Refusing Despair

Refusing Despair, we surrendered to Hope. We remembered our ruined stories and marked the disasters along the way. Returning to scenes of misconceptions, we nearly drowned for fear of their depths. But Faith carried us forward. We opened our eyes. We unstopped our ears. Truth showed us grief we ignored, crimes we witnessed. We came to believe life had always been unmanageable alone but now we embraced the friendship of clarity. Using the mirror of our memories, we found relics of our desires and unearthed them with our prayers. In the spring of our returning we found the children we suffered to be. Discovering them isolated, cold and hungry, we embraced them, soothed them with listening, cradled them with understanding. We told them what we ourselves had forgotten and they had never heard – “Don’t be afraid. Fear robs. Hope protects.” We became new children that day, chattering like birds, receiving our bread every morning, drinking God’s peace with the moon.

Get Carried Away (or Statement of Rights)

We have the right to get carried away by love, to celebrate the whole of creation, to smile, to pray, to bear witness as to what it means to be created in the image of God. We have the right to praise The Creator, to keep our eyes open, to examine our intentions, to cherish mercy, to stand against evil, to sit in solitude, to sing in community, to be amazed at children, to respect the elderly, to walk around flowers, to expose cruelty, to cling to faith, to practice gratitude, to say we’re sorry. We have the right to speak the truth, admit confusion, strive for simplicity, accept God’s liberation from chaos. We have the right to refuse the shame of our need, admit pain, to ask questions, celebrate joy and the freedom to live with an eye toward the dignity bestowed unearned upon us by God Almighty.

This is a short short video about my novel: The Frankincense Tree

https://www.wevideo.com/hub/#media/ci/212092060

Your Trip to Paradise

 

I

 

At 3:00 a.m. on a black kettle night,

a yen for Paradise snaps you awake.

Rising, you pack ridiculous flimsy clothes -

shirts without sleeves,

pants without legs,

shoes without a hint of protection. 

  

You commit this crime in faith,

Commit it in passion and a kind

of boulder-hoisting desperation.

 

You carefully make your bed.

In case you don’t return, in case

Indiscriminate survivors blunder through

your private domain.

 

Bent on Paradise,

you want to leave Perdition

in an ordered state worthy of a

benevolent obituary.

 

Stepping through the door,

the night hits your face and

you take note: this is not a dream.

The sun, held back by fermented rain,

and the liquor of nocturnal recline,

shows no sign of appearing.

 

You board the metal bird in the guise

of a Boeing 747 and

close your eyes as it lifts from the sliver of earth.

 

You are not alone.

Through the square of layer glass, you see the beautiful creature,

the who of you, the yes of you,

the now and then and hope of you,

the transformed you after you accept

yourself as the soul you were

you were fashioned to be.

 

This astonishing you runs at break-neck speed.

But you are not out of breath.

Colored in twilight, your legs drum the delighted sky.

You run outside the strapped-in shell of you,

patiently waiting to make your acquaintance. 

 

Studying you, you gape amazed. 

You are ageless.

Empowered by engines not your own,

Endearing and enduring through weakness,.

through storms meant to grow you wings,

through sunflower gardens turned toward the moon,

rivers of ice flowing uphill to sky,

through yearning and angst all forgotten.

There you go, swift through trees hung fat with I-can-do-anything-leaves,

diving backwards, neck arching, legs stretching,

your toes pointed to God.

 

You are dizzy with balance, 

giddy with peace. 

Leaving a trail of shrinking lights,

you think primordial thoughts - thoughts of fire, of flood, of disarmed fate.

You are a river undamned by God. 

The current is swift, but it is not against you. 

Rejoicing and weeping,

a flock of crystal stars fly beneath you.

With wings of diamonds and bone

and feathers of colored surprise, they churn the wind for the transfiguring mill of you.    

 

 

 

II

 

For this excursion children alone are permitted to sit in exit rows. 

