Beloved,

I remember that last night on the threshing floor. I was sifted there, beaten, winnowed -- chaff filling the wind, a swirl of lambent golden husks as empty as my dreams of the future. You reached down and picked me up, gathered every nerve and fiber 'til your hands were full of me, and put every cell back in its place. As soon as I could, as soon as brain and muscle were connected, I ran from you. You had seen too much.

Now I stand here, our love the dust that drifts about my feet, shimmering as it catches photons in the air. All of our once-possible lives rushing through me, the future collapsing to this dark, solitary singularity: me without you.

Evolution never angers or disappoints me so much as when it is applied to mankind. I can only read so many articles explaining away the enigma of our souls before I am impelled to blog about my indignation. Everything about humankind that is a mysterious reflection of the divine is belittled to a mere reproductional boon. I suppose, in the absence of anything else, there is a comfort in Darwinism -- no supernatural, no surprises, everything very clear and orderly. But all it really provides is a framework for fairy tales. Nothing more.

Of all tears, they are the best that are made by the blood of Christ; and of all joy, that is the sweetest that is mixed with mourning over Christ. Oh! it is a goodly thing to be on our knees, with Christ in our arms, before God.

-- John Bunyan, from Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

The Prophet and the Whore I

You never asked for salvation. You didn't want to know if it was possible, for fear that it wasn't. For fear that it was.

You despised him, shackled to his strange mission, free in his pure devotion. You had forfeited that freedom for yourself, and you hated him because he made you want what you couldn't have. He made you want to be the woman you should have been.

So better the indifferent eyes and ungentle hands than the touch that knows you, that has strayed onto your inner wounds but does not recoil, his unmerited love shaming you in your brokenness. You will not have anything you don't deserve.

All that has been running through my head lately has been images and metaphors of pain. I imagine being delicately flayed open with the thinnest of knives, knives slicing down between ribs, ribs splaying. Reaching between to stop the quivering, exposed muscle inside. The struggle that ensues between mindlessly driven flesh and tireless, merciless intent.

The refrain in my internal monologue has been, This hurts like hell. Stopping for a moment to ponder my language, I conclude that I couldn't have said it better. Hell to me means two things: knowing sin but being alienated from good. Guilt, but no forgiveness.

There is nothing like the loneliness of having transgressed beyond the bounds of divine patience, where the form of forgiveness might be had, but not its substance.