Summer Trees

"Hush," sing the trees 
Gracious in so soft a murmur,
Whispers of a gentle breeze,
Glancing over my coarse face,
Parched by the long days.

As we reach out in words,
Summer splits sideways 
In a slowing sun,
And the heat of a Southern smile 
Slips into my eve.

"Who are you?" they beg.
Yet we know not, 
For the heart still ponders, "Are we?" 
Unspoken silence, unturned pages,
Interrupted by laughter.

There is, I know, something
And yet never could I explain,
Until perhaps someday,
When neither of us need words;
A lost future somewhen.

Of all the words in all the worlds,
You somehow sang into my own.
May the grace of your soul 
touch the hearts of many,
as it has stolen mine.

Always

Know this:
I am with you.
It is not that I will be with you in the future 
as though I were not now;
But I am with you.
Always.
Ever present.
With you.
I am, I exist, I reside, I walk with you,
holding your hand,
Always within you:
in your heart, your eyes, your feet and hands,
your soul.
I am ever present as the Word on your tongue,
ready to spring forth from your mouth,
proclaimed by your lips:
I am.  
And in that I am, you are.
For I, Christ the man, cannot--but by my Spirit--
be in the world unless through you.
But behold:
I am with you always.
Always.
Even to the end of the world.
Even there.
Even then.
I am.
Through all the trials and tribulations,
through all your suffering and despair,
through all your tears of joy and jubilation;
Through all, with all, and in all,
I am.
I am there.
I am always.
Always with you.
With you.
With you.
With you.
Always.

---

I am with you now.
Listen.
Be.

Paint, sing, listen

"Paint, paint!" cried the boy silently from the room,
Eagerly dancing about his seat, waiting for reply.
Yet still was he, motionless without descent,
As he pondered the next move of a fine artist,
For well did he know that
There was but one composer in the gallery
In a picture full of paintings
In a room full of words 
and silence
Ready to burst forth into life and deed,
Ready to leave behind the so adequately familiar, 
and the so comfortably lifeless.

"Sing, sing!" thought the boy aloud from the church
Tirelessly resounding at his pew, praying for company.
Yet silent was he, hushed without sound
As he prayed the angel to herald just one look,
For well did he hymn that
There was but one voice in the chapel
In a stream of beauty
In an ocean of servants
and love,
Softly begging the Lord for forgiveness,
Swiftly bending the knee of repentance 
For what I cannot now hold
and what I cannot now leave.

"Listen, listen!" exclaimed the eyes of hope 
Curiously skipping about my own, looking for...
Yet tired were they, restless without a home
As I stop for a moment to think of their lull
For well do I see that
There is but one gaze in this world
In galaxies of stars
In boundless heaven
and hope
That could stir so deeply a heart,
That could leave me taken aback
Into the great unknown
and the silence of my being.

Oh the Humanities

The humanities are so aptly named, because they are just that: human.  They are the stories, the lives, the questions of humanity throughout the ages and place in which we have dared ever so boldly to live.

Patiently do you wait

Patiently do you wait for me, my God,
Never pushing, never rushing me to your arms;
You simply wait, as you have promised, 
And there you remain 'til I am ready,
Ready to part with my guilt, 
my wandering from your path
To chase some distant call.

Patiently do you wait for me, my God,
Until I draw near to you, 
And with head bowed I am enveloped
By your healing embrace, your fatherly love
That pardons forever and always
All I could wrong in heart, in deed, in unawareness,
And I am whole again.

Patiently do you wait for me, my God,
Sitting at my side, always watching,
Always smiling with deepest caring eyes,
And as I stumble along the path,
The road I know so well,
I wander once again towards some love
That I fail to see as you.

Patiently do you wait for me, my God.
Patiently do you wait.

Ever-you

Kindly and ever so soft
  Does your gaze rest upon mine,
    Riddled in riddles and vast mystery,
     Quiet, but so bold.
      I have many a thing to say:
       A life-time and asking yours,
        Such things that weigh heavy
       And are bound to be freed,
      Through ways with which I am unfamiliar
     And with someone quite new.
   I can't help but now acknowledge
 This fascination with ever-you.

A Winter's End

I cannot look into your eyes for but more than a second,

Two at most,

For they cut with such ease of nature

Through my many masks

And into the uncertainty which racks a fickle heart.

