Radical Lent—A Poetic Approach to 40 Days in the Wilderness

So it’s Lent. If you’re Christian, that is. Lent spans 40 weekdays, beginning on Ash Wednesday (today) and ending the Saturday before Easter. I grew up Catholic, which I consider a privilege, mostly because grounding in any faith tradition gives you something to work with. Whether you practice it or not as an adult, a childhood spent in a strong religious tradition means you are never homeless. I may be wrong, but leaving home, while difficult, may be easier than never having had the feeling that you belonged somewhere.

Lent has some beautiful theological significance, which you can read about if you are so inclined. But one of Catholicism’s (Catholic school, specifically) greatest weaknesses is the inability to translate deeper spiritual practices into meaningful experiences for children, so what I remember about Lent is that you either give up something you like or do something that you don’t like. Forgive me, but the spiritual gap between Jesus’ self-sacrifice and giving up chocolate (or, as my son Jacob decided when he was 8, beer) for 40 days is so enormous as to be absurd almost beyond words.

This year I have decided on a radical approach to Lent—I am going to do more of something I love and less of things I do not love. Specifically, I have committed to the discipline of reading one poem each day for 40 days, and writing about what it reveals. This is not really radical, because my belief is that unlike the giving up beer approach to Lent, which treats us as if we are spiritual babies, this approach will bring me more into an adult-adult dialogue with myself and the world, which I believe is what God would prefer anyway.

Continue reading “Radical Lent—A Poetic Approach to 40 Days in the Wilderness” →

February 17, 2010 10

For Valentine’s Day (a short love story)

“I’ll always think of you when I see dirt,” he told her. He said this because every time they walked in the woods, she smeared dirt between her hands. Dry summer dirt, cold, crunchy winter dirt, and all the promising, practically edible dirts of the spring and fall. Being with him was like that. Earthy. Messy. Like compost–generating a slow and steady heat. She was completely awake with him; she saw everything. The tiniest ferns unraveling, moist green mosses, as complete as the world; and once, the blossoms of a cherry tree fluttering to the ground. “Snow,” he said that time, and they both laughed.

“I just want to love you,” she told him as they walked through tall prairie grass in the spring. “Yes,” he said. They walked in all seasons. Once, in the rain, he gave her his jacket and she had to roll the sleeves up four times. “How do you feel?” he asked another time, standing in the middle of a summer forest. “Like myself,” she said. “I always feel like myself with you.” He didn’t say anything. There were mosquitoes that day, and clouds of little gnats hanging in the humid morning air.

Another time, they walked across a quiet frozen lake. They had been sledding on a flimsy plastic sled that he had tied to the roof of his car. They ate chocolate and drank the juice of a grapefruit from each other’s mouths. He walked to the edge of the lake to look at the snow, and she laid down in the middle, looking up into the white sky.

A black bird winged–she remembered thinking that word–winged–from the top of one bare brown tree, across the lake to the top of another, and it was as if love itself had flown down and blessed them.

February 13, 2010 3

Because there are all kinds of love poems

I wrote this poem for my sister-in-law last summer when she was very kind to me at a difficult time. “An der Ringkirche” is the street where she lives, and ‘Ringkirche’ means “the church near the ring.” You can see a gorgeous, almost magical 19th-century church right outside the window of their apartment building. This poem tries to describe a moment when a small gesture made me feel truly loved.

June 1-An der Ringkirche
for katja

After months of struggle
in this hard interior country
I am landed here–
a clean sunlit room with one white orchid,
and air that rings round and rich
with cathedral bells.

In the center of the glass table
someone I love has left a gift–
pale gold perfume.
When I spray it into the sunlight
it makes a living glimmering cloud,
and as I step through it I breathe, Yes.
Yes: it can be as easy as this.

LCS
2/10

February 11, 2010 1

a heart-felt holiday

A repost from December 2009. It’s worth it.

————————-

Having neither spectacular accomplishments nor grave misfortunes to report, and, to be honest, having exhausted the vein of humorous family anecdotes over the years, I will tell you instead that we are all well and fine, and hope that you are too.

Instead of Srajek family details, which are really much the same as any other family’s day-to-day lives, I offer this story about something that happened to us this time last year, at the start of a long Midwest winter.

In our local paper there used to be a kid’s feature called “Letters to the Editor,” where school kids responded to a question from the editor, and then some responses from each school got published. One week last December, Jacob’s answer to the question “What is the top item on your Christmas list this year?” turned up in the paper. He wrote that since he wanted to be a carpenter when he grew up, he had “always wanted” a carpenter’s plane.

If he didn’t get that, the number two thing on the list was “lots of nice building wood,” a response that makes him sound quainter and less electronically minded than he really is, but, well, he was probably writing what he knew had the best chance of getting published (they’re never too young to play to the crowd).

About a week after his response appeared in the paper, we received a letter in the mail from a woman we did not know. She apologized if we were not the parents of Jacob Srajek, said that she had looked us up in the phone book, and she hoped her writing was not an imposition to us. A clipping of Jacob’s letter was neatly taped to the corner of her own letter, which was printed on paper with a decorative floral border.
Continue reading “a heart-felt holiday” →

December 11, 2009 1