the tape is a blur of
ordinary splendor
songs sung loud in a messy
house vivid patchwork
some mention of a circus
close to the tear in the hand-made quilt
I touch your brow
tell you
take your medicine before you go out to play
Round, pink, chewable analgesic
as you lift your head to receive the pill
Eucharist in the living room,
old and beautiful
Words for “good” and “grace”
So close to your already liturgical
Beautiful like…
A rose
A ruby
A diamond
A butterfly
A boy in flight
in a fit of unease
she has an out-of-body experience
Rising above the squalor
Imagining what it would be like
To live inside the perfect house
Instead–she dusts the counters and all the edges
with cinnamon to deter the sugar ants
Beats the air with questions
Washes and re-washes clothes, stones, teeth
Delays bodily functions
To search for
-The weighted blanket-
Surrogate mother/synthetic comforter
Lyrics/verses
of a lullaby sung softly by the
I still have unanswered questions for the hand-sized catfish I pulled out of the Blanco River today.
It was caught in some debris, entangled in some fishing line.
Hard to get to.
Weirdly specific salvation (if you don’t believe in a God who sees stuck fish).
But if you do…
You wonder who was the fisher with the broken line?
When was he last here?
How long has this darkish catfish been stuck in the line?
Will it live? Line cut, hook still in?
The Gospel is chocked full of fish stories.
But they don’t all get saved, hook or no hook still stuck in the craw.
And then there is me: fished out by Jesus, standing wet in the afternoon sun, inventorying fish stories.
…. Caesar’s likeness on the coin in its belly.
….No sign but Jonah
….The empire of Rome long gone
this one small fish wriggles free
marvels at the hidden depths
in the quotidian
stories of being
fished out.
having an ordinary name
(Think cow or child’s toy)
Means misnomer–
Betty, Becky, pieces left out
Or added
My favorite-gleanor
So close
To gleaner
I ask myself
What if it was George? Harold? Londerson? Jamal?
Would I still
Recognize your voice
Trace the familiar
Lines along
Your hands, your face?
Your gaze holds firm
Your love unswerving
Written, Word
these interlocking pieces-
a woman in the crowd reaches out to touch
Slowing down motion
to Jairus’ daughter
Take this stranger by the hand
(For science, of course)
Blindfold emotion
-While the girl lies dying-
Somehow temporarily
All of us
nailed to this single day in history
When you let go of
Everything you had a right to hold
Go where we never
want to go
Then tell Mary
Don’t touch me
Last trace of hell still on my skin
You draw us to your
Broken.
Make us whole again
With this system of touch.
I am a big fan of Jesus, even though he is a little scary.
Why? Well, there is the dying for the sins of the world thing, but there is also the stuff he idly seems to throw into his parables–weeping and gnashing of teeth, something about being salted with fire.
CS Lewis is right, he is not a tame lion. He is the only and original badass and he more than deserves to be the divisor of before and after in human history.
Years ago I cried when I read an article about a nurse who visited new and at-risk parents. She said that years later the babies she had visited would recognize her voice when they heard her in random places.
This mattered to me because I have a baby out there somewhere who might recognize my voice even though she was just 14 months old when she was taken from me.
The voice of love–that is what I hear when I read Jesus. He is, by turns, funny, deadly incisive, ironic, and passionately in love with us.
Crucifixion and resurrection kind of passionately in love.
When I lost my little foster daughter I grieved beyond what is comfortable to describe. I took my cry to God–why?
His voice was clear–if you have to choose for her to know just one of us, you or Me? Which would you choose?
Him, of course.
Always and only Him, baby girl.
Hear his voice.
John 10:2-5
Only the best are chosen
to man this ship
Sinking
with its nuclear core
whether it is true or not
I picture the submarine, home in the deep
sea inexplicably punctuated by
Bits of blinking light
Windows, a wrap-around porch,
(entirely decorative) men
Tiny inside
Atoms knit of blood and bone
All the oceans of the world reduced
To a thimble full of water amidst the stars
This metal vessel,
This Berlin heart,
Resuscitate us, sinking fast
without You.
