Sleeping Lions

This story is Escrisal 2, and if you’re not familiar with the phrase, click on the tag for this post and it will take you to the first entry that explains what (and why) it exists.

I broke the 300 word rule.  In fact, I broke it for #1.  So let’s call that one more of a suggestion than a guideline.  :)  Everything’s coming in around 380.

*   *   *

The hills were sleeping lions, tawny flanks baking in the California sun.  To Walter Groves, they felt more alive than his passengers.   His Greyhound was weaving through the torpor of high noon at fifty miles an hour, a hurtling gray pill filled with ten sleeping bodies.  In the oversized mirror hanging above his head Walter could watch them with their backs flattened to their seats and their heads nodding and swinging with the curves of the coastal highway.  They seemed more like ragdolls than human beings.  And meanwhile the hills were flashing their golden manes of wheat at every turn and dabbling rocky paws in the Pacific, as if only moments away from the hunt, as if the right scent or the right sound would muster them into wakefulness, and only Walter would see them stir. 

                The bus made an odd rumbling noise; Walter heard it as a growl that shook the cabin.  The highway before him was a long black line; a lion’s soot covered tail, ending in a tuft of willows.  He looked up and as startled to see eyes blinking in the hills.  They were emerald and slit like a cat’s.  A mouth opened beneath them—rows of long white teeth, like sun-bleached logs strung together with barbed wire.  A red carpet emerged from a lion’s yawning face and found no parable in nature.  Walter stood stricken by the vision, found his hands in the wheat, in the feline fur.  Where should they be?  Surely not stroking these soft golden stalks that sprouted from the sides of lions.  He heard the beast growl again, felt it through the seat of his pants.  It jogged loose urgent thoughts that had been growing in the slow corners of his brain.  

                He was not alone.  He was not on safari. He was Walter Groves.  He was not driving his bus.

                His head jerked up off his chest.  He looked up, saw a flashing field of blue and white.  In the mirror all his passengers were astronauts, floating up out of their seats.  A nickel passed before his eyes, moving strangely, right to left.  He followed its movement with his head and saw the cliffs, the rocky paws of lions.  They lunged parallel to the bus, past his window, into a wall of water.  That, and the hideous silence, tore a scream from his throat.  From the part of him that remained an observer came the thought that it was a primal, jungle sound.

Escrita de Salão

Brazil is well-known for being a global soccer factory.  One reason some of the best players in the world come from Brazil is related to a national obsession: Futbol de Salão.  The name of the game is translated, from Portuguese, as “Football in the Hall.”  The game is played with a smaller and less bouncy ball than normal soccer, and is played indoors, in rooms much smaller than your traditional grass pitch.  Because of the smaller dimensions and more frenetic pace, players touch the ball some six hundred percent more than in your standard soccer match, and soccer skills are developed much more quickly as a result. 

When I learned this, the first thing I thought was, “how do I apply this to writing?”  The answer is the following experiment.  I call it “Escrita de Salão.”  Writing in the Hall.  The name of this game is imitation of the Brazilian game, the art of condensed repetition.  The rules: each escrisal (the Brazilians similarly smoosh the name together) must tell a complete story.  This story must be under 300 words and have a distinct story arc.  The arc itself is somewhat loosely defined; though it might consist of the classic storytelling elements of beginning, conflict, climax, and resolution, the arc might eschew these in favor of a more narrowly focused story.  Dynamism.  Change.  Metamorphosis.  

As a writer who wants to tell epic stories spanning a wide variety of genres and concepts, I intuitively think this is nuts.  But it’s worth a go, if it worked for Brazilian soccer.  Maybe next week I’ll try a writing exercise inspired by the Netherlands.  If you watched the World Cup this year, you know what I mean.

*     *     *

Escrisal 1

On his way out he looked down at precisely the wrong moment and saw her wedding ring sitting on the kitchen table.  The reminder was a warm wet shock, an internal mechanism flopping loose and hanging obscenely.  He willed his hand to the doorknob and blinked back the sting.  In the car he fumbled to plug his cell phone into the car charger with cold fingers.  He watched the tiny battery in the corner of the screen fill up as the car idled and smoked, and the windshield slowly changed from frost to glass. On a whim he paged over to text messaging.  Stared at her name. 

