God's signature

At your finger tips you have the very
face of God.
Perhaps you have come across theology.
It's not helpful

The music of the cosmos needs players,
and that's us.

What we touch and what
touches us to make lives sound
more than superficial
is obvious:

each moment is a print and
each small purpose
declares something known as the word of
love.

What an empty word this is,
aching for something to fill the omega.
We seek an epigenesis
and really, everything points to that individual
print of person in the making.

Not many of us die
complete.

I wonder how many signatures there have to be and
how many times God signs
our human document before
a name ripens enough to reveal
something worth satisfaction.

Each baby is different,
every life distinct,
and the ink of my heart writes
hesitantly until I know the power of God's
print urging something strong
out of my soul.

Don't look for an articled God who is a
Western noun.

One cell, one atom of your body is enough for
belief. Your miracle is the same as
mine.

Mowing the lawn

Long ago I helped my godfather to
mow the lawn.
We pushed the machine across an amiable
surface.
We sweated together in Swiss sunlight and
I can't remember if we spoke
but my body remembers
everything.

Up, turn, around, and the pattern of everything
falls into place.
When places, dreams and returning things
cut across your temporary grass,
what is that jet tearing across the sky?
What is that scream that grass
closes as it
grows?

My godfather knew something
I still want to find in his kindness of'
pushing that lawn-mower and me.

After we had sweated in Swiss sunlight,
beside the slope down to the cellar I
remember well,
what a complex darkness of rooms
that was!
He cut bread, poured a cold drink,
and sliced onions, because the work was done and
we could eat for morning's work. 

Something tells me I must get up early
in the mornings of now because
grass is growing,
growing fast.

Not really for myself, anymore,
but for my children, and their children, too.
It's not so much about cutting it back,
but about a tidiness I'd prefer.
I don't mind sweating in Swiss sunlight when you know that
grass and onions and bread add up
to something simple and good.

If I had a lawn to mow in Africa,
where drought is normal,
and grass isn't
and onion is your staple diet, perhaps,
and not a treat with your godfather,
the steps taken over that land needing
something called love
are mine.
I am looking back to all my days,
and claiming them without
distinction of where the sun was
when I was there.

That death is not failure.

I think I'm beginning to learn the biggest lesson of my life. One has little control of what happens to you, especially as you learn what goes together and what doesn't in the early years. Neurons are neurons, and they are both forceful and forgiving in the dialogue between the whole and the sum of its parts.
For the whole of my life, thus far, I have been trying not to die. What this means is that at the age of about five or six, I took one horrified look at death, and knowing what I thought I knew about it, then, that it meant eternal failure and punishment of the worst unimaginable kind, that I wasn't going there.
I actually remember the attitude drawing up inside me, like some kind of austere refusal, aligning with elegant living, holding aloof from the decay and ugliness of physical dissolution. It also smelt bad. That was the messy part. The emotional part was worse. I was heading for a trap from which I could never escape: the devil and his demons were fully in charge of my dying, death and whatever came after, and unless I performed a magical trick, which intellectually, I still attempt, I would stick there not for a long time, but for eternity.
It's a bad situation and outlook for a five-year-old. My parents and everyone else agreed that to avoid this lost eternity,as they put it, I needed to give my heart to Jesus, and be saved.
I was a good boy, needing approval and acceptance, and not wanting to go somewhere dreadful for ever, so I told the preacher one eveing the words everyone needed me to say.
I am still wondering what I meant then, because I couldn't have known. Those words, no matter how ignorant I was of what I was saying, have stood me in good stead, because my heart hasn't changed much.
In my early years these things became associated: death, failure and damnation. I was unfortunate to have as teacher and principal of my primary school, one misguided, cruel and abominable woman who hammered home the fear of failure, linked directly to the fear of physical pain. On a daily basis I observed the terror and trauma of children subjected to her impatience and rage. I knew what awaited me, should I fail in anything at all.
The pattern was put, and has persisted. I have avoided anticipating my death. The aftermath has been too much too contemplate.
But after my mother-in-law died, at the end of October, last year, something shifted. Something in my body recognized that this was the end of failure.
It was time to speak up.

