it_is_enough_pt_2-6.6#

Finally
by Wendell Berry

Finally will it not be enough,
after much living, after
much love, after much dying
of those you have loved,
to sit on the porch near sundown
with your eyes simply open,
watching the wind shape the clouds
into the shape of clouds?

Even then you will remember
the history of love, shaped
in the shape of flesh, everchanging
as the clouds that pass, the blessed
yearning of body for body,
unending light.
You will remember, watching
the clouds, the future of love.

Last night, some friends and I were speaking about the Eucharist (the Lord’s supper, Communion, Common Meal, etc.) over whiskey-and-gingers. Thinking back to our conversation, I was reflecting today on the persistent mystery of the Eucharist. And my unabated tendency to talk too much.

Afterward we drove to a downtown grocery store, listening to John McMillan’s choral piece “Seven Last Words from the Cross.”

We bought some juice, some flatbread. And we had a small service on the back of my car, around midnight.

The windows of the car down, we played Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” through the stereo, his meditation on the Trinity. The simple violin and piano competed with the hip hop blaring from other cars. It was beautiful how clearly the music sounded through as we partook: the body of Christ, broken for us. The blood of Christ, poured out for us.

The past few weeks, I’ve seen friends old and new, from so many different periods of my life. I saw a high school friend, a few friends from college, a friend from England, new friends.

I think I entered these encounters looking for some kind of sign to who I’ve been and who I’m becoming. To trace the path of my life, to scour it for some sort of key to myself. And I found no such key, and the questions that I have about my life and myself are like an unanswered grief. How could I have lived so long and still not know the things that I don’t know?

What I found in place of an answer, though, was hospitality.

Two friends from college sitting in my basement, showing a deep hospitality through their interest, their kindness, their love. I wrote of it to a friend: “I felt that they’d invited me in somewhere warm on a cold night, that they’d set a chair close to the wood stove where I could sit and listen to the melody of the wind, the music of low and loving voices.”

A high school friend helping me think through issues in a parking garage at 3am. Another college friend sharing his passion for the creative community of his city. Sharing a pipe and conversation with two friends on the river downtown, and more conversation by candlelight in my home.

Sitting on the porch with two new friends that I already cherish, sharing a love for pipes, scotch, poetry. And speaking that poetry, words we have known and loved well, into the night. Words that are small but have so much power. Words that bring joy and laughter, or that open up worlds of meaning within the silence.

Last night, in that parking lot, the four of us came to eat the meal that God offers us. We ate, and drank. And maybe Communion doesn’t provide us with answers to many of the questions that haunt us. But in it we find the presence of God. A deep and abiding hospitality.

I wonder if some part of Job was dissatisfied when God offered only His presence, a Creation described in terms of intimacy with its Creator, at the end of Job’s trials: no real explanation, no comfort. Or maybe Job was just wiser than me in the ways of a mysterious God. Which is not hard to imagine.

In the midst of dark trial, I know I have looked at what God has offered and thought, “It is not enough.”

But then, sometimes, astoundingly, in those same dark places, it is enough.

God’s presence, and the remembrance of His presence, may be dramatic and awe-inspiring in such moments. Or they may come on quietly, as when Elijah heard the quiet whisper of the presence of God.

But in that moment, either can seem like nothing less than an invitation to eat and drink at an extravagant table.

familiar_birds-5.17#

Today I decided to rest.

I woke late. Heated up some chicken tikka masala I made for lunch yesterday. I ate while I perused a Henri Nouwen book I’ve read before.

I went for a drive. The usual drive. Forty-five minutes of winding through forests to a lake-side park. I always stop halfway at the same grocery store for a rather humble cup of coffee to accompany my pipe.

Today, the whole drive out, I felt like I was waiting to wake up. I have been tired. And I’ve been blowing on an ember of discontent, and it’s been glowing. And it’s been hard to hold, and I’ve been holding.

I parked in front of a wall of honeysuckle. I stepped out, and was struck by the scent. Just like always, like every spring, when those fragrances of the warmer South spread again.

I sat at a picnic table there, looking out over a broad expanse of lake. I lit the pipe, which took a while in the wind. I sipped the coffee. And sat.

