Sheesh.

Today I got to that state of spentness after a fast few days in which I hesitated to open my journal because I felt unequal to the task of articulating my thoughts and was afraid that what I wrote would be negative (busyness provokes venting in me) and that wouldn't be fair to posterity because there are good things dancing all around me as well and who am I to skewer a happy memory by introverted angst? My brain sucked in breath to further the tirade and suddenly my soul butted in, painfully polite, with the pert observation that the point of a journal is to have a shelter all one's own where one can rant and rave to the heart's content and that the historians who will one day ferret out my brilliant private jottings when I am famous (and dead) will simply assume the usual and say that all artistic types are angsty and self-obsessed. Thanks, soul. Now I feel better. I think.

Does anyone else ever have these inner conversations?

Honeyed light

I am a psalm a day sort of girl. The psalms are a door to me, a portal of entry into that room I seek every single morning where God waits, waits, for me to join him. Those words, all cadenced in sorrow and struggle, awe, joy, are the best way I know to chant my brain into the hushed wonder that becomes my key in the lock of God's presence.

I do have my favorites though. There are a few that come to me now and then like pieces of gold dropped in my hand, or rare, limpid summer days. They are full, rich, and just what I want. They are the ones that dwell on a world made right by the Messiah. In these Psalms, the red of struggle, the dark and dusk of anguish, even the taut grey of hope deferred in patience, all fall away, and there is only gold. Light. That inner glow that rises from every created thing being just as whole as it was meant to be.

To read them is like peering at a painting by an artist like Vermeer, or Caravaggio, or the Hudson River Valley school, those masters whose brushes somehow caught the light of a world purer than our own. Vermeer's The Milkmaid, where the light dots the corner of bread and jug and the girl's hands at their work are a slow, holy dance. Or the landscapes of Thomas Cole, with light on the mountains like it must have been in Eden, with every leaf and fisted branch gilded in this still, honeyed glow. Each color is richer for the quiet, as if the world were at its deepest peace and the zenith of joy all at once. Those paintings, and my psalms, dwell on the world I need to be true. I could not keep walking the days of my life if I did not have these pictures, these golden images of promise to speed me on the way to the perfect world that is coming. But the psalms especially, also picture for me exactly what I must try to live, every day. To read this morning that:

God will deliver the needy. Has compassion on the poor. Will rescue the poor from oppression and violence. There will be an abundance of grain in the earth and on top of all the mountains. That those from the city will flourish. That God's name will increase as long as the sun shines. That all nations will call him blessed...

The words are brushes stroking a mighty picture in my mind of shelter and arms strong to save, of hands reaching to fallen people, homes built up for the lonely. Health, and friendship. And also an earth, a life, ripe with beauty. A world rich "in grain," in feasting and festival. The celebration of a world and a people, remade and righted by the Beautiful One. It grows up in my inner mind as this great mural that is the example by which I strive to live my small days, because those words picture the mighty creation that is in process even now. The process of redemption, the kingdom of heaven, is here. And I join it, I join it, when I live it out in my life. By loving those close to me, and bringing those close who are lonely. By fashioning a home, a life, with the artistry of love, and a sense of stewardship for all the beauty God has handed me. By saving the poor, the lonely, the ones who need food or clothing, or just the kindness of a caring touch. By being a light of truth that heals to those blinded in spirit, to those who have never heard truth, or had love.

And glory grows up, ripe, and quiet, all around.

Sniffing

There are moments when I feel that being a dreamer (or artist, or writer, or really, God lover at all) is like being a bloodhound.  Floppy ears, saggy face, sad eyes, snuffling and all. There I go, sniffing the holy out amidst the roughage and roots of the everyday. Nose to the ground, tripping along in a mad lurch after any sign, oblivious to anything but that scent of faint transcendence. Then off in a baying run after this fleet-footed beauty, this eternity I have never actually seen, and never quite seem to catch. And yet, for one glimpse of which I am willing to run my poor, panting soul to death. Not a particularly elegant or convenient way of being. All too true though, if you ask me. Good grief.  Saturdays sometimes have this affect on me.

