while I was packing I thought you said

Always this, slowly this

a sigh, ten minutes pass,

I am trying to tell you something...

    ...I know

but you don't, you don't and I don't

know how to tell you

beginning

      another beginning surrounded by

good intentions, intentions

piled so high, crumbled all around me

with the sincerity of origami folds

this will be, this is, this was

pounding relentlessly in my head till I

...oh nevermind

no, what, what were you saying?

always this

surrounded by another beginning

and hedged, hemmed in by

papers, the past, the fragments

always, writing fragments 

I...

beginning

straight-faced we stare into

the illusion of historicity

and embrace translations,

illegible and illiterate

with religious fervor

the static whisper of the conscience

beneath the hum, hiss-rush of

soundwave masses is too faint to grasp...

but I search, stethoscope to heartbeat

do you know what I mean? but, oh, how could you?

this conversation is so old,

so old it might disintegrate were we to press it

we await our animal tongues

to stir, to seek the prey of

undsicovered, to devour the unknown

and speak and ask 

            words

what is the depth of the sound of the sky

I hear only an echo

though she swallows our cries

while

fingertips encrusted with the dust of nature

hold flecks of memory that freckle our skin

the way will descend into my

soul as the dew, inescapable,

I adore the distance as a

worshiper of wandering

of the thousand lives indwelling one 

and this storm shuffles down the valley,

a steady unhurried approach, 

where time is only a servant to emergence

an arrival that can never be late

all i have left is this

is this and only this

(and this is more than enough)

do you understand?

but oh, how could you?

Dark Night Poetry Slam

* * *

On the night before your wedding I asked you, “what is the geography of love?” 

It’s a land I’m afraid of becauseI’ve heard they’re all nudists because you have to strip yourself bare to be vulnerable. I prefer layers.  I’ve been folding myself into sharp creases telling myself I’ll shape a paper crane someday.  

You asked: Do you remember what our love tasted like?

I remembered the rain beading a necklace on the nape of your neck and the cold stone on my spine in the graveyard the day I was too afraid to tell you. But I said no. 

  I’ve wrapped words around my windpipe till the sound is clogged and sometimes it the things you want most you have to let silence enfold.

     Love doesn’t possess things because it is the child of a treasure hunter and a miner. It unlocks the birdcages, it winds up courage like a jack-in-the-box and whites out the periods at the ends of sentences so the stories keep going. 

Love is a song we played on a saw, between the teeth, and the whine of our ghosts always haunted the melody, but we cut each other into before and after. And you can’t ask for love back. Love shatters our bodies but we keep collecting the pieces to make kaleidoscopes. And that damage is beauty, waiting to turn. 

I said, tell me your love story. 

You said I have so many.  

You sent me a letter that was just a blank page, and it said everything. I carry it in my wallet; I let it change owners, because love only makes us wider, it’s like splitting the darkness open like a loaf and swallowing that density.  

You said love is a land full of beggars, who will tap you on the shoulder and hold their hands empty waiting for your offer. Love will ask you for all your glances cast backward, for your nervous laughter, for the times you run up your basement stairs. It will ask for all your fears. And it will scare the hell out of you. So what will you carry in your pockets?  

I said what is the weather like there? And you said, it isn’t mild. The climate is tropic. There are typhoons, like the time we made love after his hands shook holding the letter that said he was HIV+ and we wept, entwined in each other.

    And the typhoons make swamps like the time it was halfway to morning and our shoes were drowning in the rainwater and you said “God’s not crying, he’s wishing he could annihilate us again.” And I said, I didn’t think so, it’s more like She knew the only thing that would make sense was howling. 

There are cliffs, where a school of jellyfish swims in your stomach when you dangle your feet over the side.  And you know there is nothing  --nothing between you and that freefall. But you jump.  And the water will crack your ribs and restart your heart every time. 

I heard you were happy. And I was happy to know it. 

I never understood physics but this is how I learned the world is round, because there are no corners where someone can stand with their back against a wall.

Because you turned my ear into a seashell when it was pressed to your navel and now it remembers the ocean inside you and recalls it to me across all this distance.  I knew I was beautiful after you loved me, even when we cast ourselves back on the tide, because the hollows are deeper-- and I can only love more. 

I’d spent so much time being afraid that love was a limited resource. That if I gave it away, if you took it away, I would be here with my hands open, empty. But, love keeps on growing like those volcanic eruptions under the ocean building new islands. 

Love is like Strega Nona’s pasta pot, there will be too much, you will be full. 

Love will be leftover. 

Yes.  

Love will be left over.

woman rings

A womanist: Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spiirt. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless. – Alice Walker

Tree rings result from new growth; they represent the growth speed through the seasons of the year, the ecology: the dryness, the rainfall, the sunfall. Dendrochronology reads the patterns, remembers the past climate.

 “Tree rings speak

of rich years, drought years,

seasons of damage

and of peace.

God reads my soul

and understands.”

In a month I will be twenty-four years old and as this season of travel and education and finding roots in new communities ends, I have decided to celebrate by marking my out my own “woman ring” – a physical representation of where I have come from and am coming from, the ecology of my life.

It represents overall coming into my identity as a woman (or "womyn") and finding the face of Mama God. It represents the wisdom of our lived experiences, of the body’s grace, the womb from which creativity and healing and life force spring forth. It represents being present, being deep awake to this moment-- that “all acutal life is encounter.” It represents resistance. It represents the Spirit of God, the Holy Mystery, the Uncreated One. It represents connection, how my life is interwoven in the lives of the people I belong too, how they have given me a security and love from which to adventure and explore, to continue in this wild journey that is life-because most importantly, I recognize my own fragility, humanity, and need for vulnerability—for stripping off layer after layer of the ways I hide and self-protect. It also represents how I am part of an ecosystem, “eventually one must come to rest, must come home and mix their blood and sweat with the land.”

"My first step from [seeing God as] the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet…it come to: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed…. " Alice Walker 

That is all.  

Reflections on the US/Mexican Border

Ah the Southwest, the Sonoran Desert, Nogales, Tucson, Arivaca...  March 5-13th were days that changed my life and have been some of the most difficult, impactful days. This week solidified a course that is probably going to be unfolding, hauntingly, for years. Right now, I am vacillating between desiring to speak to everyone I see and not wanting anything but silence... my heart and my mind are in the desert. 

Dorthea Soelle wrote, "If one finally understands what is really going on, one cannot live with a clear conscious in this bourgeois world, pursuing one's career and entertainment. Other priorities arise in one's life. These priorities are encompassed in the comprehensive word, 'resistance.'" 

For those of you who didn't hear, I spent my spring break on the US/Mexican border volunteering with No Mas Muertes, a humanitarian aid organization that seeks to end migrant deaths in the desert. The situation at the border, the way migrants are being treated is terrifying and a moral failure of us as humans. 

      To explain more: We spent the week at an aid camp and spent the majority of our time on water/food drops, walking migrant trails through these remote regions. "Somos amigos, tenemos aqua y comida." It was so difficult to realize the atrocious, pervasive ignorance between my life and their situation. The economic policies of the US (particularly NAFTA), drive these people from their homes and communities, then criminalizes their struggle for a decent life. Criminalizes their poverty.  Whatever language we use, the reality of the situation is the production of a sentiment... that we (the US) would rather see them die in the desert than cross into our country.   And it amaze/horrifies/frightens me... that we will take lives in the name of this nation, when all of us-- when from time immemorial, people have migrated, people have wandered the earth. So why can I say, I am American-- I took this land from the indigenous people, I took this land from Mexico, and this is mine and no one can come here unless I say so. That is what our government says. And the church sometimes says it. It makes me feel nauseous... As Derek Webb brilliant said, "my first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man, my first allegiance is not to democracy or blood- it's to a king and a kingdom." I thought of Jesus saying, "I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink... whatever you did for the least of these you did for me." (That is Christianity, nationalism is not.) 

I sat beside the grave of a fourteen year old girl, Josseline, who died alone and thirsty in the desert.  Afterwards she walked every trail with me, lingering between the prayers of my footsteps and the whispers of forgiveness for my complicity.  I had the privilege of talking to a man that had lived in the US for fourteen years and was deported and is just trying to make his way back to his life, his wife and family, his kids-- and yet he still sang songs. A girl on our trip got frostbite, layered and in our tent-- and imagine how cold it is for them... how they see this hostile landscape of mountains and cacti and they have to hide, are being hunted... and an unknown grave that was only 6 months old... and the litter on the sides of the trail of shoes, backpacks, sweatshirts.

