Now, in the lovely wake of Annie's log, I'll write a little about my part in the Good Friday vigil at our chapel. Unlike Anne, I couldn't take a middle of the night shift (almost forbidden to take the one I did), but I thank and bless her and the others who did. My prayer time was the privileged one, the last shift of the 24 hours. The two hours that I prayed seemed like ten minutes at the most, and even my knees didn't scream until the end. I love intensive prayers at times and in places like this, and being a part of the chain which had spoken the same names again and again felt like a gift. So did the prayers, the evidence of the hearts that wrote them down for me to speak with the fervour of a loving stranger, most of the time. The way some were written touched me into silence, often, including a few I thought I could identify, not because of personal request but because of the beauty and caring of the kind of wisdom that has "been there." I have continued to pray for those who are trying to disappear, for those who are trying not to live, for those who don't know where they are and for those who know but can't yet accept it as where they need to be. How could those things be said better? For the rest, though I may forget names, I won't forget individual needs or blessings.

The service began as I was still in prayer. I found that the same kind of group gospel reading that had not reached me on Wed. night now did as strongly as those words have ever come home. And what Lane said--his words are as welcome as Becca's--was perfect. Here's a paraphrase of part of the homily: Lane began with Pilate's question, "What is truth?" First, he began to separate truth from the ways we often define religion, offering this better definition of seeking religion: "I look for someone who has told me the truth so clearly, I want to hit him." He discussed religion's continuing indigenous problems with human sexuality and emphasized most that religion must never more and must never replace the Lord, who is Truth embodied. The church is only to be emptied continually, in help and in love. Faith, being open, risky, and uncertain and requiring a disposition of living entails radical choice--because it means we have to engage. And because we are always in danger of a cross. But he reminded us of the garden as well, the place where Jesus truly became himself, at first with hesitancy, fear, and uncertainty, and then fully. Chrisitianity is not a collection of laws, rituals, prohibitions; it is a person who loved and calls for love.

Finally, as we sang, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord" and went up one by one to embrace the cross, nearly everyone was in tears. A simple service, simply beautiful. A good Friday.


posted by Sandy at 2:08 PM

Two poems that speak to my own Good Friday vigil:

It's Possible

It's possible that while sleeping the hand
that sows the seeds of stars
started the ancient music going again

--like a note from a great harp--
and the frail wave came to our lips
as one or two honest words.

Antonio Machado

Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before:
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard.
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door.
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Robert Bly
posted by Sandy at 7:34 PM

A Postscript:

For The Sake of Strangers
Dorianne Laux

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waiting patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another--a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a retarded child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them--
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

And another:

Oceans
Juan Ramon Jimenez (trans. Robert Bly)

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing. . . Silence. . . Waves. . .

---Nothing happens? Or has everything hap-
pened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
posted by Sandy at 2:54 PM

Short Leg to Jacksonville, Pt. II


“The book you’re reading. Pascal,” I said.

“Oh. Yes. I’ve always been fascinated with Pascal. I’m a mathematician myself…well, computers. I like it that Pascal was brilliant--but a Christian too.”

That’s it, I thought. I am this man’s evangelical mark of the day; no doubt he thinks divine guidance has led him to win me over.

This time I spoke fast: “Oh yes colleagues at my university, my CHRISTIAN university, are always telling me fascinating ways to approach mathematics from CHRISTIAN viewpoints.” Something like that, inane, stammered out.

His face didn’t change in the least, smile just as gentle and illuminated. “What do you teach?” he asked.

From the left, I could hear the Bahamas woman showing the other one pictures of her children, then of her husband. “He’s fine,” the other woman exclaimed.

“Yeah, but no account,” she answered. “But the children….. that’s why I don’t leave. Can’t leave if there’s kids. If I can see my man few times a year…”

“As long as you’re enjoying yourself,” said the window-seat woman, who had already said that at least four times. “Who keeps your kids?”

No way to turn. I’d have gone up if I could, floated on the ceiling with the oxygen masks. I said, “I teach literature and creative writing.”

The smile grew larger. I checked for the twelfth time. Definite wedding ring on his finger. Hand-crafted. The ring on mine less obvious, I knew.

“My boyfriend’s good-looking. He’s a fine man. He’s fifty,” the woman’s voice raised now. “I’m not robbing no cradles!”

