Christ, I hate your nails, I loathe your pints of blood.

Artificial passion

I.

What's artificial is their passion.

It's akin to the "Just Like" colognes

from the dollar store:

no pain, no doubts

nothing hot enough to burn someone;

nothing raw enough to expose ones blood.

It's sanctity that's dead letters in a book

ones we dream "if only's" about.

II.

I trip upon my struggles

my pretences to follow you

to cling tenaciously with passion

to whatever I need to mimic you.

Your feet have pressed into the land

that mark of passion that's real obsession:

red roses soaked in gall

beaten and stirred to the sweetest fragrance

borne stately like thorns ringing the skull

and binding like nails through ones wrists.

You rub against my coward's flesh

to summon me whene'er you call

your niggling spirit pushing me

through tears difficult to swallow.

III.

There's no escape but death

no assurance to measure ones step.

Send quickly then your Paraclete

and coax me up your hill.

I'll cry Abba-Daddy, give me candy

cause I'm scared to taste your meat.

*Thoughts of Frederick Beuchner:

  -Peddlers are people with packs on their backs full of things they want to sell, and the things they try

to sell hardest are the things they think will sell best.  Peddlers are less concerned with what the world needs than with with what the world wants or can be made to settle for.  Peddlers are salespeople who are interested less in the quality of what they're selling than in the success of their sale. So if the peddlers of God's word happen to be preachers, it's preaching as an end in itself they're apt to concentrate on.  They do their best to be effective, eloquent, original. They choose the stories that will go over best and be remembered to their credit longest.  Or if we happen not to be preachers, then when it comes to just speaking of, and out of, our faith in a general way, we, like them, tend to stick to the salesmanship of it and speak of it whatever is easiest to speak and whatever we think will go down most easily.

  -Because all peddlers of God's word have that in common, I think: they tell what costs them least to tell and what will gain them most; and to tell the story of who we really are, and of the battle between light and dark, between belief and unbelief, between sin and grace that is waged within us all, costs plenty and may not gain us anything, we're afraid, but an uneasy silence and a fishy stare.

  -The story of Jesus is full of darkness as well as of light.  It is a story that hides more than it revels.  It is the story of a mystery we must never assume we understand and that comes to us breathless and broken with unspeakable beauty at the heart of it yet by no means a pretty story though that is the way we're apt to peddle it much of the time.