I first posted this a few years ago. The reason I did so then is the same I do so now, to celebrate my wife’s birthday. In the digital age, discovering a person’s age is as easy as a cursor, a mouse, and a nosy desire to know something. But, in the interest of propriety, I say simply, “Happy _____ birthday, babe!”
Babe, you still brighten the road before me…
An iron clutch without hope of release
gives way to an embrace
where death and dragons are vanquished
with a kiss from the once dead lips of the truest man.
Yesterday, too ordinary to see –
today, too bright to miss –
unless you were looking elsewhere.
And the happy songs of women
tell of news we should never have heard.
Dullards refuse, and, breathless now, men must admit
what was then has become heaven’s now.
When it comes to the spiritual enterprise, I’ve always found delight in the iconic metaphor of wandering. My best guess is that it most capably represents my propensity for being lost in places even blind people navigate with ease – a hallway to the bathroom, the distance from upright to nosedive, or retracing my steps from mall to parking lot.
It has found its way into my songs for years.
There are innumerable metaphors employed by the writer’s pen to describe transition, or passaging, as I like to call it. We “turn over a new leaf” or perhaps move from “night into day,” “turn on a light” or some such thing. Such metaphors reach for the deeper comparisons within us between what was, what is, and what is yet to come.
But this is different. Wandering isn’t the right metaphor here. This feels less like seeking something out than coming to terms with what is; a new normal. In that way, it is more the turning of a page in a book with more chapters read than yet to read.
I begin with a few words I wrote upon turning 50 a couple years ago:
“Our lives are a series of passages. One tributary leads to another, which in turn yields to something else on its way to waterfall or harbor, estuary or eddy. At times we are stuck, unmoving. Or so it seems. To be stuck can actually be a decision not to decide something. Perhaps it’s a slow, deep spot before being sucked back out into the rapids where we easily lose our sense of direction and the not unreasonable expectation that we’ll fly ass over tea kettle into the frothy spray. There are even times when our boat slows almost to a crawl and we find ourselves in the enchantments of a Pirates of the Caribbean style rendezvous with delight.”
In the chapter that is my work at Yakima Covenant Church, specifically with friend and colleague Duncan A. MacLeod, a page has turned. A new estuary has emerged requiring caution and intentionality, things I am not always known for. Like me, he too is passaging, seeking to ford new streams of possibility with their own risk and reward. He is writing a new chapter in a book yet unfolding (and a rather smelly, farm-y type one at that!).
“Whatever the case may be it should be our goal to passage well. That is, when faced with life’s bone-chilling decisions, we learn to listen for the most gracious, compassionate means by which to navigate such. Bad transitions lead to less than adequate skills needed for the yet more difficult passages to come. They also create a sinkhole of insecurity since we’ll just have to face similar rapids again later but with one more failure to our credit….I want to say goodbye well, with class, grace and compassion. A goodbye that puts a Gospel period at the end of a glorious sentence.”
Learning to passage well has many rewards. Fewer regrets I suppose might be one. But, more than that, in the ever-expanding journal of our meandering lives, a clarity of chapter markings brings a satisfaction to the sojourner of adequate closure before moving on to another part of their story. It expresses a sense of poise and, ultimately, denouement to our lives that those whose eyes watch us for signs of the Divine are longing to see. More than anything else, how we transition through the passages of our lives reveals the level of our trust in the unseen God making Godself seen – through us. Through you. Through me.
So, then, with the same trembling, inadequate faith with which I’ve typically faced these passages, I do so now once more. Who knows, perhaps this time I’ll have matured enough, even sub-atomically, to the point where I can help lead others in the same challenges?
But, then again, that would be faith in faith, not in God.
Picture found here
What sounds are these I hear
of sobs and sighing, seering pain of doubt.
If leaves could talk what might they say
of a crying God, a hopeful hopelessness wrapped in trust?
* * *
Raked across an endless heart,
the bursting bastions of familial love
come couched in terms of unsteady prayers, yearning, yet wavering.
