Lessons: To Be Human

I put to words some of my innermost fears. Then, I re-wrote the fears as hopeful invitations (below). I want to transmute the energy of my thoughts for my, and the world's, betterment.


Release the rigid thought that you are too small a part of the universe.

Open to the expansive, unfathomable realms of worlds you are.

Become someone who chooses your manifestation at each unfolding level.

Honor the common yearning for connection: to move at the pace of being human with other people.

Forgive yourself for thinking you fall short of your narrow, self-defined human standard.

Relinquish saying this: “I am not doing it right.”

Free yourself of the assumption that you have failed or will fail to be good.

False humility projects an environment that stretches only to the expanse you think you can be.

Live into harsh, frank, disappointing weakness.

By your inconsistency and inauthenticity, build a bridge to all other people.

Feel empowered to bare your vulnerability in small and big ways.

Welcome yourself into the possibility of belonging. 

A Pilgrimage

Thoughts from a contemplative pilgrimage through Louisville, KY, to see the ordinary more fully as it truly is.

FOUNDERS SQUARE      

The chiming Cathedral bells sound ominous in the cold morning air. I stand in the center of Founder’s Square, watch the waking city, and imagine a time not so long ago in this place when trees were the tallest forms and the noise of birds beginning their day deafened the ear. I imagine native people, the ones who called this land home for thousands of years, gathering to bury their dead. The river must have sounded so close, like the roar of a world just-beyond. Perhaps the forest thinned in this spot, offered a patch of light and a panoramic view of darkness. On a misty morning like this, as they whispered their prayers, turned the earth, and lowered still bodies, could they have guessed that Europeans would come to flatten their burial grounds in a mere few hundred years?

The ideals we suppose upon which we are founded – hope in a New World and, presumably, a better one – were never manifest. This square is a lie; the world was not made new, or better, by covering sacred spaces with asphalt and steel. One cannot build progress on the bones of the dead, nor fashion an image after something that never was. The ghosts of another time are more real than the mirage of this metropolis.

I envision dark eyes, long, silky hair, silent breath lingering here. I see faces, past and future, turned toward this moment with dependent curiosity. The choice to place myself here as a witness holds the promise of reconciling the gap between where we have been, or what we have done, and where we are going, or what we are creating. My aching heart, wracked with sorrow at suffering long past, offers me the chance of healing. Although I cannot resurrect old bones, perhaps I can hold them in the light, one hand clutching the talismans, the other reaching out to the rushing potential that courses through this moment, this air, my veins, this holy ground.

CATHEDRAL OF THE ASSUMPTION

The gold stars that adorn the ceiling of this sanctuary, though beautiful to behold, are flat representations of reality. The walls are painted to look like blocks of limestone and marble, but are, in fact, artificial simulations. The structure is one of glittering opulence, but little substance.

The Church: a grand façade, a spectacular temple of jewels, metals, and stone that craft an empty chasm; a cold, lifeless void in which human flesh is made to seem unsacred.

When I was seventeen, the priest who once offered me my First Communion held aloft to his congregation a new, solid gold chalice and paten. Each parishioner stood in thunderous applause at the just and proper display of devotion. This extravagant piety violated the truth I understood the Eucharist to be. I felt my little remaining faith in the Church crumble like clutched hosts.

Eucharistos: “gratitude.” Communio: “mutual participation.”

The pull of hungry bellies and empty pockets, of forgotten people and neglected neighborhoods tugged my gut as the cup and plate gleamed. Imagine how many starving children that cost could feed. Was this what Jesus meant to tell us when he said, “Take and eat; this is my body” – to show gratitude by squandering the poor’s money on precious platters? Did he mean us to fixate on his lifeless body, or the Living Body?

As I approach her statue, I gaze upon the pristine face of the Virgin, her eyes cast skyward, her foot gently resting on serpentine evil. Although such depiction makes her seem otherworldly, the truth is that she was as fully human as I am. As a young woman, she felt a child press upon her inmost being. She wailed, pushed, screamed, and sweated, and her flesh ripped as she birthed her son. She nursed him, disciplined him, held him, worried for him, took pride in him, watched him, grieved him, and loved him in all his humanness.

