UpfromtheStump - Archive 52

11 February 2009 5:50pm

There is something of the way he holds his hands, his cross, his face that has garnered my life, my actions and thoughts. You would think one grows bored with the same person day after day. But I have to only take a moment and look at him, and I am ushered into the fullest of life and joy with God.

How can such a simple and mysterious thing be communicated? I think of the healed blind man who is brought before the courts. "Tell us how this happened," they demand. "Tell us." And tender power of the God-breathed text is revealed in his answer: "I don't know," the healed man answers. "All I know is that I once was blind, and now I see." I once was without a song in my heart, without a source of peace and stability, without life, and now I have it. I have no idea how this happened, but it did, and it has something to do with that lonesome abandoned lover of mankind. I watch him stoop to the face of a child, touch a leper's sores, dine with a prostitute, and quietly abandon the crowd's adoration. And I look down and, oh, I am running after him. I am running and I am not looking back.

Please don’t wait for me

I lost my way again

I lost my house and my good name

When I found the road of my king

When I was young I dreamed

Of a life that had beauty that had joy

But now I lost my life

For the one I dreamt of as a boy

Please don’t wait for me

I ain’t coming back again

I cannot turn around

From the place I’m going to where I’ve been

-Josh Garrels

7 February 2009 12:05pm

To understand my neighborhood, you must understand cancer, the mute geist that haunts the corners of each room, no exceptions. For when we round the members who were too sick to come Sunday, who do we sit with but its victims. Each week another living room, another endured chemotherapy or mastectomy, another patient.

From the way they speak, to fall from a balcony would be better than this. At least the injury could be grasped, at least there would be a bruise to point at and say, 'Yes, this is it.'

Instead the awful unknowing lies stagnant in the mind. And I would be overcome with hopelessness if it weren't for the words of the victim, if we hadn't taken time to slow down and listen:

"I was in bed for hours the day I came home from the hospital," she told us. "I was thinking over and over how the owner of the factory told his bosses not to drink the water we had been drinking for months. I was thinking of the six friends I worked there with, all down with cancer like me."

"But the day I got home, I told myself, get up! I stood and walked to the mirror and looked in, and I swear you to, my face was shining. I had looked in the mirror expecting the worst, and instead saw my face giving off a beautiful light. And I said to myself, ok. Ok. God is with me. Whom shall I fear?"

a cry of the once born

to a remembered hope

stretched to solid

the delight of earth

and heaven join

5 February 2009 6:19pm

Oma's body lies on the bed, in the same bed where she died three days ago. People have been coming into the house, reserved, loitering until a proper moment. Opa stands, stooped and simple, and leads them close, leads them into the room and is speaking to them quietly. This is a one sided conversation: he is telling them all about how it went and how it is going, and they respond in pure listen. The perked faces that emerge take a moment to adjust, take a moment to come down because they were caught up.

The Netherlands is cold and sunny in February, colder and sunnier than any other time of the year. There is little rain, a fleck of snow at times, and a horizon silent and weighted as a mountainline. The sky, usually gracious in Holland with rain, the source of this country's mighty fields, the sky gives nothing. Its a one sided exchange. Any heat is given leeway to leave by that vast emptiness. The sun sends down a beautiful light that tempers the steady Dutch landscape, but the beautiful light lands cold.

The men who came for the casket are all I can understand right now, because the experience was too big to grasp. The men were as silent as that sky, steady, dark suits going into that bedroom. We were drinking coffee that morning, gathering coats and clarifying little things. There was a gentle business between everybody as we sorted details, like tying and retying laces, but an eye of everyone was held pensive against that open doorway where the men went. So when the dark suits silently reappeared we all started behind. We followed them as they feather coaxed that large box down the hall and into the elevator. We were talking, imagine that, and it lightened the mood. My mom made a joke, because we didn't dare, and it worked. My Opa is smiling, so I am allowed, and it feels good.

23 January 2009 12:58pm

fashioned on a spindle, braiding dna as twine

god makes us still

cup overfilled with heart and strength and mind

17 January 2009 9:25pm

A new friend today. He moved in today. He is over fifty and Indian, the kind in Asia. He arrived a bit nervous, like I did. Moved in with four or five black plastic bags worth of stuff, moved onto the bed next to mine, set up a spot in the bathroom, a corner of shelf in the kitchen. And he is brilliant.

Wherever he came from before here, wherever he's been, I can tell that his entry into this country has not been easy. He looks Indian. His accent is thick, and I bet it attests him everyday to where he is. I bet there is a thick hindering remnant of his culture that crusts almost everything he calls himself. I imagine this crust hints like heartbeat softly within him to become the source of his awkward kilter, the foundation of what drove him to do very destructive things, drove him to end up in the ward of a hospital, the ward of a very different kind of 'internal injury'.

And he's brilliant. The mild mention of a verse in scripture causes him to softly burst forth in a passionate dutied reciting of whole passages as a tumbling brook. Today somebody casually leveled the first verse of the twenty seventh psalm, and my roommate lofted it like a verbed foxtail, its timbre and rise gliding with heavily Indian-accented spoken grace.

I am half his age, twice his height, and a fraction as memorized, but I can tell that he is to be my roommate as God would have it. Just as God works such places of things in all lives, today here in ours he has worked this.

15 January 2009 8:08pm

Where will we find God? Where will he be found? Will we feel his lazy presence on a television screen? Will we see him poignantly diagrammed in a textbook of higher learning, resting easy?

I am adjusting so harshly at times from three years abroad, watching myself twist under the rigors of again being American in the United States. Each day is heavy as a driving test. And in it a light shines down into my will, not pleasant like a lite stream of sound, but fierce and valiant, the wind of God's burning. The bundled people of this city, the plastic upholstered chairs in my house, the cracked drywall in my office, reheated chicken: these are the points of my hours. And as I twist under these rigors, held in God's arms like one teething, I am beginning to see anew. Rise up you Spirit of truth, and devour me; return me sober to where I live.

Great truths are greatly won. Not found by chance,

Nor wafted on the breath of summer dream,

But grasped in the great struggle of the soul,

Hard buffeted with adverse wind and stream….

But in the day of conflict, fear, and grief,

When the strong hand of God, put forth in might

Plows up the subsoil of the stagnant heart,

And brings the imprisoned truth-seed to the light.

Horatius Bonar