Category Archives: Poetry

Your pot of anger — a psalm

A life in the Spirit, Poetry

My pot boils.
I don’t attend it until the liquid is gone
and a dark, dead scum is left
to scrape off and wash away.
Whole kettles have been lost.

Sometimes a simmer
bubbles all day, attended and fragrant,
and a deadly anger turns to action,
into something to be savored
like a done just enough stew.

If one is evil, vengeance is food,
the feast of the grave
waiting by the door, unmastered.
If one is good, the feast is justice,
like a dug up garden
soaking up love to produce good fruit.

So don’t leave your pot untended.
Follow the fragrance up to your room.
Kneel on your bench and listen well,
or your heart will grow dry
and your mind imprisoned by your fears.

Anger needs to simmer.
Some days it is stew.
Some days it is death.
If not cooked in God’s kitchen,
who would know?

Planting hope: Even facing the impossibility of family

A life in the Spirit, Marriage and Family, Poetry, Spiritual direction, , , , , , , ,

We planted a dogwood tree in our little back yard. It is how we respond to Trump and his flailing fascism project.  We likely won’t see it come into its full glory. But, as we say, we will stay in the game of hope, realized or not, until the last buzzer.

In 1893 the U.S. Marines overthrew the government of Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii; later that year the Panic of 1893 kicked off a economic depression. About that time, Lucy Larcom wrote a poem:

He who plants a tree
Plants a hope.
Rootlets up through fibres blindly grope;
Leaves unfold into horizons free.
So man’s life must climb
From the clods of time
Unto heavens sublime.
Canst thou prophesy, thou little tree,
What the glory of thy boughs shall be? — from Plant a Tree 

1n 1973 AIM activists occupying the Pine Ridge Reservation at Wounded knee surrendered to federal authorities after 71 days; later that year Alexander Butterfield informed the Senate Watergate Committee that President Nixon had secret recordings of incriminating conversations. Wendell Berry wrote a poem:

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. — from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Spend a minute with me and let’s nurture some seeds of hope with the poets.

We have a shortage of hope

One of our old friends was visiting last week so we invited the family over for dinner. I was impressed by her being impressed by their sense of security. They give me hope.

But they are inheriting a world full of insecurity. We’ll see if they become tree planters, or if they have grandchildren of their own.

You are probably aware that the birthrate is going down all over the world — especially in places where women have the right to choose their own destiny rather than being subject to a man. Their choice seems to be a strange thing to need to point out, but equality in the U.S. is not a done deal AT ALL. In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade and we can see how fragile that was.

There are many reasons women are not giving birth at rates that sustain their nation’s population. In the New York Times this week, Anna Louie Sussman said the main reason is hopelessness. Married couples cannot justify launching their child into uncertainty. Sussman is the author of the forthcoming book Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty.

Prospective parents may be hopeless because they are godless people who think they are stuck with gaining enough power to rule their private world — and they can’t control it well enough. Or they may be hopeless because the rulers of the world in the last 30 years (here is your list of billionaires)  have infested the ground with weeds of disaster that overwhelm their every positive step.

Sussman provides an example of this new instinct among potential procreators:

Raleigh Rivera and her husband had spent five years fine-tuning their parenthood plan: In 2025, they would move from Los Angeles, where they have been living since 2023, back to Ms. Rivera’s hometown, Minneapolis, where they could afford to buy a home and start a family. “We both have been baby- and kid-crazy for our entire lives,” she said.

They had planned to start trying when Ms. Rivera turned 30, a birthday she celebrated last summer. But that same year, everything that had felt stable to them started to crumble. It began with the Palisades and Eaton fires decimating parts of the city they called home. The prospect of a first-time home buyer credit, something Kamala Harris had campaigned on, had disappeared. By summer, Ms. Rivera’s parents in Minnesota were choking on smoke drifting over the border from Canadian wildfires. Her husband is a citizen, but since he is Mexican American, she worried that racial profiling policies put a target on his back. Ms. Rivera, who has a master’s degree in public health, worried about sending a future child to school with unvaccinated classmates. “We felt like we had worked hard on ourselves, making sure that our finances and our health and everything was in order,” she told me when we spoke in August. “And those plans are on pause right now because everything is — it’s just impossible to know.”

