I can't seem to stop dreaming. Not that I would ever want to, but I am remembering them more and more as I wake. Last night, I dreamed of someone who hurt me terribly when I was a child. In my dream, I was not a child and I went to war with him. And he did not win. I have no doubt the dream was prompted by the events of yesterday, a discussion of the seven deadly sins and the seven lively virtues...and the stories that followed. My own energies were stirred up, and they had no safe place to go but into my dreams. I am grateful to have the ability to remember them. It also seems like years since I have had these "good" dreams, these "working it all out" dreams. Finally.
So it was a bit more than creepy, when I picked up a book this morning...one that I got for 50 cents at Goodwill...thinking it was a book about a show I listened to on public radio, but it was much different...kind of like porn, but not. I planned to throw it away, but thumbed through the pages and came up with something...about sin. Sub specie aeternitatas: meaning, "under the aspect of the eternal" Spinoza: "There is no reason to believe that anything matters." Frankl: "It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future"
I could not find the Catholic reference to the quote, although I am not giving up. The quote in the book concerns the nature of man...and claims witchcraft to be the reason for man to choose to sin sexually. It was a disturbing quote that made a lot of sense. I wrote it out in my private journal. (Yes, I have things I don't put here) It perhaps makes more sense to men, because it was written by men about men...but for me, stuck in this woman's body, it provides more insight into how men think, how they view their existence. And how they view their "rights" as male human creatures. It was no accident that I came upon this book, just after some challenging conversations and a wonderfully straightforward lecture on the seven deadly sins.
Like it or not, everything is gender biased. I watched a video this morning on FB about a seal, a female seal, who decided to bond with a woman sitting on the beach. What prompts the seal to become so enamored with the woman, female, but of a different species? It was beautiful, almost courting in its nature. And maybe it was. A gay seal? Visions of "Dumbo" come to my head, the story of a misunderstood mother and her very unique child. No one really understands another person, they can only assume some things based on what they observe and what they already know. A gay seal? Definitely a lonely seal...I'm thinking she was attracted to the red jacket the woman wore. It looked like blood. Women know about blood, in a very different way than men. Blood is life. Blood creates life, nurtures it, sustains it. But I perhaps digress too much.
There is an eternal something that I am always looking for and towards.
According to the quote in the book, men are doomed (by witchcraft) to seek out and use women...and that "bottom line" is the ultimate inescapable reality of being a man. (Sounds rather Calvinistic to me). So without reading the book, I am assuming that the author is using the statement of the Church to justify his actions: I can't help myself. I was born that way. The Devil made me do it...or in this case, "The witch has made me into a demon."
I am not responsible for my actions. Forgive me.
This coming after a lesson in sin, conversations about people being invisible, my dream of an adult who used me for his own pleasure...this is not an accident.
I prefer to think that God did not create human beings as corrupt as we have become. I don't believe we have been bewitched by some evil (suggestively female) force, that we might be able to blame and then perhaps appear less "bad" in the eyes of God: I was a victim, Lord. Take pity on me...is not a confession, and is not contrition. I suppose we are all victims of history...such is that mortal coil...that brotherhood and sisterhood we cannot escape...nor should we want to escape. It is all part of our gift.
Being held accountable. Being responsible. All those seven lively virtues: humility, admiration, generosity, forgiveness, self-control, chastity, zeal. These are CHOICES that can be made instead of living up to what some people call the darkness of men. These are the gifts of light. Or we are just animals...
But then, there's that seal again...who understands love on some level. And seeks it outside the box.
There's more to the story. I simply don't know it. Yet.
Friday, November 15, 2013
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Invisible
The past seven days have been surreal. Must be a dream, must be imagined, must be...not real. The Velveteen Bunny. King Arthur and Lancelot. Sherlock. Characters, not people.
Headline when I turned on my computer this morning: Dead Baby Found in NY Recycling Plant.
As a poet, as a writer, as a lover of God, just try to get your head around that one. Macabre. No other word fits. It's like, well...we are all recycled, aren't we? Eventually. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. Kind of contradicts the belief in God. That is, if you think God uses physics to create the universe. Get it, God follows our rules...it's a joke.
