Leshem Shamayim: “For the sake of heaven.”

Sometimes, forgetting becomes the way of life, too ordinary and common, the purpose falls away, until we are willing to remember, rehope, relearn, and regain;
You placed in me a soul that knows You, an ache that requires You as a satiation..
The yearning for heaven… to know what it is and why it seems so far away…
Why Your face and the presence above us, present with us… somewhere beyond and untouchable? There is a disconnect in the gaze of my soul, the upturned eyes and the hollow stare, of eyes in front, catching glimpse of the shifting shadows of the world around me.
Sleeping in a dream, hypnotized by the rush of life surrounding every activity,
I lost my trust, and therefore my hope… my faith faded into the past and You were only a memory of a dream; a distracting dream at the very least, and enchanting,
Beguiling my soul away from the world surrounding, removing the focus from life itself.
My eyes growing misty, I lost sight of the world, I diluted my thoughts, my interaction slowed
And finally ceased, the spinning, the faces all blended into one, and individuality was lost.
For the love of God, I abandoned the world and then lost sight of You;
Abstracting You into an idea of love, I fell into You deeply or the idea of You.
But here I woke up again this morning and the joy of You flooded me again…
The tension increased and dissolved at once between You and the people of the world…
You teach me to love, only when others draw near..
The closeness is still separation, as my love unlaces, You undo me to make me full,
Break me to make me whole, because mended I could disperse Your love.
Paint into me the hope of heaven again, seeking to walk as You have led, to give
And to love after the fashion you laid, and giving up heavy heart to ceaseless praise.

May my lips speak Your praise all the days of my life, for You continually create a new song in my heart, sigh after mourning, a gasp after a laugh;
May You be the first word on my lips, the constant meditation of my heart, eliciting from withing the core of my being all that wells up to worship You;
May You be the source of my delight, drawing me into a dance where all creation worships You, every child-like, upturned heart praising Your name.
Let me receiving within my being a new heart, restored and recreated to encompass all Your light—as the moon reflects back to the sun with a brilliance that illumines the darkness, I year to show out Your love;
Let me hold open a heart to You, Your handmaiden for Your service, losing myself in wonder and releasing the inhibitions that I erect to withhold my surrender,
Let me loose the feebly anchoring ropes which I have bound about my heart to prevent rupture and loss wrecked by love and joy.
Only let me be like Mary, awed at the multitudes of angels You subtly slip into my life… let me revel like Hannah, magnifying Your name from the depths of soul, rejoicing in You my savior.
Only let me finally let go, and be the earthen vessel You made me as, not patching with unfit material the cracks in my sides, stopping up that life blood of Your heart;
Only teach me to surrender my fears and be content to be as You made me, running some still path of transformation as You teach me my own limits.
Hear my simple prayer, from a heart too weighty to let go in You light—You made us to bear Your burdens which are only heavy in our strength;
Hear the voiceless ache of my heart to learn the secret joy of submission and gingerly lay myself before You without constantly reclaiming the very gift I sought so hard to give;
Hear my confusion, a void noise, deeper than black-hole mystery, sucking out my life like a spectre feeding on my own soul… stealing away the joy in my life.
Return to me memory of this world of the living, for in You I have chosen  to trust beyond reason, even as I seek to substantiate my own weakness;
Return the hope and joy I once had in You, in the midst of darkness, which enlivened my entire world… turning away from a more morbid fixation.
Return the words of deliverance You once taught me, for you set me free and I returned to captivity, though I seek again the gaze of Heaven.
You have placed me in this world, to learn and to love, to feel and to think , to give and to receive—may I always hold open my hands to receiving and not fear the giving.
You were the first love of my heart, and now reigning as my idol, I understand why You decreed no images, for Your face is more varied than on one to fix the heart;
You again are the one I’ve returned to, in dissipating whirlwind, to just stillness again… and in there I know to be rest and contentment.
Send me, Lord Jesus, Your handmaiden is waiting.

How big is your God? I love that question… its one whose answer changes continually… yet always remains the same, encompasses the very activities we do and call religion, our “conversation” (i.e., prayer) with God, and our engagements of faith with one another. God’s place of relationship in our lives is as big as we allow it to be. A lot of people throw around the phrase “God is a gentleman,” referring to God not forcing relationship upon any of us, but once we feel a true need in ourselves, tap into the slakeless thirst for Him, we are totally enslaved. And we desire to be so. Yet, we live in a fact of life that is full of extremes, of many varying positions, many good choices, many options that affect our ordering and composition of life. God may be the captor of our hearts, but the amount He does in us, with us through us does entirely depend on how much we submit to His life, that life of heaven on earth… and because we are mortal (as I am slowly learning… and coming to terms with my own nature), we are limited in what we can do.