There had been a trip to Tahoe, in the first years of their marriage, when they had seen a truck hit a deer at fifty miles an hour.  In that instant before the impact she had reached out and grabbed his hand, barked “Ron!” as if somehow he could pause the frame with the deer unharmed, and change the terrible course of physics.  Later, much later, with their second son hours away from being born, he’d called her from Minnesota and wept while she’d listened.  Her voice had been a too-taut violin string on the other end of the line.  “You’ll make it,” she’d said. 

Thinking of how she’d smiled at him, propped up in the hospital bed with their son in her arms, he let go of the breath he’d been holding and looked up through the sweating windshield into leafless branches.  Up past the tangle of gray limbs, up into the second story window where her orchid was blooming.  She’d cooed at the plant all winter long, right up until the end.  The flower had grown sickly beneath the antiseptic glare of the hospital fluorescents, but she’d reassured it during its long sojourn.  “Soon you’ll be right back in your spot,” she’d said, “right back in that East window.  Okay?  You’ll make it.”  Her frail hand had patted the leaves reassuringly. 

He glanced down at the phone, paused.  Her lovely name.  He opened the last message.  “We’ll make a greenthumb of you yet,” it read. 

The engine shuddered to a stop as he turned the key, slipped back out into the cold.  He would be late.  But at least he’d remembered to water the plants.

God was in the news

An article appearing in the Seattle Times this week recently surprised me, by turning the meteoric fall of Indiana’s Mark Souder, a “strong Christian” who was recently outed as having an affair with a part time staff member, into an appeal to Conservative Christians everywhere.  Taken as a slice of the public paradigm floating around out there in America, two things are truly interesting about the article, written by E.J. Dionne Jr.   For one, it reveals just how far the Christian community has strayed from the heart of Jesus.  For two, it displays how little our American culture really knows about the Gospel.  And both of those things, added together, come up to zero for the Good News.

Two quotes provide ballast to the public opinion.  In the article, Dionne quotes Jesus, saying “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  That’s a familiar passage, even to Americans that haven’t cracked a bible once.  These words could be offered as a comfort to the now-resigned congressman, but Dionne isn’t satisfied with only offering grace to the disgraced.  He goes one step further.  “It would be lovely,” he writes, “if conservative Christians remembered Jesus’ words not only when needing a lifeline but also when they are tempted to give speeches or send out mailers excoriating their political foes as permissive anti-family libertines.”

How might the Bible back up Mr. Dionne?

In Exodus 33, Moses is dealing with the aftermath of the Israelite idolatry, the golden calf they’d set up in place of God while Moses was powwowing with the Almighty for a few days.  God, every faithful, tells Moses that He will give the Israelites the land He had promised them, but rather than lead them there Himself, God says that He will remove His presence from their midst.  It’s in Moses’ response to this edict that we see the departure of the current Christian culture from the heart of Christ.  Moses says to God, “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. 16For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?”

In other words, there’s nothing inherent within Christians that makes them special or elevates them to a moral high ground above the rest of the faith community.  The plan was never to create a religious army, with the singular purpose of stamping out sin in liberal congressional districts.  The plan was that God’s people could be marked with humility and grace, so that others might look at them and say, “that same free gift of grace is offered me.  That same source of life and love can be mine.” 

But still we label, we judge, we paint hatred on picket signs.

How many times have Christian Conservatives, touting family values, placed upon themselves the mantle of perfection, of shimmering morality, rather than pointing towards a God who showers them with grace despite their many flaws?

Fortunately, there’s very good news for Mark Souder, E.J. Dionne Jr, and the rest of us.

Dionne, who admits to admiring Souder somewhat from a distance, says he hopes “Souder finds a way to work out his redemption.” 

The good news?  That was already accomplished two thousand years ago, on a cross. 

And the only difference between him and the rest of us is this–when our imperfections and defects emerge from the places where we’ve kept them hidden, it doesn’t make the Washington Post.

Truly not a Whitman. Eh, Whatever.

