Poetry is a sofa full of blind singers who have put aside their canes… Poetry is the sound of summer in the rain and of people laughing behind closed shutters down a narrow street.
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 January 2000

Poetry is the purest of the language arts. It’s the tightest cage, and if you can get it to sing in that cage it’s really really wonderful.
RITA DOVE, Poetry Flash, January 1993

Poetry is language at its most nourishing. It’s the breast milk of language.
ROBERT CRAWFORD, The South Bank Show, October 1994

Poetry is like a substance, the words stick together as though they were magnetized to each other.
DAVID GASCOYNE, Stand, Spring 1992

Poetry is energy, it is an energy-storing and an energy-releasing device.
MIROSLAV HOLUB, Poetry Ireland Review, Autumn-Winter 1990

Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
CZESLAW MILOSZ, Poets & Writers, November-December 1993

Poetry is a diagram of reality. A distillation of reality, that may make us free.
ALICIA OSTRIKER, The American Voice, no. 45, 1998

Poetry is language in orbit.
SEAMUS HEANEY, Sunday Independent, 25 September 1994

Poetry is an act by which the relation of words to reality is renewed.
YVES BONNEFOY, Times Literary Supplement, 12 August 2005

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.
MARK DOTY, The Cortland Review, October 2000

Poetry is words in space, representing words in time.
GLYN MAXWELL, Fulcrum, no. 4, 2005

Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning.
DANA GIOIA, Can Poetry Matter?, 1992

Poetry is a verdict that others give to language that is charged with music and rhythm and authority.
LEONARD COHEN, The Sunday Times

Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.
BILLY COLLINS, Portsmouth Herald, 23 January 2005

Poetry is a thief that comes in the middle of a new day, while the critics are still studying by night light.
JAMES LIDDY, Éire-Ireland, Spring 1991

Poetry expresses the newness of the day.
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI, AGNI online, 2004

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language.
PETER PORTER, BBC Radio 3, May 1995

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
UMBERTO ECO, The Independent, 6 October 1995

Poetry is language wrought by feeling and imagination to such a pitch that it enacts and embodies the thing it says.
CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON, PN Review, March-April 1993

Poetry is a fire, well banked-down that it may warm survivors in the even-colder nights to come.
HUGH MAXTON, Dedalus Irish Poets, 1992

Poetry is deep gossip.
LIAM RECTOR, The American Poetry Review, September-October 2005

Poetry is a dame with a huge pedigree, and every word comes practically barnacled with allusions and associations.
JOSEPH BRODSKY, The New Yorker, 26 September 1994

Poetry is philosophy’s sister, the one that wears makeup.
JENNIFER GROTZ, Here Comes Everybody blog, April 2005

Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.
R.S. THOMAS, Residues, 2002

Poetry is the eroticization of thought—psychic vitality.
CAL BEDIENT, Denver Quarterly 39, no. 2, 2004

Poetry’s a zoo in which you keep demons and angels.
LES MURRAY, The Australian, 10 May 1997

Poetry is… a kind of leaving of notes for another to find, and a willingness to have them fall into the wrong hands.
MATTHEW HOLLIS, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2004

Poetry is language that sounds better and means more.
CHARLES WRIGHT, Quarter Notes, 1995

Poetry is about the intensity at the centre of life, and about intricacy of expression. Without any appreciation of those, people are condemned to simplistic emotions and crude expressions.
ANNE ROUSE, The Sunday Times, 28 January 2001

Poetry is a way of communicating a vast array of thoughts and feelings by concentrating them into minimal, or even single, points which describe the whole.
FRIEDA HUGHES, The Guardian, 3 October 2001

Poetry is the meeting point of parallel lines—in infinity, but also in the here and now. It is where the patent and incontrovertible intersects with the ineffable and incommensurable.
JOHN SIMON, Dreamers of Dreams, 2001

Poetry is language pointing beyond its own capacities.
DON McKAY, The Toronto Star, 4 June 2007

Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative.
HAROLD BLOOM, The Art of Reading Poetry, 2006

Poetry is like fingerprints / on a window, behind which a child who can’t sleep / stands waiting for dawn.
HERMAN DE CONINCK, The Plural of Happiness, 2006

Poetry is the rapture of rhythmical language.
GREGORY ORR, The Washington Post, 16 May 2006

Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.
NATHALIE SARRAUTE, cited in Staying Alive, 2002

Poetry is a perpetual redefinition of beauty and truth in patterned language. An assault on yesterday’s beauty which no longer shines. An assault on yesterday’s truth which has become a lie.
ROSANNA WARREN, Fulcrum, no. 4, 2005

A poem is words at work, on us and for us.
PETER FALLON, The Poetry Paper, no. 3, 2006

A poem is a machine for remembering itself.
DON PATERSON, Strong Words, 2000

A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.
MARIANNE BORUCH, The American Poetry Review, September-October 2006

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE, The Poetry Paper, no. 3, 2006

A poem is partly grace, partly discovery, and partly a struggle to squeeze out a little bit more, to conquer another foot of territory from the unconscious.
ÁGNES NEMES NAGY, A Hungarian Perspective, 1998

A poem is an attempt to find the music in the words describing an intuition.
P.J. KAVANAGH, BBC Radio 3, December 1990

A poem is a smuggling of something back from the otherworld, a prime bit of shoplifting where you get something out the door before the buzzer goes off.
NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL, RTÉ I television, July 1995

A poem is like a ghost seeking substantiality, a soul in search of body more appealing than the bare bones mere verses rattle.
WILLIAM H. GASS, The Georgia Review, Spring 2004

A poem… is the attire of feeling: the literary form where words seem tailor-made for memory or desire.
CAROL ANN DUFFY, Out of Fashion, 2004

Every poem is an answer to the question what poetry is for.
JAMIE McKENDRICK, The South Bank Show, October 1994

• 1) Personhood- Made in the Image of God
• 2) Biography
• 3) Our Web of Relationships
• 4) Creative Writing Process
• 5) Spiritual Foundations and Beliefs as we Intersect with the World
• 6) Personal Spiritual Journey
I find that every semester it is good to draw from each genre. We all need to meet new spiritual guides, but we may need a week to stretch and do more of our own writing. If your demographic is facing the challenges in a web of generational relationships you may choose more from that category. If it has been structured as a faith based class you may pull more topics from that cluster. If it was a neighborhood book group and seeker oriented you can not choose any of the faith based topics. Thank you for reading my story of fining my vocational love. I haven’t had a single person that has known me long and then hears of this endeavor doubt that all of the good and bad days I have had up until now were the perfect preparation for the gestation and birth of crazy poetic liscense blended with a dash of formal monastic order– this new thing called CreativeLectio!

Does everyone have to “get” poetry?
Does the leader need to love poetry?
Does the leader need to be a writer?
Do the weeks build on one another or can they stand up as individual weeks?

I would love to address these questions. First

That might be why there are 100 different topics that I call “Lesson Plans”. Not only does it mean lectio could work for five years ongoing before the topics were exhausted but it means that variety should keep people anticipating group as a place to be surprised and thrown off the “course” of expectations that we bring to a traditional Bible study for women. It is not essential that a person leading love or “get” poetry. It only means that, as T. Hall said in Too Deep for Words—, “the person is comfortable with an encounter with beauty.” Every topic that I highlighted uses audio or poems that are accessible by anyone. They aren’t riddles or confusing puzzles to sort out. I have highlighted two that are wonderful for breaking down fears of being in a group.

It is fun to dream of your small group at church or neighborhood Bunco friends coming together as a group to try out Creative Lectio! I would love to touch base with you to make a custom list of topics that match what your group would want to study. I have many compelling audio podcasts that work well with a group that is in the starting stages. Each group would have their own web site for content so they can read a poem a few days before they arrive at your door. Let me know soon! Nita

If you will read this, and bring back your writing on the topic of the face — this will be all you need to do to get ready for Tuesday.. also.. the archive in the rightcolumn gives you the way to read about a moment I collected.. as we cobbled together some ideas to improve our writing last Tuesday we mentioned being attentive to moments and knowing which moments were valuable to record and give to others as a gift. So.. here is the link It is titled Fenders and Feathers.. it is a work in progress.. as we said, blogs can be writing that is not taken so seriously.. See you Tuesday, Nita
p.s here is the text if the image isn’t clear enough

The Self Slaved by Patrick Kavanaugh

Me, I will throw away
me, sufficient for the day
the sticky self that clings adhesions
on the wings to love and adventure.

to go on the grand tour
a man must be free from self necessity

see over there
a created splendor
made by one individual
from things residual.
With all the various qualities hilarious
of what hitherto was not.