I am not Jesus. But the Spirit of Jesus lives in me…why should it be any other than Him who sets the standards? Yet look at Jesus, he took rest, He didn’t heal everyone, He opened His heart to everyone.The Jesus I know is this person who listens to every story of any heart that unfolds itself to Him… there is a sort of invitation in His presence to come close and rest your head against His knees if you happen to be too weak to rise, or to run energetically with Him into the dawn of a new situation. This invitation Jesus is constantly extending unnerves me to the very core of my soul, inspite of a relentless desire to fly up from my place, wherever I am, catch His hand, and follow Him into the adventures of a different sort of day. Yet the vulnerability it takes to let go of where I am to grasp hold of the hands He extends to me shakes me… terrifies me: What wonderous love is this, my soul, that caused the Lord of bliss to bear the dreadful curse for my soul? I know how undeserving I see myself to be… and He sees whatever the truth of my being is, and its constant change, draws me by the slender connection we have formed over my heart.

This wild and restless heart, this seat of my soul, wrapped up in will and full of stubborn desires… what will tame it into the stillness required to run away with my Jesus? Submission being chosen obedience, what would cause that which resists, dodging and weaving through the labyrinths of live, dancing walls… the people and commitments I have made to each individual, avoiding  the facing of Jesus, in spite of how much I desire it. He catches my chin and siezes me gaze, and my heart can avoid him no more. What will bring me to You, Jesus, when all my life is running, but running away, because there is an end of the running in You?

I have been stilled by You in the mystery of litrugy… the song of heaven woven and spun by the chorus of earth. I remember the first time I was going to mass… it was at a Civil Air Patrol event, I had recently turned 13… cadet conference, I believe. I had heard words like litrugy then, but in the unruly, untamed passion of my little heart, I resisted any sort of structure. Who would want to be part of something that was rote, redundant, repetitive… boring. My first mass, I still remember the content of the homily: spiritual leprosy, from one of the gospel passages, Matthew, I think, of the leper who returned to thank Jesus for healing Him. We are all infected with spiritual leprosy, the priest told us… how many are willing to return for the thanks. Litrugy, to me then, took on the character of that return to thanksgiving. So our music wasn’t stellar, a couple off key boys and me, cracking out a hymn…but the prayers which I first encountered and learned were prayed all over the world struck me. I witnesses a mystery in that continuation… the same prayers, same pattern, but that pattern seemed to expand, like a song with chords that continue throughout the entire piece, but are complicated by additional notes.

Attending mass again (the only real litrugy I have been too on any consistent basis, having once been to a Byzantine liturgy and a Lutheran liturgy)… I was struck by the same familiar mystery, but since my first exposure, my curiousity was a little thirstier. I watched a bread and cup ceremony, invocation, that had the same matter (with the addition of alcohol) to a service that happened anywhere from once a month regularity to scattered occurance at other churches I’d attended. Why everyday? Why so central? Why did the doctrine of substance changing at some point matter so much? Why pit this at the middle of everything, and rest upon it as a mark of something requiring an innitiation? My soul brimmed with questions then, and now too. I began to continue my re-visiting to the mass. There was something same about it each time… that same thing, whatever it was, I didn’t know at first… but it was something… someone I knew my soul was absolutely craving… and always present in a sense I couldn’t find elsewhere, in a way every other place I went to seemed empty. I think I met Jesus in a different way. I think in that litrugy, He let me kiss Him; He let me be still, and consoled and encouraged my soul to a further holiness. Not every time, but the potential was always there… but my heart did not always offer a great expectation of His advent.

I learned that litrugy was more than the mass. And I hungered further with a greater wonder as I learned more. I was asked, why, if I can see Jesus anywhere, feel Him anywhere, would I limit myself to that re-presentation, that set order of encountering my God? Limit? The prayers I have learned to say as I was increasing in the volume of my liturgical life came from one of the most dynamic sources of prayer: the Psalms. Learning that they fulfilled the needs of my life, the cries of my heart to God, that they traced the human events and decisions and provided words where I was speachless, I found myself falling in love with the Divine Office: there again, a set aside sacred time and place, where I begged Jesus to open my lips and receive my praise; where I long for a burning coal from the altar to be placed on my tongue and where I found created for me in the presence of my God and community a place to be still, and wait for my God to come. I love going to morning prayer and kneeling in the silent chapel before we begin… savoring the time with Him. He quiets my heart and restores my soul… giving me the space I need to wrestle out with Him His place in preeminance over the rest of the business in my life. In this liturgy, this ordering where I remove from what is familiar to be quiet, directed and focus, my Jesus walks with me into the stillest dance I could hope for, and begins to teach me rest, something I am absolutely incapable of on my own. Finding my resst restores my joy, and I am free to run and live with/in Him.

