July 1: Fantastic Dreams, God's Love, Patricia Lockwood, "When the World Was Ten Years Old He Fell Deep in Love with Egypt"

And in church he recalled certain recent fantastic dreams.  There had been a dream about ancient Egypt recently.  Of it he could remember this:  of riding across a desert in a chariot to attend a dinner party at a nobleman's house.  He driver was a Nubian slave.  In that incarnation Ives was a minor architect of some kind.  He wore a silken cape and a soft gold skullcap and gold bracelets around his arms.  He carried vials of perfume as a gift for his friends. . .

Ives has a lot of strange dreams and visions.  There's colored winds and spinning suns.  He's an Egyptian architect and a French monk and a Parthian.  Each incarnation of himself is searching for some kind of divine knowledge, and understanding of God's love.

I've been thinking about God's love a lot today.  Maybe "thinking about" isn't quite the right phrase.  More like "struggling with."  I'm not really seeing God's love in what's happening with my sister.  I don't see divine mercy or justice.  I don't really see anything close to what I associate with Jesus or the Big Guy in the Sky.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this post.  I'm angry.  Not thinking really clearly.  I'm thinking of the plagues God visited on the Egyptians, especially the final one, where all the first-born children of Egypt are killed.  I've always had a difficult time with that plague--how children are somehow punished for the sins of their parents.  I know God had to get Pharaoh's attention, but killing kids just doesn't jive with my vision of a loving Deity.

Okay, I'm not going to go any further with this.  I'm trying to figure out the mind of God, and that's not a healthy pursuit.  I'm confused and sad and pissed and tired and _____ (insert any emotion here).

Saint Marty needs to get to bed.

When the World Was Ten Years Old
 He Fell Deep in Love with Egypt

by:  Patricia Lockwood

Just as he fell in love with the dinosaurs,
just as he would fall in love with the moon--
no women in the world yet, he was only ten
years old.  A ten-year-old is made of time,
the world had forever to learn about Egypt.
He entered encyclopedias and looted every
fact of them and when he had finished looting
     there he broke into the Bible.  He snuck
into his mother's room and drew thick lines
around his eyes and those were the borders
of Egypt.  He carefully wrote in stiff small
birds, he carefully wrote in coiled snakes,
he carefully wrote in flatfooted humans.
The ten-year-old world needed so much
privacy, he learned to draw the door-bolt
          glyph and learned to make the sound
          it made.  I am an old white British man,
decided the ten-year-old world, I wear a round
lens on my right eye, the Day, and see only a blur
with my left eye, the Night.  When the sun shone
on him it shone on Egypt, all the dark for a while
          was the dark in the Pyramids, the left lung
of his body was the shape of Africa
          and one single square breath in it Egypt.
They never found all the tombs, he knew.  Anyone
might be buried in Egypt, thought the ten-year-old
world in love with it, I will send my wind down
into my valley, and my wind will uncover the doors
to the tombs, and I will go down myself inside them,
and shine light on all the faces, and light on the rooms
full of gold, and light on even the littlest pets, on the mice
and the beetles of the ten-year-old kings, and shine light
                              on even their littlest names.

Can you explain God's love to me?