One, two, three faltering steps toward full submission to…what?
* * *
“Must it be this way? Must this broken sentence require my full stop?
Let it be but a misstep, a simple error in divine judgment, and a world
hurled into disarray is called back again.
Must you kiss away their pain with my blood on your lips?”
* * *
Daylight friends become nighttime strangers.
Eyelids, heavy with grief, fear and confusion
flutter and fail. Closed and unseeing they become
when sharp and sure is needed most.
* * *
Gruff and groping they march,
crashing through grass, garden and grove,
sniffing and snorting with dark and heavy purpose.
A poisoned kiss stops cold their treading, hateful boots.
* * *
Two cold lips meet two warm cheeks.
Foe, one time friend, greets friend of all foes
and the world holds its breath –
pausing hell’s raucous revelry and heaven’s sonorous singing.
* * *
Ponderous parade of an army and shackled lamb
whisks down backroads to audience with puppets and clowns,
whose dirty, back-room deals deal out kangaroo justice,
promising the untimely sham of caustic, casual connivances.
* * *
Spewing, spitting, spluttering out lies,
the venom of their dalliance denies all place for truth.
And a king receives a pauper’s sentence.
And a pauper refuses a king’s ransom.
* * *
The dam of reason well collapsed
and the hammer of hate posing as justice
falls as teeth, claws and fangs bite deep
tearing open his back. Men flay the skin of God.
* * *
He is dressed in the accoutrements of power
the punch-line of sparring, jousting jokes
fit for fools, bullies and frightened little boys
with big fists and a caged bird.
* * *
His walk of shame, will soon regale his fame
and repeal the petty finagling of men, insane with lust
for blood, and bone and sating their angry palettes
on the sight of sorry sacrifice.
* * *
Bones meant for healing and holding faces in tender embrace
part for fiercer spikes, a government’s answer
to the unanswerable questions posed by a hated God,
whose broken feet stay secured to the place of their forgiveness.
* * *
Now begins, indeed, a most sinister work.
An only child, spurned by a doting Father scorns
the unsearchable pain of eternal loneliness that supercedes
a lesser pain: political torture by tiny men.
* * *
The uncertain winter sky belches forth
her mystifying darkness and the once joyous birdsong
succumbs to a silence, infinitely louder,
dripping with the shame of what shouldn’t have needed to happen.
* * *
Time’s bullseye is set in its fitting of that heaving breast,
gasping for breath, groping for a sorry excuse for waning life.
But oh, what shines forth from such battered spirit:
the alchemy of grace, a gavel strikes with love.
* * *
“It is finished” – such words, by heaven hitherto unspoken,
hang in the air like molecules of exhaled proclamation:
a deed done means another can begin,
and in 3 words, the world is forever changed.
* * *
Carrion collective circles high above,
the smell of death and forbidden dinner ripe in the air.
They, whoring, hope for bits of flesh, hair and bone,
meal of mangy wing-ed mongrels bent on the efforts of others.
* * *
Not so for this diamond, bloodied, limp and alone.
A poor man’s corpse blesses a rich man’s tomb
and scented linens shroud the face of passion
that, for now at least, lie pristine and still.
* * *
Why should such a tale, so swift, so sorrowful
twist itself into our earthly fabric?
How could such shameful chaos perpetrated by pawns
undo the fickle fate of cowards and kings?
* * *
What sounds are these I hear?
They are the mournful sobs of a Mother,
the shameful cries of deserters,
the longing sighs of the dead…
Photos: http://www.artbible.info
If not for this, then all would be that,
and when forsakes why,
and time gasps for breath.
Stand still with nowhere left to go.
Sing these notes now,
these words for this, not that,
waiting for the longer wait;
the unplanned non-plan;
all counting, forsaken, in the business of nothing –
and watch what yet will come.
In those long and pasty days,
wrung out with the common befuddlements of
our race, there can seem to be no
end to the tributaries,
soggy back roads,
sullen detours, the personal politics
of working in a chain gang fog.