Sleepy mornings and restless nights, an existence transient and seemingly light
For the depth brings and anchor and the stability a weight which self-constucted,
Rarely constrains more than consented, except by obligation, when the tie loses effect.
Obligation produces a resentment, from the strength of the command conflicting with rebellious freedom; the beast inside lies quietly, patiently beside the lamb and the dove
Still, until annoyed beyond discontent with its own unmotivated state, it stirs trouble, riling
Again the unsteadiness which totters over the edge of a knife, drawn in place by magnetism.
We cannot face the true weight of the one half, while allowing the natural lightness of other,
So into the incomprehensible being we plunge, to extricate meaning from the thrownness
We will never step out of till death. Fearing all we don’t know, we move with false confidence,
Too caught up and preoccupied to analyze each risk into which we step and each danger we cross; such scrupulosity would drive us mad, to dare to even approach introspection to our actions lures out the annoyance of the beast, a mere fester of self-comliance and satisfaction—
Wonder escapes us as too much beauty floods our glutted gaze—and we are lost again.
A thousand steps a day we fall, and strive a third as much to regain heaven;
Our work is never enough, and we have accepted that as an impossibility, rather than to lose
Again that persistent stride which disrupts our disformed limbs in the marathon.
Keep running we must, but not in accustomed circles or flat byways—we must risk the hills,
The mountains, the valleys where lie hidden in veils of forgetful mists the truth of our actions,
Our daily lives that dissapear as soon as they occur; that remain light because they are empty.
We fear death and so refuse to endure the dying, though every day would be so much fuller if
We might. Not the suicide of ending, but the death of continuation, renewal and reformation.
We pile on heaviness in light states of air and find before long self-created whirlwinds flaring
Into storms on the depths of our oceans. Deep, You call to my deep in the roar of Your ocean.
In Your unmaking and dismembering storm I am faced with the flaws that I already confessed;
Yet recognizing the wrong, I refused the purging of my soul through a renewing fire—
A perpetual penitent beyond the point of redemption, I classify myself as Your scapegoat.
Yet one sacrifice is enough and You do not require the blood of my death and torment.
Your tender hands catch and hold all the hair I rip out in mourning and grief, but still fixated
In the brew of pungent rot, remaining inside myself, unmade, ungrown, You see lack of progress.
I produce the heaviness in myself, the burden drowing me in the filth I have accumulated.
Heaviness and weight, Your yoke easy, Your burden light? Not for a sinner such as I.
You call me beyond, leave what You were and become new in me, exchanging You and me.
Stumbling will not cease, this body too fragile, but always being perfected, You
Call for patience, the blood still stains my hands, my soul, but You scour deeper to replace
My own blood with Yours. I have longed to be near to You, and yet I have withheld myself.
The sanctuary of stone remains my refuge, I haven’t allowed You to create one yet in my own heart—I once rejoiced in You always, returning to You in my heart at each opportunity,
Daring to come before You with outstretched hands and willing heart;
Discover me again and bring me before myself so that all I see is You, transfixed and mesmerized. Enchant me again… enter into the heart that once longed to touch You and grasp
Hold of these hands again. As I pursue the exploration of being, I hardly believe I can continue
Without breaking, and in this I find I may fall into Your hands… You keep me weak to make me
Strong—to be my strength when my own desire would collapse into itself forget again.
Driven after You, I lost the search; the desire became an obligation, the yearning, the thirst crumpled into mouthfulls of dust—even the touch of Your flesh and blood became forgetfully common, I took the death You exchanged into life, and remained in the shadow of an elegant tombstone. Do You see me here, looking round at You?
A dirty child crouching behind the grave, peering into Your blinding light…
Maybe this time it will cost me my sight to open the eyes of my soul into Your sweetness…
The fragrance howls at me louder than the stench that lingers over me from death;
Too familiar have she and I become, not as sisters, but as jealous lovers, seeking the same—
We have forgotten the nature of Your love and so were emptied of all but fiercesome desire.
She is stronger, she’s torn me deeper because I faught for a You that does not exist.
Like a lover stoning lover, I killed myself by forgetting Your face, returning to my own dust.
You’re calling me out of the ashes, let me be weak in my resistance to come forth

