Under The Earth

I don’t want you to be you
I don’t want to admit that you did
What you did
God, I wish I hadn’t found out
You wanted to keep it from me
But you didn’t hide it so well
Your secret burrowed its way out
Of the sheets and came to me
Maybe shame has a mind of its own
Maybe it knew
Better than you
That you needed to tell me

EASTER MONDAY

I go to Mass this morning, Easter Monday, to figure out where we’re going. The journey through Easter is not only brighter than Lent. It is longer, by ten days. Going through Lent is like traveling in the belly of a whale. Easter is a bright sea strewn with white petals. But it’s one I haven’t; navigated, or haven’t paid enough attention to before. What is the use of the fasting and the penitence of the last forty days if I don’t know how to live in Easter? That was what all the fasting was for.

On Holy Saturday at the vigil that makes Easter, we all stood in the church and as the priest sang in Latin, “Light of Christ,” and we sang back, “Thanks be to God,” from the newly lit candle at the altar all the little tapers we held in that night blackened church were lit until we stood there, a hopeful galaxy of wavering points of light. What were we all hoping for? Why were we all excited? Because it would all be well? Because despite everything it would be alright. Because we had begun to see and to believe, without being able to go into the details of it, only touching bits and pieces of it, resurrection.

I know I cannot go back to the old way, but what exactly the new way is and the new rules I am not quite sure. Some things needed to be figured out alone, but we the journey doesn’t have to be made alone. We came through the pit of the year together, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and before that Ash Wednesday. We were together enough to remember what we so quickly forget, that we do belong to each other and travel with each other. Though, yes, some may travel better, farther, with more grace than others, we do so together.

All through Lent we said, on our knees, the confession of sin for over forty days, sometimes twice a day. Now there is no confessing, there is no penitence, there is learning joy again and the new song is “Christ Our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast.” It continues, “Not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

So I come to learn this new bread because it seems that until now I was fueled on jealous, spite, the inability to see past my nose or believe in possibilities, rash judgments, attributing to everyone around me the worst motives for their deeps. Hopeless, the desire to give up all too quickly. And now I get up these days, sort of like a baby. Having consumed all of this pseudo-food I must get up, take this new bread, and to learn how to eat.

CHANGING THE MONEY

When he came into this temple
With palm branches withered
From the heat of one day
All he did was stand there
With the heat of his love
And these ice walls couldn’t endure it
Salt on my face
The water from the rock
Is the only cure
For the stone in me
A heart of flesh
And face in my hands
Born again

PALM SUNDAY

And now
After the scourging
After the pillar and the slap on the face
And how everyone tried to capitalize on
My devotion
And I tried to make it fit in
There is the procession of palms
We’re all holding fronds
And none of us is dancing.
Catholics want to sing
They want to jubilate
But who knows how?
Here in the Midwest
Where the daffodils push up through the ice
What counts, what’s best is to be nice
In our khakis and Oxford blue shirts
But I want to be intoxicated
God when you rode an ass into the church
When you drove out the changers and the ushers
And the priests
And everyone carrying on
Trying to be something
Carrying on their backs carcasses
And corpses
And corpses
Of names
And titles
And dignities
Lord,
What I did was take off my shoes
And take of my tie
All dignity flies
In the face of something more
That after searching
Scourging
Reading
Fasting
Resisting
I just want to be crazy
I just want to be mad
I just want to wander and sit on the floor of your house
Drunk with jesus
And everyone who sees us
Will think we’re mad
And that could be the end
“There is a tree” they sing
“There is a tree”
on a green hill…
and if this ecstasy kills
then is there room on your cross for me?

When I do rise above myself and do something good, especially something surprisingly good, I think, "Why can't I be like that all the time." Or I think, "That's not me." But both of those thinkings are wrong. Of course that goodness is me. I don't leave myself. I become me. We have been told that when Lent rolls around we must return to God and we have been told that our wills and God's will collide. That we must accept God's will. But this only proves how skewed things have been.

The truth is that the me that I am afraid to be, that feels so terrible good when I am him feels good because he is home, because he fits. And the sub-me, the half blind, grasping, miserable me, suspicious and the intrument of all of his tools of destruction is so miserable because he's a temporary and sad shack. So during Lent it is not God's heart I am traveling to, but my own. It is a house bright with lights and on walking through the door I am startled to laughing seeing that God has been waiting there all along.

