The Ephemeral and The Everlasting

I love the Rockies, although in comparison to my Jill, you might say I tolerate them.  For her it is a love affair, replete with fragrances, palpitations of heart and spirit, and tears at the sight of them.  She loves an idea of Heaven, and if it is better than the Rockies, she believes we will all be overcome.  Continually. Rapturously.

We agree the Rockies are incomplete without clouds and snow.  Think of a beautiful woman.  Some of her allure, her mystery derives from her arrays in clothing, scarves, hats, veils, kimonos, shawls, make up as desired, hair treatment, jewelry, and so on.

As I watch clouds decant onto a range, or see that range drape itself in wisps, or flaunt a towering, lightning ensconced thunder storm I see its ridges, feel its dimensions, intuit its contours so much better than on clear, cloudless days. 

As peaks powder themselves in snows, it accents improbably smooth bases and intricate crevasses, delineating one stunning alp from another. 

And clouds’ ephemeral essence, their fleeting transience underscore the everlasting bulwarks’ will.  They wrap themselves endlessly, cloaking and revealing granites, schists, shales, micas, endoliths and lichens. 

And in feeding the micro and macro organisms enduring on the crags, and in insinuating themselves into the rock to freeze, then liquefy or sublimate back into air the fleeting, ephemeral clouds are themselves infinitesimally wearing down, they are eroding the mountains. 

So all things are subjects of time and entropy.  All kneel however slowly so that, even a mountain will be as a hill, and even a cloud will be as sea. 

So, I who am in holy writ a vapor on a lake in a morning to be burned off by a noontime sun have hope.  May He who subjects all to time, and Himself exists outside of it, be kind enough to let me live beyond this water and earth forming my corpse, outside time to learn wisdom from my brief, ephemeral passing through here?

Pace

When Black Lives Matters comes forward pressing home so many inequities, I am first stymied. Overwhelmed. Indicted anew.

I am stymied because the sheer scale of the issues(s) stops me cold. It is too much. Too invasive.

Then I remember the two frames I have been given in my world.

Think globally. Act locally.

Believe and hope for all people and time. Act presently.

Then I select a speed for my day. If I slip into rushed, harried, hurried, tending to angry at the slightest, I zoom past places to act locally, presently. I judge using stereotypes, heuristics, making myself feel approved, superior, affirmed.

But if I choose a slower pace. Driving. Thinking. Reading. Listening. Paying attention, then a miraculous moment can slip past my defenses and rote reactions. I act, I speak, I open a moment with someone not like me, and sometimes a miracle happens.

I wonder if Jesus were better equipped to save a world because He came to a place and time where He walked rather than sped.

And here is the craziest thing I am realizing. I have yet to slow up and find a moment when my list of to-does was obliterated. The ravening pressures will always be with us. They wait. So pause and be present and possibly amaze someone.

I am not that good at it, but what little I have seen amazes me.

Beadoleoma

“Ah dinna ken” is one of Jill’s and my favorite ways to say “I don’t understand.”  I have ways in other languages.  I NEED more ways to say “I don’t understand.” 

So “ken” is a favorite word. It may stem from reading At the Back of the North Wind, and The Princess and Curdie from George MacDonald, who Mark Twain loved touring.  CS Lewis published an anthology of MacDonald.  He also put George in The Great Divorce. George just walks into the action, and if you had read him, you shake your head and laugh!

So “ken” is a favorite word not a favorite doll.

“Kenning” is also a favorite.  Kenning is when you pair two words to create an evocative new word.  In Beowulf, over a third of all words are kennings.  Two favorites are bone-house for a body, and beadoleoma for “battle light” or Beowulf’s sword.  Now you sense Tolkien’s source for a sword that glows as enemies (and battle) draw near. 

And where I got my name for WordPress.  Maybe it is not blinding, more of a dull, you really must turn off all the lights to see it — and it is not a razor, but it is my battlelight. 

Which touches on Paul and his letter to maybe his most beloved folks.  Ephesus was scary, hard, beautiful and Paul’s kind of folks.  He skipped meeting them on what all figured was his last trip before dying.  Could not not see them.  He stopped down the coast and folks ran down, fell on his neck weeping so hard they all staggered down.  Then they dusted him off, pointed him to his boat taking him to a certain fate, and waved bye-bye. 

Ephesians.  So in his love letter to them he writes a sustained metaphor: the Armor of God for believers.  And at the last of the list he bequeaths to them swords. 

What loving God bequeaths swords to His children?

The same God who sends His Own into sewers to find disposable babies, into brothels to find disposed-of children, into labs to research what we cannot see but die of easily.  This God who loves the world through us gives us swords, and if my kenning is correct, the sword that lights your way, also is sharp beyond your ability to hone it, and it awaits your using it to better, to protect, to save, and light the way for those given to the slaughter. 

Beadoleoma.  If it is bright, you did not make it so. 

The Dailiness

Caryl Talley says things. Some bear repeating, like, “I don’t mind being a Christian. It is just the dailiness of it.”

I have laughed at that. I have sworn at it.

The dailiness before others: I can carry it off. The dailiness in front of close souls; they have stories, whopper failures.

Worse is the dailiness in my confessional. Frightening. Failures rampaging.

