Emmanuel: The Look of Love

I have a vision at the center of my soul: the vision of the temple with waters flowing out from under the threshold of the door, waters that flow out to feed a desert plain, flowing higher and higher, flooding the dust and penetrating beneath its wind-blown layers, eventually waking up the seeds that lay layers below, the faceless plain suddenly burgeoning into grassy meadows and a line of fruitful trees along the flowing river.

When I first came upon it, I knew this vision in Ezekiel prefigures the Temple, the Lord God, and, somehow Christ; I just did not know why, somehow, it pertained to me. Like certain poetic and prophetic images which call to us, intaglios already present, it seems, on the soul, perhaps from the moment of our existence (which is why we respond to them when we find them spoken to us in some way, either through words, the Word, or images), this image challenged me, as well as defined me. But I never understood it.

I have lived all my life also with terrible images and intuitions and in-pourings of radical abandonment, which always seemed a mystery to me, as my parents never did this to me: I had a loving family (not without problems, of course), and many tremendous gifts. It was that I saw it, when a young child, as daily images in Afghanistan, and they called to me: the beggar, the primitive, helpless mud huts, the children vulnerable to violence, the terrifying vision I had in 1974 that Afghanistan would be torn apart by fire; yet, there were gifts given, as well: beauty in Greece, love, relative wealth in so many ways. As a young person, I squandered many of these gifts in my flight from the  abandonment and rejection I saw around me, and the resulting sins of despair, pride, and anger within me, lest it infect my life or lest I had to see myself as the marred creature I had become. One of the major ruptures in my life was to reject God because I felt I had trusted Him and been let down: I was a contemplative child--contemplation is not so lofty nor inaccessible, especially for a child--and I was His friend, His intimate; in my child's way, I knew how to listen to His silence; but as a child, I conflated peace in Him with peace in this life, and when that was shattered after we moved from Greece and I went through years of culture shock, loneliness, and bullying, I decided that He was not a very good friend. And so, I lost the Center of my life, and lived in my own shadow.

It took me ten years of running, of sin, of darkness and pain, and the grace of wounded healers in my life, to return to Him, and then almost ten more to come home to His Church, to a fuller communion with Him. I married a Socrates and my life of deep joy along with deeper suffering began in earnest. Underneath it all, in the place where I meet God inside me, still lay that image of water flowing from the eastern side of the Temple. I bathed in that water through the Sacraments, and I struggled with the pain I saw within people around me, within me, in the very call of the wind and the animals: the cry of suffering that Dorothea hears continually, in Eliot's Middlemarch. It is a cry echoed always in my own heart: I cannot build walls so that I cannot hear it and remain myself—yet I cannot survive the pain I take in, the pain I cause, alone. It is a kind of double-bind, the kind Fr. Keating speaks of.

As I look back to the time I began to understand that suffering had a place in the life of a Christian, and that indeed, somehow, God entered into that suffering, I begin to understand that what I have suffered with and feared most is rejection: I see why I began to learn how to simply love those who also seemed to feel that rejection; I could help because I was living it, day in and day out, had been familiar with it since childhood. The greatest pain, though, was as I saw myself, in turn, reject and slowly close off to my life, as despite my attempts at love, the process of rejection went deep inside and manifested itself in my body as I suffered a miscarriage, and a subsequent chronic illness that seemed to have a thousand faces of rejection: foods I could not eat, extreme chemical sensitivity, sensitivity to a climate, an atmosphere, and thus a community I loved but could not live in any longer.

In that image at the center of my soul, the water from the Temple seemed to have dried up; the opening seemed walled up, or blocked. I felt only confusion, abandonment, and a terrible murkiness; I felt again that terrible forsaking, and I realized again that this lay at the center. But I could not understand it. I have always cried out for simple, clear, friendly conversation with God, a conversation in which I cannot, will not, put words in His mouth, for a clarity of the path ahead instead of my sinful, prideful, idiotic stumbling around in the murkiness. I have had moments of such freedom that I wanted only His will. But then the fears come again, the feelings of abandonment.

Over the last painful and beautiful years in the high mountains, in certain moments, the water would flow again, pure and clear, when I tried to get out of the way and identify with another's pain in mentoring, teaching, mothering, and friendship. It seems to me now that it was pure because I knew I could do nothing myself. It was the greatest joy, the joy of motherhood, like the joy I have in being the mother of my own children, aware that I am not the source of life for them. I was not crushed by others' suffering in the same way I am by my own; I knew simply that I must be a conduit and lay that suffering down at the foot of the Cross--and so I wore the carpet down between my office and the little college Adoration Chapel, where Christ waited to take on the pain.

