I Am Where My Feet Take Me

I have just returned after an intense last week of class with my wonderful Fuller cohort in Pasadena. Please forgive me for the extended blog absence. As one of you mentioned, seeing that bloody Harry Potter post each day for the last week has been quite irritating and horrendous. My apologies. I might offer the following condolences:

{alpha} I hope to post each day for the next week, providing I have sufficient internetting to span my Northern journeys.

{beta} These artful words slash prayers:

"For who am I? ...Am where my feet take me...
Come unto me, you say. I, even to myself, turn.
O Lord and lover, I come if I can to you down through sleeping and waking and eating and saying goodbye and going away and coming back again. Laboring and laden with endless histories heavy on my back."

-from Frederick Buechner's The Alphabet of Grace

(Photo by Phil Hilfiker)

"He Calls Me To Be A Life Again"

(for Rachel and her dreams) some re-discovered words from Buechner's The Alphabet of Grace :

Beneath the moonlit drifts of sheet, I turn in my sleep and draw up my knees...And with my knees drawn up, I dream I am sitting down. I am sitting on a stool at a bar, and my glass has left a wet ring on the wooden counter-top. With my finger, I start to move the wet around. I move it this way and that way with nothing much on my dream of a mind. And then on the smooth counter of the bar I write a name. When I have finished writing it, I start to weep, and the tears wake me up. I cannot remember the name I wrote, but I know that it was a name that I would be willing to die for. Maybe it was the secret name of God or the secret name of the world. Maybe it was my own secret name. The dream is only a dream, but the tears are exceedingly real.

Darkness was upon the face of the deep, and God said, "Let there be light." Darkness laps at my sleeping face like a tide, and God says, "Let there be Buechner." Why not? Out of the primeval chaos of sleep he calls me to be a life again...To wake up is to be given back your life again...Waking into the new day, we are all of us Adam on the morning of creation, and the world is ours to name. Out of many fragments we are called to put back together a self again.

"My poor misguided child," my grandmother says, "is all this cloudy rhetoric your way of saying that in the morning you wake up?"

"Yes, it is," I say...

-Frederick Buechner

(Waking up photo by Phil Hilfiker)