Ezekiel 13:14
The house stands gleaming, but underneath
It’s split, creaking and shaky.
Most walls are shredding from rot
Underneath the smeared whitewash of a false peace,
But no one seems to notice.
The other rooms offend,
But it’s a holy blood that soaks them deep,
Throbbing life into the uncovered filth,
And whispering of future glory
When the age of war is done and the pretty dead walls are broken,
Leaving only the true ones forever –
The dust weeps.
Torrents cannot heal its rending, for
The Curse fingers its way past elements.
All the breathing fight and collapse,
Souls sighing thunder over the state of things.
Grasped pleasures dissolve to cold ash
As time takes and pain shakes
What was only meant for here
And now – in this dismal labor room,
The sweaty, straining City groans loud for
The last re-making.
The sanctuary’s rigid pew kept me still,
But my stormy mind refused to hush.
Thoughts were taken captive by an old friend I thought I’d moved past,
Who seemed to like these Sabbaths best
To bring bitterness to precious things.
Fierce attempts to be at rest and humble fell bloodied again, and grinning arrogance gained a decided seat.
Every try reeked of my unwelcome guest, dead to me – but we still held hands, tighter today it seemed.
No goodness this way. Let go.
Black sin-love was laid ugly and bare in the familiar good law,
And I wept over soul poverty with heavy confessions of need. I prayed to feel it, and it hurt, of course.
“It is sweet to be nothing” is truth, but only as the aftertaste
Of choking down this bitter pill – to ruin my heart-lean on anything plus.
I learned it again today and I only learn it hard.
It’s a Gospel of an Only,
And it’s only for the Nothing.
It takes shatterings.
Many heavy shatterings, because
The hallowing needs to hush them.
Loud, lying lovers – reveling in jactation;
Fraudulent food their famine feast.
The breaking came and showed beauty to the
Abysmally satisfied. Tenderness wrecked all imitations
Of the real gem –it wasn’t you after all.
Look, this –yesterday’s fallow flounderer now
Heaves for heaven. Sleepless seeker
Silenced by a strange undoing of death
By death.
Still we beg more
Crushing –flint-faced ruin races to
Win over the widening white.
Just –
Rend more busy shadows hard embraced for
A true sort of quiet.
A strange grace invaded
this marvelously ruined city.
Highest glory is with us,
the God-man, breathing our
Sin-poisoned air and loving the
stumbling, the simple, all who
Dare not lift their eyes.
Our fathers coveted the sight.
Fainting hearts running to the child
whose blood would mercy-seat
Us to the King. [we hated but who yearns
still.]
Enfleshed, God inhabits darkness, tastes
weakness. Knows
Need. Temptation will be no stranger
to the forever firstborn, entering
Time to be the Fulfiller of wallowing
humanity. To hush the
Stubborn, bring near what we distanced.
The Branch, stooping lower than
Eyes were anticipating,
obeyed, [never scorning]
delivered, [idol-bound exiles]
redeemed [HIS].
I felt frigid chills as she drew
My eyes to the angst-ridden scene.
The air was not cold, but the warmth
Had escaped this chaotic mess.
Unkempt undergrowth dashed by the entangled
Branches of poor-postured trees.
In greenless grey, this bleak wilderness
Whispered the approaching bitterness
Of winter.
Had we come a few days sooner
There would have been vibrance
And delight in fall’s rich texture.
But she sensed a beauty that begged us to linger.
It was the grim desolation that pleads another garment -
This one of white so white no bleach could compete.
And we knelt to the grace that
Brought order to our disarray.
The somber hush falls, naked limbs scrape the sky.
Yesterday’s color seemed eternally bright
In a brilliance we forgot, this season’s might.
Black flocks forebode, we feel despair as they fly
In frantic formation, never ceasing their cry;
And they are restless and stirring before comes the night
We might not be ready, but the time must be right
For this sudden change. In the questionings why
We must silently wait. This death will not stay,
For a time will return for the budding of gold.
And change whispers something of a higher way,
As ever-constant Truth has wiser tales to be told.
And every season of grief and of fear in the fray
Cannot shatter the trembling lambs in His hold.
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