Out at Sea

I am the worst of the hunt and peck sorts of Bible readers. I do, I have to admit, open my Bible on many mornings and turn until something meshes with my thought. I have decided to amend this bad habit of mine by reading straight through several books of Scripture. Word by word, action by action, I want to discern the story that grows up from the disparate statements and events. I’ve been at the Psalms and Matthew for three weeks now and today, I was hugely rewarded. The hunt and peck method of study has has always made Jesus’ life a little enigmatic to me. Read out of context, his miracles, parables, and occasional rants to the Pharisees can seem vehement, but random. Today though, I discovered that there is almost always a thread tying one miracle to the next. Until now, I saw the feeding of the five thousand, and Jesus walking on water after as two miracles simply narrated next to each other; a merely chronological connection with no meaning between them. Then, a little note in my Bible informed me that Jesus had compelled his disciples to leave him after the feast for five thousand. Compelled, noted my notes, meant he pretty much marched them down to the waterside and shoved their boat off himself. What, I asked, could have prompted Jesus to this action?

Revolution, apparently. After that miraculous feast, the crowds decided that Jesus ought to be crowned on the spot. With zap like that, Jesus could could multiply power like bread. Rome would be thrown in a day and the crowd was ready to begin. The disciples agreed. For once, they were on the side of the rebel rousers, the stragglers always tagging at Jesus’ heels. The craze of a feast of a miracle hinted at the fulfillment of the freedom they had so long desired. If Jesus could be king now they could all have everything they wanted. I can see them, in a hot, sweaty crowd, grabbing at his shoulders and hands, begging him to please, finally, drop the servant guise and act like the Messiah he claimed to be.

Jesus responded with force; he sent them all packing. He slapped their hands away, stared down the crowds, and very calmly strong-armed his disciples into an evening sail. “Leave me alone!” he said and headed, literally, for the hills. But those words set the stage for the next miracle. The flamobyant spectacle of a walk across the sea was intricately connected with the drama of the feast and fight of the day before. For the first time in reading that passage, I understood why, and it was because I realized how those men felt as they set sail, and how it shaped their hearts for the storm and splendor to come that night.

They were furious. They were his right hand men. They had left all and followed this bright-eyed, beguiling bachelor because he claimed to be the Messiah.  He was supposed to free them from Rome, take Israel by inspired storm and get them the freedom they desired. And that day, it had all been within their grasp. That miraculous feast had set the stage for Jesus to march into the city at the head of a miracle-drunk mob. Jesus threw it away. Not a thought, not a glance at the glorious chance they had all been waiting for. How maddeningly like him. He always drew back. He swore anyone who saw his miracles to silence, he healed blind beggars instead of rich merchants, and wasted his time with children. The twelve had stood it until now, but the big chance had come and been spurned and it was all too much. Peter, I’m sure, all but tipped the boat in his furor, oaths on his breath, his big feet in a stomp up and down the decks. He must have said what everyone else was thinking: Jesus had let them down.

He didn’t mean to say it. Only the heat of possibility in that crowd, and the chill, clear cut refusal on Jesus' face had forced the words out. But the doubt was spoken, and suddenly Peter, and each man there, was bewildered. If Jesus didn't want to be king, what did he want? If his goal was not a palace, where was he headed? Dark pooled in water and sky, a stillness crept in that is day when it is bereft of light. Jesus was absent and there, in the dark, the disciples sighed and knew again that Jesus was not to be followed with ease.

Why did they follow? He never gave them the riches or power they thought they wanted. He never promised them places of honor; he told them to be humble as babies instead. Of course, life was a thrill with Jesus. Dramatic arguments with stuck-up religious leaders, demons careening out of wild men; it all kept them with him. And for a few, for Peter in his headlong devotion, and John, with his watchful hush, there was the mystery. A tantalizing secret seemed always alight in Jesus’ eyes, a flame that rose in his face every time he healed a blind man, held a child. To see it was to be struck with hunger, the ache of young, first love. There was shadow too, a swift darkness that came into his face, a look they did not often want to meet. That too, held them, for it spoke to some blackness in themselves. But where was it leading them? The facts must now be faced. They had left jobs for him. Dropped friends and neglected lovely wives and little children. They stood to loose all, they stood to die a martyrs death at the hands of Rome or the rabbis if Jesus said the wrong thing. The plans they had made for Jesus to fill their dreams had fallen dead. Jesus had refused.

