stick

What makes grace stick?

Stick against the ribs,

like peanut butter coating the stomach,

oatmeal in the bosom;

what makes it stay and

last through each and into every day?

What mechanisms need be operated

what hurried or unhurried phrases to guarantee

or acts again-membered?

what words iterated

what water-shakers sprinkled

what breads broken and consumed

what

what

what will make grace stick?

Look how we stand here fragile, shaking

as if it was cold and not just our own unease;

Look how we wait here vulnerable, wondering

still unsure whether the answer will stick

when we hear, perhaps for the first time

it's been a long day, admit it, so long a day

it's hard to remember, hard to hold together

all passed by this way, all in this same long day.   

reflection on poetry writing, waiting and redemption

Can it be the case what I hope to be untrue about the world is what I write about? That I intimate my suspicions, my fears about the nature and quality of created life? Do I doubt that goodness can last or issue forth after such violence and tragedy that casts history's meaning into doubt? Do I believe that God will remedy and restore the infinite indiscretions and failures that characterize human existence?

Will God redeem it all? What will it mean for all to be redeemed? Is it conceivable? Have I given myself the time and attention required to trust this God who promises redemption, this God who holds together Shoah and Hiroshima, Gomorrah and Golgotha, together in himself, this God who creates all that is through himself and sustains all that is through himself? This God who is more intimate than any of my numerous appendages, more intimate than synapses firing in my brain, more intimate than a beloved's breath pressed against the bare skin of my neck? This God who is more distant than my sight of the neighboring galaxy, more distant than my awareness of the synapses firing in my brain? How can this God hold it together? Fully removed, fully involved. Privy to all things, subject to nothing.

God inhabits counter dictations, competing words who fashion alternative worlds: intimacy and removal, deep involvement and critical distance. Who's to say that God's not all of this, all of this and more? Who's to say and not say what God can and can not be? Certainly, it would seem there are boundaries, edges between the trustworthy and speculative, but these are edges who strain with the resonant notes of historical fluidity, the enduring notes of occasional porousness. Can we hold it together as we wait to see if God can hold it together? How long will we be waiting, or has God already answered and we've been too busy asking the questions, too busy speculating on our speculations while God's been busy speaking Swahili and teaching Kenyan street boys a resurrection song?

Don't miss out on what God's doing. Don't miss out because you've removed yourself, under the banner of critical reflection; this distance which you carry as a burden with you, this open wound, is meant to be healed, all this time, meant to be healed. Let God's doing, do his thing here.

A Psalm for Cloud-chasers

How long will this cloud be with us,

day and night, without end?

casting god-sized shadows on sun and moon alike,

here impatient wills tap feet anxiously,

persistently since the First Crossing.

When the cloud lifts, we're supposed to follow?

Why does this following seem like a game of chase?

“Israel, a nation of cloud-chasers,”

other nations will mock in unison

their voices rising high over the earth,

“Israel drags an empty balloon

before us, behind us,

a vacuous balloon

waiting to be inflated by their god's presence.”

What reply is there to give? And if already here,

then when may we give it?

We are stalling, desperate all the time

for the balloon to soar against desert sky

and remind us that we're not impotent magicians,

unable to conjure life in the wilderness, instead

that we're promise-laden sons and daughters

waiting for his coming.

In that hour, his hour and ours with YHWH,

the nations will tremble

for one moment beneath the cloud

produces the crushing weight of annihilation

or ecstatic joy of triumph

not ours alone, but his with us.

Raise the banner of your involvement, O YHWH,

we shout aloud before these settled nations,

become to us the one who acts on our behalf

may this cloud become a substantial sign

upon which we may build our present hope

and future satisfaction. 

Strangers to hope

We did not always have these words:

ways to be like him and unlike the world

ways to find him and ourselves

ways to become ourselves in the world

God was not always here with us.

Long stretches of centuries,

filled by the strivings of ignorant, contented living

changeless, endless centuries

projected like corridors without beginning and end

all through which we traveled and travailed,

until disrupted by a host of great acts

uprooting the world's foundations

and our foundations in the world.

We were now faced with such an offer:

God's claim to be with us and over us

created out of the sterile ruins of wilderness,

the possibility of abundant life:

life-after-desert.

We were strangers to this hope.

Strangers to:

covenant dealings

divine showings

but we were never strangers to

human longings

facing uncounted weary

days and nights

that is, before now—until now.

Teach us to count the days,

to number in our memories

in the stories we tell our children

to re-mark with our telling

be re-made in our hearing

the dusk of your nearing

the nights of our waiting

the dawn of our hoping

the days of your appearing

Remind us to recount your words,

to memorialize in our minds

and mark with our bodies

the deep through which you've brought us

—pain and joy a thousand years overwhelming—

the height to which you'll bring us

and the promise to be filled out that

all strangers to hope will find home with you.

Prayer of Today

Brothers and sisters

wait and watch

life unfolds in the retelling,

whose story comes to us?

They are man and woman, like us:

naivete and desire led to our rupture,

what is it now?

Today, what maintains this rupture,

Today, what rebuilds?

Lord, teach us, today,

Today, reveal what is an alternative:

two ways are set before us

life and death, blessing and cursing,

a world devouring, a world renewing

we are caught like deers in the headlights

between two worlds

Today, we would heal this rupture,

Today, turn toward life,

Lord, keep us, today,

Today, walk with us

and set our feet upon life's way.   

Weary Year

During a weary year

our own lives washed away,

worn down on the sanded sea bank

like polished whale bone

or the filmy salt lines residing

between the dead shore and living sea.

We came upon a new day,

like a freshwater current overpowering

a salt-struck river

in that day we drank deep,

injected life into this year's veins

put meat onto bones

and life into meat

and our own lives restored,

like energized whales

departing into deep waters.