Apertures, January edition, No. 13

reflections on sanity; the precariousness of prayer; confessions of silence; Ann Powers' deep listening; Buechner's patriotism; confetti over Times Square; and hospitable emptying, + 5 songs.

Welcome to Apertures. A monthly letter collecting themes of grace from short essays, poetry, music, movies, news and photographs. All pictures taken by me unless otherwise noted.

1. Somewhere This Side of Sanity - Christian Wiman

Somewhere this side of sanity

let me have one glimpse of you God.

I have grown tired of gazing at the seams in things,

believing that there are seams in things,

that all reality is ventilated with an absence

that both is and annihilates vision.

If prayer then prayer to be free of the need for it.

If renunciation then of the need to renounce.

To stand neither bored nor alarmed

looking out on your life

like a child’s chalk-drawing a child watches

washed away by a storm.

January has a way, doesn’t she? She’s long and bleak, offering cold edges and a harshness that either shakes us awake by our collars or forces us to burrow deeper. At her best, she invites us to do both: walk deeper into the cold, fully awake. At her worst, well, she’s bitter and annoying. I feel we’re living in a time, now, that is all shock, and I’m missing shalom. Somewhere, at the crux of where Christ meets us, is an invitation to sit in the stillness of His awe.

Awe in the aftermath of shock keeps us stunned, frozen, angry, reeling.

Awe in the aftermath of shalom keeps us anchored in the sure as January, frozen ground of Christ: flowing with life and peace, stillness in the chaos.

The truth is, I am so tired of “gazing at the seams of things.” I want to gaze at the tapestry.

photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

---

2. Running Along the Depths - Janell Downing

(Moses approached the darkness where God was, while the rest of the people stood far off)¹

Most of my friends are anxious

But anger pursues me relentlessly.

Beast run along the depths of the earth, naked.

Slights of hand and word,

Backhanded cuts into your bleeding heart.

The same thing that holds back my anger

holds back my joy.

One wrong turn of the key,

one slip of the tongue,

sparks.

Let yourself be undone I tell myself,

let the lock be picked

let the Word who became flesh pick the lock of my heart.

Sparks.

Are not locks an invitation to be broken open anyway?

Joy is a laughing stock when you try to pin her down.

(Moses approached the darkness where God was, while the rest of the people stood far off)

“But me he caught—reached all the way from sky to sea;

he pulled me out

of that ocean of hate, that enemy chaos,

the void in which I was drowning.

They hit me when I was down,

but Yahweh stuck by me.

He stood me up on a wide-open field,

I stood there saved—surprised to be loved!”²

With a toss of a lasso, a plunge of weathered hands,

a right turn of the key, the bedrock of faith captures me.

Cracking and dripping with a taste so sweet,

I’m distracted by a shimmer, something like honey.

Licking my cracked lips,

fluttering to escape.

(Sometimes, I approach the darkness where God is, while the rest of the people stand far off)

Joy laughs when you try to pin her down.

I wrote this poem out of a desperate need to channel my anger for something good. Wringing my hands, mad at God, for just how dang hard it is to pursue Him. At some point, or many points, our pursuit becomes His pursuit. There is nothing left to do. There are many gaping holes of crisis along the way, and rather than fall into the abyss, we are surprised by Love. Struck by the image of Moses “approaching the darkness where God was,” the desire for God pulls me towards Him, even in darkness. I think it’s one of the ways He tells us we’re not alone. It’s a precarious situation to be sure.

As Rosemarie Carfagna writes in her book, Contemplation and Midlife Crisis,

“The one who prays is, if you will, in the constant state of existential precariousness. One is conscious of living continually on the edge of nothingness, yet equally conscious of being kept from falling into the abyss by the sustaining hand of God.”

Maybe that’s what C.S. Lewis meant in Surprised by Joy. Rather than keep playing games with a dead man, we are invited to play with the One who is alive and well, and see what happens.

“But let me tell you, that to approach the stranger

Is to invite the unexpected, release a new force,

Or let the genie out of the bottle.

It is to start a train of events

Beyond your control…”

- T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

---

3. Advent - Enuma Okoro

I want to find my place

amongst the people of Advent

but I can’t quite decide who I am.

I want to be pregnant with God

but it takes such a toll on the body.

I have given birth to things before

And labor is hard and untimely //

I want to welcome angels and say yes,

to anything.

but if I saw an angel I would hold him

hostage and send a ransom note of questions

demanding answers, to God //

I want to cheer blessings from the sidelines

with a belly growing with prophecies,

and have friends and strangers take hope.

Because God has a season

for those whose seasons have passed //

I want to put my trust in dreams

and in the words of the ones I love,

to believe that God is as close as

the one who would share my bed //

But mostly I want a break from being

the one who mostly falls silent

in the presence of all that’s holy,

who loses her words in disbelief,

terrified by claims of joy and gladness,

unable to believe that prayers are answered.

