A 7000-Mile Journey,

I will praise you, Lord, with all my heart;

       I will tell of all the marvelous things you have done.

I will be filled with joy because of you.

       I will sing praises to your name, O Most High.
                                                                         
                                                            Psalm 9:1-2

 
VIOLA

If I did love you in my master’s flame,

With such a suffering, such a deadly life,

In your denial I would find no sense;

I would not understand it.

OLIVIA

Why, what would you?

VIOLA

Make me a willow cabin at your gate,

And call upon my soul within the house;

Write loyal cantons of contemned love

And sing them loud even in the dead of night;

Halloo your name to the reverberate hills

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, You should not rest

Between the elements of air and earth,

But you should pity me!

OLIVIA

You might do much.
                                    
                    Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5

One sure test one’s love is to ask the lover to speak their love. Not just to say words, but to speak, to breathe that love into existence where it once did not exist in such incarnation, such incantation. To “make love,” in the old sense, means to create love from words spoken, to woo one with words as Cyrano does Roxanne from below her balcony– not the describing of one’s feelings, but the creation of that love in the space where it did not exist the very moment before.

Like Peter’s love on that beach with his beloved Lord, like the bride and groom speaking their vows into existence, there are things which do not exist until we speak them into existence. The Logos, the Word—everything was created through him, the universe, the “one word” was created through him– The Word.

I currently have the great privilege to co-lead an English/Bible study on Tuesday nights which serves up to two dozen university students and graduates from the Pusan National University area. It is one of the high points of my week, as I have the absolute delight of reading and speaking God’s Word with them. 

I also have been writing a new study in my spare time on the mesage and implications of the Gospel. The bulk of responders to the invitation to this group have been young Korean Christians, so the need/desire seems clear. Many times after our current Bible study, students will share a genuine and deep passion for knowing God more which has been kindled by our study that night–May we have the opportunity to further serve these students and to share the reason for the great hope we have, and the great love.

         Like many others, I have a trail of old and defunct blogs littering the internet. Sometimes I go back and look at the dates, remember the images, the thoughts, and they seem so fresh, so close. There are a lot of wonderful memories. And there are sad ones, too—choices made that I wish I could take back. Other choices I wonder about having not taken. There are things I did not know at the time—choices made out of the person I was on that timestamp, that particular date when listening to this album or snapping that photograph. Sometimes the recollection stings—sometimes burrows into my stomach.

But what else could I have done?

What else could any of us have done? Before we come to our senses we often make our way, sad but true, to the pigs and the pea pods.

Before Peter denied him, Christ knew.

He knew that all those closest to him would do the same. The bunch of miscast actors playing their parts unknowingly, perhaps knowingly in only flashes, who had eaten, drunk, slept, voided with him. The ones he chose to huddle with while here amidst his own soil, the bodies he now knew through his own, the ones who would go out from the moment of their realization, their breakthrough from blindness to light to all ends of the world… but on this night,

“Tonight all of you will desert me.”

Eyes widen, mouths drop.

“No we won’t, Master.”

Perhaps a pause, a space for breath, for the minds and pulses to settle and Jesus to hold their gaze, perhaps to remember what they looked like in that moment, their eyes wild with devotion, ignorant, unknowing, doing only what they knew, vowing what they could not know.

“Even if we have to die with you, we will not deny you!”

He looks at them again.

Christ holds the Passover cup aloft perhaps in a moment similar. The air is still, a hush of anticipation. How many times must he have done the same? Before the woman about to be stoned he knelt and drew with his finger in the dust, spying Zaccheus in the tree, did he pause for a moment, a grin spreading across his sweaty face and allowing the crowd’s gaze to follow as a master showman would? And that terrible, dreadful silence that was to come before Pilate when the Roman let drop from his lips the challenge we have all asked Christ and do, impetuously still,

“…What is truth?”

And then our Lord’s silence, again.

But the cup is aloft now. There is still time for him to turn back. In that moment betwixt, a silence… but then our Lord vows to the twelve, and to us through all history,

“The next time I drink with you will be in my Father’s Kingdom.”

