Thing With Feathers

As we were waiting to go trick-or-treating (a wholly American tradition I never hoped to partake in, but have found myself compelled to allow my children to enjoy) my six-year-old man-child started singing a song.  Standing on a darkened street, dressed in white tights, a wine colored crushed velvet fitted jacket and a flute in his hands, he started singing a song from the musical RENT.  His young voice rang out into the balmy night with "five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes" and quickly faded into the abyss of unknown words.  

Yet he still hummed.  His tune echoed the music, but the words ceased to exist on his lips.  The words were utterly lost to him, but he knew the love of the music, the melody in his heart, and so, he carried on.  

That moment in time carried me to another space, another time.  A time in which my heart sang out the music of overwhelming emotion, needing words but my lips could not form them.  A bit ago, my beloved grandfather was in hospital.  Leaving his room after my first visit, I felt a shadow clawing, I knew there was something written in the stars and it wouldn't go well for me, for him, for my family.  A few days later, that gnawing feeling I had been running from, ignoring out of fear, came to pass.  I arrived at hospital with my grandmother only to learn that today was the appointed day no one had known about, Gramps would leave this world.  It was such an agonizing and joy-filled space.  Beth Moore, a Christian devotional author, in her study on the Book of James, alluded that you cannot have anguish without corresponding joy, that the pain of labor is always followed by a birth of something. We were in that space, and it was beautiful.  I stood, as one of many, surrounding my grandmother and grandfather as they drew their last joint breaths, there to fight through all the emotions that come from the new anguish of loss together, united.  I did not have that particular pleasure with my own father when he passed away just months before.  Gramps had half the equation right; he died surrounded by loved ones, lifted on the prayers of saints.  But Dad got it half right as well; he was peaceful, at home, in his own bed.  Sometimes, two halves don't make a whole.  And I was fully aware of all this weighty knowledge standing with my grandmother, my aunts and my uncles, with my Gramps... and my heart broke and the falling pieces sounded a tune my heart knew, but my lips couldn't utter.

Come though fount of every blessing

Tune my heart to sing Thy grace

Streams of mercy, never ceasing

Call for songs of loudest praise

Teach me some melodious sonnet

Sung by flaming tongues above.

Praise the mount, I'm fixed upon it

Mount of Thy unchanging love. 

I was lost.  I was lost to grief and the deafening noise of the world shifting on it's axis.  I was lost to myself and what life could possibly look like moving forward.  It was not the first time my world has come crashing down around me.  Not by a long shot.  But association with calamity doesn't make you assimilate the mess with any greater ease.  In another lifetime, I used to write blogs about my family and my perspective as a woman and mamma who was being seasoned, wizened by life, love and experience.  In an instant, a particular moment in time, at a meeting that will haunt me for as long as I draw breath, I lost the voice that gave lyrics to the music of that gloriously mundane and sacred life I had.  I lost my voice for so many, many things.  I can sometimes recall a string of notes, a snatch of the tune, much like  my son as we were trick-or-treating.  Those whispers of melody are few and far between these days though, the rhythm so distant it's as if it's from another world, a beat from across the waves and beyond the oceans.  

"But now I understood that, although words were God's first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven."  -Alice Hoffman, The Dovekeepers

I used to believe in the strength and power of words.  My prayers these days though have become this kind of silent lumbering to the throne of God.  The heavy trodden steps of a weary and broken traveler.  But just as there was beauty in that hospital room, and just as there was sacred in a death without the surround of family, there is journey left in this silence.  I've come to realize so much about myself, my Creator, and my faith through this journey of brokenness, of silence.  Sitting in shul today, listening to the cantors, the clear, crystal and heartbreakingly poetic voice of the rabbi, I was struck again that there is a way to pray without words, a way to sing without lyrics, a way to walk without moving.  Proverbs 14:10 says it best:

"The heart knows its own bitterness and joy; he will not share these with strangers." (WEB)

There are things in this life to be pondered and treasured up in the heart.  Things that aren't shared, cannot be.  These are things which live in the space of poetry and art and music and tears.  Things that cannot be explained, only felt.  Heraclitus said that no one can step into the same river twice for the river is never the same, nor is the man.  I am not the same person who used to write about the mundane and sanctified actions of changing diapers, hanging laundry, weeding a garden while a babe sleeps in the shade of an olive tree.  I have not known mundane, or the consecration of it, in too long.  Everything seems to be upheaval, turmoil, a constant battle against the powers and principalities, against my own demons and myself.  So I found myself here.  I have a different timbre to my voice, words that are so unfamiliar and yet so tightly woven into the fabric of my being that I cannot dismiss them.  They are my own utterances, my own unfamiliar groanings.

This, this humble blog, is my space to find my new rhythm, the new purpose for my ever cracking and terribly pitchy voice.  My space to remember that anguish and joy can and will go hand-in-hand if I let them, and that art and poetry and hallowed will be that very intersections within my heart.  My space to remember that even hope has an unnamed space, a sanctuary all it's own.  

Much like my son, who persevered in his song, even when the words failed him, this is my new place to persevere, even when words fail me.  

"Hope" is the thing with feathers-
That perches in the soul-
And sings the tune without the words-
And never stops- at all-

And sweetest- in the Gale- is heard-
And sore must be the storm-
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm-

I've heard it in the chillest land-
And on the strangest Sea-
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb- of Me.
-Emily Dickinson-