And the border patrol. I have never been so challenged by seeds of hatred... so many documents of abuse. A migrant man who asked not to be put in the back with the dogs because he was allergic, who at the aid station later had not only allergic symptoms but dog bites. How have we forgotten our humanity? How can we look past a body, to an idea?  Our water drops, if found by the border patrol, were often slashed, the food dumped out-- this shocked me, and it was not a one time occurrence.This is a way we are all guilty of killing. These deaths are not an accident, they are a manifestation of our border policy. And it is mothers, sons, daughters, children, old people, fathers, brothers, sisters. 

I also bore witness at he Streamline Operation (which is this court where they deport 70 immigrants at once having had only 30mins to talk with a lawyer, kept 5-10 days in makeshift facilities where sometimes there is not even room for everyone to lie down. This is a sin.)  I saw a man beg for his life trying to escape gang-life, and he has been denied asylum, so there was nothing the judge could do: It is the law of this land.  I was sitting next to the door they were led out so they'd look at me and I wasn't aloud to speak or tell them I thought it was unjust, all I could hope was that in my tears they would see compassion. Yet, it felt like so little to offer while they were chained ankles, waist, wrists... like animals, like criminals, these young scared men whose only crime is being poor. is being brown. is being born outside our wall.  We have a WALL across our border. It's ridiculous, it costs tax payers 700,000- 7 MILLION DOLLARS PER MILE... and prevents migrants only 5 minutes, but forces them into the most dangerous terrains. ... from CA to Texas 600-700 are caught trying each day... and people are dying... and its so hidden and manipulated by fear and greed.   

I could say so much more. But please, stop. think. become active in changing this catastrophe. 

Being back at school is... hard to say the least. All I want is to be back in the desert giving water, to focus on anything, to write a paper, to not think of Josseline, my friends, the desert, water, trails, the evidence of their passing, of the talks on white privilege, on the banning of ethnic studies, on the discrimination and racism so many people face... I can't focus in classes. I feel overwhelmed. I feel like rocking back and forth and sobbing. I feel more rage then I have ever felt. It's not okay. It's not okay. And, this is being done in my name-- in your name... for us to have this life. And I do not want that. Our policy is unfair, is inhumane, is selfish and ludicrous. 

More:

Josseline's story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124046778

Operation Streamline: http://www.immigrationforum.org/images/uploads/OperationStreamlineFactsheet.pdf

No More Deaths: www.nomoredeaths.org

"all actual life is encounter."

I have been reading this book that excites me so much... I borrowed it from my philosopher professor. It's called I and Thou (Martin Buber), it's about encountering other people about relation. The kind of book that's poetic and rambling and entices you in while subtly rearranging you as you read it, or at least reminding you of how full of awe we should be at the Uncreated One and the glorious beings surrounding us.

He talks about how we either relate to people/things in the world as objects or as beings. And only in "I respond to You with my whole being" do we truly not just experience (which is a monologue), but encounter (a dialogue, that is dynamic and evolving and able to reshape us and this is presence and present.) In the whole experience vs. encounter - I started thinking of how little we know how to open ourselves and how to encounter, we rely on formulas that don't breach the surface (sentences, questions we think we must ask or not ask even when we really want to just mingle, meld, collide into another.) We don't know how to breach the surface for true resonance or responding (just like spiritual language has become so co-opted that it's hard to articulate any sort of experience without it sounding cliche or church-y). 

But we all fall back on the formulas that don't allow for spontaneous or new encounters, we don't meet anything in a new or unique way. Our language and rituals and ... I guess the social structure confine us to the same ways of relating- even if that leaves us without genuine human interaction. And those formulas also conceal how we really desire to interact or encounter an other, a "You." There's always such an enormous gap between people, unsure of how to be vulnerable, how to be intimate-- how to give ourselves. But I wonder at that, what language do we need to undo and what questions lead us into people? He says- "try to meet every person, situation, and object in its own way." (But to me that seems so hard) It's a task of extraordinary attentiveness, and I think challenging our nature of trying to categorize and order things, reducing all experiences to routine and repetition vs. encounter. I think there's an aspect of needing to cultivate our capacity for wonder- not just at beauty or scenery, but wonder at the mysteries of another person, developing our desire for exploration. (but how to do that?) It's like the craving of authentic cultures, of some new place to travel, always seeking something new (for the chance of its profoundness)-- but all of that desire can be captured in the desire to travel into another person as well. "Allowing the encounter of another to disturb, disorient, unsettle us" so we continue becoming. Paying attention.

