Like Shining From Shook Foil.

Tonight the moon is a feather floating over the Haitian sea. The chatter round the dinner table has long since ceased, only a conversation in Creole from the shadows of the courtyard remains. And of course the waves, the ever rolling, soul soothing tidal wash. I am nursing a cup of Haitian coffee, dark and black and strong. I am letting each sip linger a little longer than the last. My thoughts are far away, in my childhood. A country whose borders I seldom cross. But instead of going home I feel like a museum patron, wandering halls and scrutinizing strange objects that seem to me should seem familiar. 

For no reason at all I do remember clearly that when I was fourteen I got glasses. It was like someone opened a window. A wind worn, rain weary, dirt blurred window. I could see! The colors, the lines, the sharpness and the contrast. It felt as though my mind had been re-booted or at the very least re-tuned. Smells were more pungent, tastes more distinct. My other senses rose to the occasion. Or so it seemed to me, at fourteen. Around that time I started writing too, perhaps in part a result of my newly resurrected faculties. It was this escape into that incredible possible world of the imagination that was the perfect antidote to the droll and drivel of Jr. high. I would lay awake at night and write entire novels in my mind. The bookshelves of which were filled with lifetimes of adventures, no deed was too chivalrous, heroes after all are as self-sacrificing as they are fearless. And the wayward world was never short of damsels in distress.


Then there was music!


Several friends got guitars and my passion became lyrics. I would write every night, sometimes all night. And when I wasn't writing I was reading every CD sleeve for lyrics to inspire me (still do). My weeks went this way: Thursday nights were always an all-nighter because Friday was kinda a throw away day at school and the adrenalin from the excitement of the coming weekend would get me through. I would write about every sort of thing that a fourteen year old had never experienced. Love lost or at least love unrequited, those were my default setting (and I suppose still are). High school came and all my dreams were rock and roll and notebooks full of restless railings and angst-infused phrases begging to be sung, or screamed as it were. Then one Christmas break, far from my rock and roll friends, cloistered away for a week at my grandparents in small-town Alabama, surrounded by farmland and open sky I wrote a poem. Oh the wonder of it! The autonomy mingled with ecstasy. I felt a discharge of my soul that gave me such a buzz, one I still crave daily. 


That first poem was about Father Jeremiah, a wizard bearded Greek Orthodox priest and his moon-eyed dog. A clunky poem I later cannibalized and re-incarnated into an earlier post. My second poem was a rather unflattering depiction of a certain high school English teacher with an obsessive and clinical infatuation with grammar...

Her neck ejaculated her face into conversation

All nouns and no verbs

Her eyes are things a cat can do to a fence

Prepositionally speaking of course

Her ears, parenthesis, close parenthesis

Around an independent thought of a nose interjected

Her mouth, list; thirty-two teeth, two lips, one tongue, 

And a voice arbitrary as grammar ever was

And dangling twice as participle boring comma

Oh dear. But I was hooked! My senior year my textbooks never left my locker, instead, everyday, all day, I carried around one rather voluptuous volume of poetry, the complete works of e.e. cummings, terminally and perpetually truant from the Hattiesburg public library. 

I read and re-read every poem in that collection a hundred times. His masterful precision mixed with a sacrosanct anarchy. Love poems that took love so seriously and yet remained playful and unapologetically romantic. And an anti-establishment undercurrent that gave every institution from science to government a good tongue lashing while all the while elevating those rebukes to high art. Lines that tied my stomachs in knots with beauty, lines to fall in love to, lines like:

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

and...

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

and one of my very favorite poems from him...

i am a beggar always

who begs in your mind

(slightly smiling, patient, unspeaking

with a sign on his

chest

BLIND)yes i

am this person of whom somehow

you are never wholly rid(and who

does not ask for more than

just enough dreams to

live on)

after all, kid

you might as well

toss him a few thoughts

a little love preferably,

anything which you can't

pass off on other people: for

instance a

plugged promise-

the he will maybe (hearing something

fall into his hat)go wandering

after it with fingers;till having

found

what was thrown away

himself

taptaptaps out of your brain, hopes, life

to(carefully turning a

corner)never bother you any more

I never got over my love for Mr. cummings. I probably fashioned most of my romantic notions about relationships while contemplating his poetry instead of say, Algebra II. But something else happened to me when I was fourteen. While I was fumbling toward first kisses and tripping rather than falling in love, the eyes of my soul were opened too. I had always believed the good news of Jesus, always loved God the best I could, even in my youngest years tried to do what my conscience told me was right. But then came fourteen and struggling with fitting in or whether to fit in at all. Then came fourteen and dabbling into the little rebellions that dirty the heart and hands. Then came fourteen and feeling out of sorts, at odds with both heaven and earth, it was then that God proved to me that He loved me. And so I had a new lens, those brand new eyes to see myself and to see the world through. And once again all my other spiritual senses were enlivened too, rescued from the futility of self doubt and empowered by His unconditional, unfaltering, unbelievable! completely undeserved love for me!! 


As I got older I have at times, as much as I desired to, struggled somewhat with writing "sacred" poetry. My lyrics and subsequently my poems failing miserably to express my faith, and in particular the greatness of God. It seemed to me anyway, that at least in part, any art (or loose approximation there of) should, for the Christian be sacred, be worship or praise. That is our art should at times be about Him, the lover of our soul, the Perfect priceless One. But how to use human words, finite sentiments to describe the eternal, boundless, mind-blowing God? Like describing the ocean as wet, so my words for God are artlessly obvious, deconstructed and restrained by the reality that even language gets all of its significance from the maker of tongues, the giver of breath, the progenitor of reason.


