The star of God

knoweth not the rush of applause

the flash of small suns,

the purr of pampered angels –

but the splash of a small stone

lunging into

an infinite sea

And now shall I praise His name

with this most simple word:

Lord Jesus rode into town

with God’s most awesome sword –

Neither a knife of slashing, nor

a weapon for a war

Nor a horse for trampling down

some misbegotten Moor

But a song of love most divine,

a Cherubic Pastoral:

Indeed His Son amongst us is

God’s best weapon of them all.

He powered them with Comfort

that they could bear

the awful things

the devil orchestrates.

The jeers of men, the fangs,

the claws in cage,

the human rage;

the demon potentates

The mobs had racked up all their

limbs for the stretch –

the grinding wheel

pulled by tormentors’ zeal.

They burned them and they boiled them

They made Saint Stew

they shut their eyes

forever with godless glue

But Satan could not prevail

by breaking backs

(for body is myth

but faith the stuff of facts).

And in the final inning

the devil lost the match;

for each time a martyr dies

his soul doth Jesus catch!

Three hermits dwelt atop

a brooding forest glen

For sixty years they dwelt there,

praying without end

Nary a soul could seek them,

and fewer even cared

For men had lost their eyeballs

from thorns in sins ensnared.

I am not writing this myself, instead I defer to this excellent video post somewhere on the Web. The text is written and read by a woman named Molly Sabourin a freelance writer and Orthodox Christian.

As I venture into later years
the words of God come clearer
Find joy and peace in gospel truth
And don’t daydream in a mirror.

But the Master said that we’d be blessed
if our thinking became cleaner
Blessed be the pure in heart
when the world outside grows meaner.

Seeing God is the next, best thing
to meeting Him in heaven.
But seeing Him in others first was
perhaps God’s intended lesson.

Somewhere between the blessing & the breaking
and the 12 baskets full, O how the heavens
weren’t quaking, but were standing still.
The 5,000 men & others there uncounted had heard Him & seen Him
and then eaten their fill.
Five paltry loaves & two meager fishes
transformed into the most sumptuous of dishes.
The Lord bestowing life on a world consumed with want;
it was no stunt, but an act of great compassion from
the Master of grace and truth, hoping that
the hunger of a many could be sated and related to
the baskets of a few.

Heaven gatekeeper – Christ is Thy lens!
As I crawl into line
I dream this of salvation: misting upwards through time
lost dimensions and managed phobias
Drifting towards the High Gate
See me as Thou would see Thy Christ
As best as I could walk in him
*    *    *
I stole a glance downward as I drifted away
The burning man cinemas of greed & hate
My new body, an alloy of flesh & spirit
Was light as silk, caught in His warm underglow
While beneath me the Worldlings argued
“I this” and “I that,” deploring their bests
For fear they would lose it

It was not worth watching any more,
so I thumbed over the next but even the commercials locked in
And the fighting intensified
They began to club each other, with knotted branches of oak
The dull drubbing of politicos, rapists, murder-mongers and worse
Fornicators all, they drew near to themselves and lusted
They wrestled harder, splashing soon into molten mud
The demons around their ring danced in adulation
Talking heads flinging floss spatter
one at another
Messing their high-def greasepaint
Squawking while
the devils squirted gasoline through their teeth
Along with their ammo books, their catchy covers
and titles galore
Burning doomsday beyond recognition

And the Lord reached the far shore and whisked away
the maniacs, pigs splashing into the brew
Come, he said, just come. Leave this messiness behind.
Let them rant while the right tree finds us and we rest

Recently, I took the family on a 2 1/2 day vacation to Boston and other parts of Massachusetts.

For me, this excursion was a dip into the past. Massachusetts was once my home — both west-central and the Boston area. I lived there nearly four years when I was college age, and, let us just say, lived rather lavishly. Painful memories abounded. A prodigal existence indeed…

The city and its state has changed and hasn’t changed. It has all the trappings of a society that has fallen in love with itself. For good reason: Boston and Mass in general are lovely places in a modern, Western sense. There are many coffee houses and bars, Pride marches, and freedom of expression is everywhere. But the side that disturbed me was that the region had lost its religion. Most churches have become museum pieces. A state that was founded on Puritan ideals has become a purely humanistic ideal. Almost.

By Sunday morning, worn down from being a tourist, I happened into an Orthodox church in Cambridge and found myself in a small islet of peace inside a rabidly “agnositicized” city. I joined the worship in a cloud of witnesses and joyful incense and for a couple of hours, escaped from the nauseating worldly pride emanating everywhere else. Thank the Good Lord for His homecoming He gives to all of us weary strangers who seek His Holy Place.

Thou, O Lord Incarnate and Mighty, which impales
on bait hooks all the evil worms below the decks
in fire-rotted hell
awful, knee-harrowing
hades, where their worm dieth not,
where darkness crushes deceivers’ souls
and they are packaged into cakes of dung
then sold to the lowest bidder
their branches cast
into the ripping flames
like the 6 o’clock lies
sent to the shredder
an amnesiac enjoying the moon
for the sun

The righteous bend of the mountain,
merging the clouds of heaven with whiffs of myrrh.
The merging of divine oxygen and brassy fanfare
the touch of His glorious pointers
inculcating life
illumining the path through gold-frosted pines
and ancient stones
Thy goads of right scripture;
setting forth parable and adage
each step of the new life beckons,
ascending through the sorrows of dark hearts.