The sun, warming and full, is the same to
saint and sinner, soldier and sailor.
But doubly-parsed is its heat, meted out to all,
recklessly packaged for warmth, whim or want –
hope to one, threat to another, necessity to all.
Yet in between the particles of dreams lie
the pocked and random picture of our days.
To hoist and heft, backs bent and necks strained,
seems lighter when singing – or laughing because
the joke is good.
To laugh means more when everyone hears
the same words but the punchlines are different.
And only the skilled purveyor of the phrase, delicately
turned and timed with skill, can help the cautious and
skeptical, proud and aloof, naïve and wide-eyed alike
to get in on something good.
The better the tale, the shorter the toil.
So we dig deep to find the best tales straining
to sort and sift and make sense of
the broken, unpatterned pieces
strewn about the edges of things.
So, with subtle indirection, the toolbox of yearning
wed to oratory, wed to a cloud of unknowing,
expecting nothing more than a tale well told,
comes the bard and we are given –
a road for our story.
_____________
Dedicated with great respect, gratitude, and love to pastor and friend and retired bard, Duncan A. MacLeod
I figured St. David’s Day was a good reason to reblog part 1 of a 6-part series I wrote last year on the Welsh-Celtic idea of “hiraeth.” Come, join me for the journey!
“The human heart is a theater of longing” -John O’Donohue (Eternal Echoes)
The Celts have a concept, Hiraeth (here-eyeth). It is a Welsh word, about as difficult to define as it is to pronounce.
Let’s try.
It might be defined as a longing, a homesickness for a home to which one can never return. It is the unrequited hope that produces ever more unanswered longing. It is a grieving for the lost places and moments of one’s past – a sense of loss for loving moments and places, fondly remembered. It sits in the dream world where longing, belonging, home, and wanderlust meet.
I’ve lived my entire life in this terrible, wonderful, aching place, rarely able to make sense of it but never able to escape it. I like to think I’m a complex mystic. Others I’m sure simply dismiss it as the cross-eyed musings of a artsy moron. But…
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Valentine’s Day, although a convenient Hallmark construct, is still a good day to tell special ones you love them. I wrote this a couple years ago in celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary. It all holds just as true today. Love you, babe.
When I look at her I see a few extra pounds, a slight sag on one side of her face, the residual effects of a Bell’s Palsy and a few extra facial lines every year. I see someone whose love for life is second only to her love for risky adventure. Most likely, one has fed the other. I see an olive-skinned, brown-eyed, Welsh-born, Canadian-raised girl whose voluptuous curves still captivate and tantalize me. I see a face wiser from pain, hands tougher from hard work, a smile gentler and more thoughtful from raising two complicated, wonderful sons and a brow somehow more relaxed from having weathered innumerable storms, many of them my sorry gift to her.
There is a bite to her wit, at once caustic but ultimately harmless. There is a joy in her step even if that means tripping more than is generally possible for the average…
View original post 447 more words
When nothing but shade
remains on our contentments,
the leaves return
and the budding forest of unborn
dreams, breathes more loudly still,
of wonder,
aching.
Photo found here
I just returned from a denominational conference in Chicago.
That in itself is nothing particularly unique or special. But it has provided ample opportunity for observing, listening, and to a lesser extent participating, in the strange soup that is contemporary evangelicalism.
I love my newly adopted denomination of the Evangelical Covenant Church.
Among Protestant, evangelical denominations it’s at the top of the list for what I expect and/or prefer in a faith family with whom I sojourn. A big front door, a big living room, a big heart, big ideas, and a small theology ledger.
A non-creedal body by history and by choice, there is no dotted line awaiting my subservient signature to enter and serve. As such, the ECC provides a place in which to actually practice the work of theology on the ground – you know, where Jesus did before leaving to get his doctorate.
