The light was thinner today, unplagued by summer arrogance.
The aging, iron-grey sky cooperates fully with the falling day,
pouring out one particle at a time onto the browning green.
I watched it pool in elegance, gathering
in the playful dance of moths and paupers.
Lower down, close to the roots of things,
my feet can touch the back of this place, falling simply
as eyes preparing for a blanched horizon are caressed
by the autumnal bounty of God’s spare time.
Lord, tie up my expectations like a pretzel
and replace them with a welcome mat
upon which are written only 4 words:
“Thy will be done.”
Lord, press into the soft, unmarrowed places
of make believe love and headstrong hypocrisy
your thumbprint still dirty from
pinching me alive.
Lord, impale me upon the stake of truth,
not the truth of deception in perfect answers
but the Truth that leaves open wounds
on a heart that only looks for niceties.
Lord, sit me down at the base of this wood
pounded together with the same nails
that tore through flesh softer than love,
tougher than hate.
Lord, with meddling tongue tied behind my back
let my hands, now free
show my mouth that it’s silence
has gifted those I now serve.
Lord, interrupt the long stream of my proclamations
of ideas diminished by my words;
words lesser still than those who listen
for something better than words.
Lord, fill my life with the awesome silence
of a boisterous heaven, singing in praise;
for only then will what I say and do
remind others of who you say I am.
Painting by James Seward
In July of this year, I posted a series of evening Poems of Examen. I thought it might be fun to post them to my innerwoven blog as well. I pray they are meaningful to you.
Glance, and I will escape you.
Look, and I will show you.
Behold, and I will move you.
Observe, and I will educate you.
See, and I will change you.
Changed, you will see me.
Perfectly groomed bushes line the windows looking out onto a courtyard greener, damper and more alive than I’ve seen since moving to Yakima seven years ago. A giant kiln-shaped fireplace centered in the garden sits quiet and still awaiting the passing of the rain and the arrival of others to warm themselves in its heat. 
I chuckle at the closed table umbrellas standing tall and upright like stoic ladies in green, puffy skirts. Their task here is to keep one dry from the reliable Portland rain. The Yakima umbrella, although rare, acts as a glorified sunhat and is seldom used anyway. There they curse rain. Here, they wait for sun (if indeed they know what that is).
How I have missed the instant plunge into the deeper regions of my psyche, specifically the creative mystic part such an environment always brings. Like these condensation droplets adorning the windows through which I am looking, words almost instantly form in my mind. I need only mop them up and squeeze them onto the thirsty page.
There are many gifts that come to us from favorite places – both geographic location and the more unnameable geography of soul – suitable to our most natural selves. What has been lacking for me in the dusty, brown, overly hot setting of Yakima has been met in a stable plateau upon which to take a good, long and slow look in every direction. With my feet sunk in a little more deeply into the dusty soil of the Yakima Valley, I’ve known a certain freedom from which to venture into other, hitherto unexplored regions in my own soul. Places in the humility of obscurity, the predictability of nothingness, the garden of faithfulness and the simple, daily routines of life.
From these places, previously visited only briefly with my face pressed up against the glass, I have seen many things. God has pulled me up from the luscious, subterranean waters of my deepest yearnings to the street where the people are. They are those who populate my days and need the nourishment I myself have been given. I am reintroducing myself to the world, seeing familiar and beloved faces again as if for the first time. Ironically, in them, I am finding myself and, even more significantly, I am seeing Jesus. God is equally present above the bald, treeless ground as below it in the dark, thin places where nutrients abound but is largely unpopulated.
Here and now converge more readily as I release the tightly held things I believed indispensable to my wholeness. Slowly, God is revealing to my spirit just how present God is in such places – places formerly reprehensible and ugly. God is nesting more intricately in me. I see God more now and that is setting me free from expectations and demands and leading me to the joys of union, home, and peace…anywhere.
It is the greatest gift I could receive on this, the day of my fiftieth birthday.
There was a light that burned,
a shifting, settled light – the kind
that changes the room from one
kind of good to a better one.
The moths played in the shade
like winged marionettes parading
their playful dance never far
from the light but choosing
to stay stuck where it only shines
to amuse and titillate, not
where it shines to tease out
shadows and contours of faces.
Above, on a hungry ceiling dwell
other specters, images drowning
in the goodness of this moment.
Seated apart but facing each other
are the comrades of long-lived kindness
still working through the politics of light.
I looked from the chair beside the window
where the night sky can taste the late hour.
Here the tally of joys and intentions
weigh themselves against the whimpering
sighs of another. Another whose chair
beside another window in another place
sees a night sky pillowed and smooth
and takes what few, rumpled clouds remain,
hiding from the dark, ready for the day.
And, in an eye-twinkle of quickening whimsy –
simply walks away.
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. 
