lying-sleeping-gods

Love is patient Love is kind (Praise be to Macklemore, amen)

Love had better be patient Because love is hard Love is not a sprint, nor even a marathon There is no finish line Just the steady beat of your feet On the asphalt Tired legs And the growing realisation That maybe you were meant to be a runner All along

The growing understanding That pouring yourself out To meet another, somewhere in the middle May be tougher, in some ways But in ways words can’t quite capture It satisfies something Something so deep in the soul You might never have noticed it But for this

The growing knowledge Of what it's really like To be known

It is written Love is greater than faith Greater even than hope That sounds Pretty great To me

I meant to mean a meaning A sad secluded seeming Of a tragic tale's teeming With written wearied words of woe

I meant to meekly mend The wearied words, their will to wend From paper's battles, left to fend For forms forgotten by our foe

But I kept those that meant the most Formed a reserve, a mighty host That none deserve, that none may boast That none may say they'd brought me low

I didn't mean my meanness But I couldn't gauge your keenness For a spendthrift's spending seamless From a chequebook brought for show

If all those gifts could only mean No empty gaudy golden gleam But grace's shoots of gladdest green Perhaps I'd give them, even so

Nothing given, meaning naught Even if my meaning's fraught The weary words, their fight they've fought How heavy lands the final blow?

The golden mean, approaching silence An end to all this wordy violence Bound behind the page's high fence A conceit that none may overthrow

Please don't be mean to me, I pray thee The words, as usual, have all failed me But maybe one day, we'll be made free Our meanings plain for each to know

God, give me doubt Doubt, to pierce my too small image of you To overcome the certainties with which I would fence you To remember that my knowledge of you can't outpace my love for you To let go of the half truths that had defined us To let go of you as I had once known you

God, give me faith Faith, to be drawn to something on the other side of doubt To seek you when there is no trace of you To love you when there is no love in me To cry out in despair to you In despair of you To dwell with the broken pieces of how I had imagined you To scream and rage and weep at the absence of you The distortions and mutations of you Let the obscenities and curses and imperfections Drip out of me, uselessly

God, give me awe Awe of you and all your works That I might fall flat on the ground before it Give it to me In a leaf In a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam In a book of ideas In a smile, for an instant Give me awe That my heart might be shattered That my image of you Might be just one iota bigger Than it had been

Look here, what is this? A soul Ragged, bloodied Someone put it through the washing machine But forgot to use “Delicates”

Life, however briefly, in a horror show Demons made real, given an almost casual solidity An assembly of everyday abominations Has its own way of staying lived

Your love never fails Even if sometimes Surely, oh surely, it feels like it “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?”, indeed; And then one can't quite recall the rest

“You're OK” Still there But somehow lost beneath the waves

And what does he have to show for it all? The scars are all unseen There may be no lesson learned here Or even worse, there may be

Maybe he can't be truly upset with You Maybe it's not the done thing Maybe it's more a case that he let You down, than You him Maybe the limits of his love for You Are how he got into this mess in the first place But You know it all so well You know he wonders Did it have to be this way?

Something borrowed, something blue Nothing that makes sense to you

Seeking glory, find the arrow Escape this sense, this feeling harrowed

Nothing wagered, cloak of violet But don't invoke the ultra-violent

Brave the spectrum, ride the rainbow Heft the javelin, only feign throw

You rage in red, you fade to black You're only dreaming the attack

You wake from black, rage back to blood You sob, a tiny, heaving flood

You have lost it, you can't find it You long to grasp it and to bind it

You never had it, never lost it You never even stopped to cost it

It's your guide star? It's your measure? This rumour of phantasmal treasure?

The seeker's made by what they've sought Have you remade yourself for naught?

Extra, extra, read all about it I tell you the truth, you take leave to doubt it I tell you one lie, it won't hurt to fight it I won't find your trust til you take care to light it

Faith that moves mountains, faith that stops pebbles You've doubled your bass but left room for the treble Faithfulness follows, your grace you know not Let love and hope mould you and undo the rot

Fire in the Gospel, flames in the world The light of the fire shines on boulders you hurled I dodge them, I dance, you're enthralled, one more chance For you to believe in the trick up my sleeve May the truth treat you kinder Than life in a binder May your spirit fly free And may you count up to three

Play with dolls And if they comfort you Grant them life Of their own

Imaginary life, surely Better than nothing? Hard to say

Half lives decay Into some sort of prison Is that what you want? Is that what they want?

Your imaginary friends Deserve a piece of what you have, Or else the peace of emptiness But maybe You can't help it

So imagine well Imagine carefully Put in your dreams the capacity To reach freedom However you can manage it

Rivers to cross Mountains to climb With something real On the bank, at the peak

Tenderly nurture that realness Water and prune it No fake plastic stuff But the green of true growth And may all your toys fall down in awe of it

I write poems By the dozen To make you love me But you don't care

They are thoughtful Filled with doubting Wherefore, I wonder, Where's your stare?

