Of course, neither of us chew
scoop cold water to our waiting lips
In the congregation of those
Waiting for bright sunlight
Resurrection
Lunchtimes with Lazarus
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Tag Archives: Lent
Fast
He moves up the wall quickly, ascending over three thousand vertical feet in a little over 3 hours. We all marvel at him, as well we should, that kind of hubris and fearlessness is an altar to the human spirit
Who fails to see the God who held him there
All along
I go back to Alex’s choosing the rocks over the ladies
As I count days and hours and minutes and seconds
A slow hunger crawl
All fat girl dependence not on
Finger strength and will power but the dorsal strength of a lullaby–
Brace yourself
Comfort girl myself
I rifle through the postcards from
The places you have been
Looking for things you loved
Always people, always broken
Then strain to hear your voice
As you tell them about the Luke 13 people
All dead, all tragic until you
direct our eyes into the deep
Pool of Siloam, reflected the tower before it fell?
Did the blind man know it was there before he could
See you standing there
Across the street from all my loneliness
Beckon me come close
Brace yourself, Love
Paper Crowns
Last spring I sheared my own crown, playing both the sheep and the shepherd in a one-woman show about redemption.
The thing is:
You can’t redeem yourself, no matter what lovely poetic last
Name you have been given.
I see the boy you used to be
I see the lost in your eyes
Playing both sheep and shepherd in your own one-man show about…
I will always love you.
Who says that and means it?
Not me. I am a coward who cannot handle her always
Ten years since he died
And I stand in the dollar store conjuring up themes for a party girl
Bikini contestant party girl
Written in permanent marker
The lost in their eyes, the voice in my head
Man who played both the sheep and the
Shepherd in his own one-man redemption show
Thorns for crowns/ Paper crowns/diadems, tiaras
For the children we will be
At the wedding feast of the Lamb.
Deserve versus worth
We can say we do not deserve what we get–either lottery or traffic ticket. We can even get quite indignant about it.
And yet if we are to believe the Cross, we always deserve worse than we get. Death, plague, betrayal, are all the carrion birds circling the dilemma of our sin.
We do not want to face what we have earned in our rebellion against love.
Which brings us to our worth.
We are by native value just pennies on the ground. But we have been purchased at such an extravagant cost by the One who loves us.
This extravagant sacrifice is the center longing of every human love story–to be redeemed, raised, and transformed by a love that will not relent or tarnish.
That is Passion. Death by crucifixion passion. Resurrect us in His arms passion.
I-will-never-leave-you-or-forsake-you-love.
A million times
I tell
The young man that I have
Fallen a million times
(Felt like it anyway)
A million falls
A million failures
A million times
An arbitrary number
Not as funny as bazillions or gazillions
Arms spread wide to denote the bigness of the thing
God sent His one and only Son
…to fall like this?
Fail like this?
Criminal nailed to a tree?
His falling and my falling, so different
His fall just
To rise to life,
Me in His arms
Ordinary Sadness
I am grateful for the rain
On this dry patch of earth
I know the difference between
Accidents and miracles
And wish to thank
The God of ordinary sadness
Who sits next to me
on the sinking-in-the-middle
Patched-with-a-heart
-on-the-back
$35 couch
Willing to abide in the center
Of my vertiginous grief
He says
Take courage
It is I
Do not be afraid
Swaddling Clothes
I have a friend who fights. She has brightly colored hand wraps that she uses to protect her hands beneath her boxing gloves.
She bandages each hand so that the knuckle is protected, the wrist and all the space in between.
When I have watched her wrap and unwrap her hands it has reminded me of Jesus.
I think of him as a baby. In the primitive conditions of his arrival, the Bible records his swaddling–wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger.
Descriptions of ancient infant swaddling talk about cleaning the newborn with oil and salt, then wrapping the child in strips of torn cloth.
Lazarus was swaddled when he emerged from his tomb.
The ancients swaddled their newborns and their dead, wrapping both in the same strips of cloth, washing each for the journey ahead.
The story of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany bears striking resemblance to his washing as a newborn and is a stated preparation for the soon-to-be swaddling of his dead body.
Three days is a long time to wait for a resurrection, four days is even longer. But for many of us 20, 30, or 40 years is how long we have waited for our dead to rise to life.
And if eternity is the span of human existence, then it is also the length of time we must measure each human soul, inside or outside our dark and solitary tombs.
To believe in the resurrection of the dead is to believe in the extreme triumph of Life over death, heaven over hell, good over bad.
To stand at the mouth of the tomb and know that someday each of us will be called to walk out of our tombs into Light.
We are fire
I see him addressing
An undiluted crowd–
You are the light of the world
We are?
Sheep, maybe
Or chicken (I know my coward heart)
But surely not light
Too strong, too bright, too burning
We must burn on
This Mount of Olives
This Garden of Gethesmane
This history and geography of light poured out in the crushing weight
Upon olives rendering
Oil and salt rubbed on the skin of the newborn child
Anointing a king
The King
Of light
Who holds
Each burning
Coil of a star,
The core of fire within each churning planet
Our ordinary souls
In the palms of his stretched-wide
Hands
Unfaithful
Dante, in his fictional portrayal of hell, put traitors at its dark, tortured core.
To betray love and abandon those close to you was a big deal for Dante.
As a writer, that is…as a man he was no hero.
Few of us are. We are all unfaithful to someone or something–our high school crush, our diet…something.
To be human is to cheat a little, I guess. But we must acknowledge this–we, each of us alone are responsible for the lines we draw around what we hold dear.
Draw the lines wrong and the “dear” slips away.
We tell ourselves–I will not go past this point of demarcation–a line drawn just past a “something” we should already not covet or consume.
We say to ourselves either–
I will not do this
Or…
I deserve…
It is the “I deserve” part we should pause to examine. Sinners (a quaint old word for all of us) tend to justify their infidelities with deserve and must have. Then cloak the indulgence in the illusion of secrecy–no one will know.
But Someone always knows.
He knows because He is God, and by definition omniscient.
He knows all our secret stories of unfaithfulness, squalor, and sin because they were poured out on Him
In the rictus of the Cross
In the jeers of the crowd
In the agony of physical abuse
In the final unbearable…
In the final unbearable He bore to make us
Faithful.
Carrying Light 