chasing bullets

Spent the morning chasing bullets.
We know we aren't fast enough to stop them before they hit their mark.
So we followed them.

One of the bullets led us to the street corner where the man who caught it had crashed his truck. He had found his lost dog and then, together, they found two 16 year olds with a gun. When the boys threatened him he laughed and tried to take the gun. He wasn't able to get the gun, only the bullet and then he drove away, straight into a tree.

We followed one bullet to a grassy hill beside a gas station. We saw the cars on the highway speeding past us like a stampede out of town the same way they did on the day a three year old boy caught the bullet we were following. He had discovered his father's loaded gun under the seat of the car while waiting for his mother and auntie to shop at the quickie mart.

We followed another bullet to a vacant lot. The grass was just high enough to hide the litter. We stopped under a tall tree in what used to be a front yard. One of our group had seen smoke, not from the gun, but from the house fire lit by the man who had first set this bullet's course, then set his home ablaze.  His wife caught the bullet and so stayed in the house while it burned. We arrived too late, of course, to stop any of this from happening.

One bullet led us past the house where one of my friends is raising children, and a puppy. We crossed the street and stood on the lot where volunteers are planning a community garden.. We saw the signs of change. The yellow police tape is gone; neon pink tape marks the locations for raised beds. A shed has been erected in the alley where a man named Saul had caught up with some car thieves and the bullet from one of their guns.

And then it began to rain like a mother's tears. Our maps were sodden. We might have lost our way.

Before we gave up we hurried to follow another. It led us to a grove of trees proudly rising out of a well kept lawn sprinkled with tiny daisies, between the elementary school and a little church. One of the women with us explained that she had seen the gun that had shot the bullet we had followed here. She bravely recalled the young man leaning out of a car window, pointing the gun at her while he laughed. As she spoke, I marveled that her mind had finally found a way to wrap around the fact that she hadn't caught that bullet. A week later a teenager had caught that bullet between his shoulder blades as he ran toward the trees for shelter. And now, we had followed the story, followed the bullet. We stood between the very trees that might have saved his life had he reached them in time.

Why do some people catch the bullets and others only chase them?
I can't be sure.
But I know that I will continue to follow those I cannot catch. I know I will not ever be fast enough or brave enough to catch them but I will chase them. I sometimes hear them explode like fireworks in the middle of the night. Their sounds punctuate my dreams and when I wake I am filled with a kind of curious gratitude and wonder why. Even if we never find the bullets we chase and even though we hope no one will ever have to catch them, they are caught. They are caught and therein lies the great sadness that sets us on the journey toward answers for the hardest questions about death. I will follow the bullets because the routes they draw invite me into beautiful places of past loss, heroism, rage, courage, resilience. These are things we should follow closely so as not to lose track of them.

the photos I didn't take

We wouldn't dare take photos of the worst places.

The window ledge I leaned against when I denied you the pleasure of a forced apology.

The table that propped up a good many raw elbows as she leaned in, locked eyes with mine and told me she would never speak to him (never forgive him) as long as she lives. 

The couch we sat on when he compared me to a disloyal dog.

The way the light made a calculating slanted rectangle on the carpet as you explained, one last time, you were sorry, all the while knowing it was too little too late.

The view of the grand canyon from 30,000 feet and forces you to admit you are moving, as fast as you can, toward your life without her and the chasm below is a crack in the sidewalk compared to the one in your heart.

It would be a really upsetting slideshow.

So I don't take the photos of these places.

What I need you to see isn't in the picture anyway; it's in your heart, in your memory, in the space between us as the story unfolds.

I don't need photos; I need friends who listen as my words slowly paint the picture.

Here is where it gets good:

There are things afforded me that are not accessible to other minority women.

and one of them is this: a room full of educated white men (with plenty of other pressing obligations). and as if that isn't enough, they are listening, really listening. To me.

Not just shuffling a deck of photos but sitting down around the table, putting themselves in my place: in the seats where I sat as I lost my spiritual foothold, lost my self.

One of them climbed up in the pulpit and, at my request, crouched down a bit, to understand what it is like to be me in a box not unlike an upended coffin with a microphone for the dead.

Another one stood near the baptismal font and looked around slowly, "I want to be able to imagine her here," he said, maybe because it is hard to imagine someone with a nose ring and tattoos glowing under the red light of stained glass. I don't forget that I have physical characteristics of my womanhood that include markers of the time I have spent embedded in cultures that permanently alter my skin, poke holes in me, leave scars and some marks I have chosen. I don't forget that it can be a shock to see me approach the altar which is as much to say I don't forget to pray for those who feel as though I am creating a spectacle. 

I suspect, though, that this man in particular wants to imagine the kinds of glory and gore that I bring to the space without need, without malicious intent but simply because I am a woman and I am created to bring forth life-quite a messy business.

