psalms, prayers, and early Halloween

This morning, I opened the cupboard door to get a coffee mug to make Kyle some coffee and a small jar of honey came hurtling out as if it had been pitched, hard, by a tiny elf (I couldn't help thinking of those elves that helped the shoemaker and his wife at night, wondering if they had a miscreant cousin whose job is to try and create small kitchen accidents.  But I digress.).  The jar just missed my head--I am almost sure it was going so fast I felt a small gust of wind.  It shattered on the floor, leaving me in bare feet, surrounded by honey and broken glass.
So this jar of honey was a gift from a dear friend on the evening of Rosh Hashanah; she gave it to me with a bag of apples and together we dipped apple slices into the honey and wished each other a sweet new year.
What does it mean that my symbol of a sweet new year, a year in which I hope to be inscribed in the book of life, flew out of my cupboard, pitched for my head and smashed to pieces?  At first I thought I was lucky, because if the honey had hit me on the head, I might have really been hurt (I know, but trust me on the mysterious physics of this morning--it was somehow going fast).  Let's leave it with lucky; I like that interpretation.

Today is Yom Kippur, the day of atonement,   Many Jews will spend most of the 25-hour holy day at the synagogue.  Prayers are said throughout the day and people are meant to reflect upon the sins committed in the last year.  As you know, cancer changes everything and nothing all at the same time, so of course, I have sinned and must seek forgiveness.  I know that I have been guilty of a kind of self-centeredness and pity, a railing against my given reality--it has kept me from being the kind of partner, and mother, and friend that I know I can be.  Among many other sins, I ask for forgiveness from you for the times, here, where I have engaged in an introspective sort of wishful thinking that puts my troubles at the center of the world at the expense of being open more broadly to the tragedy of others and at the same time to joy in the experience of full living.

Temple, though.  Yom Kippur is one of the holy days which doesn't welcome in someone who doesn't know the words, like me.  I need today to be a day of rest as I work through starting this new drug regimen.
That doesn't mean I won't pray.

Psalm 139 begins, "O lord, thou hast searched me, and known me."  Or "You have searched me, Lord, and you know me."  Or "Lord, you know everything there is to know about me." I like the O before Lord, and I like the past tense, as if, at every moment, God already knows us. But my favorite beginning to this psalm comes from the Book of Psalms translated by Robert Alter, which I think is probably the English major's favorite translation: "Lord, You searched me and You know."

Those words "inaugurate one of the most remarkably introspective psalms in the canonical collection." The entire poem posits a God who is inescapably and beautifully omniscient. I think of it as 'and already there.'  God is always already there.  As Alter puts it, the "poem is essentially a meditation on God's knowledge, and on God's inescapable presence throughout the created world." It is the answer to Oh God, why have you forsaken me? the answer to the dark wandering night of the soul.  There is no forsaking.
"There is no word on my tongue, but that You, O Lord, wholly know it."
I don't take this fatalistically, in the sense of free will, or future casting on the part of God.  I take it as intimate knowledge, something resembling the kind of intimate knowledge that I have known between myself and my children, at times, between myself and the people I have fallen in love with, at times.

There is another beautiful moment in the psalm:

For You created my innermost parts,
wove me in my mother's womb,
I acclaim You, for awesomely I am set apart,
wondrous are Your acts,
and my being deeply knows it.
My frame was not hidden from You,
when I was made in a secret place,
knitted in the utmost depths
my unformed shape Your eyes did see
and in your book all was written down.

I read an article about the ways this psalm has been used, including as an an accompanying lyric to the anti-abortion movement, printed on posters in crisis pregnancy centers and tied to high-resolution ultrasounds, the movement's technology servant--and yet who among us who has watched the tiny baby leap into life on the blue screen while the fetal ultrasound monitor ran over our bellies, who does not respond to God's familiarity backwards into time--knitted in the utmost depths, woven in my mother's womb.  I don't have an ounce of patience, not an ounce, for the anti-abortion movement, but the psalm's prediction of cellular understandings, the double helixes of DNA knitted in the utmost depths takes my breath away, sharply.

