faith

Magnetic poetry

ckirgiss2 Comments

Every now and then, I refashion the refrigerator door.

This is something that I imagine organized, intentional, and purposeful people do on a regular basis.

In my case, the motivation has more to do with either 1) avoiding some other necessary and unpleasant task or 2) being bored with (or similarly overwhelmed by) the current refrigerator fashion.

The side of the refrigerator rarely gets such personal attention. With its sidelong stance and hoarding tendencies, it lives a prodigal life of its own making. (Which is to say, I have neither the will nor the stamina to tackle 8 years worth of haphazardly displayed this-and-that.)

The fridge front is currently in a Magnetic Poetry season, a season that usually lasts anywhere from 6-9 months (because it’s so intellectually fulfilling with all of its semantic possibilities) and then gets packed away for 2-3 years (because it’s so pragmatically and emotionally taxing with all of its potential organizational disasters…like when the standby adverbs and adjectives start mixing it up so that I can’t even think straight for all of their renegade whimsey).

Words are just about the best thing ever, which makes sense since God used them (in some perfected and sacred form, I presume) to speak the universe into existence.

With all their inherent power, then, the best writers know how to transform them from individual units of nothingness (dry as dust until someone breathes life into them) into startling and exquisite bolts of energy that can be surprisingly life-giving even as they knock us to our knees in breathless amazement.

Proof:

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

[No digressive Tolkien tangent to follow. Simply this: go here and listen to Tolkien read about Gollum. And this: read The Hobbit if you haven’t. Please. I beg you. Before you see the movie, which is, remember, an adaptation of the book.]

“Oozy smell.” Perfect. Wonderful. Miraculous. Nine letters. Two words. Infinite possibilities.

I recently hosted a play-date with my five-year-old neighbor friend. The plan was to do typical five-year-old-play-date kinds of things – books, snacks, stickers, crafts – but instead, she spent two hours at the refrigerator, choreographing a linguistic dance of sorts with what she dramatically referred to as “all these words that have vowels and competents in them!” Two hours of enthusiastic magnetic lexical ballet thoroughly dismantled the (neurotic) demarcation lines between nouns, adverbs, and adjectives (a good excuse to refashion the refrigerator door in the coming weeks), but it left unscathed the topmost semantic creations from the recent months:

Wild angel worship pierces my night with a vision of sweet eternity.

Translucent and smooth poetry whispers to me and surrounds my broken heart like ferocious love.

Deliciously sacred words dance through the universe and celebrate deep in my blood like fresh morning stars.

And that just about says everything a person could ever hope to say (on a refrigerator door, anyway).

Keep breathing

ckirgiss4 Comments

For the past several years, I’ve been fascinated with (and severely sidetracked by) the idea of breathing. Not just breathing, really. Breath. Life. Spirit. Breathing. God. New life. That kind of thing.

When something captures my attention, it’s pointless for me to try and redirect. I find it best to just hang on tightly and see where the ride takes me.

This ride has been quite something. Quite something, indeed. And I suspect that it’s nowhere close to being over.

The thing about breathing is that it’s so, well, normal. Everyday. Ordinary. Unspectacular. Mundane, even. Which is right up my alley.

I’ve always been enamored with The Mundane. As far as I’m concerned, the seemingly mundane things of life are where it’s at. Things like junk drawers, frozen brown bananas, old Reader’s Digest Condensed books (just the covers, actually), and public library book sales are as interesting and profound as the things many intellectuals hold up as revered sources of Signification and Ontology and Elevated Discursive Topics (That Very Few People Care About Or Understand). Measured in terms of its excitement value or its rarity, what could be more mundane than breathing?

[Jesus, by the way, is the main where-it’s-at thing in my life, but I certainly do not categorize Him as mundane. I do, however, find it interesting that He spent so much time talking about and paying attention to things and people and ideas that in His day were likely viewed by the masses as mundane.]

The big things in life wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the small things…the mundane things…the unflashy things. In that respect, then, there is nothing small, mundane, or unflashy about them. And so it is with breathing.

In. Out. In. Out. Minute after minute. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year. For a lifetime.

It’s a bit boring…or breathtaking…depending on one’s view of the mundane.

I believe breathing is a very Jesus-y thing.

God created humanity and breathed the breath of life into them. They are made. They are alive. They are loved by God more than anything else in creation, to such a dizzying degree that King David muses: “When I consider the night sky, the glorious works of Your hand, the stars and planets and universe at large, I have to ask you, God…who am I that You would pay any attention at all to me, would care for me, would even notice me?!?!” But He does. If I read the Bible rightly all the way from Genesis to the Psalms to the Gospels to the Epistles, I can only conclude that humanity takes God’s breath away, so deep is His love for us.

Then humanity – in very human fashion – proceeds to unmake itself by saying to God (much like the younger son of Luke 15): “Thank you very much (or not), but I’d like my share of the estate. Now. All of it. Mine. So long. Outta here.” Humanity, spiritually speaking, is dead. Unbreathing.

But rather than abandoning humanity – which is what it has asked for and earned and deserves – God says: “Don’t panic. I’ve got this. I’m on my way. I’m here,” (my paraphrase), shows up on earth as a human Himself and willingly goes to the cross where His love for us literally took His breath away when He breathed His last and finished the task only He could do.

Well…that’s just the start of this whole breathing thing. More (of the mundane) to follow.