True Liberality

Marilynne Robinson has done it again.  On my birthday I received her latest essay collection, entitled When I Was A Child I Read Books.  Sure enough: I'm only 83 pages in, but already her scrupulous, uncompromising insights are exercising my brain and stirring me to new interest in areas of life (politics, education, history, theology) that I rarely take time to consider.  Although I am a dedicated reader, I tend to choose literature of the sort that tells a story rather than makes a reasoned argument.  As a result, Facebook and MPR account for almost the whole of my exposure to whatever discourse is going on in the world.  Imagine what a breath of fresh air these essays are!  Also, how chastening.

Today's essay was particularly inspiring.  Entitled "Open Thy Hand Wide", it describes the motivation for and character of liberality in the Calvinist tradition.  It portrays an attitude toward generosity rooted in Mosaic law, an attitude that promotes unconditional sacrificial giving, that shows much greater concern for the poor than for safeguarding personal property.  Citing the law in Deuteronomy 24:10-13 which commands a creditor to restore at sundown the cloak pledged by the borrower to ensure that he may sleep in his cloak, Robinson writes, "So this-worldly are God's interests that he cares whether some beleaguered soul can find comfort in his sleep.  He cares even to the point of overriding what are called by us, though never by Moses or Jesus, the rights of property."

The rest of the essay goes on to describe the utterly biblical and yet embarrassingly foreign liberalism that Calvin and the Puritans, following Old Testament principles, promoted.  Calvin declares that it is every believer's responsibility to "advance in an increasing liberality", describing it thus: "True liberality is not momentary or of short duration.  They who possess that virtue persevere steadily, and do not exhaust themselves in a sudden and feeble flame, of which they quickly afterwards repent. ...There are indeed many occurrences which retard the progress of our liberality.  We find in men strange ingratitude, so that what we give appears to be ill-bestowed. ...But let us remember this saying, and listen to Paul's exhortation 'not to be weary in well-doing;' for the Lord exhorts us not to momentary liberality, but to that which shall endure during the whole course of our life."  

These injunctions are supported by the theology of mankind being created in God's image.  More Calvin: "We must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the image of God in them, to which we owe all possible honour and love. ...Whoever, therefore, is presented to you that needs your kind offices, you have no reason to refuse him your assistance.  Say he is a stranger; yet the Lord has impressed on him a character which out to be familiar to you; for which reason he forbids you to despise your own flesh.  Say that he is contemptible and worthless; but the Lord shows him to be one whom he has deigned to grace with his own image.  Say that you are obliged to him for no services; but God has made him, as it were, his substitute, to whom you acknowledge yourself to be under obligations for numerous and important benefits.  Say that he is unworthy of your making the smallest exertion on his account; but the image of God, by which he is recommended to you, deserves your surrender of yourself and all that you possess."  

While I know and thought that I believed all these things, I find myself rebuked when I look at my life and the choices I daily make, and discover that I am not following the Christian imperative to advance in increasing liberality.  If anything, I indulge in "momentary liberality," and grow weary in well-doing.  And all too often when I survey the image-bearers around me it is from a posture of grasping selfishness, a desire to protect my own rights and preserve my own comfort.  So often I withhold a kindness that it is in my power to bestow because it would inconvenience me, or because I think it undeserved.  I forget that "I was hungry and you fed me.  I was naked and you clothed me."  I forget what it truly means, to love my neighbor as myself.  

I love how Robinson describes Calvin's angle on this matter.  "For Calvin, every human encounter is of moment, the other in the encounter is always 'sent' or 'offered.'  So respect for every circumstance is reverence to God."

It excites me to think ahead to all the people I am going to be sent in the days that remain to me, of all the opportunities to show my reverence to God, honoring him by sharing his gifts with his image-bearers.    

Inspirited

It's the final day of calendar summer.  As I drove home from work, the far bright moon and the far brilliant lights of the Minneapolis skyline begged to be admired: pieces of a matching set, cold and glittering.  I love to inhale this cold and glittery air and then exhale it, magicked into a warm human vapor.

Tomorrow will be the first day of the week as well as the first day of the season.  I have reason to dread it.  There has been a serious muddle.  All week it has been dormant but prominent, sitting like an evil egg in the cozy nest of my community, and tomorrow it is going to break open and release its cache of consequences.  Those consequences will be long-abiding guests that we must accommodate with all the grace and generosity we can muster, for how we receive them will define us much more decisively than any words we could speak about ourselves.  

I think again about the clarity of the air I breathed tonight, how it quickened me. I think to myself that, in all that lies ahead, if only I could be like that to those I encounter.  Just a pure, clean, life-giving presence they can effortlessly inhale, and then, inspirited, generously breathe out as a gracious human warmth.  

