"Twilights of Dew and of Fire"

I was spending time with the Sammamish River again today; the movement of water and foot feeds my soul in a meaningful way. My time with water has evolved into a habitual routine over the years, deeply intrinsic to the fabric of my identity. I feel occasionally like the waters are more home to me than the walls I sleep between, particularly because housing seems eternally transient.

I especially love my time with water in the spring time. Today, I was struck by the brush on the river bank. Only weeks ago, I forged a path between the reeds and they wept in my wake – clutching at me with twisted, arthritic fingers yellowed and dried by the harshness of winter. This afternoon, verdant growth erupted around my heels and stretched nodding heads up to beg grooming from my fingers. I encountered the One who calls death into life, who makes from dust a new creation. I borrowed from the hope that the grassy bank offered, and felt fresh, green life surging in my limbs.

And I thought of a friend I met on the street corner some time ago . . . a friend I’ve named Twilight. She saw me standing on the corner and ran to me – like she knew me from another life. She threw herself at me and exalted that we’d seen each other, “It’s been so long!” she cried, “You remember me, don’t you?”

I tore through the attic of my mind trying to find her face in a picture book somewhere – dumped over old boxes in a split second and found her . . . nowhere. “It’s so good to see you! I feel like it’s been forever!” Deceitful? Kind of.

She introduced herself to the team-mate standing beside me, explaining of me, “We’ve known each other for years. She saved my life,” turning to me, “You remember, don’t you? The night that man came with the bottle?” She turned back to my friend, “I was so pregnant then – he smashed that bottle against my baby. Bleeding everywhere. She saved me. She saved me!”
I felt confused and flattered – didn’t have the strength to deny my supposed identity, not because I wanted the credit as much as I wanted her to feel connected to someone. Our conversation continued and I was able to draw out some idea of who she was. She hadn’t been in Seattle for a while – working in other cities, travelling around, and clearly using (though I wasn’t sure what).

In the early hours of morning soon before my team packed up for the night, she stumbled back to me – crying, but not in a quiet and endearing way. Snotty and teary-eyed, broken and heaving for the world to hear her pain – she gurgled the story of a bad date. A man had taken her into his car, promised an agreed upon sum, and she had serviced him – then he took all of her money by force, threw her out of his car and dragged her for a ways along the pavement as she struggled. He took her forehead and beat it several times against the cement sidewalk – then drove off and left her. What brings a man to that place?

Her forehead held the marks and the bleeding. I held her and I broke with her. I ached to see her off the streets, and I thought of another I’ve known whose forehead was crowned with blood. The blood cried out against sin – the blood of suffering the punishment of others – the blood that prayed for another way – the blood that feared abandonment, but did not shrink back. The blood that chose this girl, and stood for her even this night. I want that deliverance for her.

A few weeks later, she and I walked the track together – I in a large poofy red jacket, wearing nine layers of clothing and still freezing – she half naked and drunk, weaving among the street lights.

I was honest. More open than I often am. I felt driven to honesty by my hunger for her freedom.

“Why are you here?”

“Where else would I be?”

“What did you dream of when you were a kid?”

“I’ve been on the streets since I was 7. My mom brought me here. I don’t know anything else. And I’m good at this. I’m doing ok. I’m surviving.”

There is a side to cruelty that leaves me breathless and wordless. And all I can say is, “I’m here for you. Call me.”

In my limited literary analysis, Yeats records in “The Blessed” a young man Cumhal searching out an elderly, blind hermit named Dathi to glean from the old man “blessedness.” Typical of old, wise men, Dathi cuts poor Cumhal’s heart with an enigmatic answer, “Blessedness goes where the wind goes,/ And when it is gone we are dead.” I feel in myself the same longing that drove Cumhal – blessedness as prosperity, the promise of security, perhaps not even wealth as much as the absence of fear or worry. It is the same drive that binds the women – that forces them back to the streets and a deceitful cycle of violence, abuse, and exploitation.

Like Cumhal and the women I serve, my initial ideas of blessedness stand in stark contrast to Jesus’. He explains that the blessed are “the poor in spirit,” “those who mourn,” “the meek,” “those who hunger and thirst for justice,” “the merciful,” “the pure in heart,” “the peace-makers,” “the persecuted.” If that’s what it is to be blessed, I’m not so sure I’m in by choice. I don’t like the pieces of my life where I have to grieve, or face regret or mistakes, walk through fire, be hated, get hurt. There has to be something deeper that makes it worth it: the promise of a Kingdom. An unshakable Kingdom – where mourning doesn’t happen anymore, and neither does war, persecution, hunger, or oppression – all of the things that create blessedness in our crazy world. Perhaps it was not Yeats’ intention to draw my eyes to this Kingdom when he closes, “While time and the world are fading away/ In twilights of dew and of fire.” (But it worked, Yeats, it worked.)