it all.
And Christ is the Alpha and the Omega. There came and has come and will come no other.
Great big statements. Tiny, personal truths.
It is very hard to despair when all filled up with Christ.
EJ
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Cry Sanctuary
...and I will hear you, so says our Lord.
Come down here. Take me. Take me in the ways we always write about but have never done. Take me in your arms. Take me against your body. Take me dancing. Take me riding. Take me to the ocean where I first knew her eyes molten. Take me away from this starry sky beside this abandoned dove house, high above the wrought iron, rusty metal acidic fire escape where I first realized that she loved me, she loved me not, she didn't know me at all.
The words haunt me. They come again and again like they burn in my blood. Every time they cycle again through my heart it beats and they come like the edge of the knife a dream told me to send.
I am speechless. I am also not who you just called me.
And the fast tumble of sorry meant so much less than I thought it would.
I was not raised to forgive this.
“I wanted you.
I wanted no one else.
I thought it through.
I got you to myself...”
Your words haunt me. “She gave me sanctuary. Her home was my safe house. I would do anything... even deny everything I am, everything I was, to have one place that was stable and sane.”
I am nodding my head. Yes. I wanted that. A safe place. A home I could count on to return to. A haven, a heaven, a heart... oh Lord. I can't believe I ever said yes. I walk my laptop to the edge of the roof and let it drop. I can't burn the letters if they're all digital. But the sound of silicon and plastic and steel splintering through the alley is the sound I'm making when I open my mouth and scream.
You have no idea, my dear friend, my sister, how alike we are. How I avoid (shunned even) the labels for so long. I am above them, I insisted. I am woman, hear me (not even close to) roar. It was so much easier. I played both sides against the middle. I danced the lines between this and that, light and dark, wrong and right. I walked the fence. I rode the centerline.
Why did I finally? Why did I finally come to yes? Was it my mind or my body that betrayed me? Was it hope... because it certainty wasn't faith.
I am crying now. But not in mourning. You, my companion, my comrade, have cried enough of those tears for both of us. Six months? Six months you have mourned? My voice bounces back at me. I rip my jacket off and throw it after my computer. My t-shirt: Silence = Death. How apropos. Tear it off, grrl. Tear off your mourning veil. Throw it down. Let it catch fire and turn to ash. Channel all that burning into making love with *your* woman. What Christ has granted you, cannot be taken away. Pull her close and her choice will be obvious between every gasp, every sigh, every time she cries your name against your heart.
Throw it down, baby. Throw it down.
“You got off
every time you got onto me.
Was it wrong
to go along with insanity?”
You will never find safety with man. My father used to say that. I thought sometimes he was telling me something nonlinear and literal. I am a rape survivor. I am a lesbian. Was he telling me something I didn't know about myself then? Something that hadn't happened yet? Other times I thought he meant it as a comment on denomination. The vice grip that holds and twists and mutilates decent souls into not knowing right from wrong. The factories that encase their children in shells of fear so thick they finally combust and burn down everyone around them. Today... today I think he just meant that in Christ we find safety. Not in the mortal coil but rather in the Holy Ghost.
Yes. There it is. The trinity returns to recast herself as a reality in my life, in my heart. The three made one. Father, Son and the Being that lives in my heart and in yours. They are talking now. They know we have laid on the bed when it was already on fire. We bared our everything and worked our hours and bled and sweat and cried and did The Right Thing. Again and again and again. But our reward is Christ. Not a world of man that hands us what we have handed them.
Cry sanctuary, and I will hear you. Let me be your safe place. Build this house with me. Dance this beat with me. Watch me show the world how dedicated I can be. And they thought they'd seen me before. Christ has stripped everything else away and showed me the essentials. Do you see the same? Everyone who robbed you of your confidence has been removed from your life, shown for what they are. They have reared up and you have stood up.
You stood up, baby.
“I guess it wasn't really right.
Guess it wasn't meant to be.
It didn't matter what they said
cuz we were good in bed.”
