along the way

The early light of this midwinter
weather is finally choosing
its full name.
Poor and transformative,
the humble challenge
of your desert Heart
shares its imagination
with every cloud,
every changing sky,
every hungry traveller
who washes the feet
of Jesus
in the busy city
along the way to becoming
the promised Feast.

----Laura Sorrells
Advent 2015

a place in the family

There’s a slender lavender cloud hanging in the sky of dusk here. The hornet’s nest, still sizeable despite its collapse in the snow this past February, seems to have taken on some of the purple-ish hue of the cloud. When I get up to let the cat out I can’t even see the purple cloud from that angle. When I sat down again the cloud was almost gone, its edges already blue and deeper than its heart.

The feeling of silent accompaniment has been powerfully present the past few times I have gone walking at the church property off Griffith Road. There was that one evening about three weeks ago before anything had started greening up----I felt the accompaniment so distinctly that I called out “Hello?” several times. I was walking the Stations of the Cross but did not finish them. Then on Wednesday of Holy Week I went out there again but didn’t even kid myself about finishing all fourteen stations. At least I know how many there are now. Tonight I walked around the little memorial garden, pausing at my mother’s marker, and took some pictures of dogwood blossoms coming apart. I felt the accompaniment strongly. I attributed it to the fact that I was near Mom’s grave, and that could have been it. But the feeling grew. Finally I went down to the pond, the one I call Snake Doctor Pond because of the hordes of dragonflies that gather there in summer. I noticed a single Canadian goose in the middle of the pond, seemingly perched on top of the water, with its neck drooping over so that it appeared to be sipping from the pond’s surface. I think there is some metal contraption out there that has some sort of function. Probably that’s what the goose was perched on. But the goose was so still that at first I thought it was some sort of decoy. It didn’t move for a long time. It didn’t make sense that it was a decoy, but it was so perfectly still, with that arched neck. So I took some pictures of the corner of the pond with its brassy golden light turning into glitter on the water. When I turned back the goose had moved its head up so that it was peering at me. I coughed and the goose kind of flinched but only a little. It reminded me of a lone goose I saw on Holy Saturday at the monastery in 2012, that liminal and intense day. I had just read the Mary Oliver poem Wild Geese when I saw that goose perched on a fallen sapling in the pond shallows. I mean that I had been sitting by the pond reading it in Mary’s Best Of Her Poetry volume two.  "Announcing your place in the family of things. " Tonight my mind felt much calmer and quieter than has been usual lately, especially for a Sunday. No anxiety, no angst, no worry, no fear. Sundays sometimes present me with that stereotypical diffuse anxiousness that I suppose many people have right before the work week starts back up. I thought of a couple of things----again of the Eliot lines, “But who is that other who walks beside you?” from The Waste Land. I think of how I looked those lines up at the monastery a week ago yesterday, in the little retreat house library. I looked for them in The Four Quartets for some reason first and ended up rereading almost all of the Quartets.  "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." I had forgotten how much I love those poems, especially Little Gidding. The next morning, which was of course Easter, Father Tom Francis began talking about The Four Quartets at the final conference of the retreat. I think it was in the context of talking about transfiguration. Fire, rose, heart, shirt of flame, be still.

The other thing I thought about tonight at the pond was a scene in the Franco Zeffirelli miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, which I have watched one and a half times since I bought the series on DVD just after Ash Wednesday. I keep skipping back to watch scenes of healing, conversation, and challenge, to see Robert Powell’s handsome English Jesus look happy to hang out with the little kids, to listen to him rage at the Pharisees and draw one small circle carefully in some sand. He puts a little dot in the center of the circle and looks up to speak to the people about to stone the adulteress. I am being avoidant in not watching the Passion scenes again. At any rate, the scene I thought of was at Gethsemane, when Judas approaches Jesus. Jesus says, This is your hour, Judas. The hour of shadows. I found myself trying to recall if those lines were in the Gospels. I still don’t know those texts as well as I might. There is poetry there, though, even so. No allegory necessarily, just words that hold sound. Maybe a kind of paradoxical nod to the darkness, calling beauty into it. Beauty was of course already there, but it needs speaking to sometimes very deliberately.

