In stillness nailed
to hold all time, all change, all circumstance
in and to love’s embrace
Beloved One, creation longs to be held
in the great hands of your heart;
O let us know this now.
Into them we place these fragments, our lives,
that you may do with them as you wish.
Into them we also place this unconscious broken world.
We know that in You all will be well,
and all manner of thing shall be well.
Amen.
First Apostle
Now his body writhes in pain:
once it was my delight, now it is my sorrow.
Blood drains from arms that held me close,
now they are fixed and life has fled from flesh and bone.
As we take him from wood to earth,
all is silent, empty—
passion surrenders to another love
that is not here
or there
but rides the breath of a greater mystery
confounding
the finite corpus
of my desires.
No longer the object of my affections,
he has become the subject of my truth.
The memory of his love no longer clings
to the skin of my life.
He has dissolved
the mirage of separation
and pours the pure wine of
his presence into the waiting
chalice of my heart.
~by Robert T. Pynn
Where can I go from your spirit, where flee away from your presence?
If I climb up to heaven you are there; if I lie down in hell, you are there;
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light around me turn to night,”
Darkness is not dark to you; the night shines as clear as the day;
darkness and light to you are both alike
Words and images from the top:
Thunderous Clouds, courtesy of author Chandler Cruttenden, Unsplash;
In stillness nailed…The Sisters of the Love of God, Oxford, England, courtesy of Holy Week Liturgies, by Cynthia Bourgeault with Ward Bauman and Darlene Franz;
Blue Abstraction by Georgia O’Keefe, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY © 2021 The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York;
Beloved One, creation longs…Intercessory Prayers, courtesy of Holy Week Liturgies, by Cynthia Bourgeault with Ward Bauman and Darlene Franz;
First Apostle, poem by Robert T. Pynn, courtesy of Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity, pgs. 103-104;
Pieta, Giovanni Battista Naldini, courtesy of wikimedia commons public domain;
Where can I go…from Psalm 139, courtesy of Holy Week Liturgies, by Cynthia Bourgeault with Ward Bauman and Darlene Franz;
Untitled, Hilma af Klint, watercolor on paper, 1941, photo image courtesy of Laura Ruth, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibit Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.