Is that what he saw? What he imagined?

Even though the superabundance of photographs is more real now than ever, there are pictures we refuse to take. There are images that create a blur on the lenses. Maybe we don't want them anyway. Maybe we don't need them. Tears render photographs useless.
There are moments I wish I could forget. I want to take the hands of the ghost of me and hold her palms to block my view when they replay in my mind's eye.

And then there are moments I wish I could go back to but no photograph will take me there.

So I have decided it is a good thing
there is a story and a song:
(just a word and a sound, really)
There is a line on my skin that you can trace with your finger tip
and the loose thread of my frayed soul that I would offer you
knowing that to pull it would unravel the whole.
There are feelings hidden leagues beneath rising to surface...
You know, all the stuff you see when your heart is brave enough to turn toward the sadness you cannot see with your eyes.

better prayers

In the event you should find an hypodermic needle in your pulpit you may consult the anglican book of prayer but there is not (yet) a specific prayer for such an occasion therein.

On the occasion you unwrap a gift from a lover... 15 years too late. Too late for what? To know you were loved so deeply? No. It is never too late for that. But there is no prayer for that.

In case you are having the hardest year of your life there is no prayer for that. Other than the tears or swears that seem to come too easily.

Or for the day when you think she said her first word, but you're not sure because, well, do babies really know how to say "Thank you?"

Is there a prayer other than, "O God. I'm not sure what any of this means. Help me figure this out"?

So I'm terribly distracted these days,
writing prayers better than the flare prayers from a sinking ship,
Setting intentions (you know, getting specific about the goals like "practice radical gratitude because logic isn't your style anyway" or "stop reading facial expressions through the lens of fear" or "notice birds-at least their songs-every day")

And I'm doing all this as though I were planning a funeral: mine as if it were yours. Worried that you will not go on without me. Narcissistic, I know. But I'm just being honest.
The funeral I'm thinking of is more a bon voyage party: you will go on this great journey without me.
You don't need me anyway, not nearly as much as I wish you did... and you surely don't need me if I'm not grateful or brave or noticing birds.
Setting intentions that way: knowing I am not all things to all people and sad about it.
since we're being honest.

In hopes of being useful,
I live a public life. It's not any weird thing (anymore) to make my thoughts public. In fact, I'm rather coming to depend on it. It's like sending messages in bottles... one word at a time. You'll have to compare notes with someone else if you aren't sure what exactly I'm trying to say.
I would have compared this to sending carrier pigeons but a small bird of prey was busy killing a pigeon in the alley behind our apartment when we left the house yesterday.
If only David Attenborough had been there to explain it to my inner five year old. He wasn't. I nearly tried to save the pigeon. Now all that is left is a scattering of feathers looking like someone tore up a love letter into bits.

So not like a carrier pigeon-endangered by hawk beaks.
Instead, already scattered, but not so much you can't understand what happened (maybe only what is happening).

That is how the prayers are coming and how the intentions are setting.
One word at a time.
and here is the catch:
the larger question is this, what do we do now?
Now that human frailty is more present in the pulpit.
Now that I am finally able to see I wasn't ready to be loved until now.
Now that babies are capable of gratitude.
Now that the words come one at a time and not just to me but from you.

what else can we do?
Even if you don't believe in prayer (how did you ever make it this far in this post?) you probably still roll your eyes (heavenward),
you probably mutter or hope or breathe

and I think that will do.
even if it isn't written, yet, those tiny acts change things. They can set things a right and set them afloat.
Maybe not me, maybe not you, but something. Maybe not ships or kings but words or air.
and just between us, that is all that is needed.

smooth the worry crease

Took a tiny paintbrush

To the baby’s face

Traced

her brows

to smooth the worry crease

Between

her eyes

as both

Followed like curious

eclipsed suns

surrounded by shattered blue skies

turning heavenward

It was just

(Like painting vines on a porcelain saucer

Or branches before they become twigs)

Only longer

Lasting.

The Baptism

I think I forgot to put this up... but if I didn't maybe it is a good idea to keep it close by... just to live with it, just in case.

The Baptism

I was born slowly and immediately

wrapped in the falling leaves of the wind-

not crying aloud,

merely breathing the first few clouds

in and out,

ferocious and bound forward-

the way the stone parts pieces of sky

before it breaks through the glass.

And this, my first word, is one word

for both of you:

(anger and hope)

at the same time.

You drank it in, tasted the salt in it and then

knew how to bathe me in it’s cold ambivalent blessing

I caught you looking down from the above just

as I shuttered in your arms and you tightened

to comfort me

Suddenly this way,

you spoke

to me,

wholly,

about me: the word dripping out between tears

-a fiery honey on my forehead

and in my mouth-

causes me to rise early and fly

-my breast ablaze with spring like the robin: curling

tones and toes-on the topmost branches of this risk

called home.

on costumes and courage

Our worries are manifold lately. Our fears are not play things even on Halloween.
I will spare you the long list that begins with war mongering politicians and ends with diseases contagious only in impoverished places.

