Hi again, after a brief hibernation! I hope your holidays have been full of good things, or at the very least sprinkled with many of them.

N and I went back to our home town, where both of our parents and some of our siblings still live, and enjoyed a week full of family and friends. We’re home again now, though, and after all the busyness and time away from routine, and as the year comes to a close and the wings of a new one flutter only meters away, I find myself restless. I’m hungry but not. Tired but not. Lonely but peopled out. I’m homesick for something I can’t quite name.

Do any of you feel this way?

Maybe a blessing is in order for all of us, as we sit in this strange post/present holiday, pre-new-year spot…

May your day today, and the days that follow it, be in some small way like a seed sending up a fresh, green sprout. May the places in you that ache and feel small or dark or lonely or cold get touched by fullness somehow—the kind that makes you feel warm and loved and like maybe it’s gonna be okay. May the questions you carry that do and don’t have answers, and the fears you have that can and can’t ever be comforted, and all the ways you wish that you or your life could be different—may you discover a layer of living that happens right alongside these things, where there is hope, and a gentle sweetness, and beauty, and wonder.

May your year ahead, and even the days of this week, be marked by a new kind of rest, and whatever it’ll take for you to find yourself falling into it.

Bless you.

What a week. Last Tuesday, when I wrote that first post about dark wonder, I felt remarkably energized. I felt a “standing-up” inside of me–a thrill at the thought of thinking creatively with others about how to stay more awake in this world. And doing it.

Then something happened on Thursday.

I think it was a combination of things, pushed further off the edge by that second threat to AJS, but by the time I sat down to work on my book, I felt like my bones had turned to jello. I put my head down and instantly got this picture in my mind of a beautiful tree in the middle of a vast field. It was full of fruit, and a low wooden fence ran along one side of it, off into the distance both ways. It was wonderful. I wanted to sit there gazing at all that quiet glory.

Then a dragon came in, stage left, and torched the whole thing. Torched all the fruit, and then turned its back to the tree, waiting for anyone to try to do anything about it.

Needless to say I was a bit shaken. I sat straight up and shook my head.

I don’t know how best to interpret that scene, but I do know that’s exactly how I was feeling–like the powers of yuck in our world had come to remind me that any fruit I have to bear just can’t be given away. Sorry honey. That’s just the way it’s gonna be.

I don’t consider myself a quitter, and I have my own “sorry honey” to say to all that yuck–like yeah, you can knock the wind out of me, but my Lights? You can’t knock those out ever. Tenacious is what those things are, as is my spirit.

I will admit, though, that this has been a week, for me, of remarkably little wind.

While I continue to recover, maybe I’ll consider these days a mirror of what Christians around the globe are doing: waiting in darkness to see a Great Light. Honoring this human experience of yearning, of wanting hope to get kindled again. Of watching to see with our own eyes that we aren’t, in fact, in utter darkness, and those powers of yuck won’t have the last say.

I’ve been thinking about how to answer Lori’s question from the comments last time. Just now before sitting down to type a response, I got an email from N, forwarding the update I added to the last post. If you haven’t read the update, it says the president of the board of AJS got a text message today saying, “You are next.”

I’m caught right now in a very dissonant chord. Finding it hard to write. I feel helpless and angry. And incredulous. Who kills people? What events brought them to this? Were they not loved very well? Is it kill or be killed for them? Are resources so scarce as to push entire regions of our globe into survival-of-the-ones-with-the-biggest-guns? It appears to be so.

I’m sitting in the library right now of one of our world’s most wealthy institutions of higher education. The temperature is just right. Sun shines through the window next to me. My stomach is full. The biggest threat I can imagine to my life is an earthquake.

God, what a world.

I want to push this chord I’m sitting in clear off the table, onto the floor, back into a dark corner where I don’t even pass it by. I want to pull the blubber close around my neck, around my head, where the brows are so furrowed, and my shoulders, with their knots. I want to go home tonight and eat a warm meal and play with my baby, and then make Christmas cards with the new stamp I bought at the stationary store, with the red pen I got for the addresses, and the Mary and Jesus postage.

I want to forget.

