Shape and Substance

Joshua 2:1-21
A sermon preached at the ordination of Andrew Aaron Lemlyn
Paul Hooker

	I once had a conversation with a military historian. I don’t often have such exchanges; my circles don’t include many folk well versed in the strategies and tactics of the world’s great battles. But as it happened a number of years ago, one of the commissioners from my presbytery to the church’s General Assembly was a retired Army officer, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, and during a lull in Assembly business we got into a discussion of the high drama of invasions. He made a statement that I remember whenever I read Joshua 2. He said that behind every successful invasion there are effective spies, and behind every effective spy there is a willing traitor. 
	Rahab, of course, is the willing traitor in the story of the spies Joshua sent to scope out the defenses of the city of Jericho. She is a “prostitute”—an isshah zonah, in Hebrew—which could mean that she has some cultic role in the fertility religions practiced in ancient Palestine, or only that she is a sex worker in the ordinary and historically common sense. In the end, I don’t suppose it matters. The point of the text is that she is someone disposable, someone without access to the levers of power in the city. Her house is located in a hollow place in the city wall—the place in every ancient city that is most vulnerable to attack and therefore riskiest to occupy. People with means live closer in and higher up in ancient cities, as they seem to do in modern ones. Rahab is not one of those. Whether religiously or economically, Rahab is a prisoner of her society. No wonder she is willing to be disloyal to it. 
	But Rahab seems to know something the rest of her city does not. Over the hills and out of sight of the city’s sentinels, the Israelites are gathering in preparation to attack. Part of their preparation is to gather strategic intelligence on the place: number of defenders, strength or vulnerabilities of the fortifications, etc. That, of course, is what Joshua sent the spies to find out, to scope out the place even as they remain unnoticed. 
	Ah, but they don’t remain unnoticed, or at least unanticipated. The ruler of the city seems to suspect they have arrived, and he sends his soldiers to arrest them. And the first place the soldiers go in the prostitute’s house-in-the-hole-in-the-wall. Where are they, demand the soldiers, these Israelites who would know our secrets and use them against us? And Rahab, already a traitor for receiving them, becomes a liar, too. “I did not know where they came from,” she lies, “but when it came time to shut the gate, the men went out.” Nevermind that the spies were at that very moment hiding beneath sheaves of flax drying on her roof. Nevermind that she had already told them that she no longer believed in her own society and was putting all her trust in them. Nevermind that she was prepared to give up what little she had in exchange for a share in what might await her on the other side of the war. I did not know where they came from, she lies.
	But, of course, she did know. She knew they came from the future, from the power and pattern of a new world order that would turn her world upside down, that they stood for the possibility that a house in a hole in the wall might not be all she could dream of, that they represented the possibility that she might cease to be a victim of society and become a full-fledged member of it. Rahab knew they came from the future, and she was prepared to stake everything she had on the apparently slender possibility that that future might come true. 
	Here is a poem. It is entitled, “The Crimson Cord.”


The Crimson Cord

Everything depends upon a crimson cord
hanging in a window, gentled by the breeze.
Everything depends upon these last few words

said in haste, in hope that others will be pleased
to make them true. Everything depends upon
fragile promises made in times like these.

It matters not so much who will have lost or won
as whose promises are kept and whose forgot
and who when all the words are said and deeds are done

spies the crimson cord tied with a faithful knot
to the window and, recalling, stays the sword
and protects this door when the fight grows hot.

Everything depends upon a crimson cord
binding past to hope of what is yet to be:
a home, a place, a life. According to your word

so let it be. Leave now, and on the third of three
cold daybreaks rise and go. Neither pause nor turn
until you reach the future. Yet remember me

and these secrets I have kept that I might earn
a place at table when at last you’ve kept your word,
and safety in your house, a Fire that, when it burns,

consumes all. From this window like a bird
I would soar, borne aloft by gentle breeze,
no longer tethered here by this crimson cord.

