Made in solemn incomprehensible earnest

Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 270)

I spent the afternoon wandering though poets. Marilyn Nelson. Marie Howe. I walked Tinker's Creek with Annie Dillard. It was like binging on an incredible box of chocolates. So rich, so many flavors, each one a grace, and all together -- too much.

...only able to endure it by being no one and so/specifically myself I thought I'd die/from being loved like that. (Marie Howe, Annunciation)

Yesterday I picked up the notes I had made when I was 50, on the 30-day retreat making Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises. I didn't find what I was looking for, quite. But maybe I have now. #4thWeek

The world is wilder than that...more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 268)

Tinker's Creek was my mother's, which I found on the shelf when we cleaned out my parent's house. There was a page marked toward the end, the back cover tucked in. So anxious was I to find the last chapter today, I unthinkingly pulled it out. Now I have no idea where the marker was left. Nor why. Was it something I would want to return to? Or just as far as she got before someone blasted in the door from school, from a wild and extravagant and bright day? My mother was 42 when Tinker's Creek was published. Would this young woman have advice for my much older self? I want to weep at my inattention.

The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time...The gaps in the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish, too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap...and unlock a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, p. 269)

I remember bundling up on a bitter January day to sit on Brace's Rock just off the retreat house at Eastern Point, somewhere in the first week of the Exercises. Cowering from the wind in a cleft of rock, hoping to catch a glimpse of God from the outside.

I have spent the afternoon. 

 

Stalking my calling

 

I was not stalking my calling, but hunting up a poem, when I stumbled across my copy of "Living like Weasels" from Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard. (I'm doing a brief reading at commencement in May, and was looking for my copy of this poem by astronomer Becky Elson, which I love, but is it too dark for commencement?)

If you haven't read it, it reads like a bloodthirsty take on Mary Oliver's poem The Summer Day. The one with the line about "your one wild and precious life." (And which I am definitely not reading at commencement.)

The whole weasel essay is a joy, science and language and imagery all tangled together like the wild roses and poison ivy around Hollins Pond. Or snapped into a single whole like Dillard's mind and the weasel's. 

She opens with the story of an eagle found with the dry skull of a weasel clamped onto its neck, driven by its predatory instincts to bite even as it became prey. To do as it must, to do as it was meant to do — bite — even in extremis.

Dillard closes the essay by mulling  about vocation. "We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — even of silence — by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse...I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you...Seize it and let it seize you up aloft..." 

In these last few weeks of teaching I seem to be stalking my calling again, looking for the tender spot, for the pulse point, and the willingness to seize it, letting it grasp me as I grasp it. To do — to be — as I was meant to be.

All my cells thirst

“I’m slipping, I’m slipping away
like sand
slipping through fingers. All
my cells
are open, and all
so thirsty. I ache and swell
in a hundred places, but mostly in the middle of my heart.”

— from Rilke's Book of Hours, I 23, translated by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

I found this snippet from Rilke's Book of Hours on a literal snippet of paper tucked between two dictionaries on my study shelf (I was looking for my Esperanto and Klingon dictionaries, if you must know). I have no idea where I came upon it, on the back is a photograph of a caterpillar chrysallis and something about undifferentiated cells. No idea, either, when or why I might have clipped it, nor how it had found its way onto that shelf of rarely consulted references (when was the last time I used Klingon?).

Meanwhile, unknown to me, cells in my substantia nigra were slipping away, like sand through an hourglass. Dying. When were a third of them gone?  a half? I didn't know. I didn't notice, until I did. Most of them are now gone, swept away by whatever molecular cleaning crew keeps station in my midbrain. 

I imagine this little spot in my brain, gradually growing dark. The lights flicking off one by one. Meanwhile all my cells thirst for what was being poured out, longing for the messages that once flowed on a tide of dopamine, but no longer come.

I ache, in my body, in my soul...and in my heart...for what I lost, all unknowing. For what I know I will lose again.

---

Estimates are that between 60 and 80% of the dopamine producing cells in the brain are dead by the time symptoms of Parkinson's disease manifest. The substantia nigra is just above the brain stem, deep in the middle of your brain. The tissue that comprises the substantia nigra is darker than the rest of the brain's tissue, hence the name.

