THE SCARS THAT LOVE BUILT

There is a cross inside my body – a sliced T where my son was cut out and pulled from my womb. He was a little tangled – upside down and backwards – and it took a bit of doing to get him out. He is so beautiful.

I heard the word natural a lot after giving birth to my children. As in, Did you have a naaaatural childbirth? I know what was meant – the question was really, Did you take the drugs, or did you take the pain? And in what manner did that baby get out of your body? It felt like I was being asked, What kind of woman are you? It felt like a litmus test – an analysis of my character, my capacity for selflessness, my inner fortitude, the purity of my love. Sometimes it felt like they were asking about my wedding night – as in, Did you wear white?

I don’t like the way it sounds – natural – like there was something unnatural about being cut from my body. There was no other way for him to be born. It was the most natural thing in the world to say to the doctor, Just do what you have to do. My body, for his life – it wasn’t any kind of choice.

I thought about this when I heard my daughter use the words my fault to repeat the story of Jesus’ death on the cross. It kind of made me cringe. My fault. I had audio for the sermon that was playing on repeat in her head – I know it line for line. Jesus died for you – for your sin. If there was no other person on earth, and it was just you, Jesus still would have died – he loves you that much. If all you had ever done was to tell one little white lie, Jesus still would have had to die – your sin separates you from God. Even if by some miracle you had never even sinned, he would still have had to die for you – you can’t stand in His presence, He’s just that holy and you, in your very nature, are a hopeless sinner. But because he loves you, his body was broken for you. He was stripped and flogged for you. He bled, he was pierced, he was humiliated – he did that for you. He died because of you.

That can sound a whole big bunch like, It’s your fault.

But I think about the T-shaped scar inside me, and the straight one stitched across my abdomen where the doctor cut my child out of me Caesar style – and I look at my beautiful son – and I never think the words, You did this to me. I never, ever imagine, It was your fault.

That would just be ridiculous. What does blame have to do with any of it?

It wasn’t his fault that I conceived him, that I wanted him, that I loved him and had a name for him before he even existed in my mind. It wasn’t his fault that he grew in me upside down and backwards. It wasn’t his fault that I submitted to the will of the Physician to do the only thing possible, the one thing necessary, to give him life.

I chose him. I loved him. The entirety of my flesh was devoted to him. And so what, if my body was wounded to give him life? I would have died for him. My scars are my commitment to him carved in my flesh, and I wear those scars with joy. It was my honour. It was my responsibility. It was my job.

There’s no great mystery to it – it is not about fault.

It is simply the nature of Love.

And there is no real strangeness to it, though it is beyond all comprehension – because of overflowing joy and absolute Love, It is God Who is the singer of the Easter song, and God sings that song over me…

She lives!

 Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross. ~ Hebrews 12:2

 

CROSS ON, CROSS OFF

And he was saying to them all, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me”. ~ Luke 9:23

I’ll be honest – I still stumble over the cross. Not the Jesus bore the penalty for my sins part – that part, I adore though I still struggle to get a grasp on what it exactly means. Not the I’ve been reconciled with God, I’ve been redeemed, I’ve been bought with a price, I’ve been sealed by the blood of the Lamb – all of that abides smoothly like a balm on my soul. It’s that take up your cross and follow me part. That’s the stick that trips me – because that part is really hard. That part sucks rocks.

I can’t nail down what it means.

It’s what causes me to ask myself sometimes, Are you really sure that you’re even a Christian?

How can you call yourself a follower of Christ, if you actually don’t really want to follow him? Maybe ten steps behind waving palm branches, waiting for your portion of bread and fish, thirsty for water, hungry for righteousness – but carrying a cross? I don’t know. It’s not a parade – it’s not shiny jewelry on a chain around your neck. It is one slow, inglorious death march Jesus is asking us to take. Don’t carry a cross and expect not to be crucified on it.

So you have to ask yourself – Do I really believe that? Do I really believe that’s the way? Is this really what I want to teach my children?

