Go for a run in a safe, well-lit place
Sing your God songs, loud if possible
Kick around in the Gospels, the Jesus stories, the Bible project, CS of course
Ask Him direct questions
We love you sooo much
But He is love–
oceans-are-small-compared-love
No-story-too-small-love
Big-sky-love
Lonely awful die-for-us love
Lend us a child like you, Love
Arms wide open love
The stars are more than fire love
In the dark sky they admonish/love
He will never leave you, never walk away
I remember you
I remember when you ran into the waiting room with your sister
I remember all the warnings and admonitions I got from Martha-the-caseworker and your recently relieved first foster mom
And your blue-as-the-sea implacable gaze across a very misguided table
I remember your speech therapist and her fairy godmother-like delight in seeing you make eye contact and in watching your self-inflicted facial wounds
Heal and not return
Storms all over the place
Storms in you swirled all around us, even when I tried to contain them.
I wonder, did he stick to the margins of the day? Hold palms aloft for shade? Trudge through the seasons? Chafe at this appointed endeavor?
Think, “surely this will vouchsafe my peaceful demise?”
I do not know anything except
The hours he had
Squinting into morning sky, evening sky
Lovely clouds, all sea foam and flocks
Anchored by love
Isaiah 40
She flaps her (flightless) wings and flutters about
Because surely birds can’t cry and this world is full of sorrow
She is almost human, fully sentient with the wary eyes of someone who knows what it is to not have opposable thumbs
So I tell her, do your graceless angry dance and I will translate for you
About how eternal we are in this brutal place
Where the stars tell us things in the darkness
About hope
Dammed hope
Which will one day soon
Break free
The bald cypress
Is just a tree
A single tree on a riverbank where
Autumnal colors signify slow, thirsty death from the bridge to the broken
Dam
They try to tell us they are dying with a bride’s train of leaves blown out on the current
Stronger now that the dam has broken
The world has always been this way they will tell you
As if that would be enough
For you, for me
What if you believed?
That the trees were all sentient beings
And their falling leaves were thirst-stricken em•is•ar•ies?
Curling boats cupped and lovely
Or spare, lacy things let go before they should
To
The rippling surface of sunlit, unexpected
Apocalypse.
Yep, I know-who?
Bear with me.
Ten years ago we discovered that our adopted son had molested some of his siblings and their friends.
I went to my friend and asked him what I should do and he said,
The truth will set you free.
So I told people the truth
Church
Work
Neighbor
Community
Family
Truth
And most people stopped being our friends.
So not who, what
A good friend never leaves, never forsakes, never hides your sin, but doesn’t abandon.
Jesus is a good friend.
What is Love
What is justice
There were times we all faced this extreme solitude of the truth. People who had been out friends could not risk the chance that we were contagious.
But Jesus was always there, the sojourning older son, back from afar, standing on the other side of the street, in sight of the house, I-am-here-darling present with us
never alone because
What a friend we have in Jesus
Recently I have started “meditating” on the good friend. I put meditation in quotes because it can seem monastic and old fashioned, could just say thinking about.
But I say meditation because the particular focus for me is the life-long friendship God calls us to pursue.
God calls us to pursue.
What is a good friend?
Who qualifies as a good friend?
How does one be a good friend?
What do good friends do together?
How much time does good friendship require?
Is there a schlepping requirement?
All these things are on the big stone table of this miraculous friendship God has called me to through the doorway of Jesus.
Very Christiany, I know.
But then I also know I could not draw close to the Holy Divine if I did not have
A friend like Jesus.
I have tried to write us into the third person for this Passover mitzvah
He for you, she for me
“Do you take this man? Do you take this woman?”
Some iteration of a
long-ago covenant made and broken in a garden
Careful to avoid her gaze as you give her sour fruit
Mixed with all the other intentional elements of our redemption
Carrying Light 