Confession

Ironically, I read this once on the Ascension this year (holla at the Catholic liturgical calendar!). Every time I’ve read it, the beginning is way different. I haven’t settled on one, or a title really, but here’s the approximate text from the Ascension Day version, for lack of a video.

Sometimes, strangers preach to me
—best when they don’t intend it.
On this occasion, I’d asked another Christian
what his faith meant to him. He said,
“It’s the reason I haven’t killed a man.”
Now, there’s a lot there.
But here’s the word I heard:
I’ve asked this question of other Christians who’ll say something like,
“It means I’ve been saved by the precious blood of Jesus Christ,”
instead of,
Jesus Christ saved somebody else’s blood from me.

And that’s easier for me to believe.
Because it’s hard to believe Christ’s concerned with saving me
from my privileged private education,
my comfortably heated apartment,
and my relatively friendly neighborhood.

And it’s hard to believe Christ’s concerned with saving me
in a world with sweatshops and slavery,
vets and elders in poverty
and my country flying drones over the Middle East

If any God is doing anything,
it’s probably saving people from my silent violence.
If God’s making miracles in the modern age,
it’s making fools fall in love in a world that learned rage
and any conversation in this era of contagion,
plastic gloves, ATMs and self-checkout stations.

I know some things are broken
—our hearts and homes have loudly spoken,
but some of them broke open
remembering true religion is for widows and orphans

It hasn’t all failed

even when our idealistic plans and dreams derailed
even when I saw the facts and faces and I bailed
even when all I think I can do is just whine and wail
It hasn’t all failed

But we are
the most dangerous things in this world
and it’s a miracle more casualties haven’t come
from my casual apathy

I wanted to ask that man
if hearing “love your neighbor” might save me
from putting on my headphones on bus 48
or arguing with the guy who asked me for change
Because I can’t talk sin nature
until I get off my armchair
and exorcise my bank account
and clean the demons from my cup of coffee
and call my sister with an honest apology

And I can’t Alleluia! on Easter
until I roll the stone away from my cold heart
and resurrect the child in me who once believed
that things were possible
and had an easier time remembering
people are good.

I want to stop asking questions
of how we get to Heaven
and what it costs—in blood or deeds—for a picket-fenced plot in North Eternity

Some better questions:
Have I learned to live in miracles with the eight billion plus connected to me?
Am I open to all of you correcting my stupidity?
The crucifixion I believe in looks like open arms and humility,
So does that look like me?
Or am I waiting for someone else’s suffering to save me?

Ribs, Dreams, and the Law of Conservation of Mass (ways of talking about things without talking about things)

There’s a poem at the end of this. You can skip to it without sitting through my other musings, but there’s always some reason for the musings.

My roommate does not believe in dream interpretation. He (like most of you I’m sure) thinks it’s hogwash, that dreams are just our memories processing and patching things together.*

And maybe that is true. Maybe that’s all they are, the dry residue of thoughts from the day finding their right compartments. My feelings about dreams is that they’re approximately as revelatory as our waking life. But if you read anything I write or listen to any of the obnoxiously long stories I tell (which my roommate also doesn’t like so much), you’ll know I think waking life is pretty revelatory. I think reading dreams is useful insofar as they’re informative but not deterministic—that is, they can reframe, change light around, add insight to what’s already there. Our minds do operate on symbols we write for ourselves or pick up from collectively constructed culture. These symbols are our language, and dreams are the poetry to my waking life’s prose. The subconscious speaks to us not to change our life’s direction but to redirect our attention.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, not even because I’ve been having weird dreams but because I’ve been having this weird interaction with my reality. I wrote this poem a few weeks ago out of an inexplicable fixation with its starting question. I had started it as prose a few times, but when I finally sat down and started it as a poem, I wrote it almost start to finish in a sitting or so, except for two lines that emerged when it became obvious where some of these questions and emotions had come from. Writing is a funny thing. Like any other art or sport or discipline, there gets to be a point where you’re not working on it so much as it’s working on you. Flow. There have been these mornings where I wake up with a couple lines from this poem stuck in my head, so fitting to exactly what I’ve been trying to process at the time. Each day it changes; each day it’s different lines that put words to different preexisting movements. The other day I performed it at an open mic kind of on a whim, and it was the lines I forgot that were eerily telling. Things have changed since the time I wrote this. My preoccupations have shifted since then. But somehow my writing reflected all these things that were already stirring under my surface, whether I was aware of it or not.

