Category Archives: God

“Hear My Voice”

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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

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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

God of the Impossible

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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.”

Little Sister

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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?

Jacob Wetterling 

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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

little girl gone

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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

The Real Girl

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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:

  • Mitigating curses
  • Magically changing  the appearance of the most ordinary pumpkins
  • Mending what has torn and broken
  • Saving a girl from “steps” of one sort or the other

(…Or in your case just your own lost-girl soul)

  • Changing epithets into flowers 
  • Or mirrors into enchanted doorways  for the…

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)

Berlin Heart

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Only the best are chosen

to man this ship 

Sinking 

with its nuclear core

whether it is true or not 

I picture the submarine, home in the deep

sea inexplicably punctuated by

Bits of blinking light 

Windows, a wrap-around porch, 

(entirely decorative) men

Tiny inside

Atoms knit of blood and bone

All the oceans of the world reduced

To a thimble full of water amidst the stars

This metal vessel,

This Berlin heart,

Resuscitate us, sinking fast 

without You.

Trauma Litany

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I have swaddled my hands, wrapping the knuckles and the wrists, the wrists, palms, and knuckles again until they are bound.  Then I have pushed these bound, mummified fists into gloves curved, padded, slightly weighted.

I don’t swing at people.  I have, I can, but when I do I hold back, talk too much through my mouthguard, obsess about trauma.

Agent-causing-trauma.  I-am-the-agent-causing-trauma.

On the bag I do not hold back.  I aim for speed then alternate with power punches, slugging at the heavy, impassive face of a leather bag filled with sand or rags.  Its resolute, anthropomorphized gut, its impassive reserve.

I do not worry unduly about traumatizing the bag.  I can–am allowed to–wail on it in repeated, staccato acts of catharsis.

Because of trauma.

Because when you live long enough you have stories.

Stories linked to the pain of a very broken world.

The puzzle of trauma is the why and the injustice.

So I will call the why the jab and I will call the injustice the cross.

You see where I am going with this–the cross.  The strong-right-arm move of a superhero God.

Whose go-to power punch so far was allowing the trauma to wash over him.

The trauma of the trial.

The trauma of the desertion.

The trauma of the betrayal.

The trauma of the kangaroo court.

The trauma of the beating.

The trauma of the spitting, the mocking, the shame.

The trauma of power in the hands of bad men.

The trauma of the broken-hearted God.

The trauma of the family.

The trauma of the thorns.

The trauma of the nakedness.

The trauma of the carried weight.

The trauma of the pierced extremities.

The trauma of the hours.

The trauma of each breath.

The trauma of blood loss.

The trauma of being forsaken.

The trauma of out-poured wrath.

The trauma of the grave.

The trauma of hell entire.

The prophet Zechariah gives us a picture of how we will respond to this trauma–

They will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child

This litany of blows.  This way that we must walk through the swaddling, the trauma, the raw lonely pain.

Because when He said it is finished, He meant it.  In the oddest k-o win ever, the victor takes the blows, both jab and cross and appears to lose it all only to give each of us the power to 

Fight trauma

Oh-Rescuer-God-

Jesus.