Wednesday, February 20, 2019

I’ll Leave the Light on for You


This article was originally posted on the Ruminate Magazine blog on 12 February 2019.

* * *

It’s getting dark out here. It’s harder to see the beauty that the eye yearns to fix on, like the way a child stands entranced before moonlight. Sometimes we cannot find the flame of Hope that keeps the soul steady—when the footing is rough and we cannot feel the Way Homeward. When Home is not visible, when we do not know what Home is. These days it’s a rugged uphill zigzag, groping for familiar signs that have always glimmered just a step or two beyond our clumsy reckoning—like a low drift of stars above a stark, dark hillside.

Sometimes it’s lonely, slipping into shadows that are patterned by a glare of harsh light.

I have lived a long life in a world too few would recognize now. I reckon, by today’s standards, it was “old fashioned.” Simplistic? We managed to live with an ingrained sense of simplicity, of sufficiency. Our lives defied any particular sort of accumulation. In my community, we didn’t experience what wealth or the utter lack of it can do to the human soul, because we didn’t face either alternative: glut or bare subsisting. My professor-papa and his mix of friends were on the same scale at the church, the school, the grocer’s, the gas station. They were there for each other in the things that counted—perhaps a side of beef from the latest butchering, hand-me-downs for the ever-sprouting kids, a strong right arm with a grip on a hammer. Or most likely, a long-strong shared grip on the collateral of daily life.

In that lost world, we didn’t count our “farthings” as if they were our life. We all “did without” during a horrendous war far from our front doors. If your car was up on blocks due to a lack of rubber, or our car was too run down to repair without new parts, we swung by for a ride. Or walked. Or streetcar’d or bussed or hauled out the old bike & patched the tires over and over.

The complexity of our interdependence was a multiple of life’s simplicities. We could not imagine today’s equations—the knot of interwoven superfluities that goad us.

War was our unseen enemy, but when the lights went out for air raid drill, the darkness did not grip. It was not fear that drew us close, not in the great Midwest, but a life-changing grief. We mourned over something much greater, more eternal than our stringent days: Our hearts were ripped, were riven over the endless cruelty unleashed by “civilized” society.

It was a time and place in history unlike any other. A long, hard historic moment-momentum of discovery, of recovery, that will never recur in quite the same way, and will forever illuminate the shadows of our need. This, this fortress that arose in a timeless panoply of Truth, is where a stranger suddenly becomes a friend. Here, and anywhere. Even our enemies. Especially them, at the end of it all. Despite all our moral failures as a nation, this lesson learned seemed to be our redemption.

Today, too, is a time unlike any other. We find the U.S. difficult to recognize now. The gloom, the clotting of our national soul. The grip of a strong right arm on the neck of civility. Today, those who rule us make war, tell us whether we are above or below our neighbors, tell us we need anything and everything. Today we so often listen to the wrong voices, and too often make the wrong choices.

Today, a friend who was etched into our heart becomes a stranger. Today, a servant of our nation devolves into a sycophant. Today, our concept of community, of neighbor, is ravaged by false dichotomies.

Today, our every day, is a eulogy for what our nation always proclaimed to uphold. Today, portions of our nation’s past lie shattered, strewn across the borders of our states, and we have raised new “boundaries” that name us. That shame us. Today is a darkness we have made, by action or consent . . . or by the kind of inaction that forfeits what we most need because it comes as a cost to our personal comfort.

Home is not visible. We don’t know what Home is. I am old, and I have lived and learned—by heart, and years of stumbling—where the footing jogs and where it runs true. I have seen the falling of the darkness and the way it swallows us. And I believe in miracles—a glow, a radiance that each of us is meant to yearn for, to soak in, to wear against our hearts to guard against the lengthening shadows. I believe in you who shrug the darkness.

I’ll leave the light on for you.

~Judith

Friday, December 22, 2017

When He Comes to Them....



When He comes to them,

oh, when He plunges into earth-life, blood-begotten, 
amnion-soaked, it is in the open rawness
of a stable. A cave, perhaps. The shuffle of sheep,
their dense pelts reeking. A sift of hay-dust floating
on the raw air. The sound of human pain . . . .
                                          ~
Shadowed by the orbit of the rising moon,
the man kneels anxiously beside his wife. She wraps
and soothes her boy-child. His puckered mouth,
his eyes screwed shut, his feeble bleating . . .
a Lamb newborn indeed. The ewes turn and
cock their raggedy heads, their nostrils quivering. 
                                     ~
The shepherds crowd the entry, their clumsy
shuffle announcing them. The mother wakes
to apprehensive faces peering down. Their first
words sparse, garbled—constrained by incongruity. 
Shaped and shaken by unutterable mystery:

The great heart of Heaven in-born, earth-bound,
bundled and sheltered in a hard-worn cloth.
For knowing it, they dare to come, to worship.

