Advent Travels: Out of Bethlehem and Into the Desert

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In a dream last night, we reached Bethlehem. There were pilgrims everywhere. Do you know which Inn? Are we too late? Some of us had gifts, some of us were hoping to get a gift. The vibe was happy mostly, mostly festive. It was chaotic but in a family reunion kind of way. Everybody wanted the same thing.

In the dream, I lead us up and down the busy roads. I am focused and intent; I refuse to be distracted. We will find Him – we will! But then – suddenly – I realize I’ve lost you. Somewhere in the flocking streams I lost you.

I begin to call your name. I shove through hordes of seekers to find you. Nothing else matters. For the first time since we began this journey, I am scared. What if you are gone?

I realize that finding Jesus means nothing if you are not there with me.

A minute later, I realize what this means for my search for Jesus. It wasn’t about him at all. It was about connecting with you. It was always about you. Always.

And you are gone.

1

The last post of a sustained writing project is always the hardest. The temptation to conclude is strong in us. We want to stick the landing, resolve the plot, put a big red bow on it.

But at the end of Advent, I can’t do that. Neither my psyche nor my writing are prone to finishing. They thrive on stories that are bigger than they are. They love disappearing in gospel mythologies, telling and retelling familiar tales at the fire.

Every relationship in which I share is an aspect of the One Relationship, which is that of God with Creation. I can’t compass that relationship in ways that resolve neatly, like a finely-made clock or O’Henry’s Gift of the Magi. There has to be something on the other side of language. Silence isn’t just the absence of sound.

I’m not the maker of our relationship, much less the One Relationship. When I consent to enter either fully, both enter me. I’m not “I” then, I’m “us,” with you. It’s open and open-ended, this thing of ours. It’s outside the bounds of “right/wrong,” “either/or” and even “both/and.”

It’s beyond “/”. It’s even beyond ” “.

Our relationship is a glittering star in the vast firmanent of God’s Delight. This was the light we followed; this is the light we always follow. It’s us. We’re the love.

2

In the dream, I am defeated. I cannot find you. I sink to my knees in the dirt; nobody notices. Nobody cares. It’s over. Loss and lack are all I know.

But then somebody kicks me, and then kicks me again, and when I turn to see who it is, it’s you. It was always you.

“Get off your knees,” you say, extending a hand. I want to say you’re luminous – I want to say you couldn’t be more Christ – but I don’t. I’m just happy you found me. And there has to be something on the other side of words. I take your hand. Of course I take it. What else were my own hands made for but this?

3

When I was a little boy, I fell in love a lot, and everything I loved was killed or sold or abandoned. Dogs, cats, cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, deer, trout, pheasants, grouse, bears. My best friend and first girlfriend moved to Kentucky. Shit happens.

Shit happens but also, life goes on. I learned that lesson early too. Everything died but life went on. No matter how much pain there was in this moment, in another would be joy. I didn’t like it but I couldn’t deny it.

So I kept coming back. You know what I mean? My heart would break, I’d mourn, and then . . . find somebody or something else to love again. Even a dandelion in sunlight, just so, was sufficient. I was always falling to my knees; I was always being offered a hand.

In childhood, among other things, I learned how to hope. I learned that hope was justified.

And look. I agree with Krishnamurti: hope is just the flip side of despair. It’s “/” all over again. We fear hell so we hope for Heaven. It’s a cycle, a trick of ego, and its only function is to keep us from ever seeing that we are doing this to ourselves, and that there is another way.

But also, hope was how I survived a difficult part of the journey. And it’s hard to let something go that served so well for so long.

Of course I’m scared. What did I think was going to happen here? What did you think was going to happen?

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When I was a child I had a recurring dream of Mary. She was standing on the Charles M. Braga bridge in light rain, staring sadly at the city of Fall River, the ancestral city of both sides of my family. The mist was a shroud hiding every other body but ours. Mary’s grief was enormous; her vulnerability obvious. Somebody had to help her. I had to help her. But something invisible separated us and I was only allowed to observe. Eventually the dream stopped being a dream and became a memory. But of what exactly? And why am I telling you? You were there.

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In the dream you take my hand and lead me – against the flowing crowd entering Bethelehem – out of Bethlehem and into the desert where it all began so long ago. I’m scared still but differently. Where are we going, I ask. But you only smile and say trust me. I will, I say. And I do. I do.

