A colleague used this poem the other day for a worship service. I think it’s a great worship resource, or just a lovely reflection piece. Â Enjoy.
Prayer for the Lady Who Forgave Us
by John Shea
There is a long-suffering lady with thin hands
who stands on the corner of Delphia and Lawrence
and forgives you.
“You are forgiven,†she smiles.
The neighborhood is embarrassed.
It is sure it has done nothing wrong
yet, every day, in a small voice
it is forgiven.
On the way to the Jewel Food Store
housewives pass her with hard looks
then whisper in the cereal section.
Stan Dumke asked her right out
what she was up to
and she forgave him.
A group who care about the neighborhood
agree that if she was old it would be harmless
or if she were religious it would be understandable
but as it is…they asked her to move on.
Like all things with eternal purposes
she stayed.
And she was informed upon.
On a most unforgiving day of snow and slush
while she was reconciling a reluctant passerby
the State people
whose business is sanity,
persuaded her into a car.
She is gone.
We are reduced to forgetting.
John Shea is wonderful — a poet story telling theologian.
Another time
Jesus smeared God like mud
on the eyes of a man born blind
and pushed him toward the pool of Siloam.
The blind man splashed his eyes
and stared into the rippling reflection
of the face he had only felt.
First he did a handstand, then a cartwheel,
and rounded off his joy
with a series of summersaults.
He ran to his neighbors,
singing the news.
They said,
“You look like the blind beggar
but we cannot be sure.”
The problem was never
that he was blind
and could not work out
but that they could see
and did not look in.
“I am the one, the seeing blind!”
They seized him in mid cartwheel
and dragged him to the authorities.
“What do you think
of the man who made the mud?”
But the man born blind
was staring at a green vase.
His mouth was open slightly
as if he was being fed by its color.
“He is a sinner,” said the priest
who knew what pleased God’s eyes.
“Can one who lights candles in the eyes of the night
not have the fire of God in his hands?”
said the man fondling the green vase.
The priests murmured
and sent for his parents
who looked their son
straight in his new eyes
and said,
“Looks like our son.
But he is old enough
to speak for himself.”
Off the hook they hurried home.
“All I know,” said the man
with the green vase tucked under his robe,
“is that I was blind
and now I see.”
But with his new eyes
came a turbulence in his sould
as if the man who calmed one sea
turned another to storm.
So before those who locked knowledge in a small room
and kept the key on a string around the their neck
he launched into a theology of sin and salvation.
It was then
that the full horror of the miracle
visited the priests.
“You, steeped in sin, lecture us!”
They tore him from the podium
and threw him into the street
where a man was rubbing much from his hands.
“How did it go?”
“I talked back.”
The man with the new eyes
took in every laughing line
on the face of the Son
who was as happy as a free man
dancing on the far side of the Red Sea.
John Shea The Son Who Must Die Stories of Faith