The Shame of the Nation

I've been reading for tomorrow's graduate class for nearly 6 hours straight, with only an hour or so break for a run in the park and a quick supper.

My mind is too full for articulate writing.

Jonathan Kozol's book The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America is, perhaps, the single most compelling piece of writing I've ever read for a college course. I've not finished it yet (some of my reading time was spent on textbook chapters before I got to the book), but I'm half ready to up and move to the inner city to teach there.

No--I'm not that hasty. I am so very aware of my own finiteness. I'm no hero, and if I went to the city there's a very real likelihood that I would just end up being one of the hundreds of teachers who end up burned out by an ethos of education that wears you down and chews you up before spitting you back out into the safe haven of suburbia (although I'd be more likely to retreat to a hut in the middle of the forest behind my mom's house). But part of me is hearing a siren call. I'll leave the up-and-moving part to God; if He wants me to go, He'll make the coals start burning hotter. For now, I'll just think heated thoughts and be caught up in a well-written-book-induced fervor.

Most of us are well-cocooned from the realities of inner-city America. Education is perpetuating vicious cycles, and the overt and explicit business mentality, curriculum, and language of some of the schools I read about were scarcely believable.

Kozol's right--"a healthy nation needs its future poets, prophets, ribald satirists, and maddening iconoclasts at least as much [more, I say...] as it needs people who will file in a perfect line to an objective they are told they cannot question."

But these mavericks and questioners are being silenced before they even know the sound of their own voices.

All In A Day's Work

You, little soul, are a walking dichotomy. On the other side of your video games and noisemaking and virtual reality is a ten-year old philosopher and a theologian whose God has been warped by a family who has it all wrong. You're asking existential questions and stunning me with your profundity as we sit on beanbag chairs side by side, our voices the only sound breaking the silence in the room.

You've learned of God the Judge, the One Who knows all you've done wrong.

As you told me of your dreams where you can feel pain, the ones that keep you awake at night out of fear, the ones about hell and the devils that scratch you over and over and over, I talk with you about the God of love.

This God knows when sparrows fall and how many hairs are on your head.

You told me that now I know your one wish--to dig a hole to the center of the earth and kill the devil.

"I know we're supposed to forgive," you say, "but there's one person I can't forgive. The devil. He could choose not to torture us, but he does anyhow."

I told you to talk to God when the dark invades your dreams. I stroked your hair and said you could eat lunch with me.

And in the end, you struggled to express to me what life is: "Life...well, life...it's thousands of souls."

You're right. It is.

Yours is one of them, and it is precious, and it is close to the heart of God.

The Earth Groans (And You Are Groaning With It)

Your voice echoed for what seemed an eternity. Not where others could hear it--just reverberating from wall to wall inside this mind that can't fix what's broken, not this time. This is a job for the heart, bleeding slow for you, pumping the same rhythm that yours beats, praying wordless prayers and pondering John's head on the breast of Christ.

Your interior castle is more intricate than most. So easy to lose oneself inside such a place. I would call out to you, I would gather others to seek you out, but I know that yours are hands that need to grope from wall to wall, finding one room after the next, grasping at locked doors before finding those that a cool breeze has blown open. 

You in your wounds, you lost in this labyrinth constructed part of God and part of man, you have shown me beauty. You who are so snared in the web of self-reflection, self-analysis, self-denigration, you who long to be a saint like Francis, like Thomas, like all those faces gazing at you from the walls of this church where you kneel praying, you have helped me see the face of God. 

You are cracked, yes. Imperfect, you yearn for perfection. Ah, I know. 

I know.

I pray you are granted grace to be patient in the hands of God.

Mother's Day: 6 Months

The African violet is blooming again. 

So is the apple tree outside my window, the one that arches over the steps like a wedding bower.

I feel lightning trembling invisible in the air, and the clouds are dark. It's about time for a spring storm to break. I crave the sound of thunder and the splash of drops hitting the dryness. 

The fan is once again determinedly blowing humid air into the tiny nest I live in, and I'm sitting cross-legged right in front of it writing this and waiting for the rain. 

Waiting. 

I walked to the cemetery yesterday. The earth is still brown, there in that place where my eyes want to look both first and last. The grass has not yet had a chance to grow. This was not my first time going back. There was grief in it, yes, but it was not the grief that lays one flat and makes you wish the body back. I was reminded that the body is a body. The soul has long since gone elsewhere, to a place where beauty lives and truth is fully understood and fears are stilled. I can't describe it well enough, or well at all. Words fail, and my understanding is small.

I went to visit my little mother this weekend. It was good to be home, good to be in Nanticoke again, good to see crabapple blossoms and sunsets, to read books to children and to share a Mother's Day feast with my sister's family. Some things stay the same. That mother of mine is pretty precious.

Driving back to Bainbridge tonight watching the clouds, though, I feel restless again. I long for what was, I long for what will be. To borrow a metaphor from a friend, I feel a bit like a rock in a stream. I suppose God puts rocks in streams for reasons of His own, though. 

I was reminded today that God moves in His own time and in His own way. And His time and His ways are good, even when I lack the patience to wait well.

The storm hasn't broken yet, but it will. And we need rain.

Companion: Sequel

[He helps me keep the night watch.]

εμψυχώνω (to the sufferers)

Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when His glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.

Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to Him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator.

 I suffer small.

Some give name, 

kin,

breath, 

blood

to You. 

I suffer small.

I think we suffer so we learn how to love.

And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins.

And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.

I will love Thee, O LORD, my strength.

Flotsam and Jetsam

The tide came in full today, 

full of moonbeams and seashells, 

and colored glass worn smooth

by sand and rowdy waves.

Why do I gather these so jealously, 

why do I line them up so tidily, 

why do I put them on display? 

A still pool in the moonlight

is all the mirror I need.

Why, then, do I hang this sea glass

in the window in hopes 

that I will better see myself?

Perhaps it is because the ocean within

breaks rougher than the ocean without,

and the small, methodical act

 of gathering, of hanging, of looking

brings a bit of calm.

Perhaps it is because the ocean 

gets lonely sometimes, 

and sea glass in windows

can be a conversation starter. 

Perhaps I should not need conversation,

and perhaps I should not gather 

seashells and moonlight, 

bits of glass and pieces of my own name.

Maybe You tire of glass hung in windows.

Yes, the tide is coming in,

but maybe I should stay away 

from the sea today.

Bench

Downright exhausted, you fretted, you cried, you fought comfort. And so I walked with you and hummed. The sun pressed warm, slanted onto your baby face. One minute, two, and you slumped, head soft on my chest. Sleep had won, and all was peace.

I found a little path, once well-worn perhaps, but not so now. I walked with you toward the sunlight in a little clearing--a pond, a bench, a birdhouse. I sat and closed my eyes and listened to the peepers. The peepers and the birds.

The grief comes in flashes now more often than days' lengths.

Heaven seemed like it was on the other side of trees. And you, baby, you in my arms were the one solid thing keeping me here on this side. The warm weight of a human only months-old, born to joy and sorrow and beauty and brokenness. It is hard to imagine that someday you, too, will have to learn how to lose.

But for now, there is such peace in your little heartbeat and your chubby calves, your curled-up fingers and the steady sound of your breathing.