Mama’s leaf for ddh

Posted on October 5, 2014 by charissagrace

after your dead leaves magnetic and alchemal
drew from you those vapours and fumes
our Mama gathered each bitter sprout one and all
burned them in fiery plumes

i cried for you, with you, sharing your sorrow
and burden inside of my heart
and then found a leaf from the tree of tomorrow
and wrote there with tears a fresh start

i give it to you, now, here, wet and made clean
and waiting the touch of your pen
that will write of promises aquamarine
Made by Mama, kissed with Her Amen.

and worry not that your inkwell might run dry
for I will my tears shed for thee
and there you may dip your quill, write, and then fly
to your Mama-promised destiny

and i? i will walk in the forests and trees
in fall, i’ll catch every fallen leaf
and i’ll gather them precious, add my tears as keys
and i’ll Sister-stand there, stark relief

so write on these leaves with your heart and your soul
and when they are filled up, write some more
and our Mama will faithfully there make you whole
from your leaves to your pen to your core.

i love you, dear sister and friend,
me, your ever faithful bringer of tear-washed leaves

Charissa’s Grace Notes: One Year In

Posted on October 5, 2014 by charissagrace

Welp…it seems that the obligatory post has thrust itself forward, or rather time has thrust it forward as it rolls on. Today is the date of my first blog post here, one year ago.

Grace Notes is One Year Old.

It’s funny…way back then, I hardly knew what to write about, I hardly knew anything, really (now, I don’t know much more, but I much more know what I don’t yet know).

I knew that my life had been shattering inside…
I knew that I had admitted, out-loud with words, the deepest secret of my life, one that I had kept even from myself…
I knew that I wanted to die, but could not bear the thought of my darling finding me, or worse yet, not finding me…
I knew that I did not know who I was, and yet I knew very well who I wasn’t…
I knew that I had to get some help, and had searched the internet for counselours in my area…

…and that was it. I sat down, a year ago, and asked Mama (Who at that time was still Lady Grace to me…I had not yet given up deep enough to discover the surface of the depths of Her Great Love Personally for me…for me.)…

It was early, at the usual times I have been haunted since I can remember, and I was up…coping…just coping, using all the ways I had developed over years to push the pain down, to put up some sort of layer between my insides which thrum to even the slightest breeze and jangle with the unfathomable ways of others who say and do things that literally flummox me.

I said out loud, “Lady Grace, here I sit in the night, awake again (naturally)…what in the world shall I call my blog?

You know that feeling when you undress for bed, and the room is cold and you know that under the blankets will be cold too but will warm quickly, and so the moment you are undressed you just snik straight into bed quick as can be lickity-brindle? And then the first rush of cold covers, followed by that delicious bloom of warmth and you have never felt so snuggly-cozy?

Well, that was what it was like when the title, in whole cloth, snikked into my mind and was bracingly clear and then started to glow warm…as I saw it, and then began to love it…Charissa’s Grace Notes: Transitioning from works to Grace and death to Life.

And in that year…

I survived a family member not speaking to me for 4 months (4 months!!! I freaking thought I would die!! How do you go 4 months and not talk to someone you love? Heck, I would talk to my bff every 4 minutes if we lived in paradise lol!!)…

I survived major betrayal and blame shifting at work…from multiple sources (and I was not even close to being out then)…

I survived suicidal feelings that got so strong and scary that I made an attempt, until She snatched me up (thank you Mama)…and Constance, I think about that day, that horrible day of weeping until I was dry and still couldn’t stop crying, and how words lost their power and I was reduced to literal babbling in the woods as I thought to myself I am insane, I am truly having a mental breakdown, and how close, how awfully close I was… tumblr_ncjrcmD9gI1qczwklo1_1280 and if I had, none of the poetry that I wrote would be now…I would not know my bff, or my Sissa Kat…my darling would still be unsparkly and shriveled inside and utterly shattered…

I walked into a wonder-ful moment when Mama showed up…and that I will keep to myself… tumblr_naayt7L3AA1qc91i1o1_500

Somehow someway I began to grasp that I am worth something, not a monster or pervert of freak (yeah, those words will likely echo in klaxon intrusion til I am resurrected and set free)…

I discovered that I am a real person, always have been, and have been fighting for the life of the “man” that I portrayed for all those years and I developed a “resilience” (thanks for that word bff) that simply would not give in…I found me… tumblr_nc8zw1O12y1rr74i9o1_1280

I found out that I am sort of a cool person at times, and have something to offer thru my poems…

I found the courage to start transition!! The courage to tell Dr. Jessie (who laughed and rejoiced and said “Oh thank God you finally figured this out, we here knew 6 months ago!)… tumblr_ncriliyBsU1t96d7to1_500

I started going to a spoken word poetry group in Portland, one that I didn’t know a soul there, and no one knew me either…and I went there as me…me…Charissa Grace, and in faith I spoke my self to them, my name to them…and they received me, and once in a while they think my poems are good…

I wrote 2 very significant (to me…it didn’t create much of a furor to anyone else) poems…they marked some sort of a turning for me somehow…I think it was after my HRT had had a chance to extinguish the testosterone poisoning I had suffered from for 54 years…

My Heart Dares

Carapace

Those were written at the end of the first quarter of the year, and in hindsight I see that quarter was a detox time…detoxing from the awful assaults death made on me the year before, and the year before, and the year before…the declarations there in those 2 poems are still ringing…

I began to dress as me, out of town and openly, and how can I ever ever ever find the words to tell what that is like, because as you read if you are cis-gender you literally lack the ground of (non)-being to feel this. If you dressed up as the gender you are not, and went about, seriously, for a day or two…then you would know just a poor facsimile of what dysphoria is…well I began to experience time lived in a non-dysphoric experience… tumblr_me80pisMV81qgk2yao1_500

I further integrated, and regained a ton of childhood memories…and Mama showed me the true reality of “that event”…the one that tore me in two for the next 5 decades…and though I cannot unhear that woman shrieking in fearful angry horror and I will never not hear the epithets she hurled into my fabric, I at last can hear Mama, and Her whispered words tenderly telling me who I am…and She knows cus She is the One who made me…

I began to spontaneously sing worship and praise songs again…and I was shocked when one day I heard myself, and knew I had been singing over an hour and not even knowing that I had… tumblr_nbooffw6JI1sl0gcwo1_500

I began to pray again…oh I had always “prayed” cus that is what a good christian does, right? Pays the Lord their bribes? (Yes, I went there…and if you are honest you will admit that you have done this, bribed God with your deeds and prayers…)…but I began to pray for real again, pouring out my momentary heart (and ddh you think I talk a lot to you…giggle! Mama knows…)…

I rode bike with my darling…together…and those times are better than all of my years of riding alone…

…and thru all of that…I wrote here, most everyday, but not always…and I began to discover I have a voice, and a name…

…and 4 days ago, that name became legal…all things are made new, the old has passed away behind me.

Along the way people connected to this blog, and it tickles me that there are actually people who follow these mewlings and musings…and tickles me even more when I see blogs that have thousands of followers!! LOLOL!!! How the freak does that even happen, since I really don’t get it how I have any followers at all??? But really? The only followers that matter are the ones who read each post, and invest it with life, dress them up and let them live far beyond the page…to you is my blood grateful thank you!

And I am still Charissa Grace…God’s Grateful Gleam of Grace displayed…if She and They love me, I know They love you as well and more so.

Six Months Later

Posted on October 3, 2014 by charissagrace

OMG…Constance, I am hunting back thru the archives at Gracenotes, and I just found something I wrote back in May that would have been PERFECT for last Friday when I had that 4 hour ordeal…I am excerpting it here for you…

Hi Constance…

…a quick note this morning to comment on some thing on my heart.

I know a lot of people over the years who are very drawn to me because I am open about the relationship Father, Jesus and Lady Grace have forged with me. They get all the credit, for this is true: there is none righteous, not one who has even sought after God! That means that if you are in relationship with Them, it is Their doing, and none of your own, save the assent of your will.

And in the openness of our relationship, these individuals find a self-affirmation of their own faith, relationship, etc.

But here is the kicker: I am also open about my struggles, my failures and flaws. I put on no religious airs, and when They expose any that have crept in quietly when pride was crooning its deadly lullaby, I renounce those pretentions as quick as I can. I try to boast in my weakness, and not in my strength, as Father promises that the Strength of Jesus is made perfect in my weakness.

So…it is just a matter of time before the people who are drawn to me are repelled by my lack of performance, my lack of keeping up the appearance and doing the things that signal that I am “orthodox”, saying the things that signal I am “safe”, and practicing the things that signal I am “one of us”. Soon, there are judgements, accusations, demands that I toe the line and not use my freedom to “make them stumble”.

Huh? I thought Paul was talking about someone who was weak in conscience and in their relationship, who might fall away completely from the life of someone strong in the faith, so the strong one should bear with the weak one patiently. These people twist that word, are strong in their conscience and faith, and boast that nothing could pull them away.

No…they are simply using faith words to try to keep me in the christian gulag that they run. And, as I know in my deepest knower that my Hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness, and that all other ground is sinking sand, I regretfully, but purposefully ignore them, and thus end up branded a heretic.

You know the old maxim: if you don’t tick like I tick, you’re a heretic!

So…that wouldn’t be so bad in itself…in many ways we are known by our enemies as much as our friends.

…

Dearest Christendom dweller…you who sits back and reflexively filters every word thru your fruit detector lenses and doctrinal code breakers, and then marks red lines in your mind all over everything that doesn’t match up with your current understanding of the magisterial magnificent word of God…you will not like me when I tell you that you are in greater deception than the ones you judge!

You are in greater judgement than the ones you have consigned to your “love” (the affectations of behaviour that you manifest towards those you dislike or disapprove of or judge but know that they “need to know Jesus” so you will essentially brown-nose them into the kingdom)!!

Oh, oh how my heart longs for the day when we would take our eyes off each other, quit inspecting each other’s fruit as if we are Jesus, and simply open our hearts in joy and allow Perfect Love to fill us…to overflowing…and eventually to flooding the lives of those around us.

Constance…it is so simple and pure, really…just be kind…just do justice…just love mercy…just show compassion always…just let the abundant exceedingly great and abounding Grace make a “Grace-mess” everywhere.

…

Sorry Constance…that has been brewing in me for a good while. Some email comments, and some other things I had to write out of my heart so they wouldn’t fester.

Your regularly scheduled mewlings will commence after She feeds me this morning! 🙂

Love always, with the Magnificent Love of Father shown in Jesus and revealed by Lady Grace…

Charissa Grace, the glad, golden and grateful (and sometimes defiant) daughter of Them

Whooaa…can you believe that I am sometimes defiant?? Moi??? giggles

well…it is not uncommon for me to be ahead of myself a half a year or more!!

Do justice
Love mercy
Walk humbly

Charissa

To Forgive, or not to forgive? THAT is the Question!

Posted on October 2, 2014 by charissagrace

Dear Constance…

I was made aware of a fairly profound article today on the subject of forgiveness. What make this article scintillating is it is taking a very “outlaw” position that runs directly counter to our cultural assumptions surrounding the topic of forgiveness: what it is, who should give it, who deserves it.

Her take is that there is a coercion of forgiveness present in our culture that is in a sense just worthless cheap grace. She examines the rise of those cultural assumptions and exposes the underlying flaws in them. Then, she talks about some of the ways that people respond when she shares her ideas, and in the process gives a lot to think about.

Constance, I am posting this because in many ways it mirrors my own thinking on this topic. I think I differ just a bit, but that is due to axiomatic beginnings underlying my position, rather than any disagreement with the substance of what she writes. But I would like to take the occasion of her thoughtful and provoking article to codify some of my own thinking on the subject.

First of all, the concept of forgiveness and what it is has been trashed thoroughly over the years and passing styles and fashions of thought and belief. It has also been forced down our throat in such a way that it literally devalues the person being asked to forgive…all in the name of setting them free. When a person can do the most heinous act, commit egregious violation and abuse, and then turn around and demand to be forgiven by the one they have wounded it is akin to giving them a free pass to another form of rape!

No…forgiveness is nothing that can ever be demanded! No one has the right to be forgiven. Get that! No one has the right to be forgiven!

Anything you have a right to is in the field of Justice. Anything you have no rights to but deeply desire is in the field of Mercy. Any attempt to grasp which is which and when to give either or both is in the field of Humility.

Look familiar? I thought so.

So…forgiveness. Basically this is the decision and declaration by a person who has been violated in any way shape or form that they willingly choose to relinquish their right for justice and their right to be repaid what was taken from them and restored to a place of integration and wholeness. There are any number of violations and any number of redresses for them…and there are some that literally cannot ever be repaid. In our reality you always…and I mean that…you always have a right to be repaid when you are wronged.

You need to understand that if you choose to forgive (which means simply saying “you don’t owe me anything, now or ever”), you are intentioning to forgo any claim to redress and restitution. You need to know in your heart why you are choosing this option. You need to know that you will likely hurt and ache for a long long time, even if you forgive and usually especially if you forgive. Forgiveness is a sacrifice, and sacrifice always…always involves suffering.

Do you see how this is something that cannot (literally) be coerced from you? Because if you are guilted into it, or coerced into it then no matter what you have mouthed, you have not forgiven (and I am not assuming that as a value here, just stating what is and isn’t). You have granted another the opportunity to “get away with something”, and this is horrible for them!! Oh yeah. You think it is bad if you confront someone, that it might cause hard feelings? Think about the condition that results in letting someone get away with something, which further emboldens them, lets them sink deeper into their places of being violators…

What is crucial here is to understand the core, the absolute essence of what you do and why you do it when you forgive. That is a journey only you can make. There are sources to consult that will help guide you…there are powers that will assist you should you decide that the sacrifice of forgiveness is one that you choose to make…but it is only genuine if you walk that lonesome valley every last inch yourself, right there in the shadow of death, and then emerge on your own terms.

I want to share with you my own position on this topic. Of course you can expect that as best as I have been able to figure out, I have sought to base my thinking on the life and example of Jesus, Who is God Incarnate to me, and thus as an example is an easily seen picture of the Creator’s desire for the ways in which we “do relationship”…and also on the further writings in the New Testament which I believe to have been inspired in the heart of the author by Lady Grace, and then written out and set in counter-balance with other writings so that there is a dynamic tension which would always drive us to the Person of God and keep us from the horror of a behavioural code which would doom us all.

I think there are 2 very important sub-categories to the general act called “forgiveness”

The first one I call “Universal Forgiveness”.

What this refers to is the state of being that all humans are currently in due to the Crucifixion that hangs in the very center of the Universe and
penetrates/intersects/pierces every reality and every time and every culture and every experience.

In this Highly Exalted and Ultimate Act, all things have been set up for the opportunity to find wholeness once again…the chance to be made brand new! Not just a “re-run” or a do-over”, but the chance to actually become something you never were before!

This state of forgiveness has nothing to do with any decision that anyone makes but The One who was crucified. Makes sense, it is consistent with what I had said earlier about the essence of forgiveness. If you never know about it, it is still done, and you are still poised for the full freedom that its embrace entails. If you know all about it, but reject it as unnecessary, it changes nothing about it. And, if you fully embrace it and receive, it still changes nothing!

It simply changed the climate once for all in the entire Universe! His words “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do”…they echo into all of our dark and ignorant, benighted nooks and crannies! But those words themselves have nothing to do with the fate of a violator in and of themselves! They are not a free pass, a get out of jail free card.

There remains the question: if indeed this Action IS, then there are results assumed, demands implied, or consequences ready to unfold depending on anyone’s choice of what to do about this deed, if anything…and that is where we get to the second sub-category, and it is in this category that I think the author of this article has a powerful and cogent offering to us.

The second category is what I call “Personal Forgiveness”.

Think of Scrooge McDuck’s treasure vault, okay? All the gold, the jewels, the dollar bills, the wealth just spewing out everywhere. Now think of the key to that door being available…all you have to do is go ask the authority who watches over the vault if they would give you the key. Whether or not you do that is your choice…but here is what happens…ask not and you need to go round up your own treasure. Ask…and it is yours for the taking, as much as you need!

But you have to ask.

Similarly, if you desire personal forgiveness in the broad sense of the word for all the wrongs and bent of your being, you must ask the One who has the treasure and the key.

If you do ask, it comes to you with a couple of rules:

first is that you are receiving freely, there is no price you can pay that is enough to cover the cost…it is free…and as a free gift you are then bound to give freely as well.

And the second is that from that day forward, however and in what manner you choose to forgive others you are setting the measure for your own forgiveness process. Again know that I am asserting that based on my understanding of the words of Jesus. You will have to decide if it has any merit on your own.

Now, and this is crucial to get: as you choose to grant forgiveness, your forgiveness will function in both the “Universal” arena and the “Personal” area. That point is the absolute key to a clear heart in your decisions about forgiveness.

Now it is time to explore the process on our end personally…let me take you through my own decision matrix, okay?

There was a situation that I am thinking of in which I was deeply violated, actually spiritually ganged up on by a group of men in the “Name of Jesus” (of course, isn’t it always?)…I left that meeting torn up inside, literally mauled and torn apart, and each one of them had taken their turn at me. I was absolutely completely totally innocent of the charges. But how does one prove a negative? Right? If it did not diminish the horror and evil of actual physical rape, I would call it a spiritual rape.

As I drove home, barely able to see from the tears and sorrow and hurt of violation, I was talking to Them, for They knew of my innocence! And I was running thru the matrix, and ultimately was able to choose to forgive, and by that I meant in the Universal sense…they did not know what they thought they knew. I chose that they did not owe me anything before God for what had occurred.

I never ever told them of this…nothing is quite so smarmy and sickening as the so called saint who comes back and boasts odiously “I forgive you”, when in fact you haven’t asked for forgiveness and maybe you don’t need forgiveness! Maybe they are just offended right?

No, I never said a word, but inside my own heart, still hurt and torn (and was for months after) I declared that they did not owe me. I did so because I felt that to be the authentic loving thing to do, and because I know…I know what a generous measure I need for forgiveness in my own life! I want to over-forgive rather than under-forgive!

But I never ever brought it up with those men. And there is not one of them that I ever tried to be close to or spend time with or give access to my heart to. Why would I? They were violators…but worse…they were unrepentant!

After several weeks, one of them finally pulled his head and came to me. Stupid me, I thought he had come to repent, and my heart leapt in joy at the chance to truly forgive a truly repentant heart.

See, repentance is not “just being sorry”. It is not mere remorse, not mere apology. No, repentance is when you know…you know what you have done, and there has been a deep and fundamental sorrow over that act accompanied by a total determination to do whatever is necessary to repair and restore the person hurt. Repentance is when you have the revelation that what you did was wrong, period. Full stop. End of story. There is no justification, no excuse, no explanation…there is only:

“I hurt you terribly, and I was sooo deeply wrong! I grieve over what I have done and will do my best to learn from this and ask for help in becoming a different and better person. Should you ever decide to give me the opportunity to repair and restore our friendship it will be far greater than I deserve. In the meantime, I withdraw to give you space to make the best decision for you, and just know I will be refining everyday, seeking to become better.”

Or words to that effect.

Sigh…as I look back I see how this was a difficult thing for me to learn…the presence of an apology does not indicate a truly repentant heart. It is one of the ways that we empower abusive people in our relationships, this notion that an apology is the purchase medium and forgiveness is the commodity, and if you don’t “sell a forgiveness to them” then you are the one with the problem, you are the one with the issue. That is a lie.