Like a dead baby found in a recycling plant. It has to be a joke. But it isn't a joke. Soylent Green. For real. No. But a horrible, terrible story accompanies the fact that the child was found. That way. In a bag. In a recycling plant.
The story reveals that the child was not born alive. That gives me some comfort...sort of. The crime is not one of murder, but of gross ignorance, or neglect. It is tragic more than terrible. The characters in the story need to be pitied, for the end result meant some woman was perhaps alone, or being abused, or a child, not knowing what to do, or someone filled with hate or anger...so many things to imagine.
I identify with the things I know. If you are reading, you take the story into things you know.
"You don't matter."
I've read it in books, many plots, stories of success and failure, surround those words: "You don't matter." That statement is the true opposite of "I love you." Even hate implies love once existed. That is the whole purpose of shunning. The pain of not mattering.
I kind of think that is the whole purpose of the Bible, to remind us that everything matters, everyone matters. To live a complete, full life, we must recognize that truth: it all matters.
That's much too big a thought, though. Like trying to imagine the whole universe at once...just too much there for a human brain to think.
Because the only way to live in this universe, knowing that everything matters...is to live detached from it, because it is so big. To look well at one thing means you cannot look well upon something else. Because we are human, and we do not have a row of eyes peering into every direction all the time. And to see it all...really see...what could we do about it, beyond seeing it? It would make us crazy, to think that we had to engage it all, address it all, make it all "better."
So, being human, being finite, we live part in, part out, of reality. And we have to work at not letting the "truth" of what we see make us crazy. The "dumpster baby" stories have been trumped for me with the "baby found in a recycling plant." Why does this story matter to me and other stories, such as the devastation in the Philippines, affect me so differently?
Because the latter story is, in most part, an event of nature. Yes, man is involved...but not to the extent that a person, or persons were involved in the deliberate choice of discarding a child's body in this particular fashion. It affects me differently, because of my own life story.
Not in a recycling plant, I have to admit, I felt discarded as a child. The body lived in the house where I grew up, but it was obvious I didn't matter. It was obvious to me anyway. So I did things to be noticed, even being noticed in a bad way was better than not existing.
I write that because I want to encourage you to really look at the "Lazarus-es" in your life. They matter to God...and thus, they should matter to you, because you will hear about it later, if you believe in God and hope to meet Him someday. I don't think God will chastise you for the choice you made to ignore someone, but I think He will bring it up...because, before you get into Heaven, you have to know what you did...and didn't do. I think it kind of works like that. I could be wrong.
There was also a story about a murder trial here in Texas. The murderer argued that he killed the girl, a young girl, because she had "ruined his life" by accusing him of child molestation. So he killed her. Texas, of course, is seeking the death penalty. It is far easier to just destroy rather than rebuild, or heal...they can recycle him and maybe get a better human being later...right? There are so many ways to observe this one: how self-centered we can be, how we think the whole world revolves around us, how everything was made for us alone, and how we can create laws in our heads that justify every one of our actions. And we can be accusers, and simply eliminate those life forms that violate our comfortable lives. I am talking about both the murderer and the "jury," that is, the State of Texas.
The only thing I know as true here is that: people were not loved and people were not observed. And evil entered...and won the battle...but perhaps not the war.
We can go on forever, in discussion and in disagreement, about how to solve the problem of being living, breathing, finite creatures. We can acquired many things in our lifetime, we can be both the "haves" and the "have nots"...but
if we do not love, we are only stardust...love is the only answer...or we are nothing. It is the only real thing we can leave behind, it is the only thing that can make us truly immortal. Love.
And I kind of think it takes an entire lifetime to figure out what that means. But it includes a whole bunch of forgivenesses, of self and others. Of the world...of being completely and totally engaged while not being attached. Of risking all that you are to become fully human. Of forgiving impossible things and loving especially the ones who vex your soul. Of self-giving and dying to idea that you are not a god.
And making sure, to the best of your ability, that no one feels invisible. That everyone knows: they matter.
