Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
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
There’s something wrong with
how we do winter, making it
the busiest time of year. Our calendar
Is all wrong. Yes, the sun
starts back
on the solstice,
but that just means
we should be rolling over in our sleep
and waiting for spring.
Why—though the empire insist—
do we stay above ground,
scurrying around
as if
everything has to
Waiting for Quaker meeting
with a fence of white jasmine
behind me
and the
sun
a bit too warm
I hear from across
another wooden fence
opposite
the shout of the
morning-sobered plumber
stumbling from his
trailer:
“Alright! The first lily
has bloomed!
Fuckin’ yes!”
Kenosis
Posted on 6.05.2015
I am tired of myself.
And not, let me say,
in any morbid, psychopathological sense.
(And why do we so quickly go there?
I’ve become impatient with the mental health frame and worry.
How everything is shadowed
by diagnoses and the fear
of being mentally ill.
Because really,
who among us is healthy?
Let me be sick for a moment.
If that is
Abba Jacob and The Theologian
by Marilyn Nelson
Thanking him for spending
the entire afternoon
and half the dinner hour
discussing the various ramifications
of the essentially paradoxical nature
of faith,
the theologian interrupts her first
spoonful of lentils
to lean forward again
and cut off
the flow of God.
Reverend Father, she asks,
what is the highest spiritual value?
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry, from The Mad Farmer Poems (2014)
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a
Hidden Hearing
by Li-Young Lee
God slips His likeness of me under His pillow.
Morning grows cloudy, the house darkens,
and I know what the rain at the sill is saying:
Be finished with resemblances. Your lamp
hides the light. A voice, being a voice and not the wind,
can’t carry anything away. And yet,
it makes any land a place, a country of the air,
and laughter
… 
… 
…