You tell yourself it is just food, knowing you want
To keep it for another time
when you could rejoice
For a year, for the first year after, for as long as it takes
like the frozen wedding cake
As though love could last forever
The way he says it does
Manna in our wilderness
I try to establish timeline–
It was the spring…close to Passover
How long had you been dying?
How long had you? he retorts, not angry, incisive.
Surely I have touched a nerve, who else gets bullied for coming back from the dead?
But it is the one question he answers, the one time I hear his speaking voice–
Same as you, from the moment I was born.
John 11:1,3 KJV
[1] Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. [3] Therefore his sisters sent unto him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.
In the waiting room, I try to act casual, as though I have not followed him here, studied his story, combed it for gaps and terrible silence.
I prattle on about my own sodden sorrow
Unsurprisingly, he is an excellent listener.
But he holds his peace, his haunting piece, tragedy and conjecture, punctuated by improbable
Glory
John 11:3 KJV
[3] Therefore his sisters sent unto him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.
In my hunger I sit with him, follow him from room to room. Marvel at his silence
He does not have to tell me what we both already know, but I trail him regardless
Want something from him
Whether it is what he saw so long ago now or what he will not say
About the days of our mutual confinement
Of course, neither of us chew
scoop cold water to our waiting lips
In the congregation of those
Waiting for bright sunlight
Resurrection
I have a dear friend who signs notes to me you are greatly loved. Which is cool, right?
On one of my phones I have played with the tag phrase at the end of emails. I am not sure anyone needs to know I have sent this from my iPhone, but perhaps they need a Bible verse, and exhortation of some sort, or to know they are greatly loved?
Sometimes I forget it is there. Sometimes I read it and think this snarky email I am about to send needs to be edited for snark if I truly believe the recipient is greatly loved. Sometimes I acknowledge it but then delete each letter because the mayor or the police chief or the college professor or college president already thinks I am crazy as a loon and annoying and foolish as well.
The phrase itself is not the strongest iteration of the idea. It is in passive voice. The active form is just I love you, which can be the most exposed and committed utterance when rendered true.
When we love someone enough to fight for them
When we intervene on their behalf.
When we are willing to be desperate or look foolish for them.
When we are willing to be misunderstood to keep them safe.
When we go hungry for them
Or give up jobs and honors for them.
Or when we call for help on their behalf.
When we give them our voice because their voice is young or small or taken from them.
They are greatly loved because love demands fierce and extraordinary things.
…..
A few days ago I was in deep mourning thinking about the sheer number of people who have decided that either I was not good enough for love, or worse, that God was not good enough for love.
I cried over this, and opened up YouTube to pray and sing through this grief. Matthew Mole’s You are loved appeared without a search or a place on my history.
God does that. He leaves signs all around us that we are greatly loved. He sends leaves falling over us, pennies shining on the pavement, songs which feel like lullabies, setting and rising suns–all love letters with the same matchless
guarantee–
You are greatly loved.
–John 3:16
Prayer comes from the Latin word precarius which means, obtained by entreaty. I remember years ago looking at the way it came to us through the feudal system–subjects would pray to their lords and protectors for the things they needed to survive.
Sometimes prayer can seem less feudal than futile. Is anyone listening? Will anyone come to save me? Those two questions can haunt the soul.
I believe in prayer. I believe it brings light and brings help.
The hardest time to tell someone to pray is when you yourself feel the most alone, the most abandoned.
God never leaves us or forsakes us.
Pray, beautiful one, pray.
I don’t know why they came then, at the heart of the hardest season of our lives, but we took them to the Aransas Wildlife Refuge. He sat in the back of the van with me and I made him do a Bible study about Jesus inhabiting hearts like they were houses, a Chinese box filled with simile and indelible pain. If I would write our story as a clever fiction I would insert a frumpy birdwatching stranger and I would accost her with my incoherent grief-
Anger is at the heart of love
overturning tables in the temple
In the house of God
I go to the stone lions, lean my head against their solid, immovable weight. I tell them the things one might tell a friend–stretches of fatigue and loneliness, grim sorties in search of solace in strange and blasted places, words for anger, stones for real
Children who cry out
Hosanna! Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes
In the name of the Lord!
-Luke 19:40
After years of not getting it
I finally do–
You dip the ravaging
Insect into
The viscous sweet
“Honey,”
He says
“This is how you make the unpalatable work.”
–Luke 7:18-24
Carrying Light 