Losing the Real America

Donald Trump for president . . . yet again?  

Trump isn't responsible for all the injustices and instabilities, brazenness and corruptions, afflicting the highways and byways of America’s ongoing political journey. But, behind his noisy suppositions, there's gritty truth this ex-president unwittingly exposes: He is truly the poster child of our unraveling, the role model for our government’s ongoing disparity. He is not the cause. He is the continuation: the undo-er of indispensable, viable governing needed at a time of evolving worldwide desperation.   

The answer is both simple and complex: We all know the mechanics of voting.   

How did we get here?  And more to the point, how did he get THERE?   

Well, there was an election, right? And he won. Yes, thanks to the Electoral College. Thanks first to those reigning Congress-persons who “opened this door when he banged on it.” Was it from their party’s fear of loss in quest for executive power? Of course! From that embryonic, decisive-divisive moment, they have edged into their sycophantic or manipulative behavior . . .  and dismissed or avoided his obvious evidences of incompetence. His divisive callousness became theirs.  

We allowed a range of conditions that invited him into escalating our national dysfunction—a heritage of which he is seemingly oblivious. In 2016, he simply barged into the Republican’s wannabe line-up for the Oval Office (Of course the Dem’s had their own.) . . . the postulate-imposter, luring us down his own winding side-street. When the ballots were counted, he had arrived at his destination—with handy electoral college advantages. We were Trumped.   

The presidency shouldn’t be anyone’s first political foray. A president should be formed by  constant maturing, informed by current development, and consistently judged well before the day of election to office . . . before seeking the authoritative, world-focal position. Our political structure, designed as a timeless pledge of balance in governing, has often resembled an oral war zone. Or a football field? In the midst of this smattered playground, our untamed, unashamed president-in-the-re-making sauntered. Our Wizard of Odds. He knew the game.  

This would-be Emperor defies standards that too many of us already ignore, and too few of us comprehend as mandates based upon honor—personal and communal and yes, universal. Respect. Tolerance. Truth. Our president’s responses defy it by his hubris. It seems to be “catching.” Nearly pandemic. His key to surmounting inexperience in “impossible situations” is to avidly seek out those who will validate him and accept his misguided antidotes.  

Perhaps this untempered one will do himself, and us, and the watching world, an unintended favor: force us into sudden focus, exposing his and our own unequivocal trail of lies. The answers stretch far back before his pretense and reach far ahead.  

If you are a resolute Trump supporter—perhaps valuing his strong penchant toward nationwide and worldwide financial “adjustments”—you have been willfully primed by a man who apparently sees all things in terms of dollars. Billions of them. You/we who checked the square next to his name on the 2016 and 2020 ballots had reasons to hope for positive results—if financial stability and incremental wages alone were the underlying keys to better life ahead. Many grasped at this hope, despite reservations regarding his character. Few of us realized that Trump would deny the undeniable and revoke the irrevocable.   

It is the mandate and virtue of leadership to be balanced and humane.   

Would you . . . I ask those of you who oppose my accusations, or who offer moderate “yes, but’s” for a man who lives for the sake of his well-being—will you, I plead, stand solemnly for a moment—before a panicked world of our fellow humans, and grant that someday, without our powerful and innovative intervention, we—or our heirs—will face our final devastation?  

We must add this: the opposition party deserves no kudos. Their plots are often sprinkled with half-truths—garnished with verbal embellishments. Holier than any Republican thou.   

We must agree that both political parties have basic truths to retrieve about their call to high purpose, and much to gain by rethinking. And yet another crucial move forward: we voters each need to examine ourselves, as voters, or discouraged non-voters—for signs of self-deception. We as individuals and collectives. Our personal and national insight are critical; they grant the legitimacy born of and borne by ethics. We must rethink the roles and rules of opposition and the essential function of political parties—and the incentives of our often insistent and unchanging but indefinite party loyalty. The political parties must begin again.  

Let us dare to rethink our tomorrow, today—that we may personally-collectively, hopefully, and adamantly alter the future. That a more sustainable society will become a gradual reality, from the heart and hands of a determined and responsible president and congress . . . worked up jointly and handed down to us soberly. We each must agree to learn how to thrive safely, honestly, openhandedly, and reach each other there—to be taught by and teach each other. And yes, moving beyond our smallish nationalism and bringing together our valid needs and creeds.  

Now is our Moment in the spotlight—not because of our wise and prudent ways, but because the world citizens are watching us falter and stutter. We will soon decide whether the next election is an awkward, uncertain, but determined step toward our tomorrow—or a casualty for humanity forever.  

 

Judith Deem Dupree, author of four books: Going Home, living with what remains, Sky Mesa Journal, and I Sing America, has retired from teaching at writers’ workshops and conferences, including her own artists/writers retreat, Ad Lib. She lives east of San Diego, CA.

