heathergoertzen's Xanga

change

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:40:41 GMT

Wes and I relocated to Peabody, KS yesterday, where our good friends have bought a farmstead and welcomed us in.
There is a slow, anonymous, unfamiliarity of life here. A refuge of sorts, with goats and chickens and lots of land to wander over. We're thankful.

a reflection from God in Ordinary Time:

CHANGE

Discerned, you say -
your world, our world, is different now.
I ask,
On your new way,
whose hand is on the plow?

on coming home

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:26:49 GMT

So, its been a while since we've posted.

We left Bolivia on September 1 and have spent the last several weeks regaining our senses, quite literally - our senses of place, of self, of rest and trust.

We have, in all of this, made the decision not to renew our contract with WMF Bolivia and are searching for a place to make home in the old country. It's quite a journey, one Wes and I are joyfully and painstakingly making together, having not shared life here before.

Here's a reflection I wrote a couple weeks back.

I think I may have said faithfulness was my path,
when really I was just being
stubborn,
obstinate,
right,
determined.

I think I may have thought that His favor,
His pleasure, would come through
my misery
instead of our intimacy.

If ever I ran away from home
in the direction of Egypt
expecting that you might delight in
my futile straw gathering,
brick baking,

Now I set down
the itchy straw
and begin picking the mud
from between my fingers.

I tighten my sandals,
turn around,
and begin the long journey home,
back to Israel,
back home,
back through the land
where snakes linger,
lions lurk.

The road toward slavery,
when I turn around,
becomes the road to my salvation.
The very same road.

So I turn,
breathe deeper,
and try quiet trust
(which looks nothing like strength).

I demount, let go.
I take down my tattered flag,
drop it there
and stumble back.

Drawn back down this road
by Your longing,
in Your kindness,
Your grace.

You rise.
I fall.

[On Coming Home, reflections on Isaiah 30:1-18]

sweet adoration

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:40:11 GMT

This was one of my favorite hymns as a child. I've been singing it all morning. To myself, of course. I'm working from home today, alone, so I've felt free.

Title: Sweet Adoration

C F G C C/B
Sweet adoration, flows from your children;
Am7 Dm7 G Am7 G/B
Glory and honor and praise are a part
C G7/D C F G C C/B
Of our constant devotion, love set in motion
Am7 Dm7 G G7 C F G7
For the Divine One, who reigns in our hearts.

C F G C C/B
When I am troubled by heartache and struggle,
Am7 Dm7 G Am7 G/B
I come and adore You, You take me away
C G7/D C F G C
From all worldly sensation, and endless temptation,
Am7 Dm7 G G7 C
All of my trials are lost in Your love

what helps...

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:06:32 GMT

So these are indeed trying times. I find myself in a thousand internal emotional negotiations in any given moment.
Today, a friend picked Plan B off my bookshelf and read herself a chapter. Apparently she came across a quote I had underlined and decided I needed to hear today:

Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn't. Shame doesn't. Being heard does. - Anne Lamott

kitchen conundrum

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:04:47 GMT

A watched pot never boils.
But then, an unwatched pot will almost inevitably boil over.
What's a girl to do?

warming

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:44:06 GMT

I know that there are many who still claim that global warming is a myth, or at least that the idea of an ecological footprint isn't likely - that if the earth is warming, it has very little to do with our practice.

I tend to believe in connectedness and think that our greed has consequences on many levels, the created world being one of the grounds.

We're thankful for the choices that are made for us on a daily basis, having chosen to live among the poor, we rely on public transportation (not that emissions testing in El Alto has really caught on), largely local food sources, and very limited energy use... which brings me to last night.

June 23 in Bolivia is known as the festival of San Juan. A Christian adaptation, it follows closely on the heels of the Aymaran New Year, which corresponds with the winter solstice, and really is a celebration of all things together. Being the longest night of the year, it also bears the tradition of being the coldest and so bonfires are the focus of the fiesta. People traditionally light fires in the streets, roast hot dogs and set off fireworks. In recent years, however, the department of La Paz/El Alto has attempted to crack down on smoke pollution and began threatening 1000 Boliviano ($145) fines for burning, which on my street, for example brought the number down from 14 to 2 visible burnings in just the last couple years. But we find our ways... Many have taken to lighting their folgatas inside property walls, in front yards, on patios, away from the watchful eye of police. We (guilty) stayed inside and partied around the fireplace. Multiply my guilty contribution by 2 million people, and well...

