Elijah finding through fighting, no closer to faith than before, stripping to essence, defenseless: Where is our God? Why is our soul cast down, disquieted in us? Why have you forgotten us? Why do we mourn? . . . Forty days living off angel-meals, lately delivered, gently called out once again . . .
"Jesus always and only for us Beginning Point with 'God,' Who goes by Other Faces, Other Names, Other Faiths, Other Works, recalling, retooling, relocating us: Family with All Others, Lovers of Diversity, respecting Every Identity,
Lovers of Complexity, respecting Every Integrity." (Progressive Christian Church, adapted) No longer "Shock and Awe" to us, nor even Earthquake, Wind, Fire; but Sounds of Sheer Silence! Very Absence of Right Answers! Only Questions, to ask and be asked, unknown, unacknowledged . . .
Second Wind, Second Fire, Second Calling . . . all things in beginning, entering history again and again: unlikely old nomads, Abraham, Sarah; despised tax collectors, "government workers," -- and sinners! Every call chance to respond as if never before, no one's example to follow, no introductions, instructions, curricula, or credentials, only trial, only error -- How else to be first of our faith? Everything bet on the promise, one dragging foot after another, Jesus our constant contemporary, "with temporariness," caught onto today, changed out of tomorrow, taken never for granted, contained or constrained, losing life in us, for us, chronically crossed up by risk, shamelessness of his company kept.
Imagining anyone waiting a lifetime for promise to find us! What is worth waiting our lifetimes for? Or losing lifetime's worth of waiting? "Juneteenth" of waiting for Word of Release! "No more dying there" -- in slavery, in passage, in resistance to capture at all! 19 June 1865, three years after, Emancipation reaching - even to Texas!
Grand Order Number Three: The people of Texas are informed . . . all slaves are free! Absolute equality, personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves! Freedmen advised to remain at their homes and work for wages . . . will not be supported in idleness!
Lifetimes of bonded labor entitling to no indentures of idleness? . . .
From holiness to holy mess, theories of life turn to practice, one long improvisation -- Jazzable? Paradoxical? Unexpectable? Inexplicable? Peaceable coexistences, oppositional elements? Tentative creative tensions, breaking forth, extravagant contradictions! Impossibility, lendings to endings, thriving on patient respect -- resilience, compassion, solidarity, care -- for cacophonous moods, moments of life-full bliss -- playing out conflicts of impulse within us, among us -- life's musics mending life's movements, at improvised intersections, insistent with irresolutions: yet Ishmael's, Isaac's joint custody of disposable patriarch.
We wake up inside Christ's body, where all our body, all over, ever most hidden part of it, is realized as joy in Him, and he makes us, utterly, real, and everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in Him transformed and recognized as whole, as lovely, and radiant in his Light, we awaken as the Beloved in every last part of our body. (Symeon)
"Same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life comes from . . . You can survive on your own. You can grow stronger on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own." (Frederick Buechner)
Most Cosmic of Learning Curves, slowly bending, again, toward mothers, toward Mother and Children Earth! No longer, my children, your children, their children, our children, only "one children" now, all of us, of us all. Sacrificing another so maleish, so muleish: Who is a woman, especially a mother, to inform or to settle such things?
Unstrapping, untethering outworn assumptions, even Goliath Somebody's Child, befriending of enemies too late if they're dead, killing so unimaginative, convenient, conventional, relentless lead stories on each Nightly News! Have we given up on ourselves? Have guns won? Doing one thing they know how to do? No bullet stray, no damage collateral, so many children so choiceless, David at least deviating from sword and spear to sling and stone, next step from killing to taming giants appearing, through youngest, lowest eye-levels, everywhere!
"What kind of logic lurks in your promise that the sky full of stars is like the number of our descendants and then demands the son's life who makes the promise possible? Can I trust a breaker of promises? What kind of game is this? . . . You --father God-- have yet to learn what it is like to be a mother . . ." (Madeleine L'Engle)
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