I imagine Mary Oliver after a nuclear holocaust writing of her sorrow that in our arrogance and anger we destroyed ourselves and most of our world I imagine her writing of her fear for the world and for herself denying nothing of her sadly changed expectations I imagine her ending But look at the way this little brown skink moves unhurried up the porch wall stopping and starting again enjoying its bit of life
ponderings
Making Space for the Divine
I am doing a six session online class on “Centering Prayer as Divine Therapy” led by Jana Rentzel at CloserThan Breath. ( https://closerthanbreath.com/ )
Monday, during the third class, Jana led us in a Lectio Divina practice, using a verse of our choosing from the Lord’s Prayer. I chose “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
After the Lectio Divina time, Jana spoke of kenosis “self-emptying” – and at first I thought an immediate NO – I want to be myself, not empty myself. But then Jana spoke of our “self-talk” and I realized how very often my self talk is negative: wants, needs, inadequacies, irritations or disappointments that I can’t let go off, ever lengthening to do lists.
Jana quoted Cynthia Bourgeault, “…love made full in the act of giving itself away.”
And like the traditional light bulb at an AHA moment, I realized the paradox of kenosis: Only by emptying myself of my own self-talk can I make space for the self-fulling love of God; the divine love that allows me to forgive those who have wounded me (including myself) and to experience the love made full in the act of giving itself away.
And so I was brought back to my verse from the Lectio Divina practice, with new appreciation for the depth and promise and sweetness of “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Now
What – who – is it that invests now with eternity?
Alan Watts spoke of reincarnation as the return of particular consciousness from cosmic consciousness.
That doesn’t have much meaning to me, although it sounds grand.
In much the same way the Second Coming sounds grand without much specific content.
What is eternal life to me if I will not be the me I know – whether it be Watts’ version or Paul’s version. If we shall all be changed, whether or not death is real, then the particular I that loves this particular You shall no longer exist. And that is an eternity that is oh so very uninteresting to me.
But this now. This early morning eternal now with you still sleeping and me loving you still sleeping. This is perhaps all the eternity I need. And for that I thank whatever, whoever created nowness for me.
Finding God
Thoughts from a morning in church and an afternoon in the garden:
We create God in our own image, bestowing desired power and glory on that image, and imprisoning it in words.
We experience God in nature, opening ourselves to the insistent richness and diversity of divinity beyond words.
“O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”
Romans 11:33 NRSVCE
Succulents
Spice died on February 27, just before our normal started to die.
We took her to the vet in the morning. I sat on the floor, on the blanket they had spread in the small exam room, the one at the end of the corridor right next to the toilet-and-sink room. Spice sat next to me, on alert. She, with her half nose and leaking bladder, wouldn’t lie down though sitting hurt her. We were at the vet, so she expected poking and probing, she expected shots. My dogs are country dogs at heart. Country dogs who live in the large back yard of our city house. They see the vet once a year, every year for twelve years. So Spice, tired and ailing, knew what to expect. So she thought. So she sat, alert and wary.
Eventually the vet came in and gave her a sedative. Then she laid down with her head in my lap, as she absolutely never did at home. Her sister and life companion, Sugar, is as big as Spice – 60 pounds of Heinz 57 rescue. But Sugar is a lap dog at heart. When I am sitting in a chair on our porch or deck, Sugar will be there, sitting next to me, head in my lap. Spice will circle in for the occasional behind the ear or belly rub but she always holds her head high and is soon on her way. We have to be careful about the gates to the yard because Spice is an escape artist. She loves nothing better than to sneak out a gate and run and run and run around our neighborhood. She always comes back, eventually.
Was…would…held…had to be…loved…ran…came back: it all needs to be past tense now.
Sometimes now the gates are unlatched. Sugar does go out occasionally, looks around the front yard, up and down the street – is she still searching for Spice? – then simply sighs and comes back to her bed on the porch.
About 10 or 15 minutes after giving Spice the sedative, the vet came back into the room, with an assistant. They shaved a spot on one of Spice’s hind legs, and gave her an injection. Just seconds later Spice gave two slow sighs and was gone. I wondered why, if we were determined to keep the death penalty (which is, in essence, as inhuman in purpose as the cross) why it could not at least be done this simply, this quietly. If a dog deserves this, doesn’t a human, no matter what?
I said yes, I wanted a paw print and Spice’s ashes. The vet used the blanket to wrap Spice. I fled to the small necessaries room next door, washed my hands and face, leaned against the sink looking in the mirror, wondering why I felt gutted when really my dogs lived pretty much independently of me.
Later that afternoon, I was rear ended by a young driver who was on her cellphone. No one was hurt, there wasn’t even any significant damage to either car. It was a bump really, nothing more. But I was breathless and scared and couldn’t stop crying.
Two days later I left for France and then, soon after, the world started to fall apart in the blazing heat of a corona. Sunspots gone crazy. If I had rescued three dogs instead of two, perhaps the third would have been named Sunspot. Sugar, Spice and Sunspot. Nice and hot. But there were only two puppies wandering that town dump in North Carolina twelve years ago. Just Sugar, looking like a yellow lab, and Spice, with her incredible cinnamon coat that got inches and inches thick every winter, like a Chow.
Spice died and I went to France to join a friend whose brother had died. I had to come back a week early when too many people started dying in too short a time all over the world. Death had become contagious.
Sugar was waiting for me when I returned. She was no longer crying, moaning sort of, occasionally throughout the day, as she did in the two days after Spice died, before I left. But when the gate is left open, Sugar now goes into the front yard to look up and down the street; she never sees Spice, so she comes back into the familiar safety of the enclosed yard.
She does, however, unknowingly, sometimes walk over Spice on her way to the front yard. By the time I came back from France my husband had picked up the plaster paw print and an elaborately carved small wooden box containing Spice’s ashes. I recoiled when he tried to hand it to me. The thought of any remnant of free-ranging Spice in that ridiculous box repulsed me.
While I was in France, Woody, my landscaping husband, started making a pathway from the side gate to the front yard. He had planned to finish it before I got back, but death not only sent me away but also brought me back early.
On one side of the new path he created a sloping garden for succulents because I love succulents. That part of the property faces south, protected between two houses, never getting very cold in winter and often very hot in summer. So Woody dug sand into the rich Virginia soil to make a good bed for succulents. I asked him to dig Spice’s ashes into that new garden that was outside our fenced yard but still on our property, close.
So sometimes, when Sugar runs out the gate to check for Spice in front of the house, she may run over Spice. And as I dig to plant my thick-leaved succulents, as I dig, I dig through Spice. As a sentence it is weird, even as a thought it sounds unappealing. But when I am kneeling beside the garden, troweling a hole for a new small plant, when I take off my garden gloves and press the plant into the hole, snuggling the gritty dirt close around it, when I sit back on my heels and admire the new plant and imagine how it will spread, well then it doesn’t feel anything but good and right. Even though there still is too much death happening too fast.
Second Comings
One of the many things I love about the movie As Good As It Gets is that to me the ultimate message is “This is as good as it gets- and that can be plenty good enough.”
Today I read this quote from Emmy Arnold:
The Christmas Star in the night sky, the shining of the Christmas light in the night – all this is the sign that light breaks into the darkness. Though we see about us the darkness of unrest, of family discord, of class struggle, of competitive jealousy and of national hatred, the light shall shine and drive it out.…Wherever the Christmas Child is born in a heart, wherever Jesus begins his earthly life anew – that is where the life of God’s love and of God’s peace dawns again.
And I thought of the Second Coming and wondered:
Are we living the Second Coming? What if it is not a single Second Coming, but repeated Comings, every time the light of love, of truth, of peace, of kindness, of hope bursts or leaks forth again into the world.
Maybe, as countless stars lend each their light to a dark sky, maybe, just maybe, we each – woman and man, old and young, Gentile and Jew – get to be Mary, bringing the starlight of God’s love into a dark world over and over again.
Maybe WE are the Second Coming!
One Father’s Forever Gift
My friend’s brother is dying. This is not a new thing. He has been living with dying for several years now. From his diagnosis, he knew the illness was “terminal.”
Of course, in a very real sense, we all live with that terminal diagnosis. We will all die. But most of us get to pretend that we will die at some unspecified point in the fairly distant future. And before that happens, we will be able to live interesting lives, full of activities and experiences.
That is not his reality now. The point at which he will die remains unspecified, but he knows it is not in the distant future. It may not be tomorrow, or next week, or even next month, but his future is now measured small, months at the most optimistic.
I don’t know him well. Really I know him only through my long friendship with his sister. But I have learned to know him better, I think, as I consider the choices he is making now, at the end of his life.
