This Week . . . A Month

Earlier this week, as my devising group and I were checking in, I began by saying, “This week . . .” and my colleague Felipe finished my sentence with, “a month.” And that was only Wednesday!

The last week and a half of my life, our lives, has been so full, with painful, hard conversations, with rich and deepening conversations, with fear and grief and wonder. I have been trying to write about it, and there’s just too much right now to weave it all into a coherent tapestry. These are snippets of my unfinished, unpolished writings over the last ten days.

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Something hits the fan

At sixes and sevens

The training wheels are off

And here we are, careening downhill, swerve left, and just before the ditch a wild swing right, heels out and white-knuckling the handlebars, gravel kicking up behind us and we’ll wait to count our scrapes until gravity lets up a little bit and we can land and take a look around.

Did you know . . . being a human is hard. 

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In praise of the impotence of words. 
That some weeks simply can’t be written about. 
That sometimes we just eat 
the whole thorny, juicy mess
whatever nutrients and the chaff taken in 
all together, 
swallowed all together. 

In praise of the body that, like a god, can sort it out. 
Can fold what is good and necessary into 
our own being,
can energize us,
can refresh our cells for their ceaseless journey toward rebirth.
Can dispatch with efficiency that which we do not need, can 
return it to the earth
to feed the next life
in the chain that is really a circle.

In praise of the weeks that both poke us in the tongue 
and fuel our growth.

In praise of the weeks that nearly choke us with grief,
but that we survive.

In praise of the weeks that are mirrors,
that are gauntlets,
those weeks that began as weeks 
and when we look back we see 
were a pilgrimage.

We look back and see what we shed along the way.
We see our tattered shoes and the offerings left behind at resting places:
conversations with friends that feel like wrestling matches, 
sheets and sheafs of paper, scratches of prayers, sketches of explanation,
all abandoned in the middle and abandoned at the shrines along the way.

Even this one.

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From correspondence with my mama:

When Dante Stewart says that because we love this country, the thing we must do is have mercy—I can’t get away from that. That as the country gets crueler, we must get softer. I can’t believe that any other thing is truer than that. And I know every religion says it, or some version of it, so I don’t really care what we call it or who says it. But I don’t know how to live in this hard world if not by that rule of love. 

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Lament & Praise

Praise for the miraculous comb jelly, 
smaller than your pinkie nail, 
who reverts to its larval self, 
beginning life all over again in times of stress.

In grief that we cannot do the same—
take our knocks, learn our hard lessons, and have another go, 
return to our innocence and vulnerability,
wiser now.

Praise for all 230 decibels of the sperm whale’s clicks,
loud enough to deafen you, 
kill you, 
and shake apart your 
little boat 

all at once.

And in wonder that, 
as far as we know,
they’ve restrained themselves 
so far.

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In praise of the sperm whales 
who sank the Essex and the Ann Alexander.

I am sorry that the latter whale died anyway.
I lament that his death was measured in 
barrels of the remarkable substance 
that incurious men called ‘spermaceti,’ 
after their own, perhaps 

no less remarkable

—in its way—

substance—

but certainly no more.

I would like to say that I lament the men who died, 
and I do,
at least the boys,
and the Black men on board, 
ages mostly unknown,
mostly 

eaten at sea.

I give praise for Henry DeWitt, 
age unknown,
the only man to choose 
his own death—

to trust his body to the sea,
to the leviathans who had been the cause of his last sad situation—
rather than surrender even his corpse to the appetites of his white shipmates.

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Emily: I love the power and brilliance and paradox of this bishop going on the offensive with a plea for mercy.

Emilia: Going on offense by asking for mercy is a really good summation of the Gospel. [. . .] I’m having no small amount of fun watching just how shocking and radical the gospel is when it is actually heard by those in power.

Emily: I saw a lot of comments on Reddit of people having no idea a church could be like that. [. . .] Mainline Protestant churches are kind of like the long-abandoned starships hidden beneath layers of trash and vines that can be resurrected to get us where we need to go. 

Emilia: This is what the last three years of my life has been about. Though I didn’t understand it until like two and a half years in. I saw the church as an ineffectual institutional dinosaur, which it is, but not as the revolutionary force for change it can also be.

Emily: Same. And all it took was one bishop to make me see the starship potential in the old hunk of junk. 

[Notes: If you have not, please watch Bishop Budde’s entire sermon.

In accompaniment and contrast, this article and phenomenon warrants much thought and conversation. It seems there is a wide-open door right now for rigorous, gracious faith traditions to connect with those who hunger.]

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In praise of peace. 
In praise that every peacetime begins like this—

[. . .]

In lament —
in lament —
in lament —

In the last precious hours before peace breaks out,
a plume of smoke rises up—

[. . .]

In praise of sperm whales, whose grammar may be as sophisticated as our own,
whose clicks are louder than a rocket launcher, 
louder than a nuclear blast.
Whose milk is the consistency of cottage cheese.

[ . . .]

In lament at our own arrogance.
At the arrogance of men.
At the arrogance of white men.
At the Biblically lamentable 
incuriosity of white men. 

I lament that those who give themselves the world 
cannot imagine 
how to decouple their lust for a challenge
from a destructive end.

Because I, too,
when I read the accounts of 
the little whaleboats, 
six or eight men strong,
rowing out to meet their vast opponent,
floating atop 
the whale’s own universe, 

I, too, feel the thrill 
of terror 
and adventure,
the rush of wonder at the wildness,
at the breathless daring 
to test one’s strength and wit and nerve against
such an adversary—