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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bearing Witness

"...may you bear witness for Christ in His glory, showing all who cross your path how the wonder of Him lives in all things, more than any man can comprehend, and with a plan that only He discerns. If His desire was for all of us to be the same, He would not have formed us so differently."

And so it came to pass that she found herself alone on the path and with child and she was not certain how it was that she came to walk upon this way and she was not certain how it was that she was without companion or champion, but she was quite certain why it was that she was unafraid. She was unafraid because with every step she was bearing witness for Christ.

It is nothing short of miracle, I think, that critics and market analysts place "Juno" and "The Passion of the Christ" in the same category. They both, it seems, spoke to the Christian population who responded by putting their money on the counter at cineplexes coast to coast. The brutal, perhaps over-dramatized life of Christ and the young, hip, abortion-isn't-right-for-me teen grrl, spoke to the modern Christian... as did the controversy that surrounded (to different extents) both films. The "Christian Dollar" is an elusive one, and the Church (as all denominations are called by the industry) is not easily courted. Which makes sense. I would suppose that Father isn't keen on dating studios (all of which are from the other side of the tracks).

We (as Christians) seem to like movies where we see our ethics come out on top. "See, Juno? Pre-martial sex was a complicated no-no, huh?" We like to see mirrors held up that we can see bits of ourselves reflected in and so justified. "See what my Christ went through? How can you not believe?!" But I find it endlessly fascinating that we tend to flock (pun intended) to the extremes. We want "Left Behind" and images of pious, pure and perfect Christians. You know... the kind that don't really exist.

There is an on-going movement by Dove (and others) to show little grrls that even rare and fabulously beautiful models and actors require an enormous amount of air-brushing. I think someone... um, maybe me, maybe you... should launch a campaign to show people, to show even other Christians, what *real* Christians look like.

Because being a Christian is being a believer in the teachings and the heart of Jesus Christ. It is being gentle. It is knowing forgiveness -- given and received. It is righteous anger. It is riotous laughter. It is freedom and confidence in our hearts. It is pushing ourselves to our full possible potential because anything less would be to fall short of what God hard-wired into our genome. Being a Christian is celebrating the temples of our body, granted by Christ, His gift to us. Elevation of music. Redemption in kisses. Hallelujah in every whispered I love you. Prayer in every moment.

The on-going conversation with Christ that includes the price of gas, the taste of bubblegum, the sound of children on the playground, the scent of new dawn, the realization when we meet the gaze of a friend that more awaits us in those quiet depths than we ever saw before.

Bear witness. Stand up for your Christ as He stood up, lay down, and rose again for you. Come out of the closet. Tell one person who didn't know that you are a Christian. But don't invite them to church. Don't spout man's scripture to them. Do it like this:

I am a raver, a biker chick, a gamer grrl, and a Christian. So yeah, that new movie does appeal to me on all sorts of levels.

...or...

That last time I had a solid KO in MMA was when this great big guy started giving me trouble because I wear a cross, cuz I'm a Christian, you know? But I've got short hair, and a grrlfriend, and I'm a chick... and he thought that didn't mesh. Like he's all into my business. That's between me and Christ.

...or...

I am not pro-choice because I believe that there are lots of choices but killing a living baby isn't one of them. However, I don't believe that candidates should be decided on one issue. I will place my vote for the person who will best guide this entire country, not just the Christian part. I am a Christian but I will not allow the pulpit to cast my vote. God gave me a brain of my own.

...or, simply...

I am a Christian. I am not a stereotype.

Real life is not about evangelic speeches. Real life is about showing, not telling. Make it real. Make it your own. Bear witness for Christ as you. Because whatever and whoever you are, if He walks with you, than you are a Christian.

EJ

And Suddenly, I Knew...

"How do you manage?"
"I just do."
"How do you do it?"
"You might as well ask me how I breathe."

I was raised to fight this hard.

I do not believe in raised Christians. Meaning, I do not believe that someone can be raised a Christian. They can be raised in a Christian household... but standing in a garage doesn't make you a car. I believe that Christians are grown. They evolve naturally, the way a plant is first a bloom, and then a seed, and finally a living thing.

I think we all, as human beings, grow and change over the course of our lives. We are influenced by how much sun and how much rain and how many rocks and how many weeds but most of us do manage to transform from one thing to another and another all through our years. And I think that more of us grow to be Christians than know it.