Typically, our post-Enlightenment milieu seeks to train up preachers like God scientists. Sideline the complexities of self and soul and stuff young heads like Christmas turkeys with doughy abstractions and crunchy data, then send them out as over-confident, naked children to fight lions with noodles.
I’ve written much about my twenty-year journey out of evangelicalism into a much broader ocean tinged in the light of a more mystical, pre-Reformation, eastern Christianity. For me to even consider climbing back aboard this ship required a pretty convincing package.
So far, the ECC seems to be that package.
In brief, the ECC is comprised of a complicated mix of Swedish Lutheranism distilled through North American Pietism. It has found its way forward, stumbling together through all manner of daunting issues, learning itself by means of diverse community, water-cooler (pub, more likely) conversation, congregational government, word and sacrament, occasional passive-aggression, all over micro-brew and cigars.
It’s enough to make C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton downright giggly.
An old world Lutheranism offers the richness of liturgical worship and sacramentalism while its new world Pietism places it in the hinterland where the ‘other’ lives. On the backroads, the rank and file are too busy surviving to worry whether or not all the right words are in all the right places.
It prefers connectivity over credibility, presence over power, and communal acquiescence over conversant apologetics. It may be the last bastion of evangelicalism where any hint of spiritual orthopraxy is wed, albeit tangentially, to theological orthodoxy. It’s tea cozies for some, bad whiskey in dirty cups for others. My kinda place.
This blog from the beginning has existed to give voice to the centrality of spiritual formation in all I do, think, say, believe, adore….How gratifying to know that this denomination has an entire wing dedicated to the promotion of the same. There is more than lip service paid to the idea of souls being satiated in the numinous realities of the ineffable God.
As one tasked with drawing a local congregation into the worship of God, this has given me a good place to explore. I can continue my journey into post-modern, eclectic liturgy rooted in a more robust sacramentalism.
But I can also do so with a view to reimagining the church’s ancient past for a very complex present. In this endeavor I am finding friends, co-laborers in the liturgical arts game with whom I can toss around the stuff of our trade. They are beautiful souls and have almost as many questions as I when it comes to how best to ply our trade in the murky complexities of local church ministry.
The ECC is not perfect. We still succumb to the temptation of hipster idolatry and the cult of relevance. We are still a bit too easily enamored of evangelicalism’s how-to mentality where every conceivable question has an airtight answer. The subtle presence of American pragmatism can be seen sniffing around the corners and we’re a bit too close to Christian industry-speak for my taste. Finally, we find ourselves mired in a safety-zone mentality on matters of human sexuality.
But in spite of this, it is a very healthy alternative to almost anything else I’ve seen within the vast dysfunction of the growing-by-division evangelical family. It’s been a good place to be found of God.
It is the garden in which I am presently planted.
And I am glad to be here.
Photos by Jessica Perez and someone else with a very daunting selfie stick
If we are made in God’s image and God sings, then we should be singing, too.
Ancient Wisdom for Modern Seekers
Spiritual Direction for Integrated Living
From liquid courage to Sober Courage
an anamcara exploring those close encounters of the liminal kind
Collaborating with the Muses to inspire, create, and illuminate
...in such kind ways...
"That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works." Psalm 26:7
Blog for poet and singer-songwriter Malcolm Guite
…in the thick of things
REFLECTIONS & REVIEWS
Seeking that which is life giving.
… hope is oxygen
Homepage of Seymour Jacklin: Writer - Narrator - Facilitator
If we are made in God’s image and God sings, then we should be singing, too.
Ancient Wisdom for Modern Seekers
Spiritual Direction for Integrated Living
From liquid courage to Sober Courage
an anamcara exploring those close encounters of the liminal kind
Collaborating with the Muses to inspire, create, and illuminate
...in such kind ways...
"That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works." Psalm 26:7
Blog for poet and singer-songwriter Malcolm Guite
…in the thick of things
REFLECTIONS & REVIEWS
Seeking that which is life giving.
… hope is oxygen
Homepage of Seymour Jacklin: Writer - Narrator - Facilitator
innerwoven 