And the only thing over all that water, under all that sky, were five birds, small and sharp-winged. They sped and dove, they played the whole time I was there. I would forget about them, and one would arc a few feet away from me. I hope to remember enough about them to identify them later. But I do not trust my memory, as fleeting as those fast wings. The birds either did not know I was there, or they considered me harmless. They flew close enough to feel kindred.

When the pipe was done, I took my coffee back to the car and got in. But then, I got out again, the car still running. I walked to the honeysuckle bush, and bent to find a suitable flower. I picked it. Pinched it at the base and pulled the pistil through to drink the nectar. I drank a couple more–like when I was a child. It was sweeter even than I remembered, the flavor stronger.

I heard a rustling–a cardinal, in the bush near my feet. A flash of red among the green. He saw or heard me, and he vanished.

And then I left. Almost as if to remind me of their play, the birds danced around the car as I drove from the park. I almost had forgotten them, as I forget so many of the small joys each day brings. I turn from blessing to blessing to blessing. Like a child, I forget, and I am overwhelmed again and again.

What a joy to share the world with these creatures that could occupy the novels of Marquez or Murakami: strange and beautiful birds that seem to know me, but whose names I either can’t remember, or never knew.

The day made me think of a Li-Young Lee poem.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Note: After spending some time with my copy of the Sibley Guide to Birds, I think my friends at the lake are cliff swallows.

it_is_enough-5.4#

It is enough that the arrows fit exactly in the wounds that they have made.

-Franz Kafka

I read this quote earlier today, and I have been turning it over in my mind since, with a host of other thoughts that sweep and startle like scattering birds.

Some think Kafka was saying that we had been prepared to receive our wounds, that our bodies held a readiness to shape the affliction. Looking afterwards, it is as if we had borne the arrows’ mark before we met them, and thus shaped our meeting. And, most importantly, as we reflect on our injuries, it is impossible to see the arrow apart from how we have received it.

Or maybe he is, more simply, referencing the kind of intimacy that we build with our sufferings. How beautiful that our lives turn into our stories! and that the borders of ourselves meet the edge of that which has helped to shape us.

hail-4.28#

The morning after,
the whole town a soft bed
of torn and shredded leaves.

Last night, a storm. A greenish sky in evening that gave way to wind and rain. Hail as big as your palm, in the shape of stars. Today, cars on the road with dents, with broken windshields.

I waited at a friend’s house until it was safe to drive home. Conversation was the rhythm of the storm’s passage, candlelight warmed our watching.

In the sky, lightning like rivers too quick to cross.

two_dreams-3.28#

I had two dreams last night that were both very striking. I wrote them down, and spoke with a couple of friends about them earlier. The language might seem a little more sparse than in my average post: many of the details are already difficult to remember, and I didn’t want to embellish.

In the first dream, my whole family is together in a miserable place. It’s like when you see a horror movie about an abandoned mental institution–white walls, a sterile feel, but now dirty from years of disuse. Except that there are people everywhere, just walking around aimlessly.

We start seeing people among the others who have turned into monsters. Awful things, that sometimes are people, but whose limbs sometimes twist into something horrifying. They keep scaring and harassing us.

At some point, I talk to another girl there, and she explains that the goal is to make us cause each other pain. The ultimate goal is to get us to turn into monsters. There is a name for each of these things, but I can’t remember it.

At night, my family members all have sleeping bags, and we all go to sleep in one room together. I wake up in the middle of the night and there’s soft music playing in my sleeping bag. I look, and I find that the source is a piece of candy I’d been given earlier. I decide that that must be what makes us cause each other pain, and eventually turns us into monsters. I want it. I had wanted to eat it all day. But instead, I throw it out the cracked window.

I still hear a soft music. And one by one, I find the pieces of candy–there are tons of them–that are all around the room, and throw them out the window. At one point, my brother wakes up and asks what I’m doing. I explain, and he says that he had wanted the candy but he understands, that I should go ahead, continue throwing them away. At one point a girl who’d turned into a monster flies by outside on gigantic wings, looking in at me–which is terrifying, grotesque.

