Don’t Fight Lions

“Willpower is not the way of life we are seeking.  Surrender is… By surrendering to powerlessness, I gain the presence of mind to stop wasting my time and energy trying to change and control that which I cannot change and control…We learn to stop fighting lions, simply because we cannot win.”

Melodie Beattie, The Language of Letting Go

I will open that drawer
and you
will fall out.
Pieces of you
will flap
and flutter about.

I will open that drawer
and you will spill
into my lap.
Dribbling,
little beads of you
will descend.

I will open that drawer
and you will lift
a kingly mane,
nostrils flaring
for freedom
and for prey.

I will open that drawer.
I
will breathe.
You
will roar.

© Amy Persons Parkes 2014

All the Same

photo credit: © All rights reserved. John Krzesinski, 2009.

The waters of my baptism were more akin to the drip of a faucet than the pushy waves of the sea under a red warning flag.

The waters of my baptism provided me no pool in which to swim, rather I was melted like a frozen chicken breast under a steady drip in the sink, thawed a bit late in the day.

Different as we are, I am no longer afraid of those who have been baptized by white caps or those whose baptism resembled the winning coach’s ice-bath.

Whether we are etched underneath a meandering stream, pelted by a downpour, or coated in a fine cool mist of a late night fog, the water of baptism claims us all the same.

Three-in-One, serve us this water as we wait expectantly at your bounteous Table, slake our thirst for belonging with a drop or a waterfall, then we will have no need of any other name than Beloved.

© Amy Persons Parkes 2014

Grace in the Line-Up

Photo credit: “blip_7” by Michael Crane Some Rights Reserved

In the line-up looking for Grace,
I found her carrying the suitcase full of money
(the check in the mail).

I saw her carrying the small bundle tightly swaddled
(and sleeping peacefully in the nursery).
I spotted her hand-in-hand with the love of my life
(and kissing the bride on my wedding day).

But when I was looking for Grace, God,
somebody pointed to the rain and the flood,
and said I should see her there.
But where, God, where is she?

And then I was searching for her on Google, Lord,
when her name appeared in the obituary.
But God, I’m confused, is she there?

So this made me wonder –
does Grace play in the unwanted rain?
Is she lying quietly in the nursing home bed?
Did I miss her in the back left pew of the church,
where she mumbled under her breath and stunk up the whole place?

In the line-up to identify Grace,
let my eyes be your eyes, God,
that I may see what you see.

© Amy Persons Parkes 2011

Written as part of the final project for the Two Year Academy of Spiritual Formation #30

The Prodigal Pain

“And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.”                          Mark 14:35

Walk toward the pain, and you will find life.  Swallow the shallow thinking that bids you turn and run.  Refute the fear that declares you are not strong enough to endure the crucible of this moment.

Walk toward the pain and let it unveil the particulars of your life so you may see with clarity and dignity the reality of this moment.  Walk toward the pain and offer it your attentive ear as it relates what you most need to hear.

Pain is merely a messenger of the Spirit of God who wishes to convey wisdom.  Pain is a child of your heart which can be held and comforted and healed under the gaze of God’s love within you.  Pain, attended to, will be transformed.  Pain bathed in grace can be an instrument to resurrect what lies putridly decaying in your soul.

So, Friend, look to the Pain of your heart, comforted and guided by the life of a suffering Christ.  Listen to the Pain of your existence; and as he comes down the long road home to you, call out to him, “Welcome!”

In compassion, run with open arms toward him and embrace him.  Bring out the finest robe of your acceptance and clothe him.  Adorn him with the splendor of surrender.  And in celebration of what he has to teach, feast at the table of Pain’s wisdom.  Once Pain has disclosed the whole sordid, aching story, how will you respond?

For you had lost him, and now he has been found.

© Amy Persons Parkes 2013

*photo from Makezine.com 

Take a Load Off

“For all must carry their own loads.”
                                             Galatians 6:5 NRSV

Paw’s load was pecans, and Granny’s load was Paw.  Granny carried more than her share.  Too bad Paw never learned to carry himself; and sadly, Granny waited until he died to live.

Carry your own load now.  Don’t wait for someone to die because the insurance money will only insure the probability that others will line up sooner rather than later, wanting you to pick up where they recently left off.

