A scientist observed several ants discarding one of their own dead. "How do they know?" he asked himself, and began mixing concoctions until he could fake an ant's death. He placed a smelly substance that marked out death on the back of an ant and put her inside the colony. Immediately drone soldier ants came and carried her off.
The desert of unprophetic years turns on a moment. It catches stars and pulls them in close like a surgeon caring for a dying patient. An angel descends looking for a certain teenage girl named Mary. When he locates her, she is startled by his appearance and his announcement. The nature of the news invites her to question…
In the face of hosannas alluring ease, you saw through the veil of cloaks and palms to find the soul of restless humanity who spat and hurled insults within the week, the dying messiah who wouldn't speak, ignoring the politic while submitting to the instrument designed that day to reconcile sin by the color red.
I press my ear to the door and listen. I hear a conversation. It drifts in and out. At times there is nothing, just silence... and me – my own person – some purveyor who has bought into the trick and doesn’t know how it works. God, let’s not pretend. My perception of your whole story, from closing up the garden shop onward, falls onto stony paths most of the time.
The prophetic is silent. Its heyday is now rained out in an unbaptized haze of tolerance run amuck. O'Connor warned us: we really want a Christ without all that crucifixion talk. We want everyone carrying around open minds on top of shoulders broad enough to narrow nothing, and arms that carry no punch of truth, no signs of crosses, no healed withered-ness in its hands.
I wonder. As I approach history, visiting churches dating well before the declaration of our independence and the security of our constitution with its promise to make no laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion and the right for any of us to peaceably assemble together… I wonder... why are all these churches locked, boarded up, empty shells?
It’s heavy; I don’t know if I can bear it; the whips are driving into my back; my feet are sore; beneath me the riveting rocks press in; my eyes sting from the sweat; I am hot; I am cold. “Why don’t you save yourself?” jeers someone close to me from the lynch mob that has surrounded me. Father even now forgive them.
Who started looking up anyhow? If gods are to be found, wouldn’t they be closer in? Sustenance makes leveled sense. Survival is intimate with what the winds bring in or what they keep away. And who moves these winds? Who strings up the clouds and thickens their skins to hold in the sun’s greed? Is the sky’s vastness reason for our inferiority?
It began in the orange grove. They were too young to realize that their curiosity had blind-alley eyes. The earth tone pickup truck melted into the turns and weaves of squatty trees that dripped its fruit. Michael’s adolescent senses naturally hunted for a solace space to take his girl. He was a hound sniffing out the chase.