I have been starving for so long, I don’t even understand
What it means to be nourished—the emptiness has become
My nearest companion and abhorrent discomfort
My frame has become weakened—impoverished past giving
Because it is never fully replenish and rejuvinated;
My life has become a slakeless thirst—I have been for so long,
From healthy that I no longer comprehend the path to wholeness.
Broken has become easier to maintain;
I was so young, in love, full of inexplicable life,
And ready to come out of the shell I had been incubated by,
Reclining deep in the assumed love of Your arms.
My words always swung out in desperation-
That ache of joy and wonder that comes from a love;
The other pain just a pang of guilt, stabbling like a
Spreading disease through all my organs—the very poison
Of my unfaithful back turned upon You.
I have been so close or so far away, like a
Recoiling catapult, cranked and strained so tightly
That it kisses the wood  from a compulsory onenness—
Only in the next moment to be cast opposingly
From its beam by the slight release of a spring;
I am thus so tightly wound.
With You and me, the commitment has always been all or nothing,
Searing desert heats, parched without trace of moisture,
Or a flood of ice, overwhelming each breath:
You and I walk a line that cannit withstand
The monotany of the middle, the mediocre ordinary, yet You call there.
We have always been extreme, I know no other loving.
I run these summer days ‘round in small circles,
Further and farther away from my once vibrant desire.
Sleep and exhaustion claim more of my time than I give to You
And yet You fill my soul with conversation.
Each person You place in my arms calls forth
Some new portion of the frozen heart, continuing Your revitalizing.
My soul thirsts for Prayer, my ears to be called into it again by others,
To be accompanied into adoration sharing hearts brimming with Your joy.
But I don’t think even when I am only before You, that my heart can be so focused in You…
I’ll restlessly fade back into the mind, the truth of seeking will enver emerge.
Call me forth again, precious Savior, and teach me the stillness
Which will pervade the burning inside of me, feeding, yet filling.

Walking down the dark streets of the first summer night, something in me snaps, not breaking, but waking, to a clarity that has been out of reach for a long time. A waking to who knows what, a clarity of something entirely unsure. But such a quiet confidence has been far from overwhelming my soul for a long time. I realized I have been too long out of my cloister… the surrounding walls of air that rush past when I run… the conversation I know must needs be more constant with God if it is going to be so constant in every other part of my life. The rush of blood into a ghostly life is always overwhelming. Overwhelmed each time I encounter the Majesty, I realize just how spiritually anemic I am… maybe so much worse; He must be my breath, or else I am left empty and again entranced into the rhythmic, spaced-out existence which defies its own temporality. I am a more limited immortal soul.

In the rush of days, the clattering of time has become more of a hissing, when the conversation… like an underpinning chant, drones into dull intonations of the mind. I have caught time like a possessed handkerchief in my hands and wrung as many drops of moments, hours, out of it as my being can withhold. My God, You call me beyond my limits. Your persistance mesmerizes me…how deep You stir in my depths with that more simple and more profound than I have given You time to teach me. Here’s the hovering ghost that has flitted away from You again and again. You reach into my restlessness and see a deeper stillness possible. You step into the void I insist in maintaining, the ambivalence without description… the form without matter. I idealize gnostic… but find flesh on bones embedding me in an ache to know You in the matter You filled me with. So what is there left, but to confess what is obvious, to search out what is pondered, to pour out the contents of the heart, and give You real substance instead of dodgy spectres?

