We,
who once discovered
in a flood that swept away
our self-hatred and alienation,
who now know that being ‘Beloved’
requires the rending
of all our sacred skies—
We,
who were driven into the wilderness,
who learned truth from wild creatures
and spiritual beings— Continue reading
Sculpture by Ken M. White
Winter gloom and darkness
turn the heart.
Blow Lent’s trumpet if you must,
and tremble.
But before you mourn in solemn assembly
remember
that these ashes
were once profligate palms
that welcomed Love.
Huddle in your prayer closet
marked with ashes as you may,
Love will see you
and prick your heart.
For February’s snow wraps the earth
as wanton Love embraces all its inhabitants.
At an age (many years ago) that some Millennials are now—and that Jesus was then—I strode eagerly into the wilderness.
And when the tempter told me to prove I was a child of God, by changing my queer to straight, I pulled my Bible from my hip pocket and shot Scripture right back at them. (Not to mention that they’d kinda got it bread-to-stones and not the other way around.) Continue reading
Urges impel me.
Eager, apprehensive,
how shall I reach
the object of my desire?
Can you be real?
I hesitate.
I might mess up,
be mistaken, be wrong
or—most devastating
—feel foolish.
Longing leads me.
Compelling energy
surges and carries me
inexorably forward
along a path.
Unable to perceive
my destination.
I project, at best,
a blurred image
—a half-imagined fantasy.
It becomes my obsession.
I tune that vision,
refining expectations
even before I breathe
its fear and promises.
Finally I release all
to emergent reality.
Soul and body,
thrust into wonder,
grasp each other desperately.
I could not know
where to follow my desire.
I dared not predict
a destination
nor even the journey.
Only by going there
could I obtain
the curse and the blessing.
Sex and the sacred,
so dearly the same.
I dream a dusty path
where cattle obliterate the grass,
making their routine pilgrimages
past a looming red barn
through weedy green pastures
to a creek’s still waters.
I never lived here,
a generation removed
from where I grew up
playing town-kid games,
seeing fields and pastures
only as a wilderness for imagination.
Fence posts mark a corner
where a barbed-wire crown dangles
half-wrapped back upon itself,
and dense hedge trees with their own barbs
grow lime-green apples
as rough as a farmer’s hands.
Distant from the farm
as from the gardens
that bracket my salvation,
I dream it as a sacred painting
an idealized icon
shining on my path.
I frame that glistening dream
now foreign to my life
and hang it as a blessing
to grace my older days,
like Jesus in the garden
or knocking at the door.
What leads me to contemplate Lenten disciplines? My religious heritage is Anabaptism—the radical left wing of the reformation about as far from high church as possible. I didn’t grow up with it—indeed, my culture was suspicious of anything remotely Catholic.
My queer proclivities lean away from S&M—not that a cute guy in leather will turn me off. It’s just that I’d prefer to take the leather off him and cuddle on the way to sensuous mutual play.
But my seminary training and syncretistic incursions of the liturgical year into my Mennonite tradition of late make me very aware that this is the time for ashes and spiritual discipline. Continue reading