Bless the breeze,
soft grass, and shade
Bless the clouded
sky
Bless the water
that we drink
when mouth and
throat are dry.
Bless the sweat
that’s on my face,
and neck, and back,
and thighs
Bless the body
keeping cool
when the mercury’s
on the rise.
Praise the Maker of
the earth
and bless his only
Son
Bless the Holy
Spirit too
Our God, the Three
in One
We saw this coming. Everyone knew. But everyone looked the other way. Pretended not to notice. Or to care. We were all tense. Unsettled. We were nervous. What could we do?
Which isn’t to say…
We’d seen the photos. We saw the police on the street, the detectives. We saw the reporters and the news crews. The bathroom window broken. A stranger on the corner. An unknown car parked across the street.
We closed the doors. Like being in a void. Avoid. Weightless and unreal on the floor. Fallen. The press of feet and hands on my face, my head. Stopped center. Even my skin was ill at ease.
But what do we know? We were obscure strangers in the dark.
“What?”
“We don’t have to…”
“We don’t have any choice.”
“Of course we have a choice. We always have a choice. God damn!”
“Sorry.”
That got half a smile. But not much more. And no news.
“Never go that dark.”
The shadows continued collapsing into the basement where he kept his pornography, his filth. The beginning, middle, and end of all his horror. All the conversational cause and effect, false affect. Fate and destiny forever just below the surface, continuing inevitable. No one paused to consider these things. We barely spoke to each other.
We smoked cigarettes.
I remember one woman, a local girl. Unzipped. On her knees. Surrounded by broken windows. Sightless windows. Half remembered buildings passed by, offices moved to new, brighter premises. A disused playground, abandoned by progress, forgotten by the future. Children crossing narrow pathways to secret places. Sheltering in improvised homes here and there.
Some desire nothing but to keep as they were. Some forget. Some sleep.
No. No. Forget it all. We had no recollection of night of the murder whatsoever. No barking dog. No surveillance. Nothing. We were trapped. Cold and nervous. The following gaze of prying eyes. Only moonlight on the lawn.
The blasphemy was
already written
on the underlying
bone
beneath the skin
What could we do
but wait for the
denouement?
Blurring
burning
breaking open now
for all to see
Close the curtain
bring down the
lights.
*For Andy.
*For Spencer.
While in Miletus, Paul summoned all the presbyopic presbyters and the elders of the church in Ephesus to come visit him so that he could give them a farewell speech. He dispatched a messenger to bring them (three days there, three days back). He sent for them. He couldn’t go to them as he was still wary of the conflict he’d faced in Ephesus, both among the Jews and the Gentiles of that city of sorrow and trials.
“You know how I’ve lived and what I’ve done,” he said to them “You know there were many against me. Hardships, extraordinary pressures beyond the powers of human endurance – so that we nearly gave up hope of even living from day to day, carrying the sentence of biological death in our bodies – imprisoned, flogged, severely flogged, and exposed to death like an unwanted child. I fought beasts, human and otherwise; I fought monsters of every kind. And you know the truth of it.”
“I’ve done everything I could for you,” he continued. “Preaching and teaching – in public spaces and private homes. If I thought it would be helpful or beneficial to you, I did it. And would do it again. For Jews and Gentiles – everyone – urging them to look for God and to look to our Lord.”
“Now I’m on my way to Jerusalem, my final run, I think. There’s still much that I would like to accomplish, but I think this is going to be the end. I’m going to Jerusalem a captive of the Spirit. The wind blows where it will blow; you can hear the sound, but you can’t tell where it comes from. And the spirit goes where it will go and you won’t know why. I don’t know what’s going to happen. The future is uncertain. But, everything that I’ve seen on the road so far, from every town and every city, from every burg and every village, it’s clear that two things are waiting for me there: Imprisonment and persecution. The road to glory always travels through those dark regions.”
He said this and he was true. The road to glory always travels through dark regions. Always. Except in America. There they seem to think that the road to glory begins in glory and only gets brighter from there. But that is neither here nor there.
“You won’t see me again, I think,” he said with great finality and wiped his palms on his pants.
“Soon – not long after I’m gone – you will face wolves attacking from without – and werewolves from within,” he warned. “White collar managerial monsters. Irresponsible men and respectable creatures with filthy appetites. Beggars and rascals. Spiritual panhandlers and theologian thieves, sermon grifters with AI generated homilies and platinum card expense accounts. They are saints of death with bile breath. They are perversions made flesh. They are walking distortions without mercy. They are little g gods preaching a Christ who has no church, and a church without a spirit. Empty of everything. The only thing they have is a travesty of the truth, a tapestry of lies.”