Jesus learned a thing or two from his mother: he touched the blind man, kissed the leper, held the children, ate with tax collectors, walked with fishermen, hanged with criminals, suffered for those he loved.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Teach us toward holy embodiment.

BALONEY ALLEY

The soft, tiny feather I found swept into this musty corner behind the west façade of Fourth Street Live! is breaking my heart with its fragility. Everything is precious, worth touching carefully like the miracle it is. The dust of this nook coats the alley, the pavement, the sign that reads “SERVING LUNCH DAILY 12:15PM-1:00PM.”

I want to paint the wall between Fourth Street Live! and the back of the Cathedral. I want to craft a mural for the folks who line up daily for a lunch at this little soup kitchen. I want to study their faces, mix my palette, and paint a radiant scene to capture the wonder of each one. I want those humble people to behold the blossoming masterpiece and their reflection in it. I want the earthy glory of every person in the queue to come pouring out onto that divisive canvas as a reminder of the humanity we can see, but keep hidden for convenience.

Someday, I want the wall to be demolished to rubble. I want people to destroy it because they have realized it shields them from their friends and neighbors on the other side. I want the Cathedral Lunchroom to close for lack of business. I want Hard Rock Café to practice its slogan, “Love All, Serve All.” I want Fourth Street Live! to represent truly the life that thrives and struggles in its sacred intersection. I want no one to slip through the cracks.

Even in this dead-end alley lies possibility, soft and waiting to be found – a feather of hope.

AFTER MERTON CORNER in the CATHEDRAL PRAYER GARDEN

This tree is beautiful, its layers of papery bark peeling back in rhythm with the seasons. I sit in its dappled shade and watch a man who is sleeping on a bench in the sunshine. Cars irreverently whiz by; the drivers are irritated by their delays, feel victimized by the beat of traffic lights and congestion. They do not see the man tucked beneath his scrubby cover. In their haste, they do not see the way the light casts his features into a dazzling vision of grit and beauty. They do not see the circle of pilgrims who have been bearing witness to their city all day.

They do not see the young woman looking at a man from under a tree, or him looking back. They do not see the small smile he slips me. They do not see the fact that he is, under the veil of dark skin, shining like the sun.

This, and this, always this is a moment of pilgrimage, of epiphany. 

Heartspeed

This is a love poem to the way I know how to love what I know.

I love
   your sleeping body, your arms draped across your chest in self-embrace,
          the rise and fall of your breath from lungs and throat and mouth
               that once expelled air to form the words, "Marry me?"
   your eyelids drawn down like the bedsheets you once bought for my birthday,
          on which we made love and I, gazing in your eyes,
               felt for the first time that kind of release where the self is lost.
   your beautiful mind, your keen sight, your soft heart,
          the safety in the circle of your shoulders and hands,
               that ring of light, the portal of letting-go.

Sunlight
   warmed the skin between my knees and thighs this morning;
   particles, eight minutes ago, expelled from the sun,
   hurled toward earth in careless release from elemental forgery and,
   after mere clock-ticks in dark space, touched the pale places of lovers reclining
   as emanations of this solar-wind life-breath -
   intertwined love as bodies seeking to draw together.

The heart only knows
   to see in light speed
   through the space between
   the lover and beloved.

The Guide to Salvation: A Vision in Which Humble People are the Gate-Keepers to the Reign of Goodness in the Cosmos

Seeking the margins of societal bounds pushes us to the limits of definition and understanding of humanity.

The people seen out of the corner of our eye, caught in glimpses of stark reality, coated in sacred dust, groaning in the pain we inflict by our averted gaze, in fact stand at the center of that which we have long ago lost sight. They stand in the center of their humanity, their deep and intrinsic connection to earth, to space, to stars, to Life and Being. They hold this knowing in the simple acts of feeding their children, tilling the earth, lacking ambition.

We who sit on plastic yoga balls and pay our personal trainers to force-feed us vegan meal plans are the ones who claw tooth and nail toward the truth that gently enfolds the humble people we do not dare to see. We are starving for the abundance they hold, and sinfully, we gorge ourselves on the excess borne of their material deprivation.

