Good Grief

I heard someone say awhile back that if you really have passion for someone, and they hurt you, as we've hurt God, there's no such thing as "simple forgiveness" (as in, why couldn't God just forgive, without the cross?) They said they were thinking that all that blood and agony is exactly what it looks like when God forgives.

:(

Wow. Yeah.

I don't know. Advent isn't even over and already I'm into Lent. My circadian rhythm's out of whack - why not the other? This is what's coming my way these days - may as well go with the flow.

I need to get beneath the anger and just stay with the grief as long as it takes, I think. Unresolved grief keeps us forever children. That's been true in my case. So what do I make of the whole deal in the light of Christ?Yeah, I want to go there. It's about time.

I've always been gut-struck by that part of the story, just after his supposedly triumphal entry into Jerusalem and after the crowds have dispersed, where we see Jesus weeping as he beheld the city (Lk 19:41). Rather jarring sequence of events, seems to me.

Palm Sunday is a sad day for the Man of Sorrows. And for good reason. I'm thinking he probably knew the same crowd would be out the following Friday singing a different song. Unrequitted love will break your heart like nothing else. Saddest story in the book. But hearing the songs of praises on their lips - oh how sweet the sound! - but you know better? That'd make anyone absolutely crazy! I can't help but notice he got real irritable right after that - he cursed a fig tree; went postal in the temple. Sounds like a classic guy thing - what I know of anger it often serves as a mask for fear or shame, and even more often for grief. Mix in a little jealousy there and you get fireworks. My take on it is what we're seeing is Jesus coming to terms with the reality of the situation there, and it didn't sit well with him at all. On Thursday he spent a pensive evening with just his closest disciples, but even then the coming betrayals and denials hung over him like a shroud. And that night in Gethsemene, alone with God, sweating blood like tears... even still, he was most gracious that night, Who on the very night he was betrayed broke bread, and said, Take. Eat. This is my body, broken for you... (not at all classic, but rather classy, I'd say).

You've heard the theories, I'm sure. It's said that what he wrestled with there in the garden that night was the coming separation from his Father; or worse, suffering the full force of God's unmitigated wrath that was millennia in the brewing and filling up to overflow. (You know, "Habakkuks oft cited but hasty assertion that God is of purer eyes than to look upon sin...") I don't know about that. Yeah, he did cry out, "My God my God why hast thou forsaken me!" Maybe his Father's rejection was something he wrestled mighily with before accepting, I don't know. Who does. What I'm thinking though is that it's just as possible what he wrestled mightily with there in the garden was having to face up to and endure to the dregs the bald-faced straight-up unmitigated rejection - a total and ultimate rejection with extreme prejudice - of his own people; the people he nevertheless loved so passionately, so dearly, so impossibly. I'm sure he suspected, but I wonder if, like us, he'd rather not go all the way into that awful truth. I don't think Jesus told himself pretty little lies - I think he knew the score.

Can you imagine the torment? Talk about exquisite.

I have to wonder what correlation there may be between his being "despised and rejected of men" and his godforsakenness there at the very end.

"We esteemed him not."

:(

He was in the world

The world was made by him

And the world knew him not.

He came unto his own

And his own

received him

not.

Lord have mercy.

Yes, have mercy. Because I see a correlation - here, now. I'm hooked. Caught in the net. Afraid to ask what's next. Not sure I really want to know.

Just stay with the grief as long as it takes.

Eat the pain. Eat it! Drink all of it. It'll be okay.

What do you expect?

Someone reminded me out of the blue today that Christmas/Advent is the "irrational season".

Have you heard this from Madeline L'Engle? I hadn't.

This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason,
There'd have been no room for the child.

That sounds rather dangerous to me for some reason. And at the same time so hopeful and even exhilarating. Go figure.

What do I expect in this pregnant time? Besides the usual ambivalence? In a word, I expect the worst. I do, dang me.

What I *hope* for in this time is that the worst will turn out to be be the best, nevertheless.

For the present, between that expectation and this hope, I labor along in ambivalence. I have especially mixed feelings about this particular notion that's borne out in the following rather poignant quote which accompanied the one above when I googled on the topic, juxtapositioned just so marvelously:

Loving the Wrong Person

We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. It isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems – the ones that make you truly who you are – that you’re ready to find a life-long mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person – someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, “This is the problem I want to have.”

But... And? So? Yes, but. I do hope for the best.

Because I can't help but notice the signs.

I keep being reminded (thanks be to God in Christ in you Bob, and you Jeanne, and you Laura, and all of you, as well) about the reason for the season - whenever I see the extra-ordinary become ordinary and the ordinary become extra-ordinary - in all the lovely little gestures and all the humble but significant gifts, given and received. And even better, and closer to home, whenever I see how when things don't go according to plan, at all, but turn out in the end to be better than either if us had barely dared dream, much less expect.

