Behind

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Oddly enough, your goal is not in front of you but behind you.

Behind. Under.

Like a hand.

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The dog in God's hand

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At the crossing, a little dog
a little dog
has 4 legs now,
has 4 legs now

looks at the girl and turns
looks back at the girl
walks to the girl
sits by the girl
wags his tail at the girl

runs away from the girl
laughing on 4 legs -- has 4 legs!
splashes in existence
swimming in the ivy like a dog swimming in the ivy.

God's hand
God's hand
my surface is God's hand

God pets the dog
God throws a bone.
God's throw. God's bone.

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Conversion

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At transitional points, at breaks -- where the skin turns into fingernail: that is where conversion occurs.

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Chapter 15: Green trees

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Una walked with the crown of her head as touching heaven, her spine straight as a thrust spear. The core lay upward and became squeezed. Her heart seemed to pierce the clouds. The book of the shoulder blades closed, tight shut. The granite dormitories stood skewed on either side, as if unable to resist the pressure of God's thumb. There was a crack down the front of the world's rational complacency and coherence, an opening of mathematical wrongness -- there for students to ponder, to fall through or ignore. It lay quietly across her forehead too. The world -- considered by itself -- did not add up. But as a kneaded paste of what was to come, it made a different kind of sense or was about to -- always on the verge, just like a human.

There was a man in the garden. Who was that man? He did his work and didn't look at her.

She was certain she knew him. She couldn't remember how. He was very attractive to her. Not knowing what to do with it, she took the attraction and shelved it like a book on some back shelf (behind the shoulder blades?), leaving it there to be latent and ready. Then she looked back and found the attraction unshelved, in front of her, bursting her heart. It had nothing to do with sex. As she stepped forward the man no longer stood in front of her, was no longer visible. But he was still there.

All around her were the green and succulent trees. As still as her own heart.

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Poem & Digression: On loving the enemy

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You must know what's at stake to understand
what cursing curses and who is
the enemy one must forgive but first
there has to be an enemy -- one must
live where these stakes continue to exist --
where men are wrenched in pieces and their blood
accumulates and starts to flood
all judgment. You cannot stay wrapped
in affluence like cotton. Never boast
you have no enemy or you are lost!
Faith must be founded in reality,
this little piece of it that juts out from
the wider providence you cannot know,
except as bone that breaks the way you go.

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The shadow of God's hand

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As she walked the mud spread and covered her -- it was a mask. One that expressed and revealed, not concealed, or one that spread its palm over untruth to conceal that and reveal the other.

God the potter spun the sharp wheel and shaped a pot or a girl. Una rolled down the hill exhilarated, hung in her cocoon of devotion. The creed was a bodily space that the body moved through. Her flesh solidified over time and flaked off. She was new.

The greatest miracle was the Crucifixion, not the Resurrection. For given an "entity" that is God, who can be surprised about its being born again from oblivion, which is merely standard behavior for a god. But that God, being who he is, would have bent forward to hollow out his own eternity and allow it to be submerged in death? Not that a given man would live forever but that God, our God, would dare to experience the other thing.

He must be crazy about us, Una said.

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So why didn't everyone walk down her pleasant campus path, the garden walk of faith? Oh because the access was so much pain. The path was pain. So all because of pain. Or rather the fear of pain -- which is actually a form of pain.

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