While I’m sitting in all this dissonance, I think I’ll have to postpone answering your question, Lori. Apparently awakening, like getting up in the morning, can lead to wonderful possibilities, but can also include those moments when the very last thing you want to do is open your eyes.

A few posts back I said I wanted to spend this advent blogging about things that fill me up with wonder. Those of you who have read here for a while may remember my review of David James Duncan’s book, God Laughs and Plays. I quoted him on wonder:

Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love–and I sometimes wonder whether there’s even a difference: maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved. Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp: wonder grasps us. We do have the freedom to elude wonder’s grasp. We have the freedom to do all sorts of stupid things. By deploying cynicism, rationalism, fear, arrogance, judgmentalism, we can evade wonder nonstop, all our lives. I’m not too fond of that gnarly word, sin, but the deliberate evasion of wonder does bring it to mind. It may not be biblically sinful to evade wonder. But it is artistically and spiritually sinful. (pg 8)

What I didn’t quote was what Duncan said about wonder’s underside:

“Wonder is anything taken for granted–the old neighborhood, old job, old buddy, old spouse–suddenly filling with mystery. Wonder is anything closed, suddenly opening: anything at all opening–which includes Pandora’s box, and brings me to the dark side of wonder. Grateful as I am for this condition, wonder, like everything on earth, has a dark side. Heartbreak, grief, and suffering rip openings in us through which the dark kind of wonder pours. I have so far found it impossible to be spontaneously grateful for these openings. (pg 9)

I’m filled with dark wonder today. I’m going to write about it, both as part of my spiritual practice this advent season, and as a means of wishing and praying and hoping the brighter side of wonder toward the situation here in question.

My husband, N, has been getting email updates for the last year from an organization in Honduras called Association for a More Just Society (AJS). This is a faith-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting justice for the poorest and most vulnerable people in Honduras. They focus primarily on labor rights, land rights, crime victims’ rights, and creating access to legal and psychological services. From what we can gather from their website and email updates, this is no flimsy deal. These people literally put their lives on the line for those they serve. Their boots are covered in mud from all the trenches they spend their days tromping: organizing, investigating and reporting injustices, and offering legal and psychological services.

Last night N told me about their work, and I was filled with the bright kind of wonder. Their inspiration is Jesus, and they’ve taken into their bones his revolutionary way. Theirs is not an aspirin-Jesus, or a prop-up-the-status quo Jesus, but one who seems to have awakened them to the notion that they can do something about the sources of our world’s darkest things. They can do something. The words ring in my ears and move toward my heart. They can do something. It’s true for me, like them. It’s true for you. We can do something.

I feel like life is an amazing narcotic for most of us, or like layer upon layer of blubber. We live most of the time with a thick and sometimes sanity-keeping layer of blubber between us and deep awareness of the suffering in our world (we all suffer, this is true. But surely there are degrees, as in “I can’t leave my front door without getting shot” suffering, compared with “my child will not eat her vegetables” varieties.). We live with blubber between us and the awareness that these lives we’ve been given, these thoughts and feelings and the money and tools we’ve gathered along the way? They can address and alleviate the things that should instill dark wonder: AIDS, poverty, corrupt leaders and governments (!), global warming. I feel heavy even listing these things, heavy trying to think of more. The blubber is trying hard to close the opening I’m making in it here–the air hole that’s my connection with the kind of Life I want to live.

I want to be awake. I WANT TO BE AWAKE!! I scream it through all the insulation: I want to LIVE! I want to be awake to the things my hands and voice and written words can do for all the parts of me that are ill–the parts that are poor and fired for no good reason. The parts whose parents have died from AIDS. The parts that are being abused, and have only slum dwellings as options in which to live. I want to be awake. I’m one who likes to see the many layers of any issue, and so am well aware that one person can’t and should not do every good thing possible. I’m not advocating a kind crazed giving that takes nothing of self or family into account. I’m just saying I want to be awake. And in my wakefulness, I want to do what my little heart tells me is mine for the doing.

