I have never been a roller coaster girl. Too queasy, but these days the ride is all mental grit and actuarial tables–I stop in the credit union parking lot just as the preacher on the radio quotes Jesus–ask anything in my name and I will give it to you!
Ok, God, I tell Him, make those doctors brave
Could substitute kind, generous, humble, compassionate
Feels impossible, I tell Him then
He reminds me
Impossible
Is His specialty.
John 5:3-4 KJV
[3] In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. [4] For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.
My first question for you is–do you believe there was an angel who came down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the waters?
So one person each time could be healed?
Crazy, right?
But no crazier than believing that Jesus healed the man who had been at the pool so long, who does not turn out to be the most grateful healed man.
I have skirted the issue of the angel at the pool for years, choosing instead to focus on Jesus and the man and the religious oligarchs who made it hard for Jesus.
I understand that angel complicates everything–messenger of God who brings some healing, brings some hope only
In a certain season.
People look for hope in all kinds of things–money, elaborate shelter, the absence of risk, the presence of satiety.
Other people
It is not hard to believe in God
By the power of blinking stars and damselflies, it is hard not to believe in God
But what is hard
Is choosing to only
Believe in God
For the hope where there is none
For the rain in a dry land
For miracle in the Iron Age of science
Hard to believe that God could comfort every soul in Lebanon when Lebanon is not sufficient to burn
Hard to believe in Resurrection at the foot of the Cross
But if you can or do
Cling to Resurrection
All things are possible
Miraculous little
damselfly.
Come, girl, let us pause and make sandcastles in the dust where once there were courts of stone, because kings may come to tear down both walls and doors, regard or disregard our little lives, take stones one from another and make each a witness
what door will you keep then, when the one true King has passed us by and taking in his wake all love, leaving us without our voices to praise him or call out? Let stones cry out if we do not
Let the doors we have kept keep us instead
John 18 KJV
When I wrote the slim, hasty, typo-ridden memoir Just, I used pseudonyms.
I chose to link my adopted children’s pseudonyms to their first initials C became Sea,
Sea like the color of his eyes
Sea like the cold ocean we stood in together
Sea like the depths, the hidden things both beautiful and terrible, the bigness of it all
Sea, placeholder for the God who makes seas then makes them evanesce
C is lost to me for now. He has disowned both me and the God who made me
But I can still remember
The time you hit your mouth on the hard metal of the seesaw and we had to rush you to the dentist
The way we would wait until you were sleeping to exclaim over your cuteness because
Most times when you were awake there was both sturm und drang
The time we went to the shore and I carried you on my back and you pummeled my head all the way back to the car
If I had a dollar for every time you hurt me or someone else I love dearly
It would not begin to be as much as you are worth
Of your eternal value
Of the Light you can become forever
If you just
Turn and face the Sea.
I once did a series of poems called the calvarium poems. I called them that. They remain in a kind of womblike obscurity, you could say the poems were like children
If only an ordinary person like me could
Cast a spell with words
Hocus pocus–live!
Abracadabra–live!
I alternate between believing
That the dry bones are the children tossed away from their mothers, their doctors, their strangers holding signs and vigil across the street from the alien clinics, iron bars on windows, misleading titles, security guards and not enough imminently visible heartbreak over this or
The people, the-all-of-us, too craven to save their little, perfect, amazing
Calvariums.
I draw from memory, with sticks of charcoal, which smudges like the dickens! The figure has the messy edges of your ordinary unfinished sketch, work-in-progress, might-never-be-finished
Angel just means messenger and
We mortals are
from dust, and dust return,
Until such piercing Light
Outshines all
That came before.
I might as well be a canine companion
In this ritual of carefulness
Wash the shoes, spray them with bleach, stuff the scrubs into the drum of the machine, always use extra detergent
Spin out
Then dry on the line
Everything sanitized
In this intense, summer light
When the older brother lifts his little brother up
So high in the air
above the dock, out into the deep river
Light scatters everywhere
And I think
You are my magical and amazing Older brother
Giving me, your little sister,
Flight
Like never reading the love letters I wrote you
Words scattered all around
Like never seeing how
I let the blazing suns of a thousand remote
Solar systems blink your name
Like ignoring the food on your plate
The clothes neatly folded and pressed
The hands that kept you there
Breathing in, breathing out, wanton flowers
The messages painted on the billboard of the world
Child come home,
Rain come down
I’ll never stop looking
Across this field for you
Carrying Light 