Nelly Sayin It Right

Ok, some deep stuff came from an odd source as far as the topic goes. Lyrics from Nelly Furtado’s song Say it Right held some weight the last time I heard them.

From my body
I could show you
A place
God knows
You should know
Space is holy
Do you really
Want to go

I don’t want to go. And know few who do. I work at a psych hospital with patients doing everything they can to escape it. The arms of the adolescents sliced up, the adults detox-ing, eyes bloodshot. Their experience has not gone well. They went for it, massive disappointment came in after. Now slicing open their arms or poisoning their body to cope with the aftermath.

Of course I’m not that far off. Right away I think of the girls that get me, that make me so vulnerable when I’m around them, causing me to long, to remember, to think about what could be, and at the same time what was there in the past. Engagements so loaded. My heart skips, like a skip deep back into desire. Though the desire doesn’t exactly feel sexy. Even writing these words, revealing some of my desire, feels foolishly vulnerable, and I want to silence it all. The heart of desire carries with it the heart of pain.

Writing, feeling just a taste of the pain, I think of the most intense desire ever lived. It fits that we call the experience of the cross the passion. Desire taken to the heart of pain, and the way of redemption, and the way of resurrection. I can’t help but see how longing calls me to die – not just to die in an abstract sense, that sounds too sexy. But to really die in relationship, to actually feel like a part of yourself is about to implode in vulnerability with another. Falling forward, letting the rush of love surely disappoint, and in the center of that disappointment, redemption.

“It is always nice to hear how God has made your life go well, but it is when you have no reason to love God that when your talk of the love of God moves me to the core.” Dan Allender from the Wounded Heart

Sense of Touch

"Mystery is very different from a problem. While a problem can be solved, a mystery is inexhaustible. A problem can be held at arm's length; a mystery encompasses us and will not let us keep a safe distance." -Gabriel Marcel

When I think I know someone, I can know how not to know them, I know how to keep a safe distance. When I allow mystery, I allow for surprise. Mystery does not create distance, but horrifying nearness. Thank God we do not fully know Him, or we would choose not to know Him, for we would make Him all the things we continually want Him to be - money, sex, knowledge, power - anything we can control. The same for you an I, for not fully knowing you allows us to know each other far more than we may want to imagine. And that is what we don't want, and that is everything that we want. As spoken in the first words from the movie Crash:

“It’s the sense of touch. In any real city you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”