	In the drama of my imagination, I envision Rahab standing in her window, watching the spies she has just let down beyond the wall run free across the city plain, back to Joshua and the future, bearing the information that will set her free. She knows she is a traitor to her city. She knows she has signed the death warrant for the way she has lived. She knows there is no turning back. She looks at the crimson cord she has knotted to the window, and realizes that just like those spies, her life, her hope, her security, her future—everything—depends on that cord. 
	You know the story of the battle of Jericho. The Israelites march around the walls the spies have explored for six days, and then seven times on the seventh day. The war trumpets blare, the people shout, and the walls fall down, and the Israelites rush in to make an end of Jericho—all except for Rahab and her house-in-the-hole-in-the-wall. Rahab was true to her word, and kept the crimson cord tied in the window, a sign of her faith in the spies, a downpayment on the possibility of a future. No less true to their promise were the spies. After the battle, says the text later on, 
…the young men who had been spies went in and brought out Rahab, along with her father, her mother, her brothers, and all who belonged to her—they brought all her kindred out—and set them outside the camp of Israel….Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, Joshua spared. Her family has lived with Israel ever since (Josh 6: 23, 25).
——
	I don’t know if you have noticed, but crimson plays an important role in the color scheme of the Church. It is the color of the Spirit, and therefore of every Spirit-inspired gathering of the people of God’s Spirit. It is the liturgical color of Pentecost. It is also the liturgical color appropriate to occasions of ordination and installations to ministry.
	This is true partly, I think, because we hope that something of that Pentecostal fire will yet smolder in our hearts and ignite our praise and illumine our actions in the world. But I can’t help wondering if crimson plays such an important role because it is the color of Rahab’s cord, tied in the window as a symbol of hope.
	You see, I think the church is—we are—that crimson cord, tied in the window of our little hole in the wall of the world-as-it-is. I think the church is—we are—the sign that a new future is coming, and that we have faith in that future and are willing to stake everything we have—even our lives—on it. I think the church is—we are—an affirmation that things-as-they-are are not things-as-they-will-be. I think we are tied in the window of the world as it is to mark the place where begins the world as it ought to be. 
	There is a passage in our Book of Order that speaks about the calling of the Church. The Church, it says

"is to be a community of faith, entrusting itself to God alone, even at the risk of losing its life"(F-1.0301).

The Church is to be a community of hope, rejoicing in the sure and certain knowledge that, in Christ, God is making a new creation. This new creation is a new beginning for human life and for all things. The Church lives in the present on the strength of that promised new creation (F-1.0301).

We live in the present on the strength of a promised future. And in so living, we are a symbol to the world of the possibility of that future. 
	A little further on in that same passage from the Book of Order, we read these words:

"The Church is to be a community of witness, pointing beyond itself in work and word to the good news of God’s transforming grace in Christ Jesus its Lord" (F-1.0301).

The calling of the Church, argues our polity, is bearing witness to the possibility that the awful sameness of things—the lies and deceit and self interest of politics, the senseless gun violence that tears at the social fabric of our lives, the grinding poverty to which so many are condemned for no fault other than the accident of their birth, the blind hatred and prejudice aimed at communities of people for no reason other than the color of their skin—that this awful sameness is not the final reality, but a way of life that is doomed to die at the hands of a new creation and of that new creation’s lord. To be sure, we live in that awful sameness, spend our days so mired in it, saturated with it, that we lose sight of the fact that it is not the only way. Our entrapment in that sameness persuades us that there is nothing to be done about mass shootings in shopping malls or racially-motivated assaults on city streets. 
	But the fact of our entrapment in that sameness does not mean that the sameness is permanent, and certainly not that it is God’s creative intent. And to be the Church is to believe that God is even now breaking the trap, shaking the foundations, transforming the landscape of reality, making a new creation. Our calling is to point beyond ourselves in our work and our words to that transformation, and to the possibility of a future.
	Be warned. To live this way is to be disloyal to things as they are. To live as a witness to the possibility of a future is to be a traitor to the reality of the present. To bear witness to the transforming grace of God is to deny the permanence and ultimacy of gun lobbies and white supremacist groups and power structures that privilege some while imprisoning most. To be a community of faith, hope, and witness is to be a place that swears no allegiance to what is and owes all allegiance to what will be. 
	Every time we gather as Church, and especially on those occasions when we gather to ordain and install a new servant of the Church’s call to ministry, it is worth reminding ourselves of this calling. A calling to be disloyal to things as they are and deeply loyal to things as they will be. A calling to be the sign and symbol to the world that a new creation is being born. A calling to be the crimson cord that hangs from the window to announce our faith in the transforming grace of God.  

