closing over

*having to do with Owen Barfield’s idea of final participation 

I am closing in 

over thy head. 

About to close, 

look not for sunlight now.  

About to bathe thee, 

look not for the light. 

Soon to be hidden 

in the waves 

above thy head, secure, 

like doors, shut, closed, 

and fastened, 

not to detain  

but to close thee in, 

to comfort and to croon 

above thy head. 

I am about to press thee 

further in than thou hast gone before, 

but I am in these with thee –  

the depths to which I ask  

thy limbs to swim, and a world, 

invisible to you above the surface, 

lies teeming for the face 

that plunges in.  

Afraid

I am afraid of myself. This Pride is stronger than a thousand armies. I could face those and die with joy. But pride survives and rises to laugh at joy, slain and bleeding on the field of my war torn being.

Christ, give me memory, clear and sharp. Like nails let it cut through the mist and self-made dark.

Allow me to accept the memory of weakness that arrogance may not taint the present strength of your huge and unyielding Joy. Let that become daily larger and larger unto me, and more beautiful than my own propped up and painted reflection.

Even now the desire steals softly through my pen to become someone. “Will people read my words and think them rather clever?” So I am coming to find that writing is an act of constant confession, and humility a moment by moment return to the Truth.

Confession

Forgive me Father, what You have made new

stumbles back gray and stooped to You.

A beggar, I have lost the gold of your rising sun;

Poor and old again I come, though born at dawn.

A strange light spins over this –

my shuffling confession;

I have asked, “Forgive”.

You have forgiven.

My slow gaze lifts

from dusty feet to Shining Face,

And from the four wretched walls

of this dim, soiled prison

my freed spirit unfolds

into the blue sky of grace.

My gaze, trembling, climbing

up into those Eyes

forgets even to see what lies behind –

what desire for rain and sun has become:

a growing thing,

tall and straight and green.

Now beautiful and fragrant,

these blood red petals

catch the sun every morning,

the dew at night;

rejoicing, they gently

hold the memory

of the cold, withered darkness

and the burst of light.

Abba

Dear Daddy,

Where are you? When are you coming home? I feel like I’m forgetting what color your eyes are. It’s raining outside and the windows are blurry so I can’t look for you down our street. I’m trying to write you messages on the water paper glass, but I have to write the letters backwards so you can read them from outside, and I keep getting all mixed up.

Are you close now? I have the recordings you left of all the things you like to say to me. Like, I’m your favorite seven year old daughter in the whole world (even though I’m the only one you have), and you love me “thiiiiiiiis much”. But Daddy, my arms can’t stretch as big as yours do, so it’s hard to remember how much it is that you say you love me.  I always ask my question before I play the best recording. I played it again yesterday when the big kids knocked me down. I didn’t mind the big scrape on my knee (and you should see how big it is!), but then they laughed, and I knew they wanted to hurt me. Daddy, I wonder why that hurts more than the knee? So I asked my question, “Daddy, do you love me?” then I hit play. “Mi hija, I love you so much.” I like the recording. But when are you coming back? What if the recording breaks?

Mom says to think about all the times you’ve come back, and you always bring things I’ve never seen before. Remember the peacock feather? You made me close my eyes and touch it while you told the story of the peacocks fighting under the jungle vines. When I opened my eyes and looked at the gold rings around green and blue pools, I could see the whole story moving in their reflection. I remember now! You said the pools were your eyes so you could see me no matter where I went. So they must be the color of our fishing hole with the sunlight like a wall all around it. Mom also tells me to remember all the times you haven’t come home, because there aren’t any. I guess that’s pretty good thinking, but that doesn’t make me want you any less. The Daddy-daughter dance is tomorrow. I can go with my friend’s dad, but its hard to feel beautiful without you there to open my door and waltz when the slow songs come on. Anyways, you always pick out my dress, so how am I supposed to know what to wear? I bet I’m just the right height now to do that double spin we tried so many times last year.

Daddy, this is a secret. Put out your pinky finger. Ok, here’s mine. Sometimes, the wind talks to me. Not shiny sounds like the chimes I climb onto your shoulders to hang from the porch sky when the flowers open, but crashing and grinding. It sounds like its locking all the deadbolts in the doors, and I’m afraid you won’t be able to get back in when you come. I’m not strong enough to open them, Daddy, and I’m scared to walk down the stairs in the dark. It’s not like when we stomp up at bedtime pretending to be bears. Bears are together so they’re not scared of the dark. But I am. I never told you because I was always with you and we were always bears. I guess I didn’t know till now either.

