I wrote this poem during Lent last year, and while I didn’t delve explicitly into universalism the allusions to Origen and Julian of Norwich definitely show my hand. If any of you are interested in more of my poetry, which often deals with universalism in one way or another I have it collected at my website - St. Jude’s Tavern - Poems. Anyhow here’s the poem, I hope you enjoy:
Lenten Hymn
Midwinter frost on the predawn window peers out into darkness
through the mists of time to Sinai’s mountain;
where the darkness of God roars from the secret place of thunder,
the sound of boulders crack and tumble over the cobblestones of
a storm-tossed shore.
Moses recalls the consuming Fire of the bush unburned,
awaiting a greater Light to blaze in the darkness.
Lenten snow blankets the pocked mounds and craters
on the field of Verdun,
forgotten bones lay in frozen silence beneath,
their cries unable to break the ground above.
The raven call in the surrounding wood beckons his flock to feed
on the carrion of a nameless beast.
The red dust and blood-stained sepulchers in the Valley of Vision
full of rusting bones that tarry –
watchmen in the long night for dawn’s breaking,
to hear Ezekiel’s divine utterance –
the alchemy of Aionian fire to purge and quicken their frames
with flesh unalloyed, golden, drossless into undying Zion.
Jude, whose brow was crowned with Pentecostal fire,
whose tongue uttered ecstatic songs we long to sing,
remember us who wander lost in the hopeless wastes
perceiving only darkness and thunder on the holy hill,
pining to behold that Fire within.
Origen, who now reclines at the celestial banquet to feast on grace,
help our hearts bear the bitter truth in the wilderness we now trod –
that which is most beautiful is most maligned.
Julian teach us the behovliness of this broken world,
that soon, soon the Aionian fire shall make
all manner of things well
and burn away the rot that wracks all that is wretched within.
Good Shepherd gather your lost on a thousand hills to the lonely peak of
Golgotha;
Let us at last hear the seraph’s song that kindles joy in the hearing;
Until at long last all creation is alight with unceasing incandescence of
Pentecostal Fire.
© Jedidiah Paschall