That’s when the storm came. They glanced up, suddenly aware of the clouds striding in like black, wild spirits. The pitch of the wind rose to the wail of their own fevered hearts. The waves rose in a swell as if their questions had grown huge hands to reach up and pry them loose from everything safe. A drenching of rain slammed down on their heads, ripped away warmth and calm until everything they thought they knew about Jesus, about themselves, about the life they lived in following him was blown away.  And they were afraid.

Not merely of the storm, but of the road they now walked in following Christ. Of the unpredictable future to which this Master led them, a man whose whims and words were subject to no one’s expectation or demand. Afraid of this man who held the glory and honor of the world so lightly. Afraid of what the alternative to glory might be. Afraid of the fact that they had cast in their lot with him and he didn’t care a jot for any of the power or favor or strength they thought important. Afraid, finally, of him. Jesus would not bend to their wills, bow to their ways. Their desires would not sway him. All power was his; he healed, his spoke words that led crowds in whatever dance he chose, he rebuked, he forgave. He could captivate any number of compliant men to replace them any who failed him. Those rain-drenched men felt suddenly expendable. After all, Jesus had sent them  packing. The thought must have come, sly, quick, a serpent's whisper in their hearts as the wind rattled their thought:  Maybe he’s through with us. Maybe we have pushed him to far, bumbled too badly. Maybe he doesn’t care about us or our plans at all. No longer able to predict or comprehend Him, I am quite sure they were terrified of their enigmatic Christ. Cold came upon them. The sea reached merciless hands to grasp them and the sky screamed with blackness.

What a moment for Jesus to show up. Hale and red-faced, striding across the writhing water, his face lighted by laughter. He was as rain-stung and wind-tangled as any of them, but his face was in a grin. Always a reveler, always full of more joy, more grief, more life than anyone else, he threw back his head to the unbridled stroke of wind and grinned a hello to his crouching, craven disciples. What a way for him to show up  too. Here was a gaudy display of the sort they were always wanting; just for them. They thought they had been sentenced and abandoned, yet here he came with a joke on his holy face, hands held out to them through the roar of the rain, and the louder clamor of their doubts.

Peter leapt up first; Peter, whose muscles and heart were always swifter than his mind. All he knew was gladness like the sun jumping up to day. Jesus was there after all. The master might love him still. “Command me to come,” he shouted, timid and bold all at once. “Come!” laughed the Messiah. Of course come. Always come. Always walk to where I am, be it over dawn-washed sands or raging seas, over your happiness or your doubt. And Peter did, splashing five times as much as any other man could, drenching every cranny of himself still dry, running twenty feet out from the boat with his first leap and breath. Then his brain caught up. Every doubt of the night, every voice that had whispered his cause to despair, every question over his tremulous future mobbed him, all at once. Especially the thought that he, Peter, might be a nuisance, a child his master would shove aside. Peter dropped his eyes. Peter sank.

“Save me Master!” he cried in what I think was abject terror. I honestly don’t think Peter knew if Jesus would save him. I think that day of miracles and raised hopes and shouting and “compellments” had so upended his neat expectations of his Master and his future, not to mention the brain benumbing sight of Jesus walking on water, that Peter probably felt that the blackness of space was yawning beneath him and overhead too. Jesus simply reached down, pulled him to his feet, made the water firm beneath him, and saved him.

“You of little faith,” Jesus said gently, his hand on Peter's shoulder. “Why, why did you doubt?”

The question encompassed far more than a query about a stumble in the water. Jesus knew every thought that had filled Peter’s mind. He knew the questions that had filled him with darkness. He knew Peter’s doubt, his resentment of his master’s mystery, his guilt. Jesus knew the terror that had almost convinced Peter he was abandoned. It was to the soul and center of the man that Jesus asked: why did you ever doubt me? Why did a little shaking of your expectations, a refusal on my part to cow tow to a riled crowd throw my love for you into question? Why did the craze of a people swayed as easily as a flock of sheep sway you from confidence in my plan?  You have seen kindness in my touch, love in my words and heart each day. I am the humble, the gentle, the meek God you never expected. I have loved you, I have made you breakfast and kissed your children and healed your sin. You have desired a glitzy deity, a Hebrew Zeus to conquer your enemies, but I have come to conquer your heart with mercy. How could a bad-tempered spit of a storm, one small refusal of your desire ever make you believe that I did not love you and that my kingdom will not triumph?

