For taste and for smell

In the beginning, God was getting down with the extravagance of His creation

And one of the stodgier angels muttered something about too much color

And God laughed and the laugh smelled like pomegranates and glittered like birdshine

This world does not need to break my heart with its loveliness, but it does every day--

And it pleased God--pleases God, if you like--that it, this earth, should possess redolence and verve

For taste and for smell, to please the eye and to gladden the heart

To enliven the soul. These are His words.

So raspberries break like laden clouds of grace on my tongue.

Lacrimosa et risum

"Festival," by Brian Kershisnik

Ah, this world is so broken, and my heart is broken, and I don’t see how God’s heart is not broken, except that He is God and even when His heart is broken, He knows it will not always be broken, because He heals all things and wipes away all tears from off all eyes, personally and one by one, and yes, I believe that. There’s that heartbreakingly lovely passage in Gilead: “Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. ‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’ It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.” The promise points to the reality of the need. To allow God to come to my face and wipe away tears requires a vulnerability and a humility seldom encountered in adults. But I think that is what it will take, to acknowledge him as Father. And sometimes perhaps our brokenness brings us to that point where we say, “Yes, now, please come and wipe them away. I have tried and tried, but my hands don’t work, and I need your gentle fingers to dry my face.” Perhaps that is the point. Children know they need someone to take away their tears.

I was reading this poem by Rilke called “Christ and the Children” (“And like the flowers that shoot up galore / on early days in spring, / the children flock to him, / while adults rarely mention his name. / For children have been friends with him for long / and they hurry to the gate of his embrace. / A pale one says, ‘You surely are the grace / for which my mother daily lifts her hands.’”) and then I looked up to see my children playing with the neighbor children in a sprinkler—their eyes were all bright and shining and good, and I saw Christ in the children. I saw, too, the other day while I was driving in my car a young girl—maybe ten years old—summer-sunbrowned and riding her bicycle, making wild gestures with her hands and sort of swinging her hair back and forth to make her friend behind her laugh on her bicycle. I wished her future husband could see that youthfulness, that exuberance. He will know her as a lovely young woman, but not as a girl. I feel privileged to know my daughter as a girl.

But here’s the thing, I was thinking the other day of this time a friend of mine called me to tell me that his daughter had been raped. I went over to his house, and he cried into my arms, and said he had a fifty cent solution, he had a fifty cent solution, and he shook in rage and grief, and I laid my hands on his head to give him a blessing. What do you say at such a time? Why do daughters get raped? Why do friends shake in my arms? How does such darkness exist in a world that has shown itself to me so often in so much splendor? How does one offer any real comfort, any real hope when you can’t fix it, can’t take it back, can’t change the world? Well, God pours out love, which is not always the same thing as healing. But it’s something, and it’s real.

My wife is downstairs right now, playing gently on the piano: Pachelbel’s Canon. A song she learned because I love it and she loves me. And I am reminded that one day the air will begin to shimmer and shake and hum with a music that is not of this world. And a light will come from the east, growing in intensity and brightness, causing the air to shake, to undulate and roll, to swell and to sing. Causing the grass to reach and to sing and the trees to shiver with music. And I will feel myself becoming lighter, sorrow and heaviness melting away like snow in spring, will feel the joy I have always known myself capable of, will look around to see others, to find ourselves soaring through the air. To meet the Lord in the clouds, the scripture says. A new song. We will come singing a new song. A song beyond words but created with human voices. And the voices of others, of angels and gods. I will know the words or the non-words, the motions of the mouth and the movement of lungs even though I have never heard it, yet I know I have heard it. I was born from this song, brought forth from this light. And the Lord will wipe away all tears from off all eyes. There will be no more sorrow and no more death. I will know as I am known. I will rise. The earth will become new. All things will be new. All things. All things.

85:10

The Psalmist doesn’t say

whether they were in a tree or not

or whether it began with holding hands

or really anything about how these two

old friends ended up in passionate embrace

Just this: “Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other.”

Reported with the laconic stroke of a headline.

How does he even know something so personal?

Were there witnesses?