Twenty-Two / Twenty-Four

Advent Travels: When in Doubt

The furnace broke last night, coldest night of the year. We were up after midnight for hours seeing if we could jump-start it, and ended up just giving everybody extra blankets.

The house is very cold today. My fingers are numb typing. I stop every few sentences, grab the coffee mug with both hands, and shiver warming just enough to write another couple paragraphs.

At the last minute – around 4 a.m. – I pulled this morning’s substack post, realizing that I’d adopted the Advent posting style for it, and not feeling confident that tone works for that setting.

I’m also executing a familiar self-con in that post – venting poetically for attention, without sufficiently accounting for a solution. “Look at me,” is pretty much all the ego needs to say. I can get lost for days in that pleading.

“Nobody likes a whiner” – I heard this or some variation of it growing it up all the time but kids don’t just invent behavior: they learn it.

I’m not a tough guy; I’m not a stoic. I believe in looking at what’s not working – inside and out – and trying to find solutions with folks around you. Healing is honorable and obligates us to be humble and communal.

Here then, as the Advent writing wind down, let me try to find not so much the right voice (voice is easy and also the fun part) but the honesty that by necessity precedes healing.

I’m frustrated with my study and practice of A Course in Miracles. I’m scared I made a mistake by following its peculiar star. In the alternative, I’m scared that I made a wrong turn with the course many years ago, somewhere in the way I decided to approach Tara Singh’s work.

(Note to self: those are different fears – don’t conflate them).

I think the course is wrong in the way it relies on mind/body dualism. I think the material is wrong and I also think that the way Ken Wapnick taught and promulgated the material was wrong (but easier to understand – Ken’s fears and mine are entangled – but what we needed was to talk as equals, not write as teacher and student – we needed a dialogue that was less beholden to the interests of hierarchy).

(Note to self: remember Sawicki’s and Fiorenza’s emphasis on Jesus’s “discipleship of equals”).

I have a handful of folks I really care about who studied closely with Ken, and I’m sorry, but I think the gnostic fantasy he so rigorously developed arises not in love but fear and specialness.

I think the course makes it really easy to indulge magical thinking – Jesus wrote the course, there are ascended masters awaiting all of us, check out my light episode, et cetera.

I think that kind of thinking is inevitable when you frame mind/body dualism the way ACIM |does, but it also prevents a meaningful relationship with our capacity to heal and be healed.

The course is a cry for help framed as a solution to a nonexistent problem, and a lot of us who respond are doing so because we recognize the cry and it’s our cry.

But the course in that light is not designed to help us; it’s designed to keep us from looking at the actual problem. It subtly – so subtly it’s easy to miss – keeps us in conflict with one another through the material.

That is, our emphasis on the material keeps us separate from one another.

That’s my sense of it. And fine, right? Everybody’s got an opinion. If it’s time to move on to the next town or practice or manger, then do it. We’re free spirits, whose travels are circumscribed only by desire.

And yet.

There is also in me the sense that I am still not seeing something in the material. “Seeing” here refers to the matrix created by understanding, acceptance and application.

And that something is not hidden in understanding (I don’t think I’m wrong about the mind/body dualism, the magical thinking, the problem-not-solution thing) but rather in acceptance and application.

I am scared to accept some healing the course offers because fear exaggerates the potential negatives effects of application.

I am projecting a future I fear and thus frantically trying to control the present to avoid just that outcome.

And yet understanding teaches me that it’s precisely that outcome that will finally and fully heal me.

Say yes to God. Let it be done according to God’s Will. Be Mary. That’s been a big theme this season: Mary, Mary’s yes, and what happens to Mary next.

That means for me some accountability for my decision to give to much attention to A Course in Miracles. It means clarifying without personalizing or poeticizing a desired (but feared) practice.

It means entering into relationship with a way of being that I actively fear and am thus unable to enact as relationship.

I’m still playing the separation game. After all these years, and all this study, and all this writing and sharing . . .

I’m still locked into separation. And it’s way past time to pretend I don’t want it this way. At some level, I do want it this way.

So on second thought, I’m going to publish that Substack post, and this Advent post. So they’re messy, so I don’t feel fully in control of them, so what? I’m tired of being scared and I’m tired of the not-trusting that fuels the fear. Not trusting God, which means not trusting you, which really really means not trusting myself.

