Then the LORD called to him and said,
“Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob;
tell the Israelites:
You have seen for yourselves how I treated the Egyptians
and how I bore you up on eagle wings
and brought you here to myself. 
Therefore, if you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant,
you shall be my special possession,
dearer to me than all other people,
though all the earth is mine.”
—Exodus 19:2-6a

O you who open prison doors
and crumble fortress walls
with sudden, terrifying force,
it is your voice that calls.

You shatter shackles, break the chains,
and set the captives free
to walk the world and know its pains—
so you have done to me.

You brought me to a pleasant land;
you bid me take my ease
and walk without your guiding hand:
O God, how can that please?

You bid me walk in righteous paths
and tell me what they are,
but all rewards and all your wraths
are distant as a star.

Then I must take it on myself
to choose where I would go:
This is your freedom, nothing else,
and terrible to know.

And when I fall, as oft I do,
and when I choose the wrong
and wander far away from you,
the homeward way is long.

But you’ll not keep me at your side
nor bind my wand’ring heart:
Not so the Bridegroom binds his Bride,
though far she dwells apart

and builds a prison once again
where she can rest secure.
You break the walls I build, and then
you set me free once more.

Claude Monet – La Corniche near Monaco (1884) – Museum website: info, picture, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11592629

Christ delighted in flowers.
–Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Loving God”

And God, eternal love from age to age,
said, “I will love what cannot last,
what is not of my being
but longs for it.  Their longing I assuage,
as to myself I bring
the ones who fall to storm wind’s blast
and time,” and made the lily and the sage.

They could not help but blossom in his love
and fade as quickly as they bloomed
to vanish from the earth,
yet when their maker left his seat above
he chose the lily’s birth:
to bud, unfold, and then be doomed
with all the flowers he’d had the making of.

For by their nature they could not remain—
these somethings made from nothing fall,
returning to the dust
and leaving nothing, not even a stain,
an ash, a fleck of rust—
yet when they live, he lives in all,
and when they die he knows their dying pain.

But he who made the seasons made the spring;
who made the stars made all the hours
and each new-mercied day,
and though we drop like petals withering
he knows our swift decay.
Christ so delighted in the flowers
he fades with us, although he is our king.

And so with him we fall and we return.
We languish with a passing breath,
as wind in autumn sighs,
yet he is curled within, a sleeping fern
and spring that never dies,
that we may blossom after death
delighting in him, too, for whom we yearn.

Rosa centifolia (cabbage rose) By Pierre-Joseph Redouté – http://www.herbarium.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=859013

Now see what she has given up for love,
for sorrow of her love, and for the hope
that she may find him yet, may climb above
the realm of tears so limitless in scope
and find the palace where her Cupid dwells,
who for his love has braved the deepest hells:

the eyes that looked forbidden on his wings,
the hands that stroked his feathers in the dark.
She bids farewell to all these lesser things
that led her on to burn him with the spark
she never should have kindled—but once seen,
his visage drew her longing straight and keen.

So she has followed Cupid in his flight
as far as mortal flesh on earth can go
and onward still into the deepest night
at Venus’ hest, beyond what mortals know.
All pride stripped back, she journeys down to death,
no memory but of his honeyed breath.

Beneath her tongue two coins to cross the Styx,
with secret wisdom swirling in her mind,
the guardian of the underworld she tricks
and begs the queen of death to be so kind.
Kinder than Venus, Prosperpina gives
to Psyche what she asks—and Psyche lives.

Herself forgotten, thoughts on him alone,
she flees the pain that burns and then benumbs
‘til shame is gone with all she’s ever known.
Emerging from the underworld, she comes;
her beauty lost, she leaves the shadowed lands,
diviner beauty hidden in her hands.

And Cupid waking, healed of his long pain,
bestirs himself to seek as she did him,
desires to see his Psyche once again
and by his touch restore her, life and limb.
He who for love betrothed him to her soul
will take her to the skies and make her whole.

Young Female Attendant, c. 340–330 B.C., Greek, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, https://kimbellart.org/collection/ap-197203

Here beneath these signs are hidden
Priceless things to sense forbidden;
Signs, not things are all we see.
—Sequence for the Feast of Corpus Christi

This summer day an image of your bounty;
this storm that’s rolling in your wrath, of course—
your mercy, too: We could not live without it.
Yes, all the things we see are metaphors

for you, and we see dimly in a mirror.
I look, and those I know all seem to me
trees walking, ‘til you make my vision clearer.
When will you touch my eyes and let me see?

I walk a world of shadows, nothing real.
Content with them, I ask you, “What is truth?”
You do not answer, only set a meal
and give your flesh to me, my tongue and tooth.

And all the bread I’ve tasted was an image,
just ink and paint and paper, dry as ash.
And all the wine I’ve drunk was but to mimic
the soul that sips a flood where you were gashed.

But when I eat the meal you set before me
I feel the life that rises from the dead.
The seed that fell and rose reveals your glory:
You offer me my first real taste of bread.

Last Supper, drawing, Philips Koninck, late 1650s. Pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, over traces of red chalk, heightened with white gouache, with framing line in pen and brown ink. Laid down. – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60888837

Before him in shame shall come
all who vent their anger against him.
—Isaiah 45:24b

Oh, I have railed in anger at the sky,
vented my rage, O Lord, and cursed your name,
yet I shall come to look you in the eye,
shall see you just as clearly as my shame.

