Freewrite For An Urgent Time

A Sunbeam, A Sunbeam

Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam

A sunbeam, a sunbeam

I'll be a sunbeam for Him

I interrupt my regularly scheduled program to bring you this piece below, started this week in an online writing practice group "Freewrites For Urgent Times - a space to write through the anger and grief of these times." 

That day I chose to let 'er rip,  no good, no bad, no comment, no filter. It came from a place of deep grief and fear and anger after watching the President of the United States speeching the most hateful, spiteful untruths on the world stage. I turned it off, walked out on the back porch in my fuzzy bathrobe and stood in the cold stillness, watching the birds at the feeder and breathed in the cold, cold air. Air so cold it hurt, a physical pain to muffle the crashing waves of fear.

I've experienced that particular kind of gut-punch fear before, a fear borne of realizing you, a sole human being, have no control over what's happening. Of course, I've lived long enough to know there is little control in most of life but my first awareness was what history calls the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember lying in my bed that night with the thought that there was a very real possibility that the dread mushroom cloud would appear over Consistory Hill. I was physically ill, the aforementioned gut-punch that sent me down the hall to the bathroom in secret.

And now, this woman, removed by many years from that little girl on North East Street, greeted the faces in the Zoom boxes, earnest and stalwart. There was a poem to get us started as often happens. And though I didn't write down the name of the poet nor did I copy the poem in its entirety, here are the words of another upon which I composed this essay.

"I pick flowers for my dead father when I'm sad..."

The Father, The Son, The Holy Ghost - but these days I prefer to think Source, Word, Spirit. But it was the Father who was the God I was instructed to worship in many years of Sunday School at the Presbyterian Church. God Of Our Fathers, Holy, Holy, Holy, A Mighty Fortress.

Sunday School, every year the gift of a little bar to hang from the second year wreath that circled the pin presented that first year of Sunday School. The little girl with her toothpick legs sticking out from underneath the full skirt plumped with some kind of stiff crinoline fabric. Wearing a Sunday dress created by my mother on her old treadle Singer sewing machine, sometimes trimmed with lace carefully salvaged from clothing that had been someone else's.

White Jesus with the flowing brown hair, the Sunday School Jesus who loves me, who wants me for a sunbeam. Listen to the echoes of our feet tromping to the basement, down those winding stairs to the concrete floor in the space that always smelled a little musty except when it was steamy from the cooking for congregational dinners, those elaborate meals served on the plates that still rest in the cupboards down there - at least one hundred of them.

The father - that God enlisted as a battering ram these days. Much like the battering rams employed against the outraged in Minneapolis. The battering rams and guns used against the humans, the Christians and Jews and Muslins and Agnostics and Atheists standing against the masked thugs sent by our government - a government supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people.

Much like the battering rams carried by the thugs who waved the Appeal To Heaven flag on January 6. That same flag that hangs outside Mike Johnson's office and flaps in the breeze at Samuel Alito's beach house.  This God , they tell me, has chosen this man, this Donald J. Trump. And Donald J. Trump - the golden idol  from the top of his golden hair to his gold burnished skin, sitting in a gilded office, shitting in a golden toilet, building a golden temple onto the people's house. That god is a dead father.

The dead father commanding that the males are in charge. With the women waiting for them, and on them, following their bidding, offering up their little girls to pleasure them, plumping their breasts and their lips to command attention. Their lips like machine guns, he says.  All in the name of their dead father.

I am so sad, so very sad but there are no flowers for the dead father in this cold, lonely, desolate, hopeless winter.