Throw away the sloth self
carry off my wrath self
with its self satirizing blotches

No self.
No self exposure;
The weakness of the proser
but undefeatable
by means of the beatable

I will have love
from anything made of.
And a life with a shapely form.
With gaiety and charm
and the grace of living.
And wild moments, too.
Self, when freed from you.

Prometheus calls me on
Prometheus calls me on.
Son, we’ll
both go off together
in this delightful weather.

The committee had fun inventing these rules

I was smiling about the “small world” effect when I kept reading the inept advice of the busy exporters. Just notice advice #3 on the list. First off, this whole bullet point lost its pronoun! Too bad, so sad. But this grammar goof up did give me license to picture my terrier with his “hand up in the breeze” (Or better yet, it led me down the primrose path of remembering the hours I have spent in charismatic worship services!) But, as I thought about breezes and worshipping I said to myself, “No, that couldn’t be right.. with China being mostly atheists and all.. they most certainly didn’t have praising Jesus in mind with advisory #3. What about the upper age limit of 105? That’s a relief for a few more decades.. and the speed limit… 5 mph to 20mph. Wow, I am glad they tested that out for my flying pleasure.. Rip resistant and it won’t hurt to take in to my bathroom shower! Good to know!

We kept right on reading and actually the list just kept getting BETTER. It kept coughing up lines and causing laughs around our house. My kids even came out of hiding from their dens of video darkness. One of my boys had a fondness for #5.. the advice came in two simple words: “Have Fun.” He liked it because he agrees with me that legislating fun for a kite gig is a dumb idea. It is like telling the wait staff at most US restaurants to say “Enjoy” at the exact moment that he or she puts a plate of food on the table. Really? Can a mood be thrust on a person like a high five? I must admit I have been so sad at diners and eateries on occasion that the meal I ordered was more about eating to do the next right thing than having a blast.. have you felt that before? So that begs the question,, Can anyone fly a kite, run in a rainstorm, or enjoy a bowl of homemade ice cream because they willed it to be fun? What do you think? China thinks so.. and there it is in the fine print: “Have fun!” It only made me wonder if the fun deprived workers at the paper plant might have spent one too many hours under the florescents. Or, maybe, they just think Americans are all like Fred Astaire, dancing in the rain most days.

So, advise me, what am I to do?

I guess I should try to obey the systematic steps.. as much as I can as an American and if I do my three inch kite might live to see another day. Maybe that’s the point of this exercise.. which brings me to one last rule– a truly inspired and poetic metaphor I found on the Promo Kite packaging. This subtle nod to Zen made me feel like folding over in a reverent Oriental bow on the spot. The words are cleverly posted sideways and fashionably gray (this may be the upper limit to how far the Helvetica family can walk on the wild side) –but there in a Helvetica font face (regular) were these words.. ‘Handle with care. Like a butterfly.’

Now, believe me, I approve of this message, though this tidbit of advice is at odds with the kite thread advice to get the thing up in the high winds! I am not sure butterfly wings are built to survive gale force winds. So ,to handle my conflict, I decided to forget the advice of the rebel in China that practiced on his promo kite in high winds (10m) with a spool. Instead, I plan to listen attentively to the latent poet writing grace on the mylar encased around my mini kite. Handle with care.. Yes. That’s good. Honor fragile insects.. That’s good, too! I, Nita Andrews, give my American assent to that globally green idea.. But what about experimenting with the kite in my backyard in July? What advice is approved for my testing ground? I guess for now, since Tennessee is a humid and static sauna, my best move is to have hands up in the breeze (advice #3), use 10 m of thread, unspool the thread, and pray that somewhere in my life my heart is handled with care, like a butterfly. BTW >>Anybody out there game to do advice #6 for me? I have never packed a map up correctly for the glove box– much less a kite.

January 25,2008.

It was 5:45 am and dark on the street and in the parking garage of the hospital. My husband pulled the car into the angled lines closest to the glass doors. We were in a soundless, isolated, parking garage until John and Kendra took the “for expectant parents” slot to the right of ours. We met outside the car to get the luggage—funny in a way and so different from the two previous times I was pregnant. Everyone in our entourage had lots to carry. After all, we were staying several days –the four of us– in two large hospital suites on the maternity ward in a large hospital in Nashville, TN. To do this as a foursome though was just the first surreal moment of a thousand yet to come. It seemed we should be unpacking for a condo on the beach to vacation as two families.

