The judgment of the eyes

The judgment of the eyes

is a fire, a consuming

fire, unquenchable,

burning what it surveys,

destroying what it encounters,

scorching with a terrible heat

cities,

earth,

hearts,

souls,

itself,

leaving ashes,

only ashes.

Photograph by Daniele Pellati via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Caravan Palace and “Rock it For Me”

Caravan Palace is a French “Electro Swing and Gypsy Jazz” band based in Paris. They’ve toured all over the world. This song, “Rock it For Me,” performed live two years at Le Trianon in Paris, was sufficient to set a short story, with hints of a novel, into motion.

I love this video.

Talking with Thomas Merton

I was talking with Thomas Merton,

well, actually, I was talking and he

was listening, that period of silence

each day those Trappists do,

you know. Silence forces you

to listen. So we talked, or rather

I talked, he never said a word

but he spoke

of everything,

like a child,

he was a child, you know,

once.

Related: My post this week at Tweetspeak Poetry on Thomas Merton's In the Dark Before Dawn.

Photo of Thomas Merton via the Thomas Merton Society of Canada.

The Bookshelf and the Encyclopedias

My first bookcase was a simple affair: four shelves made of boards of pine stained a reddish brown. My father built it one weekend; I would have been nine or ten years old. It held my Golden Book Encyclopedias (purchased one a week by my mother at the A&P grocery store); my Hardy Boys stories (usually placed in the vicinity of my Trixie Belden mysteries); several Tom Swift books; and the books I ordered each month at school through the Scholastic Book Service (oh, my barely contained excitement to see the monthly SBS box sitting by the teacher’s desk).

The first bookcase ended up traveling; it followed me to Texas, and then it followed my wife and me to St. Louis. It was joined for a time by the college student’s need for cheap bookcases (cinder blocks and board, again of pine but unstained), then by the set of three-you-could-buy- fairly-reasonably at the furniture store (the set you knocked together yourself).

Actually, it was followed by several sets of three over the years. Some of those sets have come and gone; others still reside in our basement, holding a host of non-book things. The good bookcases are upstairs, occupying most of one bedroom and part of another. Oh, and there’s that small shelf in still another.

The original bookcase, now more than half a century old, sits in our basement. It’s still just as sturdy as it ever was. It’s never needed repairs. And on its bottom shelf sits that same set of Golden Book Encyclopedias that my mother bought at the A&P. (If you look closely, we can see them in the picture above on the bottom shelf, to the right of my high school “Warrior” yearbooks .) Years ago, when we were visiting my mother in New Orleans, she asked me if I still wanted them. If not, they were headed for the next garage sale. Since the Hardy Boys and Trixie Belden had already walked the plank at one of her garage sales, I took them back to St. Louis.

I suspect that the only reason she didn’t set them out to be sold was that she remembered buying them a volume a week at the A&P, trying to remember which volume to get, occasionally marking it down on her grocery lists, sometimes buying the wrong one and having to return it. Yes, she had a lot invested in those encyclopedias.

The bookshelf they sit in, that bookshelf they first sat in, is a bit worn, sitting rather quietly as it does in the basement. I can still remember watching my father build it. I can still remember my excitement. I can probably imagine my mother’s relief at having a place to put my books.

My father and I did few things together, outside of working at his printing business. The bookshelf project was one of them, even though my participation consisted of watching him. But that was sufficient; he was building it for me.

 

And those encyclopedias – they’ll likely end up eventually as a donation to Good Will, or sitting in a box on the driveway as part of a garage sale. But not in my lifetime. They may be meaningless to my children, but I know what attention and focus my mother brought to their acquisition. Just as I know the effort my father put into that bookcase.

In Finding Spiritual Whitespace: Awakening Your Soul to Rest, Bonnie Gray talks about a bookcase, one she kept in her bedroom until a friend convinced her to move it to the living room. The bookcase represented safety and escape. It blocked memories of bad experiences. Moving it was an act of embracing vulnerability.

And there’s my bookcase, sitting in the basement, holding those encyclopedias, among other things. It’s a reminder of things my parents did for me, ways they recognized that they had this voracious reader in the family and weren’t quite sure what to do with him, but they would at least build him a bookcase to hold his books. 

