Margaret's Birthday Post

I wake to stars behind my eyes, pinwheels and kaleidoscopes of darkening dreams.

Tasting poetry, I stepped into the morning, tiny flakes of crystal cold melting into my hair and weeping down my jacket. The argument, caught in my teeth, that thing by which nothing greater can be thought is thought and thought again and draped, hanging out in the sun and dripping soapy water on the grass.

That thing, that noun, the encompassing arrogance robbing language with letters and blank slates that veil perceptions, assumptions. With groanings that cannot be uttered, as though my wrung out soul were washed in words, words, words. My hand, ebbing the tide of inky madness pouring unstopped from my eyes. My trailing fingers, my gasping breath pushing against the water. 

Named and unnamed, life and universe, what I know and don’t know ripping in pieces the careful hope I have crafted. Built on words which dry out—raisins in the sun— and loves long gone on dusty roads.

Burrowed into a couch, the screen governs my imagination and ends with Frodo gone to safety, into the west. As though the eye of Sauron fell today, and yesterday, and forever, as though the sons of Gondor and of Rohan were eternally circled in sanctity, as though the age of mankind could hold at bay the hours of wolves and shattered shields. And yes, at last, the burden is over and done, but some scars are too deep to return to. And forever the words swim through my sunken mind, Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild. With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

And we are the hollow men. Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response falls the shadow. Life is very long. We are the broken and the lost, we are the weary and the weeping, we are Original Sin. 

Power to the people? Power to this race of evolving souls who feel more deeply than death, who murder and create, who see beauty and who seek truth. Hosanna, save us, we are stuck between the lines of black and white, waiting for the light though we are underground, spinning past the world through subway doors and careening buses. 

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

A whimper like mother Eve, who said she was deceived as she saved the human race forever. A whimper like Jehovah, who hung from a cross and plead for an answer from silence. A whimper like Joan of France who burned her youth away and would not relinquish her grip on heaven. A whimper like mine, in the dead of night, when the walls close in and the prayer cannot hold words. 

Eve, you to whom all living owes blood and vibrancy, can no one know why it was that you took that first bite? Eve, my mother, did you weep to know that you were tricked, manipulated into darkness for your sacrifice? And when your choice was full and hope grew again, did you ever wonder why the beauty came from facade? 

Perhaps I am deceived. Tricked, manipulated into darkness by beauty and love that carries the voices of the world. Perhaps this tapestry of color and light is no more than distraction, clever ploy that disguises something rotting from the inside. Perhaps these voices, these millions of suppressed representatives who are finally speaking out, perhaps they are the light, but I am the fire. Or maybe the light is higher than us all, and we can only listen. 

And we’re trying to be faithful but we’re cheatin’ cheatin’ cheatin.’

Cello notes sing out from my lightly beating heart, breaking wide for all of the music that will never be played, never be heard. And Sonny pours his soul into the merciless black and white of piano keys, and he gives all. So at last, at last the brothers know.

While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

We suffer, we hurt in this never ending narrative of mortality producing the same agony and ecstasy. But in the lump sum of moral faces, in this mass entity that weeps and sighs together, sad echoes linger in the hemisphere and symphonies fade into tuning pitches, and it is only the raw tapestry that greets my unwashed eyes. For the madness, it is creation that speaks. It is the organization of newness, the reordering of material, the listening to notes centuries old. It is the action, stepping onto the canvas of this life to listen, speak, hurt. 

I am born again, and again, and again, standing where I stand in the embryo of creation, liberating the membranes of my mind, moving from passivity of observance to the action of interpretation. I participate, I accept and reject, I stand in the line of fire and burn. 

Get thee to my lady’s chamber, and tell her to paint her face an inch thick. Lady Ophelia, I will weep for you. I will weep for your mind which was broken and your heart which was weary. But I will wake to dream, and dream to wake, and act to place these pieces into wholeness. 

Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the Shadow. For Thine is the Kingdom.

I might understand your choice in the shadows. I too might know that I’m the hero of my story, red on my forehead and conviction in my bones. I might believe that meaning is mine and cannot be told.

To whom shall we go? Thou hast the words….

I wake to stars behind my eyes, and weeping fires on a summer day all to explain why I whisper that my thoughts are ashes. I am as a Phoenix, rising to sweep galaxies with hope.

Referenced Works (in the order they appear) Ontological Argument (https://www.princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/ontological.html) Romans 8:26 Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2 “Raisin in the Sun” Lorraine Hansberry Speech at the Black Gate, The Lord of the Rings “Stolen Child,” William Butler Yeats “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Elliot “Hero” Regina Spektor “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin Hamlet, Act 5 Scene 1 John 6:68

With Healing in His Wings

Lewis Smedes' book “Shame and Grace: Healing From the Shame We Don’t Deserve” addresses a mindset most of us experience in varying doses and frequencies: shame. We've all experienced it; it comes in many different forums both public and private. It is pernicious and lingering, fueling self-destructive behaviors and an inability to accept love. Smedes writes that “the underlying dynamic of shame is the fear of rejection.” Shame begins when experience mocks an innocent trust, when expectations end in heartache, when people let us down and when disappointment convinces us that it is safer to just "take care of me."

