on the eve of thanksgiving break,

i would like to post a poem that makes me grateful.

i thought of posting the why of my gratefulness, but i think i will not, and will allow you all to reason it out for yourselves.


Pharaoh's Cross

It would be easier to be an atheist; it is the simple way out.
But each time I turn toward that wide and welcoming door
it slams shut in my face, and I - like my forebears - Adam, Eve -
am left outside the garden of reason and limited, chill science
and the arguments of intellect.
Who is this wild cherubim who whirls the flaming sword
'twixt the door to the house of atheism and me?

Sometimes in the groping dark of my not knowing
I am exhausted with the struggle to believe in you, O God.
Your ways are not our ways. Your ways are extraordinary.
You sent evil angels to the Egyptians and killed;
you killed countless babes in order that Pharaoh,
whose heart was hardened by you (that worries me, Lord)
might be slow to let the Hebrew children go.
You turned back the waters of the Red Sea
and your Chosen People went through on dry land
and the Egyptians were drowned, men with wives and children,
young men with mothers and fathers (your ways are not our ways)
and there was much rejoicing at all this death,
and the angels laughed and sang, and you stopped them, saying,
"How can you sing when my children are drowning?"

When your people reach Mount Sinai you warned Moses
not to let any of them near you lest you break forth
on them with death in your hand.
You are Love, and you command us to love,
and yet you yourself turn men's hearts to evil,
and you wipe out nations with one sweep of the hand -
the Amorites and the Hittites and the Peruzzites -
gone, all gone. It seems that any means will do, and yet -
all these things are but stories told about you by fallen man,
part of the story (for your ways are not our ways)
but not the whole story. You are our author,
and we try to listen to what you say,
but we suffer from faulty hearing and loss of language
and we get the words wrong.

Listen: you came to us as one of us
and lived with us and died for us and descended into hell for us
and burst out into life for us:

Do you now hold Pharaoh in your arms?

-Madeleine L'Engle, A Cry Like a Bell