Labor Day

Bryant Avenue North: Late afternoon

09/02/2013

Ours is the house across the street from the tattooed blonde gardening beneath the lazy sway of her front porch's American flag.  

In our own backyard, the sunflowers are leaning their faces over the fence and brushing up on their Spanish, mute spectators of the series of volleyball matches that have been conducted by our neighbors all day long.  

Behind the sunflower fence and across the alley drive, the aroma of grilled meat wafts from a hazy back porch.  

Two shouting boys tear down the alley and leap up the curb where our trash and recycling bins are standing.  They huddle beside the bins until they realize that I am watching them from behind the irrepressible sprawl of the tomato plant in our raised garden bed.  A moment's blinking surprise, a flicker of sheepish grins, and they are bolting back down the drive, leaving me to continue my happy work of harvesting the perfect ripe grape tomatoes from the drooping vines.  

Once indoors, I arrange these fruits on the counter beside my harvest of four juicy beefsteaks and a clutch of dusty carrots.  

Within the mission-style interior of our home the sounds of the neighborhood drift in through the open windows: an ice cream truck's ditty weaving through the streets, cars blasting music, voices of children and voices of adults, a rowdy array of accents and tones quarreling and laughing and hollering.  They keep me company as I do my afternoon housekeeping: loads of laundry, menu-planning, floor sweeping, dish-washing, food-preparing.  

Soon enough the food will be eaten, the laundry folded into closet drawers, the dishes air-dried on the kitchen rack.  I will take Janie out to the back stoop and watch the horizon-hugging lights of Orion signal the advent both of twilight and autumn.  

like bread

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

[Ursula K. LeGuin]

Two Years

Shocking that this anniversary has passed unnoticed except in afterthought!  The promised two years of vigilance following my final days of chemotherapy are over, and according to my oncologist I can now consider myself "cured."

Perhaps the forgetting of the anniversary is its greatest memorial.

I had expected to meet the day with fanfare, but as I reflect on it I now think it fitting that I celebrated by simply doing those quiet little life things that I had been deprived of for so long: curling my hair, shaving my legs, drinking (and enjoying) a cup of coffee, doing an honest day's work.  Feeling healthy without even really noticing it.

Even so, I must remind myself that taking notice is important too.

Today isn't any particular anniversary of any major life event.  Therefore.  As it was good that I kept the anniversary of my cure by overlooking it, so it is best that I observe the quotidian perfection of this dripping May afternoon by pausing my day for a moment of glad commemoration.

excerpt: "From The Distance"

The wheel of eternity is turning
in time, its rhymes, austere,
at long intervals returning,
sing in the mind, not in the ear.

-Wendell Berry

Vermiculite tea

I've just tucked a seedling or two into each of the homely newspaper pots on my front porch.  Stepping backwards and ardently sniffing their aromatic cargo of potting soil and vermiculite, I survey the three trays of uneven and patently homemade pots.

Am I satisfied?  Not yet.  Expectant and optimistic I most certainly am, but I will not be able to make true peace with this day's light labor until I see green.

Until then, I'll drink it.  Reaching for my mug of green tea, I intend to make a solitary toast to the seedlings in their newsprint houses...but catch myself in time.  While I worked I must have accidentally shaken some vermiculite into the cup: flecks of it swirl against the porcelain edges.

Instead of a toast, then, a libation!  I unlatch the front door, glance over my shoulder significantly, and douse the threshold of my home with a mugful of lukewarm vermiculite tea. It's a grander gesture anyway, and one that seems to encompass not merely the humble potential of those inhabited pots, but also the many broader, deeper, less tangible potentials that the home itself holds.

Janie doesn't bother getting to her feet as she witnesses this odd ritual, but she pays homage to my little ceremony with a few lazy sweeps of her tail across the carpet.

And it is spring.

At home

It is a March evening in Minnesota: the lingering light surprises me still, only a few weeks since Daylight Savings reset our clocks.  7 pm, and the windshields of the cars that line our street still wink up the last glow of day. As the sun sinks, the room I most enjoy is the kitchen, which faces west and soaks up the sunset.

And it is Friday: a good one, although not THE Good One...that's next week.  Friday means more to me now that I no longer work weekends.  Two days out of seven to spend as I please!  What luxury.

Tonight Friday has meant preparation, which is a favorite form of work for me, since in this particular instance it means very little actual labor.  I just sat at the dining room table with my french press pot and a plate of french toast and bananas and did some planning for tomorrow: research into when my local farmer's market opens, a few tasks related to the church bulletin, and the composition of a mighty spring cleaning to-do list.  Then some garden daydreaming as I looked ahead to spring's arrival.  Also some brainstorming about the impending visit of my family in just a week: sights to see, food to prepare, beds to magic into existence.  (See also the aforementioned mighty spring cleaning to-do list.)