Look—

The distance between you and me is either

The fibrous white wall of a paper coffee cup,

Name-thin and opaque, but

Warm.  Or,

Transparent plastic, filled with

A form of liquid that changes over time until

It dissolves into murky water and

Sloshes in the cup holder.

In the latter case, what was inside

Has lost its form, its brilliance over time

And rides along with us until we have a chance

To dump it out.

And neither of us want that.

That’s how I justify putting this into the microwave,

After the first kiss of the wand has worn off and

The coffee’s a bit tepid.

It isn’t ideal.  But the budget was your idea.

Consider this a romantic gesture.

Alright?

Don’t harass me about it.

Morning Pages 1

My friend Wayne explained to me that ecologists can tell the health of a river by digging a meter-cubed sample out of the bank and counting all the critters, the invertebrates, that inhabit it.  If a river is stressed, there will be fewer creatures rummaging around in the silt. 

I read in a book that a good way to stimulate creativity is to just create, three full pages every morning.  The rule is no self-criticism.  Nothing edited, or changed.  Just what floats through the mind.  Faithful.

So this is my meter cubed, my sample.  Just don’t jump to too many conclusions about my mental health based on how many creatures are crawling through the silt.  Deal?

*   *   *

Now he sits, his hat on a little crooked.  Didn’t bother to wash his hair.  A gray hood over the hat.  His legs are twisted around the table leg, jeans running into beaten tennis shoes.  He hasn’t played tennis in two years.  The computer in front of him is small.  He doesn’t move as he types, just flicks his eyes up and down, from time to time and from face to screen, to take in the line of customers whom he observes, making little observations of his own.  Little stories.  Trying to force himself out of his own, crowd himself out so that he can see what’s really happening here.  All his life he has been convinced that there was more to the story.  He has been a fly on the wall, on the window.  Wandering along the glass of his life, a portal stiff and sterile, seeing colors and branches moved by the wind, but buzzing. Trapped. Resisting the newspaper.  Stupid fly—get out of the sill and fly—up, up!—and you won’t wander anymore.  Glass deserts.  How many fly corpses line the sill? 

John taught the bible.  He would have fit in a TV show about ancient rome.  He’s wearing a dark gray jacket, a mountain-ready conglomeration of fabric.  He’s found his purpose.  One hand holds the bible open towards the end.  The index.  It’s best to know the context of this term in other books, he is saying.  Gestures with his coffee-cup.  The young man in the red shirt opens his bible and points something out, eager.  The roman grins.  Be humble Caesar, he is thinking to himself, but don’t let this opportunity pass.  Let the wise sit at the gate and make their proclamations.  The young are so.  Poor Stacy.  She’s working, like a dog right now.  Not my fault she hates her job.  Doesn’t claim to have time for this.  For giving back.  I made my money, and I don’t need to make any more.  Don’t need to prove anything to anybody.  I’ve got Jesus now.  So, look at this passage.  What does it mean to you?  I’ll help.  Why don’t you let me?  She never lets me help.  Shoulders the world, and takes it all out on me on the sailboat.  Stresses me.  There’s a reason we bought the damn thing.  I imagined white wine and waves.  I should drive to the marina when the kids leave.  Nice day to scrape the hull.

Sam watches and he just doesn’t get it.  He has a headache.  He hates Starbucks.  He sits in the chair and fills it, just with his knees and elbows.  The core of him is somewhere else.  It’s thinking about the argument he had with his roommate.  He’s reminded how much he hates to read.  Swipe a hand beneath the old  ball cap.  God, my head.  Stop with the Word.  No more words.  Sam doesn’t want to get it.  Sam hates his name.  Mom named him Samuel because she was told she couldn’t have children.  Along came the miracle baby.  Miracle baby grew up and developed a love for Copenhagen.  Went adrift.  Sits in Starbucks and thinks about playing Call of Duty.  No room for anything else.  Sam is not permeable.  He does not permit osmosis.  He does not read his bible.  He had a conversion experience, once, but it was a pull-myself-up-by-the-bootstraps conversion, a do it yourself.  He worked on his Dad’s deck last summer, thought maybe this was what it was about—a day of splinters, nails, hot sun on your back.  Honest punishment.  Sitting with his Dad, swapping stories over a Pepsi.  Thought maybe he would move in, get the dirtbike running.  Dad, you could come to church with me.  But then the winter came, and Dad had to cancel, flew to New York.  He’ll be back in the spring.  Rain check.