But, like the loss of Greece, again I have felt my sin, again, and the sorrow of leaving that little office in the downstairs corridor. I think now I was reaching another layer of wall of rock, pride and sin in myself that had to be knocked down. All I know now is that I am, again, perhaps through my own faults, in a place of abandonment and insecurity, wrestling with rejection and my weaknesses. I am not the child anymore so quickly conflating the peace of this world with that of God, but I am that child at heart, heartbroken and alone in the dark. Here, in sunny California, among my beloved cypress, bougainvillea, near the ocean, I see, as one sees beyond a veil, along with the love and beauty in nature and in others, more suffering here in this society than I have since Afghanistan, and I again feel completely helpless to help; I simply feel the abandonment, the rejection, the rage, the despair. One of my young students here phrased it well: "Underneath the veneer of relentless positivity, is rage." It comes through me, seeking solace, and without God I would have nothing but confusion, fear, rage, and weakness to offer in return.

Listening to a priest's thoughts on contemplation, though, has perhaps connected me in a new way to that image of the Temple watering the desert. He spoke about a surrender to love, a kind of annihilation of self which allows us to transmit Christ to those around us. This is what I saw within myself, this is the deepest desire I have: to be Christ: I have wanted to heal, to bind up, to bring joy, to suffer alongside, to watch a soul light up again, freed from fear and despair--for others, especially my students, I have the vision of the light that is before them, that will become who they are, glowing love in the darkness, Christ's particular manifestation in them. I don't have that for myself, really; I feel inside, when I look at myself, only selfishness greedily eating up that light, pride taking over that light and turning it into a solipsistic neon sign.

And I keep crying out to God, to the Blessed Mother, for that simple conversation in the sunlight on the back porch, for the end to the rejection and abandonment and darkness and fear that I know are woven into my heart, at times blocking me away from everyone around me, even from the color and wind.

The priest-teacher said that God is humble because He allows His creation to be messed with, in the hopes that we will love Him, because one can only love via free will. And then I saw Christ on the Cross, looking down on His people, the ones who mocked and rejected, the ones who stayed in sorrow, the ones who ran from Him because He was not successful; I saw His look of love, the look that sometimes, just sometimes, I have felt coming through me towards a hurting young person, frightened and alone, sitting across from me, the look I can see in my brilliant, honest, humble husband, a Socrates often rejected, a gadfly. This look is us, yet not; it wasn't just me--it was Him with my will allowing His will, His look, to pass to others in that simple way that I long for myself, always. I only know to allow it through myself because I feel the same need, the same desire, the same poverty as the person across from me. I have had the infinite privilege at moments to be Fr. Nouwen's Wounded Healer.

I looked at that image of Him at the greatest moment of failure, on the Cross, taking pain into Himself, sin, rejection, even abandonment by the Father, and returning a look of love; I have said to students before that this look, at this moment, is so beyond what a human can do--this forgiveness, this overcoming, this flowing of pain in, love out--is so astounding, especially when we know who He is: our Creator, our King. Only the most sublime can reach the true depths of humility, pain, rejection, and abandonment: a rejection unmitigated by any pride or sin that deserves, in some way, that rejection: this rejection of the infinite, the sublime God is the deepest rejection possible, and so His look of love is the greatest love. This is another image that has, in the last two years, begun also to call to me, alongside that Temple image.

And then I saw it: water flowed from the side of the Temple, water and blood from the side of the Lord: I finally saw the meaning, the fulfillment of the image that had been pressed onto my soul, probably at my conception. It was the end, the purpose for my seeing and receiving that image of the desert, the waterless, the abandoned, the fruitless, and then the Temple with water flowing from under its threshold. On the Cross, it is no longer a trickle under the threshold, but a full opening, the veil and door of the Temple ripped open, as Christ's side is ripped open and water flows freely. He is the greater, more open door, as He is the greater Temple.

Somehow, through the priest's words that God calls us to also be emptied so that we may participate in His Divine Life, I saw who I am, my vocation, and it was true, and yet awful. I do not want it, know I will be perfectly terrible at it in my own efforts, but it simply is me. It is the only thing that makes sense of the pieces, the patchwork of my life: To be one of those little people who can be the Look from the Cross, the look that is both the precursor to the physical water flowing from His side, a symbol of the greater Water, and also the actual Water of Love flowing out from the side of the Temple, the Look of Love from the Cross--it is that which heals, a look which is with, not above, but with. God with man: Emmanuel. 

