A Lenten beat poem
based on Matthew 4:1-11 and Isaiah 58:1-2
We long to know the face
and grow in the ways
of the Lord, but growing pains
strain us
as we fill into the God-shape.
In the past,
on a monastic retreat,
I resisted the delicious scents
of fantastic eats.
But no ascetic ecstasy awaited me that Lent
- just the persisting hunger of a fast broken and bent.
Lenten abstention came and went,
but what had it meant?
Is self-affliction our eternal condition?
Images of the kingdom
riveted to the lingering
moments of hunger and homesickness
- those cravings
enslave us to the awaited
age of rebirth,
testify to our desired new earth,
preempting redemption through a
Lenten diremption
of temptation from beneficence.
Empty the self kenotically.
Idiotic?
Possibly.
Gutting the body, hollowing the bowels,
following the hallowed fertilized fallows
awaiting a new seeding.
Make peace with the season
as a septic cleaning
- an existential enema
for the proleptically resurrected.
Fasting is not being-unto-death, but living
through the death-ing of the present everything,
stretching longingly
toward eternity.
Yet we are indeed
called to recall
that we are carbon-based life forms,
fodder for conqueror worms,
whose enzymes and germs
will un-spoil
corpses into topsoil,
readying the killing fields
for harvest yields.
Resurrection smells like the mouldy bread of vitality,
a non-finality despite the decay of mortality.
Etching an ashen intersection upon my face,
I reminisce the life-in-death of the Lord’s Last Feast.
Our results are not timed at the finish line,
but by the rhythm and rhyme of the sacred time.
The divine kairos
criss-crosses
the minutes and seconds of history
which all of us spend in blisteringly
dull routines, with aches in our feet
racing and pacing in the desert heat.
We miss the synchronicity,
that cosmic elasticity,
when the Spirit spins the globe
to revolve on the rpms of the heavens,
faster,
faster,
fasting.
Then the world grinds to a halt,
and the light and the salt
dissolve into wastelands
everlasting.
A perimeter line
on the sandswept hillside
etches the divide
between the swollen cravings
of my heart’s raging
and the distant objects of my extant longings.
They’re what I pace toward,
turn my face toward.
As long as I seek my missing piece,
the reasons I give
for the habits I live through
only justify
and lie
that the circles on the ground
my tracks have worn down
are a path that’s tried and true.
Hold fast,
boldly fast.
Striving for renewal,
depriving my insides of fuel
for my drives
...but still alive.
Viewed from addiction,
elation is temptation.
My motivation and identity
pours forth from negativity,
an abyss obsessing over what will fill me:
a far cry from Chesterton's vision
of the necessary as luxurious,
the quotidian as the flourishing,
a revelling in the commonplace
as the placeholder of grace.
Glasses raise
just to reach normalcy
instead of praising exorbitantly.
The moment that wine
becomes medicine,
it settles in
to balance the baseline:
liberating libations
instead merely negate negations.
Zero-sum logic
turns gifts into projects,
and the overflow of the gift
becomes a leaking drip to be fixed.
So don’t discourage in privation,
but flourish in elation.
Yet I profess that fasts
slowly grow awareness
in us.
Wallace reminds us
that this is water.
This is water.
This is water.
This is wine.
The scratched record skips
and flips
and finds a new groove,
a new tempo in time.
From the background,
we hear the soundtrack again,
new sounds bounce back and then
echo and fade.
Wade through the white noise,
wait for the right pause,
orchestrate the wait,
and test that whole rest.
...
Mark time
til you find
that stark line,
a melody to remedy
and supercede
the unplayed notes and beats
you left behind.
Overblow the pianissimo,
‘cause finally the finale
rallies the silent symphony.
Break your fast now
as the band breaks into a faster tempo,
desires fire on all cylinders
as they fill up on sensory overload.
Shout like trumpets,
blow low and high notes
- and know that your song floats
toward the right hopes.
This is no time to forego,
this is the time to go forward.
Out of the wild,
riled up to sup.
Out of the desert
seeking dessert.
Never abstain because you’re still stained,
never desist because you’re diseased.
Indulge in superfluous profusion:
fast faster...and feast!