You know that I am torn,

For I cannot face you,

When I see the swelling azures,

Dancing,

Free,

Loving and concerned,

Inviting and

Longing only to go

And to grow deeper,

Into you, into me,

All I can picture is the day,

Written on the Sky,

As we tearfully dance to and fro

Arm in arm as the crowds watch,

Not whispering even a word,

But knowing within that now

Is here, is now, is 'til our eternal rest.

We are first mates on this mysterious adventure,

And I am filled with great joy and peace.

Are you, my dear?

Are you, my dear?

Incapability

There once was a young lad who loved greatly
the color crimson.
Red as roses and rosy cheeks,
apples on weekends, Jonagold and
particularly Paulas.
The mark left from old ladies' lipstick
on the edge of glass--
the sort of thing he would find
at his favorite ice cream shop.
And what could top
sundae with a cherry?
The dashing dog that greeted him
each day in front of
The redbarns blushing deep in the summer
sun singing his skin
into a most wonderful ruddy.
A lone balloon
at the weekend fair dances,
smiling, looking for
a companion,
but he could not see his beloved friend,
for red was all he knew not,
except for the occasional oddly green.
Our young sir, born blind from color
never saw his true love, and when he did,
he knew it not, for he was but a boy,
frightened and so foreign to such great things.

Decisions

This has all made me think rather much
And so often what my mind tells me
Is to listen to my heart,
To step through the gate of my inner walls
And leave unlatched the lock,
That I might see my soul, my me,
Exposed for who I am.
I've never felt so torn.

17 April

Why does your soul ring so true,
Almost as a butterfly--
bold in its blues and audacious oranges--
Springs forth from the caccoon
to new life, breaking free from the shackles of
incubation and childish growth,
Free now to flutter about in your flowing beauty.
Today was just perfect;
You ruined my hockey game though.
I'll have to search deep in my heart,
to see if I can forgive you for this.

"I am with you always, even to the end of the world."

There is such struggle within me

Every nerve, every ounce of flesh rages.

It seeks what it cannot and what cannot

Fulfill the deepest yearn,

Which is indeed not so deep,

And yet it calls deeper within me,

Begging to be free and to reign unruled.

I drive, I drive, I take turns down the hill,

The mountain of my inner world,

Longing for the curves and sharp corners

That once kept me so alert.

I am but only a man

And a young one at that,

Who understands so little of life, of mind, of flesh.

But I burn.

I burn unrighteously, yet so naturally.

My God, my God, you call to me from within.

What do you seek, my Lord?

What do you seek?

Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.

O sweet mother, gentle woman, forever blessed,

You come and knock at my door,

You seek your Christ, your Son,

'Is he in here?'

I dare not say, my lady, for I fear to disappoint.

Yet even in my disappointment

I am filled, sustained, made whole

By the love of Whom you seek,

But it is not really He for whom you search,

It is I, for I am the one lost,

The one whom you and your Christ wish to bring back

To Him, for my sake, for his glory, through his love.

For often I wander

Far from your world, yet never far from your eyes,

From his eyes, from my own.

For though I seek and stray,

I am gently watched,

Lovingly held,

Graciously bound.

Something within me stirs—

May I be according to his Word.

Reflections on the Brothers Karamazov and Mimetic Violence

11 March 2013

Christ absolutely grates against the core of our culture. It is so much easier to hate than to love one's neighbor. It is so much either to damn the person who has wronged us than it is to reach out with forgiveness's embrace. It is so much easier to look at the criminal and, in an act of feigned human justice, sentence to prison or death than it is to try and rehabilitate. We so badly want to believe in the evil of humanity, that we will often not even allow for the possibility of good in another. We want to judge, to condemn, to ruin, for not only do we fail, but moreover we refuse to trust that justice is, in the end, God's. We want to point, blame, and watch as someone else burns, in order that we may look away from our own shortcomings, our own faults, our own lack of good. For it is much less challenging to see the sins of another than it is to be aware of our own. We ourselves do not have to change to see when someone else does harm. This makes no claim on ourselves. And perhaps we so desire not to see our own sinful natures because we know perfectly well that we can do nothing about them. It is only God who can change our broken selves.

We want to see the accused convicted because we want the easy way out. That is our American culture. This is our human culture. More, faster, easier, now. We do not want to deal with details. We do not want to do hard work. We do not want to examine ourselves, our hearts, our lives. We want the simplest solution, and we want it now. Yet Christ shows us this is not how God is. This is not how humans are intended to be. This is not how God spoke them into being and breathed the life of love into them. Christ shows us the way to the cross, the way of love. And this is something that will ultimately cost us our lives. For that is what love is: to lay down one's life for another, to love so fully that it cuts against the grain of our self-obsessed and overindulgent society and to such an extent, that this narcissistic culture will, in some way or another, crucify us. For the lover of self alone cannot stand to see someone else loved. The lover of self alone cannot bear to see self-sacrifice. It wants a victim other than itself, because then it has escaped a little longer from looking in the mirror and seeing the shallow, empty shadow of a human being that it is.