 

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

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 

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

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.

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. 

Beyond the Cock-Crows

Public domain image courtesy of Pixabay

Reprinted from the Ruminate Magazine blog, 29 September 2015

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. 

*(© Legacy Art Studio, Sunrise Greetings)

Seeing Sideways

Originally posted on the Ruminate Blog on 1 February 2017: "Seeing Sideways"

It was raining again when I walked out of church—a slow spritz that would invoke a guffaw in the saturated NorthEast. But in California it was, Oh yay, rain! I smiled, raised my umbrella, and headed across the street.

And I saw him standing there. Facing the church, holding a ragged cardboard "help" sign. My first thought: Panhandling, of course. He knows how to 'guilt' people! Get them coming out of church, stoked with a good sermon on 'doing unto others.'  But he was directly between me and the parking lot, and to evade him would have looked obvious. Yeah, evasive. We know it well.

So I walked directly up to him. I was almost surprised to look into the face of someone as alert and "normal" as other folks zigging past us. Not one of the usual street people. His eyes were intensely blue, clear, observant—the word benevolent occurred to me. Strangely, because he was seeking our benevolence. Here he was, slightly shivering, damp and uncovered, and he might have been handing out bonbons or tracts, for the look on his face. 

Not a tinge of down and out.

"Hi, my name's Jerry.* I'm an ex-Marine, on disability, and the checks quit coming. I'm trying to get through the legalese and straighten it out. I'm supposed to have more surgery." His declaration was quiet, well-modulated. He stopped and lifted the cuff of his knee-length khakis. His leg was distorted, and a thatch of scarring ran from ankle to mid-thigh, where it disappeared under cover. He looked straight at me. "Afghanistan. I survived. Got patched up, discharged. And lost my home, lost my address, pension, medical . . . lost it all." It was matter-of-fact, direct. "I need a bus pass to go get help. A monthly pass—so I can go back and forth and deal with all the government paper work and stuff."  He explained it all carefully, his reason for asking.

"Where are you staying?" He obviously wasn't rumpled and unbathed, unshaved.

He gestured behind him. "Oh, there's a shelter a few blocks down. No computers, nothing but a free bed. Me and 250 other guys." He smiled ruefully. And then he grinned. That surprised me—the way he shrugged off the hardship of his predicament.

"God knows where I am. The bus will take me where I need to go." He said it quietly, carefully. He was watching me closely.

And I knew: He was a believer. Jerry came to us, to believers—not complaining, but directly presenting his need. Directly focused on what we could do to get him through. Our brother.

We talked a bit more about that—the Connection. I dug in my wallet and handed him a small wad. My husband came by, assessed the basics and added another bill. A sister scurried over, carrying a jacket, and helped him into it, adding a bright purple "girlie" umbrella and a quick hug. We all laughed at "purple." With a suddenness that amazed me, we were a small, brief family—HIS people standing there, damp and undampened by weather or "whethers." It was a meeting of Minds, of mindsets that were timeless, that were set in Place, in focus, over 2000 years earlier.

This man wasn't a beggar wheedling. He was our brother, setting himself before us, whole and broken, trusting in our broken wholeness. Jerry was our unfamiliar friend who needed a daily ride to the right place for the right reasons.

Because God knows where he needs to go.

Our adult class this morning focused on indifference: What it has done to the world we live in, to the people we live with—nearby or distant. The Jerry's of our world have been defeated by indifference. By bureaucracies that regularly ignore/avoid too many "Jerry's." By nations preoccupied with real or supposed exigencies, and cities that have grown apathetic about the "dregs of humanity" that litter their sidewalks and make everyone uncomfortable simply by being. And we, by our preoccupation with the nitty-gritties of our own lives, and yes, by our own care-less-ness. I have often been guilty.

The Good Samaritan comes to mind here. His inner eyes weren't focused on his own pending situation—the why's and wherefore's of his journey, the occupation and preoccupations of purpose. The man, a pariah himself, had "sideways vision" too.

He checked the ditches, walking by.

The things that compel us, distract us, attract us, and fret us—these effectively bind our larger thoughts, blind our wider vision, dim our compassion, our rightful determination. The barriers to our benevolence. We do not clearly see the peripheral "other." Not really. Only smelly, messy, chronic, dysfunctional other. We measure lives by what they have become, and seldom wonder how they got "there," how their lives unraveled, how the right people crossing the street at the right moment (one infinitesimal example) might have changed the outcome.

We overlook the poverty that hovers over the Appalachia's, the dead-end tenements in too many cities, the hovels adjoining crop-fields, the wretched encampments that metastasize beneath freeway overpasses and spill onto our urban avenues.

