BARN DOORS
Old barn doors, gray boards creak open on groaning hinges.
Dust dances in rays of light.
Smells like leather and manure.
There’s a stirring, a portal.
Wanting to climb and hide from the world, but not
today.
Today … once more I reach through a ray of dusty light for
the worn shovel.
Work for the night is coming yet always remember the dusty
light.
Gull tracks in the sand,
and on a sliver of white shell,
as if etched by human hand,
Gull tracks again.
Tracks in the sand,
It's as if I can hear the staccato, beating, gull heart.
tracks on the shell,
Frozen in time.
How long ago,
On the history of tides,
were these tracks made?
Now,
then,
Signs written in the sand, on the infinite grains of eternity.
hidden in plain sight.
Waiting to be seen.
Truth etched in the face of God.
I am that grade school child under the house on a hot summer
day. It’s cool under here, lying on the cold red clay where Mom told me not to
go.
I am a child walking from Joyner’s Grocery. Struggling and sweating
because they scolded as I was leaving,
” Don’t mash the bread.”
So, I lift it high, holding by the tie twisted tail of the
plastic bag but my shoulders scream and fail, and I must keep stopping.
I am the skinny teenager with wire rim glasses and a spray
of freckles confused by the girls that came back to school more like women
while I blush my read haired way down the halls.
I’m the China Fleet sailor crossing the concrete bridge into
sin city of neon and street vendors and Asian hookers in hot pants,
“Hey Joe … Come ‘ere, Joe”
I am a new father cradling his son, amazed that this
purplish mass of flesh with huge dark eyes has survived the trauma of birth.
I am a son of God, resting each morning and each night in the divine light of meditation and prayer.
Breath, each breath coming home, home to the cool red clay
under the house and they call from the car,
“Scotty, where are you? We are going to the circus and we
can’t find you.”
REFLECTIONS OF A USED CAR SALESMAN
Sometimes I wonder where we have gone and where we might go.
Living in a world where violence and hate are lifted in the name of Spirit, I know
that at our core we are better than this.
When we let our fear of “the others” rule our actions and
our beliefs we become victims of our own shortcomings.
Yet the same people who would elevate destruction also feed
the poor, help the widow and orphan, build homes for those without.
What is prejudice but fear?
Long ago I was fortunate to discover that my anger was but
fear evolved and in so doing I began to find the courage to at least try to
live in communion with my fellows. I understand that we must defend and protect
those we love and our country, yet I have come to believe that,” a power
greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.”
When I stand in a voting booth or sharing what I believe to be
truth, my prayer is that courage will overcome fear and I will know that each
soul in this reality is a beating heart that yearns for salvation.
Would that I can act to protect each one of those beating
hearts.
Twice yesterday, I heard social commentary where one comedian then a renowned physicist spoke about an unfair God. Each stated they had cast off the idea of an omnipotent
and omniscient power because they could not accept the suffering of life. Their
perspective seemed to be that a benevolent, loving God would not create a world
of such suffering as this.
I thought this way for many years. How could God allow
abuse, addiction, cataclysmic events that kill thousands? Until I came to
believe, “why not?” Did the scriptural authors tell us that creation meant no pain? Sometimes
I wonder if the Adam and Eve story is where the breakdown occurred. Were we
created in His image to be without suffering until we ate from the “tree of
knowledge”?
It came to me that this conundrum is much like marriage.
Early we are saturated with desire and full of hope so we marry and have a
honeymoon. There is usually a period of relative bliss until life begins to
happen. We encounter problems and pain. “We” being the optimum word here. We
move through it all together. At times we grow apart. Then at other times we
grow closer. If we stick it out (for better or worse) we come to realize that
all of it has taught us many lessons. We have grown stronger. We now “love” one
another.
When he was 11 years old my son was diagnosed with
bone cancer. It was horrifying. I can’t say there were no moments when I was
angry with God. There were. Yet when all was said and done I came to a place of
painful acceptance rather soon. “Bouncing molecules”, I heard myself say.
God didn’t attack my son or my family. It was literally
cellular. Some cells that all of us carry dormant triggered and became active
producing a tumor. The year of chemo threatened to kill him. My prayer was that
his suffering ease, however that looked. My wife has shared that her prayer was
that he survive.
He has survived yet with many challenges. We did too. As a result,
I found that I was closer to God as I understood him beyond any place I had
been before. Early morning on the greenway outside the hospital I would run
into the rising sun communing with God and His creation. Life and death were
near in each breath. One morning as I returned on the path I looked up to his
floor … his window. The sun was bathing the side of the mostly glass children’s’
hospital. In golden light there was a cross. I know our minds will
play tricks. I kept looking as I struggled for air. The cross did not dim. It
has not faded still.
My wife and I are still married. My son works alongside me
now. He’s a bit cranky and hurts quite a bit yet full of spit and vinegar. Not
long past he sat at my desk.
“I’d like to start going back to church, I think, Dad.”
He’s never uttered a negative word about God. If anybody has
a right to be mad and or disillusioned, I’d say it was him.
Through it all my family persevered. I would say that
overall, we are better for it. There are scars and cracks for sure. I think the
Muslim poet Rumi spoke to it all best:
“The wound is the place where the light enters you”
No doubt life is full of pain and sorrow. It is unfair and
often devastating. Is God punishing us? Why would a benevolent God allow such
things?
I suspect he created order from the chaos. We … this reality … are his thought and his love. There’s good and bad. I suspect what matters is
how we deal with it.
I have often imagined a black American slave woman toiling
in the boiling southern sun of a cotton field, singing gospel hymns in praise
and wonder, smiling to the Father of her heart and salvation and I know:
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and
all the rest will be made unto you. “
Matthew 6:33
I feel sort of bad for those commentators and all who feel the same. In resentment I too once
threw “the baby out with the bathwater”. I once despised what I perceived to be
an unjust God.
That’s when I learned what real suffering was.
I was standing with my 5-year-old godson on the beach by
water’s edge.
“The beach is my favorite place, Baba. It’s like God.”
“I feel the same way, Toby. We can share that now.”
Wind like the sound of AUM rumbles in my ear, caresses my
skin, Divine Mother’s touch. I watch him there in his new oversized ball cap
digging at surf’s edge. White foam tumbles out of the blue gray Atlantic,
reaching for him, time and time again; myriad tendrils of foam yearning to
touch this small boy playing under the universe.
Every now and then he pops up and runs back and forth with
it like a sandpiper … laughing all the while.
I am older now. All the scars have weight. Each day I work
through the pain of mistake after mistake, trying not to let remorse win,
seeking the flow of divine witness. I have to just keep doing the next right
thing.
An old, once upon a time, China Fleet sailor sitting here
watching this child play at surf’s edge, indefatigable and I know … the cycle
continues. Like the ebb and flow of the tide, my remorse fades as the sea calls
me home, blessed home … into eternity.
As a youth I railed my plaintive cry; “I seek to find the eyes to see
existence’ ocean of tranquility.”
Finally it is done.
For now.
Our hair grew, and our hearts wilted.
We took beauty and filled it with drugs until emaciated,
We found ourselves lying broken in the dark.
All of it seemed a bit funny yet the laughter bled,
Into a hollow place.
Gray now and wondering, I work to pay penance,
Yet the end will not come.
Arrogant still, I refuse to forgive us … forgive myself.
I’ve seen purgatory and it does not want to let me go.