So I wonder what's being birthed in me - in us - these holy days. Something is indeed stirring. Has been for awhile now. I see such beauty all around us, all the precious babes born into the world, into this little corner, and I wonder; will it be so with me and mine? Will anyone call me blessed? Will I?

What will be will be. Let it be. Tell me once more that all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well - remind me Whose I am. I will and do believe you. I see it in you...

And I rejoice. And so I hope.

But I haven't a clue what specifically to expect. It's bigger than me. I do expect it'll be different. And also the same. Isn't that how it works? Even from the beginning? Is now? And ever shall be?

Is that not very Christ? To be expected?

I s'pect so.

The presents are under the tree. And around and about, as well.

I wish you all the blessed best - the best that you are and have been for me.

Calling all humans

Heard this from Holly Near and thought I'd pass it along.

I've thought this. Haven't you?

Planet Called Home

Can you call on your imagination
As if telling a myth to a child
Put in the fantastical, wonderful, magical
Add the romantic, the brave and the wild

Once upon a time there was a power
So great that no one could know its name
People tried to claim it and rule with it
Always such arrogance ended in shame.

Thousands of years would pass in a moment
Hundreds of cultures would come and go
Each generation with a glorious calling
Even when they were too busy to know

Then one day after two millennia
Which after all was a small part of time
Hundreds of souls found their way out of no where
To be on earth at the threat of decline

Let's all go, they moved as one being
Even though each would arrive here alone
They promised to work in grace with each other
To brave the beautiful planet called home

There was no promise that they could save it
But how exciting to give it a try
If they each did one or two actions beautifully
Complex life forms on earth might not die

And so they arrive in a spectrum of colors
The population on earth did explode
Some threw themselves in front of disaster
Other slowly carried their load

Some adopted small girls from China
Some lived high in the branches of trees
Some died as martyrs, some lived as healers
Some bravely walked with a dreadful disease

They mingled among each class and culture
Not one of them could be identified
But together they altered just enough moments
To help the lost and the terrified

To step outside our egos and bodies
To know for once that we truly are one
Then quickly we would forget to remember
But that's OK, their job was well done

And earth went on for another millennium
And now its time for my song to end
This magical story of hope and wonder
Invites you all to wake up and pretend to be

Fabulous creatures sent from the power
Souls that have come with a purpose in mind
To do one little thing that will alter the outcome
And maybe together we can do it in time

Can you call on your imagination
As if telling a myth to a child
Put in the fantastical, wonderful, magical
Add the romantic, the brave and the wild

The Souls are coming back
The Souls are coming back
The Souls are coming back
The Souls are coming back...

marriage of heaven and earth

PBS is airing Mystery of Chaco Canyon again. Fascinatin' stuff, Maynard. I'm even more intrigued the second time around. Well, for a couple reasons. Some kinda convergence going on, seems like. "Stars aligned and our webs were spun." Kind of familiar, actually. Like I've been here before. Well, I have, actually. A couple times. 'Til by turning and turning we come round right...


We don't have cable or satellite TV, and only get 3 stations out here on our bent and lopped rabbit ear antennae - Fox (of course! for keeping up with the Jones's), CBS, and (thank God!) PBS. I follow along with PBS pretty faithfully - I especially enjoy Washington Week (Gwen Ifill rocks!), McLaughlin Group, Bill Moyer/David Broncaccio's Now, Frontline, Tony Hillerman's detective stories on Mystery, BBC News... and I used to catch Charlie Rose every night, but not so much lately. And I especially appreciate the local stuff. It's all good. The kids love it, too.


So last night I needed a break from my current project (I'm writing a fancy-dancy genealogy program in Visual Basic I have high hopes for generating some income - we just gotsta to get some income comin' IN), so I popped the cap off the last beer in the fridge (left over from our 10th annual 4th of July family get-together) and plopped myself down in front of the tube for a couple of hours.


The first offering up, from the Secrets of the Dead series, was Search for the First Human in which a "team of scientists claim fossilized bones discovered in Kenya during a 2000 excavation are the oldest direct ancestor to humankind." And we are talking old, here - over six million years of ancient history. That's pretty old. It seems dear Lucy, who lived only 4.5 million years ago, isn't our gramma after all, but a cousin, and about 160,000+ times removed at that. The new Mother of All Living's surname is Aurora - though they're not sure she left any progeny, given the tiger teeth marks found on her femur. But if she did live long enough to pass along the human DNA torch, and barring any terminal interruptions in the reiterative branching out of her family tree, she could conceivably be our grandmother prefixed with 250,000 greats (give or take 75,000).


Conceivably? One of the lasting images I took from the film was the way they put that number in human terms - if all your ancestors were to line up single file one behind the other, your 60g-great grandparents would be about 120 feet behind you. They would have been born about 30 AD. Aurora would be standing about 90 MILES behind them.


