Never forget that God speaks your very own special language.
Matthew 10
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Author Archives: Elea Lee
Shout their voicelessness
Children are notoriously voiceless, which is why Lindy West’s crusade to “shout your abortion” is so very tone deaf.
In this country and in many countries all over the world, women of childbearing age may have the right to kill their own small daughters and sons, but once that procedure has resulted in the death of a child, it no longer belongs to the mother to shout.
Mother–see how ironic that sounds.
We have to shout for…
…the voiceless girls
Who have lost their lives, their right to shout
For daughters
For sons
Forever missing
Their voices.
Prayer
Prayer comes from the Latin word precarius which means, obtained by entreaty. I remember years ago looking at the way it came to us through the feudal system–subjects would pray to their lords and protectors for the things they needed to survive.
Sometimes prayer can seem less feudal than futile. Is anyone listening? Will anyone come to save me? Those two questions can haunt the soul.
I believe in prayer. I believe it brings light and brings help.
The hardest time to tell someone to pray is when you yourself feel the most alone, the most abandoned.
God never leaves us or forsakes us.
Pray, beautiful one, pray.
4 Days Gone
Who knew the bosom of Abraham was the ICU at the Birmingham Children’s Hospital or that anybody could become impatient with the nearly-returned-from-the-grave, this is sleeping beauty territory, he says, so many years after the event, as he stays with me through the insomniac watches of the night. You see only a muted scrim at first, but later you see so much more, the way time can be a tomb, and you in it, Lazarus,
It is He who always has
Walked in and out of these rooms with me
Delivering Light
The Altar
It was a garden-variety Protestant set up–big ol’ baptistery in the rear, low pile carpeted stage, wood veneer podium, and home-made wooden sign written by an earnest non-native speaker of English,
DO not PLAY on the stage!
I used to speak there once a month for several years. If it was my week to sermonize I would pray first, wait for a topic to surface (unless one was assigned or liturgically evident), then chew on that passage all week. I would research words in original languages, cross-reference key words with other passages, sift through for what it all might mean for us.
I remember speaking on faith, rivers, stones, and children. The process was often exposing, riveting, beautiful, intimate, and met with a regularly dozing deacon or two.
You preach a message and then hope some small smudge of it besmirches the forehead of the listener.
And still I struggle whether anything did.
Anything like–once there was a woman who used to speak in a church where there was an ordinary altar, garden-variety stage, oddly capitalized sign propped upon it.
DO not PLAY on the stage
Sometimes all we need to know about the beauty, splendor, and grace of this dying religion is that the Spirit of the Living God can drive an ordinary man to
Print the words that matter
ALL IN capital letters
For those who are awake
By the end of the sermon.
Uncomfortable Sermons
I wonder, perhaps more often than I should, what would happen if we actually expected church sermons to be practical, actionable, real?
I wonder this because in the last 10 years I have worn my proverbial mendicant’s shirt to communities of faith, as has my whole family, only to find that the churchy probably don’t want us there.
They don’t want us because we talk about horrible things–rape, sexual assault, the abuse of children, sexual exploitation, the way the justice system fails victims, the way branded communities fail.
Not all at once, mind you.
But the truth remains so. If you tell a story about faith-minded adopting family neck-deep in ministry and family and community and then those people, especially their young children, are hurt, terribly hurt, by the people they were supposed to consider family.
Well, that is not a good sermon.
It is, however, very similar to many stories in the Bible, which is where I have gone for my uncomfortable sermons.
Where do you find yours? Where do you go to find the way through
The darkest, hardest places?
Chipped China
The bowls, cups, and occasional ramekins return my level gaze. All damaged, we regard each other warily–the gash, the chipped and missing pieces, the jagged edges
Make us all precipitous,
Weepy as we
search for impossible answers for
Broken
Mansfield
How do atheists turf their ghosts? Wispy girls, long gone, in their place, algorithms, aggregates, the trees were old back when we were young, how wise they will be when we have left this place.
Who will bear the children of the dead? Who will tell the grown man
How pretty, how young you looked in your operatic yukata, how many letters have been written for you, all for you
Careful, I say, careful.
measure out impossible prayers to a Most Evident God
As though they were
Leaves caught in the wind
We Speak in Parables
Could be a lost child or the appearance of a tear in ordinary fabric. Could be the silence of the resurrected or the name of a wildflower on the back of a bus, here today and gone tomorrow no recorded words, no age, no cause of death, just a suddenly re-spooling life
As though you could call what we do here spooling,
as though any word at all could substitute for resurrection.
When pictures are unbearable
In five years a boy goes from child to young man, unless a day changes everything
For everyone
For all of us
The street, the people who remain there
Never the same
No amount of water
Can wash away grief
Carrying Light 