Don’t miss celebrating Holy Week with Wayfare poetry! Read the bread of life, by Kyle Beshears, linked above.
MY HEART AT GOD’S ALTAR
O God
The call cracks my heart. Splices it, pares it down, strips it to bare essence. A primordial reaching, a beckoning for home, for release from displacement, loneliness, fear, acedia, ennui; it’s a plea from the belly of this post-truth cavern. A shout from one side of a canyon to another. I approach the bridge to cross, the way to fly over the cliffs, the path around the loose and falling sediment. I yearn for escape from the consistent brush with physical and spiritual death. This cry to God loops me into the fray, but still, the signifier can’t begin to capture the width and depth and height of the signified.
I meditate over the appellation, measure it with what and how I know, actually know, my own earthly father. A monument exists in the title and reveals granite in his justice, temperance, and honesty. He’s sent me here to breathe and bathe, winnow and receive, understand what’s gained and lost in time, money, mountains, and dust. No matter how much of eternity I see in my own parents, I’ve come to this communion table to seek out his span and reach, his care, work, and unwearyingness.
In the name of thy Son
I remember the grumblings from earlier in the week: a friend who couldn’t keep their mouth shut, a relative I assumed was sidewinding, a child who didn’t listen each time I told them to cut their siblings some slack. The anger leached out in passive-aggressive moves against my wife, who admitted she found it hard to breathe when she heard the edge in my voice, my facial lines crinkling, aging me ten years in five minutes. I rankled, pivoted, and left the room. I then gave way to trolling through MLB.com, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Hours passed through me into others’ polished lives; those photos scintillated with an intoxicating veneer, cruise-like waves, and opening night spotlights. When I couldn’t fall asleep, I remembered the rationalizations that kept me from saying sorry, the ballooning pride still rising. The mumbled murmurs, “But then . . .” and “I never . . .” and “How do you expect me to . . . ?”
Entering church felt robotic (almost like an afterthought). But now with my head bowed, my face flushed and burning, my hands pressed together, forehead nearly touching the pew in front of me—I ask for another shot, another clean and usable slate.
No WhatsApp call here. No text message or comments post. No canned phone ring or buzz. His name renders me mute, speechless. Irrational thoughts and guilty ticks slow down. I turn away from the mental gymnastics of justification and regret. I feel perfectionism and the simultaneous lack of it start to whirl away. I speak his name so that only I can hear. I say it again, slowly, when someone behind me won’t stop talking, when the kids in front of me turn their heads with their shy, giddy glances, when the bishop catches me looking in his direction. I imagine limestone and lambs and date trees in the Holy Land. I begin to feel olive oil coat my lips. I consider his Mediterranean hands, how they might pull me up, his even gaze whispering, “Be not faithless, but believing” (John 20:27, KJV). The words are something between a tackle and an embrace. The waters of mourning and baptism pour down my face.
Bless and Sanctify
One is nearly sixteen, red-headed, taciturn, and staid. Another carries the load of autism. The one on the far left is a wrestler. They offer the ordinance—quickly, haltingly, sometimes quietly, most times figuring out where to pause, what to emphasize—to cleanse and purify on my behalf, on behalf of those sitting next to me, around me, and in the adjacent hallways. Somewhat tongue-tied. But earnest. Unsure. Leaping. They hand the emblems to former versions of themselves, something of Enoch and Jeremiah in each of them. Like me, they are as common as salt. No less unruly, except maybe in appearance. Insouciant. Peach fuzzed. Nascent.
Souls
There’s the sister who uses a walker. Sitting near the chapel doors, she smiles often. She teaches weekly institute classes. Or, the stuttering young single adult who waves in my direction, so frank and dutiful. He shows up to clean the chapel, mop the gym floor, or move the transients when others won’t. The calloused-handed brother who works with drill bits, wood, and electrical tape, the “wases” and “weres” mixed up in his speech, all settled in the back. And the 40-year-old woman, just entering college, recently arrived from a distant land, looking at the floor, perhaps wondering about rent and debt. I’m not surprised by the octogenarian who tapped me on the back just as the prelude ended, said, “Gotcha” for the fifth time this month, the stare in his eyes at once coherent and vacant.
Yet I slip back into solipsism. I look over my knuckles, open and close my hands into fists, feel the cricks and stiffness in both hips and back, my knees and ankles somewhat calcifying, ligaments tightening. From the past week, I mull over the missed conversation with my daughter, wonder why I assumed my son didn’t want to spend time together, rehash the spousal conversation that revealed my tendency to play the victim and spew hasty generalizations. It’s close to noon, yet my eyes won’t stop squinting in the middle of my own blundering darkness.
And then, I hear something, like a sheep bleating in the distance, or like water running down the block, or a child pattering around the house. Sometimes it’s a good friend’s voice. Sometimes it’s wind chimes. As I hunker down, stillness wells up like water in a well. My skull recalibrates. My hearing amplifies with an increased measure of attention. For a few seconds, my eyes are unobscured, focused. My mouth prepares to taste. I envision those hands with scars fastened in both palms and wrists. Searing pangs. Wrenching hours. Unspeakable gift.
