Triptych: Christ's Sermon to God from the Wilderness
Creech, Morrie
Triptych: Christ's Sermon to God from the Wilderness To what, Father, shall I compare the kingdom of man? Shall I say it is like the son who forsakes his father for a landscape emptied and...
...2 You who made me neither lamb nor shepherd, but a keeper of bees who must approach the hive slowly, and must feel each unregenerate sting blister his hands, to extract the comb you cherish-tell me, Lord, has the flesh not made the honey you feed upon...
...No metaphor suffices, when to be human is merely to live in the blaze of your silence...
...Shall I say it is like the son who forsakes his father for a landscape emptied and shimmering as heaven, where the light forgives nothing, and the wind strips the splintered shards of bone...
...Yet this is what I would have you understand, having starved myself so long, neither god nor man, that I might pass through the narrow gates of both kingdoms: for the son so loveth the Father that he shall turn away from His example and teach Him the discipline of mercy, the venom that scalds the essential blood...
...3 All morning I have held this scorpion, and considered how the spine curves toward the raised barb of its malice, and have watched it stand poised there in the shadow of my will...
...Morrie Creech Commonweal | 8 February11, 2000...
...Yet for weeks now I've spoken to you of lilies and bridegrooms, appealed to your logic in sermons and parables-and resorted, at last, to the eloquence of hunger...
...Father, how to explain why I wept for its fierce perfection...
...And shall I call forth the smoke of the spirit to calm and confuse them, now I have felt the swarm that rages in the chambers of the heart...
...When it struck my palm why did I not let go and curse its name, grind it in the dust beneath my feet...
Vol. 127 • February 2000 • No. 3
