The world wants you
To be a tool for its use.
Refuse.
Hold your brokenness high.
Your bleeding wounds, lift up.
The pain, don't trade it for anything.
It is your living.
Do not fit in,
Especially when it costs you money;
Especially, especially, especially
When it costs you you.
Give up every happiness
To stay wild.
Give up everything
To love the one who sets you free.
When someone sees you as a god — a woman degrades herself because she sees you as the one who gives her value — the loving response always involves some sort of crucifixion. For the undignified woman, your own desires and any potential response which does not aim to restore her dignity must be killed, no matter how painfully, in such a way that her own dignity can be restored without shame.
The pain Christ feels is not because our sins hurt him. It’s because it hurts to see a beloved one degrade or afflict their self. In the crucifixion, he takes our degradation and affliction upon himself. That is the preferable pain when someone you love is hurting.
The world wants you
To be a tool for its use.
Refuse.
Hold your brokenness high.
Your bleeding wounds, lift up.
The pain, don’t trade it for anything.
It is your living.
Do not fit in,
Especially when it costs you money,
Especially, especially, especially
When it costs you you.
Give up every happiness
To stay wild.
Give up everything
To love the one who sets you free.
Grief is the lover who gives
And gives
And gives
And waits
And does not receive
And dies of starvation.
Grief is why the widow —
Who once slept peaceful
In her lover's arms;
Who once had dreams
Instead of memories;
Who once caressed
Her lover's cheek and lips,
Lost in cosmic wonder —
Cannot eat more than
A spoonful of soup.
Grief is
Going home without,
And never again
Going out with home.
In this world, there are places with God and places without God. That is for a very good reason. If there were no places without God, we would have nowhere to run from him.
For God’s love to be real, we must have the freedom to refuse it, to refuse him. It’s not true love if it’s not a gift, and it’s not a gift unless it can be refused. If we couldn’t refuse it, it would be an imposition, not a gift.
God makes his love a gift by giving us places to go where his love is not, where he is not. But a place without God, the source of all life, is a place with death. Death is the cost of a world where love exists.
Because we are loved, death is a part of this world.
Today, Catholics celebrate Passion Sunday, in which we remember Christ being deeply troubled upon seeing his friend, Mary of Bethany, weeping.
In John 11:33, Christ’s behavior is described with an intense Greek word, enebrimēsato, that translates to something like “he snorted in spirit.” Christ groaned from the depths of his soul, like a sobbing child, upon seeing the pain that death has caused his friend. He grieves at the pain caused by loving imperfect lovers.
Sometimes you just hurt.
You wake up feeling beat up,
And then you hear they’re choosing her.
They’re choosing her,
The one you loved so much,
Who did not want you to exist.
She didn’t want you to exist,
But no one saw the hate she gave,
So they chose her and so she wins.
You want to hate her for that.
You clench and grimace and cringe,
But all you can muster is pain,
And maybe that was her hate too.
It wasn’t hate of you.
It was just some other pain.
Still, you want to hate her for it,
But you don’t because you understand.
You’ve done the same to others as she’s done to you.
So you try to forgive her for it,
But you don’t because you can’t.
Maybe yesterday, but not today.
And you carry all of this
Without a friend to walk beside
Because they all chose her.
They all chose her,
And the clock keeps moving forward,
And you’ve got to get to work.
So you do what you do sometimes,
You just hurt.
The man who just sat down,
You smiled at him.
He did not smile back.
He’s a large man.
You might have been offended
By his lack of courtesy,
But you’re wiser now.
You’ve received the grace of pain.
And so instead of taking offense,
You wonder if his age and size
Have amounted to a painful walk
That felt, to him, like a marathon.
And then you see his knee,
The scar down the middle,
The oceanic swelling.
It wasn’t that he didn’t smile,
This man who just sat down.
It was that he couldn’t smile.