Was old David hiding in the bushes

stilling the strings of his old harp

as these two came ambling into the space

lighted by streetlamp, laughing together?

Were they walking home

from the house of a mutual friend

where their eyes just happened to collide

for the briefest, most enduring moment?

Did the singer see the brush of hands,

the lighting of eyes and the quickening

of pulses?

Did the two just decide by happenstance

to climb a sycamore tree

to watch the moon rise over the valley?

And was it Righteousness who made the first move

or Peace, with his gentle, shy, yet manly ways

who first leaned in with more than friendly intent?

Did he grab her by the arms like they do in the old movies,

or was it just a gentle peck on the cheek?

These are only questions, but one thing is certain:

Things have never been the same since the day

that Righteousness and Peace kissed each other,

and everything is charged with hope.

Ablutions

"Gardening in the Rain" by Brian Kershisnik

I like the idea of lares, these small gods of hearth and home—open and ancient acknowledgments of the myriad shards of holiness which shoot through the most seemingly mundane aspects of existence. Isn’t this what all poetry celebrates—the holiness of the everyday?

I remember one cold Saturday giving the kids a bath. In winter they will often curl up under their hooded towels and sit hunched on the bathroom floor. It’s a visual image I love. Well, this day they were crouching on the bathmat when Lydie saw a bug. She exclaimed, and I went to witness. Lydie and Em had their hoods on and sat crouched and bent over the small bug, their heads inclined as if in reverent acknowledgment of the holiness of very small things. They looked like a couple of colorful monks, Lydia in bright pink and Emerson in orange surrounded by our bright blue bathroom. Blue shag-carpet grass. It made me smile.

Tuesday night at our house was a celebration of the human capacity for expulsion. My children spent much of the night vomiting and retching and moaning. At one point, I think it was about four a.m., after Julie and I had spent an hour cleaning vomit out of the carpet and had changed and rinsed four sets of sheets and four sets of pajamas, I was giving my lissome ballerina daughter a bath, spraying the half-digested food out of her hair. I had tried to hold it back in a pony tail while she puked, but her hair is unruly and indomitable and wanted to fall in her face. She was shivering, fragile and lovely as a butterfly as the water fell over her. I was tired, but the thought came to me that of all the humans who live or will live on this planet, I am one of only a very small handful who will ever have the honor of rinsing vomit out of the hair of this holy child. Suddenly the air was music and the light was gently bright. Exhaustion melted away, replaced by gratitude and mysterious tears. How many such ablutions have I performed without perceiving the beauty of washing another, washing for another? “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.” “Unto him that loved us, and washed us . . . be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.”

Julie spent the next two days washing clothing and sheets. When I was a small boy, I remember my mom saying once, “I have figured out what the Neverending Story is. The real Neverending Story is laundry.” I want my mother and my wife to know that the ground on which they stand is holy. “What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? . . . These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” And, “He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment.” A friend once told me the story of a woman who had lost her memory completely. She did not recognize her family or friends. They took her to the home where she had lived for many years, and none of the rooms brought reminiscences. And then they took her outside to the backyard where she had hung her family’s laundry. Her face was transfigured and shone with recognition and she began to speak with feeling of hanging her children’s clothing. The small wet pants and shirts—evidences of a life of performing sacred ablutions. These things remained with her even when nothing else had. These daily acts of holiness.

Night after night, I stand at the sink and rinse the dishes that carry the food which feeds my children. Warm rivers run through my house, cover my hands, bless our living. Surely, this too is a sacred act. Ablutions.

Because of the angels

Just this note to the late apostle Paul: Thank you for writing this verse to your old friends in Corinth, “For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.” It has made me smile for two days.

Turns out the old scholastic theologians, Aquinas and his cronies, should have been asking about the dancefloors sitting atop the shoulders and necks of their wives and daughters. Forget about the pinheads. Angels and angels sitting, pirouetting, leaping, reading, sipping, sighing, smiling on the tops of girl’s heads.