You, who will deny me. You who will leave me in the moment when I am most alone, rejected, despised, tormented, brutalized, butchered, cut off, the lamb, the Lord of the universe, needing what was withheld in that moment, needing as we need, too. A man, God, needing, and without.

“My soul is crushed with grief—I feel so close to death,” he croaks not long after through tears to the three close to him in the garden. “Stay with me, watch over me.”

Clutching hands. Watch over the Lord of the universe. For him, be with him. Please. Three times in the garden our Lord asks that the cup be taken from him.

The cup is aloft, and he vows. His hesed, he vows. Through all times and all generations he vows while the cup is aloft, and once lowered those with him drink the contents, the substantia which will sweeten until eternity.

A foretaste now, in moments, and a day to come.

This brings sweet comfort to me. Some grace then. To fail, to deny him still, to deny others. Lord, I don’t want to! But I do. Some days you must move my hands for me. Some days you will hear my vows, read my vows and see the same wild eyed, childish ignorance you saw that night before the garden. In that moment I know you saw us all, and that is why you lowered the cup, and we drank, and one day we will drink again, oh, how I long for that day.

“Do you love me?”

He asks Peter, the smoke still smoldering on the beach and the smell of fish in the wind, but the scent of betrayal and regret perhaps stronger still in Peter’s nostrils.

“Yes, Lord, you know I love you.”

And then Christ’s gaze in that moment. A cool breeze, the sun rising now.

“Then feed my lambs.”

The clutch in the throat, and perhaps tears beginning to well in Peter’s eyes, not so wide as they were before.

 “Do you love me?” he asks again.

        Three times our Lord asks, because perhaps our vows are always disconnected, ghostly, hollow until he can catch us in that gaze, that moment of stillness when our words, our vows once again connect to our hearts, and in that moment we realize that yes, indeed we do love him, and we will never let him go again, for once is too many times to lose him, and thrice is too many times to deny him. Perhaps, too, Peter could not hold his gaze, for when we look into the eyes of those that love us without bound, those who have died for us in many ways even here, we become connected once again, and to be connected to reality is the most painful death of all.

Could we, can we, ever, here, look into that gaze?

Can we hold one another’s? Can we remain in the stillness of his hesed and through this begin? Have we seen, and known him resurrected yet? Have we known his gaze to be this yet? If his gaze, in his words, in song, in beggar’s bowls and love’s embrace does not, in the words of the old song cause me to tremble, tremble, tremble, I do not yet know the love behind those eyes, and I do not know my Lord.

“Do you love me?”

My Lord, you know I do.

A hungry centipede cornered a spider and was about to eat it when the spider said, “Let me ask you a question.”  

The centipede replied, “Alright, ask away, but then I’m going to eat you. “

How do you keep all those legs coordinated?” the spider asked.

The centipede frowned and said, “I don’t know. I’d never really thought about it before.”

Grinning, the spider ran off and when the centipede tried to follow, he tripped and fell over all his legs.
 

I bought a legitimate Russian naval sweater last Halloween online from some distributor in the Midwest. They also peddled old Soviet bazookas and land mines, but I was on a budget. Anyhow, I dig the sweater, I kept the sweater, I still wear it. It’s very warm, form-fitting in a way described online as “designed to snug the flattering body of man,” with nice blue and white horizontal stripes. The thing is, it doesn’t have tags of any kind, so I don’t know which way is front or back. I figured out the up and down okay, but front and back elude me. I’m almost positive now that it’s designed for either, but the thought of my sweater being on backwards sometimes lodges itself in my conscious like an existential burr.

There is a great section in “The Red Sea Sharks” (a childhood graphic novel in the Adventures of Tintin series) where one of the main characters, Captain Haddock is cursed by his first mate Allan when the latter asks him if he sleeps with his beard under or above the covers. The result is no sleep for the Captain that night as he restlessly tries both options over and over to no end.
 

