Mystic Chickens

Chickens on the Porch Kristen Reitz-Green

                                                      

The summer we left Red Mountain Church, I hauled one of our dining room chairs out on the back porch and sat in the shade eating Girl Scout cookies and reading every single cult-escape narrative in the Social Sciences section of the Birmingham Public Library. One day, months later, if finally dawned on me what the heck I was doing. It's funny how our brains and emotions team up like that but keep the conscious part of our minds from understanding until we can handle it. Maybe, that's what denial really is. (Or, maybe it IS a river in Egypt.) 

Evelyn Underhill writes that one of the most important aspects of the mystical life is drawing every shard of our fragmented identities together into One Unified Whole and then learning how to focus the mental energies of that singular identity on the contemplation of one overarching Other. I picture myself, leaning off the porch, calling "Chick Chick Chick! Come home, chickens!" And seeing every birdbrained aspect of my identity come rolling out from under the porch, off the doghouse, around the side of the barn looking at me with  little red combs a-jangle like "what now, pops?" It's a daunting proposition.

I am feeling especially fragmented. And when I feel like this, I want to look at something wise and knowing and I want to pull myself together with someone else's string. I want to hear someone tell me what to do when A happens to B and yields C.  The jumbled prose of my life clunks along and drags like the fiddle in a Hank Williams song and I want it to SNAP to attention like a Marine Recruit and transmogrify itself into some kind of mathematical equation. It's funny that the more my brain gets like that the more I want some kind of Totality to tell me what to do. Ironic I suppose, because when I look back on those times I almost hear the buzz of the real potentiality of my naked identity hopping out of the self-crafted crate of conformity I've stuffed it in and running around the yard (with it's head off?).

And the problem I invariably encounter—whether it be with Catholic theology or Quiverfull ideas of submission and family or even the Holy Bible itself—is that I connect all the dots and still can't quite tell what the picture is supposed to be. No one, I think, is in my tree. So sometimes I just sit and look at one leaf of the White Oak tree outside my window and I call hard to that overarching Other and I wait for him to tell me what to do. And sometimes he does. But sometimes, I make that mystical connection that we've all made by accident around the fire at camp or on the front porch with friends or listening to music or contemplating the nature of a really good dog, and I do feel transported to some kind of liminal place between the earth and where He is. And it's then, if I can be bold enough to say it without being accused of deifying myself, (God forbid!) that I'm really at home inside my soul.