Last night N told me about a progression of updates he got from AJS this week. The first was a request for prayer. One of AJS’s lawyers, a man who represented clients abused by two of Honduras’s major corporations–one of the corporations a security service, no less–had recieved a death threat for the work he’s doing. Yesterday N got a note saying the lawyer had actually been killed. Just outside the courthouse, masked gunmen took him down. He leaves behind a wife and young son.

A hole is ripped through all my insulation. Dark wonder still pours through. This man was awake. Maybe he still is, in some other form. But not in the way his wife and son need most. Not in the way his clients need, and his colleagues, who, awake though they are, surely must be quaking in their boots right now. And grieving. Yes, grieving. Fear and grief are some of the best blubber producers, I think (though sometimes they’re the opposite…), and may be reason, in the case of AJS, for enormous setbacks.

I don’t know what to say about all this. I don’t know what to say about the powers in our world that pulse against everything I understand Life to be. I don’t understand them. Are numbness to their reality and self-centered living the best responses we have to their presence?

I’m planning on donating money to AJS, and invite you to do the same. But even more than that, I extend an invitation, as one who needs the invitation too, to not wait until tomorrow or next week or ten years from now to find a way through all the blubber. Maybe read Duncan one more time, thinking both sides of wonder as you do, rather than only just the bright:

Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love–and I sometimes wonder whether there’s even a difference: maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved. Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp: wonder grasps us. We do have the freedom to elude wonder’s grasp. We have the freedom to do all sorts of stupid things. By deploying cynicism, rationalism, fear, arrogance, judgmentalism, we can evade wonder nonstop, all our lives. I’m not too fond of that gnarly word, sin, but the deliberate evasion of wonder does bring it to mind. It may not be biblically sinful to evade wonder. But it is artistically and spiritually sinful. (pg 8)

UPDATE:  Here is a note that N recieved from AJS today:

The enemies of justice continue to oppose the poor and those who would help them in Honduras . This morning Carlos Hernández, president of the board of AJS (and also director of Genesis) received a text message in English on his cell phone sent from the internet that read, in part: ” You are the next.” We do not know whether this is just a sick joke or whether it was sent by someone who is truly a threat. But circumstances do not allow us to take this lightly. Carlos at this very moment is denouncing the threat before the national Human Rights Commission and other organizations.

More than ever we at AJS need your prayers right now. We also need your help:

1. Send an email to Honduran officials urging them to address Dionisio’s murder and to guarantee the safety of the rest of AJS’s staff and board.

2. Donate to one or both of two funds we have set up in memory of Dionisio–one to fund the education of his 7-year-old son Mauricio and one to help AJS continue Dionisio’s work of promoting labor rights.

To do either or both, please visit www.ajshonduras.org/dionisio

Thank you, and may God bless you,

Abram Huyser Honig
AJS Communications Coordinator

(This is continuing the conversation started here and here.)

When I was a child I don’t think I ever heard about clairvoyance or other kinds of outside-of-what’s-normal-for-most-of-us psychic phenomenon. Probably the first time I heard of such things was from television, where the pseudo-documentary shows always had deep, male voices narrating, like the one that does the trailers for movies: very dramatic, intended to spook you out, or get you thinking this is the most amazing, unbelievable thing you’re ever gonna hear. I always loved seeing those shows, and loved believing with only about a tenth of myself that the stuff they were showing was real. Most of what I saw seemed staged, or at the very least over-inflated, and the reports explainable by other means than actual psychic phenomenon. I wished I could talk with someone real, who really had such experiences and wasn’t always voiced over with that dramatic morning-voice guy. Would they be able to just talk…normally with me?

Spring of 2004 I started working on the novel that I’m working on now. I knew I wanted to tell a story about human motivation, and some of the common things I think all of us carry around inside. The seed for my story was a boy who has a gift for seeing in picture form, as well as actual scenes, what’s really going on inside of people. Like in his mind’s eye. He is the catalyst for most of the story’s conflict, because what he sees so often contradicts what people actually say their motivations are.

Anyway, I was in the beginning stages of dreaming up this character and forming a story around him, and decided to have him write me letters, telling me about himself. I didn’t use the word “clairvoyant” when thinking or writing about him because I had no category for his gift. It was just a gift that I gave him, and one for which I had to work out the “rules” (like how exactly does it work? when does he see these visions? can he see inside of everyone?).