Yet even in our folly, we cannot help but be immersed in the truth of Oneness. The difference is that their surrender has been their salvation – they have spread their arms wide and floated on the gently lapping waters of wonder in Something Greater. In the struggle of the First World – absent-mindedness, incessant business, and arrhythmic rationalizations – we have asphyxiated. We drown in our own womb-waters because we refuse to breathe in the direction of dependence. We insist we can feed only through our brain, not through our gut roped to the Mother Globe and our iron-infused heart tied to Parent Galaxy.

Gaunt and grim, we turn to look at those impoverished people who stand on the edge, and in horror at our own absurdity, finally see that they stand at the threshold of a horizon from which we have been running. Just beyond them, in the direction of their sight, is a new paradigm of Personhood, formed of fine energetic connections that lace a gentle path. This weft of light leads to Universal Integration, but first, to a realized vision of Justice for inhabitants of Earth.

How do we return to right relationship? How can we make the quantum leap necessary to traverse the chasm we have created between us and our brothers and sisters of every species who never let go of the truth?

The truth, it seems, never let go of us.

It whispers to us,

Simply remember the song your body hums to the rhythm of the cosmic hymn.

Resist the pull to the top that propels you away from true presence.

Break open your heart; empty out all you thought you had to be in order to reclaim who you always have been.

First, look. See as if you have never seen before, which you have not, as each moment is now, and now is the only time what you see has been, and now is when you are looking. In looking as if you have never seen before, notice the familiarity. Hold the grace of the mystery that, somehow, you have always known what you see.

Second, learn to speak like that. When judgment creeps into your language, let silence reorient you to the being in-itself, which is the object, the person, the place, the idea you behold. Learn all things and people as a reflection of you, and remember that you are wholly good. Listen – your story is told through the mouths of others.

Third, align your action with your speech. Feel the path you carve with every gesture and choice. Allow slowness to keep you in your body. Witness each deed as a creative effort toward a reality you decide.

Fourth, unclench your tight fist clinging to comfort. The soft pillows of wealth stifle your lungs and insulate you from a freshness your being craves. When you begin to feel cold and heat again, your chills and sweat will disturb you. Soon, though, the ease of knowing you are actually alive will create contentment in all seasons. You will feel that you are neither warm nor cold, but that you are given dimension by your experience of warmth and coolness. In a miraculous moment, you will grasp in a flash the beauty of that release.

Fifth, go where you will hurt. Pain precedes all growth and yields new dimensions. Penetrate the ever-emanating orb of suffering by carrying it with others. Keep moving through it, touching it, allowing its sting to singe your bones until, as a distant pinpoint, you see with your companions a spark of hope, which will grow to a joy that tenderly envelops the pain. The energy of joining-together is what heals all brokenness. Reassemble the pieces by adhering to fellowship.

Finally, arise. Realize you have always been in the right place, because, like all places, it is the center. Meet the eyes of your brothers and sisters whose struggles were caused by people who, like you, needed lessons to regain their humanness. Watch as they lock eyes with yours, smile, and extend a hand. Reach out and meet your own extended arm.

In the folded fabric of spacetime, you once saw a hierarchy and division…now, you feel the tug of strands all around. By this shape with no sides or angles, all form is perfectly represented.

There is nowhere to get to, no place at which to arrive. There is only here and now, and the perfect alignment of oneself with the wholeness of this.

Divinity shimmers in every facet. The face of God comes to light as Creation.

One touches the vibration of All That Is by taking the pulse of one's own heartbeat.

Peace becomes the only end.

tentative poems

I am comfortably a lover of poetry, not a poet. These brief lines come from a tentative place in me that longs to expand.


Morning Mountains

The mountains hold an emptiness, and the morning.
I look. I cannot capture it.
I surrender and
fall into it.
I was already
there.

-*-

Gift

Present moment brims -
wonder splays, blossoms adorn
laden tree branches,

unfold toward sunlight,
incense mystery I
gratefully receive.