If I reach into my veriest place of communicating, I would say this: sure, if you make an attempt in respect of something and it doesn't work out, you could say it failed.
But does life itself fail? Does the cosmos somehow fail, just because I will die one day? Does evil really triumph because of physiological dissolution? Is one's life an empty vessel, full of pathos, at the end?

I have this to say: there is no ending. Sure, many moments are irreversible, but that's different. There is no cosmic ending. The tree has not ended because of autumn. Earth does not die in winter. God does not make a mindless sacrifice to save God in vain. Fervour, formality and faith do not dream the same dream.
There is no defeat in death. Sure, there's sense of separation, vulnerability of self and plenty of preverbal anxiety because only priests and doctors are allowed to make ultimate pronoucements.

So let me make my pronouncement: that death is not failure, not at any level. Those who cause unnecessary death are evil, if such is their intent. Life is indeed beyond precious.
But for those who weep, or wonder, or drag woundedness into remaining steps of life, I would say
"but this is natural. How could it be otherwise? Embrace this depth of unknowingness and rejoice in it, because this frees you as nothing else does."

So while I have tried, thus far, not to die because of fear of failure, I turn now to living because I am sure that Presence guiding and granting all things is not a damning one but  gracious and generous spirit that seeks out so much more than we can think of or imagine. And if we stop to feel, however fleetingly, the impossible utterances the heart affirms before words can, we can sense the surprise of that which can never fail.

Holding hands

When there's not much left, and your heart wants to say
much more, and all that's left is cynical,
I'll hold your hand.
I can't do more than that.
I have walked many nights to
reach you,
and perhaps,
I have further to go.
But now you know,somewhat,
how far I have come
and how much  further my heart can go.
There's a song in this, and some-one will
sing it slow.

Hold my hand now,
it will always last.
Hold it fast,
it will touch and know
forever now.

It will touch and know
forever now.

Crying out

If you grew up in a world where
crying out
was discouraged,
better know that everything else
does.
The table of elements, for example,
horrifies itself by making allies across
impossible events.

Take the body, for another example,
an impossible vehicle for living,
yet what a living it is,
and so much depends.

If you'd surprise yourself, just a little,
and look under the lining of language,
behind the curtain of contrived care,
beneath the carpet of courage on which
we'd all prefer to walk:
and recognize the face that
we avoid:
we might see our own,
and hear our voice for the first time
crying out something really simple
we've never learnt to say.

One note of music, then the gap before the next,
when you know it,
tells me this.

I have heard it crying out,
saying the very
impossible.

I have no problem
believing it because I
hear the heart.
It sings its own way
without trying
and the orchestra is having fun
following some composer's fascination
before going home
to known smells and rain
rattling down on the roof of
everything,

Waiting for rain.

He was told about rain before
he had langauge, so when language
came, as it does, without the
bigger picture,
he had no understanding
of what to expect.

I have waited with him for
sixty-one years.
"Is it like wearing clothes?" he asked. "They say
it's all over your skin if it's heavy."

My heart is heavy for him.
He waits for a story he wants and expects.
It will never come.

I've walked in rain, lots of showers, storms and
silly drizzles. Perplexed puddles, reflective ripples running on
pavements. Soaked, shivering, steaming.

Who doesn't know rain?
If you live in a desert, that's something else,
but he lives among us.

He waits, watching the sky, checking at least
each hour, even in dreams,
and speaks to me anxiously.

I'm not sure what advice to give.
I could suggest don't wait, anticipate.
Don't ask, receive.

But I sense he's gone through every part of
that.

I'm not sure about accompanying him
much longer.
It rains where I live, and when you realize that wisdom and
wetness aren't the same,
there isn't much you can do with words.
Still, he's a friend, and the longer he waits,
the more I sense the story
of what he wants.