I still kind of feel the accompaniment, even here at home. The sky is dark now, the lavender cloud subsumed by the night. The mountain is the same color as the forest. One roseate manmade light winks halfway up it. That in turn reminds me of something I read in a book about the mountains and forests around and on the Qualla Boundary, how there are these mysterious lights that move and appear in a ghostly way, like foxfire about to become airborne. I think of the place at the convergence of those two rivers where I stayed this summer and of watching the geese navigate the green and silver water as the river currents came together. I have always felt a heart of gentle sacredness in that place. The geese seemed silent witness to that, reminding me of my place in that family of things, of how it is no place and every place. A body, an accompaniment, one quick light, a cloud becoming sky.

The Testament of Dom Christian de Cherge

If it should happen one day, and it could be today, that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my church and my family to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country. I ask them to accept the fact that the One Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure. I would ask them to pray for me: for how could I be found worthy of such an offering? I ask them to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones which are forgotten through indifference or anonymity. My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value either. In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood. I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems, alas, to prevail in the world, even in the evil which might blindly strike me down.

I would like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human beings, and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who will strike me down. I could not desire such a death. It seems to me important to state this. I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder. It would be too high a price to pay for what will perhaps be called the "grace of martyrdom" to owe this to an Algerian, whoever he may be, especially if he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam. 
I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on the Algerians indiscriminately. I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism fosters. It is too easy to soothe one's conscience by identify this religious way with the fundamentalist ideology of its extremists. For me, Algerian and Islam are not that, but rather a body and a soul. I have proclaimed this often enough, I think, in the light of what I have received from it. I so often find there that true strand of the Gospel which I learned at my mother's knee, my very first Church, precisely in Algeria, and already inspired with respect for Muslim believers.
Obviously, my death will appear to confirm those who hastily judged me naïve or idealistic: "Let him tell us now what he thinks of it!" But these persons should know that finally my most avid curiosity will be set free. This is what I shall be able to do, please God: immerse my gaze in that of the Father to contemplate with him His children of Islam just as he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, the fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and restore the likeness, playing with the differences.
For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God, who seems to have willed it entirely for the sake of that JOY in everything and in spite of everything. In this THANK YOU, which is said for everything in my life from now on, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you, my friends of this place, along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families. You are the hundredfold granted as was promised!
And you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not have known what you were doing: 
Yes, I want this THANK YOU and this "A-DIEU" to be for you, too, because in God's face I see yours.
May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both. AMEN! IN SH'ALLAH!

 -----Christian de Cherge

Tibhirine, 1994

the rhetoric of silence

The burning cure
of sacramental encounter
is calling me out
of my stillness.
The rhetoric of silence
is teaching me how
to ask, how to
worship. How to
confess the petty
troubles of my
willingness. How,
finally, to remain,
despite the pull
of the world's
safe and stifling
strangeness.

©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

written without words

The humble star

you point to

insists on 

revelation.

Free and empty,

my little pilgrim’s

heart celebrates its

shine and what

it shows us:

a family, a seed,

a silent prophet

abiding in the desert;

a herald, bold and holy,

a taste of something

original and wild,

written without words across a living sky.

©Laura Sorrells 2014

all rights reserved

who?

Who says these
dangerous, lonesome
prayers? You talk
like a creek feasting
on mud. Because of
this conversation, my
life has become a
thirst, a surrendered
flag trembling
in the generosity
of your breath.

----©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

the story

The solitary fire
you travel with
knows the story
I chase. It
brings me the password
of transformation; it
mends the bones
of my wildness.
Hungry for its
beggar's whisper,
I wait for the refuge
of its reach:
ready,
trembling,
grateful,
replete with
the shock of Love.

©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

only

My heart has
become the
exultant disciple
of your
thirst. No
mantra, no
movement, no
author. Only
this sweet
desert, this
family of
fire, this
breath.