It kind of came down to it this week – the rubber met the road and left a skid mark. I halted. I dropped my cross cold onto the ground, set my shoulders back straight and said, Seriously? Wtf. No.

Because it happened to my child. That’s how it is with convictions – they are stone solid, until it’s your child.

My child made a mistake. It wasn’t a big mistake – it was the kind of mistake a hundred other children could easily make in a day laughing, without conscience, without fear of reprisal. It was a mistake made in secret – nobody ever would have known. But she knew. And because she has a conscience that is tender, a heart that hungers for righteous and a stomach that spits sin out of it before it ever gets sour, she confessed it to me.

And because I never want her sin to go ingrown, into secret places, into hard to sweep spots, I took her by the hand and I said, This is the way. I said, The truth will only set you free. I said, You are so brave and I just love your heart and I am so very proud of you. I said, God will honour you for telling the truth.

But it didn’t really work out that way. The confession cost her. It cost her big.

Her mistake was not forgiven – in fact, it was held up and used against her. Not only that, but that little mistake drew old buried under the blood sins from years past to it like a magnet – things long ago repented of were pulled out and held against her. And a Jesus-loving adult pulled out an indelible marker and drew lines around her, and wrote words over her – all her sins. They called her a name.

And her tender conscience, her beautiful heart, her personal integrity, her unbelievable courage, her strength of character, her simple honesty, and her obedience to what’s right even when she’s done wrong – all of that was ignored, like it didn’t happen. Like she’d never been the one to confess it first, to shed tears over it, to seek to set it right.

And my soul felt Judas – like I had betrayed her with a kiss.

I thought long and hard about stones. I thought long and hard about picking one up and throwing it right back. I had a stack of them, equally sized, equally weighted.

But a Voice said, An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

I thought, It was such a stupid little mistake. What did I have to go and make it a big deal for? Why couldn’t I have taught her how to sweep under the rug? Nobody would ever have known.

But a Voice said, My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.

I thought, She did what was right, even though it was hard. Why, God, have you forsaken her?

But a Voice said, They do not know what they are doing.

And a Voice said, Forgive.

That cross is so hard – because it just is not fair. It is so unfair, it’s offensive.

My daughter got her first hard lesson in the painful part of the Gospel – that Truth does not spare you the cross. She paid the price for her sin old school. She got shunned, old school.

I am still going to teach my children the way. I am still going to teach them that God sees the heart, but that the only name He ever writes onto us is Mine.

But I’m not going to lie – the temptation is there. The next time somebody comes at my child with a log sticking out of their eye, I might decide to go old school. I might decide to think Yael. I might decide to think tent peg.

FAITH, HOPE, LOVE

I almost lost my faith this year. I know for absolute sure that I rolled a stone over my religion.

It isn’t that I for one moment stopped believing in God, but rather that I lost sight of Who God is. God came too close – took up more space than usual – and wouldn’t let me take a step back. God got BIG, and my soul had no scope fit for magnifying. I couldn’t draw God into focus.

I grazed the hem of the garment of Great and Mighty, and it made me feel so small. Like, bacteria small. What is one, single bacterium in a galaxy the size of ours? Or in a universe that holds over one hundred galaxies within it – and those being only what we are aware of? And then factor in time, and how much less than a breath in it we are? What is man, that God is even remotely mindful of me, that God would have any concern for my offspring? What in the world could a God that big – God Who breathed the stars into space – what could a God that beyond comprehension possibly care about a widow’s mite, or a servant’s unforgiving heart, or a finger crushed in a punch-press or a pierced belly button? How bored would God have to be to even notice, let alone care about what I do with my one gasp of fleeting life – let alone bother with what goes on within the untraveled, unravelled universe that is the mind of my heart?

I went a little Ecclesiastes.

I don’t exaggerate when I say that the BBC’s Planet Earth renewed my faith. I caught a glimpse of God in glory veiled. I beheld Beauty. I kept saying Wow, and Wow, and Wow – and, This is too much. My brain is going to explode. If I could really grasp this, I think I would actually die. And I clasped a thread from the hem of the garment of Holy.