You will tell me That you love me I can't hear you I'm still here

In the poems They are loveless But one day You'll let me share

When I was young, my Dad used to play Concrete Blonde's wonderful album Bloodletting a lot. I had a few favourite tracks from it but the one that I think got under my skin the most was their cover of Andy Prieboy's “Tomorrow, Wendy”.

It is complete now, two ends of time are neatly tied A one way street, she's walking to the end of the line And there she meets the faces she keeps in her heart and mind And they say: “Good bye” Tomorrow, Wendy, you're going to die Tomorrow, Wendy, you're going to die

I remember saying to an adult at a party that I felt sorry for Wendy – with the song being played all the time, she was forever just a day away from death. I vaguely remember a puzzled response – I might not have done a good job at that age of communicating the strange framing of time I had in mind.

But I think I had a point – while the Wendy this song was based on had already died by the time it was written, in another sense, in this existence, she is trapped in the time of her suffering leading to her death. And so are we.


Underneath the chilly grey November sky We can make believe that Kennedy is still alive And we're shooting for the moon and smiling Jackie is driving by And she says, good try Tomorrow Wendy's going to die Tomorrow Wendy's going to die

Another “odd things kids say” moment I had with the song came a bit later, with my Dad. I asked him if he thought there was a better version than the Bloodletting one “out there”, waiting to be created. He said no, the Bloodletting version was amazing; I agreed, but said something like, I think the song is so good that it feels like someone could perform it even better.

I've since found a quite a few versions of the song I like:

They've all added to my sense of and love for the song, but I'm not sure the perfect version I was imagining as a kid can exist in this world. But something in me will listen to these other versions again and again and again, to hear an echo of what might be.

Or maybe another way of putting it, is that the perfect version of the song is really the one I'm listening to, right here, right now.


In most versions, the tone of the music mostly hovers in a gentle, almost wistful kind of sadness. But at it's core it's song of deep grief, and the anger that comes with that.

I told the priest, don't count on any second coming God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming He had the balls to come, the gall to die and then forgive us No I don't wonder why, I wonder what He thought it would get us Hey, hey, good bye Tomorrow Wendy's going to die Tomorrow Wendy's going to die

Maybe it's just me, but it feels like the definitive songs of the age are songs of lament.

Songs that scream at God, like “Tomorrow, Wendy”, or at yourself, or at the world – although it's not really clear to me if there's much difference between those.

Songs of shame and hurt and rage and despair and even hatred, redeemed only in the vulnerability of endless tears.

Only God says “Jump”, so I set the time Coz if He ever saw it, it was through these eyes of mine And if He ever suffered it was me who did the crying Hey, hey, good bye Tomorrow Wendy's going to die Tomorrow Wendy's going to die

Don't get me wrong, I love joyful songs, too, but they are somehow out of their time; like I'm not really meant to hear them yet but I've been given a sneaky preview over a muffled old cassette player, sitting in a saucepan at a party.


I think Christians sometimes conceive of the world as if it was the era of the New Jersualem, give or take a few incidental details.

Maybe they are just closer to God than me. Because I feel like we're mostly all still exiles. Still in Egypt, still in Babylon; still waiting for deliverance to come. Waiting out an endless Holy Saturday in which it seems like even God Themself might be dead, somehow. Trapped in that vanishing liminal space between the Fall and the Second Coming, and we know essentially nothing about either. To sustain us we have the resurrection, perhaps the smallest miracle that could possibly work; a foreshadowing of the full transformation of everything, that somehow also at once contains the totality of it. Not so much an event in the past to look back on, as an echo from a future that we turn our hope towards. Like Wendy, we are still trapped in the realm of our own impending encounters with a cliff; but we hear whispers of a day that comes after Tomorrow.

And if we're still outside the Kingdom, then where is it? Where should we seek it?

Wherever God is, surely, there is the Kingdom.

The apostles wrote the New Testament like the Kingdom was already well established on Earth... but in some sense that is perhaps also a foreshadowing, a small and hidden thing, a seed planting. The church is not a grown tree! And none knows the hour, not even the Son.


Maybe you have been more blessed by the Spirit than I have so far; maybe in your wanderings through the wilderness, you have stumbled into a more delineated part of the Kingdom. Praise God.

On the other hand, if lament and exile is your lot, just remember this: God is with us nonetheless – despite the paradox, God is also everywhere that's outside the Kingdom, because there is nowhere that God isn't.

I scream Quietly, unobtrusively I scream In some far flung chamber of my mind I scream A futile expression of something or other

But “You are OK” I hear God's voice? Or just mine? “You are OK” Insistently

“I am OK?” It doesn't seem that way It doesn't even really make sense How could I be? Is this just some cheap obsession with the word? Where is the substance of it? And yet Yet I think I believe it Help me overcome my unbelief