I Loved Your Son For His Sturdy Arms

We always, at some point or another, pick our favorite Bible character. maybe its in a classroom on sundays when the adults go to "big church" and you find a picture of mary. and decide to like her because she always wears blue and you like blue. or maybe you choose gabriel, or any angel for that matter. because they have wings and that means they can fly.
recently i discovered a new favorite Bible character in a rather conventional way. just right there, sitting in church and looking at the pages in luke and finding there, elizabeth. but she doesn't come into it until later. first. zacharius. God struck him silent. maybe he talked to much. maybe he didn't listen enough. maybe he was tired of waiting around for his turn to burn the incense. for the mail to come. for the car to be fixed. for his wife to have a baby. and he forgot why he was waiting. and then at last. he's next in line to burn the incense. he gets dressed up in his sunday best. packs a small bag. kisses his wife on the cheek. waits for the footstep and conversations about the dust and the next rain to leave him behind and alone. and after all this, with so much to say, surely, to God. about his feet hurting because of the dust. about his wife, elizabeth, who he loves dearly but never gets pregnant. about his car in the shop. and he is struck silent. ha. take that. i imagine God saying. enough. i imagine God saying. i know. i imagine God saying to zacharius. he isn't good with his hands. sharades. hasn't practiced. has, now to tell all the people about what he saw. but they aren't very good at watching and guessing games. especially in the dust and heat. He talked too much. and now, he can't talk! thank God. have God do that to my little boy a mother chuckles to her friend outside the temple.

but here is the part about my favorite character. so, zacharius returns to elizabeth. his wife who chose to stay. chose to stay when there wasn't so much dust in the ground and they had planted a garden together. when the rent was late and they painted the roof blue. when she told him she wasn't-. when he had bought books for. and he comes back, opens the door, stands there, all speechless and expected. and maybe she is mending his clothes. or hammering a nail thats loose into the wood in the kitchen. or maybe just waiting for him.

when God tells Mary she is going to have a baby, she is scared and too young and unmarried. valid feeling. when God tells sarah she is going to have a baby, she laughs. tries to hide it. but you did laugh God says. but now Elizabeth. and now Zacharius, standing in the doorway, beard needs trimming, scar above his eyebrow. and zacharius tells, god tells, elizabeth, it is tonight they will concieve. a baby, even after the year the rain washed out the fence. and the year he built her a tree swing. and the year the neighbors had a little girl. and zacharius in the doorway, with his small bag, wearing the sandals she mended for him last spring. (he is not very good with his hands). and will she understand? and how will she feel?... but because she knows zacharius and expects the curves of his chest and the scar above his eyebrow and because she is my favorite bible character, she chooses to compliment her eyes to his quietness. and kiss him on the cheek.

*photograph by Cameron Stephen, Kid with Baby Chicken, more at http://www.lomography.com

thoughts...concerns?

The Trapeze Act Was Wonderful

boy selling tops in istanbul, turkey

the storm broke away this morning in a great wind that hit my windows and against the trees in a fierce and cleansing kind of way. the kind you either want to stand against, all heels down and slanted, or lay across and be carried by or carried away or carried. but lying in bed, i wanted niether of these and was content to listen and imagine it washing over me and to finish reading the story about angels and sheep and straw. i've never seen the river move so quickly either. it twisted and slipped and was weighted with great pieces of ice and wood and trash but insisted on moving all the same. it moved as though the moving would take it somewhere other than into itself (but we all knew of course it would not). it felt like this day was struggling to find its way out.

suggested song: Colors, Amos Lee, Just Like Heaven soundtrack

So May the Sun, rise, Bring Hope Where it Once Was Forgotten

so i have chosen to write it out, in all its insufficiency and mumbling and declarations and suprises. Because I believe words can speak the worlds into my ordinary days and help them remember their necessity. Because in writing there is the hoping that thoughts are given more than syllables and sentences, but breath and circulation that would not otherwise be. Today, my thoughts are, in fact, ordinary, but ordinary to me only because I have held and turned them over a good many times before handing them to you...
it is heartbeats that shuffle against my chest as i lay on my stomach in the morning. it is the hearing of tape unsticking and watching boxes pile and shift as my roommate makes her way back to iowa. its rolling the christmas hymns around in my mouth until they feel weighted and human. its shoveling and slipping with fumbling southern feet into snow drifts and towards the mailbox, still the same dark blue with the creaking handle. its moving my big, green chair so i can sit and warm my feet on the radiator and watch the cathedral shed light off its stone steeple. its the feeling just before sleep comes, of shaking or weariness or laughing. its the singing of oh come thou long expected jesus with a certain anxiety, as though the ending might not be the same this december. but its the remembering that it will be the same, in all its quiet grace and loyalty and roughness. and its the realizing how, so very badly, i need it to be the same, especially this year.

suggested song: Upward Over the Mountain, Iron and Wine

My Bones Don't Ache From the Snow

but my heart has grown up overnight and it has been broken many times before. and not just from the loves and the lovers but also from those unsuspected. it has been broken by friends i wanted to take with me but left behind instead. broken by family and their effort to understand me in so many complexities they cannot see, and i have chosen not to show. broken over others and for others whose names are not important, at least to this reader. in this now breaking and in each time, a new cast comes forth. a new organ altogether. with new mechanisms for survival and new pathways for the blood to pass, or not. since the last breaking, i have laid my heart asleep, imagining, in its stillness it has healed properly and with the least scarring possible. i have been scared to death of its waking and so stopped any movement i thought to be coming from it. in the past few weeks my heart's waking has let me know it will now have its own way with me. that in its lying still it has in fact not healed properly. and in its now waking it is truely a tired and creaking machine of a heart. its moving challenges my survival mechanisms and sheds practicality as though it never did me any good. its orders are tall and difficult, demanding its immediate use. demanding that i love, in spite of love's impracticality or what it has taught me to well avoid in the past. demanding, that i hurt, if hurting will help the moving. because surely, that is better than its sleeping. this waking is not easy nor does it come quickly. like that of sleeping beauty's awakening, that brings life suddenly in a sweeping light across her city. nor like that of the small girl in mark's version of christ, who arises at the strange touch of deity and smooth roll of hebrew across her body. it is more like waking up to a snow heavy ground that matches the sky and spending hours in bed before crawling out into the world as you have found it. it is slow and hard to get your joints moving at top speed when it is so early. as it it with a heart newly awakened. i am quick to return to my silence, supposing if i just lie still it will fall back asleep and i will be safe in my dreams again. but i find myself rising and leaving my sensibility and my memories of "what happened last time i had these feelings" in bed. i am so very glad in its awakening. i am full in its movement and my inability to stop it because i believe, and dare i say with all my heart, this is something of what redemption, feels like.

suggested song: Time of Need, Ryan Adams
*photograph by andrew lock, i heart red brick walls