Soon I was in admitting. The seriously adult financial part of the process. I was lost in a flurry of clip boards loaded thick with soul numbing forms. It was even more than usual given the name change switcheroo that was going to happen seconds after birth. And who wears those ID wristbands and do they print two or four? On and on. I fell into something of a drone voice. I spoke a flat sound like a newscaster in front of the twin towers on another Friday morning less than ten years before. My voice was stubborn; refusing to let anything inside my skin “go live” while a scene of absolute chaos was falling around my emotional shoulders.

As for the paperwork and the plans made for me . . . I went along. I was suspended like a thin leaf in winter skimming a rushing stream. I was caught in a gravitational pull far beyond the power of a resistant word. So much about a hospital depersonalizes a soul. The rooms are cold and you don’t say so. Nurses are brusque and you don’t pull your arm away from the syringe… you comply. It’s an authority figure times a million. Hospitals are big and imposing like that. My belly was big and imposing like that as well, so most folks we met were clear that they understood–– look on my face meant birth, inevitable birth… and no matter how the legal part landed it was going to happen.

In this dead zone maze of hallways I met my surgeon. Her name was Dr. Woods. I felt better when she said ‘doctor words’ and approvingly smiled. She seemed more like a warm and dear friend when she led my sons and my husband to see me behind the curtained prep room. We exchanged kisses and inane words. What else can you do in antiseptic yellow room that seems more like a movie set than your own life?

I was about to catch up to some real fears as they hit some real tears when it hit me that everyone had to leave and quickly! My attending nurse had gotten some word of “ready” from the other side. The little hand hadn’t even hit the ‘12” saying 8 am and my number was up. I was left in a cold room with lots of paper clothing and gaping bow ties. Then the memory of the one thing I forgot to ask fired off in my head. I didn’t ask about the “A” team! Oh, panic… so I say in a whisper to myself. Just who is on the other side of the wide swinging doors?

Here was my perplexity: Who was I to be looking for? I seriously doubted that if they were the “B” team they would wear a badge to tip me off that my surgeon’s plan hadn’t worked. So had it?? Did she get the A team to come in for my procedure? As you might guess, I really didn’t want the “B” team and if I had the “A” I wanted to get some peace out the arrangement. So who were these people behind the little nose covering masks? Did she get them out of bed to have them scrubbed and ready for this surrogacy birth by 7:30 AM? Could I hope? Yes. But I thought better of asking about it…cause I am too much of a southern girl to make a scene by asking about it… I wouldn’t do anything that might embarrass the B team. I have been on that team so many times. I know it’s the pits to be a back up.

At 7:42 I looked up at the big schoolroom clock so I could remember that is when I was wheeled in. Kendra was in scrubs and all brown eyes with tears in the corners. Here it was. The destiny of the shots, the naps on the couch, the ultrasounds, the long hours of insomnia that were the month of December and most of January. This was the stroke that carried in the echo all of the hours of Kendra waiting to meet her little boy. This moment converged into a random still life, fastened together by the hasp of one color. White.

White draped, blinding white light. Instruments of white and silver sheen. Metallic white and my white face reflected on the big yellow glasses that hovered on faces all moving around my head.

It was frozen ice white as the snow anesthesia numbed my lower body. I was falling, falling like drifting snow. But in the blur one thing was clear; I was a white woman falling into the “A” team. Which I found out was not a team at all. My escort through the passage was
Going to be
One umber skinned,

Basketball loving, grandchild bragging man named Lonnie.

He brought the kindest eyes I have ever seen near my face.
In a matter of seconds I was seeing the ensuing car wreck at this intersection. All occurring in absolute slow motion. Here were two stories hurling across the wide and cavernous southern divide— I expected crashes in metal –LOTS of swipes and spins.
all of this so an infant boy could breath his first breathe –– so a white girl could breathe anew.