I’m learning lots of things I wouldn’t if you were here. Like making pancakes by myself. But I don’t really like the pancakes I make. They’re flat and the wrong color – light brown instead of golden. Mom says the missing ingredient is Daddy Love, and the stores are out of it. She makes jokes because she wants me to laugh, and I do try. Then she sighs and we both agree her jokes are funnier when you’re in the kitchen to laugh at them too.

Now I’m sitting at the kitchen table and I’m trying to make a list of all the things you might bring me:

• my first pearl earrings
• a little fruit tree from the other side of the world
• a light blue hula hoop

but I know that if I can imagine it you won’t bring it. You always surprise me. And I get tired of making lists. All I really want is your arms.

Daddy? I can hear the door creaking! But all I can see is that little tatter of light coming in the crack. I just want to put my hand on your heart and listen for the knocking like you taught me, Daddy! Just to make sure. Just to make sure. Are you on the porch? I helped Mom paint the front door, do you think it’s the wrong house? But you’ve always come back, and you always say you can read the writing in the windows even when we walk outside and laugh at the crooked lines or the smudges the sun left when it dried up my letters to you. Daddy! My heart is burning and the smoke keeps going up and up. My chair fell over and I’m trying to crawl toward the door but the place you taught me to find a drumbeat is all crumbling, crumbling! Daddy are you home? Are you home?

A Letter to Christ

Lover,

 

What have you done to me?

I didn’t use to be beautiful

before you loved me.

I used to be gray.

 

Why did you ever love me?

I  see. That’s what love is.

 

I don’t have words for this.

I don’t need them.

This is just for You.

 

You.

 

How that word draws me in!

You. All that I ever wanted,

and didn’t know it,

so I pushed You

away and away and away.

 

You. The whole world breathes inside it.

You. My whole world.

 

I’m new, now.

You have loved me into perfection.

You have loved me into joy.

You have loved me into living. Nothing

is the same anymore.

 

All the colors go deeper.

You love me into laughter.

You love me into tears. Nothing

matters anymore but to hear

Your voice in everything. See

Your face in everything.

 

When I am tired there is a place for me here.

You. My sanctuary. A holding place.

You. Surround me. This

is an embrace.

Just to sit and be loved —

Is there any greater joy?

 

 

Vessels

The vessel matters not so much

As that which is poured through it.

We have this treasure in jars of clay

That they over us might choose it.

 

Lord, take all gilded, fashioned merit —

Of appearing goodness let me be bereft.

Except that which is one with Thee,

Let not of me be left.

 

When I am tempted to seek and strive

To make known my own false glory,

Remind me then to sacrifice

These scribbles to Thy unending story.

 

Do I chisel and scrape this image of self

To form a statue worthy of worship?

Lord, take this rotting idolatry!

Fix these roving eyes on Jesus.

 

All these broken pieces now are yours.

All my joy that through them shines your Glory.

Weak and wounded, broken, poor —

Come, see what He has done for me!

 

and will He not do the same for Thee?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whole

Human beings are broken.

We all know it.

And say that it’s beautiful:

A pattern from the cracks.

And all that.

 

But my question is:

How do we know that we are broken?

What were we before

We broke?

 

The chanting wind whispers

And the swaying wheat whispers

You were whole

 

Softly, this craving chisels away our souls,

Hunger eating out our bellies,

Bellies made to be full.

 

Hunger drives us, a beating desire

For magic and divinity

And something else that would not

Be itself

Were I to mold it into words.

 

Memory must hold

Somewhere

A knowledge of the whole,

Of free and enough,

Else we would not know their counter-meanings:

Glue, and chains

And more stuff.

 

We each know it’s coming – the last bus.

Perhaps mine is 65, and yours 71,

But it must come.

 

Until then you barter vehemently with the hawkers

Crowding your bus-stop.

 

I couldn’t say if this feeling

Is dread, or anticipating;

I commit to hoping in the promise

Of hungering;

Not, perhaps, that food is coming

But simply that there is

Such a thing as food.

 

 

 

Storms

Give me my own storm, I will not say that it won’t hurt me, but it will be my own hurt and my own healing. It is the storms of other people that break me. The storms I cannot fix, cannot disperse, in many cases – cannot even mitigate.