Love, Cindy
Headline when I turned on my computer this morning: Dead Baby Found in NY Recycling Plant.
As a poet, as a writer, as a lover of God, just try to get your head around that one. Macabre. No other word fits. It's like, well...we are all recycled, aren't we? Eventually. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. Kind of contradicts the belief in God. That is, if you think God uses physics to create the universe. Get it, God follows our rules...it's a joke.
Like a dead baby found in a recycling plant. It has to be a joke. But it isn't a joke. Soylent Green. For real. No. But a horrible, terrible story accompanies the fact that the child was found. That way. In a bag. In a recycling plant.
The story reveals that the child was not born alive. That gives me some comfort...sort of. The crime is not one of murder, but of gross ignorance, or neglect. It is tragic more than terrible. The characters in the story need to be pitied, for the end result meant some woman was perhaps alone, or being abused, or a child, not knowing what to do, or someone filled with hate or anger...so many things to imagine.
I identify with the things I know. If you are reading, you take the story into things you know.
"You don't matter."
I've read it in books, many plots, stories of success and failure, surround those words: "You don't matter." That statement is the true opposite of "I love you." Even hate implies love once existed. That is the whole purpose of shunning. The pain of not mattering.
I kind of think that is the whole purpose of the Bible, to remind us that everything matters, everyone matters. To live a complete, full life, we must recognize that truth: it all matters.
That's much too big a thought, though. Like trying to imagine the whole universe at once...just too much there for a human brain to think.
Because the only way to live in this universe, knowing that everything matters...is to live detached from it, because it is so big. To look well at one thing means you cannot look well upon something else. Because we are human, and we do not have a row of eyes peering into every direction all the time. And to see it all...really see...what could we do about it, beyond seeing it? It would make us crazy, to think that we had to engage it all, address it all, make it all "better."
So, being human, being finite, we live part in, part out, of reality. And we have to work at not letting the "truth" of what we see make us crazy. The "dumpster baby" stories have been trumped for me with the "baby found in a recycling plant." Why does this story matter to me and other stories, such as the devastation in the Philippines, affect me so differently?
Because the latter story is, in most part, an event of nature. Yes, man is involved...but not to the extent that a person, or persons were involved in the deliberate choice of discarding a child's body in this particular fashion. It affects me differently, because of my own life story.
Not in a recycling plant, I have to admit, I felt discarded as a child. The body lived in the house where I grew up, but it was obvious I didn't matter. It was obvious to me anyway. So I did things to be noticed, even being noticed in a bad way was better than not existing.
I write that because I want to encourage you to really look at the "Lazarus-es" in your life. They matter to God...and thus, they should matter to you, because you will hear about it later, if you believe in God and hope to meet Him someday. I don't think God will chastise you for the choice you made to ignore someone, but I think He will bring it up...because, before you get into Heaven, you have to know what you did...and didn't do. I think it kind of works like that. I could be wrong.
There was also a story about a murder trial here in Texas. The murderer argued that he killed the girl, a young girl, because she had "ruined his life" by accusing him of child molestation. So he killed her. Texas, of course, is seeking the death penalty. It is far easier to just destroy rather than rebuild, or heal...they can recycle him and maybe get a better human being later...right? There are so many ways to observe this one: how self-centered we can be, how we think the whole world revolves around us, how everything was made for us alone, and how we can create laws in our heads that justify every one of our actions. And we can be accusers, and simply eliminate those life forms that violate our comfortable lives. I am talking about both the murderer and the "jury," that is, the State of Texas.
The only thing I know as true here is that: people were not loved and people were not observed. And evil entered...and won the battle...but perhaps not the war.
We can go on forever, in discussion and in disagreement, about how to solve the problem of being living, breathing, finite creatures. We can acquired many things in our lifetime, we can be both the "haves" and the "have nots"...but
if we do not love, we are only stardust...love is the only answer...or we are nothing. It is the only real thing we can leave behind, it is the only thing that can make us truly immortal. Love.
