Pray for the Bad Guys

             Bless those who curse you,
           pray for those who abuse you.
                           —Luke 6.28

The more monstrous a person's evil,
the more evil their monsters,
and the more unable they are to overcome them.
They need you.
They need you to stand beside them and pray
as they can't, pray for their redemption.
If you want peace in the world,
if you want justice for all the oppressed,
for the abused and enslaved and trafficked,
then you want most of all
the redemption of all wrongdoers.
God's great justice is not revenge.
That's too cheap, too human, too small.
No, God's justice is actual harmony
and fullness of life for everybody.
Not payback, that endless loop,
but transformation (which is harder).
Pray for the bad guys,
even the tyrants and torturers, that with love
God will wrench them out of their hell
and deliver us all.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net November 4, 2022

After Reading Peterson's Guide

 

I used to call them

Morning Doves, those birds

with breasts the rosy color

of dawn who coo us awake

as if to say love . . .

love . . . in the morning.

 

But when the book said

Mourning Doves instead

I noticed their ash-gray feathers,

like shadows

on the underside

of love.

 

When the Dark Angel comes

let him fold us in wings

as soft as these birds’,

though the speckled egg

hidden deep in his nest

is death.

Linda Pastan, chronicillnessliving.blog, May 5, 2020

The Husband

He comes every day to eat lunch and sit
with her in the sunroom. Sometimes he reads
letters out loud from their children or friends;
sometimes he reads the paper as she sleeps.
One day the staff makes her favorite cake
to celebrate their anniversary,
and he tells how, to buy her ring, he worked
months of overtime at the factory,
so she thought he was seeing someone else.
"As if I would look at other women
when I have Pearl," he says, shaking his head.
She begins to cry and tells him, "You're sweet,
but I miss my husband." He pats her hand.
"I know," he says, "It's all right. Try some cake."

 

Joseph Mills, Love and Other Collisions (Press 53, 2010) 

Walk Gently

Walk gently on this earth with purposeful steps

You share this space with seven billion human beings

And countless other precious life forms

Just like you

They all want to be happy

Just like you

They all need love

We’re not going to survive unless we walk

Gently on this earth together,

Until we touch something in others that

Feels just like the shards of our own pain,

The fluttering warmth of our own joy,

Until we sew their wounds into our hearts

And seal it with our own skin

 

Kaveri Patel, tarabranch.com June 10, 2022

  

Sometimes When I Catch Myself

Sometimes when I catch myself
judging someone else—
a stranger or perhaps a beloved—

I imagine my son and father watching me,
not looking down from above,
I imagine them looking out from inside me.

I don’t worry I am disappointing them—
I feel certain they would be generous with me.
See how human she is, they might say,

loving me despite my humaness,
because of my humanness.
In that moment of imagining,

I feel myself soften,
feel my heart unfurl like a new leaf in spring,
feel how possible it is to be generous

with the humanness of myself and others
and the relief it brings.
In that moment, it is easy to be alive.

Easy to notice my annoyance
and be gentle with the self who gets annoyed.
Easy to touch my palm to my heart

and know it as the palm of my son,
the palm of my father,
reminding me how truly I want to walk it,

this path of compassion.

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com July 17, 2022

Myth Dispelled

The flu vaccine cannot
give you the flu, I tell him.
It's dead virus, there's
nothing alive about it.
It can't make you sick.
That's a myth.
But if we bury it in
the grassy knoll
of your shoulder,
an inch under the stratum
corneum, as sanctioned by
your signature
in a white-coated ceremony
presided over by
my medical assistant
and then mark the grave
with a temporary
non-stick headstone,
the trivalent spirit
of that vaccine
has a 70 to 90 percent
chance of warding off
the Evil One,
and that's the God's
honest truth.

 

Adam Possner, MD/JAMA December 5, 2012 vol. 308 (21)2178 Copyright 2012, American Medical Association

The World

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between "green thread"
and "broccoli," you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."

Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent from someplace distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing

that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue,

but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile,
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

—to anyone among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.

 

Tony Hoagland, Sweet Ruin (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999)