My favorite commentary on this verse is from Albert Barnes’ comprehensive notes on the Bible: “There is scarcely any passage in the Scriptures which has more exercised the ingenuity of commentators than this verse. . . . After all the explanations which have been given of it, I confess, I do not understand it.” Or maybe this briefer one from the 1557 Geneva Bible (Will Shakespeare’s Bible, you know?), annotations by Laurence Tomson, who was himself compiling generations of commentary: “What this means, I do not yet understand.”

Well, I understand it well enough. I sent my wife and daughter on a plane to Arizona today, and well, I miss them, angels, power, and all.

The Water's Edge

Friday night I held Eleanor’s small, perfect, pajama-clothed body against me to warm her and to be warmed by her as we stood outside on a rooftop and listened to human beings pour music out of their insides and out of their (mostly stringed) instruments. Ellie watched wide-eyed and happy. She cooed and sang and I felt her small head vibrate under my warm hands which perched atop her head in the attitude of blessing, covering her ears to muffle the sound and offering what heat or fire I could. The songs they sang were mostly about light and water. The water ones washed around my thoughts:

Now Jordan’s banks they’re red and muddy,

And the rolling water is wide.

But I got no boat, so I’ll be good and muddy,

When I get to the other side.

And when I pass through the pearly gate,

Will my gown be gold instead?

How many times did ancient Israelites cross the river Jordan into a new life, an unknown? Joshua’s priests, hoping against hope that this swelling spring river would stop when the soles of their feet hit the wetness. As a heap. Those priests carrying their precious ark got a little wet, a small splash on the robes, but the others passed over dry-shod to the unknown of those high walls of Jericho. A new life. Utterly different from the wilderness they had just left. Of course, their fathers had passed through the waters as well. From slavery to freedom. From relative comfort to uncertainty, too. And Elijah crossed that same river to board his chariot of fire, off to a life of certain light. A new and different ministry. But he left behind poor Elisha to pick up the mantle and cross back—lonely, confused, uncertain. He walked into a world of miracles, though. They usually did. And then the Savior walked into that river a carpenter’s obedient Son and walked out the very Son of God. Well, or so it seemed to His mystified neighbors.

And there was this song: Wade in the water. Wade in the water, children. God’s gonna trouble the water.

A man sat by the pool of Bethesda—the pool of the house of mercy—waiting for an angel to trouble the waters. Troubled waters bring healing. But the waters came to him. A woman sat by a well, cracked like the worn jar in her hands. The Son of God said to her, “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.” How? You have nothing to draw with. “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” This woman spoke with the embodiment of Living Waters. The waters had come to seep into and soothe her broken soul. “Give me this water.”

So, then, just this: Maybe the water meant so much because I had come to that music from the baptism of a student of mine—a bright, glistering, good young woman who has waited a long time for this. It was good for us to be there. Baptism is a death and a birth at the same time. Every crossing of the waters is. “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” But this burial is into life itself, not in earth or under stone, but we are immersed in water, enveloped in life. “Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” Newness of life. “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” To die into living waters and to emerge transformed. The very air is different.

I don’t know the quality of life we will enjoy in the next world, but I feel somewhat certain that it will be life “coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.” There will likely exist certain parallels between this life and that—for life is life. But we will glow. We will know. Life elevated. Death will be a birth into a newness of life. Resurrection always follows a passing away.

So, too, I suppose that the quality of Shain’s life will change dramatically after being immersed in that font of living water. She will breathe differently. When she came mewling into this world and screamed her first breath of mortal air, she began to experience something unparalleled in her existence. From the light of God into this diffused, slanted earthly light. But now embodied. Able to hold a hand and to hug a friend. To smell the wispy fresh-washed hair of an infant. That former life surely held its glories. But without dying to that life, I could never have experienced this.

For the past two days, I have bathed in a flow of Spirit and words. I love living apostles and prophets. My heart has hummed and sung and glowed. This new life. This new life.

When I was born, I was given a new name and a family. Every birth provides these gifts. My name identifies, distinguishes, and associates me. Shain too received a new name at baptism. She took upon her the name of Jesus—distinguished from the darkness of the world by her new relationship with the Light of the World and associated with the fellowship of the Saints. This is a family of open arms. She will stumble as she begins to walk in newness of life. She will stutter as she speaks with the new tongue—the tongue of angels. But she will grow up in this new life. She has come to the water’s edge. And she has crossed. I have come to the water’s edge now several times. Every crossing brings death, cleansing, and a resurrection to newness.