Confessing may be great for a soul. It can also kill you. I start sliding down a “truthfulness” chute, and sometimes see an oceanic abyss of others’ lies, sins of our fathers, faux Facebook faces, and sink to soul crushing depths.

I use two crutches. Crutch one is Grace, extended by God in a Son who “gets us”. Casual Christians dance forgetting their ongoing, unrelenting need for Grace. If I forget how desperately I need it, I forget giving it to others.

I found my other crutch in scary scripture: Lamentations: “His mercies are new every morning.” Mercy means I am dead, caught, red handed and the Judge will not throw the book at me. New every morning means: daily.

He knew.

God knew dailiness erodes us, evaporates souls, expunges essences. So He hands out crutches. Even Christianity’s critics know this, disdaining any crutch.

Their confessionals may be smaller, ill used. I happily hobble away from mine. Want to try a marathon?

Recipe(s)

Take two eggs and break then into a microwave safe bowl. Add milk, salt, pepper, smoked paprika or other seasonings to taste. Scramble them as little as you like or beyond recognition.

Microwave on high for 45 seconds. Remove, whip again. Put back in microwave.

Microwave for thirty seconds on high.

Add grated cheese at this point if you so desire. Scramble more, or let runny parts run to outer edges of bowl, like in a saucepan if your are making an omelette.

Microwave for another thirty seconds on high. For my hotel microwave, it is sufficient. The whole reason I learned this recipe from goggling was that all I have is the hotel microwave. I add salsa that I bought at the Farmer’s Market from a woman who told me she grew everything in it herself. Eat carefully, parts will be very hot.

It is a recipe. Americans tend to approach a lot of life like consistent recipes. “Here is successful woman #279. This is how she became successful. Maybe you can follow her recipe for life, or for a healthy body, or for success in relationships.” We forget that much of life is miraculous, even religious people forget the miraculous.

Churches continually look for programs, studies, or personalities “that work” to try in their own church, bible study, life group, or relationship. They act as if the recipe worked at so-and-so’s church, so it will work for us.

That is closer to magic than to faith, for the record.

What worked in one town for negating racism, in one couple’s life to heal their marriage, in one business to become a successful startup has some elements you can derive from a recipe. It takes mind boggling work. It takes continual mindfulness and work, did I already say work? And it takes something of Providence, or the miraculous.

See it another way. If you have a body where all 37.2 trillion cells work well enough for you to have a great day, that is a miracle. It is so far beyond a recipe as to be laughable. If that body is your body, then be a bit humbled and mystified.

Even in a kitchen, recipes turn out a myriad of wonderful outcomes, and some headed straight down the garbage disposal.

Work for outcomes you deem important, remembering recipes’ limitations and that a new outcome takes work, faith, and persistence. What I did when the egg thing did not work so well the first three times.

Small Thing

I walked from the hotel to the nearest viewing site for the fireworks last night in Chelsea, Oklahoma.

The air, cooled by afternoon thunderstorms felt heavy, pregnant with possible rain and almost fog.

Someone’s first skyrockets spiraled into the full moon peering through clouds. The moon seemed disaffected by the distraction, but it was beautiful.

The BNSF lead locomotive thundered bestially, looked like a leviathan snaking through the trees and circumscribing arcs into the almost fog.

I walked in a night of wonder. The newest fads in fireworks were baffling and beautiful, and all around me as I walked, people fired off big boomers, spiral screamers, and flourishes of small cracks.

At no time did I lunge protectively to the ground to escape impending danger.

No small gift that sense of safety.

May it be so in all our cities on all days for all our children.

Still She stands.

Torch flaming, a gift from another country, Lady Liberty is beautiful, though for reasons we rarely attribute to her.

There in the folds of her garb are differing formulations for counting slaves in our first documents.  All of the compromises so slave owners could keep their “property” and make people who hated slavery cooperate with hunters.  The Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth are there as clearly as ANNA towns, Tulsa and Atlanta and a host of other riots, lynching, all the way to the amazing election of a black man to the presidency.

No one can tidy up the story.  No one honest denies the twists, horrors, or inequities.  Along with injustices to Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Irish and Slavs, she stands with her torch held high and astonishingly, people still flock to her.

She stands taller not due to a pedestal, but because she unflinchingly rises above the swamps, detritus, lies, anger, and racism.  Yes, she is an ideal, and oh yes, we fail her.  But she is an ideal for which men and women fought, died and gave us a choice: either unite as the ideal is greater than our differences, or be less than those who died hoped for us.

Her torch unflinchingly lights today’s strife, insouciant biases and lies about ourselves and others.  She lights those shortcomings to appear so dark, so depraved because she is an ideal.

Here is to Her and besting our failings.  Here is to her ideal in a measure of hope that we will appeal to the “better angels of our nature”, as one president agonized and gave his life hoping for us.

Lincoln’s hope for her as an ideal demands more of us.   As others live in less than freedom, less than fearlessness, we find ourselves with work to do.

The Lady, and Lincoln hark back to a non-white man who died young on a cross, and whose followers overcame slavery because they believed, “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  The origin of that impossible ideal?  Maybe.

I learned the word “impossible” as if it were the essence of American.  We should return to impossible hopes like our forebears did facing fascism.