Rilke's original German has no reference to cells, but speaks instead of senses thirsting in different ways: “Ich habe auf einmal so viele Sinne, die alle anders durstig sind.”

Beloved. Period.

We are beloved.
     Period.
Not beloved because
Not beloved if
Not beloved but
Not beloved for
Not beloved sometimes, by some people. 

We are beloved. No commas, no clauses.
Beloved, period.

We are beloved, as we are,
      as we were even before the spirit breathed upon the waters,
          as we will be when the sun itself returns to dust.
Be loved.

Be love. 

---

The parish mission, executive summary. A riff at the end on the Zen koan: "Show me your original face, the face you had before your parents were born.”

Jarred silence

[image or embed]

— TinyTalesDaily (@tinytalesdaily.bsky.social) February 12, 2026 at 9:01 AM

I am, you anxious one.
Don’t you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch? 
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings. 
Can’t you see me standing before you cloaked in stillness?
...And with the silence of stars I enfold your cities made by time.”
— Rainer Marie Rilke

from Rilke's Book of Hours translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

I used to dive into the silence once a month at the Jesuit Center near Wernersville and perhaps a bit tongue in cheek, would offer to bring back a bit of the silence for friends. I have been thinking about how to package up silence recently. Or rather, contemplating how to open a space for stillness and silence for those who are seeking it. What would it look like to set up that sort of portal in the parish church for an hour? What could you give people to take home...if not in a jar, but a gift of a way of drawing that cloak of silence and stillness around themselves if only for a few minutes?

It is so tempting to try to push lots of advice in, but I keep returning to Abba Moses advice, "Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything." Or to riff on Mary Vorse's advice to young writers (including  Sinclair Lewis) “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”: to sit in prayer is simply to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. I don't want to constrain prayer.

As to the jars in the TinyTale, I am with Marty Laird OSA (Into the Silent Land) on the notion that contemplation will somehow erase the woundedness we experience. Opening that jar of permanent silence isn't necessarily going to hush the screams in the other jar she bought. Prayer is not snorting lines of euphoric peace, warns Fr. Laird.

Light from light

I am giving a day of retreat at a retreat house in Bryn Mawr on the first Tuesday of Advent:

“God comes to us in light and in shadow. Aflame in a bush calling out to Moses, brilliant in the star that led wise men to a savior in a manger, and radiant in Christ transfigured on a mountain top. But as poet Rainer Marie Rilke noted, God can also be found deep in the darkness. A billowing cloud led Israel through the desert, the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary so that she might bear the Messiah, a voice from a cloud spoke of a beloved Son. As we await the celebration of the birth of the Light of the World, join us as we pray with these luminous images.”

I spent today sketching the texts for the four reflections that will frame the day and working out the discussion/sharing sessions that (I hope) will draw people into conversation with each other and the material. It was such a grace to have an entire day to devote to writing and thinking, to work at an unforced pace. This is what I am looking forward to in the next phase of my life!

And I learned how to use my phone to capture what I am thinking aloud and transcribe it for me. I had been using Dragon dictation on a PC when I didn’t want to type, but it’s nice to be able to not have to mov between devices (the phone syncs automatically to the laptop). 

A potent wizard

I follow an account on bluesky (@bookgaga.bsky.social) that regularly posts poetry. Today's selection was short and evocative for me, "Emerald Inula" by Sam Cherubin. (Full poem is here)

"i.

Apples in Schiller’s desk, Balsam of Peru, rockrose,

rose alba, Helichrysum Everlasting, Immortale.

Why can’t this be enough?

ii.

Dried petals staining the pages.

Attar of cells breathing sun.

Flesh never accepting, but aching."

I learned that inula was a plant and that the 18th century German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller kept decaying apples in his desk drawer because their aroma spurred his creative juices when he was feeling stuck in his writing. 

Smell is a potent wizard, wrote Helen Keller. Indeed. Like Schiller's apples, the scent of rose congou in the afternoon can draw words to the page.  The shadowy fragrance of incense, all balsam and frankincense, that shakes out of my alb transports me to a darkened church, prostrate before mystery. The sweet sharp smell of an organic chemistry lab summons my father's ghost. What is scent enough for me to stir sentences into words, to conjure up  memory, to assuage the aches of loss? One molecule? Two?

