Your heart

Your heart is safe with me

I know all about hearts.

At med school I studied their electrophysiology, and microscoped the cardiac cells of husbands and higher creatures. I coaxed reluctant hearts back to life and midwifed the final pulses of the dying.

I’ve watched hearts fibrillate on bypass, then stop before starting anew, strong and vital. I’ve been at postmortem and held the cold still heart of a child in my warm, pulsing hands.

Your heart is safe with me.

I know a lot about hearts.

I have never knowingly broken one, but am gentle, as I know how they shatter and fail.

My own has been ripped out by lovers, tossed around for sport and thin quivering slices fed to a husband’s girlfriends while I wept.

I know how hearts can bleed.

Your heart is safe with me.

I know a wee bit about hearts.

I would never treat yours recklessly, though I might tinker with the rate control from time to time

I love hearing your heart race when I lie with my head on your chest, and then slow to synchronise with mine. Your rhythms are no longer strange to me.

I am learning that your heart - like mine- is given too easily, too quickly, too fully.

That it is a little scarred, a little scared, but generous and true.

I would like to know your heart as well I know my own.

Trust me with it

Your heart is safe with me.

I am learning about hearts.

For Vaughan

Grief dismembered me

Removed arms for hugging

Eyes for weeping, for scanning the exits

A tongue to cry out

Grief stopped my heart from quickening

Stole legs for running away, for moving towards, for stuttering steps

Immobile, I

Grief passed me his scalpel

I clenched it in my teeth

Pared away flesh, exposed nerve

Excised friend, home, memory

Loss cauterized the wounds

Tribeless, I

Grief suckled me, stroked my hair

“There, there. What need have you for hands to signal ‘Help, I’m drowning’?.

I will shelter you”.

Helpless, I

In the riptide

Time shuffled past, eroded grief’s grip

Created openings through which sprigs of life might slip and bloom

Light slanted shyly through

Illuminated, I

Time showed me other griefs, larger than mine

More valid

Self pity, exposed, self-immolates

Awakening, I

Then you,

Laid back, healthy, happened along

‘What are you doing with these?’

Plucked the shutters from my eyes

Unpinned my arms, wrapped so tightly around myself

You sneaked in the gap

We blossomed there

A warming embrace, given and received, breaks grief’s spell

Remembered, I

Unfriended grief; neutered and neutralized it

To set aside for now

Arms hug and are held

Legs move towards, wrap around

Eyes open, smile

Tongue speaks joy

Reconnected, I

Feel alive

Xo

Calling

What does God's call feel like? Look like, sound like, taste like, smell like?

Does it sometimes feel like a weightless certainty, and at others as urgent as two labrador puppies on a leash - busting to get going but not 100% sure which direction, just away, just acting, not standing still!

Is it sometimes a burden,and other times a joy? Sometimes almost clear, other times a mystery? Sometimes close and other times all-enveloping?

I have a call, an insistent, not always pleasant call.

'Feed my sheep, travel if you have you, but feed them! I don't need another pew-warmer. Time is short. GET MOVING!'

'But how, Lord? Alone? Do I need innoculations, a passport, a degree, a church to sponsor me? Could you tell me a bit more? Perhaps make some aspects clearer? Should I stay here, work in the community, feed the lambs whose language I speak and know?'

'You will know when you're doing it right, just DO IT. Time is short, the flock is hungry. Move!'

Or do I imagine it? Is this insistent urge just a fantasy, a hope that God finds me useful enough to speak to and encourage and whip into shape?

Meantime I squirm in the pew, pray for guidance, look at all the options, feel like I'm not doing enough. And the call, the insistent, urgent, GET OFF THE TRACKS call... help me to decipher it.... please.

Please help me in praying for guidance, and for clarity. I would have said patience too, but I feel the impatience does not come from me...

For Mellory

I never met you, Mellory, but we would have recognised something in each other.

The mark of the street.

We have each been a person of the night: pale, restless, empty, yearning.

Busted and messed up and so very full of nameless pain.

The papers and message boards are full of angry takes on your story, penned with such viciousness, some of them, that the page bleeds.

The kind of viciousness that set your feet on the path that sadly, inevitably wended its dark and nasty way to the Avon river, and your senseless, brutal death.

You are to blame, they say, for your fate. You had faults, you committed crimes, you hurt people. At 15, when you entered the sex trade you were OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER!

This Christmas, there is no scoring or whoring for you. It's over, perhaps for the first time in years, and to celebrate your freedom from it I offer for you a prayer of peace and love and comfort.

May the God who sent love down at Christmas extend his great grace and mercy to you, Mellory.
May you rest in his peace.

Meantime those of us who lived long enough to leave the streets, and those who never felt that dark lure, the need or the compulsion, let's tuck our kids in tight, let's be glad for what we have, and let's stop casting stones at the vulnerable, the broken and the dead.

