Handmade Prayer: Apocalyptic

Come, Lord Jesus

The Revelation to Saint John

Short Thoughts #5: Listening

I have come to believe that listening is an act of spiritual warfare. Who would have guessed?

Old humble ear. A pathway straight to the heart and no one gives you any credit. They all go for the eye or the tongue or the fingers.

Be patient with the little humble ear, friends. It is a strong lover, fierce and wise.

All around, the strangest things are whispering the name of God. Bad drawings, good songs, pebbles falling back into the ocean, lost footballs, the unexpected jump of a tree, every person that you'll meet, kind and mean.

Of course, we all know this. But it's the forgetting that gets us. This war has been going on a long time.

Don't fret. Cynicism and shame are burned up in the fire of one open and listening heart.

However, I have also learned that listening gets harder and harder the more I commit to doing it. It feels kind of like playing an instrument, skills are bought with sweat, but the best stuff comes after long practice. When I can just let myself go. When I surrender to the absurd hope that all things eventually lead to beauty kissing justice. In front of everyone.

Home.

It can be a long 'eventually'. Longer than the best marriage. Hard, too.

The world is full of stopped up ears. Pray for mercy, listen. It is an abomination to evil that one fragile soul would stop, shift and peer into the underbrush, listening like a kind hunter, for the breath of another fragile soul.

There is music everywhere. Be brave.

Something for Someone: Isadora Duncan, the inventor of modern dance (1877-1927)

she was magic incarnate. the wildness of lost punctuation. she broke norms. she broke boundaries. she broke hearts.
apparently, she was killed in a car accident when her scarf, typically long, got tangled around the open wheel. she was pulled down. her neck broke.

awful, i know.

this story is a fierce, sad and strange one, especially for a dancer.

the gravity that she had defied,
then coerced into loving,
then defied again, agile and powerful.
that carried her through the air, at a tenuous peace with her and her legs, arms and lungs and stomach in front of the awe struck world. flashbulbs and all.


that gravity is what took her life.

isadora. what tragedy.

question for god:
why are we often killed by what we love the most?

amen.

Handmade Prayer: Lament

We have a little sister.

Song of Solomon 8:8

Cloud of Witnesses: Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

Handmade Prayer

Word to live by: Job 38:37

Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? - God

This sentence burns deep in the middle of my little heart. Gerard M. Hopkins filled his diary with descriptions of clouds. The old, absurd poet who scribbled Job, broken and wiser than the other friends, has God come down in a whirlwind and ask these types of questions.
I can't think of anything more severe and beautiful.

Clouds are too soon dying works of art - as unique as any mountain or continent.

Who has the wisdom to count these things? I try.

On my best days I slow down.

I watch the sky and see clouds bloom and disappear knowing that each has a name, and that rarely heard.

Birth and death slowly blowing over our own little births and our own little deaths.

Our little dancefloors, our little hospital rooms.

I guess clouds are icons. They are dramas of the crucified God. Slow beauty explosions that can't last forever on our whirling earth. The winds are simply too strong and the world is such a dry place in need of rain.

Short Thoughts #4: Reality Show Drugs

I, too, have crunked to reality shows. The postmodern colosseum. Daughters and sons that I barely know embroiled in quickly digestible drama. But good drama is never quickly digestible.

I watch them and train my teeth for biting.

This one’s a bitch, that one’s a hero.

Or borderline. Or narcissistic. Or selfish.

And all the while my soul is practicing how to kill with words and find enemies.

My own prayer for mercy forgotten.

How do I stop network editors from becoming my spiritual advisors? How do I resist the urge to hate and label the adolescent adults splayed out across my screen? Vain and bearing, as much as anyone, the image of God.