As I anticipated their arrival, I spent a few moments trying to conjure up how my new home and hometown will appear to them during their stay.

It has been three months since I changed my last name and moved into my husband's home--now my home!--in Minnesota.  Part of me protests that surely it cannot have been three months already.  How new and fresh everything still feels!  Another part of me drowsily smiles that it has surely been much longer than that.  How comfortable I am, how natural it is to be here!  Perhaps that is what the honeymoon period means: the excitement and security of sharing a fresh start with someone who is also strangely new to you, and yet who feels familiar enough and is dear enough to make any new place feel like home.  At any rate, that is what it means to me.

With one out of four seasons of my first year of marriage behind me (at least I trust that it is behind me: the calendar says spring has arrived and there is the matter of the daylight, even though my morning walks with Janie over icy snow-banked sidewalks remain treacherous indeed), I am peering into the season ahead, the goals I hope to accomplish, goals that would've surprised me years ago.

Aspirations to better stewardship: to gardening enough to bring a significant portion of our own food to the table this summer and autumn (and perhaps even winter, if I dream big), and to seeking out quality foods that will not burden the world in which I live, but will promote ecological and personal health.  This topic, which meant so little to me that I rarely gave it a first thought, let alone a second, is now one that increasingly stirs my conscience and imagination as I learn more through online courses and personal readings. Such stirrings are at times uncomfortable, but they also gladden me: they remind me of all the good work before me, the myriad ways that I can quietly do my part to thank and serve my Creator God.  That blend of excitement and security again: the newness of learning about this world and feeling called to act on this knowledge, while at the same time resting in the assurance that He controls all things, that He is the Provider as well as the Creator.  Active faith and passive faith.

Then there are domestic aspirations, particularly in the culinary realm.  My limping efforts in the kitchen (which have been complicated of late by my turmoil regarding the groceries we consume) daily remind me of how very much I have yet to learn.

And there is my work with vulnerable adults, which gives me such joy and satisfaction, and also ample room to grow!

Along with all these good things, I aspire to deeper relationships here in this new home.  Relationships that are true and pure and have the radiance of God's love saturating their every demonstration.  I aspire to a generosity that invites all to the table to taste and see that the Lord is good indeed: a hospitality of heart as well as home.   To faithfulness in all these enormous little things.

I have work to do, praise God.  But now it is dark, and the day is done, and I am ready to lift my soul to heaven for an evening blessing, and rest awhile.  

Like Snow

Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly,
leaving nothing out.

-Wendell Berry-

Rejoice

"There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice." [John Calvin]

July 14, 2012

RING SONG

Think of the secret rings carved in the tree

that, on the day you took my hand

and lit it with this shining band,

screened us from the summer heat.

Our future too will be engraved:

each year a circus ring of living braved,

then sheathed by time and memory to stand:

a lived and living thing that offers shade.

---

There are sounds that have a ring,

that catch the light,

that sparkle, as bright

as this diamond I wear.

I leave you the ring of these words in the air:

I love you.

Eden was a garden

First I hoe.  The dirt beneath my bare feet bakes my soles, and a puff of dust coughs up around my ankles every step I take.  Above my head the pale blue sky rings with brightness.  Cooking in my own perspiration, I drag the hoe over the ground stroke after stroke after stroke, enjoying the feel of the earth cracking then crumbling then churning beneath it.  I enjoy the toughness of the task, the strain of it, the way it makes my heart pound a little, the way I can find a tempo to work within that silences my brain.  This brain-silence is no robotic mindlessness, but rather a vibrant clarity of purpose that focuses me so completely in each moment that all other concerns are eclipsed. 
When I finish hoeing the final row of corn I chuck the hoe over the garden fence and grab the handle of my weed bucket, my shoulders burning and my shirt drenched, a brilliance behind my eyeballs that aches.  After the driving beat of the hoe, the silence that enfolds me is a rich relief.  My heartbeat remembers its natural rhythm and as it calms I find my mind kindling awake. 

I love this part the most.  Hunkering on my heels, I inspect the first bean plant, grazing fingertips over the flowering sprouts, combing fingers up from the stem through the branching leaves, just feeling the shape and the texture of it.  I could almost weed by touch alone at this point, so familiar am I with the contours of my own plants, although I would never be so reckless.  Besides, I love to look at them as much as I love to touch them: their particular green coated with dust and sunshine, the dainty flowers adorning each ripening bunch.  I love the way the air espouses their scent when I touch them, love knowing that I’ve stirred to life the earthy fragrances that fill the air I’m breathing. 