“As long as you’re happy.”

“I’m happy,” she said, giggling in glee. “Third time I’ve done this, last year and this one, save my money. You can do it all in a day.”

I tried not to imagine how that might be possible.

“Yes,” he said, “yes.” His green eyes said, “I should have known that’s what you’d teach, and I couldn’t be more gratified than to hear it.”

They said something intimate and privileged, as if I should know. But I didn’t.

We were landing, thankfully. I put my tray table down, slapped that magazine on it, ducked my head and didn’t lift it until we’d reached the terminal. To my left, the day-tripper showed off a deluxe collection of Dior perfumes. She even showed them to me, shoved them under my bowed chin.

“Duty free?” I asked, and she kind of jerked her head toward me. Oooh, that was cruel. Why did I say it?

“You’re staying on this plane, aren’t you?” The window-seat lady leaned up.

“Yes,” I said, “but don’t worry. I’ll let you out.”

“Guess you don’t like having to make that stop at Jacksonville.”

“I can’t complain,” I said. “Free ticket.”

“How’d you do that?”

“Four flights. That’s Southwest’s new frequent flyer program. Four flights, then a free one. I didn’t even know it was due. Just opened up the mailbox one day and there it was.”

“What?” my neighbor cried. “You mean if I go see my boyfriend one more time some letter’s gonna show up at my house saying where I’ve been?”

“Well,” I said, lamely, “I don’t think it said what it was on the envelope.”

“Oh, God, no!” she said.

She was nearly crying, and my former antipathy waned. I almost told her to get a post-office box, but what business was it of mine?

Then we were at the gate, and I stood up and stepped back, keeping my eyes down, to let them pass.

“Have a good journey,” the window seat lady said as she passed me. I noticed that the man had started down the aisle toward the door ahead of her.

I sat back down quickly so others could pass, leaving my belt unbuckled. Then I saw the man headed back toward me. With a face I’ll never forget, he picked up my right hand and held it a minute. I was frozen, astonished, and I couldn’t even tell you what he murmured as he turned and left. I know it wasn’t a name or phone number. It wasn’t a Christian blessing. He wasn’t a lunatic. I’d swear he’d never done such a thing before.

It may be vanity, but heaven help me, it felt like the conviction that he had seen his soul mate and recognized her but time had run out. In my mind, I could see Zhivago’s face in the bus window, see him running after Lara, then clutching his chest.

I was shaking my head as I watched him walk back down the aisle. “It’s not me,” I was telling him in my mind. “You got it wrong. I’m not the one. This is déjà vu for me. My heart’s given. That’s why I’m going back to Nashville.”

“You’re a lovely man,” I thought. “But it’s not me. Why would you think it is?”

I found it all immensely disturbing.

They haunted me for days, one woman, one man, distracting me from many things. I talked to one of my Honors’ students at Fido on Monday. She asked me if I ever found that something seems to emphasize itself, like a symbol, like maybe she would hear the word “enchantment” in a song and then begin to see it everywhere. I talked to her about Jung, synchronicity, meaningful coincidence.

I still don’t know what meaning to take from that flight. There were immediate “meanings” that I tried on and rejected, too simple, too black and white. In the end, I feel like Gabriel at the window at the end of Joyce’s “The Dead.” I felt so much compassion, for all of us. During that hour and twenty minutes, windows were open on both sides to give me views I had not asked for. Are we always in the midst of so much difficult and glorious life, paused at so many crossroads, asking so many astonishing questions that can’t be answered? Would I know that if I troubled myself to open the blinds? Would I want to know?

The next morning, I saw a headline on the MSN homepage that seemed to me to stand for all questions that are difficult to answer, for all the things we do and don’t do, never sure what’s right. For all we’ve missed and all we’ve found. .

I thought it might become the title of a poem someday., one of those titles that suggests more than it says. The headlone read, “Who will bury Iraqi soldiers?”



posted by Sandy at 10:27 AM

Short Leg to Jacksonville (Pt. 1)

I like aisle seats and I never fasten my seat belt at first because Southwest always warns that its flights are “anticipated to be completely full.” Most people won’t take a middle front seat until the back is completely full, even if they’re stalled in the aisle beside one for ages. But this time a hefty African-American woman said, “I think I’ll just take that seat.” So I stood in the aisle to let her in, hoping the woman would fit.

