[iconoclast!]

Iconoclast! I would bear
asdfthat name–
Smashing my heart’s high
asdfplaces and
Hacking her Asherah
asdfto bits.
Let no pagan-passion King
asdfAgag
Live in my consecrated
asdfseat of
Thought and affect.
asdfI stand
Destructive with that man
asdfof God,
Dread Samuel, bearing a
asdffell blade.

Where do you run for
asdfcomfort,
O my soul? At what
asdfaltars
Do you offer up
asdfyour plea?
What ghost-town Gilead
asdfhaunts my
Heart in search of balm?
asdfFrom forth
What broken cisterns gushing
asdfgood do
I expect? O idolatrous,
asdfGentile
Heart, be circumcised:
asdfBelieve.

[the bruised reed battles heaven // a sonnet]

“Draw the word of promise out of its scabbard, and use it with holy violence. Don’t think that God will be troubled by your importunately reminding Him of His promises. He loves to hear the loud outcries of needy souls.” -Charles Spurgeon

Great God of hosts, Whose
Raging wrath commands,
Compels unnumbered angel-armies,
Why do You make war on me,
Poor, pitiable wretch beset
By sin and weakness-wracked?

If You will war me, then
I’ll mount my prayers and strike
Resounding blows against
Your throne with weighty words
Of promise. Wait!  I have
From Your own hand

These weapons and this steed.
O break not this bruised reed.

[hummingbird]

To my Dad.

“The greatest unkindness you can do to [God] is not to believe that he loves you.”
John Owen

Bright buzz-winged bird,
To and fro flitting
Tongue of fire, tarry at
My window a moment more.
Fierce flutterer, impossible
Flyer, fly before
My face and SPEAK LOVE
Divine, beyond the bounds
Of all that I could ask,
Think, imagine: Depths,
Heights of Death’s death,
Life conquering, bonds
Broken, free indeed.
SPEAK this, little bird,
To me: the God who guides
Your flight LOVES me.

[cambridge // a sonnet]

The young and lonely writer sits
In a Cambridge cafe quiet,
Sipping on a cool white wine
And of Mediterranean diet

Partaking. Grateful to have ’scaped
The storm that rumbles overhead
And pelts the ancient streets of brick
And pavement where the learned dead

Will roam when once the sun has sunk
Behind King’s College gate and chapel.
He will walk these darkened ways
And with the scholar-spirits grapple,

As Jacob with the angel of the Lord
For blessing wrestled fierce at Jabbok’s Ford.

[the holy war]

It is true:
A just war is a glorious endeavor.
But that glory, with acidic fear
And reality’s bitter gall mixed,
Makes a heady cocktail offered up
To cracked and bleeding lips on
A soiled sponge.

Our Savior
Grappled invisibly with the evil one
As He hung bearing wrath
Upon the rugged tree and drained
The sour cup to dregs.

But O!
What small but mighty taste
Of joy lay at the bottom of
That cup! Out of His anguish,
By foreknowledge inexorable,
He saw His many offspring
Counted righteous, and the
Spoils for the resurrected Strong
Awaiting.

Now may I,
Made righteous by His blood
And with Him united, blessed,
And seated in the heavenlies,
Possessing all good things in Christ,
Remember, accept discipline,
Cast off every weight and sin besetting,
Look to Christ taste and see
Afore the joys laid up in Heaven,
Lift drooping hands and strengthen knees,
Strive for peace and holiness,
And take up again my God-given
Armor, become like Him in His death
And bear away the Kingdom-life
With holy violence.

May I hate
With perfect hatred every spiritual
Enemy, and my own sin indwelling,
Waging war not according to the flesh,
Armed to the teeth, weapons of
Righteousness in my right hand and left,
With full confidence not in
My own skill or strategy, but in
The gracious Sovereign under
Whose banner I rage.

These three
Are the secrets of war: Joy,
Mourning, and Liberty. Let me fix,
As did Christ, on sure knowledge
Of future joy vouchsafed to me
In Holy Scripture: I am destined
For glory; this war’s outcome
Is sure. At present let me
Mourn for sins abiding and be
Comforted by the Gospel, putting
To death the body’s deeds.
A free man fights most valiantly,
And when freedom is at stake
He fights with the strength
Of a score of slaves. Stand firm,
Then, (O Lord, grant it that I would!)
And submit not again yourself
To slavery. Grace sweeps over
All my sins from past to
Future, a crimson tide, as the
Red Sea swallowed up Pharaoh
And his armies.

O Lord God,
Let me live in the faithful tension
Between “The battle belongs
To the Lord” and “Everywhere
You put your feet, you will conquer.”
Grant that I, your soldier-servant-son,
Free in bondage to the Truth, would
Fight unending and courageously,
With faith not in those efforts
But in Your mighty hand. For Your
Name’s sake, O God, give me
Victory against my foes.

Amen.

[dad sighting in the blogosphere]

Hey guys, just wanted to let y’all know that my dad’s been inhabiting the blogosphere for a while now… Check out this poem he wrote, inspired by a trip we took over spring break.

Wisdom Road

Coming up there’s a railroad crossing

Or the left lane is closed ahead

No U-turn, Do Not Enter

Don’t turn here the end is dead.

Exit 70 will take you to Dallas

The construction means it’s all a mess

Must be careful ’cause the fines are doubled

Better buy a good GPS.

But I’m not looking for Madison Avenue

Every town has an MLK

Streets named for coaches and presidents

Even stories ’bout a lost highway.

And I’m not searching for ribbons of pavement

Or the widegated thoroughfare

Mass transit makes you lose direction

Where’s the narrow gate that gets you there?