Blessed Thankfulness

"Healing" by Brian Kershisnik

I came across something recently in my scriptures that instructed and delighted me. Have you ever noticed the peculiar, powerful, lovely connection between giving thanks and blessing in the accounts of the life of the Savior? The two ideas seem to be synonymous, interchangeable, in the Gospel writers’ minds. When John Mark—that young boy who lived in the bright warm home of a mother who received apostles and prophets after they had escaped from prison with angelic help, and who grew up to write the greatest hero story in the universe—records the feeding of the four thousand, he writes that Jesus “took the seven loaves, and gave thanks, and brake, and gave to his disciples.” And then Peter's friend Mark writes that Jesus, (perhaps smilingly, certainly knowingly and  compassionately) reached for “a few small fishes: and he blessed, and commanded them to set them also before them. So they did eat, and were filled.” As I read this, I wonder if He did or said anything different when He gave thanks and when he blessed. Or are they one and the same? Is gratitude the essence of blessing? Does it sanctify and set apart? Does it render a thing holy and wonderful and blessed? Does the act of thanksgiving make life more radiant, saintly, godly, blessed?

And this isn’t the only time this connection occurs in scripture. Matthew—that filthy treacherous publican who used to take taxes from hard-working gentle Jews to fill the coffers of their overreaching Roman overlords, and who immediately abandoned money at the first beckon of the Divine Rabbi and thus showed the true tenor of his heart—writes of the feeding of five thousand that the sensitive, holy Son of God “took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude. And they did all eat, and were filled.” And when he records the later feeding of four thousand, the words are almost identical, with one slight variation: “And he took the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks, and brake them, and gave to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude. And they did eat, and were filled.” But the stories don’t end there. These are stories of abundance and extravagance. God’s grace was not only sufficient on these days to fill the hungry masses, but the profligate kindness of the mortal Messiah produced baskets and baskets of excess. Seven. Twelve. More than we can possibly eat. When I give thanks, I acknowledge and access the prodigality of God’s goodness. And I am blessed.  

During those last solemn hours with His mortal friends, Jesus broke bread and blessed wine. Both Matthew and Mark make the link between blessing and thanking obvious: “And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body. And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they drank all of it.”

Joseph B. Wirthlin, that tender, temperate apostle with the small voice and enormous soul once said, “Gratitude turns a meal into a feast and drudgery into delight. It softens our grief and heightens our pleasure. It turns the simple and common into the memorable and transcendent.”

My grandmother was a small, smiling woman. Her family was her life. She had eleven children in a small and loving home. She played the piano and my grandpa sang. When grandpa died, she was left with three small children still at home and no money. She taught piano lessons and trusted in miracles and grace. Every year at Christmas, she made batches and batches of strawberry jam. Every child and every grandchild got their own, with a small loaf of homebaked bread. And when I got married and had kids, I got a loaf and a jar of jam for every new member of the family. Everyone was family to grandma. She sent a dollar bill and a handmade birthday card without fail every year of my life. For me and my wife and my children and my forty-five cousins and all of their wives and husbands and children. She came to every baptism, every baby blessing, almost every baseball game. I don’t remember seeing my grandmother sad. When she was dying, her children and grandchildren took turns spending the night at her house. It’s just a matter of time, the nurses said, we just want to make sure she’s as comfortable as possible. There was lots of singing in those days around her bed. One night when I was sleeping over, I read to her from the Book of Mormon, sang her some of her favorite hymns, and asked her to tell me all the wicked things my father had ever done in his youth. She couldn’t come up with one. He was always such a sweet child, she said. If he hadn’t been so good, I wouldn’t have had any more children, she laughed. As it turned out, he was number six; five more would follow. After changing her briefs and her pads, I went to wash the dishes. The Christmas before, all of her progeny had banded together to buy her a dishwasher. She had lived for sixty-plus years of marriage with eleven children and she never had a dishwasher. As I rinsed the dishes in the sink to load into the automatic washer, I noticed a small sign I had seen before. It sat on the sill above the sink. It said, “Thank God for dirty dishes, they have a tale to tell: While others may go hungry, we’re eating very well.” I thought of my grandmother silently, smilingly washing dishes for all of her holy children for all of those years, and I sobbed at that sink as I thought of the power and beauty of a life defined by what is present rather than by what is not.

Gratitude is the highest form of praise. To acknowledge all that God is, all that He has done, all that He does, gives Him pleasure, I think. He does delight to bless us: “Yea, and the herb, and the good things which come of the earth . . . are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart; Yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and enliven the soul. And it pleaseth God that he hath given all these things unto man.”

I spent two years living in Mexico as a missionary, and I wasn’t especially surprised at the poverty when I arrived there. I had expected dirt floors and one-room houses. I had not, perhaps, expected houses with no running water or cockroaches in the bathtub. But they did not shock me. The shock came when I returned home from that gentle, violent, miracle-ridden land. I remember very clearly my astonishment at the size of houses in my home state. And when I stepped into my parents’ house, I rolled on the ground with explosive, joyous laughter. My little sister thought I was crazy. And I was—crazy in love with carpet: wonderful, soft, miraculous carpet. I had not seen it for two years. And then, wonder of wonders, I stepped into the shower. I didn’t have to wear flip-flops to ward off cockroaches or snake bites or fungus. And when I turned the water on, not only did it come out of the faucet, but it rushed like a mighty river, with enough pressure to drench my whole body. It was the beginning of the cold season, and the wetness plummeting from this miraculous indoor waterfall was warm warm warm. I said a silent prayer of gratitude. And then it struck me: if I wanted to drink the water, I could, and I would not vomit violently, would not spend days in the bathroom, would, in fact, be nourished and refreshed. I cried, and my tears mingled with fresh, purified water. Now every shower is a prayer, if I remember. Every shower is a praisesong. And when I remember to give thanks, my life feels brighter, holier, blessed.

One of the greatest of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s holy sonnets is “God’s Grandeur”:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;	5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;	10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The whole commonplace world shimmers and sparks with a brilliant holiness. God’s grandeur is ever-present. I think that gratitude is the act of removing one’s shoes and wriggling our toes in the rich, astonishing earth. It is the removal of that which separates us from the divine. Every child’s face and every sunset and every blade of grass possesses “the dearest freshness;” everything glistens, glimmers, glows, glitters, gleams with a miraculous light. Gratitude is the lens through which this light is perceived. It is attentiveness and reverence, awe and affection. John Ames—my favorite fictional pastor—writes, “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.” In this passage it appears that visions of the divine come unannounced and apparently uninvited, which may be true in certain instances, but Ames recognizes that the temporary nature implied in these words does not quite do justice to his notion of theophany. He amends, “But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than [that] 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. Only, who could have the courage to see it?” When I live in thanksgiving, swim in gratitude, bask in open-eyed awareness of God’s goodness and the blessedness of life, I manifest such courage. I see and I bless.

Praise Song for Marriage

I lived in Mexico for two years as a missionary, and I’ve been accustomed to speaking, and thinking, of those years as the most formative of my life. There I walked a godly walk—entering into the homes and hearts of real people who loved and longed and ached and wept. I laid hands on heads and pronounced words far beyond my experience or knowledge. My heart expanded and my soul soared. It was more humanity, sometimes, than I could bear. I was only twenty. But I felt so much sorrow and so much love. I learned there what Paul means in his letter to the Philippians when he says that Jesus “emptied himself” and took upon himself “the form of a servant.” I poured myself out in service, and I felt close to God and his angels.

But it struck me the other day with the force of revelation that the most truly formative, shaping, re-creating experience of my life has been my interaction with my bright, holy wife. If my missionary years gave me a sense of the way I wanted to live my life, then my Half Orange (as they would call her in Mexico) has shown me how to mobilize those desires. Julie is the most salient element in my mortal experience.

Let’s celebrate in song-and-dance

the day that she said yes

and I said yes,

and songbirds sang, and angels left their nests.

