Poems

An imaginary lion is outside my tent. At first I am alarmed, but then I see that he is quite harmless.

Long ago, men tried to bury the Christ in darkened cave, and rolled a heavy stone across, to seal the grave. Fear, hatred, jealousy, lack of understanding, condemned and crucified; yet the living Christ today bears witness to the Truth, which never died.

I left behind a pile of disenchantment rolled up in tattered rags, a hug of holes, through which the wind of God blew out the husks of mortal sense— blew in Soul-sense. My Father ran to greet me.

Let not the love be stifled in the breast that Love has wrought in me and you to live. Let what Love's loving wakens in each heart live forth the love a heart's designed to give, for living without love is not to live.

I chose you because you were, so to speak, always on your knees— No glib absolutist, But a caring Christian, full of cleansing grace, With tender Christlike words that nourished My disenchanted hope And melted pain and a prison full of self Until I earned humility too, Though bought with a hefty sum. You knew that Jesus suffered.

Love, You have come Comforter— not simply to take the edge off the irony of loss. You come to lift up this cross, dissolve recalcitrance, wing me for spiritual flight.

Today I thought about the oak and how it couldn't return to the acorn— and then a new thought, angel-borne: Because there's no acorn for it to go back to! What a relief for one who often bemoaned the past and its mistakes, to know there's no past for me to go back to (not even the moment just vanished)! Acorn dissolved, I'm free to grow. MARGARET R.

Thank you, Father, for purer love, for stronger faith. Let higher/deeper praise sing sweeter song to parentage; equip our listening heart to quench heredity's lie, dispel each dreaming nightmare never made by this all-knowing One, so that we know and see the so-called terminal belief only terminate itself, leaving us untouched illustriously exempt.

No error ever permeated now . Its stale insinuations will always be too late.

Its tone, its timbre, the very sound of moral— beautiful to me! Yet moral is the means to the spiritual I really am. Moral is where I need most to be: Striving, praying, climbing the moral way— the way of hope and certainty— the way to spiritual reality.