I’m beginning to sense the rhythm and sway of a stone that on the surface shows no movement. I come without a sense of time, no clock ticking it away, but respond to the sound of the bells almost without awareness.

No one says, “Stand up.” No one says, “Take your seat.” Still, I move in time to the hollow notes without a Protestant hiccup. Though I couldn’t tell you later the order of the liturgical process, my spirit remembers the rhythm in its practice.

And this is good.

– Making Headroom, Week Seventeen

Say what you will about Job’s friends. It’s true. Once they started yammering, they wove their strands of talking points between what was true and what they only wished were true until it’s no wonder Job didn’t lash them all together with that rope and walk away, leaving them bound to discuss his plight amongst themselves into exhaustion.

But for seven days — an entire week — they held their knowing tongues and grieved alongside their friend in silence.

When they arrived, Job was in such emotional anguish and physical distress they did not even recognize him. This could no longer be the greatest man in the East. He was a blistered and scabbed shell of a man, the rhythmic scraping of his flesh with a shard of sun baked clay the only sign he was even still alive. 

They did the thing that true friends do. They sat with him in the ashes. The tore their own clothes and screamed to the heavens. They poured dust on their own heads and mourned.

Their lament wrapped its arms around Job’s and they wept together.

They sat together, bearing witness to suffering, letting silence say what words would soon enough dissolve.

Seven days. For more than ten thousand minutes they managed to keep their lips from moving, tongues from wagging. Not a single word.

Say what you will about Job’s friends. But I’m not sure that I know how to love the way seven days of silent communion does.

::

Posted as part of an ongoing, albeit irregular, series on the Book of Job. Read related posts here.

Why is everyone hungry for more?
“More, more,” they say.    ”More, more.” 
   I have God’s more-than-enough, 
   More joy in one ordinary day 
Than they get in all their shopping sprees. 
   At day’s end I’m ready for sound sleep, 
   For you, God, have put my life back together.

: : :

The words of David, upon being answered.
Psalm 4 for your Sabbath Preparation.

Find some quiet contemplation in these weekend communities:

Still Saturday with Sandra King    |    Sunday with Deidra Riggs

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The regular return to the psalmist’s lament, his unrelenting darkness, his inescapable sense of abandonment — in some odd way I find this comforting. I remember my own need to sit in the lament now and then. Even here, straight-backed in a hard wooden pew where the words of his anguish ricochet off cold stone walls.

Heman ends in despair. His last words do not return to hope. And yet I consider as I listen, as I recite, that though he speaks as though convinced God had stepped out of the room, he continues to pour out his heart, to talk to the one he believes had walked away.

And I wonder if he believes it at all.

– Making Headroom, Week Fifteen

The last time I spent any time with a book by Julia Cameron, I got into an altercation with my Writer. She hovered over my desk, whining relentlessly about how everyone else’s Muse went for long walks and exotic dates, sipping tea hot tea and macchiatos at tables adorned with fresh cut flowers.

I lost my temper and whipped a pencil, aiming between her doe eyes. She slunk away whimpering to the showers. Not long afterwards, I looked up to see her dripping form, wrapped in a towel and reaching out from the dim shadows of my office with a crumpled, soggy scrap of paper. (Read the rest at Tweetspeak Poetry…)

::

We’re starting a new book club soon. I’ve been down this road before. Or on these tracks, anyway. I’m a little anxious. (Pick whichever definition you like.) Head on over to Tweetspeak to find out why, and get your invitation to join us in a new discussion of Julia Cameron’s landmark book on creative renewal, The Artist’s Way.

I’ve been, these past weeks, getting to know the boy Samuel. I’ve hovered over and dipped into the early chapters of the first book of Samuel for a very long time now.

Once in a while I read the whole thing. And another day just a little bit seems to rise off the page to meet me.

Now and again I’ll even pull a commentary or read an article.

But I always end up back just chewing the text. None of the learned ones have managed to explain, at least to my satisfaction, what puzzles me most about the boy Samuel.

Samuel, the one for whom his mother ached and yearned for years. Her grief grew deeper whilst the other wife, blind in her abundance, shamed her for her emptiness ’til food tasted like sand. And small comfort, her husband, though he loved her most, failed to grasp her longing, and sought to fill her ache with richer servings on her plate.

