This young woman needs our prayers. Please pray for her.
Pray for the captive
Reply
Tag Archives: grief
The Music Box
It is morning, the day before my mother’s funeral. My oldest son and I are standing by the French doors in the great room of my mother’s house. He is cleaning the windows and I am admiring the view of the pond when we both hear music coming from the mantle above the fireplace, six to eight feet from where we are standing.
I go over, thinking it must be one of her clocks. It is not. It is a music box, playing its song.
It played for a couple minutes, then the morning quiet resumed.
That was all.
My mother died last week
She was sick. The accretion of conditions related to smoking years ago and other things were taking their due.
John 20:1 NIV
[1] Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance.
John 20:19-23 NIV
[19] On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” [20] After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. [21] Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” [22] And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. [23] If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”
Advice for the dictator
Lately he doesn’t seem to smile much, hardly a surprise when his latest hobby is world domination.
I pray for him, but how?
How do you pray for a monster?
By acknowledging we are all monsters, only some monsters do not obey the voices in our heads which
Reduce cities to rubble and children to dust.
The advice is simple–
You are a man, just a man
And you are dying
You cannot, no,will not, outrun God
Repent and change
Leave everything but your soul behind and say you are sorry for what you have done
Replace your illusions of control with the acknowledgement of your weakness
For we are all monsters here
Debtors all to grace
Like a time traveler
Like a time traveler, Lazarus returns, sits with me on the steps of the old San Antonio house
We hug our knees together, the way children do
I tell him my losses
And he tells me his founds
–you never forget the way
Dim shadows turn to light.
The Feast of Thorns
Long before our terrible story your birthday was already
the feast of Servites pruning winter roses. I cling to that now, all the other days this day could be:
Obstinate mountains lumber into obeisant seas
Lame men whole, blind men see
Dead men rise and shake off their shroudy bindings
impossible things all around ya
If only you will
See
Chuppah
You should not drink juice, especially from plastic straws, should not drink milk, especially whole, for animal protein is a moral issue now, too much to intervene, to save the children from anything but
Juice and whole
Milk, honey,
And mammon are such old words, reminders Jesus is older than
All of us. This rough hut, this hand-held chuppah, this soaring cathedral, this new grave, this glassy sea.
I may tell myself in my best moments that all this is the real real, true true we will inhabit together One Day, One Day
But today, yesterday, tomorrow even
We are the monsters
We become.
Blown apart
The hole in my chest has opened up again
Opened up
The whole in my chest is blown apart
Blown apart again
The tree abandoned by the river asks for something
Water or some proof
Some proof of all
made whole once
once again
The Gerlach Method
From the beginning I have only been able to see them as tiny iterations of Calvin–the cartoon, not the moral philosopher.
They lie prone in upended rows in a hand-drawn version of
The antithesis of a maternity ward
Rows of neatly labeled, perfect and tiny, dinner roll backs, so prone, exposed
No skin gun can ever save us now
Words for thirsty
We sit in the shade, it is all shade here, so incorporeal, so many of us, all waiting for a voice, for a light, for The Before The After, the now and forever, we talk of sunsets, the way the sun might send one last piercing shaft of light up through the darkening sky, faith-hope-love coming for us, they say, these men who have seen the-greatest-of-these-is-love
But when? How long until
We are irrevocably
Called to life.
Carrying Light 