Me, change! Me, alter!

"Me, change! Me, alter!"

Me, change! Me, alter!
Then, I will, when on the Everlasting Hill
A Smaller Purple grows--
At sunset, or a lesser glow
Flickers upon Cordillera--
At Day's Superior Close! 

Emily Dickinson 

I think this is a poem about sanctification. A cordillera is a Spanish word for mountain range. I love the mountains-- I remember them in California and Tennessee, and the Rocky's, taking that great odyssey from southern California to Kansas City, and before that from Virginia Beach to southern California, and before that...
And God was always with me, and he is still, even now, without my mountains outside the window.
Maybe when I am finished growing up I will move to a place with mountains again. 

Communion

Lift up your hearts
up 
up 
up   
we lift them up we lift them 

The day I preached my first good sermon Pastor Sheila asked me to help with communion and I just stared at my feet and when it was over she told me to take a piece of bread for myself and I just took a corner and it crumbled in my hands and she said

Always take a big piece.

At the Christmas service upstairs in the living room Pastor Sheila asked me to serve again, and this time I looked them straight in the eyes, and I got electrocuted.

Communion is dangerous

More dangerous than death (or life, for that matter

Pastor Sheila always used King's Hawaiian Bread, not those stale saltine things, and it was light, sweet, and I was floating 

up
up
up
we lift them up we lift them

Every time we have communion on Sundays-- at big church, not campus church-- I watch Richard preside. And preside is the right word, it's like a magic show, he wears his big black robe and I want to be him, I want to tower feet over a table and turn bread into sacrament...

I want to see their eyes
I want to give bread to a preschooler and say, Jesus loves you very much
(because they are too little to hear about blood and bodies, because they hear, and I know they hear)
I want to bless mustached men who think they aren't good enough for God, who will learn better-- soon

He gave thanks to you and broke it and said, This is my body, given for you

up
up
up
we lift them up we lift them

what if i explode what if i

"The Eucharist is the consummation of the whole spiritual life"

lift up my heart?

The Tears of God

There is only one novel I really love, and I say that as an English major. Oh, sure, there have been other good ones, but this novel feeds me in ways no other book has. It's called The Chosen, by Chaim Potok, a story about two Jewish teenage boys living in America during the Holocaust. Ironic, for a twenty year old Protestant woman. 

Judaism has always fascinated me. I have always said if I couldn't be a Christian, I would be a Jew. Candles, Hebrew, their Simchat Torah, when they dance with their scrolls, rituals that enlighten every day. Believing Jews love God in ways few Christians do, I think, myself included.

Anyway, in the book, Danny is a Hasidic Jew whose father is the tzaddik, the chief rabbi of this particular community. Danny's best friend, the narrator of the book, is named Reuven and is an Orthodox Jew, more liberal than the Hasids but still very thoroughly Jewish. Anyway, Danny becomes increasingly interested in Freudian psychology even as he is supposed to be training to succeed his father as tzaddik. He slowly realizes he wants to be a psychologist, not a rabbi; although Reuven wants to be a rabbi, ironically. Meanwhile Danny's father raises him in silence, not speaking to him except when they are studying Talmud together. The silence has been going on since Danny was four years old.

Danny suffers terribly as a result of what would now be considered child abuse. He has Reuven, but eventually because of Reuven's father's zealous leadership in the Zionist community (attempting to establish Israel as a Jewish state after the Holocaust became public knowledge), Danny's father forbids Danny from speaking to Reuven. If he does, Danny will be removed from the prestigious school and homeschooled instead. Danny's Hasidic peers see him, like his father, as godlike, a prophet and not a peer. He is left terribly alone. 

Ultimately he decides to go to graduate school to become a clinical psychologist, using Freudian psychoanalysis to help heal people, going against the long-standing tradition of the community that the oldest son should become the next tzaddik. Danny lives in terror of his father finding out. Eventually Danny's father invites Reuven over for Passover, and the three sit down. Speaking to Danny through Reuven, Danny's father says he has raised him in silence because  his brilliant mind and boundless ego kept Danny from loving. He had to suffer in silence to know pain and be able to carry other's pain. 

Danny's father cries out, "A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!"

He concludes by saying the silence has done its work, that Danny shall be tzaddik and carry the sufferings of the world as a psychologist, and the silence is broken and they talk again.

I have read that holy book more times than I can count, and every time it haunts me.

Aren't we all Danny? Doesn't our Father God withdraw from us all in silence at times to teach us how to suffer and carry the pain of others, to "walk around inside yourself in company with your soul," as the novel says?

The great Soren Kierkegaard wrote in his journal, "To love God and to be loved by God is to suffer." (He always had a flair for melancholy drama, I think.)

But isn't it so, on some levels, anyway? The promise is that we emerge from the scourge of the infinitely loving silence of God to comfort each other, to heal, to minister, to be priests (for we are all, who believe in Christ, priests of God), tzaddiks. 

Danny says slowly, thoughtfully, "You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it."

What a terrible paradox-- the silence speaks, the absent God is near, the dark nights enlighten us beyond measure.

Danny's father weeps uncontrollably throughout the book. He often can't finish his breakfast, he prays long prayers, swaying, tears dripping from his gray beard...

Perhaps if we are silent enough we can hear the tears of God.