Shutting Down

Does a body ‘decide’, like a government, when to shut down?  Is our own physical shutting down, slowing down, winding down, a decision or something that merely happens to us, like time?

If bodies, as my faith teaches, resurrect, do governments?

If we’re sitting on an ash heap, what phoenix-like new thing will emerge?

Metaphors only take us so far in our understandings, don’t they?

So mostly today, I am left wondering.  And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.  As poet Rainer Maria Rilke once pointed out to a young would-be poet (I’ve always wondered whether his promise every bloomed into something I may have read*) . . .

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

 And because it is a wondering day, I am also wondering how someone with the pen of a Rilke could also reportedly have said that fascism is a source of healing and Mussolini its bringer.  And then I wonder what questions another might have when looking into my life at such a distance.  It is not forgiveness, exactly (for that is not mine to offer or deem necessary), but the question stays a question, at least for now.


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*It seems history does know the young poet, but mostly only via this correspondence.  Wikipedia.  

A Woman Dies By Cop and I Am Left Wondering

Yesterday while the seat of government wound inexorably on inside its marble cocoons in Washington, a woman apparently tried to use her car as a weapon and ended up, all-too-predictably dead.

And I am left wondering.

Lawyer me wonders whether police who, during the government shut down,  aren’t being paid,  are still police and what that might mean for the potential financial liability of those doing the shooting.

Preacher me wonders about the well-being of those left in the aftermath: the now-motherless baby . . . the officer or officers doing the shooting . . . the family and friends of the woman who died . . . the first responders . . . a nation already on edge . . .

Peacemaker me wonders about choices made in the moment and why it’s easier or first instinct to shoot the person rather than the tires of her car when standing right beside the vehicle in that split-second moment of committed decision.

Citizen me wonders how many of us – probably in the thousands – a woman with serious problems must have walked, run and driven by on her way to her own death without us noticing, caring, acting, or knowing what to do to change her course.

Woman-of-faith me wonders if this woman whose name I do not even know is finally at peace.

Human me wonders what it takes inside a person’s body chemistry, history and decision-making places to use a car as a weapon of destruction when she could well have had that omni-present ‘baby on board’ sign in her back window.

I read today from the blog Everyday Grace about the prayer to be enabled to see others as God sees them and gingerly, ever so gingerly, I offer up the same prayer.

The House at _____ & _______

I don’t know what this stretch of Rt. 42 is called - they can’t be routes anymore.  Not since 9/11.  Isn’t that odd?  Who would have thought of all the things that could and would change, that how we name our roads would be one of them?

But there’s a house on Rt. 42, just past Parnassas – you can’t find it on MapQuest, so don’t bother trying – not so sure about google earth.

The house is beautiful – white frame house with an almost-wraparound porch.

Of all the houses I’ve lived in, it’s the one thing I long for but have never had: a wraparound porch – an outside inside kind of place that goes clear around the house like a skirt – a place where kids and adults can run round in circles to their hearts’ content.

So whenever I pass this particular house, with the spectacular, but not quite wraparound porch, I always sigh just a bit with longing.  For in my imagining, somehow, the wraparound porch, evan an almost one,  is the embodiment of the perfect life.

Odd that I never see anyone on the porch.

Maybe I drive by at the wrong times.

Or maybe they’ve just forgotten what a magic place a porch really is.

I sure hope not.