I am prayer.
I am
community.
I am
God’s anointed.
I am the standing, sitting, processing,
kneeling,
genuflecting, all as able.
I am the gestures across the heart,
the
twiddling fingers tracing the Gospel cross
thrice.
I am the
stillness,
the
stiffness,
the
reverent,
the
irreverent.
I am he/him/his,
ally of her, zir, and singular them.
I am the erring and straying lost sheep,
lost,
because the resolutions rain down on me,
the
arrows of the hordes standing behind their high walls
their
altar gates,
their
chasubles.
I am that oil running down Aaron’s beard,
caressing
his pomegranate skin,
knowing
the ephod’s secrets,
his
cast of stones.
I am looking,
searching
for that love that endureth forever,
searching
for my “in sickness and in health,”
my
“til death do us part,”
searching
for my dearly beloved.
Of those 1,000+ pages, where is my name mentioned?
Of the Rites, where am I a worthy partaker?
Does not
my history, 26 years and counting, give me authority?
Does not
my family of clergy and laity give me weight?
Do not
my education, my “thy before thee except after thou,”
my
ἐκέκρικα, my experience,
my visions and prayers
count?
μὴ γένοιτο!
I am the μὴ γένοιτο.
I am not Paul’s model:
the celibate man,
the polemical,
the God-damning
the
eraser of false teachings.
I
am not the good will on both sides—
bearing torches and flaming crosses
stabbing with my piercing tongue
throwing brothers, sisters, siblings
from the rooftops,
beating with chastening rods
leaving them to hang on
fenceposts
to give up
their ghost.
I
am the meek heart and due diligence,
the people walking to the new
creation,
el desamparado, el
necesitado.
Wait,
I thought I was a very well organized,
very strategic,
very well financed,
very powerful hijacker—
then why do I get death
stares?
Why do people want me
behind electric fences?
Why do I have to work
against the grain
flailing my
arms at policies smothering me,
as
I shout out to a panel
of
men staring at each other
while
I throw the Bible right back at them?
If
you know where that money is,
show
me, sugar daddy.
Nah,
I
am the Texan, rising in support
of my own voice.
I
am treading the path through the blood of the slaughtered,
facing the rising sun of my new day
begun.
I
am the weak theology,
I am Te Deum, Hildegard, Bach,
Wesley, Willan, Price,
Pulkingham;
I am Montes, S and A’s.
I
am solace, strength, pardon, renewal.
I
am 高興歡喜
I
am in print, featured in Church Publishing,
not that other idea from long ago,
left to collect dust,
or suffer, scaffolded in irate and
greedy beaurocracy.
I
am página 284,
las campanas,
el órgano.
You
can decide what you want
in this ecclesia viae mediae,
But
just know,
I know how best to show God’s love
in my life,
for
I am the Book of Common Prayer.
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