what's better

Often when I'm feeling the urge to write, it's because I desire to say something important. Or impressive. Or both.

But really, what's better is to say something true.

Truth will be misunderstood and maligned. Its implication will be dismissed and missed by the ignorance of blindness. I know. I do it all the time -- in darkness, I stumble over the twig across my path, because I didn't see danger. Or I see and decide I've got it covered. I can handle this impediment in front of me, I imagine, believing myself impressive, thinking along the lines of Adam: Hey, it's me; of course I can do this. Next thing I know, my legs are tangled and my nose has pounded turf.



But truth won't cause the one who receives it to stumble. Truth can only, by nature, lift up; it will not destroy. Lies destroy; when all's said and done destruction is all a lie can do. Truth knows the annihilation its opponent brings but is not afraid in the slightest. There is nothing, truth understands, that can keep itself from remaking, redeeming, joyfully renewing what came about by the lie. Truth will never flag in zeal; truth always brushes me off and says There, there.

Like air particles -- noisy ones -- the lie surrounds me, and I listen. I'm covered in lie-smog, yet I am not of the lie. I'm not the lie, but I'm not the truth. I live in a process toward the truth. Somehow I know the truth reaches over the topmost bar. It streams past the locked gate, toward me. Not a single fumble matters. No awful word is measured, no crumbs spilled are counted. I am loved, and that is true.

linkage

Infants and their grandparents fascinate me now. Now that I've spied the irises of my first grandbaby, our boy Edmund, turning toward my voice, seeming to spy me and be all right with me, as if he recognizes something in my timbre from before he emerged to rest in my arms.

The above photo is me in Grandma's arms, my mother's mother who visited us in Buckeye, Indiana and gazed at my puckered face the way I gaze at Edmund's.

It's quite a thing.

I'm guessing Grandpa took this picture, but I don't know for certain who did. Grandpa, seven years Grandma's junior and quite a guy, always had the latest photographic equipment; thanks to him Mom owns a color 16mm movie of his and Grandma's wedding in the late 1920s.

Yesterday holding Edmund, I mused about my grandparents holding me. Like me and Edmund, Grandma and I were born in different centuries, she having taken up residence on earth in 1898. Of course, Edmund and most babies born this year have parents who were born last century -- last millennium, in fact. But perhaps not too many have the heritage of a great-great-grandparent from the 1800s. Maybe more do than I realize.

The thing that strikes me for the first time is my imagined view of somebody in 1898, one of my grandmother's grandparents, holding her and gazing in wonderment like we all do. This person back then would have been born fairly early in the century just following the birth of our nation. They would have lived through the Civil War.

That's something I don't think about often, the connections between us beyond crafted words on paper or screen regarding history. We are living links to the past, making the histories we live.

Yep, quite a thing.

an arrival

A new person enters the world, and everything seems more fragile,

while at the same time bright with strength.


We are first to witness an expression, this emergence of what wasn't here before.

Discovered in a prayer: a solemn mystery.
This is where I remain,

lost in wonder.