Betrothal

Betrothal
(Mark 15:40)
“I could use a woman like you.”
I had heard it before from men who mistook my vivacity for flirtation,
my unbound hair as a sign of promiscuity.
But something in the way he said it made me drop the mending,
ignore Martha’s hollering, and leave.
At first, it was what I feared; filling the waterskins, listening to his friends argue
while I looked for wine, cleaning up after immense dinner parties.
But later, it became caring for the ill, and pulling him from a fistfight
in his father’s house on a holiday.
Finally, it was speaking, head uncovered, before spoken to.
Sitting. Listening. Waiting.
When Martha begged me to come home, he smiled. “I’m coming with you.”
I thought he meant for good.
Martha met us in the road, screaming that my brother was dead.
Hurrying home, he murmured: “You know how she gets. I’m sure he’s just asleep.”
When I saw my brother’s face, ashen and set in stone, I wasn’t sure.
So when I saw the pair of them step from the room a few minutes later,
I dropped the jar of perfume I brought for Martha. It broke and spattered at his feet.
Wiping them with a towel, I heard him say: “I think it’s time you met my mother.”
And I did—
over bread and wine in a borrowed upper room while he chatted with his friends.
As we stood alone that windy hill the next day,
she held my hand and wiped my tears.
Telling me things weren’t what they seemed.
That she thought of me as a daughter.
That she had been waiting for something like this to happen.
A few days later, standing open-mouthed in a puddle of spices, broken crockery, and spilled oil,
she squeezed my hand and told me that it was all right.
She missed him too.

I have been known to, on occasion, be a little sassy.

A Draft:

For Corey
After Repeatedly Encouraging Me to Use More Similes

The fact of the matter is that I cannot stand using them. It's like using the phrase "as if" or "Gee golly whiz." Staid. Meaningless. Or wearing a Chanel suit. It's difficult to do without pretension. Equally bad, the deliberately obtuse: "The trees are marching like Frenchmen." What does that even mean? Like black holes, sucking all the light and meaning from a poem. Or, really rich triple-chocolate lava cake with peanut butter ice cream. So sweet you can't have more than a bite for fear of sickness. Sometimes akin to Romance novel heroines, hysterical and overblown. Worse yet, like coffee made with too much water, weak and tasteless. Only occasionally like the first Minnesota snowfall, so crisp and straight forward.

Life is What Happens

New Prose Poem Draft.

Life is What Happens

Life is What Happens
Wells Fargo called. The car payment is late. And, speaking of late, so am I and I don't know how to tell you. At the moment, the dog needs to be walked, the repairman couldn't fix the washing machine, and your mother won't get off the phone. I hope that when you come home we can slip off for a walk or a late movie. Although, it's more likely that we'll make some mac and cheese and argue about dishes and who forgot to make the bed this morning. Then, I'll drift to my Hebrew textbooks and half-finished papers. You, to your crossword, the television on in the background. Later, brushing your teeth, you'll hear me adding another blanket cursing the broken, cold radiator. Shivering together under the covers, you'll whisper "Won't it be nice when..." falling asleep before you can finish. I'll kiss your shoulder and wonder if I'm crazy. I love the way things are now.

Winter, Collegeville

New draft.

Winter, Collegeville

Winter, Collegeville.

Cold. So cold the old radiator can’t keep up.

There's a thick layer of ice on the windows.

Your breath feels like it might freeze in your lungs.

Whiteouts, too. Eight hours only of weak

sunlight. Black ice. Scraping the car windows

every morning. Running the car for fifteen minutes

before you can begin to coax it from its parking space.

But, also, stars so numberless and bright they’re painful. The Northern Lights.

Sledding, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing. Deep breaths of air

so clear it feels like the first breath you’ve ever taken. Soup and

crusty bread shared among friends. Ice-skating. Scarves and mittens.

Mulled wine. Hot tea. December 22^nd. Your claw-footed bathtub.

And always, the hope for April’s first rainstorm singing down the windows.

Revealing the many small green growing things, just waiting out the winter.

Risky

Dear Friend,

Love is Risky.

I keep running over these words as I finish the last week of my first semester at the School of Theology. As I struggle to finish papers, take mind-bending exams, submit proposals, and work a 40-hour week, I have been overcome by the most intense wave of self-doubt I have ever experienced. Am I smart enough to be here? Is my writing strong enough? Am I strong enough? Have I learned anything? Will I pass my finals with distinction? Will I pass them at all? Can I really keep working while I'm doing this and not go crazy? How much are my relationships suffering because of my schedule?