And yes, there’s this . . . oh, this: the rupture
and unbidden rapture of the night sky! The ecstasy
of a timeless canticle, images and echoes
that will never end. An eternal diorama—this gift
they frame forever and carry in their empty hands:
the hill, the sky, a multitude of angels. 


          Maybe we may find ourselves beside them,
                    in an unexpected moment.

             Wishing you a very special Christmas!


                             ~Judith 

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Riding the Waves



“And when He got into the boat, His disciples followed Him. And behold, there arose a great storm in the sea, so that the boat was covered with the waves; but He Himself was asleep. And they came to Him, and awoke Him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing! And He said to them, “Why are you timid, you men of little faith?” Then He arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and it became perfectly calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What kind of a man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey Him?”      

Adversity, by its definition and very nature, is an “attack” on whatever is foundational to us. When significant aspects of living become lost to us, a part of us is lost. Alas, we have no magic wand to compensate for whatever undercuts the fragile footage of life.

Beloved faces are swept beyond our touch by the ravages of death or the failures between us. Or a job disintegrates—the livelihood that was our “outer garment,” perhaps worn a bit thin at the elbows, but still part of our daily pulse, our daily bread. Or the very roof above us, our shelter and part of our identity—that which grounds and shapes us in community—is taken from us, swept away by nature or the "nature" of economics. Even losing a small accumulation of treasures that remind us who we are, where we have been in life, and who has been a part of it—even this may be a grief. A greater loss, our health—immobility, psychological problems, various afflictions that threaten our very life or bring devastation upon us and those around us. And always, the non-corporeal scars, our invisible wounds: the loss of dear ones, or the deep sickening that others’ betrayals lay upon us  . . . the robbing of our very soul. Any of these, and more, may defeat us. Grief is utterly personal, and our hearts sometimes break for reasons that seem inadequate to others. So, adversity brings to us "loss" in some form.

"Sweet are the uses of adversity..." says the bard. We do not ask for them. They are hard “gifts,” after all. We humans, who by nature cling to whatever we deem as desirable, as good, perceive the harsher blows of life as a seedbed for more bitter fruit of such kind. Passion fruit does not spring from poison oak.

And so true adversity (as opposed to the “setbacks” that fret us) is not “useful.” It does not offer solace, redemption for what is torn away, repair of the irreparable, comfort and bedding for the plundered psyche. Adversity is a great shadow that passes slowly, inexorably over us, stripping all that it touches—or a tsunami that strikes quickly, leaving a wake that leaves us breathless. We cannot fathom, cannot see beyond it.

We are set adrift in rough and alien seas, flotsam around us, flotsam within.

But consider this: Jesus rode upon that sea, in a teetering boat—asleep, incredibly, in the throes of a violent storm. The disciples, paralyzed with fear, wakened Him. The rest is history: the Christ who lay exhausted among them, weary human that He was, woke up—and rose  up—to a stature that engulfed the chaos threatening to engulf them all. He spoke into the implacable deafness of wind and water . . . and the roiling was stilled, within Him and then around Him.

Jesus doesn’t ride in our leaky boat. But . . . but, He does—if we see Him there. No, He’s not holding that fabled magic wand. He is holding our lives, lifting us—that fragile essence of us—above what threatens to engulf us.

When we see Him, when our interior eye is refocused, life itself—all that is our life—rises with His hand. He absorbs our adversity. He contains it, constrains it—prunes it down to a size we can endure. The thrashing wind and waves, our utter brokenness. He enfolds it all, bearing witness to YAHWEH’s timeless Truth. Not fact, that barren word!—but to the indefinable, immutable Life Energy, the outflow of His Authority, which keeps us, succors us.

This is sustaining Truth that we can live with and live within: Love, life, endures. No—more than endures! It’s not that He will rewind or resume the reel of our days and ways for us, move things along the familiar track, patch up our humpty-dumpty hulls. No, that’s not what endures. What we discover, slowly or in a flash of intuition, is that because He is unlimited of scope—that He once and forever rose above the violence of waves, above His own small earth-personness, beyond the loneliness of loss and sorrow—so may we. He has not perished. Nor shall we. 

