I once attended a church in my childhood and growing up years, truly, about eighteen years.
The church was also a school. I spent eighteen years at this school, too.
After it had breathed it’s last breath, somebody new and fresh
with suits for Jesus
thought how ugly everything was
and wanted things like purple pews
and a giant Bible verse plastered on the wall above the baptismal,
replacing where the cross once hung.

By this time, I had moved on.
But one day I was driving by and felt myself turning into that parking lot.
A parking lot I knew so well. The doors were open and maybe someone was there
but I can’t remember.
What I remember was standing in that dark sanctuary,
with so much orange light streaming through the broken stained glass windows.
Oak and walnut being replaced for lighter wood.
New and updated windows void of color were about to be installed.
There I stood, in a hall of shrapnel.
My childhood faith, wrapped up in that oak sanctuary with it’s orange windows and pews.

Philip Larkin says that this is a serious house on a serious earth.
I am wrapped up in that serious house and those serious people.
I am fractured now in the same way the oak splintered with a sledgehammer
and friends said you can have your Jesus in all the rubble.

Where is your God now?

But today I sat in a pew and all
that was asked of me was to receive the
beauty of my own mortality
etched across my forehead.

Swiftly.
Miserere mei, Deus.

Maybe they were ashes from an old oak pew
I sat in for eighteen years.

A smudge, a blot.
Miserere mei, Deus.

The angel of death
does not pass over.
Miserere mei, Deus.

Polyphonic music
sung unaccompanied,
cloaked us

In our nakedness
we knelt in our humility,
in this serious house.
And rose stooped
in our depravity
on this serious earth.

Where is your God now?

He is smudged across my forehead
rising from that old oak tree.

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