December 31, 2008: While It Was On My Mind

“The commonest question is whether I really ‘believe in the devil.’

Now, if by ‘the Devil’ you mean a power opposite to God and, like God, self-existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly No. There is no uncreated being except God.  God has no opposite.

. . .

Devil is the opposite of angel only as Bad Man is opposite of Good Man. Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.

. . . .

They [angels] are a pernicious symbol.  In Scripture, the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying ‘Fear not.’”

–C.S. Lewis (from introduction to The Screwtape Letters)

August 16, 2008: Full of Grace

Ave Maria, gratia plena,
I quietly ask for your healing.
Spear my heart, full of grace and love and mercy.

. . . Dominus tecum.
But could he be with me?
I receive him humbly and shun him loudly.

I push them all away.  I defend.
I am helpless. 

Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
I am unwhole throughout.

. . . et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
I am unwhole within.

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
Mercy is such a beautiful word,
With such a beautiful meaning.
I crave it like wanting to speak,
Without the ability to communicate.

ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc
For this moment.
This moment is the lapse of my eternity.

et in hora mortis nostrae. (. . .!)

Amen.

May 28, 2008: Randomness and Ick

I’m sorry that I forced you into such an adult decision shortly after your 18th. . .

*******

I thought I didn’t have regrets, but as I get older, I realize they are just emotions unuttered.

I know you would have bore it with me, brave and unflinching, but it doesn’t explain why I didn’t tell you.  Maybe if I had, you would have flinched.  A thousand thoughts race through my mind, but none that I can vocalize.  And none that I can remember.  What was I thinking?

I’ve had this conversation before in front of my mirror.  I watch the tears well up in my eyes and I think somewhere you would have pity.  Or maybe you’d cry, too.  Because we are one and the same.

I printed the Letter of Pilate to Herod.  I read the translation.  I hope it is accurate.  I quiver at the thought.  As Emily wrote, “How can they deny that God exists if I show them the Devil?”  I hope an angel really did receive his head when it was lopped off.  It breaks and heals my heart to know that the judger would be gloried, even in spite of his misjudgments.  Perhaps there is hope after All.

I wish he would know that I am entitled to change my emotions.  What was once an iron wall is more closely looked upon as a void of infinitely small cracks and voids.  Nothing ever touches, really.  Microscopically.  It is liquid.  And if nothing ever touches, how are words ever really communicated?  Do the external ideas ever reach the mind like sound envelops the ear?  Why am I not allowed to change my mind?  I want to let go, but I don’t think I was ever holding on.

Crushed blue flowers, I see no difference.  The seeds I sow won’t grow.

September 6, 2007: Un baiser. Un péché.

a-t-il jamais la fille ?  ce jour foncé et tout que je pourrais penser à rien mais à toi.  tu ne sais pas pourquoi je suis belle et je crois que tu es aveugle. mais ces pensées ne sont pas idéales. elles sont foncées et promiscueuses.  pourquoi “profonde”, pourquoi “sincère” ? dis-moi, s’il te plaît.  pour le ce soir je vais dormir et je rêverai de ton visage au-dessus de moi. quelles  expressions tu ferais. combien sont doucement les lèvres ?  que chuchoterais-tu dans l’oreille ?

comment tu partirais le matin, avec toutes les excuses.  comment tu m’incites à pleurer.  peut-être parce que je n’aurai jamais su les réponses à ces questions ?  peut-être parce que quand je me rappelle toi, je me rappelle la douleur de ton abandon. un contact.  une pousée.  un baiser.  un péché.  

 et avec toutes ma confusion et convoitise, je ne comprends toujours pas pourquoi tu continues cette conversation.

je ne peux pas attendre pour voir ton beau visage un jour. . . il y aurai des années. Avec les cheveux qui sont tachetés avec le gris.  et avec les rides qui te rendront plus attirant et plus distingué.  et si tu m’aimes toujours alors nous verrons.