I saw the majesty of vapour – of the ruach Elohim – how God moves as breath in all and through all and for all. I saw my place – how everything lives and dies and is renewed and changed, world within world within world into infinity. I saw how, This is not all about me.

I saw Love, and how small we make It, and how It’s nature is to magnify, to draw close, pulling us into God’s view, not the other way around. I saw how Love makes us larger than life.

I saw how very, very much we do not understand – how base our thoughts and words and actions are if they are empty of Love.

Because God IS Love. That invisible, mighty Force beyond parallel Who moves between people, Who leads us to choose to be together, Who asks us to choose to know another and causes us to ache to be fully known by another, Who invites us to pick dandelions, and to dance on couches, and to sing around lampposts, and floods us with happy just to stand on the street where someone lives; that Force Who strengthens our will to march and to fight and to lay down in trenches and to die; that Force that says your will, not mine – This is Love. This is God – not God’s activity. God. This is God in us, moving through us, to fulfill God’s purposes on the earth.

And Love put on skin and came among us so that we could see what exactly that word means.

And God tarnished the reputation of a terrified teenager to show that Love is never concerned with what people think. And God grew from a cell in her womb, made her swell, made her stretch, made her squat on her knees in pain to show that Love is not above wounding, that it comes with a cost, that it demands space to move and to grow. And God melted into her arms, and fell asleep on her breast, her milk pooled in his mouth and warm in his belly, and he let himself be fed and nourished by a girl who did not know what she was doing.

In everything God does in us, in every way God moves among us, God entrusts Himself – God entrusts Love – to people who do not know what they are doing. And we really do not have the faintest idea what we are doing.

We have yet to understand the most obvious.

God is patient, God is kind, and is not jealous; God does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; God does not seek His own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. God never fails. ~ 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

BOBBED HAIR, BOSSY WIVES AND WOMEN PREACHERS

The first thing I remember really wanting to be when I grew up was a preacher. I had dozens of dolls, all of which I loved, none of which I particularly wanted to mother – I would line them up in rows like in straight-backed pews in front of a white wooden play crib which I stood on its end to resemble a pulpit. I would peel back the pages of The Daily Bread and I would read to them all from its platitudes. Dearly beloved – let us pray. Passionately, like I had heard my Grandpa had done when he was loving Jesus so much that he sweated straight through his suit jacket. I would pound. I would lean. I would watch the plastic faces for tears – for signs in flat eyes of conviction, for signs that the Holy Spirit was leading.

For a dozen reasons, not least of which was that I was a girl, not least of which was that I was afraid of the power of my voice, of my unbridled tongue, of my sass, of my too-big-for-your-britches, of my who do you think you are, not least of which was that I acquired early a taste for sin, I set that dream aside. I put away childish things.

 

I thought about becoming a lawyer.

It can take a long time to switch that question, What do you want to be? for What is the name of that plant growing within you? It can take a long time to wrap your arms around yourself, to say yes to the God thing seeded into you, to say yes to the knotting and the twining, and to the droughts that make the roots dig down deep for water. It can take a lot of years to learn that the Pruner’s shears are for you – for you, so that you might grow tall and straight and full, so that you don’t have to even think how to withstand fire and flood and famine.

And it can happen in one day – in one blaze of razing fire – that all the brambles and bird’s nests and the things others have built are removed to reveal what was there all along growing tender, low to the ground, deeply rooted in rich, blackened soil, already bearing fruit.

My novel is never going to be born – I am not going to live to be one hundred.

But I am not a novelist – I never, ever was. I am a preacher.

I have begun a new book. It is smaller, it is less impressive, it might fall the way of foolish things – but it is the berry born of the vine from the seed that was planted in me, stewarded to me by the hand of a loving God Who trusts me, Who believes in me, Who has invested deeply into me, Who has infinite time and a knack for knitting.

All things work together for good for those who love Him and are called to His purposes.

