My Words for Now

On my desk, an addressed, stamped envelope is wedged between a partly-burned candle and my dusty lamp. It has been moved around my desk since late spring, since I received it from a good friend who was going to Japan for the summer and was asking for financial and moral support. I intended to send it containing a note to welcome him back, to tell him how much I enjoyed his email updates, how I was looking forward to surfing together again. But it's still on my desk, and nearly two months has passed since I flew to California to attend his funeral. He drowned while swimming with friends in a place called Pilgrim's bay.

Today I tried to peel the stamp off, and use it for a letter I needed to send. It was stubborn enough for me to have to consider what I was doing. That's not my stamp--it's John's. The letter is eerie in its reminder of how John interrupted me--when I had the best of intentions--leaving before I could say all I wanted to say. I smoothed the curled edge and propped it next to other letters I have to send.

A friend wrote me last week and told me of a sudden death that has left him reeling. He asked how I was doing in my own grief. This was how I replied:

Words are exposed for their inadequacy when things like this slice our lives open. Our wordlessness exposes how little control we have, how little we understand, and how big the darkness really is. What have I learned as I have walked through the darkness of the past months? Live into your grief, into the confusion and sadness, into the anger and throbbing pain, into the darkness we are all so afraid of. In Exodus, as God is preparing to speak to Moses, it is recorded that "Moses went up into the darkness where God was." I have been confronted with the fact that this is not the God I wanted to know. So then, am I an idolator, creating God as I would like him to be, instead of as he really is? What choice will I make as I look to know God--pray to him, worship him, speak of him--and do not find him to be as I had thought?

Let yourself ask hard questions like these--indeed, live inside of them, and let yourself not only deal with the confusion that is outside of yourself, but inside. What kind of God allows these kinds of things to happen, anyway? Is it a God who truly knows our native tongue? How, then, is he speaking now--or what might he be saying in this vast silence that words are inadequate for? And how do I understand words, if Jesus is called Logos, and I am at a loss for words, what is there--in him--to be found and deepened in my understanding of what words are to be? I have found myself returning again and again to the life of Jesus, to the incarnate God who humbled himself to have his diaper changed, learn Aramaic, experience indigestion, hit his thumb with a hammer, have nails driven through his wrists. Have I ever understood any of this at all? Have I ever been willing to?

My questions, my silences, my words and the spaces they echo in--finding a place where they are necessary, where my stories and poems can shape worlds, as my world has been shaped.

I have deliberated for far too long about creating my own blog, waxing like Hamlet in an existential dilemma only I could create--to blog, or not to blog, that is the question. Well, with five minutes of (well-considered) spontaneity, I have answered it, and have joined the millions who use this forum to vent, process, be inane and create. This is an attempt to discipline my writing, to carpe candidus--seize the writing--so that the busy classroom doesn't steal what I know must be more a part of the rhythm of my days. This is part of me learning to be a writer who teaches, not a teacher who writes--who is determined to learn to find and call out the poetry in the ordinary spaces of my days. And it is part of me who holds back my written words too often, waiting until the letter can't be sent. These are my words for now.