by KPB Stevens
We four climbed the mountain, and He was changed,
changed like the flaws made by freeze
and thaw as it cracks the walls of a church,
since change breaks all that we struggle to contain.
Change is raw, it weeps and seeps and breaks
the load-bearing law, and brings us, the remaining three,
to creep on painful knees. It is a riot, and the sorrow after,
flowers sprung from blood and cadaver,
and the innocent hung on crosses as the world comes undone.
The earth spins around the sun, gates and graves
open again, seasons change and stay the same.
I see it now, down on my knees – God will always
remain one, standing still, ever-flowing, never done,
and we will change from this moment, this revelation,
constant, and spinning, and gone again.
Illumination
On Saturday, we discovered that the ice had cracked the mosaic above the door of the church and sent the tesserae falling down. On Monday, I went to a rally, clergy gathering to defend the immigrants from Haiti who had been invited to a small Ohio town to help revive the economy and now might be told to leave again. We were asked to reflect on the change we’d like to see, and I found myself resisting the question. As my colleagues got up to answer, I stayed seated, not knowing if I could say what I really wanted to say. Which is that true change cannot be predicted. And that focusing on the future and trying to force it into our visions of what it might be is not an exercise in embracing change.
God refuses to be contained, even by our visions of the future. When Peter, James, and John went up on the mountain with Jesus, they were bewildered by change and desired to build a structure for it. But change sets itself against our structures. Laws, constitutions, contracts, agreements – these are all mechanisms for trying to evade change or, if it comes, manage it. Perhaps they’re necessary for human life. But as I sat among the clergy, I was of two minds. I wanted to embrace the efficacy of the law, the long, slow lope of managed change, and I wanted to see it overcome entirely. That is, after all, the story of our faith. Peter, James, and John will live through crucifixion and resurrection, and those two events will establish a great pattern of change that will repeat, like the seasons, throughout the centuries. And yet, even that pattern will be managed by the church that these three apostles help to establish. Christians will be told that the cycles of death and rebirth can be contained in creeds and rituals, and we will lose our sense of shock, our distress, our agonized need to find meaning in the incoherence of crucifixion and the ineffable nature of resurrection. So we will come to this moment, where we cannot imagine the chaos of real change, and when we speak of it, we will only be able to evoke the patterns of the past.
As a priest, I love ritual and I can tolerate creed. But these things only point to the transfigured moment, when divinity reveals itself as constant and at the heart of things. My faith must move beyond its sheltered crouch at the heart of the spinning, that place at the core where the dizziness can be managed. Somehow I must bring myself to venture out to the edge of the vortex, where ideas collide and the potential for pain and hurt is ever-present. I can stay cowering in my church. But the cold of winter is breaking the walls. As if it wants to tell me that I must embrace my fear and go outside and seek the danger of the cross. Which is the danger of covenant. Of forever wanting to embrace God’s changeless love and forever wanting to face, bravely, the collapse of this current world.
KPB Stevens 