WORDS MADE FLESH

I have a fear of losing my voice. I send the words out wrapped in hooded blessing, and I try not to think about where they might end up or where they might trip and fall. I lose faith in them sometimes – I wonder if they will be kind and determined, as I mean them to be, and whether they have the strength and the wisdom to withstand a wolf. I want to tempt them to return to me, but they are already changed. They are already in somebody’s belly.

At times I feel a hand clamping over my mouth, and I don’t know whose it is – I don’t know whether to bite on my tongue or the hand. The words want to escape, but I don’t know if I am their captor or their abettor. I am thinking about ineffable, and I am asking the God words what they are even for – what is it they are trying to do?

Sometimes I have to talk with other words – listen to ones that I know are other. I need to know my neighbour. I may need to borrow some sugar – one of us may land in a ditch. I need to stand face to face with God words that I don’t like, that I don’t believe, that are written in ways that anger me or hurt. I need to feel myself trip over them and bang my head. I need to remind myself that it’s ok – it is not death, for the words to hang there abandoned, despised, rejected. I need to bear witness to how life comes forth reborn because we cannot agree to disagree.

There are words that are simply true for everybody – breathing, loving, and pain. They are blankets – they don’t need to be spoken because we already know, yet we still want to pull them around us. We share them willingly with one another, when we are cold, when we are afraid, when we love. The words become the light, the wind, the earth, the sea, wrapping us in all that we know together. The words enfold us in the safe embrace of the universe – they assure us that we are, none of us, alone.

But there are words that are intimate, timid, murmured by a solitude within us, drawn from us because we are alone. They are drawn from us while we are asleep. With the God words our soul is cut and shaped into bones. The bones are sent out to find flesh to absorb them and give them a place to live. The offering is taken – a piece of ourselves – and cupped in the hands of God. We hope that God will breathe into it. We hope we will awake to a mate.

TELLING TALES

Since making the rookie mistake of saying out loud to people that I am writing a novel, I generally get asked one of two questions – each entirely predictable and without answer. What is it about? How far along are you?  I don’t know how to satisfy these questions. It’s not a baby – girl or boy, how many weeks? I don’t know what it’s about – I haven’t written it yet. I don’t know how far along I am – but I’m a very, very long way from done. I just want it to be healthy.

If I am feeling safe or risky or pressured, I will sometimes offer, It’s about Sarah. Blank stare. You know – Sarah? Yawn. Tucked between crisp paper sheets, back at the beginning of The Book, in a dead sleep. Abraham’s wife. Isaac’s mother. When your story is 127 years from beginning to end, I do think there is something faulty about not being identifiable by much more than that.

There are a lot of things that frustrate me about Sarah, and about the way we tend to read her story. I have yet to resolve for myself whether or not I even like her. I don’t know that I’m supposed to like her. Honestly, I kind of don’t. It’s difficult to write that. It’s difficult to say out loud, I’d rather be on an episode of ‘Cops’ than model my life after a woman like that.

 She must have been impressive. She’s the CHOSEN. The MATRIARCH. Overlooking a few notable very bad decisions and one cynical laugh, she’s a perfect example of that most definable and desirous of creatures – the Godly woman. She’s a living sacrifice, a testament to faith. She’s beautiful. She whips up a feast fit for angels on a moment’s notice. She’s the Tammy Wynette of Genesis – the emblematic long-suffering wife doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons, and standing by her man. He, in turn, gives her a very expensive funeral.

Sometimes I want to skim over her. Make justification for how she used and abused her handmaid, Hagar. Not think too long and hard about how she tossed Ishmael – her own son, for all intents and purposes – into the desert to die once she’d birthed another on her own. Not consider why she did not rip Abraham apart with her hands, after he had tied up their child and tried to light him on fire. After that episode I would have put the God-covenant in a pitched basket and sent it down the river for someone else to find. I would have rolled that old man up in a carpet and hammered a peg through his temple while he slept. No. More. God. Encounters.

But I’ve been conditioned. I want Sarah to be holier than me. I want her to be devout, full of faith, relentless in her chasing after righteousness, courageous and indomitable, dignified. I want her to be always only a woman seeking after, and submissive to, God’s heart. I want her to be character flawed. A weaker vessel. A little cracked. I want to be able to read her story and press my hand to my forehead, and say wistfully, Oh, IF ONLY. If only you had just trusted God a little more, a little longer, you would have had everything you ever wanted. And how the world would be different now! I want it to just be a story.

