*Loaves and Fishes---a Poem

This is not
the age of information.

This is not
the age of information.

Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.

This is the time of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

               -----David Whyte

21 people parachuted down onto this faraway Alaskan island last week (including Philip and Janet Yancey.) What kind of world would we create? In boots with backpacks men and women from everywhere clomped tremulously down the pontoon into the water onto the beach, through the open garden gate. Each one came freighted with apprehension, with the weight of their families’ worries, their own burden of words.

What would we make of this island this week?

 We gathered around words every morning. Not so much to fix them. More, to listen. Sprung from our closets, where we write, all of us, utterly alone, here, now, every class, every meal is a feast of presence.

We were FOR each other, not against. We were not competing with one another but collaborating. We never went hungry. We could hardly stop.

Do not say “Of course! Of course!”  This is not the usual world. I have been in classrooms, universities, workshops with dire shortages of food and water. In these deserts, honor and kindness were bargained or stolen, yanked from the uncertain, the humble, the seeker, the meek. Just one or two were the lucky ones, the smart ones. The desert got only one queen.

But not here. Nor anywhere people gather whose hearts are not theirs but their Makers. When the bread and fish kept breaking and breaking, and thousands lugged home their bursting stomachs---this was us too. Abundance, excess, overflow, love.

What is this open-gated place? Where do we find it? What do we name it?

This is the body of Christ.  This is the economy of heaven. These are the metrics of the “Kingdom Come” life . Here. Now.

(But how did you do it, God? Did you really turn it all over to us, your just-made red-dirt beings fresh-hatched from your hands? How did you turn your Very-Good world over to them, to us, to know-nothing Us? How did they dare to begin?)

Your love made them brave, those two: first man and woman of the new earth who set about settling, naming and harvesting with vigor and joy.

Your love makes US brave too, brave enough to leap out of floatplanes, to sail rainy seas, to inhabit a wilderness island, to see fully into another’s dark closets of pain, to harvest true words. To make of a desert, a wild and profuse ocean-garden of love . . . .

And it was all very very good.

    Friends, we will be gathering again next September with Ann Voskamp. (More info and application here ) How I wish I could fly you all up here to join us!! Sadly, I can accommodate only 21! (But that's part of the joy of it---this intimate family that's formed.)   

But you have been called to the same work no matter where you live-----naming this wild world, and taming it with love. I pray you seek and speak sweet true words all this week!!

    Always,

      Leslie

*Special thanks to Carol Lee, poetry-spotter extraordinaire