little t's

I looked back one day

and instead of the dutiful structural wall

I expected to be standing, marking the path I had been walking

the past few years:

each stone set on a foundation of Truths

most little t’s, with some big T Truths

God is Love, and Love is Real-

But that day, whenever it was exactly,

I turned around and found a little gremlin

was smashing around making a mess of it all-

even the foundation stones were crushed.

I wept, grieved for a while.

I was angry some. Heaven disappeared

and god was a deepening mystery

I read philosophers.

Nietzsche has plenty to say

But so does Abraham Heschel

and how Wonder is all he ever asked for

and god gave it to him.

I take this back to my wall.

Caputo steeps in the weakness of god:

unstable, barely functional-

I take some of this back to my wall.

Grace Jantzen reminds me that Deconstruction

is a way to reconstruction.

I take this back to my wall.

I wrestle with the gremlin for a year or two,

then decide to take a break because it’s exhausting

spending every moment in existential skepticism

and I’m just tired, damnit

god damnit.

yes, god, damn it, please.

If you’re there, if you have any power left

damn it.

and I’m just gonna take a break

and if that’s okay with you,

I’m gonna just let this go for now

so I can start breathing normally.

I go from being angry

inside the eternal dark night of my Kierkegaard-ian soul

waiting for the rubble to make itself a wall again, to pave itself

ahead of me, and

getting angry when it didn't—

To just letting the world happen to me;

listening to the words of poets

Who have long gone before me-

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Rumi.

Who have known things closer than I could explain,

“Let everything happen to you; beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Rilke.

Who comforted me in my state,

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body

loves what it loves.” Mary Oliver.

Music saved me. Theatre is my Church. Art is my prayer.

Words have so much power if you let them.

So let them.

And then, one day, you may find yourself

asking those small, eternal questions again;

the wall crumbly but giving it a go-

the gremlin tamed and even cuddly. And then

meekly, like a child whispering in her mother’s ear:

“I love you,” to which she responds

“I loved you first.”