Remedy for Shame

Remedy for Shame

(“So let us boldly approach God’s throne of grace. Then we will receive mercy. We will find grace to help us when we need it.” Hebrews 4:16)

Shall we bow in grateful devotion;
shall we never take it all for granted?
Stubbing our toes or shooting our foes,
we used to feel like we had to beg for
exoneration. We would make it all up,
we would make it good if only we could.

It used to be debatable and I would cry like
I had caused the next apocalypse. I would hide
for fear
I had caused the end of the world. My missteps
still sting, they are mottled needles filled with
regrets and dull anticipation. I walk miles treading
the ground everyone else has covered.

But now, at the end of the day or the beginning of
rain, I can find a balm that calms the breezes that
used to freeze my soul. My resolutions are seldom
solid, my promises sincere but weak as decaying wood.
I have discovered…no, it has landed upon me like a
remedy I never dreamed. There is a hand that, firm
as fire,
reconnects me to the might of mercy and grace’s
brightness that subdues the dark of the night.

The remedy for shame, the medicine for shivering regret,
we find a throne occupied by fiery love. We do not
shrink back for the flame bids us come closer and
learn that the burning that once consumed us whole
is now a glow larger than a super nova. We are infused
with grace, a blaze that ignites us to discover we have
been family all along.

The State of My Brain

The State of My Brain

(“The Lord makes our human spirit like his lamp inside us. It shows us what we are really like.” Proverbs 20:27)

I’ve got enough time to read a chapter or two,
to turn on the overhead lamp and see what the words say.
I’ve been reading from the day I knew that one word and
another
could take me to world without moving a muscle.
A man down the street asked me what kind of books
I liked the best. I was eight or nine and I said “adventure”
though I wasn’t entirely clear what the word meant. He gave
me two books, one about the thirteen original colonies and
I don’t remember the other one. Maybe a Hardy Boys mystery.
I made weekly trips to the library; its front steps were marble.
Sometimes I walked since it was only six blocks from home.
I would take a volume of an encyclopedia and start reading articles
in alphabetical order. I wondered who wrote all this candid information
and how they knew so much stuff.

Reading captured me as a teen. I read all of Shakespeare in one summer and most
of John Steinbeck. The next summer it was Ray Bradbury along with the
poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Rod McKuen got an occasional look.

I read early twenty century playwrights and imagined their words in
my mouth.

Ten years later I was a newly formed follower and read books on
prayer and spiritual gifts and how to manage your emotions by concentrating
on Christ. Truth? I found myself falling woefully behind.
There was a method to pray an hour a day. I managed 15 minutes.
There was a way to speak in tongues, and I mumbled them well. I
never got my mind swept clean from thoughts that invaded constantly.

Today I read memoirs and liberal theology. Today I quiet my mind
with music before I read. Today I talk slower and less certain.
Today I am not sure of my purpose, but I do not shame myself
for the state of my brain.

DisCovered

DisCovered

(“[The Lord’s] intention in giving me this authority is to build you up, not tear you down.” 2 Corinthians 13:10b)

Buried beneath truckloads of shame,
beneath the heavy loam where breath is lost and
light barely breaks between the clods; he was still,
no, he was stiffened as the fright consumed the nerve endings
from finger tips to toes; clamping fists and eyelids clenched,
he would have held his breath forever, if forever was possible
to keep it from escaping.

They stood him up. Yes, someone discovered the burial mound.
The brushed him off. Yes, the mud stuck to his sight, to his bones.
They whispered long. Yes, the words were mixed, like blizzards in Spring.

He found his legs while the world spun against him.

He delayed his reply; would his past-tense stories be held against him?
He heard one hope; perhaps the night had stretched far enough that
morning was required.

They stood him up and brushed him off. He found his legs and turned around.

And 100 people stared at the emaciated corpse before them;
his rescuers spoke in uncertain terms (parsing their words, though)
while the little blood left drained from his face and the room spun while
the rest of them whispered their own stories (confidences trusted, lives
broken by the telling).

The promise, the restoration, the power, the indoctrination all
spilled like blood before him. Sick and nearly dead from wearied
cringing,
he hoped the syringe was a dream he could wake from. It was a
handgun he had to wait for, brandished by the promisers and
primed by the best pharisees and new-charisma followers who
could not tell the difference between their night-dreams and
a man’s daylight weeping.

He limps still. The wound is open still. The grave they found him in
was filled in long ago; it’s a hotel for conventions and he was
never invited to its groundbreaking or Grand Open-

ing.

Fill their Faces

"Fill their Faces"

(“Fill their faces with shame, and let them seek Thy name, O Lord.” Psalm 83:16)

Those who have filled the ditches with their opinions,
making the jobless into jokers begging;
Those who have filled the minds
with mythology
that the poor are riddled with lazy bathtub rings;

Those who have taken lives not belonging to them,
planted doubt in the corners where one once believed
and rose with the morning to conquer with joy,
and concur with mates who loved it like the sun,

Beaten with words that bestowed question marks where
exclamations once broke the dawn;
Those who spoke them
into the corners never noticed the
shivers that began, the tremors of their hands,
once the synapse was rewired to make them
prisoners of their intentions,
(kidnappers of their impressions)
and left them to lie upon the dictations of
black versus white typed upon vellum; narrow columns
of distrust. Dusty spellings, and tears smearing the
letters and colors others had impounded.

Fill their faces with red, (not from dread, like they
filled the faces before), but from personal shame,
let them take the paintings out of the frames,
run their fingers over the strokes, smell the fresh-paint
(the aroma of verity’s obsession),
until the infusion of laughter and tears,
red blood and blue notes, pink mayflower and
violet alfalfa convince the typeWriters the world

Is fuller of Godly creation than their
constitutions and bylaws can
ever contain.