Paul K Hooker/ Baccalaureate Sermon

Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

14 May 2020

John 14:1-7

The Kingdom of Anxiety

            Every New Year’s Eve I revisit a poem, entitled “Year’s End,” by Richard Wilbur, one of my favorite American poets. Wilbur reflects on the last fading hours of the year, as late December snow covers the landscape of his Connecticut home. He meditates on things overwhelmed and frozen by change, his mind wandering from image to image, across time and space. A New Year’s Eve party visible through illumined windows fast covering with frost in the deepening night. A freezing lake, trapping leaves from overhanging branches that, once fallen, are “held in ice like dancers in a spell.” Ferns and mammoths fossilized millions of years ago in the very stones on which they fell in death. Victims of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius at Pompeii, eternally engulfed in pyroclastic ash. Here is the final stanza: 

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause   

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.^[1]

            We fray into the future. That’s it, isn’t it? We weren’t ready for this. We weren’t ready for the virus. We weren’t ready to be locked away in homes and connected only in the ether. We weren’t ready for the year—indeed, for a seminary career—to end so abruptly, with words unsaid and things undone. We fray into a future “rarely wrought/Save in tapestries of afterthought.” More time, we plead, more time. But here we are in the midst of it, at the “sudden end of time,” and while the world goes on its perhaps-not-so-merry way, we sit in this moment frozen in our anxiety, like leaves upright in forming ice, or fossils in stone, or bodies entombed in volcanic ash. 

            In John’s story this morning, Jesus’ disciples aren’t ready either. They must have thought some change was afoot, but they have no inkling of the apocalyptic volcano about to erupt and entomb the world they love. More time, more time. But there he is, in the midst of them, talking about going on ahead of them to the Father’s house to prepare their rooms, leaving them to catch up the best they can. There will be a place for them, he promises, and all they have to do is believe. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is believe. But on he goes, heaping symbol upon figure of speech, while the sudden end of time looms and the future frays before them. Until finally, Thomas—bless his anxious, literalistic heart—at last asks the question that always lingers on the lips of the left-behind: We don’t know where you are going; how can we know the way?

            “I am the Way,” Jesus says, with a poet’s eye for metaphor, “and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” We argue even now about whether one must believe in Jesus to follow this way to the Father. Let me confess my heresy: I don’t care. I don’t care who is saved and who isn’t, or if anyone is or isn’t. In such moments as these we are living, nothing could matter less. What I care about is the metaphor. Something about Jesus embodies a Way, something incarnates Truth, something enfleshes Life itself. As we stand fraying into an uncertain future, hopes unraveling and dreams growing ever more distant, I suggest that this metaphor is all we have: He is Way and Truth, and Life.  

            The mid 20^th c poet W. H. Auden understood this metaphor. Auden’s long poem, For the Time Being, is subtitled “A Christmas Oratorio,” but I find myself straying into it at odd moments during the year—moments like this. Auden’s title speaks the existential truth: we are trying to figure out how to live “for the time being.” We live for the time being, between the promise of Christ’s heavenly kingdom and its as-yet-unfulfilled reality. We live for the time being, hoping for extraordinary blessing while trying to cope with ordinary cussedness. We live for the time being, while the anxieties of the present fray at the edges of confidence and hope, and the future unravels in the direction of despair. Auden wrote in such a moment. For the Time Being was published in 1944, as the world bled and died in the paroxysms of the Second World War. The poem’s characters are figures from the ancient gospel nativity scenes, but they are also very modern people dealing with very modern anxieties. Joseph waits in a bar for Mary, his date who never shows, and struggles to come to terms with how little he matters in his own story. Wise men follow the star to Bethlehem not as a pilgrimage of self-devotion but as a process of self-discovery. A liberal humanist Herod worries that all his enlightened good works will be forgotten because “reason will be replaced with Revelation.” Auden’s Narrator speaks for us all when he observes that “The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.” Despite the Christ’s entry into the world, nothing in the world has really changed. “Here we all are/Back in the moderate Aristotelian city/ of darning and the Eight-Fifteen.” Auden knows what we know: somewhere the light of the Kingdom may have dawned, but it’s still dark where we are. We may have seen the power and pattern of the future, but for the time being we are frozen in the moment. To know the shape of, the hope of, the taste of the future, and not be able to reach it, to dwell in it, even to draw near it—that is the definition of anxiety. We fray into the future.