Peter; my son and student, my disciple and friend. All of you crouched there in the boat, drenched and staring with eyes like black pits. You cannot confine my love by petty power. You cannot save the world with a sword, or bend my grace to your own shortsighted will. You can only follow me. Come to me, walk unharmed over raging doubt, and the upending of earthly expectations. Come to me now, as you did at first, because of the love you found in my face and the joy it brought to your heart. That is what my kingdom is made of. That is what I seek and that is what you will find if you follow me. When Peter finally looked up, I am quite sure the storm was gone and the stars glinted out, fresh, and sweet, and clean.

Now, I hear the same question of Christ in my own heart. Why do you doubt? And oh, I do. Like those opinionated disciples, I have expectations of how a good God ought to behave. I think his love ought to guarantee my happiness; make money and good friends easy to come by, open paths like golden highways up at my feet. I’ve followed him so it’s only fair he shield me from sickness, rejection, or the little agonies of life in a fallen world. When he doesn’t, I feel at sea. And the waves that rock my little boat of self are the same ones that tumbled Peter and the disciples over a sea of deep despair. I begin to doubt everything I ever believed about my Master. I question his goodness, his presence; convince myself he might have left me. Nothing has turned out as I expected; how can I believe he still loves me?

Just as I’m drowning in my own dramatic despair, tossed on the waves of my unsteady heart, he comes. Happy and heedless of my thunder, eyes alight, hand outstretched. I am the unsteady one, this world is the unsteady place. But he is sure, astride the waves, light beyond all the shouting darkness. I look at him for just a second, eyebrow cocked as I ponder. I cannot predict any part of my life with him except his unfailing presence with me. I cannot plan on any outcome except that he will love me. I can’t bank on any riches but his those of his grace. I sigh. He holds out his hand.

Come.

I leap out of that boat and hope I never look back.

Asheville percolations

My foot knows every cobble,As I amble, I am part of every thought That grew these houses From the loamy earth, and curving girth Of hills, whose bellies rumble far beneath The stones that found, These nooky, olden houses, With their eaves that lean to shelter, Their lights that gleam A welcome from the blink Of brooding windows, As the bell of evening wind tolls Through the streets that ribbon softly through the trees.

Here, I wander free as all The sky-eyed souls Who bear their dreams as mounting storms, Within their faces, Yet find shelter from themselves within the grace, Of little mercies: Lace at window, Light like snow upon a crisp white table, Hours lithe and quiet, Days like cups to catch the bright, Small drips of dream, and sun, and sleep, That make a lifeboat for a soul.

Counsels of dusk

I had a decision to make. One of those choices that seemed to pit me against myself, and then the both of us against God. A dilemma that split my soul into numerous bits and set all of them fighting each other. On the rare occasion this sort of thing confronts me, I often creep away to some quiet place where I can pray away all my confusion. There's an old castle-styled historic place nearby, and I hied me there for a night and a day. I spent my first afternoon in dutiful thought; weighing this option against that verse against that friend's opinion, against the yen of my own heart. By sundown, my head was a bee's nest of voices. I stumbled out of my castle room in search of a walk, intent only on getting away from the small spaces of my head and even the indoors.

Cold air can be a sort of salvation. It can smack your face with this sweet, reviving touch that regenerates you from the slow suffocation of your own tunneling thoughts. Out in the sharp-edged dusk, as shadows made dark outlines of rock and tree, I felt the contours of my thought expand to the pearled blue of sky, the sudden precipices of cliff as I walked a short way up a canyon. Everything in me widened and breathed.

Crisp, with the glitter of a day's melting on its skin, the snow was pure as child's sleeping face. The mountainsides jutted through it, the rich, wet red of their stone like the beating heart of the wintered earth. And the trees, giant, crooked firs, with a hundred years of abiding green woven over their arms. It was at just such a tree that I stopped, craning my neck to meet the height of its quiet face, standing near the curve of its changeless arms, its motherly shadows. I watched the sky deepen, brood about it. In its shelter, my mind clarified by cold, my questions came slower, the voices in my head slowed and spoke clearly. I asked God what in creation I was supposed to do.

"REST."

It was clear as any word in my soul I have heard in my whole life. There was even a tinge of exasperation in it, as if this were probably the one thing I had never thought of doing. As dark snaked through the canyon and I turned homeward, I crunched through the snow, turning this word over in my mind. Rest from what? I asked. From the strife of your own wisdom. From the push to define a plan and act on it when no plan has been whispered into you from God. From the desire to have your whole life in a known, gridded outline. From the push to prove your worth, to be outwardly successful (and inwardly bankrupt), to look on top of things. From the frenzy to have a plan, instead of letting God tell a slow, rich story through your days.

