Note to Abusers

Though you break them, they will rise

With stark knowledge in their eyes:

Terrible what they have seen,

Terrible where they have been,

But it is your soul that died,

Leaving raging lust inside.

Power is the drug you yearn

For the pain you won’t discern.

For the things you will not own

Play you like a gramophone

With a scratchy, broken tune

Howling to a silent moon.

Put in place your plastic smile!

It won’t hide the crocodile

Lurking just below your skin

Ravening for another sin,

This dark hunger won’t be fed

Till it eats you and you’re dead!

Every time you harm a child

You yourself become defiled

The Parable of the Plants

I was dreaming, and in my dream I saw a vast plain, stretching to the horizon.  A high wall of solid rock divided the plain, so that one side of the wall was in brilliant sunlight, and the other in perpetual shadow, with only a kind of twilight from the glow on the other side of the wall. All over the plain there were green plants. On the sunlit side the plants were not yet fully mature, but they were flourishing, and as they grew you could see that each plant was unique, bearing its own kind of fruit or flowers. Some were bushes, some were young trees, each of them had room to spread its branches, and all of them were beautiful.

It was different on the dark side. They had rigged up artificial lights to help them grow, but the wavelength of the light was wrong somehow, and the more they leaned towards these false lights, the more their growth was distorted. Some were taller, some were shorter, some were stronger, some were weaker, but none of them bore fruit. They blamed each other for their lack of growth. “You’re crowding me!”, or,  “You’re taking my space”, or “my soil” etc., were common complaints. Everything was competitive.

Every so often the word would go around that the only way to flourish was to be uprooted from the dark side and replanted on the bright side. Occasionally a plant would cry out “I surrender!” and a giant hand would reach down from the sky, pluck it out of the ground and transport it to the other side of the wall. Most of the plants around it would be horrified, it looked like a form of death, but sometimes another plant would be moved to cry out its surrender too, and be transplanted.

And as I watched, it seemed like time was speeding up, and the dark side was growing darker, and the bright side was growing brighter …

This was my dream, make of it what you will

I will thank

For the gentling of my days

For these moments in the sun,

Rainbow’s promise, spring’s caress,

I will thank the Holy One.

For hard truths that shaped my soul

Bitter tears and hopes undone,

Dreams that crashed and wings that smashed

I will thank the Holy One.

For the joy of simple things,

Gladness, merriment and fun,

Smiles like gifts across our days

I will thank the Holy One.

For the beauty of this world

Reaching out to pierce and stun,

Splitting wide my calloused heart

I will thank the Holy One.

For the promise and the peace,

All His suffering has won,

Mercy that will hold me fast

I will thank the Holy One

 For the wonder of such love,

Love that loved ere stars and sun,

Love forever and beyond,

I will thank the Holy One.

The Sad One

She had lost her freedom, and her honour, and now her child. Less than a year ago she had been a free woman, the honourable wife of an honourable man. But that part of her life was gone forever. One night had changed her destiny and ruined her hopes. And all because she was keeping the law …

It had been the time of her monthly purification, and she had been bathing herself, just as the law of Israel decreed. As she washed, she had been dreaming of her husband Uriah, and how she wished he was home with her instead of away with the army. But then, of course, he would not have been the man she loved if he had not put a high value on his duty.

She had barely finished drying herself and dressing, when there was a knock on the door. Surprised, she had run to open it (could it possibly be her husband?), only to find a messenger from the palace saying that King David wanted to see her. Bewildered (what could a man she had never met possibly want with her?), she complied. One does not disobey a king.

She should have known. In the months that followed she castigated herself frequently with those words. What did a man ever want with a woman? But would knowing have made any difference? One does not disobey a king. It was a night that shamed and confused her, but she resolved to think no more of it, especially since there was nothing she could do about it. But then she found that she was pregnant, and that changed everything. She would be disgraced if she bore a child when she had not seen her husband for months. So she sent word to the king. She did not know what he could do, but the whole situation was his responsibility, and he must somehow make it right.

She was not quite sure of the sequence of events that followed – men did not take women into their counsels. She heard rumours that her husband had been summoned to the palace, but he did not come near her, and she tossed through sleepless nights wondering what was happening. Then they sent her a message that Uriah had died in battle, and she was to come and join the king’s harem. Again, what could she do? Her honour might be saved (was there honour in a king’s harem?), but she wept for her husband, now lost to her forever, and that she would never again be mistress of her own home.  And she wondered what exactly David had done, though perhaps it was better not to know.

And now this child, whose coming had disrupted her whole life, was dead. She had lost everything.  Sure, there was every luxury here, but what was that compared to freedom? Her heart questioned and her soul wept. Her honour and her self-respect lay in tatters. She did not imagine that God himself would restore her and lift her up to be part of the lineage of the Messiah who was to come.

The Way Back

One more step

Then another

Another,

No! This really is too hard!

Pause …

Rest …

But I can’t stay here,

Here is no place to stay,

And I don’t want to waste the steps I’ve taken.

Pause …

Think … yes, pray!

