How should I
do this?
Nothing
is written
down.
Image: “Kitchen chair in sunlight,” Vihara at Little Duxmore, Isle
…Author: Mike Shell
It is the women
going to care for
the body
in the tomb
who find him risen.
The men
cannot believe.
There is nothing in this moment
that stays.
Nothing to guide me,
Nothing to hinder me.
Those are all thoughts and feelings
that rise and fall.
They come from nowhere
except from
previous thoughts and feelings.
Yes, there is sensation and emotion,
the brain’s tools for
sifting through
So difficult to sit doing nothing
unless enforced by the presence of others.
Alone, I want to be busy every moment.
What makes me uneasy with stillness?
Uneasiness itself?
I’m not doing anything!
You are breathing, pumping blood.
Holding down the chair.
Filling space.
Dying.
No. That word
came from elsewhere than cleverness.
That word is
closer to the bones.
I’ve not tried before to retrace in memory how my poems come into being. Yesterday a close friend’s response to “Fixed” move me to do so.
This poem came to me, as most of them do, in much the same way that spoken ministry messages come to me during Quaker waiting worship. I am inspired by something, perhaps something very minor, that crosses my awareness, and suddenly there is an image or word or phrase.
My usual morning practice
…I feel stalled
and confounded.
Snow
not yet fallen
chills me and
gets in my way.
I do not want to slow down,
let go,
wait.
Yet I must,
either restlessly
or willingly.
Nothing seems fixed.
… Are modern Friends still driven
by the nineteenth century’s social
gospel, that
worthy yet material world
oriented political drive,
standing in for waiting
worship and
seasoned
leadings?
There is a grave error in the penitential notion of “mortifying the body.”
It replicates the false dualism of “spirit versus matter ” that crept into and overwhelmed the Jewish faith and practice of Jesus as his followers spread out through the Greco-Roman world.
A truer practice is to “affirm the body,” to affirm it as a mortal yet sacred part of the divine whole.
When I allow myself to suffer the large or small sufferings of my body,
Today I am greatly conflicted about the Quake peace testimony. Not giving it up, but struggling with the horrendous cost in lives entailed in staying true to it.
As of March 7, 2022, the Russian military is surrounding Kyiv, Ukraine, and it continues its deliberate targeting residential neighborhoods and blocking of escape by war refugees. The suffering, death, and destruction are escalating rapidly.
I long to see something done at once to save the people of Ukraine from Russia’s violence.
…
“Waiting for Queer Theology,” Mark D. Jordan’s review of Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics, by Linn Marie Tonstad (Wipf and Stock, 2018), in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Autumn/Winter 2021.
Queer theologies as processes, not products
The key concern for Mark D.
…