The dream was incredibly frightening, and I feel that I’ve forgotten all the scariest parts.

I know that I remember less from the second dream. In it, I’m on an island. There’s a tall building with many floors right on the edge of the ocean, where everyone in the dream lives. Almost everyone else there seems to be strongly against reading. There’s a girl there that I’d grown up with, who is everything to me. But in the dream something happens to her, and she dies.

We are having a funeral for her. She’s wrapped up in a sheet, and we’re getting ready to throw her from a balcony into the ocean. But I want to read something over her first, even though the others are all upset by the idea.

I go to find something to read, running down several flights of stairs to search through books, trying to find just the right passage. I’m down there an hour, maybe a few hours. Finally I find it, something from a novel. But as I’m running back up all the stairs, someone sees me and tells me that they’ve all been looking for me, that they couldn’t find me anywhere.

By the time I get back to the balcony, almost everyone is gone. The few of us who are left have a short service there, and throw her over the railing into the sea.

stopping_the_car-3.24#

“When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the tree with the lights in it.’ It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually, the light went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”

-Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This morning I saw on campus, in the early sun between buildings, a tree of light spring leaves, lit from within. It made me think of Dillard’s “tree with the lights in it,” though I didn’t have time to plumb its depths. One of the things Dillard reminds me is to watch, to see, to stalk. To make time for life. It’s not always easy when you’re hurrying through the cold to class.

The air Tuesday night was perfect, the way it is after a rain. I took the long way home, stopping at a lake, and lost myself in remembering, in shorelights reflecting on water.

Nothing significant has happened to me on the waters at the edges of this city. But all the silences I’ve shared with friends at their dark shores, all the moments I’ve stared into their depths or, from beside them, stared at a parallel depth of starlight, have grown into my idea of Home. And now, when I think of this city, I must include this sparse cry of nightbirds, this ineffable glass surface, this exquisite shadow.

A few days ago, I saw a hawk drop from the sky to kill a cardinal. A flash of brown and red, a moment of struggle, and then silence. It was the first time I’d seen a hawk kill. It seemed almost too fast to be the end of a life.

A few days ago, sitting in the sun, smoking a pipe, my to-go coffee cup would occasionally catch the wind and sing a long, low note. Later, driving, the wind spun dry leaves across the road in front of me in a perfect spiral.

A few days before that, driving through the city in the still-dark morning, an animal trotted into the road. I slowed, I stopped. It paused to looked up at me: a red fox. And then we both went on our ways.

Most days I can have similar encounters if I have time to stop the car. It may not be the overwhelming glance of the tree with the lights in it, but I can see, and be seen. A fox; a sudden symphony of birdsong. That late-spring scent of turned earth. A building, abandoned, reclaimed by dust and light.

“… knowledge does not vanquish mystery, or obscure its distant lights.”

dust_and_ashes-3.17#

I remember the first time I went to [East Asia], I was fifteen years old. Our group was there for about five weeks, and were given certain advice about wisely living in the city for that length of time. One of the things we were told was to not give money to beggars.

At one point I was out with some native friends walking through the park. And at one point, I heard a cry. Suddenly I noticed the boy, probably eleven or twelve years old. He was lying on the ground, his legs misshapen, twisted around. He was dragging his body across the concrete with his hands, begging for money, for anything I could give him.

My friends were embarrassed, were leading me away, were pulling me. And I was looking back at this child, at this suffering, this pit of desperation and pain. It was at this point that I realized, down to the depths of myself, exactly where it is that we’re living.

What are we doing here? What are we supposed to be doing?

I have spent most of my life trying to be more loving. First of all, to love my God more. And also to love my brother more, my brothers in Christ and in humanity. I have tried to love more the unlovable, to see the image of God that he bears that I do not believe he can destroy. I have tried to be moved by suffering, to be tender to it, to seek to help. I have tried to care more about the loneliness that we all live in. To care more about the struggling soul, the heart in peril.