After inspecting each plant, I clear the earth around them of weeds, filling my bucket several times over as I move from my bean rows into the luxuriant jungle of my tomato vines (bursting wildly out of their wire cages), and then the sprawl of my melons (lifting scratchy tendrils to drag up weeds from beneath them, correcting the path of the rambling ones that have sought sunshine in the corn or beyond the perimeter of my patch), and then my peppers (sighing over their blighted produce and wilting leaves), and finally the hardy potato bushes, the rows and rows of sturdy corn, already knee high.  I follow the same routine with each plant.  First attentive scrutiny.   Then the loosening of my mind as I pull weeds that leaves me room to note the bigger world:  distant traffic, children’s voices, insects jamboreeing, doors slamming, lawn mowers purring, even on occasion the crack of fireworks.
   
This is the summer I learned to love gardening: the blending of labor and languor, of concentration and abstraction, of sunshine and soil and sweat.  All five senses get their moment.  Mind and body are equally engaged. 

I would declare that I am--heart, mind, soul, and strength--the happiest creature on God’s green earth. 

shine like transfiguration

I’ve spent the morning cleaning while it has thunderstormed gloriously.  The living room of my apartment is on the third floor, and the south facing wall has a huge windowed door that opens onto a trim balcony with a cast iron rail, and a tangle of leafy branches beyond.  Once I’d stowed the vacuum, as the rainfall made it inadvisable for me to seek my usual morning retreat in the wicker comfort of the balcony furniture, I retired to my living room to drink my morning coffee instead.  With the door pulled open the lush sound of the rain still reaches me freely and the cooled air carries its scent and taste into the room.  Janie stands guard on the rug before the door, her nose lifted and tremulous, picking up signals from the verdant breezes that are wasted on me. 

Yesterday was Father’s Day, and I spent it at my sister’s house in rural Ontario to celebrate the baptism of her youngest child.  My father (“Poppy” as the other two children clamouringly call him) came along, as well as my mom (“Grammy”) and two of my brothers.  These occasions are always a special treat because we see our Hannah and her husband and children so rarely.  The children change drastically between visits, although there is always that inimitable something that marks them, reassuringly enduring although impossible to put into words.  Sammy’s Sammy-ness.  Ava’s Ava-ness.  Natalie I met for the first time, her abundance of chins and her turned-up nose and the blue eyes that already might be darkening to hazel.  The household is as rowdy as you would expect with three children aged three and under, and no doubt the presence of five adoring relatives rather catalyzed the tendency to chaos. 

Such an experience, all our lives bumping against each other in that summery household, almost makes the bond of love a palpable thing.  Perhaps there is a science that God sees in it, invisible to us aside from its effects—as though, in peering into the windows of the living room where we all congregated, what he might see would be a very intricate sort of chemistry: each soul uniquely bonded to each other soul, all of them interacting according to their individual natures and by universal laws under various circumstances to produce a beautiful result, a result that they feel but do not perhaps perceive as he does. 

For instance, there was a moment when I was briefly alone in the living room, and Hannah was within eyesight stooping to pick up a purple-faced squalling Natalie, and the thought struck me that she and I have been alive for the exact same number of seconds, although our first gulps of oxygen were eleven minutes apart. I was taken with the realization of what a rare relationship the two of us shared.  Meanwhile she was oblivious to me, cradling Natalie and smiling and murmuring soothing words, feeling an utterly different sort of fierce bond with this child she had made and carried and brought into the world.  And Natalie was bonded to her, and I was bonded to Natalie, in singular and powerful ways as well.  Maybe what was a moment’s brief mute flare of interacting and overlapping fellowship to the three of us was in the eyes of God and his angels like color, or light winking off a wave.  Maybe we are as unaware of the phenomena we create as the elements of the periodic table are. 

The idea takes me to Christ.  If that is true, what of the Incarnation, of divinity dressing in our nature and entering the periodic table of humanity?  That is what God did.  A painter infuses his identity into a painting, and God’s Spirit has indeed filled Creation with intimations of God’s nature.  But God went so far as to become His creature.  He did not stop at portrayal, at artistic rendering from a specific vantage point.  He entered the picture he was creating and created it from the inside out as well as the outside in. 

As I watched the minister of that tiny congregation in Burgessville Ontario dip his fingers into water and sprinkle drops onto Natalie’s crinkled forehead, my heart pounded.  My mind was still taken with the idea of love as a transcendent physical phenomenon, and I felt an acute awareness of the mass of faces turned on Natalie in that room, of their bonds to each other.  Beyond that, though, I had a supreme sense of God’s very presence: his Spirit in the words the pastor intoned, in the hearts upon which the words fell.  The knowledge that the water on Natalie’s young flesh represented blood of all things: Christ’s blood, his claim on her that transcended even the claim of a Creator.  The bond that the triune God was establishing in covenant with her surpassed all the other powerful human bonds that existed in that sanctuary.  Marvelously enough, it was a bond that he had also established with my own soul, and with most if not all of the other souls present.

