After Lunch

After Lunch

(“Then he said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.’” Luke 8:48)

He had just finished lunch and his hands
were still greasy;
he needed to wash them before touching anything.
He wasn’t sure where the pain would take him,
it had struck him nearly dead the day before.
He wasn’t sure what friends would believe him,
or if they would talk about their aches too.
Or would they leave him thinking every word was
another complaint from a faithless mind?

It struck him, a mallet to the head, that so many who
once loved his words,
now barely heard what he had been saying
for years. Certainly, since they could not see,
the invisible pain must be a cry for attention.
(or at least something he should become strong for,
should overcome for the sake of those who walked past
him in phases like the moon who heard the same tune
and nothing new.)

He washed his hands with dishwasher Dawn
And cut the grease, deleted the germs and viruses
just in case someone might hug him back into the world.

Some even asked him, face to face, why his prayers
were not answered or
why he felt God fell silent
when he inquired as to causes and sources.
There must be a reason for the secreted decade
of pain.

Just the same, he wondered too, but with more passion
than suspicion. Just in case, he took to asking, in the
fashion of the day,
what the the definition of love was
among those who stayed away. 

A trace of mustard remained between his fingers;
he noticed the spicy notes as he scratched his nose.
He wanted to spill the beans, empty his heart of everything,
but there was no one nearby who would do the same,
and he feared losing his sanity over silences that remained
when he asked the rest of his friends why God had not
answered them.

But someone saw, the decade of bleeding, someone obscured
by humanity’s crush, someone surrounded by heaven’s attendants,
someone, it seemed, just like us.

He braved the cloud of unknowing, reached past the murky air
into the other world that crams this world complete. He found,
still with pain unabated, someone who knew before
he was known. His hand still stained, he moved in closer,
and remained until he was finally noticed. And then

He withdrew

still laid flat by the relentless plague; still chased by the
the unshakeable isolation of the unclean issue of nerves
he had spent a fortune to heal.

If anyone had seen him reach beyond the veil,
then saw him the next day, and a month after that,
they would swear he had failed, and knock less often
at the door of his heartache.

But there were moments, shorter than lightning, when
he knew
there was less wrong and righting than this world knows,
and only love that heals whos and whys and those
who wait uncurled for the new kingdom,
the new world,
the--your will on earth as in heaven world--

World without end, amen.