A shooting star. There are fighters and lovers and teachers and preachers. The best partner is all of those. The waves. That night. The paint brushes scattered on the floor. The growl crack shout of my body waking up for the first time. The knowledge of Christ in the room. The realization of no. We, you and I, share so much – not just wings. I feel we are soldiers together at war. We work the system, run the lines, and know how to dance around the mines.
She tells me your personal myth. She has woven you into the tapestry of her muscles. She says in words, white on black: She is incorruptible. She is bronze and forest eyes, still and quiet and sure. She is passion like flame across my skin. Yes was never a question. When was the question. I cannot exist without her. She was angel and threw herself down for me. I was... so hurt... and she had seen enough. She wanted it done. The damage was done. But the certainty was I would find salvation in her arms. It would take almost forever, it seemed, but the first time... in blood, and tears... breathless... salvation.
She says that you snuck up on her. She didn't know until your feathers tumbled over her body, bare in the blue light of post-midnight. She didn't know until you wouldn't take no for an answer. She cried sanctuary. You provided one without tearing apart her world.
Step outside under these stars with me. The celestial dome is perfection, flawless, effortless in the singular purpose: To give the trees something to hold up. Christ said: I am here because you will never love each other as I will love you. You will never understand each other as I will understand you. You will never hold each other as I will hold you.
There are no lies, no deceptions, nothing but Christ when you hold each other. Keep each other in that truth.
“Guess I stuck around for
all the wrong reasons...”
I am, once again, laying here, renaming constellations. Without my connection to the digital world. Without my armor. Even my steed is far away. My feet, my hands, my muscles and bones brought me here. I am alone. But you are here. I knew you would be. You want nothing from me. You are in my world one day and the next and five months from then. You are not daily, weekly, monthly, scheduled or neat. You are not conditional. You are constant. Now then forever. I name my North Star after you. My fingertips trace lines and curves. I discover hosts of angels in the sky.
How will this story be retold to strangers I will never know?
I cannot deny the smile that slides across my face. Shh. Come closer. Lay down beside me. I have found the Southern Cross above the streets of LA. I have found something, someone, so good for me. All this was worth my discovery of you.
“Singing amen, amen.
I'm alive.”
EJ
Come down here. Take me. Take me in the ways we always write about but have never done. Take me in your arms. Take me against your body. Take me dancing. Take me riding. Take me to the ocean where I first knew her eyes molten. Take me away from this starry sky beside this abandoned dove house, high above the wrought iron, rusty metal acidic fire escape where I first realized that she loved me, she loved me not, she didn't know me at all.
The words haunt me. They come again and again like they burn in my blood. Every time they cycle again through my heart it beats and they come like the edge of the knife a dream told me to send.
I am speechless. I am also not who you just called me.
And the fast tumble of sorry meant so much less than I thought it would.
I was not raised to forgive this.
“I wanted you.
I wanted no one else.
I thought it through.
I got you to myself...”
Your words haunt me. “She gave me sanctuary. Her home was my safe house. I would do anything... even deny everything I am, everything I was, to have one place that was stable and sane.”
I am nodding my head. Yes. I wanted that. A safe place. A home I could count on to return to. A haven, a heaven, a heart... oh Lord. I can't believe I ever said yes. I walk my laptop to the edge of the roof and let it drop. I can't burn the letters if they're all digital. But the sound of silicon and plastic and steel splintering through the alley is the sound I'm making when I open my mouth and scream.
You have no idea, my dear friend, my sister, how alike we are. How I avoid (shunned even) the labels for so long. I am above them, I insisted. I am woman, hear me (not even close to) roar. It was so much easier. I played both sides against the middle. I danced the lines between this and that, light and dark, wrong and right. I walked the fence. I rode the centerline.
Why did I finally? Why did I finally come to yes? Was it my mind or my body that betrayed me? Was it hope... because it certainty wasn't faith.
I am crying now. But not in mourning. You, my companion, my comrade, have cried enough of those tears for both of us. Six months? Six months you have mourned? My voice bounces back at me. I rip my jacket off and throw it after my computer. My t-shirt: Silence = Death. How apropos. Tear it off, grrl. Tear off your mourning veil. Throw it down. Let it catch fire and turn to ash. Channel all that burning into making love with *your* woman. What Christ has granted you, cannot be taken away. Pull her close and her choice will be obvious between every gasp, every sigh, every time she cries your name against your heart.