            For the Time Being closes with these famous lines:

He is the Way.

Follow Him through the land of Unlikeness;

You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.

Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;

You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.

Love Him in the World of the Flesh;

And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.^[2]

            Every time I read this poem, I am struck by the difference between the way I hear Jesus’ metaphor and the way Auden hears it. We hear that Jesus is the “Way” and think he means “the way out.” We hear that he is “Truth” and think he means to give us a club to quash all the falsehoods of our time. We hear that he is the “Life” and think he means “eternal life” or at least “life somewhere other than here.”

            But Auden is not offering us escape from this anxious world; he is forcing us back into it. Auden knows that, in the kingdom of anxiety with all its chaos, there is a fixed point, and the point is Christ. Christ stands ever and always rooted in that kingdom of anxiety, where people are fraying into an uncertain future and pleading for more time, more time. Auden offers no cheap cure for our anxieties. He knows that the resurrection of Christ may change everything theologically, but practically it changes nothing at all. Easter has come and gone, and yet here we are, still in lockdown, the economy still reeling, and all our saviors, medical and political, fighting each other for pride of place at the presidential podium. And yet, Auden says, there he is, in the midst of it: Christ the Way. Christ the Truth. Christ the Life.

            Christ is the Way that wends through strange lands, realms unlike anything you have been prepared to expect. Forty-one years ago, on an occasion not unlike this, the novelist Frederick Buechner spoke at my seminary graduation, and he quoted Tolkein’s poem from The Hobbit: “The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began….” Buechner was suggesting that we intrepid seminary almost-graduates were embarking on a great journey, not unlike the hobbit’s, full of challenge and also of joy. He was right, but in ways neither he nor we could imagine.  Seminary had prepared me to serve a Church that probably didn’t exist by the time I was handed my diploma and certainly doesn’t exist now. I have served a Church wherein dwell not the playful lap dogs of settled dogma but rare, sharp-toothed theological beasts that, though they have taught me much, have also taken more than a few bites out of my backside. I have had “unique” adventures—I use the adjective with tongue planted firmly in cheek—and they have made of me. for better and for worse, someone I could not have imagined becoming. And now I stand here, as if in a parallel universe, to say that all these things will happen to you, too. The Church is transmogrifying before your eyes, and to walk in its Way is not to stroll down a smooth-paved road but to blaze a trail through dense undergrowth. And yet, there he is, in the midst of it, like an overgrown but still discernable path through dark and unfamiliar woods, a road that goes ever on and on. He is the Way, a way as rare and unique as it is dark and fearsome. He beckons you to follow in his Way.

            Christ is the Truth that can only be sought with eyes wide open, willing to abandon notions you thought were true because you wanted them to be. Some truths—maybe even all truths worth knowing—carry you into anxious places, take you far away from comfort and farther still from security. Some truths you will cling to even as others call them lies, hoaxes, fake news. Some truths replace reason with revelation, even when reason was perfectly understandable and revelation makes absolutely no sense. Some truths force a choice between one hope and another, a lesser good and a greater, love or justice, knowledge or mystery. It is not an easy thing to seek the Truth. And yet, there he is, in the midst of it, in the center of a great city full of anxious hearts and worried minds, all seeking truth and all terrified of finding it. He is the Truth, even though knowing it neither resolves anxieties nor eases worry. He summons you into the mystery of his Truth.

            Christ is the Life, and if you would live this life you must live it in the flesh, with all the weakness and limitation and insecurity that pulses through your veins and bores into the marrow of your bones. Flesh is prone to the worst the world can do: viruses that attack like a mugger in the bushes, cancers that proffer death in the organs meant to give life, hungers that growl in the gut and yearnings that howl in the heart. But flesh is also capable of the best the world has to offer: joy that breaks forth in song, love that enraptures you at the very thought of the beloved, beauty that fills your eyes with tears of gratitude for the simple gift of being alive. And there he is, in the midst of it, like a bridegroom at a wedding feast, dancing with the pleasure that only flesh can know and angels are forced to envy, filled with love that commits to face both weal and woe with grace and equanimity, steady in suffering and expansive in hope. He is Life, brimful and overflowing with equal measures grief and glory. He welcomes you to the lusciousness of his Life. 