So there I was, spending lots of time getting into the mind of this kid.

One day as I was working, I began to get an uneasy feeling. It wasn’t indigestion, and it wasn’t that I was realizing I had done something wrong, or forgotten to do something I was supposed to do. It was a different flavor of uneasiness than any of these things.

I kept working, trying to ignore it, trying to swat it away, and even got up from my desk and cleaned the whole house, trying to ward the thing off. But it persisted. I couldn’t get away from the sense that it had to do with someone else, someone that wasn’t me, and that whoever it was was feeling the very feelings I was, only way, way worse. The thought seemed strange, and wasn’t one I tried to produce or puzzle out–it was just a kind of clearness that was with me, like when you’re having a dream and just know something to be true.

Finally by early evening I felt so bad that I simply had to stop and listen. If this was about someone I knew, then I figured I might as well try and figure out who; if they were feeling these feelings worse than I was, surely they were suffering.

So I sat down on the floor and tried to listen.

Instantly a dream that I had had the night before and forgotten about came to my mind. In it I had watched a friend of mine at his place of work leave with two others to deal with a fire that had started in another part of the building. My friend had told those of us in the first location to stay put, that he and these other two would deal with this and be back soon. And everyone but me did just that.

I did not want to stay put, though, and so followed after them to see what was actually going on. Would they be able to put out the fire?

Then I woke up.

So as I sat and listened, this dream popped into my mind, and another knowing feeling came, where I knew it was this friend who was suffering so badly. I also knew his suffering didn’t concern me, and wasn’t something I was in a position to do much about. So I sent out all the strength and help I could wish and pray for, and tried to continue about my day.

That night I still felt awful. I went to bed, but had only fitful, frustrated sleep. I kept getting this image in my mind of a letter, though I couldn’t ever see what it said. All through the night I saw that thing, over and over, often in dreams, sometimes in half-sleep. It was charged, somehow, and deeply connected, though I did not know how, to whatever my friend was wrestling through.

I still felt bad the next morning, but within a couple of hours of rising, something dramatically changed. I had been feeling like something was making it difficult to breathe, a pressure on my chest and a kind of metaphorical smoke, but almost instantly that feeling was replaced by the freshest, most peaceful breeze. I can’t say literally, since I was in my house with all the windows closed, but more…internally. I actually got an image in my mind of a beautiful blue sky with bright white clouds and clean air. And again, that knowing feeling, this time that my friend was fine. I knew that whatever thing he had been struggling with was through.

The experience puzzled and perplexed me. It had come unbidden, and left within the day. And it brought to mind similar experiences I had had at other times, too, but without accompanying dreams. Occasionally I would get an image in my mind of a certain location–a parking lot, a street, a home–and the distinct feeling that something bad was about to happen there. I’d usually pray, feeling helpless to know what was actually about to happen or how to prevent it. The images were fleeting, but super charged–a whole different quality from the kind of images any of us gets in a day as memories are sparked, or daydreams wander through. I never thought to call this clairvoyance.
Given I was just in the thick of developing a character with a similar sort of gift, I started feeling strange inside. Wobbly. Shaky. Like life was getting too weird all of a sudden, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Like I was taking on this gift that my character had…which I had thought I had only made up.

I wrote to my friend.

“You may think I’m crazy,” I said, in effect, “but…did anything difficult happen to you on such and such a day? Here’s what I was feeling then, and the things I dreamt about before and after.”

He wrote back with only confirmations. He couldn’t betray any confidences, but said that the day I had felt so bad, he had become nearly debiliated by the afternoon from a conflict that was in the works. He and two others were involved in it, and he wrote, “I felt as if the air was being squeezed from me, the forces of Death looming large.”

The next morning, though, he got a letter from one of the people involved that cleared the whole thing up. The person had had a change of heart, and a truly awful situation got completely turned around. By means of this letter.

That week I had two other dreams/feelings of the same quality, but without any clarity as to who they were about, such that by the time I visited my therapist the next week (on a normal weekly visit), I was all worked up.