All this has me questioning the value of protection. How is it we place such a high value on something so elusive? It's an illusion really and yet we're nearly addicted to it.
We think of buildings as something stable and strong. But children of domestic abuse and adults facing foreclosure know this is often wrong.
We think of clothing as a descriptor, a message that we ought to be respected or at least we have covered our private parts. Also an illusion.

Today we don costumes (my daughter's preschool class looked like a little zoo (with one puppy dog and one garden gnome)) and tomorrow we will celebrate saints who took vows to wear burlap, cover their heads and live simply. Today we play a part, wear a mask and pretend our fears are only a gesture toward death; tomorrow we celebrate those who revealed truths that were not hidden by God-but hidden from us by our denial.

Around this time in 2009 I ordered my first clerical collar (not for Halloween, mind you). It was a size 8 (I wear a size 2). I took it to my mother-the woman responsible for a large bit of my spiritual (inner) tailoring as well as my diminished physical stature. She reverently hacked away at it so I'd look less like a toddler wearing one of dad's dress shirts.

I am still not always sure what it is for, what it does or when to wear it. I know there are obvious answers. But I like to say I am open to the mystery (mystory?) of it... if only because I am hoping to stay open to it's impact on me and my context.
The nose ring, the tattoos, the facial expressions I wear are not quite so mysterious. It's a little easier to predict who they may offend. Honestly, if I count the number of people offended by my tattoos it is equal to the number of people offended by my collar... only those offended by my collar often feel oppressed, rather than justified(!) in complaining about my garb.

The collar is not a costume, nor are the nose ring or the tattoos. They are more like monuments to who I have been and how I got here. They stand out against the landscape of my past and my future as well as all my relationships, they remind me that life requires bravery more often than it requires adequate protection.
They remind me that while protection is a rare privilege and often a mirage, bravery is not an illusion; Bravery is facing the reality and risking to change it.

I wrote the following poem after I opened the box that contained my mail order, 100% cotton monument
to the courage required by my position as a pastor
but more importantly to my position as a child of God.


This Cotton

I am caught on is from
A Fortress: just a phone call away.
I give the orders.
And it arrives and its small brown box, too light,
Belies the misgivings.

Oh carrier of this holy calling,
You are more than a covering;
You tighten around my neck—
A collar: like the rising at the bell
This tintinnabulation tab -
let rangle me—
I choke on each word.

And I am to become
A Friar: fire tucked
below the belt.
Sustained by alms, the scratching of the sack
Cloth, sloth, wrath, pride, lust, envy, gluttony finally wrapped in a showy snowy shroud.
And I am drunk with power
on the spirits that burned my nose and throat, and finally fell into my gut.

You knit this while I was yet in my mother’s womb, weaving past and present,
Bring me back to!
A woman will convert you and I: in an upstairs room with a machine
Darting back and forth this way and that–
my mother tightened the white, in her affinity, her cotton for my skin,
(She is using the same machine to fix it in place
That once quilted scraps of my youth)
Bolting from the bolt:
Lightening—no, not weighing any less—
Rather, striking again and again,
Leaving crass like glass (see how my skin shows through!) where once was
One tiny stone, one Word among words,
atop a million others battered
against the water and roiling in the foam of hope.
And this cotton testifies that I too started from beneath your feet
But you never would have guessed—
I rose too high too fast—it was the busiest of illusions.

And you will know me, if you see me
A Vicar: vicarious curio, proudly displayed
Lined up behind a man, among men
Who fit better into this weave.

But mostly I am still…

A Woman: of the cloth
This (clo(th)ing) that bears buttons
Like batting and battens down, hatches all around me—
The flames of Pentecost
Or Jeremiah’s fire
Burning from the inside
Burying me in the white heat
And all that remains is to speak over you
And I: ashes to ashes,
dust to dust, and cotton enough to catch them.

On the occasion of my daughter's first birthday

For You

Time does not make a single sad line;
each tick of the clock
a pebble and we toss them coyly together

watch the puddle where
they shine
ring joy,
they gather and leave no choice-
only growth.

Movement is a miracle you discovered slowly,
raise your arms in praise of the world coming toward you.
Laughter weaves a warmth around your world-
branches holding tight
the moon.

Speak the language of your soul soft and wild,
know we understand,
a song that can
sweep the desires out of their hiding places,
bite the traces of sweetness arriving,
all this only ever
an offering.
It rises to the surface,
naturally.

Pull the fabric of our faith,
trust it's twisting in your fist,
a prayer occurs with teeth bared-
an honest smile- your eyes search the heaven of you reflecting
mine own.