You are sitting on the rooftop at my side and you are renaming constellations, making up new mythology for them. All of your myths involve young heroes forced again and again to prove themselves to the even the people who love them. Most of your heroes are plain-looking, by your descriptions "unremarkable" or even "odd." All of your heroes are men.

As I sit silently and listen to you, just talking softly while I type with the FlipStart on my knees, I think to myself that you are a Christian and you don't even know it. This voice of guidance and solace that whispers to you in the night and in your dreams and when you lean in pointedly, is so obviously the voice of Christ. But you insist you believe nothing. When our soul leaves our body (and you do admit that the soul is part of our anatomy) it simply does something, goes somewhere but this life is all there is.

You think that makes you not a Christian.

I think that makes you content. You are unafraid to spend your days -- two or twenty thousand -- living fully in your body.

A friend says to me:

"If her touch is the height of sensation I will ever feel... if the most divine moments of my existence are beneath her hands, her mouth... than I walk willingly into any den of lions, into any fire. Christ has placed her in my life and I rejoice with every fiber of my being. I know eternity in her arms."

This is what Terrapyres are. Those children of Fallen Angels and man who are half of the Mardi Gras 3000 brand. They are my messengers. They present a type of Christianity that is alive and untamed, untethered to church or pulpit. They crackle with passion, with seize the moment, with joy. They tumble into oceans of emotion, of possibilities, of experiences and emerge, surface, better people. They cast aside the question of cultural, popular ethics and ethos and embrace transcendent living that is painful, that is brilliant, that is everything beating in their racing hearts.

I think a Christian has to be that alive. There is no such thing as an "arm chair believer."

It seems simple, but I will say it again and again:

I love your loud laughter. I love your bawdy humor. I love your harsh critique and your selfless nature. You are a small woman who takes big risks. You are a fighter, a lover, a charmer, a mother... a Christian. With leather jacket and right wristlet, in dancing, beaded braids and burning eyes, you are everything Christ demanded of us.

We need more warriors to wake up and realize that they have been Christians all along. We need more gamers to wake up and realize that they can change the world because they form their own mythos. We need to wake up and see dawn and accept it as the miracle it is.

My friend writes to me:

"Like the rain when it isn't falling across my face, like the sun on snowy nights, like the sight of the sea beyond the porch, and the crash of the waves throughout the night... I miss you. I think of you. I am not alone but I feel something is missing and it lies in the miles between us. That something is you. Sister. Soldier. Please know I am with you."

And every day when I wake, I realize I am more Awake than ever before. I am not interested in spending my days simply existing, but rather I want to be fully alive. Seize the day is too simple. I want to seize my own potential. Not do everything I want, but to do everything I do to the best of my ability -- beyond my best.

I want the rain on my face. I want the sun. I want the snowy nights. The sea. Your kiss. Your hands in my hair. The heat of our bodies. The cold of the starlight. The speed of my bike, the beat of the music. If I miss you (and I do) than I want to feel it, a tangible ache in my chest. I would rather yearn for you, my sister, my soldier, my friend, than feel nothing.

I don't think a real Christian can feel nothing.

And I have never felt more real.

EJ

In His Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let go. Let God.

In His Time.

EJ

Tangible Dreaming

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

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

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

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

And I receive my communion.

Divine inspiration...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EJ

And in the Garden

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because she carried Him.

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

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

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

And the dove appeared.

And the Lord spoke.

And the stone was rolled away.

And the women knew that He was risen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of us do not need the words.

We have here *tapping my heart* the Word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EJ

My Prayer

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

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

It is like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is easier...

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

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

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

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

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

Christ? Shout for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't hate you.

...

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

EJ

How Will They Know?

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak up."

Pastor Martin Niemoller inspired these words with his speeches in 1946. My grandmother sat across the table from me in 1991 and spoke with quiet force, her eyes on me but her words in response to a conversation between my parents who sat with us:

“They came first for the Christians, and I did nothing because I am not a Christian. Then they came for the Blacks, and I did nothing because I am not a Black. Then they came for the women, and I did nothing because I am not a woman. When they finally came for me, there was no one left to do anything.”

I was eleven. My cheeks burned. I shook so hard I spilled my glass. I couldn't take my eyes off my grandmother. Of course, she was a Christian, and brown-skinned, and a woman. But that was not the point. The point was it means one thing to fight for someone just like us. Someone easy to love. And it means something completely different to fight for someone nothing like us at all.

