2007
Empty Lamentation
Seeking for inspiration
where none is to be found. But where am I looking? Turning to the sky
heart of my blessed mother in anguish, I am given II Cor. 4 wherein it
is revealed that we have this treasure in clay jars. Surrendered up to
death for Jesus’ sake, that he might live in us. My little sister hawk
spirals, her wings riding the updrafts, through the high meadows in
search of ground squirrels, but today refuses to answer. We are both
hunting. I am not seeking for novelty, but for insight.
Today I could almost agree with the old curmudgeon that I am indeed a vessel of clay. But it is not the clay that I would offer, but gold—and not the stellar gold of forms, but the gold, which is the vessel itself, arrested in the purity of being substance, inseparable from all accorded values and dreams. As it is, I can neither bridge the chasm between myself and the world, nor yet take solace in the specious platitudes that obscure my vision with facile explanations of nothing.
Such is my old friend, come haunting the spring. We do not tire of each other quite as easily as either one of us would perhaps wish. This barren field we have so often gone over, sown and harvested and replanted….a wonder that our hope of making it fertile has not long since died. Oh, it bears fruit, in its season. It has made of us farmers of thistles and weeds, our feet heavy with the oozing clay of our interminable crucifixion—the self-loathing narcissism of banal preoccupations.
Cleave then to the real, if such it is, bearing your gifts of offal. Even despair is better than untruth. My own gift is dust, an empty cup, and perhaps the real. And what is that but the substance of faith? Let it suffice. A treasure forever beyond our reach. Fallow lamentations without issue. Birth without life. In a desert of water do we seek to quench our thirst. Beyond me lies the solace of a vision—the sweet annihilation found in the contemplation of pottery shards and what they meant to the potter as she molded the light of God with her hands. And that is all.
Today I could almost agree with the old curmudgeon that I am indeed a vessel of clay. But it is not the clay that I would offer, but gold—and not the stellar gold of forms, but the gold, which is the vessel itself, arrested in the purity of being substance, inseparable from all accorded values and dreams. As it is, I can neither bridge the chasm between myself and the world, nor yet take solace in the specious platitudes that obscure my vision with facile explanations of nothing.
Such is my old friend, come haunting the spring. We do not tire of each other quite as easily as either one of us would perhaps wish. This barren field we have so often gone over, sown and harvested and replanted….a wonder that our hope of making it fertile has not long since died. Oh, it bears fruit, in its season. It has made of us farmers of thistles and weeds, our feet heavy with the oozing clay of our interminable crucifixion—the self-loathing narcissism of banal preoccupations.
Cleave then to the real, if such it is, bearing your gifts of offal. Even despair is better than untruth. My own gift is dust, an empty cup, and perhaps the real. And what is that but the substance of faith? Let it suffice. A treasure forever beyond our reach. Fallow lamentations without issue. Birth without life. In a desert of water do we seek to quench our thirst. Beyond me lies the solace of a vision—the sweet annihilation found in the contemplation of pottery shards and what they meant to the potter as she molded the light of God with her hands. And that is all.
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