 

NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE

I wonder sometimes how often Jesus’ disciples got into scraps with one another. They were a pretty hodgepodge group of guys, and even the dullest of personalities have been known to clash. Big-mouthed, burly fishermen and straight-laced, don’t you see what you’re doing tax collectors – Jesus handpicked them all. They had to have walked loaded with baggage. They had to have had soul-struggles knotted into their sandals, unlaced in scuffles in the dust. Having the Prince of Peace living and breathing beside you twenty-four seven is no guarantee that everyone is going to agape.

There are things that make my blood boil, hanging my own soul-struggles like an iron pot over a fire. I get that Somebody find me a whip kind of feeling. I badly want to flip over some tables and not even help to clean up after. It always feels like righteous indignation but of course it rarely, if ever, is. Most of the time, I have to dig through a mile-high pile of bat shit pride before I can even  get a glimpse at the root of it.

I have an aversion to people who carry rulers – stiff, flat things that measure off life in millimeters, that mark the straight and narrow, that find their way to a child’s backside when they step out of line. I see in their eyes, You just need a good spanking.

It’s not rules that I don’t like – rules are boundaries. People who have been violated have love affairs with fences. If I were being crucified, the sign over my head would likely read, No Trespassing. Rules help people to get along with one another, keep order and structure, remind us that we belong to one another and that life is not all about us. Rules teach us respect for ourselves and for others, teach us obedience and what authority means, give security, safety and stability. Rules are a protection, a structure, a shield. They are a well-shingled roof over our head, and clean walls around us.

Rules are boundaries, and I am all about boundaries. Without Law there can be no Grace, and I am all about Grace. God save us from a world without rules.

What sets my blood bubbling is Rules. Capital R. When the Rule stops being a roof and a wall, and becomes the foundation – the thing everything is built upon, the last word, the period at the end of the sentence. When adherence to the Rule takes precedence over the moral imperative to carry one another’s burdens and to love one another. When the journey of a mile in another’s moccasins is subverted by the need for socks.

There are Rules. Period.

Rules are solid foundations – you can sink your feet deep into them like wet concrete and sing with all confidence, I will not be shaken, I will not be moved. When you have a Rule, you are battle ready – almost always inherited, revered, passed down from generations, Rule is the sword of Law. When you wield it, at your back stands an impenetrable army of cement-blocked soldiers, fixed and immovable. You own the last word. WOA. Hold up! Nobody is trying to OFFEND you. This is not MY opinion - this is a RULE.

When you have a Rule, you don’t have to read between the lines. Kindness, compassion and empathy become the extra that you do – not required, but extended at will because you are in a good mood, well-intentioned and perhaps actually a good person. Truthfully, you don’t have to care much about another soul to be classified as a good person. There is no law that says you have to care – even a nurse is not required to care.

When you are swinging a Rule you don’t have to stop and take the time to consider whether your words or your actions might be a serrated knife into somebody’s spirit-spine on any particular morning. You don’t have to look in their eyes and see desperation, maxed-out, hanging by a thread. You’re right. Clearly you’re right. Everybody can see plain as day that you’re right.

Obedience to Rule is freedom for the keeper of it – freedom from guilt for not stopping to lend your gifting and resources to another person for the monumental task of trying to actually pull their wailing donkey out of a deep, dark well. Whose donkey falls into a well? How does that even happen? Are you giving it water? I’m not saying you’re necessarily doing anything wrong, but my donkey has never been in a well, ever. We have Rules. OMG. Is your donkey not wearing SHOES?

When you serve Rules, you don’t have to spend any energy wrestling with God or woman, getting all sweaty and sore trying to get a good hold on Holy. You don’t have to set the motives of your impure heart onto the God-scale, ponder the vastness of the created universe that exists between bone and marrow, or unravel your too much tension knitted mind back to the point of the dropped stitch. You don’t ever have to feel your heart break for another person and ask on their behalf, Why, God, why? You already know why – they didn’t follow the Rules. Period.

It is a toxic mentality, it is demoralizing, and on this I have completely lost the will to try to see it from the other side. Perhaps that’s one of those good God things that died in me this year – taking walk-abouts in other people’s shoes. God has corked the flow of Grace for that. I’ve seen one too many women literally damned to hell for cutting their hair, for wearing pants, and for wearing open-toed shoes to church. Don’t get me started on the perils of dancing. We wouldn’t know a proper Rule if it spanked us.