I have often wondered about the seeming contradiction of the call to "become as a little child," or the ambiguity of "the natural man." These are trite little phrases meant to convey entire doctrines and mantras for mortality, yet to me they seem unequivocally enigmatic. My favorite professor once provided her own explanation, that the natural man is developed when we realize that trust disappoints. The natural man is the shame of Adam and Eve which Satan instilled by convincing them that they were unworthy to stand in God's presence, that they should be ashamed of their own mortality. The opposite of the natural man is the childlike willingness to trust again, and Smedes calls this experience grace. He writes, "“to experience grace is to recover our lost inner child. The heart of the inner child is trust. We lose our childhood when we feel that the persons we trusted to accept us do not accept us. Shame cheats us of childhood. Grace gives it back to us.” It is a beautiful idea, but I think many of us "are not prodigal sons who might come to our sense if we felt a shock of acute shame we are the obedient sons who stay at home and still suffer the constant cramps of chronic shame." This floating rhetorical idea of "grace" resides in a kind of liminal space, a grey area that promises peace and hope yet feels to many of us unreachable. It is overwhelming to feel vastly inadequate and even more so to be continually requesting the grace of heaven, knowing it is there, but not feeling the immediate peace of its presence. I recently read the most beautiful short book by C.S. Lewis,“A Grief Observed.” It is a collection of his raw thoughts directly following the death of his beloved wife. He talks about the shock of his grief and the depression and bitterness he felt lingering for months and even years afterwards. He talks about knowing the scriptural promises of grace and yet feeling like the “knock and ye shall receive” has left him with bloody knuckles and the same aching weight in his heart. He doesn’t offer solutions, he simply shares his agony and soul-wrenching grief. It was so moving to me to think about this man who we revere as practically the 13th apostle absolutely immobilized by his grief in the wake of loss. Somehow, it left me feeling so hopeful. I have felt that kind of heavy, dark, bitter grief for much of my life but there has been a deep sense of shame attached to it. It was quietly reassuring to recall that grief is real, it is raw, and it does not magically disappear with a few magic words. 

I think maybe grief itself can heal us. The experience of feeling our own emotions without attempting to mediate or appropriate them is the most universally human thing I can fathom, yet perhaps one of the most difficult. We are so convinced that we must feel a certain way to find approval that we can’t seem to allow ourselves to simply be. Smedes writes of a quintessential experience of shame, “I felt all alone. Helpless. Drained. The ideals I had tried and failed to live up to were so absolute and so undefined that my shame was equally absolute and undefined. I was hopeless. I seemed to be sinking into a darkness where I would be stuck forever. It was only a dark feeling you say. But feeling is what hurts when it comes to shame. When a person with more unhealed shame than he can bear finally gives in to his feelings, he falls into a sadness that he has stored up and not dared to feel for years. It is a mourning for a lost joy. He is not sad about something in particular, the specifics are buried in events he cannot recall. It does not matter. What matters is that, finally, he is feeling it.”

I suppose what I am trying to say with all of this talk of shame and seeking grace is that we seem to be universally craving freedom, and I think that grace is freedom. Freedom from self-hate and the demons of mental illness and personified disorders and hopeless, agonizing fear. I have to believe that the messages I am hearing today about the infinite atonement and resurrection of Jesus Christ are as liberating and redemptive as they promise to be. Some days they fill me with bitterness and resentment when my knuckles knocking at the throne of grace are bloodied and the heavens are still silent. But other days, days like today, the suffering around me is too much to bear without believing with the particle of faith I can muster that somehow it can all be healed, that somehow there is a living hope. I must believe that C.S. Lewis' Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia, a representation of Christ, did rise from the dead because of "the deeper magic" that the powers of darkness and greed "knew not of." That like him, Christ does rise "with healing in his wings" and that in the sweetness of free-falling trust "justice, love, and mercy meet." 

Today I hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s words to the dampened spirits of cruelly discriminated peoples of black Americans. For him it was a dream that we are still working to fulfill, and I must believe that it is catalyzed in Christ. "Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” Christians preach freedom to the captives, and aren’t we all captives? I think of Elder Holland’s words of hope to those of us suffering from the “crater in the mind” that is mental illness: “I bear witness of that day when loved ones whom we knew to have disabilities in mortality will stand before us glorified and grand, breathtakingly perfect in body and mind. What a thrilling moment that will be! I do not know whether we will be happier for ourselves that we have witnessed such a miracle or happier for them that they are fully perfect and finally “free at last.”” I don’t know that I can ever describe that hope that those words provide me with. I will be “free at last” someday, and so will countless others whose demons threaten to drown them with the pernicious tides of fear and shame. The message of a Savior is a message is of liberation and healing. We cry “hosanna,” save us with both gratitude for what we believe and desperate yearning for what we wish to feel. We believe with all our hearts that as we do the work of compassion and grace in verb form, we ourselves become Saviors on mount Zion. I believe that Easter represents that prayer of hosanna, that pleading of the weary and broken, heard echoing through the valley of the shadow of death with a kind of hope-filled, life-giving music that begins to overcome the shame that would break us apart.

“Taking over this town they should worry,

But these problems aside I think I taught you well.

That we won't run, and we won't run, and we won't run.

And in the winter night sky ships are sailing,

Looking down on these bright blue city lights.

And they won't wait, and they won't wait, and they won't wait.

We're here to stay, we're here to stay, we're here to stay.

Howling ghosts – they reappear

In mountains that are stacked with fear

But you're a king and I'm a lionheart."

Of Monsters and Men, "King and Lionheart"