Fellowship & Fairydust

Before we begin let me confess I gave up nothing for Lent this year; sure there was this vague promise to give up ‘negativity’, but that lasted all of fifteen minutes so…

The truth is, in the days preceding Lent, the thing I most considered giving up was Christianity.  America’s 2016 election and specifically the Evangelical factor thereof had hit me harder than I realized.

You see, I grew up in the Evangelical Christian rite, I know that nightmare world and at a very early age, too early I encountered its nightmare god, a Being who, despite a truly impressive PR campaign to the contrary, had little love to give and even less forgiveness. That first encounter was devastating to my eight-year old psyche, but it was the start of a journey and at 42 I thought I had made progress, but a few days into Lent 2017 I realized with crushing clarity that, despite years of paying lip service to a more loving, more inclusive God, that nightmare being of my childhood still lurks in the deepest recesses of my scarred, battered soul…

My first instinct was to scoop up my wounded, bleeding inner-child and flee until the borders of anything remotely ‘Christian’ was far, far behind me. I seriously considered it. I’d fled before and stayed away for years, but somehow when I tried it this time…I couldn’t go. I wanted to go, I felt that for the preservation of my very sanity I needed to go, but I just couldn’t do it…

Which bring us here just passed the halfway mark of Lent and I finally have something to give up for Lent: god. Or rather, all the god-images to which I unconsciously cling, the benign as well as the malicious ones.

I do not know who God is, and emptying myself of those deeply ingrained god-images is perhaps my way of acknowledging that. Meister Eckhart once famously prayed “to God to rid me of God.” I pray that prayer daily now. I pray it with trembling and hope.

What will come after the emptiness of Lent? I have no idea. I hope, I pray that I may one day have the courage to look inside myself and just begin to answer the question Jesus posed to his disciples in Matthew 16:15 : …14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” 15 “But what about you?” Jesus asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Until then this poem by an unknown author gives me a measure of solace: 

God Is Not a Noun

god is no noun.
and certainly not an adjective.
god is at least a verb,
and even that shrinks her.

god is not so much a woman
as she resides in the improbable
hope of brown mothers.
god is not so much a man
as he is at work in the memory
of my grandfather’s laugh.
god is not trans.
god swims in the tears
of the one who sees
her real self,
at long last,
in the bathroom mirror.

god is not black; neither is he white.
god is wading in the contradiction of songs from slave shacks.
and I have seen god in the alabaster smiles
of children at play.

we’re getting michelangelo all wrong.
god is not the bearded one surrounded by angels,
floating over the sistine.
he is not adam with his muscled back pressing the earth.
no.
god is the closing inch of space
between their reaching fingers.

don’t believe for a moment that god is catholic.
for god’s sake, he isn’t even human.
have you heard the wood thrush
when the sun glistens the huron?
can you see the flowers,
how they speak to bees without a word?

still, god is no spring blossom, no wood thrush.
god is neither the sun nor the bee.
god is what you see in the blossom.
god is when you hear the river
and suddenly discover how
much of it is part of you.

to be clear,
god is not you.
god is somewhere in the 14 billion years
which have come to mean that you are.
god is, after all, at least a verb.
she is neither pharaoh’s rod nor moses’ staff.
we must be the ones to cease our slavery.
she is not interested in blame, neither does she offer praise. truth, gratitude are ours to breathe.
she will not have your answers.
she is too large for answers.
she dances too wildly to be fastened to them,
and answers are nouns anyway.

god is at least a verb,
twirling in the radiant reds of spring
blossoms,
singing in the rare silences between rapid opinions,
attending the tears of dark-skinned deaths, learning in tiny, alabaster smiles.

god is waiting in the space between fingers
that might connect.

he is waiting for us
to stop naming her.
she is waiting for us to
see all of him.

god is waiting

to be un-shrunk

AUTHOR UNKNOWN