People of the Bubble

People of the Bubble

By Rev. Molly Housh Gordon

Once upon a time, in a land that was neither here nor there, there lived a people, who were neither like us nor unlike. These people did all the things we do. They were born and they died, and between they lived lives of differing lengths. They learned things, they played, they danced and sang, they had ideas, they yelled and picked fights, they meditated and prayed, they ate and drank.

But these people were different in one big way. They each had a stretchy, shiny bubble around them.

Living in bubbles meant that they bounced, and that they were always safe.

And so it was that these people, in this land, were happy, and bouncy, and safe.

Then one day, among these people, a little girl named Ava was born, and she had no bubble.

The people felt sorry for Ava and watched her with great fear. "What would happen to her without

her bubble to protect her?" they whispered to one another.

There was no way to know but to wait and see, and so they looked on as poor little bubble-less Ava grew up.

They watched as Ava learned to walk, flinching each time she teetered and tottered. They watched as Ava picked dandelions and blew on their fluffy heads, sending them blowing out across the wind. They sighed as they watched her stroke a fluffy cat.

Maybe their safe and bouncy bubbles also meant they couldn't do a few things that looked rather nice, they realized.

Then one day when little Ava was learning to roller skate, she fell down, and since she had no bubble, she didn't bounce. She hit the ground hard.

The people gasped. Ava cried. But she wasn't too badly hurt, so she stood back up again, and it was then that the people of the bubble saw blood for the first time, for little Ava had scraped her knee.

Some of the people looked on in fascination, others fainted in horror. Ava just wiped her knee on her sleeve and went inside to get some ice cream.

The next day she roller skated down a big hill, laughing as the wind tickled her face and blew her hair into a streamer flying out behind her.

It was then that the people realized, inside their bubbles, that they had never felt the wind tickle their faces or blow their hair.

That night, the first bubble-breaker climbed out of her bubble, and left it behind in the garage. It was a girl named Penny just about Ava's age. And that night, she felt for the first time how soft her favorite blanket was as she fell asleep.

The next morning Penny grabbed her roller skates and raced to the top of the big hill. And she raced down it with the wind in her hair. And she laughed and laughed and the wind blew tears of joy off her face.

Yay! Said Ava, waiting at the bottom of the hill, and she threw her arms out wide. Penny skated right into her arms.

And that was when everything changed.

That was when the people of the bubble first saw a hug.

And it looked so cozy and it looked so happy and comfy. And the people of the bubbles realized that they had never touched one another, had never felt that connection.

That night there were a dozen more bubble-breakers who climbed out of their bubbles and left them behind in the garage. And then the next night a dozen more. And on and on.

Because of Ava, the people realized that they needed to feel fluffy cat fur and the wind in their faces and the embrace of loved ones.

Of course, many of them scraped their knees and pricked their fingers and sometimes worse, for they were no longer very bouncy or completely safe.

But when they hurt they held each other tight, and no one dreamed of going back to their bubble.

Flying

I am not an infrequent flier. Many, many times now, I have leaned back in my seat and felt gravity push against my chest as we climb. Still, at every take-off, I feel my heart thumping fiercely in protest as it rises and drops.

To ease my mind, I imagine different sources of help, and I pray.

I picture God's hand (the God that is a child, seriously playful) zooooooooming us down the runway in our toy plane and woooooshing us up in the air, lips buzzing with all the proper sound effects.

I envision us being lifted into the air by waves of love and well-wishes, waves carried with each passenger from loved ones near and far. Pooled together, what power they must have! Certainly enough to lift a plane up safely.

All this, I realize, to avoid the truth that when I stepped onto the plan I gathered my life up in my arms, like my coat or some more precious bundle, and handed it over to pilots and mechanics and countless others. I am, coatless and shivering, at their mercy.

And it is only rarely, as we reach cruising altitude, that I allow myself the deeper truth. It was never my bundle to give away, not really. Walking or flying, we are always tethered or held aloft, always, by the web of life that threatens and sustains us, that makes us vulnerable, makes us human. We are at... and in... its mercy.

No promises. Only the reality of our naked connectedness.

And just as I realize that we are not only coatless but may as well be flying in the nude, for all the control we (n)ever have... we arrive. We collect our coats and shrug them on, and we step out into the sun, blinking and grateful.

Ash Wednesday

Making a Fist

By Naomi Shihab Nye b. 1952

We forget that we are all dead men conversing wtih dead men.

—Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

I felt the life sliding out of me,

a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

I was seven, I lay in the car

watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.

My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”

I begged my mother.

We had been traveling for days.

With strange confidence she answered,

“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,

the borders we must cross separately,

stamped with our unanswerable woes.

I who did not die, who am still living,

still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

clenching and opening one small hand.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist” from Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry. Copyright © 1988 by University of Utah Press. Reprinted at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241028

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We clutch so hard at life, attempting some sense of control in the face of our own finitude. We clench our fists. We numb our senses. We deny our mortality in a million different ways.

But today - Ash Wednesday - we let go. We stop clenching and clutching. We acknowledge that we will die.

We fall back against the earth and realize that we are still held. That we can rely upon gravity and the embrace of love.

The ashes smeared across our foreheads mark our mortal limits, which are exactly the places we are open to Love.

During this Lenten time, these 40 days of fasting and contemplation, I invite you simply to unclench your fist.

Not to give something up in an ascetic exercise of rigid control, but rather to let go.

What are you holding that is preventing your hands from cupping the gifts of love and beauty?

Let it go.

Pick up a handful of soft earth and let it slip through your fingers. Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.

Let it go.

Hold your hands open, fragile, soft - ready to receive.

Let go.