Guest posts | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

When the Bible Makes You Want to Run Away… A Guest Post by Heather Caliri

This was going to be a pretty post about God singing back to us.

Zephaniah 3:17 says:

The Lord your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

I love this image of God singing back to us, of the music of the universe originating in the one who is mighty. I love the idea of God standing over us like a mother singing lullabies. I love the closeness, the power and music in this verse.

The only problem is the book that surrounds it.

It’s horrifying.

I don’t like reading about entrails being poured out, or people groping like the blind because they have sinned. I do not like hearing about the Philistines being wiped out completely.

I don’t usually like reading the prophets unedited, because I do not understand them.

I have been afraid of the Bible many times when I read it. Sometimes I read it and its words do not speak to me, or the words they do speak are dark and bloody, like something out of a movie I wouldn’t watch for fear of bad dreams. There is darkness and death in the Bible, and I want to ignore it. There is ugliness and pain and condemnation and I want to run away.

I have been trying, lately, to not run away. I have been trying to take baby steps towards being honest about passages that grieve me. I am trying to trust God with His word.

So, I bring myself back, trembling, to Zephaniah. There the Lord is, singing, and there is the death and destruction alongside him. I wonder: how do these belong together? How are entrails and the quiet love of the Lord not just in the same Bible, but in the same book?

And here’s what I see when I read more carefully, when I look through some commentaries and read a few different translations:

I see the power structures of the ancient Near East exposed and condemned.

The foreign powers: the kings that mock the Israelites and their God, who oppress and exile the people.

But also the powers in Israel: the wealthy, the indifferent, the corrupt.

Zephaniah speaks words of some comfort to the humble in the middle of the book:

Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land,
you who do what he commands.
Seek righteousness, seek humility;
perhaps you will be sheltered
on the day of the Lord’s anger. (2:3)

It is something, especially given the verses that attracted me to Zephaniah in the first place. No, I don’t like that word “perhaps,” but it is something.

I think about those causing pain in our world and I can understand, with an ounce of me, the desire for compensatory suffering.

I sit with that ounce for a moment. Here’s what comes to me.

Compensatory suffering: I see Jesus on the road to Calvary. I see him stumbling as though blind. I see them piercing his side, and the water from his entrails running out.

Did the conflagration come? No, God took it upon himself. Somehow, he swallowed whole that awful prophecy and bore its destruction for us.

The truth is, these words, the awful darkness in the Bible is too much for me, but it is often because I hear it echoed each day in the destructiveness of this world. I do not want it to exist, but it does. I do not want redemption to be needful, but it is.

I would like the darkness to be less obvious in the Bible, because it makes me deeply uncomfortable. But maybe uncomfortable isn’t a terrible reaction. No, I’m learning to sit in my discomfort and my honesty and wait for the song to come.

* * *

Heather Caliri

Heather Caliri is a writer and mom from San Diego. Two years ago, she started saying little yeses to faith, art, and life. The results shocked her. Get her free e-book, Dancing Back to Jesus: Post-perfectionist faith in five easy verbs, on her blog, A Little Yes.

The Secret of Life (A Guest Post from Kelly Belmonte)

By Anita Mathias

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” ― Elie Wiesel

This is what I love about writing. Writers are so greedy for life, they live it three times: the first time in the flesh, the second on paper, and the third when they read what they wrote.

Writing is not only a greedy practice but a generous one. Beyond the third life of words, there ripples a wave of life as other readers take part in your original in-the-flesh moment. The writer’s magnanimity allows for this reliving.

You can’t be indifferent and be a writer. By living (and reliving) this life of words, the writer takes a stand against indifference. Each scribble is claiming, “This matters, and that matters, too.” It matters so much that I’m going to live it over and over again. It matters so much, I hope you live it with me.

***

I woke up on a morning recently when it was still the deep gray of pre-dawn. A nameless bird sang a tuneless melody of five tones: first three the same, followed by two that were both different, ending on the highest note. And then the bird would repeat it, over and over.

I lay there listening, not trying to understand. What’s to understand, except that this is a life and a song? This is not work, it is sabbath. The secret of life is in those sabbath moments of not having to be useful or successful or right or ever planning how not to be thirsty or afraid. It is in being fully alive – and not indifferent – to what is there before me.

I believe the poet e. e. cummings was on to something when he wrote poem number 53 that opens, “may my heart always be open to little / birds who are the secrets of living.”

***

In my non-sabbath time, when I am in full justification mode, having a reason for all my actions, I am what they call a “knowledge worker.” Perhaps that term is passé by now – I hope so. It basically means I get paid to know stuff, to understand stuff, to analyze stuff, and to somehow make decisions based on that stuff. Basically, I get paid to be right.

In the fresh wisdom of cummings – “…for whenever men are right, they are not young” – I get paid to be old.

And in this rightness – this oldness – there is a kind of indifference. We call it objectivity, but it’s a slippery slope to indifference.

By way of clarification, I do not mean to suggest that there is anything wrong with work, with hard work that makes us tired and long for rest, that aches our fingers, that makes us sweat (in mind and body). Such work is redemptive. Such work cracks us open to the secret of life, the meaning behind the job description.

