Oh high heavens, the art of the bone pokes through divine filigree
Yet calls itself the body
Where is the kingdom in all this stuff? Angels find grottos and flying buttresses to provide cool shade in the midday sun, but no human scaffolding could replace the simple architecture Christ designed,
To love
A circumstance of grief overtakes the witness to these scenes
As great messengers come and go, like judges rising and falling with the land
Groaning against God then seizing earth and blood and forming gods and godheads dressed up in the death gowns of men, but supposing authority of Christ himself.
My great pain focuses on the salt that is not taste but a mud and mold
Oh Word, the convoluted design
Makes no home on the maps men apply to suppose you, Lord, in our every day strivings.
Somehow missed.
Total submission to the simple architecture Christ presented…..
To love
Do you know the words that men and women meant to present you, Lord, to edify your kingdom, and yet
Blood and war flowed from you in their clumsy hands?
How you must sit in your throne daily weeping…my children, your bones were not meant to be broken, your beds were not meant to be stained with urine and clouds of dead seeds
How you must gnash your teeth and put on sackcloth and wail
I cannot imagine such scenes…two thousand years of stiff-necked agents who took your name and went whoring and pillaging
I cannot imagine such pains.
How do you not rage at the smallness below that drinks its own offal and calls it sweet wine?
How do you not throw ash on your face to hide your eyes from such debaucheries that have cut off your children from the King’s domain?
My Lord, my faith secures me in your kingdom so I do not write for me, for I am in your home, I am in your love,
But my letter is for this body of bones
Two thousand years of popes and kings and witches and wizards who took your name and killed your prophets and your priests who dared speak the simple architecture of Christ,
To love.
Even in my time, in my simple places, such microcosms of the whole of earth and King plays out.
To love is simple if that is your root, but to live it as a practice, as a plan of redemption without submitting to its will borne from your sweet, simple architecture is not within our human capacity.
Oh Lord, I seek you tonight in my physical pain.
Oh Lord, I seek you tonight in my grief of your kingdom, your body broken under death’s rude blows, living as a corpse perfumed and concealed with rich powders and fine silks,
Like the bone of a dead man’s finger disguised with thorns and rose petals to take the place of a living rose.
Oh discursive voice of the night that rings me out of bed and calls me now to type,
Lord
Hear my prayer,
Oh Holy Spirit,
Speak with simple truth what my human mind cannot fathom, the depth of your simple architecture, to love
To be but one living stone of that design I seek,
Let my mind, my heart, my spirit not be crushed by this tumult,
The wings of demons fuel the circumstance of air that blows such flames across great distances where the mind cannot reach you….
Hear my prayer, my Lord,
My simple song
To know your simple architecture, set me in my days and my days and my days
And my hours, Lord my hours of seeking you,
To minutes and minutes and minutes and more, the seconds I must ponder, ticking one and two and three to find you over and over again
Bringing my mind, my heart, my spirit again and again back to your simple architecture, to love…
Oh Lord, let me die today or live a hundred years if this will serve you.
Oh Lord, let me be a steward of hundred castles or live in penury if this will make my life your mortar and pestle…
My words for you tonight, as I drink the dark teas of the terrible two thousand years brewed, release me Lord from this sad known, that your kingdom is designed in living Word laid bare for men to see
But yet no voice, no circumstance takes hold to soften necks to simply bend to you
An isolated saint plucked from the mud comes here and there, no more….
Release me Lord, I plead, and leave my words a witness to my own flawed mind, my mind that seeks to die to let you live in me…
Release me Lord from what I know….let me study your body’s history with an anesthetic of the Holy Spirit that will allow me to see what you want me to see insofar as that view serves your design for my physical paucity.
I seek to die so you might live. I seek to be no more.
Oh Lord, I pray with all my human failings that I could only know your simple, sweet architecture, to love.
Lord,
My head hates me. My heart hates the world. My spirit grieves for what has been lost and what loss is yet to come.
I want so much to come home.
Oh circumstance of life,
Oh human death and illusion,
Oh horrors of fat kings and gossips,
Whores and corrupt priests,
How do you Lord rest so still in love as men destroy your kingdom, as princes neglect your house and build their own,
Princes called Pastors,
Princes called Saints,
Princes called men and women shuffling to and fro, searching desperately for your purpose for their life….
By your grace, by the Holy Spirit, please, share this stillness, this patient love with me
That I might not become stained with vinegar,
Dipped in bitter juices from strong lemons,
That I might know your grace for them, for me, for I am one of them
As riddled with dry bricks building Paul cathedrals as everybody else…
My cries, laments do not elevate my name
Or make me king of the rotting air, for I am but a breath of dark without that same grace I seek to know
That grace you send to men and women such as me…
Oh Lord, my home is not my own if you are not my King.
Oh Lord, my flesh is death upon me, seeking constantly to invade your spiritual home that lives within my breast.
Take this death away, cut away the bone and sinew that seeks to strangle me…
Let my heart, my mind, my spirit be Free in your simple architecture, to love
Oh sweet design
Oh Lord,
No philosophy, no known word can replace your Word, rooted as it is in that cornerstone, Christ. Send me after your design,
Fill me, through your Comforter, the Spirit Christ left for me, with what you wish my mind to know…
Let me pursue your purpose, without seeking to know it, but to live it in hours, in minutes, in seconds, from breath to breath your purpose will unfold, and I, like a blind man told to walk across a noisy street with rushing cars, will step off the curb
In faith, in trust, in your Love, without need to know
Why you commanded me to step into that breech, that cacophony, that din of potential crush
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