See our love turn to rust

We can't fix what's broken so let's leave it here and walk on, 


I'll be right behind you

Love changes everything

I'm not sorry we loved,
but I hope I didn’t keep you too long

We're not experts

We are believers, ministers of silence

Let no man pull us under doubt

I'll always open my hands to you

I'll be right behind you

— Sam Phillips, Love Changes Everything

Sometime last summer I was in the car traveling to my hometown with my husband. It was one of those moments when you witness the symmetry of things. Calling this serendipity or coincidence does not describe it. Earlier that day I had a hankering to listen to one of the bands that created my musical identity both artistically and spiritually. The days of self-discovery and my first brushes with spiritual intimacy surround the early work of U2. There are others who would like to deny they had the same encounter with the band considering the confusion of their overwhelming popularity. Yet when Larry begins the first cadence on Sunday Bloody Sunday, my first brushes with social justice re-awaken. Pride (In the Name of Love) taught me that I should be vocal about spiritual heroes in defiance of those leaders that embarrassed me when it came to my faith. Bad was a song that taught me yes, there are some things that are too difficult to talk or do anything about. And 40 was the first time I had heard a Psalm sung proudly outside of the church.

My own spiritual landscape is such a varied place. Love was as pure as the thin air on mountain tops that seem so far behind me, never to be approached again. There are lush forests I tucked into out of fascination with the green then became horribly lost in the darkness there. There are lakes where I have sat near to ebbs and flows and into which I was lured to play. There are overwhelming fields of harvest so terribly mangled by religion where I do not know where to begin and sometimes turn away from. Streets and streets of grit and despair are there, where I have to keep remembrance of those the mountain tops.

I want to run

I want to hide

I want to tear down the walls

That hold me inside

I want to reach out

And touch the flame

Where the streets have no name*

The moment I had in the car that day was one of deep listening. A rather long song, Where the Streets Have No Name, was playing as I was reading a short biography on St. John of the Cross. The connection I had with the music and the difficult story of St. John's desire to create heaven on earth grabbed my attention.

I want to feel sunlight on my face

I see the dust cloud disappear

Without a trace

I want to take shelter from the poison rain

Where the streets have no name

St. John was a reformer when reformation was not cool in 16th century Spain. He tried desperately to reform the Carmelite Order, and made a female friend with whom he shared the spiritual practices of solitude and silence, St. Teresa de Avila. Together they founded many ministries and monasteries, making themselves active in the political and religious busyness of the time. They ended up being the first barefoot Jesus people and created the Discalced (shoeless) Carmelite order.

Where the streets have no name

Where the streets have no name

We're still building

Then burning down love

Burning down love

And when I go there

I go there with you

It's all I can do

John was captured by the shoed Carmelites, beaten and imprisoned. They had launched a counter-reformation against his values and the shoeless ones. Being it Spain in the 16th century, John was also tortured. He spent nine months in a cell not much larger than his body. A friar had been slipping paper into his cell, and during this time of humiliating confinement he wrote the poetry that became his Spiritual Canticle. After months of muscle atrophy, malnutrition and darkness, he escaped by pulling the hinges of his cell door. He returned to his friend and spiritual sister Teresa to continue their ministry of shoelessness and reformation.

The city's aflood

And our love turns to rust

We're beaten and blown by the wind

Trampled in dust

I'll show you a place

High on a desert plain

Where the streets have no name

St. John was known to have taken his young monk brothers on walks along the Spanish plains to tell them about wonders of nature and the glories of heaven. He frequently related the beauty of the earth to glories of heaven to his charges, walking barefoot through the fields with his charges. He had a deep desire for heaven.

He also had a habit of silence. He would spend long periods of time in deep silence to point where he would dive into the darkest parts of the unknown places of God. He dared to confront the silence and found rapturous joy there. It is from these experiences with the most silent darkest place of where his treatise on the dark night of the soul was born.

He was arrested again a few years later and severely beaten, to the point where he was disabled from injury and sent to a far off monastery where the abbott was told to let him die. Although John's brothers begged the abbott to have mercy on him and get him a doctor, the abbot refused to disobey his authority. John's condition worsened, yet he remained placid, anticipating his place of heavenly splendor. As John was dying, the abbott asked for forgiveness. John forgave him and let go of the place that held him from being with his Divine love.

