O Eve

Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals
that the LORD God had made.
The serpent asked the woman,
“Did God really tell you not to eat
from any of the trees in the garden?”
The woman answered the serpent:
“We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;
it is only about the fruit of the tree
in the middle of the garden that God said,
‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.'”
But the serpent said to the woman:
“You certainly will not die!
No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it
your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods
who know what is good and what is evil.”
The woman saw that the tree was good for food,
pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom.
So she took some of its fruit and ate it;
and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her,
and he ate it.
Genesis 3:1-7

And when the serpent whisper
slid hissing in your ear,
how long did you resist it,
“You surely need not fear”?

How often did it echo
on any given day?
How often did you beg God
to take the thought away?

Yet if he did, it crept back,
louder, stronger, again:
“But did he really say that?”
revolving without end.

You tried to tend the garden,
distracted through your days,
your eyes forever drawn to
the truth you mustn't taste.

How long 'til it consumed you,
caught in the serpent's teeth,
until you failed, as all do?
And we have called you weak!

Yet be consoled, O mother,
howver deep you fall,
for there will come another
to enter that same brawl,

and he will sink down with you
to dwell among the dead
whence he has come to lift you
and crush the serpent's head.

You, firstfruits of temptation—
how can the heart conceive?—
are mother of salvation.
Exult! Exult, O Eve!

“Eve and the Serpent.” Plate from Penholm by G. Howell-Baker. – https://digital.cincinnatilibrary.org/digital/collection/p16998coll21/id/38116/rec/1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104281987

Temptations

For the First Sunday of Lent, and the temptation in the desert:

We do not live on bread alone,
but by the word of God—
a feast that may as well be stones,
if words are all our food.

O Christ into the desert led,
and there how sorely tried,
you give us both the Word and bread,
and we are satisfied.

We shall not test you, Lord our God,
demanding signs and works,
but strike the rock with Moses' rod
or we shall die of thirst.

And so we strike you, saving Lord,
to test this love divine.
You give us water—what is more,
you turn it into wine.

Yes, we shall worship God alone,
and him alone we'll serve.
If we should kneel before his throne,
it's more than we deserve.

So, Master, you should say to us, 
“Serve me, so I can eat.”
Instead, you look upon our dust
and kneel to wash our feet.

Yes, you, who made us, know our strength,
our weakness and desires.
What we would chase to find but death,
you turn into new life.

The temptation of Christ by Tobias Verhaecht – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114470497

There Is a Light That Shines On Me

For when reading a Sister Wendy meditation on Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son gets you thinking about Psalm 139:

O God, you see into my heart;
you plumb the marrow of my bones.
You hear my silences afar;
all of my words you first have known.
When I rise up or sink to sleep,
there is a light that shines on me.

Ere I had seen the light of day
or stars afire in midnight gloom,
before I walked, you wrote my ways
who sculpted me within the womb,
and anywhere those ways may lead,
there is a light that shines on me.

Where can I go?  Where can I hide?
Where is there darkness deep enough?
The night is open to your eyes,
the shadows pierced through by your love.
What though I dive beyond the sea,
there is a light that shines on me.

When I run open-armed to death
and turn from all that love can do,
you wait for me with bated breath
and draw me softly back to you.
That in the end, wheree'er it be,
there's still a light that shines on me.

Return of the Prodigal Son By Rembrandt – 5QFIEhic3owZ-A — Google Arts & Culture, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22353933

Dust Has Turned its Back

Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.
Joel 2:12-18

See, dust has turned its back on dust,
has broken limbs and broken trust—
but will return, as all things must,
for dust comes ever back to dust.

But even now, let dust return;
let arrogance to ashes burn,
the joyous with the grieving mourn,
for all alike to dust return.

The trumpet sound! Proclaim a fast,
the first as hungry as the last.
The hoarded seed now sow broadcast,
for harvest day is coming fast.

Reap it before that sun has set
to feed your foes and pay the debt
for all the pain your sin begets,
and join the feast your Savior set.

For there shall all the last be first 
to fill their hunger, sate their thirst.
The best shall sit beside the worst.
For all alike shall Christ be first.

Then come to him: Become the last.
Lay down your pride; begin the fast
before another day has passed,
before the feast begins at last.

Ash Wednesday by Carl Spitzweg: the end of Carnival By Carl Spitzweg – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=159077

We Work the Soil

A combination of Ordinary Time readings from Genesis and thinking about the Eucharist:

We work the soil, to reap its thorns and thistles;
we toil until we join the buried seed.
We sweat the days from birth to our dismissal,
and what we long for, we can never eat.

There is no bread that satisfies our hunger;
there is no wine can slake our endless thirst
until we taste the dirt we're buried under,
until the dust we came from comes to dust.

For we have poured out blood upon these furrows,
and thereof we have eaten bitter grains.
The firstfruits that we offered God were sorrows;
resentful and downhearted, we were Cain.

And this is the compassion of our maker,
the light that guides us into ways of peace:
He shapes himself of sod to be our savior;
the master serves his servants at his feast.

Not just the wheat Cain burned upon the altar,
but Abel's lamb disguised as simple bread.
So God accepts Cain's once-imperfect offering,
and Cain at last, at last can lift his head.

The dust we taste is not our bread forever,
and sorrow is not all we're doomed to eat.
Our seeds will finally grow to something better;
our bitter plantings blossom into sweet.