Everyone must carry their own load.  Now is the time to take an inventory of what you need to see about yourself, the laundry list of inescapable strengths and weaknesses that parade behind you like a waddling line of downy yellow ducklings.  They will follow you anywhere.

Tend to your own load lest those ducklings obediently plunge off the precipice of your self-deceit.  You wouldn’t have flown so far down if you had known the ducklings were far too immature to fly.

Yes, Wisdom, help me to carry my own load.

© Amy Persons Parkes 2013

The Dark is Me, Too

I don’t know when or where or how or from whom I learned not to look at the dark side of myself.  It’s not like I don’t have a dark side.  I have plenty of dark side.  And I don’t mean that I  learned to pretend that I didn’t have a dark side.  I knew I had a dark side; I simply learned not to look at it.  I didn’t look at my dark side like I managed not to look at someone who had spoken unjustly to me.  I didn’t look at my dark side like I both recognized and avoided the person I was embarrassed or ashamed to talk to.  I didn’t look at my dark side like I haven’t looked at some of the buskers near the subway stairs.  I know they are there; I hear them; I see them.  I just don’t have the time and money to spare, right now.  Nope, not right now.

And my dark side, let me clarify.  I’m not talking about illegal activities or heinous omissions of ethical behavior.  It’s pretending that I am listening when I am really forming a judgment about why you should be listening to me.  It’s believing I am calm and peaceful and forgiving while I am in an all-out brawl with anger and resentment, refusing to acknowledge their presence and throwing them out the back door of the “I’m So Good” Club hoping no one else ever saw them come into the place.  My dark side is the place where I know I could see (if I took a good hard look) the full reality of my brokenness, my humanness,  and my incompleteness.  My dark side is the part of me that is me, the part of me I wish weren’t me, that I was hoping would somehow change, disappear, or mature if only I could put enough distance between us.

And here’s what caught me, the question of attention.  Would it be okay to give my dark side a thorough gaze?  Or would this serve to fuel the darkness residing therein?  If I looked at the darkness, would I be swallowed up within it, rendering me incapable of ever leaning out toward the light again?

“But,” I sang to my Self, “attention need not be laced with shame nor approval.  Attention may be clarifying while gentle, humble yet accountable.”

May the light of my eyes, cast a luminescent glow, one encompassing net, about my dark side.  May the gift of a sacred attention irradiate what I have been unwilling to fully acknowledge.  May I learn to love my darkness, for that is me, too; and may the Light which has never been overcome by darkness be my guide.

***

What have you learned about yourself and God when you turned your attention to your darkness?

© Amy Persons Parkes 2013

Invitation (a prayer)

As surely as the envelope comes in the mail,
or the phone rings with opportunity,
or the innocent child asks, “Will you come play with me?” –
you, O God, invite me
to taste and see,
to hear and heal,
to know and be known.

With tenderness and vulnerability,
I pry open the sealed note of this moment
and pray with hope
that I will be available
and able
to respond
to You.

© Amy Persons Parkes 2011
(written as part of the final project for the Two-Year Academy of Spiritual Formaion #30)

To Speak and To Listen

“Listen, and I will tell you a mystery…”
                                                                (I Corinthians 15:51)

When I was in the fifth grade, our teacher instructed the class on the practice of effective listening.  “Watch the person’s lips,” she admonished, “Don’t watch her face.  Watch her lips.”

I remember a time in my late teens when I was trying to listen to God.  How are you supposed to do that?  God doesn’t have lips to watch.  And without lips to watch, I heard a cacophony of voices in my head giving directions, offering advice, and issuing threats.  The voices tumbled over one another in an endless cycle as if my mind were a dryer with a glass door.  I was listening, but not to God.  The tumbling voices were attached to all the people who had praised me and loved me, who had scared me and hurt me, who had cajoled me and manipulated me, who had taught me and challenged me.  People had lips; God didn’t.

In the passing years, I realized that the tumbling voices came from a gift; I am a good listener.  Listening well means more than watching lips.  Listening well is hearing tone and sensing emotion.  Listening well is to pull back the Self in order to create as much space as possible for the Other to speak, to play, to emerge, to soar, to spill, to spew.  To listen is to pay attention to the hands and the shoulders, trace the arc of the eyes, hear the pattern of verbs, and to follow the billowy, lacy, delicate web of thought, gossamer thin and light, sheer, yet, defining.

