Stuff Over on the Right Side

I've added a few badges to the right-side navigation. The High Calling Blogs badge (top right, above my photo and profile) has been there for some time. I've been following the posts there for some time, and then they posted one of my poems, and then their parent organization published one of my articles, and then they picked up a couple of my own posts from this blog, and now I'm an officially designated writer for them, and, well, you get the picture. It's a cool site, and a great group of writers and editors to be connected to (yes, I ended that sentence with a preposition) (except now I didn't).

If you scroll down a ways, down below "Search This Blog," you'll find I've added five badges:

• Seedlings in Stone, the blog site for L.L. Barkat, author of Stone Crossings and the soon-to-be-published collection of poems called InsideOut. I first "met" L.L. when I read Stone Crossings as I lay in a hospital bed with some broken ribs and partially collapsed lung back in July. Four months later, we're partners in crime with Eric Swalberg in publishing TweetSpeak Poetry, an online journal for Twitter poems (and other things).
• Holy Experience, the blog site for Ann Voskamp, a site I visit every day for the thoughts, the words, the photos and the music. Ann's blog is a chronicle of life on a family farm in Canada, and it's one of the most beautiful places I've found on the web/internet/blogosphere/Twitterdom.
• Billy Coffey, the web site (and link to his blog) for the writer of the same name. He writes one of the best blogs out there, because he's one of the best writers out there. And his novel Snow Day is set to be published in the fall of 2010.
• Hey look, a chicken!, the blog site for Kathy Richards, aka @katdish. Kathy's was one of the most original thinkers I've run across, and she'll take you for wild rides and end up in thoughtful, profound places. (She's also famous for her exuberant rants, and they are a marvel to behold.)
• Soccer for St. Louis. This is a group attempting to promote St. Louis for the World Cup games. No, I am not a major soccer fan; my youngest son is the soccer fan. You do strange things for your children sometimes.

I've added these badges (well, except for the soccer one) as a thank you in this season of thanksgiving to five writers and one organization who've brought some joy, and fine writing, to my life. I'll be adding a few more soon. (And if Shrinking The Camel had a badge, I'd add his, too.)

Update: Just added the badge for L.L.Barkat's InsideOut, her collection of poems to be published soon. Click through to the book's home page.

David, Hillside

On my rock,
My rock on the
Hill,
I sit to watch
And tend
My father’s flock.

It’s lonely, this place.
Watching is
What I do, mostly,
Except to play
My stones and sling
Against the wayward wolf.
When I talk to the flock,
They baa-laugh
And move away from
The crazy boy.

On my rock,
I dream my Lord,
My Lord most
High,
Who drew me from
My father’s seed,
Knit me in
My mother’s womb,
Breathed spirit
Into my soul.

I feel his breath
In the wind,
His tears of joy
In the rain,
His heart in the warming
Of the summer sun.
He plays with me,
Sings to me,
Coaxes me from
My shyness
To talk with him,
A conversation of
Tender moments.
I hear his laughter
In the birds
Above me.

Then, his voice.
Even as he
Frolics with me,
His voice.

The time is coming,
My beloved.
I teach you, now,
So you will be, then.

He calls me beloved,
As he holds me
Like a lamb
In the palm of
His hand, kissing
My brow
With drops of
Morning mist,
Gently,
Like a lover.

(This week, for the Random Act of Poetry over at the High Calling Blogs, the subject is "Love in Character," a love poem written in character -- real or fictional. If you'd like your love poem in character included, you can leave a comment here at Seedlings in Stone.)

Words That Pierce and Shatter

Bonnie Gray over at faithbarista posted Friday about the importance of “whitespace” in our lives, the times when we can break the frenzied patterns of day-to-day living and take a walk, sit calmly, or perhaps wander around aimlessly. These times are critical, she points out (based on scientific studies, not to mention common sense), for things like creativity. And relieving stress. And mental health.

For the last two months, I’ve been doing something I never thought I would find myself doing – writing poetry. It’s been a kind of therapy: lots of organizational changes at work, trying to help a lot of people deal with the changes, trying to deal with them myself. I think I turned to poetry as a new way to find some whitespace in my life. And I’ve met some neat people as a result – people I’ve never met in person but whom I consider to be friends – the people I’ve met via blogs, Twitter and Facebook.

