“We live the given life, and not the planned.” Wendell Berry

This did not go at all as planned, if I ever had a plan.  It had something to do with impressing everybody, but doing it without appearing to, effortlessly, the way I tell jokes,without smiling, looking away afterwards, leaving people to laugh or not, too cool to acknowledge my own cleverness.

But I was broken out of my intellect, my intention, my talent by the brokenness of my body, and though I wanted to relate to Christ in his witty reparte, his compassion, his healing, I now relate most to his twisted form on the cross, eyes shut in pain, not yet dead, not yet ressurrected, not yet ascended.  My Lord, the suffering, naked, four inch plastic form on the eight inch wooden cross.

I am not making a theology out of this.  Far be it from me.  I am telling you what I do not know, not what I know.   I am in pain all the time.  I am dizzy, nauseaus, exhausted, and this is before the side effects from the medications kick in.

Jesus’ features are not twisted in agony.  If you didn’t know better you might almost think he looked peaceful.  But I think that I recognize the movement inward that a long-suffering spirit makes.  It is close to meditation.  You have less to do with the world, with what is going on around you.  Physical and emotional sensation takes over and then, somehow, you sink below that, to a place deeper than that.

The contemplatives teach that at our very center the Spirit is constantly praying; that our act of prayer consists of joining in awareness with that ongoing prayer.   This is the only kind of prayer I can hope for, now.

I place a finger on each nail and press the wooden cross to my heart, the broken body of Christ against my own.

Missing the rest of the world.

It’s been three years since I’ve left the country.

Three since I’ve been to Poland.

Four since I’ve been to England or Morocco.

Five since I’ve been to Canada.

Eight since I’ve been to The Netherlands.

Nine since I’ve been to Turkey or Croatia.

Thirteen since I’ve been to Mexico.

And FOURTEEN since I’ve been to Israel.  I think I miss Israel the most.

israel_jerusalem_dome

Currently reading or planning to read

Auralia’s Colors, by Jeffery Overstreet.  It is wonderful so far, and the author is alive and still writing, which is my favorite kind.  Send him vitamens here.  Or just buy his book and he can buy his own vitamens, live long and keep writing books for me to read.

Culture Makers, by Andy Crouch.  Get in on the discussion here.

Nature’s Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith, by Daniel Harrell.  Read it, and/or come to my church where he is the associate pastor and listen to him preach.

I have recently been exploring the wide world of podcasts and audio books, and recommend very highly PRI: Selected Shorts, available on itunes, The Writer’s Almanac and The NewYorker Fiction podcast, also on itunes.  All of those are free.  There are also collections of old Selected Shorts episodes which are really fun to listen to.  The art of reading stories has suffered, I think, in our age of multimedia, but these readers do the great old stories justice.  My favorites so far are D.H. Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse read by John Shea, “There must be more money; there must be more money,” and Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever read by Maria Tucci.  They are on itunes or here.

On the subway

A middle-aged man wearing all grey and eating a lollipop sat across from me on the subway today.  After a few minutes he started speaking to me, in a gently frustrated voice.

“I make a lot of money,” he said, “But I don’t spend any of it.”   I met his glance and he looked away, but kept talking.

“You tell me you have health problems,” he said, “And then you ask me for a cigarette.  I tell you I don’t have one and you reach into the ash tray for a butt and ask me for a light.  Then you show me the scar on your chest where you had surgery on your lungs.  So what am I supposed to think?”

He went on for the rest of the trip, popping the lollipop into his mouth between pronouncements.  I was struck by how he addressed me so directly as “You.”  Did he think I was someone else?  Or was it Martin Buber’s “Thou,” the I reaching out to find a connection with the you, with another soul, another being.  He wasn’t well, obviously; was either mentally ill or mentally handicapped.  Maybe he was speaking from a concept of the world in which there weren’t many different people, but only him and “you;” the other, the “not me” of the eyes that met his.  Or maybe the “you” was — as Buber conceived it to be — God, and his conversation was not with me or with his smoking friend, but with the supernatural other to whom he was trying to find a connection.

“Seek,” said Jesus, “And you will find.”  If the deepest cry of our heart is to “you” then it makes sense that we would keep saying “you” until we found the One who is the ultimate YOU, the ultimate other, the ultimate connection that Augustine says we were made for.  In fact, Augustine too says, “you,” not “he.”  It is that second person tense that makes his book “The Confessions,” and not “The Doctrine of St. Augustine.”  “We were made for YOU,” he says, “And our hearts are restless untill they find rest in YOU.”

To the grey clad man on the bus, and to all of us searching for YOU, I pray that YOU would find us.

In other words…

“We take our own spiritual consecration and try to make it into a call of God, but when we get right with Him He brushes all this aside. Then He gives us a tremendous, riveting pain to fasten our attention on something that we never even dreamed could be His call for us. And for one radiant, flashing moment we see His purpose, and we say, “Here am I! Send me” ( Isaiah 6:8 ).

This call has nothing to do with personal sanctification, but with being made broken bread and poured-out wine. Yet God can never make us into wine if we object to the fingers He chooses to use to crush us. We say, “If God would only use His own fingers, and make me broken bread and poured-out wine in a special way, then I wouldn’t object!” But when He uses someone we dislike, or some set of circumstances to which we said we would never submit, to crush us, then we object. Yet we must never try to choose the place of our own martyrdom. If we are ever going to be made into wine, we will have to be crushed— you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed.

I wonder what finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze you? Have you been as hard as a marble and escaped? If you are not ripe yet, and if God had squeezed you anyway, the wine produced would have been remarkably bitter. To be a holy person means that the elements of our natural life experience the very presence of God as they are providentially broken in His service. We have to be placed into God and brought into agreement with Him before we can be broken bread in His hands. Stay right with God and let Him do as He likes, and you will find that He is producing the kind of bread and wine that will benefit His other children.”

~Oswald Chambers