Meanwhile

Lord, my body is not yet a temple,

But only one of your fair fields.

An empty field that nobody wants, at least not yet.

But even here the lily is somewhere,

Sometimes it lifts its head above the grasses,

The daises, the milkweed, the mallow.

And sometimes, like us, it sleeps, or at least

Leans below the blades of the grasses.

Lord, I live as you have made me to live.

I bite hungrily into the peach and the turnip.

I bite, with sorrow, into the calf and the lamb.

I drink the tears of the clouds.

I praise the leaves of the shrub oaks

And the pine trees in their bold coats.

I listen and give thanks to the catbird and the thrush.

Meanwhile, the fox knows where you are.

The bees leave the swamp azalea and fly straight

To the shadow of your face.

Meanwhile my body is rustic and brash.

The world I live in is hedges, and small blossoms.

Lord, consider me, and my earnest work.

A hut I have made, out of the grasses.

Now I build the door, out of all things brash and rustic.

Day and night it is open.

Have you seen it yet, among the grasses?

How it longs for you?

How it tries to shine, like gold?

The very first sermon I ever preached in a Unitarian Universalist church was based on the Christian reading “Consider the Lilies.” In Luke 12: Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!

Mary’s words speak of her doubts, her questioning faith, or perhaps your doubts and mine? Is it possible to work hard enough that we might be accepted, or better said, that we accept that we are not separate from the glorious whole? We are as noble as the lilies, the grasses, the ravens. Perhaps it is not a matter of work, but faith to live as best we can and know underneath our daily paths, or perhaps to the side, is a field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing. What are we waiting for? Let’s go lie down in the grass and let the fire of love consume us.

Rage - March 18, 20

10

You are the dark song

of the morning...

But you were also the red song

in the night..

When the child's mother smiles

you see on her cheekbones

a truth you will never confess

and you see how the child grows

timidly, crouching in corners...

In your dreams she's a tree that will never come to leaf..

in your dreams you have sullied and murdered

and dreams do not lie.

This story is so familiar across our ravaged landscapes - such rage our species takes out on one another and our earth. In my childhood home there was rage barely restrained and I have in my home now a young man whose father did not know restraint. In me, the anger simmers. Yes, it's a matter of degree as I have never hit anyone as an adult. The beast is within, she cloys at me to believe that someone else is responsible for my anger. If I can just lash out, all will be well, all will be well. And that to me is how hell is born. And gets born again in each moment we drift from love's bonds and in each child that grows up around our hurt. But there is another dream other than anger. This is the dream upon awaking that refreshes the morning, that is not a dark song born of red anger, but a dream of light, of sons, that go not to war or to fight, but to love the children within us all. Each morning the sun asks again as she peers through our windows, isn't it time to wake up?

Where do you have violence in your life? What are your dreams like?

Mussels - February 8, 2010

......in the slow

washing away of the water

in which they feed,

in which the blue shells

open a little, and the orange bodies

make a sound,

not loud,

not unmusical, as they take

nourishment, as the ocean

enters their bodies.

...I choose

the crevice....

Even before

I decide which to take,

Which to twist from the wet rocks,

which to devour,

they,...Together

they make a sound,

not loud,

not unmusical, as they lean

into the rocks, away

from my grasping fingers.

Once again Mary speaks of song, as in the "Three Poems for James Wright." The song is in feeding and being fed upon a like, and it is the same song, the song of the universe. I am reminded of the closing lines of the novel, "The Road" from Cormac McCarthy,

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the fow.. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Even in extinction and apocalypse visions, there is a song, and it is the song of the universe. This is a composition where death and suffering does not ring a chaotic note, but blends with harmony into the symphony of the stars. The mystery is how to hear the music as it forms the melody of our individual lives.

What is the story you tell of a cycle of nourishment where death turns to life? If it is all a song, what then do you make of the notes of The Holocaust and Haiti?

The Return - January 11, 2010

.. Hunting the minotaur

I was no common man

And had no need of love.

I trailed the shining thread

Behind me, for a vow,

And did not think of you...

I touched the thread and wept.

O, it was frail as air....

And the thread held.

In our lives as we forget love and pursue our dreams that there is a thread of interconnection that binds us all together. It will hold, oh yes, though our awareness of it is so tenuous. If we could but touch love and weep perhaps it will take hold in our lives.

Where do you journey without love?