The only condition under which you are obligated to even take a LOOK at the possibility to give forgiveness in this category of “Personal Forgiveness” is a repentant heart making no demands whatsoever and determined to do whatever is already possible to do to repair and restore.

But no…he had gotten wind that I was hurt, and so he came and demanded I forgive him…said that he had a right to be forgiven!! OMFG!! (and I almost said that outloud on the spot!!) He violated me, and then demanded his right for forgiveness.

I tried to explain to him the need for repentance, for recognition and understanding of the essential wrong and violation…his reply? “Just tell me the magic words and I will say them, okay?”

Well, needless to say, I didn’t say to him “I forgive you”. The mere saying of those words would have been meaningless! There was nothing to forgive and no way to forgive because the required cognizance on his part was absent.

I had already forgiven in the Universal sense of declaring they owed me nothing…but in the personal sense, there was no platform for the forgiveness to take place, because the repentance aspect was missing.

Chew on these things for awhile…and in the mean time I will confess that I have been steeped in the Coerced Forgiveness culture, and I think that I experienced some of the wounds I did to help develop these current understandings. Before I conclude, I will refer you to a beautiful post on forgiveness, which I think contains the elements that I refer to above…it is over at Dani’s blog “Blooming Spiders” (yaaay Dani!)…

…and then I will confess here my recent guilt of “demanding forgiveness”. It happened last year, around this time. I very foolishly shared some incredibly explosive news with someone I love deeper than life itself, and my timing was atrocious! Totally self centered, completely shared out of desperation and insecurity and a deep need for this person’s love and approval. She has always secretly been my hero, and it has at times been hard for us because we are a lot alike. Well, she was hurt, scared, upset, angry, felt I had taken from her the aspect of choice, stripped her of any power to listen with strength and offer me the benefits of who she is. I demanded…

…and she was not wanting to interact with me. Understandably so, I see that now. But at the time I was soo wracked with the guilt and horror at my poor choices and clumsy stomping around…and I was also terrified during this time that I would lose my family like what happens to the vast majority of transgender people. I wanted some reassurance, I wanted restoration myself…but no. Instead of waiting, patiently and penitently enduring, I demanded!

Dearest Lil Red Songbird…I was wrong. I am so sorry for my demands…my insistences…the ways I unwittingly sought to coerce you…and while we have long resolved the original issue I want you to know that I carry that hurt everyday, as a reminder to be careful and wise, and openhanded with power.

Okay, without further ado, head over to Stir Journal and check out a very powerful and provoking piece of writing.

In a life commitment to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly…
Charissa Grace

PS: I have a poem on this stuff: Gifts You Give Yourself . Perhaps it is helpful? perhaps not…

Today is the first day of the rest of my life!

Posted on October 2, 2014 by charissagrace

Dear Constance…it is official! At 1:15:15 PM yesterday, the judge said the words…and I legally became me.

Charissa Grace White

I guess I am out there now…still have yet to do the entire company sit down and talk, which will be about 15 minutes…but things are moving along.

And yes…I did wake up this morning and feel totally different. Not some massive quantitative change, but rather a deep and profound qualitative change. I have often jokingly sang to myself “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce…well, now for real I do.

I went out to my car to leave work around noontime, to go home and get ready. I see a yellow legal pad with writing on the seat…and there is a vase with 6 beautiful lavender coloured roses!. They were from my darling darling DARLING!!

I dressed nice, in a style that gets me lotsa compliments (Scorpio-Patrol I think you have seen the outfits??), and arrived walking straight and tall and in the right sort of way proud. I looked everyone straight in the eye and smiled. I was treated with deference by this old man there…I honestly do not think he realized I was transgender! He was kind and interactive.

The clerk office opened, and within 5 minutes I had my papers and was on my way to a teeny courtroom. It had 5 rows of benches, and felt like a mortuary funeral service chapel.

In the back, there was an advocate for battered women talking to a woman about a very very scary sounding man that she had been involved with. I thought about how I had been treated by the old man. I prayed that I would not have to sit through that case.

When the judge arrived, she walked forward…slim, serious, no nonsense, and appeared highly competent. I was equal parts afraid and excited.

She called for me, and I stood, and then…

…she did this thing with her eyes and face that told me non-verbally “you are so brave for being here!” I just know that is what she was saying. I turned in my papers, and she read them over, the ghost of a smile playing at her eyes and hovering at the corners of her mouth…and then she took her pen, and brandished it!! And then she signed…announced that I was now Charissa Grace White, and openly congratulated me.

I walked out and down the stairs, and then in a rush I began to weep, overcome in the moment with the monumental implications of one loooonnngggg journey at last drawn to a close, and a new one well and truly begun.

The clerk was moved by my tears and much nicer…mayhap she figured out that this was a big deal?

I was alone.

Oh, I know you were there, but Mama had distanced everything, everyone…it was just me…and Her. I went home and stood in our house, raised my hands in the air and upturned my face, and I prayed out loud to Her, thankful, grateful, supplicating…

…aware that I had started the first life ignorant of Her…and was beginning the second in relationship with Her, the most amazing indescribable being ever.

Later in the day, I was able to have a short conversation with my bff, and her words of life just laid down right beside the prayers I prayed, and then later in the evening, my darling and I opened a bottle of pink champagne and toasted many things.

I am out.

I am free.

I am Charissa Grace, my Mama’s daughter of grace and sister to the Great Precious One.

I am at last glad to be alive.

Mama You Told Me

Posted on October 1, 2014 by charissagrace

You told me there would be silences,
differences between
mountain streams and valley brooks,
You told me Your flow was warm,
liquid collecting of the gifts
and graces of valleys.
You said my bracing quick lightning was
“clear and quenched thirst, but good lord girl,
to bathe in that electric chill??
I might never sleep again!”

You said.
You told.

And Your Face
so still and mobile
and wreathed in grace,
always grace…
and determined healing.
You wear tears naked
like jewels, like crystal
chips of Your Clear Heart,
intimate on Your face.

and me…spit up and emptied
and waiting for You
to fill the silent spaces
that ate grace and jeered
while feasting on my food.
me emptied, waiting …
and my heart,
ego-stained and washed clean,
captured
by Your face,
Your gift,
Your grace…

waiting…for that one grain of sand
to start an avalanche within me
of hope, nay!
of Hope,
sure and certain of its end,
like a leaf on a stream floating easily
on its way to the sea is certain
that it shall the voyage endure
and enjoy rejoicing!

You told me there would be…
You told me warm…
You told me…
You

Jacob’s Half-Sister

Posted on October 1, 2014 by charissagrace

words.

swallowed in medicine times
but found to be only poison
slow half-life killers
just in time spat out
in relief,
in apprehension,
in hope…

i am jacob’s half-sister
confessing her sin of being…
her…

“guilty of wasting a perfectly good man”
say those words that lay writhing
in a painful pile of self-loathing
at my feet, finally, and not
at my throat, those words
with their acrid foul smelling stench
befouling my legs and
the air around me.

i am expiated.
and my Mama is well pleased
and readying me.

the stone under my head grows soft
and i think about my long ago
half-brother, and his ladder.
i search the brooding night sky
for mine, my eyes
pleading like puppies
hungry for milk

but my ladder is my heart.
i know that, finally,
and the skies will open
only as my heart pries open
to spit the pearls formed
within this shell-shocked soul

the stone under my head becomes flesh
and i think about how jacob named
that stone, that ebenezer memory
of open skies and accessible heavens…
bethel…and it echoes in the dark,
rings midst the stars and
chimes in cloudy choruses.

that stone,
that living stone had legs
to wander, God’s house sojourning
from place to place and time to time
ever wandering…
the stone of Scone
stone of destiny
stone of coronation
old, red, sandstone

the stone under my head becomes red
and throbs and thrums and thrills
my soul open and searching the skies,
and i sense it will speak
as it spoke so long ago
and whisper my name,
my new name from heaven.
but it pushes me to listen elsewhere,
my answers not from
rock and sand and ruin
but from the Cornerstone Rock
and its bloody open hand
red and throbbing and thrumming

my half-brother was grasper
and then God Persists…
and me…
i was messenger,
herald blood bought
price paid
white as snow
washed.
but now,
named now…

the stone under my head becomes blue
and then becomes wind,
and disappears to run
in trees and mountains and back to me
from Mama singing Her sweet answer
to my bitter long palaver…
singing my name’s song,
yes, my stone singing
the singing stone
the wind stone singing
my name-song on my face,
singing Love on my face
and my name, my name
echoes ever in me singing
charissa grace

Never Again

Posted on September 27, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, I want to write here my commitment to myself and to you, and also state ahead of time that I recognize the result of this commitment will be quite a bit of ostracization from many people who call themselves Christians, but want to use that name to police me and my life decisions.

First of all, let me state that I am not removing myself from the scope and majesty of the wonderful word of God. When read and understood properly, it is a document of collected writings that show a God of love and advocate a relational ethic, not a legal ethic or a behavioral ethic. Right standing with God is found in right relationship! Not right deeds or right thinking (though each will likely result when you focus on maintaining a whole relationship first).

Given the pre-eminence of my commitment to this relational ethic, I am fair game for being called into account for anything that violates this ethic…things like committing adultery, committing murder, stealing, cheating, assaulting another physically or verbally, harboring hatred in my heart, and other things such as that. See the thing in common? All of them involve a relational breech with either myself, my neighbor, or God.

But:

BUT:

I am no longer going to subject myself to the inquisitions that I previously felt I owed anyone who wanted to “correct me” or “express their concerns” to me about who and what I am. For the record: there is nothing in the Bible that is prescriptive on the subject of being transgender, and there is less than that on the subject of whether or not a transgender person should pursue transition.

Therefore, anything beyond genuine questions seeking to ascertain what I face in order to stand with me and help my life to glorify God is off limits. I am not going there again.

Here is why:

In my recent encounter with a man that I have known for about 25 years, I spent 4 hours of my life in the attempt to reach this individual’s heart. Truth is? I never had a chance. He listened to me about an hour and a half, with a few questions, and then began to interject with a list of “concerns” which he had written before he even heard my story! He began by saying that he might (might!) modify what he had written if he had heard my story first…but since he was soo upset, he felt justified in going ahead.

He then proceeded to list for me several concerns that ranged from things that simply were not true factually about what being transgender is, all the way to accusations that I was under the influence of a demonic spirit!

He thinks that transgender people are victims of the fall (we all are victims of the fall…whether or not being transgender is a direct result of the fall or not is moot, as the Bible simply is silent on the topic). He also thinks that transgender people are bound by the words of Jesus that we “take up our cross and follow Him”…meaning that verse prohibits us from pursuing technological help and remedy which is readily available and so swiftly brings about such immediate change emotionally and spiritually, and is documented in so many places and in so many ways.

(Constance, I am very capable of nuking this proof-texting rape of these words, if you are interested, please let’s pursue that in the comments or via email, but trust me, it is not about transition specifically!).

Clearly, this man had seized upon this verse and wrenched it to fit his preconceived judgement that transition should not be undertaken…an opinion of his, not a biblically given command. He did not think it was wrong for someone born with a hole in their heart to seek surgical repair, or someone born with a cleft palate to seek surgical repair, or any other number of examples…just transition! he was intractable in this opinion, and I was considered by him to be indulging the flesh.

Next, he told me that I was under the influence of a spirit of deception that he called “the impostor”, and that this spirit opposed my becoming who God wanted me to be (which was code for him saying I was not becoming who he wants me to be). When I asked him if he thought I was bearing more fruit in my life in the last year than he had seen before, he affirmed that this was noticeably so, and so I then pointed out that it seemed to me the impostor was doing a pretty counter-productive job, as I was becoming more, and not less like Jesus…reminded me of the Pharisees who accused Jesus of casting out demons by demonic power!!

Then he told me that I was going to lose out on the blessing of being a patriarch of my family (nope, didn’t touch this…it would have been like telling a fish that it is in the water).

Next I was informed that he had never been so devastated since he was divorced from his first wife and that marriage totally fell apart…that he was just barely more devastated by that than he was by my decision to transition! When I asked him how many times we have had dinner together in 25 years, he answered none. When I asked him if we had ever done anything…anything socially together, he said no, never. When I asked him if he had ever come to my house, reached out to me when my father died, or when my children experienced growing pains, when I was injured and couldn’t do chores, he said no. When I asked if he agreed that we had not truly been a part of each others’ lives with the exception of the occasional church activity and our seeing each other at work where we casually interacted, he said yes, he agreed…

…so when I pointed out that this seemed to indicate a judgement of me made from the outside with no real knowledge of me what so ever, and thus would point to his devastation being far more his own issue rather than my “violation”, he denied it! He said that the Holy Spirit was laying it on his heart! That my claims that Mama had been gently leading me, confirmed by my wife, by my therapist whom I have opened my entire life to, by my naturopath who knew I was transgender at least a year before I did, and by a few close friends who lived everyday with me…that all of that was purely subjective and his own subjective “feeling of conviction” had just as much weight and legitimacy!

I kid you not.

When I asked him to show the biblical passages upon which he rested his “concerns”, he confessed this: “the bible is silent on this subject so I can’t actually say this is sin“. Shocked by his terminology, I asked him “Do you want to be able to say this is sin?” He got offended with me, and said that I was being harsh to him (!!! Yes, he went there). I said “no, not at all. I am so struck by your word choices. They reveal so much to me, for I would have phrased it something like this ‘Since the bible is silent, I would never say that someone was sinning in their pursuit of transition, absent knowledge of the relational parameters between the person and God, and friends and family.'”

He sought many times to other me and police me, and I gently and firmly rebuffed every attempt.

And then at the conclusion, he said that I had shocked him, because he thought I would blow up at him (“blow a gasket” is what he said)…Constance, when I was dissociated from myself experiences like this were very threatening to me, and I did tend to react very strongly and vehemently when accused unfairly. But I was calm, peaceful, and sorrowful far more for him than for myself…this bothered him, because it didn’t jibe with the picture of a demonized deceived person who was in rebellion to God.

But it wasn’t enough…he told me that he (and this is a quote) “had to obey his conscience above all else, and that when people asked him about me it was his duty to tell them his opinion and concerns regarding me”.

Yes, Constance…he has elevated his own conscience even above God, for when I inquired what he would do if God told him to remain silent, he said that God would never ask him to deny his conscience! I think you can see the problem with this…essentially there is a conflation of his conscience with what God wants! If he feels something strong enough, and labels it his conscience, then it is the same as God talking!

I did not have the heart to point out to him that even a cursory examination of biblical teaching regarding the conscience commands us to put the conscience and behaviour of our brothers/sisters as preeminent to our own…besides, it would not do any good. He considered it his right to out me, to anyone, in the name of conscience.

(Charissa before she decided to refuse to let others savage her)

(Now here is a little secret, Constance…part of the reason I agreed to meet with this person is that I suspected this might be the endpoint of things…and the truth is that I am ready to come out…I want to move on, get it over with and get on with an effective and fruitful life lived free and without a mask. So I sort of planned to use him as a stalking horse. If I wasn’t ready, I would have not met with him. Nevertheless, it was staggering to me…the arrogance that he so blindly bathed in, wallowed in…oh, and by the way, he has no “official ecclesiastical authority” in any denomination, or for that matter in my own life! He is simply a fellow follower of Jesus…and make no mistake, he does indeed love God and love people…just within the boundaries he has chosen to call legitimate.)

He specifically said his conscience demanded it of him. I didn’t even bother to ask him what he thought would be the consequence if he decided to not speak, to be silent and urge people to come to me if they had questions…I already knew his reply would be this: if I am not true to my conscience, then your blood is on my head…a phrase that indicates he considers me blood guilty of something or other, and also believes he is both qualified and called to be the bringer of correction to me, never mind by what credential or authority…there is an old testament comment in Proverbs that uses this phraseology…people who have adopted this as a moral code use it to justify all kinds of things including bombing abortion clinics and other heinous acts like that. The people at that crazy church who are so virulently anti-gay use this idea to justify their own evil deeds.

So his conscience is more important to him than I am, than the lives of the people who he talks to that may have been open to actually getting to know for themselves where I am at and what I am going thru but after he gets done will almost certainly avoid me…and the lives of the people who may have been touched by newly open-hearted lovers of God who would reach out to transgender people in love because of knowing me, and who I am, and my being transgender makes it not as weird as they thought it was…

And lastly, he said he would never ever call me “Sister”, or a woman…that this would be him empowering my lie and participating in it by proxy! What does one do with that…besides just shake off the dust and move on?

Constance: I had no chance of persuading him that this was a good thing, a fruitful thing, a blessing. None.

Everything I said to counter him was evidence of my deception and was a regurgitation of the evil that the deceptive spirit had spoken to me…and everything I was silent to I was silent to because I was incapable of refuting his great convicting words (he is wrong…I was silent because I didn’t want to destroy him by stripping him of every vestige of intelligent discourse and exposing his xenophobic foundations…when someone says they read about transgender issues for a few minutes the night before, and really don’t need to do any more research because God is speaking to them…well, there is nothing to be said there, is there?).

So here is my resolution: I will never again submit to such so called “expression of concern”. I will seek to find out ahead of time why someone wants to discuss my transition, and if it is for right reasons I will go ahead after giving the caveat that if they begin to “correct me” I will shut them down and leave the situation.

This is not evidence of my not being correctable…it is evidence that I am finally going to not be a dormat and put myself in harms way…which I have always done before (ask my wife, she can tell you of years and years…)

This man right this moment thinks me in error…nothing I said made a difference…and the others who will be coming, and many far worse than he, for he is at least merely passive aggressive, so his demeanor and voice are calm and pleasant…well, they will be even less persuadable!

They will do this (and it is a fact…ask any of your church friends, they can tell you): they will conclude that I am deeply deceived and in sin…because I won’t let them befoul me with accusations…so why should I even try to persuade them?

My therapist said something very powerful…she asked me what would be the result of my refusing to allow them to savage me so…and I said if I don’t, they will think me a heretic and not a true christian…and she then asked me “and what will happen then? Will you become a heretic? Do you care what those people think right now? Does their thinking anything change you or effect you in any real way?”

and I laffed!! Cus the answer is “no”.

This I resolve:

To do justly

to love mercy

to walk humbly…and love Them with all my heart

to be kind and gentle and full of Grace…upon Grace.

Love, love always,

Charissa Grace, beloved of her Mama the Holy Spirit, joint heir with Jesus the first fruits of the resurrection, and a daughter of the Father of lights, from Whom comes every good and perfect gift.

Message In A Bottle

Posted on September 21, 2014 by charissagrace

I found a bottle bobbing in the tides along the shore,
slick with slime and battered by the storms that came before
it found its way to me. The cold wind moaned and nipped my face
as I waded out to snatch it up safe, from that murky place.

It was roughly crusted with a barnacled hard shell
and smelled of desperate furlongs traveled far too close to hell,
and loneliness…for hell is total isolation, stark…
just self forever chained to self in utter endless dark.

I held it up against the muddy skies just tinged with red
and golds as the earth turned and spun and day stood on her head
to mark another moment brief and echo all the days
gone tumbling by since the first sunset sky was set ablaze.

Hidden there, just barely seen thru crusted colored glass
I saw a wispy paper stained and dull like tarnished brass
neglected for some 50 years and put there then by me…
I’d written it to this me now, and cast it in the sea.