-*-

Lexington Road, April 29th

man twirls ninja bow-staff in secret
dances under deep green canopy's quiet
on expansive seminary grounds

-*-

Tilt

What is it?
Filtered light through membrane
walls traced with thin veins.
Familiar...foreign.
Spinning   spinning   spinning
Large eyes mirror mine -
Butterfly wings -
Deep water -
spin-light
breath-spin,
tilt into space-time
I cannot yet penetrate
the edge of knowing.

-*-

Soft

Mess of lavender
Perfumes the clear morning light
That wakens my heart.

-*-

My Forgotten Child, Dzhokhar (As I Grieve the Boston Marathon Bombing)

Sun-soaking in breezes like sips of fresh water,

hot light warms my hair and casts a halo glow on my crown,

dazzles my shaded eyes searching for light

through the winking gaps of vines grasping

the sky, which grasps nothing, but holds

everything underneath its blanket of wonder,

shelters the sinners and saints and sovereigns all the same,

brightly beams at me, and you, and the young boy in Boston

who bombed the marathon runners, mothers and fathers

and babies all trying to make sense of a race to nowhere,

a sprint that loops us 'round to the same ruminations:

Why pain? Why struggle?

Why hate, harm? What need for hope?

Why blood and blasted limbs, why a bastard child

of humanity to turn us, again, against each other?

Because we fear to see that his scars

are ours, on our own bodies and souls -

ours, because we all have assaulted one another with lack of love.

The threat of walking into a crowd of strangers

is less than the death that comes of never being known.

The threat to humankind that comes of crucifying a Chechen

in the name of public safety and justice

is greater than the risk of calling him our son,

cradling him in care, gently stroking his hair in sunlight,

holding him with branch arms that bring his

brightness to blossom, allow us to glimpse

his glory under gory wounds, and offer him up

into the expansive sky-love

that will rain down refreshment of forgiveness,

will remind us that no one is simply a spectator,

that "Victim" names each and every forgotten child.

.

erythros

So much blood has spilled...so much deep

red warm thick blood has seeped through

skin and delicate veins and has coalesced

in pools on floors   in forests   on hands -

touched tongues with taste of cold metal.

Iron forged in bellies of distant stars, dynamic

cosmic ovens, swims in the hemoglobin

of each human being, membrane body.

erythros: red.
kytos: hollow.

Only less than 200 years ago did we peer

closely enough to see the individual 

biconcave discs with no nucleus, a hollow

center, and scarlet miasma searing through.

Each second, 2.4 million new blood cells

are birthed in you. 60 million died
in the second world war and in Rwanda, 800,000

in only 100 days. No one knows how

many were killed in the Crusades, or

for countless unimaginable reasons.

20-30 trillion corpuscles navigate the thin

channels that traverse organs and tissue in

the field of your body. They carry the exhale

of trees to each part; they speed so that

each minute the cells cover the meandering

path three times. Tiny membrane-bodies that

coagulate into miniature rivers and streams ripple

and teem with your Life, are journeying those

halls of your mysteriously confined figure.

We forget that we bleed the same color, that

erythros-red is what we all are on the inside,

and that each cell is hollow at the center,

save for that mesmerizing sphere of light

that glows on every level, in each smaller

piece that comes together to form something

greater.

Madonna

I cradle her softly in my memory of Friday morning, as she stood bravely, silently, then spoke with a steady, even tone into the still room held captive. She was thirteen. Dark, dark, dark: her hair, her eyes, the teeming ripples of thought under her smooth, opaque surface as she brushed curls from her eyelashes and prepared to respond as the Truth that found her. Although she trembled, she gracefully gave in to the pull of power greater than herself and, in the surrender, spoke from a place of wide-eyed awareness, of keen and inconsolable connection to everything.

"She held these things and pondered them in her heart," the ancient book says. She received, and felt, and broke, and cried as her children hung on beams that ripped the fragile human fabric. She saw, she heard, she touched the scars and suffering, and let it all rush into the core of complacency's comfort. She was told she was to embody the divine nature of matter, and she, in her willing wonder, said "yes." Mary, who we call Mother of God, was probably about thirteen years old. 