And the why's and wherefore's escape us. The endless poverties spin on and out―all for 

the want of a horseshoe nail.**

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. 

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

"For want of a battle the Kingdom was lost?" Yes! Yes, it was, is that. His Kingdom lost.

Indifference is the missing nail. We fail to see sideways, and then perceive attentively, the deteriorating state of humanity—the poverty, home-grown and world-wide. Here, it has become simply a familiar backdrop to daily life. Across the barrier of seas, the tide of refugees rises and never wanes. It begins to engulf everything.

When humanity is ready, ultimately, to fight the right battle, to face the inner myopias, to call out—cry out to see through a glass less darkly, to wage peace against the war within and with-out . . . HE will raise us up from the dust of our ploys and pretensions, from the honest griefs and struggles that engulf us. His Kingdom will take shape before us, finally, our eyes clear-seeing.

This is my ultimate "take-away" from a brief encounter with Jerry, a solid-wounded man standing  in a drizzle on the curb across from where I worship. Where I head every Sunday to celebrate and petition the GodMan who sees everything—sideways and inside out. 

Everything.

The One Who rescues because He lay flayed and splayed in the dirt, finally, before the nails—helpless and spat upon. The Rescuer whom we abandoned at the cross. Who comes to us over and over to heal both our abandonment and abandoning, to awaken us, His hurting and hurtful world. To save us from this long indifference.

HE knows where and who we are, each of us. He will take us where we need to go.

                                                            *          *          *

*Name changed for the sake of privacy.

**This ancient proverb, in various forms, has been quoted and repeated for varying uses over the centuries, particularly in Early English writing. Benjamin Franklin also made note of it.

                                                                                                         

Alive, Alive, Ohhh! An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

This excerpt is reprinted from Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree, courtesy of Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock

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There are no funerals in Heaven. As a believer in the sacred History of faith, I accept death. It is the [often] hard shell we must break through to begin our flight into Life. It is moving from chrysalis to Chrisom, perhaps. Our ultimate birth.

To Christos. Truth is an upward spiral.

I despair of the despair that we wear so often as an arm band, the existential angst we endlessly proclaim, which leaves no room in the soul for resurgence, for resilience, for hope. And now I see that I also have done this! What a vast, a blind betrayal!

Those who cannot celebrate life destroy it―destroy others, who in turn destroy.

What they cannot celebrate, they desecrate.

And living must be, the soul insists, a celebration. To exult is to exalt. To proclaim the tender truth and rollicking affirmation of faith is to live beyond mere enduring. It unleashes the neurons that fire the thoughts that fuel the muscles that raise us up from indolence.

Such is the House that God built. Existential pleasure must bring a recognition, a small ecstasy of awareness―I am alive, alive, ohhh! And I am not a cockle, not a mussel. Living is surely meant to be an endless orbit of meaning-full, an upward cycle that siphons finally into that slender Passage which is not, oh no, a dark hole.

Entropy is a ravage only of the temporal and temporary and intemperate.

And so, today, I lay down this weight of timeless grief against the splendor of this day, against the altar of these rocks, this gravel I stand upon, with the incense of this morning still awaft like a certain holiness within my breathing.

I celebrate being. Despite the daily horrors, despite the anguish surging, despite the fire of grief that still looms, ever creeping, like the ghastly glow of holocaust beyond us. I celebrate because I must; because we must, because God hears and surely answers . . . or this maelstrom will consume us; it will be a prophecy fulfilled.

I celebrate what it is to be truly human, what it means to share the earth together, what it has been to us as home away from Home, what it must become within us and among us, and beyond us, for our children. What we must become, within us and among us and beyond us.

Celebrants. I celebrate the very fact of life, of seeing these shaggy carpets of green-and-ochre and the wild-painted skies that cover me, of hearing the chirrup and buzz and flutter of small life, of knowing earth-born labor and labors borne of the heart.

I celebrate the being of you who cross my path this day in thought or step, who share this swath of earth or one dissimilar, who grieve for its poverty and share its richness with me. Who enrich my poverty.

I thank God for my life, for giving breath to my halting aspirations. For your life and finest hopes. For His breath upon you, within you.

I thank you, oh God, who redeems me from myself in this small celebration! Who calls me to Rest. Who gives me today geraniums, and a new, eager flow of thought. For doughty ferns in pots, and doughty friends who force my rusty gates; for violet sage and stippled rocks to catch my eye, to catch my breath, my soul.

I praise the God who sprawls His name, and the signature of His Son, His Chronica Christos, across the bursting universe and weaves it deep within the spiral of our genes.

Who walks the waves still, always . . . stilling them, forever stilling them.

Truly the gates of hell shall not prevail.