I have been a woman at the end of every known to man resource, forcing myself to get out of bed, digging deeper than Hades for the will to be kind, to not take it out on my children, to not drop the ball on anything that really, truly matters. Armed with a slingshot and not a Solid Rock in sight, in a battle to the death against generational curses. Poor in spirit. Not feeling blessed. I have narcissistically prioritized my own needs in my children – compassion, expression and choice. I have wrapped myself sticky like a fly in a web, surrendered to the bloodletting of faith, hope and love. I’ve been bent low, back down into the Hades hole, under the weight of Rules like, Thou Shalt Wear Socks.

Always with the socks. I like the way Jesus said it – Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

Jesus did not go out of his way to break the rules – he paid his taxes and he obeyed his mother, who may or may not have forced him to keep his five year old feet booted in a library. But Jesus understood that at the heart of God, the point of it all, was people – broken, burdened, mind-twisted, world-weary people seeking out Love and to be fully known. He looked them in the eyes, and he really saw them. I think Jesus fully grasped that when your ship is going down one of the first things thrown over the side of the boat is Rules, and that the only thing that can even hope to float you is Grace.

I do wonder a lot about Jesus – what he was like, really. I wonder if he had any friends, back when he was a boy, back when he was hanging out in the temple, not out kicking cans and rocks, not joining any clubs. I wonder if people thought he was kinda weird, gossiped about him, scape-goated him, told their kids not to play with him. I wonder if he was good at everything or if the Father measured out his gifts, gave him a little less to work with, forced him to draw from Spirit. I wonder if he struggled with grammar, with the difference between the tenses – Past, Present, Future – and if he ever had to practice, practice, practice and do it again.

I wonder if being so attuned to the Spirit, all senses abuzz and aware of everything, gave his body temple sensory issues – caused his collar to chronically itch the back of his neck, made him struggle to sit both feet on the floor at the table, gave him an aversion to anything too soft on his skin or cinched too tightly at the waist, caused him to say, Who touched me? I wonder if he fidgeted to distraction over anything that came between his travelling shod with the Gospel of Peace feet and the grass and stone earth to which his flesh would never turn.

It’s impossible to know. And not that it matters, but of this I am almost certain – Jesus did not wear socks.

BE THOU MY VISION

Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again.The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” Then the Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on. ~ Exodus 14:13-15

Guidance and direction are no doubt at the top of the list of things that people turn their heads heavenward for. God is probably the only Being in the universe that I have ever looked to and sincerely said, Just tell me what to do – which is kind of a big deal for a person with Oppositional Defiance Disorder. If God ever once actually wrote on a wall for me, I’d probably die of shock – I might be more inclined to think it was a handy God-card to play in times of confusion.

God doesn’t generally tell me what to do. Morally, yes. Matters of conscience, absolutely. Not that I always obey, but God has woken me up in the middle of the night and flat-out said, You need to deal with this, please. But for big life decisions and forks in the road, I’ve tried knock, knock, knocking on Heaven’s Door and have received only the wisdom of raw knuckles. I’ve tried drawing straws, I’ve tried jumping overboard, but there never seems to be a swallow you up here, spit you out there whale around when you need one. 

It has happened that I've been on my face on the floor, being still and waiting on the deliverance of the Lord, and a Voice will say, Why are you crying out to Me? Keep moving.

Sometimes I think I confuse God with a game show host – I just want a quick peek behind Door Number Two before I decide if I should sell my house and move to Yemen. We’ve all read Robert Frost – we know how way leads on to way. Nobody wants to mess up, miss the boat or land on a snake that’s just going to take us back to square one – unless the boat is the Titanic, and then we definitely want to be sure to miss that. Isn’t that what God is with us for? To say, This is the way – walk in it?