So here I met You: a Friday night on the town, Jesus in a night club.
You came to me, and You were wondering… the human God; You were sorting Yourself together in preparation to give all of Your heart away to a love that might break You, a love too true to be squandered, but in being offered without a necessary acceptance, You put Yourself in peril to try and give away gracefully all that You had, Yourself.
I turned, an in an instant I met You again, the social diva of the group… vulnerable and timid, seeking a solace You knew You wouldn’t find; testing my heart to see if I would dare to love You, a complete stranger, and give away that cherished coffin for a tattered garment without seems. You unravelled in my arms, but Your scared eyes pleaded with me to keep my arms open. Burrowing like a child into the furry warmth of its mothers arms, You risked trusting me with Yourself when the self wasn’t even sure if self was a thing beloved enough to care for.
I lifted my eyes again, and You showed me Yourself as a mirror, hundreds of writhing bodies indiscriminately exploiting sensation looking for what You were and what You were not. Yet You moved in the bodies that were trying to dance and forget; You were in the stumbling inebriated who tripped into cold night air for a light up.
Somehow, You walked into the politically charged scenario of sensory marketing and made Your presence uneasily known: You had at least one drink and found Yourself in the midst of the mass of bodies; You were bumped, touched… You scandalized me with holiness.
Long hours of dark, noise-blasted air reverberated through Your eardrums and dulled Your sense a bit, so You projected over the night… You tried to listen to my silent voice that rolled under waves of hypnotic music… enticing the whole of each being to invite You home with them—but You are too vulnerable to see that Your heart would be ripped off Your sleeve, and maybe the entire sleeve as well…You know our bent nature, to possess at any cost, or destroy for personal pleasure, but are compelled by the size of Your heart to keep giving till it bleeds.
So You were weak, but like a father-brother, comforted all the weaker. And gave up your own heart. I met You, and barely knew You at all.

I have been finishing some article summaries for my independent study sociology of religion class… these articles were fascinating. Later, I will reflect more on shame and repugnance and other issues that fall into these categories:

1. Harriet Martineau. “Dress and Its Victims.” Pg. 151-6.
Critiquing women’s “slaverishness to fashion’ and of the role of men in ‘inducing’ women to wear clothing that puts them at risk” (151), Martineau decries the constraints of clothing women have been socially constrained to wear. Ideally, “dress ought to be agreeable to wear: and this includes something more than a good fit. It should be light, and subject to as few dangers and inconveniences as possible,” (153) but women’s clothing is not protective, only “perverts the form disagreeably.” (154) Skirts and coresets are constant social perils to women, Martineau notes of popular fashion in her time,  putting women in contstant social peril of fires or difficulty breathing. Encumberant dress seemed a difficulty for women of high rank rather than lower classes, Martineau considered— whatever the idle and fanciful may choose to do, the useless mortality will be mainly stopped, and the general health prevented from sinking lower.” (156)“ Observing Victorian American dress and makeup standards as impractical social constraints on women, Martineau asks: “Do the petticoats of our times serve as anything but a mask to the human form- a perversion of human proprtions?” (155)

2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “The Dependence of Women.” 163-5.
Perkins discusses the early 19th century American considerations of equality between a man and his wife:“she is in no sense a business partner, unless she contributes capital or existence or labor, as a man would in like relation.” (162) Perkins noted that wives were considered  employees of their husband, earning housing, food, etc. from husband by services in the home. Comparing the value of women (who were assumed to marry and bear children) to that of the economic value of horses, Perkins observed a crucial role women held in the economic market of her day: “although not producers of wealth, women serve in the final proces s of preparation and distribution.”  (162) Women were forced into dependency by the general social conderation that“the labor which the wife perfoms in the household is given as part of her functional duty, not employment.” (162). Even in recognizing women as not being valued in the home, Perkins expressed the opinion that all society considered her entitled to were the wages of those of in domestic service positions such as cook, housekeeper, nurse, but nothing more (163). From her perspective,“whatever the domestic industry of women I, they do not get it: the women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.” (163) While all wives in general are underappreciated and are too valuable to be compensated by salaries which attempt to compensate for their services in the home, Perkins believes that mothers suffer the greatest. Though “the duties and services of a mother entitle her to supports,” the extra responsibility of“motherhood bears no relation to their [wives’] common economic status” (163). Because Perkins views the wife and mother’s economic status as irremovably bound to that of her husband, her working power, regardless of the amount of effort exerted, does not obtain for her any more indepdendance from males.

3. Jane Addams, “Utilization of Women in City Government.” 166-72.
Analogizing the maintenance and administration of a city with “housekeeping,” Addams believes that “city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted to its multiform activities” (167). Noting that the inner workins of a modern city have their origins in traditional women’s activities, Addams theorizes that women were separated from political involvement when these traditionally female activities “became matters for collective action and implied franchise.” (167) In considering political involvement to engage one in relation to the bodiless machine of government, Addams supposes women would not have fought for suffrage; but from the perspective of the family as the foundation of the city, women wish to engage politics for the person-to-person interactions. Blaming the industrial revolution for the impersonalization and abstraction of government from person, Addams claims that machinery denied women “the priviledge of regulating the conditions which immediately surround her” situation in life (168). Before the family was separated from the industrial state, daughters were given more education and value in the political sphere (170). If women want to secure their old statuses of industrial value, Addams recommends that “the modern woman must needs fit her labors to present industrial organization as the simpler woman fitted hers to the more simple industrial order.” (171) Calling back to the mind of her early 19th century readers the familial basis of political structure, Addams impels women to action, stating “that woman has no right to allow what really belongs to her to drop away.” (172)

