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Death and Gravity

My dear ones keep departing and taking pieces of me with them and I remain torn, tossed, foot unsteady in their vacuous wake.

How can a person be so animated in body, with eyes so radiant, and so connected to me, and then just blown out like the flame of a candle?

In my bones there is a sure knowing, that this love never ends and that all God has made belongs, and returns to source. But this ground of certainty also has its limits as I face my own plunge into unknowing.

Strangely, I have begun to love this precipice. It whispers gentle and often: “let go, trust the edge of love and its vast unfathomable depths”.

Can death be such a friend, and approaching bride groom? What will happen to all my present boundaries and my sense of self? Do they just fall away like a robe from a naked body?

And what about my loved ones who have crossed over, will we know and be known again? Are they the gravitational pull, the summoning whisper I feel, that grows by the day?

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Threshold

When you crossed the threshold I wish I could have been with you.

When you took your last breath I wish I could have held your hand.

When you were finally free, I wish you could have rejoiced with me.

I wish you could slip a message across the threshold, to say everything is okay.

I would like to know how you spend your time where there is no time.

With your crossing I now live on this threshold, because a part of me has crossed with you, and a part of you has remained with me.

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Unbound

In a coffin of pecan wood, before the altar, he lays still.

His mother approaches and kisses his face and runs her fingers through his hair.

The older brother comes to weep over him, and younger to say what had been left un said.

The lid closes, and a communion of saints gather around us, and we are held by love.

His body goes to ground under Wye Oaks, to soon beside Grandparents.

But his spirit soars, unbound from shame, untouched by fear, and welcomed home.

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Stained Glass

I look upon the broken shards, healed together and fused into beauty.

Waves of purple sadness and violet hope refracting through us.

Love’s colors being cracked open, distilled down, and poured all around.

And the saints gather to hold us up in this light that passes through.

We are suspended now in a tender embrace, still not knowing, and yet somehow assured that all will be well.

“The light shines in (this) darkness, and the darkness cannot over come it”

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Mourning Light

I rise and take up my mat of grief, pulling it over me like a heavy wool wrap.

My son draws near, standing in the shadowy membrane between memory and presence, to remind me that Love never fails.

I turn and pull up the shades to face the mourning light, with all its pain, to be assured the night has not overcome me.

I limp toward the kitchen with these torn ligaments of love, searching for a way back to wholeness, but everything looks different now.

I pour coffee, break chocolate into chunks and sit with sadness in the mourning light.

A warm consolation seeps into my bones as I realize it is not just my mourning, its ours, and its His.

All His wounded children are here, all His severed limbs, we sit together, one in hope, in the same light, waiting to be healed into the one body of Christ.

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The Dead of Winter

It is interesting that the “dead” of winter provides the most beautiful and open landscape. The fallow fields can now be traversed in all directions and we are not confined to the cut and maintained trails. I can unhook the leash on my black terrier and watch her thrill and throng through the golden grass. Oh how I wish I could describe the enchantment that winter light holds within my soul, how freely and softy the light moves through the humble wood and sets the brush a fire. I will gladly pause from the season of green growth to have this light and space.

The death of a loved one or the end of a season in ones life is never easy, but if we allow ourselves the time and space to walk through winter fields there can open for us a beautiful clarity and freedom. The air is thin and cold, and stings the face, but  the light is  soft  and there is space for hope to dwell.

1/3/2018