And such work is rare, especially when we are old, or feeling old. It is nearly impossible when everything depends on our being right.

But if I were young (in my spirit, in my mind, my heart), perhaps I’d get paid to be wrong, to fail spectacularly – to make outlandish statements and extreme promises, to go to the edge of a concept and peer over it into unknowable possibility, to a place beyond simple declarations of right and wrong, to sing like a bird on a limb.

Perhaps I would be compensated for not being indifferent.

For me, this would serve as the perfect job description (a la cummings):

“Stroll about hungry and fearless and thirsty and supple.”

***

This noisy bird outside my window matters to me. I want you to hear those five tones. I want you to feel the soft heaviness of the deep gray of pre-dawn beneath flannel sheets.

And I want you to care about it. I want you to be “in on” the secret of life, and to love it.

If I can do that as a writer – care enough to prompt a caring in you – I have lived, and lived again.

***

Kelly Belmonte

Kelly Belmonte is a poet, blogger, and management consultant with expertise in non-profit organizational development and youth mentoring. She currently serves on the board of directors for Exeter Fine Crafts in Exeter, New Hampshire. Her first published book of poetry, Three Ways of Searching, is available through Finishing Line Press

Image Credit: BBC

When you’re waiting for the lightning and you miss the rain (A guest post from Kelli Woodford)

By Anita Mathias

Today’s guest poster, Kelli Woodford lives in the Midwest, with her husband and her seven blue-eyed children, and in the midst of it quietly chronicles grace on her blog The Chronicles of Grace

Confession: I hate prophetic posts.

My heart yearns for story. The subtlety of its events, the conflict and resolution, the intimacy of character development. Story tugs at the heart in surprising ways. Ways unimagined and unseen. And I would suggest, produces a deeper, lasting change on its hearers than a prophetic, calling-it-out word, because it engages more facets of the intricate design of the human being: it engages the heart. Prophetic posts just can’t touch that.

But I’m about to write one.

Because I need to remember my size.

So often I labor and get weary trying to wrap my mind around a concept. The abstractions of sin and salvation; the depths of human connection and multifaceted relationships; bigger and bigger the questions, rising from a mind filled with all things notional. Everything from law and grace to faith and deeds to mice and men. I read and research, fill my days with ponderings, bounce ideas off whoever comes to mind – and then suddenly the sun goes down (what?!? how did that happen!) and I realize how much I have missed.

It might be part of my personality, it might be an old addiction dying a hard death, it might be that idolatrous yearning for certainty that we all find comfort in. But there is no life like the one at my fingertips.

And By God, I’m going to enjoy it.

So I’ve put my hands in the dirt and wiped bottoms and made delicious pinterest-quality dinners, only to burn the edges. I’ve tossed a wiffle ball to my kids and run and tagged them and tripped on sticks and felt grass coming alive. Felt me coming alive. I’ve thrown open windows and sucked huge lungfuls of summer wind and fresh black earth, turned over in the fields around my house. I’ve sung loud, old hymns and Mumfords, shower water warm enough to ease the ache of holding up more than I can. Believing hard in grace and choice. I’ve scrubbed carpet stains and toilet bowls and felt the dry tightness of my finger tips that lingers after the bleach is back under the sink. And I’ve missed these things.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I have done them all along. But doing them to get them done is different than doing them to relish the moments.

When my mind is afloat in matters too great for me, then I am not there with my kids in our rag-tag baseball game. I am not there to taste the west wind or hear my own voice off shower walls. I am not present for the moments of my life drifting humbly past while I surf the waves.

But, if there’s anything I hate more than a prophetic post (in which you find yourself elbow deep here), it is a guilt-trip post.

So I’ll not make this into that.

I will readily admit that there are times for big issues. There are moments when all the dailies must be abandoned in favor of the lightning bolt that just seared the snot out of my easy answers and left me scorched and smiling. There are times for study, and for prayer, and for solitude, and for mano-a-mano combat.

And there are times to cease.

For me, now is the latter.

Because when time and God have done their thing and I’m smelling the singe and wishing for more fire? I should hold the ash in my hand and call it a very holy thing. But not a predictable one. Perhaps the kind of dirt that rings a soul after an extended time in an ivory tower is harder to wash than a crusty toilet bowl. Perhaps it can only be sanitized by digging my bare digits into earth and pain and Velveeta and lilacs and the radical romance of everyday hope.

And when it’s time for this kind of soul-cleansing, I should walk into my bathroom, scrub brush in hand. I should walk into my yard, dragging the bat behind me. I should walk even into the church (eek!), armed only with love.

I should leave the wrangling words and the draining discussions and go out and plant a flower.

Then I should watch it grow.

: Kelli Woodford

I live in the midwestern U.S., surrounded by cornfields and love, with my husband and seven blue-eyed children. We laugh, we play, we fight, we mend; but we don’t do anything that even slightly resembles quiet. Unless it’s listening to our lives, which has proved to be the biggest challenge of them all.

I blog regularly-ish at Chronicles of Grace. You can also find me on Facebook and Twitter.

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