Ah well . . .

I remember years ago in a church basement an older man saying to me gently, “when in doubt, don’t.” But I learned another way, which is, when in doubt, do you best to minimize harm but then do. Don’t be afraid of fear, yours or anybody else’s.

Twenty-One / Twenty-Three

Advent Travels: Admitting the Wound

Yesterday it snowed a little as the sun set: prismatic flurries tracing faded planes of light down western hills slowly darkening.

I stood shivering on the front porch, breathless and grateful, now and then remembering to take a sip of coffee. I cannot bear the loveliness sometimes; I cannot compass the love the loveliness reflects.

Elizabeth Fiorenza invites us to set free “the emancipatory power of the Christian community which is theologically rooted neither in spiritual-sexual dimorphism nor in patriarchal ecclesial dominance, but in an egalitarian vision and in altruistic social relationships that may not be ‘genderized'” (In Memory of Her 92).

Everyone gets a seat at the table; everyone takes turns cooking, serving and eating. All power belongs to God; everything else is shared.

All day – coffee and writing, driving with C. to buy grain for the horses, dinner with friends and family – I kept coming back to that sentence of Fiorenza’s. It called and called but apparently I am still learning how to respond.

Yet later, laying in bed, on the horizon of sleep, something softened in the neural matrix, and I got it.

Fiorenza is clear about something I hadn’t noticed in Sawicki, but which is there, and which I cannot now unsee: those women are not interested in Jesus so much as they are interested in the wisdom movement that birthed and then resurrected him.

They’re not opposed to Jesus – not at all. They’re just not buying the whole “special guy who saved the world” schtick. That’s the order that he helps undo. It’s not about him; it never was.

They want to get to what it’s about – healing, comforting, feeding, sheltering, nursing.

Their work decenters Jesus by shifting focus to his program, his mission, and being clear that it’s meant to be lived now, in whatever context is given to us. It’s meant to be enacted here. Peace, happiness, fulfillment, love – all that follows the interior “yes” which activates our cooperation with God in and through Creation.

(Tara Singh often wrote how Helen Schucman told him the course was meant to be lived, and pointed at Mother Teresa as the premier example).

So Fiorenza is “ecclesial” – it takes a village, a community, a collective. Call it a church or whatever you like; it takes at least two to manifest the Lord. And as Lynice Pinkard says, it’s okay to be messy in community. It’s okay to be beginners when it comes to holy relationship.

There are no blueprints. And there is no space of purity from which to act. We must begin imperfectly from within the messiness, in ways that respond to and engage with our concrete and particular contexts and circumstances (Revolutionary Suicide).

I got distracted for a long time by oneness. I got distracted by my own personal “special guy who saved the world” schtick. I objectified myself as a spiritual hero in at least two religious traditions and resisted anything that suggested I was not.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been holding apart – a fantasy of spiritual accomplishment and the reality of how hurt I am and how needful of spiritual help.

But Sawicki and Fiorenza (and Pinkard, too) would say, you’re still keeping the focus on yourself, Sean. You’re still indulging the fantasy of going it alone, being a saint, a monk, whatever. Self-improvement is always an ego project. You’re making it personal. That’s the problem, they’d say. That’s what keeps you separate from the help you need and want.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post called Christ is a Collective, a kind of homage to Helen Beeth, whose writing and teaching feel so liberating to me. It felt like a deep interior cleansing, writing that post. It felt like coming to coherence. But also, I was concerned. Is this my reality or is it a fantasy? Am I hiding behind writing?

But now I see those questions aren’t real. Sometimes what we write isn’t our reality now, but can still function as a light making clear the next step or two. Just keep swimming. Don’t stop sharing.

So at last, I am beginning to piece together a practice – one that harmonizes with my eclectic study and innate wordiness, and liberates me from the confusion wrought by obedience unto men and orders of men who are often sincere but nearly always deeply confused. There is indeed another way and it is being revealed. Nor can I find it without you.

Yesterday Susan asked how am I keeping the Christ-embodied Mary outside of my heart, and my own heart briefly caught fire. Yes! That is the inquiry. But then everything slipped back into its familiar groove with one tiny exception: I knew I was not alone. And I thought then of Emily Dickinson, who wasn’t alone either, and yet still managed a vast and fertile solitude. She wrote these lines in I think 1870, after the “white heat” had passed and she was ordinary again.

