Yesterday I met a dead end and ran into the bathroom. I pressed my face up against the mirror. When you’re that close to a mirror there is no edge or reflection. It was as though I was outside my body looking in at it. Or like it was someone else. Somehow the sense that there was more than one of me gave me courage. It reminded me of something I’d written earlier:
‘She turned to face herself and then they faced the world together’
Something else. Leaving the church felt in many ways like another dead end. When we went back to see if God was still there it had felt somehow like a funeral. Like his funeral. There was something of him still there, but it was just a memory, or people talking about someone not in the room. That made us feel sad. Sadder than anything.
Slowly though, I’m becoming aware of something. It’s funny how slowly. I already had this in words long ago, without ever really understanding them. God is everywhere. God is love. Build your house up as tight and solid as you can. The sheer weight of his rain will push down upon it, until it comes leaking through the walls and windows.
There’s a TV on our wall and a radio in my window. Through them come songs and images, parables and prophecies. When I’m in pain and no one around me cares, a song sung for someone else is somehow sung to me. I’ve always wanted someone to write me a song. And they have, even if they haven’t realised it.
Love has many sources. No one is unloved. How can it be fair for the happily married’s to have all the love, whilst the single-too-long get none? The luxury of being in love is a mere foretaste of what’s always, everywhere, just within our reach.
The flowers left on the bridge are not for them who’s gone; they’re for them who’s still hanging on. Love, once it’s been put out there, is the property of the universe. You become the girl in the poem, the star of the movie, the missing daughter in the newspaper. Love is God. Love is everywhere.
‘Field of diamonds in the sky, are you the tears angels cry?’ Johnny Cash
Sunlight in the Brain Attic 