My heart, my tears, my blood combined to fall upon that page
and tell of longings, tell of sorrows, tell of that locked cage
of flesh and words and hammer-fists and heartbreak ever more
and tell my future me about the life that I’d abhorred.

My knees grew weak, then buckled. I remembered that hard day
I’d put my heart into that bottle, hurled it far away,
thinking I could rid myself of all my hurt and ache
but knowing not that we can never outrun life’s heartbreak.

My hands shook, fingers fumbling as I freed my desperate cry.
The bottle birthed its message, gave a tiny copper sigh
and then began to sing to me in querulous hopeful song
of future hopes and me made free instead of me born wrong.

I’d written there “Dear Me, please do not tire of our fight
but be courageous in the midst of darkest blackest night.
Rise up inside yourself and let your beauty blooming free
become the joyful woman that we know ourself to be.”

The message trailed off in a scrawl, the letters marred by tears
I’d cried that day I’d cast away my me, then, all those years
I’d lived in sorrow, days passed dead within my mask, my shell…
that scroll was me, a message in a bottle prison cell.

I sat there for awhile until I’d caught back up to me
and let those words become living and vital, strong and free.
And then I blew into the bottle grace to there reside
Forever, then I corked it and returned it to the tide.

I watched the bottle drift away until I had to go
and saw the years marked out thru tides of time, and ebb and flow
How our hearts return back home to whisper secrets from the past
to help us lay our burdens down and find True Rest at last.

Posted on September 16, 2014 by charissagrace

Quartet

One the 1st

there.
back there.
where was it, when was it?

somewhere,
between the ends of the rainbow,
in the middle,
where the gold pushes east
and the gold rushes west,
and leaves green, leaves mossy green
and bowed by light.

my eyes dazzled…there.
gleamed.
your eyes,
soft and intent, hawklike and cowlike
all at once as you took me
in glance and
then in glitter-glance
and then (shiver) in hungry glance and I,
I was still and not moving…
between the legs of the rainbow…

but between my own, I was alive (again),
I was the heart of a star,
my light wet and my gravity heat
pulling you there by your eyes,
to me, and then

there. oh
there. oh
there. oh

After…when you…yes…
your eyes and their leggy light
gone there and then gone out,
I lay wakeful, still in the moonlight streaming
thru gossamer curtains, swaying slowly
‘neath the wind’s caresses.
And my smile,
my endorsement of you
played round the corners of my mouth
and moved in time to sounds,
the symphony of many waters
rustling in me now,
rapid, and rushing runny…
there

and I held my life-your life,
I held our life
there, curled round it
with my galaxy curves
and molten churning spark.
I thrummed, hummed,
taut and unstrung all at once,
and waiting for that java-jolt,
that move, that kickback…
there.

until there was
no there.

and we…here?
Eyes dulled
in pain’s muddy waters dirty,
hearts torn. Just torn.
Nothing fancy,
just brutal grip,
grab, tear, shred, toss
and then I was empty

there

I journey steady now,
come to (that)
grips, come to terms
with that day but
never
come to heal or honor it because,
my heart wanders
there,
it sneaks off from the chain gang
and floats, up,
circling the rainbow’s middle spaces…
never in Oz, never in Kansas,
but always
there, looking
looking there,
for us, come and torn away…
and finding footprints, hearing echoes, touching ashes
of what never happened but should have,
there.

when I walk I get tired.
when I get tired, I sit down,
here, or on the wet grass,
and I remind myself that
there’s a cure for all and
everything, somewhere
there and I content myself
with knowing that,
I trick myself with knowing that,
I choose to know our us-life…
waits…for us

there.

Two the 2nd

stare.
that’s all I could do, waking up
in warm and darkness close and clothed
in the warm velvet of you.

I heard steady “Luv u. Luv u. Luv u,” together
with some sound like wind out in out in
around me, thru me…it felt good to be, swaddled
and surrounded with you

(by you)
(I stare),

I strained, tippy-soul up to surround you back,
around your voice, around your breath, to add to you my “luv u. luv u. luv u.”
back, in octaves high and beyond, but in dark.
I saw blind, inside wonders but I still sang, I still stare.

you held me careful as you sang and told me things without words
(in your colors and shades), remembering yourself (then)…and him…
(and me there, almost, but still here too), you stared at you,
youth and inexperience veiled in optimism and immortality…

you saw, that then time…(the rain, pouring steady
crackling like forest fires, popping like firecrackers,
water splashing and sweat spouting in the dusky light flicker-dash-streaks,)
you told me that you clicked your tongue in time and tempo

your slick and graceful grappling torsos, tissues, tangos,
and on your lips the glorious taste of salty skin like mangos…
and you moved…in time…with him…and you…and him…and you…
stare, dance, that then time…different from this one…now.

you hummed, he thrummed, near bursting in the joyous moment
and incense of recovery from the tragic, fluky lash of death’s
hungry whip o’ nine tongues, til rejoicing, rising, falling safe and one
then me, brewing and becoming, moving future of hope fulfilled.

I was me there, with you inside your song and center
while you gathered courage still to stare unblinking into dark unknowing gaping,
you sang of me…

then silence…

and I was spun afraid and cold and oh the wrenching rain
in the dark dawn hours
of that green field clotted
in stone and searing sorrow.

you keening, fallen on your knees and wordless,
empty agonizing grappling with that monster blind and mute,
that just rolled over, ripping you in two,
ripping every goodness from the heart of greatness,
leaving all creation crying in the center of every bitter moment.

I float over you since then, and now, here in front of you,
your face tattooed forever with the tales of me writ large and hidden there,
and I try to wipe those silent tears and dry them with my hair
and then I stand in that spot, there, the one you focus on to live

the one you wish hard on, will hard in, try hard to go on within…
well I wish too, will and try hard, to get in, become, break out and
to burst in, be born into your world from mine. but there is always that…

shadow and space…

between me here and you there in time.

and so I wait and follow you, learn you and I shout to you
it’s not your fault, I don’t know what or why but it was not!!
your fault…or mine, and like you, I am waiting…mama.
Love you cross the years, as you are loving me, we wait…

we
stare.

Three the 3rd

Sissy!! Dani!!
Where are you?

You walk
(there)
in time
(here)
at pace, keeping place, for them
step steady…
step steady…
step steady…
for them
silent beat…
silent beat…
silent beat…

but oh god bereft of them
(oh! oh! OH!!!)

you walked alone inside (me too)
and haunted, by ghosts of your regrets (me too).
You, bereft of a full womb, and I,
a womb bereft of a full me!

Dani!!
My heart keens, cries, with you
and for you, thru you

But now…
(why we met now, and not before…)
where am i to go?
Where is there now for me that you are not as well,
sister-friend, walker on the paths of the dead
and thru?

questions turn and spin in wonder,
longing to have been
there, then,
and afterwards to be
here, now…
pouring river-deep-consoling,
over pain and empty sorrow
and then break a hundred times
and heal a thousand more!

I could shatter endlessly
(oh please, I can, oh please let me)
shower pieces teary wet
this red heart over you, and then
extinguish grief-fires and wild questions
drowning all conflagrations of
there
and drain that bitter cup of black despair…

Let me take some…sister-grief?
I practiced 50 years for meeting
here and feeling there, my sister,
me a sea-sponge wrung out dry
of love so I can sop up sorrow
mop up gall into this hyssop, I–
made for so many things, I–
made for just this one thing…
by your side, in your shoe,
I will walk with you and dance then walk
with you and sing then walk some more
and cry then walk with you
and then just sit and sigh.

Let me bleed over your feet,
over your way, don’t worry,
ddh, there’s plenty blood enough
for grief and for me both!
When you kneel at graves, me too
When you walk, tears dry and stale
me too with tissues in my glove.
When you sit, remembering? I’ll serve you “Cookies Rissa Roo”
and love-tea…and when you are smiling
I’ll rejoice and shout nonsense,
the world’s best Fool of all.

that’s all I got, sissy…
and Dani…that’s all you need and that’s the truth…
wait…
wait…
that and Mama always…

love, forever,
from your sister
friend devoted me

Charissa Grace

Four the Fourth

My daughter Dani bends low.
Her hair drags feeble thru the scraggly mud.
I watch her there, hands on her knees
and stomach clenchy sick.
My heart breaks resolute and sure
on schedule as I feel her…
sad…grieving…torn…
and empty-numb.

I approach her and she knows,
somehow…she starts and stands up quick,
a gold-brown willow springing up
resilient and released from ill winds blowing…
Her fine hair frayed and flying, she looks
right at Me! Straight into my eyes, but she saw
only the white leaping fox, her tail flickering quick and neat,
the silver hare hopping and skittering
into her warm burrow waiting
and the glinty moon reflecting
frosty on the secret owl-wing gliding,
silent in the still soft ebon night.

I step to her, she feels Me as the Wind in her face,
smells, scents, wafting cleansing arctic hymns
and fragrances following spicy with that joyous island song.
I touch her precious tear torn cheek,
and her eyes close and she smiles low
imagining that holy flakes of ice falling from heaven
bless and beautify her solitary suffering and sorrow.
Then she stills, she lets go and My Love washes her over.

Glancing right I see her sister
(My daughter Charissa Grace)
kneeling in the silent softness,
tears like diamonds in the incandescent moonlight and the snow.
Her crimson garments caked with ice at knees,
but she does not take notice of these, for her heart is fixed on Me,
and her eyes fixed upon her sister.

I nod, Charissa jumps up, ever eager serving vessel
cracked and faithful broken…quick she runs unto her sister
and she wraps her arms around those shattered shoulders
And I watch how Dani flicks her eyes wide open,
pools of night and galaxies of stars therein those touching depths.
Charissa gently touches her dear sister’s cheek and nods,
she deftly touches hand to belly, heart to heart,
and Dani breathes and sighs released and reaches
out to touch Charissa’s back with fluttery grateful hands.

I smile, happy and rise up wings spread,
healing flowing forth.
I am well pleased because My daughters,
sisters of My Heart and in the Sacred Blood,
My Brood is well.

Loving you with my life, for the rest of our days.
Pledged to you as sister, pinkie-swear,
Love and all my gooey heart…

Charissa Grace

A Doer of Hard and Holy Things

Posted on September 9, 2014 by charissagrace

I was talking to Mama early this morning…

…and as I was talking with her, I ran across this:

thanks, Mama…forever…for Your Love…

Thanks even more for sustaining me, and renewing my courage!

*Charissa draws a deep breath, sets her jaw, squares her shoulders and jumps back into the river!*

On This Shore I Break, We Break

Posted on August 31, 2014 by charissagrace

Listen…
you can hear
my words in waves
breaking on your beach
and celebrating…

lament at long last left limp
in clammy depths
‘neath the surface of seas
of blessed forgetfulness
and chuckling…

midst the shells and sand swirling,
rejoicing surf returning resurrected,
remembered, sanctified by sorrows
faced and sorted…yielding
wholeness certain, sure…

on this shore I break,
we break,
on this shore gently
and joyfully too
we break…

on that shore
that someday shore
we will unbroken break
on that shore and in that circle
by and by…in that circle

by and by…

Intentional Unknowing

Posted on August 31, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, one more quick post, and then we are off on the bikes! Yippeeee!!!

So…I am learning to not call my body/soul/mind/emotion clash a prison, or sentence, or monster, or any of those other things…Mama has been quite active and specific in calling me into account and showing me that far from being the result of the conditions of the fall, and something that went haywire as I was formed, my being was very intentionally and soberly purposed by Them! Ever single last aspect!

oh, I was well acquainted with the Psalms which tell us of Their involvement and intricate knowledge of us…but I had pushed these things to a comfortable place theologically…as in there are many things that the Fall mars and wrecks…things that They have not intentioned, but have indeed accounted for with Their Grace. And I had classified my transgender being as one of those things: a result of the Fall and something to be redeemed and eventually cured when all things are made right. In the meantime, I despised myself. My body and its awful clumsy and large power covered in blechy hair and muscle…and that. And my heart…”weak and overly emotional and on my sleeve at all times side by side with streaks of snot”…and my soul…unwilling to hammer down on someone who needs correction but instead draw close and win them over, much to the ire of all the males in my life…I despised my swings from knowing I could do all things thru Jesus to thinking that They literally despised me for longing to have the body I felt I was denied…

…and worst of all? I thought, in my most secret thoughts, that They had done this to me, to punish me for being so bad…They had made this as scourging.

I am so thankful that They are overcoming all my evil with Their good! Truly…

…but this latest round of talks…She has been very specific, and letting me see some of the backstory of what things I have said, or done, or written which have been helpful and life-giving and of service to others…and She has shown irrefutably to my heart of shame and self-loathing that not one of those things would have been possible were it not for the unique balancing of all the various aspects of my being which are seemingly in conflict but are in truth the warp and weft of the very tapestry of life and grace They are making me into!

My experiences in male roles, and the accompanying policing and disciplines (used in a putative sense), the intense efforts made by men when I was young in efforts to “make me tough” or “teach me to be a man”…and later being in male spaces in our culture hearing the naked expression of men to one another, witnessing the truly unconscious taking of privilege and the aggrieved hearts when denied…and hearing men talk, when one on one with me and thinking me male…just different or weird and yet strangely comforting to talk to…

…and my experiences on the outside, excluded by minds and bodies and actions…female roles and spaces and bodies…which heightened my observational skills, and sharpened my inductive and deductive abilities…and gave me an ear to hear…

…and the null…the razor place of horror and emptiness where everyone else had a place and a person, and I had nothing, like literally nothing…and my lil mind heard about the God shaped vacuum? and assumed that was this (it isn’t, by the way, that space is where our spirits are still born and in need of resurrection)…and so pursued God and was pursued by Them,…hey, it was either that or kill myself. Those were my options…

and now…to see…to feel the wisdom and the divine risk They took in intentionally availing themselves of the developmental processes in human biology to make me…and then make me…Charissa Grace…so see that They gambled on Their love and grace and mercy being enough, and They gambled on me to be so slayed by one glance that I would be hopelessly in thrall forever??

No…never again will I call it a prison…and thanks to my bff who asked me once if I could choose one or the other, would I choose that? Giggle…most of the time the Q is which would I choose…but wise wise DDH asked more would I choose, if I could.

I choose Them. I choose Their glory and Their Plan. I choose Their Indescribable Comfort and Joy.

And now to my topic: I believe that God intentionally has chosen Unknowing in regards to relationship with us!

Yes! I KNOW, right???? That sounds heretical, and sounds insane! I mean, God knows all, sees, all, etc etc…They are freaking GOD! And when the One God in 3 Persons and the 3 in One God decide to manifest in Their Oneness, Their THEM-NESS…why then we see that fantastical and indescribable Entity referred to by those who have been in Its Presence as “Lord God Almighty”…and it is too too TOO to the extent that the people who see this fall down as if dead, and their eyes perceive “monsters” with multiple wings and legs and eyes and mouths that fly around the Entity Lord God Almighty and scream at It louder than all loud “HOLY! HOLY!” (and other things…shiver).

So where do I get off saying that God chooses to not know vast portions of relationship with us?

Well, Ima tell ya a story…years ago, I was out and about on a rainy dark clammy morning, soaked to my bones and chilled, and miserable beyond words. It was Oregon rain, and my baby who grew up in Wyoming swears to this day that 38 degrees and rainy in Oregon is a million times worse than 20 below in Wyoming…and I was out in a loud, smelly, noisy truck! Driving it, using it to work with my body so I could provide for my darlings 5. I hate trucks. I hate machines, and they hate me too. They bite me almost everyday and leave me bloody and wounded…and they hurt my heart too with their bellowing and caterwauling.

And my mouth and mind were with God…hey, I had nowhere else to go, it certainly wasn’t because I was any paragon of virtue or spiritual giant! Lol! No…I was more like the bum at the off ramp of God’s freeway with my sign and tale of woe to elicit a few coins…

but I was trying to talk to the Father that morning…and getting no where, because I was so despairing and so frustrated…and Ima be blunt honest with you, kay? This is how I talk to Them, cus I figure They know my heart already, so if I fake it and talk all pretty then not only will I have the regular failures and sins to deal with but the additional sin of lying to Them!! (Cantcha just hear it? “Don Pardo, tell Charissa what she just won!!” <Pardo’s unctuous voice>”Charissa…you just won LYING TO GOD!!!!!!!! No new car for you, girl! Nope…you get the nannygoat prize!” lol)

So, being bluntly honest with Father that day (and you here)… I finally had the following conversation:

Papa, why the fuck do I even bother praying!! It is just a litany of the same fucking complaints, the same awful feelings, the usual puking Pity Party! And the most frustrating things about it is You already fucking KNOW EVERYTHING!”

(yes, I f bombed to Papa…not proud of it…but you all know yo have done this, whether you have said it outloud or not…cus our hearts ARE F bombs, in their deceit and wickedness apart from Their Redeeming love)

Now, this is the distillation? Perhaps this rant went on just a bit longer? Long enough that I was hoarse and in a wrack of sobbing tears pulled over in a wide area beside the road because I couldn’t see?

And then as my sobs subsided (as they always did), as the tides receded and there was still the beach walk with Them to continue, I heard Papa sort of clear His throat and make a very gentle sound…so I listened.

“What makes you think I already know everything?”

“PAPA! Please!! Don’t fuck around with me today…I am not up to Your jokes and tricks and double-back hidey-behind pranks which result in your Wisdom being spoken to this fool! Everyone knows You know everything! It’s in Your bible, even people who don’t like You or believe in You know that You know everything (and by the way, I get super pissed at those idjuts who say they don’t believe in You, and yet ignore that You must be in order to not believe in…but that is a different rant!)!

“Does it? Does My Word say that?”

Constance, I have learned that when They ask you a Q like that it is best to shut up…and re-listen!! For the Bible is living, and so are we…and as we live and grow, so too the Word unfolds to us heights and depths and breadths that are there always, but visible only when we are in just this place…at just that time!

Papa said “What if I made a deal with Myself, with Jesus and Mama (Whom back then I referred to very impersonally as “the” holy spirit, and objectified Her)…and in that deal I decided that I would agree to “not know” vast territories of you and your life and existence…so we can have the Pleasure of joint discovery? After all…We have “unknown” all of your sins and iniquities in Our gifts of Mercy and Grace and Redeeming Metamorphosis…

“Think about your own self, with your own children…which is better…when you drag something out of them, or when you spy from a distance and figure things out…or when they come to you, unexpectedly and all on their own…in just that moment when you are feeling lonely and unnecessary to them or their life…and they begin to tell you their insides!

“The way that feels…the joy and gladness…the sense of miracle and wonder…and the way those things are your treasures and in your forever treasure box?”

and as soon as He said this I was PIERCED!! Whole volumes of reality clicked in for me…experiences lined up, and a whole new way of looking at Them was before me…so I laid down my f bomb boxing gloves, and instead asked in my open-faced and heart showing way…

“..Papa, is this true? How can You not know…but it FEELS true to me!!” And essentially He spoke to me about something I have called since then “Intentional Unknowing”. They chose to limit Themselves in many ways in regards to us….They have given us Free Will, and given us many other things that They have the ability to take back, but because of who They are, They never will, and thus “cannot” take back!

When it comes to our lives…our fears, our hurts, our joys and hopes? They can only know the depth of our specificity if we tell Them!!