Throw it down, baby. Throw it down.
“You got off
every time you got onto me.
Was it wrong
to go along with insanity?”
You will never find safety with man. My father used to say that. I thought sometimes he was telling me something nonlinear and literal. I am a rape survivor. I am a lesbian. Was he telling me something I didn't know about myself then? Something that hadn't happened yet? Other times I thought he meant it as a comment on denomination. The vice grip that holds and twists and mutilates decent souls into not knowing right from wrong. The factories that encase their children in shells of fear so thick they finally combust and burn down everyone around them. Today... today I think he just meant that in Christ we find safety. Not in the mortal coil but rather in the Holy Ghost.
Yes. There it is. The trinity returns to recast herself as a reality in my life, in my heart. The three made one. Father, Son and the Being that lives in my heart and in yours. They are talking now. They know we have laid on the bed when it was already on fire. We bared our everything and worked our hours and bled and sweat and cried and did The Right Thing. Again and again and again. But our reward is Christ. Not a world of man that hands us what we have handed them.
Cry sanctuary, and I will hear you. Let me be your safe place. Build this house with me. Dance this beat with me. Watch me show the world how dedicated I can be. And they thought they'd seen me before. Christ has stripped everything else away and showed me the essentials. Do you see the same? Everyone who robbed you of your confidence has been removed from your life, shown for what they are. They have reared up and you have stood up.
You stood up, baby.
“I guess it wasn't really right.
Guess it wasn't meant to be.
It didn't matter what they said
cuz we were good in bed.”
A shooting star. There are fighters and lovers and teachers and preachers. The best partner is all of those. The waves. That night. The paint brushes scattered on the floor. The growl crack shout of my body waking up for the first time. The knowledge of Christ in the room. The realization of no. We, you and I, share so much – not just wings. I feel we are soldiers together at war. We work the system, run the lines, and know how to dance around the mines.
She tells me your personal myth. She has woven you into the tapestry of her muscles. She says in words, white on black: She is incorruptible. She is bronze and forest eyes, still and quiet and sure. She is passion like flame across my skin. Yes was never a question. When was the question. I cannot exist without her. She was angel and threw herself down for me. I was... so hurt... and she had seen enough. She wanted it done. The damage was done. But the certainty was I would find salvation in her arms. It would take almost forever, it seemed, but the first time... in blood, and tears... breathless... salvation.
She says that you snuck up on her. She didn't know until your feathers tumbled over her body, bare in the blue light of post-midnight. She didn't know until you wouldn't take no for an answer. She cried sanctuary. You provided one without tearing apart her world.
Step outside under these stars with me. The celestial dome is perfection, flawless, effortless in the singular purpose: To give the trees something to hold up. Christ said: I am here because you will never love each other as I will love you. You will never understand each other as I will understand you. You will never hold each other as I will hold you.
There are no lies, no deceptions, nothing but Christ when you hold each other. Keep each other in that truth.
“Guess I stuck around for
all the wrong reasons...”
I am, once again, laying here, renaming constellations. Without my connection to the digital world. Without my armor. Even my steed is far away. My feet, my hands, my muscles and bones brought me here. I am alone. But you are here. I knew you would be. You want nothing from me. You are in my world one day and the next and five months from then. You are not daily, weekly, monthly, scheduled or neat. You are not conditional. You are constant. Now then forever. I name my North Star after you. My fingertips trace lines and curves. I discover hosts of angels in the sky.
How will this story be retold to strangers I will never know?
I cannot deny the smile that slides across my face. Shh. Come closer. Lay down beside me. I have found the Southern Cross above the streets of LA. I have found something, someone, so good for me. All this was worth my discovery of you.
“Singing amen, amen.
I'm alive.”
EJ
Sunday, May 24, 2009
The Holy Trinity
Father. Son. Holy Ghost. The Holy Trinity as we have come to know it, including the words Holy Trinity, do not actually appear in the recognized scriptures, which I have always thought fascinating since the Roman Catholic church has held huge sway over what verse and laws were laid down and officiated. It would seem in their best interest that concepts like sainthood and tri-aspect divinity would be better covered.