Sometimes it's hard to follow Jesus...

Following Jesus is a doddle some days.

When life shines brightly, and the world feels good, and my neighbours are loveable I can be the Christian I long to be.

A Christ-follower with grace and patience, true to the Word, true to my beliefs, someone who strives to make the light of Christ visible in this dark and broken world.

Some days it's a doddle.

Yesterday it was excruciatingly difficult. Yesterday I failed, as I will doubtless fail again.
I have a son, Paulie. He has an intellectual disability that makes him trusting, open, a target for other people's treachery.

Paulie works fulltime on minimum wage as a trolley-pusher in a local supermarket. He saves his money to buy himself nice things, which he shares with others.

Paulie is a shining light.

Last night he opened his door to a man 'who didn't look like a robber' and let him use the phone.
The man left after stealing Paulie's call phone - a Treo which was his pride and joy.
Paulie phoned the police who were too busy to respond, then his dad and me.

I was mad. Mad as hell. Mad as a mother whose vulnerable child has been ripped off and disappointed. Did I love my neighbour the thief?

Hell no.

I sent him several texts telling him what a scumbag he was. I used very unchristian language, and railed against him. He returned my vitriol with interest. Anger responded to anger. I wasn't mad about the phone - it's just a thing. I was mad that I couldn't protect my son against the meanness in the world.

This morning, after prayer and a good night's sleep I am working on forgiveness.

Paulie will buy a new phone, a little sadder and wiser about the world, and I will work again on grace, and forgiveness and loving my neighbour.

There are days when following Jesus is a doddle. The true test of faith is following him just as closely and truly on those days when it is not.

Those days when we can't fathom other people's motives. Those days when life isn't fair. Those days when we don't get what we want, or deserve, or desire.

Forgive me Lord, on those rainy days, for this sinner is a work in progress.

Just a season...

In the drought we long for mist; in the cool months, long-past summers fuel our dreams.

We live in a world in-between: forgetting to delight in the now. Forgetting to be present to the beauty that exists today.

This day.

Every day.

It's so hot and dry: the hills baked to the colour of ginger-crunch, the lake a desert oasis, the strange mist of a few mornings-ago a cool blessing.

The mist rose early, so deep that the world disappeared in its moist white embrace.

It pressed its damp cheeks to the house, repelling the sun that would disperse it.
We were all alone, marooned on an island of cloud.

Gone was the lavender outside the bathroom window; gone the burned grass bank behind it. Gone the rabbits, the pukekos, the hunting cat. The lake and ponds gone - erased from the canvas while we slept.

The mist pressed a cool compress to the baked earth. It smothered the sighs of the wilting olive trees, it caressed the dried arrangements that once bore fruit. It whispered to the land that one day the drought would end.

The quiet, shrouded earth rested, recovered a little.

The bell-bird who sips each morning from the flax flowers stayed in its nest. The tui in the gum, no more, no more.

No magpies gargled. No frogs creaked. No plants tap-tapped against the side of the house.

The morepork slept, his head pillowed on his chest, dreaming of the hunt just finished.

The clock ticked, time shuffled its weary feet, light imperceptibly slipped through the muffling mist.

The lavender - usually bee-buzzed by now - ghosted silently, empty against the window.
The trees tiptoed back into place, trailing cottony shrouds behind them.

Soft glints of sky peeled off the lake, the parched world was reviving.

The birds ran quiet sound checks before one by one rediscovering their voice, and they hailed the bright, hard sky as it returned.

Drought, broken for a brief time, is so much easier to bear. A promise glimpsed eases our pain, allowing us to appreciate anew the beauty here and now.

It's just a season: its time is limited.

The world will return to rights.

Relax, wait, enjoy.

This time too, will pass.

Ghosts

Who sleeps in the star-strewn bed in the sunlit room in the house on the high hill?

Who curls in a ball, deep, deep asleep between clean sheets, and cannot be waked?

She is away,

Away

Where fear is dead and the dark a friend -

Life safe and predictable, and she is free.

Where there are no sharp edges, only bellbirds ring, and a white cat purrs on a pillow.

She plunges so deep all her cares are drowned.

While she floats, drugged by sleep, in buttery sheets, rocked by the wind.


When hypnos flees who stirs, and stretches, breaks the ghostly web?

Finds her inner grown-up and rises, feeds the cat, waters the plants and returns to curl, to shrink, to sleep again.

In a star-strewn bed, a feather pillow, with some books and a cat for company.

The one who sleeps gets smaller and more tenuous every day.

If i find her before she disappears i'll send her on her way.

Away, away

With clean sheets, a well-fed cat, and a starry blanket

And though i'll miss her, i will let her sleep

her life away