But tonight, staring at the moon, listening to the lullaby of the Caribbean and drinking in the salty sweet cocktail of sea spray I realized that all beauty points to the One who created it. The moon, the sea just being the moon and the sea, are graced with the brushstrokes of God. And that for us the act of creating alone may be one of the best most sacred homages we can offer the Creator. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then just as He poured the light of the Word into the formless void, into this often cruel, callous, and ugly world we should pour beauty through our words. Or try our very darndest to do so. 


Art is sacred then, not because it captures the infinite (for to capture it is to cage it and to cage it is to try and tame it), but because when finite creatures bend toward infinity, when they mimic their God, they too point to Who made them. It follows then I think, that a heart immersed in His love, stammering out its bravest poetry, its sincerest prose is one of the closest things we may ever get on this side of eternity's veil to a wholly sacred proclamation. So then, until death rends that veil forever, let's keep scribbling down our biggest most beautiful thoughts. About the moon, or the ocean, of love lost and especially love longed for. 


One more poem before I go. My very favorite of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who himself struggled to describe God and wrote mostly about the glory of His fingerprint in Nature. 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;        

  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;        

And though the last lights off the black West went

  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hope.

Growing frustrated with my infantile Creole, Donell searches for the words in English. Finally, voice cracking he says "I am just f--king tired. Something must change."

We are standing in City Soleil, the largest, densest slum in the western hemisphere and by far the most dangerous. I put my hand on his shoulder. There is nothing to say, not in any language. He pulls a worn New Testament out of his pocket. A picture of his best girl and his baby sister tucked safely into the gospel of John. On the page facing Jesus tells His disciples "don't let your hearts be troubled". I want to tell Donell the same but again language fails. 

We are covered in mud. His tent city has flooded due to early rains and a very clogged drainage canal. It has taken us three days but the water flows freely now and the muddy slum begins to dry out. 

Marciell, Evonne and Donell working so hard. The drainage canal was full to six inches below the rim with  tires, tarps, cables and every sort of garbage and plant mass. 3 days of intense work with our bodies shoulder deep in sludge and the canal is clean! 

On our lunch break Donell takes me to his 'house'. It is no bigger than a closet, it is tarps and dirt and a cinder block platform covered in cardboard that is his bed. The water was six inches above the cardboard which is still wet. He doesn't ask me to take a picture. He is a singer. This place does not define him. He will make it out one day. He has to. 

But Donell is the exception, everyone else it seems wants me to chronicle the flood, their squalor, the disintegrating tarps and canvas. The mud. 150+ tents, 1,500+ people, covered.

The next tent is worse than the last and the deeper into the camp you go the deeper the mud, the frustration. These people are refugees in their own city. The are desperate to be heard but feel like no one listens. The camera listens, if only for a second, and so they each tell their stories into its unblinking eye.

But soon they forget the camera. Soon they begin speaking to me as if I understand. The elderly especially, holding nothing back. Their eyes betray their fear, their hopelessness.

The couple above wave their arms wildly, both simultaneously telling their story. The man motions where the water from the downpour came in through the holes in their tent while his wife tells how the flood waters ruined all they had, went two feet up the tent walls. She seems like she is going to breakdown but then draws from some inner strength, perhaps the sobering responsibility of taking care of her blind husband. 

But where the elderly are wrecked with worry, the children, as children do, remain carefree and defiantly joyful.

The reality is that April starts the rainy season and with it malaria and the dreadful horror of cholera. With no latrines or fresh water, feces mixes with mud and enters open sores especially on bare feet. Enters little mouths by way of sucked thumbs and soiled playthings. Cholera is easily treated if caught immediately but with little education and the incessant reality of diarrhea due to any number of dietary and health factors many times people wait too long for treatment.  

What struck me with the deepest sense of awe, maybe even more than the indefatigable joy of the kids, was the dignity of these amazing people. Their resilience, their grace, their unconquered beauty. In a slum of half a million with rampant gang violence and a suffocating quality that is palpable even to outsiders, they soldier on. They love their children, they work so very hard, and they share with each other. Given the smallest chance I know they would thrive. 

  

There is a Haitian proverb that goes: Deye mon, gen mon. Beyond the mountains, more mountains. It captures the fatalism and tragedy of the Haitian life so perfectly, that even if the Haitian people overcome one struggle there is another struggle waiting to sucker-punch them. And they have come to accept it. Several times this week Haitians have said without a hint of irony or self-pity, "Ain't nothing easy."  But yet they don't give up. They hold on to something. Perhaps like Donell, a dream.

I ask him what kind of music he sings. It would have been quicker to ask him which kinds he doesn't sing. Donell's smile widens as the list goes on. He only smiles when he talks of singing. He reminds me President Martelly was a singer. As if to say, "See? Anything's possible." The Haitian leader smiles down in agreement from a billboard that marks the entrance to City Soleil. 

Donell

Dreams are powerful because they tap into that invisible reservoir of hope. But dreams usually don't come true. Dreams disintegrate, are ground to grit by the daily grind and with them the heart too is crushed. So what then can sustain a desperate soul? What can resurrect a heart killed by sorrow and then heal it forever? From where comes everlasting hope?

I believe it is in Christ alone. That it is in Him we can have "the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before time began." It will not come from money, nor politicians. Neither will stem the tide of suffering and despair. It will not be found in the rote of religion or the prestige of power. Neither will break chains or unlock cages. Peter wrote "For it wasn't with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ....through Him you believe in God, who raised Him from the dead, and so your faith and hope are in God."

This is my prayer tonight for City Soleil, for Donell. That the God of all hope floods them with all joy and all peace as they trust in Jesus, so that they may overflow with that precious hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Oh Lord please let it be so.