#SOL17: Wonder that Leads to Praise

House by the Tracks (M.A. Reilly)

I.

The most devout person I have known was my mom, Catherine Reilly. Her faith revealed itself in her day-to-day living, in the kind acts she did quietly, in the way her study of St. Paul's letters informed her decisions, in her generosity. She was a woman filled with wonder and more. It wasn't until I was listening to an interview between Krista Tippett and Mary Catherine Bateson that I better understood the relationship between wonder and faith. Bateson was discussing the intersection among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and said this:

"And what struck me is that what — actually, all three of the religions that come from Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — that what we all have in common is the sense of wonder that leads to praise" (from here).

A sense of wonder that leads to praise.

It was not wonder alone, but rather wonder that led to praise that better fit my memory of my mom.  So certain of God's love, she showed my brothers and me the many ways to hear one's conscience.  Years later, these daily lesson lived, more than taught, remain with me the most.

II.

I woke up thinking about this sense of conscience-listening this morning. I wondered how the many people today who will cast a vote for Roy Moore will do so. What role does one's conscience play in how decisions are made and broken?  How is deep religious faith balanced with the desire for expedient outcomes?  The president has told the voters of Alabama that he needs a senate seat to make America great again.  He told them, “The people of Alabama will do the right thing...Roy Moore will always vote with us. VOTE ROY MOORE!”  His sole argument for Moor is that he will vote for "us" and us is a narrow group.

A devil's bargain that.

I was raised Roman Catholic and surely at the liberal end of that continuum and so it may not be so surprising that the white Evangelical movement as displayed these last few decades has confounded me.  White evangelicals gave us Trump and perhaps by the end of the day they will give us another predator, Roy Moore. It seems antithetical to all things holy to support  men who fail to engender a sense of wonder that leads to praise, unless the praise is about themselves. Where is God in such displays? How do these self-defined religious people square their choice with their faith? How do you look a pedophile, like Moore, in the eye and vote yes?

I don't buy the argument that because Moore has not undergone a trial voters ought not to consider the vile crimes that the women who have spoken out against him have claimed.  That many were minors should concern all. That argument is weak and frankly, if the man in question was someone else--say a Democrat--would they be so hesitant to believe the accusers?  Just look at pizzagate when many of the same people believed that Hillary Clinton was running a child pornography ring out of the basement of pizzerias. Such idiocy is still believed.

I'm curious how you reconcile yourself to all of this. What's your understanding?

#SOL17: Faith

From my art journal, 2017

Faith
is the bird
that feels the light
And sings
when the dawn
is still dark.

                                 —RABINDRANATH TAGORE




It was decades ago when I first heard Rob, the man who I would later marry, read a poem, "Faith," that he had written. I was in the basement of an old mill in Paterson, NJ--one of many in the audience that night. We had gathered to hear poetry read aloud. We were moved by the narrative in Rob's poem that chronicled  a neighborhood in Hell's Kitchen--a neighborhood he knew so well.

#SOL17: Faith - A Poem My Husband Left Behind

Rob and Max (Many, many years ago)

16 months after Rob died I have found the courage to sit down at his computer and to begin to browse. It's a stormy night and somehow the mood seems right or perhaps the courage I needed to do this is somehow present.  Rob left behind 40 notebooks and a computer filled with images and poems and stories and the the first 6 chapters of a novel he was writing when we first me. Lemmings. 

I have been thinking about a poem he wrote--one I fell in love with as I was falling in love with him. I can remember him reading the poem aloud in in the basement of an old mill in Paterson, NJ at some poetry event. The emotion his voice captured. The passion. It remains.

He wrote "Faith" when he was 33-years-old. What legacies there are that he has stored and left behind in this old computer. Such gifts.

Rob Cohen

FAITH

   

I stood on line

in a chinese takeout place

on 9th ave

while the owner

leaned

his back against the counter

& spoke

on the telephone

I wanted to know

how

an american phone

could speak chinese

as if the technology

were language dependent

& I thought

of all the prejudice

I was taught

about foreigners

    

that each country

has a separate history

that all those people

in all those places

are different

that this

is america

& our technology

is ours

do you picture china

with phones?