In real time red began showing up in the blinding beveled fixture of light dangling close to my surgeon’s head. I thought, oh, so much crimson paint! I saw each inch broken in mathematical order. My blood was a smile drawn in a careful grid of quarter- inch mirrors… such odd fragments. Lively stuff was happening on my my half of the disco ball and I was interested in trying to decipher the surgeon’s moves over my flesh.

This academic view of the novelty of me was descending into my eyes from this dish hanging over Lonnie’s shoulder –at first it was worlds away and I was seeing it from the wrong end of binoculars. But somewhere along the way it became too much. In an instant I felt I had 100x magnification and I was on the right end of binoculars.
I began caving in.. and wishing that the movie would pause. Wishing Lonnie could slam dunk that beveled world into the next galaxy.

So, He read the moment in my tense muscles… and soon I found his eyes instead. And we talked – his hands braced my body and saw my pain before I could say it.
He lifted an unbearable weight and spoke without a single word of the BIG things.. like Why ? –How — Why?—How?? Would I make it through?
I had been sure when meeting Lonnie that I would be whiplashing by now over my fearful past with black men. Maybe he wouldn’t be the “A” team for me.
I thought our two stories would be smashing like fenders. I thought wrong.
FENDERS WERE FEATHERS
It was not a stretch at all for my spirit to grasp a strange magnet– one that erased all the film reels I carried inside. Hammered all the metal round.
Gone was the suspicion I had hardened every time I was cornered in my high school hallways.
It had not been a very civil rights experience. My thin skinned boundaries had been easily trespassed and I had frozen. I generalized about the boys getting off the bus in the dark in my white neighborhood.
But here in this sterile cold room I remembered to believe my belief : It is the content of one’s character–it’s only about a man’s peace at his core.

I was glad to forget the mirrored light, glad to join in on the stories of our hometown. The restaurants we remembered and the ones we were sad to see close down. The teams, the seasons, the crazy politicians. Minutes flew by as I was making it fine with my heart rate and my temp through the surgery.

My ‘A’ team was was telling me how I might want to live the years I had yet to live in the south. The decades to be faced long after the hospital flowers were faded and thrown away.
He told me that there is kindness possible in duress . . . and that’s the best time to be kind.
He spelled out for me how to say good-bye to Wilder as they lifted him out of my womb and into his mother’s waiting arms.
It took me thirty five years to face the “A” team and 24 minutes to enlist in its ranks.
By 8:20AMI was wheeled to a curtained post op. I had almost six hours there to let the tears ride from each eye’s inside corner to a bleached white sheet. My hands were immobilized so I couldn’t cover anything. Couldn’t dry anything. Couldn’t toughen anything. My joy was to fall in and out of sleep asking…

Why live at all if I never risk to take a perfect hand extended? Why inhale another day’s gift if I turn my face from love’s unexpected arrival on a Friday morning? True. Wilder arrived. Also true: Forgiveness. Pardon. Peace.
When the steel heart shows and stiffens its defending fenders
I think feathers.
Swords can be ploughshares after all. Shards of glass and jagged metal can be swept from my intersections all over town.
hard edges
–worn down by what matters.
The peace of lightweight feathers.

What’s in My Journal

by William Stafford

Odd things, like a button drawer.

Mean
Things, fishhooks, barbs in your hand. But marbles too.

A genius for being agreeable.

Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous 
discards.

Space for knickknacks, and for

Alaska.

Evidence to hang me, or to beautify.

Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected

anyway.

Deliberate obfuscation, the kind

that takes genius.

Chasms in character.

Loud omissions.

Mornings that yawn above a new grave.

Pages you know exist

but you can’t find them.

Someone’s terribly inevitable life story,

maybe mine.

“What’s In My Journal” by William Stafford, from Crossing Unmarked Snow © Harper Collins, 1981.

It is a solemn thing for a soul to grow ripe. Emily Dickenson

Beauty is found in its perishableness. Denise Levertov

Regarding Eiswine/Icewine— The grapes come from two stalwart countries Canada and Germany—-

Questions to consider about your own harvest:

Can you believe in a ripening when other vines have a successful harvest and you are left in the elements—Can you go through longsuffering?

Can you gamble?  If your timing is off and all is lost what do you stand on? If the freeze comes too late.. the grapes decay and die.

Can you live towards a complexity of flavors even if it means having less volume of your output? How will you cope if life is lived in what seems like being forgotten? How do you grow when all that you are cuts against the consumer model of large production? Mass volume?  Can you risk obscurity?