May 22, 2007: The Goings On in Life

Somewhere, I lost it.  God is hidden behind a book on my shelf.  Collecting the dust of intentions.  I prayed today and balked at the silence.

It’s funny how I get philosophical when I’m tired.  When I’m exhausted.  As if I have nothing to lose.  Or rather, too weak to defend myself.

When I admitted my crush out loud, it freed me.  Suddenly, the water’s clear and I can see what is truly there and what truly isn’t.  And that lets me pave the way for friendship.

My emotions have subsided for a while.  I don’t feel quite the same without them, but it is rather nice to take a break from anxiety.  This is not a bad, or sad, passionate or happy thing.  It’s just. . .

      content?

Somehow, I relate this all to driving unconsciously.  Those moments when you’re behind the wheel and you can’t remember actually driving.  But you still arrived safely.   Holy spirit . . . blowing through the air, in my hair, encouraging me to nap and forfeit the reins. 

And here is the poem (slam) that I keep phrasing over and over again: (from Gemineye’s “Penny for Your Thoughts“)

Did I ever tell you about how you fell asleep in my presence, and your mere essence, kept me up for hours as I cowered with this feeling of a sexually unadulterated mental connection? And as you laid by my side, I pushed my blinds aside, and took the time in the moonlight of that night, to count 72 eyelashes on the upper eyelid of your right eye; because as you sleep, your eyes remain open slightly. And while we, probably moved to quickly into some sexual shit, I’ve always cared more about the explicitly illicitness that came from between your lips…meaning your voice.

March 7, 2007: A Place in Heaven. And Other Random Thoughts.

I was sitting on the couch last night, relaxing when a sudden and sad thought occurred to me:  what if there isn’t a place in heaven for me?  What if all of my intentions, good or bad, don’t make the cut because there’s already someone there to fulfill the role I would represent?  And I would be denied the chance to see God.  And then that would be Hell.  And the angel on my left shoulder says, “God loves all his little children, no matter how sadistic their thoughts may be.”  And it was ironic that I found myself thinking this way.  Cause this didn’t reflect my idea of heaven and hell at all.  But the thought occurred and it was powerful enough to make me shed a few tears for a bit.  I’m sure I’m not doing it justice.  After all, by the time you type out your thoughts, 30 thousand have already passed.

So they always argue that the mean ole God from the OT (Old Testament) is a different God.  But when I was reflecting the other day on my lenten reading, I was thinking that the God of the OT seemed to be all about punishment and the God of the NT was all about “why can’t we be friends?”.  But then I thought more deeply (a paraphrase of an Aquinas meditation):

As he hung on the cross Christ said, “My God, my God, what have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46).  God left him at the mercy of his torturers. 

“To hand over an innocent man to suffering and death, against his will, compelling him to die, as it were, would indeed be cruel and wicked.  But it was not in this way that God the Father handed over Christ.  He handed over Christ by inspring him with the will to suffer for us.  By so doing the severity of God is made clear to us, that no sin is forgiven without punishment undergone, which St. Paul again teaches when he said, “God spared not his own Son.”

OK, OK.  So all you non-Catholics probably think of this as a guilty, self-torture.  You probably think of “Simon” from the DaVinci Code and Opus Dei.  But if you’re thinking that, you need to do more of your homework and quit believing everything you read from mass media.

October 24, 2006: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison connait pas

« Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison connaît pas. »

“The heart has reasons that Reason knows not of.” . . . a more literal translation.

It truly is my favorite quote in the world.  It’s a very true saying in reality.  But I’m a romantic and that’s another story altogether.

When I wrote that “God ‘allows’ bad things to happen, I was not emphasizing that God requires anything to happen.  I used quotation marks around “allows” in order to emphasize my lack of vocabulary for something that’s more apophatic in definition.  I suppose the word “permit” would be better in my explanation.  

