Flint Psalm at the Ruined Gate

Amid civic ruin I am forced to name goodness
without lying for it.

You will not let me praise from a distance,
Christ,
while sirens stitch the dusk
and the courthouse wears plywood like a blindfold
and under the overpass a man sleeps
with his shoes in his arms
as if even sleep must keep watch.

You put two stones in my mouth—
praise and protest—
and say, Strike.

So hear me:
I will not call smoke incense.
I will not bless the boot for being swift.
I will not name the decree mercy
while mothers count the missing.
I will not lay a white cloth over the mouth of suffering
and call the gag a hymn.

Yet You press harder.
Not goodness as cover.
Not goodness as answer-sheet.
Goodness with glass in its palm.
Goodness kneeling in the blood-warm stairwell.
Goodness giving its last clean water away.
Goodness refusing the throne of cruelty
even when cruelty has all the loudspeakers.

Then You breathe.

Not on the safe part of me.
Into the split in the throat.
Into the jaw where praise and protest grind.
My ribs become bellows.
My tongue, struck flint.
A spark climbs the wet rope of the spine.

I say I, and the word begins to loosen.
The avenue runs through my lungs.
Ambulances ring in my teeth.
Brick-dust enters prayer.
Your side opens over the city,
or the city breaks open inside Your side—
I cannot keep the edges.
I only know the wound has taken in the streetlight,
the broken bottle,
the child crying under somebody else’s coat,
and nothing is lost there by being seen.

I try to accuse You
and the accusation bursts into petition.
I try to praise You
and the praise comes up gravelled, true.

Blessed are You—not for the fist,
not for the cell,
not for the clean-shaven lie calling itself order—
Blessed are You in the woman binding a stranger’s head
with the hem she tears from herself.
Blessed are You in the boy who carries bread
through a corridor of curses.
Blessed are You in the hand that shakes
and still lifts the beam.
Blessed are You in every small unbroken yes
the world has not managed to kill.

Now the voice sparks.
Not mine.
Yours, finding tinder in the wreck.
The mouth that wanted verdict becomes ember.
It names goodness the way a bell names morning:
by being struck.

So I kneel in the runoff of a burst hydrant,
black water, red light, a shattered moon,
and say good there.

It hurts.
It burns clear.

Before the mouth can claim the word,
my hands are already under the fallen beam.

Comments

When Neighbor-Love Files a Records Request

Hagerstown’s fight over an ICE warehouse shows why Christian public witness must be peaceful, lawful and stubbornly awake: Four toilets can tell you a great deal about a nation’s conscience. In western Maryland, the Department of Homeland Security bought a vacant 825,620-square-foot warehouse near Williamsport for $102.4 million, with plans to convert it into an immigration detention facility capable of holding up to 1,500 people. Maryland’s attorney general says the building was constructed as a commercial warehouse, with minimal office space, two water fountains and just four toilets. ( Maryland Attorney General ) That is not only a plumbing problem. It is a moral signal. The news matters now because the plan has already moved from possibility to litigation. Maryland sued DHS and ICE, arguing that the federal government moved toward converting the warehouse without required environmental review, public participation or state consultation. A federal judge has issued a preliminary inju...

The Hidden Room of Obedient Love

Where the Spirit of Truth Makes Christ Known in Those Who Keep His Word A Sermon on John 14:15–21 On the night before the Cross, the Lord Jesus does not gather His disciples into a theater of sacred ideas. He gathers them into a room of love, fear, nearness, and impending loss. The hour is heavy. The betrayer has gone out into the dark. The powers of the world are drawing near. The Lamb is moving toward the altar of His own self-offering. And in that charged and trembling hour, Christ speaks of love, commandment, Spirit, indwelling, and manifestation. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” He does not say, If you admire Me, you will understand. He does not say, If you are interested in sacred things, you will receive. He does not say, If you stand near enough to the mystery, you will possess it. He says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Here the Lord opens a door that cannot be opened by curiosity alone. He discloses that the Spirit of truth is not received by...