Where the streets have no name

Where the streets have no name

We're still building

Then burning down love

Burning down love

And when I go there

I go there with you

It's all I can do

Our love turns to rust

We're beaten and blown by the wind

Blown by the wind

The music and St. John's story married in deep, intricate way within me that day on the road home. It was as if the song was written about him, about a friend who had suffered and passed on. I grieved for him. I knew more about what my faith was worth threw his eyes; those eyes that saw in the silent moments of meditation our resplendent heaven. I felt a little of what his sister-friend Teresa may have felt felt, participating and seeing all of her brother's history making.

In my life, I admit I have no been able to be St. Teresa to my biological brothers. I have failed, as well as the conflicting voices of godliness that surrounded their upbringing, to help them know the love God has for them. There have been a few friends, male friends, with which I have felt I've been the St. Teresa co-conspirator on their long spiritual journey. We have made many stops along the way. A bookstore in a rusty title city called Flint, a pentecostal church choir, a farm in the middle of a cornfield in Illinois called Cornerstone, a queenly, European city called Cincinnati and a small town with a chapel on a hill in the town square called Tyldesly.

This band of brothers has seen relationships that have come and gone, marriages, children and more children. A brother just toured Venice. One is an artist, his dream. Another is a music minister. Another just had his heart pulled wide open by love. And another I found along the roadside, walking alone.

This last brother came back to me via a dream I had (about Chinese food in which my husband's cousin Amanda made a cameo) and the search button on Facebook. It has been over a dozen years since we communicated, yet it feels like we are picking up straight from the time when we wrote each other packets of letters that drifted for weeks over the ocean.

I was impacted not just by the fact that he has produced four children over the years but also deeply affected by that he has lost touch with his faith and left the church. He found himself an absence of hearing from God within, depressed and no longer believing what he was brought up to believe. He bravely walked away not wanting to be a hypocrite, knowing it would affect his family. He couldn't find anyone to help him get past the point in his faith when he want the big MORE. The ones surrounding him by just didn't have the capacity educationally, spiritually or psychologically to facilitate MORE. They were caught up in agendas, prognosis and politics. I feel it is no big wonder that he took the long walk....AWAY. His wings crashed around the cage he was in until he figured out it was easier just not to fly, and not flying fits.

My brother has grown mentally, as he says, and feels a strong confidence about his life plans. He hopes to find his place again amongst the folds but waits. I find him courageous for taking up the challenge of finding his faith beyond the definition of others, even his own ideals of what that means. Yet I feel as helpless to bring him to any conclusion as I feel in the reawakening of my own biological brothers' faith. I just want to listen and walk along side of my friend as St. Teresa did with John.

Oh, and I see love

See our love turn to rust

We're beaten and blown by the wind

Blown by the wind

Oh, when I go there

I go there with you

It's all I can do

*Where the streets have no name by U2

Skimming and sinking

My fifth anniversary weekend I stood on the shore of Lake Michigan skipping stones into the gray-blue water, feeling the urging and release of small stones lodged in my heart. There were dozens of nameless stones with almosts, mistakes, incomplete and deep burdens etched onto them; formless intentions until joined with rock and water in my letting go.

You listen to the waves
you listen to the throw away
All you think I had
all we ever had
Watch me soon pray
the cheap wine takes my fear way
I pick up stones and throw them out to sea*

I was feeling a gentle dip in equanimity that produced a desire for peace, a peace not just for myself to be a better me but also for those who had left the shadow of the Wing I stand under. Was I feeling the loss of their place in my community? Perhaps. Did I believe that they now held a destiny different than mine? No. Yet the loss was there along with a longing with love to please come back.

Lower the wooden boats
liar comes and liar goes
Just watch as I throw all I have vowed to the sea
Will you meet me?
Will you meet me?

There has been this warning rising up within for a long time, tangled and un-articulated. The current modalities of faith have chosen logic over wisdom and politics over potential. Self-inflicted victims of the effects of the Enlightenment and influence of Dante and the American Dream, the kingdom has become a misappropriated place of militancy and strict conformity instead of simply just being a place of dwelling within.