He gathered up the storm and silenced it. He will gather up our storms. A silence—a release—will come. Not in the margins of our being, but the center of our seeing.

We have loved deeply and suffered deeply, or not been loved and never flowered with passion for life—a sorry seedbed indeed. But both poverties are drawn into His own sudden rising, still numb with exhaustion, His springing from a troubled slumber in the hold of that small ketch, stretching to the inner height of Heaven . . . .

He reigns there, commanding the darkened sky—containing, before our startled eyes, the uncontainable. Controlling within our ravaged souls the uncontrollable. And within Him are stored our hearts’ treasures—those we have known and lost, those we never truly recognized, and those—ah yes—those not yet bestowed that He holds in custody.

For this, all this, we may fully live again. 

~Judith

Friday, June 2, 2017

Poem: "The Way the Soul Arcs"

Delphiniums courtesy of Pixabay

This poem was first published in living with what remains:



THE WAY THE SOUL ARCS
              Judith Deem Dupree

A bee has come
to harvest my delphiniums --
circling them,
leaving a halo only I can see.

The blooms are potted
on the sun-streaked deck --
in clay flared slightly
by the hands that held it to the wheel.
Its shape reminds me
of the way my hands cup, rising,
opening in praise
when Grace is nearly palpable.

Blossoms spill in tangled glory
down the earthen jar,
too much glory to define as *blue*.
They break with logic,
with its need for category --
the prompting
to explain, to clarify, compare...

Like the way the soul arcs around
our shaped theology,
searching for that unseen radius
where Glory spills --
as indefinable, as prescient,
as honeyed as the aura of delphinium.


Thursday, April 13, 2017

Maundy World

The Last Supper at Cologne Cathedral (photo in the public domain)


Maundy: Middle English maunde, from Old French mandé, from Latin mandatum; command, order; from the words spoken by Jesus to his disciples after washing their feet at the Last Supper, “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another...” (John 13:34).

Today. This day. This moment in Time unlike any other in anguish, in impact, in historical consequence. In power. Hope. Promise. 

We are here, struggling through the metaphorical, and increasingly tangible, high tides of earth-life—clinging to the beauty, the integrity, the absolutes that remain, a constant shimmer above the dark waters. Our lives, our future upon this planet, all that it means to be human is caught in a rip tide. 

We need—oh, how we need—to see, to perceive the One who calmed the raging sea.

We cannot recognize Him within the storm until we see Him sagging from the nails that, finally, held the weight of Him . . . and yet, we cannot fully perceive the purpose and power of the cross until we see Him standing imperially in that small, tossing skiff. Caught in the grip of a violent storm (Luke 16.22-25). Unafraid, majestic. God in the midst of His elements. 

He was, in both disparate moments, in utter control over Life. He established His authority over the elements—the Genesis Moment—simply by raising his hand against the inanimate. No mortal man, even the occasional "miracle-workers" who habited the fringes of spirituality, could control the rudiments of earth. It was here that He identified Himself in full to His disciples, beyond their stumbling cognizance. Here they perceived The One. Here they gained a fear of God, beyond their fear of death.

But . . . He forfeited His authority over His own authority at Gethsemane. Strange statement? Certainly. But we cannot fully decipher the authority of Jesus the man, maimed and murdered, until we calculate Christ the man perched in utter dominion
 . . . upon the edge of obliteration. And obliterating it. 

We are clinging to the mast, to the sides of our small skiff of life, watching the storm metastasize. And He is waiting, ready, not asleep. 

This night He dies again, once again, as He has through all the centuries before us. The One Who raises us, the dead, from the soul-storms that destroy our life. The nails will never hold Him again. Earth is not large enough to define Him. Nor small enough to confine us to a shattered end. 

One day soon we shall meet Him, walking on the waters, His arms opened wide. 

Friday, March 17, 2017

Poem: "One Day"

Photo courtesy of Pixabay. In the public domain.

One Day

One day, before the earth grew old
and mostly bald and full of stink,

one day I woke to music, to a chirrup
in the trees that rose and fell
like exhalations of the earth itself―
a gargling of the morning air
in bright polyphony, in crisp staccato.

And I knew the birds were prophesying―
knew I heard the voice of God,
sweeter than the earth itself,
rising like a counterpoint, an arching,
aching tremolo―

heard the wild of Him that we have tamed
come bursting forth in feathers
and arpeggios and yearnings inexpressible,
too large and small for syllables that slip
into our narrow ears;

and so I stood and listened to the world
as He described it, listened to the reveling,

and knew that I was born for this―knew
that doves, that sparrows sing epiphany
at dawn each day, and breathe
the earth’s core in and out, and feather
all that breathes and flies and sings,
and I must sing, must sing, must sing,

and this is my arpeggio, my only syllable.