Soon, if you are listening, you begin to see the delicate web is everywhere.  I saw it all; all of us like Charlotte’s babies spinning our silk and ballooning from one place to another.  And I began to wonder if spinning my silk to the breeze was a betrayal of the gift of listening I had been given.  All those years of listening, observing, making room for the Other to speak, became obstacles to listening for a God with no lips, obstacles to listening to my True Self.  When I tried to listen for God, I heard everyone else. When I yearned for my own voice, I could not discern my whisper among the tumbling voices; the voice of my True Self was as hard to find as a lost sock.

Wondering, I asked, “What if I listened to myself with as much attentiveness and gentleness and interest as I had listened to others?”  As I became a better listener, I learned that listening well means that I must not forget that I am the one who listens.  To hear the tone and sense the emotion, I use my faculties and my intuition.  To pull back the Self is not to say the Self can or should disappear.  To pay attention to hands and shoulders, I watch with my eyes; to trace the arc of your eyes, I use my vision.

I listen; but when I listen well, I also speak.

© Amy Persons Parkes 2013

Healing

When the blister heals, water stings the opening.
I itch after the sunburn eases.
As the scrape on my right foot heals,
I feel bumpy scabs tighten across my skin.
And I’m wondering, Healing God,
about the pink and purple
and yellow and green
dyeing my healing bruise.

By what change, what beauty
what discomfort, what surprise,
will you heal me, God?

On second thought,
like the vaccination needle
maybe it’s better
if I don’t know
what’s coming next.

Great Physician,
Compassionate Nurse,
Ever-present Attendant,
do what you think is best.
Comfort the fever of my resistance.
Dress the wound of my pride,
And cover the nakedness of my deepest pain.
In and through Christ, I pray.  Amen.

© Amy Persons Parkes 2011

Written as part of my final project for the Two Year Academy of Spiritual Formation #30

A Girl Catching Bees

Like a hair perm gone terribly awry, frizzed, unmanageable, and impossibly unkempt, the wisteria tendrils and shoots amassed around the base of the towering black walnut tree in the side yard of Grannie’s house, that is, until sometime in late February or early March when the unruly mass of vines inconceivably transformed into a living, throbbing, buzzing island of lavender blossoms, green stems, and black-headed and yellow-headed bumble bees.  The wisteria was alive with color and sound, alive with an invisible cloud of perfume luring the bees and me to her tangled mess; the wisteria with her siren song of smell secreted pheromones like a trail of little candies leading her children home.  So summoned, so lured, so enticed, we all presented ourselves before her.  She needed us; we needed her, the bees and me.

The black and yellow-headed bumbled bees penetrated the purple concave openings of each tiny bud sipping her nectar, brushing against her pollen, retrieving the first food of spring flowers draping trees and bushes in our small region of south Alabama.  A week or two more, and she would have been competing with the azaleas on the front side of the house.  I was not bedazzled by the flowers, by the pollen or the nectar; I was drawn by the bees.  As an eight year old, I thought I was playing with the bees; but as an adult I know, I captured and suffocated them.  In hindsight, I came to kill the bees.  I know now that the reason I went to her, following the bees, was because I was bored.  I was also powerful, and the bees were available.

With my bare hands, I caught the yellow-headed bumble bees.  I stalked the blossoms, waiting for the moment of in-between hovering when I could see for certain that the head of bee was stained with a patch of yellow.  (The black-headed bees would sting.  I didn’t catch those.)  When I snatched one in mid-air, I marveled at my ability to contain the bee’s aliveness in my young fist, to feel its beating wings and throbbing thorax in the palm of my hand and on the underside of my fingers.  I felt the power of defying my natural enemy without being stung, of glorying in the impotence of these yellow-headed bees.  I always wanted to catch more of them.  How many could I catch?  With a sharp butcher knife, I stabbed slots into the flat shiny surface of a mason jar lid.  I deposited bee after bee into the quart jar, with a balance upwards of twenty most days.  In the jar, the bees fell silent, no humming buzz, no beating wings, no vibrating body.  Disoriented and drunk for lack of freedom and air, they stumbled and fell upon one another while my marvel wilted alongside the cluster of wisteria blossoms I had picked to keep them company.

I was a little girl enamored with the chaos of a living, throbbing, buzzing island of flora and fauna.  I was a little girl unaware of the living, throbbing, buzzing island of chaos at the base of my little tree of life.

© Amy Persons Parkes 2013