Jesus

You are the missing person in my life.   Even the days when I am ashamed of my forgetfulness You are the ghost in my memory.  I feel a hole shaped like You but I can’t be sure if I made it or if You made me this way.  My life’s yearning is to hear You speak.

Jesus.  Not the cartoons, the several and contradictory cartoons of both zealots and skeptics.  Whatever You may be, really and really.

The world is gathering energies into a coming war on You.  They vomit to hear of you.  I doubt You exist when I hear them think but then their wildly irrational bile toward You feeds my faith.  Such an odd reaction,  unlike any other passion in their cluster of passions, this hatred of You, whom they insist does not exist – it feeds my faith.  Why would the nations rage at just a cartoon?

They are mustering their energies toward war on You.   Something about your name bares their fangs, and they suddenly morph into the devils I saw in the fundamentalist cartoons of my youth.   If the devils are real then the angels must be.

Ah, an insight, a particle of logic, a byte.   I have no use for it.    Always back to you.  Like the deer pants for the brook, so my soul pants for thee.  I can string together words here in the dark of midnight, with my family asleep, strings of logic and phrases I like, but then I wake up from the sleep of thought and language to your name, which for 40 years has held me hypnotized.  From thought and language I come back over and over to your simple name and find the midnight thirst is watered, mysteriously.  How your name waters me is hidden from me.  I cannot step far enough away from the flow to see it.  Not seeing it I cannot say anything about it.  So I find the only water my soul knows just slips through my perception and is gone.

I don’t know what I mean to you.  I wish I knew, then I would know my real name.  I’m an orphan; without father, without mother, coming from nowhere and traveling toward nothing.  My name is in your seeing me, but your thoughts are not mine and these things are far above me.  Call me by my name just one time.  Peter, Mary, mother, son; shepherd, preacher, martyr, prisoner.  You call each star by name and not a sparrow falls lest you mark it.  To be a sparrow in the corner of your mind.

I think the whole world is ordered by your word as well and I think it goes to hell when You don’t speak.  Men, the best and brightest, will someday burn each other in ovens if left to themselves.  I hope I am wrong, but the last thing they would want me to doubt is the evidence of my senses.   The Lamb of God is become the King of the Universe; kneel in fealty, worlds, or you will find yourselves armied up and slaughtering each other in the valley of kings.  All the birds of the air will feast on the flesh, says the Apocalypse.  The world has decided this is the vision of a schizophrenic mind.

Yet, the armies grow.