Yada,
he said,
means to know through experience.
For instance, it is not knowing Finland exists,
because I have not been there.
It is to hold an orange,
feel the texture of its skin,
behold its bright sunny color,
to sink your mouth into it
until the juice runs down your face,
to taste it, to swallow,
to make it part of yourself.
And I thought of you.
too tired for poetry, but please refer to
www.hupaithrios.blogspot.com
for blogging about greece…nothing’s up yet because i’m sleeepy but eventually. 
I’m back on the porch again with Daddy.
Older now, I am even more impatient,
and I tell him:
To hell with waiting for the damn man to come
traipsing down that dusty road,
wanting me to wash his feet like the
good girl I am.
I’m going inside.
To hell with it.
Faithless, Gomer rises again,
covering bare breasts with cold arms,
goosebumps rippling over hips and thighs.
Resigned, she gazes at another bed,
empty-eyed and dishevelled.
There is perfume on the nightstand.
Who is the God of faithless lovers,
the patron saint of whores?
I will go and find him.
(It will certainly be a man, yes?
In this Christendom that says
my face, my eyes were made
for gazing up,
this Christendom that says
no equal partnerships may be.)
I am Gomer, the faithless;
I am Eve, the trespasser.
We are the root of all the evil in the world,
and two of us together will certainly overturn it.
A power to be tamed by preachers,
by meekness and fear of the Lord,
by marriage.
We are formidable, but if we want to taste heaven,
we will bind ourselves to men,
to the patriarchs, to the church fathers:
they will pull us through. We’ll
ride on their coattails to heaven,
and they will gloat to see us almost letting go.
We’ll find heaven in a sacrament that confirms that
we are less; they are more; and we find God in them.
It is a shame I cannot
take you by the hand and
walk sweetly to heaven with you -
you of the same-length arms and legs
as me.
Faithless, Gomer rises,
wondering who she broke faith with
this time.
It is like this:
I, an image of myself
six years younger,
who tumbled out of bed at noon
(i still love a good meeting with noon and my bed)
to grab birthday cake and a Bible,
to sweetly and meekly pray down a list:
bless camp. bless my parents. bless my school.
to underline verses like:
i have engraved you on the palms of my hands.
This layered with myself now:
tousle-headed, tired-eyed,
inept at the great Wrestling,
more familiar with the intimacy it grows,
praying somewhere in my unconscious:
fix it. fix this. fix me.
(a holy liturgy that has sung in me for,
oh, four years perhaps – maybe longer.
sometimes louder, sometimes softer.
today it’s a gong or a clanging cymbal.)
underlining verses like:
a darkness to be felt.
a night of watching kept by the LORD.
a night of watching kept to the LORD.
But still the cake in the kitchen beckons,
and still my mouth craves cake and my soul
craves Christianity and being Christian,
But I know what cake is.
I have always been wary of wanting things,
of holding things too tightly.
The God of my youth was jealous:
If you loved something more than him,
he took it away. And it is
hard for me to love things that I see
less than things I don’t.
I know this theology by rote, so I
turn a blind eye to what I love,
suppressing it,
suffocating it,
the knowledge that I love -
(I won’t say it. When you say it, it leaves.)
I won’t call you Mommy,
said my half-brother to my mother.
Mommies leave their babies.
And she said, Ok,
and went to her room and cried for his
broken heart.
If you love her, let her go – that’s what they say,
isn’t it?
If you don’t love her, can you hold her?
Can you keep her longer, marvel at her
stirring gently in the palm of your hand,
watch her chest rise and fall?
Can you bend your face to her and as she breathes
feel her breath over your cheeks and mouth?
I don’t know what love is.
Love is when “how to keep people”
dissolves, because they want to stay,
because you believe they want to stay,
because you look in their eyes and see how much
they want to stay.
You hold her in the palm of your hand and she
tilts her head and eyes you and struts around its perimeter
then all over its creases, following them like pathways,
discovering the endings and turnings-around.
She likes your hand. She stays. You marvel,
feel like God himself has said: Your hand is good,
nice for resting in, for walking on. It is a nice size and warm
and gentle. I think I’ll stay.
That’s what love is, but I still don’t believe it.
Love fades, says the ache in my brother’s heart.
Love can be overcome by convenience or annoyance
or any little thing.
Solomon’s Beloved – a child – her breasts not yet grown -
she knew nothing of love, of the rivers that can quench it,
of the many waters which can wash it away.
She delighted in her ruddy lover, in his arm beneath her head.
(Arms grow tired and complexions fade,
but the fear of YHWH…)
Oh Adonai desires sacrifice, martyrdom,
a steely faith that remains unattached to mere mortals,
a setting of the eyes and of the jaw.
Oh praise Adonai.
El, will you settle? Will your wings fold
as you land in the palm of my hand?
Be here and all love. Bless this,
that I love.
God, bless us. God, bless me.
(Jacob would not stop wrestling until he received his blessing.
And he wrestled with the angel of YHWH until daylight.)
Calvinism is a pretty big but quiet issue in my church right now – which is to say, it’s quietly and politely causing a ton of division. What’s disheartening is that the Calvinists just kind of throw their weight around and are mean and condescending to the Arminians. That is no good. I think there are maybe two Calvinists at the church who even attempt to speak to the Arminian side as a legitimate stance.
I’ve been a Calvinist since I was like 10 – it just always made sense to me. However, I see how it’s negatively impacted my life in many ways*, and I’ve seen that many of the Christians I respect find Calvinism appalling, and I see the beauty of free will. For all these reasons I agree with the paradox idea. Just as a stereotype, Arminians seem more respectful of people’s views, more compassionate and involved in people’s lives. I try to cultivate those things too by appreciating their views.
In return for respecting their views, I’ve found that Arminians often try harder to understand mine. Since I incorporate in these discussions the ways in which Arminianism is attractive and beneficial, I can also express the ways in which Calvinism is attractive and beneficial. We can learn from each other then. Really, the two just glorify different aspects of God.
Also I notice that if I’m really nice to them they won’t freak out so much about my theodicy…
Okay, I’m bored and all I’m doing is procrastinating, so this is done now.
*I can’t believe I’m footnoting my blog, but I wanted to say how Calvinism has been negative in my life because I figured someone would ask. Calvinism’s emphasis on total depravity is good in that it emphasizes the goodness of God, but it’s bad in a culture where women (and men) are constantly confronted with all their flaws anyway. Total depravity makes me believe that I have to be a certain kind of Christian to be acceptable to God – which is of course true to an extent, but I get carried away with it all the time. Also, something about Calvinism – I’m not sure what – is really bad in my worst times in that I wonder: If I’m such a crappy individual, how do I know I’m elect? It’s this really nightmarish thought that somehow I know all the theology but am not really loved or adopted – I’m not really a Christian. These anxieties are hugely detrimental, and I know I’m not the only one with them. I also feel like it has narrowed my view of God’s love. Even though this theology states that God’s grace and love cause him to save any at all, it easily gives the impression instead that God’s judgment and pettiness made him pick and choose. I carry these rigidly defined “Jacob have I loved / Esau have I hated” into daily life with me, which means I love less.
“The Young Housewife”
William Carlos Williams
At ten A.M. the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband’s house.
I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
—-
I wonder how she would have felt to know the neighborhood doctor who passed on his way to work every morning had written a poem about her.