I feel like that is so hard for our culture, because we get so used to entertainment. And so few people appreciate silence and quiet but that's so central to encounter or true relationships, the continual opening and vulnerability and acceptance of unknowns in each other and even to ourselves, and the potential for change and evolution and cycles and growth. And he talks about seeing people as a whole, neighborless, seamless You that fills the firmament (when we are encountering them, that sort of intense focus, being truly present and attentive to encounter-- expanding how we interact, so we do not experience, but stand in relation too.)

I could go on and on... its such simple concept, but it is exactly what I have been wanting to read and dwell on lately... that aching to travel into others, to explore... and allow others to emerge, not trying to order, control, or possess them, but to reach out for that genuine human interaction. I think mainly that is what it means to love others- to appreciate and hear them as who they are. "Nothing else is present but this one, but this one cosmically." Then he ties it into God too. The life of spiritual beings is "wrapped in a cloud but it reveals itself, manifestations, it lacks but creates language. We hear no "You" and yet feel addressed'; we answer- creating, thinking, acting: with our being we speak the basic word unable to say "You" with our mouth." 


(I think this articulates so much our struggle with relation to God, he created language but doesn't use it audibly for us, yet we sense Him, we try to speak back but are stuck in words.) "But how can we incorporate into the world of the basic word what lies outside language? In every sphere, through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze toward the train (the edge, the hem) of the eternal You." (He uses You here as being/ that which we encounter or can be in relation too.) We perceive a breath of it; in every You we address the eternal You." This excites me about God... His permanence, His hidden nature and yet... it beckons to me.  

"It is up to you how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for you... it does not stand outside of you, it touches your ground, and if you say "soul of my soul" you have not said to much."

The Little Red Brick Home

Remember that night, we spoke casually till your limbs began itching for the doorframe, only then did you ask, “Why are you standing on the table?” I couldn’t explain that I needed to. So I said, “I just want to.” But you understood, and threw a tantrum for me so we could laugh instead of cry. I collapsed on the ugly couch. 

We talked about hanging family portraits in the stairwell of people we should belong to, mostly grandpas from National Geographic who are slightly eccentric and sisters from Africa whose bold gaze continually startles me. We don’t have fathers or mothers.

Some days we laugh in two-part harmony.  An atomic high-five skipped down the passage of our eyes when I lead him through the door and passed you in the hallway.  Beneath my barely concealed joy and mildly discreet contentment you knew the interior of my head was pin-balling. 

I externalize my secrets by accident, like the day the dishwasher snowed on the kitchen floor after we’d packed up the entire house to rave music and cursed the bug kingdom from A to Z. I’m still up for inventing the PA system so we can interrupt each other abruptly and she won’t have to use her cell phone to call from downstairs to upstairs. 

We plan anti-party-parties with one-hand-count guest lists.  My mood hop-scotches like scanning the radio, but you don’t mind.  We co-exist in our compulsive movement, talk of foreign lands, of turquoise tiles, of sunflowers on the table till the map falls off the wall. You beg me to write that feminist poem, so we can put it on the fridge. You’d probably even find a sticker for it, like a mother.

Remember the night I locked myself out and came to your door:  and in the morning we felt inebriated by the bullet-like joy that had pierced us, we stayed in bed, basking in the luxury of sabbath sundays, whispering like sisters, finger-puppets and gangster yoga poses in borrowed sweat pants till the laughter tilter-worlded. We ate fig cake for breakfast.

Yellow leaves plastered the ground and we walked till our feet hurt, trying to walk something out of our soles. Sudan is red. I read Nietzsche aloud to you along side the Bible and we break our broken hearts into pieces of laughter and shouts to cough out of our body. I read your palm, your eyes, and write it down in poems and you say, "screw you, Meg Brauckmann, for stealing my soul." 

