The ashes in my mouth taste like talc and powder. I swallow, move the tongue, wipe between teeth. It’s always like this, always a material experience that solidifies the visceral into something I understand. It’s candles to facilitate prayer, it’s arms raised to worship, it’s dancing on a cliff’s ledge to break before the Spirit. It’s taking off my shoes on the dirtiest, holiest ground.
It’s not Scriptural, if Scripture is prescriptive. It’s Scripture with flesh and blood, if Scripture is the stuff of the Spirit of God.
I’m on my knees, fire blazing, touching ashes to my tongue.
He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, “Is there not a lie in my right hand?”
(Isaiah 44:20)
We are doing a study on idols at church – what it is to make and have and hold idols in our hearts, and Isaiah likens the idol-worshiper to one who feeds on this dust of the fire. I’m bent over the study book, having one painful tissue severed at a time, layer upon layer and here it is, a hook to hang this soul-work on. Feeding on ashes. I eat, so I can remember. I taste, and it will never leave my memory. It is so very different from Christ’s flesh and blood.
I remember. 2002 and a cliff’s edge, a dumping ground for mountain garbage. Plastic bags and tin cans and old tires litter the slope; it is a dump with a view of glory. I stand atop my car and let God sear his words right in to my soul, arms outstretched, head thrown back, tears streaming. My hair blows wild around my face, catching in the pockets of my pants, blowing against the antenna of the 1988 blue Corolla. I stand in the center of a burned out ring, which is a memorial to the time my brother had failed to secure the new battery and the car had erupted into flames. I stand in the evidence of the ring of fire, and welcome a Refiner’s blaze.
How I worship. 22 years old and still full of enough naiveté to just let it be Jesus and me. Still innocent enough to worship God without straining through forms of man and church and tradition. He says, “pick up the trash,” and I do, every last ugly piece of it, filling my car to the brim and emptying my soul of the waste that lingers. A material expression of the visceral becoming total in my being.
It is still 2002 and I stand before my speech class to tell the story. Garbage and Mountain Tops and God’s Voice. I am caught up in the glory of it, unaware that I ought not say, “and God said.” Oblivious. It doesn’t enter my mind that there are rules. My audience is lost behind eyes wide with danger and suddenly I register fear. I’ve crossed a line but I don’t know what the line is. I scramble, I curse myself. I am always crossing lines. I may have been raised Charismatic, but this Christian college thinks the last time the Voice of God spoke to a person was in 1844–and, well, I forgot. It’s tantamount to heresy, to infer you might also hear from the Lord. Prophecy is dead. We no longer listen to voices in our heads. A petition is submitted to remove me from the theology department, and the professors call my fiancee to a meeting to tell him the reasons I will not make a good Christian wife. He marries me anyway.
Always too much, and never enough, and saying exactly the wrong thing. And, hello, Christ.
Can we write about doubt? Can I write about doubt? This doubt that opens my heart to hear when he says, “remember.” A cycle of faith, of rotating in an oblong way? If Jesus is the sun, I am like Mars, pulled closer and closer in my rotation and then suddenly flung to the far reaches of eternity, only to be yanked back by his gravitational force. His are the bonds that hold me. Mine is the heart that adores. Closer, closer, further, further, and then close, so close again. My belief and understanding are as close as the breath in my bones and then as far as hell from heaven. I possess the deepest knowing, and the profoundest doubt, and the Lover who doesn’t let me go.
Ashes.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Hide your story and can you not see: you’re writing with a lie in your right hand.
Remember these things, O Jacob,
And Israel, for you are My servant;
I have formed you, you are My servant,
O Israel, you will not be forgotten by Me.
– Isaiah 44:21
This is My body, broken. This is My blood, poured out. Take, My love, take, eat, drink.
You wrote it well
There is so much here, Harmony. I was
Ack! I submitted that comment before I was done! I wanted to say that I was making so many different connections as I read. I loved what you said about the physical and spiritual being tied together. I was also reminded of a friend I had in college who had converted to Christianity from Buddhism. She used to tell me what God had said her about various things and she was very surprised that I didn’t hear Him in the same way that she did. But she also pointed out to me that I had been baptized as a baby and thus had always had that spark of the Holy Spirit within, so perhaps I was so used to His voice that I didn’t notice it anymore. For her, being baptized as an adult, the Spirit had come at a time when she could perceive the difference tangibly. I pray that I can learn always to discern His voice and listen closely when He speaks.
Thank you for these beautiful words.
Lisa, I always appreciate the meat in your responses. Thank you. That’s such an interesting story about your friend. I feel as if I’ve always “heard” His voice – not always as in every second, but always as in throughout my whole life. But a lot of that is hindsight, you know? The sheep hear his voice, and we don’t even think about it much of the time. Most often, for me, it’s a knowing, deep in my soul, a still, small voice at the center of my heart. The more I listen the more I hear. “What is man that He is mindful of me?” I don’t know. I don’t know why he communes with us. I just know that he does.