Category Archives: Poetry

Incarnation

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The Nativity of Christ, Icon by Ranosonar

The Nativity of Christ, Icon by Ranosonar

 

In a world where we have pushed the heavens into the farthest recesses of the universe

And we filled the pores in the world where angels and demons, magic and mystery could enter in

Filling each transcended node with the immanent certainty of rationality and reason

Plugging ourselves into our own isolation connected through patterns of numbers and light

We created a world of which we were our own new gods claiming the generative power of words

Yet, as our own new gods we find ourselves being consumed by the hungry creation we unleashed

Wired into our wireless networks, completely disconnected in our continual connection

Yearning for hope in the tyranny of the soulless world in which nothing is sacred

 

Yet, there is a memory of a different story from a different time that tugs at my thoughts

Of the transcendent coming to occupy the immanent, of the creator incarnating the creation

Of the infinite coming to occupy the mundane and the ordinary, of making sacred the secular

And perhaps in this season as we remember the narrative of the Word that become flesh

Living among us and daring to enter into a creation that has lost its dreams of tomorrow

That the light may enlighten the present darkness of our permanently lighted world

That we may dream of the truth beyond the facts and the vision beyond our perception

The poetry of a God who invades the impersonal world in the form of a person

Who brings acceptance in the midst of rejection and love in the midst of hatred

In the midst of our perceived wisdom the wisdom of God may appear foolish

And strength comes masquerading as weaknesses and power in the guise of powerlessness

 

If the Word becomes incarnate and lives among us it comes not to conquer and enslave

But it does come to offer us a dream of a different world and to shape for us a new reality

While it may describe and illuminate and deconstruct the world we shaped for ourselves

It comes as the wisdom that holds the creation together and narrates for us a new story

And in the light of this enfleshed Word we are renamed and our stories have a new frame

Where the sacred inhabits our secular world and life takes on a sacramental reality

And from the soul of the new creation emerges again and ancient hope that we are not alone

For Emmanuel has come and our God is with us, we are among those God favored ones

The ancient angelic host announced in a long ago age when our world still had a place for them.

Death and Taxes

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denarius

The only two certainties are the things we dread
For the notion of control gets stuck in our head
How can death take the life we try so hard to live
Or a government tell us how much income we have to give
For it is all about control of our lives and our share
Yet death and taxes are a burden we all bear
Is it lawful to render to Caesar we complain
Please tell us it’s our to hold and sustain
Don’t tell us to render to God the things God is due
We’d rather bicker and argue to fight to sue
Tell us somehow that by growing our bottom line
That our place in the kingdom will be just fine
Not to sell our possessions of give them away
Or to render to Caesar our portion to pay
Yet if we put our treasure where our heart should be
We would give more away and hold on less tightly
For in a world of death and taxes we scrimp and pinch
We dread each penny lost and charge for each inch
But perhaps in a world death no longer holds sway
And taxes aren’t needed to fund things anyway
In a dream of a kingdom, this strange peculiar dream
Where the people of the king don’t hold onto anything
When someone is in need they simply give things away
And all can eat and drink at the feast where no one has to pay
A dream that is so foreign to you and to me
Where death and taxes are not certainty
Neil White, 2014
A little rhyming fun with Matthew 22:21

Anticipation

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"Ai" the traditional Chinese character for love. Consists of "heart" inside of "accept, perceive or feel"

“Ai” the traditional Chinese character for love. Consists of “heart” inside of “accept, perceive or feel”

Every moment points to that time, that special time
Where the heavens meet the earth and all is right in the world
Where the waiting is over and the celebration can begin
Where love washes upon the shore in its unending waves
And euphoria captures each second stretching it to eternity
When tears are wiped away and laughter erupts from joyous hearts
And hearts are whole and filled with the peace that the time has come
Neil White, 2014

Gracefully Unfair

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The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, Codex Aureus Epternacensis, 11th Century

The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, Codex Aureus Epternacensis, 11th Century

It’s not fair, this may be what I signed up for but it’s not fair
That in this crazy mixed up world of grace the last are first and the first last
Where a person can work from sunup to sundown laboring in the vineyard
Bearing the brutal rays of the sun beating down upon their backs
Getting up early to be the early bird that gets called out into the fields
Being the ant who works all day every day unlike those others
Those others who might look different, party different, act different, smell different
So that they get left behind among the other laborers, for it is about my skills
The sweat of my brow, the skill of my hands, the pain in my back from the harvest
And yet others work less, coming in later, leaving earlier, getting the same recompense
In a world of continually increasing worker productivity and efficiency
What is this inefficient master doing in the distribution of grace
Don’t I deserve more for my labor, for my conscientious and diligent striving
For I could manage the field better than this crazy master and the world would know no rest
For everyone would work as hard as I do or they would never work at all.
Yet maybe in this crazy and gracious world a new and strange master emerges
One who challenges the lords of commerce and time or wage and resource
One who sees the people left behind in the world of competition
Those in the market at 9 o’clock and noon and even at 3 or 5 o’clock
Those who no one sees or cares about, those who no one will hire
Those who wait all day in the hope that they too might enter into the fields
Perhaps in this crazy mixed up world of grace they are seen and valued and fed
They receive the same in some injustly and unfairly gracious manner
And why does my heart grow angry against those for whom the master’s heart breaks
Neil White, 2014

