God’s Mysterious Ways

What’s the difference – a mysterious God whose ways often appear out of synch with human values or a mysterious cosmos whose ways often appear out of synch with human values?

Do you think “logically contradictory” is a good definition for “mysterious?” If not, what does the word mean to you?

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Eat Pray Endure – and other possibilities…

Which best describes how you think people should live? Which how you’re actually living? Or do you have suggestions for other philosophies of life?

1. Get Yours – Get it while you can, whatever it is that happens to float your boat – from as much money, sex, and fame as you can get to life’s quiet pleasures such as the enjoyment of nature, literature, and the arts.

2. Do Good Plus – Do your best for the wider world as you come into contact with it and realize inner peace in the process.

3. Only Believe – Get it while you can – and thereby do good because our selfish behavior unleashes beneficial market forces that are making the world a better place even as we speak.

4. Think Positive! – Think happy thoughts for a guarantee of prosperity, good health, long life, and a successful next-incarnation.

5. Eat Pray Endure – Go to church, follow the rules, and lead an ordinary life with your focus on the next life – where hopefully you’ll be rewarded for having put up with this one.

“I’m the Only One that’s One with the Father so Worship Me…” –?

"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love."

- Meister Eckhart

In comments to the previous post someone questioned how love can be connected with any idea of the divine that doesn’t view God as an ontologically distinct Person. Thinkers like Meister Eckhart, who discuss love from the perspective of mysticism, often do so. As I recall, other examples of this from the Christian tradition include John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila.

When I was reading such writers in divinity school, my impression was that they had to work pretty hard to reconcile their experiences of the unity of all things with church teachings. During the Middle Ages a lot could be at stake – you didn’t want to get burned at the stake for heresy.

It’s interesting to me that Jesus’ proclamation of “I and the Father are one” is featured so prominently in the gospels. I wonder if his followers necessarily understood what he meant. Certainly when mystics speak in similar terms they don’t intend to claim an exclusive and special relationship with God or the One but rather speak to the depths of their experience of life as human beings.

Had a poem published in The Mennonite this month. (No, I’m not a Mennonite…)

God’s Love

God loves us by loving through us. Our job is to clarify this – to become clear or transparent to the love of God like space is clear to light.

About the word God: To borrow from Paul in the New Testament, God is the One in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). By God, I mean the greatest Context that exists - being in the immensity of its full power for inclusiveness and creativity, including and beyond the world as we have knowledge of it.

Believers may want to cite additional attributes of God. Nonbelievers may take the word God to refer to Being or Reality itself.

Joy - from Two Angles

Here’s one event from two perspectives. The poem comes from early in my school counseling years and was written in the mid eighties when I was still in my twenties. I wrote the essay much later – early in my housebound years, probably 2005 or 2006.

Start of the Season

For Laura

I love the way this gangly grade-school girl
Sun-lit, freckle-spangled,

Surprises me with real speed sprinting for first base
Growing into her long legs.

I love the way she makes the God in me
Spread slowly into a long grin.

Broad as the greening lawn, my love rounds third for home
Growing into its own world.

Safe, Kind Of

I could never quite figure out their relationship but I could tell it was close. Laura and Nicole were similar and dissimilar, but operated as a team.

Sixth graders, both girls had long limbs and were tall for their age. My grandmother might have described them as being in “that awkward stage” – not little girls anymore but not young women either – except that they weren’t awkward at all. Each possessed a real physical presence and grace.

Nicole had dark brown eyes and smooth brown skin. Her hair was black with loose curls. Her dad was black, her mom white. Laura appeared to be of Irish descent – folks in our area were mostly Irish or French Canadian. She had fine, light freckles that were really more like speckles. Her face barely crossed the line from plain into pretty, but it did. Laura either didn’t know this or didn’t care, which was part of what made her pretty.

