REVELATION?
What is this vision
bursting from the womb
of my prayer?
A revelation?
A dream?
A freak apparition
of which I never,
ever
dimly surmised?
Is not every prayer to be
so--
never birthed
before?
Oh, it is so cunningly fresh,
so new to me!
But others say “It is
too radical!
Do not touch it!
It is not the way
things are.”
(The way, they mean,
they think they are.)
But is it a marvel
that deceives-
this vision
rustling in the leaves?
“No!” I blurt.
“Deception never comes so
pregnant with peace,
bursting with love for God,
humbling with thankfulness!”
Oh, I seem to see my very Lord--
his wounds, radiating the crimson
rivulets of his forgiveness--
lovingly fixing me in his gaze.
I feel him touch my spirit
with such a radical awareness
that all my failures,
all the shame
that has pounded me--
all was his handiwork.
He was always leading me,
repainting me day by day
into the arm-upraised, heart-
bursting minstrel of praise
I am today.
“My soul clings to you....”
Psalm 63
“Did anything so great ever happen before?
Deuteronomy 4: 32
PRODIGAL GOD
Prodigal God,
did not you, the great I Am,
forget who you are?
You hid your beauty
in withering flesh
(Was that a joke?)
and chose to loom over us,
a bloody, ridiculed criminal
on infamous Calvary?
Did you not then
strip off your majesty,
become prodigal
to your very self?
(“Where is God?” we
gazed at you and asked;
surely not this bloody,
contemptible mess!)
“No!” you said.
“You are so so dense!
My majesty had to become prodigal
by losing myself in you,
my masterpiece.
How else could I make you see
my passionate love
unless I became like you,
stripped off all selfishness,
spread out my arms
like an eagle over her young,
emptied myself to fill,
to restore you to my likeness?
“I longed for you to grasp
my consummate passion--
to repaint you
in the pristine beauty
I intended,
the proud creation
of my concentrated energy of love.
I needed you to see
that I, your Master Painter,
your creator,
your ultimate destiny,
cannot bear seeing you
defiled, distorted,
made a caricature
of your original beauty.
“Only by a radical undoing
of my divinity
could I show you;
only I, I alone,
alive in you;
I, your original perfection.
“Like me, your destiny is to be
a prodigal lover,
imparting yourself
wholly to others
by dying to erase
the crude distortion
sin makes of my children.
I have so yearned
to restore you
with my love’s livid fire,
and even share with you
my painterly task:
to shine with my own brilliance,
to make all see, all who grieve
in all the sordid, crumbling,
sin-infested
tenements of the blind:
I am your life, your source,
your glorious,
your indestructible
destiny.”
“They rejoiced ... that the Lord brought them to the harbor they longed for. “
Psalm 107: 30
THE NIGHT-COVERED SEA
The stars never sleep
that sparkle without cease
in the crystal sheen
of the night-covered sea.
They shine far above
the turgid gloom of your
disheveled years.
Oh, surely, I am God!
I so wish
to wrest perfection
from your need,
that you might grow.
I could hurl you,
did you ask,
instantly into burning tears,
erase your gloom and grasp
your heart ‘till it bled
far brighter than these
magic stars to make night sing.
I could fell all fetters from
your mind, make you shine
glorious, divine.
(“So full of me,” people would say,
“Christ is here in you today!”)
I could, did I choose,
make your heart-tendons tear,
make your tears
refashion your flailing,
tepid years, light
your murky darkness
brighter than any star.
I could fill you to the brim
make you
my Tabor-gleaming gem!
The ancient agony of your love
is that you cannot grasp above
the pitiful, craven aspirations
that blind you
to my Spirit’s inspirations.
I who walk with angels high
on Tabor, Zion, Sinai--
I call you like my Son to grow.
He alone can help you know
the treasure he so richly gives:
my own magnificence fully lived.
“The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament proclaims his handiwork
Psalm 119:2
A Tree in Eden Only God Knew
THERE IS A TREE IN EDEN
There is a tree in Eden
Eve could not see--
her heart was so brazen.
Oh, how this tree bloomed,
shy in a sea of shadow
where God’s firelove shone
in mystic brilliance.
God alone knew:
this tree, though smallest,
was the greatest;
it alone was his heart’s
greatest treasure;
it alone shone--
and still shines.
Nothing can quench its fire
to repaint death’s
dark perfidy into
eternal sunrise
unveiling life in it’s fullness
where greatness is
an adjective
attached only to the sovereign
love of God.
“Then God said, ‘Let there be light!’ and there was light.”
Genesis 1: 3
THE DAY IS BORN
Though moonlight be frozen
and forlorn in the
garden of dying dreams,
to the lone lover of God
a blithe, endless path gleams
where twisted branches weep joy
and scents of deathless spring
waft, full of high gaiety.
Deepest dark could not see
sunlight straining at the gate
as eternal dawn was rising
to blaze fiercely-fair
like the silken cascading locks
of newborn Eve.
Dark did not surmise
Eden re-birthed in a crib
(in Bethlehem, for God’s sake?