©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

This

This flame, this ribbon, this branch, this windblown cloudbank covering up the sun.
This song, this crevice, this hammer, this net,
this scrap of orange fabric in the grass.
This pause, this shoelace, this errant ladybug with distended wings crawling across the soft gray crawlspace of my pillow.
This hymn, this bird, this bit of news I wish I hadn't overheard but did.
This wasp fallen into wine.
This lost sentence of love trembling with need,
this half-acre of of sawdust and clay,
this trembling oak leaf suspended by nothing visible from a tender twig in the small gray rain.
This crow, this dog, this laughing coyote, this shed skin that wants to find itself a home in dirt.
This choir stall, this stairwell, this echo of an antiphon in darkness.
This shoe, this hearth, this rock, this bell,
this dazzle of lonesome verbiage truncated into a punctuation full of fire and the scent of piney heartwood as it catches.
This pen, this slip of paper made from sand and bloodroot, wanting nothing but the touch of a thought too small to shout, too big to whisper, too unrepentant to have it out with God,
too shy and wild to say its name in any place where anyone might hear.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

This is another poem from Thanksgiving week of this year, when I was on retreat at Gethsemani.

the smoke from it sings

My listening heart
dares to praise
the perpetual, tender
roar of your
fire. Sometimes
the smoke from it
sings. Not with
words, but something
seen, a quiet
shadow; or tasted,
the unguarded psalm
of pomegranate
or river.
Nothing else
steals from me
so gently.

-----©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

I wrote this while on retreat at Gethsemani Abbey the week of Thanksgiving 2012.

that conversation

Something in this silence
needs to be loved.
Its breath wants
the careful religion
of attention. Each
smoky sigh deepens
the wordless blessing
of this ache. My eyes wait
in the dark for the tender
call of Nothing.
Anywhere can be the
meeting-place of
hymn and emptiness,
the marriage bed
of praise and distance.
Listen for that
conversation, and
be ready
to leave your life.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

prayer poem before coffee

The world's empty garden
opens to me, a
prayer that wants to
bring me the
living vein of
love I have
longed to breathe
every morning.
Its season is this
prayer's only
moment, a
hatching, a light,
an everything begging
for surrender.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

that secret commotion

The unfailing laughter
your compassionate fire speaks
enters the wilderness of rust
that my little soul has built, teaching
me the blossoming
I pray for, showing
me how to want
that secret commotion
that leads to holy stillness.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

kindled

Listen for the secret name
of God
that the sky prays
in April.
Something wild
and shining follows me
across the dark roof
at night.
My kindled heart
cracks into
lace and marble,
a silent room waiting gladly
for the auspicious weather of Christ
to meet me,
carrying nothing, new-born and
empty as light.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

I got this found poem mostly from Annie Dillard's beautiful book Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, which I just ran across while looking through some old books of my mother's.

approach

Tonight was the first night of autumn’s approach. Cool, windy, with wild golden light strobing across the smoky blue of Sharptop and the mountains around it. A rainbow, faint and tall, showed up over to my left as I drove past the Piggly Wiggly and across the train tracks. I went into town, parked my truck on Refuge Road, and walked into the fading light, towards the park and the haunted little pond with the one tree in it. As I walked I realized how hidden I’d let my vision become. I’d stepped away from the expansiveness of spirit with which I’ve always looked at this town, the sleepy little town my mother grew up in, the town I relocated to at thirty. I walked into the park. The tractor show is tomorrow so some men and their families were camping there with their RV’s, their folding camp chairs, and their ancient rusty John Deeres. I waved at the people I walked past and went up past the old county post office, which has been resettled in the middle of the park, and then down to the pond with the single tree. D. and I used to walk here. Of course I walked here before that too but this place has the silent singular energy he can carry. The tree had been pruned or cut but was still there in the middle of the little pond. The water was low and layered with algae. It was getting dark so I couldn’t tell what colors the algae held but I found myself glad that I wondered what they were. I walked through the woods up past the pond towards the firehouse and its big old barn and antique fire engines. I didn’t hang out there but turned and came back to the park and then up into town. This town is almost never in any kind of hurry, but there was a lonesome rush to the wind as I walked past the old county jail and the fountain that I jumped into one Fourth of July a couple of years ago. I had had on shorts and a bathing suit and no one seemed to mind. People waved nonchalantly to me. It was just getting dark then too. A little boy joined me after asking his daddy if he could. The water wasn’t deep. It felt good. I stood under the part of the fountain that brought water down from above and tried to coax D. into the fountain with me. He would have none of it, which surprised me. Remembering that night this evening I felt light and happy, strong and full of the quiet peace this past year's transformation has brought. Nothing is missing. The light is perfect as it changes.