Or do you see

a peasant

farmer

in a coolie hat

& loose garment

in a paddy

hungry

or perhaps

at work

        bent over

some old piece of equipment

in an antiquated sweatshop

in a rickety seaport warehouse

where there are no downtowns

this man

who spoke chinese

became more

& more animated

until I realized

his voice

was translated

by a device

which does not remember

conversation

yet carries out

an ordered transfer

of energies,

              his voice

broken into parts

dissembled

& reassembled

in a demonstration

of 3rd grade science

where atoms

are made of parts

so small

that the distance between them

is comparably vast

as in a solar system

where most of everything

is made of nothing

is this the logos?

No. It is just

cheap talk.

& I wondered

who

was on the other end

of the line--

a chinese man

in china?

do you see him

in a 3-pc suit

briefcase in hand

as he stands

in a tall building 

an

     important man

with a corner office

one window

a view

of the waterfront

the other

of the countryside

No.

He spoke to a different china

--the one downtown

is a selfsufficient village

a bunch of brownstones

where gardeners work underground

old apothecaries

have potions for everything

& the gang of 4

wears leather jackets

knives & chains

a west side story

in chinese

& because the words that carried

across connections

were messages

of a confused culture

chinatownman

in a broken down universe

tells us

how it is

each mystery

lessens the number of things

we understand

about democratic laws

that let a chinese man

speak his ancestors tongue

on an american phone

laws which last

& work

only

as we believe in them

did we want phones?

Doctrine tells us

to stay on the line

just hold on

it will work better

once we find the explanation

for all of this

we can harness

this universe, understand

its every machination

an autism

which barely initiates

is its own language

it keeps

every last bit moving

when we already know

what it means to believe

that the way we have come

is not

the way things are

.

#Poetry Break: Faith

Counting (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Faith

  - by Tim Seibles

Picture a city
and the survivors: from their
windows, some scream. Others
walk the aftermath: blood
and still more blood coming
from the mouth of a girl.

This is the same movie
playing all over
the world: starring everybody
who ends up where the action
is: lights, cameras, close-ups—that
used to be somebody’s leg.

Let’s stop talking
about God. Try to shut-up
about heaven: some of our friends
who should be alive       are no longer alive.
Moment by moment death moves
and memory doesn’t remember,

not for long: even today—even
having said
this, even knowing that
someone is stealing
our lives—I still
had lunch.

Tell the truth. If you can.
Does it matter     who they were,
the bodies in the rubble: could it matter

that the girl was conceived by two people
buried in each other’s arms, believing
completely in the world between them?

The commanders are ready. The gunners
go everywhere. Almost all of them
believe in God. But somebody should

hold a note     for the Earth,
a few words for whatever being

human     could mean
beneath the forgotten sky:

some day one night,
when the city lights go out for good,

you won’t believe how many stars

-->

Copyright © 2014 by Tim Seibles. From Fast Animal (Etruscan Press, 2011). Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.

#SOL16: An Old Chair and All We Cannot Know

Rob's chair.

I.

It was just an old, undersized, mauve reclining wing chair. 28 years old to be more precise. My parents bought it for Rob and me and we moved that chair three times across the last few decades. Today, I gave the chair away.

Rob always hated the chair. He said it was uncomfortable and though I defended the chair for decades, the truth is no one sat in the chair very often. About two years ago, Rob bought a chair of his own to replace an oversized recliner. He kept the chair in the guest room alongside the shelves and shelves of books he had read or was reading. This past Sunday, I finally summoned the courage to reorganize the room, removing old and damaged books, office supplies, and other odds and ends that found their way there. And getting rid of the clutter allowed me to better see Rob's chair. It was exhausting work--the third room I had cleaned and it was late in the day and so I sat for a bit in the chair, I think for the first time, and realized that Rob knew comfort.  The chair fit like an old friend and it was an old friend I so needed. And though Rob died in late winter, I felt as if I was saying goodbye to my husband this past Sunday.  At one point I asked Rob to send me a sign, something, anything.

Some days grief is nothing more than raw, unprocessed pain. Just pain. Sunday was such a day.

II.

On Sunday evening, I dragged Rob's chair to our bedroom, thinking I would swap it with the mauve recliner. Devon helped me to get the recliner out of the room and as I eyed it I noticed it was faded and no matter what I did to clean it, it still, would be uncomfortable.