What I really want’s a moral compass

I’m tired of kicking at a formless goad

My journey finds its redeeming value

When I’m traveling the Wisdom Road.

Now you see where I got my poetic genes from!

(HT: Game Point)

[epigram: Matthew 7:13-14]

O the hardness of this Way!
Demands each day a dying-day
To be, and wrestles, wrenches flesh
Of old man off, revealing
A bloody child!

[broken abide]

John 15

A broken branch I am and dry,
Soon ready for to face the fire,
All straining, sapless, to produce
Some fruit but lacking vital juice.
A loving Husband-hand does touch
My roughish wood and lift, with much
Skill grafting me into His Vine
Again, commanding me, “Abide.”

[again i've gone a-whoring]

Again I’ve gone a-whoring,
After Canaan’s gods of filth
And drunk the pleasant poison
Of the idol, subtle Self,
At whose altar I would fain
Have offered time and time again
My life had You not rescued me
Who quivered ‘neath the knife.

I have made the ministrations
Of this covenant of death
And heeded all the preaching
Of my Accuser to my flesh.
All drunk off condemnation
For sin I did not do, I am
My master, slave at once. Lord, let
My mind be chaste to all but You.

cf. this post: [c.s. lewis and beating myself up]

and Jeremiah 3

[starfire]

“The heavens declare the glory of God…The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul.” Psalm 19

He set their burning light in motion,
The ancient work of flaming fusion;
The singing, starry host of heaven’s
voice is silent in the sky.

The self-same Lord Who fashioned spheres
Of flame to sing in each man’s ears
His praise has brought His burning Word, this
sinful soul to purify.

[atonement // a sonnet]

O, would that I did always rest
So sweetly in the merits of
My Savior, from Whose battered breast
Flow streams of fear-outcasting love,

As these two weeks of late have I.
The poor in spirit’s uttered cry
Of shame becomes a shout of joy,
Distresses vexed which did annoy,

As Death itself was made to die
When Christ absorbed the wrath of God.
So through the doorposts stepping, I,
Where “Victory” is scrawled in blood,

Do freely into Freedom go
When Substitution’s grace I know.

[common grace]

“Chaos is dull.” -Chesterton

I slept and slept in fevered dreams
Of unmoored ships and wandering travelers,
Fierce seas and tangled roads,
Nights too black and days too grey,
Blizzards overwhelmingly white,
And felt the fallenness deep in my soul
Like a crack in the foundation of Self
Life, a slumping construction, rests on.

I woke to find the World instead infuriating order,
Lying down in a dampened meadow.
I found that though it drizzled,
The sun shone through a little,
Laid my hand upon a compass and a map.
On map the roads in grid arrayed,
Like engineering paper,
Indicated bridges out and blockage of the way.

Corruption could not undo Order;
Though all the marching feet of Time
Had trampled it for unknown years,
It, scarred, held fast and true.
Against all Sin and indication
Of thermodynamic law,
A Hand unseen upholds the World,
Or else a Word unheard.

[poetic apologetic]

I’m taking American Lit, 1860-present this semester, and lately we’ve been covering modernist poetry. It’s some of my favorite stuff because it deeply investigates the culture in which it was written. But it’s also generally anti-Christian, written in the aftermath of WWI when people thought the old philosophies and religions just didn’t make sense of reality anymore. One of the most fascinating modernists is Wallace Stevens. He worked a steady job as an insurance man and wrote on the side. He was obsessed with the impossibility of objective truth and instead stressed the importance of belief in story. Crazy how much of that viewpoint has worked its way into the church. His work is exactly the kind of stuff Francis Schaeffer was aiming at with The God Who Is There. Anyway, here’s a brief quote, a poem by Stevens, and a poem I wrote in response.

“The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a
fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that
it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Snow Man Redux 10.23.07

by Jonathan McGregor

A snowman melts in Texas’ mild January,
And Wallace Stevens is trying to destroy me.
Here are the briquettes that were his eyes,
Trickling away in dirty little rivers
On the brittle lawn
The broom is slumped,
The carrot haphazard,
The water returns to the earth.
A brief glance of sunlight shimmers on the slushy surface,
Inviting me to stoop and see
The faintest pink reflection of my curious face,
And I know that I exist.
His images of irritum are themselves brought to nothing
By inexorable turnings
Of the Word-ruled world.
I kick the crumbling corpse
And a lump of watery snow
Falls harmlessly to the ground.

*irritum = Latin for ‘nothingness’

[the idol]

The Idol 08.18.07
“When you grow silent, I start to fall…” -Jon McLaughlin

The dirty earthen statue stands,
Precarious on his pedestal
Of cold cash and empty music.
The mob, the crowd of manwoman worshipers,
Forms without faces falling to the gritty ground
Of the open-air temple,
Contort and cry their glossolalia.
Their sonic force of praise
Upholds the tottering icon.
But in this Areopagus are other idols found.
And other sonorous statues seduce the fickle mob.

Their worship wanes to quiet
As they heed the others’ call,
And when the crowd goes silent
The idol begins to fall.

A man steps forward from the shadows,
Immaculate in his black suit.
He cleans the clay shards scattered
Across the temple floor.
He gathers up the money from
The fallen statue’s pedestal
And loads it up into a large black bag.
He wanders in amidst the mob
And taps one on the shoulder,
Offering him the bag with his right hand.
The formless man accepts the bag
And changes in an instant
To another earthen statue
Adding noise into the fray.
The suited man rebuilds the altar
Of cash and hollow music, setting
This quaking man of clay on top
To be adored again.