Never has the riskiness of love been as apparent as it was while I've holed up writing a paper about the beauty and terror of the Crucifixion. People often ask me--despite corruption in the Church, pedophilia scandals, power abuses, degradation of women, in spite of a religion at which any reasonable person would scoff—in spite of all of this, why do I remain Catholic, Christian, a student of theology? While writing this paper, I thought about the riskiness of the Incarnation; the beauty and terror of a God who loved the world enough to say "yes" to torture and death. This, to me, was more than enough to become a Christian, and certainly enough to keep me in a Church with which I so often feel in conflict. My experience with the Catholic Church has been analogous to falling in love. It's risky. I've had to open myself to an uncertain future with nothing but faith in the other party. For an extreme type-a personality, this has been a difficult, but necessary process.

Yesterday an unlooked for and very dear friend stopped by. He knocked in my door in the midst of my cursing Turabian style guides and feeling like I was drowning in a sea of my own inadequacy. Expecting another student, I was near to tears with the thought of another distraction, another indication of how much smarter and self-possessed my compatriots are, when he burst through my door. A graduate of the SOT, he knows much about my frustrations, exhaustion, occasional total and complete apathy toward my subject, and intense doubt about my own scholarly abilities. During these final days of December, when Minnesota is so dark, quiet, and lonely, he arrived as an unforeseen blessing; a small gift to remind me that amid the milieu of papers, exams, sleeping through the alarm, phone calls, mail merges etc. ad nauseum, God is Present. Shaun reminded me what it is to be in real communion with another person. Months worth of emotional crust was stripped away and I remembered what it was like to love someone and allow them to love you just as you are.

I take much comfort in some words of Karl Rahner's which I read in the last week: "And in Jesus he (God) experienced the fact that the mystery of man, which it is not for man himself to control, and which is bound up in the absurdity of guilt and death is, nevertheless, hidden in the love of God." In typical Rahnerian style, he cannot help but obfuscate his own meaning. After much unpacking of and prayer over these words, I think what Rahner is saying is that human nature, despite its fallenness and sinfulness is inextricably interwoven with God's grace and love. I find the idea of a constantly graced existence both compelling and true to my own lived experience. Shaun's vist and Rahner's words came to me at the same moment, each a different and equal blessing as I muddle on the best I know how.

How are you? How are your own joys and small sorrows? Your moments of beauty and terror? Are you staying warm? Finding ways to overcome the darkness? Are you looking forward to the solstice? Christmas? The ending of an academic semester? The beginning of a new year? I would like to tell you more, but the kettle is whistling and my slippers are waiting. I hope you remain safe in your travels and that you embrace love's riskiness, whatever it may mean to you.

You are in my prayers. I hope to remain in yours.

With love,
KMJ

Sabbath

Another draft for my Theological Aesthetics final project.

Sabbath
After Wendell Berry

I spent most of today
tramping through the woods.
I donned my down vest, old boots,
and woolly hat Mother made.
I hunted mushrooms.
Dug around roots and rotting stumps.
Kicked a path in fallen leaves,
watched my breath crystallize in the air.
Now, curled with a cup of hot tea
and a rattling radiator,
I hear church bells tolling for vespers.
I will go, but not yet.
No, it is still too soon.

New Poems

I'm currently working on final project for my Theological Aesthetics class involving Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry's poetry. The last five or so pages of the paper will be my own poems dealing with nature, faith, the transcendent experience, and organized religion. Here are my first two attempts (still in draft form).

Doubt
I do not know if I have a soul.
Or if, when I die I will return
to bits of bone, and dust, and ash.
But is that really so terrible?
To remain as part of the prairie grass and pine trees,
to have a sparrow shake me from her wings
before flight seems, sometimes,
more beautiful than staring off the edge of a cloud.
Please, if I must go, give me a few more moments.
Another nap in the afternoon sun and sweet birdsong.
One more chance to dig my garden in the warm spring dirt
before I am spirited away to harps and halos
or darkness and silence.


The Simplest Thing

It begins so simply.
Quit your job.
The one you've always hated, but kept,
Because sticking things out is what you do as an adult.
Once you've rid yourself of your job, take everything you own
Except a pair of boots, a change of clothes, and the little book
Of Rilke's elegies you've always kept in your pocket.
Tell your love they can follow, or wait,
or leave if they want to,
but you are going. Linger,
briefly at the crossroad just outside of town.
But do not regret your decision.
If there is anything worthwhile in life,
It is this. Only this.
It was always this.