4. Elsie Claus Parson. “Feminism and Conventionality,” 173-7.
Parson believes that women were subordinated by social confinement to the domestic sphere, though in this very limiting of world, women have been able to come closer to life than men. As an early feminist writer, Parson emphasizes that sameness (her definition of equality) with men is the first step to obtaining as man occupational freedoms and options as men: “Before women can imporve on men’s ways, those ways, one and all, must be open to women.” (173) Noting that women rarely seem to be able to be alone or alone with other women, Parson observes two exceptions which feed conventional belief: (1) in the public area, for the domestic arena seems to allow women to associate more freely with strangers, and (2) male solitude/seclusiveness in the home… avoidance of those areas where women exercise freedom… in exchange for their more amiable behavior in public circle. Parson notes that women implement usual social method to celebrate the normal, dramatic occurences, showing a consistency in female understanding of private and public spheres. When men make contracts with non-familial groups, Parson notes that all relations associated with this leaving of the home pay attention to ceremony because of their non-homogenous membership (175). When women seek entrance into these non-familial groups, Parson postulates that women override conventions as valueless (176). Accute male sense of female transgressions of convention seem to account for male resistance to accepting women into realms of convention: “Merely to lessen masculine apprehensiveness and to overcome masculine antagonism women might do well to adapt quickly and unquestoningly masculine conventionalities” Parson suggests (176). Even if women did change behaviors and mannerisms to be more “male,” Parson stresses that men are resisrant to apprehended, rather than actual difference between the sexes (176). The goal of feminism according to Parson, then, is to reduce humman apprehensions and anxietites about difference, eliminating “devices of self-protection [which have] prompted… ceremonial, conventionality, and segregation.” (176)

Words seeking to define an existence that never really repeats itself; each moment is separate, and never, ever going to see itself in the mirror. We find a lightness too bright and airy for us, and gravity too darn heavy… the eternal repetition of what we have been.
Trapped in the ceaseless sensation of whirling inside from the out, unbalanced but caught
In  centripital motion that creates force in a vortex, a maelstrom dashing me on a rock in its heart.
The commotion of aloneness drives the reverberating being, clattering and clapping like a clanging pendulum… a rag fluttering in the wind, unsure if it is able to make sound by
Smacking itself in the emptiness, or whether it is too flimsy
Its quiet, and all is well, the soul is still in a whirlwind of its own motion;
The whirlwind is still at its center, the hurricane has ceased, and I hang suspended…
And there is the stationary place in which I find myself, still and calm.
It makes sense of the insensible quiet, the still motion, I am emptied.
Sweetness of fresh air, still, chewable… formulative. Creative.
New words are bitten and thrown in torrents from the rabid mouth of my hungry life…
Words create nothing except ideas, matter for ideas… the endless defining of soul.
To be full, we become too heavy… in emptiness we are despondant and search for movement—
So where does stillness enter our lives. When are we so fully empty that we would give ourselves away, again and again. We are made to be scattered like seeds of Your body,
Drops of Your blood to water again this earth where nothing matters, and everything is crucial.

At a late hour of the morning, the early day is darker than the night. Questions like the endless stream of a river, and I have accepted that there are just more and more currents of them, leading through the journey, all tugging in different directions, but flowing down the same way. So Jesus, here I am, looking at my hands again, and wondering again what this life means. I decided to agree with Madonna, nothing really matters, love is all we need… but everything You put into my hands, this life, each moment, is all I really have, in all its glorious uncertainty. You see these tears, Jesus? I thank You for them, because I think You are their cause—You and Your radiant face. I think my heart is remembering what it means to love You sometimes… the behavioral decisions, finding reason for what I do, and even when not, doing the right in the moment as You principalled to be right, and reasoning later. I bless You for ingraining deeply into me something that primordially knows You; I think its Your image. I can feel in my very heart, the inner workings of this mind/body when I am doing anything which could be injurious to our relationship. Relating with God my Savior. What wonder You strike in me.