 I cannot do it, yet I am, have been in it, doing it in a broken, terrible way, in snitches and pieces. It is the listening ear, the watchful eyes, the simple things one can do for another in the day, for that is all He gives us; it is the openness to let love flow out, taking many forms (whether it is food for the hungry, or song in a wretched silence, or taking on spiritual or physical burdens); most of all, it is seeing the great beauty in another soul, without the blindness of fear or selfish ambition. I think now, for the opening in the Temple to flow through me, within me, I have to let Him do it, be it--that is the simplicity and beauty, the light yoke. I have been doing it all my life, but seeing it as a punishment, or the result of some lack in myself which somehow I must fix. I have many, many faults, and lacks, which must be fixed. But to stop and let Him be, again, the carpenter, the stoneworker, the architect, to let Him open the side, and to let Him be the Water, the One who upholds it and does it...

...and is this all? Is the end, the telos, a hanging on a Cross, strung between heaven and earth, yearning for the truth of God to flow out? My daughter reminded me, after reading a draft of these musings, that the Cross is the not the end; it is the beginning, in a sense; the opening of the side of Christ is eternal yet always fulfilled in a greater end: the Resurrection. By my daughter's admonition, I was taken back to when I was a young woman, about the same time I found the vision of the water flowing out of the Temple, and my beloved aunt asked me to choose a 'life verse": It was Philippians 3:10-11, St. Paul crying out, " I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead." The depths of humility and rejection were, are, plumbed by Jesus, and He conquered them, did a 'spiritual judo' on them, on evil, and have made them fruitful, the fertilizer for His people, for the world if it will receive Him; the water flowing from His side will result in endless orchards where once was only desert. I am, like millions of other small souls, called to join Him in this: "If by my life and death I can serve You..."

Don't  fret because of evil men, or envy those who sin; 
for like the grass they'll wither soon, like plants will die away; 
trust in God, do good and dwell in safety in the land. 
Delight in God alone and He will give to you the desires of your heart. 
Commit your way to the Lord, trust Him 
and He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, 
and the justice of your cause, shine like the noonday sun.*

And now, with my 'mobile office' in tow, a super-rolly duffle bag, I again, at times, feel the water flowing out towards a young person sitting with me in various places around campus; Christ can love them through conversations about their intellectual thoughts and dreams, and their sorrows, all profound and weighty like the heaviness and softness of the Magi's gold. What a thing it is to find one's heart again, the pieces of one's deeper life in God come together, and to see it, and to say with St. Augustine, "Late...late.."Already I feel the failure; already I know that I will lapse into fear--but Lord, take it all, revive those who have, like me, become withered grass, turn the deserts into Your righteousness, Your justice, Your Look of Love, Emmanuel.




*Psalm 37

The Landscape Beyond the Leaf

In 1938 or '39, "Leaf by Niggle" was written, either in Tolkien's rounded, Hobbithole-like handwriting, or on a typewriter with impossibly crude, round keys on long, arching supports. I imagine him sitting at a desk in his home, a desk facing a lattice-like window patterned with the slow, downward dance of English rain, the drops shivering occasionally in wind gusts; perhaps, as he wrote, Tolkien wondered about the subtle, rather ominous rattling of the shingles on his roof: a true professor never knows quite what to do with ominous rattlings in a house--too practical a problem--so perhaps he simply incorporated the rattling into his short story about Niggle, and his neighbor Parish, who seem to live in perpetual rattling of shingles and rainstorms. I imagine Tolkien took the rattling into his fingers and his soul and made it, somehow, part of a great and deep parable about the landscape beyond the leaf, the work beyond work.

I just re-read "Leaf by Niggle" in the midst of great soul-pain: feeling rattled, blown about, unheard and unwanted in my own work, knowing somehow, simultaneously, how unworthy I am to be heard, how paltry is my work as a teacher and guide of young people in comparison to others, to my mentors, to the work of Our Lord in His lifetime. Within, we are all artists in a sense--we work on the art of rhetoric, or plumbing, or mathematics, or mothering and fathering. We have arts we perceive clearly as those we are working on, and we desire to be affirmed, to make a difference in the world.

Niggle, like myself, worked on his great painting, and like myself, he loved the sheen of light and color on single leaves; he built great landscapes around the leaves; they were details that drove meaning: like myself, he failed, and was failed by, his human community. His great work was housed in a shed on the remains of a garden; his neighbor Parish, an artisan-gardener, and highly annoying to Niggle, assumed what Niggle was doing was no more than a waste of good roofing canvas. Like myself, Niggle was also selfish with brief flashes of true charity, and was deeply wounded by being unseen--and like me, he was never sure during his lifetime of what, really, his art, his great work, his passion was all about.

