Disappearing the Dead

During my trip with CPT to Colombia in the summer of 2005, we hear about the displaced and the disappeared.  One of the things I notice time and again in lands torn apart by the violence of war is the absence of the men, especially the young ones.  In my prayer journal, I wrote at the time about that absence . . .

Where are all the men?  Dear God, where are all the men?  And what kind of a world have we made when a woman’s prayer of most hope is “let me die first”?  O God, forgive.

Esperanza?  Where is esperanza?  Where is hope?  Donde esta?

Fathers and brothers and husbands and sons killed and killed and killed until there are no more men and women are left to look for and bury their bones.  In this land of widows and orphans, men are literally an endangered species.

With a violent death, is there always frozen a moment, the last ordinary moment, the moment before?  Is it the moment you imagine could change it all if only it were changed?  Left instead of right?  Or is it only the frozen, beautiful moment of before?  The moment just before the moment when ordinary time ends?

Seven years later she still mourns and does not forget that no priest was permitted, no proper words allowed to be spoken, when her murdered husband was buried.  Cut off, under threat herself, she notices the absence; it is a part of the litany of her suffering, their abuse.

They even disappear the dead here.

In a World Where Giraffes Are Possible

Some years back, a whale swam up the Delaware River clear to Trenton [who swims to Trenton, New Jersey?] and every night became a whale watch . . .

In distant jungles are birds that sing with their wings and dance backwards – O delight!  Hand-clapping . . . laugh-out-loud . . . do-it-again-pleading delight –

I live in a world where giraffes are possible and rainbows are common place.

I am blessed.

Answered Prayer

Prayers wend like streams of consciousness through a day . . . thank you . . . help . . . guide . . . don’t let him crash and burn – don’t let him . . . please . . . glory . . . a husband’s thank the Lord upon good news of his wife’s surgery . . . I’m so grateful for you . . . the gentle talk among friends distracting a husband from clock counting awareness that carries on despite the kindness as the perpetual backdrop to each spoken word, each silent moment . . . let it be otherwise . . . worry transforms to pleading to prayer and mixes with the smoke of hope . . . and in the waiting time, when outcomes are unknown, there is rest and respite and the sense of prayer heard, prayer answered and all is as it is and that too is prayer and answer . . .

Why Is the Knowing So Costly?

For in much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.  –Ecclesiastes 1.18

Blissful ignorance –
you state of happy
unknowing
Donde estas?
Gone . . .
gone . . .
erased slowly
with each bit of
knowledge achieved . . .
of wisdom received

Why is the knowing so costly?
The question percolates up
to the place where wisdom
and grief
knowledge
and sorrow
meet and dance

Why so costly?
How could it be otherwise?

________________________
Written in 2005, I pondered then as I ponder now the place of blissful ignorance and the cost of knowing the cost to others of the actions I take as they ripple into this world of which I am a citizen too.  Yes, knowledge is costly, as it should be.

Blessed with Eyes to See

You, my Lord, have stood on earth and looked at the same moon that I see.

In Your humanity stands the center of mystical Love.

Here . . . now . . . the entire world is sanctified. . . holy made . . . consecrated blessed.

How I long to ascend . . . descend . . . approach . . . to simply rejoice in the many ways of knowing always . . . ever . . . only . . . You.

El-roi, God Who Sees . . . You have granted me a wee bit of Your seeing eyes as here I stand and behold the same moon Your eyes have seen, Your hands have held.

Blessed.

Prodigals Don't Always Leave By Choice

In the early summer of 2005, I traveled to Colombia with CPT.  Among so many others, we meet an older couple whose son was murdered 18 years previous because he went fishing on the wrong day in the wrong place – or so another man with a gun thought at the time.  I wonder if that man still lives and what he thinks of that life he took now.  I wonder if there were other lives taken.  I wonder the cost to him in the taking.  I wonder about wildernesses of our own making, we human-war-making beings.  These are the things I wonder now.

What I wrote, what I prayed at the time, was all about these parents growing old without their boy . . .

Dona Marcelena and Don Juan sit and speak quietly.  Don Juan tells us, “we do not manage the fear; the fear manages us,” describing nights of belly-gripping terror, spent listening to every sound of the forest, every rustling leaf a potential FARC, ELN or para.

O God, forgive us that in their old age, we visit on such folk fear and not peace, sorrow and not joy at a race well run.

They have had 16 children, but even 15 will not make up for the one who is missing from their table.

Prodigals do not always leave by choice.

Why a Wilderness?

Jesus was getting ready by
         doing less
         eating less
           taking in less
         perhaps even
         being less

In less did lie his strength
         this anti-Sampson
         of a hero . . .
         or not