I read Barbara Holmes’ book on contemplative practices in the Black Church the other month, and the book was as amazing as it was historically grounding and refreshing. In it she says, “Some sacred spaces bear none of the expected characteristics.”
It is within the spirit of contemplation and the gift of sacred spaces that I offer this poetic piece which Nate shared with me. You may enjoy it, but hopefully you won’t (in the best way). There is language in this that you may not want to blast:
His ways are circumspect and bound
With trite simplicities;
His is the grace of comforts found
In homely hearthside ease.
His words are sage and fall with care,
Because he loves me so;
And being his, he knows, I fear,
The dizzy path I go.
For he was once as young as I,
As prone to take the trail,
To find delight in the sea’s low cry,
And a lone wind’s lonely wail.
It is his eyes that tell me most
How full his life has been;
There lingers there the faintest ghost
Of some still sacred sin.
So I must quaff Life’s crazy wine,
And taste the gall and dregs;
And I must spend this wealth of mine,
Of vagrant wistful legs;
And I must follow, follow, follow
The lure of a silver horn,
That echoes from a leafy hollow,
Where the dreams of youth are born.
Then when the star has shed its gleam,
The rose its crimson coat;
When Beauty flees the hidden dream,
And Pan’s pipes blow no note;
When both my shoes are worn too thin,
My weight of fire to bear,
I’ll turn like dad, and like him win
The peace of a snug arm-chair.
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
The unrepeatable, searing Javon Johnson:
Life for my child is simple, and is good.
He knows his wish. Yes, but that is not all.
Because I know mine too.
And we both want joy of undeep and unabiding things,
Like kicking over a chair or throwing blocks out of a window
Or tipping over an ice box pan
Or snatching down curtains or fingering an electric outlet
Or a journey or a friend or an illegal kiss.
No. There is more to it than that.
It is that he has never been afraid.
Rather, he reaches out and lo the chair falls with a beautiful crash,
And the blocks fall, down on the people’s heads,
And the water comes slooshing sloppily out across the floor.
And so forth.
Not that success, for him, is sure, infalliable.
But never has he been afraid to reach.
His lesions are legion.
But reaching is his rule.
Writing by Joyce Rupp
I wait out sluggish days,
empty evenings, mulish
attempts to capture words
hiding themselves
inside the undulating sea
of my mental thesaurus,
not even remotely available
for me to scoot them
onto my fingers and
into necessary revision.
So I wait, and wait,
and wait some more
while I fumble uselessly
with worthless concoctions
until
one early dawn
the tide comes in
and the first word peeks out.
then they all follow,
and like a flock of gulls
I swoop in to snatch
the sea’s latest prey.
Javaka Steptoe’s Seeds
You drew pictures of life
with your words.
I listened and ate these words you said
to grow up strong.
Like the trees, I grew,
branches, leaves, flowers, and then the fruit.
I became the words I ate in you.
For better or worse
the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Joyce Rupp’s Greedy for Too Many Things
ravenous for too many things,
even spiritual growth,
greedy to grow without effort,
to have it all, to sit back and bask,
luxuriating in what was never mine
in the first place.
greedy for more time in the day
when I already have
all the time I need.
greedy for companionship
while I ignore the One Companion
always near.
greedy for, oh, so much,
while I miss the chipmunk
chewing on the sunflower seed,
the sound of soft July wind
rustling cottonwood leaves,
the color of azure sky as the sun
rinses morning out of it.
I find that intentionally easing the fast pace of my days is indispensable if a spirit of hope is to be sustained in tough times. Being overly active and involved in the constant bombardment of social media or other stress-induced activities whittles away my ability to go to the deeper places of life. Without daily attention to what lies beyond the outer world I can easily get mired in the non-essentials and miss the hidden movement leading to future maturity.
…There awaits something of worth even though I may feel emptied and forsaken, beaten or humbled by loss.
From Joyce Rupp’s My Soul Feels Lean (pg. 87).
From Christian Wiman’s meditation, in My Bright Abyss (pg. 161):
Life tears us apart, but through those wounds, if we have tended them, love may enter us. It may be the love of someone you have lost. It may be the love of your own spirit for the self that at time you think you hate. However it comes through, in all these—of all these and yet more than, so much more—there burns the abiding love of God. But if you find that you cannot believe in God, then do not worry yourself with it. No one can say what names or forms God might take, nor gauge the intensity of unbelief we may need to wake up our souls. My love is still true, my children, still with you, still straining through your ambitions and your disappointments, your frenzies and forgetfulness, through all the glints and gulfs of implacable matter—to reach you, to help you, to heal you.
Beneath our enduring friendship
the unspoken, latent fear
I never mentioned to you,
that I would lose you
to work, to poor health,
to a faraway move
or something unforeseen.
And then one day I did lose you.
Death sliced you from me
with a condor’s swiftness,
ripped you out of
my fearful grasp without
a moment’s hesitation.
Always death wins
in who gets to keep.
You are gone now
and so is my old fear,
leaving plenty of room
for loneliness and sorrow
but also sufficient space
for the savoring of love,
the one thing Death
could not take from me.
From Joyce Rupp’s My Soul Feels Lean
Michael Washington 