From The Wisdom to Grow Downwards, Annunciation, Mystic Songs Section

The Gift of Illness, published in The Higher Source, December, 2001.

Maybe when you find
the seed I planted
when the wind swirled red,
for then I dug it deep
through curled brown leaves
to plant my longing strong
to be released.

Maybe now the trees are letting
go their green
along the artist's walk
where mists meet
the maker's feet
transform themselves translucent
to release.

Maybe then I'll pass this illness
from my lips
to sing my King,
and swirl the mists
from longing light to radiance,
from baser hands
to miracles released.

First Gospel Lesson
for Gordon J. Hilsman, Director, Clinical Pastoral Education,
St. Joseph Hospital, Tacoma, WA.

Lately you've been
rousing me awake with a
rumbling on the inside,
shaking me to stand so I've been
stumbling in the darkness,
towards the light to ask you "What's the
reason for the stirring?"

Can't you see
I've been snagged
and I've sewn
myself up
in pinholes
and seams of
despair?

But my losses and grief didn't bother you much,
not that they were discounted.
It's just that you knew they would pass,
as all things pass
in this, your world.

It was time.  Time for my body to wake up.
I felt you start to caress me,
or what was left of me--
the ghost part on the inside.
You took that faint pulse
and pressed it to your lips,
humming a Magnificat that turned the season forward
with just one knock.

Then came the patting down new rootlings,
the tapping out the fertile eggs,
the cracking open of new shells in the wide, warm sun,
and the earth smelled clean and good and fresh.

My tears were not needed now to wash this new earth
for something else was coming,
coming with the spring.
Something new was coming
circulating upwards with new roots
that touched the sky
from the inside-out
green and burgeoning its skyscraper heaven.

Looking up I began to sense your heaven
your great big immortality.
In small degrees I began to see
your immaculate kingdom
that which I only perceived as possibility
since my own divine conception.

But I didn't recognize you when the knock came.
The long lost daughter
long ago lost by the light those others kept
for years lost, but now returned,
and welcomed with just one knock.
Welcomed and seeking your face,
your hands, your body,
your love.
(Have I ever known your love?)

And when your messenger told me
that it was I who came a-knocking
(for lo, I was blind to that then)
He mentioned that perhaps
you were my parent, my guardian, my creator.

But I am no mother.
I do not see through those eyes.
I have not born my own seed
so I do not know what it means
to see my own image and likeness in another,
nor to care for my own kind
as you care for me.

But even this ignorance,
this undistinguished fate
is a shape that you minister unto,
that you nurture and love.
Your eons of time, they show me.
Your universe unfolds before me.
Your grace and your strength
are the arms that hold fast
as I move through this great world of change.

For I see now that
you will sustain me forever
no matter what circumstance,
ignorance, question, trial or fear
I may bring to your open door
of everlasting acceptance.