For my eldest brother, and a few others, both men and women, I’ve been lucky to know. 

You were plucked from the current,
only to be tossed back in,
facing upstream,
to capsize again and again.

Your vocation concerns the chemistry of ambiguity,
the logic of paradox, the mathematics of mystery.

Semi-hermit, secret mystic, cultural iconoclast,
on-call counselor, ribbon cutter, weary diplomat.

Part thespian, part pedestrian, part Edgar Allan Poe,
Billy Crystal, Billy Holiday, St. Theresa, Hank Snow.

You are an under-sourced apologist, toiling into the night
to roll away a single stone.

You feed upon the pages of ancient scribes,
your knees are glazed, your eyes burn.

Aware of splinters in your faith, distance in your soul, still
you preach of what you long for, dream for, unquenchable.

Your knuckles bleed from knocking,
your ears ring from straining.

You author picture-rich sermons,
in the knowledge that sermons seldom convince.

You lean heavily into God is love.
Knowing everything else you say is tinged with heresy.

You lie on small beds of nails,
knowing the gossip at Sunday dinners is not always polite.

You are a contemplative on a full schedule.
A prayerful sub-contractor, meditative time manager.

You are faithful to show up at hospitals, prisons, shelters.
You quietly resist all mantles.

Your tools are a stir stick, some clay and water.

The seminary has given you the uniform of a tour guide.
You wear it for a year.
One Sunday you disrobe and stand naked in front of the pulpit.
(Forever forgoing invitations to more celebrated circles.)

At the board meeting, you recline under the flashing storms in the room,
show how each one’s inner light is neither rare nor elite.

When in town, you blend in, yet rarely escape
the conversation that exposes your vocation
and elicits the awkward air,

the unstated appraisals that pitch you in with the hucksters,
the imposters, the deluded, the pitied.

You lean upon your partner, your good friend, your Jesus,
for this is your enlisted, pilgrim-lonely life.

Like those stones on the beach, no one selects,
those shells above the tide no one stops to pick up,
turn over, hold up to the sun, see the pearl-coloured beauty within.

All this, and still you rise to fling your thankfulness out over the water,
and feel within your body, a holy longing, a growing tenderness,
a loving-kindness and truth,
you will not conceal from the great congregation.

Day by day feeling farther from the grave,
feeling there is no grave, not really.

Grow up evangelical and you’ll not avoid the revival meeting. (You’ll also be familiar with this booklet). Still, however you view it, Holy Spirit or hypnosis, or somewhere in between, there is a kind of electricity that builds and spreads, not unlike a fueled Grateful Dead concert. But I don’t disparage. For some, perhaps many, it’s life-altering. This was not quite that.

Sunday Evening Revival Meeting and a Short Train

Bodies were swaying as in a gale of grace. It looked like a storm of intimacy: shining faces like flares of mercy, arms embracing under a hail of forgiveness. And you, from your drifting raft, raised your hand, moved down the aisle and knelt at the altar.

An usher handed you a booklet of spiritual laws — precisely four. Jesus was there, and the Holy Spirit, plus the Father, all three of them drawing diagrams with arrows and crosses, drafting a plan for your life.

God the Father assumed the pen and drew a really short train: just two cars, plus an engine he called, Fact. He drew you as a stick man sitting on the engine and wrote in a bubble: You Have Entered Into A Personal Relationship With Christ.

The storm had passed, and you were hoping to talk to one of the counsellors, maybe a spiritual mentor, or even the usher; but his head was on some kind of swivel and he was talking over you, and his finger was stabbing at the car labeled, Faith, telling you to get in.

But you were in the caboose named, Feeling. Tending an old wound, longing for an exit, and yearning for something you couldn’t define. Still, this small dawning: how you had raised your hand, knelt at the podium, not for heaven, really, not even for Christ, who you’d just met, but for some genuine human connection.

The morning glory —
another thing
that will never be my friend  – Basho

The heavens declare the glory of God,
the firmament shows God’s handiwork.  – Psalm 19

The rock sitting in the heaving surf is the size of a V-8 engine. Incessantly, the sea throws cylinders of water at it, and the rock retaliates with explosions of white foam.

But perhaps I’m mistaken about this relationship. At times the sea is a wild-haired, many-breasted goddess; and the rock is a minor prophet, surrounded by parchment, opening ancient scrolls, holding them up one after another.

I come here often. I sense something spiritual. Yet the sea has no need of my friendship. It rises, full of mystery, and recedes, offering a brief slip of perception. The rock stands alone, watching. It has never asked me for directions. It has no need for my greedy observations, which every day, turn up wrong.

But one day I came to the rock, blind. That is, my eyes were on the sea-leaning cedar farther up the beach that carried twenty resting gulls. I was deep within their feathers and the tireless tree when I felt the slow energy of the rock, a kind of hum, perhaps the plainsong of life’s entangled currents — and between me and the rock and the sea, there was no break.

It was good to be given this true thing. And as with all true things, it held no command that one should carry it home and make a religion. Instead, I felt assured it would find me, again, when I was ready.