letters from barabbas

How could anyone help but adore these beautiful, graceful people?
Play this interview, and take a nap or something.

Spring break came just in time.
One more day in Auburn, and I may have imploded.
Friday marked the first time I've been defeated by the Triple Lindy.
The loss, I assure you, was due entirely to extenuating circumstances.
I wish I had something more to say about the gap between by brain and my fingers, but I'm getting tired of thinking about it, to tell you the truth.
[Maybe that's the key: stop thinking.]
To give you a feel for the height of the past days' melodrama, I wrote in my journal Saturday:


I don't want to be strong anymore
I want to break down completely

He will rise again at Dawn.
And will I come up with Him,
or have I forty more years to wander?


I have plans for this week, though. You betcha.
1. smile
2.

You reached down to catch me a frog, and reached up to show me a sleek green joy. Neither of us realized clutching tighter only killed them.
In return, I spoke of fireflies and steel and California. You would ask me what is an enigma, a monument, ambivalence: you'd mispronounce them all. I would ask you what is faith and newness and forgetting. Wouldn't you smile and call me silly, and think I was playing a game?
I'll withhold from you the monuments as long as I am able.
Content yourself to laugh and sing and hide under the table.

If you could read, perhaps you'd quote me Rilke:

And we: Spectators, always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It overfills us. We arrange it. It falls apart.
We rearrange it, and fall apart ourselves.

Who has turned us around like this, so that
always, no matter what we do, we're in the stance
of someone just departing? As he,
on the last hill that shows him all his valley
one last time, turns, stops, lingers--,
we live our lives, forever taking leave.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, you know....
And you would quote me Solomon, too:

Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosed,
Or the golden bowl is broken,
Or the pitcher shattered at the fountain,
Or the wheel broken at the well.
Then the dust will return to the earth as it was,
And the spirit will return to God who gave it.

"Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher.
"All is vanity."

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:
Fear God and keep His commandments,
For this is man's all.
For God will bring every work into judgment,
Including every secret thing,
Whether good or evil.

[Rilke, Duino Elegies; Shakespeare, Hamlet; Ecclesiastes 12]

"I don't exist much in the physical realm," I said half-sarcastically to John a month ago.
I was restoring an old library book entitled At Ease in Zion, making it into a journal for Calla Maria's birthday. Marvelling at the monument I was establishing, the sacraments of artwork and gift-giving, I couldn't get my mind around the mechanisms of remembrance. How can we engage our bodies in something so intangible as human interaction? How do you wrap up your love for someone and extend it across the space between your hearts?
Fashioning my affection into something tangible and permanent, lost in thought in the living room, John brought up talk of a tentative trip to Philadelphia this May. I want to get a feel for the city because I am considering spending a year there after graduation and working with Chi Alpha. He said he would like to stop and spend a day at Gettysburg. I scoffed, said he could have fun with his history. I'd go hang out with the Amish, something more worth my time. He was surprised at my insolence. I tried to describe how I don't understand monuments, how I'd rather read a book or pray about something than look at a slab of marble, how I can't transcribe spiritual reality into physical reality.
I have a hard time connecting with an abstract concept by focusing on a concrete representation. Somewhere between my heart and my hands there's a gap that I can't overcome. I've been been aware of this dichotomy for years, but pondering it especially much ever since Dr. Gresham made me read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, examining my selves from various angles, trying to seal the gap.

I was trying to explain it to Josh today. He posed the question: Is this something that is a part of your personality, something unique about you that might even be vital to your personal ministry? Or is it just a defense mechanism, the result of twenty-one years of managing sin, chasing approval, Gnostic denial of the sensual?
Whatever it is, I can feel the Holy Spirit drawing my soul out of its prison. He's pressing on the walls of my heart, ready to burst them, so my spirit can flood out into every inch of my flesh: fingertips to toes, mouth and eyes and nose. Perhaps he'll cut the telegram wire that runs between my mind and my heart, forcing them to intermingle, communicate face-to-face.

:So I can hold my girlfriend's hand and feel it draw her near.
:So I can shake an outcast's hand and feel it bring him in.
:So I can squeeze a patient's hand feel it calm her fear.
:So I can take my Father's hand and feel it lead me on.

I'll step into my skin and walk around in it someday. It's part of growing up.
You can help me bridge the gap, perhaps. He's already using my friends. He's using other people's thoughts, others' revelations.
Read this: it's an exercise I intend to try this weekend.
If you know of any other exercises I can try, let me know.
All of this is will just be practice, though, for the day...

when i stand on the edges of Jordan
with the saints and the angels beside
when my body is healed and the glory revealed
still i can boast only Christ
- derek webb

Until then, no matter how sensual I become, I'll never be completely me: existing and eternal and alive, at ease in Zion.

For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.
So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.
--II Corinthians 5:1-8, NKJV

I imagine you've read this poem at some point in your life:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

-William Carlos Williams


I know I'm really flaunting my cheesiness here, but I love the following, it always makes me laugh. Hope you feel the same:

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
And then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave the away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy, and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

--Kenneth Koch