prayer is no longer the waiting room it used to be. it is like something primal. it is like the pacing of breaths. like footfalls converting. it is like how life is sometimes the little deaths in ourselves now and then. it is like a warm friday. like facing east. it is like ice cubes marinating in a jug of sweet tea on the toolbox, head tilted thoughtfully under the hood of some Oldsmobile classic listening to the cylinders fire and the sound of something being born again in this life.

It is important to wield yourself, the magic does not happen otherwise. Throw your hard feelings to paper and hew your long memories out of stone. Nobody will speak for you; it has decreed by God, ever since he made you out of interstellar material to walk among the magnolias along roads so quiet maps cannot hear them and men cannot recall. The local foliage begins to warm itself and young nebulae receive their crowns. Rosary beads fall from the hands of a Catholic priest in mid prayer and the universe might be bending.

Picture her in the middle of the street the city spreading out from her shoulders like vast concrete wings Graffitied railcars for bracelets and city lights for rings. Picture her in pose, her curves flirting with geometry, her black dress moving like a round of applause. Picture her as a precursor, a lovely gospel, carrying the blueprints for life in her body. Picture her as scripture, less a descendant of Eve and more the witness of Magdalene.

The hills and cliffs still bear the scars of where the Ohio once slashed at them. It is at the site of this attempted murder that the city rests, still asleep in its work clothes the crumbs of weathered roads and broken curbs littering its chest. Faded brick alleyways seep between buildings like old capillaries The Capitol theatre wears the evening like a tux Old leather volumes ferment silently in a bookstore In bars, the carousing liturgy of stories being told some legend, some folklore.

I thank you God for the death of standing still, for that leaky old bus station in Indy where a homeless man sat nearer to you than any saint. I thank you for orchids resting from the work it takes to be beautiful and the food pantries that do better work than the pew. I thank you God for the story so far. For no place to lay my head. For women in the shape of you and the art of their curves that you commissioned.

Be thankful for hands that hold things you cannot keep forever. Give thanks for trinkets that go missing and never come back. Take joy back from the daily slaughter and reconcile with the storm behind the eyes. When in doubt go live in Kansas. Meet with men who know they are going to die. Find a diamond. Buy a field. Sell everything you own. Go and love someone and never come back from it.

Choose life. Well what is life? Where does it begin in the mind where imagination will escape from reality or reality will instead become its son. What of our white picket kingdoms our beautiful depravities. If we are dead in our beliefs we are dead in our days. And in our innermost chamber the starving dogs we find there. Yet these things must be. All things lead back to him. The righteous are born from broken glass and in such pieces even the blind can see themselves clearly.

In the three years since the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic it can be said that the Church has gone through an identity crisis; but even if you are little more than a novice student of church history (and I am) you may be able to see that from the…

I watch as trees sleep outside my window their branches scrubbed of leaves the way at times my own soul feels fruitless but what a God that gives the grace of spring to the winter heart that needs it a blessing that is known by simple staying awake to see it.