            He is the Way, the Truth, the Life: that’s all we have, my friends, as we stand here fraying into the future. It is also all we need. For he is standing here, too, in the midst of us, transubstantiating the hard bread and bitter gall of the Kingdom of Anxiety into the broken loaf and poured wine of the Kingdom of God. You will meet him here, at this banquet table, the wedding feast of these two Kingdoms. This table, which speaks to us of both suffering and hope, death and resurrection. This table, whose fare is more meager than that the emptiest cupboard can prepare, and yet more sumptuous than all the feasts of all the kings of all the anxious kingdoms of all time. This table, to which you have come, around which you have stood, behind and beside and before which you have and do and will serve your whole life long. This table, that gathers up past and future and transfigures them as the time being. This is where you will meet him—where you will always meet him—who is Way and Truth and Life, in all the anxious moments of all your todays and all your tomorrows. 

The Invitation

You will meet him at the table,

the One who, emptied of Himself, becomes

the Empty space within the heart of Silence,

where Beauty gathers all the world’s deep darkness

even now and fills it with the Light. 

You will meet him at the table

who calls to you in midnights of the soul

and bids you follow through divided seas

and cross the holy deserts of the heart;

even now you feel the ancient Fire.

You will meet him at the table,

who reaches out to heal the shattered ones, 

the dimming shards, the broken, disillusioned,

world-weary, hope long ago abandoned;

even now you see his wounded hands.

You will meet him at the table,

whom you know by many names, inscribed

across the intersticèd universe

or whispered in the smallest breath of love;

even now your lips dare frame their sound.

You will meet him at the table

whom Love now fractures open on the altar,

whom Judgment now decants upon the earth;

his brokenness is rendered up in Beauty

even now, as you take bread and cup.

You will meet him at the table.

He is the host, and holds this space for you,

you who only lately join the feast

and yet are welcomed into realms of Light.

Even now. See, all things are ready.^[3]

---

^[1] Richard Wilbur, “Year’s End”, in New and Collected Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1988, p. 302.

^[2] W. H Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 65.

^[3] Paul Hooker, “The Invitation” from The Hole in the Heart of God, publication pending, 2020.

Today is the 40th anniversary of my ordination to the Ministry of the Word and Sacrament (or “Ministry of the Word” as we called it then in the old PCUS). Rather than pride, I am mainly surprised I am still here.

I’ve been thinking lately about the church, aware that the church I serve is not the church I intended to serve, nor would have chosen to serve if I could have predicted the future. That’s just as well. That church belonged to the past. The jury is still out on the question of whether I belong in the future.

I have been inventorying my theological commitments of late, and fewer of them than I thought “bring me joy.” More than a few notions that used to be central confessional commitments now seem, at best, adiaphora, or at worst, irrelevant. I don’t care much who is saved or who isn’t, or if anybody is or isn’t. I don’t know (and don’t particularly care) whether Christ was two natures in one person, and certainly don’t understand the mechanics of such metaphysics. I don’t know whether God’s eye is on the sparrow, but I have the creeping sense he isn’t watching me. I don’t doubt the reality of God, but I also don’t trust that God is in any meaningful way “personal” (let alone that “Jesus is my personal savior”). Curiously, I am daily more convinced that John Leith was right when he taught us about the persistence of sin in the life of the redeemed. Or at least about the persistence of sin part.

I enjoy the struggle to answer disputed questions, more for the dispute than for the answers.

Poetry has given me language that could never be spoken on the floor of a presbytery in an ordination examination, though perhaps it should have been. It has made me want to say the unsayable. It continually surprises me to discover through it what I trust and what I don’t. It has also deepened in me the yearning to come to font and table, to approach the ineffable by way of the tactile reality of water, bread, and wine. It is the rock in the darkness, the first and final thing I “believe.”

I find myself preferring silence to the noise of public prayers (including my own), singing to speaking, and solitude to the company of assemblies. Reading Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens of a morning on the back porch, teacup on the table beside me, seems to me an act of worship. Working the Times crossword puzzle is a spiritual discipline.

I no longer care if I contradict myself.

Like Pilate, I wonder what is “Truth,” or if it should ever be capitalized.

That said, I am not quite yet ready for the glue factory. There are more questions to ask, more classes to teach, more sermons to preach (although I can’t imagine why anyone would want to listen), and more poems to write. There are students who still need something I have to offer (I think), and I still have energy to offer it. I am still enthralled by the possibilities of wonder and mystery.

And I am still here.

Tea and chocolate
make me wonder
if the world
is as safe a place
as it appears to be. 
 
Steak and eggs
prompt me to fear
that the circle
though it turns
is not unbroken. 
 
Wine and cheese
make me think
more highly
of myself
than I ought to think.
 
Whiskey and water
help me trust
that the day’s trouble
is sufficient
for the day.
 
Toast and coffee
persuade me that
the fires of nightmares
are extinguished 
by controlled burns.

                        I

He awoke to the discovery
of holes in the roof above his bed.
Rain was dripping slowly, rhythmically
in great droplets on his head. 
 
All his life, through flush and thin
he had trusted in this shelter
against the storm. It had been
security and comfort. He felt it
 
like a blanket, wrapped around him.
Yet now there was no room for doubt:
the weeping gods had found him
and would force him out
 
of bed. Insistent tear!
He thought of turning on his side
but that would only fill his ear
with heaven's outrageous tide.
 
Get up and find the pitch and patch the hole
that threatens peace;
it might just be good for the soul
to soil the hands in grease…
 
…On the other hand, a moment to reflect
is always wise. 
Less work means less one must correct
or others criticize. 
 
Soon enough the rain will end
and then what use will be the patching tar?
Do the holes not finally portend 
a clear though narrowed focus on the stars?
 
Best to bide the time and see
what clouds the wind will blow away or keep.
Decided it was wise to let it be.
Pulled up the blanket and went back to sleep.
 
 
 
                        II

She woke in wonder.
Thunder, lightning, 
steady rain, a cataclysm in the night,
tore holes in the roof, peeled it back
like opening the doll house of her childhood
to rearrange the helpless little lives.
Gods make such cruel use of wind. 
 
Spent the night in a closet
safe enough, she prayed.
But in the vortex safety is an illusion; 
rather, trust in luck. And she was lucky.
The wind blows where it will, she remembered,
though having heard the sound approach, 
she thought she knew both whence and where.
 
Luck is a relative thing:
it offers and it snatches away
breath in exchange for breathing’s reasons,
heartbeat for habits of the heart.
Not much left of furnishings, assumptions;
find the clock in the neighbor’s yard,
the notebook come to rest just down the block.
 
Nothing left to do
but change her state of mind.
No time to mourn what wind has torn away.
She breathes, and gathers up the remnants
of her thoughts. Other storms
are forming on the far horizon.
She finds a pen, sits down, begins to write.

The world stands out on either side/No wider than the heart is wide. 
—“Renascense” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 
How wide the world?
“No wider than the heart is wide.”
 
Enough to gather in the storm
that tears not merely roof from hearth 
but soul from soul as well?
 
Enough to bind the wounded orb
bleeding from every pore
weeping in every chirp and howl?
 
Enough to reach between nailed palms
opened  out in love’s embrace,
‘til they circle ‘round the realm of pain.
 
How wide the heart?
As wide as all the world is wide. 

John 21:1-19

In the morning mist, along the seashore
boats return from evening’s labors vain;
 “Cast your nets in waters yet uncharted;
trust in me with faith now unconstrained.”
Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep.
Those he loves will his commandments keep.
 
Asks the one who breaks the bread at fireside,
“Simon, do you love me more than these?”
Asks the one now broken on the table:
Will you take your cross and follow me?
Feed my sheep. Tend my lambs.
Love is your commission from his hands.
 
Learn his way, this watcher from the shoreline,
while the paschal fire still sheds its glow.
Other hands will soon lay hold upon you,
take you where you do not wish to go.
Do you love? Do you love?
Pray that love through all your pulses move.