Glory musings, part one

The angelic herald echoes like ­­a sweet haunting, a gentle annual pulse to set our pace.

And it comes like a taunting, when our hard core realities reel chaotic, and blow shredded and shattered like forgotten rubbish: its synthetic rustle hissing through the breeze’s song, resilient ugly tendrils marring the broken scene. The second law of thermodynamics seemed efficient enough for our undoing; why add this man-made grief? 

Isn’t natural pain enough? Why the unnatural weight too? We could barely endure the first, but crumple—utterly undone—under the second’s insidious slashes.

There must be different degrees of knowing, an ebbing, layered sphere of atmospheres we breathe, entering one and leaving another so seamlessly that we live unconscious to the power we inhale. To know you are helpless and hurt, a needy beggar, and to know—the sheer, unreserved, raw state of your reality—the atmospheric conversion.

It’s not just being a country shepherd, a noble, honest task where you content yourself and thank God you can sleep under the stars. No, it’s the outcast, the scruffy thieves and chronic liars . . .locked out at night and avoided in the day. The shepherd: excluded from court cases, their word not worth being heard; shunned in polite and even normal society, their association not worth the potential business or communal risk. Living honest, lowly, and poor wasn’t humble enough: the association of others’ misdeeds hangs irreconcilable on you, a weight unbearable, unavoidable . . .the intolerable synthetic pain.

And there must be varying degrees of living, potentials of capacity we have not plumbed yet, realms high and deep, primed for the expanse of the soul, prepared for possibility, like the echo of a promise.

And doesn’t GLORY pull us deeper, higher, real-er? Doesn’t it create the environment for potential? The capacity for knowing, for living, for joy and for pain find a harmony in the song of GLORY.

And sometimes, it takes the shattering, brutal synthetic to wake us to glory. Because constant pain grows dull, normal (even if it cripples us). But shearing pain rivets us, and makes us know that something is utterly wrong, and something is utterly Right.

And perhaps, in all this chaos, the world heaves and aches, priming for the coming of GLORY.