Oliver

I feel like I have a disability when I read her poetry and compare my own blasted vision and dulled spirit to the persona in her words.

When she writes of this fat lean bleak beautiful world, stringing a taut grid of tensions across her canvas, my eyes are first opened to and then blinded by the intricacy and mystery that we all inhabit.

Her art drives readers to examine their lives, and does so beautifully with both candor and artistry.

Her words have been agents in my spiritual life, challenging my faith and stoking my zeal.

She has taught me to pay attention.

She asks me to contemplate the exhaustive sweeping world, that Great Engulfment of Time and Matter, and has taught me that the only possible response to this world is one of gratitude and praise.

She has taught me that sorrow is valuable. Without taking evil lightly, she has pointed me away from it, towards goodness, towards light.

Like the psalms, her poems stir within me desire and joy enriched by the reality of suffering and doubt, propelling me toward holiness.

Although her poems are pervaded with disquieted reservations, they yet have achieved greater fluency in the language of faith and worship than many who claim that language as their native tongue, and yet stammer and hesitate, or are silent.

"The day's crowding arrived / at this abundant stillness. ... / Gift after gift." (Levertov)

It has been a joyously productive morning in my house today. Our dogs are luxuriating in their fragrant glossy fur (Dove rejuvenating shampoo) after the usual wrestling bout that is bathtime. The kitchen gleams, the bathrooms sparkle, and the living room carpet is lined with vacuum marks. I've made a pot of coffee, and am allowing myself the special indulgence of a third cup as I sit here at the computer and watch the trees pan the sunlight through their branches.

I love these sated pauses for the luxury they are. It is so rarely that I truly lean back and blink the world into fresh focus, so rarely that I can fill my being with the bounty of it and translate that bounty into a yearning song of gratitude.

With Mary Oliver, this morning I am gushing, "Oh! / the sweetness of reality!"

It is a day when my hosannahs crackle with blinding alleluiahs.

I am letting my Self pollute my experience of life more than usual, lately.

Puppeteering my relationships so that I see only strings.
Hearing only the pitch of my voice when I sing.
Feeling only the unstirred beat of my heart when I pray.

I want to see people when I interact with them.
I want to listen to the entire choir.
I want another to stir my heart.

Self is a big mean ole bully, wrestling gentle Spirit to the ground, pretending to be unaware that he needs Spirit to be truly real, truly fulfilled...pretending not to know that he is weaker.

Please bear with my Buechner kick

Buechner writes that living right is living out of your own humanness and thereby awakening the humanness in others, as well as the humanness in yourself.

But what does that mean, "living out of your own humanness"?

When I consider "my own humanness", I consider my unfinishedness, the idea that as a human I am a work in progress. I am undergoing constant refinement and alteration. To "live out of this" is to live in a way that acknowledges that I am incomplete...or rather, that I am being completed. It is to be aware of the agents that are working to change me from without and within. It is to resist my inner default setting, a setting that I cannot quite seem to re-program, that tells me that I am, in and of myself, as good as I'll ever be.

Practically speaking, I live out of my humanness when I open my heart to the painful reality of my spiritual impoverishment, yet without despair. Pain of this sort is actually a symptom of growth, and should be celebrated as such.

It is vital that I keep in mind that living out of my humanness involves living, intentionally, judiciously. It is a state of being that demands more of me than the state of dreaming on autopilot, that opens me up to real challenges and real relationships and real vulnerability. It is a state that chooses to focus on pursuing Life: Abundant Life. It accepts nothing less.

I am so grateful for those in my life who live this way, and have at various times awakened within me (unbeknownst to myself, perhaps even unbeknownst to them) my own humanness.