Tag Archives: Mystery

September 25, 2012 · 5:41 am

Poetry Tuesday: Make Me A Tower (Don’t Reduce Me)

What if we treated each other like poems?   Things of beauty to be broken apart and experienced instead of commodities to be judged?

Here’s a piece that I’ve performed a couple of times, down at the open mic of the Seattle Poetry Slam and then in a worship gathering at the Northwest Church.   (edited slightly for the church performance.)   There’s a series of these poems based on the notion of “Don’t Reduce Me.”   Reductionism is at the heart of stereotyping, and the fact that we often deal with each other as if a single fact (skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever) tells us everything we need to know.   Truth is, identity is mysterious and emergent, and we should all pause at the holy mystery that is the other person in front of us.   Needless to say, life goes too fast to allow such a thing.

To read each other like poems, we’d have to slow down.    Way down…

—–

MAKE ME A TOWER

Don’t reduce me.
Make me a tower.
Shower my mind with reasons
Why days all of grime
Can turn into fine
Seasons of nothing but better.
Better yet, can you cut through the clutter
And just sputter me out some hope here?
I’m trying to cope here, and I don’t want to shutter down,
So please—just utter me some good.
Give me some kind of beauty
I’m looking for my heart; I lost it, in part, to duty
And fear of hell, and fell notions of holy.
Now only oceans of you can open the fist.
I missed this,
Missed the gist of this.
Don’t dismiss the potential for bliss here, people.
What I need are open faces,
Designs of production making praises that function
Like light on the leaves of opening trees.
I need to receive the sun’s gift, that spark
That runs down the dark, runs down the miles
Arriving to open the sad into smiles, through all of life.
A kingdom of good I would make if I could.
Now, that attention you pay,
The fine notice you take,
It starts turning the pages,
It rattles the cages inside this man, and
This dead heart starts to shake, starts to quake, and maybe it has to break,
But it can, in time, start to wake up, and by God,
It’s sublime to find in the fine detail what really might be a human face.
I’m more than a race, some type and some chatter,
Be in my now, right here has to matter
We all got some color, some black, white, and brown,
We’re deeper than that once the bias breaks down
Let’s get past it, let’s ask it, whether all that typing and crap
Is what’s wrapping our spirits up so damn tight,
That we fear it, we won’t come near it, our own spirit, we steer it into hiding,
Riding straight into the abyss,
Missing what “could have been” in our time.
Put your mind to better use, and try to deduce the me,
The whole me—I been standing here the whole frickin’ time,
Man—the mission is the recognition
Of the emergent, towering woman and man,
That powerful I am that stands in every common
Image carrier of God.
I’m not a body, I’m not a soul-
I’m a human, I’m whole
An entire being, tired of being abused.
Of being used so poorly.
I sorely hope in the future, we can just refuse to do that,
And choose to see each other—
Don’t reduce me.

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January 4, 2012 · 7:46 am

Breakthrough

This morning, I wish I was a poet.

I’m sitting in the middle of an experience that’s hard to describe, and yet, it couldn’t be simpler.  To put it into words seems ridiculous.

It reminds me of the day my first child was born.

It’s trying to turn a key in a lock in a door for over 30 years, and suddenly there’s a click, and the doorknob is freed.

It’s realizing the full weight of your own foolishness, and shaking it off like an old, well-loved, but too long worn shirt.

It’s realizing that God knew exactly what He was up to when He made a human being.

It’s mystery begetting mystery, and being overwhelmed with gratitude that you don’t control much of anything.

It’s realizing that all the stuff you thought you were…you’re not.

It’s free-fall into freedom.

It’s realizing that like the Apostle John explained about the Christ (John’s Gospel, Chapter 13)…you come from God, and you’re on your way back.  What else in the world is there to do but serve?

It’s realizing that when God created humans “in his image”, he didn’t leave out the “I am” part.

It’s detachment, like I’ve read about for years, but in experience, is nothing like what I thought those writings meant.

It’s a future opening like a heretofore unseen flower, petals in colors and textures I’d didn’t know were possible.

It’s gut-laughter in the middle of the night, connected to the long ache that’s always been there, but that is just now eased into friendly hope.

It’s wondering if you’ve lost your mind, but the coherence is too clear and sharp, like bright stars in dark, cold, midnight country sky.

