Poetry

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Poetry

Jesus said, “Gird your loins and light your lamps and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.”

In college I learned to love poetry, especially the dark stuff by T. S. Eliot and the happy-go-lucky stuff from e e cummings and the imaginative apocalyptic poems of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Like Jesus’ parables, poetry gets at truth on a slant. If you want to hear the truth, you will. If you don’t, well, then you won’t.

Now in recent years I’ve discovered this former pastor named Steve, whose almost daily posted poems reach into my cliched assumptions about God and stir them around.

His poems sometimes respond to contemporary events like floods, or elections, or blizzards. But rather than rub our faces in our loss or our helplessness, Steve’s words invite God down to minister to us. Here is a piece he posted after Hurricane Helene:

When the flood waters scrape it all away

we recoil at the knives

of what once was, or should have been,

that is not,

the jagged edge of what we wanted

and still want

but can no longer.

 

And yet all of that (yes, so dear,

which is why the rich man went away grieving)

is the camel that couldn’t pass through the needle’s eye.

 

But you have.

Maybe shoved, but you have come through,

yes, with sorrow and trauma, but through

the needle’s eye of loss,

into this world.

 

You, whole and alive, are here,

along with so many

who have also been drawn

through that same needle’s eye,

drawn on the thread of grief,

by the hand of love.

 

For love has also come through. Love is unburdened,

and passes through any needle’s eye,

through any wall, through any grave.

 

Let yourself be stitched, then,

with all the others, in life’s fabric.

The whole wounded world needs your love,

the torn fabric needs the thread of your grace.

That is why you are here.

Amidst the mourning, the picking up of pieces,

the starting again,

keep loving.

In the end, it is all that survives disaster,

and all that redeems it. – Steve Garnaas-Holmes

We each find ways to focus our thoughts and center our lives on what God commands: “Love God and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Created from words that stretch our imagination and fire our determination, poetry helps us make this happen.

Be vigilant at all times and pray that you may have the strength to stand before the Son of Man.

(Ephesians 2, Psalm 85, Luke 21, Luke 12)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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