The River on Aisle 4

"The River on Aisle 4"

Every Mother’s Day I stand in the card aisle of some grocery store with a knot rising in my throat. They never sell what I want to buy.

There are googly eyes glued onto Prozac cartoon doggies. There are cabbage roses, drippy lace, pink ribbons, pictures of weight lifters in provocative poses. There are fat little rodents in chintz aprons. There are saccharine silver fonts swirling "MOTHER," like a queen's herald crying, "Make way!” Behind her litter trail iambic verses, bouncy and buxom as Bruegel peasants.

There are declarations of excess:

"To the best mother in the world." (There are twenty or thirty of those, in five different designs.)

"You were always there." “You were always safe.” "You have always been my best friend."

Alongside them, the bruised cards. Apologetic.

"Mom, I know we haven't always seen eye to eye."

I held that one in my hand a long time, chest tightening, imagining all the daughters and sons who stood this year with their heads bent in some grocery aisle reading it.

I felt the gravity of whiskey-loose mothertongues given over to fury. I saw those mothers who hit kids, whose wild-eyed wrath ripped trust like the sleeves off a jacket. I thought of tired mothers who finally gave up the fight and collapsed into the arms of a lover offering five-days-worth of lost beauty. I saw mothers who left their children ravaged, stumbling, faithless, and hungry. I saw mothers who criticized until their children were immobilized.

Some story like this had grown inside that man standing beside me in the grocery. I could feel it. He had a strong back and three-day-whiskers. We were strangers sifting cards, whispering “Excuse me,” when our arms crossed. My sleeve touched his, and I felt the pain radiating off of him. I didn’t know what to say.

I saw silent cards, too, and they were the worst ones of all. Flat and formal acknowledgements, asking for nothing.

"Today is the day we celebrate Motherhood. Happy Mother's Day."

Resignation. The asking was done.

They lay still as an infant left in a cardboard box on a street who has cried out all his dignity. Loss has dried white salt lines down his temples. He stares now empty and numb, his soul dissolving into the high blue, noticing the flight of a starling.

There were cards of jolly surface affections, inside jokes, and gingham lunches. Verses that folded into yesterday's tossed-back laughter, into rooms where simple conversation gathers easily as fireflies on a summer night.

There were vintage photographs of women wearing shirt dresses breaking propriety. The sacred comfort of silliness.

There were religious cards for the beloved women.

I sorted and I sorted, never finding anything that fit all of what I needed to say. There were bits and pieces. But not all of it.

See, my mother is brilliant. She would fight the whole mad world for me.

She isn’t perfect. Nor am I. We have loved and sometimes warred as fiercely as thinking women should.

All my life she has died for me, and lived for me, and made me see that I am stronger than I think.

She has taught me which lines are worth stepping over. She has taught me to make the best of it.

She has made the most of her time.

She has been interested in everything.

She has been a creator of the sort who digs into the trash of the earth and makes it beautiful through faith and force of will.

She despises insincerity.

She innovates.

She reforms.

She loves God in a way that might blind me if I looked straight into it.

She chases lost causes because they are the right causes.

She brings home broken children.

“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! Happy Mother’s Day.” That’s a decent start on the card I need.

Forgive me, I am a poet born into a family of scientists. I consider my condition a birth defect, for it has left me passionate, and difficult, and prone to the usual errors of artists. I feel too much, and think too much, and generally make polite people uncomfortable.

So every year, come Mother’s Day, I stand in the grocery store, cursing.

“Next year I’m making one,” I say. But I never do.

Because the thing is impossible. If you knew how my mother lived, you would know that she could never fit into a space so small. She is too mighty, and too deep, and too beautiful. We are too complex, both of us.

Our story is too big for a card, and we are not the only ones. I know that we are not.

There are thousands of us. There are thousands of mothers, and sons, and daughters who stand in complicated silence. Thousands who cannot find pre-printed words that fit.

For instance, some of my friends are grieving this year.

I know daughters who have lost mothers to heaven and to earth. I know mothers have lost sons to the same.

In my circle of friendships are empty beds, empty wombs, empty hearts, unspoken stories. There are memories too beautiful to catch up in a net, joys that defy reduction, and wounds too sore to buffer by rhyme.

We gather like pilgrims, all come to the river of Aisle 4, looking for something we can never find.

For life is not as it should be. Nor are any of us. Not yet.

But the tide is turning. It is almost turned, in fact.

The whole world groans like a girl in labor. Groans with the flutter of days that no one really understands yet. Groans at every attempt at Hallmark reduction. Groans at every platitude. Groans with every strained rhyme.

And it is fine to admit as much, though the truth is hard to tell. It takes such courage.

Here is why truth is hard. Because Truth is foremost a person born of God and of a woman. He is complex as grief, simple as laughter, deep as grace.

Truth was born through travail, into loneliness, into flight, into lack. He was born into abuse, into misunderstanding. He was born into false accusations. He was born into betrayal and the silent ache of death.

He is too beautiful to be caught by my words.