This morning we woke to a sky less smoke-filled than we remember in years past. And yet, our temperature which has consistently been hovering in the mid 30's (F) for the past 4 weeks or so registered a steamy 42 degrees this morning (this, by the way, is inside our bedroom). And I will admit, it felt good - or at least better. But when I look past my own room, over my neighbors houses, lift my eyes up to the mountains and can visibly register the shrinking glaciers, I feel sad... and responsible.

love after love

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:36:04 GMT

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

by Derek Walcott

collapse

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:44:21 GMT

We had a holiday on Thursday: Corpus Christi, which means "body of Christ," but no one around here seems to know exactly what we're celebrating. Failed catechisms. My favorite reflection on the day was found in my aforementioned new favorite book, Take This Bread, in which Sara Miles remembers her time in Corpus Christi, Mexico during the Corpus Christi Massacre, in which she reflects on a popular dicho, "en su propio carne." Or "in your own meat" literally, to live it in the flesh, as we might say, which I like the sound of. Living it in your own meat. The high call of the Gospel.

So I took advantage and rented a tiny cabin room on Lake Titicaca, took a couple books to guide me and spent two days in mostly quiet spaces. I listened and waited. I heard through the voices of psalmists and prophets cries from my own desperate depths. I scribbled journal pages of "excavation of self" (I think Keating uses this phrase in the Human Condition). I stopped running from all the things that are pushing in and threatening to crash. And I wish I could say I've come out with a regained sense of purpose and peace. The truth is, stillness most often gives way to honesty, and truth says I'm desperate, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked (rev. 3). And I feel it. Cold. Tired. Unseen and unseeing.

In the days since I feel like I've answered almost every question with, "I don't know," and almost every request with, "I just can't." Which is about all I can offer.

This is me in my own meat.

as we do

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:10:15 GMT

Yes, reading Sara Miles' Take This Bread, and quite taken. I'm on page 6.

Margaret (Sara's paternal grandmother, a missionary in Burma in the mid-1920's) wrote:
"The problems of our little Shan church seem delicate and difficult, and our responsibility is very great, for the Shans still lean dangerously upon the missionaries. We hear ourselves constantly mentioned in their prayers - the three 'mamas' and the great teacher who have come so far to help them - come from the wonderful country of America, a sort of earthly paradise where everyone is wealthy, and everyone is happy, and everyone is good. Would you feel flattered in our places, or would you feel deeply humiliated, as we do?"

I feel you, Margaret. Deeply.

monday

Fri, 29 May 2009 19:19:52 GMT

she pushes forward for a moment.
finds a hope that was buried,
way at the slimy bottom
under hate
and desperation and fear
in the strewn wreckage
a shiny pretty broken thing comes forth
and she holds it carefully.
she knows it could cut her,
but also knows the fragmented reflection it tempts her with is something of the color of truth and decides to chase it.

i fight for her and with her
and want to believe, perhaps even more than she wants to believe, that this day marks a new thing:
that truths have been told,
and lines have been drawn,
and the stakes are higher now because once told, truths are harder to deny.

lies can’t live here.
they are disarmed, pathetic and powerless.
they accuse us weakly, but we are strong, resolved.
we are doing it for the tiny squirming hands we’re holding,
to redeem the scar over her right eye and the deep invisible pulsing ones she still sometimes traces over unaware.

we file papers and give testimony and play hopscotch on a stone mosaic courtyard.
we catch snowflakes on our tongues and run in when we hear thunder and shiver a little under foreboding skies.
we follow directions and make plans and act braver than maybe we really are.

because when night falls, lies get louder and reflections dim.
she falters and the shiny thing she thought was hope cuts her and she bleeds and he tells her that he is her only truth, that colors don’t exist except in her mind.

and she falls back
into untruth and unhope
and hate and desperation and fear.
she gathers up the wreckage,
settles back into the lies she can trust,
if only because they’re constant.
and glances discreetly at the smeared shard of hope one last time before slipping it deep into her pocket,

for another monday.