donnaker

In this wilderness of unhappiness

and lack of suffering,

I find myself making koala noises

and eating leaves to make a child laugh.   

I find my pages open to a dozen

half-done applications,

too ashamed to fill them to the full.

I find myself climbing into bed 

at eight, nothing left to do and staying

up until eleven doing things like this.

Today, I watched a child rolling, screaming, 

crying in the grass, ruining his pants,

because I would not let him say donnaker one more time,

and he did, five more times,

but it’s such a fun word, he said between sobs,

I couldn’t help it.

I gave him freedom to flail in his misery

until his mother came home.

As I backed out, I made koala noises at him

through the window of my car 

and he made them back 

in a bizarre reconciliatory language.

This evening I skipped bible study

and allowed myself to be unhappy.

Last night at bible study I confessed that

I have been prone to wallow.

The silence of God

lets me have my tantrum.

This poem is my bizarre reconciliatory language.

And in the very complaint,

a response.  

He never said I’d like it.  

Can't say I do.

In case you were wondering, he says it means toilet.  

awkward silence

I am not going to say it doesn't exist.  It definitely exists.  Or only shallow people can't stand the quiet.  Or that our culture is too noisy.  I am going to say, however, that true awkward silence is more precious than we think.  That it is a prison that ought not to be hastily escaped.

In an improv scene, there are moments when you realize someone should say something or moments after someone did say something, and it was a bit....off.  Do not be afraid!  Step into the moment and try to weave the off-words back into the fabric of the scene by making the tangent long enough to loop back and add interest to the pattern.  At least, that is what I've been taught, but it does not come naturally.  However, there is redemption even in the unsuccessful attempt.  People have done it for me.

A pregnant pause that is barren adds weight to the words that break it.  And every second that ticks by adds more meaning.  That is why perhaps it is so scary to break!  Because no question seems heavy enough to break through, for example, the blind date quiet.  We sit around, pushing our peas, afraid that after our meager question, the one word answer will make the silence even heavier.  Sometimes after a few of these attempts, the awkwardness becomes palpable like a thick suffocating blanket.

At this point, there are those who choose to acknowledge the awkwardness, hoping through some meta-conversation about the conversation, laughter will aright the flagging ship.  Sometimes this does happen, but mostly, I think it is a bit cowardly.  Plus it assumes awkward silence is inherently a bad thing, as opposed to an exhilarating intersection in a conversation with 1,000 different roads to walk down and a brief moment to choose which one to take, rather than just letting the conversation take you places, which is albeit more comfortable, but usually ends up in you telling an anecdote you've told a million times or talking mindlessly about movies.  Not that those things are inherently bad either, but perhaps the awkward silence doesn't need breaking as much as we need to allow it to break us.  Out of our habits, out of our normal mode of speaking in which we easily forget there is a consciousness looking and listening back at us.  It awakens us to that deafening roar on the other side of silence, gives us a moment to breathe, and then speak life to the face of the Other, receiving life from them.

Slowly, we learn to catch each other, and the silence becomes less and less awkward and more and more comforting, making us wiser.  Quick to listen, slow to speak.  If awkward silence is a hole we are falling down, it is a lot less anxiety producing if you know at the bottom you won't die a fiery social death, but will land on feather pillows in a room you've never been before.  Maybe you'll like it, maybe not, but it's worth the attempt to push through, to hear and love the stranger at the party who you apparently have nothing in common with.

May we have the grace not to desperately seek common ground or an excuse to leave but to tread lightly on another's uncommon ground, enjoying the new roads or rooms and savoring the kind of redemption that only awkward silence can bring.


    

the backwards kingdom

Desselb are the roop 

Desselb are the das

Desselb are the keem 

Desselb are the yrgnuh and the yrsriht

Desselb are the luficrem

Desselb are the erup in traeh

Desselb are the srekamecaep

Desselb are the detucesrep

poetry is more than a cute idea, but sometimes that's all you have and it's ok.  May we be a backwards people in all the right ways.

by the way

I ate your figs grainy

with seeds

so nasty 

so wrinkled.

you probably planned

to let them rot.

I’m sorry.