So why?
So why is their heart dead
as we skim stones and we sink boats instead

And those who see this misappropriation feel the hypocrisy can't get past it. Why wouldn't they feel the sinking of their faith? Those who rail against the mainstream find the energy it takes to do so crippling, until waves of cynicism crush what precious left they have. Others float to the surface of grief and stagnation called acedia and just remain there.

So why?
So why is their heart dead
as we skim stones and we sink boats instead

I have never known a time when I did not have faith. I've always been able to intuit the Spirit's leading, not letting the way I feel keep me from the Spirit's undoing me. It is enough for me and I can't imagine it not being enough for anyone else. I have survived the church. I still believe in Mystery. Is that evidence enough for anyone?

Will you have a go?
Will you have a go?
Just take a look at me
is it the same world you see?
Is it the same world you see?

It is painful to see friends walk away. The language and alchemy of the relationship shifts as they break up with God. The Mystery becomes someone else's mechanics. It is worse than a parting for me because I listen to see its affects happen on disparate levels.

I look them in the eye
They shout in my ear
they shout in my ear
they shout in my ear

Who have we become as a people of faith? In this day of sensitive identities can we draw such vaguely constructed lines to separate sheep from goat? Skin from skin? Bone from bone? Why would we ever want to take on the only job for which God is employed? How can we spew words love and enforce such separation between our brothers?

So why?
So why is their heart dead
as we skim stones and we sink boats instead

My thrown stones created ripples as they skipped along the Sunday sunset water. The Spirit and I were the only witnesses, who knew what they meant in our kingdom within. The longing remains. Even now my heart whispers, "Come back to me, my kin with tender skin and heart of stone."

Skin and stones just
skin and stones
we're sinking boats and
we're sinking boats

*‪Sinking Boats by Iain Morrison‬ (click to listen)

Sun, Shadows and Facebook Forgiveness

I picture you in the sun wondering what went wrong
And falling down on your knees asking for sympathy
And being caught in between all you wish for and all you seen
And trying to find anything you can feel that you can believe in*

There are many things that don't work themselves out. For me it at times has been friendships. There is that finality from being dumped by a "boyfriend" which is on one level. On a deeper level for me there is having someone who fills in the shadows punctuating them with humor, love and possessing a personalized platonic soothing no longer speak to you over years. There have been, without making this sound like an autobiographical eulogy, many rays of light in my life that play against one another, infusing me validation and attaching this light to my soul. When one beam drops away, I feel their cold, empty shadow inside sometimes for years.

May gods love be with you
Always
May gods love be with you

I instigated the first one. I had seen this person's tiny electronic pop around on Facebook, feeling a fuzzy, achy static electricity inside. It had been over two years since I had spoken to the person and I still felt the humiliation of being stood up in a crowded breakfast place downtown, waiting and waiting as I occupied one of two coveted seats—one for me and one for her. I sat. I called. I sat there for over an hour until my mind began to piece together the un-returned phone calls and unanswered notes. A week later, giving this person time to call me back, I left an angry, questioning phone message. I didn't understand and the situation became painful to think about. My wedding came and went with no other contact. So after I pressed send on a message of forgiveness to to ease the static inside and give the grief rest, it was a day or two before a custom written apology appeared. And there it was, a wedding invitation to her own.

I know I would apologize if
I could see your eyes cause when you showed me myself
I became someone else
But I was caught in between all you wish for and all you need
I picture you fast asleep
A nightmare comes
You cant keep awake

The second apology came out of the blue via a dream. A former co-worker I had been close to in a needs-to-be-forgotten professional life send me a message saying she had a dream about me. She saw us laughing and talking intimately once again and this is how she knew she needed to say she was sorry for abandoning or friendship. Back then we had fallen into a professional spiral of silences and the distance made me not know where I stood with her. There the apology was in my inbox, and I was delighted at her request for forgiveness. All I could do was feel grateful that I was valued and deserving of the request. I had surmised that in the great before I was professionally unfashionable to be friends with and she had shed me in an act of self-preservation. But all that was gone as we exchanged written accounts of how our life is right now.