What a picture. That there is one tall tree. My program's relationship calculation algorithm would handle it, but I doubt my database engine could. Not to mention my hard drive's data capacity.


What really intrigued me is that great-gramma Aurora's bones still speak for those who have ears to hear. Kind of like the blood of Abel that still cries out from the ground, even now. "He being dead yet speaketh." It's a meta-language thing, I guess. "There is no speech nor language, nothing audible is heard, yet their voice goes out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world..." Body language, anyone?


"The universe is made of stories, not atoms..." That's what got me interested in genealogy in the first place - wanting to know the stories. Everyone's got a story. Some have two. Put all the stories together and you get History. The Loom of Heaven weaves all the threads of our tell-tale lives together into one magnificent and most eloquent tapestry. I rather think one reason eternity lasts such a long time is so we can hear them all.


One particular story I'd especially like to hear is how it came to be that my grandfather Ray, my dad's dad, didn't marry Dorothy, my grandmother. Did his older brother Wesley, the hotshot pioneering pilot and instructor whose temper exempted him from wartime service but who was killed in another war 20 years later from a 20 guage shotgun blast to his head while he slept, talk him out of it? Grampa Ray didn't have time to tell his story properly - he died at 20 a year after my dad was born when he flew his Buhl Pup he had bought just a week prior into a tailwind (he saw some buds on the ground below and circled around to wave 'hi!'), and dropped out of the sky like a cold stone. (I wonder if he ever circled around Dorothy's folks farm at Corunna a few miles to the north from where he went down, perhaps maybe catch a glimpse of the fruit of his youthful loins. Who wouldn't? Or did big brother Wesley sufficiently "warn" him about those kinds of tail-winds but not the other? Near as I can tell Wesley didn't become a flight instructor until after the crash. So many questions.)


My dad actually saw the plane with his own eyes. It was still parked there in the barn 13 years later when my dad started wondering about the story, himself. He told me there was still blood stains on the cracked windshield.


I got to hear the story, the parts my dad knew and remembered. It explained a lot. I found out that my penchant for pepper is genetic. When I went to see my dad for the first time in 30 years (that was back in 85), he told me Gramma Gussie (her given name was Augusta, but everyone called her Gus for short) was just so pleased to see him pepper his eggs so profusely, "just like my Ray, your daddy, used to." Well, my daddy was pleased at my peppered eggs, too. As was I. Hey, a taste for pepper is primal stuff. I'll take the connections where I can find them.


Well, my dad's going to get to hear the rest of the story pretty soon. Found out last month he's got cancer in both lungs. I might still be in shock, but... I'm excited for him. Our story turned into a happy ending one - after thirty years of separation he and I re-connected and caught up with each other. We're both so fortunate to have had that conversation before either of us died. It's been health to all our bones for both of us. But he never did get to have that talk with his dad. Soon he'll get to, and I'm happy for him. It's a conversation that's been left dangling long enough.


Anyway, back to the recurring day-dream from last night. The Mystery of Chaco Canyon...


You should watch it. It's all about architecture, about making a place for people that's situated between heaven and earth, a mid-point place of meeting that brings the rhythms and patterns of the two together in a shared and blended symmetry of space and time in such a way that one reflects the other, answers the other with an awe and delight that only comes from a divine kind of romance, the kind of recognition only lovers at first sight know, full of irresistable intrigue and fascination, evocative of the kind of wide-eyed rapt attention that never blinks. Ever.


Which is my theme, my recurring dream - my own personal cosmic drama: in which all things (my wife and children, my church, the sun, moon, and stars, trees, a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, golden-oldie tunes, even shows on PBS) are sacraments that speak to the Romance at the heart of the universe, the Love that turns my world.


Weird, I know. Yeah, dream on. But it's mine. It has its charm. However, lately I wonder where I got that idea. Because I've had it for awhile, now. Well, I got to wondering, and then remembering, when I had one of those "NPR driveway moments" a couple weeks ago. I've tried to write about it a couple times ever since, because it was more than just a moment, and I wanted to get it down, or out, like putting it away in jars, like gramma did jam. I wanted to preserve that moment, because it was the sort moment that illuminated a whole lot of certain kinds of similar moments I've had over the years, sort of like a deja vu but without the dread. But until now it just didn't come right.


Well, it didn't come partly because part of me was afraid I had gotten my "charming idea" from my cult. Scary thought, that. They did leave a mark. There are connections. And I remembered those connections in the midst of my NPR driveway moment, and it was reason enough to give me pause. What caused me to remeber was hearing the voice of Judee Sill on the radio. Judee is one of those old familar voices to me, one I hadn't heard since 1974, since shorly after I'd left the cult. No one else has heard from her either, turns out. As the NPR story about her life and recordings (which are making a significant comeback, lately, hence the story) unfolded, I was shocked and grieved to find out that Judee died of a drug overdose at the tender age of 35 back in '79. Too soon! Too sad! So I spent the rest of the day scouring the internet, trying to find out "the rest of the story". To hear others tell it, she was one of those folks with a couple. A couple rather sad ones, too.