And I kind of think it takes an entire lifetime to figure out what that means. But it includes a whole bunch of forgivenesses, of self and others. Of the world...of being completely and totally engaged while not being attached. Of risking all that you are to become fully human. Of forgiving impossible things and loving especially the ones who vex your soul. Of self-giving and dying to idea that you are not a god.
And making sure, to the best of your ability, that no one feels invisible. That everyone knows: they matter.
Love, Cindy
Rain and other things
I wrote this entry at least a week ago. I didn't want to post it, but it's part of the story that I am still trying to figure out. My thought it, only people who need it will read it. Life is still very much of a great puzzle for me. Like the one at the beach, hard to see how it goes together unless you look at it in a very specific way.
The problem is, the closer I get to understanding it, to putting it all together, the scarier it gets. It might be better to never know. Maybe.
The past week has been filled with vivid dreams. I can hardly remember them, but they were all active and exciting...and way better than life in so many ways. In my dreams, I can solve problems. I am forever young and healthy. I have the relationships I long for. I can fly high in the sky. I can walk in the Garden of Eden. I can actually live as one with God.
Life is a bit more complicated. Driving in the rain, past Highway 21, I was flooded with memories of how drastically life had changed for me in college. I remembered my fears of being forced to grow up, how much I hated Houston...and rich people...who thought they had the right to do anything to anybody. I did not want to grow up. I did not want to be like them. I don't remember being happy very much. While childhood was a kind of war zone, my observations seemed to indicate that life would only get worse as I grew older. And I wanted no part of it.
The only time I was truly happy was with God...whatever that was. This week, I was flooded with memories good, bad, beautiful and ugly. I recalled what I learned, what I did. And in the midst of the all the goods and the bads, I finally accepted that those things are just being alive. You judge, you make choices as best you can...and then you live. Anyway. The best thing to do is to not beat yourself up over the realization that you could have done things better...or worse.
It is what it is, in this human body. We can only pull off so much. But we can often get away with too much.
In the midst of knowing that we are finite, I discover that I am a person of ritual, of ceremony, of blessing. It was difficult for me to let someone else pay for my very expensive meal. Mostly because I consider myself a bit of a 'tag along'. I feel much like that one whom no one knows exactly what to do with, but kind of needs to be there. So I created a purpose for myself. I am the herald, the recorder of events, the one who surprises, the entertainer. These comments remind me that I still consider myself of no particular worth. They remind me that I still do not see clearly.
My grandchildren somehow find my worth...and not just in what I can do or be for them. I had to have them enter in to my life for me to understand that concept. Worth without doing anything. That is a hard one.
And while I could just whine and be sad over that understanding of myself, as I walk with people as they near death, I discover that the most delightful people suffer the same thoughts. Successful, beautiful, loving people...wonder in those last moments, remember all the good they might have done and didn't...
And in those moments, I get to do my job as one who knows, who has been there.
Of course, God loves you
You did good. (I do not say, "You did the best you could" unless they are unable to receive the first. Saying the latter implies a guilt might remain)
Yes...all those things are there...but God loves you. Really.
It's time to let it go.
Everyone will be fine.
You will understand soon.
They will understand one day.
It is the ritual of death. The words of the Church are good and helpful, but there is more to do. It you want to say only the priest can forgive the sin (actually only God forgives sin), that is fine. But the greatest work, the hardest work, the last work...is to forgive yourself.
"Indiana, let it go."
I always think about that line from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." The driving force of the story was to achieve the Holy Grail. Everyone wanted it. This "cup of eternal life." The "cup of Christ" but really, the adventure was the real story. It was not the end, it was the journey. Elsa and the other character (can't think of his name)...wanted "eternal life". They thought life was a thing. It's not. Elsa grabbed for the thing...and died. Literally fell into the bottomless pit of despair. (Ah, yes, I even dreamed about teaching last night!) And Indiana, whose father was holding tight onto his hand, whose father had ignored him all of his life to find that "holy grail," help tight to the child, called him by name and said, "Let it go." The father made a choice: the son. The son made a choice: the father. Yes, all the mistakes that were made did not go away. When they leave the cave/church, they will make more mistakes again. But they made a choice. They chose wisely: the life. The adventure.