This world, this life, is richer beyond the powers of my human soul to grasp, and the tantalizing glimpses I receive are a grace for which I constantly thirst.  I spend most of my time blinded by the ordinary, allowing its veil to prevent me from catching intimations of the true world.  It is so easy to despise the day of small things.  When things are taking their “ordinary” course, it’s hard to remember what matters. 


In Robinson’s Gilead, the narrator speculates upon what relationship this present reality bears to ultimate reality.  I love the conclusion he reaches, and my heart rises to the challenge he expresses:


“It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life.  And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. …But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than that thought seems to imply.  Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.  You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.” 

favorite chore

Taking out the trash: my chore again tonight.  I heave the third stretchy black bag, redolent of rot and sickly sweet, onto the chipped yellow wagon parked outside the far exit and reach for the handle. 

As I pull the squeaking cart out of its pebbled ruts and onto the walkway, I find myself awakening to the surrounding world, as though I myself am being pulled out of the pebbled ruts of my work life, loaded with the cargo that exudes the odor of a day's worth of anxieties and burdens, onto some smoother ontological plane that gently, beautifully eclipses each individual sense.  Birds fill my ears with sweet infrequent questionings over the humming backdrop of cicadas and treefrogs.  The air is warm and soft on my skin, a friendly presence.  Smoke from a nearby bonfire lends it a convivial tang, which mingles with the fragrances of growing grass and spring flowers. Above my head the constellations have been flung across the darkening sky, and they seem to gain in brilliancy with every passing moment as their backdrop deepens toward nightfall.  I walk through intensifying shadow towards the hulking dumpsters at the far end of the estate, dragging my little wagon, adding the scrape of my footsoles and the churning wagon wheels and trash stink and my own coffee breath to the lavishness that surrounds me--shedding them somehow with every step I take.

This particular night I am thinking about all the times I have taken out the trash over the years, and how charmed those forays so often have been--as this foray is, tonight.  The break they have afforded me from other labor, the sometimes shocking refreshment of slipping outside and remembering that the world is still there waiting, no matter how stultified and stagnant my day has felt up until then.  These brief journeys have been, so many times, the cool hand of God on my burning forehead. 

I fling the dumpster lid open and hoist the heavy bags into its black maw, pause before I close the lid again to watch the headlights illumine the street several yards away, revelling in my invisibility.  Then I take again the handle of my emptied yellow wagon and retrace my steps, down the drive, through the cast iron gate and the little path in the hedge, back onto the pebbled parking space, to a crooked halt.  Usually by this point my own heart feels relieved of the waste that had accumulated over the course of the day, stilled and receptive. 

I pull open the door and return to work. 

It Happened Overnight

Stranded in Minneapolis during the collapse of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, December 11, 2010

 Trapped in the airport far from home
I watch the scene from every screen.
Less than a week of falling fluff
(soft noiseless stuff) had felled the dome.
 At first, beneath the weighty drift
a telling swell, snow dusting light.
Then the sudden give and cave,
the drift a drop of driving white--
the air ashake.  And I, awake.

All that night I cannot sleep.
Over the arena of my heart
thoughts of you fall thick and deep.

wonderful work

I am tucking one of the residents in bed for the night.  We've shared a laughter-lush afternoon and evening, and she takes my hand and kisses the top of it as I perch on the edge of her bed and make sure her head is elevated properly. 

"I like you, honey," she informs me--one of many sweet refrains that she frequently addresses to those privileged to spend any amount of time with her. 

"And I love you!" I gush my usual reply, turning her hand over in mine to plant a reciprocal kiss on its wrinkled top. 

"Thank you for kissing my hand," she murmurs.

"You sleep so well, and let me know if you need anything, okay?" 

She reaches her arms up to wrap me in a long hug and says, "I will, honey."

Then I am on my feet and thinking ahead to the work that remains for me to do once I leave the dark bedroom.  I notice, as I cast a parting smile in her direction, that her face is quizzical.  "Is everything okay?" I ask, pausing in the chink of hall light to await her response. 

She hesitates, and then says vaguely, "I need something."

I turn my full attention on her again.  "What can I do for you?"

Her eyes widen and she scootches upright in her bed, declaring with enthusiastic abruptness--as though she's made a compelling discovery--

"I need another hug!" 

---

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in a haystack of light...

