lenten journal: blessed are those . . .

I spent the better part of the morning with some friends from church as a part of a Lenten Bible study. We are focusing on the Beatitudes. As I was preparing to lead the group, I was struck by the fact that Matthew takes just four chapters to move from Jesus’ genealogy to his birth to his baptism to the temptations to calling the disciples and then spends the next three chapters on one sermon. I’ve been reading through a couple of commentaries that talk about understanding the blessings of the beatitudes as Big Picture: an eschatological perspective of the realm of God, which is both now and not yet. I thought about the commentator’s word when I sat down this afternoon with Stephen Dunn again and his essay on “Poets, Poetry, and Spirituality.”

The classic spiritual journey is from travail to understanding to acceptance. (168)

That classic journey is the one on which I was raised. As the old gospel song says,

farther along we’ll know more about it
farther along we’ll understand why
cheer up my brother live in the sunshine
we’ll understand it all by and by

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews proclaimed, “the evidence of things not seen.” Yes and I have come to see that life is more nuanced and more complicated that the stepping stones in the classic journey. Dunn offers another thought:

Spirituality in poetry. Here’s another attempt at a definition: A journey from travail toward an understanding that leads back to mystery.” (170)

Though Dunn is not writing from a Christian perspective, he informs mine because he asks good questions. I have found that I need the questions of those who are not insiders to my faith perspective to challenge me to see more than I can find on my own or within my community of insiders, particularly when it comes to dealing with pain and struggle. Take, for example, Tom Waits’ song, “Georgia Lee”:

cold was the night, hard was the ground
they found her in a small grove of trees
lonesome was the place where Georgia was found
she's too young to be out on the street.

why wasn't God watching?
why wasn't God listening?
why wasn't God there for Georgia Lee?

When I was in the deepest part of my depression and trying to figure out what was happening to me and how to begin to make meaning of it, most Christian writers were not much help because they had a hard time coming to terms with despair without offering how I let Jesus fix me. I didn’t need someone to fix me. I needed someone to listen, to resonate, to sit there in the dark with me and admit it was real and that I could survive. Dunn, again:

I know that despair often can be a ticket to an unchosen journey, and to survive it is to come back with glimpses of what was not available to us before. (160)

As Lent began this year, I observed – no, I celebrated two years that I have been off of my antidepressants. Life is lighter these last two years than the eight years before them and I am grateful. I worked hard to understand what depression was and how I could deal with the darkness and I don’t understand how or why it let up on me in many ways. I live now with the prospect that this is a season of relief, which may last a long time and which may not, and I must continue to let my faith and my life be informed by what I saw and felt and learned while riding the monster. I see what Dunn means by catching glimpses of “what was not available to us before,” just as I have a deeper appreciation for the prepositional phrases that complete each of the Beatitudes:

blessed are the poor in spirit FOR theirs is the kingdom of heaven
blessed are they that mourn FOR they shall be comforted
blessed are the meek FOR they shall inherit the earth
blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness FOR they shall be filled
blessed are the merciful FOR they shall receive mercy
blessed are the pure in heart FOR they shall see God
blessed are the peacemakers FOR they shall be called the children of God
blessed are those persecuted for righteousness FOR theirs is the kingdom of heaven

Jesus’ words feel like an invitation to the journey Dunn described: “from travail to toward an understanding that leads back to mystery.” To begin to grasp the blessing means to be first acquainted with grief, with loss, with suffering. To begin to understand the substance of things hoped for is to find resonance first with the pain that is the substance of human existence. Such is the paradox of blessing, the opening to the deeper mystery of God.

After eight years of depression, I know experientially more about emotional pain than I did before. I also know that love did not let go of me. I didn’t learn that because someone told me to trust Jesus or told me that love wouldn’t let go of me. I learned it because people who love me – Ginger being at the top of that list – didn’t let go. They didn’t try to fix me or correct me; what they did best was not leave. They incarnated love in a way that gave me room to trust that I would be comforted, that God was somewhere in the dark as well. As REM sings in one of my favorite hymns,

when your day is night alone
and you feel like letting go
when you think you’ve had too much of this life, well hang on
‘cause everybody hurts
take comfort in your friends
everybody hurts
don’t throw up your hands
don’t throw up your hands
if you feel like you’re alone
no, no, no – you’re not alone

Despair is the seedbed of hope. Hope is more profound than explanation or reprieve. Love never lets go.

Someday we shall see face to face.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: part of the story

Here’s more of Stephen Dunn, once again, from my reading today. These are the opening words to a chapter titled, “The Hand Reaching Into the Crowd.”

We live in a graceless age. Accordingly the word grace (in its various parts of speech) has lost power and significance, though it is frequently used. We have our saving graces, we are graced by one’s presence, we seek to be in someone’s good graces, and sometimes we need grace periods, which instructively, are given these days more by banks than by other higher powers. A recent headline read, Still Cheaper Chicken May Grace Our Menus Soon. The word is nearly unhearable, nearly dead, in that context in which it is familiarly used rarely compel us to engage its meaning. It might be said that all much-used, debased words are looking for restoration, for revivifying contexts.

In its Latin and Old French roots the verb means either to favor or to give thanks. In Modern French it means “to pardon.” . . . The noun’s theological definition refers to God’s free and undeserved favor, at once suggestive of beneficence and selectivity. We cannot earn it; we can only hope for mercy.

When I finished writing last night, I sat down next to Ginger in the adjacent room just to be together for a few minutes before we fell asleep. Between blogging and watching basketball, I had missed who had been voted off of American Idol. She picked up the remote to find the recording. “You can just tell me,” I said.

“Oh, no,” she replied, “you have to see it.”

What followed was the surprise that Casey, one of the more talented of this year’s crop, came in last in the voting. He was then given the chance to “sing for his life,” as Ryan Seacrest called it, though he was hardly through the first verse when the judges stopped him to say they were intervening to save him from elimination. They have one “save” per season and they were ready to use it. The young man was overcome. In the flood of emotion that followed, I heard him say to the judges, “You only have one save. Why would you use it on me?”

After that, all he could say was, “Thank you.”

Tonight, I sat down to dinner with three of our godchildren (and their parents). Jasmine, who is seven, was asked to say grace. She began a series of sentences, each one beginning with “Thank you, God,” that told the story of her day: what she had done, whom she had seen, what she had eaten, all the way down to our sitting around the table and the empanadas that were waiting to be consumed. By the time she was done, all I could say was, “Thank you.”

Dunn’s discussion of grace was a lead-in to a story and a poem about the aftermath of the 1993 World Series where Mitch Williams, a pitcher for the Phillies, gave up a series ending home run. Reporters descended on him in the locker room to ask the akward and agonizing questions reporters ask in the loser’s locker rooms because it was their job. “If the were better men with better jobs,” Dunn wrote, “they would have put their arms around him, asked how they might be of help.” Then, another Phillies pitcher, Terry Mulholland, reached through the mob of mic holders, took Williams’ hand, and led him away from the assault without saying anything to anyone. “Oh,” Dunn writes in the poem, “the luxury of failing in private.” Then in the next paragraph he writes,

Christianity has given us great stories of pardon and forgiveness, in other words of moral grace, but very few stories about the symmetries and felicities of art. We are our stories, which is why it is useful to know many. The scariest people I know are the ones who avidly subscribe to one story, one version of the world.

Perhaps one sign of our graceless age is fail has come into its own. We use it as almost its own part of speech. Epic Fail. Noun, verb, adjective, adverb all rolled into one. We are all each other’s band of reporters, pushing microphones into one another’s faces demanding to know how it feels to be such a screw up. Private is an anachronism. Context is of little consequence. We are being conditioned to think of life as a sequence of YouTube videos or news segments edited to show our failures from every angle without telling the story.

Jesus met the woman at the well and they talked. She had failure written all over her. She was alone at the well because that was the least painful way for her to get through her day. Jesus listened to her story and told her some of his. When she went back into the village, she invited the people who held the microphones in her face to come back with her to the well to meet the one who had offered her grace. Her statement has always been puzzling to me. She said, “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done,” as if that were somehow a comforting statement. I’ve often thought perhaps the gospel writers left out part of her invitation. I want it to read, “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done and still loves me.” Dunn’s description of Terry Mulholland leading Mitch Williams out of the ring of reporters gives me knew eyes. Mulholland knew what Williams had done and knew the way to forgiveness, to grace and gratitude. Not only did he know, but he took him there by telling his own story of failure through his actions.

The point of life is not to measure up, or even to get it right. I don’t really know if life has a point anymore than a great story has A Lesson To Be Learned. Every story that moves us, that makes us more human is one of failure and forgiveness, of loss and redemption. Sometimes we are the ones who blew the game standing in the spotlight of the inquisitors. Then there are the stories where we get to take someone by the hand like Mulholland, or awaken hearts with our gratitude like Jasmine, or speak words of healing like Jesus. To be a part of those stories, we have to be paying attention.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: spring rain

It’s the end of the grading term at school, the students are frantically trying to finish the rough drafts of their research papers, I’m faced with grade reports – so I spent my free period reading poetry. This morning as I left the house, I picked up my well-worn copy of Poems to Live By: In Uncertain Times, which I bought eight or ten years ago and continue to mine for treasure. The one that grabbed me today was a poem by Robert Bly:

Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Maybe it was the image of the deranged bear, the child-bearing moose, or the promise of forgiveness that reminded me of a poem by William Carpenter quoted in Stephen Dunn’s book, Walking Light. Both poems share the same sense of yearning and hope, offering voices that calm and encourage.

Rain

A man stood in the rain outside his house.
Pretty soon, the rain soaked through
his jacket and shirt. He might have
gone in, but he wanted to be wet, to be
really wet, so that it finally got through
his skin and began raining on the rooftops
of the small city that the man always carried
inside him, a city where it hadn’t rained
for thirty years, only now the sky darkened
and tremendous drops fell in the thick dust
of the streets. The man’s wife knocked
on the window, trying to call him in.
She twirled one finger around her ear
to sign that he was crazy, that he’d
get sick again, standing in street clothes
in a downpour. She put the finger in her mouth
like a thermometer. She formed the word idiot
with her lips, and, always, when she said that
he would give in. But now he stood there.
His whole life he’d wanted to give something,
to sacrifice. At times he’d felt like coming up
to people on the street, offering his blood.
Here, you look like you need blood. Take mine.
Now he could feel the people of his city
waking as if from a long drought. He could feel
them leaving their houses and jobs, standing
with their heads up and their mouths open,
and the little kids taking their clothes off
and lying on their bellies in the streams
and puddles formed by the new rain that the man
made himself, not by doing anything, but standing
there while the rain soaked through his clothes.
He could see his wife and his own kids
staring from the window, the younger kid
laughing at his crazy father, the older one
sad, almost in tears, and the dog, Ossian—
but the man wanted to drown the city in rain.
He wanted the small crowded apartments
and the sleazy taverns to empty their people
into the streets. He wanted a single man with
an umbrella to break out dancing the same way
Gene Kelly danced in Singing in the Rain,
then another man, and more, until the whole
city was doing turns and pirouettes with their
canes or umbrellas, first alone, then taking
each other by the arm and waist, forming a larger
and larger circle in the square, and not
to any music but to the percussion of the rain
on the roof of his own house. And if there were
a woman among the dancers, a woman in a flowery
print skirt, a woman wetter and happier and more
beautiful than the rest, may this man be
forgiven for falling in love on a spring
morning in the democracy of the rain, may
he be forgiven for letting his family think
that is just what to expect from someone who
is every day older and more eccentric, may he
be forgiven for evading his responsibilities,
for growing simple in the middle of his life, for
ruining his best pants and his one decent tie.

One summer night, when I was Youth Minister at University Baptist Church, a bunch of kids were over at my house for a Bible study or something. We were all sitting in the living room when a Texas thunderstorm blew in quickly and the rain fell in sheets. Everything was soaked in a matter of seconds. One of the kids caught my eye and, without a word, we got up, ran out into the rain, and started jumping up and down in the puddles. It was a moment of unadulterated joy. When I turned around, I saw that everyone else had followed us. We stayed outside until the rain left as quickly as it had come and then realized we had about fifteen minutes before everyone’s parents came to pick them up. I handed out every towel I could find in my house and we were still wet and laughing when the cars started to arrive. I remembered that night as I read about the man soaking the city inside him in the rain.

I don’t have a big point to make other than these are all stories that felt worth sharing.

Peace,
Milton