What happens when someone you love completely dashes all of your hopes and expectations for their standards and honor? What happens to our hearts when someone dear to us betrays the ideals he/she professed?
It's been a while since anyone for whom I had such affection disappointed me so thoroughly. I feel as if a tiny piece of myself has died. Upon reflection, I think that this is more common than I once knew. A friend moves away: we die just a tiny bit. A relative passes: part of us passes too. We give sacrificially of our time or energy and it doesn't seem to go far: again, a miniature death. Entropy isn't just limited to the physical world. Sanctification certainly isn't. But oh it hurts, especially when we kick against it.
To live is Christ; to die is gain? Die to self? Are we allowed to mourn these small deaths?
Pick me up, O God. Only You you will never fail. Your angels amaze the mortal stars with songs of eternal wholeness around your throne.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
This afternoon I was walking toward the N/W trains at Madison Square Park when a woman tried to shove a flier into my hand. In these situations I usually smile and shake my head; I mean, just because flier-hawkers make money through actions that annoy the general public doesn't mean that unspoken rules of common courtesy should bend and break in their faces. But in the infinitesimal moments between seeing and refusing the flier, I realized what she was saying: "Ma'am, can I tellyouwhatIseeforyou?WhatIsee foruisa vision of a--" and I understood: fortune tellers. They ply their trade not only in storefront businesses in the boroughs but also at stands in Union Square and on the radio stations here: "California Psychics: What's in YOUR future?"
My first reaction was a frown and a half-turn away - but in the next millisecond I was considering engaging her in conversation about my motivation for refusal. Yet, as I did, she broke off and drifted away without even the appearance of tenacity that clings to hawkers who want to get rid of their alotted fliers. She GAVE UP at the first sign of disinterest and moved on to solicit the next stranger in her rushed, auctioneer's voice.
My reaction shocked me: in the moment after she melted away, I felt offense. My offense came not because she'd offered me an unwanted flier; not because she'd taken up my time with foolery or things distasteful to someone of my faith - but because she claimed to have a vision and gave up on it. I entered the subway with a bitter taste on my tongue. Of course I knew she was selling visions; of course I knew they were not real. But this tangible evidence of the commercialization of a lie made me furious. She was saying this thing to everyone. She was blatantly perpetuating a lie and cheapening even the idea of what she claimed to be truth.
A vision, by its very definition, connotation and semantic uses, implies a special ability to see truth that others cannot see. It's a gift, an ability passed on by the supernatural to equip the seer to understand truth or future events or to imagine possibilities otherwise unimagined. Visions are sometimes not even specific to one visionary; in the context of the Church they are, like speech in tongues, often shared and confirmed by others. The visions serve to illuminate, elucidate, bless. They are, like water, air, trees, gifts of the Creator - not to be SOLD and not to be taken lightly. They are - like superpowers - to be used for the greater good. Think of Scripture, folklore, even common popculture references: visions don't always bless the seer, but the seer is always compelled to tell of them or act on them. If this woman indeed had a true "vision" she wanted to tell me, why did she give up on telling about it? And - God forbid such things - why was she trying to sell it?
What angered me was this woman making money by lying in the faces of harried, lonely New Yorkers who want to know whether they will be happy and loved or even alive two years from now in this City of steely canyons. She's offering them visions and taking their money to make them blinder.
"Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, 'If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.' As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins." James 4;13-17
My first reaction was a frown and a half-turn away - but in the next millisecond I was considering engaging her in conversation about my motivation for refusal. Yet, as I did, she broke off and drifted away without even the appearance of tenacity that clings to hawkers who want to get rid of their alotted fliers. She GAVE UP at the first sign of disinterest and moved on to solicit the next stranger in her rushed, auctioneer's voice.
My reaction shocked me: in the moment after she melted away, I felt offense. My offense came not because she'd offered me an unwanted flier; not because she'd taken up my time with foolery or things distasteful to someone of my faith - but because she claimed to have a vision and gave up on it. I entered the subway with a bitter taste on my tongue. Of course I knew she was selling visions; of course I knew they were not real. But this tangible evidence of the commercialization of a lie made me furious. She was saying this thing to everyone. She was blatantly perpetuating a lie and cheapening even the idea of what she claimed to be truth.