After Niggle's death, his canvas is used to patch roofs, namely Parish's; the 'great work' does real work-a-day work by becoming roof-tarp to keep Parish and his wife dry under their rattling shingles. Yet, one corner of the painting, a beautiful leaf-spray with mountains in the distance, is found later on the ground below the roof, fluttering in the grass; it is framed and put in the museum under the rather lame, generic title "Leaf by Niggle"--and eventually, even the meaning of 'Niggle' is forgot in the business of life, of rattling shingles and storms.

I resign my teaching post, my community, now, and in great sorrow and pain at the leaving; I am primarily a educator, one with great passion "to lead out"--into the light beyond the cave, I hope--though, I, like Niggle, also paint--I leave at WCC paintings of leaves and mountains, and beautiful words of St. Bernard and St. Paul on the walls of the Latin Room; I leave my calligraphy and paintings of Dr. Carlson's beloved poems on the hallway outside my now empty office; my office name plate will come down soon, my title "Tami Kozinski, Faculty" is now defunct, and Mrs. K's office will become again an empty shell until another artisan fills it. My signatures "tkozinski '10" on my paintings and calligraphy will remain a little longer in the collective memory, but soon, very soon, "tkozinski" will have no meaning here anymore: just a name inside a black frame.

What is left? As the last semester wound down, I felt a failure in so many ways--so much sin in me, so many weaknesses as an artist, as a human being; I felt failed in many ways--unseen, unknown, unheard, flotsam and jetsam.

Then on a whim, I re-read "Leaf by Niggle"--it popped into my head as a help to my daughter, also struggling with feelings of failure in her art. We read it aloud together, and she had to finish reading it, as I was weeping almost with abandon by the end. In trying to help her, I was given also a great vision, a healing vision.

Niggle dies, leaves his art, his community, his neighbor, and must do penance; he must be healed in the hospital beyond the grave; when he learns the humble joy of diligence and anonymity, he is sent on to a land he recognizes as his own painting: it is the work beyond the paltry work, and it is built around the tree that contains all his beautiful leaves. He understands how to truly work on it now, and eventually Parish comes and joins him, providing necessary gardening artisanship--and they realize that they needed each other all along--Parish is astounded at Niggle's true vision, his work beyond his weakness, his art beyond his failures; Niggle is supported and able to finish the work because of Parish's expertise in gardening and his discipline.

I die, in a sense, now: Leaving, like all leavings--this leaving a profound one for me, a leaving of a deep part of my life's work, to help grow a beautiful institution that Our Lady wanted in Wyoming--is a death, but being here was also the hospital in which I began to learn my deep faults. I do not know if leaving here is a mistake and failure also (does Death also feel like a failure?); I only saw, like Niggle, what more I could have done, how I felt impeded or misunderstood, or how I could have done better.

Yet, in my pain and discouragement, in leaving, the Lord gave me the rare chance to see the real work I helped Him do here, and it was a landscape far beyond, but built around, single leaves: as they said goodbye, students began to tell me about the work I did, the image I placed in their souls, the leading out: it was the work in the soul of a young person for which the academics are only a precursor. They left little yellow leaves on my door, post-it notes: I found that I was seen as a model of what it meant to be a woman, a person, a teacher, a learner, a follower of Christ; I was taken by surprise at the depth to which my simple leaves rooted themselves in young souls, the landscape the leaves built.

The real moments, the true leaf-spray in all the work, the years, the attempts? Great teaching moments? My expertise? Not primarily. I kept being told that I "saw" them, or tried to; I "heard"...it was the leaves of love bursting from the branches of the classroom, the teaching, that did the real work, and opened the passageway to the mountains beyond, the mountains down which the Lord comes to meet the young souls. I recalled my inspiration, long ago, out of fear of the responsibility of teaching, to pray before each class for the Holy Spirit to use me as He wished : As a teacher, but more importantly, as one who, through writing and rhetoric, through counseling and just being,  I tried to free their voices, to hear and see who they really are and tell them they are loved and to have hope in the Lord, to speak about Him in everything they say or do, that as they speak truth, they speak about Him. In this, I know that it is utmost joy of the artist: To have God bring good out of what we attempt, to see Him make a beautiful painting out of our small attempts at beauty and love.