A couple of weeks ago, one of those friends, L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone, asked for help from several of us with a book giveaway project. The book was The Real Mary by Scot McKnight, and it moves beyond all of the Catholic vs. Protestant controversies to look at who Mary really was.

I was pleased to be asked to help, and came up with the idea of writing three poems about Mary to be published on this blog over the week of the giveaway – one on Friday, one on Monday and one on Thursday. In the flush of theological and marketing enthusiasm, I collectively called the Mary poems a “triptych.” In the middle of working on those poems, I was also developing a poem about “The Real _____,” a subject of our choice, for the Random Act of Poetry section of the High Calling Blogs, and a blog post on obedience, part of Peter Pollock’s “one-word challenge blog carnival” at Rediscovering the Church.

I wrote the four poems and the post on obedience in this order: (1) Mary poem #1, “May It Be to Me;” (2) Mary poem #2, “He Had to Be;” (3) “The Real Poet;” (4) Mary poem #3, “Your Son, Now;” and then (5) the blog post on Obedience. Looking at them collectively, I can see they are all pieces of a whole.

Something happened to me in this process, something I didn’t expect. It’s called pain. And something else I can't explain yet.

After writing the first two poems on Mary, I grew quiet and pensive. Something was bubbling around, and I didn’t quite understand what it was. I sweated out (figuratively) “The Real Poet;” when my wife read it later after it was posted, she came to me and said, “No one will know the pain that’s behind that poem,” proof (as if you need any) that your spouse always knows what’s behind the camouflage.

My response was a nod. By that time, I had written “Your Son, Now” and the obedience post, and the pain was no longer hidden. As I worked “Your Son, Now” over and over, I reached a point where I almost couldn’t write. The enormity of Mary’s sacrifice as a mother, and the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus, overwhelmed me. It wasn’t that I was unfamiliar with either. But something was happening in the writing of it that suddenly made it immediate, almost urgent, as if I was there. As if I was helping pound the nails. I broke down at one point, but still kept writing.

Afterward, via email, I asked my friend L.L. Barkat about what had happened, and she said that sometimes a poet can be pierced by his or her own words. I felt pierced, all right; I also felt shattered. The comments left about the poem told me that a few people, at least, had a glimpse of what had happened.

The post on obedience was written in the aftermath of all that and in a way is a kind of quiet distillation of the four poems into prose. Since then, I’ve written some prose posts for the blog and edited the Tweet-Party poem now posted at TweetSpeakPoetry.com. There’s also a poem I wrote before all of this that I haven’t yet posted.

But I haven’t written any more poems since the Mary Triptych. I’m not sure why. What started out as a way to help a friend became something else, taking on a meaning and result that I’m still wrestling with. I think there are more poems coming, but right now, I’m in that “whitespace” Bonnie Gray talked about in her blog post.

It’s a good place to be.

Mary Triptych (Part 3): Your Son, Now

The book giveaway contest concludes tonight at Seedlings in Stone at 6 p.m. Eastern time. A winner will be picked at random to receive a copy of Scot McKnight’s The Real Mary and have the opportunity to write a guest post for BeliefNet. So you still have time to leave a comment and be automatically in the drawing.

Here’s the third of the three “Triptych poems” I’ve written about Mary, the mother of Jesus. In a few days, I’ll post some thoughts about them. The first two, "May It Be to Me" and "He Had to Be," seem to have struck a responsive chord; they’ve also taken me to a place I never expected to go – the place of writing as pain.

Your Son, Now

In upper room,
I sit with disciples, praying
With Simon Rock and
Brother Andrew, James,
Doubter, Publican
And Beloved.

Each day I walk
To this place with Beloved.
My son, now;
His mother, now.
Since that day when he said.

That day I saw
The other,
Brow pierced by thorns,
Back lashed, body bruised
From Roman beatings.
That day, the life
Washed from his eyes,
The eyes looking at me
As he suckled,
The hands reaching for me,
The arms clasping my legs.
The life now washing away.