A not admitting of the wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my Life had entered it
And there were troughs beside –

How I wish I could have heard her read her own work! Can you imagine it? In the quiet seclusion of her bedroom after dark – moonlight and a lantern – and the world at her window leaning in?

Healing and attention are intimately connected. Admitting the wound is the way the wound heals, because the admission beckons the healers, in the same way a light calls weary travelers off the road.

I cry out and you are here, as if you always were. You lift me and ask am I ready – not to travel but to be home. Or am I lifting you? And does the distinction matter?

We begin again, again, companionate.

Twenty / Twenty-Two

Advent Travels: Waiting for Her

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Today is winter solstice. In my little town we’ll have daylight just over nine hours. This summer it was closer to fifteen.

Now, going forward, instead of darkening, the world becomes a little lighter and warmer. Things will grow differently; they will create differently.

More of my ancestors celebrated solstice than Christmas. But when I celebrate Christmas, ghosts of their rituals and festivities, inform me. There is no separation anywhere.

This morning, I nodded at them all as I sipped coffee on the back porch, awaiting the light in which writing becomes possible.

This morning, they nodded back. This morning they said, “hey Sean, what did you mean by “ecclesial reckoning?”

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The phrase “ecclesial reckoning” stunned me a little. It stunned me when I wrote it – I didn’t want to see it. But this morning, my family said, “don’t look away.”

Sawicki is less interested in a therapeutic model for its own sake because of the risk it will devolve into something merely personal, effacing the necessity of ecclesial reckoning. Whatever illusion resurrection penetrates, it must also takes with it the illusion of separate interests. Do you want to see the Lord or not?

I mean yes, I want to see the Lord. I want to look at the Lord. But no, I do not want to go to church. Fuck church.

I mean that.

I know what some folks say here: fine, don’t go to church. You’re an adult. The world doesn’t care. You do you.

But that’s not what I’m saying. Or rather, that’s not what the writing is asking.

The writing invites a “reckoning,” in the archaic sense of “settling up.” There’s a debt somewhere, somewhere justice is being measured and paid out. Expectations and obligations abound but not in the clear light of day and reason but deeper in the psyche, where Grendel lives and great floods begin and certain hugs and kisses have to suffice for lifetimes.

Sometimes I say to people who are lost in moral quandaries, strangling in scrupulosity, or all tied up in someone else’s text, “get right with your God.”

I mean, figure out your moral and ethical stance and then live by it. What does God want? What is God asking? There are answers to those questions but to reach them you have to realize in a deep and sustainable way that a lot of the interior welter is pitched against realizing those answers.

If, when someone asks, what does God ask of me, and you cite A Course in Miracles or some other gospel or self-help guru, then you have not yet gone deep enough. You are still collaborating with ego.

God is incredibly specific and totally transparent: I say this from experience.

When I sit quietly with God – when I go to the well, when I kneel at the altar, when I sip from the confluence of the Alpha and Omega – I do so always in fear and trembling. Why? Because God invites me to live in a way that heals my heart and the world’s but the world doesn’t see it as healing and so actively – sometimes murderously – opposes it.

Love is often mistaken for weakness, naivete, and disorder. To ego and ego’s works, love is a threat. A world constructed by guilt and fear is not going to just say, oh thank the Good Lord, Jesus is here.

Jesus wasn’t killed to atone for our sins or for any other fancy theological reason. He was killed because he lived a life of love that threatened the dominant political and religious culture and so they tortured and killed him. They always do.

The crucifix is no joke, nor is it merely an historical event. And absent the crucifixion, you don’t get resurrection, and it’s resurrection that joins the circle and unites us with all Creation.

Sawicki says, in order to make sense of resurrection, we have to interpret something. We have to learn how to see in a certain way, a new way. That’s the point of all our practice: we want a new way of seeing – a new way of making meaning together out of our living.

The Holy Spirit’s goal gives one interpretation, meaningful to you and to your brother. Thus can you communicate with him, and he with you (T-30.VII.6:2-3).

Sawicki says – it’s the part of her writing that I resist, set aside, it’s the part I forget – that you need a community in which to teach and learn this new way of seeing.

Also, this teaching and learning reflects an active pedagogy – it’s not just we feed the mind with beautiful scripture and deep metaphysics. It includes – it must include – the body.