Rare, I think, in this life, does the Lord give us the gift to see a glimpse of the harvest, of our real work: He does this to encourage, to humble us, to set us straight, and because He also wants us to know that He sees us--since the first childhood reading of Moses' desire to see God face-to face, I also have burned with this same desire--and now, through my own real work of trying to see others in the midst our mutual lousiness, I know He is face-to-face with us, though we are often blind, though we are disfigured and swollen at times. Using Martin Buber's great term "I-Thou as the look of lovers," I know He is face-to-face with us, because He has the human face of Christ. Through this face, God is always the Lover. He tells me through this also to remember that my art is only done also through the help of my colleagues and neighbors, that He uses for my good even those who do not see me, or what I am doing. It also teaches me that in community we must humble ourselves to look and see our colleagues in the light of God's work, not our own.

Because of the glimpse of myself reflected in His eyes beyond my paltry attempts at painting leaves, I also know that each person brought into this world, even if only for a brief bird's life like my Ellie who died before even being born, has a real work beyond, yet somehow based upon the imperfect art each pursues and is, and based upon the deep and great foundation of human and divine communion that is necessary for the making of a leaf.

Kandylakia

Petros speeds away from Athena, east to the Aegean,
chortling a bazouki beat,
past olive, cypress, past confections 

in marbled cement, decorated by
tokens of human existence:
shirts pinned in positions of helplessness,
soggy towels, exiled plastic nothings.

Hand on handle in the back, I am
hanging on, filling up with west wind, my heart
rippling loose; I see Iris in the front
Germanically pondering the chances of death
as Petros sends horn-sounds around
the right side of a dwarf-Peugeot.

Roadside, a tiny church on a pedastal, a kandylakia, winks by.

I see inside for an instant.
Like the burning eyes of the young Greek priest
I saw once pulsing along Athinas Street,
from behind the small windows  red-lit, smoky saint-eyes
watch, remembering the world, 

and the long-ago accident that
hurtled someone through his miniature iconastasis,
that soul-sized door.

I am still too composite.
Rocking and singing past the red light and the eyes,
the sea-soil-olive air fills me still
like a lover's breath.

Fruit Trees

I have searched for you, Lord; Lord, you are ever calling me. And yet I am immersed in human language, those symbol-translations, rough-cut boulders as heavy, material-laden, weak analogies to the fluidity of the thoughts of the heart; I am always expecting you to speak to me in boulders, when you actually speak in that water, the wind, of the heart. I knew this better when I was eight, as I escaped the workaday world and lay for hours on a boulder in a pine forest on the Boy's Side of Anatolia College and watched for you in the light peeking through the needle-laden branches and the cloud-castles of a blue sky; like Elijah discovered, though,  I found you not most deeply in the light or the castles; you yourself were beyond sight and poetry. Like Elijah, when I kept my heart open to finding you, I heard your call in the small, gentle wind as it caressed the pine trees, and then me. You spoke to me beyond words, you gathered up my emotions, quieted my mind, sharpened my soul, and spoke directly to the center of my being, language clear and pure that cannot be adequately expressed in symbol or analogy or poetry, though perhaps the poets can come the closest to your language. I cannot write what you told me exactly, but it changed me, changed my life, forever.

Then I lost you, Lord; Lord, you ever called to me. Now, when I am tired of ambition, tired of trying to be something others want, exhausted by ego, I have begun to desire your voice, as I once did, childlike, again; the deer panting for the waters now, again, is one of your images calling me back. You had to crush my ego, my demands, and yet you have never let me fall irrevocably; you have helped me see that much in this world blinds us, but that nothing blinds us so much as pride and the fear that is the inevitable result of putting self at the center of the cosmos. When I began to leave all to you, I could hear you calling, though I had become again a neophyte in the language of the heart. So, you worked me through living parables, one after the other.

When you came to your people in Palestine, you became a living parable, and you told those who were not open to the language of the heart parables, "because though hearing, they are deaf." Your life on earth was a layered poem, an epic with many facets, many devices, many tropes and metaphors, to reach people of all kinds and all levels of openness, like a rhetorician who works simultaneously with a thousand tools, a master above all masters of the art of communication, and you did this, burdened by speaking with boulders to those who could not understand the language of soul-water.

You do the same with me, because my ears are clogged with the dust of this world now: ego, expectations, authority, property.