Little by little, and sometimes too much by too much, his life has been diminished. He could no longer travel, no longer play golf, he could seldom play any sport, even in the backyard at family gatherings. Then he couldn’t work. And there were the treatments, the pain, the side-effects. Then he couldn’t walk very far, then not without a walker, then he started needing a wheelchair at times. And the pain kept growing, and the side-effects more difficult to treat. Then the medications to control the pain blurred his mind, taking from him even the clarity of thought and speech that was his hallmark. He is a natural caregiver who could no longer even take care of himself.
A few weeks ago, he entered palliative care in a hospital. Yet still, he agreed to another round of radiation treatment, talked with the doctors about other possible treatments – knowing that cure was not even a remote fantasy, that the only reasonable hope was to extend his life – with suffering, with almost no ability to do most of what he loved and valued – by days, weeks, maybe, at the most optimistic, months.
Why? Why does he make these choices when many would have gone, if not gentle at least resigned, into that good night? Why does he continue to, not rage, but fight against the dying of his light, his life?
It seems to me there is only one answer. Because everything else has been stripped from him. He cannot work, he cannot play, he cannot walk, he cannot care for himself, he cannot even think clearly at times. So much is gone that what is left becomes very clear. What is left stands out against the emptiness of all that once was there.
His children.
He hangs on for every day, every hour, every minute he can have with his children.
He loves his whole large close family. His brother and sisters, their children and grandchildren. Cousins. He loves them all. He has done more than his fair share of taking care of many of them. But would he hold on just for them? I can’t know. Maybe, maybe he would; maybe it is just in his genes, in who he is. Maybe he would hold on even if he did not have children himself.
No one can know. But I choose to see in him the full nobility of a father’s love. Nothing that he has lost is as important as what he still has, as what he can still give – his presence to his children.
I don’t know if he has a lot or a little or any money to leave them. I don’t know if any bequests he can leave will last a short time or a long time. But this I know. He gives his children a forever gift with every day of his presence. As long as they live, to everyone they care about, his children will be able to say, “My dad chose to live when he had nothing left to live for except to spend more time – despite pain, despite humiliations, despite tiredness – more time with us.”
What a gift!
The Grandeur of God
Earlier this week I read a Facebook post about a Catholic priest justifying excluding women from the priesthood by saying we see the “grandeur of God” in the male priest. This has been a niggling, itching irritation in my mind since then.
I just left the grocery store. I am not young, but I am tall and straight-backed, and I move easily. In the store I watched a classic “little old lady” roll her shopping cart slowly down the long aisle. She had a very wrinkled face, even the backs of her hands were wrinkled, her hair was wispy, she shuffled, bent-backed, down the aisle, slowly reaching for the canned goods she wanted. She looked up, caught my eye, and smiled. Now there, I thought, is a glimpse of the grandeur of God.
And then, inevitably, I thought of the opening lines of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
And then Gerard Manley Hopkin’s God’s Grandeur:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.
And I gave thanks “to whatever gods may be” not for my “unconquerable soul” but for opening my eyes to the divinity shining forth in a grocery store aisle.
Thoughts about God
Earlier today, driving through western Texas while my husband napped in the passenger seat, I spent some time thinking about how our greater awareness of LGBTQ+ people and of sexuality and gender as continua rather than boxes can help us better imagine God in somewhat new ways. I was thinking that God is neither god nor goddess but rather, while fully personal, is not constrained by our created sexual categories.
I have been moving back and forth in my prayers and thoughts between referring to our divine creator as God and Goddess. Neither is completely satisfactory to me but simply saying “Divine One” is not always satisfactory either.
Sometimes, I like my angry prayers best. Prayers that sound blasphemous but are often my most intensely personal with God. “Explain to me, O great creator of everything, how you can be so powerful, so knowing, so loving and such a god almighty bastard.”
But I digress. Somewhere in the middle of southwestern Texas – the sheer empty expanse of which lends itself to such thoughts – I thought that maybe I could refer to our divine creator-redeemer-sustainer as Goddest.
Legacy
Here is the legacy of being a woman raised Catholic:
I can’t decide if I am saner or crazier than my teachers.
I can’t decide if I am more or less enlightened now than when I was a
Catholic in good standing.
I can’t decide if I believe anything or nothing that the Church teaches.
I can’t decide if I love or hate the Church.
And mainly I can’t decide why the hell I care.
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