Would you die for the person you despise the most?

Would you defend the person who makes your life the hardest?

It is so easy... so very easy... to bolster ourselves and attack those we hate and those who make our life harder. It is simple to hate the enemy. It is easier to rescue a friend than it is to rescue an enemy. It is simple to garner pity. It is easy to rally forces against someone who is Other Than you. We all do it. Complain about the boss with family. Nitpick a husband with friends. Gripe about the world and laws and conventions of culture at an anonymous forum. We are never at fault. We are often comforted and supported and "justified."

But it is not Christian. Nor is it excusable.

The sociological phrase is political apathy. When we only take up arms to defend those like us. The homogenized culture that will we never have in America. And PTL for that, baby, or this brown grrl wouldn't be here. Political apathy is the refusal to see community outside likeness and commonality. It is also the inability to claim identity. It is a seed for spiritual apathy.

I am...

I am...

I am not...

Socio-political labels exist so that we understand on what foundation we stand. They are not necessarily who we are. Five days after my grandmother ended that argument at the dinner table both of my parents marched in the Boston Gay Pride Parade. They were happily married all my father's life. I do not believe either of them ever thought of themselves personally as gay or lesbian. But they did consider themselves members of the GLBT community and the numerous organizations and helplines and centers they gave time and money to would certainty agree with that membership.

When we are feeling alone in the world we turn, most often, to those who are like us. Maybe they have the same skin color. Maybe the same economic status. Maybe gender, sexuality, religion. Whatever. But when we are feeling the most lost, we rarely turn to those truly alien and different. We don't want to learn and take risks. We want to be coddled and stroked. We do not turn to those who are the briers or wolves that hinder and hunt us.

But who did Christ turn to?

In the desert, in His life, in the years He walked and taught and fought on this, His own green world, did He turn again and again to those loyal and true to Him? Did He find Himself enriched by constant isolation with His inner circle of common men? Or did He turn to the thieves, the prostitutes, the lost men?

You are lost. You tear through briers to ask the wolf, “Do you know where we are?” Do you truly think the wolf would eat you when you have asked him a question?

I have not been afraid of wolves since that dinnertime with my grandmother. And though I have found that sometimes when I speak to the wolf, he still bites me, he has never taken me down. Maybe this is because I know so very strongly who I am that I am not shaken by anything anyone else might say. The bricks that make up my foundation have nice, clear, strong labels engraved on them. They are society's labels but not what society thinks they are (Christian. Grrl. Raver.). Rather they are words with my own definitions (Lover. Woman. Fighter.) that do not waiver in the quakes that life rocks me with.

Often the wolf sheds his skin to become my closest ally.

He rarely looks like me -- in or out of his hide.

I said to a friend recently, “Does your lover mind that you blog so explicitly about him?” It is beautiful, sexy, powerful, earth-shaking writing, but despite the fact that the names and places are striped away, it is *very* explicit. Hauntingly so.

My friend takes a long time to answer me. Finally he says, “The poet Minnie Bruce Pratt once asked her partner, transgendered writer and activist Leslie Feinberg, if it was alright with Leslie that Minnie wrote about them explicitly. Leslie answered, 'If you do not write of us, how will anyone know we existed?'”

We lived and loved and existed on this only green world. But we said nothing. We wrote nothing. We did nothing.

And then... none of us were left to tell our story.

I am writing on the digital cave walls.

For me. For you. For them.

Now then forever.

EJ

You Will Hear From Me Today

Lord? Walk me away from everything. Walk me closer to you.

I drive for twenty-three hours to find Christ. I could have found Him in three minutes on my roof top, or in no time at all just by closing my eyes. But I wanted to be here. This place untouched and almost unreal.

I stop for hot coffee before the final five miles to the trail head where I'll stash my bike in the brush and hope I can still find my way. The cook/owner/waiter asks me where I'm headed then cocks his head and an eyebrow. "The McAllen place. Waves rose up and took them both. Washed everything but the house out to sea."

I pay for coffee and tip. I buy two bottles of water. The door chime shows me out and, "It was two nights after Eve McAllen died. So heartbroken, Georg called up the sea."

