Dear Anne:
Jackson has asked me to wake him at 4:30 if I can remember. For the past three nights our dorm has ricocheted with the fiesta sounds of mis campaneros cantando, singing folklore and ranchero into the wee hours. He wants to catch up on his rest.
What do you want? Yes, the seminal question of restlessness. Recently I told a friend that I admire the longing in his heart, how he spurns the formulaic and doxological in search of authentic encounter with the face of God. His custom prayer has long been to sit in silence. He is one of those firebrand intellectuals whose introversion yearns for privacy while burning feverishly to ignite passion for justice in others. At rest in solitude he makes a disciple of calming the storm of his convictions, the winds of his ideas and the waves his emotions. When we last spoke he had just reason to ignore my call since, after all, he was on silent retreat. I felt the tension of existence, the riptide of guilt undercutting my outgoing confession of genuine feeling for him. How did I dare interpolate the silence of his retreat?The life and death of human sexuality, the urge to know and be known amount to a mysterious connection of yin and yang for to ask of another is to penetrate individuality and to question is to disturb.
This past Christmas family reunited in Tucson, Arizona. Not all of share the same pages in the book of life we have received. Beautiful weather, family traditions and sincere joy in Christmastime reconciled us to the same page. For all us a riptide of concern for my impending fate worked to decenter us with fear. When I was beginning to feel guilty of causing this tension, I received a calming message from my friend. He simply said in reply “thank you for your long letter. I think more than a full response I just want you to know I honor the insight you’ve given me to your tumultuous soul.” And having spent several summers in Arizona with humanitarian relief group to deserted immigrants, No More Deaths, I knew he meant that in the midst of hard experience good can be seen. As he put it, “Remember the colors of the dessert.” He was right not to let myself get towed into the tumult of vicarious tumult that my relatives were experiencing. It assured me to trust in my acquired taste of beauty, learned in direct contact with the poor, the bent the broken over these many short years of my life. I remember soft pink hues that play upon the hard surface of the Tucson mountain skyline. In memory I savor the alpine glow from a jail cell, relishing in similar ways love from others that my soul preserves.
The other day on country cable TV I watched the music video of Jerrod Niemann’s haunting song “What do you want?” It depicted a disconsolate singer and a waif figured would be lover. The singer panted for the other’s affection like a Song of Solomon. Two tears spilled down my cheeks as I sang along.
I so badly want more from the Americas, our America. Am I abandoned or do ideals lead us eventually to a greater cooperation? I would have our pathway unite at the farm but we have cars and the roads all lead to the empire. Indeed, along with the men caught up in ICE we have been taken to the Roman Coliseum for humiliation. Would that we could all be true stewards of the land rather than impressions of men, characters in a scene, called criminal which is another word for savage. Thus this jungle jail in which each has his prisoner’s dilemma, to talk or not to talk, afraid a snitch will defile any intimacy. So we suffer under the barbarous regime of our ancestors in a survival of the fittest feat; man and beast become indistinguishable to the Judge. We languor stupidly.
The television is our pacifier, the NFL our own coliseum to mold the mass of America into lesser men whose capacities to reason have become so suppressed we remain stupidly fascinated by the myth of redemptive violence.
Chris