“What do I do with these things?” I asked frantically. I was feeling like I was back in time, playing some of the guessing games with God that had so characterized my young adult days of Christian evangelicalism. My beliefs at that time had made every day feel like a test of my faithfulness and attentiveness, where I was supposed to do and say specific things in specific instances, but never given clear instructions as to what these things were. It was up to me to figure them out, and I never felt like I knew if I got them right. It was crazy-making, I tell you. No way to Live.

“I don’t think you have to do anything,” my therapist said. “If these things come to you, just acknowledge them, and move on.” She knew me and wisdom well enough for this to resonate right away as what I needed to hear.

As time went on, my experiences like this lessened. I was fascinated by them, though, and could not help wondering about them. Why did they come when they did? Does everyone have these experiences? My dabblings in physics and Eastern thought made me search for some kind of theory on this stuff, some way to make sense of it. The explanations I would have made earlier in my life–having to do with God, and God’s urgings and conveyings of information–didn’t seem to describe what I was experiencing, or jive with my emerging concept of God. Jean Bolen’s The Tao of Psychology and Belleruth Naparstek’s Your Sixth Sense, were helpful reads at this time–the latter a very practical, down-to-earth discussion of the ways some people have actually nurtured this kind of gift. Naparstek thinks everyone is capable of having it, though some are much more naturally wired for it. I considered trying to nurture it more in myself, but never felt right about doing so. The possibility felt charged with danger for me.

That winter I stumbled into a comment left on someone’s blog that referenced this kind of thing–a kind of clairvoyant “knowing”. I emailed the commenter, asking him more about his comment. We proceeded to have a fascinating conversation, in which he described his own clairvoyant gift, as well as the gifts of some of his family members. His father and his daughter communicate regularly, he said, telepathically. His daughter can move physical objects with her mind. For years he was involved in the darker side of these things (I’m not sure what he meant by this exactly), but as an adult became a Christian and chose to use them only when he feels led by God to do so, and within his Christian framework for understanding things. He was a warm and generous fellow, from what I could tell, and it felt wonderful, on one level, to finally talk with someone so normally about these things.

But then my own “knowings” started to return. And unlike that first experience, they weren’t accompanied by clarity as to who they were about. They’d come most often as I was trying to go to sleep at night, like when my conscious mind relaxed. And again they began raising my anxiety about what to do about them, and also that crazy sort of feeling you get when it feels as though things you take for granted–gravity, for instance, or physical distance between people–are presenting themselves more as illusion than fact. I wonder how many people we consider insane in our country are actually in touch with everything this way–in touch in a way that makes it impossible for them to function normally. We need our illusions, I think.

One night as I lay there trying to sleep, I felt as though my brain tapped into a firehose of knowings. I wasn’t trying to know anything, but there I was, getting some of the most awful images. All of them were intensely charged. I felt like they were from people in the near vicinity–maybe the apartment complex next door. I got up and shook my head and shut my mind’s door. And decided this had to stop.

Reflection and another conversation with my therapist convinced me I didn’t want to pursue this at all at this point (i.e. try to develop this gift more, or continue conversing with the guy online). I was pregnant at the time, and, for the life that was growing in me, needed to be as grounded and centered as possible. I didn’t want to pry into anyone’s business, and didn’t want to play guessing games about uninvited information. And, tangentially, of course, didn’t want to feel or become insane. So I ended my conversation with that fellow online and kept my inner door shut. And have ever since.

Occasionally I’ll get a dream that feels more charged than usual, but generally I’ve been “knowing”-free for a couple of years now. And it’s felt great.

My take-home from all of this, including the research that I’ve done, has been a deep conviction that the psychic stuff people report isn’t all hogwash (including telekinesis, ESP, precognition, etc.). Though some of it surely is, it isn’t all made up. I’m convinced we are all interconnected in some mysterious way, and that time and space are both shorthands for something that’s bigger than both, that contains them both. I’m convinced that love makes time and space between people disappear sometimes–even into the past and the future–and opens up channels of communication that otherwise exist, but don’t get tapped into. And I’m convinced that at least in this season of my life, I don’t need to try to know, firsthand, how true all of these things are.

How does all of this jive with any of your thoughts or experiences? I’d really love to hear.