Unity

My prayer for all of them is that they will be one…..John 17:21
Stretched before you like the river of an unforgettable song,
your days might haunt you. In their entirety
they might overtake your life–what you spoke
as prayer and what you really meant–the fear
you pretended not to have even as the husk
of your inner thoughts composed this cacophony
in place of the honest melody that you were afraid
to strut and fret upon the stage. What were your intentions
in the beginning of yesterday? We all wanted the same thing,
and yet our worship has turned out so differently, the way
in which we shelter our own ideas, the way in which
we cut them off from their mothers, the way our orphans
flee from their articulations and hasten to the boon
of homophonic tones. Silence, then, is the hand that catches us.
Silence before the shape of our lives when all our days
dance before us in a numerical trance. Nothing separates
this silence before God.
-submitted by Kerri Snell

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.

Timelessness

The resurrection is upon us. Reflection has led us to old, perpendicular boards where the essence of a power we seek in ourselves and in everything and everyone around us lies in wait for whatever worshipful moment becomes ours. I am an Easter rebel.

I don’t give up things for Lent. I choose to be told what I can do, not what I can’t do, believing that if I fill my moments with all that is possible, there won’t be many linear segments of time in which I will focus on the can’t.

Poets are obsessed with time. T.S. Eliot comes to mind, but really all poets, unlike novelists and those who write nonfiction are constantly within and without the craft of their work attempting to suspend it. A poem only works if it exists in timelessness. I might give up time for Lent within the context of a work of poetry. A poem that fits upon the page is a revelation because it is an entire world scrawled into being, a heterocosm that makes its own rules, then breaks them.
Take the famous “Red Wheel Barrow” poem by William Carlos Williams. Read it and invariably it means something. With a few simple words carved into the niche of universal symbolism, we are drawn to the vignette and we don’t care when that is. The poem happens for us as we read it and it happens all over again for the next person to encounter its simple genius.


So much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white
chickens.
No internal punctuation, the poem only works because of the order Williams followed in the placement of his words on the page. Time stops. Fascinating to me is the realization that the chickens just have to be white and there has to be water in the poem–ablution.
The resurrection is where time stops, where the sequential doom of all civilizations comes to an abrupt halt. The resurrection is the point at which I look in the bathroom mirror, turn the lights on bright and see my sin. The resurrection is the point at which I close my eyes and place my pointy finger on a page of the Bible and the words ring out with life-sustaining relevance.The resurrection is the resounding message which I can’t work hard enough to believe. I can’t click off to-do’s on my Lenten sight-seeing tour. I can’t buy enough souvenirs, eat enough crackers or drink enough grape juice to deserve.
I must carefully open the pages and tread within the border of the poem that is the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and simply take it all in. So much and beyond so much….everything depends upon that.