I have failed in this more often than not. When I encounter the weak, the suffering, the difficult, I see again how small my heart is, how hard. Some days, grappling with that hardness of heart feels like nothing short of a barroom brawl. Some days, then, I don’t fight at all. I only see afterwards how I let down a friend by choosing to not listen or pay attention. I only acknowledge later how callous I was in a situation, or even how purposefully hurtful. Even then, I downplay the damage I’ve caused. When it comes to loving God I fail in even more serious ways, and in ways, I’m sure, that I’m more oblivious to.

But regardless of how short I daily fall of the mark, it is still my goal. I have been loved by God. I have, by His grace, loved Him in return. I have been loved well by other people, and, more rarely, loved them well in return. I have seen the transformative and healing power of real love. In the light of it, I have grown.

I know that love has an aspect to it of discipline, a certain rough and wild character. I believe that kindness is a part of it, but “niceness” probably isn’t.

/ “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” /

/ And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. /

I suppose, what I’m struggling with, what I’m struggling against, is the idea that there is no reason to have compassion on the unsaved. Real compassion. I don’t think that compassion needs to involve misrepresenting our faith, I don’t think it needs to involve changing our beliefs. But sometimes I feel that I have more in common with a wrong view presented in kindness and compassion, than a correct one presented with harshness toward the unbeliever.

/ The king was shaken. He went up to the room over the gateway and wept. As he went, he said: “O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you–O Absalom, my son, my son!” /

/ But now, please forgive their sin–but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written. /

/ I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit— that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. /

What was it that enabled Moses and Paul to make these extreme statements? What was it that moved them?

Some memories you can, in an instant, recall so strongly that all of its emotions flood in together. Even now, years later, I can place myself in a refugee tent, in sweltering heat. I had undertaken about 24 hours of travel, with many mishaps and false starts on the way, to try to help any way that I could after a natural disaster. And finally here I sat, in a refugee camp for the few who had survived two villages that had been completely, irrevocably destroyed. For days, I had talked to person after person, all day. Every story was the same: “My entire family is dead. I am the only one left.”

Now, sweat and dirt prickling my skin, among the hot smell of grass and earth and plastic, holding a six-week old child whose mother, twenty-one years old, had died five days earlier. The father, twenty-four, sat in front of me with tears in his eyes. And I prayed for this child, in a foreign language, and I tried to put everything of myself into that prayer. Limited by language, by experience, by humanity, I wept and cried out for this child, for every child, and there were no words, and the words I prayed were jumbled, and in the face of the situation they were dust and ashes, dust and ashes.

After leaving them, in the immediacy of the experience, I offered a life for a life. For that child, I offered what I could not offer to gain what God would not promise. Inside, the problem of suffering is like a dark moon on the horizon, and that moment crashes against the hard rock of unbending theology in unending tides. The rock doesn’t move. But I hope, and hope, and hope, and I try to give as much as I can give. At my best, I try to be broken, to be poured out, for all men, after the example of Christ.

The irony, of course, is that more often, suffering doesn’t move me nearly as much as selfishness. Only in a few moments has the sheer gravity of it bowled me over, so that even years later I am left dazed.

Job had many questions, questions at least as pressing as mine. His had an urgency that, much of the time, mine do not. He prayed, he cried out, he struggled in the context of an unhelpful, judgmental community. He was a man who knew the heart of God. And, at the end, the only answer he was given was God’s presence, His immediacy. The idea that a person who doesn’t have conscious, cut-and-dry theological answers is one that hasn’t struggled for them, in both prayer and Scripture, is false, false, false.

/ “But let him that glories glory in this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the LORD which exercise loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight”, says the LORD. /

We often have a way of saying we believe things for the sake of the glory of God. Like Calvinism: we believe God is sovereign, and He chooses to accept and deny men for His glory. Or Arminianism: we believe Man freely choosing God is what most fully glorifies Him. Ultimately, whatever we decide to be true, we then decide that it glorifies God. And when we see people turning aside from these systems, we say that they are attacking God’s glory.

/ “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” /

/ I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time. /

/ That is why we labor and strive, because we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe. /

After judgement, what will happen to the love I have for the unsaved? I believe that these people may experience very serious consequences for not being in right standing with God. This is what I’ve been taught, and ultimately, it’s what I believe. I believe in the destructiveness of sin. And I believe that sin is an offense against God, an offense that deserves punishment. I understand these things.

