Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
I spilled tomato juice on my
flannel shirt my
first year in kindergarten
in a new town with
kids I didn’t know
and they laughed.
It felt like they laughed
at me but
who knows?
When at age four you’ve
just spent weeks in a hospital
and months taking
hot baths and castor oil
but they tell you how lucky
you
How can a virus travel
and not love?
Or are we not now all infected
with shame
at our human nakedness?
We don’t want to know our own evil
so profess good, pretending
to smile without hurting.
So painful.
The Tiananmen butterfly warns us:
cyclones we’ve stirred with our grasping
While the world shudders.
Rain
somehow feels
like starting over.
Waters over the earth
reconnecting
with those beneath.
Do I need to step outside?
Inhaling
the original air.
We’re all stuck on hold.
The pioneers thrust out
with their usual
armed vengeance,
no clear purpose
except to recreate
the old world
in the new.
The rest of us wait
Can you not see
that the hurricane
is not
about you
but
around you?
It is not
being done to you. You
simply happen to be
in the midst
of it.
As the pastor began to speak the absolution,
I stood up and
interrupted the liturgy.
“Anyone who looks into their hearts
and acknowledges what they find there
also finds the power
to forgive
themselves.”
To the woman on my right
I said,
“You can still make love
…
The world groans.
She cries out under
heartless regimes
propped up by fearful,
hungry people.
The powerless
are driven into homeless exile
in the very battlefields they fled.
Broken,
with their children
stolen from them.
Other ages were more hopeful.
But ours
sees only end times
and flails back
…
When Jesus utters the cry
“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”
It is the cry
Of Job, that is,
the cry of every sentient being,
“Why am I dying?”
The only answer that comes back
from the universe is,
“Because you are mortal.”
What is it
I’ve decided I can’t
cope with
that hasn’t happened
yet
That I’d rather
lock my jaw or
pluck out my eye
than face?
A day?
Two? Three?
Before either I
see through to it or
can no longer
The empty
…