Wow. Powerful. Thank you.

What a great reminder to be honest about our dark days when God seems a million miles away. It seems we always hear the "testimony" after someone has been through a spiritually dry experience instead of "please pray for me now."

To Nola--because the "please pray for me now" often is nothing more than gossip fodder, and we realize that we truly have nobody but God to lean on. We can give the testimony after we've come through it, be we often have to go through it alone.

M

I wonder our communal spiritual journey be more real if we were to share the times when God didn't "come through?"

An ironic spiritual comfort.

This piece is inspiring and gives me fuel for the day. Thank you for the poem about reality.

Beautiful. Thank you.

I love how the poem transforms into something unexpected, almost shocking. I was pleasantly surprised by how the poem gets turned on its head. The movement of the poem is toward wordlesslness, emptiness--away from the images and attachments we carry about God. And yet, it does so, paradoxically, necessarily, in words. I think it is a beautiful idea that God may want to keep that aching emptiness alive in us so that we continue to yearn and reach for God without end.

And thanks, John, for pointing us towards Martin Marty's book. I love the concept of "wintery spirituality" as I have always related more to it than the more summery version of faith. I'll have to check his book out. I briefly came across Marty's work on this in a reference by Belden Lane in his book _The Solace of Fierce Landscapes_ which I highly recommend.

I'll include a seemingly relevant quote from Lane's book here:

"It is a deep mystery that love is born in the mind's (and body's) experience of emptiness and loss. The longing of the soul, made sharper by the painful absence of that which it loves--by its inability to close on what it desires--reaches in darkness for a beloved who comes unannounced and without guarantee. God reaches through the dark night of the senses, as John of the Cross would express it, to offer freely in love what no human effort could buy. If God is to be loved as God loves, it will happen only in the dark corridors of emptiness. Only in devastating loss--beyond all security of language and identity, in despairing ever of obtaining the glory first sought--only then does a truth too wondrous to be grasped come rushing back into the void. Love takes wing where calculation ends," (73).

Thank you to all who have posted. I am always deeply moved when I find that a poem that I have written has resonance for someone else. Specifically, Heather thanks for the Lane quotation. I do sometimes feel that I am on the outside looking in when what is expected as the correct and natural state is the saved soul’s expression is joyous country summer shine always.

One need only read the poetry of the Psalms to find that sunshine is mixed with storms and rain.

Thanks...

Frank

True enough ~ I'm a fan of Psalm 88 for example . . .