I am enjoy very much sitting and talking about comparative religion. This is when, often, people like to argue about who did what first. Like, the church co-opted all the pagan rituals and holy days to better woo the people. And the pagans were just co-opting the seasons (ahem *cough* made my God) and so the natural order of things (*cough* also laid down by God). I like to talk about all the different religions that have their own Great Flood, or Virgin Birth, or Risen Savior. Some of my co-workers like to think they can unravel my faith if they just read enough ancient history and human mythology. What they fail to comprehend (in all their textbook comprehension) is that my Lord is as nonlinear and universal (literally) as their lord (facts) is black, white, and all straight lines.
And you all know how I feel about straight lines.
The true Trinity, of course, is God, Christ and us. God, our Lord of Lords, the force that created the universe as His own divine Bang. Christ, as the physical, mortal manifestation of that force who walked on Earth and taught us before returning to that force (without ever leaving it, nonlinear awesomeness and all that). And us, the thinking, feeling, mortal, physical, limited, loving, scared and sacred by-products of that before mentioned Bang and so creations of God and Christ and pretty much awesome... *just as we are made.* (Yes, I went there. You know what I'm talking about... or do you? We'll see May 26.)
Is God in all of us? Of course! He made the whole universe! He's everywhere! Are we all God? Of course not! We are creations of Him. We are part of His masterpiece that is this existence. Just as my paintings are a reflection of me, are a mirror to my heart, my hopes, but they are not me, so are we the reflections and hopes of God without being Him.
And yet... my paintings mean so much to me. Didn't He say, we mean *everything* to Him?
Yes. He did. And so did He.
EJ
I am enjoy very much sitting and talking about comparative religion. This is when, often, people like to argue about who did what first. Like, the church co-opted all the pagan rituals and holy days to better woo the people. And the pagans were just co-opting the seasons (ahem *cough* made my God) and so the natural order of things (*cough* also laid down by God). I like to talk about all the different religions that have their own Great Flood, or Virgin Birth, or Risen Savior. Some of my co-workers like to think they can unravel my faith if they just read enough ancient history and human mythology. What they fail to comprehend (in all their textbook comprehension) is that my Lord is as nonlinear and universal (literally) as their lord (facts) is black, white, and all straight lines.
And you all know how I feel about straight lines.
The true Trinity, of course, is God, Christ and us. God, our Lord of Lords, the force that created the universe as His own divine Bang. Christ, as the physical, mortal manifestation of that force who walked on Earth and taught us before returning to that force (without ever leaving it, nonlinear awesomeness and all that). And us, the thinking, feeling, mortal, physical, limited, loving, scared and sacred by-products of that before mentioned Bang and so creations of God and Christ and pretty much awesome... *just as we are made.* (Yes, I went there. You know what I'm talking about... or do you? We'll see May 26.)
Is God in all of us? Of course! He made the whole universe! He's everywhere! Are we all God? Of course not! We are creations of Him. We are part of His masterpiece that is this existence. Just as my paintings are a reflection of me, are a mirror to my heart, my hopes, but they are not me, so are we the reflections and hopes of God without being Him.
And yet... my paintings mean so much to me. Didn't He say, we mean *everything* to Him?
Yes. He did. And so did He.
EJ
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Pocket Jesus
Sensing in me doubt, not of a spiritual kind but still doubt all the same, a pastor friend said to me two weeks ago, "I think, perhaps, you are trying to do too much. What you need is a Pocket Jesus." And indeed from his pocket he withdrew a baby Jesus, arms out-stretched above snug swaddling clothes, all carved from olive wood and no bigger than a quarter.
"How many of these do you have in there?" I grin at his deep suit jacket pocket but I am only answered with a matching grin and the little wooden figurine being pressed gently into my palm. My fingers curl around the strange little effigy and I wonder to myself, "Isn't this a graven image?" I bury my hand in the pocket of my leather jacket and silently let the gift drop into the depths. It is almost a week before I take it out again.
And realize that it is a carving of an angel, wings out-stretched, not the baby Jesus at all.
