In the last two weeks or so I have lost two dear mentors (one a priest and one a bishop) and a dear parishioner to death. The Virginia Seminary Chapel where I prayed and worshiped for three of the most formative years of my life has burned down so that little remains. So we come to the season of Samhain -- the Pagan Celtic time of the dying earth at the close of summer that eventually got tangled up with the Christian festival of All Saints (or All Hallows) and Halloween. I am grappling with this sense of a closeness of the threshold with dying and decay and all that takes life. It is a strange place for me to remain. I usually eat enough chocolate to keep from such a morbid lingering. But I don't stay here because I want to, or because I just wish to feel bad. I am here to discover a new beginning. Always, the threshold that is an ending is also a beginning. The black vultures that took the dead deer's life from its remains near the road outside my house have brought their own life even as they cleaned up, so that we would not be diseased. It is this that makes Halloween a joy for me: it is not just about pretending and dressing up or candy, but about life and death and who we really are and how we grow through things -- even or maybe especially through dark things. We are all like vultures who must live off death. We grow through the dark times to find new light. We cannot waste the carcasses of our life, for even they have nourishment to show us new life. Thresholds are rich places to stand for a moment, but eventually we must walk through them to discover what new awaits. There is life to come out of things like the destruction of the seminary chapel. There is even life to find in the loss of my mentors Phil and Charles and my parishioner Margo. Always, always, the dying is really about life. The vultures in the tree outside my window are not ominous but virtuous. They portend new life to come.

Sacrifice (A visit to a Mayan ruin in Belize)

I climbed the steep grey steps in the heat of the day
Not thinking of what I would see at the top.

Below I had seen the baths and the market --
Hints of life and humanity from long ago.

The table is
Nothing --
Just fitted rocks,
Held together by the silt and clay of the beautiful green rainforest surrounding it.
It sits on the top of the tallest mounded pyramid, with silent stone faces larger than a man on the way up.
It is about four feet in diameter.
Not long enough for an entire body --
Just a bit too short.
It is round.
A strange shape amidst the jagged pyramids and pointed arches.
It must have held, as best it could, many a sacrifice.
Humans.
Hearts beating.
And then not.

I touched it.
It spoke it‘s stone words.
Soaked in the blood of the martyrs,
It seemed to bask in the sun today like all the others.

And I pulled my hand back.

No one else wanted to touch the thing
But part of me wanted to lie down on the stone as best I might fit and see what happened.
Part of me knew I was the priest to perform the sacrifice also.

There was agony
That ages of sun and rain could not deny.
There was the strangely shaped human ability to destroy life
With the hope of something good or holy or right to come of it.
The stones.

We Shall All Break

We shall all break --
In spite of our selves and our hard shells --
Like the dawn.
Just over that distant hill
Or through the old gnarled tree branches that
Yearn and search and weep.
Break.

In the black shadow of the oak
Where even the lichen will not hold;
In the dark hollow of the hill
Where all appears black together
And sorrow and joy stumble in tandem
Experienced yet not known.

That silent, blind realm opens the
Broken word to speak
Scouring space to raise the brow
And prepare the wound
To see the healing.

Fraction your life.
Offer bits and crumbs
Abundant yet unsatisfied.
Parse it out
Not in miserly portions, but
Pour it out -- humpty dumpty --
For gravity to assume.

Assumed we join
A star blazing into one light
And a sun rising into wholeness.
Then, we shall break
Like the dawn.

I am always amazed at the folks who seem to find their religious identity in a rigid and certain belief that is unchanging. Where does such a way of believing come from in this world? It seems to me faith is precisely not having that kind of certainty, but depending on something or someone we only hope to be dependable. As one of my favorite writers, Frederick Buechner puts it colorfully: "doubt is the ants in the pants of faith." Here is a little poem full of ants. (The picture is a walking iris flower opening in faith to a spring morning.)

Faithful Despair

Unglued jumble
Hesitating skip
And stumble
Falsely humble
Heartbeat out of tempo
Half-formed questions
Answers scorned.
This is where faith is born
To grow
The swallow turned to gulp
That does not satisfy
Or comfort
But draws us
Out
Empty
Lost
To God.

The photo is of Nat, my second son, trying his hand at surfing at Manhattan beach last summer. And the poem is from an experience I had at the Atlantic a few summers back now on an early morning. Nat -- do you remember your moment's pearl?