May gods love be with you
Always
May gods love be with you

I do have one friend that I don't know if things will ever return to that quality of closeness. She penned a breezy note to me inquiring about my family over the message inbox. I was still pained by the past, and although I passed on the events of the past dozen years I ended the return message with an attached honesty that likely did not settle well with her. I have yet to receive a reply but minutes ago I penned this, "I did not expect to feel that emotional in my last message about something that happened so long ago. It appears I still may have some letting go to do. I regret that I may have offended you. I know that the situation was not your fault and that you may have feelings about it, too." And I pressed 'send'.

'Cause if i find
If i find my own way
How much will i find
If i find
If i find my own way
How much will i find
You

I miss my friends: the college friend, the best friend from high school, the painter friend in Nashville. There are times I feel the shadows, especially when these friendships are lost in the train wreck before apology meets forgiveness. Perhaps Christ meant that when you forgive someone 77 times, you help them not to experience the place where His spirit has lived mending the hollow spaces and painful wreckage, and help them to experience the joy and peace of letting go.

I don't know anymore
What it's for
I'm not even sure
If there is anyone who is in the sun
Will you help me to understand
'Cause i been caught in between all I wish for and all I need
Maybe you're not even sure what it's for
Any more than me

I talked to an old friend recently. I told him how embarrassed I was of my own self in the past, when I had lacked the listening skills and lost in my own fearful dealings with control in my life and dolled out advice or direction with my own spin of empathy. I think many people may only view me in one way because of this and that way is that I am harsh, bossy and a bit of a know-it-all. The truth is more like that Bob Dylan lyric,"...I was so much older then." I regret my own potential for mistakes, my own noisy way of elbowing my way into self worth and how it may have distanced me from those I truly value. For those who love me, I thank you for transferring your grace. For those whom are still feeling my stinging ways, I hope our story is yet undone.

May God's love be with you
Always
May God's love be with you


* In the Sun by Joseph Arthur (click to listen)

Black Metals and Pearls

Come on children
You're acting like children
Every generation thinks
its the end of the world

And all ya fat followers
Get fit fast
Every generation thinks it's the last
thinks its the end of the world*

Certainly the hard times have been magnified and our politicians have blackened our eyes here in the Magic Mitten. I can't figure out if this outstretched hand we live in is a "Come take advantage of us some more, we can't help being suckers." or a "Please help us, we are desperate." My husband, as did many others, lost his dream job last year and our 5-7 year plan has grown to a 7-10 year plan. Recently on the road to Chicago, using up the very last of his travel bonus points, we dug into our Wilco CDs, anticipating a new kindle from Tweedy. When I heard the lyrics to the bands newest release, I could not help but think of where my husband is in his career.

Yes dream down a well
There's a lone heavy hell
I don't care anymore
I don't care anymore
It's a feeling we transcend
We're here at the end
I don't care anymore
I don't care anymore
You never know

You can pretty much track his career by the transitions in advertising media technology. He began his career as a keyliner and then came desktop publishing. He became a producer as a result and now even that has been digitized by job tracking systems on the client and vendor side. He's not sure what to do next, and his realism transitions like the lyrics of the song. The childhood dream of living The Dick Van Dyke Show is just a worn-out, jaded fantasy. Looking for meaning in the second half of his life, he wants someone to believe in him, to give him a message that there is something to do and have the faith in him to complete this unknown vocation.

Many women have been in my position over the past year or so: bringing home the bacon, frying it in a pan and not being able to let your spouse forget he's a man. At times, the stress ends up thick around your middle in more cortysol and less portion control. It is not all that fun and freeing for yourself nor the man sitting at home. That Laura Petrie character from the show is a fascinating artifact that should be documented in a museum. I want to tell her that her fancy of women's liberation will only end in this year of 2009 in a screwed up economy of women holding on to jobs for the sheer fact that corporations have gotten away for decades with paying them less and that men like Rob will be left behind. Men need this architypal sense of vocation for the sake of their masculinity, and I respect this need. I really want my husband to feel like the world needs him again.