The Sorrow That Leads You Home

How do I distinguish the conviction of the Holy Spirit from shame that only drives me inward and away from God? Not every pain in the soul comes from the same place. There is a grief that is holy, because it tells the truth and leads you back to God. There is another grief that may feel intense, even religious, but it folds the heart in on itself until prayer feels impossible and God seems far away. The fact that you are asking about the difference matters, because much of the spiritual life is learning to tell apart the wound that heals from the wound that only hides. The conviction of the Holy Spirit is often painful, but it is clean pain. It does not flatter you. It does not excuse sin. It does not call darkness light. But it is specific, truthful, and strangely lit from within by hope. It says, in effect, this was false, this was cruel, this was proud, this must be confessed, this must be repaired — and because it is the Spirit of God, it says all this while still drawing you towar...

Under a Merciful Light

How do I begin to examine my inner life honestly without falling into either denial or excessive self-accusation? You begin honest examination of your inner life not by becoming harsher with yourself, but by stepping into a truer light. That matters, because denial and excessive self-accusation are not as different as they first appear. Denial refuses the truth because it fears exposure. Excessive self-accusation distorts the truth because it fears mercy. One says, “There is not much wrong here.” The other says, “There is nothing here but wrong.” Neither posture is honest. Both keep you from standing quietly before reality. Real self-examination begins when you stop trying to secure a verdict and consent instead to be seen. The purpose is not to prove that you are good, nor to prove that you are irredeemable. It is to tell the truth before God. That is a very different thing. The conscience is meant to be a lamp, not a whip. Its work is illumination. It shows what is there: where...

The Wounded Light: A Prayer on the Passion of Christ

O Christ of the hidden fire, Lamb of God, pierced yet radiant — I enter the shadow of Your Passion, where love was stretched upon wood and Light was veiled in blood. Lord Jesus, You walked willingly into suffering, not as one overcome, but as one who gave Himself — a living offering, a conscious descent. You carried the weight of the world’s forgetting, the blindness of hearts, the fracture of souls exiled from their own Light. And still — you did not turn away. Teach me to behold this mystery rightly. Not only the pain — but the meaning within the pain. Not only the cross — but the fire hidden inside it. For Your Passion is not defeat, but revelation: that Love, when pressed to its limit, does not break — it becomes eternal. O Crucified One, when You were lifted between heaven and earth, You became the bridge between them — the meeting place of wound and glory, of death and awakening. Let me not look away. When I see Your wounds, let me remember my own — not as shame, but as places wh...

Myrrh in the Mouth

Praise curdles in my mouth, Risen Christ. I taste it turning — milk to gall, hymn to a blade — because you stand radiant above a world still wet with cruelty, and all your dawn, for all its white fire, still smells of burial spices. I do not know whether to bless you or strike your name against the stone again. My throat is a narrow room. My tongue drags myrrh and iron. Below your lifted hands the murdered keep happening. The earth does not close. The blood does not finish speaking. What am I praising when the flies still choose the wounds of children, when grief goes on kneeling in the road with its raw mouth open? Yet you do not step back. You stand there with death’s perfume clinging to the seams of light, with the tomb not washed from you, with the nails still burning like small suns through the wrists. You are not clean of it. That is what undoes me. You have not come back sweet. You have come back scented with the place they laid you, aloes, myrrh, the shut rock, the dark linen, ...

Purity of Heart or Spiritual Ambition: How to Discern Whether the Desire Comes from God

What awakens a true desire for purity of heart, and how can I know that this desire is coming from God rather than from spiritual ambition? A true desire for purity of heart is usually awakened not by disgust with yourself alone, and not by fascination with a better spiritual version of yourself, but by an encounter with Christ that makes inward division intolerable and communion desirable. Grace gathers scattered attention, heals divided desire, and gives birth to deeper obedience, so that holiness begins to look like daily turning, truthful speech, hidden faithfulness, and prompt return after failure rather than dramatic display. When the desire is from God, it usually arrives as gift before demand. Christ forgives before he reforms. He gives his Spirit before he asks for fruit. The movement is less “I will manufacture purity” and more “I am being summoned into truth, mercy, and surrender.” Transformation begins where outward conduct and interior truth meet, and its decisive signs ar...

Innerstellar Arcadia

Search This Blog