Navigating and staying afloat

skin boats (Photo credit: 50mm-traveller)

It’s summer. Yup. And that means change and adaptation and realignment for me. I wrote about it here. And now I’ll share a wee bit more here.

I’ve been in a slump since Easters (reference to one of my fav. movies Nacho Libre). I sang in the choir, walked out of the church with a ceiling and walls, and couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t go back. I tried to figure out why. I made up excuses. I was dejected. Apart from a place I’ve been involved with for 20 years, I felt no compelling force drawing me back. I checked out an edgy inner city church. And when nobody there met my entirely unexplainable criteria, I knew I wouldn’t go back there either. I attended to soul care, read the Book, and engaged in spiritual conversations and activities and poetry. But no church.

There’s another book I read recently called Skin Boat, by John Terpstra (An interview with the author, here). A refreshing book about navigating faith (get this book!!!). Like my own faith journey, the author experiences questions without answers, a sense of belonging some days followed by lingering feelings of marginalization and confusion. His journey is shifting and liquid, and of searching for and finding enough to return for. As Terpstra says,

“I have heard everything there is to say about the place, for and against; both its necessity and its redundancy. Have felt it all, in my bones.”

And I guess, for me, it came down to what I felt in my bones this morning when I woke up. Today I chose to go because I wanted to be with my husband, sit together on a wooden pew. With anxiety and angst and dragging of feet, I pried open my fingers and received a crumb of bread from God’s table. (I didn’t go looking for bread, yet I was given enough to appease my hunger). It’s personal, what happened. But there were tears and words and nodding of heads and something inside of me realizing the reasons for staying away were far smaller than the reasons to be part of what is “church”.

Terpstra writes as both poet and cabinetmaker: “I have thought: the reason I persist is for what is being made.”

This morning I felt a seed of persistence sprouting within the soil of sadness I had allowed to gather in me. And a hint of what is possible, what is being made, should I continue to choose this place. I felt the embrace of arms, looked into eyes, listened to words that I scribbled down madly so as not to forget. The music lifted. The tears cleansed. And the seed continues to grow…

As described in this Can Lit interview, Terpstra asks himself why he keeps being part of this wayward and suffering and paradoxical institution, he responds, “this is the only place I know where time and eternity meet on a regular basis.” 

Today, I was at the meeting place.

SDG, Lesley-Anne

Poetry Friday013

Dark lamb

On the morning that you pushed out of
her warm yet constricting comfort;

Did you know —
that you weren’t snow white
pure, and commonly desired?

Did you sense —
the beginning of knowledge in your belly
of things outside commonplace, or
revelations of rebellion?

Did you guess —
as you kicked up your heels
running joyful on your newly dried legs
in stubble not yet promising summer sweet grasses,

that the darkness that set you apart,
might be your complicated Saviour?

Lesley-Anne Evans
April 2009

Poetry Friday011

Bird’s eye

In my conservative, fresh from the suburbs view
(from above you on the balcony),
I see how nonconformity is perhaps in itself conformation.
Dread locked into hemped up anti fashion statements,
The mosh pit is filled with organic righteous, gifted saints ‘au naturel’.
Wafts of patchouli and musked flesh rise to my nostrils, as
Bongo meets zydeco. A same sex couple touch tentatively,
Lean in, sway to the music, with bright eyes darting
‘Round the room in search of reaction, or like minded acceptance.
Side tables are laid out with found objects;  bones, driftwood, feathers, and
Mashed wool recycled broaches, silver, objet d’art, canvases layered in promise.
All the while, artists and rebels and world informers nod intently to one another
Speaking in hushed whispers, over styrofoam cups of steaming tea.

I am without.

Lesley-Anne Evans, May 2010