Francis Ford Coppola used to work as a youngster at a Western Union office in Italy. He would paste the telegraphed messages to cardboard and deliver them on his bicycle. In a recent issue of Esquire magazine, he told the story of how he did something terrible to his father out of love.

"...I knew the name of the head of Paramount Pictures' music department — Louis Lipstone. So I wrote, "Dear Mr. Coppola: We have selected you to write a score. Please return to L. A. immediately to begin the assignment. Sincerely, Louis Lipstone." And I glued it and I delivered it. And my father was so happy. And then I had to tell him that it was fake. He was totally furious... I know why I did it: I wanted him to get that telegram. We do things for good reasons that are bad."

I want my husband to get a communication like that message, that someone to believes in him and has faith in him to complete this unknown vocation. I want him to get that message so badly that it came up physically in my yoga practice, as tension that had built up in my body, which I let go as prayer. Yet I know that message can only be un-buried from within himself. We all have to at the end of all of this ruination to find the God-given strength to believe in ourselves more than we believe in the American Dream.

I had stopped by the book store before my yoga class to pick up a book for my husband. It was a manual to get him started on something new that I hope will keep him a few steps ahead. I want to let him know with strains of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" in my heart that it is not the end of the world because, well, you never know.

Come on kids
You're acting like children
Act your age
Put back the black metals and pearls
All ya sword-swallowers pull yourselves together
Every generation thinks its the worst
Thinks it's the end of the world

It's a secret I can't tell
There's a wish down a well
I don't care anymore
I don't care anymore
It's a long heavy hell
Super-size it by 10
I don't care anymore
I don't care anymore
You never know
You never know

::END::

* You Never Know by Wilco (click to listen)

The Gag Reflex

legs scream at bikes
and bikes scream at trucks
and motorists curse their lousy luck
crossing guard's not doing his job
and traffic's not about to stop
for the first casualty of thought

it's the rules it's the rules*

“He can do that for hours,” Linda described the focus her 2 year old son, Cooper, maintained as he roared his toy car round and around the edges and over the lumps of fabric of the family love seat. His concentration was immense for someone so small.

I was sitting with her daughter Audrey with Audrey’s feet on me, waiting for tiny blue toenails to dry. It was our little ritual that happened each time I was over. Audrey gets her nails done while mom and the rest of the girlfriends get caught up. Audrey was joyously eating a chocolate chip cherry oatmeal cookie one of us had brought. Then her face tautened with alarm, the way that major tragedies do with almost 4-year-olds.

“I don’t like it.” Audrey pulled a half chewed cherry out of her mouth. I took it from her hand and placed it on the towel on my lap.

“Sorry, she inherited her father’s gag reflex with certain things,” Linda apologized. I didn’t mind it, I was glad it was out and not working itself back up. I thought briefly of what the girlfriend/maker of the gourmet cookies spent on the cherries: time, money and talent. When Audrey was done, four shiny, mangled, leathery cherries gathered on my lap.

Lately we’ve reached out from under all of this snow to spend time with friends over wine and good food under kitchen candlelight. Having people over or going to their home feels like Christmas and a vacation all at the same time. The reach has felt good, like a long yawn and stretch following a long afternoon nap.

A few Saturdays ago a couple that stood up in our wedding came by for paella and garnacha. We ate and ate, watched obscure Roxy Music footage and played Scrabble. Over the evening they revealed their doubts about their faith, how they were in the process of figuring out who Christ was and is for them: difficulty with the red letter words of Jesus and the council of Nicea was what I heard. Raised in the church and after a long absence during their marriage they had reentered a faith community only to exit it and seemingly regretting the awkwardness this created in their friendships there. As my husband and I listened, the quote from Say Anything played through my head where Lloyd Dobler talks about what he wants to do in his life.

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."

I told my dear girlfriend that I was glad she was in the process of rediscovering her faith. I, too, was secretly tired of being oversold by the religious right because it had become in the public eye exactly what the movie described: not love.

superfarmer's bent on the cover of time
the moralist screams he's all mine
so the bard isn't doing her job
the vacuum night
the darkest rites
the small quarantined thoughts

it's the rules it's the rules

People have kidnapped portions of our culture and very little has been done to supply a ransom let alone a rescue mission scheduled. It's difficult to express anything about this time in history without feeling a general sense of disappointment. Disappointment has become the rule of the day, expressed as the simplest of personal actions. For those of us who lived by the rules before, the rules have shifted to a more astringent form and it almost feels as we are being punished for others and their living off the rails for a long time. At what time do you speak up? To whom? Will they listen?

I had recently stumbled across a blog of someone condemning the practice of yoga and thus the moniker Christian yoga. I was baffled by the superiority of someone so little acquainted with my own reality. It was an old post, and I doubt the individual even read my response. Yet I was not stopped. I wrote the following:

"First, yoga cannot be called "Christian" any more than an apple, a collection of music or a calendar can. Only people can be Christian, and to say that the product of their efforts is "Christian" is to lessen the objectivity of being called by the name of Christ. Secondly, Yoga was developed by Hindus, yes, yet there are other practices to which people who are Christians devote their efforts, and the religion of the creator is not called into question. Football. Baseball. Basketball. Soccer. Lacrosse. If you research the origins of these games, some of them have primitive, dark, ritualistic roots based in what can be termed "paganism". And should we dump psychoanalysis because it was developed by scientists with no devotion to religion of any kind? Lastly, as a Christian and a yoga (little "y") teacher, the foundation of the practice is religion-less, seeker oriented and essentially healthy as well as morally challenging. Please take the time to research the yamas and niyamas as well as the rest of the 8 limbs of ashtanga before committing an opinion. Often Christians make too many assumptions without effective research to develop an observation due to fear of contamination. It is with respect I write this post."

So many people have taken a piece of Christ over past and present history that his image has become like the bloodied corpse that was taken from the cross. It felt like and continues to feel like that moment. I don't blame my dear friends for harboring doubt. We stand outside little Cooper's circular, certain, childlike intensity, the same effort we see in those that are content to move in seeming effortlessness through the mainstreams of faith. For many of us, like Audrey, the sweet delicacy of life has become an un-chewable, over-sweet, meaty mess that just won't go down. Discontent breeds disinterest in mainstream thought and deep longing for truth. For many like my dear friends and me the nights are lengthy and we crave a dose of empathy as well as honesty.

salesman says this vacuum's guaranteed
it could suck an ancient virus from the sea
it could put the dog out of a job
could make the traffic stop
so little thoughts
can safely get across

it's the rules it's the rules guaranteed or not it's the rules

I think back to the character, that young hero Lloyd Dobler, and his simple, well thought out request of life and how that was tested. He also said to his Joe obsessed friend in a moment of doubt:

You probably got it all figured out, Corey. If you start out depressed everything's kind of a pleasant surprise.

I don't want life to be what it is now. I don't think any of us do. After all, what comes after the choking sensation driven by irresponsibility and assumption? Gord Downie's tongue-in-cheek, lyrical sarcasm from the song above calls into question how this has been steadily filtered into our lives and grown roots of compromise. I am not going to be oversold by something that guarantees my unseen language of feelings and thought and, yes, doubt gets verbalized and communicated. I don't want life to exist in a haze so that the small miracles I encounter become just a "Huh!" and a smile. I can't let the mediocrity of those who un-fruitedly claim to be experts or self-righteously deem themselves (religious or not) knowledgeable enough to deliver some interpretation of history or implant some idea to pass off as truth influence my heart's honest reality or my quest for principle. I don't want my faith in Christ to be something served to me and un-digestable, casting dark shadows over others who do not believe as I do when truly all I and those who genuinely feel called by His name want to do is love.

It's time to re-write the rules.

Board the plane. Be seated. Clasp hands. Lift off.

Love.

::END::


*from The Rules by The Tragically Hip (click to listen)

Sing Inside Like a Radio

‘Be careful, that edge is sharp,’ ‘You’re going to drive your father to the edge,’ ‘Don’t get close to the edge,’ our parents caution us.

‘I was at the edge of my seat,’ ‘That was cutting edge,’ ‘She’s got the edge,’ we hear as adults in the world.