Can you watch diligently and with a daily rhythm for the one prime hour when you are changed? When summer is frozen inside you, distilled truth is yours to name… and your gift is ready to be released from the vine? When the call comes can you press grapes until midnight for the glory set before you?

Can you believe in a good God if many cherished grapes on the vine beside you are swarmed by birds and taken off the vine? Can you trust through violence? Can violence be integrated in your story?  Will you grapple with God about when loss is an unexpected and rude intruder? How do you handle the denuding of your protection?

Can you let the seasons be the seasons?  If the freeze this year is too intense and the wind chill is severe.. there will be no juice.  How do you handle sovereignty? The years when there is nothing to celebrate? How do you grieve? Who modeled how to grieve?

When you have ordered your heart, time and resources, can you tolerate the loss in spite of your labor? Can you find value in a yield that is one fifth of what the rest of the vineyards yield? Can you walk a narrow road littered with unknowns while the multitudes are walking wide roads with wealth and predictability?

Beauty is seen when a person, belief or object is resting in its right proportion. For example a beautiful diamond is very small in size. You know its value in proportion to the suffering inherent in attaining it.  It is small and hidden in  hard coal and extreme darkness inside a diamond mine.  Can you celebrate the power of redemption and the joy that in Christ nothing is lost.  Can you see that all of the  suffering  that went into creating  a full  but very small taste  is worth it?  The strenuous process of discipleship is accomplished by Christ, the vinedresser.  In time your heart is distilled and radiant. The glory it reflects is intense and it is a foretaste of a heavenly table when the Groom will host the marriage supper of the lamb. At that festival where loss and victories are overshadowed by the beauty of summation there will be a final union with Christ. Our Savior shows the import of our battles by holding the best wine back until we are seated and able to partake of His rich gifts. He plans a lovely time of great communion at the end of a hard fought battle and the wine’s quality matches the proportion what it means for us to accept his invitation to stay His disciple to the end. The reserved wine is the best representation of a life poured out first for sacrifice and now ceremonially. You are applauded for having robbed death and blight in your tested life.  I believe the finest of wine is sought and brought to the table just for you.

Can you accept that you are worthy of  being contained in slender and lovely hand-blown glass?  Can you taste and see the crescendo of the late harvest? The wine is rare, from a limited time, atmosphere, through tending by the vinedresser.  In so many aspects the wine’s survival (like your own) is doubtful and its hope perseveres through limiting circumstances.  Ice wine is preserved through so many severe and numerous tests of nature that each ounce worth 300 % more than table wine that is a staple of our lives!

How is your belly laugh these days?

tower of babel

Speak Silence to Arrogance

This morning I was thinking about the new and very cool buzz phrase “speak truth to power.” It always comes into play at the pivotal moment in an interview when a rock star wants to sound immersed in the cause of justice worldwide. It is a perfect period at the end of a rant about the abuses of power in governments worldwide. I have a wee problem with this: It is so easy to say and yet I don’t often see these folks knocking on the doors of the bad guys in power and giving them a piece of their mind. Aren’t words easy to throw around?

I can’t talk. I can be guilty of dropping a profound tidbit just as criminally. Some things sound so profound and edgy they are hard to pass up in a conversation.

So, today is no exception. Except that I am inventing the new buzz phrase. Speak Silence to Arrogance. This is my 2009 version of the pithy one liner, which is free for use by celebrities and the like.   Please add that to your Late Night with David Letterman discourse. Twitter this one to your friends for me.

Let me explain. Everywhere that I researched set forth the idea that silence is a very active sound. We need to think of it as just another modality of sound. It can be seen a way of speech as much as yelling. It is full and potent in its own right.

Today I have been thinking about silence and the contrast of God’s silence with the three loudest events in the Bible. Take a minute and come up with your list before you read mine. Here are the three noisy affronts to beauty that I believe are the worth examining. First, is the tower of Babel, second is the noisy rampage of Pharaoh’s army to the Red Sea, and third is the crowd yelling “crucify Him.” just days after Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem where they had called out, “Hosanna, be blessed!”