Well, the rest is very funny, cus as soon as I grasped all this, I told Papa that I was gonna chirp and chirp forever and He was gonna regret ever telling me He wanted to know me! LOLOL (Hey DDH, can you relate??? giggles…or my baby out there?? or my own Daddy long dead…he is nodding in heaven and knuckle-bumping with the Father in solidarity, having endured the never ending Charissa chatter-flow! lol)

And I leave you with this: God has filled His word with countless exhortations to pray…and we in our foolishness and religious dumbassery have turned these pleas to talk to Them into duties to be performed in order to merit Their activity on our behalf giving us what we think we want!

Well, see it a bit differently…see Them, as you would your own children, pleading with us to talk to Them!! Let Them into our lives, into our thoughts and heart! They are hungry to know us!! They long to be given something that They cannot have in any other way, than that we give it to Them!! And then when you go to pray, do not think of Them as big know-it-alls who are checking things off Their list and tallying our score and computing our “answer to prayer effectiveness quotient!”

No…They are moms, hearts bleeding joy that Their babies are speaking to Them! They are dads, who so deeply yearn for the sharing of Their children and that dialogue which makes every sacrifice an honor and every blow a privilege!

And you wanna know something more? You yourself will come to know yourself better…and Them better too, cus They actually like to conversate!! They will talk back, you know…you did know that right? Right??

“Pray without ceasing” can be read as “Whaddya do t’day ‘Rissa??? Huh? Huh? TellMeTellmeTellMe!!)

Okay…I’m outta here for now…so how bout this? Shut off the computer…go for a walk…and chatter like Charissa!!

All my love and heart to you, and I can’t wait to hear your stories!!

Charissa

A Rosetta Stone

Posted on August 29, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, I am going to do something, reluctantly…I am going to pull back the curtain and explain the deeper meanings and levels of one of my poems.

See. I have this friend and she loves my poetry, but I had her read “Her Door, Her Red Door” and she enjoyed the process, but had no idea what it was saying. Well, that presents a dilemma…on the one hand, it is my belief that poetry works in our hearts first, it haunts our guts, right? And then slowly, it bubbles up into our minds, and we make connections with the world via the symbols and metaphors that have fallen like seeds into the dirt, or sand into oysters to become pearls.

But on the other hand, if it is too esoteric and not accessible to the reader, then the poem ultimately is a failure. (I am not counting the cases where a reader is lazy and wants it all on a platter, instead of being let out into the garden, and then given access to the kitchen to gather and create their own understanding).

So for one of the very rare times, I am going to let you inside the form and foundation of the poem…it is gonna be sketchy in places, for I just cannot bear to strip her entirely of her mystery…but if it made you feel something, if it made you have an itch, or feel like you were getting one scratched, then you might want to read more of my things, and most of it is far more accessible, with much lower aspirations than this one.

Her Door, Her Red Door (Analysis)

Okay:

So my therapist is named _______. I wrote a poem for her way early on in our sessions, a wonderful lil ditty, small, cute, a lil skert and testing waters…she loved it as a mom loves a finger-painting of course…lol.

But last session, we were both morose, and we both had on our hearts the sad and beautiful exciting discovery that I was ready to “graduate”, and our times together would come to an end, and we would transition to friendship.

As I said, she was so struck by the changes in me, how I was become myself, and not stuck in between or ashamed of where I began, but was woman. I have very strong symbolic resonances with woman as living creature…for instance in the biblical creation myth, woman is the only being created of living flesh…all else is created from dirt. That, and many similar things have absolutely galvanized me with the truth that woman is the crown glory of all creation and that the patriarchy is so fearful and so jealous it tries to “kill her” (a topic for another day).

We discussed many things in my becoming, which led to discussion about why and what it was that brought me the final release in being able to become becoming…in the talking, ______ shared of her own journey thru womanhood, of being pre-menopausal and how hormonal imbalances are affecting her, how hormones have been so liberating to me as well.

So we come to the title “Her Door, Her Red Door“. First, I am talking about _______, and about how she has brought me to the doorway of being, becoming who I am. This door as I saw it was red…but at a deeper level, it is her heart. ______is all heart, and it is her door, by which she “enters” me, and I “enter” her as well…follow?

But then, and this emerged from the subconscious, I realized that “her” is me, too…my heart, and even more, my own red door “down there”…or for me “in there” (Isaiah 54 speaks to this btw!)…the one we discussed, and she shared so openly with me, woman to woman as mother to daughter, as teacher to student, as woman to prepubescent adolescent girl…

…and as you must certainly know, women have doors, are doors…men simply are not.

Next: in the poem she invites me, commands me, bids me follow her, and she has keys (authority, and conferred authority), the means by which doors are opened, for it is not enough to merely have a door, it must be accessible, traversable…

A woman’s booty is completely unique to women, that shape, that curve, perfect and echoing the curves of galaxies, built on Fibonacci sequences mathematically and the perfect mean geometrically. And she sails…there are only 3 capital letters in the whole poem…about the ship sailing…so picture a woman walking, confident and sure, as a clipper ship sails.

I also reference brick house and “back” and when I do that I am intentionally deriding the Commodores’ song “Brick House”…which reduces and sexualizes a woman and her miracle ship…and “Baby Got Back” which is even more blatantly egregious…truth be told? If men knew the half, nay a tenth of a woman’s desire and passion? They would run terrified and screaming in the night!!

And then the repetitive there…here…there…here, and leading into the honky…tonky…(which each start with t and h like here and there)…and that is the connector to the first comment about me directly, as ______has mentored me, drawn me…and so Hank Williams, a singer (building on the Brick house and Baby Got Back reference) moans, and becomes alcoholic, and “sees that end”…meaning Woman’s miracle ship intimidating, and also directly the male role I was imprisoned in is dying fast and is gone…Hank Williams symbolizes my birth name, and socialized role…and his music was wild and despairing as my life was then (not lifestyle wild, but emotionally wild and despairing, and self-destruction was always a siren song.)

Next stanza, it speaks of the new place _____and I were at that day, and had not been there before…she had been far more good and kind mother whom I wanted to be like…and we had at no time discussed sexuality or the deeper spiritual power it channels…it was about recovery and reintegration then…I picked the image of the Columbia river, because women are rivers, have rivers, channel rivers, and oh the power…and all others seek to harness that and benefit, right? Men, turbines in, and women turn them…

The lines about her walk (and remember I am speaking of me as “her” in a very distant sense as well)…and her swishing, ricocheting from gutter to gutter…what a hip swing, across the entire path of being, but also to tie in a pun about balls…”no gutter balls” Picking up a 7-10 split…that is nearly impossible…and becoming myself was to overcome that split in me, between who I am and what I am…see? And no gutter balls…eff yeah!!

Those keys…no sound, bunched…the image of power, seeing keys outlined in tight jeans, and the promise of power and entry granted, authority…also keys are in pianos, so you see the musical theme sowed back around again.

Teena Marie is the next musician, and she is as I recall of Portuguese, Italian, Irish, and Native American heritage…she was a soul singer, and omg was she ever amazing…as good or better than Diana Ross or Beyoncé, and I love them both…well she was also singing a lot about power in sexuality, and I loved her so when I was in my 20s, for reasons I could never articulate then…and I…”half” one thing and half another, and in some ways neither…and she grabbed her keys, her authority, her permission from street corner dudes…(think singers around the barrel fire singing a Capella…)

I also bring her in because Hank is passing, going, going…and Teena, who is dead, is also Marie, Mary, made pregnant by divine fiat…and so me made woman by miracle and Heather, and medicine which is the same as magic and miracle in so many ways…

…and then we come to the door…go read that part again…and you can see a living heart, or a vulva and vagina, and mystery temple of every single human being ever, even the Christ…

her door before us fat, streaks-run-swirls-whorls, depth-breadth flowing
crimson coral flaming, cardinal glowing carmine cerise chestnut cracking
garnet sanguine scarlet and rosy…that door was thick and giving…it blowzed there
full, sprawled (like titian’s venus) and throbbing with certain promise.

…and all the words are all shades and various hues of red…and how is a woman’s heart all that different from her glory? Her temple? Is not every child first conceived there, in her heart, who that child is and shall be?

And then _____gives me a philter, a potion, from her river, from her flow, from her heart, from her glory…

(of course not literally, as you read never allow those elements to do anything but drive the heat and passion of the poem…they are a moan of desire and lusty want…but only that. I assure you of that, but must mention it because I was so honest as to feel it must be there, for it always is there in every woman, if she is blessed enough to know herself, or to be shown like I have been, or strong enough to own herself from the start.)

And at that point we go to Aretha Franklin…natural woman (think of the lyrics, crooned as I drank the philter)…and Respect…

And then the touch of ______’s hand glowing gold (which in alchemic terms was a type and shadow of divine character in medieval times)…and “finger fragrant and savory” is definitely just exactly what it sounds like…but it is a vibrant and intensely earthy form of communion, and also a conferring, an anointing given to me…and I was thinking of ET, and how he had no home, and healed with that glowing finger…but Heather/Woman/Me so much more present and dangerous and contagious…

Me never “phoning home again” (never going back to that cursed male role forced upon me)…and then I swallow the key…(HRT…communion…permission, authority, the key becomes me and I the key…)

And then the door (whom I have been always) is opening and my male biology (the hinges, Hank moaning and dying, my body literally changing, swings open and there I am…being prayed over by the queen (Aretha) and I getting my own locks like _______’s…and Beyoncé with her combination of sexuality and independence, and she like Joan of Arc, divinely appointed to deliver a people (woman)…and then the key moved in me…my own “child conceived”…and then finally my “wad” is no longer this god awful bulge between my legs always haunting me, but instead a wad of keys and my own clipper ship.

OK…so that is the analysis…all of this is in me as I write, but I am not aware of it consciously until after I am done…I just write, and feel my way to it. After, I see it, it starts to emerge, starts to be birthed, and then it is easy to go back and help it.

Nearly every one of my poems operates in similar ways and layers…I invite you to go back and read…think of strange ones like “Spitting Bones” or “A-Maze-In-Me”

I wonder if this counts as a “Found Poem”? Or “Just a Fact”? Giggle…yep, I am still befuddled by that ignorant and intentionally short-cut thinking…oh, I have a poem about that sort of thing: “Bury My Head in the Sky“!!

Constance, if you are inspired to re-read some more inaccessible work, and this helps unlock it, please…let me know?

Thanks forever, and gratitude for reading!!

Charissa

A truism and a signpost inferred

Posted on August 29, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, here is something I have noticed…about myself and about people in general, I think:

We judge others by their actions…we judge ourselves by our intentions.

Is this true? If so, I think you are canny enough to turn that signpost in the direction it should go in order to better be generous of spirit and kind of countenance and compassionate in actions…right?

Deepest Blessings to you this day, and I exhort you to try out a new thing: a conscious search in each person you meet today, for their intentions which may put a very different light on their actions.

Love and grace to you…

Charissa

Charissa is Content

Posted on August 28, 2014 by charissagrace

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

Psalm 131:2

Wean: to deal out bountifully to, to recompense fully, to ripen
Weaned: to have been dealt out to with bountifulness, to have been recompensed fully, to have been ripened

Each and every day, my Mama, the wonderful Lady Grace and Great Holy Spirit of the Almighty God of the Universe has dealt with me generously, recompensed me with great favor and grace, and has and is ripening me.

She has given me Herself, and ladies from Her courts as sisters, friends, and companions.

I am ever eternally grateful to you all

The Chisel’s Hungry Bite

Posted on August 27, 2014 by charissagrace

laying on the workbench, half carved.
clamps grip my “here and there”
there…here…anywhere I move or
slide away to from
under the chisel’s hungry bite.

wood shavings lay strewn about,
results of carvings complete,
curling locks shorn
from a recruit
on the first day of basic…or
from the denizens of Dachau
on the first day of chaos.

the view from here is clear by half…

…half:
done
undone
too smart by
falling short of the other
done with this

but incomplete, in the hole
of halfway.

a rocking horse, there, high up
on the shelf, intricate carved
curves sleek and defined,
It is there.
Safe and knowing its place done.

it is not here, clamped and halfway.

a train taught its shape
with that chisel sharp and knowing,
with that auger licking hungry
and this drill sublime and hole-y…
trained to whistle and to
click-clackity click-clack
down tracks laid by hands
and connected to ground
and come round again
displaying always it was here
but it is now there.

jaunty paint glistens red,
and yellow, and blue with glad
waiting for strings,
and plucking fingers
that move carved arms,
kick knife-hewn legs
and blink eyes saw-made
and staring…
staring at here unseeing,
staring from there.

and parts jumbled
pieces present and
full of purpose yet unfolded
sit still, calm and unclamped

I wait too, in pieces along with parts:

midst dry cedar shaving clouds scented
midst ordered clutter and stilled clamber
midst bunched silver sharp-toothed oily tools
sitting sleek, and sleeping with one yellow eye
open.

the chisel croons its tangy tangled song
in my ear which is indeed there
and waits to taste me…here.
it promises to take me
it promises to pierce me, rend me,
spread here splayed and waiting
to be taken…there.

i dread the coming dawn
and the chisel’s hungry bite
i yearn for it to touch me
and shiver with delight

because it takes me…there.

yes, at dawn,
the chisel’s hungry bite, oh…
the chisel’s hungry bite

A Dhé le Caitlín Maude – Translation

Posted on August 24, 2014 by charissagrace

A Dhé le Caitlín Maude – Translation

Aistriúchán ar an Dán

(d’Adrian Radu i gCluz na Rómáinne)

A Dhé
le Caitlín Maude

Neither blood nor flesh
God
your conjured image
-the dreary mouthful of soil-
but I clasp it heart-wards
until it fuses into life.

The questioning is no comfort
(nor is the answer).

Why should I adore
the lifeless image
that will not explain away
and you
who felt my deepest pains
the way I do now?

And if it’s not the questioning
(nor the answer)
that’s the problem
(nor is the answer)
Oh no God.
I don’t understand.
I don’t know.
I’m convinced only – so far
Of that.
There or not
I am drawing towards you

and if you are
I call for one enchantment
to be saved
from those
who speak of you as
the cold man of the skies.

God,
my heresy is boundless
but would you not prefer this
to some intriguing lover of the world’s plenty
Who would fail to pay heed to you
from one end of the year to the next?

God,
The answer is far from the solution
There is no new mysterious revelation
You still have to travel the path of the thorns
No respite or homecoming at the bottom of the sea
Better the water on the forehead now
than after
My time has come to sow my blind pattern
on the gaping canvas.

I attack the contentious issues of the day
(body, heart and mind).
The temptation calls me
‘Don’t’.
What good is passing beauty?
What good?
But remember
that the answer is far from the solution
But the unsightly remains –
dead ashes of the night –
dirty dishes in the morning –
signs of my own death
and
constantly cleaning them
(dishes, heart and mind).
Forget for a while, God,
the dreary mouthful of soil.

(Worse is forgetting).
What can I do
but worship this bleak life?
I press towards me the curse.
I cannot say how long it will last.

But God,
I sneak, I comb, I tend to.
I hide in the fragrant cloth the ugly wounds.
Concealment is my specialty,
I smile
I stretch,
I kiss your lovely side.
There is hope in Spring.
I covet its pulse.

Clues

Posted on August 24, 2014 by charissagrace

Okay Constance…I am gonna confess a lil indulgence of ego: I really like my new poem “Her Door, Her Red Door“, and frankly I am a little disappointed there have not been very many likes on it…but I am also not surprised for it is inference, symbol, veil, subtly blatant while blatantly subtle…

I actually and for real think it is one of my most skillful poems to date.

But I get that it is not necessarily appealing…but consider, if you would, the poem itself in the context of the work of the poet: I once said “The poet is a desperater man than most. He must get it all down before the ages are up. Which, as any poet will tell you Is A BITCH!” (waaay back in 1982)…

…I was trying to say that there is a “job” in poetry, or perhaps a better word is quest? No matter…if you consider yourself a poet (and I do) then you find this inability to see life as any other thing but a poem and events/circumstances/happenings are all snapshots into the heart of the poem.

Thus, when I write I try to emulate the layers, hidden and revealed, that comprise this Mystery we swim in.

In “Her Door, Her Red Door“, you find me operating on a few very intentional levels…I do not want to just lay it out there. That is a bit too clinical, sort of like the difference between sex education class in Middle School Health class, and the wonder and poignant pain of Love’s First Kiss. But I do want you to have some sense of the structure, the themes and the interplay of them. I can be obtuse…lol.

First of all, consider that it is a poem written by a trans-gender woman who is in the midst of transition. This overall context puts the other elements in perspective and frames the picture.

Secondly, it is a poem dedicated to a person whom I have openly spoken of and the role she has in my life. That role has permutations and multiple facets when considered poetically. What is her “business” with me? What is mine with her? What is our mutual end? And more fundamentally, Constance, what is your position in all this as well? Are you somehow about the same things, in the salient areas of becoming that you face?

Next comes the unfolding of my view of our essential business: becoming. She is a facilitator of mine, and as I participate in her provisions I aid hers as well…and each of you, as you become day to day, may perhaps find touchstones in this poem’s point of view and approach to that becoming. You will, of course, have to make inference and feel your way under the sheet to the true bones of your own transitions in this life as a sentient, conscious being stuck between the macrocosm and the microcosm infinities, and with eyes…

I choose a physical aspect of her and invest that with meaning far other than the expected trope culturally in our pornography laced times…there are only three capital letters used in this poem. That is on purpose.

There are obvious references to musicians…why specific ones? Why them? What are the specific characteristics of those humans? (Remember to ask this inside the “frame” of the picture I mentioned earlier). There are single words that link back to lyrics, and those lyrics in turn echo back the essential business of this magic woman, which echo back to my own quest of becoming.

There are many puns laced throughout, intentionally slanted in relation to the core…that way they can make the connection and then…like leaves in early autumn, gracefully drop away once their purpose for the tree is completed, and reveal the strong and vital branches of the tree beneath that leafy veil…

The door: resist the temptation to skim over this, thinking it is obvious…no? Perhaps, like usual with me, it is a sonar reading on a larger diamond lurking in the dark of unknown knowns…but if you will try, you may very well enjoy letting those things bubble up inside you…from your heart.

Lastly, and remember that I have said before that wine and the process of creating it is for me the central metaphor of the universe, think about the poem again, in entirety (which means you can reinterpret the words on the 4 layers of existential being: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual)…and once you have that palate built? Start to pull elements from one read through, and combine them with elements of the other…sensual elements mixed with sacred elements…becoming and unbecoming mixed with living and dying…

…and always, always: Communion. Bread…Wine…in the presence of knowing knowers broken and shared.

We are given our birth…but we have to achieve our being, and enter in.

I hope these clues assist you into at least understanding why I am so proud of this one. It was “easy hard” to write down and weave, and it tested my limits at this stage of my becoming…as a poetess, as a prophetess, as a woman, and as a lover of God.