This young woman who stood before me hears gunshots, sees drug deals, feels unkind words like pinches on the soul, knows the schisms between what is actual, what is real and what is true. She declares her life "indescribable," and in hearing in her witness the confusing clash of industry, violence, apathy and despair, you know it is so. The loss of what is precious pours from her being; each syllable screams that we have forgotten who we are meant to be. She looks at it all. She has made of herself a sacred vessel amid mundane terror, a voice of resistance to the wrong that met her with many faces of our world.

My soul glorifies the Divine,
my spirit rejoices in God, my Saviour.
God looks on the lowliness of his servant;
henceforth, all ages will call me blessed.
The Almighty works marvels for me.
Holy is God's name!
There is mercy from age to age
on those who fear God,
God puts forth his arm in strength,
scattering the proud-hearted;
casts the mighty from their thrones,
raises the lowly, fills the starving with good things,
sends the rich away empty.
God protects...his servant,
remembering his mercy,
the mercy promised to Sarah and Abraham 
and their descendents forever.

Her dark was rich and dimensional, glittering with sparks of something greater. In her wounded words glimmered the light of restoration. She closed by saying, "Someday, someone will care," and the way she carried those words to the ringing ears of those gathered suggested nothing less than that she was the one she had been waiting for, and still didn't know it. She stood vulnerably, emptied of the pain she held gingerly with fingers that stroked the wailing woe of isolation. She released the carelessness she could not control and chose to adorn herself in the strength of what she could: her willingness to receive. In holding it all, she was holding the world together for all of us. The stark, simple beauty of her love-act struck each of our hearts.

Eternity

Wedding anniversary gift to my husband - November 27th, 2012

ETERNITY

Someday, long after you and I have died, our bodies will burst

into a supernova so vast it envelops everything

we have ever touched, and reaches beyond

the farthest ring of our solar system.

At times, when I look in your eyes, I feel the brilliant boom

of the beginning,

The Beginning, the wonder of all

that came before and after the first moment

of Time, the spontaneous

unfolding of Space, the Light

of new stars.

Maybe I feel this because you and I, our bodies, were once

in the same arm of a galaxy, extending outward, touching dark.

Perhaps we were nestled in an intimate part

of the dust whorl that condensed to become Earth.

We could have swam in the same primordial sea before the first creature

with eyes had Seen.

There is a chance we were bark of the same tree

                that a deer nibbled

                                that a long-ago hunter arrowed, who

                                                became the ancestor of all living people.

Is that why I feel I am in the perfect place

when I lay my head on your heart?

Is that why my hand fits yours

like, somehow, our molecules all fit

just the right way to give life?

Is that why I see you as the teaching

of all I have known in my short life,

the path I am to walk, the reminder of who

I am at the root?

Is that why, to you, I say yes

forever?

September 6th, 2012

There seems to hang a film of light in the early morning air of this September 6th, a thin veil of particles suspended in the breezeless humidity. As if emanated by the tall, old trees I pass that wait to loose their autumn splendor once again, the soft gold halo enfolds a fresh layer of reality, the realm of what is to be: the coming day, the coming season, the just-beyond. The trees hold the tension, do not haste to what they must know, in some sense that supercedes my limits of understanding, is coming - the time of brilliant color, then release. Rather, they breathe from where they are to where they are to where they are, ever-present and ever-faithful (apart from any self-righteous faith to which we humans grasp) and ever-becoming, without hindsight or forethought.

As my feet step one in front of the other, walking under a canopy of oaks and maples, passing the dogwoods and crab-apple trees, their stillnes brings me to pause. On the precipice of my myopic vision, I see in the distance - or dream I see, in the muggy heat - a gentle shimmering, as if an unfelt breeze has disturbed the portal to a reality imminently close, but in a direction fatally foreign to me. The grainy apparition is clouded by the sheer glow of this pink day; I blink, and it is still there, but no clearer. I glance around as if the wet pavement or rows of houses could offer new perspective, to no avail. The trees are soundless. Though their unseen roots are gulping water from last night's rain and the pores of their delicate leaves are pouring pure oxygen into my lungs - although they exist undeniably in my physical presence - they also, I feel in the tingling quiet, live in a place to which I have rarely, if ever, been.