Daughters of the moon

One of the delights of graduation is standing in line, well not the standing-in-line part, but the who-I'm-standing-in-line-with part, sometimes with colleagues I haven't seen since last commencement. I am privileged to work with some pretty amazing people, and this year stood across from a colleague who is an award-winning poet (she won a Guggenheim!). We chatted about the moon, its moods and modes, how it can seem to loom so large in certain places. Her students, she tells me, are in love with the moon. My students, I confess, not so much.

We wondered what it might be like to swap classes, perhaps my students could learn to swoon over the moon as hers do, and perhaps her students might enjoy raiding my language for their own purposes. I would tell them about the daughters of the moon, that carry the history of their mothers with them in their cores, bearing it forward billions of years. A process in which decay does not mean loss and despair, but instead transformation and eventual stability.

My students are peevish about the moon because of a problem we worked about dating the rocks brought back by the Apollo missions. It's a problem that crosses two of the topics we've discussed, chemical kinetics and nuclear chemistry. I'm fond of the problem because it uses material from the very beginning of the course and from the very end and shows both how they are connected and can be used in a very practical way by another field. But making connections can be challenging, and at the end of the semester my students are tired. They are less intrigued and more resigned.

The moon, like the earth and pretty much everything on it, contains radioactive elements. Sometimes these radioactive atoms are versions of stable elements, sometimes all of the versions of an element are radioactive. (Carbon-14 is radioactive while the most common carbon atoms on earth, called carbon-12, are not. On the other hand, there are no stable versions of uranium.) Radioactive elements are like tiny clocks, transforming themselves from one element into another at a particular and fixed rate. Comparing the amounts of a radioactive element at two different times can tell you the time spanned. For example, if an artifact like a wooden carving has 50% of the carbon-14 that it had when it was made, 5500 years have elapsed since its creation. We say carbon-14 has a half-life of 5500 years.

These built-in atomic clocks can run on short timescales, a matter of days or seconds, or on incredibly long timescales. The rule of thumb is that a given radioisotope can measure out time spans up to 10 times the half-life. So carbon-14 can be used to date materials up to about 55,000 years old. Potassium-40, the main reason human beings themselves are radioactive, has a half-life of 1.3 billion years and can time processes going back to the Big Bang.    

Uranium-238 gives birth to daughters such as thorium-234, radium-226 and polonium-218. (I note that some of these daughters were discovered by a daughter and a mother, Marie Curie.) Eventually all her energy is exhausted and U-238 finally plops down onto the island of stability as lead-206. This is not a short process, it takes 45 billion years for (nearly) all of the U-238 to find its way to the stable space of lead-206. But her daughters will hold tight to her history all along the way.  And we can read it in their very identities.  

Principle and foundation redux

“In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance before all created gifts insofar as we have a choice and are not bound by some responsibility.   We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one.  For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a more loving response to our life forever with God.

Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening life in me.” — David A. Fleming, S.J.

As much as the Exercises are structured linearly, each week building on the next, ultimately we find ourselves revisiting them out of order in various moments of our lives. It’s Easter season, but I am floundering in the Third Week, scrambling to find my balance.

Ignatius’ First Principle and Foundation animates his Spiritual Exercise. If you have not acceded to this, you are not ready to immerse yourself in the work of the Exercises. I may have accepted the Principle and Foundation long ago, but I cannot say that I have always managed to live in such perfect indifference. It’s a process, it’s the little things. I still do not suffer wet socks well.

Or, it’s not the little things…A few weeks back I woke up with much of the vision in my left eye gone. Light and darkness, color and movement remained, but the world to my left rippled and wavered in a disconcerting way. Shortly I was sitting in a chair in a darkened room as my ophthalmologist ran through a series of possibilities — none of them particularly comforting. When I could not read the letters on the eye chart with my right eye covered, a line from Fleming’s paraphrase of Ignatius flashed through my head: “We should not fix our desires on health or sickness…” I wondered if I had the courage to keep from fixing my desires on sight.  "Pray for the desire for the desire, then," I hear a long ago spiritual director advise.