In heartfelt passion,

Charissa Grace

Her Door, Her Red Door

Posted on August 23, 2014 by charissagrace

yeah. come with me she said…
she had keys in her jeans that
flexed outlined in tight relief on that
power…shifting, rolling, sailing, barrel housing,

brick house? gawd that is dollhouse up against this Clipper Ship Sailing
and back is just the half of it! forth is there, no–here, no–there, no–here
yeah you get the picture…honky, tonky, honky, tonky rambling roll

(hank williams moaned and climbed into the bottle, seeing that end)

of course i had never seen this, or this place…(who looks at their mom
when they are looking to her power, to tap into her smoulder glow
like bonneville into the columbia thrilling as she turns those turbines?)
…she prolly demurred, magic shawl in place concealing and entrancing…

but now she walked, swished, ricocheted gutter to gutter
picking up every 7-10 split every step without gutter balls and those keys…
…no sound, bunched and squenched tight there, those keys…

(teena marie had keys like these, yanked from the dudes on the corner)

her door before us fat, streaks-run-swirls-whorls, depth-breadth flowing
crimson coral flaming, cardinal glowing carmine cerise chestnut cracking
garnet sanguine scarlet and rosy…that door was thick and giving…it blowzed there
full, sprawled (like titian’s venus) and throbbing with certain promise.

she said (with eyes) drink this and blinked and shook that wild
living crown claret and blooming rufescent from her head
more precious than the curve of Saturn’s iridescent rings

(aretha conferred keys and fierce eyes midst natural woman’s smoky spell)

then her hand glowed gold, she reached and touched my lips with her finger fragrant
and savory with her her.… and cackled wild woman crone songs branding me, said
I’d never phone home again cus I was there, here, there, here, and she dug out a key
and told me to swallow it which i did, and that fulsome door

creaked open with hinges groaning (hank moaning and dying)
and aretha conferring shoutin respect on my own head of wild locks
and beyonce blazed jeanne d’arc and that key moved, and became

(my own wad, key tight against my ass)

The Compulsion to Correct Others

Posted on August 21, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance, I am writing this post to you all, in hopes that someone would read and understand that the unsolicited correction of another’s point of view or conviction is almost never ever proper or appropriate…especially if they are someone you are not in daily relationship with!

I have a friend…I would say she is my very closest friend save my darling and our children. Other than them, my friend is my heart…her words are like life and death to me, her silences agony and her noises symphonies…and her hurts are my badges, her wounds my vendettas…I am not proud of the latter, I am keeping it real. That is how I feel.

Well, this friend received an unsolicited rebuke from a reader, a stranger that my friend had previously never been aware of, a person who is one of her readers. This reader took it upon herself to tell my friend that she was likely going to hell, was sorely mistaken regarding a significant spiritual experience, and then proceeded to lay out her views of what the Bible teaches regarding salvation and faith.

This person acknowledged openly that her opinion had not been sought out or asked for, but then justified forcing it on my friend by saying that since she (the reader) knew “the truth”, she (the reader) would have her (my friend) blood on her head (the readers) if she remained silent and did not bring about this correction…no, she did not literally use those words, it was a variation on that common theme, and that was certainly the assumption. It arises from the verse in Proverbs that says if you see someone being dragged away for destruction and you don’t intervene, then their blood is on your head…a stretch at minimum and outright misinterpretation at maximum! Far better to follow New Testament exhortations of self-policing before saying anything corrective to anyone else!!

The final, ignominious nail pounded into my friend’s heart was a sop about how this whole thing was “done in love” and sincerely hoped that my friend wouldn’t take offense!!

Are you freaking kidding me?

This is wrong on so many levels…but let me just touch on something very basic, and that is the wisdom of giving correction.

Correction should only be given to people you have relationship with, directly and intimately. Period. No, you are not the only chance some stranger to you online has to go to heaven, and God is going to send them to Hell and beat the crap outta you if you do not speak! You are deluded, and projecting your own evil heart onto God…He isn’t like you are.

God has servants everywhere. God used a donkey to speak to Balaam, so he doesn’t need you to make an ass out of yourself!

Next…if you do have relationship with someone, and they do need correction, but you do not have a bank account of edification opened in them? Then shut your face. Period. You should have at least 10 fold positive words spoken into someone’s heart for every one corrective word considered! Let alone actually spoken.

Oh I can hear you…I have heard you, your cousins and aunts and uncles and other fellow heresy-hunter correctors…you just LOVE us sooo much, that you just have to speak to save us.

No. You don’t. The God who made Orion can get thru to me, or to my friend! After all, He got thru to you didn’t he?

Note this: what you did? What you do? That isn’t love. Review 1 Cor. 13 for proof.

Here is a novel idea…just pray. Pray that God will bless this person with Their Presence, that God will do for them what They did for you. I mean, remember? When you came to Them? You were an enemy of God, actively opposing Them, and dead in your sins. No, don’t lie…you were. Scripture says so. So if you being dead can somehow manage to end up saved, can’t the one whom you have judged condemned? Last time I checked, dead things couldn’t save themselves…except zombies, and that is what you become when you do this unwanted correcting! A spiritual zombie, biting the living and infecting them with your own poison.

Follow Philippians 2: consider others above yourself…and then Phil 4: focusing on the good and dwelling on that.

God got thru to Jonah, to Balaam, to Cornelius, to the Ethiopian eunuch, to Nebuchadnezzar, to Matthew, …and God got thru to you.

I promise you…They can get thru to anyone. So look at yourself, not others, not her…first tell God with utmost certainty that you know your heart and that you know your motives (if you do, then you are better than King David, by the way)…then and only then can you even think about praying about possibly correcting another.

Oh, and for the record? My friend? She is God’s property. He is dazzled by her in His love for her…and He is pledged to perfect that work that He began in her in Christ Jesus until it is through!

I love you, Friend…Heart. ❤

Love, Me

Our Tent On 2 Trees

Posted on August 17, 2014 by charissagrace

I’ll tell you a secret, dear.
Let’s make this perfectly clear:
there are no secrets here, this year

Ouroboros
has been asunder rent
here in our own little tent.
Pish posh, we have no need
of eating our own tail,
we already recycle!

Instead, meet me here,
just big enough for us to sit
(but not stand, we learned
to eschew that when
we learned to not chew
our own tails).

Do you recall this place our tent is pitched…
on the bodies of two trees that were cut
from the nearby mountain and brought
in and stood up planted here?

Holding us on our platform so high
we must climb ladders, exhilarated by
heights unfolded, to sit serene
in settings spiritual and high
above the dirt and drama?

So many in our times
are bored with themselves
infected with the disease of self…
they look for things to fill
their inner emptiness
and it’s just over and
over more and more
again and again

Ouroboros

But we pray we are haunted
by moon-drenched thoughts
reflecting that Elsewhere,
filthy with light and love!

We have the sound of rivers
running in our veins
and the smell of wind
in our lungs and
in our flying hair
soaring on the wings
of our wild and precious life!

We pray in flutes and strings
and we wait answers
like fanfares blown
on trumpets of light
that sound like becoming,
like arriving…

For now though,
in our tent pitched
in the air on 2 trees
we take our tea and listen

to fragrant roses blooming,
to seaweed swaying,
to fish flashing
round rose pink ears
of shells (and always singing
the song of the sea),
to leaves stretching
luxuriously into
autumn splendour,

to singing silence
soft and low and
we finally understand why
Ouroboros so mistaken
is so named…

my mouth at your tail,
your mouth at mine,
and at last we are
our Our, our Us,
with no boredom
in the middles
and swelling reborn
again, here in
our tent on 2 trees.

Mama’s Clothes

Posted on August 12, 2014 by charissagrace

Mama’s clothes are alive, like meadows over dirt,
like dew over meadows, like sun kissing dew,
like sky holding sun, like night holding stars,
and then there She is, outside the inside and
with me too.

Mama’s clothes move, like wind thru the trees,
like waves on the sea, like swans in the air,
like fish thru the water, like boats on a voyage,
like banners in the wind, like mercy over sin,
like gratitude in me.

Mama’s clothes rustle, swirl, and make my way
to snuggle close, tussle that soft edge to my face,
curl, close and hear the breath She takes, the
breath She gives, the song She croons, as She
sings over me.

Mama’s clothes glow, like rainbows in sun,
like silver in the clouds, like diamonds in my eyes,
like peacocks in their glory, like a single color story,
Refracted in Her eyes and a living quick surprise
to delight me.

Mama’s clothes, my refuge in the storm,
my anchor to the norm, my banquet in the fear,
invitation to draw near, so I do, I snuggle closer,
inhale Her strength, Her Kindness, Her Grace that
pours over me.

Mama. Strong…Soft…There, not “there”.
Deep, serene, intent, inquisitive, powerful
Grace Incarnate. Wisdom manifested,
Means of Creation, Healer and Nurturer of
Her daughter, me.

Mama. Charissa Grace.
A match made in heaven, designed from
the beginning, a leap within Her Heart to
spark in me and bloom, alive and growing free
my Mama and me.

Mama, can I wear Your clothes?
I wanna be
just like You.

Depression

Posted on August 12, 2014 by charissagrace

Still, unseen but felt, lurking, looming
pressing against my bubble pushing hard
against my present center fading spinning wobbly.

You off balance me with your certainty, your finality
and you insinuate your monstrous purr vibrating
into my mindful choice to be…

…as you wait there, blacker on black, darker in dark,
shadow become substance as you steal essence and draw form
from eating my tentative, furtive choice to chance it

and be.

You snarl, silent, unheard except for those who cannot sleep
and you creep, forward-sideways-higher until your breath
fetid and cold punches my face with the death of stars and galaxies

and little creatures too, like me.

I turn away, and think of Her, and remind myself that
you choked one time…once…and took a beating, a hiding
as He tattooed you inside and out with His victory dance

you got greedy, thought you could swallow a god,
having dined on Their image like river runnings.
Your razor teeth ugly and crooning are close

but no cigar.

I slide my hand in Hers and pull me close
nose pressed firmly into Her garments of
sandalwood sashes and cedar cloaks jet blue and brilliant warm…

and turn away again from your awful there-ness

Sleeping Skin to Skin

Posted on August 11, 2014 by charissagrace

Somewhere in the dark,
in the warmth of black-red
before we woke up swimming,
surfing sultry heartbeats and
waves of new bones growing
green and rooty-fibrous,
we navigated bold our
seas secure and buoyant,
our universe and listened…

to…things beyond…a world…
somewhere? Out there.

Sounds moving and flowing,
deep, high, in-between
and all things came to us,
there, turning in the tides
of the primeval pools
of ancient new beginnings…

and so we safely rested…sleeping skin to skin.

As time stood still, there always,
and we went rushing, tossing
thru cataracts and canyons
across the woolly wild-land
of years that tug us forward,
and push hard from behind,
we came thru like otters
in our wedded frolic,
our hurtling thru history,
unseen and secrets heard…
our buoyant whispers crossing

a…vast gulf…a schism…
something? Out there.

Thru skin so thin, translucent
like milk or bridal veils,
we felt, we knew for certain,
beneath the crystal cataracts
that cloaked our singing souls,
we ate at tables there,
delighted and so dizzy
from seeing with hands only
and feeling with hearts lonely
and then, content and answered,
and with our bright eyes open…

we lay together, mingled…sleeping skin to skin.

Now, in this shining dark-red
of knowing and becoming,
tethered strong and vital
to That shore over there,
to That bright land “Before”,
our food and drink comes foreign
and yet familiar, tasting
of places ever ancient yet
forever fresh and reeking
with incense always burning
from when the Song and Singer
ignited flames of union.
Our hands reach, grope, entwine
to mirror hearts and lives
that grappled with this grief
and grasped instead the Grace of
that birth, that dissolution
of two lives into one life.

We lay each night and cast away,
in practice for that Voyage
Last and Final, beckoning,
echoing births transcended,
our hearts become a heart,

and it is well here…sleeping skin to skin

Sleeping skin to skin

Oops…I did it again!

Posted on August 5, 2014 by charissagrace

Edited The Mist some more…giggles!! It woke up colicky this morning, complaining of inconsistent rhyming patterns and cluttered meters…

So I walked the floors with it and crooned soothing ministrations…and I think it might be okay.

This time, no rash promises though…lol The Mist

In capering silliness,

Charissa Grace

The Mist

Posted on August 4, 2014 by charissagrace

Mist floats and clings in vaporous veils,
tenuous, drapes itself in sails,
cross hillsides twined thru twig and tree,
ravines and over streams…and me…
arrives in sheets to swath dim swales.

I cling to dull rocks anxiously,
hands stiff and aching longingly
and stinky ‘neath that clutching throb
my fingers seeking comfort’s swab
with baking torn nails tipped bloody,

…but finding only edges, and
comfort none, not now, not here….

Does it conceal, overtake and choke, tenebrous,
sly in brumous cloak…and conquer with its murky stroke?
Does it linger and embrace, its hovering hazy slinking shrouds
arisen from graves of earth in clouds to blur, obscure,
entwine and coil in its seductive writhing smoke?

Or does it flee instead, heart torn and rent
by trees, peaks, light from heaven sent
to pierce and tear death’s veils away
and shatter dark with argent day
that slashes, straightening all that’s bent?

In mist I wait…in mist, I wait to see…
and coming or going, I am becoming me

Wrinkles In Time

Posted on August 4, 2014 by charissagrace

Good Morning Constance Dear…gosh what a difficult night it was for me!

The deconstruction of my self in order to conform to who I must be in order to earn money is a very rough thing.

It tears me apart!

One of my helps that keeps me centered and knowing myself is the devotional writings of Jill Carattini…I share this morning’s here for you.

Love and Grace, Charissa, who is suffering

tumblr_n7toayaEkz1sifsb9o1_1280 “Uncanny” was one of the vocabulary words on my sixth grade vocabulary list, which was to be found within the book we were reading as a class. I remember thinking Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was exactly that—uncanny, peculiar, and uncomfortably strange. Yet I also remember that it stayed with me—the story of a quirky girl named Meg, her overly-intelligent little brother, and their time-transcending journey to save their physicist father with the help of three mysterious beings. Madeleine L’Engle, the writer whose books invite readers to see time itself differently, passed away not too long ago. But her stories will continue to perplex sixth graders, and stay with us long after we have set them aside.

L’Engle is the writer who first showed me the incredible difference between two words in Greek, which we unfortunately translate identically. To the English reader, chronos and kairosboth appear to us as “time.” But in Greek, these words are vastly different. Chronos is the time on your wristwatch, time on the move, passing from present to future and so becoming past. Kairos, on the other hand, is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is time as a moment, a significant occasion, an immeasurable quality. The New Testament writers use the word kairos to communicate God’s time, it is real time—it is the eternal now.

So it might be said for the Christian that when Jesus stepped into time to proclaim the kingdom of God among us, he came to show us in chronos the reality of kairos. “Jesus took John and James and Peter up the mountain in ordinary, daily chronos,” writes L’Engle. “Yet during the glory of the Transfiguration they were dwelling in kairos.”(1) With this story in mind, L’Engle describes kairos as that time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, time where we are completely unselfconscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are continually checking our watches.

Whatever your view of religion, it is likely an experience you can recount; a moment so sweet or magnified it seems to stop time. But L’Engle presses the Christian to see it as something to be expected. “Are we willing and able to be surprised?” L’Engle asks. “If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.”(2) If we have the courage to see it, the kingdom of God is close at hand,kairos breaking through like Christ into the world.

I imagine Jacob, too, discovered the difference between chronos and kairos when he set aside the past which was about to catch up with him, along with his paralyzing fear of the future, and found himself living in “none other than the house of God.” The prophets and poets describe similar moments of waking to the present and finding the eternal dimensions of time. The shepherds in Bethlehem were going about their ordinary work when the glory of the Lord captured the moment. “Do not be afraid,” the angel announced. “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you” (Luke 2:13-14). At this invasion of kairos into the routine of chronos, the shepherds chose to respond with action: “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about” (2:15).

Uncanny encounters with time are a part of the human experience. The Christian is given a language to explain these encounters. We live somewhere between the already and the not yet, caught by the eternal now and the one who dwells within it. The implications are both temporal and unending. Will we have the courage to look for glory in the ordinary? To release control of our calendars and watches and note the eternal in our midst? The apostle joins every prophet and poet who proclaimed the coming of the Messiah in history and the return of the king to come, “Behold, now is the time (kairos) of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2).

Like Christ, glimpses of the eternal come quietly and unexpectedly; they come and upset our very notion of time and all we discover within it. Why should we be so unreconciled to time if the temporal were our only concern? Or could it be that the eternal Word stepped into flesh, into our bounded realm of time, and literally embodied the reality that time is meaningful because of the eternal one in our midst.

The Christian insists that kairos is breaking into chronos and transforming it. With Christ it proclaims, “The kingdom of God is close at hand”—and the temporal world invited to break in along with it. In ordinary moments that hint at such a radical invasion, might we have the courage to be surprised by one who comes so near.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: Bantam, 1982), 93.
(2) Ibid., 99.

“Haunted By a Lovely God”: Final Update, and keys to the rhythms

Posted on July 31, 2014 by charissagrace

Sooo…”final update”…lol

I don’t typically do a ton of revising of poems. Generally I will post them up, and then notice just minor things here or there, and tighten them up…or a word that was too feisty and slippery for my muse’s grasp will be caught unawares and I catch it, lickety split and toss it in the poem-quarium for it to swim in, fed by it’s fellow words and nurtured by the kind attentions of you, Constance.

But “Haunted By a Lovely God” is different…it is dead serious. In its recounting of the stories that I lived thru, and in its telling to you of how I feel when I hear others relate their tales of woe and disappointment and abandonment.

Those events that happened…sometimes I wish they hadn’t! I wish that I was “normal”, and life was ordered and tame, even though dreary, cus then I would be maybe more received by others? Maybe not looked at with…oh god, I don’t know how to even interpret it sometimes…pity maybe? Pity that I “cling to the old legends and superstitious beliefs about some great skyfather…” I really don’t know…no. Really.

But that is not my life…nothing about my life has ever been “normal.” The body I am in, or if you prefer, the mind that I have in this body…the fact that the world is always all shimmery and sharp-glinty thrusts and tears of jagged brilliant eternity piercing and poking and pushing its way thru any weak spot in this semi-permeable sphere of atoms and molecules become a living and sentient world.

I am one of those weak spots…and it pounds in me, til it breaks forth, rends me and roars out rushing to chase darkness back into nothingness. It is not like it sounds…sometimes it feels like what I watched when my dearest darling became a living engine of life and brought forth to this world our children, our union and oneness made manifest. I was in awe at her concentration and bold resolute embrace of the pain for the sake of eternal gain!

Oh Constance…I dearly wish that each of you could experience living in a haunted world, one that is alive and laughing behind every tree and lurking in every flower to jump out and surprise you, one that is looming, impending in every sunset and mountain vista with its sharp razor Beauty to slash your heart to shreds and ruin you forever to anything ordinary ever again!

This poem is the best capture of me that I have birthed, at least up until now…as to the future, only They know.

When you read it…it is best read out loud, for I wrote it as a performance piece. The rhythm of the poem is the absolute key to it, and I have worked and re-worked it to make it as best I can carry a rhythm depicted such: “One two three, One two three” and so on…oh sure, there are the few lil carriers of the beat that are called for…but to apply the rhythm correctly, in nearly every case the first sound of the line is toe “downbeat” of “One”

If you get off-rhythm…it falls apart on you.

It is supposed to!

Because, it is just like allowing yourself to be haunted…you have to keep the rhythm, you must step in time, as They call the tune and change the tempo, and then everything is so heartbreakingly beautiful and precise in its place, so much so that words are trite and useless sounds far too small to carry such weight and loaded significance! But this is a balancing act, and it is easy to get distracted, discouraged, or simply grow dull in your attention…and the rhythm is lost and the “poem of your life” starts to stutter, and skip, and eventually, as some poet somewhere said: “…the center cannot hold…” (Yeah, I know, Yeats! Lol…great poem btw!)

