he's got the whole world

I held it in my hand, the pale green, cheerfully colored box. The one, tiny pale yellow pill. I flipped through the glossy, mini guidebook, to make sure...to make sure what I don't know, I just needed something to do. It's just a little pill; it looks like my allergy medicine, or headache medicine.

But it wasn't.

It started with a panicked look, eyes that I'd seen a hundred times before, that I knew as well as my own, a cold hand on my wrist: "The condom broke."

And it ended with me, in a car, in the parking lot of CVS, holding the box, the one with the pill. The morning-after pill, that is.

--

We practically grew up together. She was only a couple of years younger than me and we were the only cousins on this side of the family that lived close enough to see each other. We spent every summer together, all of us, since I was born.

We were like sisters, my little cousin and I. And the last time I saw her before this she had never had a boyfriend, had never had sex.

I tried to tell her how even though it's the hardest thing, harder than the Olympics, it's worth it, it's so worth it to wait, you won't regret it. I wrote her a letter once trying to convince her that she is beautiful and loved and that someday a man will come, a good man who treats her right, not like her father, but who tells her every day that she is precious to him and amazing and smart, someday this man will come and he will have been worth it.

Then, she meets a guy, a guy at work, the bartender, who's several years older, and who has told her all those things. He tells her she's beautiful and calls her "Princess" and tells her he loves her and everything else she's been waiting her whole life to hear from a man.

When I finally see her again after a few months of us "being busy" she's asking if she can trust me with a secret and her eyes are wide and scared, her hand on my wrist: "The condom broke."

The story of how this guy swept her off her feet comes in the car. At first she wants to go to the local Planned Parenthood but, honestly, I can't stomach that, so we go to CVS. She's telling me how wonderful he is, how much they love each other, how she knows, she just knows he would take care of them, her and baby, but they also have a problem because he wants to move back to California and maybe she wants to go with him.

I haven't said anything; me of a thousand words, and I can't find any good ones. I tell myself I'm overreacting, people have sex all the time, lots of people don't wait, heck, I have friends who didn't wait but who I still love and respect--

She turns to me at a stoplight, a hand hesitantly fits into mine, my little lost cousin, "Please don't be angry with me. Please come in with me. I need you to come in with me. This is the right thing to do, right? Right?"

For a second, I think she might cry. She's looking at me, needing me to say the right thing, and suddenly all the voices of the past few months, of all the times I've argued, online and in real life about contraception, about the HHS Mandate, about abortion and Planned Parenthood, are sucked up like by a vacuum into this one moment.

I squeeze back. I tell her: I'm not angry, how could I be? I love you. I'll go in with you. I'll keep your secret.

The light changes. She gives a nervous laugh, he'd kick me out you know, my dad. I nod, I know. She says she thinks her mom knows she's started having sex but hasn't said anything but, don't get pregnant.

I feel like I'm failing her, and myself. Like I've already failed. In the back of my mind, the old tape is playing. It's okay, don't overreact, it's just sex.

We're there. I can't be, I just cannot get pregnant, she says under her breath, and I can see her envisioning it. They'd kick me out and our whole family will say I'm a slut and I'd have nowhere to go.

She asks for "a Plan B, please." The woman behind the counter looks at me, momentarily uncertain. My cousin is older than eighteen but looks much younger, and especially now, under the fluorescent lights, her face is bright red and she's trying to hid behind her bangs. Again, she looks like she might cry and I think she looks even younger than that.

When we get back to the car she opens the box, pulls the pill pack out and hands me the directions and the little question-and-answer booklet ("What if I'm already pregnant?" "What does Plan B do?"). I know this is the right thing, I mean, this is the right thing to do, right? She keeps saying.We look at the little yellow pill in her palm and I fail her again. I can't say yes. I can't make the word come out. I just tell her, it'll be okay.

How do I do this? How do I take it? But I can't answer that either so she takes a sip of water and then the pill.

She closes her eyes and sighs, her head falls back on the seat, relief. There, it's done. There, whatever secret thing may have been happening within her, it's done.

And, right then, I believe everything I've said the last few years. Everything I've said about contraception and abortion and babies and making babies, I suddenly believe it. My heart believes it.

