Month: December 2019

The Words Live On

Rita Sommers-Flanagan2 Comments

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This past week, Ram Dass died. He’d had a stroke in 1997, and his acceptance of that disabling event was inspiring. This morning as I read over quotes that capture his sensibilities, I feel envy. Don’t we all want to be a guru? An old soul? But I say to myself, “Choose your poison, choose your longings, choose your savior. But most importantly choose your words.” Ram Dass knew the power of choice and the power of words, especially after the stroke. Words are part of the way we build up or tear down. We can hurt each other with a simple twist of the tongue. We can speak vicious untruths.

One of the reasons I like God is that God lives so far beyond words. Sure, she stops by, and we chat in English (I am hopelessly monolingual), but sometimes she lifts me by the back of my neck and nestles me down in something indescribably warm and delicious. “What is this place?” I ask by lifting one eyebrow. She laughs.

“I call it forgiveness,” God says. “But you might think of it as gratitude. The place where the best ideas are born. I don’t know. Call it whatever you’d like. Use your words.”

I throw a holiday pillow at God. She’s put a Christmas stocking on her head and wrapped solar LED lights around her waist. “In the beginning was the Word,” she says, teasing, almost giddy. “Why do people ignore that? Word. Word. Word.” She then begins singing. “All you need is Love…da da da da da…All you need is Love. Love. Love is all you need.” She leans in, holding a golden microphone. In the glow, I feel old. Unshiny. Words are escaping me at ever accelerating rates. I want them back. I want fresh starts, clean sheets, no scars. And lots of fancy words. But God just shakes her booty and turns up the volume.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown
There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be
It’s easy…Love is all you need.

“Lennon and McCartney.” She kisses her fingertips and takes a bow. “Brothers from another planet.” Again, envy. I want to be a brother from another planet. I want to be Ram Dass, Maya Angelo, Sir Paul, Lady Gaga, Nancy Pelosi, Mother Theresa, and Harriett Tubman. I want to matter. The glib assurances of salvation from a distant God, formulas and pat answers—I spit them out. I want to eat first fruits from the magic tree.

“Oh, no you don’t,” God says, suddenly quite serious.  “No, you absolutely do not want to do that. Why on God’s green earth do you think such things?”

“Because someone has to save us from ourselves,” I say. But I know that isn’t true. It’s already too late, and the saving has been neatly wrapped in the dying for longer than anyone but God can remember. God grins at me. “Been there, done that,” she says. “And to tell you the truth, sometimes I wonder if it was worth it.”

Now I’m the one who is suddenly serious. “Oh, it was, baby God,” I say, letting those words take my entire being. “It absolutely was.”

What to do with the Minutes and Years

Rita Sommers-Flanagan8 Comments

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“God,” I said while I gazed at my elevated feet clad in thrift store Christmas socks. “You’ve bothered me since I was four years old. Is it really necessary to keep doing that?” My mood wasn’t entirely God’s fault. For reasons obvious to a certain group of us, I had googled holy writings about God’s preferred treatment of the poor and hungry. Sure enough, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist…The writings from faiths all over the face of our little planet tend to agree on this point.

FEED THEM.

The average citizen may not realize that globally, every year over three million children die of starvation, malnutrition, and diseases that prey on the underfed. This is not something I want to realize either. This means God’s heart breaks three million times each year. Every hour that passes, tra la la, we lose 312 youngsters. Give or take. And that’s just children.

These simple statistics put me in a very bad mood. And it gets worse when I try to consider my role in all this. I had a nice, tasty breakfast. I have a couple of warm places to live. I have a lot of diplomas, good friends, loving family, and an impressive array of used snow boots. The few poor people I have any contact with bother me. The starving people I see on the news upset my stomach.

What to do? My supposedly-elected officials face a ridiculous amount of pressure, but it isn’t pressure to reduce suffering, clean up our toxic messes, provide better education, health care, or safety. Nope. It is pressure to reduce the amount of money the wealthy (me included) contribute to the common good. We are insistent about this. We don’t like taxes.