Crucifixion and resurrection are things that happen to and through bodies. Miracles and meals – the crux of the historical Jesus’s practice of justice and mercy – are also things that happen to and through bodies.

I’m not saying throw A Course in Miracles away! I’m saying, it’s wrong in a vital way about mind/body dualism. But “wrong” is really a cry for help, one to which we are personally called to respond. We want to see it differently, right?

I will write more about this “cry for help” elsewhere later. Here, this morning, I simply want to stand in the light cast by the phrase “ecclesial reckoning.”

What is God asking me here? And is it separate from what God is asking you here?

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Jack Gilbert’s poem “Island and Figs” is a good poem to read on winter solstice. Everything in it is dense and bright and solid – the sun, the rocks, the stone. Even the old woman gathering snails owns an ancient quality, as if she has been there a thousand times a thousand years working to feed us.

Here is how Gilbert ends his poem:

The heart
never fits
the journey.
Always
one ends
first.

Next to Emily Dickinson, Jack Gilbert is my favorite poet. Nobody taught me more about how to see the world by living in it a certain way. My debt (there’s that word again) is large.

And yet.

In Advent, on Solstice – heart weary, mind at range – I wonder. I wonder if Gilbert’s assumption is an error. What if that to which the word “heart” can sometimes point never ends? What if “journey” is merely “seeing another way together?”

I wonder about this fight I’ve been having for going on sixty years. I wonder who am I fighting? I wonder if my enemy is as lonely as I am? I wonder if he, too, wants a reason to lay down his arms?

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I wonder if he, too, has spent a lifetime looking at women – even a woman – waiting for Her to look back and see him? Sawicki again: “The word that became flesh was yes and Mary said it” (Seeing the Lord 326).

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The long night ends but this light, my God, it blinds me.

Nineteen / Twenty-One

Advent Travels: Behind the Barn

Reading Humberto Maturana taught me that love was not a feeling but a state of being, a way of giving attention to life that was creative and nurturing, that was, in and of itself, life-giving.

Through Maturana I discovered that love was inherent and fear alien, and that it was possible to be happy in a deeply serious way (which is different from being happy in a deeply serious way – that’s an effect of a practice).

In love – in this new understanding of love – I was born again, and the world was born again with me. I was instantly intimately related to everyone and everything, without qualification or condition. Human beings, deer ticks, shooting stars and viruses . . . – I gave – not paid, gave – attention to all of it. I was devoted to the gift of attention. I gave and received in perfect measure, and the peace that resulted was not subject to analysis. Judgment was not mine but the Lord’s, and the Lord was radical because He excluded nothing and accepted no less of me.

. . . in the relational domain of love the other is not asked and is not expected to justify his or her existence . . . Love is unidirectional, and occurs as a spontaneous happening of accepting the legitimacy of the other as a matter of course without expecting retribution (Maturana 273).

More colloquially, love is the relationship – itself comprised of relationships – by which we come into being and know ourselves as Love Itself. Knowing ourself is to know the other; no other knowledge is possible.

Love is a process of mutual recognition, in which we come to see each other as unique and valuable beings. It is a process of creating a shared world, in which we can experience intimacy and connection (Maturana & Varela The Tree of Life).

But creating is active. It is enacted. Understanding matters but application does too, perhaps more. Tara Singh knew. And he also knew that application in the fullest sense required a relationship of – or with, perhaps – the highest order we know. On our own it cannot be done.

If you want to bring the Course to application, know that you have His divine presence with you. Knowing that He is with you inspires a quality of love and reverence. How would you then sit in His presence? (Commentaries on A Course in Miracles 38)

I began and for a long time transitioned through projections of God. God the judge, God the father, God in Heaven, God-as-Love. But then I realized that god was everywhere in all things, far upstream of language, concept and even behavior.

Jeremiah heard God say, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you.” God is outside of time and space altogether, so must be his Creation.

We are discovering this; we are remembering it, together.

I began to see the wisdom of making all thing a gift unto God. If you believed you were in the presence of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, of God, what would you do? As Tara Singh wrote, how would sit in the presence of God? It’s not a criticism – it’s an invitation.

For me, I cannot answer that question alone. That is where I am at now – I have the pieces, I’ve made the puzzle – but the finished puzzle is not the answer. I thought it would be but it is not.

