A Dedication.

 These words are for the artists and dreamers 

Who want a slippery God,

Not the stone one

nailed permanently to a cross

In old buildings,

tacked down in polity and institution.

These are letters to the distracted ones

Endlessly scrolling the glowing screen

Needing a word to help them look up

At the glimmering sky,

To awaken again to the world.

These are for the workers, the doers, 

Who never have time or energy enough,

The ones enduring the daily monotony 

Longing to escape the slow strangle

Of unending tasks and obligations.

These are for the weary mothers

Wondering if they are disappearing,

Drowning in the bottomless needs 

of their beautiful beloveds.

These are for you,

You gorgeous broken-hearted,

open-hearted ones.

You oh-so-overwhelmed ones.

You vibrant, silent ones.

You unnoticed, unsung ones.

 

A Dedication.

You treasure hunters,

Looking for words and incantations,

That will map a way to the 

Magic underneath everything

That too often hides or slips away.

You who wonder why

Religion hasn’t been spacious enough

To allow the mystical, the whimsical, the wild

Divine to slip in.

You who are parched and

Longing for a deeper well

Of more and more

and more.

You who don’t long for more dead words

On more dead pages,

But living words and musical balm.

You who recognize the dance of this life

with all its terrible and tender grace.

You who need a sacred place 

To hold what is real, and holy, and true.

This place, these pages,

This sanctuary of phrases

is for you.

out of egypt.

"An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod." -Matthew 2:13-14

Out Of Egypt 
A Song of Grief and Hope for Mary and Joseph The world can be terrible.
It can steal everything: Safety. Livelyhoods. Breath. Hope. Sometimes there is Nothing left to do But flee. To run to A place that seems A fraction better. And try to make a life Stone by stone. Word by word. Day by day. And still the day comes When the child you Held tight against Your chest. The one You saved against All odds. Will hang Bloody and beaten Dying in front Of your tear-washed eyes And you will think You cannot feel a more excruciating pain than this. But you will be wrong. Because in the dark days after His death you fall into an Emptiness that swallows you whole. You wonder if you should Have stayed in Egypt. If you might have Been better off not listening To those damn angels. Even Wishing for a fraction of a second the wish you will never forgive yourself for: That he had never been born. Then he might have been spared This horrific pain. And you Might have been spared this Grief that cuts your heart So deeply you wonder how It keeps on beating. You want to run, Run away from this terrible Story that claimed you And your son. Run from The fathomless sorrow of it. You dream of going back to Egypt. The place where for a moment You were a family: happy and new. But you remember the old stories About people who were safe And enslaved there. And how They were called out into a wide wilderness. And how all the fear and death Led to dancing and new life. You cry out, not in holy prayer,
but in anguish and anger: “My God, My God, What kind of promised land Could there be in a tomb?” And in the distance you can Almost hear the sound of Stone scraping against Earth,
of light slicing open the darkness. And you remember how his tiny warm body felt Full of possibility, as you carried him, Squirming and crying, out of Egypt, Into the very land where graves open and the dead rise.

to the new year.

“Think of the year as a house:
door flung wide in welcome,
threshold swept and waiting,
a graced spaciousness
opening and offering itself
to you...

And may it be
in this house of a year
that the seasons will spin in beauty;
and may it be
in these turning days
that time will spiral with joy.
And may it be
that its rooms will fill
with ordinary grace
and light spill from every window
to welcome the stranger home.”
-Jan Richardson

Here’s to a year of more coffee and good books.
More crawling on the floor building pillow forts and slaying imaginary dragons.
More flickering candles and taking time to breathe.
More deep relationships and laughter.
More wine and chocolate and cheese.
More tears and honesty and love.
More risk and adventure.
More creativity and more hope.
More doing life together and making the world new.
More opening to the mystery and holiness in the cracks of ordinary life.

Here’s to you, 2019. May you be the best yet.

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.