When I call you “Mother,” Lord,
I don’t often think of my mother.
She seems to have kept her spirit locked away.
At least she never revealed it to me:
Rebellious, willful, resigned to being bad,
Bravely sailing on her own path with her sailor.
I should take another look
And find you in her nature and love.
I seem to have missed you as I turned away
And left her wondering where my faith took me:
Rebellious, willful, resigned to go new ways,
Bravely sailing on my own path with my Sailor.
But You were in my own backyard
As well as in the endless dawn —
In her laughter, optimism and perpetual pluck,
In her courage and friendships and hospitality,
In her wonder, curiosity and righteous fury:
Making a cake, talking to the dog,
Loving a game, having a chat,
Keeping the peace, playing a prank.
You found me on my mother’s path
And I met you in my mother’s fashion —
In all the playful ways you have turned to me,
In the way I see you finding me funny:
Rebellious, willful, we resist the ways of the world,
Bravely sailing on everyone’s path to fullness.
I don’t know Mom’s destination.
But I have seen your destination in her,
And mine.
And I give thanks.
We’ve been packing up our house for quite a while. Now we are at the last moment before the move this week. So that was disorienting enough!
Then Covid-19 stole the best together-times of the year: the sunrise meeting for Resurrection Sunday and the parties afterward. Gwen and I usually have a party. I was sad enough about moving and missing things until family and friends started telling us how much they were missing things with me! So on the most joyous day of the year, I was sad, too.
Angie sent over a video that made me cry for joy and tear up for sadness because a flash mob was praising God in the mall but we can’t do that together right now.
So that’s how it is this year. The lockdown finally got to me on Easter. But it feels kind of fresh, too. On Good Friday, I wrote the poem that follows. I thought I’d put it out there again, now that I know even better how we all have a bittersweet taste in our mouths: sweet from Easter candy and bitter from Easter coronavirus. Things may never be the same for us this year, because of joy or because of sadness, but Jesus will be our joy and ever with us in our sadness.
On Friday, my thoughts turned to the terror and ecstasy of birth. I’ve got a feeling we are all being cleansed in a way by this strange, communal experience of “social distancing” and the threat of catching the virus. I know I feel like something new is being born. It made me think of another notable birth I experienced.
My wife was as big as a barn.
Her water broke with a flood
and the twins rode the river.
The birthing room was a bedlam:
our household peeking in,
a class walking through gaping.
Crazy, wondrous — jolt after jolt.
The first twin came out blue,
The next surfed out, tubing it.
Grief — surrounded on the table.
Joy — held by a slimy ankle.
I was suspended between.
The blue baby pinked up enough,
the flying one tucked up next.
And the birth-threatened love lived.
All was well again.
Awake at 3, the night bird sang;
I’m awake to listen.
And then the siren sounded.
The song of love met the tragic:
a tulip pushes up,
a loved one moves through the veil.
Our grief is budding out this year
like an unknown blossom
in a dystopic garden.
Our birthing room is a bedlam:
Peeking, pushing, pinking.
We are suspended between.
I had a new moleskin in which to write poetry. I have lost it in the chaos of my house as we get ready to move. The reality inspired my psalm today.
I had turned a poetic page
to pencil in a new moleskin: …..one free of lines, …..one more expansive and new, …..one now completely out of view.
I wander my boxed-up world
unpacking what now can’t transport: …..a book I never read, …..a folder rarely needed, …..a move now fully impeded.
Yet here we sit in disheveled mess –
quarantine, lockdown, stay-at-home test.
And you resolutely show your face:
the smallest touch,
the sweetest look,
the ease of much,
the weird Facebook.
In all the church
now all online
the birds on perch
sing all the time.
And there is joy in our messy place.
My moleskin will rise in time,
A witness to what can’t be seen — …..an order like the dawn, …..one more expansive and new, …..one now completely out of view —
by me, not You.
We’re weeks away from things that may not happen till who knows when –. …..the coronavirus contributions to life make former anxieties seem odd.
Somehow, it seems like it is a new world and all we can do is change – …..like Covid-19 is a means to reorient us like Peter meeting Sapphira:
the old order of greed and lies generating control and oppression …..meets the new order of “You all manifestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”
So it seems like a good time to change, …..since that horse has left the barn.
Chase it down and ride it.
Seeing a disease as a blessing may not be welcomed without a fight – …..even among you friends who are kindly used to me, and still love me.
But somehow we were consigned to a locked room for self examination, …..and I can’t bear the thought of watching the entire Netflix catalogue.
Instead, I am face to face with the traits with which I was bored anyway, …..And your voice seems clear, “You manifestly don’t need to be as you were before.”
So it seems like a good time to change …..in ways that did not seem likely.
It’s a post-Covid world.
Let there be peace on earth. …..May the disease teach us all the lessons people are learning, like me.
But let it begin with me.
It is always risky to look at the past and be inspired to leave it …..because the past contains all those reasons you never change.