An age of uncertainty

Researchers run into this sense of impossibility wherever they go. I run into it in my therapy office almost every day. If you are trying to make useful policies for the future or you are predicting what future demographics will be so you can get ready, you need to factor in that young people bring an inescapable and crushing sense to the discussion — that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Sussman says, “Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.”

The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. Here are the reverbs concocting a vibe:

  • In the United States, workers spend less years at a job and experience less stable income.
  • Life expectancy, once inevitably increasing, has fallen for less-educated women and men.
  • Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile.
  • “Disruption,” once a byword for a disturbance or a problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy.
  • The rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino.
  • The climate crisis is spiraling.
  • The costs of everything that could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care, are unaffordable.
  • The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility.
  • Even declining fertility rates feed the vibe: How will society function if each generation is smaller than the last?

The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age during world-scale catastrophes. Their trauma amplifies the vibe:

  • Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes.
  • Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upended by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners.

Now the man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad.

You can probably feel the anxiety rise in you as you read all this stuff, right? If not, turn on a screen. The Great Recession’s outsize impact may also be due to its status as the first economic crisis in the era of a nonstop digital information deluge, which rendered it, and the sense of dread it engendered, all but inescapable, even for people not financially affected. The same kind of impact is now generated by natural disasters, political upheaval and war from anywhere in the globe; no one is insulated.  We don’t just bear our own uncertainty, we bear the amplified uncertainty all around us as well. It is hard to disentangle from what concerns mostly others to concentrate on what concerns mostly you.

Faith boosts fertility

In some studies, researchers have found an element that boosts fertility: faith. And I don’t think they were just collecting J.D. Vance sermons. For many believers, faith provides deeper certainty.

The famous Romans 5:1-5 is basically a poem about hope in the hands of the paraphraser, J.B. Phillips:

Since then it is by faith that we are justified,
let us grasp the fact that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Through him we have confidently entered into this new relationship of grace,
and here we take our stand,
in happy certainty of the glorious things he has for us in the future.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we have only a hope of future joys—
we can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles.
Taken in the right spirit these very things will give us patient endurance;
this in turn will develop a mature character,
and a character of this sort produces a steady hope,
a hope that will never disappoint us.
Already we have some experience of the love of God
flooding through our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us.

To read these lines in the manner Paul wrote them, we need to exercise our spiritual awareness deepening into Holy Spirit awareness. We can all get there.

But it might be hard to get out of the gnawing fear we feel to do so. The ordinary awareness of this present age is rifled with uncertainty. That has always been the normal state of humanity separated from God. But today it is even worse, as humanity is wrapped up in a virtual oneness under the thumb of the purveyors and manipulators of an artificial intelligence.

My family experienced a large dose of uncertainty last month due to death and illness in the clan. I’ve watched us reach for the resilience to cope with loss and change. Some have turned to faith, and love. And I think there is some shaky hope that some did not live by until they needed to. It is sad to find yourself old and in need of hope in the most uncertain of times – your old age in the age of Trump.

Phillips gets at what Paul has to say to to encourage us — young and old alike, very well, I think:

  • Grasp the fact that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
  • Here we take our stand, in happy certainty of the glorious things he has for us in the future.
  • We can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles.
  • Character of this sort produces a steady hope, a hope that will never disappoint us.

I don’t know about you, of course, but when I read those lines a few times, I felt better. I made myself read them again just now because I want to feel better.

When the Tennessee legislature bends the knee to Trump and turns back the clock that  briefly marked an attempt to undo the racism of the U.S. society, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ and we take our stand in that.

When I drove over the line from gentrification to devastation in North Philly last night, I knew we could be full of joy here and now even in our trials and tribulations, not because we don’t care that the world is an uncertain, cruel place, but because the love of God is being poured into it.

So we plant trees. We have children in hope. Not because we are certain the world is worthy of our love and trust. But because we trust the love being poured into it.

We grasp the peace and take our stand in the certainty that God has hope for US! Jesus is joy, itself, no matter what the passing-away powers do. If anything can change the world and change us to see the goodness built into it, it is people who hope like that.