It’s just an idea, a collision of thoughts, and an understanding that gives up all pretense of understanding.

It’s finding that faith, indeed, is what justifies life, and that the faith you thought you were on your way to losing has been powering up deep in the hidden places to await it’s  appointed emergence.

It’s realizing that indeed, “All is well.”

It’s weeping for love unrecognized and unknown.

It’s running toward home, where love and welcome waits, but it’s new, it’s surprising, and it’s enough.

It’s now, it’s here, it’s presence.

It’s also beyond words.   So enough.

A glimpse into Pascal’s fire?   

 

 

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November 9, 2011 · 7:33 am

How to Stay Astonished in Five Simple Steps

How’s the old Kathy Mattea song go?   “Standing knee deep in a river, and dying of thirst.”

My wife puts up with me, but it has to be annoying.

“Isn’t it funny that we ingest food,” I say.   Or, “It’s so strange that we have these orbs in the front of our heads that rotate, and that using them somehow results in us ‘seeing.’”  There may be any number of these “isn’t life strange?” statements from me during the day, at which point those aforementioned orbs in her head start rolling.

But I can’t help it.   The fact that we are here astonishes me.

That markings on a material can create communication.   That the seemingly gibberish sounds of other languages have structure and syntax, and that those language emerged at all.   That hearts beat without being plugged in.   For years.   That there is now feverish activity going on in garages and offices and bedrooms and kitchens all centered around creativity and invention that will one day yield future technologies that will put the work of Steve Jobs into a distant, remote past.   Geniuses are being born even today.   Starlight millions of years old will tonight just be arriving in my Seattle sky.  Every relationship is a miracle.   Balance, eye-hand coordination, home runs (in season, at least), and self-sacrifice…all astonishing.   Concertos, voices that can hit high C’s, the warmth of a home, the compassion that wants the warmth of a home for everyone, the impulse to not follow the cruel impulse those that insult and demean us seemingly deserve.    Bodies, processes, architectures, leaves falling, petals of brilliant color inching into being, the storehouses of snow prepping at the hand of God to inflict both beauty and suffering on a wintered country.

I know…we’re too busy to be astonished.

So here’s five simple things to turn up your astonishment on any given day.

  • 1.   Stop what you’re doing.
  • 2.  Breathe
  • 3.  Focus on one thing in front of you.
  • 4.  Reflect on the following:  how did it come into being?  What might the world be like if it was completely absent from everywhere?   What if the thing under reflection was perfected?  What is its goodness in your life?  Who should you thank for that goodness?    Why is there any goodness at all, that we should enjoy it?
  • 5.  Remember that your ability to “do”, to have agency, and to act–that thing that you stopped in step 1–that your breath that you thought about and noticed in step 2, that your ability to shift your mind into a focused point of reflection, musing, remembering, and imagining–steps 3 and 4–that all of this is frankly, miraculous.

We did not ask to arrive on the planet, and contrary to our beliefs, we do not control our exit.   The days are full of surprise, diving possibility (as Barbara Brown Taylor reminded me this morning), dangers, and moments of astonishing reality.

There is always something a bit healing about standing aware inside a miracle.

As you exhale, let your lips form a small “wow.” 

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November 8, 2011 · 7:06 am

Meditations on Malick’s “The Tree of Life”

I’ve been hearing about this film for awhile.  ”You’ll either love it, or hate it,” people told me.  A few people who know me pretty well figured it would be my kind of movie.   Anjie travels, and I’d been contemplating watching it without her, but I kept thinking, “No.  I’ll wait for her.”  So Sunday night, we finally sat and watched it, and my first thought was, “What a mistake not to have seen this in a big theatre.”   We live on a busy street, buses going by, windows rattling.  We kept saying, “What did he just say?”  and rewinding.   Pitiful.  There were a couple of other interruptions as well, but we finally made it through.

Why, O, why didn’t I see this in the big theatre?

Frankly, even on my television, with buses roaring by bent on spoiling the most intimate film I’ve seen in a long time, I loved it.  I’ll love it a lot more the second time I see it.   To say that I loved it doesn’t mean I was completely satisfied by everything.  (The people wandering on the beach didn’t quite take me where I think Terrence Malick was trying to get me to go.)  But overall, brilliant work.