Body
Frayed. Cracked. Fractured. Split. Severed. Broken. Torn. Whipped. Shredded. Cut. Slashed. Rent.
Willing
The word’s easy on the lips, especially here in this air-conditioned chapel. I’m willing to shovel snow in the middle of July. I’m ready to garden when the harvest is thick. Willing to show up on a Saturday at 10:00 a.m. to help someone move three doors down, all the household goods boxed up, ready to heft.
The word is a world away from reality. I pause at late-night texts and phone calls. I reach for pretext when someone else’s barn is burning. I shrink when scorn flows fast, raw, and fresh.
Not now lingers like 6:00 o’clock traffic.
I feel the weight of soldiering on, agreeing to full-send a thumbs up next time, bring a wet rag, stay another hour when a friend or stranger at the end of the line is ready to give up.
Too often I’ve hesitated to knock on doors across town, wondered about the hunch to return to the store, equivocated with slumping posture, bumped through excuses until I’ve heard those words, “let this cup pass . . . nevertheless . . .”(Matthew 26:39).
Blood
Wine. Pores. Sweat. Platelets. Hematidrosis. Consanguinity. Flagrum. Thorns. Press. Cup. Hemothorax. Shed.
Always
I find it easier to remember specifically during Christmas and Holy Week. Palm Sunday emerges with the spring sun. I measure time, pour over the gospels, calculate distance. Hear sober joy and cheerful sorrow in the ineffable silence of Wednesday. Betrayal of Maundy Thursday. Paradoxical goodness of Good Friday. Hymns cycle one after the other throughout Easter Sunday.
Often, though, budget analysis, travel songs, and baseball season lure me away. I trip over petty arguments, tumble down the slippery slope of a news story’s bitterness. Sidle up to the rumors of increased property taxes and speculate over what happened to the neighbors down the street. My tongue grows thin and silent at the first signs of heat.
I avoid work complications, fissured relationships, financial woes, communication breakdowns; embrace athletic distraction, weather illusion, meme attraction. Some days, I need stillness like I need breakfast, but don’t admit it. When I hit a breaking point, I tell myself to turn around, cease backsliding, stop being impatient. “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). I keep hoping the line will act like a mantra even when it doesn’t. At times, I’m a faulty socket.
Still, now, his wordplay, invitations, and equilibrium return: Give up navel gazing to find your life, embody the wisdom in serpents, treat others with dove-like gentleness, love without conclusion or pretense. Accept his word when he speaks of light and doors and vines. Day Star. Shepherd. Yoke and rest.
I hang on to when he healed Bartimaeus, admire the woman who cleansed his feet. I pray, seeking to understand what it means to worship. In my mind, I run to the borrowed, empty tomb. I savor the word Rabboni. My hands grip the plow, push through the impulse to turn back.
I recognize the quivers and closed eyes in each fellow disciple’s face and know it’s not just temple trips and ward parties and firesides and morning meetings and all our testimonies. And it’s not about my mission or singing at the assisted living center, or that dozen or so times I’ve donated blood. It’s the hours and minutes right now, yesterday and tomorrow, next week, and the entire stream of months and years and however many decades ahead.
Commandments
Once the bread and water have passed, I arch my shoulders back, sit up straighter, plead for more chutzpah to leave the old self burning on the altar, seek a skosh of steely discipline, a touch of confident stoicism, to allow nothing between me and him. To cease polishing my trophies, quit fishing for accolades, refrain from mentioning how I can dig a ditch. I want to use his name less like punctuation, routine, or doorstop. More like the feeling that arrives after a first snowfall or when I’ve heard my children breathe at night. I imagine a Sabbath without dos and don’ts. Commit to calling my parents on a Monday morning, Thursday afternoon, or whenever they least expect. “Watch and pray” (Matthew 26:41) becomes the honey to bolster my wits.
Spirit
It’s like the selah after Amen or like the wassail I drink after shoveling snow, or perhaps it’s like the occasional nap I take on the basement couch on summer afternoons. Or maybe, like the organ when its notes gather slowly, deliberately, rising in my backbone, circling my lungs, tingling through my forearms, palms, and fingertips. Yes, and just like the time my wife and I walked out of the hospital, together, for the first time carrying the no-longer-empty car seat. Wind and rain pushed us off the curb and into the parking lot, waking me to the Light that I almost forgot, but instantly knew was there. I leaned into that pure singular presence. It kept my broken heart then—and even now—secure and driving through the viscous October air.
Since 2000, Mark has taught writing and literature at BYU-Idaho. During that time, he has authored four collections of poetry. He and his wife, Kristine, are figuring out gardening, home repair, and grandparenthood.
Art credit: Church Pew with Worshippers (1882) by Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890).
 | A guest post by
|