Category Archives: grief

“I will never leave you nor forsake you”

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Over the course of my life I have been booted out of a variety of clubs..oh…I mean communities of faith.   Always for taking a stand on some issue, always with the subsequent silence and loss.

Financial accountability. Child safety.  Confronting greed, lust or both–there are all kinds of ways to trudge down the “narrow road” in christianity.

Which is sometimes confusing and disorienting but never totally forsaken.

Jesus is there, saying what he says to all of us–I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

We will never get that kind of promise from anyone else.  We humans are nothing if not forsakers. We bolt at a pin drop.

Not him.  Jesus stays with us.

And always he says the same thing. “You are in good company, darling…always.”

Cleaning house

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the lovely stranger

Tells us all

If this thing in front of you 

Doesn’t give you joy throw it

Away

I kinda wonder about the ordinary scrub brushes thrust into the most terrible places

Do you discard them too?

Replace them with newer ones without the dark history?

Maybe keep them away from the crap

Which tangentially reminds me of

Poor Thomas Crapper–

Bringing us into modern hygiene at the expense of the family name

Don’t worry, Thomas

Your job may be thankless

Your name synonymous with 

Well, crap

But I won’t forget you

Joy may be a too-strong word

For preventing public health catastrophe

But somebody gotta do it, TC

Somebody for all the rest 

Our ordinary demise

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While the crucifixion of Christ is overwhelmingly unbearable, the deaths of ordinary humans are awful enough.

We are all certain things when we die.

The cessation of breath is a terrifying thing.  Add to that helplessness and pain–most of us avoid death the way you would avoid the edge of an unforgiving precipice or an unguarded incinerator.

John the Baptist’s death is no exception.  He died as a direct result of powerful people’s sin.  He died in chronological and geographical proximity to Jesus.

The howl of the unfairness of it all is unmistakable.

Which is why I stick close to men like him.  What if John had not questioned Jesus?  What if his grief and doubt had not been recorded in the Gospel?

…I would have fewer answers for my lesser questions…and one fewer member of my support group.

And a narrower understanding of Jesus–no Santa Claus god.  Jesus commands us to focus on both who He is and what He does for us on the most primal level.

He gives us back the one thing we can never get back ourselves–eternal life.

The death of every human may seem inevitable, but who we trust with the forever after makes all the difference.

To John the Baptist and every ordinary me.

He came in disguise

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I have told my kids (on too many occasions) that I would love to see a spy movie in which the main character’s spy skills are demonstrated by the character’s thorough-going appearance transformations.

He would become she, young and handsome would morph into old and frail, fat to thin, and tall to short…by assigning entirely different actors to play the part in unbroken succession.

Then it occurs to me that is what Jesus did–He came in disguise.  Clues for this theory are in the Gospels–the transfiguration (why take only three disciples?), the times when He prohibits the healed from blabbing about their transformations, the healing of Jairus’ daughter (again, only three disciples?) and then those times after His resurrection when people don’t recognize Him.

God in disguise.

It makes sense when you see Him described in other places in the Bible.  Excuse my French, but Jesus in His “real form” is unmistakably bad-ass. 

Which brings me to the most haunting part of this story of voluntary disguise.  

The Lord of glory, Creator of the universe, Beginning and the End, Lion of the tribe of Judah, naked, eviscerated, gasping on the Cross.

My death.  This is the purest place for me to see who I really am–the person who deserves this terrible end.

He wraps Himself in the vortex of hell to give us access to heaven–undisguised.

Apparition 

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after years measured in either sabbaticals or fists

The woman in the box 

Realizes she has only been an apparition 

Sorting through previous 

Versions of “her”

She sees one to nurture– 

No lines around the eyes or heart

An ordinary girl

Who believed in human intervention

Fragile thing, scoops her up

Just a bird in the hand;

Looks for a place to set her down

If only to assess 

the utility of wings

Older Brother

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My son tells me his fears and I tell him mine are remarkably similar–fear of the tragic loss of love.

Sometimes he and I get to the end of an ordinary day and he says our crew is still together, Mom.

We are citizens of a dangerous and lonely kingdom.

But only because the true King travels in disguise.

He is this magnetic force–scarred forever by his tragic love for us, hole in the chest and again in each Vitruvian extremity.

Stranger at the party.

You should get to know this guy.  His words and actions may seem either simple or radically divisive, but His gaze is irrevocable.

He is the perfect older brother, fierce in both love and justice.  When I dread this fallen world I turn to Him.

Knowing He will never fail.

Monsters of righteousness

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Imagine them as you will but never

Assume your scepticism will make them 

Mythological again

In the smoke of our discarded daughters 

/commerce of indifference 

Shoots craps in crowded rooms

Sweat-palmed cash for common shame

Summon  these 

Monsters of righteousness

From this fire we

have made of love.