On a journey as impossible as this

Prayer becomes necessity, like breath,

I breathe in Hope, I breathe out all my fear,

And tears will wash the signposts.

See, a few more steps

Taken, that I hardly noticed,

Breathing, praying,

One foot following the other,

And look how far I’ve come!

But oh!

Look how far I have to go!

Breathe … pray … and weep …

Nobody told me about the angels.

I cannot name their faces, but I feel their touch,

In the helpless chasm of night

When serenity has fled

They are there beside me

And I know in my not-knowing.

This is a difficult climb!

Someone once said, “The descent to Avernus is easy”.

They forgot to mention

That the climbing back

Will scrape off all your skin until you quiver

Like a newborn creature, bare before the world.

Somehow I continue.

I have turned aside and then retraced my steps

Too many times to count.

I am all done in

And yet, each day, somehow,

I have moved forward

On this narrow path whose bourne I do not know

Except it is the only way to go.

Sometimes I see,

In dreams most glorious, my Father’s house,

Waiting there still,

But is there love for me?

But the stranger things become,

The more familiar

The path becomes.

I can almost taste

The bread on my Father’s table.

Why do I see

A nail-scarred hand hold out the wine for me?

And the angels whisper

I am almost home. 

Some Lines on the Present Situation

Always, I want to run and hide,

To cover my eyes and my ears

To disengage

From the hopeless task of rebuilding the world in Love.

This is no time for silence

No time for averted eyes, walking past on the other side,

Caught in the moral vice, we must stand for truth.

And we must kneel and pray.

We must pray for our brothers

And sisters

Churned in the chaos of the times,

We must pray for them all,

For those who care, and those who can care no more,

And those who have never cared.

Seared to the heart by the flame of their own anger,

Calcified by fear,

Consumed, by themselves till nothing remains but pain,

We pray for them.

We pray for those who have never known justice,

The squeezed and the crushed, left bleeding by the side,

And no one stops to help,

The forgotten ones, embarrassing by existence,

Reminding us how shaky are our thrones.

We pray for them.

We pray for those whose skin or sex is wrong,

Forever despised for being who they are:

Broken like us, yet in God’s image made.

We pray for them.

We pray for those we will never understand,

Whose souls are set on an alien trajectory,

Whose words and actions confuse us,

Whose intentions make no sense.

We pray for them.

We pray for those who are vulnerable,

Who watch each story on the news

As the prey watches the predator

Hoping to stay unexposed.

We pray for them.

We pray for ourselves, that we will find fidelity

In a world that is wildly unfaithful,

That we will find that holy ground

Where Truth and Love are joined

And stand there while the waves of chaos swirl;

That we will find our voices

And speak out holy words,

Silencing our own fear to speak

The words that heal the world.

We pray, we pray …

And may God have mercy on us all.

The Vine

The sun beat down on him while he sat there, sweltering in his rage. The whole thing had been a fiasco from beginning to end, just as he knew it would be. That was why he hadn’t wanted to go in the first place. He knew that was how it would end up, and it just wasn’t fair. If Israel were God’s chosen people, why should God give second chances to their enemies? He had done everything he could to avoid this happening – running off towards Tarshish (that didn’t end well – for the rest of his days he would shudder in horror whenever he remembered that time in the fish’s belly!) and then giving the prophetic message as bluntly and negatively as he could. He need not have bothered trying to resist. The Ninevites had repented, and God was going to spare them. It simply wasn’t fair.

But then, feeling almost idiotic, he realised that if he just moved a little bit, he could at least be out of the fierce heat, which was already unbearable so early in the morning.  A vine had grown, and was providing lovely shade as the sun rose higher in the sky. He was sure it wasn’t there yesterday. Ah well, if it had grown overnight, miraculously, then God still had a care for him. Maybe if he waited a few days longer, God would destroy Nineveh after all? He stretched out in the shade and waited …

The next morning, the sun was hotter than ever, but where was his shade? He looked around and saw that the vine which had been so generous yesterday, had withered up and shrivelled overnight. He looked closer. Some insect, some hideous creeping thing, had gnawed at it overnight and destroyed it, and even now was happily munching at its base. He was angry: angry for himself that he was once more exposed to the pitiless, scorching sun, but there was something else as well. He realised that he was actually angry for the sake of the vine itself, which had been his benefactor, and, for its pains, had been remorselessly devoured.

It was then that God spoke, and the message was so clear that Jonah found himself weeping.  There he was, feeling a terrible pity for a mere plant, eaten up because that is the fate of plants. Meanwhile, if he, a mere human, felt such compassion for a mere vine, how did the God of all compassion feel about that great city spread out below.  Sure, there were sinful men and women there, given over to cruelty, idolatry and every form of depravity. But even if such a merciful God ignored their repentance, and God was always merciful to the penitent, they weren’t the only ones to be considered. What about the little children, too young to know their right hand from their left, let alone commit any evil? Even the domestic beasts of the Ninevites were worth more pity than a mere vine!

And Jonah bowed his head, there was nothing left to say.