Sometimes we get wrapped up in particular dilemmas concerning “God’s will,” “soulmates,” “destiny,” etc. and we are left like the centipede, or like me in my sweater, or Haddock under his sheet… detached from reality, from our hearts, from the wonder and joy that we first felt at play as children or when first falling in love. We have plenty of ways to excuse our behavior, to rationalize our concerns and ambivalence, but in the end, we are left hungry and alone if only within our own safe worlds, a moebius strip of self, and we may never make a choice at all. We allow time, others, fears to choose for us, we end up being carried only where the current currents flow.

There is only so far our minds can take us, and that’s a good thing. It’s a great thing to use that mind to carry us as far as it can, and through the areas of its domain, but it must work in tandem with our hearts, with out intuitions, with our courage and willingness to abandon ourselves sometimes to the unknown, but the hopeful. Sometimes we grow quite adept at labelling our fears and stubbornness as holiness or wisdom, when this far from the simple truth.

Oswald Chambers speaks of abandonment frequently in his classic devotional My Utmost For His Highest, and points to the fact that often we hear the call of God in particular areas, but then in time we become practical, we have misgivings, we think rationally about it all in some false sense of being responsible when God simply us to follow that calling into a life of excitement, abounding joy, trust, surprises, newness, life. Instead, we ask for permission, we look for signs and reasons when he simply asks us “Choose today who you will serve.” Choose.

God wants us to know him, intimately. And the more we do, the more our hearts become his, the more his becomes ours, the more we become ourselves, and the more we become one another. And then the choices come easier, more naturally, abounding in joy, freedom, life. Through the bounds of intimacy, we become free, truly free.

Let’s choose, and create! Allow our hearts to love, and follow them. Find the work of our hands, the sweat of our brows in that love. Let’s not excuse ourselves from the creative process of molding a life our own and a universe for ourselves and others to inhabit.

This life, this world has been given to us.

“All the world’s a stage,” somebody once said, “and all the men and women, merely players.”

Teaching at a university is a new role for me, and I am enjoying the plumage. My first day was a week ago, and the day before I cleaned and pressed a decided wardrobe which fell into the casual professional range– and I modeled it a few times in front of the bathroom mirror to be sure it “made the grade.” Shoes were shined, belt curled into cobra’s coil and all placed carefully on the seat and back of my ornate, secondhand desk chair.

I decided on which pens, which pencils to carry, slipped and zipped them into my leather organizer, scrawled preparatory notes in my composition book, laid my textbooks atop the rising temple of materials, and envisioned myself in front of my first class, my first modest audience of 30.

There’s not much difference really, between this life and that, each folding in upon itself. When are you really “you?” You do have great say in who you will be with others, how you will present yourself, how you will love or hate or be indifferent.

I have been hurt before. Sometimes that hurt leave a trace, a trail of blood from the wounded. Perhaps the hurt, the anger, the resentment, the desire for revenge never fully goes. Perhaps, sometimes. Perhaps not. But one can choose, one can act, can crumple the bill despite the mood, and in time this changes us. But even if it doesn’t, it changes those around us, and the air we breathe.

I came to this realization: perhaps this is it. Perhaps never again in this life to feel whole, unscathed, untouched by darkness. Never fully reconciled with others in some cases. But to act in spite of, to be something more than the sea of all that lies beneath. Some days to limp, some days to moan. And others to joy, to laugh, to scamper.

When your eyes turn outward, there is no longer a you to feel these things. And if those your gaze falls upon are shimmering in the midst of some love you are able to mete out to them, there you are, once again, somehow whole.

Someday, someday, sooner than we know, that gaze will be forever outward.

round moon,

swollen in an empty sky

spilling a fertile secret

from your cold, hard mouth.

It’s hard not to shout it out sometimes, I believe, this love lying within us like the fish that bit at the boy’s dangled toe… lurking, sulking beneath the still and murked waters in an instant ready to flash free, to break the padded surface and to sink keen and hungry teeth into something, anything, unabashedly, unknowingly, with no thought of pain to self or other and then often to disappear again beneath the waters, a deep ripple left to mark the act which in time will still itself again.

Sometimes it takes the angel to disturb our waters, at our Bethesda. We wait, lepers, cripples, blind, bruised and broken by that pool-edge, waiting, waiting, for someone to move the surface that we may drag our shattered bodies and our souls into that magic, that miracle that is love, and is life, and is everything we were intended for.

