Tender God

Tender God,

you have seen my affliction,

and unbound my eyes;

you have bereaved me of the burden

to which I used to cling;

you have woven my pain

into patterns of integrity;

the wounds I cherished

you have turned into honors,

and the scars I kept hidden

into marks of truth.

You have touched me gently;

I have seen your face, and live.

Mary Ellen Ashcroft

Source: Spirited Women

"Now I Become Myself"

 

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted so by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

May Sarton
Source: Collected Poems 1930-1993

What's More Important? Jesus' Life or Death?

Confession

I confess I'm a Christian, newly minted or "reminted" if that were a word. I have a new understanding of what being a Christian means, and it's not the one all the Christian assholes on the far right are trying to impose on us. It's the opposite really. I constantly have to defend myself against the hate and legitimate scorn and condemnation they've earned. I'm not them.

At the same time, the scorn and hatred and condemnation they "earned" are not Christian ways of acting them or anyone. I'm trying not to hate them, and I'm trying not to hate the people who lump me in with them. I'm trying to love myself, other people no matter how "bad" or unfair and insensitive I deem them to be, the natural world God created and Jesus and his "Way." In fact, his Way IS love.

Here's a quotation offered by the organization "Inward/Outward" and my comment on it. If you have any thoughts on this subject, please comment here! The whole point is that no one's "right or wrong." We're all seekers, not static "believers."

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Sin or Separation? Sacrifice or Reunion?

"For Jesus, nonviolence is at the heart of the new dispensation, in which we are all called to love and forgive even our enemies…. The early Christian church, preoccupied with a cult of heroism, became enthralled with the violent death of Jesus, largely unable to grasp the dynamic power of a life radically lived to the point of death. They missed the message of the life and ended up exalting the death as the primary catalyst for redemptive liberation."

Diarmuid O'Murchu
Source: Catching Up With Jesus


"They missed the message of the life and ended up exalting the death as the primary catalyst for redemptive liberation."

I agree.

Jesus is actually offering a revolutionary "paradigm shift."

Sin and salvation are not the point of Jesus' life and death. I don't understand "sin" as doing/thinking evil but as separation from God and from each other. Jesus is the way to reunite with God and God's love for the world and everything in it including ourselves. We're not born bad - our "sin" is not original, not our very nature. We are children of God. How could he create evil people? Thinking that way is itself both a result of and a cause of separation from God. Guilt should not be what leads us to Jesus and to his Father.

The idea of Jesus' death as "atoning" for our sins is the old way of thinking that Jesus condemned and tried to transform. Thinking we need to settle our accounts with God through sacrifice is what the temple "money changers" were trading on (by selling sacrificial animals). That made Jesus so angry he literally "turned the tables" on the money changers - and on the very idea of people as fundamentally and unavoidably bad.

We don't need to "atone" through Jesus' bloody and tortured death, we just need to reconnect with God through the love Jesus showed for everything and everyone, even "bad" people,  even the people who killed him. We are to replace the old moral calculus with love, pure and simple. Love - for ourselves too - reunites us with God, other people, ourselves and all of creation.

It's a NEW covenant, not a new clause in the old one. Love replaces good/bad.

How liberating.

Breathing and Reading for the Rest of My Life

 
Today was a beautiful day, outside my house and inside my head. I have been trying to spend a bigger part of each day in reality, the physical world where you clean stuff and hug your dogs and sit outside under the trees and possibly even talk to another person, to be present for other people, rather than walking the labyrinth inside my head and on my computer screen all day and all night.

It feels good, it is good to be alive, to be at least a little more open to the whispers of infinity and completeness you can hear if you just stay still and listen. 

And I'm relearning how to read. I really thought I'd lost for good the ability to concentrate, and not stop after every word because I lost the thread or a thought or memory intruded. Maybe meds, maybe my bipolar brain, maybe age or loss of the ability to imagine someone else's feelings and the structure of a text - maybe they explained why I couldn't read anymore. 

But actually it's still there. If I put down the Internet and open a book of printed paper instead of being willingly held hostage and bombarded with 15 second flashes of "information" for hours and hours every day - my captor having trained my brain to crave this passing show of images and uncrafted words - I can actually still read! I can engage with another mind, follow a long and curving train of thought, and see with my inner eye Keats' "beauty that is truth."

I'm alive in the world and I can read. With love surrounding me too, my life is full.

And now I'm going to walk my dogs and feel the moonlight.on my skin. Then I'll read in bed with a fan turning over my head, and another day like this one will come tomorrow.

I brought someone - three  someones - into this world through my body. Now I'm ushering someone out of this world through her body - the same one that brought ME into this world. Spirit flows to flesh and flesh to spirit, like a river running both ways always and forever.

Rest in Peace

Dorothy (Dottie) Pottle 

July 9, 1921

June 22, 2014

Milestones, Millstones

Well, so I haven't been to sleep yet.5:30 a.m., My son is graduating today at 1 p.m. after a 15 year slog through the swamps of special ed with only shreds of his self-esteem left. My daughter and I went to my mother's this afternoon so my sister could go to the grocery store - they moved a hospital bed in last night and my mother is now practically immobile, on morphine, confused, in and out of consciousness. She is disintegrating and turning into dust in front of our eyes. Her eyes light up when my daughter comes. She tells her how much she likes her boyfriend over and over - she forgets she said it - and tonight she told her how pretty she is and that she wants her to know how much she loves her. My mother is not a sentimental woman. We all cried.

And all of that is swirling around my head, making my skull ache and my foot jiggle and my mind dream dreams of death, my mother's, my own, my husband's (but I can't go there), my kids, even my 4 dogs. The terrible uncertainly of when these utter certainties will occur ... 

For my sister, it is normal that a daughter takes care of her mother unto death. It's what is done. I could never do that, even if I had a close sunny devoted relationship with my mother - which I don't. So that makes me, what. Selfish. My sister doesn't lay this on me - I draw my own conclusions. It is true, I am a very selfish person, because I am so vulnerable to being hurt. I am "unstable" and I have to safeguard my equilibrium and shelter myself from turbulence. I hate that about myself, but there it is. I'm a de facto narcissist. If I don't wrap myself up in myself I would just bleed through my skin when you touch me, and crumble. Now I am thinking, well, I'm just going to crumble now. This is maybe what real life is all about. Crumbling, Disintegrating. Turning to dust.
 

Letters

Miss Manners answered a letter today about how to react sympathetically to a Facebook post indicating someone's sad or has sad things going on. Clicking "Like" seems rude or callous. Her reply: "To express sympathy, it is essential to demonstrate that you are thinking about the person." The computer interface is designed to keep time spent on any one thing or one person to a minimum.

So, she says, write a letter. If you care deeply about the person, write a letter.

I have all the letters anyone has sent me since it became incomprehensible to sit down and write one. There are only a handful. Before that, I didn't keep them because I wrote and received so many I didn't realize they were precious - and it never occurred to me that one day they'd be like extinct exotic animals. They're more meaningful than photos even because the person's mind and soul are uniquely present in them.

I still write letters when my heart is very full or when someone else has written me with a full heart. I'm curious: When was the last time you wrote a letter?