So, you called me again through another living parable; in a deep and hard decision, a life-changing one, you asked us to seek you, and gave us the grace to even desire, above all else, if only in the conscious part of us, our reason, our weak wills, Your Will. As a boulder-speaker, I was looking for you to just tell us the way. I told you, in the beginning, that "the desire in my heart is to be fruitful for You; it brings me the joy of being who I am meant to be; so Lord, I asked, please just tell me where you would like us to be fruitful; we both want this most deeply. To serve you and be fruitful for You."

Then there was silence; You seemed to recede. Why would you not tell us clearly? Instead, you began to make each way, each road leading away from this crossroads, equal; you kept us at an aporia, a point past which our reason alone could not go: I thought you were being evasive and cruel, and I cried out over and over; I was so afraid of making a mistake, of not following You.

In Adoration one evening, I heard you speak again in the water-language of the heart. You said something like "Of course you cannot go forward without Me; of course your way will be a disaster if it is outside My Will. You know what that is like, Tami. You have done it many times, and so yes, I confirm your intuition that You need Me. I am here." So, I went out, driving home in my beloved truck, rejoicing that the Lord would show us the way. Yet, the confusion returned, continued. My doubts, like the dirt rising to the top of the water when the pond is agitated, rose again and choked my heart.

It forced me to dig again, dig deep, with my husband, past the surface and into the layers of my true self. I found selfish desires from the past, wounding from the last ten years, and deep pain, and so much fear, and ambition, and ego, and also love and gratitude and forgiveness and repentance. I began to see that it must be about love, and trust. I watched my husband in his childlikeness and his humility; I watched him trying to lay down his life, his career, his desires, for me; I watched the beauty of masculinity pouring out self for the good of the family; I saw him struggling with his own wounds and fears. I felt alone, we felt alone, and confused, but I kept calling out to the Lord, more and more in the language beyond words, asking the Holy Spirit to speak for me, to call out the truth, good or bad, that still lay hidden in our hearts. I longed, with Moses, to speak to Him as a man speaks to his friend, face to face.

I began to see that we are, I am, hopelessly tangled in images, narrations, tangled in the boulders that choke the flowing river of the heart, and so as Lewis says, "How can He speak face-to-face to us until we have faces?" How can He speak to us clearly, pour out His water, when our hearts are boulder-like? So I went to His poetry, the translations of His fluid language into the pebbles that humans can finger, carry, more easily: I went to the Scriptures, and like a lost man searching for a trail under the leaves, I looked for him in David's cries, Jeremiah's exhortations and dehortations, in Isaiah's trumpet-calls. I looked for him in St. Paul's mysterious allusions. I called to all my heavenly family to help me, and I felt, sometimes, their presence as a fierce fire and clear, cold water, as pure and unadulterated joy that lives beyond the messiness of this life. They watched with me, they watched me like a mother watches, still and intense, as her small child tries to make his way across a narrow bridge over a rushing river. They were speaking to me but it seemed beyond language, somehow silent, or beyond me. Maddeningly, even, they seem to relate to me from the already completed pattern of my life, from that other shore, and so were responding with that end in mind rather than the immediate end I wanted, of just knowing the way forward. The answer was deeper, beyond the boundaries of my rational mind.

In my searching, I found again Jeremiah's poetic image of the river flowing from the east side of the temple, and I realized the Lord had given me that image many times during my life: the image that I, also, am meant to be His temple, and that water from my heart, where He lives in me, will flow out, and many fruit trees will be planted by and along and because of that river. He has promised me this, even when I least deserved this, even when He knew that I would go the wrong way; it is as if He says, "This is what I made you for, and I will bring it to fruition in your life, because my plans are not thwarted...I will bring to completion the work that I began in you when you first called to Me, came searching for Me among cloud castles as a child, came listening to the wind."

I found Socrates again in the Symposium;  I found, through him, Diotima, who says to Socrates, "This is the way of going": she is speaking about how, through everything we learn about, as we grow and mature, we are meant to ascend a ladder of love; we first only see the Good and Beauty in bodies, in physical objects, but as we grow, we begin to see that this Good in these particulars is more deeply expressed in the reason, in the will where virtues are developed, in the rational and then spiritual, and finally, to draw in another image from Plato's Republic,we come out of the Cave and are meant to "converse with Beauty" directly. Yet the lover of wisdom, of the Good, is speaking with Beauty (which implies a person with whom I can converse) and simultaneously must hold the glimpses of Beauty, what he cannot yet see fully, and must return to the Cave to draw others up towards this Good; in this life, we still must converse with Beauty and Goodness as He lives within the boulder-like particulars of our earthly life. In the Symposium, for example, Socrates is, at one moment, in contemplation outside Agathon's party, in direct contemplative conversation with Beauty, and yet after a time makes his way to the party and through the ensuing boulder-rhetoric, and just like Christ with 'those who cannot hear,' draws the others higher up the ladder of love towards a conversation with Beauty: one feels that Socrates, especially as he nears his death in the Phaedo and Crito, is living in two worlds: an increasingly pure conversation with Beauty and a difficult, painful, tiring conversation with those who still barter with boulders, an uncovering of Beauty where He is found in the particulars. Only one living in this tension, living along the Ladder of Love, ascending and descending, can truly teach.