©Laura Sorrells 2012

all rights reserved

a shout in a dream

Always, the radical
wisdom of paradox
brings me the work
my spirit yearns
for. The austere gifts
of conversion reveal
a frontier I have always
longed for in the
secret obedience of
my heart. Love's
pensive psalm travels through
and with me
like the surprise of a shout
in a dream, an ancient
source remembered,
holy, sweet, and fierce.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

The liturgy this hidden
country breathes
is a dance of living
emptiness. Its smoky desert
heart brings secrets home:
crows flying in peace
with eagles, a
transformation shining
like a bonfire's
dream.
The nearest temple is your own
barefooted truth. The God
you are learning to love
might bring you anything,
now, if you listen, if
you see, if you
let his wild
and claiming silence
begin.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

softer than

The language of slipstream and bridal veil
slides across some holy threshold,
a breath softer than the Spanish
songs that punctuate my dreams.
The patience of God shivers
in the ordinary shapes of grotto
and fern, dusky and wild
like the mystery
of rain summoned by prayer.
Everything is willing to be itself.
Whose forever can hold
such sweet chaos,
such grace?

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

the shape of revelation

Here in this bright summer
world of blackberries and river,
a green tumble of sweetness
breathes into a beginning.
Anything can bear
the shape of revelation:
if you listen, the recklessness
of paradise confesses
how it has dreamed your truth,
and you will be ravished by
its wild and happy
mystery.


©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

a shared seeing

I can’t quite see the mountain from where I am. Tall trees obscure its tip. A collar of pink clouds rises up from just above it. I am reminded of last October when I wrote about the shedding of old skin and the emptiness that follows. That skin has continued to fall away, mostly, with patches of reclamation here and there. There is loneliness in it but beauty too. A paradox, as ever. I have a little outdoor altar here, with a fading illustration of an artsy greeting-card rabbit amidst a little silver crucifix and a swathe of bright green flowered fabric. Shells and feathers are settling into the damp fabric after today’s rain. A tall spike of some kind of volunteer bulb spreads out across the glass table towards the forest. I light a tall white glass pillar candle and a glass pillar candle with an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on it, both brought in with dry wicks from my hearth. A whippoorwhill calls in the woods and I remember that I actually seem to have heard cicadas out at a friend’s horse rescue farm the other night. Seems improbable in May but it sure sounded like cicadas to me.

That night was one of connection, understanding, and conversation offered and shared with tremendous warmth and sincerity. I sat on a log beside a campfire with two people who had heretofore been strangers and talked about my spiritual journey and listened to them talk about theirs. We all believe in paying attention to synchronicity, and we talked about that. We laughed at our own misadventures and at the beautiful incongruities of being human. We talked about sacrifice and how we watch it happen and how some people seem to choose it, to take on the pain of others in a deliberate way, a profoundly unselfish and loving thing that is impossible to explain in words. It sounds trite. Unless you have seen it, it can sound maudlin and empty, platitudinous. But it is not. And I honor it in my heart every day. I know it when I feel it, more than when I see it. It is a palpable energy, a largesse of soul that I do not understand or even envy at this point but which I revere and am grateful for. It felt good to be able to say these things and have them be understood.

And we laughed and ate pizza and they drank a little beer. Finally it began to rain, and as the sweet early-summer smell of grass and hay began to saturate my senses I gathered up my camera and my old serape and the peacock feather one of my new friends had given me and headed home. 

--©Laura Sorrells 2012

all rights reserved