The Graft at Thaw

I stand where winter wood loosens
and the first bud clenches its green wound.

Lord, not yet flower, not yet leaf,
not yet the dark branch persuaded into fruit,
I have come with my beautiful lie of wholeness
folded under my coat like a stolen skin.

Take it.

No—
You have already taken it.

The bark of me splits before I consent.
Sap starts where shame had sealed itself.
My throat, long schooled in completion,
fills with thaw-water and iron.

I wanted to be seamless for You,
one clean vessel, one polished cup,
no crack where the old frost entered,
no missing handle, no bruise under the glaze.

But You, Christ of the pierced side,
You do not drink from my perfection.
You put Your mouth to the fracture.
You breathe where the clay gave way.

A terrible tenderness begins there.

Not above me.
Not after me.
There—
in the unfinished rib,
in the branch rubbed raw by weather,
in the scar that would not close because it had become a door.

You press Your thumb into my lack
and call it ground.

You name the hollow orchard.
You name the amputated root.
You name the black seed asleep in its own burial
and the seed, hearing You,
breaks faith with its husk.

I am not whole.
I am opened.

I am not healed as stone is healed,
by remaining stone.

I am wounded into green.

The winter wood shudders.
Every twig remembers fire.
Every knot in the body’s timber
loosens its clenched account of pain.

My hands, which kept inventory of absence,
begin to ache with small invisible fruit.
My palms darken with pollen not yet made.
My pulse climbs out of its narrow room
and staggers, sap-drunk, toward the branch.

O Maker of figs from fissure,
O Vine who enters the cut
and does not despise the knife-mark,
do not restore me to the locked shape
I mistook for holiness.

Let me be grafted, not repaired.
Let me be joined where I am least proud.
Let the missing place be fastened to Your abundance
until I cannot tell whether the sweetness
rose from me
or descended
or was always waiting in the wound
for winter to fail.

Now the bud swells like a question in flesh.
Now the air tastes of wet bark, bruised moss,
cold loam loosening its fist around the dead.

I feel You making fruitfulness
not despite incompletion
but through it,
through the torn cambium,
through the scar’s dark grammar,
through the yielded lack that trembles
because it is no longer empty enough
to belong to despair.

My name thins.

The branch says I.
The root says I.
The thaw beneath the stones says I.
Then even I is too round a word
for what Your pressure does inside me.

You do not fill the hollow.
You make it sing.

You do not erase the scar.
You teach it how to bear.

And at the threshold—
winter behind me with its white teeth spent,
the first bud before me, fierce and unopened—
I surrender the finished self,
that sterile idol with no wound for grace,

and receive the orchard of the incomplete:

green fire in the break,
bread rising from the bruise,
Your nail-light under the bark,
my lack, at last,
heavy with figs.

Comments

Repenting with a Divided Heart

What does sincere repentance look like when I still feel divided within myself? Sincere repentance does not always look like inner clarity. Very often it looks like conflict. It looks like standing before God with one part of you ready to come home and another part still clinging to what has wounded you. It looks like wanting to be free and yet feeling, painfully, that you are not simple inside. That does not make your repentance false. In many cases, it is the very place where real repentance begins. A heart that feels no division can sometimes be farther from repentance than a heart that aches with it. When you are fully asleep to your sin, you do not struggle much. You explain yourself. You protect yourself. You make peace with what is killing you. But when light begins to enter, it does not always make you feel whole at once. Often it first makes you feel split. You begin to see that there is truth in you and resistance in you, longing in you and fear in you, love in you and self-p...

The Least Holy Hour

After the inward famine I become a clean animal of denial. I keep myself alive on flint. I harden the mouth against sweetness. I call the empty room honest. I call the shut door wisdom. I call Your silence truth, and the name of that truth is absence, and the name of absence is safety, and the name of safety is this iron little self that survives by accusation. So when You come, You do not come at the kneeling hour. Not under candles. Not while the psalm is still warm in the throat. Not when the soul has washed its face and arranged its grief before heaven. You come in the least holy hour, when the kitchen light is a cheap wound, when the sink smells faintly of old plates and metal, when my hands are raw with nothing noble, when I have not prayed but only stood there in my body like a house refusing entry to its own fire. Lord Jesus— I say Your name now because You force it from me. You arrive without thunder. No wound in the ceiling. No doctrine of light. Only this: a tenderness so su...

