WordsOut poems by
Ascended
The
harder question is not where you’ve gone,
but why you left us here. The work was done,
you nailed it on the cross—so what remains?
It’s for our sake you went, you said, because
the Comforter could be with everyone—
yet isn't there more comfort for us all
to be with you today in
Why leave us here, born into suffering,
dying in ignorance, while sin plays out
its tragic farce in world and church alike?
What have we gained by Inquisition,
plague and Holocaust? Silent you watch
despoiled by Abraham’s family's vicious feud.
What has it taken you—where time means nothing—
these two millennia still to prepare?
It seems your love will not be satisfied
until you live your life out through us all
in the shambling, disunited parody
we call your body. You're gone, yet still here:
and we live on in you and you in us—
the one within the one within—inside
the gap of grace and misery between
your resurrection and its consequence.
You have your reasons. Love underwrites them all.
Faith must be worth a great deal if it costs
so much for all of us to harvest such
a small amount of it. Come, Lord Jesus, come.
Written for an Ascension Day
service at