Elementary

Is it wrong that I sometimes

Sit back and look out my window at the world

And find it incomprehensible?

Me, who glories in meanings and mysteries.

Who sniffs out patterns and possibilities like a

Bloodhound roots through fallen leaves.

Believes.  Catches the scent of hidden things.

Is it wrong that today I am weary of the scent of earth?

Is it a sin that I look through the rain on the glass

And see the chaos there as elementary,

Better than me, more honest than I am even

On my best day?

If only we more rational creatures would

Follow the advice of those prone to instinct.

Roll over.  Paw the sky.  Expose our bellies.

Naked beneath the teeth of our adversary, but

Willing to hope in the gentle hand.

New Song Lyrics

I’ve been challenged to write a song about the Icelandic Volcano.  This is not that song.  This is something else I’ve been working on–and I’m proud of it.  I think that it’s close to the writing style I’d like to try my hand at a little more, a little more “skin left on the table,” to quote Bono.  So here’s the latest. 

By the way, the album’s shaping up nicely.  I’ve got about ten tracks that I’m beginning to feel very good about.  The next step really is fleshing them out.  It’s so edifying to truly work on a project, rather than meander through sleepless 3am writing binges, with little to show in the daylight hours. 

*   *   *

Everybody’s always lookin at me

From the corner of their eye

And when I catch them starin’ they’re

Always wearin’

 guilty smiles

Why does

Everyone need me,

Everyone feed me

Say they believe me

Turn up the TV

 CHORUS

I —

am more than meets your eye

Am a star that crossed your sky

Am a man that lived and died

And I still do everyday

And we

are worlds that go unknown

Are not the troubles that we’ve sewn

Don’t know how far we’ve grown

But we still do everyday

I don’t look up passing strangers in the street

I wonder what their glances meant

Traffic slows down to see the glass on the ground

We’re only interested in accidents

Why does

nobody know this

Nobody show this

Nobody notice

We’re lacking purpose

Skeptics and mystics and thieves

They’ve all gone and pawned the last word on me

All of the world’s a too tiny stage

That’s why some people live on the front page

Why do

I let it hurt me

Let ’em all search me

Get up too early

Still run the derby

Litany

I found this, and it moved me.  Some credit Mother Teresa with this, but actually it’s from a Cardinal named Rafeal from early last century.  I hope that as you pray through this, it also moves you. 

I am reminded as I read that the true achievement of Jesus isn’t in the smoothing away of rough edges–it is the complete reinvention of the human creature.  My “sins” are nominal compared to my sinful heart.  To change the very nature of a thing is far greater than to merely change its behavior. 

Amen?

 The Litany of Humility.

*   *   *

O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.

From the desire of being esteemed, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being extolled, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being honored, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being praised, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being preferred to others, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being consulted, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being approved, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being humiliated, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being despised, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of suffering rebukes, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being calumniated, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being forgotten, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being ridiculed, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being wronged, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being suspected, Deliver me, Jesus.

That others may be loved more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That, in the opinion of the world, others may increase and I may decrease, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be chosen and I set aside, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be praised and I unnoticed, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be preferred to me in everything, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

He Needs to Live in This Story

Some people have asked about the reading I wrote for Good Friday.  I’m publishing it here on the blog, so that you can read it for yourself.  The evening was based on the stations of the cross; this particular reading focuses on Jesus as he carries the instrument of his death. 

By way of commentary–how often have we pulled back from the full humanity of Christ, and why?  Are we afraid of ourselves, afraid of what it means to pretend at civilization, and insert Jesus into that charade?  I’ll tell you there are beautiful moments in life, and darkness, too.  And in between, there are the glassy-eyed hours, the dumb beast hours, the stuff that never makes it off the cutting-room floor of the stories we tell about ourselves.  Moments of rage between moments of hopelessness.  We are fickle, uncertain, flightless birds.  To put Jesus into that story, the story of the mob, feels abhorrent. 

But it’s necessary.

It was that thought that motivated the passage below.

*   *   *

We watch as Jesus carries his cross through the crowded, sun baked streets of Jerusalem.  We are the faces in the mob.  We kick up the dust with our shuffling, our jostling for a better view.  It coats our throats and clogs our nostrils, we taste it on our tongue, smell it mixed into the feral scent of blood and sweat and the hot air sweeping down like hell’s breath off of Skull Hill. 

Behold the wretch, the would-be king, a spectacle.

The din of the crowd is staggering.  The women wail in his wake.  The gloating priests pour their laughter like stones down upon his head.  The sound is like the pounding of the waves on Galilee, the rush of blood in our ears as we watch helplessly, the maddening gale-force bluster of gossips and jesters who jape and jeer—and we would shout, scream into the empty sky: where now is the still small voice that calms this terrible sea?    

Behold the silent man, whose bloody grip slips on the timber. 

He was supposed to be more than this.  So much more than 75 trillion cells that compose, like ours, his human frame, cells that even now leak alarmingly into the fibers on his back, the grain of the wood, the hot pebbled soil beneath his feet.  He is so like us—afflicted by the whims of our urgings: satiation and satisfaction, waste and want.  Disturbingly animal.  Still enthralled to the powers of death and those that deal death.  Dog eat dog.

Behold the lamb, the brute led to slaughter.

What story do you carry with you, Jesus?  Is it called Justice?  Mercy?  These are the myths of a kingdom that we have never seen, whose halls are figments of our fairy-tales.  How can we hope to see them now?  When last we lined this path, we waved palms at you, and called it a Triumph.  What will we call this day?  What will we call this day, when reality in Technicolor killed the story-teller, the meaning-maker, the one who made it all make sense?  What do I do with my story, Jesus? 

Is it there, in those blood soaked beams laid across your back?  Tell me you take it all with you.  Tell me you saw this, you knew this was coming.  That all the heat and the noise and the blood and the dust, the anger and pride and misery and lust that I know so well go with you now.  Because if there is more to this story that what meets our eyes now, Jesus—more than just dumb slaughter—we will call this day a miracle.  We will call this day blessed.

We will call this day good.

Revealed: My Late Night Obsession

I’m including a screenshot of the project that has had me up at nights, working at odd hours, oftentimes with a few cursewords held poised, like small nuclear missiles, on the tip of my tongue, ready to inflict scathing shock and awe at the Mac, at Pages, at the fact that an hour ago at ten-thirty, I had told my wife I would be home in ten minutes.   For the better, Steve Jobs has yet to invent a computer whose feelings can be bruised.  For now, there’s no app for iEgo.

Really, it was a love hate relationship.

For every one of those moments of impending and private techno-cold-war, there were three moments where something clicked into place, or the computer surprised me with its cleverness and foresite (thank you again, Mr. Jobs) and I raised my arms in exultation.  I even made several wordless ululating cries.  In the night, in the pool of lamplight that kept my eyes from burning out of their sockets. 

I guess what I’m saying is, I had a blast writing Journey Magazine.

So though it will be revealed in person (or, in paper) on Sunday, I have to just give you a quick glance at the table of contents.  Not the cover, because it’s too cool to really show off yet before it’s in people’s hands.  But the table of contents, yes.  It’s like the magazine’s profile on eHarmony.  Hopefully it will make you want to see the rest.

As a point of interest, that red line at the top of the page is a cut mark.  It’s how the printer knows where to cut the page to the appropriate size.  You won’t see that in the final copy.

You know, it’s funny–in this edition I wrote articles about cafes and theologiants (that was misspelled, originally, but then I realized it was appropriate for A.B. Simpson), and then realized that they would represent the first material I’ve ever written that would be read by more than a handful of people.  That’s strange to me, kind of a like a hitchcock twist.  That’s how my dreams become realized, in increments, and never as I imagined them.  When I thought of my future self as a writer, in my teens, it was always as the kid who would write the great American novel.  And my first step towards the world of being a published writer is as a magazine editor, working at my local church.  Maybe easy to dismiss, but guess what… I get paid to do this.

I’m going to sit back and enjoy the moment. 

*   *   *

Journey Magazine, Spring 2010, Contents