I’ve decided that my class in Pastoral Theology is less about learning how to be with other people and more about learning to truly be with ourselves.  Of course, I get the joke… I can’t do one without the other.  Damn these teachers who know what they’re doing!

It seems that all semester I’ve been coming face-to-face with the demons who have devoured my soul… one by one… just like the dancing girls who come in from stage-left across the front, kicking in unison to some banal band music.

The following is a result of one such bugger-of-a-member of my own personal chorus line.

And now… on with the show!

Sometimes I yearn.

I don’t know what wakes it,

this simple, subtle creature,

but once it emerges from its den of sleep

all I long for is relief

from its insatiability.

My thinking stops

my heart beats, suspended in mock openness, readiness

and every cell of my body seeks to be overcome.

A wide-open mouth to a breast

Eyes expecting loving gazing

Upon that which will grant its own fruition…

Like a docking procedure.

Not desire… nor want, need, wish or covet

Those are not a body’s words

But a mind’s decision to possess a thing

Rather a body’s movement towards

That which it knows not

Something…

it can lock its sights on.

Is it instinct…

this body’s language

that the mind cannot grasp?

Sometimes I want to know why this body yearns

because I want to stop its pain.

The yearning starts and I follow

down this path of trying to find

a something which it seeks

but I never do.

Find it.

There is only this gaping hole,

that never gets fed.

If I could just crawl into the arms of the Lover and be the Beloved,

If I could just feel his Breath fill my lungs and be the Word he speaks,

If I could just suffer his pulsing life into my own and know sweet liberation in that moment of union,

I would never have to dine again.