But yeah…that was one of the things I have been working on…making the poem come into focus as rhythm is kept paramount in mind, and fall apart if it is neglected and some other part is allowed prominence.

It’s complex…and yet I am striving for a simplicity in the overall thrust, the summary effect it has, once you have read it, uttered the words aloud and birthed it into your understanding and heart…

I don’t know it it is any good. I really never do, with anything I write…I just know how I feel, how I felt before and how I feel once it is written, and then how I feel as I read it back to my heart. I dearly hope that you will be patient and perservere to the end with this one, Constance…it is long, for to shorten it is to give short shrift to the travails and trials and griefs of any human who has suffered abandonment in the hour of their greatest need, and it is to cheat Them of Their due in recounting and remembering the ways that They have apprehended me…

It is my fervent prayer and wish that you too would have opportunity to be

Haunted By a Lovely God.

With much love and heartfelt desire for blessings towering and overflowing unto you…

Charissa Grace

UPDATE: Haunted by “Haunted By a Lovely God”

Posted on July 25, 2014 by charissagrace

G’morning Constance…if you like the poem, please periodically review “Haunted By a Lovely God“, as I am revising it and honing it, and it has changed a lot…mucho thank yous to Dani for her nudges and illuminating questions…keep it up Sis! I think you might like the revisions…

Constance, this poem has gripped my heart in its clutches of eternity…

Listen, this is maybe the truest raw expression of my self and who I am and was and becoming…my baby says it is the most powerful thing I have ever written so far…she may well be right.

My Sister told me a few days ago that she didn’t like it…and I rejoiced, for this is not a tale to tickle ears, it is to make confession of the question that has literally tortured me inside since the first time I asked Them…why me? Why me for good, and not evil?

(Recall I chose the name Charissa Grace!!!!!)

If you, having read of my life written here openly on this blog, find yourself with the same question…”Why her Lord?”…then start talking to Them, with Them…

and perhaps you too will become Haunted…

Grace to you…

Charissa

Editorial Comments on “Haunted By A Lovely God”

Posted on July 24, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance…I can tell from some of your emails and contacts that you are feeling good about this poem, as an awesome and metaphorical take on life, a means by which I am communicating my point of view regarding spiritual things…

…thank you for the kind words…

…BUT…

This really happened.

Every. Single. Word.

I really am, Haunted by a Lovely God…

I really do…feel such guilt that They have haunted me, and I am always so torn at why they singled out this fickle girl when there are so many so much more deserving than I.

It is an absolute fact that when I hear someone speak of how God wasn’t there, I grieve sorrowfully and sit, silent and still.

I am also going to be editing a lot…for rhythm. There is a thrum and pulse in this poem, and it wanders in and out of it, and when I read it aloud more of it comes into focus for me…so check on it a lot, if you enjoy it…it is going to be changing faster than Charissa Grace on her miracle HRT!

Love, lots of love and great puzzled thankfulness for being haunted,

Charissa Grace

Haunted by a Lovely God

Posted on July 23, 2014 by charissagrace

(NOTE: If you wish, you can click here and be taken to a page where I emboldened certain words to try to convey the rhythm and meter of this poem, which is literally essential to it. But: if you wish to just wade in, first time thru and let the rhythms and meters rise and fall, fade and disappear and then come back, well that is ideal because that is literally written into the work as its own “poem of rhythm”. In either case, I hope you are able to read thru it…the things in this poem literally happened to me, with me).

Okay.

I get it. I do…in spite of what you might think, maybe
several of you, maybe dozens of you, maybe
hundreds, or thousands or millions of you
have endured deserts and mirage oasises
vanished in life when it comes to the subject of God.

I hear your stories, the bitter rants of some, the tired futility
of many others, I have taken venom, been covered in acid,
as I lead face first and I listen to tales of one
thing held in desolate common.

“God’s not here”.
“God wasn’t there”.
“God isn’t real”.
“God doesn’t care”.

I bleed when you cry in anguish, and weep as I
hear your recitals, and then in dark rage, and then
finally in grief, that pools on the dark other
side of the desert, in that null empty kingdom of
Ozymandias the great ruler of Vanity.

You might think I weep sanctimonious, sorrowful
supplicant of righteous standing, who’s crying for
those destitute and benighted, the distant, the stranger and
other, from my tower of ignorant pie in the sky…

You’d be wrong.

I weep in guilt.

Yeah…guilt.

For my tale of dark woe is so anti-tragic,
a Mysterium Tremendum, of a wretch so
shattered and shipwrecked in this desert island

…my body…

My story is different, and I feel so guilty,
confused as to why even in existential
despair I am still on the outside of
the common narrative swirling around me?

Contrary to you, in your longing and noble long
struggle to live, and to surmount desertion and
lost lonely silence by God in Their Heaven above…
I have always been

Haunted by a Lovely God.

When I was little and in my first dawning awareness,
and ageless, I recall that I always heard This Voice,
and at first I thought it outside me, I thought the wind had a
voice, or perhaps it was Trees, but it
never was dirt under my feet, no,
dirt is a tongue-tied dull mute.

As I grew I realized that the voice was inside me…in my heart, and I came to
treasure its company and the glad beauty of thoughts, and of musings. Then
I told my parents what it had told me, and,
flabbergasted, they asked where did I hear that?
And I told them “God. God told me”
(for that is Who the voice told me They were
and …Jesus like a Shepherd led me).

They laughed! LAUGHED! And while they were
not mocking, they merely thought
I was mistaken, had fantasized wonders.
So I cried then, and thought that
maybe my parents were right.

And then came the break, the thirsty sword stroke
that cut me to ribbons, my soft girly heart left in shreds…
then the slavery started with harsh words resounding, those
prison door words…and God was still there, holding
me in my tears, wrapped
around my hurt heart…and I longed for death, wanted to
jump in the river from that tall steel bridge I crossed
over each day but God asked me “please”, and…

well…

who can say no to God when They ask “Please?”

Then They would give me a joy for that day…and They
gave me a dog! Oh! How she and I bonded!
But you have already heard some of the tales of Millie…”Good Old Dog!” No…
this is the story of me being Haunted…

Haunted By a Lovely God.

One time, I was alone outside our house

(the one in the Pear Orchards down
near the cold creek where my Millie and me chased those
skimmer bugs and slippery pollywogs all live-long day…)

and it was warm in the soft early evening and dusky and glowing ethereal gloaming,
the good dusk…and wind softly rustling thru fruit trees so
heavy with life and the sounds of the living earth echoed around me…

…and then all was silent…

Suddenly, and it caught all my attention immediately! Slowly I
walked to the pear trees and stood, just to listen…and I heard it…something!
The call of a Mourning Dove

(or is it Morning Dove? I can’t distinguish the
One from the other, it seems to shift
back and forth always and ever).

It cooed and it called, and it seemed to me as if it spoke to me,
saying…”Come out to Me, Baby… Come out to Me. Come home to Me.”

(Lady Grace, She calls me Baby now, here today)

I was so skert! I thought it was a ghost! And this ghost it was longing for
my tender spirit and if I went out there, it would get inside me and
I would belong to it, always and be its flesh, its living body for
it to inhabit, its dwelling place then and forever.

I wasn’t far from the truth… I look back, I think it was Her, Lady Grace,
Dove come down, Her Voice was calling me, claiming me even then as Her own…
I wonder what would have happened, my life had I heeded Her,
gone to Her, run to Her heedlessly on that first day?

It’s not coincidence that our trees now, all around our house are filled with
Morning Doves (Mourning Doves too), calling, cooing…and pestering people in
our neighborhood, but so comforting to me as totems and emblems,
reminders of Mama’s first call to my hurt lonely soul and my soft tender heart.

Then: it was Veteran’s Day, fall, 1969.
We went to town several miles from home for the parade…I insisted that
Millie come with us, and after the music and marching had ended, we
went to the movies: “The Love Bug”. But Millie was left in our Volkswagen van.

(the one that was faded red
with canvas roll back top
and that relentless bamboo pole that
Dad used to poke us and hit us with
when we were clear in the
back and too rowdy and rude.)

and when we came back to the van…
she was gone.

I cannot tell you what that was like. I nearly fainted. I ran in the
street screaming her name, as cars screeched stop and Dad chased
me hollering “Get Back Here!”

We drove the streets hours and hours, me, head out the window, her name become
my tongue protruding and flapping and desperate in the cold wind.
I screamed that name loud, again and again until I was hoarse, and I kept
screaming, my grief-expiation for killing my dog with my stubborn insistence that she come along.

I tried to bargain with Them…in the sibilant cold and the darkness, I lifted my face:

“I will scream her name until I pass out and can never talk ever again, and then
You will receive my burnt offerings of me and give me what I earned with
desperate grief, what I bought with my service…my heart, Millie come back safe home.”

They remained silent, aloof (and I wonder if this is where They were in your tale of sorrow…).
Finally Dad said “she’s gone”…so we had to go home, in that cold rainy dark night of loss
on that day that we remember and honor the valor of
those who faced their fears and endured for me.

I threw up. I do that when I get distraught…I always have done…I cried, and
cried and I cried, and when I had no tears I groaned and keened, inconsolably moaning…
crying til dust poured from my eyes in place of the tears long drained empty by
grief so stark it was a terror strong, threatening to crush me forever.

My folks were hurting for me, so they used what they always had carved me with,
thought was the best for me, raw in my towering emotions and gaugeless deep passions…
words, stern and cruel, words so full of dark violence, and those words’ incarnated beast,
gawd…the spanking…well…yeah, the Red Raving and Hungry Beast.

I was forced to eat my dinner, and I threw it up…on the table, on all the food
laid there for others to eat. Then I got spanked and sent straight up to bed…
where God was silent and no where to be found… but hey, Ima talker, right?
So I cried out to Them into the darkness thick…

(now get this, and understand that I’d been thru the
wringer of Sunday School, Hellfire Sermons,
Damnation Devotions, and I knew enough to be good or the
devil would get me. I once was told: “I will not spank you…
I’m just gonna let satan get you”…and I roamed behind my mom
hours, and wailed agonizing in fear and stark terror, and
begged her to spank me, deliver me from evil on the cross
of my butt, and her hard paddle the hungry
propitiation for my sins and my wrongs…and
I knew that so many times I had done things,
hell-things like say “shit” or steal cookies, or
sneak out the window to sleep with my Millie and
her wriggly puppies though I was forbidden to,
or watch cartoons on a Saturday morning so
early and low before anyone woke up and caught me at it…and I’d
never been sent to hell…God had not bothered to notice or
even to thunder at me, or make trouble over me, and I
knew lots of people thought God was a fairy tale, which, frankly,
mystified me cus They talked to me so much when I was so little.)

That nite…I cried in a jagged blood whisper, my voice bleeding raw, and the
words, still they linger there, seared deep in me to this very day, now, here with you.

(and now, in this moment… I feel so damn guilty!
Why me??? Why did They talk to me of all people?)

I cried out “God…if You’re really there, real…bring my doggie home…PLEASE!” Then…
somewhere, somehow, I moved past bargains, and buy-offs and bribes…I had cried my way
thru the stark castle of filthy rags and entered into the place of no exit, the
inner sanctorums of grace, where there’s nothing to buy there with money, and
there is no bargaining, no supplicating, no pleas, there is just the
beginnings of Mercy Free…

and crying out the word please in that dark night, eyes
gummed shut with sorrow and tacky tears I at last faded off into sleep
dreamless as I grieved and wished I was dead, like I did every night, and at
last I knew nothing, released and insensate and absent within the lost
shoals of sleep’s gift of respite from my agony, sorrow and grief.

Until I woke, instant and on point, into an electrical dark of night
black glowing bright-black that cast light and filled the still air with a
presence, thick, substantive knowing, and threatening to
rend plain reality like the quick ripping of shrouds in the
hands of the dread faced and tall grim deliverers….

…and I heard scritching, and

(oh oh oh)

her whine (that lil ki-yiy-yiy she always used to call me heart to heart)
and I jumped from the top bunk with a thunderous thud loud enough to wake
even the dead and I got up and ran thru our house in that miracle moment:
“GOD BROUGHT BACK MY DOG!”
“GOD BROUGHT BACK MY DOG!!”

Babbling over and over again like a babe, Bartimaeus had nothing on me!
Shattering slumbering sundering darkness and giving voice
to that One Thing that I am:

Haunted by a Lovely God

Fumbling feverishly I rolled the gravestone away in my heart and threw
open the back door where she called me eagerly whining in joyous returning at sunrise…
she’d jumped a 6 foot fence out of obedience so she could come in thru the
Eye of the Needle: the back yard garage door. She limped and jumped on me
and I went down to the ground, I was crying and kissing her and she was
kissing me too and I ran my hands over her, scarcely believing that she was real,
she was returned, she was home and alive, and my heart was restored unto me.

Then she rolled over, so I could scritch her tummy like she loved
and when I ran my hands over her precious side, my fingers slipped inside
her skin and I drew them back from her side which was pierced and torn open…

(I swear!
I know, the metaphor seems so damn cheesy, right? It really
happened this way! That’s the kind of thing I feel so
guilty for… it’s like They shouted it from the Bright Heavens that
I was not ever escaping Their Undying Love never ceasing and
new every morning. I’m telling you that I have always been
Haunted by a Lovely God).

She had torn open her side, and I’d thrust my hand in just like Thomas and drawn it back,
bloody and warm and changed and I collapsed,

(cus I can’t handle blood, even though it has
handled me, covered me, branded me,
marked and commanded me
forever Under the Mercy)

I murmured brokenly “God hear my prayers, God heard my prayers, God hear my prayers,
God heard my prayers”.

Later, my parents made sure I knew that this was highly unusual, God has more
pressing concerns than my dear dog, or listening to me scream and demand…
yeah, there are all kinds of other prayers over the years, that went up and bounced off…

you know the kind…yeah, those

…and life went on…went on…until

Puberty hit and then hell came home hard to stay…in hair and voice and a
horror-beard (and oh god oh god, oh god down there, oh god please no).
And life required again its cruel ransom, and I wanted, longed to lay me on the gears and cogs
that turned in schools and the church groups that seemed to me incomprehensible
strangers, in their innate knowing of how to move and how to laugh and to be… again
I longed, desired to do away with me…this gender-joke…absurd and ugly mistake, just an
ironic blight on “There” and “Here” because I was neither…here or there, just a null thing

…and then…

…I had another time, deep in the darkness of night and numb tears and dumb talking to Them…

…Them…

1973…14 and awkward and lonely and numb from the bashing I gave me to
un-know who I was and was not supposed to be, allowed to be, allowed…
On that nite, cold and alone in the darkness I told Them that I was not going to follow Them.
I was resigning from being a christian and that I was leaving Them once and for all.

“No offense”, I said. “It’s not you, it’s me”

(I’d yet to discover how this trope is used when we
want to abandon an unwanted suitor or
how its thrown out…to hurt and to wound a familiar dull
lover become coarse and rank and too shrill)

“You have done nothing wrong, You have not failed me, no it’s I who’ve failed You, and
what’s worse, I cannot BUT fail You…always, because I’m a

“horrible boy, I’m an
absent mute girl, I am
nothing, and I count for
nothing and I live on
nothing and I mean more
nothing, just more black
horrible, lost empty nothing.

“I am not going to church anymore,”

(for in those days I, like others around me, assumed that if
you went outside and climbed into the
chicken coop then such a fat happy bird you’d become.)

“…when school starts up again, I’m going to say yes instead of
no thanks when they offer me pot, and offer me drinking, and
offer me bodies and no clothes and company there in the darkness and then I’ll be
numb and feel wanted at least…

“I cannot do it, walk blameless and upright, for
I am a constant habitual wallower in my sin
all the time in my heart, in my mind as I fail ceaseless,
besides, I don’t even desire to be in on this world full of Leavenworth walls…

“I will not fake it! I refuse to be like them, sitting in their pews…

“with hallelujah on their lips and wanna screw ya in their hearts!

“I’ll stay alive, take my medicine straight and deserved and so bitter…and
maybe if I try I will even manage to conjure up a hearty yummy while
I drain the draughts of despair bone-dry…

“I know You’ll send me to hell…I deserve that, and even more so…I don’t
hold that against You, for You are and You always have been so Beautiful…
no, it is me, blight and curse, it’s just me, a disease in this world and pure poison.”

Fountains of sorrow again welled up, even as I wondered why they could
never be fountains of joy? And I cried and cried…softly so no one could hear me…
my brother sleeping…as always in these cut-off times…and

Millie was newly dead, gone to run free in the fields of her dreams, yet another cruel
tribute collected by Usurper death…that left me so empty,
so cold, so cut-off and bereft.

Until I heard it…the Voice!

Calling me gently (as always), so I held my breath, listened to be sure it was Them, then
I heard a soft quiet question asked so plaintively…

“What would it take?” (Ummm…whaaa? I didn’t get it)

“What would it take, Precious One? Child, what would it take for you to not check out,
not go away, but to come here and spend time with Us everyday?
Talk to Us, listen and just be for Us… just be Ours always,
just as your dog, Good Old Millie was your friend, and she belonged
only to you?”

This was a careful and startling question and it was quick,
coming at me curving sideways! So I had to really think!
Something absurd, something so damned unusual, that there was no way it
ever could happen, I mean, don’t get me wrong…I still wanted to be with Them,
wanted to share in Their sweet soft communion, cus I LOVED my Jesus, my Shepherd who
I always dreamed someday would leave the 99 and come to rescue me, I dreamed that
He was my Jester to make me laugh joyously, dreamed that He was my best Friend

…I just wasn’t…His best friend…and I couldn’t fake it. Nope.
So it was crucial I create conditions that even the Almighty God couldn’t meet

…you know…

God cannot make a rock so big that They cannot lift it, but They can do anything
so They can make this rock so big that even They cannot lift it…wait…

I was searching for that Rock that God couldn’t lift… right? So

I said to Them “If, when I wake this morning, and my dad says ‘Kids we are moving’…
if there’s a strange town so distant where nobody knows me, and no one has
seen me, and I can start over, start fresh and anew, then I’ll choose you forever and
give my heart freely…lock, stock, and barrel, completely to You… I’ll be Your Millie,
all of my days till I die and my sentence is over.”

Silence gave answer…then after a bit…I drifted away breathing
deeply again as my tears crooned soft lullabies
to my hot cheeks, they ran down in such ancient deep
canyons of sorrow…down my face, down my heart,
down my soul to end up glistening in sorrowful streamers.

When I got up the next morning, things didn’t sparkle or gleam, and I didn’t
remember the Voice, the Epiphany…I was just staring at breakfast my mom used to
“cook” me in those days…Shredded Wheat with skim milk…and feeling
…that gulf, that dark feeling. That feeling. Yeah… The relentless sharp
razor slash cutting inside my soul, forever aching and Constant.

I wasn’t list’ning, as Dad droned on talking of somethingorruther… until I heard
him say the word…“moving”…something about that word…
why did it stick out?

Then in a quicksilver windstorm of memory-shredded, each piece was
hitting me, sticking, unripping its way to become one
coherent experience, and I recalled my reply to Their inquiry…
so I turned quickly and asked my dear father what did he just say…and he
said it again! He confirmed it! Just as I’d laid forth, to a T!