2026 Psalm: Hold on for dear life

A life in the Spirit, Poetry, ,
Trump at Davos

Lord, eight countries
bombed in one year —
our president’s distinction
alphabetically:
Iran, Iraq,
Nigeria, Palestine,
Somalia, Syria,
Venezuela, Yemen.
Add Minnesota.
We’re great again.

Meanwhile, you heard,
his peacemaking claims:
Thailand/Cambodia,
Congo/Rwanda,
Israel/Hamas,
Israel/Iran,
India/Pakistan,
Armenia/Azerbaijan,
Egypt/Ethiopia,
Serbia/Kosovo.
He wants a prize
before he dies.

Did you notice the peace?
You saw the deals made,
gilded with self-interest.
But no love was shed
by the spider, the snake,
the toddler driving the car,
the sociopath-in-chief.

It does not feel good
to make these lists,
to wretch these labels, Lord.
But it feels better –
like tagging a rainstorm
an “atmospheric river,”
or a snow disaster
a “bomb cyclone.”
There is comfort
in naming the dreadful.

But there is more comfort
in turning into your call:
“Set your face
like flint
toward good this year.”
Selah.
“Hold on
to each day’s blessings
for dear life this year.”
Because life is dear
and love cannot be controlled.
It can yet be received,
cherished, nurtured,
but never commanded.

If love, or if I, seem paltry,
that may be very true.
But you are truer, Lord.
If my trust stumbles
in the face of fears and faults,
you remain trustworthy, Lord —
our dawn after the storm
who will not be hooded,
the colors of the bow
that no lie can dim.

Jesus was born again in the year of King Donald

A life in the Spirit, Poetry, Spiritual direction, The Mission, , , , , , , , ,

Jesus was born again in the year 2025,
in the reign of King Donald, who
commandeered the airwaves to recite
his pack of lies once again and again,
vainly propping up his house of cards.
No one watched.

The prophets echoed like memories of angels:

When tyrants tremble in their fear
And hear their death knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near
How can I keep from singing?

In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging,
When friends by shame are undefiled
How can I keep from singing?

“Pauline T” in 1868 (Civil War) and Pete Seeger in 1978 (Vietnam War)

Jesus was born again in the year 2025,
a time when the jester, Pete Hegseth,
sent drones to kill the unsuspecting,
smugglers and fishermen on the open sea,
like Herod searching Bethlehem.
No drugs were found.

The prophets echoed like magi in the night:

Herod the king, in his raging
Chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay

That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”

Robert Croo (ed.) in 1534 from 1456 (War of the Roses)

Jesus was born again in the year 2025
when Old King Donald faked emergencies
and Congress sat on their wall, never
to stop him “Stop Him!” and his illegal tariffs,
and his slicing the world into spheres.
His mania spiked.

The prophets echoed like shepherds telling the news:

Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king
Do you know what I know?
In your palace warm, mighty king
Do you know what I know?
A Child, a Child shivers in the cold
Let us bring him silver and gold

Said the king to the people everywhere
Listen to what I say!
Pray for peace, people, everywhere
Listen to what I say!
The Child, the Child sleeping in the night
He will bring us goodness and light

Gloria Shayne Baker in 1962 (Cuban Missile Crisis)

Jesus was born again in the year 2025
When King Donald and his minions
vainly tried to stop the tale of Epstein
from being told across the land.
He protected pedophiles.
He pardoned felons.
He profited billionaires,
and called it hope for the poor.
No one believed him.

The prophets echoed like John the Baptist preparing the way:

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother,
and in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
let all within us praise His holy name.
Christ is the Lord! O praise His name forever!
His pow’r and glory evermore proclaim!

Placide Cappeau in 1847 (2nd French Revolution)

Jesus was born again in the year 2025
when King Donald begged for a peace prize
and an arch to validate his vapid life,
and placed his name on someone else’s memorial
prophetically putting himself
in the grave.

The prophets echoed like a memory of Mary’s great song,
like the worms that ate Herod cried out for lack of enough voices:

But with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring; –
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!

Edmund Sears in 1849 (Fugitive Slave Act)

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Angels Appearing before the Shepherds, c. 1910

Jesus was born again in the year 2025:
born in us who hear the angels sing,
born in us worn down with woe,
born in us subject to sociopaths,
born in us bound by bloated oligarchs,
born in us who amplify your voice,
louder every day, as the dawn rises
and the Son shines through the veil,
the Light of our restoration.

