Walt W. and the Love of Jesus

Visiting with my new pastor and his wife, on a warm July night, we talk about everything. Friendship and love, writing, preaching, how to make to-die-for zucchini snacks... and how God speaks.

Somewhere between talking about our kids and chatting about the challenges of marriage my pastor says, God speaks primarily through His word. And just as I begin to assent, there's a little catch in my throat. I... I'm not sure I agree... my voice drifts off. I've been thinking about this very thing as I struggle to write my next chapter in God in the Yard.

I am thinking about how God spoke to me about the importance of family, through seeing the lost and homeless on the streets of Washington, D.C. I'm thinking about a filmed art piece called The Way Things Go, in which sometimes imperceptible changes caused a chain reaction of events, that caused another chain reaction, and so on... and God spoke through that too, about life and living it consciously and well.

Maybe more than anything this night, I am thinking of Walt Whitman, an unlikely bard of the inexpressible love of Jesus. There is this poem, see, and it manages to speak of grace. The inexplicable ability of Jesus to see us as we are and not turn away, to gently touch all parts of us, both glorious and inglorious. Reading this poem makes me weep, and I find myself practically laid out flat with the wonder of what it means to be loved, really loved, graced by Jesus.

I pick up a paper-thin zucchini, dripping with vinegar, sprinkled with salt and fresh ground pepper. I turn it over on my tongue and let myself revel in its texture. I smile at my pastor and his wife, and bite into the words of God to my heart. Love, grace... in a fresh, ivory, green-bleeding slice of zucchini...


Red Design photo, by Sara. Used with permission.

STONE CROSSINGS:

Andrea's gentle Book Review

Ted's book club post Goldsworthy's Wall: Sacrifice

RELATED:

LL's Word, at Love Notes to Yahweh

Visitation

Standing before this painting, I remember confusion.

Pure emotion of entry... visitation... energy... blood, like Leda under the feathers of the swan, though less violated and more intrigued, comforted... perhaps.

Perhaps... the way I felt this morning, rocking in the white wooden rocker, beneath the warmth of morning light. Watching wasps play at the tips of the hemlocks, their wings made amber-gold by the sun's entry, visitation. And the hemlocks too, visited, energized by light that seemed to glow from the inside out of their myriad needles, transforming them into something like green wands in the hands of a woodland fairy.

Myriad... thoughts played in my mind... of Clairvaux, who, it has been said "absorbed the Bible so completely that his writing breathes with it." Thoughts, too of L'Engle's tribute, written by Luci Shaw... her longtime friend, who observed that L'Engle loved scripture and read it every day and that it inhabited her writing, as if from the inside out.

Out... over the waters of Genesis, the Spirit too, ruah*, breathed first words of light, life, entry, visitation, energy.

Holy Spirit, come afresh and visit Your Words in me, that my own words might golden-amber, life, light be.


Clairvaux quote from Water From a Deep Well, p.178. *Ruah means spirit or breath in Hebrew. Stations of the Cross painting photo by L.L. Barkat.

Of Bridges and Violins and Words

Day begins to slip away on the Brooklyn Bridge. Eldest Child has run ahead with daddy. Youngest is at my side. We stop, countless times, to look at the water, the wires, the people, and now the Manhattan Bridge. The sky is a painter's palette dabbed with slate blue and powder blue and pinks. The Manhattan bridge (how many times have I passed it by?) is an arc of loveliness, a masterpiece of shape and color embracing the city. I have never see this bridge in just this way.

But today on foot I see you, Manhattan bridge. I see you, sky above, and river beneath and city beyond. And I feel a bit of the way I will feel just a few weeks hence, when I hear Sophia, little child, play Chanson de Matin (not Sophia, this link... but just a clip of someone else playing the Chanson... not nearly as achingly). Tiny Sophia too will be beautiful, leaning in, pulling back, touching the strings of her violin as if she were caressing velvet. Coaxing the sound into the air, into my heart. So, so lovely. The notes tumbling towards an end where they will become so thin and high that I can hardly hear them, yet can hear nothing else in the world. Until I feel I am completely broken and completely whole, completely empty and completely filled.

I have felt this too when I have tasted the intoxicating writing of Ann V. Or when I have seen the icy glory on my street.

What is this I am touching, tasting, smelling in the far corners of the world and right here at my feet? What is it, but the Divine, breaking in, oozing, enveloping, exhaling. Sometimes I am too weak and sometimes too strong to take it in. Make me, O Lord, this day, just right and ready. For the bridges, the sounding strings, the tiny child, the words, the weather... for You.

Manhattan Bridge at Sunset photo, by L.L. Barkat.

STONE CROSSINGS:

Ted's book club post Howe's Cave: Baptism

Hard Commodity in the Blogosphere

I am still making my way slowly through Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith. It's as good as any story, the way it moves forward through the framework of Tippett's life while discussing science and faith, life and death, doubt and devotion.

Last night, I related to this passage quite keenly...

I have always been invested in ideas, in words, in the presentation of words. The people on Wooster II took me out of my head. They taught me the gravity of nonverbal presence— of eye contact and touch. I learned to accept silence, not to fill it with talk, to respect the immensity of what eyes and hands alone could express. The writings of Margaret Spufford came back to me on that dementia ward— the notion that in the end, the reality of God is most powerfully expressed not in ideas and proclamations but in presence. I sometimes felt that presence palpably in silence and the inchoate, searching bond of raw togetherness between us. p.118

As I considered Tippett's words, they resonated. And they pained me, regarding my blog relationships. What, really, can I do to be present in this way, this raw togetherness way, over a bunch of wires and through signals? Not much. I can only wait for the chance to be together, in some cases again, in other cases for the very first time.

Not that I find no community here. I've said before that I think I do. But presence is a hard, perhaps impossible commodity to truly find in the blogosphere.

Together Photo, by Sara. Used with permission.

LL IN OTHER PLACES:

At the High Calling this week, Don't Give Your Gifts a Haircut

PLEASE WELCOME:

A post on a lighter note, from Long Island Express Girl

Thoughts on silent words, from Janet Collins' OnWords

Jane Emmert at Inspiration and Art