Two roads diverge in a wood, and we can lose all sense of reason. Oh God, where do You want me to go? Where do you want to go? I don’t know, where do You want to go? What do you mean, where do I want to go? I’m everywhere. Where do you want to go? Wellll… honestly? The Promised Land You were mentioning earlier sounds nice. You know, all that ‘flowing with milk and honey’ stuff? It sounds pretty appealing. Which way will fast-track me there? You don’t know anything about taking care of cows or bees. Good point. But I want to be in Your perfect will, Oh God, and I especially want life to be a lot easier – I would assume, because You love me, that we’re pretty much on the same page on that one? Not too easy, mind you – I don’t want to feel guilty about how great my life is. But just good enough that people can see that You’re with me, and that I’m doing all the right things. I've loved You with everything in me, and it would give us both credibility if my life was a little more ‘charmed’. Honestly, right now, I've got that 'I want to go back to Egypt' kind of feeling going on - so consider Yourself warned. You know the kind of troubles I really like? The kind that allow me to play to my strengths. No more of those ‘take you out at the knees’ kind of troubles, please – my floors are rarely clean enough for that. I would really like to go in a direction that makes my life less stressful, allows me to use my strengths, brings out the best in me and makes me feel that I have fulfilled my purpose as a human being. This sounds like a job interview. I’m just looking for a little direction, God. Just a quick little finger-point, really, and I’m good to go. I am having a hard time hearing Your voice over the sounds of my children fighting, and the washing machine is kind of loud. Sorry, did You say ‘right’, or ‘left’? Seriously? This again? How old are you? Enough with this ‘right or left, right or left’ stuff – it’s starting to get on My nerves. Oh God, is that really You? I don’t recognize Your voice – I’ve never heard You use the word ‘nerves’ before. God, if this is really God, just give me a sign so I know that it’s You. (Face palm) Listen. I gave you skills, I gave you desires, I gave you burdens, I gave you My solemn vow of faithfulness to you. I care about who you are, not where you are. And you know exactly what that means, so don't pretend that you don't. 

It has done me well to remember that God has no problem with letting me walk around and around and around the same stupid mountain until I die, if I can’t manage to get my attitude in line. God is not concerned with destination – God is concerned first with redemption, and then with having right minded people ready to accept and endure the very hard work that is required to live and to make peace in the land of Promise. Apparently this can take more than forty years if you’re prone to error and grumbling.

We generally think that having direction means that we can see – and the thing about deserts is that on a clear day, sand dunes aside, you really should be able to see for miles and miles. Anything ominous coming, you’ll see ages before it pulls up alongside you – not that you’ll have anywhere to hide. Vision should really be the least of your concerns, except for the fact that everything looks the same whichever direction that you look.

It isn’t that you can’t see. It’s that you can see everything, and you can’t see any way out. Nothing you do makes any difference to the scenery. You lose your point of reference. Whichever direction you turn its same sand, different dune. You start making mistakes on purpose just so you have something new to sing about, so you can taste something other than manna and sand, so you don't forget that you are alive and that life is about more than one foot in front of the other.

During their hurried flight from Egypt, and while they were waylaid in the desert by their own rebellion, impatience, dissatisfaction, ingratitude and lack of faith, God led His people by giving them something fixed to set their eyes upon – not a road map, not an inuksuk, but a Seeing, Knowing, Moving presence that completely blocked their line of vision. He led them by a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night.

In the daytime, a cloud rolling in front of you would block your line of sight at a time when you really should be able to see what lies in every direction. It would allow you a clean view of everything except what lies ahead. At night, a fire blazing in front of you would allow vision when you really should not be able to see what is going on around you. It would not serve as a light unto your path – it would blind you to what lay ahead while pushing back the darkness to reveal things that have nothing to do with where you’re going and would otherwise never be seen.

I don’t even have any clarity on what that means, practically speaking – but in those times where I feel like running and I can see everything BUT which way to go, I know that I need to trust the smoke and the flame and that God is in them. I know that following God has nothing to do with seeing the path, and everything to do with locking eyes on the Guide and trusting without grumbling, without trying to run out in front, without holding the security of slavery in my heart. I know that this becomes especially important when God is trying to put distance between you and something, as it is when you find yourself going around and around the same stupid mountain.