Before Bread

In the dream the wheat burns standing. No storm tears it. No reaper enters. Each stalk keeps its thin psalm of height while fire climbs through it from the root, a blue obedience, a bright undoing. I run to save the field. I am already counting winters, already lifting the mouths of others in my mind, already loving the gold because it can be given. Then smoke crosses the furrows and chooses me. It threads the throat. It puts its bitter thumb on the tongue. It fills the chest with a blackened sweetness that will not let me call this loss by any gentle name. Let the false harvest go, You say. Not from the sky. From inside the burning. And suddenly the sheaves are no longer out there but stacked behind my ribs: bundles of usefulness, goodness tied tight for admiration, kindness dried hard in the sun of being seen, all the bright labor I meant to carry to the hungry before Your hand had touched it. My palms blister on emptiness. My mouth is full of chaff. The spine becomes a furrow. The h...

Beneath the Shape of the Temptation

How do I discern the root of a recurring temptation instead of only fighting its outward form? To discern the root of a recurring temptation, you have to stop treating it as only an enemy at the gate and begin listening for what it keeps trying to promise you. This does not mean trusting it. It means becoming honest enough to ask why this particular temptation has learned your name. The outward form is usually loud. It announces itself as an urge, an image, a craving, a fantasy, a reaction, a familiar doorway. Because it is loud, it feels like the whole battle. And sometimes, in the moment, the faithful thing really is simply to resist: close the door, leave the room, end the conversation, put the phone down, say no before the mind begins negotiating. There is no shame in needing firm boundaries. A soul in training should not pretend it can calmly study a fire while standing inside it. But if the same fire keeps returning, then resistance alone may not be enough. You may be cutting bra...

Terrible Rosary at Line Four

I accuse You with my hands full. Not from a mountain, not from a clean room of candles, not with the silvered mouth of a saint, but between the chute and the press, where the belt keeps bringing the same small wound of metal to the same place in my palm. Absent One, I say it under the guard of the motor: You hide in repetition because You fear the naked instant. You hide in the bolt, in the box, in the clamp, in the blue glove stiff with oil, in the exact return of the lever as if eternity were too ashamed to arrive except disguised as hourly wage. The line answers by not answering. Click. Feed. Lift. Press. Click. Feed. Lift. Press. The fluorescent tubes hum their thin white fever. My wrist learns the religion of no escape. The clock above receiving hangs like a nailed eye and will not weep. I say, Lord—if Lord You are— come out of the pattern. Come out. Come like a rupture, come like a hammer through the roof, come like thunder with Your name exposed, because I am tired of this small...

The Door of the Guarded Heart

How Christ Turns Self-Protection into Passage, Safety, and Abundant Life: John 10:1-10 (ESV) 1 “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. 2 But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. 5 A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.” 6 This figure of speech Jesus used with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them. 7 So Jesus again said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. 8 All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. 9 I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and ...

When Good Gifts Become Hidden Masters

In what ways can comfort, approval, success, or control become idols in the hidden life? Comfort, approval, success, and control become idols in the hidden life when they stop being received as limited gifts and begin to function as secret saviors. They rarely announce themselves as idols. They usually arrive as reasonable desires. It is good to want rest. It is human to want to be loved. It is fitting to want one’s work to bear fruit. It is not wrong to plan, prepare, or protect what has been entrusted to us. The danger begins when these good things quietly move from their proper place into the center, when the soul starts arranging itself around them as though life itself depended on keeping them. Comfort becomes an idol when peace is confused with the absence of disturbance. Then the hidden life begins to shrink. A person avoids difficult conversations, delays obedience, dulls conviction, and calls it “self-care” when it is actually fear wearing soft clothing. Comfort promises safet...

Innerstellar Arcadia

Search This Blog