What if you believed?
That the trees were all sentient beings
And their falling leaves were thirst-stricken em•is•ar•ies?
Curling boats cupped and lovely
Or spare, lacy things let go before they should
To
The rippling surface of sunlit, unexpected
Apocalypse.
Yep, I know-who?
Bear with me.
Ten years ago we discovered that our adopted son had molested some of his siblings and their friends.
I went to my friend and asked him what I should do and he said,
The truth will set you free.
So I told people the truth
Church
Work
Neighbor
Community
Family
Truth
And most people stopped being our friends.
So not who, what
A good friend never leaves, never forsakes, never hides your sin, but doesn’t abandon.
Jesus is a good friend.
What is Love
What is justice
There were times we all faced this extreme solitude of the truth. People who had been out friends could not risk the chance that we were contagious.
But Jesus was always there, the sojourning older son, back from afar, standing on the other side of the street, in sight of the house, I-am-here-darling present with us
never alone because
What a friend we have in Jesus
The hole in my chest has opened up again
Opened up
The whole in my chest is blown apart
Blown apart again
The tree abandoned by the river asks for something
Water or some proof
Some proof of all
made whole once
once again
I have tried to write us into the third person for this Passover mitzvah
He for you, she for me
“Do you take this man? Do you take this woman?”
Some iteration of a
long-ago covenant made and broken in a garden
Careful to avoid her gaze as you give her sour fruit
Mixed with all the other intentional elements of our redemption
She lames her ankle on the descent, finds her ever-less-corporal-self still bound by grief and pain as the light cotton shift falls to her feet
You must shower, girl, leave all the light behind
And enter into this entirely different kind of
Love story
Walk ahead, don’t look back
Never let him know how much it costs to stay
Inside the dark box of the bet he lost
For both of you
Within a month of each other, several things happened–
I know how much you believe in abortion. I know how little you believe in God, yet I believe that the first abortion happened when a literal and real woman (like you and me) murdered all of us with a powerful and deadly choice in a garden we call Eden.
She made a choice, we make choices
As women, as mothers, as friends
To intervene for either life or death.
I believe in a literal hell, literal hells, already clearly delineated in our history of meat shields in steppe conquests, gladiatorial death matches, the ridiculous and deadly crusades, the Inquisition, bubonic plague, and in our case the body of every one of those meticulously harvested prenatal humans, old enough to live outside their mother’s wombs long enough for the doctor to use their pieces and ignore the sum of those parts.
Because livers are so necessary to scrub the toxins in the blood…even the flooding, momentarily excruciating wasp toxin.
You will think it strange that I thought of you and others who do not believe in Hell when I reeled into the pain of that single sting. I thought about how terrible it would be not to believe in the soaring truth of 1 Corinthians–“Oh, death, where is thy sting?”
No accident I write this to you on Father’s Day. When I lost my father it was so devastating–how could death have lost its sting if that single death hurt so much?
You know what I believe–I will see my father again one day, because Jesus took the real sting.
Catastrophically painful, eternal, and all of our faults. Sometimes no bigger than a wasp’s sting in the dark, or smaller than each prenatal human’s carefully extracted extinction.
But there in the Cross–
Our hell, our iterations of hell
Whether we believe in them or not.
Dear, you will and always and eternally be, dear, very dear to me.
So much so that I would risk your real and legitimate anger if it might spare you the measure of that incomprehensible Corinthian sting.
For months now I have walked carefully, gingerly, with the rocking gait of the elderly, infirmed, or, in my case, feet surreptitiously lamenting for the loss of the whole–
broken heart
crepe-fine skin
Liver, spleen, lungs, and stomach all exposed
As the obligate carnivores we tended as children stalk the house now
Grown
Larger than life,
Pacing hungrily to and fro
As we eye them in dismay
Their pets now
I want rudimentary shelving in the wild backyard for the Walmart canoes
I want an art table
And an extra large button-down shirt with flecks of paint already on it
I want a shelter for the sun and shelter for the darkness
I want the trees to grow up around us, ramparts
And the tiny praying mantis to have a disproportionate number of siblings
Rain, so the river can rise above the exposed and naked roots of the
Already. Dying.
Around 9:19 Sunday morning, a group of the gleaming victorious held their trophy improbably aloft as they processed along a predetermined route–grass, soil, concrete, rock. An entire congregation of them, as exoskeletal and bronzed as their trophy, the hind-leg of an unfortunate cockroach, meaty, mute contrast to those who intend to be meticulous
As they devour all
An image has been taken, carefully constructed–a smiling woman with her small child, a pink placard, and a message of support for the categorical destruction of babies remarkably similar to her own.
When I was younger the rhetoric surrounding the clinical extermination of humans before the age of birth was careful, reluctant, almost sheepish or apologetic. Famous among these voices was Hillary Clinton who said that the aim of promoting legal abortion was to make it, “…rare”
When I was younger “the unborn” were called babies by those on both sides of the argument.
When I was unborn, abortion was illegal.
Not now.
Now there is a veritable cacophony of irate institutions and voices–democratic presidential hopefuls, movie streaming services, (ironically) the Disney company, a long list of celebrities, and that smiling lady with her baby on the grass
All bent upon promoting and facilitating medical murder.
And with each carefully posed picture, each premeditated exclamation of outrage they push down the simple facts–we have laws in this country which promote and facilitate the brutal, violent, dehumanizing murder of millions of people.
People who would one day watch Disney movies
People who might subscribe to Netflix
People who would argue unequivocally for their own right to life
If they were allowed to live long enough to
Sing
where have all the flowers gone?
Our children all
Gone.
Carrying Light 