God’s Feet

I just finished  a book called All of our Worldly Goods.  It takes place in France in the years between 1914 to about 1945.

Pierre, is at Church on Good Friday.  His son is at the Front and he is bringing his fears to Church.  He describes his transformation from just a man with earthly worries: his fears and his anguish, into the purest flame “burning at the foot of (my) Creator.”

Don’t laugh at how high handed that sounds.  The whole passage arrested me because of the beauty of his transformation from regular guy, husband, father, business man to being “face to face with Christ, and (having) God listen to him”.

I was struck by the beauty of this moment and wish I could have it for myself.  I am known.  I am loved.  (You know that old saw about worries shared are worries halved).

It is a reckoning, if not a relief to be stripped down of our outward trappings, our conceits and failures and stand before, if not God, than ourselves.  Ah…there I am.  Just me.  Just little old me, naked and alone.  Just me.  Laying my fears, my fears for my children, my husband, my life, my little dog, my nation—just laying all those things aside.  I have no control.  I cannot fix everything.  Some things I can tinker with but, really not to any lasting effect.

I lay myself down knowing that all the love in the world, the research, the thought, the intention will be no cure for the world’s woes.

We pray because that is all we can do.  Send out our hopes and fears and then carry on.  Don’t lose faith.  Mitigate your losses, my friends.  Try to do no harm.  Try to love no matter what.  Try… and lay the rest at God’s feet.  Better hers/his, than mine.

And here, just because I can is a god’s big toe:

Three lovely dogs leading their cattle to safety in a flood.  I have decided that I need a leader to show me the way, a shepherd.  Christians might say Christ, Muslims, an imam, Hindus, a great teacher, Jews, the rebbe.

I am just so damn stubborn though.  I have never been susceptible to guidance from a religious leader.  I know I’m foolish.  I know there are many wiser people than I to whom I could go to for guidance.

How do you find them?  Do you interview them?  So far it seems my only recourse has been my close friendships where we talk and talk our way through life seeking enlightenment and sometimes finding it.

A relationship of equals, searching.  Tell me, do you feel this?

Oh to be a cow following a cowdog.

Love Always

I’m kind of sad today.  I’m looking through a box of pictures that have been stored in my brother’s basement since my parents died.  The family joke was that my mother never met a picture she wouldn’t frame and this box of memorabilia bears this out.

Amidst the dreck I found many gems.  I found thank you notes from Emily and Tessa thanking the grandparents for Christmas gifts from thirty years ago.  Tessa’s note is oddly formal.  She went through a formal phase when she was about 10.

There are many pictures of my sister Betsy that make me want to sob, and pictures of my young mother and father on their honeymoon at Seaside.  A lovely rather poignant image of my grandpa sits beside me now on the desk—he is in a suit holding a bowler hat and looks swell.

I love pictures but these family pictures framed by my mom, cherished by her; pictures going back generation—grandparents, great grandparents, birth certificates, marriage licenses remind me that individual lives are subsumed by generations;  the who-ha begat so and so, and so and so begat someone else and on and on.  We can follow the genes down the years in someone’s eyes or coloring or twitches.  My mom played a game with each new baby added to the flock—“ooh, she has Kathy’s eyes, or, my that nose comes from your grandpa or those eyebrows remind me of Uncle Blackie.”

The only thing that stays constant is love.  Love binds the generations.  My mother took on the job of keeping the lamp burning.  This is not just hoarding, although she had some tendencies in that direction.  This was cherishing, safeguarding.  I do not believe I’m up to the task.  I don’t  know what she felt about this task—did she welcome it or was it an onerous task which she passed on to her children?

I do not want to store them. I have enough memories of my own, and yet I cannot bear to part with this history she so assiduously kept.  Everyone’s name, who they married, names of their children and their children’s children.  Aunt Beth was no slouch either tracing down the generations. For me it is too big a responsibility.  Yet I cannot bear to throw them away.

Pictures are how we remember our lives and other lives too.  They take us on an imaginative journey out of time with people we will never know but whose DNA lives in us.  It’s pure magic.

 

Utopia

Dream last night.  I came into a town with my friend Sue.  It was dark—dark brick, empty streets.  We came to a hill where we could look over an expanse of land and that too was dark—dark stone, dark trees.  We entered a doorway into a subterranean set of rooms.  The people were here.

We sat down with a few folks.  One young man was very engaging.  He told us that this was an intentional community.  Each person had their job, their passion, which they were allowed to pursue.  Everyone was fed and clothed and housed.  Nothing fancy, just adequate.

I later found myself at a huge loom where I was weaving a swath of light fabric that unspooled below me as I worked.  I finished the piece I was working on and as I examined my work I noticed a not insignificant flaw.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to fix it without the flaw being apparent.  Someone told me that was okay.

When I woke up, I thought UTOPIA.

“In 1516 Sir Thomas More wrote the first ‘Utopia‘. He coined the word ‘utopia‘ from the Greek ou-topos meaning ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’. But this was a pun – the almost identical Greek word eu-topos means a good place. So at the very heart of the word is a vital question: can a perfect world ever be realised?”

A good world can never exist and a perfectly spun swath can never be realized.  Flaws, they’re what makes us human.  Sigh.

 

Where’d she go?