Grant me the faith to believe that Life is stronger than death, and Love deeper than hate. Let me never abdicate my house to the hungry thieves that would rob each room of its particular treasure, and curse the one who lives inside as worthless, no more than an empty purse, a justly abandoned figure on a severed fragment of scorched earth. Let the figure refuse the facile fabrication of an identity based on feelings of uselessness and ugliness, but rather let these feelings pass. Let them move through the physical body like a river, however muddied, moves through a canyon, rather than harden into a dam of mind-made steel. O God, Creator of all that is good and real, without whom there can be no unity, let the faint beginnings of light seep through the cracks of my divided self and thaw the ice congealing in my heart. Bring me back continually to the depths of your peace in the present moment, and do not let your sun come up over the hill to shine through my window while I am lost in a state of war, with myself or with the world. Let me face each state, whether familiar and painful or strange and painless, with courage and compassion. Do not let me act from an unconsidered sense of lack, but let me look directly through that hole, like one whose right eye through the tiny lens of a telescope sees with a jolt the vast sky lit up at night, limitless and unimaginable.
Faith
“Muse”
I shatter and break,
I heal and take heed,
I heed a call I no longer hear;
I do not know if what I do not hear
still calls me.
I cannot wake up early enough
to cover the distance
that divides me from myself.
I haven’t heard from you
since I wrote you that long letter.
I can’t remember
if I put my return address.
Would you have me say,
“Please return to me?”
You know I have too much pride,
too little faith, too much doubt.
I don’t know if I’ve ever believed in you,
and I’ve always struggled to believe in myself,
never knowing who I was
struggling to believe in.
Would you have me say,
“I was wrong, I admit my error,
I open myself to your truth?”
You know I am much too stubborn;
I resist too much
And am too opposed
to any truth not my own.
But I hear you saying,
“This is not a truth that is not yours
nor is it believing in your self alone.
This is opening to a truth
that is mine and that is yours,
a truth between us
that covers the distance
that never existed,
that unites what was never divided,
that heals and makes whole
what already is.”
I hear you saying,
“How could I return to you,
I who never left you?
How could I write you a letter,
I who am written in your soul
when you see a cloud lit up by the sunrise,
when you see a man on a bridge over a freezing river,
when you see a child standing in the light?
Is not each true word you put down
written by me,
with me in you?”
I hear these words,
but is it you I hear
who speaks them?
Or do I only hear the empty space
between you and me
which these words cannot fill?
Is there space between,
and is it empty?
I do not know
where each true word comes from.
I cannot say it comes from me,
not knowing what that would mean.
You ask if it is written with you in me.
Is that true?
Do I ask myself,
or do I ask you?
Who do I ask if I ask you,
and how will I know your answer?
Do I ask to receive an answer?
Brian Leibold 