The three loud moments all have some things in common. Wendy Brown writes about loud public scenes in Edgework. She describes it this way: “the situation is so crowded with humanity that one’s own humanness becomes a question.” In each of the three loud moments in the Bible this is true as well. The mob is pushing in. They share one mind, bent towards aggression. There is no pause toward silence or sensibility. Think of the violent Egyptian soldiers after the plagues. They feed off of the lust for revenge and blood while chasing Jewish slaves on horseback. They are a deafening and impersonal force. As is the crowd wanting a spectacle at the feast of the Passover. They remain anonymous; faceless and nameless individuals. A powerful crowd calling for the blood of the innocent.

Soon in each of the three scenes God causes arrogance to drown. I am amazed by this pattern. I had never seen it before. This overwhelming experience brings humanity back from the brink of its arrogant self destruction. The funny thing is: Silence is the tool God uses.
God speaks silence to arrogance. For the image of man to be lifted back to its status as a glorious ruin some loud noise must be cut off. With noise we are just a ruin and we are incapable of empathy or sacrifice for another.
Primo Levi, writes in The Drowned and the Saved, that there are places in history “filled with a dreadful sound and fury signifying nothing; a hubbub of people without names or faces drowned in a continuous, deafening background noise from which, however, the human word did not surface” The human sounding word. Isn’t that what your heart wants to hear at a family table? Isn’t that what we want to hear of the negotiating rooms within the United Nations? How different would it be to have a world leader that listens to God in reverence and lets his power be a shelter for humanity instead of a war zone. A man of silence could be that shelter. Maggie Ross has written eloquently about the power of silence. She describes our initial fear of being reflective. She says that we use our busy and loud lives to”bark at the angels.” We fear the mystery that might captivate us as we listen so we choose to scare any unknowns away from sight. Do you agree? have you known times that you deliberately loaded your schedule so that you would plug your ears to keep from hearing any whispers from God? I have. As I face that my mother is in the care of hospice I catch myself saying “yes” to things that keep that reality of her death at bay. I say “yes” and get moving into a chaotic life before I realize what my yes was actually accomplishing for my spirit.

The Pharoah of Egypt was equally clueless about his barking at the angels. Ten times you wait for Pharaoh to sound human when God says, “Let my people Go” and over and over again he refuses shelter and spends the lives of those under him like worthless coins. His noise was finally stopped. Can you imagine the silence when the boisterous army about to catch their prey is swallowed up by the walls of water? The Red Sea closes over them and there is no battle cry heard over the desert sands. Golden.

What about loud Babel? Like children with a miniature chemistry set they decide to play God and break their way into the top place. What is the gift God bestows on that bad idea bunch? They find quickly that the linguistic order is lost. Each person drowns in a sea of words that they cannot interpret or use to communicate. It is loud but not for long. To fight off insanity each person disperses to remote corners of the civilized world. Soon the magnificent tower of human ingenuity falls strangely silent.

Have you ever felt insane because you were assaulted by a barrage of words? Talk radio? The View? Advertisements that broadcast two steps louder than your setting on the TV? These are bad but words of my own invention some times are even harder than these to untangle and clarify.

Why is it terrifying to be adrift in a sea of words? I can only guess at how it would be for an adult to be illiterate in the US today. How would you feel to be lost in a sea of words that you can’t decipher? A world of advice that you cannot heed? Confusion is the end result of deafening noise. You are adrift and not sure how to find solid ground because there isn’t a centering weight. This is the anxiety that is a restless master. We have fears of others, fears of death, and fears of fears rummage through our minds without fences or filters. Everything is laid waste. You are loud and clambering after solutions that are no solution at all? At midnight you might cry out, “who can deliver me from the body of this death?”

Recovery by Drowning

My thought is, accept the drowning of your arrogance. That is the first step out of the mess.This drowning will have some component of silence. A new kind of listening to God.

And finally.. It will have some kind of return to individual work instead of the big public push. When the big crowds cried out “Give us Barabbas” in the loud New Testament event they showed how politically they were pinning their hopes on a big answer. Babel is a big tower looking for a big way to be God. Egypt’s Pharaoh and his army is a big enforcer with a big stick outnumbering the Jewish slaves by thousands.
So.. Big didn’t win and loud didn’t convince heaven to bend an ear. In the scene on a hillside as the quiet darkness falls on the area around the crucifixion you only hear of individual responses. There isn’t a mob anymore for either the good or the evil. It is one brother, one mother, one thief and one soldier. One Pilate, one Joseph of Arimeathea. They have names and faces. They quietly decide where their loyalties will be given. God always works in singular decisions. Not nameless or faceless mobs. He offers a still point of making a humble decision even to Pharaoh. T.S. Eliot wrote.” Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” I really believe that. The reason God wants to stay stronger than our noise is actually so we can be more fully alive. More human. Not less.