God forbid Sarah should think and feel and behave like a real person. Nobody wants her to actually be a broken thing – shattered, spilled out, making a mess all over the floor, stinging our noses. It feels so wasteful.

If Sarah wrapped those crisp, white sheets around herself and crawled out from between the black covers, and spoke, I think she would be terrifying. She might float out over my bed at night, like Fruma Sarah from Fiddler on the Roof, and with musty burial wraps billowing around her she’d screech at me, How do you like me now?!

I ask God for the courage not to reach out and try to soothe her.

I pray to remember that God more than loves the mistake-makers. God chooses them. God goes galaxies out of the way to seek them out and to find them. God locks eyes and heart on the broken, the poor in spirit, the damaged, the beyond repair. God lays claim to their lives, and repurposes them. God writes the whole entire Story around them.

IN THE RYE

I’ve been channeling Holden Caulfield lately, looking at life through borrowed eyes. Having and ending one-sided relationships with strangers in my head. Fantasizing about jamming toothbrushes down people’s throats. Hanging out with a bloodied face, saying deep things like, If I do, I will, if I don’t, I won’t, and  I’m not in the mood right now. Very close to snapping. Is this what 42 is supposed to be for a woman? Channeling a 16 year old boy on the verge of being institutionalized? Is everything suddenly coming into hyper-focus, or is it time for a prescription lens? Is this me being more aware of my surroundings than I’ve ever been before, or am I days away from twirling blindly over the edge in a field of rye? I’m doing things I wouldn’t categorize as sane. I’m not questioning my judgment. Oh, I’m with you, Holden – I, also, am SO tired of fake.

Starting this blog has been an exercise in courage. I have an imposter complex and a fear of disappointing. I am always afraid of getting in trouble. I have spent the largest chunks of my life trying to please God and man, and child and parent and boss and teacher and pastor and crossing-guard. Like a lot of people I know, I rarely ask myself what I want – and want is such a tricky trickster. Want likes you to believe that it is the opposite of have.

Sometimes I do enjoy the wanting a lot more than I enjoy the having. Want is self-indulgent. It masquerades as abstinence – a waiting, a preservation of self, a dedication to prudence. It’s controlled. It doesn’t hurt anybody, or make them think less of you. It’s long-suffering. It paces patiently at the precipice. It’s safe. It catches you in the rye, stops you from losing your footing, going over the edge, falling.

What I think I am realizing is that want has been a dead thing eating a hole in my brain. Want is apathy resurrected and turned violent. Sometimes, to get where you need to in life, you just have to make a run for it – over the edge. Sometimes a free-fall over the precipice is the only way of escaping the zombie in the rye.

THE WORD

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. I wonder how many times John wrote and rewrote those words, shuffled them around, scratched them out and started over, banged his head on the table, read them aloud to himself, second guessed, edited and re-edited to get it just right. He was inspired, there’s not a doubt in my mind about that. Those words are solid rock Truth.

Words are big. They’re the stuff of beginnings. They fall firmly into the realm of stuff God does - parting waters, making the sun stand still, burning bushes, casting words across the universe. Even before nothing formed into something, God had voice and God was speaking.

I wonder if God feels the acid in the belly after the words are out there. I wonder if the Godhead ever reflects, Wow, We know so many different kinds of people, and they all know different parts of Us. There are a lot of people We really care about who actually have no idea who We even are. What We really want to say is going to seriously affect the way they think about Us, and they might not even get it. Let Us choose Our words very, very carefully. Nobody writes a story like God does, yet even God only got six chapters in before being flooded with a desire to bury the whole sorry thing under a 40 day avalanche of rain.

I feel my own words in my belly, in the back of my throat, behind my knees. I shape them carefully, I wrestle with them and yet they still come out wrong. They burn my lips and I vomit them onto strangers.

Writing is riskier than a tattoo. When you tell people you want to write, they should caution you. They should say, “Imagine you at 90. Are you going to be able to live with those words you write 50 years from now when your mind is shrivelled? When some stranger is giving you a bath in a care home, how will you feel about the written word then?” If you’re going to write something down, you have to be sure that it’s what you really want to say, that you could say it out loud to your husband or your mother or a stranger and it would still be true, and that you will still be glad you wrote it how you did even if it disappoints – even if it twists and sags and morphs over time.