Ready For Jesus
The missionary is only 20.
He's telling us that the people in Honduras have nothing---
he describes a family of seven
who live in a mud hut
with a dirt floor and a doorway
with no door so the animals wander in and out.
They are ready for Jesus...
he says,
Their existence is painful,
so they're
looking for some meaning.
He tells us that they are the other race
in Honduras,
not the Latinos.
Hundreds of years ago,
a slave ship wrecked
off the coast,
they washed ashore
and never left, kept their language,
their culture,
stayed separate.
In my high school geography text,
a map demonstrated
the movements of the tectonic plates,
how the continents had once fit together as a
single mass called Pangaea.
I wonder if the Honduran coast
would match up
against the original home beach
of these people like
if it weren't for time, this
transplantation
would have been nothing
more than
a hike across the grassland.
The young man's eyes are wild
as he tells us he's broken
off his plans for Law school to do
this.
I pick up my notebook,
and am about to write something
about how pain comes in going
from one thing to another
too suddenly,
being jolted even
half-a-foot
by a car from behind;
or smooth skin made in an instant,
two bleeding halves
by a blade:
the abrupt imposition
of a foreign object
disrupting the order..., when
he asks for money.
The woman across the aisle from me
begins to dig in her purse
for the piece of Jesus she will
send.
*********************
A Conversation with Logos
I
The Greeks described logos as the living
substance that enlivened, animated
all things, they said it inhabited the world like
honey inhabits the honeycomb-- logos
saturates all that we are, is associated with
fire and light.
The Hebrews understood
logos as the great mysterious inter-
cessor between God and humanity... they named it
Torah. But Torah was not simply written
word; the rabbis claimed, When G-d began
to create the world, He consulted Torah... Torah,
logos, the Word that preexists speech,
writing, art, earth, sky, universe.
The gospel of John begins, In the beginning
was logos, and logos was with God
and logos was God, he was with God
in the beginning, and through logos all was
made, without logos nothing that is
could have been, and logos was life, and
that life was light, and that light
shines into darkness... and darkness cannot
overcome... light, word, life,
warmth, logos...
Darkness cannot over-
come, darkness cannot overcome,
darkness cannot overcome
light.
II
The irony of
the Word
preceding all speaking,
the warmth
preceding all fire,
the life
preceding all bodies,
the light
preceding all creation,
is that
all talk must be
silenced, all lamps
extinguished, all
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