This has nothing to do with the post- but I voted today :)

The line between prayer and poetry is blurring for me recently. The block poem that is today's entry is a scrap of an ongoing internal discourse re: faith and sanctification in the real world. ("Real world" meaning, for me, mundane, prosaic, longing, fear, and beauty. If that definition makes sense to you, or if it doesn't but you're at least interested, then I think we're on the same page.)

Anyway, it was born out of my prayer this morning and I think still holds remnants of the questions I have about how my faith fits into the metrics of my daily life. Ontology and eschatology are easy for me (well- as easy as they can be), in the sense that I get how my faith demands certain assumptions, creates a specific worldview that dictates the beginning and end of this whole thing. What's curiously obscure is how faith winds into life through the redundant and the required, the workday and the laundry and reorganizing the pantry and taking out the dogs. Because I think it does; or rather, I think it must in order to be relevant and meaningful.

There must be true worth and value and love and gritty spirituality mixed in with life here. Because this is life. This is how it works, for most people, most of the time. Where is sanctification? Is it in the pride of being, doing something important or interesting? Like I know my life is holy because, here, here is the cause, and I can point to it with a commanding righteous hand, and it's erect in front of your face like a pylon or Lot's wife turned to salt. Or is it that grinding of humility that works itself into your skin and through your bones and inches toward your heart when you set your shoulder against life and push. When relationships are not what they used to be on paper, in an email update- roommate, boyfriend, classmate- but the places where we commingle our lives, and fill in the dark spaces between the globes of light cast on the concrete by the streetlights.

So come beside me, or don't, because where you stand is less important because it doesn't matter where I am, either. Write notes while I speak on a pad with preset lines- lines if you're an American, grids if you're European- and arch a brow to make light of the whole proceeding and when I'm done, call me back as soon as you get my message because you thought I might not be ok and you care enough to be wrong about that and know you've written enough notes if you're right. Make plans to mix drinks with me and mouth cigars in a smoky city room where we've never been before or tear walls and floors out of your new house, and it's good because we're filling in the dark spaces with life. And sanctification costs this much: as much as a pad of paper, a mixed drink, and a hammer broken on your old house. 

rkb