Bitten

"Because grieving is drowning -- suspended"
Death is a scar that marks us all. We wear it on our hearts; hidden by layers of blood vessels and tissue, it lies on our central organ a memento mori. Death and life seperated by inhalations, as cells are reborn and depleted in the steady rise and fall of our breath.
I have two peers who are currently in the midst of grieving. One just lost his mother to a slow battle with terminal lung disease and the other is currently living with his dying mother-in-law. Their grief is so loud it beats in their ears with the same thrumming pulse a child about to be discovered in hide and seek feels.
I don't understand death. Like my peers I have also known it intimately and tragically...but I still don't understand it. The death I have seen lacks the dignity and peace Sunday School painted it to be. Its visceral, desperate, and cruel. It leaves a web half woven and the survivors crawl about trying to patch a pattern they do not have the instructions for.
The scar is not just on our hearts. Creation itself is cracked; each blade of grass flitting in the wind, the rough grains of sand that rub each other raw, and the waters that strain against the shores, feel death. The immortal rendered mortal does not simply forget its heritage.
For once upon a time there was a boy and a girl. And they played where they should not have, and ate what was not theirs, and a pain filled their chests and they were changed. And we were changed. And it all changed.
I too have a thrumming pulse in my head. Grief that screams at me above the crowded noise. My chest heaves in a pain that feels like it could rip me in two. I feel the scar. A rough scar with two perfect punctures. For once upon a time a snake coiled up around us and slithered things in our ears and as we listened it slyly sunk its fangs into our chests, and we were changed.

Lent

Because I Do Not Hope to Know
Because I do not hope to know
The season of Lent has become, for me, a season of acceptance. A time when my strivings, insecurities, and vanities, are exposed like carcasses in the wasteland, and I simply am. Lent is the desert. Lent is waiting. Lent is letting go.
I am a latecomer to liturgy. My Pentecostal upbringing,while rife with memory verses and songs that utilized the word “hosanna”, taught me nothing of the liturgical
practices of the Christian faith. So, when at university I became aware of the rich history of the church, I was fascinated. The ability to integrate the relational and often emotion-based faith of my childhood with an intellectual and academically oriented church tradition was incredibly liberating. Liturgy in an age of experience-based faith felt wild, even rebellious. Some kids do drugs; I read Christifedelis
Laici.
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
It was in this period that I first experienced Lent. I vowed to write in my journal every day, commit to disciplined devotions, and I expected, like some crazed Essene in the desert, to be blown away by daily if not hourly revelations of God. It didn’t work out too well – I, in my normal “Striving McStriverson” way gave myself rules in achieving closeness with God. I found instead a sense of isolation and distance.
I had created an image of God that matched my own limitations, and in that control was blinded.Lent is letting go. Lent is waiting. Lent is the desert.
A couple of years ago I decided to go to Christ Church Cathedral downtown for the Ash Wednesday sunrise service. I had just moved to the city, was pretty much jobless, and the beginning of Lent seemed to offer hope that change was coming. But on the way to the church I got completely lost in Vancouver traffic, rather upset at my new roommate (who was trying to “un-lost” us via Google directions), and missed
the entire service.Lent is waiting. Lent is the desert. Lent is letting go – and not flipping off the guy who just cut you off in the Cathedral parking lot.
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Shall these bones live?
Shall these bones live?
That same year I got the chance to take a road trip to a four star hotel built into the Monterey Bay in California.It was a week filled with stillness and rest. One night while I doing my devotions on the balcony of my hotel room, I felt calmness consume me. In the midst of the unknown, alongside the uncertainty of where life was headed I felt a penetrating peace. The constant buzzing of my brain slowed and I sat listening in the darkness to the crashing of the waves below. I heard a pod of whales sounding off to each other across the ocean bay. To me at that moment, it was
the sound of hope, of the eternal, the sound of letting go.
Lord I am not Worthy,
Lord I am not Worthy,
But speak the word only
Last year I managed to make it on time to the Cathedral for the imposition of ashes. The priest smeared the oily charcoal of burnt palm fronds in a cross on my forehead, and quietly repeated, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” For me the black smear on my forehead (which was hilariously perceived as dirt and continually attempted to be rubbed off all day by the dancers I worked with) was a reminder, not that I was different – but that I was the same.It was a reminder that I come from dust, and that I will return to it. That in that same dust-derived form Christ came, roamed the desert and lived, walked amongst us and loved, and stretched out his arms and died. In Lent we wait,we wait for the celebration of the incarnation -- of dust
bearing life. Lent is accepting the finite. Lent is admitting I don’t know. Lent is letting go.


Elliot, Thomas Stearn. Ash Wednesday http://www.msgr.ca/msgr-7/ash_wednesday_t_s_eliot.htm

God's Flash Photography

"Its silent just the crickets and my breathing,
and the God above is practicing his flash photography."-Sheree Plett

I have always been awed by lighting storms. They illuminate the opaque black night instantaneously, sheet lightening revealing the grass swaying in the fields and outlining the naked branches of trees like children caught in a game of hide and seek.

Like these lightening storms of exposure, the weight of emotion hits me unexpectedly. Moments where light captures me, reaches me, and reveals all I am for a moment. It is as though my numb exterior is uncovered for an instant and I feel everything. I feel exposed, broken, and weak. A child running from shadows.

The art of feeling I believe takes practices…
and I am out of practice.

Much of how I understand God, is based in what I feel -- and as one prone to numbness, this makes God seem as elusive at times as the morning fog. Much of life passes around me unfelt, like a stream past a boulder. I am solid and unmoving.

Until, God practices his flash photography in my life. In those brief glimpses I experience life to all its extremes, emotions without the corners cut. Reflected in the negative is a split second of seeing myself, of seeing God, of feeling the unfelt storms of my past.

I feel. I feel. I feel.

And God, not elusive but constant, is the one with the flash bulb chasing the shadows into the night.