A vision, by its very definition, connotation and semantic uses, implies a special ability to see truth that others cannot see. It's a gift, an ability passed on by the supernatural to equip the seer to understand truth or future events or to imagine possibilities otherwise unimagined. Visions are sometimes not even specific to one visionary; in the context of the Church they are, like speech in tongues, often shared and confirmed by others. The visions serve to illuminate, elucidate, bless. They are, like water, air, trees, gifts of the Creator - not to be SOLD and not to be taken lightly. They are - like superpowers - to be used for the greater good. Think of Scripture, folklore, even common popculture references: visions don't always bless the seer, but the seer is always compelled to tell of them or act on them. If this woman indeed had a true "vision" she wanted to tell me, why did she give up on telling about it? And - God forbid such things - why was she trying to sell it?
What angered me was this woman making money by lying in the faces of harried, lonely New Yorkers who want to know whether they will be happy and loved or even alive two years from now in this City of steely canyons. She's offering them visions and taking their money to make them blinder.
"Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, 'If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.' As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins." James 4;13-17
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Do you remember when you first understood a poem? Do you recall that moment when it hit your heart and your ear at the same time and reverberated like a tuning fork struck smartly, confidently, straight and true? Can you reclaim that clarity to break your heart, like a horn across the hills, or the lone sound of a cello calling to the silent orchestra in the stillness of a concert hall? I remembered tonight while I was reading in a moment that left my mouth dry. I remained transfixed in front of my laptop screen while I read, each atom of me thrilling warmly to the POEM -the truth of those images and thoughts like kinsmen embracing me before a feast.
Human heart, that wicked wicked wonderful thing that yet retains the echoes of a perfect Word: You can still vibrate with the smallest pulse of greatness.
Human heart, that wicked wicked wonderful thing that yet retains the echoes of a perfect Word: You can still vibrate with the smallest pulse of greatness.
Saturday, September 05, 2009
At my age she already had three children. She laughed and struggled and basked in the familiarities of wanted motherhood. This had always been her dream: to make a family and turn her agile mind to the task of raising them better than she had been raised. And she struggled- oh she did- against poverty and in-laws and the little disappointments of a young man’s pride and a young woman’s expectations. But this was what she wanted for herself.
At my age, she had loved and been loved and made love and understood the differences between infatuation and loyalty. The infinitesimal beauties of daily requited affection lit workday darknesses and rockingchair nights. She shared her life with one person to whom she had pledged it with all the girlish hope a woman’s heart invests. She knew love and she clung to it.
I look at the woman she was at twenty-seven, when I was six, and I imagine myself with two small children and a baby in my arms. With wonder I kiss their infant cheeks and hold them close, rejoicing as their limbs harden, their faces change, and infant cries give way to childish shouts. They run – I watch and laugh, my voice echoing theirs, the sound of a hundred million mothers watching the stories of their children’s lives enfold before them. Tears wash them away before us; these mingled tears of joy and grief carry them out into the channels of time. They go – and we follow along the banks, baskets in hand, waiting to scoop them up, hug, dry, scold when needed. But they go –
From my place here I watch her live the life of one who’ll always be left behind. I ache with the responsibility of that tender-fierce love, the ageless knowledge of loss and memory and hope. Her pragmatic mind will never express these things; yet I see within her capable frame the fire and iron of a wondrous strength. This love, mother, forged within you, is just what you wanted.
At my age, she had loved and been loved and made love and understood the differences between infatuation and loyalty. The infinitesimal beauties of daily requited affection lit workday darknesses and rockingchair nights. She shared her life with one person to whom she had pledged it with all the girlish hope a woman’s heart invests. She knew love and she clung to it.
I look at the woman she was at twenty-seven, when I was six, and I imagine myself with two small children and a baby in my arms. With wonder I kiss their infant cheeks and hold them close, rejoicing as their limbs harden, their faces change, and infant cries give way to childish shouts. They run – I watch and laugh, my voice echoing theirs, the sound of a hundred million mothers watching the stories of their children’s lives enfold before them. Tears wash them away before us; these mingled tears of joy and grief carry them out into the channels of time. They go – and we follow along the banks, baskets in hand, waiting to scoop them up, hug, dry, scold when needed. But they go –
From my place here I watch her live the life of one who’ll always be left behind. I ache with the responsibility of that tender-fierce love, the ageless knowledge of loss and memory and hope. Her pragmatic mind will never express these things; yet I see within her capable frame the fire and iron of a wondrous strength. This love, mother, forged within you, is just what you wanted.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Writing Exercise: A non-restrictive imitation of Wallace Stevens' "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
13 Ways of Looking at an Umbrella
I.