She's more relaxed now, less nervous, and we go home. She'd driven a couple of towns over so she wouldn't run into anyone she knew.

Something comes over me and I turn to her, a knot in my throat. I would help you. I would drop everything and drive down here and get you and you wouldn't be homeless.

She tries to cut me off -- don't say that, I'm not pregnant. As if by speaking the words, I could accidentally speak a baby into being.

I'm serious, I say. You're not a slut. I believe in you. I know people who can help you. I know it would feel like your whole life is over but it wouldn't be. It really wouldn't be. I would do whatever I had to, I would take time off work. I would come down here and I would help you.

And I knew, with all my heart, I would. I don't know how, but I would.

She doesn't say anything for a while, then, thank you for coming with me. But it's okay because I know she's heard me.

When we get back into town, back home, back with the rest of the family for lunch, the moment's over and I know she doesn't want to talk about it again. She jokes about the "near miss" with me and her younger sister later. But I know her and I know she heard me, she hasn't forgotten what I said.

--

I'm staring down a long stretch of highway. I'm on my way back home with my family and I chose to do most of the driving because I had tried to read and couldn't. I had tried to listen to music and couldn't.

I couldn't save her from herself this time. I feel like a hypocrite. How could I, who doesn't believe in using contraception, all but put the pill in her hand myself? Should I have done something different? Did I say the right thing? Did I do the right thing?

That morning, I had seen a scared little girl. Later that night she would suggest I read Fifty Shades of Grey and find myself a man, hollow, empty words.

I just hadn't been able to leave her. I couldn't let her go in by herself. I felt, somehow, that running away from this would be worse than going with her. But I'm left with doubts; did I hurt You, Jesus? 

The ride home gives me time to think. Maybe it was my overactive imagination, but when I'd looked at the pill, so plain and small, I'd felt a darkness. The guide it came with said in bold, "NOT AN ABORTION PILL." She had read it out loud, reassuring herself, telling me.

But I couldn't stop thinking.What if there had been a baby? A tiny, undeveloped, unknown, little bud of a life, and I sat there and watched as all that was swept away. I thought I might be sick.

Because no matter what my mind said, the lines I'd heard from our culture, I knew it was wrong and it wasn't love and if I had taken part in something which ended a life, no matter how small and invisible to all but its Maker, I don't know how I could live with that.

I've seen love, true, God-given love, bright as the morning sun and pure as gold, and I've heard the truth, clearer and sharper than silver, and goodness, like a crystal light - and this wasn't it.

I had never felt the weight of my broken-ness, our broken-ness, like I did then.

We broke it, sex which was supposed to be pure and holy and is sometimes still. But we broke it and made a mess of it and this is what's left.

I've never, ever needed Jesus more.

the book of mercy

image from here

We were at Friendly's. Home from college, old high school buddies. Maybe we were a little too loud, a little too boisterous. The waitress had been rude the whole meal, was slow with the orders and the water, though the place was empty. When it came time to pay we thought to shortchange her on the tip but one of my friends put in extra, more than what was even normal. When asked why she said, "Maybe the waitress was having a bad day."

Mercy--

Old man and his dog, fresh from the groomer's, weathered face, flannel and Levis: farm uniform. At the end of the leash he's holding is a little tan and white dog with a bow on its neck, wagging his little tail furiously. The man says its name is Larry. He bought Larry from the local rescue after his last dog died. It was his first rescue. Larry had been abused in his old life, bullets still lodged under his skin, but you can't see them now, only the bow on his collar and the way his tongue hangs out the side of his mouth when you pet him.

Mercy--

High school friend, known him since middle school, all of us going through all the awkward and angsty teen years together, is killed in Afghanistan. Everyone in three towns shows up to line the streets from the local base where his family received his body and back here, keep him company on the last drive home. At his wake and funeral the place is packed and there are so many people standing, being there, they had to close off the roads.

Miles and miles of mercy--

the ballad of judas iscariot

You begin on the sea.

There is only you on this boat, you and another. By your feet, cold, wet fish flop helplessly, as their life leaves them. The air itself is salty, sticky on your skin, and warm. The boat moves back and forth in the rhythm of this sea, the water gently hitting the wood of the boat, it is a give and take, give and take that you have known since before you could walk, that is in your very blood.

nothing can ever separate us...