“In times of desolation, we must seek deeply for the will to hope, and we must do so while feeling spiritually weak.” - Rosemarie Carfagna

4. Ann Powers on deep listening during the in-between

I loved what NPR’s music critic, Ann Powers shared in her email over the new year. I don’t know if she realizes this or not but, it was very contemplative. I’ve been slowly taking her practical advice and it’s been helping my nervous system. (Those Gen X-ers were onto something ;)

Here’s the part that resonates:

There is a way a passionate and curious music lover can lift herself out of the rut dug by the wheels of corporate commerce, though: Simply return to the music. Actually spend time listening. As it happens, the turn of the year is a great time to do this; consider it Dry January for your ears and soul. I’m not going to give you too many guidelines, but here’s what I’ve been doing as an exercise in auditory sobriety. One, I’ve turned my social media consumption down a bit while taking some of what my scrolling dumps on me offline. You know those engagement-bait posts about your favorite whatevers of all time? I grabbed a couple of those and responded, but only to myself. It’s not a contest, it’s a way to reflect on what you love. Two, I returned to old favorites in the physical world, pulling out vinyl records I hadn’t put on the turntable for decades, staring at the covers and seeing what they brought back to me. And three, when I did return to the problematic algorithms of the streaming world, I made it a point to not jump from one new discovery to another. If my feed suggested something intriguing, I gave it my full attention, giving artists I hadn’t previously known or fully noticed a serious chance to win me over. On one level, this has been cosplay — me putting on the ears and habits of a younger Ann, who’d spend a whole weekend in her room with a four-album haul taken home from her record store gig. On another, it’s been a way of retraining myself to not extract what I thought was “the story” from a musical work immediately, instead letting its various meanings coalesce, dissolve and rearrange themselves.

four albums i've returned to this month

What have been some albums you’ve been listening to?

---

5. Patriotism - Frederick Buechner

From Whistling in the Dark, an ABC Theologized

All “isms” run out in the end, and good riddance to most of them. Patriotism for example.

If patriots are people who stand by their country right or wrong, Germans who stood by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich should be adequate proof that we’ve had enough of them.

If patriots are people who believe not only that anything they consider unpatriotic is wrong but that anything they consider wrong is unpatriotic, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy and his backers should be enough to make us avoid them like the plague.

If patriots are people who believe things like “Better Dead Than Red,” they should be shown films of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, and then be taken off to the funny farm.

The only patriots worth their salt are the ones who love their country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or anything like that but champions of the Human Race. It is not the Homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost but the planet Earth as Home. If in the interests of making sure we don’t blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty.

There is only one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of another sort altogether.

Take what you will from Mr. Buechner, but he sure has a way of parsing things out. And then he’ll leave you with a thought entirely different from the one he started with. Brilliant.

---

6. Who releases 3,000 Pounds of Confetti on Times Square by Hand Every Year?

---

7. The Woodcarver - Chuang Tzu

When I began to think about the work you commanded

I guarded my spirit, did not expend it

On trifles, that were not to the point.

I fasted in order to set

My heart at rest.

After three days fasting,

I had forgotten gain and success.

After five days

I had forgotten praise or criticism.

After seven days

I had forgotten my body

With all its limbs //

By this time all thoughts of your Highness

And of the court had faded away.

All that might distract me from the work

Had vanished.

I was collected in the single thought

Of the bell stand //

Then I went to the forest

To see the trees in their own natural state.

When the right tree appeared before my eyes,

The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.

All I had to do was to put forth my hand

And begin.³

As I continue forward on becoming a Spiritual Director, the way of hospitable emptying is set before me. There is now an obligation to sort out, to re-order the goods. That’s the work of discernment that’s connected to any vocation we find ourselves called to. The other day I realized my yellow chair had been a tactile place for me to receive hospitality like this.

My brother passed this yellow chair onto me years ago. At the time, I didn't really know where to put it. Eventually, it ended up in this solitary and odd little corner of my bedroom.
A singular place, hedged in by two windows.
It's become a place of refuge, this wide yellow chair that matches nothing else in our house. I've spent hours upon hours reading books on Spiritual Direction, praying, writing, crying, being sick, sitting, and staring out my window.
Some of us need more space and time to remember our true selves in the loving presence of God. And that's OK. I've come to accept this about myself. I've come to love yellow - a color that signifies vitality and abundance, something my complacent heart needs.

Don't underestimate those solitary and odd spaces. They might just be what you need to begin again.

---

8. Mockingbird’s favorite devotional poems

This month’s poll gathers us Mockingbird contributors and our favorite devotional poems. From Herbert and Tolkien, Heaney and Eliot, to Karr, Oliver and Larkin. And more in between.

• Find our selections and reflections here

---

On My Bookshelf

• This is Happiness by Niall Williams

• Contemplation and Midlife Crisis by Rosemarie Carfagna, OSU

• Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies. By N.T. Wright.

• Whistling in the Dark by Frederick Buechner

Finally, Five Songs Worth Repeating from January

(Almost) every month, I add five songs worth repeating to a continuing playlist.

Here’s the five songs:

1. Good Enough, Joy Oladokun

2. Second Nature, Bon Iver

3. New Year, Beach House

4. Midwinter Swimmers, The Innocence Mission

5. Trees, Brett Leyde

Listen to playlist here

1. Exodus 20:21 - “The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.”

2. Psalm 18:16-19, The Message translation

3. Quoted in Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey toward an Undivided Life—Welcoming the Soul and Weaving Community in a Wounded World.