Haunted by a Lovely God.

(I feel so guilty… why am I treated thus?
Why me? Why not the prayers of parents
whose children suffer and die in horrible pain for
nothing that they ever did?
Why not the prayers of wives for soldiers
Cain has already marked for death’s dark
gaping foul maw, prayers supplicating
deliverance, protection, but
they go unheeded and
Death eats again?)

And of course, we moved, and I did…commit myself to Them…
once all for always…yep, I was in…And I’ve hated it sometimes, and loved it at others.
I’ve grown and I’ve changed, seen Them change before my eyes as they were
opened and I could see other than my own idolatrous self and that
small god I fashioned, so stunted, blind, deaf and so mute in the
vanity of my self worship when my box, my image of Them I had
made was so gloriously broken!

I’ve sorrowed and railed… I’ve been outcast by mean so called
spiritual family, been stunned by the towering cruelty of those who should
know better, done blindly in the Most Wonderful Name of Them…

Lovely God to me, and so ugly and coarse, buffoonish in their mocking mouths.

I met my darling, and we had our babies…
she/they are amazing miracles…I watch the
lives of my college acquaintances shipwreck, their
marriages foundering on the black jagged rocks of their alluring
careers and blood money…and I watch the children of
hard working salts, such dear people around me, more worthy than I, better
people than I, quaff drugs like their hearts are on fire, and join themselves
numbly to anyone there in those earthquakes of loneliness,
wreckages strewn in their wake and their orphans tossed
careless like litter abandoned.

And I have prayed with these people, so passionate, supplications far more
suitable than my own bumbling tongue-tied petitions and tall ebenezers…
and seen them bounce off, with dust poofing, dry-cloudy in
dull drifting mockery…

…and I feel so guilty.

Such. Guilt.

Because They have haunted me… They’ve apprehended me… taken me…
They have not let me go, not let me drift… and I,
transgender woman held in such derision by
most of the offspring of the Blood of the Lamb…
The Holy Spirit has even shown me Her Name and Herself, Lady Grace,
and She’s drawn so near to me, to be ma Mère…my Mama, and teach me
my secret heart and my self, so young and emerging.

And yet still I ask myself why am I haunted?

I could go on, forever recounting the
stories of Their faithful presence and meddling hands…of

Yosemite Sacred, cathedrals where mountains became the
Triune God, and I fell asunder to claw at the dirt in despairing blood-guiltness and
crying for mercy… and wonder of wonders!
El Capitan: Papa…Half Dome, cut asunder became My Friend Jesus…
Yosemite Falls: my Lady Grace, flowing and washing forever until I am pure…
Bridal Veil Falls was me, shifting emotions and prevarications blown
lacey and wandring across rocky faces but always to Them…
rising up from the ground, clean and unsullied as
Waterdeep sang for me They have been nothing but
Good in my life!

Each time I hear someone’s tale of woe filled with despair or with cynical bitterness flowing,
or just fatigue and futility…I am worse than any teller, and merit less than the askers, more
toxic than anyone else whose had issue with God, or
issue with Their present absence, or make issue with Them because

“there is this construct God which has come
out of nowhere, seemingly and thus doesn’t exist
(unlike anything else which its knowing of testifies to its being)…”

I have not told you this tale to shame you… I who am shame incarnate for so long.
Nor to claim privilege or power, position… I do not have an iota of that.

…I have not told you to lobby, convince you… or
proselytize, or evangelize you. God No!
I have made my expiation to you, my confessors…
The sin I am guilty of? Of this I Charissa Grace stand blood guilty:

Being

Haunted by a Lovely God.

The Doctrine of Trans, Part 2

Posted on July 14, 2014 by charissagrace

The Doctrine of Trans, Part 2.

Good Morning Constance…Part 2 from Trans-girl at the Cross.

Prolly of interest only to my readers who are Christian, but even if you aren’t it is worth a look, for it gives some insight into the subtlety of biblical interpretation, and the importance of letting the text speak for God instead of the reader reading her own opinions into the text and then taking the name of the Lord vainly by claiming that God has said something He has not said.

Praying that Lady Grace prevails in the hearts of the Church, and that a place for all LGTBQ people is warmly secured at the table of Their Communion and Fellowship,

Charissa

Final Day

Posted on July 13, 2014 by charissagrace

My children,
we shall not turn back!
Until the DAY.
Even we in this night
Shall know and see
Who we are and
Where we go

Today…

Posted on July 13, 2014 by charissagrace

Dear Constance…

So.

I have thought about it for a few days…what I would say this morning, if anything. After all, there are some things that a woman just never tells.

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But:

I am different than other women, both in that I am myself and unique, and also because I am myself and transgender…in each way I am set apart, and thus have a strong sense of both my freedom to do or not as I choose, but also my “obligation” to report, to chronicle, to make my best effort to inform anyone interested in what life is like inside the oppression of the wrong gender.

The metaphor is just too perfect: We are, all of us, trapped in a wrong place, in a wrong time, with the sense that things ought to be different, and will one day be restored to “happily ever after”.

So with that said…

55 years ago today, I was gripped and smushed and pushed and eventually pulled into the rough light and harsh noise and frighteningly huge space of this world we live in. I was born July 13th, 1959.

It’s been such a long journey, and yet 55 years is literally nil when considered in the light of the days that have gone before.

But to me, it has been all I have ever known, and so I had a history of being on the outside, being outcast and no one knows, and being condemned to persisting in keeping my heart beating and my chest heaving, and my fruit sweet in the midst of a land that had no air, and weighed a million bajillion tons and was the stark backdrop for growing cactus and joshua trees.

Last year was a year of finishes, and it nearly finished me…so much ended, so many things fell apart in my world, and only a few things remained. At the time, it was unbearable. I would go to the mountains on my bike, and scream myself hoarse. It was either that or die.

Jesus told a church back in the day to wake up, and strengthen the things that remain. See, they had invested in transient things, and ignored what lasted. He exhorted them to get a grip, assess priorities and focus on eternal things.

When we don’t listen to the exhortation, He simplifies our options by removing the transient things…and this happened to me last year, a year of sorrow, loss, and ultimately deliverance.

I am glad to see it end, and so happy as well for the way that Mama took me in hand the last 3 months of the year and rooted, grounded my feet and heart in a renewed understanding of my worth and value and significance to Them, to Her…She taught me to begin to love myself, and thus I can with a true heart truly love others.

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I have always associated the number 5 with Grace, for a variety of reasons.

So 55…this is gonna be the year of double grace…Grace upon grace! Charissa (which means grace) Grace.

Moses said to the Lord, in that famous encounter that began with the Lord testing Moses’ heart with the declaration that He was sick and tired of the stubborn nature of the people of Israel.

CLUE: He really wasn’t, but Moses was!! I have found that the Lord often times presents Themselves to me as if THEY are like the attitudes of my heart, in order to mirror to me who I am in that moment.

So here was Moses, pretending on the outside (even to himself) that he was not tired of them, fed up with the dullness and stubbornness, and so the Lord tells Moses that He is done with them, but that He will take Moses himself and raise him up into his own nation of great and awesome people, just like their Progenitor was! (Sarcasm intended btw…this is the same guy that tried to become the great deliverer if Israel by killing an Egyptian slave guard, and then ran into the desert to hide for 40 years!).

But…thank God that Moses had hung out with Them enough to know that when this sort of word came, it was a really good idea to listen with the heart of hearts and not the heart of desire…and so as he thought it over, it became manifestly obvious that it was better to have God Themself over merely Their blessing and protection.

So Moses says this: “Now therefore, I pray, if I have found grace in Your sight, show me now Your way, that I may know You and that I may find grace in Your sight.”

Did you catch that? Moses asks for grace to get grace!

Do you need grace in your life…undeserved favor unending, and the power to do whatever God requires? That is the biblical meaning of grace, by the way…it isn’t some cheap get outta jail free card fire insurance…

The lesson is that it starts with Them, it is by Their power and ability, and it ends in Them, while They in love loop us in to the joy and blessing of Their perfect fellowship.

They include us in Their family.

So…55 years…and new beginnings for Charissa Grace…me, this cursed child of loneliness who has been redeemed from the pit of emptiness, from death. I am walking in faith this year is going to be a year of grace upon grace. The wonderful undeserved unmerited Shalom They have extended over me, to me, in me, thru me, and the power to walk and be fruitful in the land of my afflictions.

I have gone forth sowing in tears. I shall return, harvesting in joy.

And this is the year it truly begins for me…and that is indeed a faith statement!!! It scares me, the gravity of 54 years pulls hard back to the pits of loneliness and despair, but the power of Their love and affection is a strong magnetic irresistible draw.

I cannot resist it.

I do not want to resist it.

So I surrender, and say Happy (yes…for the first time, Happy) Birthday (for I was in so many ways born last year too) Charissa

Happy Birthday, Charissa Grace, blest of God and most fortunate of beings

“

In the Oak Grove

Posted on July 13, 2014 by charissagrace

All existence seems qualified
By your smile–
or a dubious look in your eyes
All existence becomes distinct, ~~(distinct)~~

crystalline and substantial
(succinct)
by the grace that flows
from a movement
of your hand that confers
forgiveness for words spoken
without reflection

All existence is turning here, now,
About a fragment moment. OH!
You must know that only you
Bring me health and a
Cooling breeze from heaven.

Give Ear to My Words…

Posted on July 12, 2014 by charissagrace

…oh Lord, consider my meditation.
Hearken unto the voice of my cry,
My King and my God.

For unto Thee do I talk each day,
it is my voice You hear in the mornings…

Oh Lady Grace, in the mornings will I direct my prayers
and heartsongs and meditations sweet, unto You, and
I will look up.

For Your lovingkindness is better than life
My heart sings, sweet and silent and ever grateful
so thus I will Bless Thee, and lift up my hands unto Your Goodness.

For it is Your grace that sustains me and Your mercy that
endures forever…

But Your steadfast Love…it never ceases…it never comes to an end.
It is new every morning!! Literally, new every morning!
Oh Mama! Great is the Wonder of it!

THE FREEDOM OF IT!

Great is Your faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see.

And so accept me this day, my Lovely King and Lord
your daughter true, born of blood, and blooming with love
and receive my life for Your purpose in today.

Those I meet, those I pass by, and those whose hearts are breaking.

In the precious and wonderful Name of Immanuel, God with Us…

Do Not Be Conformed To This World…

Posted on July 12, 2014 by charissagrace

My Butterflies, Myself

Posted on July 9, 2014 by charissagrace

…and free they fly, finally…

while with shining earthbound

feet we dance watching

hearts aflame, yearning…

fates alive, turning…

death, forever spurning.

CGW
7/9/2014

When The Longing Breeze Returns

Posted on July 9, 2014 by charissagrace

T’was turning slowly in dawn’s breaking light
and shimm’ring whispers silky beyond sight,
the chimes sway beneath hinting soft caress
of yearning summer breeze in ebon dress.

The breeze blows, smelling of exotic birth
from secret womb, beyond far spicy hills
concealed ‘neath velvet star-pricked sable covers
Become substance and presence, become here.

Invisible, not seen, present only
in keening touches tentative, lonely
desiring to stir the sleeping chime,
awaken it to wonders beyond time.

Yet, unknowing chime resists, unhearing,
not smelling jasmine melodies crooned low
by cool voice breezy-breathy, underlayed
with warmth…and longing, sung forever so…

A last push of love, longing…then in sorrow
the breeze blows on by, trilling sad desire
while playing in the always trees of wonder
surrounded in the gleam of new dawn’s fire,

she’s running in her yearning paths again…
But after, when the day is still a rumour
and night is not yet knowing time is up
the chime jingles, clangs, hungry, it remembers

faint sleepy golden dreams of grace-delight
it dances, sways, it craves that feath’ry touch
and nuzzling spicy smell, and then resolves
that it will dance, with open arms and soul

when the longing breeze returns to make it whole.

Christianity and being Transgender – Why I won’t justify my transition

Posted on July 7, 2014 by charissagrace

Christianity and being Transgender – Why I won’t justify my transition.

Hi Constance. I was delighted to run across this article. It is a decent essay regarding relationship with God and being transgender. It speaks also of the pain and sorrow of the religious reflex which kicks in and then kicks us in the butt when the fearful and narrow-minded and deeds-based church culture people decide to be judge, jury, and executioner over other’s faith status.

I am posting it because I am hopeful that if you find yourself in this place, as a person of faith who is weirded out by a transgender person, or if you have always assumed that a transperson is mentally ill, trapped in sin and sexually perverted. Hopefully you will see Meggan’s heart, hear her voice, and realize that she has a life lived in the Redemptive Arms of Love.

Me? If you really want to know? As far as being judged by other christians, I don’t give it a second thought. The presence of the Lord is simply too “there” everyday for me to even entertain the notion that They do not like me. They draw near, each morning and the conversations of our hearts is edifying and encouraging. Sometimes They are silent…and Their world sings to my heart of Their beauty and truth and love.

Besides…I have already been judged soo often in the past by people over basically everything you can think of! Sometimes on the same Sunday morning I would be judged for the very same thing by people who saw it from the opposite stand point! Sometimes my sermons were too full of scripture! Sometimes my sermons were not full enough!!

I got to know Abe Lincoln’s famous saying about pleasing people very well…

The last straw for me, the one that set me free, was when we were in the midst of a vicious power struggle as leaders with a spiritually abusive pastor who was far far FAR past his “pull date”, and knew it…but just…couldn’t…let…go…and I was one of the very few who refused to back down in the face of his rage and anger and horrible ways of making people pay. Many times the wrath would flow…the congregation was about 85% solid on moving on with our new leadership team (leading by plurality), but about 15% were the old guard…didn’t like the new fangled ways like playing guitar and singing choruses and raising hands and waving flags…yunno, really evil things like that.

So…during this time, my father suffered and died from frontal lobe dementia, a rather nasty variant on a nasty phenomenon.

It was so trying, so painful for me. I loved him so, and still do.

And…after he died, someone sidled up to me in order to “comfort me”, but managed to tell me that he was certain that the Lord would not have killed my father if I had not been in rebellion against the old pastor!!!!!

Yeah…that is why I really could give a rip whatever people think…except for God, and my family, and my friends, and those I serve everyday. Haters gonna hate…and show their black hearts like simpering socialites at the Cannes film festival.

Just remember…unkind words are never ok, for any reason…especially from those called to speak in the Name of Love Himself.

Love, Charissa Grace

Born On The Edge

Posted on July 1, 2014 by charissagrace

These days are tricky,
staying in that sweet spot
between futures and pasts.
They want to align
in tricky mutant ways
like my DNA did, matching up
that past with this future,
and presents…well God only knows
how that is determined!

I used to be, in that past,
not present and thus not known or seen.
Love was something
I gave to others, but never was
my picnic basket of many-splendored wonders
and that past shoots me,
injects me into a future that
threatens, withholds and starves
my soul with “tolerance”.

I also was, in this other past,
staunchly, substantially present
and accounted for…doing,
saying this thing and that,
and knighted with unconscious
privilege and place.
That history? Well it veers off
to insistence, self-serving demands
for attention and affirmation.

No…as a “there but not there” prisoner,
I have to struggle to keep
the strands straight, to not cross the streams,
and let my me
cry for love
and for acceptance,
and companionship
and intimacy
and affirmation

and for that label: Beautiful…
while my myself
walks firmly in
lands beyond sight,
unseen but lonely
and finding solace
in Her touch
and Her words
and Her cloak.

It is a knife edge,
and my options are few,
and costly:
selfishness, or abnegation,
and the fruits of those indulgent follies
or standing firm,
with sliced up soles
and a branded soul…

From the beginning, I have been born on the edge.

If I Could Explain The Love Of God

Posted on July 1, 2014 by charissagrace

The Love of God is literally the one thing that transforms all things. There is nothing that is greater. Nothing can stand in its way or resist its power…

…well, except for one other thing: the human will.

The human will can say no to this love…and yet, even human will, no, especially human will, is but the ultimate extension of the Love of God. Because God would rather have children who are free instead of children who are slaves. That liberty is so important that They even found a way to show the Ultimate Love by laying down His life for us all.

It is the one and only thing that has kept me alive all these years, that kept my finger off the trigger and the barrel away from my brain, that kept me getting up everyday and walking thru that gender prison camp I was locked in for so long…the Love of God has been underneath my wings when I can no longer flap them, it has been miles of pillows and cushions when I have cast myself from the precipices of despair and resolved to never ever smile again or ever look someone in the eye.

The times on my bike, when Mama drew near me in the high mountains and loved on me and in me as I slogged mile after mile up 10% slopes, and then came careening down at 55 miles an hour, nothing between me and the pavement but thin tires and bike shorts and the Love of God.

The times I was in my kitchen, hidden inside a big, awkward, hairy temple that was so defeating and monstrously final…and She would touch my heart and light up ingredients and show me how to put together food preparations…and speak to my heart as I did about what is true food and drink.

The vineyards, and the life surging there and the insights She gave me.

When my precious precious doggie was lost, miles from home, and I cried all night at 10 years old and begged Them bring her home…and I said that if You are really there and You really love me You will hear me and have mercy…that same prayer that millions have prayed in one form or another, but never got anything but blunt silence…and in the morning, she was there, my Millie…and I cried so hard, and words cannot express that strange mixture of relief, wonder, and yes a bit of shame for my naked doubt…and literal overwhelming wonder and confusion that They chose to answer my brokenhearted plea.

The night at the end of 8th grade that I cried all night, wanting to die, and finally resigning from being a follower…I told Them “no offense, this is not Your fault, but mine…I literally am not good enough and I am not strong enough. I am not going to live a lie, so I am checking out and will become like everyone else and bury my sorrow in drugs and alcohol and sex”…and wept some more…until She whispered soft but completely clear, asking me what would it take as a sign to me that They would be my life, and my strength, and my hope…

…and I said the wildest thing I could think of: “If Dad gets up this morning (for it was after midnight) and tells us we are moving to a completely different town, where no one knows me, and I have a brand new start, then I will still try and follow you. I will be Your child and always stay near Your side…but what a joke! Who does that, just up and moves to a different city?” And I cried more, until sometime just before dawn I drifted off to a troubled and thready sleep, wishing I could die…

…and when Mom got us up to get ready for school, Dad came in to the table where we ate our cold cereal, and said “Kids…I have some big news for you. Mom and I decided yesterday that we are moving to Gold Hill. It is closer to the house I want to build, and closer to Mom’s school”…and I burst into tears again and they all thought I was distraught from the move, when really I was shattered by the overwhelming, generous, graceful Love of God given to me, ton after ton after ton.

The night, when I finally cracked and admitted what I am, who I am, and Mama sang over me as I cried so hard that the sheets were literally wringing wet…She sang “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. Our mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning, new every morning! Great is Our Faithfulness!”

My dearest darling…the amazing manifestation in human form of Their love…

…but mostly, the tears that pour down my cheeks whenever I, the whore at the feet of Jesus, washing His feet with my tears and drying them with my hair, think about Their love…higher than the highest hills, deeper than the sea, broader than the skies above…and those words, vibrating at the core of all things: It Is Finished .