Sandman and the Crab

The tiny crab's eyes folded down and then popped up again Like the nursery rhymed weasel. Before us the waves had formed a new mound of sand With a design on its back to imitate the crab's. And the waves still rolled, of course, Clapping every now and then to keep me awake to the dawn. They created a small inlet at the side of their mound And crept back behind it . . . to rest? Or, when boldness and the tide gave the impulse, They would push their dirty white foam right over the mound to slip down the other side. And as the wave left again, returning to where it came from, The mound's back glowed with the water's pearl For a second, or longer if your eyes were popped, And your mind awake with the last clap. Then the mound would swallow and sift the pearl into itself Out to the wave's edge And back to the pond's edge on the opposite side of the wave's mound. The crab and I both saw it, I think, and sensed our part, For, as I rose to return to the day, The crab scuttled sideways into this sand cave To search out the moment's pearl, a dry glory, And the bold impulse to Awaken.

If nature is God's first word to us before we can even read a Scripture, then surely one way I have experienced God is in my fascination with collecting rocks. It goes well with my other obsession with plants, since the rocks can be lovely additions to the garden or the planter. But as I hope you will see here below, I think they do much more than just add a decorating flair!

Geologos

Rocks. I confess. I have a love affair with rocks.
Not faithful to one, but groping faithfulness
For them all, I -- and we -- strain like blocks
Of wall leaning one into the others to bless
The whole with stability, depend on grace in gravity
The rocks know so well -- even though, at times,
A fine round flat one skips a brevity
And walks on water's surface, climbs
The air, before it settles sweetly in the deep.

Stone-mongering may be my life's best task,
Although these creatures of the earth will keep
Long past my final sleep, I, cornered then, must ask
To hold them for a day, a breath, a life
Then let them pass to find another way
To sun warm in the morning's chill and ending wear away -- strife
For these rocks, a past creation, born of pressure's morphing play
And sometimes sun-flare heat, or spit like watermelon seed from earth's red groin
To rocket high the crusty life we know to join.

I keep them in my pocket now -- one at a time -- where my right
Hand surprised can rediscover their whole, dense solidness -- or
Pull them out to watch and glint in my half-sight
A hint of something bright within, that is before,
Was now, and holds its own. Beyond, for me, my youthful
Breath in Gabriel's angelic mountains, when I
Homed at the feet of Old St. Luke, whose snow-white rule
And crown beckoned my child's light to rise with it, explore, and sigh,
Annunciating births my pocket wombs but cannot hold.

Science's disinterest cannot our relationship design;
The rocks do not experiment with me. But we enfold
In experience, roll up together, to hone a moment fine,
Or more finally, to pound out heart sublime. Carbon dating
Is not our way. I do not use the rocks to list and know
But bow vulnerable and bare my dusty self with them, bating
The holy dirt between us, the mud of us to flow, and to grow
To show us who we were and are to be. I scrape in roughened palm
Obsidian's glass Alice and Narcissus to avoid, expelled with nature's balm.

I finger topographies of basalt, whisper what truth I guess into
Unaccountable holes of limestone, allow the quartzite
Light to laser through my center to discover, perhaps, that I too imbue
Refracted color, bent yet true. A bit of shale crumbles at my touch right
Beneath my wandering boot -- at appointed fissures, turns to dust.
Breathless, these rocks and I explore like lovers first undressed
To discover one another, to plumb love. Amidst the orange rust,
The bodies naked, flawed and cracked w muscle ourselves blessed.
Rock face, stone grace, inanimate trace -- a glance of space where Logos dwells.

I fairly new friend has been sharing with me her absolutely amazing photos of butterflies. I can never get them right in a photo myself. They close up their wings right when I want to take the shot or they flit when I need them to float. But I have caught them a bit in a poem I wrote a few years back now.

Fritillary Dance

Guessing when to tighten the muscle
So that delicate sails rise to attention,
And when to lay out flat in honest proclamation.
Knowing in your weightless being
The grace to soar in the warmth
Or pull and flap through a lull
And how to fall.
Living the design of your wings,
Trusting the breeze,
Tasting the blossom at your feet,
Resting on the outstretched finger of a leaf.
Arching through the sky's mutability
To write God's current name
In the breathless light of a day.