I wear a torn place on my sleeve || John

Behold, I will do something new,
  Now it will spring forth;
  Will you not be aware of it?
  I will even make a roadway in the wilderness,
  Rivers in the desert.

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation...

I wear a torn place on my sleeve.
It isn't as simple as that.


John

I weep a lot these days. They'd laugh if they could hear me say that, the men who travelled with me in the desert. "Really now, John?" They'd say, pounding nails for the tents into ground. "You, a weeping man? Where's the repent and fire business?"

Or maybe not. They had been there too, the first time I really wept before men.

My mother, when she was alive, would look at me with those sad brown eyes, turned golden by sun and by age and say, "John what is wrong?" I can't even count how many times she'd said that while I was growing up, because I did not weep. My mother was special that way. She always knew things. She saw things that others shut their eyes to, like how I never wept.

I miss mother, I think, with tears in my eyes. My father too. I think of them often these days, now that I see.

I remember being a much younger man and my father telling me about the child I was born to herald. He said love a lot, with his cloudy voice. "Father, I'm a man." I'd say. "Not some simpering magician, a prophet, Father. A prophet's passion must leave no room for silly love."

He wept at that.

For a long time, while I fought Herod among the lions in the desert, I told myself the same thing. I'd pound in the nails for my tent and say, "God is just."

I met the child, you know. The one my father used to tell me about, the Christ. He came to me as I shouted and my heart grew full of fire as I stood in the river, wet with the  Jordan and with teh sweat of righteous anger.

Oh no, Lord. I am unworthy to even untie your sandals.

I all of a sudden understood my parents in that moment. All of a sudden, my eyes were full of tears and I knew what was wrong with me when my mother asked. It was the same thing that my father had tried to ask me.

What is love?

Look how far I've come. I'm not sure if it is blood or tears running down my face. Far cry from the voice crying in the wilderness, I'm reduced to counting nails in the prison door, counting time by the shadows of the sun and times my enemy has asked me who I am now. What I am now.

My insides are being eaten away and my enemy exults and what do I do? I weep.

I weep for Herod and for the hungry fire of my enemy eating with pain at his soul.

I weep for the girl who dances while she asks for my death as a game and the way that she will one day weep in bitterness because her childhood has been stolen in fear.

I weep for my disciples, who laugh and preach and sing the psalms, but who will fall to pieces like a jar when I am gone. They just don't know. Please God, they don't know what they're doing.

Mostly, I weep for the child. My father was right. Love isn't what I thought it was. What love is this? He is my friend.

And I tremble as I think this.

I know him.

I weep.

I am just a voice, Child. I am yours, save me.

Somewhere, I think he weeps too, and there is glory in his tears.

My enemy is trembling now. I can see the devouring fire in his belly and I choose to stand and laugh amidst my tears.

This is called love, my enemy.

A dove alights.

I hear my Savior say, Thy strength indeed is small.

My head, my head

Tears fail not.

A nail falls like a pin dropping

And

i

with

it



Love is a  new thing.
(to be continued)

(Isaiah 43:19, Anais Nin's Henry and June, and W.S. Merwin's The Nails provide the epigraph.)