And thirty minutes past the trail head, thunder rolls low and tumbling with danger and I think about the first time we made love.

The forest is close and unkempt. I think of my Lord in the wilderness. I remember His voice when I have been afraid or have felt lost; He has always said the same thing. "You will hear from me tonight." And I wait. And I always do.

I wonder over the nature of temptation and I write this sermon in my head, all in time, poetry, prose, beat, fall, beat with the cadence of my boots on the path more impassioned and far less traveled. I think about slam poetry and open mics and why I insist the sky is best silver, blue, black, orange, and not green on green on green like it is right now, here in the depths of wood. It is not long before darkness takes my way out from under my feet and washes color from this only green world. But it is then that I realize that I know my journey even blind. I am not afraid. I am not alone.

This knowledge in the world is more important to me than breathing.

I woke Saturday morning to another body in my bed, warm and bare and without pretense or complication. Still half in dreams, I murmur a name that is familiar to neither this audience nor this room. I blink. I stand. I realize I need to drive. This was, almost, too easy because it was an effortless fit.

"Do you think Christ put us on this Earth to have it easy?"
"I have fought so hard for so long... I want to lay it down."
"Go ahead. Lay it down."
"Yeah?"
"When you die."

The thousand plus miles between us shrink. I am racing toward the speed of sound. The sadness, secrets, sleepless notes of a hidden struggle. We must push away to push up, to grow... closer to God... to grow... stronger on our own. Christ gave us these bodies to discover range of emotion. Not repetitious but naturally cyclical, ever widening concentric circles. You channel it into music that no one else will ever truly hear. Your prayers whispered between strums of steel and brass and copper, wrapped within the reverb in some ancient tongue. Do you really think anyone understands? If they are fully alive they come close. You will know them when they look away, when they cannot meet your eyes for the tears that well there, in happiness or in sorrow. To anyone else, it is only noise. From your hands to Christ's ear.

Then one day, drifting, echoing past so many deaf ears, one single note will plant itself in the loamy, rich, fertile soil and by Christ's hand you will wake that dawn to a wild rose, blooming riotous blood red. And when you hold that blossom in your hand, you will know who hears you. Go to her.

By the time I hear the waves on rock and sand and shore, I am ensconced in thoughts of ageless prophesy and the eternal nature of art and the art of eternity. I consider stars, peeking through tree tops, as fires, as creatures, as living things with souls and dreams and every fine masquerade of life. I consider the way your words, your voice, your hands, move across me like Christ's own wind pushing, pulling and caressing the tide. I break from the forest and onto the coast, open and bare to this wind, to the world, to the waves and I wonder what difference is it that instead of standing here with me, you are found instead in the written verse tucked in my pocket. I believe I have found the truth, beside this sea, beneath this sky... tonight.

My memories and my desires mix and meld effortlessly into one existence and time slipstreams:

The moment I understood what "Come here..." meant. Tomorrow night, our hips (not our hips), locked into hard beat on the dance floor. The morning I realized that your "no" meant you didn't trust me. Strobes, raver glow, your eyes closed, your head cocked, you keep rhythm at the base of your spine, 2-2-3 when everyone else pounds 1-1-2. I want to stand in the open rain...

I didn't know this would all be so hard. No one told me this would be so damn hard.

And the thunder keeps her promise and shares her release, torrents of rain, fresh water passion throwing back salt water desire. Reciprocity, indeed, I scream. I throw my head back -- I see like in a photograph, like in a memory, like in the here-and-now, your wrist tucked against the small of your back, your other hand skyward, hallelujah -- and I scream.

The ocean, the thunder, the rain is louder. The whole world is louder than I am. But still Christ hears me. I play my notes, my voice bouncing off cresting waves and standing stones, and lone house filled with ghosts, and Christ hears them all. Who knows what other ears will hear. Right now, I need only for His.

As the storm realigns me, I know that this is Him. I knew I'd hear from Him even as He hears me. How can this compare to the feel-good bubble cast by mortal man's pulpit? I am aware, alive and on fire with His word, His voice. How can I be sustained, reset, lifted up by pews and politics and platitudes? I cannot. I need Him raw, real and eternal. I need Him to grab me, shake me, open my eyes. Christ is feast in famine, vaccine in plague, salvation in hell, this hell -- the only one that exists. He said, "Change it. Do it. Feel it."

Who am I not to listen?

EJ