Marilynne Robinson writes, in my favorite novel, “I know this [life] is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.” If that is true, and it feels true to me that we will look back with great affection on this strange and wonderful mortal existence, then for me the songs will largely deal with the quiet, gentle struggle for joy that marriage has mobilized.

I don’t really know why I feel so inclined, but I want to sing a paean for marriage today, in praise of the brilliant, dizzying adventure of matrimony. Marriage is holy. It is ordained of God because God loves us, and marriage is the vehicle for more joy in this life than any other thing. Joy is the measure of our creation. This is why a man leaves father and mother and cleaves to his wife. This is why the twain should be one. In our world there is a fear of marriage extant that frankly baffles me, and a propensity to give up on it too easily that saddens me. When I knelt in a sacred place across an altar with the girl—and she was really just a lovely, scared, excited girl—I love more than anything in the bright world and received a promise from her holy, wise grandfather that our love would sing and shout and shine long after the earth was a smoldering heap of rocks and steam, I could not have been happier.

But that was just the beginning. I had no idea then the strength that would come from having a helpmeet, a perpetual teammate who would always play on my side, lay by my side laughing in bed about something one of our little bedlamites said or did. This communion is the closest thing to contact with God I have ever achieved. And we do laugh. And it’s one of my favorite things. If I were trying to calm young Von Trapp children on a stormy night, I would sing of late night laughing and two heads on a pillow. Still, my wife is a holy mystery to me sometimes. But I know her better than any person on the planet. This is the deepest and richest of friendships. And that fact alone—the possibility of really coming to know just one person on this earth—makes marriage a really remarkable thing.

In oneness she’s shown me some things—

eternity is made up of more than solemnities,

though solemn sometimes I feel in the face of her faith,

her sunbright soul, her singsong spirit,

her God-gifted goodness, her yes.

And yes, this yes whispers shoutingly, brightbird-singingly.

My heart sits on the edge of a warm dirt path, next to hers,

(life-green grass) smells the air, takes in the dawnsong,

feels her fingers feeling, blessing, giving.

Outstretched and open.

And, oh, my heart beats: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that marriage can be quite difficult sometimes. Catholic theologian, Michael Novak, wrote something very nice about the benefits of marriage: “Marriage is an assault upon the lonely, atomic ego. Marriage is a threat to the solitary individual. Marriage does impose grueling, humbling, baffling, and frustrating responsibilities. Yet if one supposes that precisely such things are the preconditions for all true liberation, marriage is not the enemy of moral development in adults. Quite the opposite. Being married and having children has impressed on my mind certain lessons, for whose learning I cannot help being grateful. Most are lessons of difficulty and duress. Most of what I am forced to learn about myself is not pleasant. . . . My dignity as a human being depends perhaps more on what sort of husband and parent I am, than on any professional work I am called on to do. My bonds to my family hold me back (and my wife even more) from many sorts of opportunities. And yet these do not feel like bonds. They are, I know, my liberation. They force me to be a different sort of human being, in a way in which I want and need to be forced.” Do you sense what he’s saying? Of course it can be hard to pour yourself out, to empty yourself. That can hurt. But that is what makes a person like Jesus. This is a sanctifying experience.

Our first, and to this day most memorable, major argument was about chocolate chips. I argued emphatically for the benefits of milk chocolate chips. My wife retaliated with a fervent testimony regarding semi-sweet. I stormed out of the house. I really did. Now that all is affable we find the whole thing laughable. But not then. It mattered. It wasn’t until I realized that it didn’t matter that peace came. I had to pour myself out. And I’ve come to learn that it’s relieving, liberating, to do so. My soul wants to let go of things that don’t matter. And marriage has given my soul the opportunity.

Back to Robinson’s Gilead. Reverend Ames writes of the experience of blessing an infant, “There is a reality in blessing . . . . It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is power in that.” Well, marriage is performed in holy places. And the ceremony certainly sanctifies the union, or at least acknowledges that this is a sacred thing: a man and a woman are about to become like Christ, to give themselves for the good of the other, to empty themselves out. They are about to experience communion and joy unrivaled. They are about to embark on the most creative endeavor.

