Resurrection Clothes

Folks in Alcoholics Anonymous speak of having “the RIDs,” meaning they feel restless, irritable, and discontent without knowing what’s causing it—a generalized feeling of anxiety and fretfulness. I know the feeling only too well, although my addiction is not to alcohol but to fixing people and circumstances. I say that, but of course it’s really an addiction to trying to fix, which results in being unhappy because I can’t fix other people—or most circumstances. Thanks be to God, over the past thirty years or so I’ve learned to more quickly recognize this temptation to fret over what’s beyond my control and instead to refocus on what I can fix: my own thoughts and actions. When the RIDs come, once I realize what’s going on, I may go for a walk, pray, meditate, read, journal, talk it out with someone, do “the next right thing” (another AA term meaning “something constructive”), do something fun, or use a technique called “focusing.”* But the RIDs eventually return, and I find

"The fever left her and she began to serve them”  ~Mark 1:29-39 I never felt a thing so good, so right as that one magic touch, as if he found the place where heat and pain were all dammed up and opened it to flow away. Surprise relief! And then surprise again, the strength! Like nothing I have ever known or could have asked! And all I wanted then, I tell you, all I wanted was to cook, to slice, to mix, to bake enough to serve them all. And soon that “all,” the hurting and oppressed, came flooding to the door. He healed, I served, he healed some more, and then in dark of night he left. Out talking with Yahweh, they said, as he so often did. But this new health he gave with that one touch has never left. The vigor at my age! Well, who’d have thought? But I can also sit like this, and reminisce, just quietly recalling, giving voice to what he gave that day he touched my head, a touch that reached my heart, and

How did it happen? This hiding of my gift to concentrate on his? I’d trained myself by not pursuing math because I saw (or thought I saw) so much more talent in the boys, for whom it seemed to come so naturally. I let it go, the math, and even more, the poetry, the writing—hid it underground. But like anything with half a will to live,  it will emerge again. Am I to judge it? Would I judge  my human child unworthy  of the trouble and the heartache of her raising,  of providing what she needs, of letting her emerge into the world to rise—or seem to fail, then rise at last?                                        …But then, what if she fails at last? What if this gift long hidden has not grown but rotted underground? What if the flighty muse has taken all her offerings to someone else? Well, come on back, I’ll try  to welcome you this time  (although you’re probably  an understudy muse, a muse on training wheels, an adolescen