Tess Lockhart
  • God Poetry
    • A Preacher's Prayer
    • Advent
    • Advent Watch
    • Ordinary Advent Time
    • First Christmas Post Husband Mortem
    • Christmas Bread
    • Ding Dong Dung
    • Christmas Credo
    • Incarnation Narrative
    • Starlings in Epiphany Snow
    • Evensong in Bleak Midwinter
    • Imposition of Ashes
    • Lenten Ruth
    • Langston Hughes on Maundy Thursday
    • Maundy Thursday's Scattering
    • Good Friday Tenebrae
    • Gardening Holy Saturday
    • Mourning, Holy Saturday
    • A Little Hilaritas What If
    • Milton on Easter Monday
    • Pentecost Invitation
    • For All the Saints
    • Winter Solstice
    • Evening Prayer for the Beloved
    • Incarnation's Repair
    • The News Was Not Good
    • Just Jump Already
    • Job's Modern Lament
    • Uncle!
    • Worship
    • St. Valentine
    • Response to a Dr.'s Rhetorical Question
    • A Prayer of Praise
    • Renunciation and Adherence
  • Marriage Poetry
    • A River of Words
    • Beloved Baptism
    • Anniversary Gift
    • Aching Pain
    • Disappointment for Nothing
    • A Lament of Recognition
    • A Marital Parable Revealed
    • Kissing Death
    • Grief
    • Extinguished
    • Not Exactly Thecla
    • Rectify
    • Love Beyond Terror
    • St. Valentine
    • Divorce
    • Marital Haiku
    • A Mockingbird
    • All for Love
    • Love's Transubstantiation
    • Enough of Love's Ideal Poems
    • My Lie
  • Healing Poetry
    • A Child Abuse Victim
    • At Grandma's Funeral
    • Confronting Nothing
    • For Want of a Ritual
    • Gardening Widow's Weeds
    • Ghost Whisperer Grief Obsession
    • Grief Drought
    • Swimming with Grief's Fear
    • Five Years Post Mortem
    • Middle-Aged Dating
    • Fire and Water
    • Canoe Wrecked
    • Desire Beyond Reason
    • A Survivor's Haiku
    • Baptismal Renewal
    • Of Children, Pigs, and Priests
    • Sometimes
    • The Trickiness of Doors
    • Tenured Otherwise
    • Turtle Soup
  • Quotidian Poetry
    • Cookies for Dragons
    • Leaving My Daughter at College
    • To Mom on Her Birthday
    • On the Third Day
    • Ode to Bermuda Grass
    • Mundane Revelation
    • Sorry White People
    • Truculent Ode to Poetry
    • Twisted
    • DeFuniak Springs

Renunciation and Adherence

Picture
​The bishop made those being baptized 
redo their renunciations
so that they rang out louder, stronger,
for he knew they would need it
when evil’s fear plays hide-and-seek
so well in our lives that no one can find it
so they just give up looking,
letting fear run the show.
Picture
​One day during a youth lock-in
we were playing sardines
and Glen went to hide,
only we couldn’t find him,
as the game requires.  
He’d slid through the secret door 
of the pipe organ’s Victorian oak paneling 
into the compartment
that concealed all the pipes,
the place where the organ repairman works.
There, in that secret chamber,
Glen couldn’t hear us calling and calling
and, when we gave up  (figuring he’d show up soon)
and turned our attention to other games,
he fell asleep.
When he didn’t appear, we grew alarmed,
secretly panicked that he might have been abducted.
We ran around the church checking the locks
until at last the youngest kid there remembered 
that she’d seen an opening into the bottom of the organ 
through the door at the back of the sanctuary
when she came to church early one morning long ago
to help her father put on the coffee and turn up the thermostat.
Knowing that Glen was an organ student, 
we tried this last spot before calling the police,
groping the oak panels for a latch
like actors in an old Hollywood movie
looking for a secret passageway behind a bookcase.
At last, we found it 
and sprang the dazed and dusty Glen into manifestation at last.
We’d spent so much time searching for him
that we’d had little fun and too much fear.
Glen, too, was shaken and stuck fast
with the rest of the group all night
until his parents claimed him in the morning light.
Picture
Metaphors fail in seeking evil, 
for it hugs shadows, seeping into those places 
so hidden away as to be forgotten, 
sometimes sleeping, awaking only to feed on fear.
It especially enjoys languor in adjustment spaces
where we try to fine-tune ourselves,
forgetting the grace of being found.
The latch that springs us, as the bishop knew, 
is a resounding renunciation 
of evil’s perennially hidden desire 
to let fear play all our stops
until sin sends us rogue.
So in the midst of searching saints 
he made us practice 
faith’s obdurate daily office
of renouncing evil and resolutely adhering 
to the One who finds, tunes, and holds us fast.

 
                                                            © June 2017, Tess Lockhart.  All rights reserved.
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