And it is risky to write a psalm that implies one is changing by the end of it, …..since it could easily idealize a process that is more pea patch than lab.
Yet it seems like a good time to change …..in ways that defy assessment –
with you on a wild ride. …..May the disease teach me all the lessons people like me are learning
like your Spirit is moving.
Sometimes I find poems that I want to keep. So I thought I’d add them to your collection, as well. This one by Naomi Shihab Nye invites us into the great grief of the world. In the communal cup of loss we share we find our deepest kinship with each other and the living world and beneath it, the kindness of our creator leading us beyond, the movement of Jesus through the world into eternal life after loss.
Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? — Romans 2:4
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
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Poetry has a lot of power. Sometimes we put it to music, sometimes we recite it plain. It matters. Beautiful, heartfelt, sometimes prophetic or even harsh words still matter. In the age of alternative facts and people hacking our clouds of data, the poets draw us to deeper truths that are beyond the reach of tyrants, bean counters and hairsplitters. It has always been that way, right back to that huge poetry book in the middle of the Bible.
A new inspiration: Malcolm Guite
Last week I rejoiced to find a new poet I would have liked to meet twenty-five years ago: Malcolm Guite [his blog]. I passed around a speech of his [All Things in Christ]. I asked Joshua to teach me how to lift an interview I heard on a Mars Hill Audio JournalCD in which he brilliantly deepened any art director’s capacity to develop our weekly liturgy [deep, obscure and so useful: Part 1, Part 2]. Mostly, I appreciated his mostly simple poetry that seems well-tuned to connect with people in the present day. Here is an example I passed around. Too bad the weather is so nice — it would be even more useful in our usual February misery. (click on the title and hear him read it!):
These bleak and freezing seasons may mean grace
When they are memory. In time to come
When we speak truth, then they will have their place,
Telling the story of our journey home,
Through dark December and stark January
With all its disappointments, through the murk
And dreariness of frozen February,
When even breathing seemed unwelcome work.
Because through all of these we held together,
Because we shunned the impulse to let go,
Because we hunkered down through our dark weather,
And trusted to the soil beneath the snow,
Slowly, slowly, turning a cold key,
Spring will unlock our hearts and set us free.
Martyrs: earth, wind, fire, water — click the picture to view the installation
We have our own inspiration to share
I suppose most of us already appreciate how powerful art can be. We don’t produce it to to have an argument, for the most part; we just do it because we are creative like our creator. But art is its own argument, as it inevitably leads people beyond their situation and beyond their present understanding and touches the places where we love and love God.
Our long-term plans as a church include an arts cooperative of some sort because we want to encourage each other to touch people deeply in the Spirit. We already have our Audio Arts team, our events devoted to lifting up artists, our art directors who imagine our worship each week, and many wordsmiths, like our pastors. We’ve begun our cooperative — we always have big ideas and it is amazing how many of them come to fruit! I see artfully acting on our big ideas as one of the things we can do to stay sane, go deeper and prophesy in this weird time we are experiencing.
Malcolm Guite, the Bible, and all my creative friends who are reading this, inspired me to write another poem, myself. What’s more, I am going to share it. It comes from my morning prayer yesterday as God met me in my questions and in my longing to experience what is next.
Jesus laid hold of me
You are not busy
but you are always working. I am not sure I will master that or am even sure about the aspiration.
But I long for a sense of timelessness
as I lay hold of that
for which you laid hold of me.
You are not impatient
but you are always creating. I would like to see endings but not despise beginning again.
I long for a sense of calm attention
as I lay hold of that
for which you laid hold of me.
In my little prayer, I turn to praise
and I am raised and drawn to care
and led beyond what wears and harms
by gentle arms that find me here.
You are not confused
but you are always relating. I would like to wake up trusting instead of needing so many songs.
I long to sense my deepest self
as I lay hold of that
for which you laid hold of me.
In my little prayer, I turn to praise
and I am raised and drawn to care
and led beyond what wears and harms
by gentle arms that find me here.
The rain feels like the tears of the world today
and it is wobbly and foggy,
like me stumbling into the daylight
still blurry and choked up over Birth of a Nation.
The rain reminds me of people in Haiti
and they are ruined and soggy.
They are stumbling into the morning
traumatized again and asking “What happens next?”
Puddles fill up
with marital woes,
unprocessed fears,
unresolved conflict,
hopeless situations
and broken systems.
Yet I am so at peace in my comfy chair
listening to the rain, feeling the pain
and trusting You, thanking You.
The rain whispers of oceans filled with favor
and it is unfathomable to me.
I keep stumbling into it like a grandson
wobbling around on the walk, arms raised, ready to swing.
And I am so at peace in your loving grasp,
flying in the rain, splattered with pain
and trusting you, laughing out loud.
My favorite days of the year! Living in the light!
Here are a few thoughts and prayers to enjoy as the sun sets:
Moments of great calm
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great role. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.
Prompt me God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.
R.S. Thomas
Think of it, all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody…what a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, intelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges…Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
