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shalom: completeness, soundness, welfare, peace

“peace isn’t merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of a person.”

may we believe that His presence truly brings peace, completeness, soundness.

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things i have mistaken for a feeling, pt. IV

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It was the flash of black among the yellow billion.

 It was the green chink on the chapel’s sphere.

 It was some rust or recalcitrance in us

 by which we were by the grace of pain more here.

 It was you, me, fall and fallen light. 

It was that kind of imperfection through which infinity wounds the finite.

Christian Wiman 

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there i find you marked in constellation

there isn’t ceiling in our garden

-bon iver, 22 (over soon)

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things i have mistaken for a feeling, pt III.

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things i have mistaken for a feeling, pt II. 

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things i have mistaken for a feeling, pt. I

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and since we’ve not learned how not to want we’ve had to learn, by waiting, how to wait. 

so i wait. 

-li young lee, in “the waiting”

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Meditation at Lagunitas BY ROBERT HASS

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

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“in a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up.” -wallace stegner

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“I need to witness miracles today — a river turned to blood, water become wine,  a burning coal touching the prophet’s lips, black ravens swooping down  to bring a starving man bread and meat,  a poor fisherman raising the dead! I’ve heard theologians say this is not the age of miracles,  but still, I’m easy to impress. I don’t need to climb out of the boat and walk on water; I’d just like  to put my head on the pillow while the storm still rages, and rest”

-richard jones, “miracles”

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“The morning might be full of all the love and kindness you need. Just don’t go thinking you deserve any of it”

-from Scott Cairns’ “Imperative”

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ICU BY SPENCER REECE For A.J. Verdelle

Those mornings I traveled north on I91, passing below the basalt cliff of East Rock where the elms discussed their genealogies. I was a chaplain at Hartford Hospital, took the Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret, learned I was an I drawn to Es. In small group I said, “I do not like it— the way so many young black men die here unrecognized, their gurneys stripped, their belongings catalogued and unclaimed.” On the neonatal ICU, newborns breathed, blue, spider-delicate in a nest of tubes. A Sunday of themselves, their tissue purpled, their eyelids the film on old water in a well, their faces resigned in their see-through attics, their skin mottled mildewed wallpaper. It is correct to love even at the wrong time. On rounds, the newborns eyed me, each one like Orpheus in his dark hallway, saying: I knew I would find you, I knew I would lose you.

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What stubborn hearts we are. What careful, difficult, painful work it takes to make us right. 

It seems there are so many processes that require beating and molding and heating and scraping to get to a thing that is good and right and true. It seems so impossible to feel these pains giving way to resurrection.

//

“The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer's art”

-t.s. eliot

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The Uses of Sorrow

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
 that this, too, was a gift.

-Mary Oliver

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a prayer:

“i know all the right answers, about waiting upon the Lord, about trusting he is a good father, about accepting what comes from his hand. but still, some part of me feels that christ knows this is a bitter cup — that this ache may persist, but that he longs to make it right.

spring is here, each day surprising me with what life has been working within barren branches and the hard earth. i don’t feel that this long winter in my heart is able to cease. i don’t quite believe that this cycle of hurt might give way to a season of beauty and love.

but i know grace can surprise, can heal the deepest wounds, can fill these empty places, that within this life of mine a mysterious work is taking place, and that life will have the final word in all the despair i see around me, in the absence i feel within me. oh lord, may it be so. may this year bring forth beauty from barren hearts”

// “it is sufficient to turn away from my darkness to his light” -merton