I have swaddled my hands, wrapping the knuckles and the wrists, the wrists, palms, and knuckles again until they are bound. Then I have pushed these bound, mummified fists into gloves curved, padded, slightly weighted.
I don’t swing at people. I have, I can, but when I do I hold back, talk too much through my mouthguard, obsess about trauma.
Agent-causing-trauma. I-am-the-agent-causing-trauma.
On the bag I do not hold back. I aim for speed then alternate with power punches, slugging at the heavy, impassive face of a leather bag filled with sand or rags. Its resolute, anthropomorphized gut, its impassive reserve.
I do not worry unduly about traumatizing the bag. I can–am allowed to–wail on it in repeated, staccato acts of catharsis.
Because of trauma.
Because when you live long enough you have stories.
Stories linked to the pain of a very broken world.
The puzzle of trauma is the why and the injustice.
So I will call the why the jab and I will call the injustice the cross.
You see where I am going with this–the cross. The strong-right-arm move of a superhero God.
Whose go-to power punch so far was allowing the trauma to wash over him.
The trauma of the trial.
The trauma of the desertion.
The trauma of the betrayal.
The trauma of the kangaroo court.
The trauma of the beating.
The trauma of the spitting, the mocking, the shame.
The trauma of power in the hands of bad men.
The trauma of the broken-hearted God.
The trauma of the family.
The trauma of the thorns.
The trauma of the nakedness.
The trauma of the carried weight.
The trauma of the pierced extremities.
The trauma of the hours.
The trauma of each breath.
The trauma of blood loss.
The trauma of being forsaken.
The trauma of out-poured wrath.
The trauma of the grave.
The trauma of hell entire.
The prophet Zechariah gives us a picture of how we will respond to this trauma–
They will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child
This litany of blows. This way that we must walk through the swaddling, the trauma, the raw lonely pain.
Because when He said it is finished, He meant it. In the oddest k-o win ever, the victor takes the blows, both jab and cross and appears to lose it all only to give each of us the power to
Fight trauma
Oh-Rescuer-God-
Jesus.
I am always uncomfortable with the things that J says which are elastic-impossible.
So You are telling me if I have a little bit of faith I can ask mountains to fall into the sea?
Yes.
This would be galvanizing if I had never tried it. If there had never been a mountain I really needed, really wanted, really believe could be…moved.
The heartbreak of the unmoving mountains.
So first, an inventory–
Mountains are so big, so high, so holy
Why should they move for me?
Today my daughter said the thing that did not staunch all the grief of unmoved mountains, but did let me see how the unanswered questions have long been answered.
She said the mountain is a metaphor for God.
The relief of it was palpable. God. I know God moves for me. Moves toward the Cross. Moves the boundaries of eternity. Moves toward the prodigal son. Runs, actually.
Suddenly I see.
It was never the unmovable mountains, it was inexplicable stones moved away from terrible places to make room for the God of resurrection.
Nothing too hard for J.
Ever.
Weddings are such artificial confections, but all funerals have a unifying element of truth–we are all prone to die.
The manner and time vary, the seeming finality does not.
Unless…
Unless Jesus is right. Unless He is the resurrection and the life. In that case the things we take for granted about the finality of the grave may not be all there is.
I went to a funeral recently. An untimely one. The priest gave the family a final story from Acts 3–the silver and gold I have none story.
Only he did not tell it right. Instead of the healing of the beggar and his resultant joy–physical, exuberant, unmissable dancing and jumping! The priest says that Peter says he will be there and pray.
Don’t get me wrong–Christians being there and praying is getting to be miraculous and rare, it just isn’t what Peter said or did. At least not all he did.
The thing that Peter did for the beggar was public, miraculous, transforming, and unmistakable.
And powerfully reminiscent of his Master. When Peter heals the beggar he signals that we are in AD now. He lets us know that any narrative that portrays Jesus just another victim of Roman torture is incomplete.
He lets us know that the flood of the miraculous has gushed into the ordinary.
A flood that should wash through every wedding and every funeral with the insistent song of redemption and resurrection and eternity.
Nothing quiet here.
