Our Mother

"As I tried to bring a deeper quality of presence
to all my works this day, I found God moving
through the day with me, like a Mother, opening
my eyes to beauty. Quietly, joyfully, gratefully,
without complaining, I welcomed all the beauty
that crossed my path."

Her babies grow so heavy
Heavy as can be
And the God who is their mother
Cannot lift them to her knee

Apocalypse Now. Kurtz, up the river where the heart
of darkness is. Remember? Willard watching him as he
spoke about judgment being the ultimate horror. His
shaved head, jungle sweat, a blood vessel in his forehead
twitching, pulse-like, by torch light.

Judgment, the horror. The horror!

Weighted by our blindness
By all we cannot see
The God who is our mother
Cannot lift us to her knee

Coretta King said once, that if the soul of the nation
is to be saved, women must become its soul. In the
same way, Mother Nature must again become the
temple we enter, distracted not by any gospel but
the very essence that leads us to grow upward,
upward, encouraged by the sun.

Heavy with believing
Heavy with decree
The God who is our mother
Cannot lift us to her knee

Kilgore said he loved the smell of napalm in the
morning. When I saw the movie, people laughed
when he said it. I used to go and sing at a mental
asylum, and I heard the same laughter there. The
broken heart does not always bring tears.

Gandhi said that non-cooperation with evil is as
much a duty as cooperation with good.

I heard a singer asking, the other day, where the
mothers of America are.

Woke the other night from a dream of angels. They
were leading this tired old warrior down to a stream.
When they spoke to him, they called him God. He
told them, with a sniff of displeasure, that they ought
not to call him by that name, that he was a stranger
to them. Then we offer water to a stranger, the angels
said. He nodded. It was a beginning.

Father Leo, the motorcycle-riding Roman Catholic
priest who married two pagan gypsies long ago, said,
we are breathing God. And slowly waved his hand
toward the plum blossoms, toward the gardens of
Beacon Hill Park, toward the diamond glints of sun
on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We are breathing God,
he whispered again, almost in tears.

All the grief we've never grieved
All the shackled liberty
The God who is our mother
Cannot lift us to her knee

The opening quote is from Macrina Wiederkehr, a
Benedictine Sister at St. Scholastica Monastery in
Fort Smith, Arkansas. In her book, A Tree Full Of
Angels, she remembers being in a bus station, seeing
a little girl helping her brother get a drink at the
water fountain. He was too small, and yet he was
too heavy for her to lift him to the stream of water.
Just as Macrina was about to rise and offer to help,
the girl ran over to the shoeshine man, pointed to
a footstool he wasn't using, dragged it to the fountain,
and helped her baby brother step on it and get a
drink.

Taking care of each other, without falling prey to our
frustrations, without waiting to be rescued -- it's the
only prayer I care to say, for it is active inspiration.
I know without asking that, when the girl took the
footstool back, the shoeshine man was beaming.

I, too, look for possibilities of mercy and delight in
my actions, to bring a deeper quality of presence
to the work I do each day. It's true, we have made
ourselves too heavy to be lifted. We are all in need
of a bright sister with a footstool.

Let us rise up from the ground
Let us learn to stand
The God who is our mother waits
For us to take her hand

"Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are
burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of
angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life
wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can
happen only if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary
by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure."

Macrina again, from A Tree Full Of Angels.

I don't want to smell the napalm. I want to breathe
in the mystery until the tears come up. Coming back
down the river with Willard, I am exhausted by what
I've been witness to. The only war I know how to stop
is the one inside of me.

DL