When you can bear it no more

There was the moment you could bear it no more

Your eyes brimming with glistening drops’

Summoned by the hunger of the world

The callous and terrible things

Men and women do to one another

                               Christine, Valters Paintner

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Perhaps this morning it became too much

the hunger and the emptiness

of men and women

 

who although opulence and power

already drip from their finger

 

sit, bloated with self

engorged with fear and anger

 

reaching with oily, tiny hands for more

 

what kind of emptiness does it take

to be so unfeeling

unthinking

so cruel?

 

what kind of pain must permeate one’s soul

that one lies awake at night “planning iniquity, and “plotting evil”

 

And then

Because they have the money

Have the power

Have the allies

“carry it out because it is in their power to do it.”  (Micah 2)

 

There have always been these

Empty souls

Who cornered by their own pain

Have sought to assuage their pain

by gobbling power and wealth

 

by creating chaos

and inflicting pain on others

 

seeking to end their pain by passing it on

 

but this is now

this is my land, assailed by this emptiness

these are my people, threatened by smallness

 

and so

I can bear it no more

 

I can no longer ignore

No longer excuse

No longer hide or pretend

 

this is the way a country, perhaps a world dies

not from Covid

or even global warming

 

but from the small decisions of small men and women

 

who daily erode all that is good

all that is love

 

my heart echoes the words of Chief Joseph

in whose beloved valley I now live

“I am tired; my heart is sick and sad.

From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

 

Perhaps we are living Biblical truth here

a truth we have seen and discounted

a truth laid out before us by Jesus and his life

 

that we minimized, thinking it was not really about us

 

Perhaps we are now the Kingdom of Israel

Trapped in greed and injustice, doomed to fail

Doomed to fall

 

Doomed to a time of mourning and exile

Before we can be restored

 

Perhaps we are those who must experience

a dying

before God can raise us up to newness

 

perhaps it is only out of the rubble of what was once great

but is no longer

that greatness can once again emerge

 

Perhaps now we will learn

Painfully

That the last will be first and the first last

That if one would live, one must die

That if one would prosper, one must “let go”

 

Perhaps it takes one

So empty, so in pain

So desperate, so reactive and cruel

 

To wake us up

And bring us the deep truths

of the Gospel

 

Perhaps this country must die

Perhaps the church, much of which is so apostate, must die

Perhaps our own way of life

Our old priorities

Old patterns of consumption

Perhaps this all must be destroyed and die

 

So that God’s new thing might emerge

 

I don’t know

What I do know is

Is this is the moment I can bear it no more

 

this is when I hand it over to Sacred

and this is, probably

when Sacred hands it back to me

 

and gently say

carry on, I am with you

 

________________________________

 

Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.  You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

 

“If you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—   John 14