steeples

I have been taught that church is a building you go into
that is somehow sacred.

And though these so-called "christian" teachers backpedal
and say they don't mean sacred sacred,
it is exactly what they mean,
because they want to invest a part of the everyday life they despise
with an element of the Divine.

They are afraid to admit the truth -
that everything is infused with God,
that it breathes God's breath -
for they fear that by this admission they will lose control of God.
Their fear will be exposed and they will whither up
like the phantasms they fear themselves to be.

Me, I think a church is a community of people
with a truth-lust raging after yearnings for the impossible.

I think it is a grouping of humilities,
of dying selves who love the poor
and want more LIFE,
not glitzy, tawdry imitations.

I think it is a broken gathering of broken people
who will admit it.

I think it is a place for losers and lovers
that exists, not between two-by-fours,
but in loves both great and small.

I think a church is made of folks who sense,
if not admit,
that everything is sacred:
even death, birth, sex and toilets.

So if you ask me what a church is,
I will tell you that I do not know...
that it is a holy mystery I enter every morning
when I softly breathe awake,
and every night when I anxiously fall away.

It is all that lies between.

It is a hug, a tree, a kiss.

It is this.