Yes, I will have the same as righteous Job:
with my own eyes shall see you on the earth
and stand so close that I could touch your robe,
although I have defied you since my birth.

Then I will cry out weeping, “Where were you?”
and you will ask, “Who shut in doors the sea?”
and there will be no answer—no, it’s true—
but that you stand upon the earth with me.

As close as you’ll be then, Lord, be here now
to show that mercy greater than my death.
Show me the livid marks on hand and brow,
my Lord and God, as close as touch and breath.

Anonymous Byzantine illustration; the pre-incarnate Christ speaks to Job. Book of Job in Illuminated Manuscripts.List of Byzantine Manuscripts with Cyclic Illustration.Mount Athos.Megisti Lavra Monastery. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10827565

The bright daylilies riot in the garden:
They shout their colors ‘til the sky gives in
and grants the weeds and all offenders pardon.
The high judge nods and sends the rain again—
not torrents of destruction, merely showers
in mercy shown to us and to the flowers.

But even so the lilies have their moment.
They followed on the irises now lost;
chrysanthemums already start to foment
rebellion, though they all give way to frost.
Each one its glory in the sun unfurling
will wither in its hour of dead leaves curling.

In Eden only bloomed no fear of autumn
but that was overthrown.  In all our years
the pleading for it fills each short-lived blossom;
they wilt though we may water them with tears.
O judge of all, will you not grant us mercy?
Though spring rains come at last they leave us thirsty.

We protest with the lilies ‘til you hear us;
in solidarity we march through time
and watch them fall, as men and flowers near us
are one by one arrested in their prime.
This order cannot stand; it, too, is falling.
Beyond our shouts some other voice is calling,

as if the judge himself became the lily
condemned to sink beneath the winter snows.
If spring should come again then he would fill it
and overturn the fall each blossom knows.
His clemency would flower in full pardon
and Eden spring again in every garden.

The tawny daylily (Hemerocallis fulva) (c)2007 Derek Ramsey (Ram-Man) – Self-photographed, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2237229

Day after day, week after week we pray,
“O Lord, I am not worthy to receive,
but only say the word—but only say—
and shall my soul be healed.” So we believe,
yet somehow, month by month, comes no reprieve
as year by year our sicknesses consume
the dust you brought forth naked from the womb.

We cannot help but know, though long we’ve pled
for ignorance or for some other fate,
the slave will die, centurion hang his head.
We pray through every moment we await
that which must come, though we know not its date—
two women there, one taken and one left,
one gone into the dark and one bereft.

Or if not death, an unseen thorny crown,
a broken frame, the sins we cannot best.
What does not kill us simply wears us down
and none of us is spared the final test.
What is this prayer, this hope we have confessed?
What but the drowning hand thrust from the wave
before it sinks, if no one comes to save?

Take, then, O God, the flutter of our hand
as frantic as the flickering of flame
upon the altar, take the breath that fanned
these torches by the whisper of your name,
as gifts we bring which only you can claim.
Take them as acts of faith despite our doubt:
Yours is the altar where we flicker out.

Still do you bring us back to life each day;
still is your mercy every morning new,
so we may bow our heads again to pray,
we who will fade as quickly as the dew,
“I am not worthy, Lord, receiving you,
but say the word and I shall be made whole,”
and wait for you to speak into our soul.

detail study for the “Heller Altarpiece” By Albrecht Dürer – Google Arts & Culture, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21792217

When all is said and all is done,
one thing I’ll know, one thing I knew:
You love us as you love the Son,
your love in him and he in you.

You loved him ere the world was made,
and you have loved us too so long,
before creation was arrayed
before the seven days had dawned.

And this, the love you set in him,
proceeding from your inmost thought
as light when everything was dim,
is that you send into our heart

and, in us, draws us into yours
that we within your heart may rest.
You open to us heaven’s doors,
the heaven of your inmost breast.

The Son in you and you in us
and love around, between, among
draws us into your loving thus
to dwell while endless ages run.

All glory to the love that was,
the love that is and is to be,
and praise for what that loving does
and did and will eternally.

Rothschild Canticles, folio 106r. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2002755

The soul within my body, form in stone,
cry out alike for light and to be known.

Dissimilar we are, and yet the same:
All matter speaks the uncreated name

and says the Maker’s making will not cease
‘til all that’s made is perfect in his peace.

The mountain’s magma, blood within my veins,
spill out in cataclysm, chisel’s pains,

‘til all of our excess is worn away
and what is left is timeless as the day.

O Sculptor, pare me down to shape and line
and let the essence of your image shine!

Female Figure, c. 2500–2300 B.C.

Bastis Master, Cycladic, Kimball Art Museum, https://kimbellart.org/collection/ag-197002

We vow ourselves to heaven; we aspire
to union with the God who made all things,
but who can bear the all-consuming fire?
We cry for mercy when it only stings.

I have to nerve myself for you and stand
as close as I can manage to the flame,
in range, a place for sparks to land
and singe, minutely brand me with your name.

Each small humiliation burns away
what should not be—a little twinge, a pinch,
transforming me just barely day by day
and inch by tiny fraction of an inch.

Not conflagrative, cataclysmic change—
I am not swallowed in the flame’s abyss,
yet I am altered, to myself made strange
by waves of heat and each small firebrand’s kiss.

O God, you’re gentle with us, for you know
of what we’re made, that we are dust and ash.
I will be changed if you would have me so.
Your mercy fills each spark and fading flash.

Sparks from a pyrotechnic sparkler. By Gabriel Pollard – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1541671