Jesus Wept
Brandon Cook
I.
We learned it as trivia, “the shortest verse in all of Scripture,” and I suppose that knowing such things can only help and not harm you on the long road to salvation
A funny thing to trivialize—
A man's loss and devastation,
But we were so damn desperate for the mini-candy bars they dangled before us,
Our own lives felt on the line
Besides, it’s what we did:
We rode sacrilege roughshod over every sacred space
Then we called it the way of God, and we embraced how right we were
(As if one can be right about tears)
Meanwhile, the longest human story, told this time with just two words, eluded us,
Unable to haunt us with its morale, message, or warning
But there was a drumbeat beneath
We felt it
A pounding—vanguard of a coming storm
And maybe some part of each of us knew it would break over us, eventually
Asking us to ask the question that questions everything:
How can life cease to be?
II.
It's forty long and short years past now, and this morning, waking again to push back like cobwebs the dire sense of desolation which so often stands insolent at the foot of my bed, at first breath,
Here in the middle stretch of life, there's not so much strife as the simple knowledge, again and again, that we will die
Life requires an insurance policy, in the end
All that's left and needed now is to see clearly, without distraction
That takes walking in the woods and letting the morning absorb us into the rising slant of sunlight
You grab your stick and put on your hat and notice how the forest sits so still, without asking any questions at all
So we, too, stop asking "why,” and we trivialize nothing
III.
This morning, outside my window, a white squirrel jumped from branch to line and back,
Its only morning task
Aware and in peace, he seemed, that all things are held by something
(The morning itself, it must be)
As pink light stretched in long strides across the high rise of September clouds
I wept, in a way, as always
But in sudden comfort I was also held
How can such beauty be reality?
We are in God’s own dissolution, surely, as at a graveside
As God weeps for all things
As Christ’s tears wet the still morning, so very dear
As beauty touches grief, and sorrow holds us near