On that hill, I thought
Of Cana, oddly.
Not my time,
He said to me, Mother,
Not my time.
But changed the water anyway.
And he danced,
His robe flowing
Like a wind song;
Joy upon his face.
But that day, it was his time.
No water, they laughed. No wine.
Only gall.

I sit and pray in upper room
With disciples.
My Joseph taught him
To saw, to cut, to
Plane, to shape
Wood into usefulness
And sometimes beauty.
My Joseph guided, his
Hand on Jeshua’s hand.
Yeshua knew what
My Joseph had done.
He stood next to me
When we buried my Joseph,
He wept tears of love
For the man who loved us both.
But on that day,
That day of heavens torn
Like the temple curtain,
That day
We buried Yeshua.
I knew the desolate solitude
Of seeing him born and
Seeing him die.
The only one.

Later I saw him
Who did not look like him,
But the for the eyes, living now
With a different life,
A life I could barely glimpse
And not imagine.
I rushed to hold him but
He pointed to Beloved.
Your son, now;
His mother, now.

My son is not my son, now.
My son is my savior,
Now.

The Crucifixion Triptych, Rogier Van Der Weiden, ca. 1440, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Mary Triptych (Part 2): He Had to Be

The book giveaway contest continues over at Seedlings in Stone until Thursday at 6 p.m. Eastern time. A winner will be picked at random to receive a copy of Scot McKnight’s The Real Mary and have the opportunity to write a guest post for BeliefNet. Just leave a comment here and you’re automatically in the drawing.

Here’s the second of the three “Triptych poems” I’ve written by Mary. The third will be posted on Thursday.

He Had to Be

Passover feast
In the city of peace.
Somber time,
Tinged with joy,
To celebrate salvation,
Deliverance
From the angel of death
In Goshen, in all Egypt.
My Joseph paid the price,
Bought the lamb,
Brought the lamb
To the priests.

Home, to Galilee,
Traveling the day.
I look for the child.
With you, Martha?
Hannah, with you?
With you? With you?
My heart, frozen.
We go back,
My Joseph and I,
Back to the city of peace,
The now feast-less city.

Three days we
Seek, seek
Everywhere.
No child; vanished.
A tiny whisper, then;
A small rumor,
A torrent of reports,
An explosion of wonder
At the child
In the courts of the priests.
Sitting with teachers,
Listening to rabbis,
Questioning priests,
Amazing with his answers,
His truth before truths.
My Joseph and I knew.
Jeshua.
I had to be
In my father’s house,
He said to us I had to be.

A bearded man, he
Amazed crowds
With words, miracles, healings
Of body and soul.
We heard the whispers,
The muted voices,
The low roar,
The rising anger against him.
We came to warn,
To stop,
His brothers and I.
Like everyone else
We wanted to touch and be healed.
And protect.

You are my mother
And brothers, he said
To others.
In his dark eyes,
The eyes of my child,
I saw the depth
Of the infinity
Of the truth he spoke.
And my son was
Not my son.

Triptych with Virgin and Child, Anonymous, Late 17th century, Ethiopian, Walters Art Museum, New York.

A Contest, and the Mary Triptych (Part 1)

Over at Seedlings in Stone, L.L. Barkat is giving away a copy of The Real Mary by Scot McKnight, who makes a Protestant case for Mary with the theological controversies stripped away. Check out what L.L. says about the book and leave a comment here, and you’re automatically in the contest, which will last until next Thursday evening. The winner will also be offered the opportunity to guest post on BeliefNet.

In the meantime, here’s the first of three “Triptych poems” about the mother of Jesus. The second will be posted Monday, and the third next Thursday.

May It Be to Me

Came in a swirl of scented,
Dry wind.
Do not fear, you have found favor.
May it be to me.

The angel did not tell what I would see
Upon my Joseph’s face,
Worse than anger, searing my soul,
Tearing my heart.
Not a rich man, a good man with
Good hands and heart,
He chose me of all Nazareth.
The man every village mother wanted as a son.
Joseph chose me of all in Nazareth.
The Lord chose me of all in Israel.

My Joseph’s eyes.
The angel, I said.
Disbelief on my Joseph’s face,
His hands clenching into fists of pain.
The angel spoke, I said; the Spirit came.