The prophets cry out with the prophets of old
and with all who relay the music of your sphere:

The original final verses:

VII
Come, Desire of Nations, come,
Fix in Us thy humble Home,
Rise, the Woman’s Conqu’ring Seed,
Bruise in Us the Serpent’s Head,

VIII
Now display the saving Pow’r,
Ruin’d Nature now restore,
Now in Mystic Union join
Thine to Ours, and Ours to Thine.

IX
Adam’s Likeness, Lord, efface,
Stamp thy Image in its Place,
Second Adam from above,
Reinstate us in Thy Love.

X
Let us Thee, tho’ lost, regain,
Thee, the Life, the Inner Man:
O! to All Thyself impart,
Form’d in each Believing Heart.

Charles Wesley in 1739 (War of Austrian Succession)

Before the foundation of the world: Ezekiel and Ephesians

A life in the Spirit, Poetry, , ,

Ezekiel is told to prophesy to the false prophets:
Have ye not seen a vain vision,
and have ye not spoken a lying divination, whereas ye say,
“The Lord saith it;” albeit I have not spoken?
Therefore, thus saith the Lord God;
“Because ye have spoken vanity, and seen lies,
therefore, behold, I am against you,” saith the Lord…
“They have seduced my people, saying,
‘Peace;’ and there was no peace;
and one built up a wall, and, lo,
others daubed it with untampered mortar…
I will break down the wall…
So that the foundation thereof will be discovered.”  (Chap 13)

I trust you Lord.
And over and over and over
your people have had to trust you,
as a Trump builds a wobbling wall
and a Charlie Kirk daubs it,
and a seduced youth kills him with
prophecy-etched bullets,
and Seoul writhes with hundreds in the streets.

I trust you Lord,
knowing I see the unseen
and am bound to wonder if I believe lies
or can rely on the eyes of my heart,
knowing I will face the same questions tomorrow
as the Epstein files are revealed,
as Peter Thiel and Opus Dei are unmasked,
as the schemes of the oligarchs come to light,
and stolen elections are finally proven falsified.

I trust you Lord
like I’m floating in comforting pools of water,
pulled under the limits of my waking understanding.
You are deep in me and a turn away from us all.
You will not surrender your Creation to evil
but proclaim your loves in voice and vision,
though the powerful eat the poor and call it freedom
and Stephen Miller screams lies from our screens,
and bigots call for the purity of “whiteness.”

I trust you, Lord.
You will be heard and known and honored.
We are listening and living to stand with you,
to feel our feet on the foundation beneath,
deep under the false foundation of the wobbling wall
ready to fall on the deluded and sighted alike.
We are who you chose before the foundation of the world,
the loved ones destined for the riches of grace in Jesus.

Aidan’s example

A life in the Spirit, Poetry, Spiritual direction

My “psalm” on Aidan Day last Sunday. 

Maybe it was on this day in the 600’s
that Aidan gave King Oswin’s gift-horse
to the peasant he passed.

Maybe the peasant had seen the holy man
coming at a distance, filled with the mystery
of the Holy Island.

Then the mystery dismounted his horse.
I see him silently give over the reins
with a gentle nod and smile.

Later the king fumed and blustered,
and wondered why his horse was wasted
on some poor nobody.

Aidan stood unbowed and undeterred,
“Is God’s beloved of less value than your horse?”
The king bowed, deterred.

We walked on the trail and reminisced
about the simplicity that captured us early on,
and saved us from many kings.

We also got off a few horses to accompany
poor souls who did not amount to much
or warrant stories.

Even Aidan, who made it into Bede’s book,
and is named on Lindisfarne to this day
is an untold tale,

lost in the smorgasbord of media,
digested in a glut of engorged data,
a footnote perhaps.

Yet I am heartened he is no hero,
not a billboard or line of merchandise,
just someone to meet,

just someone on the road who gets down
and is just a person who knows you,
who cares to see,

who cares little for kings and horses
and knows very little about what is right
except to be in Christ.

*****
Today is Peter Claver Day! Honor his devotion at The Transhistorical Body. 

In the move

A life in the Spirit, Poetry,

 

 

 

 

 

I am eating salad.
The cat,
the cat finds a way,
finds a way to knock the Tibetan bell,
the singing bowl, off the shelf.