Love, is where we sprang from and where we will return. For some of us, for most of us, in different fashions and in different circumstances, wearing different skin and whispering different words, love, too will be engendered, love will spring from us and back and forth and then love will grow hands and feet and walk on all, then half of them, someday to dangle its own toes, or to bite at others.

Love must never be underestimated, undervalued, understood, must always be spoken, be written in a thousand flaming strokes until the end of recorded time, be acted out and upon, held like a coal, bellowed to ignition, carried from life to life with each breath and with each fleeting glance, touch, blow, heave, cripple carried, pool stirred, body beside.

Who could be silent beneath, beneath this?

7 train to Jackson Heights, transfer to the E out to Jamaica Center where the Airtrain awaits to whisk me  off to JFK and then beyond to Detroit, Tokyo, Gimhae– South Korea.

One stop before the E pulls into Jamaica Center, a young couple enters my car pushing a stroller with wrapped child, swaddling clothes. and the man begins his speech. Spend enough time in New York and you will hear them all—this time it’s an ex-con, recently released, trying to get back on his feet, find a job, pay the rent, support his wife and child, anything will help, any amount will be appreciated, God bless.

My head is full of anger this morning– the reason is unimportant now just as it will be on my deathbed– but it is the kind that today will blur my vision, sap my strength, make my thoughts skip in their groove as I fold in upon myself like a paper doll. But somehow I reach for my wallet and open it to three singles and a twenty. My hand crumples the bill into a ball.. not out of humility, but humiliation because the thought that always comes to mind first in these situations is “This guy is taking me for a ride,” and if I am willingly going for that ride at least those around me don’t have to see how far I’m being taken.

I fit the bill into the man’s hand.

“Thank you. God bless,” says he.

And I nod, the anger still sapping away any real care, any humanity. When he reaches the other side of the car and his wife and babe, he says something to her and looks back to me and nods. It was the twenty I had crumpled, and the hand that crumpled it had been moved only by something deeper (hopefully) than the anger, something I pray will always be.

The train hisses, we are in the station now and I climb out, bags in tow. As I struggle to heft my hiking pack the family approaches and the man speaks,

“My wife and I wanted to thank you.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.” The anger keeps me even from looking at them. “You just lost your job?”

“No, I was incarcerated. Just got out. I’ve been looking for work but it’s hard to take care of my family and do everything so sometimes we come out asking for help. It costs a lot with the food and diapers and all. Especially, you know, these days.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“But thank you, brother.”

“No thank you.” JUST SPEAK says something/But you don’t even feel it says another. ”Truth is, I’ve been in a pretty dark place this morning and it’s good to get out of myself, you know, so thank you for that.” It’s true– I know it, though I do not feel it. “I’m John.”

His hand extends. “Angel. This is my wife, Nikki. And that’s Nathaniel.”

I wave to Nathaniel– this sweet little unknowing thing being rolled about in the subway, and then for some reason my hand pauses in the air and I make the sign of the cross over him. Unknowing myself, as if the hand were moved by another, and something breaks a little inside me. I’m angry for myself that something has to break, that my heart is so wrapped up in itself, still angry for my own unimportant reason, still angry to have to talk to another human being and not be able to retract into self again.
 

“Well, God bless, take care.”

“Yeah, you, too. Bless you.”

I’m moving away now, still aware that my own heart is a mess, praying that I wake soon, that a joy and a love return with abiding heat to move my hands, my feet, rather than this that moves them now, but I know that this, too, is enough, that Angel and Nikki and most importantly little Nathaniel need most my crumpled bill and not my best mood. I know my heart will return, I pray that all our hearts will return.

It is days now, hours, time beyond that singular moment of my hand moving of its own and I am ascending the steps of the subway station at Buam, Busan, South Korea, and there is a mangled hand outstretched to me, one eye peering out from under a bandaged head, and this time my heart is awake, awake enough at least to feel for her and to hope for the day when the shriveled hand bursts from the cloak afresh, anew, and my own hand is moving in the interim to care how best I can in this life.