Within an hour some of the worst diagnoses were off the table, but more tests and a visit to the sub-specialist had to follow before there would be any clarity, metaphorical or literal. I sought the anointing of the sick. I sank into the Gospel stories that wound closer and closer to the Passion. I assiduously avoided the stories in which the blind regained their sight. My sight certainly had not returned.

The specialist had a diagnosis, for which I am grateful. The prognosis is mixed. This will not progress. But I will not entirely regain what I have lost. On the left, I am like the blind man in Mark’s Gospel (Mk 8:22-25), who when only partially healed sees people walking about like trees. The right remains clear. This is the First Principle and Foundation embodied, the two desires compassing me about.

So I struggle to find that indifference, the desire not for any particular path, except that which leaves me closer to God. I find comfort in Rilke, believing that somehow in the ebb and flow of event, God is cutting deeper channels into my soul.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for 

may for once spring clear
without my contriving. 

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.  -- Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours I, 12

There is always light

 

...our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,

battered and beautiful
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it

— Amanda Gorman, in “The Hill We Climb”

I was riven by Amanda Gorman's fiercely resolute poem for the inauguration, drawn not only by the images of light, but the way she lays out what the light demands of us. Where can we find light, she asks, among all the shade of events recent and distant? Look around, look inside. Strive, not for the perfect union, but "forge a union with purpose." Look not at "what stands between us/but what stands before us".

She demands we see ourselves, see each other, as aflame, always alight, always light. If you wish, she whispers, you can be all flame.

---

I had used pieces of John O'Donohue's "Matin"s at a day of reflection earlier this week, and Gorman's images gave me a very different read of that poem.

"Somewhere, out at the edges, the night

Is turning and the waves of darkness

Begin to brighten the shore of dawn.

The heavy dark falls back to earth

And the freed air goes wild with light,

The heart fills with fresh, bright breath

And thoughts stir to give birth to colour.

...

May I live this day

Compassionate of heart,

Clear in word,

Gracious in awareness,

Courageous in thought,

Generous in love."

John O’Donohue, from "Matins" in To Bless the Space Between Us

 

How to cook

A poem found by stirring together one part reheating instructions, two parts installation instructions and an ad for a local garden.

How to cook

Activation is available by running

        I’m running late
        Dinner in minutes
        How many minutes?

Full of advice
        One quarter teaspoon of saffron harvested at the equinox.
        Stir twice, counterclockwise.
        Drizzle with oil pressed from sun kissed olives, salt, pepper ground fine.

Contents HOT
        Contents under pressure
        Do not heat a closed vessel.
        Turn right, turn right, turn right, turn left.
        Turn around.
        Time.

Spectacular...
        ruin

An older item already exists in this location.
Do you want to replace it?

        No.

Books: Alchemy and poetry

Crash has returned to his own apartment, leaving us with a call board to plan the meals and organize the day and an (almost) up to date inventory of the chest freezer.  Much as I appreciate the latter ledger, I'm wishing I'd kept a ledger of the meals we made over the course of these months.

I have been dipping in and out of Jane Hirshfield's new book of poetry, Ledger, which opens with "Let Them Not Say":

Let them not say: we did not see it. 
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

When I read "Advice to Myself" about a file with that title (and presumably advice) created a decade ago, I felt very seen.

I pulled philosopher Harry Frankfurt's little book On Bullshit off the shelf and am glad to have done so. He references Augustine! The essay attempts to carefully delineate lies and liars from bullshit and bullshit artists. 

"For the bullshitter, however all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

In this particular political moment, I highly commend On Bullshit to you. 

I've been captivated by Ainissa Ramirez's The Alchemy of Us. The opening vignette about traveling timekeepers was fascinating.

Anne Perry's Death in Focus is set in Europe during the rise of Hitler. It's a mystery, it's dark, and it's reminding me that we shouldn't close our eyes or ears. I have seen. I have heard. It's incumbent on my to speak. And to vote!