(Mary Oliver)

Waiting

Three months had been lived (what a grace!) since my last checkup, and so I find myself walking down Cherry Street in downtown Grand Rapids yet again.  The wind skips like a fool behind me, shoving my shoulders and ruffling my hair, a young and lively and rakish spring wind.  He swings me around the corner of the brick building to the entrance, and I wave at the familiar red-suspendered figure of the valet as I duck through the automatic doors.   The wind does not stick around: one icy farewell gust, which nonetheless warms my spirit, and he's gone, and I'm wrapped in silence and the chillingly institutional warmth of the building. 

The smell hits me instantly: soap smell, clean and chemical and, to my remembering nose, faintly nauseating.  Each visit it bothers me less. 

I pass by the information desk and round the corner, past the elevator, to the Lack's Infusion Center, where the receptionist is giving directions to a smiling man in a sharp black suit.  He steps back deferentially to let me check in, and she calls my name to mind after a quick glance at her computer screen.  After verifying that my information has undergone no changes since my last appointment, she nods me over to the waiting room, calling to my back, "You look great!" 

The waiting room is a space within a space, like an organ of the body.  The far end of it curves to follow the curve of an exterior staircase, and part of the wall that curves is made of chunky cloudy glass squares, through which it is possible to discern the distorted shadows of people as they climb up or down the staircase.  There are no windows--just that milky glass and, on the other end of the room, an aquarium embedded in the wall with its disinterested culture of fish and bubbles. 

I choose a seat beside the mannequins, three red-lipped pouting stares on tiered shelves behind glass, with silken scarves around their long plastic necks and fashionable wigs covering their shiny bald heads.    They separate me from the nearest human occupants of the waiting room: an old man and two very young healthy-looking boys.  One of the boys catches my eye and I grin at him.  For a few moments we play a little game: he turns away from me, I pretend not to see him, and then--ha!  I catch his eye and grin, and he burrows his face against the old man's arm.  The game ends when a panting gray-haired lady steps into the waiting room and announces, "I'm done.  Let's get out of here."  The three men flurry around her, boys clutching her hands, man solicitously taking her purse from her and offering his arm. When they have left, I open my book and scan a few sentences.

Women in scrubs poke heads into the room and call names in conjunction with the name of a doctor.  People rise when summoned, vanish, and reappear after a few moments with bandages taped to the crook of their arms, or, after a longer timespan, to retrieve their moral support and belongings, shrug into their coats, and depart. 

I find myself regarding the carpet, which consists of huge blocks of various earth tones: green, yellow, brown, red, orange.  It looks to me like the colors are afflicted themselves with some disease, some cancer that has leeched them of brightness.  Suddenly I am seeing disease everywhere.  In the carpet, dull and stained and pulling apart at the seams.  In the mechanical wheezing of the computers across the room from me, which I know from experience are ridden with viruses, slow and outdated and destined for the junkyard before long.  In the glass wall's clouded vision.  In the half-empty styrofoam cup of coffee left to congeal on the puzzle table.  Every chip in the furniture catches my eye, every scratch in the shabby yellow paint.  I remember that the room is cut off from telephone tower reception, and even though I have no reason to call anyone, the thought troubles me.

The music begins to bother me, too.  It is elevator music, waiting room music, aimless and anesthetizing, empty technique.  It does not invite a response--if anything, it encourages disengagement of the emotions, lulls you into not-feeling. 

Heaps of magazines cover coffee tables and bulge out of shelves on the walls.  Two circular tables stand supporting unfinished puzzles.  I think about all the fingertips that have marked them, and about all the sets of brains that have regarded them.  All the lives on hold, penned up in this little waiting room.

Memories of previous visits always descend upon me eventually in this room.  First always is the image of one very ill woman who had been wheeled into the waiting room soon after I and my parents had arrived for our first consultation with my doctor, and the sick fright I had felt as I saw her piteous hollow unforgettable face--how like a death's head it looked when she smiled.  I don't let myself wonder about her long, a year since our paths crossed, because I think it unlikely that she is yet living, and that assumption twists my gut with a sort of baffled survivor's guilt.

Then I am remembering my first morning of chemo, a week after my discharge from the hospital, sitting with my father and my friend and the man I love on that very couch where today the old man with the gray ponytail is dozing alone.  I had been so relieved to have a conversation with a woman who was waiting for her mother to emerge from the chemo ward, to divert my mind by entering someone else's trouble, distancing myself from my own imminent treatment.  I remember how it hurt to sit and stand when my name was called, each movement tearing at the stitches that still zippered my stomach together.

