Archive for January, 2012

Devastating Beauty

Posted: January 23, 2012 in beautiful
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The Artist played out in front of us as low light jazzy music filled in the large room and  black and white images flickered on the screen. There were no voices in the filled theatre — except mine.

I  whispered the title cards to Rosalind, seated close beside me, as they came up on the screen. Like the silent actors on the screen that we watched, she said nothing.

Half-way through the film, a youngish man seated in the aisle across from us said loudly in our direction, “Be quiet; you’re ruining it for everyone!”

Rosalind’s head came up, and looking aggressively toward him, she called out loudly, “Shut up, “shouting out her rebuke with just as much if not more much pain than was present in the filmed narrative streaming in front of us.

At that point, with that cry into the dark room, the pain in the film jumped off the screen  and entered the audience.

Rosalind, as if shot,  slumped down in her seat and broke, sobbing. You could hear her soft cries through the theatre. I could feel her head and her warm tears on my chest and then I could see over the top of her head,  faces turning in our direction.

She cried, I held her. It wasn’t over.  From across the isle a man jumped to his feet, and suddenly he was there standing over us.

“I’m so sorry!” he said, “I’m so sorry!”

“Go away,” cried Rosalind up toward him, “Go away,” and she hid her face in my arm.

He lingered just a moment and then rushed out of the theatre. A few minutes later, another young man seated beside him got up, and left also. I was sorry for him. He missed the point of the film because he didn’t understand what was going and left too early to get in all figured out.

Rosalind’s cries softened. We didn’t leave, although for a moment, I thought of it.

We’ve learned to stay.

It  won’t go away, it won’t really ever go away,  and  besides, there was a movie to be watched and finished and more title cards to be read, although more softly now, with my mouth right up to Rosalind’s face, my warm breath warm on her ear, my arm around her shoulder.

Rosalind and I finished the film, together,  and laughed and danced over the final redemptive Singing-In-The-Rain tap dance of the artist and his partner, Peppy.  We loved it.  The artist didn’t quit! He didn’t commit suicide. The artist, with help from a friend made a come-back!

I learned something. I need to be more careful in silent films.

Not everyone is ready yet for talkies.

Red

Posted: January 16, 2012 in nature
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I clearly remember the moment I first  took responsibility for the earth.

It was the day I found big Red. He was a mangy male on the plus side of the scale, lots of ginger hair with some facial scars that belied his kick-back personality.

When I found Red, wandering, I drug him home with me, his forelegs hanging over both my arms, his stiff ears brushing the underside of my chin,  his back legs and tail bumping along on the ground behind.

My mom let me keep him, but he was pretty much confined to outside, where he wanted to be anyway, just in case there was a chance to mix it up with the feline cuties flirting in the neighborhood.

To get a sense of Red, you must understand something: He was so large and prowlish that when he was out and about, mothers pulled their small children back inside the house.

I was very, very proud of Red; his homecoming put me in a God-like category.

Genesis 1:26 states rather underwhelmingly that in the amazing and astonishing beginning of the very beginning of us, God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature so they can be responsible … “

And then, in perhaps the greatest omission in world literature, the text goes on to say, “for the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the cattle, and, yes, earth itself, and every animal that moves on the face of Earth.” In other words, for Red.

The author, seemingly unawares, blithely glosses over the emotional reaction — an unbelievable ellipses! Upon creation of beings like himself, God must have jumped up and down, waved his arms and  hooted! Adam and Eve must have screamed with pure delight. The animals must have jumped into a celebration chorus so raucous and joyful that it forever upstaged any and all imitative, animated, Disney-movie hit tunes!

What? The emotional response to creation was not mentioned? Perhaps, it was shockingly lost in the Hebrew oral tradition, or perhaps Moses thought he couldn’t do it linguistic justice.

But the effect wasn’t lost. According to the record, Adam and Eve jumped right into the forray and started happily naming things. With all the acumen of a Carl Linnaeus they classified the marvelous creatures they were  now wonderfully “responsible” for.

Cool! They acted out the DNA of God. They named, they brought home, they cared for — Red!

To care for the creation, to name it, feed it, pet it and bring it home with us– this is the image of God in us. The image of God is reflected in human responsibility for creatures. The sacred text itself says, God made us like him, so we could be responsible.

And in a damaged world and a broken creation, it is certainly the most God-like thing we can do to find lost creatures and to bring them home and care for them.

Want to be God-like?

Feed the dog.

Bring home a lost  humanoid too.

Ordering Disorder

Posted: January 13, 2012 in becoming
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Around him sat at least 15 open paint cans, a half-dozen paint trays half-full of paint and a good 20 rollers and brushes with paint hardening at the edges.

He looked up at me from the mess, smiled wryly and said, “It would have been a lot easier to do it myself with a paint gun and one helper.

This was what the end of a church painting project at a campground in Mexico.  About 20 people had been recruited, transported, armed with paint “weapons” and turned loose on a couple of now shinning buildings. It worked — kind of.

It’s typical. The  end of most attempts to order the earth have a behind-the-scenes disorder to them.  It’s called clean-up.

Last week, I got out the ladder, and took down the Christmas lights. There was a pile on the lawn, then a pile in the box, then Christmas was again on the top shelf of the garage.

Life is a lot about the clean up, about ordering the disorder created in our attempts to bring about order.

I talked to someone yesterday who is in need of redoing their taxes, in a better way, a more orderly, honest way. They told me that they  have a sense of an era closing. They simply aren’t going to cut corners they used to cut. A new definition of what’s orderly has inspired them and a mess is going to be cleaned up, as best it can be cleaned up.

Paint rollers, taxes, Christmas decorations, the kitchen sink, our minds, our hearts — all need attention, ordering. To leave them as they are is to complicate the future. To order them is to bring about the next thing, to provide an opportunity for something new to happen.

I just cleaned out my clothes closet in my bedroom. Some of the shirts and pants that I had not that long ago bought, placed in my closet, wore, washed and returned to the closet  were now tossed in a box to be donated, in order to restore order to my closet. Some of them, I just wasn’t wearing anymore and they were complicating and hiding the clothes I am wearing.

When I finished, I felt ready, for this year and I felt something else. I felt calm.

Isaiah the Jewish  prophet,  claimed that the effect of being right and doing the right thing is peace.

Order equals calm. I like it,  calm, a sense that for the moment things are okay.

What’s next? We decide, what to do with disorder in our lives.

A good plan for any chaos or mess  might look like the following:

First an ordering of the disorder, then calm.

The garage.

The closet.

The past.

A broken relationship.

A mental confusion.

The inner-most closet of the heart  — think cleanup.