Photo courtesy of Pixabay. In the public domain.

One Day

One day, before the earth grew old

and mostly bald and full of stink,

one day I woke to music, to a chirrup

in the trees that rose and fell

like exhalations of the earth itself―

a gargling of the morning air

in bright polyphony, in crisp staccato.

And I knew the birds were prophesying―

knew I heard the voice of God,

sweeter than the earth itself,

rising like a counterpoint, an arching,

aching tremolo―

heard the wild of Him that we have tamed

come bursting forth in feathers

and arpeggios and yearnings inexpressible,

too large and small for syllables that slip

into our narrow ears;

and so I stood and listened to the world

as He described it, listened to the reveling,

and knew that I was born for this―knew

that doves, that sparrows sing epiphany

at dawn each day, and breathe

the earth’s core in and out, and feather

all that breathes and flies and sings,

and I must sing, must sing, must sing,

and this is my arpeggio, my only syllable.

Amen.

Public domain image courtesy of Pixabay

Reprinted from the Ruminate Magazine blog, 29 September 2015

Up with the roosters this morning. And yes, I can hear one of those feathered alarm clocks―his voice far greater than his body warrants―ratcheting his endless observations through this dark and drowsy neighborhood. Does this remind us of the current political scene?

Ah, human nature has not changed since satan shaped his body and his lie to the contours and contents of a tree. He still slithers up our spine, our trunk, to reach the hidden source of all thought: our cerebrum. The crown of our own Tree of Life―The Eden of our every intent, that incomprehensible core of us that births the comprehensible . . . over and over each day.

And ah, again: the enemy has entered our garden with new and poisonous seed. Fruit that we have known forever―for we have always tweaked the message to fit the equivocation. But there's something shrewder happening in this Time, this edgy, edgeless season, this strange new world we live in.

We are assaulted, continually, by crushing changes in social contract. The welter of ways of our time-tested "role playing"―the nudge-wink-wink of flawed and fatuous discourse―is almost "quaint" today. Humanity's thoughts, and tongues, are honed to lethal verbal weaponry. And primped with a litany of obfuscations that distort the realities beneath their promises.

"The world is too much with us..." William Wordsworth, commenting poetically (at the dawn of the 19th century) on "the decadent material cynicism of the time." A prophetic insight. The seeds have sprouted, replicated endlessly.

Some mind-shift largely inexplicable―often unperceived, even unpredicated on such a scale―is ripping through communal relatedness, and indeed, rippling across our larger earthlife. It is shattering our histories, our stories, our ancient inter/intra-societal algorithms. Something ingeniously crude is tweaking the long-established, heart-felt empathies into ersatz niceties and/or nasties. It births and preens a strange hybrid of smooth double entendre and a razor-rough hide.

Tensions escalate and boil over. Now, across continents, great uprooting, wars of tortured words becoming bloodbaths. And now, across continents, the homeless, the forsaken tread their via dolorosa on the way to nowhere.

We who watch, hearts in our throats, are left groping consciously for the known that has staked our own perimeters like a pivot point. What does all this mean? What is the why of it? What do we do with such misery? It has torn the very fabric we are wrapped in.

We are all in shreds. It is, yes, too much with us.

The cock has crowed over this broken world. We are all akin to Peter, retreating in fear from the sight of his bloodied Master, denial his only defense.

There is only one Voice louder, fuller than the roosters of this chicken-little world.

In the beginning was the Word . . .

We cannot know anything pure, ultimate, bounteous beyond the Word of that mysterious, ineluctable, unfathomable Primer Mover who reigns beyond the stars―and deigns to harbor in our tiny cranium. We know nothing beyond and aside from His preternatural act of defiant mercy: the birthing of the Son who was born of our blood-line . . . and lived in our skin. It must have chafed. Badly.

But this earth-shaped-One had His Father's genes. He decoded earthlife just as preternaturally. He spoke into the blatant hypocrisies that shaped the theses and postulations, the smiles like scythes, the lies that wreathed Him like a troubled cloud. He knew each forgery of truth, each vanity . . . and named them.

He is waiting. Forever waiting in the wings of this great, rickety teatro oscuro. He is the author. All the roosters of the world will go hoarse when He edges back onto Stage Earth.

But here―ah, here is a thought I gleaned unexpectedly, just after the next-door rooster gave up. Ordinary, simple, uncannily powerful words. From the front of a birthday card!

"Forever stay open, curious, fearless, transparent, and willing to be and love being exactly who you are." *

This has dropped like ripe seed upon my sterile soul-soil. How pertinent to everything! Words of YES to carry with us, into the gulf of grief around us. To fear not, and deign not to accept the small, the pinched, the shrewd and slanted forever forced upon us. To break through barriers of pretense we sense around us. Fearless and transparent before the great deceit. The deceiver.

Who we are, and choose by the moment to become, and Who we listen to, and choose to rise up and follow―openly, gently, fearlessly―across this great, crumbling stage . . . this is our constant, whatever-the-circumstances YES to life!

This is the mending of the broken mind, the healing of our broken heart. A steady and sturdy Gift of hope for our broken world.