Winners and Losers

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We’ve created a culture of antagonism and agitation, of winners and losers
Where words can cut deeper than spears and pierce our enemy’s armor
We refine and polish our arguments like swords to gut our opposition
Trained in a culture of savage warfare to transform opponents into enemies
One who was once a brother or sister now becomes something less than human
A demon in my eyes to be cast out and slain, their bodies and reputations annihilated
Rather than walking a mile in their shoes I doggedly pursue their retreat
Hunting them down in their refuge and taking captive their allies and families
Dividing the world into camps and erecting walls of dogmatic certainty
Turning plowshares into swords and pruning hooks into spears
We ignore the costs and the civilian casualties incurred in the onslaught
As we raise our standards and blow the bugle to assemble the amassed armies
There to fight a war that never needed to be waged if we could learn a different way
 
In a world of winners and losers there is no need for reconciliation and healing
History belongs to the victors and the losers are a part of the casualties of time
Or become the terrorists of tomorrow fighting a lost battle because it is all they know
But maybe there is another way where the conflict never evolves into combat
Where swords can be returned to the forge to become the instruments of harvest
Where the enemy becomes my brother and my opponent my sister
And I walk in their shoes and begin to see the world through their eyes
Where instead of tracking my enemy down in their home I welcome them into mine
My righteous indignation can be set aside at the mote in my neighbor’s eye
And there can be a future together in the dawning light of forgiveness
And the world gasps a sigh of relief that its forests are no longer consumed
Building walls and siege engines to fuel a conflict which never ends
 
And perhaps in our culture of agitation and antagonism we are all losers
Caught in perpetual cycles of conflict, continually training for the next fight
Unable to be at rest under our own vine feasting with our friends and companions
Perhaps in our string of victories we may ignore the tremors of our own trauma
We may justify our own unending nightmares of the past or the wounds we carry
For in a world of harsh justice where wound cried out for wound, scar for scar
And eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a heart for a heart, a life for a life
We all come out broken and hurting too tired to focus on the fields of harvest
Perhaps there is a time to end the pouring out of our neighbors and our own blood
As some sort of sick libation to the cruel gods of conflict we choose to serve
And it is a time to live, a time to be born, a time of peace
A time when brothers can live together in harmony if only we can learn another way
 
Let us Beat Swords Into Plowshares, a sculpture by Evgeniy Vuchetich, given by the Soviet Union to the United Nations in 1959

Let us Beat Swords Into Plowshares, a sculpture by Evgeniy Vuchetich, given by the Soviet Union to the United Nations in 1959

Forgiveness

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There is no better future without letting go of the sins of the past
Without being willing to see others not as a summation of debt unpaid
For we all walk around carrying the burdens and baggage of our lives
Fearing that someone might see the scarlet letter we cover with a coat
Or the identity we hide behind the masks we wear for the world to see
Pinned within boxes far too small to fit our frames constricting our freedom
And our shame is a garment that makes it too hard to breathe the thin air of life
For until we learn to forgive and love ourselves we will be enslaved to shame
Unable to feel the love we desire or the compassion we seek
 
Forgiveness is such a simple word to say and a hard life to live
Love would be so easy if only it didn’t involve letting down my walls
And when one has pierced my heart to let them close again
To offer peace to one who acted in war, to offer friendship to an enemy
To love one who I would rather label as unloveable, unforgiveable
And yet rather than picking up the blade that pierced my heart
Turning once again to use it on its previous wielder,
To demand an eye for an eye and a heart for a heart
Perhaps I can learn to see the wounds they already carry
And in my own healing begin to point the way to a new future
Where swords are put aside in favor of the surgeon’s needle
As lives become stitched back together and hearts are make whole again.
Neil White, 2014

The Prodigal Son, Marble Statue by Joseph Mozier (1857)

The Prodigal Son, Marble Statue by Joseph Mozier (1857)

Playful

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summer

As children we danced through the daisies and gazed at the clouds
We built castles of blankets and pillows defended by imagined armies
The world revolved around us and we delighted in the gifts of each day
We ran and played and laughed and enjoyed the moments of life
Then we got older and forgot the steps to the dance and how to smile
 
The blankets and pillows were replaced by brick and mortar
And life became consumed by maintaining the walls that surround us
We closed ourselves within our own cages where we no longer looked up
The clouds replaced by the dust that we stir up as we shuffle through the day
And maybe we aren’t too old to relearn the steps to the dance and smile
 