She did, sort of, but even as the plane taxied to the runway, she hadn’t fastened her belt. Something perverse in me made me move my magazine as the attendant passed by; she slowed and said, “Fasten the belt, please.” The woman sighed and did so, more easily than I would have thought. Her hair was corn-rowed tight to her scalp, and she wore large gold earrings and stretch polyester pants. She had by then already greeted the smaller black woman who sat by the window.

I used to fear flying. I don’t anymore, but I still keep up the habit of reading trashy gossip magazines to distract me. Actually, the cabin pressure reduces my brain capacity to about the level that all I can absorb is what Melissa Rivers wore to the Oscars. So many designer dresses. I don’t think I looked up again until the attendant asked, “Could I offer you something to drink?”

I looked up into the eyes of a man seated across the aisle, one row up. That’s pretty close on a jet this size. He was unabashedly turned around, looking directly into my face. I must have skittered away like myself at five years old. But sometimes you can feel someone’s staring, and, even before the drinks came, I must have met this man’s eyes four times. They were nice eyes, sort of quiet green. He was easy on the eyes all around, graying but not old, well-built, a smile that lit his eyes. Intelligent face. Absolutely nothing about him looked like the kind of Lothario reduced to picking up women on Southwest flights. And, even if he were, I could not imagine why he’d settle on me. Besides the usual, I’d been riding nearly three hours in a truck across Alligator Alley, shedding some tears as I told my girls good-bye, and wearing my sun-hat, thereby flattening my hair entirely. As usual, I hadn’t checked my lipstick in hours.

It was surpassingly strange.

As much as is possible, I turned in the other direction, toward the neighboring women. The large one (she was, believe me) asked the other: “Where’re you headed?” I think she said she was going home to Virginia Beach, connecting in Jacksonville, after a vacation in Ft. Lauderdale. “Hmm,” said the woman in the middle,” I’ve been to the Bahamas.” Appropriate soft exclamations from the window-seat woman. And then the drinks came. And another round of meeting that guy’s eyes. He was definitely smiling now. I tried to think if I could possibly have known him from somewhere.

Nothing said for a while except “Thank you”. Then my neighbor fairly burst out: “I went to the Bahamas with my boyfriend.” Before her new friend could even absorb that, she continued: “Actually, I went to the Bahamas today !”

“Today?”

“Yeah,” she giggled. “I flew out of Jacksonville at seven this morning, and I’ll he home by six tonight.” She took the stub of her boarding ticket from her purse, tore it into bits, and placed it in the pocket on the back of the seat.

I was glad I wasn’t the one who had to answer that. But then she said something about how her husband wouldn’t like it if she stayed any longer. You have to understand, I was only partly hearing at this point, though I was fascinated, because the man had turned a bit further around, reached over to my tray, and opened my peanuts packet for me. I had to stop him before he opened the other one.

I am so southern. I know I am. I probably should have slapped his hand, but I just offered him the peanuts. He didn’t want them, but he said, “Going anywhere exciting today?” Now, it may have been a while, but I’ve heard a few variants of that in my lifetime, so I shrugged and said, with little warmth: “Nashville….home.” He just sat there and kept smiling, expectantly. And, of course, I thought it’s always possible he’s just trying to be nice. A little polite bubble slipped through my lips: “You?”

“Virginia Beach….Norfolk….home.” Still smiling. “Nice place,” I said. Smiles. “You stay on this plane for Nashville, right?” “That’s right,” I said and once more turned toward the women for relief.

“I can’t ever get my husband off the couch,” the Bahamas one was saying. “Don’t want to do nothing any more. I can’t live like that. Mean with his money too.” She was still so glowing that all of this sounded positive.

“Mmm.hmm,” the other said.

“I’m still young.”

“That’s right.”

“But I don’t want to leave my husband. Children’s sake, you know.”

“Ummm.”

“Got to think about the kids, not me.”

I feared they would think I was eavesdropping, so I tried to read again. Mr. Friendly had a book open on his tray table. I saw the title: Blaise Pascal. He used his hand to mark the page and turned back to me again. It freaked me, so I asked: “Interesting book?”

“Hmmm?” he shook his head as if ridding it of clouds.
(to be concluded tomorrow)

posted by Sandy at 3:10 PM