A Beatitude

Blessed are you, when your fingers are numb and unfeeling, and you can't wield a pen or grasp a knife or wash your hair.

Blessed are you, when you're alone and corpsed on the floor, wracked by pain, crying out a prayer of mercy.

Blessed are you, when you lay down in the middle of your language class, so you can rest your spasming body. 

Oh keep her as the apple of your eye, hide her under the shelter of your wings!

Blessed are you, when your deepest fears assault you, of being sick while apart from family in a foreign country, living alone. 

Blessed are you, when you're making appointments at unknown offices for scans and diagnosis's, bombarded with past medical traumas, shadowed by looming uncertainties.

Blessed are you, when you bravely share your prayer requests in the midst of waiting for your full healing, reaching in faith for the Body's loving arms to uphold you.

Oh send out your word and heal her, your beloved and your friend. 

Blessed are you, when you wait for His appearing.  

I am blessed

I don't get mad at them; they are me. I'm three kilometers from a checkpoint where one and the other, one armed and one with arms, navigate a dance of coexistence, a tension of fear and mutual resentment as common as the dust of which we all sprung from. 

I don't get mad at them; they are me. I'm three kilometers from a checkpoint where sons and daughters have sought heaven through dismemberment, taking life upon life in a moment, unleashing chaos and fear. 

I am slow to anger, so I don't get mad easily. Even when the headlines shade the truth on the sunniest day, misinform in a continual defense of power and subjugation. Even when families are separated by walls and hatred hurls children into hopeless futures.

I am slow to anger, so I don't get mad easily. Living under constant threat from within and without, nuclear arms missiles aimed continually at my heart, murderous minds indoctrinated and equipped for my destruction, declarations of annihilation, and a history to prove it. If you give them an inch, they'll take a mile.

I am slow to speak, quick to listen. Brother James taught me, he learned from his brother, the true Iman-Rabbi-Teacher to us all. He blessed me with a blessing in my present-tense being and my in my doing:

I am poor; I am blessed.
 I am mourning; I am blessed.
  I am meek; I am blessed.
   I am hungry; I am blessed.
    I am thirsty; I am blessed.
     I am merciful; I am blessed. 
      I am pure in heart; I am blessed.
       I am forgiving; I am blessed.
        I am peacemaking; I am blessed.
         I am persecuted; I am blessed.
          I am reviled; I am blessed.
            I am slandered; I am blessed.

I am interiting, I am comforted, I am satisfied, I am receving mercy, I am seeing God, I am called a child of God, I am receiving the Kingdom, I am receiving great reward.

For though I am dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on me a light has dawned. 

Journal of decline

Father, I come to you with a Father's declining.

Fragility... his emaciated, atrophied body
Frailty... how long can he live independently?
Futility... is this decline inevitable?  

I have waded into the depths of fear of loss before;

Successively through prediabetes, diabetes, cancer, now loss of mobility, maybe dementia?

Will he rally? 

Will this be the end/if (when) he falls without his phone, how long will he lay unseen on the ground?  

Fears are so beguiling, so convincing, and following the thread to the end of panic, helplessness and guilt and blame for being a million miles away 

I am fragile, too, even as he wavers and shakes 

My faith feels so frail and brittle, are you calling me home? What am I even doing here.

Is this futile to hope for redemption? 

Is this journal healthy detachment, letting go of a man who has done what he's wanted all his life and is now reaping the consequences for decades of additions; tobacco and alcohol and sugar 

Never a non-canned vegetable, never a workout 

I still feel sad, his prognosis is grim, 

This man who did what he wanted all his life, his arms are being stretched out and strength diffusing, he's going to be taken to a VA where he doesn't want to go...

7/15; 7/25;

Roads, Boundaries, and Walls

I took Hebron road, south to north, vein of the land

Some travelers passed this way before; crusaders, armies, empires, traders, supplicants

It was a way, effective transportation of self beyond the

Lines on maps, boundaries of languages and culture and 'us and them'

And though I've transgressed beyond the boundary I haven't overtaken the 

Wall of noise, the separation of 'otherness'

The road is more than mobility, the past is more than archeology

Bound up in the boundaries

The wall is penetrable, intentionally

Some can take a road to a checkpoint and cross, some cannot 

The wall was built over the line, proactively,  provocatively

Some built, some broke

The wall is protection, exclusionary

Some find protection, some find hopeless isolation

The boundary is stronger than the wall, as resentment is stronger in the second generation

Some find deliverance in immigration, some in martyrdom, but a few in forgiveness

The boundary is fear, the wall is the manifestation

The butterfly is the resistance.

---

Inspired by Course Catalogs & Mahmoud Darwish. 

A dismantling

In these rambling words I hear my own lostness, 

a wondering, wandering confusion

What once was solid is disintegrating, plains are leveling

Mountains to valleys, fierce and unwavering

Right and wrong and black and white, dissolving. 

What is the narrow line of justice?

What road am I called to walk that will lift the burdens from my fellows

Carrying, lightening, lessing the hopeless void of despair

With the very light of God, that weighty substance which soothes like dew 

draping freshly as a garland upon a troubled mind

Without naming the territories under dispute 

The assumptions and promises held aloof 

Labeling the other, 

Building barriers against a brother, 

Language, culture, history, policy to politics, supremacy 

This is a prayer to gain wisdom. 

This is a plea to leave my comfortable privileged ignorance

And be clothed with a new perspective, a fresh empathy toward understanding. 

A remaking of sorts, so that the long-Promised One, the Rescuer, might be seen and known through me. 

(And knowing my own weakness, I take no credit for this desire, but give glory to His goodness that surpasses knowledge). 

Opening of a window

Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let His will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to Him in our will, an effort to make Him the LORD of our soul. 

-Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel