eyes to see

TODAY was horrible. The 8th graders were killing me, moody and unresponsive, flopped over on their desks one minute and then chasing each around the room the next. C. (from 3rd period, most difficult class) came to my office during lunch and cried. Just bawled and bawled without saying why. I don't know. You tell me what you'd have done. I had a hard enough time not bursting into tears myself.

And then, after the final bell, the fun really begins when I pick up A. and drive to Falls Church for his weekly appointment. I spend the next 5 hours with a psychotic former citizen of the Eastern Bloc trying to be my life coach-- overflowing with helpful suggestions as to why I'm not married, not a homeowner, and have bad hair. Don't try to reason with him--it's no use, the good doctor in the cowboy boots warned minutes earlier. So I sat there. Sat in traffic that would not move and tried not to listen as he compared my life to a Kraftsman mower (virtually worthless) and his own existence to a John Deere tractor (a thing of worth beyond compare).

It goes like this all day. You're not an ATM, he pointed out the other night, in his good & practical way; as usual, reeling in the rambling and spinning it into a useful object lesson. He's right. My reserves of grace & good cheer, patience, pith & insight are awful low lately. Can you find an armored car dealing in currencies this foreign--this rare and valuable?

By the time we reach home I have slipped from uncharitable, to annoyed, to downright frightening and mean. I can barely look my mom in the eye when we sit down to the meal that she timed especially for our late arrival. Foregoing lingering conversation--even basic pleasantries, I slip out the door and across the deck.

OUTSIDE, the sinking sun looks strange above the river, almost surreal. The sky is mostly blue with a wide band of brightest red directly above the water. Normally I don't care too much about sunsets beyond sitting and letting their light fall on me while I read a book. Too common and overdone, I lump them in with boquets of roses, store-bought Valentines--all those unconsidered displays of sentimentality. This sunset holds me for a moment. For whatever reason. Maybe just a cheesy reminder to stop, breath and look, I figured.

And then, back in my room, a perchance flip through a book in search of a phone number and this, suddenly under my nose:

We Used to Grade God's Sunsets
by Rod Jellema

Why we really watched we never said.
The play of spectral light, but maybe also
the coming dark, and the need to trust
that the fire dying down before us
into Lake Michigan's cold waves
would rise again behind us.
Our arch and witty critiques
covered our failures to say what we saw.

The madcap mockery of grading God as though
He were a struggling student artist
(Cut loose, strip it down, study Matisse
and risk something, something unseen--
C-plus, keep trying--that sort of thing)
only hid our fear of His weather
howling through the galaxies. We humored
a terrible truth: that nature gives us hope
only in flashes, split seconds, one
at a time, fired in a blaze of beauty.

Picking apart those merely actual sunsets,
we stumbled into knowing the artist's job:
to sort out, then to seize and work an insight
until it's transformed into permanence.
And God, brushing in for us the business
of clouds and sky, really is a hawker
of cliches, a sentimental hack as a painter.
He means to be. He leaves it to us
to catch and revise, to find the forms
of how and who in this world we really are
and would be, to see how much promise there is
on a hurtling planet, swung from a thread
of light and saved by nothing but grace.


Maybe this won't make sense outside the firing of my neurons, won't hang together in any sort of meaningful way beyond the walls of my own thick skull. Then again, I could be wrong--maybe it might.