Ten feet away sits the newly installed fireplace.
My mom comes here at 3am when she cannot sleep.
I would burn a million times for her to rest the whole night.
Now, I am here, witnessing the heights and flux of the flames
while remembering, sensing and giving thanks for a lover who
recently said "burning, but not consumed: i like that image of God best."
Me too. Kinda how I feel about you.
Two hours ago I sat around the table with thirty women,
listening to one in particular share about the loss
of her alcoholic sister to an alcoholic death.
She wept in that upper-middle-class-white-woman kind of way:
tears reluctant to come, but when they finally surface
(after one hundred compulsive blinking attempts to avoid them)
a kleenex swipes to the rescue.
Too much make-up could smear; too much moisture could fall on the table-top;
too many tears behind these tears--gotta stop them quick.
I get it. Kinda how I feel about dad, church, that baby...
Striking how grief and passion threaten to consume with such similarity;
Fascinating how the burning feels like an eclipse of the erected boundaries we (foolishly) believe in and depend on, both in loss and desire.
Staying awake in such moments is worship,
a witness and testament to the power of our "corporeal vulnerability"
where God en/unfolds us in a blaze of glory.
***Ckeller and Jbutler live in the last 2 lines.
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