Yet all things that have existence are good, and through their participation in Good Himself, they can speak to us in lesser or greater degrees of Beauty and Goodness Himself. It is not that we, in this life, can ever leave these earthly realities behind, and Christ has made it so that these earthly things will even be baptised into that language of water, of healing, of the heart, of His heart; in the fullness of time, in the fulness of Christ, creation will cease groaning and will become conversant in the language of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit who is, in a sense, the spirit of Love that Diotima speaks of, that Love who 'sleeps out along the roads' always desiring and drawing us toward that Good and Beauty, and yet, beyond Diotima's wisdom, and Socrates'. He is also simultaneously the completion also, having no need, an eternal, complete, perfect Love creating within Himself a place of desire so that He can, in His mercy and self-giving, allow us a place in Him.  He hollows out a place for me so that I can "make up whatever is lacking in Christ's suffering." The Christian life, the Real Life, is a paradox of the union of particulars and universals; Christ is a living image of this paradox: He is God and man. Beauty and that in which it subsists can, in Christ, become one, can reach completion. It is a paradox. It is beyond language.

So, with Socrates, in my particular pleas for guidance, I felt deeply only that "I know what I do not know"; we stepped out in faith and in some darkness, but on one of two roads, two roads that He had made equally rich, equally blessed. And I realized the deep love in this; He had hollowed out a choice that we could make, really make, in peace and blessing. In that darkness of great light, a light so bright and full that it blinded us, I panicked again. What if I was fooling myself? What if we were harming ourselves and others, and being selfish? Only when you really try to be docile to the Lord do you find out how deeply selfish and stubborn you are; only when you try to fear the Lord do you realize how deeply brazen you are. You realize also that truly Satan roars around like a lion, ready to devour the straggling and the weak sheep of the flock, that fear and sin draw him like the scent of blood flowing from the wound in the leg of the lamb.

We reached out to mentors, the spiritual giants in our lives, those farther along the road to the Lord, both those older and younger than ourselves in the age of this life (for often that time-age means nothing in the realm of the Lord). They prayed and advised and encouraged. My mother gave me Isaiah 61, which speaks in another way about fruit trees being planted; it says that God will do the planting.

This morning, I listened again to the boulder-poetry given us by others who have tried to fear the Lord--Psalm 128; all I had to hear was the first few lines:

Blessed is the one who fears the Lord
The one who walks in the Lord's ways.
You will eat the fruit of your labor;
blessings will be yours;
The Lord will make you rich indeed.

I heard, suddenly, the Lord, speaking clearly in the language of the heart, and I cannot do it justice with these symbolic boulders, but I will try: He said to me, "Do not think about mistakes; you have done your best to fear me, both of you. No matter where you go, I will plant those trees; because you have tried, even imperfectly, to fear Me, because you have tried to cultivate the pure desire, in the heart, for My Will, I will condescend to follow you wherever you go. In fact, I will go out before you and the water will flow from you both, and I will plant my trees and make them fruitful. Because your husband is trying to not despise humility for My sake, and you are trying to lay down your will, even though you are both still proud, I will lift you both up."

I know that the lifting up, for the Lord, looks upside down to the world; it looks like a dumping into the dust, sometimes; but for those who look, ever, for Him as the source of joy, even His flinging one into the dust and beyond, His picking one up for any use, is happiness.

I have searched for you, Lord; Lord, you are ever calling me.

Sea Glass

Along the rocks by the sea
he dangled me:
I, faceted glass contraption
laughing in the light

Turning to seabird call
he let me fall
I, love concocted in glass
splintering in the sun

To the forgotten seabed
was I wed
I, many-mirrored star-shards
shining holes to heaven

Past the edge of the sea
He came for me
I, barnacled bits re-gathered
weeping in the light

Buried Alive

Antigone, sentenced to be buried alive, bound amidst the watery glow of torches, hidden, silenced, left to crumple and shrivel, thirsting for water and light, hung herself before her lover, her bridegroom, could save her. She was made voiceless first by the fate of her father, then by the tyrant, the city, her own ego, the earth and stone isolating her, and finally by her choice to take her own life.

