Two Moments of Water/Grace

1.  Home late (very late) from work, but needing to burn some of the energy that had been festering in my office chair, I set out for a run around the Capitol Hill neighborhood where I live.  And there I made a discovery: the federal government turns on its sprinkler systems at about 12:30am.  On the wide lawn behind the U.S. Capitol building, a whole field of sprinklers sprouts in regimental rows, spraying perfect snowcone orbs, like giant dandelions with cotton seeds you could blow away, or like squat spirits popping up out of the ground to haunt the surface in eerily organized fashion.  In a word, the perfect invitation for a late-night runner to dash through, to bob, weave, twirl, cut and dive through, pretending to dodge the spray (or spirits) and joyfully failing.  A hundred yards away, on marble steps of the Capitol, two security guards could only watch--and then I was gone.

2.  We had a downpour, a cloudburst so heavy, so torrential, that it bordered on the ridiculous.  As soon as I got home, I peeled off my sopping blazer and formerly-creased trousers, pulled on my running shorts, and went out to get properly soaked.

The interesting thing about a heavy rain is how much space there is.  I quickly became entirely wet: my shirt a translucent shrinkwrap around my ribs and chest, my curly hair matted flat on my forehead, my black running shorts an oil slick around my thighs.  And yet, when I spread open my palms or tried to lean with my face into the apparent wall of water, I was left empty, grasping.  All I could feel was a series, admittedly rapid, of little pelts of cold stunning water--rap tap tip tap tap pop--that vanished before I could examine, feel, or reflect upon them.  I reached out for substance and instead found mostly empty space, pocked with tantalizing interruptions.

It wasn't until after the run, stretching out on the sidewalk, that I figured out the secret.  Cross legged, butt planted in a concrete semi-puddle, I let the rain fall upon me.  And it did.  Over and over and over again it fell upon me.  I felt the individual drops and did not try to grasp them; I just let them rest and sink into me, covering entirely, bit by bit.

Where Love Abides

One of the early machines

dug up in dusty excavations

through attics and deserts

is made of metal,

(wrought iron if from the days of blacksmithery

or bronze if more ancient)

and usually is classified and tagged

among the crates marked

“Unknown Purpose.”

That is how we know

it is so important.

And that is why we also look for it

among our own artifacts—

among iPhones, sticky notes,

frisbees, bins of old landline cords—

looking for the thing

that will prove to have an unknown purpose.

In Excelsis Deo

We had a talk tonight at the Trinity Forum from the excellently-named Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, an astrophysicist at NASA and, of particular interest, a confessing, practicing Christian.  Dr. Wiseman is a smart cookie, and a well-credentialed one: from her Arkansas farm roots, she found her way through MIT and Harvard, sharing a grading curve with a couple of future Nobel Prizewinners along the way, and even getting a comet named after her, which, if you’re an astrophysicist, seems like just the sort of thing to do.  Her topic tonight though was only half about stars and comets and such; the other half being, how does her understanding as a scientist of the vastness of the universe in space and time, affect her Christian faith?

            

Dr. Wiseman showed us a lot of dazzling pictures from the Hubble telescope, and suggested throughout that she regarded the scope of the universe as something awesome, a fertile ground for reverence and worship.  Which is a natural response for a Christian to offer.  She also noted the range of other responses people have had, including the very opposite sort of responses from the Carl Sagan crowd, which sees our speck-o-dust status as a refutation of any human-centric religion.  To my mind the hardest question was this: How do you still believe in the personal nature of, and personal relationship with, God in the face of such vastness?  When the universe was smaller this was easier to accept.  With a sizable, but not infinite, earth plumb at the center of the cosmos, surrounded by concentric layers of dome, all packaged within a timespan of thousands, not millions—never mind billions—of years, it seems easier to envision an omnipotent God caring about each one of us.  But open up the aperture of time and space to incomprehensible proportions, move from the Grand Canyon up to galaxy clusters, and our smallness, or fleetingness, seems to curdle healthy humility into a despairing meaninglessness.

            

That was my thought as I walked toward the metro station afterward, until I was interrupted by a phone call.  It was a friend with whom I’d been playing phone tag for the past month, and who had news about a new job she’d started this week after a long search, a position as a campus minister at one of the local universities.  Initially, she’d told them she wasn’t interested, then she agreed to interview, thinking she could use an offer as leverage for the entirely different sort of job she really wanted.  Then she got two offers: the ministry job and the job she really wanted.  Easy decision, right?

            

But a funny thing happened: the underdog kept sticking in her mind.  She prayed about it, thought about it, imagined about it, and in the end decided that she felt called to take the ministry job.  So she turned down the job she thought she wanted, and instead signed up for an adventure she never expected.