Is this something you really want to keep? my son asked. 

I don't know. My mom gave it to us. 

It was never comfortable, mom. 

I laughed and said, You sound just like your dad. He too must be laughing at this, cause you know what? He was right. I never told him that, but that chair was never comfortable. 

We each stood at the top of the stairs, the chair between us as I considered what to do. Okay, let's take it downstairs.

I thought to donate the chair to the Vietnam Vets who have been to our home more times in the last few months than most, but learned they don't accept recliners. So instead, the chair sat in the hallway for another day until we hauled it outside. I then posted information about the chair on a Facebook group for my town and am hoping someone will take the chair away.

III.

For the last two weeks I couldn't meditate. I'd sit and begin to fidget 10 minutes in. I remembered a friend saying that her brothers had specific places in their homes for meditation. That made sense to me but I found that couldn't determine such a place in my own home. After settling Rob's chair into a corner of our bedroom, I wondered if I might have found my meditation place. Early this morning, before getting involved in the world, I sat in the chair, feeling it fold around me and I easily meditated.

No fidgeting, just that powerful fall to no time, no space. As I sat in the chair, I felt surrounded by Rob's spirit.  On Monday evening, I was telling this story to a group of women and one named what I could not say, "You got your sign from Rob."

And how right those words felt to me. My eyes grew wet immediately, stung and Yes, I wanted to say, Yes, I did get a sign, even though saying it aloud felt a bit corny. Before Rob's death I didn't pay much attention to signs, nor do I recall placing any great value on stories about signs. Before enduring Rob's illness and death, I was more a doubting Thomas wanting verification through a sense.  Give me what can be observed, what the mind determines. Watching Rob die and living the aftermath has opened me to possibilities that are not rational.  Grief mostly requires us to believe in what is beyond our experience--what is beyond our capacity to name. Grief is its own language full of starts and stops and pauses where early morning light finds a woman humbled by all she could not have known, held in the comfort of her husband's opened hands.

#SOL16: Design

(M.A. Reilly, iPhone, hipstamatic app)

I've been planting. A lot. Filling clay pots with geraniums, petunias, fuchsia, lavender, lobelia, vinca, Dracaena spikes, rosemary, spearmint, tarragon, larkspur, snapdragons, and heliotrope. Inside, I have potted plants from last year and as soon as the weather warms a bit more I will be putting the parsley, basil, aloe, and cactus outside. In gardens I have planted over the years I notice that the peonies are up and the Hosta has broken through the ground and is unfurling. Azaleas and lilacs are beginning to bloom, rhododendrons are budding, day lilies are growing and the hydrangeas are beginning to reclaim their spaces. The butterfly bushes are greening and finally the birch trees are leafing. There's something so satisfying about growing plants and bushes; trees and shrubs.

Spring gardening reminds me that something bigger than my immediate sense of life is at work here. This morning find me thinking about Robert Frost who in the poem, Design, asked if design governs in a thing so small as the interaction among a spider, moth, and heal-all. Frost lodges such an important question of faith in a few lines. I remember Rob and I discussing this poem once and Frost's question during an English class. We were impossibly young at the time and matters of faith, of God, of mortality were distant marks we mostly ignored. We were so busy living, loving.

(M.A. Reilly, iPhone, hipstamatic app)

Now, matters of faith, of God, of mortality and afterlife are more immediate. I never expected Rob to die so young, to become a widow while still in my 50s. I didn't expect that my husband who never professed much belief in God would be the one to help me know that design does govern. In the last few weeks of Rob's life he shared with me what he was experiencing as he readied to leave this life. He told me he knew how to leave, how to cross over. He told our friend Jane one night as she sat up with him. As Jane tells me, Rob said, "I am seeing the most glorious things. Things you cannot see." 40 hours before he died, before he slipped into a coma, my brother, Jack and I stood next to Rob's bed and marveled at the look of ecstasy that lit his face as he stared at the ceiling of the room. We knew he was seeing well beyond what each of our eyes could see; he was seeing beyond our mortal limits. Rob told me he knew how to get to the next life and when it was my time he would be there to help me cross over. And he will.

Spring reminds me that life beats on infused with designs I sometimes understand and ones I am graced sometimes to sense.