But I do hope that there is more mercy, more grace, more salvation than it seems like there is. May the Lord be my greatest hope; but this is a hope of mine, akin to my hope of redemption for the lost, my hope of renewal for the broken. Maybe this has all been a defense of that hope, and a defense of the love from which it grows–in spite of what I believe.

Because I do not rejoice to acknowledge that most victims of the natural disaster whose aftermath I saw, the tens of thousands of victims whose survivors I’ve met, may be headed toward not only physical, but also eternal, destruction.

I do not feel I need to attribute it to the glory of God. I don’t consider it something that should elicit my praise. I do not know, I do not know. I have struggled, I have strained my whole life, to love people, all people, even from afar, even though I do not seek enough to know them, even though if I did know them I would surely fail them. I cannot be content with their destruction. I am not sure what will happen.

And I mourn.

Dust and ashes, dust and ashes.

O, Absalom, my son, my son.

giving_dust-3.9#

“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?”

I received ashes tonight.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

My Lenten disciplines will be to listen, and to see. And also to participate, in whatever ways present themselves, in restoration.

Lately the ways have been many, and they have been difficult. In fact, I’ve scarcely been able to escape the fact that I’m dust. And what does dust have to give, but dust?

There are so many limits involved in mortality. So much inherent need.

Luckily, I will never escape those limits or that need. That is not, and will never be, the goal. Usually we think most of the pain of mortality. I was thinking today of its comfort, and the way it leads us to rely on a loving Father to do what we cannot.

I hope those in my life will accept what I do have to offer: some of myself, the dust of a mumbled prayer or spoken word, a hand on the shoulder. Something small, that will pass away like all things.

mansion-2.9#

I was looking through old e-mails from my time in [an Asian country] today, and found in one of them this passage about the love of God. I wrote it in a difficult time, and it’s strange to read now, so far removed from everything related to that life.

“There is one home: our Father’s mansion, with its many rooms. Yes, the one prepared for us in the afterlife. But on this mortal coil, this mansion is the love of God. We are always inside it, even now. Sometimes, through sin or circumstance or merely time, we fall asleep, and it seems that in the night we have been carried to a strange place. We are somehow in a place that’s dark, painful, terrifying. We may exhaust tremendous amounts of energy trying to leave this strange house and return to our Father’s love, to our true home. When we call for Him we may hear nothing, we may run through door after door, we may prostrate ourselves and weep. Often only then, calmed by our own tears, can we recognize that we have never left home–never left His love–only entered an unfamiliar room, an unfamiliar manifestation of the very love that brought our world into being. His love, this mansion, is simply too large to be fully known.”

advent-12.11#

I’ve been stepping into Advent over the course of the last month. Stepping into that moment of waiting for God to act: the moment before the Exodus, the time of the Psalms that cry out for salvation, the time before Christ’s birth as the nation of Israel groaned in exile, the Holy Saturday where a great question mark loomed, and then all the time since and all that to come until Christ returns to judge, we are told, the living and the dead.

There have been times of Advent in my life, too. Merton writes of how, in liturgy, we are experiencing the past, the present, and the future. And I have seen that that experience is not only cross-generational but personal. As I cry out to my God for salvation, for release, for peace, for a return to my homeland, those cries echo my own desperate pleas from past seasons. In a different way, they are my cry now. And I know they also hint of cries that will wrack me over the course of exiles that lay long in the future.

A tutor of mine in Europe once told me that he wished there was more in the Bible that talked about the difficulty of everyday life. The difficulty of just getting out of bed in the morning and doing what needs to be done. It’s a strange thing to say, but there are certainly times when I agree. Every moment I need salvation. Every moment I am waiting on God to act. Every moment, unhinged, I await Christ’s return, not least of all in my own heart. There are moments when I forget this, but in Advent we enter the rhythm of need, of waiting, even of despair, and in the silence and darkness we watch the single candle as it flames into light: the Savior, whom He has prepared for all the world to see, a light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of His people Israel.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus.