borrowed poetry

From Edna St. Vincent Millay:

I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, - let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

So wonderfully subtle...

And so it is...

Just how it should be... That this is the one place I can post this now because there have been so many secrets and disappointments over the past several months that there is no one else to tell. I'd almost forgotten about this space myself, but this is exactly why it's here. It doesn't matter who reads it - it just needs to have a space outside my own mind and my own meager physical space.

What is it? Simply that I have survived - to put a melodramatic air to it, but it is something nonetheless, whether it matters to much of anyone. I took another trip to hell and have finally gotten a glimpse of the other side, if still through the tears I'm fighting off. Why do these things happen? Why do I make the same mistakes? When will doors start opening instead of closing.?...it all just closes behind me right now and there is no door to the future. The doors close, but there is no closure because memories can't be erased. "I am a part of all I have met," wrote Tennyson - and it is all a part of me for better or worse. There is no letting go of the things that leave such deep marks or of the moments when the darkness crowds in again. There are echoes that follow you throughout, ghosts of the people loved and those who failed to love you. I want to give them all a proper place (a proper burial), but there is no room - my head and my heart are too full, so it still floats on the surface, always hovering around me. Memories or hauntings? There is no erasing the past, nor is there always a moral. Everything simply goes on and it is of little importance to the world, but here I am still.

I am tired, but life hasn't beaten me yet, though it has come close to turning me bitter. There are no great complaints only a litany of disappointments and unfilled expectations and a life that I still have to decide what to do with. Would that something would be easy, something would change, something would happen that didn't leave me feeling so empty. God and I will have a lot to talk about on the other side, though I suppose God already knows...does incarnation mean that God lives still in each of us enough to experience it with us? Would that God would break the silence and the loneliness, but yet I am.

One person...and so many. I should be easy to forget, but there you have it--I cannot say goodbye, so things will just continue to fade on as we continue not speaking or speaking past one another...this is all that is left of friendship, of the love that I wanted. I can't carve you out and yet there is no room for you in me or me in you that fits either of us. And yet we are and our lives are now interconnected and things done cannot be undone, though they may yet be forgiven.

And so, without saying much to the point, I have said it - this IT that I have accomplished in simply staring down someone who hurt me deeply, in not breaking, yet have I failed by not being human? Because that is the charge I bring against you...I can't shut you out and you never let me in.

old words, my words?

I found an old (a few months) poem last night and I was amazed - that I couldn't remember writing it, that it so easily spoke to all that I continue to feel, that I wasn't embarrassed by it. I wonder what of my theology exactly is revealed in it, but here it is nonetheless.

September 27, 2005

I understand the hardness of God
when sin is too gentle a word.
What is it to dream God's dreams here
and be broken again and again
with God's own heart?
Every childhood stolen
by our indifference
and unwillingness to see
God, I cannot hold another heart, another life
and my prayers are as much for myself now
when I've lost the words
with my teeth set on edge
with the little girl in me
unable to admit the nightmare
But God doesn't mince words.
God is not comfortable.
God is the anger and hurt and fear
in the little girl eyes
that become our cross, our burden;
The curtain ripped,
laying bare our inhumanity.
It cannot happen here;
there's no space in my life
for the pain
of the children eating sour grapes
for our sins, for our dreams
that wash them out
white-lining the world.

God is not sad -
God is the rock against which
we throw out sadness
until we break with it
and can no longer look away.
This is the hardness of God -
that holds us up against the world
not letting us run away
branding us in this moment
with the cross
that we might stand,
that I am forced beyond
these tears
that God's dream persists by sheer force
that does violence to our pretensions.

I understand the hardness of God
watching a Son die again
and again
that we might not be wholly broken
by the dreams God lets us see.

To the only faithful reader I know I have - I do not deserve your encouragement, but God knows I do need your prayers. God bless you!

silence....

Silence welcomes the dreamer, the wanderer
the imagination of the soul searcher
the child inside the weary philosopher
embracing the forgotten in velvet-lined obscurity
and filling the abyss of the lost heart

Silence has been my friend for several months now because unlike the great mystics, I have no powerful words for my dark nights of the soul. I don't know how well I am seeing the light yet, but Advent is a season of hope, so I must yet believe and let myself be pulled along by the anticipation of something new that I can't quite yet imagine.

Silence - the sound of God in my life. Who is it that has said we know God most profoundly in his silence? that we feel God most deeply in her absence? I should know quite a lot by now for all the heartache the still hovers around me. In times like the past months, I think I know what it means when Paul (it is Paul isn't it?) says we are in this world, but not of this world. This world has certainly not felt my own - with all of its disappointment, uncertainty, and my groping for answers.

I have once again set my heart at something that I likely can't have. I should know by now what is worthy of my love, but my heart seems to refuse to learn. If only I knew, really knew what God wanted for me or had some glimpse that I would yet turn out okay...."'For I know the plans I have for you, 'says the Lord, 'Plans to propser and not to harm you.'" There's a secret I wish I was in on because I cannot hear the meaning yet in my life - and I long for a love that seems so elusive. My heart is restless til it finds rest in thee....but it remains restless.

I wish I could say what I want to say - I wish that words were enough for what I feel and I wish I didn't feel so alone. How do you reach someone who refuses truly to live? How do you love someone that is closed off to love? How do you let go when you can see the beauty, the potential lying there, just beyond your reach? How long should you hope for what seems impossible?

a prayer?

For the clarity to find meaning in this place
For the vision to see beyond myself
To hear whatever word it is that I'm supposed to learn right now
To move beyond this present darkness
To find the strength and compassion and hope to be the person I want to be

It is hard to talk and to write right now - and people who haven't been to this place don't quite understand the darkness. I can't explain it, I don't want it, I try to fight it, but still it is. For the friends I have shut out and those who shut me out, I am sorry. There is a healing that needs to happen that is beyond me and will only come with some time and some perspective. I've yet to have anyone who can really ride out the storm with me, so there are few who will see me cry, few who will know what is at the heart of it all.

There are the immediate things - the job, the loneliness, the church - that underscore the larger longing and I'm not quite sure I believe in miracles, for myself, that is. It's too small, too selfish.

But it's the ache that lies beneath certain songs - the echo of the life, of the person you could be - that glimmer of paradise in an autumn sunset that shows you have far you have strayed from the kingdom. It's that fleeting sense of connectedness you feel as you look into the eyes of someone you could love - and then to watch them turn away. It's that moment when the whole world floods in are you are a part of it all and it is all of you - all of the heartache, all of the joy, all of the trivialities. It is the ground, the deeper ground, the source that in a breath lets you know that there is something holding together this crazy, tragic world and something beyond even that you couldn't begin to put words to. It's that one thing out there that lets you know something is missing...that you're not quite complete without, but still can't quite get your hands around. It is the meeting point of the question and the answer before our forgetting and remembering.

I want to explain, but there is a wildness and sadness to it that I cannot - the flip side of the coin that you don't want to see. I cannot be simple. I cannot speak plainly. I cannot be what you want me to be.

I don't know anyone with the strength to hold me now, hold me here - to truly hold me and prove God's love in this moment, but I won't ask, I won't cry, I won't break again and admit my vulnerability because I don't want to overwhelm my world with all that it is, and so I write bad poetry.

I don't know how not to believe, but the dreams I dream are too hard to live.

riddles

I feel like I have lost a friend this past week - in misunderstanding? I'm not sure. The hardest part is that I know I'm somehow supposed to understand because it's the very thing I would expect as well, but I missed a cue somewhere along the way. And if I ask for a hint now, it feels like a failure because I should know. I should know, but silence is as confusing as the words.

So I'm sorry - for what I have said or haven't said that seems, at least on my end, to have created an even greater distance. If I am right, then I've been dishonest. If I am wrong, I have only made the situation worse. The best solution would be to say nothing, but I thought you knew me a little better than that.

Let us go then, you and I,
when the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
.
.
.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare? and, "Do I dare?"
.
.
.
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For deicions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have know them all already, known them all -
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
.
.
.
I am no prophet - and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
.
.
.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
to have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say, "I am Lazarus, come form the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"-
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the
floor -
And this, and so much more? -
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if the magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on the screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window should say:
"That is not it al all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

If there is one thing to know then, it is that I've worked this riddle before - and I should have learned a lesson. So I'll borrow someone else's words again because my own seem to get me in so much trouble.

Without a plan

The weekend is here and I can finally write off a bad week. I haven't had a slump that bad in quite a while and it's still fighting me a little bit, but there are small signs of life - it feels like I am coming up for air.

And old friend (almost something more) burst back in to my life - this could get interesting, but my biggest problem is always trying to live life before it happens (or after for that matter) and expecting too much. Deep breaths....but the light is still there. Maybe it's a door in another part of life opening when in the one I am so desperate to change, I keep running into walls.

If only I could read the signs better or hear a little better. I've never found talk about God's "plan" all that helpful because my life seems so without direction and the times I think I feel nudges, I seem to end up turning the wrong way. It's like a reflection, a movement on the edge of my glasses and I turn my head to find it was only shadows and light or even a speck of dust. The moments where it seems God should speak, I end up hearing just myself.

Jesus said to him, "‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." (John 20:29)

I haven't seen or if I have it has been the images that float past the corners of my eyes and I can never be quite sure - it's enough to hope I suppose, but it's never quite enough to grasp and be sure. But would I hold too tightly to it if I could somehow get a hand on it? I have seen faith squeezed to death by all the plans people see God making - I think Fueurbach got it partly right when he said that faith was projection - it can be when we confuse God's plans with our own desires or our need for self-justification or with a simple formula for "salvation" that cheapens the best of God's plans.

And then there's all that is beyond me - and to hear the struggling for words and faith in response to this recent and other natural and human disaters. I cannot believe in a God whose "plan" it is to cause/allow so much death and suffering. I cannot believe in such a mechanistic God - pulling the strings of world events. I think we misunderstand the working of God and the concept of omnipotence isn't helpful.

As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. ²His disciples asked him, "‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"’ ³Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God'’s works might be revealed in him." (John 9:1-3)

God is not the source of the disaster or the illness or the suffering - as time has gone on I have less need to answer the "why" of these things happening - because I don't need God to be all-powerful or step in magician-like to stop the bad things from happening; I want God to be there in the heart of the bad things and I think this is the incredible choice that God make through Jesus on the cross or no, choice is the wrong word. I think the cross is the ultimate demonstration of what God's power is - to be present in the very worst situations, to enter into them with us, to lift us out in the end through the power of love.

It's a different kind of power, a different kind of plan. God doesn't cause the pain, but works through it to bring us back to communion, to community, to remind us how fragile life is and how beautiful, to call us out of our complacency and neglect. God didn't send the hurricane, but is moving in the hearts of people to convict them about the poverty and inequality in our country that the devastation has revealed. It wasn't God's plan for so many to be left homeless and needy, but God is working in hearts to remind us who our neighbors are and to point us to all of our other neighbors around the world.

Not power, not control, not a plan for each life that leave the most anal among us without compaint.....but a God of love, and that for me is of greater comfort, even when I don't know where I am going, even in the darkest moments, even in the greatest tragedies - I'd rather have love than power. I'd rather have the cross than the king.