The recollection has me jumping to my feet,  relieved at how easy and good the gesture feels, striding to the puzzle table, where this morbid bent in my brain has me dwelling on the--is it irony?--of placing enormous difficult puzzles in a waiting room to divert people who are grappling with enormous difficult problems in their lives.  And that awful artwork on the wall, disembodied hands releasing bright balloons into a blue sky.  Letting Go it is labeled, and seems to preside over those partially finished jigsaws and their jumbled unrealized potential. 

It happens every time I return here: this recognition that no matter how long I live, I will never be able to sit in this or any other waiting room and feel like I have done all I can.   The spectre of unfinished business will ever haunt me in places like this, spaces that bring me face to face with the fact of my finitude.  It is good for me to remember this.  It makes me weigh the potentials of my life in the scales of eternity.  It forces me to prioritize again, to shake my heart back into perspective.  And it drives me back to the Alpha and Omega, the only One who can give me grace to run my race, fight the good fight, keep the faith. 

Always I end up lost in prayer, waiting on God in the waiting room.

The wind is waiting for me as I stride back outdoors after my checkup and I draw in deep lungfuls of spring air as we walk back up Cherry Street towards my parked car, where I put the key in the ignition and resume things for as long as they are there for me to resume.  This side of Eden, resuming and faithfully resuming are my task.  I leave perfection to heaven.

"Forbid my vision / To take itself for a curious angel..."

A few nights ago I had a long visit with some work friends.  For awhile, our conversation engaged the topic of what God's purpose could possibly be in permitting disabilities to exist.  The three of us work as aides in a home for adults with severe mental and physical disabilities, so the topic is one we have each had cause to ponder in a very personal way.

My brain fills with a rush of reactions all at once whenever the idea of God's tolerance of disability is broached in my presence. I feel the need to point out that that question is just one tiny branch of the immense question of why God tolerates any distortion of His Creation at all...including the disabilities that we all suffer in this fallen world. And then I am bursting with reasons I am so glad that God has placed these people on earth, in my life, as I reflect on what they have taught me about myself, about God, and about how to live...and also as I fondly picture my friendships with each one.

I have not struggled as much with the theodicy inherent in any discussion of the disabled population as my coworkers have.  This does not mean that I do not sorrow for the way sin manifests itself in the world; merely that I can entrust its outcomes to God.  I recognize that some would see this response as taking an easy way out of a difficult problem, but I disagree.  I believe that bitterness is easy. Unbelief is easy. Despair is easy.  Faith in God is hard. Believing that He is Who He claims to be, in the face of evil, is not easy. So when someone asks why God allows children to be born with mental and physical impairments, I do not say it carelessly, but I do say confidently, "If He does it, it is for good."  Perhaps I'll flesh that topic out more thoroughly later--you can't explain a theodicy satisfactorily in a paragraph (indeed, perhaps you can't explain a theodicy "satisfactorily" at all!  Terms are slippery!).  For now, leaving that difficult issue in God's hands, I can still affirm the powerful personal impact these people have had on me. 

None of us right now is what God created us to be. Working with disabled people has given me insight into what I myself must look like against heavenly standards. My physical body is ridden with the effects of sin.  My strength and stamina and coordination (even at my best) have definite constraints, I am vulnerable to disease and injury, and what mobility and powers I do possess are sure to be lost over time.  The same sort of impediments afflict me mentally: my thoughts are cloudy, and I am limited in how much I can learn, and in how to use that learning.  I am mostly and most disproportionately consumed with myself...I lack true perspective.  And I am oblivious, for the most part, to how deeply disabled I am!  Blind even to the fact of my blindness.  These impairments affect my behavior, leading me to commit absurd follies and grievous offenses that defy the good law that God has set in place (for my happiness).  When I see these impairments from which I suffer "writ large" in the persons with whom I work, I realize that what separates me from them is the degree of impairment, not the fact of it.

And that leads me to praise!  Like these people, I am not left to live out my days in neglect and suffering.  Like them, I still have within me the ability to experience the delights of this created world, to interact mentally and emotionally and spiritually with God and with others...even if those experiences and interactions are flawed and curbed by my disabilities.  And, like them, I have been given more than I could ever have known to ask for if left to myself--more than I could ever have imagined.  I have a Caretaker, and He not only meets my barest human needs, He also daily lavishes love and attention upon me, gives my life richness and purpose, and helps me to better myself.  He is divinely patient with my weaknesses and failings.  In becoming acquainted with the residents under my care, I have been ushered into an infinitely humbling and breathlessly heroic vision of what God's love means.  The idea of providence has taken on a dazzling luster.  I cannot but praise Him when I think of it. 