Among other discarded things
Sleeping next to trash cans
A man and an umbrella share shadow.
II.
I felt myself drained of life
Like an umbrella gasping
On the coat rack.
III.
The umbrella cranes its neck
To judge the sky:
It looks like sunny weather.
IV.
A girl and a dog
Dance down the beach.
A girl and a dog and an umbrella
Dance down the beach.
V.
We do not know which begins romance:
The gesture
Or the acquiescence,
the umbrella arm offered
or accepted.
VI.
The moon pooled thick
And pallid above the chimneys
It melted over the umbrella
With slow insidious light
And dripped
Onto the dark ground
To ooze a stasis.
VII.
See, O Manhattan
That Spring is capricious like a teething child;
Better to bring a small umbrella everyday and be mostly dry
Than to bring a big umbrella by forecast
And be wet by Spring’s fretfulness.
VIII.
I perceive
That uniformed people kissing
In frozen black and white
Call forward my history;
I know that an umbrella
Is somehow involved.
IX.
Because the umbrella moved
Into your space
It brought into contact interconnected travelers.
X.
In a land unprepared for storm
The phantom of an umbrella
Over a lone man’s head
Throws people into red panic.
XI.
She climbed into the painting
On a sunny day
And jumped at a pointillist downpour
For she had taken
George’s umbrellas
To be parasols.
XII.
A wet man clutches his fingers.
His umbrella must have passed on.
XIII.
Sol was singing in the rain.
Prismed color hung in the air
And hung like mist-music all day.
Umbrellas floated through rainlight.
©Megan Sherrin 2009
13 Ways of Looking at an Umbrella
I.
Among other discarded things
Sleeping next to trash cans
A man and an umbrella share shadow.
II.
I felt myself drained of life
Like an umbrella gasping
On the coat rack.
III.
The umbrella cranes its neck
To judge the sky:
It looks like sunny weather.
IV.
A girl and a dog
Dance down the beach.
A girl and a dog and an umbrella
Dance down the beach.
V.
We do not know which begins romance:
The gesture
Or the acquiescence,
the umbrella arm offered
or accepted.
VI.
The moon pooled thick
And pallid above the chimneys
It melted over the umbrella
With slow insidious light
And dripped
Onto the dark ground
To ooze a stasis.
VII.
See, O Manhattan
That Spring is capricious like a teething child;
Better to bring a small umbrella everyday and be mostly dry
Than to bring a big umbrella by forecast
And be wet by Spring’s fretfulness.
VIII.
I perceive
That uniformed people kissing
In frozen black and white
Call forward my history;
I know that an umbrella
Is somehow involved.
IX.
Because the umbrella moved
Into your space
It brought into contact interconnected travelers.
X.
In a land unprepared for storm
The phantom of an umbrella
Over a lone man’s head
Throws people into red panic.
XI.
She climbed into the painting
On a sunny day
And jumped at a pointillist downpour
For she had taken
George’s umbrellas
To be parasols.
XII.
A wet man clutches his fingers.
His umbrella must have passed on.
XIII.
Sol was singing in the rain.
Prismed color hung in the air
And hung like mist-music all day.
Umbrellas floated through rainlight.
©Megan Sherrin 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
Struggling with a first draft that eludes me. I need thoughts and ideas. Thoughts from listening to a Redeemer Presb. service on King David and community (2 Samuel 23 and surrounding)...
Am i understandable? How do i achieve clarity?
Community
In the indeterminate breaths
Between the moment of handshake
And souls’ unconscious two-armed clasp
How does the spirit-blood transfuse?
Friendship is a brassy, colored thing
Boasting feats and twirling bold-faced
In the street. What is this Other -
Pulsing quiet between these selves?
We strain beyond our holding squares,
Tossing coins at neighbors’ cold feet
Imagine – cents for lifeblood—so
God laughs and pours it on the ground.
Sometimes in the clamor of a life
Some separate selves press close, share blood
With sting and spark of mingled drops
Thought far behind us - is this will
Or childlike mimic of the He
Whose own blood still makes us Other?
©Megan Sherrin, 2009
Am i understandable? How do i achieve clarity?
Community
In the indeterminate breaths
Between the moment of handshake
And souls’ unconscious two-armed clasp
How does the spirit-blood transfuse?