We may hate that we cannot hide into a group and make a loud splash politically or even with our proud and orthodox beliefs. My hope is that before I run to the loud options I remember how God will flood me until I stand alone relating to Him and listening. My fears can look to Him and be radiant in that flood light. My name and face are out of hiding. It is safe in the shelter of God’s silence; a depth that is the only shelter for true power.

I wonder why I held on to the emotion of dread as the clock strikes the bewitching hour today. After all, 2008 is about seven years after my boys entered elementary school. Why do I still foster the mindset that cooking for my family is nothing more than zookeeper’s duty? 

The Great Hoodwink of this Generation-

I think I know why I have stayed with the negative ideology about our dinner hour. Kingsolver calls it the great hoodwink of my generation.  I guess I succumbed years ago to the propaganda that cooking was “slaving at the stove” and far beneath my rights as a liberated woman. Really?  She says that when parents stopped cooking this way for their children they received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. What if I looked at “slaving” differently? What if it became inventing?  What if I changed my perspective about it?  Kingsolver reminded me (pg 127) that the fast food that looks like salvation in the short run is an imposter. She suggests that maybe the marketers of fast food are the ones I am enslaved to, and my real liberation might look more like an alternative and creative way to view food. Creative? Joyful? How can that happen at 5PM? Like you, I hear it and I do a double take. It’s funny though; it is only my language and attitude that needs an overhaul. My verbage is what is outdated. It doesn’t match my actions. I have never been one to zoo keep: to bring bland, industrialized food to my loved ones when the bell rings to herald the dinner hour. I have always been a mad scientist with spices and fresh food. If a marinade is involved, Lookout! In that case I view anything as fair game!

I have created years of dinners that tell a better story than drive through ease at McDonald’s or the predictability of a set menu at Burger King. They show my small strivings for beauty much like the creative approach Kingsolver outlines. Last week I made a Thai dinner with ingredients that stretched my sons’ exposure to a culture across a continent. It was full of color and variety in texture and taste. I found them more than willing to love the flavors in the Lemongrass & Rice Noodle, Garlic and Ginger Surprise. So, I guess I’m not a liberated woman after all but a homemaker.  Somehow I want to write an apology for that.

The Measured Pace of Nourishing Routines

 Yet, Kingsolver is retro as well. She believes it is a noble thing to take up the art of “molding our families’ tastes and zest for life.” I agree. I just didn’t know it yet! She speaks of the “measured pace of nourishing routines.” This seems similar to musical orchestration. The composer has a reverence for arrangement, he works within the limits of each instrument’s range and yet there is boundless variation possible within the musical notation.  Routine is the calendar on my fridge. It is the alarm clock that tolls for waking and the bell that rings the kids in from playing outside at dinnertime.  Nourishment is within the tradition but it must be a form that carries an intangible; the element of surprise. It is the spice you cannot name or say you have tried before. As parents we are part of the shaping of taste and setting our children up for a zest for life. We give them this crazy gift, even at 5 pm! It is hard to come in from the busy day and find a way to give, yet it is nourishing at fifty as much as it is at fifteen.

Traditions Arrest Time

Gina Bria, a sociologist, studied the ethos of the family unit in many different cultures and found that traditions arrest time.  I love that! Family traditions have the power stop the ravages of time. Sometimes I wonder what my sons will feel decades from today when the lift the candlesticks (that have been at the center of our kitchen table) out of a U-Haul cardboard box to place in their home. Will they remember their hallowed position as artifacts called in to service for our daily tradition of eating by candlelight?

      When chaos is surrounding the outside of the house.  When loss, change, and the grief of beginnings and endings feel like back breaking burdens, I hope that the extra chives and the sour cream dollop on the mashed potatoes gives a solace to my sons. I hope they ponder the secret hidden in the white lumps: that in one corner of the world beauty will win.  Love can taste familiar for years not just minutes.  Comfort food is good in a crisis and food prepared tastes far superior to food manufactured.