Not too many folks knew of Judee the singer/songwriter back in '74, but I did. Through her record, Heart Food, Judee was my constant and delightful companion at a very tough and very tender time in my life. Hers was the first record I bought upon my return to my "old" life after exiting the cult. She came at just the right time, too, and hit just the right spot. Her songs were like no one else's, and she sang them like no one else, either. They spoke to me. Well, I recognized her voice. I loved her voice. She was like a big sister to me. She kept me from going crazy.


Or, then again, on the other hand, perhaps she was influential in perpetuating those crazed cosmic notions of mine I picked up God knows where. I look back and I do see how that marvelous mystical spin she put on such ordinary things helped keep those same romanticized cosmic Catherine-wheels turning in my brain. She sang in the same key, and with the same resonant strains of music that the moving of the heavenly spheres make. She had the knack. Judee found a way to hit that one sublime blue note of the lost chord with such perfect pitch it could shatter cold stone in a heartbeat. But then her story falls off after that. Go figure.


So I couldn't write about this, as much as I wanted to, as often as I tried. For various reasons. But then last night, when thousand year old echoes from out of the ruins of the Anastasi's sacred stone monument at Chaco Canyon carried on the air and reached my ear, I recognized the old familiar pattern once again, and I was back in the driveway, paused and attentive, once more. So I put it in a jar to save for later. And as always, it comes with a story. Inside a story. World without end. Amen.


Want to hear Judee? Oddly enough (or not so oddly, on second thought) she reminds me a lot of Bruce Cockburn. See if you can hear the similarities. Let me know if you do. I know there's no accounting for musical taste, and maybe you had to have been there, but I'm thinking it's not just me.


Here you go:


Down Where the Valleys Are Low

There's a Rugged Road

The Donor (my favorite, but it stops right at the best part!!)

Soldier Of The Heart

The Pearl

The Kiss (I love this one! here's the studio version set to sucky you-toobie graphics - better if beheld with eyes wide shut.)

The Phoenix

Enjoy!

a confessional? mmm... nahhhh...

I popped. Hit someone smack in the eye, too, sad to say. Foul emissions all over the place. But, ah... I decided this isn't the place to disperse the miasmic effluent around even more. Not that it's private so much... more it's just poor taste. So... what will I do with this place, then? I do like it, I must say. Didn't think I would. So, I guess I'll just take it a day at a time, and see what may come of this space as it goes. Tomorrow is another day. A brand new one. Free for nuttin'. I heard it said that the shortest bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep. Sweet dreams.

uncorked? not yet...

I dunno. I need some space to open up. That's why I made this place for myself. I'm corked. I feel trapped. Stuck. Don't like it. I've been around long enough to recognize when I'm feeling that way that it's something inside that's stuck, something unsaid that needs to be said but is trapped. I got a bone in my throat that needs to come out, but today's not the day. It's still tricky, even here. It's still public, and what I need to express is of a very private nature. Not mine - I'm transparent to a faretheewell - I prefer to let it all hang out, all over the place, cumquat may. I don't like secrets at all, and have a hard time distinguishing between what's private and what's secret. When it comes to others' boundaries, of course that's their call, not mine. But the truth is, others' secrecy/privacy does affect me. In fact it makes me very sick. Sometimes. Some secrets can. They can alienate me, disconnect me from others, from what's real, and for me that's the worst thing. So, it's tricky. So I don't know about cork, yet. what I do know is I so want to just let it pop - I also know something's got to give, and I know even better it'll come out sideways if not out the top. Sideways is not our friend. I need a vent-buddy. Been saying that for years. Hoping this blog-spieler could be something of a stopgap. Maybe. It's weird tho, because I know someone's listening. I kind of like it tho? It's somehow comforting. It's lots worse feeling corked and invisible. I feel like that a lot. Have for a long time. It gets old. So this is like a confessional, then, a place to tell my truth, however haltingly or abridged. It's still something. It's a way to "chunk it down" like Marilyn said. So we'll see. There's got to be a way to uncork without spilling someone else's beans, or hitting someone else in the eye with an ill aimed flying cork. I'll figure it out. But not altogether today, it would seem.

Thanks for the ears, dears. I know you're there. I can feel you. Crazy, isn't it? This virtual space? This word-world. Where we can be so close and so far away at the same time? Odd sensation, that. Not sure what to make of that, either, but thats another day's topic. For now, this'll be my entry for today. Not too exciting, or funny, but... it's mine. And it's what's happening, abtract and obscure as it is. It's only words, and words is all I ha-a-ve...

hello world

got a quarter?