And Truth was born (of all things) to a mother who was not promised love swept up into neat little rhyming verses, but into that elaborate, transcendental love that often runs like a spear through a heart.

How terribly honest. He is as honest as the story you have lived.

Because of Truth, the truth of this holiday is permitted to run past the trimmed edges of a greeting card. You are given permission to be exactly where you are. You are permitted to be a misfit, to be barren, to be broken, to have lived a love too glorious, or tender, or sad for cabbage roses and lace.

There is room in Jesus for you just as you are.

There is room for you like a bed made up with white sheets and quilts, windows thrown wide on the upper floor of a Kentucky farmhouse.

There is room for you, like a mother’s cool hand on your forehead, testing for fever.

There is room for you desperate, thrown weeping into the soft skirts of a wide lap.

There is room for your longings, fears, dangerous places, and disappointments.

There is room to expand,

room to heal,

room to be silent and think,

room to hold the whole of you.

The Voice

One of the wickedest things humans ever do is to withhold affirmation from one another.

We have been given voices with the power to speak healing and life, but we do not use them.

We dole out the good we might give with an eyedropper.

We walk among the silent desperate, the smiling breaking, the industrious grieving, the bold torn by hidden demons, the glorious crumbling,

yet, because we are in a hurry,
because we feel ugly today,
because we are jealous,
because are afraid of the power we might grant to another,

we choose silence.

We choose to sow death into the earth instead of resurrections.

We notice kindness, but we do not celebrate it.

We brush against wisdom and do not grab its shoulders and shout over it like an old school chum.

We see beauty and turn from its brightness.

We walk through the blood of martyrs, brushing the flies from our noses.

We feel the winds of heaven on our arms, and feel ashamed because our stomachs grow hot.

We stand silent as hell while the music of angels rings round us.

Instead of looking upon the out workings of imago Dei and proclaiming what our spirits know is true and lovely, we shut our eyes and look inward.

We resist delight and awe so that the hater of all that is good might feast in the dark caverns of our mute tongues.

Let us remember instead that our Father lives and works among us.

Let us see His hands and his feet in the beauty of His children. Our brothers. Our sisters.

Let us be the Recognizers.

The Proclaimers.

The Levity.

The speakers of Life.

Let us walk the earth as mothers dancing over a child's drawing,
pressing our fingers into a perfect green Crayon line,
laughing with joy.

Let us go forth into the company of one another
collecting sacred makings of all sorts,
hanging them on our refrigerators,
speaking over what has been wrought,

"I see you.
I see what you have done.
It is good.
It is good."

May 6

It's Monday, and I am awfully tired. While I was riding to school this morning, the rain ran sleep lines down the sides of our windshield. I watched gravity build water rounds, watched them swell, burst, sigh down the glass, felt their breath fall like someone tickling the soft white insides of my arms.

I was supposed to be coaching my teenage son on how to manage wet roads, but the cardiac thump of the wiper blades made my eyelids heavy, and I drifted, somehow five again.

My strong young dad was driving instead of my strong young son. I pressed my head against the passenger window, felt the road gravel jostle, thought nothing, and drank up everything while the thousand May greens slapped round with rain fluttered and flapped.

I was carried. Carried like grace carries.

It has been so long since I have leaned into grace as if it were a thing of this moment. When I very young, I knew how to do that. Most children do. When you are five, people expect you to spill your milk and wear your pants backwards some days. They grant you room to grow into your arms and legs. They hold out their arms while you laugh and jump off the wall, expecting to be caught. There is mutual delight in dependency, because you are small and small is good.

Somewhere along the way, though, you come to know better.

You learn to confess your foolishness, to feel shame, to strategize against the next time. You shake your drowsy self awake, force focus on dangers, anticipate, prevent.

Pastors of fury rise behind pulpits calling the fallen to walk forward for grave deeds done. Sinners, there is time today to turn from Friday's whiskey, from Saturday's revelries, to be made Sunday new for Monday is the first day of the rest of your life.

And yet, it is Monday, and I am awfully tired.

I just now swallowed the cold bottom dregs of my second coffee, and still I haven't found the strength to be much yet from it. Gravity builds inside me, it seems, with each passing year.

The silence stands cold inside my chest, like an old stone chapel returning to earth. Trees are grown round it. The roof has rotted, collapsed inside its own walls. Maple leaves four decades deep, fallen from the sunheights, now line the floor like pages torn from a hymnal.

The windows have lost their glass. The homilies of the scarlet tanager, the towhee, the warbler, the crack of the woodpecker pass freely as communion through the air of the place. The lemon prick of pine covers decay like tomb spices. Like the glory tang of present grace. Like running, and jumping, and being caught. Like resurrection.

No. 2

The Lord is my shepherd.

I am made calm
by the strong turn of his fingers
round the staff that collects me
into His company.

For I am the nervous sort,
bothered and bolting.
His hands have grown thick and brown
from our long, shared days of summer sun.

