When I think of you,
I think of your troubled sleep
and many hard choices.
I see you at night
in the desert,
getting Mary to safety.
And later, again, the three of you in flight,
pyramids looming in the distance.
In all the Gospels you never once opened your mouth.
You didn’t have to. Your actions said it all.
For you were, as all could see,
faithful in all things.
You know I’m not, but would like to be,
so I ask, meekly, that you pray for me
that I might be
in more than just my mind.
I am the box
lid open
not big enough for God
so flat now
wide as a box can be
How could I not live in this world
where I speak to the dead and
they speak to me, and intercede –
if I would, if I pray –
even if I never knew them?
How could I not sign on for angels
and parted seas and tents in the desert,
and the last prophet who was the greatest,
but less than every child still to come?
How could I not want every chance repeatedly
to see and forgive – to tap out deeds of love
and be propped up – to pick up my mat and
soar, dammit, in a sky of mercy?!
I could not not turn to you
or live in any other world.
This is the world,
and I claim it.
How’s a stick man to warm his insides?
“For de Lubac this means that God has built into such a nature, not a supernatural power, but a certain receptive potentiality, which is to say, a capacity to recognize that what will truly make us happy is something we cannot attain or know or even fully anticipate on our own.”
Robert Royal, A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century
Utrecht Journal 