A divorce, my Joseph said.
Quietly; I will not humiliate you,
My Joseph said I love you too much.
He went to weep the hurt
Into the quiet of his mat.

The angel dreamed my Joseph.
Then he knew,
Taking me as wife with joy,
Protecting the child,
Loving the mother.

My Joseph held the baby bathed in blood.
He cut the cord of life to separate life.
He lifted him up.
My tear-stained Joseph set him in my arms
And whispered,
Jeshua.

May it be to me.

Triptych, Bartolomeo Vivarini, 1460s, egg tempera on wood, Metropolitan Museum of New York. The side panels illustrate various scenes in the life of Mary.

The Poetry Closet

Yesterday, one of the best writers I've run across -- both print and online -- posted this on one of her three blogs, Seedlings in Stone. When I read it, my ears burned.

I've talked before about L.L. Barkat's book, Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places. This is the one I read straight through during the night I spent in the hospital after learning the results of my bike crash -- three broken ribs, a fractured fourth rib and a partially collapsed lung. Since hospitals are no places for rest, I abandoned all hope of sleep and instead read this wonderful book. And she has a new book coming in 2010 from InterVarsity Press, God in the Yard: Tending the Soul in Small Places.

Yesterday, I had an email exchange with L.L. about how I got into this "poetry thing." I've read a lot of poetry over the years but would never have called myself a major poetry reader or even a minor fan. In high school, I liked the English poets of World War I, like Rupert Brooke, possibly because of the Vietnam War going on at the time. I liked the modern poets the best -- T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas -- and have also read a number of contemporary poets -- Richard Wilbur, Billy Collins, John Ashberry and Brendan Galvin. I learned that just about anything written by Wendell Berry sounded like poetry. And my background, training and experience and experience as a speechwriter had required me to be as mindful of words sounds, rhythm, cadence, language -- all the proper domains of the poet. But me thinking about writing poetry? Not.

I can actually pinpoint when this poetry "thing" started: Sunday, July 5. Okay, so it's confession time. I was sitting in church, listening to our senior pastor's sermon on John 3 -- the scene with Jesus and Nicodemus when Jesus speaks to being born again. What caught my attention was one of the overlooked parts of the story: Nicodemus came to Jesus at night. As I listened to the pastor, my mind wouldn't let go of that. It was at night. Nicodemus came at night because he didn't want anyone to see him talking to Jesus.

I started taking what looked like notes (my wife was pleased I wasn't nodding off) but were really images and thoughts and ideas. I listened to what the pastor was saying and let what he said form images in my mind that somehow changed into something else when I wrote (the order-of-worship sheet soon looked like a mess). During the next two weeks, interrupted by my bike crash and hospital stay, I worked on what eventually became this.

Then, a month later, came this, based on the story of the crippled man by the pool who's not fast enough to make it into the water when it ripples. That was inspired by another sermon -- same pastor, same situation, similar scribbles all over the order-of-worship sheet. When I posted the first poem, no one had noticed or at least commented. This second one, though, prompted some comments, including one by L.L., welcoming me to the poetry closet.

Was I in the poetry closet?

I'd been following L.L.'s weekly RAP (Random Act of Poetry) on The High Calling Blogs site. This is a weekly invitation for poets to right about a particular topic, and L.L. had been doing a series on rooms in a house. The final room in the series was the closet, and I decided to try it. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done -- 20 or 30 drafts, constant reworking and fiddling with words, most of the drafts written in long hand until I finally typed it and then kept working over individual words. And this poem is SHORT.

The result was "Testimony (in the closet)." It prompted a number of responses and reactions. I had some comments on the blog, but also emails from people, including at work. Perhaps the best response was from my wife. Just as I was falling asleep, she came in the bedroom with tears in her eyes. "It's my wedding dress," she said.

I've done two more since then, "Knows" and "Summer Light." I'm reading more poetry online, from poets like Marcus Goodyear (see "Eve's Second Garden") and Jim Schmotzer. Marcus and L.L. have "introduced" me (electronically) to another whole group of poets who particpate in the weekly RAP. And then I'm finding incredibly good writers and poets like {this restless heart}.

