Something Turned, Something Shifted

 

Something Turned, Something Shifted

(“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Lord’s Spirit is, there is freedom.” 2 Corinthians 3:17)

He wished to have anyone,
anyone else all to himself;
he was starving for presence,
hungry for acceptance and so
he stood with holy reticence and waited.

Once he had prophesied from stages,
now he stood where he once had memorized faces
and counted their names carefully. He was so
grounded his feet rarely left the earth. And every
annual report would attest to the numbers and
members that underlined every word.

Now he stood where he spoke so much truth and
was amazed that so little happened at all. The
attendance spiked, and everyone liked him well enough.
But the stuff of heaven had too little grit in it for him
to sit on panel discussions about growing numbers or
training soldiers.

He was tired. His soul felt weighted with the stones
upon his chest
that held him in place, magnetized to death.
And from that position there was no escape,
no speeches, no teachings, that would release his
hands and feet
from under the concrete poured around his soul.

The day ended with everyone knowing the pain that
crashed from his body to his brain. And the long night
began
after the audience all went home
and left him alone
to face the wordless dark of stars a million years old.

Something turned, something shifted. Like
monarchs roosting in the cedars,
like sparrows returning to Capistrano,
his words, he felt, were coming home. But they
were
not his words,
they were their words. They were conversation
without answers, dialogue unscripted, hearts and breath
in a dance of winged butterflies in play. He did not
know what to say
when the silence came. He waited. Everything between
the farthest star and the core of the earth
surrounded the moment in lightness and aboriginal atoms
shared by everyone in the earth, the universe.

And there was darkness, and there was light, and God said
(as if the Spirit hovered between and within everything)

It
Is
Good.