It is a late night to be reflecting again, Jesus, but too many masks still hand in my wardrobe. I am a great, happy costume artist… but the one I hide most from is myself, covering the real me from me in shadowy burkahs so others see more of me than I will dare to look at. You are a difficult mirror, darling Jesus, because even as I keep staring at that crucifix, where You hang, naked, scorned, open and inviting…. The most brutalized of lovers, I see again and again what I am unwilling to do, to become, because I am still not falling in love with You each moment. And yet each moment is different. Memories, cleaving to You and the moments when I could best imagine You… yet each time I sheild myself from the rest of the world that is currently around me, tucked safely away and curled up in my memories, You pull off the covers and expose me in Your love. Its not nice, Jesus. But I think its good, that rawness You remind me of, not chasing away the fear of demons, but showing me they are in me and they arent demons, because You came to take all the disembodied pieces of me and recreate Your masterpiece that I was well on my way to destroying, Jesus, I looking over and saw another piece. Here it is, do You want to do something with it?

I’ve been childish, which is probably my way of masking immaturity, more than admitting to something; You said child-like, not childish. Naivete and innocence are different, one shields stupidly, ignorantly, and the other is some kind of conscience guarding that You have to do with me. But You put it in my hands to learn about, with all the rest of me. Why would You trust me with so much? But I am playing excuse games with You again, because I ask You all the time for freedom, set me free…but I have been thinking this entire time that freedom is something where there are no boundaries, where I don’t have to interact with anything potentially “impurifying;” O Jesus, I have erected another “bubble” to keep myself safe… but in this act, I have kept myself breathing the same polluted air. I impaled myself on this knife of fear: I feared the very gift I just recognized You’d given me… something like a big heart… because I knew it had to love, to love deeply and fiercely, and I knew I couldn’t keep it inside me. I was childish, when gathering up all those roses of joy from the ashes where they grew like phoenixes from a tearful bed of mourning. I didn’t risk trusting You again… I didn’t love You enough to try.

I became defensive because of fear and told You that it was because I didn’t want to be a burden that I had reclaimed my heart. But that was in fact because I know that my heart becomes attached deeply wherever I go, as if its dispersed along the streets as I walk—and yet somehow even when all my strength is dry, there is more and more and more of it. Like You are my heart, and I can’t pour You out enough to use You up. But I can use up my strength, and Jesus I have been childish about that too. I can have a wounded heart that pours out and bleeds while its pouring…I remember when this heart became so shredded, I wanted to patch it up and let it just rest in You—but You are always on the move loving. Jesus, teach me what it is to love. I tried to give all of myself to every person I met, but then I kept encountering people wanting what I couldn’t give to everyone, something that moved me out of a sphere of loving like You to one more like prostitution. If my body is Your temple, then You alone must reside in it, or it is entrusted to another priest serving for You, High Priest. I consecrated myself to You, whomever You give me too… if its not one, it’s the world.

And the world I tried to love… but the world thinks love means stuff like sex and physical pleasure and doing what is nice, what is enjoyed. For so long Jesus, I have been so defensive that I have revolted at what You made to be good. For so long, I thought that You didn’t want us to be happy. For so many years, I took what You made beautiful and profaned it, not in exploitation, but denying its beauty. What people in the world want to see me doing as normal, to be happy, to express love… keep teaching me what it means to love in purity, what that looks like. I have hurt, and so rejected everything associated with hurt, because it reguritates memories to see… but help me face the everyday memories so as not to erect a wall that would keep me from fully loving You. You didn’t hide Yourself at all, how can I either, by refusing to love a way You might call me to in purity. I have allowed myself to scandalize so easily… but Jesus I have been exposed to too much for too long to keep being kiddish and cootie-ish about it… the rubber meets the road here where I come to You without reason for all I do, but knowing You take pleasure in the rigor (not the proodishness). And somehow, I think You would agree about what I consider holy to be in the ways I want to learn how to love… and You would also agree that I am profaning love by how I treat it… as a burden to most, a gift to a few.