Oh, to have that deep knowledge of a life lived in an upward direction, then immobile, yet omnipresent; to regard this moment, as I stand in their wake, as parallel to the time when families in the 1940's were moving into these new homes, or when surrounded by cool forest in all directions before Europeans came, or when first breaking through the hard shell of a seed to the rich, damp earth; to live in this world and another, and to perhaps know no distinction between them; oh, to radiate light, and a constant invitation to pay attention to the possible hanging thickly in the still air of this and every morning. I continue walking my linear path, thirsty for the gift of submission to now, now, now.

Later, the pink morning yields to blue; the branches sway gently overhead as I sit on my porch. The sunlight is clear and unfiltered, distinct and bright. A breeze caresses my cheek and moves my hair. The trees seem to speak, This is our world, too. 

- Written 9/6/2012

Watercolor

I drag this line, that line across the boundaries
of shape emerging from the brushstroke of learning
to be open, and awakened, and new.
Sharp, dark edge - I want definition, for once,
a harsh divide, a beginning and end,
somewhere to stand and assert, "I know what I am."

But color doesn't move like that, he says,
only the thought patterns of the mental plane,
or the unnatural paths people have carved
into the sides of perfect hills,
or anything we suppose we can control.

At times, I see the world as a contrast between
the linear vision of all the ideas humanity has collected
in the vast, expansive plane of consciousness
that, nevertheless, has its limits,

and all we can never understand, hidden between
lines that never travel in any unwinding way,
but flow in and out of Being and Nothingness
and lead us to a path that pulls us farther and farther
away from our Selves, into the heart of Everything.

In this way, each movement is a poem.
Each hue is a song.
Each dip into water
becomes a drink of release.
Each touch of brush to paper
asks less and less of me,
and more and more of something greater.
Maybe the colors of my heart will always bleed
into everything, will always seep outward
to touch the edges, will absorb
the rainbow of the immensity
I artlessly embrace.

Perhaps this is how we learn
to dance in liminal space.
This is how one might, without trying,
find veridian green in a sunset
and magenta in her heart.
This is how, within and without,
the Dark makes the Light.

At Home

This article was written in May 2011. Although I no longer work at CrossRoads Ministry, I am still connected to the work facilitated there. I am also still connected to my friends at St. Vincent de Paul.


I stand in a line of huddled bodies, taking in sights and smells that have become familiar. I catch the eye of a stranger or two and smile – “How are you?” I ask. “Hello.” The chatter of friends murmurs amidst the clang of pots and pans from the kitchen. I scan the rafters, the stained glass windows, the tables with vases of bright flowers. We fall silent and remove our hats as a prayer is offered, blessing the food we are about to share, and declare “Amen!” together as the line begins to slowly file along. Those who have come to eat – old and young people of all shapes and colors and creeds – resume their talk and make their way through the lunch bar. I find an ease in this space. I am at St. Vincent de Paul’s Open Hand Kitchen. Here, once again, I know I will find good food that nourishes me and good friends who enrich my spirit. Here, I will break bread with strangers and friends…and, more often than not, I will break open my heart in profound ways. Here, I will discover people who are on a journey, who I can connect with and learn from. Here, I find wondrous paradox in the faces and stories of those I meet. Here, I have found a home.

I remember when I first came to eat lunch here at the Open Hand Kitchen, when I felt apprehensive and unsure walking into a soup kitchen to eat a meal with strangers. Such apprehensions are now far, far gone. I search the tables for an empty seat, shouldering my backpack and carrying a tray loaded with lunch. As I settle into a seat across from a new face, it feels like second nature to strike up a conversation, always of mundane beginnings – “Hi, I’m Mandy. How is your day? My, it sure is cold!” – that oftentimes flows to remarkable revelations.

