Within days of the end of an era I lay beneath a cloudy night sky and drew faces from slow moving clouds and stars and planets
I resisted the urge to cup your face in my hand or bang the flats of my palms against the heavy plate glass of the cathedral
Yell your name
But I had to
Had to
Had to
Touch the hem of your garment
Pray you turn and say my name
He would be
A lovely boy who lived
Close to the frog pond
The tadpoles would catch glimpses
Of him through the refractory waters
Walking to and fro in the cool of the day
But could they trust their love? How could they ever measure up?
How many froglings does it take to amalgamate
A suitable consort for a King?
All of them with all their hearts
Eyes fixed skyward
To see his face and speak at last in the tongues of
Men and angels
You have to see past the blood—your own and his
The stinging sweat and the jeering crowds
The voice in your own pounding brain
Nay, voices—
Saying that no king of anything could die like this
Alone and vulnerable in the dumpster fire of all
You have to focus on his eyes
What he sees and what is reflected in them
Love beyond measure/sky without end
And you must listen to his voice
Agony is too small a word for what he has done for us
The fire of the wrath of a holy God
Substitutionary Everything
Nothing left without Him.
Jesus knows that his beloved followers will need things to hold onto as they undergo the crushing persecution and ostracism of the first years (300ish) of Christianity.
So he gives them stories—stories so vivid and memorable and simple and beautiful that they can go back again and again to these stories to nourish them in the dark places they will find themselves in as followers of The Way.
The parable are rooms we can live in, stories we can inhabit, people and places and symbols we can return to again and again
As we wait in dark places
For the Return of the King.
Why must I know what day it is in order to prove that I am cognizant?
Time is a shape shifting chameleon
Once a sundial or a watch of the night
Now it monitors the heart
Attempts to forecast the rain
And makes us feel the limits of the box we cannot bust out of on our own
Meanwhile
Eternity, the Infinite
Has already won.
You tell yourself it will do no good
To acknowledge the child who floated in the beads of the ultrasound or the mantras of the obstetrical attending—
It is for her best not to know
Or the terrible error in calculating
The time it takes to unpack and repack a Pilot
A truck, an Accord, a house, a life
You tell yourself
It would have happened by now
The Icarus Moment
The violent fall
When an ordinary man walks into light eternal
Only to become it
We will all be changed
Some moments last for all
Eternity
Sarah? He asks on the street by the Rucker library
I look bewildered. No, not Sarah
You look so much like her!
Dark? Pretty? Young?
We never met
But recently it has been happening again—over and over
So many times
In Spanish and in other tongues—
Fatima? Esperanza? Rachel?
Who are they now?
Grey! Rumpled! Doughy!
We are a sisterhood across decades and barricades
The Sarahs by the library of now
Beauty behind, light ahead
I can picture her, but not her name. She said that when she was growing up they had swimming lessons that were entirely land-based.
Stand and glide your arms in the air above your head!
Lie down and kick your legs!
She never said they worked
No one learns to swim
Without the water
God knows the hairs on your head
He sees the sparrow fall
And He knew, knows, will not forget
Every day in the Age of Grace
All 728 thousand of them and counting
And on the last day of waiting
He will show up
As usual for Jesus-
Perfect and on time
Carrying Light 