 

Lost poem

I've lost a poem, not a poem of my own, 

not a poem whose lines have wound themselves 

into my soul — but a poem that could own me.

It was fleeting, in my stream for a moment. 

Keep it, the thought flickered, but I swept past. Now

           My hands are bloody from digging...

If I could pull it from the sky even 

one shattered fragment.

Her words, for I am certain it was her words, embedded in her stream. 

Still. I can remember only one word: Dakota

And that it made the ordinary sacred.

Raids on the ineffable

Cycle B. Mostly Mark. And an empty crib, an empty shell
within a rough fired clay support.

I have 252 "drafts" sitting in my blog queue. Some with just a title, others with one or two lines suggesting what I was thinking of writing about (but didn't at the moment have the time.) Some of them are more than a decade old, the oldest one dates to April 2005, which is roughly when I began regularly posting to this space.

What was "The Litany of the Snacks"? Hint: Crash Kid and Barnacle Boy often lack inspiration in the morning. 1/31/2006.  Or the inchoate post, "prostrate on the floor," from the middle of May 2005? It was the end of the semester, I had a 9 year old and an about to be 7 year old, of course I was prostrate on the floor. On the kitchen floor, apparently: "rule of benedict has prostrate on the floor when change kitchen detail...I'm prostrate just _from_ the kitchen detail"

More recently I abandoned a piece titled "Raids on the ineffable" which contained no useful clues to what I was thinking, including where the title came from. Google was no help, while "raids on the ineffable" is the subtitle of a relatively recent book on the philosophy of mysticism (which I've now added to my wanting-to-read list) I'm nearly certain that wasn't the source. For some reason I think it's a fragment from a poem? There's a similar line in T. S. Eliot's East Coker, "a raid on the inarticulate" that appears to be frequently misquoted as "raids on the ineffable." But I don't think that's it either. Huh.

My current writing project could certainly be framed as a raid on the ineffable, a book of reflections on the readings of Advent, sending me deep into Isaiah and Luke's territory with the hope that I will return with some little bit of something for someone and then wraps completely inadequate words around what surely/hopefully/perhaps is treasure. Eliot is not encouraging on this front.

...And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

Or perhaps he is.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I'm trying.

Overflowing with glory

In the beginning there was God.  And there was chaos and confusion, a universe unshaped and restless, smoldering in the darkness.  The Spirit hovered over the waters, living and breathing above the abyss.  With a word, there was light, or so we read in the book of Genesis.

To hear the astrophysicists tell the tale, when the universe was one millionth of a second old, it was the size of a grapefruit. I could set it on my desk, cup it in my hands. Everything that would be was contained in that unimaginably hot, inconceivably dark, dense sphere. Matter was so tangled in its depths that even light could not wriggle its way out.  A quarter of a million years later, unable to bear the strain, the universe unfurls into the emptiness.  So now we have light.

Sometimes I imagine God cradling this rough-hewn and snarling mass of darkness in his hands, turning the inchoate universe over and around, pondering what will be.  Perhaps he set it on the desk for a while, leaning back in his chair with a creak to get a new perspective.  And when the time came, with a breath and a prayer—Spirit and Word— God’s hands opened and let what was within spill into the emptiness. God from God, Light from Light.

Humankind once held, all unknowing, the entirety of the universe, and more, in our hands. Inconceivable energy pushed into an impossibly small space.  The all-powerful, ever-living God contained in the body of a man, come to unravel the chaos. Perhaps the strain on the universe was again unbearable, for we hung God-become-man on a tree, and watched as he strained for breath and died. All that is, was and will be, pulled from the cross and cradled in his mother’s lap. We wrapped his body in linen, and set it aside. Only to have Light once more spill forth from the emptiness, washing out the darkness.

“Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” said T. S. Eliot. Certainly I cannot. I can contemplate with delight the small ball that was the universe in God’s hand. I will fall on my knees before Christ, who emptied himself out on that cross. But when again and again I cradle in my hands the Body of Christ, take the cup that bears God's very blood, I can’t bear to imagine the immensity of what is contained within.