But for five days, I didn't know that.
There was something so strange about it. That little boy Jesus riding in the soft dark silk of my jacket pocket. Something so odd. I thought about it before anything else every morning. I remembered it every time I shrugged into or out of my jacket. I started to brush the hem of that pocket when I passed the jacket hanging on the coat tree at home or the hook at work. I started to close my eyes and dream of that peaceful place that nestled my talisman, my compass, my safety.
"Why should I need you?" I finally said, somewhat indignant, near the end of day four. "I do not need you." I was standing, arms crossed, feet planted wide, staring across the room at a pocket in a motorcycle jacket. I was quite honestly miffed... hurt... fuming a little even. Over-reacting? No. I had actually come to rely on that little Pocket Jesus... and it was seriously bothering me.
"I have Christ with me. I don't need you," I continued aloud. "I don't need the trappings and the rituals and the tokens of faith. I feel it here, in my chest, in my heart, in my muscles and blood and bones. I hear you... Him!... clear and strong and brave and tough. I don't need the weight of you tangible. Why do you try so hard to remind me that I am only human? That I have physical desires like touch and sight? Why do you worry away at my faith when it is all that I have?!"
And finally the moment came. The moment that had been so long in the coming -- four days had never been longer. My own epiphany. As that fourth day rolled over into the fifth and the light of dawn crept into my studio and restored color and life to the canvases and palettes around me, it became very clear.
It's okay.
We are all only human. And sometimes the rituals and the easy comforts and the tangible, factual knowledge is what we need to carry us over or past a rough emotional sea. Sometimes we just need it to be simple.
And I crossed the room and reached into the pocket and withdrew an angel. I lifted her to the dawn light and she was actually an olive tree. Then brought her closer to my eyes and saw a cross... and a dove... and a woman praying.
Just keep it simple. And divinity tumbles home.
EJ
"How many of these do you have in there?" I grin at his deep suit jacket pocket but I am only answered with a matching grin and the little wooden figurine being pressed gently into my palm. My fingers curl around the strange little effigy and I wonder to myself, "Isn't this a graven image?" I bury my hand in the pocket of my leather jacket and silently let the gift drop into the depths. It is almost a week before I take it out again.
And realize that it is a carving of an angel, wings out-stretched, not the baby Jesus at all.
But for five days, I didn't know that.
There was something so strange about it. That little boy Jesus riding in the soft dark silk of my jacket pocket. Something so odd. I thought about it before anything else every morning. I remembered it every time I shrugged into or out of my jacket. I started to brush the hem of that pocket when I passed the jacket hanging on the coat tree at home or the hook at work. I started to close my eyes and dream of that peaceful place that nestled my talisman, my compass, my safety.
"Why should I need you?" I finally said, somewhat indignant, near the end of day four. "I do not need you." I was standing, arms crossed, feet planted wide, staring across the room at a pocket in a motorcycle jacket. I was quite honestly miffed... hurt... fuming a little even. Over-reacting? No. I had actually come to rely on that little Pocket Jesus... and it was seriously bothering me.
"I have Christ with me. I don't need you," I continued aloud. "I don't need the trappings and the rituals and the tokens of faith. I feel it here, in my chest, in my heart, in my muscles and blood and bones. I hear you... Him!... clear and strong and brave and tough. I don't need the weight of you tangible. Why do you try so hard to remind me that I am only human? That I have physical desires like touch and sight? Why do you worry away at my faith when it is all that I have?!"
And finally the moment came. The moment that had been so long in the coming -- four days had never been longer. My own epiphany. As that fourth day rolled over into the fifth and the light of dawn crept into my studio and restored color and life to the canvases and palettes around me, it became very clear.
It's okay.
We are all only human. And sometimes the rituals and the easy comforts and the tangible, factual knowledge is what we need to carry us over or past a rough emotional sea. Sometimes we just need it to be simple.
And I crossed the room and reached into the pocket and withdrew an angel. I lifted her to the dawn light and she was actually an olive tree. Then brought her closer to my eyes and saw a cross... and a dove... and a woman praying.
Just keep it simple. And divinity tumbles home.
EJ
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