I suppose this means I am indeed in that poetry closet.

Findings on Today's Web

Mike Duran over at deCompose has a good post today about the aim of Christian fiction. Is it discipleship, evangelism or both? His argument, and I think a good one, is that it's supposed to be both but skews heavily towards discipleship, i.e., the Christian market. Interesting discussion.

L.L. Barkat, who has three blogs and posts on several others, has a short, sweet post today at Seedlings in Stone called "Nothing in Return" and one at Love Notes to Yahweh about coming into wild roses. (OK, so I'm a fan. I like her writing and her art, and her children are no pikers in the art department either.) (I have a real rube's definition of art -- if I can draw it or paint it, it's not art. I can't do what L.L. does. And I can't do what her children do, either.) And in only the way that the internet can, I tweeted a reply to an question from Intervarsity Press about a favorite IVP book (Stone Crossings), L.L. retweeted it, IVP retweeted my blog post about it, and my blog got a rush of visitors. Crazy but fun.

I'm still reading Michael Snyder's Return Policy. I'm deliberately reading it slowly, catching the rhythm and the pace. I don't think I've read anything quite like it before. It reminds me, in a way, of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, but Snyder has his own distinct voice.

I spent part of the weekend working on two articles about blogging about layoffs. The editor who commissioned them saw my posts here and asked if I could write one or two articles about them. (He was editorially nonchalant, and I was editorially gaga, at the request.) We'll see how the editing and rewriting process goes.

Shrinking the Camel and Inside Work

I’ve written before about a blog called Shrinking the Camel that I follow closely. It’s done by a business executive named Bradley Moore, who lives and works “somewhere in the northeast U.S.” In addition to his own blog, he also posts on a site called Inside Work, which is all about the practice of faith in the workplace. And yes, I follow that site closely as well, and not only for Bradley’s posts. There is a whole group of terrific writers and thinkers – and they write about faith and business. They don't write about the application of business practices to the church -- an affliction in the church in America for more than two decades. Instead, the writers at Inside Work look at the practice of faith in the workplace.

Yesterday on Inside Work, Bradley posted an article called “How God Saved My Life through Writing.” And he talks about how he came to start writing the Shrinking the Camel blog in 2008. It’s honest writing, writing from the heart.

How I happened across Bradley’s blog, as well as the Inside Work site, is one of those stories about how the web works. I was reading a blog post on a writing web site, and saw an interesting comment by a guy named Marcus Goodyear, an editor and poet who's actually written a poem for his wife about the Large Hadron Collider -- and had it published. I clicked on his name, and landed at his web site, Goodwordediting.com. One of the things he does is serve as an editor at a site called HighCallingBlogs.com, a collection of blogs that look at the entire world as a place to practice faith, including the culture (a shocking notion, I know). One of those links took me to Inside Work, where I found an article written by Bradley – and I clicked through to Shrinking the Camel (cool name for a blog, by the way).

And this process continues. At the High Calling site, I read a post about poetry by a writer named L.L. Barkat -- clicked through to her blogs (there are three, including Seedlings in Stone), and am now getting ready to start her book Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places.

In his latest article at Inside Work, Bradley writes about how he began writing – disillusionment with evangelical Christianity, a sudden skepticism about the Bible, angst and burnout with his career – and he discovered that God was creating a new work in him through the whole process (my words, not Bradley’s). Reading those words evoked a powerful sense of identification. I’ve gone through a long period of skepticism, not about the Bible, but about the contemporary American church. Having gone through a disastrous experience with a church that embraced every business fad found on the bestseller list, and wrecked anything in its path that might stop its quest for cultural relevance, I pulled back, and pulled back hard. And angst and burnout with my career? Yes, I've known that, too, a couple of times at least.

About three years ago, I started writing a novel, and actually finished it, along with a sequel and a plan for a series. Some of the partially completed “volumes” in the series have as many as 40,000 words or more. And I learned something, the same thing that Bradley has. Writing has been a means for me to begin coming to grips with what happened to my church, and what happened to my faith. In an odd way, writing is like having a conversation with God.

I’m still on that road. Finding the Bradley Moores of this world is like having a fellow pilgrim come alongside.