Talking about the edge causes a swirl of emotions. On one hand you have all of the warning information from your youth—-harm, provocation, danger. On the other you have for what people as adults often strive--excitement innovation,adeptness. I was recently asked what my own personal edge was, this edge being very different, how my personal equanimity is received. I have waited for the moment I could say this. God plays me love songs on the radio.

Oh, Oh Deep water
Black, and cold like the night
I've stand with my arms wide open
I've run a twisted line
I'm a stranger
in the eyes of the maker*

I was pulling into work the other day thinking about what the next entry in my blog would say when Bob Dylan’s “Broken” came on the radio. I mentioned this song on one of my last blogs. Daniel Lanois produced this song, the DJ mentioned. Daniel’s name has been popping up quite a bit. I heard a bio on him on Saturday. I downloaded a podcast on him yesterday. He plays Toronto’s Massey Hall tonight and the DJ after interviewing him played the song “The Maker”. I hadn’t heard this song in years, and thought, ‘That’s it. This is what resonates with what I have to write.'

He’s done it countless times. You’ve come here and if you’ve read here, you already know. It shows up mentally most prominently in my writing. Writing keeps my pendulum sinking deeper between erudition and apathy, between listlessness and driveness.

I could not see
for the fog in my eyes
I could not feel
for the fear in my life
From across the great divide
In the distance I saw a light
Jean baptiste
walking to me with the maker

Mentally, like anyone else, I have had something preventing me from seeing the truth of myself and others, and it’s a constant noticing that lifts the haze from my life, affirming that I don’t have to be like anyone else and the uniqueness of each being. I can choose not to be haunted by fear. My faith in God can unfold like the intriguing lives in His Word, filled with individuality and a deep desire for me to know how much He loves me. I have small books and scraps of paper throughout my life demonstrating this.

My body is bent and broken
by long and dangerous sleep
I can't work the fields of Abraham
and turn my head away
I'm not a stranger
in the hands of the maker

This deep listening happens on the physical level for me with the practice of yoga. Many friends have questioned me doing this, dismissing it as it being something that would lead me into spiritual darkness or heresy in my faith. Saying this would be the equivalent of their child becoming a Buddhist from the practice of hapkido or karate. It is so far from the truth. This psychological science of mind, body, spirit relationship has at its core a non-judgemental, non-directive devoutness, any person of any religious fidelity would be at gain to practice. And it is not without the support of my pastor and spiritual director that I do practice.

Through the mystical union of spirit and breath, yoga has brought my body and mind deep healing in areas I could not describe to a physician or psychiatrist. This ritualistic repetion of the asanas of has guided me through some obscure, cold places and made me more aware of the Light I attempt to live out. It has helped me to be more calm and merciful to myself, opening me to love others more. Yoga has done all of these things so very profoundly, I have decided to share it with others and become a teacher of this ancient healing art.

Brother John
Have you seen the homeless daughters
standing there
with broken wings
I have seen the flaming swords
there over east of Eden
burning in the eyes of the maker

Spiritually, listening for the intertwining themes and harmonies erupting happens through an openness of mind, heart and spirit. I can't describe how this happens, but I have a sense of awe about it. It is like God playing love songs on the radio, but I am the radio constantly tuning in to everything that enters my life. I live in the city and there is a rawness about it, a grit that enters your soul and creates a sensitivity to the human condition. I belong to a church that is dedicated to their relationship with the city and fortifies me for service with words and music. There are other sudden bursts of connection--books, lectures, nature. It settles into the spaces of my solitude.

Why do I tune in? Simply because they are all eternal activities. I am one small radio that can transmit the eternal interconnectedness of what I experience. This is were I feel equanimous, at home and free.

oh river rise from your sleep....

~END~

* "The Maker" from the album Acedie by Daniel Lanois

Fractures of Forgiveness

“I was able to go to her yesterday,” my eldest cousin said today. “I am not sure if you knew this but it had been five years since we had spoken. We were able to make peace. I was able to make peace with her before she passed and know all of that has gone away.”

To tell the truth, I had no idea. I don’t know much about my family here in the US. Let me rephrase that. I do know too much about them. But I know not to try to know too much about them.