In case of a crash, only the children can open the doors. 

It has always been this way, but only is it safe to be one.

As a child, you behold yourself in a lime green shirt.

Or is it red?  Blue maybe?
You decide on a dotted Swiss dress with a yellow belt.
You remember bare hands, fingers dipping into a sugar bowl
and giving your tongue a treat.
Yes, the hands are small and the child is you.     

You look down. 

You want to know this two-legged shape attached to you and you to it.   
But it is not a completed you. 
Your body is merely a sentence that carries the noun of you,
You are a fabulous stuttering phrase carried by the ill-stated truth of you.
But it is never, not ever complete enough.

And now you remember your former bed, the warmth of it and 

how it felt to be in the arms of it, how it protested with your every turn
and how the covers were never exactly the weight you wanted them to be.

You remember God’s smothered voice, the feel of your hands against your ears. 

In the knowledge of the smallness of your hands you agree to stop apologizing,
to stop making excuses.

Yours is a story that keeps being written.

And not a story meant to be written alone.

In the story you wrote alone you stayed stuck behind a curious door,

afraid to try the handle, afraid to risk its turning.
But the nudge to do so insisted.   

All along you’ve questioned the nudge.

God.

God himself explains the nudge.

God himself explains your hesitation.
Your fear of the nudge has to do with God.
Only God makes sense of fear. 

In Perdition there is much to overcome, to improve,

to remodel, destroy, amend, excuse,
flatter,  impress, refute.

Paradise turns fixing obsolete.

In Paradise the water brims with tears nobody needs to cry.
And the birds?
The birds derive from angels.

The clocks are clowns and time is hour free. 

The cutting wind has dropped its blade and
grown a cotton tongue, and all the words are waterfalls and
all the dots have i’s. 

The shredding cloaks of poverty transform to gleaming gowns and broken doors
are used as boats and oars are pulled by skies.
In Paradise your questions beg and answers grow like alms.
And yes and no are Simese twins and Mondays carry songs. 

In Paradise you are who you were born to be and no one thinks to drown.

She believed her many-headed self was proof of a scattered brain. But a scattered brain was better than a frozen brain.  Most would agree.  Being scattered trumped being frozen; it was her comfort. But she often wondered how to repair herself.  For a season she hunted for glue, for a kind of epoxy that would mend the scatters.  For a while she used only some of the fragments. That season perplexed her. 

She didn’t like the cold.  She was frightened by glaciers: Enormous blue-white citadels moving towards the sea, skyscrapers of ice bent on barely discernible progress until they reach the continent’s edge and tip inelegantly into the sea.  That is what this is all about: moving from frozen to liquid and then letting go.  Letting go was not her first choice.  Her first choice was clinging.

Letting go was slow in developing.  It is still not done.  It comes in stops and starts with sometimes dark moons and missing stars.  And sometimes the sun shines so bright she wears a blister. Thank Jesus for the Sabbath, for celebrations that include candles. Fire. Fire. Fire. She struggles with limbs and appendages. She sets her sights on what she thinks she needs and lets go all over again. She's often dizzy but not so much as she was before. She is coming to love movement and understanding her need to change.

I hope you never change, they said.
But Life said, I hope you do. I hope you keep changing. I hope you never stay the same. 
You aren’t the girl we knew, they said.
She doesn't argue but in her heart she knows she wasn't who they thought she was.  

This is a season of stepping into The Push. A season of tumbling.  Grace has her flying head over heels. She accepts the spinning. Moving keeps her warm. She's made friends with Grace and admitted she can't change. Only Grace can change her and He did and He is.  She reminds herself often: Change is good. I am not afraid of change. Stuck is what to fear. Stuck prevents change.   