I put down my fork.
I feed,
feed the next disaster,
the thing that needs fixing or finding
so the next problem can happen.

I gnaw a new problem.
The garage,
the garage door won’t close;
the door thinks it’s squashing a baby,
not landing on a vintage slab.

I know vintage.
The turn,
the turn is one thing I learned:
any move needs time for moving,
time to turn toward eternity.

I eat in an eternal now.
The right now,
now is for feeding on the future,
the future-present ordering of your love,
a whisper away in this breath.

Born again and again: Alan Jones and Anne Sexton guide us

A life in the Spirit, Poetry, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, , , , ,

From the Grace Cathedral Instagram page advertising their solstice concert.

Alan Jones was Dean of Grace Cathedral from 1985-2009. He died last year at 84. In his obituary from the church the present dean wrote:

For nearly a quarter of a century, Alan served as Dean of Grace Cathedral. He was one of the most powerful preachers of his generation and helped make the cathedral one of the global centers of Christianity. During his tenure, we constructed Chapter House, the Great Steps, and our parking garage. With Lauren Artress, Alan helped to make walking the labyrinth into a religious practice observed by millions of people. Alan inaugurated our Forum series and represented the cathedral admirably in the community.

His legacy is better represented in his books. One has become a spiritual classic: Passion for Pilgrimage: Notes for the Journey Home (1989). One of the aspects of the book which impressed me most was the amazing depth of reading he displays! I often pass over quotes in a book as if they did not come from somewhere. But the people Jones knew or knew about intrigued me so much I began to look into their lives, as well.

In 2021 I peeled back the cover of Jones’ work for my church and highlighted a few of the people he referenced. As Jones listened to each of them, he was also attuned to the Holy Spirit at work in them and told us what he heard. They all demonstrated different ways we die and rise along our pilgrimage home. That’s the theme of his book: “God has fallen in love with you and wants you to come home.”

Anne Sexton

One of the people I highlighted was Anne Sexton.

Anne Sexton

I did not know a lot about this poet, apart from some of her poems, until Jones drew me into relationship with her. Her life is a tortuous story of mental illness and award-winning creation. Although she died in her forties by suicide, the depth of her work still moves us and teaches us. If you are chronically depressed, she speaks your language beautifully. The Poetry Foundation has a nice biography and a selection of works.

Jones  draws us to meditate with Anne Sexton as she moves through one of her own last meditations on “eating the Bread” in John 6:

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise [them] up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood resides in me, and I in [them]. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who consumes me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven; it is not like the bread your ancestors ate, but then later died. The one who eats this bread will live forever.” – John 6:53-8 NET

Uncomfortable in faith might be normal

Anne Sexton never got to a comfortable faith, but she wrote about it a lot. And she had a long correspondence with a “monk,” right up to the point where she sent off her last work:  The Awful Rowing toward God. Once it was sent, she put on her mother’s old mink coat, went to the garage, started the car and made the exhaust that killed her at age 45. One poem in her last self-collected book was titled after one of Soren Kierkegaard’s works which you can read here:

The Sickness Unto Death

God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper,
as if the sun became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

Someone brought me oranges in my despair
but I could not eat a one
for God was in that orange.
I could not touch what did not belong to me.
The priest came,
he said God was even in Hitler.
I did not believe him
for if God were in Hitler
then God would be in me.
I did not hear the bird sounds.
They had left.
I did not see the speechless clouds,
I saw only the little white dish of my faith
breaking in the crater.
I kept saying:
I’ve got to have something to hold on to.
People gave me Bibles, crucifixes,
a yellow daisy,
but I could not touch them,
I who was a house full of bowel movement,
I who was a defaced altar,
I who wanted to crawl toward God
could not move nor eat bread.

So I ate myself,
bite by bite,
and the tears washed me,
wave after cowardly wave,
swallowing canker after canker
and Jesus stood over me looking down
and He laughed to find me gone,
and put His mouth to mine
and gave me His air.

My kindred, my brother, I said
and gave the yellow daisy
to the crazy woman in the next bed.