So it will be for all of us. We can wait until that very last moment...and choose good. We can keep striving for all sorts of things, thinking they will make us feel worthy. Or we can choose people and adventures now.
Heaven can begin here, if you are willing to just let it go.
The problem is, the closer I get to understanding it, to putting it all together, the scarier it gets. It might be better to never know. Maybe.
The past week has been filled with vivid dreams. I can hardly remember them, but they were all active and exciting...and way better than life in so many ways. In my dreams, I can solve problems. I am forever young and healthy. I have the relationships I long for. I can fly high in the sky. I can walk in the Garden of Eden. I can actually live as one with God.
Life is a bit more complicated. Driving in the rain, past Highway 21, I was flooded with memories of how drastically life had changed for me in college. I remembered my fears of being forced to grow up, how much I hated Houston...and rich people...who thought they had the right to do anything to anybody. I did not want to grow up. I did not want to be like them. I don't remember being happy very much. While childhood was a kind of war zone, my observations seemed to indicate that life would only get worse as I grew older. And I wanted no part of it.
The only time I was truly happy was with God...whatever that was. This week, I was flooded with memories good, bad, beautiful and ugly. I recalled what I learned, what I did. And in the midst of the all the goods and the bads, I finally accepted that those things are just being alive. You judge, you make choices as best you can...and then you live. Anyway. The best thing to do is to not beat yourself up over the realization that you could have done things better...or worse.
It is what it is, in this human body. We can only pull off so much. But we can often get away with too much.
In the midst of knowing that we are finite, I discover that I am a person of ritual, of ceremony, of blessing. It was difficult for me to let someone else pay for my very expensive meal. Mostly because I consider myself a bit of a 'tag along'. I feel much like that one whom no one knows exactly what to do with, but kind of needs to be there. So I created a purpose for myself. I am the herald, the recorder of events, the one who surprises, the entertainer. These comments remind me that I still consider myself of no particular worth. They remind me that I still do not see clearly.
My grandchildren somehow find my worth...and not just in what I can do or be for them. I had to have them enter in to my life for me to understand that concept. Worth without doing anything. That is a hard one.
And while I could just whine and be sad over that understanding of myself, as I walk with people as they near death, I discover that the most delightful people suffer the same thoughts. Successful, beautiful, loving people...wonder in those last moments, remember all the good they might have done and didn't...
And in those moments, I get to do my job as one who knows, who has been there.
Of course, God loves you
You did good. (I do not say, "You did the best you could" unless they are unable to receive the first. Saying the latter implies a guilt might remain)
Yes...all those things are there...but God loves you. Really.
It's time to let it go.
Everyone will be fine.
You will understand soon.
They will understand one day.
It is the ritual of death. The words of the Church are good and helpful, but there is more to do. It you want to say only the priest can forgive the sin (actually only God forgives sin), that is fine. But the greatest work, the hardest work, the last work...is to forgive yourself.
"Indiana, let it go."
I always think about that line from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." The driving force of the story was to achieve the Holy Grail. Everyone wanted it. This "cup of eternal life." The "cup of Christ" but really, the adventure was the real story. It was not the end, it was the journey. Elsa and the other character (can't think of his name)...wanted "eternal life". They thought life was a thing. It's not. Elsa grabbed for the thing...and died. Literally fell into the bottomless pit of despair. (Ah, yes, I even dreamed about teaching last night!) And Indiana, whose father was holding tight onto his hand, whose father had ignored him all of his life to find that "holy grail," help tight to the child, called him by name and said, "Let it go." The father made a choice: the son. The son made a choice: the father. Yes, all the mistakes that were made did not go away. When they leave the cave/church, they will make more mistakes again. But they made a choice. They chose wisely: the life. The adventure.
So it will be for all of us. We can wait until that very last moment...and choose good. We can keep striving for all sorts of things, thinking they will make us feel worthy. Or we can choose people and adventures now.
Heaven can begin here, if you are willing to just let it go.
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