God have mercy

I have been rather silent these days, despite my desire and promise to blog more, because God is digging out a canker in my soul.  If you are the praying type, you might pray for God to have mercy on me and that I would have the strength to make needed changes.  I am always afraid that if I say something like that, people will take it more seriously than they need to.  That your curious imaginations will assume terrible things about some hidden sin I am harboring.  But we all struggle daily against sin and flesh and devil.  This particular instance is neither exceptional, nor remarkable.  Only let us pray through the watches of this night.

In the mean time, a poem, (after T.S. Eliot's "East Coker, III" in The Four Quartets, alongside an image from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renasence," if you like to know these things;  I always find Eliot so inspiring).  By me.  For you.

Advent 3:  The darkest day

A lament on the death-day of St. John of the Cross and those lost in Sandy Hook

The year is dark.  The leaves dead

and rotting in the gutter. 

The light is weak and short,

the bleak night long and cold. 

Sickness presses deep in the chest,

fogging brain and laboring breath. 

Head aches and body groans,

cold and stiff.  The persistence of

dull pain presses us down

into the dark rot of the year

where all the filth of existence smears us.

Earthen walls crawl with the unknown.

Hemmed in on every side

by the darkness of God, we hear: 

The screams of the violent and the victim. 

The lament of those who sit alone.  

Our own voices’ echoes

in the hollow, grey chambers of the skull.  

Water drips down our bodies

like a spider’s crawl.  It pools in the darkness,

breeding darkness.  Dank breath

reeks, laden with pestilence.   

Ashes and moulder burn the tongue. 

Until everything is darkness and quiet,

and stillness becomes a pressure around us.

Our muted senses lie flat

as though in the mud under a lake

until lungs are fit to burst. 

“Move!” cry out our limbs,

“or lie in the dark forgotten forever.”

Yet still, eyes closed,

we roll the boulder of hope

and false-hope from our chests. 

Lungs gasp into the expanse of the darkness. 

We cut the iron band of love

and false-love from our hearts.  

Their beat fills the silence

like the inexhorable footsteps of a jailer

strolling slowly toward our cell. 

In the mind’s eye, a tiny seed

reaches one pale hair’s

root into rich, black soil. 

Here we wait

in the shadow at God's back.

 December 14, 2012