We sometimes speak of some future godhood in which we will create worlds. But I think that is here and now. That is marriage. We create a home and a brand new culture, a small world, and children. That is surely godlike. Every day I am Adam, deeply grateful for my Eve.

Do you remember the morning

we awoke to see the deer

there,

right outside our window?

I was Adam, you were Eve

and the golden world was new,

glistening with possibility.

He ate the trees, and you

kissed my cheek.

And now, every morning I awake

to the song of your smile,

and the world feels refreshed,

renewed,

as if your lips had gently,

ever so gently,

brushed its brilliant face.

She is the mother of all living. Praise her. And praise the union that made us one.

(The painting is "Dancing on a Very Small Island" by Brian Kershisnik)

Ezekiel

A couple of months ago, I taught my classes about Ezekiel. Four years ago I skipped Ezekiel completely. I think I did not understand him well or I did not have time. But I will never skip Ezekiel again. He is one of my mortal heroes. And his heroism is precisely in his mortality, in his humanity. God calls him over and over again "son of man." Most commentators see this as a humbling appellation, the Hebrew word for “man”—“adam”—meaning also dirt or earth. But it can also be seen as affectionate. Either way, Ezekiel is very earthy, and that may be the source of God’s affection. I imagine He has great tenderness for this earth.  

Well, I love Ezekiel because of his unorthodox (but not all that uncommon among Old Testament prophets) mode of teaching. At the beginning of the book, Ezekiel is given a scroll to eat, God’s message. It seems that God wants Ezekiel to internalize the message in a very real way, to make the message a part of himself, deep in his bowels. And if you really are what you eat, Ezekiel is supposed to become the message. And he does. God asks him to enact several prophecies—to do strange acts in the presence of his people in order to teach them about some forthcoming destruction or hope. After making a tile on which he portrays Jerusalem, he is asked to lie on his side for 390 days next to the tile to represent the siege of Israel, and then to switch sides and lay another 40 days to symbolize the burden of Jerusalem, all the while eating defiled bread (see Ezekiel 4). Then he shaves his head and beard and divides the hair into three piles before burning one, chopping one up with a knife, and scattering the last one (Ezekiel 5). This is supposed to show the fate of the then-rebellious covenant people. He is asked to move and to eat his bread quaking and drink his water astonished (Ezekiel 12), to sigh (Ezekiel 21), to not mourn his wife’s death (Ezekiel 24), and to write on sticks and pick them up (Ezekiel 37), among other things. Can you imagine this? It heartbreakingly funny and wonderfully lonesome.

So I wanted to make a movie of it to make it real for my students. So on a whim the day before I taught it I bought a beard from a party store and got Julie to film me enacting a few of his dramatic prophecies (while holding the camera in one hand and Eleanor in the other. Who is this girl? Pretty cool, I say). When Oliver saw me with the beard, he said, “Take it off, daddy. You a bad guy. Take it off. It creepy. Take it off.” By the end of the filming, Lydia and Emerson loved Ezekiel. “Ezekiel’s funny,” they said. If that’s the only thing that came of the movie making, it is worth it to me, that they sense the humanity and humor of a prophet. Tonight I was singing “Ezekiel saw the wheel,” and Lyd asked what wheel he saw. I briefly explained the vision in Ezekiel 1, and she said, “That’s a cool vision, dad.” At dinner she tried to tell Emerson about it. You try telling someone about that vision. Ezekiel evidently had a hard time: “round about within it,” “the likeness of the appearance of the glory of the Lord,” etc.


But I digress, I wanted to tell you about the message of Ezekiel. His name means “God is strong,” and the whole book seems to support that thesis. Well, okay, let me tell you about His strength of goodness and mercy. This was Tuesday night, and I got the kids tucked in about nine o’clock (have I mentioned yet that we have missed Nana and Papa for myriad reasons—bless them for all the help they are). I came downstairs to do a (hopefully) quick editing job on my little video so it would be ready for the next day. My video editing software on my computer was damaged and would not work. It took me about an hour to figure this out. By then it was ten and I was thinking I should go to bed in case Ellie woke up for hours in the middle of the night. So I went to pray. I told Heavenly Father that my computer was broken, but I had shaved my head and cut up a really great fake beard, and well, I really wanted it to be worth something. “Go to bed,” He said. “I want to,” I told Him, “but I can’t sleep.” Okay, He relented.