            

It made perfect sense to me.  And the whiff of the lived experience of relationship with a God, a wind-blowing Spirit, was a strange but instructive counterpoint to my cosmic ennui.  It was such a small moment, in one life (now two lives), and so full of splendor, splendor enough to rival the supernovas and colliding galaxies.

For Adulthood

I recently found out, on the very same day, that one of my friends was engaged to be married and was expecting his first child, and that another had been diagnosed with late-stage cancer.  I felt terrible. Such a tragic waste of life.  So much needless suffering.  As to the other friend, I’m hopeful that against long odds, chemo can reverse the cancer’s progress.

                                    --Excerpt from “Against Adulthood,” Washington City Paper, January 6, 2012

                 

It’s less fun than you imagine childhood was, but more fun than childhood actually was.  Magic dries up, but you’ll observe that real things have a certain sheen to them, like the scrambled light coming off the surface of one particular pearl, or like the whoosh sound of air ripping across a pond, right as a skein of geese coasts down to land.  And seeing that shimmer is astounding.

There is sadness, which if handled artfully, can leave a satisfying aftertaste of wisdom.

Most importantly, there is choosing, a land of opportunity, each day giving the chance to measure the angle, to weigh the force of the stroke, and then to strike the nail and fasten a moment of yourself to the board of history.

One thing more: If you choose this life, the life of adulthood, one day—many days—you’ll be caught, suddenly, by the spectacle of yourself playacting, doing adult things, making such important decisions under the influence of the role.  Then (and only then) can you be born again, a wiser child.

My morning hot chocolate

To top off my morning hot chocolate

Here at the office

I open a carton of milk,

One of the small ones--

Tear away the glue

And peel back two

Cardboard flaps along

Ready-made creases.

I pull back the triangles, and there,

Greeting me,

The Milk Carton Smiley Face.

Two eyes to show

Where to press your fingers,

A dotted smile,

Arrowed at the corners

Showing where

To push the triangles back,

To squeeze the smile

Into a fish face, and then

Release back:

A perfect diamond milkspout

Is created;  

Just like new, like every

Milk carton ever.

I remember how Will Schmeeckle

And Anthony Flores

And me in the second grade lunchroom,

Would fold the cartons

Around little red straws

So the carton became

A tank.  And we’d impale

Helpless tater tots,

Dipping their chunky corpses

In ketchup blood.

Back then we never said anything

(Though we saw it every day)

About the Milk Carton Smiley Face.

But twenty years later,

Now, in a place I never

Imagined I’d be

That face appears again

And looks at me.

Prayer for a Parking Lot

The world is full of non-places.

The parking lot outside the window of Room 212 at the Sleep Inn in Omaha, Nebraska is one of them. On an autumn night, wind makes the plexiglass window hum, and so I peel back the shade of the tomb of a room and look.

It’s a parking lot, entirely empty. The few guests here tonight have parked out front. Beyond the blacktop and curb is a bank of trees, a field, an office park, and, at last, a regional airport whose last flight already left.

The parking lot is a space created by man and left alone by man. Out there in the dark, windy, unknown and unnoticed spot, no two human bodies have ever met in passing, never touched, never spoken. Never admired, never even thought of. Maybe, once, a confused deer or a rabbit might have emerged from the little group of trees, suddenly tense at the exposure, wide-eyed at the flatness. But that would be all. This place has no retrievable past and no hope of anything happening here in the future. The last moment in history for this place was the day it was paved.

Even so, Lord Jesus, quickly come, come to the place outside this window, and night shall be no more. For where can I flee from Thy presence? If I run into the windy, abandoned parking lot behind Room 212, Thou art there before me, and after I leave, Thou remainest behind, dwelling in a place Thou lovest and that Thou rememberest in the midst of all the changing universe.

The Bicyclist

Pudgy, you’d call him, or squat, a smallish boulder of a man, but in any case well-balanced. With two bearskin hands bearing down on the handlebars, he whizzes through dew-laden traffic in the early morning suburban outpost of a metropolis. Beneath his bulk, the bicycle looks like it could snap, like the just-too-thin tree branch giving way beneath Pooh on his way out to the honey hive. But up he stays, and then some, cutting off cars, torpedoing down the hash marks while they, the inflexible hulks whose mirrors reach out to clip his elbows, wait at intersection lights.

He’s older than you’d expect, and he wears no underwear, a fact abundantly revealed as he glides past the corner crosswalk, hunched over for speed, pulling the fringe of his pleather Redskins jacket up, and the beltless hem of his light blue Levis down, revealing a wide fleshy band of gargantuan pinkness. We on the corner pretend not to notice the magnificent jest of his enormous presence.