Something as Real as the Wind

I’ve talked about this before, but some years ago, on a mission trip to Eastern Europe, I experienced something I thought I had never previously encountered. Sitting in a small church in Erfurt, formerly a communist party social hall (delicious irony, that), and talking with a young pastor while we were being videotaped, I was overcome by what I can only describe as a presence.

So were the pastor and the cameraman. For no discernible reason, the three of us began to weep, and simultaneously.

It lasted but a few minutes. We looked at one another, and knew something had happened. I don’t think any of us could ever describe it exactly; I remember feeling slightly dazed. And I remember thinking everything has changed.

It seems almost too easy to say it was the Holy Spirit. No tongues of fire appeared upon our heads; no odd languages escaped our mouths. Just the weeping, a sadness, a kind of gentle desolation.

I had never experienced anything like it before, inside or outside of church. In American culture, people will look at you a little strangely when you describe an experience like that.

Whatever it was, it was real.

I didn’t see anything; but something happened, something as real as the wind.

I think hesitate to name what I think it was because I have no corresponding experience to validate it.

In Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, Francis Chan says “there is a big gap between what we read in Scripture about the Holy Spirit and how most believers and churches operate today.” We pray to the Father; we have a “personal experience” with Jesus. But the Spirit is banished to a closet somewhere in the basement.

Right from the start, Chan is asking some tough questions. Without the Holy Spirit, does the church live any differently than any other group of people? Have we indeed banished the Spirit to the basement? Do we really even understand what the Holy Spirit is?

One of Chan’s statements is haunting. “The light of the American church is flickering and nearly extinguished,” he writes, “having largely sold out to the kingdoms and values of this world.” I ask myself if that’s true. Are we indeed more concerned about weekly attendance than the movement of the Holy Spirit?

It promises to be a wild ride of a book.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, a group of us have begun reading Chan’s Forgotten God. To see more posts on the book’s introduction, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact. And consider joining us – we’re covering a chapter a week (and I downloaded my copy on Kindle).

Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Thomas Merton and “In the Dark Before Dawn”

He died almost half a century ago, but Thomas Merton (1915-1968) continues to exert a significant pull on the imagination, the intellect, and the conscience.

Perhaps it is partially his resume: child of a New Zealand father and American mother; raised partially in France; parents dying of cancer; something of a dissolute youth related to his short stint at Cambridge; literary influences of Columbia University; conversion to Catholicism; joining the Trappist monks with their vows of silence at the Abbey of Gethsemani outside of Louisville, Kentucky.

Perhaps, too, it is his writings; he was a ferociously prolific writer. Coming to national attention with The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948, Merton wrote poetry, essays, criticism, and religious philosophy. (He was so prolific that many of his writings and poems were published for the first time after his death.) He became an opponent of the atomic bomb and went on to become an antiwar activist in the 1960s. His faith became the basis for social action and social activism.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Vera Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

We found the boat above the shore

We found the boat above the shore

            buried in the weeds;

we found the boat above the sea

            covered in debris.

A giant wave had lifted it

            high up into the trees;

the boat had floated down the line

            and rested in the weeds.

Eons of time had come and gone

            and men had done their deeds;

while through all time the boat had sat,

            filled with nature’s seeds.

No path to walk to find the boat

            hidden in the weeds;

pure chance, perhaps, caused us to slip

            among the slender reeds.

We placed our hands upon its bow

            and dragged it from the weeds;

we tore our clothes to make its sail

            far from the thick debris.

We sewed our clothes to make it sail

            upon a glassy sea;

we watched the boat sail from the shore

            toward the open sea,

            toward the open sea.

On Saturday, Eileen Knowles over at The Scenic Route had a post entitled “Romancing the Heart of Stone.” This line caught my attention: “Beauty awakens by romance.”

The post included a video by Rend Collective, a group that have been around for a fe years, but this my first experience with their music. I loved the song, and Eileen’s post plus the song gave birth to the poem above – old-fashioned, to be sure, and rather reeking of the 19^th century. But it was great fun to write.

The poem is dedicated to Eileen.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission