Waiting worship
alpha and omega
are not
yet completion
because
there is a
huge
gap
in the middle.
the life which spills
from the wound
does not satisfy
but increases
our hunger.
therefore
we are not ready
to eat
at that table.
instead
we want to
dance.
dancing hungry
is
sometimes
better than
eating
another man’s
bread.
if we
sat in the trees
and waited
perhaps
manna would fall.
even so
it would taste
stale
and dissolve into
rust
on our tongues.
so
we go on
dancing.
not joining
the table
even though
we
dearly love
the
host.
4 comments On Waiting worship
quiet contemplation hits the nail on the head
Evocative and an intriguing mix of language appropriate for one so dually engaged in Pagan and Christian myth. There’s the obvious biblical and Abrahamic references to the alpha and the omega and to the manna from heaven but also the image of the dance which puts me in mind of Dionysus and of the conflation (at least in my own mind) of Christ as Lover. I especially love the end reference to love of the host which put me in mind of the bridegroom and as the wine and bread of life which leads me to Christ as the male embodiment of Persephone in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Dancing hungry is better than eating another man’s bread and this is the fate of the spiritual seeker whose life is one of hunger and longing caught up in an almost ecstatic, even erotic quest for the Divine…
Anyhow…that was what I felt when I read it.
Wonderful! Thanks.
Friends,
I’m amused that WordPress’s automated “Possibly related posts” feature found On Waiting and Squirming, since that is an appropriate free association with this poem.
Poems like this one take me by surprise.
I start writing without knowing what will come next. I don’t think of this as “Spirit-led” verbal ministry. It’s more a matter of the subconscious brain pulling images together as in a Cornell box, partly because of random aesthetics, partly because their juxtapositions “mean” something.
This one leaves me uncomfortable…as it probably should.
It speaks about an unfinished person. Or, rather, a person’s unfinished relationship with the Divine.
The longing to join the table for Eucharist in tension with the awareness that something is missing from what the conventional Church presents as the official “explanation.”
Walhydra goes to church is another, earlier approach to the puzzle.
What is important to me, what saves me from terror and dismay, is that the Divine is not waiting for me to “get the relationship right.”
It is right.
As Friend George illustrates so well in Confessing Together that Christ is Come, Quakers know experimentally that Christ is already here.
And so it is.
Blessèd Be,
Michael
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