Impossible!)
in a day that shall never set,
where all tears turn silver
in the wondering, upturned,
startled eyes of prayerful
night-walkers.
“The day is here!
Be merry!”
we will sing. “The day
we so ached for--
finally.
Now we can lift high
the golden chalices
of cheer and sing
the unheard song,
the frail, siren song
of forgotten firstyear.
‘Oh!’ everyone will exclaim,
‘Do you not feel
the Father’s kiss?
Have we not entered
his regal halls of forever?’”
WHAT DARK MONOLITH IS THIS?
Sun blushed as night stole
radiance from noon;
storms tore the sky, outraged;
earth quaked violently to see
the rising dark monolith,
a shameless siren--strutting
over our troubled days;
Calvary, a grotesque monument,
brazenly baring her breast
to feed Eden’s outcasts with her
prideful lust, only to famish them
with self-hatred and disgust.
We, whose dignity is to share
the boundless love of God,
saw that blest but hell-torn Friday
our maker, savior, brother
overpower her shameless pride
not by force but gentleness,
not by might but mercy,
in a raging tide of love that
burst from his pierced side as
he showed us our worth and
himself our way, out truth, out life.
O lurid siren! You no longer
strut with your obscene pride
but cower, a broken monument
to sin’s demise; your melody
grown stale, your deformity faded,
but a sign of my life remade,
as I walk reborn toward Christ
who smiles, beckoning me, his beloved,
into love’s radiant timeless sunrise.
“Thomas said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’
John 20:28
RESURRECTION
What is this?
A beginning? The!
The ultimate
sunrise
of a birthed God,
the sigh
of an eternal Father
capturing our hearts
finally.
We, the child--
yes, we--
whisked
into the
simple yet regal
palace
of Today--
at last;
at that point
where all is still,
all made new?
Yes!
O
motion,
you begin
now!
He!
He is!
He is alive-
and here
for me--
forever!
“[Jesus] said, ‘It is finished!’ ‘’
John 19: 3 26
MOTHER OF SORROWS
What sorrow is as great as mine?
My boy, heaven’s solace,
for all ills
so cruelly silenced!
What mystery did I
cradle in my arms,
nurture at my breast,
guide through boyhood
to now--to be so despised,
so mangled--God’s
master pot crushed
by the reckless wheel of evil?
O bloody night!
What crimson glimmer rises
in the frail stealth of dawn,
bloom of that love
for which his dead corpse fell?
Dawn in midnight!
Victory in defeat!
Rebirth of Adam’s race!
Harvest of a Father’s tireless
determination to salvage,
to reform his incomparable
masterpiece.
“[...at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bend....”
Philippians 2: 10
WE REVERENCE YOUR CROSS
In your cross, Lord,
your love blazes
in cruel glory--a bleeding,
fierce sunrise.
Your face
gazes through the years at everyone.
O loving eyes whose tears
hallow with unspeakable love,
eyes in which I see
the eyes of my mother and father,
indeed, of all I ever loved--all
part of you and me; each
a part of your gaze; your loving voice
theirs, saying, “O, how I love you!”
So many, many times we came
to reverence your cross--
my mother, father, many
family members--
through my fledgling years.
Oh, and today, how they and I
are one with you in all
songs sung on Sundays
in our family church.
I hear so clearly my mother
and others I love--
voices were never so beautiful!
I see them in you--ever here,
ever with me at your cross,
to be so--eternally:
for the love that bound us
through life, you assure,
is forever--yet ever better.
This awesome awareness
moves me to tears:
how your love
has guided all my hallowed,
my often troubled, years;
and even now, Lord,
the sun of your glory rises
and we shine with you--
we sons and daughters
of your re-birthed creation--
and our voices unite
with heaven’s emblazoned throng
of angels and saints
who, seeing you, cannot but sing,
‘All glory to your holy cross!”
“Blessed are they who have been called to the wedding feast of the Lamb.”
Revelation 9: 9.
“As a lily among thorns, so is my beloved among women.”
Song of Songs 2:13b
II
CALL OF THE
BELOVED
“Arise, my beloved,
my beautiful one
and come.”
Song of Songs 2:13b
THE SECRET STREAMS
The secret streams
flow on and on,
their soft murmur
mingled with the singing
of wild birds and the smell
of damp pine thickets;
their endless song
ever magnified
by the haunting voices of silence
chanting longingly,
of monks and hermits
whose pilgrim prayers
pierce the deep recesses
of murky swamps
and rotting corpses
of bygone years.
Who
walks alone
among the mossy sentinels
of heaven
as day’s first rays
spot with heavenly splendor
the world’s leafy floor?
Who feels,
as his eyes shut to see
the smooth, warming inflow
of heavenly light,
the gnawing pain
of hunger, thirst, and exile?
Who
bows his hairless,
browned head
beneath a frayed
homespun hood,
as tears of longing bliss
flow down his frozen cheeks?
Who
is this
who never speaks,
whose heart
is never silent?
Is it not you, little one?
Is it not you--
ushered
into the halls
of silent voices
A God Desperate To Be Loved Page 2