The other thing about writing is that it is always there. Even when my scrawled-on printer paper is destroyed, my journals become ashes, and cyberspace collapses in a highly theatrical apocalypse (or a good ol’ fashioned server crash), words stick sometimes, even if they take on new meanings. Law of Conservation of Mass: even when it seems like Something is There and Now it is Not, it is never simply true that Something is There and Now it is Not.

I started writing this reflection a few days ago and it keeps getting weirder and weirder to read over. And this seems like it could be a terrible and stupid time to post this, but I’ve been meaning to, waiting for a sensible time, which is never going to feel fully true. Anyways, it’s mine, and I think I need to just throw it back into the world for it to breathe and live its true life.

*I will give full disclaimer that I may be misinterpreting his explanation, but that’s mostly beside the point

Sculpture

This may be familiar to some:

Bruises

I was told to detach myself
Not to get too emotionally invested
When you’re spending time with those people
Some painful falls are to be expected

But a “bad apple” is still an apple
And what’s grace without it?

See I made the mistake of falling in love
with a place that’s chaos like a barn
mangy as that one with a manger and a baby
(who we pretend didn’t poop* on himself
and spit up when he was eating)

and I let my heart get tied up
in dangerous things
in too many people
so that each life boat rope they threw me
wrapped around my heart and
knotted
it
tight

The coarse fibers of twine
have kept me up at night
and ropes cut away
leave the worst indentations
nicks and bruises

But is the Sacred Heart of Jesus
just a glowing valentine
outside a white man’s chest
a plastic candy heart
he won’t even look at

or is his skin ripped and raw
above the bent bars of a ribcage
a heart that broke loose
its tissues bruised
and frayed?

I used to spend so much time afraid
to use this electric muscle
whose first job was to
keep pumping outward
I kept it behind my own bone walls
But every chest
rises
and
falls

And what is grace without
a rise and a fall?

Flying (2011, Dec 2)

I’ll add this to the list of phases I think everyone goes through: Everyone, at some point, or another wishes she could fly. Everyone has some desire to get away and get above, some longing to have enough faith and hope that if you jump, if you let go of the ground, you will be lifted.

But when we play the little game where you name your ideal superPower and people get bored with an old answer, we box it in stipulations.

Do you have wings?
–Wouldn’t you get tired flapping them? What kind of superpower is that?
—-So, like angel wings? Or bat wings?
So, fine, you don’t have wings. Do you just spread your arms out?
–That’s it?
—-Doesn’t it hurt?
Well, can everyone else fly?
–Then are there traffic laws in the sky?
—-But what if too many people are flying? You can’t just have everyone flying.

And so we become preoccupied with the requirements, the attire, the equipment, the authority, the rules involved, the words we use, who gets it, who doesn’t, what we call it, when we do it…when all we wanted was to take one gracious leap of faith and soar.

---

About the Haikube Free-Writes:
Haikubes are a set of cubes with words printed on them, like magnetic poetry with a multidimensional, randomizing twist. (I got a box as a Christmas/birthday present this past year—thanks, sis!) Many mornings I pull one from the box, roll it, and write a small page prompted by whatever word I roll.

beside a yucca in new mexico, july 14th

I am
finally letting myself hear
that God
in the quiet.
It is like two friends sitting
in silence
yet still
sharing heart.
The greatest teachers have tried to tell me
that God
is in the still small voice, in the wind,
yet crying,
“Wind, where are you?“
the only wind I heard
was my own.
It is good to watch your breath
blow through the trees,
but where does
that breath
come from?
Today I heard the wind
say what she has been saying
all her life:

“Here I am.”