It was on a retreat at CrossRoads Minstry, an outreach of St. William church, that I was first invited to spend time with the folks at St. Vincent de Paul. As a sophomore in high school, the thought of knowingly entering into the company of someone who might be homeless was foreign, and the idea of initiating a conversation with that person went against every notion of “common sense,” caution and culture. It was acceptable to volunteer, serving food to those lining up for a meal; my Catholic upbringing invited such “compassion.” Didn’t Jesus say to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty? At the time, I was more than secure with charity. I didn’t mind reaching out with plastic-gloved hands and a ladle, comforted by the barrier between me and “them,” sharing a smile, passing a tray and moving on to the next person in line. But walking down the street, I avoided the eyes of people who might ask me for some spare change. My life connected to theirs only to the extent that I was present to serve them. Otherwise, I would rather be safe than sorry. If I offered an opening, who knew what might be at risk.

What I found the summer of 2004 opened my eyes wide and shattered my selfish complacency. In a few short days of playing, laughing, sharing and loving, my life was utterly transformed. In the men at St. Vincent de Paul, I found true friends. I found vibrant human beings with complex stories, with families and hopes and struggles and fears. I met people who opened their lives and welcomed me when I felt most isolated and afraid. I found companions who cared about my life, who felt gifted by my mere presence, with whom I loved to spend time. The veil of dissimilarity slowly lifted, and instead of feeling anxious, I grew more excited each day as I walked up the steps to the metal cafeteria doors. I looked forward to seeing my friends again, people who the world labeled “homeless,” but who I now saw as much, much more. As I hugged Ricky and laughed with Russell, I finally understood how self-centered I had been to exclude these precious people from my life, and how desperately I needed them. In trying to live a safe and careful life, I had in fact been leading one of great harm, both to myself and others. These men revealed the deep, divine truth: that I was the one who was hungry for community and thirsty for connection, and they were the ones serving me. While it is holy, necessary work to attend to the needs of others, I had been missing the root: We are profoundly connected.  They didn’t need me to serve them lunch and then forget their faces; it wouldn’t help to pass them some money and move on; their lives would not be helped by my shallow, distant pity. These friends needed me to care, really care for them. And I needed to look into their eyes and see my self reflected in their being. I needed to wade in the depths of their stories to behold the God-light blazing at the core of their hearts. I needed to hear their songs of pain, of friendship, of failure, of love, because they are the same songs I am singing. I needed them to remind me that my life could so easily reflect theirs on the surface, and that although they look dissimilar, our life-threads are woven into the same tapestry, overlapping to form an image incomplete without one another.

If we take some time to discover it, our paths as human beings intersect in profound and remarkable ways. Mother Theresa said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” These magnificent men reminded me what we all so desperately need, and humbly showed me, in precious moments of care, how a world of peace can look.

Seven years later, I now work at CrossRoads Ministry and am privileged to bring retreat groups of high schoolers through the doors of the Open Hand Kitchen. I offer them the invitation I was offered those years ago: to have a conversation, and perhaps a radical conversion of heart. In these short visits throughout the year, I continue to find new friends and visit with old. I’ve met people who are urban and rural; those with Master’s degrees and those who only completed grade school; people who have owned restaurants and have driven trucks cross-country; those who fell on hard times and those who were born with mental illness; young people, old people, veterans, brothers, fathers, grandpas, professionals, students, addicts, musicians, extraverts, introverts, sports fans, men of faith…in short, I have met human beings. All come hungry to share a meal. Some stay for a while and move on to the next phase of their life journey; some continue to come back again and again. I keep coming back, too. In conversations with these homeless men, I know I will find refuge in our common struggles, needs, and dreams. In relationships with men who have no shelter to call their own, I find a safe haven for altering my life for the better. For me, St. Vincent de Paul offers sanctuary from a world that screams praises of division, of separateness, of self-centeredness, of complacency. These men are my teachers, and in each encounter, I learn a little more about what it means to love. They continue to make me kinder, more open, more compassionate, and ever more in awe of the profound responsibility we have to care deeply for one another.

As I look around the dining room, I see how a world of peace can be: a world much like this holy space, one in which even the most unlikely people sit at tables together, well-fed and cared-for, reminding each other of who we really are, and who we are meant to be. Here, I am at home.