Maybe I loved it because I’m in the middle of looking very hard at the two roads suggested by the film.  The way of the Father and the way of the Mother.  The way of Nature, and the way of Grace.   The layering of the metaphors is subtle and dense, and the non-linear approach to the narrative serves the meditative feel of the film well.   I’m sure its very frustrating for folks who want answers to certain questions (how did that one character die? What happened?) that Malick has no real interest in answering, but for me, the quiet, the images, the sweep of trying to grapple with the full mystery of things left me thankful for a filmmaker willing to take those kinds of chances in story-telling.  Of course, I was also wondering how it ever got made.

I know we say that God is above gender, but there’s just no question that our language plays into the masculine side of the equation.  God is a man to most of us.   If that’s not true for you in your bones, good for you.  But my suspicion is that most of us see, uh…Him, as a masculine presence.  I’m not particularly fond of gender-inclusive language translations, but I can sure see why some people are passionate about them.  I do not pray to Him as “Mother.”  Neither did Jesus, for that matter.  What that means in the great reality that is beyond my consciousness to perceive about the reality of God, I don’t know, but on the street where most of us do our living, somehow it matters.   In The Tree of Life,  the father is tough, harsh, realistic, and ultimately deals pretty honorably with his failures, both of career and son-raising.   The mother is strong as well, but dances in the air, plays, protects, and extends ongoing opportunity for grace and change and life.

The two roads live together in all of us, as they do in the character of the grown son who talks (so quietly) about the way his mother and father grapple inside him.    And though we all walk both roads to some degree, my suspicion is that most of lean one way or the other.   I lean toward the mother’s road, unquestionably.   Is it right?  Is it the best?  Is it more complete, more God-like, more Christ-like than the harsh, demanding, warring, scrapping father?   The world is what it is, and we must make our way through it.   Truth is, Malick gives us some great images of the ups and downs of both roads.   Brad Pitt’s strong portrayal of the Father gives us glimpses of the work of grace, and Jessica Chastain’s vision of the mother has backbone and power and her own ways of demand.

To say God is not male is, I think, the right thing to say, the true thing to say.   To live as if He’s not, struggling to unearth the practical differences our thinking makes along these lines is a far different challenge.

And then there’s Malick’s framing.   We get intimations on the beginning and ending of time, and the fact that we are here in the particular now, and small, and forever kinds of people.

Gorgeous, stunning, troubling, and oddly, welcome.     As all good meditations should be.

Let me watch it again.   Maybe I’ll have more to say…

 

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September 19, 2011 · 5:58 am

The Unmerited Grace of the Work

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace.  It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.  You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then–and only then–it is handed to you.”  –Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Odd isn’t it, that there is work in receiving grace?  It was Dallas Willard who said that grace is opposed to earning, not effort.  How strange it is that grace and effort are symbiotically linked in a relationship designed to throw the lazy off the track.  Couple the word “grace” with “free” and spend a few hundred years railing against meritorious work and life lived knocking on the Christian door can get pretty out of kilter.   The conundrum of the loving Jesus offering grace set against the Jesus of Revelation 2 and 3 who says unless you turn around and change what you’re doing I’m going to take your lampstand away, spit you out of my mouth, and (perhaps, if you’re Thyatira’s Jezebel), kill your children…well, this is hard stuff.

It seems strange to have to work at receiving a gift.  But there is work to be done in receiving a thing, especially if you think you’re above the gift…or the giver.   Perhaps this is why pride is the worst of sins–it keeps you from receiving the grace being poured out.

Dillard writes about this so eloquently in the fifth chapter of The Writing Life.   She describes that sensation follows the hard work of probing, researching, hunting, structuring, and alligator-wrestling sentences.   When the work actually appears, even as you stand there with sweat dripping off your nose, you know that the arrival of the solution, the form, the final expression of what you had in mind all along has very little, if anything, to do with you.    The chapter, the novel, the play, the poem…they arrive by grace, as you are faithful.

Grace grows crops, but only if we seed, plow, and harvest.

God embeds his ways in ours, inviting us to join in shouldering the world even as He carries the whole thing.

Be faithful, show up, apply muscle, and open your hands and arms as wide as you can.   And grab some friends.  There is way more grace pouring out than we can handle by ourselves.

Grace works…

 

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