You scribbled “manual labor” as your dream job, and I knew you were mostly serious—because we need messy hands for our messy hearts, sediment on our fingers to ground us. We turn up the music, so we can say what we want. But the sound beneath the song is always fear and love, fear and love, and every once in awhile: home. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Kundera, that simple phrase convinces me you knew:)

It is not enough to walk below galactic blessing

I thirst to swallow galaxies

feel them slush down my esphogaus

to crack the ice-moon between my teeth

sending shivers down my spine.

The cinnamon sun must melt on my tongue

my limbs grow bark when I embrace the oaks

to rip my hands through air, a current

I thirst to meld, mold, devour

possession, possession 

of this -- Eternal Now.

I wrap my arms so tightly

to take up so little space,

 to take up no space at all,

oh for fusion to exist. 

I am ravenous from wonder,

lusting for deep awakeness

but this want for life 

is a wound awaiting sutures,  

is the death rattle of starved appetities

listen: 

approach each person barefoot,

encountering holy ground.

listen:

 live like making love 

this strongly, urgently

for there is nothing else

Fearless, for you can lose nothing 

you can not be robbed of this

Give your love away

drench the earth with mercy

litter earth with bearable weight.

Speak, bravely:

Here is no fear in loving,

only to be deep, deep awake.

a later thought

He etches a map to the next world

into his body with each breath,

imprinted as a tenderness

between his teeth-comb ribs

dislodging the dandruff

of his hopes.

He is beginning the ascent

from limbo, prayers paid

for permeable edges 

between the concentric

circles of life and death. 

Walking alien sidewalks

he spies on the wind

in its endless pursuit,

hears the name of the

lost child she is 

calling.

He absorbs the sterility

of a new world; cleanses

the mother tongue from his

language, discards the lint of

memory of a land

from between his toes. 

He is a snowflakes slow crescendo, 

one among many,

He is ascending,

and who knows if we survive 

by our small deaths?  

Disclosures

[excerpts from the epic letter I wrote to my siblings last year.]

Lately I've been feeling like there are variations of me floating around the world: full disclosures, half-disclosures, illusions. The more I think of them the more internal strife I have over the fact that, if I am not actually revealing myself then people are not actually loving or knowing me. I think I have grown so accustomed to the tearing back and forth between identities and beliefs and the scatteredness of my life/travel that instead of being a wholly united person I am fragmented selves that exist for certain people. I don't like that feeling. Inside of me is in motion. Africa is like this huge inhale that I don't know how to explain... so I won't get to that yet.

There are so many things I am afraid to disclose to others because of how it would effect our relationship, but then these nagging unsync'd versions of myself feel disingenuous and unsettling. I need disclosure... let people add me to prayer lists, shake their heads, I am seeking the Uncreated One as best I can, I am excited by my questions, passionate about the God who chatters and who is mysterious and beyond my reach, who I adore and ignore and am haunted by. I am also terrified of rending relationships, of the way certain parts of my ever-evolving beliefs may threaten others, may be inexplicable and simply unsync-able with others' worldviews... others who are important to me. But, these questions have come from every way I have chased after Jesus, and I'm sure God is not surprised or threatened by them. I don't want to be labeled by them, or told I am "abandoning the values of my youth". I fear how others would take this list and paste it as a wall between us.

I feel the corners of my body cringe at certain language, at ways of knowing God and while I can recognize the experiences are so powerful and real for them, I am struggling to find new ways to connect to a God who feels so present and so elusive and compels me to seek. I know it will be threatening to some because I feel the inward threat that my own questions provide to my faith- somedays I feel I'm losing it, other days I feel like I am being tackled by the lion- seized by great affection. I have to push. Perhaps its my nature. I have to wonder. I have to search for response. Messy, inconsistent, wrong, limited.

I have to keep disclosing what I believe-in-progress so people can continue to know me. Not what O think is the version that compliments them but me with integrity to myself, to my search and understanding of life, with hopeful doubt and joyful attentiveness, and I want others to feel free to do the same, and to hear and hold inside me their narratives, their relation to everything around them. For all of us to occupy the territories of our faith/experience/journey. The problem is, I have swallowed myself so often among certain people that the paths forked so long ago without them knowing that the ground to cover has so much explanation... five years, sometimes more... that I think they will rightly be shocked to discover, I am not who they think. I do not think what they think.

So, disclosures I would like to make, that I'm afraid to make, that I don't know how to make...