The Wisdom of Trees

Old, lovely trees, how I long to climb the long, dark ladders of your branches to the sky!
Let me dangle from the tip of a twig, grasp the twisted bark, stand on a breeze, feel the heavenly pull.
How I would yearn to let go, and fall in an expansive second into the wondrous blue veil.
I could fall forever through an ocean of air to sparkling black wonder,
wrapped in the glittering firmament of stars.
I could feel the eternity of a moment, like waves in each palm of my hand.
I could see in all directions the touching ends of spacetime, curved like cosmic seashell.
I could ride the dark tide of matter that ever tends to always.
I could learn to breathe in emptiness, drink cold refreshment, eat the nourishment of light.

But I look again more closely, careful trees, and I see your extension in another dimension.
Plunging the depths of warm dark, your roots thrust down into soft soil and muted tones of solidity.
The hairs of your underground organs vibrate with the resonance of planet and potential.
You taste salt's fire, finger crystals' magic, soak in waters' memory, carve defined spaces in clay.
You touch the pulse of Earth with rough hands of kind gentility.
You mark the rhythm of aeons with displays of beauty and new rings of growth.
You know how to be still, and to hold the cosmos from a fixed, constant place.
You are perfectly filled by the richness of where you are.

Which way do you really reach, ancient ones?

I am suspended between terra firma and an ephemeral eternity.
I walk by, in awe of the wisdom of trees.
Grateful for gravity, I take another step, then another.

Dust and Light

This post was written a couple of months ago, but it fits my current mood perfectly.

Dust and Light
or November 12, 2012

Today, yellow and gray.

Yellow leaves floating down to stick to
Gray pavement wet with cold morning rain,
     gray as it falls and clouds the yellow sun.
Yellow lines bright on the road to work,
     yellow letters - HEINE BROTHERS COFFEE -
          gray warm soy mocha latte under foam.

Yellow: seeing my father yesterday, broken foot on the mend.
Gray: when he spoke of his fraternity brother, newly dead,
     killed by a suicide no one could have predicted.
Yellow and gray: imagining Dad singing
     "Rainy Days and Mondays" by the Carpenters
          on this kind of day.

Gray mood that settles over R when he's
     tired, stressed, overwhelmed, distant, so
          removed, unavailable, gone...but
Yellow light he shone this weekend, happy to
     see friends, happy to live life,
          happy to be with me.

Gray - the space between pure dark [matter] and pure
     light of suns the size of billions of Earths,
Yellow - light of suns the size of billions of Earths
     that touches the edge of pure dark.

Yellow and gray, the knowledge that
     this is perhaps my only life to live
     (although I doubt this more each day as I redefine each moment "I," "life" and "to live");
          this is a miniscule point in time at the
               dawn of humankind;
     this Earth, if we don't kill it first, will die
          from maybe a meteor or a galaxy collision or a
               supergiant Sun that grows and eats planets
                    and it will happen within a couple billion years;
     this world contains as much mystery as the entire cosmos
          and we know it is precious, and we don't remember.

But at some point in time, all our atoms will no longer be ours;
     they will be part of a beautiful supernova
          nestled in the galaxy created by Milky Way and Andromeda,
               and we will inevitably be perfectly what we strive for now:
                    ego-less, equal, perfect love,
                         suspended in a swirl of gray and yellow
                              dust and light.

This Body

In which body do I know you?
Is it the body of a thousand
lifetimes, the way I know you in every
color and form,
all particles and waves of your presence,
each scent that drifts from a distant
past and future
that rushes in the now?

Is it the body of feeling
like I have sung your song in the depths
of each ocean of pain
and ecstasy,
have touched the vibrating cords
of your extended arms that embrace,
the radiant beams of your heart?

Is it the solid body of nails
in skin, of heavy breath and the weight
of frozen light around the sun
in the center of my body
where your solid body meets
the limits of its entrance?

Is it the body of euphoric darkness,
the one from where we come, to where we return
with a primal cry, a release
of bliss, an exhale, then
silence?

Our limbs are tangled like they are all of
one body.