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 turn 50 on Monday. Sorry, just let me write that again to be sure I’m not asleep. I turn 50 on Monday. Numbers. We get so stuck on them. Especially the “decade” numbers that are supposed to magically move us on to newer, higher, greater things than we were meant to achieve in our last, apparently insufficient, decade. So, at 50, what should my “achievements” be? To whom do I speak to discover my rating for my forties? Who hands out the balloons and coffee to the five-decade newbies? It comes either with joie de vivre or woe is me that numbers are wielded with respect to age. Along with the number comes a freight train long derivative connotations, expectations, projections, assumptions, and tongue-in-cheek pathos. Pish posh says I.
I think so little about age related stuff these days. Make no mistake, I’m still vain, overly self-concerned and a bit slower maybe. But the idea that, by this age, I should or shouldn’t be something is anathema to me. I am exactly what, who and where I am. It just…is. Yes, I have goals. Yes, I have patterns and certain expectations both of others and myself. Yes, I have jetsam floating in my wake I wish weren’t so obvious. But, at almost 50, I’m happy with what life has or has not become.
I’m much more interested in being the most surrendered and loving person I can be at any given moment during these passages of my life which only seem to come more quickly all the time. I want to say hello well with a definitive eye to eye recognition of another human being equally as needy as I. I want to say forgive me well, and often, to those who have had the misfortune of discovering just how much of an asshole I can be. I want to hold people’s pain and joy well, that they invite me to do so again and offer similar friendship to me. 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 me.
Lord, I pray that I’ve passaged well from my forties to my fifties. Let love and kindness be the obvious characteristics of this next passage, Lord. Let the walls of this tunnel be painted with the handprints of those I’ve loved. May the wake of my boat be littered with the flower petals of other’s lives I’ve been blessed to know. May this aging pilgrim always see the best in others and give them the chances afforded me. It’s how I most want to passage.
I turn 50 on Monday. I can hardly wait.
How about you? What does your current passage ask of you?
How might God be inviting you to passage well in these days?
When the reprisals of our souls,
too young to love, too small for pain,
repeat their mistaken ventures into
the uncolored light of mistaken journeys,
then it is that the walls whisper
their ghostlike songs of ever after –
sighs of the imperfect.
* * *
Here there are no endings,
only endings of old beginnings
that transform by a refusal
to submit to the indentured servitude
of the hollow and broken,
preferring instead the ancient newness
of Cistine handshakes.
* * *
In the cowls of earth, her ears of stone,
hear fathomless time, tonsured and teased
from her birthplace deep in
embowelled truth whose Name Is.
Encompass within yourself this
faceless sojourner only now
learning his name.
Photo courtesy of my friends and fellow monastic-creatives at Abbey of the Arts. Thanks Christine Valters-Paintner.
Here, in this place awash in daylight grace,
I live my entire life on the head of a pin
on which is inscribed a single word:
surrender.
When todays are saturated in
a low, crawling, redeeming sadness:
surrender.
When the all-pervasive pall of a greening grey
removes dead soul-skin and tastes
like eating raw sewage:
surrender.
When the bitter pill of leafless desire
gets stuck in my throat and
stops up anything nutritional:
surrender.
When the wafer thin moments
of happy times bought at another’s expense
rob me of me:
surrender.
When my lover who shares
my bed, my skin, my guts, my hopes,
becomes nothing more than a side dish:
surrender.
When, in convenience, I sidestep
responsibility to another
and choose the busy road of non-involvement:
surrender.
When I’ve surrendered all I am and have,
all I’ve been and will become,
all that was, all that is and all that is not:
surrender.
When I’ve surrendered all,
I gain the one thing,
the Pearl of Great Price,
the Lily of the Valley,
the One who is in all,
who is all
and who needs no introduction because…
my soul knows him.
Lately, I’ve been reading the journals of the late Trappist monk, author, priest and activist, Thomas Merton. He has long fascinated me both as a spiritual mentor and as poet and literary figure. In so many ways he is among those I most seek to emulate. He’s artsy – a poet at heart, which means he’s also moody and can take forever to determine new directions because he “lives in his head” too much. He longs for silence and the contemplative life of solitude but cannot escape the draw of the monastic community and the world at large to whom he is constantly being called. “My first duty is to start, for the first time, to live as a member of a human race, which is no more (and no less) ridiculous than I am myself. And my first human act is the recognition of how much I owe everybody else.”
Merton belonged because he didn’t belong. His life away from the world was how he best loved and served it. He was not cloistered to escape his humanity but to better love and live it. “I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am…We must first become like ourselves and stop living “beside ourselves.”” I, like Merton, have learned best from what I haven’t done well than what I have. By how I’ve failed, not passed. By how truly unremarkable and troublesome I am, not my efficiency and accomplishments. I am failing my way to the deeper realities of my own soul.
Thank you, brother Merton, you are helping me to relax in my humanity.
Oddly, I’m finding Jesus there.
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 