having an ordinary name
(Think cow or child’s toy)
Means misnomer–
Betty, Becky, pieces left out
Or added
My favorite-gleanor
So close
To gleaner
I ask myself
What if it was George? Harold? Londerson? Jamal?
Would I still
Recognize your voice
Trace the familiar
Lines along
Your hands, your face?
Your gaze holds firm
Your love unswerving
Written, Word
these interlocking pieces-
a woman in the crowd reaches out to touch
Slowing down motion
to Jairus’ daughter
Take this stranger by the hand
(For science, of course)
Blindfold emotion
-While the girl lies dying-
Somehow temporarily
All of us
nailed to this single day in history
When you let go of
Everything you had a right to hold
Go where we never
want to go
Then tell Mary
Don’t touch me
Last trace of hell still on my skin
You draw us to your
Broken.
Make us whole again
With this system of touch.
I am a big fan of Jesus, even though he is a little scary.
Why? Well, there is the dying for the sins of the world thing, but there is also the stuff he idly seems to throw into his parables–weeping and gnashing of teeth, something about being salted with fire.
CS Lewis is right, he is not a tame lion. He is the only and original badass and he more than deserves to be the divisor of before and after in human history.
Years ago I cried when I read an article about a nurse who visited new and at-risk parents. She said that years later the babies she had visited would recognize her voice when they heard her in random places.
This mattered to me because I have a baby out there somewhere who might recognize my voice even though she was just 14 months old when she was taken from me.
The voice of love–that is what I hear when I read Jesus. He is, by turns, funny, deadly incisive, ironic, and passionately in love with us.
Crucifixion and resurrection kind of passionately in love.
When I lost my little foster daughter I grieved beyond what is comfortable to describe. I took my cry to God–why?
His voice was clear–if you have to choose for her to know just one of us, you or Me? Which would you choose?
Him, of course.
Always and only Him, baby girl.
Hear his voice.
John 10:2-5
take hunger, take thirst
Go
stand in the storm
know this to be true:
Thunder, wind, rain
fall splendor from this
Cloud-dark sky
and lift these things
empty into tumult–
The way a man might lift his just-born
hunger, thirst
Once and only filled
By the God of the storm
John 11:4 NIV[4] When he heard this, Jesus said, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.”
What is impossible? Is gravity? The suspension of gravity? Space flight? Sea urchins?
We live in a world filled with wonder and darkness. The wonder feels improbably miraculous until the darkness throws an extreme curve ball and bam!
Death takes all.
Or so it seems.
When Jesus says this sickness will not end in death it seems like he knows what he is talking about.
Several days later when he weeps with the mourners he seems like a total nut job. Until…
I am going to hold that until–single note sung in the dark.
Some of the untils we weep through are excoriating, catastrophic…terminal.
It is important to pause at Jesus’ pronouncement. If you know the story you might be tempted to breeze through to “the good stuff,” but in this case time takes the stage–time for Lazarus to go from well to unwell, time for Lazarus to go from unwell to fatally ill. Time for Lazarus to die. Time for Lazarus to be prepared for the grave. Time for grief. Disbelief. Sorrow. Anger.
And the apparent absence of Jesus.
But…
He is not absent. He is impossible. He is the God of the impossible.
Wait. Impossible means powerless, the opposite of able.
How can God, by his very nature omnipotent, be defined as not able.
Deliberately. He was intentionally…
“not able” in death.
“not able” on the Cross.
“not able” for us.
Jesus called Lazarus out of the grave in preparation for his own death. He gave his followers an impossible four day route through death and burial so that when it was his death they would only have to wait three days.
The three darkest days of history. Three impossible days.
Until…
Sunday morning and the God of impossible things walks back in.
When you were little your foster father would throw you in the air above him. Within one second your face would register fear, exhilaration, joy, laughter.
It has always been a picture in my head–this God of sea urchins and dwarf stars throws us high up in the air for each single looped thread in the seam of all eternity.
The fear and uncertainty only bearable when we know, know, know…
He will catch us in His arms.
As He has already caught your beautiful mama, let Him catch us too…
Forever.
Safe in the outstretched arms
of Love.
Luke 18:27 NIV
[27] Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”
this is what I would say,
If I were your real mother–
Use the pink phone with the rubber buttons
the canned voice locked inside it
–May I help you? She would ask gamely
Each time you rang her up
She would
Drop everything
Just to hear your voice
At the other end of the line.
for seven years
in the back of my head
there has been a terrible
Terrible story
started a long time ago
When a 15 year old boy
hurt his little sister
(Bad)
and then…
Our paths separate at this point.
And I only know the story of the other 15 year-old-November-16-2009-boy
Because I talked about you, Charles, my-used-to-be-son
All the time
Until tonight I did not know your doppelgänger’s name–
Jamar Pinkney, Jr.
Or the queasy details
No, not the terribly private awful
…the public strange
—don’t call a child molester “Teddy Bear” or put his face on your t-shirt
Ask instead–
How in God’s name…
Is his little sister?
they say you should not
look directly
at the sun
ignoring the real possibility
that it is the night
that has already
blinded us
To the scared, cold,
Ordinary child
In each photograph
Owned by
This oddball monster
While the dying sun,
Claw-handed scribe, failing light,
Scribbles justicejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejustice…justicejusticejustice
Into one kind of eternity
Or another
you search for a word for this kind of thing–
boat lost at sea
balloon gone untethered
the appropriation of breakup
…songs
we used to sing as lullabies
now ectoplasmic
only you are the ghost in your own
skin
house
grief
rolls this monster
wave over you
grief-stricken mama
trapped inside this Chinese box
feel the wounds born into
each wrist
howl, howl, howl
hours before dark
You always used to say I was not
Your “real mom”
And I say,
“Tropes!”
What you really need to study are tropes.
For instance–
all the insinuating places
Fairy godmothers turn up:
(…Or in your case just your own lost-girl soul)
The forever, the divine, the set-free, the
Real girl you
Should recognize in the faces now of your own
Bewildered children.
(Wake up, sleeping beauty…wake up)
Carrying Light 