How do you awake such a barren soul, O God of hope? How do we love and give ourselves as an oblation to you, O Christ? How, O Spirit of truth, do we receive your grace to actually live as Christ?

Some musings

We are not called to do.  We are called to be. To be in the truest sense, in awareness of our supreme fragility, brokenness, and poverty.  This is how we are called to live: to look that thunderous insecurity in the eye and embrace it with all our being; to face the impoverishment of our lives not as a brother, a sister, or a friend... but as it is, as we are.  And then, and only then we will know what it is to be human, to be loved by the All-Mighty.  And that is the great mystery of our love: that with all our attempts at control, all our false securities broken down, we are so loved.

A Lovely Thursday Eve

There is simply something about the way
the sunshine shimmers through your hair
golden, on a grassy knoll of Castanea Hill.
The sweetsoft touch of a mid-Spring breeze
gently dances about your curling locks,
swirling, and twirling into your gaze.
And oh! your eyes...
          ...your eyes...
              ...your eyes...
A moon not quite concealing dear Helios,
whose timid glance spills over in overtly orange,
painted deep on cerulean skies;
Only nature can craft so careful an eclipse,
and only aloft is my gaze, for I am but a bird
drifting along with no great care
for much anything below.
Just grant me this one slightest glance,
And off I shall flutter towards your Sun.

The beginning of a short story begun in 2011

Frederick Johnson IV was not a lubricious man.  Or at least he never intended to be.  A tepid and quite often nervous fellow, Mr. Johnson was the butler of the prosperous van Scurilitas family of New England, but had moved south to accompany the family’s son, James.  The well-meaning butler had from birth a peculiar interest in the festering cheeses from the western reaches of Lisieux, and, duly, some imagined predisposition toward a canonized Carmelite nun from that area.  No one understood the latter, or the prior for that matter, for the cheeses of the western reaches of Lisieux are most foul indeed. 

James van Scurilitas was the family’s youngest and only child.  He thought it befitting of himself to reside in a place that would afford him an even more luxurious lifestyle, so he moved to quaint estate in Louisiana after having spent a considerable amount of his father’s not-so-meager funds on a considerable amount of education.  At his disposal had been all the best schooling since a wee boy.  Beginning with the prestigious Harvard-Franklin preschool in Crawford Notch, Pierce-Bauschman-Heindlieben Kinder-Prep at Jefferson, the Yale Law School Kindergarten Extension on Lake Winnipesauke, all the way up through two nondescript bachelor’s degrees from Darmouth College, he had enrolled in three terminal masters degrees, none of which he completed, at Amherst, Harvard, and Dartmouth respectively.  The van Scurilitas boy practically had more courses under his belt than the entire population of the mountain-backed state of New Hampshire.  But we are getting off track.

     As I said, Frederick was not a lubricious man.  He bound himself to the van Scurilitas family with—as they saw it—an unnecessary and wholly unflattering promise of chasteness.  While initially assumed to mean loyalty to their family alone, it was quickly learned that the subdued butler fully intended to remove himself from the reaches of female prurience.  (His father, also a butler, had formulated a farce teaching him that those of the feminine persuasion had a voracious appetite for servants of rich families.  This was done in attempt to keep the boy from finagling about with girls.)  His chastity was practiced to such excess that Frederick became quite uncomfortable when in the presence of a woman, making him twice as awkward as he was on any other given occasion.  And herein lay his problem.  In his bouts of discomfort he would lose control of his tongue and inevitably spurt forth some innuendo, or at least something that could be construed as having another, more exotic meaning, without any intention of the matter whatsoever.  This often created the most splendidly uncomfortable situations, where Frederick would turn a bright rose, begin sweating as though he had just encountered a lion on the street, and, in the worst scenarios, set down another accidental implication or two.  In hopes of remedying the perspiration issue, the family insisted he wear a few more layers so as to hide the dampness fleeing his armpits.  But Frederick was a man with a naturally high body temperature, and this only exacerbated his problem.  As to the double entendres, there was no solution: only further discomfort and reservedly annoyed requests for him to get something at the store...