Easiest to Overlook Nooks

The artist

he could never believe it

whatever the relief

and yet he stayed close to it,

 leaned into it—

breathed it—

took threads from tabernacle’s glance—

and wondered.

“Know thyself, my dear,” says the old fellow, “But don’t think much about yourself. It gums up the being, you know.”

His gnarled finger taps her brow lightly. She scrunches her face. 

“You mean I know me without thinking about me? That’s like, backwards. I can’t know if I don’t—”

“Don’t make a fool of yourself, my girl. Hush, and let that settle a bit before you open your mouth.”

“Hey!” 

His brows rise.

“Don’t tell me to shut it.”

“I didn’t. I said hush.” 

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“Sometimes, my dear, the ones that think most, most up in their heads, know the very least. You think on that, hm?”

And oh, my dear Lord Wimsey.

Tumbling GF has an on-the-dot apt wrap up of navigating holiday and food events with friends and family when one has Celiac, or similarly serious food allergy / intolerance.

Navigating Social Food-Related Events and Get-Together-ing

I have a nook in myself that came of growing under the hapless tutelage of adults entirely unaware of their adulthood. I came to think that being an adult meant being dead, miserable, as helpless as a child—but without a parent, or any crutch, to aid the crippling. It was also miserable.

I dug that nook out for a closer look, and don’t much care to set any important pieces of me on it any longer.

But it struck me in a similar contrast to the way my culture, the people around me, view God.

How do you see God? What does it mean to be spiritual?

We’re all spiritual beings, spiritual, and physical, so there’s nothing so extraordinary about everyone having an anchor in heaven—any more than it’s unusual for a man to have two eyes, or to have both the senses of sight and smell.

But there’s this bloody nook that seems to shelve spiritual—or, relationship with God—as something purely for a purportedly gifted class; an elite; a small cadre of peculiarly saint-like exalted human creatures. Ah, they say, you’re spiritual. You should be a nun! You should be a missionary. You should become a yogi, the next Ghandi; shave your head, don saffron, and move to Japan. You should do all that interior talking with otherworldly matters; serving; singing; praying. You’re spiritual.

And you’re not?

Is it a question of being called, or of searching? Is there some small elite of saintlies stumping about in incadescence, humming hymns—or are there innumerable, incomparable individuals with the capacity to see the Face of God, who simply focus on the rush, the run, race to tidy, to make money, to get married, to not get married—to get clothes, homes, information, degrees, careers—and never sit in silence with the still Small Voice.

YOU should be a nun, a customer told me; she held a brimming compassion and interest in a smile like that one uses towards a thing behind a pane of glass. You’re spiritual, she said, so spiritual.

I said, thank you.

I should be a nun, I told myself.

Only nuns are allowed to love God above all else. Only nuns are allowed to enjoy praying. Only nuns are spiritual. We, all the others—we who run like cogs to keep the world turning—the world we pray, perhaps, and acknowledge to be on the fulcrum of God’s grace—but no, we who keep the world turning don’t have time.

Only nuns have time to have all their senses; to be spiritual.

Is that not a crooked nook in a culture? Only a small class, only those others, are allowed to really have faith. Materialism takes up the rest of time. Only a small group of human beings are permitted to be fully human, to use their senses up to and through the sacred singing of a soul that has found its happiness, and its end (telos).

But what if I were permitted to love God, enjoy God, serve God—through my life. What if there were time, I allowed time, I trusted this God to provide for me while I made and set aside time—to be a woman steeped in prayer, a girl close to God, a grubby child clinging to abba’s heels. Would I still think I had a vocation to the religious life?

I don’t know.

But I know a nook which places God on a pedestal too far to reach for mere rat-racing mortals is no orthodox alcove. It isn’t true. But it is an easy to overlook nook, in the rush, in the fear, in the go-getting materialism which always places the next rung on the ladder a little farther, a little longer—a degree; a job; ‘security’; while God sits Still, Small, Silent right now, waiting for me to see.

got wires

acquired

to string a line between

mind and mind—

wires sire wires.

now the mind—

the tenuous thread, dreams

through a choir of singing wires—

dreams of the touch

mind to mind,

single and unlined

by a nest of wire.

This bit has the pieces, but I’m not perfectly satisfied with their fitting.

Good Friday: 2012

cobbled stones

or cobbling

footsteps, men 

out of staggering bone

—alone. alone.

watch. the man falling 

—again. again. 

on cobbling.

cobbling footsteps, men

out of swaggering—

come, fall into the gathering

that beats the cobbles 

—alone. alone. 

in swarming crowds; 

but alone

abandons the Man

to grit and stone.