1) I'm okay with the idea that the world evolved, God exhaling a conversation, an unfolding, surprising universe-- and there are things about the world and the nature of God that I think make sense of this, and the more I learn of science (and evolution) the more wondrous and compelling and insanely complicated and beautiful I imagine God.

2) I don't think the Bible is a period, the end of God speaking, or even full revelation. I think it is a dialogue, a living thing, a book of a long history of people grappling for language that describes God, for a vocabulary that syncs their life to what they feel (and I think it falls short and evolves too), I think it invites us into the conversation, trying to find words that throw a hook into the real, tangible nature of God. It's a living thing... a relation to Truth as a person, it means so very much. and I think there are things outside the bible that tell us just as much about God.

3) Maybe in mysterious ways God is bigger than Christianity and Jesus incarnates the Way in ways I don't fully understand... more than just the C.S Lewis Last Battle scene... "and you may have been right, but not to what you thought. not to what you think. you have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out- perhaps a little at a time." "and how long is this going to take?" ... "I don't know. As long as you live perhaps." "That could be a long time." "I will tell you a further mystery, he said, "it may take longer." (Jayber Crow) ... I really can't grasp on to evangelical language at the moment, it just doesn't connect me to God at all, actually it makes me feel a little nauseated. I can't help but pursuing my questions, and I don't really care if that makes people think I'm less close to God because they're wrong.

4) I believe hell is empty and somehow Jesus leads grace, mercy, and unconditional love to ultimate victory. Which doesn't mean it doesn't matter if we know this Uncreated One, it just means I don't think eternal punishment triumphs, because to me that is a victory for darkness not God. (See: Raising Abel, Love Wins, etc.) 

5) I don't think homosexuality is a sin. And I will err on this side, because that's what I've come to and I'm part of the LGBT Safe Space club on my campus, and some of my closest friends are gay, and I support them. 

6) I think Jesus was non-violent and presents an example of self-sacrifice. And I think non-violence is important and redemptive.

7) I'm not a political label. And I don't think either label matters as much as people. Because I think people are holy ground and we need to keep listening, and never stop asking questions or think that the labels mean much. I like a boy who isn't a christian and right now I'm okay with that because I understand the mystery of spirituality and needing to puzzle through it and that God is broader. That the narrow path might just be balancing on the spine of a mountain, or a winding river.

8) I voted for Obama and I still would (or maybe John Paul) but I don't think McCain was dumb or evil, there's so much space for the ways we construct the world around us, so much need to see those ways and live by conviction to what we value and believe in. To live with conviction and humility.

9) I don't think everything is pre-destined. I think God is our companion in this journey and He has a plan and things are happening, unfolding... or maybe it's somehow both (God's beyond me).

10) Sometimes I swear, and its cathartic.

...The more I speak the more I want to spend a year in silence, and I'm sure there's more things, but that's probably enough to raise hell. Tell me disclosures! Not even things you think people should know about you, things you'd like to speak without fear... (these are things I don't want to just nail like 95 thesis to a wall, but things I want to stop hiding, to allow to rise to the surface as they may. for the leaves to fall). We need to talk. We need to keep asking each other questions.

I love you guys. Love, your lovely black sheep. 

after a year and a half this is emerging...

Mmhmm...

[Hopeland]

The embers of a bruised mango sun

draw shapes across concrete floor

And while we wash red earth from our feet

 I remember: "The Lord God formed man from dust"

Tongue carved into the arch of my mouth,

It was in tall grass with a skirt in serpentine twists

 that I buried god along with a calling

that had whispered to me as a child

A suit and tie told me doubt tastes

of lukewarm stale cola, but life grew wings

and song filled my veins with helium

kneeling into mama's dirt, I weed the poisons of holy books. 

It was in a street, filled with the skies burden

of rain, the hoarding of months,

that I was baptized into hopeful doubt

 Africa, you began all this. 

Tonight we sit on the porch clenching mugs

a last defense

and I confess my prayers lately have been:

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

She says, "Maybe Jesus is a leaf."

You aren't dead. You're reincarnated.

Mystery, mystery, mystery. 

I tremble to repeat it, fear and exhilaration. 