Cain and Abel, 15th-century German depiction from Speculum Humanae Salvationis By Unknown author – Title of Work: Speculum Humanae Salvationis Production: Germany; 15th century.Source: http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/britishlibrary/controller/subjectidsearch?id=10614&startid=11550&width=4&height=2&idx=2, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34028272

Not Perfect

“You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have?
Do not the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet your brothers only,
what is unusual about that?
Do not the pagans do the same?
So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Matthew 5:38-48

The sun you made shines on us, bad and good;
your rain turns field and fallow both to mud.
You water weeds and wheat; you give them light,
and love us when we're wrong, as much as right.

This is the love you ask us in return:
to love the ice and love the fire that burns;
to love the noontime and the deep of night;
with all the stars to shed alike our light;

so to be wounded when our love is spurned;
so to be frozen; so, too, to be burned;
pierced by the sun and blinded by the dark;
shining on all the same our brief, bright spark.

Is this a weight that mortal flesh can bear?
Not since we've known what good and evil were.
How shall we carry love for all the world?
O, help the wheat, and help the weeds, my Lord!

Let what I am grow ever toward your light,
both in the sun and in the stars of night.
I am not perfect, and I am not just,
but pour your mercy down upon my dust.

Rain falling on a field, in southern Estonia By Aleksander Kaasik – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63681273

Vulture

Before he sent the raven or the dove,
Noah unleashed a vulture from the ark
and there she waits, still circling up above,
unhurried as the beat of her own heart.

For all the secrets buried in the flood
she clears away for Noah and his kin.
They dig their fields on plots she has made good.
Where she has cleared a place, we start again.

And after our next great apocalypse
(and every cataclysm after that),
when all our songs have died upon our lips,
she will be there, her hunger just as vast.

But now she hangs, as silent as the grave,
as patient as the mountains wearing down.
Upon the heights or underneath the wave,
wherever we may go, we will be found.

We need not run—no, she will come to us.
In all the world, there's nothing else so sure
as vulture's wingbeats stirring up the dust
when she has come to make us clean and pure.

If man were meant to fly, he would have wings,
but flipperless upon the flood we rise.
She is no gentle dove, no olive brings,
but someday she will raise us to the skies.

American Black Vulture Coragyps atratus, Farallon, Panama, 2005 December; This individual was one of a large group of vultures (and circling frigatebirds) waiting for fish offal from local fishermen. By Mdf – first upload in en wikipedia on 21:55, 13 December 2005 by Mdf, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=704791

Something New

He began to teach them
that the Son of Man must suffer greatly
and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and rise after three days.
He spoke this openly.
Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples,
rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
Mark 8:27-33

How could we know what “Christ” would mean
before you showed the way?
What could we think of but a king
to hold eternal sway?

It wasn't 'til you touched our ears
(since Eden, deaf to you)
that heart could grasp or we could hear
what you have done is new.

Our eyes could never see your face
until you opened them,
not just in healing but in grace,
in weeping at your end.

(How could we know of death's defeat
before you rose to show?
Not since the serpent spoke to Eve
was there aught else to know.)

Then touch our ears again today,
and give us eyes to see
there are new worlds in all you say,
new grace and mystery.

Our minds can know and hearts can feel—
if you have touched them, too—
beyond the lessons of the years,
you will do something new.

Full title: Christ appearing to Saint Peter on the Appian Way.Artist: Annibale Carracci.Date made: 1601-2.Source: http://www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk/.Contact: picture.library@nationalgallery.co.uk..Copyright © The National Gallery, London

Save Us, O God

So the LORD said:
“I will wipe out from the earth the men whom I have created,
and not only the men,
but also the beasts and the creeping things and the birds of the air,
for I am sorry that I made them.”
But Noah found favor with the LORD.
Genesis 6:5-8, 7:1-5, 10

Save us, O God: The waters rise
to drown the earth in flood,
as thunder drowns the heartrent cries
of creatures you called good.

Relent, O God; have mercy yet—
Our lives are but a day.
What could it take to clear the debt
before we're swept away?

Bring back, O God, what we have lost
beneath this flood of tears.
Though we could never bear the cost,
redeem the squandered years.

Renew, O God, the world you made:
Split land from sea again.
Though all your works we have betrayed, 
we, too, come from your hands.

Forget, O God, what we have done;
remember not the past,
but bring your sons and daughters home
through storm and flood at last.

Restore, O God, all humankind,
and let the waters part.
Let earth rise up again to find
the mercies of your heart.

12th-century Venetian mosaic depiction of Noah sending the dove By Anonymous Master – basilica san marco, venice, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4147510

The Law Is Heavy

Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar,
and there recall that your brother
has anything against you,
leave your gift there at the altar,
go first and be reconciled with your brother,
and then come and offer your gift.
Settle with your opponent quickly while on the way to court.
Otherwise your opponent will hand you over to the judge,
and the judge will hand you over to the guard,
and you will be thrown into prison.
Amen, I say to you,
you will not be released until you have paid the last penny.
Matthew 5:17-37

The law is heavy, Lord:
I cannot bear it all
or keep it, whole in every word.
Beneath its weight I fall.

But you have borne its dread,
fulfilled its every jot,
and set before us life and death—
Choose life, for I cannot!

I am not clean within:
My brother knows my guilt;
against my sister I have sinned
and cannot pay the debt.

Forgiven I must be
and washed, as if a child.
To lay my gift before your feet,
I must be reconciled.

Come, earth and heaven's son
who bridged the great divide—
In you alone could they be one,
and so, in you, can I:

At one with earth and heav'n,
with sisters, brothers, too.
In mercy, let me be forgiv'n;
let me be whole in you.

A an etching by Jan Luyken from the Phillip Medhurst Collection of Bible illustrations housed at Belgrave Hall, Leicester, England (The Kevin Victor Freestone Bequest). Photo by Philip De Vere. https://www.flickr.com/groups/the_phillip_medhurst_collection_of_bible_prints – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20116195