RAZING CAIN: Mid-life Crisis - Part II

My family and I spent time this past weekend watching some of the Planet Earth movies produced by the BBC. They’re a great thing to watch if you’re feeling insignificant in the cosmos, pregnant with doubt, low on words and highly attuned to the shimmering threads of birth and death hanging taut in knitted webs behind your eyes. I could not watch them without thinking God – without feeling fearfully and wonderfully made – without feeling unfulfilled purpose.

In caves and desserts, oceans and jungles, there are galaxies within universes that are teeming with an intricate and savage beauty that human eyes will simply never see. Insects crawl from the jungle floor once every seventeen years, cocoon into moths within twenty-four hours, and spend their one remaining day of life being a food source. Translucent glow-worms transform a sunless cavern into a starry sky while salivating balls of silk into dangling, predatory strings of iridescence more exquisite than any strand of pearls.

Humpback whales creak like wood as they slide nose-up beneath the water, their bodies ridged, scraped and dull like their surroundings, like the underside of a barnacled boat that is sinking. Brightly marked salamanders crawl out from between grey rocks looking as smudged and carelessly coloured as a chalk drawing on a sidewalk. Shellacked ducks bob on water, their bodies carved, bejewelled and painted with a fine point brush.

Fresh water sits impossibly on top of salt water like oil, in a cave that Elohim forgot when He first separated the waters. Glimmering pink fish with porcelain-like fins nestle between rocks in a lake of sulphuric acid. Calcite drips like melting wax from the ceilings of caverns that lie beneath mountains of limestone, and shapes into glossy pillars of rippled bone. Water and wind erode stone into deep valleys forming ruffles and hollows resembling layers of eyelet on a spread-out skirt. Crystals hang opulently in rows in caves like a hall of chandeliers, or spread across flat land like a blanket of sugar.  

All day long, all night long, the earth is singing and screaming and dancing and dying, gyrating and heaving in one perilously sensual tango, fluttering like the tinsel on a Christmas pageant halo. Nowhere is desolate – at its most barren the earth, like the very Word of God, is living and active. The earth echoes The Name, bears witness to the ways of God, lives and acts as one body that is continually renewing and being transformed and testifying. It tells the God story written by the Divine hand even into the unseen cells of the universe that is our own body.

It makes no difference to me whether creation took six days or six billion years – whether it was birthed with a bang or a whimper – the earth holds the shape of the fingerprints of its Maker. The whole earth cries out, Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty, Who Was and Is and Is to Come.

The earth was my first spiritual teacher. As a child, growing up in the country, I watched my parents burn out an overgrown brush near our house. I remember wondering, tearfully and fearfully, why any wise hand would want to destroy something that had taken so long to grow, that had done what it was told, achieved the purposes for which it was created and that’s only offence was to grow too much. I remember my parents explaining, the way only ones whose hands have lived in the soil can explain, the necessity of death, how it walks hand in hand with life in and out of season. They used the word faith and taught me to believe in seeds and bulbs and things unseen, and I learned what it meant to wait and see.

I saw the charred, shorn ground when the green began its pushing forth – I saw how the earth is strong, how it bends its knee, how it receives its renewal without petulance or grudge or need for a better story.

I learned it then, before I had ever tasted the sourness of death, what it means to die and to be born again.

Something died in me this year. Not cracked, not broken, not spilled out – dead, in the only way that the living can comprehend the meaning of the word dead. A good, growing thing inside me was set ablaze by a Wise Hand and razed to the ground, and it is completely gone. It is so far gone, its place remembers it no more.

If this has ever happened to you, you will know that the first thing you become aware of – after the fire has died down and the smoke has cleared and the first new buds of something unidentifiable begin to push out – is that you are naked. There isn’t a place in the world to hide when you are being born again. Old words, like old wine skins, like old plows, like old fig-leaves, must be replaced.

That word Christian – I do not think it means what we think it means.