When I reached the castle, I stopped on the terrace. Night came and stood on one side of me, cold on the other, their touch gentle, propping up my heart as I let stillness drive away my worry. I waited there, for some sense of conclusion in my heart. There was no tidy answer to my dilemma. No, succinct word to shut up each clattering voice in my head. There was though, a reshaping of the spaces inside of me, a widening of my thought so that the voices faded away and a restfulness came to the inner rooms of my heart.

The all important picture...

On one of my restless nights last week, I watched the movie Luther. And there was this one scene that made me sit up straight in the theater-like darkness of the living room; sit up and watch Joseph Fiennes as if he were Luther himself thundering a sermon straight at me. The scene was merely one of Luther preaching in the church of his home town- a tall, echoey chapel that gave a ring and height to the words he spoke. But they were such gentle words, and he came down from the pulpit, shuffling up the stones amidst peasant and lord, merchant and beggar saying the single same thing to all (please know this is a paraphrase of what I remember and should not be compared to the movie script!): "If Satan comes to you," he said, bending down with a face of mock fierceness to the people nearest him, "and says, you aren't worthy to be loved, or forgiven by God, then just agree. Say merely that he is entirely right, that you are weak and sinful and frail. But tell him also that your Father doesn't care. That God loves you, loves you my friends, as the sons and daughters you are. God doesn't sit above in anger, He is your Father."

And in that moment, I repented. There was Luther, defending to those people, to the Catholic church of his time, to the world, to me, the tender fatherhood of God. I sat up straight in the dark, and told God I was sorry for the persistent, stubborn way in which I have pictured him as angry at me. This is my constant fight, my constant wronging of a gentle God. God gives all that we may know, and be known by him in utter love, and yet my daily temptation is to see him as angry. I come before him cringing as if he were a petty, demanding master ready to throw a petulant fit at my slightest sin. I think it must be a slap in his face.

I have been thinking about this all week, because I have realized that the image we carry of God, the picture of him that comes to us the instant we think of him, is the defining picture of our lives. This image of Him, the face we see when we look into our hearts to the place where he dwells will shape every jot of life. In our hopes and dreams, does he treasure and know us as special creations, or will we be streamlined into joyless service? When it comes to money trust, is he a benevolent father or a fickle deity? And especially when we come to relationships. Is he Love, truly? This inner image of him drives every word we speak to every other person. It shapes the love we bring to children, to friends, to husbands and wives, to strangers on the street. It is not merely belief in the existence of God that shapes who we become and what we do in this world. It is our belief in the existence of a good and loving God that makes his kingdom come here on earth.

This came powerfully home to me this weekend as I worked at my family's conference for moms. Let me just say right now that it is a surpassingly odd thing to grow up in a parenting ministry because you begin to have very strong opinions about child discipline while still in your teens. By the time you're twenty-five or so, like me, you're a downright expert in philosophies of character-training and Christian discipline. So odd, I know. But this I see after three gazillion conversations and fifteen years of conferences: the image any parent carries of God in their hearts will form the sort of parent they are to their children. Their picture of God informs every word and touch and provision they make for the children in their home. If they believe God is a big, grace-hearted Father with a hearty laugh and patience wide as the ocean for their own foibles and follies, then they are able to extend that same grace to their children. If though, they see him as furrowed of brow, harsh, quick to punish, they become the same, angry sort of parent.

I think what so moved me about the scene in Luther was the fact that he was defending the tender heart of God, and in doing so he reintroduced the living Christ to a world that had lost sight of him. This is what knowing yourself to be loved does. I want to do this too. I don't want my own guilt and Satan's whisperings to turn my eyes from the radiant love God beams on me every single second. I don't want to be tricked into the false, furrowed image a fallen world would have me believe. We must all, my friends, must, challenge our hearts to rise to the work of seeing God as he truly is. It means looking at him instead of our own sin. Fixing our sight on his love instead of our frailty. It's an act of creation, using Scripture and faith and a determined joy to paint a picture of God that honors the love he offers.

I think its artists and lovers like that who go on to bring the sort of change and grace that Luther did. Let's start painting.