Unholy Sonnet 4

I'd love to tell a hard tale of miserable abuse that I have suffered at the hands of conservative evangelicals that might excuse my tendency to push against them when in conversation. The thing is, I haven't suffered enough to have even a modestly-interesting story. I have issues, I guess, and those issues make me bristle in my soul whenever someone claims certainty about God--not certainty that God exists, but certainty about what He thinks or who He loves or doesn't love. Truth be told, I the only concept of God that doesn't set off angst in me is God as the source of unfathomable, unconditional love. That's my idol of choice.

It is no better and idol, really, than my Calvinist friend's 5-point, concrete system, and no better, really, than my brothers and sisters who picket funerals and claim to know with certainty that "God HATES Fags." Still, I choose Love. I say that it is better to throw away the scriptures than to use them in a violent, unloving way as a weapon against another. I say that God LOVES Fags at least as much as He loves self-righteous believers, women-haters and bigots.

But there I go, again, weighing this monologue to may way of thinking.

I love the way this poem, by Mark Jarman, strips away concepts of God as a thing--idolatrous versions of The Real God--and replaces that with the Truth that God is NO-THING, and therefore beyond concepts of God. Jesus is as close as we can get (I believe), and we pretty much mess Him up, too, and use Him in ungodly ways (and there I go yet again!). I swiped it from Steph Drury's blog Get your adverbs here.

Unholy Sonnet 4

Amazing to believe that nothingness

Surrounds us with delight and lets us be,

And that the meekness of nonentity,

Despite the friction of the world of sense,

Despite the leveling of violence

Is all that matters. All the energy

We force into the matchhead and the city

Explodes inside a loving emptiness.

Not Dante’s rings, not the Zen zero’s mouth,

Out of which comes and into which light goes,

This God recedes from every metaphor,

Turns the hardest data into untruth,

And fills all blanks with blankness. This love shows

Itself in absence, which the stars adore. 

 

—Mark Jarman

Sorry I Never Listened, Dad...

People say some strange, amazing things. It's weird to me, but much of the wisdom I've been offered has made absolutely no sense to me until much later, after I reached a certain age, experienced certain things, or just sort of grew up (at least for a time). For instance: I remember reading "The Road Less Traveled" when I was a Junior in college in Oklahoma and being completely blown away by this short, overly-quoted poem. I was actually kind of embarrassed that it suddenly meant so much to me because it was everywhere--I had read it before, and everyone else had, too. Coming to feel the poem in such a way seemed silly to me, especially when I tried to express its perfection to my friend, Nicole. I felt like I was rambling on and on about how much stuff Wal-Mart stocked, or something.

Still, that poem is amazing, which is why everyone has already read it. What is still baffling, though, is why I didn't "get it" the first time I encountered it. Was I not ready at 19 to feel that poem? Was I distracted? Probably all of the above. All I know for certain is this poem, which had seemed trite to me, I guess, suddenly felt unspeakably powerful, and the poem had not changed; I had.

Achtung Baby by U2 is my all-time favorite album. I ignore it for years at a time, but each time I play it again my old friend works, running me through the same whole-spectrum-of-feelings as it did in 1992. But, what I don't usually share when I speak of this album is that, though I wanted badly to love it upon my very first hearing, I was initially disappointing with it. After loving The Joshua Tree so fully, this new album felt harsh and even overly contrived, like the boys were pretending to be Eastern European or something. After having the album for six months, I heard a bit of it in Leigh Ann Tucker's Honda Accord and was floored to know that what I was hearing was the same album from six months back! And just like Frost's poem, the album had not changed. My expectations of U2 and my own feelings about myself did change, though, and allowed me to be open to the truth of the album.

Again and again in my life I find that the difference between experiencing the truth of something and missing the richness of it is often just time. It is true in my marriage; Thanks be to God, Stacy and I are in a place together that I literally could not imagine two years ago. She has changed, I have changed, and what I thought about her and about who she is inside is changed. The same is true in my faith--I doubt God has changed much, but I certainly have.

We ebb and flow. Time does, too. The wisest thing I think of (which may sound trite to you, today!) is that we are supposed to be in this present moment as fully as possible, so we can enjoy the peace and understanding while it is here. Because it will all keep washing in and out, we must try and try again to "get it" when we're ready.

Radical love

Welcome to the planet

Here we are--four months into 2011, and what have I shown the throngs of people who follow this blog so far? Nothing! You would think that I have been up to absolutely nada in this world. In truth, I have been terribly busy at work, and haven't been taking part in much of my usual activities, so I have had little worth writing about.

That is, unless you count having a beautiful, funny, full-term baby daughter as worth writing about!

Anna Kathryn was born on March 29; she was 18 and a half inches long (short like her daddy) and weighed in at 6.9 ounces (a whopping 4 pounds, 5 ounces aver Mia's birthweight!). Stubborn little thing that she is, she came out letting us all know that she has great lungs and a strong will, two facts that she continually reminds us at the Dickerson casa. She loves to eat; she had a few days of starvation while learning how to properly suckle, but she has made up for that time and is now about seven pounds. She is beautiful and very cuddly.

Aside from our collective lack of sleep, we are loving having a new baby to hold and feed and burp and change, and feed and burp and change. :o) She is one month old as of yesterday--give us another couple of weeks and we will share her with everyone!

Welcome, Twenty-eleven!

I mean, you might as well welcome the new year because being inhospitable to it won't do anything good for you. :o) And that is true of so many things. For instance, you can push hard against whatever you encounter and make it worse, or you can accept it as it is and try to dance with it a little.

This is a core idea to Buddhism that I find really practical. I am terrible at it sometimes, but there have been times of my life when I have been blessed with the ability to really let things be as they are, and those times have been joyful at their core.

Stacy is 27 weeks pregnant today, and that makes her one week more pregnant than she has ever been before. A couple of weeks back, she was placed on bed rest because she was having frequent Braxton-Hicks contractions, and with our history of early babies, her doctor wanted to play things really safe. My response was to freak out! I went batshit inside, mostly because of fear buried from the last baby (I have pretended to be enlightened before, writing about the problems of embracing love instead of fear, but that is all intellectual posturing in the face of real, latent fears). Anyway, things are okay, now, just as they would have been had I relaxed and accepted the situation as it is. The drama came when I rejected the situation with a hearty, "this cannot be happening again."

2011 will see the birth of my second daughter, Anna (Beth or Reese, as of right now). Mia will finish up with first grade. Stacy will deliver this new baby and be able to enjoy her at home without waiting months for the baby to get out of the hospital. She will survive bed rest with her sanity and we will be fine without her income. And who knows what else this year will bring?

Dance the dance to the tune that is playing; don't try to make the music fit the steps you have practiced and prepared for because you will be the one who looks silly, not the music.

I'll keep telling myself to practice what I am preaching. :o) Welcome, 2011!