Bible
Creature
O Lord, You held me
cupped in Your hands, cradled
in Your arms. You made
me to tenderly lie against
Your bosom. You formed me and
shaped me until I was as
close to Your image and likeness
as a human creature could
become, and then You
looked into my face and
breathed my name, and like a
tiny mustard seed in
the womb You placed me –
into the innocent,
lush garden of an in utero,
warm enclave.*
Confessing
I was too tired to pray,
so all I could barely whisper was
to ask Jesus to recite my
prayer for me, the very same
Jesus Who was being
scourged and abused at the pillar,
crowned with vicious thorns,
dragged cruelly through
screaming passageways to
Calvary, and then nailed
with filthy Roman spikes to a
Cross, and in the last
throes of His agony crying out,
“My God, my God, why
did You abandon me?”*
Yes, that is the same Jesus
Whom I implored to recite the
words for me…because I
was too tired to stay awake and in
self-centered pity to pray.
But for the Mercy of God
Matthew 7:1-3
(“And with the Measure You Use, It Will
Be Measured to You”)
As if by a lightning flash
across the sky, I am illuminated in
all my nakedness! As if by a
sword, I am eviscerated
and ripped asunder, my quarters
tossed to wild dogs fighting
neath this table of raging thunder!
I am to be measured by how
I measure?! I am to
be judged by how I judge?!
All is hopelessly lost!
My cup once full is now
carelessly spilled, the
oil for anointing wasted, and
all the finest, aromatic
perfumes misused – shamefully
applied at wedding feasts
seated in wrong places.
It is too late to unbury all
the bodies I buried. It is too late
to do anything to assuage
the hurt. The battleground lies
scorched under a blazing-
hot sky, and all I can see
are reapers picking at bones
littered ‘cross this field of
hard-bitten, unforgiving desert,
where banshees screech
that my heart lacked the human
compassion of eyes, and
wolves and ravens now jostle for
any entrails remaining.
Grace
O my Lord,
You so easily peer into
my heart, winding Your way
deftly and knowingly through the darkened
corridors and staircases
and recesses of my soul –
and alas You find
me – on a slab in a drab
burial cloth, hidden
behind a hewn rock hitherto
unrolled, but just as in
the Garden of Eden where
You found Adam and Eve in leaves
after their fall clothed, and
just as for Lazarus in
Bethany four-days aft his
death be told, You mercifully
summoned me forth,
and grace’s raiment You chose
that I wore.
Gethsemane
(“Not My Will but Your Will Be Done”) *
…Alone now,
suffocatingly alone,
squeezing Jesus’ chest but
soon scourging every inch of His back,
Jesus’ temptation at its most
vulnerable peak,
nothing but the sounds of
His disciples asleep,
critically unable their lids to lift
and eyes open to keep,
the penultimate test of His will,
His followers blending
and fading invisibly into the
utter blackness of
the night, becoming part
of the stark silence
of immense isolation
enclothing Him, no more
Voice from the heavens as at the
rapture of the Baptism
on the Jordan, or when
boomed the Majesty of His
Father at the glorious
Transfiguration on
Mount Tabor, just Jesus’
agonized pleas in a
pool of red in the sweat
of His blood, and the
dawning knowledge His Father
had determined there
would be no remitting of the
nails and terrors of
Golgotha’s morning
Cross…