for all the saints.

"Sing with all the saints in glory, sing the resurrection song!
Death and sorrow, earth's dark story, to the former days belong.
All around the clouds are breaking,  soon the storms of time shall cease;
in God's likeness we, awaking, know the everlasting peace...
Life eternal! heaven rejoices; Jesus lives, who once was dead.
Join we now the deathless voices; child of God, lift up your head...

Life eternal! O what wonders crowd on faith; what joy unknown,
when, amidst earth's closing thunders, saints shall stand before the throne!"

-Sing with All the Saints in Glory by Willian J. Irons


a blessing for all saints.

May we gather up the treasures
scattered by those who
walked and worked before us.
May the depth of our grief reveal within it
the abundant gifts of memory and love.
May the darkness where we now linger
become the place where light finds and claims us.
May the shadowy windings
of these cavernous tombs
lead ever into resurrection.
May we draw near to the ones
who carved the paths we now walk
and celebrate their resurrection stories.
And may we too be resurrected
to become today's saints 
continuing the blessed work
of renewing and remaking the world.

the gift of years.

a poem for my 35th birthday

The gift of years.

Thirty-five journeys round the sun
on this beautiful spinning globe
of budding earth and swirling sea.
I have been, with you,
a part of the eternal dance
in this vast expanse
of unknown universes.

Here, on our little patch
of known time and space
each day is small, but holy
as we breathe together
this miracle of air,
and stare up together
at the impossibly wide
canvas of sky.

In my numbered days
I have felt deeply;
I have been swept up
in peels of laughter.
I have wept and pleaded and howled
with both delight and sorrow.
I’ve had my heart shattered,
and pieced the shards back together
again and again,
in the constant making
that is being alive.
Each year, each week, each moment,
we fumble to arrange the fragments
into something more beautiful
and somehow more whole.

This mosaic,
tenderly assembled
in the breaking and re-making,
is the lavish gift of years.

to be born.

For Gabriel

Your life until now
Has been all warmth and shadow,
As you float to the music
of distant muffled voices, and dance
to the rhythms of heart and breath.
You know nothing but the comfort
Of this perfect blanket of dark.
This cocoon of water and flesh
Is the only world you have known,
And it has been entirely beautiful.

When your world cracks open,
It will feel immense and terrifying.
All will seem too loud, too bright,
Too much to be grasped.
This life as you know it now
Will be over in an instant
As you slip from the only
place you have ever known,
Haunted by the terrible truth
already inscribed on your bones:
you will never be able to return here
to the ground of your making.

But, my darling, there is so much
Beauty on the other side:
Wonder upon wonder
You could never have dreamed of.
There is touch, light, sound,
Color, creativity, texture, hope,
And love, love, glorious love.

I wish I could tell you it will be easy,
That you will be safe as you
Step into the wide terrain of this world;
But there are too many sharp edges
And, tender as we are,
No one walks through unscathed.

What I can promise is you won't face
This looming future alone.
Arms are waiting to hold you.
Lips are longing to greet you with a kiss.
Eyes are yearning to behold you.
Hearts are flung wide open
Ready to adore you.

I suppose what I want to say is this:
It's okay to be scared,
It's okay to cry out in
Surprise and doubt and even terror.
Weep a thousand tears if you must,
As you face the unfamiliar landscape
Of a future you never would have chosen;
And grieve the great loss of what
You must leave behind.

But come anyway.
For your one wild, wondrous life
Is waiting for you;
And you are the only one capable of living it.
You already have all you need.
So even when you feel small
Be brave.
When you feel ready to turn back
Look ahead.
When you think all is lost
Trust the miracle of the next moment
And the next as they keep
tumbling toward you.
Greet them as the unwarranted
miracles that they are.

You were made for the adventure
Of all that is to to come.
You were made for this world
As stunning and frightening
And sharp-edged as it is.
Oh My Love,
You were made
to be born.

the hardest year.

Here is what I have learned this year: trying to bring life into this world is a warrior's task. And I am not entirely sure that I am a warrior.

In December of last year, I learned I was pregnant. I began the year with all the hope and joy that comes of dreaming. A new child fresh and new. Everything possible. I would be a mother again, my greatest role so far, the one I cherish most deeply.

But by the end of January the dream was gone. I was bleeding, my womb and heart empty, a grief cutting so deep I thought I might not survive. I was a changed woman.