This morning I nudged the tip of my nose
against his wrist three times,
leaned the weight of my body against His leg,
hoping that that He might lower His forehead
to press it against mine
and whisper anything at all.
His voice is beautiful.

I have heard it rise, lung-full and light
as a father laughing over his first son born.
I have heard him
as a man singing, walking in full stride
over Miller's Ridge.

His hands are warm.
The lines of their wear
are inscribed with secret things,
though I have read my name
in their valleys.

There was frost on the pasture in that first hour
the maiden sun strained to climb against the gravity
of Galileo's earth.
She shook her hair fire to dry
upon the glass cathedral
spread for her child glory.

My feet were cold from walking in the wet night grass,
but the Lord is my Shepherd.
The Lord is my Shepherd,
I shall not want forever.

I pushed my nose against His hand
until He turned it open against the sky
so that I might breathe into it,
feel the heat rising from it,
and find that place
where I am sealed.

No. 1

The Lord is my shepherd,
And yet, I want.

He maketh me to lie down
in long, sad years of breaking.

He leadeth me beside
hostile waters
rolling with serpents,
Bible salesmen,
charlatans,
napoleons,
Judas, and the evangelists of consumption.

I bleed in that river,
and every hateful hungry thing
grows wild with want.

Yea, I walk through the valley
of a silence that I can never seem to unwind.
Instead, I brew the tea for supper,
taking care not to let the grinds
break through.

Thy rod and Thy staff
are fearsome to me,
for this morning I lifted
my fists to the heavens and shouted,
“My God! My God,
Why have you forsaken me
to panic
to fury
to loneliness
to injustice
to betrayals
to longings
to failures?”

Then I stood in a field,
weeping over a fattened calf
slain on behalf of my accusers.

An accusation against the gods
is its own answer.

The hem of holiness flutters,
caught a half-second in the late April honeywind.

Has He not made the whole loud world
shouting every moment of its turning?
“Glory! Glory! Glory!”
from the tree lights,
“Glory! Glory! Glory!”
from the thousand-throated skies,
“Glory! Glory! Glory!”
even the rocks cry out with all creation,
until the brightness of it rips the sky in half
and throws me face to earth
in a blast

that smooths my fibers
so that I listen,
relinquishing
while my lungs pump.

Thou art with me.

Easter

When I was a little girl, Easter morning meant candy, pinchy buckle shoes, and scratchy dresses that I needed to keep from getting dirty. Sitting on a long wooden pew, I would lay my head against the soft of my mom's arm. I would be groggy from pre-dawn sugar, and the preacher's voice would rise and drone while sunlight fractured and fell through colored glass windows like confetti. Those years were raspberry pink, and butter yellow, and robin's egg blue. I listened while the choir sang, "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," knowing the story, thinking Christ's warm brown eyes looked kind in that painting hanging above the baptismal.

When I was sixteen, Easter morning meant candy I didn't need to eat, because I was forty pounds too heavy, and such baggage puts at least fifty miles between a teenage girl and the rest of her world. I looked bad in my dress, so I teased out my hair and packed on more eye makeup, hoping to paint my way into hiding. The church was full of hypocrites. I had seen it. There were weak men, and hateful women, people who used, and people who abused. I sat next to that skinny red haired girl who smoked in the back lot, and kept my stare flat, reminding my heart not to trust too much. I was too smart for all of this. The choir sang, "Low in the Grave He Lay," and so did I, though I didn't believe in resurrections.

When I was twenty-five, Easter morning meant a tiny basket with a new son. (We wouldn't give him candy like those busy, terrible, working mothers! He would be a bookish child, delighted with red pears and sweet potatoes.) I had come to peace with God and a needy world. I was willing to sacrifice comfort to help Christ save the hungry and hurting. I had studied theology enough to have answers ready, and strategies, and time. I sat in the church amid the glory (and pomp), gentle but knowing better how to do things. And the choir sang, "He Lives!" And He did live, though I saw him walking on the road to Gethsemane, and I knew Him not.

I am forty-one this year. I went to the grocery late last night and bought peanut butter eggs, and jelly beans, and marshmallow animals, and wild sugar cereal with cartoons on the boxes, and Pop Tarts, and all manner of terrible things in a fit of reckless abandon. I packed all of these foreign extravagances into bright baskets, knowing my youngest son would creep down the stairs with the dawn, morning eyes sticky and blinking, and stand before the madness gasping. Because Mom never buys this stuff. She doesn't, but today she does, because Easter is not like the other days. It is a day when the regular rules do not apply... or moreover... a day when all the rules were filled up, and overrun, with something altogether mysterious and new.

And I will sit in church filling up with a beautiful sort of desperation, for the old things are slowly fading: dresses, resentment, cynicism, knowing better, saving the world by the strength of my arms.

I will sit younger than I have been before, smaller and simpler. Wanting more and wanting less. Broken and breaking.

We will sing, "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," and those words will make me ache. For He is so close and so far all at once, and the whole story matters more to me than it ever has.

Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Alleluia.

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