Standing Right in Front of You

 

Standing Right in Front of You

(“Jesus said this because the people were saying that he had an evil spirit in him.” Mark 3:30)

You have him standing right in front of you,
the one without the loaded gun,
(No, I do not have a gun).
the one who eschewed the sword,
(Lord of peace, king imbued with grace).
You have him kneeling right in front of you,
the one with the washcloth in his hand.
(No, I do not boast of loss).
the one who disdained the crown,
(Prince of the found and lost).

And still we ignore you, too quiet for our own tastes.
And still we mistake you, too subversive to be a saint.
And still we see demons where healing is measured
in bushels of liberation to the underserving back alleys
and sad mistakes
and perpetual retakes
and weighted heartaches
without ever entering the high stakes
steeples we have erected to point far above
the places you selected to dwell.

We will learn to dissolve our high-minded walls
when we lay down our calls for doctrines to referee
every notion encapsulated minds have formed.
(if they said demons inhabited You,
what prevents us from saying worse about the
least of these?)

Meanwhile we load our rifles, grab our clubs,
march into a garden where a man has been praying
all night long (far after the last refrain of the last psalm)
and demand proof of his identity.

We see demons everywhere when demons have circled our
unrequited thoughts and pulled them tightly around us like
a hat band squeezing our brain. Little room remains to see
the world, the divine,
the image, the new wine,
the healed, the holy
in the feet of one who walks the backroads
slowly, ambling through our souls, one at a time,
and healing those we have left behind.