I sat an inch from a lifeless body

and discovered new hollows

for this ache too shallow

caverns, caverns 

No, I never told my mother

that I laid my Bible in a grave 

heart howling, shaking, finally exhaling. 

It was black skin that taught me joy,

that forgave my whitewashed sins.

***

And this, was the calm of the day: If Jesus is the Way, then Truth with a capital T lies in a person, and a relationship to Truth as a person is completely different than truth as a proposition. When you marry someone no matter how intimately you know them, they remain a mystery. And that is how Jesus/Truth will remain, intimacy and mystery.

Faith-in-progress

Spending this summer at a Unitarian Universalist retreat/learning center is wonderful-- and deepening my own faith in unexpected ways, renewing my awe at deep, deep grace. Each day here fosters diverse and lively conversation about truth, faith, religion, worldview, the common good, issues, justice, etc. -- passion that leaves me full of hope and also aware of my limited perspective. Perhaps one of the most important ways we journey towards God is through encountering others.

In encountering the spirituality and beliefs of others, I am learning how to occupy the territory of my own faith-- the on-going process of doubts, questions, and revelation. And being witness to the present wounds the lack of consistency between Jesus and we, the church, has inflicted is eye-opening, humbling, and convicting. A UU Christian writer recounted what I've been noticing, "The well, for too many UUs, had been irrevocably poisoned, and they would thereafter drink of the living waters from another source. Any other source, it seemed, but the Christian well." 

Being one of few here who worship God-in-Christ causes me to pay attention to how I marginalize others and how I minimize my own faith in my desire to find common ground. In some ways I feel less diminished or wearily labeled here, it is refreshing to not feel like God is in a box or to feel the tug of red, blue, hippy, evangelical, progressive, blah blah blah. (Especially because I so often feel pulled between identities.) In some ways, its like coming out of the closet, instead of feeling pressured to conform to a particular idea of Christianity, I feel only responsible for myself. And I am already curiously "different." Here there's just the terrifying (mercy-filled) weight of comparison to the Christ I am claiming to follow, the weight of integrity to myself.

The thing that matters most to me is consistency between the internal and external, a genuine expression not of rules, values, morality, or religion (though freedom is most often bounded), but of my own encounter with the Uncreated One and freely embodying my faith and worship. I think of social reformers, of priest, of theologians, who embody their faith in a way that is full of life, engaging, and not defensive. To live bravely and to speak with my own voice, my own conviction. That challenges me. 

* * *
The same writer I mentioned above, explained her path to "Jesus claiming her" this way... 
"Who is Jesus Christ to me? He is both a teacher of the Way, and the Way itself. For one who has always had a hard time grasping the concept of God, let alone developing a working definition of God, Jesus both points me toward a definition of God and then lives that definition. Jesus Christ is the freedom that laughs uproariously at the things of this world, while loving me dearly for being human enough to lust after them. He is my soul’s safety from all harm. He is the avatar of aloneness, a compassionate and unsentimental narrator of the soul’s exile on earth, and proof of the soul’s triumphant homecoming at the end of the incarnational struggle. He is not afraid to put his hands anywhere to affect healing. He mourns, and weeps, and scolds, and invites. He is life more abundant and conqueror of the existential condition of fear.
“By their fruits ye shall know them,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. There are indeed degenerate branches on the tree of Christian life, but this does not keep me from Christ. There are even disagreements among Unitarian Universalist Christians about the appropriateness of this or that perspective, practice, or teaching—debates that I regard mostly with affection, if occasionally with irritation. We have so much else to do. My daily Christian practice, although it changes frequently and is augmented by wisdom and practices from other traditions, consists mostly of clumsy efforts to love my God with all my heart, all my mind, all my soul, and all my strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. That’s work enough for this lifetime.
I call myself a Christian because I am a disciple of Jesus Christ—not just Jesus-that-great-guy-and-teacher-with-the-long-hair-and-sandals but Jesus the living avatar of the great God and Jesus the Christ of Easter morning. ... When we (UUs) say that our living tradition draws from “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life,” I think of that original community of disciples, who had a direct experience of the risen Christ that I revere and respect. ... Do I believe, then, in the resurrection? I believe that the original community of disciples had a direct experience of one who was truly dead, and who soon thereafter sent them out to love the world, to serve, to heal, and to overcome the forces of hatred and oppression.

... And I am convicted."