In yesterday’s Advent writing I wrote the phrase “eccesial reckoning,” and felt a deep call to go into it. Sawicki is clear that post-resurrection Jesus communities were ecclesial. Church matters. But I hate church, and always have.

This morning I woke up thinking about Maturana, who invites a more radical communion than the formality and dogma of church. Or does he imply an even older way of churching? A simpler way?

What needs to be organized in my life? What needs a new rule to remember what it is?

Outside this morning it was cold and overcast. I shivered with my coffee. You make this harder than it has to be, says Jesus

Not always, I answer, and he nods in agreement. Not always. Often, yes. But not always.

We are quiet then, behind the barn, the world waking up. I wander down to the raspberries and wonder again if I should cut them back. I’ve been here before; I don’t want to be anywhere else. The homestead calls to me and In that call Jesus dissolves. Specialness dissolves.

I come inside then to write. I sit quietly by the Christmas tree and write. Neither sad nor happy, neither asleep nor awake. When it will be enough asks a familiar angel, and for the millionth time since this difficult journey began, I say not yet. Not yet.

Advent Travels: Church Goes with You

What is clear at 4 a.m. is less so as the day goes on. It rained last night; I sat in the darkness and listened. Christmas is coming, plans are being made. I’m tired and I want to rest.

In Advent, in prayer, a lot opens up and a lot slips away.

I remember Elango all those years ago telling me outside the library in Burlington, it’s not intensity you lack but focus, which struck me as oddly backwards. This was around the time I told Andy I was going to wear my crucifix outside my shirt and he was visibly shocked. Pray on that, he said, and I did because of how it mattered to him.

I used to wake up Dan in the middle of the night, whatever floor or couch we’d fallen asleep on, and say things like, we have to drive to Boston. Or, we have to go into the woods. “My God you’re a fire,” he said once, forcing himself awake at two a.m. to drive us deep into the Northeast Kingdom. I was never happier than watching the sun rise over Lake Memphremagog that morning. The church goes with you or it’s not a church.

By dusk yesterday I realized the hypocrisy in yesterday’s writing: bragging how spiritually mature it was, not publicly engaging with my critic which was, of course, a way of publicly engaging with my critic, which neither surprised nor disappointed me. I’ve been walking in this direction a long time.

Separation is a way of thinking that produces behavior that makes us, singly and collectively, unhappy. We insist that something naturally unified must be held apart, and then expend tremendous energy keeping it apart. But what? What is being held apart?

In Advent, something hidden remains so. I have to accept it may always. I may not reach the manger. And honestly? It’s okay. It’s more than okay.

Yesterday I wrote this sentence to a friend:

It seems clear to me that your relationship with yourself as a writer – a creator, an artist, a free spirit – is somehow damaged and the damage lies in a domain signified primarily by gender and that you have hidden – protected, secured – the requisite healing in a version of Christianity you have yet to discover because you have yet to create it.

. . . and wished someone had written it to me. Like really wished it.

In those days – with Elango, Andy and Dan – I was still studying under Lorrie’s direction, even though we hadn’t talked in years. The reading list she’d left was vast – Derrida and Barthes, Mary Daly, Gertrude Stein. The curriculum was thrilling but private. Nobody knew what I was doing.

I read all the time, wrote as often as possible, and spent the rest of my days dragging men into various arguments that most of them didn’t realize were arguments. Or rather, didn’t realize how high I wanted the stakes to be.

Sawicki is less interested in a therapeutic model for its own sake because of the risk it will devolve into something merely personal, effacing the necessity of ecclesial reckoning. Whatever illusion resurrection penetrates, it must also takes with it the illusion of separate interests. Do you want to see the Lord or not?

My answer, not exactly on point: I don’t want to be seen doing this. Doing what? Writing this way.

Do you see what am I saying about separation? And projection? Do you see what I am not saying?

Dan and I fought exactly once, a terrible argument from which the relationship never recovered. Forty years later I am still baffled and hurt, wishing I could repair the damage. The rest of them it’s okay they’re memories. But I do miss Dan.

In Advent it rains. December softens growing darker. Each sentence this morning was a difficult pill. Who was the desert father who kept a stone in his mouth for thirty years in order to learn what silence was? I want to find his cell and take him in my arms. I want to say, “brother, spit out that rock, let’s talk.”

Eighteen / Twenty