After forty days hid in the cherry thicket with you
We come like a medieval procession, followed
By lambs and nuns and joseph and candles
Up the steps and through the incense
This is the house
This is the house
Who may go up to the house of the lord?
I in my veils
And you veiled in me
And you—like every child
Are a new thing who—such a short time ago in
My short life did not exist
And—yes—just like any child—
You are eternal.
Blinking you tell me
You have always been,
You are everything
You are God of God
And every baby knows that
That man
That arbitrary old man who doesn’t know you
Doesn’t know you like I know you
Like the only way that matters to know you
Like all the old men and women and hopefuls who will
Come and call you this and that and everything but the
Important thing
Which is my baby
That old man is lifting you up and singing words over you
Departing in peace, departing in peace
And lintels are lifting their heads
Growing higher ancient doors
For the king of glory
But I don’t need this glory
Or these words like a guillotine
The child will not live
The child has cancer
The child is not like other children
This child will not be loved
This child will not walk
This child cannot talk
This child’s skin will never heal
Any mother knows
Any body who has ever mothered a body knows
When she sits, when he stands over the thing he loves
And hears the sentence like a gun shot
Sees the body of the baby in the shoebox coffin
The ravaged child, the little horror of the corpse in the wood
All the candles mock them
The psalm slaps them
The old man chants on heedless
And heart freezing like a stone
This is your presentation

Halfway into Lent it occurs to me that somewhere along the way I rationalized so much, reinvented such a great deal, that I has ceased to believe. I didn’t mean to stop believing, I just learned a lot, added a lot, got used to a lot, separated myself from a lot. I remembered grudges as well and now I have to admit I also held back a lot, afraid to be taken in.

Prayer is presence I think. I mean presenting yourself to whatever. The whatever is God regardless if you want to admit it or not, no matter how many things you slap on it. And, after a time, the Whatever is also the story you grew up in, the story you may have walked away from, the story you’ve been walking away from gradually without knowing it. You give it a chance again, afraid, disappointed, you dare to engage it. Well, this is what I’ve done.

Time is like a Mobius strip and faith exists in time. Getting dressed this morning for Mass, after morning prayer I take the comb through my hair and in a moment I am taken back to being six years old at Saint Nicholas, watching the priests and the altar boys come up the aisle. One thing links to another. All the moments of what could be called belief, but I think are better called encounter, encounter with the terrible wonder of a first Communion, of the first time I heard the text for today, the story of Lazarus. The wonder of doing one good thing, touch someone and them looking into your eyes and you—both of you seeing yourselves in the other. The discovery of love—messy love--on the edge of everything that works well and fits together. They are all linked and as I get dressed comes the proposition: why not believe?

Not believe what comes out of the book or every little thing the pastor, the priest and the Vatican tell you. Not letting go of everything that means anything, not forsaking my penchant for gay rights, Women’s rights and Lurianic Kabbalah, not letting go of everything I’ve learned. But letting go of the resentment, of the fear, that’s believing.

Why not believe?

WHITE LIFE

On that Sunday, after I touched you and smiled at you or on you and I smiled back at you, you said, “My name is Michael,” and I said my name and you said, “Thank you for your kindness.”

And there have been many times when people have said something like that and I’ve thought… who are you talking to? If you knew me you would never say that? I am not kind. And then there have been times when I’ve thought, this goodness of mine as an anomaly. It can’t happen all the time. It doesn’t happen all time. But that’s not true. If I step back I realize that I have an amazing capacity for seeing the right thing to do and doing it. But I also have an enormous capacity for cruelty, an appetite for nastiness and an addiction to all things petty.

Tonight, I think on these things. I have been all too quick to forgive myself. But what I call sarcasm is often scathing judgment, and what I call pet peeves are just dressed up pettiness. All through Lent prophets speak to the city of Jerusalem of repentance, they speak in grave terms as if repentance is the only alternative to destruction and when I look at history I realize this was true. Everytime the prophets rose up there was an army coming to ruin Judah and burn Jerusalem to the ground.

And if I look at my life it is much the same. The prophets are not talking hyberbole. Those things I look at carefully and repent of for the first time, those deeds that I have not forgiven so much as overlooked in myself, the smoldering judgment I have called—falsely—discernment, will destroy me and burn me down as sure as the Babylonians razed Jerusalem.

Things happen if we let them. There is so much good that wants to happen, that sits on our shoulders waiting for us to do it if we just… well, do it. This Lent has been a time of minor miracles. There is the slip of paper from the other day when I took my laptop to Saint Mary’s College and didn’t know how to get onto the Internet. A girl there showed me and then she scribbled down her passwords so that whenever I come to the school I can use their wireless network. She just did it, with a shrug and a smile.

There was Crystal, my new favorite barber at the Vogue. I sat down in the chair and said, “What’s that music they’re playing?” It was Saint Patrick’s Day and they had some faux Irish music piped in.

“It’s bullshit,” she said. “That’s what it is,” she told me when I started laughing. “I don’t know what else to call it.” I wanted to get a hair wash before I left, but was limited for time. I told her that and she said, “I tell you what? I’m going to wash it once, but I’m going to wash the SHIT out of it, okay?”

At Mass, on Sunday, the fellow next to me doesn’t take Communion. When I come back, and the choir is in the loft, chanting the motet while the servers in their white robes come out with more chalices and the crystal ewers of wine for the endless line of congregants, he moves over for me. I hear him sniffling, like his nose is stuffed. Or like he is overcome by some terrible emotion. And then I put my arm around him quickly, and he looks up and I smile and he smiles back, cheered momentarily and lifted from whatever private hell he was going through, may be going through again. And so in the end he is in the Communion, he is not excluded from this grace where God comes down into humanity and fills our moments with wonder by filling them with himself, with his simple power. And that is incarnation.