Robert Alter's translation does not include the phrase the gay rights movement adopted-- "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made."  "Fearfully and wonderfully made": the beautiful cry out for acceptance on signs at gay pride parades, or in sermons where God "discerns" our thoughts from afar: "You know my lying down and my rising up." All of us, completely, known by God, fearfully and wonderfully made. This verse becomes a way back in.

The psalm is my tradition, but I have never had a religion to shut me out, or to welcome me home.  I don't know the words is how I explain my deep discomfort in temple--I am lost in the Hebrew, the prayers, the practice.  My yearning for God has been a haphazard journey, made up of abbreviated Seders, the Chronicles of Narnia, Jesus Christ Superstar, Pema Chodron, Christmas pajamas, cake on Passover, Anne Frank.

I have been thinking about how to pray, and memorizing one or two of the psalms is a good place for someone like me to start because of the poetry.  I have started to remember Psalm 23, because it helps me think about my own funeral.  I spoke with my mother on the topic during our walk to the bog earlier this week--no one likes to have this conversation.  But the time is now, not later.  I have heard people say that people have a fantasy about being at their own funeral--we have Tom Sawyer to thank for shoring up that theory-- but whoever really has that fantasy is not someone who is living closely with death.  That's the fantasy of a teenager, who wishes to know how much she is loved.  I can't see the point of a funeral, unless it does something for the people who are left behind. Does it provide closure? Might it mean something to my children or to my parents to learn that I was loved by others? I can't see how that would create comfort--funerals feel like one more thing to do, one more task amongst many.  But maybe the problem is I haven't been to enough funerals, or to the right funerals.  I've certainly never been to anything you might call a celebration of life.  Do you ever leave a funeral and say that was a good funeral? Maybe you do.

Cameron, my eldest son, is literal-minded and his wit is absolutely dry and lightening quick. He would be a great person to put in charge of a funeral meant to keep its attendees from getting too serious.  I can imagine the sardonically named craft cocktail and witty drawings illustrating the program notes.  I'm starting to think I'm on to something here.  Hopefully I can hold off on this type of request until Cam finishes his finals (see, his point of view is wearing off on me already, get it, finals?--but really, he's in his last semester of his master's program and I don't want him to take his eye off the prize).  Maybe I can get to work designing the program with him, and thinking about what poems I want to push towards you as a farewell offering.  Maybe thinking about it will be enough, in lieu of an actual funeral.  I'll send you all a short reading list and call it a day.

Okay, I hear you. I started out offering solace through the psalms, and I'm starting to get maudlin.  Though I walk in the vale of death's shadow,
 I fear no harm,
for You are with me.
The vale of death's shadow--what a beautiful thing to say, and how frightening, and yet not, even before the terror can alight, and take up real residence in your heart, God is there, with his rod and his staff, to console.  This is what is meant by omnipresence, the very meaning of the word, I think.

Just to keep us on our toes, the kids went with Miss Kim to get Halloween costumes on Monday after school.  There was a key difference between what a five year old might consider acceptable for Halloween (Star Wars, perhaps a robot, a droid) and what a six year old might want--this year, the scarier, the better (and it goes almost without saying that two moms be damned, all of this is unbelievably gendered--my household is light years away from a princess or a unicorn costume, which seem such lovely, harmless ideas (okay, I understand princesses aren't harmless and unicorns are said to be captured only by virgins, an incredibly fraught category in and of itself, but you follow me) was manifest in the moment when Asher and Elijah burst through the door in their costumes, Ash as a werewolf, his plaid shirt in tatters (why werewolves always wear plaid shirts, like certain lesbians, is beyond me) and fake blood around the mouth of his mask, and Eli, wait for it, as Death himself, encased in a black robe and a mask that hid his face and carrying a scythe.  The irony wasn't lost on me, but it was lost completely on him.  Eli wanted to frighten his audience and he had no idea, nor should he, of the weight of his choice on his mother with stage four cancer.  It made me love him, my skinny adorable little Death, with his plastic scythe and his hilarious "Did I scare you, huh mom, did I scare you?"

Not this time, Elijah. When I look at Death, all I see is my irrepressible, charming six year old son, his tattered sneakers peeking out from under the black robe.  I don't think this is exactly the same as God having my back, but it's pretty damn close.