Amen.

© Judith Deem Dupree 2017


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Friday, March 10, 2017

Beyond the Cock-Crows

Public domain image courtesy of Pixabay



Up with the roosters this morning. And yes, I can hear one of those feathered alarm clocks―his voice far greater than his body warrants―ratcheting his endless observations through this dark and drowsy neighborhood. Does this remind us of the current political scene?

Ah, human nature has not changed since satan shaped his body and his lie to the contours and contents of a tree. He still slithers up our spine, our trunk, to reach the hidden source of all thought: our cerebrum. The crown of our own Tree of Life―The Eden of our every intent, that  incomprehensible core of us that births the comprehensible . . . over and over each day.

And ah, again: the enemy has entered our garden with new and poisonous seed. Fruit that we have known forever―for we have always tweaked the message to fit the equivocation. But there's something shrewder happening in this Time, this edgy, edgeless season, this strange new world we live in.

We are assaulted, continually, by crushing changes in social contract. The welter of ways of our time-tested "role playing"―the nudge-wink-wink of flawed and fatuous discourse―is almost "quaint" today. Humanity's thoughts, and tongues, are honed to lethal verbal weaponry. And primped with a litany of obfuscations that distort the realities beneath their promises.

"The world is too much with us..." William Wordsworth, commenting poetically (at the dawn of the 19th century) on "the decadent material cynicism of the time." A prophetic insight. The seeds have sprouted, replicated endlessly.

Some mind-shift largely inexplicable―often unperceived, even unpredicated on such a scale―is ripping through communal relatedness, and indeed, rippling across our larger earthlife. It is shattering our histories, our stories, our ancient inter/intra-societal algorithms. Something ingeniously crude is tweaking the long-established, heart-felt empathies into ersatz niceties and/or nasties. It births and preens a strange hybrid of smooth double entendre and a razor-rough hide.

Tensions escalate and boil over. Now, across continents, great uprooting, wars of tortured words becoming bloodbaths. And now, across continents, the homeless, the forsaken tread their via dolorosa on the way to nowhere.

We who watch, hearts in our throats, are left groping consciously for the known that has staked our own perimeters like a pivot point. What does all this mean? What is the why of it? What do we do with such misery? It has torn the very fabric we are wrapped in.

We are all in shreds. It is, yes, too much with us.

The cock has crowed over this broken world. We are all akin to Peter, retreating in fear from the sight of his bloodied Master, denial his only defense.

There is only one Voice louder, fuller than the roosters of this chicken-little world.

In the beginning was the Word . . .

We cannot know anything pure, ultimate, bounteous beyond the Word of that mysterious, ineluctable, unfathomable Primer Mover who reigns beyond the stars―and deigns to harbor in our tiny cranium. We know nothing beyond and aside from His preternatural act of defiant mercy: the birthing of the Son who was born of our blood-line . . . and lived in our skin. It must have chafed. Badly.

But this earth-shaped-One had His Father's genes. He decoded earthlife just as preternaturally. He spoke into the blatant hypocrisies that shaped the theses and postulations, the smiles like scythes, the lies that wreathed Him like a troubled cloud. He knew each forgery of truth, each  vanity . . . and named them.

He is waiting. Forever waiting in the wings of this great, rickety teatro oscuro. He is the author. All the roosters of the world will go hoarse when He edges back onto Stage Earth.

But here―ah, here is a thought I gleaned unexpectedly, just after the next-door rooster gave up. Ordinary, simple, uncannily powerful words. From the front of a birthday card!

"Forever stay open, curious, fearless, transparent, and willing to be and love being exactly who you are." *

This has dropped like ripe seed upon my sterile soul-soil. How pertinent to everything! Words of YES to carry with us, into the gulf of grief around us. To fear not, and deign not to accept the small, the pinched, the shrewd and slanted forever forced upon us. To break through barriers of pretense we sense around us. Fearless and transparent before the great deceit. The deceiver.

Who we are, and choose by the moment to become, and Who we listen to, and choose to rise up and follow―openly, gently, fearlessly―across this great, crumbling stage . . . this is our constant, whatever-the-circumstances YES to life!

This is the mending of the broken mind, the healing of our broken heart. A steady and sturdy Gift of hope for our broken world. 

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*(© Legacy Art Studio, Sunrise Greetings)