Antigone is a living archetype; she lives as a martyr-vision of thousands of particular Antigones. They live among us, and we don't see them, because we cannot see each other's souls bare, naked, without the masks and costumes worn to create an image, an eidelon, of some ideal: whether that is an uber-tolerant totalitarianism, a rigid conservativism, a position of power, or a victimhood. We don't see our own Antigone buried inside, that stunted, deformed, voiceless part of ourselves that has forgotten the light; we cannot hear, in the world around us, a million inner voices, our real voices, buried alive; we are left as fractured selves, dealing with receding, dying echoes of the cry within the walls, dealing with the anger and the despair at the meaningless silence that finally settles when too much time has passed.

When are we so wounded? How are we to be healed?

When does a child understand that his or her true voice is deformed, unwanted, in the eyes of those whose care it is to find, encourage, love, that voice? Where does good socialization end and enforced, silencing conformity begin? When are parents shaping an eidelon, an idol of their child, and when are we educating, or leading our child into a place of light, of truth: the truth of a God who has made him or her in His image, and is the true Father, true Teacher? When are we burying our children alive, and when are we providing space for them to speak and then, finally, sing, unashamed by the nakedness of their soul before others, before God?

When do we make those voices sing, like parrots, in our own voices?

For we are all born, like Antigone, out of, and into, deformity, our inheritance from our own Father and Mother; we are all brought into families struggling with deformity and deep flaws amidst flashes of love and light. Yes, to mature, we must negotiate our identity within our human community else we become egoists and narcissists. A true voice develops in negotiation with the Good, with God, with the flaws and beauties of ourselves and others; educare,"to lead out," means that we are given the tools and paradigms in which to freely, honestly negotiate; however, too often those in authority over us do not negotiate but rather demand, or ignore, or suppress. Many parents wish the best, and yet struggle themselves with voicelessness, with uncertainty, with deep fear in the face of a young soul so fragile and sensitive, so easily wounded, so beautiful in its intricate design, meant to be a fountain of light, an unrepeatable pattern of colors yet unseen.

The Father gave me a vision of you, young man, young woman, young Antigone, with your fragile ideals grown in the light fields of heaven, ideals that must, so often, be crushed before they can survive in this earth-encrusted world. Yet when I prayed to be a healer for you, young Antigone, I never guessed it would be out of a vision of the imperishable light within you, a vision of such beauty and power that all I can do is to use my voice, the voice I am finding again all the time, to lead you again to yourself, to love yourself, to unlock the stone and earth prison from the inside.

I see, Antigone, your Bridegroom ever watching you; He watches you, and waits, as you make your choices in the heavy nights to keep speaking in the face of contempt and ignorance or to begin to bury your true voice and craft another, one that you believe will be heard. I watch with Him, Antigone, as you are repeatedly condemned, corrupted, encrusted in the expectations of others, of teachers and would-be gurus, all those you looked to to lead you out; I close my eyes as you lock out the Bridegroom and begin preparation to hang your own voice, yourself.

The Bridegroom shows me His own vision of you and asks me to listen for the last vestiges of that voice, crying in the depths, under all your practiced tones of competency and complacency, that crying that your anger and despair and self-hatred are all pointing to; I listen, and sometimes I see the crushed counterpart, within you, to the vision He gives me. I find the pieces of that vision in your pain, and I try to use poetry, identity of ratio, analogy, challenge, but mostly the settling into my heart before you, the nakedness of my own past burial.

I tell you that I was also Antigone, that I buried myself alive in order to survive, that I built the prison and accepted my deformity as deserved, as identity. I condemned myself in my ignorance and ego. Then I tell you of the moment in the garden, when I, an old soul, a scarred soul, heard the Bridegroom whisper, "I have seen it all. I have been with you through it all. I have witnessed it all; I never left."

"I never left."

I tell you that your Bridegroom has always been with you as well, and about the mystery of the sin, of the burial, of the deformity, that will become the new note in an astounding, unrepeatable symphony of light; I tell you that you have never been alone, that your Bridegroom clings to you even as you hang in the darkness, and wishes to wed you still, and to lead you into the light, to heal you, to hear you.

He tells you that if you will let Him cut you down and if you take His hand, you will speak again, and sing, and that song will be shared, will fill the heavens with its intricate pattern of tone and word, will be an indispensable step within the Great Dance.