I Love You With…:Confessing Love

I was reading Anne Bogart’s What’s The Story: Essays About Art, Theater And Storytelling on the train, and after reading the following passage, I just had to start writing love poetry. This is the passage. My poem comes after.

“Constantin Stanislavsky articulated the actor’s paradox and dilemma succinctly: you are in a living room and you are about to confess love for the first time to the only other person in the room. The situation is deeply personal, private and exposed. And there are a thousand people watching.”

I thought about what it is like to confess love to someone. 

I love you with all the radio songs of the world
playing through my body. I love you with all
the pieces I thought were dead: dead hands, dead voices,
leaves and walls. I love you with the pain
that finds my lifeblood coursing in my veins
with the love of oceans that rage against the rocks
with a violin that empties its sound in a church
with the voice of an actor speaking from his wound
with the salvation of daybreak rising over graves
with the stirring of freedom that bends us over cliffs
with the wildness of hunger and the thirst of truth
the delight of touching and the gift of rain
the texture of oranges, the strums of mandolins.
I love you with the eagerness of a colt called into spring
with the running of bare feet not fearing splinters
with what used to be my sadness metamorphosed
from clanging tears into the quietness
of morning buds now lifting out their flowers
with the reverence of figures in stained glass
the moment when God’s setting sun breathes through them
with the closeness of a beach up to the water
with the discovery of feelings in a novel
with what used to be anger now defiance
like the tossing of a stallion’s mane
and emptiness into our murmurs together
the lips of friends, the glasses of companions
the newness of warm eggs laid in their straw.
I love you with the eternity of stars
with everything I’ve ever felt or dreamed
or known or ever loved. I love you with
my whole or many hearts or many lives.
I took so long to say to you these words.
But they come only from a breath that rings
my body in my spirit and my truth.
The well was deep. I offer you this drink,
after longing’s exhalation, filled
to sing the very breath of my own heart.

Songs of pain, words about walking

This week I’ve been reading Léonora Miano‘s Contours du jour qui vient. It’s a novel where, in a fictional West African country that resembles Cameroon, a young girl recounts her experiences growing up to her mother who abandoned her. I have found these two passages to be particularly heartbreaking, moving, painful, beautiful, and breathtaking. After reading the second passage, I put the book down open on my leg and started rubbing the pages back and forth as if to warm it, to soothe it, to tend to it. I started to think of how I could use this piece in the creation of theatre. Since I don’t think there is an English translation of this novel, I am sharing these passages here. 

“Sometimes, the fleeting image of another time darts across our eyes. Then we see, in the thick leaves of the large boabas and in the flowering red flamboyants, that one day we had a destiny. We have put it in a tomb. And from this grave where we have buried it so deeply and abandoned it, it cries that it is still moving, that it is there, that it just needs us to give it a chance…We put the palms of our hands over our ears so that we cannot hear anything but the untethered rhythms that we invented for ourselves in order to numb ourselves and unmake ourselves. In our depths, there is nothing left but the cavernous voice of a god of unlove and the false image of a future to achieve in Europe. The baobabs and the flamboyants watch us and their trunks dry up, split themselves from the inside. If they could speak to us, they would tell us that our greatest fault, the perpetual blasphemy that we commit, resides in this inability for us to envision ourselves.”

“I don’t have shoes. They haven’t ever given me any. I walk tiptoe to avoid feeling my feet break apart down the middle, like they do when we walk for too long. The pain is so strong that it feels like my feet are crying. Asphalt comes after the dirt road. On one as on the other, I still feel the heat of the day. Here, the cold gets no lower than fifteen degrees. There is trash on the ground. Shards of glass. Cuttings of wire, hidden splinters waiting where human eyes cannot see them. I walk, watching where I put my feet. The splinters stab me all the same. They sink into my flesh. I do not try to pull them out. We all live with thorns in our body. It is enough to know how to move so that they never reach a vital organ. They stab me. I do not cry. I walk through the city, and I am almost free.”

I will also add that I had the privilege back in college of meeting Leonora Miano and hearing her speak. I wrote down pages of notes, and I think about these words of hers all the time:

“Il faut triompher pour être vraiment eux-mêmes.”

We have to triumph to truly be ourselves.

What I’ve been learning about Jesus’s prayer

“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.  Pray then like this:

‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.’

 

I’ve been learning some new things about this prayer this year. I’ve been praying it almost daily since 1996 so this feels like a big deal. The remarks I make below are (mostly) copied from email exchanges with my brother across the months. (Thank you.) I might one of these days write something of fuller length–or maybe have the opportunity to speak and to share my thoughts with a group–but since I try to post something here once a month, I wanted to get these initial ideas out there. What do you think? What have you been learning? Where does this scripture ring true for you? Does it?

1. “Your will be done.”
I am struck by how, in the Lord’s prayer, the things God is expected to do are assumed to be done by human beings. And the many things human beings usually expect to do for themselves and their community become supplications for God to act. Even down to feeding ourselves and resisting temptation. God’s forgiveness, which we would expect him to grant, an action we would expect him to do, seems conditional on our forgiveness. And in a related way can we consider “your kingdom come” to be an action of God’s in this prayer? (Who is doing it? How is it happening? What is the process?) Throughout the rest of Jesus’s teaching in Matthew’s gospel (including, I think, the sermon on the mount) there is an emphasis on God’s will as “being done” by us. Now when I pray this prayer, I have the possibility in mind that I am praying for others and myself to be doing God’s will on earth as it is in heaven.

2. “On earth.”
It feels powerful to me that this prayer teaches us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth.” That his kingdom come on earth. What I mean is, to me it really feels right to pray for things here on earth–timebound, embodied, human earth things, and so I love that this is how Jesus is teaching us to pray. And some people I interact with (mostly people who aren’t Christians but some Christians too, through the ages) seem to suggest that our faith is all about the spiritual, heavenly spaces (in ways that don’t respond to or offer salvation for the pain and suffering of our lives.) It hit me today that that it is RIGHT IN THE PRAYER that Christians have been saying for centuries: your kingdom come on earth!

3. “Our”/”Us”/”We”

In this prayer, we pray to our Father, someone who can be known by all of us. Who is willing to be expressed by our hearts and our breath as belonging to us as we worship, as we hallow, as we speak to our Father together. And we are praying “us.” We are praying “we.” Not any “we” that narrows community, that privileges some over others, and excludes. But, truly, “we.” All of us are required to do his will on earth. All of us are invited to ask for bread. All of us who have been trespassed against. All of us who forgive. All of us who need deliverance from evil. This is a prayer we pray together.

I have prayed this prayer most of my life through an individual lens. I do think the prayer is in fact wide enough to carry each of our individual experiences.  Forgiveness looks different for me than it will for you, just like the hurt of being sinned against, and the consequences for those who are closest to us. Sometimes “I” need to pray this prayer, just as “you” do, and I find “my own” meaning in the prayer.

But if the prayer is in fact wide enough, the truth resonant enough, the kingdom beautiful and good enough, our Father powerful enough and faithful enough, the question this prayer asks me today is, “Are our communities strong enough to pray this prayer together?”

If we are praying “us,” are we strong enough to feel each other’s pain so that it is our own? Are we connected enough to each other’s lives that the bestowing of forgiveness becomes a communal act and that the asking for forgiveness is a collective experience? Are we brave enough to do our Father’s will together? And when we pray this together, are we willing?