Maybe we aren’t too old to run and play and laugh and enjoy life
To, just for the day, to ignore when the world around us frowns
Breathing in the fresh air and singing out at the top of our lungs
To let go of the carefully choreographed lives we live in
And remember that in our youth we didn’t need the steps to dance and smile

Drawn in the Current

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Adrift by Locopelli at deviantart.com

Adrift by Locopelli at deviantart.com

So much of my life I have tried to set my own course
To sail to destinations of my own choosing, charting my path
Powering through the waves ignoring the push and the draw
But now I sit aimlessly enjoying the wind and the current
That draw me to places I never before imagined
And perhaps before it was all about the illusion of control
The continual application of power and steering
Trying to capture the wind and waves and use them for my purpose
Yet, perhaps the underlying rhythms of the deep knew all along
Where my ship was sailing and slowly but surely exerted its pull
To a new world beyond the edges of my dreams
 
Neil White, 2014

Soft Hearted

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love me forever by syntheses on deviantart.com

love me forever by syntheses on deviantart.com

We enter into a world full of broken people and shattered stories

Am I my brother’s keeper? Who is my neighbor and who can I ignore?
Can’t I just send the crowds away with their insatiable appetite and needs?
Or ignore the foreigner on my doorstep who cries out for her daughter?
Who can I, in my mental and physical fatigue, exclude so I don’t see?
 Where can I go to escape the cries of creation that fill my ears?
In the highest heaven they ascend to God rending the creator’s heart
And they echo from the walls of the endless abyss creating a hell of brokenness
 
I don’t want to see, I don’t want to care, I want to block it out
To plug my ears, cover my eyes, harden my heart and distract my mind
To hear no evil, see no evil and to feel no compulsion to speak back to evil
To wall my broken heart away behind immense walls of cold stone
Some safe shelter where I can isolate myself from the needs of the world
To buy in to the promise of despair, that in giving up hope I can save myself
That the promises of the kingdom of God are not worth the birth pangs of creation
And that by pulling away and shutting out the world that the pain may simply cease
 
From a young child I was taught to hide the feelings, the emotions, the pain
That to be a man was to be like some distant unloving picture of a god
Who was unaffected and unattached to the world around him
Whose heart did not break, but rather this deistic god was unmoved
And to live a life in that stoic god’s image was not to feel, not to love
For in feeling there was fault and in love there was weakness
And to be weak was to fail and to fail was to be worthless
It was a god that seemed to demand nothing and to give nothing
But its sacrifice was the very marrow of life, it sucked dry the bones
Exchanging the risk of love for the a hollow security of disconnection
For in love there is joy and pain, in losing there is loss and gain
And I could never exchange the fleshy heart in my breast for a stone one
Yet, from a young child I was taught to hide the feelings, the emotions, the pain
 
As a man I began to realize the pain and cries of a loving God
Foolish enough to love the world, to cry for its hurts, to enter its rejection
A God of crazy dreams of new creation that emerges out of the brokenness
Where shattered shields and broken spears become the instruments of harvest time
Where even in the midst of death, life can emerge from an unending well of love
That the world in all its broken people and shattered stories can be taken in
That it can be loved, not because it is loveable but because that is what the softhearted do
And that perhaps, in a company of bumbling fools who dare to hope and dream
Who put aside the false promise of despair and have the courage to love God’s beloved
That perhaps in those moments where stones slowly removed change mountains
We see the hope that the creation has long been waiting for
The instruments of God’s work being those who can take up the sensitivity of a child
To see the world as it is and to dare to believe that it can be better
And that the discomfort I feel is not weakness, but the strength of a soft heart
A heart not content to be locked behind walls of stone separate from the world
But rather that sees the evil, hears the evil and dares to speak and name the evil
And perhaps to do my small part in the struggle, for the dream of a better world
A world of compassion and justice and joy and love, the world that could be
To dream and speak that world into being one small act of love at a time
A world where hearts of stone are replaced by soft fleshy hearts
That dare to love, the courage to hope and the audacity to dream
Of a time where tears are wiped away, where pains are healed
And we can enter into a world of healed people and mended lives
 
Neil White, 2014

Posted

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mail-letter-10

I took my words, my thoughts confined to the ink on a page
I took them and bound them within the comforting wrapping
An envelope which contained an address and a flowered stamp
And from its home in one box it vanished, swept away
Carried by mechanisms unseen and unknown from me to you
And in this time between times, this passage of days
Where the words from the past meet you in the future
They wait for removal from their slumber to awake in your mind
 
In this age of digital where electrons travel in an instant
Across the nodes on the map, bearing their message without fail
There is still something to the deliberate and slow method
Where the words must wait until their parole comes
And they can break free from their prison and embrace their love
To risk that in the time of transition that the words don’t lose their meaning
And that like a good wine they get better with the time.
 
Neil White, 2014