T.S. Tuesday: Antsy for Creation
In his own poem, Eliot finds that often poetry can fall short of explaining the mystery and awe and wonder and heartbreak of life. In the middle of the poem, he writes,
"That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings."
And that intolerable wrestle with words and meanings is what brought me back to God. I found that when I couldn't pray--couldn't even consider praying--I could wrestle with words. I could write questions and question meanings. I could create meaning and delight in my creation. I could wrestle with poetry and in a way wrestle with God.
I started a journal I titled, "Antsy for Creation." Because I was. But as I started to write and create and wordplay, I found I was even more antsy for God. For the Creator who stamped his own desire to create on my soul from the very start.
God spoke to me through poetry long before he spoke to me through prayer. And why wouldn't he? The Bible is filled with poetry, with testaments of ancient, anxious wrestling with words and God and meaning. And God speaking into chaos. God filling and comforting and redeeming with
his words and his meanings.So whenever I read this poem and these words by Eliot, I am grateful for a God who created me to create and who brings forth his presence into my own "intolerable wrestle with words and meanings"--and makes it a little more tolerable.
The Day I Stole a Haitian Woman's Parking Spot
You know the people who pray for God to give them a parking spot? Well, I'm not one of them. I've secretly wished under my breath that a gap in cars lining the OBetian street was, indeed, a parking spot and not another driveway, or worse, a bus stop.
But this night I was desperate. Not, however, for a parking space, but for God. I was desperate for God to show up. Desperate for something to assuage my guilt and sadness that the world completely and undisputedly sucked. I had just watched "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" and the pain and injustice, the Nazis and concentration camps, hatred and selfishness and suffering, was too much to bear. This was in addition to the semester I had spent on a "Poverty Tour of Central America" that left me numb and questioning everything I had ever known about God and grace. I was also currently reading "Mountains Beyond Mountains" that detailed the overwhelming disease and injustice in Haiti.
I was desperate.
So I prayed about my parking space. Not that I would get one, but that I wouldn't get one. I prayed a frantic prayer relinquishing my entitlement to a parking space if it meant one woman in Haiti wouldn't die of tuberculosis that night. I breathed out please please please God DO NOT give me a parking spot.
But he did.
And not just any parking spot. The closest parking spot I'd encountered at that hour the entire time I'd lived at that house. Smack dab outside my front door. That was the final unstable plank in my Jenga composure. I performed the most excruciating parking job of my life, ran inside to my bathroom, and collapsed before my God.