Her last book was dedicated to the monk. Sexton drafted her final book in two and half weeks during January of 1973. Two of those days were spent in a mental hospital, where she spoke with a priest. She told him she wasn’t sure if she believed in God. “I can’t go to church,” she said. “I can’t pray.” She wished to take communion but knew that she could not. She feared formal conversion: “It would ruin, it would formulate, my thinking: I’d want Him to be my God, anyway. I don’t want to be taught about Him; I want to make him up.”

The priest read Sexton’s drafts aloud to her. “Your typewriter is your altar,” he said.

Meditations from Alan Jones

What follows is Alan Jones meditating with Anne Sexton and giving us all a chance to do our dying and rising. All last week I ran into people who can’t help but think the whole country is dying and about to rise again. I thank God for people who can carry others who are sunk in depression. Enjoy Jones.

“Ironically, the Virgin Birth was insisted upon in the early years because there were those who said that Jesus wasn’t really human. He was some heavenly being. Mary was the guarantee that Jesus was really one of us. This crude insistence on the material is emphasized in the Gospel [as in the quote from John above]…

Think for a moment of Mary. She has just said Yes! To the baby, to the longed-for unknown. She contemplates the future stretching from her belly, and her own stretching by the child that will be born. It is a common experience for mothers. It is a metaphor that others in our culture need to appropriate – both men and women. Giving birth is an ordeal, and we, pregnant with God, are to give birth to a new understanding of ourselves. We are called to assist at our own birth. I know of no greater adventure. I know of no other way to describe it but as an ongoing drama of resurrection. The love letters never cease to amaze me.

George Emery, an old friend and expert in Christian mythology, sent us a Christmas poem not long ago about Mary as a sign and promise of new life breaking out in us.

To understand ordeals underground
Following the footsteps of the Lord
Into our own identity
Is difficult. As a new baby
Finds his mother to be another,
And she is a new person,
Mary saw God in her son,
Beholds him still for us
Both there and on the cross.

This describes our inner pilgrimage. It is an underground ordeal into the mystery of who we are. Through the agency of others we become new persons. Anne Sexton contributed to the bundle of love letters when she wrote,

Oh, Mary
Gentle Mother,
open the door and let me in.
A bee has stung your belly with faith.
Let me float in it like a fish.
Let me in! Let me in!
I have been born many times, a false Messiah;
but let me be born again
into something true. (From The Awful Rowing Toward God)

We follow the footsteps of our Lord into our own identity…to be born again and again and again. What freedom there is in my not having to be my own messiah!”

Eat the Bread of Life Instead: Memorial Day Psalm

A life in the Spirit, Poetry, , ,

June 14: Click the picture to access an interactive map

When the houselights came up and people did not chat,
…..when they jumped on their phones to occupy themselves
…..lest they be undistracted too long,
When curbs to a federal judge’s power to hold someone in contempt
…..were stealthily added to the bad billionaire budget,
When I went to the protest with all those grey heads
…..and noticed my black neighbors were checked out of the fight
…..and the man I love like a son refused to listen to news anymore,
When Stephen Miller gave the word to bomb Houthi civilians
…..and Pete Hegseth concocted a way to get Trump his Qatari jet,
When Israel decided to colonize the spit of land
…..the Gazans they are starving call home,
When Kivu, both Sudans, Somalia, Kashmir, Ukraine
…..frothed in the sea as mountains fell, and five years after George Floyd,
…..police kill more people than ever, and Kristi Noem is someone,
When my list went on,
I was tempted Lord.
Memorial Day was a bitter taste in my mouth.

But when I turned to you, I remembered wonder:
Remembered anxious people reaching out to yesterday’s rainbow like a life raft,
Remembered over 1000 events planned to counter Trump’s vanity parade —
…..the “Tanks-Rut-on-Constitution-Ave. Day,”
Remembered concerts of talented children making end-of-year music,
…..Remembered Bruce Springsteen taking the hits with his hits for us,
Remembered new neighbors checking to see if we need anything,
…..Remembered the dogged kindness of the people in my church,
…..Remembered how we somehow got a new cat who kisses,
Remembered that affliction breeds endurance which breeds character
…..which still breeds hope, born again.
It is hard to stay bitter in May.

God help me, I felt Memorial Day possibilities
…..despite the day’s repulsive hypocrisy —
…..business people wading into the ocean down the shore
…..in their Odunde-like appeasement to capitalist gods.
But, God help me, some old men said we were born for a time like this.