As I ran on the still, joyful trail by the Old Mill, a storm brewed. I ran by the Reservoir, a lake tucked away between the mountains. I watched as drops hit the surface of the water – movement rippling outward, interlocking with the sequins of other drops, creating a dancing, morphing pattern.

I had been praying for Emilia.

I could smell the deep, untame wind of the coming storm. The raindrops were tears. I watched as the sky wept.

Then suddenly, as if I had opened my eyes for the first time, I saw that each raindrop, each teardrop, was the storm of a soul. Each storm touched the ones around it, linking arms and spinning in circles, creating that same rhythmic, pulsing dance. It throbbed with a beauty that broke my heart.

But my mind pushed back the beauty. “God, I have seen so much pain. How is it that beauty can come from these tears?” The Voice of Christ sprang to answer, (and it was touched with some strange, strong wildness) “You cannot yet see because you are only another raindrop. But Sophia, this lake is the palm of my hand. No storm ever crashes, no tear ever falls, outside of these cupped hands. Now you see a dim reflection, a proto-type, a prophecy. One day, you shall see face to face. Now you see in part, then you shall see fully, even as you have been fully seen.”

The unavoidable freedom of my own helplessness invaded me. I watched a single raindrop make its dent and stretch itself outward.

There in the mud, I slowly knelt and stretched out my own arms. The burden of control was swept from my open hands. I laughed aloud in the joy of being a raindrop, falling into the hands of her God.

Then the weight of His glory crashed over me, and I wept with the storm.

Gospel-Telling

As I was running one day on the Old Mill Road on top of a mountain in Georgia, I was wishing I could hear Christ’s voice. I felt far because I had not been listening daily to His words in Scripture. I knew that it would only be by His gift (are not all things so?), but I asked that I might hear Him. The sense of His consciousness invaded me gently, “Look around you.” And then His almost daily repeated question, “What do you see?”

I saw trees, green and dancing. I saw old trees, slumped and dying. I saw soil composed of a million leaf skeletons. I saw the extraordinary, sprawling life that had grown up from that soil. So I answered, “Father, I see life from death.” He replied gently, softly, “Sophia, is that not the Gospel?”

My soul gasped. He was right. Everywhere, all around me, the world whispered and cried out and soared and waved and grew and died and lived again. My ears opened and for the first time I truly heard. The very pattern and cycle of nature cries out the gospel story! Then an electric shock ran through me. I, too, am a part of nature. Different, certainly; but yet, created. I am called to the Gospel-telling, as surely as the rocks cry out His name (Luke 19:40).

“How am I to tell it?” I asked.

“Before a seed can grow, it must fall to the ground and die.” (John 12:24)

I realized, then, that the death from life cycle of nature is another prophecy of who we are to be.

“Lay down your life. The one who seeks his life will lose it, but those who lose their lives for my sake will find it again.” (Matthew 10:39)

Extraordinary thought! We must die if we are to live. It is the essence of our nature – quintessential, inescapable. And it is strange to me how loathe I am to give myself up to the unconditional love of the Cross. Never have I found anything but strength and joy, in that place of total surrender to the requirements of Love.

Father, teach us to place the interests of others above our own. Teach us to choose the path of the cross. Teach us to step into what we have no duty to perform, pick up the dish towel, and wash your children’s feet. Teach us to die. May we desire not the life of this world, but only, and single-mindedly, the resurrected Life of Christ.

We are surrounded by the Gospel-telling! Dying, living, growing things spring up all around us. They are pictures of a cross and a resurrection and a man named Jesus. Remember the towering trees grown from skeletons of falling leaves, tiny seeds, once. But now grown up – beautiful. That’s your soul. Step into the ranks of Gospel-tellers, a part of the whole. And here is the question of them all: would I – would you – hold back our worship, when all the world cries out His name?

Let it never be, Lord. Let us step into the ranks, your blood within our veins, ready to die, ready to live.

Here we stand, surrendered to this glorious Gospel-telling.

Salvation Belongs to the Lord

My wild eyes looked into His,

I’ve lost the key to my soul.

The gentleness of that smile.

Words

Cannot say.

But he did not need to speak.

It was as if His whole being spoke.

It was as if the words came through

The open door of His soul.

You did not lose the key.

I’ve had it 

All along.