He shook his head before continuing. “You’ve known me. You’ve seen me. You know how I’ve worked – and paid my own way, and that I’ve paid for all my companions and fellow travelers. By any means necessary, I have supported others. And this is the truth of it: we must exert ourselves. We must work so that we can support others. We must support the weak and the powerless; this is our duty. As our Lord told us, ‘There’s more joy in the giving than in the receiving…’”
An American Evangelical with a time machine burst into the room at that point and began snarling “No. No. No Jesus never said anything like that. Show me in the gospels,” he growled. “Show me in that red-letter bible that you claim to love so much, where he said anything of the kind. Cite the chapter and verse for me. But you can’t. You can’t because he didn’t. He didn’t say it. He didn’t say anything like it. You can’t turn him into one of your Marxist icons!”
“Read Sirach,” I told him after pulling him aside so as to let Paul continue his farewell address. “’Do not let your hand be stretched out to receive and closed when it is time to give’. Or read Clement, who said, ‘And ye were all humble, boasting of nothing, submitting yourselves rather than subjecting others, more gladly giving than receiving, content with the…’”
“Nope. No and never,” the American Evangelical interrupted me. “You can’t trust the Church fathers, and you know that the apocrypha doesn’t count.”
“Give, and there will be gifts,” I began. “Full measure for full measure…”
“No.”
“But that one comes from the Gospel of …”
“No. I don’t care what you say, Jesus was no Marxist,” he shouted at me, red-faced and sweaty.
“I never said that he was. That would be a gross anachronism,” I said winking to the reader. “He might have been some sort of socialist but, you’re right, he was no Marxist.”
“Well,” the Evangelical said with a smug satisfaction, “I think I’ve made my point.”
“If you say so, boss,” I said. “Now where was I? You’ve made me lose my place in the story.”
The American Evangelical thumped his Bible on the table, and with a flash of his teeth and a haughty superiority, got back into his time machine and disappeared. I went quietly back into the other room where Paul was finishing with his farewell. The brothers and sisters gathered there hugged him around the neck and kissed him upon the face for they were overcome with sadness knowing that they would never see him again in this life.
Acts 20:17-38
We were, one night, the last night we were there, gathered together in the upper story of the house, the great room with many small windows. It was late and we’d been working all day but Paul was going on and on, preaching as he did. It was a conversational sermon, Q-and-A, give and take, rap session concerning the glories and hardships of living in the kingdom. And he went on and on and on. It was very late. We lit many torches to light the room. Midnight and many lamps.
And one of the boys, Eutychus, Little Lucky we sometimes called him, was sitting on the window ledge for the breeze. The room was stuffy with the hot and oily air. Claustrophobic and close. Eutychus sat in the window for a breeze but still he grew drowsy – his eyes moving slowly, his muscles relaxing – brainwaves diminishing - and was soon overcome by sleep. His head bobbed down and up and down and then he fell from the window. Three stories down, he fell and smashed upon the pavement below.
I’m a one-time sleepwalker, myself. I was fifteen or sixteen, away from home for the weekend at a youth retreat. I woke up in the middle of the night, very early in the morning, on the floor of the cabin bathroom. I assumed that the other guys in the cabin had dragged me there as a joke or a prank on the spindly kid with glasses and braces who preferred Dungeons and Dragons over football. I woke up, cold and confused on the floor, in the dark with no idea where I was. It took several long, almost panicky moments to figure out where I’d awoken. Realizing that I was in the bathroom didn’t alleviate my confusion. I went back to my bunk and back to sleep. I expected that the other boys would tease me in the morning. But they didn’t. No one said anything about it. I realized that I must have been sleepwalking. I had no sleepwalking episodes before that. And I’ve had no sleepwalking episodes since. My younger brother, however, used to sleepwalk all the time. He’d walk out of the house and urinate on the front porch when he was a small child. I don’t know if he still does that.
But brother Eutychus wasn’t a sleepwalker. He was a sleep faller. And his was a sort of autodefenestration, if you will.
What is sleep, anyway? No one really knows. Even the neurologists who study sleep don’t really understand it. Neurotransmitters acting on groups of neurons in the brain. It is death and it isn’t. The body may be stilled (somewhat) but the brain is living and active. Sleep is a sort of death. Sleep is a strange country.
For Little Lucky, the euphemism of sleep became the reality of death. We raced down the stairs and found him, smashed upon the pavement and picked him up dead.
But Paul in prophetic reenactment clasped the body of the boy to himself and said, “There’s no reason to fear,” he said, “There’s life in him yet.” Yet he was dead. In the strictest and severest sense of the word. We know death. We’ve seen death and we know death. A broken neck is death but Paul said, “There’s life in him yet.”
We were still there with tears forming in our eyes when, without warning, Paul stood up and went back upstairs to break the bread with the brothers and to continue his preaching until daybreak.
A few moments later, Little Lucky – Eutychus – coughed once and spasmed twice and began breathing again. I leaned over him and felt for a pulse. It was strong and true. “Speak to me, son,” I said. “Recite your numbers.”
The boy stood, folded his hands and recited his lessons: “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Jack. Queen. King.”
We were not a little comforted. There he was, our Little Lucky.
There Once Was a Prophet from Judah: Biblical Limericks for Fun and Prophet