Cue Allie and Alex, my sister- and brother-in-law. While I am praying, I hear a key turn and the front door open. I come downstairs to find Allie and Alex, whom we had invited to stay with us until they move, but I didn’t know where that had ended up. And Alex had just made a movie for his History of Creativity class and happened to have his laptop. Well, God is strong. Alex and I sat up for an hour or so editing and went to bed tired and happy with the result. Their arrival certainly felt like a tender mercy. Perfectly timed. Perfectly orchestrated. God is strong and God is good. He is smooth, I say.

Well, so the next day, first period kids are laughing and they clap at the end of the movie (they had complimented me on my haircut as they came into class). My next period, just as we are getting into the lesson, my computer crashes. Just stops working. I try rebooting it four times. Nothing. It comes up with a diagnostic thing. I try it. Nothing. My students can tell I’m a little disconcerted. So I set them to studying chapters two and three of Ezekiel, which they do very diligently and sweetly. I run to the office of my co-worker who has a little experience with computers. It is his prep period. God is strong. He tries a couple of things. Nothing. I need to get back to class. So I leave the computer with him, call Alex and ask if, maybe, he could bring his laptop down to the seminary. Luckily I had made it on his computer, so that it didn’t crash with mine. He is so good. So willing. I ask another co-worker if by chance I emailed him my Ezekiel powerpoint. It would make some of the teaching smoother. He finds it and lends me his computer. I get back to class. Students are very engaged and sensitive. We get past the point for the video and move on with the lesson.

Just then Alex shows up. I grab his laptop and am about to set it up when my co-worker with my computer comes it. It’s fixed. And my other co-worker is back for his computer. I look at these three men in my classroom, all sacrificing for me, for this lesson, and I feel like crying. God is strong. So strong. And He gives strength, which is an alternate reading of the meaning of Ezekiel. We watch the video and the kids laugh and tell me they are touched that I would shave my head for them. And then we look into Ezekiel’s testimony of the majesty, grace, power, and goodness of God. And I get to tell them that they have witnessed it that day. Prophetic object lesson. Acted out. As if on purpose. Oh, children, God is strong.


Here’s the video:

(the link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3MX9arWxGo )

Astonished By Grace

God speaks to me in nature. A couple of weeks ago I stood at the top of a mountain, looking down the canyon at the sweep and flow of trees clapping and shouting for joy. And a wind picked up to touch me, almost to lift me. The Hebrew word for wind, ruach, is also the word for spirit, often specifically the Spirit of God. It’s no wonder to me that wind has often been seen as holy, a manifestation of the invisible yet tangible. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” (Interestingly, the Greek word pneuma is used for both wind and Spirit in this verse.) We live in a world in which the invisible is as real, I think, as the visible.

But what I see with my natural eyes often teaches me of what I do not. So I try to perceive with other eyes. “Earth’s crammed with heaven,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “And every common bush afire with God; / But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.” Last summer we had rains and water like I’d never seen. And a waterfall taught me of God. I made this little essay-on-video:

(If the video doesn't work, here's a link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui4odDwMfns )

Moses hit a rock and water gushed forth. Refreshment from a stone: an astonishing moment. But it was the liberality of the act that delights and teaches me. “And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly.” Or this from the Psalms: “He brought streams also out of the rock, and caused waters to run down like rivers. . . . the waters gushed out, and the streams overflowed.” God’s grace is sometimes sufficient: the Israelites were given manna from day to day. And that would be enough. And yet, sometimes, God is prodigal in his tender mercies and lovingkindnesses. Annie Dillard notes, “If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor.” Quail up to the elbows as far as the eye can see.

Muhammad said that God is beautiful and loves beauty. The beauty of this world shows me the face of God. Dillard again: “Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator’s exuberance that grew such a tangle . . . . This, then, is the extravagant landscape of the world, given, given with pizzazz, given in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over.” Praise him.