Of course, having experienced God's tender provision in my own life, I feel compelled to communicate what I've been given, as much as I am able, to those beneath my care.  In this way, they have assisted me by inspiring me to godliness.  Not a day passes without these dear people challenging me to tend the fruits of the Spirit in the garden of my soul.   They give me a thousand opportunities to practice love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.  And by practice, I mean practice, because (they daily remind me) such graces do not come easily to my disabled heart!  Things like training my touch to a patient tenderness while assisting with cares that could be executed faster if done with more roughness, less compassion.  Or striving to be a tranquil presence that warms them with care and attention, when I would rather spend my time conversing with staff members or getting ahead on my chores. Responding to even the most trying situations with composure and grace and cheerfulness rather than frustration and rudeness and ill will.  Being faithful in the little things--food quality and housekeeping--that contribute to making the building feel like a home, when it would be so easy to cut corners and let things slide.  Each day spent with them shows me how lacking my care for them is in comparison to how I have myself been cared for, and it drives me to seek to serve them better. 

Not to mention, they are simply delightful human beings! There is intrinsic pleasure that results from learning to communicate with them, knowing what makes them happy or upset, what causes them discomfort and how to alleviate it.  Also in seeing them respond to my attention and interest with affection, realizing that they recognize and respond to my voice, and arriving at a relational level where we even have inside jokes and practices.  Along with all they have taught me, I am blessed to be able to also claim them as friends. 

So, fallen disabled human being that I am, I am grateful that God has filled my life with these other fallen disabled human beings.  I hate to witness the effects of their impairments, which (like the impairments themselves) are often so much more severe than the effects of my own.  I yearn for their future restoration, even as I yearn for my own future restoration. 

In the meantime, I love them and praise God for them. 

I am convinced that this world is better because they are in it. 

I always find myself returning to Richard Wilbur's The Eye, particularly Part II.  I am ever claiming it as a prayer for my own life, and it certainly is an appropriate way to end this particular rumination. 

Preserve us, Lucy,

From the eye's nonsense, you by whom

Benighted Dante was beheld,

To whom he was beholden.

If the salesman's head

Rolls on the seat-back of the 'bus

In ugly sleep, his open mouth

Banjo-strung with spittle,

Forbid my vision

To take itself for a curious angel.

Remind me that I am here in body,

A passenger, and rumpled.

Charge me to see

In all bodies the beat of spirit,

Not merely in the tout en l'air

Or double pike with layout

But in the strong,

Shouldering gait of the legless man,

The calm walk of the blind young woman

Whose cane touches the curbstone.

Correct my view

That the far mountain is much diminished,

That the fovea is prime composer,

That the lid's closure frees me.

Let me be touched

By the alien hands of love forever,

That this eye not be folly's loophole

But giver of due regard.

Morning Ritual

A steady rain was falling, grasses greening beneath a smear of grey. 

Janie shadowed me as I took up a lighter and lit wicks on bookshelves and coffee tables, filling the house with a cozy glow. Then we both settled in the living room and waited for the water I'd set on the stovetop to boil, her tail an inconstant beat on the floor that quickened if I looked her way, accelerated when I addressed her, and died out whenever my attention drifted. 

My canine lady in waiting trailed me into the kitchen after the water had boiled and watched me pour coffee beans into the grinder (cowering as I reduced them to grounds in the noisy machine) and tap them into the French press.  I carefully poured steaming water over the grounds and stirred the mixture till it bloomed rich and foamy, then set it aside to steep. 

I stared out the kitchen window at the fat squirrels plundering Oma's birdfeeders and waited.  Meanwhile, Janie was sniffing the garbage closet, her tail wagging at least as enthusiastically as it had in response to my most affectionate tones--an observation guaranteed to keep me humble.

Four minutes later I returned to the counter. Janie padded across the kitchen to me and leaned her warm weight against my legs while I stood there and pressed down the plunger with my palm.

I poured myself that simple, essential thing: a cup of coffee. 

A steady rain was falling, grasses greening beneath a smear of grey, while I drank it lazily in the living room.

It’s a flirtatious March day.  The sunshine winks at me from the windshields of passing cars, and the wind is toying with my curls, and here I sit at a sticky outdoor table with my laptop and my coffee mug.  I should be working.  I should be clearing the backyard of a winter’s worth of dog poop, or purging my closets and drawers of wool and flannel, or at the very least gathering some of those blooming daffodils for the pitcher on my bookshelf.  Instead I am googling everything from “poems about spring” to “how to start a garden,” and inundating my system with cup after cup of the most ordinary Maxwell House brew.  

I will not argue that I could have used the free bright hours of this afternoon much more productively.  Even so, I do not consider them wasted or misspent.  I claimed them, in my own small way.  I have found some good poems.  I have seeded my heart with Edenic aspirations that I hope to one day realize in the sunshine and soil of my future. 

And now remains to me the long-lit length of early evening, to do the tasks I’ve been postponing.