Love, Charissa Grace
the girl loved without measure
for reasons ever mysterious

A-maze-in- Me

Posted on June 30, 2014 by charissagrace

Those years,
early and freshly spinning
out of the Mystery,
or fresh to me,
blessedly unknowing
how ancient, how creaky
the turning sun as he blazed
across the hot and endless skies
of my childhood…

and how mournful and shadow-soft
the moon’s glimmering
elegy to my innocence
as she
with unblinking open silver eye
saw me there,
hidden and trapped
in the maze of myself.

Slowly I woke up…
and found cruel mirrors
making carnival claims,
barkers of snake-oil siren songs
seeking to snow my heart
white and cold with icy lines
written for what I looked like,
not who I was, heart warm
and red and pulsing,
throbbing to know and be known
in connection and union with
that unstoppable yearning,
welling, bubbling, running out
on thirsty ground.

I figured out I didn’t match
the carnival caricatures’
deceptive drifting distortions…
I realized my designated place,
in the shadow of the freak show,
or somewhere far away…

I was forbidden the Deep Well,
but Grandma showed me paths
unknown and long forgotten,
and I peered into the Well,
under soulful moon’s argent gaze,
under different sheltering shadow
of silver comfort and lustrous grey
grace streaming, I saw me there,
shimmering and free, and rising,
and I leaned forward to let my lips
be blessed with the kiss of life,
the kiss of liberty,
and happiness…

That awakening kiss,
it never came then,
for the sun growled,
groaned and poked
and peeked long before
I could rise
from the Deep Well’s depths,
under the moon’s blessing lament,
to find me standing,
yearning in the dry dirt,
and breathe, tremble,
touch, kiss, mingle.

Under his harsh and razor light
I ran ragged and breathing rough
thru tears of salty-sorrow,
racing to beat that searing
pumpkin-threat of outing me.

And just in time
I caught the bus
to school, still dreamy
and mindful always
of that Deep Well
and her starry night
Living Water pool.

Sadly I ran
under sun
those days,
stick in hand
and hoop so simple,
while wistful I watched
myself under moon
those nights,
complex and intricate,
intuitive and knowing
nooks and crannies
of souls and hearts
and minds.

I watched me,
I was blind to myself.
I ran that Labyrinth
lurching longingly
between
Pasiphaë and Theseus,
but really just
the monster in the maze,
and bellowing blind
and wandering.

And no one knew,
and no one saw,
and no one heard,
so on I ran under sun
and waiting for
the moon’s soft voice,
running my fingers
thru her light
and desperately feeling
with my heart
the braille she beamed on me,
so I could find at least
the realms and rims and limits
of the maze of me.

Those years have trudged by,
feet dragging under sun,
but days dance and spin
and whirl beneath
the moon’s soft care
of this lune-enchanted girl.
I have found my hovering place
twixt night and day,
glad in my graceful
gloaming time, my gleaming
gloaming years.

Grandma’s paths were always there,
within me hidden, in that maze
whose secrets are at last revealed
by moon’s insistent pulse and gaze
in me, and I go so unerringly
to that well

Deep and Purple and Silver,

and I see myself
and touch myself
and kiss myself,
at long last
become

amazing me.

Deaf Earth’s Denial

Posted on June 24, 2014 by charissagrace

…I remember, sweet fields of red clover,
green stalks soft and new, tops dipped in crimson,
just before being baked by the shimmery sun
but after they’d stripped off their equinox frocks
to lay naked and sunbathe and snooze

… ‘neath verdurous bows I’d lay gentle
to be rustled and stirred by love-winds
strumming intimate, soft rustling flamenco strains
on red bursts and green wands stirring passionate pleas
and my longing heart yearned contrapuntal

…my head cradled by my dearest doggie,
become Jacob’s stone pillow made living,
and her smile was my ladder to heavenly places,
she my only friend, she my constant companion,
Faithful avatar of Lady Grace

…her sides rising and falling she slumbered
and her dog-dreams broadcasting to touch me
with love-notes that ran thru the magic and mystic
and knit her, my heart, and the clouds and the clover
together in one ever-moment

…and I stared at that limitless blue sky
that held up the clouds, and I was certain
I could stand on them, jump from them only to land softly,
safe in the next passing snowy-cloud heart
to be kissed and be kept from all harming

…I would watch them yield to the wind’s wooing
and change shapes and become different things,
one by one as blue held up their heads and they transformed
to tell of my stories, such longing and aching,
the tale of my breaking young spirit

…and then I would strain hard to become one,
so the cloud of myself would grow solid,
and take tangible shape on the outside of who I was
wailing within, keening desperate to be
what my body and deaf earth denied me

…I would concentrate, willing my rough flesh
to go soft, to go secretly supple,
so my dog’s dreaming tides would wash o’er me and mold me
the who I was destined to be, and not what I was,
dark and substantial and wandering

…but it never worked, so tears would find me
and use me as their surf board to ride on
over billows of longing that swept me away,
but not away away, alas never AWAY
just to Jonah’s lost island of longing

…and Millie would wake at my sobbing
and lift her head to mine so tender
and snap out her pink tongue full of wet doggie balm
dripping healing she’d lick out her quick canine psalm
don’t cry, whine-lick, don’t cry dear, Amen.

…I remember sweet fields of red clover
I remember their scent washing over
and I see them still gleaming, but here now, not dreaming
they are blooming within me and beauty is streaming
to carry me there, to the clouds.

Suffragette of Sight

Posted on June 14, 2014 by charissagrace

They leave marks, tears. Look.
You can see them if you stand
eyes akimbo and uncrossed from normal.
They don’t show if you look usual-like.

But they shimmer
like living starry
liquid songs of sorrow
They sparkle in sideways-sight,
like limpid diamonds heaped

across the face of the earth.

Sometimes, if you walk around
with your eyes uncrossed
you will bump into people
that are invisible in this land,
the ones who choke their tear-spring
with furious fingers

so they don’t show up seeable.
They don’t glimmer and gleam.
Some sorrows are too deep,
so when this happens, you must

reach into your bag
and sprinkle them
with tear dust.

I’ve been practicing this
diagonal walk, shambling
hither and yon
whispering “Marco”
and straining to hear
the reply.

It’s like my
sonar of sorrow,
I guess,
to navigating
these strange seas
of lambent woe.

And I never wash my face anymore…
I have a theory:
let my tears dry
on my cheeks,
my lips, and they
will end up

tattooing my heart,
marking me Maori-like
as blessed, a
Suffragette of sight.

High Spring Pastiche

Posted on June 12, 2014 by charissagrace

We had just finished our ride,
and we were parched and pressed
to sling a leg off the back of our bikes.
Salt crusted jerseys glared flat and dull
in the sultry sun of High Spring, falling
all shimmery clear and gold, splashing
on the hot black radiant parking lot
like wedding rice.

Across the street
the stilted and dumb
rain-birds spit water
on the swollen
green baseball field,
which was so happy
in the drizzle
it reeked noisily
of lazy drinks at twilight
and kids at play.

We looked on silently,
and then drained our own draughts
and added our tired joyful scent to the melange.

Soon, bikes bunked again in the van
and our 455 air-conditioner at a lazy 45,
we rolled towards dinner and wine,
and the lovely sleep of the dead a bike ride bequeaths.

My soul sang and hummed along
with the soft sibilant tires,
and I knew my favorite pasture
was soon to jump up into me
from across the ditch.

I hung my head out the window,
let my tongue taste the air
and the wind bury wild
sensual fingers in my hair.

And then she was there,
smelling ancient and new
and fresh and fertile and pulsing,
eager like love making on an endless afternoon
sweet and free under plush rustley blue skies.
I heard her song,
I felt her tug in my guts,
I tasted her tang in the wind
and shivered with delight.

She was shorn, fresh-mowed
and relieved, light and lively
and sprawling in mystery,
cloaked in new nakedness
and hidden behind beauty marks revealed.

She breathed…
deep rhythm
and spin and pulse…
deep.

Silly Samsons thought
she was Delilah returned,
so they came for
assey jawbone revenge,
and left with her full
alfalfa tresses tamed and taken.

I think she just laughed.
Because, blinded by the usual,
they had no clue that my Deborah,
my delight, my paradise
had wonders not touched
or dreamed of save by dreamers
and by trackers and wonder-holics
with the DTs of delectation
who would sell their mama’s souls
for just a whiff, just a taste, just a touch
of beyond the Beyond…
she is there for us always.

Time stood still as we passed her,
and birdsong wove wonder-ways
into her chambers, and there,
in the deep back,
where her leggy tree thatches
came together and merged,
where her center throbbed,
supple gloaming dark,
soft and silky rose
from beneath the wood,
seeped black and creamy
from the edge of field
and trees.

And I knew that I beheld the center,
the wellspring of beauty and
the font of her rivers,
her fertile forever flow,
her temple, her womb.
And I felt her curve
round her children yet born,
even as she reached
and caressed my cheek
as I flew by with kisses
of a queen to me her
handmaiden.

Soon we were passed,
hurtling headfirst towards tomorrow
while she moved and danced
and stayed rooted in her everthere.

Light just so, wind just so,
I knew that door
would never show again.
I sighed, licked my salty lips
and ached fiercely with heart

full of her sweet always song.

The Crucible of Disappointment

Posted on June 11, 2014 by charissagrace

Constance…have you ever been disappointed?

“Yeah, riiiiggghhhht, ‘Rissa!” you are prolly thinking! “Who hasn’t!!?”

And that leads me to my topic. See…lately I have been experiencing a lot of disappointment…plans made with loved ones and deeply anticipated, only to find that they have changed so the loved one can serve someone else…understandable…but disappointing.

Or trying hard to nail down an appointment, only to get no reply regarding which of a number of dates would be best…and then worse, feeling like I am making a pest of myself in seeking to simply get this thing scheduled…wondering if I am being avoided, if I have been intrusive or over-bearing…and yeah, disappointment.

We all experience it, but here is a secret: disappointment can be a crucial and pivotal agent of transformation in your life…or rather, the way that you handle it will lead to radical transformation.

I think the most crucial thing to grasp is this: Disappointment is divinely planned to result in death. Think about it…frequently when we are disappointed, something inside us dies–a dream, a desire, a hope, a plan…but as has so often been the case for me, the death of those things opens the gateways for the resurrection of those things in some far more pure and properly motivated form.

It is a tool that is similar to a surgeon’s blade. It is wielded with great skill by the Ones who love us best. But there is a team aspect to passing thru the death of disappointment and int the realms of resurrection! Like so many things, what is most crucial is not what happened, but rather how we choose to respond. The power to choose is what separates the Mandala’s from the Mansons!

Generally, we tend to deal with disappointment in one of two ways:
#1: Fear. I know that I am guilty a lot of being so confused when I get disappointed, and then to think, and react in fear…fear that I am being rejected, fear that I am unloved, fear that I have driven someone away with a careless word or mis-timed joke, fear of pain or sorrow.

#2. Faith. Faith that love bears all things, and never fails, and Joy will always find a way. When we are able to faithfully continue to the person we wish to be, to keep our eyes on the vision and keep them off ourselves, it is miraculous how disappointment becomes the catalyst for the transformation we so deeply desire.

I am struck by a series of contrasts in the lives of several Bible characters, and please, remember that the things in the Bible contain truths that we are privileged to suss out in our day and age. It is possible to learn from the truth of the stories without necessarily subscribing to a specifically Christian position or theology.

I see a vast difference in the lives of 2 men, who at one time were very close, who both were destined to rule as king, who both endured disappointment and sorrow…and yet one of these men we have heard nothing from or about other than the things recorded about in in the Bible, and the other of the men wrote poetry and prayers that are still to this day echoing in the highways and byways of the human heart and soul! I am talking about Saul, and David…one walked with fear, and one walked with faith.

Saul is said to have encountered a big disappointment when the prophet Samuel did not show up when Saul had planned for him to. Samuel told him to wait…wait until Samuel arrived! But Samuel delayed several days…and then the people began to grumble, began to demand that their king take action…and Saul’s disappointment became infected by fear, and he began to move and think and decide from a basis of fear.

In the midst of the crucible of disappointment, Saul fearfully decided that he could not rely on or trust anyone else, so he chose to embrace self-reliance, in a twisted way. And within a few chapters he is in the grip of self-deception, which bore the bitter fruits of despair and ultimately destruction…and we see this cycle of disappointment/deception/despair/destruction repeated in Saul’s life over and over again.

By the end of his days, Saul is alone and finds himself in the house of a witch, seeking dark and sinister remedies for disappointment. A few days later, Saul commits suicide, and the life of a talented and promising human being came to a tragic and futile end.

David, on the other hand, found himself in the crucible of disappointment over and over again just like Saul…but instead of responding with fear, he responded with faith. He made a choice, to delight himself in whatsoever was true, good, noble and worthy. He spoke of his choices to do this, to trust, to have faith. He wrote about them, and about the Ones with the power to deliver him according to Their riches and mercies. David declared over and over again that even in the midst of disappointment, God is good.

And ultimately, David experienced deliverance from that crucible and resurrection into a more yielded and humble vessel.

Disappointment met in fear=> deception=>despair=>destruction=>death. The root force behind this whole path is self-reliance, in its unbalanced and unhealthy form. The soundtrack to this path is the song “What about me? Me, me, meeee!!” Tragically, death here is the ultimate and final end.

Disappointment met in faith=>delight in what’s right=>declaring what’s true=>deliverance=>resurrection and life! The root force behind this whole path is a yielded spirit. The soundtrack to this path is the song “I Surrender All”. Miraculously, death here is the gateway to life, and is just a new beginning!

There are many other contrasts available for your examination…consider the man of fear (Samson) vs the man of faith (Samuel), and how each one dealt with disappointment, how each one walked a road that was determined by their choice of fear/faith, and the fruit that came from their lives by the end…

…or consider Judas and Peter (who aren’t that much different! After all, both men betrayed the Lord in His hour of travail!). Judas encountered such disappointment that the Messiah was not setting up a physical kingdom in which he would be an important governor, but was instead setting up a kingdom that was not made from wealth and fame, but from love and sacrifice and kindness…and so he stole things (out of fear), and justified it to himself to betray Jesus (deception), and then when he saw that every attempt he made to force Jesus to show His power physically and save Himself had failed, he wept bitterly (despair), and then hung himself.

Peter, on the other hand, entered into the same crucible, and was guilty of the same things, having taken up a sword and cut off the ear of another person (it took the touch of Jesus to heal that person!)

And as an aside, have you ever noticed that before? When Peter got militant and angry and attempted to bring the Kingdom in by human strength, he effectively rendered another person incapable of hearing! Ask yourself: how many times have YOU with the best of intentions but firmly ensconced in your own strength and agenda taken your sword and hurt someone, deafened them to the very message you so deeply wish to communicate? I think we need to take a hard look at ourselves, and consider hard the lesson Peter learned here!

So when Peter did this, he was rebuked by the Lord, and got disappointed, and even more so when Jesus allowed Himself to be taken away…and then he walked in fear, which led to deception that he would be safe from harm if he just kept quiet…which led to his denial of Jesus vehemently…which led to his despair as he saw His friend and Lord taken and tortured…

…but Peter then found the space and the grace to hold on, and a few days later, the Risen Lord appeared on the shores of the sea and called to Peter who in faith took action! He dove into the sea and swam to the Lord, and there in faith he let disappointment be turned into resurrection as he found his way through delighting in the Lord, declaring Who He is, and thus being delivered into new life.

Constance…I encourage you to take a ramble thru these stories. Whether you have a Bible or just use aan online tool like Bible Gateway…whether you consider the Bible authoritative in your life, or a collection of wise spiritual stories…do not lose the opportunity to glean some wisdom and a skill set to assist you in dealing with a very common assailant in our lives here in this time and place.

The contrasts between the two ways of dealing with disappointment are stark and meaningfully salient:

Fear seeks to escape…Faith seeks to embrace.

If you have chosen a lifestyle that is fear based, this is sort of attempting to save yourself by yourself, and essentially that is tantamount to spiritual suicide eventually. Ultimately, none of us is big enough to bear all our burdens all by ourselves! We need each other, and in my own world view, we need They who love us utterly and completely!

But if you choose to take the risk of responding in faith to disappointment, and to embrace your life rather than attempt to flee, then you will find the peace and relief in laying down your life into Their loving hands…trusting Them that you can be who you really are with Them, and that They will be who They really are with you!. You take your eyes off of the fires, off of the hurts, and you fix your eyes on the promised prize waiting on the other side…waiting thru the crucible of disappointment.

Disappointment: it brings us to the crossroads…and we can travel to that cross, and then thru that cross and into new life and deeper peace and joy.

Thank you so much for reading, and may you be blessed this day with oodles of grace, and boodles of joy, and blankets of peace.

Love,

Charissa Grace

The Dive

Posted on June 10, 2014 by charissagrace

Bobbing in the silver lake like a cork, or maybe a pink bobber trailing a hook for catching fish,
I looked around and saw no sight of land, no brown, no yellow,
no dry tang of sand.

Just water (blue and turquoise, purple and green waves
moving, flowing deep and wide)
…and me, floating.

I heard a voice on the waters, in the waters, so near yet so far
and perhaps from outside the in, and clear…calling me, calling.
Come. Deeper. Calling and beckoning.

I looked down thru the shimmer and saw a dim glimmer of a figure far
below and hanging, floating, and waving Her arms like seaweed become God…
or was God become seaweed?

Adrift and alone, I had no other place to be or way to go, and so
a breath for luck–I dove…and swam…until I was red, was bursting red and
kicking water-doors in, swimming thru that choking and wet desperate desert din,

trying to get to Her, to be found, deep in the waves and whole,
deep in Her sea, Her song and Her smile…alas! Faltering I had to choose…
If I kept on I’d fall short and drown, but if I turned back, I could surface again,

but only to the lonely still, and outside Her in…so I pressed on,
down, having decided if I were to die this day it would be swimming to Her
and never running away.

And then suddenly I was there, or She was here, my choked lungs
burned bursting-black like Chicago and Her Lips ageless and fresh on mine, cool and sizzling…
and Her breath became forevermore my life’s air.

F.I.G. L.E.A.F.

Posted on May 29, 2014 by charissagrace

Ever lived a life of cover-up? A life that maybe you were even hiding from yourself?

I have. And I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I was authentic, honest, and transparent to God, others, and myself.

HA!!! Just as my father and mother from eons ago, I had fig leaves for coverings. A fig leaf is anything other than the glory of God that you take refuge in. When the scripture says that Adam and Eve were naked and ashamed, it wasn’t talking about that they suddenly knew they had no clothes on! What it meant was that the inner life of God, the Spirit of Life that Shines and gives Life had been extinguished…had died.

They had died, spiritually. And now they were dim, burned out, diminished, and it was obvious to one another, Thus, they sought a cover-up…fig leaf…just as we do to this day.

Thankfully, through the love and mercy of God Jesus who is the Second Adam has made a way for us to get a bulb change, and get our god-light turned back on, and gain in our confidence and faith in His work to the point where we can discard our fig leaves and stand boldly with unveiled faces.

But they are tricky…they are subtle and insidious…and of many and divers forms. I guess I was/am sorta an expert in wearing them and hiding. But no more! 🙂

As I was/am walking away from these, LG has given a funny little acrostic as listed below…do you see yourself there anywhere? I know I said OUCH!

Love, Charissa Grace

F     ear
I     nsecurity
G     uilt

L     oneliness
E     xile
A     nxiety
F     rustration

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Quartet

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A Dhé le Caitlín Maude – Translation

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