“How long do you plan to rant?” God asks. “And when you’re done, could we do some painting or play a party game or something?”

God and I have a stare-down. God wins. I get out the brightest colors in my collection and slather pink, orange, and lavender across the blankest wall I can find. I streak my hair red and blue. I sketch a tree on an ugly shelf and imagine spring arriving in neon green. I color my sadness yellow and my anger purple. My self-pity is burgundy now, with just the faintest suggestion of fuchsia. Around the shoulders, the immense, muscular, trustworthy, buff, and ready shoulders of Creation-infused-Creator, there’s a flax golden glow. And I know. I just know.

“I’ll do what I can,” I say.

“Yes,” God says. “I know.”

Bubba

Rita Sommers-Flanagan6 Comments

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The Honorable Hugeness Beyond Human Comprehension, Sacred Smallness Down Under, Journey That Never Ends, Fairy Dust That Clings. The Ultimate Lover, Thinker, Forgiver, and Doer. The One and Only Silence. Cacophony. Irritating Rash. Soother of Every Fear–God isn’t picky about names or even who believes and who doesn’t. You can’t prove God; you can’t disprove God. A that’s how God likes it—which makes me very crabby sometimes. But I live with it.

This Holy Energy—and the chats we have, the little tricks she plays—at a personal level, these are generally good. The synchronicities and coincidences tickle me. And yes, they also scare the Bejesus out of me. What if, what if, what if? A God so tiny? A God so enormous? A jokester, donkey, poet, physicist, an artist, a hungry dog? A neighbor, an enemy, the blight on the chokecherries? If you could manifest in any form, what would you choose? If you could speak in any voice, how would you speak? Smooth, seductive? Thunderous? Or in the muted voice of the powerless?

“All of the above,” God says. “I love multiple choice exams.”

“Are you ever happy, God?” I ask, changing the subject. “I mean, really happy?”

“Oh, sure,” God says. “How could anyone be God and not be happy? I’m happy a good deal of the time. But then, time is meaningless to me. So, yes. I’d say I’m happy. What would you say?”

This puts me on guard for some reason. I take a swig of my dark beer and consider drinking the whole thing for once. But I don’t.

“Well, Bubba,” I say, “Here’s the deal: Sometimes I think you hitchhike. I think that when mortals manage to be happy, or joyful, you ride the waves. You gobble it up. Expand, magnify, and revel. I think you’re a joy-a-holic.”

“Busted!!” God shouts. “Absolutely. Always. Forever. I loooooove it. Joy-a-holic! Wouldn’t that make a great tattoo? Maybe burned across the sky, hot orange and midnight blue– wide on the electromagnetic spectrum. Sound good?  Yes!” Sometimes God provides his own answers.

I shake my head as the Creator, the Big Belly Bubba Essence takes over the sky. Behind my closed eyes, in a secret place, God is heavily tattooed, circling Saturn, jubilant, erotic, irreverent. God is an untouchable ecstasy. If you’re brave enough to hang around and watch, beads of sweaty joy fall like stars, and you can put them in your pocket and take them home. But beware. They’ll burn through your defenses and put you on the street. They’ll blind you to the small differences between you and anyone else.

What’s left of this morning’s conversation? Three chickadees and a gaggle of ungainly turkeys pecking the soggy ground. They move with deliberation, wary of each other. Wary of the wind. But blissfully unaware of their indwelling grace. I envy their simplicity. They own this moment and nothing else.

Mice

Rita Sommers-FlanaganLeave a comment

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‘Tis the season for the battle between humans seeking untainted cupboards and mice seeking warm, tasty accommodations. Humans have superior fire power. Mice have elastic bones. It’s a version of David and Goliath. And yes. Humans are Goliath. We are big, smart, and temporary. They are small, but they are many. We will eventually lose. But in the meantime the traps are set, ultrasonic sound devices are plugged in, and steel wool is stuffed tight in every conceivable nook and cranny.

