You have parted the seas of pain in my life
Been my fortress in the fires of my suffering
Walked with me
Over the waters of my fear
And through every storm
You have been my covering.
How much more can you do
In these Covid times we are in,
As events continue to unfold.
We have seen it before
And we will see it again
Your goodness, Your victory, retold!
There will be times you are at your lowest points
When anguish engulfs you and there is nowhere left to run
And the words of our loved ones fall flat, hallow
No one can meet you in this darkness
And the support will seem lack lustre
Will seem disingenuous
Will be flawed
And you retreat within, in solitude
Praying away this poison chalice
This cup of suffering
In a manic display
Until your legs give way and succumb
To the gravity of surrender
And then
Beyond the unrest
Beyond the disquiet of your anxiety
The starring of the still small voice
Overtakes you to reveal
“Beyond this pain
Beyond this bitter suffering
And far beyond what your mind can perceive
Lays a promise, a hope,
A purpose for all that be
Rooted in my immeasurable love
And, oh, how I love you,
Cherished one
One day you will see
The glory and the splendour
Of an eternity with me.”
And as these words leave me
Some things do stay
Like the peace that passeth understanding
To guide me on my way.
I was in my room reading Matthew 26:36-46 and I was struck by the sheer humanness of Jesus. The lines –
38 “and he said to them, ‘The sorrow in my heart is so great that it almost crushes me. Stay here and keep watch with me.’
– hit me first and birthed the opening lines of my poem Gethsemane. We have all experienced extremely low and painful moments in our lives, what this passage reveals to us is that Jesus has been there too. In my weakest and most heartbroken, when the sorrow in my heart was so great it almost crushed me – God has felt this too. I am floored that this is a Love and this is a God who intimately knows my suffering and that through suffering I can grow deeper in my relationship with Christ.
The lines –
40 “Then he returned to the three disciples and found them asleep; and he said to Peter, ‘How is it that you three were not able to keep watch with me for even one hour?'”
– hit me next and I felt the disappointment Jesus must have felt in that moment when he found his disciples asleep. The experience of being disappointed by your friends and loved ones is profoundly universal and I wanted to capture that my poem as much as I could. People let us down and the weight of that disappointment can be enormously heavy but I have found, in my own experiences of disappointment, that God can meet us there and help us carry that weight (and even take it away).
It’s not here
The Fear that plagues you
The Love that binds you
The Desire that drives you
It’s not here
The mechanisms of love
The barriers you place around it
The romantic illusions that pollute it
The myths that mask you from the truth
It’s not here
The saving grace
The divine light
Blazing away sorrows history
From your veins, from your veins
It’s not here
In that powdery embrace
A nose full, a mouth full,
a forbidden pharmacy
It’s not here
In that liquid luck
And all the ways you try to orchestrate your own destruction
It’s not here
It’s not here
It’s not here
Look within.
Welcome to Ruth's Rhapsody 