It helps me sometimes, to picture all of us in our sheep costumes, thin elastic chin straps, holding on our faces.
Helps me to remember
We are all sheep
If you don’t count the wolves among us
And all we, like sheep have gone astray
So you will not be the one to forgive my helpless anger
At all the lambs lost to slaughter
While the Shepherd was away.
We are collectively surprised at how ephemeral the boat is, balloonish, easily punctured. As are we. I wonder if the others have drawn the same conclusions-we have become ghosts in our erstwhile stories, still haunted by the house, by the spouse, by the hope we left behind.
Only Lazarus whistles a chipper tune. Why is he so happy? Because nothing is a cool hand to lose.
I bought a boat in the hill country, she says to herself,
In this place where the Sky always becomes an ocean
We have lost so much, but I will have this beat-up John boat, recompense for years ago when I
Told you, leave your anger and walk home from here
As though we all don’t have to do that
As though there is any other way for stone-cold prodigals to
come home
It is just an email for something fun for the kids, but it reminds me of my former squalor, the way you might try to love someone who treats you like the bars, the cage, the meal set before them.
I could tell you all the symptoms and all the chaos, I could tell you the inadequate advice, the befuddlement of friends, the tragedies of children, or the strange calm caused by heavy psychotropic drugs, doctor’s office fish, surely unaware of the storm of a girl in this office by the sea.
I wake up from nightmares feeling that way again–mornings of dread, a low-grade fear of all our tomorrows.
What will become of them? Children without possessive pronouns
To guide them home.
Of course, neither of us chew
scoop cold water to our waiting lips
In the congregation of those
Waiting for bright sunlight
Resurrection
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?
A new ordinance has been signed into law in New Braunfels, TX. Please be aware that it is soon to be an illegal “offense” to feed the wildlife on public and private land within the city limits.
That means that a sentence that has been both true (and legal) for my children and for me will not be true for my grandchildren–
When I was little I fed the deer at Landa Park.
I have a very distinct memory of my son holding out a graham cracker to one of the deer at the park.
There was a period of time when we went to the park–a park, every day to feed someone–duck, chicken, deer, squirrel, turtle, fish, goose…each animal encounter was a priceless chance to sustain my children’s empathy. They practiced compassion, mercy, self-sacrifice, even science, and the scientific method as they spent time observing and feeding animals.
When we went to feed the animals we also tended to feed the children. We bought food from dozens of local restaurants and groceries. We ate our picnic, hiked, fed the animals. This ordinance prohibiting the feeding of animals in New Braunfels will mean we will buy less food from all these places. We will spend less time and money in New Braunfels.
We will not feed the children at the parks of New Braunfels, if we cannot feed the animals as well. It will be too painful remembering what used to be, for one, but then there is the pesky inviolate injunction of the law. What if we were to drop a cracker or a pizza crust? According to the city ordnance we would be breaking the law.
So, somehow, our city government and elected officials have decided. We should not feed the animals they say. And that leaves me deeply grieved, because I know, my children know, that
What they are really telling us is:
Don’t feed the children!
Because as Jesus has said more eloquently than I could–food is more than food, it is everything that feeds our souls.
And this kind of rich food for the soul of kindness and community and blessing is now thoroughly illegal
In New Braunfels, Texas.
Luke 12:23 NIV
[23] For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes.
The Calhoun County Courthouse is a mausoleal mid-century modernist confection, the juvenile detention courtroom then a windowless (Chinese) box on its second floor.
Perhaps I am biased. I remember envying the parents whose kid had gone on a wild joyride and the various parents of pot sellers and users.
I remember thinking the local Baptist pastor who was there for jury duty was a harbinger of God as I spilled out
The terrible story of why I was there.
Which had to be after the judge used the shade of our old oak tree for his big white truck. After his lawyer son stood across the street, bemused as Mary, on the roof, hurled her salty invectives at me.
After the juvenile probation chief told us they would not hold Charles forever and I thought to myself as I looked at him, (what do you have to do in the state of Texas to get yourself thrown in prison?!)
They say there is a library somewhere, an Ivy League kind of library, which has thin panels of white stone from floor to ceiling.
The light diffused through the thin white stone, perhaps to show-off or to shield the books.
I have searched for it for years, can’t find it
So much like a pearl, mother-of-pearl, an alabaster jar
Full of the most unmistakably broken
Perfume.
I don’t know why they came then, at the heart of the hardest season of our lives, but we took them to the Aransas Wildlife Refuge. He sat in the back of the van with me and I made him do a Bible study about Jesus inhabiting hearts like they were houses, a Chinese box filled with simile and indelible pain. If I would write our story as a clever fiction I would insert a frumpy birdwatching stranger and I would accost her with my incoherent grief-
Anger is at the heart of love
overturning tables in the temple
In the house of God
25th birthday
I go to
The-cards-for-pariahs section
Away from all the other
Greeting card confections it is
lightly and surreptitiously attended, although I myself come here often
Oddly situated on a half-aisle between
plumbing and luggage
The cards here are all in shades of ocre
Sometimes the clip art is unbearable, smudged, or just incomprehensible scribbles…macaroni mosaics where all the pasta is long-gone,
All’s that’s left: glue ghosts,
No words left to signify anything but metaphysically inky
Noon-to-3
Carrying Light 