epiphanies of passion

I read "Ash-Wednesday " last night and wept. It was an odd place to weep, sitting on the toilet, but then again, not so odd. There's something about the privacy of a toilet where you can go escape and hang your head and give the semiotic irruption of tears free rein. I believe it's a tendency developed in large families and cemented during middle school.

Something about the love of God has been overwhelming me. The incomprehensibility, perhaps. I have no intention of making this musing a fluffy and nauseating display of puppy enthusiasm that I've hated so much from other people and other people's essays, especially at the Grove (oh God, creative writing personal narratives), but the coffee spoons of the week have featured this unfathomable attribute of the divine regularly enough to be mused on.

It was the subject of Sunday's sermon, and I sat in the pew and cried quietly wishing I hadn't done a purse purge that morning which left me bereft of Kleenex. A freely running nose in church is embarrassing. The love of God is something I haven't quite believed in as applied to myself for the past ten years, when the little bundle of raw nerves that converges into my self heard every week at Youth Group how horrible and nasty and repulsive human nature is to God. Even after I realized that my youth pastor was overzealous, the ideas festered. Anyway, it's been a long time of putting it away and not thinking about it but healing quietly under the surface and it's strange to know that I can be healed. Un-scarred. I've been reading Ezekiel and something semiotic (again that word) about the inexorable passion of God for his people swells in the mind. He says to them, in essence, "I WILL redeem you."

I don't understand the passion of God. I've begun praying on my knees before my bed, because as overwhelmed as I have been, nothing less seems quite expressive enough. I have nothing to give back. My hands are empty. But that's nothing he doesn't already know. Therefore let my devotion be kindled and my hands filled with acts of obedience and love, as my heartfull offering to the One to whom it doesn't matter how little I have to give.



Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

~Eliot, 1930