Nicole, who was plain, had a respectful and yet direct way of looking at you and stating things. Laura, although the eye contact was good when you spoke with her, had a habit of keeping her chin low, so that she was always sort of looking up at you. So despite the good eye contact, she gave an impression of somehow hiding out behind her eyes. There was an element of tentativeness or uncertainty to her demeanor.

Nicole was on my roster, and when she’d done a good job completing her assignments she could meet with me at the end of the week just for fun and pick a friend to come. It was always Laura.

Nicole did practically all the talking –not that she talked a lot. It was just that practically whatever talking there was to do, she’d do it, not Laura. And she’d be the one to make special requests, like, “Can we stay out a little longer?” or “I have a hardball in my backpack – can we use that instead?”

Around me, at least, Laura spoke very little: basically, “Yes,” “No,” or, “OK.” That was why I could never really fathom the nature of the girls’ relationship. But from what I could see, even though Nicole talked more, it wasn’t a leader/follower kind of thing. They treated each other as equals, and there was a subtext between their slight exchanges in my presence that suggested shared secrets.

Honestly, at this early stage of my career, I saw reward time as being just about the best part of my job. When kids messed up, my disappointment was more than strictly professional. That spring, Nicole was usually finishing her assignments and she was going through a baseball phase. For me it was like having two half-grown kid sisters around for playing softball once a week!

One afternoon Nicole was pitching, Laura was at bat, and I was pretty far back in the infield and toward first base. Laura’s long arms connected neatly with the ball, delivering a grounder past the pitcher’s mound. It was heading almost straight for me, but I was too far out and found myself having to run in for it. I thought I was moving just fast enough to let Laura beat me to first, but not by a lot.

That’s when I glanced up and noticed that she was really moving. So after grabbing the ball, I picked up my pace toward first. I wanted to make it interesting.

Laura had no such intention. She was flying, and suddenly I found myself in an all-out sprint. All I could see was the bag in front of me and Laura from out of the corner of my eye.

The next several seconds seemed suspended in time – kind of like it feels when it looks like you’re about to get in a car accident! We were both running at full speed and I saw that we were going to reach first at about the same time.

One part of my mind – not to be confused with “the mature part” –remained totally committed to finding out if I could get there ahead of Laura if I really wanted to. The other part was busy contemplating last-second bail-out procedures. Because of the laws of physics and the characteristics of human locomotion, I was on the verge of being unable to control what would happen next. But I was still just inside the line and aware, dimly but urgently, that I should avoid that most flagrant foul where the school counselor runs over the eleven-year-old girl for no apparent reason. This was the mature or “I want to keep my job” center of my intelligence and emotion, which was kind of flickering on and off maybe because of all the running.

In a flash, we were stepping on opposite sides of the base, with Laura landing on her left foot. This had a major advantage: her trailing right leg swung to the right of the bag and away from me, creating a little extra room between our bodies as we crossed paths. Finding my bail-out plans unnecessary, I allowed momentum to take me through the space that her body had occupied a fraction of a second earlier. Simultaneously, Laura performed a feat of physical finesse and agility that still amazes me.

Because as I was hitting the space where Laura no longer was, I found myself also wondering where she was! In one fluid motion, Laura had touched the bag at full speed, then immediately dropped into a low crouch as she continued moving a few feet farther, covering up with her forearms but still peering up to identify where I was.

Her execution couldn’t have been better or her plan smarter. Dropping into that same crouch from out of fear just half a second earlier would have guaranteed collision. But the way she did it, it was just a safety precaution once she'd reached her goal. We’d been of one mind, equally intent on getting to first ahead of the other while avoiding the increasingly anticipated possibility of a crash.

I pulled up and turned around. Laura stood and glanced at me with a smile, then immediately looked back down, still smiling. In part, her smile said, That sure was fun. And the way she looked right back down again would have been genuinely sweet and shy in the way that only very young girls can pull off, except that her smile wouldn’t go away, and there was an added brightness to her eyes that seemed to say, And I just found out you’re crazy, but I can’t say anything till I talk to Nicole after school!