I should not

have stopped you.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15535

expectations

I thought it was a roma bean

and it tasted horrible

I thought it was a lima bean

and it tasted sweet

I thought it was a magic bean

and it gave me a stalk

with angels ascending

and descending

and I prayed for grace 

to climb with no expectations,

but to know and love Him more,

to receive each bean as a gift,
each gift as a seed.

let it out

Today I found a journal entry that reminded me of a time I was bawling so hard it felt like my eyeballs were going to pop out.  There were two people there praying with me and they kept saying, let it out, not into the air but into the side of Jesus.  And so I did.  I let it out, not to be dissipated into the universe but directly to Christ.  It is not often I feel so strongly that my words are going straight to the Divine Ear that is closer than the mouth that cries them out.  Often I imagine all these filters, films, barriers, the requests traveling through a maze, half of them getting lost in translation, getting lost in the mail, lost in the midst of a million prayers rising up.  But if the next words on your tongue were heard by the Creator of the Universe, the Sustainer of all Things, the Lover of your Soul, and you knew that you knew that He was listening, what would you say?

Say it.  

witness

The kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but power. -1 Corinthians 4:20

I recognized this scene, saw it a hundred times both in great and terrible films: small factions begin forming beneath the street lamps, confronting each other with a crescendo of discontented, indiscernible words, attracting more people, more voices, more syllables taptaptapping into some ancient nameless hatred, hardening hearts, arms raising arms, until the irrevocable bang, the scurrying, the body of the best friend left lying still, lit by indifferent and unnatural light.  

There was yet no bang, but the air quivered beneath their anger, staggering like a boy bearing a weight too heavy upon his shoulders.  Emerging from my car, I met friends emerging from their house, concerned about the violent shouting that shook the air.  I put my shaking thumb on the nine of my cellphone, and in the moment I felt purposeful, powerful, whispering with my friends on the porch about what to do, thinking to myself whatistherightthing, the smartthing, the bravething, the christianthing.  And then suddenly one turned her back upon our caucus and then the other glanced at me before she too turned her head, and I was left alone, my arm hanging impotent at my side.  I did not understand.  I did not know what I was supposed to do, and I did not know what they were doing.  Why would they leave me without telling me where they were going?  Why were they walking closer toward the angry crowd, their backs straight, jaws set?  I do not want to be a part of the gawking masses, I thought.  I will respond as I would a tantrum from a child; I will not give this event credence with my eyes.  And yet I was the child, the one feeling abandoned, caught in my own emotions even as the world screamed its own pain at me, begging me to know suffering larger than my confusion, abandonment far deeper than a twinge.  

And when I did look I saw my friends standing as statues on the skirts of conflict, different from the others in their silence and in their stillness.  And then a third and then a fourth emerged onto the sidewalk, and until then, I did not know compassion could set one’s eyes like flint.  And then I understood that they were standing there as witnesses, the pillars of a roof I could not see, offering protection in a way I had not yet thought to provide.  

Soon after, the police arrived, and forty youth scattered into the shadows.  My friends returned; we retrieved the cooler out of my car I let them borrow for a camping trip; there were goodbye hugs, and I drove home to a peaceful cul-de-sac, the kind of sack stuffed full of my dreams of ending poverty and theories of justice and the role of the church, untouched and untested, pristine in their verbiage and powerless in the fight.  

I do not lie to you; the morning of this incident, I was in Norwood with two of these four friends talking about what living the gospel looks like in our neighborhood, how a core message of the good news is that we are not abandoned.  I distinctly remember getting up on my high horse about a sermon I heard about how the core of the gospel is not “do the right thing” and how it feels like so many in our church view it like that.  And yet, in the situation I describe, that is exactly the mindset I responded with.  I did remember to pray, but part of me wonders if that is not an extension of the what-is-the-christian-thing-to-do mindset rather than allowing Christ to truly live in me.  I know at times it might seem like a small difference from the outside, but I have truly felt the radically different nature in my life and have been privileged to witness it in others along the way.  I think there is a time for talking about what the gospel/church is, but there is a time for leaving the caucus on the porch and learning how to watch and listen and intercede.  Lord, have mercy.

As a side note, this is the sermon I referenced about how the gospel is more than doing the right thing.  Most of the sermons on there are excellent including this one.  It is from the Anglican church I belong/ed to in Wheaton.  Anyway, perhaps something to listen to while you are cooking for your neighbors. :)

http://www.churchrez.org/sermon/i-am-the-way-the-truth-and-the-life/