Among Us

What if the flesh of God hung upon His words,
His clarity stretched like a sea
not a code to crack. Not a mystery novel
drenched in tweed, not a symbol for anything,
just God’s hands in this world today for real.
God’s fingers stretched in the soil–
God’s hands buoying childhoods–
God’s hands at Disneyland–
God’s hands touching the sick and the dying–
God’s hands twitching in the midst of human prayer,
opening the doorknob for the spirit–
God’s hands quiet and watching,
listening to music, fiddling with the remote.
What if all revelation were just evidence of that–
God in this world, loving it–
His weathered skin scavenging for food,
handing light to the blind. What if all God wants
is a world to come to Him, to finally recognize
His marrow in the blade of grass, His attention
to the plain birds, His omnipotence through windows,
His power which gives and takes, but does not accumulate
a list of strikes or reasons why a man should ever hide from Him.
What if God isn’t really hiding at all from us? What if He just meant
the Beatitudes? What if He is saying them over and over in the North Wind,
clouding the skies of the planet with the beauty intended  for us.
What if that is the lightning rod we fear? The lost potential
of our humanness when we turn our backs on the God in the room,
the God this close to us, a part of our breaths,
 architect of all the corridors
of our minds.
–Kerri Vinson Snell 2011

Pentecost

We attempt to add the indeed
to He is Risen. After Easter, after so much after.
The Word walked on egg shells
among us. Fortunate for us the trembling stone,
the largess less likely to be whisked away
than simple, mountain words. Fortunate the witnesses,
the matriarchs and their meticulous haste in doing
what they’d always done, and the boys who followed,
whose precepts grew up in the shells of their own eyes. Each sound
beckoning the white silence, then water rushing through vocal cords,
then fire.  How can this uneducated fisherman show us God?
Fortunate for the obedience of fishing, for the leaves which shudder
in the sac of life, for the broken process of finding seeds, for the words of a man who left the sand immaculate
with the brush of perfection. Not fire, light.