deeper things - maybe

I have been so tossed around by the storms and waves that I have almost completely taken my eyes off Jesus. I forget who calms the storm, whose power is ultimate and who, even when the storm is raging, is in control. Well, today, a few reminders crept back in to tap me on the shoulder and nudge me to pay better attention. Not that I feel that good physically, not that I am past the depression, not that I don't at times get overwhelmed by fear...but maybe, just maybe, I can find a way to let His embrace surround me again. Today I stumbled on this poem which, though I had the book (House of Light) sitting on my bookshelf, I can't recall ever reading before. Maybe, in the midst of my own frequent exhaustion, I can again open my sleepy, slumbering heart to Him.


Maybe
Mary Oliver

Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,
silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved
that night.
But you know how it is

when something
different crosses
the threshold -- the uncles
mutter together,

the women walk away,
the young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
like the wind over the water --
sometimes, for days,
you don't think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forth
like a tremor of pure sunlight
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it --

tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was --
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer storm.