A poem for the day

It’s not my day to blog, but I decided to share this on our Convention Blog today (and with all of you).  I bought a book by L. William Countryman this week at the Exhibit Hall called Love Songs & Reproaches, a Conversation with God.  (I know.  You’re shocked that I bought a book, but you don't have to move it mom!)  It has a poem in it that is really speaking to me about General Convention, and church governance, and really churches in general, so I thought I’d share it with you. 

Fair warning: you are about to read poetry, something that gets my students shaking in their boots. J

A Voice in the Static

Your words are hard to decipher,

your voice, submerged in the static

of chattering minds and hearts,

is hard to hear—

above all, for us the pious,

trying so hard to listen!

Jesus was never more of a problem

than for us who knew God best,

who read the scriptures and taught

the rest to know their sins.

The more confidence, the more static.

Better to confess, with Solomon,

that, finally, we do not know.

Confessing our ignorance, we make room

for friendship, we affirm beyond our understanding.

                  When Jesus brought good news,

he said, “Turn and believe.”

What does it take to believe

good news? Turning away from despair,

from fear and foreboding, surrender

of self-confidence, the opening of the hand

to receive goodness, the triumph

of thanksgiving over dread.

                                                      Grace

can only come as surprise.

And when grace comes, it confuses

all our accounts.  All that time

spent with the double-entry columns

of our merits and our sins—all

swept away.  All that deliberation,

the slow building of confident theologies—

all shattered.  Yet, not all wasted.

Lying among the fragments,

we find, like Paul, the neglected

words that could have pointed us

toward the forgotten possibility,

to a knowledge of you that admits

we do not know, to a heart

willing to accept surprise.

                  Turn and believe the good news.

Your good news does not amend our knowledge of you.

It upends it, till every element of it,

shaken loose in free fall,

rearrange itself to form

a picture we recognize and yet

could not have drawn before.

                  Turn and believe. There is no hearing

of your voice that does not transform.

And no single hearing

that transforms once and for all.

Always some static remains,

blurring the voice we hear. 

Grace, even when we have known it

many times before,

will still find ways to surprise.

Its music penetrates the gabble

and we are astonished and we are changed.