Friendship is a brassy, colored thing
Boasting feats and twirling bold-faced
In the street. What is this Other -
Pulsing quiet between these selves?
We strain beyond our holding squares,
Tossing coins at neighbors’ cold feet
Imagine – cents for lifeblood—so
God laughs and pours it on the ground.
Sometimes in the clamor of a life
Some separate selves press close, share blood
With sting and spark of mingled drops
Thought far behind us - is this will
Or childlike mimic of the He
Whose own blood still makes us Other?
©Megan Sherrin, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Today is the day before my twenty-seventh birthday.
Today is the day before the next day of my life. No one day is momentous in itself, I think. Even if we graduate from college or lose a tooth or find the love of our life, the connecting steps between, and choices we make before and during and after, those days, determine where our lives are headed. One simple choice can change the course of a day - or life - but another can alter it yet again. I'm trying to learn to live purposefully each day. It's these lost days in between the momentous ones, these days during which I do nothing because the day is normal and calls for no extra effort, that keep me rolling smoothly and banally along, accomplishing little of what I dream of doing. I betray my own aspirations because I fail to see the importance of the little days.
Tomorrow I must wake up prepared, or perhaps expecting, to die. Perhaps then I'll live purposefully.
A friend's husband cheated on her. I read her blog remembering who she was when I knew her at college, recalling the quirks and off-kilter humor she offered the world. Now I hear her screaming and slanting more - verbally punching walls and cursing the God who tilted the smooth plane of her life and sent her sliding into an unknown rocky landscape, alone. I wonder how she survives each day and wakes up with a cold and hateful emptiness on the other side of her bed. Her name means grace. Will she find it?
On the night before my birthday, this woman's half-birthday has just passed. I wonder why she's on my mind and why I grieve for her when our friendship and contact is limited. Perhaps I see in her life what mine may have been - what any woman's may be - through no or little fault of her own. Perhaps I grieve for beauty of spirit bent under the warping weight of betrayal. Perhaps I hear in her crude acerbic tone echoes of my own spirit's response to life's cruelty (mine is laughably smaller). I stand and wonder how well I would survive under such a strain, and I wonder what this year might hold for us both.
Perhaps birthdays aren't times to reflect on sadness. But perhaps they are if that reflecting eventually prompts a desire to look forward. When one has sadness to look back upon, light ahead seems all the brighter---- right? Pray for C. - pray for restoration. And pray for a grace that lifts both a betrayed woman and one who betrays herself.
Today is the day before the next day of my life. No one day is momentous in itself, I think. Even if we graduate from college or lose a tooth or find the love of our life, the connecting steps between, and choices we make before and during and after, those days, determine where our lives are headed. One simple choice can change the course of a day - or life - but another can alter it yet again. I'm trying to learn to live purposefully each day. It's these lost days in between the momentous ones, these days during which I do nothing because the day is normal and calls for no extra effort, that keep me rolling smoothly and banally along, accomplishing little of what I dream of doing. I betray my own aspirations because I fail to see the importance of the little days.
Tomorrow I must wake up prepared, or perhaps expecting, to die. Perhaps then I'll live purposefully.
A friend's husband cheated on her. I read her blog remembering who she was when I knew her at college, recalling the quirks and off-kilter humor she offered the world. Now I hear her screaming and slanting more - verbally punching walls and cursing the God who tilted the smooth plane of her life and sent her sliding into an unknown rocky landscape, alone. I wonder how she survives each day and wakes up with a cold and hateful emptiness on the other side of her bed. Her name means grace. Will she find it?
On the night before my birthday, this woman's half-birthday has just passed. I wonder why she's on my mind and why I grieve for her when our friendship and contact is limited. Perhaps I see in her life what mine may have been - what any woman's may be - through no or little fault of her own. Perhaps I grieve for beauty of spirit bent under the warping weight of betrayal. Perhaps I hear in her crude acerbic tone echoes of my own spirit's response to life's cruelty (mine is laughably smaller). I stand and wonder how well I would survive under such a strain, and I wonder what this year might hold for us both.
Perhaps birthdays aren't times to reflect on sadness. But perhaps they are if that reflecting eventually prompts a desire to look forward. When one has sadness to look back upon, light ahead seems all the brighter---- right? Pray for C. - pray for restoration. And pray for a grace that lifts both a betrayed woman and one who betrays herself.
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