This same Samuel, he no sooner arrived wailing newborn promise to flood her parched places when she stretched arms to the sky with the boy in her hands and gave him back to the Giver.

This was no lip-serving baby dedication, but a heart-ripping surrender of all she’d lived to gain and all she’d die to herself to lose.

She’d trust the Giver to take all.

She’d trust the Giver to take well.

Samuel grew up in the temple, ministering to a Lord he did not know.

This is the riddle, the thing wise scholars with their many degrees and lifetimes of study cannot open to me.

In days when the word of the Lord was precious for its scarcity, in days when He did not often reveal Himself as plain as day, He came to the temple recognized neither by Eli the priest, nor by the one to whom He called by name.

Samuel would hear his name float through the temple chambers and think it to be his master Eli. And Eli would think it no more than a tired child’s teasing dream, a nuisance to wake him from slumber.

Eli had drifted, no longer recognizing his Master’s voice. But Samuel, in the tenderness of his years, had not yet heard the voice. Never had he heard his Master’s whisper or bellow, song or lament.

His heart did not know the very One whom he served.

How can this be?

How can it be that the boy clad in a linen ephod could still not know the One for whom he was born to live, surrounded as he was with all that pointed Godward, the candles and flame and incense and parchment and sacrifice?

I do know how. But then, I don’t know how.

This mystery latches on to the next. How should the very first words to ring in a boy’s untested ears be for the coming destruction of his teacher’s priestly family line?

How should the first words a boy hears from his Master, his Life-Giver, be the kind that send him back to his blankets, hiding away in the night lest his teacher ask him for the painful saying?

These words, sometimes they leave me crawling back to my bed too, lying down until morning, hoping none ask.

For sometimes, despite how He lays out out His precious word before me day after day after day, I haven’t any idea what He just said.

::

From the archives.

I wait impatiently through the antiphon. I’ve never felt so eager for the pause to end before. And yet it’s not for a refusal to sit still. I simply want more than anything to be saying these words out loud.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.

– Making Headroom, Week Twenty-Two

After pounding another ball toward the green, he stomped away, looking to the sky as if to curse the mythical gods of the game for abandoning him to flail on the fairway without hope. We followed behind and caught a glint of the Callaway with the orange chevron in the grass. It had bounced off the bridge and cleared the trees, playable but found too late.

I picked it up, feeling an ache for my son. At thirteen, he was among the youngest that day on a cruel, rigorous course. As the day wore on I reached often into my pocket, turning the ball and fingering its dirt-crusted dimples . . .

Read the rest over at TweetSpeak Poetry today, where we’re wrapping up our book club on L.L. Barkat’s Rumors of Water. And maybe you’ll be surprised to find out what we’re going to do next . . .  I need a couple of weeks off to brace myself.

In springtime, when she flew in with twigs and
brittle leaves in tow did she know?

When she lined the inside of that sprig bowl
with soft grasses and downy feathers, did she know?

When she strained to push out fragile helplessness,
all dappled in brown, did she know?

And when she settled in atop waited
for life to crack out the sides, did she know?

Did she know of the searing, consuming fire soon would fall
so close to the kindling that formed her walls?

Did she know of the smoldering wrath?

Did she know of blood that would cascade?

Did she know of life one would lose?

Did she know of loss that was yet to come?

Had she an inkling of the danger
of building nests and birthing babes
in the shadow of a blazing altar?

Or, in finding home in His dwelling place,
did she see only the refuge?

How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints,
for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and my flesh cry out
for the living God.

Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may have her young—
a place near your altar,
O LORD Almighty, my King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in your house;
they are ever praising you.

(Psalm 84:1-4)

::

Reposted from the archives.

The words of David, angry and bewildered, and then reminded.
Psalm 22 for your Sabbath Preparation.

He has never let you down, 
      never looked the other way 
      when you were being kicked around. 
   He has never wandered off to do his own thing; 
      he has been right there, listening. 

- – -

Find some quiet contemplation in these weekend communities:

Still Saturday with Sandra King    |    Sunday with Deidra Riggs

(Thanks for stopping by today. I’m encouraged by your visit.
I’ll beg your understanding for the closed comment box
on Preparation Days. It just helps me not talk so much.)

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