My mother, filled with tears, grace and light, had called me earlier that day. She told me that my cousin passed away that morning. I knew this cousin had been suffering from pancreatic cancer and my husband and I had prayed for her often. She was nearly ten years older than myself. My mother asked me to call the eldest cousin to ask for more information about the showing and funeral. I obeyed.

I didn’t how to say anything but the polite thing. “I’m am very sorry for your loss. I am glad you were able to make peace with her. What are the arrangements for her?” I asked.

My mother taught me that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. (It is one of the only sayings she can’t get right without mixing in some other metaphor.) It’s not that she wants me not to disclose our family’s locked hidden secrets, I just think she is asking for respect without trouble. The truth is that for the past ten years or so having the older friends that I do, my brain has become a repository for many secrets. I dare not open my mouth for fear of creating some concoction that will inadvertently sever me from them. I love my mother. She deserves for me to behave graciously and tight-lipped. She’s put up with all of this mess for over 70 years. So I tend to focus on the truth. It’s sometimes the only thing that can keep the pain that unforgiveness generates on a leash.

She is trapped inside a month of gray,
and they take a little every day.
She is a victim of her own responses,
shackled to a heart that wants to settle, and then runs away.

It’s a sin to be fading endlessly.
Yeah, but she’s all right with me.*

The mayor took a plea today. I suppose in a city like Chicago one is too enchanted with proper city amenities and culture to become too disenfranchised with city leaders. There may even be accountability involved, who knows. In Detroit, things are too small to even know what all of that looks like. We just take it. It is painful. It’s like a chemical reactor that makes small children look at you strangely because you appear to be white and living in their neighborhood. It closes the Catholic school down the street and reopens it as a charter school while the public school on the next block closes. It causes the dark person in their late model car to cut you off at the light. You have use up gas to haul all of your smelly recycling with your car into the plant instead of having it picked up at your home. There is a sewage treatment facility with money in their pocket while the city’s workers are jobless with picket signs in front of it. You can’t scream to the little child that your husband has lived in this neighborhood all of his life. You can’t re-shufffle institutional changes within education. You can’t honk at the car that cuts you off without fear of repercussions. You can’t demand city officials reexamine how recycling could revive their budgets. You can’t point a finger at who’s palm in city government was greased to get the sewage treatment contract.

You deal. Day after day.

She is leaving on a walkaway.
She is leaving me in disarray.
In the absence of a place to be,
she stands there looking back at me,
hesitates, and then turns away.

She’ll change so suddenly-- she’s just like mercury.
Yeah, but she’s all right with me.

I opened my Bible and read twice of wisdom this week. The first time on how David felt it wise to abdicate to Solomon. David was forgiven by God of adultery and murdering Solomon’s mother’s first husband. And yet from that mess he received a son who would become king. The second was of what Solomon, who as king could have any given good thing from God, when asked of God what he desired most, Solomon requested wisdom to lead God’s children. My husband spoke specifically about forgiveness today. And this is wisdom. He said we could not as a family and as a people who live in this city mock the situation further by emphasizing it. We had to forgive and move on. This had to be demonstrated in our subtlest actions. And this is from a Caucasian man who has been at the brunt of the “dealing with it” for all of his life.


Keep some sorrow in your hearts and minds
for the things that die before their time:
for the restlessly abandoned homes,
the tired and weary rambler’s bones.
And stay beside me where I lie.

I am too relieved to hold onto anything about the mayoral situation. I feel released inside now that it is over. I feel empathy for the prices paid yet at the same time feel confident that the beginning of accountability has come. Yet this is what I feel today. I can only intend to continue to feel this hope.

She’s entwined in me-- crazy as can be.
Yeah, but she’s all right with me.
She’s all right-- she’s all right with me.

I will go see the cousin that passed at the funeral home. I will see all of the family that did not come to my wedding and hope they love my merciful mother a little more. I will vote this November with my fears reverberating from the lack of connection in every direction as well as the quake of the country’s collective unconscious sullenly stirring. I will look ahead the future instead of back at scandal. I will try to be my mother, my husband, King David and his son King Solomon. Yet mostly my mother.

*Mercury by The Counting Crows (Yes, Adam, I know it is not a song about love but a song about addiction. Humor me on this fractures of forgiveness line.)