When a Fireball Lands in the Middle of Your Dreams

This is what happens when the fireball in the sky lands in your dream and you have to listen to its flames and have to make sense of the blazing language that climbs up on your tongue and starts it wagging. A light gets turned on. All those dark nights turn into summer and you begin to see why the shadows confused you. The fireball doesn’t have to be enormous, it just have to be hot. Given the nature of fire you know that it is. You know it can burn you but it won’t. The fire will only burn the things that aren’t needed. Things like shame or fear or regret. Things like "I wish I had not..., I should have... I missed out on...." Once the fireball lands you’ll be like those crazy people in Acts who knew about love. You’ll stop being cold, you’ll think about winter and how it won’t ever freeze you. You’ll realize how ridiculous it is to bundle up your desire. You’ll begin to yearn and stop caring about what is missing and why you can’t have it. You’ll start telling the truth and feel the fire warm you on the inside where snow used to camp. You’ll act a little crazy when the fireball lands but it will be the kind of crazy that makes sanity jealous. People will circle around just to stay warm and you won’t run out of blankets. I think the fireball was never meant to hide in the sky. I think it was meant to hide in you and me. It was meant to cause an uproar. To wake us up. To keep us hopping. To make us lie still. To undo us, to put us back together. All of this. All of that. The whole thing is ours. Its fire and its God and it is crazy and its good and now we can fan the flames and let it burn. Good morning.

What Jonathan Edwards said is still true.

“The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of earthly friends, are but shadows; but God is the substance. These are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams. But God is the ocean.

She grew up in a hive, a vast, endeavoring conglomeration that stretched from here to there and beyond. The scope of its distance was too far to see. The wealth of effort and sacrifice and unappreciated toil encompassed not only her lifetime but lifetimes before hers – each life, comparatively short., but the lifetimes together stretched into eons. The hive surged with effort; effort of mothers, of fathers, of brothers, sisters, of husbands, of wives, of soldiers and drones. And though it was true, there was a bounty of sweetness, every day demanded more. In trying to calculate how she could escape and still remain faithful, useful, loyal and loved, she failed. She wasn’t good at math and the formula to keep her wings a flutter seemed beyond her capacity to sustain. The hive was a place where enough was never enough and she grieved at her lack. Stepping out of the hive wasn’t her idea. Indeed she would have never gone if she hadn’t been pushed. The miracle of her exit remains. She is grateful and ambivalent. The hive had clear and precise measurements. This equals that. That equals this. Outside the hive the measurements were all askew, up for grabs. What was she worth outside of the hive? Some days her life looked like honey. Some days it looked like sloth.

Some Words about Abiding & Freedom

After it was over and they could talk about their freedom they said – well it’s not like what happened could be explained in concrete terms – no, not as if we’d timed it so we were able to observe something NOT ABSTRACT like the sudden appearance of smiling dolphins or anything as laughable as that – of course not and with all the confusion caused by the red sky at the wrong time of the day – and no indication of moring or night – yes, we had no choice about the sky – all we know is grace holds up the clouds and seems to keep our pulses pulsing. They weren’t in a joking mood but a joke was hard to resist. One of them calmed the other by putting a hand on her trembling shoulder and said – I’m grateful for the impracticality of the word abide. It’s the only word that comes to mind right now – Abide? Isn’t that strange. I thought I heard that word just now myself, like a reverse injunction, a mandate of some kind – Yes, or an invitation – Abide? It’s not a word that comes up a lot – not on the radio – or the internet, but I heard it all the same – Me too, yes, abide. They sat together in silence, all stunned by the terror of freedom. One woman (top right), almost being choked by her wings. One woman (bottom middle) reclining, reluctant to make the first move. The other woman (top left) leans into freedom, ready to leap.

ON THE HUNT

On the Hunt He has looked everywhere. He has looked to the skies, in nature, in power, in relationships, in success, in symbols and dreams and stories and song. Indeed so fervent is he in his hunting he has almost silenced that small inner voice that has been trying to tell him all along what it is he’s hunting for. C.S. Lewis was right (of course) when he said in The Weight of Glory, “Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosphies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.........” .