In May, a new life was planted. I was pregnant again. At first, I felt the rejoicing... But things turned so quickly. But soon I was sick and tired. Feeling a weariness in my bones I had never known before. Every day I am sick. Every day I can barely keep food down. Every day I feel hopeless. Almost every day I debate if it is worth getting out of bed and I would stay if there wasn't a toddler, a husband, a job, a life making demands that cannot wait. Nearly 6 months in and I am still sick, losing what's in my stomach in the middle of the night or the tiny hours of the morning.

To be honest, it makes me feel inadequate. So many women I know love pregnancy. Even when they were sick and tired it didn't debilitate them. They were happy and hopeful. So every day I face my not-enoughness. My illness feels like a daily failing.

And at surprising moments the grief of the life lost still sneaks up on me. The thin skin I thought had developed over the wound of the miscarriage, peels away so easily. What should have been the birthdate passed in August. I should be holding a child now, I think. I should be celebrating. Instead, I am sad and sick. It makes me want to curl up and cry.

I feel strangely unattached to the child living inside me. He is a stranger. I wonder if he feels my distance. I, unreasonably, feel I am already failing him as a mother.

"You're absolutely glowing!" the well-meaners say, as if I am as new and shiny as a lucky penny, or a prized jewel. As if I am not sick and worn and just a slice, a shadow of who I know myself to be. It makes me feel completely unknown and unseen. Am I invisible, I wonder? Is my pain obsolete?

"I don't know how you do it?!" they cheerfully say, as though I am some kind of hero. As though "doing it" were a choice. I am not heroic, I want to tell them. I am barely surviving. I do it by spending time nearly every day crying about all that I am not doing. Grieving all the joy and strength I do not have.

For me, in the end, there is likely to be wonder worth the misery. In a few months I will hold a slippery, crying babe in my arms and I will whisper, "welcome to the world." I will fall in love again. I will sing lullabyes at 3am for an audience of one. I will feed him with my body. I will be awestruck by the curl of his lips, the flicker of his eyelids, the openness with which he takes in the world. And I will think: I made him. I brought him here. I was a vessel for a miracle.

But for now, I am still in the hardest year. And it is terribly exhausting and terribly lonely. Perhaps, you are there too. Perhaps you have felt grief and pain that made you numb to the joy everyone else expects you to carry. Perhaps you too have been isolated by a weariness you couldn't even put into words. Perhaps you have born the weight of not being okay for months or years, and having to breathe and smile and live through it because there is no way to the other side except through.

Perhaps, we all just need to know we are not walking this hard earth alone.

a simple guide to love

You can love anyone
if you really look at them.
Notice the delicacy
of their eyelids
the unique color
and texture
of their skin.
Listen
to the rhythm
of their breath,
hear the longings
of their heart.
Study them
like a poem
or painting.
Look long
enough to see
the layers and lines,
crevices and curves.
Human-beings are
breath-taking works of art.
Fleshy machines, both
beautiful and complicated.
When you really look
how could you not
fall in love?

the revealing.

"And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed." -Genesis 2:25

I love the idea that in the beginning we were naked and unencumbered before God. For me part of the Christian life, particularly in the wilderness season of Lent, is about dismantling the careful walls and masks we've created to protect ourselves. Allowing ourselves to be seen by the Holy and by one another can be terrifying and painful. Discipleship and authentic relationships demand that we let our scars, our limitations and our flaws show. The divine challenges us to stop playing the game of proving ourselves and pretending. We are invited to vulnerability, intimacy, wildness and freedom. 


The Revealing
It hurts--
this uncovering
this laying bare.
It would be easier
to stay contained,
comfortably covered.
But piece
by jagged piece,
you reveal me.
You ask me
to be seen.
You uncover all
I prefer to keep veiled.
I can almost hear
you greet my
vulnerable form:
There you are, darling.
Aren't you beautiful?

the furious beating of wings.

"They wheeled in a wide arc
with beating wings and then
they put their wings to sleep
And glided downward in a drift
of pure abandonment
Until they touched the surface of the lake
composed their wings, and settled
on the rippling water
as though it were a nest. " -Anne Porter, "Wild Geese Alighting on a Lake"

We are furiously beating
our wings, always gasping
for breath as we seek
some imaginary destination
always further and further,
higher and higher.
So desperate are we
to make it upwards,
we do not see
the sky we fly in,
or feel the wind
the brushes our
radiant faces.
We never stop
to rest our weary wings
until they break and crack
and we plummet like Icarus
toward the hard earth,
despairing and weeping
that it was all for nothing.
What would it be to
unfurl our heavy limbs,
and let the invisible
carry us; to glide
and drift with abandon;
to open our mouths to
drink in the sweet air
and our eyes to see
the wide expanse of
sky and possibility?