We all need love, but that which can be good isnt always good in the ways You have made us to love. I dance around the issues again. I wanted to guard my eyes and my heart, not that some lust would be stirred in me, but to eliminate the distraction from things which I am not involved in as worship (and all of life is worship)… to remove distracting pictures and personal expressions in order to keep the window of my heart pure. Jesus, You have given us bodies which are good, expressions of love for one another which communicate the incommunicable (verbally)… and I keep rejecting these because I am uncomfortable. You want more of me, but I don’t think all of these thing are engaged. Jesus, teach me how to redirect intentions made towards me to You; I don’t have enough me to give each person who wants something of that love… You give a different kind through me. And it is because You always hear my heart as a confession and console me into love that I adore You…

“Looking into You, eternal God, I see You are the Fire of Love and You have created in me Love.” St. Catherine of Siena

Too damned unable to let go of the one control I have,
Too fearful to stop doing and be in the way I was made to be,
Discovering the contradictions inside of the self, unfolding a new leaf
To surprise, but not to relief from an intricate confusing puzzle, my labyrinth to God.
For You, I have skimmed beneath the surface and dredged up enough skeletons
To prove some effort, some measure of love… at one point I released
My being, unleashed my will, and fell towards You in a conscious motion:
I fell, headlong in love, baffelled and star-struck incensed into
A delusion of sacrifice and hoping somehow to be made undone.
Undone, when still in the shadows, when too stiff and solid to be taken apart?
You said, let go further, trust me deeper, stop looking, close your eyes, I Am here.
Holding onto You, my eyes were fixed so fast and hard willing You to remain,
You never left, always stayed, even when my wandering heart dared to stray…
Vacating Your hand from desire for a more cintilating distraction.
I bored of the labor of love You gave me, myself in exchange for others…
Battling the selfish beast and knowing the passions to give them to You,
Every moment of every day, requiring a constant unwinding of the burial clothes.

I am a tomb, I have been so long, a frozen body between sheets of ice,
Placing myself on this cooling rack, restraining myself with so many cords until
I was unable to be my own captor and surrendered control to one weaker.
You remained, as I, ashamed, turned my eyes from You and lost sight of light…
I kept waiting to embrace You, denying what was real to train all of me
To relentless pursue You; but restraints drained the blood from my limbs, as I lay
Dying upon the bedrock of me, shaken and crumbled, I called again Your name.
The waters beneath my foundation swelled and raged up, shattering me…
Thin ice in shards embedded in bashed and broken frame, which had thought
Itself strong from the binding, the discipline, the constraint; I missed the point…
You didn’t want me boxed in, pent up, and deformed into decrepit inability; free me from myself, the one I keep hating, the captor who still holds the keys I’m seeking.
Will all this sin be justified? Can I cover myself up so well,
That these burial clothes become fashionable and I appear perfect?
The skin transclucent after so long on ice, the heart even bluer than before…

Am I all You asked for? The moments become eternities in my little pocket of a life…
Some part of me feels that all my days are indeed like grass- wind sweeps me like a plain;
I am a lake beside the mountainous torrents of wind, the surface of my pool continually raped
Multiplying the deadness of its depths beyond awakening-
Sharp-cutting wind bites deep, but cannot pierce into this impermeable rock of feeling,
Beneath my surface, leaving me as unmoved as ever I was before.
Change covers me like a mere shadow, over the twinkling ripples of my silent water-body.
Nothing more than transient tempterature change results from its presence, I remain still.
But not still. Unruptured film covering my surface betrays, masks
The extent to which I have withdrawn from Your touch, Your kiss in life—
Not letting others in, to discover me. I am lost to myself amidst the roaring of distant oceans—
Of which somehow I am a part. But the land has done violence to me,
Cutting me off—I cry to my sandy captors.I am all alone and nothing
will stop the slow dispersion of my body through silty accumulation on my heart.
This frozen heart, heart of stone… buried in an unmoving pool, water so thick
It might bleed if it could be pierced by a sword.

So You have come to disrupt, to shake up, to redeem into the solemn from the madness.
All I ever wanted was to be free, to move with the wind, to change, to dream, to do in becoming.
But You caught the hands of a madly raving manic, who could do no more obedience
Than to draw blood in attempt to cease the sin. She who once fell in love asks to fall again…
And if this is what it takes, to keep falling, because to be crushed is indeed the only stability.
It was not only my own self that shook me with terrifying force… but something outside…
When I was impervious to anyone, to anything, I strolled through the city, so far from You
A kiss from You on my lips, heartwrenchingly awkward to stumble across the man in the street,
Hopeless screams coming from crazed lips, I have rights, I am a person…
I trip over my heart and it chokes me in my throat, I am helpless.
Bodies line the streets like victims of a holocaust, their souls prostrate lower than mind can break
Or heart can ache; its manic to walk through prospering corridors and encounter them.
Lifeless, almost, hollow and sunken, some more content from having met You in daily bread.
I am weak, not strong, I cannot save anyone, much less myself… dispersed to a crowd,
All go away hungry from my flesh, tasting bile and imperfecting. I just need You Jesus.
Keep me in love with You.