27 Nov 2023
No One Chose the Way
Readings and Thoughts on Poetry, Faith & The Imagination.
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The Road by Dana Gioia
He sometimes felt that he had missed his life
By being far too busy looking for it.
Searching the distance, he often turned to find
That he had passed some milestone unaware,
And someone else was walking next to him,
First friends, then lovers, now children and a wife.
They were good company–generous, kind,
But equally bewildered to be there.
He noticed then that no one chose the way—
All seemed to drift by some collective will.
The path grew easier with each passing day,
Since it was worn and mostly sloped downhill.
The road ahead seemed hazy in the gloom.
Where was it he had meant to go, and with whom?
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Death of a Dream
Oh Christ, in whom the final fulfillment of all hope is held and secure,
I bring to you now the weathered
fragments of my former dreams,
the rent patches of hopes worn thin,
the shards of some shattered image of
life as I once thought it would be.
What I so wanted
has not come to pass,
I invested my hopes in desires
that returned only sorrow and frustration. Those dreams,
like glimmering faerie feasts,
could not sustain me,
and in my head I know that you
are sovereign even over this--
over my tears, my confusion,
and my disappointment.
But I still feel,
in this moment,
as if I have been abandoned,
as if you do not care that these hopes
have collapsed to rubble.
And yet I know this is not so.
You are the sovereign of my sorrow.
You apprehended a wider sweep with wiser eyes
than mine. My history hears the fingerprints of grace.
You were always faithful, though I could not always trace quick evidence of your presence in my pain,
yet did you remain at work,
lurking in the wings, sifting all my
splinterings for bright embers that might
be breathed into more eternal dreams.
I have seen so oft in retrospect, how
you had not neglected me, but had, with a
master's care, flared my desire like silver in
a crucible to burn away some lesser longing,
and bring about your better vision.
So let me remain tender now, to how
you would teach me. My disappointments
reveal so much about my own agenda
for my life, and the ways I quietly demand
that it should play out: free of conflict,
free of pain, free of want.
My dreams are all so small.
Your bigger purpose has always been
for my greatest good, that I would
day-to-day be fashioned into a more fit vessel
for the indwelling of your Spirit,
and molded into a more compassionate
emissary of your coming Kingdom.
And you, in love, will use all means to shape
my heart into those perfect forms.
So let this disappointment do its work.
My truest hopes have never failed,
they have merely been buried
beneath the shoveled muck of disillusion,
or encased in a carapace of self-serving
desire. It is only false hopes that are brittle,
shattering like shells of thin glass, to reveal the
diamond hardness of the unshakeable eternal
hopes within. So shake and shatter
all that hinder my growth, O God.
Unmask all false hopes,
that my one true hope might shine out
unclouded and undimmed.
So let me be tutored by this new
disappointment.
Let me listen to its holy whisper,
that I may release at last these lesser dreams.
That I might embrace the better dreams you
dream for me, and for your people,
and for your kingdom, and for your creation.
Let me join myself to these, investing all hope
in the one hope that will never come undone
or betray those who place their trust in it.
Teach me to hope, O Lord,
always and only in you.
You are the King of my collapse.
You answer not what I demand,
but what I do not even know what to ask.
Now take this dream, this husk,
this chaff of my desire, and give it back
reformed and remade according to
your better vision,
or do not give it back at all.
Here in the ruins of my wrecked
expectation, let me make this confession:
Not my dreams, O Lord,
not my dreams,
but yours, be done.
Amen.
Source: Every Moment Holy (Douglas Kaine McKelvey)
