MikePaschall.com

I’ll admit it: much of what I read online or hear in the national media—especially anything tied to abuses of power in or by our leaders—leaves me searching for the smallest morsel of human decency, untouched by the rancid smell of partisan self‑interest. Lately, I’ve been hearing about “gerrymandering.” It even sounds dirty… manipulative… exclusive. And it seems we’ve become so desperate for total control that we’ll do whatever it takes, no matter what it cost, to get what we want, whenever we want it, at the expense of those we deem necessary to exclude from the great human experience. So much for liberty and justice for all. So much for America the beautiful—and for the dreams of MLK and RFK: equality, peace, justice, and the tangible ripple of the love of Christ. A love that “prefers others before self.” If I’m not mistaken, Jesus said that we’re supposed to love one another in the very same way that we are loved by God. This is not that. This is politics. This is power-over. The Church should be losing its ever-loving mind over this kind of stuff! It’s not. I hear golf claps. It is sickening to even ask the question of what’s at the heart of it?

So, today, I’m posting from the writing of Brian Doyle. It’s a different mind… a different way of seeing what’s around us… a peek into God’s marvelous world, God’s beautiful diversity revealed through people, God’s blessings at our very feet. Hope this lifts you today. Hope it lifts us all. We need some hope.

Mike

COOL THINGS

As a fan’s notes for grace, and quavery chant against the dark, I sing a song of things that make us grin and bow, that just for an instant let us see sometimes the web and weave of merciful, the endless possible, the incomprehensible inexhaustible inexplicable yes.

          Such as, for example, to name a few,

         The way the sun crawls over the rim of the world every morning like a child’s face rising beaming from a pool all fresh from the womb of the dark, the way jays hop and bees inspect and swifts chitter, and the way the young mother at the bus stop has her infant swaddled and huddled against her chest like a blinking extra heart, and the way a very large woman wears the tiniest miniskirt with a careless airy pride it makes me so happy I can hardly squeak, and the way seals peer at me from the surf like a rubbery grandfathers ,and the way cormorants in the ocean never ever get caught by onrushing waves but disappear casually at the last possible second so you can see their head long black stories written on the wall of the sea like moist petroglyphs, and the way no pavement asphalt macadam concrete cement thing can never ultimately defeat a tiny relentless green thing, and the way people sometimes lean eagerly face first into the future when they walk, and the way when my mom gets caught unawares by a joke she barks with laughter so infectious that people grin two towns over, and the way one of my sons sleeps every night with his right leg hanging over the side of the bed like an oar no matter how many times I fold him back into the boat to the bed, and the way the refrigerator hums to itself in two different keys, and the way the new puppy noses through hay fields like a headlong exuberant hairy tractor, and the way my daughter always makes one immense final cookie the size of a door when she makes cookies, and the way one son hasn’t had a haircut since Napoleon was emperor, and the way crows arrange themselves sometimes on the fence like the notes of a song that I don’t know yet, and the way car engines sigh for a few minutes after you turn them off, and the way your arm goes all totally nonchalant when you’re driving in the summer with the window down, and the way people touch each other’s forearms when they are scared, and the way every once in a while someone you hardly know says something so piercingly honest that you just want to kneel right down right there in the grocery store near the pears, and the way little children fall asleep with their mouths open like fish, and the way sometimes just a side long glance from someone you love makes you all shaky for a second before you can get your mask back on, and the way some people when they laugh tilt their heads way back like they need room for all the hilarity in their mouths, the way hawks and eagles always look so annoyed the way people shuffle daintily on icy pavements, and the way churches smell dense with hope, and the way that men’s pants sponge up at the knees when they stand after kneeling in church, and the way all knees are gnarled, the way faces curve around the mouth and eyes according to how many times you’ve smiled over the years, and the way people fall asleep in chairs by the fire and snap awake startled and amazed, unsure, just for a second, what planet exactly there on, which is the question we should probably all ask more often than we do.

         Look I know very well that brooding mishap and evil is everywhere, in the brightest houses and the most vehement denials, in what we do and what we have failed to do, and I know all too well that the story of the world is entropy, things fly apart, we sicken, we fail, we grow weary, we divorce, we are hammered and hounded by loss and accidents and tragedy. But I also know with all my hoary muddled heart, that we are carved at immense confusing holiness; that the whole point for us is grace under duress; and that you either take a flying leap that nonsensical illogical unreasonable ideas like marriage and marathons and democracy and divinity, or you huddle behind the wall. I believe that the coolest things cannot be measured, calculated, gauged, weighed, or understood except sometimes by having a child patiently explain it to you, which is another thing that should happen far more often than it does.

         In short I believe in believing, which doesn’t make sense, which gives me hope.

Brian Doyle, “Cool Things,” Portland Magazine (Summer 2006), vol. 25, no. 2.