HAUNTED BY THE HOLY GHOST

And the writing takes you to the most improbable places...

Untold Story, originally uploaded by _marmota.

No one knew why or how it had happened. We only knew that it did and that was enough to bring a tear to the eye and a deep empty feeling in everyone. Shocked out of our daily routines we could only stand in stunned silence, wondering why no one had noticed, why no one had done anything to stop this. Some day the whole thing would surface, brought into the light of day, but it wouldn't be today.

 

*16 pages and counting....will she make the deadline, or will she be forced to make up some wild excuse again?

And there are even more entertaining possibilities than last year...like this Facebook invite I got concerning "the boy" who appeared in last year's excuse....You are invited to join: "If this group gets 1,000 people, C____ will come out of the closet".

 

To anyone who has me listed under "Orthodox blogs" in their sidebar lists...I am still Orthodox, but I am finding it difficult to say anything of interest about "being Orthodox" that doesn't get me in trouble with someone.

With that, it's off to our former Lutheran Church to the "Commissioning into Ministry" of one of my best friends, Maggie.

Now there is a story in that.....IF I have the heart to tell it.

MIDWINTER SPRING

"Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?..."

                                     T S Eliot "Little Gidding"

Photo by JUDE/flickr

I need, she needs, we all need each other

As I said, I  really need my editor, but she really needs all the prayers and love right now.

We will never be aware how much we need each to learn how to live and how to die;  but we must never stop trying in our crazy, inarticulate, and sometimes hopelessly misunderstood ways to give in love, what God has to graciously given to each for the good of all.

excerpt for the Glen Workshop: From the Introduction.....

In the middle of this enlightened, reasonable, and modern world, my husband and I live as misplaced medievalists;

We believe that God is Three, yet indivisibly one; we believe in a God so transcendent that speaking His name can inspire shuddering fear; yet we believe in a God so immanent, so loving,  that He is closer to us than our own breath, our own skin; we believe that that death is just sleep; People don’t go missing in some hypothetical three tiered universe, they just go unseen in a one story universe where all that was, is and is to come intermingles everyday.                            
The visible and invisible claim equal footing in our world.  We knock up against the unseen as often as we bump up against the furniture.

We also believe that marriage is an eternal bond that cannot be broken.  We can break each other, break hearts and we can break  faith, but nothing in earth or heaven can break the bond of marriage.  Some people would think that a unbearable weight and even a curse; to us, it is one of our greatest comforts.

The other hope we have is that history is holy; nothing is ever lost to time or memory; Love that was once cannot not be.

The theological ramifications of really believing “God is Love” are enormous.
Pieces of God don’t just go missing.......ever.  Woe to those who misplace, or scorn a gift of such Worth.

Speaking plainly, this could be an end where two people, destined to never travel alone, now travel the same way, however, they travel in silence and isolation after trying everything not to let the story end that way.

But Hope is as much of God as love. This may also be just the beginning of a new chapter in the story; this one ends with two souls traveling and arriving at the same destination as one whole, but wounded, immortal body;

This is the life I lead, the way my thoughts stretch out across the dark horizon at the end of all things, late into the eve of the seventh day; this is the live you get when you love a God who raises the dead.    

                                photo by nikaa

 

FAST AS YOU CAN COUNT TO TEN

WAITING FOR SOMETHING, originally uploaded by nikaa.

    Fast as you can count to ten
    commandments, I would count to
    twenty forgivenesses, could I
    think which twenty, and till I
    can, let me offer all and with-
    out number and beg for myself,
    if you please, your used mercies.


poem:john ciardi
PHOTO BY NIKAA

Image Profile in the National Catholic Reporter

Image Profile in the National Catholic Reporter   

Last week, the National Catholic Reporter published a piece profiling Image journal and its editor, Gregory Wolfe. The piece, written by Erin Ryan and entitled “A Bridge Between Religion and the Arts,” highlights how Image came to be—beginning with Wolfe’s transformation from what he calls “a conservative ‘culture warrior’” to a Christian humanist whose love of art began to undermine his previous “tendencies toward... ideological politics.” The article also explores the role that Wolfe’s conversion to Catholicism played in his vision for a new journal that saw art, like the Incarnation, as something that “brings together those two poles of human and divine, justice and mercy, all these different tensions in which we live.” Read the article to find out why Wolfe does not believe that our modern culture is going to hell in a hand basket… and for a glimpse into the vision behind the founding of a journal that has, over the last twenty years, grown beyond a handsome print journal into a flourishing suite of programs.

Click here to read the article.

UNFAITHFUL

Marriage is nothing more
than shared incompleteness
utterance to the groaning of all creation
with distant strains of the rest
the closing cadence of Salvation
Peace lived before it's time
but we have shifted modes
a half step up,
or was it down
we sing the same song
but our melody is undone

reignited the longing
that cannot be quenched
taking it upon ourselves
to bind and loose
disturb the fragile rest
misplace the cadence
unfinished the song

The last augment has been made
and the fight lost and won
surrendered and conquered
no victor, no heroes, no homeland
just refugees
and silence; that we call peace

we have been undone
each of us wants to ask
but courage seems like cruelty
and love forbids the question
though our names are carved
into each other's heart

this is how we remain one
imperfect, but one

Do you ever wonder if one of us will turn
grow cold, grow soft, grow tired
enough to ask, dare ask, dare answer
yes
Am I Eve or Mary

The world is without form
that I can recognize
gravity has shifted
I struggle to stand alone, to stand at all
I fall when you are not looking
I hide the bruises with a false pride
and the false pride covers layers
fear, anger, betrayal
and sadness that grows toward despair
My joy, my confidence shattered
and, I fear, my sanity

 The world has split in two

I have been unfaithful
but I don't know to whom
All I want is Him
but all I think of is you
He listens to my bone dry prayers
You wipe away the tears
He fills the emptiness of my soul
Yet it is you I reach for in the dark
trying, trying to feel whole
what have I done
have I given more than was asked?
or taken more than was deserved?

It seemed good.....to me
Was it Eve’s sin all over again
or is this an echo of  the Virgin Eden
The Dark Perfection of Adam before Eve
with secret sighs in the loneliness of the night
longing, aching for.....what?
Was God not enough for Adam?
I’ve heard whispers, rumors
incomplete completeness
imperfect perfection
possessing all, but able to have more
Perfect love that has not learned to love enough
and refuses to rest until......

my whole world aches
and you ache, too
I long to rest in that completeness again
to  wake without the emptiness
that haunts each sunrise
Was God jealous?
loved better than we love

what was the one needful thing
held out to us
that we could not obtain together?

so we live in the “little while”

with vows to keep
new and old

till death do us part
has been turned on it's head
the golden bowl will shatter
the silver cord will break
things will be restored

death or mercy, will bind us together, once more

 

PHOTO: lost melody BY TimKruskampo

 

FAITHFUL

                                                                                          

                                                                                    

And I will cause all her mirth to cease, her solemnities, her new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her festival times. And I will destroy her vines, and her fig trees, of which she said: These are my rewards, which my lovers have given me: and I will make her as a forest, and the beasts of the field shall devour her.

And I will visit upon her the days of Baalim, to whom she burnt incense, and decked herself out with her earrings, and with her jewels, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, saith the Lord. Therefore, behold I will allure her, and will lead her into the wilderness: and I will speak to her heart.

And I will give her vine-dressers out of the same place, and the valley of Achor for an opening of hope: and she shall sing there according to the days of her youth, and according to the days of her coming up out of the land of Egypt.And it shall be in that day, saith the Lord, That she shall call me: My husband, and she shall call me no more Baali. And I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and she shall no more remember their name. And in that day I will make a covenant with them, with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of the air, and with the creeping things of the earth: and I will destroy the bow, and the sword, and war out of the land: and I will make them sleep secure. And I will espouse thee to me for ever: and I will espouse thee to me in justice, and judgment, and in mercy, and in commiserations. And I will espouse thee to me in faith: and thou shalt know that I am the Lord.

Hosea 2

Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible

PHOTO:Flickr-cevizliekmek

So How's the writing going. mom?

 

Epitaph for a Poet

 

Here lies Richard.

He tried to improve on silence.

—Lola Haskins

photo by

kattenmeisje, Queen of the Pussycats

UNSAID

So much of what we live goes on inside–

The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches

Of unacknowledged love are no less real

For having passed unsaid. What we conceal

Is always more than what we dare confide.

Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Dana Gioia

photo by Niika

THIS PLACE IS NOT AS ABANDONED AS IT LOOKS

STANZAS,  by nikaa.

Another photo from my favorite photographer and friend, niika, who inspires me to keep my camera ready and loaded in case I  ever get out of this room/house again.

November in my soul has also been inspiring with his  wordless, but strong reentry into blogdom through photography.

If you look carefully, you may notice my "Winter Reading" changes every few days....I am reading, but not able to write much right now...which begs the question of  the sanity of the decision to register for the writing workshop at "The Glen" again this year?

Again, much is riding on another new medication; not so much "if" it will work (it has a long,track record of success)  but rather  "if you can survive taking it" it will work. 

Why is so much of so-called "modern medicine, more akin to  Medieval Trial by Ordeal?

Obviously, my reading has been, a bit too heavily weighted in  soteriology.

Funny/ ironic-I have read more Luther since becoming Orthodox than I ever read in all my years as a Lutheran.

A New Blog added to my list of Orthodox writers worth reading; EARL DONALD THE BEWILDERED, authored a someone I first encountered in the com boxes at THE OCHLOPHOBIST and other top notch Orthodox blogs.  His prose are thick with metaphors and poetic, but his thinking and ideas are refreshing transparent.  Check it out.  His name is  Maxim (makes me think of "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again...The first line from one of my favorite books—Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca),

...Probably because both, Ken Follett's " The Key to Rebecca" and Michael Ondaatje's  'The English Patient', have passed through my Winter Reading list.  Until recently, I  never knew that Count Laszlo Almasy, the English Patient, was based on a real life historic character.

I Don't Even Know What Songs Would Please You

                                                                            

MORE FROM THE GLEN

REBECCA, THIS ONE IS FOR YOU: (click listen to this track)
No words could do it justice, you have to listen to it.

 

"Mary's Waltz".
It's like no Chistmas Carol I have ever listened to.