God cannot force evil (bad) things to happen, it would be a blatant contradiction of his essence.  Let me use an analogy of a mother bird.

The mother bird nurtures her offspring and shelters them. Sooner or later, it’s time for the fledgling to leave the nest.  The mother bird does not hesitate to push the fledgling out of the nest, even if this means death from a resulting fall.  Certainly, it is a bad circumstance if the fledgling falls to its death.  In fact, it’s very sad.  But God didn’t push the bird out.  The bird needed to fall out in order to pursue a better purpose – to fly.

Similarly, humans need to suffer.   We’d all be victims of a severe god-complex, otherwise.  Our suffering is a result of a pursuit of a higher purpose and/or a higher lesson to be learned.  How else would humans understand compassion, pity, and even love . . . all these things of the heart that can’t be taught reasonably without suffering?  And so in order for God to be the ever-loving parent, he teaches us by allowing our own pursuits for a higher purpose to teach us these essential tools, even if that pursuit means suffering and even if it results in evil.

Evil is an invention of man, perhaps, not an invention of God.  The God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are one and the same.  There are various interpretations (by man) of what exactly “God said”.  I don’t find an instance in the Old Testament where God does evil acts.  He does what is necessary to ensure the survival of man.   For instance, God does not kill Isaac.  He orders Abraham to kill Isaac, fully “knowing” that Abraham will be stopped upon his word.  He doesn’t (for lack of a better word) intend to harm Isaac at all, but rather to reveal Abraham’s own faithfulness to himself.  Some people say that God was “testing” Abraham.  God didn’t need to test. . . Abraham needed to.  

And of all those people in Sodom and all those people within the walls of Jericho and all of those people drowned in the flood?  And the pharoah’s first-born son?  I have two theories of these killings.  Theory A is that these people had already made a choice of rejecting God and no matter how much God revealed himself, they just weren’t having any.  How do you save someone who doesn’t want to be saved?   Theory B is that God’s omniscience already knows where these people are going.  No, not hell—God is incapable of condemnation, as people put themselves in Hell, not God.  But if “life” is truly everlasting, then the loss of human life is much less emphasized.  If we truly live eternally, what is 80 years on earth?  If souls are everlasting, and at one point in eternity, all will be set right and all will be with God, is the consequence of losing your earthly life for a higher purpose (i.e., in order to reveal God’s providence) still “evil”?   Or is it “Good”?

October 7, 2006: Two Fleurs

You and I are two flowers. . . continuously thriving in a field.  If a mighty wind blows, we are lucky enough to brush our petals together and maybe our leaves embrace.  Otherwise, under the starry skies, you were meant to be seen by the moon and reside with another patch.  The devil is in the details, in the concept.  In the memory of your petals.  “What love unites, let no one divide,” so say the Psalms.  There is no one divided, but rather two.  And who is to decide the union and when it may be?  And which of the four loves was it?

August 29, 2006: 12 Years

It was a beautiful wedding and a beautiful event, save for this one sad part.

He said, “I should get your number and email address and send you pictures of the girls.”

I just nodded, not really wanting to give him anything, and kind of smiling a smirk that really said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

But my conscience got the better of me and I handed him my business card.  He said, “Can you get personal emails at work?”

So I shifted around, uncomfortable, but finally decided to write my personal email on the back.

“I’ll send you pictures as soon as I’m back home.”

The rest of the night, he was kind of somber and stood back, a little abashed.

It was getting later and the best man had already gotten so drunk as to take off his pants on the dance floor.   I slumped on the table with my elbows, exhausted and my feet pumping from pain.

Then I felt his hand on my back and he leaned near my left ear to whisper (or in a tone to talk above the music) behind me.

“I just want you to know that even though we haven’t seen each other or talked in 12 years, I want you to know that I still love you and I always will.”  And he kissed my right temple.  And walked away.

My eyes swelled with tears.  I couldn’t decide if this was anger or forgiveness.  Because I didn’t hear an apology for the twelve years of not caring about my life.  Not an ounce to reply for his brotherhood absence.

