I adore Rebecca Reynold's poetry and writing at her blog "Thistle and Toad." She also writes for The Rabbit Room
and The Story Warren.
Her oldest went to college and as you know my youngest went to college.
She has poetry oozing and I imagine her brain to be full of images and words every morning.
Here is her latest poem and you must listen here.
I have listened about a dozen times. I love her voice and the way she knows how to say what the poem says. Her heart is overflowing. My tears did.
"Grace is Gossamer"
I used to whisper in my oldest son's ear at night,
"Love Jesus," and now I wish I hadn't done that
because it's a weighty thing to say;
it's too weighty.
It's the weight of a first born mother telling her firstborn son to
worship, as if getting to know the Almighty were as simple to follow
as a recipe for chicken noodle soup.
Two teaspoons of unsalted butter.
Three stalks of chopped celery.
Two diced carrots.
Make them sweat, Son, before you add the broth.
It can't be done that way.
It's not that I'm a Calvinist, see,
but I've always done wrong by trying to make
my heart the Divinity chaser,
trying to make my love worth love,
trying to slap mud on rudimentary, homemade cathedrals woven from split
reeds I found in the woods.
I stay a little bit nervous
about bears.
And I'm not sure where that happened,
maybe in some Baptist church way back, way back,
when some preacher was telling me that I might miss out on glory.
Or maybe keeping your foot on the accelerator is just a natural casualty of
being a first born of a first born.
But no wonder my kind has always stood out in a field sulking
while some renegade kid comes home from a party
to a party --
because my kind digs holes, digs holes, digs holes
and expects heaven to come up wherever we plant it.
Sins of a parent go down three generations they say.
Trauma gets in the DNA and changes a person
inside out, and probably bad theology does the same.
Lord, forgive me, for I tried to push the same gravity on my children
that I carried inside myself
when Your yoke is easy
and Your burden is light.
Grace is gossamer,
sunlight caught in a spider's web,
it is lake water thrown from the tail of a carp,
and that is so hard for me to believe, no matter what you say.
I wish I had taken more deep breaths,
taken more cool baths.
just reveled,
just waited,
just watched glory before trying to make anything of it at all but
wonder,
just whispered, "You are loved,
and Honey, that's the sweetest thing in all the world."