“Safe?” I yelled over to Nicole.

Nicole was staring at us in the unfazed, slightly bored manner that many people at or near adolescence reserve for anything that doesn’t directly involve them.

“I dunno,” she stated flatly.

“Safe!” I hollered.

If “Great Moments in Sports” have ever been achieved through competition between men of low athletic potential and eleven-year-old girls, this must have been one of them. It was pure sport, done for the sheer joy of it - competition without meanness and without any "performance" aspect, not even for Nicole, whose existence there on the field we had briefly forgotten.

Darkness Recollected

Most of the poetry I wrote before becoming housebound was in response to particular experiences – maybe something I saw while out jogging or in response to an interaction with a child at school. But there was no specific occasion that prompted this poem.

Despite the medical imagery, I found myself writing it one morning during the best years of my adult life – in my early thirties prior to disease onset when I was perfectly healthy. My youthful despairing period had ended about ten years earlier.

When I was depressed, I did no creative writing – I was too depressed! But after writing this poem in the kitchen of my bright and cheerful apartment in Rochester, NH, I remember thinking that for me it really captured the darkness I’d experienced in my late teens and early twenties.

That was the most interesting thing to me about writing this poem – to see how it was possible to imaginatively re-enter a mental space I’d left behind but used to know so well. I wonder if that’s the sort of use to which actors put their pasts?

Dream of Falling

A warm bed could be a forever-shelter,
The body heat beneath these blankets
Could dissipate little by little,
Unnoticed

But for words and faces; always
More faces and words, but none to help.
Above my bed they scurry, the worried doctors
Not grasping why the patient
Is slipping away, the patient
Despite his rich Judeo-Christian heritage of reasons,
Not grasping why the masked faces
Should want to live and move and have their being
In the brief shadow of a meantime caught between
One void and the next; small, mean meantime;
A closed room, an operating table
And all the instruments and barometers of our distress.

Birds have given up trying to fly
Over the rainbow; if only I could
Fall through this dreaming earth
Like a mute statue; each limb
Made of lead, the ground would open once,
Receive my dead weight. Inside,
A damp rush of murky dirt-brown
The smell of cellar walls
And in a blur, the struggling roots
Twisted, contorted, of things that stand above the ground.
But I would pass on; pass gently, without contact,
The burden of my weight made light, spinning leaf-like
With arms banner-spread, standing for nothing,
Down, way down below the sullied walls
Content to fall forever;

To devolve from pain of thought
To one tiny point hidden in a hollow of the cosmos,
Far from earth, blank as stone;
Nothing to tell.

Wild Thing

I didn’t write poetry until my mid-twenties; this is an early one written when I was probably twenty-five. My life at the time embodied the classic scenario of the underpaid/not quite full-time/no benefits English major living in his mom’s basement to wait out the recession of the early eighties. This was a time of great hardship and anxiety for many American parents...

But that spring my mom and I had been getting a kick out of watching some form of wildlife that had taken up residence in an adjoining backyard. It was brown and about the size of a large cat but with a chunkier shape, short legs, and kind of an awkward way of moving. A badger?? We could see it from our kitchen window as it engaged in its morning routine while we went about ours.

This had only lasted for about a week when my mom told me about the interaction she had with our neighbor that the poem relates:

Senseless

Raining on his brown back now
But full of sunny days ahead
Young and living by the pond
We watched him through binoculars
Coming out at dawn
Before the traffic’s roar – a
Wild thing
In this little out-of-doors
Our neighbor’s lawn.
Outlawed by the tended pets
With eyes darting
And scurrying to stay alive
This miracle of reflex action
Every fiber of him longing toward
His next meal
Another day.
“Don’t shoot!” my mother said in play
To the man, our neighbor, with his
Gun;
Who smiling raised his arm
To dangle in her eyes
A thing become unconscious
As the hand that held the prize.