Don’t give up America.
…..People bled for your best ideas.
Don’t give up church.
…..People are looking for you right now.
Don’t give up leaders.
…..Your good intentions are enzymes in the body politic.
Don’t give up high school grads, college grads, music students.
…..A.I. avoiders and creators,
…..inheritors of a warming earth,
…..first victims of the billionaire world order.
Please make something better.

Yes. Exceptionalism is an illusion.
Yes. America-the-better won’t save you.
Yes. The whole thing is a grift right now.
Yes. Memorial Day is a celebration of power not love —
…..at least not the love of bread, wine and miracle.
But very few are listening for America or God,
…..just yet.
No one sacrificed for Donald Trump in Germany,
…..or would.
So yes. You’re right.
But remember Jesus, beloved country.
…..Turn into visions of born-again better.
When you’re tempted to feed your list to the phone
…..eat the Bread of Life instead.

The One Tree

A life in the Spirit, Poetry, Spiritual direction, , , , ,

One of the words I kept hearing at the CAPS Conference this past week was “presence.” The message I took away was: “In the middle of Trump turmoil, stay present to God.” Like anxious clients need to hear, “Feel your feet on the ground and sense the air moving in and out of your body as you breathe deeply.” In doing so, we return to our awareness of our life in Christ and rest in the presence of God.

Returning

If you are anything like me, most days I get “messed up.” People and situations disturb my equilibrium, and my capacity to think and feel are an invitation to be disrupted from the inside, too, even if I stay holed-up in my house.  I need to get up every morning and turn into my source of life.

Psalm 65 is a useful tool for returning. I meditate with it using three long, slow, deep breaths, one for each stanza:

You answer us with awesome and righteous deeds,
    God our Savior,
the hope of all the ends of the earth
    and of the farthest seas,

who formed the mountains by your power,
    having armed yourself with strength,
who stilled the roaring of the seas,
    the roaring of their waves,
    and the turmoil of the nations.

The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders;
    where morning dawns, where evening fades,
    you call forth songs of joy.

After three sets of three breaths, I think anyone might be more able to face the day.

Now is the time

The springtime of Lent is a perfect time to turn.

The other day I wrote my own psalm like Psalm 65 but in my own time and my own place. I did not write it in the name of great art. But you might relate to it and find it useful for your own process. The Lord stills the “turmoil of the nations.” Yesterday, I was stilled by the dawning of creation on the leafing trees outside my window. In the middle of my mess, God called forth “songs of joy.”

Lord,
there is that one tree —
just the top of it I see
through the legs of my desk
as I look toward the sky,
in the Spring morning looking,
looking for light, looking
to see if the chilling wind I fear
is moving in the tallest branches
and locking me in some defensive coat
as I venture out into the sun
after a chilly winter, one chilled
with trouble and the grief
of letting go and letting in.

As I start to write, the tree,
that signal tree, roots me
yet reaches into uncertainty.
We’re completely still.
Serene. Blessed. Surprised
by the joy of the morning.
Nestled. Snug with the other trees
blessing the park with their community,
a home for us wanderers longing to rest.

Now, as I turn my head and heart,
I see the faintest touch of breezing start.
Breeze winds its way through the tallest twigs,
teasing the huddling branches apart.
My tree raises hands and gently claps
in the rhythm of creation as old as time,
in the glow of day breaking with new unknowns,
assured, as one who knows Spring personally
and feels rain like friendship.

In the chill, I would have huddled
in reassurance, longing to cuddle
some wished-for insurance
against the cold, some imminent gale.
But the season has lifted.
My roots tingle with the whispering
of ancient voices tendriling in the park
with a message as fresh as Mystery.

Your love is a hard truth and scary,
and a beam of sunlit hope to carry,
hope gently pushing me like what launched
the tuft of spring’s first dandelion,
a seed launched into the way of brother wind,
now looking for a place to root and bloom
at the foot of our wizened Oak
in the freshness of a Spirit-blown day.

You might want to hear me read it here. 

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Today is Oscar Romero Day! If you want to know how to respond to authoritarian regimes, he’s your spiritual guide. Commune with him at The Transhistorical Body.