The sun is setting, an explosion of blood red and orange light pours out across Galilee and the whole world is swallowed up. The other one with you is not looking at the horizon, or the fish, or the water, or the shore; he is looking at you. 

I knew you... 

It is a look you've seen before, your father watching your mother prepare his favorite meal, her kneading the dough, smiling back at him in a cloud of flour. When your brother was born and your father held him and learned the baby by heart and opened the window to let the sun warm the baby and you watched it and thought this was how it happened when you came too. When it was you and Father on the boat and he handed you the net and showed you where to catch the best fish and you learned the sea-rhythm together.

All of this, a whole lifetime, in those eyes.


Now you're in a garden. It's silent, the deafening kind, and only a cold wind accompanies you. The olive leaves are rattling in the trees and somewhere you think you hear someone laughing.

Where were you? 


You close your eyes and stick your hands out; you can remember where all the bodies stood, the sounds of metal clinking, sweat dripping, hands gripping, eyes unblinking - the olive eyes, bright eyes on an open face, an easy face, you could trace its lines in the air though you've never touched it - can feel its warmth on your lips from the one time you kissed it.

Father... 

You rub the brittle dirt between your fingers, the dirt from underneath the sandals - here, this is where he stood. There, that's where I stood.

The unfriendly wind carries the smell of fire, of burning wood, and the vague distant muffled sounds of voices. You know that if you look you will see light, torches, people gathered and pushing and moving and screaming to watch them take him away.

But he is looking past them, over their heads, and you are back on that boat in Galilee, just you and him, and it's those eyes looking at you again and your skin can't contain what you find there.

You scream into the ground until you run out of air. Until you just run out. You hit the ground, hard, to see if it will open for you.

Father, why have you abandoned me? 


You can still taste the bitter wine, the blood red wine, he'd held out to you, in a cup, he'd looked right at you, right through you, right into you, down into the marrow of your bones, and back out again, when he'd smiled, you realized, he knew. He knew. Why did he come?


You press your cheek into the cold cold dirt, colder even than your lifeless skin, and before you close your eyes, before it is finished, the last thing you smell is Galilee, salty-sweet, and the last thing you see a single white dove.

Father, forgive them.

thoughts for a sunday

Suppose a musician in an orchestra freely strikes a sour note. The conductor is competent, the music is correctly scored and easy to play, but the musician still exercises his freedom by introducing a discord which immediately passes out into space. The director can do one of two things: he can either order the selection to be replayed, or he can ignore the discord. Fundamentally, it makes no difference which he does, for that false note is traveling out into space at the rate of more than a thousand feet per second; and as long as time endures, there will be discord in the universe.

Is there any way to restore harmony to the world? It can be done only by something coming in from eternity and stopping the note in its wild flight. But will it still be a false note? The harmony can be destroyed on one condition only. If that note is made the first note in a new melody, then it will become harmonious.                       -- Archbishop Fulton Sheen

The Cross is in sight. We can see its shadow over the edge of the hill. We can begin to hear the din of the crowds, crying for blood. We can feel the hopelessness of a humanity sunken down deep in its own mess. We can hear a future of gunshots and bombs and orphans crying and applause as leader after leader in an endless procession of misery orders the killing of innocents. We drown in it; will it ever end? It's the sound of screaming and someone pounding on a piano, notes flying all over the place, discord and pain.

It is not time for the Resurrection yet. We who know the end of the story, who've already flipped to the back of the book, must be patient. To get to the Resurrection, we know we must first go through the blood and fire. To hear that first, quiet, gentle note, slipping by unnoticed, that first note which begins the new song: Hope.

 

 

when God uses glee and st. john of the cross in the same sentence

Bear with me, there is a method to the madness.

We must then dig deeply in Christ. He is like a rich mine with many pockets containing treasures: however deep we dig we will never find their end or their limit. In every pocket new seams of fresh riches are discovered on all sides...The soul that longs for divine wisdom chooses first, and in truth, to enter the thicket of the cross. (st john of the cross)