Finding their bodies broken and contorted in the snapped traps is distressing, disgusting, and sad, but not as sad as finding their poop turds in our rice or oatmeal or my neatly folded towels. I don’t like war. I don’t like killing. But I draw the line at surrendering to rodents.

The previous owner of our home had given up. Frail and confused, she lived among the mice, littering her leftovers around the house, letting them have the run of the place. I suspect their offspring remember the halcyon days. The remnants of their reign are mostly cleaned and gone now, but just last month in the root cellar I found a long-necked bottle with a perfectly preserved skeleton. Decades ago, the mouse had squeezed itself in, dropped to the bottom, and belatedly discovered there was no way out.

“I remember that little fella,” God says, reading over my shoulder.

“Oh, hi,” I say, in a friendly voice. I wave my hand toward the easy chair. God settles in with a sigh and says, “Thanks. Do you mind if I put my feet up and take a quick nap?”

I shrug and nod, my face conveying fond approval. God’s eyes close. I consider the weight of omnipresence, momentarily glad I did not create the ever-evolving universe. I am not God.

Wind moves warm air across the snow, and an eagle flies by with a fish dangling from its beak. I think of a phrase from a long, sorrowful poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: nature red in tooth and claw… and the line Dorothy Day loved from The Brothers Karamazov: Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.

I have seen the way of a cat with a mouse. I have seen the way of an owl with a kitten. My entire being strives to accept the turning of the seasons, the transformations, the endings with unknowable beginnings, but I can’t quite get there. I am tender with grief.

God dozes while we sit warm in the risen sun. I’m everyone and no one. I’m alone, but I am together. I am the fish and the eagle. I am a mouse in a dark brown bottle. There is no escape, but I’m glad for the company.

DNA

Rita Sommers-Flanagan4 Comments

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In many ways God and I have very little in common. The narrow gateway of our commonality is not the DNA I share with other humans, fruit flies, bananas, trees, or goats; not my uncertainties or my short journey in this limited body. And absolutely not my tendency to bite my thumb when I sense God is close. God doesn’t have thumbs. But sometimes, she borrows one and bites it while I write, just to demonstrate her solidarity. It’s a transparent solidarity. I slip my hand through and watch the world turn to fire. I am intrigued by the godness of fire as mass gives way to energy.

Often the godness around me is so dense I can hardly breathe. Billions of people seething and searching for the right ways to live their lives, afraid of all the wrong things. Even the stars are born and die, so what do we have to fear? One form godness takes is joy, a flower with roots that run deep in dark places. Another form of godness is suffering, and it will be with us until the end.

“Yes,” God says, affirming my pondering. “Maybe not DNA, but joy and suffering. Yes, these we have in common.”

“God,” I say. “I don’t always love it when you show up and agree with me.” I turn my gaze inward, where of course, I find God smiling between the strands that define who I think I am. I slide my consciousness back out, trying to think of other things. Deadlines. Vitamins. Bad travel conditions. Entropy. Anything but You-Know-Who.

“Okay,” God says. “Let’s play hide-and-seek. Shall I find you, or do you want to find me?”

“What does it matter?” I say. “It’s one and the same.”

God pretends to ring a bell. “Ding, ding, ding,” she says. “Folks, we have a winner.”

I can’t help but laugh. What a chump. I shrug. “Fine. So you’re here. What’ll it be today? Compassion? Sacrifice? Slippage? The mundane grip of reality? Painting sticks? Rearranging my rock collection? Maybe a small skirmish with the dark forces of hell and selfishness?”

God mimics my shrug. Then she leans over, examines my thumb, and kisses the bite marks away.

“All better,” she says, her voice tender and soothing. I stare at my thumb.

“Maybe,” I say, tears welling up. “But I don’t see the point. You know I’ll bite it again.”

“Exactly,” God says. “Exactly. Maybe that’s why I love you so much.”