Another Poem

Emboldened by the fact that no one said my last one sucked, I give you another.

Kneel

It was silent where I heard you cry
Living out your dual destiny of
Slowly dying in the midst of life
You held out your crooked cup
Half-full of metallic gleam garnered
Like some broken-down beggar who,
Aiming for something greater,
(To be a mendicant monk, perhaps)
Now in blank descendancy
Spilling blood on wrists
Like tattoo on chest
Like fury in my breast
Like some pointless test
I have not studied for this
They did not teach me this
As if nothing had gone awry
In those sleight-of-hand hearts
Those culture shock eyes
Only disbelief and distancing
Without a doubt
Every tongue will kneel
Every knee confess

From Mercersburg in 1846

This Reformed theologian of the 19th century sure sounds different than a lot of Reformed leaders of today.

�As the Eucharist forms the very heart of the whole Christian worship, so it is clear that the entire question of the church, which all are compelled to acknowledge�the great life problem of the age�centers ultimately in the sacramental question as its inmost heart and core. Our view of the Lord�s Supper must ever condition and rule in the end our view of Christ�s person and the conception we form of the church. It must influence, at the same time, very materially, our whole system of theology, as well as all our ideas of ecclesiastical history� (John W. Nevin, �Mystical Presence� [1846] in The Mystical Presence and other Writings on the Eucharist eds. Bard Thompson and George Bricker [Boston: United Church Press, 1966]).