I say, far too quickly, “Amen.”  I believe.  I assent.  But will I become? In receiving the Eucharistic, St. Augustine observed, “You are saying 'Amen' to what you are.” Can I stop, wait, and contemplate that in receiving this gift, those unimaginable forces have come to reside in me? What have I become?  And if I can bear that, can I imagine my neighbors holding such power in their hands, overflowing with God’s glory?

Perhaps what I really cannot bear is what this means I must do.  For what should come forth from my hands when I open them, if not light from Light.  What should I see in my neighbor, then, if not God? If I truly understood who I had become, would I not pour myself out for the kingdom of God?

Christus Resurrexit! 

Vere Resurrexit! 

Alleluia, Alleluia! 

From an essay in Give Us This Day, April 2017

The light is red

The light is red.
I'm 10th in a line of cars.
I am, perforce, stopped.
I have not blocked the entrance to the side street.
The car behind me is black and expensive.
And honking.
And impatiently pulls around me.
To block the side street and be 10th in a line of cars.
The light, sir, is still red.

Merry Christmas!

Now burn, new born to the world,
Doubled-naturèd name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ in Wreck of the Deutschland

Merry Christmas!

Wheeling about

I went to California to see my dad, who's ill and for the moment in a care facility bridging the gap between hospital care and home. Wheelchairs were part of the landscape this trip.  Dotting the hallways, parked in corners, tucked between the curtains in the room. Occupied and not.  I felt tall in this community, where nearly everyone is in bed, or in a wheelchair, some so bent I could not see their faces.

The first night I left my dad's room, but it was late and various doors had been closed and lights turned out. I got turned around in the dark (this would a theme of this trip!) and couldn't find the exit. I walked past a man who seemed to be dozing in a wheelchair parked in the corner.  Suddenly he called out in a loud voice, something I couldn't figure out.  Had he mistaken me for someone else, or this place for somewhere else?  I turned to be sure he didn't need anything, and he looked up and me and repeated firmly, "¡Para alla!" My jet lagged brain flipped a switch into Spanish.  Directions to the exit. He then gave me careful and correct directions, in Spanish, to the main exit.

I came in on Sunday to find a family in one of the corridor alcoves, the elderly mother in a wheelchair, her daughter leaning forward to say, "Mom, you can choose to be happy." Her mother took a breath and replied, "I am sad." I wanted to cry for them both.

And then there was the elderly man in the wheelchair at the end of the offramp for Highway 101 in Salinas. Struggling to hold up a sign, though the inscription was illegible, I had no trouble reading it. Help me. There was no place to pull over and help. Huge trucks came rumbling off that ramp, heading for the coast.  Would they sideswipe him? Who do you call? I had no idea.

My temporary and relative vantage point left me feeling not powerful, but powerless. Reeling from seeing through so many eyes, Christ dancing in ten thousand places, scarred in limb, yet lovely...

_________
As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

small & fond & local

If you haven't listened to the Jesuitical podcast — do.  Even if you aren't in their demographic (which I'm pretty sure I'm not.)  I found it because they interviewed my boss at the Observatory, Br. Guy Consolmagno, SJ. This week's episode is a conversation on faith with poet Mary Karr, and in it their weekly "Consolations and Desolations" plunges into the depths. 

Karr read "The Voice of God, (from her latest collection taken from a series, "The Unholy Bible").  It's the Book of Wisdom rewrit and begins,

Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you
    could be cured with a hot bath,
says God from the bowels of the subway.

It's the end of the semester here, generally stressful, and this year a bit more than usual. (Or maybe age is catching up with me?)   The days spit me out at the end, damp and knotted and with a to-do list longer than when I began.  Out of the depth, I cry to you, O Lord. Hear me, and if you can't answer me, might you at least answer some of my email? (#modernMiracles)

So here is the answer, take a hot bath, not rumbling under my feet on a city street, but Bluetoothed into my earbuds.  Speaking of modern miracles. God, whispering in my ears. Take a hot bath, it'll cure ninety percent of what ails you.

The voice of God: "small & fond & local"

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You can read the whole poem here.

All creation holds its breath

“All creation holds its breath, listening within me,
because, to hear you, I keep silent. ”

Anita Barrows.
Rilke's Book of Hours. Book of a Monastic Life, I,17