Later, after I recovered from nearly bawling my eyes out in the bathroom, he said, “We were in no position to raise Bridgette.  We were all using drugs and just in a bad place in life.  The best decision we made was sending her to Texas.”

I replied, “Bridgette is the hardest working woman I know.  She did a complete 180 when she got to Texas.”

“It was because of you.”

“It was because of my dad.  He laid out rules.”  And he gave not one shred of acknowledgement for that.

So here I am, at my desk, three days prior to his arrival home, and not an email since.  He talked of arranging 5-year reunions, but we both know that won’t happen.  No one seems to have much of a problem keeping in touch, except for us two.

August 16, 2006: In the Causeway

I passed a man in the hall today and we exchanged our normal hellos and good mornings.

But underneath our casualties, we both remember an intimate experience we shared months ago that will keep us forever bound. 

We met in the hall of a hospital, hustling along in the evening hours.  I was tagging along with my husband to see his sick father.   This man was leaving the hospital from visiting his sick wife. No one else was in this hall, as it was an alley to a part of the hospital that had already closed for the day.  The auxiliary lights were on thus giving the hallway an eerie and lonely feel.

I have a small phobia of hospitals.  The smell is repugnant to me.  It reminds me of all of the times I went to the hospital to visit many dying relatives.  It reminds me of suffering.  It reminds me of cemeteries.  And I always found it ironic that they decorate the walls in some neutral, politically-correct mauve or other purplish-pink or grayish-blue color.  Is death purple-pink or grayish-blue?  Because when I envision death, I picture the cold stainless steel of the autopsy room or the black wear of the mourning.

I had only been acquainted vaguely with this man before now, but because I recognized him, I called his name when I saw him.  And for a split second, it hit me about why this man was here.  His wife had had a stroke.

He chatted briefly with my husband and I about why we were there.  My husband’s dad was a smoker and his lung had collapsed.  He was recovering.  But it was not necessarily life threatening. 

I could see a bit of a tear well up in his eye.  Perhaps talking to us–a young, married couple–made it hurt much more.  He told me of his wife’s predicament.  I couldn’t believe it.  It was much more serious.  She was paralyzed somewhat and had other internal problems.  I thought in the back of my mind that this man has a kid.  He made casual laughter at our small talk, but Im sure it was more out of nervousness.

 It’s very awkward to meet an acquaintance at such a personal place in their life.  How do you reveal the most precious and profound realization to yourself?  But here we were, all somewhat strangers, and we were thrust into the center of each other lives with no warning.  No opportunity to put up any defense.  Too much of a stranger to ask to withdraw.  Withdraw from knowing the hurt.  Withdraw from being involved in another persons life.

 We finally end the chatter and go our separate ways us into the hospital and him to the parking lot.

The following day, he sent me an email entitled “I hope. . .” asking about my father-in-law and that it was very nice of us to exchange kind words.  I remember thinking, once again, if this conversation was necessary.  I do like the man, professionally and personally.  He’s a very humorous and fast-paced person.  But somehow, I felt that my secret and his secret were spilled into the causeway that separates our departments.  I felt awful–his situation was so much worse than mine.  Not just because his wife was in her position, but because a coworker reminded me that morning that they had had a child die of pneumonia recently.   Absolutely speechless.

 What to say?  I replied to his email thanking him and I wanted to say something more spiritual because that helps me.  I know that he is Jewish.  I know his wife may not be, so I left my reply more abstract by writing, “An author once wrote that if pain and suffering must exist, they must be absolutely necessary in order to better appreciate love and mercy.  I hope that neither of us has to meet up again in that hospital for unfortunate reasons.”

So today, as I pass him in the hall and exchange good mornings, I wonder if he will always associate me with this grim reminder as I do him.  I think now there will always be this necessity towards small talk and yet withdrawing from the defense between us.